Poem: The Answer to the Riddle of Needs

by Chengde Chen*

Photo credit: Chuck Kuhn. Night Moods: Red Moon Over the World's Fair 1964.

People have always believed that
it is a human need to develop technology
But this is a confusion of two kinds of needs –
needs for survival and needs of a value system
The former comes from nature
while the latter is created by man
If we choose a different value system
we would ‘need’ different things

Developing technology was originally a need to survive
From drilling wood for fire, to farming and weaving
man had to claim his fill, warmth and security from nature
In the great struggle for survival
we formed a utilitarian value system –
pursuing wealth and encouraging competition
with the market and technology as its two engines
This system drove the economy successfully
and then the economy meant survival

It is because this system has been successful
that it has become the soul guiding our thinking
What else do we need after meeting the needs for survival?
No one knows, as the answer is what to be created
The utilitarian values, however, are the creators –
Technology tells us what we ‘can’ need
The market tells us what we ‘do’ need

Originally we did not need the car
but since the car was invented and on the market
we came to need it, and need it so much
that we would feel imprisoned without it
Originally we did not need the television

but since the television was invented and on the market
we came to need it, and need it so much
that we would feel our day incomplete without it
Modern society is a technology-addicted society
Technology for us is like spirits or nicotine for the addicts
It creates the blood and nerves that need it, as well as
the greed for consumption and the desire for competition

Do we need air travel?
Do we need flying at the speed of a bullet?
Why is travelling to a remote and strange continent
more enjoyable than meeting neighbours or friends nearby?

Do we need to go to the Moon?
Do we need to be a hero to destroy its beautiful fairy-tales?
Why is a lunar crater dead for a million years more interesting
than the green hills and flowing rivers of our homeland?
Do we need all those life prolonging medicines,
or to live in the electric current of a life-support machine?
Why is letting a withered leaf struggle on a winter’s branch
more moral or prudent than allowing it to go naturally?

We do not really ‘need’ them, but we think we do!
It is because of nothing but competition
We believe that we need to do what others can
as well as what others cannot
If you can fly into space, I must touch the Moon
If you have reached Venus first, I must land on Mars first
regardless of millions of hungry children crying on Earth!

It is believed that life needs competition
In fact, it is competition that makes competition a need
The strong swagger around, the weak refuse to be outdone
Those in the middle have to struggle against both ends
Every one compels others to be opponents
Every nation forces other nations to be arrivals
Oh, is this all necessary?
Once escaping from the net of utilitarianism
you will find the world war an uncalled-for game
As an old Chinese saying reads:
‘If no side wants to win a war, they win the peace together!’

Many of our needs are in fact not ‘our’ needs
but the needs of our values
The answer to the riddle of needs lies in our value system
Utilitarianism is only one of the possible systems
It championed civilization before, but isn’t an eternal law
nor is it the unique basis settled by Heaven and Earth
If the risk of self-destruction means a new need for survival
mankind has to choose a new system!

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* Chengde Chen is the author of Five Themes of Today, Open Gate Press, London. chengde@sipgroup.com

Picture Post #48: Gratifying Human Necessities

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.' 

Posted by Tessa Den Uyl

Florence, May 2019

Horses have been bred to gratify human necessities.  For centuries, the horse has been the vehicle for transportation of goods and people.  Above all, it has been a symbol for war.  When motors were invented, the horse retired from its often ‘inhorse’ duties, and we could advance our propensities in other ways.

The picture has something to do with tourism, expansion, and war.  More deeply, it reflects something about the human mind, which flaunts its inventiveness -- turning everything into a tool.  In the prancing horse on the Ferrari logo, we may gaze and wonder:

            what or whom is served with this kind of human resourcefulness?

Picture Post #25 The Machine Age

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

1950s advertising image for a new-fangled vending machine

You can just imagine the conversation...  ‘Hi Betty, can I ask you a dumb question? Better than anyone I know Bill!’

Okay, maybe that's not what the image brought to your mind, but it is what the  copywriters for the original magazine adverstisement came up with - under a heading ‘Sweet ’n’ Snarky’. Don’t ask what ‘snarky’ means exactly, as no one seems to agree, but here the image gives a particular sense to the term: ‘smart, stylish, a little bit rogueish’.

Nearly 70 years on, the machine no longer looks snarky, indeed it looks pretty unstylish and dumb. The green fascia and the plain helvetica font shouting out in red the word ‘COFFEE’ scarcely impress, as surely at the time they would have done. That’s not even to start on the drab characters in this little play, Bill, the office flirt and Betty, the attractive secretary.

In those days, the set-up might have seemed attractive; offering new technological developments combined with social engagement. Just like the characters in a popular TV soap series, the image created by others seeks to tell you who you are. Advertising media in particular have long been keen to exploit this role-play and their success offers a fascinating additional question. Which is; just why do people like to be reduced to their function, to a stereotype?

  

Of course, the advertisers were not really interested in what an actual Bill might have to talk about to an actual Betty. Real characters are multifaceted. Why, this Bill and Betty might even have both been academics chatting during a break between lectures!

‘Hi Betty, do you think these coffee machines will increase our happiness in life?’

‘Hmmm. Good question, Bill. And my answer would be ‘Yes and No’.  Soon we’ll find ourselves oppressed with new technologies but first let us celebrate the reflection of change this one represents.’

Welcome to the deep world of everyday expression, not the frothy one of advertisers’ expresso.

Picture Post No 10: Faceless Fighters of Vietnam, 1972

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t that what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

Somewhere in the Nam Can forest, Vietnam, in 1972 ( Image: Vo Anh Khanh)

In the pciture above, faceless activists meet in the Nam Can forest, wearing masks to hide their identities from one another in case of capture and interrogation.

For many Americans, the dominant image of the Vietnamese and their Viet Cong allies during the war was as a ghostly enemy sneaking down the Ho Chi Minh trail defying US bombs and apparently inured to suffering.

The visual history of the Vietnam War has been defined by such images. There is Eddie Adams’ photograph of a Viet Cong fighter being executed; Nick Ut’s picture of a naked child fleeing a napalm strike, and Malcolm Browne’s photo of a man setting himself alight in flames at a Saigon intersection.



These scenes were captured by Western photographers working alongside American or South Vietnamese troops. But the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong had photographers of their own. Almost all were self-taught, and worked anonymously, or under a nom de guerre, viewing their role as part of a larger struggle.

‘For us, one photo was like a bullet.’ 

As one of the revolutionary photographers, Nguyen Dinh Uu, put it much later:

‘Processing chemicals were mixed in tea saucers with stream water, and instead of darkrooms, film was developed at night.’

Another photographer, Lam Tan Tai recalls how they came up with a new form of flash photography in order to picture fighters and villagers who were living in bomb shelters and tunnels.

‘We emptied gunpowder from rifle cartridges onto a small handheld device and then lit the gunpowder with a match. The burning powder provided all the light we needed.’

For Mai Nam:

‘The vast dark forest was my giant darkroom. In the morning I’d rinse the prints in a stream and then hang them from trees to dry. In the afternoon I’d cut them to size and do the captions. I’d wrap the prints and negatives in paper and put them in a plastic bag, which I kept close to my body. That way the photos would stay dry and could be easily found if I got killed.’

These photographers worked in the shadow of death whether by bombing, gunfire or from the perils of the jungle on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Nine out of ten Vietnamese photographers perished whether by bullets, bombs, or disease. Many, such as Vo Anh Khanh, working clandestinely in the South, could never get their images to Hanoi and the media, but instead exhibited them to fighters and villagers in the mangrove swamps of the Mekong Delta - to raise morale.

Each image was precious. Today, with digital images essentially infinite, it is revealing to read that one photographer, Tram Am, had only a single roll of film which he had to use judiciously for the whole duration of the war.

In the early 1990s, two photojournalists, Tim Page and Doug Niven, decided to try to track down surviving Vietnamese photographers. One had a dusty bag of never-printed negatives, and another had his stashed under the bathroom sink. Vo Anh Khanh still kept his pristine negatives in a U.S. ammunition case, with a bed of rice as a desiccant.

One hundred eighty of these unseen photos and the stories of the courageous men who made them are collected in the book: Another Vietnam: Pictures of the War from the Other Side (National Geographic, 2002).

These pictures tell the story of a simple, rural people fighting the most technologically advanced and militarized nation on earth - and finally defeating it. They reveal a reality that nobody outside of the local experience could truly imagine. Looking back today, at Vietnam itself, in many ways their sacrifices seem to have been for nothing. Yet perhaps their struggle, and the images it spawned served a more profound purpose.

Life is not a neatly defined itinerary as these safeguarded masked women neatly standing in line might seem to imply. Rather, there are always several layers of meaning. Indeed, as one Vietnamese proverb puts it: ‘If you travel with Buddha, wear a saffron robe, but if you go with spirits, wear paper clothes.’

Read (and see) more at Mashable.com

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Picture Post No 10: Faceless Fighters of Vietnam, 1972

---

'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t that what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

Somewhere in the Nam Can forest, Vietnam, in 1972 ( Image: Vo Anh Khanh)

In the pciture above, faceless activists meet in the Nam Can forest, wearing masks to hide their identities from one another in case of capture and interrogation.

For many Americans, the dominant image of the Vietnamese and their Viet Cong allies during the war was as a ghostly enemy sneaking down the Ho Chi Minh trail defying US bombs and apparently inured to suffering.

The visual history of the Vietnam War has been defined by such images. There is Eddie Adams’ photograph of a Viet Cong fighter being executed; Nick Ut’s picture of a naked child fleeing a napalm strike, and Malcolm Browne’s photo of a man setting himself alight in flames at a Saigon intersection.

These scenes were captured by Western photographers working alongside American or South Vietnamese troops. But the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong had photographers of their own. Almost all were self-taught, and worked anonymously, or under a nom de guerre, viewing their role as part of a larger struggle.

‘For us, one photo was like a bullet.’ 

As one of the revolutionary photographers, Nguyen Dinh Uu, put it much later:

‘Processing chemicals were mixed in tea saucers with stream water, and instead of darkrooms, film was developed at night.’

Another photographer, Lam Tan Tai recalls how they came up with a new form of flash photography in order to picture fighters and villagers who were living in bomb shelters and tunnels.

‘We emptied gunpowder from rifle cartridges onto a small handheld device and then lit the gunpowder with a match. The burning powder provided all the light we needed.’

For Mai Nam:

‘The vast dark forest was my giant darkroom. In the morning I’d rinse the prints in a stream and then hang them from trees to dry. In the afternoon I’d cut them to size and do the captions. I’d wrap the prints and negatives in paper and put them in a plastic bag, which I kept close to my body. That way the photos would stay dry and could be easily found if I got killed.’

These photographers worked in the shadow of death whether by bombing, gunfire or from the perils of the jungle on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Nine out of ten Vietnamese photographers perished whether by bullets, bombs, or disease. Many, such as Vo Anh Khanh, working clandestinely in the South, could never get their images to Hanoi and the media, but instead exhibited them to fighters and villagers in the mangrove swamps of the Mekong Delta - to raise morale.

Each image was precious. Today, with digital images essentially infinite, it is revealing to read that one photographer, Tram Am, had only a single roll of film which he had to use judiciously for the whole duration of the war.

In the early 1990s, two photojournalists, Tim Page and Doug Niven, decided to try to track down surviving Vietnamese photographers. One had a dusty bag of never-printed negatives, and another had his stashed under the bathroom sink. Vo Anh Khanh still kept his pristine negatives in a U.S. ammunition case, with a bed of rice as a desiccant.

One hundred eighty of these unseen photos and the stories of the courageous men who made them are collected in the book: Another Vietnam: Pictures of the War from the Other Side (National Geographic, 2002).

These pictures tell the story of a simple, rural people fighting the most technologically advanced and militarized nation on earth - and finally defeating it. They reveal a reality that nobody outside of the local experience could truly imagine. Looking back today, at Vietnam itself, in many ways their sacrifices seem to have been for nothing. Yet perhaps their struggle, and the images it spawned served a more profound purpose.

Life is not a neatly defined itinerary as these safeguarded masked women neatly standing in line might seem to imply. Rather, there are always several layers of meaning. Indeed, as one Vietnamese proverb puts it: ‘If you travel with Buddha, wear a saffron robe, but if you go with spirits, wear paper clothes.’

Read (and see) more at Mashable.com

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Doublethink 13 - Powdered Pixels

 

Index: 237

Doublethink 13 - Powdered Pixels

Index: 237