These are the following words.
Epimenides is a liar, therefore he will always tell the truth.
Hope has become diligence, curiosity and care replaces imagination, and the transgressions of yesterday were those of my fathers and mothers, and not mine. We have washed, and so we have cleansed by the river of memory. What does it matter, the year, the decade, the century, as principles stand on their own, timeless, unalienated. I think no two citizen will give you the same answer. My own view would be, that the old country consists of speculations about matters where exact knowledge is not yet possible, but that would be my answer and not anyone else’s.
I am not very keen on labels, I rather avoid labels. In my mind, the way to get at the nature of any subject, is analysis. And that you can analyse until you get things that cannot be analysed any further.
I do not write with an aim to tell you of events as that is old, because what is telling is not worth picturing. Rather, my humble manifesto, a hundred years ahead of pigs flying and I become Prime Minister that very year, will imagine with you what is logical, what is sensual and sensational, and more importantly what is discernible, as far as we know, laid bare in front of us. We may call it art as it is a craft. After all, while the doubters who used to trade in questions now begin to transact in certainties, we see what we read. And thus, there is no place for hyperbole or hifalutin for I do not stand on any boxes or cartons, and instead on Apple and Androids.
Roughly you would say, this new country, is what we know, and the old country is what we don’t know. It is a simple definition, and for that reason, supporters are perpetually crossing over from the old country into the new country as knowledge advances. When something is established and discovered, it ceases to be the old country and becomes new country, and also questions that used to be labelled 'old country' are no longer so labelled.
What good is the old country, you ask? The old country has several uses. One of them is to keep alive speculation about things that are not yet amenable to the new country, after all, the new country covers a very small part of the things that interest citizens and ought to interest them. There are a great many things that remain interesting about the new country, and I do not want people’s imaginations to be limited and enclosed, especially, to what can be now known. However, I think to enlarge your imaginative purview of the world into the hypothetical is one of the uses of the old country. But there is another use, which I think is equally important, which is to show that there are things we thought we knew, but we did not know on the one hand, and on the other hand keep us thinking about things that we may come to know while modestly aware of how much that seemed like knowledge, is not knowledge
Subjects that have been speculated about can often then produce material results at a later point. For example, some time ago, in the old country, there were ‘old’ people who invented a whole lot of just causes, that turned out valuable later, but which in their day could not be tested. Take for example, the common notion of equal rights for every person. Someone, somewhere in time, invented the cause for the rights of every person, and that a country consists of every person in equality, and after about a few hundred years, or rather more than that, it turned out that this was the right new country view, but in his or her day, it was merely a suggestion.
Citizens would have thought of such a thing as fairly about just the privileged class with a lot of nonsense. And thus, we fellow citizens were horrified by him or her, and said that all of it should be burnt, because we did not like a new country, we liked people, but we did not like anything else that was renewed a country. In this way, the old country, in a sense becomes a kind of person-design as we justify our deeds today by craftily reconstructing the past. But, of course, there are a number of things that the old country cannot do such as - answer all questions of values for example. The old country will never tell you what is good and what is bad which is to tell you good or bad as an end, not just as a means. Depending on the school of old country you are thinking of, in some, it is an attempt to understand the world. There are some citizens who exist to uphold the status quo, and others, who exist to upset it.
For my part, I regard both as not the true business of citizens of a new country, and I should say the business of citizens of the old country is not to change the world, but to understand it. And there are people who do not want to answer questions, but to get the meaning of the question quite clear - to get the question right, never mind the answer as it is somebody else’s business to give the answers. Some, are full blooded, providing apologetics for traditional religion. Thus we may be completely puzzled as to how to conduct ourselves because we’ve ceased to accept the traditional signposts of 'right' actions, and do not know what others to adopt.
I think the sort of old country I believe in, is useful in this way; that it enables people to act with vigour when they are not absolutely certain of the right action. I think nobody should be certain of anything. If you are certain, you are certainly mistaken, because nothing deserves certainty. Almost always one believes with a certain element of doubt, but ought to act vigorously in spite of the doubt, after all this is what a general does when he is planning a battle. He doesn’t quite know what the enemy would do, but if he is a good general he does right, if he is a bad general he does wrong. But one has in practical life to act upon probabilities and what I should look to the old country to do is to encourage people to act with ardour, without complete certainty. How about this business of making people so uncertain about things they believed and have faith in, does it not rather disturb them? It does for a time, of course, and I think a certain amount of disturbances is an essential part of mental training, but if they have any knowledge of the new country, they get a ballast which enables them to avoid being completely upset by the doubts they ought to feel. I do not think the old country in the future can have anything likely of importance that it had to old citizens. The rise of the new country inevitably diminishes the importance of the old country. The new country generated present keeps you realising that there are very big and very important questions that a new country attitude by itself is not adequate. It ought to make people a little more modest intellectually and aware, that great many things which have been thought certain, turned out to be untrue. There is no shortcut to knowledge and that the understanding of the world which to my mind is the underlying purpose that every citizen should have. That chase is a very long and difficult business about which we ought not to be dogmatic.
Thus, the score so far, a grand coalition in office, economists scrambling for world views, predictions persists, the youths still watching near the gates of power instead of dancing in its corridors and hallways, pioneers of hope joyously fist-waving, committees reforming, a market of ideas finally filled with produce, and a noble, abhorred, paces anxiously in his house. Did you hear of the world news, today? How dare he.
In this peculiar moment where anxiety meets release, under the streamers and banners of triumph, the critical still tread cautiously leaving no word unturned. The heavy labour of days from yesterday is over, we sigh relief, yet the grinding monotony of our march through history passes through May and then on and on, and on we sigh.
Treasure these days, not for its euphoria, but for the quiet strength we have shown in love and in hatred, in sickness, or in anger, and most of all in common sense. May you never have your stained index figures, severed.
MA