It’s a picture perfect of winter outside... The sky has cleared up a bit since yesterday - that’s the one good thing about this island: clouds drift away as swiftly as they appear - and the wintry sun is a dim golden glow on the snow.
The naked trees have a thin layer of whiteness spread along their twisted limbs and the evergreen shrubs are half-immersed in a blanket of snow. Birds are fluttering from roofs to treetops, wings black against the sun that seems to set low forever in this winter time. And when I pop my head out the open window, a gush of icy air greets me, full of mordant freshness that tickles the skin. It looks and smells just like winter indeed.
The news are full of snow stories, of course, and the media even managed to come up with a new expression: Frozen Britain. I’m really starting to think they have that one person sitting in some office, somewhere, hired and paid for the sole purpose of coming up with such catchy expressions. It’s probably the case. Why not? Everything these days is delegated to the maximum and every task imaginable has been split in smaller ones so that no one person ever does anything on their own anymore.
Apparently, division of labour speeds up the supply of any sort of goods and greatly increases it. The great downside of this, and to me it is a huge one, is that we end up with people who are unable to do one COMPLETE thing themselves. They can do part of a thing, but someone else is now forever needed to complete that thing. I don’t see how that makes us stronger or more evolved in the detail.
On the whole, we do look evolved because the masses end up making a complete thing, but what doesn’t fit is the fact that in the detail, each individual is maimed: not one person can actually do a damn thing. It bothers me no end. It makes me feel as though I was handicapped from the start. Maybe that’s exactly it. That division only served to nurture consumerism, and the price to pay was that it handicapped us as individuals. We don’t know anything completely, we only know bits of things.
Even if you gathered all the bits that you know, it wouldn’t even come close to knowing ONE thing completely. Therefore knowing a lot of different parts does not equals to knowing the whole. We are handicapped. Our minds are like a limp foot. We ‘know’ a lot of various little things, perhaps one little technique in the detail, but we remain ignorant of the whole. Our knowledge becomes even more limited and so does our perception, if not our reality itself. We feel more knowledgeable because we seem to know so many little things, but we are really more ignorant than ever before.
The proof is, again, in the pudding. Not only are we growing dependent on complex, faceless structures from ‘above’, but we don’t even realise it. How could we? The only way to realise that is when those structures collapse, and suddenly we have to rely on ourselves, and... Surprise! Most people couldn’t save their lives even if they tried. They wouldn’t even know where to start. In that sense, I feel like we’ve been turned into mindless chicken, except our type of chickens live in 'luxury' homes rather than inside a wooden den.
Take away the landscape detail, and all that’s left are chickens.
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