Lonely life in singapore
-
look no further than the dear leader of North Korea.
But I not under his rule.
Kim Jong Il dares to confront USA, Lee Kuan Yew dare to confront USA?
-
Flapdoodle... really truly understand hw u feel... Im goin thru the same situation. Its either home to work, work to home during week days. Library, shoppin center, home during weekends. U r doin something but yet its empty inside. U want to talk personal stuff to someone so badly but there is noone there whom u can rely on. You don hate people. Just going thru a 'down' time..
-
Originally posted by Ah Chia:
But I not under his rule.
Kim Jong Il dares to confront USA, Lee Kuan Yew dare to confront USA?
hahaha okok. since your obsession is to hate him, continue then.
-
U want to talk personal stuff to someone so badly but there is noone there whom u can rely on. You don hate people. Just going thru a 'down' time..
Kampong life destroyed.
-
What?
-
hahaha okok. since your obsession is to hate him, continue then.
My obsession is to see him die.
-
U r a sadist
-
What?
Another paradigm I want to establish is a difference between two kinds of
civilizations, which means a difference between two kinds of governments in them.
Asiatic Civilizations, which I call Class B Civilizations, generally do not attempt to
deal with individuals or with the problems of individuals; they leave interpersonal
relationships to the local or kinship community.Class A Civilizations including Classical Civilization, our own Western Civilization, or the first Chinese or Sinic Civilization, whose dates are 1800 B.C. to 400 A.D. In class A Civilizations, although the civilization begins as an area of common culture made up of communities, there is a long term trend to destroy and break down those communities.
The way I would like to express this would be -- and I used to draw it on the
blackboard -- by saying that all civilizations start out as aggregations of
communities.Those communities are generally of two types, either local, such as
parishes, neighborhoods, villages, or manors; or kinships, families, clans, and so
forth. When a civilization begins with such communities, as ours did in 550, there is
no state, and there are no atomized individuals.I will not go into the details of this, but in such communities, there are no written laws; all law is customary.
Most controls on behavior are what I call internalized, that is, they are built
into your hormones and your neurological responses. You do what is necessary to
remain a member of the community, because if you were not a member of a
community, you would be nothing. You would not be a man.As you may know if you ever studied linguistics, the names which many primitive and not-so-primitive peoples have for themselves is the word for man. The communities from which Classical Civilization came were clans, kinship groups; the communities from which Western Civilization came were local villages and manors. Lucky civilizations, such as Chinese Civilizations over the past 1500 years, generally have communities which are both kinship and local.
What happens in the course of a class A civilization, over a thousand or more years, is that the fundamental communities are broken up and gradually disintegrate into smaller and smaller groups, and may end up simply as what we call nuclear families, a father and a mother, who eventually lose all discipline and control of their children. The result of this process is a state which is not only sovereign but totalitarian, and it is filled with isolated individuals.Of the four civilizations which came out of Classical Antiquity's wreckage, two,
Islamic and Byzantine, clearly are Class B Civilizations, that is, they continued to
work for communities. Their governments were governments of limited powers, of
which the most important were raising money and recruiting soldiers.The finest example of such an Asiatic Despotism was the Mongolian Empire of Genghis Khan about A.D. 1250, but its origins go back to the Persian Empires of the Achaemenids and the Sassanids. Good examples of such a structure are the Chinese Civilizations of 220-1949, the Byzantine Empire after 640, and the Islamic sultanates which eventually culminated in the Ottoman Empire.
The efforts of the Carolingian Franks to establish a similar empire in Western Civilization collapsed and led to the dark age of 860-970.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/13458196/Prof-Carroll-Quigley-The-Oscar-Iden-LecturesLecture-1-The-State-of-Communities
-
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah!!! blah blaaahhh!!! -
Now I will put on the board something with which former students are familiar. I always call it the levels of culture, the aspects of a society: military, political, economic, social, emotional, religious, and intellectual. Those are your basic human needs.
The interesting thing about them is that they are arranged in evolutionary sequence. Millions of years ago, even before men became human, they had a need for defence of the group, because it is perfectly obvious that men cannot live outside of groups.
They can satisfy their needs only by cooperating within a group. But I'll go further than that, and return to it again in a moment: Men will not become men unless they grow up in communities. We will come back to that because it is the basis of my lecture tonight.
If you have a group, it must be defended against outsiders; that's military. Before men came out of the trees they had that need. If your needs are to be satisfied within some kind of group, you must have ways of settling disputes and arguments, and reconciling individual problems within the group; that's political. You must have organizational patterns for satisfying material needs, food, clothing, shelter: that's economic.
Then came two which have been largely been destroyed or frustrated in the last thousand years of Western Civilization. Men have social needs. They have a need for other people; they have a need to love and be loved. They have a need to be noticed. Sirhan Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy because no one had ever noticed him and he was determined that, from now on, someone would know he existed. In fact, most of these "motiveless" assassinations are of this type.
Someone went up to the top of the University of Texas tower and shot something like seventeen people before they caught him. That was because no one had ever noticed him. People need other people. That's the social need. The basis of social relationships is reciprocity: if you cooperate with others, others will cooperate with you.
The next is emotional need. Men must have emotional experiences. This is obtained in two ways that I can see: moment to moment relationships with other people--moment to moment-- and moment to moment relationships with nature. Our society has so cluttered up our lives with artefacts-- TV sets or automobiles or whatever-- and organizational structures that moment to moment with nature are almost impossible. Most people don't even know what the weather outside is like. Someone said recently that until September we had a great drought here in Washington, and four or five people standing there said, "That's ridiculous." We had a shortage of about eight inches of rain. Because they're in buildings, it doesn't matter to them whether it's raining or not.
The next is the religious. It became fashionable in Western Civilization, particularly in the last hundred years, to be scornful of religion. But it is a fact that human beings have religious needs. They have a need for a feeling of certitude in their minds about things they cannot control and they do not fully understand, and with humility, they will admit they do not understand them. When you destroy people's religious expression, they will establish secularised religions like Marxism.
Now, on the intellectual level: people have intellectual needs. I used to tell students that Marilyn Monroe had profound intellectual needs. And when no one would treat her as an intellect or even as a potential intellect, for obvious reasons, she was starved for intellectual experience. That's why she married a man like Arthur Miller: she thought he was an intellectual.
All right, those are human needs. Power is the ability to satisfy those needs. And someone who says that power is organised force, or that power is the outcome of an election, or that power is the ability to cut off our oil supply, has a completely inadequate way of looking at it. My experience and study of the destruction of civilizations and the collapse of great empires has convinced me that empires and civilizations do not collapse because of deficiencies on the military or the political levels. The Roman army never met an army that was better than it was. But the Roman army could not be sustained when all these things had collapsed and no one cared. No one wanted to serve, no one wanted to pay taxes, no one cared.
The other part of this will require you to put these things together to some extent. Persons, personalities if you wish, can be made only in communities. A community is made up of intimate relationships among diverse types of individuals--a kinship group, a local group, a neighbourhood, a village, a large family. Without communities, no infant will be sufficiently socialized.
He may grow up to be forty years old, he may have made an extremely good living, he may have engendered half a dozen children, but he is still an infant unless he has been properly socialized and that occurs in the first four or five years of life. In our society today, we have attempted to throw the whole burden of socializing out population upon the school system, to which the individual arrives only at the age of four or five. A few years ago they had big programs to take children to school for a few hours at age two and three and four, but that will not socialize them.
The first two years are important. The way a child is treated in the first two days is of vital importance. He has to be loved, above all he has to be talked to. A state of individuals, such as we have now reached in Western Civilization, will not create persons, and the atomized individuals who make it up will be motivated by desires which do not necessarily reflect needs. Instead of needing other people they need a shot of heroin; instead of some kind of religious conviction, they have to be with the winning team...
...In the final aspect of this process, controls on behaviour shift from the intermediate levels of human experience--social, emotional and religious--to the lower, military and political, or to the upper, ideological. They become the externalized controls of a mature society: weapons, bureaucracies, material rewards, or ideology. Customary conformity is replaced by conscious decision-making, and this usually implies a shift from your own conformity to someone else's decision. In its final stages, the civilization becomes a dualism of almost totalitarian imperial power and an amorphous mass culture of atomized individuals...
-
ah chia u male or female eh?
-
Male? -_-"'
-
In my first lecture, I portrayed the sweep of a thousand years that we are concerned
with as beginning with a period in 976 when we had no state at all. All power was
private power. But we also had no individuals, that is, no isolated individuals. All we
had were individuals so deeply embedded in local self-sufficient
communities that the power relationships within which they functioned
were in theirDay-to-day activities and the controls of their behavior were almost totally
internalized in their neurological and hormone systems. So they obeyed
what seemed to them to be their inner compulsions while they fulfilled their
functions in this interwoven community structure, which changed so slowly that
even in a long life of sixty or seventy years -- and, of course, most people in those
days did not live long lives -- almost no changes would be noticed by anyone in the
patterns embedded inside themselves.And at the end of the thousand year period, in the year 1976, we no
longer have communities, except shattered, broken, crippled, isolated
ones. Instead, we have states of monstrous power and frustrated, isolated
individuals; and the state and the individuals are working together from
opposite sides to destroy what we have left of communities -- local, family,
or whatever they might be.Over this long period of a thousand years, the growth of the state, which is our
subject, began with the appearance of a state apparatus of a very primitive kind,
made up of a king and his assistants, who eventually became a monarch and a
bureaucracy. Around this core, there gradually accumulated sufficient activities to
make what we would regard as a public authority and, ultimately, a state. The mark
of what that process can be most clearly indicated, I think, by the development of
what we call sovereignty.Without sovereignty, I do not think we could say that a
state is much of a state, although we might call it one. There has been a great deal
of talk about sovereignty in books -- not very much, unfortunately, in history books
-- but no one has ever bothered to define it. From my study of the growth of the
state, I have been able, it seems to me, to put together what sovereignty consists
of, historically, in the tradition of our Western Civilization. To me, sovereignty
seems to have eight functions or aspects, and I will define them for you in
the approximate order in which they appeared.All human needs require that a person live and co-operate with other people for satisfaction. None of us can satisfy human needs by acting alone in a state of nature. The two fundamental needs men had from the beginning are, first, that a group within which a community is functioning and satisfying the needs of its members must be defended from outside attack.
So the first aspect of sovereignty is defense. Secondly, disputes and conflicts within the group must be settled, so that insiders cooperate rather than fight with one another and open themselves to enemy attack. Thus defense against outsiders is first; settling disputes among others is second...
http://www.scribd.com/doc/14819541/Prof-Carroll-Quigley-The-Oscar-Iden-LecturesLecture-2-The-State-of-Estates -
ah chia u male or female eh?
Why?
-
Originally posted by Ah Chia:
Why?
just answer
-
Originally posted by marcteng:
ah chia u male or female eh?
He is male.
-
Well, i think that the problem lies on how you handle things. Everyone is making use of everyone... like making use of friends to keep you company and vice versa... so what's the really big deal?
-
male lor.
But last time in army my platoon sergeant call me gu nian.
-
I guess so
-
Originally posted by Snow peaz:
Flapdoodle... really truly understand hw u feel... Im goin thru the same situation. Its either home to work, work to home during week days. Library, shoppin center, home during weekends. U r doin something but yet its empty inside. U want to talk personal stuff to someone so badly but there is noone there whom u can rely on. You don hate people. Just going thru a 'down' time..
ya. sometimes when i see people or couples, i get jealous.
-
Wake up and see what u are lacking within - otherwise misery is your main diet!
-
I feel the same way as TS too. I am in sec 3 this year. I cannot think of any of my classmates as friends. I have this close friend, same class and same cca. But his position in cca is higher than mine. I do not care much about my cca, and always skip it. Even though he is my friend, he thinks that just because he is of higher position, he can scold me for that. Is this a real friend? My other cca-mates are equally bad.
-
I feel the same way as TS too. I am in sec 3 this year. I cannot think of any of my classmates as friends. I have this close friend, same class and same cca. But his position in cca is higher than mine. I do not care much about my cca, and always skip it. Even though he is my friend, he thinks that just because he is of higher position, he can scold me for that. Is this a real friend? My other cca-mates are equally bad.
strange, hope that it's just you.
Or did PAP go and screw up the system after I left school?
-
Originally posted by flapdoodle:
What do u think of living a lonely life in singapore. How many of u do this. No friends , no clubbing hangouts, just stay at home,
i find that social life in singapore sucks because people always have a motive for mixing with u..everyone is using each other.. i have let go of all my frens and living alone , just with my family members..I find that frens need u they come to u, and when dont needs u , will forget about u. Over the years i realised one thing: that my true "friends" are not people. But things like cinema, shopping centres, parks, entertainment.These are always around for me. I hang out at these places alone...going to cinema alone...
who here is the same as me.. lost faith in freinds...i have started to hate people already.
Ts I understand how u feel.. i feel tt in most parts of my life too.. e feeling of frens coming to u only when they need u and disappearing when u r down/need help..
but dont ever hate. like what someone here said "no one is an island".
of cos e best senario wld be u hav a bestie by yr side whom u can confide with. but its nv ez to find tt person..
btw hw old r u?
-
Originally posted by Uraniumfish:
I feel the same way as TS too. I am in sec 3 this year. I cannot think of any of my classmates as friends. I have this close friend, same class and same cca. But his position in cca is higher than mine. I do not care much about my cca, and always skip it. Even though he is my friend, he thinks that just because he is of higher position, he can scold me for that. Is this a real friend? My other cca-mates are equally bad.
Is it because you always skip CCA., and that is why you got scolded by them?
If you are in a Arts/Performance related CCA, it will be important for the members to be present as often as possible to practise their performances.
If you are in a Sports CCA, training for competition is very important.
If you are in a Uniform-Group CCA, doesn't frequent skipping of CCA shows a lack of discipline?