attending a seminar about politics and power taught by manuel castells, and then jumping into a talk by noam chomsky on participatory democracy are those sort of things that i will definitely miss from mit. having powerful thinkers around you is inspirational. you can learn a lot from listen to this great professors. the lessons of today are quite provocative. while castells introduced me to the theory of affective intelligence, chomsky confirmed the obsolescence of markets and wage labor. the field of affective intelligence is a crossover, a border, between neuroscience and political psicology. in a nutshell, it is a research and methodology that has identified and proved how the brains of the people and ther bodies are manipulated by the media environment. the social systems works sending signals to peoples brains. those signal produce emotions, those emotions make feelings, and those feelings make reasoning. that is the change. the interesting thing of the signals that are transmitted to people brains is that the primal feeling of pain, when is created among citizens makes them less critical, more inclined to vote for war policies, and stop recording information. fear is related to anger and it has a sort of negative thing going on. conversely, positive emotions, such as pleaseure, induce critical thinking, careful information processing and gathering, and encourages learning processes. listen to this catalan professor, on of the major sociologist of our times, made me think in my country and its history of wars and violence and terror. and specially in the figure of the president uribe, a tropical dictator as the ones that gabo portrayed in his books. but maybe even worst.
it is interesting to see how critical thinking and learning processes are connecting to the signals that the citizen gets from the media environment. it is also sad because when one analyses the colombian scenario, there is not much hope. just ignorance and fear. listening to chomsky and his point about how isolation is what makes people be under opresion created a kind of crossover. it is fear a mechanism to have people issolated, to avoid talking to each other, it is fear what prevent people to organize themselves in groups, organizations. it is the fear what also creates racism. colombia is perhaps one of the places where the society has more fear inside. that is also one of the reasons of the violence of this country. it is very sad. everytime i think of it i discover how spoiled it is. all the actors are totally degenerated: militars, police, paramilitars,guerrillas. but they are creating more fear, and keepping all the people inside the stupid loop of the war. an infinite loop. very sad. that is one of the reasons i try to not speak to much about that. but maybe is also because i have fear as a colombian. fear sucks. and also that is one of the reasons i am now not in my homeland. fear does not make you free. and freedom is the essence of life. what keeps our rhythms going.