Pamela's Blog 50

[In Progress] , October , 2009 by Nas2EndWork.org

“Wading Into The Muck Of State”

"...If we want our children's minds to have patience for complexity..." ***

[See :"...A Power-Down Plan", OTheRLogs 39, 49, and 52 ... and Waking Up, The Plan, Pt. 11; and given that "people glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbors..." let us not forget that... ***]

by Pamela Satterwhite

Not long ago...

...on KPFA...

...I heard a child with sickle cell say...

...that though at first the disease was a curse...

...a burden to endure...

...it eventually occurred...

...if she could help others feel less alone...

...then her life was not her own....

There's a devastating thing happening...

...the earth as our communal legacy...

...has been stolen...

...incrementally....

It's hard to react to...

...as a passive status has had us...

...in its grip so long....

Our lives unfolding within it...

...a false skin...

...we've come to fit in...

...as if it was our own....

Living 'on automatic,'

...it's hard to shake off the pattern...

...the groove...

...the habit...

...of deferring responsibility....

...But it's time...

...to shake off the way of death-deifying,

...growing empathy instead for all our relations...

...re-making thereby our lives.

Honoring "wholeness"...

...means being willing to advocate...

...for those "yet unborn"...

...means witnessing...after all these centuries...

...the truth podrunks have "worked hard" to keep us from seeing:

– our lives are not ours...

...alone.

Reclaiming the earth...

...renouncing dependency –

– that perpetual childhood...

...thrust on us....

...by the podrunks....

...means...

...we're growing up!...

...beginning to see...

...our responsibility...

...to the "yet unborn these"....

Pass it on!

...There is often something poisonous in the air of public rooms. Strong men can stand it, but it tells on people in proportion to the delicacy of their systems. (George Eliot)

Recently I attended an elementary school "play." The duplicity in the room...the pretense...was suffocating.

(I don't just mean the stage...

...or the truth that actors are slaves...

...I mean the "smile to beguile"...

...or the miming of "content"...

...when the artificiality is omnipresent...

...and the body longs for movement.)

When I saw tiny humans absorbing...

...the lie that "to live" means 'performing'....

I came away from the spectacle convinced...

...that the chief evil we must renounce is "performance"...

[See "The 4 Ruses – 2 (Part 2)" for more on the connection between Passive Obedience and Duplicity.]

...it's inherently dishonest...

...none of us like it...

...when it's forced on us...

...it's a violation of good fellowship.

It's particularly appalling to witness ...

...when instilled in our children...

...who come to us naturally honest...

...and to manifest the future...must be left so.

Our children harbor within them – the closest approximation we have... available to be seen – what 'truth' and 'honesty' mean....

Our 'work' right now is to re-enter our bodies...stop performing...and start feeling... using our ability to touch, smell and see...

...and then to notice...and credit...what our earth-given gifts tell us:

...the 'Abyss' we must fill is the disconnection from what's real....

In the film Silence Of The Lambs there's a line I like:

"What do we covet?...What we see every day."

What do we..."see every day"? Is it the dense, lush, fecundity of life? Is it the power of the earth exuberantly blooming around us?....the rich feel of it... pregnant with our future?

I remember once...working in my garden...

...a little one stopped and asked his mother...

..."what is that?"...

...looking at a fat, almost black...

...particularly prime, plumply purple, lavishly lush, sweet plum...

And his mother replied....

...without breaking her stride...

...an impatient frown urging him on...

...and in a perfect embodiment of "done-before-begun"...

..."Oh, that's just a plum."

*** “If we want our children's minds to have patience for complexity..."

[...let's end the practice of packaging our children for ease of use by those who abuse us. (From OTheR Log 83.)]

If we want our children's minds to have patience for complexity...

...we have to change what they see around them daily....

If we want our children to embrace good fellowship...

...they have to see it...

...and if we want our children to feel powerful and free...

...we cannot condemn them to artificiality.

And if we foist them off on "the state" to 'train'...

...then all we'll get for our future is "more of the same"...

...(and a lot fewer darker-skinned brothers and sisters...

...which is what podrunks want...how 'bout you?)

Recently someone asked what Polanyi meant (discussed in Waking Up, The Two Winds, Pt. 2) by saying the power-drunk 'solved' the problem of how to slot us into commodities by means of the deus ex machina of the state.

If you don't know the phrase deus ex machina, take a moment to get acquainted...

1. in ancient Greek and Roman drama, a god introduced into a play to resolve the entanglements of the plot. 2. any artificial or improbable device resolving the difficulties of a plot (literally, "god from a machine" [i.e., stage machinery from which a deity's statue was lowered.])

When your thought process comes from what's real...

...from what you see...

...around you in reality...

...materiality...

...there's a depth and fecundity unknown...

...to the punditry-prone....

But this depth can only bloom in minds when we possess time...

...a.k.a., our lives.

[By doing our Division Work of instilling Passive Obedience in children, we seek to commandeer their thought process...

...to "our" (i.e. "the state's") purposes....

(This is discussed at "The 4 Ruses – 2 [Part 2]" (in progress.)]

...and when what we see is true power...

...the artificial version...

...loses its allure.

But before we can covet it...

...we have to see it.

This quality we have of being 'anything'...

..."malleability"...

...in our tribal cultures was 'mimicry'...

...a game we played...

...just for a laugh...

...to keep things light...

...because it felt right....

But...

...as time passed...

...the abandoned child came into being...

...and this nature-given gift became its' terror...

...as they need things fixed in place...

...in order to feel safe....

So they controlled this gift by making it a commodity...

...which means turning people into puppets that dance on their strings...

...and they scooped up some stories from the vast pool we'd made...

...stripped them of meaning...

...and told us to think them...

...daily....

Things that were stolen...

...were frozen...

...or packaged in boxes...

...called "jobs"....

And they counted on Time taking...

...our talent for making...

...spontaneously...

...our own stories...

...fresh...each day...anew...

"What leads to the need to claim full power?"

"What do we covet?"

Tasks to do (some of) as an electrician out of The Hall: look at the print...note location of circuits...where boxes will bloom...in the walls of a room...

I remember thinking once, as I was setting boxes and running conduit...that an electrical distribution system is like a garden...the power source the seed...the conduit the roots....

And as I looked at the naked studs...I could see my garden...blooming around me.

Our ideas all come from the earth ultimately...that being the case...it makes sense to say "thanks" now and then...with reverence....

...particularly as Grandmother offers by her example...the way out of our dilemma....our entrapment...capture...slavery....

The very notion "distributed generation" is earth-given...

...minute power sources off the main...sending out roots...then tender shoots...then you and me....

A "neighborhood anchor's" a power-source, a rich compost, shared by all...

– the mother-ship, a "common comfort"...that becomes the source of...

...particular comforts – our unique talents and gifts....

But to begin doing this means a determination to upend "passive obedience"...as we've been trained to defer to that institutional 'other,' "the state," and to think of it as the "designated solver"...of all problems...

But...the problem of how to get 'power' off our backs, "the state," by definition, can be no help with ("...not in the job description, folks, it really ain't...").

Living things long to have a transformative impact on the world...without doubt this urge is stout in humans....

All of us want our lives to "mean something."

Of course 'power' fears our transformative gifts as much as it wants to seize them. It's a delicate dance their stiff legs must do....(pardon me if I decline my sympathy)...

...so over the course of millenia the 'power-elite' has worked itself into lathers trying to "figure out" ways to seize, train and contain our transformative gifts...gobbling them up, and then offering to "help" (via "states", i.e. the political process) when we find ourselves stripped and destitute (spiritually as well as materially)...

Generally speaking, our power to make things has been channeled into "jobs"...a fact we've accommodated ourselves to...after centuries of state-sponsored violence...that took away our Commons....

In the past the podrunks needed lots of "hands" to make the 'wealth' they then sell and grow fat with....

...but today, you could say we've worked our way out of 'a job'...much as our brothers and sisters who built Auschwitz...did...

...much as our brothers and sisters who built Auschwitz...did....

And so...when the lower-income are told, "no, thanks, we don't need you"... what then?...

...the years left ahead hang long and loose in our hands, so...

...we're told, "hold on...we can fit you in...into this cannon!"...

"...and any 'redundants,' listen to this, we can fit you in too...the prisons!"...

...Our youth (in lower-income communities) are being told they're "expendable"...and that's not just wrong...it's not true....

Imagine...if we all got to do exactly what we wanted to do.

Imagine that world. That world's our future.

"The system" has shaped us to fit into it...so we have become...through passive obedience...barren off-shoots of "state power"...unable to sustain ourselves without it...which (as I'm sure you can see) is a completely... unnatural...way to be.

As Erich Fromm has pointed out...our natural state is to be powerful...

Brotherly love is love between equals: but, indeed, even as equals are not always "equal"; inasmuch as we are human, we are all in need of help. Today I, tomorrow you. But this need of help does not mean that the one is helpless, the other powerful. Helplessness is a transitory condition; the ability to stand and walk on one's own feet is the permanent and common one. [Erich Fromm quoted in Waking Up, The Two Winds (Pt. 9)]

But when "the state" usurps "fellow feeling," it kills the capacity for love in us. (Which is a bad thing...as it interrupts grieving...for the loss of our stolen lives...sucked into podrunk-striving...to the sad realizing...of dreams not our own. [Time to give it all you got...time to stop focusing on all the other shit, and just focus on this. Say it out loud: "We want our freedom now!"])

The heart muscle's loss is the largest cost of "the system's" assumption of our 'helping' function.

Our natural inclination to be "of help"...i.e., our earth-given gift for good fellowship...has been checked...by that "god from a machine" wheeled in and plopped among us...by the podrunks.

So these crises we find ourselves in now – 'power'-caused and state-sanctioned – we're helpless to address (from the mindset of 'passive obedience')...as we've been 'historically' excused from the conversation...told, in fact, to go sit in the back, and, in a cruel twist, told to weave more rope to hang ourselves with....

While our earth, air and water is being poisoned...the hungry imprisoned...our youth without means fed to military machines...

...we're told to sit on our hands and await commands....

...and in these circumstances....

...we learn that "fellow feeling" is purged when it's merged...

...with the religion of 'state,' "death-worship."

Kept 'busy' following orders...manufactured crises unfold around us...without our being able to see the malevolence causing them....(The other issue too is simply the deluge of 'problems'....If they drown us in 'crises,' they reason – climate, the 'financial system,' 'jobs,' state budget cuts...random acts of 'irrational craziness' like "attack anthrax" sent just for the hell of it... – they can postpone indefinitely...The Reckoning.)

Over-burdened by lies on all sides, we feel unequal to the challenge of ending that rough ride of 'power'...over us.

Open, any week of the year, any community paper, and you find, e.g., that because "the state" thinks it's cool to have hydrogen fuel cell buses at $2.5 million a pop, the folks on their feet have fewer bus stops...

...or: a city tells its arts organizations to tighten their belts, while it pays a half million (the exact amount taken) for a single art piece for the 19th Street BART....

How do such 'decisions' get made, when a random selection from everyday folks would choke at the insanity of such indulgences...at the expense of the rest of us?

We're all so tired from following orders, we barely notice that we've been pushed into a corner....it can be almost comforting, when we're so exhausted, to tell ourselves that it's "the state's" 'job' to solve problems...and then we drift even further asleep by telling ourselves we live in a "democracy."

But when 'power' determines 'reality'...

...with its dollars and technology...

...we discover what we're taught and told...

...about 'the state' being 'us' in macro...

...is laughable....

...The 'state's' been bought and sold!

(But I'd add this coda...

...to what Machiavelli wrote...

...that in "the opinion of the many"...

...today at any rate...

...exists "the state.")

[OK, I'm speaking very generally when I say "we"...the youth in my neighborhood don't need to be told that 'the state' is just the PR face of 'power' ...they just need someone who cares...]

So a critical question we have to face is...

...how do we relate to "the state"...both in 'calm' and in 'crisis'...?

In Waking Up I wrote that "there are two levels to our activism, two 'faces'" of our "Activism Aikido"...there's the face we must wear for the state, and the face we wear with our brothers and sisters...("Claiming The Commons")...(assuming of course those willing to take this on have done the 'healing work' of confronting their own personal internal "state".)

I think the two facets of this tactic are...land and people...

...gathering people to pitch for land...and gathering land to pull more people.

...Plots right in the city, not 'public' but "for the people"...land designated "For the communal uses of Earthships [my bias], food, gardens, orchards, and forests" – in perpetuity – with those who build it seeding "good fellowship" for all...

A little oasis, free from taxation...

...so the NEW future can grow in the womb of the old....

...and those who live there make an agreement to share...

...because they believe in...

...the principles of communal living...

...and beyond this to plan...

...how the numbers of plots will expand...

...as before more can believe they have to see...

...the communal alternative.

...Our "job" right now is to win over all our brothers and sisters...including our brothers and sisters who work for "the state"...

...so while we work delicately with those stuck in complicity – who also long to be whole...to be seen...to be listened to...–

...we keep our eyes on the prize of freedom-designed-lives.

To survive...what would not any of us do...without our 'tribes'?...which buttress our hearts when they buckle ...stiffen our resolve to resist....We will have to gradually rein in Passive Obedience...tempt Trust to come out and play with us...using the sweetness of Tenderness...

...And the stimulus of creativeness....

"What do we live for if not to make life more interesting [and less difficult] to each other?"

Activism Aikido means incorporating a higher level of subtlety into our way of being...

...and the ability to infuse tenderness into the hard-edged strategy...

...that comes from seeing reality....

We expect from "the state" what "the state" will do...

...and we expect from "the human"...outside of "the job"...

...the ability to evolve....

So we may never know if the seeds we plant ever grow...

...but when we honor our Grandmother Earth –

...recognizing her in our brothers and sisters first...

– and craft our lives to serve that purpose...

...we're powering up The Reversal.

And this is where we finally talk about Dr. Nyiszli... “It was with hesitation that I accepted the invitation to write a foreword to this book [Auschwitz]..." **

Seated around the table were the Kapo-in-chief, the engineer, the head chauffeur, the kommando leader, the "tooth pullers" and the head of the gold smelters. Their welcome was most cordial. They offered me all they had, and there was an abundance of everything, for the Hungarian convoys continued to arrive at an ever-increasing rate and they brought a great deal of food with them.

...Our conversation grew more and more spirited....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.

Since then four years had passed. Countless thousands had since climbed down from the box cars and crossed the thresholds of the crematoriums. The present Sonderkommando was the twelfth to bear the name. I learned the history of each preceding Sonderkommando, when it "reigned" and who its heroes were, and I was reminded of a fact I already knew: that the Sonderkommando's life span was only a few months at the most.

Whoever among them practiced the Jewish faith could thus begin, on the day of his arrival, the purification ceremony in preparation for death. For death would come to him as surely as it had come to every member of all the preceding Sonderkommandos.

It was almost midnight. The company assembled around the table was weary from the day's work and the evening's consumption of alcohol. Our conversation grew more and more listless. An SS making his rounds stopped to remind us that it was high time we were in bed. I took leave of my new companions and returned to my room. Thanks to the rum I had drunk and my tired nerves, I spent a relatively quiet first night.... (Miklos Nyiszli, Auschwitz, p. 45-6)

("The machinery of death has gotten better at killing people...." is one of his warnings to us.... perhaps I'm representing for him...counting up all the ways they kill us....)

I feel like I've been descending deeper and deeper into the psyche of the death-defined as I try to explicate the line that "capitalism is doomed." My jouney, interestingly enough, as I twirl on this tabletop, waving the flag of The Communal Alternative, can be traced in the gifts of happenstance from the 25 cent book rack...and the movies borrowed for free.

The first was George – who's never abandoned me – with the reminder to share the complete "command exists but with obedience."

Next was James Baldwin, the one who called me in ****, as it was he who first invited me into that Another Country of those who think critically.

And it's probably not such a mystery that Samuel Butler was unknown to me as The Way Of All Flesh is a treasure trove of insight into passive obedience...

...And Emile! where have you been all my life! that I have to be damn near terminal before I find Germinal!

Deeper and deeper down I've gone, like Emile into the pit...

...and there at the bottom looking up at me...

...is Miklos Nyiszli in Auschwitz.

His have been the hardest eyes of all to see through...

...those unimaginable horrors he bore witness to...

...so that all of us may see...

...where "commodification" leads....

...and that it is indeed 'for us' in these times...

...to end the ways of the death-defined.

He crafted a purpose for his life...

...to insure the world would see...

...the full extent of the insanity (of class society).

But I would argue that the Grand Schemes of sadists...

...the earth-haters...

...life-debasers...

...are not aberrations...odd exceptions...to the general quest for "democracy"...

...but logical conclusions to "class"-based exclusions...

...of the "intellectually-supreme" from the collectivity....the vast majority...

...us.

And I would argue that the Grand Schemes of sadists...

...the earth-haters...

...life-debasers...

...far from being aberrations...psychopathic abominations...

...are the logical conclusions...to "intellect"-based exclusions....

...of the few from the manual work that...

...(we're told) the many must do.

And that it's time now to reclaim us...

...from the Death Maw that presumes to name us...

...who call us peasants...call us slaves...

...call us coal to fuel their flame...

...while our own fire sputters out...

...(which they could give two shits about.)

** “It was with hesitation that I accepted the invitation to write a foreword to this book [Auschwitz]..."

Other physicians have written other books about their experiences in the concentration camps...Dr. Victor E. Frankl, [e.g.]...But Frankl did not help the SS in their experimentation on human beings; he did not pervert his calling by joining those who have aptly been called doctors of infamy. Instead of helping SS doctors in the killing of people, he suffered as a human being. Speaking of his experiences, he quotes Hebbel: "There are things which must cause one to lose one's reason, or one has none to lose." One of Dr. Nyiszli's fellow doctors did lose his reason, and the description of how it happened is not only one of the most moving parts of the book, but one of the most reassuring. There were, and still are, people who lose their reason when there is sufficient cause to do so. (Bruno Bettelheim, "Forward" to Miklos Nyiszli's Auschwitz)

But what is 'sufficient' for one is not for another....We're all different in being all one. For some it's 'sufficient' when you're told to rank your sisters and brothers...or to sell your spirit for pay....These you, Bruno Bettelheim, may have done....Should I cast you from the embrace of human sympathy?

I can almost feel the waves...

...of aloneness across the decades...

...that come from being maligned...

...when you have your eyes on a higher prize...

...(and here Barack also comes to mind.)

And Miklos Nyiszli's been horribly maligned by Bruno Bettelheim...who misunderstands Nyiszli...colossally .

(I can't help but wonder what's become of the ability to perceive subtlety?)

There's a moment early on in Nyiszli's testimony when he could not say more clearly that...as long as he breathes his purpose will be...to expose the barbarity of totalitarian 'authority'...of the belief that 'Mind' has made you "divine"...and justifies your deciding who lives and who dies...

With one mechanical wave of his hand Dr. Mengele would direct my parents into the left-hand column, and my sister would also join that column, 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. (Miklos Nyiszli, Auschwitz)

This is when The Plan first begins to form...(and..."self-esteem begins with a workable plan...")...

It's important to keep in mind that this grit evolved over time...that when he first stepped forward out of the line...he was unconsciously being complicity-seeking...

[Today (02.03.14)… I would modify this to say… that Miklos has the advantage of me in his thought’s quickness… now that (with the radio shows) I’m spending more time with him I better see this… so that rather than put it as ‘seeking complicity’ I would put it: ‘accurately assessed things… rapidly…’ (see the Waking Up Radio Show of… for a further assessment…)]

After all I had learned, I was not sorry to have acted boldly and tried to better my lot. By having been chosen, the very first day, to work as a doctor, I had been able to escape the fate of being lost in the mass and drowned in the filth of the quarantine camp. (Miklos Nyiszli, Auschwitz)

When you strive to 'escape' the fate of the mass, you'll generally be rewarded.

(You can always get paid to do Division Work...)

...but Bruno Bettelheim doesn't just confine his Division Work to maligning the man to whom we owe the complete picture of where 'class society' leads us....

...he goes on to show how little he knows his own unconscious motives...by attacking the very victims...with the suggestion they were too cowardly to marshal a resistance:

War is horrible, and man's inhumanity to man even more so. Yet the importance of accounts on the extermination camps lies not in their all too familiar story but in something far more unusual and horrifying. It lies in a new dimension of man, an aspect we all wish to forget about, but forget only at our own risk. Strange as it may sound, the unique feature of the extermination camps is not that the Germans exterminated millions of people – that this is possible has been accepted in our picture of man....What was new, unique, terrifying, was that millions, like lemmings, marched themselves to their own death. This is what is incredible; this we must come to understand. (Bruno Bettelheim, "Forward" to Miklos Nyiszli's Auschwitz)

You can always get paid...

...to add your moan sorrowfully...

...to the "man's inhumanity to man" mythology....

...giving convenient cover...

...to those desperate to keep us from discovering...

...that the source of the disease of sadistic contempt...

...lies with "the system" itself.

It's beyond infuriating...to read this way of describing...folks caught in the death-trap...of the mindset of 'Abandonment'...

The truth is "good fellowship" is our biological inheritance...

...it's the SS who were lemmings, if anything...

...not those starved to near-death...

...and bludgeoned into permanent shell-shock....

This kind of arrogance shows that Bruno Bettelheim...

– as much as those who wielded the mallet...

...with unconscious malice –

...unconsciously identified with those who wield 'power' over our lives...

...starting with parents (in class society)...and on down the line....

It's a common contempt we're all (in class society) trained in...

...this longing to please "the parent"....

So "the state" we must first wade in...

...are these bodies "the system" does a booming trade in....

(I'm hoping the day will be soon...when the "progressive media" chooses to structure the discussions of the real challenges before us...with the clarity needed to achieve our future freedom...)

None of us knows what "the state" will do...

...we can't control that...

...anymore than Nyiszli could...

But just as he did...

...we keep going while we're breathing...

...and firmly refuse...

...the Division Work they'll pay us to do.

"Good fellowship" and "harmony" is our natural (healthy) way of being....

...To understand misanthropy...in the human family...

...you have to look at 'class society'...

– which this "system's" podrunks strive mightily...

...to keep us from seeing....

In misdirecting our eyes Bruno Bettelheim shows he likes the taste just fine...

...of that swig of 'power's' wine....

And when he writes about "our system of value and thought" (when he really means the false face 'power' has taught him to see)...I must disagree:

[Auschwitz] is an unbelievable story, but we all know it is true. We wish to forget it. It just does not fit into our system of value and thought. (Bruno Bettelheim, "Forward" to Miklos Nyiszli's Auschwitz)

Oh, doesn't it?

I beg to differ....This story is the story of class society..."our" "system of value and thought," indeed!? As if ranking our fellows is fine...as long as it stays behind some arbitrary line that "the system" itself (whatever pitiful power-drunk happen to call themselves 'rulers' at any particular time) defines...

The SS strategy, in reality, is precisely the essence of class society (which is deception): "as long as no one sees...as long as we control the symbols...the meanings...the messages...the look..."

– as long as a pretty false face is well-pasted in place –

"...well, then, 'it's all good'...in my book!"

However...if you're looking for some 'good news' (and, trust me, I am too), I'll tell you something else true....

Because our inherent nature is 'freedom,'...because the earth continuously seeks to reclaim her own...

..."Passive Obedience" is an inherently unstable state....

...So the seeming omnipotence of "the system" is actually illusion...(and they know this better than you and I do...)....

...The need for an "Echo Chamber" means "weakness"... not "strength"....

...Eternal vigilance is the price 'power' must pay...

...for maintaining Passive Obedience.

But we can never rest in complacency...

...as it's critical we never forget...

...that the train "Passive Obedience"...

...has the destination "Totalitarianism"....

Passive Obedience leads to Totalitarianism inevitably...

...and "Obedience" is in us all (in class society)....

...and...Passive Obedience is not just the root of Totalitarianism...it's the root of "Democracy" too....

As long as folks need to feel 'special'...

(...i.e., don't know that they are...) then...

...'democracy'...like every other excrescence...

...of an organized elite...

...will inevitably become...

...just the latest version of...

..."the system"....

The sad truth is...damaged humans have a seemingly endless capacity to normalize insanity...and make no mistake enforced passivity damages us.

Is not unquestioning obedience to 'authority' in the face of the "irrational" exactly what we all do every day?

So...

As it is 'for us' to "weaken the elements tending to produce friction and retardation" as we invoke our communal future...

...and as the extreme right-wing believes totalitarianism both attractive and viable...

...and as the mental habit of passive obedience is the core quality undergirding the authoritarian state structure...in all its guises...

RESOLVED: the redoubling of our efforts to uproot Passive Obedience.

Everyone I talked with in Panama was convinced that the military coup that had overthrown the democratically elected president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, had been engineered by two U.S. companies, with CIA support. Earlier in the year Chiquita Brands International, Inc. (formerly United Fruit), and Dole Food Company, Inc., had severely criticized President Zelaya for advocating an increase of 60 percent in Honduras's minimum wage, claiming that the policy would cut into corporate profits.

Memories are short in the United States but not in places like Panama. Whether I chatted with men planting trees in the Darien ecoregion, taxi drivers, waiters and shopkeepers in Panama City, or the movers and shakers I met at the rooftop reception, I kept hearing people who claimed that it was a matter of record that Chiquita (United Fruit) and the CIA had toppled Guatemala's democratically elected president Jocobo Arbenz in 1954 and that International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT), Henry Kissinger, and the CIA had brought down Chile's Salvador Allende in 1973. These people were certain that Haiti's president Jean-Bertrand Aristide had been ousted by the CIA in 2004 because he proposed a minimum wage increase, like President Zelaya's.

I was told by a Panamanian bank vice president who wanted to remain anonymous, "Every multinational knows that if Honduras raises its hourly rate, the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean will have to follow. Haiti and Honduras have always set the bottom line for minimum wages. The big companies are determined to stop what they call a 'leftist revolt' in this hemisphere. In throwing out Zelaya, they are sending frightening messages to all the other presidents who are trying to raise the living standards of their people." (— from John Perkins' latest, Hoodwinked, p. 212-213)

The above quote is the most useful thing I found in Hoodwinked. In the public political education practices of the people, and in the reconceived allegiance of the bank vice-president, we see the powerful practice of the growing Refusal.

And...given that the machine metaphor is the leavener bringing Passive Obedience to the fore – letting it rise slickly with the veneer of scientific authority – it may be useful to think in terms of "functions performed" by the three key machines used to inculcate this mental habit...

...to identify and then target them...

– with our redoubling efforts.

And so long as the Machine (in all its guises) keeps chugging along, we can at least clog the works with our Refusal...

When Machiavelli wrote, speaking to the "princes" that:

"...few know what you are, and those few dare not oppose themselves to the opinion of the many who have the majesty of the State to back them up..."

...what he could not do is add the framing we need today – that in "the opinion of the many" crouches "the State"...that "the State" is us, literally...incorporated in each one of our bodies.

– We can refuse to instill individualism, insecurity, competitiveness, performance (artificiality), and lack of empathy in our children...

...to do so is the necessary culture work that will bring us our future freedom without bosses...

– We can refuse the role 'consumer' and embrace the role 'creator'...

...to do so is the necessary culture work that will bring us our future freedom without bosses...

– We can refuse competitiveness at the job and develop in ourselves instead the skill-sets belonging to the work of building a unified consciousness with our fellow living things...

...to do so is the necessary culture work that will bring us our future freedom without bosses...

– We can refuse enforced separation from our neighbors, our earth, and our ancestors by seeding good fellowship and beginning to think 'large'...to know that when you level your eyes on land for all...you carry up in your arms those not strong enough yet...but who you represent:

[...From "What Is Our Responsibility To Others":

...to know that we are experiencing a spirit-deficit means that...those who have the means to manifest 'spirit' must...by all means...begin...

...to put it out there and know that it will grow is a luxury not (yet) unfortunately for the many, so the privileged few who can do such things...communal things...

...little outposts of good fellowship...open to all:

...land with which to make the demand (of whatever level of 'state' you can level your eyes with) for Earthship projects not just viable...but blooming.

...earth for neighbors to grow with...unplanned street parties...signs on fence-posts that say "coffee and biscuits here"...

-- those who have the means...by all means...begin.

As with all other socialists, Marx's basic concern is man. "To be radical," he once wrote, "means to go to the root, and the root -- is man himself."...Man has been the object of circumstances, he must become the subject....for Marx...The free man is the rich man, but not the man rich in an economic sense, but rich in the human sense. The wealthy man, for Marx, is the man who is much, and not the one who has much. (Erich Fromm, The Sane Society)

The problem is...primarily...sharing work, sharing experience....We must decentralize work and state so as to give it human proportions..." (Erich Fromm, The Sane Society)

*** ...and let us not forget that:

...unless we commune with the ancestors, how can we realize how truly prosaic, how well-and-truly-trod, stretched out and knocked about, are our "fresh and original" thoughts?...

...And how will we avoid being duped by phony praise designed only to keep us busy for a lifetime...

...so we will overlook the obvious? (OTheRLog 31, Monday, 09.18.09)

What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?......

People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbors....

(George Eliot)]

...and we can refuse enforced separation from our neighbors, our earth, and our ancestors by seeding good fellowship in many more modest ways:

• Film screenings on white vans...

• Beans and rice in solar-pans...

(political discourse on the side...)

• "Free Festivals" – give-aways – and food...

• Group analysis of "the news"...lubricated with the brews...

• Street art and nature communes...

• Meditations with the Muse...

We build monuments to the future that everyone can see...

– make manifesting our future our chief priority.

We "speak-out-loud"...shout...what we want...

Say it loud!

...We want our freedom now!...

Say it loud!

...Fellowship is how!...

Say it loud!

...Keep it round!

...in creative ways that inspire...

...and in so doing enlarge ourselves...incorporating our desire...

...with others who brew critical thought...

...into fresh ways that expand, extend...

...our mass movement.

Nothing is more important right now than waking up your brothers and sisters...

...to normalize the daily practice of envisioning...

...because as we develop our own projects...we dispel the fog of Passive Obedience...blow it out of our bodies – and therefore minds...and grow...

...a very different world....

Time to give it all you got...turn from your other projects...and focus on this.

...One week after I saw the injured gull (OTheRLog 38) I saw another, different, gull – its entire foot was gone...

...and it received the same brotherly love I saw in them then...

“...Man is utterly alone except inasmuch as he helps another,” Fromm said.

Perhaps some tincture of this wisdom works with the gulls as well...

...at times it seems to work better...

...the critical part of this essence being ‘time.’....

For instance, was not ‘time’ speaking the day I parked at the library and a voice said, “Hey, you!”?

– an older man telling me it was street-sweeping day – saved me forty bucks....

Our natural inclination to be “of help” is the voice of the communal always within us as our biological inheritance – which, misdirected into “the job,” becomes a sword we fall on every day...

...not foolishly but still fatally, as we're forced apart from that which is truly worthy of our allegiance [...See: Becoming The Function (How The Job Is The Booster Shot)] – and to bond with what is not.

Brotherly love is love between equals: but, indeed, even as equals are not always "equal"; inasmuch as we are human, we are all in need of help. Today I, tomorrow you. But this need of help does not mean that the one is helpless, the other powerful. Helplessness is a transitory condition; the ability to stand and walk on one's own feet is the permanent and common one. [Erich Fromm quoted in Waking Up:The Two Winds (Pt. 9)]

The half-inverse of Fromm's "Today I, tomorrow you" that many good-hearted glom onto is the unstable half-precept, partial payment: "Today I help..."

..."Today I help" is a seductive, and destructive, place to get stuck in...

...seductive...as it flatters the “helper” with false notions – blinders installed on the workhorses of state...

...and on those fast-running good-hearted media...

– (who rarely notice the track) –

...destructive...as it forces the majority into service as the mandatory captive audience, stripped of all power but to watch and wait...

...while our future's delayed in direct proportion to the time we're forced to wait ...

...while the egos of those with the ‘“I-help”-jobs’ get stroked and grow...

[See: "You Got City Hands Mr. Hooper"]

...It pulls you in, rummages around inside you for your hope, yanks it out, sucks on it, carves it into thin lifeless pieces served cold, finally dividing it into small duties that obliterate your original purpose...

...drift...dissolution...dilution...disappointment...forgetfulness...await those who linger too long in this place...

...Knowing this in advance, I tell myself, might innoculate me against the illusion that gross power differentials will somehow shift for me.

The challenge is to confront "The Hidden Malevolence" that lurks 'behind' the official "democracy" story.

[..in progress...]

...Meantime...I went to a meeting of Berkeley's Homeless Commission and presented a...Proposal To Allocate $331,200 Of Berkeley's $1.3 Million In Stimulus Dollars Designated For The Homeless To Fund An Earthship Construction "Test-Site" Built By And For The City's Chronic Homeless...

...See: "An Initial Stab At A Power-Down Plan".

“Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime.”—Author unknown

Fence off the river, the coast, the lake, the woods, the fields, the orchards, and you have made him a slave for a lifetime.

...so it will certainly require a heap of conscious desire to break down the cycle of 'power'...

Nothing will change 'til this 'help' we got is for building the 'what-is-not'...but I'm thinking: we need a wholesale boycott of 'what-is' to see the 'what-is-not'.

[Erich Fromm quoted in Waking Up:The Two Winds (Pt. 9)]

see: "You Got City Hands Mr. Hooper"

...See: "An Initial Stab At A Power-Down Plan".

...See also: Becoming The Function (How The Job Is The Booster Shot)

"One great reason why clergymen's households are generally unhappy is because the clergyman is so much at home or close about the house....Our great days were when my father went for a day's shopping to Gildenham....As soon as his back was turned the air felt lighter; as soon as the hall door opened to let him in again, the law with its all-reaching 'touch-not, taste not, handle not' was upon us again. The worst of it was that I could never trust Joey and Charlotte; they would go a good way with me and then turn back, or even the whole way and then their consciences would compel them to tell papa and mamma. They liked running with the hare up to a certain point, but their instinct was towards the hounds." (Samuel Butler, The Way Of All Flesh)

Trouble is so hard to bear, is it not? – How can we live and think that any one has trouble – piercing trouble – and we could help them, and never try? (George Eliot)

[**** "If you don't become the ocean, you'll be seasick every day." (Leonard Cohen)

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[In Progress] , October , 2009 by Nas2EndWork.org

“Wading Into The Muck Of State”