The Nascence to End Work ...“The NEW”:
“Nascence” means “birth.” To birth a movement to end work is the work of The NEW.
We have to be made commodities before anything else can, and we have to be made whole again before the earth can. (From: Seeing The Communal Alternative.) "Gross disparities in access to the goodies" is the "planetary imbalance" I'm waiting for all the environmentalists to confront.
05.10.13: Brothers and Sisters… Valuing ourselves and valuing the earth is the same thing. Once we refuse to sacrifice ourselves, we'll no longer tolerate the sacrifice of our earth… in the name of abstractions that never were…. I hope in this song you'll recognize yourself: Never Was A Child...
06.21.12: Please listen to media analysis and discussion of issues critical for society-redesign… live online at 104.1 FM Berkeley Liberation Radio Sunday mornings at 9:00 P.S.T. Starting to discuss disallowed thoughts ...is the only way our thought develops...
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December 21, 2013: Brothers and Sisters… * “please see my note below…”
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…and… * “please see December 24, 2013 note below…” …and… * “January 2, 2014 note below…” …and… * “January 8, 2014 note below…” …and… * “January 15, 2014 note below…”and… * “January 23, 2014 note below…” and… * “January 27, 2014 note below…” and… * “February 3, 2014 note below…” and… * “February 12, 2014 note below…” and… * “February 23, 2014 note below…” and… * “February 26, 2014 note below…” and… * “March 6, 2014 note below…” and… * “March 10, 2014 note below…” and… * “March 18, 2014 note below…” and… * “March 25, 2014 note below…” and… * “April 1, 2014 note below…” and… * “April 8, 2014 note below…” and… * “April 15, 2014 note below…” April 17, 2014 Update: Sisters and Brothers: This morning my Adobe CS4 Master Suite of programs… DreamWeaver… InDesign… the works… stopped working… So… if anyone can help… please get in touch… For the time being I'm… stuck… I won't be able to upload to this website. Pamela. P.S.: I'll put the text and audio files for the next few shows here, beginning with the April 20, 2014 show: Miklos Nyiszli's Lessons on Class (temporary page) and hope I re-acquire DreamWeaver soon.
And just uploaded 01.26.14: “Founding & Realizing A Test Site – not modeled on ‘democracy’… but on freedom – Premised On “Leisure IS Happiness…” (pdf file) [in development…]
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…so please download and share the most recent volume of our “Reclaiming Our Leadership: Waking Up Radio Conversations (Vol. 3)”… which include the initial drafts of some of our upcoming shows: Volume 3 includes the November 10 - December 8, 2013 shows: “Reclaiming Our Leadership: Waking Up Radio Conversations (Vol. 3)” (pdf file)
11.25.13… Sisters and brothers: Please download and share: “Miklos Nyiszli’s Lessons on ‘Class’” (pdf file)… which includes my commentary on his book… Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account… which we will be reading and discussing on the December 15 through 29, 2013 shows…. I will update the pdf periodically. This first one covers the first seven chapters. Also: our discussion will begin with an excerpt (included in the pdf and here on our Miklos Nyiszli page) from Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood by Fatima Mernissi… who was born in a harem in 1940 in Fez, Morocco. [As of 04.07.14: most recent update of the pdf for this page is through Ch. XXVI – 308 pages, 1.8 MB – and includes a transcipt for the April 6, 2014 show…]
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11.05.13… Sisters and brothers: please download and share the pdfs of the transcripts of recent Waking Up Radio Shows. Volume 1 contains the June 16 - August 25, 2013 shows, and Volume 2 includes the September 1 - November 3, 2013 shows:
(…and just uploaded 02.11.14 an expanded version of Volume 1 (includes now the June 16, 2013 show): “Reclaiming Our Leadership: Waking Up Radio Conversations (Vol. 1)” (pdf file) [As of 03.21.14: most recent update of the pdf for this page is 202 pages, 1.34 MB] and:
“Reclaiming Our Leadership: Waking Up Radio Conversations (Vol. 2)” (pdf file)
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11.10.13… Sisters and brothers: When I got the recorder home that I use to record shows I found, after downloading the file, that it had been wiped clean. Don't know how such a thing is done but… in any case… I will re-record key bits from home… sorry to not be able to put up the actual show.
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* December 21, 2013: Brothers and Sisters…
The U.S. Declaration of Independence has established that the people’s right to pursue happiness supercedes the ‘right’ of the state to exist. The state serves at our pleasure… we don’t serve at its. Once we understand that ‘politics’ is about consolidating and compelling human energy… then we can see… that we’re moving to a time beyond ‘politics’… beyond the ‘polity’… beyond ‘the state’… because ‘the state’ not just inhibits… but destroys… our humanity… and therefore our ability to make happiness our priority.
This past week I was listening to a call-in radio discussion of government surveillance and the Edward Snowden revelations about NSA spying… and a couple of different callers asked, “Was Snowden patriotic in revealing state secrets?” In response a subsequent listener said, “Why do people care whether Snowden was ‘patriotic’ or not? The German people under the Nazis were ‘patriotic’.”
And that’s a really important point – and perhaps the best way in to our discussion of ‘the state’… and the question of its ‘legitimacy.’ The example of Nazi Germany makes it clear that ‘patriotism’ is not our standard for being healthy humans… which – being healthy humans – I would argue… is about meeting our responsibility to each other and to the earth (irrespective of divisions manufactured by statesmen…) by furthering the health of both. And if ‘patriotism’ isn’t the standard by which we judge whether we are meeting this responsibility… what is? From whence the standards by which we withstand the pressure of false authority?… false standards – from whence the authentic standards that enable us to stand up to a state and call it by its name: “illegitimate” – if not the earth? What deserves our eternal allegiance… if not the earth… if not life… if not good fellowship with all our relations… and respect for each others’ inherent freedom… and for our devotion to ‘planting’ the tools that further it?
Another way into this discussion of “what legitimates authority?” is through the lens of ‘destination’… of ‘tendency’… of “what future do we want?”… as the practices we allow to accrue… build… over time… create lasting effects… seemingly independent of human action. De Tocqueville pointed this out while discussing the effect of establishing patterns of accumulation – or of impeding such patterns. We’ll be looking more closely at his words as we consider the experience of Auschwitz. I will be making the point that the global economy is accomplishing what Auschwitz set out to do (in its own mind): “identify (and milk) the so-called ‘best’… and destroy the rest…” either slowly or quickly… either way our lives become nullities in terms of self-creation… but this is true of all under class… even the intentionally ‘privileged’ ones.
Using Tesla’s analogy about Edison helps to clarify the comparison. Tesla wrote:
If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor. (Nikola Tesla)
‘Auschwitz’ is “sifting the haystack”… ‘the global economy’ reflects Tesla’s method… in taking De Tocqueville’s ‘advice’… his advice (essentially) to… as we were told ad nauseam in the trades: “work smarter, not harder.”
What does “pursue happiness” mean… if not “listen to our bodies”?… to their longing to be free… to breathe clean… to rest without worry or stress… because the problem of ‘necessity’ has been put to rest by the establishment of abundance… not just of food and shelter… but of time… of leisure… of access to our earth-given gifts… and to our capacities of leadership.
In thinking about Miklos’ greatness… his quality of courage that is also supremely graceful… I thought, “yes, but we are all great… we just need to know “what’s up”… what we’re faced with… in order to decide to use it… our greatness.”
We must do this… for humanity itself to exist.
The state is not more important than us… we have the right to pursue happiness.
Join us tomorrow, Sunday, December 22, 2013, Waking Up Radio, as we begin discussing “Miklos Nyiszli’s Lessons On Class”.
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* December 24, 2013: Sisters and brothers…
Listening this week to a couple guys hawking their book about so-called ‘Big Data’ – propagandists busily telling us what our future will be… (i.e. it will supposedly be the living installation of the film Minority Report…) because… apparently… ‘science’ so decrees – I found myself feeling nostalgic for a long-gone-for-reasons-unknown radio program called “Ask Mr. Science” (I find reason to miss it daily… daily we’re bombarded with the ‘science-says-so’ con… A few days ago I heard it reported that ‘science’ has ‘proven’ that “laughter is bad for you…” and just today a pundit was proclaiming that the responsibility for earth-raping lay not with ‘power’ but with our ‘over-population.’ For this pundit it was literally easier to imagine a world in which there were no people [he’d written a book on the subject] than a world in which the people are free… have full ownership of our bodies… and can sit around and think like he. For others it’s easier to imagine ocean-death… than a world in which we’re out of harness – this should show us the depths of our disengagement from our own bodies. ‘Power’ is working “science-says-so” hard… it may not be the best play in their propaganda playbook… but it sure seems they find it to be the most needed one – along with homophobia… and religion… and the wage divide itself… tied to ‘merit-rises’.) Anyway these ‘Big Data’ guys were quite energetically bludgeoning our hope… and – as is usually the case with propagandists – taking that ‘Managers’ Stance’… saying stuff like… “the moral challenge will be figuring out what we will do with folks who we know are disposed to commit crimes…” while the host nodded sanguinely… eagerly going along… with the con – sad display. So… whether the subject is controlling our supposed ‘bad genes’ or our fertility… ‘we’… must be ‘managed.’
It is this ‘Managers’ Stance’ that is used to woo youth… the ‘Big Seduction’ placed to lure them into complicity with ‘power’… it’s the street-wise… low-budget-size… ‘philosopher-statesmen’ – that Plato-play effective then… effective today… because ‘class’ is ‘class’ is ‘class’…
…which means that both ‘the economy’ and ‘the polity’ are… at base… about marshalling (and controlling…) human energy.
But the ancestors, the earth, and each other… our sisters and brothers… have other plans for us… and are dropping us breadcrumbs… and leading us home.
Brothers and sisters, once we have hopefully absorbed every word Miklos at such tremendous cost brought us… we will be turning to… full-facing… our future freedom… attempting to make concrete in our minds its broad outlines… in order to keep it in view as we steadily move to it.
These are my initial thoughts… which I’ll transfer over to a page I’m calling: Founding & Realizing A Test Site – not modeled on ‘democracy’… but on freedom – Premised On “Leisure IS Happiness… :
In this space we’ll probably include a number of thought-experiments like: “a lot of wars were fought over spices… so people must really like them… how then will we get them… in our freedom?”… and then take other contentious things… like energy… and ask: “how do we do self- (not ‘statesmen’) –created ‘village self-sufficiency’ – as a global humanity?”
And we’ll be asking our brothers who want to control women’s energy: “how much do you want to be free?” Because the end of class means the end of all ranking… depends on the end of ‘privilege’… on the end of ‘the difference’ as Fatima’s mother put it… on the end of “‘in’ and ‘out’”… of “the two worlds”… as Virginia put it…. So, again… “how much do we want to be free?” is the question we must broach with each other… which is acknowledging that it is when we accept the privilege the state extends – parental privilege… education privilege… income privilege… gender and sexual orientation privilege… religious privilege – that we most manifest the state. States extend these privileges for obvious reasons.
Pure Happenstance
In Blog 50: “Wading Into The Muck Of State”, I noted that our under-siege-but-yet-surviving communal legacy called ‘The Library’ had unfailingly provided the ‘breakthrough breadcrumbs’ leading me home… brought the ancestors needed… the missing pieces… to fit into the puzzle of our containment under class. The pieces all seemed custom-fit for… the particular place (questions) I was stuck in.
Well… a few weeks ago it gave me such a gift… I’m still pondering it… and will be for a while yet… so precisely fit for where we are now in our process.
It gave me De Tocqueville’s Democracy In America, Vol. 1 – which is both painting clearly our needed picture of ‘democracy’ itself… and showing the seeds of which the U.S. was founded.
[Continued at “Miklos Nyiszli’s Lessons On Class”… Under “December 29.”]
Please tune in Waking Up Radio this Sunday, December 29, 2013, as we continue reading and discussing “Miklos Nyiszli’s Lessons On Class”.
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* January 2, 2014: Sisters and brothers…
In attempting to think through the key qualities of ‘governance in freedom’ that would distinguish it from the existing forms under class… I kept running up against the fact that there are key conversations that we need to be having… which is why I stress so much the propagandistic role the punditry plays – necessarily… because they depend on the wage – because they collaborate with ‘power’s determination to exclude these conversations from the public discourse. It’s a strategy of containment that works because of our atomization. We have no reality-check for our own thought-process except the official voices that ‘power’ permits (sanctions) – until, that is, we struggle against this pressure of sanctioned thought and create the alternative for ourselves.
The challenge is to develop this alternative way of looking at the conventions of class in the absence of a clear picture of an alternative (to class) future… as… the clamps on our thought is ‘total’. So how to find a way in… to an authentic thought process… one which would then allow us to see the approved discourse as propaganda?
And how to begin to develop the alternative vision of freedom when we have not thoroughly examined and rejected the thought ‘power’ sanctions?
Without the ‘certainty’ that tested discussion brings… it’s very difficult to see clearly the degree to which we’re being squeezed… to see the degree to which we aren’t free.
So… being able to see the propaganda depends on our having a picture of freedom… and a picture of freedom is deepened by seeing our ‘unfreedom’… by our recognizing how pervasive the chains… how tight the ‘thought-vise’ ‘power’ applies… and all the more so as the propaganda shows such craft. Here’s some examples I heard this week… all of which illustrate Bentham’s emphasis on controlling the lexicon: [Continued at “Miklos Nyiszli’s Lessons On Class”… Under “January 5, 2014” and discussed as well in: Founding & Realizing A Test Site – not modeled on ‘democracy’… but on freedom – Premised On “Leisure IS Happiness…]
Please tune in Waking Up Radio this Sunday, January 5, 2014, as we continue reading and discussing “Miklos Nyiszli’s Lessons On Class”.
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* January 8, 2014: Sisters and brothers…
January 8th, 2014: Sisters and brothers…
Pondering… particularly the words from last week’s show: “‘power’ wants to control the so-called ‘knowledge resources’ of the world… which means they must control the so-called ‘grunt work’ of the world…” – the reality that there can’t be exclusive ‘thinkers’ without debased exclusive ‘grunts’… and Auschwitz shows us that this is what they want…
…when we consider the aims of Auschwitz…
…the stronger the sense…
…that we are living…
…‘Auschwitz - high-tech’…
…Auschwitz by other means….
(…with its media-manipulating enforced silence about ‘weather machines’… and wave-warping… haarp-stringing… technology wet-dreaming means of distancing themselves from their own misanthropic impulses… their need to rid the earth of all challenge to its authority…. And can we please… or rather… speaking to the Left punditry… please stop doing the propaganda-disseminating for ‘power’… megaphoning the ‘bad-cop’ supposed ‘climate-change deniers’… [try to recall that these guys hide… and work behind scenes… so the bombast they put out is designed to serve their larger dramatic (ideological) purposes… which feature… most prominently… conning us into seeing austerity as a patriotic… as well as earth-treasuring… duty…] and instead at least consider [out loud] the possibility that climate-change provides them… and their demonic devices… with plausible deniability.)
It’s search… obsession… with ‘Perfection’ is precisely what all states profess…
…putting screws to ‘their’ people in order to…
…supposedly… or so the story goes…
…identify… and privilege… ‘the best’…
If the goal is to be ‘the best’…
…and the state is the driver of that process…
…then…
…it must be the driver of us….
Is this what we want? To establish on earth… ‘Mind’-Reified?… the pure distillate itself?… or… rather… all of us pretending that such a thing exists… and that ‘states’ make it?
And listening to an interview with a man from the Workers Rights Consortium this week, describing the painful price the Cambodian state is exacting from Cambodians demanding more from life than ‘beat-down-status’… brought this:
…as we ponder the Third Reich’s voracious appetite for the clothes and shoes ‘manufactured’ in its extermination camps… in order to ‘feed’ ‘its’ people… using them to intentionally privilege ‘its’ people… – they were… just like the Cambodian ‘statesmen’ “keeping ‘production costs’ at an absolute minimum…” just as the largest retailers (The Gap and Wal-Mart) demand of Cambodia… –
…let’s ponder too… what to do…: [Continued at “Miklos Nyiszli’s Lessons On Class”… Under “January 12, 2014” and discussed as well in: Founding & Realizing A Test Site – not modeled on ‘democracy’… but on freedom – Premised On “Leisure IS Happiness…]
Please tune in Waking Up Radio this Sunday, January 12, 2014, as we continue reading and discussing “Miklos Nyiszli’s Lessons On Class”.
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* January 15, 2014: Sisters and brothers…
January 15th, 2014: Sisters and brothers… more forthcoming… but to start… I have “Ten Questions for Richard Wolff”
Sisters and brothers… just heard a ‘news’ report that ‘power’ uses radio wave technology to plant surveillance software on computers globally… and if we don’t think they’re also using that technology as a weapon – using Nikola Tesla’s research on the effects of very low frequencies on the heart – we’re deluding ourselves. And here in the U.S…. they don’t have to install transmitters… they have ‘smart meters’. Miklos counted up the ways they kill us… why aren’t we?
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If you would know the full adult… De Tocqueville tells us… you must watch the infant in his mother’s arms… and if you would know the nation… you must examine its infancy as well, he says. But let’s go deeper and say… that if we really want to understand the nation’s prejudices and biases… we must look at its ‘genetic predisposition’… in class….
Class is the root of the horrors we cope with… and when our divisions are given center stage by the media we must remember whose behind them… and stand visibly with our brothers and sisters… targeted by the state… whether its gays and lesbians in Nigeria or Russia… or the people’s militias in Mexico… fighting the drug cartels.
(…and never forget: ‘power’ will shine its garish light of wrong on sycophantic outrage…
…and… there’s a reason they get those book deals…
…and film deals… I believe we have to view their boosts of division front and center before our eyes from the perspective of the practical requirements of ‘rule’… of ‘power’ – and a start in this would be acknowledging that it exists – and consider the effect on our unity of these offerings…. Our betrayal of each other is always at the behest of ‘power’… if a film or a ‘training’ focus on us as the source of the problem… and the malevolence behind scenes it ignores… it’s part of ‘power’s plan… pure and simple. They want our eyes off them… which we must never do for an instant… knowing their intentions for us are malevolent… not for an instant… except… we replace their plan with one of our own invention… re-invention… return… reverse… – to freedom…)
…if a pundit tells us his ‘solution’ is a ‘new’ way to make the best of it… we must ask… “why?… why should we settle?…” (this is what my “Ten Questions for Richard Wolff” boil down to…) and not stop until we have our answers…
…because if pressed that pundit will ultimately say… “‘we’ (meaning he and ‘power’…) ‘we’ require you to work so that we can continue our ‘research’… ‘Thought’ requires the brutalization of humanity… is what this answer says… for centuries and centuries under the regime of class… we’ve worked… and worked… and worked…
– because you asked us to… and we are a cooperative species… but look where your unending appetite for our bodies leads… look!… what hustled and overworked and overwhelmed silence has meant… not just to our issuance… but to all existence….
Brothers and sisters… this demented and irreverent system of rank… of boxes… of rating us according to our use to the state… of false quantification and division… must end…
…and it’s time for us to refuse to go along for the ride…
…it’s time for us to reclaim responsibility for our own lives.
And this is an aside… but I must say… that for centuries… with their increased level of organization and conscious global planning… these sad children – ‘power’ – have deluded themselves into thinking that the mere fact that they know what’s going on – because the malevolent devices being implemented are of their invention – and we don’t… means they’re ‘smarter’… and this delusion is fed daily as they find amusement in our confusion….
To stack the deck… rig the game… and then delight in ‘winning’…
…is a child’s play…
…no… an abandoned-child’s play…
Please tune in Waking Up Radio this Sunday, January 19, 2014, as we continue reading and discussing “Miklos Nyiszli’s Lessons On Class”.
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* for the January 26, 2014 show: Sisters and brothers…
The man forced open my busted car door… thrust his head and shoulders in… (and whether the man was sheepdog… paid… or authentic… is irrelevant…) and with his face close to mine screamed, “I’d like to kill you all… all of you vagrants…” And the rant against vagrants worked… because the officer who came was more concerned… that I’d parked against a recycle bin… than that before us stood a man who wanted to kill all of us ‘vagrants’. That’s the mindset that gave us Auschwitz… both the officer’s and this man’s (whether real… or planted… and… never doubt for a minute… while statesmen (and whether ‘out’ or shadow… is irrelevant…) ‘rule’… that on-going all around us lives… The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It’s very insidious. Who’s real? Who isn’t? We need a world in which truth lives.
Brothers and sisters: All we’re asking for is a choice… and the power to choose… we are the streets of Kiev… of Caracas… of Suiz… trying to rise above… vicious state repression – and ‘patronage’. I heard one woman put it succinctly: “We want to choose our own destiny… we want dignity…” We want a choice… and there’s a deeper longing she’s tapping into… that’s not about a choice between Moscow or EU… but rather a choice between being subjects or free… Founding & Realizing A Test Site – not modeled on ‘democracy’… but on freedom – Premised On “Leisure IS Happiness… is saying… just as she is… “Why can’t we have a choice? We don’t want to be railroaded – herded – anymore. We want to choose our own destiny.”
The U.S. State gifted 7% of ‘its’ land to the railroads… straight-up gift… gratis…. Why are we less important?… when we’re designing a whole new society… one fit for life… that exists beyond manufactured ‘scarcity’.
January 23, 2014: Sisters and Brothers…
Auschwitz… an aberration? Really? Then how is it Charlotte could castigate it so clearly?
Oh, lovers of power! Oh, mitred aspirants for this world’s kingdoms! an hour will come, even to you, when it will be well for your hearts – pausing faint at each broken beat – that there is a Mercy beyond human compassions, a Love stronger than this strong death which even you must face, and before it, fall; a Charity more potent than any sin, even yours; a Pity which redeems worlds – nay, absolves priests. (Charlotte Bronte, Villette)
…and… need we add: “and philosopher-king-statesmen…?”
And how is it Popper could trace its roots to Plato (at least as its most conscious propagandist…) and yet we… so determinedly it seems… continue unable to see it (as a broad generality)? What does this tell us about our ‘education’… our training… if not that its central objective is to prevent our questioning ‘class’? …and how deeply in our psyches it plants the false sense that it is legitimate?
The page Founding & Realizing A Test Site – not modeled on ‘democracy’… but on freedom – Premised On “Leisure IS Happiness…is attempting to elucidate this… to explain how the terms (we are given) themselves constrain… control… construct… us… and therefore how it is that we are brought to see as ‘normal’… patent insanity.
The society of Auschwitz is an exact replica of this one we are living this moment… in which certain people’s deaths… and a certain number of deaths… are accepted… the difference being that the murderer’s hand is kept hidden… and so we can’t even begin to count his methods… as Miklos did. ‘Power’ hides by physically atomizing us (think of the successive layers of fragmentation attendant on our domiciling…) ‘power’ hides by fragmenting us into ‘functions’… ‘power’ hides by giving us the very thoughts we think – silencing the soul by these means – propaganda piped in… and whether by the ‘progressive’ or ‘conservative’ media is irrelevant… for the fundamental terms of our containment are not questioned.
As ‘creatures of illusion’ (as Virginia Woolf termed us…) atomization is all that is required… so long as the propaganda gets piped in… and we’re denied the earth for reference… then alternatives simply never occur to us…
…we are effectively controlled by being kept dreaming the dreams of those in ‘authority’…
…we say ‘we’ when we mean ‘the state’ because we have no self-determined ‘we’… and we are a social species… and so we need some ‘we’… to keep our sanity….
‘Power’ knows this… and can create and sequentially provide our ‘we’s… our state-sanctioned boxes for ameliorating the isolation… in which we are marched through life until our appointed hour arrives….
If we don’t see the piles of bodies… then… they hardly exist, do they?… and can’t upset the illusions piped-in.
The terms… the rules… the law… dictate… and we adjust to their ‘requirements’… and never peer beneath the skirts… behind the scenes… to see the hidden hand… we can’t even acknowledge among ourselves that it exists… as Miklos and his fellow captives can. Our noses are bent to our carrots.
The pretense of normalcy when we have no ability to speak the truth… or hear it spoken… destroys our humanity… for our bodies know ‘performance’ is not truth… and if truth is not honored… then… it must be irrelevant… and so nothing matters… nothing has meaning… and we fall asleep….
When we are prevented from using our self-directed Reason… we are made structurally unable to help each other… as any significant attempt at a spiritual exchange must be mediated by the state… and any significant attempt at a material exchange must be mediated by the market. This compartmentalization and fragmentation of human-social-wholeness into functions determined by ‘power’ means we are as structurally powerless to help each other… as the kommandos and other prisoners of Auschwitz. And for pundits to claim to be mystified by our alleged myopia… while they pretend they don’t see the loops of chain encircling our knees… is a depraved capitulation to ‘power’.
(Today [01.24.14] I heard one seem to be amazed that a man she attempted to shame for helping to make cruise missiles could say, “I’m making money…” i.e. “are you going to provide for me and my family, lady?” Once pundits begin to stand shoulder to shoulder with us… by designing… with us… the alternative to this mess… she may encounter a different reaction.)
By fragmenting us into functions they accomplish Plato’s goal for the state: ‘no change’… because no forward-motion is possible… only a circular treading-in-place. Inter-dependent action… self-directed… required to accomplish anything… is effectively thwarted.
Miklos says that the worst of the criminals of ‘power’ are the ‘criminal doctors’… but… in essence… he’s saying ‘brains-for-hire’ are the worst criminals… the willingness to sell our reasoning capacities to the highest bidder… and… moreover… our willingness to hold our reason in check… at the starting gate… awaiting payment… and the track on which to run…. But on reflection… it seems to me he’s right in this… doctors – or ‘men and women of science’ – tell ‘power’ how to kill us… and that is the most clear-cut corruption.
Recently I spent time with a child – a friend of my grandchild’s… his age – who I hadn’t seen for some time… and the transformation from authenticity to performance had already started… in that moment from age two… to three…. It startled and saddened me… and then suddenly… I thought of that Donald Sutherland film – Invasion of the Body Snatchers – and in a whole new light… and I recalled the story Alice Miller told in Prisoners of Childhood… of how one of her patients had ceremoniously buried his soul… at age three years old… turned away from its loss… into performance – conformance – … and did what he was told.
Please tune in Waking Up Radio this Sunday, January 26, 2014, as we continue reading and discussing “Miklos Nyiszli’s Lessons On Class”.
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* for the February 2, 2014 show: Sisters and brothers…
Brothers and Sisters… Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account is an account of what happens when a whole society “does what it is told.” But that level of conformity is what we’re seeing when we arise… and when we close our eyes.
[…with this is mind… we’re going to look at the work of two guys… slickening the trap… that they hope will hold our Global Awakening back… in a new page I’m calling “‘Digital Athens’? Or Last-Ditch Drama?” I hope you’ll take a look at it…]
The people of Germany under the Nazis are no different from us… accepting our clothes and our shoes without asking questions… never demanding the slaughter’s dismantlement.
A virtual-child-on-the-loose in Boston was the excuse… to test how far along we have advanced… in our training in passive obedience… how deeply our bow to authority… and I think the results for ‘power’ have been pleasing.
“How do we regain our leadership capacities?” is the same question as “How do we reclaim our own reasoning capacities?” is the same question as “How do we regain our humanity?”
In Founding & Realizing A Test Site – not modeled on ‘democracy’… but on freedom – Premised On “Leisure IS Happiness… I’m trying to show how the circular trap of official state ideology works… in the case of ‘democracy’ (noting that it works the same with other state-legitimating ideologies…) hoping that if we can see that the only ‘progress’ being made… is toward tighter and tighter containment (although we are – with our ancestors’ help – peeling away the layers of the illusion…) that if we can see how we’re merely tail-chasing when we pursue the goal of ‘improving “democracy”’… that we can begin to step off that track… and take ‘the future’ back.
All of us are kept focused on the narrow tasks before us – whether we’re on the street… making a building… in a comfortable ‘analyst’ seat… or in a laboratory… or in a legislature making policy… we’re all encouraged to make our ‘check-lists’… but the future we continue to leave to the ‘statesmen’ (and ‘shadow’ more so, we’ll see… than those in the limelight-glow…) who set our courses behind-scenes (always pushing to the forefront… the ‘scientists’….)
Until we refuse this narrowing of our thinking – the boxes – the hierarchy… the dehumanizing focus on function merely…
(…we’re not made for that Brothers and Sisters… it’s not our nature to be narrow… just the opposite… we want to encompass the ‘all-of-it’… But we can’t do this in harness… we must end once and for all… ‘power’-worship… which exists behind the state’s existence… it is the ‘cause-generative’…)
…and reclaim responsibility for the goal… reclaim exclusive focus on determining the goal… focus on it… and only on it… until we got it… then… they got us. The folks who brought this effort from MIT discussed in “‘Digital Athens’? Or Last-Ditch Drama?” are just the latest installment of an on-going (since ‘class’ began…) effort to lock down our containment.
Getting off the ‘Class Train’… defining a new destination… is the challenge of the moment.
We must start talking about this… state-legitimating-ideologies cannot be ‘fixed’… they are designed to work us out of the whole ‘calculus’… of determining what world we want… of what the world is that we will live in….
These ‘statesmen’ are rapists. They want us to surrender our bodies without complaint… never raise our vision above what they give us… steal our vitality and answer us with, “sit down!… shut up!… don’t interfere with grown-up business!”
The result: Auschwitz.
Please tune in Waking Up Radio this Sunday, February 2, 2014, as we continue reading and discussing “Miklos Nyiszli’s Lessons On Class”.
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* for the February 9, 2014 show: Sisters and brothers…
February 3rd, 2014: Sisters and brothers…
When we hear of public people with resources and heart who die before their time… there’s always that question that lodges in our mind (yet another reason to leave ‘power’ behind… truth watches sullen from the skies when such bullies stride about…) – I’m thinking in this instance of Philip Seymour Hoffman… but I have to say I thought the same of Tony Scott… who brought us such a powerful metaphorical romp as Enemy of the State – knowing the evil ways and ruthlessness of ‘power’…
…knowing this… prudence suggests… if we would do their heart and humanity justice… those who model vulnerability in a world that would have us be robots…
(…and if everyone’s a robot Plato’s Tribesmen can be the only ones with any seeming personality… so to woo… dupe… and subdue us all the more… we subject people…)
…we should take a look at what that project was that they were working on… and boost it up into the light… we owe them this… in case… there was more hiding in the shadow than what we’re told… and either way… we’re giving thanks to those who shared uncommon much of what we need to see… to recall our stolen humanity. And… who knows?… what from this boosting-up might come?… what may emerge… and thereby justice serve.
With the passing of Pete Seeger the airwaves have brought much discussion about whether… or to what degree… ‘art’ can lead to (put in what I consider more authentic terms…) ending ‘power’… or… even more helpfully… ending ‘power worship’. I think putting it this way is more accurate… and therefore generates more useful discussion (i.e. reflecting a clarity of thought… based in seeing reality…) as it opens the door to recognizing that we also manifest ‘the system’… and to thereby taking greater responsibility for creating a truly different world… as opposed to handing to those next-in-line for this wild ride called ‘life’ (in this hideous ‘power’-worship iteration…) just re-packaged class relations.
So what might be a realistic sense of what ‘art’ can accomplish? Absent its necessary conjunct – on-going discussion… on-going breaking out of our atomization (upon which ‘power’ depends to exist…) – it proceeds in this ‘power’-ending project too slowly. That we’re seeing ever more (and escalating) resource-wars and ever-growing earth-crises means… we’d best set ‘art’ up for success… and pair it with a vision and a plan… and on-going discussion.
And do ‘artists’ (designated such as part of the propaganda of class… to reinforce class hierarchies…) have any greater responsibility for accomplishing the task at hand… i.e. ending ‘power’-worship?
What’s been coming up for me are several things I’m pondering… and please bear with me as I take Philip Seymour Hoffman to illustrate.
There’s a luminescence and an intimacy to his portrayals that seemed to pull me into a circle of light… his light, of course… his sharing of himself… and which now I see as a huge empathy.
Does not that empathy… and this is what I’m pondering… under conditions in which a very few want to control not just what we think… but the capacity to think itself…
…does it not put such an artist… at tremendous risk?
It’s the time one has… potentially (i.e. potentially the owning of one’s life…) while seeking the authentic… which one must do… to take the calling seriously… that… necessarily, it seems to me… leads a true ‘artist’… a true human being… into ‘power’s crosshairs.
For what is ‘art’ (if ‘art’ is self-defined… and not regurgitation…) if not a dedicated pursuit of truth?
And what is an ‘artist’ (if self-defined…) if not a very fine instrument for getting to it? By which I mean ‘empathy’… trusting one’s body… and following where it leads… getting to the underlying motive-force of things….
To attempt to do this… if one has clawed one’s way out of The Matrix… is a very dangerous project. (And… trust… there will be Iagos a-plenty around such a person… and around the people who know this person… planting seeds of doubt… insinuating… trying to blot out from within our beacon… who brought us so much light. And I would be very interested to know… whether any of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s friends have experienced such Iagos.)
‘Art’… like all of ‘power’s boxes… is an artificial construct it gives for us to stand in (if we’re willing to play the ‘artist’ role…) and this box is particularly tight-crafted under ‘power’s steady eye… as it could… in theory… bring to charismatic figures large numbers… in both senses… both currencies… that ‘power’ monitors and traffics in: money… and the ability to capture our (we-the-people’s) allegiance – and so present to ‘power’ a competing interest… which ‘power’ won’t allow.
Entertainers (and by this word I mean ‘public figures’…) are court-jesters and people-pacifiers for ‘power’ (and by this I mean no offence… as obviously I don’t mean by the artist’s intent… but rather how the so-called ‘rulers’ look at it – when you understand ‘power’s way of seeing… it’s like a key… that opens up the door… on all their misanthropy….) Should any of them not understand their role… and venture out beyond those bounds… and towards ‘the people’… while possessing sufficient magnetic draw… that others in large number venture with them… I can’t imagine ‘power’ not giving them its full attention.
Recall it’s all about the imperative to keep the people sleeping… it’s all about the people never thinking…. So when entertainers who do inspire us to think die unexpectedly – and… trust… ‘power’ would not venture to this tactic unless it had a reasonably viable back story to plug into our questions (here’s another good reason to get focused on our future freedom… and leave self-destructive practices behind… and state publicly, loud and often what it is on which we’re aiming… and not admit dalliances with distraction of any kind…)
– so when public figures who possess the unlikely combination of heart and resources die unexpectedly… please examine their current projects… please help them… bring them home.
Please tune in Waking Up Radio this Sunday, February 9, 2014, as we continue reading and discussing “Miklos Nyiszli’s Lessons On Class”.
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* for the February 16, 2014 show: Sisters and brothers…
February 12th, 2014: Brothers and sisters…
Last week, Miklos made a really important point… about strategy… for those of us who want to end ‘power’… or… rather… want to end ‘power’-worship. He said… in essence… that it is the feeling we are left with… after our discussions… that is key in setting a movement up for success… key for ensuring that a movement can begin to build momentum and substance… because for anything that’s alive to live… it needs energy… and so with energy we must feed it. And by this I’m not thinking of quick-burning and soon-spent empty calories – the pap that dissolves to nothing that we hear over the airwaves – but neither do I mean craftily-twisting made-up ‘systems of thought’… – ‘thought’-for-‘thought’s sake (or… in truth… ‘for-‘power’s sake… and here the philosopher Hegel comes readily to mind) – designed to twist thought up in knots such that we never find our way out (this is also Fromm’s distinction between ‘using one’s intelligence’… and ‘using one’s reason’… which is also… necessarily… trusting one’s body… because the ‘mind’ – ‘body’ distinction is a false division…)
…but rather food rich in nutrients… requiring slow digestion… but which leads to solid structure… and lasting understanding – i.e. it helps unravel more and more of the mysteries of ‘modern’ human relations… because they are all but varieties of one: class.
But how do you tell the difference?… in the messages we’re given… particularly over the course of our youth (that key pass that ‘power’ is determined to ‘shepherd’ us through…) that’s one question… particularly as there’s an ‘oblique’ that tumbles you toward truth… and an ‘oblique’ that’s really a leash, fashioned stiffly. We’ve looked at this issue before… and it bears continuous examination.
(And perhaps I should explain my use of the word ‘oblique’ here… I use it because ‘oblique’ makes us think… which as humans we want to do… an ability we take pride in, in fact… and… as Plato said… for ‘power’ this capacity… proclivity… fondness… is dangerous. I hope no one requires ‘proof’ of this… but trusts what our bodies tell us: that we resent being ‘shepherded’… and yet… clearly… objectively… this assumed role – ‘shepherds’ – is definitive of ‘power’… “organized ‘power’” means to seize and shape our collective reality. On this, at least, can we agree?… and also therefore that… to allow our reasoning process to be the result of a self-determined process… will pose a challenge to those who hope to shape us?
So what does this mean… in terms of strategy?… for ‘power’?… for us? If not that it is critical for ‘power’ that our thought be shepherded… and for us… that we see how this con is done… in order to embark on an authentic process of thought’s development.)
So what’s also been coming up for me this week – as a subset of the broader question of distinguishing authentic probing to uncover what lies hidden… from propaganda… in order to release human energy from the constraints of ‘rule’… ‘power’… the ‘philosopher-king-statesmen’ – is the particular question of dissent on the Left…
…and the necessity for ‘power’ of intercepting it…
…and why we never hear this (or the broader… related… question of strategy overall…) discussed on the Left…
…and… when you stop and ponder it… it’s really quite odd (try to imagine ‘power’… if you can… not devoting its every conscious moment to it…)
…particularly as we’re by nature problem-solvers… and if we give ourselves authentic questions we will solve them (and this is no less true for ‘power’ than it is for us…)
…and particularly as… once we embark down the path of authentic thought… the whole of truth unfolds pretty quickly.
So… thinking of this… I’ve been looking afresh…at the issue of propaganda… and the reality that ‘power’ needs… a really good story. Because the ‘best’ (most effective) propaganda is not about outright lies… but selection… selection amongst the vast array of ‘facts’ from which one can systematically craft a story.
Now the Nazis… and ‘power’ generally… created the ‘facts’… the ‘evidence’… with which to con the people… but to know which ‘facts’ you need… you first have to have… your story….
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Today (02.14.14) I listened to a portion of a radio show by economist Richard Wolff in which he was commenting on a recent CNN poll which found, he said, that two-thirds of U.S. citizens “want government to make the distribution of wealth and income in the U.S. less unequal….” He then said that:
“…these were the same numbers collected in 1983 under Ronald Reagan…. From 1983, until last month, the distribution of wealth has become more unequal, and yet the same two-thirds are displeased as were displeased in 1983, and with greater inequality now. Republicans bear some responsibility for not doing what the people want done… but Democrats also have failed… both have presided, the last 30 years, over an exact opposite of what the people want. What lesson do we draw from this? Republicans and Democrats share common responsibility for not doing what Americans clearly wanted, but neither party delivered. Both parties are disconnected from what a clear majority want. Growing inequality must serve the interests of somebody. Those who favor increased inequality obviously are the big corporations and the wealthy – the one percent. Their interests have been served.”
Now… I call this propaganda – and we’re going to hear from Noam Chomsky [below] twenty years ago saying the same thing… that for 30 years the state has delivered exactly the opposite of what the people want – so… these words of Richard Wolff I call propaganda… yet most folks on the Left would not… and the needed energy will elude us… the necessary forward-thrusting momentum… unless we push forward some necessary discussions (‘necessary’… at least… by my reasoning… and once submitted to your scrutiny… I hope you will agree…) for a critical mass that is on the same page to seed.
You see… I draw a very different lesson from the stasis of those numbers… but I’ve not heard any pundit express that perspective… while Wolff’s we hear ad infinitum… and not just for thirty years… but for centuries… what does this tell us about strategy?
Hearing Wolff today particularly struck me because I’ve been quite literally pondering the very thing he’s calling our attention to all week… because I’d found a book from 1996 that had a ‘Forward’ from Noam Chomsky in it. And at the end of that ‘Forward’ it says: “excerpted and adapted from Z Magazine, June 1966, and from the transcript of the Cleveland-Marshall Fund Lecture, Cleveland State College of Law, March 1996.” Here are its first two paragraphs:
Public attitudes shed interesting light on what is happening in the corridors of power. More than 80 percent of the public feels that the government is “run for the benefit of the few and the special interests, not the people,” up from a steady 50 percent for a similarly worded question in earlier years. The same percentages feel that the economic system is “inherently unfair,” and that working people have too little say in what is going on in the country. More than 70 percent felt that “Business has gained too much power over too many aspects of American life” and “has benefited more than consumers from government deregulation.” Two-thirds say that he “American dream” has become “harder to achieve” since the 1980s. And by what Business Week calls “a stunning 95 percent-to-5 percent majority,” the public believes that corporations “should sometimes sacrifice some profit for the sake of making things better for their workers and communities.
Such attitudes, novel only in scale, suggest some conclusions about how the population perceives the workings of power. But these are not the conclusions that have regularly been drawn, for example, by the journal that reported in 1992 that 83% of the public think that the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and the economic system is “inherently unfair.” From these facts, we are to conclude that people are angry at “their well-paid politicians” and want “more power to the people,” not “more power to the government.” That is an intriguing interpretation of the facts reported, though it makes some sense on two essential principles that the doctrinal system has labored to implant in “the public mind”: first, government cannot be responsive to public interests; and second, private power does not exist, even though the Fortune 500 control almost two-thirds of the domestic economy and much of the international economy, with an enormous impact throughout the political and ideological institutions, and the society and culture generally. (Noam Chomsky, “Debunking the Corporate Agenda,” Forward to Corporations Are Gonna Get Your Mama, edited by Kevin Danaher, 1996.)
So ‘private power’ he establishes at the outset as ‘corporate’… the villain we are to gnash our teeth at is… ‘capitalism’. I call that mis-direction.
Now… first sentence aside… this could have been written today, right? And his point (that will be reiterated in the further quote below…) that there is a “gap between public preferences and public policy…” is the same point I heard Richard Wolff making today (and the reference at the end states that portions of this ‘Forward’ came from a 1966 article.) And while pundits on the Left all want us to “fix government”… to make it “more responsive…” what we never hear discussed is the pundits role in this constant reproduction of stasis.
But the Left pundits constant focus on polls (along with that Chomsky first sentence) got me thinking. I’ve been so used to viewing polls as primarily propaganda tools trotted out at decisive moments… generally involving voting… that I overlooked the obvious: that ‘power’ is obsessed with knowing what we are actually thinking… not just what they’re trying to manipulate us into thinking. Which means… that they know much more precisely than we every could… given our atomization (and until we start overcoming it…) to what degree we are already… more and more uniform in our thinking… we are more and more of one opinion when it comes to ‘rulers’… that we don’t want them… and that this is a global phenomenon.
Now… imagine yourself as one of this ‘power’-Tribe… what would you do… to keep your dream of the Republic alive? Would you not want to hook we-fish… with bait crafted to suit our tastes? (Especially as these guys fancy themselves surgeons… or fine craftsmen… or subtle pilots of the ship of state. Would not such guys likewise try to fine-tune the limits of acceptable dissent… always… always… as dictated by the goal… the gold… for which they’ve reached consistently… century after century. Which is why that first sentence struck my eye: “Public attitudes shed interesting light on what is happening in the corridors of power…” because… given its placement as intro to polls… it’s very suggestive… of a heightened awareness… and resulting activity… of ‘think-tanks’ being cranked-up… and organization being stepped up.
Noam Chomsky had been for me in every way a puzzle: a ‘socialist’ and “fellow traveler” in the anarchist tradition drawn to ‘powerful’ institutions; someone interested in language… but not… apparently… because he delights in words, but because he must be rigidly in control of them… or… perhaps… master their manipulation… often resulting in a convoluted construction about which the reader is left uncertain…
(…for example, in this sentence: “As unthinkable as the idea that pleas to the autocracy to be more benevolent may not reach the outer limits of extremism is the truism that corporate America has always insisted on the traditional version of free market doctrine: for thee, but not for me, except for temporary advantage.” …while we get his drift… and want to agree with the gist of it… such impenetrability… in a linguist… must be intended…. )
Now it’s difficult to know the heart of any class-bound human… but I have to say… I find so many contradictions in his apparent opinions… e.g. on the one hand telling us that all states require that the people submit… which is obviously true… but then tells us that the problem is not those states requiring our submission… but states not having sufficiently reined-in corporations… the drumbeat of all Left pundits. (These guys have learned to use ‘the economy’ for cover… so at this point perhaps we should re-write to make more clear… those “ways to see the propagandist in the pundit: they push forward ‘the economy’ for ‘power’ as ‘cover’ [this is the effect… let’s set aside intent…]; they insist the state must be made more ‘democratic’ yet never define how that leads to us getting free – put that out there as the objective… you’ll start generating energy; the ‘solution’… they tell youth… is to help their fathers “fix the state”; and attention is deflected away from the state as the “manufacturer of consent.” They never advance a clear alternative… and a plan for how to get there. Which… strategically… is key… as… when we give ourselves the right problems to work on… we solve them…)
The official version of reality [and by this he means the money-driven ‘propaganda system’…] portrays a conflict between the government, which is necessarily the enemy, and the people, who are living the American dream: the sober working man, his loyal wife… – all a model of harmony… and un-Americans such as union organizers and other riffraff… (“Forward” to Danaher book)
The enormous public relations industry, from its origins early in this century, has been dedicated to the “control of the public mind,” as business leaders described the task…
With a proper understanding of the concept of “consent,” then, we may conclude that implementation of the business agenda over the objections of the general public is” “with the consent of the governed,” a form of “consent without consent.” And in the same sense, “society has consented” to grant to “leadership and propaganda” the authority to “mold the mind of the masses” so that they will perform their duties in our free society as do soldiers in a properly disciplined army. It is the hard and demanding task of the responsible men to present a suitable version of this to the “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders,” particularly when the public is called upon to carry out its periodic task of “aligning itself as the partisan” of one or another of those who understand “the higher interest.” Within the political system, that is; not in the governance of the economy, which must remain securely in the hands of virtually unaccountable power systems.
There has often been a gap between public preferences and public policy. In recent years, the gap has become substantial, as changes in the international economy have rendered superfluous the gestures of the benevolent aristocracy towards “welfare capitalism,” or so it was believed until ominous signs of a “second front in the class war” were detected in early 1996. (“Consent without Consent: Reflections on the Theory and Practice of Democracy”, 1996)
Where’s Bentham? Where’s Hegel? It’s what he carefully omits that’s most instructive… Bentham on the state as manager of the people… who helps us see the two ends of totalitarianism… that meet most clearly in Fascism… but which are inherent in ‘the state’ in all its cases… whatever its legitimating ideology: protection of and allegiance to ‘the Father’… the ‘unique’ ‘national personality’ (Hegel) which the leaders best manifest (commandeering the heart…) and the requirement that obedience be instilled in the majority (wielding the hammer.)
And while he seems by his tone… to not believe in the notion of ‘the rabble’… his acts and their effects belie this… his very presentation reinforces the opposite myth… that… if we would align with he… a pure distillate of ‘intellectuality’… be part of the Tribe of Mind Reified… we must necessarily embrace and deepen the divide… because that’s just the nature of ‘the beast’… the ‘cattle’ cannot fathom… all the ‘complexity’ that must be mastered. To stand with ‘the really smart ones’… you must not romanticize ‘the people.’
When we look at the effects of the pundit and ask… does he leave us feeling stronger… with more inner light to shine on ‘power’s deep deceptions… or does he leave us feeling less adequate to face those challenges… and more hopeless? (and more wanting to align ourselves with the powerful state….)
Because it’s time for us to admit… in considering the propped-up pundits… that the feeling they leave us with… is their purpose….
And for hope to live… we need prescription.
With Chomsky… and all Left pundits… we aren’t encouraged to go for… start planning… moving toward… anything dramatically different… and so there’s no reason to get excited… his tone… his delivery… his message – both overt and hidden – all say… “stay the course”… “fix democracy”… no matter to submit means soul-death… and to coerce our submission is the purpose of states… and if that is so… and this he tells us he knows… then whence comes our hope? It’s as if Miklos would believe himself encouraging of his brothers and sisters if he said, “we’ll soon get to choose the SS murder methods!”
With Chomsky… and all Left pundits… there is no analysis beyond the obvious: the masters want to rule and the subjects push for ever more room to maneuver… and the middle ranks must choose which side they’re on… and try to ‘help’. But that the ‘responsible men’ are in fact sociopaths… and that relinquishing our future to them… the ‘statesmen’… is a prescription for continuous insanity… and that it’s not about new ‘institutions’ (corrupted by the same old hierarchy… as ‘rank’ has been planted deep by ‘power’…) but creating ourselves anew… and that this we can only do by sitting down together… on-goingly… to begin designing together a new vision for humanity… a test-site we can see before us… the seed for a different future… globally… which Chomsky could get rolling easily – these things he will not say.
So the ‘story’… at base… that Left pundits are telling is as old as ‘class’… it’s called “the class struggle.”
This is the obvious story… the only story… for youth on the Left to latch upon… as it’s the truth….
And the issue before you… if you’re ‘power’… is how to insert your ‘piper’ in that story – and… recall… the ‘piper’ used to catch rats… but the people betrayed him… and so he decided to ply his trade with a different master.
But let’s pause for a moment and ask: does this make sense – inserting a ‘piper’ – … if we’re wearing our vampire hat?
(…and that’s a really good metaphor by the way…
…light… exposure… is what they’re most afraid of… it’s extraordinary how apt the vampire metaphor is… for ‘power’. It surpasses the ‘Mr. Smith Virus’ in this [addressing / explaining ‘power’s need to stay hidden… i.e. its fear of the truth… but also I suppose in its seductiveness…] which shouldn’t surprise us… as it was millennia in the shaping… to fit… ‘we-the-people’s dilemma… in attempting to wrestle with ‘power’…)
Because if it’s the right strategic move – inserting a ‘piper’ – … based on an accurate analysis… and you have bottomless resources with which to do it… ‘prove’ it… and centuries piled high of experience doing it….
If you must hide to survive… and you are the tiny few… far out-numbered by the billions of minds (potentially) devoted to the problem of how to get rid of you… i.e. the ‘role’ of ‘ruler’… how do you stay hidden?… except by systematic… continuous… misdirection (after of course you’ve established atomization… which defeats thought’s continuous growth…)? The thoughts you enforce on ‘the people’ must systematically and uniformly point away from you. Is this not obviously what ‘power’ must do?
And… as ‘power’ can’t defeat truth… and clearly they’ve tried… Fascism… Miklos shows us… was their most strenuous (because compressed within such a short time…) attempt at this…
– and by ‘defeat truth’ I mean in this instance ‘defeat the story “the class struggle”’… replace the reality that “there are a tiny few who want to rule over the rest…” with “there are a tiny few who are ‘the best’.”
‘Power’ has given its every waking breath to establish that Plato-driven myth in enough of our heads. It will never abandon it… it’s too core to their world-view and plans… but…
…as they see themselves as being masters of strategy… and with mountains of money… and think-tanks a’plenty… and bought-brains to fill them… we’d be foolish indeed to think they have no ‘Plan B’. (This too… is from Plato… who advised ‘power’: always temper the ideal… with the possible….)
And if mis-direction is key to keep the people from seeing you… you must give them a villain… prop it up as a target… to absorb all the world’s willingness to wrestle with wrong… to draw and expend… direct down useless efforts… and pass the uselessness on in the bargain… down… down… down the road… to subsequent generations… on and on flows confusion… ad infinitum…
…or so you hope.
Please tune in Waking Up Radio this Sunday, February 16, 2014, as we continue reading and discussing “Miklos Nyiszli’s Lessons On Class”.
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* for the February 23, 2014 show: Sisters and brothers…
People of Ukraine… we celebrate you today… you braved the cold… the guns… the intimidation… the murder of your loved ones… and emerged triumphant. Thank you for showing us how it’s done. We salute you. You’ve taken your lives in your own hands…. Don’t stop now. “Yanukovych gone” don’t mean “free”… keep planning your freedom… and that means… factoring in the global shadow statesmen… and their control via financial mechanisms: debt and the extension of credit… control of markets… food and energy especially… – and that means planning for self-sufficiency… for yourselves and all humanity…. We must break free of the training we’re all given… to deny our body’s longing for freedom. We have to figure out how to inter-knit what we have in common: our efforts for authentic freedom… the kind our bodies recognize because we’re living… finally… without the whip’s crack… somebody riding our back….
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February 21, 2014: Brothers and sisters… and particularly those with whom Grief is keeping company… the Requiem I heard being sung from Independence Square in Kiev… brings these thoughts… about how ‘class’ – the state – creates ‘chaos’.
Of course this is the opposite from what we’re taught. In fact, everything we’re told – under the regime of ‘rule’… from the ethos of the state – about how our society is arranged is upside-down… because ‘power’ must hide… must divert our eyes… to survive.
So ‘class’ – the state – doesn’t ‘protect’ us from ‘chaos’… it creates ‘chaos’ (and I’m using the word as we’re taught to… not as it is…)… to keep us at each other’s throats… because it knows… that when that day arrives… when we refuse to be divided… and when we embrace each other at last… and reject narrow patriotism… and therefore ‘class’… the curse of ‘chaos’ is past.
‘Class’… the exclusive access of the few to prized resources – creates ‘chaos’ – using nationalism to get us to do its work of ‘division’… unleashing a host of ills: anger… secrecy… greed… mistrust… sabotage… betrayal… duplicity… spying… underhand dealing… fear… doubt… sadness… insecurity. It creates the very things it claims it holds at bay… while telling us it battles ‘chaos’… by ‘organizing’ the world into packages – beginning with these individual bodies we walk around in… on up to the states that try to keep us in our ‘places’… hoping to suppress… or finesse… the resulting anger that flows in its wake… while telling us this is the ‘chaos’ that we make…
…which they then use as excuse for their continuous drive to control all life… as the globe entire is the ‘ultimate’ ‘end’… of its demand for ‘orderliness’. And here ‘Plan C’ kicks in. ‘C’… for ‘catastrophe’.
Last week we called attention to ‘Plan A’: promote “rule of the best” as propaganda…
…and then… ‘Plan B’: “mislead dissent…” tell them it’s all about ‘the market’….
But when the people see through them… start seeing through the lens of truth Plans ‘A’ and ‘B’… as in Kiev…
Then…
…herd them together and unleash ‘Plan C’…
…because ‘chaos’ is ‘power’s reason-to-be…
…and no discussion of ‘democracy’ is complete until we consider what that means…
…examine more closely this ‘Plan C’… and so what better follow-up could there be… to our master teacher of ‘class’ and ‘strategy’… Miklos Nyiszli… than Keith Lowe’s Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of WWII… because he shows how ‘power’ – the state – systematically sows the seeds of ‘chaos’… disharmony… discord… disunity… betrayal and despair. And when you look at these key strategies for keeping the people asleep… none of them is official state ideology… yet all states depend on them to augment ‘patriotism’ when the official state ideology – be it ‘democracy’… or ‘communism’… or ‘socialism’ – wears thin.
“The individual state is the wrong frame…” we said in Palmers’ Chat. Fascism was systematically sown across Europe… and as Goring said… if they’d succeeded they’d be deemed the masters of men… but they didn’t and ‘power’ once again… tempered its ‘ideal’ with its ‘possible’… backed away from this failed attempt… and gave its chiefs their marching orders… to bide their time until… circumstances became more ‘propitious’… not just by the coming to fruition of their established trends (and I’m thinking here of their use of financial instruments and institutions…) but by making full use of all they’ve learned… over the centuries… about ‘breeding’….
My personal belief is that a lot of state executions… in the streets of Kiev… and wherever the people see through the cons… are targeted…. And this brings to mind another example of shadow-direction of the state (Solar Radiation Management is another we’ve looked at recently…) and that is the borrowing of the U.S. police of a tactic from the Israeli military… which we saw here locally in the suppression of the Occupy Movement… i.e. the targeted firing of tear gas canisters at members of Iraq Veterans Against the War. We-the-people obviously don’t want that…. And this tactic of targeting isn’t something with which the entire police force is complicit… just the opposite. ‘Shadow’… by definition means ‘small and hidden’… clandestine… infiltration. But the entire force will get the blame… and the people’s passions against them… enflamed… and we’re back at each other’s throats again.
My personal belief is that a lot of state executions… in the streets of Kiev… and wherever the people see through the cons… are targeted…. Please bear with me as I cite what some may see as an irrelevant comparison:
…‘breeding’ begins eating…
…human sistren and brethren…
…and its own children….
…[And this…
…was hardest to admit.]
Class society began with a betrayal… the four-leggeds, lured with the promise of friendship, fell… under the pressure of necessity… under a wavering, utilitarian eye…. Friendship soured to cool appraisal, and, in the end, the ultimate degeneration… love turned to cold calculation…. Which flank held meat?… which mouth good teeth?… how solid of leg?… how easily led?
If he just realizes the advantage of having a group of such half-tamed beasts hanging around the fringes of his settlement as a reserve of game easily caught, he will be on the way to domestication.
Next he must exercise restraint and discrimination in using this reserve of meat. He must refrain from frightening the beasts unnecessarily or killing the youngest and tamest. Once he begins to kill only the shyest and least amenable bulls or rams, he will have started selective breeding, eliminating untractable brutes, and consequently favouring the more docile. But he must also use his new opportunities of studying the life of the beasts at close range. He will thus learn about the processes of reproduction, the animals’ needs of food and water. He must act upon his knowledge…. It can thus be imagined how with lapse of time a flock or a herd should have been bred that was not only tame, but actually dependent upon man. (p. 78 - 9)
Finally, war helped to a great discovery – that men as well as animals can be domesticated. Instead of killing a defeated enemy, he might be enslaved; in return for his life he could be made to work. This discovery has been compared in importance to that of the taming of animals. In any case, by early historic times slavery was a foundation of ancient industry and a potent instrument in the accumulation of capital. (V. Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself, p. 134) (quoted in Palmers’ Chat: As We Take Our Earth Back)
Youth and their elders of heart are being decimated globally… and never doubt… these words that Childe applied to non-human animals… ‘power’ applies no less to us.
‘Power’ hopes to ‘weed out’ dissent… and so we ‘intractable brutes’… we ones who refuse… ‘power’ wants to be rid of.
But I believe it’s time to set anger aside…
It is Anger, after all, that got us this mess…
…and it must be Love that gets us out….
Love be now your song immortal One….
The Tribe of Plato, doomed and ruinous,
that caused the people loss on bitter loss
and crowded brave souls into the undergloom,
leaving so many dead men – carrion
for dogs and birds…
…and the will of the Abandoned Child was done. **
I am told that the first word Homer wrote foretold the theme, as it will be with our amended opening.
Love be now your song, immortal One.
A song of understanding… a song of hope… and, most of all, a song of determination…
For when we see the earth herself is calling, there is no greater love than to rouse our hearts and minds… and answer with raised hands and voices… her command.
But first… we must understand.
(from Palmers’ Chat: As We Take Our Earth Back)
** This is an alteration of the opening lines of Robert Fitzgerald's translation of The Iliad.
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February 18, 2014: Sisters and Brothers…
I’ve been thinking a lot about children… and loss… and waste.
‘Waste’… in many ways… is the word that started me writing Waking Up.
Like the economist David Gordon I was moved by the notion… of the loss of us… of each individual one of us… of we-the-people.
For despite what we mostly say… I believe that we are sacrificial lambs to the exigencies of state… that we lose ourselves every day just to ‘make it’… I know I did… ignore what my body said… in order to be ‘productive’…
…and that’s what’s most hideous… the fact that we mostly don’t see… because it’s never discussed publicly… that we’re made to sacrifice… everything.
My thought’s bent started with a dream in which I was holding a baby… and he was smiling up at me…
…and completely happy.
And I awoke with such a warm feeling… and I thought… at first… that it must be Nanji … the baby… and then… the next night… the dream-more-like-a-feeling came again… and I realized that… no… it wasn’t him… it was my son… it was T… smiling up at me… as he was at the start…
…before unanswerable hurt… took over his heart…
…and I didn’t know that we start out whole….
I didn’t know that.
I was oblivious… and the resulting loss… waste… of us… now that I can see it… is… hideous.
(But I have to interject that these past five years have shown me… we give ourselves back… we do… when we begin to create our own selves… we give our lives back to ourselves… and we begin anew.)
But two-year-olds have shown me… so now I see more clearly… the cost of… not being able to give each other… our attention.
And this is a knowledge babies teach… that helps us see the goal we seek… the destination is the medium in which we’re moving that suffuses us with that warm loving feeling….
So if living isn’t love… it’s not the world we want.
There… that’s a clue to fuel our planning… the goal is simply the feeling we want to be living.
And since I’ve been on this path… in this place… of having come to decision… to certainty… about the world we deserve – …and I mean all humanity…
…I know…
…that the world in which no child will take that hit… that deep-soul-wounding festerment (because no one knows how to answer it…) that world in which we give attention… share our thanks… live our reverence… will be an amazing place… and we deserve it – that’s the world I want.
Last week we said that “we have to have a goal… to get there…” and afterwards I thought, “did I say ‘we’? did I emphasize the ‘we’?” Because it’s the ‘we’ who have to conceive it… the ‘we’ that for ‘power’ is so threatening… not the ‘we’ of a single rally… but the ‘we’ of on-going meeting… to fashion together the goal… and to live the achieving of it.
(And shall I state the obvious and say…
…that we’re seeing this in Ukraine today?
Young and old uniting to maintain…
…a Protest Camp of those who see…
…that it’s in living ‘the change’ we want to be…
…on-goingly…
…that we create a whole new society.
It’s called “being alive”…
…it’s what we do when we refuse the ways of ‘rule’…
…of ‘rank’… of ‘elevation of the few’…
…those vampire-like shadow-statesmen…
…and listen rather to the true authority…
…our earth… our bodies… the ancestors who are calling “be free!”
…and embrace the certainty…
…that the way of ‘rank’ will no longer be…
…the legacy to our children that we choose to leave.)
How do we start?
We need someone to gather the actual… objective… facts of our situation as commoners: automation… resource exhaustion and depletion… death of our common oceans –
…present the objective case… that ‘work’ as we’ve been conditioned to accept it… is fading away… explain that it in any case… reduced whole human beings to functionaries… and that the species can’t grow when most are made to let go… their leadership capacities.
Then we need to convene the children and youth – we elders who support them – and begin a conversation about ‘work’… and why we’re here… and realizing the authentic dreams of the ancestors…. We could describe it as “the FYI Campaign” – “for youth independence” – from the drag of ‘rank’… or maybe… “FELICITY”: “Freedom in Establishing Leisure In Common Trust with Youth….” Whatever we call it… that’s what it is… and it’s what we have the right to… because we’re here to live…
…life furthers life (and we’ve been feigning it….)
These guys have invaded our homes… our hopes… our heads…
…they’ve destroyed our peace… and our right to live free…
…it’s time for their regime to end.
Like my sisters in Ukraine breaking up the concrete… so are we… so are we.
Kropotkin told us that sooner or later ‘history’ would have to be rewritten along new lines (from ‘below’….) Under ‘class’ the line… the lens through which events are viewed… is through ‘scarcity’… ‘scarcity’-assumed – and of course ‘scarcity’ really is “created scarcity”… as ‘class’ creates scarcity by definition… in insisting on exclusive aggregation by the few… so that line ‘fits’… seems to make ‘sense’ – as well as through the twisted notion of “‘power’-driving-excellence”….
But what makes more sense is the imbalance in human relationships… attendant upon ‘class’… the evil seed sown… by betrayal and child abandonment – the violation of good fellowship. I wrote about this in Palmers’ Chat:
Coercion is by definition unstable… as water seeks its level… earth seeks its balance… and we are earth.
Imbalance embedded in the human family has to be corrected. That’s inevitable. And we seek Mutual Aid as certainly as all other species do. Petr Kropotkin showed us this:
Sociability and need of mutual aid and support are such inherent parts of human nature that at no time of history can we discover men living in small isolated families, fighting each other for the means of subsistence. On the contrary, modern research… proves that since the very beginning of their prehistoric life men used to agglomerate into gentes, clans, or tribes, maintained by an idea of common descent and by worship of common ancestors. For thousands and thousands of years this organization has kept men together, even though there was no authority whatever to impose it. It has deeply impressed all subsequent development of mankind; and when the bonds of common descent had been loosened by migrations on a grand scale, while the development of the separated family within the clan itself had destroyed the old unity of the clan, a new form of union, territorial in its principle – the village community – was called into existence by the social genius of man. This institution, again, kept men together for a number of centuries, permitting them to further develop their social institutions and to pass through some of the darkest periods of history… (p. 153)
…Stems are seen to fight against stems, tribes against tribes, individuals against individuals; and out of this chaotic contest of hostile forces, mankind issues divided into castes, enslaved to despots, separated into States always ready to wage war against each other. And, with this history of mankind in his hands, the pessimist philosopher [Hegel comes readily to mind…] triumphantly concludes that warfare and oppression are the very essence of human nature; that the warlike and predatory instincts of man can only be restrained within certain limits by a strong authority which enforces peace and thus gives an opportunity to the few and nobler ones to prepare a better life for humanity in times to come…. (Petr Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, 115 – 116)
Petr understood that ‘power’ selectively passes down the ‘stories’ that further its mission, and that, “Ere long history will have to be re-written on new lines….”
So, for instance, Plato’s seemingly endless tomes and disingenuous propaganda are carefully preserved and falsely taught, while the anti-slavery movement of his day is discounted, if not disappeared altogether.
‘Class’ is a weight that must be continuously applied… and re-applied… to survive. So the institutions and the financial tools are made to counter our continuous tendency to awake. (from Palmers’ Chat: As We Take Our Earth Back
Today (02.19.14) I listened to a woman who’d written a book about catastrophic species die-offs accelerating around the globe today… a result of ‘climate change’ – i.e. the result of a system of ‘rule by the few’ called class (of course she didn’t put it like that): the loss of the coral reefs… ocean death… the particularly devastating amphibian impact… she’d collected a lot of ‘evidence’… and a caller asked, “why is it that we listen to devastating reports such as yours… and then go right back to doing what we always do?” And her response… as you can guess… is that “people feel powerless…” and I of course objected… that we aren’t asking the right questions… like: “why is it… that ‘people feel powerless’?…” could it be the state forces us to be… structurally?
Consider how we’re trained to see ourselves as functionaries… all our energy… we’re told… must be forced down the right hole… feed the right tube… in order to be a ‘lucky one’ who is allowed to feel ‘useful’. The ‘story’ of how our energy is to be ‘spent’… has long since been made the state’s exclusive province.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” is the only story children hear… the only frame in which they’re allowed to try to conceptualize… the purpose of our lives. This turf was captured long ago… no one ever challenges that story. We obediently concede… to let others lead us… agree to let others determine the use of our energy.
But look around at where our deference has left us! Look where our obedience leads! Is there really any ‘mystery’ to our ‘helplessness’? Is there really any wonder we’re unequal to the challenges facing the species (and all life itself)?
If there are certain subjects that are taboo – and ‘work’ is the one at the core – then we have to courageously face reality… and admit that the media silence around challenging the dominant story means… totalitarianism is already here… and that it’s our responsibility to begin… to talk about it…
In 1212 two youthful preachers – one in France, the other in Germany – led columns of young people to the sea expecting God miraculously to part the waters so that they could march to Jerusalem. Since this miracle did not take place, most of those who had survived the long march returned home. A few who took ship were either lost at sea or captured by Muslim corsairs and sold into slavery. (Richard A. Newhall, The Crusades, 1963, p. 77 – 8)
The Children’s Crusade invites speculation about the role abandonment might have played in it: this mysterious event took place around 1212 when, according to scattered comments in chronicles, thousands of children undertook to free the Holy Land and marched from areas of France and Germany to points in Italy (and France), where the movement dissipated. The chroniclers do not suggest that parents encouraged their children to go, merely that adults, in awe of the holy motivation inspiring persons so young, allowed them to leave. It does not appear to have been a camouflage for abandonment, although the fact that the movement began (apparently) among shepherds may mean that the children involved were already on their own in some sense. If, as several accounts maintain, some of them were actually sold into slavery at the ports they reached, it was not by parents or relatives, and was little different from other instances of slave trading involving children, apart from the peculiar ugliness of the circumstance. (John Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers: the Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance, 1988, p. 349 – 350)
The children were… and are… mis-led under ‘class’… but the earth leads true… and if we as her living advocates and devotees help our children to be free… it would be … we would see…
…a ‘Children’s Crusade’ designed authentically… to redefine ‘work’ as ‘attending to the earth’… and learning from her… a Crusade to help youth establish a very different future… for all of us.
Vampires aren’t the only ones to span the generations. The ancestors who want us to be free also are living.
Please tune in Waking Up Radio this Sunday, February 23, 2014, as we continue reading and discussing “Miklos Nyiszli’s Lessons On Class”.
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* for the March 2, 2014 show: Sisters and brothers…
It’s not fair for folks with less means than we do to take on global misanthropy alone. We need a global popular consciousness. We have the numbers to move this human story forward… out of the muck of ‘class’… so that we can live our gifts at last.
February 26th, 2014: Sisters and brothers…
I’ve just been typing a scene in which Miklos was lying to the women…
…about the truth of the crematoriums….
To tell the truth would create a panic…
…and they’d all be dead…
…so…
…you have to be strategic…
…is what this said.
But we are growing stronger…
(…and if any among those reading this… say to themselves “but I’m living my gifts…” say “my talents receive recognition…” I’d ask…you don’t think you’re in a prison?… you think the so-called ‘rulers’ would never do to you… because you work so hard and have such talent – like the Sonderkommando – what ‘power’ did to them?…)
…and these processes of ‘class’ have so advanced… that more and more of us are ready to see… reality… i.e…. that the state is here to milk and manage human energy… not to ‘protect our freedom’…
(…and as we see with Putin’s machinations… pushing to the fore ‘his’ military… statesmen tarry not… when they see us waking up… make haste to create the threats… that seem to validate the state’s existence… either by trying to dupe us – yet again – with nationalism… or by shameless allusions to their ‘rule’… by jangling the coins they keep in their pockets… while carefully watching our responses. The only way we commoners can stand up to them… is with a global consciousness… carefully gifted to us by our ancestors of heart… who have given all we need to join together… against these ‘class’-old cons of manipulation…)
…and we are not only at a point where we can take the truth… but change this reality… that we are being overseen.
So how can we be Miklos Nyiszlis… in this more advanced iteration… of ‘class’ dynamics… in this world scene… how can we be strategic?
How can we begin to shape another path forward from that of ‘the state’?…
…that we in every land can choose to take….
(…‘choose’ being the operative word. This isn’t about ‘force’… just the opposite… despite what some members of ‘Plato’s Tribe may fear… that if we-the-people were released from our long captivity that we would behave as they do… nothing could be further from the truth…. We are not them. It couldn’t be further from our minds… ‘retribution’. What we want… is to begin again.
And this must be something we say with each other as well: “What argument could you possibly raise against a test site?… a few… whoever wants to… beginning to develop a different way of life…? We have to start asking ourselves… why the resistance in us? We understand why in ‘power’… but why in us? Why would we not want to let those who want to figure this out… have a little bit of land… and a lot of love… and a release from the constraints of building rules and regulations (as Michael Reynolds said…) freedom from taxation…. We need a little oasis… where we can solve this thousands and thousands of years… of the devastation of class… the chaos of class….)
Ukraine knows this moment is pregnant…
…that the steps they take now will survive the moment…
…are seeds that will be planted…
…from which will grow…
…either re-forged chains…
…or our future freedom.
It’s a solemn moment which all of us struggling with the same issues are trying to take in… with you…
…in common we trust…
…you are not alone.
That being so… what are the right steps that we can all meld together… a synchrony well-placed to crack the concrete?
I think it starts by being articulated… these steps… by saying out loud… that we finally see… that the way of ‘the state’ has failed us completely… and that another way is coming to be… a way with land held in common… held in trust for perpetuity… say that all our planning will tend toward it… toward a physical manifestation of freedom… toward working to realize a test site… while ‘living-light’… for the General Strike.
(Because how else are we going to support each other globally? Truly?
We’ve been talking these past few weeks about being strategic. All we have is our human energy… and our heart… and our love… and the Internet… and the ability to inter-link. This is the only way we can… not just save the planet but… for those of us who actually care about these human bodies we walk around in… save us as well….
I listened recently to a man… and… don’t get me wrong… I am definitely in love with our animal and plant brothers and sisters… who was talking about the horses who pull the tourist carriages in New York… and saying they have to work a 9-hour day and that it’s hard… and it is… agreed… but when are we going to start caring about we human beings in harness? When are we going to start caring about that?… with equal fervor?… all of my brothers and sisters in the animal-rights-movement? We are animals too! And when you start putting us first… we can then breathe a sigh of relief… and know that we indeed… matter… that we are card about… not viewed as just beasts of burden… of less worth than all others.)
Unless we make real by validating for each other what we truly want… what our bodies want… we can’t get it.
This is about standing with our bodies… instead of with the state… but we can only begin together… when… a few in every place globally… fold our words and acts together… behind a common banner… that means we hold the land in common… we hold the land in solemn trust… i.e….
…‘wholists’….
You’ve claimed Independence Square… why not keep it?
…make it the center of a Ukraine that’s free…
…create a model that all can see…
…of how human beings…
…can at last get free…
…share what you’ve learned about the role of the state…
…no matter its legitimating ideology…
…share what you’ve learned about growing your gifts…
…and the need of human beings to own and grow their own leadership…
(…capacities… by which I mean each human being…
…is supposed to be a leader…
…of course we don’t start out that way…
…we need each other to get big…
…but that’s what we’re here for…
…not to implement the commands of others…)
…share what you’ve learned about ‘power’ being global…
…how it uses food and energy access to maintain its control…
(…and when I say ‘food access control’ I mean as well…
…their obsession with controlling the very weather conditions we need to grow with…)
…how wage work is the means to make us all have a leader….
…and to train us in obedience and docility…
…and that we can’t do this alone…
…we need each other.
People of Ukraine… it’s ‘one-step-at-a-time’ time… time for planning… time for knowing the prize… and time for fixing our eyes on that vision… and definitely time for synchronization.
So what are the steps we synchronize?
Number one: Don’t give up Independence Square… you won it… you keep it. If you give it up it’ll be hard to recover… look at Egypt… look at the Occupy Movement.
(…and by ‘Independence Square’ I obviously don’t mean just the actual earth [as critical as it is…] but the relationships… the good fellowship…)
Number two: Discuss and get clear on the vision… on-goingly… with your brothers and sisters…. ‘The state’ ain’t the way for us to get free… never was… never will be. And we can’t be free wearing a leash… but only when we… as a global humanity… provide for our own necessities (and that means earth to grow things…) can we grow beyond perpetual infancy.
(…and to help us see more precisely just how phenomenally creative we are… and therefore just how much power ‘power’ has claimed in claiming us… consider this: last week we said that ‘class’… ‘rank’… ‘power’… creates ‘chaos’.
[And of course we’re trained to think the opposite… that it’s our energy unleashed that leads to it… but that makes no sense… as even a brief consideration of the accomplishments of ‘power’-worship shows us… e.g. the attempt to recreate ancient Greece by enslaving we Africans… and it reduced the built-world of the entire European continent to rubble… and dropped an atomic bomb on human populations… so everyone could see who has the big cojones… and some of us… even after considering this list… are concerned that we… released… means ‘chaos’? What greater evidence do we need… to prove that our thought is conditioned?… than that any among us could imagine… that we-the-people create ‘chaos’.]
So we see… in the quote following… what ‘power’-worship achieves… but also an illustration of the fact that our power can rise to any challenge… when we’re off-leash… when we choose… when we decide… to set things right… we do…
[…and here – please forgive the interjection – Chokwe Lumumba, Mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, is coming to mind. A few weeks ago we said… if an empathic public figure’s death is unexpected… let’s take a look at what they’re doing… and boost it… pump up their vision…
…and when we look to see what Chokwe was doing… we see an attempt to “re-invent ‘government’”… his vision was to make it “inclusive’… by which he meant… “let’s let the people make the decisions…’ it’s quite believable that such a goal… put him in ‘power’s crosshairs…. Let’s boost that goal up… let’s keep it going… let’s take what we need to push forward his example… let’s let the people decide! (after, of course, we’ve probed the taboo subjects… exposed the wounds of class completely… for… as we’ll see below… when deep wounds go unexplored they but open further… and our waking up… and growing up… ‘power’ successfully forestalls…
…and we also said… that they’re here with us… our ancestors of heart… right now. Here’s an example… today (02.28.14) we heard from Mario Savio… another powerful man who ‘conveniently’ (for ‘power’…) left the planet because of a heart attack….] Just as Chokwe was determined to make ‘governing’ inclusive… Mario wanted the same for ‘education’… well… Mario too died fighting an attack on that inclusiveness… by the ‘regents’ squeezing more fees out of students… and though the vampires never stop trying to sink their teeth into us… Mario lives in his latest iterations… in students who pushed his strategic gifts further. When the university bosses… back at it again… tried to impose a $500 ‘fee for success’… students circulated a pledge… that said… “if you pass this fee… when we are alums… we will never donate to this university…” Awesome strategy… as… vampires understand what ‘future planning’ means… Mario Savio lives at Sonoma State University…
…forgive the long digression… which continues with this:
Chokwe’s example shows us how quickly we can begin to grow beyond containment… even in the belly of a very sick beast… and in his case without many resources (as were devoted to the Reconstruction of Europe… the case about which we’re going to read…) but rather with sheer heart – operating with the principles of inclusivity (and, by the way, the energy of rebirth… beginning again… is always the people’s energy… no matter how determinedly ‘power’ tries to claim it…) – with very few resources beyond the principles of inclusion themselves… which we have to start seeing as the most important resource of all. We don’t need to be forced to creatively cooperate… we just need ‘power’ off our backs.
And in the following quote… when you imagine this land without borders… imagine as well ‘power’s hidden hand… and of course their swollen egos… and their mad scramble to reassert their command… always guided by their vision… which… Plato-given… seeks to impose an illegitimate ‘order’.
Imagine a world without institutions. It is a world where borders between countries seem to have dissolved, leaving a single, endless landscape over which people travel in search of communities that no longer exist. There are no governments any more, on either a national scale or even a local one. There are no schools or universities, no libraries or archives, no access to any information whatsoever. There is no cinema or theatre, and certainly no television. The radio occasionally works, but the signal is distant, and almost always in a foreign language. No one has seen a newspaper for weeks. There are no railways or motor vehicles, no telephones or telegrams, no post office, no communication at all except what is passed through word of mouth.
There are no banks, but that is no great hardship because money no longer has any worth. There are no shops, because no one has anything to sell. Nothing is made here: the great factories and businesses that used to exist have all been destroyed or dismantled, as have most of the other buildings. There are no tools, save what can be dug out of the rubble. There is no food.
Law and order are virtually non-existent, because there is no police force and no judiciary. In some areas there no longer seems to be any clear sense of what is right and what is wrong. People help themselves to whatever they want without regard to ownership – indeed, the sense of ownership itself has largely disappeared. Goods belong only to those who are strong enough to hold on to them, and those who are willing to guard them with their lives. Men with weapons roam the streets, taking what they want and threatening anyone who gets in their way. Women of all classes and ages prostitute themselves for food and protection. There is no shame. There is no morality. There is only survival….
In 1944 and 1945 large parts of Europe were left in chaos for months at a time. The Second World War… had devastated not only the physical infrastructure, but also the institutions that held countries together. The political system had broken down to such a degree that American observers were warning of the possibility of Europe-wide civil war. The deliberate fragmentation of communities had sown an irreversible mistrust between neighbours; and universal famine had made personal morality an irrelevance….
That Europe managed to pull itself out of this mire, and then go on to become a prosperous, tolerant continent seems nothing short of a miracle…. Germany… transformed itself from a pariah nation to a responsible member of the European family in just a few short years. A new desire for international cooperation was also born during the postwar years, which would bring not only prosperity but peace….
[And I have to interject and ask: “who paid the bill? Who got skinned so Europe could ‘begin again’? And I’m talking well beyond and in addition to the commonfolk of Europe themselves… to the earth-connected commoners of many continents…. See… we’re forced to contribute our energy to projects that we are directed to do…. Imagine when we’re free to share our gifts willingly… – P.S.]
…The Germans call the months after the war Stunde nul (‘Zero Hour’) – the implication being that it was a time when the slate was wiped clean, and history allowed to start again….
There was certainly no wiping of the slate, no matter how hard German statesmen might have wished for one. In the aftermath of the war waves of vengeance and retribution washed over every sphere of European life. Nations were stripped of territory and assets, governments and institutions underwent purges, and whole communities were terrorized because of what they were perceived to have done during the war. Some of the worst vengeance was meted out on individuals. German civilians all over Europe were beaten, arrested, used as slave labour or simply murdered. Soldiers and policemen who had collaborated with the Nazis were arrested and tortured. Women who had slept with German soldiers were stripped, shaved and paraded through the streets covered in tar. German, Hungarian and Austrian women were raped in the millions. Far from wiping the slate clean, the aftermath of the war merely propagated grievances between communities and between nations, many of which are still alive today.
[He’s writing about the period 1944 – 1949… and when we read this book… keep in mind that this is us… we commoners… who are the ones who bled… who died… who were persecuted… by each other. True, we were all set up… but we paid this price… not ‘power’… they got to test out their experiment… just as when they experimented by dropping an atomic bomb… and they experimented with enslaving a whole people. They have been toying with our lives for millennia… and we imagine… that our energy released is scary! We have been thoroughly brainwashed… but… on second thought… maybe not… as we don’t have access to the airwaves… we don’t know what each other thinks. What we do know is that we haven’t developed the means… using the tools we have… to inter-link our efforts.
Where is the Left? In every nation… why not simply say: “It’s time for a global day of planning.” We have to move on from this mess. We have to stop and think… all together… what we want for our future. It’s time to not let it be in the hands of the statesmen anymore. – P.S.]
Neither did the end of the war signify the birth of a new era of ethnic harmony in Europe. Indeed, in some parts of Europe, ethnic tensions actually became worse. Jews continued to be victimized, just as they had been during the war itself. Minorities everywhere became political targets once again, and in some areas this led to atrocities that were just as repugnant as those committed by the Nazis. The aftermath of the war also saw the logical conclusion of all the Nazis efforts to categorize and segregate different races. Between 1945 and 1947 tens of millions of men, women and children were expelled from their countries in some of the biggest acts of ethnic cleansing the world has ever seen. This is a subject that is rarely discussed by admirers of the ‘European miracle’, and even more rarely understood: even those who are aware of the expulsions of Germans know little about the similar expulsions of other minorities across eastern Europe. The cultural diversity that was once such an integral part of the European landscape before, and even during, the war was not dealt its final death-blow until after the war was over. (Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II, 2012, p. xiii – xvi)
This is one of those books that runs the risk of being suppressed… because… like Miklos before him… it probes the ugliness of class – a necessary and important book.
…so…at whose behest… the insistence on all the rigid categorization? Who created all the havoc?… as the Fascists have their funders and industrialists… it takes means to make massive ‘mischief’.
The tactics of ‘power’ have never changed…. It takes little imagination to see the hidden hand of shadow-statesmen… crouching behind all the ‘class-atrocities’ the people are egged on to make… or coerced to make by the simple means of the wage.
Yet it’s never discussed this way. Even when it’s obvious that only the few… who are always discreetly out of view… sitting on their ever-bloating egos and coffers… have the means to try to turn us against each other… has the ‘vision’ (‘no change’… everyone in their place…) to guide their actions… gives the steps they conspire to implement… and the playbook (the Republic)… long practiced by ‘rulers’ of states…that bestows the confidence… and sense of legitimacy… gives a false cast of benevolence to all their callousness.
This is ‘class’… this is ‘rank’… this is the ‘chaos’ that ‘power’ makes…
…but… and this we must face unflingingly… with our unconscious complicity… the minds and hands and hearts of we-the-subjects. And while there’s no shame in this… there is a huge requirement to return to the ethos of the earth… once we’re free of the hierarchy . ‘Hierarchy’ doesn’t allow time to think… as ‘class’ accelerates… in equal measure does our thought deteriorate… as… we can’t get past the wound of ‘class’ until we probe its ugliness… which we are now doing… globally.
What this means is that we’re finally freeing our energies from the huge load of guilt we’ve all been carrying… in being the physical manifestation of ‘power’… ‘class’… ‘rank’… because we are all complicit… all do ‘power’s division work for it… all have been mired in the guilt of mutual betrayal….
The wounds are deep… but a test site can reach them… and ultimately… the only way to secure our freedom is to end ‘power’. Did Chokwe die on his own or did he have help? We don’t know. All we know for sure is that the development of radio wave weaponry means the technology exists for ‘power’ to do this… and that ‘power’ can never resist… testing its weapons. ‘Power’ must end… to secure our freedom.)
Number three: Get clear on the scope – that its global… get clear that our efforts must be on-going… and must be… to be successful… inter-linked.
Number four: They’re trying to ‘breed’ our humanity out of us… so to refuse we must give our babies their due… resistance means giving them full attention…
(…and I have to interject that what I mean by that is a communal attendance…. I’m certainly not thinking of a ‘nuclear family’… or a struggling single mom trying to make ends meet. I mean that we must band together… and help each other… give each other our due…)
…so… full attention… full affection… and no judgment. (I stood in line this week behind a baby crying while his father stood placid and implacable. And the look on the baby’s face said, “why… why… why?…” And I tried to distract the child from his clear pain… but he couldn’t stop looking at his father’s face… and his look kept saying… “why… why… why?…”)
(Do you see?… that such callousness begets misanthropy… sociopathy…
…a mirroring lack of empathy?
And therefore…
…when we give our children their due attention…
…it cracks open the system?
That ‘work’… that true work…
…of making love our song…
…begets our new start…
…is the well-aimed strike…
…into ‘power’s heart.
We can’t serve two masters.
We either serve each other and the earth…
…or we abandon them… our children… healthy ecosystems… healthy oceans… and truth itself…
…to serve the ones who’ve trained us to serve them…
…we abandon what we long for out of fear that it’s a fraud…
…fear that we’ll find ourselves betrayed again…
…and that we can’t allow…
[…we’re far too ‘smart’ for that….]
And so on the cycle goes… and so our hearts grow cold.)
Number five: Think for yourselves! I listened this week to part of a documentary… called Spies in Mississippi… and some of the testimony revealed that folks who betrayed their brothers and sisters at the behest of the government used the excuse: “if the government says to do it… it must be the right thing to do….” (I have some neighbors that I would wager are saying this very thing… and this is another way in which reverence for the father [and mother] causes us to betray each other… parental harshness… for sure… but… this self-betraying reverence… is also in evidence in expressions of ‘patriotism’.) And it’s critical that we press forward the logic… start the dialogue… press the facing of facts…. Because if we know that the state is our overseer and keeper… then we can face this juncture authentically… knowing our choice is not between rivaling concepts… but between continued diminishment… and being free. And as social beings we must do this together… we need each other to get free… and so agglomerate necessarily….
(And I must add that… ‘power’ does!… Do you really not think… that every statesman [even as they compete for ‘supremacy’…] has ‘containing the people’ as their number one priority?… or that… English, German, and U.S. shadow-statesmen… don’t scheme together on this?…
…and when I say ‘shadow-statesmen’ I’m referring to the global state. That’s a collective project. They work together on that… scheme together on that… on how to play the ‘nationalist-card’ to greatest effect… and on how to wrest the means-of-state… from the hands of populists… like Hugo Chavez…
[…and by the way when we look at what Hugo Chavez was doing when he died… we see he was trying to create a regional counter-weight… to the ‘power’ of the global state… but the hierarchy defeated him. It’s in releasing the power of the people globally that we win. Let’s begin talking about this…]
…or that Putin and Angela Merkel are not as one… when it comes to keeping the people of Ukraine from carving out a new way… from the way of ‘the state’?)
Number six: Share what you’re doing… give it a name… and encourage your brothers and sisters globally to do the same.
Number seven: Make love your song… Immortal Ones… and… never forget… they’ve got plenty of money they’ve been saving for this moment… and I’m talking about the global shadow-statesmen… to try to turn you away from that knowledge… but don’t study on them… study on this: “Love be now your song, Immortal Ones.” No matter how the ‘kings of state’ try to debase it… that word ‘love’… we know… that on their tongues it is but dust… their use of it… need not concern us.
Please tune in Waking Up Radio this Sunday, March 2, 2014, as we continue reading and discussing “Miklos Nyiszli’s Lessons On Class”.
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* for the March 9, 2014 show: Sisters and brothers…
March 6th, 2014: Sisters and brothers…
Last week we (in a sense) asked: “Are we ready for the truth?” This question returned to me just now as I heard someone say… over the airwaves… that the women of Ukraine are trying to get more informed about ‘democracy.’ “What is ‘democracy’?” is one of those taboo questions that always returns… because no authentic discussion of it is tolerated.
I’m going to share a paragraph on this week’s show that I’m encouraging us all to think about… let lap slowly… in concurrent waves (that’s a shout-out to George Eliot… and I have to say that it shocks me when I hear pundits borrow from the greats and not give credit… and give thanks…) across our minds.
The communities therefore in which the secondary functionaries of the government [local and state legislators] are elected, are perforce obliged to make great use of judicial penalties as a means of administration. This is not evident at first sight; for those in power are apt to look upon the institution of elective functionaries as one concession, and the subjection of the elected magistrate to the judges of the land as another. They are equally averse to both these innovations; and as they are more pressingly solicited to grant the former than the latter, they accede to the election of the magistrate, and leave him independent of the judicial power. Nevertheless, the second of these measures is the only thing that can possibly counterbalance the first: and it will be found that an elective authority which is not subject to judicial power will, sooner or later, either elude all control or be destroyed. [We should listen to the words in terms of ‘power’… ‘power’-struggle’… – P.S.] The courts of justice are the only possible medium between the central power and the administrative bodies: they alone can compel the elected functionary to obey, without violating the rights of the elector. The extension of judicial power in the political world ought therefore to be in the exact ratio of the extension of elective offices: if these two institutions do not go hand in hand, the State must fall into anarchy or into subjection. (Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy In America, Vol. 1, Chapter V, “Necessity of Examining the Condition of the States before That of the Union at Large.”
One of the interesting things about that quote is what it takes for granted… assumes we know. ‘Power’ is so obvious it’s a given… yet today on the Left it’s gone missing… and with it… accurate analysis… and with that gone… so is gone effective action.
It was also interesting reading De Tocqueville warn ‘power’ about the need for proper control over us… by means of the judiciary… to ensure enforcement of its priorities… i.e. ‘supremacy’ (that last is a given… once ‘power’ is admitted… into the conversation…) after listening to two women from UC – Berkeley say that the university’s “official policy” means nothing…
(…it doesn’t matter what the words say… what matters is what actually happens… and what actually happens is the official policy… no matter what nice words they issue in their official statements. The policy is what they allow to happen. They’ve got all he cards. They’ve got all the ‘power’. If it’s happening it’s because they want it to…)
…the university’s “official policy” means nothing when there’s no enforcement… that the frat-guys (i.e. future ‘power’-hopefuls…) know the true policy… it’s “take possession of women’s bodies.” Never forget that this is a ‘power’ institution… hoping to attract future global-state statesmen. And what did we say recently about global-state statesmen?… that they are sociopaths and rapists. ‘Power’ wants to claim women’s bodies for their procreative capacity and as a perk for them. This mindset they teach all men… to woo them into collaboration.
In Savage Continent, there’s a disturbing photograph of a Corsican woman… accused of collaboration… stripped by French partisans… and the author commented that her body was being repossessed by the state. Exact… apt… true.
“How do you compel obedience?” is the first-last-and-always preoccupation of the ‘philosopher’-part of the statesmen… men like De Tocqueville and Bentham… who sat down at their desks to establish the necessary… components… qualities… bits… from which a functioning ‘democracy’ could theoretically exist. ‘Power’… of course… was a given of these efforts… which… right at the outset as we embark on our quest… to understand this word more clearly… and… to find the way out of our current (global) mess… of resource-wars… and lost humanity… and loss of a vital earth… should give us pause… as… ‘power’ is the cause-generative… and what it requires… must obviously be flipped… to reverse these devastating effects.
I.e. ‘democracy’ is not fit for a free people… by definition… because it requires our submission… it means… “‘power’ must have its way with us” – because while ‘power’ exists… it will stage the play to accomplish this.
But you may say… along with a pundit I heard the other day… that “‘democracy’ is only as good as the people elected…” – but this by-passes the fundamental question of obedience. ‘Rule of law’ officially means ‘we’ subject ourselves to agreed-upon restraints. But Bentham and De Tocqueville are honest and say that the point of ‘the law’ is to compel us to obey.
But you then may object that if ‘we’ make the agreed-upon standards our object… what’s wrong with that?
What’s wrong is ‘force’.
What’s wrong is the hidden assumption that mutual aid is not our nature.
And it is.
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March 3rd, 2014: Brothers and sisters…
The machinations of states is theater with two tightly inter-woven objectives…
…first: work steadily to conquer the people… according to the ‘laws’ of hierarchy (i.e. ensuring there are ‘winners’ and ‘losers’… this is key overall strategy…
(…and… by the way… when we said that the responsibility of the ‘intellectual’ is to stand with the people and renounce the privilege of standing apart… this is not a national project… a national Left is useless… it effectively means you stand with ‘power’… agree to its terms… agree to betray your brothers and sisters who happen to be the designated ‘losers’… globally speaking…)
…so this is key overall strategy… both for maintaining the undergirding ideology… as well as ‘power’s invisibility…) and of PR chest-pounding-posturing (this must be on-going…) and…
…second: play the game of ‘supremacy’ successfully… using quantifying means to keep score (otherwise known as ‘the economy’…) while maintaining the chest-pounding to draw from the people… the requisite energy.
We’ve said that the definition of ‘economy’ that’s most authentic is “eating the earth”: controlling the resources of the planet… the most key one… strategically… being us…. But with ‘socialism’ (which in the people’s mind then… and to many today,… simply meant ‘freedom’…) sweeping across Europe… and ‘infecting’ the ‘colonies’… that resource which is absolutely key to controlling all the others… us… was at risk of being lost… so ‘economy’ geared up… for destroying is also consuming… and… and this is the point… removing resources from our use… which makes sense from ‘power’s perspective… but never from ours. From ours it’s almost inconceivable… “why destroy that fertile land?”… we ask ourselves… “why enclose something that was doing such good things for everyone?”… why not universal health care?” You know we always ask ourselves these questions as if it’s just a matter of ‘power’ being educated… having their horizons broadened… gaining information… and so then the pundits delude themselves… if they’re not bought… into thinking they’re ‘helping’ to educate the ‘masters’. Trust… the ‘masters’ know what’s up… they know what’s going on. We have to start teaching each other to see reality.
And the book Savage Continent provides prodigious illustration of resources being removed from our use… and the whole mess being turned back over to ‘power’… because we were thoroughly demoralized… globally.
What he describes is an orgy of destructiveness. This systematic attack on ‘economic life’ was itself the ‘economic system’ working at a clip… racing at a pace unequaled since…
…but of course… ‘power’ isn’t done… yet.
The ‘economic system’ is not ‘capitalism’…. It’s called ‘power’… and they invent a tool called ‘the economy’ to keep us confused.
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War is an ‘economic system’… and ‘the economy’ is war by other means… i.e…. it’s about controlling the energy of the majority… the goal being… to beat us into submission… and…
…in the ‘normal’ course of events… overt violence is (as Solozzo said…) “too expensive…” in terms of maintaining legitimacy… as a means of controlling. And so they ‘normally’ rely on Bentham… whose Panoptic guidance says: “wage war by other means… i.e. be ‘economic’… and ‘efficient’….” “Let the weight of scarcity weigh on their minds…” Bentham advised.
But when the people arise… ‘economy’… ‘efficiency’… and all that jazz… flies out the door…
…and in walks war.
‘Economy’ is just a tool… like any other technology.
So ‘war’ is always war on us… whether they spill our guts with guns… or markets.
The economy is just war by other means… and war is the profligate failure of ‘breeding’… to control the energy of the majority (the true point of the ‘education’ we’re all given.)
What they (the ‘power’-guys…) hate most… is resistance. What they love most… is obedience –
(…and… on this tip… it was a bit discouraging to listen to a man hawking a book… with similar sentiments to me when it comes to our non-human-animal friends… which is that they can teach us empathy… they can teach us how to be a living thing… as we seem [here in the U.S.] to have lost the knack. And to hear him scratching his head about where violence comes from… and how a sociopath could love animals… and then to say he thinks he’s figured out “why we’re violent…” that it’s because ‘we’ve’ created this notion of ‘the other’… ‘the other’ is co-terminus with ‘class’… with ‘power’ – it’s called the division between ‘the barbarian’ and ‘the citizen’… it’s called ‘Plato’… why won’t they say that? Why won’t they put it in that frame?… so that we can see the continuity of this mess and realize that if we don’t get busy we’re condemning our children… and the earth… to even worse destruction and devastation.
But on the connection with ‘obedience’: he was scratching his head about how the Fascists loved their dogs…. Yes… they love obedient beasts. Definitely. I’m sure it warms their hearts… and they’ll call that ‘love’. Don’t be deceived. What they ‘love’ is obedience. They love others reinforcing their sense of themselves as superior beings.)
What they love most… is obedience – to force us to obey is the name of the game… the key that explains everything… under ‘class’.
(So what does this tell us about the people of Ukraine? It should give us some sense of the risk they are in… as we said about Egypt… and Haiti… and Venezuela….
Come on! the Left. Let’s be a global Left. Let’s start realizing that if we don’t stand with our brothers and sisters in targeted regions… or in so-called… what? Whatever categories ‘power’ uses: “Well, these are the ‘producers’… and these are the ‘food growers’… or whatever. We cannot allow ourselves to be chopped up and managed.)
Keeping us stuck following orders confers on ‘power’ multiple ‘economic’ (i.e. in terms of maximizing – i.e. most ‘efficiently’… following Bentham’s ‘deep training’ way… his insistence on totalitarian control of all social institutions – the control of human energy…) benefits: it renders us pliable material with which to work… we easily bend to any use to which we’re put… offering no challenge to them; and it keeps our minds empty… bringing within reach… Plato’s dictum: “no change”… rigid class fixed in place; and… just as we need each other to develop our thought… the flip is also so… if our thought stagnates because empathy is lost… we’re less likely to congregate and overcome atomization… and so ‘decision-making’ then seems quite beyond us.
Hitler… Stalin… Mussolini… and… let’s not forget… the 1934 coup attempt in the U.S…. coordination on this scale is not gone and done… but living with us… until we… step up.
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And… in every instance… of the hidden malevolence… coordinated planning to realize global totalitarianism… whether the global-statesmen are forming alliances… or jockeying with each other for position… who pays the price?… not these ones with the hubris… not these ones setting the goal… but always we commoners.
This will not end till we either deal with them… or are thoroughly conquered (which ain’t gonna happen…)
…but whatever does happen… while ‘power’ exists… whatever their intra-ruler machinations… while statesmen rule over us… they will be as one… in their fixed determination… to have their unfettered way with us…
…so that they can keep ‘working’ on… their ‘more perfect Union’ – of ‘rule’.
When will we refuse? Is it really true that we can’t move on… until we expose all of the ugliness? I hope not because it’s bottomless.
No… the answer is… we-the-people assume responsibility for our own education.
The propaganda of ‘class’ is everywhere and intense… when are we going to start challenging it?… the bizarre notion that some should have grand palatial residences… for their bodies’ and thoughts’ ease… while others not even protection from the elements… and the soul-wearying insecurity that results from it. Are we not all human beings? Is the earth not abundant?
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This week I heard an interview with a 21-year-old woman in the Navy as she described how… as she put in more and more time… essentially ‘making tribe’… she found herself becoming patriotic… although her reasons for signing up had been strictly economic. The folks on board talked a lot about ‘readiness’… so ‘the enemy’ could be targeted at any minute. ‘The enemy’ is how these young people are being trained to think… and we have no counter-education to offer a different way of seeing… a different story to counter the state’s. Instead… we placidly go along with patent indoctrination. When will we begin planning our way that’s opposite?
‘Power’ maintains its control by means of atomization and hierarchical division – and then by coercing (by means of the judiciary… as De Tocqueville said…) each fragment of this artificial social arrangement into performing the same inane and harmless (to ‘power’…) tasks…
…while it keeps the true goal hidden… completely outside this process – whether the angle on this manufactured reality is ‘the polity’… or ‘the economy’… or ‘society’ – in which ‘the people’ are forced to reside… i.e. the true goal is externalized.
The statesmen have by definition ruled out our freedom – by calling it ‘anarchy’. Remember Bentham’s: “He who owns the lexicon rules the world…”? Well… ‘power’ has seized exclusive naming rights for the key terms we need to get free… then told us they know best (“rule of ‘the wise’…”) that the world is too ‘complex’ to be turned over to ‘the people’… an heretofore mere uninitiated audience to the ‘world historic’ figures… and the ‘scientists’ and pundits are all pushed forward to ‘prove’ this….
…so to undermine our confidence that we don’t have to believe them… we don’t have to accept their definitions.
Of course we’re ‘smart enough’. The way the world is arranged is not ordained… is not about ‘intelligence’ but rather ‘power’…
(…our ancestors knew that… were very clear on that… we have to get back to their level of savvy when it comes to this because we have the tools now that allow us to act on it… globally…)
The current social arrangement is not about ‘intelligence’ but rather ‘power’…their control of aggregated human energy… which is true power… the power of life… which we reclaim when we stand with each other globally… and not with the would-be ‘masters’.
So what’s the opposite of this?… of standing with them?
…the opposite of hidden is transparent… instead of midnight… daylight…
…the opposite of exclusion is inclusion… wholism instead of division and atomization…
…the opposite of an externalized goal is an internalized goal… i.e. brought into the bosom of the people… as a goal we all pursue…
…thereby structurally eroding ‘power’s structure… thereby eroding its enforced control of us.
‘Moving on’ is a ‘simple’ matter of having a transparent goal that we all discuss and get clear on… and then start working on… everywhere….
What is this transparent goal?
‘Democracy’… as De Tocqueville describes it… is a fragile… carefully balanced compromise – given ‘power’ (which he most certainly does…) – between ‘anarchy’… ‘the people’ released from captivity… i.e. a classless society… and ‘subjection’… i.e. dictatorship… totalitarianism.
So it’s not ‘the economy’ that ‘power’ sees as the delicate watch (I’m referring to Albert O. Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests…) but ‘democracy’… requiring extreme craft and skill… or so the story goes….
But… to maintain a fragile balance requires a lot of energy…
…being free doesn’t.
But it does require some guarantors of non-interference with it… in the transition.
What would they be?
Individual freedom… i.e. individual ‘freedom from necessity’… or individual ‘self-sufficiency’… must be structurally guaranteed.
That is the standard… the goal… the vision… that must guide… everything… all of our actions. And… think about it… that means we can allow our thought process – our reason – to live. We can set aside the fear of how to exist… mere survival… we can devote our time to pondering from the vantage of the whole. And so… being powerful beings means that when we want those great ideas to live… we have to make that case… and convince… appeal to each other’s reason.
Universal freedom guarantees universal leisure… and vice versa… guarantees that the few cannot aggregate our energy. Because once we’re free… once it’s structurally supported and endorsed… we are at a point now where we can help each other globally… and… as Nikola Tesla saw… that’s a whole new set of terms and conditions that we have to start believing it… seeing… accepting… trusting.
That is the standard… the goal… the vision… that must guide… everything… all of our actions.
This is the point… of thorough and on-going global discussions… i.e. how to create the global infrastructure that undergirds universal leisure…
(…and by ‘universal leisure’ I mean the end of ‘coerced work’ (whether they call that ‘your service’ or ‘the wage’…) the end of others sucking on our aggregated energy… I mean freedom… freedom from necessity… individual self-sufficiency…)
…that is what we must figure out. What is the global infrastructure that allows that to be… because once that is structurally in place… we’re gonna hold on to it… we have the tools to ensure that now – thanks to Nikola Tesla and his Tribe… and all the hard work of all our commoner-ancestors over the millennia.
And once we have a clear start… we have our plow… and we who choose…
(…because it’s not about force… not about that mindset of ‘not-trusting-each-other’ – it comes back to that – and once we start the discussions that will become transparent…)
…and we who choose to be the ones who get us there… to universal leisure… can put our shoulders to it.
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So that’s what we have to figure out… what is that global infrastructure.
And if each individual being free from necessity is the goal… then… that’s a straightforward problem… the kind we humans are used to (over our thousands of years on the planet…) “piece a’cake… piece a’pie…” – as opposed to trying to reveal ‘power’s deep deceptions and untangle their knotted lies.
E.g.: what are the basics of shelter and food? What food holds up well over time and gives much in taste and nutrients? (…and states already keep such reserves anyway… so it may be a mere matter of mapping what’s already there…) so we can supplement food needs of our sisters and brothers elsewhere and locally. And how keep central to our thinking the value of ‘balance’… key to successfully creating an ‘opposite’.
Identification of what to do is straightforward… once we know what we want.
What we want for our world in many ways is guided by our bodies… by trusting at last what they’ve decided…
…and what they want… is to not be dependent…
…to be dependent sucks, doesn’t it?
So this is the touchstone of our discussions… what global reality… supports individual self-sufficiency?
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People of Ukraine: if we who have the resources… the means… to say we will strike with you when you decide you’re ready… to make of Ukraine not a ‘third’… but an opposite way…
…do not step up…
…then global ‘power’ can keep holding all the cards that control your ability to survive… because planning an opposite way… takes time.
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When we look at the vast and ‘incomprehensible’ devastation that Keith Lowe shows us… in Savage Continent… we think… or, rather are trained to think… ‘madness’!… (or ‘evil’!… or “those sad, demented autocrats!”…) and this is indeed the feeling one gets from the contemporary witnesses who come afterwards (whose words Lowe documents…) who all say, “such viciousness!… why?… why the viciousness?” They cannot grasp the ‘why’ of it… and yet… Miklos shows us the devastation as these acts are being committed… and in them the functionaries do seem… as Hannah Arendt termed it… ‘banal’… but it’s not the “banality of evil”… it’s the banality of obedience… of following orders… putting our thought processes on hold (which we’re trained to do by parents…) which is all too familiar to us.
This is one of the most important things Miklos shows us… the sense of normalcy that prevails… subsists… among the functionaries.
The banality of following orders means… our empathic feelings are frozen… but… released from the obedience training called ‘the wage’.... what flows is: more time with the children… more time to process the pain of one’s growing up… trapped in abandonment (in the “never been ‘seen’”…) and in the training in obedience… and we begin to make sense of what’s been happening to us.
But we’ve yet to ask ourselves… we’ve yet to say (in broad and extended global conversations…) how will we counter our massive mis-education?
I want to thank a man I heard this week… who called in to a radio show to counter the flood of orchestrated resistance to the notion… that we can learn empathy from our plant and animal friends. He told a story of how his anger as a child at being abandoned – and it’s always at base… our anger… due to this… the normalized mistreatment of children under ‘class’ – led him to take his anger out on small animals… and try to kill them. But one didn’t die… one lived long enough to look up at him… and say: “look at what you’ve done to me…” and so… helped him return to himself… his original empathy… because before all else we are living things – before a few among us tried to make us think that they were ‘kings’ – and our nature is to help each other…
…and this is what we must start saying… that ‘the way of states’ is opposed to our being living things… that grow according to our nature… we are not machines… here to perform the tasks we’re given… and then go meekly to our graves… give up our places… never having seen the depths of our longing even begin to be achieved…
…and it’s that longing that we’re here to attend to.
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Our feelings and empathy are forming again… here in the U.S…. “the thunder is the thunder of the floes…”
(…I’m referring to that poem I love from Christopher Fry’s play A Sleep Of Prisoners:
The human heart can go to the lengths of God.
Dark and cold we may be, but this is no Winter now. The frozen misery
Of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move,
The thunder is the thunder of the floes,
The thaw, the flood, the upstart Spring,
Thank God our time is now when wrong
Comes up to face us everywhere,
Never to leave us till we take
The longest stride of soul men ever took.
Affairs are now soul size.
… but… the risk is enormous in this… as this means… by ‘power’s way of looking at things… that there are too many of us… i.e…. time for ‘Plan C’….
So you see what Shakespeare means when he says: “God grant I never prove so fond [foolish]… as to trust ‘power’ on its own bond… or a dog that seems a’sleeping… or a keeper with my freedom.”
So long as ‘power’ exists we are subjects…
…so long as we are subjects… we are subject to ‘power’s conditions…
…and its whims.
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The profligacy with which they waste our lives astounds us… and yet nonetheless (or maybe because of our astonishment…) we consistently seem to refuse to see… what’s obvious: that we are the targets… that we are what they’re trying to conquer…
…on this they’re all united… all the global shadow-state-statesmen.
And what’s the drumbeat I’m hearing today from the pundits who speak for this global shadow-state? (Ray McGovern being the most duplicitous… and John McCain the most ‘prominent’…): “Putin is crazy… Putin is nuts….” “Putin has an emotional attachment…” says Angela Merkel… playing Iago to perfection. “He’s not in touch… no telling what… insane stuff he’s capable of….”
Sisters and brothers… let’s never forget… that the media we’re given is orchestration…
…so… the question is… what is being orchestrated?
And as we said last week… until we no longer have keepers… we have to face the fact… that…
…it could be anything…
…anything along a horrific spectrum… from the most modest being… to remind us all globally… how comforting it is… to have a daddy…
…to… a conclusion that too many of us are actively presenting a challenge….
Recall what we said… that… because of our atomization… only they know the true global situation… how far along is our resistance… only they know the full extent of it….
This is no way to live…
…wondering just how hideous the next horror will be that they’ll choose to visit upon us.
It’s critical that we start our global planning to move beyond it…
…but… as we’re being confronted with this mess… if I had to guess… I’d say… we’re seeing an elaborate scheme… to discredit Barack… and regain the U.S. Presidency. That these guys have been desperate to discredit him… fabricating one crisis after another (Benghazi attack… the Syrian state killing ‘its’ citizens… phone taps – on ‘our’ ‘friends’, no less… [Angela Merkel… significantly…] Affordable Care Act… horrific drone attacks… I.R.S….
…from ‘right’ and ‘left’… hoping to make Barack look ineffective… has been patently obvious.
(And I suspect discrediting Barack is about more than just regaining the presidency of the U.S. [they can do that with a ‘Democrat’ – Jerry Brown being that stealth candidate….] And with this tactic about to be discussed… Miklos and Popper and Bernal have provided invaluable assistance… to enable us to see how ‘power’ invents the stories it needs… that ‘fit’… with them being ‘supermen’… men of ‘breeding’ and ‘cool intellect’… and that story will not admit… an African-American president that out-shines them in every respect… and most particularly in the enactment of their favorite story: ‘statesmanship’… which is supposedly their game… their signature expertise and specialty… the skillful guiding of the ‘ship of state’.
I suspect… they are compiling [crafting…] as we speak… the ‘evidence’ to make the case… not only that the first African-American president just ‘couldn’t cut it’… but that he was almost “the ruination of ‘us’….” This… in keeping with their usual practice… is the story they plan for the ‘history’ books… this is what ‘power’ does… in order to pursue its obsession… its dream of being deemed the ultimate supra-national ‘supermen’.)
But we’re still moved to ask: should they regain the White House… what’s their plan?
What would you imagine? Let’s get out our Plato-given-hubris gear… and put on our vampire-hat.
Please tune in Waking Up Radio this Sunday, March 9, 2014, as we continue reading and discussing “Miklos Nyiszli’s Lessons On Class”.
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* for the March 16, 2014 show: Sisters and brothers…
Thank-yous are due… to our brothers and sisters in Ukraine… staying clear and focused in the face of tremendous pressure… and to the people of Russia… who turned out in the tens of thousands to stand with them… and say ‘no’ to Putin… a very dangerous thing to do….
Today… before we hear from Miklos Nyiszli… we’re going to spend some time with Rage Against the Machine… the band… but also the historical event… which we’re still in the midst of…
…and how appropriate for us to do this today… when we give thanks for the incomparable courage of Rachel Corrie… thank you Sister… words fail… and we know that you’re just the known tip of an enormous well of courage found in every land… but perhaps most in those regions of the globe facing the greatest challenges (because designated as ‘peripheries’…) the ‘global South’: the Middle East… Asia and Africa… for whom surviving each day is a tremendous victory… who must watch their dearest ones fall… and yet live on… love on… fight on…
…you are in our hearts.
(…but on second thought it’s come to me… it may be we here in the U.S. who face the greatest challenge… threatened loss of empathy… as a direct consequence… of our deep atomization…
…all those with heart… despite… you are our inspiration….)
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March 10th, 2014: Sisters and brothers…
It’s interesting that George Eliot came up for me last week… because she’s coming up again for me now…
…both because I received in the mail this morning Joel McIver’s just-out book on Rage Against The Machine… [you can read the interview he did with me for the book on the page: Conversation with Joel McIver]
…and… simultaneously… because I’ve been pondering this word ‘democracy’…
…and a poem she wrote is pertinent:
1st Gent. Where lies the power, there let the blame lie too.
2nd Gent. Nay, power is relative;
You cannot fright the coming pest with border fortresses,
Or catch your carp with subtle argument,
All force is twain in one: cause is not cause
Unless effect be there; and action’s self
Must needs contain a passive. So command
Exists but with obedience.
It’s startling to me… as I read Joel’s book… what a gift it is – what he’s done – by asking the tough questions… the questions that have been plaguing the Left for some time…
…like: how to end ‘the system’ while being part of ‘the system’?… and what exactly is ‘the system’ anyway?…
…and: what is the objective?…
…and: should we try to be strategic?…
…and: should our focus be ‘local’ or ‘global’?…
…and: is Noam Chomsky right when he says, “don’t worry about what ‘the alternative’ should be. If you want a more free and democratic society, you go out and do it…”?
…but: what is ‘free’?… what is a ‘democratic society’?… and does ‘democracy’ mean ‘free’?… And why do our bodies contradict what you say?
In examining Rage Against The Machine’s messages and why they resonated…
…in exploring what gave rise to the band… and then…
…in asking those continuously recurring questions…
…he’s describing the dilemmas that still face our resistance – we who are grappling with how to move on – beyond commodification… beyond de-humanization… beyond our separation from each other…
… and… by bringing together the existing views of ‘where we are’… he’s… in a sense… assessing the current state of our resistance… summarizing the current state of our understanding of ‘the system’… of our ‘seeing-reality’…
…providing a tremendous service thereby …
…one very relevant and needed… I believe… in the current moment… for reasons I’ll be sharing shortly.
The most attention-grabbing element of the first 12 Rage Against The Machine songs was their lyrical content, devised by de la Rocha, and a pulverizing denunciation of almost everything which Western society was based on in 1991. Poverty versus wealth, exploitation of the masses by vested interests, the war crimes of the elite, the failure of education, the mental and physical enslavement of you and me… all of these things were spat out and stamped upon by this passionate kid with dreadlocks.
They use force to make you do what the deciders have decided you must do...
Now ya do what they taught ya
Now you're under control
Fuck you I won't do what you tell me
(‘Killing In The Name’ – 1992)
…[T]he unforgettable ‘Bullet In The Head’, which begins with a chorded bass riff and slips quickly into some of de la Rocha’s most venomous lyrics. Addressing themes such as the manipulation of our minds by advertising, the song paints a picture of a zombified population (“believing all the lies that they’re telling ya / buying all the products that they’re selling ya”), sleepwalking through life as if brain-dead. The singer refers to TV as an “in-house drive-by”, and audiences as the victims who are dispatched for corporations’ convenience. Grim stuff, but delivered in a funky-as-hell manner, with Commerford’s relentless bass groove devolving at the song’s end into Rage’s most famous riff, a spidery, descending figure that is still heard all these years later in guitar stores worldwide. (Joel McIver, Rage Against The Machine, p. 53 and 62)
I give a shout out to the living dead
Who stood and watched as the feds cold centralized
So serene on the screen
You were mesmerised
Cellular phones soundin’ a death tone
Corporations cold
Turn ya to stone before ya realise
They load the clip in omnicolour
Said they pack the 9, they fire it at prime time
Sleeping gas, every home was like Alcatraz
And mutha fuckas lost their minds
Just victims of the in-house drive-by
They say jump, you say how high
Just victims of the in-house drive-by
They say jump, you say how high
(‘Bullet In The Head’ – 1993)
There’s a lot here to ponder in those lyrics… and in the tough questions Joel documents. We’ll but scratch the surface of it on March 16th. If you’re interested in checking out his book, you can visit: Joel’s site or: the Blabbermouth site. And if you’re interested in taking that broader discussion out into the community… me too… please get in touch.
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For the past few weeks we’ve asked: “Where is the Left?”… and Joel McIver’s book arrived and I opened it… and as if in answer to my question… there was Noam Chomsky… being quoted advising guitarist Tom Morello of the band. This was 1996. A pregnant moment. Here was a group of young people reaching large numbers… and they were searching for the truth. They had high hopes for what could be accomplished… if truth were in hand.
I doubt not that ‘power’ put them in its crosshairs… made certain lots of inauthentic people crossed their paths… did all it could to sow dissension among them… did its best to lessen their effect… to nullify their impact… and of course… to pull them off track. This is what ‘power’ does when it perceives a threat.
And in this context… they sought unimpeachable sources… they reached out… and I have to speak on that… at the risk of singing solo voce… once again… I must wade in….
Not only was Noam Chomsky speaking on ‘democracy’ on the first page of Joel’s book… but when I turned on the radio this morning (03.11.14) there he was again… omnipresent spokesperson for the wise and measured Left it seems… and Joel’s book is helping me see more clearly… that the metaphor that came to me in pondering Chomsky’s impact… a few shows back – The Pied Piper of Hamlin – was all too apt…
Superficially… I thought… listening this morning… my words and his seem consonant… he too reminds us all that states serve themselves (and implicitly the game of ‘supremacy’…) and not ‘the people’… but this is posed as a failure of ‘democracy’… urging… by example and word… both a ‘left-style’ of patriotism (“make democracy real”… or “fix the state”…) – which reinforces the state – and an endless and ultimately fruitless quest to “be the best!”… i.e. learn more… get better informed… take on all the Left causes… and you’ll be making a dent… for the next generation to start with.
Except… each generation… we dig ourselves deeper and deeper… caught… high-walled-in… into creeping (or actual… depending on your slotted spot in the world – and on the definition…) totalitarianism.
And what do our wise elders say to do… when you’re stuck in a hole and can’t get out? Stop digging. Stop doing the conventional thing… the knee-jerk following of advice that is essentially but a set-up for burn-out…
(…mission accomplished?…) from ‘power’s perspective…
…and don’t we just do that too… all of it… try to be the best (intellects…) put our dedication to the test… try to soar above the common hoard (implied… but never said…) and flame-out trying?
–––
The professional Left… the ones whose voices get to speak over the airwaves… in our atomization-clogged class-rigid-mired manufactured reality… have an obligation to the youth… to help them… as Karl Popper said… grow independent of ‘us’… of this calcified ‘reality’… of the limits imposed by their so-called ‘betters’…
…and they owe a debt to all of us… to we-the-species… to move us past this miring of class… it is a debt to humanity and all life… the price we pay for our ticket to ride….
And what I’ve learned on my recent spin… circling around and getting my look at it… is that this mess ain’t complicated… and if a pundit… with all his years on the planet hasn’t given us at least this… and therefore the way out of it…
…that’s not an accident.
Please listen to the following fragments from earlier shows. The first one is from December 2, 2012 (“…it’s not ‘the market’ that ‘power’ wants to make ‘self-regulating’… but us… we-the people…”), and the second is from January 13, 2013 (“…if we can be made obedient… ‘the system’ can be self-regulating’…” and… “the pundit class is the only thing that gives ‘power’ its hold…” [and some may be wondering about that… because there’s lots of ‘buffers’. But is the ‘pundit’-one key – because of our need to feel ‘smart’?])
…this is the goal of totalitarianism… Plato’s dictum: “no change.”
They bear, I think, on where we are now in our discussion. I’m more convinced than ever that “planning our future is a school… and what comes from it are tools…”
…it’s not ‘the market’ ‘power’ wants to make ‘self-regulating’… but us… we-the-people… and:
…if we can be made obedient… ‘the system’ can be ‘self-regulating’….
–––
This comment of Miklos’ from an upcoming chapter is coming up for me… I’ll share it – with my comment in reaction to it – as I ponder it…
I might add that during the filling of work quotas, the SS commission first accepted volunteers for the convoys, and used arbitrary incorporation only when the number of volunteers did not attain the required number. Nevertheless, there were few volunteers, since nobody wanted to forsake the advantages of his present situation – that of not working – for another. Few were willing to volunteer for forced labor when the food rations were insufficient even to sustain life in the KZ. Poor, short-sighted women, if only they had understood the mentality of the Third Reich’s KZ, they would have realized that those who did not work did not live.
[Need it be said that this is the mentality of ‘power’?… that ‘rule’ and ‘economic system’… are coterminous… – P.S.]
I think this is coming up for me because of that second implied Chomsky message: “focus on being ‘productive’… be the best… work hard….” This is the point of the state. For when we’re kept busy, we can’t figure out the illusion. Our eyes can’t see it… what we wake up to every morning: that we’re captives… that this is wrong… that this is not what we want.
–––
Because the story Joel McIver is telling is unknown to me… except in its larger sense of “youth posing a threat to ‘power’…” I approach it fresh… and so reads almost like a mystery: “how will ‘power’ mess with them?” is part of what I’m thinking…
…because that ‘power’ messed with them… I have no doubt.
But another part of what engages me is it’s underlying and running theme of ‘voice’… of how difficult it is to find it… one’s own authentic voice… given such massive state repression [because that ‘busyness’ starts early… we have to talk more about that…] that never rises to the level of discussion because it’s never acknowledged. We send our children to schools where orders are barked at them all day… and reward them according to the degree to which they learn to follow them unquestioningly… which to do means… silencing authenticity… their authentic voices…
…and of course the silencing begins before then… at the nipple… or in the crib….
So ‘claiming voice’ in a world where ‘power’ seeks to name us… that’s resistance…… that’s being ‘disobedient’…
…but then… what more is needed?… is the question that I ponder when I read George Eliot’s quote (and Joel’s book…) extended to conceive ‘power’ globally. Why is ‘disobedience’ alone… not enough… to expose… confront… and engage successfully with global ‘power’? For if it was… then… Rage Against The Machine… surely… and all the ones with equal determination if not more… all those large spirits… who refused to settle… who refused ‘obedience’ as their course in life… like Bob Marley… and Paul Robeson before him… also musicians who set out with intention to change the world… going head-to-head with ‘power’… would have done it… would have seen the ins and outs of ‘power’… and lit… that necessary global resistance. So why wasn’t it enough?
In a show over a year ago we said… while thinking through that poem by George Eliot… that “our choice can’t be disobedience unless our obedience comes to our awareness…” – and that means that ‘the state’ becomes a question. But Joel’s book is helping me see that that conclusion – that ‘the state’ itself becomes a question – is not self-evident… that there is much confusion about “what is ‘the state’?”… because of all those buffers… between ‘the people’ and ‘power’… and that this is precisely the borderland where dissent gets waylaid… gets intercepted…
…in this borderland of confusion….
“…gets waylaid…” in multiple ways… all of them varieties of distraction… all of them buffers that get pushed front and center….
Perhaps their favorite… because it works so faithfully… and is relatively cheap… is ‘the police’ (and I’m putting that in quotes to express that it’s a tactic…) that waylays our bodies… and then there’s the pundits… who define what it means to be wise… ‘smart’… which of course we all want to be.
So what does all this activism mean, if at the end of the road a band as venomous and exciting as Rage Against The Machine can fade quietly away? Perhaps this – that their message, viral in its behaviour, lingers on long after the music itself has stopped. What Rage would no doubt tell you to do would be to stop reading, go out and do whatever you feel you need to do to make the world better. On which note, there’s one more Noam Chomsky quote, as directed to Morello in that pivotal Radio Free LA interview, which we should revisit to ensure that this final point is hammered home.
Asked “What sort of society do you envision as one that would not be based on exploitation or domination, and how would we get there from here?” the great man replied: “I don’t really understand the question. It’s kind of interesting. I’m asked that question constantly in sort of privileged circles. I’m never asked it when I go to talk to poor people. They tell me what they’re doing. Maybe they ask for a comment, but they don’t ask how they do it. How you do it is very straightforward: you go out and do it. If you want a more free and democratic society, you go out and do it.”
He elaborated: “The civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the sharp critique and breakdown of illegitimate authority in all sorts of domains which took place since the sixties, the environmental movements, the feminist movement, the solidarity movements in the eighties – all of these things changed the society a lot. Well, how did they do it? Well, they just did it. People get together, they organize, they pressure, they try to learn, they try to help others to learn. That’s the way things change. That’s why we don’t live under feudalism and slavery. That’s why we have, by comparative standards, a very free society in the United States, with a lot of opportunities and options and very limited capacity on the part of the state for forced control. Well, that’s been gained by struggle.”
[Notice that he changed the subject? – P.S.]
Chomsky continued: “People are now fighting to preserve workers’ rights and Social Security and medical support and some sort of health programme, and so on. People are now fighting to preserve these things. Well, they were not there not long ago. They were achieved by plenty of popular struggle and there are no limits to this. There’s no reason why corporate tyranny – which is a fairly recent development, its institutional form is from the early part of this century – there’s no reason why that form of tyranny should not be dismantled, just as other kinds of totalitarianism were dismantled. Fascism and Stalinism, for example. And there are no particular limits to this.
“Any kind of illegitimate authority that exists, whatever it may be, from interpersonal relations up to huge states and transnational corporations, every such form of authority has to demonstrate legitimacy. They have the burden of proof… When it can’t be met, it should simply be dismantled. And that’s the way to move more towards a free and just democratic society. I don’t think there’s any sphere of life where these questions don’t arise. There’s different answers in different places and that depends on the circumstances, but the mechanisms are always the same. It’s engagement, education, organizing, pressure, building new institutions. Those are the ways. In a country like ours they’re much more available than in a place like Haiti or Colombia where you might get murdered for it. It won’t happen here. But it’s the same mechanism.”
You take his point. Action is all that is necessary to make change happen: that and co-operation. Whether it’s sending a song to number one at Christmas, or evicting a dictatorial leader from office, the approach is essentially the same: get together, form a plan and execute it. And why you’re at it, play some inspirational music and turn up the volume. I’m sure you can think of the perfect band. (Joel McIver, Rage Against The Machine, p. 209 – 10)
The problem is… ‘power’ is using that same inspirational music… has a global focus… a tight lock on the limits of debate… and virtually limitless resources… and our oceans are dying.
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“…he’s describing the dilemmas that still face our resistance – we who are grappling with how to move on – beyond commodification… beyond de-humanization… beyond our separation from each other…”
…and when we attempt to move on beyond commodification… beyond de-humanization… beyond our separation from each other…
…at each one of these junctures… sits the state… enforcing them… the state is the enforcer for ‘power’… in every way… at every ‘level’… that no one says this… is not by accident.
The state appears at every juncture… every level… every box we’re herded into…
…‘power’ can only hide if we are ‘self-regulating’… i.e… obedient….
But ‘disobedience’ is easily contained… within a narrow state frame… as every state… to be a state… must be able to arouse anger against an ‘other’… create buffers… to ward off potential invasions of thought as this… as Rage… ideas that challenge it… i.e. challenge the legitimacy of ‘rule’ itself… so states are guardians at the gate – police our global interactions… our ‘idea-exchanges’… to be ready to repulse potential threats… Plato guided them well in this (his railings against ‘imperialism’ – his word for foreign invasions of thought…) here no less than in the need for keeping youth in check….
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So how do we see the state… standing at the gate? How do we ‘out’ ‘power’ wherever it hides?
…in class… (“‘natural’ inequalities”…)
…in greed (“corporate acquisitiveness”… and ‘human nature’…)
…in violence (‘human nature’…)
If we can set a path to a future that is the opposite of ‘power’… then ‘power’ cannot hide in our movement.
As I read Rage Against The Machine I found myself noticing if there was a way ‘power’ could have been ‘outed’… made transparent… and so both enable a focused effort to move on around it (assuming a clear goal…) as well as to enable us to use our encounters with ‘power’s representatives as a learning experience… as they do with their encounters with us…
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So how did ‘power’ ‘mess with them’ – as I went into the book thinking?
If you set aside the all-but-guaranteed and omnipresent agent provocateurs – some in uniform… some… not – inciting violence at public events… and the probably unprovable but equally certain Iagos… whispering in their ears… or providing drugs…
…and of course the inevitable right-wing media attacks… intended to prejudice the broader populace against them (which matters… by the way…) and use them as a tool for stimulating fear of ‘radical youth’…
…on the surface… ‘power’ seems to have ‘messed with them’ by granting them a healthy recording contract… which tells us… what?… in terms of that challenging double-question the book raises: “how to end ‘the system’ while being part of ‘the system’?… and what exactly is ‘the system’ anyway?” In some sense my work of recent years has all been devoted to that question… and we can’t delve deep in these brief minutes. Suffice to say… Epic Records… or Sony… had zero concern about them actually ending the system. But ‘ending the system’ was never framed as the end… how could it be… with the guidance they were given… born up by centuries of conventional wisdom…centuries of pundits containing us… establishing the ‘legitimate’ limits of thought – because we all want to be ‘smart’… right?
But I also think there’s another way that ‘power’ messed with… not just them but all of us… or rather… used them to mess with all of us…
…because ‘power’ learns from movements. It is a ‘learning-bot’ that also steals… raids… the people’s creativity… and uses what we’ve made… to grow stronger… to (to their minds…) hopefully inoculate them from us… for next time.
I.e. they plan…. (When will we do the same?… as determinedly focus as they do… on our goal… on what we want… because once we do… we’ll get it.)
Watching Rage move… how loose they were… reminded me of many of the inauthentic youth I met while hawking books (…I’m thinking also of Venezuela right now… there’s lots of ‘clues’….) So it didn’t surprise me to read… how ‘right-wing’… and Fascist movements have adopted their music as their own (the book documents its use in right-wing movements or causes in Britain… by Paul Ryan here in the U.S…. the jailors in Guantanamo….)
You see they study mass movements for tips on how to strengthen their totalitarian one (on-going though subterranean… until they have a firm hold on the U.S. government (what they’ve been seeking for decades….)
I suspect they’ve learned to use the music for their own ends… rather than fight it (remember?… “always temper ‘the ideal’ with ‘the possible’”…) their ends being to tempt as many youth as they can… into totalitarianism… dressed up as being ‘shepherds’ to gather up the sheep… patriotically, of course… and herd them to the den… to teach them to want to be just like them… “the wise ‘philosopher-statesmen’….”
If we name these aggressive… very intentional… organizing techniques and infiltration practices of ‘power’… then we can start to do something about them… but most importantly… whether you believe ‘power’ engages with youth to this degree or not… the pressure of converging crises weighing on our humble earth must surely help us see… that we must offer youth… another way to be… another kind of society… an alternative….
If hope is to live among us then… we must start consciously creating that opposite… with them… with our children… as they will be living it when we’re gone.
Today (March 15, 2014) I heard a Syrian activist living in exile… a man whose wife and younger brother had been kidnapped by… at least in one instance for sure… the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. He was asked what he was feeling and he said, “I am angry and I’m trying to express this anger in a creative way and help our people find some hope for the future.”
In the name of ‘the state’… in the name of religion… in the name of Plato’s Tribe… in the name of those who call themselves ‘the wise’… these killings are done… “killing in the name of…”
And he’s so right. Miklos has shown us this too… we-the-global-people… need a realistic sense of hope. That is the priority… beyond all else… and certainly… beyond anger.
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As living things… whether you’re card-carrying Plato’s Tribe or we-the-global-people… we are continuously learning as we go…. So I don’t altogether agree with Dorian Lynskey when he says… in answer to a question from Joel… that there’s less of an appetite for ‘protest music’ today than two decades ago… because “the world’s problems seem so vast and suffocating…” (p. 158 – 9, …maybe our ‘protest music’ has gone deeper than just needing a song….)
What made Rage electrifying for the class-bound… trapped-in-suburban-bland youth who flocked to see them… was that they demonstrated what listening to your body means… what it looks like… showed how tapping into the force of life itself releases power… and puts you at odds with ‘the system’…
…they modeled that.
But… having pushed the limits of intuitive ‘disobedience’ as far as it could then be imagined… and yet… to see that it was absorbed by ‘the system’ – that ‘power’ handled it… that is a devastating final message to send…
…so then comes the pondering… and then ‘power’s reaction: incorporating and directing (they intend…) the inevitable ‘rage’… youth feel under class…
RATM showed ‘power’ that this rage must be managed and contained… and that that rage (they think…) can be… perhaps (they hope…) successfully diverted down totalitarian roads…
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It feels like this Catch-22. We can only get free by listening to our bodies… but if we listen to our bodies they can always get us with their ‘police’ tactic (i.e. react with anger when provoked by agent provocateurs…) and divert our focus onto the buffers (they can give us buffers ad infinitum… we gotta talk about that… we gotta look past the buffers. That means we have to have a goal to keep our eyes on…)
…so… it’s a circle of growth that we must consciously sow… never forgetting… that we must provide… for each other… a continuous feedback loop of support. We are many… they are few… we have to be many eyes and minds watching these tactics unfold around us… and know how to respond… help each other… return to calm… and while we know… that some among us will be inauthentic… it matters not… if we know where we’re going – it’s only when we don’t that this tactic influences us… that we can be led into confusion.
I think that we are processing the fact that… until we see the snare… that we are ‘the state’… until we refuse to harbor that nightmare.
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“…Affairs are now soul size…” means our souls themselves are at risk – are what’s being contested – and that if this is the way more and more of us globally are looking at it… then this is the start of what unifies us…
…and we can begin with this… begin orienting our efforts – before having a common name – around this ‘knowing’…
…this ‘knowing’ that it is absolutely critical that we start the ‘opposite’…
– the ‘opposite’ to this current social arrangement –
…this ‘knowing’ that we begin the unification in our pointing away from ‘this’… this current ‘system’ – for our brothers and sisters – seeing the ‘this’ as ‘class’… and seeing ‘class’ as ‘the state’…
…before we physically manifest it – this ‘knowing’ – in a single day of resistance to the ranking… the division… to the atomization… to ‘power’… to ‘the state’…
…a day in which we simply say…
…“Love demands we take each others hands… globally…
…and show allegiance to our common life…
…by freeing ourselves from the constraints imposed by states…
…and with compassion and with courage… learn the ways by which…
…we self-govern (using those new tools that Nikola Tesla helped us have… we can do this now… we can self-govern… these are for us… this technology – not the evil stuff… but the stuff that helps us be one… and self govern…)
– ‘govern’ ourselves directly –
…and we need no name for that but ‘no-more-masters’…”
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And please tune in Waking Up Radio this Sunday, March 16, 2014, as we continue reading and discussing “Miklos Nyiszli’s Lessons On Class”.
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* for the March 23, 2014 show: Sisters and brothers…
[Folks… I’ve hesitated about saying so (evidence of manipulation has been going on for some time…) assuming you probably know… but my files are being messed with… as in… altered… I believe ‘malevolent forces’ have made duplicates… for what purpose I think can easily be imagined… point being… I’ve decided to say something specifically about the substituted pdf of Miklos Nyiszli’s Lessons On Class… because that’s something (I hope) I can address… though I know it’s just the tip. I just discovered a much less complete substitute (1.3 MB as opposed to 1.6 MB) is what some folks may be downloading (the Internet download indicated it was 1.6 MB (and opened up this version on my machine) but when I opened up what was actually on the Internet from the top of my download list… it had switched to 1.3 MB – for the current time, i.e. the current download… a version from over a month ago. So… just so you know… when I upload more chapters I’ll make a note on the Nascence website… indicating how many chapters / pages you should be receiving.
The other thing is… since I’m on this topic… ‘before’… i.e. before the radio show… making books was a relative breeze (I’d done 5 print books… no problem… using the same software…) now it’s more like tacking into a strong wind… requiring extreme concentration… a mini-odyssey… so please accept my apologies for the haphazard formatting… typos… and some omissions I’m sure (as there’s always updates once I do the actual show…) but getting them out at all – these pdfs – feels like an achievement… each one a tiny victory. – P.S.]
March 18th, 2014: Sisters and brothers… I think we should talk continuously – perhaps in ‘meet-ups’ – about the opposite of ‘power’… so we can start being strategic… and not be perpetually rolled-over by ‘power’. ‘Power’ has the resources – it has been systematically setting it up that way – claiming the resources of the globe-entire – to ensure that we got nowhere to go –…
The other thing is… since I’m on this topic… ‘before’… i.e. before the radio show… making books was a relative breeze (I’d done 5 print books… no problem… using the same software…) now it’s more like tacking into a strong wind… requiring extreme concentration… because ‘In Design’ seems to have sprouted viruses… and my hard drive seems to have an evil twin… one open to wireless… which replaces the one that isn’t (but it does have expanded capacity – it’s a miracle!…) a mini-odyssey, it’s been… just to make and put up pdfs… so please accept my apologies for the haphazard formatting… typos… and some omissions I’m sure (as there’s always updates once I do the actual show…) but getting them out at all – these pdfs – feels like an achievement… each one a tiny victory. – P.S.]
March 18th, 2014: Sisters and brothers… I think we should talk continuously – perhaps in ‘meet-ups’ – about the opposite of ‘power’… so we can start being strategic… and not be perpetually rolled-over by ‘power’. ‘Power’ has the resources – it has been systematically setting it up that way – claiming the resources of the globe-entire – to ensure that we got nowhere to go –…
…it has the resources to mess with us endlessly… provide us with ‘causes’ aplenty to keep us ‘busy’ – which is its key objective with us – busy for a lifetime (so like a parent locking a child in a room… and telling herself she’s helping her child learn to be ‘obedient’.) It’s all about leaving the ‘running’ of the world to a tiny… miniscule… number of people. We’ve never discussed the implications of this….
But beginning to discuss – and subsequently define – what the opposite of ‘power’ would look like… not only allows us to begin being strategic… it continuously feeds a realistic sense of hope… which we need to be ready… for whatever catastrophe ‘power’ unleashes.
(And on second thought… let me apologize for putting it like this… as if they haven’t already done this. But because they play the Liar’s part… because they act with hidden dollars… that doesn’t mean they haven’t already unleashed multitudinous catastrophes on Asia… Haiti… Eastern Europe… Egypt… and the Middle East generally… and Syria particularly… and Africa – which is not even to speak of the everyday catastrophe of being forced to live robotically.)
But even in the midst of manufactured crisis… we can continue to build our ‘opposite’: foster a global consciousness while building our interconnections – locally and globally…
(…the ‘local’ interconnections have to be with a global consciousness… that means we are at the same time consciously interlinking with all of our brothers and sisters… so that we can coordinate a global action: a global General Strike…)
– …coordinate our actions globally… begin to build a communal ‘infrastructure’ – i.e. increased abundance… to support individual self-sufficiency and therefore good fellowship… embrace key slogans like, “no more masters…” and “no more commodities…” discuss and flesh out the key elements of a social arrangement based in good fellowship… like, ‘consensus authority’… ‘open tribalism’ (which has sharing as its purpose…) ‘transparent and inclusive decision-making’… fluid ‘structures’ and continuous growth… global-interconnections supporting individual self-sufficiency. [I’m planning to flesh this out more on the page Founding & Realizing A Test Site – not modeled on ‘democracy’… but on freedom – Premised On “Leisure IS Happiness…… which is also a periodically-updated pdf: “Founding & Realizing A Test Site” (pdf file)….]
If we start building our global mutual aid ‘infrastructure’ now… we’ll be able to withstand the pressure of a re-stimulated (by ‘power’…) sense of dependence on a ‘daddy’ (the state…) when global ‘crises’ are unleashed on us… because we’ll know the critical elements of a future based on opposite premises… aiming toward an opposite result… we’ll be able to see how to foster that opposite in concrete terms… e.g. we’ll be able to actively counter state appeals to nationalist sentiment by harboring and broadcasting its opposite. But so much depends on putting in place the communication means that would allow and support the fostering of these discussions… so how could that happen? This is key. I know we can start doing this individually in our individual networks… but we need broader means of talking to each other… a kind of a ‘Pacifica Network’… we have to increase the speed by which we forward our planning of an ‘opposite.’
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.
It seems to me what we’re talking bout is a globally inter-linked network of villages… land-gifted to folks who want to engage in this effort to design a future beyond force.
(This is not about force. We don’t want your stuff. Trust. That’s the point… there is abundance. There is enough for all… spend some time with the earth and she’ll show you. But we need our global interconnections to realize that possibility… that potential… if for no other reason than that ‘power’ has created so much havoc… with its ‘drought-making-techniques’ called ‘Solar Radiation Management’. So we have to help each other globally. We have to have each other’s backs. ‘Power’ has systematically tried to create a world in which survival is a question for all of us… and some more than others. So we who do have means have to help our brothers and sisters who have been systematically disadvantaged… whose means have been systematically removed from them. We have to do this all together… which is why if the Left punditry don’t start coming from that perspective… they’re carrying ‘power’s water.)
It seems to me what we’re talking bout is a globally inter-linked network of villages… land-gifted to folks who want to engage in this effort to design a future beyond force.
Because we’re living things… at base we want the same things… we want to govern our own lives… to once again own our own time…
(…there’s a Woody Guthrie cartoon I love that shows a man wearing boxing gloves… and in front of him is an alarm clock… and the caption reads: “Punch the clock!”)
…and time is essential in order to experience our lives… ‘time’ is just the way they got us to alienate our own lives from ourselves…
…and so at base… we have to put in place… an ‘infrastructure’ that allows this…
…“‘village-scale’ is ‘human-scale’” simply means we get to experience our breathing… see the plants and animals around us… know the folks with whom we share the soil that feeds us… notice ways we can increase the love and beauty in the world…
(…and by ‘beauty’ I don’t mean ‘aesthetic sense’ but rather ‘life unfolding as it’s meant’… and ‘respect for balance.’)
The point is… that nothing can matter more than living our gifts… and living our interconnections – locally and globally – because this is the truth… it means aligning our lives (at long last!…) with truth.
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Last week, with the prompting of Joel McIver’s book – and Rage Against The Machine’s music – we were able to put in sharper focus the degree to which ‘power’ goes after the youth…
…and… obviously… in so doing it’s just being strategic…
…and therefore helping us see that every move ‘power’ makes is about being strategic… is about getting to that neatly categorized world where everyone cheerfully fulfills his or her given function – while we… on the other hand… have no strategy… for getting to the opposite of ‘power’.
And while ‘power’ is continuously trying to figure out how to inoculate themselves against us… against our movements… we haven’t been trying to figure out how to inoculate ourselves against them. We’ve just been ‘taking it’… blow after blow… while celebrating that we still have our existence… and the capacity to occasionally raise our fists to them… while they mutely step around us (while delivering a few kicks to our knees as they go.)
(I misspoke on the radio show and used the word ‘captivity’… which sounded like I was saying: “celebrating that we still have our captivity…”
…which prompted the pondering… what about those who ‘love their jobs’… why should they want freedom from necessity for all?
It gets back to this notion of ‘hierarchy and force’… that ‘class’ requires that there be ‘winners’ and ‘losers’… it gets back to that cattle-prod called ‘bills’ at our back…. But ‘force’ dogs the lives even of those who don’t have the worry about paying the bills…. Maybe we should do a show about how to see that ‘coercion and scarcity’ is the absolute premise for everyone’s life under ‘class’… no matter how privileged… no matter where your place is on the ladder… in the hierarchy…)
Meanwhile that existence is growing barer and bleaker… for the vast majority… and we pretend not to see… that we’re careening toward disaster.
(Perhaps that’s the best answer to the ‘I love my job’ sentiment. Settling for ‘a job’ means leaving the running of things to a sociopathic few… and whether we love our jobs or not is irrelevant to the oceans dying… to our brothers and sisters slaughtered for their land and mineral resources…. We have to take our earth back… from the sociopaths. And ‘our earth’ includes our bodies.)
We have to start inoculating ourselves now against ‘power’…
(…we have to figure out that whole tactic of getting pulled off track when they insert those agents into our process…. It happens so easily because we are of good heart… and we want to believe that people are what they say… and some among us will passionately defend the right of these (unbeknownst) inauthentic folks to pull us off track… so this is partly what I’m thinking about in trying to develop tools for staying centered… and I know that ‘love’ is there at the core… is core to whatever techniques we develop to not get pulled off-track by inauthentic folks… because you can never prove it… and it’s not worth our time trying… and this sapping of our energy is what’s so insidious about the hidden-ness of ‘power’… which of course they’re well aware of…
So we have to figure out how to not get pulled off-track by ‘power’ when they unleash that epidemic of ‘scarcity’ and nationalism – recall it only takes a paid tiny few to damage or destroy our carefully grown hope… our fine fabric of mutual aid.
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“A realistic sense of hope…” – that phrase keeps coming back to me… because it is the reverberation from one of the key recurring questions for our resistance under class… of class itself – a question which at root is about this planned conflation in our minds (so destructive of hope…) of ‘the insanity of class’… with ‘human nature’. And the question reverberates from the confusion about the true (‘power’) dynamics at work – difficult to see and talk about… because ‘power’ works behind scenes.
This came up for me listening to a Ukrainian man speak on a radio program about the lingering Russian militarist (autocratic) influence from the Soviet era in Crimea even before recent events… because Russian generals retired on the peninsula and their descendants are often true to the influence of their fathers. He spoke about growing increasingly anxious… said he was contemplating returning to Kiev… despite loving the beauty of Crimea… because he could feel an ugly tension beneath the surface of things… an ominous undercurrent of malevolence… a heavy breathing on scurrying feet… sowing the seeds of totalitarian authority… like a monster seizing the opportunity to come out of hiding.
The physical devastation of Europe was more than merely the loss of its buildings and its infrastructure. It was more, even, than the destruction of centuries of culture and architecture. The truly disturbing thing about the ruins was what they symbolized. The mountains of rubble were, as one British serviceman put it, ‘a monument to man’s power of self-destruction’. For hundreds of millions of people they were a daily reminder of the viciousness that the continent had witnessed, and which might at any time resurface. (Keith Lowe, Savage Continent, p. 10)
In pondering that George Eliot poem we read last week it occurred to me… that it’s the ‘command’ part of it that’s tricky (“…command exists but for obedience…”) for us in our current iteration of class society.
For if the ‘command’ part (i.e…. ‘the system’…) is not properly understood… one’s ‘disobedience’… is useless.
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During last week’s show… I argued that Left pundits serve ‘power’ unconsciously by promoting a ‘left-style’ of patriotism (“fix the state”… “make ‘democracy’ real….)
I can imagine some folks asking, “well, what’s wrong with that?”
What’s wrong with that is that ‘power’ has no nation…
(And that’s patently unfair, right? ‘Power’ acts with global resources and as a global-shadow-state… and we are stuck in our little ‘nation-box’… trying to fight with this massive global Goliath. If the pundit Left was serious… was truly representative of us… they would be helping us figure out what to do about that… recognize that acting within these little state boxes is a set-up…. I’m sure we could design a child’s set of blocks to illustrate this. A child could show us the insanity of that so-called ‘strategy’.)
…views ‘nations’ as either pack mules or racehorses in their possession… beasts needed for their grand, global competition… and they delight in their command of us… in how thoroughly they can dupe us…
…so a passive… hard-working… populace reflects well on them… in terms of their global competition…
…but what it means for us is… that we don’t get to live… our lives are stolen.
(And I hope everyone knows what I mean by “to live”…. Look up at the sky the next time some birds fly by to get a sense of what I mean.)
It is the function of the global-state to ‘win’ our agreement… to work for ‘it’… to keep us busy serving ‘its’ (the global-state statesmen’s…) objectives. And if they can’t ‘occupy us’ via market mechanisms – i.e. struggling to overcome ‘scarcity’…) then they will ‘occupy us’ with war (with more direct threats to our physical existence.)
What has been the consistent trend in the behavior towards us (we-the-people) of ‘rulers’… not just in recent memory… but throughout class’s demented ride on us?
You could say ‘exploitation’… that’s the traditional lens of left pundits. But a more useful… more strategic lens for us, I think… is ‘privatization’… because it more clearly ‘outs’ ‘power’ and its dream… as… what does ‘privatization’ mean?… if not reducing the vast majority of people on the globe to penury… via the means of making ‘scarcity’ the dominant theme of our existence on the planet… as ‘class-humans’. (Bentham… recall… said that the purpose of government was to “increase want – scarcity – to make the physical sanction of hunger effective.”)
Now… this is not always immediately apparent. Forcing us to keep our sight within narrow-state-lines can sometimes disguise it… distort the picture for those in ‘wealthier’ global regions. Because of ‘power’s ‘legitimacy and control’ issues – its need to create and maintain rigid hierarchies – it seems ‘wealth’ (‘jobs’… whatever…) is being ‘created’ when in reality it’s just been transferred… ferried up… from those lower in the hierarchy…
…so hierarchy is key… to maintain ‘power’s legitimacy… to keep us believing in its system of ranking. (You know… the ‘merit-rises’ con….)
And so another way to say: “…the function of government is to increase want – scarcity – to make the physical sanction of hunger effective…” is: “…the function of government is to punish those who don’t work…” which gets plugged into the targeting of various groups… i.e. various forms of ‘ism’s… which reinforces the con… that some are legitimately treated wrong… which easily feeds a vicious competition (as no one wants to end up on the bottom…) – and so the death of our mutual sense of interconnection…. And we need each other… to free ourselves from ‘power’.
“It’s dog-eat-dog…” “it’s a jungle out there…” “you’re on your own…” “you got two choices: you can be ‘predator’ or ‘prey’…”
When a ‘predator-prey’ choice is forced on us it destroys our humanness… and yet ‘power’ has successfully done this… not for generations… but millennia… in the name of ‘competition’… and yet the Left never talks about it…
And because it’s never discussed… it creates a sense of hopelessness… because our nature is mutual aid.
(You see this in little children… a point where they just give up trying to live according to what their bodies want… and they instead just try to be obedient… because that’s what gets rewarded… it’s called ‘domestication’.)
If the job of the state is to increase want (scarcity)… the job of freedom is to increase abundance.
Our work right now is to define ‘power’s opposite. Not having a goal that is the opposite of ‘power’ has meant we allow it to herd us into one hideous violation of good fellowship after another. It’s time to have a goal… a global goal much less ambitious than ‘power’s global goal to realize its ‘vision’ of the Republic… because global good fellowship conforms to our nature…. It’s want our bodies want to do.
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Now… recall what we said in a previous show about war serving the political function (for ‘rulers’…) of removing resources from our hands (the same result – purpose – of ‘the market’.)
We said: “war is always war on us… whether they spill our blood with guns or markets…”
…reducing us to penury (globally…) forcing us to our knees (viewed from the perspective of humanity as a whole…) is the only way a tiny few can pretend to be ‘kings’… as we are many… and they are few.
(And we have to always remember… all these agents… all their surveillance-state-troops… are paid to do what they do… it’s not what their bodies want…. The minute an alternative that seems viable is offered… it’ll break that down. The earth is powerful… it’s a powerful pull… life… letting your body do what it wants. There will be that tipping point. We just have to have a goal – which is obvious: freedom… freedom from necessity – that we move systematically towards… we have to say out loud that we want it.)
So amassing ‘wealth’ (the resources of the planet…) is but means for reducing us to penury so ‘rule’ may… without interference from the hired help… sculpt the world they want.
Add to this their obsession with acquiring… and exclusively possessing… high tech weaponry capable of causing massive destruction… ‘weather machines’ and such… “weaponizing the energy in the environment…” with the goal of both de-stabilization… and stimulating a faster rate of resource-transfer… from our hands to its coffers (by means of controlling access to ‘credit’… money…)
(Think about it. It’s like a blank check… a ‘without-limits-ATM-card’.)
…so all this… is the backdrop in my head… as I hear repeated… these last few days… talk of… ‘resilience’…
“…we want ‘resilient children’… says the education industry…
…and just now (March 18, 2014…) ‘the news’ has brought the tidbit that a new initiative is being unleashed on us… by the Rockefeller Foundation… to create ‘resilient cities’… as part of its ‘Resilience Project’… $100 million for 100 cities to render them capable of surviving… catastrophes.
Consider this moment we’re living… of the greatest concentration of ‘wealth’ in human history… who holds the keys to these coffers? Not you and me.
So… recall what ‘the foreclosure crisis’ did. It sucked almost all of low-income wealth out of the cities and into the banks…. But there’s a little bit left… in the ‘slightly-higher-income’.
And… thoughtfully… as there’s a ‘shortage of affordable housing’… San Francisco is raising its mortgage loan granting standard… for ‘first-time-home-buyers’… while Oakland is busy “growing its economy”… inviting investment from China and India.
>(…war by other means, right?…)
But… how unfortunate it would be… should the region need to be ‘resilient’… should we be forced to read… a new chapter in ‘power’s ‘privatization’ story.
And… as always I must say… when will we on the Left use these tools Nikola left us… for our own benefit?… and organize in every land… a day – to be expanded into three… and more… until it’s on-going – so we can plan our future beyond class… and in… good fellowship…
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Last week we said that if we discuss and define… and get behind… a goal… globally… we’ll get it…
…if…
…we don’t allow ourselves to get distracted…
(…and certainly not by agents – we’re going to be figuring that out – [you can tell one or two has crossed my path… since I’ve been on my journey…)
… if we focus only on the goal.
What are the distractions? War… religion… particularity (tribes that are exclusive… premised on the ‘specialness’… ‘superiority’… of its members….)
(One day… as Kropotkin said… ‘history’ will have to be rewritten along new lines… because there’s a big ‘silence’ out there which I have been blessed to become privy to. There’s a big silence of folks who have been ‘treated’ to these techniques of ‘power’ that it does behind scenes – whether it’s bombarding people with their radio wave weaponry causing them health problems if not death… strokes… they’ve been doing this to a lot of people who can never say anything because it’s hidden… dancing these inauthentic folks in their paths… and they can say nothing because it’s hidden. If you even try to bring it up… ‘power’ will encourage [by means of its control of the mediums…] the response: “…O my God she’s paranoid…” “…he’s got conspiracy theories on the brain….” What do you think this secretive weaponry is for? No one is saying that it doesn’t exist. Do you think it’s simply so they can save it for a rainy day […holding it in reserve to save us from ‘terrorists’?…] No. They deeply believe in ‘breeding’. Fascism wasn’t an aberration. It still exists… this goal of totalitarian ‘Perfection’.
And so what does this mean… that folks can’t talk about it? It means we let it continue to be used successfully.
(So we have to figure this out. We have to acknowledge that it exists… without allowing it to pull us off our vision. I guess it’s just as simple as that. And that’s where the ‘love’ comes in – the ‘love’ part. Because if someone starts complaining about being victimized like this… it could be real… or it could be inauthentic… and so the only way for us to respond and keep focused is to say: “You know, I know that capacity exists… but what we have to do is stay focused. We can’t waste time on it. So we have to trust. Know that it exists… and not get distracted.)
What are the distractions? War… religion… particularity (tribes that are exclusive… premised on the ‘specialness’… ‘superiority’… of its members….)
It’s critical that we start talking about this issue of strategy. Otherwise we’ll have forfeited ‘the game’ (proprietary stamps on our lives…) without knowing we’re in one… and ‘power’ will always ‘win’… because they know where they’re going…
(…it only takes a miniscule few to dominate [‘manage’] huge numbers if they know what they want (and so can strategically plan… punishing dissent… while systematically giving us things to calm our fears…) and if the huge number is confused [disorganized]…. Recall Miklos’ lesson from the annihilation of the Gypsy Camp… i.e. that it only takes a few to control large confusion…
…and we should see that this is what we do… to domesticated animals that aren’t human too…
…notice that the reasoning of those who perished in the Gypsy Camp is precisely that of non-human domesticants: “why would they feed us if they mean us ill?”
‘Betrayal’ is the beginning… middle… and end of ‘class’. ‘Honesty’… honesty… is what we want. We want a world in which what people say they mean… and… I have to say this… 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… live our gifts… is the opposite of this.
So our challenge now is to define it.
Please tune in Waking Up Radio this Sunday, March 23, 2014, as we continue reading and discussing “Miklos Nyiszli’s Lessons On Class”.
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* for the March 30, 2014 show: Sisters and brothers…
Shout-outs of thanks for courage today… in Scotland… breaking free of U.K… and in the massive resistance to so-called ‘austerity’ in Spain… and in the Ukraine… showing uncommon endurance in your search for a new path… in the midst of a global pressure that’s enormous… and for Egypt… writing our lessons in blood… grappling with a deepening military entrenchment… determined to turn back the clock for all of us…. But we know the time… we know that the time of ‘the people’ is come… and though it may be stalled… ‘power’ can never end our movement… our movement is life… our always-recurring good news… but it requires global action… you cannot claim Suez alone… we must back you.
March 25th, 2014: Sisters and brothers… The more I ponder it… the more I trust… what I thought at first… in Waking Up… before it was tested… with such diligence… which is that… it’s defining the vision which is the real challenge… our vision of freedom… and that once we do that… as a critical mass… what ‘power’ does… becomes increasingly irrelevant…. We can step around them… as they did us… as we recognize that they can do nothing else but… cause the havoc they caused… and as we see that that’s true… of our deeply dreaming sisters and brothers too… as we embrace love… as our future…
Have you noticed that the art… our mutual expressions… that remain in our hearts… the ones representative of us… that we claim as such… despite… initial suppression… ‘power’s attempts to silence… or render invisible from neglect… like Sly & The Family Stone… Rage Against The Machine… Bob Marley… Prince… Malcolm X… Martin… Michael… Johnny Cash… or films like Beverley Hills Cop… or Attack the Block…
…tell the truth… represent… for “the opposite of ‘power’”… inclusion and unity rather than division and exclusivity….
In recent shows we’ve been saying that if we don’t know where we’re going… we can’t be strategic…
…and that… if we want “the opposite of ‘power’” for our future… “leisure for all” instead of “all serving the few”… we have to clearly see… what ‘opposite’ means.
I.e…. we have to define it.
But what this also means is that if we don’t define this ‘opposite’… we will perpetually manifest… ‘the system’… that is: hierarchy and division… ‘making-use-of’ and commodification… decision-making that’s narrow and exclusive… condemning the majority to never experience our leadership… normalizing child abandonment… forcing the-most-of-us to relinquish our gifts.
This week on Democracy Now there was an example of what it means for ‘power’s every move to be strategic… while ‘the Left’s… to the degree it exists… isn’t.
And if we don’t begin to see that ‘power’ sows Division’s seeds consciously… simply by means of holding the purse strings… by determining what gets seen… which phony controversy we’re given to keep us distracted… via the tactic of using the pundit class… as the medium – we’ll continue to get manipulated.
On Monday March 24th, 2014 the entire show was devoted to a film of which… the title alone was sufficient, I think… to find it the necessary funding… given… given what ‘power’ looks for… to further its objectives… aid its sculpting…
(…and what are ours?… we-the-people’s?… What are our objectives? ‘Survival’, merely?)
So we see here another angle on why ‘power’ needs the pundits – the middle ranks who pretend or believe they speak for ‘the people’ – ‘power’ uses them to drive wedges between us… because the media cares about what happens to the privileged – but not… the commoner – and likes stories of psychic-blood-and-guts… it will zoom in on them… and then pretend… that what they say is representative…
…and a whole generation is led down the garden path… of mutual-eye-cutting… and of seeking their ‘special identities’.
Miklos shows us the truth. Keith Lowe shows us too: that we like our rich variety… the stimulation the profusion of color and sound it’s providing. We keep reconstituting it… and ‘power’ keeps destroying it. (Have you noticed that the more we flee to our boxes… the more we’re leveled out [globally…]? The U.S. is now what used to be called… a ‘banana republic’ [with its crushing load of ‘scarcity’… disease… hunger… earth-poisoning… child-jailing… and overall populace-incarcerating stats…) – the proud of every heritage is being brought to its knees…. ‘Power’ is flattening us out… driving us all to a common submission. And as you hear his words… think about the silence to which the survivors returned.)
During the course of just six years, the demographics of Europe had changed irredeemably. The density of Poland’s population fell by 27%, and some areas in the east of the county were now barely populated at all. Countries that had once been ethnically mixed had been ‘cleansed’ so extensively that, to all intents and purposes, they now included only a single ethnic group. As well as an absence of people, therefore, there was an absence of community, and an absence of diversity: large areas of Europe had become homogenous. This process would only accelerate in the months after the war. (Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of WWII, p. 21 – 22)
Here in the U.S. at the very moment when its populace has come together more than at any time in its history… is it random… is it a mystery… is it accident and unplanned that we’re seeing a level of sowing Division’s seeds that is unprecedented?… always remembering that it only takes a tiny few… to sink a fragile hope grown in the vast majority…
…a tiny few… in police forces… and in universities…
(…and there’s a good illustration of this in the current East Bay Express (March 26, 2014) – which in one day had been disappeared from a lot of boxes – called “OPD Promoted Cops Involved in Scott Olsen Case” by Ali Winston:
As the Express reported in December 2011, those [Tango Teams… tactical squads…] also included several OPD officers who had used deadly force in the past and had been involved in numerous use-of-force cases over the years.)
…a tiny few… with allegiance not to life… not to open-ended possibilities… but the opposite of this: allegiance to Plato’s dictum… “keep them frozen in place in their separate boxes… if you would rule… and establish ‘Perfection’ (or allegiance simply to paying the bills… and that could be any of us… )”
So could racist frat-parties be a tactic?… Is ‘power’ capable of such machinations?
‘Power’ is constantly sowing these seeds of Division between us… constantly planting them in the media… is it really possible that the punditry doesn’t see them… doesn’t see this tactic?
I doubt it… which means it screams all the more… their silence…
–––
‘Silence’ is a key theme in our discussion this week. Who gets to speak?… the true self… or the one seeking approval?
So there’s the silence behind performance (and that’s heart-breaking to see in a three-year-old…) but there’s also the silence underneath… the secrecy or ‘power’. Shakespeare called attention to that… as with almost every one of our dilemmas of ‘class’:
“Bad is the world; and all will come to naught,
When such ill dealing must be seen in thought.”
(Shakespeare’s Richard the Third, III.vi)
[Recall, ‘seen in thought’ means: “observed but not referred to” (…you know… like this totalitarianism growing around us?…) (Yale Edition, edited by Jack R. Crawford)]
Silence… when only voices scrubbed by ‘power’ gain currency…
Silence… when born into a manufactured ‘reality’…
Silence… when masks are all we get to see…
Silence… is the death of authenticity.
Not long ago I listened to a conversation about the power of advertising to create opinion… influence thinking… and I replied in my head: “that’s only because of our inherent communalism… we’re all searching for ‘the communal voice’… that’s part of our nature… mutual aid… our nature is to seek the truth by consulting the communal voice… the historical consensus… that comes from many minds working on a question.”
So ‘power’ services our need for that communal voice by providing mass media. What is the opposite of a manufactured communal voice but an authentic one… one that arises from our communal practice. But we can only provide this for ourselves if it is an on-going practice.
But until we create such a practice… it seems we’re in a Catch-22. We can only ‘think’ – i.e. in the communal voice – through the punditry… and it only represents for ‘power’.
This is what makes the betrayal of the punditry so devastating… when ‘power’ owns them… it owns the communal voice… it creates… names… what it is possible to think… creating the illusion of ‘truth’… as Bentham instructed…
…because an authentic communal voice is denied us due to enforced atomization…
…and authenticity is effectively silenced.
This relates to this film first because ‘power’-orchestrated events – the manufacturing of ‘reality’ – remain hidden… under the terms of so-called ‘professional journalism’ (I’ve never heard that conversation either…) – remain forever removed from what it is possible to think…
(…because these guys have layers and layers and layers – you’re never going to prove it – and if you waste your time… which is all we get from ‘journalism’… pretending it’s doing us some vast service… as if this is a ‘mystery’…. Here… let’s from below… start saying out loud to these folks… “it ain’t complicated… ‘states’ are there to get us to do the work – it’s pretty straightforward – and they’re gonna have layers and layers and layers of… misdirection… and songs-and-dances to distract us from the obvious truth… it’s all about controlling our hands… our work…. They want to be able to harness our energy… to be able to put our brains to work for them… for obvious reasons: they want to think that they are in fact supreme – difficult as that may be for earth-rooted people to believe. But Virginia Woolf nailed it in one: we are creatures of illusion…)
…and from our understanding of ‘reality’… and because authenticity must be silenced for the ‘pundit’ (public personality) to be ‘seen’.
So the film director would find funding flees from a film about ‘power’ orchestrating Division… and certainly it would never get wide promotion… and the Abandoned Child needs to be seen…
…and so… we-the-people never get to advance our thinking… because we’re stuck in atomization… we’re trapped in the inauthentic.
–––
To the degree the description of the film contained in the interview is an accurate reflection of the film, I’d say… the director is doing but a soft-shoe of “crabs-in-a-bucket” – softening ‘class’ for a complex of reasons: I think we’d find ‘self-interest’ in that mall… and ‘self-consciousness’… and a longing to belong… and a whole lot of unprocessed resentment dumped on us on our time… on our dime – completely discounting the political cost of so doing…
(…recall what we said in recent weeks… that it matters what the majority think (and by ‘the majority’ I mean those stuck in conventional thinking…) And by ‘it matters’ I don’t mean that we ‘play’ to the majority… to the ‘asleep’… but that we call ‘power’ out… that we challenge and illuminate… its manipulation strategies – because truth necessarily plays to us all… and our ears can be retrained to recognize its song… tuned to hear… its fine rhythms….
Because unprocessed ‘crabs-in-a-bucket’ but dumps on us more of the same. That’s not ‘disobedience’… that’s very much doing what you’ve been trained to do…)
I prefer the more mature reflections of Barack. There’s a scene in his memoir from when he was in high school in which he brings two white friends to a black party. Here’s some of the background to that scene:
“Man, I’m not going to any more of these bullshit Punahou parties.”
“Yeah, that’s what you said the last time.”
Ray and I sat down at a table and unwrapped our hamburgers. He was two years older than me, a senior who, as a result of his father’s army transfer, had arrived from Los Angeles the previous year. Despite the difference in age, we’d fallen into an easy friendship, due in no small part to the fact that together we made up almost half of Punahou’s black high school population. I enjoyed his company; he had a warmth and brash humor that made up for his constant references to a former L.A. life…
There were times when I would listen to him tell some blond girl he’d just met about life on L.A.’s mean streets, or hear him explain the scars of racism to some eager young teacher, and I could swear that just beneath the sober expression Ray was winking at me, letting me in on the score. Our rage at the white world needed no object, he seemed to be telling me, no independent confirmation; it could be switched on and off at our pleasure. Sometimes, after one of his performances, I would question his judgment, if not his sincerity. We weren’t living in the Jim Crow South, I would remind him. We weren’t consigned to some heatless housing project in Harlem or the Bronx. We were in goddamned Hawaii. We said what we pleased, ate where we pleased; we sat at the front of the proverbial bus. None of our white friends, guys like Jeff or Scott from the basketball team, treated us any differently than they treated each other. They loved us, and we loved them back. Shit, seemed like half of ‘em wanted to be black themselves – or at least Doctor J….
One day in early spring Ray and I met up after class and began walking in the direction of the stone bench that circled a big banyan tree on Punahou’s campus. It was called the Senior Bench, but it served mainly as a gathering place for the high school’s popular crowd, the jocks and cheerleaders and partygoing set, with their jesters, attendants, and ladies-in-waiting jostling for position up and down the circular steps….
[Now this is a really good illustration of what’s really taught in school: “find your rank… find your place… and endorse the ranking with your support of it… ‘prove’ you’re ‘better-than’ by sniping at whoever you can… and the more you reinforce ‘class’… the more you’ll be rewarded…” – P.S.]
…One of the seniors, a stout defensive tackle named Kurt, was there, and he shouted loudly as soon as he saw us.
“Hey, Ray! Mah main man! Wha’s happenin’!”
Ray went up and slapped Kurt’s outstretched palm. But when Kurt repeated the gesture to me, I waved him off.
“What’s his problem?” I overheard Kurt say to Ray as I walked away. A few minutes later, Ray caught up with me and asked me what was wrong.
“Man, those folks are just making fun of us,” I said
“What’re you talking about?”
“All that ‘Yo baby, give me five’ bullshit.”
“So who’s mister sensitive all of a sudden? Kurt don’t mean nothing by it.”
“If that’s what you think, then hey – ”
Ray’s face suddenly glistened with anger. “Look,” he said, “I’m just getting along, all right? Just like I see you getting along, talking your game with the teachers when you need them to do you a favor. All that stuff about ‘Yes, Miss Snooty Bitch, I just find this novel so engaging, if I can just have one more day for that paper, I’ll kiss your white ass.’ It’s their world, all right? They own it, and we in it. So just get the fuck outta my face.”
By the following day, the heat of our argument had dissipated, and Ray suggested that I invite our friends Jeff and Scott to a party Ray was throwing out at his house that weekend. I hesitated for a moment – we had never brought white friends along to a black party – but Ray insisted, and I couldn’t find a good reason to object. Neither could Jeff or Scott; they both agreed to come so long as I was willing to drive. And so that Saturday night, after one of our games, the three of us piled into Gramps’s old Ford Granada and rattled our way out to Schofield Barracks, maybe thirty miles out of town….
…I could see right away that the scene had taken my white friends by surprise. They kept smiling a lot. They huddled together in a corner. They nodded self-consciously to the beat of the music and said “Excuse me” every few minutes. After maybe an hour they asked me if I’d be willing to take them home….
…Outside the air had turned cool…. In the car, Jeff put an arm on my shoulder, looking at once contrite and relieved. “You know, man,” he said, “that really taught me something. I mean, I can see how it must be tough for you and Ray sometimes, at school parties… being the only black guys and all.”…
…By the time I had dropped my friends off, I had begun to see a new map of the world, one that was frightening in its simplicity, suffocating in its implications. We were always playing on the white man’s court, Ray had told me, by the white man’s rules… if he treated you like a man or came to your defense, it was because he knew that the words you spoke, the clothes you wore, the books you read, your ambitions and desires, were already his. (Barack Obama, Dreams From My Father, p. 72, 81 – 85)
‘Dependency’ sucks… don’t it? But who set it up? Who’s staging this play? And what is it anyway? Not just who wrote the script… but what’s the point of it?
Well… there it is… there’s the set-up in all of its hideousness… “crabs-in-a-bucket” – loss of ‘longing’… souls gone into hiding… separation… division… confusion… mutual-eye-cutting… and a whole lot of unprocessed resentment dumped on us… by ‘power’… on our time… on our dime…. It’s a jungle out there…
This new film being discussed is a good example of a key ‘power’-strategy: “dupe the young”… who can’t know the historical ‘common-ness’ (under ‘class’) of what they’re going through… can’t know that they’re stuck in a living incarnation of Groundhog Day… and that… for all the seeming ‘disobedience’… they are not advancing us one iota… towards our long-delayed… much deserved… freedom.
–––
Now let’s consult one of our ancestors who’s devoted a whole lot of thought to… what was called in her day… “the Race Problem”….
From the perspective of ‘power’ “the Race Problem” is how to keep us herded into boxes and therefore successfully divided….
For Zora Neale Hurston… the whole thing was nonsense…
…for me… it’s a con (i.e…. intended nonsense…)
How then did I get back to school? I just went. I got tired of trying to get the money to go. My clothes were practically gone. Nickeling and dimering along was not getting me anywhere. So I went to the night high school in Baltimore and that did something for my soul.
There I met the man who was to give me the key to certain things. In English, I was under Dwight O. W. Holmes. There is no more dynamic teacher anywhere under any skin. He radiates newness and nerve and says to your mind, “There is something wonderful to behold just ahead. Let’s go see what it is.” He is a pilgrim to the horizon. Anyway, that is the way he struck me. He made the way clear. Something about his face killed the drabness and discouragement in me. I felt that the thing could be done.
I turned in written work and answered questions like everybody else, but he took no notice of me particularly until one night in the study of English poets he read Kubla Khan. You must get him to read it for you sometime. He is not a pretty man, but he has the face of a scholar, not dry and set like, but fire flashes from his deep-set eyes. His high-bridged, but sort of bent nose over his thin-lipped mouth… well, the whole thing reminds you of some old Roman like Cicero, Caesar or Virgil in tan skin.
That night, he liquefied the immortal brains of Coleridge, and let the fountain flow. I do not know whether something in my attitude attracted his attention, or whether what I had done previously made him direct the stream at me. Certainly every time he lifted his eyes from the page, he looked right into my eyes. It did not make me see him particularly, but it made me see the poem. That night seemed queer, but I am so visual-minded that all the other senses induce pictures in me. Listening to Coleridge’s poem for the first time, I saw all that the writer had meant for me to see with him, and infinite cosmic things besides. I was not of the work-a-day world for days after Mr. Holmes’s voice had ceased.
This was my world, I said to myself, and I shall be in it, and surrounded by it, if it is the last thing I do on God’s green dirt-ball.
But he did something more positive than that. He stopped me after class and complimented me on my work. He did something else. He never asked me anything about myself but he looked at me and toned his voice in such a way that I felt he knew all about me. His whole manner said, “No matter about the difficulties past and present, step on it!”… (p. 107 – 8)
One day, after about a week in school, Bernice Hughes, whose father, Dr. W.A.C. Hughes, was somebody important in the Methodist Episcopal Church, and a trustee of the College, sat watching me. Her gray eyes were fixed on me, and her red lips were puckered in a frown. I did not know what to think. But it was in English History which I liked very much and I was not doing badly in recitation. When the period was over and the class passed on to the next room, she fell in beside me and said, “If you ain’t one knowing fool! I’m naming you old Knowledge Bug.” Then she laughed that kind of a laugh she has to cover up her feelings and I laughed too. Bernice can register something that makes you look at her and like her no matter what she does.
“I’m sitting by you tomorrow, fool, and from now on. You hear me?” She went on with her catching laugh. “No use in both of us studying like a fool. You can just study for both of us.”
So from then on I was knee deep in the Hughes family…. (p. 110)
My two years at Morgan went off very happily indeed. The atmosphere made me feel right. I was at last doing the things I wanted to do. Every new thing I learned in school made me happy…
…When it came time to consider college, I planned to stay on at Morgan. But that was changed by chance….
…I shall never forget my first college assembly, sitting there in the chapel of that great university. I was so exalted that I said to the spirit of Howard, “You have taken me in. I am a tiny bit of your greatness. I swear to you that I shall never make you ashamed of me.”
It did not wear off….
…My joining The Stylus [“the small literary society on the hill”] influenced my later moves. On account of a short story which I wrote for The Stylus, Charles S. Johnson, who was just then founding Opportunity Magazine, wrote to me for material. He explained that he was writing to all of the Negro colleges with the idea of introducing new writers and new material to the public….
This move on the part of Dr. Johnson was the root of the so-called Negro Renaissance. It was his work, and only his hush-mouth nature has caused it to be attributed to many others….
…So I came to New York through Opportunity, and through Opportunity to Barnard….
I have no lurid tales to tell of race discrimination at Barnard. I made a few friends in the first few days…. They were well-traveled and cosmopolitan. I found out about forks, who entered a room first, sat down first, and who offered to shake hands. A great deal more of material like that. These people are still lying very close to my heart….
Because my work was top-heavy with English, Political Science, History and Geology, my adviser at Barnard recommended Fine Arts, Economics, and Anthropology for cultural reasons. I started in under Dr. Gladys Reichard, had a term paper called to the attention of Dr. Franz Boas and thereby gave up my dream of leaning over a desk and explaining Addison and Steele to the sprouting generations….
I had the same feeling at Barnard that I did at Howard, only more so. I felt that I was highly privileged and determined to make the most of it. I did not resolve to be a grind, however, to show the white folks that I had brains. I took it for granted that they knew that. Else, why was I had Barnard? Not everyone who cries, “Lord! Lord!” can enter those sacred iron gates….
…Two weeks before I graduated from Barnard, Dr. Boas sent for me and told me that he had arranged a fellowship for me. I was to go south and collect Negro folklore. Shortly before that, I had been admitted to the American Folk-Lore Society. Later, while I was in the field, I was invited to become a member of the American Ethnological Society, and shortly after the American Anthropological Society….
…My search for knowledge of things took me into many strange places and adventures…. (Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks On a Road, p. 107 – 124)
Zora is a really good example of ‘Open Tribalism’: sharing herself… living large… an open, curious spirit… as probing of others as they were probing of her. Because… by the time she consciously chose her path of Learning… she was already ‘big’… she didn’t self-censor – it was a white man who told her… when she was a child… that “truth is a letter from courage…” – early on… she wanted to be ‘big’… to have courage…. There’s a sense in which she cultivated it. So… as they weren’t the source… no one could take away pieces of her – she had no grievance on that score.
The real issue is… “how to occupy our ‘human-ness’… fully… with ‘power’ and its ‘rule-the-world’ issues – which each generation of so-called ‘rulers’ consciously absorb themselves with… and pass on to the youth the intention to realize that vision… mission – so how to ‘occupy’ a new vision… with this sitting on us?”
The questions Zora’s involved with are the questions that should – if we could ignore the heinous crimes of ‘power’… globally – absorb us. They are the ones that look beyond this mess… they are concerned with humanness.
But we’ve arrived at the juncture where this can no longer be an individual effort. The oceans are dying. Our brothers and sisters are being slaughtered… imprisoned… and executed. Our earth has been trashed beyond belief. We cannot leave this mess for future generations to deal with.
–––
In Waking Up I argued that the abandoned child is the source of our problems… that it has systematically done to others – to those who still had cultures… to those who still cherished their children – what was done to it: it made orphans. Putting it this way explains why ‘power’ is so antagonistic to our own authentic cultures: obviously first… because they are the basis for self-definition (and ‘power’ wants to name us… give us our assignments…) but no less… because… when we are earth-connected… we cherish our children… this is but the earth speaking through us… our allegiance to life… and the ancestors.
Unless we’re of the First Nations…
…the First Folks on this side…
…or our earth-connection has miraculously survived…
…Abandonment sweeps us up in its tide…
…we are immigrant nations all here in the U.S.…
…caught… trapped… imprisoned by…
…the secrecy of ‘rule’…
…the sine qua non of ‘Plato’s Tribe’…
…who serve ‘ideas’ instead of life…
…and you cannot serve two masters.
Remember that scene in the Robert DeNiro film The Good Shepherd…?
Mafia Man (Jimmy Palmi, played by Joe Pesci): Youse are the guys that scare me. You’re the people that make the big wars.
CIA Counter-Intelligence (Edward Wilson using an assumed name, played by Matt Damon): No, we make sure the wars are small ones, Mr. Palmi.
Mafia Man: Let me ask you something. We Italians, we got our families and we got the Church. The Irish, they have their homeland. The Jews, their traditions. Even the niggers [Africans] they got their music. What about you people Mr. Carlson? What do you have?
CIA Man: The United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting.
There was a pregnant… a significant… silence in the wake of those words. This is what ‘power’ does… it steals our voices… our vibrancy… our light… for this is not something that can be mimed. It’s from within – it’s an earth-gift.
We didn’t make this mess, says Barack’s friend Ray: “It’s their world, all right? They own it, and we in it…”
…and… moreover… we’re not welcome in it… they suffer our presence… depending on our obedience…
…and this means all of us. You see… that’s the truth we never get to hear… that’s the silence all pundits… and media interviewers… tacitly agree to… so they play their parts in a most depraved stage-play… helping to construct… and legitimate… an elaborate charade….
…“Dupe the children” is the name of the game … because grown-ups know we’re living in The Matrix… and to the degree we do… and don’t tell the children the truth…we’re complicit too.
–––
“Truth is a letter from courage.”
The truth is… all pundits take the money and run… that’s the deal they make to be pundits… but very few have the courage to admit this… which means they choose – to the degree that Abandonment could allow them to do anything but – they choose… to be silent.
The Lost Child made orphans… but he also made silences.
Who gets to speak?… the true self… or the one seeking approval?
In the present example of the interviewer and the film director… we’re led to believe that the former is helping the latter to get out his truth… because it reflects a problem to be addressed… which can only be corrected… if we-the-people better understand … ‘race politics’:
And I think – you know, I think part of it is – and what I also wanted to do, I didn’t want to vilify anyone in the film. I think that one of the most interesting things about researching these parties is the responses that these students give after the fact. And believe it or not, there really is a sort of a naiveté to what they’re saying and a really sort of like – they kind of didn’t realize like how messed up this was and didn’t completely comprehend how that would come across to a minority, particularly in those environments. And ultimately, the movie, to me, is not even really about racism; it’s about identity and about sort of like what is the mask that you wear, what is the mask that you’re forced to wear by the culture around you. And there’s no better way to get into that than by showing students who are literally wearing blackface and wearing these masks and wearing these costumes that, to them, represent Martin Luther King. To me, like there’s just no – there’s no – that, to me, was like a perfect end, and particularly since it’s kind of a phenomenon. I mean, it happens every year, all the time, no matter how many times these controversial stories come out.
Could it be a tactic? Is ‘power’ capable of it? Is it likely they do this? Hell, yes. What have numerous ancestors shown us about ‘power’ manufacturing its ‘evidence’? And what could be more important to it – as ‘rule’ itself depends on it – but stirring up among the people mutual disaffection…. Particularly as…
…these incidents are dwarfed by the evidence of our increasingly coming together… learning about each other… liking each other?
‘Power’ is scrambling right now to somehow turn back the fact that tens of millions of white folks helped to elect Barack.
Now… what does the Left punditry imagine the U.S. state is? Do they not understand that for Plato’s Tribe… who have the coffers and the conviction… and the firm determination… to realize their vision… that it is a vehicle for them to demonstrate for all (other statesmen) to see… not just their supremacy… but the validity… the truth… of breeding. Plato is their Paterfamilias (‘Plato’ being not mere metaphor…) and they are loyal to him… and his ‘racial theories’…. Imagine how infuriating it must be for such as these… to see a Black man walk into that symbolic role…
And… moreover… think what it means for our overcoming ‘power’s chief divide between us… here in the U.S.
Think how critical that divide is… for its control of us.
What a gift gratis – except they paid for it – this film must be. It reads like a Plato’s Tribe fantasy: Black – White Divided… mutually sniping.
The director tries to play it off… like the title’s irrelevant…
You know, I just say to all the white people in the audience, on behalf of all the black people in the world, you have the right to laugh. You get a free honorary black card with each Sundance ticket. Because it is – it’s meant to be a satire, you know? I think if you stop at the title, and you get the knee-jerk reaction –”Oh, this is just going to be an indictment, you know, an hour-long indictment”– you’re kind of missing the point. It’s the title of a movie, and I just want to put people at ease. It’s OK, you know? This movie is meant for people of all races to connect to. I think that the issue of being an other is a universal human experience. I happen to be talking about it from a black point of view, and just like every filmmaker is talking about whatever they’re talking about from their point of view. And that should make it no harder to watch or enjoy than any other movie.
…but the title’s the sound-byte… the title’s what ‘power’ bought… so of course a whole lot of folks will be put off….
How would the director feel about a film taking the opposite tack… that claimed it was speaking to us ‘dear’ Blacks?
And the interviewer was clearly complicit. When she asked one of the actors if he’s ever had an experience such as the one the film describes… he replied:
Yeah, it was – it wasn’t a black-themed party, but, I mean, you have, you know, Cinco de Mayo parties. You have, you know, Chinese New Year… all these different – so, as minorities as a whole – right before we started shooting, a friend was throwing a white-trash party. That’s what they called it, a white-trash party. And I had read the script. And prior to reading the script, I probably would have went. I probably wouldn’t have even thought – you know, I wouldn’t have thought anything of it. But I didn’t go, because it was the same thing – in terms of – you know, whether it’s economics, it’s the same thing.
If ‘truth’ getting out… was what this media-show was about… the next question to be asked was obvious… but it was by-passed –
…and in Waking Up I wrote that when they don’t ask the tough questions… it’s a con… a ‘reality’ is being sculpted.
‘Race’ is a tactic for Division. Division is key for control. This is basic class-truth… and for most of us obvious… and without it there is no “analysis of race politics…” which is how this film is being described.
–––
Remember how we said that force – coercion – dogs our lives under ‘class’ even if we’re free from worry about bills?
‘Power’s hatred for authentic… self-defining… cultures (that that scene we referenced from The Good Shepherd so powerfully expresses…) is a good illustration of that.
For if you don’t have worry about bills… you have worry about your soul… even if it’s unconscious… because the earth always pulls… the earth… she’s always there… and she has certain requirements… independent of one’s conscious caring…. And she wants community for us… communalism… and mos def love.
You see this in Zora (in all of us…) – until she got right with what her body wanted… she couldn’t be happy.
And that gets us back… we here in the U.S…. back to what we’re guaranteed in the Declaration of Independence… that it is our right to listen to our bodies… our right… to pursue happiness…
…and when the state gets in the way… it is our right… to abolish it.
Instead of “Move To Amend” we need “Move To Plan”… the state’s abolishment… and our gradual transition… to freedom.
Please tune in Waking Up Radio this Sunday, March 30, 2014, as we continue reading and discussing “Miklos Nyiszli’s Lessons On Class”.
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* for the April 6, 2014 WUR show: Sisters and brothers…
Last week we attempted to show that… the state disallows our pursuit of happiness… because the state exists to enforce its mandates (division and subservience…) – and that ‘force’ and ‘happiness’ are not just ‘ill-matched’… but opposites…
…and that… everywhere globally… and certainly here in the U.S…. a movement to end coercion… is also a ‘Move to Plan Our Alternative’….
This week’s show takes the next step… and suggests that ‘Move to Plan’ is coterminous with developing our thought process (which is being true to this gift of life we’re given…) – i.e., that the state cannot ‘govern’ if authentic thought is not conquered… that ‘force’ (the state) and authentic thought possess a mutual… and contrary… animus. [This is discussed in Founding & Realizing A Test Site – not modeled on ‘democracy’… but on freedom – Premised On “Leisure IS Happiness….]
And as I listen to the official ‘media-voice-left’… each day I’m struck by how they confuse the process… by assuming the state’s definitions… and never questioning them… e.g. here are the ones I’ve just heard (on April 4th): the speaker was urging us to act ‘for the good’… for ‘peace and non-violence’… and… here’s a good one: “a dispute is not a zero-sum game…” and suggesting that this is useful guidance… for charting a course (which… per usual… they all say… will take “quite some time… centuries maybe…” so… “good-luck oceans”… “good-bye freedom”… “good-bye life for many of our brothers and sisters…”) for charting a course… to… what?… they don’t say.
April 1st, 2014: Brothers and sisters… In an interview on Democracy Now (of March 31, 2014), Egyptian Activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah described how he was being punished… essentially… for thinking… i.e. thinking authentically… like Andrey Platonov’s Voshchev:
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. (p. 3)
“The government gave you an extra hour for your thinking, Voshchev. You used to work eight hours, and now it’s only seven. You should have lived and kept quiet! If everybody starts thinking all at once, who’ll do the acting?”
“Without thought, there won’t be any sense in the action,” Voshchev said reflectively. (p. 6) [i.e. we would be like the rocks… and the dried-up leaves…] (The Foundation Pit, by Andrey Platonov [1899 – 1951], written in the late 1920s and early 1930s)
In listening to Abd El-Fattah describe the dashing of hope our brothers and sisters are experiencing in Egypt… I thought: “Isn’t that a familiar feeling? Isn’t that akin – though certainly a massively enlarged version – isn’t that akin to what we experience when we first enter what we think at first is the ‘job’ of our dreams?” We stretch our wings and imagine limitless possibilities… and then… then comes the reins… the threats… the intimidation.
It’s… not just important… but it’s everything… it’s the whole thing… that we see… that this global system is a single reality… – a totalitarian regime… a totalitarian whole… and that we can’t get free… unless we take ‘the whole’ as our goal…
…and we certainly can’t do this by imagining that we can re-take a tiny piece of it… and clean it up… and establish it on principles that are ‘honest’… whether that tiny piece is an individual… a radio station… or a nation.
(If we are focused on ‘the small’… it leaves them free to focus on… ‘the all’… and we forfeit our lives to them… because in controlling ‘the all’… ‘power’ owns them (our lives.) And we’re going to be discussing how ‘jobs’ commandeer our energy… divert it down fruitless paths – in terms of getting ourselves free. This is what struck me when reading about the endless discord at Pacifica Radio… that the internal strife – the so-called ‘political in-fighting’ – successfully diverts a lot of progressive energy… kills a whole lot of hope… so what do we do about it?
Or about the fact that this humble pirate radio station hasn’t had a stream for almost a month… and no one knows what to do about it….
You KPFA listeners… and those of all the Pacifica-affiliates… you’re pooling your money… why not pool your brain resources… and figure out how to make each station a local communal resource? The folks who work in these places are stuck… trapped in the hierarchical structure imposed by management. So how could these stations become village possessions? And how could we dismantle the Pacifica Foundation? )
But ‘the whole’ is our goal… because whether or not we’re aware of it… our tiny piece is still connected… still receiving a blood transfusion… from the vampire’s heart… daily… right back into it…
…and when we’re fed by the vampire global-state with poisoned food and blood… eventually… inevitably… we’ll be re-taken – that is its nature. It’s nature is force – to force us to be it… no matter how small the corner in which we try to live.
This is a single problem we are all grappling with globally… and it is a single ‘opposite’ to which we must give our allegiance… if we are determined to achieve it… as… and this we must always remember… ‘power’ is totally committed to preventing this… and they have systematically gobbled up… the planet’s resources.
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And listening to Abd El-Fattah… I also found myself thinking… that we keep cycling round and round (for centuries…) the same major dilemma of ‘class’… summarized well enough perhaps in a conversation D-Way and I had a year ago. Here’s a snippet I hope you’ll listen to in advance of the April 6th show: …the problem is developing the certainty that we can… in fact… work together to create a society in which we get to express our gifts fully… [the text follows:]
The Raven: 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.
And I know folks are doing that… that they are putting their own gifts first… over jobs… a lot of people are trying to figure out how to hang onto themselves while doing jobs. I’m just suggesting that 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 hang onto… it’s every human being and that we have to reach out to each other. So how do we start?… is the question.
D-Way: There’s too many dilemmas that come up: the need to make money… that seems to be ingrained in all of us: “I don’t have enough money… I need money… I need a job…” that script is what plays out in our heads over and over again… so how do we break that script? It’s incredibly hard because we do need money in this system and we do need to provide for our families… I’m feeling that pressure a lot… the financial pull is really hard…. And it is an issue of coming together and talking about it… but it always seems to be this Catch-22 because it seems to be that there’s no time for this because our minds are wrapped around trying to survive… and so how do we break that?… it’s very difficult….
The Raven: [So…] until we are free of necessity we are not free. And that ‘getting free of necessity’ is not rocket-science… it ain’t difficult figuring out how to reproduce our lives… we know how to do that…. The problem is getting ‘power’ off our backs. So I’m more and more convinced that the problem is developing the certainty that we can… in fact… work together to create a society in which we get to express our gifts fully. So… it is developing the certainty that is the issue. With certainty we are fierce… we are fearless. If we knew for sure that we deserve to express our gifts and that this is wrong… the putting them on hold and the selling them… then we will do what has to be done. We will go door-to-door… we will name place and time and provide some snacks and say: “come sit down we’re gonna talk about our stolen gifts and how we move on as a global humanity. We would get the job done.
It’s just like Shakespeare said: “all difficulties are but easy when they are known….” And so it is only by coming together and pooling our information… sharing notes… that we can know for certain that we can have each other’s backs… that we can help each other… that we can grow food for each other… and share the burdens together… “all difficulties are but easy when they are known…” that’s why they work so hard to make sure we are kept apart from each other… so we can’t know… that the difficulty is not each other… the difficulty is ‘power’… and we have to get it off our backs. Period. (130303firststep.mp3, Waking Up Radio of March 3, 2013)
Last week we said we need a “Move to Plan” the state’s abolition… and our transition to freedom. Today we’ll discuss not only that we’re taught that this term’s (‘freedom’s) meaning is its opposite…
…that we’re taught to reject (per our parents example and instruction…) our body’s truth – this is the message packed in the faulty notion that ‘freedom’ and ‘governance’ exhibit some vague equivalence (we’re taught as youth that ‘the state’ ‘governing’ us is but the larger version of us ‘governing’ our ‘passions’ – i.e. the truth of our bodies’ (the earth moving in us…) a false equivalence that quickly falls apart when we trust our body’s longing… the course in which it directs us…
(…now some might say: “one’s body sometimes leads you true… and sometimes astray…” and I would answer: “it only seems that way…” because our process of growth has been sat on by ‘power’ for millennia… and we are all damaged souls… but we must trust that we will get whole… and we must also see that ‘power’ has a totalitarian reality… a whole world-view… defined according to its control-needs – to pull us back into… in the aftermath of those moments when we break free… we have to build an alternative focal point – a different center around which to orient our energies – all the energy that is released with ‘power’s hold loosening – which we’re seeing globally…)
…we’ll consider not only that we’ve been intentionally trapped in scarcity… in survival-mode for millennia (and keeping us in survival-mode erodes our leadership capacities… our courage… so the problem is not just the ‘chaos’… it’s ‘dependency-made-chronic’…)
( – and I have to add here that African-American and indigenous youth are targeted… because they have not been for millennia in harness… and still have vibrant alternative cultures… alternative allegiances (which makes them attractive to other youth, by the way… whose bodies miss these things…) – and makes them (by the system’s way-of-seeing…) ‘disobedient’… and so particularly threatening to ‘power’…)…we’re going to discuss that the difficulty is not just that we’ve been atomized and divided from each other… not just that we’ve been taught to believe that ‘democracy’ – and ‘civilization’ itself – depends on all of the above… but that… even if we could somehow see through all of these cons… too many of us deeply believe that we’ve been rendered so inadequate to the challenge of feeding… clothing… and sheltering ourselves – independent of ‘the state’s assumption of this prerogative – that we’d never be able to make it through a planning period…
…that this is not true too many of us fear to trust.
Egyptian Activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah summarizes it thus:
And so, obviously now, where the state only aligns via Hellfire missiles, it becomes a space where human trafficking and drug trafficking and arms trafficking and also terrorism and jihadis and so on flourish. But then you use that fact to make people live in fear, fear of Sinai, which is part of the country, which is a part of the country that we went to war for and, you know, people died for. And now it’s being treated as an alien threat. And now it’s being – it has become – I mean, they have mismanaged it until – I’m not – I mean, there is a real threat. Yes, there is a real threat. They created it. But now we’re stuck with it. And so, people are scared of change.
And I somehow have to find a way to explain to people why we need to dismantle the state and build a different one and appease their fears and actually find a way of confronting all the chaos that they are unleashing right now…
[But this is only a problem because we haven’t cultivated sufficient ‘certainty’ globally… obviously we can’t… stuck in our individual ‘state’ boxes… confront global ‘power’ alone… and it is global ‘power’ he’s confronting – global ‘power’ that has the deep pockets… that funnels its dollars through layers and layers of actors… – P.S.]
…And I somehow have to find a way to explain to people why we need to dismantle the state and build a different one and appease their fears and actually find a way of confronting all the chaos that they are unleashing right now and all the chaos that they will continue to unleash and all the chaos that will be unleashed when they collapse. And they are going to collapse. That current military regime is – I mean, it could last for years and years. But this current state of emergency is not temporary. I mean, that’s – violence is the only thing they have. They’re absolutely incapable of even producing discourse that young people, even young people who are not revolutionary, you know, or radical in any way, just even people who would love to believe them, and they keep alienating them. They keep alienating them. It was very clear in the referendum when basically most – almost all young voters did not show up. The discourse they use is so poor, you know, that it’s just – and you’re talking about most of the country if you’re saying young people. But even – even the people who believed them, the people who rallied to Sisi and, you know, created the Sisi cult and so on, they were being promised security, stability and food and work and so on. And they have absolute – and they have an energy crisis, which they’re going to solve with coal, which is going to create a massive environmental and health crisis. The healthcare is in collapse. Education is in collapse. Staples are completely dependent on – we’re completely dependent on imports for food staples, which means that we’re very dependent on hard currency. And, you know, their plan is to just borrow a lot of money from Saudia and Emirate, and that’s not going to last.
And when they collapse, it’s going to be scary. It’s not going to be – you know, when Mubarak collapsed, it was beautiful. And there were months in which the regime was so – I mean, they never lost complete control, but there was–but the revolution was so strong, and the regime was so weakened, that at least in public space and in the street and so on people were liberated and could imagine a completely different world….
[Let’s be strategic. Isn’t it obvious where we have to put our energy?… on building a solidarity that can’t be undermined? How do we do that?… while we plan… using the Internet. – P.S.]
The moment even when they collapse, unless we do something about it, you know, the sense that is going to prevail is not a sense of liberation but a sense of fear. And that’s going to get the worst reactions out of people. We’ve seen that when Morsi’s rule collapsed…
[Morsi didn’t do his analysis. Basic analysis: what is our strength?… it’s our hands… it’s the people. It’s our work they want to control. In whose hands were we placed? In Egypt. The Egyptian military… obviously. So for Morsi to ‘suck-up’ to them… was a strategic error no less than a moral failure… a failure of ethics… of love… of solidarity with his brothers and sisters. – P.S.]
We’ve seen that when Morsi’s rule collapsed. Everybody was scared of everybody. Everybody was being paranoid. And so, for a couple of months during July and – most July – July and August, there was civilian-on-civilian violence. I think something around 200 people were killed in civilian-on-civilian violence that had absolutely no logic and was so chaotic and so – so scary – even though the police and the military were all over the place.
Police completely collapsed in January 2011, and we spent months with no authority on the ground. But they were safe months. You know, people were not killing each other. There wasn’t a wave – there wasn’t a crime wave. Prisons were opened. All the detainees were out in the street, and nothing happened, or not much happened; while [on the other hand] you had these months of absolute military control, but people were scared and paranoid, and so we had chaos. And I think we’re going to get more of that, unless we do something about it.
…when we talk about the revolution while living it, we are talking about a dream, you know, a wish, something that we’re trying to fulfill, something that we’re trying to create…
But for it to be a revolution, you have to have a narrative that brings all the different forms of resistance together, and you have to have hope. You know, you have to be – it has to be that people are mobilizing, not out of desperation, but out of a clear sense that something other than this life of despair is possible. And that’s, right now, a tough one, so that’s why right now I talk about defeat. I talk about defeat because I cannot even express hope anymore, but hopefully that’s temporary. (Egyptian Activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah on Prison & Regime’s “War on a Whole Generation”, Democracy Now of March 31, 2014)
We’ve discussed this dilemma a lot… particularly as it relates to Egypt… and I hope you will listen to the excerpts I put up for this show (transcripts of the final two are included on the page for WUR shows of July 7 and 14, 2013, which are also in “Reclaiming Our Leadership: Waking Up Radio Conversations (Vol. 1)” (pdf file). But I’m going to repeat some of what I think is key in them:
I believe we need to re-think ‘governance’…. Re-reading Beginning Again I realized I see the word differently now… since Bentham explained to me the way it’s used by ‘power’ to mean: “ensuring that we are obedient…”
It may be we cannot get ‘obedience’ out of this word ‘governance’ [because ‘governance’ is but another word for ‘rule’… and remember… “command exists but with obedience…”] and need a new word that supports true power: ours… and the earth’s….
If ‘democracy’ is a management strategy… technique… tool… along with ‘philosophy’ ruled by ‘hierarchy’… part of an hierarchical management structure… system… is not even more so ‘governance’?
Each one of us being free, I believe, is key to a truly new society… the force of the underlying structure will assert itself and so ‘obedience’ cannot be in us if our world is to be based in freedom and good fellowship. These… along with reverence… are the qualities… qualities that we need to live individually… no less than collectively… free…
[So there’s] no division between [my brothers and sisters] being big and my being big… we ‘all’ have to be big in order for ‘me’ to be big. That’s just the reality… that’s just the underlying earth truth…
…but let’s not get stuck on an individual focus.
So… mos def… let’s meet each other’s creative needs… [was the point of the ‘Planning’ tool I included at the end of Waking Up.)
But I’m more and more convinced… because of the ‘time’ issue… the crunch we’re under with the consumption of the planet… that [our resistance… and all of our efforts to get big individually…] have to be tied to a larger goal of ‘moving on as a species’…
…have to be tied to a sense of unity with our brothers and sisters struggling all over the world. This is something that all of us have to do. And so having some ‘art collective’ in one small community… it may feel good… but it’s not gonna get us our future unless it is consciously intending to. In the same way that Bentham was powerful for ‘power’… his certainty was powerful for ‘power’… because it unified their thinking… it helped give them certainty… and they concentrated their efforts on a goal. I believe [their focusing on a goal] was more important than the trillions amassed by the financial industry to ‘guarantee’ (to their minds…) as security to get them to that goal of total suppression of the world population (and I mean that as an internal ‘suppression’… I don’t necessarily mean hardcore [violent…] although we’re seeing that obviously.
[They desperately want us to be ‘self-regulating’ as Bentham advised – as a matter of energy-conservation-and-efficiency.]
I believe there will be differential means used for differential groups… depending on who they think they can con… and who they can buy off… and who they can’t.)
[And “who they can’t” includes not just the youth of Egypt… although they are certainly – along with the people of Haiti and South Africa and Indonesia – the most threatening… but just in general the ‘low-slotted’ of many places: Spain… Greece – those tenuously-threaded-to-work generally…]
But if we do not have the goal of a re-designed society globally in mind… then [our resistance] will be co-opted… no doubt…. It will fit right into those various ideologies of control we talked about: whether ‘nationalism’… or the notion of the superiority of ‘this people’ over ‘that people’… the notion that we have to serve the installation – the triumph – of ‘science’ or ‘technology’ or ‘the rule of reason’ or whatever the ideology is that separates us from our brothers and sisters or convinces us to give up our gifts… or put them on hold… we will be suckered into that… because we want our gifts to live some kind of way… even if it’s in a tiny little familial bubble.
So how do we believe in our gifts?… enough… not to put them on the market? It’s not an easy thing… but we have to take the first step by first acknowledging that we want to talk about it with each other…. There’s a deep pain in not being ‘seen’… that our gifts aren’t valued…
…We are priceless… each one… and we’re conned into believing the opposite…
[Here’s an illustration I heard on April 3rd from an ‘economist’ being consulted about… what the segment termed, “the food stamp economy”… by which they meant that big businesses like Wal-Mart suckled on the public tit while claiming they are providing us a wonderful ‘service’. He said, speaking about the folks forced by necessity to work there: “I wish they were more skilled and could earn more from the ‘labor market’… but…” This is the ‘merit-rises con they always throw in our faces… as if his excess reward was a law of nature… and not the result of his being ‘exceptionally’ obedient.]
…that we are tools to serve the few…. And so… just saying that out loud with each other… and beginning to grow them… with each other… is huge… if it’s tied to a goal of supporting our brothers and sisters to get free of this system… all of us… and to not diminish the suffering of someone stuck in a job because there’s folks literally in slavery… or being slaughtered for their mineral resources. We are all in this together. We are all the pawns of this system… and it’s wrong… plain and simple. It is wrong. And when something is wrong… you work to make it right….
Egypt: a de-centralized civic structure… requires transforming 'work'…:
So… Egypt… the Ukraine… Honduras… Nepal… Venazuela… South Africa… Greece… Spain… Haiti… the Indegenous globally… how can we support each other? What are the mechanisms that will allow us to have each other’s backs globally?… so that we can align our actions…. This is the question.
And I do think that language is at the heart of this matter of our transformation… because to work together we have to be on the same page… working with the same meanings… share the same definitions…
…so we return to this issue of shared media… in which our speech can gain currency… and with it… our confidence grow… and with it… our hope.
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 give the attribution… 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.
(# 1659, Emily Dickinson)]
[Journal entry of 04.02.06:
“…as I have a new Perry thriller, almost as hard to put down as the previous one, the night is shaping up to be a book-party night. And because, at least for another week, work is not an issue, I’m free to indulge my whim. Freedom is never having to worry about time or space while limitlessly able to ponder time and space. You may quote me.” – P.S.]
“…hegemons are self-liquidating…” [“…things fall apart…” so what is there to gather that energy?… is what we should be asking ourselves… if we were being strategic…] On the December 2, 2012 show we said that “the global economy exposes the con ‘nationalism’…” Egypt is showing us this… as it exposes that ‘rulers’ or elites have only one allegiance: to ‘power’… whatever their nation-state of origin…. It’s a world economy. ‘Ruling’ elites in every nation-state have only one allegiance: to ‘power’.
And we also said in that December 2nd show that global scarcity… what they call ‘austerity’ eliminates the need for economic ideology… as ‘scarcity’ is self-justifying…
[…as D-Way pointed out in that earlier excerpt… and as we all know – and what did Shakespeare say… and what did Barack add? “Self-esteem begins with a workable plan.” We in the U.S. are at this Disaster’s epicenter… and we here in the U.S. have this advantage… called “The Declaration of Independence”… which says that we have the right to abolish this state when it gets in the way of our happiness… so with the speed and the energy of the vortex in our hands (because we have the Internet…) what we send out… can sweep wide around….
We – or, rather, some of us – have benefited from the ‘rulers’ pillaging of the earth… and never known… but now we do… and now we see the difficulty for our brothers and sisters stuck in scarcity (jobs that barely provide subsistence…) or in brutally repressive regimes (never forgetting that ‘jobs’ are also ‘brutally repressive regimes’…) and so it falls to us… here in the U.S. to serve the re-balancing process… consciously… and to consciously take the lead… in bringing about freedom for our global humanity…]
De Tocqueville (Democracy In America) shows us that atomization and division are intentional tactics of control on the part of ‘power’…
(…because they are key to manufactured and enforced dependency… which… recall… when made a chronic state… forestalls our thought process… prevents conviction… certainty… and with it… courage… i.e. we need each other… we need to be backup for each other… to reclaim responsibility for setting the terms for our lives… i.e. to overcome so-called ‘scarcity’…)
So these are intended tactics of control on the part of the state (FYI: the word ‘administration’ is used to mean ‘management’ – of us…)
But what I have already said may suffice to show the general principles on which the administration of the United States rests. These principles are differently applied: their consequences are more or less numerous in various localities; but they are always substantially the same. The laws differ, and their outward features change, but their character does not vary. If the township and the county are not everywhere constituted in the same manner, it is at least true that in the United States the county and the township are always based upon the same principle, namely, that every one is the best judge of what concerns himself alone, and the most proper person to supply his private wants. The township and the county are therefore bound to take care of their special interests: the State governs, but it does not interfere with their administration. Exceptions to this rule may be met with, but not a contrary principle.
And… see… that’s what has to be flipped. It’s not “ourselves alone” that must concern us… but ‘the whole.’
(And what’s true for the U.S…. likewise applies to the globe-entire.)
Do we understand that ‘management’ means ‘not free’?… and that if we are only concerned with ‘the small’… ‘the state’ is free… to ‘govern’ (i.e. ‘rule’…) ‘the whole’.
Centralized de-centralization – and the Pacifica Foundation is a mini-example of this – soft totalitarianism… is present… as our ancestors recognized… from ‘democracy’s inception [this is discussed in Founding & Realizing A Test Site…] because once the terms are established… the reins may be adjusted in due course…
…you may leave the ‘states’ to their various devices… so long as you have firm control of the judiciary (the rules…)
…what’s key is manufactured dependency… ‘scarcity’ established as the condition for our lives – which is why Pacifica keeps going after local budgets – accomplished via our enforced atomization… which creates and is created by – both mutually-reinforce (see… it’s a single inter-locked system…) hierarchical and other false divisions between us.
All of which results in the ‘externalization of one’s leadership capacity’ (the longing for a ‘Daddy’… discussed as well in Founding & Realizing A Test Site…] rootless-bootless-ad-infinitum that comes from manufactured and enforced… insecurity.
When we… we-the-people… as a critical mass… start to see… that the global state is the one (no matter our particular region or location…) the one we all confront… its terms imposed across the globe… and plan from this vantage of the whole… then at last… we’re cooking with gas.
What Alaa Abd El-Fattah is expressing is our seeming dependence on something that is creating that sense of dependence by creating our fear.
Our dilemma is just as he said: unless we’re ready… prepared… for ‘power’s response to us (and ‘ready’ means ‘working with the entire populace’…) we’re readily disassembled by what they do to us – i.e. undermine our mutual trust – because once this is done… we’re rootless… bootless… done (for some time indefinite…)
And this Democracy Now program is a really good example… not just of the insufficiency of ‘journalism’ (for we-the-people… it serves ‘power’ well enough…)
(…and in this sense they can be like soldiers who are incredibly heroic… and yet in fact serving an ultimately harmful project…. Journalists too might see themselves as ‘patriotic’… involved in a ‘fix-it’ project… if not for a nation… then for an ideology… like ‘democracy’…)
…so this program helps us see that harm results when ‘journalism’ is abstracted out… or independent… of… a [global] plan – for it forwards this ‘rootless-bootless’ problem ad infinitum.
Here they broadcast Alaa Abd El-Fattah’s plea… this clear plea – if phrased generally – for assistance…
…which our common humanity yearns to answer…
…and this is Egypt for love’s sake… Egypt… which… with Tunisia… led the way… and yet we do nothing?
But once the media-show is over… it’s on to ‘the next thing’… the next thing to divert and entertain its audiences… divert us from our heavy chains of boredom… and service to ‘we-know-not-what’… akin… in essence… to that Afghan child suicide-bomber… tool of those who serve ideas instead of life.
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So what does ‘working with the entire populace’ mean? How do we make our discussion of these issues on-going? Such that when we hear pleas from Egypt… the Ukraine… from South Africa and Spain… we’re ready to respond.
And in what way do we incorporate ‘listening to our bodies’ into this plan?… beyond… that is… incorporating food, song and dance in our movement?
And to what degree do we emphasize the need to develop our thought?… because it is ultimately this that the state wants to render harmless… speaking in terms of the broad populace…
…and this state project is endorsed by almost all media outlets… by providing no means for us to develop our thought collectively…
…because for authentic thought to come… and be developed… we need independence from the state….
So… just as the state stands in the way of our pursuit of happiness… it stands in the way of developing our thought….
But what’s key is seeing that ‘the state’ has followed Bentham’s (and Plato’s) advice and ensures that it delegates itself to every corner of our lives – i.e. is totalitarian.
But what is also key – for our re-balancing – is seeing that we have the means… finally… to accelerate the unraveling… the center loosening… losing… its hold…
…and that means trusting that what we are inherently… needs no ‘management’… but only honoring.
Please tune in Waking Up Radio this Sunday, April 6, 2014, as we continue reading and discussing “Miklos Nyiszli’s Lessons On Class”. [As of 04.07.14: most recent update of the pdf for this page is through Ch. XXVI – 308 pages, 1.8 MB – and includes a transcipt for the April 6, 2014 show…]
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* for the April 13, 2014 WUR show: Sisters and brothers…
April 8th, 2014… Sisters and Brothers: Last week we listened to Egyptian Activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah testifying from Egypt… how… following each one of our steps toward freedom… ‘power’ learns from our movements… and mounts a reaction… that… they hope… incorporates what they’ve learned.
In Founding & Realizing A Test Site… we noted – or rather De Tocqueville does – that this is a long historical process (much longer than he discusses…) coterminous with ‘class’…
…and that it was with the French Revolution that the dutiful sons of ‘rule’ finally got what Plato was trying to teach them… that the only way to successfully… to permanently… sit on the people is: if they (‘power’… the philosopher-king-global-statesmen…) unite… while we (the people) are systematically riven (by them…) by divisions…
(… and aren’t states just working double-time on this of late – perhaps they are ever working double-time on this – trying to rev up antipathy towards immigrants… gays, lesbians and transgendered… mutual mistrust between police and people… and between various ethnicities…
…and let’s not forget that the wage work system is the mechanism by which states utilize our energy… and thereby implement their plans: so the Kenyan police become tools of those who rule… and are the means for global-state-backed ‘ethnic cleansing’… and Russian soldiers are similarly played… to try to create divisions in the Ukraine…. This is the banality of obedience – everyday horrors ‘power’ unleashes around us – the banality of ‘following orders’. Only when we are free to think for ourselves can we end these everyday horrors of betrayal… and of the failure of our empathy… our greatest gift as a human being – and the coerced work system… our dependence on the state for the ‘right’ to exist… doesn’t allow this…)
…and – and this is equally important – they cannot successfully sit on us… and thereby maintain their ‘superior’ position… unless the development of our thought-process is prevented.
Just as ‘power’ was slow to grasp Plato (it took the French Revolution and Bentham to accomplish it…) ‘power’ has been likewise slow to ‘get’ De Tocqueville – or maybe just slow to accept his message… that we-the-people will never stop pushing to use our gifts… and that they must ‘manage’ it – this longing (preferably… for ‘power’… in the way that Bentham said – and De Tocqueville heartily endorsed: “get them to internalize ‘discipline…” [and – going beyond this – De Tocqueville praised the U.S. way of de-centralizing our – we-the-people’s – management… because it makes the state seem non-totalitarian.])
Yet the consumption of the planet… and the advance of the Internet… occurring at once… pose an unmeetable challenge for ‘power’.
When De Tocqueville describes ‘democracy’ as an irresistible force he’s but noting that we human beings are determined to grow our gifts… to get ‘big’… and use our leadership (capacities.) This is the earth speaking in us.
So what can ‘power’ do about it?
What it does is to… simultaneously (again following Plato’s guidance…) rank us… teach us to deify ‘mind’… equate ‘mind’ with growing our gifts… while only allowing some to devote their lives to this ‘mind-worship’… and… if all else fails… try to orchestrate a way to make us (the broad populace…) feel we’re growing our gifts… our leadership (a quality… again… inherent in every human being… by virtue of our being living things.)
(They can only make it seem like a scarce ‘commodity’ by using the means we’ve been discussing: creating ‘scarcity’… and so dependence… ensuring insecurity as our general inheritance… and its sine qua non applied-atomization – the means of achieving this larger orchestration of managing and maintaining the illusion of ‘scarcity’ – )
So… ‘leadership’ is in all of us… and as the Piper’s price (his blood-lust of consumption of the planet’s resources…) has now fallen due… is weighing on us… ‘power’ has three choices… which in its desperation it unleashes all at once: first… appeals to nationalism… by creating external threats – the threat of war; second… population-reduction… by unleashing catastrophic events; third… buy-off the former ‘better-offs’… the ones it used to placate with jobs… with offers to let them use their ‘leadership’….
(And now that I’ve delved a bit into ‘Campaign Sic-Rifkin-On-’Em’… I have to admit a fourth option… though it’s really an amalgam of all of them… but for convenience let’s call it “re-energize ‘capitalism’”.)
Which is the proper context… I think… for making sense of this series of over-lapping orchestrations that we’ve been witnessing… from ‘power’s bought-and-paid-for media. This is what ‘power’ does… when it unleashes significant propaganda. It throws it at us from every angle… using multiple pundits but with single messages… variously stated… employing inter-linking… mutually-reinforcing… terms and concepts – all designed to paint a clear picture… of the future ‘power’ wants us to want (while always controlling the definitions): “local economies”… “worker-owned businesses or cooperatives’… “‘democratic’ economics”… “making independent contractors owners of the company”… “the ‘Third Industrial Revolution’”… “the sharing economy”… “‘owners’ instead of ‘workers’”… “a new left-right consensus”… “guaranteed minimum income” – and just now (April 9, 2014): “zero-marginal-cost-jobs”… “social commons”… “cooperative commons”… “collaborative commons” (‘the commons’ being a concept of which they are obviously much a’feared…) – that are “based on the notion of ‘abundance’ instead of ‘scarcity’”…” (‘abundance’… likewise a word the definition of which ‘power’ very much wants to determine… to ensure a definition of ‘abundance’ that refuses all relationship with ‘reverence’…) ‘self-sufficiency’ (of course what they call ‘self-sufficiency’ isn’t ‘individual self-sufficiency’…
(When you look at the terms they claim… you see the terms of which they are deeply afraid. I heard another one just today (April 11, 2014 on Democracy Now)… another one they’re rushing to name… fit into the ‘democratic economics’ frame…
…so when they propose their vision… of ‘socialism’…
…let’s get out our glasses with clear lens for that discussion… let’s insist on certain basic parameters for our future… and never forget that clear terms… definitions… language… is critical… as is the fact that until now ‘power’ has owned them, the terms… controlled the lexicon… and so the thoughts we think keep getting stuck in empty jargon.
Or… worse… mire us in division. For example… we’re thinking with ‘power’s terms when we use those ‘ism’ words. We could say instead: “systems of ranking imposed by ‘power’”… which locates the source… and helps us align our sense of reality more accurately – rejecting ‘power’s frame. We can’t develop our thought… and we can’t get on the same page… using ‘power’s concepts and frame.
So let’s not be duped by circular… abstract… loops… that are designed to cycle us right back… to rule by the few.)
And perhaps the most telling fact dropped along the way is that: youth today can’t be bought with a wage… they want their ‘work’ to also be a contribution… they want their ‘work’ to be socially significant… probably because… the earth is in the throes of consumption… and the Internet has brought us all closer… and they care about their brothers and sisters….
So… ‘power’ asks itself… “how to control them?”… “how to manage this matter of shrinking resources… and swelling numbers of humans who no longer want to be ‘factors of production’?”… “how to push back into boxes the growing numbers who are determined to get out of them?” If not by controlling the menu of options available to them?
So the questions that matter most to us everyday folks… are carefully avoided:
What about the children who are being abandoned right now? Does he care about them?
And what about us… stuck… soul-crushed… right now? Does he care about us?
And how did these global-statesmen who pay him fill their deep pockets?… how did they get their bottomless war chests?
What about all that ‘legacy-disparity’? While the youth are building the ‘healing economy’… their ‘merit’ rising them up to the surface… does he care about us systematically kicked below it?
What about ‘hierarchy’?
Who makes the decisions?
What about this matter of global-‘power’ sitting on our leadership?
What about the horrors that have come from states instilling ‘obedience’?
And how do we help our brothers and sisters? (They want us to not care about our brothers and sisters. Lack of empathy will always be rewarded with a ‘wage’… or with whatever new word they come up with that means the same thing: “Don’t fight the leash and you'll get extra things…”)
And is your vision of future based on coercion?
Doesn’t following the state’s orders but gets us more ‘Auschwitzs’?
Isn’t what’s needed that we-the-people free our souls of ‘obedience’?
The future is not the global-state statesmen’s exclusive province. ‘The future’ means the lives of all of us. And they cannot be respected by maintaining the current terms of ‘governance’… which disallow ‘all of us’ making the decisions… and rather, as Spearman said, ever tend us toward totalitarianism.
How is this so-called ‘new’ vision not “the subordination of the individual to the collective purpose…”? as Diana Spearman described ‘dictatorship’?
‘Power’ must end for our world to be based on reverence… instead of obedience.
It could not be more obvious that ‘power’ is but trying to get their ‘global-statesmen-status’ past this present generation… past those dangerous (for ‘power’) questions…
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April 10th, 2014… Sisters and Brothers: The more I probe this latest thrust… from ‘power’s ‘Shape the Future’ Project… in which they make use of Jeremy Rifkin (I listened to an interview with him yesterday… promoting his latest book…) particularly as there’s quite a pile of spokesmen now stacked up (Venus… Zeitgeist… Thrive… the MIT guys… the pop-economists asking us to help save ‘capitalism’… all the ‘visionary thinkers’ telling us what our future will be…)
(…and realizing that they will just keep coming… they can trot them out ad infinitum [and so… what do we got?…] because ‘power’ has endless resources to devote to their problem… of herding us into our 21st century boxes…)
…the more it seems to me…
…we need strategy sessions… ‘planning-ins’ (‘Planning-ins’ to launch our transition… ‘PILOTs’… pilots of the process of helping to further these necessary discussions…) we need on-going efforts that aren’t exclusive… that recognize, e.g., that folks who work construction… or grow and harvest our food… may be the ‘thinkers’ that we most need… to get us to… the ‘opposite’ of ‘power’… of ‘rule’… of hierarchy and exclusivity.
Because… truly… we must somehow make our voices louder… somehow get our priorities out there… those of us who want to move forward an alternative for popular discussion… demonstrate to our brothers and sisters that ‘power’s plans are being met with an alternative….
This cannot only be and an academic discussion. This is up for me because when I went to look at Jeremy Rifkin’s book I saw almost next to it a book called Does Capitalism Have A Future? And impetuously I splurged and got it… because it includes an essay by Immanuel Wallerstein… and I thought… here might be the best offensive… against ‘power’s ‘Shape the Future’ Initiative…
We’ll see… although my first foray makes me kind of doubt it. My first foray makes me think… that we-the-people are caught between ‘two poles of punditry’ (as I’m seeing these two middle ranks as either unconscious or conscious servants of ‘power’): ‘the scholarly pursuit of truth’… versus ‘the planted propagandist’…
…seeing this… a strong sense of urgency in me surges… that says: we on the Left… that is, those of us who admit that ‘power’ is not engaged in ‘objective’ ‘scholarship’… but is deadly committed to its ‘future-vision’… we have to start talking about how to challenge it… meet it with an alternative vision that is not elitist… but rather is ‘power’s opposite.
Given the time constraints of the radio show… and given this effort’s (of ‘power’s) scope… what may be best is to list some of my concerns about this propaganda plant of Rifkin’s… and then tackle the whole initiative in more depth (as doing so will help us… I think… get clearer on ‘power’s key con ‘the economy’…) using the page we set up and left (initially titled “Is Capitalism Doomed?”… but which should perhaps be re-titled “How Do We-The-People Come Together To Invent The Future We Want?: Getting A Design-Draft… Putting It On The People’s Telegraph” [because that’s the real issue…]) – and inter-linking its discussions with those of Founding & Realizing A Test Site
(We learned from Sebastian de Grazia that ‘power’ has known for decades that ‘wage work’ is an antiquated system… and that it doesn’t need us on leash anymore. It’s long past time for us to figure out how to have our time back – that’s the only way to be happy…. So we have this right… here in the U.S…. to plan freedom… and it’s just so completely reasonable to say “let’s have a test site… – just the folks who want to… we’re not trying to impose nothing on nobody. We just want whoever is interested… we need a sufficient little bit of land… we want to use all this amazing knowledge [Michael Reynolds’ Earthship… David Blume’s de-centralization of energy production… e.g… each village having it’s own energy co-op…] that people are putting on the table because they want all of us to be free [globally….] So this is reasonable. There’s no reason aside from ‘power’ nakedly exposing itself why this shouldn’t be… a test site.)
It seems to me we need to identify the key criteria – the people’s criteria – for evaluating any proposed plan for our future… so as not to be duped… as Karl Popper said… by ‘mere words’.
(See… this is where we’ve been tripped up in the past… with mere words… plugged into our good-heartedness and our longing to be able to trust our fellows…. We’re told: “Now we own the means of production! Get to work!” And the flowery phrases don’t make my body feel any more free – and my speaks true… I’m not.)
Some of the main ones we’ve identified:
First: Does it help free us – each individual one of us – from dependency? Does it emphasize individual self-sufficiency? Is ‘freedom’ defined as “freedom from necessity”? Is ‘work’ or leisure at the core of the vision?… leisure? – living and sharing our gifts freely?… or forcing them to fit within given limits?
(Consider… for example… this from David Blume… who argues that de-centralized production of alcohol… from a variety of plant sources… could allow all humans to be energy self-sufficient:
It’s become a sort of heresy to talk about alcohol fuel or any form of alternative energy as a viable way out of our energy dilemma…. Rest assured, there is enough land to produce solar energy in many forms, including alcohol, for a world that makes energy-efficient design a priority. We can have a large cooperative cellulose distillery operation in each county, producing ethanol and biomass electricity to keep our essential services running. We can have small integrated farms that produce fuel, food, and building materials. We can eat well on locally produced food and locally processed products. We can even cogenerate our electricity and hot water at our homes using our cars running on alcohol in a pinch…
…I was granted a patent in 2007 on the process to use distiller’s dried grains with solubles [DDGS: “the substance that remains when, in making alcohol from grain, all of the starch is removed, but all of the protein and fat, some of the cellulose, and a wide array of vitamins and minerals remain, along with yeast from fermentation; useful as animal feed. In the case of DDGS, after the DDG is separated from the spent mash, the liquid portion is evaporated to concentrate the soluble components to a syrup, which is then blended with the DDG.”] as a combination fertilizer and herbicide. Now an agribusiness corporation cannot patent it and then prevent others from using it. I am going to handle use of my patent in a completely different manner than a large agribusiness corporation would. A program will be set up to let individual farmers and small collectives with small capacity license this patent for a nominal fee, perhaps only requiring registration (details are still be worked out as of the publication date of this book (2008).]
I ask the following three things of these small-volume users of my patent: 1) that they not use chemical herbicides and not use genetically modified seeds; 2) that they learn how to breed and save their seed from season to season; over time, you will end up with a variety tailored to your climate and soil (write me if you need help with this): and 3) in lieu of the patent royalty, donate what you think is fair to the International Institute for Ecological Agriculture [309 Cedar Street #127, Santa Cruz, CA 95060, USA] so that I can keep doing this kind of work. Make sure that you take care of your family and workers first. I trust my fellow small farmers to do right by me if their profit increases. So take that, Monsanto!
Alcohol fuel production can result in more concentrated corporate farming of monocrops processed in giant plants, or it can save the family farm and provide farmers with markets for a wide variety of crops. The preferable route to a sustainable agriculture system looks to me like farmers cooperatively producing fuel and multiple co-products in small plants, using a wide range of feedstocks, from roots to grains to cellulose. (David Blume, Alcohol Can Be A Gas!, p. 24, 50, info@permaculture.com)
Second: Does it acknowledge the existence of ‘organized ‘power’’… and that there will be therefore strenuous resistance and reaction (backlash)… and factor that into the plan for how to get there? Does it even have a plan for how to get there?
Third: Does it overcome our atomization? Does it bring us together – physically and psychically – across false divisions?
Fourth: Is decision-making broad and generous… open and transparent… slow and inclusive?
And far from us needing ‘power’s help with this business of reproducing ourselves… their imposed class-regime of millennia has but meant them sitting and sucking on us.
Moreover… as David Blume illustrates in his book… ‘power’ sits on the ideas that would free us from their ‘direction’ of us – Nikola Tesla’s work being perhaps the most glaring example – at least until we start to do them anyway… and it’s clear they can’t be stopped – then it rushes in to claim ownership… and as they’re shameless… they’ll even try to reinvent provenance out of whole cloth… and pretend they are the source of them.
The parade of ‘power’s prognosticators are revealing of their plans for us. But I’ve yet to hear our commensurate response – i.e. one global in scope… that penetrates the deep social relations of class (as ‘power’s does implicitly… never inviting discussion of course…) and attempts to enlist global humanity in this massive ‘transition’ project. Now that’s largely a matter of our not having our own public media commons… our own shared public discussion space… our own shared voices to echo throughout our day to counter ‘power’s. But that we must figure out how to create such spaces could not be clearer. In the space “How Do We-The-People Come Together To Invent The Future We Want?: Getting A Design-Draft… Putting It On The People’s Telegraph” [because that’s the real issue…]) – and inter-linking its discussions with those of Founding & Realizing A Test Site I’ll try to present as much of Does Capitalism Have A Future? as I can… so that we can engage with it… and advance our thinking on the question… and hopefully make progress toward consensus… but consider how it begins:
Our quintet gathered to write this unusual book because something big looms on the horizon: a structural crisis much bigger than the recent Great Recession, which might in retrospect seem only a prologue to a period of deeper troubles and transformation. Immanuel Wallerstein explains the rationale for predicting the breakdown of the capitalist system. Over the next three or four decades capitalists of the world, overcrowding the global markets and hard pressed on all sides by the social and ecological costs of doing business, may find it simply impossible to make their usual investment decisions.
[…he will be arguing that the sine qua non of ‘capitalism’ as a world system is not wage labor… or production for exchange and profit… or the class struggle… or the ‘free market’… but rather the endless accumulation of capital… which Rosa Luxemburg told us a hundred years ago… – P.S.]
In the last five centuries capitalism has been the cosmopolitan and explicitly hierarchical world-market economy where the elite operators, favorable located at its geographical core, were in a position to reap large and reasonable secure profits. But, Wallerstein argues, this historical situation, however dynamic, will ultimately reach its systemic limitations, as do all historical systems. In this hypothesis, capitalism would end in the frustration of capitalists themselves. (Wallerstein, Collins, Mann, Derluguian, Calhoun, Does Capitalism Have A Future?)
But what about organized ‘power’? Where do they fit into this analysis?… is one of the key questions… as we begin examining the book… that we will be asking.
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Initial Thoughts On the Rifkin Initiative:
• As with all ‘power’s propaganda about ‘the future’… it uses the declarative voice. It brooks no challenge… no counter vision… and certainly no squawking from mere commoners. This is ‘Big Boys Business’ is what he’s saying… the ‘Big Boys Game’… the exclusive province of the Global Players.
So we’re told what we’re going to get – and it’s an appalling vision… all this “billions of sensors” business has always been ‘power’s longing: total surveillance of us and all life. But it’s not what we want. Where are the healthy, happy babies in this vision? Where is the limitless time? Where is the boundless roving and the spanning of seas to explore new things? When ‘power’ salivates about how it can monitor the entire planet from it’s Control Room atop the Panopticon… and waxes poetic about how we also should want it… should passionately wish to contribute our small bit to the “billions of brains” working on Total Surveillance… 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…
• …so what ‘power’ most wants is for us to turn our backs on our brothers and sisters… keep to our given tasks… and be obedient.
• He describes an ‘economy’ in which ‘marginal costs’ (of production) will plummet… resulting in a Brave New World in which:
…thousands of start-up businesses and hobbyists establish 3D-printing operations, infofacture products at near zero marginal cost, power their Fab Labs with green electricity, market their goods for nearly free on hundreds of global websites, and deliver their products in electric and fuel-cell vehicles powered by their own green energy.
A powerful new technology revolution is emerging that is going to fundamentally alter our economic life. The Communication Internet is converging with an embryonic Energy Internet and Logistics Internet to create a new technology platform -- the Internet of Things (IoT) – that connects everything and everyone. Billions of sensors are being attached to natural resources, production lines, the electricity grid, logistics networks, recycling flows, and implanted in homes, offices, stores, and vehicles, feeding Big Data into the IoT global neural network. Small and medium sized enterprises and Prosumers will be able to connect to the network and use Big Data, analytics, and algorithms to accelerate efficiency, dramatically increase productivity, and lower the marginal cost of producing and sharing a wide range of physical products and services to near zero, making them nearly free, just like we now do with information goods.
The plummeting of marginal costs is spawning a hybrid economy – part capitalist market and part Collaborative Commons – with far reaching implications for society. Millions of people are already transferring parts of their economic lives to the global Collaborative Commons.
But who is buying these things? And how is it that they’re able to? And who will feed the folks who have all this discretionary income?
• And since we’re on the subject of food. To keep the book from being a downer… so as to not spoil the good vibe… blow the great high… he thoughtfully leaves the dire predictions to the end… when he says:
Extreme storms and floods… are occurring twice as often as they did a century ago…
Droughts are proliferating everywhere. A 2009 International Food Policy Research Institute report on the impact of climate change on agriculture in the developing world was sobering…
The impact on agriculture in the Middle East and North Africa over the next four decades because of climate change is equally alarming: rice yields will decline by 30%, maize by 47%, and wheat by 20%…
Climate change will have no less of a dramatic impact on human infrastructure…
Is it any wonder they’re pushing so hard to create an ‘economy’ based on ‘cooperation’ (for us…) to get us to give generously of our time… and… willingly… continue to let them direct our lives.
They have manipulated our good hearts and our good natures only because we haven’t been able to talk about it. Those good hearts and good natures need to be turned to a worthy object: ourselves and the earth…
• And every good fairy tale needs a villain… would it surprise you to learn it’s corporations?…‘power’s traditional cover – the facade global-‘power’ apparently cannot do without.
(During the February 16, 2014 show on “mis-directing dissent” we argued that the Left’s ability to be strategic has been successfully derailed by ‘power’… in large measure via the efforts of propped-up pundits directing it down fruitless paths… so here’s another example not just of the broad strategy of misdirection but of the particular strategy (for ‘power’) of using ‘the economy’ for cover.
And while last week we repeated what was said in an earlier discussion: that “‘scarcity’ is self-justifying”… and if imposed universally reduces the need for economic ideology… what we’re seeing… in ‘power’s clinging to it – the idea of ‘capitalism’ – is ‘power’s need for its larger ideological purpose: ‘capitalism’s ideological function… in this stage of the game… is less about providing motivation – or legitimization and justification of ‘rule’ – and now almost exclusively about providing ‘power’ with needed cover… i.e. shielding its totalitarian planning from public scrutiny… and trying to get we-the-people on ‘it’s side [as Hugo told them… “no vacuum in the human heart…”] So… their story will go “there’s no ‘plan’ to force or brothers and sisters in other lands into a desperation that’s inescapable… oh no… there’s only evil corporations…” And of course that example of destitution will also do admirable service as a cautionary tale for all of the ‘privileged’ servants… as a reminder of how ‘good’ they have it: a ‘guaranteed income’!… and all that ‘freedom’.)
And who is the only player strong enough to do battle with this villain? – the evil corporations – well, ‘the state’ of course… only Daddy has sufficient resources… we-the-people are way out of our league… we must go back to our bedtime stories… and let the Big Boys lead.
• He tells us there’s an ‘epic struggle’ going on… and I agree… but of course his is not the ‘epic struggle’ that I see…
(Further discussion of ‘power’s ‘Shape the Future Project” will hopefully unfold at: “How Do We-The-People Come Together To Invent The Future We Want?: Getting A Design-Draft… Putting It On The People’s Telegraph”.)
Please tune in Waking Up Radio this Sunday, April 13, 2014, as we continue reading and discussing “Miklos Nyiszli’s Lessons On Class”. [As of 04.07.14: most recent update of the pdf for this page is through Ch. XXVI – 308 pages, 1.8 MB – and includes a transcipt for the April 6, 2014 show…]
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* for the April 20, 2014 WUR show: Sisters and brothers…
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April 15th, 2014… Brothers and Sisters: Decisions are being made for us apace… under the banner “Stop Climate Change.” When have states done anything but… use whatever’s around to bolster themselves? (and then send out their hired guns to cover their butts.) This is ‘the state’s raison d’etre. States don’t exist for our benefit. Recall what we said during the July 28, 2013 show… that the state exists to keep power out of our hands in order to maximize its…. So they lie to us… by means of their propaganda mechanisms. This is what states do… as… if they told us the truth… how could we be kept in check? And checked we must be… for states to direct our energy… and play the game of global supremacy.
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Is a global ‘Supremacy Game’ necessarily totalitarian?
In our upcoming show we’ll be considering this question… and one that flows from it: “What does it mean to have a revolution… in a “world-‘class’-system’”?”
Obviously as I write this the Ukraine is at the foremost of my mind… but not she alone… there are many today… and many that have gone before… who walk the very road the Ukraine walks today: the U.S…. France… Haiti… Russia… China… Cuba… Rwanda… Somalia… Venezuela… to name perhaps the best known since the advent of the ‘global system.’ It seems that no matter what a state does… it becomes what it was… before the ‘revolution’ (a term-apt as it’s from the late Latin: “to roll back”…) the ‘leaders’ but need an external threat… which the ‘global order’ is more than happy to provide to it… to be restored to ‘statesmenship’…
…or the ‘Big Boys’ will systematically whittle it away… or orchestrate its ‘decay’… and the culprit-recalcitrants will be dismissed… like children who have been disobedient… and sent to languish at the bottom of ‘the order of upright states’… or expelled altogether from grace and labeled ‘failed states’… cautionary tales for others to contemplate.
So… what does it mean to have a revolution in a global ‘power’-system?
It means to be a target… it means to be harassed… it means trying to live with a vampire on your ass… it means balancing on an edge with a bully behind you howling menace….
During the June 23, 2013 show we quoted Victor Hugo and then George Bernard Shaw:
The counterfeits of the past take assumed names, and are fond of calling themselves the future. That spectre, the past, not infrequently falsifies its passport. Let us be ready for the snare. Let us beware. (Victor Hugo, Les Miserables, Book VI – XI)
“Revolutions never lift the burden of tyranny, they merely shift it to another’s shoulders.”
This is so because ‘tyranny’ and ‘rule’ and ‘statesmanship’… are coterminous. Or… as we’ve said before and will say again: ‘power’ is ‘power’ is ‘power’.
Consider this from Plato’s beloved uncle Critias:
Then came, it seems, that wise and cunning man,
The first inventor of the fear of gods…
He framed a tale, a most alluring doctrine,
Concealing truth by veils of lying lore.
He told of the abode of awful gods,
Up in revolving vaults, whence thunder roars
And lightning’s fearful flashes blind the eye…
He thus encircled men by bonds of fear;
Surrounding them by gods in fair abodes,
He charmed them by his spells, and daunted them –
And lawlessness turned into law and order.
And consider this from Kissinger’s On China:
Confucius’s answer to the chaos of his era was the “Way” of the just and harmonious society. Confucius preached a hierarchical social creed: the fundamental duty was to “know thy place.” To its adherents the Confucian order offered the inspiration of service in pursuit of a greater harmony…. His philosophy sought the redemption of the state through righteous individual behavior. Oriented toward this world, his thinking affirmed a code of social conduct, not a roadmap to the afterlife. (p. 15)
And consider this from Mary Peter Mack:
As Bentham’s pages on Indirect Legislation are among the most neglected of all his work, so too are they among the most important. What did he mean by “indirect legislation”? “Legislation is a state of warfare,” he said in another favorite metaphor: “Direct legislation – a formal attack made with the main body of [the legislator’s]… forces in the open field; indirect legislation – a secret plan of connected and long-concerted operations to be executed in the way of stratagem or petite guerre.”… His vision was remarkably Confucian. “But the thing is,” Confucius said in the Analects, “to aim so that there should not be any lawsuits at all.”
And consider this from Bentham:
All the indirect means, then, which we can use with advantage, must be employed in directing the inclinations of men, in putting into operations the rules of a logic hitherto but little know, the logic of the will – …
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But resources are not only shrinking costs are rising
But resources are not only shrinking – our earth’s been gnawed to the bone – and what meat is left for the global pot must be carefully apportioned… costs are rising: crumbling infrastructure… toxic dumps in our earth and water (long-ignored…) must be cleaned up… middle ranks in ‘emerging states’ must be paid off – and ‘power’s thinning soup can’t support enough of us.
In starting to read this collaborative effort of Wallerstein’s (Does Capitalism Have A Future?) [discussed on the page “How Do We-The-People Come Together To Invent The Future We Want?: Getting A Design-Draft… Putting It On The People’s Telegraph”] – keeping in mind that for us this – “can ‘capitalism’ continue to exist?” – is not really the question… for us the question is strategic: “how do we get the future we want?”… because it’s time for us to start living self-determined lives… –
…as I consider how they (how all of us…) are trained to see the world… multiple interrelated (in ‘class’) issues relevant to our strategic question arise. First… that if the future we want is (as I’ve been arguing…) the opposite of ‘class’… so will be our ‘way of seeing’… as Kropotkin said – and ditto for its implied ‘value-system’. Second… if that ‘opposite lens’ – the view from ‘the bottom’… is simultaneously… necessarily… the view from the vantage of ‘the whole’… i.e. encompasses more of the truth (what the earth has established as reality…) it must best represent for the health and wholeness of the planet. And lastly – and this is an issue that comes up every day… as I listen to the media-propaganda-parade – that there must be a way for us to have this discussion… of the importance of controlling the definitions… for ‘power’ – to control us… and for us – once we have ‘the People’s Lexicon’… i.e. our own definitions – in order to begin creating the world we want.
Yesterday (April 14th, 2014) I listened to one voice over the airwaves after another echo what I hear from folks out in the ‘day-to-day’ – who say the job is forcing them to act like robots… i.e. that we’re being sped-up…
(…which concretely illustrates the point Wallerstein’s making: that even as the earth-resources available to ‘the rulers’ for eating… are shrinking – or perhaps because of that fact – ‘power’s unconscious agents (the bosses) are determined to extract even more out of us… determined to get every last bit… until all the life of the planet has been ‘spent’…)
…I listened to folks say… in essence… that 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…
This story in which they ride our backs – that they call ‘Progress’ – was written by others who then strangle all other stories… cut them off at the pass…
Please tune in Waking Up Radio this Sunday, April 20, 2014, as we continue reading and discussing “Miklos Nyiszli’s Lessons On Class”. [As of 04.07.14: most recent update of the pdf for this page is through Ch. XXVI – 308 pages, 1.8 MB – and includes a transcipt for the April 6, 2014 show…]
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11.17.13… Brothers and sisters: on Sunday, November 24, 2013 we’ll be continuing to deepen those colors and textures of our picture of ‘transition’ – and look at the practical question of ‘fostering’… or ‘manifesting’… something new. I believe that we need to create a global infrastructure of helping… that we need to help each other… both because it fosters our growth… and because it’s too hard without it… our movement grows too slow without it.
So we need a network of ‘safe’ places for pursuing ‘self-creation for the species’ – akin to the ‘Infoshops’ of anarchists’ – with the goal of planning a future in which the pursuit of happiness is not defining of individuals… but of humanity itself… places not exclusivist… not puffed up with academic jargon… not definable by any category of class… but rather definable by life only… by our need for a world of fully-developing-individualities… for any one to be… so must it be for humanity as a whole…
…and this is why it must be we… here in the belly of the beast… the U.S. state… to do this… we… in a supposed supreme democracy… we… with the codified right to do precisely what we’re doing… pursue happiness –
…this is where it happens – world human energy released to ensure our happiness – because… so far from it being illegal… it is our codified right. This is key… because what we’re doing must be done openly… must be seen… to grow exponentially…
…discussion must be robust and open… we must be the world we want to see…
…a world in which we live our gifts…
…are guided by earth-reverence…
…and a need for good fellowship.
[…continued at: “Initial Thoughts for November 24, 2013” on the page “Reclaiming Our Stolen Gifts… Our Leadership… To Establish A Future Based On Distributed Generation”]
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11.12.13… Brothers and sisters: Please join us this Sunday, November 17, 2013 when we’ll be taking a closer look at this notion of ‘rule’… as its necessity is still assumed… at least in the public discourse… and so very likely as well within us. And we’ll be continuing to ask, “what holds us back?” by trying to deepen the colors and textures of our picture of ‘transition’ – and not from the perspective of a particular town or village merely… but, most importantly, as a global humanity. Developing this picture is essential to our gaining the initiative in defining the world we want… and to ensuring that we aren’t caught off-guard by ‘shock-and-awe-like’ tactics of ‘power’ – a point that will be concretized when we spend some time with Miklos Nyiszli. You can almost feel the rush of ‘power’ to get us all – ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ alike – on ‘lock-down’… feel it rushing to massage the ‘knowledge-sectors’ even as it rushes to demoralize ‘mere’ ‘hand’.
[…continued at: “Initial Thoughts for November 17, 2013” on the page “Reclaiming Our Stolen Gifts… Our Leadership… To Establish A Future Based On Distributed Generation”]
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11.08.13… During the July 21st show we said that our training in ‘ever-strivingness’ (‘internalized discipline’…) in ‘being productive’ serves a ‘definite political function…’ (to use Poper’s phrase…)
…because ‘ever-strivingness’ forestalls the development of thought – it doesn’t allow time to think… and so…
…progressively… under ‘power’s regime…
…the regime of ‘scarcity’
…‘thought’ atrophies….
…as we leave to ‘our betters’ – the miniscule few – the pleasure of thinking…
…and of ‘leading’…
…making of ‘leadership’ itself…
…a scarce commodity…
…delivering us helpless… into the hands of ‘power’…
…forcing us to pretend…
…that ‘thought’ is the equivalent of…
…‘internalized discipline’…
…‘being efficient’…
…following orders with expedition.
[…continued at: “Initial Thoughts for November 10, 2013” on the page “Reclaiming Our Stolen Gifts… Our Leadership… To Establish A Future Based On Distributed Generation”]
Please join with us this Sunday, November 10, 2013 when we continue probing the depths… of how to reclaim our leadership.
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10.31.13… Sisters and brothers: This morning (10.31.13) I listened to an interview with a man, Jack Hyde I believe, who has written a book called The Nazi and the Psychiatrist… about the life of a man sent by the U.S. military in 1945 to evaluate the captured Nazi leadership – to determine their mental fitness for standing trial. What surprised me most about the interview was the apparent belief of the interviewer that their must have been some common pathology that the leadership suffered from… he kept digging to find out what it was: “So did the psychiatrist [Douglas Kelly] ever find that trait?” he asked near the end of the interview… when…
… had we been discussing it… had we been discussing Alice Miller… Miklos Nyiszli… Karl Popper…it would have been obvious… for all of us… that the pathology is the class system itself.
There is a total absence of logic in the way ‘work’ is discussed across the political spectrum (again… this speaks to the reality that the class system is totalitarian….) The obvious truth that we are captives within the coerced work system (whether it’s the ‘money-illusion’ or the illusion of ‘our betters’ that coerces us…) – is never spoken. So… on the one hand… while it’s perfectly obvious to us all that we are not independent actors while “on the job”… but rather puppets… this obvious truth is never spoken… while the discourse of the pundits all implies that we are independent actors.…
The anger of pundits leveled against folks who “did their job” – i.e. heinous acts they were paid to do… acts compelled by the system … never broadens in its scope to embrace the class system itself. There is this insane assumption – insane because it flies against all of our own personal experience… it flies against truth – that captives are not captives. It strikes me that these attacks must be for the benefit of young people with little experience with the coerced work system… but no interviewer ever calls them on it… no radio host ever states the obvious. To live under such patent insanity does violence to what we are as living things… undermines our humanity.… [continued at: “Miklos Nyiszli Lessons On Class”, Chapter VI; and discussed this Sunday… see: “Initial Thoughts for November 3, 2013” on the page “Reclaiming Our Stolen Gifts… Our Leadership… To Establish A Future Based On Distributed Generation”]
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10.24.13… Brothers and sisters: With Karl Popper’s help we’ve been attempting to come to grips with the implications (for our ‘selves’… our souls… and necessarily then… for our common humanity…) of giving our allegiance to the state… arguing that doing so has meant (and can only mean) betraying our common humanity and the earth…
…as allegiance to the ‘common wealth’ (the group project of raping the earth so that it may be converted from common treasure to private ownership…) has meant – and will continue to mean while it exists – giving our allegiance to ‘princes’… to ‘statesmen’… to puffs-up-in-love-with-an-illusion…
…and that to establish our world based on (the opposite operating premise inherent in) distributed generation… we have to develop – each one of us… our leadership.
This Sunday, October 27, 2013 we begin that conversation.
At this moment we are globally pondering… globally trying to see… what the qualities of a new world – beyond commodification and rank – would have to be… for us to constitute the opposite of class authentically.
It’s time for us to embark on our common road together… toward “Reclaiming Our Stolen Gifts… Our Leadership… To Establish A Future Based On Distributed Generation.”
We begin by looking at the question of ‘leadership.’
[…continued at: “Reclaiming Our Stolen Gifts… Our Leadership… To Establish A Future Based On Distributed Generation”… “Initial thoughts for the October 27, 2013”…where partial transcripts of The Waking Up Radio Show are located.]
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October 4, 2013… also during upcoming shows we will be discussing not just Popper’s insights on ‘authentic education’… and the fostering of ‘leadership’… but also whether, or to what degree, these insights bear on the possibilities for ‘authentic governance’… i.e. we will be challenging this seeming sacrosanct notion of ‘rule’…. For more on this select “On ‘Leadership’ and ‘Self-Organization’… on ‘Poor’ and ‘Rich’” from the right-hand column in: “The ‘Global Awakening’?… or “The Great ‘Re-Set’”?”
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October 1, 2013: Sisters and brothers… During the September 29th show we discussed – and on the October 6th show [continued discussion of “ ‘Global Awakening’?… or ‘Re-Set’”?”] we will expand on – the hidden agenda of ‘power’s “re-setting ‘progress’” propaganda, which dresses itself up as a ‘society-redesign’ project… an effort to develop “a new economic paradigm and… a paradigm for the world”…
…and noted that youth and their education are particularly being targeted… with an appeal for their participation – especially ‘the creatives’ – in “saving the planet.”
And on the September 22nd show we said that ‘power’ churns the available ‘solutions’ to all the problems caused by its existence…
…and then cranks them out as ‘fresh’ to each new generation…
And these so-called ‘solutions’ are necessarily false because they all are premised on our continued captivity and ‘power’s existence…
…so, since releasing us from captivity is off the table… and ‘power’ is ‘power’ is ‘power’… the available ‘solutions’ …that maintain class in place… in essence haven’t changed since Plato’s day…. On this page – Karl Popper on Authentic Education for Youth… The Global Awakening or The Great Re-Set? (part 2) – we will be noticing… and discussing (beginning in mid-October, 2013…) if this is so. Stay tuned…
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The discussion that’s being discreetly ignored in the spate of articles about this supposed ‘re-invention’ of ‘business’ is ‘economics’ itself – ‘economics’ being, at base, a ‘value’-assigning mechanism – and the concept, therefore, at its core: ‘value’.
But to say this is also to say that ‘economics’ is a ‘rank’-assigning mechanism… and though the main one, not the only one. ‘Education’ is a big one… and will, I believe… should ‘power’s will prevail… swell in importance as it steps up to preserve, if it can, ‘class’… and, then, they hope, supplant it.
And no doubt we’ll have to discuss the plans of ‘power’ to (supposedly) rule by ‘merit’… as it may be (for some) counter-intuitive… to challenge it.
We learned from Marilyn Waring that ‘value’ is in the eye of the beholder… and from Bentham that ‘power’ plans to be the single ‘eye’ we see through (by means of his Panopticon….)
‘Power’s dream to keep us asleep…
…to keep us hypnotized…
…is to be…
…for every human being…
…the single dazzling eye…
…that awes us by being…
…or seeming…
…‘all-seeing’…
…the sun to which we rise…
…that calls us to our labors…
…gives us light and the food that feeds us…
…gives us our every thought to think…
…becoming, in short…
…our everything.
Now until very recently this is a description that fit ‘the economy’. But in this ‘wake-up’ moment for ‘the people’… globally… ‘power’ has decided (too late we hope…) in all humility… to toss off that robe… and reveal itself in all its golden wisdom… and ‘all-seeingness’… and benevolence…
(…I mean… they are ‘the A Team’… as The Economist told us… the misunderstood ones… and despite our obliviousness… they must save us… they must step up. There’s a crisis!
And though their motives may be misjudged… and they may be abused by some (the ungrateful ones…)
…and the rest hang back and are helpless…
…only they can do what needs to be done….
There remains, merely… the anointment.
So… purse-bulging…
…he convenes groups of ‘experts’…
…all eager to please that bag…
…and to get written up in the papers…
…as the ones who are saving the planet.
So… as ranking can never produce ‘happiness’… the challenge for ‘power’ is how to seem to retire ‘rank’ while maintaining (or rather even deepening) ‘class’… i.e. their exclusive hold on ‘decision-making’… their ownership and defining of ‘the state’.
It seems to me they will have to fall back on some alleged ‘natural’ distinction between those who are ‘gifted’… and those who are ‘not’…
…falling back on some alleged ‘natural’ hierarchical barriers / divisions between us…
…that they must ‘prove’ by means of the ‘education’ system… ‘show’ (because everyone, they will argue, is given the same ‘chance’ (back to that hideous Gates Foundation mission-lingo…)
So there are multiple cons (illusions) ‘power’ is floating right now… several ropes it’s playing out with which it hopes to hang us (or just tie us up… depending… on whether and what use it has for us…) in order to achieve certain outcomes.
Sisters and brothers… Please join us this Sunday September 29, 2013 for our discussion: “The ‘Global Awakening’?… or “The Great ‘Re-Set’”?”
Sisters and brothers… Anybody got info on… the U.N. draft report on ‘the New Development Paradigm’?…
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…and please listen to the following audio-files (from the Archives)…. They will be discussed this Sunday September 22, 2013:
How does turning the world into a heartless jungle promote 'happiness'?…
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The way they conned us was… the particular form the Panopticon took… was by means of the global market and our joining with our masters in their global ‘competition’…
…so by the simple means of a ladder… and by making resources scarce… ‘power’ kept our eyes narrowly focused… on the con ‘economic growth’… our personal stats and ‘the nation’s… both….
But ‘the economy’ cannot provide it any longer… this ‘economic’ defining of ‘the good life’… and in particular cannot fulfill our expectation that we will set up for our children better times… than we accepted for ourselves.
“So ‘the good life’ must be re-visited,” says ‘power’, “revisited and revised… such that ‘the people’ can be reminded… that ‘the good life’ is all in their minds… ‘money can’t buy happiness’ we will tell them… after which we can advise: ‘set aside all fruitless complaining… and make… out of thin thought (individually)… something ‘happy’… and construct… for yourselves… better lives….”
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The discussion that’s being discreetly ignored in the spate of articles about this supposed ‘re-invention’ of ‘business’ is ‘economics’ itself – ‘economics’ being, at base (under ‘class’), “the defining and assigning of ‘value’…” – and what’s particularly being ignored is the concept at its core: ‘value’.
‘The economy’ (under ‘class’) is essentially a ‘value’-assigning set of practices… conventions… made concrete by embedding them in our social relations… out of which grow the structures of state that ‘ensure’ (until we stop believing in them… i.e. stop thinking the thoughts we are given…) their continuance.
Marilyn Waring and Joan Robinson put their fingers on the key issue… “what has value? And who defines it?”
[…continued at: Staying Focused on Designing A Future… On Not Getting Divided… “Initial thoughts for the September 22, 2013”…where partial transcripts of The Waking Up Radio Show are located.]
Last week we learned [see: “Unpacking Robert Reich’s Baggage”] that Manfred Max-Neef is one of a group of 60 or so folks planning… what he says is… “a new economic paradigm and… a paradigm for the world.”
…and here I must cut in… to amend this earlier speculation… with some corrected information:
In April 2012, Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations, urged the Royal Government of Bhutan to take GNH to a new level. He gave the government the task of creating a New Development Paradigm (NDP) that, whether adopted into policy or not, will mark for future generations a point in history when populations across the globe started rethinking the role of government.
Secretary Ban Ki-moon, said there is an urgent need for “a revolution in our thinking” to address the multiple economic, ecological and social crises facing our world. “The old model is broken. We need to create a new one…. In this time of global challenge, even crisis, business as usual will not do…. Clearly we must unite around a shared vision for the future – a vision for equitable human development, a healthy planet, and enduring economic dynamism.”
To that end, prime minister Lyonchchen and the Kingdom of Bhutan hosted this landmark IEWG gathering in the capital Thimphu from January 28 to February 2, 2013. The prime minister’s steering committee assembled an impressive list of participants including scientists, economists, environmentalists, psychologists and other great minds from all continents to collaborate with a select group of their Bhutanese counterparts. Their job was to “articulate the principles, goals, structures and responsibilities of the new paradigm, so that this alternative perspective on development can contribute to the United Nations’ post-2015 development agenda.” The Secretariat stated that “The new development paradigm will focus on balancing thriving natural, human, social, cultural and built assets, and recognising ecological sustainability, fair distribution and the efficient use of resources as key conditions.” The draft report will be presented to the UN in June, 2013, and a final document given by September 2014. (Written by noajones on February 14, 2013. Published in Relationship trouble on Asia, Bhutan, >http://futurechallenges.org/local/a-new-development-paradigm-takes-shape-in-bhutan/<)
Now it seems to me this whole effort rests… on controlling the definitions…
…on re-defining … not just ‘economics’ (which Ban Ki-moon suggests they start calling ‘development’…) but… even more importantly… all the terms that we would want to use… to free ourselves… from ‘power’… and it’s becoming glaringly clear, that if we-the-people do not interfere… in this plan of ‘power’… to seize the hour… away from our Global Awakening… we will be turned from the future we deserve… and handed with new collars our ‘new’… ‘re-designed’… and re-defined… ‘work’….
The battle for our future…
…‘power’ wages behind scenes…
…behind a screen of lies…
…and the class-old-cons that it revises…
…and the lexicon it’s hurriedly re-writing…
…a gift of its pundits’ naiveté gratis …
The signs are everywhere (in the media that it uses to keep us – particularly those among us who might claim the name ‘progressive’– conditioned…) that ‘power’ has mounted its fleetest steed to overtake ‘we-the-people’… in this race – on the part of ‘we’ – to get free…globally… and – on the part of the ‘philosopher-statesmen’ – to ‘re-set’ the class system.
[…continued at: “The ‘Global Awakening’?… or “The Great ‘Re-Set’”?”… ]
09.11.13: Sisters and brothers…
Recently, my son and I were talking about ‘money’….
(…misdirected, I believe, by the pundits… and on this tip… the September 15, 2013 show will also examine… the layers of misdirection… in the words of Robert Reich. [ “Unpacking Robert Reich’s Baggage”]
He’s been hearing the argument a lot lately that it’s the root of all of our problems of injustice in our human relations, and therefore that the abolition of the monetary system would be a big step forward… towards our future freedom. I heard this argument in Lakeport when I was there as well. But I believe that the focus on money is a diversion… that money is but a stand-in… a symbol… a nexus… for something else… and that it’s this ‘something else’ – the earth – that requires our notice and our repossession.
Money is but tool…
…a means to measure…
…a ruler…
…to show how much of earth into your coffers goes…
– in ‘power’s way…
…unnoticed and unthanked.
And though converted into death…
…to silence…
…into inert objects…
…minus eyes or tongue…
…it still…
…as air that seeps up from the pit of hell…
…will mutely speak…
…the loss of all soul’s guidance.
So now that all the earth is eaten, nicely packaged, poisoned, pocked, and made damaged… now… when the lion’s share of means to feed ourselves is put in private hands… and we-the-people also packaged in our narrow box called ‘worker’… now… with manufactured scarcity in hand… ‘power’ is ready… to dispense our dangling signs that read: “will work for food.”
So… “who needs money?” ‘power’ says… “the work of setting place and privatizing means is done… money’s but an inconvenience to us now… it screens transactions of ‘the people’… and we insist on seeing them… all….”
I said in the Conversation with Joel McIver that if our efforts to end ‘power’ coalesced behind the banner “a mass movement to end wage work” that it would be very difficult for ‘power’ to undermine it. But it strikes me that – unless we talk about it and so are not caught unaware – that this diversionary tactic… this red herring… ‘money’… could be a way for ‘power’ to do precisely that… for the ‘power-‘guys (and their emissaries) to say they too are all about ending ‘the wage’… and that this movement therefore must instead be framed as “a movement to end coerced work… to end the sway of ‘necessity’ in our lives… and to usher in… a world of generalized human leisure.
[…continued at: Staying Focused on Designing A Future… On Not Getting Divided… “Initial thoughts for the September 15, 2013”…where partial transcripts of The Waking Up Radio Show are located.]
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09.06.13: Sisters and brothers… British writer Joel McIver is the author of several books on rock music and is currently researching for his upcoming biography of Rage.Against.The.Machine. (Working title: Know-Your-Enemy) The theme of ending a system that serves the few brought him to Waking Up: Freeing Ourselves From Work, and he got in touch. We spoke on 09.02.13. You can read this interview at: Conversation with Joel McIver
I hope you’ll read it because I think it’s a pretty good short explanation… of how it is that ‘power’… over the generations… has been successful in keeping us from achieving our well-deserved prize of generalized human leisure.
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On the September 8, 2013 show we’re going to continue thinking about what it means to: “stay focused on designing a future… and argue that “staying focused” also means “clearing away the diversions…” and that “the hidden tribalisms of ‘power’ and ‘punditry’” – and “the machinations of states” that unite them – are the major ones.
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09.04.13: Brothers and sisters… 80,000 South African miners… 10,000 Mexican teachers… thousands more on their feet in the U.S…. serving food made fast and cheap… or being picked at in Wal-Mart’s teeth… as it fattens on your shrinking standard of living… on your low wage subsidies…
…it’s time to think and plan more strategically…
…and combine our strikes globally…
…and ask all folks of heart to show solidarity…
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‘Power’… by means of global geo-political planning bodies… acknowledged and covert… are determined to ‘organize’ the world for us… impose a structure of the world that realizes a vision over two thousand years old… the very age itself of it they believe makes it legitimate… and no sacrifice… of the earth or our bodies… is to great for us to make… if it will allow Papa-Plato to rest at last…
So the Tribe of Plato presides over greater and greater…
(…seemingly impartial as the rules themselves empty our shrinking stores into their coffers…)
…consolidation of the resources (wealth) of the planet… even as we are pushed into smaller and smaller units to prevent our coming together… and are prodded, as we squirm in our small buckets… to lash out at each other.
So this is ‘the state’ our pundits are wedded to… and desperately trying to convince us… as their ‘worth’ (to ‘power’) depends on it… to be wedded to as well (…but there were in the not-too-distant past significant exceptions… significantly all dead… or mostly… but one thing is for sure… they are no longer speaking.)
“The sky is being poisoned with nuclear fallout. The world’s ozone layer is diminishing, and the seas are polluted. No economic model provides the means for understanding how both economic growth and ecological sustainability might be possible.” (Marilyn Waring, writing in 1986)
..this is the state of affairs the punditry seems set on preserving… and now we’re facing imminent ocean death (see “You Know How I Know 'Localization' or 'Democratic Economics' Is A Con?”).
When will we accept that the global inter-state system… and the world market…are actually not set up to improve our conditions of life… but actually to worsen them? That this worsening is what is happening is indisputable… the only question is intent. And I put to you… that question is irrelevant…
…whether with intent or no… it’s time for both of these structures to go… and for we-the-people to assume our much deserved… and much too-long delayed place… as stewards of our own lives… and the earth.
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I’ve been trying to find the words to describe the lunacy of… the sense of unreality with which I hear… the complete illogic of… the discourse from Left pundits on the issue of U.S. intervention in the proprietary gassing of a head-of-state of ‘its’ ‘citizens’. Here we have a U.S. state that closely monitors ‘its’ ‘citizens’ for signs of independent thinking… China likewise… Russian ditto… on down the line (maybe you know one that doesn’t… if so, fine… but the trend is clear, I think we can agree on that….)
The weight is all on the side of global ‘power’ to ultimately decide the fate of the planet’s inhabitants… given time and our quiescence they will do it… those trillions make it so… those trillions buy a lot of ‘political-and-pundit-class’ quiescence. But it can’t buy us… ‘the people’… especially if those privileged-intermediaries decide to stand with us… across the false divisions.
[…continued at: Staying Focused on Designing A Future… On Not Getting Divided… “Initial thoughts for the September 8, 2013”…where partial transcripts of The Waking Up Radio Show are located.]
09.01.13: Brothers and sisters: The conversation that I participated in with Allen Markowski and others of KPFZ of Lakeport, California, hosts of Voices of Lake County this past Friday morning, August 30, 2013 from 9 – 10 AM, PST will be archived at some future date.
He asked me to come up with a few questions that I would want to make certain get asked:
• Why do you think we need to end the wage-work system?
• What would replace it?
• Do you think the human species is at a turning point?
• Do you think we should be having society-wide discussions about the future, and what design of society better serves humans... and all life?
• Do you think as the challenge before us is global, that the frame for change... for the actions we take... our practice... should be global as well? What does that mean?
I thought I’d share my train of thought in doing this:
The mind-set of ‘class’ cannot get us to our future… in which every human being gets to explore and fully develop their earth-given gifts…
…we have to think new thoughts.
I believe that we live our lives according to certain untested assumptions… which have led us to relinquish our unique gifts and cede our authority for decision-making (for the world… and in particular for the species…) to a select few, who cannot – because they are a select few, and good decision-making requires full inclusion, the full involvement of everyone (and by this I’m not thinking of ‘voting’…) – who cannot create a world that works for those of us they want to ‘profit’ by (and by ‘profit’ I’m thinking much larger than mere ‘money’). And the result of this relinquishing we can see coldly around us today – species die-offs and ocean-death… clogged lungs… lives wasted in humans denied their full strength… and in struggle for resources made scarce… made scarce by making a market of them.
‘Select fews’ tend to want to maintain their ‘selectness’ – as ‘selectness’ itself is made scarce.
But now with the earth – all life – seriously in trouble, most of us globally are seeing… we have to reclaim full responsibility… and that means taking ourselves off the market… because we’ve seen where marketing resources leads… and because we need our full lives back to direct our energy best… where it’s most needed.
To develop the confidence that we can achieve this… requires new ways of thinking… which we must begin discussing… tout de suite… right now… immediately.
–––
08.27.13: Sisters and brothers… We are living in times in which we-the-people are challenging… globally… ‘the fait accompli of the state’… asking… must ‘the human’ mean ‘the state’?… should it not be all of us that determine it?… determine what ‘the human’ is?… and not the narrow ‘few’… forcing us to be conditioned… by its mechanisms of ‘state’… to fit its slender contours… our soul its image make?
What is a ‘human being’?… will we really continue to allow those damaged souls who sit atop us to be the ones who tell us what a human being is?… the limits of what’s allowed for our common humanity? Surely not… surely all our ancestors of heart did not labor so for us that now… when Tesla’s dream’s upon us… and we could awake and make it real… surely not… brothers and sisters… in these times to serve but self-betrayal to ourselves?… when we could retake our world?….
The September 1, 2013 show considers the hidden tribalism of ‘power’… and its connection to oligarchic decision-making posing as ‘democracy’ – elites are primed for ‘rule of the people’… and ‘the people’ are primed for work.
And this show will ask “what is a human being?” “Who gets to decide?” “Is the ‘human being’ ‘the state’?” “Is the ‘human being’ ‘the tribe’?”
…or is ‘the human being’ ‘the ocean’… the pulsing earth… the sky? Are we all that ever lived and died?… that loved and laughed and cried? What is a human being? And who gets to decide?
We’ve done it ‘power’s way for many millennia… we’ve walked that road… know every nook and cranny of that road… and… if we’re honest with ourselves… we know its destination….
“Seldom comes the better…”
…they said in Shakespeare’s day……but our remade world is waiting…
…so our remade phrase must say…
“Seldom comes the better…
…except we make it so…”
…that needed ‘we’ we have now…
…that before we didn’t know…
…and all of the religions…
…are premised on that ‘then’…
…a ‘then’, that’s true…
…millennia long…
…ten thousand years and more…
…but ‘then’ is done…
…and ‘now’ is come…
…when humanity as a global ‘one’….
…together will make ‘the better’…
…and leave the ‘then’ to be…
…a dimming thought…
…a shudder-sense…
…from a fearsome-felt…
…and daily-fading…
…dream.
Their way is to care about naught but ‘self’ and one’s own tribe… and they’ve ensured their tribe has in its hands the globe-entire… its resources, and especially our lives… they’ve set the terms… they’ve placed the weight that makes them always win… and we’ve lived by their rules… their given limits to us… despite our knowing… that they tested false… over and over again…
…and still we live by them….
…it’s cowardice alone… or rather fear… that keeps us silent… fear, and separation from each other… which it’s time now… for us to end.
The faux-maxim they put on bumpers…
…to keep us lulled to sleep…
…has it exactly backwards…
…as its very locally we must think…
…with these local minds and bodies…
…our hands… our eyes… our speech…
…and the trees that bloom just for us…
…through the earth beneath our feet…
…answer “here” to “what will we covet?”…
…in this inter-linked-vision we see…
…and will… very soon…
…with our sisters and brothers…
….act globally…
…to make it be.
[…continued at: Staying Focused on Designing A Future… On Not Getting Divided… “Initial thoughts for the September 1, 2013”…where partial transcripts of The Waking Up Radio Show are located.
P.S.: My son and I are recording children’s songs designed to confirm and encourage their love for themselves… if anyone among those listening in would like to help us get them out into the world… your help would be most welcome.]
(Nanji:
At two he was his mother’s…
…at three he came to me…
…at five there were no others…
…to ‘govern’ him but he…
…and Oh that ‘he’ it held the earth…
…and all the ancestors of steady berth…
…fast-held docked in lovingness…
…for all the world…
…for all the world…
…is he.)
“Listen to the MUSTN’TS, child,
Listen to the DON’TS,
Listen to the SHOULDN’TS,
The IMPOSSIBLES, the WON’TS,
Listen to the NEVER HAVES,
Then listen close to me –
Anything can happen, child,
If you want it to be.”
(Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends, 1974)
[“Nashville is hard on the living… but it sure does well by the dead.”]
–––
08.19.13: Sisters and brothers: There continues to be confusion and disagreement about the nature and the purpose of ‘the state’ (now that’s an obvious conversation to have… if there really was such a thing as open discussion in this country…) which is why I heard a pundit reply in the negative when asked whether the August 14th massacres by the Egyptian state could have been predicted.
So… let’s ask ourselves… what is the purpose of ‘the state’?
Last week we said that ‘the state’ and ‘the wage work system’ are two ways of saying the same thing. A cursory look at the question tells us that ‘power’ doesn’t want us to think of our core societal role as anything more than ‘worker’ (and by ‘core societal role’ I mean how we feed ourselves.) Now, most of us seem to believe (although in the absence of on-going… direct discussions in our communities, this is difficult to gauge…) because we’re taught to think this… that it has to be this way – that we must be stripped of our gifts… (and they doubt whether any exist…) and compelled to work in order for ‘society’ to function ‘efficiently’…. No one wants to do the ‘drudgery’… so… some ‘must’ be ‘trained’ to do it… and egoism being what it is (as Plato schooled ‘power’ to see…) the majority we need to end ‘rule’ is easily confused into thinking that “the drudgery-work is not for me, but you…” and, “my gifts are such they place me above the vast majority…” and we then work hard our whole life long to ‘prove’ it… and ‘power’ is left alone… to rule us.
So… seeing that equivalency – regardless of its imagined legitimacy… or not – seeing that ‘the state’ constructs us such that we relinquish our authentic power… and get to work… thereby helping to reproduce the set of terms by which ‘power’ is aggregated in ‘the state’… that the point of the coerced renunciation of our power – our unique earth-gifts – is to make us easier to control – easier to manipulate on those strings (or treadmill…)… make us ‘processed’ versus ‘crude’ fuel to light ‘the theatre’… the stage on which the few can play-pretend at being philosopher-king-statesmen….
…means that (as Plato put it…) ‘the state’ exists to “keep the cattle herded”… and not “to help ‘its’ people develop their earth-given gifts and cultivate within themselves… ‘the infinite’” (as the ancestors who wanted each one of us to be as ‘big’ as possible – and who I believe we should emulate… told us.) Recall Maxim Gorky’s words: “I know the time will come when people will wonder at their own beauty, when each will be like a star to all the others… and the best people will be accounted those whose hearts are most capable of embracing the world and of loving it, those who are most free, for in them lies the greatest beauty.”…
While we will hear ad infinitum that our priority should be to ‘develop the economy’, we will not hear discussed how ‘the economy’ is the structural framework for ensuring that we never develop our voices… our unique gifts.
If we see all this as we see the trashing and consuming of the earth… it’s easier to see why it’s but continuing our enslavement with re-forged chains… re-polished locks… to limit our vision of the future to ‘fixing the state’… i.e. to ‘improving’ incrementally the conditions of our lives, or trying to ‘lessen’ ‘power’s grip on the planet… while leaving the structure… the class system… the wage work system… intact.…
I believe that to begin living authentic lives we have to begin having authentic conversations with each other about the reality of our lives… and entertain the possibility that we have been misled… and systematically placed upon a treadmill that we were trained not to see…
…but that… now that we see it… it is possible to step off of it.
There are two images to keep before our eyes… ‘what we want’… and ‘what we don’t want’… and the threat of that ‘don’t want’ is the spur at our backs… and the prize of that ‘do’ is the sparkling ‘ahead-of-us’ that we don’t want to lose.
So let’s begin with the threat… with ‘what we don’t want’: we don’t want to lose all empathy for our brothers and sisters… which we are at risk of having happen to us…
…when those who have access to ears and eyes in many countries around the world refuse to say:
“…we need a mass movement to end wage work… and we must begin now… take that first step… that leads to the next… that leads to the next… by withholding our labor all around the world on a single day which we take for ourselves… a one-day Global General Strike to sit and discuss with each other what the future we want would look like… and perhaps its reach is such that it doesn’t even register as a blip in overall global human-energy-extraction… but in a month or so… we do it again… and again… and again… each time discussing… each time putting more flesh on our vision… such that a picture begins to form before more and more eyes – and then… we have a means… of responding… to the massacres… to the callousness… to the wholesale contempt and abusiveness… of ‘states’…”
The end-point is inevitable… because earth (earth in us) backs it… if we would but start.
The need for urgency is there for all to see. ‘Power’ is moving… apace… apace… apace… to separate our lives… our ‘fates’… to divide us globally… by the very fact that they can unleash atrocities… for all to see… and send the implicit message, “you are helpless to intervene… you can do nothing…” and by sending that message and we receiving… and with that receipt confirming its imagined truth… they incrementally but systematically (as it builds daily) blunt our outrage… dull our appetite for empathy….
When we don’t build a global response, we are not just helpless… we are forwarding a process by which we become less and less human.
So when I say we must join hands with Congo… with Egypt… with Syria… Bangladesh… and China… with Bedouins robbed of their ancestral lands… with all those who have no homes… I don’t mean “send money”… I mean “let’s form a plan to end ‘power’ globally…” and systematically work toward realizing it… by embracing with our actions… not just those targeted to receive ‘power’s worst beatings… but ourselves.
[…continued at the “Staying Focused On Designing A Future” site…]
… Beginning with our August 25, 2013 The Waking Up Radio Show) partial transcripts will be located at: Staying Focused on Designing A Future… On Not Getting Divided…
The following two audio-file-excerpts from our June 3, 2012 show will be discussed on the August 25, 2013 show: *“Staying Focused on Designing A Future”* and…
–––
08.15.13: Sisters and brothers: The suffering Egypt is being subjected to was utterly predictable. An organizing effort that turns out 24 million people – a third of the populace – inevitably makes Egypt a big red target in ‘power’s big bright spotlight (the ‘power’ that hides behind scenes even more so than the folks in government clothes.…) Without the support of ‘the people’ globally… and until we forge new means for building solidarity… within a single frame… ‘global support’ can only mean whatever segment of the labor movement that has the capacity to organize globally. But for that segment to act… would have required the possession of ‘certainty’ that it needed to… and that would have required realistic discussions of the purpose of ‘the state’… in a class system… a subject as taboo as the discussion of ending the class system… the wage work system… itself.
Egypt: We have few facts about your fallen…. but I feel certain that the critical issue for the military who did the targeting is not the religious or political affiliation of those slaughtered… but the heart required to brave the danger in the first place… and I hope it matters more to you that they are your brothers and sisters than that they long to see a short-sighted and callous president reinstated. The issue is the state… the issue is ‘power’… the issue is a military whose souls have been purchased by placing in its hands almost the whole of your country’s resources – it’s in the Duke of Gloucester’s purse… and he can pull it out and put it back as he pleases. So, there must be a vision the way to which cannot be clouded. A vision makes almost irrelevant who torched those churches and businesses… though I suspect clandestine agents (it’s what the state would do to bolster the story they want believed globally…)
I hope we will begin discussing (globally) the fact that in some form or another what is being done to Egypt is being done everywhere – ‘wrong’ is coming up to face us everywhere… ‘division’ and ‘separation is being stoked everywhere… ‘austerity’ is being imposed everywhere… fear and insecurity is being fostered everywhere… and we must learn how to begin having each other’s backs… everywhere.
And this cannot become a prolonged setback to a nation that organizes 24 million people into the streets. We need your heart and example… and you need more from us than the mere pondering of filtered and predigested pap. It’s time to set ‘particularity’ aside and say… until we have re-constituted our lives on a communal basis (globally)… that we will put our tribes on hold when it comes to ‘vision’… we need a collective, common vision… a vision big enough to hold all particularities. Let’s ignore those false divisions. Please. The issue is ‘the state’… and needing our freedom… globally.
–––
08.13.13: Sisters and brothers… on our August 18th Sunday Waking Up radio program will focus on “growing ‘certain’ that we want to ‘grow up’ as a global humanity… reflecting on Kropotkin’s point that individual initiative and growth depends on having mutual confidence in each other –
(…the absence of which is part and parcel of the lack of confidence in ‘the state’… aggregated ‘power’ (and its lack of authenticity… its fundamental dishonesty is disseminated out… and filtered down… through us…) …as a collective body that exists – in the propaganda, or according to the ideology of ‘democracy’… or ‘communism’… or ‘socialism’… or ‘social democracy’… or ‘participatory democracy’ [perhaps… letlet’s talk about it. And with that conversation in mind… I’d appreciate your feedback on these comments I shared with my fellow Berkeley Liberation Radio Collective members: “On the practice of ‘democracy’”…] to advance, protect… and advocate for in the global arena… the interests of ‘the people’…)
– our fellows of the same species – and on the fact that the ‘wage-work system’ erodes relationships of trust from within – because anyone can be bought to do anything…. And because it coerces us to support dishonesty with our children (about their value and the value of the earth… about our power… about the legitimacy of ‘the state’… and about ‘truth’ itself.)
In recent shows we’ve said that the power of an authentic definition is such that it illuminates far beyond itself – as… what is ‘authentic’ reflects truth… and truth is an intricately interwoven whole… meaning that the threads are interlaced without artifice… and that the more we delve… the more we see… of the whole – which is why we need to start using the lexicon for a free people… so we can begin to reveal to our eyes the whole…. If a definition does not lead us into light but rather deeper and deeper into confusion, that’s not ‘gold’… brothers and sisters… that’s a con.
This issue of distinguishing ‘truth’ from lies is up for all of us right now for many reasons… but a big one is that the secrecy of ‘power’ in its ‘state’-form is being progressively exposed – i.e. more and more of us cannot help but see it’s reality. So what does that mean? What does it mean that more and more are seeing the hand that wears the stain? I think we need to look more deeply at this question of ‘secrecy’.
Last week we said that there are three possible definitions of the main problem facing us as a global humanity – at least from the perspective of folks who want to establish societal conditions based on ‘fairness’ (i.e. cooperation… openness… and sharing…) instead of on cons and manipulation…: the problem could either be ‘unrestrained greed’… with the solution ‘fix the state’; or the problem could be ‘impersonal but accelerating economic forces of consumption unleashed on the world’… with the solution ‘fix the state’; or… the problem could be ‘Plato-lovin’-philosopher-king-hopefuls’ (a.k.a. ‘power’-guys) consciously moving us toward totalitarianism… who use the global inter-state structure and the global market (as levers)’… in which case ‘fixing the state’ but strengthens ‘power’… helps the ‘power’-guys realize their vision.
And I’m arguing that we need to put these theories to the test of the Great Communal Mind working on them… which means discussion… which means that we must hear all of them.
Now the latter possibility we never hear discussed over the airwaves such that ‘the people’ could hear it and begin considering it. And that omission is not just suggestive… if you think about it… it’s definitive… as it cannot be explained except by accepting that there is conscious design… (and this is also the case I think with the cutting-away of planetary health beneath our feet [but let’s talk about it…] because it fits with that definition and not the others.
So let’s probe further the hypothesis that there are ‘power’-guys with a vision…
(…and a vision makes everything they do more potent and dangerous… because it means conscious, intentional magnification of effects… because it’s reinforced across multiple overt policies and clandestine acts…)
…that is essentially totalitarian… and let’s also figure out how to push that discussion onto the airwaves… as we need all of us… or at least an ever-growing percentage of us… working on this question. We’ll be asking of our hypothesis… do the facts fit neatly into it… does it grant greater clarity to the puzzle-mask ‘power’ erects to keep us con-fused? Because there will likely never be exposure to the degree that will satisfy the punditry. They’re there to plant doubt – if they do their job well (from ‘power’s perspective…) – if they perform such that they attract to themselves the highly valued recognition…
…and their structurally-assured-and-designed longing for this reward insures their compliance, unless by some rare chance they received both financial independence and heart (love)… an almost miraculous combination – as Plato schooled them… so they will ever – whether consciously or not – work to deceive us. That’s their job.
08.07.13: Hang in there brothers and sisters occupying Berkeley’s main Post Office… who, folks should know, are now being threatened… in a city where the mayor claims he’s so ‘supportive’ of keeping it in the people’s hands. So why are the occupying heroes… folks challenging privatization (a global assault…) being threatened? Perhaps he’s unclear on the word ‘support’ when applied to campers… I can help clarify… ‘support’ is tarps and mats and sleeping-bags and cook-tents and porto-potties and rich, organic coffee and croissants delivered fresh every morning… and Cheese Board pizza every night… and big bowls of green-things and trail mix and musical treats all day. I hear Berkeley is enjoying a nice budgetary surplus these days… why not do something luminously wonderful and honorable with it?
…and please tune in this Sunday, August 11, 2013 for a discussion of: “what do we covet?”:
I believe that our authentic lives are sacrificed when we do not think and live consciously… which is necessarily the case when we are prevented from examining the assumptions that structure our lives…
(…and I hope we will start asking ourselves what we are when we are not self-determined… self-created?)
…and I believe our authentic lives are sacrificed when we are born into hierarchy… into multiple layers of scarcity… kept dancing on a leash… leaping for a minute share of what is ours by birth… the earth’s abundance… kept artificially scarce… by making a market of it.
But the threat to all life now demands… that we fight our way to the truth, whatever else we do… that we reclaim our lives… our thoughts… our minds… and direct them to creating… and continuously testing… a social world that works for everyone… i.e. creates the terms for furthering health and self-creation.
But we can only do this by becoming certain that we do not live authentic… i.e. self-determined… lives currently… and that we deserve them….
How do we reclaim our belief in our right to our own beauty (self-creativeness)… without that beauty (self-creativeness) in hand? This is a more intimate version of saying, “if the mechanisms that exist for self-governance are not in our own hands, why should we be endorsing them?”
Discussions of this dilemma are happening… all over the planet… but how can we broaden and accelerate them?
I think we have to see it… we model it for each other… and draw on our sources of power… consciously… for help. If we let ‘power’ define us… we will forever be its servants… and lost to ourselves…
…these initial thoughts for this Sunday's Waking Up Radio show… continue at: Classifying Will Not Bring ‘Class’ To A Close: The Case For Not Labeling Our Future Freedom … under: “Initial thoughts for August 11, 2013.”
July 26th, 2013: The moves of the Egyptian Army to clamp down on the hopes of the Egyptian people… the killings of university students (generally the ones best positioned… along with organized tradesmen and women… to develop conviction… certainty…) is more than just ‘worrying’… it is clear-cut plan disrobed and armed…
…so food and gas may flow… for the army to test its success with this lever of control… but the long-term levers don’t exist… especially with this populace… this degree of heart – and this goes as well for our brothers and sisters in Tunisia – so I have to believe… somehow… the help they have so dearly earned… will come.
July 24, 2013: Brothers and sisters: … for the July 28th 2013 show… I was initially planning an appeal to those who call themselves ‘socialists’ to consider no longer using that word… and to begin thinking instead… in a more open-ended fashion… on freedom…
…and on what freedom would have to be… to not be ‘class’ all over again.
But now that I’ve been listening… pretty much non-stop… to what I consider appeals to entrenched division across the progressive airwaves… ever since the Zimmerman decision… I feel moved to speak on it.
Yet… the two conversations are not really separate…
…I think we’ll see their fundamental unity by probing more deeply several questions raised in recent shows:
• Is ‘developing our thought’ our hand-hold out of the pit of the class-system?… when we reclaim thought… do we reclaim the power to name the world?…
…if so, do our socialist brothers and sisters forward this process?
• Is the point – of all our action ‘to change things’ – to define the future that works for us?
• Don’t we have to see the underlying structure of class society (see what-is) before we can newly-invent society (create what-is-not)?
• Can we newly-invent our world without newly-inventing the words and language we use to think about it with?
• If a future that works for all of us is the goal… what actions or discussions would set our thought on the right track to it?
• Does ‘critique of the system’ set our thought on the right track?
• Is ‘injustice’ “in us”… does it ‘crop up’… manifest at the command of ‘the state’?
• How do ‘race’… and other false divisions… divert us from seeing the underlying structure?
I will be arguing in what follows that what sets our thought on the right track… is the discussion of what we want… otherwise… we are rudderless and we forfeit the future… to the miniscule few… and that…
…we are trapped in the ‘master’s boxes… the categories we think in… are pretty much trash… and that we need new ones… to move beyond ‘class’.
I write these words after having listened to an archival Pacifica Radio speech of Price Cobbs from the late sixties, I believe… and the progressive-radio-folks… in fundraising mode… said they were struck by how ‘relevant’ were his words… and in truth, anyone listening would have a difficult time (if you ignored the occasional use of ‘groovy’ and ‘cats’…) from distinguishing them from those of any of the favored pundits on ‘race’ that the ‘progressive’ airwaves host in fundraising mode… or those incorporated in the speech of its regular programmers.
The gap between our hanging back…
…and deciding to act…
…cannot be filled but…
…by our restored power…
…and our love.
[Continued at, Classifying Will Not Bring ‘Class’ To A Close: The Case For Not Labeling Our Future Freedom … under: “Initial thoughts for July 28th, 2013”; …and if time permits I hope you will consider the words of Charles Johnson quoted in the chapter, “Progress” in Waking Up]
July 21, 2013: Brothers and sisters: In today's show we asked, “if technological domination is ‘power’s fallback… or muscle (if we wake up…) then either Marcuse’s “organized resistance of the scientists…” comes into play… or we… stop waiting for daddies and start discussing how… to just… stop… if only for a day… and test-drive ‘freedom’.”
We also asked, “what design of infrastructure supports ‘freedom’?”… as well as, ‘in what way is ‘rationalism’ a dimension of totalitarian control?”…. Please visit: To Rebuild Our Freedom (Pt. 2) for a partial transcript, and our The Audio Conversations Page to listen to excerpts.
In future shows we will be focusing on this matter of ‘the future’ we need if we are to develop and use our earth-given gifts… each one of us… and in particular we will be asking the question: “why not begin developing a vision of ‘freedom’ for our future… not ‘socialism’?”
(And… please don’t let us ever forget the virulent effect of agent provocateurs. If you were a small group of high-flyin’ statesmen… sitting on mountains of money… and a Global Awakening was happening… and you knew clandestine agents were a relatively cheap and extremely effective means of unseating it… and of therefore preserving for you your extreme privilege… in which you get to make the decisions… for the world! (now that’s high-flyin’ vision)… what would you do?
[If you haven’t already considered the essay “Agent Provocateurs” in the blog “Occupying Our Commons”… I hope you will.)
Partial transcripts of recent discussions are posted at: Beginning To Rebuild Our Freedom (Pt. 1)….
(Part 2 of these discussions (beginning with the July 7, 2013 The Waking Up Radio Show) will be posted at: To Rebuild Our Freedom (Pt. 2)…
The radio show discussions of ‘the economy’ also build on Confidence is Everything – The Need for Theory … and… "The Plan, Pt. 4… 'Seeing Reality'" from Waking Up: Freeing Ourselves From Work… which was my first wade into these waters… and the section of Palmers’ Chat… As We Take Our Earth Back… A Call To Reclaim… Our Earth… Our Thoughts… Our Minds… It’s Time …that recalls Hesiod… (it's noted in the Table of Contents…) and on June 23, 2013 we will also be discussing Blog 48: The Responsibility of the Intellectual.
The May 12th, 2013 radio show discussed the current relevance of Bentham's Strategic Verities.
The May 26 – June 9, 2013 shows examined the recent James Galbraith book, Inequality and Instability. You can read extended quotes from this book at: Excerpts from Inequality and Instability.
Brothers and Sisters… Please "Support The Nascence".
06.21.12: Please listen to media analysis and discussion of issues critical for society-redesign… live online at 104.1 FM Berkeley Liberation Radio Sunday mornings at 9:00 P.S.T. Starting to discuss disallowed thoughts ...is the only way our thought develops...
I do hold left pundits to a higher standard. and… even though "I'd rather have that pillow fight" …but…
…what is exciting… a holiday gift to share… for children (and adults) everywhere…
Please listen-and-share the audio book: The Talking Tree audio book… and we hope you will watch the (just put up on April 5, 2013): The Talking Tree slideshow …our gifts to you.
And please don't forget to check out our other books and essays:
Uploaded 11.05.13, and expanded version just uploaded 02.11.14: “Reclaiming Our Leadership: Waking Up Radio Conversations (Vol. 1)” (pdf file) [As of 03.21.14: most recent update of the pdf for this page is 202 pages, 1.34 MB] and: “Reclaiming Our Leadership: Waking Up Radio Conversations (Vol. 2)” (pdf file)
And just uploaded 11.22.13: “Reclaiming Our Leadership: Waking Up Radio Conversations (Vol. 3)” (pdf file)
“Waking Up: Freeing Ourselves From Work” (pdf file)
Palmers’ Chat: As We Take Our Earth Back… A Call To Reclaim… Our Earth… Our Thoughts… Our Minds… It’s Time.
Unpacking ‘Democracy’ (Vol. 1 of 5)
Revealing Division (Vol. 2 of 5)
Beginning Again (Vol. 3 of 5)
A Practice Of ‘Nonviolence’ Must Be Anti-Class... (includes “The Violence of 'Class'”)
“Miklos Nyiszli’s Lessons on ‘Class’” (pdf file)[As of 04.07.14: most recent update of the pdf for this page is through Ch. XXVI – 308 pages, 1.8 MB – and includes a transcipt for the April 6, 2014 show…]
…and we hope you will visit "Support The Nascence" for information on how to get the physical books... and our The Talking Tree page to see the full cover art.
We need a 'distributed-generation' 'think-tank'... Jeremy Bentham's “greatest happiness principle” is actually the “greatest-happiness-to-work” principle… His purpose-in-chief: to keep us working… and… more precisely, to keep us happy to work… This, he argued, should be the goal of the state.
Let's never forget his advice to rulers: “he who defined the language ruled the universe…” making the sovereign-legislator “the ultimate lexicographer…” The larger the scope and operational range of his abstractions, the wider his area of government, of legislative and judicial authority. To him, he said, “belongs the power of making wrong and right change nature…'” (Mary Peter Mack quoting Bentham.)
04.08.13: Brothers and Sisters, here are the thoughts I shared at the conference and related events on nonviolence convened at Kansas State University, April 4 – 6, 2013. It includes “The Violence of 'Class'” handout. Your feedback is welcome… A Practice Of ‘Nonviolence’ Must Be Anti-Class... (includes “The Violence of 'Class'”)
05.03.13:
Yesterday I listened to an excerpt of a speech left economist Gar Alperovitz gave in the Bay Area (California) last week and I thought that rather than respond in an audio blog… I'd summarize my concerns about what I heard here and reference (link to) some things I've already said. Please forgive my 'briefness'… You Know How I Know 'Localization'… or 'Democratic Economics'… Is A Con?
104.1 FM Berkeley Liberation Radio show excerpts:
(Others are found on The Waking Up Radio Audio Conversations Page )
04.13.14: (For a partial transcript... visit: “Miklos Nyiszli’s Lessons On Class”) Today's show: …So… ‘leadership’ is in all of us… and as the Piper’s price (his blood-lust of consumption of the planet’s resources…) has now fallen due… is weighing on us… ‘power’ has three choices… …and… Let’s not let another generation have to deal with this mess… Please!… we need on-going efforts that aren’t exclusive… ‘power’ is deadly committed to its ‘future-vision’… we have to start talking about how to challenge it… meet it with an alternative vision that is not elitist… but rather is ‘power’s opposite.… …and… We learned from Sebastian de Grazia that ‘power’ has known for decades that ‘wage work’ is an antiquated system… and that it doesn’t need us on leash anymore. It’s long past time for us to figure out how to have our time back – that’s the only way to be happy…. So we have this right… here in the U.S…. to plan freedom… and it’s just so completely reasonable to say “let’s have a test site… …and… Consider… for example… this from David Blume… who argues that de-centralized production of alcohol… from a variety of plant sources… could allow all humans to be energy self-sufficient… And far from us needing ‘power’s help with this business of reproducing ourselves… their imposed class-regime of millennia has but meant them sitting and sucking on us… …and… …we need our own public media commons… our own shared public discussion space… our own shared voices to echo throughout our day to counter ‘power’s… and… let’s get on the same page regarding this matter of ‘the economy’… and consider together “Does Capitalism Have A Future?” …and… …so what ‘power’ most wants is for us to turn our backs on our brothers and sisters… keep to our given tasks… and be obedient… else… how can ‘statesmen’ govern? …and……and who is the only player strong enough to do battle with this villain? – the evil corporations – well, ‘the state’ of course… only Daddy has sufficient resources… we-the-people are way out of our league… we must go back to our bedtime stories… and let the Big Boys lead… …and… more to follow… on how to begin refusing 'obedience'… choosing responsibility… for 'the whole thing'… in order to pursue true happiness…
04.06.14: (…apologies if you tried to listen online… there was no stream…) (For a partial transcript... visit: “Miklos Nyiszli’s Lessons On Class”) Today's show: …‘jobs’ commandeer our energy… divert it down fruitless paths – in terms of getting ourselves free. This is what struck me when reading about the endless discord at Pacifica Radio… You KPFA listeners… how could these stations become village possessions? And how could we dismantle the Pacifica Foundation?… …and… …we must also see that ‘power’ has a totalitarian reality… a whole world-view… defined according to its control-needs – to pull us back into… in the aftermath of those moments when we break free… we have to build an alternative focal point – a different center around which to orient our energies – all the energy that is released with ‘power’s hold loosening – which we’re seeing globally… …and… “And I somehow have to find a way to explain to people why we need to dismantle the state and build a different one and appease their fears and actually find a way of confronting all the chaos that they are unleashing right now and all the chaos that they will continue to unleash…” (Egyptian Activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah, Part 1) …and… “The moment even when they collapse, unless we do something about it…” Let’s be strategic. Isn’t it obvious where we have to put our energy?… on building a solidarity that can’t be undermined? How do we do that?… while we plan… using the Internet… (Egyptian Activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah, Part 2) …and… “But for it to be a revolution, you have to have a narrative that brings all the different forms of resistance together, and you have to have hope…” I believe we need to re-think ‘governance’… It may be we cannot get ‘obedience’ out of this word ‘governance’… They desperately want us to be ‘self-regulating’ as Bentham advised… (Egyptian Activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah, Part 3) …and… “Fame is fickle food…” I do think that language is at the heart of this matter of our transformation… because to work together we have to be on the same page… working with the same meanings… share the same definitions… so we return to this issue of shared media… in which our speech can gain currency… and with it… our confidence grow… and with it… our hope… …and… “…things fall apart…” so what is there to gather that energy?… is what we should be asking ourselves… if we were being strategic… …and… …we here in the U.S. have this advantage… called “The Declaration of Independence”… which says that we have the right to abolish this state when it gets in the way of our happiness… so with the speed and the energy of the vortex in our hands (because we have the Internet…) what we send out can sweep wide around… it falls to us to serve the re-balancing process… to consciously take the lead in bringing about freedom for our global humanity… …and… …So… just as the state stands in the way of our pursuit of happiness… it stands in the way of developing our thought… for authentic thought to come… and be developed… we need independence from the state… …and… As I left C Camp, I let my gaze linger in farewell upon the rows of dilapidated barracks. It was with a mixture of sadness and compassion that I looked once more upon the grotesque spectacle of our women and girls… (Part 67) …and… The twelfth Sonderkommando had almost lived out its four months. The sands of our allotted time were fast running out. We had only a few days left – at most a week or two – to live… (Part 68) …and… Dr. Mengele’s decision to liquidate C Camp had been carried out… stripped of their clothes… they were quickly pushed below… And what a long road they had traveled in coming here! How filled with unimaginable sorrow each lap of that journey! … (Part 69) …and…
03.30.14: (…apologies if you tried to listen online… there was no stream…) (For a partial transcript... visit: “Miklos Nyiszli’s Lessons On Class”) Today's show: But we know the time… we know that the time of ‘the people’ is come… and though it may be stalled… ‘power’ can never end our movement… our movement is life… our always-recurring good news… but it requires global action… you cannot claim Suiz alone… we must back you… …and… …as we embrace love… as our future… if we don’t begin to see that ‘power’ sows Division’s seeds consciously… we’ll continue to get manipulated… so what are our objectives?… we-the-people’s?… …and… During the course of just six years, the demographics of Europe had changed irredeemably… large areas of Europe had become homogenous… So could racist frat-parties be a tactic?… Is ‘power’ capable of such machinations?… …and… …our nature is to seek the truth by consulting the communal voice… the historical consensus… that comes from many minds working on a question… This is what makes the betrayal of the punditry so devastating… when ‘power’ owns them… it owns the communal voice… it creates… names… what it is possible to think… creating the illusion of ‘truth’… as Bentham instructed… It ain’t complicated… ‘states’ are there to get us to do the work – it’s pretty straightforward… …and… …because unprocessed ‘crabs-in-a-bucket’ but dumps on us more of the same. That’s not ‘disobedience’… that’s very much doing what you’ve been trained to do… (Barack in High School, Part 1) …and… …‘Dependency’ sucks… don’t it? But who set it up? Who’s staging this play? And what is it anyway? Not just who wrote the script… but what’s the point of it?… This new film being discussed is a good example of a key ‘power’-strategy: “dupe the young”… who can’t know the historical ‘common-ness’ (under ‘class’) of what they’re going through… … (Barack in High School, Part 2) …and… “This was my world, I said to myself, and I shall be in it, and surrounded by it, if it is the last thing I do on God’s green dirt-ball.”… “No matter about the difficulties past and present, step on it!”… (Zora in High School, Part 1) …and… “My two years at Morgan went off very happily indeed. The atmosphere made me feel right. I was at last doing the things I wanted to do. Every new thing I learned in school made me happy…” (Zora in High School, Part 2) …and… We cannot leave this mess for future generations to deal with… Remember that scene in the Robert DeNiro film The Good Shepherd…?… We didn’t make this mess… they suffer our presence… depending on our obedience… and this means all of us. You see… that’s the truth we never get to hear… …and… What does the Left punditry imagine the U.S. state is? Do they not understand that for Plato’s Tribe… who have the coffers and the conviction… and the firm determination… to realize their vision… that it is a vehicle for them to demonstrate for all (other statesmen) to see… not just their supremacy… but the validity… the truth… of breeding.… What a gift gratis – except they paid for it – this film must be. It reads like a Plato’s Tribe fantasy: Black – White Divided… mutually sniping… …and… …you see this in Zora (in all of us…) – until she got right with what her body wanted… she couldn’t be happy… and that gets us back… we here in the U.S… to what we’re guaranteed in the Declaration of Independence… our right to listen to our bodies… our right… to pursue happiness… Instead of “Move To Amend” we need “Move To Plan”… the state’s abolishment… and our gradual transition… to freedom… …and… …“Poor, short-sighted women, if only they had understood the mentality of the Third Reich’s KZ, they would have realized that those who did not work did not live.” – Need it be said that this is the mentality of ‘power’?… that ‘rule’ and ‘economic system’… are coterminous… that the point of the state… is to coerce our ‘agreement’… to work… (Part 66) …and…
03.23.14: (…apologies if you tried to listen online… there was no stream…) (For a partial transcript... visit: “Miklos Nyiszli’s Lessons On Class”) Today's show: …5 print books… no problem… using the same software… now it’s more like tacking into a strong wind… requiring extreme concentration… because ‘In Design’ seems to have sprouted viruses… and my hard drive seems to have an evil twin… …and… ……the ‘local’ interconnections have to be with a global consciousness… consciously interlinking with all of our brothers and sisters globally… so that we can coordinate a global action… discuss and flesh out the key elements of a social arrangement based in good fellowship… like, ‘consensus authority’… ‘open tribalism’ (which has sharing as its purpose…) ‘transparent and inclusive decision-making’… fluid ‘structures’ and continuous growth… global-interconnections supporting individual self-sufficiency… …and… …“Punch the clock!”… time is essential in order to experience our lives… ‘time’ is just the way they got us to alienate our own lives from ourselves…… and so at base… we have to put in place… an ‘infrastructure’ that allows this… The point is… that nothing can matter more than living our gifts… and living our interconnections – locally and globally – because this is the truth… it means aligning our lives (at long last!…) with truth… …and… …we have to figure out that whole tactic of getting pulled off track when they insert those agents into our process…. It happens so easily because we are of good heart… this is partly what I’m thinking about in trying to develop tools for staying centered… and I know that ‘love’ is there at the core… is core to whatever techniques we develop to not get pulled off-track… …and… …he was contemplating returning to Kiev… despite loving the beauty of Crimea… because he could feel an ominous undercurrent of malevolence… a heavy breathing on scurrying feet… sowing the seeds of totalitarian authority… like a monster seizing the opportunity to come out of hiding… …and… …‘power’ has no nation… And that’s patently unfair, right? ‘Power’ acts with global resources and as a global-shadow-state… and we are stuck in our little ‘nation-box’… trying to fight with this massive global Goliath. If the pundit Left was serious… was truly representative of us… they would be helping us figure out what to do about that… …and… …‘weather machines’ and such… it’s like a blank check… a ‘without-limits-ATM-card’… There’s a big silence out there of folks who are targeted and can say nothing… Fascism wasn’t an anomaly… the goal of totalitarian ‘Perfection’ still exists and so what does it mean if folks can’t talk about it? The only way to counter this is to say “we know it exists… but we won’t get distracted from that vision of freedom…” …and… …it only takes a miniscule few to dominate [‘manage’] huge numbers if they know what they want… Recall Miklos’ lesson from the annihilation of the Gypsy Camp… we should see that this is what we do… to domesticated animals that aren’t human too… …and… These remarks constitute, medically speaking, one of the basic laws of heredity concerning twins. This law has been used extensively by those who claim that environmental factors, such as education, nutrition, the illnesses a person may have suffered, etc., influence only slightly… (Part 60) …and… I know men, and it seemed to me that my firm attitude, my measured sentences, and even my silences were the qualities by which I had succeeded in making Dr. Mengele, before whom the SS themselves trembled, offer me a cigarette in the course of a particularly animated discussion, proving he forgot for a moment the circumstances of our relationship. (Part 61) …and… Never to my knowledge had anything like this happened in the history of the camp. I did not know quite where to begin. The women were quartered in the C, B3 and FK4 Camps. As far as I knew, most of the Hungarian women were in C Camp. I decided to try there first. (Part 62) …and… If they had been able to recognize me it was because I had managed to live in such a way that I still looked like a human being. But it was almost impossible for me to recognize them…. Three months had been long enough for them to have learned to regret the past and fear the future. (Part 63) …and… After three months of KZ life they too had learned that the Sonder was the kommando of the living dead. Both looked at me aghast. I reassured them as best I could and promised to return the following day. (Part 64) …and… “The fact that I had found my wife and child made sensational news at the crematorium.… But all good things must come to an end.” – …war itself – its result being its purpose: control of us – is ‘economic’ in function… removing from us any hope of self-determined access to our own reproduction process… (Part 65) …and…
03.16.14: (For a partial transcript... visit: “Miklos Nyiszli’s Lessons On Class”) Today's show: …“killing in the name of…” remembering the incomparable courage of Rachel Corrie… …and… Joel’s book asks the tough questions… like… what exactly is ‘the system’ anyway?… And if you’re interested in taking that broader discussion out into the community… me too… please get in touch. …and… I doubt not that ‘power’ put them in its crosshairs… made certain lots of inauthentic people crossed their paths… …and… “…work hard…” This is the point of the state. For when we’re kept busy, we can’t figure out the illusion. Our eyes can’t see it… …and… …that there is much confusion about “what is ‘the state’?”… because of all those buffers… between ‘the people’ and ‘power’… and that this is precisely the borderland where dissent gets waylaid… gets intercepted… …and… The problem is… ‘power’ is using that same inspirational music… has a global focus… a tight lock on the limits of debate… and virtually limitless resources… and our oceans are dying… …and… If we can set a path to a future that is the opposite of ‘power’… then ‘power’ cannot hide in our movement… as well as enable us to use our encounters with ‘power’s representatives as a learning experience… as they do with their encounters with us… …and… In the name of ‘the state’… in the name of religion… in the name of Plato’s Tribe… in the name of those who call themselves ‘the wise’… these killings are done… “killing in the name of…” …and… Rage… demonstrated what listening to your body means… what it looks like… showed how tapping into the force of life itself releases power… and puts you at odds with ‘the system’… …and… …they can give us buffers ad infinitum… we gotta talk about that… we gotta look past the buffers. That means we have to have a goal to keep our eyes on… help each other respond… return to calm… …and… …that we begin the unification in our pointing away from ‘this’… this current ‘system’ – for our brothers and sisters – seeing the ‘this’ as ‘class’… and seeing ‘class’ as ‘the state’…… …and… …Annihilation time had come for the 4,500 inhabitants of the Gypsy Camp. …This time, however, the victims thrown to the flames were not Jews, but Christians: Catholic gypsies from Germany and Austria. (Part 59) …and…
03.09.14: (For a partial transcript... visit: “Miklos Nyiszli’s Lessons On Class”) Today's show: One of the interesting things about that quote is what it takes for granted… assumes we know. ‘Power’ is so obvious it’s a given… yet today on the Left it’s gone missing… and with it… accurate analysis… and with that gone… so is gone effective action… …and… …what actually happens is the official policy… no matter what nice words they issue in their official statements. The policy is what they allow to happen. They’ve got all he cards. They’ve got all the ‘power’. If it’s happening it’s because they want it to… …and… I.e. ‘democracy’ is not fit for a free people… by definition… because it requires our submission… it means… “‘power’ must have its way with us” – because while ‘power’ exists… it will stage the play to accomplish this… …and… …a national Left is useless… it effectively means you stand with ‘power’… agree to betray your brothers and sisters who happen to be the designated ‘losers’… globally speaking… …with ‘socialism’ sweeping across Europe… destroying is also consuming… and… and this is the point… removing resources from our use… …and… ‘Economy’ is just a tool… like any other technology. So ‘war’ is always war on us… whether they spill our guts with guns… or markets. The economy is just war by other means… and war is the profligate failure of ‘breeding’… to control the energy of the majority (the true point of the ‘education’ we’re all given.) …and… …the answer is… we-the-people assume responsibility for our own education… …and… Of course we’re ‘smart enough’. The way the world is arranged is not ordained… is not about ‘intelligence’ but rather ‘power’… their control of aggregated human energy… which is true power… the power of life… which we reclaim when we stand with each other globally… and not with the would-be ‘masters’…. ‘Moving on’ is a ‘simple’ matter of having a transparent goal that we all discuss and get clear on… and then start working on… everywhere… universal leisure… each individual being free from necessity is the goal… …and… So this is the touchstone of our discussions… what global reality… supports individual self-sufficiency?… People of Ukraine: if we who have the resources… the means… to say we will strike with you when you decide you’re ready… to make of Ukraine not a ‘third’… but an opposite way… do not step up… …and… … but it’s not the “banality of evil”… it’s the banality of obedience… of following orders… putting our thought processes on hold (which we’re trained to do by parents…) which is all too familiar to us. …and… And I suspect discrediting Barack is about more than just regaining the presidency of the U.S. [they can do that with a ‘Democrat’ – Jerry Brown being that stealth candidate… …and… Whenever there was an alert we were taken, convoyed by well-armed SS guards, to the Sonderkommando shelter, that is, to the gas chamber. (Part 57) …and… This news gave us some slight hope for the future. We knew that the hands that had smuggled us these weapons could not be far off…. As for those destined to pay with their lives, at least they would not have died like worms, crushed by their butchers’ unclean hands. On the contrary, they would be the first in the history of the KZ who, despite overwhelming odds in both numbers and material, would have sowed death and destruction among their torturers before dying proudly like men… (Part 58) …and…
03.02.14: (…apologies if you tried to listen online… there was no stream…) (For a partial transcript... visit: “Miklos Nyiszli’s Lessons On Class”) Today's show: It’s not fair for folks with less means than we… to take on global misanthropy alone… we need a global popular consciousness… we have the numbers to move this human story forward… out of the muck of ‘class’… so that we can live our gifts as last… …and… “What argument could you possibly raise against a test site?… a few… whoever wants to… beginning to develop a different way of life…? We have to start asking ourselves… why the resistance in us? We understand why in ‘power’… but why in us? Why would we not want to let those who want to figure this out… solve this thousands and thousands of years… of the devastation of class… the chaos of class… …and… “Live light for the General Strike…” because how else are we going to support each other globally?… We’ve been talking about being strategic… what else do we have but our human energy?… and heart… and love… and the ability to inter-link… …and… What greater evidence do we need… to prove that our thought is conditioned?… than that any among us could imagine… that we-the-people create ‘chaos’… …and… When the university bosses… back at it again… tried to impose a $500 ‘fee for success’… students circulated a pledge… that said… “if you pass this fee… when we are alums… we will never donate to this university…” Awesome strategy… as… vampires understand what ‘future planning’ means… Mario Savio lives at Sonoma State University… …and… …we’re forced to contribute our energy to projects that we are directed to do…. Imagine when we’re free to share our gifts willingly… …and… Savage Continent – a necessary and important book… Where is the Left? In every nation… why not simply say: “It’s time for a global day of planning.” We have to move on from this mess. We have to stop and think… all together… what we want for our future. It’s time to not let it be in the hands of the statesmen anymore… …and… This is ‘class’… this is ‘rank’… this is the ‘chaos’ that ‘power’ makes… in being the physical manifestation of ‘power’… ‘class’… ‘rank’… because we are all complicit… all do ‘power’s division work for it… all have been mired in the guilt of mutual betrayal… the wounds are deep… but a test site can reach them… and ultimately… the only way to secure our freedom… is to end ‘power’… …and… Do you see?… that such callousness begets misanthropy?… we abandon what we long for out of fear that it’s a fraud… fear that we’ll find ourselves betrayed again… …and… It’s in releasing the power of the people globally that we win. Let’s begin talking about this… …and… Do we really not think… that Putin and Angela Merkel are not as one… when it comes to keeping the people of Ukraine from carving out a new way… from the way of ‘the state’?… …and… The KZ also had its ration system, a much better one than that in force throughout Germany, for it furnished those who used it with any item they desired… it only took one point per item, a point of flame from the Ober’s gun… (Part 54) …and… Even though we did not survive, it was our bounden duty to make certain that the world learned of the unimaginable cruelty and sordidness of a people who pretended to be superior. It was imperative that a message addressed to the world leave this place… (Part 55) …and… I had become used to seeing a truck enter the crematorium gate every evening about seven o’clock, carrying 70 to 80 men and women on their way to be liquidated… (Part 56) …and…
02.23.14: (For a partial transcript... visit: “Miklos Nyiszli’s Lessons On Class”) Today's show: I apologize… 25 minutes… no mike… The Raven snipped her own flight… …and… People of Ukraine… we salute you… And when you look at these key strategies for keeping the people asleep… none of them is official state ideology… yet all states depend on them to augment ‘patriotism’ when the official state ideology – be it ‘democracy’… or ‘communism’… or ‘socialism’ – wears thin. …and… ‘Power’ hopes to ‘weed out’ dissent… and so we ‘intractable brutes’… we ones who refuse… ‘power’ wants to be rid of. …and… …the goal is simply the feeling we want to be living… …and… …we need someone to gather the actual… objective… facts of our situation as commoners: automation… resource exhaustion and depletion… death of our common oceans – present the objective case… that ‘work’ as we’ve been conditioned to accept it… is fading away… explain that it in any case… reduced whole human beings to functionaries… and that the species can’t grow when most are made to let go… their leadership capacities… …and… Coercion is by definition unstable… as water seeks its level… earth seeks its balance… and we are earth… Imbalance embedded in the human family has to be corrected. That’s inevitable. And we seek Mutual Aid as certainly as all other species do. Petr Kropotkin showed us this… …and… If there are certain subjects that are taboo – and ‘work’ is at the core – then we have to courageously face reality… and admit that the media silence means… totalitarianism is already here… and that it’s our responsibility to talk about it… we need a ‘Children’s Crusade’ designed authentically… to redefine ‘work’ as ‘attending to the earth’… and learning from her… a Crusade to help youth establish a very different future… for all of us… …and… “Doctor,” he said, “come quickly. We just found a girl alive at the bottom of the pile of corpses.” (Part 50) …and… What could one do with a young girl in the crematorium’s Sonderkommando? (Part 51) …and… He considered the dispatch of hundreds of thousands of Jews to the gas chambers as a patriotic duty. (Part 52) …and… I calmly related the terrible case we found ourselves confronted with. I described for his benefit what pains the child must have suffered… (Part 53) …and…
02.16.14: (For a partial transcript... visit: “Miklos Nyiszli’s Lessons On Class”) Today's show: So what does this mean… in terms of strategy… for ‘power’… for us… that our thought is shepherded? …and… Which means… that ‘power’ knows much more precisely than we every could… given our atomization (and until we start overcoming it…) to what degree we are already… more and more uniform in our thinking… we are more and more of one opinion when it comes to ‘rulers’… that we don’t want them… and that this is a global phenomenon.…and… You gotta have a goal to get there, right? …and… Left pundits insist that the goal is to make the state more ‘democratic’… yet never define how that leads to us getting free – put that out there as the objective… you’ll start generating energy… …and… …it’s not about new ‘institutions… but creating ourselves anew… (and…) If you (‘power’) must hide to survive… and you are the tiny few… far out-numbered by the billions of minds (potentially) devoted to the problem of how to get rid of you… i.e. the ‘role’ of ‘ruler’… how do you stay hidden?… except by systematic… continuous… misdirection… …and… …So I had been given competent, qualified collaborators, who would share my burdens. For me this was an undeniable relief. (Part 45) …and… Approaching his bed, I was moved and chagrined to see that the patient was none other than the “Captain”… A native of Athens, he had been a captain in the regular army and tutor to the children of the royal family of Greece… (Part 46) …and… There’s (one of many) an interesting passage in Popper on this: “Plato introduces his Myth of Blood and Soil with the blunt admission that it is a fraud. ‘Well then,’ says the Socrates of the Republic [i.e. Plato’s straw-stuffed manikin…] (Part 47) …and… While Plato invented… ‘power’s playbook – and the influence of his thoughts… in being reverenced by ‘rulers’… who need to believe in a larger (‘Historical’) meaning to their misanthropy… cannot be over-estimated… his encouraging child abandonment and infanticide it created a need to ‘prove’ worth that continuously seeds and rebirths misanthropy… which ‘power’ needs… for class to exist…… (Part 48) …and… “FREEDOM THROUGH WORK”… (Part 49) …and…
02.09.14: (For a partial transcript... visit: “Miklos Nyiszli’s Lessons On Class”) Today's show: The role of ‘art’ in ending ‘power’-worship: on Philip Seymour Hoffman… (Part 1) …and… Recall it’s all about the imperative to keep the people sleeping… it’s all about the people never thinking… The role of ‘art’ in ending ‘power’-worship: on Philip Seymour Hoffman… (Part 2) …and… …faced with a serious shortage of food… their remedy had been both drastic and efficient… (Part 38) …and… I am not one usually given to pause and weigh the pro and con before acting. I decide quickly and act quickly, especially when it is a question of an important decision. The results are not always brilliant. The fact that I had ended up here in the crematoriums was the result of a snap decision… (Part 39) …and… …‘power’ ensures that the hurt we do to each other happens structurally… automatically…. With all his concern about climate change I noticed he failed to blame himself for taking money from Bill Gates… who funds ‘solar radiation management’ … (Part 40) …and… Everywhere I looked I saw nothing but a vast network of barbed wire… The KZ was nothing but barbed wire; the whole of Germany was encompassed by barbed wire, itself an enormous KZ.… There was no denying it, the name “Dr. Mengele”… had made a strong impression on the SS slave.… (Part 41) …and… I began to see the light. Dr. Wolff was also engaged in research. In the midst of the stench and smoke of the crematoriums, he too wished to profit from the hundreds of thousands of human guinea pigs available in the KZ… (Part 42) …and… “…self-esteem begins with a workable plan…” – and by ‘workable plan’ I mean one that is the result of our process of reasoning… of an analysis that proceeds from point ‘A’ through ‘E’… identifying the steps in-between… that realistically lead… to an absolute challenge to the insanity… (Part 43) …and… Obersturmfuhrer Wolff’s former patients, all dead of dysentery, passed in succession beneath the scalpel. (Part 44) …and…
02.02.14: (For a partial transcript... visit: “Miklos Nyiszli’s Lessons On Class”) Today's show: …that if we can see how we’re merely tail-chasing when we pursue the goal of ‘improving “democracy”’… that we can begin to step off that track… and take ‘the future’ back.… and end ‘power’-worship once and for all… Getting off the ‘Class Train’… defining a new destination… is the challenge of the moment. We have to be able to say that how this ‘society’ got this way was through a massive mistake. This is discussed in John Boswell’s The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children… …and… As always… ‘class’… ‘power’… hides in these conversations… is hidden… passes unexamined. They need us to do what we’re told – this is called ‘education’ – and they protect for their tribe the prerogative of control… …and… How many more atrocities must we wait for them to commit?… before we’re ready to take that first step… talking about it… allow in the thought that we must… begin again… this time as global humans… not ‘citizens’… …and… …the victims spilled to their death with maniacal fury. Horrified, I noted with what order and robot-like precision the murders were perpetuated… If by chance I ever get out of this place alive, I thought, and have a chance to relate all I’ve seen and lived through, who will believe me? (Part 34) …and… Thus I became, with this one autopsy, the coroner for the KZ in charge of all matters pertaining to forensic medicine in the Gleiwitz district. (Part 35)…and… It was here that the “surplus” from the “Jewish ramp” was sent, that is, those for whom there was no room in the four crematoriums. The worst kind of death awaited them. (Part 36) …and… The pyre was a ditch 50 yards long, six yards wide and three yards deep, a welter of burning bodies. (Part 37) …and…
01.26.14: (For a partial transcript... visit: “Miklos Nyiszli’s Lessons On Class”) Today's show: …I have to go to my car to write and read… …and… All we’re asking for is a choice… and the power to choose… between being subjects or free… …and… …‘power’ hides by giving us the very thoughts we think – silencing the soul… As ‘creatures of illusion’ (as Virginia Woolf so aptly termed us…) atomization is all that is required… … …and… …we’re dreaming their dreams… and never given the time to think about our own… …and… …Invasion of the Body Snatchers… Prisoners of Childhood… shows… how one of her patients had ceremoniously buried his soul… his authentic self… at age three years old… turned away from its loss… into performance – conformance – … and did what he was told. …and… Was it conceivable that Dr. Mengele, or the Berlin-Dahlem Institute, would ever allow me to leave this place alive? (Part 28) …and… I suddenly realized that, besides death by gas and chloroform injections, there was a third way of killing here… The Sonderkommando brought out a football. The teams lined up on the field. “SS versus SK.” Sonorous laughter filled the courtyard. Stupefied, I made that mental note as well. (Part 29) …and… The first job of every Sonderkommando crew was the cremation of its predecessor. (Part 30) …and… To be condemned to death and yet forced to perform jobs such as we had to perform day after day was enough to break the body and soul of the strongest among us… (Part 31) …and… …they’ve been inordinately successful given their numbers… this tiny few. It shows the power of a plan… of having a vision and working systematically towards it. This tiny few… who desperately want to believe that they are superior beings… and therefore that it’s a legitimate hierarchy… (Part 32) …and… The Sonderkommando was an elite group… Fully aware of this unbalanced situation, the Sonderkommando distributed food and clothing to their less fortunate comrades whenever they could. (Part 33) …and…
01.19.14: (For a partial transcript... visit: “Miklos Nyiszli’s Lessons On Class”) Today's show: Despite high-tech sabotage… the earth… she is vast… she is generous… she is us… and that… if we talk with each other… come out of our boxes… that new world is right within our reach… …and… It is the story in which ‘division’ is placed that is critical… This dog just seems a’sleeping. … given cover by the media… …and… To stack the deck… rig the game… and then delight in ‘winning’… is a child’s play… …no… an abandoned-child’s play… …and… …who will say that the only meaningful resistance is to offer our brothers and sisters an alternative… a clear and practical vision… based in reverence… of our own invention… in which we have no keepers… (Part 22) …and… The experiments, in medical language called in vivo… This phenomenon was unique in world medical science history… They had to die together, and in good health. (Part 23) …and… …whose tiny bodies had to resolve the secret of the reproductions of the race. To advance one step in the search to unlock the secret of multiplying the race of superior beings destined to rule. (Part 24) …and… …Thus I learned that the experiments performed here were checked by the highest medical authorities at one of the most famous scientific institutes in the world. (Part 25) …and… If Dr. Mengele had any idea that I had discovered the secret of his injections he would send ten doctors, in the name of the political SS, to attest to my death. (Part 26) …and… The directors of the Berlin-Dahlem Institute always warmly thanked Dr. Mengele for this rare and precious material… In all three instances the cause of death was the same: an injection of chloroform into the heart. (Part 27) …and… more to follow… on how to begin refusing 'obedience'… choosing responsibility… for 'the whole thing'… in order to pursue true happiness…
01.12.14: (For a partial transcript... visit: “Miklos Nyiszli’s Lessons On Class”) Today's show: The notion ‘citizen-barbarian’ is inherent in all of the ideologies of class… not just ‘fascism’… …and… …Auschwitz by other means… with its media-manipulating enforced silence about ‘weather machines’… and wave-warping… haarp-stringing… technology wet-dreaming… …and… …If the goal is to be ‘the best’… and the state is the driver of that process… then… …it must be the driver of us… …and… …we must conceive and execute an education campaign to plan a different future for humanity globally… leading to a one-day General Strike… What would be different in the physical structure of society if ‘scarcity’ (manufactured) didn’t exist?… if we could design it ourselves? …and… …and of coure they’re gonna fight tooth and nail our developing a test site… so it’s about numbers… and it’s about we in the privileged sectors of the world using that privilege to stand with our brothers and sisters globally… …and… …once we start the conversations… they will snowball into the future… …and… …so all divisions of class are at base expressions… of the so-called ‘citizen’-‘barbarian’ division… which is the ‘intellectual’-‘manual’ divide… as if our freely living our gifts is not going to result in the most mind-blowing explosion of creativity that we can’t even imagine now… …and… So our communally-created knowledge endowment… that could support universal leisure… in the hands of an infinitesimal few… would be used to oppose it… (Part 20) …and… The ‘work standard’ – slavery – has ever been the constant of class… consider the constant pressure it puts on ‘hand’ labor to ensure for it a state of continuous worry and stress… and in that pressure can we not see that the goal is Auschwitz? …and… Trucks took the ashes to the Vistula, a mile away, and dumped them into the raging waters of the river. (Part 21) …and…
01.05.14: This 01.05.14 Show did not either air or stream over the Internet. BLR has not transmitted over the air for almost the entire time this show has existed, but for the last few days the server that carries our signal to our transmitter has been down. We don’t know why. (For a partial transcript... visit: “Miklos Nyiszli’s Lessons On Class”) Today's show: …once we are stuck in that box… called ‘the job’… or called ‘our service to the state’… we find ourselves with a pricetag on our heads… because the box is a way to… in theory… quantify our so-called ‘worth’… …and… It’s a small step from jumping for a star on your forehead… to jumping for a job… and then… Auschwitz is but a nudge away. …and… …‘power’ wants to control the so-called ‘knowledge work’ of the world… which means they have to control the so-called ‘grunt work’ of the world… …and… …for even if she were ordered into the right-hand column, she would surely beg, on bended knee, for permission to go with our mother. So they would let her go, and she, with tears in her eyes, would shower them with thanks… (Part 14) …and… The news of my arrival had spread like wildfire throughout the crematorium. (Part 15) …and… I learned the history of the crematoriums. Tens of thousands of prisoners had built them of stone and concrete, finishing them in the middle of an extremely rigorous winter. Every stone was stained with their blood. They had worked day and night, often without food or drink, dressed in mere tatters, so that these infernal death-factories, whose first victims they became, might be finished in time. (Part 16) …and… …if we can see Auschwitz… living and feeding on us… settling itself in us… we will rouse ourselves to stop it… (Part 17) and… …Modest women and girls looked at each other questioningly. Perhaps they had not exactly understood the German words.… (Part 18) …and… …– a job the Sonderkommando carried out by a voluntary act of impersonalization and in a state of profound distress –… (Part 19) …and…
12.29.13 (For a partial transcript... visit: “Miklos Nyiszli’s Lessons On Class”) Today's show: “Make sure your seedling has really good light, so it will develop good roots and stalk…” …and… For others it’s easier to imagine ocean-death… than a world in which we’re out of harness – this should show us the depths of our disengagement from our own bodies… …and… How much do we want to be free?… as the end of class means the end of ranking… of all privilege…. It’s when we accept the privileges the state extends that we most manifest the state. So these and other questions we must face in order to “found and realize a test site…” …and… …both painting clearly our needed picture of ‘democracy’… and showing the seeds of which the U.S. was founded… …and… So I, Dr. Miklos Nyiszli, had ceased to exist; henceforth I would be, merely, KZ prisoner Number A 8450.… (Part 5) …and… Then began the most inhumane part of the KZ program: roll call.… This sport continued for several hours. (Part 6) …and… If there were any dead in the barracks… they too had to be present for the inspection… (Part 7) …and… …they practiced their profession with complete devotion… young French or Greek doctors… their wives, their children, their relatives and friends had been liquidated upon arrival. Or rather, burned. (Part 8) …and… This was the famous “Gypsy Camp.” The Third Reich’s ethnological experts had classified gypsies as an inferior race. Accordingly, they had been rounded up… throughout the occupied countries… (Part 9) …and… …expelled from some fair-sized city: the prisoners’ clothes were smartly tailored… they had managed to create for themselves a pleasant, cultured way of life. And that was the cardinal sin for which they were now paying so dearly. (Part 10) …and… I suddenly realized that I was about to take an examination, and that this was the jury before me, a highly important and dangerous jury. (Part 11) …and… …the pathology is the class system itself… there is a single mindset behind Auschwitz and that of the larger society: the mindset of ‘class’… (Part 12) …and… I took it all in, paralyzed with fright. As soon as I had come through the main gate I had realized that I was on death’s path. (Part 13) …and…
12.22.13 (For a partial transcript... visit: “Miklos Nyiszli’s Lessons On Class”) Today's show: The state serves at our pleasure… we don’t serve at its… …and… …this millennia-long haunt… only ends by being confronted… and with Nyiszli’s light… we’re much better equipped to try… …and… The news about that bomb plunged Father, Uncle ‘Ali, and my young cousins into deep despair… …and… One thing was for sure, the Jews had always lived with Arabs, since the beginning of time… …and… But that still does not explain how the Jews ended up in the land of the Allemane, does it?… …and… We must never forget the lessons Miklos brought us… bought with such unfathomable hardship… …and… Inside each of the locked cattle cars ninety people were jammed… (Part 1) …and… …this tactic of barking orders at us when we’re tired and disoriented is very effective if we haven’t prepared ourselves for it… (Part 2) …and… The left-hand column included the aged, the crippled, the feeble, and women with children under fourteen. The right-hand column consisted entirely of able-bodied men and women: those able to work… (Part 3)…and… I fell to thinking about… Germany, where I had spent some of the happiest years of my life… (Part 4) …and…
12.15.13 (For a partial transcript... visit: “Reclaiming Our Stolen Gifts… Our Leadership… To Establish A Future Based On Distributed Generation”) Today's show: …occupational hazard… …and… …how to express the urgency of the need for us to reclaim the leadership of guiding the world… …and… …‘global supremacy’ for a reason… …and… …conversations about ‘democracy’ are largely conversations about ‘strategy’… as what we all have in common is… we want to escape slavery… …and… …I think No Sizwe may be missing what I consider most significant about this passage… the term ‘stay-at-home’… counterposing it with ‘universal adult suffrage’… …and… “…Pourquoi pas nous?… Why not us?…” Just as the election of Barack sent a bolt of hope across the world… a General Strike here will electrify the world… …and… They want to be ‘players’. They want to use their gifts… they want to be ‘big’… …well… so do we… …and… ‘Keepers’… keep us… …diminished… …and… …happiness requires leisure… your body tells you that… trust it… …and… …the mindset of ‘ruler’ and ‘ruled’ – pushed out and suppressed all others… and we manifest it… but the good news is… we can de-manifest it… …and… …“how do we pull together?” – out of harness, why would we not?… …under conditions of generalized human leisure (freedom) ‘unhealth’ can never again achieve ‘bias’ – weight enough to tip us into ‘unhealth’… we have to think from the vantage of the whole… It is the health of the overall earth that we’re concerning ourselves with – not controlling our brothers and sisters… …and… So what could I have done when I was a young mother… and someone said to me… “The regime of class is totalitarian… …and… For too long we’ve been trapped in the mistaken notion that the only escape from slavery is ‘power’s hoop of ‘knowledge’… …and…
12.08.13 (For a partial transcript... visit: “Reclaiming Our Stolen Gifts… Our Leadership… To Establish A Future Based On Distributed Generation”) Today's show: …the planet cannot support both we-the-people’s global and common demands for full human dignity… and ‘power’s need to maintain gross disparities… …and… …that piped-in voice of authority… the punditry… vetted to ensure only the “…‘fix-it’ strategy” gets spoken… locks young people in lies… …and… …our longing for freedom gets sucked into ‘power’s longing for ‘perfection’… …and The state can never allow us to define ourselves (self-creation…) as it is determined to define us… …and… …this is a nation founded in a mindset of service to goals given us (by ‘power’…) we haven't been able yet to think through what it means to grow up… and develop our own goal… …and… …our great work… the promise… that falls to us… here in the U.S…. to accomplish… is for all humanity: to establish general human leisure… globally… …and… “…good boy… good boy… you did a good job…” can we please stop saying that to our children?… rage comes from containment… …and… …with ease we could unloop each others legs… because… these gifts we are given are meant to be grown… …and…
12.01.13 (For a partial transcript... visit: “Reclaiming Our Stolen Gifts… Our Leadership… To Establish A Future Based On Distributed Generation”) Today's show: …getting ‘free’ in one nation ain’t the point… we have to represent for the health and the wholeness of the human soul… we have to face ‘class’… and that ‘Auschwitz’ is its destination… we have to look at that moment… to see the present moment… …and… …in many ways… getting to our future freedom is about speech… about being able to tell our authentic truth… which is our body’s truth… that we are never allowed to hear spoken over the airwaves… our bodies don’t want to do it this way… the way imposed on us by states… …and… …the percentage of youth out in the world today… may be what’s causing this surge of hopeful energy that many of us are feeling… …and… …the goal begins when… over the airwaves… someone has the courage to speak the obvious: “…we don’t need a system of coerced work anymore… generalized leisure is possible… and without it we're on the road to totalitarianism… given the planet’s problems…” …and… Is ‘democracy’ the goal?… given the end of ‘work’ as we know it?… That’s a big conversation… which… trust… ‘power’ will coopt in a heartbeat into the illusion of ‘democracy’… if we let them… …and… “…and the people will remain quiet…” We have to discuss that quote… me too… we don’t want anyone’s head to roll… we want our hearts open… every one of us… but down through the centuries we’ve been stuck in the lie … “…labor is our inevitable lot…”… and it sounds right… which makes the ideology of ‘democracy’ sound right… …and… Once we start talking about class dynamics, we’ll start to understand the rage that comes from containment… …and… It’s not ‘evil’, as Hannah Arendt termed it, that dark… it’s ‘absence’… and it’s not the lapse of a few under class… but of all of us… as Alice Miller showed us… …and… All roads lead back to abandonment… today we abandon our children in pursuit of the wage… and that’s what ‘power’ seeks to impose on the rest of the world… that’s the essence of its totalitarian vision… no allegiance but to ‘the state’… …and… De Tocqueville – writing in the 1830s – has already taken the logic of ‘democracy’ as an ideology of ‘rule’ as far as it can go… and as long as it serves the state… that ideology can only serve ‘rule’… States cannot by definition deliver happiness… because they require us to work … …and…
11.24.13 (For a partial transcript... visit: “Reclaiming Our Stolen Gifts… Our Leadership… To Establish A Future Based On Distributed Generation”) Today's show: …if it’s not about us owning ourselves then what’s the point?… Truly… a new cast of characters in the say-so seat?… I don’t think so… …and… There is a logical trajectory of thought – whether ‘power’s or true – which discussions will tease out… for which I hope the (just up) Volume 3 of “Reclaiming Our Leadership” pdf will be useful… we can't be leaders while working these jobs… can we at least get a pundit to say that? So we can begin to unload this massive shame… …and… …we cannot expect ‘power’ to behave differently… what we can expect of ourselves… is to render their fear moot… …and… The 5th century B.C. Athenian movement against slavery – challenging the key divide of class – achieved considerable practical success… …and… …our first allegiance is to our humanity – we have to stop passing on this thinking in boxes – we have to start talking about class… …and… …‘right’ laws… ‘right’ state… ‘right’ lock-down – to preserve the sanctity of ‘rule’ – at the cost of our humanity… …and… …the power of our first allegiance (to life itself… to humanity itself…) has since ‘class’ began… been the chiefest threat to ‘power’… against which Plato schooled it to be ever-vigilant… …and… …the state… step-child and servant… of the quest for ‘perfection’… Popper… with his eyes on the fangs… ignored the coils encircling us all… in the class system… …and… What has become of intellectual courage in the pundits… who could so easily launch the freedom ship… of necessary conversations… …and… …we-the-people drive what ‘power’ calls ‘economic development’… by our determined efforts to escape slavery… being subject to necessity… …and… …the ‘altruism’ that we need… defends one’s own very personal body… defence of the soul is what we need to get free… …and… …our unmet ‘need-to-be-seen’… sets us up to‘need’ ‘the wage’ as well… …and… …we need a global network of helping… with the goal of planning a future in which the pursuit of happiness is not defining of individuals… but of humanity itself… …and… more to follow… on how to begin refusing 'obedience'… choosing responsibility… for 'the whole thing'… in order to pursue true happiness…
11.17.13 (For a partial transcript... visit: “Reclaiming Our Stolen Gifts… Our Leadership… To Establish A Future Based On Distributed Generation”) Today's show: What does it take for us to claim our ‘bigness’ now… so we can create that critical mass? …and… When we are divided from each other we are completely vulnerable to the “shock-and-awe” tactics of ‘power’… which uses “rule-by-bias”… all that weight rolls the way those who control it want it to… …and… …‘investigations’?…‘revelations’?… ‘exposes’?… of the misdeeds of ‘power’… or rather… us planning the alternative… so folks can have a choice… and hope? …and… “…Grant I may never prove so fond [foolish]… To trust… a keeper with my freedom…” and… year-and-a-half no signal?… please… …and… …if you can control where money goes… you can control what gets done… in a system… …and… …the “logic of rule” is the impetus behind the de-humanization… privatization… and accumulation processes of ‘power’… accumulation accelerated precisely because ‘power’ got organized… …and… …we are already engulfed in resource-wars… we are living the end of an era… let’s prioritize getting free before “saving the planet”… ‘power’ will be happy to fund that… but will never fund our getting free … …and… It’s quite likely Popper didn’t take in… ‘accumulation’ as a totalitarian weapon… …and… Another way of saying… “…we develop our leadership…” is “…we develop our unique voices…” …and… …the choice we are faced with… stunted lives… division from our fellows… lost empathy… lost humanity… or the opposite of those tends… by reaching out to our brothers and sisters… …and… …if we accept the terms given… ‘rule by bias’ will always have its way with us… …and… …a personal sense of justice is rooted in allegiance with one’s own body… which doesn’t want to be forced… …and…
11.10.13 (Sisters and brothers: When I got the recorder home that I use to record shows I found, after downloading the file, that it had been wiped clean. Don't know how such a thing is done but… in any case… I will re-record key bits from home… sorry to not be able to put up the actual show.) (For a partial transcript... visit: “Reclaiming Our Stolen Gifts… Our Leadership… To Establish A Future Based On Distributed Generation”) Today's show: …when Plato cautions ‘power’ that “there must be no split in the unity of the master class”… operationally this means “there must be no split in the unity of the master’s thought…” as concretized… embodied… in us… …and… …tell me your logic… I could level more honest outrage at the pundits for not caring about their brothers and sisters in harness right next to them… and that caring could end ‘power’… …and… …we parents make of our children ready soil for ‘power’ to plant totalitarianism in… …we can only get free by ‘unclogging’ ‘the state’ in us… by developing our thought… …and… …if they knew the truth about Plato… would they accept the mantle ‘power’ lays upon them? …and… Arresting thought… leaving to the state the prerogative of making the decisions… leads to the withering away of any moral sense… as “the criterion of morality is the interest of the state…” …and… …folks who have a goal… in this case a very big goal… know they must accumulate the means to get things done… …and… …Popper shows us how we think… or rather… that we are not actually thinking at all… …and… Does not ‘governance’ itself imply… rely for its relevance on… ‘scarcity’ as concept and as manufactured reality? …and… “…humanitarian ethics demands an equalitarian and individualistic interpretation of justice…” …and… Utilitarian ethics defines the world we live in… the state… the market… our inter-relationships…. This is why we’re concerned about humanity itself… we can’t ignore it anymore… it’s time to take that longest stride of soul… …and… …inherent in the very notion ‘institutions’ is self-betrayal… …and…
11.03.13 (For a partial transcript... visit: “Reclaiming Our Stolen Gifts… Our Leadership… To Establish A Future Based On Distributed Generation”) Today's show: …this transition is inevitable… we’re arguing in this space that it’s time for us to make the decisions for us… Miklos Nyiszli reminds us that we have no choice but to step up… …and… …an authentic discussion of The Nazi and the Psychiatrist would expose the totalitarian nature of class itself… as well as the hidden coercion when ‘guidance’ is monopolized by the few… serves only that ‘single pattern of thought’ of class… …and… …being trained to obey… means our true gifts… blow away… …and… What’s not discussed is not just that the lust for limitless ‘power’ exists, but that that lust is leading us… ‘statesmanship’ is the exclusive hold of the few on leadership… when pundits don’t ask the obvious the implicit message is “…they are our betters… nothing can be done…” …and… …uniform capacity and differential gifts… in toto mean ‘abundance’… …and… The Citadel… a doctor’s story… representing for the Tribe of Free Beings… …and… …our would-be ‘masters’ are planning the transition… why aren’t we?… …and… …coerced work is a con… and if you encounter resistance when you say this then talk about it… test the notion… distribute as broadly and deeply as you can those discussions… …and… “Plato recognizes only one ultimate standard… the interest of the state.… Morality is nothing but political hygiene.”… Overt fascism is the fangs… but totalitarianism is the snake itself… and its coils are tightening around us as we speak… …and… more to follow… on how to begin refusing 'obedience'… choosing responsibility… for 'the whole thing'… in order to pursue true happiness…
10.27.13 (For a partial transcript... visit: “Reclaiming Our Stolen Gifts… Our Leadership… To Establish A Future Based On Distributed Generation”) Today's show: …Atropos has come with her shears… the time of ‘rule’ has full-run… the time of individualities has now begun… …and… …at this moment we are globally pondering… what the qualities of a new world – beyond commodification and rank – would have to be… for us to constitute the opposite of class authentically… …and… …recall Kropotkin’s concern… that he didn't give enough attention… to the period of transition… let’s think this through now… …and… …that’s the point of forcing us away from our children… to make of our children empty vessels – for ‘power’ to fill… …and… The truth of abundance is not just of the earth… but of each other… it’s all around us… we just give ‘power’ the credit… …and… …this is what I hoped to show in The Talking Tree – that we’re stuck in the same story… …and… …so ‘progress’ always was a Ponzi scheme… …and… …‘Ancient Greece’ was an invention… it was The Great Mediterranean Bowl… and… the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of reality… of the truth… which we have to dispel the lies of class to get to… …and… All of us have to be leaders… …and… …all of our thought process in encampments needs to be about “how do we seed the future in this community so we can be supported? How do we increase our numbers?” Because we are ready tinder we-the-people… we are ready for the light… Bring it… …and… Plato… he’s the gold standard for propagandist… ‘power’ has never stopped battling with the truth of our fundamental unity – ‘power’ is ‘power’ is ‘power’… …and…
10.20.13 (For a partial transcript... visit: “The ‘Global Awakening’?… or “The Great ‘Re-Set’”?”) Today's show: …there has to be a way for us to go around the weight… of the machines of states (both shadow and official…) and start building mutual aid… …and… …KPFZ-Allen: the videos and mp3s are much needed… …and… …you are invited to Frank Moore’s, the shaman performance artist, latest dance jam celebration… …and… …infants are here to show us that we’re born happy… so the fact that its ‘pursuit’ is an issue… exposes the illegitimacy of what states call ‘governance’… …and… …so as the conditions of our existence have progressively worsened… decade after decade… ‘governance’ is a fraud… you let our human energy go and we’ll show you it’s not hard to steadily improve our conditions of life… we are rich in gifts… we just want to be able to use them… …and… …the system’s stripping us of our power… is… the stripping us of our happiness… …and… …if the aim of ‘rule’ (the system) is totalitarian… arguably it is totalitarian… as ‘rule’ has the weight to set that tendency… and the tendency is therefore weighted to produce its intended outcome… …and… …central banks suck our energy (represented by money) out of us… and earth… as we rape it… and recycle it to more raping… and to states who chain us for ‘power’…also: is ‘class’ an advance… or an energy-sink and a blockage? …and… …‘power’ is leading us to but a deepening of ‘class’… to ask how we can begin leading ourselves… we must confront the past… …and…
10.13.13 (For a partial transcript... visit: “The ‘Global Awakening’?… or “The Great ‘Re-Set’”?”) Today's show: “…salvation from your woes is only possible when you free yourself from the obsolete idea of patriotism and from the obedience to Governments that is based upon it, and when you boldly enter into the region of that higher idea, the brotherly union of the peoples…” …and… …and I want to see every child get ‘big’… to use their full human gifts… …and… …if it’s designed not to work… that’s ‘shadow governance’… …and… …all the waste of our energy… …and… …the intoxicating pursuit of ‘the Republic’… requires fat funding… …and… …there are global statesmen with a totalitarian ambition… who move policy coherently because they have a destination… this state of things wasn’t governed into being… and it won’t be governed away… …and… …we have to begin thinking differently… or the thoughts we’ve been trained in… reconstitute class… …and… …‘power’s tactic when afraid of an action: “…get to the front and lead ’em where you want ’em to go…” and the resources they bring are very seductive… so it’s easy to lie to ourselves about it… …and… …stateless trillions held in reserve for… …and… …we have to begin discussing how to lead ourselves… as becoming ‘big’ is what brings true happiness… as ‘rule’ forbids the development of this quality inherent in all of us… leadership… ‘rule’ legislates away our happiness… …and… …how to see in the club of the budget… shadow governance…? …and… …figuring out what we need to be ‘happy’ is not difficult… we don't want to be forced to work anymore… …and… Their ‘New Development Paradigm’ will probably look like this… ‘benevolent’ ‘rule’… rules… …and…
10.06.13 (For a partial transcript... visit: “The ‘Global Awakening’?… or “The Great ‘Re-Set’”?”) Today's show: “Socrates’ Dilemma”… points to the illegitimacy of ‘rule’… …and… …and it beggars belief to pretend to think… that Sir Richard’s and Ban’s and the World Bank chief’s efforts are completely distinct… let’s not waste time investigating… let’s “Learn - By - Play”… …and… ‘Education’ may replace ‘the economy’ in determining ‘rank’-designation… if we allow the ‘A-Team’ to ‘lead us’ to their ‘new and improved’ class-destination… …and… …as ranking can never produce ‘happiness’… the ‘A-Team’ is rushing to define it for us… ‘scientifically’ of course… …and… …forget the toy car… let's come together… let our eyes scale the walls of the illusion… and decide what it means… to ‘pursue happiness’… …and… “Surviving Progress”… classic bait-and-switch… is also classic propaganda in defence of the class system… …and… What we have is a communally-developed-and-egalitarian-species-creativeness stuffed in an ancient, millennia-long class / rank-based ‘elevation of the few’ form of social arrangement… and we are bursting out of the false constraints… …and… It’s the youth this propaganda effort is for… “time captured by jobs” is shrinking… the ship called the global economy is sinking… and they have “too much time” for thinking (and this is thinking authentically)… …and… It would be hard to find a clearer admission… of a totalitarian ambition… and ‘the people’ just want… to be free… …and… …it’s not the ‘smart ones’ that we need… it’s the global releasing of the people’s energies… …and…
09.29.13 (For a partial transcript... visit: “The ‘Global Awakening’?… or “The Great ‘Re-Set’”?”) Today's show: Growing our authentic thought is ‘wealth’… growing our authentic thought is ‘pursuing happiness’… ‘pursuing happiness’ requires leisure… …and… Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies can help us see ‘power’s motives… and its plans… and how they manifest in us… let's discuss the page of his words I’ve put up… …and… The U.S has fattened off the world… it’s time for us to give back… it’s time to pursue happiness… it’s our codified right… …and… Think about the shift in the electro-magnetic field of the world… when we all… globally… start to want our energy back… …and… …there we see the importance of codification… now we must re-seize the initiative on ‘pursuing happiness’… before its possibility is nullified… …and… …time after time the punditry buffs up some words and says… “See… now you’re free…” ‘power’ is trying to re-direct all those youth who care deeply about the planet… before they can take that next necessary, logical, step to seeing that their brothers and sisters are the ‘earth’ that has to get freed before the earth can get free… …and… …we are earth… so it will pull our coats… …and… …when the B-Team say… “No one could foresee the results of our profligacy…” we say… “Pawn your cons some other place… Nikola Tesla pulled your coats a hundred years ago…” …and…
09.22.13 (For a partial transcript... visit: Staying Focused on Designing A Future… On Not Getting Divided ) Today's show: Anybody got info on… the U.N. draft report on ‘the New Development Paradigm’?… …and… It is our right to abolish a government that does not allow us to pursue happiness… the pursuit of which requires… leisure… …and… …it’s as if Sir Richard has jumped on Bentham as being useful for ‘power’ today … for reframing ‘the role of government’… …and… ‘The economy’ can’t provide ‘the good life’… so ‘power’ is busy redefining it… but the ‘value’ of commodification itself… of marketing our gifts (the key source of our unhappiness…) ‘power’ will not revisit… ‘the economy’ is a fiction that we treat as real… …and… ‘The pundit class’ is the physical manifestation of that necessary barrier between ‘the rulers’ and ‘the ruled’ that Popper wrote about… its creation assured by ‘power’s exclusive control… of the assignation of ‘value’… …and… The ‘market mechanism’ assigns values to us… this can never produce ‘happiness’… we have the right and the responsibility as life… to start fresh… …and… “‘Measurement’ to guide us… toward what?” is for all of us to think through… because in a future premised on generalized leisure… there is no ‘economy’… …and… The con “You’re not smart enough” can’t work anymore… authentic thoughts are flying across the globe simultaneously… this is a unique moment… …and… “This strong word ‘value’ has been taken from us…” by… who are these guys? …and…
09.15.13 (For a partial transcript... visit: Staying Focused on Designing A Future… On Not Getting Divided and “Unpacking Robert Reich’s Baggage”) Today's show: …and when I say “all the earth is eaten” you know that I mean that the control of it is secured… and how is it secured?… it's secured by states… that’s key… …and… Now that so many of us are being tossed out of the jobs-nexus… let's use that time… our lives… to think through what this system is based on… and how to move beyond it… …and… The other key dynamic leading to a terminal confrontation with ‘power’ is that we want more than this… privatizing obsession of ‘philosopher-statesmen’… animated by the simple means of a market in our lives… …and… …us not wanting to be slaves… plus ‘accumulation’… equals… ‘end-game’… …and… Thor's hammer… …and… …we are creatures of ‘power’s illusions… …and… We have to pay attention to how they use words to con and control and claim the earth for themselves… and we really have to get our own lexicon going… …and… …the “‘nation-state’ as frame” con… (pt. 1) …and… …listen to what your body says… which for more and more of us globally is… “I'm tired… I'm tired of this mess [called coerced work and the raping of the earth…]” The so-called economic golden era of the 1960s is a subtle promotion of the ‘nation-state’ as the only important frame… (pt. 2) …and… What Reich is calling for here is a ‘re-set’ of the economic and political order …by “‘re-setting’ the next generation” on the fruitless path of ceding to ‘power’ the design of the world… …and… Max-Neef's new paradigm for the world… OK finally… we’re talking the right scale… let’s follow up… …and…
(…also… From The Archives… a June 3, 2012 excerpt: …‘class’ creates the scarcity mindset… the chronically unsatisfied need to be seen… is set up structurally… so is ‘self-healing’ a con?)
09.08.13 (For a partial transcript... visit: Staying Focused on Designing A Future… On Not Getting Divided ) Today's show: …“Know Your Enemy”… …and… …a spectrum of ‘heart’… …and… …if your analysis has got you to the ‘power’-guys… if you’ve gotten to that point… why stop? …and… The wage work system does not allow us to develop our gifts… why does no one in academia talk about this?… and what to do about it? …and… …it’s as if the U.S. state is a daddy left pundits castigate… …and… …confusion about ‘economy’ abounds… without the ‘people’s lexicon’… …and… …an ever-decreasing fragment of our energy is devoted to the wage-work system… while our major energy has to be working toward the prize of a future of generalized leisure… …and… Generalized human leisure means we define ourselves… instead of continuing to waste our days in endless recognition-seeking… of the system… …and… So… it is only to preserve the privatizing means of ‘power’… and essentially their egos… that we accept the degradation of human beings. …and… We've been recycling the same thoughts… stopping short of a critique to end ‘power’… generation after generation… …and…
09.01.13 (For a partial transcript... visit: Staying Focused on Designing A Future… On Not Getting Divided ) Today's show: …still processing Lakeport… …and… The bigger the goal, the bigger our impact… …and… Using Plato's playbook ‘power’ invades places with powerful people to flip the culture… if they can… and so: Heads Up! Kris Worthington… come on!… …and… It's up to us to decide that we humans will grow beyond being ‘the state’ and ‘the tribe’… …and… “Seldom comes the better, except we make it so…” …and… We have to act globally to be free locally… …and…
08.25.13 (For a partial transcript... visit: Staying Focused on Designing A Future… On Not Getting Divided ) Today's show: Why is it that “those whose hearts are most capable of embracing the world and of loving it are the most free”? …and… …the tactic of paying folks either without means or without heart to pretend to be what they aren't in order to influence public opinion… …and… …it must be we in the ‘mind-work’ zones to take the lead… and say “we need a Global General Strike…” …and… …without a global response we become less human… and the Sophists ‘power’ was so afraid of they had to redefine ‘sophism’… …and… What is ‘the state’? …in what sense do we represent for ‘the state’? …and… …apocalyptic propaganda notwithstanding… good fellowship will prevail… once abundance is the premise of our lives… once we start organizing those global strikes… …and… …it's so easy to be free… because the earth is abundant and shares her knowledge… so ‘freedom from necessity’ for us… to ‘power’… is anathema… …and… …the practice of child abandonment is not just socially-sanctioned… but socially-mandated… …and…
08.18.13 (For a partial transcript... visit: Classifying Will Not Bring ‘Class’ To A Close: The Case For Not Labeling Our Future Freedom ) Today's show: Egypt… the issue is the global state… we need a common global vision big enough to hold all particularities… …and… ‘Democracy’ cannot work in circumstances of scarcity… and in the absence of scarcity… what would there be to vote on? …and… Unleashing Greed but aggregates the resources of the planet in the hands of the very few faster… so what do you suppose are their plans for it? …and… “Is it funny?” …and… …they have a ‘form’ of ‘state’ that serves them as guide, which means their capacity to do damage far exceeds our ability to expose it… rather than ‘uncovering’ or ‘reporting’ the havoc ‘power’ wreaks far better we should be about developing our common global vision… …and… …a ‘propagandist for power’… serving Senator Wyden?… or the National Security Council?… …and… …the ‘pundit class’ unconsciously carries ‘power’s water… and relinquishing our authentic voices means our children are provided… by us… with a false model of what it means to be a human… …and…
08.11.13 (For a partial transcript... visit: Classifying Will Not Bring ‘Class’ To A Close: The Case For Not Labeling Our Future Freedom ) Today's show: …if mayors with means need help understanding the support Occupiers need… in addition to land… let's see… …and… …is the problem organized folks who can't stop eating the planet? (i.e. greed for money and 'power')… 'impersonal economic forces' run amok?… or organized folks who use aggregated means and who are consciously shaping the world that they want? (i.e. greed for 'power' combined with a massive self-belief in rigid rank and authority… …and… …authentic lives means self-creation…truth… happiness… …and… …we don't know our own beauty… …and… …for the 'social musculature' of the future… I choose what Nikola chose… our unified Mind… …and… …now that’s the wage-work system… manufactured scarcity makes it so… …and… …the power of ‘intended but unrealized effects’ (i.e. a vision)… let’s get us a new destination… please… …and… …just a shiveringly-small and unloved child… …and… Let's start talking about the power of a vision… for 'power'… for us… …and… The discussion ‘what does it mean to be free?’ leads to the discussion ‘what does it mean to be powerful?’… we need a secular model of service to advocate for the species… …and… …our conditioned passive listening serves the pundits but not us… when will they want us all to share in what is now a ‘perk’… reserved for them?… …and… …we all have rich capacities… untapped under ‘class’… they come with the package called ‘human’… …and…
08.04.13 (For a partial transcript... visit: Classifying Will Not Bring ‘Class’ To A Close: The Case For Not Labeling Our Future Freedom ) Today's show: When we live under conditions of scarcity, that's another way of saying we are made small… (so) we have to take ourselves off the market… …and… …let's flesh out our picture of 'global state' and ask: "Does your definition of 'participatory democracy' preclude the aggregation of 'power'?" …and… The power that Zora had was true wealth… she did not have thousands of years of being trapped in the illusion of 'class' in her past… …and… There's no 'social musculature' of 'future' that is not premised on ending manufactured scarcity… …and… …we have to newly-invent the language… and discuss the power of words for controlling us… …and… …Shakespeare by class… …and… …the truth is there to see of 'power's deeds… …and… …'mutual confidence' must be the emblem of our future… must give it its design… …and… …to distinguish true gold from false gold in a goal… …and… Gorky prayer… All things are attainable to those who are free… …and…
07.28.13 (For a partial transcript... visit: Classifying Will Not Bring ‘Class’ To A Close: The Case For Not Labeling Our Future Freedom ) Today's show: We reclaim our power by reclaiming our authentic voices... and show it... be it... and unite our discussions within a single frame...globally... …and… If we unite our strikes globally... and set our thought on (a common)... the right... track... …and… …we have to see what advances our thought… what aligns with the truth of the earth… and get on that track……and… That world of hurt in all of our early stories… and late ones… tracks back to class… …and… …we have to see beyond the tactic and the pain of privileging folks of European descent… …and… States are true to their intentions… which do not include letting 'the people' make the decisions… …and… Relinquishing our power is the world we've had since class began... (and... a thank you to Click and Clack for your laughter...) …and… A true road must lead to tenderness… what else but this could our future be? …and… Only when we own our lives can we take responsibility for the world... (and) we don't need 'masters' or 'managers' to work hard – let's say that out loud and start the conversations... …and…
07.21.13 (For a partial transcript... visit: To Rebuild Our Freedom (Pt. 2).) Today's show: A big shout-out and thank you to the youth not letting 'power' play you... …and… If there are people paid not to care... the problem is the wage-work system... …and… Let's focus on the underlying (hierarchical) structure... recognize that it is inimical to life... and then start 'future-defining'... instead of focusing on the antics of the state... …and… So the difficulty in chief... is overcoming the belief... that nothing is certain... …and… It's easy to see what we need for a healthy life... and the resources exist for it... that instead life is made a feat of endurance... should clue us in... there's a plan... …and… The point of 'class'... as Plato named it... is to prevent thought (in us) from happening... and looking behind we see... a structure that precludes the possibility of empathy... …and… …helping each other… our natural tendency to come together… is the true force… that 'power' must continuously attempt to crush by creating conditions of scarcity… …and… We don't talk about what we've lost is losing the earth… this is another one of those conversations about ‘the future’ we need to have… …and… The official Left has forfeited the ground of ‘freedom’… self-creation… …and… ‘Power’s hollow concepts tumble in when examined… and… once this is the work of enough of us… crash ‘the system’… …and… The power of 'certainty'... …and… Technological domination... 'power's muscle... can be met by the organized resistance of scientists... or... if we just... stop... …and…
07.14.13 (For a partial transcript... visit: To Rebuild Our Freedom (Pt. 2).) Today's show: The 'imperialism of rationalism' erects interior structures in us all... …and… When will the Left pundits call the question of what we want? …and… Egypt has given us so many gifts... they are showing us that the global economy exposes the con 'nationalism'... …and… We have to stop focusing on the name they give to 'the system'... it's only the fact there is a class system that is relevant... …and… The exploding, eroding notion of 'work'... …and… For thirty years at least we should have been talking about this contradiction Terence Hopkins pointed out... …and… Terence Hopkins and Karl Popper: different angles on the truth that together reveal more of it... the key for rectifying them – called 'the earth' – will have to be developed quickly... in real time... …and… The 'accumulation process' is the 'privatization process'... …and… Is it really possible for we-the-people to claim the mechanisms of 'the state'? …and… "This world is not conclusion... the world in which each one of us gets to be 'big'... stands beyond... …and…
07.07.13 (For a partial transcript... visit: To Rebuild Our Freedom (Pt. 2).) Today's show: Egypt: a de-centralized civic structure... requires transforming 'work'... …and… Egypt calls the question of 'the state'... …and… What gets numbers is big vision, big hope... we want big change... we want the future... "affairs are now soul size"... …and… All of our un-asked-for energy we let go... that's wrong... there are critical ancestors who preserve the thoughts (the certainty) we need to see through 'power's cons... …and… Seeing in 'the infinite' the key to bridging rifts between all religions (and it's only 'scarcity' that leads to all the false divisions being contentious issues between us)... …and… So what would the martial arts training for ending 'class' look like?... But we have to want to be free to start working on it... …and… We have to change the physical infrastructure of society... and that means de-centralizing 'power' globally... …and… Controlling us has three aspects... comprehended by 'the Panopticon'... globally... …and… A single world market compels everyone, all the people of the world, to, eventually, ‘come in’… making ‘the economy’ thereby a ‘universal lexicon’… …and…
06.30.13 (…not over airwaves…) (For a partial transcript... visit: To Rebuild Our Freedom.) Today's show: A wage work system negates any attempt... to pursue happiness... …and… What in a wage work system speaks to us as 'happiness'? …and… The codified right to 'pursue happiness' is an advantage that carries greater responsibility... …and… We have no means to know ourselves except through these mediations of 'mind-workers'... …and… To achieve a broad existence on earth... to realize in ourselves more and more of this truth called 'the infinite'...[is also] Tesla's sense... feeling... of science... …and… Words matter... and feeling excised means 'performance'... on the job... and under orders... …and… We are defined by the structures we are born into... we have to be the ones who design them... …and… Why I love Robert Shaw... …and…
06.23.13 (…not over airwaves…) (For a partial transcript... visit: To Rebuild Our Freedom.) Today's show: At least we have agreement that "'capitalism' is doomed"... …and… The system coming to an end is not 'capitalism'... but 'class'... …and… 'Capitalism' as ideology... …and… A wage-work system means narrowed vision... …and… We have a 'left' / 'right' version of the same story... 'progress'.. …and… ...so a tiny few can play 'dress-up' in ill-fitting robes... …and…
06.16.13 (…not over airwaves…) (For a partial transcript... visit: To Rebuild Our Freedom.) Today's show: Does a 'wage work'system tend toward totalitarianism? Why aren't we discussing it?.. …and… We're captured by cons... in the absence of alternative thoughts... …and… The myth of 'sustainable growth and development... and the myth of 'mind-makes-wealth'... …and… ...drumbeat suggestive injunctions... …and… The myth is that 'progress' secures existence... this is what 'wage work' means... …and… One day of a global mass strike and we will see... that we are everything... …and… The key con of 'the market' that 'the best arise'... is to hide the creation of a permanent 'underclass'... how else provide food cheap? …and… Because it's remunerated well... it seems as if the 'mind-work' is actually generating wealth... …and… They set the weight... the thoughts... that bend the world its way... …and…
06.09.13 (…not over airwaves…) (For a partial transcript... visit: To Rebuild Our Freedom.) Today's show: 'Power' (coercion) drives down the cost of food... to subsidize... everything else... …and… Economists are stuck in unconscious assumptions... of 'natural' hierarchical divides... …and… 'Profits'... in our mother-tongue funds but diminishment... …and… True wealth was stolen... …and… The means exist for us to solve our own problems... and only we can solve them... …and… The preferencing of 'mind' over 'hand'... as key to 'power's rule... supercedes money in priority... …and… "Jakarta pays the check." …and… Poorly-remunerated 'hand' subsidizes highly-remunerated 'mind'... …and…
06.02.13 (…not over airwaves…) (For a partial transcript... visit: To Rebuild Our Freedom.) Today's show: We're not here to help 'power' rule over the resources of the planet (including us): a big thank you to our brothers and sisters in Turkey …and… Economists tell themselves that 'inequality' is built into the 'mental - manual divide'... …and… ...a massive con's at work... …and… There's a child at the tot lot... …and… The fallacy of the 'necessity' of inequality... …and… 'The market' under 'class' is a con in the service of 'power'... …and… Do we really have to see this pattern develop to its fullest extent... before we respond appropriate to the threat? …and… ...and to convert 'life' into 'thought' is called "creating wealth"... …and… Notice that this so-called "canonical Kuznets movement" strips us of our ability to be self-sufficient... so 'growing up' turns out to mean... 'staying children'... …and…
05.26.13 (…no airwaves for this…) (For a partial transcript... visit: To Rebuild Our Freedom: Taking A Look At the Galbraith Book.) : This train is set in motion... and it's got a speed to it... (Galbraith review, Pt. 1) …and… We must start saying, "We need a mass movement to end wage work..." it's the only refuge... because they can't get in front of it... (Pt. 2) …and… How do we know 'power' is sculpting a reality? (Pt. 3) …and… This is called sculpting by means of credit... i.e. money... (Pt. 4) … …and… Our thought to step in concert must before-hand be in concert... tell me the question before you tell me that the answer varies... …and… "...twenty million people at our beck and call..." …and…
05.19.13 (…not over the airwaves…): Occupy The Farm!... …and… Atomization... and systematized lies... fuels a disbelief in each others' abilities...and... we bought these lies at tremendous cost to our solidarity... …and… Trust... 'power' is behind this... "find-the-solution-within" con... …and… ...he kept going back secretly... to finish his project... then 'power' puts its face on it... …and… 'Power' stands in our reflected light... how do you command something as powerful as the human? …and… ...being on opposite sides with our body unconsciously demoralizes... which is why 'happiness' is 'self creation'... …and… ...it's even more essential that we begin to see ourselves... as our collective power cannot be conquered... …and… An ancient Chinese fable... …and… We aren't telling ourselves that we have to root ourselves to unroot 'power'... so that freedom in infinite diversity can live... …and… Heads up! for next week: on 'power's tactical uses of money to sculpt the future it wants... i.e. as a planning tool... a first look at James Galbraith's book Inequality and Instability …and…
05.12.13 (This show was not broadcast over the airwaves.): Strategies are illumed by the goal... …and… Reacting to what 'power' does is not going to get us a future based on freedom (leisure)... …and… Good strategy comes from seeing reality... …and… If we are no longer made 'self-regulating' by the market (via the wage)... what does this mean for 'power's project of managing... us? …and… When they tell us to put our lives on hold... to sacrifice... to save the earth... don't buy it... remember: we are earth... …and…
(…also… From The Archives… the June 3, 2012 excerpts. This is actually our second show. The first one, on May 27th, never went out over the airwaves (they generally never do)… and the recording we made on the station computer was deleted (we were booted out of the station before we could grab a copy). The next week we arrived with our own recorder and maintained that practice since. For this... our second show… we tried to reproduce the conversation of the previous week, which had the theme: "Can we fix this system?"): (06.03.12 ... Our "first" show: Is there something wrong with a world designed to suck on our human energy? …and… ...an ethical question so deep we don't see it... a system designed for an elite to enjoy leisure is not going to work for all of us to enjoy leisure... …and… Whose baby is it anyway?... Until we see we've relinquished our power, it's hard to see that 'the system' is set up to keep us from developing our power... …and… ……more to follow…)
05.05.13 (The phone line at the station site was out... so there was no transmission of this show at B.L.R.): Seeing these guys is seeing 'class' because 'class' is their work... their effects... their vision made manifest... and... would not our prospects improve if 'control' was the word Marxists used... instead of 'class'? …and… Karl Popper explains why 'power' believes only the 'philosopher-king' can govern effectively... …and… Says 'power' to us: "Violence is 'out' but yea! for dictatorship..." …and… If you're sculpting a world reality of hierarchy... there's gotta be winners and losers... (Pt. 1) …and… ...sculpting a world reality... as crises deepen... (Pt. 2) …and… Our growing numbers don't mean a thing... if it's their thoughts we're thinking... …and… Our struggle is not with 'market forces'... and... Is 'management' Marx's fatal flaw?... and... Does the word 'class' serve us? …and… We are responsible for shaping the future... …and…
04.28.13 (The computer at the transmitter site stopped or was cut off... so there was no transmission of this show at B.L.R.): 'Power' tries to substitute a 'web of obligation' for a 'web of life'... in our minds... …and… David Brooks... and controlling the lexicon... (Pt. 2) …and… David Brooks... and controlling the lexicon... (Pt. 3) …and… All ruling elites invent a grand mythology... …and… 'Power's 'web of obligation' would not work if we parents refused to create the mental frames that support it... …and… If having bosses doesn't work for me, it doesn't work for you... …and… This is the unpaid death-embracing work we do: we teach our children that to be 'good' means 'loss of freedom'... so 'power' can "shape the future"... …and…
04.21.13: "...there's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will." …and… What do I mean by 'ideology of class'? (Pt. 1) …and… How will the 'global managers' "eradicate poverty" while killing the oceans? (Pt. 1) …and… What does loss of earth-connection mean for 'human nature'?... and more on Red Inc. …and… How do we give 'bettering the world' its due when we're kept busy jumping through hoops? (Pt. 2) …and… Discovering our true allegiance... (Pt. 2) …and… It's time to stop "fighting the good fight" and decide to win back our lives... else we let the oceans die... (Pt. 3) …and… Alice Miller's message boils down to...the root ideology of class: "we are nothing and the state is all"... …and… In reality...we are obedient... until we have our own inter-communication means... (Pt. 2) …and… David Brooks... and controlling the lexicon... (Pt. 1) [Parts 2 and 3 on the April 28 show]…and… 'Online education'... and "the two worlds"... …and…
04.14.13: 'Anti-class' means standing in solidarity with life... …and… The loss of the authentic self in forcing children to perform... …and… Only by facing the dark can we release that repressed energy which is our authentic voices. …and… Facing the dark is facing the internalized state... …and… Red Inc. is documenting a massive silence... …and…
…03.24.13 (D-Way was unable to share the DJ chair today.) What defines 'class'? The mindset of "'in' and 'out'" (Pt. 1)... …and… 'Power' on-goingly manufactures two separate worlds... and crafted the mechanisms for instilling discipline globally using that ideology... (Pt. 2)... …and… Until we eradicate "the two worlds" in how we treat children (Pt. 3)...(also) ...we need a global referendum on "consent"... …and… Neo-Hegelian, Plato-lovin' madness... …and… Why do we have pundits? …and I would appreciate your feedback on the notion of “a global referendum on 'consent'.”
(…also… from the July 1, 2012 show: "'Power' has vastly bigger ambition..."…and… Is ending 'class' utopian? …and… Our thinking has been stunted... but analysis must precede action... …and… Would a vision of a future without force have prevented the dismantlement of the encampments? (Pt. 1) …and… ...should we 'occupy' a vision? (Pt. 2) …and…
…03.17.13 Technical difficulties... …and… 'Power' is losing the eyes of more and more of us.. …and… When will we organize our global response to 'power'?... starting with a one-day global withdrawal of our hands... …and… 'Power' is laying the groundwork for the world they want... Let's prepare to counter it with our own commitment to a vision... …and… Do 'we' have a 'problem with greed'? …and… This is a learning moment for 'power'... …and…
…03.10.13 We all have to be Hugo Chavez... …and… What you see on the media is very constructed... …and Corporations exist to shift the provenance of our creations... …and… Our numbers trump money if we start replicating their strategy... …and… How do we shift this downward energy? …and…
…03.03.13 (The stream was down so this show did not go out over BLR)… On 'ideologies of control'... and... let's start saying "anti-privatization" instead of "anti-austerity"... there's more 'earth' in it... …and… There's a deep pain that our gifts aren't valued... but our creative resistance must be tied to a larger goal... …and… What is the route to 'certainty' that we must put our earth-given gifts first? (Pt. 2) …and…
…02.24.13…Seeing & planning from the vantage of 'the whole' (Pt. 1) …and… Seeing and planning from the vantage of 'the whole' (Pt. 2) …and… On 'nation-state' forestalling global unity... and giving ourselves permission to move on... (Pt. 1) …and… This has to be through our own development as human beings... (on 'giving ourselves permission', Pt. 2) …and… "Gotta get Solozzo..." (Pt. 1) …and…
…02.17.13… (D-Way was out ill) ...a protection-racket on a global scale... (the moral universe of 'class', Pt. 2) …and… ...what if the single eye was shattered? …and… This is conscious plan by 'power' ("the logic of the will"... how belief is crafted) …and… …and… On deferring to the 'thinkers' (...the 'citizen-barbarian' division... Pt. 2) …and…
…02.10.13… Nonviolence conference... and Talking Tree, the CD... …and… I want to sit with my body, feel what I need... …and… ...a systematic denying of power... …and… ...to obey is not our nature... …and… Is automation 'the new wealth'... or... 'what is "wealth"'? (Pt. 2) …and… Why use the word 'slave'? (Pt. 1) …and… Why use the word 'slave'? (Pt. 2) …and… Why use the word 'slave'? (Pt. 3) …and…
…02.03.13… This is our new story... (Pt. 1) …and… This is our new story... (Pt. 2) …and… "Stone Soup"... our new story... (Pt. 3)…and… It's easy for 'power' to create havoc... "Save Our Post Office!" …and… …more to follow… on how to begin refusing 'obedience'… choosing responsibility… for 'the whole thing'… in order to pursue true happiness…
…01.27.13…If enough of us but say what they were saying when they died... …and… Why are we being forced? (Pt. 3) …and… How is it we can imagine imminent ocean-death but not the end of 'class'? …and… Words are mighter than the sword... …and… Only a global fellowship can end 'power'...(Pt. 1)
…01.20.13…"...So he wasn't writing for working-class people?..." …and… This is what we're here for...…and… How do we get to authentic 'happiness'? …and… 'Wholeness' can't exist if our 'thought' is partitioned... …and… On "beginning to de-commission 'the system'"... …and… It's time to design ourselves... it's time to move on... …and…
…01.13.13…We are the heart of the future... …and… You can always get paid to do 'division work'...
…01.06.13…What is 'the division between mental and manual labor'?…and…Labor is not our inevitable lot... (Pt. 1)…and…Labor is not our lot... (Pt. 2)…and…How does turning the world into a heartless jungle promote 'happiness'?
…12.30.12…'Vision' requires controlling the definitions and controlling the definitions requires 'vision'... (Pt. 1) …and… ...controlling the definitions...(Pt. 2)…and… 'Economy' is the Panopticon and simultaneously...the Lexicon... (Pt. 4) …and… We have to redefine the problem as 'coercion'...not 'violence'...(Pt. 1)…and ...the problem is 'coercion'... not 'violence'...(Pt. 2) …and…
…12.16.12… how do we rebuild our freedom?… If you would develop your voice... start seeing your thoughts...…and… Whatever do the would-be-kings mean by 'global governance'?...…and…How does 'self-governance' relate to 'global governance'?…and…I feel in a way I'm almost the anti-Bentham... …and…
…12.09.12… Leisure would transform us... …and… Is the 'nation-state' doomed? …and…"Development of the 'productive forces'... for what? …
…12.02.12… 'Power' exposed... the 'philosopher-king' has no clothes... and "All difficulties are but easy..."
(…also… from the archives… 09.16.12 Show: Richard Aoki and the abandonment of our children - pt. 1… and...abandonment - pt. 2… and...abandonment - pt. 3… and...the abandonment of our children - pt. 4… and…
…11.25.12… What is 'progress'? and The goal of 'power' is to create scarcity …and… Is 'Capitalism' doomed? …and…What 'power' can't figure out... …and…
Other excerpts are on our Audio Conversations Page.
09.14.12: Brothers and Sisters… We need your support to keep developing and distributing tools for "Society Re-Design" based in the operating principles 'non-coercion' and 'reverence'. Help build a future based in the full release of the human possibilities of… everyone. Please "Support The Nascence" and
When you donate you will receive hard copies of our books or audio accompaniments.
10.07.12: …D-Way and The Raven have their first video conversation: "Unpacking 'Economy'".
04.11.12: Brothers and Sisters… to hopefully jump-start some conversations… I've put together small books… available at cost for $2… Volume 1 (of 5 parts) is called Unpacking ‘Democracy’, and Vol. 2 is called Revealing Division… and…
07.15.12: Below are volumes 1 - 3 of a 5-part series: We Are Living The Transition That Ends The Class System… And Ushers In Our Future… Freedom:
Volume 1: Unpacking ‘Democracy’ …and…
Volume 2: Revealing Division.
Volume 3: Beginning Again.
07.31.12: Brothers and Sisters… The video of the interview my son and I (D-Way & The Raven) with Frank Moore will be archived (at some future date) at Shaman's Den Vimeo.
Also see: “The Pursuit of Happiness”… in addition to our conversations: “The Egyptian Revolution” and “We Are All Leaders” and…
…Palmers’ Chat: As We Take Our Earth Back… A Call To Reclaim… Our Earth… Our Thoughts… Our Minds… It’s Time.
More on reclaiming language and developing our alternative vision at “Occupying Our Commons”, and "Getting To Our Future Freedom". And check out the song “A Daddy.”
01.27.12: Also: is there a brother or sister out there who can tell me whether a "smart meter" radio signal path can be used to infect a home electrical system?
Brothers and Sisters… Let's prepare our children for a bright future. Check out: The Talking Tree.
09.01.11: Brothers and Sisters:
Challenging the ‘wisdom’ of allowing ‘the state’ to define the lines and limits of our future does not mean it is irrelevant who (nominally) controls existing government… it means we must (as always) juggle many tasks… become skilled in the balancing act… graceful at maneuvering in a swamp… because we must both systematically build our future – i.e. authentic lives that extend our inter-connections with each other and with the earth – and hold the ‘power’-mad at bay…. And with this danger-infused latter task the election of Barack was a gift we had no reason to hope for….
Plato’s Tribe has been testing the winds for furthering totalitarian tends for some time now (Honduras comes to mind… ditto the many cloaked passive-obedience experiments they continuously float… [how many can you spot?… e.g. telling incoming university students they must submit samples of their substances…]). Re-electing Barack could not be more important.
The Extreme Right’s objective is to make ‘government’ (until it’s totalitarian) ineffective… and ‘One-Man-Rule’ seem attractive (as the Spearman book says). Note how in eight years of Bush they seeded their functionaries in every nook and cranny of government… there to sneak and defeat, relay and delay… if we lose the presidency now, ‘government’ will quickly decay (and I don’t mean ‘wither away’… as we claim our own days)… it’s already been bled dry by ‘disaster’ after ‘disaster’…. (I’m sure for them it’s a hearty laugh… a great joke… to hear the name ‘god’ invoked.)
And if ‘government’ decays, as sure as paychecks means puppets they will wheel in some ‘strong’, ‘fatherly’ figure who will tell us he can solve all our problems for us… ‘poverty’… ‘violence’… crumbling infrastructure (think of the ‘jewel’ Ancient Greece could be with all that slave labor pounded out continuously… never fear, ‘our’ (read: ‘their’) cities could be just as ‘beautiful’ here….)
If ‘controlling the people’ is the primary goal (of ‘power’)… and it is… then levers must be found, refined, and religiously applied, to accomplish this design.
[“Occupying” is not about picking up trash *… it's much deeper than that… it's a movement that moves us… to our future freedom.]
05.22.11: Brothers and Sisters:
I’ve written a book in draft... but as... I'm experiencing body issues… and I like to plan… and life ain’t promised… (a truth-gift given with the pain… we all live under numbered days) …I thought maybe this time… I’ll share it serially online… and extend an invite… to any who’d like… to experience some insights… all together.
So right off the bat… I’ll tell you that… it’s called:
Palmers’ Chat: As We Take Our Earth Back… A Call To Reclaim… Our Earth… Our Thoughts… Our Minds… It’s Time.
(© 2011 by Pamela Satterwhite in support of Nas2EndWork)
So, here’s a “heads up” to those who want to engage in this show… there are four books you should know, if not in their entirety, then mostly:
The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1: The Spell Of Plato, by Karl Popper (© 1962 and 1966)
Plato is ‘power’s’ chief deity…
…providing its theory…
…and reason-to-be…
Modern Dictatorship, by Diana Spearman (© 1939)
Spearman shows that as the 20th century unfolded…
…a Plato-inspired vision of…
…a global… static…
…hell…
…was alive and well…
The Kindness Of Strangers – The Abandonment Of Children In Western Europe From Late Antiquity To The Renaissance, by John Boswell (© 1988)
While we know how viciously war rends…
…every soul caught in its destruction…
…and urge the need to treat…
…returning soldiers’ PTSD…
…I haven’t heard a peep…
…about the need to treat…
…the quite visible psychic remnants…
…of three thousand years of child abandonment…
(…and we know... its chief promoter was Plato.)
[I finally understand “Rock-a-bye Baby…” as a child it never made any sense to me.]
Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots Of Classical Civilization, Vol. 1: The Fabrication Of Ancient Greece 1785 – 1985, by Martin Bernal (© 1987)
The subtitle says it all…
…we owe a debt of thanks to Bernal…
…for showing how ‘power’ does it…
…when it needs a ‘history’ constructed…
So…I propose… a collective untwisting of a knot… the question of why so much disaster has been wrought… …by so few….
…I mean, really, what are they up to?
Because ‘greed,’ I learned, is for them but a tool…
…a weapon in a monumental dual…
Here the interests are far from taming or chaining the passions of the rulers; on the contrary, if the citizens become absorbed by the pursuit of their private interests, it will be possible for a “clever and ambitious man to seize power.” And Tocqueville directs some superbly caustic and prophetic words (written years before the rise of Napoleon III) at those who, for the sake of a favorable business climate, ask only for “law and order”:
“A nation that demands from its government nothing but the maintenance of order is already a slave in the bottom of its heart; it is the slave of its well-being, and the man who is to chain it can arrive on the scene.”
…If it is true that the economy must be deferred to, then there is a case not only for constraining the imprudent actions of the prince but for repressing those of the people, for limiting participation, in short, for crushing anything that could be interpreted by some economist-king as a threat to the proper functioning of the “delicate watch.”
Secondly, [Adam] Ferguson and [Alexis de] Tocqueville implicitly criticized the older tradition of thought that had seen in the pursuit of material interest a welcome alternative to the passionate scramble for glory and power…. [Their] point: as long as not everyone is playing the “innocent” game of making money, the total absorption in it of most citizens leaves the few who play for the higher stakes of power freer than before to pursue their ambition. In this way social arrangements that substitute the interests for the passions as the guiding principle of human action for the many can have the side effect of killing the civic spirit and of thereby opening the door to tyranny. (Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph, p.123 – 125)
Because ‘greed,’ I learned, is for them but a tool…
…a weapon in a monumental dual…
(…and while they know this is true, we-the-people for the most part have yet to… so… let’s open our eyes and get to… our true ‘work.’)
The chief insight that will ensue… is that global suffering is solely due… to the misplaced allegiance of a few… to the Paterfamilias of Western ‘Thought’… who wreaked so much havoc on we-who-are-caught… in their monumental sense of loss….
You probably know…
…I’m talking about Plato…
…and as the disaster riding this steed…
…never stops accelerating…
…it’s time to consciously know…
…our historic role…
…of choosing the fate of conscious heroes…
…facing a completely uncompromising foe:
…the ‘Tribe Of Plato.’
“Why are the podrunks so afraid?”, my son asked me in one of two audio interviews. Of course a sound-byte venue ain’t really fit for big-chunk, musing analysis.
Hence this new book asks: “why indeed?”
But what’s even more confusing and calls for our musing is: “Why do we give ‘power’ our allegiance… allow them our passive obedience?”
And, lastly, Palmers’ Chat will argue that we must substantially sharpen our picture of ‘freedom’… …of ‘future.’
I think it’s time for all of us to get clear on these points, first, because so doing will help us know what (world) we want – and if we aren’t clear what we want, we won’t get it – and, secondly, if we don’t know what we got, not only will we be handed a future instead of creating it, we could be duped into believing the ‘future’ we’re handed is something ‘new,’ when it’s really just the same old poisoned brew.
When ‘power’ looks at our dilemma…
…they see no viable alternative…
…and for millennia they’ve known…
…that protest without vision…
…got nowhere to go.
We must recall they call us ‘cattle’…
…easily dismissed…
…easily saddled.
Imagine a herd gathered at your gate…
…threatening to strike…
…if there’s no hay-hikes…
…what would you do?
…you’d probably wait…
…until their stomachs start to ache…
…and then maybe offer to negotiate…
…pretend to placate…
…and watch while ‘protest’…
…predictably…
…dissipates.
Before we begin, a further word on my dilemma:
I spent a lot of time initially trying to get answers to the often all-body-pain. The knee, back and hip aches… and the asthma… were straightforward enough, but the head-aches and chest pain, doctors couldn’t explain. Eventually I arrived at the point (where I am still) in which using my available energies to write became more important to me that using them to run to ground my physical maladies.
Applying for disability brought further disappointment.
How to live? I worried, when I was rejected… Then I found on appeal they were willing to deal, on condition I accepted I was mentally defective. Afterwards in talking to my neighbors I discovered this tactic is frequently used on black folk, just as our youth are disproportionately slotted into “special education” classes. (We must be seriously threatening to this system.)
So let’s all claim ‘mental disability’…
…and, while we’re at it, ‘stupidity’…
“Stand with the Stoopids!” I say…
…and then maybe…
…one day…
…soon…
…together we’ll claim…
…our much-deserved…
…long-delayed…
…freedom.
So…solidarity in hand… I invite your feedback as we begin.... Find my postings herein:
Palmers’ Chat: As We Take Our Earth Back
P.S. to ‘power’… from Charlotte:
Oh, lovers of power! Oh, mitred aspirants for this world’s kingdoms! an hour will come, even to you, when it will be well for your hearts – pausing faint at each broken beat – that there is a Mercy beyond human compassions, a Love stronger than this strong death which even you must face, and before it, fall; a Charity more potent than any sin, even yours; a Pity which redeems worlds – nay, absolves priests. (Charlotte Brontë, Villette)
05.27.11
Brothers and Sisters:
(Has it really been a whole year?)
It's rather pathetic to feel such a sense of accomplishment in being able to upload to my own website. I changed my ISP only to find I'd only jumped side-to-side, to the very same company's 'green' alter-ego... Oh well.
...anyway, the upload function is working, so... if I can (lovingly) squeeze a minute or two from my son's time... a challenge as he just became a daddy (making me... ...ah... in the course of time... life finds its rhyme)... we will try to do... one or two or a few... more audio interviews.
I hope you'll... let me know what you think...
PS (from 06.01.10): The more I ponder the effect of "the news"...the more I'm convinced...it's primary purpose...is passive obedience...as what we're told is "reality"...promotes the grossest insanity...and our own slavery. I think it's time to think of "the news" as meaning what you and I do...with our limited time...to leave behind...a planet in far better shape than we found it...having discovered that it is "our hands"...under our own command...that will return us to...what we once knew: "the communal".
06.01.10
Dear Sal,
Thank you for your letter. It was helpful. I appreciate your sharing...not just your ideas, but the heart behind them. Lynn hasn't replied...which makes sense as she 'works'...and the point of 'a job' is to ensure we're too tired to help our brothers and sisters...so...my getting feedback on your legal issues may take some time. That you, despite being under such stress, take the time to engage in long-distance discussion is very generous.
I actually don't think of us as "brainwashed"...even though it's incontestable to say we've been 'trained.' (After all, from the perspective of 'Power,' what's the point of all those dollars if they can't buy a sense of safety? a guarantee of our continued passivity?)
When I was reading your letter I couldn't help but think of Emile Zola's Germinal – one of the few honest treatments of the lives of working people under the harsh regime of 'The Industrial Revolution.' I'm sending it along in case you haven't read it and might enjoy traveling with Emile for awhile. He researched it exhaustively to ensure accuracy – it's based on an actual event.
I can relate to your distaste for the state...but (as David Cay Johnston writes), "there's a reason that 35,000 people are registered as lobbyists in Washington, double the number of lobbyists employed there in 2000." The financial industry particularly has been yanking the state's chain for centuries....and my delving into their antics has definitely shown...you gotta follow where the money goes.
But I think "the state"...along with "the police"...exist not just as means...to transfer our dollars to the back pockets of the wealthy's jeans...but also to serve as buffers...so that "the puppet-master" behind the scenes can remain discreetly hidden. For example, Bill Gates is a major funder of these demonic geoengineering schemes you mentioned.
Zola is one of the very few ancestors (that I know of) who grapples with this problem.
In my life / experience it has been the literal truth that the ancestors, the earth, and each other are sources of power – the only true power...and that the force, manipulation and control the power-drunk are obsessed with...is illusion.
Our ancestors went to their deaths yet wrestling with the very same vampire we wrestle with today...it's critical that we honor them...and advance their gift.
Did you ever read this poem by Emily Dickinson?
I took my Power in my Hand –
And went against the World –
'Twas not so much as David – Had –
But I was twice as Bold –
I aimed my pebble – but myself
was all the one that fell –
Was it Goliath – was too large –
Or was myself – too small?
When we join with them we make them bigger...so that one day...their enormous love will be big enough.
On the very last page of Flesh, when the narrator asks Ernest, essentially, "why keep writing when nobody hears you?" he answers..."Wait."
Truth will out.
(It is a mathematical certainty.)
...Looking forward to our future freedom without bosses....
Brothers and sisters...
Happy May Day Yet To Be!...
...as this site approaches its one year anniversary...
...arguing that the only way to be free is to get off our knees...
...and embrace across the categories....
...And as "the system's" destroying the planet....
...it's imperative we withdraw our hands from it...
...and turn instead to our own project...
...which could be called: "re-incorporating the power-drunk...
...into the rest of us"...
...or, speaking more subjectively,...
..."listening to our bodies"...
...or...maybe...
..."seeding our freedom by being willing...
...to believe in good fellowship!"...
This site argues for the elegance of a theory and a movement...
...that advances our ancestors' gifts...
...and crosses borders of issue, state, race, religion and "complicity status"... ***
We've been falsely divided by a few elites globally...
...who are terrified of our becoming unified...
...and of our realizing that we don't need them...
...at all.
This site and the book appealed...
...to your support to keep it real...
...but that support has yet to congeal...
One man's given $12, another $20, and the third (a real prize) $45.
This practical parsimony comes at a time...
...when a flood of ideas are coming down the line:
...a kitchen to extend good fellowship...
...festivities for the youth here...
– as what middle-class movements find "fun"...for youth in the "street"...
...may not be.
So I'm asking more directly...in the hope you also see the crossroad where we stand...
...and the importance of the alternative taking material form...i.e. being seen...
...so that many more can change what they "believe."
...And...
Brothers and sisters...can we please stop saying, "we need jobs"...? Every time we do we're aligning our interests (unconsciously) with the pitiful-power-drunk-few. We don't need 'jobs'...we need full, vibrant, interesting, fun and reverent lives free of the yoke....It's time to houseclean our heads, sweep out the conditioning, change the messages, make our own 'stories,' re-name our 'selves.' I've looked "human being" up in the dictionary and there's nothing there about being a slave.(From: "The Ruses Used To Rend Us"]
Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds;...There is a terrible coercion in our deeds which may first turn the honest man into a deceiver, and then reconcile him to the change; for this reason – that the second wrong presents itself to him in the guise of the only practicable right... (George Eliot, Adam Bede)
"There is a terrible coercion in our deeds..." – and though we may be as unwilling to own them – as Arthur in Adam Bede was unwilling to own his heinous acts – when we sell our agency...our energy...our vitality and powers of analysis to the highest bidder...that deed shapes us nonetheless...makes us what we are...
– so how can we begin to make ourselves rather than cooperating with the plans of others to make us?
[Continued at: "Becoming The Function"]
Brothers and sisters:
Is there a word or phrase you'd like to taze?...or set ablaze...in innumerable ways...because of the walls they raise...and the ways they degrade...?
...for example...: "We need jobs;" "The experts say..."...
*** “We cannot allow good fellowship to be riven by false divisions."
Not long ago I passed by folks parading with pickets – calling attention to podrunk thievery....
By the time I'd reversed track and was on my way back the police had been called...to harass them....
One man in blue was talking to a woman clearly he was attracted to...
...I heard him gripe he didn't like being a tool for those who rule...
...so they smiled at me good-naturedly when I found myself bursting...
...into the song: "Which Side Are You On?"
Though it's guaranteed the power-drunk...
...are busy organizing as many complicity-seeking folks (caught in system-stoked invisibility) as they can...
...(police especially)...
...though this is a given...we can't allow good fellowship to be riven...
...by false divisions.
The majority of police are aware of the devastating cost to everyday folks...
...of the demonic schemes of the financial industry...
...but there are those, we know, being paid to sow...
...racial tensions between us...
...and as the stakes have stepped up...
...we'd best step our game up...
...and not hesitate to pitch our good news to the folks in blue...
...(and if you want Waking Up for this use, I'll send it to you)...
...police are forced to be "slaves" too....
...We can't make assumptions...
...based on salary-given functions....
...the fist called "the job" has us by the short-hairs too.
[See "Thank You Sandy"]
* This is a reference to a comment over the airwaves that one community is organizing a neighborhood clean-up as part of the ‘occupy movement.’
No one else can tell you what work you're here to do.
Across all false divisions that states inculcate, people are people everywhere.
"Human intelligence is like water, air and fire – it cannot be bought or sold."
The work that must be done requires all of us or none.
We need strategies; we need a plan.
We need approaches; we need a path.
We need steps we can follow,
And a view of the end;
We need patience to get there,
And a place to begin –
Refuse Division Work;
All of us, or none;
No tests;
No diplomas;
No degrees.
They aren’t needed
to be free.
All together now!
One, Two, Three, Four,
We don’t buy from you no more!
Buy from the people,
Buy from the source
Buy from each other
And bury the corpse!
Done with the fearing youth.
Done. Done. Done.
Love them
and they’ll love you back.
Feed them
and they’ll grow.
Done with the hurting youth.
Done. Done. Done.
Hitting is so passé,
so completely
yesterday.
We’re too brilliant
for such crude techniques,
Too buoyant
to be so cold.
Live simply,
Help each other,
Don’t buy anything
but the least you have to.
And whatever we use
We get from friends.
We’ll be forming the crew
that builds the NEW.
No more settling
for less than what we want.
Little by little
we whittle and whittle
away the death-worship,
the denial of meaning,
returning to reverence,
to spiral renewal,
to springs out of winters,
and to all things communal.
© Nas2EndWork (the NEW)
We’ve been conditioned to struggle with our frustrations – the challenge of trying to be a full human being, full of life, health, and joy – alone. Now is the time to talk with each other about these difficulties. Simply meeting together and acknowledging that the current social arrangement cannot meet our need to be whole is a huge step forward, but we cannot stop there.
We’ve been systematically stripped of our inheritance as free beings. Now is the time to reclaim that freedom.
This site inaugurates the movement to end wage work. Over the course of millennia the creativity, blood, sweat, tears, and love of working people have fueled a massive and bloody exploitation of the planet…but it’s time to rest. Through arguments, ideas, and actions explored and discussed on this site, our collective efforts to create a very different form of social organization – premised on our future freedom without bosses – will be evolved and pushed forward.
© 2009 Nas2EndWork (the NEW)