Capitalism is boring ... that's why they're protesting

Sometime ago I wrote this, on a flight to Oxford University:

EXCERPT ON CULTURE AND TRANSFORMATION

"Culture" has become an important debate in an age wherein boundaries continue to shift and peoples began to claim their rights as citizens of the country they are in, and the meaning of democracy is beginning to be understood. Culture, to me is not merely about the house we inhabit or merely the tools we use, but a combination of both and more than this, it is about the way we enrich the sense of humanism we embody.

I am reminded by what the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset said, "Man does not have nature… what he has is history." This seems to be a notion of humanity worth exploring if our belief about human evolution takes into consideration how human beings take what is available form nature and transform the resources into tools and institutions, and then turn institutions into tolls that will transform human beings into classes of people who have the power to turn less powerful others into machines or automatons who have lost their soul to the spirit of the machine.

One can also argue that the origin of domination of human beings over others comes not via the manifestation of "evil within" as theologians would argue, but also a consequence of enabling technologies that speed up the enabling of "evil within". As in the case of slavery, it is not merely through "evil" that slavery was born but through human being's control of knowledge and consciousness and the nature of how one defines each other. It is through the technology of "language" and the written and spoken word, and whoever has better control of these will determine the nature and nurturance of slavery. As Marx in his "deterministic way of analysing history" would argue, whoever controls the production of knowledge controls the means of controlling the consciousness of others.

One can also argue that all forms of slavery, whether ancient, modern, or postmodern have been made possible by the "evolution of institutions" that evolve out of "inscriptions". This means that whoever authors the ideology that creates the Great Pyramids of Gizeh, The Great Wall of China, The Great States of Greece, Rome and London, authors the means of institutionalising people through these institutions. In Malaysia, the institutionalisation of The Great Johor Super Corridor, inscribed in the name of The Iskandar Development Region, is yet another form of postmodern institutionalisation of postmodern slavery mystified in the name of globalisation, free enterprise and liberal democracy, in which the profits will be siphoned out of Johor whereas the locals will become postmodern slaves happily made to believe that they will be producing for the glory of The Kingdom of Johor specifically, and the government of Islam Hadhari in general. The concept of " hamba sahaya" is taking a semiotic term.

One can see how much the stock markets of the world whether in London, New York, Tokyo or even Kuala Lumpur – as powerhouse institutions of corporate capitalist domination – continue to allow their players to bet on the lives of others and make the powerless of the world pawns in the precarious and pandemical game of postmodern matrix of global slavery, by the click of the mouse. These are, again, the nature of the rhythm of capitalism in synchrony with the tune of the velocity of money as it races up and down Wall Street. The "bloodsuckers amongst us", as American profound revolutioner Malcolm X would say, called the capitalists, have been successful in leeching off the world's poor through the control of language and the design of the architecture of financial power.