* “A bit more on ‘certainty’… and ‘theater’…”.
* Re: “Jennifer Hoelzer Interview on Democracy Now!”.
Classifying Will Not Bring ‘Class’ To A Close: The Case For Not Labeling Our Future Freedom
This continues the conversations: Beginning To Rebuild Our Freedom and To Rebuild Our Freedom
(See also: “Occupying Our Commons”
"Getting To Our Future Freedom")
07.27.13:
This page presents partial transcripts of our discussions on the Waking Up Radio Show beginning with the July 28, 2013 show.
To read partial transcripts of our May 26 – June 30, 2013 shows, please visit: Beginning To Rebuild Our Freedom (Pt. 1) and of our July 7 – July 21, 2013 shows, please visit: To Rebuild Our Freedom (Pt. 2)
…and for our shows beginning with the August 25, 2013 show at:
Staying Focused on Designing A Future… On Not Getting Divided
Excerpts and audio files follow.
For other audio files visit: Waking Up Radio Audio Conversations Page.
Initial thoughts for the * " July 28, 2013 show".
Initial thoughts for the * " August 4, 2013 show".
Initial thoughts for the * " August 11, 2013 show".
Initial thoughts for the * " August 18, 2013 show".
WUR, Sunday, July 28th, 2013: “‘Classification’ will not bring ‘class’ to a close… (Pt. 1)” Draft
We reclaim our power by reclaiming our authentic voices... and show it... be it... and unite our discussions within a single frame...globally...
The gap between our hanging back…
…and deciding to act…
…cannot be filled but…
…by our restored power…
…and our love.
If we unite our strikes globally... and set our thought on (a common)... the right... track...
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’… or does it manifest at the command of ‘the state’?
(…you don’t truly think… that bullyishness comes with the package called ‘human’, do you? No… bullyishness is learned…. Sit exclusively at the feet of your babies till they’re three (and try not to teach them anything)… if you don’t believe me…)
• 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’.
–––
…we have to see what advances our thought… what aligns with the truth of the earth… and get on that track…
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.
Now… I’ve been arguing that the messages they propagate do not further the necessary goal of ‘unity’… ‘necessary’ if we want to end ‘power’… and I do…
(…and what should be meant by ‘ending ‘power’ is another one of those conversations we should be having… and would be having… if we did indeed have an airwaves that serves we-the-people…)
“Why have we been treading water for centuries?…”
So why is it we have been treading water on the issue of ‘race’ for centuries?
Why is it we never hear Zora Neale Hur.ston’s perspective on the issue?
Why are we never encouraged to consider her castigation of her grandmother for trying to destroy her hope… and force her to set her horizons low? (I shared her poetic description in the blog, “Who’s Loving You, Michael?” )
Why do we never hear presented the words of the Black sociologist, Charles S. Johnson, that Karl Polanyi tells us to listen to… and who I cite among the opening quotes of the chapter, “Progress” in Waking Up?
(…and, by the way, Karl Polanyi is an ancestor whose insights are far more pregnant and prescient and needed and worthy of being mined than any of those of the average pundit that Pacifica network treats us to today…)
While Price Cobbs tells us the damage caused by racial division began with the ‘peculiar institution’ of chattel slavery in the Americas, Charles Johnson goes deeper:
It will be remembered that Adam Smith expected the land-divorced laborer to lose all intellectual interest. And M’Farlane expected “that the knowledge of writing and accounts will every day become less frequent among the common people” (1782). A generation later Owen put down laborers’ degradation to “neglect in infancy” and “overwork,” thus rendering them “incompetent from ignorance to make a good use of high wages when they can procure them.” He himself paid them low wages and raised their status by creating for them artificially an entirely new cultural environment. The vices developed by the mass of the people were on the whole the same as characterized colored populations debased by disintegrating culture contact: dissipation, prostitution, thievishness, lack of thrift and providence, slovenliness, low productivity of labor, lack of self-respect and stamina. The spreading of market economy was destroying the traditional fabric of the rural society, the village community, the family, the old form of land tenure, the customs and standards that supported life within a cultural framework…By the 1830’s the social catastrophe of the common people was as complete as that of the Kaffir is today. One and alone, an eminent Negro sociologist, Charles S. Johnson, reversed the analogy between racial debasement and class degradation, applying it this time to the latter: “In England, where, incidentally, the Industrial Revolution was more advanced than in the rest of Europe, the social chaos which followed the drastic economic reorganization converted impoverished children into the ‘pieces’ that the African slaves were, later, to become…The apologies for the child serf system were almost identical with those of the slave trade.” (Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p. 293-4, quoted in the chapter, “Progress” in Waking Up)
And, yes. the damage goes deep, as Cobbs says… in how we’re taught to think… so, then, yes, it is internal. And, yes, it is in all of us.
But what is ‘it’ fundamentally?
And why did Virginia Woolf say, “thank God you heap abuse upon me!”
And why did Christopher Fry say, “thank God our time is now when wrong comes up to face us everywhere!”
And why did Zora Neale say, “thank God I’m black!”?
Short answer?
…because you see more of the whole… more from the vantage of the whole… more of the truth… and the truth is the wealth we need to get free.
–––
“The savage institution of ‘class’…”
That world of hurt in all of our early stories… and late ones… tracks back to class…
Interestingly… the very day Price Cobbs was having his say… I heard an interview with a man (Keith Lowe) about his book, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II… in which he describes horrific state-encouraged… state-sanctioned… violence and maltreatment of various peoples and categories of people…
…Jews… to steal their stuff and get rid of them…
…Germans outside of Germany… across Europe… to steal their stuff and get rid of them…
…struggle and strife over food-access…
…women… whose bodies were used as a perk for occupying armies…
…public humiliations of women (by hair-shaving… to render them readily recognizable) for having ‘slept with the enemy’, i.e. with Germans during the war…
…forcing women who bore the children of Germans to register their children as dangerous, illegal ‘aliens’ every year until they turned eighteen.
The picture that emerged as he spoke… was of a ruling class attempting to ‘tidy up’… “here… you get in your box… and you in yours… and so on…”
… and ‘the state’ issued its orders to this effect… and… as we-the-people have been trained to do… we complied…
…because “what is official is incontestable…” we’ve learned that lesson well… at our mother’s knee.
Which brings me back to Price Cobbs.
Listening to the title of the book he wrote, Black Rage… I thought… “I think I have that,” and I went to the shelf… and there it was… bookmark inserted… I suspect where I left off… on page sixty-eight… in 1970. I’m pretty sure it was 1970 because the bookmark is one of those old house-party-invites (dated that year) popular during my teenage years back in Detroit…
(…which is being dragged through its own version of a public humiliation right now… for the crime of being powerful… that’s what happens… under class… if you show your back is gaining length…)
…“The Black Renaissance”… it says… “creates a Mist of Soul with the mood of the Jones family… $2 donation, with invitation only…”
On the page where I abandoned the book I found this:
…a family is a functional unit designed for one primary purpose – the protection of the young; and while it serves other vital social purposes, none is more important than the function of protection.
But the black family cannot protect its members… (Black Rage)
I can well imagine what my 16-year-old-self thought reading this.
As far as my horizons showed me… Detroit City-proper was all-black… teachers, cops, tradesmen… you name any of the category-boxes they slot us into that my little-girl-self could see… black folks ran them (except for the firefighters, at least when I was small). Now ask me if I felt ‘protected’?
It was black fathers and mothers and teachers who hit us… black cops that hit on us young black girls… quite often successfully… (I remember one telling me how he loved to shine his flashlight into cars at Belle Isle after dark just to see what he could see…) True, the doctor who could care less whether my father lived or died was white… but I was legally grown by then.
…we have to see beyond the tactic and the pain of privileging folks of European descent…
Let’s just say, that my friends and I did not grow up feeling ‘protected’ by the family….
One friend was raped for years by her father before her older sister intervened… another child had the misfortune of a mother who was a Jehovah’s Witness… the beatings he received still bring fury to me today…
And I suspect that across race… this is more often than not the case… this ‘not-feeling-safe’… particularly if you have time… and plenty of earth-teaching… helping you to think it through….
Now the blurb on the back of his book says this: “Forcibly uprooted from his home, cut off from his past, robbed of language and culture, the black man in America has been methodically dehumanized and exploited by our society…”
…but this is true of every commoner under class…
…it differs only by degree…
…and by the pain of ‘white’ complicity…
…but those who see…
…of whatever category…
…who see beyond and beneath…
…the violation of our unity…
…beneath betrayal entrenched…
…and with purpose set…
…to enmesh us in pain and regret…
…must start to raise our voices up…
…as… trust…
…they’ll never be met…
…across the airwaves.
And all of the pain and scrappling with each other is due to the privatization mechanisms of ‘power’… to create and maintain conditions of generalized scarcity… with which we are now all overly endowed… by the simple fact… of being born under ‘class’.
As long as manufactured scarcity persists… made and maintained with intent… the structure of hierarchy does the rest… keeps us but… crabs-in-a-bucket.
–––
“Is the future we want called ‘socialism’?”
States are true to their intentions… which do not include letting 'the people' make the decisions…
Listening to several “Socialism 2013” speeches… I thought, if this is what they want… this shadowy vision they call ‘socialism’… why not define it?… tell us up front, “this is what we want…” and tell us why… and why it would work… and how we could achieve it… and how that vision gets realized. Why not concretize the word?”
Instead I hear this: “…if government is going to collect data on all of us it should at least be submitted to a referendum…” from which we glean that their ‘future-vision’ is not substantially different from what is existing now… so… is what we have now… ‘socialist’?…
…what underlying structure must exist… to make the society it generates… ‘socialist’?
Another’s speech was full of outrage at the Obama administration….
Now… to confine his speech to critique is telling. It tells ‘power’: “we got nothing.”
(And, by the way, of course the U.S. state is ruthless… is careless of the sanctity of life… is this news to any of us? And what is it that you propose to do to unmake what was made to be that way… i.e. ruthless? Made to be true to its intentions… which do not include… letting ‘the people’ make the decisions. What do you think ‘the state’ is for, exactly? Why was it invented?)
Relinquishing our power is the world we've had since class began... (and... a thank you to Click and Clack for your laughter...)
I’ve been arguing that the challenge before us is not ‘eliminating injustice’… but replacing a hierarchical world-structure….
And why aren’t we discussing the hollowness of ‘state sovereignty’… given the world market… why fight for a piece of what is fundamentally diseased?
Why not focus rather on fleshing out what that structure would have to be – to not be ‘class’?
–––
“Both foci are premised on scarcity…”
Both foci – ‘race’ and ‘socialism’ – are premised on scarcity… on scrappling for a piece… of a design handed to us… which we had no say in…. They’re both “tinkering with the machinery of death…” in order for some privileged intermediaries to make themselves (and theirs) exempt… from being ground up in its gears… they’re both based on fear… fear that ‘love’ is not real….
–––
“To know the truth is critical… To hear the truth expressed is critical…”
A true road must lead to tenderness… what else but this could our future be?
The media they present to us is extremely well-vetted… reflects exceeding artifice… it would have us believe that our crops will soon be harvested by machine… and that we should be joyfully embracing the practice of insect-eating… and… here in the U.S…. as everywhere… ‘power’ wants ‘its’ people to learn to accept… less and less (for the sake… of the planet of course…)
… and if you want to be among ‘the best!’…
…you’ll wear your ‘less-and-less’…
…with panache!
(…perhaps they’ll even invent some “pieces of flair” like the waitress in Office Space was told to wear…)
…to distinguish U.S. ‘less’ from the even bleaker ‘less’-expressions elsewhere…
…in our “new and exciting world of greater and greater ‘less-and-less’!”
But… as always… of course…
…not for them…
…not for them contaminated air…
…not for them eating roaches…
…or genetically-modified-food-like-substances…
…not for them the pesticide-ridden… early-picked and tasteless…
…not for them huddling in smaller and smaller ‘apartment-like’ units…
…while attempting to comfort themselves that they’re helping the planet…
…not for them pre-packaged living…
…not for them…
…not for them….
But for us it’s different…
…because, well…
…we’re… ‘not-them’….
“Ah yes. That’s it.”
Simple as that.
What mistaken notions must there be to imagine that a state will change its ways because we wag a finger at it?… or that we-the-‘workforce’ could be moved to join a project that means but a change in management?
What did Emily say? “to fill a gap, insert the Thing that caused it…”
Well… the ‘gap’ to fill between our hanging back and our being moved to act… is but our stolen lives returned… it’s that for which we yearn… the missing love and power… took.
–––
So what would the authentic conversations about ‘race… about ‘socialism’ be?… the ones that do lead to a true road?
They would… as Gustav Landauer told us…
([Gustav Landauer] defined as the task of the socialists and their movement: "to loosen the hardening of hearts so that what lies buried may rise to the surface: so that what truly lives yet now seems dead may emerge and grow light." (quoted in Erich Fromm’s, The Sane Society)
…as Fry told us… as Alice Miller told us… as all the ancestors who see that we must be the opposite of what we have been made to be… under class…
…they must lead to tenderness.
What else but this could our future be… if its opposed to the frozen misery of centuries… breaking… now… finally... at long last.
And, yes, it’s in us… of course it’s in us… is us… this ‘state’ we manufacture fresh every day simply by not consciously renouncing it… and turning to our (always present) tenderness. It’s there for us the second we stop jumping on our leashes.
–––
Only when we own our lives can we take responsibility for the world... we don't need 'masters' or 'managers' to work hard – let's say that out loud and start the conversations...
As Christopher Fry said… to not care is hell… the opposite of our nature… and of what we want…
…but it’s also true that our caring can be hijacked into supporting the system… precisely because this capacity in us – our empathy – is such a threat… it must be hijacked… and directed towards false ‘culprits’… a simple matter (for ‘power’) as we’re all complicit… we are all ‘the system’… though it existed before us and we had no say in it’s establishment.
So… as we’ve discussed… we have to see from the vantage of the whole… and take for our banner that which burns their hands – they cannot wave the flag of generalized freedom (defined as generalized leisure… freedom from necessity… a definition ‘power’ will never… can never… embrace… which means it’s the one we must take… leisure to make the decisions… for only when we own our lives can we take responsibility for the world… as de Grazia saw…
…only then can love expand to enfold it in our arms… as our posterity and paternity in one… our all… to give and to receive is one.
We don’t need ‘masters’ or ‘managers’ to ‘work hard’… when will that be what we hear discussed over the airwaves?
WUR, Sunday, August 4th, 2013: “‘Classification’ will not bring ‘class’ to a close (Pt. 2): how it keeps us uncertain” Draft
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…
08.01.13: Brothers and sisters: I’ve been asked by Allen Markowski of KPFZ of Lakeport, California, one of the hosts of Voices of Lake County on Friday mornings, to come up with a few questions… and I posted the questions that I came up with on the home page. The interview will take place on Friday, August 30, 2013 from 9 – 10 AM, PST. If you have any questions that you would like him to ask… his email address is posted on the homepage… as is the live stream link.)
I thought I’d share my train of thought in beginning to do 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.
–––
…let's flesh out our picture of 'global state' and ask: "Does your definition of 'participatory democracy' preclude the aggregation of 'power'?"
Stay strong… our brothers and sisters in Egypt and Tunisia and Turkey… and places we never hear about where these discussions are happening… confronting all the weight of the clandestine global ‘state’…
(…and we have to flesh out our picture of what that is, so we can have realistic discussions of ‘democracy’… as ideology… as is, I believe, ‘participatory democracy’… unless your definition of that precludes the aggregation of ‘power’…)
…you are leading the way… show us how it’s done… and strength as well to our brothers and sisters challenging the privatization project of ‘power’ all over the world… and certainly to those right here in Berkeley occupying the land at our main Post Office to keep the building and the land for us… the ones who made it… and much love to those of us abused by the fast food industry who are rejecting that abuse… who are demanding that their humanity be recognized. Stay strong. And stay strong… as always… to our imprisoned brothers and sisters… especially those on hunger strike… risking their lives.
–––
Last week we said, “let’s not use empty words… words matter… they’re everything.”
To move beyond ‘power’, we have to have our certainty… which means we have to have our words… but I also believe we need… means for distinguishing true from false gold… that we need a touchstone.
And we said that the point of having people who say they speak for us is to strengthen our confidence… our confidence that we can run things ourselves.
These are the themes of today’s show.
–––
I’ve been arguing that ‘rationalism’…
(…or ‘mind’ stripped of feeling… with the stripping based on the propaganda that using our wholeness mis-equips us for making the big decisions about our world…)
…is a means used to rip our body’s truth from our hands… and to trivialize the importance of the earth which is the chief source of our power… and thus disarmed… to make us easy fodder for their mis-management of us… and of the earth… to be easily ground up in their machinery of… ‘state’-making… i.e. leaves us dependent on the state… both psychically and materially.
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…
The state controls our means of connecting to mind, body and spirit. We’ve been arguing that our disconnection is a triple one… which amounts to three dimensions of ‘power’s totalitarian control of us: to mind – to the ancestors – by controlling the kind and quality of, and access to, education…
(…e.g. once when I was hawking books on the UC – Berkeley campus, I encountered a woman who, when I described Unpacking Democracy… which discusses the totalitarian nature of Plato’s thought, got interested and said that the issue of Plato was up for her because she was taking a class on Plato. She’d never heard of Karl Popper. Now… if the usual game-plan of ‘power’ – shielding from our eyes the ancestors we need… to get free – goes according to plan… she will never read and discuss The Open Society and Its Enemies: The Spell of Plato. And not reading key ancestors conditions us – we stripped of earth… or other means of arriving at these key truths – it conditions us to be heartless… and this was a sistah-girl, a particular threat because her training in class did not run many-multiples-of-generations deep.)
Maybe we need to talk more about that down the road: the power that Zora Neale Hur.ston tapped into… the power that Bob Mar.ley tapped into… to clarify that that is true wealth… and that we have to start understanding ‘wealth’ in those terms… when there are perhaps good-hearted people who are who are misled by… and attempt to mislead us with… a lot of nationalist rhetoric …and I’m using that word ‘nationalist’ as a black woman in America… thinking in terms of the assertion of a culture that’s been attacked… and targeted…. We do need… as people from particular cultures… the ancestors of our particular cultures to help us get free… but the problem with that… particularly for us as Black people in America… is that we’ve only been struggling with this monster for a few centuries… but our brothers and sisters of European descent… and of Asian descent… have been struggling with this monster for millennia. There’s a reason Shakespeare is powerful… and there’s a reason why we need him. And Karl Popper clued us into the fact that there was vigorous opposition to slavery in ancient ‘Greece’… and ancient ‘Greece’ ain’t ancient ‘Greece’, by the way, they didn’t think of themselves that way… Plato based his whole theoretical system on… and honored… Egypt for their rigid caste system and drew on it in his writings. So this is not a ‘Western’ dilemma in the sense that we’ve been taught the word ‘West’. I open the “Living the Transition” series (the Preface) with the image of a ‘great Mediterranean bowl’… and it was the world travelers of that day who circulated these ideas around. And so Plato had the opportunity to understand the weaknesses of a caste system (from the perspective of ‘power’… the perspective of his would-be ‘philosopher-statesmen’…) and to write what he felt those ‘ruler’-descendants would need – just as Bentham did – what they would need to strengthen up that ideology to make it firm… hard and fast… such that it could endure the inevitable (as we are beings of earth and built to resist force… coercion) resistance.
So… there is a deep, millennia-long history of struggle against this caste system which… if you’re going to set to one side and say that it has no relevance to you, you will certainly be encouraged in that presumption by ‘power’… and encouraged to dismiss folks of color who press the reading of Shakespeare… or Karl Popper… on you… and say that we need to understand what they want us to know… that they have the thoughts that we need to get free. The fact is… they… and their ancestors… have been struggling with it longer. There is thousands and thousands of years of thought… of “how do we do this?” pondering. And these ancestors are not just trying to free us… they’re trying to free those would-be philosopher-kings… who are also trapped in the illusion of class.
The state also attempts to control our means of connecting…to spirit – our brothers and sisters – through processes of atomization, controlling and limiting the kinds of collectivities we are able to come together in…
(…this goal of ‘power’ explains the nervousness of states when we come together on our own… whether it’s Black youth, or Occupy, or Tahir Square, or Taksim Square or Gezi Park… you see the same response of states: infiltrate… have the agents commit or provoke acts of violence… make certain the media broadcast the fact of the violence widely… discredit the protesters… and then move in with the heavy hand of the state… saying your only concern is to protect health and safety…);
…and to body – the earth – by severely limiting our access to shelter, beauty, and food…
(…e.g. it won’t be Haiti where the “new sharing economy” and “local self-sufficiency” get promoted and lauded… we won’t see blooming small villages conspicuously flavoring and favoring the land there… such that every Haitian can enjoy their hard-earned and well-deserved leisure… hard, despite their living in a food-rich paradise.
And that means our motto for getting free must be… absolutely… “all of us or none….”)
Viewed another way, however, we are talking about three dimensions of loss… three dimensions of keeping us uncertain…. Today’s show is also partly about feeling those losses.
• Rationalism causes us to turn deaf ears to our body’s voice… undermining spirit from within…
• ‘Power’s possession of the lexicon… stealing our words… turning their use to deception and betrayal… undermines from within our ability to develop our thought…
• Structurally-enforced and reinforced scarcity… ensuring that physical survival and well-being is uncertain… undermining physical health from within the construction of society itself.
–––
There's no 'social musculature' of 'future' that is not premised on ending manufactured scarcity…
Yet there’s a sense in which ‘rationalism’ unifies all the dimensions of ‘power’s control… by keeping us generally uncertain… because it plays a role… is insinuated in… all aspects of our existence under class… it keeps us mistrusting our bodies; it keeps us feeling intellectually inadequate… fearing that we aren’t smart enough… or doubting the quality of our thought; and a key residual effect is that vague oppressive sense of guilt… or at least a mild dissatisfaction… about the state of our heart… a concern about its poverty… the fact that it does not care… about its brothers and sisters – structurally ordained though it may be… it still feels yucky.
And there’s no judgment in saying that… it simply means that what we’ve been enabled to see – or not – is by virtue of our connections to our power-sources… that determines how much of the world we can be. That ‘power’ keeps us disconnected from them… intentionally… is devastating to the health of the species.
In the final analysis, ‘rationalism’ is a scarcity of feeling… and ‘scarcity’ is a scarcity of feeling… because there is no scarcity in reality… as the earth is abundant. So it’s a matter of ending manufactured scarcity… there’s no social musculature of future that is different from ‘class’ that isn’t premised on that.
…we have to newly-invent the language… and discuss the power of words for controlling us…
This… rationalism (or its practical expression: ‘scarcity’)… is a meeting place of all the rigid structures… an ‘imperialism of rigidity’ we’ve been trapped in… in being trapped in bloodless thought and denuded words and manufactured want… they meet in us…
…we are trapped in words and thought that works against us… an interweave in us… but then dispelled as well… in us… by developing our thought… by making our own lexicon.
It is only the few… under the rule of ‘power’… who have determined and possess the lexicon… and so it inevitably reflects and reinforces ‘class’…
…and this problem of ‘class’… (or ‘power’…) owning the lexicon will plague us… until we take that ‘longest stride’ Fry told us we have to take….
As Christopher Fry said… in A Sleep of Prisoners… “the human heart can go to the lengths of God…” (he spoke personally….)
It is the endless delimiting of things that got us this mess… would you clap rings around the infinite? Must we drag our chains into the future?
I think not.
We have to newly-invent the language as we newly-invent the world… New words mean not just seeing with fresh eyes… but rebuilding trust… which Shakespeare shows to us.
We’ve discussed the fact that Shakespeare is a rich and complex study of ‘power’… but that study is simultaneously, and inextricably mixed with… a study of the power of words for controlling us… i.e. as a tool of ‘power’… and I don’t just mean… in a simple sense… as propaganda… but, more subtly… as a worm to be inserted in the apple of communion… into our inter-relationships based on good fellowship… rotting them out from within. This is a tactic as old as ‘class’ itself.
This is up for me because I’m reading Shakespeare’s Richard III… the man who was the king of England from 1483 to 1485… the one we mentioned recently because his sword-bludgeoned and humiliated skeleton was found under a parking lot in Leicester….
…and by ‘humiliated’ I mean that there were ‘humiliation injuries’, the article said… “including a sword wound in the right buttock.” We can imagine, I think, what happened. A note at the back of Shakespeare’s Richard III says this (in explanation of the line, referring to Richard, “thou elfish-marked, abortive, rooting hog!”):
Richard’s badge was a white boar. In the second year of Richard’s reign, 1484, William Collingborne published the couplet:
“The Cat, the Rat, and Louell our dog,
Rule all England under an hog.
Meaning by the hog, the dreadfull wild boare, which was the king’s cognissance.”
Collingborne was executed for this indiscretion. (The Yale Shakespeare, Edited by Jack R. Crawford)
…Shakespeare by class…
Anyway… the play by Shakespeare was mentioned on the radio because it has a particularly strong woman character… so strong in fact that it inspired the guest to want to be an actor… and as I don’t need a lot of prompting to pick up a Shakespeare play… and as I’ve only read a very few, I thought, alright… I’d check it out.
…the truth is there to see of 'power's deeds…
Now this theme of the mis-use of language by ‘power’ comes up constantly in Shakespeare, yet we never hear its significance discussed for our current puzzle of how to get beyond these sad guys… and any listener to these shows will not be perplexed about that… (what? ‘power’ doesn’t want us discussing its chief tactic?!)
(…as that is how they control us… with words… and rationalism is how they rob us of them… as Shakespeare pointed out in Measure For Measure… [see: “Getting To Our Future Freedom”’s “The Language”])
In Richard III… which I’m still laboriously step-step-stepping my way through… as the notes in the back are a necessary accompaniment to the main themes… one of the first things I find myself pondering… possibly because I’m also simultaneously reading Christopher Fry’s The Lady’s not for Burning… is the notion of ‘the witch’… because it seems to be a person who can see the truth writ in acts (the acts of ‘power’… whoever manifests it)… and is not conned by ‘mere’ words.
…'mutual confidence' must be the emblem of our future… must give it its design…
Of course, that words mean nothing means the shattering of the possibility of trust… and the vampire loosed… runs….
‘Power’ has quite literally stolen our words… when they are hollowed out to zeros… and turned over to mere inventive manipulation of what – denuded of heart – is weighted by ‘power’ with rationalism.
Mutual confidence comes from a common language… from having our words back… on which conviction... certainty… can begin to grow…
[Kropotkin tells us that “mutual confidence is the first condition for courage…” (and we cannot have confidence if nothing is certain….) I think the sense in which he means that, is both societal and spiritual… that ‘mutual confidence’ must be the emblem of our future… must give it its design… so I believe we should be asking: “how can ‘mutual confidence’ be reflected in the design of our world?” (See: “A bit more on ‘certainty’… and ‘theater’…” below)
And our upcoming shows I hope will be useful in helping us think through the musculature of a social world in which each one of us is actively… consciously actively… uncoerced actively… growing that world with our lives… in which the world is a garden blessed by the heathen rainfall – us.]
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…to distinguish true gold from false gold in a goal…
Do we really need ‘the media’ to: “tell us what’s going on in our lives”? as one progressive pundit said this week…
“…if people do not know what’s going on around them they cannot act intelligently…?” said another…
…or do we need to listen to our bodies?
If we have been robbed of words… as I’ve been arguing… and in being robbed of the power of defining… and holding those definitions firm… robbed, as well, of certainty… which we need to challenge ‘power’s totalitarian control of our thinking… then we do not want the media to “tell us what’s going on in our lives…” just the opposite… we want the media to disperse widely the unthinkable thoughts… to encourage us to think about… and discuss together… what is not going on in our lives… what is not there… what has been stolen… why it’s not there… why it’s gold… and how to distinguish true from false gold, We need a touchstone.
And for that there’s this: heart knows….
Does the pundit call on you to reach out for those excised bits?… to reclaim what’s been stolen?… to affix to that from which we’ve been disconnected?
The human heart extends to the lengths of the infinite… and yet… we’re never allowed to come together to realize that truth. Does the pundit want us to? Does it tell us that the theft of our connections is illegitimate?
This week I listened to a pundit who lightly plunks the bell of righteousness but never summons up the strength to grab the pull and put some body into it.
This is what he said (in paraphrase):
The Occupy Movement, we’re told, lacked a goal, but that’s not so… it had a very clear demand: “we want to reverse corporate domination and take back power for the people.” The decision to break-up the encampment was telling. It said the state has nothing but repression with which to control the people.(Chris Hedges, speaking in Seattle, replayed by David Barsamian on Alternative Radio, 07.29.13)
So… to distinguish true gold from false in a goal… ask: “what is the operational flip-side? When you flip that goal you gotta see… one clear road to get there… if it’s gold. But far from showing us a clear road to the goal… all he can give to us… is more hopin’ and wishin’ and dreamin’ and prayin’…. This is not gold… this is common as dirt… and designed to keep us wallowing in it… ad infinitum.
To serve as advice to us he took the words of a priest he knew:
“…we have to do the good and then we have to let it go. The Buddhists call it karma.” If we stand with the good ‘power’ can be defeated.
To offer such advice in such times as these… is gross abdication of that responsibility he wears… by claiming to represent for those of us who have no way… of having our voices flung across the world.
And it’s straight-up con to say that all the state has left to rely on is blunt repression with which to corral us… come on… that’s not just crude assessment… it’s wrong. The state didn’t dare lift its heavy hand till it had already undermined Occupy from within… with agents…. ‘Power’ knows it must first capture hearts and minds (…with lies – that’s all they got…) for when the people are roused… they rise.
And so the dilemma of agents must be factored into our goal…. If Occupy had stiffened itself up with a vision… of a different future… with a clear picture of the world they wanted… and found some means of communicating it’s basic lines to ‘the people’… that would have energized and strengthened – bulked up – the movement.
Because a healthy wind is blowing…a new reclaimed spirit is remaking the world… we are being made ‘one’ on a new basis… on a basis of a conscious claiming of our commonality and our responsibility for each other and the earth.
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We develop certainty by reclaiming our sources of power consciously… if we let ‘power’ define us… we will forever be its servants… and lost to ourselves…
…so we need quiet… we need to disconnect from the ‘master’s voice and tongue – which means we have to think and speak more consciously… let our heart and courage guard the gate – is that word ‘worker’ tainted slavish? Then let’s not use it brothers and sisters… let’s listen to those who love us… not the ones who want to use us as fuel for furthering their fantasies… listen to the earth that feeds our wholeness… not the broken souls who want to control us…. A hold on minds is only broken from re-thinking bottom-up.
And listen to our heart that beats in common… feel the sadness and fear so we can move beyond it… let each source flow into the others till your heart… filled with that knowledge… lifts up your brothers and sisters…
Gorky prayer… All things are attainable to those who are free…
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. The earth will be peopled with free men, great in their freedom. The hearts of all will be open, and every heart will be innocent of envy and malice. Then life will be transformed into the great service of Man, and Man will have become something fine and exalted, for all things are attainable to those who are free. Then people will live in truth and freedom for the sake of beauty, 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. They will be great people, those of the new life!…
And for the sake of that life I am ready to do anything at all. (Maxim Gorky, Mother, Chapter XXIV)
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WUR, Sunday, August 11th, 2013: “‘Classification’ will not bring ‘class’ to a close (Pt. 3): “what do we covet?” Draft
…if mayors with means need help understanding the support Occupiers need… in addition to land… let's see…
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?
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…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…
We don’t know our own beauty… our vision is kept intentionally skewed and foreshortened… the punditry is the Greek Chorus to ‘power’… (and… as an aside… it’s suggestive that in the early 19th century – says Wikipedia – controversy erupted among the claqueurs of the day at the intimation that the purpose of the Chorus was to indoctrinate ‘the people’… to tell them what to think…) the ‘wage-work system’ means you can buy anyone to do anything – and that alone should tell us that it’s unfit for the life we are given – and so what is the ‘social musculature’ of freedom? Also… in Waking Up and subsequently I’ve been arguing that ‘power’ is very organized… and… since reading The Open Society and It’s Enemies… that it is not monied interests as monied interests making the deep moves behind the scenes… pulling the strings… but something far more disturbing…. A handful of folks who dream of being philosopher-kings… The Tribe of Plato.
Today we’ll also be asking how do you know that it’s these folks and not ‘capital’… i.e. impersonal so-called ‘economic forces’? How do you know that there are conscious actors rigging the rules of ‘survival under hierarchy’ such that all the resources of the planet get concentrated in their hands… to be used to realize a plan… that is in essence totalitarian? And why does it matter? Why does it matter whether the folks causing the harm are organized players motivated by greed for money and ‘power’-to-stay-on-top… or organized players motivated by greed for ‘power’ because they have a clear plan… and a clear picture in their minds… of what they want?
Is the point of our activism just to address the harm and attempt to reverse its effects? – which is all we hear from Left pundits.
If the problem is defined as unregulated competition… or unfettered greed that disturbs the orderly consumption of the planet… then you’ll hear even left pundits – as I heard one this week – say that “we need rational economic planning at the G20…” I’ve heard that all my whole life… “we need rational economic planning…” – the level of that planning just keeps ascending up there. So you see how that definition of the problem – that we hear from the pundits – pushes us to get on the same side with ‘power’… to believe that our interests coincide… whereas, if the problem is defined as conscious actors with a plan… then… they are taking us somewhere… with intention… with focus… and with a whole lot of determination… which means that if we don’t stop them, we’ll find ourselves deposited in a hell-hole for a future bemoaning our fate… betraying our children… and the whole human race. So this must be discussed… and discussed broadly.
We just have to define things authentically… and sense is made of the mess.
These are the themes of today’s show.
…authentic lives means self-creation…truth… happiness…
In upcoming shows we’re going to try to merge our discussion of the need to develop certainty – by means of a common, authentic (earth-based) language – in order to flesh out our picture of a future premised on abundance instead of scarcity… with our discussion of infrastructure redesign. And on this last point I just want to say that it might forward our discussion if instead of saying ‘the state’ we begin to use the phrase “the aggregation of ‘power.’”
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. And I prefer the phrase ‘self-creation’ to ‘self-determination’ because ‘self-determination’ has been claimed by ‘power’… and has come to mean ‘state sovereignty’… which once again cycles our thoughts back to ‘protecting and strengthening the state’… instead of taking for our basis self-creating individual human beings… agreeing to congregate.
But we can only create this society 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?” – means and ends are one… when it comes to freedom.
Discussions of this dilemma are happening… all over the planet… but how can we broaden and accelerate them… commensurate with the threat that faces us?
I think we have to see it… see ‘self-creation’… and that we have to model it for each other… and lean on our sources of power… consciously… for help. If we let ‘power’ define us… we will forever be its servants… and lost to ourselves…
…so we need quiet… we need to disconnect from the ‘master’s voice and tongue – which means we have to think and speak more consciously… let our heart and courage guard the gate – is that word ‘worker’ tainted slavish? Then let’s not use it brothers and sisters… let’s listen to those who love us… not the ones who want to use us as fuel for furthering their fantasies… listen to the earth that feeds our wholeness… not the broken souls who want to control us…. A hold on minds is only broken from re-thinking bottom-up.
And listen to our heart that beats in common… feel the sadness and fear so we can move beyond it… let each source flow into the others till your heart… filled with that knowledge… lifts up your brothers and sisters…
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. The earth will be peopled with free men, great in their freedom. The hearts of all will be open, and every heart will be innocent of envy and malice. Then life will be transformed into the great service of Man, and Man will have become something fine and exalted, for all things are attainable to those who are free. Then people will live in truth and freedom for the sake of beauty, 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. They will be great people, those of the new life!…
And for the sake of that life I am ready to do anything at all. (Maxim Gorky, Mother, Chapter XXIV)
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…we don't know our own beauty…
What’s clear from the very first page of Mother is that we-the-people don’t know ourselves as stars… and that we are careless of our beauty – many ancestors who long for generalized human freedom have pointed this out – and the reason we don’t know it is that we’re never given time to stop… to see it….
‘Power’ will encourage us to believe… by means of its recognition-dispensation rights… that beauty exists only where it serves them… and for that they will dispense recognition… for qualities we exhibit that bolster their story… the story that legitimates the fact of rule itself (‘progress’ being the chief one – and by the by, have you noticed that whenever the people [globally] start to rise… they announce some new Mars-expedition? I guess just to remind us [and themselves] who’s in charge…) gifts which… once relinquished… deepen our unconscious shame and self-betrayal… eroding our spirit from within… when we sell our gifts from earth (‘power’ didn’t give them… yet they make certain they brand them…) to the highest bidder.
Recalling that ‘power’ has locked us in place by being global – by ensuring that we got no place else to go – when I read what follows from the opening pages of Mother… we should ask ourselves what the people he describes could do to unseat that weight that ‘power’ had placed to bias the world toward manufactured scarcity (uncertainty…) to suit the narrow interest of the few.
I suggest we do this because our situation today is no different… except in one important respect… from that of these men and women laboring in a Russian factory a hundred years ago… but the distance from our present enmeshment may help us to see more clearly the lines and dimension of the trap… help us see what some of us can’t see in looking at our contemporary reality – because we are too involved in it… it’s our water when we’re fish.
Some ancestors of heart tried to help us see how contrived (planned) our enslavement… the poisoned fluid we swim in… by presenting it as a futuristic nightmare (George Orwell’s 1984). Others (like William Shakespeare and Christopher Fry) tried to help us see it by showing that the past is… in its essentials… in its relationships of ‘power’… the same as this present that we’re living. Still others, like Maxim Gorky, exposed reality directly… by shining a bright light around it:
The day had been devoured by the factory, whose machines sucked up as much of the workers’ strength as they needed. The day was struck out, leaving not a trace, and Man had advanced one more step towards his grave. But now he was looking forward to rest and to the delights of a smoke-filled tavern, and he was content….
On meeting their friends they talked about the factory, the machines and their foremen; they never thought or talked about anything not connected with their work….
Their human relations were dominated by a lurking sense of animosity, a feeling as old as the incurable exhaustion of their muscles. [Especially the ones called ‘the brain’… and ‘the heart’… and ‘the soul’….] People were born with this malady of the spirit inherited from their fathers, and like a dark shadow it accompanied them to the very grave, making them do things revolting in their senseless cruelty. (Maxim Gorky, Mother, Chapter I)
The ‘wage-work system’ gives us what thoughts ‘power’ is comfortable with us thinking… thoughts designed to limit us to given functions… consign us to a life we do not determine… except in the sense of choosing chains… and the selection we’re presented with is that fait accompli called ‘the state’… ‘power’-aggregated.
So… this is us… if we care to admit it…
(“…Oh, be disturbed, be disturbed, madam, to the extent of a tut and I’ll thank God for civilization.” [The Lady’s not for Burning]…)
…and it’s essential that we start to care… because we are in a moment when the exhaustion is curable and this cycle of beleaguered spirit can be broken… and we can look around us and no longer see ‘inevitability’… but instead ‘possibility’… writ large in the restless hearts around us… and to the degree we back each other vigorously.
…for the 'social musculature' of the future… I choose what Nikola chose… our unified Mind…
Now… on this matter of ‘the social musculature of the future’… which we raised last week… I believe we have to rethink ‘social life’ such that it means full engagement with the world… of everyone in society… and of everyone with… their full faculties. And that can only mean uninfluenced by anything but what “the soul selects…”
The Soul selects her own Society –
Then – shuts the Door –
To her divine Majority –
Present no more –
Unmoved – she notes the Chariots – pausing –
At her low Gate –
Unmoved – an Emperor be kneeling
Upon her Mat –
I’ve known her – from an ample nation –
Choose One –
Then – close the Valves of her attention –
Like Stone –
(Emily Dickinson)
We need that level of focus on our future… to get there.
So let’s stretch wide our visioning wings for a moment… and swing our vision wide around the globe… where first alight our eyes… on what?… that… set alight… would send light further on… into ever greater illumination… of the world we want?
And I choose what Nikola Tesla chose… our unified Mind… built into the infrastructure that we create… but it must be an infrastructure that cannot harm us.
Ok… so let’s assume, for the purposes of this discussion, that there are wireless signals that don’t damage the heart… the circulatory system… as I heard one electrical engineer say some while back… on the progressive airwaves….
If ‘power’ depends on secrecy to keep its’ mean privilege… needs it for its very existence… (and so needs the punditry to direct our eyes elsewhere…)
…then…
…dispersed… decentralized… and distributed power and truth to every corner of our earth depends on openness…
…on all eyes coveting a healthy earth… and healthy souls… and the honor of being common shepherds of that health.
We need full openness.
And that being so… the social musculature of our future distributes power and light (knowledge of one another)… ‘light’ meaning the free flow of our communications… such that as we maintain village life we maintain the whole….
This means we see… and so consciously and continuously maintain and recreate… our inter-connectivity… our interweave… If our social world is a tapestry… we are all sewers of it… and textures and tinters and weaves… ends and means in one.
As rivers run to oceans… and as the water passes by… we see its full trajectory in our minds… each one of us… standing on our bit of earth… eyes sweeping in wide arc across our common sky… we see the interweave in full… we see we are a part… of a vast tapestry… of heart and mind unified.
But not one contrived by force… but by our open and encouraged and enlarged ‘seeing’…
…every one of us has equal access to the means…
…as every one of us is self-creating means…
…so each can move to where the thoughts and actions are that move us…
…that we want to see more of…
…and all along the course of each one’s journey to this ‘closer seeing’…
…we offer to each other… means…
…we want to further our sisters and brothers…
…as we want that for ourselves…
(…recall… we are the opposite of ‘class’…)
…and some among us ‘see’ by sitting with the green…
…and some among us ‘see’ along the long roads…
…noticing what is needed….
Imagine the world that will unfold…
…as we walk freely on our roads…
…a world of conscious… engaged… ‘seeing’… folks…
…looking for beauty…
…to cool the eyes…
…and in incipiency…
…feeding wholeness and health for all life…
…and ‘loss’ is lifted by a hundred hands holding it…
…and in…
…that love that’s given unreservedly…
…because it can.
I write these words after a lifetime of not seeing – of being kept intentionally in the dark… what worse indictment can there be… of a global society… with a bankrupt leadership by-and-for the few… it’s sole aim being… to keep us quiet… and ignorant of the truth.
You know how… with tree roots… when they encounter a house, they go around it?… and I suspect a lot of young, non-human, urban animals get hit by cars because such blunt lack of accommodativeness… is unknown to healthy life…
…life accommodates life… unless mutilated by force – necessity.
…so it will be… that once we are free… and all of us can see… Grandmother’s vast abundance… we will not be covetous of it… and will only want to see… more and more and more… like all our great… and I mean Goya-great… who every day see more… and more… and more…
So the ‘social musculature’ of our future freedom is a mental musculature – the capacity to develop our thought unreservedly is allowed in every human (…because it’s what we want to do by virtue of what earth gave us… it’s what we are as earth…)
…because we can (…the earth allows it.)
“The Soul selects her own Society” – that can only be true for each one of us… if coercion is removed from our backs… and we can stand unbeleaguered… and we are free to choose… as a bloom unhindered feels its way to the sun it needs… so must we be allowed to feel… (the wage-work system converts us all into automatons. Emily in some sense foresaw this, she said, “…Reduce no human spirit to disgrace of price…” wise advice.)
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…now that’s the wage-work system… manufactured scarcity makes it so…
I’ve been arguing that we need our own lexicon… The People’s Lexicon… A Lexicon for a Free People…
…in it we might define ‘necessity’ as: “to drift from our true nature because we feel compelled to…” and ‘wage work’ as: “the practical expression of created scarcity, the key means for compelling and conditioning humans to service, for keeping humans needy, and subdued to ‘power’.”
Jennet: Do you think he knows what’s been happening to us?
Thomas: Old angel-scraper? He knows all right. But he’s subdued to the cloth he works in.
(Christopher Fry, The Lady’s not for Burning)
O, for my sake do you with Fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide
Than public means which public manners breeds.
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,
And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.
Pity me then, and wish I were renewed,
Whilst, like a willing patient, I will drink
Potions of eisel ’gainst my strong infection.
No bitterness that I will bitter think,
Nor double penance to correct correction.
Pity me then, dear friend, and, I assure ye,
Even that your pity is enough to cure me.
(Sonnet 111)
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In The People’s Lexicon… our Lexicon for a Free People…
‘Worker’ might be: “a person all of whose thoughts are given or driven by the Duke of Gloucester’s purse”:
Murderer 1: I thought thou hadst been resolute.
Murderer 2; So I am, to let him live.
Mur. 1: I’ll back to the Duke of Gloucester [soon to be Richard III], and tell him so.
Mur. 2: Nay, I prithee, stay a little: I hope this passionate humour of mine [conscience] will change; it was wont to hold me but while one tells [counts to] twenty.
Mur. 1: How dost thou feel thyself now?
Mur. 2: Some certain dregs of conscience are yet within me.
Mur. 1: Remember our reward when the deed’s done.
Mur. 2: Come, he dies: I had forgot the reward.
Mur. 1: Where’s thy conscience now?
Mur. 2: O, in the Duke of Gloucester’s purse.
Mur. 1: When he opens his purse to give us our reward, thy conscience flies out.
Mur. 2: ’Tis no matter; let it go: there’s few or none will entertain it. (Richard III, I. iv)
Then… as now.
Now… that’s the wage-work system… manufactured scarcity makes it so… the Duke of Gloucester’s purse driving and controlling us… whether we want to admit it or not…
So, we’ve no shortage of honorable ancestors telling us the truth… the only shortage is of opportunities to discuss it over the airwaves.
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…the power of ‘intended but unrealized effects’ (i.e. a vision)… let’s get us a new destination… please…
All life is so powerful – but it needs to be free… if you try to harness that power, you destroy its essential nature… and create something… not just half of… but warped from… what it’s meant to be.
(Now, ‘power’ will tell us that it’s not possible for all of us to be free… or, like David Brooks, will tell us that ‘free’ means “the wisdom to see that not everyone can be free”… or: “the wisdom to see that each must be unfree for ‘society’ to be free”… or some such convoluted non-logic… convoluted the better to con us with… to get us to accept that ‘web of obligation’ as ‘the good life’… or ‘maturity’… or some such nonsense… so his masters can enjoy their leisure untroubled and unhindered by the foaming of the spent fuel – us – unwilling to go quietly to our cages… and then our graves.)
In harnessing us to its vision… with the weight supplied by us given… the world was distorted by that weight… and the biased minds keep biasing the means… exponentially… so the purse grows… continuously… as into its coffers our stolen lives go… exponentially. This is what Hirschman was duly noting… how wishes are, in this case, indeed horses… and these horses have been pounding our backside… for quite some time.
The basic theme of this work also connects with a common interest in self-knowledge: how exactly have we ended up where we now are?…
…there is much general interest in the relationship between expectations that support and sustain powerful and profound changes without actually leading to the realization of those expectations. In contrast with Smith’s and Menger’s interest in, and Hayek’s fascination with, “unintended but realized effects,” Hirschman shows the power and influence of “intended but unrealized effects.” [i.e., a vision…] The latter may be less observable than the former (since unrealized effects are not there to be observed), but the influence of those unrealized expectations survives powerfully today. (Amartya Sen, in his “Forward” to Albert O. Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph, p. xvii
“How ’bout it Doctor, why don’t you focus some of that high-powered insight on yourself?… or maybe you’re afraid to?” (That’s from Silence of the Lambs.)
Brakenbury [regarding the sleeping Clarence (the imprisoned brother of the Duke of Gloucester), who’d just described a horrible nightmare in which he was tormented by his guilt and betrayal]:
Sorrow breaks seasons and reposing hours,
Makes the night morning, and the noon-tide night.
Princes have but their titles for their glories,
An outward honour for an inward toil;
And, for unfelt imaginations,
They often feel a world of restless cares:
So that, between their titles and low name,
There’s nothing differs but the outward fame.
(Richard III, I. iv)
But… I would add: “and the capacity to do harm.”
The note at the bottom tells us that ‘unfelt imaginations’ means: “what they imagine they might do but are unable to realize.”
I.e. the power of a vision is also the curse of a vision… if you can’t do it… if it’s opposed to life… if it’s against the earth… because earth… life… will rise.
And even though that ‘for-the-few-exclusive-goal’ be unattainable… O the damage it can do… the damage that this tiny few can do… in their continuous strivingness… to fill that bottomless hole.
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…just a shiveringly-small and unloved child…
Considering the character of Clarence, I thought… Shakespeare absorbed almost all of the whole… now that’s a goal… that’s a vision that can’t bite you in the ass… because the earth backs it.
It’s quite disturbing to see Shakespeare begging child-princes for money to write and produce his plays… but the result speaks for itself. He shows us ‘power’ despite…. We saw what happened to Collingborne when he looked too closely… Shakespeare had to do a mad-dance on that egg… he looks directly at the ‘power’-guys… and they don’t like to be scrutinized. And saying this reminds me of that line, spoken by Clarice to Lector, in Silence of the Lambs: “How ’bout it Doctor, why don’t you focus some of that high-powered insight on yourself?… or maybe you’re afraid to?”…
(Recall the character of ‘the prince’… his vision and his troubled soul… its ever-seekingness… the fact that he can only pursue his vision if we aren’t aware he’s doing it… the exceedingly strong need… given all of this… for a huge self-belief. This quote from Virginia Woolf, modified, sheds even more light on this question:
Possibly when [‘the prince’] insisted a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of [‘we-who-do-the-work’], he was concerned not with [our] inferiority, but with his own superiority. That was what he was protecting rather hot-headedly and with too much emphasis, because it was a jewel to him of the rarest price. Life for both sexes – and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement – is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle.… [We-who-do-the-work] have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of ‘the prince’ at twice its natural size. Without that power probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle. The glories of all our wars would be unknown.… (A Room of One’s Own)
But perhaps the potent reason is the best one… that if we make them out by their acts… if we see the hidden hand that wears the stain… and rigs the game… then that’s the end of rigging… and all thought for them of winning… and if they can’t win!… well, then… O my goddess they’d be common!… and ‘common’ to them means the fall… of the paterfamilias… of the Tribe of Plato….
The power of conviction is such… that when its feathers are plucked… its magician’s trick exposed… and it can’t stand up for the cold… it shrinks to its immature stature… and we see that what caused such havoc… was just a shiveringly-small and unloved child… (as in the closing credit-sequence of the film Men-In-Black… when we see that the ‘power’ wreaking havoc with the world is but a child ignored… with means… grown mean… and bored.)
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Let's start talking about the power of a vision… for 'power'… for us…
Listening to a series of foreclosure-fight-back stories, I thought… “what’s not to be inspired by?” creative challenging of heartless banks… well, let’s all rise and cheer… but… it could inspire us to believe… that just being on the side of ‘right’ means the world we want will come about incrementally… just lots of good folks doing lots of good things will do…
…and so it might… if ‘power’ wasn’t’ actively working against it… with a lot more accumulated resources (the fluid form of our lives…) and much greater certainty about what they want… and the means to span centuries.
We have to start talking about what it means that ‘power’ looks long… what it means to have a vision… what a long-term vision can do… that it multiplies impact… that it allows ‘power’ to be almost indifferent to short-term set-backs because it rears ‘its children’… biological and trained… to continue to move towards realizing those long-term effects that give it its raison d’etre. (Recall the …ancient Chinese fable… that Mao told….) Let’s start talking about it.
What does it mean to have a vision?… for ‘power’… for us.
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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…
“We don’t need ‘masters’ or ‘managers’ to ‘work hard’… when will that be what we hear discussed over the airwaves?” is how we concluded last week’s show… such a simple thought… and… once we consult our bodies… when we’ve got that glimmering fish we’re pursuing by the tail… so obvious…
…so obvious… and yet a truth we never hear… “now, why should that be?”
And we concluded that authentic conversations about ‘race’ and ‘socialism’ must lead to tenderness… i.e. to allegiance with each another and with all life… i.e. must lead to our own power restored… i.e. must lead to solidarity… i.e. must explode all idle categories.
And we argued that we have to unite these discussions of ‘the state’… jointly with discussions of what it means to ‘be free’ – into a single frame globally… which lights them from within… that… united global action requires that we first have thought it through…
…literally… “thought it through”… with the light of authentic earth shining into every hollow category… and exposing it as false…
…as only when we readily distinguish false from true… and test truth with the steely communal mind’s eye of mutual discussion… a test of strength that only earth withstands…
…will ‘certainty’ be like steel tempered in our hand…
…and only when we have this truth in hand… do we possess the necessary ‘command’… does certainty become our joint possession… our weapon and our staff… for standing strong together… and against… ‘class.’
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The discussion of what it means… “to be free”… necessarily leads to the discussion of what it means “to be powerful”… and beginning to think this “through and through”… from one side to the other… and from above…
…this process develops our thought… forges powerful people.
And this is critical… as we can’t want to be powerful… until we see it… see it modeled…
“…what do we covet?” said our Hannibal Lector to his Clarice… his light upon the world…
…and as we explore this notion of being powerful individually I think we’ll see… it necessarily means exploding the categories… becoming more open beings…
…not relinquishing tribe exactly… as its through our very personal relations that we learn the world… but certainly more porous… as once it was… when strangers were honored for the broadened vistas that they brought… as world-travelers… with them.
Our allegiance is necessarily dual… both to the earth (all life)… and to ourselves… as its closest manifestation… to the degree we represent for it.
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Towards the end of the July 28th show we said that ‘the state’ plugs our ‘caring’ into ‘outrage’… and then directs it towards false culprits…
We could as justly have said that ‘the state’ hijacks empathy into ‘service’ … and ‘service’ ends up meaning ‘the state’…
(…even when we call it something else… like an NGO… or an ‘issue’… because ‘the state’ is that fait accompli we adjust to… and we legitimate it when we’re successful in making incremental improvements in the lives of some tiny percentage of its subjects…)
…because we have no other secular models for service… and the non-secular models mire us in particularity… Popper’s unhappy notion of what ‘having tribe’ would mean.
I believe we need such a secular model of service to advocate for the species… and for life generally… and that focusing narrowly on a specificity ultimately becomes but a form of ‘mind-worship’ (elevating abstracts)… or proselytizing… a narrowing of responsibility.
–––
…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?…
“What, after all is a halo? It’s only one more thing to keep clean.” (Christopher Fry, The Lady’s not for Burning)
They’ve got us focused on function… on distraction and diversion… on performing… to keep us… from… listening.
So… we’ve discussed that:
…the current structure prevents our being powerful… as the current structure reproduces scarcity…
…the current structure prevents us living our nature… as ‘scarcity’ dries the bloom of empathy on the stalk….
We’ve also said that power comes with certainty… and that our trap is structural… i.e. was here before us… built with intent to last well past any living generation…
…so we must ask: “in what way does the structure itself reproduce our confusion – which is the mental state that accompanies structural disempowerment… the continuous mental state associated with the absence of certainty? How is this mental state reinforced daily… as part of the structural reproduction of the absence of our – we-the-people’s – certainty?”… a continuous state of confusion is like a ‘bolster shot’ for the structure.
In order to shake off ‘power’ and build our power we have to dispel confusion… and this requires developing meanings that we share in common and agree on…
…dispelling confusion, e.g., about the meaning of words like ‘structure’ or ‘structures’ or ‘organizations’… or ‘institutions’… and about the notion that if we create ‘new’ ones… or ‘fix’ the old ones… we need not upend… or start all over again… but… rather… ‘progress’?… ‘advance’?… or ‘stretch’?… the rigidness to ‘fit’ our greater expansiveness?
‘Power’s institutions are riddled through with that intent of reproducing ‘class’… are structured hierarchically to ensure it… and cannot exist in a world in which we straighten our backs… and live fully in our human-ness…
During the July 28 show, in answer to the question, “why to we have pundits?”… it seemed to me the inescapable conclusion was: to keep us confused… fused… frozen… fixed… paralyzed… in cons.
The punditry conditions (limits) our ‘seeing’… conditions it to ignore the obvious: that ‘power’ exists… and that ‘rules’ don’t apply to it… to view ‘rule’ as legitimate – and ‘the rules’ worthy of respect… and the false divides of ‘nation’ and ‘class’ the punditry all treat as sacrosanct. So if what we covet is what we see… the song and dance of the punditry is designed especially to keep us from claiming as our dual birthplace… our bodies and our world… which the pundits are paid to tell us… are both the province of the state… ‘power’-in-aggregate.
The punditry… in being ‘power’s cheerleaders and the back-up singers… its claqueurs and choir… are designed to erode our confidence and our belief in solidarity.
It is a tribe in the worst sense… in Popper’s sense… Popper’s concept of ‘narrow tribalism’ being the antithesis of the ‘openness’ for which he was the chief advocate… and which he consciously and continuously tried to forward in emphasizing the importance of honesty in education of the young… i.e. he believed in helping us all develop certainty….
But his notion of ‘tribe’ is a ‘class’-based… i.e. scarcity-based notion… and this notion definitely applies… to how the privileged-intermediary-official-spokespeople practice their ‘craft’… opposed to seeing all of us share in what is now a perk reserved for them….
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…we all have rich capacities… untapped under ‘class’… they come with the package called ‘human’…
When we hear one say, “there’s no such thing as ‘perfect equality’…” let’s think this through… and as we do… remember what we’ve been discussing… about the illusion… systematically-maintained… of ‘scarcity’…
Just as Popper’s concept of ‘tribe’ is a scarcity- or class-based notion… so is the pundit’s use of ‘equality’. And class-based notions are false… i.e. the earth don’t back them.
Some months back I listened to a public radio conversation between dog-trainers on their ‘craft’ (and we’ll ignore for the purpose of this example the issue of ‘training’ non-human animals.) One guest… who talked more like a policy analyst or academic… (actually he may have been an academic…) than someone who worked with living things… said: “just as some people are more intelligent than others, some dogs are more intelligent than others.” You could feel the bristle when the man with more earth in him replied, “I don’t believe there’s any stupid dogs. There are people who don’t know how to work with certain dogs… but any dog is capable of learning anything.”
‘Power’ is very big on this notion of ‘breeding’… the notion that some… by virtue of their ‘blood’, or genes… possess some ‘natural’ superiority when it comes to ‘intellectuality’ – ‘mind’ – which… as we’ve been discussing… they claim reverence for… and elevate over… ‘hand’.
And this false reverence and false elevation is what pundits are thinking of when they say, “there’s no such thing as ‘perfect equality’….”
When I went into the trades, one teacher said to us that what he loved about electrical work was that there was a place in it for everyone… a spot every one of us could find… in which to shine. If you loved ‘logic’, there was motor control; if you had an artistic bent, especially if it was combined with an intuitive gift for making spatial calculations, you could bend and run conduit or racks. So whether you loved math or physical challenges, big-picture layout or electrical calculations, drawing, theory, or the visual-rendering of things in spatial-relation…
…I mean electrical work is a universe unto itself…
…and it all required… relied on… bringing… and using… the whole of one’s self… one’s wholeness – mind, body, and spirit.
The truth is… we all have rich capacities… untapped under ‘class’… under ‘power’… it comes with the package called ‘human’… and the misshapen, shallow thing that pundit-intermediaries mean by ‘equality’… (i.e. squirming on the same narrow rung while stomping on those below…) is a standard we shall blow past so fast – once we’re free – the living of it will be breath-taking.
All ideologies of ‘class’ have at base this key message: “Turn away from your brothers and sisters… they are common, you are not… ally yourself with the truly great… the power and the majesty of the ideal state.”
To tell men that they are equal has a certain sentimental appeal. But this appeal is small compared with that made by a propaganda that tells them that they are superior to others, and that others are inferior to them. Are you naturally equal to your servants, to your slaves, to the manual worker who is no better than an animal? The very question is ridiculous! (Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1. p. 96, quoted in Revealing Division, p. 58)
The key divide of ‘class’… is the classification-divide between ‘hand’… and ‘mind’…. Once we leave that behind… the possibilities for a whole life… for humans and all life… are endless.
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WUR, Sunday, August 18th, 2013: “Growing ‘Certain’ that we want to ‘grow up’ as a global humanity… (Pt. 1): “what do we covet? (Pt. 2)” Draft
Egypt… the issue is the global state… we need a common global vision big enough to hold all particularities…
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.
‘Democracy’ cannot work in circumstances of scarcity… and in the absence of scarcity… what would there be to vote on?
08.13.13: Sisters and brothers… today we will focus on “growing ‘certain’ that we want to ‘grow up’ as a global humanity…. Let's begin by reflecting on Kropotkin’s point that individual initiative and growth depends on having mutual confidence in each other. He wrote that, “mutual aid leads to confidence, which is the first condition for courage… and mutual aid leads to individual initiative, which is the first condition for intellectual progress…” (Petr Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, p. 15)
(I believe that our lack of confidence in each other is part and parcel of the lack of confidence in ‘the state’… as we manifest and represent for ‘the state’… as Bentham instructed ‘power’ to ensure… by which he meant that we must be so instructed (constructed) such that we support the set of terms by which ‘power’ is aggregated in ‘the state’ – the primary one being that we renounce possession of our own power… and vest it in ‘the state’. Aggregated ‘power’ (and its lack of authenticity… its fundamental dishonesty… as it must conceal its true purpose… is disseminated out… and filtered down… through us…) is a collective body that exists – in the propaganda…
[…or according to the ideology of ‘democracy’… or ‘communism’… or ‘socialism’… or ‘social democracy’… and perhaps even ‘participatory democracy’… 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’…. But of course that’s never the case in reality… as the B.L.R. example illustrates.)
– 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.)
“Is it funny?”
(Our accommodativeness with what we know in our hearts is not right – ‘the state’ – is picked up on by children at least by age two… the message that “nothing can be done…” so… scale back your hopes and your power… and adjust yourselves to that fait accompli… so they sacrifice themselves as their parents… we… have done… and do.)
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?
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’… and ask what social musculature supports full transparency.
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 behind it… because it fits with that definition and not the others. (And this is also the case I think with the cutting-away of planetary health beneath our feet…. I mean… it’s true that greed does lead to eating the earth faster…i.e. the consolidation and aggregation of the planet’s resources… but this means putting them in a very few hands… and as resources are finite… these few butt up against very real physical limits… but the accumulation is still in their hands regardless. What do you suppose they intend to do with it? Redistribute it… or apply it to the concretization of a vision in which their supremacy gets locked in place… which can only happen if our ‘lower status’ is ‘locked in place’…
…a vision in which they cannot be challenged as… as we’ve been discussing… ‘the state’ is in their pocket. So the question is: what do we want to do about this biasing of the world?
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…)
…a vision 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.
We’re going to begin with some illustration of how using an accurate definition of the problem not only serves as a compass… showing you which way to that future freedom… but as a touchstone to distinguish true from false gold… in the words of the folks you hear… whether in person or over the airwaves.
We’ll take for illustration thoughts and words heard on a single day – August 12, 2013 – on KPFA, a Pacifica (progressive) network radio station. We’ll be asking: “does the pundit shed light?… illuminate ‘the pattern of ‘power’’… help us see past its mask and to its underlying motives?… does it help us become stronger… stimulate us to expand our power… such that we can begin to ask what we want?… or does it confuse?… cause us to feel overwhelmed?… or feed a sense that it’s ‘all too complicated’ for everyday folks to understand?
Because if the world is structured hierarchically… and who can deny that it is?… and if scarcity is the defining characteristic of our lives (globally) overall… and… again… who can deny this? Then that pattern can be found everywhere (and the letter that I shared: “On the practice of ‘democracy’” also serves us as illustration…) and once it’s seen… if we are growing human beings (and I’m talking about the species over time) we should be about moving beyond it… not rediscovering it… generation after generation. Most of the efforts of the pundits in aggregate… because they never point the way out of the muck… the circular trap… but serves to tell us that ‘nothing can be done…” And this is wrong.
We’ll also be discussing the article by David Price that I’ve linked to on the Nascence website, so I hope you have time to check it out: “A Social History of Wiretaps”… that was the subject of one of the interviews we’ll be looking at.
…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…
When we see the same things happening across the country… and the globe… it’s not by accident. But without adequate means for us to discuss what we’re seeing… it’s difficult to piece together the pattern… and act on it.
For some time now, I’ve been looking around, what once was an open and easy-going college-town… and thinking… “all of a sudden it’s like Wild-West-time here…” and I know… it’s not Berkeley alone… it’s all over the globe. We’re those frogs in warming water getting conditioned to accept the heat… Let’s jump out, brothers and sisters, let’s jump out…. And reclaim possession of our kitchen… and brew us up some healthy self-confidence… to turn the false-hearts out… so we can begin to live as free beings.
As confirmation that it’s happening all over… Just now I heard an interview with a New Yorker staff-writer who’s written an article on “civil asset forfeiture…” about how a militarized network of police forces is stealing folks’ property… because they can… and… because they’re told to…
[…let’s always add that last point… of course they are following orders… how else could there be such a synchronized pattern? And don’t you follow bosses’ orders? So let’s not demonize cops… particularly as that is precisely what ‘power’ hopes we will do…]
…and a woman called in from Mendocino County and reported that police there… are using ‘suspicion of a crime’ as an excuse to… strip-search teenagers and confiscate homes…. She said, “In Northern Mendocino County a lot of the criminal activity is on the part of the police force.”
(…and by the by… I don’t think it’s happenstance that twice in recent months a young African-American father with an infant child were shot and killed here in the Bay Area… the first when the father was pulling his baby out of a car-seat, and… most recently… the father and his baby were asleep in a car…. Now it could just be unpaid-racists in love with a fantasy… but it could also be that loving African-American dads is not part of the picture of ‘the Republic’ these ‘power’-guys have…. If you are ‘power’… and have a picture of the world you want… your resources are such… that you can pay people to do the snipping away of what doesn’t reinforce that picture… which makes the work on the policy end… simpler…
…and three catastrophic train accidents within a brief period… all in places where they’re trying to overcome opposition to pipeline-construction… could be coincidence… or could be… not…)
We have to learn to see, recognize and read patterns quickly… while saying focused on a common global vision – i.e. once we see the pattern overall… to develop our own ‘overall’ pattern.
I hope we will not let our activism rest in the collection and dissemination of horrors… ‘power’ is manufacturing trouble in oceans globally… we cannot keep up with them… nor should that be what we’re about. They can manufacture them so fast because they have an ‘original’… a ‘form’… of ‘state’ by which they operate… that serves them as guide…. We have to have our own… ‘picture’ that we systematically watch unfold… and exponentially so… as the fact of our numbers means… if we could coordinate and concentrate our ‘seeing’… we’d be there in triple-time.)
…a ‘propagandist for power’… serving Senator Wyden?… or the National Security Council?…
• A guest on Democracy Now who was a former deputy chief of staff for Democratic Senator Ron Wyden, was interviewed about government domestic surveillance (“Senate Insider Speaks Out: Ex-Wyden Staffer on Secret Laws, Domestic Spying and Obama’s NSA Reforms”), seemed to me a propagandist for ‘power’…
(…and even though you can be a propagandist for ‘power’ without being aware that you are – simply because the ‘master’s voice is so omnipresent… and generally the only one we hear and are conditioned to accept… and we tend to believe the thoughts we hear repeatedly… I suspect this woman is not an unconscious propagandist for ‘power’…)
…but how do you know true from false gold… without a touchstone? Because they will say some things that you agree with… we listeners who want to see fairness established in the world… so some things will seem to cohere with that aim – how else get good-hearted folks to listen sympathetically (‘power’ was schooled in that tactic by Plato…) rather than with a critical mind.
What first got me curious is that Amy Goodman kept trying to get her to voice things that she apparently had written. The guest kept duckin’ and dodgin’… that’s always a ‘tell’… and, secondly, when you find basically only one key substantive point being made repeatedly… only in various ways… repeated throughout the interview… obsessively – that’s another ‘tell’… this guest was not there for discourse… she was there to plant points.
(And… as an aside… I have to express my gratitude to Democracy Now!… despite its silence about ‘power’… about ‘the state’… and the limits it imposes on what we’re allowed to think… for giving us those transcripts of their shows. Because often you don’t realize that delivery has far outdistanced substance… and that no one asked the tough questions… until you read the transcript.)
(There was a second… though minor… point the guest seemed there to plant: “Barack did not keep his promises…” a point being made across the political pundit spectrum. I think we can see in it a Right-wing diligence with an eye on the history books… on constructing a story… the story that Barack’s is a ‘failed presidency’ [and of course as part of a strategy for regaining the presidency]… a diligence which, again, speaks to ‘power’s long-term vision.)
But her primary talking point was this: “Senator Wyden did everything he could… he tried to draw attention… to the Administration’s overreach in its interpretation of the new power authorized by the Patriot Act.” She repeated this refrain in various ways in answer to every question Amy Goodman asked.
We’ve said that a key ‘tell’ that what we’re being served up is not gold… is that the obvious questions are not asked. So when… during the interview… they replayed Barack saying this:
Barack: …[Regarding] Mr. Snowden… if the concern was that somehow [what he did] was the only way to get this information out to the public, I signed an executive order, well before Mr. Snowden leaked this information, that provided whistleblower protection to the intelligence community, for the first time. So there were other avenues available for somebody who’s conscience was stirred and thought that they needed to question government actions.
…the obvious question is: “is that true?…” and if so… what would lead him to not avail himself of this ‘whistleblower protection’… if it exists… and if it would have applied to him?
When Senator Wyden and his former staffer emphasize that he ‘tried’ to tell us his concerns… and the guest makes this point over and over… the next obvious question is: “why does he speak as if he’s helpless? Why not call for debate on the Senate floor and make it clear to us all the extent of the additional power the Patriot Act gives ‘the state’?”
Why was she not called on her talking point: “Sen. Wyden did ‘everything he could’”? …when Article I, Section 6 of the U.S. Constitution says that: “for any Speech or Debate in either House, [a Senator or Representative] shall not be questioned in any other Place”, thus (says Wikipedia) “Senator Gravel [who read 4,100 pages of the Pentagon Papers into the record] could not be prosecuted for anything said on the Senate floor, and, by extension, for anything entered to the Congressional Record, allowing the Papers to be publicly read without threat of a treason trial and conviction. This was confirmed by the Supreme Court in the decision Gravel v. United States.”
And, interestingly, a guest on Letters and Politics last week made precisely this point… saying that if Edward Snowden has simply followed historical precedent and found a sympathizer in Congress to read his revelations into the record he would have had immunity from prosecution… and then this woman is slipped into Democracy Now!
So… how does someone like this get on Democracy Now!… all I can come up with is: she’s a smooth operator and folks spoke for her… but… I suppose to Amy Goodman’s credit… she does cover her butt right up front… by telling us that “Jennifer Hoelzer went to school at the U.S. Naval Academy and spent two years interning for the National Security Council…” and in telling us that probably told us all we need to know.
• Later that morning, a guest on Up Front was interviewed on the same topic. Now I generally don’t find much cheering in the work of academics… but I very much appreciated what I heard from David Price, being interviewed about his article, “A Social History of Wiretaps”, especially in contrast with the earlier interview of the former Wyden staffer. He described the cowardice of Wyden as compared with Otis Pike, who chaired the Pike Committee in the 1970s, which seized Congress’ authority to declassify documents. Pike simply opted to tell people in the U.S. what was being done in their name.
Price also pointed out that moral outrage at government intrusion in our lives is being incrementally massaged out of us with each passing generation – saying that… as opposed to their parents’ generation… his students, far from being horrified at the persistent and increasing intrusion of government into their thoughts and actions, seem to be passively accepting it. (Though we can comfort ourselves by imagining that his students are drawn from among that ‘segment’ that is particularly groomed for self-betrayal.)
…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…
American attitudes towards wiretapping significantly shifted during the 1940s, as the war and changes in the class distribution of telephones helped shift judicial acceptance of wiretaps. In 1940 J. Edgar Hoover attempted to secure new wiretapping powers from Congress but was defeated by FCC Chairman James Fly. But President Roosevelt issued a secret executive order authorizing widespread Justice Department wire-taps of “subversives” and suspected spies. Hoover used these vague new powers to investigate not just Nazis but anyone he thought subversive. Hoover’s assistant, William Sullivan, later recalled that during the war, the FBI routinely conducted warrantless wiretaps. “with the country’s future at stake, getting approval from Washington seemed like an unnecessary legal technicality. Years later, the FBI was still listening in on other people’s conversations without the authorization of the attorney general.” The social history of wiretaps is a history of mission creep, where FBI agents initially hunting for wartime Nazi spies soon monitored progressive activists fighting racial segregation…. (David Price, “A Social History of Wiretaps”)
To plant the explanation ‘mission-creep’… versus ‘vision-creep’… the systematic advancing of a vision… misleads… in a self-flattering fashion… as it implies that we need the pundit class to re-design – de-bureaucratize bureaucracies – as opposed to ending the possibility… of ‘would-be-philosopher-king-statesmen’…
So, in a sense, this show has been about reclaiming our own authentic voice… as opposed to letting the media tell us what are ‘appropriate’… ‘legitimate’… thoughts… thoughts that cede to ‘power’ everything… everything is ceded in ceding the fait accompli of ‘the state’….
The pundit class acts as a Greek Chorus for ‘power’… that insidiously plants the thoughts to think and the frames in which to think them… and their uniform, constant refrain is… “accept the fait accompli of ‘the state’….
We are conditioned to believe that we must relinquish our power in order for ‘the state’ to be powerful… and the damning result is that our children are provided… by us… with a false model of what it means… to be a human.
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[Part 4 of this discussion (which begins with the August 25, 2013 The Waking Up Radio Radio Show…) is at: Staying Focused on Designing A Future… On Not Getting Divided…
Here is an audio-file-excerpt from our June 3, 2012 show that makes this point: **“Staying Focused on Designing A Future”**
…continue on to part 4…]
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