* The Stakes:
The Tribe of Plato is tightening the knot, whether we know it or not.
So what should we do about it?
Whether you believe there is a (very) organized elite determined to control “the human cattle,” or whether you see this notion as divisive conspiracy-theory... either way, we-the-people have to face the persistence in ‘Western Thought’ of propaganda – embedded in language, in the official stories, and in us – that precludes (sanctioned rhetoric notwithstanding) the ‘cattle’ ever growing up.
(And we gotta grow up, y'all... if we wanna hear Freedom's call... walk tall... knock down walls... make this class system fall...)
The problem is that Plato’s ‘Thought’ has become our ‘thought’ without any ‘thought’ at all.
Because it’s not true that only ‘The Tribe Of Plato’ views we commoners as cattle… this arrogance runs deep in class society.
In fact, its history is defined by the striving of ‘slaves’ to rub off that ‘stain’…
…leave behind that ‘sin’…
(and ‘solidarity with our brothers and sisters’ with it.)
(…None of us want to think of ourselves as slaves to ‘power’… whether we manipulate physical objects or ideas. Saying that the history of class society is the history of we commoners’ efforts to escape the category ‘slave’ is simultaneously saying, “our history – and consequently a truth-based history – has yet to be written.”)
There are unstated, unexamined assumptions in progressive discussions that must be set on the table and scrutinized if we’re to have any chance of catching up with those who rule our lives.
The left is just as swayed by these unstated assumptions… just as caught fast in the web of ‘better-than’ as the ‘ruling class’.
We lead our lives according to convenient – and necessarily harmful – lies…
…treating myths as reality…
…illusions as likelihoods…
…embracing strategies long since proven fruitless as if innovative and promising…
…(at least in the U.S.)…
As long as we view our lives by the light of lies… substituting fresh ones every so often will not prove disconcerting…
…as…
…‘we’ve’ actually gotten pretty insensate… sleeping on that shifting plate…
So, for instance, in recent months I’ve heard these thoughts expressed on the progressive airwaves:
“Corporate media has produced a nation of ‘know-nothings’…unable to discern fact from fiction.”
“…the genius of the Greeks for inventing democracy.”
“…the system is broken and we must fix it.”
“If we don’t like our government we can vote it out of office.”
“Which shall lead, money or intellect?”
“Is Paraguay doing anything to attract investment so it can develop?”
“Homes are non-productive assets, they don’t produce anything.”
“Collective bargaining represents a form of democracy in the workplace.”
“The economy belongs to the American people.”
“We have to learn from the Tea Party.”
“I don’t know how long Americans are gonna be in denial.”
“We have to put people to work.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the profit motive. Capitalism is fine as long as we have restraint.”
“So the Chinese are making this transition from commodity capital to intellectual capital…using cheap labor…to leverage intellectual capital.”
“The Dark Ages were dark in every way. Without money, you weren’t supporting philosophy, great works of art…”
“Solidarity is the basis of democracy.”
When I heard a pundit refer to “the psychology of the masses,” I wanted to holler at him, “and who are you exactly?”
Then I heard another one proudly place herself on “the middle ground”… presumably the ground where ‘Reason’ engages in endless argument while our brothers and sisters are crushed under the wheels of ‘power’…
Would she agree ‘power’ has no right to be? If so, what’s the qualifier on that?
Seriously.
But one thing’s indisputable… if all the ‘reasonable’ people keep running their mouths she can feed hers.
(OK, OK, I feel you… where's the ‘love’?
...What can I say, it's a struggle, day-to-day.)
When we express thoughts that bear no relation to reality, but are just flowery phrases, designed (not by us) to deceive… we lose our ability to perceive reality… to live authentically…
…and we participate in the scam that condemns the vast majority to lives of the bitterest drudgery… or virtual slavery.
Media-collaboration with the elitist logic of class is so the norm we don’t notice it anymore. Recently I listened to an interview with the current Secretary of the Department of Energy, Steven Chu. He was speaking about nuclear energy, and although both the interviewer and he agreed that the people don’t want it, prefer safe, renewable energy, the interviewer never said, “but I thought we live in a ‘democracy’?” If she had, it would have produced the pleasant effect of hearing solidarity expressed with we-the-people, we who have no illusions that we live in a ‘democracy’. *
Karl Popper warned us not to be duped by “mere words”:
What did Plato mean by ‘justice’? I assert that in the Republic he used the term ‘just’ as a synonym for ‘that which is in the interest of the best state’. And what is in the interest of this best state? To arrest all change, by the maintenance of a rigid class division and class rule. If I am right in this interpretation, then we should have to say that Plato’s demand for justice leaves his political programme at the level of totalitarianism; and we should have to conclude that we must guard against the danger of being impressed by mere words. (Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1: The Spell Of Plato, p. 89)
As we fashion our future we will need the guidance of Karl Popper – I know of no ancestor better equipped to help us confront the totalitarian threat…
…but more than that, to help us think authentically, and to help us figure out for ourselves what we mean by the word ‘freedom’…
…and hence, what future we want.
There are points where I disagree, but I absolutely trust his honesty and his love… no small things in times of such duplicity.
I cannot resist presenting him here, out of sequence, to give you a chance to ponder his words. This will be a lengthy quote because the libraries, the media, the education system, and every means of reaching him is under assault. We were not meant to find Popper. *
* Popper Excerpt - 1:
Like other totalitarian militarists and admirers of Sparta, Plato urges that the all-important requirements of military discipline must be paramount, even in peace, and that they must determine the whole life of all citizens; for not only the full citizens (who are all soldiers) and the children, but also the very beasts must spend their whole life in a state of permanent and total mobilization.
‘The greatest principle of all,’ he writes, ‘is that nobody, whether male or female, should ever be without a leader. Nor should the mind of anybody be habituated to letting him do anything at all on his own initiative, neither out of zeal, nor even playfully. But in war and in the midst of peace – to his leader he shall direct his eye, and follow him faithfully. And even in the smallest matters he should stand under leadership. For example, he should get up, or move, or wash, or take his meals… only if he has been told to do so… In a word, he should teach his soul, by long habit, never to dream of acting independently, and to become utterly incapable of it. In this way the life of all will be spent in total community. There is no law, nor will there ever be one, which is superior to this, or better and more effective in ensuring salvation and victory in war. And in times of peace, and from the earliest childhood on should it be fostered – this habit of ruling others, and of being ruled by others. And every trace of anarchy should be utterly eradicated from all the life of all the men, and even of the wild beasts which are subject to men.’
These are strong words. Never was a man more in earnest in his hostility towards the individual. And this hatred is deeply rooted in the fundamental dualism of Plato’s philosophy; he hated the individual and his freedom just as he hated the varying particular experiences, the variety of the changing world of sensible [perceived by the senses] things. In the field of politics, the individual is to Plato the Evil One himself.
This attitude, anti-humanitarian and anti-Christian as it is, has been consistently idealized. It has been interpreted as humane, as unselfish, as altruistic, and as Christian. E.B. England, for instance, calls the first of these two passages from the Laws ‘a vigorous denunciation of selfishness’. Similar words are used by Barker, when discussing Plato’s theory of justice. He says that Plato’s aim was ‘to replace selfishness and civil discord by harmony’, and that ‘the old harmony of the interests of the State and the individual… is thus restored in the teachings of Plato; but restored on a new and higher level, because it has been elevated into a conscious sense of harmony.’ Such statements and countless similar ones can be easily explained if we remember Plato’s identification of individualism with egoism; for all these Platonists believe that anti-individualism is the same as selflessness. This illustrates my contention that this identification had the effect of a successful piece of anti-humanitarian propaganda, and that it has confused speculation on ethical matters down to our own time. But we must also realize that those who, deceived by this identification and by high-sounding words, exalt Plato’s reputation as a teacher of morals and announce to the world that his ethics is the nearest approach to Christianity before Christ, are preparing the way for totalitarianism and especially for a totalitarian, anti-Christian interpretation of Christianity. And this is a dangerous thing, for there have been times when Christianity was dominated by totalitarian ideas. There was an Inquisition; and, in another form, it may come again.
It may therefore be worth while to mention some further reasons why guileless people have persuaded themselves of the humaneness of Plato’s intentions. One is that when preparing the ground for his collectivist doctrines, Plato usually begins by quoting a maxim or proverb (which seems to be of Pythagorean origin): ‘Friends have in common all things they possess.’ This is, undoubtedly, an unselfish, high-minded and excellent sentiment. Who could suspect that an argument starting from such a commendable assumption would arrive at a wholly anti-humanitarian conclusion? Another and important point is that there are many genuinely humanitarian sentiments expressed in Plato’s dialogues, particularly in those written before the Republic when he was still under the influence of Socrates. I mention especially Socrates’ doctrine, in the Gorgias, that it is worse to do injustice than to suffer it. Clearly, this doctrine is not only altruistic, but also individualistic; for in a collectivist theory of justice like that of the Republic, injustice is an act against the state, not against a particular man, and though a man may commit an act of injustice, only the collective can suffer from it. But in the Gorgias we find nothing of the kind. The theory of justice is a perfectly normal one, and the examples of injustice given by ‘Socrates’ (who has here probably a good deal of the real Socrates in him) are such as boxing a man’s ears, injuring, or killing him. Socrates’ teaching that it is better to suffer such acts than to do them is indeed very similar to Christian teaching, and his doctrine of justice fits in excellently with the spirit of Pericles.
Now the Republic develops a new doctrine of justice which is not merely incompatible with such an individualism, but utterly hostile towards it. But a reader may easily believe that Plato is still holding fast to the doctrine of the Gorgias. For in the Republic, Plato frequently alludes to the doctrine that it is better to suffer than to commit injustice, in spite of the fact that this is simply nonsense from the point of view of the collectivist theory of justice proffered in this work. Furthermore we hear in the Republic the opponents of ‘Socrates’ giving voice to the opposite theory, that it is good and pleasant to inflict injustice, and bad to suffer it. Of course, every humanitarian is repelled by such cynicism, and when Plato formulates his aims through the mouth of Socrates: ‘I fear to commit a sin if I permit such evil talk about Justice in my presence, without doing my utmost to defend her’, then the trusting reader is convinced of Plato’s good intentions, and ready to follow him wherever he goes.
The effect of this assurance of Plato’s is much enhanced by the fact that it follows, and is contrasted with, the cynical and selfish speeches of Thrasymachus, who is depicted as a political desperado of the worst kind. At the same time, the reader is led to identify individualism with the views of Thrasymachus, and to think that Plato, in his fight against it, is fighting against all the subversive and nihilistic tendencies of his time. But we should not allow ourselves to be frightened by an individualist bogy such as Thrasymachus (there is a great similarity between his portrait and the modern collectivist bogy of ‘bolshevism’) into accepting another more real and more dangerous because less obvious form of barbarism. For Plato replaces Thrasymachus’ doctrine that the individual’s might is right by the equally barbaric doctrine that right is everything that furthers the stability and the might of the state.
To sum up. Because of his radical collectivism, Plato is not even interested in those problems which men usually call the problems of justice, that is to say, in the impartial weighing of the contesting claims of individuals. Nor is he interested in adjusting the individual’s claims to those of the state. For the individual is altogether inferior. ‘I legislate with a view to what is best for the whole state’, says Plato, ‘…for I justly place the interests of the individual on an inferior level of value.’ He is concerned solely with the collective whole as such, and justice, to him, is nothing but the health, unity, and stability of the collective body. (Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1: The Spell Of Plato, p. 103 – 106)
[W]e have seen that Plato’s theory of the state is totalitarian; but we have not yet explained the application of this theory to the ethics of the individual…
‘We have three classes in our city, and I take it that any such plotting or changing from one class to another is a great crime against the city, and may rightly be denounced as the utmost wickedness?’ – ‘Assuredly.’ – ‘But you will certainly declare that utmost wickedness towards one’s own city is injustice?’ – ‘Certainly.’ – ‘Then this is injustice. And conversely, we shall say that when each class in the city attends to its own business, the money-earning class as well as the auxiliaries and the guardians, then this will be justice.’
…[A] glance at Plato’s argument will show that his whole trend of thought is dominated by the question: does this thing harm the city? Does it do much harm or little harm? He constantly reiterates that what threatens to harm the city is morally wicked and unjust.
We see here that Plato recognizes only one ultimate standard, the interest of the state. Everything that furthers it is good and virtuous and just; everything that threatens it is bad and wicked and unjust. Actions that serve it are moral; actions that endanger it, immoral. In other words, Plato’s moral code is strictly utilitarian; it is a code of collectivist or political utilitarianism. The criterion of morality is the interest of the state. Morality is nothing but political hygiene.
This is the collectivist, the tribal, the totalitarian theory of morality: ‘Good is what is in the interest of my group; or my tribe; or my state.’ It is easy to see what this morality implied for international relations: that the state itself can never be wrong in any of its actions, as long as it is strong; that the state has the right, not only to do violence to its citizens, should that lead to an increase of strength, but also to attack other states, provided it does so without weakening itself. (This inference, the explicit recognition of the amorality of the state, and consequently the defence of moral nihilism in international relations, was drawn by Hegel.)
From the point of view of totalitarian ethics, from the point of view of collective utility, Plato’s theory of justice is perfectly correct. To keep one’s place is a virtue. It is that civil virtue which corresponds exactly to the military virtue of discipline. And this virtue plays exactly that role which ‘justice’ plays in Plato’s system of virtues. For the cogs in the great clockwork of the state can show ‘virtue’ in two ways. First, they must be fit for their task, by virtue of their size, shape, strength, etc.; and secondly, they must be fitted each into its right place and must retain that place. The first type of virtues, fitness for a specific task, will lead to differentiation, in accordance with the specific task of the cog. Certain cogs will be virtuous, i.e. fit, only if they are (‘by their nature’) large; others if they are strong; and others if they are smooth. But the virtue of keeping to one’s place will be common to all of them; and it will at the same time be a virtue of the whole: that of being properly fitted together – of being in harmony. To this universal virtue Plato gives the name ‘justice’. This procedure is perfectly consistent and it is fully justified from the point of view of totalitarian morality. If the individual is nothing but a cog, then ethics is nothing but the study of how to fit him into the whole.
…Totalitarianism is not simply amoral. It is the morality of the closed society – of the group, or of the tribe; it is not individual selfishness, but it is collective selfishness. (Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1: The Spell Of Plato, p. 106 – 108)
* Is There Such A Thing As A 'State' That Works For The Benefit Of All?:
(Did the above send chills up your spine as you realized the neocons’ ‘state’-design – including the “anti-Christian interpretation of Christianity”… and the constant reiteration “that the state… can never be wrong in any of its actions, as long as it is strong…” – is a design they legitimize as the Book Of Plato authorize? [By the by, the ‘dominionists’ ‘godly lie’ is an exact replica of Plato’s ‘lordly lie’… see Popper, p. 140.])
Recently I listened to a progressive pundit skewer an elitist academic, a man who sported that same cold demeanor we associate with Cheney… a “let-them-die-and-decrease-the-surplus-population” kind of guy.
And the skewering he gave was really quite effective. But it left me with the question… “if you already know there’s a ‘Tribe Of Plato’… folks who prime their heartlessness by preening on their imagined greatness…
“…if you already know that ‘power’ pretends ‘preeminence’ by pounding the rest of us into indigence…
“…if you already know that… why not act… act to insure that those who ain’t got, get?
I think part of the answer – an important part – to dismissed harm is that we’ve all been disarmed… by ‘the state’…
…so what ‘the state’ means – to we who are conditioned to be-subservient to it – is important to consider first. But let’s not lose track of some other (related) facts that cause us to turn our backs on those dismissed… by ‘the system’… i.e., lack of empathy... and... fear of ‘the people’… we’ll consider these next once we’re clearer on what ‘the state’ represents (‘the father’).
It is not the global South alone… Tunisia and Egypt particularly… that must grapple right now with ‘the state’ in theory… who must ask themselves (along with Popper, as we will see), “what would a ‘state,’ ‘fully-functioning,’ be?”
Perhaps if we ‘work’ all together furiously… from different places… but with a common goal… in the process we’ll see our future unfold….
The progressive pundit, though outraged at the rampant elitism of ‘power’s’ lapdog, was – or felt – powerless to help the people hurt by the policies the lapdog produced.
Why?
Because we’ve been conditioned to believe that coming to the aid of brothers and sisters to whom no attention is paid is a function only ‘states’ entertain.
So the only ‘action’ allowed the pundit – or any of us – by ‘the system’ is to petition ‘the state’ for redress.
But… of course…
…in reality…
…‘power’ has captured the state…
…so…
So we either say, “the suffering of others (not us) is the price ‘we’ pay… for a state that allows some to be ‘great’ (i.e., reflect ‘power’ in the way it chooses to be reflected)… or…
…or we wrack our brains to create a world that works for every body….
At some point (so why not now?) we will realize that what doesn’t work for everybody… doesn’t work.
Our brothers and sisters in Egypt and Tunisia are struggling right now to figure out what does work…
I think we should too…
…and soon…
…before we lose even more brave souls… on the frontlines… of ‘state’-redesign.
Recall: we know some things that our brothers and sisters in the streets of Egypt, Tunisia, Syria… and across Africa, Asia and the Middle East may need to hear and see from us…
…we commoners in the U.S. know that ‘democracy’ don’t mean ‘free’…
…we know that ‘democracy’ is perfectly compatible with collars and leads…
…and… we’re figuring out some strategies for moving beyond what ‘power’ tells us is ‘democracy’ to something stolen millennia ago… but which our bodies and our souls still know…
…to freedom.
Freedom is on the table today… but it can not happen state by state, but only by all of us uniting on that shifting plate… until it breaks… allowing from our hands a new world to take shape.
And we in the U.S. can take the lead because we’ve experienced the con ‘democracy’…
...and are positioned by our longer time with it to tease...
... fact and fiction from the word… and see…
...how...
...as it shares roots with totalitarianism’s shrill screed… we know…
...it’s not the way to go...
(…at least in the form that ‘power’s’ allowed us to know.)
There are some critical discussions we all need to be having… across the globe….
And here in the ‘West’… our ‘greater freedoms’ can be put to the test. We can use this ‘democracy’ it’s been alleged we have… to frame some strategies for settling ‘power’ at last….
…allowing our brothers and sisters in the global South to confront their puffed-up winds-from-above – un-backed ‘elites,’ de-stringed and de-fanged – and not risk dying in vain.
Because Popper is so well grounded in the ‘thought’ on which ‘democracy’ is founded, let’s listen to him explain how it could, in theory, operate:
* Popper Excerpt - 2:
…[T]he protectionist theory of the state was first proffered by the Sophist Lycophron, a pupil of Gorgias. It has already been mentioned that he was (like Alcidamas, also a pupil of Gorgias) one of the first to attack the theory of natural privilege. That he held the theory which I have called ‘protectionism’ is recorded by Aristotle, who speaks about him in a manner which makes it very likely that he originated it. From the same source we learn that he formulated it with a clarity which has hardly been attained by any of his successors.
Aristotle tells us that Lycophron considered the law of the state as a ‘covenant by which men assure one another of justice’ (and that it has not the power to make citizens good or just). He tells us furthermore that Lycophron looked upon the state as an instrument for the protection of its citizens against acts of injustice (and for permitting them peaceful intercourse, especially exchange), demanding that the state should be a ‘co-operative association for the prevention of crime’. It is interesting that there is no indication in Aristotle’s account that Lycophron expressed his theory in historicist form, i.e., as a theory concerning the historical origin of the state in a social contract. On the contrary, it emerges clearly from Aristotle’s context that Lycophron’s theory was solely concerned with the end of the state; for Aristotle argues that Lycophron has not seen that the essential end of the state is to make its citizens virtuous. This indicates that Lycophron interpreted this end rationally, from a technological point of view, adopting the demands of equalitarianism, individualism, and protectionism….
The fundamental idea of protectionism is: protect the weak from being bullied by the strong. This demand has been raised not only by the weak, but often by the strong also. It is, to say the least of it, misleading to suggest [as Plato did] that it is a selfish or an immoral demand.
Lycophron’s protectionism is, I think, free of all these objections. It is the most fitting expression of the humanitarian and equalitarian movement of the Periclean age. And yet, we have been robbed of it. It has been handed down to later generations only in a distorted form; as the historicist theory of the origin of the state in a social contract; or as an essentialist theory claiming that the true nature of the stae is that of a convention; and as a theory of selfishness, based on the assumption of the fundamentally immoral nature of man. All this is due to the overwhelming influence of Plato’s authority….
Now it must be realized that the elaboration of its allegedly selfish basis is the whole of Plato’s argument against protectionism; and considering the space taken up by this elaboration, we may safely assume that it was not his reticence which made him proffer no better argument, but the fact that he had none. Thus protectionism had to be dismissed by an appeal to our moral sentiments – as an affront against the idea of justice, and against our feelings of decency.
This is Plato’s method of dealing with a theory which was not only a dangerous rival of his own doctrine, but also representative of the new humanitarian and individualistic creed, i.e., the arch-enemy of everything that was dear to Plato. The method is clever; its astonishing success proves it. But I should not be fair if I did not frankly admit that Plato’s method appears to me dishonest….
Summing up, we can say that Plato’s theory of justice, as presented in the Republic and later works, is a conscious attempt to get the better of the equalitarian, individualistic, and protectionist tendencies of his time, and to re-establish the claims of tribalism * by developing a totalitarian moral theory. At the same time, he was strongly impressed by the new humanitarian morality; but instead of combating equalitarianism with arguments, he avoided even discussing it. And he successfully enlisted the humanitarian sentiments, whose strength he knew so well, in the cause of the totalitarian class rule of a naturally superior master race.
These class prerogatives, he claimed, are necessary for upholding the stability of the state. They constitute therefore the essence of justice. Ultimately, this claim is based upon the argument that justice is useful to the might, health, and stability of the state; an argument which is only too similar to the modern totalitarian definition: right is whatever is useful to the might of my nation, or my class, or my party.
But this is not yet the whole story. By its emphasis on class prerogative, Plato’s theory of justice puts the problem ‘Who should rule?’ in the centre of political theory. His reply to this question was that the wisest, and the best, should rule. Does not this excellent reply modify the character of his theory?
…We have seen that Plato’s idea of justice demands, fundamentally, that the natural rulers should rule and the natural slaves should slave. It is part of the historicist demand that the state, in order to arrest all change, should be a copy of its Idea, or of its true ‘nature’. This theory of justice indicates very clearly that Plato saw the fundamental problem of politics in the question: Who shall rule the state?
…[W]e may distinguish two main types of government. The first type consists of governments of which we can get rid without bloodshed – for example, by way of general elections; that is to say, the social institutions provide means by which the rulers may be dismissed by the ruled, and the social traditions ensure that these institutions will not easily be destroyed by those who are in power. The second type consists of governments which the ruled cannot get rid of except by way of a successful revolution – that is to say, in most cases, not at all. I suggest the term ‘democracy’ as a short-hand label for a government of the first type, and the term ‘tyranny’ or ‘dictatorship’ for the second. This, I believe, corresponds closely to traditional usage. But I wish to make clear that no part of my argument depends of the choice of these labels; and should anybody reverse this usage (as is frequently done nowadays), then I should simply say that I am in favour of what he calls ‘tyranny,’ and object to what he calls ‘democracy’; and I should reject as irrelevant any attempt to discover what ‘democracy’ ‘really’ or ‘essentially’ means, for example, by translating the term into ‘the rule of the people’. (For although ‘the people’ may influence the actions of their rulers by the threat of dismissal, they never rule themselves in any concrete, practical sense.) (Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1: The Spell Of Plato, selections from pgs. 115 – 125)
So what is this ‘state’ we must allegedly make?
How useful will be Popper's – the generally accepted – notion of ‘democracy’…
…at least in the forms of it we’ve been allowed to see…
…in shaping our inter-relations once we’re free?…
– Not very.
I think we have arrived at the historical time when we must ask ourselves whether we do want to rule ourselves “in any concrete, practical sense.”
But before we address this it might be as well to examine the legitimacy of what Popper calls ‘democracy’…
How do we assess his comment:
It should be mentioned that, from the protectionist point of view, the existing democratic states, though far from perfect, represent a very considerable achievement in social engineering of the right kind. Many forms of crime, of attack on the rights of human individuals by other individuals, have been practically suppressed or very considerably reduced, and courts of law administer justice fairly successfully in difficult conflicts of interest. (p. 113)
This rosy view can be held on to only if critical bits are extruded from our canvas. Let’s add further color to our problem of ‘state’ by throwing in…
… ‘world-systems analysis.’
* Hopkins Excerpt :
If, now, one were to try to give the main ideas informing the construct of “the modern world-system” in a highly abbreviated form, they might run as follows. First, there is the “structure” of this social system, consisting of: (a) one expanding economy; (b) expanding multiple states; and (c) the capital – labor relation. Second, there is this social system’s “development”….
…This one world-scale economy… has a single or axial division and integration of labor processes (“division of labor”), which is both organized and paralleled by a single set of accumulation-processes, between its always more advanced, historically enlarging, and geographically shifting core and its always less advanced, disproportionately enlarging, and geographically shifting periphery. (p. 11)
The inherent contradiction between the development of the “one economy” and the development of the “multiple states” continually paces, and shows itself in specific forms in the course of, the social system’s long-term development (which equals modern social change)…. It is the articulation of the processes of the world-scale division and integration of labor and the processes of state-formation and deformation… that constitute the system’s formation and provide an account, at the most general level, for the patterns and features of its development (hence, of the patterns and features of modern social change). The articulation of the two sets of processes necessarily results, in the theory, in the network of relations among political formations… being patterned like the network of relations among production-accumulation zones (core-periphery), and vice versa….
Centrality in the axial economic network and centrality in the political network thus tend to coincide. Strong states, in relation to others, develop in core areas; weak states, in relation to others, develop or rather are developed in peripheral areas. Not less important, strong states… develop core processes; weak states… develop, or rather have developed for them, peripheral processes….
[There are] two important [contradictions]… : (1) the growing competition among states (owing to their increasing number and their increasingly competitive policies) to house centers of the production-accumulation network versus the strengthening tendency of that network toward centralization of the accumulation process (fewer centers); (2) the increasing influence of class-organized politics (resulting from capitalist development) on state-policies versus the increasingly competitive search by larger and larger units of capital for larger and larger pools of low-cost labor. (Terence K. Hopkins, “The Study of the Capitalist World-Economy: Some Introductory Considerations,” in Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein (eds.), World-Systems Analysis: Theory and Methodology, p. 12 – 13)
Let me now turn to some processes shaping the modern world-system’s major political arenas or networks: its historically original interstate system; its political centers, the constituent states that form or are reconstituted as the interrelated units of that system; and its imperial patterns which these states establish, in relation to one another, over peoples elsewhere in the world – patterns which are continually interrupted and transformed by the anti-imperial movements they perforce set in motion and the rivalries they define and reflect.
Here there are difficulties. Most students of modern social change tacitly presume the framework of a relatively autonomous abstract state (or economy, or society) as the given locus within which the changes they are explaining take place. Our concern, in contrast, is with the formation and development of the larger and longer-enduring setting. Put another way, today’s world of interrelated and massively unequal sovereign jurisdictions cannot be taken as a given in world-system studies – as the point of departure for picking and choosing a site or two of state-formation or nation-building – in order to construct a theory of such developments inductively. It itself is a subject matter in need of examination and explanation. There is thus no theory of the formation of states on a world-scale comparable to (let alone integral to) the theory of the accumulation of capital on a world-scale….
The interstate system (often called the international system) had its beginnings with the virtually simultaneous formation of the so-called “new monarchies” in Europe at the end of the fifteenth century – the French (Louis XI), the Spanish (Ferdinand and Isabella), the English (Henry VII), and the “Austrian” (Maximilian I) – and the subsequent novel establishment at each major European court of permanent embassies from each of the major courts. None proved able by war or marriage to incorporate the others; and with a pair of treaties in the middle of the seventeenth century, what had perforce become practice – balance of power politics – became as well a principle and a “system.”
This European state-system formed in the developing-core area of the world division of labor, primarily as the relations among the states-in-formation there, i.e., among political communities, increasingly centralized in order to mount efforts to expand their jurisdictions over core-area processes and thus, necessarily, over and at the expense of one another. The system, in short, primarily constitutes the interstate relations among rival, and in the event stronger and weaker, core-states and their semi-peripheral state allies. It is thus a set of arrangements not so much for deterring war as for waging it. What marks it is this: the alignments or sides are so formed on each occasion (“balance of power”) as to reproduce, as the outcome of conflict, the necessary condition for the state-system to continue to operate, namely, an array of interrelated states no one of which can mobilize the force and allies needed to subjugate all the others (thus preserving the development of the modern world as a world-economy by blocking its conversion into a world-empire). The network expands by invitation, outsiders always being brought in to help block a growing power (the Ottoman court in the sixteenth century against Charles V, the Russian in the eighteenth against the French monarchy’s moves.) With the inclusion of the United States and then Japan at the end of the nineteenth century, it becomes de facto a global system, which in no way, however, impairs its operation as a system of shifting alliances among core-states and their semi-peripheral-state allies for the conduct of war. What is impaired, of course, is the relational (and relative) strength of the states in Europe. The decisive locus of interstate politics shifts out of their interrelations and into the relations between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.; and the so-called “new” and “old” state-units of the now global international system form its Third World.
Both cause and consequence of the shifting alignments, the open conflicts and their outcomes would seem to be the underlying and ongoing changes in the location of what we have been calling the modern world-system’s axial division of labor, which is what is meant by speaking of the economic reasons for the wars and alignments. In particular, focusing now on the lines of interrelated production processes that converge toward, and thus form, the respective centers of the core-area, some centers – or rather, some politically unified as well as economically interrelated centers – develop more rapidly than others usually by virtue of more rapid capital formation (which in turn usually results more or less directly from state policies). As this occurs, the existing set of political borders – which reflect and shape the directions in which interrelations of production processes develop – increasingly become constraints on the continued growth of the more dynamic core-area centers. The interstate system is the mechanism, so to speak, through which existing political borders are made more or less permeable (open or closed), and on occasion are redrawn altogether (powerless political entities are not invariably preserved), and new borders demarcating previously unincorporated areas are determined. It operates in part, then, as the reflex of the underlying changing relational strengths and weaknesses of the constituent core-states….
We turn now to conceptions of the formation and transformation of states, viewed from the outset as the sovereignties of the interstate system. There is wide agreement among comparative historians and scholars of civilizations on the historical originality of the European state-system. For example, Walter Dorn (1963) begins a study by noting that the “competitive character of the state system of modern Europe… distinguishes it from the political life of all previous and non-European civilizations of the world.” It is thus especially disconcerting that none of the explicit theories of state-formation (nation-building and the like) takes this apparently unique setting as its point of departure. (Terence K. Hopkins, “The Study of the Capitalist World-Economy: Some Introductory Considerations,” in Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein (eds.), World-Systems Analysis: Theory and Methodology, p. 23 – 26)
How does splashing a little ‘world-systems analysis’ on our canvas add to our understanding of what ‘state’ is? How is it relevant to Egyptian (and our own) ‘state-building’?
It’s important that we see this matter of ‘state’ authentically… realistically… as it is – not as we’re told it is.
I hope you reading this will copy and print for later moments of quiet contemplation the above words of Terry Hopkins. (And when you do, please don’t forget to tell him, “thank you.”) There are some dense sentences in there that it would be as well to take some time with. I quote him at length because I know of no better summary of the ‘setting’ in which state theaters unfold their dramas… those stilted, false plays which nonetheless so many are so eager to perform in… and therefore of the necessary context for any serious discussion of ‘the state’ – whether its ‘reform’ or its ‘building.’
For almost all of my days, it seems, I’ve heard progressive pundits say, “unless we get the money out of politics we can’t take back our democracy!” And this sentiment is always cheered as if the audience is hearing it for the very first time.
What Terry shows us is that this constant iteration is worse than meaningless, it leads us to waste our days in politically impotent ways…
…what Terry shows us is that the ‘individual state’ is the wrong frame.
This monster we’re wrestling with cannot be defeated state-by-state… and it never could.
(And it's long past time for us to pay closer attention to Terry’s point about the uniqueness of the European state-system. More on this later.)
‘States,’ it seems, are mutant things… born with heart and lung… missing… created for ‘power’s’ purposes, not our own…
…and the mutant has parasitic growths… (and I don’t mean us – Reagan, who thought so – was a Platonist… fer sure)….
This thing called ‘power’ sucks ‘states’ dry… waits a bit… lets them catch their breaths… and feasts on them some more….
Greed is set upon the people like Akhaians set on Troy… goaded on by mails of bronze that relish the false glory felt… while letting others’ blood.
But set by who… or what?
(“Shall we all wield the power of Kings? We can not,
and many masters are no good at all.
Let there be one commander, one authority,
holding his royal staff and precedence
from Zeus, the son of crooked-minded Kronos:
one to command the rest.”)
“One expanding economy”….
While Popper could fight for us with ‘power’s lapdogs… the hired guns and devotees… because he knew Greek and could show how the academic ruse was done – how ‘power’ deceives…
…seeing Plato’s ‘thought’ globally… as the organizing and unifying theory inspiring Europe’s ‘elites’… giving them (to their minds) their legitimacy and reason-to-be… can only be done derivatively…
…because ‘power’ likes to hide… because ‘power’ lies…
…when it… like an unloved child… says, “prove it!”… we should not be duped by that strategy.
We see their habit of thought in the damage they’ve wrought…
…so…
…the degree to which the sovereigns of Europe consciously sought to operationalize Plato’s ‘thought’… we see through its effects….
…it is the scent by which we know the essence.
…
There is a tension, often, between lapdog and scepter…
…while it’s lapdogs that generally make the effervescent nonsense on which scepters levitate… too often lapdogs lap their own bubbly and don’t see that…
…see…
…that…
…for ‘power’… ‘philosophy’ is strictly a matter of utility.
So… for instance… lapdogs may produce and promote notions like ‘Reason’ and sell them in sincerity to ‘the people’… but ‘power’ will more likely say, “if the cattle like ‘Reason’ and it keeps them from seeing the blood at the root… well, shoot, let ’em eat it …it keeps us discreetly hid and it’s certainly cheap, so…”
(No… that’s too flip… ‘Reason’ served/s a more insidious role than this – ‘safety’ from the ‘Abyss’… the mystery… more on this….)
This is a con you cannot see if you look at ‘states’ individually, but when you step back and see ‘state’ globally, the rape can’t be hid, or the enslavement sweetened, ‘power’s’ mask drops a bit… and then… there’s problems we can cause for it….
But despite the evidence of our senses… most still defend this mess… tell ourselves ‘the state’ is what we make it… and similarly ‘the economy’…
…despite the obvious truth that ‘class’ is the chief product of ‘states’… and ‘economies’… and that ‘Need” don’t have a rat’s ass of a chance against ‘Greed’… whether you call the chance we’re given ‘democracy’ or ‘heraclitocracy’…
…call it what you will… it means countless lives spilled… thrown away… down the drain…
But ‘power’ makes certain that ‘the people’ are conditioned to say, “if I don’t see it, it must not exist.”
We see this myopia around us constantly… this narrowing of focus in order to celebrate ‘democracy’… “see the food program!”… “see the local bartering system!”… “see the myriad ways local folks are making democracy… real!”
“This is what democracy looks like!”
Step back…
…more…
…no, not enough…
…don’t you see that man bagging your groceries?…
…you think he has dreams?…
…step back some more…
…no, not enough yet…
…you still don’t see the pregnant teen dying in the fields…
…do you see her now?
…how about the refugees drowning in the Mediterranean Sea?
‘Wholism’ is a political theory, not just a program for self-development…. It means embracing not just “all of me”… but “all of we”….
What doesn’t work for everyone… globally…
…doesn’t work.
We have a global system of power that pulls the individual strings of individual states…. We have to inter-link our thoughts and acts as religiously as they do theirs…
…but first…
…we have to care.
It’s an astonishing thing… when you stop and think… that not only is this system of class a massive energy-sink… in the process wreaking incalculable havoc (on the planet) in only point-one-five… percent of total species-time…
…but it’s actually… (arguably the worst wage of this evil seed…) led us to renounce our defining gift as human beings… our empathy.
Our biological inheritance of two million years grants us a mysterious power to merge with other spirits… an imaginative ability… though not unique in us… probably deepest and most wide-sweepingest in us.
And yet… it lies fallow and untapped… worse, atrophied from lack… of any use at all…
Some argue it can be seen in any of the myriad ‘movements’ critiquing state policies… whether environmental…. or social… or military…. But I don’t think so. Most of these express less identity with others suffering as ambitious allegiance to the notion of ‘perfecting’… some idea or other… (usually ‘mind’ or ‘professional’ or ‘state’)… but without seeing our sisters and brothers… outside our gates.
As George Eliot said… “people glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbors...”
Recently I listened to a nasty, vitriolic attack on what the pundits doing the sniping called “phony peace advocates”… for supposedly abandoning their forward thrust… because Barack is in the White House.
I beg to differ.
What I think… is that…
…worry about economic security is sorta up for most of us… (apparently not for these pundits…)
…and… a lot of us (apparently not these pundits…) are looking for the strategic locus of ‘change’… for what works – in terms of helping our brothers and sisters – as we’re tired of doing what doesn’t….
It takes time to process… that doesn’t mean “nothing is happening”… on the contrary, it means things are sinking in… particularly the reality that we are wrestling with a global system… and that without a vision of the future and a plan… ‘protesting’ is but spittin’ in the wind.
But over and above, there’s this issue of ‘love’ that’s coming up now… and which means… strategies that are about reforming rather than transforming… about claiming ‘the state’ rather than making what manifests ‘love’… for everyone… (even your nearest neighbors)…
…are being reconsidered.
Why is the anti-war movement the wrong focus or frame?… why are ‘anti-war movements’ not ‘anti-class-systemic’?… particularly given the centrality of ‘war’ to Plato’s raison d'être?…
The answer resides partly, I think, in our limited resources and time… given that it’s a system we’re wrestling with, not a state – a system that generates conflicts at a rate that far out-strips our ability to keep pace with it.…
An anti-war strategy attempts to intervene in a geo-political scene where it can have no lasting effect… it may inconvenience ‘power’s’ plans but it won’t stop its advance….
But… in addition to the question of strategy, delving deeper, pondering ‘roots’… it’s worth considering why we on the left keep going after issue-after-issue-after-issue… organized by ‘heads’ (usually a boss’s), not ‘hearts’…
I’m inviting a broader pondering… as to whether attaching ourselves to various causes is less about ‘empathy’ than staking a claim… making a name… finding a place… in a more perfect union of ‘players’…
Of course if you (unconsciously) see your neighbors as ‘cattle,’ this makes sense…
…likewise if you (unconsciously) fear them.
* If A State-By-State Strategy Doesn’t Work (To Reclaim Our Lives, Settle ‘Power’ Permanently And Establish Global Freedom)… What Will?
Not only is a state-by-state strategy not enough, arguably it’s not anything… as it doesn’t upend the Platonic Mission and release our brothers and sisters – i.e., free captive energy globally.
On the contrary, it quite placidly maintains the hierarchical ‘leadership-system’ which, as it ever-deepens, ever becomes more extreme… ultimately leads to various forms of totalitarianism.
It is pure illusion to imagine that we can end an abusive global system by maintaining Division.
However, as this last might be misunderstood – this matter of ending ‘Division’ – to clarify I’ll say that while ending the ‘division’ between ‘power’ and ‘the people,’ while included in our ultimate vision, cannot be imposed on us and yet be authentic… its occurrence ‘becomes’ from the world we make, not from our (unconscious) agreement to remain insensate.
For example, when we listen to political discussion over the public radio outlets, basically what we hear is… invitation… invitation to join the ‘rulers’ in that statist ‘we’.
‘Power’ wants to ‘manage’ the world’s resources (including us) unhampered by any butting-in from the ‘natural slaves’… so while they see us as eminently dupable, they nonetheless fear our power of thought. Plato gave them ample ‘heads-up’ on this, after all:
‘All great things are dangerous’ is the remark by which he introduces the confession that he is afraid of the effect which philosophic thought may have upon brains which are not yet on the verge of old age. (All this he puts into the mouth of Socrates, who died in defence of his right of free discussion with the young.) But this is exactly what we should expect if we remember that Plato’s fundamental aim was to arrest political change. (Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1: The Spell Of Plato, p. 133)
For this reason, Plato is an invaluable resource for ‘rulers’ who study him for propaganda techniques and manipulation strategies. The one I think of as… (literally) key… is this one:
To tell men that they are equal has a certain sentimental appeal. But this appeal is small compared with that made by a propaganda that tells them that they are superior to others, and that others are inferior to them. Are you naturally equal to your servants, to your slaves, to the manual worker who is no better than an animal? The very question is ridiculous! Plato seems to have been the first to appreciate the possibilities of this reaction, and to oppose contempt, scorn, and ridicule to the claim to natural equality…. [In] the Laws, Plato summarizes his reply to equalitarianism in the formula: ‘Equal treatment of unequals must beget inequity’; and this was developed by Aristotle into the formula ‘Equality for equals, inequality for unequals’. (p. 96)
So over the airwaves we hear, through the system’s mouthpieces, the unstated message that the system’s ‘complexity’… as managed by ‘experts’… is delicate and elaborate puppetry… a chess game of infinite subtlety…
…so who could resist such flattery… of state reps as good as saying… “yes, yes, you and you, are all experts too!”… when they issue that invitation… for us to join them… in figuring out ‘our’ geopolitical dilemmas?
“How do ‘we’ manage the transition to ‘democracy’ in the Middle East?”
“How do ‘we’ help all those po’ folks experiencing drought?”
[…after ‘we’ snatch their water under cover of ‘climate change’... a.k.a in this case ‘cloud-seeding.’]
“How do ‘we’ keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons?”
And there was rejoicing across the land… “We’re not like the dumb shlubs cleaning out tubs, or giving backrubs, we’re thinkers!”
Thus are we led… not just to identify with ‘the imperial project’… but to turn our backs on any authentic ‘we’…
…identifying with ‘the state’ leads to contempt for ‘the people.’
‘Contempt’ practically dripped from those two vituperative pundits who chastised the ‘duped’ ‘anti-war movement’…
…but they nonetheless seemed to celebrate being one with ‘the state’… (“we have to get out of Afghanistan”….)
As long as ‘we’ are waging war, we certainly won’t notice that war is being waged on us… (“Oh, no! Is ‘we’ waging war on ‘we’?”… “Have ‘our’ leaders betrayed us? How could it be?”… Confusion reigns…)
…there’s so many catches to getting collared…. quite a few hiccups when we allow leashes to be put on us….
So…
…when ‘power’ ‘invites’ us to join them in their imperial project… that’s not ‘overcoming division’… that’s ‘getting finessed’….
Our allegiance cannot be with ‘states’ and with the earth….
It is true… we cannot serve ‘two’… we will have to choose….
And if we choose ‘earth’… ‘power’ has to be ‘settled’… and ‘power’ cannot be ‘settled’… unless we unleash the power of ‘the people’….
And consider for a moment how much power that is… now, and over the millennia….
Recall Plato’s directive:
The greatest principle of all is that nobody, whether male or female, should ever be without a leader. Nor should the mind of anybody be habituated to letting him do anything at all on his own initiative, neither out of zeal, nor even playfully. But in war and in the midst of peace – to his leader he shall direct his eye, and follow him faithfully. And even in the smallest matters he should stand under leadership. For example, he should get up, or move, or wash, or take his meals… only if he has been told to do so… In a word, he should teach his soul, by long habit, never to dream of acting independently, and to become utterly incapable of it... There is no law, nor will there ever be one, which is superior to this…
Has it not all come to pass? Can we deny that ‘states’ have implemented his demand to the letter?
Have we not put ourselves in boxes… corralled our action in them… worked ourselves like horses ’til we dropped in our graves?
Even the global pool of NGOs… funded by… who knows?… sending out their troops… hierarchically controlled.
We have organized our lives according to a plan writ by a man almost twenty-five hundred years ago…
…it’s time to ask ourselves why.
To ‘settle’ ‘power’, we have to ‘release’ ‘the power of the people’…
…and this is only possible if we reclaim ‘leadership.’
Let’s consider this ‘inter-state system’ again… is it not just an outsized hierarchical ‘leadership-system’? How do we end it? By each group of state ‘citizens’ battling their respective ‘states’…. Are you serious?… I’m as willing to believe in the miracle of David as the next person, but this is more like David up against a global army of Goliaths, all working together with unlimited resources, when David hasn’t even figured out how to feed himself yet.
We can only bring down this monstrosity by linking thoughts and acts (strategies, targets, plans) globally… while simultaneously building local self-sufficiency… all tied to (informed… fueled… enlarged… by) a united vision of the future we want.
So our planning must be on three fronts simultaneously:
• Getting clear on our vision of the future… based in self-sufficient, freely collaborating, villages…
• Coordinating our thoughts, strategies, and action globally…
• Designing and building local self-sufficiency.
Let’s be clear…
…‘power’s’ Number One Fear… is our self-sufficiency…
What does that mean for us?
It means… self-sufficiency must be our Number One Strategy… tied to a unified vision of the future… as without that we’re just padding our cage with some nice carpet… and turning our backs on our brothers and sisters.
I can think of lots of ways we can self-organize our lives once they’re ours to make… and I know you can too (consider it a ‘thought experiment’)…
…all it takes… is caring about each other… and…
…making a decision to reclaim…
… the earth ’neath our feet…
…our ‘communal mind’…
…and our time.
* Interludes In Field And City
A brief pause to say…
…I’m grieving for KPFA…
…and so longing to see it exist…
…without brute force hanging over it.
It’s the Morning Show I’m missing…
…and I find myself wishing…
…as this global battle for our earth accelerates…
…that we had at least this small space…
…over the airwaves…
…with Brian’s probing presence…
…fueled and driven…
…by furious good fellowship…
…demonstrating every day that our true work is…
…making our future freedom.
The immediate motive for this missive was a telling juxtaposition. I turned the dial and there was Bonnie Bone. I’ve been meaning to tell her thanks for a while now… loving her musical choices… so grounded in love for her brothers and sisters…
…and by-the-way ditto to Lewis Sawyer… [12.07.11 Addendum: and big ditto Peja Peja to you, Wednesday reggae-guide nonpareil… Where are you?… 01.25.12: So glad you're back.] I played him loud… with a love-sick pup in tow… on our way to NUMMI every Tuesday… The little pup did not want to hear how wild women love to party… don’t get the blues… and wanna end up compost when that time comes.
I made him listen anyway.
But back to Bonnie… I only caught the last song this morning (06.16.11) but it was the essential message we all need to ponder ’til we be it…
Oh my mama told me
That she say she learned the hard way
Say she want to spare the children
She say don't give or sell your soul away
'Cause all that you have is your soul
So don't be tempted by the shiny apple
Don't you eat of a bitter fruit
Hunger only for a taste of justice
Hunger only for a world of truth
'Cause all that you have is your soul
I was a pretty young girl once
I had dreams I had high hopes
Married a man he stole my heart away
Gave his love but what a high price I paid
All that you have is your soul
Don't be tempted by the shiny apple
Don't you eat of a bitter fruit
Hunger only for a taste of justice
Hunger only for a world of truth
'Cause all that you have is your soul
Why was I such a young fool
Thought I'd make history
Making babies was the best I could do
Thought I'd made something that could be mine forever
Found out the hard way one can't possess another
And all that you have is your soul
Don't be tempted by the shiny apple
Don't you eat of a bitter fruit
Hunger only for a taste of justice
Hunger only for a world of truth
'Cause all that you have is your soul
I thought thought I could find a way
Beat the system
Make a deal and have no debts to pay
Take it all I'd take it all I'd run away
Me for myself first class and first rate
But all that you have is your soul
Don't be tempted by the shiny apple
Don't you eat of a bitter fruit
Hunger only for a taste of justice
Hunger only for a world of truth
'Cause all that you have is your soul
Here I am I’m waiting for a better day
A second chance
A little luck to come my way
Hope to dream a hope that I can sleep again
And wake in the world with clear conscience and clean hands
'Cause all that you have is your soul
Don't be tempted by the shiny apple
Don't you eat of a bitter fruit
Hunger only for a taste of justice
Hunger only for a world of truth
'Cause all that you have is your soul
Oh my mama told me
That she say she learned the hard way
Say she want to spare the children
She say don't give or sell your soul away
'Cause all that you have is your soul
All that you have
All that you have
All that you have
Is your soul
(Tracy Chapman, All That You Have Is Your Soul)
Thank you Tracy. Thank you Bonnie for that taste of truth.
The entire class system is a counter message to this… but there’s a particular piece of it I want to address… inspired by words of a ‘businessman’ [also this morning… on public-airwaves-not-KPFA] about so-called ‘developing’ nations:
“…until you begin to have a middle class the country can’t develop….”
This bubbly is akin to Michio Kaku’s betrayal (in an interview on Democracy Now!) when he callously touts the notion of ‘intellectual capital’ driving China’s advance into the crystalline purity of ‘Development’… that bloodless phantasm… that brutal cold Oz… that ‘power’ teaches its lapdogs… exists… for privilege… at the ends of its Rivers of Blood.
Privileged Intermediaries have been taught to talk upside-down. This perpetuates the insanity of class society. It is we refusing to be slaves… despite the relentless efforts of ‘power’ to make us so… that is the engine of ‘progress’… It is so today… and… so long as ‘class’ holds sway it will always be this way…. As William say, “truth is truth to the end of reckoning.”
(In a way the entire Palmers’ Chat is just an elongated explanation of that above paragraph.)
We need William’s courage more than ever…
…to say the unspoken…
…push the disallowed thoughts…
…possible today…
…at a momentum and on a scale…
…we could never before hope for…
…or contemplate…
…so yoked… and choked… we’ve been…
…with too-few voices that spoke our challenges….
…KPFA should be ours in this moment…
…furthering ‘power’s’ end…
…hurrying its demise…
– not sinking us in dim, unconscious ‘division’…
(…you can always get paid to do division work….)
…In Pacifica’s stepping in…
…I think can be seen the ‘jog circuit’…
…in progress…
…stalling… forestalling…
…a building…
…momentum….
The trouble before us now requires a flowering of deep thoughts… a harvesting of hard work. There is a world of difference between reading questions someone else wrote for you and having conversations that push understanding further.… Brian Edwards-Tiekert (and I know he’s not alone in this at KPFA) has that Larry Bensky-like gift of incorporating a continuously questing curiosity into the work of interviewing, milking (in a good sense) a conversation for all it was worth… only possible if you’ve thought at least as deeply as the person you’re interviewing. This facility requires unbound time, the help of the ancestors, concentration and a sense of security… the very things bosses don’t want us to have.
* Spearman Excerpt - 1
Dictatorship is an expedient that readily occurs to people’s minds when the country is disturbed by troubles which are in reality superficial and which could be removed by administrative reforms. Inefficient government tends to weaken the psychological resistance to dictatorship by depriving democracy of most of its advantages. A corrupt and incompetent Parliament and Civil Service can produce conditions which seem as tyrannous to the ordinary citizen as the rule of the most ruthless autocrat. (p. 41-2)
Governments like those of Kemal [Turkey] and Pilsudski [Poland] have often occurred before, and although there is no exact parallel to the Communist dictatorship, it is an idea with which philosophers, from Plato onward, have often toyed. But Fascism is the result of modern conditions and could hardly have appeared in any other period. It is an attempt to solve all the problems of modern society by centralizing every activity in the state. It arises out of the difficulties of highly-developed, not of backward, states. In Italy and Germany Fascism is supported by a doctrine of mystical nationalism and inspired by imperialist ambitions, but it is by no means certain that all the characteristics of Fascism might not appear without the theories which are known as ‘Fascist.’ In England, for example, it is the Left rather than the Right who desire the all-powerful state. In both Italy and Germany dictatorship superseded a democratic government. The possibility of dictatorship in a democratic country depends on the failure or the apparent failure of democracy. In Italy this failure was perfectly real and objective, while in Germany it was psychological or illusory, according to one’s point of view. (p. 44 – 5)
It must also be remembered that the German Empire was a libertarian state in the sense that Hegel used the word ‘liberty’, in the sense that it was ruled by law and not by the caprice of an individual. All the German States had constitutions…. There is also, quite apart from the spread of socialism in all European countries, a definite tendency in German thought towards socialism…. But this socialism is not the socialism of humanitarians. It is, as Goebbels said, ‘not a Socialism of theory, but of practice. It is the heroic, manly Socialism that our Prussian Kings once practiced. It is the soldierly Socialism of the Prussian Grenadiers.’ Its inspiration is Sparta rather than Marx; yet, at the same time, it encouraged the working class with the echoes of their own ideas. (p. 50 –1, 59)
Although repression is an essential part of the administration of even the most benevolent dictator, it will not permanently safeguard a ruler unless the conditions incline people to submit; in fact it is not even possible for a dictator to suppress his opponents, without causing his own overthrow, unless there seems to be an urgent necessity for strong government. Both the dictator and his subjects must feel that the object of the dictatorship is of immense importance and that any opposition will seriously interfere. This becomes even clearer if the failures amongst the dictators are examined. Hitler [Germany], Mussolini [Italy], Pilsudski [Poland], King Alexander [Yugoslavia] and Kemal [Turkey] were all successful in the sense that they seized the power and have retained it up to the present, or have only been removed by death. In Spain [Primo de Rivera], Lithuania [Valdemaras] and Greece [Pangalos], dictators appeared who were not successful, even in this somewhat limited sense. (p. 60 – 1)
When Primo de Rivera declared himself dictator, there was very little opposition, less in fact than attended the debut of any other dictator, except Kemal…. His failure seems to be due to two things: first that he did not have complete control of his own instrument [the army], and secondly that he could not provide any doctrine which would have rallied the people to him. He achieved power by means of the army, but he was not, as were the other military dictators, its unquestioned chief. There were hundreds of generals who felt they could govern as well or better than Primo de Rivera. As there were also hundreds of civilians who felt the same, and conditions in Spain encouraged these feelings, no one had considered himself endangered by the previous disorders; they had been merely inconvenient. Spain was not menaced by any aggressive power…. The very mildness of the dictator’s rule probably contributed to his fall. It is better for a dictator to be loved as well as feared, but it is essential for him to be feared. Primo de Rivera was always regarded as something of a joke, even by his opponents. (p. 62 – 3)
Pangalos, in Greece, set up a military dictatorship in 1926. He could not, however, establish himself permanently. There was no real hostility to democracy, though democratic government might be held responsible for the disaster of first beginning, and then failing to win, the war with Turkey. Pangalos was also just a general, like Kemal. The Greeks have none of that delight in obedience which distinguishes the Turks and the Germans, and they were not frightened of what might happen if the government was not strong, as were the Poles…. The Greeks were tired of trying to wrest portions of Asia Minor from the Turks, even the dream of once more owning Constantinople had lost its hold. (p. 64)
If things are only bad enough, a dictator might appear in any country, even a country whose traditions were violently opposed to it, but the fact that dictatorship has everywhere arisen out of a crisis is not an explanation; every sudden change comes, in a sense, from a crisis, and the questions still remains, Why in these circumstances do people turn to a dictator? (Diana Spearman, Modern Dictatorship, p. 65)
* Spearman Excerpt - 2
And Diana Spearman confirms Popper’s point that modern totalitarianism is not a departure… but a continuation of ancient tendencies… tendencies inherent… I would argue (and obviously inherent, I think we’ll see, once we have a chance to talk about it…) in class itself… in the division between mental and manual labor – the citizen-barbarian divide – (and I intend to stand with ‘the barbarian’… when so-targeted by ‘the state.’) [This is from Founding & Realizing A Test Site – not modeled on ‘democracy’… but on freedom – Premised On “Leisure IS Happiness…]
The administrative efficiency and the emotional attractions of dictatorship have an application in all ages, no matter what the intellectual background may be; but there were certain nineteenth-century developments, both in ideas and in organization, which in themselves tended to produce autocracy and had a profound effect on the actual form which autocracy took. Dictatorship is not, either in ideas or administration, such a complete breach with pre-war Europe as might be supposed from the apparent victory of Liberal ideas. It is a logical, although unexpected, development of pre-war tendencies in democratic no less than in autocratic countries. The dictators found in the autocratic theories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries plenty of material from which to concoct their creeds. From the point of view of organization the dictator’s party is clearly an adaptation of the mechanism of party government to the needs of autocracy. The growth of autonomous associations within the state, which appeared at first sight to favour the syndicalist organization of society, ultimately simplified the task of the dictator and made it easier for one man to control the multitudinous activites of modern life.
The sources of National Socialism in the German romantic attitude have already been pointed out, but many of the political theories of the nineteenth century – even theories which appeared to be democratic – can now be seen to have prepared the way for the acceptance of autocracy. The two dominant ideas of nineteenth-century Europe were individualism, in the sense of the supreme value of human personality; and collectivism, in the sense of a growing feeling of the importance of the community, whether this expressed itself as Socialism or as Nationalism. In both of these ideas there is one aspect which finds its completest expression in dictatorship, in the all-powerful State controlled by the all-powerful human being. Collectivist theories, whether Nationalist or Socialist, lead directly to this consummation; individualist theories take a more devious route through hero-worship and through the worship of human personality dissolving into worship of those forces which give birth and nourishment to the personality. In most cases these forces express themselves in the national State. Both the worship of individuality and the depreciation of individuality tend to the justification of violence.
In spite of the subordination of the individual to the collective purpose in dictatorship, the dictatorial State is saturated with hero worship. The dictator has even stolen some of the attributes of God. This attitude is, of course, antagonistic to the conception of individualism which flourished in the period when individualistic doctrine appeared to be triumphant. At that time it was linked to Liberalism, and to a respect for all human personality. This attitude implied political liberty in order that everyone might have a chance to develop his potentialities, and in order to prevent that cramping of personality which tyranny was thoughts to produce. But at its birth in the Italian Renaissance individualism tended to an attitude more akin to that of modern dictatorship, an attitude which was fundamentally regardless of the claims of society. The Reformation moralized individualism and harnessed the idea of the full development of human personality to the idea of the social good. But in its origin attention was concentrated on activity as the expression of personality, not on activity as moral purpose. Neither Machiavelli’s Prince nor Marlowe’s Tamburlaine inquired what social benefits would result from his activities; simply:
Nature, that fram’d us of four elements
Warring within our breasts for regiment,
Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds.
Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world
And measure every wandering planet’s course,
Still climbing after knowledge infinite
And always moving as the restless spheres,
Will us to wear ourselves, and never rest,
Until we reach the ripest fruit of all,
That perfect bliss and sole felicity,
The sweet fruition of an earthly crown.
It is clear that individualism of this kind could develop on the one hand into tyranny and on the other into hero worship…. In the later years of the nineteenth century… a group of writers… produced a conception of autocracy extremely close to that of the Renaissance. Indeed, Nietzsche, the most important, was directly inspired by Renaissance models. These writers exulted in the violence and illegality of the historic tyrants, and regarded as virtues those qualities which had been previously denounced even by defenders of autocracy. This latter Nietzschean view has been incorporated into the doctrines of Fascism and National Socialism. It professes delight in the autocrat for his own sake, not for any purpose which he may serve, and is essentially different from the practical defence of autocracy as the most efficient form of government.
Beside individualism conceived as hero worship, both Fascism and National Socialism proclaim their belief in individualism in the ordinary sense. Hitler says: “Our movement must develop by every means personality. One must never forget that all that is valuable in humanity resides in individual value, and that every idea and every action is the fruit of the creative strength of a man.” Mussolini, too, has always insisted on the part the great man plays in the development of culture. He says – frequently – “A hierarchy must culminate in a pin-point.” The means by which the dictators propose to teach men a respect for personality is clearly shown by Hitler’s words: “One must not forget that admiration for the one who is great not only represents a tribute of gratitude to greatness, but also a virtue which binds together and unites all those who experience the gratitude.” He adds: “To renounce the rendering of homage to a great spirit is to deprive oneself of an immense force, that which emanates from the names of men and women who have been great.” Compare Mussolini: “There is a lack of leaders; what we want is to have the few who can guide the many, men strong in faith and in self-sacrifice, who will temper like steel the excited feelings of the multitude.”…
The combination of this justification of violence with the idea of the victory of the masses makes the exaltation of violence particularly vicious. Nietzsche’s theory was framed for the individual. The individual is fully conscious of his acts – in fact, the readiness to accept the burden of this responsibility is one of the signs of the great man. There must be no attempt to shift the responsibility on to a party or a creed, or even to argue that the end justifies the means. There is no end except the full development of personality. The Sorelian attitude allows the cruelty to be increased while the responsibility is borne by the proletariat or historic forces. It is possible to forget that in reality it is a man who kills and tortures. Nietzsche may encourage cruelty, but at least a price – courage – is exacted for its exercise; Sorel encourages the cruelty of cowards. Sorel’s influence on Mussolini is direct and avowed by both master and pupil.
Nietzsche’s importance probably does not lie in his effect on the dictators themselves. Rulers have never found it difficult to justify their actions or to turn any theory, from Christianity to Communism, to their own ends. His ideas seem to be serious rather in their effect on those young men who were to make up the dictator’s party. His influence, both before and since the War, on the student and the young intellectual has been enormous…. Three aspects of Nietzsche’s thought have entered into the official theories of Germany and Italy: anti-intellectualism, expressed chiefly in a belief in the superior power of faith, courage, and instinct over reason’ a repudiation of all forms of materialism, a denial that even happiness is the object of life, much less economic or material welfare; and the assertion of the value of the individual personality. All these ideas, with the exception of the last, are found also in Bolshevist thought.
Anti-intellectualism was of course a strong tendency in pre-war thought…. An ethical revolt against the intellect can be seen in the works of D. H. Lawrence, and Aldous Huxley’s doctrine of the complete man is in the same tradition. The distrust of reason and an assertion of the barrenness of the intellect has been one of the main intellectual tendencies of the twentieth century. It would be hard to find a more perfect expression of the National Socialist attitude than this passage from D. H. Lawrence: “My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds, but what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true.”
Lawrence, of course, was not concerned with politics, and the element of truth in the anti-intellectualist attitude should not blind us to the other truth, recognized by none of these philosophers except Nietzsche, that, while rationalist ethics allow freedom of choice between different impulses, if we trust in “what our blood feels”…
[…forgive the interjection… but I have to say… that under the regime of ‘class’… i.e. of ‘betrayal’… of ‘make-use-of’… “what one’s blood (generally) feels…” is rage… and to think… is to challenge this way of things… the ‘right’ of the ‘might’ of ‘the father’… – P.S.]
… if we trust in “what our blood feels”, then we must accept all the impulses in human nature.
[…when we allow the inhuman regimen of ‘class’ to pass unexamined… as it clearly was in the post-mortems of Nazi Germany… then the heart of the problem is never exposed… and ‘rule’ may proceed with its misanthropic ‘impulses’… and is able to convince… subsequent generations… that they come from ‘human nature’… – P.S.]
As Nietzsche said: “With every degree of man’s growth towards greatness and loftiness he also grows downwards into the depths and into the terrible.”…
[…straight-up Hegel… and of course Plato… – P.S.]
(Diana Spearman, (from Chapter IV, “Authoritarian Tendencies in Democracy,” Modern Dictatorship, 1939, p. 141 – 144, and 146 – 148)
* Is ‘Unleashed People-Power’ ‘Chaos’… Or The ‘Expansion of Possibility’… The ‘Blossoming of Creativity’?
Not long ago I caught part of a lecture by Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano. Near the end he listed some heinous acts ‘humans’ uniquely (as a species) commit, including renting ourselves in exchange for a wage. But this was then immediately juxtaposed with: “but humans are also the only species that makes art…” the suggestion thereby planted (whether consciously or not) that without the one, not the other.
“Without slavery… not ‘civilization’….”
This thought is systematically woven into our consciousness in countless ways…
…into the physical structure of the world of ‘class’ itself…
…as the values of ‘class’ (competition, hierarchy, deference to authority)… and the material reality underlying them (the imperative of the manual-mental divide)… shape every social institution in class society….
But is it true?
Could it be… as with everything ‘rulers’ ram down our throats… ‘civilization’ (and ‘atomization’ and ‘specialization’) is just ‘class-rationalization’?
For those who lust for indefinite ‘rule’… the notions of ‘progress’ and ‘civilization’ are critical tools… both psychologically to maintain their sense of dominance, and, practically, to defeat our longing for self-governance.
In the quote below Popper shows us this con… instead of ‘philosopher’… think ‘civilization’…
For a full justification of the demand that the philosophers should rule, we must therefore proceed to analyse the tasks connected with the city’s preservation.
We know from Plato’s sociological theories that the state, once established, will continue to be stable as long as there is no split in the unity of the master class. The bringing up of that class is, therefore, the great preserving function of the sovereign, and a function which must continue as long as the state exists. How far does it justify the demand that a philosopher must rule?… The great importance which Plato attaches to a philosophical education of the rulers must be explained by… reasons…purely political.
The main reason I can see is the need for increasing to the utmost the authority of the rulers….
Thus Plato’s philosophical education has a definite political function. It puts a mark on the rulers, and it establishes a barrier between the rulers and the ruled. (This has remained a major function of ‘higher’ education down to our own time.) Platonic wisdom is acquired largely for the sake of establishing a permanent class rule. It can be described as political ‘medicine’, giving mystic powers to its possessors, the medicine-men. (p. 147 – 8)
So does ‘the state’ exist to preserve ‘civilization’… as pundits proclaim (across the political spectrum)?… or does (the con) ‘civilization’ exist to preserve ‘the state’… i.e., Plato’s * ‘best state’ – the state that elevates the truly ‘great’? (*…Plato, for whom distinctions of rule ‘economy’ and ‘polity’ are probably prosaic, and certainly ‘banausic’.…)
But even Popper worried about the phony problem of ‘chaos’…. if there was no ‘state’ to rule us. Of course he was writing in the terrifying times of Fascism’s rise… and believed ‘state’ was an essential defense to external threats…. He writes:
Although much of what is contained in this book took shape at an earlier date, the final decision to write it was made in March 1938, on the day I received the news of the invasion of Austria. The writing extended into 1943; and the fact that most of the book was written during the grave years when the outcome of the war was uncertain may help to explain why some of its criticism strikes me today as more emotional and harsher in tone than I could wish. (p. viii)
It’s all the better for it, Popper….
It means, whether you knew it or not, you were writing for us… as…
…the totalitarian threat is still ‘up’…
…it’s embedded in ‘class’…
…and will not become ‘history’…
…’til ‘class’ is consigned…
…to the trash.
Perhaps if Popper had been an electrician, he would have seen ‘power’ more accurately.
Even though ‘power’s’ been kickin’ around… haunting our lives… for a relatively short amount of time… (a mere matter of a few millennia)… this disaster… downhill-rolling… is exponentially building….
When you’re an electrician you bend metal tubing called ‘conduit’…
…now if you think of ‘power’ as a ‘tend’…
…a tiny bend…
…that starts out slight…
…then…
…when…
…you look at that ‘tend’ over time…
Through the power of the visual…
…you’ll see…
…there’s a critical need to begin again…
…if we’re ever to be free.
Because… while Popper thought that eventually all voices get heard, all enter the mash, then we all have a good hash…
…that conduit bend over time… shows that ‘power’s’ rise… as it constantly grows… stills the voices of the many… weakens our ability… to be part of the conversation…
…until eventually…
…we’re locked out permanently…
…and as this is a ‘tend’…
…it’s not going to end…
…all on its own….
We have to make it go.
Why is ‘chaos’ a phony fear?
Let’s look at the truth.
Look around you.
It’s obvious that ‘power’ creates ‘chaos’.
(Who else has the funds… or the deep malevolence… to cause such ‘mischief’?)
We in the West have had this so-called ‘democracy’ Lo! these many years…. Is the air any clearer? Are the oceans blooming? Is our species-health secure? And how many other animals and plants have simply disappeared? Do we live in fellowship?… in happiness… without fear? Do we make our own lives? Do we feel powerful and satisfied? Are our abilities fully utilized?
And if any small voice should be raised in doubt, we’re told, “Pipe down!… don’t complain… things aren’t what they seem, those are pipe dreams!”
But your body tells you true. Look around you….
‘The people’ want peace… want good fellowship and security.
We know this is so… after each ‘disaster’ we see how it goes… how ‘Each’ fills the gap she sees… how ‘Help’ runs when he sees ‘Need’.
In fact, we’ve been the target of ‘power’s’ scorn continuously over the millennia precisely because we’re not ‘to-the-weapon-born’.
In The Iliad there’s a moment when it seems war will be avoided… and the front line soldiers relax… rejoice…
Now all hearts lifted at his words, for both sides
Hoped for an end of miserable war;
and backing chariots into line, the men
stepped out, disarmed themselves, and left their weapons
heaped at close intervals on open ground.
But ‘fate’ (read: ‘power’) had other plans… and when hope for peace was dashed, out stalked ‘command’… urging the disappointed troops… spewing invective… ridiculing…
“Rabbit hearts of Argos,
are you not dead with shame?
How can you stand there
stunned as deer that have been chased all day
over a plain and are used up at last,
and droop and halt, broken in heart and wind?
That is the way you look, no fight left in you!
Will you stand by till Trojans overrun
our line of ships, beached here above the breakers,
to find out if the hand of Zeus is over you?”
Popper and Brecht and Zora and William… all point to our basic goodness… all great writers do…
…our ‘badness’ has never been the issue…
…‘Necessity’ at times, it’s true…
…rears its ugly head…
…but we’re long past the time when ‘power’ could…
…with any truth at all…
…chase us with that dread.
The problem is not us, the problem is ‘power’-lust’.
First principles.
What is ‘power’? What does it do? It steals, lies and hides… that’s pretty much it. How can it do this? It exploits ‘distance’. Nikola Tesla saw the truth of it… once communication is instantaneous, it becomes the light… that dissolves ‘power’ into it.
Nikola saw clearly what ‘instant’ meant…
…it means we don’t need leaders to ‘think’ for us…
…we never did but now it’s obvious….
But…
…we can help each other only if…
…‘power’ stops controlling us…
…and that will only happen if…
…‘power’ no longer exists.
Our hands are all-determinative… ‘power’ can do nothing without them…. We now can share lives across great seas as easily as across city streets…
…so…
…they can no longer manipulate our fear (if we stand together), and we’ve always known how to live with respect here, on our mother’s broad back, every day looking both forward and back.
It is their greed, not ours, that wrecked things (for the planet, for our brothers and sisters, for our plant and animal friends.)
We’ve allowed ourselves to be prodded for millennia. ‘Power’ kept us moving so fast we could neither turn around nor catch a thought. Moreover… even when we turn ’round… we can’t trust what we see… having only ‘power’s’ false lens… false language… false thoughts…
…thinking, as they do, that ‘wealth’ means ‘plunder’…
…or ‘treasure’…
…not our bodies and hands and the earth…
…which must be ‘worthless’, as…
…‘wealth’ obviously glitters…
…and we lost our shine long ago…
…caught, sold, bought…
…“set in the market-place to sell…
…set for still-bait…”
And have we not been ‘still’?
…
…But wait!
…Conditions have changed!…
…and our souls haven’t gone…
…they await….
Samuel called them ‘the unconscious’…
I have said more than once that [Ernest] believed in his own depravity; never was there a little mortal more ready to accept without cavil whatever he was told by those who were in authority over him: he thought, at least, that he believed it, for as yet he knew nothing of that other Ernest that dwelt within him, and was so much stronger and more real than the Ernest of which he was conscious. The dumb Ernest persuaded with inarticulate feelings too swift and sure to be translated into such debatable things as words, but practically insisted as follows:
“Growing is not the easy plain-sailing business that it is commonly supposed to be; it is hard work – harder than any but a growing boy can understand; it requires attention….
“You are surrounded on every side by lies which would deceive even the elect, if the elect were not generally so uncommonly wide awake; the self of which you are conscious, your reasoning and reflecting self, will believe these lies and bid you act in accordance with them. This conscious self of yours, Ernest, is a prig begotten of prigs and trained in priggishness; I will not allow it to shape your actions, though it will doubtless shape your words for many a year to come. Your papa is not here to beat you now; this is a change in the conditions of your existence, and should be followed by changed actions. Obey me, your true self, and things will go tolerably well with you, but only listen to that outward and visible old husk of yours which is called your father, and I will rend you in pieces even unto the third and fourth generation as one who has hated God; for I, Ernest, am the God who made you.” (Samuel Butler, The Way Of All Flesh)
Conditions have changed.
“The system can not stop your thinking now, or stop you coordinating globally your thoughts and actions; this is a change in the conditions of your existence, and should be followed by changed actions.”
Youth today have grasped the implications of our communally-developed, communally-owned communication technology… they are trying to figure out how to drive this opportunity home…
…we adults who can must give them a hand…
…folks with access and stuff…
…step up!
We have to push each other home.
The disempowerment from our conditioned belief… in ‘leaders’ and ‘rulers’ and ‘states’… is so deep…. We’ve become perpetual children to the fatherly state…
…this is by design, not innate.
At the very beginning of this conversation came the question: “if you agree that ‘power’ has no right to be, what’s the qualifier on that?” I ask in all sincerity.
Because so long as ‘power’ exists, it will shape, invade and dominate all social institutions… inevitably…. It cannot be ‘restrained.’
What is its nature? To steal, lie and hide.
What does it do? It seeks to ever-accumulate…. It eats without cessation, for if it stops it will be eaten….
Remember its objective…
…one ‘master’….
Last man standing…
…is…
…‘it’…
…a ‘grand’ (to their minds) competition…
…so ‘nobly’ seductive…
…the ‘best’ survive…
…the rest…
…deserve to die.
Let’s always recall…
…we have at least five thousand years of experience with organized ‘power’…
…we’ve learned its nature from our many errors…
…we know what it needs…
…so it’s a simple matter of…
…starving the beast….
I think we need to seriously ask ourselves why so many of us are so much more interested in ‘power’ than ‘love’… and teach our children that ‘power’s’ all that matters….
We’ve internalized ‘Plato’…
…we’ve gotten ourselves on ‘power’s’ side…
…unconsciously trying…
…to realize…
…Plato’s dream (‘no change’)…
…but…
…if our future’s to be about ‘love’…
…our current institutions are worse than useless…
…they’re pillars to ‘power’, monuments to its worship…
…and so how will our youth learn anything different?
It’s time to turn to youth… fresh from ‘the river’… and ask them what should be done… to build a world based on love….
We know the problems we face… problems with empathy and atomization… the lack of communal ritual, the absence of any real sister and brotherhood….
(And here I must pause and ask that you never forget…
…that our brothers and sisters in the Arab world face an enormous threat…
…precisely because…
…they actively practice…
…communal traditions of good fellowship….
…And as people in the street makes ‘power’ feel unsafe…
…threatened, and insecure…
… ‘Power’ has Islam in the crosshairs….
…It’s not about religious intolerance…
…they could give two turds for mere words…
…but physical bodies that physically meet (regularly)…
…that ‘power’ will ever be determined to defeat…
…[and I suspect their current strategy…
…is to defeat revolt with food (and water) insecurity.]
So in the below factor in this particularly pressing need for solidarity.)
Youth of every region…
…why not meet and make a vision…
…of the future that you want to see…
…a future based in self-sufficiency… (food, shelter, energy, transportation, communications, sanitation, infrastructure, health, education.)
Here in the U.S. it sometimes seems we live in an abyss of soullessness. Feeling this… if we want a future based on ‘love’… it’s time… way past actually… to let youth lead.
(…by which I mean all youth, not just youth in ‘academes’…)
Perhaps a way to begin… to contemplate our mission… is to come up with a design that addresses those empathy and atomization issues… a design that builds our communal mind, and both brethren and sistren traditions.
Here’s just a ‘for-instance’… a future-first-stock-trade… in which global youth help each other face intransigent states… submit ‘stock-solidarity-options’… offerings that build global credits… solidarity… internationally… that could later come back to them.
A trade in “continuous days in the street”… “feets in the streets” …when and how they’re needed… based in values of non-commercial solidarity… that move us closer to our future freedom.
It would be a flip of ‘power’s’ strategy.
They love to take our ideas and creations, package and rename them. Now we can return the favor… create future-first-stock ‘options’ for helping our brothers and sisters.
So, youth in a region meet and greet… create a vision of the future… and submit an ‘option’ for solidarity… a goal that could use international feets in international streets… and add it to the exchange…. Youth could then vote on priority and agree to get behind whatever uprises…
…creating surprises….
Youth of Greece! Tell us what you need!… likewise Syria and Tunisia… India, Egypt and Bahrain… don’t forget Congo, after that, who knows? Pick a Number One and help those brothers and sisters ’til the job is done. Then we pull the next ‘option’ and continue ’til each battle’s won…
…and…
…simultaneously…
…a vision of ‘future’ begins….
Out of pale gray and dim…
…a brilliant array…
…of color…
…emerges…
…a future to step in.
* When Will We Stop Microscopically (Falsely)-Analyzing All The ‘Problems’ – Which ‘Power’ Is Happy To Solve For Us With Totalitarianism… ‘One-Man-Rule’… – And Begin Instead To Ignore ‘Power’ And Plan… Our Future Freedom?
Challenging the ‘wisdom’ of allowing ‘the state’ to define the lines and limits of our future does not mean it is irrelevant who (nominally) controls existing government… it means we must (as always) juggle many tasks… become skilled in the balancing act… graceful at maneuvering in a swamp… because we must both systematically build our future – i.e. authentic lives that extend our inter-connections with each other and with the earth – and hold the ‘power’-mad at bay…. And with this danger-infused latter task the election of Barack was a gift we had no reason to hope for….
Plato’s Tribe has been testing the winds for furthering totalitarian tends for some time now (Honduras comes to mind… ditto the many cloaked passive-obedience experiments they continuously float… [how many can you spot?… e.g. telling incoming university students they must submit samples of bodily fluids…]). Re-electing Barack could not be more important.
The Extreme Right’s objective is to make ‘government’ (until it’s totalitarian) ineffective… and ‘One-Man-Rule’ seem attractive (as the Spearman book says). Note how in eight years of Bush they seeded their functionaries in every nook and cranny of government… there to sneak and defeat, relay and delay… if we lose the presidency now, ‘government’ will quickly decay (and I don’t mean ‘wither away’… as we claim our own days)… it’s already been bled dry by ‘disaster’ after ‘disaster’…. (I’m sure for them it’s a hearty laugh… a great joke… to hear the name ‘god’ invoked.)
And if ‘government’ decays, as sure as paychecks means puppets they will wheel in some ‘strong’, ‘fatherly’ figure who will tell us he can solve all our problems for us… ‘poverty’… ‘violence’… crumbling infrastructure (think of the ‘jewel’ Ancient Greece could be with all that slave labor pounded out continuously… never fear ‘our’ (read: ‘their’) cities could be just as ‘beautiful’ here….)
If ‘controlling the people’ is the primary goal (of ‘power’)… and it is… then levers must be found, refined, and religiously applied to accomplish this design.
* Introduction:
I.
Fire….
First there was the ‘Idea’…
…from ‘nothing’… ‘something’…
…from ‘immateriality’… ‘reality’….
II.
‘Idea’ sees…
…‘it’ can make things.
III.
Revelation!…
…the living too bends…
…to what ‘Idea’ intends….
…Plants… four-leggeds…
…are bred.…
…And then…
IV.
…‘breeding’ begins eating…
…human sistren and brethren…
…and its own children….
…[And this…
…was hardest of all to admit.]
V.
Now the secret of ‘fire’ must be hid…
…thefts denied…
…stories invented…
…the trick of ‘rule’ to hide…
…to perpetuate the lie…
…fix in place…
…‘the slave’ ever-bowed…
…to the ‘master race’….
VI.
And this way of thinking became…
…phantasmorphorical chains…
…from ‘nothing’… ‘something’…
…from ‘immateriality’… ‘reality’…
…packed and re-packed ’round our children’s brains…
…and as we who loved them placed them there…
…they reason the reason’s for their welfare…
…that we bid them become…
…the ‘master’ the parent…
…never was.…
VII.
Parents…
…it must be us…
…to relieve the children…
…of this crookedness….
VIII.
And youth!…
…it must be you…
…to new stories make!…
…glory re-take!…
…‘the gods’ re-incorporate!…
…And all around blooms…
…new fruits of our inter-connected roots…
…calling into being what we once knew…
…Freedom…
…to begin anew.…
* “…over three thousand years ago… Hesiod… a farmer… had knowledge we will prosper by again…”
Over three thousand years ago a prosperous Greek farmer wrote that there really was no need for anyone to work. Hesiod knew this because he was a student of Demeter, Goddess of the Corn.
Corn was sowed long before vines were planted. The first cornfield was the beginning of settled life on earth. Vineyards came later. It was natural, too, that the divine power which brought forth the grain should be thought of as a goddess, not a god. When the business of men was hunting and fighting, the care of the fields belonged to the women, * and as they plowed and scattered the seed and reaped the harvest, they felt that a woman divinity could best understand and help woman’s work. They could best understand her, too, who was worshiped, not like other gods by the bloody sacrifices men liked, but in every humble act that made the farm fruitful. Through her the field of grain was hallowed.
“Demeter’s holy grain.”
(Edith Hamilton, Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes, p. 47)
Hesiod mocked the men who devoted their days to endless discussion, the men who lived but to argue, planting their points in the stars.
And he mocked, too, those who lust for plunder, the ‘gift-eating men’, the “Fools!… [who] don’t know how much more the half is than the whole….” (Every farmer knows that! …It is fear that drove us off our land… and fear that must be conquered… before we can begin again.) What good is your argument, he asked, and your fat tastes, if “there is not a sufficiency stored within of seasonably gathered grain, earth’s produce, the fruit of Demeter?”
It was the false cleverness and inflated egos of these two ‘classes’ of men that ruined our chances… we who have been hobbled by ‘class’ for thousands of years… by drawing down upon us… Zeus’ curse:
For the gods keep hidden the livelihood of men.
Otherwise you might easily do enough work in a day to have enough for a full year with no further need to be working,
and might immediately hang up your rudder in the smoke of the fireplace
and release your oxen and hardworking mules from their labor.
(Hesiod, Works and Days, lines 42 – 46, R. M. Frazer translation)
But there is another ‘class’ of men… standing coolly apart and above… who secretly nestle the ambition of Zeus. These men observed the bitter scrambling and dissension of their fellow mortals… once ‘class’ came to be… with unconscious fear and conscious contempt. For these, ‘passion’ is a bitter place… where nothing is certain, where the vile corrupt the perfect, and ignorance drowns ‘the Idea.’
I.
Fire….
First there was the ‘Idea’…
…from ‘nothing’… ‘something’…
…from ‘immateriality’… ‘reality’….
II.
‘Idea’ sees…
…‘it’ can make things.
…The discovery [of fire] was one of first-class significance. Man could thereafter not only control but also initiate the puzzling process of burning, the mysterious power of heat. He became consciously a creator. The evocation of flame out of a pair of sticks or from flint, pyrites, and tinder looks very like making something out of nothing. When it was a less familiar event, it must have had a very exhilarating effect; you must have felt yourself a creator indeed. (V. Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself, p. 51)
In what follows I will be arguing that this fact Childe grasped, that “man makes himself,” explains much of our history with ‘class’… and that once ‘power’ honed this understanding into a fine tool… an ‘art’… the official story, all the ‘knowledges’ we commoners were given to memorize, served the purpose, at base, to further ‘power’s’ designs. (This is of course but Popper’s point, made decades and decades ago… truth we should already know…. But ‘power’ places people… those it strokes and praises… to intercept such ‘dangerous’ (to it) truth as this and make sure it never reaches the people… we ‘beasts’ but born to groan and sweat… and waste ourselves in grief.)
Over the course of millennia, ‘power’ has methodically shaped the ‘world’ according to a mission. And because we do indeed invent ourselves, those who have a clear vision of what they want, and work together, and systematically accrue power to themselves to realize it, and who figure out how to get enough of those systematically harmed by it to nonetheless support it, and who then systematically pass this mission on to their offspring (like a debt owed)… have given themselves a seemingly insuperable edge… over the rest of us whose power is systematically… exponentially… lessened.
But like Akhilleus, ‘power’ has a weak spot, it can never everywhere and altogether inoculate itself against the very strategy by which it could itself ‘self-make’… i.e…. we commoners can do the same… once we understand their game… (…which is to seem like gods… so of course they’d want a ‘weather-machine’… and to cloud-seed… and to make crops swell or wither as they will it… and to try to awe us with a seeming-power of prediction… they are such heartless children….)
Betrayal:
III.
Revelation!…
…the living too bends…
…to what ‘Idea’ intends….
…Plants… four-leggeds…
…are bred.…
…And then…
IV.
…‘breeding’ begins eating…
…human sistren and brethren…
…and its own children….
…[And this…
…was hardest to admit.]
Class society began with a betrayal… the four-leggeds, lured with the promise of friendship, fell… under the pressure of necessity… under a wavering, utilitarian eye…. Friendship soured to cool appraisal, and, in the end, the ultimate degeneration… love turned to cold calculation…. Which flank held meat?… which mouth good teeth?… how solid of leg?… how easily led?
If he just realizes the advantage of having a group of such half-tamed beasts hanging around the fringes of his settlement as a reserve of game easily caught, he will be on the way to domestication.
Next he must exercise restraint and discrimination in using this reserve of meat. He must refrain from frightening the beasts unnecessarily or killing the youngest and tamest. Once he begins to kill only the shyest and least amenable bulls or rams, he will have started selective breeding, eliminating untractable brutes, and consequently favouring the more docile. But he must also use his new opportunities of studying the life of the beasts at close range. He will thus learn about the processes of reproduction, the animals’ needs of food and water. He must act upon his knowledge…. It can thus be imagined how with lapse of time a flock or a herd should have been bred that was not only tame, but actually dependent upon man. (p. 78 - 9)
Finally, war helped to a great discovery – that men as well as animals can be domesticated. Instead of killing a defeated enemy, he might be enslaved; in return for his life he could be made to work. This discovery has been compared in importance to that of the taming of animals. In any case, by early historic times slavery was a foundation of ancient industry and a potent instrument in the accumulation of capital. (V. Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself, p. 134)
(Never doubt it… ‘power’ views us as ‘beasts’… and its project with us is selective breeding…. This thousands-of-years experiment they call ‘civilization’ is now at the moment where it’s totally about ‘breeding.’ They want to weed out resistance… and seat ‘passivity’… solidly.)
‘Betrayal’… or ‘duplicity’… is not in the nature of any living thing… and cannot be entertained unless it is explained.
The first explanations in Western class societies – and, as we will see, ‘West’ means the great out-spinning churning from the epicenter’s turning… the Great Mediterranean Bowl – became a pantheon of intricately inter-woven stories.
Heraclitus, who lived after Hesiod, after Homer, but a century and a half before Plato… was entirely dissatisfied with the messiness of all these explanations and decided to tidy up. He began this work and Plato followed up… but Heraclitus was straight-forward, and Plato… was not.
Heraclitus, the first philosopher to deal not only with ‘nature’ but even more with ethico-political problems, lived in an age of social revolution…. In spite of his proud refusal to take part in the political life of his city, he supported the cause of the aristocrats who tried in vain to stem the rising tide of the new revolutionary forces…. His interpretation of the people’s motives is most interesting, for it shows that the stock-in-trade of anti-democratic argument has not changed much since the earliest days of democracy. “They said: nobody shall be the best among us; and if someone is outstanding, then let him be so elsewhere, and among others.” This hostility towards democracy breaks through everywhere in the fragments: “…the mob fill their bellies like the beasts…. They take the bards and the popular belief as their guides, unaware that the many are bad and that only the few are good…. The law can demand, too, that the will of One Man must be obeyed.” (Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1: The Spell Of Plato, p. 12- 13)
But unconsciously there is always uneasiness when good fellowship is abandoned. Betrayal comes with costs… psychological and socio-political…. (Our… we commoners… inability to throw off the yoke these many thousands of years is due to the fact that ‘power’ used its advantage to skew the conditions of life so as to insure that we pay the price for the gross imbalances and strife caused by their false stratagems. And so they turned their ‘costs’… into ‘benefits.’ So they’ve been able to work steadily toward their ultimate goals by preventing us from forming any.)
Heraclitus ‘solved’ his uneasiness by inventing a soothing explanation: we are all ‘Fire’… we are all ‘One”…. And the universe is a Great Bowl that holds all the Fates and all living things… and sometimes it churns up ‘master’… and sometimes it churns up ‘slave’…. So… “it’s all good!”… if you get the fuzzy end… just hang in… things’ll look rosier next time you up-end… if you work hard and learn your lessons.
“The opposites belong to each other, the best harmony results from discord, and everything develops by strife… The path that leads up and the path that leads down are identical…. The straight path and the crooked path are one and the same.… For gods, all things are beautiful and good and just; men, however, have adopted some things as just, others as unjust…. The good and the bad are identical.”
But the relativism of values (it might even be described as an ethical relativism) expressed in the last fragment does not prevent Heraclitus from developing upon the background of his theory of the justice of war and the verdict of history a tribalist and romantic ethic of Fame, Fate, and the superiority of the Great Man, all strangely similar to some very modern ideas…
It is surprising to find in these early fragments, dating from about 500 B.C., so much that is characteristic of modern historicist and anti-democratic tendencies. (The Open Society, p. 17)
Not so surprising at all….
The Hirschman quote below is intended to show how ‘power’ uses money as a lever… to control our behavior – through ‘jobs’ and ‘business’ and other money-seeking endeavors – and of course also to make themselves feel clever… and that, with fear, is why we back… their imperial project they call ‘class’… to win what they have: certainty of being ‘better-than’…. But the truth, and true power, as compared with that rot, is the certainty… that we are not.
It’s time to see more clearly… our hidden adversary… it’s not ‘capitalism’ or ‘business’… or even ‘corporate interests’… that rides our backs with such arrogance… but simply ‘Plato’s Tribe’… ‘power’s’ wantons relishing mad designs… toying with our lives, hoping that… we’ll be too busy chasing dollars to notice the fact… we’re being slowly stretched on a totalitarian rack.
Here the interests are far from taming or chaining the passions of the rulers; on the contrary, if the citizens become absorbed by the pursuit of their private interests, it will be possible for a “clever and ambitious man to seize power.” And Tocqueville directs some superbly caustic and prophetic words (written years before the rise of Napoleon III) at those who, for the sake of a favorable business climate, ask only for “law and order”:
“A nation that demands from its government nothing but the maintenance of order is already a slave in the bottom of its heart; it is the slave of its well-being, and the man who is to chain it can arrive on the scene.”
…If it is true that the economy must be deferred to, then there is a case not only for constraining the imprudent actions of the prince but for repressing those of the people, for limiting participation, in short, for crushing anything that could be interpreted by some economist-king as a threat to the proper functioning of the “delicate watch.”
Secondly, [Adam] Ferguson and [Alexis de] Tocqueville implicitly criticized the older tradition of thought that had seen in the pursuit of material interest a welcome alternative to the passionate scramble for glory and power…. [Their] point: as long as not everyone is playing the “innocent” game of making money, the total absorption in it of most citizens leaves the few who play for the higher stakes of power freer than before to pursue their ambition. In this way social arrangements that substitute the interests for the passions as the guiding principle of human action for the many can have the side effect of killing the civic spirit and of thereby opening the door to tyranny. (Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph, p.123 – 125)
And while ‘power’ doggedly shapes and makes the ‘last-man-standing’ scenario on which it fixates… we simply ‘skate’… and then celebrate ourselves for our – for millennia! – continuing to “fight the good fight.”
Not long ago due to a heavy bombardment of toxic radio waves… clashing, crashing… my face aflame… sweat streaming… heart fast-beating… head and chest aching… ears ringing… nausea weakening me… the thought visited… “why not leave the hermitage?”
So off I went. And walking about I found… new ventures up-springing… artistic venues and second-use-selling… all clinging to life on a narrow cliff. And in one, I was given a gift….
A CD… with a perfect message for the day… as I’d just heard a progressive pundit say, “I’ve been doing this work for thirty years.” Proudly, because, you know, he was “fighting the good fight.”
Well on this CD one of the tracks is called “Good Fight”… and a voice at the end said:
Good Fight.
A good fight is when it doesn’t last very long, you know?
Like I just sucker-punch someone in the fuckin’ face and they fall over.
Good fight. Done. Over.
That’s a good fight.
(Candlespit Collective 2010)
(Seriously.)
What follows are broad fragments… to be filled in… as we win.
V.
Now the secret of ‘fire’ must be hid…
…thefts denied…
…stories invented…
…the trick of ‘rule’ to hide…
…to perpetuate the lie…
…fix in place…
…‘the slave’ ever-bowed…
…to the ‘master race’….
VI.
And this way of thinking became…
…phantasmorphorical chains…
…from ‘nothing’… ‘something’…
…from ‘immateriality’… ‘reality’…
…packed and re-packed ’round our children’s brains…
…and as we who loved them placed them there…
…they reason the reason’s for their welfare…
…that we bid them become…
…the ‘master’ the parent…
…never was.…
Coercion is by definition unstable… as water seeks its level… earth seeks its balance… and we are earth.
Imbalance embedded in the human family has to be corrected. That’s inevitable. We seek Mutual Aid as certainly as all other species do. Petr Kropotkin showed us this:
Sociability and need of mutual aid and support are such inherent parts of human nature that at no time of history can we discover men living in small isolated families, fighting each other for the means of subsistence. On the contrary, modern research… proves that since the very beginning of their prehistoric life men used to agglomerate into gentes, clans, or tribes, maintained by an idea of common descent and by worship of common ancestors. For thousands and thousands of years this organization has kept men together, even though there was no authority whatever to impose it. It has deeply impressed all subsequent development of mankind; and when the bonds of common descent had been loosened by migrations on a grand scale, while the development of the separated family within the clan itself had destroyed the old unity of the clan, a new form of union, territorial in its principle – the village community – was called into existence by the social genius of man. This institution, again, kept men together for a number of centuries, permitting them to further develop their social institutions and to pass through some of the darkest periods of history… (p. 153)
…Stems are seen to fight against stems, tribes against tribes, individuals against individuals; and out of this chaotic contest of hostile forces, mankind issues divided into castes, enslaved to despots, separated into States always ready to wage war against each other. And, with this history of mankind in his hands, the pessimist philosopher triumphantly concludes that warfare and oppression are the very essence of human nature; that the warlike and predatory instincts of man can only be restrained within certain limits by a strong authority which enforces peace and thus gives an opportunity to the few and nobler ones to prepare a better life for humanity in times to come…. (Petr Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, 115 – 116)
Petr understood that ‘power’ selectively passes down the ‘stories’ that further its mission, and that, “Ere long history will have to be re-written on new lines….”
So, for instance, Plato’s seemingly endless tomes and disingenuous propaganda are carefully preserved and falsely taught, while the anti-slavery movement of his day is discounted, if not disappeared altogether.
‘Class’ is a weight that must be continuously applied… and re-applied… to survive. So the institutions and the financial tools are made to counter our continuous tendency to awake.
The project to continuously ‘remake us’ as ‘slaves’ and themselves as ‘the best’… as continuous preparation for the ultimate contest was begun with Plato. But at least since the French Revolution… and probably much earlier… ‘power’ made a conscious effort to step up its game. It was one of those moments (like the 1970s in the U.S.) when ‘power’ took stock, assessed its strategies, regrouped, retooled… recommitted itself anew… (to its ‘Man-Makes-Himself” project…) to move us all along to the crystalline purity of ‘One-Man-Rule’… that phantasmorphorical Zeus who best represents… ‘the Idea’.
…Gottingen [University], in the period from 1775 to 1800, not only established many of the institutional forms of later universities, but its professors established much of the intellectual framework within which later research and publication within the new professional disciplines was carried out. In this very distinguished company, there is no doubt that the centre of the intellectual ferment was in Classical Philology, later to be given the more imposing and modern name Altertumswissenschaft or ‘science of Antiquity’. (Martin Bernal, Black Athena, Volume 1: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785 – 1985, p. 220)
The evil seed ‘betrayal’ brought ‘breeding’, rank, and caste… all of which manifested as… this sick system of ‘class’… which history of, rapidly becomes… a history of our seeking ways… to escape the category ‘slave’… which efforts generated… accelerated… even further the need to betray.
Tellingly, V. Gordon Childe, who titled his book Man Makes Himself took this knowledge to heart. Martin Bernal tells us that he personally made political use of it by participating in the project well underway in Childe’s day – as it was officially launched in 18th century Germany – of constructing a history that promoted an alleged European superiority.
Despite the beginnings of a new attack on racism, there was an increase of Aryan racism not only among the extreme and disreputable right, typified by the Nazis, but in regular academic circles. Even the great Marxist prehistorian Gordon Childe shared in it, devoting a whole book to The Aryans, the preface of which linked language and physical race: “The Indo-European languages and their assumed parent speech have been throughout exceptionally delicate and flexible instruments of thought…. It follows then that the Aryans must have been gifted with exceptional mental endowments, if not in the enjoyment of a high material culture.” Childe also referred the ‘certain spiritual unity’ of those who share a common tongue. He explained the superiority of the Aryan spirit with the following example: “Anyone who doubts this would do well to compare the dignified narrative carved by the… [Aryan] Darius on the rock at Behistun with the bombastic and blatant self-glorification of the inscriptions of the [Semitic] Ashurbanipal or Nebuchadrezzar.”
An equally crude racism pervades the first edition of the Cambridge Ancient History, published under the editorship of Bury and his colleagues in 1924. Intended as a model of the ‘new’, ‘objective’ history written collectively by experts about their own particular fields, it quickly succeeded in gaining canonical status, and the same model of ‘Cambridge History’ has now been applied to many regions and cultures in the world. (Martin Bernal, Black Athena, Volume 1: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785 – 1985, p. 388 – 389)
Though it may seem a long leap… at least in terms of centuries… we’ve actually just stepped… from ‘breeding’… to ‘breeding’… with the ‘official story’ established in-between.
By the middle of the 16th century… a number of Christian apologists were using the emerging paradigm of ‘progress’, with its presupposition that ‘later is better’, to promote the Greeks at the expense of the Egyptians. These strands of thought soon merged with two others that were becoming dominant at the same time: racism and Romanticism…. This racism pervaded the thought of Locke, Hume and other English thinkers. Their influence – and that of the new European explorers of other continents – was important at the university of Gottingen, founded in 1734 by George II, Elector of Hanover and King of England, and forming a cultural bridge between Britain and Germany. It is not surprising, therefore, that the first ‘academic’ work on human racial classification – which naturally put Whites, or to use his new term, ‘Caucasians’, at the head of the hierarchy – was written in the 1770s by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a professor at Gottingen.
The university pioneered the establishment of modern disciplinary scholarship….
The paradigm of ‘races’ that were intrinsically unequal in physical and mental endowment was applied to all human studies, but especially to history. It was now considered undesirable, if not disastrous, for races to mix. To be creative, a civilization needed to be ‘racially pure’. Thus it became increasingly intolerable that Greece – which was seen by the Romantics not merely as the epitome of Europe but also as its pure childhood – could be the result of the mixture of native Europeans and colonizing Africans and Semites. (Martin Bernal, Black Athena, Volume 1: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785 – 1985, p. 27 – 29)
(By the by, as an aside, surely it’s obvious that it’s cross-fertilization and feeding the curious that stimulates the creative imagination… not what’s static and homogenous.)
* Of course this dismissal of what the people want is true about almost every issue that would mean greater health, happiness and security for us. Do any of us want perpetual war? …the absence of health care? …education priced beyond our means compromising our ability to think? Do any of us want clouds seeded? …precipitation snagged surreptitiously before it hits the Gulf Stream… or having decisions made for us when none of us knows what they mean? Cattle indeed. And let’s be clear, this is not about ‘complexity’… it’s about control.
* I’d call him ‘Karl’ as he inspires, as does Miklos Nyiszli, a love-infused admiration for one who does immense and important work… for the future… simply on trust… never knowing if it will ever find us – but I love to say, “Popper” too much.
* A quote from Aristotle describes the sense in which Popper uses the word ‘tribalism.’ Popper writes: “Aristotle’s objections [to protectionism] are all intended to show that the protectionist theory is unable to account for the local as well as the internal unity of the state. It overlooks, he holds (III, 9, 12), the fact that the state exists for the sake of the good life in which neither slaves nor beasts [“workers”] can have a share (i.e. for the good life of the virtuous landed proprietor, for everybody who earns money is by his ‘banausic’ [‘mundane’] occupation prevented from citizenship). It also overlooks the tribal unity of the ‘true’ state which is (III, 9, 12) ‘a community of well-being in families, and an aggregation of families, for the sake of a complete and self-sufficient life… established among men who live in the same place and who intermarry.’”(p. 261)
* This “women’s work” business reads like gross exaggeration… splashing backwards the tints from later tends. In fact, Hesiod calls women a curse, because we do no work. And Homer wrote: “Think how a man might tend a comely shoot of olive in a lonely place, well-watered, so that it flourished, being blown upon by all winds, putting out silvery green leaves, till suddenly a great wind in a storm uprooted it and cast it down: so beautiful had been the son of Panthoos, Euphorbos, when Menelaos killed him and bent over to take his gear.” (The Iliad, Book 17)
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed it’s the only thing that ever does. (Margaret Mead)
[These words were always more appropriate to ‘power’ than to us…
…as…
…we claimants to freedom...
…claim ourselves as a global ‘one’…
…not ‘citizens.’]
Oh, lovers of power! Oh, mitred aspirants for this world’s kingdoms! an hour will come, even to you, when it will be well for your hearts – pausing faint at each broken beat – that there is a Mercy beyond human compassions, a Love stronger than this strong death which even you must face, and before it, fall; a Charity more potent than any sin, even yours; a Pity which redeems worlds – nay, absolves priests. (Charlotte Brontë, Villette)
The job leaves us no choice but to defer…
…we’re that beaten dog with the jaws of the victor on its neck…
…we can’t move….
But as we’re cut loose…
…as the system kicks us to the curb and says “done!”…
…we can pick ourselves up…
…take a moment to grieve…
…and then start to see…
…the earth ’neath our feet….
It’s calling.
Over the carnage rose prophetic a voice,
Be not dishearten’d, affection shall solve the problems of freedom yet,
Those who love each other shall become invincible,
They shall yet make Columbia victorious.
…
(Were you looking to be held together by lawyers?
Or by an agreement on a paper? or by arms?
Nay, nor the world, nor any living thing, will so cohere.)
(Walt Whitman)
In this connection I may express my opinion, that one can find a great deal of comfort in the fact that anti-humanitarians have always found it necessary to appeal to our humanitarian sentiments; and also in the fact that they have frequently succeeded in persuading us of their sincerity. It shows that they are well aware that these sentiments are deeply rooted in most of us, and that the despised ‘many’ are too good, too candid, and too guileless, rather than too bad; while they are even ready to be told by their often unscrupulous ‘betters’ that they are unworthy and materialistically minded egoists who only want to ‘fill their bellies like the beasts.’ (Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1: The Spell Of Plato, p. 263)
Where Did It Go?
Know – the way that we were long ago
sequoia-souls living in flow
Powerful, sure, and unbowed
Where did we go?
I knew as a child I was whole
There was no ‘Time’ squeezing my soul
reducing my ‘all’ to a role
Where did I go?
Hear – the whispering voice in your ear
that tells you to face down the fear
that keeps you in chains
year after year.
Trust – this ‘all-for-me’ system is dust
The new way is not ‘I’ but ‘us’
We’ll share the work
and bloom in the union
as we embrace the sun.
(10.03.07 Thoughts To T)
…
When you understand the theory…
…of what makes healthy beings…
…it’s obvious what we need…
…and what our future must be.
Our future’s made of sylvan musicking…
…sky-watching and meditating…
…it’s made of gardens we work commonly…
…and dance and song and poetry…
…it’s made of restoring our ancestors to their rightful roles…
…in their proper stories…
…it’s made of continuous community re-design…
[…and by the way… if we really were ‘self-governing’…
…wouldn’t we want a place held commonly…
…in perpetuity…
…with a mural that represented…
…our common vision…
…of the future we want…
…in reference to…
…and looking forward and back…
…we would ask ourselves…
…“are we on track?”]
…and helping our neighbors world-wide…
…it’s made of time alone with the earth…
…and sharing each others burdens.
…
So…
…the shape the new world makes…
…can’t be imposed…
…it grows from the earth of which its made…
…it flows…
…as water bends to greet…
…each life it meets…
…and grows to what it is…
…from all it is…
…unique…
…and living…
…wholes.
VII.
Parents…
…it must be us…
…to relieve the children…
…of this crookedness….
VIII.
And youth!…
…it must be you…
…to new stories make!…
…glory re-take!…
…‘the gods’ re-incorporate!…
…And all around blooms…
…new fruits of our inter-connected roots…
…calling into being what we once knew…
…Freedom…
…to begin anew.…
Looking back, I feel my life has been a tale of two blended maxims: “It’s never too late to be the person you should have been”… and “I am large, I contain multitudes.” (The first from George Eliot, the second from Walt Whitman.)
When you straddle many worlds, as I do, as a child it’s a curse… as a questing youth, a burden… as an evolving spirit… such a blessing.
It means you have nothing but questions. Nothing is certain. You cannot accept what you’re told because you’re told contradictory things. You must figure it out.
So I explored a lot… and fell in love a lot.
Wanting to claim my power I studied mar.tial arts with women and immediately fell in love with all of them… so moved I’ve always been by the determination to be big, despite all the efforts of this system to make us small.
Wanting to claim my power I went into the trades with mostly men and immediately fell in love with all of them… so moved I’ve always been by the determination to be big, despite all the efforts of this system to make us small.
Wanting to claim my power I gave myself to visions… one of which… is for this house where I sit… to become the center of the Nascence….
But any house can be the center of the Nascence… any one person with Intention large enough can spark the beginning of ‘the reversal’, as Marcuse termed it… because we’re all so ready for it… we all so want it.
So… here’s my personal plan to create a center to support ‘the reversal’….
…But first!… breaking news!
My son’s father, who I haven’t seen or spoken to for twenty-four years, Mudada Montgomery, called two weeks ago (on 07.25.11). Within days of his calling the Nascence number, the calls kept dropping, and this physical-fitness-fanatic who is T's Dad had (after a stranger gripped his hand) fallen down stairs in a sudden fit of dizziness, been detained by the Detroit police as he left the hospital, interrogated about his “West Coast travel plans”, kept in a jail cell for two days with another man also inexplicably curious about his “West Coast travel plans”… and released in pain and confusion – “I feel like the last few days have been a dream” – a bad dream… like stepping on a hornets’ nest. I suspect Mudada’s Rasta background and gifts that became obvious during his Navy stint has meant ‘power’s’ kept an eye on him over the years… and that his getting in touch with me made ‘power’s’ imagination fly furiously.
Anyway… Mudada, Welcome back!
Here’s my ‘plan’:
I have written a children’s book that I’ve come to think, after much soul-searching, I must charge money for… the youth in this neighborhood are hanging on by the fast-thinning thread of a few elders’ social security checks… and often not even that.
My friend Bob has designed a small, four-hen, middle-class-family-size, chicken coup and is willing to teach the youth in our neighborhood carpentry skills… and there’s people nearby with chickens and the knowledge to raise them who will share it. And because of the rapid influx of middle-class families in this, one of Berkeley’s last remaining low-income communities, we also have folks who will be interested in buying them.
This is not about ‘business’ or ‘entrepreneurship’… it’s about building a consciousness of community self-sufficiency.
So when the book comes to your local bookstore, please consider buying it and supporting what I’m tentatively calling the ULYSSES Project… the Urban Low-income Youth Self-Sufficiency & Earth Supreme Project.
And… by the way… I don’t ‘think’ we’re gonna win… I know we are… once the understanding rolls… and the consciousness grows… and Intention seats solidly (as it’s already doing)… it’s just a matter of time. As Petr says:
Man is no exception in nature. He also is subject to the great principle of Mutual Aid which grants the best chances of survival to those who best support each other in the struggle for life. (p. 115)
Now, by heaven, the issue lies upon the gods’ great knees, and as for me, I’ll make my throw. Let Zeus look after the rest. (Homer, The Iliad, Book 17)
There is the proper role of the village…
…and the proper role of the ‘task’…
…coordinated by free-range-folks…
…from wisps… to… fish…
…aflit in lucid lakes…
…who swim to beach o’er-hung with cliff…
…there first to make both tentative… and daring… steps…
…to study …note… espy…
…to thoughts that agitate… and fly…
…circling… settling… perched a’high…
…sussing out the fiercely hid…
…out it… free it… spin out its dread…
…widely ’volving… then dissolving…
…shrinking… narrowly proporting…
…proper more to minnows… finches…
…that at last become mere glimpses…
…of a dimly-faintly-thought…
…which, looking back…
…is wisp…
…then…
…lost.
There is the proper role of the village…
…and the proper role of the task…
…each person has some…
…or one…
…that…
…coaxed to life…
…becomes…
…a spilling-in…
…a-churning…
…sends…
…to sprouting-up in green…
…what will it be?
(We’ll see.)
The bombardment of ‘facts’… is intentional flack… distortion… diversion… to defeat our plans… forestall our acts.
