The Nascence

[Return to: Miklos Nyiszli's Lessons on Class (temporary page)] for audio files and transcripts of the June 1, 2014 Waking Up Radio show that discusses this notion of ‘inclusive capitalism’.

[Return to: “Keith Lowe Lessons From Savage Continent… For Building Our Future” (Part 1)] for audio files and transcripts for the July 6, 2014 through the September 28, 2014 Waking Up Radio shows.

[Return to: “Keith Lowe Lessons From Savage Continent… For Building Our Future” (Part 2)] for audio files and transcripts for the October 5, 2014 through the November, 2014 Waking Up Radio shows.

“Embracing Global Goals, Scope and Action: Becoming Global Actors… Claiming the ‘All’”

“My Son's Beats… WUR Spoken Word-Beats”

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These beats are also posted as “anti-coercion commercials” on YouTube. Art by Wassily Kandinsky (except in “Future Freedom” which presents “Freedom Sun” by David Sterenberg) and original music and beats by Thandiwe Satterwhite. They can be found at: “Nascence Anti-coercion Commercials”

“Is it really just ‘the state’… that’s robbing our children of their youth… or is it also ‘the state in us’?…”

“We are asserting our common ownership of the earth… and as soon as we make our own bodies part of that goal… as soon as we include our bodies in that goal consciously… we’ll be on our way home… to freedom…”

“Until we have certainty about our gifts… that they are more important than anything… that… when we put our gifts on hold for some ‘greater good’… it doesn’t work… we become miserable and then we have less and less and less to give… it is only by becoming ‘big’ that we have anything worth sharing…”

“…and I know folks are doing that… they’re putting their own gifts first… over jobs… a lot of people are… trying to figure out how to hang on to themselves while doing jobs… I’m just suggesting we take the next step… of organizing around that truth… that it’s not just a few of us who have gifts that we’re trying to hold onto… it’s every human being… and that we have to reach out to each other… so how do we start… is the question…”

“Hannah Arendt had it wrong… it’s not evil that’s ‘banal’… it’s ‘obedience’… of ‘power’…”

“…so we have a responsibility to our posterity… no less than to ourselves… to fight for and achieve the absolute prerequisite for living freely… i.e. living our dreams: freedom-leisure-happiness… based in universal individual freedom… premised on freedom from necessity… material abundance for all… not just for the few…”

“When we give food to an animal… that has a universal meaning in the language of life… it means: ‘I want you to live.’ In the world I want… we don’t lie when we do that. So the only logical… realistic goal for us if we want to determine ourselves… if we want to live our gifts… is the ‘opposite of this… so our challenge now… is to define it…”

“Sisters and Brothers: I think we should talk continuously… perhaps in ‘Meet-Ups’… about the ‘opposite’ of ‘power’…”

“So much of our forward movement to freedom rests on language… on knowing exactly what we’re saying… because we’ve discussed the ‘meanings’ of things together… and have come to ‘certainty’ about them… such that we know exactly what we’re saying when we say it… and therefore… mean it…”

“Why do we accept the limits imposed by ‘power’? Why do we tell ourselves we’re ‘making a dent in the system’ when we’re not even scratching it? And then… why do we tell ourselves making a dent… added to the dents of others… will eventually end it?… when they’re not aimed at the structural underpinnings?…”

“…Returning to the article, ‘Discovering the Water Planet’… ‘each year we kill and discard globally… thirty million metric tons of accidentally-caught marine life….’ Without force in our lives… we would live in harmony… we would ask of the earth only what we needed and give back more… because we give thanks… we have time to…”]

“Why aren’t we saying the goal for all of us to unite behind? What bothers me… is not… at base… money… it’s their control of our lives that bothers me. Money simply tokens this control… measures its degree… but keeping you and me from developing our full human possibilities… when there’s absolutely no need… no reason… beyond lust for supremacy… To do this signals a narcissistic depravity that would bring down all life in its wake… cares not a whit for planetary health… hears no counsel beyond the walls of its poor self… cannot its own… dis-owned self… hear… What is our goal?… if not to release our lives… all life… from this… death grip. I think we have to be concerned at this juncture… when all life is at risk… with the narrowing of goal implied by ‘nationalisms’… of whatever kind…”

…but today I would add: “and choose instead open tribes: generous… cooperative… earth-connected and protective.

“…he put his thought-process on hold. What we haven't sufficiently credited is that… that’s what ‘work’ does… not just what ‘work in the military’ does… that’s what ‘work overall’ does… it puts our thought-process on hold… and when we accept others telling us what our work is… we’re shown the most relevant meaning of George Eliot’s words: ‘our deeds determine us as much as we determine our deeds…”]

“…this train called ‘class’… called ‘just sit back and enjoy the ride and let the big boys… “the important ones” … drive…’ is rolling downhill… and it’s got a speed to it… The story in which they ride our backs… that they call ‘Progress’… was written by ‘power’… who then strangles all other stories… cuts them off at the pass… as Plato instructed… It’s the fact that they had a story… a plan… that made them ‘powerful’… because it meant they had certainty’… and could move forward with conviction… we cannot get free unless we deeply believe… that our happiness is the point… our reason-to-be… our babies come to show us that… and then we give them our backs… it’s time to trust those toothless smiles they give us… trust… the flight and song of birds… the lolling sound of the ‘useless’ waves… It’s time to trust that joy is our birthright… and must always be the core of the new story we write… the story that is ‘the opposite’ of ‘power’… It only takes a few to begin to make this world based in trusting our bodies’ truth… in putting that first… based in letting our joy live. It only takes a few… and others will come to it. It only takes a few…and we are already many… It’s not the earth we must save… it’s ourselves… just put that first… and the earth can take care of herself…”]

“These cons – “people are violent…” “industry is ruthless…” “the security of the nation is threatened…” “‘global warming’ means we need ‘the state’… – are all presented to us as disparate… to encourage and reinforce our fragmentation – and deep confusion – when in truth all are weaves from the single thread of coercion… and all reflect the state’s need to seem legitimate… …and [relatedly…] its need to keep divisions – particularly hierarchical ones (are any not?) – well-sown between us. So certain ‘demographics’ – slotted categories of ‘class’-humans – will be presented as ‘more violent’ than others… while the middle ranks of ‘knowledge workers’ are reassured they don’t abandon their children – oh no… not them – because ‘studies show’ they ‘spend’ more time with their children than did their mothers – as if the hyper-scrutiny and over-management and deep training in hierarchy and ‘class’-service – ‘work’… it’s true… our parents were less dedicated to – as if this heightened surveillance and obedience-training they give their children were… somehow… not abandonment…. Remember that illustration from Alice Miller’s Prisoners of Childhood in which a young vacationing-couple are enjoying ice cream cones… while their toddler cried? Well, that’s what Alice Miller means by – one example at least of – ‘abandonment’. So let us not be duped by the propaganda over the airwaves… which is trying to implant in our minds a very literal meaning for that word. No. ‘Child abandonment’ is a broad category that includes ‘training your children to be obedient’…”]

“I happened upon a journal entry (of 04.02.06) from 8 years ago in which I was pretty much resigned to my captive status… …resigned to not living my gifts… accepting their relinquishment… in exchange for an insecure… tenuous… always conditional ‘security’… and a bit of ‘entertainment’. My body knew I was being lied to… but I couldn’t see a way out of it… because there is no individual solution… not for an individual person… or an individual nation. We are one – all of us – being masticated or managed together… on that shifting plate. I use that metaphor a lot… and the last time I forgot… to attribute… and give thanks: Fame is fickle food… Upon a shifting plate… Whose table once a… Guest but not… The second time is set. Whose crumbs the crows inspect… And with ironic caw… Flap past it to the… Farmer’s corn – Men eat of it and die.” (Emily Dickinson, # 1659)

“During the Great Depression here in the U.S. folks were paid to travel across the South to gather from former captives their memories of captivity (and I hate that word ‘slave’… it assumes facts not in evidence: that there is such a thing. My use of it in my very first blog was to say: “if you apply that concept to one… apply it to everyone … we are all in the same boat…” Trust. We are all in Auschwitz. No matter what nice upholstery they give us for the particular cage we’re stuck in. And it’s simply ‘betrayal’ to pretend otherwise.) What if we started gathering our visions of freedom and good fellowship… and the ‘infrastructure’ that supports it… collecting these visions from each other globally?… information-gathering for founding a free… globally-consciously-interconnecting society… for a purpose that we have made – we-the-people… globally…”]

“There’s a certain amount of trust that is required for us to take that leap into the unknown which is our future… the trust has to do with the fact of knowing that we are earth… and just as we trust that the earth will be there for us each morning when we get up… we have to trust the earth in our own bodies: that is wants to heal… that it wants to be whole… and that as soon as ‘power’ is off our back we can start to grow straight again… trust that. That’s real. That’s true…”

“We have a ‘system’… a few misguided folks who have… over the centuries… constructed a heartless machine that they keep going by misguiding… manipulating… and exploiting our human capacities… our energy – a system that suppresses our natural urge to grow… to grow endlessly… by restricting what we are allowed to think… and keeping us worried about material survival… – and this perpetually-made… insecure… constructed mass of us… is then given false choices in the formal political arena and… by means of this device… the fraudulently-conceived result is trumpeted as our ‘consent’… or our ‘apathy’ and ‘stupidity’. But once the false survival pressure and suppression of our ancestors’ thoughts that work to make us whole again… once that pressure and suppression is gone…Oh the beauty and brilliance that is us will be as if a second sun is rising in the sky… as so it will be… as so it is.”

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“Sisters and Brothers: “There’s fascists a’foot. There be fascists in the woods…” – the world reeks of Hidden Schemes and False Actors… infiltrating… trying to unseat what cannot be unseated: our understanding of the motive forces Behind Things… particularly: the sad need to feel ‘supreme’ that led abandoned children – the would-be ‘global-statesmen’ – to unleash disharmony and misery upon the world. It is a Fearless Youth Energy – willing… to face… to see… what an undue sense of guilt at their forced complicity turned their elders’ eyes from – a Fearless Youth Energy that we’re seeing today: manifesting the ancestors’ call… to correct millennia-long wrongs. They see… what’s happening… and heroes that they are… are stepping up to take that “longest stride of soul”… to a future that’s free. What’s needed is for us to globally plan… plan for building the certainty within the hearts of our brothers and sisters… that we don’t need the statesmen’s ‘management’ of us… which… to say the least… it is incredibly energy-inefficient (as Nikola Tesla told us… a hundred years ago…): to throw away the power and creative energy of the vast… vast… majority… energy that we want to share… cooperatively… guided by our self-created… freely-developing… individualities as they grow… given joyfully… without force – energy that cannot exist under terms of coercion… under compulsion – “…every effort under compulsion requires a sacrifice of life energy…) “How do we transition to freedom?” This key question is the point of all our discussions… all raise the hope that we will join in the birthing… of a new world… beyond class… beyond structurally imposed and enforced stagnation and immaturity for the vast majority… …‘immaturity’ because we are compelled to be dependent… compelled to self-limit… compelled to relinquish our gifts… …and this ‘social arrangement’ cannot continue if we are to honor our commitments to life… to each other… and to a healthy planet.”]

“We have a ‘system’ that subjects us to its scrutiny… and asks, “are you good enough to serve me?” What if we flipped it? How would we make ‘it’ work? (Although in truth there is no ‘it’… only freedom.) Bend ‘it’ to our – each individual’s – will? How would we make ‘it’ provide what we needed… to make each day a masterwork of freedom?…”

“…and I have to say… it has occurred to me more than once… that their fantasy… these Plato’s Tribesmen… is to replace those gods on Mount Olympus… with themselves: the roar of their drones overhead… that are to inspire fear and dread…”

“…all we need to regenerate hopeful energy… is a vision… a view… of a free future… how can we move on as a species if the vast majority are not allowed to develop their gifts?… not allowed… to think…”

“If we stop to consider the matter we’ll see that our diminishment is the point of ‘division’ – beyond its main purpose to contain and control us… – to distinguish who is ‘good’ from who ‘isn’t’… to sift out the obedient… that ‘division’ is key to establish the need for some artificial… mythical belief in the efficacy of ‘hierarchical leadership’… and this ‘style’ of ‘leadership’ is co-signed by illusory notions of ‘excellence’ (perfection)… and that ‘excellence’ is determined by means of educational institutions… which exist to select ‘obedience’… – and that the ‘job’ of this ‘educational result’ (the obedient) is to construct and control ‘popular opinion’… the endorsement of which protects the ideology of ‘democracy’… which forms the warp and weft of ‘rule’. And so this diminishment is made to justify everything… its every horror may be laid at its door: “are they poor?… well… it’s because they’re ‘uneducated’…” “do they tend to dissolution… do they drink… use drugs… disrespect their bodies?… well… what do you expect… they never learned better… we must work harder to ‘help’ them… by building the technological and surveillance infrastructure to ‘identify’ their ‘needs’… so we can drag them into the twenty-first century…” I heard her say: “They don’t want to ‘lead’…” But ‘Mother’ didn’t want to be a fearless evolutionary… till she was… Things change… in our sense of ourselves… as we gain new information… We are all brilliant – and probably all the more so to the degree we know how much we’ve yet to grow…”

“…so we are being set up for conflict… and while we're told via the media that that conflict is white against black… what we know in our own experience is that there is actually a coming together… I mean Barack couldn't have been elected otherwise… around wanting to be free from surveillance… free from this constant assault on our civil liberties… free from the oppressiveness of always having to struggle to survive… but the conflict that we are being set up for… is the police and the people perceiving each other as mutual enemies… which means that minimally we-the-people have to begin countering these moves on 'power's part… to divide us… So… instead of saying 'the police'… when referring to their acts of brutality against us… that we say 'the state' instead… and recognize that the police are paid actors…”

“…It worries me that I very rarely hear said that the main issue is work… that the lever of the wage does in fact convert us into something very like a machine… that says what it is paid to say… does what it is paid to do… and that that means a totalitarian future. If we were to talk about it we would see that when you restrict the ability of people to be free agents… to think and act independently… it means being set up for authoritarian rule… which we are in fact living in… without discussing it…”

“My concerns about our lack of clarity about the word ‘vision’… when applied to the critique of our current social arrangement… is part of a general concern about the lack of clear definitions among those of us who want to end ‘power’s privilege. This concern centers on that sentence we began with: ‘Power’ is global… ‘class’ is totalitarian. What does this tell us about an effective vision? If we agree that the ‘citizen’ – ‘barbarian’ divide… is at the root of all ‘class’ ideologies… then we can see that ‘class’ itself provides the fundamental raison d’etre for the state … and that… therefore… necessarily… there’s built-in inequality… and… if we truly want to be free… then… necessarily… we cannot accept enslavement… or ‘barbarian’-status… for any of us.”

“And how does a common concept of ‘vision’ make a difference when… as we’re seeing in Hong Kong… the state can play its trump-card of physical repression… can employ clandestine military action… and… because it owns the media (as we saw in Egypt… and of course here in the U.S. with the Occupy Movement…) can mobilize the ‘internalized state’ in our sleeping brothers and sisters? Now this has always been our primary challenge… that ‘internalized state’ within all of us… because we are turned over to the system and ‘educated’ by the ‘masters’. It’s very hard to challenge the state…”

“…developing a common global vision of… and activism for… freedom… may be less of a problem than we suppose precisely because – I mean we’ve never done this… we’re going to be talking more about what ‘global action’ means in upcoming shows… but it’s a game-changer… it changes the rhythm of our activism… it’s a new beat… it’s a global beat… it means we reverberate back and forth with each other… it’s ‘call-and-response’… in real time… using instantaneous communication means – it’s a different world from what has ever existed before – it’s just getting past that initial challenge of doing something that we’ve never done before.”

“Is it clear that only fully-developing thought in every one of us is an effective check to concentrated ‘power’… because concentrated ‘power’ only exists by concentrating our energy. Let’s consider again the concept of ‘the nation’ in this light… In Waking Up I defined ‘political power’ as “…the ability to induce others to labor (while exempting yourself…)”and by that definition I think it's clear that if, in fact, 'politics' is about controlling… harnessing… the energy of the people, then it's about a system of class that has been… that there has been a continuous thread called 'class'… which explains why when there seems to be a 'revolution'… there's no fundamental change in the lives of we-the-people… we are still the energy-source for everything… and that it is that… that has to change… for there to be the evolution that we require… that we are responsible to see happen for humanity overall… as a whole… that is our responsibility: to forward all of us… as life… that's what we're here for. As George Eliot said, “what do we live for if not to make life less difficult to each other…” and I would add… that we can only do that fundamentally… by ending ‘power’ – ultimately – because they can manufacture difficulty ad infinitum… It is we-the-people who are going to have to take responsibility for the evolution of humanity itself…”

“What we’re going to be considering is that we are always ready soil for totalitarianism until we decide to confront the mindset of ‘class’ within our own thinking – thinking that we’re all trained in. Almost every day I hear some illustration in people’s speech of this reality… that it’s embedded in us… in our thoughts… people saying, “well, I just want my child to get a good education and get a good job….” How many times do we hear that? How many times did we speak it as parents? “Get a good job… be a good worker….” And we are entering in a time when there is no ability anymore of the earth to crank out enough wealth to capture the hands of enough people to allow the notion of a system based on ‘fair compensation for work’… of… “you give up your autonomy as a human being and we will give you a job”. Well that ‘social contract’, as we call it, can’t continue anymore. ‘Power’ knows that, that’s why they’re rushing, rushing, to plan our future for us… they got the ‘Trans-Pacific Partnership’, the ‘Trans-Atlantic Partnership’… they’re trying to unify the globe… quick! quick! make sure we got nowhere to go… then… when we start getting restless… direct our eyes to: “look! look! we got this U.N.-sponsored… that means it’s all of us globally… at least the big, smart ones… us important ones… we are figuring out… how to keep you guys… eating… given that we can’t give you ‘jobs’ anymore. But, don’t worry, we got it covered.”… Now… not only does that consign – because ‘hierarchy’ is a key ideology that they can never let go of because that would mean letting go of their exclusive privilege… so there’s going to be folks who don’t get to have ‘local self-sufficiency’… it’s not going to be an ‘even’ distribution… it never has been under ‘class’… it never will be… and once again we’re letting our so-called ‘betters’ decide these big questions of who gets to eat… who gets to use a little bit of their gifts… and who doesn’t. So given that this transition is inevitable… what we’re arguing in this space… is that it’s time for us to make the decisions for us…”

“Castles in the Air” is in honor of the people of Hong Kong:

“I learned this, at least…that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him…In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.” (Henry David Thoreau).”

“Our cage has many sides… but all sides of our containment share a common wall: the lock on our thoughts ‘power’ holds that makes division… rank… hierarchy… authority… ‘the state’… seem legitimate… And today… I’m looking at this angle: ‘clandestine’… that manifests as ‘what is never spoken but which our bodies feel: that all around us seethes… from ‘power’s hidden actors… a festering excrescence… that saps our energy… and poisons our relations with… everything – the earth… our own breathing… our knowledge of ourselves and each other – when nothing is what it claims to be… or what it seems…’”

“So… they have all the cards… they set the terms… they set those terms in opposition to our nature… our biological inheritance of ‘mutual aid’… and then raise before our eyes our violent reaction to it… to these terms of coercion both tangible and tacit… and adding insult to injury the state then sets us up as ‘culprit’… even as it unleashes its violence upon us… ‘coercion’… that term… encompasses all violence... it’s the more accurate one to use… so let’s substitute it… just doing that one thing expands our thinking… ‘coercion’ is in every nook and cranny of our lives… compulsion is in every phrase they train us with… when we start thinking in terms of that – compulsion… coercion… force – we’ll see that there’s no aspect of our lives that isn’t dogged by it…”

“A society that has been crafted for this long… without our discussion… represents severe containment of us. We’ve been caged… so tightly… so thoroughly… that it’s not a surprise… our difficulty organizing at this juncture… our heart has been broken many times… it’s hard to believe in the possibility of global unity… particularly as they use relentlessly their strategy of infiltration and causing disharmony and dissension and despair internally – that’s their key tactic. How do we overcome that?… So it’s no surprise that we have a hard time knowing how to start forming trust again… in order to build the kind of unity we need – we-the-people – and I don’t mean through ‘our’ ‘herders’… the ‘organizations’… that have been licensed specifically for that purpose… to manage us. I mean we-the-people… we-actual-people… have to do this. But the existence of the Internet… the communication means for our global organizing exists now. New terms requires… new hope… new sentiment… new conviction… the building of the certainty that we have finally arrived at the moment for our freedom. It’s ‘Freedom Time’… and we can feel it… but we have to start acting on it.”

“At seems the earth-connected view the world more dynamically: a constant ‘growing’ or ‘unfolding’ in the midst of dense connections. Whereas those tightly held in ‘power’s grip perceive the world in categories that are fixed… fixed in the moment we are looking at them… to remain so for some period indefinite… categories which then determine the possibilities of those stuck in them.… A small example. Maybe ten years ago or so a Venezuelan documentary came out about one of the many initiatives of Hugo Chavez to build the confidence of the people: musical instruments were given to the children… I believe… of Caracas… and they were taught how to play them. One scene showed two children practicing… and one was further along in her claiming of the instrument. And when a sound from her friend’s instrument emerged discordant… they laughed and laughed. The sound was for them a joke… but never the person. It was understood… this is a process… this is what we all go through. That’s a lesson the earth teaches the earth-connected. But a ‘power’-allegiance would put the two in hierarchical rank and judge one to be the ‘lesser’ of the other… and the judgment tends to then become a label… from which others turn as from contagion.”

“And as far as the state ‘protecting’ us goes… a sufficient time to reflect will expose… that the ruthless commodification of life that it sanctions and condones… is making our lives a hell-hole.… Karl Popper said: “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.” …and Popper’s words ring particularly prescient as we look about us at the accelerated efforts of ‘the state’ to ‘cleanse’ urban areas – of those without homes… of ‘criminality’ – defined broadly in this same ‘utilitarian’ sense Popper is talking about… i.e., that which challenges ‘the state’. When I listened this past Friday (11.01.13) to a discussion of the militarization of the police… how ‘Homeland Security’ has pressured more and more urban areas to create a detailed surveillance grid – ‘domain awareness’… a matrix-map of so-many-square-foot sections for ease of drone-targeting… using a ‘crime-fighting rationale… in which cell-phones are data-collection devices for the state (“information biometrics”)… and the police are encouraged to view their city as a battleground. And as the drones buzz the pleasant propaganda buzz drones in our ears… massaging away our fears… “no, no, no,” we’re told, “this isn’t a police-state you see, gaining greater and greater substance around you daily… police-states are passé… at least for we modern democracies….” No matter, we’re told, that their soothing tones fly in the face of the reality we see building around us daily… cities divided into carefully-plotted matrixes… surveillance cameras everywhere… drones constantly buzzing overhead… while the airwaves are flooded with soothing propaganda…. Let’s give ourselves a good shake, brothers and sisters, and find the means to communicate authentically… locally… not as members of any tribe but the Tribe of Free Beings. Overt Fascism is the fangs… but totalitarianism is the snake itself… and its coils are tightening around us as we speak….”

“Now these were just tossed-off asides… but I’ve often found these ‘asides’ to be the main purpose of the speech – embedded propaganda. He said: • “Youth! You have limited time… you must be productive [activists]!” No… I wouldn’t be sitting in this seat if that were so. • “We must support the drunk!” OK… that was random… clearly suggestive of propaganda… ‘power’ has a lot invested in having its agents use the ruse ‘addictions’… i.e. “I’ve been wounded by ‘the system’…” to distract us from our purpose. • “There is no alternative […where have we heard that before?… – P.S.] we have a void in organizations…” We should have a word – maybe ‘double-dump’ (although that sounds a bit earthy… maybe that makes it a good choice for earth-speak…) – for the multiple-simultaneous-plants-in-a-single-thrust this man favored. And this propaganda is akin to that invitation we discussed earlier… in which young people are lured into betrayal of their brothers and sisters by telling them that “only the most [add desired quality here… ‘clever’… ‘radical’?…] ‘see’… that this tactic is the most [whatever…]; and he is encouraging them to think of the ‘solution’ in terms of building an ‘organization’ [‘party’ perhaps?… hierarchically-structured and disciplined?… ‘power’ would love that…] • “Violence disempowers the system…” Could you show me the analysis on that please? • “We don’t know what we want… yet…” Yes we do… yes we do… we don't want to be forced anymore… We want a world in which we can share our gifts without force… • “…we have to smash the system to have a hole to build a society around…” [Excuse me… we – we- the people – built this stuff… this is our stuff… why would we ‘blow it up’? Our hands built it!] All of which displays (I believe) intentional misunderstanding (and misleading) about what is ‘the system’… ‘the state’… ‘power’…”

We all (under ‘class’) receive deep training in powerlessness as infants… when we see adult distress… and then our own… and then are told… in blows and boredom… in curses and coldness… in false-feeling-expressed… and in obliviousness: “you can do nothing about it…” so we let ourselves go. …I mean… you can actually see this in two-year-olds… you can see them trying to tempt adults back to themselves… back to reality… back to playfulness… back to joy… – and then their on-going perplexity… their on-going question: “Why? Why not? What’s wrong?…” and you can also see… see them give up on it… see them bow… to what feels like the inevitable: powerlessness… trained in us… beginning with our parents… because they have no choice: they have to work. We don’t own ourselves.

“We took time with Galbraith because he was studying ‘power’s track… the slime they drag behind them… showing its global nature… and how ‘governance’ is done clandestine… by applying and withdrawing ‘credit’… we see this whenever large sums are exchanged between large banks and states… or large states to smaller…. or on Galbraith’s and Henry’s scale… by the big global banks setting interest rates… and imposing ‘austerity’ globally… and we know that ‘austerity’ means ‘disciplining the people to accept less and less…’ less and less control over our own lives… less and less earth for our personal use… the absence of leisure for ourselves and our children… the absence of health… less and less safety net… and of course less and less food… especially untainted and fresh…. And this is a global imposition of ‘less’… accomplished ‘simply’ by siphoning ‘money’ (a representation of earth…) out of our communities… by ‘power’s henchmen in government… quite nonchalantly… who sadly or blithely (it little matters…) cite their ‘budget authority’… raise it up high and pound it hard on our heads. The wage work system destroys our empathy… …the surveillance state destroys our trust… each one of us is meant to grow our full gifts… division… coercion… and necessity forestalls their development… the hiding and pretense warps our humanness… and absolutely none of it (not remotely…) brings us happiness.”

The audio-blog (below)… from our July 14, 2013 show… refers to events a year ago… and still in progress…

“– but I do want to re-emphasize the point that we have to be helping Egypt right now… which means helping ourselves…. If we can help Egypt forward this discussion of “how do we achieve our freedom when ‘the state’ has been captured by the ‘global economy’?”… which is just another word for ‘power’…. We have to be talking about this all over the globe… because otherwise we’re going to be duped by these pundits who tell us to ‘fix the state’… and that that’s the way… “let’s just start working on the Constitution…” come on…. And so Egypt is accelerating our thought process on this… because… whoa… I mean it’s breathtaking… two revolutions in the space of a couple years…. So… it’s like: “ok… here’s our revolution… we got rid of the dictator… alright, now let’s have this democracy… ok, no… didn’t work… perhaps ‘democracy’ is a con… hmm….” And so then they went ahead and called the question, right? “We don’t want repackaged tyranny… we want democracy…” and so now… they got nothing else left to give the Egyptian people but… ‘divide-and-conquer’: “Oh well, see, ‘tribalism’ is rearing its ugly head… that’s because, well, we turn against each other because of… blah, blah, blah…. Or… because the world economy is in such a dilapidated state… there’s scarce resources, so we gotta fight each other… blah, blah, blah…” So… this is not Egypt’s problem, this is the problem for global humanity… to see through this con ‘nation-state’… or… what I’m arguing is… because they’ve claimed the lexicon, we’ve got to start developing earth-terms… that cannot be co-opted… and undermined that way… that we cannot let them tell us that ‘leisure’ is ‘having free time’… we cannot let them tell us that ‘freedom’ is anything but ‘freedom from scarcity’… having the possession of our own bodies… being able to do what we want when we wake up in the morning… every single one of us…. We have the means. The earth is extremely generous.”

“Am I being clear enough about the connections between ‘power’ hiding… their employing propaganda – layered hierarchical propaganda to correspond to the various ranks of us they've created – propaganda to help them hide… and stay hidden – and what we on the Left have been accustomed to call ‘the class struggle’…? Is Shakespeare right when he says, “all difficulties are but easy… when they are known…"? If so… we don't yet know… our opponent…”

D-Way: “You had some propaganda props before we get started?” The Raven: “Just one. I caught a snippet of a documentary over the airwaves this week… it was on the insidiousness of racism… and I heard someone say, “…if I want my child to have a good education, I have to, unintentionally, reinforce power disparities and racial divisions….” But what is a 'good education?… In an earlier show we were discussing how hard it is for a young person to challenge conventional thinking… or to go against the crowd…. We said that part of the reason is that they're fresh from an educational system which is set up to convince young people to accept a lifetime of jumping through hoops… which is essentially a lifetime of following instructions and obeying authority at all levels… as Bentham pointed out…. We have a system designed to make us serve the few… while training us to think we serve the many – the 'greater good' – and we have to redesign education… as we free ourselves. We're going to have to design an education that reinforces the key values of the future we want: generalized human freedom.”

From Waking Up Radio show of November 11, 2012:

“And then the issue of ‘drones’ arose… – oh… and by the way… I really believe it is time… long past time… for us to get this phony sense of 'indignation' out of the Left discourse. 'Phony'… because the Left 'Intellect' pretends to be above… and not manifesting… 'the system'…. All of us manifest 'the system' – and we're not going to get to our future freedom by not recognizing… seeing… how it manifests in us… how it reproduces itself in our own participation in it. Until we make these things conscious… and join with our Brothers and Sisters… and stop pretending that while we are ready… the problem is those other unconscious folks who are not… – then we are in fact going to keep spinning our wheels… playing 'power's game… which serves some pundits, I believe, consciously and unconsciously. And then they turned (this was Election Night coverage…) to this issue of ‘drones’… and the way [this pundit] attacked Barack was so virulent… it struck me as extremely self-righteous indignation… and whenever I hear this indignation expressed about the overt and covert violence of nation-states… and of the United States perhaps in particular… I think, “Excuse me… but… what does he think this president is the president of? The Republic for World Peace?” What does this pundit imagine to be the goal of the U.S. state in an international state-system? Whenever I hear all this false outrage of the Left punditry I think of Diane Keaton and Al Pacino walking that road… trailed by the limo… Al essentially saying: “…this is what all nation-states do in their battle for 'supremacy' (“anyhow never second best…”) while Diane sputters her indignation…”

[Now what does Henry propose we-the-people do?…] “The second challenge is to organize a global alliance around this issue. This is more difficult, although steps are already being taken. Global organizations like Tax Justice International, Oxfam GB, Friends of the Earth, Global Witness and Christian Aid are converging on a new global campaign around the issue of havens and offshore tax evasion. They've been enlisting support for this effort from countries like Norway, Chile, Brazil, Spain and France, organizations like the UNDP, the World Bank and even the International Monetary Fund.… This is very exciting…” [Perhaps he should temper his excitement a bit… because… as we’ve been discussing with issues of re-defining ‘work’ and defining ‘happiness’… when ‘power’ is afraid of something… they ‘leap-frog’ jump to the front of it… and try to direct it… That’s a key tactic of control. Get to the front and lead them where you want them to go. And… again… having those resources is very seductive… everybody wants to see their power expanded… so it’s easy to lie to ourselves about it…]

“And even though so many ancestors saw through the cons… and left their precious help… not a one could overcome the structure of class itself…. We have to change the infrastructure… and… never doubt… we all want this… good fellowship… heart… which… if we develop the stances and the practices we need… trumps heartless ‘division’… brings… the upstart Spring. And therein lies the key to a successful strategy when we find false minds are crawling through our movement.… I believe that allegiance to our values can inoculate us from the poisonous bite of agent provocateurs… Last week we said that the structures of class are designed to keep us contained… and that inserting good people in them cannot change them… but there is a second part to that question… which is that the real action of ‘statesmen’ happens behind scenes… and that the forefront is theater… and a third part… which is that the ‘imperialism of rationalism’ erects interior structures in us all.…”

Sisters and Brothers: The word-beats that follow are from the conversation that D-Way and I had during our September 30, 2012 Waking Up Radio show. They are a multi-part series on ‘Moving Forward’:

D-Way: “Then what is my responsibility to my Brothers and Sisters?… and how do my actions [get] in line with the analysis that I have done [confirming that class is totalitarian…] and also: you've talked with people on the street… and you're also seeing a lot of different perspectives… some people feel that they can only manage to do what they have control over… e.g. to be the best person… to effect change within their interactions in the physical world… and is that enough?… [in order] to not be overwhelmed by the overwhelming responsibility [of dealing with] this whole global system that has oppressed [all of us…] their far-reaches of control has suppressed the whole globe… – that is really overwhelming… So… how do we move forward?… those of us who are consciously trying to create a new world – where that system [of class] no longer exists… How do you do that… and still stay sane or feel powerful or feel strong?” The Raven: “I've been thinking about this question too… in the sense of: as you said D-Way… a lot of people both are done with a system of rigid… fixed… class divisions… and… feel powerless to change it… And so this is why I write… this is why I engage in conversations about this… because I don't see anything more important for us to focus on as a species right now. So I ponder what it means for our behavior and our beliefs to be so out of sync… what this means for our souls… what this means for how we are not addressing the problems that are critical for the species in order to heal the planet and ourselves… For instance… most people I talk to both agree that we are in totalitarianism… and yet admit that they don't really do anything about that. And that to me is horrifying. That to me is how Hitler came to 'power'.” [Spoken word is from our September 30, 2012 radio broadcast.]

D-Way: “I'm wondering why… for people out there who you interact with… and they say they feel like they're 'powerless' to do anything to combat the creeping totalitarianism state… that totalitarianism is here… people agree… but feel like they can't do anything about it… so… why do you feel like we can do something about it?… like… what do you say to people who say that to you?… you know?… because it is overwhelming when you think about the level of control and dominance that this system has put over the globe… So why are you hopeful that we can effect that change?” The Raven: “Well I think one way to answer that question is to respond to what we were just listening to prior to this show… When we got within a couple blocks of the station we started hearing the voice of Helen Caldicott… and she was interviewing Colonel Ann Wright… and Ann Wright was bemoaning the fact that can't get people to mobilize around… anything… that there is a scary passivity on the part of us… and a scary hearing loss on the part of both [political] parties… and so they were in effect acknowledging that we don't have an existing democracy… and that the problem was out there somewhere… 'the problem is Barack'… 'the problem is apathy'… the problem is everywhere but that man or woman in the mirror… For instance… [in her identification with the state… and lack of recognition that change comes from below…] being eternally 'surprised' that 'power' acts like 'power'… and then they're always 'surprised' that people have no time to engage in political activism… and they… almost as an aside… they said, "Well… people want to keep their job…" as if that's an aside… and irrelevant… to how we solve this problem… As long as they can control whether we eat or not… as long as we are not questioning the deep underpinnings of a 'class'-system… how in the world can we pull ourselves out of a sense of apathy?” D-Way: “I wanted to… back it up a little bit to the personal responsibility and how you said that people see… in the media… problems like violence or sexual assault… but we rarely want to internalize it… see how we perpetuate the system… but I just wanted to go back and say: it's hard for people to hear… that they are the problem… Are you suggesting that people should think of themselves as a problem?” [Spoken word is from our September 30, 2012 radio broadcast.]

Sisters and Brothers: The word-beat below continues the conversation that D-Way and I had during our September 30, 2012 Waking Up Radio show. This is Part 4 of a multi [probably 10]-part series on ‘Moving Forward’:

D-Way: “That’s where I’m confused with where you’re coming from, Raven… is… when you take responsibility for your Brothers and Sisters what’s the language that you use to describe the relationship that you have with this system?” The Raven: “Well I believe that we… all of us… manifest ‘the system’… I believe it’s important to say ‘the U.S. state’ and not ‘we’ because I think using the word ‘we’ leads to confusion and we absolutely have to start getting clear… developing clarity of thought… When we say ‘we’ meaning ‘the U.S. state’ it could be interpreted in many ways… it could imply a patriotic position… it could imply confusion… it could imply a sense of responsibility that ‘the state’ is in us… as you were suggesting… although… for the most part… when I hear it used that way on the Left… it is used to say: ‘we have to make this state better…’ – it’s the ‘fix-it’ ‘solution’… and I’m arguing that that’s a dead-end… that it isn’t a real solution… that you cannot ‘fix’ a state established to keep us contained and corralled… it’s not designed to [do what the people want…] So… in order to speak clearly… when we mean ‘the actions of the U.S. government’ we should say ‘the actions of the U.S. government’… and when we’re talking about how ‘the state’ gets reproduced on multiple levels… in multiple institutions… that’s a different level of analysis… and then we can start talking about… because I believe we have to start explaining… as we do our analysis… the world we’re living in… it never gets discussed in an open… authentic… way… over the airwaves… and so we have to start doing that for each other… so we have to start explaining how there is a single operating premise in a class system called ‘supremacy’… yes… it is manifested in the military… but it is also manifested in us… in how we relate to our children… and… when we talk about ‘the responsibility of pundits’… and who gets over the airwaves… and who doesn’t… I want to always give thanks for the ancestors… and to remind everybody listening… that there are no new thoughts about how to deal with this ‘class’-system… and it is evidence of the degree of our containment… and the level of totalitarian control of our thoughts… that we are still repeating the same conversations… in fact… at a much much lower level of analysis than our ancestors had figured out hundreds of years ago… For instance… in a book I picked up recently by Petr Kropotkin – it’s a collection of his pamphlets… A hundred and thirty years ago he wrote a pamphlet called ‘An Appeal to the Young’… addressing this issue, D-Way, of ‘well what is our responsibility? – he’s saying to young people: ‘you have a responsibility…’ and then he speaks to young people who want to become doctors… scientists… lawyers… engineers… teachers… and he concludes with artists… And in the one on ‘teachers’ he says (and I thought about this because you work with children, D-Way…) he says… Kropotkin: “And what shall I say to the schoolmaster – not to the man who looks upon his profession as a wearisome business, but to him who, when surrounded by a joyous band of youngsters, feels exhilarated by their cheery looks and in the midst of their happy laughter; to him who tries to plant in their little heads those ideas of humanity which he cherished himself when he was young. Often I see that you are sad, and I know what it is that makes you knit your brows. This very day, your favorite pupil, who is not very well up in Latin, it is true, but who has none the less an excellent heart, recited the story of William Tell with so much vigor! – [“Tell, William, a legendary hero of the liberation of Switzerland from Austrian oppression. He was required to hit with an arrow an apple placed on the head of his son, which he did successfully. The events are placed in the 14th century, but there is no evidence for a historical person of this name, and similar legends are of widespread occurrence.”] – His eyes sparkled; he seemed to wish to stab all tyrants there and then; he gave with such fire the passionate lines of Schiller: ‘Before the slave when he breaks his chain, Before the free man tremble not.’ But when he returned home, his mother, his father, his uncle, sharply rebuked him for want of respect to the minister or the rural policeman. They held forth to him by the hour on ‘prudence, respect for authority, submission to his betters,’ till he put Schiller aside in order to read Self-Help. And then only yesterday you were told that your best pupils have all turned out badly. One does nothing but dream of becoming an officer; another in league with his master robs the workers of their slender wages; and you, who had such hopes of these young people, you now brood over the sad contrast between your ideal and life as it is. You still brood over it. Then I foresee that in two years at the outside, after having suffered disappointment after disappointment, you will lay your favorite authors on the shelf, and you will end by saying that Tell was no doubt a very honest fellow, but after all a trifle cracked; that poetry is a first-rate thing for the fireside, especially when a man has been teaching the rule-of-three all day long, but still poets are always in the clouds and their views have nothing to do with the life of today, nor with the next visit of the inspector of schools…. Or, on the other hand…” [Spoken word is from our September 30, 2012 radio broadcast.]

From Waking Up Radio show of December 21, 2014:

“Immanuel Wallerstein: “What is meant by hegemony in a world-economy is the ability of one state to impose a set of rules on the operation of all other states, such that there is relative order in the world-system.…” Recall: he along with Terence K. Hopkins and Giovanni Arrighi… the three of them together… wrote Antisystemic Movements… when he and his co-authors wrote: “Opposition to oppression is coterminous with the existence of hierarchical social systems. Opposition is permanent, but for the most part latent…” And while it’s certainly true that ‘power’ has ever… since ‘class’s onset… been strenuously endeavoring to shape us… make us… be what it ‘needs’… to accomplish its (variously defined over the ages… but all a specie of the same arrogance…) its ‘greatness’… while certainly this is so… there is a missing factor which only we-the-people can add: our earth-given-knowledge of freedom… which never leaves us. “Opposition will be continuous…” …now that’s straightforward and clear… It’s clearly true… we need no ‘proof’… we know it in our bodies… And yet… …treatises will flow… …there will be oceans of deserts of theories… …there will be endless dissertations on them… And so… clarity was let go… …because the incentives… …were so ‘generous’… Surely… he must know… …that there’s absolutely nothing natural in that ‘order’ he seems to approve… …and that ‘order’ is a pleasant word for ‘force’… …that coercion’s both a fine web… …and a tank that mows us down… This is earth-speak: …we will resist… …we continue to resist… …we will resist some more… So… wither-dry-husk-blown-to-the-wind your phony ‘scientific theories’… …your social algorithms… Get you hence you calculating-cons… …get you gone. How dare you reduce the intricate web of our thought process… …the sighing of our infinite hearts… …to postulates and raw data… …to be polished smooth… How dare you take the mystery and magic of the subtle interweavings of our myriad experiences in multiple translations… …both in fluid memory and real-time… The world of ‘logic-systems’ is an invented world… …elaborate and well-organized… …there’s much to master… …much to digest… …much to offer in placation… …that abyss where was your soul.” [Spoken word is from our December 21, 2014 radio broadcast.]

The following mp3 is not a beat… it is the conclusion of our February 8, 2015 show… following which – after uploading edits and audio for the opening of the show the following morning… later that day – no edits would subsequently 'save'… i.e. I was no longer able to edit the page (“Embracing Global Goals, Scope and Action: Becoming Global Actors… Claiming the ‘All’”). “Embracing Global Goals” is being suppressed precisely because it's right on target… So let's do it!… Let’s go… Let’s claim global goals! (For the other missing audio files from that show please visit the: “Missing Audio Files From… The February 8, 2015 Show from the Embracing Global Goals Page” And please tune in to our February 15, 2015 show.

“National liberation in segments of the capitalist world-economy, and the transformations it has effected in relations of rule and other social relations, have altered the social structuring of the world-historical accumulation process. That much is historically evident and therefore theoretically to be taken into account. [Don't you love that?… that analytical clarity?… I mean… who else… who says they're devising theory even bothers to ensure that it's based in reality these days?… or 'strategy' likewise… or particularly… – P.S.] But it has not eliminated the relational conditions through which the accumulation process operates. And precisely that world-historical elimination, of the relational conditions through which accumulation of capital occurs, is what is entailed in the idea of the class struggle as the pivotal process in the transformation of the capitalist world-economy into a socialist world order. [What happened to that as our goal… hum?… We seem to have lost track of that somewhere along the way… – P.S.] …If, however, we cease to accord strategic primacy to acquiring such state power within the interstate system, far more becomes historically possible and thereby, within the domain of historically realistic alternatives, theoretically possible. It would seem a dubious theoretical tenet to assert that national liberation, in its successive occurrences, is in any way a necessary condition of the revolutionary transformation of the world-economy. It is surely indefensible to claim it as a sufficient condition.”

Our February 15, 2015 show audio-files and text are posted at: “The February 15, 2015 Show , which includes excerpts from John Boswell’s The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance… while I determine how best to maintain the momentum of our discussions. It includes the following urging as relates to ‘strategy’, which I hope you will consider deeply:

…and therein lay the success of hidden ‘power’… they operate clandestine… and ‘the media’ is designed to refuse the claims of its victims… and so ‘power’ can stay hidden… “Sweet…” I’m sure they think… a ruse they can use… ad infinitum… Except… despite the historical success of its central strategy… ‘power’ today is wading into uncharted waters… hence the danger of this moment… because surrendering their grandiose fantasies… is not in the mental-makeup… of global-state-statesmen… On ‘the news’ this week I heard that the head of the US Navy is ‘requesting’ use of ‘rail guns’ [if I got that name right…] on their vessels: weapons that use electromagnetic force… it’s not difficult to see… that the ‘same-family-weapons’ that they’ve designed to use against us… when applied clandestine… ends our ability to dissent… Given this ‘historical reality’… I’m putting this question out there: are there means for detecting and documenting the presence of these waves… or pulses… designed to cause harm… to interfere with biological electrical systems… and how can we get this detection means in the hands of folks being targeted? And then… as to the way in – because we need this ‘way in’… to re-claiming our thought process… into a mindset for getting free… of thinking… and taking action… globally – consider this: the Longshoremen have been our staunchest allies globally… over the course of recent ‘class’-history… Let’s plan and organize and call… a one-day Global General Strike in support of them… the Longshoremen… striking all up and down the West Coast US… Global-action is how ‘power’ breaks us… global-action is necessarily the means for our getting free… because the alternative… is the end of dissent… and we must not allow… that descent.

As always… thank you for your patience… Pamela

The Raven: “Then [Kropotkin] says… well, that could be your response… or: “… Or, on the other hand, the dreams of your youth will become the firm convictions of your mature age. You will wish to have wide, human education for all, in school and out of school. And seeing that this is impossible in existing conditions, you will attack the very foundations of bourgeois society. Then discharged as you will be by the board of education, you will leave your school and come among us and be of us…” So… this is ‘authentic talk’… He’s saying that there is no way to ‘fix this’… there simply isn’t. And so he concludes his essay ‘An Appeal to the Young’ by saying: “You stop me at last! ‘What the devil!’ you say. ‘But if abstract science is a luxury and practice of medicine mere chicane; if law spells injustice, and mechanical invention is but a means of robbery; if the school, at variance with the wisdom of the ‘practical man,’ is sure to be overcome, and art without the revolutionary idea can only degenerate, what remains for me to do?’ A vast and most enthralling task, a work in which your action will be in complete harmony with your conscience, an undertaking capable of rousing the noblest and most vigorous natures. What work? I will now tell you. Two courses are open to you. You can either tamper for ever with your conscience and finish one day by saying ‘Humanity can go to the devil as long as I am enjoying every pleasure to the full and so long as the people are foolish enough to let me do so.’ Or else you will join the ranks of the socialists and work with them for the complete transformation of society. Such is the necessary result of the analysis we have made. Such is the logical conclusion at which every intelligent being must arrive provided he judge impartially the things he sees around him, and disregard the sophisms suggested to him by his middle-class education and the interested views of his friends. Having once reached this conclusion, the question which arises is ‘what is to be done?’ The answer is easy. Quit the environment in which you are placed and in which it is customary to speak of the workers as a lot of brutes; go among the people, and the question will solve itself.” So… he wrote these words one hundred and thirty years ago… I’m saying something very similar. What is ‘progress’? I agree with Nikola Tesla… and I agree with Kropotkin… that ‘progress’ happens as we start implementing that advice… of Petr Kropotkin’s… on a world-scale: we go among each other. And… in fact… what Kropotkin also says is that… we must come to a common understanding with our fellows… and form societies… and know that this has to happen across nation… So what we need to know has already been figured out… the question is how do we do it… and in the discussion that we hear from ‘the pundits’… that’s never addressed… See… those who honestly wanted our freedom as human beings… our generalized human freedom… are practical beings. They didn’t shirk their responsibility to address the actual human conditions that we’re living in… and so they came to the logical conclusion (as Kropotkin said…) that you can’t do this in the existing institutions… you can’t… and so what do you do? And [so the question becomes…] do you want your beliefs and your behavior to coincide? [Spoken word is from our September 30, 2012 radio broadcast. This is Part 5.]

D-Way: “We’re talking today about “responsibility to resist ‘power’”… Very interesting quote by Kropotkin… and I agree the solution is very simple… yet it is… arguably what people are most afraid of: to see each other… to talk to each other… ‘Power’ has done an excellent job of conditioning us… of keeping us atomized in boxes… and that conditioning is very powerful… When you’re hearing these discussions… and you’re hearing: ‘if you do the analysis… we come to the conclusion that ‘the system’ isn’t just these military-… or educational-… or political-… system… or ‘system-of-class-structures’… that the system is inside of us. And when people start to sit with that… and talk about it… it’s not to feel like that that is an attack on an individual being… saying that ‘the problem is you… and you need to fix you’… in fact… we… ” The Raven: “And I actually believe that those who have access to the airwaves… the ‘punditry’… have a really big responsibility to talk in authentic ways because that’s what turns us on… that’s what excites us…” D-Way: “So… why?… obviously those in the media who have a megaphone to numerous people… and who you would think would be grappling with the morality of the times right now – if you do the analysis you have a responsibility – so… why is that authentic conversation… truthful… earth-based… discussions… why are they not happening more on the airwaves?… it seems like times are getting harder – The Raven… you say that the people [you speak with] on the street… more and more… are saying, ‘yeah, we’re in a totalitarian state right now… this is a reality…’ So… why… when you turn on KPFA… even on the progressive media… why are you not hearing an earth-based discussion? I mean… I understand the pressures of trying to keep that conversation under wraps… But… more and more I feel like that would be a hard task to try and control that conversation. And people on the Left… on KPFA and all those worlds… is it just that they’re being tugged by ‘power’?… that they have bosses and can’t say certain things because that would shut down their radio show… or whatever it is that they’re putting out there?… I don’t quite understand why the analysis that I hear on the radio isn’t… ‘streety’… isn’t earth-based… isn’t something that really, truly reflects what is going on? For One… OK… so why aren’t we hearing it on the radio… on the airwaves… and Two… if we’re not… then… let’s do it ourselves… and I think that’s where we’re coming in with what we’re trying to do… is to create the conversation for ourselves… because… if we are the most interesting people… then why are we giving our power… our thought… over to these ‘medias of distraction of thought’?” [Spoken word is from our September 30, 2012 radio broadcast. This is Part 6.]

–––

“It’s time for us… we-the-global-people… to have our global dialogue between ‘Authority’ and ‘Freedom’…. For millennia… only ‘Authority’ has had a chance to speak… because ‘Freedom’… i.e. honoring self-creation… trusting good fellowship… has been scorned, slandered, derided and demeaned. And this happens before we’re old enough even to speak. Our authentic voices have been silenced and our memory of having had them… erased. Let us have our dialogue. There is a divide. It’s “which-side-are-you-on?” time… those of us who see… that with thought our souls are wrought… and that… in the words of Socrates… “where God is our teacher we all come to think alike…” …we but add to this that ‘God’ has many monikers… and each one means… ‘the earth’. In ancient times there was a goat that fed the infant Zeus without stint… and as reward its horn transformed into an endless abundance. We are that goat… our hands and minds and hearts together form that horn…. For centuries piled high we’ve held that horn out to the ‘statesmen’… the so-called ‘rulers’… and they’ve grown fat and proud… inventing stories of fancy to shroud the gift’s provenance… and pretended to themselves they were the source of it. This hubris has been going on so long… has bent the wealth of all the world to bolster its continuance… this hubris… until… we… the mighty source of all that ‘rule’ pretends to own… have fallen asleep – the grief… at what seems to be a betrayal without end or bottom… has been too much for our conscious minds to bear. But it’s time – we cannot sleep when oceans weep… when the soul of all humanity is falling lost into the deep… the Abyss… our ancestors of heart have prophesied this… of perilous times… when decisions must be made… sides chosen….” [Spoken word is from our June 8, 2014 radio broadcast.]

“He gives a quote from Disraeli that says, “Sensible men never tell…” well I believe that those who want to be rulers of all the rest of us take that advice very seriously… “Sensible men never tell…” What this means… is that there are hidden 'truths' that a very very few keep very close to the chest… they don't want us to know about them… 'us' meaning… 'the people'… and… irrespective… I'm arguing… of what the formal kind of ideology by which these men…primarily… legitimate their 'rule'… whether you call that 'democracy'… 'social democracy'… 'communism'… 'socialism' – whatever it's called… “Sensible men never tell…” [Spoken word is from a September, 2012 conversation.]

“…creative energy seeks its mate… We do this for each other… miracle… grace… call it what you will… it it the energy by which we reclaim our world… My love and gratitude to those who give it… is endless… We but need to realize it in the physical world of our creation… It's as if all the trials… all the lessons… of my life were preparation for this moment… helping me to come to be… to try to be… fit… fit for being company with… one with… a quality of love I didn't know existed… in the arms of which I place myself utterly… But the proof is in the doing.” [Spoken word is from our March 15, 2015 radio broadcast.]

“When the ‘Founding Fathers’ set in the prescriptive… codified history of the nation the people’s right to pursue happiness… they said “the right of ‘the people’…” not of ‘individual persons.’ Jomo Kenyatta… in our February 22, 2015 show… provided a vivid illustration of the process by which the determination of this… the state of our happiness… occurs: the people meet in groupings and discuss it. Meeting in groupings and discussing is how our thought develops itself (and included in this is our communion with the ancestors…) which is why global-state-statesmen – by which term I refer to those in ‘command positions’ who bear – carry around with them at all times – an unequivocal global commitment… to install their vision of ‘Perfection’… the Republic… a vision of rigid… fixed… ‘class’ divisions… in which their ‘rule’ has been made permanent… which is why global-state-statesmen insist on regulating it (…and more and more it's clear to me… that monitoring and regulating our conversations – the state… the quality of… our thinking – is the point [for 'power'] of nations… in a global 'class'-system… in order to keep us from unifying across them… across-nation…) the terms under which we meet in groups and discuss… what we want… for our future. They insist… these Plato’s Tribesmen… following their paterfamilias’ guidance… that each of us possess (are possessed by…) ‘leaders’… which is easily accomplished with a coerced-work system (jobs) in which our lives are atomized… and security non-existent… because scarcity has been manufactured for all of our means of existence – setting us up to battle (compete) with each other for a meager share of them.…” [Spoken word is from our March 15, 2015 radio broadcast.]

““Can there be a broad… popular… movement for 'soul-sufficiency'? But there must be… for us to achieve our freedom. What would it look like? How would we know it?… if not by its goals… if not by its representing for all the world?… i.e., 'soul-sufficiency' necessarily means a design tied to others all over the world… necessarily has a global cast… taking on the challenge of consciously composing… a 'global symphony'… of all our voices…” “Laws for creations, For strong artists and leaders, for fresh broods of teachers and perfect literats for America, For noble savans and coming musicians. All must have reference to the ensemble of the world, and the compact truth of the world, There shall be no subject too pronounced – all works shall illustrate the divine law of indirections. What do you suppose creation is? What do you suppose will satisfy the soul, except to walk free and own no superior? What do you suppose I would intimate to you in a hundred ways, but that man or woman is as good as God? And that there is no God any more divine than Yourself? And that that is what the oldest and newest myths finally mean? And that you or any one must approach creations through such laws?.…” [Spoken word quotes Walt Whitman… and is from our March 29, 2015 radio broadcast.]

[The spoken word of the following wordbeat is from the April 5, 2015 show:

“[Of the processes that stem… from 'capital's ongoing centralization…] the second and third… entail the redefinition of trajectories. For the de-nationalization of domestic labor forces suggests a fundamental change, on the part of the left, as to what “national” means…. To accomplish the reconception will entail a degree and kind of substantive and rhetorical inventiveness not presently in ascendance within prominent movements. And the third, the increasing salience of the gender question, entails… the further generalization, from the pauperization of women to the pauperization of people on a world-scale, that is precisely the change in consciousness the very effectiveness of the organizations in core zones may help to bring about, as part of world-scale movements that bypass and so subvert interstate arrangements.” (We're going to be thinking more about this… the suggestion that you can 'bypass and so subvert interstate arrangements…' and still keep intact the overall centralization of capital processes that are going on – or… in the terms being developed here… maintain the global-state-statesmen… the 'power'-guys… hidden 'power'. And we're also going to be pondering this whole issue of: How do we create a global consciousness of our shared purpose and objectives…) “The Outer – from the Inner… Derives its Magnitude – 'Tis Duke, or Dwarf, according… As is the Central Mood –” [I like the way she puts that… that sort of covers it all… 'the central mood': be that 'dangerous… unhealthy obsession…' or be that… 'life's longing for itself…' (nothing healthier than that…)][Spoken word is from our April 5, 2015 radio broadcast.]

[This is Part 7 of our “Moving Forward” series… revisiting the Waking Up Radio conversation of September 30, 2012:

“…and I think it's important for us to remember that while we have to struggle to the truth… because 'power' has a monopoly on the media… and always has… and in terms of how we can interconnect with each other… they know how critical… at least since Plato they've been very clear… that the power of thought is dangerous… and rulers know this… have known this… and because they can devote their lives to planning… ” “…you said 'the power of thought is dangerous' and I wanted to talk about that for a second… and make a distinction… The way I would phrase it is: 'the power of thought is powerful in conjunction with the sharing of ideas'… that if an individual says, 'I am free… I don't let the system control me…' that that is not an 'earth-based' assessment of what's going on… So: 'power of thought' in conjunction with 'the free-flow exchange of ideas'… with… as Kropotkin put it: 'going to the people'…” “Yes precisely… and in fact that ['going to the people'] is what the media is doing in a very 'efficient' way… because when Helen Caldicott or Col. Ann Wright says something like: 'the military trains people to become violent'… we are all… thinking that at the same time… so… it is a form of collective thinking… we're all thinking together… there isn't the exchange… that's the next step… that's how thought develops… And so the media is a critical piece in terms of speeding up the process… so that's why it has been obvious to 'power' for millennia how important is to control how thoughts get out… what thoughts get out… and particularly in this moment with these accelerated means – the speed with which things can get out – …it's a safe bet that they have been planning for this moment for decades if not centuries… the moment when the planet has been consumed to the degree that it can no longer adequately fund their game of 'supremacy'… and by 'fund' I mean 'fund our energy'… 'fund keeping us bought-off or complacent.' It's a global game of 'supremacy' they play which requires our unconscious complicity… And when you are in the 'end game'… which we are in… it is a very dangerous moment… So you can bet they have been thinking about… 'how do we neutralize the Pacifica Network'… 'how do we make sure that no rogue element advocating a mass movement to end wage work'… which is so incredibly obvious…” “If we talked to one another… and that's where I want to go with this: talking about the fears around responsibility…” [Spoken word is from our September 30, 2012 radio broadcast.]

[This is part of our “Moving Forward” series… revisiting the Waking Up Radio conversation of September 30, 2012:

“…at the very moment when our brothers and sisters in Egypt were using social media to get rid of a dictator… there was a group of young people in southern California who were using it to plan a pillow fight… ” “…Yeah…” [Spoken word is from our September 30, 2012 radio broadcast.]

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[Please listen again to some of our earlier thoughts on 'education':]

Practical solutions… guidance – guidance that reflects the actual circumstances of our lives – is precisely what we’ve been denied… and this is what makes our Good Three’s contribution so important… and no less so Kropotkin’s… whose words… built on here suggests this: that ‘power’ uses ‘education’ (under ‘class’) to provide the ‘objective evidence’ of ‘natural inequality’… and ‘science’ (including Marxist theory…) as the legitimating ideology (full-spectrum propaganda-coverage…) ‘Vetting’ of the media is made automatic by the “‘class’ education project”… and that the ‘education process’ alone ensures that only the thought-parameters established by ‘power’ are allowed to see the light of day… the airwaves… [From our February 22, 2015 show.]

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…the ‘class’-system is based on the assumption of ‘scarcity’(…because… if we think about it… if ‘knowledge’ is scarce… belongs to only a few… that can easily form the mental frame for ‘scarcity’ overall… because if we don't know what to do to preserve our own lives… reproduce ourselves… we are condemned to be slaves to Necessity…) – the belief that ‘there isn’t enough… stuff…’ and that we-the-people are not sufficient… and that we believe this… contrary to reality… because this is the substance of our ‘education’, both official and the unspoken ‘education’ embedded in our social relations… utterly dependent… And so… therefore… we also said… the flip-side of the story “The Elevation of The Few”… is our diminishment… in our own eyes. And truly… with this lens in our possession… the media-display becomes one long parade of illustration… of our conditioning to not see our own abundance. [From our January 25, 2015 show.]

“So all the various ways our numbers are systematically reduced… our numbers available to come to consensus… on the need to discuss what should be the world we live in – how do we make what we want… come to be… Because we in the U.S. have this codified right to 'pursue happiness'… and that is not an individual pursuit… they try when they put out their propaganda to frame it that way and make it seem loony… but… rather… it is in fact our right as a people to come together and collectively discuss: What does it mean… to 'pursue happiness'… if not to realize our inherent gifts… our right to grow our knowledge… as they do!… or as they think they do but as we do authentically… …our right as a people to pursue truth… We have the codified right to come together and discuss how we do that… as a collective… as a people… In a sense I'm asking the same question that our Academe Three are asking: How do we confront the dilemmas facing our ability to move on as a global humanity? How do we do that? Because we are… all of us global humans…living in a moment when the story has to change…” [From our February 1, 2015 show.]

[“151027powerisarapist.mp3”:]

“…what it’s lusting for is the end of our efforts to even try to be independent… the achievement of their deep longing that we will end all resistance… and become passionately ‘self-regulating’… eagerly offer our allegiance… (Doesn't that sound like the dynamic of the rapist?… Over the ages of 'class'… 'power' is 'power' is 'power'.) [Here's the relevant paragraph from that story of Lucian's that I bungled… called “Lucius the Ass”: “When we got back, we came upon the old woman dangling at the end of a cord from a rock; obviously she had been so terrified of what her masters would do to her for letting the girl get away that she hung herself and strangled to death. The bandits, admiring the crone's consideration for their feelings, cut her down and heaved her over the cliff, cord and all. Then they tied the girl up, left her inside, and sat down to dinner and a long session with the bottle.” (On the back of the collection of his satires it reads: “Lucian, born in Syria in the second century A.D., came to Greece at an early age and mastered its language and literature. He took up law, left it for public speaking, then turned to full-time writing… A master of the vivid scene, Lucian used his pungent style to ridicule the tyrants, prophets, waning gods, and hypocrite philosophers of his own day and the centuries preceding him.” [Selected Satires of Lucian, translated by Lionel Casson]) [From the April 13, 2014 Waking Up Radio show.]

[“raiseuplove.mp3”:]

“Facing fear… raise up love… raise up love… Facing fear… raise up love…” (Thandiwe's word-beat of Kate singing Coleen's song, posted to the November 15, 2015 Waking Up Radio show)

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For our April 17, 2016 show:

[“160413goalofpower.mp3”:]

“If the goal of 'power' is to privatize everything… obviously the goal of 'power' is to create scarcity. Period. It's very straight-forward… our reasoning powers lead us to the truth… because it's obvious when you disregard the conditioning… the deep propaganda… and use your own reason… as all of our ancestors have been telling us…” [From the Waking Up Radio show of November 25, 2012]

[“150503rateofprofitfalls.mp3”:]

But here's the catch that caught Marx's eye: that because there's a 'relative surplus' of us… this surplus of us grows “proportionately to the advances made by capitalist production not because the productiveness of social labour decreases, but because it increases…” […automation… 'electronification' of processes… instantaneous communication and flow of information… which to acquire converted huge amounts of the earth into physical things and money (financialization)… – and as all that 'social labor' increases… 'power' don't need us no more… it stole our substance and now it's time ('power' believes…) to say “bye… see ya… don't need ya…” Alright… so what does 'power' do? Now… Marx could see far but he couldn't see as far as into the diseased souls of these guys… plug in the technology… and you have a lot of room for a lot of misanthropy… a lot of genocide… a lot of blood-flow… a lot of phony-crises… and 'natural disasters'…

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For our August 7, 2016 Show:

[“150111rulebyhidingtruth.mp3”:]

“And so a clearer… and more inclusive and practical (and so more accurate…) version of that De Tocqueville quote I cite in Unpacking ‘Democracy’ – “if you can get ‘the many’ chasing money… it leaves the few who play the higher stakes of ‘power’ freer to pursue their ambition…” – would be: “…if you can get the vast majority stuck in simply surviving (or ‘getting things done’… ‘accomplishment’…) it leaves the infinitesimal few freer to pursue their global game of ‘supremacy’ – the pursuit of ‘Knowledge Infinite.’” Diana Spearman’s book, Modern Dictatorship (excerpts and discussion of which can be found both in Palmers’ Chat – see its Table of Contents – and in Revealing Division – free pdfs available on the 'Tools' page) is helpful for understanding this underlying motive of ‘power’. The philosopher-king-statesmen reason that if they can own / control ‘all’ the ‘Knowledge’ – and particularly the ‘knowledge’ of how to kill us (see the January 26th, 2014 show… on the page: “Miklos Nyiszli’s Lessons On Class”) – then their ‘supremacy’ can never be challenged. It is time to confront Du Bois’ question: what price do we place on freedom?… Are we ready to begin organizing these discussions?” [Spoken word is from the Waking Up Radio Show of January 11, 2015 – (also posted to “My Son’s Beats – Spoken Word)”]

[“160807secretkillingthetrumpcard.mp3”: the word-beat…]

The Raven: So keep in mind… this is the objective of the 'power'-guys… they've been using that book the Republic for the last two hundred and fifty years… in order to create a world of fixed unchanging 'class' divisions… what Plato wanted and thought could never happen… They want to achieve his vision for him… they think this is an honorable mission that they're on… D-Way: Why did Plato think it couldn't happen? The Raven: Because people want to be free… and that unless you could make the entire world obedient… there's always gonna be people who are free…and who come in and… just like Jesus… just like all prophets of 'class'… they spread sedition in the sense of: “We're born free… look at the ravens… look at the birds… they don't bow down to nobody… what's wrong with you people? We're here to be free… now to kowtow and kiss ass…” Plato knew that… we're born free… that's want we want to be… So… he knew… you have to breed people to accept their position… And then people like Prince come along and write “Slave” on their cheek… what are you going to do with them? So they wanted to breed us obedient… and you can only do that if you control the entire world… Or we're gonna look over and see… “Well look at those Haitians they got their freedom… they don't bow down to nobody…” “Well… we just create an under-ocean earthquake… Two hundred thousand dead… Bam!… Oh Not enough dead?… Let's infect them with cholera…” So you see the ability to kill anybody… secretly… who doesn't obey… is the supreme check on disobedience… D-Way: Trump card.The Raven: Trump card. [(Wordbeat of Part 5 of our No-Stream Fill-in Waking Up Radio show of August 7, 2016]

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Nascence to End Work

Waking Up Radio Theme

“Berkeley Liberation Radio Stream”

“Berkeley Liberation Radio Stream” (alternate)

“Embracing Global Goals, Scope and Action: Becoming Global Actors… Claiming the ‘All’”

“My Son's Beats… WUR Spoken Word-Beats”

“Is it really just ‘the state’… that’s robbing our children of their youth… or is it also ‘the state in us’?…”

“We are asserting our common ownership of the earth… and as soon as we make our own bodies part of that goal… as soon as we include our bodies in that goal consciously… we’ll be on our way home… to freedom…”

“Hannah Arendt had it wrong… it’s not evil that’s ‘banal’… it’s ‘obedience’… of ‘power’…”

“Sisters and Brothers: I think we should talk continuously… perhaps in ‘Meet-Ups’… about the ‘opposite’ of ‘power’…”

“…and I have to say… it has occurred to me more than once… that their fantasy… these Plato’s Tribesmen… is to replace those gods on Mount Olympus… with themselves: the roar of their drones overhead… that are to inspire fear and dread…”

“…all we need to regenerate hopeful energy… is a vision… a view… of a free future… how can we move on as a species if the vast majority are not allowed to develop their gifts?… not allowed… to think…”

“Castles in the Air” is in honor of the people of Hong Kong:

The audio-blog (below)… from our July 14, 2013 show… refers to events a year ago… and still in progress…

Sisters and Brothers: The word-beats that follow are from the conversation that D-Way and I had during our September 30, 2012 Waking Up Radio show. They are a multi-part series on ‘Moving Forward’:

Sisters and Brothers: The word-beat below continues the conversation that D-Way and I had during our September 30, 2012 Waking Up Radio show. This is Part 4 of a multi [probably 10]-part series on ‘Moving Forward’:

From Waking Up Radio show of December 21, 2014:

As always… thank you for your patience… Pamela

[The spoken word of the following wordbeat is from the April 5, 2015 show:

[This is Part 7 of our “Moving Forward” series… revisiting the Waking Up Radio conversation of September 30, 2012:

[This is part of our “Moving Forward” series… revisiting the Waking Up Radio conversation of September 30, 2012:

“…at the very moment when our brothers and sisters in Egypt were using social media to get rid of a dictator… there was a group of young people in southern California who were using it to plan a pillow fight… ” “…Yeah…” [Spoken word is from our September 30, 2012 radio broadcast.]

“Facing fear… raise up love… raise up love… Facing fear… raise up love…” (Thandiwe's word-beat of Kate singing Coleen's song, posted to the November 15, 2015 Waking Up Radio show)

For our April 17, 2016 show:

[“150503rateofprofitfalls.mp3”:]

For our August 7, 2016 Show:

Thandiwe's Word:

Waking Up Radio Theme