Gillian Anderson Interview

Recently, I went back with my boyfriend and watched most of the XFiles series. The last seasons start to plummet downhill at an exponential rate, so we almost made it through Season 7. Although they lost fuel to continue a government-conspiracy-cover-up-from-alien-plans-to-colonization-Earth plot line, they stretched it as thin as they could until they just weren't able to pretend anymore. 

I was feeling curious about Gillian Anderson's life outside of the XFiles. I found an interview with her and some of her comments about living in America were quite interesting (she's been back and forth between here and London her whole life):

 "It's easier to be myself here. I can go out wearing whatever the hell I want, no matter how ridiculous it looks. If I do that in America, people look at me like I'm insane. There are aspects of the British press which are incredibly intrusive, but then you'll go to a premiere and someone will ask permission to take a photo, and when you say, "That's enough", they'll back off. In the States, you go to a restaurant and there are people lined up outside with 8x10s of you. Or they just follow you with a video camera. I had someone deliberately rear-end my car a few years ago in L.A., and there was a video camera: they were videoing my reaction. Luckily, I was in a good mood.

I know people who are embarrassed to be American. They don't like showing their passports. It's becoming a scary place. It takes someone very brave not to be quiet, someone who doesn't mind death threats, their life being turned upside down, news cameras outside their door. There is no freedom of speech in America anymore. They are not living up to the constitution. There's so much fear in America and control."

Maybe Americans don't see it as much within the country, but I've definitely seen people not wanting to admit they are American when they travel outside the country. Their usual cover up is Canada, since the accents are close. 

Sometimes it's real embarrassment for the country as a whole, but other times it's just wanting to not be associated with certain images:

Gillian offers a distressing insight. Take Egypt, for example. They've just succeeded in overthrowing a dictatorial regime through revolution, so they can live a free, democratic life. Their most powerful guidepost, however, the United States, has citizens that don't feel free, feel fear to tell the truth, and want to deny they are Americans when they leave the country?

Everything is good in theory - but when it's put in the hands of flawed human beings and brought into reality, it never looks quite the same. 

On the positive, our democratic society has access to a cornucopia of knowledge and has significant personal freedoms compared to most people. That's worthy of inspiring others to ask for what they deserve as human beings. Even if this change doesn't result in a completely ideal world for the Egyptians, there will definitely be significant improvements, and that's nothing to sneeze at. 

The view of Cairo is nothing to sneeze at, either

On a different note:

"I walked in thinking, it's going to be like riding a bicycle. It wasn't. It was like riding a unicycle. I'd been trying so hard to stretch myself in other roles, and to catch myself when I did anything that remotely resembles Scully, that when I was put back in the ring with her, my brain started misfiring."

This is a personally relevant quote for me. Brings me back to my struggles of putting on a filter in my mind to make sure the 'right' thing is released, while subduing what I 'shouldn't' do. Then, somewhere down the line I try to access those oppressed parts of my mind, only to have the empowered parts rebel and misfire on me. 

The good news - it takes time and patience, and I have definitely become more patient in recent days. I'll talk more about patience in another post. 

My conclusion on my searchings - Gillian Anderson, aside from being more beautiful than was obvious in her frumpy FBI clothes in the series, seems to be a really cool person. She has a daughter named Piper Maru, got married the first time in a Buddhist ceremony on a Hawaiian golf course, the second time on an island off the coast of Kenya, and is heavily into philanthropic and charitable organizations. And - she has intelligent, insightful things to speak about. 

I love unexpected inspiration.

Collapsing

"We live amidst the ruins of our own creations"

This was a poignant comment made by an author about our current human civilization, in comparison to our ancestors. He said the phenomena of still being in existence while living among extensive ruins that we ourselves have created in our lifetimes is unprecedented.

For the Maya and the Anasazi, perhaps it was a 50-200 year drought that led to their abandoning their cities and eventual collapse. For the Mesopotamians, perhaps the mineral salt build-up in their crops destroyed their agricultural system. War, lack of necessary minerals and nutrients, a shifting atmosphere and climate - there are so many different reasons why civilizations have fallen.

I always find it fascinating to take a step back and really look at the scope of our current human civilization. We haven't been around for a very long time at all, and I sense a repetition of history in our arrogance that we think we will simply always be in existence.

Not that I don't want our civilization to survive. But all of those reasons for a civilization declining that I listed above are very real threats to us now. Our population is becoming so large that we already can't feed and give water to all humans on the planet. To enhance the problem, those who have more access to food and water are hoarding supplies away, 'just in case'. This makes the number of people we can supply through cycling our resources even less.

Interesting survival skills - we utilize the same techniques with greed and money as we do on basic survival. Or perhaps the bigger issue is that people consider them one and the same.

Anyway, we are clearly tapping all of our minerals and resources, and changing the climate in a big way as a result. Will we run out of oil before we come up with a truly successful and efficient way to produce cleaner energy, or will we choke ourselves to death on the pollution we're causing?

Or, will we just blow each other up in a final nuclear war?

Eek! That got pretty heavy and morbid just then. Not trying to bring you down, but I'm sure this is something that you've thought about. Anyway we're pretty casual about it - we've taken some ancient civilization's predictions, made a blockbuster movie where the world is destroyed by AWESOME special effects and HEART STOPPING dramatic close-calls - I think you've proven you can handle the discussion.

Anyway, as far as the whole Mayan Calendar thing, what I think is that it won't be one event that happens on December 21st. I think that the year 2012 will put us face to face with the choices that determine our survival more than ever before. We will either make the choices that alter the way we look at our human society, or we will choose the path of greed and destruction. Some things aren't yet written in stone and I think this is a big moment for free will.

Or maybe the aliens are finally coming to try to colonize and we'll have to band together and become planet Earth, rather than this country, this continent, etc...

:-)

There's a difference between wishing for world peace in the world as it is now, and wishing for deeper human collaboration in order to create a completely new way of living. We need a way of life that looks at trade/commerce differently, we need a way of life that focuses on the basic necessities of survival first and foremost, and then picks up their Wii afterwards. It's about living a life such that you are your priority, but you are also aware of the effect of the way you live, and are active in making it as compatible with the rest of the world as possible.

Ah well, one can dream, right? 

Hybridizing

It's becoming more and more important, as we globalize and dive deeper into the web community, to improve our capacity to see things from multiple vantage points. It's not so simple as it once was to have a single tradition that is not influenced or altered by another, as we have exponentially increasing interactions with other cultures and countries. 


I think it's really beneficial for people to feel encouraged to experiment with the possibilities of assimilating other perspectives/morals with their own. That's not to say that we need to become one hive mind or global community, but since we have access to one another in ways we never have before, consideration of alternate values should be prioritized.  It would be just as acceptable to me for someone to consider all of the other options and still decide they want to go the way of their ancestoral traditions, as it would for someone to decide that they want to incorporate different cultural elements into their lives, creating something of a 'hybrid culture'. The thought process of consideration in and of itself opens the mind to a way of thinking that enhances human development. And, of course, it increases tolerance. 


It would be better to take the reins and have a say in how our lives fit into this expanding community and consequently smaller and smaller planet, rather than resist and lose faith in a stubborn refusal to see other possibilities.


I've been speaking culturally, so far. But now I want to shift the conversation completely and go the sci-fi angle (I've been reading a lot of sci-fi lately). One of the major science fiction considerations has always been - what makes a human, human? Is it our empathy and complex mental processes? Is it our physical bodies? Our cultural diversity? Our technological intelligence? A question that is becoming more and more important to answer.


It's clear that on average, our society (and I'm talking about the Human Society at this point, not just one country) is willing to accept technological advances. The Internet and cell phones are the two major indicators of this. On the Internet, we are exposing ourselves to the rest of the world - learning everything we can about everyone else, and allowing our information to be available to whoever wants to search for it. Cell phones connect us instantly face-to-face with whoever we desire, and they now contain all the information we previously could only get from computers. If we are willing to embrace these sorts of technological advances that are ever-increasingly controlling our day to day functioning, we are opening the door for the soon-to-come technologies that will not only be a part of our lives technically, but literally. 


When we start to introduce chips and implants that can connect us to other people or the world in different ways, this is where the question of humanity will begin to really take shape. Instead of these machines being able to respond to our word and do our necessary tasks for us, what if those machines were inside of us and we could control them internally? 


Or even more simply, what about people with robotic limbs? Those that have lost limbs and have a machine in place of what used to be flesh and bone? Are they still human? What if there was a chip that could be placed in the brain that could cause functionality in a person with disabilities? Are they still human? What about clones? Are they human? Are the the same human? And the toughest question yet - if a person could somehow put their personality or DNA into a chip that was then placed in another body (perhaps robotic)- are they still human? Are they the person in the chip, the combination of person and body, or no longer human at all? 


I love thinking about this issue, and it can be fun since it's mostly theoretical right now. I still have a lot of reading to do, of Kurzweil and others regarding the Singularity, so I will continue this discussion as I go deeper and deeper. But when this all becomes reality, the weight and seriousness will increase significantly. 


As our western culture tries to stay the same and live as long as possible, while doing as little as possible (for example- not needing to know where anything is because the GPS will take me where I need to be) we are asking technology to take the reigns for us. Not only does this seem like a dangerous step towards making ourselves dispensable in the universe, but when we succeed in AI technology and really begin to question what is a 'human-like' being, I see slavery becoming a tough issue once more as well. We keep fighting the same battles to define our humanity, just in different forms. Are we coming any closer to a conclusion, or are we meant to repeat the same histories and eventually be succeeded by our creations rather than our offspring?  


I just finished a book series by Dan Simmons - Endymion and the Rise of Endymion - and they are just incredible. One of the things it discusses is that in order for the human species to survive, we must evolve the nature of our evolution. The human species, as it has been defined for so long, must change completely. In fact, we need to adapt and become different species, not just different cultures and different races. 


It’s pretty great to think of many human species instead of just our current one.  Of course, active space exploration would really be the starting point for this, since that's when we would have many different atmospheres and lifestyles to adapt to. Right now we can only evolve so much - but hybridizing ourselves by placing computers in our bodies is a start, on our single planet. 


Since we aren’t looking at a long enough timeline it’s easy to pretend that we are suited for survival and we don't need to consider other species or forms of the human, and don't need to worry about defining what makes us human. In reality, denying this need is making it less and less likely that our species can survive on its own. 


For now, we’ll keep musing, talking, inventing, and calibrating our moral compasses. Hopefully, after enough consideration and open discussion, we will be able to extend our timeline out to where we can boldly stand up and face the survival of our humanity. 

www.mondolithic.com

To Laugh

I want to say a little more about humor. A lot of humor these days is heavily dependent on shock value. It doesn't have to be something particularly amusing that’s being said, but the bold and shocking content has you giggling, in a haze of disbelief about what you just experienced. That’s the stuff I like. Why is it so amusing? Well, part of it for me has to do with my logical mind - it loves when something irrational or of a distorted context is intentionally placed for humor’s sake. And the shocking stuff is hilarious because it tests the boundaries of our fabricated 'safe' zones. 

The last few generations are a lot more desensitized than previous ones, which is why it’s not likely that you and your grandmother are going to be giggling over South Park. Raising the bar seems to be happening exponentially in terms of raunchy, disgusting and offensive jokes. So what will this humor evolve into? It’s a tremulous line. Going from funny, to hilarious and slightly offensive, to offensive and sort of funny, to downright offensive and negative, to making you cringe with discomfort because of it's lack of integrity as a 'joke' - we at least still draw a completely tasteless line somewhere. 

There are some tried and true comedic methods that still always work, for me - like dry, British humor. There’s something about it that never gets too inappropriate (a matter of opinion, of course) and knows the perfect combination of human interaction, awkwardness, and word play. But then again, that’s my taste and I know some people can’t handle it. It can be corny.

But you know, I’m realizing something that I have kept hidden for awhile (though maybe more from myself than others since I'm sure there are people who have picked up on it long ago) - I’m really corny. There, I’ve said it. I have corny, ridiculous humor that isn’t always funny. Sometimes I just say words because the word combination sounds funny to me, not the content. Am I the only one that does this? I wonder if it’s because I’m a writer so words that sound funny together are just one of those kicks that I'll get, and everyone else looks cross-eyed at me and thinks I have some mental instability. But it’s true. Banana poodoo, for instance. I might sound like a child, it might make no sense, and it may hold no context. But doesn’t your mind giggle JUST A LITTLE when those syllables roll off the tongue? 

Ah, well. To each their own humor. I equally appreciate good random humor as well as clever, witty humor - it's all about the delivery. And either way - we’ll always figure out a way to laugh. Whether or not it corresponds with an accepted moral compass, we can’t help but laugh. It's part of the necessary balance of being human.