China : Lunar Recycled

Why the next man on the moon wil be Chinese - The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/200...

"The attitude to the space programme in China is a little bit like the attitude towards space exploration in the western world in the 1960s," says Kevin Fong, an expert in space medicine at University College London. "There's a deep fervour among their university kids for space technology. The main difference between China and America now is that China can just do something - they don't need to ask permission or go through a democratic process and get the budget approved." This means that China can progress its space programme quickly; if it wants to land on the moon - and many observers think it does - the country could do it well ahead of 2020, the earliest possible date for an American return.

"The attitude to the space programme in China is a little bit like the attitude towards space exploration in the western world in the 1960s," says Kevin Fong, an expert in space medicine at University College London. "There's a deep fervour among their university kids for space technology. The main difference between China and America now is that China can just do something - they don't need to ask permission or go through a democratic process and get the budget approved."

Why the next man on the moon will be Chinese – the Guardian

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Well, I suppose it is easy to institute a Nike-ian (Just Do It) culture of 'just do as you're told', as it is in Asian 'democracies', when the intellectual aid of the masses has already been garnered through 'chaotic' western democracies.  In that, the non-chaotic vicarious experience of the west enables a shortcut past thought in the east.

~ ed

I have no doubt that the next man on the moon will be Chinese.  Just as the collapse of the Roman Empire saw the Church attempting to usurp its stature, the nation-state thereafter, and Hitler thereafter – with Roman, Catholic, Citizen and Aryan serving as synonyms embodying efforts to be ‘the chosen ones’- the rise of the Asian Democracy will require one amongst its aspirants to show the west that they can match them in their own game.  And with this, they will be able to say, ‘we may have a different kind of democracy and version of ‘humanity’, but since we can do as much as you, we are as good as you.’  The ‘Asian Democracy’ is waiting for just such an opportunity to complete its argument for a dual universe of two different species of humanity.  And with that, China and the Chinese Diaspora can finally relieve itself of the abject feeling of inferiority and cultural doubt they have felt ever since the west carved up China in their colonial ‘scramble for concessions’.   They will again be reunited with the age-old conception of themselves as ‘the middle kingdom’ (which is a translation of the Chinese word for ‘China’) bringing about mass cultural and racial identification for the purpose of the instantly gratifying ‘feel good’ high it delivers.  Just as the Roman empire was later split into two with ‘2 Romes’ in the form of the western ‘Rome’ and the eastern ‘Byzantium’, we will again see this split with ‘2 Romes’ in the form of Washington and Beijing. (Hmm..and some monkeys still believe that we are living in ‘modern’ times’.)  And America will cease to be ‘the greatest nation on earth’ to being ‘the greatest nation amongst western or western style democracies’ whilst China takes on the rubric of ‘the greatest nation of ‘Asian’ or ‘Asian’-style democracies.’

But whilst China will be able to deliver the superficial result of western civilisation, by bypassing democratic procedures and excluding the people in idea-generation and decision-making, it will further reinforce the basis upon which its population will remain as perspectivally stifled as it has been since 221 B.C., and which saw them playing merely the role of brawn, opportunists despite human welfare, copy cats, and the appropriators of foreign intellectual capital, when they opened up to the global economy.  That’s what the ‘don’t question and do as you’re told’ mentality always produces.  If it produces intellectual ineptitude within the parent-child relationship, there is no reason why this won’t be replicated on a national scale.  But, no matter, as the virtue of evil lies in its innovative ability to circumvent the consequences of itself.  Hence, for instance, whilst the west, with its ‘chaotic’ democracy produced great minds, the Asian democracy will simply appropriate the companies wherein capitalism condemns it to be interned under threat of oblivion and starvation.  And if it is able to deliver the same economic ‘affluence’ despite mass intellectual ineptitude, it will be perceived as equal in value – whilst reinforcing the notion that ‘affluence’ means nothing other than economic affluence as opposed to an intellectual one.

Whilst many would certainly compare China to India, and further reinforce the basis upon which Indians, with their acutely honed critical faculty, a faculty which is discounted in Asian democracies as ‘talking/questioning/complaining to much’, are marginalised, what is missed by fixation on the end result is that which it takes to widen the intellectual horizon far more than the narrow mind can deliver.  India, like the west, tends to include the masses in idea and decision-generation.  Whilst, in the short-term, it can lead to a stuttered move forward, it serves as the breeding ground for minds that can add on greater value to a project in the course of its realisation that can deliver far more than can otherwise be conceptualised.  Through the inclusion of the masses, the collective self-worth is validated. 

Like I said in a lecture (I call it a ‘lecture’ because people here generally have nothing to add to my perspectives by way of ideas or questions) to an acquaintance in conversation over my usual cheap cup of tea, the value of India lies in the intellectual propensities that are honed in the course of a stuttered development.  India was never a singular state, never had one ‘universal emperor’, no one single source of enlightenment, no one culture, no one religion, no one language, and no one God.  It takes a mind that is trained to believe that all that one sees is all that exists to produce the perspectival ineptitude it takes to mistake this for ‘chaos’.  Rather, it serves as the valuable ‘stutter’ that elongates thought prior to speech and action.  And in this, the self-worth of many is validated to the point that the collective intellectual produce supersedes that of just one ‘universal emperor’ flanked by yes-persons in the Land of Nod. 

Thus, when one finally gets in her/is word in after a long drawn and seemingly tedious stutter, it is usually of enlightening proportions as opposed to the reflexive ejaculation of one who says the first thing that comes to mind.   If we apply the phrase, ‘think before you speak’ within a social context, the ‘think’ component is an analogous reference to ‘including the people in the thinking and decision-making process’.  The act will be more refined thereafter.  But when we abide by a, ‘don’t talk so much and just do it’, approach, it means, ‘let us think and the rest of you just do as we say’.  In this, the potential result of many minds is discounted for the immediate actions of the few, or forces one to simply imitate those from more inclusive or ‘chaotic’ milieux.  And in this, the people will be underdeveloped enough to confuse that which is delivered by the few minds as the best that can be delivered simply because they are no better to know better.  Given the context within which such ‘laudable’ achievement is produced, it wouldn’t be far from the truth. 

So whilst China, as opposed to India or many other western states, will probably be the first to put a person on the moon after the other ‘Rome’, and whilst many will see this as the anointment and reinstatement of the ‘Holy Eastern Roman Emperor’ with Beijing taking the place of Byzantium, they will thus be detracted from the fact that it is an imitation brought about as a consequence of not stuttering their progress by popular inclusion, and through that, perhaps going where no westerner has ever laid a footprint before. 

However, it is not that the west won’t be undone by this either.  In the competition that will ensue between the 2 Romes, the west, and the rest of the world, will be fixated on how the Chinese were able to deliver the affluence that took the west a few thousand years of ‘stuttered’ development to deliver.  In that, they will unwittingly fixate the masses on economic affluence as opposed to the intellectual affluence that founded western intellectual progress.  And as this is already underway through the professionalisation of the populace in the west that renders the people quite capable in their economic and reproductive functions, but intellectually decrepit, it won’t be too long before the west and all who still mindlessly adopt their pop culture and economic ethos, become little more than Asian democracies themselves.  The Asian democracy will serve as the personification of ‘fast-track meritocracy’.  This, upon scrutiny, will mean, making your persona as little as possible so that little can be appreciated as much.  And all the great philosophers of the west and India will be reincarnated as mere milestones along a ‘progressive’ route 66 which they never intended.

Hence, in this small step for wo/mankind that China will undoubtedly make in the not too distant future, humankind will take a monumental leap backward.

Ed