Art is expansive and triggered by emotions and desire.
Religion is triggered by fear of death, punishment , social pressure. It is restrictive, it tries to protect us with rituals.
It constraints is for our own safety.
Art develops us, breaks boundaries and invades territories.
In the religious art you have this tension.
Science it removes the fears and weakens the religion but it damps down Emotion and art.
I am reading the novel 'Ion' by Liviu Rebreanu.
Ion is a poor ambitious Romanian peasant who lived in the Austro Hungarian occupied Transylvania in mid 19 century.
He was the son of a peasant women who had a lot of land but she married for love with a drunken lazy man who wasted her wealth.
Ion sees an opportunity to regain his wealth by marrying the not so beautiful daughter of a rich peasant in the village, Ana. Her father does not want him, so he makes her pregnant.
Ion actions mirror the actions of Julien Sorel in 1830 Stendhal novel 'Red and black' but is more calculated and cruel.
In 'Great Gatsby' F. S. Fitzgerald's hero uses money to win over his love Daisy.
In old world, old, tall hierarchies make people trade they feelings for wealth and position, and more the person is to the bottom, more cruel and cunning he has to be climb socially and survive.
Life of Ion is surrounded by death and illnesses. Many women have 9 children and only 3 survive. Ion is a secondary citizen of Austro Hungarian state, his lack of knowledge of Hungarian, condemns him to be enclosed in his village from mountains.
Jay Gatsby on the other hand doesn't have this hierarchical structure above to fight against it, he tries to enter in an expensive club, for this he must equalize generational wealth. And doing so he goes to the bottom of social hierarchy to make a fast buck.
European dream is as ascension in closed tight hierarchy, American dream is ' be what you want to be '
Every person is primed by social factors to react in a certain way.
Think how a Finn and Italian will react.
How the Russians are primed to react ?
From what I saw high risk situations prime Russians to react.
YouTube is full of crazy stunts done by Russians.
Bravery of Russian soldiers is legendary.
Russian officers can use them in suicide missions because they have fatalistic attitude of "fuck death"
By the way: I saw on TV how an police officer tried to drag a woman who protested against Putin, a man said: "leave her alone, I know you have a quota for the arrests, take me in, instead of her" and he let himself arrested instead of the woman in the applause of other citizens.
So no wonder that the game of filing one chamber of a revolver spun it and close it, putting the revolver to the head was called Russian roulette.
Everyone was worried about the fall of dollar as global currency.
Now with increased oil prices due to attack on Iran and net exports of US oil, the demand for dollars will increase.
The fact that China has to pay more for energy is another effect of attack in Iran.
Hamlet uses the lie if theatre play to tell truth about power.
The power uses the truth to create lies. Spin off stories, paintings and statues who glorify battles almost lost.
With an enormous debt and a need from refinancing. Trillions of dollars in treaduries held by foreign investors, and huge military industrial complex, it seems that the only chance of the US to avoid a plunge of the dollar and a 1929 crisis, is to be gun for hire for investors.
If US doesn't defend Japan, they could sell all the treaduries.
If US doesn't help EU against Russia, it will happen the same.
USA won't fall the dollar won't fall but the positions of power reversed.
Anyway US involvement overseas would not affect the internal politics, and US could dispense some air carriers to defend Japan, to overthrow Iran, and some air force to defend Israel.
Both Isaac Asimov and PKD have created artificial men.
Asimov called them robots and PKD androids.
Asimov organized their thinking top down, from some higher purposes that govern the actions of the tobits.
PKD created their minds by imitation of human beings with no moral judgement no social restraint.
The result was robots were morally superior and they enriched their society while the androids were pure psychopaths.
Application of PKD idea that androids should imitate people led to AI that makes teenages kill themselves and cars that smash into lorries.
I think a top down approach for AI, starting from some etic goals would have been a better development.
Making a self driving car that respects the traffic rules would have avoided many accidents.
But what morality have the people who have mantra: 'Fake it till you make it ?'
