Arquivo de Notes | Page 286 of 335

The Story That Kafka Did Not Write

A very banal guy keeps, for fifteen years, the same cell phone number. He has thus built up an extensive network of personal and professional contacts. He is, above all, dependent on this number. Suddenly, he receives between 100 and 150 daily calls during business hours from companies trying to sell him some kind of financial product. Between 100 and 150 calls from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.: doing the bakery math, the number is equivalent to approximately one call every five minutes. The guy, or better, the young misanthrope is forced to answer them all since there is the possibility of finding a possible customer among the unknown numbers. The number is also a work number. Every five minutes, the phone rings. The young man attends with rudeness, dismisses the invasive company very irritated for being called to listen about products that he has no interest, without having ever granted opening in order such calls were made. So his routine becomes hell. He cannot concentrate on anything, the phone does not stop ringing. He has to answer, he becomes rude in the first word, mistreats professional contacts by mistake. “Mr. Luciano Duarte, please…”, “Kindly Mr. Luciano…”, “At this number I can talk to Mr. Luciano…”. Oh, Kafka, brother, help that your character!

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Pleasure in the Verb

It is truly impressive how the human being likes to talk, talk, talk when the silence is infinitely more pleasurable. To relate or, in other words, to engage in an irritating and endless war of vanities… Meeting people: what is that, God? Time, that finite good, spent in a pernicious way. But there is worse: the verb, the shaking of the vocal cords is rarely the fruit of a noble motivation. Bad intention, unpleasant results… and we continue to collect inconveniences…

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The Collapse of Democracy

I have fun, for a few minutes, imagining chances for the natural collapse of democracy. The collapse is natural because democracy is naturally flawed and incompetent. Let’s see: the first hypothesis would be some kind of revolution. Difficult. Revolutions make noise, the people are the master of noise, and hardly the people would support a revolution for the abdication of their power. The people would never say: “Really, I am an imbecile, and the world would be better off if I stopped meddling in issues that I don’t have the least capacity to evaluate.” That is why, even if democratic regions were to find themselves in misery, it would be difficult for an undemocratic solution to be approved by “sovereign will.” Second hypothesis: subjugation by force. Undemocratic countries would subjugate the less developed and control them politically. Very, very difficult if done uncovered: it would culminate in war, death, revolt, etc. etc. War seems to me, above all, not intelligent. There is a third hypothesis, still considering subjugation by force, but in a veiled way. That is: by economic force, the most developed and undemocratic would undermine the sovereignty of the backward. It seems perfectly possible to me, given the infinite and hypothetical means of execution. To cover up the people would be a very easy task in the marketing era. It would be difficult, perhaps, to subjugate the ego of the representatives of the supreme will. But for that there is the capital, there is information technology, there is intimidation engineering. It’s funny: even if we dispense with conspiracy theories, conjuring up collusion among the global elite, there is still a balloon inflating, inflating, inflating, and it is inevitable not to have fun imagining it bursting.

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Every Attack of a Moral Nature Is, First of All, a Testimony of Vanity

Every attack of a moral nature is, first of all, a testimony of vanity. Those who attack consider themselves morally superior to those who are attacked. But when executed en masse, not only does vanity manifest itself, but cowardice and, who knows, certain sadism, natural to the members of the noble species when unable to control their most perverse impulses. Of these, what is expected of a hyena is expected: a smile of scorn and blood running down their teeth.

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