The Architecture of Distraction

What is supposed to be our responsibility? What is it supposed to be the direction of this responsibility and how long should we pay attention to the advance of time for this responsibility to be effective?

How do we live, how do we act, how do we connect and sum or subtract into this world. How do we give power to others and how do this power is lost from our side or returned in long lasting benefits that most likely would empower us to advance?.

But... against my speech... there are two critical words in the last paragraph: POWER and ADVANCE.

This essay is a series of some interpretations about the influence of people in others, how do they speak how do they convince, persuade, and please their own reasons ort other's reasons, even at their own moral extent or their most beautiful dreams. Giving power to some opinions in order to facilitate advance.

The Architecture of Distraction is a call to be responsible analyze ourselves, in a critical way and empathize with others instead of convince or being convinced by others, the purpose is never to choose but to think how to move your brain. Its a call to slow down the fast pace of choosing a path or "advance" and slow down at the same time "the power", the so falsely called "success!".  The purpose is to increase the detail in our actions and ask ourselves for its purpose as it stands, for the search of simplicity instead of the simple, and sincerely thinking and talking to ourselves about  the complexity of our lives.

We must avoid the excess of "success!" and the fast powered pace of distraction that brings with it, and favor our most precious, truthful and beautiful instincts.

Truth is beauty and beauty is truth -- that is all (John Keats)

For contemporary humans, beauty is all that gives pleasure, as broad as it is. A beautiful car is the pleasure to drive it, a beautiful house is the pleasure to live in it, a beautiful watch is the pleasure to wear it and give the right time, a beautiful pair of shoes is the pleasure to walk on them. But what is a beautiful life? what is a beautiful sky or a beautiful morning? what is a beautiful human, or a beautiful flower. Most of them are mentally pictured as immobile stereotypes that never change, never move and are ignored as soon as the advertising of the new car appears in front of our eyes distracting our view from the sky and the sun and all the stars and the different clouds and the different trees. All of those giving no comparable pleasure because our aesthetics of the world has been deviated from our own good. it has changed towards the remarkable inhuman scale of its ability to achieve the power to have and possess pleasure and execute pleasure out of it. The architecture of distraction is the tergiversation of the natural aesthetics or the golden mean the deviation of the balance of our lives.

The Opera for instance or any representation of human expression is not a matter of beauty and truth anymore, if so a train of words describes a sloppy story from the lips of the ignorant viewer at the end of the show but instead it has become a way to empower others attention to advert our own pleasure, it has become a distraction, a diversion to put us far away from the purpose of thinking by ourselves empathizing and reasoning, facing our own thoughts in front of the mirror of life. 

Ideas are mind consuming parasites, everyone has ideas, even the most ignorant of the humans have them we are born with the capacity to spawn them and release them into the human dispersive sea of intentions and oblivion. Too many of them are a bad thing, too few kills us,only those ideas that bring intentions to lasting constructions build elites of the world, although the whole process of the history of time does not guarantee their fairness, virtue, benefit or commitment to us; humans. But don't take me wrong, we need ideas to survive to create to communicate but not all ideas are suited to be accomplished and definitely not all ideas should be executed. This abrupt end in the logic of what is an idea lead often times to the dominant elite to empower people's minds to control their idea production through ideologies or methods of living and doing things, that encompass resource management, political control and behavior. The concept of idea itself take us to think about control and how to generate, complement or counter-act other people's ideas, and this is the origin of our most entrenched conflicts as humans.  A reminiscence of this are the varied religious and creeds, that pushes humans to live as blind ignorant institutions, or on the other hand political institutionalization of science and its scientific methods would lead to fabricated societies whose aim is to prove themselves right.

Idea continuity results in fabricated images which do not apply to new contexts and dynamic societies. The rigor of governance through the elite believes that the logic of disaster in the past is the logic of disaster of the future it is the continuity of the castes a reflection of regularity in society as a reflection of hidden historical aspects or events, controlled by the power of tradition, power and hegemony who structure human time and law, thus belonging to themselves, perpetuating their own influence. Everyone wants to be king, and afterwards wants his/her kingdom to last for thousand years and after that they might want to proclaim themselves ethernal gods and masters of history and in fact this is how our history has been made. 

"Foucault (1983) sums up the Ancient Greek concept of parrhesia as such:So you see, the parrhesiastes is someone who takes a risk. Of course, this risk is not always a risk of life. When, for example, you see a friend doing something wrong and you risk incurring his anger by telling him he is wrong, you are acting as a parrhesiastes. In such a case, you do not risk your life, but you may hurt him by your remarks, and your friendship may consequently suffer for it. If, in a political debate, an orator risks losing his popularity because his opinions are contrary to the majority's opinion, or his opinions may usher in a political scandal, he uses parrhesia. Parrhesia, then, is linked to courage in the face of danger: it demands the courage to speak the truth in spite of some danger. And in its extreme form, telling the truth takes place in the "game" of life or death."

Distraction is one of the tools to deceive the mind's bravery entrenching actions through a series of interconnected mounds of susceptibilities for desire, halls of seduction to wander under. Although this interconnected spaces of inoffensive attractions makes us need to be identified with something usually a mega-stereotype (slim, musculous, atheltic etc) these subdivide into hundreds of other types or subtypes of identities and classifications that allows us to live and survive the modern world. Wanting to become something that exist or wanting to be someone else drives our economy, our daily lives and actions, these are the distractions to break the hard continuity of the elite.

This is the very basis of the architecture of distraction.

Realizing our limitations about the world and our inability to re-create ourselves independently of raw models, leaves us in a very empty space and the next question could then be, Can I be? How can I become? and perhaps angrily you dear reader could be judging me right now for instance. But there are always essential things to remember and that is that we still have a wealth of ideas to blast and think trough, in every idea there must be a great sense of responsibility, each one of them must have been thought through time before hand, it must be kind with others, and benefit many others as much as it will benefit me for at least 50% of the time this idea is being executed this is a call to find  the aesthetics of society, and work for it with responsibility and temperance.

Stand against The Architecture of Distraction.

A.F DIAZ