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“Reclaiming Our Stolen Gifts… Our Leadership… To Establish A Future Based On Distributed Generation”

This continues the conversations: “The ‘Global Awakening’?… or “The Great ‘Re-Set’”?” and Staying Focused on Designing A Future… On Not Getting Divided and “Unpacking Robert Reich’s Baggage”

(See also: Bentham's Strategic Verities and Karl Popper on Authentic Education for Youth… and Miklos Nyiszli Lessons On Class]

You Know How I Know 'Localization'… or 'Democratic Economics'… Is A Con? and Conversation with Joel McIver)

10.24.13:

This page provides a partial transcript, including audio files, of the October 27, 2013 Waking Up Radio Show.

 

Excerpts and audio files follow.

For other audio files visit: Waking Up Radio Audio Conversations Page.

 

Initial Thoughts for the: * October 27, 2013 show.

 

Initial Thoughts for the: * November 3, 2013 show.

 

Initial Thoughts for the: * November 10, 2013 show.

 

Initial Thoughts for the: * November 17, 2013 show.

 

Initial Thoughts for the: * November 24, 2013 show.

 

Initial Thoughts for the: * December 1, 2013 show.

 

Initial Thoughts for the: * December 8, 2013 show.

 

Initial Thoughts for the: * December 15, 2013 show.

 

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* “The October 27, 2013 show”

 

WUR, Sunday, October 27th, 2013 radio show: “Reclaiming Our Stolen Gifts… Our Leadership… To Establish A Future Based On Distributed Generation” (Pt. 1) Draft

 

…Atropos has come with her shears… the time of ‘rule’ has full-run… the time of individualities has now begun…

 

Today we’re going to argue that we can’t grow up as a global humanity while letting the few lead… and those few also are stuck in immaturity… putting on their little performances for us… living in inauthenticity… and… by the way… we were given two really good examples this week of how the official governance structure is theater.

 

I caught part of an interview with the man who wrote Fast Food Nation about his new book in which he tells one of the back stories to the Cuban Missile Crisis… that Khrushchev and Kennedy had a secret missile-removal deal – “I’ll take mine out of Turkey if you take yours out of Cuba… – which allowed Kennedy to pretend to the U.S. captive audience that he’d just slapped Khrushchev around a bit….

 

And we have a really good current illustration – although with even more sinister undertones – in this pretense of outrage from European heads of state that their communications were swept up by the N.S.A. This is exactly the performance-tactic Shakespeare describes in Richard III (the hidden machinations for the throne…) which fooled no one in Richard’s day either.

 

But the even more sinister aspect comes in when you consider that the Republicans are trying to make hay over the Snowden revelations about N.S.A. spying. I learned this… this past Thursday waiting in a check-out line… from the most recent issue of Mother Jones (while one of my tires was being slashed – the fourth such incident, by the way.)

 

You know Wallerstein… at that same Left Forum conference earlier this year when he made the remark about Denmark… said that all systems have a life… and that ‘capitalism’s is t an end… and I replied in my head, “No… it’s the class system for whom the shears of Atropos have come… she’s that one of the Fates who cannot be turned… the time of ‘rule’ has full-run… and the time of ‘individualities’… is now begun.

 

…at this moment we are globally pondering… what the qualities of a new world – beyond commodification and rank – would have to be… for us to constitute the opposite of class authentically…

 

10.24.13… Brothers and sisters: With Karl Popper’s help we’ve been attempting to come to grips with the implications (for our ‘selves’… our souls… and necessarily then… for our common humanity…) of giving our allegiance to the state… arguing that doing so has meant (and can only mean) betraying our common humanity and the earth…

 

…as allegiance to the ‘common wealth’…

(…and by the way I recently learned that the ancient word for ‘wealth’ and ‘death’ is the same… so… brothers and sisters resisting austerity in Portugal… thank you and hang in there… all of us globally must get on the same page… must start helping each other… our hearts must heal collectively… the on-going pain called ‘rank’…)

…(the group project of raping the earth so that it may be converted from common treasure to private ownership…) has meant – and will continue to mean while it exists – giving our allegiance to ‘princes’… to ‘statesmen’… to puffs-up-in-love-with-an-illusion…

 

…and that to establish our world based on (the opposite operating premise inherent in) distributed generation… we have to develop – each one of us… our leadership.

 

Today, October 27, 2013, we begin that conversation.

 

At this moment we are globally pondering… globally trying to see… what the qualities of a new world – beyond commodification and rank – would have to be… for us to constitute the opposite of class authentically.

 

It’s time for us to embark on our common road together… toward “Reclaiming Our Stolen Gifts… Our Leadership… To Establish A Future Based On Distributed Generation.”

 

We begin by looking at the question of ‘leadership.’

–––

 

* “On ‘Leadership’ and ‘Self-Organization’… on ‘Poor’ and ‘Rich’”

 

…recall Kropotkin’s concern… that he didn't give enough attention… to the period of transition… let’s think this through now…

 

[From… Karl Popper on Authentic Education for Youth…: In upcoming WUR shows we will be discussing not just Popper’s insights on ‘authentic education’… and the fostering of ‘leadership’… but also whether, or to what degree, these insights bear on the possibilities for ‘authentic governance’… i.e. we will be challenging this seeming sacrosanct notion of ‘rule’. We have to challenge the notion of ‘rule’ because that’s the only way out… as our global ‘intercourse’ must be effectuated somehow…. We either leave it to those who see us and the earth as means for them to achieve their illusion of supremacy… or we grow up as a global humanity. – PS]

Labor unions are anathema to ‘power’ because in them they see the capacity for ‘self-organization’… or another way of saying (seeing) this… they see in them a capacity for ‘leadership’ – they see a capacity that could potentially step into an assumed ‘vacuum’… a gap in service provision, say… or food distribution….

 

So let’s talk about this question of ‘self-organization’ in a transitional period.

 

On a previous show we talked about Petr Kropotkin’s broken heart [watching totalitarianism wither the hopes of those who had welcomed the Russian Revolution…] because he felt that maybe he hadn’t thought through well enough this question of the transitional period and the need for food…. So let’s do that work now. Let’s think that through now.

 

We-the-people have been conditioned to see ourselves (or others among us) as ‘poor’ (whether in ‘thought’ or in ‘possessions’…) and ‘power’ as ‘rich’ (whether in ‘thought’ or in ‘possessions’…)

(…and Bill McKibben’s speech provides a good illustration of this… when he says, “…the reason corporations should not have the right of free speech is because they’re simple. If you want to build a car efficiently a corporation is a great tool. They are far more capable of executing a plan… it has a single-minded focus on creating wealth… like the Koch Brothers.” (…I heard this excerpt on 10.08.13 on KPFA.) Such language contributes to the mythology of dispassionate ‘machine-like market forces’… as well as the mythology of the ‘innovativeness’… the ‘productive genius’… of concentrated ‘power’ – “it may have no conscience but it sure gets things done.” But ‘it’ is not doing anything… we-the-people are the ones who are getting everything done… and we can either stay in harness and be directed by actual, real, literal sociopaths-in-love-with-an-imagined-paterfamilias (and not metaphors for sociopathy…) or we can begin directing our own energies…)

…and to the degree we feel (fear) this… to that degree we fear opening our hearts to the possibility of freedom… i.e. true freedom… from ‘necessity’… from coercion… and from the fear of necessity and coercion.

 

…that’s the point of forcing us away from our children… to make of our children empty vessels – for ‘power’ to fill…

 

But before we begin this discussion I think we should ground ourselves in this: the whole wage-work / coerced work system promotes a callousness towards our brothers and sisters. The grief beneath these words have never been probed: “if you can get the many chasing money…” – we don’t trust ‘power’ but we don’t yet trust each other.

 

What we don’t see… because ‘power’ has blindered our side-wise glances successfully… is that what we see in ‘power’s ‘wealth’… or ‘capacity’… is but our reflected selves… the extraction of our wealth… our wealth appropriated… our renounced gifts… our earth’s boundless riches… seized… using us as means… to cast our self-knowledge of abundance into shadow (“Keep It In Its Container.” It begins that early.)

 

The truth of abundance is not just of the earth… but of each other… it’s all around us… we just give ‘power’ the credit…

 

But with ‘distributed generation’ we create ‘a new abundance’… in aligning our lives with truth.

(‘Power’ knows this… that we are the source of all abundance… sees that the only way to restore the earth is to feed our energy back into it… just as they finessed the guileless in Detroit to attempt to cleanse vacant lots of contamination. But for ‘power’ the risk of our reconnection to earth is immense… and it knows this too… so it’s determined to get in front – and stay in front – of this (reconnection.)

“What we want” is what we’ve always wanted: to explore our earth without fear… to walk its roads and know that anywhere we stop we’ll find a welcome… because we are… each one… as stars to the other… and with a ready pace we embrace our sisters and brothers. (And in future shows we’ll be talking about the connection between leadership and cross-fertilization… how the confluence of diverse perspectives helps to stimulate leadership….)

 

–––

…this is what I hoped to show in The Talking Tree – that we’re stuck in the same story…

 

There is an existing governance structure for the world… it is a ‘shadow structure’… i.e. it is ‘informal’ and depends on (embeds itself in) secrecy… but it is this shadowy web… that we must consciously ‘exit’… as we begin weaving an alternative… even as we reclaim its stolen capacity as our own.

 

We have to devise fluid structures that survive attempts to re-establish ‘rank’… hierarchy.

 

Until now… we’ve mouthed the thoughts of ‘power’ pretty exclusively… turned our backs pretty sharply on those who dared to let reality creep into their speech…

(…and I have to share this quote from a man who spoke these words two thousand four hundred and sixty years ago… more or less:

The commands of law are artificial, those of nature necessary. The commands of law are the result of agreement, not of growth; the commands of nature are the result of growth, not of agreement. Therefore the transgressor of the law, if he escapes the notice of those who made the agreement, is free of dishonor or punishment, but not if he is seen. But suppose a man goes against possibility and does violence to something that has grown up in nature, if he escapes the notice of all men, the harm is no less; if all see him, the harm is no greater. For the damage is not a matter of opinion but of reality. The point of this inquiry is that the majority of the rights laid down by law are at enmity with nature. (Antiphon writing about 450 B.C.)

This is what I hoped to show in The Talking Tree… that we’re stuck in the same story.)

Until now… we’ve mouthed the thoughts of ‘power’ pretty exclusively… turned our backs pretty sharply on those who dared to let reality creep into their speech…

…but not today….

 

Today other voices are being raised that counter false division… that refuse to say ‘the poor’ are anything but the shadowy unseen figures that lurk behind the scenes… stroking their weight of gold and watching the globe to anticipate where it must be placed… to lure the unsuspecting and the complicit with its ‘credit’…

(…and today [10.24.13] we were given a really good illustration of this when the City of Fresno demolished yet another encampment… a small, established group of women had built community together… good fellowship… were causing harm to no one… but the City found their living arrangement… by its very existence… posed an intolerable challenge to the logic of ‘the state’ – the ideology… propaganda… that it’s needed to ‘protect us’…. When one of the women who’d lived there for three years was asked, “What will you do now?” she replied, “Let go and let God figure it out.” That is richness. Thank you sister for that gift.)

Globally we are seeing that the presented governance structure is paraded like PR… a charade to entertain and ‘occupy’ ‘the people’… to satisfy with pretense our need to believe in some degree of ‘fairness’ or ‘legitimacy’ in the rationale we’re given to ‘justify’ our lost lives.

 

–––

…so ‘progress’ always was a Ponzi scheme…

 

‘Ponzi scheme’ defined: “…a form of fraud in which belief in the success of a nonexistent enterprise [in our case called ‘progress’] is fostered by the payment of quick returns to the first investors from money invested by later investors [our ‘investment’ coerced… extracted with violence]. Named after Charles Ponzi (died 1949), who carried out such a fraud (1919 – 20.)”

So ‘progress’ always was a Ponzi scheme… the former so-called ‘European peasantry’ is paid off with so-called ‘New World’ blood… and on it went… each ‘new discovery’ or ‘new conquest’ in reality new rape and pillage of the earth… grabbed and stuffed into the maw of ‘power’… that eats without cessation and without thanks… its only thought how the expense of each new conquest can be pushed off down the road… its only thought ‘the race’… to be the ‘last man standing’… the one who rules o’er all… amidst the Pyramid’s collapse… the one on whom the crown is planted… ‘controlling interest’ of the world… who calls the tune the earth-entire must dance to… all living-now… all coming… and all thought of what can be.

(It wants to triumph especially over our sense of our own possibilities… we… as from ‘power’s earliest beginnings… being the critical ground to ‘cover’ and to claim.)

A Ponzi scheme which sucked us all into the machinery of ‘power’… as drivers and as fuel (in truth its ‘fuel’ we all were simply…) eyes full of its false promises of payment down the road… a promissory note that never could be paid…

 

…but that we didn’t know.

 

And so we let our hearts turn cold and brittle… our faces frozen masks… so we could betray each other… and crisply turn our backs… until we caught our sad reflections in the glass… and, all-unwilling, saw the shadow that looked back.

 

We class-conflicted humans… with our eyes on ‘power’s purse… for long now we’ve avoided our devastated earth… but now that purse… it shakes out empty… and at last we turn to truth… and our gaze now that we see her… without judgment… she returns.

 

And now there’s no one left to con… the Pyramid is coming down… and with it banners, walls, illusions… all…

…all fallen back to earth…

…and now…

…we look around.

 

–––

 

…‘Ancient Greece’ was an invention… it was The Great Mediterranean Bowl… and… the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of reality… of the truth… which we have to dispel the lies of class to get to…

 

In earlier iterations of this apocalyptic confrontation of ‘power’ with ‘the people’ – and a brief pause here to thank the man who recently published a book on the Occupy movement (I believe it had the word ‘apocalypse’ in the title…) for the information that the ancient meaning of the word ‘apocalypse’ was “to uncover” or “to reveal.”

(…and whenever I hear people refer to ‘Ancient Greece’ I think, “thank you, thank you Martin Bernal… who wrote Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Volume 1: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785 – 1985… for the necessary reminder that ‘Ancient Greece’ was an invention – the concept… the lie… the propaganda… ‘Ancient Greece’…. The ‘ancient world’ was ‘the Great Mediterranean Bowl’…. Here’s one example (as well as an example of how we uncover the truth [reality] by following our questions…) I was just reading the “Epistle” to Sir Thomas More’s Utopia… in which the writer tells a story about Diogenes “now, who’s ‘Diogenes’?,” I wondered – who… when he saw his fellow townspeople in urgent preparations for an invasion by Alexander the Great… began rolling his tub up and down a hill. When someone stopped and asked him why he was rolling his tub up and down a hill, he replied, “everyone else is so busy, I thought I should be busy too….” When I went to the footnotes to find out more about this strange tale, I learned it was from ‘Lucian’ – “well, who’s ‘Lucian’?” – and I found out that Lucian was a Syrian… born about 120 A.D…. who went to Athens to learn the ancient Greek language so he could read the works written in it…)

All of us have to be leaders…

 

He described it as a moment of enlightenment or revelation… a point of crossing-over from which one can’t cross back… and he said that many members of Occupy had experienced this ‘Thelma and Louise’ moment….

(…and this is another good example of how ‘power’ changes the meanings of words it’s threatened by…)

But to return to this thread of ‘leadership’… in earlier iterations of this apocalyptic clash of ‘power’ with our refusal to go back to our debased status… ‘power’s m.o. (modus operandi…) was to identify the ‘leadership’ and get rid of it….

 

Of course they still do this… even with ‘Occupy – which professed no leadership – they did this. I remember hearing that ‘certain occupiers’ (who not-coincidently were key to the encampment’s success…) were hit with ‘stay-away’ orders from the courts.

 

But missing from the discussions of ‘leadership’ – a thread that it’s critical that we-the-people take up – is “where are we going? …” “leadership to what?…”

 

Because… how… for any group that is activist… can ‘leadership’ of any form exist… if that question hasn’t occurred to it? if the only thing it says is, “Resist! Resist! Resist!”? If that’s the extent of our activism then there truly is no leadership… and ‘leadership’ we need… otherwise our ship is rudderless… and founders in the blast of wind or water ‘power’ brings… as we sit and motionlessly dream…

 

–––

…all of our thought process in encampments needs to be about “how do we seed the future in this community so we can be supported? How do we increase our numbers?” Because we are ready tinder we-the-people… we are ready for the light… Bring it…

 

If we had done our analysis… there’s no way any of us could have sat blithely in encampments and think ‘power’ was gonna let that go on. So all of our thought process in encampments needs to be about “how do we seed the future in this community so we can be supported?” “How do we inoculate ourselves against agent provocateurs?” “How do we increase our numbers?”… because we are ready tinder… we-the-people… we are ready for the light. Bring it. Bring it.

 

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Plato… he’s the gold standard for propagandist… ‘power’ has never stopped battling with the truth of our fundamental unity – ‘power’ is ‘power’ is ‘power’…

 

So rather than ‘no leaders’… it seems a key part of our motto must be “all of us are leaders”… individually… collectively… severally…

 

…individually… collectively… severally…

…we know where we’re going…

…and our oars find ‘fit’ in the same ship…

…and they pull in stroke together…

…and we find we’re moving forward… finally…

…finally rowing in the same direction…

…and all knowing that when we reach our destination…

…we will look around and notice we can breathe…

…as free beings…

 

–––

 

* “The November 3, 2013 show”

 

…this transition is inevitable… we’re arguing in this space that it’s time for us to make the decisions for us… Miklos Nyiszli reminds us that we have no choice but to step up…

 

Today we’ll be interweaving… because they are necessarily interconnected… several themes: “how do we regain our leadership abilities… how do we reclaim possession of our own gifts… and begin planning the transition to a future based on the premises opposite to class.

 

I’ve put up the page – “Miklos Nyiszli Lessons On Class” – because in December I’m planning to devote a significant portion of that month’s shows to reading and commenting on his book, Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account… which I consider to be an extremely important book because it reveals in graphic detail… and in a way that no sociological or political treatise on ‘class’ possibly could… that ‘class’ is embedded in the way that all of us think… just as Alice Miller said in For Your Own Good… it wasn’t a freak, random accident that folks went along with Fascism across Europe in the 1930s and 40s… they were ready soil for it… and, what we’re going to be considering is that we are always ready soil for totalitarianism until we decide to confront the mindset of ‘class’ within our own thinking – thinking that we’re all trained in. Almost every day I hear some illustration in people’s speech of this reality… that it’s embedded in us… in our thoughts… people saying, “well, I just want my child to get a good education and get a good job….” How many times do we hear that? How many times did we speak it as parents? “Get a good job… be a good worker….” And we are entering in a time when there is no ability anymore of the earth to crank out enough wealth to capture the hands of enough people to allow the notion of a system based on ‘fair compensation for work’… of… “you give up your autonomy as a human being and we will give you a job”. Well that ‘social contract’, as we call it, can’t continue anymore. ‘Power’ knows that, that’s why they’re rushing, rushing, to plan our future for us… they got the ‘Trans-Pacific Partnership’, the ‘Trans-Atlantic Partnership’… they’re trying to unify the globe… quick! quick! make sure we got nowhere to go… then… when we start getting restless… direct our eyes to: “look! look! we got this U.N.-sponsored… that means it’s all of us globally… at least the big, smart ones… us important ones… we are figuring out… how to keep you guys… eating… given that we can’t give you ‘jobs’ anymore. But, don’t worry, we got it covered.”

 

Now… not only does that consign – because ‘hierarchy’ is a key ideology that they can never let go of because that would mean letting go of their exclusive privilege… so there’s going to be folks who don’t get to have ‘local self-sufficiency’… it’s not going to be an ‘even’ distribution… it never has been under ‘class’… it never will be… and once again we’re letting our so-called ‘betters’ decide these big questions of who gets to eat… who gets to use a little bit of their gifts… and who doesn’t. So given that this transition is inevitable… what we’re arguing in this space… is that it’s time for us to make the decisions for us.

 

And Miklos Nyiszli is, I believe, necessary for us to take in for us to get it that we have no choice but to step up.

 

I want this to be a useful conversation for those of us who want to plan the transition.

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…an authentic discussion of The Nazi and the Psychiatrist would expose the totalitarian nature of class itself… as well as the hidden coercion when ‘guidance’ is monopolized by the few… serves only that ‘single pattern of thought’ of class…

 

On the page “Miklos Nyiszli Lessons On Class” I wrote the following:

This morning (10.31.13) I listened to an interview with a man, Jack El-Hai, who has written a book called The Nazi and the Psychiatrist… about the life of a man sent by the U.S. military in 1945 to evaluate the captured Nazi leadership – to determine their mental fitness for standing trial. What surprised me most about the interview was the apparent belief of the interviewer that there must have been some common pathology that the leadership suffered from… he kept digging to find out what it was: “So did the psychiatrist [Douglas M. Kelley] ever find that trait?” he asked near the end of the interview… when… had we been discussing it… had we been discussing Alice Miller… Miklos Nyiszli… Karl Popper…it would have been obvious… for all of us… that the pathology is the class system itself….

 

There is a total absence of logic in the way ‘work’ is discussed across the political spectrum (again… this speaks to the reality that the class system is totalitarian… “a single pattern of thought”… is what that word means… impressed across all aspects of society.) The obvious truth that we are captives within the coerced work system (whether it’s the ‘money-illusion’ (always, always undergirded with ‘manufactured scarcity’…) or the illusion of ‘our betters’ that coerces us…) –

There is a total absence of logic in the way ‘work’ is discussed across the political spectrum (again… this speaks to the reality that the class system is totalitarian… “a single pattern of thought”… is what that word means… impressed across all aspects of society.) The obvious truth that we are captives within the coerced work system (whether it’s the ‘money-illusion’ (always, always undergirded with ‘manufactured scarcity’…) or the illusion of ‘our betters’ that coerces us…) –

 

(…and we’re going to be talking more about coercion hidden in seeming assent. We see this across age ,but young people are more vulnerable to this hidden coercion because they’re new to the experience of dealing with this system. So, when someone in authority says, “this is the right thing to do…” youth credit it – which would make sense under ‘wholism’… under terms of generalized health… then it would make sense for young people to look to more experienced people for guidance. And ‘power’ is determined to provide the only ‘guidance’ young people can find. The ‘echo-chamber’ that Jeremy Bentham describes is an expression of this imperative of ‘power… this determination of ‘statesmen’ to claim exclusive possession of that quality called ‘guidance’ – because the youth are looking for it… and ‘power’ insists on being the one that gives it… the ‘power’-guys want to have the routes all nicely-paved and say, “here… go this way… and you’ll find the guidance you need….” And I’ve learned in my life that that’s a lie… the guidance that we need I had to fight my way to… or… in some cases… ‘float’ my way to… the ancestors can sometimes just pick you up and carry you along… or bring things to you… but it definitely wasn’t given to me by the system….

 

So there is a hidden coercion when ‘leadership capacities’ are monopolized by the few… and we all come to this earth striving to figure it out… for knowledge… so if the ‘power’-guys say, “there’s no way to get it but through us…” that’s a kind of a coercion because it’s a ‘necessary’ for us as for all living things… knowledge… so they manufacture scarcity there as well….)

So… on the one hand… when we don’t hear the truth spoken… the truth that our gifts are coerced in a coerced-work-system… when we don’t hear that spoken over the airwaves… (the truth that it’s perfectly obvious that we are not independent actors while “on the job”… but rather puppets… and yet the discourse of the pundits all implies that we are independent actors…) while on the other hand we hear all this… judgment… this accusatory anger directed at folks who are doing their job… because… the paycheck… the paycheck… has a powerful hold over us… we’ve been atomized… we don’t have any other source of survival… and so the discourse is contradictory… we hear all these attacks on folks… like the firefighters who let that man drown because it “wasn’t in their job description…” the police that herd us… the folks who fly the drones…. There is this assumption that we uniformly hear over the airwaves that they are responsible… and that anger never broadens out to embrace the class system itself.

 (What specifically led me to write this was hearing criticism of Janet Napolitano [this morning, 10.31.13] because of acts this current university functionary committed as a functionary of government. It strikes me that these attacks must be for the benefit of young people with little experience with the coerced work system….)

That’s nuts. It’s an insane assumption – insane because it flies against all of our own personal experience when we are that person in that job and we know that there are certain walls that we cannot heave ourselves over… or even peek over if we want to keep that job –

… it flies against truth – that captives are not captives. It’s not a fair position to put us in. We are supposedly independent actors… responsible for what we do… and yet… the resources that we need to survive are kept in the hands of the few… and if that were spoken we could start talking about it… but no interviewer ever states the obvious… no interviewer ever calls any of these pundits who express this outrage on it…. To live under such patent insanity does violence to what we are as human beings… as living things…. It undermines our humanity.

[From: “Miklos Nyiszli Lessons On Class”, Chapter VI.]

This is that moment that Christopher Fry spoke of… that time when wrong comes up to face us everywhere… “the longest stride of soul men ever took…” is that stride that’s in front of us right now. We have to represent for humanity itself. It is at risk.

 

…being trained to obey… means our true gifts… blow away…

 

When asked what he thought was the key message Dr. Kelley left for the world, the guest (Jack El-Hai) replied in Kelley’s own words: “There are people who would gladly climb over the corpses of half of the population to gain control over the other half.”

 

Now that is a pregnant beginning… will the pundits follow up?… will the necessary questions be asked… the obvious conclusions be drawn?

Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.

 

Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.

 

Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

 

(Hermann Göring in an interview with Gilbert in Göring's jail cell during the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials (18 April 1946, from Wikiquote)

So… as the people waking up is the chief threat ‘statesmen’ face… and today we are waking up apace… the entire human race… we can look around and expect to see… the ‘common threat’ card of states being played liberally… but let’s not let ourselves get duped… please… we have the chance now to get free… and that means globally.

 

What’s not discussed is not just that the lust for limitless ‘power’ exists, but that that lust is leading us… ‘statesmanship’ is the exclusive hold of the few on leadership… when pundits don’t ask the obvious the implicit message is “…they are our betters… nothing can be done…”

 

Of course we the people who have lived long enough know this… know not only that the lust for limitless power exists… but that it is coterminous with ‘statesmanship’ (the exclusive hold of the few on ‘leadership’…) i.e. that it is precisely this mentality that is leading us….

 

Yet this is never discussed.

 

Yesterday (11.02.13) I listened to a conversation on The Moyers’ Report about the Trans-Pacific Partnership – the thinking driving which is of actors whose loyalties are not tied to particular states… and the pundits all professed shock… that such a major trade deal could be arrived at in such a fashion… a process well beyond the reach of we-the-people… and they professed confusion as to why China is excluded… averred obliviousness as to how these ‘power’-guys could imagine that ‘the economy’ could ‘get better’ if ‘the people’ are leveled to a common misery.

 

And then one says, “of course for the people in ‘power’ things are pretty good. They’re doing fine.” And another explains, “they don’t have much contact with people who are suffering.” And then there was, I’m sure, much sage head-nodding at this… but no one said… “Hasn’t it always been like this? And for millennia? …irrespective of ideological justification? Whether it’s ‘democracy’ or ‘communism’?”… as Göring said. “So what do we do about it?” is the obvious, key question… which of course no one asked.

 

It’s as if there’s this invisible barrier which all the pundits agree never to mention but to always respect…. So as they don’t ask the obvious… the implicit message is: “they are our betters… nothing can be done….” Instead of stating the truth: ‘leadership’ is our common inheritance… it belongs to all of us… we must take it back…” and then following the questions that come from that.

 

 

…uniform capacity and differential gifts… in toto mean ‘abundance’…

 

As the obvious is never stated in speech that we hear… as young people growing up… we learn from the silence… as we gain experience in the world… that “nothing can be done”… and so we make our compromises and adjustments… all unconscious.

 

Living our lives by conventional lies means living in insanity. So what would push us past dull unconscious despondency?… the hump of lethargy?… the boulder of resignation and fear that “nothing can be done?”…

(…because this is what our parents [unconsciously] taught us…)

…Lucian suggests… and Shakespeare… and all those who broke free of conventional thinking… that it is rich and diverse experience that does this… helps us break out of corrals… both physical and mental – engagement with our fellows… and speaking out loud what we see – which may perhaps have implications… for how we plan the transition.

 

–––

 

In recent shows we’ve been arguing that we can’t grow up as a species while letting the few lead. That just seems so obvious, doesn’t it? So why aren’t we discussing it? …except we’re duped by ‘class’?… by the belief in differential capacity among us… instead of uniform capacity and differential gifts… that in toto mean ‘abundance’ – an abundance that ‘power’ has set the entire store of its organized and concentrated energy against our achieving… it will spend its last breath to keep us from seeing it.

 

When we see that ‘self’, in reality, is also a collective ‘we’ – which… as we see this… leads us to a greater understanding of how it is that… as Karl Popper says… fully developing individualities manifest altruism – it helps us see why there is an association in minds… between the notions ‘wealth’ and ‘death’…. (And also… as in Congo… ‘wealth’ means ‘death’ because ‘wealth’ brings death… it brings ‘power’….)

 

…

 

The Citadel… a doctor’s story… representing for the Tribe of Free Beings…

 

Recently I heard a doctor’s story over the public airwaves. It was about going somewhere to do doctoring and finding that before doctoring could meaningfully take place… the people first needed proper irrigation, say… or maybe it was drainage… the point being that what they needed… was to do with engineering… i.e. not his ‘specialty.’

 

The story reminded me so much of a novel I read once, that I believe was largely autobiographical, by A. J. Cronin…

(…and this example also shows the power of words… as this novel, The Citadel, led to the creation of the U.K.’s National Health Service…)

…that took place in the 1920s in South Wales. The hero of the story was forced to do his first ‘post’ [internship] as a doctor’s assistant in a mining town – which meant a lot of ailments:

For an hour and a half [Andrew Manson, the doctor] sat in the little back-shop cubicle which was the consulting room, wrestling with a packed surgery until the walls sweated and the place was choked with the steam of damp bodies. Miners with beat knees, cut fingers, nystagmus, chronic arthritis. Their wives, too, and their children with coughs, colds, sprains – all the minor ailments of humanity. Normally he would have enjoyed it, welcomed the quiet appraising scrutiny of these dark, sallow-skinned people with whom he felt he was on probation. But now, obsessed by the major issue, his head reeled with the impact of these trifling complaints… (A. J. Cronin, The Citadel, 1937, p. 14)

The ‘major issue’ is typhus. Our hero at first tries to soldier on alone, once his attempts to raise the interest of the District Medical Officer (Griffiths) prove unsuccessful. He’s confused as to the source until his colleague, Philip Denny, pulls his coat:

“You’ve got cases too?” Andrew asked with tense interest.

“Four! All in the same area as yours.” He paused. “And these bugs [bacteria on a slide they’re looking at] come from the well in Glydar Place.”

Andrew gazed at him, alert, burning to ask a dozen questions, realizing something of the genuineness of the other man’s work, and, beyond everything, overjoyed that he had been shown the focus of the epidemic.

“You see,” Denny resumed with that same cold and bitter irony, “paratyphoid is more or less endemic here. But one day soon, very soon, we’re going to have a pretty little blaze-up. It’s the main sewer that’s to blame. It leaks like the devil, and seeps into half the low wells at the bottom of the town. I’ve hammered at Griffiths about it till I’m tired….

“It’s a damned shame,” Andrew burst out, forgetting himself in a sudden rush of indignation.

Denny shrugged his shoulders. “He’s afraid to ask the Council for anything in case they dock his wretched salary to pay for it.” (p. 15)

 

[…the budget… the money-lever craftily converted into blunt instrument… has ever been the daily tool of choice to keep us reined and feeling hopeless… its use means they can put in storage its brute force…. If we are only allocated so much of the earth’s treasure… and told we must live within those limits set… and we believe it… whether ‘we’ is an individual… or a community… or a nation… we are reined-in effectively. – PS]

Having a frustrating day, Andrew stops by Denny’s lodgings and finds his friend is very grim:

Philip received him in morose silence with a gloomy eye and a darkened forehead.

Then, after a moment, he said: “Young Jones died this morning at seven o’clock. Perforation.” He spoke quietly, with a still, cold fury. “And I have two new enterics in Ystrad Row.”…

“We must write to the Ministry of Health.”

“We could write a dozen letters,” Philip answered, with grim restraint. “And all we’d get would be a doddering commissioner down here in six months’ time. No! I’ve thought it out. There’s only one way to make them build a new sewer.”

“How?”

“Blow up the old one!”

For a second Andrew wondered if Denny had taken leave of his senses. Then he perceived something of the other’s hard intention. He stared at him in consternation. Try as he might to reconstruct his changing ideas, Denny seemed fated to demolish them.

Manson muttered: “There’ll be a heap of trouble – if it’s found out.”

Denny glanced up arrogantly.

“You needn’t come in with me, if you don’t want to.”

“Oh, I’m coming in with you,” Andrew answered slowly. “But God only knows why!”

…

Denny had made his plan and timed it carefully. The late shift at the mine had gone in an hour ago. A few lads hung about old Thomas’ fish shop at the top end, but otherwise the street was deserted….

Immediately above Glydar Place they reached the main manhole of the sewer, a rusty iron cover set in rotten concrete, and there they set to work. The gangrenous cover had now been disturbed for years but, after a struggle, they prised it up. Then Andrew shone the torch discreetly into the odorous depths, where on the crumbled stonework a dirty stream flowed slimily.

“Pretty, isn’t it?” Denny rasped. “Take a look at the cracks in that pointing. Take a last look, Manson.”

No more was said. Inexplicably, Andrew’s mood had changed and he was conscious now of a wild upswing of elation, a determination equal to Denny’s own. People were dying of this festering abomination, and petty officialdom had done nothing. It was not the moment for the bedside manner and a niggling bottle of physic!…

His heart was thudding with excitement. It might not be orthodox medicine, but it was the best moment he had ever known. (p. 20 – 1)

Now… neither these two doctors… or the doctor whose story I heard recently over the airwaves… in facing the reality of the situation they were in… said, “hold on a minute…. Let’s wait a bit so I can get the proper approvals… or degrees… or clearances… No, they trusted their senses… their intelligence… their analysis of the situation… and they stood in solidarity with their brothers and sisters – took ‘humanity’ as their ‘tribe’.

 

They came from a place of love.

 

…our would-be ‘masters’ are planning the transition… why aren’t we?…

 

Kropotkin, in pointing out how individual initiative blossoms in the security created in ant-tribes… saying this is equally true of bees… also observed:

These small insects, which so easily might become the prey of so many birds, and whose honey has so many admirers in all classes of animals from the beetle to the bear, also have none of the protective features derived from mimicry or otherwise, without which an isolatedly-living insect hardly could escape wholesale destruction; and yet, owing to the mutual aid they practise, they obtain the wide extension which we know and the intelligence we admire. By working in common they multiply their individual forces; by resorting to a temporary division of labour combined with the capacity of each bee to perform every kind of work when required, they attain such a degree of well-being and safety as no isolated animal can ever expect to achieve however strong or well-armed it may be. In their combinations they are often more successful than man, when he neglects to take advantage of a well-planned mutual assistance. (Petr Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, 1902, p. 16)

“…a well-planned mutual assistance…” is exactly what requires, endorses and develops, fully-developing individualities… as does, “…a temporary division of labour combined with the capacity of each [individual] to perform every kind of work when required…”

 

And this obviously ties in to our question of education… once we’re in our future freedom… and perhaps as well in transition…

(…and to my brothers and sisters who long for freedom: after all we’ve suffered at the hands of the ‘philosopher-statesmen’… of the would-be masters… under the regime of class… why do we turn to them and passively ask for their guidance… ask for our future to be ‘delivered’ to us? Why do we restrict our efforts (thinking) to “tinkering with the machinery of death”? They… so full of their deeply-lodged sense of their ‘legitimate and exclusive possession and prerogative of leadership’… are planning “the transition.” Why aren’t we?)

…coerced work is a con… and if you encounter resistance when you say this then talk about it… test the notion… distribute as broadly and deeply as you can those discussions…

 

And last week when we said, “Let’s think through the challenges of transition now…” we didn’t mean: “let’s develop the local and global organizations that could ensure that there would be no distribution interruptions…” No. All we need of infrastructure exists – or largely… there will be things we see we need… e.g. ‘the state’ does not facilitate mobility… to say the least… it wants us to be captives… so it’s expensive to travel… and yet we need this physical inter-knitting of our experience… not just our inter-knits on the Internet.

 

And we certainly don’t mean: “Let’s figure out ways to get our brothers and sisters back in harness… so we can ‘get things done’…” No. If you think this… some time with our three sources of power is advised. We have what we need… the issue is believing it – which is essentially believing in ourselves. So we have to push forward the truth that coerced work is a con… that there’s no need for it – and if you encounter resistance when you say this… then talk about it… test the notion… distribute as broadly and as deeply as you can those discussions… that’s the ‘distribution knitting’ that needs to be developed. We have the Internet and all the bits and pieces of self-sufficiency… so the issue is getting free… so we can begin organizing and using these things.

 

…

 

Now compare the rich and interesting diversity implied in these examples of the fluid inter-play of life-with-life… with the imposed and deepening rigidity we’re living with daily… for there’s no doubt our power as human beings has decreased – Plato’s dream of fixity has not dimmed… just the opposite… we’re moving ever-faster toward its realization… because we have not consciously organized against it. (It’s only when we consciously resist that resistance can gain momentum – and critical mass….)

 

–––

 

 

“Plato recognizes only one ultimate standard… the interest of the state.… Morality is nothing but political hygiene.”… Overt fascism is the fangs… but totalitarianism is the snake itself… and its coils are tightening around us as we speak…

 

But what Popper fails to address is… where his own reasoning takes him… which is that ‘the state’ itself is totalitarian… in requiring of its citizens… to subject… rather than grow… their individualism…. This is the ‘single pattern of thought’ inherent in the state’s very existence (rank). To raise the hope up of ‘checks and balances’… is but holding a candle to the sun (Sir Thomas gave me that one, ‘the people’ gave it him…) when it comes to our freedom (defined as “freedom from necessity”…) it’s worse than irrelevant… it’s undergirding propaganda.

 

It seems Popper held to a romantic view… that for him was rather unusual… unusual given what he knew… for him to see so unrealistically… which is why I think we need Nyiszli (see: “Miklos Nyiszli Lessons On Class”….)

And as far as the state ‘protecting’ us goes…

…a sufficient time to reflect will expose…

…that the ruthless commodification of life that it sanctions and condones…

…is making our lives a hell-hole. – PS]

 

We see here that Plato recognizes only one ultimate standard, the interest of the state. Everything that furthers it is good and virtuous and just; everything that threatens it is bad and wicked and unjust. Actions that serve it are moral; actions that endanger it, immoral. In other words, Plato’s moral code is strictly utilitarian; it is a code of collectivist or political utilitarianism. The criterion of morality is the interest of the state. Morality is nothing but political hygiene.

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

[…Overt Fascism is the fangs… but totalitarianism is the snake itself… and its coils are tightening around us as we speak…– PS]

–––

 

* “The November 10, 2013 show”

 

WUR, Sunday, November 10th, 2013 radio show: “Reclaiming Our Stolen Gifts… Our Leadership… To Establish A Future Based On Distributed Generation” (Pt. 3): Understanding how we are ‘the state’… and beginning to think through ‘institutions’

 

…when Plato cautions ‘power’ that “there must be no split in the unity of the master class”… operationally this means “there must be no split in the unity of the master’s thought…” as concretized… embodied… in us…

 

During the July 21st show we said that our training in ‘ever-strivingness’ (‘internalized discipline’…) in ‘being productive’ serves a ‘definite political function…’ to use Popper’s words as he described the function of higher education:

We know from Plato’s sociological theories that the state, once established, will continue to be stable as long as there is no split in the unity of the master class. The bringing up of that class is, therefore, the great preserving function of the sovereign, and a function which must continue as long as the state exists. How far does it justify the demand that a philosopher must rule?… The great importance which Plato attaches to a philosophical education of the rulers must be explained by… reasons…purely political.

 

The main reason I can see is the need for increasing to the utmost the authority of the rulers….

Thus Plato’s philosophical education has a definite political function. It puts a mark on the rulers, and it establishes a barrier between the rulers and the ruled. (This has remained a major function of ‘higher’ education down to our own time time.) Platonic wisdom is acquired largely for the sake of establishing a permanent class rule. It can be described as political ‘medicine’, giving mystic powers to its possessors, the medicine-men. (Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1, p. 147 – 8)

But while Popper’s analysis shows us how the regime of class has led to the deterioration of the moral compass (“Plato’s moral code is strictly utilitarian; it is a code of collectivist or political utilitarianism. The criterion of morality is the interest of the state. Morality is nothing but political hygiene…”)

(…and using an economic lens Polanyi says virtually the same thing: “to allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and the earth, would result in the demolition of society…” [The Great Transformation, p. 73.] He’s describing a utilitarian ethics…)

…the companion loss to the loss of our moral-sense has been… as Fromm pointed out (“In observing the quality of thinking in alienated man, it is striking to see how his intelligence has developed and how his reason has deteriorated…”) the loss of our unique earth-gifts…

…because ‘ever-strivingness’ forestalls the development of thought – it doesn’t allow time…

(…unbidden time… dis-obligated time – meaning time which is consciously wrested from the wholly illegitimate obligations imposed by ‘power’… and not by our own earth-given analysis…)

…time to think… and so…

…progressively… under ‘power’s regime…

…the regime of ‘scarcity’

…‘thought’ atrophies….

…as we leave to ‘our betters’ – the miniscule few – the pleasure of thinking…

…and of ‘leading’…

…making of ‘leadership’ itself…

…a scarce commodity…

…delivering us helpless… into the hands of ‘power’…

…forcing us to pretend…

…that ‘thought’ is the equivalent of…

…‘internalized discipline’…

…‘being efficient’…

…following orders with expedition.

We will be building the argument here that when Plato cautions ‘power’ that there must be “no split in the unity of the master class…” operationally, this means: “…there must be no split in the unity of the master’s thought…” as concretized… manifested… embodied… in us.

 

–––

 

…tell me your logic… I could level more honest outrage at the pundits for not caring about their brothers and sisters in harness right next to them… and that caring could end ‘power’…

 

Recently I listened to a documentary that sought to raise awareness about the devastating impact… in Pakistan’s tribal areas… of drone missile strikes on the civilian population. And the picture the filmmaker presented was horrific… a clear case of state-sponsored terrorism. But I had to ask myself, as I do with all progressive strategizing… “what is the goal?”… to educate and inform… no doubt… but towards what end? Has that question been thought out? Important information is being provided without question… but what does the filmmaker intend we do with it? What ‘story’ does she hope it will be plugged into?

 

What I will argue is that absent useful guidance… the message it sends… unintentionally… is that “nothing can be done.” As… “write your Congressperson”… “march against war”… if that is the guidance… the overall strategy, I will argue… is misguided. It plugs easily into a dull apathy… that says to itself: “…well, at least we’re not being blown up in our beds… or picking vegetables in our own gardens… we should count our blessings….”

 

So… to the documentarian: what do you expect folks will do once they are forced to face the brutal truth? What is your goal and how does your strategy lead to it?… tell me your logic….

 

If the goal is “stop the drone strikes”… what is the path to that end that your reason sends? …that the outrage stimulated will lead to thousands in the streets… who will mass at the White House and demand an end to state terrorism?

 

…set aside that millions rising to avert the Iraq war was simply ignored… let’s just say that the goal is a mass uprising of outrage….

 

The strategy of ‘outrage’ might work…

…if we were free…

 

(…an aside: once again the message is planted unconsciously that “we are free… because we’re not being killed by missiles…” so the issue of our lack of freedom… by being by-passed… is being presented falsely…)

 

…but that’s a falsity… we aren’t free…. I could – with greater intrinsic honesty… more ‘justly’… more in line with reality (truth) – level more honest outrage at the pundits for not caring about the fact that their sisters and brothers… here, right here, aren’t free… and ‘honest’ too because that caring could ultimately lead to the end of state terrorism… because it states that goal directly… as ‘the end of state terrorism’ has at its core… the end of class.

 

Much better it would be… because it has the advantage of being direct… and accurate… and stated clearly… and speaks to the long-absent-from-the-public-discourse grief… our brokenness… and our longing to be free… for that… we will take to the streets… in the numbers required to make it be.

 

So you see the complete illogic of it – the progressive punditry expects a critical mass of captives to care about the mistreatment of others when no one cares about the mistreatment of them… this flies against all historical experience… and common sense. It’s like asking the inmates of the Gypsy Camp at Auschwitz to care about the prisoners they treated so brutally. We know from even a cursory look into the matter that… as Alice Miller says… the way this dynamic works is rather the ‘Circle of Contempt’ – it widens and widens and embraces ever more… and more.

 

The goal of the drone strikes is to dehumanize people with heart and turn them into us… dispassionate and callous… that’s the political play behind the phrase ‘misery loves company’.

 

…we parents make of our children ready soil for ‘power’ to plant totalitarianism in…

 

You know that other old cliché that “you can’t love anyone else… if you don’t love yourself”?… well… how can we love ourselves when we’re angry at ourselves every minute (unconsciously…) every minute… for being smaller than we are… for renouncing our gifts…

 

But let’s be honest… who made us smaller than we are?… who made us ready soil for ‘power’ to plant its crookedness in… if not our parents… if not we parents… doing this daily… the work of the state… all unconscious… as Jeremy Bentham said so approvingly… and Alice Miller after him… shedding her light in hopes to change it. But her light was artificially dimmed. ‘Power’ will shine its garish light of ‘wrong’ on sycophantic outrage… on that which helps to keep us feeling small… unequal to the wrong around us. But that which shines the light on them… the  ‘power’-guys… they are determined to dim.

 

And ‘power’ ensured we wouldn’t get the chance… to heed our Alice.

 

But now that we’ve our own means to start discussing her… we must… we must… push past ‘power’s limits… we must not let them stop us… from discussing Alice.

Parents, even if they are highly educated and have sufficient time at their disposal, are helpless when it comes to understanding their child so long as they must keep the sufferings of their own childhood at an emotional distance…. Thus, I see it as my task to sensitize the general public to the sufferings of early childhood… (Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty In Child-Rearing and The Roots of Violence, 1980, p. xv)

 

In Prisoners of Childhood I took pains to point out that looks expressing disapproval and rejection that are directed at the infant can contribute to the development of severe disturbances… in the adult…. every small child needs an empathic and not a ‘controlling’ human being (whether it be father or mother) as caregiver.

 

An enormous amount [of abuse] can be done to a child in the first two years…. The child will overcome the serious consequences of the injustice he has suffered only if he succeeds in defending himself, i.e., if he is allowed to express his pain and anger. If he is prevented from reacting in his own way because the parents cannot tolerate his reactions (crying, sadness, rage) and forbid them by means of looks or other pedagogical methods, then the child will learn to be silent. This silence is a sign of the effectiveness of the pedagogical principles applied, but at the same time it is a danger signal pointing to future pathological development. If there is absolutely no possibility of reacting appropriately to hurt, humiliation, and coercion, then these experiences cannot be integrated into the personality; the feelings they evoke are repressed, and the need to articulate them remains unsatisfied, without any hope of being fulfilled. It is this lack of hope of ever being able to express repressed traumata by means of relevant feelings that most often causes severe psychological problems. (Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty In Child-Rearing and The Roots of Violence, 1980, p. 6 – 7)

 

This perfect adaptation to society’s norms – in other words, to what is called ‘healthy normality’ – carries with it the danger that such a person can be used for practically any purpose. It is not a loss of autonomy that occurs here, because this autonomy never existed, but a switching of values, which in themselves are of no importance anyway for the person in question as long as his whole value system is dominated by the principle of obedience.

[…In the audio-blog (show excerpt) “Richard Aoki and the Abandonment of Children” we said that a surveillance (shadow) state needs surveillance (shadow) troops – it needs children… young people… willing to ‘serve’ it – and that means they must be both bred and recruited. When you establish within the family the pattern that you must bend… bow… to ‘authority’… that “you must be obedient…” – that obedience, as we’re hearing from Alice Miller, transfers seamlessly over to ‘the boss’… over to ‘the state’… whether that ‘state’ be – as we learned from Hermann Göring – whether that state call itself ‘democratic’ or ‘totalitarian’ or ‘communist’… all of these are patterns… ideologies… of class. And when we as parents create that pattern of responding to authority with unquestioning obedience it is almost inevitable that they become ready soil for the recruitment efforts of a ‘state’… because the state becomes an easy substitute for the parent in the child’s training… in the pattern of thought that he’s learned. And when we as parents train our children in that pattern… in that mindset… we will forever be dealing with the totalitarian threat. It’s time to move on. – PS]

…we can only get free by ‘unclogging’ ‘the state’ in us… by developing our thought…

 

He has never gone beyond the stage of idealizing his parents with their demands for unquestioning obedience; this idealization can easily be transferred to a Führer or to an ideology. Since authoritarian parents are always right, there is no need for their children to rack their brains in each case to determine whether what is demanded of them is right or not. And how is this to be judged? Where are the standards supposed to come from if someone has always been told what was right and what was wrong and if he never had an opportunity to become familiar with his own feelings and if, beyond that, attempts at criticism were unacceptable to the parents and thus were too threatening for the child? If an adult has not developed a mind of his own, then he will find himself at the mercy of the authorities for better or worse, just as an infant finds itself at the mercy of its parents. Saying no to those more powerful will always seem too threatening to him…. Individuals who refuse to adapt to a totalitarian regime are not doing so out of a sense of duty or because of naïveté, but because they cannot help but be true to themselves. (Alice Miller, For Your Own Good, 1980, p. 83 – 4)

[Alice Miller and Jeremy Bentham are discussed further in the pamphlet The Violence of ‘Class’.]

Alice said… that even our slight looks of disapproval cause psychological damage. And I confess I can’t tally up the times I did this to my son… cast disapproving looks on him…

 

…add to this his father’s unconscious abandonment… because for my son… at age two… a father’s leaving can only mean what it is: “he left me…” and when you love him so… your heart gets broke…

 

…add to this an unconscious mother… who didn’t know how powerful we are at age two…how big our spirit… how solidly we sit in our full power… how massive is our will to make and shape the world aright… to put wrong right… and make the crooked smooth.

 

We must stop weighting them with so much manufactured wrong. Endorse and nurture all that bigness… for its needed now… to help dissolve this massive wrong… called ‘class’.

 

But how to do that… when we ourselves… are captives?

 

We can only get free… by ‘unclogging ‘the state’ in us… by unclogging… and so developing… … by developing and so unclogging… our thought.

[…There must be a Greek Chorus to tell ‘the people’ what to think… Bentham explained it clearly to the ‘power’ of his day: “the people will believe anything so long as it reverberates on all walls of the echo chamber…” and today we have the punditry to play Greek Chorus. – PS]

–––

…if they knew the truth about Plato… would they accept the mantle ‘power’ lays upon them?

 

 

Arresting thought… leaving to the state the prerogative of making the decisions… leads to the withering away of any moral sense… as “the criterion of morality is the interest of the state…”

 

“Now see whether you agree with me,” says [the manikin-Socrates invented… constructed… by Plato.]

[…This wholly-made-up-manikin-Socrates… and I have say as an aside… that I wonder sometimes how is this taught in elite institutions… whether it’s made clear to these so-called upper-middle and elite children that this ‘Socrates’ is an invention. I mean I’m sure they’re taught the Republic is fiction…. But are they told that this ‘Socrates’ is a construction? It seems unlikely to me, because if so… as Plato and Socrates actually existed… as they are real people… the question that necessarily arises is… “well why did Plato lie?”… after which reply a modicum of thought will land the fish… it’s propaganda… and then ‘thought’ would take off… and fly beyond the walls built tall to contain the children on whom the hand of ‘power’ has laid the mantle… the heavy responsibility of realizing the unmet fantasies of Plato… of ‘power’.

And so how could they approach this prospect with relish if they knew the truth… that what they were signing onto was a project most debased… following a man who tells statesmen “take your infants to the battlefield and make them taste blood…” who recommended culling of the weaker ones… infanticide to ensure wealth not be diluted… for wealth you need… to play the game of supremacy… and establish ‘the Republic’… globally.

 

And let’s not delude ourselves that this is a mindset that is gone and done-with… recently I heard a man tell his story (I believe on the radio program The Moth Radio Hour) of being forced to go hunting with his father… and then forced… after his first ‘kill’… to taste its blood… broke his heart… the whole thing hideous… from one end to the other… – PS]

“Do you think it would do much harm to the city if a carpenter started making shoes and a shoemaker carpentering?” – “Not very much.” – “But should one who is by nature a worker, or a member of the money-earning class… manage to get into the warrior class; or should a warrior get into the guardians’ class without being worthy of it; then this kind of change and of underhand plotting would mean the downfall of the city?” – “Most definitely it would.” – “We have three classes in our city, and I take it that any such plotting or changing from one class to another is a great crime against the city, and may rightly be denounced as the utmost wickedness?” – “Assuredly.” – “but you will certainly declare that utmost wickedness towards one’s own city is injustice?” – “Certainly.” – “Then this is injustice. And conversely, we shall say that when each class in the city attends to its own business, the money-earning class as well as the auxiliaries and the guardians, then this will be justice.” (Plato, Republic, 434a-c)

 

[…what’s interesting about this passage (in addition to Popper’s comments) is the clear objective to arrest thought… by means of a propaganda technique perfected but not bettered since Plato demonstrated it… which is suggestive of the fact… that to arrest change… you must arrest thought… (see Karl Popper on Authentic Education for Youth… for his comments on these observations from Plato’s fictional ‘Socrates’… – PS]

Arresting thought… leaving to the state the prerogative of making the decisions necessarily then leads to the withering away of any moral sense as… as Popper explained: “Plato’s moral code is strictly utilitarian; it is a code of collectivist or political utilitarianism. The criterion of morality is the interest of the state. Morality is nothing but political hygiene.”

 

And this is the juncture where we stand… a fork in the path… one way bends toward ‘species-growth’… the other toward calcified rule of the few.

 

Developing our thought re-stimulates our moral sense because… as we do… ‘the state’ is dissolving in us.

 

–––

 

…folks who have a goal… in this case a very big goal… know they must accumulate the means to get things done…

 

Last week we said:

…that we-the-people must decide…

…if we’re tired of just being along for the ride…

…if we’re willing to put false division aside…

…and get on the same page…

…which means the same side…

 

[…which is not difficult, by the way… once ‘power’ is off our backs. I was listening this past Friday (11.01.13) to a woman who was part of humanitarian relief to Syria say that prior to ‘power’s conscious efforts to divide… Arab peoples got along just fine…]

 

…and it means… developing our latent leadership…. But leadership to do what? What’s the goal?

 

For Popper and for John Stuart Mill the answer might be, respectively: “to improve the conditions for humanity by teaching the youth authentically…” and… “to be a better citizen.” If we agree with Tolstoi and Popper that the state is not our master… but that we serve God (or I would say ‘the earth’…) then… it’s for she to whom we owe our gifts… that we grow them… she who is the object of our leadership.

 

And we under ‘class’ very much need Karl Popper, as he’s pondered precisely those issues and concepts that we need to get clear on… to move on.

 

And it’s not just that Karl Popper has thought so deeply about how we change society to get the future we want… but also that he did his ‘figuring out’ while watching an earlier version of the very same drama – the totalitarian threat – that we’re looking at today… which is not surprising… as the actors haven’t changed (but which, nonetheless, we never hear acknowledged.)

(A Fascist movement don’t run on nothing – everything that happens (of scale) under class… depends on cash. Folks who have a goal… in this case a very big goal… know that they must accumulate the means to get things done…

 

…what follows from this is that: preventing… keeping us from seeing that they have a goal is key – because once we see that… all the twisted bits fall into place… their strategies become transparent… and this in a global marketplace… of thoughts… leads… to us getting free.)

…Popper shows us how we think… or rather… that we are not actually thinking at all…

 

Very few saw as clearly as he… that the ‘ruling elite’ unfold their plays behind scenes… saw their fierce determination to bring into being … a regime in which ‘mind’ is theirs to command exclusively… could see the denouement so clearly… that comes when the few try to rule over all:

…all the history which exists, our history of the Great and the Powerful, is at best a shallow comedy; it is the opera buffa played by the powers behind reality… It is what one of our worst instincts, the idolatrous worship of power, of success, has led us to believe to be real. (Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 2, The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx and the Aftermath, p. 272)

Although I would argue that this is a class-specific idolatrousness.

 

But even more important for the development of the understanding we need to confront the threat we’re living under… than his historical insight… is that he helps us see how we think… he shows us the hidden assumptions of the categories of ‘class’… how deeply they run in the past…

 

…he shows that our training goes all the way back (at least…) to Plato….

(…but… going deeper… Popper shows us… by exposing Plato’s writings as propaganda… and then showing how it has been deeply planted in the world we live in… that we are not actually thinking at all… we are performing… regurgitating… and inspecting the puke to ensure it conforms to standards… the ones we are told to uphold. We use our intelligence… but not our reason… as Fromm said [see part 2 of Blog 42: “You Got City Hands Mr. Hooper” for the fuller quote.]

 

If our leadership’s been stolen… we must reclaim our lost bits… but then the question is… what do we do with them? And that of course depends on where you sit… because once your thought starts to grow… then you know… the elaborately constructed lies which oppose this growth… are inimical to life… and must be exposed and ended… so that our children… and we… can be as big… unbent… and ever-growing… as we’re meant to be.)

And as we must get free of this false training… and recapture our frozen abilities to lead… we need Popper’s help… to ‘redesign’ ourselves.

 

Does not ‘governance’ itself imply… rely for its relevance on… ‘scarcity’ as concept and as manufactured reality?

 

But it seems he’s set us an impossible task… we who must be the leadership that we need…

 

…we who want to build a future based on different premises – a future of unleashed… freely released… leadership… that being the ‘original’… the ‘goal’… for which we reach.

 

On the one hand… he tells us that ‘who has what particular gifts’ cannot be predicted… nor can we know in advance what gifts will be needed by our collectivities… so attempting to shape or create these things is beyond the province of ‘education’ (and, needless to say, the totalitarian-minded… think otherwise… as they want to be seen as the source of our gifts… to be… or rather seem to be… omniscient… the possessors of ‘All Knowledge’… which we must therefore go to if we want our portion of it.)

 

…so there’s that – that we must be free to develop our gifts freely (without coercion or duplicity… without agendas, hidden or paraded…) and not just selfishly but because our brothers and sisters will need them.

 

And then he says that we need these fully developed individualities… that can therefore be altruistic… in order to alter the present… but that only institutions can shape a different future.

 

The assumption / acceptance of this ‘institutional role’ is an expression… a reflection… of his acceptance of the fait accompli of ‘the state’.

 

Unintentionally, Popper has us chasing our tails, it seems… trying to fix that which is making us… shaping us… to keep making it – the institutions of class.

 

Bentham schooled ‘power’ well on the importance of setting up the echo-chamber ‘family-school-state-market’ to ensure that we never hear thoughts that challenge class… that contradict the logic of ‘rule’… the ‘ethics of utilitarianism’… i.e. to ensure that we cannot become ‘individualities’ in Popper’s sense – that is, to ensure that we cannot grow our gifts…

 

…and, indeed, it’s impossible to accomplish this… in an unlimited sense… within the parameters given by… not just ‘existing institutions’… but by ‘institutions’ themselves.

But I may be doing Popper a disservice…

…it could be simply that he trusted the earth…

…much as Nikola’s mom never doubted his return…

[In his autobiography Nikola recalls that, “at a certain age I contracted a mania for gambling which greatly worried my parents…. My father… gave vent to his anger and contempt, but my mother was different. She understood the character of men and knew that one’s salvation could only be brought about through his own efforts.”]

…or what our non-human animal friends have learned…

…to trust what comes from ‘Chaos’…

…perhaps Popper trusted that Grandmother would bring back…

…her wandering children…

…of Abandonment.

But that’s avoiding the question of ‘institutions’….

 

In a recent show (September 22, 2013) we concluded that in a future that’s free there is no ‘economy’, because it needs no means for ‘rank-assigning’. This could likewise be said of ‘education’. And in a world defined by love… children are no longer possessions. And in a world in which we live our gifts… including the quality of ‘leadership’… would not life itself reincorporate what we think of now as ‘governance’? Does not ‘governance’ itself imply… rely for its relevance on… ‘scarcity’?… as concept and as manufactured reality?

 

–––

 

“…humanitarian ethics demands an equalitarian and individualistic interpretation of justice…”

 

Let’s reconsider and delve a bit deeper into what’s implied when Popper reminds us that, “…an individualist, can, at the same time, be an altruist; he can be ready to make sacrifices in order to help other individuals…” and then adds:

Plato’s identification of individualism with egoism furnishes him with a powerful weapon for his defence of collectivism as well as for his attack upon individualism. In defending collectivism, he can appeal to our humanitarian feeling of unselfishness; in his attack, he can brand all individualists as selfish, as incapable of devotion to anything but themselves. This attack, although aimed by Plato against individualism in our sense, i.e. against the rights of human individuals, reaches of course only a very different target, egoism. But this difference is constantly ignored by Plato and by most Platonists. …Plato’s identification of individualism with egoism… had the effect of a successful piece of anti-humanitarian propaganda… that… has confused speculation on ethical matters down to our own time…. (Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies: The Spell of Plato, Chapter 6, p. 101–104)

And then later saying:

So far, we have seen that humanitarian ethics demands an equalitarian and individualistic interpretation of justice; but we have not yet outlined the humanitarian view of the state as such. On the other hand, we have seen that Plato’s theory of the state is totalitarian…

 

[Popper’s “humanitarian view of the state” is a ‘protectionist’ view of the state, about which he says (see “Karl Popper on Authentic Education for Youth” for the longer quote) – P.S.:]

 

…[T]he protectionist theory of the state was first proffered by the Sophist Lycophron, a pupil of Gorgias. It has already been mentioned that he was (like Alcidamas, also a pupil of Gorgias) one of the first to attack the theory of natural privilege…. The fundamental idea of protectionism is: protect the weak from being bullied by the strong. This demand has been raised not only by the weak, but often by the strong also. It is, to say the least of it, misleading to suggest [as Plato did] that it is a selfish or an immoral demand. (Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies: The Spell of Plato, p. 114)

…This is a view many today still adhere to. Popper imagined the future will change as institutions do… in other words.… he accepted class and the state as fait accomplis….

 

But what Popper fails to address is… where his own reasoning takes him… which is that ‘the state’ itself is totalitarian… in requiring of its citizens… to subject their individualism…. This is the ‘single pattern of thought’ inherent in the state’s very existence.

 

–––

 

Utilitarian ethics defines the world we live in… the state… the market… our inter-relationships…. This is why we’re concerned about humanity itself… we can’t ignore it anymore… it’s time to take that longest stride of soul…

 

So Popper poses this notion of the ‘humanitarian state’ in opposition, again, to Plato… saying that Plato’s totalitarian theory of the state:

This is the collectivist, the tribal, the totalitarian theory of morality: “Good is what is in the interest of my group; or my tribe; or my state.” It is easy to see what this morality implied for international relations: that the state itself can never be wrong in any of its actions, as long as it is strong: that the state has the right, not only to do violence to its citizens, should that lead to an increase of strength, but also to attack other states, provided it does so without weakening itself. (This inference, the explicit recognition of the amorality of the state, and consequently the defence of moral nihilism in international relations was drawn by Hegel.) (Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies: The Spell of Plato, Chapter 6, p. 106 – 7)

What Popper is arguing is that this notion of the ‘amoral state’ is not inevitable… and yet I think if we look around ourselves… at not just today… but decade after decade… there’s no doubt… this describes perfectly the ‘state’ of all states… utilitarian ethics defines the world we live in… and it defines the state… and it defines the market… and it defines our inter-relationships… this is why we’re concerned about humanity itself right now. It was not difficult to see this moment that we’re in. It’s been projected… and we’ve been warned about it repeatedly. We’re living it now. It’s time to finally come to terms with it… take that longest stride of soul. We can’t ignore it anymore.

 

…inherent in the very notion ‘institutions’ is self-betrayal…

 

The problem… as Nikola Tesla correctly assessed… analyzed… were the barriers between us… which can only exist when we don’t know each other… when we don’t have first-hand, direct, information of each other – that’s the only way they can con us about each other. So he knew that once we were in this moment that we’re in right now… with all of us thinking and talking together globally… that we’d be in a new ballgame – these new terms are a game-changer… a game-‘ender’. It’s up to us. We either prolong this misery… because the train we’re on is on a self-destructive course – and it’s always been on a self-destructive course… it’s always meant enormous misery… enormous waste and sacrifice of life. So if for no other reason than that it is wrong… and that we can now change that… end that… we have to. That’s not just our ‘right’ as life… that’s our responsibility as life.

 

When Popper says in chapter 7 of The Open Society and Its Enemies:

This theory of checks and balances can at least claim careful consideration. The only objections to this claim, as far as I can see, are (a) that such a control is practically impossible, or (b) that it is essentially inconceivable since political power is essentially sovereign. Both of these dogmatic objections are, I believe, refuted by the facts… (p. 122)

 

Those who criticize democracy on any ‘moral’ grounds fail to distinguish between personal and institutional problems. It rests with us to improve matters. The democratic institutions cannot improve themselves. The problem of improving them is always a problem for persons rather than for institutions. But if we want improvements, we must make clear which institutions we want to improve. (Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies: The Spell of Plato)

So this is a version of “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater”… he’s saying that these ‘democratic institutions’ are mere ‘tools’…. It’s the way I, for instance, think of the Internet… it’s a tool. We use it for our purposes, and, ‘power’, of course will use it for its purposes – uses technology in ways that are very dangerous for us right now.

 

But is this true? Is it true that the ‘democratic institutions’ are mere ‘tools’… that do good or ill depending on who wields them… and with what purpose? This is the discussion that we need to be having: discussions of whether or not there is an institutional role… in our efforts to get to a future that’s free.

 

And what I’m arguing is that ‘power’ has captured the institutions… and, further, that inherently… in the notion of ‘institutions’… is our self-betrayal – that in using the very notion of institutions… we are undermining ourselves.

 

‘Power’ calls every tune that institutions dance to… by the simple means of making a market of everything… by privatizing our common ‘goods’ we must go… hat-in-hand… as… we must get money somehow… (notice for example the sad rationalizations the president of Ecuador resorts to… to justify the rape of his people and land….) By removing control of how we are able to feed ourselves to the global sphere… we’re trapped… and no individual state can ever change that… only we-the-people can.

 

–––

 

* “The November 17, 2013 show”

 

WUR, Sunday, November 17th, 2013 radio show: “Reclaiming Our Stolen Gifts… Our Leadership… To Establish A Future Based On Distributed Generation” (Pt. 3): Understanding the “logic of ‘rule’”… and getting clearer on ‘the transition’

 

What does it take for us to claim our ‘bigness’ now… so we can create that critical mass?

 

 

When we are divided from each other we are completely vulnerable to the “shock-and-awe” tactics of ‘power’… which uses “rule-by-bias”… all that weight rolls the way those who control it want it to…

 

Today we’ll be taking a closer look at this notion of ‘rule’… as its necessity is still assumed… at least in the public discourse… and so very likely as well within us. And we’ll be continuing to ask, “what holds us back?” by trying to deepen the colors and textures of our picture of ‘transition’ – and not from the perspective of a particular town or village merely… but, most importantly, as a global humanity. Developing this picture is essential to our gaining the initiative in defining the world we want… and to ensuring that we aren’t caught off-guard by ‘shock-and-awe-like’ tactics of ‘power’ – a point that will be concretized when we spend some time with Miklos Nyiszli. You can almost feel the rush of ‘power’ to get us all – ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ alike – on ‘lock-down’… feel it rushing to massage the ‘knowledge-sectors’ even as it rushes to demoralize ‘mere’ ‘hand’.

[This radio show in large measure is about testing the unconscious – and conscious – assumptions of ‘class’… asks why it’s supposedly ‘not possible’ to end ‘class’… end ‘rank’… end a world of ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’… ‘winners’ and ‘losers’… ‘citizens and barbarians’ – this is our mental mindset simply because we’ve been trained in it… and we can begin creating a new one… one that is of our own creation, we-the-people’s. For millennia we’ve been living with one designed by the few… so it’s no wonder at all that we feel that there’s no other choice… but now that we can talk globally… we can have these global conversations because it’s going to take all of us together… to move on as a species…. We’re starting to do it.]

…‘investigations’?…‘revelations’?… ‘exposes’?… of the misdeeds of ‘power’… or rather… us planning the alternative… so folks can have a choice… and hope?

 

But first some ‘thank-yous’ and ‘stay-strongs’ to our brothers and sisters challenging the “logic of ‘rule’” in Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh and in Cambodia… even their… ‘modest’ doesn’t even begin to describe it… how little they ask for the billions they generate… their request for a heart-breakingly small portion of those billions… is met with violence. This is how heroes… folks with heart… are treated under the regime of class. And to the six students at UC-Berkeley who camped out on the steps of Sproul Plaza to remind us all that ‘heart’ still exists on this UC campus – for ‘heart’ is needed to resist a sea of ‘assent’ – thank you for that courage.

 

And some cautions… all around us the accelerated pace of ‘power’s race to achieve total suppression of our humanness is in evidence… here in the Bay Area the state is threatening to impose a curfew on youth (who tell the truth) in Oakland (the police-state it is marching apace…) and I have to say… when I hear tell of unheard-of 195 mph winds… when we know the dark DARPA capability exists… to boost the strength of storms… [see the Leuren Moret article, “The Historical Roots of the New World Order and Its Permanent War Economy”: (http://exopolitics.blogs.com/peaceinspace/2009/12/haarp-the-space-preservation-treaty-planet-earth-as-weapon-target-by-leuren-moret.html)]

“…Grant I may never prove so fond [foolish]… To trust… a keeper with my freedom…” and… year-and-a-half no signal?… please…

 

(…and the point here is not to over-credit the ‘power’ of ‘power’… or to pretend a certainty we can never have – although why develop the capacity if not to use it? – or to provoke an urge to delve into it… for me, it’s sufficient to know the tendency… that ‘power’ wants such means… and to know that until the ‘power’-guys, the ‘shadow-statesmen’ are no longer sitting atop us, we can’t know when they apply, and when they withhold, their most debased tactics… the point is that we can no longer indulge this luxury of letting others lead… if ‘luxury’ it be.

 

To slightly modify Shakespeare:

 

“Grant I may never prove so fond,

To trust ‘power’ on its own bond;…

Or a dog that seems a-sleeping;

Or a keeper with my freedom.”

 

(Timon of Athens)

…and the Philippines hosts a powerful resistance movement… a movement demanding of the state its right to autonomy… we cannot help but wonder… at the convenience of it for ‘power’… and how is it even being considered as a possibility… far less presented as a certainty!… that the state of California could be planning to ‘cloud-seed’ because it (!) hasn’t enough water for its needs… it says… robbing the people of Asia, Africa and the Middle East of water… as if their suffering has no meaning… no concern is evoked in the pitiless mental spokes of ‘power’s heartlessness… but surely… we-the-people can still demand some say in this?

 

–––

 

…if you can control where money goes… you can control what gets done… in a system…

 

Last week we said that Popper didn’t follow his own reasoning… and… if you read further into the online writing for this show, you’ll see that I’m arguing that for this reasoning… we have to go to de Grazia… who wrote Of Time, Work and Leisure.

 

We saw last week that Popper both hoped that individuals would make the state more humanitarian… by modifying its institutions… while at the same time saying what I think is obviously true… that “…a humanitarian ethics requires an individualistic interpretation of ‘justice’.”

 

But individuals do not operate the mechanisms of state… functionaries do… functionaries captured by the wage…. So if you can control where money goes… you can control what gets done… in a system.

 

So with this in mind… let’s consider Popper’s hopes about how we might get the future we want.

 

Quoting Popper:

There is another distinction within the field of political problems corresponding to that between persons and institutions. It is the one between the problems of the day and the problems of the future.

 

[…putting it this way makes it clear that for Popper… and many today… there’s no way around having a state… as the ‘problems of the day’ and the ‘problems of the future’ are the same (under ‘class’…) and I for one don’t want to continue struggling with them – the problems attendant upon class… upon letting the few lead – so in wrestling with Popper on this question… I think we wrestle with the popular consciousness…– PS]

 

…the “logic of rule” is the impetus behind the de-humanization… privatization… and accumulation processes of ‘power’… accumulation accelerated precisely because ‘power’ got organized…

 

While the problems of the day are largely personal, the building of the future must necessarily be institutional. If the political problem is approached by asking, “Who should rule,” and if Plato’s principle of leadership is adopted – that is to say, the principle that the best should rule – then the problem of the future must take the form of designing institutions for the selection of future leaders. (p. 127)

 

[…and Popper will subsequently acknowledge that that is precisely what we got… an education system that propagandizes to children and youth… as we saw last week in discussing one of Plato’s too-many-to-count disingenuous passages of propaganda…– PS]

I’ve been using this phrase “the logic of ‘rule’ to describe the impetus behind the global privatization / de-humanization process…

 (…for what is slavery if not de-humanization? …and what is ‘rank’ if not likewise?…)

So… behind these global processes – ‘de-humanization’… ‘privatization’… and (for the last two and a half centuries…) ‘accumulation’ – the impetus behind these processes is the ‘logic of rule’…

 

…and this ‘global’ privatization / de-humanization process has been proceeding apace for the last few millennia… as well as the process of accumulation marching in lock-step with privatization / de-humanization for the past two and a half centuries…

(…and this is worth a long conversation in and of itself… it ties into what we noted on a previous show that ‘progress’ is a Ponzi scheme…. Let’s develop this further next week…)

 

…and key to the ideology of ‘progress’… is this notion of ‘stages of development’ – an unfolding of ‘stages’ – ‘power’ likes to present it as a progressive sequence:  de-humanization (‘ancient slavery’)… to medieval privatization (“enclosure of the commons”)… to ‘capitalist accumulation’… as if there’s been an advance… when it’s just the opposite… we’ve become less and less powerful as human beings… as ‘accumulation’ becomes more complete… more and more of our soul has been ceded to ‘power’.

 

And the ‘accumulation’ we’ve been seeing since the French Revolution – this accumulation accelerated precisely because ‘power’ got seriously organized…

 

(…with the creation of the ‘bill of exchange’ and the imposition of the international gold standard… resulting in exponential growth of ‘wealth’ – though they like to present it as some sort of almost ‘magical’ process [‘market forces’…] as opposed to the truth: ‘power’ got seriously organized…)

 

– so all of these ‘processes’ which ‘power’s pundits so considerately and voluminously systematized for it… hide the hand behind them… provide ‘thought-cover’… to create the illusion of ‘naturalness’… of some alleged ‘natural development’… of ‘things unfolding’ as they must… and so… ‘scientifically’… satisfactorily for pundits because it creates a ‘need’ for them… and of course most satisfactorily for ‘power’… as it maintains, this provision by the pundits, our dis-organization… and confusion… which is key to its control…)

So let’s take a moment and test it for soundness… to see if it really is… a ‘necessary’ for us… this “logic of ‘rule’ – is it really necessary for our future?

 

Quoting Popper again:

…We have seen that Plato’s idea of justice demands, fundamentally, that the natural rulers should rule and the natural slaves should slave. It is part of the historicist demand that the state, in order to arrest all change, should be a copy of its Idea, or of its true ‘nature’. This theory of justice indicates very clearly that Plato saw the fundamental problem of politics in the question: Who shall rule the state?

[…Do any outside of the ranks of ‘power’ still believe in the notion of ‘natural rulers’ and ‘natural slaves’? perhaps so if we substitute ‘followers’ for ‘slaves’. Are the majority ‘followers’? Certainly we’re trained to be so… but I don’t believe for a nanosecond that any of us are ‘by nature’ followers – by nature we’re cooperative… social… like the bees. And like the bees each individual is capable of assuming any task needed for the reproduction of the group… at least in potential…. But ‘power’ wants to freeze our natural process of continuous growth… freeze it to keep us children… easy to mould… and control. – PS]

…[W]e may distinguish two main types of government.…

…we are already engulfed in resource-wars… we are living the end of an era… let’s prioritize getting free before “saving the planet”… ‘power’ will be happy to fund that… but will never fund our getting free …

 

[…and we must always in the back of our minds remember what Hermann Göring said – and he had no axe to grind when he said it – that: “it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship…” – the ‘rulers’ can always get ‘the people’ to follow because we’re trained that way… this is why we have to re-train ourselves to be leaders… it is key that we do so… which means that it is key that we start having these conversations more broadly. I believe this moment requires of us a sense of urgency even greater than that required on the cusp of twentieth century fascism… because we are living the end of an era… the end of breakneck consumption of the planet… we are already engulfed in resource-wars… and there’s nowhere else to go (despite the propaganda they’re attempting to plant about ‘space exploration’ and the supposed treasure-trove of minerals the new ‘space explorers’ will supposedly score…) ‘power’ knows they cannot maintain ‘accumulation’ at its previous pace… so… from its perspective… ‘there are too many of us…’ so the urgency is even greater. Let’s put this on the front burner… please… prioritize it before ‘saving the planet’… because ‘power’s got that covered: “We’ll fund ‘saving the planet’…” they are already saying… but… best believe… they’re not gonna fund us getting free.

 

And I know it’s going to be very tempting to go where that money is – that’s why we have to get tight with our three sources of power… so we know why we’re here. – PS]

It’s quite likely Popper didn’t take in… ‘accumulation’ as a totalitarian weapon…

 

…The first type consists of governments of which we can get rid without bloodshed – for example, by way of general elections; that is to say, the social institutions provide means by which the rulers may be dismissed by the ruled, and the social traditions ensure that these institutions will not easily be destroyed by those who are in power. The second type consists of governments which the ruled cannot get rid of except by way of a successful revolution – that is to say, in most cases, not at all. I suggest the term ‘democracy’ as a short-hand label for a government of the first type, and the term ‘tyranny’ or ‘dictatorship’ for the second. This, I believe, corresponds closely to traditional usage. But I wish to make clear that no part of my argument depends of the choice of these labels; and should anybody reverse this usage (as is frequently done nowadays), then I should simply say that I am in favour of what he calls ‘tyranny,’ and object to what he calls ‘democracy’; and I should reject as irrelevant any attempt to discover what ‘democracy’ ‘really’ or ‘essentially’ means, for example, by translating the term into ‘the rule of the people’. (For although ‘the people’ may influence the actions of their rulers by the threat of dismissal, they never rule themselves in any concrete, practical sense.) (Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1: The Spell Of Plato, selections from pgs. 120 – 125)

In Palmers’ Chat: As We Take Our Earth Back… I asked, in response to this last comment of Popper’s:

So what is this ‘state’ we must allegedly make?

How useful will be Popper’s – the generally accepted – notion of ‘democracy’…

…at least in the forms of it we’ve been allowed to see…

…in shaping our inter-relations once we’re free?…

– Not very.

 

I think we have arrived at the historical time when we must ask ourselves whether we do want to rule ourselves “in any concrete, practical sense.”

But before we address this it might be as well to examine the legitimacy of what Popper calls ‘democracy’…

How do we assess his comment that:

 

 It should be mentioned that, from the protectionist point of view, the existing democratic states, though far from perfect, represent a very considerable achievement in social engineering of the right kind. Many forms of crime, of attack on the rights of human individuals by other individuals, have been practically suppressed or very considerably reduced, and courts of law administer justice fairly successfully in difficult conflicts of interest. (p. 113)

 

This rosy view can be held on to only if critical bits are extruded from our canvas. Let’s add further color to our problem of ‘state’ by throwing in…

… ‘world-systems analysis.’

It’s quite likely that Popper didn’t take in the use of ‘accumulation’ as ‘totalitarian-weapon’… see that…. essential to an accurate picture of ‘the state’ is the discussion of how the ‘tend’ itself… accumulation… privatization… de-humanization… creates the (apparent) need for ‘the state’. The scam works like the game of ‘Monopoly’… which could be called ‘Supremacy’ – the ‘winners’ buy up everything and leave the less ‘fortunate’ with no options… no where to go except to you for everything…

 

…but the escape clause for we-the-people was given by a ‘higher authority’ – the earth – and so this seeming control absolutely depends on our being cut-off from the earth… our back-up… and even more ultimately depends on our vesting the so-called ‘masters’ presumed ‘control’ with our belief in it… which ‘control’… because the earth don’t back it… is false.

 

–––

 

Another way of saying… “…we develop our leadership…” is “…we develop our unique voices…”

 

 

…the choice we are faced with… stunted lives… division from our fellows… lost empathy… lost humanity… or the opposite of those tends… by reaching out to our brothers and sisters…

 

Popper took previous class history as his model… saw the truth of Plato’s analysis… that the master class seemed capable of rending itself endlessly with squabbles (and likely didn’t see their organizing quietly behind the scenes…) and assumed that we-the-people could figure out how to maneuver in and manipulate those squabbles… and rise to the top in time… as we incrementally learned how to rein-in ‘power’.

 

But we have now the advantage of a further seventy-five years of testing Popper’s sanguine hopes… sanguine even though the Big Boots marched and nation after nation spawned dictators. And today we see the dictatorships… hidden and paraded… still hold sway…

(…today [11.13.13] I listened to an interview with the heroic Mark Klein… who I sure hope is being hosted royally at numerous speaking engagements across the country… his courage was never held up and celebrated as the model of heart which it clearly was… he’s the man who learned when he was working in an AT&T ‘Internet Room’ in San Francisco, that directly below him a secret room had been installed with a splitter… he exposed the fact that AT&T cooperatively funneled all of its data to the NSA. AT&T was never punished. He estimates that there are 15 – 20 such secret rooms across the country. He spoke out in 2007… six years later nothing has changed… except I’ve no doubt Mark Klein has been forced to pay a hefty price in health and peace of mind…. So those that can… those who have the luxury of a sweet spot in the Matrix… play-pretend they live in a ‘democracy’… and those that can’t… are punished…)

…and more telling… we see that the earth that feeds us has been almost unimaginably debased… the disparities are ancient in their fixity… and extremity…

 

…so the earth is progressively trashed… and its bounty progressively stashed in the coffers of the few… the effluent slops over onto the ‘privileged’ states… the ones designated to be ‘winners’… and the ‘losers’ get to watch their children scream in hunger… and cry out in thirst.

 

So the vantage of those three-quarter-century years can now inform our thinking… and those who give the horror those years discharged its due know that the choice we are faced with… is to continue to accept stunted lives… and being divided from our fellows… and, moreover, deepened apathy… and lost humanity… as ‘rank’ gets fixed in place… in a rush or incrementally – or decide to reclaim responsibility… and realize the opposite of those tends… by reaching out to our brothers and sisters… to restore ourselves and the earth to health again.

 

–––

 

…if we accept the terms given… ‘rule by bias’ will always have its way with us…

 

It’s the ever-drivingness of ‘power’ that seems till now to check us… and our… not just inability to stop it in our current disorganized state… but our ever-increasing and deepening inability to confront it – because we weaken as it deepens. It is the extralegal tend – that shadow governance – which we could call “rule by ‘bias’” – those bags that fatten exponentially… against which we have no defence… if we accept the terms given… by the logic of ‘rule’. So we have to step outside it to view our freedom – take its broad dimensions… and breathe air pure and undefiled again. We don’t want to exist to ‘deal with problems’… ‘power’ will be pleased to invent them for us ad infinitum… to keep us busy and feeling useful… or beat-down and demoralized, depending… depending on where you are shaken out on the ladder… whether you’re an ‘insider’ or ‘outsider’… ‘citizen’ or ‘barbarian’…

 

–––

 

…a personal sense of justice is rooted in allegiance with one’s own body… which doesn’t want to be forced…

 

The system (of class)… the state… insists… mandates… that we limit our concept of what is altruistic to the collectivist….

 

(…as… just as Popper says… ‘the state’… per Plato’s counsel… is set up to defeat individualistic ‘altruism’ – i.e., making ‘justice’ personal… a very personal matter… which, by definition means allegiance with one’s personal body… which does not want to be forced. We should sit with that for a while – just to sit with one’s own body… and feel… and credit… and honor… what it says… would overturn this system. It doesn’t want to be forced.

Personal definitions of ‘justice’, then – i.e., one based in our allegiance to our bodies – preclude… disallow… coercion… disallow a system of coerced work… and coercion this work system will be until each individual has sufficient means to live unbent… unbegging… free of necessity and so… free.)

…and an interview I heard yesterday (11.12.13) with Tom Hartmann on Democracy Now might serve as an illustration of how the state limits our concept of what is altruistic to the ‘collectivist’. He was plugging a book… the facade of which seemed designed to reassure us about his progressive cred… to pull us in and win him a warm welcome… seduce us to think he stood with our – we-the-people’s – best interests… and it could just be that he, like Popper, genuinely believes that our best interests are served by incrementally bringing the state to see its people… and to care about us…and give us all the best amenities that a ‘modern’ people can be provided with by ‘the prince’ – but it matters little… as regardless his words serve well the interests of the state to lull us back to sleep. Until broad discussion is allowed over the airwaves of alternative perspectives, I think we have to call such discourse propaganda… because it contributes to the suppression of all but the dominant view.

 

He began by saying that the ‘U.S. political system’ and the ‘U.S. economic system” need fundamental structural change… and then proceeded to translate this into reforms he hoped would happen… but which he acknowledged were unlikely as ‘the political will doesn’t exist’ to make them. And this is always the Catch-22 the progressive pundits trap us in… they refuse to call for the release of we-the-people… from the capture of our energies which is the coerced-work system… this being – our release – the only move capable of generating the ‘political will’… the accomplishment of which renders the reforms irrelevant, as we’d have a wholly new society… designed by us… without institutions… and so ever-unneedful of ‘reforms’.

 

And then he tells this story that acknowledges the reality of shadow-governance… of the Machiavellian plotting of ‘princes’ that unfolds behind scenes… saying that J.F. Kennedy et al. plotted to kill Castro… even as they were negotiating with him the restoration of diplomatic relations… and how once Kennedy was killed… the U.S. statesmen were supposedly ‘so afraid’ ‘the people’ would blame Castro… and that the reverberations from this would supposedly provoke World War III… and so the statesmen ‘heroically’ manufactured a cover-up… to protect us from ourselves. Now this is the key ideological rationale of ‘rule’… of ‘class’… of ‘power’ itself… that it is beyond our station to know… ‘the good’… and so to seek ‘perfection’….

 

And just in case we were unclear that his point was to reinforce the need for the state…

(…which he calls ‘the commons’… which, as we know, is an important new-old tactic of ‘power’… i.e. to take the words we value… and pound them flat and insert their own stuffing… and use the flaccid concept that results to lull us back to sleep…)

…he tells us: “if you stop administering the commons with government, you create a vacuum that the Koch brothers are just waiting to step into….”

 

But this is that other new-old tactic of ‘power’… manufacture… sculpt… the reality you want… in this case, our diminishment… our dependence on the ‘statesmen’… and then pronounce that reality (with your pundits faithful service providing the theories…) ‘inevitable’… so that it seems to the people ‘right’ – whereas honest actors who truly do serve the best interests of the people – i.e. our getting free – would be working furiously right now… to release our leadership capacities… which would not be difficult (given a pundit’s reach…) as this is what we are inherently… – and so ensure there is no vacuum… but rather powerful beings spreading their wings.

 

–––

 

* “The November 24, 2013 show”

WUR, Sunday, November 24th, 2013 radio show: “Reclaiming Our Stolen Gifts… Our Leadership… To Establish A Future Based On Distributed Generation” (Pt. 4): Understanding the “logic of ‘rule’”… and getting clearer on ‘the transition’ (pt. 2)

 

 

There is a logical trajectory of thought – whether ‘power’s or true – which discussions will tease out… for which I hope the (just up) Volume 3 of “Reclaiming Our Leadership” pdf will be useful… we can't be leaders while working these jobs… can we at least get a pundit to say that? So we can begin to unload this massive shame…

 

This radio show argues that the only goal worthy of the name for ‘we-the-people’ is to get free. Because if the future is not about us owning ourselves… then what’s the point?… truly… a new cast of characters in the ‘say-so’ seat? I don’t think so. That’s not good enough for we-the-people.

 

And I hope these shows are useful for clarifying that… which is why I’m sharing the transcripts as pdf files to be downloaded free. I’ve just put up Volume 3 of “Reclaiming Our Leadership”… which includes both completed and projected shows: the November 10 – December 8, 2013 shows. I’m putting up the projected transcripts in order not to shortchange the analytical process in motion… of understanding the “logic of rule” – given that much of December will be devoted to reading and discussing Miklos Nyiszli’s Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account.

 

These shows have been so helpful for me to see the logical outcome of authentic thinking… and until we do this more broadly it will be hard to double-check that… and triple-check that… but from my perspective… once you start with the truth… have a hold… a handle… on reality… and start pulling on those threads… you begin to untangle the confusion – all the cons – that we’ve been bombarded with for millennia… so it’s no wonder we’re so deeply enmeshed in them. But once we start unraveling it… one thing does lead to another… which leads to another… and so there is a logical trajectory of thought… and these shows have been helpful for me to begin teasing that out… seeing where… both where the thought of ‘power’ goes… and where authentic thought goes… and to see that those are two opposing trajectories… and that we cannot stay on ‘power’s train and expect to get to anywhere but to ‘power’s destination.

 

So there has been a logical progression in my thinking… that I want to play out… and I want to share it with you in advance. I’ve been focusing on “reclaiming our leadership” because that’s what’s been stolen… because we can’t be leaders while working ‘jobs’ – can we at least have a pundit say that? So that we can begin to unload this massive shame that somehow we’re not smart enough because we are not like the so-called ‘leaders’… who aren’t loaded with this massive weight of… filling their coffers… essentially… because it’s not “reproduction of ourselves” what we’re doing – which once we begin doing that for ourselves we’ll realize it’s so much easier than when we’re in harness… to ‘reproduce’ ourselves… because we’re not ‘reproducing ourselves’ when we’re in harness… we’re reproducing their ‘power’… their position… their privilege. That’s it. Not ourselves. Our souls get put on hold… our growth gets forgotten and let go… that’s not the way it’s supposed to be.

 

So please download Volume 3. Recognize that it is ‘in progress’… so the ‘Volume 3’ you download in a month will be more complete than the ‘Volume 3’ you download today… but the essentials are there.

 

–––

 

…if it’s not about us owning ourselves then what’s the point?… Truly… a new cast of characters in the say-so seat?… I don’t think so…

 

Last week we noted that the impetus behind these global processes – ‘de-humanization’… ‘privatization’… and (for the last two and a half centuries…) ‘accumulation’ – is the ‘logic of rule’… and that this ‘global’ privatization / de-humanization process has been proceeding apace for the last few millennia – along with the process of accumulation… marching in lock-step with privatization / de-humanization for the past two and a half centuries…

 

…and we said that the ‘thought cover’ (provided by the pundits…) the rendering of these practices into a ‘system’ (‘stages of development’… ‘the march of civilization’…) this conversion of the ignoble reflexes of ‘class’ into a supposed ‘science’… the massaging of Plato’s injunctions – about keeping ‘the cattle’ (us) well-herded… and no one being without a leader… and ensuring unity in the ‘master class’ – this conversion of the outcomes of a ‘scarcity’-mindset – ‘power’s mindset of abandonment – into the spruced-up notion ‘progress’… is a Ponzi scheme…

 

…and in this case… we could define ‘Ponzi scheme’ as a con in which you get those from whom you’ve sucked the wealth… to see its glut… its accumulation… as somehow benefiting them… to see the ‘progress’ from ‘de-humanization’… to ‘privatization’… to ‘accumulation’… somehow as a boon….

 

…we cannot expect ‘power’ to behave differently… what we can expect of ourselves… is to render their fear moot…

 

We have been encouraged to mistake ‘power’s “‘progress’ in ‘managing’ its pursuit of ‘power’”… with… “progress for humanity”… for… as Albert O. Hirschman showed us (and Shakespeare for that matter…) Plato’s observations about the seemingly endless self-rendering capacities of ‘kings’ greatly troubled the shepherds (the statesmen…) and they devoted much pondering to solving this dilemma: figuring out how to follow Plato’s injunctions… particularly that there must be no squabbling in the ‘master class’.

 

As the earth has grown progressively more biased… with all the weight of our stolen wealth… and the wealth of the earth… on one side… with all the weight of our shadow lives (and heart… depending…) amassed at the other… so progressively has grown the ‘master’s fear… and lack of understanding of us. We cannot expect them to behave differently. What we can expect of ourselves is to render it – the ‘master’s fear – moot… null… void… absolutely irrelevant.

 

–––

The 5th century B.C. Athenian movement against slavery – challenging the key divide of class – achieved considerable practical success…

 

Plato’s treble intertwining injunctions to ‘statesmen’… “everyone in the ‘republic’ must have a leader…” “it is dangerous to let ‘the people’ think…” and… “there must be no disunity in the ‘master class’…” reflected pre-existing divisions (‘class’… ‘caste’…) but sought to harden them… ensure them against humanitarian pressure… make them permanent. But concern for each other is our nature… and only dire… and then dour… necessity – chronic manufactured ‘scarcity’ – can kill it.

 

In Volume One, of The Open Society and Its Enemies: The Spell of Plato, Popper notes:

There is strong evidence that at least in Plato’s (and Aristotle’s) time, the problem of equalitarianism was clearly seen to be concerned with two fully analogous distinctions, that between Greeks and barbarians on the one side and that between masters (or free men) and slaves on the other… Now we have very strong evidence that the fifth-century Athenian movement against slavery was not confined to a few intellectualists like Euripides, Alcidamas, Lycophron, Antiphon, Hippias, etc., but that it had considerable practical success. This evidence is contained in the unanimous reports of the enemies of Athenian democracy (especially the ‘Old Oligarch’, Plato, Aristotle…)

 

If we now consider in this light the admittedly scanty available evidence for the existence of cosmopolitism, it appears, I believe, reasonably strong – provided that we include the attacks of the enemies of this movement among the evidence. In other words, we must make full use of the attacks of the Old Oligarch, of Plato, and of Aristotle against the humanitarian movement, if we wish to assess its real significance. Thus the Old Oligarch attacks Athens for an eclectic cosmopolitan way of life….

 

…our first allegiance is to our humanity – we have to stop passing on this thinking in boxes – we have to start talking about class…

 

[Popper cites some “extant statements of this fifth-century movement”: “Antiphon… attacked the distinction between Greeks and barbarians as being fictitious. Tarn comments on Euripides’ fragment which states that a noble man can range the world like an eagle the air… by remarking that “he new that an eagle has a permanent home-rock”; but this remark does not do full justice to the fragment; for in order to be a cosmopolitan, one need not give up one’s permanent home. In the light of all this, I do not see why Diogenes’ meaning was purely “negative” when he replied to the question “where are you from?” by saying that he was a cosmopolite, a citizen of the whole world; especially if we consider that a similar answer (“I am a man of the world”) is reported of Socrates, and another (“The wise man belongs to all countries, for the home of a great soul is the whole world”… of Democritus…. (p. 278 – 279)

 

…‘right’ laws… ‘right’ state… ‘right’ lock-down – to preserve the sanctity of ‘rule’ – at the cost of our humanity…

 

[Popper later quotes Plato in Laws, 950d, that:]

First, no man under forty years shall obtain permission for going abroad to whatever place it may be. Secondly, nobody shall obtain such permission in a private capacity: in a public capacity, permission may be granted only to heralds, ambassadors, and to certain missions of inspection… And these men, after their return, will teach the young that the political institutions of other countries are inferior to their own. (Plato)

Similar laws are laid down for the reception of strangers. For “intercommunication between states necessarily results in a mixing of characters… and in importing novel customs; and this must cause the greatest harm to people who enjoy… the right laws” (949e/950a) (p. 298 – 299)

 

…the power of our first allegiance (to life itself… to humanity itself…) has since ‘class’ began… been the chiefest threat to ‘power’… against which Plato schooled it to be ever-vigilant…

 

[Popper tells us (p. 184) that “there rose a new faith in reason, freedom and the brotherhood of all men – the new faith, and, as I believe, the only possible faith, of the open society.” And a note in the back reads:]

 

It is most interesting to contrast Sophocles’ attitude towards the new faith with that of Euripides. Sophocles complains: “It is wrong that… the lowly born should flourish, while the brave and nobly born are unfortunate.” Euripides replies (with Antiphon) that the distinction between the nobly and the low born (especially slaves) is merely verbal: “The name alone brings shame upon the slave.” (Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies: The Spell of Plato, p. 299)

Popper has shown us that “…a humanitarian ethics requires an individualistic interpretation of ‘justice’… having a ‘self’… a judgment independent from that imposed or sanctioned by the state… and these quotes above show us why… the power of our first allegiance (to life itself… to humanity itself…) has… since ‘class’ began… always been the chiefest threat to ‘power’… against which Plato has schooled it to be ever-vigilant.

 

I consider this to be the only basis for true altruism – one given by our independent judgment… our earth-given process of analysis… that comes from our study of the earth…. Without this independence… we are wholly crafted by ‘power’ (which is why Alice Miller is such a threat….)

 

Another word for this ‘altruism’ is ‘heart’… and, of course, if you are ‘power’… you will be determined to steer it away from avenues disadvantageous to ‘power’… and therefore away from the questions that arise when you notice the endless capacity of ‘the system’ to churn up ‘problems’… ‘power’ is determined to turn us away from wanting to end the terms (turns) that make the chronic problems… that continuously churn them… to keep us from figuring out that we can create new ones… new terms that allow for a self-reinforcing…self-sustaining… health-cycle… for the species as a whole…

 

…as the truth is that our gifts and heart are boundless.

 

–––

 

…the state… step-child and servant… of the quest for ‘perfection’… Popper… with his eyes on the fangs… ignored the coils encircling us all… in the class system…

 

That Popper does not admit the seemingly incontrovertible fact that ‘the state’ sanctions ‘altruism’ – i.e. the kind of ‘altruism’ that is allowed to exist – seems inconsistent… as he has said to us that… “the only possible faith of the open society…” is a “faith in reason, freedom and the brotherhood of all men.” It suggests that he was too enmeshed in the raging, overt fascist threat… engulfing states right and left (and the book Modern Dictatorship, a few excerpts of which can be found in Palmers’ Chat – see the table of contents for it – written as the totalitarian plan was unfolding gives us a good sense of this….) So the contrast I think we’ll see… between Popper and Nyiszli… will be revealing. Popper… watching fascism rearing… hoped his work could help de-fang the beast for future generations. But Nyiszli… in its belly… could not be deceived… saw the threat as embedded in the quest for perfection… and saw it had captured ‘the state’… saw that ‘the state’ is not just (necessarily) implicated in… but owes its existence to… stepchild and servant that it is of… that quest. There’s no way it could ever pose a challenge. Popper… with his eyes on the fangs… ignored the coils encircling his waist… and around all of us caught… in the class system… (i.e. the ‘quest for perfection’ – and once we see that… that ‘class is crafted… and is the quest for so-called ‘perfection’… we can ask if we want to impose that on ourselves… the species… or the planet.)

 

What has become of intellectual courage in the pundits… who could so easily launch the freedom ship… of necessary conversations…

 

But it also may reflect what I consider to be a false belief – which many of us share – that ‘the people’ are ‘not ready’… that the first task is to correct ‘education’… free it from the biases of ‘statesmen’… and then… once education is set on the right path… toward the open society… then the next step is to just move steadily…

 

…patient, steady faith in education is the program many call for yet today… even as Titantic slips into the ocean… and those of us at its lowest point drown first.

 

And this ‘strategy’ – though it doesn’t deserve that title – in essence says (once again… as each generation it’s heard afresh… as each decaying crop of pundits crumble into dust this seems to be its legacy – at least the ones we hear tell of…) “we must leave it for the children… they will fix it… they will do the heavy lifting and ‘save the planet’…” and this, I believe, to be the grossest abdication of responsibility… to… yet again… put the burdens of class upon the children.

 

For the only ones to do this are we… we walking around in our bodies just “cluck-clucking-ain’t-it-such-a-shame” empty-talking… we are the ones… who… right now… and not just in some dim future… want to be free… it must be we… and that means all of us… every nation… for we are all of us… of one blood… every nation.

 

Diogenes and Antiphon did not wait for the children to have courage… to be honest in their logic… to call the myths of their day – which are the same as ours, by the way – insane… they told the truth. What has become of intellectual courage… in the pundits?…

 

…who could so easily have the necessary conversations behind scenes with one another… and decide to launch a freedom ship on which would sail the hopes of all humanity… for our at-long-last-and-hallelujah-release from captivity… imagine how we’d meet it! Imagine what a grand and epic odyssey it would be!

 

And we mustn’t be deceived… as Popper told us... by a sleight-of-hand with labels… a life of imposed necessity… is not free.

…

 

This notion that we’re ‘not ready’ I think can be traced to our false training in the alleged ‘dullness of the masses’… those ‘always-out-there-others’ who are never we – as we’re among the smart ones – and so this propaganda depends utterly… on our atomization.

 

–––

 

…we-the-people drive what ‘power’ calls ‘economic development’… by our determined efforts to escape slavery… being subject to necessity…

 

But we must get straight with Popper… we need his logic… we need his straight-talk – and always… always… always… we need his heart…

(…simple logic is dangerous for ‘power’… e.g. the pressure of those designated to be ‘out’ to get ‘in’ – which ‘power’ re-frames as self-justification and to keep us from seeing the actual dynamics of ‘class’… by calling it ‘economic growth’ – is on-going… will never end until class is done…

 

[…when we read this, for example, from de Tocqueville… what does it tell us:

“…it is impossible not to consider every addition to science, every fresh truth, and every new idea as a germ of power placed within the reach of the people. Poetry, eloquence, and memory, the grace of wit, the glow of imagination, the depth of thought, and all the gifts which are bestowed by Providence with an equal hand, turned to the advantage of the democracy;… where the poorest and the weakest could always find weapons to their hand.” (‘Preface’, Democracy in America, Volume 1)

…what does that tell us?… given the shrinking resources of the planet… where does our logic lead us? – …perhaps to why they want their dark DARPA capability? …to close night upon those it chooses?…)

So we need Popper’s example of straight-forward logic… clear thinking… so unlike the pundits flooding our airwaves (I’m thinking of a man I listened to who was part of an effort to amend the Constitution who kept repeating the phrase that “we need rule of the people”) – Popper told the truth: that under ‘class’… ‘the people’ “never rule themselves in any concrete, practical sense…”

 

…what I’m arguing is that to expect our ‘keepers’ to do well by us… is ludicrous.

 

–––

 

…the ‘altruism’ that we need… defends one’s own very personal body… defence of the soul is what we need to get free…

 

Popper shows us that whole (or ‘individualistic’ he might say) human beings see what’s ‘wrong’… what needs to be ‘fixed’… around them – but then argues that their levers must be institutions (this is a version of ‘representative government’… we are ‘represented’ by institutions) – and that… through institutions… make improvements… because ‘institutions’ can’t ‘fix’ themselves….

(This is similar I think to de Tocqueville’s belief in the need for representative government… in order to manage conflicts. Both Popper and de Tocqueville took ‘class’ as a given. Neither then can see a way out. They assume endless conflict – both between and within ‘classes’ [which… are manufactured… these ‘groupings’… by the way…] because they both assume class…)

…But what he’s not seeing – or if so discounting – is that ‘institutions’ can’t ‘see’ what’s wrong and modify themselves because they are captured by the ‘wage’… by the logic of ‘rule’… which is the logic of ‘accumulation’. And that ‘power’… by controlling ‘credit’… by controlling what activities get supported with a wage…

(…and this is in the main… and it is only by stepping outside of the logic of ‘rule’ – which is essentially the notion that ‘the people’ must have ‘leaders’ [keepers] – and outside the [its other name] logic of ‘accumulation’ – which says: “the rulers must get the means [for survival] away from the peoples’ hands… or else they cannot ‘lead’ us (looked at this way… i.e. without the pretty packaging… can any deny it is insanity?) –

 

…the logic of ‘rule’ manifests in the assumption that ‘institutions’ (and this includes ‘non-profits’… ‘NGOs’…) must make whatever change we see is needed…

 

…so it is only in stepping outside of this logic that an individualistic altruism can come to be…. ‘Representative government’ defeats individualistic altruism because its very existence represents – as it itself manifests – the opposite… so we cannot support our diminishment and expect our development… we cannot vest our power in the state (or in non-profits…) and then expect to have it… we cannot have our cake while others eat it.

 

So we must ask… if the state sanctions altruism… claims the right to define it… can it exist under class?

 

One way to look at this issue is with Alice Miller’s eyes…. When she says that “perfect adaptation to society’s norms” precludes the development of autonomy [the self…] …this also means that “perfect adaptation to [‘the state’s] norms”… applies to the adoption of the state’s norm for altruism… precludes individualistic altruism… precludes ‘heart’…

 

…for ‘the self’ never existed… to define authentic standards.

 

And in the absence of the self… the only ‘altruism’ that the individual can know is that which the state bestows… i.e., service to it… and even when that takes the form of ‘helping others’… the goal (for ‘power’…) is to bolster the legitimacy of the state.

 

But another way to look at this issue is through the simple means of the wage. The two ends, however, fit into each other perfectly… are two sides of the same coin. If you control where attention goes, you control who gets love (or what passes for it under class…) if you control where money goes… you control what gets done… in the system.

 

So we see… with Popper’s help… that the ‘altruism’ that we need… the only kind that will lead to us getting free… is ‘individualistic’… i.e., takes as its point of departure a deep longing for one’s own very personal body… to get free…

 

…which means that in our actions of transition… ‘defence’ perhaps most importantly means “defence of the soul”… and ‘nascence’ likewise… “defence”… of its continuous growth.)

…our unmet ‘need-to-be-seen’… sets us up to‘need’ ‘the wage’ as well…

 

‘Power’… by controlling what activities get funded… what activities will be rewarded with a wage… i.e. by using the ‘accumulation’-tool for sculpting … is sculpting ‘class’… is sculpting the ‘best state’… an ever-more-rigid class structure…. and Popper seems to have unintentionally fallen into the same myopath-trap that we noted earlier… the trap laid by pundits of demanding full accountability of individuals caught in coercion… caught by the short hairs… because we need to eat… while letting the folks who impose the coercion off the hook.

(And as an aside… while the compulsion of needing to eat is primary… true… we mustn’t overlook the almost-as-strong need to be seen… as we were denied its fulfillment as infants… and tend therefore to be forever empty… so the psychological need for the wage compels as well. The ‘vacuum’ we need to be concerned about ‘power’ has already leaped in to fill millennia-long ago.)

…we need a global network of helping… with the goal of planning a future in which the pursuit of happiness is not defining of individuals… but of humanity itself…

 

So when I suggest a dual – ‘defense / nascence’ – concept of ‘governance’… as a way to begin moving toward (as we claim our leadership… our full gifts…) a future that’s free… this is not re-stating Popper, but rather saying that individualistic altruism is the only true form of it that exists – if ‘humanity’ is our point of reference’ – that we must reclaim (the defining of) ‘reality… reclaim our leadership by developing (unclogging) our thought (which necessarily then is challenging, and demolishing, the logic of ‘rule’…) on the way to – i.e. with a conscious determination to achieve – a future of fully-developing individualities.

 

So… a transition in which we ‘defend’ and ‘nascend’… is a transition in which the unclogging and development of thought… of developing (reclaiming) our leadership (capacity)… are primary. All of which can also be viewed in… and through… the distribution: reclaiming mobility, diversity and speech (…as ‘power’ wants us immobile, atomized / divided, and silent.) This tri-partite lens is, in essence, the transition.

(‘Mobility’ – off-leash – might in truth say it all – rich and diverse experience with rich and diverse peoples… and sitting with and speaking out loud in voice and word… the insights that come as you grow your gifts.)

 

And ‘defending’ and ‘nascending’ our mobility also means… reclaiming the infrastructure of our global brain… a form of which exists in each one of us if we listen to it (the infinite… we can “range the world like an eagle the air…”) and grow our gifts… including this greater mobility infrastructure… the fluid mutual-‘visiting’ of ‘soul’….

 

We need to create an infrastructure of helping…

 

But we need to create a global infrastructure of helping… we need to help each other – because it fosters our growth… because it helps us to avoid the ‘myopath-trap’ of demanding full accountability of individuals caught in coercion…

(…and… as we earlier noted… we hear this all the time from progressives… especially in its public discourse on ‘war’. In one anti-war publication I picked up I read: “…if every foot soldier threw down his rifle war would end…” and while this seems like a noble sentiment… it could have the unintended effect of leading those who don’t put down their weapons to blame themselves… as it almost says, “I did it so you can too…” which isn’t true. We implicitly blame individuals when we aren’t ourselves creating the alternative physical world for them to begin shifting their allegiance to…

 

…but before we can begin… creating that alternative… we must first have the discussion… that will allow us to move past the ideology of ‘democracy’… and say out loud that each human must be free of necessity… to be free… not: “…each human being must serve the state commensurate with his or her ability… and be rewarded for their service with physical existence…” which is the practical reality of what pundits mean… when they say ‘democracy’…)

 

… and because… it’s too hard to do without it – challenge ‘rule’s irreverent ‘logic’ – without a global infrastructure of helping… and so our movement grows too slowly.

So we need a network of ‘safe’ places for pursuing ‘self-creation for the species’ – akin to the ‘Infoshops’ of anarchists’ – with the goal of planning a future in which the pursuit of happiness is not defining of individuals… but of humanity itself… places not exclusivist… not puffed up with academic jargon… not definable by any category of class… but rather definable by life only… by our need for a world of fully-developing-individualities… for any one to be… so must it be for humanity as a whole…

 

…and this is why it must be we… here in the belly of the beast… the U.S. state… to do this… we… in a supposed supreme democracy… we… with the codified right to do precisely what we’re doing… pursue happiness –

 

…this is where it happens – world human energy released to ensure our happiness – because… so far from it being illegal… it is our codified right. This is key… because what we’re doing must be done openly… must be seen… to grow exponentially…

 

…discussion must be robust and open… we must be the world we want to see…

…a world in which we live our gifts…

…are guided by earth-reverence…

…and a need for good fellowship.

 

–––

 

* “The December 1, 2013 show”

WUR, Sunday, December 1st, 2013 radio show: “Reclaiming Our Stolen Gifts… Our Leadership… To Establish A Future Based On Distributed Generation” (Pt. 5): Understanding the “logic of ‘rule’”… and getting clearer on ‘the transition’ (pt. 3)

 

–––

…getting ‘free’ in one nation ain’t the point… we have to represent for the health and the wholeness of the human soul… we have to face ‘class’… and that ‘Auschwitz’ is its destination… we have to look at that moment… to see the present moment…

 

As always our love and thoughts go out to our brothers and sisters globally… being worried in the jaws of this beast called ‘power’… playing its game of supremacy. Egypt… Haiti… Honduras… Bangladesh… Cambodia… Thailand… Tunisia… it’s a long list – it’s all of us… that’s the point.

 

May we… in the so-called ‘Western democracies’… very soon start using our greater wiggle-room to start organizing a series of world-wide general strikes… each one dedicated to supporting sisters and brothers facing a particular dictatorship. Let’s start naming them one by one….

 

It worries me… very much… that I’m not hearing discussion about the nature of a hierarchy… and the fact that it is a global hierarchy… and that ‘getting free’ in the U.S. ain’t the point – ‘getting free’ in any one nation ain’t the point – we have to get free as a global humanity… and that means representing for the health and wholeness of the human soul.

 

–––

 

Also – I’ve included as a ‘Preface’ to our discussion of Miklos Nyiszli an excerpt from Fatima Mernissi’s story of her childhood in Morocco called Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood… and these are her thoughts as a five-year-old. She was born in 1940 and – in this excerpt – she’s writing about 1945… so it’s the exact moment when Nazis were stomping across Europe.

 

And I realize I’ve been rushing through my words (another DJ now comes in as this show is ending…) in order to present these thoughts in full and be ready to begin discussing Miklos Nyiszli on December 15th – a conversation that I see as the logical next step to this conversation about “what gets in the way of our reclaiming our leadership”… i.e. a conversation about the need for us – we-the-people – to face ‘class’… and to see that ‘Auschwitz’ is its destination. I believe that we have to look at that moment… that is a critical moment when ‘power’… just as today… is ‘going for it’… the installation of a global ‘lock-down’…. But I’ve decided that I’m going to try to stay present with the words that I’m saying… and not worry about the clock… or the calendar.

 

–––

…in many ways… getting to our future freedom is about speech… about being able to tell our authentic truth… which is our body’s truth… that we are never allowed to hear spoken over the airwaves… our bodies don’t want to do it this way… the way imposed on us by states…

 

In many ways… getting to our future freedom is about speech… about being able to tell our authentic truth… which is our body’s truth… that we are never allowed to hear spoken over the airwaves… our bodies don’t want to do it (reproduce our lives…) this way… the way imposed by states… and so we tell ourselves the stories we’ve been taught to make them do it… and I’m saying, “no, no, no, no, no… our bodies are right…” There’s a song I used to sing to two-year olds sometimes at the ‘Tot-Lot’: “…children are right and grown-ups are wrong… and grown-ups should be sor-ry…”

Popper was mostly concerned about education… for good reason…

 

–––

 

…the percentage of youth out in the world today… may be what’s causing this surge of hopeful energy that many of us are feeling…

 

Popper, in saying that the future is only shifted by changing institutions – i.e. by accepting the fait accompli of the state – is unintentionally returning us to a collectivist view of ‘altruism.’ Because ‘the state’ is designed to suck on and divide… devour… denude… de-spirit… defuse our – we-the-people’s – power. When he says the following… the fait accompli of ‘the state’ is evident:

This theory of checks and balances can at least claim careful consideration. The only objections to this claim, as far as I can see, are (a) that such a control is practically impossible, or (b) that it is essentially inconceivable since political power is essentially sovereign [i.e. in its essence… inherently….] Both of these dogmatic objections are, I believe, refuted by the facts…

 

[…and here our people’s lexicon clears things up… as it helps us see that political power is indeed essentially sovereign… as political power means controlling us…– PS]

…with the sweep of the hand… he unconsciously shoves to the back… our hopes… our thoughts… our plans… for true freedom. Why would he do this… if he too wasn’t afraid… of the full-releasing of the people’s energy? Because of the horror of Marching Boots around him… I believe he was struck by how easily, he saw, we could be manipulated into following ‘power’s lead – as the ‘thought’ in Göring’s words – that the ‘rulers’ can always bring the people around to do their bidding – was certainly not novel to our Popper. And give Göring’s thought its due… it certainly has been true. So how can we know… as I wrote in Beginning Again… that:

‘The people’ are ready.

 

‘Class’ divides insidiously…

…before we even know it we…

…deny full credit of infinite possibilities…

…to our brothers and sisters…

…‘ready’… instantly… to be free…

(…consider ‘alchemy’…)

 

Because we’ve been divided from each other, Popper couldn’t know what Thomas Dekker knew, or even what George Sand knew [see “What Is ‘Freedom?” from “Getting To Our Future Freedom” on the nas2endwork.org website]: unrealized interdependency means structurally-reinforced irreverence… i.e. the circuit never completes… all our energy gets sucked away… into the hands of the few….

 

I pondered a lot how Popper… so clear of thought… so honest… could have missed the implication of such blatant irreverence… built structurally… into ‘class’-society…. What Popper couldn’t see… was the need for ‘Reverence’ (acknowledgment of ‘debt’) to be reinforced structurally… built into our built-world.

 

So Popper couldn’t know what he couldn’t know. What doesn’t he know? ‘The people’ are ready.

 

The only real reason we seem ‘not ready’ is lack of empathy… but we’ve been designed that way. We will have to consciously re-design ourselves… re-learn how to think in earth-terms.

‘Empathy’ jump-starts the process of thinking authentically… because if you can see the unfairness… the mind starts working on how to end it…. (Beginning Again, p. 17)

But what about those Marching Boots?

 

We are ready because we’re looking for what’s true…

[…and we have a lot of youth energy around the world today… the percentage of youth out in the world today may be what is causing this surge of hopeful energy that many of us are feeling…]

…the good fellowship we are born with that is our due…

…and we’ve been trying since the broken-hand-to-hand of class began…

…to understand how the violation happened…

…and most importantly how to move past it…

…the goal begins when… over the airwaves… someone has the courage to speak the obvious: “…we don’t need a system of coerced work anymore… generalized leisure is possible… and without it we're on the road to totalitarianism… given the planet’s problems…”

 

…and restore a global human fellowship…

…and we who see it must boost its size…

…and hold it high…

…and now we have the tools to this…

…globally…

 

‘Power’s search for ‘perfection’ has for too long caught – captured – our search for what we’ve lost… and they’ve been so certain… and we so trapped in necessity… that we’ve let them lead… but their sleight-of-hand with labels… slapping ‘order’ on our longing for ‘peace and goodwill’… and solidarity…  for and with each other… confused our sense… for millennia.

 

But thanks to Nikola we now see… and so… consider ‘alchemy’… the alchemy of sudden light in what was dark… and how that changes everything….

 

But inertia is a reality… and we’ve been marching with the Boot of ‘Power’ for so long… and we dance with him we think what brought us… till we find the legs beneath us are our own… and know all of a sudden… that false ‘order’ of which we’ve been told is not our home… that our authentic home is good fellowship… and so… can form a plan to reach that goal….

 

So the way out of this seeming dilemma is having a goal… and asking for the help of our brothers and sisters… who are waiting to be shown a viable alternative… who are so ready… trust… to be done… with ‘power.’

 

Is ‘democracy’ the goal?… given the end of ‘work’ as we know it?… That’s a big conversation… which… trust… ‘power’ will coopt in a heartbeat into the illusion of ‘democracy’… if we let them…

 

And by the words ‘finding our legs’ I mean, “challenging the logic of rule,” which also means, “challenging the notion of ‘democracy’… questioning its legitimacy… beginning to see that ‘democracy’ in the hands of ‘rulers’ will ever be an ideology in service of a plan… a vision… Plato’s vision: ‘no change’. You can hear that clear intention… that motive… in these words of de Tocqueville:

I can conceive a society in which all men would profess an equal attachment and respect for the laws of which they are the common authors; in which the authority of the State would be respected as necessary, though not as divine; and the loyalty of the subject to the chief magistrate would not be a passion, but a quiet and rational persuasion. Every individual being in the possession of rights which he is sure to retain, a kind of manly reliance, and reciprocal courtesy would arise between all classes, alike removed from pride and meanness.

 

The people, well acquainted with its true interests, would allow, that in order to profit by the advantages of society, it is necessary to satisfy its demands. In this state of things the voluntary association of the citizens might supply the individual exertions of the nobles, and the community would be alike protected from anarchy and from oppression.

 

“…and the people will remain quiet…” We have to discuss that quote… me too… we don’t want anyone’s head to roll… we want our hearts open… every one of us… but down through the centuries we’ve been stuck in the lie … “…labor is our inevitable lot…”… and it sounds right… which makes the ideology of ‘democracy’ sound right…

 

I admit that, in a democratic State thus constituted, society will not be stationary; but the impulses of the social body may be regulated and directed forwards; if there be less splendour than in the halls of the aristocracy, the contrast of misery will be less frequent also; the pleasures of enjoyment may be less excessive, but those of comfort will be more general…

 

The nation, taken as a whole, will be less brilliant, less glorious, and perhaps less strong; but the majority of the citizens will enjoy a greater degress of prosperity, and the people will remain quiet, not because it despairs of amelioration, but because it is conscious of the advantages of its condition. (Alexis de Tocqueville, “Author’s Preface,” Democracy in America, Volume 1)

 

Once we start talking about class dynamics, we’ll start to understand the rage that comes from containment…

 

(…so… he admits that “in a democratic state thus constituted…” it’s not going to be the Republic… but “as close as we can get…” – i.e. the ideal will be tempered with the possible – P.S.)

 

“…and the people will remain quiet…” i.e. no more French Revolutions… that’s what ‘power’ is determined to avoid… -– me too, by the way… I don’t think we want to have anybody’s heads roll… we want our hearts open… every one of us….

 

And I think we have to begin discussing this quote… because some significant percentage of the world’s citizens agree with that quote. And down through the centuries we’ve been stuck in that lie: “labor is our inevitable lot…” and it sounds true… as it might be said that even the animals and plants ‘work’… so it sounds right… except not in application. Our human energy should be no more a commodity… on sale… for the market… than the air we breathe. And I don’t care if there’s no ‘market’… if the control of the earth’s resources is kept in the hands of the few – e.g. China and Egypt also have coerced work-systems because the resources are consolidated in the hands of the few (though their economies… true… are integrated in, and subject to… the global market…) – we are captives… with subjected individualities. – P.S.)

 

“as close as we can come…” – i.e. the ideal will be tempered with the possible – P.S.)

His and Jeremy Bentham’s perspectives are both entirely consonant with each other… and necessarily also… with Plato’s. Plato too advised statesmen to temper ‘the ideal’ with ‘the possible’ (recently Kissinger reiterated this advice in his book On China…) so long as the overall vision – each class ‘happy’ with its station – is pursued.

 

It’s not ‘evil’, as Hannah Arendt termed it, that dark… it’s ‘absence’… and it’s not the lapse of a few under class… but of all of us… as Alice Miller showed us…

 

As long as we believe we need ‘democracy’ to – in truth – ‘rein-in’ the ‘passions’ of ‘the people’… we are cycled back to ‘power’… for we have neither broadly changed the definition of that term – ‘democracy’ – i.e. addressed the hidden elitism in the word – or devised a new one that is free of rank – of the hidden agenda to install ‘perfection’ (‘order’… ‘calm’… ‘Tranquillitas’… call it what you will….) It’s clear that statesmen are afraid of ‘passion’… Hirschman made that case well… but so are ‘we-the-people’ under class… until we start having those conversations that allow us to understand class dynamics – and the rage that comes from containment – we will be afraid that rage is inherent in our nature – ‘the dark side’ we’re told it is… we’re taught to think… and the system ensures the conditions that allow us all to ‘see’ it… are delivered up in oceans… to ‘prove’ we need ‘it’ (the state) to protect us from ‘it’ (the ‘dark side’).

 

So… for so long as we think this… we will demand “the strong arm of the law”… our vested power… to protect the weak from bullies. Once we understand class dynamics… we won’t be afraid of ourselves anymore – which is why we will face that dark fear that Miklos faced… and with him… move through it. And it’s not ‘evil’ – as Hannah Arendt termed it, that dark… – it’s ‘absence.’ And it’s not the lapse of a few under class… but of all of us… as Alice Miller showed us. (When will we get the film – and the on-going subsequent discussion – about Alice’s work? [This is a reference to the fact that there is a new film out about Hannah Arendt.])

 

Until we confront class… and decide we’re done with it – confronting all of those cons: “well, we need ‘class’ for ‘progress’…” “we need ‘class’ to control each other…” we need ‘class’ for ‘knowledge’ itself…” we have to systematically work through those… while we’re building the alternative – we cannot trust our humanity in the hands of any state… no matter what its justifying ideology… as Göring said.

 

So we have to face our fear… with the calm and loving light of truth… inspect it in that light… see the shivering child behind it… forgive the wrong it’s done… see the state in our own actions… and the falsely constructed Necessity behind it all – see it all from top to bottom… and with re-formed love… move on….

 

–––

 

All roads lead back to abandonment… today we abandon our children in pursuit of the wage… and that’s what ‘power’ seeks to impose on the rest of the world… that’s the essence of its totalitarian vision… no allegiance but to ‘the state’…

 

Hirschman showed us that one of the arguments for ‘capitalism’ prior to its (accumulation’s) ‘triumph’ was that ‘the interests’ tamed ‘the passions’… and then Hirschman – with de Tocqueville’s help… and hopefully Polanyi’s – showed us what chasing money would mean: the demolition of society… and opening the door to ‘tyranny’ – which did not wait for further invitation… – opening the door to people for whom ‘power’ was the issue… never ‘money’ solely.

 

But ‘money’ only seems to tame ‘the passions’… in reality it provokes a frozen rage… as money becomes the ‘sole nexus’… as Marx told us… “between man and man…” forcing us all to manifest… embody… dehumanization.

 

Asking why ‘commodification is a specie of ‘rule’ (which we will when we discuss Miklos’ account…) is the same as asking why dehumanization is a specie of rule… which is the same as asking why rank is a specie of rule.

 

Are these merely tactics of control? Necessary psychological slop-overs?… or slop-overs of the psychology?… the cause: ‘longing’… ‘will’… ‘need’… ‘absence of self’… the effect: causing hardship for our brothers and sisters… by ensuring their dependence… to ensure their thoughts are captured… and denuded of all challenge to the logic of ‘rule’… to keep ‘power’ safe?

 

I’m sure there was a certain amount of trial and error in the settling on these tactics… which were long since ‘systematized’… transformed into a ‘science’… by Plato and his predecessors in the study of ‘rule’.

 

We can’t be ‘done’ with ‘democracy’ until we have our thorough discussion of ‘class’ – how ‘class’ has deformed us from our nature… our inherent respect for freedom.

 

So perhaps the question is “what is rule”?… where did it come from”… this need to dominate and control – if not the abandonment of children?

 

The dispassionate… heartless… dispensing with… dispatching… of our sisters and brothers… screams loudly of the truth of what was done to us… abandonment writ large in ruthless acts… and… as Alice said… the cutting-off and distancing from… the ‘weakness’ of one’s childhood… captured… that ‘book’… that experience… trapped… in those legacy-thoughts… on which we are now shining the calm and loving light of truth.

All roads lead back to that abandoned child… and the need to ‘prove’ one is ‘good enough’… to keep.

 

…When I was young I thought – most peoples of color did, I think – that it was all that cold and snow that provoked such a bitter need for “More!” – and when we discuss Miklos we’ll hear this expressed from a child’s perspective in Dreams of Trespass – and… no doubt climate played a role… but not a determinative one… as we see with our Inuit sisters and brothers… no…

 

…and then I thought it was slavery that caused the rift… the death of good fellowship…

 

…and this too was implicated but not determinative… as many in the Southern end of ‘caste’ knew well the slave market… no…

 

…It was Plato… Plato who said to those seeking to stand with the so-called ‘wise’… “keep only the best… and abandon the rest…” and so today we’re living with that sad… and most-ill… false advice to those who seek to stand among the ‘learned’. And when I say, “we still abandon our children today…” I don’t mean on the steps of orphanages… I mean to pursue ‘success with the wage’… and with ‘pleasing the state.’

 

And that’s what ‘power’ seeks to impose on the rest of the world… that’s the essence of its totalitarian vision: “no allegiance but to ‘the state’.”

 

All roads lead back to abandonment… and the inability to blame one’s parents (the state….)

 

…And this answers Terence Hopkins [see Palmers’ Chat ‘Table of Contents”] question as to why ‘rule’ in the European nation-state system was so competitive… but now…

 

…we are freeing ourselves of the thought of our ‘fathers’.

And today we have what Popper didn’t… we have Nikola… and all our brothers and sisters globally to teach us… to show us the possibilities inherent in freedom… and the exponential speed with which… the evolution of humanity can be accomplished… once we get ‘power’ off our backs.

 

But with the frothing fangs of fascism at his back and on the march… it may be that Popper didn’t trust fully enough that each human being wants to strut their stuff… wants to get big… to continuously learn…

 

…and the more we learn… the more our hearts open… and the more our hearts open… the more we want to learn.

 

Re-learning how to see authentically helps us re-embody that toddler-energy that was crushed under ‘class.’

 

And this business of getting free is a relay race not a sprint (as the expression goes…) and when Popper let’s go the wend… the true service… de Grazia picks it up again.

 

De Tocqueville – writing in the 1830s – has already taken the logic of ‘democracy’ as an ideology of ‘rule’ as far as it can go… and as long as it serves the state… that ideology can only serve ‘rule’… States cannot by definition deliver happiness… because they require us to work …

 

One of Mill’s chief worries was the ever-growing pressure that government, industry, and public opinion put on the individual to conform to their requirements. This, the third quarter of the nineteenth century, was a great period in English trade and industry. It must have seemed that machines were here to stay. Mill must have thought there was little to do to liven the deadening routine of factory work, but indirectly one could do a lot. When men were not working they could devote their free time to politics. There they would learn about cooperation, they would sharpen their wits in discussion and begin to feel a sense of local and national responsibility….

[…we’re quoting de Grazia describing John Stuart Mill… who was a student of Jeremy Bentham (who died in the 1830s…) – P.S.]

To keep men toward these worthy objectives the first step was enlarging the suffrage. This would bring men around to voting, give them a stake and, hence, an interest in politics; after interest would come participation, which in itself was a form of educating the citizen. At present, men’s work was a routine, a satisfaction of daily wants, not a labor of love. Neither the product nor the process of their work life lifted their minds above ordinary beings, stimulated them to reach for books, brought them in the circle of persons of culture. Just giving a man something to do for the public would supply almost all his present deficiencies. “The proofs of this,” Mill wrote, “are apparent in every page of our great historian of Greece.” His model is Athens. Men’s leisure should be dedicated to the polis. Participating in politics, Mill pointed out, “raised the intellectual standard of an average Athenian citizen far beyond anything of which there is yet an example in any other mass of men, ancient or modern.”

[…and Mill’s is a good example of unrooted thought – unrooted from physical reality. We can see de Grazia embodying and playing out John Stuart Mill’s logic… showing us how it runs… or doesn’t… – P.S.]

…Once the citizens took a more active role in politics once they had the liberty to vote and speak and be educated, what then? How does this liberty lead to the good life?…

[…and as we saw… de Tocqueville had already provided the best answer to that question… within the terms that ‘class’ allows the abstracted (unrooted) thought of philosopher-statesmen. De Tocqueville… writing in the 1830s… has already taken the logic of ‘democracy’ as an ideology of ‘rule’ as far as it can go… – P.S.]

…Liberty for Mill was doing as one pleased, a phrase that seems related to the idea of leisure. And to have as many choices as possible is a good thing because it prevents the routine of work from turning one stale. At the mention of work, though, the resemblance to leisure evaporates. You can only be partially free if you are not free of necessity. The working classes whose heads Mill wished to lift couldn’t lift them while they were tending a loom, driving a quill, or selling goods over a counter….

 

…How can you be free to do as you wish if you have to work all day? How will your free time be free if you have to be ready to go back to work on the dot, and if your free time is clocked too, and if in it you are reacting to your work – blowing off steam, making a whole article in your basement workshop, wearily watching TV. Work is still working on you…. (Sebastian de Grazia, Of Time, Work, and Leisure, p. 270 – 273)

States cannot… by definition… deliver happiness… because they require us to work. What ‘power’ wants – and de Tocqueville expresses it with a slyly antiseptic… false civility…

The people, well acquainted with its true interests, would allow, that in order to profit by the advantages of society, it is necessary to satisfy its demands. In this state of things the voluntary association of the citizens might supply the individual exertions of the nobles, and the community would be alike protected from anarchy and from oppression. (Alexis de Tocqueville, “Author’s Preface,” Democracy in America, Volume 1)

…that sounds so courteous, doesn’t it? – much too polite a phrasing for what ‘power’ has done to us. I prefer Townsend’s bluntness: “If you grab ’em by the short-hairs, they’ll follow you anywhere…” – the time-tested advice of philosopher-statesmen to rulers across nation and millennia.

 

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* “The December 8, 2013 show”

WUR, Sunday, December 8th, 2013 radio show: “Reclaiming Our Stolen Gifts… Our Leadership… To Establish A Future Based On Distributed Generation” (Pt. 6): Understanding the “logic of ‘rule’”… and getting clearer on ‘the transition’ (pt. 4)

Madiba Tribute songs: Hugh Masekela’s “Mandela”; Soweto Gospel Choir’s “Kae Le Kae”, “Voices on the Wind”, Mangisondele Nkosi, Yam”, and Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s “Ngingenwe Emoyeni, Wind of the Spirit of God”, Thandiwe Wami (My Lover)”, “Long Walk to Freedom”, and “Shosholoza.”

–––

 

…the planet cannot support both we-the-people’s global and common demands for full human dignity… and ‘power’s need to maintain gross disparities…

 

Let’s send some encouragement and gratitude to the folks determined not to be ground up and masticated by the fast food industry. They set up pickets this past Thursday all around the U.S.… battling to wrest a slightly improved quality of life from the open and gnashing maw of ‘power’. And I’m going to challenge you to draw your logic out further… and come to the conclusion that what you deserve, our brothers and sisters globally do too… and to begin discussing how to reach out across the illusion “captives in a ‘nation-state’”… i.e. begin working your way towards a one-day global strike in the fast-food industry… after which… the very next step… is asking all the rest of us – globally – to join with you.

 

In a ‘man-on-the-street’ interview about BART management’s decision to throw a spanner in the works in its ‘in-bad-faith’ contract negotiations with the folks who actually do the work to keep the trains running… the interviewee said, “I don’t understand why all of a sudden there’s so many problems with BART.” It’s important that we begin discussing this novel moment in the human story that all of us globally are finding ourselves in. We are in not just “one of those moments” when ‘power’ is pushing harder than usual to force ‘we-the-folks’ to our knees… but the moment of ‘power’s terminal crisis (‘crisis’ from its perspective…) fighting for its very existence (and therefore for the success of its vision.) No middle ground is possible for it… because the resources of the planet cannot support both our constant pressure to assert our human dignity globally…

(…a restless… constant pressure that the U.S. was founded in, by the way… and the longing of some in Ukraine for a EU-connection – despite what they see it did to Greece – is an example of this… of the pressure from we-the-people… that will never end until class itself is ended …)

… and its rigid hierarchies… maintaining gross disparities. It either finds a way to condition some folks ‘on the bottom’ to accept subservient status… so that food and service and resource extraction will be provided ‘cheaply’… i.e. at the cost of our forfeited souls… or it forfeits the game’… the ‘vision’… the goal… as we start some necessary conversations with the necessary ‘end-point’ of our restored souls.

 

–––

 

…that piped-in voice of authority… the punditry… vetted to ensure only the “…‘fix-it’ strategy” gets spoken… locks young people in lies…

 

In past shows we’ve noted that a key role of the punditry under ‘class’… under ‘rule’… is to deflect and confuse the energies of youth… while simultaneously bolstering key cons… myths… and ideologies – primary among them being ‘merit-rises’ (“rule of ‘the best’”)…

 

(…this means stoking the fires of ‘productivity’… ‘competition’… and particularly that which pits folks in the U.S. against those of other lands (while… of course… all the other states are simultaneously doing the same thing…)

 

…the other key cons: “humans are inherently violent…” “labor is our inevitable lot…” the ‘necessity’ of the “habit of obedience” (‘service’ – akin to the ‘be-the-best” / productivity / merit-rises con…) and the “equivalence between ‘class’ (which in practice is coterminous with “work hard”… and… “Left Pundits”… can we at least start talking about that?… that ‘class’ just means ‘work hard’?…) and ‘civilization’… (the ‘progress’ myth….)

 

And as a stimulus for all this… we’re shown a ranking within the punditry… and the elevation of a few to celebrity status… which – and I’ve never heard this discussed except by Karl Popper – sabotages… savages… intellectual independence…

 

…and reinforces the ‘ever-srivingness’… which is the key mind-set of ‘rule’ (‘class’… ‘power’….)

 

This is up for me because I’ve heard a string of progressive ‘thinkers’ this week – who comprise the ‘left’ end of ‘thought’ allowed on the airwaves – all of who promoted – or represented – versions of one or more of these key cons.

 

In “Blog 51” we quoted George Eliot:

Dorothea, early troubling her elders with questions about the facts around her, had wrought herself into some independent clearness as to the historical, political reasons why eldest sons had superior rights, and why land should be entailed... (George Eliot)

 

“Dorothea...with questions...had wrought herself...” [‘self-creation’…]

Questions are how we begin to distinguish ourselves from “the system” – (“Seeing The Communal Alternative”)

But when you remove ‘leadership capacities’ from everyone… from the broad generality… when you vest so-called ‘intelligence’ with this notion ‘experts’… so you take this so-called ‘knowledge’… and you vest it in this tiny few called the punditry… and elevate them above us… and make young people feel that they have to go to that so-called ‘repository of the knowledge’ in order to figure out what’s going on… if you have captured the routes to what’s available for ‘figuring out’ what’s going on around us… you’ve locked young people into lies – and the punditry unconsciously (as they were duped too) serve these purposes of ‘power’. You get rewarded for reproducing the same lies… the same cons – and when we’re young we reason that… “if that’s what gets elevated…” Young people want to succeed… they want to be seen and recognized… because that’s what’s been denied them from birth… what’s been denied all of us… due to the privatization of children.

 

What we’re seeing here is how all of these threads intersect… these… bars of our cage… all inter-lock – it’s the ‘echo-chamber’… and young people are desperately trying to figure it out… they’re told you have to go to these so-called ‘experts’ to figure it out… the ‘experts’ have been vetted… and will only say the “we-gotta-fix-it” strategy… and then you’ve perpetuated the system. And it takes a long time, then, once you’re set on the wrong path… it’s difficult to back up and get on the right one… …because that piped-in voice of authority – which is what the pundits comprise – does not allow for one-on-one questioning… on-going one-on-one questioning… over time… and this is critical… discussion has to build and develop over time. This is what was beginning to happen in the Occupy encampments… which is one of the reasons it got shut down.

 

…our longing for freedom gets sucked into ‘power’s longing for ‘perfection’…

 

When youth are encouraged to ‘hero-worship… ‘power’ multiply benefits by their sacrifice of ‘self-creation’… as… what happens then… is… our ‘ever-strivingness’ for freedom… gets sucked (suckered) into ‘power’s ‘ever-strivingness’ for ‘perfection’ (into ‘being productive’… into ‘demonstrating ones’ efficiency….) And so Plato’s Tribe’s self-inflicted wound is consciously imposed on us in so-called ‘Western’… so-called ‘modern’… so-called ‘civilization’ – which they are well on their way to making global… a global woundedness of ‘ever-strivingness’ – trying to please ‘the fathers’ (‘the state’….)

 

‘Power’ has learned those several points of intersection with our earth-truths… learned to send its intercepting tentacles to those points and use them – our natural tendencies – to draw us back in… so that we may be used to fulfill its mission… its mission to literally ‘manifest’ their ‘destiny’…

(…which I suspect they tell themselves is “fulfilling the “‘promise’ of ‘America’” – and we have to look at that in a future show because it suggests – and de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is helpful with this… because he wasn’t writing about ‘America’ he was writing about what they called ‘democracy’… which in practice is the latest version… or the update… of the Republic. And they’ve learned in the interim that it has to be global. So when I use the phrase, “fulfill the promise of America…” I’m not talking about a narrow ‘nationalism’ but rather a global vision… indistinguishable from totalitarianism.)

So they exploit our longing for ‘freedom’… our longing to be ‘part of’ something bigger than our individual selves (our communal nature…) our longing to be ‘big’ – i.e. to use our earth-gifts.

 

Previously (e.g. in Palmers’ Chat) we thought about ‘civilization’ as ‘class-rationalization’… i.e. as ideology… which of course it is. But de Tocqueville – who we’re beginning to examine – is showing us a point de Grazia makes… namely that…

“We all have been too much taken in by the thousand-things-to-do. The times have taken away our balance, that tempering force without which we are at peace neither with ourselves nor with our neighbors.”

We-the-people (globally) are wrestling with a global ‘power’ that is not at peace with itself.

 

I believe that the “thousand-things-to-do” is about “reining-in ‘chaos’…”

…that… for ‘power’… ‘commerce’ is ‘holding demons at bay…’ is ‘taming the passions…’ ‘idle hands’ being… etc. etc.

 

‘Class’ is means for ‘keeping everyone (and it must be everyone… to ‘be’ ‘total’ [so… “you will be compelled to come in…”]) busy… ‘justifying’ one’s ‘being’… as if we have to…. That’s the con we internalize early… early on.

 

–––

 

The state can never allow us to define ourselves (self-creation…) as it is determined to define us…

 

So… it’s not just that the job consumes our time… a.k.a. our lives… that it disallows full engagement… participation in shaping the ‘civicry’… the public space… the commons…. Perhaps even more disabling of spirit… debilitating to the full development of our gifts… is that it conditions us to accept… the “corporate ‘we’”. But this is just two ways of saying the same thing… a consumed life cannot become an individuality. All walls of ‘power’s echo chamber reinforce that this is how it must be… we must be sacrificial lambs… for the sake of this ‘greater good’ called ‘the polity’… ‘the state….

 

We have to start creating the definitions that determine our possibilities… as we are creatures of illusion (until we reunite with our earth…) we must make our own definitions… instead of adjusting to the ones ‘power’ has designed for us…. Once we see that happiness is self-creation… we realize the state can never ‘provide’ it… simply because it is trying to design us.

 

An individualist altruism… in not being subserved to any ‘tribalism’… is also not subserved to any ‘patriotism’… to any state… to ‘rule’… which means ‘rule’ must end… for the time of individualism to begin… if we are to have our happiness again… and be as stars to each other. This is not just where ‘logic’ leads… this is what our bodies want to do… i.e. bend to our earth-truth.

 

–––

 

…this is a nation founded in a mindset of service to goals given us (by ‘power’…) we haven't been able yet to think through what it means to grow up… and develop our own goal…

 

In the “Introduction” to his great work Of Time, Work, and Leisure, Sebastian de Grazia wrote that, “The Constitution neglected to state clearly what its more perfect union of men was for…”

An age on the verge of change gets restless, it reviews its history, it runs to try new openings. The passengers on the Mayflower before debarking did solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God and one another, covenant and combine themselves together into a civil body politic for their “better ordering and preservation.” The Constitution neglected to state clearly what its more perfect union of men was for. Evidently, to establish justice and provide for the common defense were means to an end. Domestic tranquility meant little more than internal order, another means to an end. This was not Jefferson’s idea. We were left with the general welfare and the blessings of liberty as guides to the kind of life for which men join in union. The liberty meant in the Preamble was freer and wider than the liberty conceived today. The Declaration of Independence had made itself clearer, or at least more forceful: alongside liberty it placed the pursuit of happiness. The men who wrote and approved the Declaration were further away from the Pilgrim Fathers than we are. For the nineteenth century brought us back closer to the Pilgrims than to the Founding Fathers. The urgency of the Mayflower Compact to plant a colony fit the later urgency to plant a continent. One of the oldest rules of political science holds that men come together to keep alive; they stay together to live a good life. In this country men have refused to budge from the first state; they have acted as if there were a wilderness yet to conquer, some great work yet to do, that keeps them from the second stage. What is this great work? The frontier ended with the twentieth century, and the wilderness long before.

[When de Grazia says, “The men who wrote and approved the Declaration were further away from the Pilgrim Fathers than we are…” he’s simultaneously revealing the key distinction under class between ‘ruler’ (the philosopher-statesmen) and ‘ruled’. The so-called ‘princes’ know where they’re going. The fundamental subservience of the first Pilgrims is shown in this Translator’s quote from Democracy in America:

 

The emigrants were, for the most part, godly Christians from the North of England, who had quitted their native country because they were “studious of reformation, and entered into covenant to walk with one another according to the primitive pattern of the Word of God.” They emigrated to Holland, and settled in the city of Leyden in 1610, where they abode, being lovingly respected by the Dutch, for many years: they left it in 1620 for several reasons, the last of which was, that their posterity would in a few generations become Dutch and so lose their interest in the English nation; they being desirous rather to enlarge His Majesty’s dominions, and to live under their natural prince. (Henry Reeve)

 

So you see the necessary division… for class to exist. We must be obedient in order for ‘princes’ to rule us. So… the ‘Founding Fathers’… their mindset is of ‘the rulers’… they take charge… they know where they want to go… they have leadership. We are the ‘ever-seeking-freedom’. ‘Rule’ knows where it’s going and they try to engage our seekingness to serve their goal.

 

We have a country founded in a mindset of ‘service’… to a goal given us… and we haven’t been able yet to think through what it means to grow up and develop our own goal. – P.S.]

 

…our great work… the promise… that falls to us… here in the U.S…. to accomplish… is for all humanity: to establish general human leisure… globally…

 

At any given moment in history a tradition trembles, a corner crumbles, gives way, the whole falls to pieces. Perhaps in the very dust that lifts, the shape of something new can be seen. Leisure, were we to attain it, could lend us truth and impart its distinctive texture to all society. What is honored in a country is cultivated there, says an even older rule of political science. We all have been too much taken in by the thousand-things-to-do. The times have taken away our balance, that tempering force without which we are at peace neither with ourselves nor with our neighbors. The wisdom of the world was madness if, in teaching men how to subdue nature and transform the earth, it made them turn their back on life. The nineteenth century’s materialism won the allegiance of every party – classical economists, anarchists, socialists of the scientific, utopian, and Christian varieties, communists and democrats. To know anything at all, to be man at all, is to do, is to act, to produce, to make something out of matter, something other than it was. Contrast this with the motto found inscribed on a sundial: Horas non numero nisi serenas. That the hours don’t count unless they’re serene is not a new notion. What is the good life?, asks Seneca. Thomas Jefferson answers him in his own tongue: Tranquillitas. (Sebastian de Grazia, Of Time, Work, and Leisure, p. 2 – 4)

From the vantage of this juncture where we now stand… we are able to see that… not only is de Grazia right… that “…leisure… [would] lend us truth and impart its distinctive texture to all society…”… but that the ‘first’ is the ‘last’… that the first is the second… the second the first…

 

…that the “great work” that falls to us… here in the U.S…. to accomplish… is for all humanity: to establish general human leisure globally.

 

To free ourselves and our brothers and sisters… from the indignity of coerced labor… is now our ‘great work’… the ‘pursuit of happiness’ (for all) is a mighty goal for us to grab a hold to… all of us together… at long last.…

 

The global economy compelled all ‘to come in’… ‘wealth’ was extracted from everyone’s skin… and we are, therefore, now structurally inter-dependent… and our future freedom… our coming leisure… is an endowment all indiscriminately share in.

 

It’s time to fulfill the work of our ancestors… we who see ourselves as the abolitionists for the freedom of all human beings.

 

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“…good boy… good boy… you did a good job…” can we please stop saying that to our children?… rage comes from containment…

 

So we must… continue training our focus… on reclaiming our leadership… and as we do we’ll keep in the forefront of our minds Karl Popper’s insights on the need for an individualist altruism to fuel an authentic leadership…

(…as Karl Popper never fails to point us to the right conversations… the ones we need to be having… to think through… and move to… new habits of self-governance….)

As we explore in more depth the notion of ‘leadership’ (‘leadership’ which… to reiterate… as we’ve just seen… cannot be released while we give our allegiance… to the corporate ‘we’… [and this includes non-profits… NGOs]) we’ll be tying his insights to these threads we’re weaving in:

• …how to develop and disseminate broadly the belief that leadership is our common endowment;

 

• …how to develop and disseminate broadly our understanding of the connection between the deterioration of our moral sense when ‘leadership’ is left to ‘statesmen’ (who are defining us as inherently violent);

 

• …how to develop and disseminate broadly our understanding of how our true gifts wither when we are trained to follow (i.e. when our true selves are suppressed…) and the implications of disappearing from the discourse the fact that rage comes from containment… (while clarifying whether ‘following’ may serve any larger purpose for the ‘species’.)

…with ease we could unloop each others legs… because… these gifts we are given are meant to be grown…

 

When we try to be ‘big’… while accepting the fait accompli of containment… our understanding gets stuck in that muck… and we get frustrated… as without ‘the state’ on which to locate the blame – the source of our inability to grow continuously – we tend to blame each other [“crabs-in-a-bucket”…])

 

…because the critical question Popper didn’t address is… “leadership to what?” He assumed we would just keep fixing what we got… not seeing the worm at the core.

 

Now… ‘power’ knows where it’s going… so… as is its habit… it strides to the fore and claims possession of the deck… and starts barking orders right and left… but… quite unexpectedly (for it…) we are sullenly looking back… and questioning its authority… so it’s forced to assume a softer tack (…relatively speaking… and more in ‘the core’… than ‘the periphery….)

 

‘Power’ has been able… over the centuries… to appear to have cornered the market on this ‘leadership’ thing… by affixing heavy loops of chain round and round our legs… then by bombarding us with orders… and forcing our eyes strictly on high… ‘power’ successfully ‘monopolized’ both ‘leadership’ and our attention… to prevent our realizing that with ease we could unloop each others legs… – that’s what Nikola gave his gifts for… for us… all of us… the species.

 

‘Power’ is able to monopolize leadership in practice… but also its ‘theory’… by capturing its definition… and with it our sense of the possible – 

 

– controlling its definition by pointing to the practice that it systematically sculpted…

 

…then orders its pundits to devise clever ‘theories’… that ‘explain’ this ‘practice’ of narrow and exclusive use… of parsimonious application… of stingy dispensing… of this gregariously promiscuous quality common to us all… inherent, in fact, in life itself… (as none of us were brought here to listlessly twiddle and twaddle about… waiting around to be told what to do.)

 

By these means ‘power’ has convinced (conned) us into believing that it (leadership) is, in fact, not a quality common to us all, but one rather that either magically or genetically… or who-knows-what-tically comes… born in the blood we’re told it comes… so we settle into our low-slotted-lives… never questioning our ‘betters’… which is how ‘power’ designed it (the system.)

 

But we’re living a time… when the earth she is rising… she’s knocking on doors… she is come a-calling… she’s come to collect our wandering souls… and she’s pulling our coats… to gently remind us… that these gifts we are given are meant to be grown… and one to each other are meant to give solace… are meant to give help to our brothers and sisters… are meant for joining our strong arms together… whenever they’re needed… which they are every moment… and never were they more needed… than now.

 

–––

 

* “The December 15, 2013 show”

WUR, Sunday, December 15th, 2013 radio show: “Reclaiming Our Stolen Gifts… Our Leadership… To Establish A Future Based On Distributed Generation” (Pt. 7): Understanding the “logic of ‘rule’”… and getting clearer on ‘the transition’ (pt. 5)

 

…occupational hazard…

 

…how to express the urgency of the need for us to reclaim the leadership of guiding the world…

 

…‘global supremacy’ for a reason…

 

In our July 14th show we quoted Hugo… saying that:

The June 30 2013 Egyptian Revolution… brought to mind those words of Victor Hugo:

The counterfeits of the past take assumed names, and are fond of calling themselves the future. That spectre, the past, not infrequently falsifies its passport. Let us be ready for the snare. Let us beware. (Victor Hugo, Les Miserables, Book VI – XI)

So long as ‘class’ exists, ‘power’ will never… can never… retire this magician’s trick… this attempt to pass repackaged relationships of class… off on us as some bright and shiny… more ‘just’… ‘future’… a sleight-of-hand which is, just as Hugo said… palming the past in a false show of ‘open-hand’… that it will, down the road, unceremoniously, shove down our throats.

 

So… it’s time to look around us and say, “is this what we want?”… as… ‘the future’ ‘power’ plans for us is but a harsher version of what we have now. “Let us be ready for the snare. Let us beware.”

But how? (The July 14, 2013 Waking Up Radio show transcript can be found at nas2endwork.org, as well as in “Reclaiming Our Leadership: Waking Up Radio Conversations (Vol. 1)” (pdf file))

“The past, not infrequently falsifies its passport.”

 

This observation has been repeated often over the centuries because it is a constant of ‘class’… a constant… that ‘power’ has had… of necessity (to maintain its legitimacy…) to dress up the same old class relations… the same old closet-totalitarian-thinking… and then present it back grandly to us as something new. (I.e., we are surrounded by… trapped in… lies… and if we’re trapped in lies… that’s containment. And rage comes from containment.)

 

De Tocqueville also took the French Revolution as his exemplar to show this (although the ‘power’-relations of ‘class’ were for him… as with Hugo… a given):

No nation had ever before embarked on so resolute an attempt as that of the French in 1789 to break with the past, to make, as it were, a scission in their life line and to create an unbridgeable gulf between all they had hitherto been and all they now aspired to be. With this in mind they took a host of precautions so as to make sure of importing nothing from the past into the new regime, and saddled themselves with all sorts of restrictions in order to differentiate themselves in every possible way from the previous generation; in a word, they spared no pains in their endeavor to obliterate their former selves.

 

I have always felt that they were far less successful in this curious attempt than is generally supposed in other countries and than they themselves at first believed. For I am convinced that though they had no inkling of this, they took over from the old regime not only most of its customs, conventions, and modes of thought, but even those very ideas which prompted our revolutionaries to destroy it; that, in fact, though nothing was further from their intentions, they used the debris of the old order for building up the new. (Alexis de Tocqueville, “Forward”, The Old Regime and the French Revolution)

As we said in our conversation with Joel McIver… if we don’t have an accurate assessment of ‘the system’… we can’t craft a viable alternative:

How the problem is defined is critical. Alfred O. Hirschman in The Passions and The Interests, pointed out, quoting de Tocqueville, that if you can get the many chasing money, it leaves the few who play the higher stakes of ‘power’ freer to pursue their ambition. And that ambition is global supremacy… and in this global game of ‘power’, we-the-people serve as fuel. Our lives – consigned as they’ve been to ‘power’s purposes, have ‘historically’ (i.e. from the perspective of self-creation) – been nullified. But the Internet, thanks to Nikola Tesla and his tribe, has finally shifted the terms in our favor.

 

If we see the problem as being caused by corporations, then the solution put forward is to limit the corporations’ ability to make profits, which will do nothing to return our earth-given gifts to our exclusive use. Corporations serve as privatizing means for ‘power’: consolidating the resources of the planet in private hands. So we need to ask ourselves what would put those resources in our hands.

 

And of course the most determinative resource for how the world is shaped is ‘we-the-people’. (Conversation with Joel McIver is posted on the nas2endwork.org website)

If ‘freedom’ seems ever… each time we rouse ourselves en masse to seize it… seems afterwards to slip away… out of our grasp… the analysis pundits of all eras give us… is self-serving… ‘state’-legitimizing… wrapped up and festooned as a supposed function of the ‘inevitable’ compromises of the ‘human condition’… if we want to live together… and collectively ‘progress’….

 

I.e., ‘class’ always remains – or attempts to remain – hidden.

…conversations about ‘democracy’ are largely conversations about ‘strategy’… as what we all have in common is… we want to escape slavery…

 

(…and the red herring advocacy of violence as a supposed ‘revolutionary’ tactic is a good example of this… of how the critical, hidden, underpinnings of class get continuously re-fed – ‘revolutionary’ it may be as it… as John Trudell points out… as it does indeed get you right back where you started.

 

…I think No Sizwe may be missing what I consider most significant about this passage… the term ‘stay-at-home’… counterposing it with ‘universal adult suffrage’…

 

Recently I heard a snippet of a buried documentary called Nelson Mandela: The Noblest Son of Africa, which talked about a resistance strategy called “stay-at-homes”… i.e. the general strike… and when I heard that, I sat up… because I’d never heard the circumstances of this tactic discussed… or its significance. I found only one mention of it on my shelf… a book written by a staunch Marxist. And it seems to me that our upcoming conversation about ‘democracy’… is largely a conversation about strategy… as all of us are trying to escape slavery. It does… at deepest level… get back to John Trudell’s point: “What we see here,” in European colonization… “is what happened to the Tribes of Europe. They lost the perceptual reality of what it means to be a human being. They got owned.”

 

“They got owned.”

 

When we talk about ‘democracy’… it’s about escaping slavery… when we talk about ‘socialism’… it’s about escaping slavery. It’s time to go to the root… as… the ‘democratic election’ of dictators who… possessing the mechanisms of the state and the means for our reproducing our lives… proceed to design us to believe its way is the ‘only way’… is… to say the least… not in the least ‘being free’… though ‘democracy’ it may indeed be.

 

The author of the book I found, No Sizwe, strongly disagreed with Nelson Mandela on this issue. He wrote:

…the old guard of the Congress [African National Congress] Movement… as well as strong factions of the leadership of the Unity Movement, did not conceive of the struggle as a permanent, uninterrupted revolution [i.e. pushing beyond formal extension of ‘democratic rights’]. A good illustration of the validity of this interpretation comes from the record of the Treason Trial. Having due regard to the nature of political trials and the constraints under which witnesses for the defence have to speak, it is none the less true that what Nelson Mandela said on the occasion quoted here reflects generally the views at the time of many of the old guard (but, ironically, not necessarily those of Mandela himself, despite his explicit statement to that effect!). In answer to a question from the prosecution about whether he thought that the demands of the Freedom Charter could be achieved by means of a process of gradual reforms, Mandela replied as follows:

 

Well, this is how I approach the question. I must explain at the outset that the Congress, as far as I know, has never sat down to discuss the question…. We demand universal adult franchise and we are prepared to exert economic pressure to attain our demands, and we will launch defiance campaigns, stay-at-homes, either singly or together [referring to the various components of the Congress Alliance], while the Government should say, “Gentlemen, we cannot have this state of affairs, laws being defied, and this whole situation created by staying at homes. Let’s talk.” In my own view I would say, “Yes, let us talk,” and the Government would say, “We think that the Europeans at present are not ready for a type of government where there might be domination by non-Europeans. We think we should give you 60 seats. The African population to elect 60 Africans to represent them in Parliament. We will leave the matter over for five years and we will review it at the end of five years.” In my view, that would be a victory, my lords; we would have taken a significant step towards the attainment of universal adult suffrage for Africans, and we would then for the five years say: we will suspend civil disobedience, we won’t have any stay-at-homes, and we will then devote the intervening period for the purpose of educating the country, the Europeans, to see that these changes can be brought about and that it would bring about better racial understanding, better racial harmony in the country…. Then at the end of the five year period, we will have discussions and the Government says, “we will give you again 40 seats more,” I might say that this is quite sufficient, let’s accept it, and still demand that the franchise should be extended, but for the agreed period we should suspend civil disobedience, no stay-at-homes. In that way we would eventually be able to get everything that we want; we shall have our People’s Democracy, my lords. That is the view that I hold – whether that is Congress’ view I don’t know but that is my view. (Carter & Karis, vol. 3, p. 593, “Does the A.N.C. Advocate Violence?,” Treason Trial Testimony, March – October, 1960)

 

The adoption of armed struggles, the influence of Communist Party members in the Congress movement, the developments in Southern Africa, and the rapid growth of working-class consciousness because of the Bantustan policy, have in the interim shifted the whole organization to the Left in spite of numerous split-offs by anti-Communist elements. There is now a tendency to see the revolutionary struggle as a continuous process towards the establishment of a socialist order. However it is clear that, in the testimony cited above, Mandela was voicing the typical liberal bourgeois point of view which was held by most of the official leadership of the Congress Movement at the time and which is still held by many ‘leaders’ who now operate in the ‘opposition’ parties in Bantustan legislative assemblies and even in the Black Consciousness Movement. (No Sizwe, One Azania, One Nation: The National Question in South Africa, 1979, p. 176 – 7)

‘Typical bourgeois’ collaborationism? Or strategic subtlety?

 

I think No Sizwe may be missing what I consider most significant about this passage. Notice that Madiba repeatedly used the term ‘stay-at-home’… counterposing it with universal adult suffrage… which brought to mind the African saying, “when the Europeans came we had the land and they had the Bible… when they left… they had the land and we had the Bible.” Well, this example provides us with a version of this. When Madiba went before the Court… they claimed to have his life… and he claimed to have the stay-at-homes.

 

So… ‘bourgeois’ collaborationism? Or strategic subtlety?

 

“…Pourquoi pas nous?… Why not us?…” Just as the election of Barack sent a bolt of hope across the world… a General Strike here will electrify the world…

 

What I have been arguing here is that it is in the strong light of a very clear goal that strategy is revealed… the strategy’s worth tested. Without a very clear goal… ‘strategy’ becomes an expression of play-acting… folks… whether good-hearted or no is irrelevant… wanting to play hero… or actually being heroic… but having very limited or no effect on the deep roots… without knowing where to go… and so… abstract notions like ‘socialism’… or ‘democracy’… are seized and posed as the goal… but which are empty of practical content… and so a workable plan – i.e. one based in reality – can never be developed to get there… because there is no ‘there’.

 

Often… very practical strategists – i.e. folks based in reality… like Madiba… like Miklos… like Barack…who base their analysis on the objective conditions of the society they are in – are misunderstood and maligned by pundits who, by definition – as they cannot face their own collaborationist role… the conditions they are themselves enmeshed in – are themselves very poor strategists… and deeply confused about their subjects.

 

I was incensed, for instance, by Bruno Bettelheim’s ‘Forward’ to Miklos Nyiszli’s Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account – which we will begin reading next week… following our ‘Preface,’ an excerpt from Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood by Fatima Mernissi. In Blog 50 I wrote:

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

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

It’s beyond infuriating…to read [his] way of describing…folks caught in the death-trap…of the mindset of ‘Abandonment’…

 

None of us knows what “the state” will do…

…we can’t control that…

…anymore than Nyiszli could…

 

But just as he did…

…we keep going while we’re breathing…

…and firmly refuse…

…the Division Work they’ll pay us to do.

(From: “Wading Into the Muck of State,” Blog 50, see a brief excerpt below)

…which brings me back to the red herring ‘tactic’… of ‘violence.’ What happened following the stay-at-homes – I believe in response to the stay-at-homes – is that… just as we saw here in Oakland after Occupy Oakland’s successful General Strike… ‘violence’ proved effective means for ‘power’ to destroy the unity of a popular resistance movement.

 

I think we will see that so long as we keep to our given ‘nation-state’ boundaries narrowly… our resistance can be effectively ‘managed’ by those individual ‘nation-states’… not by the use of agents instigating violence merely… but because individual states do not represent a large enough share of the global economy to tip the resistance into a definitive challenge to global ‘power’… that is…

 

…with the exception of this one… the U.S.

 

Just as the election of Barack sent a bolt of hope across the world… a General Strike here will electrify the world.

 

They want to be ‘players’. They want to use their gifts… they want to be ‘big’… …well… so do we…

 

‘Power’s belief in the ‘promise’ of ‘America’ is not about the U.S. state… it’s about the role Plato’s Tribe of every ‘nation’… the global statesmen… have dreamed it would play in fulfilling Plato’s vision… which… even if ‘leaders of state’ don’t start out in that camp… if you want to play the game… you end up in that camp… because they’ve established that as what ‘power’ means… you either get with them… or you get with ‘the cattle’… and that’s an easy choice for the global statesmen to make… they’re very clear on that. They want to be ‘players’. They want to use their gifts… they want to be ‘big’…

 

…well… so do we.

 

So the ‘promise’ of ‘America’… for ‘power’… is about the role they have dreamed it would play in fulfilling Plato’s vision …but… as with all to do with ‘rule’… we can… and must… ‘flip it’… and make of our strategic location here in the U.S… the means to fulfill a much larger… and much more honorable… promise.)

‘Keepers’… keep us… …diminished…

 

So if ‘freedom’ seems ever… each time we rouse ourselves en masse to seize it… seems afterwards to slip away… out of our grasp… as ‘violence’ but feeds the state’s rationale that we need it to be our ‘keeper’… to ‘manage’ our ‘conflicts’… this is because ‘class’ remains discreetly hidden… within the ‘traditional’ means ‘the state’ uses to keep us divided – it hides in our so-called ‘human nature’ that is ‘violent’… it hides in our so-called need to ‘progress’… it hides in ‘merit-rises.’

 

(* Excerpt from “ Wading Into the Muck of State” )

 

And the resulting loss of freedom – restored coercion and restrictions – that with intent up-ooze from the ‘market’ / privatization-imposed scarcity… seems to say… “we must… as always… fall back…

…on the state…”

…accept diminishment and ask ‘the state’ to ‘save us’…

…‘save us’ from the crime… the violence… the misery…

…that manufactured –

…imposed and enforced by state-and-market-in-concert –

– ‘necessity’ makes.

 

How can we be tenders of our freedom?… how can we keep it in our hold… let alone grow it… when ‘work’ requires and enforces an ‘absent-mindedness’ toward it?… pushes to the forefront of our minds the imperative of ‘bills’… demanding of us payment… they claim our full attention… and our ‘freedom’ – such as it was – is left to ‘others’… our ‘keepers’…

 

…i.e. the luxury of creating the thoughts we think…

…is left to others….

…and these thoughts are all the same…

…designed to keep us in our chains…

…and this uniformity in thrust…

…means in essence…

…it is totalitarian.

 

–––

 

…happiness requires leisure… your body tells you that… trust it…

 

‘Power’s thought (and ours… until we remove ‘power’s stops…) is totalitarian – a log-jam in our thinking process. The challenge before us… is to break it up… by growing authentic thought…

 

Popper’s assignment to Plato of responsibility for the substitution in the realm of ‘politics’ (i.e. the project of coercing human energy…) of a collectivist as opposed to an individualistic concept of everything ‘altruistic’… essentially everything to do with how we conceive of the notion of ‘power’ – human energy application – under the regime of class: whether it’s the pursuit of justice… the pursuit of ‘the good life’… the definition of ‘knowledge’… or of course the pursuit of happiness… is absolutely warranted… and it would have revealed to us… if we-the-people had been allowed to discuss it… the true nature of the monster-threat totalitarianism… i.e. that it’s the spawn of the ideology of ‘rule’… is itself the minimization of ‘we’ and the bloating of ‘the elite’… i.e. it is the imposition of rank…

 

…if we had been discussing it… it would have enabled us to correctly direct our self- (and life-) affirming energies… our activist efforts… to ending the class system itself… instead of to its means and effects: ‘corporate interests.’

 

We would… here in the U.S…. likely have honed in sooner on that escape clause given in the Declaration of Independence… the ‘pursuit of happiness’… as even a cursory exercise of thought would have established clearly… that the pursuit of happiness –

(…which of course those first statesmen – U.S. and ancient – always intended only for themselves. That ‘we-the-beasts’ – ‘we-the brute-force’ – might someday see ourselves in those words… might one day – this day – conceive of ‘leisure’ as our entitlement as life… that… the ‘statesmen’ could not conceive… the notion that we would some day – this day – come to see that leisure is not just a possibility for the broad generality… but the only way to save our common humanity…)

– happiness requires leisure (your body tells you that… trust it…) leisure requires autonomy… requires escape from the ‘echo-chamber’… requires escape from ‘the bucket’… from ‘necessity’… requires existence of… ‘the self’… ‘self for self’ and not ‘for others’… as there is no collective pursuit of ‘happiness’… because implied in such a notion – the ‘collective defining of “happiness”’ – is the disappearance of the ‘self’… or its shrinkage to an irrelevance… an insignificance… too weak to challenge ‘rule’ (which is the necessary conclusion of Popper’s thinking… that he apparently avoided going to… giving too much credence perhaps… to that old bugaboo of class: ‘chaos’…)

…the mindset of ‘ruler’ and ‘ruled’ – pushed out and suppressed all others… and we manifest it… but the good news is… we can de-manifest it…

 

(…which the ancients weren’t afraid of, by the way… and their view’s but a few choice concepts away. When Hesiod says, “the first power to come into being was Chaos. Then arose Gaia, broad-bosomed earth…” he’s but speaking of that which is self-generative… the force of love and life – “the more I give to thee the more I have” – as both are ‘the infinite’… which each one of us is a spark of. It’s nothing to fear… far from it… it’s “life longing for itself…” a notion worthy of being developed… and a view ‘governance’ would do well to take into her spheres.

 

One way to think about this may be: “fear dissolving in abundance…” analogous perhaps to Engels’ notion of “the state as overseer and manager of the people…” melting into a simple function of administering things… and then that function itself dissolving into the capacity ‘distributed generation’ – Tesla’s notion of our unity in thinking simultaneously… merged with John Trudell’s observation that we-the-people are the most relevant (for restoring all life to balance…) ‘alternative energy’… i.e., the capacity for healing our earth and ourselves – for this is the true work before us – resides in every human being… and ‘health’ as the goal plots the course… sets the overall tasks on our paths… which means we are all pulling together at last.)

We need Karl Popper because he helps us see the necessary consequences implied in the concepts with which we think… if we continue to allow them to patter about in our heads unmediated by our conscious, collaborative thought process.

(‘Worker’ is a good example of how a collectivist category hobbles our individual power, even in concept – as we have to supersede the category to even imagine being a full human being [a ‘star’…] hence our celebrity-worship, when it exists… ‘stars’ manifest our own unseen and relinquished gifts. Use of words like ‘worker’ and ‘thinker’ is participation in a mindset [class] that has caused so much pain, misery and hardship over the millennia. It is a slavish mindset – which we must stop teaching to the children and youth… and to each other.)

And here, again, I think we can see that he himself perhaps did not draw out the implications of his thought process… i.e. he knew, perhaps none better… the power of thought… and yet I do not think he fully credited what it meant for thought to be concentrated… and particularly over time…

(…‘power’s single pattern of thought – the mindset of ‘ruler’ and ‘ruled’ – pushed out and suppressed all others…)

…for it is the concentration of ‘power’s thought that must be ‘broken up’ – otherwise it will reconstitute itself – and it can only be broken up by an over-equal and opposing force.

 

‘Power’s thought is a log-jam in the stream of growth of human beings… in the expansion of our ability… to live fully in our gifts.

 

And we have to digest that we manifest that log-jam… but the good news is… that that means we can de-manifest it.

 

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…“how do we pull together?” – out of harness, why would we not?… …under conditions of generalized human leisure (freedom) ‘unhealth’ can never again achieve ‘bias’ – weight enough to tip us into ‘unhealth’… we have to think from the vantage of the whole… It is the health of the overall earth that we’re concerning ourselves with – not controlling our brothers and sisters…

 

But if each of us is busy ‘growing our gifts’… how do we pull together? How do we nurture common goals? And how best to help our children… what practices should we show?

 

How does a wild horse test her speed against her sistren and brethren… and manage not to cannibalize them at the same time? If not by respecting their freedom? As they so manage so shall we. We need to trust our health and wholeness… and the happy curiosity and good fellowship that comes from it… our longing to further each other and our children.

 

And we need to consider the significance of our constructed global inter-dependence.

 

And we need to follow the children’s model of openness…

…which is not ‘childishness’ but is profoundly right and true… built to last the species… help the species endure and thrive.

 

Because the model of ‘individualism’ with which we’re all presented… by ‘virtue’ of the election of certain ones (by ‘power’) to celebrity status – is so ‘I’-centered… (understandable when egos are so stressed by the requirements of ‘class’…) it seems to ‘prove’ the ‘truth’ of Plato’s analysis… his dim view of our hearts… in which a focus on the ‘me’ negates the ‘we’…. What we’re presented with as models of ‘bigness’ are not ‘fully-developing individualities’… but rather of the celebration of egoism… which reinforces the ideology of ‘rule’… of its promulgated notion of ‘leadership’ as the province of the few… unconscious service which we all, at times, manifest…. And understanding how we manifest the state allows us to consciously choose whether we want our children and we to be ‘subjects’ or free… “freely-developing individualities.”

 

So… “how do we pull together?”… the more truthful question is: “…under conditions of generalized human leisure… why would we not?”… as the truth is that it is our nature to pull together… we want to pull together (which is why the state was able to tempt us to self-betrayal in the first place…) as any one growing his or gifts depends on everyone growing their gifts….

 

By way of illustration, let’s take one of the more difficult examples (for me) of how we don’t pull together: how we treat our children.

 

Recently I listened to a discussion (on the 12.11.13 radio broadcast of World Have Your Say) of “what is appropriate ‘discipline’ for children?” One of the guests had apparently written a book on “getting children trained before age two”… or some such horror… the ‘idea’ is to cut the ‘terrible twos’ off at the pass and never let them get through – by intercepting signs of life and whacking it with a spoon. He was one of those “never-hit-your-child-in-anger-but-hit-’em” guys… folks unaware of their own deeply suppressed history of abandonment…

 

…and I kept hollering at the radio, “why don’t you talk about the underlying issue of ‘obedience’?”… but that would have called the question of the state… which ‘power’ does not allow over the airwaves.

 

Anyway… the point I’m getting to is that… here’s a circumstance in which this man and I could not pull together… on this issue of how children should be treated…

 

…and these are the kinds of examples that we tend to think of when we fear that ‘good fellowship’ can’t become a concrete reality… because we’ve thought through neither the implications of abundance… nor the implications of our global structural (i.e. built-into the infrastructure by which we reproduce our lives…) inter-dependence – i.e. the infrastructure for mutual aid already exists… what holds us back is our fear that good fellowship can’t really exist.

 

But consider what rewritten terms of abundance means for the challenges that plague us…

 

…recall that ‘health’ is the captain of our ship… tells us the direction in which to go…

…recall that what biases human energy is weight – numbers – i.e. the goal – which until now has been given to us…

…and recall finally that what causes the unhealth of the planet is our collective energy – directed by the statesmen – applied to it… to ‘unhealth’….

 

Now… back to our original example…. Consider it with the changed circumstance being that we are all out of harness… we are all looking about us and coming together to create new villages and ways of helping each other… because our fundamental interdependence will then no longer be hidden in market relationships… but created fresh by us authentically… the technology allowing absolute transparency in our social relations.

 

Now within this scenario… place our child-haters – i.e. place these living embodiments of the unhealth of the regime of class. Even should they all clump together in commiserating villages… clearly… that mindset is opposed to life… it can never achieve bias… weight enough to make unhealth ever again set the terms by which we live.

 

We have to step back and think from the vantage of the whole… and trust… that the earth is with us… with life.

 

It is the health of the overall earth that we’re concerning ourselves with – not controlling our brothers and sisters.

 

–––

 

So what could I have done when I was a young mother… and someone said to me… “The regime of class is totalitarian…

 

Confronting our rationale for accepting subjection reveals this: fear of our fellows – and that’s it… the lack of belief in the possibility of good fellowship… but as only a critical mass of folks who do believe in its possibility is required… and as the rest need only to see it… to believe it… it is this critical mass we must foster and grow…. As those who see our future must be the ones who – with intention – manifest it….

 

But what would I have done – when I was a young mother – if someone had told me this… I still have that question.

 

I can hear ‘power’ now… “if it wasn’t for me… you wouldn’t be able to read – or buy those books you needed so, once you did learn. You wouldn’t have believed you could… I gave you the confidence… the money you saved to create the Nascence came from me. Don’t bite the hand that feeds!”

 

So what could I have done when I was a young mother… and someone said to me… “The regime of class is totalitarian. You have been raised and are raising your child… the both of you… as subjects… ‘power’ is global… it is privatizing the globe and so re-making ‘human nature’… ‘humanity’ itself is now at risk… the commons is rapidly disappearing… the earth we need to live has been ripped from our hands and made private… our common wealth has been turned to the ignoble game of ‘rule’… of determining who will be ‘the pinpoint of the hierarchy’… and we commoners are but the pawns and fuel for them… at their disposal… and rewarded or punished at their whim…”

 

What would I have done?

 

And the truth is… I don’t know… except to say… my habit has long been to follow my questions… and to seek out what feels authentic… beyond that… I don’t know.

 

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For too long we’ve been trapped in the mistaken notion that the only escape from slavery is ‘power’s hoop of ‘knowledge’…

 

‘Commodity’… during England’s medieval period was used to mean ‘good’… i.e. a ‘good’ (of use to…) the ‘commonwealth’… the collectivity.

 

During the June 16, 2013 show, we said that Shakespeare, in King John…

…used the word ‘commodity’ to mean being tempted to self-betrayal… and what better proof of the truth of his words… than to see how we walk through our days so thoughtlessly… so forgetful of ‘self’… begging to be used….

Shakespeare’s usage ties perfectly into the point Popper (and de Grazia… and Alice Miller implicitly when she speaks about the need for the ‘self’s autonomy… to escape the surrounding ‘totality’… which is the broader class society…) is making…

 

…that only that which is of use to ‘the state’ [this will be discussed in Miklos Nyiszli Lessons On Class….] can command a price… can be exchanged… only that which the ‘commonwealth’… the state… regards as such… is a ‘good’…

 

…in this we see Popper’s point as he explained the implications of Plato’s ‘thought’: the self means nothing… only the state… the ‘commonwealth… matters….

 

That this – self-submersion in ‘the whole’ – resonates with us as living things is obvious… our hearts are bound to further each other…

(…this is the key capacity… quality… ‘good’… ‘power’ has stolen for its ignoble private purpose (‘use’) – that which… prior to subjection to ‘rule’… before we shared willingly… and consciously… with our tribes…)

…but that this deeply lodged pearl in our hearts – concern for the whole – is ripped out and priced for the market… is a deep wound we heal as we face… and choose to re-lodge consciously within our care… our alienated gifts and ‘goods’… our earth.

 

The self-betrayal forced upon us by the conditions set by statesmen… life crusted over with concrete… this weight… that was there before any one of us came… is what is now being dissolved… by our necessary synchronous thinking…

 

…in holding before our eyes the goal… of the released leadership capacities of every human being.

 

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And on this issue of our need for knowledge… of knowledge being a ‘necessary’ for us…

 

…it’s not just that statesmen were trained to see and display ‘learnedness’ as a trophy… as a prized possession… which we were taught to covet unconsciously… but that consciously they strive to monopolize its seeming possession… and consciously use this illusion as a tactic of control. As Popper points out… it’s imperative that ‘power’ seem superior:

For a full justification of the demand that the philosophers should rule, we must therefore proceed to analyse the tasks connected with the city’s preservation.

 

We know from Plato’s sociological theories that the state, once established, will continue to be stable as long as there is no split in the unity of the master class. The bringing up of that class is, therefore, the great preserving function of the sovereign, and a function which must continue as long as the state exists. How far does it justify the demand that a philosopher must rule?… The great importance which Plato attaches to a philosophical education of the rulers must be explained by… reasons…purely political.

 

The main reason I can see is the need for increasing to the utmost the authority of the rulers….

Thus Plato’s philosophical education has a definite political function. It puts a mark on the rulers, and it establishes a barrier between the rulers and the ruled. (This has remained a major function of ‘higher’ education down to our own time.) Platonic wisdom is acquired largely for the sake of establishing a permanent class rule. It can be described as political ‘medicine’, giving mystic powers to its possessors, the medicine-men. (p. 147 – 8)

So the manor clerks of medieval England all made their entries in Latin… so so-called ‘masters’ down through the years have ever lived in fear that the thoughts of the so-called ‘slaves’ would grow beyond their ‘station’…

 

…so ladders… and pathways to proving ‘merit’ were erected… and the enforced privatization of children worked to make certain… that there would be no routes to truth… and as children try their best to please their parents… all the accoutrements of ranking did what it’s designed to… and kept the vast majority trapped in fear… that they never would be ‘smart’ enough to matter… still jumping nonetheless… still hoping for the ‘weight’ that would bring ‘recognition’… and help to overcome their fears of lack of worth…. The cons all worked with a wicked misanthropic potency… and we-the-people have suffered… prodigiously…

 

…which is why we must step up… and see that as it is ‘power’s clogged thought that is the problem… it is this clogged thought that must be broken up… not in and of itself… but as the token of… the incidental to… our growing up…

 

…because as Nikola’s mother said… it must be we who’ve suffered the consequences of this clogged thought of ‘princes’… to break free… by breaking up their thought… by developing our leadership.

 

The emperor won’t stand fully exposed… till we grow big enough to know he has no clothes.

 

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For too long we’ve been trapped in the mistaken notion that the only escape from slavery is ‘learnedness’… i.e. joining with ‘power’ in its privatization / dehumanization / accumulation project… or put more plainly… its project to craft ‘the perfect state’….

 

Even those who hoped to preserve their heart… their soul… were captured… by accepting ‘power’s terms for altruism… that preserve the fait accompli of the state.

 

But now that those terms are falling under our scrutiny… and the cons are unraveling… we see… that only by standing with our brothers and sisters globally… and the earth… and our ancestors who fought so bravely for us… can we be free.

 

 

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* …return to top…

 

* Excerpt from “Wading In The Muck of State”

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

 

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

It’s beyond infuriating…to read [his] way of describing…folks caught in the death-trap…of the mindset of ‘Abandonment’…

 

The truth is “good fellowship” is our biological inheritance…

…it’s the SS who were lemmings, if anything…

…not those starved to near-death…

…and bludgeoned into permanent shell-shock….

 

This kind of arrogance shows that Bruno Bettelheim…

– as much as those who wielded the mallet…

…with unconscious malice –

…unconsciously identified with those who wield ‘power’ over our lives…

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

 

It’s a common contempt we’re all (in class society) trained in…

…this longing to please “the parent”….

So “the state” we must first wade in…

…are these bodies “the system” does a booming trade in….

 

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

 

None of us knows what “the state” will do…

…we can’t control that…

…anymore than Nyiszli could…

 

But just as he did…

…we keep going while we’re breathing…

…and firmly refuse…

…the Division Work they’ll pay us to do.

 

“Good fellowship” and “harmony” is our natural (healthy) way of being….

…To understand misanthropy…in the human family…

…you have to look at ‘class society’…

– which this “system’s” podrunks strive mightily…

…to keep us from seeing….

 

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

…of that swig of ‘power’s’ wine….

 

And when he writes about “our system of value and thought” (when he really means the false face ‘power’ has taught him to see)…I must disagree:

[Auschwitz] is an unbelievable story, but we all know it is true. We wish to forget it. It just does not fit into our system of value and thought. (Bruno Bettelheim, “Forward” to Miklos Nyiszli’s Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account)

Oh, doesn’t it?

 

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

 

 The SS strategy, in reality, is precisely the essence of class society (which is deception)…

(From: Blog 50: “Wading Into The Muck Of State”

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The problem is...primarily...sharing work, sharing experience...

The problem is...primarily...sharing work, sharing experience...

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