Malay mo totoo?

The Logic of Online ‘Cursed’ Messages

I have long been irritated by messages that I’m sure you’d find in your e-mail inboxes, YM offline messages or friendster/myspace bulletins. Some controversial header would catch your attention: “Yahoo Messenger is Shutting Down”, “Urgent, please read” or as absurd as “Don’t Open”, “My family was massacred”, “Walang Pasok!” or “Crush Kita”, “Goodbye”. You’ll get curious so you’ll open the message and lo and behold, a message strikes fear on you, “Since you opened this message, someone will call you by phone and you’ll die in seven days, unless you repost this” or try “Repost this message quickly and blessings will come to you in 3 days.”

And you wonder why such absurd messages run amok in the internet. So let us analyze this social phenomenon, shall we? The message is obviously designed to attract your attention. Because curiosity is a human thing, and no one can resist opening a message with a header “Do not read”, you open it. To your shock, the message has that FEAR factor. Familiar thoughts would come to mind: “What if this is true?” or “I won’t lose anything naman if I repost this.” Applying a twisted version of Pascal’s Wager, you just say “If this is true and I repost this, nothing will happen to me because I just did what the post told me to do. But if in case this isn’t true, nothing will happen to me as well.”

Well truth be told, Gossip has those same elements with these so-called “Online Doomsayers”.

It’s like saying, “Don’t tell this to anyone ha?” to make the person interested in what you’d say. Then you change your voice modulation, with an eerie ghostly feel to it: “Because you’ve listened to me, you’ll die in seven days.”

Apparently these rumors are rampant among us Filipinos, because we still believe in what we call, ‘chamba’ or ’swerte/malas”. Everything depends on chances. “Malay mo totoo. Wala naman mawawala di ba kung gagawin mo?” That train of thought has the assumption that there’s no telling if this is true. Chances are, these might happen. Wala naman mawawala di ba? I beg to disagree. Something was indeed lost. That is, our will to choose, that capacity to summon our energies to redirect our so-called ‘fate’. Lose that and you’d just end up being a victim of circumstances (in this case, a victim of a measly piece of message) and not a mover in history.

I mean, c’mon… would you even believe a baseless statement?

Would you believe “The Earth is Flat” simply because I said it? Of course not. All the more so, considering the one reposting the message you just received just got tricked by that message. One can logically conclude that the sender of the message is a ‘victim’ of the message that was sent.

So here is my suggestion. If you ever encounter such message again, even if it threatens you by telling you, “If you don’t repost this, something terrible will happen to your family”, don’t believe it. You’re not a victim of ‘what ifs’ and other irrational statements. You have every right not to believe simply because it doesn’t have any basis at all. Don’t be easily convinced and resort to resignation.

Trust me, you’ll save people in your email address book from reading another message that may yet waste their precious time. Just treat it as spam.

~resplend3nt

Greetings from a reader of the classics (Part 1)

Hello guys. i recently started reading the classics again. and it was a pleasant experience, revisiting the reasons why i adored the classics while growing up. reading iliad for example brought me back to the kind of poignant heroism of achilles. truth be told, i find it hard to watch Troy again. it’s one of those unrepeatables, all because of the PAIN that the viewer must face too in processing the choices that the heroes faced. hector was the ideal but was doomed to stand up for an ill-decision not of his own making. achilles craved for glory but could only gain it through a tragic death and in it, find his humanity. if you go further down the line of the great writings of the greeks, you’ll discover the tragedies and commentaries that answer what makes civilization? now jump a bit to another hemisphere and you find the russians tolstoy and dostoevsky who were decidedly un-western. read further and you discover what tolstoy has in common with augustine and rousseau! they all wrote confessions! augustine wrote his The Confessions while rousseau wrote his Confession and tolstoy wrote A Confession. as to the content… most insteresting is rousseau’s because he is TOTALLY RIDICULOUS. how’s that for an enlightenment thinker! enlightenment in his context is an absolute misnomer. now you will not be surprised why the french revolution was the way it was.
–The Fool