Consumerist Christmas.

My philosophy IA is about Fight Club and I am looking at the idea of consumerism. Returning to Denmark, I have found this dominating consumerist mindset just about everywhere and just wanted to make a note on this.

I seem to be returning to the point of Christianity ebbing out rather often and I will do it once again. Christmas has to be the brightest example of this. Christmas is a consumerist holiday. However bleak that statement may seem, I believe it to be true. Of course it is not only that. For a few, Christmas is actually a time to celebrate Christianity. For most, it is a time to come together and enjoy the traditions they know and love. But for all, it is a time to buy. The amount of money that Danes spend during Christmas is insane. The food, the decorations, the presents. The thing that made me most aware of this extreme consumerism was an article in a Danish newspaper. It was based on an study of last year’s Christmas presents, and showed that 21% of the people in the study did not remember a single Christmas present! I find that absurd and unpleasant. What is the point of spending such an incredible amount of money on something that is so quickly forgotten or put away?
To top it all off, the Christmas light-installations seem to be even more flamboyant and extreme this year (I did not think it possible) despite the fact that my city has just hosted the cop15 climate conference.

All in all, I think it is a shame that Christmas seems to be turning into a holiday of stress and consumption rather than a time to get together and enjoy each others’ company. That being said, I do love this time a year, especially since Denmark is covered by snow right now. A white Christmas is just priceless. Merry Christmas everyone.

 

Santa Claus and virtuous behavior.

Christmas is fast approaching, and it made me consider the idea of authority as a thing that makes sure we act in a virtuous way. Allow me to explain. As a kid, I was told that Santa Claus would know it if I did something bad, and that I would not get any presents if I did. Although I am not sure exactly how seriously I took this threat, I remember that especially in December, I did my very best to be a good girl. Sad as it is, I no longer believe in Santa Claus. I don’t remember exactly when this belief was shattered, but I know that December is no longer equal to a month in which I am especially aware of being ‘good’.

The authority that Santa Claus provided made sure that I acted in a virtuous way. I was told that he would know everything I did, and I believed it. In this sense, faith and moral behavior seem to be interlinked. Of course, the grand example of this connection is the belief in God. But, as I have said before, Christianity in Denmark is fading away and the belief in God in itself is no longer enough to uphold a moral behavior. So what prevents us from doing wrong things?

Of course there is the law, and I do understand how that is powerful enough to prevent our wrongdoings. However, the fear of the law and the consequences that come with breaking it is only put into effect when you actually get caught doing something wrong. It is connected to a certain fear, but not necessarily to guilt. Our incentive to act according to the law is that we do not wish to be punished. It is very different from the idea of an all-seeing, all-powerful God.

It can be compared to the question of whether a tree falling in the forest makes any sound if no one hears it fall. If we do something wrong but are not caught doing it, there is no consequence in relation to the law. If we believe that God sees all, even the wrongdoings that have no witnesses and no way to be linked to us count, since he sees all.

So, as we grow up and stop believing in Santa, or when we no longer believe in God, are we bound to become less virtuous? Or is there a certain innate feeling of right and wrong that causes guilt that is not connected to authority? 

Convenient Christianity

In the 7th grade the girls in my school, including myself, were given the opportunity to be confirmed. My parents aren’t Christian and neither me nor my older brother is baptized, something that is very uncommon in Denmark. Although I did attend a few of the preparation ‘classes’, I quickly decided that confirmation was not for me.
During the following period of time, I felt pretty left out. Almost everyone else was going crazy preparing for their Big Day, the way especially girls tend to do it. It was almost equivalent to a mini wedding preparation. Every discussion seemed to be centered on the upcoming confirmations. What clothes were they going to wear? What food were they going to eat? Where would they have the party? And so on and so on…
But hold on. I never heard any of these girls have a meaningful conversation about exactly what they were about to say yes to. There was never any mention of God in these conversations, but merely a never-ending stream of dresses, napkins, parties and presents. It is common to receive quite a large amount of money at your confirmation, and the length of the wish lists of these girls was quite immense. I have heard people blatantly state that they got confirmed in order to get the presents. In fact, there is such a thing as a ‘Non’-firmation, rather than a Confirmation, in which a young person does not go to church or prepare in any way, but merely throws a big party. A Nonfirmation is essentially saying No to God and Yes to the presents.
Although I disagree with the idea of a Nonfirmation, I would be a hypocrite to criticize it completely. Most of our holidays are Christian, and yet many, if not all, of them no longer have a religious focus. As I said, my family isn’t Christian, and yet I remember the Christmases and Easters as an integrated part of my childhood. Celebrating Christmas while cutting out the religious annotations to it is essentially the same as having a non-firmation. On Sundays, my brother works as a choir-singer in a small church in a Copenhagen suburb. They are usually around 5 people in the choir and yet, my brother has told me, they often outnumber the churchgoers. But come Christmas Eve, the church is filled to the brim with people who don’t set foot in there any other day of year. I think that Christianity in Denmark is ebbing away and that a lot of Danes seem to be Christians only when it is convenient to be so. This kind of detachment from the actual religious part of our traditions made me realize how prevalent the gradual disconnection from Christianity is in the Danish society.
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Statement t-shirts, piercings and tattoos

People want to be heard. They want to be noticed. They want to express themselves. So they wear their opinion on a shirt.
Perhaps people wear statement t-shirts because they find them funny or fashionable. Maybe it happens to be their laundry day or perhaps they spilled something and needed a clean shirt. But no matter what the reason, I find that it often bothers me when people wear these t-shirts. Because is it really necessary to instantly make a statement in the way that having some catchy phrase written across your chest does it?
I suppose that all clothing makes a statement. The clothes we wear allow us to express something about ourselves. Even if unconsciously, we usually place people in some kind of category according to what they are wearing. ‘Hippie’, ‘Punker’, ‘Preppy’, ‘Grunge’. Just by looking at them. Even if you make the choice of not caring about what you wear, it says something about you, so I guess there is no escaping the fact that our clothes affect how we are perceived. But I think that the trend of statement t-shirts is taking it a bit far, especially because most of these slogans are really not all that great. In fact, I think most of them are rather pointless and some of the shirts are outright rude. DO I LOOK LIKE I CARE? , YOU SAY I’M A BITCH LIKE IT’S A BAD THING, etc.
I think that wearing shirts like these, at least the rude or offensive ones, may affect the way you are perceived to such an extent that certain people might steer clear of you because of the message you have chosen to convey by wearing the shirt.
This leads me to the topic of piercings and tattoos. Not too long ago, I was considering whether or not to get a septum piercing, or a so-called ‘bull-ring’ in my nose. A lot of the people around me had several facial piercings as well as tattoos and at the time I thought it would look good. But after discussing it with my mother, I gave it a second thought. She told me that she wasn’t going to stop me from piercing my nose, but that she did not find septum-piercings appealing and that she was very likely to pass judgment on someone who chose to wear a septum piercing.
After thinking it over, I chose to leave my face metal-free. I realized that if I put a ‘bull-ring’ in the middle of my face, the way people would perceive me would inevitably change. I think that a lot of people, especially from my parents’ generation would instantly see me as ‘rebellious’, ‘wild’, or ‘disobedient’. Although I simply liked the way the ring looked, the connotations that would come with it are not detachable. When people get piercings and tattoos, they change the way they are perceived. I could not help but wonder whether my friends had pierced their faces for aesthetical reasons, or because of the statement it makes. In a sense, tattoos and piercings are essentially long-lasting statement t-shirts. I know how much I have changed over the last couple of years, and can say with almost complete certainty that any tattoo I might have wanted to get a couple of years back would be nothing but regret permanently imprinted on my skin now. I think it is important to pay attention to how the choices you make when it comes to your appearance affects the way you are perceived.

Reaction to This Is What Democracy Looks Like

The film ‘This is what democracy looks like’ made me think of something that happened in Denmark a couple of years back.

Until 2007, there was a place in Copenhagen called The Youth House. This was essentially a place that was open for anyone, although it attracted mainly young people with a left-leaning mindset. The place hosted a number of events including many concerts with especially upcoming punk bands. The walls were covered with graffiti and worn-down, but the place inevitably had a soul due to the large number of people coming and going. And then, on the morning of the 1st of March, 2007 the clearing of the place started.
The political implications behind the clearing were complex, but I will focus the reaction from the users of the Youth House. The clearing caused uproar. In the following days, the streets surrounding the House was chaotic and more than 700 people were arrested, including a number of passer-bys who just happened to be caught up in the havoc. On the 7th of March, the House was torn down completely.
Although I know that the vast majority of the people involved were fighting for a cause they felt strongly about, I think that in some cases it was not so much the cause as it was people uniting and fighting together that became essential. It may be a bit exaggerated to say that our generation has nothing to fight for, but it is not completely off track. The clearing of the Youth House provided people with a tangible cause to fight for, and strangers were fighting side by side, brought together by the common cause. The embodiment of the ‘Evil forces’ behind the clearing became the police, and the young people fought against them using all means. These people, who declared themselves ‘peaceful protesters’, got so caught up in the action that curbstones were thrown at the police, buildings vandalized and cars set on fire. It was mayhem. More than a year after the initial ‘war’ was over, there were weekly demonstrations held by the supporters of the Youth House. The house had been located on the address ‘Jagtvej 69’, and the number 69 became the symbol used by the supporters. The number was spray-painted onto walls all over Copenhagen. This summer, when I was in Aarhus – a Danish city in the other end of the country, far from Copenhagen – I saw the number sprayed on a bus stand. It struck me how even now, more than two years after the clearing, people who were in no way directly in touch with the Youth House still supports the cause and the fight through these little reminders.
I think people long to be a part of something. They want to unite and work together, towards a common goal. And sometimes, I even think that this feeling of unity can overshadow the cause itself.

Mainstream

Something that has been bothering me for a while is the way in which people tend to start disliking something as soon as it becomes popular. I have often heard people cry out “That’s so mainstream!” in a condescending tone, without actually knowing anything about whatever it is that they are criticizing. I think this logic is rather twisted. How can the fact that a lot of people like something make it less likely that it is worth your time? People must really find themselves unique if they can define their opinion of something as simply being the opposite of the majority’s.
“Oh, I don’t read Dan Brown. He’s so mainstream.”“No, I don’t listen to Coldplay – they’re so mainstream.”“I don’t eat breakfast. It’s so mainstream.” (okay, that was far-fetched.)
I believe that people with this mindset (and there are quite a few, believe me) are missing out. There is a reason why things become popular. I often find it interesting to analyze what it is that makes vastly different people appreciate the same thing. It impresses me when something is able to appeal to a large number of people irrelevant of for example age and nationality. I often come across popular culture that I don’t connect with in any way, but I do not think that steering clear of something completely because of its popularity makes a lot of sense. Not that I am trying to promote conformity. Often, I find that the most interesting movies, books and songs are not necessarily the bestsellers and crowd-pleasers. I think it is important to look into the aspects of culture that are not as widespread and popular and to support them. But that does not mean that we need to shun popular culture completely.
Another sign of the fear of falling into the mainstream is the growing tendency to actively change your self in order to stand out. In Denmark, it seems to be ‘in to be out’. Some people have the need to declare themselves unique. Everything they do has to be Outstanding. It has to be strange in the Right Way. They claim to be open-minded. They don’t exclude. They are not racist. They are not prejudiced. They do not judge people – everyone is welcome. Except, they do not exactly practice what they preach. They claim to be all-welcoming, but I think these people are some of the most exclusive I have ever encountered. Sure, if you are a bit strange and rebellious you are welcome. But as soon as you are ‘ordinary’, you are not. If you like popular music and movies you are ‘boring’ and ‘monotonous’ and ‘mainstream’. I should think that if these people truly had an open mind they would accept even those who are not like themselves, although they might not be ‘special’. Because if everyone is trying to be different, aren’t they basically all the same anyway? I’d like to end with a quote from The Incredibles here, a movie that is indeed very mainstream:
Helen: Everyone’s special, Dash.
Dash: That’s just another way of saying no one is.

Not all that Twitters is gold.

I was the last person in my class to get a cell-phone. I swore never to get one, claiming that it was completely unnecessary for me. Ditto email-account. Ditto laptop. Ditto facebook. All of which are things I feel more or less dependent on today. So, knowing myself, I’ll probably end up getting a Twitter-account sooner or later.
I think that the idea of Twitter is essentially fine. I like the efficiency that the short updates provide, and the idea of keeping people up-to-date on your life through regular posts seems reasonable. But when people start updating tweets about things that are simply irrelevant to anyone else, the point gets lost. Is it really necessary to know exactly what everyone is doing, every minute of the day? I think it is questionable exactly how much one can convey through 140 characters. Is that not the essence of shallowness – replacing actual conversation or opinion-sharing with short, instant updates?

When you are far away from home, it makes sense to give out these short updates so that people who you might not necessarily have the need to write a full email to can still get a general idea about what is going on in your life. However, I would argue that the importance of knowing what is going on in someone’s life is not really relevant if you don’t also get to know how and why. Due to the briefness of the updates, Twitter is inevitably superficial and I think it is worth considering whether a superficial update on someone’s life is preferable to no update at all.

However, I do think that Twitter can simply be seen as a fun way to share your thoughts in a convenient way. I think that it is essentially a good concept, but that the way some people tend to use Twitter as a tool of narcissism and self-absorption is simply annoying. Perhaps people want to believe that they are interesting enough for somebody to follow their every move. But when it goes as far as people posting their tweet-status simply as: ‘Is twittering’, the pointlessness reaches a peak and I have to say that all that twitters truly is not gold.
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Yes or No

Just a thought:
During my summer holiday, I voted for the first time. I voted on whether or not the Act of Succesion should be altered so that the firstborn, no matter what gender, should be allowed to rule, whereas it has earlier been the firstborn boy rather than the firstborn child.
When I entered the isoloir (feeling very mature and grown-up) I found that the ballot paper read only ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ with a box next to each. Although it makes sense that the voters would know what they were voting for or against before entering the isoloir, I find it very odd that there was no explanation whatsoever on the ballot to indicate exactly what ‘yes’ and ‘no’ meant. I only thought about this for a second, and I imagine that the majority of the people knew what was being asked immediately. But I also believe that a few, or perhaps a large part, did not. I know that a lot of people are not all that interested in politics and was not really aware what they were going to vote on. I find it highly unlikely that anyone, if in doubt of what exactly they were voting on, would stick their head out of the isoloir and ask ‘hey, guys – what exactly am I voting on, again?’
This might be far fetched, but I believe that this might be an attempt to manipulate the small percentage of people who did not know what they were being asked. If I was the one who was in there, not knowing what question I was being asked, I would most probably tick ‘yes’. ‘Yes’ seems like an active choice. It makes you a good voter. You have taken a stand on something, you support something, you are a good and strong citizen. Could that be the case or did whoever designed the ballots simply assume that people would have the courtesy to at least know what they were voting on before going to vote?
Anyway, 85.4% voted YES and the Act of Succesion was altered. Point proven? Not at all, but theorizing is fun.

Political Supermodels

Our recent class discussion on the concept of ‘Political Supermodels’ made me think…
During the time of the last Danish election, my mother was working for one of the smaller parties. Seeing it from the inside, she made it clear to me exactly how much thought goes into every single detail of an election campaign, and exactly how much effort is put into it. On TV, the campaign videos start popping up, and you see posters with smiling politicians in every streetlight. This is a remarkable feature of the political campaigns. These posters are designed so that the face of the person is clearly the essence of the poster, accompanied only by the name of the party he or she represents. There is no mention of the opinions or viewpoints of the politician or the party, only this link between a face and a party. In this way, the focus is on the people rather than the politics.
The strategy that the parties use is essentially the same. They want to make themselves look good. They have different ways of portraying a favorable image, but they are all trying to do it. If those who have the best campaign = those who get the greatest number of votes, this is a vicious circle, since the larger parties have a lot more money available to them to run a campaign than the smaller ones.
I am not trying to say that Danish people are stupid, ignorant or easily manipulated. In fact, I have a number of friends who have been politically active for years despite their young age. Still, I think that a lot of voters have only a very superficial comprehension for politics, and that they are likely to be influenced by a strong campaign rather than develop an in-depth understanding of the party’s political standpoint. For example, I have spoken to people who voted for a party because they liked the color of their campaign poster or because they thought a party-member was attractive.
A few years back, a very conservative Danish political party (Danish People’s Party) used the lyrics of a song to promote themselves. This does not initially seem like a problem, but it caused a great uproar at the time. Loosely translated, the song is called ‘Give Me Back Denmark’ and is written by the artist Natasja. It deals with how Denmark is moving away from what it once were – how the free expression and spaces to unfold are getting lost with a specific reference to the tearing down of the ‘Youth House’. In general, it criticizes a conservative and discriminating mindset and encourages people to bring back the free spirit of an ‘old Denmark’. The Danish people’s party took this hit song that basically criticizes their policies and used it in their favor. They used the campaigning slogan ‘Give us back Denmark’. Many found this outrageous and rude as the Denmark that the Danish People’s Party is asking to get back is a conservative ‘monocultural’ one with no room for diversity. In effect, the exact opposite of the Denmark Natasja longed for. Plagiarism or not, the popularity of the song made the slogan memorable and tongue-in-cheek enough to ensure the party a large chunk of the votes. Whether this was because of their promotional trick or their actual policies, I am not to say.
Since I am eighteen years old I am allowed to vote, and although I would love to say that I am immune to the political campaign, I think that I, as everyone else, will be biased by the parties’ strong self-promotion.

I swear

When I speak Danish, I swear in English. I am much more inclined to throw in a ‘shit’ or ‘fuck’ (pardon my French) in a sentence than I am to use the Danish translation. By doing this, I think that I somehow distance the word from its actual meaning. But now that my everyday language of communication is English, I have become a lot more aware of what I am actually saying when I use these swearwords. Nonetheless, I feel that after coming to MUWCI, my tendency to swear has increased.
Why do we swear? I know that many of my peers use swearwords to a much wider extent than I do, but I still find myself swearing more than I need to.
Would cutting out the use of swearwords from my everyday language limit my ability to express myself, or would it perhaps challenge me to describe how I feel more precisely? If I could not just throw in an arbitrary swearword in an otherwise completely valid sentence, I would have to find an alternative that actually expressed what I wanted to express rather than just being a rude addition to a sentence. A curse adds no real substance to a sentence and most swearwords seem to have lost their actual meaning completely. In fact, the extensive amount of swearing degrades the emphasis that each swearword puts on a sentence. It is a vicious circle. The more we swear, the more we need to swear in order to express the same amount of shock, awe, frustration, etc.
Would I swear if no one around me did? At home, one of my closest friends is very religious, and in her social circle as well as upbringing, swearing has been completely off the table. Whenever I am around her, I become very aware of the swearwords I use. In MUWCI, I do not give it a thought, since the people around me swear just as much as I do. If this was a ‘swear-free’ community however, I doubt that I would use the rude words as much as I do now, if at all.
Is this perhaps a pattern of behavior that can be transferred to other areas? Swearing is a very minor part of our interaction, but is the way in which my swearing seems to have increased since I came to MUWCI a sign that I have effectively let the habits of the people around me alter mine? I essentially see the habit of swearing as a negative thing. If it is something you cannot control, the image you project of yourself seems immature and somewhat aggressive. However, I have taken on the habit of swearing, even if unconsciously. I believe this model to be true for a number of other areas in MUWCI. When you gather people from around the world and expect them to fit into one community, some people will adjust to the norms of the community and the people around them.

Awesome trivialities

I first came across the word ‘awesome’ when analyzing a poem in my 6^th grade English class. I was instantly drawn to the word as I found the sound of it pleasant and peculiar. Today, I feel that it belongs in the mouths of teenagers more than in old English poetry. In any given conversation, it seems to be slipped into every other sentence.

“Dude, that party was awesome!”, “Your hair looks awesome”, “This hamburger is awesome!”
I dare say that although a hamburger might be good, satisfying, tasty or delicious, it has to be a somewhat extraordinary burger to truly fit the label it is given when we call it ‘awesome’. One definition of awesome is this: extremely impressive or daunting; inspiring great admiration, apprehension, or fear. This is hardly what we are trying to express when we use the word in everyday conversation. The overuse of words in itself is something that easily gets on my nerves but in the case of ‘awesome’ I feel that something has been lost with the change in meaning and use for this particular word. For what do we do when something truly is awesome, that is to say when it leaves our jaw hanging open and overthrows us completely; when it leaves us in awe? Of course we can use synonyms to properly explain ourselves, but if this is the direction in which our language is going and we keep discharging words of their meaning by overusing and trivializing them, is our range of possibility to truly express ourselves decreasing?

Seeing the word in poetry now, it stands out to me as being strangely misplaced. In this way, the meaning it has come to have in my everyday life has effectively overruled the original meaning of the word. While I know this is natural, and that it happens to many words it is slightly depressing to know that my opportunities to truly express how I feel has been narrowed down, even if only by a microscopic bit. Although the word is still perfectly valid when used in its original meaning, a sentence like ‘It was an awesome cathedral’ has a strangely casual ring to it, and I am afraid I will never quite be able to appreciate the word in its original meaning again. This bothers me quite a bit and it is definitely not awesome.

First posts, years and impressions.

MUWCI is often referred to as a bubble, a description I find quite precise. When I am here, it is easy to forget that the outside world exists. In a way, the bubble we lived in through all of last year has already burst. There is no way you can take away half of the people who made out a community and still expect things to be exactly the same. In my opinion, this is a good thing. Change allows us to take a step back and evaluate the things we encounter. Our batch has been given the opportunity to readjust our way of thinking rather than simply continuing to act in the same way because that is ‘how it has always been’. Saying that the things we do are right just because we have been doing them for a long time is a passive and unconstructive argument. However, it is much simpler to think like this than to actually evaluate and change our behavior. Coming to MUWCI, my second years’ way of thinking and behaving heavily influenced mine. I think this is quite natural. It took me a while to adjust to being in India, and adapting someone else’s approach to things was far easier than completely building up my own from the beginning. I am not saying that I blindly accepted whatever my second years presented me to. However, having been here for a year did give them some kind of authority or at least knowledge about the place that I did not yet have. Thinking about it now, I realize exactly how much the attitude of the people around us changes our view on things. If each of us attempts to approach the people and situations around us with an open mind this will inevitably affect the general feel of the community. Also, I am wondering how this place will change along with the people in it. If it is true that we are really just an ensemble of relationships, to how great an extent are we ourselves bound to change when more than a hundred new people are introduced to our lives? And how prominent is a first encounter really? I have no memory of when and where I first met most of the people that I now consider my closest friends. I would like to think that a part of me is consistent no matter who I am around. However, over summer I found it hard to combine the person I used to be at home and who I felt I had become during the year I had spent in MUWCI. Maybe it is not true that the people around us completely make us who we are, but rather that every relationship we have leave some kind of impression that will inevitably shape our personality.