A WORLD WITHOUT ANYTHING NEW
And so I took this title from the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity.
I am far from being a philosopher, like him, and that is why what jumped out at me was the political situation in which we live.
Let me explain: Today we have presidents of countries that have been in power for twenty years or more. I am talking about the Russian Vladimir Putin, the Turkish Recep Tayip Erdogan, the Chinese XI Sing Pin, the Iranian Ali Khamenei, the Belarussian Lukashenko, the Jordanian Abdullah II, the Syrian Assad, and I could add others. All this to say that these rulers are there, without necessarily doing any good for their citizens.
What do all these individuals bring to our lives. They are all living off of us through our labor and taxes. The unfortunate thing is that we vote for them, so why worry?
What's new about all this? And to think that these same people seriously think that they will be around for life!
And while all of us want something new, nothing happens. And if we look at our lives, the only thing new is the technology that would suddenly change it. There is no assurance of such success, however.
Our daily habit, Work, Eat , Sleep, we have lived with for decades and it doesn't seem to end. Nothing new here! By the way, I heard some are thinking of sending us into space, to visit Mars. That would indeed be new, wouldn't it?
Yes, we want change because our lives seem dull. We have our habits that we don't change even though we don't like them. Fashion changes and makes the economy work, does it make us happier? I doubt it.
Sometimes we have new friends. Will this new action last? Just like in the kitchen, a different dish to enjoy, will it change our life? I recognize that there have been wars and they have indeed brought something new, something we could have done without, right?
I am very far from the philosopher Levinas and do not know what he would have thought. Maybe I should read his Ethics and educate myself a bit. He often talks about ontology, that knowledge of being as being. He realized that the world had nothing new, but did not propose what it lacks.
