Maelstrom

     The title of this blog is incoherent. "Wyyes: microcosm" is intentionally enigmatic because it means exactly what the author desires without cluing in a casual observer. The meaning of this article is similarly convoluted, but as much of life is, the presence of confusion does not imply a lack of function or purpose; because a topic is difficult to convey does not mean that the topic is useless. The first time a chef makes a dish, the end result is not always the desired product, but patience, a working understanding of food chemistry, and the determination to persevere combine, sift, and combine to formulate later successes.

     What is a "malestrom" other than a word used to convey fear of the uncontrollable forces of nature? A chaotic current twists and pulls with an unpredictable flow that dictates the direction of watery paths.
     The thoughts of man meander along similar lines through the settings of time. Tangible yet difficult to see, thoughts seem to follow no direction, but once pulled in, there is no escape. History, society, politics, science, and the interrelationships that tie seemingly unconnected things into a powerful, conglomerated entity that forces humanity to either strive for avoidance (nuclear war) or to strive toward (ending global hunger).

     This concept is not new. The secondary definition of "maelstrom" is "a scene or state of confused and violent movement or upheaval." The turbulence of life displaces, disorients, and disenfranchises most efforts to subdue the natural forces around us. While it is nearly impossible to harness nature, by studying its patterns, rhythms, and motions, large scale implementation of improvement attempts is more readily uncovered. 

     Man is unpredictable yet powerfully motivated. Nature is the perfect depiction of inconceivable strength. Both can be ignored and avoided, but once you begin the advance, there is no retreat - from hurricanes to the minds of men, the forces churns with unbridled curiosity.

     The world is turning,

     Man is yearning,

     Time moves on - 

     And so will I.

 __    
Agatha Tyche

Anarchic Desires

     Since revolution means "to revolve" or "to return to a previous position," it is fitting to consider what 2014 will bring. The term "revolution" did not mean "violent coup" until the late 1700s with the American expulsion of British governance in the New World and the ousting of the monarchy in France. The French Revolution sought to ease the tax burden on the Third Estate, the common man, but only established a new monarchy with Napoleon after half a decade of death.
     The new idea of nationalism, that one's own culture and country were inherently superior to others, spread through Europe with Napoleon's conquests. Because a majority of the peoples of Europe lived in national boundaries determined by larger groups, the mid-nineteenth century saw several revolts. Germany and Austria had several cities overrun with revolutionaries because of the nature of those countries' populations: large numbers of minority groups vying for unity and political voice. These politically undermined groups developed a secessionist attitude that created a divisive atmosphere against the common, historic holdings of power. As groups sought independence from major powers, pro-anarchy sentiments rose, and sixty-six years after the revolutions of 1848, the 1914 Serbian situation provoked the great nations of Europe, and with them the world, into the Great War.

     Not all revolutions resulted in the collapse of governments or world wars. The 1848 revolutions in Europe cemented a modern understanding of citizens rallying against government policies without destroying the system as a whole. Seeking a different, maybe better, way of life, economic, civil, militaristic, spiritual, or political reforms gained popular  support to change legislation. In America, "Populists" took on a similar role in the 1880s before transforming into Progressives.
     In the first decade of this millennium the world seems to have invigorated recent revolutions including Egypt and Ukraine which have continued this trend of voicing discontentment for information access rights to national alliances and economic concerns.
     Having examined the acts of insurrection and rebellion of uprisings from Rome to England, France, Germany, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and America, there remains only one question: What drives man to rebel?
     Is it resistance of exploitation? Fear of oppression or destruction? Anger? Desire to protect wealth and family? Hope for a better future?
     If those questions are the answers to the cause, why do some people choose not to revolt in similar circumstances?
     People hope. For improvement, life, and accomplishment. Not always are those hopes fulfilled, but one of the greatest encouragements about our species is the desire to strive forward for greatness. The most devastated people demonstrate their strength and hope in the darkest days. Man does not surrender.
When any of life's aspects challenge the certainties and comforts of familiarity, your choice is whether or not fighting is worthy of man's efforts. For with the power of hope, change comes.


 __    
Agatha Tyche

Christmas Special: Christian and pagan origins

     Christmas is a holiday now celebrated through many different cultures around the world. Some Muslim nations even hold Christmas as a special time of year. The holiday has grown to encompass more than the Christian reverence of Christ's birth, and  it now stands for the love of mankind for his fellows, an appreciative acknowledgement toward the friends and family that make life meaningful.
     The origins of this "Christian" day are far from their modern recognition of Jesus of Nazareth's birth.
Ancient Egyptians and ancient Greeks worshiped gods of the resurrection (Osiris and Dionysus respectably) at the end of the year, but European paganism had the strongest impacts on modern traditions.
     The sum total of Christian impact on the holiday is a recognition of Jesus's birth. All similarities end there since Jesus was born anywhere from August to September, not December. Early church fathers make no recognition of Christmas as a revered time of year since adoption of the holiday began later. After centuries of church leaders discouraging celebrations on 25 December because of non-Christian traditions, Pope Gregory I instructed his priests not to ban winter celebrations but adapt them for Christians. This did not definitively end Christian opposition to Christmas's celebration. Though Christmas was eventually an intimate part of Christian religion, Oliver Cromwell's government banned the festivities in England during his reign because of the pagan origins. In the British colonies of the New World, Puritan groups such as the Massachusetts Bay Colony continued the ban for several years while other areas embraced  the tradition.
     The Romans held an annual week-long festival, Saturnalia, 17-25 December, to honor Saturn, the god of agriculture. A Christianized Roman populace later replaced their heathen celebration habits with a recognition of  Christ's birth, but the traditions used to celebrate this holiday did not noticeably change for centuries. An example of unchanging practices despite a religious shift is easily exemplified with the human-shaped biscuits, the origin of the gingerbread man, that were eaten during Saturnalia to symbolize the human sacrifice of the Lord of the Misrule at the end of the festive week. While the human sacrifice is no longer a part of tradition, the gingerbread man is.
     The dominant origin for most Christmas traditions actually spring from European pagans. Rituals celebrated the winter solstice and recognized the return of daylight with spring on the way. Pagans decorated their trees in worship of natural spirits, the predecessor to Christmas trees, used mistletoe to poison the victims for their human sacrifices, and sang carols to ward off evil spirits.

     Santa Claus is an excellent example of merged traditions. Bishop Nicolas of Myra in Turkey attended the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. In 1087 his body was moved from Turkey to Italy where it absorbed the gift-giving tradition of Pasqua Epiphania, a local saint, especially placing toys in children's stockings. Gifts were exchanged on 6 December, the anniversary of Nicolas's death. As this tradition spread north into pagan tribes, representation of Nicolas merged with Woden: a man with long white beard riding a horse through the sky in late autumn in heavy winter clothing. The celebration date shifted to 25 December as Christians attempted to convert the pagan rituals as was done with Saturnalia centuries before.
     The modern depiction of Santa Claus, however, comes largely from the nineteenth century. In his Knickerbocker History, Washington Irving, an American writer, used the translated Dutch name of Nicolas (Sinterklaas), "Santa Claus," to describe a bearded, horse-riding man. The poem "T'was the night before Christmas" changed the steed from a horse to reindeer and added the descent by chimney. Harper's Weekly, a newspaper, popularized the visual aspects of Santa Claus from the 1860-1880s. As the final touch, Coca-Cola commissioned a Santa advertising campaign in the 1930s with the only stipulation being a Coca-Cola red suit. Thus, Santa Claus contains elements of Christian, pagan, and commercial origins that effectively represents the amalgamation of Christmas today.
     By the 1880s the modern conception of "Christmas" was secured with egg nog, Christmas cards, Santa Claus, and the Christmas poems and stories by Clement Clark Moore and Charles Dickens. By the mid 1940s Christmas became a commercial focus for many American-based companies with FDR's extension of the Christmas shopping season to Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, as well as Coca-Cola's successful development of Christmas advertising begun in the 1930s.
     Christmas has long been a winter holiday celebrated by people of different religions around the world. Despite the modern Christian emphasis, it is fitting that a holiday begun to celebrate life and human relationships continues to spread joy around the world in all different cultures, religions, and peoples.


  __    
Agatha Tyche

Years that Question

     The history of man normally has various centers of power. Rarely are those centers tangled into one place. America, the superpower, is projected to be replaced by China at the economic pinnacle by 2016. The Christian missionary title of the world already belongs to South Korea so the United States has lost that too. As a military might, the young nation still holds up the mark for now.
     With the widespread protests, civil wars, and increasing wealth of the Middle East, the population explosion in Africa, and the increasing economic might of SE Asian nations like the Philippines, India and Indonesia, the focal point of global power is already changing, but will the landscape change as a whole or only within the upper classes? European imperialism shredded the last African-based empires a century and a half ago, and the Ottoman Empire's fall after World War I ended the last prominent Middle Eastern empire.
     Will economic development in previously termed "third world" countries finally sling-shot forward? If a non-Western country becomes a superpower, will the change in power be beneficial to their economic development and social stability or will the effort of rising up empty the coffers? Alternatively, will the newly found power refocus attention on the new pole and cause further development?
     Much of the twentieth century focused on the mutual destruction of Europe's powers. With this new century other nations are stepping on the springboards of global domination, but will they learn the lessons of their predecessors or only seek accumulation and domination?

     As with all new things, elements of excitement and fear merge indistinguishably. Population dynamics of a growing world are prying power from the elderly Western nations. What will become of the old powers - looted, restored, or stabilized? Will a multi-polar world destroy or encourage trade?
     Let's find out.

  __    
Agatha Tyche

House of Cards

     Always destruction is faster than building. A big family dinner can take a full day to cook but eating rarely takes more than an hour. Clean up is faster than adding ingredients and cooking as well, and the time to make a fancy dinner is easily two-thirds of the total time. The Twin Towers of New York City imploded in an hour and a half but took five years to construct.
     The universe's touted law of entropy never sleeps. Disassembly is quicker than manufacturing. One of the starkest revelers of this fact is fire.

     House fires, ships burning at sea, fires that consume entire cities from Rome in 64 AD to London  in 1666 to Chicago in 1873. The accumulated work of thousands of hands is destroyed in hours. The Sack of Rome by Alaric's Visigoths in 410 robbed the city of nearly 800 years of art and wealth.
     While man is a master craftsman capable of making beauty inexpressible in words, he is also the master of ruins. Life is a tentative thing with many ingredients needed to usher in a new generation that can be undone with few decisive actions. Genocide removes a unique perspective of life from the world just as war obliterates the creations of an entire civilization. Is man not to fight the entropy around him by assisting, fabricating, and envisioning what the works of his hands could be? Let us not allow the continual story of man's answer to entropy be bureaucracy and mass production but the beauty of our lives, stories, and the love we share with our fellow man.


  __    
Agatha Tyche

What Man Has to Say

     The most rudimentary forms of civilization involve man's organized interactions with others of his cultural group under rules of social interchanges. An authority higher than the individual unites people together whether from a small group of local extended families, an expanded tribal system, or a government with positions beyond the individual leaders which pass power on to consecutive generations. As governments developed and attempted to force their wills upon the people they governed, an obvious problem developed. Since the government derives it power from those it governs, a populous cannot be governed unless it submits to that government.
     The philosophy of this social contract has undergone intensive analysis since its popularized conception in the seventeenth century with notable advocates John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. The social contract states that the power of the government, specifically that of a monarch, is derived from the subjects that empower it. Thomas Hobbes famously describes the processes of governing man whose natural state is anarchy and is subdued with promises of protection and threats of violent death usually carried out via execution.

     In the nearly five centuries since the birth of this political philosophy, the world has change. Monarchs no longer dominate the spectrum of governments in power around the world. Mercantilism is no longer the prevailing economic theory of Europe. Life imprisonment has replaced the death penalty in most Western nations since the 1970s. Instead of having a government ruling over illiterate masses with the threat of exploitative military enforcement, the people now decide who oversees their nation's domestic and international affairs.
     Neither Hobbes and Locke's world nor our own have succeeded in uncovering the perfect government,  but in the centuries since the European Enlightenment, the common man has gained a voice of authority after a long struggle. Still the task of governments has not changed. Strength is in the appeasement and distraction of the masses to rising against the body of government as the French did in their bloody revolution at the end of the eighteenth century.
     Ancient Rome's deteriorating economy encouraged emperors to give large food handouts to prevent the one million people in the city from rioting over grain prices which gave origin to the phrase "bread and circuses (panem et circenses)" to describe the collapse of civil duty and only give sustenance to public approval.
     A thousand years later the people's voice still thundered. The 1381 Peasant's Revolt in England came about because of government incompetence and high taxes. The American and French revolutions occurred largely because of high taxes and the political oppression of the common man. The 1790s stirred Europe into a revolution frenzy with several smaller revolutions occurring through the early 1800s, especially the Europe-wide 1848 revolution. Under the Soviet regime in Eastern Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, Hungary rose up in 1956, and Alexander Dubček's initiated the Prague Spring in 1968. Both sought anti-centralization. The recent and widely televised 2011 London riots were also credited, in a large part, to a common and growing frustration of the government's mismanagement of economic policy's.
     After two millenia of documented uprisings caused largely by economic stimuli, does this still impact modern governments? Yes. As Thomas Hobbes explains in The Leviathan, governments are created to protect and control people, but if the government fails in its purposes, the people should and shall rise up as the American Founding Fathers explained in several Lockean documents. People outnumber government enforcers since the regime's protectors come from the population it governs. Thus, if a significant portion of the populace is dissatisfied enough to riot, a new government can be created.
     George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four touches on a similar topic. As the main character, Winston Smith observes,

"If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five percent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within. Its enemies, if it had any enemies, had no way of coming together or even of identifying one another. Even if the legendary Brotherhood existed, as just possibly it might, it was inconceivable that its members could ever assemble in larger numbers than twos and threes. Rebellion meant a look in the eyes, an inflection of the voice; at the most an occasional whispered word. But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire. They need only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely, sooner or later it must occur to them to do it. And yet --!
Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they will never become conscious."    George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 60-61.

     Considering the absolute power many monarchs held centuries ago, modern man is the most privileged class ever. The goals of cultures differ from each other and from themselves through time. Food and wealth accumulate with those in power, and since man needs to eat, he will always rise up when the life of those he loves is threatened.
     When evaluating the policies of your country, make sure to consider them based off historic perspective and the goals of the current regime then consider how that impacts the population as a whole: beneficially or detrimentally. No man or government is perfect, but since we have to share the world, let us do so with the satisfaction of making it as good a place for as many as possible.

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Agatha Tyche

Thank you

     After 18 months, I would like to thank my regular readers, especially from the United States, Russia, China, and Germany. We've covered topics from the aspects of the soul, the purposes of wars and revolutions, and reflections on virtues. Thanks for hanging in there!

     The bi-monthly posts will keep coming. Working outlines for posts through July 2014 are already being researched and written. Thank you for following my disparate thoughts, and if you have ideas, interests, and topics you would like presented, leave a comment.
     The list of nations is organized by the number of views from that nation. If there is an equal number for multiple nations, the country first to view comes earlier on the list. Thank you, readers around the world!

United States
Russia
China
Germany
Ukraine
France
United Kingdom
Netherlands
India
Poland
Kazakhstan
Malaysia
Chile
Lithuania
Brazil
Columbia
Indonesia
Mexico
Peru
Latvia
Venezuela
Israel


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Agatha Tyche