01.04.12 – 01.10.12: * "Put On Your Vampire Hat"
Recently I listened to Gar Alperovitz and David Korten being interviewed unctuously about what they called the ‘Local’ ‘Movement’.
Let’s assume the best and not suspect funding from right-wing malevolence.
It could be they are genuinely fuzzy on the question of what ‘wealth’ is and where it comes from… or just have books to sell… or both.
The following is a little of what David Korten had to say:
“The solutions will not come from the system, the real solutions will have to come from the bottom-up, from people building their local economies… [by shifting their dollars away from large corporations to local businesses…]”
“We have to change the rules to fundamentally shift power back to the people… [this will be hard but] we have to start on the local level.”
“Capitalism presents itself as the champion of democracy and free markets and it’s actually the opposite. It is the local economy that’s the foundation of real democracy and real markets.”
While these are mostly noble sentiments… (of course ‘power’ must be returned to the people)… and while they, most significantly, tapped into the growing determination of ‘the people’ to reclaim responsibility for the planet…
…their ‘solutions’… (and they admitted this…) could not possibly be accomplished for many years to come… (if at all… truth to tell… ‘political realities’ being what they are…)
(Whenever pundits tell you “it’s going to take time”…
…when you know our brothers and sisters are dying…
…and babies and trees can barely breathe…
…and we daily forfeit our dreams…
…trying to feed our families…
…please don’t listen to what they say….
Listen to the earth…
…listen to your labored breath…
…the dirge of distress…
…the howl…
… …)
And… guaranteed… those “many years” will see… a choking off of our Global Awakening.
(And… significantly… he links ‘democracy’ with ‘market’… which aligns his message with a recent directive from right-wing propagandist Frank Luntz (sp?)… who advises his constituents to stop saying ‘capitalism’ and say instead ‘free market.’)
Let’s look at one of their ‘solutions’: “worker-owned businesses”.
A “worker-owned business” would only keep money in the local community if it was structured not to ‘grow’ – i.e., not extract much more from ‘earth’… than it gives back… (and by ‘earth’ I mean ‘earth-as-us’ and ‘earth-that-provides-all-the-stuff’…)
…it could do nothing to address the ‘Legacy Imbalance’…
(…or the existing blood-streaming-globally into ‘profits’…
…that becomes our jeans… or leashing-debts…)
…– i.e., the dis-eases with which our earth is burdened…
…and the great piles of money that determine…
…whose hides will be tanned first…
And these businesses are so constructed that they can never correct the Legacy Imbalance.
They may help a few have less hideous lives…
…but ‘power’ remains free to jump, stomp and stride…
…all over Grandma’s hide….
And we’ll still have trouble breathing…
…and our earth remains dis-eased…
…and our bodies still not free.
Let’s say we don’t want particulate matter in our babies’ lungs…
…or those who harvest our food dying in the noonday sun…
…how would we seize the results of corporate greed…
…that cause the dust we see spewing from all the factories?
How would we re-take…
…the earth which makes…
…the food from which we re-generate?
(…and…
…believe…
…your backyard can’t feed…
…us being tossed into the street…
…by the financial industry…
…or those dying due to drought…
…brought about…
…by cloud-seeding.)
Any ‘play’ we try to make…
…to restore power to ourselves…
…or refresh our earth’s depleted stores…
…means aggregating ‘means’…
…means ‘money’…
…and “‘power’-knows”…
…where it goes…
…controls…
…its uses…
…access to it…
…all skewed to serve…
…‘its’ abuses…
…while we stand hat in hand… begging… “please… could we just… at least… have a brief respite… a chance to breathe?”
OK…
…go get your Plato-Given-Hubris-Gear… and put on your vampire hat… you know, the one with the drop-down eyes that turns everything you see into dollar-signs?
What do you see?
You see an earth pretty much divvied up and done… the mineral and oil wealth has been found… nicely converted into abstract quantities and placed on balance sheets… (yours… your balance sheet…) and is flowing with admirable regularity into your coffers… (yours… your coffers…) via channels of Sweet Sweet Manipulation… delightfully devious twistings that are virtually untraceable….
You are safe from detection.
You can’t be found out.
The earth is tapped out…
…and you’re sitting on mountains and mountains of money….
You are a hair’s breadth from being what you’ve always dreamed…
…part of that elite corps of philosopher-kings.
Are all bases covered? Think. Think.
All the One-Time-Money that can be squeezed out of the planet is already in your pockets… or is solidly in-line… in private hands… (yours… or those you can control…) waiting for its turn… to serve….
The earth-earth is threatening to churn up more ‘cost’ than ‘credit’… all that poisoning leading to… upchucking bio-diversity… and who-knows what horrors… that could still upset the cattle… all the human Renewables….
So the Renewables must be dealt with… fed… bred… multiply-misled… but otherwise almost infinitely bled…
…tapped… to fill with their own blood… the well-earned gap… between ‘them’… and ‘us.’
And… fortunately… you have so structured things that… for them to have any comfort at all… any relief from the pain of not being self-determining… they must have…
…money…
…and…
…Look! (smile)… you seem to have some (smile)…
“So…” (you smile at them)…
…“here’s some fields that need a hand (or two)…”
…“here’s mines… (a few)…”
…“but… (sadly)… there are far too many of you…” What to do?
And at this point you withdraw behind the veil of Stolen-Cattle-Dreams and confer a bit in quiet… with a few more of your tribe.
So this is how you reckon:
“We’ll train a few to guard the moat…
…give degrees… and tests….
And then…
…address residual distress…
…with pundits mouthing the usual nonsense…
…about self-governance….
And the poisoned earth will keep them busy and distracted…
…and their lives non-protracted….
And to these ‘middle-classes’…
…who provide us ‘higher’ services…
…we’ll grant a longer leash…
…let them plan…
…their own ‘urban experience’….
And our pundits will proclaim…
…that ‘capitalism’ has changed…
…into a brand ‘new’ game…
…called ‘De-centralized Local Governance’….
And those few…
…we give money to…
…can tell themselves they’re ‘owners’ too….
And we’ll let this chump change rest…
…in ‘local institutions’…
…that ‘re-invest’ in…
…‘local institutions’…
(…and of course some leakage is to be expected…
…some drift…
…into the global game of death.)
And those who play…
…this global game…
…called ‘Power’…
…will roll its eleventh hour…
…into…
…a ‘play’…
…in which only they…
…can move.
––––––
‘Localism’ is a shade…
…a pillow…
…and a Sweet Forget…
…a rationale…
…for the wage-enslaved…
…turning away…
…from brothers and sisters…
…facing hopelessness.
Embedded in this glory-talk of ‘localism’ without consciousness…
(…without vision… of freedom…
…of life lived in the authentic…
…in our own bodies…
…not in the heads of ‘representatives’…)
…without responsibility except to self…
(…hiding in the guise of ‘citizen’…)
…to keep your own ‘self’ ‘healthy’…
…while leaving the earth-connected…
…to fend off Vampirism all on their own…
…while we exist aglow with Plato’s blessing…
(Here’s truth: that’s inverted too… the earth-connected are true wealth… true knowledge and true health. They hold our souls, and we have ‘all’ to learn from them… if we could learn that our ‘help’, in standing solidly with them, is solely salvation for our ‘selves’.)
…embedded in this glory-talk of ‘localism’ without guilt or consciousness…
…is an ideology preparing us to accept as legitimate a bifurcated world…
…globally and ‘locally’….
01.13.12 – 01.19.12: * "Is 'Occupation' "Largely Symbolic"?"
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.
Over the airwaves I heard a young person from Occupy-Wall St. describe the occupation of Liberty / Zucotti Park as “largely symbolic” (i.e it ‘stands’ for something else, but is not what it is.)
Does she mean by this it was a gift…
…to ‘middle classes’…
…so they may see…
…that fear of ‘the masses’…
…is conditioned idiocy?
…and that she…
…in actuality…
…has no interest in being free?
…
Erich Fromm showed us that we use certain activities as substitutes for living… that allow us to feel alive…
…challenging work…
…sex…
…drugs…
…communal expressions of religion…
…war and nationalism…
…in which we come together with our fellows and embark on joint projects.
‘Power’ of course knows this… knows that these are palliatives… substitutes for self-creation and freedom…
(…you’ll know you have it [freedom] when you ask yourself each day… fresh… anew… “what do I want to do?”…)
… and these substitutes can be used therefore… to manipulate and control… i.e. are levers…
…not… generally… as powerful as the main one… ‘money’… as we must first exist before we can ‘enjoy’ those other things… but potent nonetheless.
So it has positioned itself (…by means of controlling access to ‘money’…)
…to be the provider and ultimate sole source of them…
…and when… it can no longer be…
…the overseer of their orderly dispensation…
…or when we try to provide them for ourselves… apart from ‘power’…
…i.e. independent of the ‘money-lever’…
…which is also a regulator…
…‘power’ must create…
…‘chaos’ and threats…
…to ‘occupy’ us.
…
01.19.12:
Unless we’re dynamically engaged with the earth we aren’t authentically living…
…and ‘thought’ can’t grow… as earth is truth…
…and authentic thought sprouts… blooms… in truth… i.e. in communion with earth [see “What Is Freedom?”]
The goal of controlling it (truth)… living in the mid-air realm of manipulated thought… as opposed to prizing the ability to truly live… reveals the truth of propaganda… and the arrogance of ‘power’…
…and will never lead to authentic… or fulsome… thought.
…
* "A Left Ideology?"
01.22.12 – 01.27.12:
Listening to a pundit decry the absence of any Left ideology that would pose an effective counter to the story the Right tells, I thought, “I’m not sure about the Left overall but the Left punditry definitely has an ideology”… at least in the sense of “a system of ideas and ideals”….
True, its’ set of ideas and ideals might not be conscious… and can’t, therefore, be integrated into any larger economic theory… but the Left punditry does operate according to a system of ideas and ideals…
…it could be called ‘utilitarianism’…
“Human beings and the earth overall are to be made use of (exploited) and ordered (ranked) in a coherent manner such that they can be managed rationally and efficiently by the people identified as “the best” as determined by their ability to advance in preexisting educational, political and economic hierarchies.”
And the reason it cannot offer any alternative vision to that of the Right is because both espouse versions of the same story…
…a story they might call ‘civilization’ and I would call ‘vampirism’…
…i.e. sucking on life until it becomes death.
(And, by the way, to refer to gambling (‘speculation’) – i.e. luring money out of people’s pockets to bet on a scheme – as “wealth creation” is obscene. It signifies a complete disconnection from life.
The Left uncritically accepting the categories given them by ‘power’… categories used to control us – ‘economy’, ‘productivity’, ‘rich’, ‘poor’, ‘efficiency’, ‘worker’, ‘profit’, ‘labor power’, and ‘progress’ – necessarily results in an identification with ‘power’…
…their very thoughts are traitors… and will never produce a truly oppositional vision.)
Some of its key ideas and ideals:
• ‘progressive individualism’… there is a meritocracy and it identifies “the best and the brightest” (they both use this phrase a lot)…
• class society allows a forward trajectory called ‘progress’…
• there is no need for a vision of the future because we’ve already arrived… so what’s needed in order to address the problems we face is piecemeal tweaking, adjusting and reforming of a fundamentally sound system.
For both the official Left punditry (unconsciously) and the Right (consciously) the orderly (or disorderly, for that matter, particularly for the Right) plundering of the earth… i.e. ‘the economy’… takes priority over the happiness and the health of human beings and the earth.
If this were not so Left pundits would be very clear that the current system must end and it would put out a call for all of us to begin designing its replacement.
If they did this… as a block of left pundits… what excitement would follow…
…what energy released.
01.24.12 – 01.27.12:
The Left punditry can’t think strategically because it’s fundamentally dishonest….
Rather than seeing their rank as a privilege system-given…
…with intention to divide us…
…it has bought the self-flattery that it does the thinking for the rest of us….
…and so is prevented from honest analysis…
…by a need to be at the center of it.
And the Left punditry can’t think strategically because fear prevents their occupying…
…their own bodies…
…the truth of their loathing and longing….
And when mired in dishonesty one cannot see reality.
Egos invested in illusions cannot lose them.
And dishonesty disables action.
* "What Is 'Happiness'? and de Grazia excerpt – 1"
01.23.12 – :
For the ‘Founding Fathers’ ‘happiness’ meant the acquisition of property and the ‘freedom’ to ‘enjoy’ it without interference from the state…
…and, of course, slave labor to do the “dirty work”.
(…Stop for a moment and take in… the deep narcissism of this….)
This notion is the heavy consequence of ‘class’ that ‘class’-carved humans have dragged along…
…since long before the writing of The Iliad…
[By the way, I’ve been meaning to say…
…ditto to Samuel Butler’s assessment….
There’s no way the man who wrote The Odyssey is the same…
…as wrote The Iliad.
Homer wrote The Iliad…
…but the writer of The Odyssey…
…Samuel said…
…was a clergyman….
I’d call him a fascist….
Those piled bodies of women at the end…
…brings clearly to mind…
…Auschwitz.]
But… to continue… never doubt the issue of “leisure” is very ‘up’ right now for Plato’s Tribe…
…as it should be for us….
Plato’s Tribe has been chasing ‘happiness’…
…and have been misled to believe…
…they can only achieve it…
…by enslaving you and me.
Sebastian de Grazia:
The first document that was meant to apply to the imminent United States of America was the Declaration of Independence. On July 2, 1776 the bare resolution that the colonies by right ought to be free and independent states was adopted. A cold statement by itself was not enough for the Founders. They insisted on a philosophic declaration for the benefit of mankind. A committee was chosen and Jefferson as we know prepared the official statement, in which these familiar lines rhythmically ring out: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The declaration of the first Continental Congress a few years before had not mentioned the pursuit of happiness – property was in its place; nor had previous documents in the Anglo-American history of petitions and bills of rights reposed on happiness either.
The one who first brings it on the stage of American politics is a classical scholar, George Mason. Ten years before he did this, he had written describing himself as a man who spent most of his time in retirement and seldom meddled in public affairs; content with the blessings of a private station, he enjoyed a modest but independent income and disregarded the smiles and favors of the great. The Virginia Declaration of Rights is substantially the work of this man. In it the natural rights of men include the enjoyment of life and liberty, as in the Declaration of Independence, and also “the means of acquiring, and preserving, property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” This clause passed unchanged over to the Virginia constitution of 1776. Mason had prepared the statement for the Constitution of the United States too; it was left out through a complex series of circumstances. In one form or another, the clause has been incorporated by two thirds of the state constitutions framed up until this century. Some of them actually go so far as to say in the language of the Declaration of Independence that it is the people’s right to “alter or abolish” a government that fails to secure happiness for the people.
I noted that Mason’s clause was adopted in one form or other. Though various, the form contains a similar string of words. Life, liberty, property, happiness, safety, seem to be those most commonly found. Though to later interpreters these words were not clear, to Mason and Jefferson they were self-evident. If life and liberty are present they can be enjoyed. The way they are enjoyed is in the pursuit of happiness. Safety and property, the two words that revolve about happiness like satellites, have each a separate relation. Safety seems to have meant a guarantee of peace of mind, and insuring against the arbitrary jolts of tyrants or the rebellious shocks of helots. It comprehended the protection of property as well as person. Property was the means to happiness, and in a way so self-evident that if the one was mentioned, the other was implied. The conception was broad: Lockeian in its feeling for persons and their self-extension through the holding of property; mercantilistic in its permitting the acquisition as well as the holding and protecting of wealth. If land is the backbone of wealth, ships and sea trade are its sinews in this age. Not so for manufactures. “Manufactures are founded in poverty,” thundered Ben Franklin. “It is the multitude of poor without land in a country, and who must work for others at low wages or starve, that enables undertakers to carry on a manufacture.”
With land or ships and land one had property, then, by which to pursue happiness. Why the repeating of “pursuing” in these eighteenth-century documents? It was meant to convey, I believe, that each person should seek after happiness as he pleased. Property opened up many ways to happiness. Liberty allowed him to follow any one of them he chose. Happiness in an ecstatic sense was not thought humanly possible. Running through the Revolutionary generation was a Christian and Stoic resignation to life’s ordeals. What men could arrive at was contentment or a kind of bliss or gladness….
The Founding Fathers had their ideal of the good life. It embraced a creator and the belief that life here on earth is not the first nor last; it held that full happiness is for the hereafter, yet man can pursue and find a measure of joy on this earth, too, if he has a small estate, unharassed by tax collectors, on which to enjoy good friends and good wine, a choice library, tranquility, and the contemplation of the cosmos, the world and its affairs. To be free of necessity and therefore free to do whatever one wants to for itself alone – this to them was the pursuit of happiness. In this they could not have been more classical….
[Lord] James Bryce was right in saying that the Founding Fathers had gone back 2,000 years for the source of their ideas. Jefferson had said in 1825 that the Declaration of Independence “was intended to be an expression of the American mind.” Intended to be, yes, and American mind, yes, but an American of those times, not these. By today’s notions, American Revolutionary leaders were un-American. They were Romans, with a dash of Christianity and the Enlightenment.…
The ideal of leisure that the great Americans held was closer to Plato and Aristotle.
The democrat might raise the objection. This is all very well for the few who possess or acquire property but what of the many more others? Where are their Vergilian bucolics?… Suffice it now to say that when Locke speaks of “men” or “we”, and the Declaration of Independence of “all men”, and the Constitution of “We, the People”, they do not necessarily intend the adult population or even all adult males…. The men referred to are those to whom what they say is self-evident, a small body of self-appointed citizens and delegates with the firm intention to write into existence their ideal of the good life. No doubt the gentry and merchants thought they left elbow room enough for ambitious and talented spirits. Let them seek their happiness where they will was the eighteenth century’s attitude. For us we seek and enjoy a life of leisure in which whatever we do is for its own sake. (Sebastian de Grazia, Of Time, Work, and Leisure, p. 262 – 267)
* "de Grazia excerpt – 2"
01.23.12 – 01.24.12:
The nineteenth century was to raise the hue and cry to define men more precisely than with the vagueness that meant gentlemen. Once the revolutionary generation passes on, clouds of bewilderment swirl around the pursuit of happiness. Since the phrase occurs in so many historic documents, the courts are soon hard put to cut a clean swath. To go into all the variants, or simply all the main lines of argument pro and con, that the courts took from the pursuit of happiness would take a full tome, but the trend is clear enough to be stated briefly. In a first step, as we have seen, property provides the means through which one can find one’s happiness; next, property and work both are necessary for happiness, and then through work alone can happiness be found.
(So… you see… ‘power’ changes rules mid-stream… to block the claims of we whose ‘labor’ or quiescence they need…
…and see… how weak are ‘legal claims’ for shoring up ‘democracy’?
Rules are made to rig the game.
It’s not the rules that have to change…
…but we.)
The last few decades of the nineteenth century speeded up the process of decision. Manufacturers, so hated and feared by Franklin and the others, were having their day in court. During the Slaughterhouse cases the brief for the plaintiffs held that it was impossible to sustain life, enjoy liberty, or pursue happiness if denied the right to work. In the last of the three famous cases (1869, 1872, 1883) concurring opinion defined the right of men to pursue happiness, “by which is meant the right to pursue any lawful business or vocation.” Already in the second case by dissent Justice Field, leading up to this opinion, had proclaimed a new “right of free labor, one of the most sacred and imprescriptible rights of man.” Neither Mason nor Jefferson would have used the word “imprescriptible.” Nor would they have admitted the right of the freedom of labor as “perhaps the most sacred of all those that are guaranteed by the national and state constitutions.” Neither could they have written the opinion that appeared a century after which slights the comparative few “possessed of such means that they will not need to labor.” It is not creditable “for these favored ones, while young and strong, to idle away their time and live as drones upon the world.” The opinion then lifts the curtain on the teeming millions that the Founders never saw, and asks “how are the great masses of the people to acquire property, pursue happiness, and enjoy life and liberty unless they are permitted to engage in the ordinary avocations? Only a student of constitutional law could tell from these few sentences that such reasoning was often used to defend manufacturing interests. The emphasis today has veered much nearer the verbal sense of the opinions; the previous language simply made easier the later passage to the working man….
For us the import is this. Only through work, a new fundamental right, can men (all adult males and some females) pursue happiness. The original idea was the reverse: only through not having to work can men pursue happiness. Not surprising, then, that those idlers and drones who lived by this last notion, the gentry who wrote or approved the Virginia Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence, never did an honest day’s work in their lives. (Sebastian de Grazia, Of Time, Work, and Leisure, p. 267 – 269)
Do you see where I’m going with this?
The Founders knew that freedom requires leisure… not ‘free time’, but freedom from necessity…
…and we are living in times when more and more of us can see that it is only by manipulation of ‘reality’ that ‘power’ can pretend that ‘necessity’ is still an issue.
There is today obvious sufficiency… means enough for all of us to “hang up our rudders in the smoke of the fireplace” and release ourselves from labor… burn our yokes… converge on the town square… take stock of available resources… organize ourselves by skills… meet need with existing plenty… and begin planning for reproducing these means… in harmony…
…I digress….
‘Power’ knows this… knows that the leisure it wants to hoard for itself could now be made available to all…
…and it knows that ‘the economy’ cannot absorb anywhere near the numbers of us that would be required to stop our thinking… (and it is our thinking they fear… and have feared for millennia… Plato’s warning echoes through their minds.)
A job is like a carrot to a bridled mule in blinders… it keeps you focused on the immediate and completely unable to look objectively at your condition or plan an alternative.
Once one is released from captivity and starts to think… and especially if simultaneously one is joining with one’s brothers and sisters to address inequities…
…
The chief threat is the agents… and the only way to counter them is to look beyond them… to bigger visions grown from wholism…
…and to assess strategies all ’round.
Viewing strategies from all sides… assessing the impact from the perspective of ‘health’… from the perspective of what makes good wholes for Life…
…always remembering that our purpose is to melt the cold…
(“…the thunder is the thunder of the floes….”)
Our job is to challenge the cold.
Don’t let it go on.
Let’s grow.
Let’s interact with other Life
So that something completely new
Can sprout
And be nurtured whole.
* "What Is 'Democracy'?"
01.27.12 – 01.30.12:
Is ‘democracy’ the ‘solution’ to a failing ‘capitalism’ as I keep hearing left economist-pundits say… as well as some activists in the Occupy Movement?
When we express thoughts that do not come from our own experience in the world but are simply regurgitations of what we learn in school… or from the media… or from “the experts”…
…and particularly when we allow these thoughts to trump our own experience… and reality…
…our unconscious knows we’re being dishonest… and wants no part of it… and we lose access to it… a little part of our soul dies.
Is ‘democracy’ the solution?
What ‘democracy’ Whose ‘democracy’?… a ‘democracy’ that never existed… except among the Indigenous?
When we use the word ‘democracy’… and even frame the thought that it’s what we want for our future… when there’s no ‘earth’ in it… at all… but only abstracts flapping heavily about… perch-to-perch… from which to shout at us….
(There can be no ‘democracy’ without leisure (freedom)… and if we’re free we don’t need ‘democracy’… which, to the degree there is such a thing, exists to establish limits to ‘power.’)
Let me give you an example. From the Left today I hear stock phrases like “we need direct participatory democracy”… and even “participatory budgeting”…
…phrases that have zero ability to get me and my neighbors to converge on City Hall, bring sleeping bags and food… and plan to dig in for the long haul… i.e. until we get our demand for land…
(By the by… when we do the analysis we see that ‘power’ quite literally wants us to be landless… to have no claim to the earth beneath our feet… no connection to the earth that feeds us….
So the foreclosure crisis is by plan….
And when you understand that…
…when you understand the larger political significance…
…of occupying the land…
…that this act hits them on the heart…
…much more than even gathering in numbers…
…you rededicate yourself to accomplishing it.)
To reclaim the earth beneath our feet we have to be concrete…
(…and nothing short of reclaiming it…
…and clarity that we want to end not amend… plundering…
– to reclaim earth… not restrain ‘power’ –
…will allow us to live as healthy beings on a healthy planet.)
What’s of the essence is to flesh out a vision…
…of the future…
…of how to get there…
…of the first steps…
…and of the immediate: the few plots to be publicly claimed… in the public domain… that can be communally named.
Given land and freedom… our bodies will do the rest.
In low-income communities there is no shortage of interested people…
…if we come with a workable plan for acquiring land:
…that includes plots… designs and rough ideas for construction… and what it is we’re demanding from… those who claim to govern us….
If we show that…
…then people can back it.
* "Unpacking 'Democracy' - 1: de Grazia - 3"
01.28.12 – 01.30.12:
Sebastian de Grazia Excerpt – 3:
An age on the verge of change gets restless, it reviews its history, it runs to try new openings. The passengers on the Mayflower before debarking did solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God and one another, covenant and combine themselves together into a civil body politic for their “better ordering and preservation.” The Constitution neglected to state clearly what its more perfect union of men was for. Evidently, to establish justice and provide for the common defense were means to an end. Domestic tranquility meant little more than internal order, another means to an end. This was not Jefferson’s idea. We were left with the general welfare and the blessings of liberty as guides to the kind of life for which men join in union. The liberty meant in the Preamble was freer and wider than the liberty conceived today. The Declaration of Independence had made itself clearer, or at least more forceful: alongside liberty it placed the pursuit of happiness. The men who wrote and approved the Declaration were further away from the Pilgrim Fathers than we are. For the nineteenth century brought us back closer to the Pilgrims than to the Founding Fathers. The urgency of the Mayflower Compact to plant a colony fit the later urgency to plant a continent. One of the oldest rules of political science holds that men come together to keep alive; they stay together to live a good life. In this country men have refused to budge from the first state; they have acted as if there were a wilderness yet to conquer, some great work yet to do, that keeps them from the second stage. What is this great work? The frontier ended with the twentieth century, and the wilderness long before.
At any given moment in history a tradition trembles, a corner crumbles, gives way, the whole falls to pieces. Perhaps in the very dust that lifts, the shape of something new can be seen. Leisure, were we to attain it, could lend us truth and impart its distinctive texture to all society. What is honored in a country is cultivated there, says an even older rule of political science. We all have been too much taken in by the thousand-things-to-do. The times have taken away our balance, that tempering force without which we are at peace neither with ourselves nor with our neighbors. The wisdom of the world was madness if, in teaching men how to subdue nature and transform the earth, it made them turn their back on life. The nineteenth century’s materialism won the allegiance of every party – classical economists, anarchists, socialists of the scientific, utopian, and Christian varieties, communists and democrats. To know anything at all, to be man at all, is to do, is to act, to produce, to make something out of matter, something other than it was. Contrast this with the motto found inscribed on a sundial: Horas non numero nisi serenas. That the hours don’t count unless they’re serene is not a new notion. What is the good life?, asks Seneca. Thomas Jefferson answers him in his own tongue: Tranquillitas. (Sebastian de Grazia, Of Time, Work, and Leisure, p. 2 – 4)
“Why haven’t we moved on?” de Grazia asks… and then Studs Terkel asked again ten years later…
…the question that won’t… can’t… go away….
…it is our biological inheritance… freedom and light… merging in life.
“Why [is ‘power’] so afraid?” asks my son in our first audio column…
…and now… as de Grazia says… with the clearing of the dust… it’s obvious…
…‘power’ is afraid of us.
What’s important to see is that ‘class’ wears the mask ‘democracy’…
…that it’s always been used to excuse… the violation of good fellowship that is human categorization and ranking of humans…
…and that the relation of ‘class’ is essentially a ‘parent-child’ dynamic…
…in which the children (us) identify with… and mime… the master….
That being so…
…we adopt their fear as our own…
…and feel suspicion and mistrust for each other…
…which being so means…
…‘democracy’ interferes with our responsibility to each other.
01.30.12:
Why haven’t we moved on? Why do we keep recycling the same issues endlessly?…
…given our nature is freedom… given the nature of life is to learn? Why haven’t we moved on?
Yesterday I heard on the radio the oft-repeated and extremely annoying lie that our natures are violent… and that “we need to learn from the bonobos how to be peaceful…”
“We can’t do it! We absolutely can’t do it!” sounding a bit exultant about it.
“Are you violent?” I would have asked her.
No.
But, she would have added, “we, as a species, have a capacity to be violent…”
“We have a capacity to be anything,” I would have answered… which is why a ‘class system’ is a form of totalitarianism…
…or its seed…
…or incipiency.
We are violent under conditions of non-freedom.
So what did Marcuse mean by “the democratic introjection”?
He means that it’s through ‘democracy’… or ‘socialism’… or ‘communism’… or ‘social-democracy’… that we identify with the masters…
…that we have an interest in our own slavery…
…and treat each other as ruthlessly as they treat us.
The anti-war movement hasn’t done its analysis…
…if we want ‘peace’…
…we must work to ensure we all get…
…our freedom.
(This discussion of ‘democracy’ continues at: "Naming the Future: “What Do We Call It? Who Cares? It Means ‘Freedom’”")
01.15.12 – : * "What Is 'Freedom'? and Popper quote - 1:"
If disdain for earth and our ‘commerce’ with it is at the core of your theory of change… there seems… if based (à la Rosa) in reality… little hope… for generalized human freedom….
Just as the savage must wrestle with nature in order to satisfy his needs, to keep alive, and to reproduce, so must the civilized man; and he must continue to do so in all forms of society and under all possible forms of production. This kingdom of necessity expands with its development, and so does the range of human needs. Yet at the same time, there is an expansion of the productive forces which satisfy these needs. (Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 3, quoted in Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 2: The High Tide of Prophesy: Hegel, Marx and the Aftermath, p. 105.)
Similar views are expressed by Engels. The expansion of modern means of production, according to Engels, has created “for the first time… the possibility of securing for every member of society… an existence not only… sufficient from a material point of view, but also… warranting the… development and exercise of his physical and mental faculties.” With this, freedom becomes possible, i.e. the emancipation from the flesh. “At this point… man finally cuts himself off from the animal world, leaves… animal existence behind him and enters conditions which are really human.” Man is in fetters exactly in so far as he is dominated by economics; when “the domination of the product over producers disappears…, man… becomes, for the first time, the conscious and real master of nature, by becoming master of his own social environment… Not until then will man himself, in full consciousness, make his own history… It is humanity’s leap from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom.” (Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 2, p. 105. Quotes are from Friedrich Engels, Anti-Duhring)
There is a well-known passage in Capital, where Marx says that “in Hegel’s writing, dialectics stands on its head; one must turn it the right way up again…” Its tendency is clear. Marx wished to show that the ‘head’, i.e. human thought, is not itself the basis of human life but rather a kind of superstructure, on a physical basis. A similar tendency is expressed in the passage: “The ideal is nothing other than the material when it has been transposed and translated inside the human head.” But it has not, perhaps, been sufficiently recognized that these passages do not exhibit a radical form of materialism; rather, they indicate a certain leaning toward a dualism of body and mind. It is, so to speak, a practical dualism. Although, theoretically, mind was to Marx apparently only another form (or another aspect, or perhaps an epi-phenomenon) of matter, in practice it is different from matter, since it is another form of it. The passages quoted indicate that although our feet have to be kept, as it were, on the firm ground of the material world, our heads – and Marx thought highly of human heads – are concerned with thoughts or ideas. In my opinion, Marxism and its influence cannot be appreciated unless we recognize this dualism….
…But although he recognized that the material world and its necessities are fundamental, he did not feel any love for the “kingdom of necessity,” as he called a society which is in the bondage to its material needs. He cherished the spiritual world, the “kingdom of freedom,” and the spiritual side of ‘human nature’, as much as any Christian dualist; and in his writings there are even traces of hatred and contempt for the material. (Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 2: The High Tide of Prophesy: Hegel, Marx and the Aftermath, p. 102 – 3. Quotes are from Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1)
If ‘freedom’ means “free from being tied to the earth”… then “Plato’s ‘world’” may be the best vision you can come up with.
“Who will ‘seed and feed and harvest’?” Plato reasons.
“Not me,” says he…
…I want to be free to think.”
During all of my life of focused-probing, when the possibility of a world of shared work and responsibility was thrown into the room for discussion, someone would invariably ask, “But who will do the dirty work?”
The drudgery.
And we haven’t advanced much in debunking the issue as Marx and Engels and their subsequent students dismissed the examples of communalism around them as ‘primitive.’
…
01.19.12:
Living and thinking (being) authentically means having a direct connection to truth… earth…
…a reverence which in practical terms means ‘wholeness’.
And so…
…far from a division between mental and manual labor resulting in intellectual stimulation, it results in intellectual stagnation….
And Creation under this unnatural regimen relies on mere linear iteration of what those who did think authentically… (wholistically…
…with brain and hand and heart all ‘one’…
Instinct is something which transcends knowledge. We have, undoubtedly, certain finer fibers that enable us to perceive truths when logical deduction, or any other willfull effort of the brain, is futile. (Nikola Tesla, Autobiography, p. 29)
One day, as I was roaming the mountains, I sought shelter from an approaching storm. The sky became overhung with heavy clouds, but somehow the rain was delayed until, all of a sudden, there was a lightening flash and a few moments after, a deluge. This observation set me thinking. (Autobiography, p. 41)
…in communion [merging] with the earth [truth]…)
…depends on what these large and loving and fully living saw and shared….
The ‘good livers’ are the ‘good thinkers.’
I had been looking for a long while and with profound melancholy at Holbein’s ploughman, and I was walking in the country, pondering over life in the fields and the destiny of the husbandman…. This wealth which covers the ground, these harvests and fruits, these splendid beasts fattening in the long grass, are the property of the few, and the instruments of the fatigue and slavery of the greater number. The man of leisure does not generally love for their own sake either fields or meadows, the sight of Nature, or the superb animals which are to be converted into gold pieces for his use….
On the other hand, the toiler is too dejected, too wretched, and too fearful of the future to enjoy the beauty of the country and the charms of rustic life. (George Sand, The Haunted Pool)
Beauty does not exist separately, by itself. It is the property of all… beauty is all days, and all things.
We grow out of the earth, out of all its impurities, and everything that is on earth is also in us. (Andrey Platonov)
On the day when he reached the thirtieth year of his personal life Voshchev was discharged from the small machine factory where he had earned the means of his existence. The dismissal notice stated that he was being separated from his job because of his increasing loss of powers and tendency to stop and think amidst the general flow of work….
Voshchev picked up his sack and went out into the night. The questioning sky glowed over him with the tormenting power of its stars….
You did not know the meaning of your life, Voshchev thought with careful sympathy. Lie here, I’ll find out why you lived and died. Since nobody needs you and you are lying uselessly in the middle of things, I will keep and remember you.
“Everything lives and suffers in the world, without understanding or knowledge,” said Voshchev, and got up from the roadside to go on, surrounded by general patient existence. “It’s as if someone, or some few, had drawn the feeling of certainty out of us and taken it for themselves.” (Andrey Platonov, The Foundation Pit)
Those that much covet are with gain so fond
That what they have not – that which they possess –
They scatter and unloose it from their bond,
And so by hoping more they have but less,
Or gaining more, the profit of excess
Is but to surfeit, and such griefs sustain,
That they prove bankrupt in this poor-rich gain.
(William Shakespeare, The Rape Of Lucrece)
Yet Nature is eternally young, beautiful, and generous. She sheds poetry and beauty upon all beings, upon all plants which are allowed to develop fully in the country. She possesses the secret of happiness, and no one has been able to steal it from her. The happiest of men would be he who, working intelligently and laboring with his hands, drawing comfort and liberty from the exercise of his intelligent strength, should have time to live through his heart and his brain, to comprehend his own work and that of God. (George Sand, The Haunted Pool)
Sweet Content
Art thou poor, yet hast thou golden slumbers?
O sweet content!
Art thou rich, yet is thy mind perplex’d?
O punishment!
Dost thou laugh to see how fools are vex’d
To add to golden numbers golden numbers?
O sweet content! O sweet, O sweet content!
Work apace, apace, apace, apace;
Honest labour bears a lovely face;
Then hey nonny nonny – hey nonny nonny!
Canst drink the waters of the crisped spring?
O sweet content!
Swimst thou in wealth, yet sink’st in thine own tears?
O punishment!
Then he that patiently want’s burden bears,
No burden bears, but is a king, a king!
O sweet content! O sweet, O sweet content!
Work apace, apace, apace, apace;
Honest labour bears a lovely face;
Then hey nonny nonny – hey nonny nonny!
(Thomas Dekker, 1575 – 1641)
* "George Sand Extended Excerpt - 1:"
Happiness would be wherever the mind, the heart, and the arm should work together beneath the eye of Providence, so that a holy harmony should exist between the munificence of God and the rapture of the human soul. Then, instead of a pitiful and frightful Death stalking whip in hand along the furrow, the allegorical painter [Holbein] might set by the laborer’s side a radiant angel, sowing the blessed wheat broadcast over the smoking soil.
And the dream of a sweet, free, poetic, laborious, and simple life for the tiller of the soil is not so difficult to conceive that it need be dismissed as a chimera. Virgil’s sad but sweet words, “Oh happy the man of the fields, if he but knew his happiness!” are a regret; but like all regrets, they are also a prediction. A day will come when the husbandman will be able to be an artist also, – if not to express (which will then matter little enough), at least to feel the beautiful. Does any one suppose that this mysterious intuition of poetry is not already in him in the condition of an instinct and a vague revery? Among those who are already protected by a little wealth, and in whom excessive wretchedness does not stifle all moral and intellectual developments, pure, conscious, and appreciated happiness exists in an elemental state. Besides, if from the abodes of wretchedness and weariness poets’ voices have already risen, why should it be said that manual labor precludes the functions of the soul? No doubt this preclusion is the general result of excessive toil and abject poverty; but let it not be said that when man shall work moderately and usefully there shall be none but bad workmen and bad poets. He who draws noble delights from the sentiment of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.
My thoughts had taken this course… I was walking along the edge of a field which the peasants were preparing for the forthcoming sowing…. At the top of the field an old man, whose broad back and severe face recalled Holbein’s ploughman, but whose garments did not proclaim poverty, was gravely driving his plough of antique shape, drawn by two calm oxen with hides of a pale yellow, – true patriarchs of the meadow, tall, somewhat thin, with long, drooping horns, – those old work-cattle which long habit has made “brothers,” as they are called by our peasants, and which, when one loses the other, refuse to work with a new companion, and allow themselves to die of sorrow. People who do not know the country say that the friendship of an ox for his yoke-fellow is a fable. Let them come and see in some dark corner of a stable a poor, thin, worn-out animal, beating its lean flanks with its restless tail, snorting with fright and contempt at the food which is offered it, with its eyes always turned toward the door, pawing the empty place at it side, sniffing at the yokes and chains which its companion has worn, and ceaselessly calling it with lamentable lowings. The ox-herd will say, “There are a pair of oxen lost; his brother is dead, and this one will never work again. We ought to fatten him to kill; but he will not eat, and soon he will be dead of hunger.”…
But what next attracted my attention was a really fine spectacle, – a subject worthy of a painter. At the opposite end of the arable plain a good-looking young man was driving a magnificent team, – four pairs of young animals with mingled black and tawny hides which gave out glints as of fire, with those short and curly heads which still show the wild bull, and those great wild eyes, those sudden movements, that nervous and abrupt manner of working, still resenting the yoke and the goad, and only obeying with quiverings of anger a recently imposed authority. They were what are called “newly yoked” oxen. The man who drove them had to break up a corner…filled with old roots, – an arduous task for which his energy, his youth, and his eight almost wild cattle were hardly sufficient….
…When the obstacle was surmounted and the train resumed its regular and solemn progress, the laborer, whose feigned violence was only an exercise of strength and an expenditure of activity, quickly resumed the serenity of a simple soul, and cast a look of fatherly contentment upon his child, who turned about to smile at him. Then the manly voice of this young father would raise the solemn and melancholy refrain which the ancient tradition of the district transmits, not to all laborers indiscriminately, but to the most consummate in the art of exciting and sustaining the spirit of working cattle. This song – the origin of which was perhaps considered sacred, and to which mysterious influences must formerly have been attributed – is still reputed to possess the virtue of supporting the courage of these animals, of quieting their irritation, and of charming the weariness of their long tasks. It is not enough to know how to drive them well, tracing the furrow perfectly straight and lightening their labor by raising the iron share or by sinking it deeper into the ground; no one is a perfect husbandman who does not know how to sing to his oxen, and that is a science by itself which demands a special taste and ability.
This song is, indeed, only a kind of recitative broken off and resumed at will. Its irregular form and its intonations, which are false according to the rules of the musical art, make it indescribable. But it is none the less a beautiful song, and so appropriate to the nature of the work which it accompanies, to the pace of the oxen, to the calmness of the rustic scene, to the simplicity of the men who sing it, that no genius unfamiliar with the labor of the ground could have invented it, and no singer other than a skilful husbandman of that district could repeat it. At the periods of the year when there is no other work or movement in the country than that of the ploughing, this song, so sweet and so powerful, rises like a voice of the breeze, to which its peculiar tonality gives it a certain resemblance. The final note of each phrase, held and shaken with an incredible length and power of breath, rises a quarter of a tone, sharping systematically. It is wild, but the charm of it is unspeakable; and when one is accustomed to hear it, one cannot imagine how any other song could arise at these hours and in these spots without disturbing their harmony. (George Sand, The Haunted Pool)
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