Hypercitizens

By Andrea Pitasi

The gift of turning deserts into gardens features the emerging new elite, which must not waste its resources feeding those who turn gardens into deserts. The elite of the past needed to control the masses to be in power. The elite of the past needed the mystery of sacred symbols and fear, just like in politics and religion, to scare and control the masses.
The elite of today and tomorrow need to shape the trends and fluctuations of intangible and invisible knowledge to turn it into wealth, just like in finance and science. This is the key to power for the new elite, who no longer need to control the masses. These new elite live at a very cosmopolitan, global and self-investing level at which life becomes pure abstraction.
This high concept, cosmopolitan novel portrays this emerging elite named Hypercitizens.

Andrea Pitasi is a university professor, a strategic advisor, an investor and lives the hypercitizen vision and style. 
www.hypercitizen.com
www.andreapitasi.com
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Phasar Edizioni
• Release date: Mar 7, 2017
• ISBN: 9788863584189

Book preview

PROLOGUE

The gift of turning deserts into gardens features the emerging new elite, which must not waste its resources feeding those who turn gardens into deserts. The elite of the past needed to control the masses to be in power. The elite of the past needed the mystery of sacred symbols and fear, just like in politics and religion, to scare and control the masses. The elite of today and tomorrow need to shape the trends and fluctuations of intangible and invisible knowledge to turn it into wealth, just like in finance and science. This is the key to power for the new elite, who no longer need to control the masses. These new elite live at a very cosmopolitan, global and self-investing level at which life becomes pure abstraction. This high concept, cosmopolitan novel portrays this emerging elite named Hypercitizens.

Amsterdam, January 1st, 2015

Chapter 1

Accept as true only that which can be seen

1.1. Amsterdam 1996. The election of the Rector of Neskens

The man in the beige and burgundy-colored plaid jacket nimbly stepped through the door at Oude Hoogstraat 24, walked into the courtyard and automatically hung the beat up black bike on a rack, entered the building from the C wing, crossed the floor checkered with white and black tiles at a brisk pace – annoyingly hypnotic – and confidently climbed the creaking and slightly swaying ramps typical of wooden structures of the downtown streets.

He climbed up to the turret of the building and pulled the key to the studio out of his pocket to open the door. He immediately turned on the computer, then took the small plastic orange watering can, went to the sink in the kitchenette to fill it, and started to water the plants, as the Windows operating system in his computer, still a little dazed and sleepy, woke up. He sat at the desk – custom designed so that he could admire the tangle of roads and canals beneath him – and began to open the mail and faxes that his secretary had already diligently organized in the beige genuine file folder with the word Correspondence embossed in gold. He threw away some invitations to conferences and various publishers’ promotions of books with titles that were too trivial and current to not stink of copying and pasting of the most trite common sense chitchat. Only one package, sent to him by his young student Isabel, caught his attention. He opened it and found the project and the first chapter of her doctoral dissertation He read it avidly in just a few minutes, smiled, satisfied, and made a mental note to call Isabel to have her come to the studio for the afternoon.

Having disposed of the snail mail, he returned to the kitchenette and poured his usual eleven o’clock a.m. glass of chocolate milk from the yellow bottle. He saw that the computer was finally ready for action, and he opened Telnet to access the Internet. A few minutes later, his email opened on the screen and he immediately pointed the mouse on the message without a subject, only seemingly enigmatic, sent to him by Abraham de Swaan, who wrote tersely, Harald? Harald! The man with the beige and burgundy plaid jacket wrinkled his nose, unconvinced, and replied, Rudolph! Without a doubt, Rudolph. He had just pressed send when someone knocked on the door.

Come in!

Before the powerful echo of his voice had faded away, his secretary leaned on the door and announced that Dr. van der Saar was waiting for him. The man with the beige and burgundy plaid jacket pretended to be upset and said, smiling, Already? But I had arranged for her to come this afternoon at four o’clock!

Isabel entered. Her red hair was pulled back in a ponytail and her green eyes lit up her freckled and dimpled face. Her look, as usual was très casual.

You’re here about four and a half hours early, he said, still smiling.

Early? It’s never early when it comes to overcoming the endless challenges that the world throws at scientific research! Did you read my chapter, then? she chirped.

Yes, of course. A good start, but you can do much better.

Isabel frowned, but the man with the beige and burgundy plaid jacket interrupted her reply before she could even start it.

Wait, before I show you the weak points in your writing, I’ll get your hot chocolate.

He ran quickly into the kitchenette and returned with a cup of hot chocolate and the steaming pot.

This is in case you want more…

Isabel replied, Let’s get started! She then drank the entire cup in one gulp. She poured another cup and, as usual, stained her jacket with a drop. He, as usual, took no notice.

So, tell me, what isn’t convincing to you? she asked impatiently.

It’s still too didactic, educational. I know well your intellectual wit, and these pages fall a little short of your talent, unless you deliberately started in a more subdued tone so that you can then suddenly surprise the reader, he said.

Isabel smiled. Read the quote that I got from Damasio, please.

The man with the beige and burgundy plaid jacket opened Isabel’s package again, retrieved the pages and read out loud, What was […] Descartes’ error? One could start with a remonstrance: reproaching him for having convinced biologists to adopt (to this day) mechanisms similar to clocks for the processes of life. But this might not be quite correct; and then you could go on to I think, therefore I am. This utterance, the most famous in the entire history of philosophy […], expresses exactly the opposite of what I believe to be true about the origins of the mind and about the relationship between mind and body; it suggests that thinking, and the awareness of thinking, are the real basis of being. And since we know that Descartes imagined thinking as an activity completely separate from the body, this celebrates the separation of the mind, the thinking thing (res cogitans), from the non-thinking body, equipped with corporeal substance and mechanical parts (res estensa).¹

Isabel smiled, pleased.

There was a knock at the door. The highly efficient secretary announced with her usual professionalism, Dean Kupfer, I am sorry to bother you, but the academic senate starts in ten minutes.

The man with the plaid jacket replied, politely but distantly, Thank you, but today the consensus needs to be unanimous, so it won’t start until I get there. And Dr. van der Saar’s research seems to me to be much more interesting than the election of the new Chancellor.

Isabel looked at him dreamily, grateful for those words, but he did not seem to notice.

So Isabel, what do you think of Descartes? A methodological error? Currently, it has been well established for years: Damasio provided additional, very convincing evidence, but the school of Vareta had already arrived ten years ago.

Isabel nodded.

You are right, Dragan, and she continued, getting worked up, but if, scientifically, Descartes was wrong, I don’t intend to see that error as an error per se, but as the perverse consequence of a strategic move on his part, which aimed to liberate science, the body and matter from the tyranny of theology. Starting from the most noble intentions, Descartes did emancipate science from most of the theological influences, but he created the misconception that there is another spiritual dimension that is intangible, separate from the material, which has been leading science down the wrong path for centuries, until Varela’s work! Only since then, however, have we understood that the solution to the Cartesian error was not materialistic monism that leads everything back to practical life, but, through energy and information, even abstracting what is apparently solid… after all, whether the body is more muscular and athletic or more flabby and sagging, it is nothing more, in the ultimate analysis, than DNA sequences…

Dean Kupfer smiled, amused.

"Message received. After all, Marx wrote, ‘everything solid melts into air…,’ Isabel! I like it! You have carte blanche, and if you need authorizations and credentials to access files and gain contacts, come back tomorrow morning at 11:30, and I will sign everything."

Isabel was excited. Thank you, Dragan!

He had earned her compliments.

Today you look really impeccable! Nice jacket, nice pants, nice shirt, socks that match your tie – and I bet your shoes are Italian!

The Dean waved it off, but she continued with a wink, After the senate, I imagine you’re going to see Albert!

Yes, you’re right. We are going to see an exhibition on the Holocaust at the Anne Frank Foundation, then an Argentine dinner and then…

He winked, and Isabel smiled back. You really love him a lot, eh?

Oh, infinitely! he replied, with the sweetest smile on his lips.

As Dean Kupfer walked to the academic senate chamber, Isabel flew down the stairs in excitement. When she arrived at the courtyard, she unlocked her rickety white and burgundy bicycle and rode toward the Overtoom, where she had recently rented a studio apartment overlooking the park.

She pedaled easily and, shortly before entering the Overtoom, she stopped as usual at the Häagen-Dazs shop and allowed herself the luxury of a cup of Belgian chocolate ice cream with a lot of toppings and cherry syrup. She sat down at one of the outside tables and thought about Dragan, her professor. Thirty-nine years old, dean for the past two years and tenured professor for seven, author of famous books in the international community, she was the favorite student of His Omnipotence. In the academic world, he was jokingly called Johann von Breitner VII, who – after becoming a professor at the age of thirty-two, dean at forty and chancellor at forty-four – had stayed in that role for seven terms before retiring at the age of sixty-five from his institutional responsibilities to dedicate himself to the highest teaching position as professor emeritus and devote himself almost full-time to study. Von Breitner VII had published the educational exposition of his theory in the volume entitled Consciousness, God and Other Futilities, which was translated into 36 languages and was a worldwide bestseller, with twenty-eight million copies sold. A huge amount for an essay.

Isabel found herself daydreaming about a similar future for herself as well, and then, noticing that the ice cream was gone, she brutally turned back to the moment in which she was actually living. She jumped onto her bike under the bizarre March sky, wintery enough to entice her to a hot chocolate but, soon after, springlike enough to make her think of getting a bowl of ice cream.

Abraham de Swaan immediately walked over to greet Dragan and shook his hand cordially. De Swaan, in his early fifties, was the Dean of Sociology, a famous commentator in the international press and holder of professorships in London and Berlin. If proof were needed, he had shown what he was made of when – just a few weeks after suffering a stroke – he had left for a six-month trip to Africa to do research on social anthropology in the field.

Dragan, as a tenured professor and the youngest dean of the university, headed for the antique walnut podium at the far right of the room, gently opened the middle drawer and pulled out the ritual hourglass that dated back two full centuries.

With the hourglass held firmly in his left hand, he took the microphone with his right hand and, after a couple of technical checks, he started the work by presenting the three candidates for chancellor: Harald Hollomberg, fifty-one-year-old tenured professor of the mathematics of chaos, winner of the prestigious Gauss medal in 1979 for his work on fractals; Jean Paul Lagarde, sixty-eight-year-old dean of the faculty of philosophy; and Rudolph de Neskens, forty-five-year-old dean of evolutionary biology. Dragan, master of ceremonies with the hourglass, invited the three candidates to present a summary of the key ideas of their program should they be elected. As per the ritual, the floor was given first to the oldest candidate. Each candidate had exactly five minutes available to him.

Lagarde began, as usual, grumbling and complaining.

Distinguished colleagues, the horrible technological innovations that have made us lose sight of the high sense of culture as the sublime recapitulation of the values of the Western humanistic tradition and the richness of its conversational nature…

De Swaan yawned, a bit bored and a bit disappointed by his older colleague who, carried away by his own Cicerian rhetoric, was getting increasingly mixed up between Plato, Fichte, Hegel and the lesson on eloquence of the Jesuits. After five minutes had passed, interrupting Lagarde at the q of a word that was probably Aramaic that he thought was Latin, Dragan was ruthlessly and deliciously flawless in turning the floor over to Hollomberg.

My esteemed colleagues, I am a scientist, not a politician, which is why I come before you without a program. If I am elected, I imagine myself as being more of an organizational coordinator of the motions that we all jointly expressed rather than as a political-institutional guide.

He was a great scholar and a good man, but Hollomberg underestimated human stupidity and the shallowness of flattery. As a good mathematician, thought de Swaan, he had little contact with people.

Finally de Neskens spoke.

"My dear colleagues, five minutes is far too long. I offer you internationalization, corporatization and great global brand value for our university, with major funding of research projects and with global visibility. That’s it."

About one hundred and seventy-two seconds had passed when de Neskens motioned to Dragan that he had finished.

Dragan invited the three candidates to sit down again among the senators – given that all three of them were also senators – and started the voting procedure by showing the urn, pencils and cards.

De Swaan suddenly stood up and said, de Neskens. Dragan immediately seconded him, and the last name of the famous biologist was echoed from mouth to mouth by all the senators, including the melancholy Hollomberg and the furious Lagarde, who said it almost growling through clenched teeth. The applause that hailed de Neskens rendered superfluous the election by secret ballot.

Dean Kupfer, in his beige and burgundy plaid suit, returned to his battered bike, satisfied, and rode toward the Jordaan, where he had bought a little house that looked more like it belonged in the Villa Villekulla of Pippi Longstocking. As a boy, he had loved Pippi and now, a confirmed scholar, he admitted that his academic vocation had also originated from reading Lindgren’s book. Since then, Dragan had dumped the prolegomena of a genuine socio-economic analysis that examined the custom of people to choose stable, concrete and immediate occupations, even if they only received mid-level pay and were destined to enter into the great vise grip of inflation with loss of status and no real purchasing power rather than focusing on occupations with a higher status, as specialists, that were maybe not very profitable in the short term, but much more profitable – from every point of view – in the medium to long term.

Pedaling along the Damrak toward the Central Station, passing it and turning toward the Jordaan, Dragan immersed himself in Isabel’s Accennatogli project. He reflected on how he could become the deus ex machina. The success of his doctoral student would contribute greatly to his position as Magister and leader of the Dutch school of evolutionary economics, which – as he often said, half seriously and half humorously – he now mostly occupied for the application of molecular biology to the systems and processes of economics. The subject of his meditation was to understand how an error or fraud contained in a book published in 1637 could throw off and slow biotechnology research at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

He retraced the salient steps of Descartes’ biography, starting in 1618, when the doctor and scholar Isaac Beeckam had introduced the twenty-three-year-old René Descartes to the world of study and research, revealing amazing coincidences. Isabel van der Saar had been twenty-three years old when, in 1996, she had embarked on a Ph.D. project on the theoretical and philosophical prejudices that hindered international research in the field of biotechnology. Twenty-three years old: about the same as Descartes in 1618. And in delving into that research, Isabel had discovered what a huge source of misunderstandings and prejudices Discourse on Method, published by Descartes in 1637, actually was.

The biographies of Isabel and René intertwined until the publication of the Discourse.

Between 1618 and 1637, the crucial period of Descartes’ life unraveled, which would culminate in the Discourse. The error of the method (or intentional deceit?) that the Discourse already contained in the first part rendered the rest a rhetorical device. And for centuries, that device would separate the spirit from the flesh, or technology from science, making the latter apparently freer to investigate the world of matter, but at the same time, reducing it to a blind technique, without appropriate theoretical guidance, which would only have taken shape around the 1930s, after the decline of theology and theoretical philosophy. In 1996, in Isabel’s world, what in Descartes’ time would have been a simple philosophical dispute had transformed into the chess tournament in which what was at stake was the future of humanity itself – for example, the development of research on a global scale in the field of cloning.

1.2. December 1618, in the name of Magister Beeckam

When a friend writes from afar, his words can soothe like a gentle breeze that warms your heart because you know that his spirit is noble, selfless and pure. But it is also precisely for this reason that his words can lash at your whole being with unrelenting indifference. A teacher knows this well and when his own teacher appeared from the south of the continent to commend him and, at the same time, to criticize one of his choices, a sharp chill ran down his spine in the already inhospitable Dutch night.

Dear Isaac, I have received many noble and flattering words about your teaching from doctors and humanists from various lands, some far away. I have also learned that you offered René Descartes the chance to restart his studies. This honors you, my dear friend, but remember that even a brilliant mind is destined to mediocrity if his thinking is shrouded in insecurity, cowardice and the obscure and general fear that will soon begin to call indolence diplomacy; if you arrive at a new important truth, you will be ready to protect it behind high walls of lies to avoid disturbing the current public order or the placid, routine and indifferent flow of your own days. Of course, not even animalistic impulsiveness is of any use to brilliant minds, but René Descartes, who was my disciple in many seminars, is ready to become the most pale and vague portrait of himself in order not to disturb the graveyard quiet of his heart.²

Embittered, Isaac Beeckam felt torn inside. On the one hand, he attached great importance to the words of his teacher – who was actually only a few years older than him – and on the other, as a teacher of the young Descartes, he felt able to give him confidence, so that his brilliant student would not disappoint expectations. With the time perspective of 1619 and a horizon of events still to be completed in order for the magnitude of Descartes to be at least proven, Isaac Beeckam put the letter from his teacher away as if it were a