If there is one thing

If there is one thing that keeps a human being alive

it is belief.

or said differently: hope.

it is hardly evidence. hardly even experience.

Belief is why we wake up everyday, the hope of some good outcome, prolonged or immediate,

it is why we enjoy meeting new attractive people, if we are single or not single,

it is why we so easily remember their names and forget the names of plane looking people,

that some unsaid unimagined unthought connection will grow into something unthought

but always imagined,

or it is why we make status updates: the hope of being noticed and affirmed

it is why we blog: the hope of being read, and someone finding the

tiny personal single life we live to be, in some small way, important,

which of course to us is hugely important,

even if no one ever ever reads it, or we get the rare affirmation,

that one affirmation gives birth, sets free, our lustful imagination

for all that could be reading it.

or even our journals, those secret things that shall never be read,

how few of us would burn those books,

how few of us write to write,

without the hope that someone in the future might stumble across it

and find that we said something,

or even the sexy thought that someone has found us interesting

and tip-toed into our room, glanced over their shoulder,

and read without us knowing.

and in so hoping, we bait hope for hope,

if we win, and someone does affirm us or notice we are breathing,

they too are hoping, they are attracted to us and want to understand,

to consume and be better,

or to know us, study us, grasp us, and win us. It is an exchange, and when even

it is perhaps what Love is, a type of Love, but it is

not always even... and so we find unrequited hope, which is heartbreak, which

is defeated belief.

I believe humans hope for such things, because we are unfulfilled

and therefore hungry. We hope for dinner and hope for a spouse and

hope for children and hope to retire and hope our children love us and hope

to make them love us right and hope to be healthy and hope for heaven so that

we have something else to hope for when what we hoped for wasn't what we wanted

and then we grow tired, and the desire starts to be tired, and we stop laughing,

and so many lose their faces.

I sound like I'm critiquing. But the alternative is nirvana, freedom from desire,

which of course is death. Hope is what living is.

Hope can sound an empty common word,

but it seems so much more real than most things I hear of Love.

This is what I'm writing for work. It is the manifesto for an ideological movement of citizenship and global identity.

Every generation is invited to endow its share of history with a name. It begins with recognition. If the events of the day are marked by a growing contrast: the comfort of some is removed by a widening chasm from the tragedy of many, and the voices of the dying are hushed by the hands of the wicked, such a day is set to end.

This recognition is followed by response. First, by bold symbolic action, usually by the young.

Then, in the audience of the effected, a proper articulation of the problem emerges. Then a movement of change, often sweeping so quickly the Establishment fumbles to trace it.

We are at such a time.

The Fourth Estate is a recognition of human identity in the face of global connectivity and the responsibility that flows from it. It is a blueprint of the future founded in humanity's bold endeavor to seek a more perfect peace, a more perfect unity, and a more honest expression of success.

We have always experienced empathy for our neighbor, our family. In a novel age such as this where the stories and faces of humanity writ large are brought to our living rooms, our eyes and our ears, and what's more: our products and consumption touch the globe as a whole: this empathic responsibility has outgrown its ancient limits of proximity.

It is a coalition of minds that believe there are no national boundaries, no laws, no man made rules that trump the law of common humanity written on the heart. It is not something new, it is the proper expansion of something old, truths that are self evident, God-breathed, and manifest in the history of discontent:

We believe all men are created equal, and that justice for some is not justice for all. We believe that human evil is the responsibility of all men. When we turn our face from horror, we bless it to continue. We believe our task is to live the simple and true things, and work them out no matter how hard: that men and women, no matter where they live, are equal. and loved. and worthy. and that we are all connected, not just in a complicated global exchange of goods and commodities, which is undeniable, but in a human web of innate value.

And these things define us: We are not the intellectual elite. We are not the bored idealists in the lounge chairs of comfort. We are the young people on the sidewalk. We will sleep where we fall and work until our hands are raw, connected like never before to the central nervous system of mankind.

In the face of a modern world that is inextricably connected in a web of exchange, we accept the responsibility to protect those that are victimized by extreme cases of injustice. It is not 'their' problem. It is a humanity problem.

We believe in starting with the specific to prove the universal. We are starting with Joseph Kony, the rebel leader of the Lord's Resistance Army that has systematically abducted children to fight as soldiers in his rebellion.

We will not ignore his murderous campaign simply because his escapades do not impact us economically or threaten us militarily. We will respond because he destroys human life.

And our responsibility to protect does not invalidate our national identity. We believe in the pride of cultural expression and society. But we do not believe in the fiction of self-interest in isolation. Our choices echo to every single corner of this globe, and we should respond with reason and temperance.

To the degree in which society denies the affect of its choices on its own citizens and those of its neighbors, is the degree it will fall victim to history as a failure. As a decaying monster.

It is about rejecting the concept of the 'other,' the belief that 'they' are the problem and 'they' are out to get us. We understand that 'they' are us, and we are 'them.'

When we acknowledge the mystery of value in every human life, and witness to such, we thrive, and succeed, and protect one another.

We choose to stand up for that belief. We will fight for it, expand our talent, exhaust our bodies in its pursuit, and define a generation of human belonging.

We are The Fourth Estate.

Truth is truth is truth

Playboy: Much of the controversy surrounding 2001 deals with the meaning of the metaphysical symbols that abound in the film — the polished black monoliths, the orbital conjunction of Earth, Moon and sun at each stage of the monoliths’ intervention in human destiny, the stunning final kaleidoscopic maelstrom of time and space that engulfs the surviving astronaut and sets the stage for his rebirth as a “star-child” drifting toward Earth in a translucent placenta. One critic even called 2001 “the first Nietzschean film,” contending that its essential theme is Nietzsche’s concept of man’s evolution from ape to human to superman. What was the metaphysical message of 2001?

Kubrick: It’s not a message that I ever intend to convey in words. 2001 is a nonverbal experience; out of two hours and 19 minutes of film, there are only a little less than 40 minutes of dialog. I tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophic content. To convolute McLuhan, in 2001 the message is the medium. I intended the film to be an intensely subjective experience that reaches the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does; to “explain” a Beethoven symphony would be to emasculate it by erecting an artificial barrier between conception and appreciation. You’re free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film — and such speculation is one indication that it has succeeded in gripping the audience at a deep level — but I don’t want to spell out a verbal road map for 2001 that every viewer will feel obligated to pursue or else fear he’s missed the point. I think that if 2001 succeeds at all, it is in reaching a wide spectrum of people who would not often give a thought to man’s destiny, his role in the cosmos and his relationship to higher forms of life. But even in the case of someone who is highly intelligent, certain ideas found in 2001 would, if presented as abstractions, fall rather lifelessly and be automatically assigned to pat intellectual categories; experienced in a moving visual and emotional context, however, they can resonate within the deepest fibers of one’s being.

—Playboy’s interview with Stanley Kubrick in its entirety (1968)

Wisdom from a sometimes hated man

"When people spend their own money on themselves, they are careful about how much they spend and about what they spend it on. If people spend their own money on others, they are careful about how much they spend, but not as careful about what they spend it on. If people spend other people’s money on themselves, they are not careful about how much they spend, but they are careful about what they spend it on. If people spend other people’s money on other people, they are not careful about the amount of money they spend, nor are they careful about what they spend it on. That is government.” - Donald Rumsfeld. Written in his private notes while Secretary of Defense.

This not only summarizes the psychology of government, it also describes man's general self-preservation and self-attention superseding all other understanding. We can only truly know our own needs. That is why we are commanded to 'love one another as we love ourselves.' There is no deeper love.

And if we find ourselves in such a state where our insecurities and self-hate act as the foundation of our identity, I'd argue that such a person is incapable of free and true love.

mingle with the truth. our feet know more than books. but books know more than self-promotion.

don't know about the hedonism of self discovery.

but know there is a truth to rejecting the path of least resistance.

resistance is the only reason man has muscle.

"Never go to art school. Never go to New York. Never rent a loft. Dump your font folder. Forget symmetry and colour coordination. Stop taking text from editorial you don't read and packaging it in eye catching ways. Walk away from your computer. Then take off, go to India, rural China, Rio, Caracas, and Belize. Mingle with the filthy rich and the dirt poor. Dig up all the roots of terror. Make hunger, disease, cruelty, lust, greed, self preservation and genocide your roommates. Then when your run out of money and can't take it anymore, fly back home. Look in the mirror. Face your fears, your weaknesses, strengths, your imminent demise. Then when all of this begins to gel into a master narrative in front of your eyes, go get a job."

- Kalle Lasn