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- laodan is a 56 year old guy from Wisconsin, USA.
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THE WAY THINGS ARE: The meaning of life is to be found in thinking about what is reality and the beauty of reality is to be found in our DNA's memorization of all forms that have been successfully retained along the four billion years of evolution of the principle of life on Gaia our earth. In the end what I mean to say is that beauty is something objective and what we call ugliness is then simply our unconscientious feel of something evolution did not retain.
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Tibet: dream and reality, by Slavoj Zizek
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May 10, 1:40pm
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•http://mondediplo.com/2008/05/09tibet
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Tibet: dream and reality
in Le Monde Diplomatique by Slavoj Zizek philosopher at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and author most recently of Violence, Big Ideas/Small Books
The West is projecting not only its own spiritual fantasies upon Tibet, but its own economic fears upon China, imagining a power struggle quite different from that which has actually happened in Tibet. We have to learn to look at Tibet as it is - and China too.
 Tibet: dream and reality
This simple "good guys versus bad guys" story that we are being fed about the relationship between China and Tibet is indeed troubling, for, it is such a far cry from reality. The nine points offerered by Slavoj Zizek are a useful reminder of some hard facts that debunk this simple "good guys versus bad guys" story.
What happens in Tibet is indeed no more than the imposition of modernity on a "pre-modern society". The same has been going on since centuries at the hand of the West while this time around the operation is conducted by China. We should thus be asking why the tyranny of modernity is never questioned instead of accusing the Chinese to commit a cultural genocide.
China enters modernity so abruptly and with such devastating consequences for the West that it is tempting to refer to it as "the bad guy" but we ought to remember that it is the West that initially bullied China on the road to modernity. The entry of nearly 25% of the world population into a game that for centuries has been played exclusively by less than 10% of the world population is world-changing, no doubt about it.
Without the knowledge that China acquired along its millennial experience in management of a huge bureaucracy the country could simply not have succeeded the rapid economic boom that we all are witnessing. Unfortunately the knowledge of this reality is not part of the Western analytical toolbox. Slavoj Zizek provocatively sketches this Western ignorance in the following question " What if the 'vicious combination of the Asian knout and the European stock market' proves economically more efficient than our liberal capitalism? Might it signal that democracy, as we understand it, is no longer a condition and motor of economic development, but an obstacle?"
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