I do not want the wishes of a happy Father’s Day, when we fathers and grandfathers en mass across the planet have failed to hand on to our children an Earth that they might survive on. Our collective participation in this system only deserves us recognition as failures, and reprimanding and ostracization by our youngers. Our lack of empathy, thoughtfulness, and mourning, that has led to our unchecked squandering of Earth’s vitality—ecocide—is made particularly visible with this now co-opted consumerist holiday of Father’s Day. Over the last 50 years, how much plastic was purchased and expected as gifts on this day? How much additional waste do we add? A celebration of father’s day is a sloppily-tied bow interwoven by insult and injury. Forget these contrived holidays—they’ve brought us to a wasteland, and to the edge of a lifeless abyss.
anti-capitalism
notes 4 today: 2018-05-16 (Weathering Down Climate; Frozen Dreams; Globalizing The Earth; Game Of Thrones Show End Scenario)
It’s been a while since I did one of these Notes 4 Today. I reserve the right to write like shit and essentially just get ideas in. But it might also be pleasant prose, depending on a variety of factors. Either way, what I like about the “Notes 4 Today” form is that it’s intellectually honest stuff I release that is in short and real form, not spinning one of these ideas in to hundreds of pages to manufacture something that can satisfy academia and the consumption culture. Pamphlets—if any written word—foster revolution, not hefty books that screw up your neck.
title: Weathering Down Climate: Alternate theories about the progress of predictability
It is quite possible that weather forecasting has become more astute over the years and that is the key reason that forecasts for weather are much more accurate than they used to be. Taking jabs at weathermen for being right only half the time is no longer in the air. The go-to cause of this is that the technology to predict, the climate modeling systems, are much more sophisticated than they used to be. I would offer that there is another factor involved—and that is that the weather is actually becoming simplified. The dynamic role of ecosystems to modulate and bring flavor and subtlety to the atmosphere has been greatly reduced as the human industrial disease tears away life on this planet. There is generally more wind as the Earth desertifies and there are less barriers to change the wind and moisture, so broader swaths of land end up being subjected to the same weather; whether it be cold moisture or hot dry air. In essence, the job of the weathermen in their increasing respectability to forecast will become more like forecasting weather on Jupiter—there will be lots of wind and a big red storm for the next 10 days.
—
title: Sleeping in the Cold: Creating the Dream World
If it’s other animals it’s called hibernation, conserving energy, and other things. If it’s humans it’s called depression and maybe chronic fatigue syndrome… which bleeds into the other seasons via the massive undulating disregulation. Anyways, I hate the cold, but sleep when it happens (meaning I’m not charged up on non-climate appropriate foods and lighting influences) is quite appropriate and natural, not just within the context of carbon life on this planet, but the general principle of the Universe wanting to evolve ever more complexly, and so necessarily doing it in smaller spaces. The lower energy places (i.e. the cold) afford life the opportunity away from the high energy that pulls us in and bounces us in different directions given our 1st generation particle make-up. The cold allows us to get to work on the 0th level, the new level, the lower level (the generation to come!). Particles get to dissociate in dreams and themselves become entire galaxies during sleep. Life doesn’t have built in waste time; only diseases in a highly inefficient relationship with their eco-system (i.e. awake humans stuck in boredom, induced to destructiveness through an analytic resource extractive relationship with the planet.
So, sleeping more in the cold is not just for energy conservation, but is an opportunity that life seizes to build configurations for conscious experience that are not normally afforded during better heated times. The problem for life then is not necessarily the cold, but being awake during it and having spent so much alert time enmeshed in it; in the cold we should be searching for the warmth of sleep, yet we steadily find ourselves in the unsteady. Thermal differentiation kills delicate vital difference that is bred in relative thermal equilibrium. The bouncing around in physical dwellings of modernity, from a well-heated home to a poorly heated home to a humid green house to the outdoors, all throw off the difference building capacities of the life. Life—a la the spreading out of the Universe—wants to get colder so that it can dig deeper in to make more exotic energy flows, and so the cold might just be the way to that. But those who brave the cold can’t tease themselves with heating, modern rat race overworking, and this sort of thing that frustrates it at every level. The person, just like any of the animals observed in the akin environment, needs to be fully committed to sleeping which includes non-sleep time activities that build sleep pressure and don’t diminish it. There is nothing more depraved than winter-time insomniacs. This is hell on the frozen Earth.
—
title: Globalizing the Earth
Humans have reconceputalized the Earth as one of our geometric object categories, a globe, and now impose on the earth all of our sciences. We stopped seeing the earth for what it was, and would rather see our own thoughts from our distorted societal interactions be echoed in the earth itself, instead of having the earth echo in us. It’s no giant leap to then start confusing places like Mars as only slightly different than the Earth because they are both “globes” and planets, and they only require ingredients, as if life is a recipe and we can now play the cooks. Earth has an evolutionary history and a concentration of subtle and unique energies that is so vastly different than anything mars or a moon of jupiter might have. Potentials are certainly there, but actuals are what life is, not some alienated scientist’s mental masturbations when s/he isn’t accidentally almost creating blackholes in the LHC.
—
title: Game of Thrones End Scenario (a new beginning)
Basically, the white walkers kill everyone over the course of the last season, on both Westeros and Essos. Even with Melissandre coming from westeros with army’s of dragons that she birthed inside of a giant snake (to speed up the time needed to get full sized dragons, all of this taking place in the shadowlands). But then in that vastness of nothing but snow and zombies in the final episode once all life has been destroyed. A huge gaping cataclysm opens up the continent and swallows the Night’s King and the entire army. This is the Lord of Light’s doing, revealed somehow. What happens next is that there are beams of light that appear on the surface and then materialize to be humans, the new “first men” or, the new “children”. Maybe the first word they say to one another is “Andal” or something like that, I don’t know. Essentially then the show will be revealing at the end that there is a cyclical nature to the GoT Universe. The Eternal Return.
the most revolutionary things in history are those that emerge without any history
I was born a libertarian socialist without having the words for it, and hopefully I will die a libertarian socialist without needing the words for it
Series of Aphorism Posts:
My Thoughts Inexactly (Primero)
Lternate Lphabet Lliteration
L is for Lamenting
Z is for Zeroing
G is for Gathering
E is for Escalating
W is for Willing
W is for Willing (ov)
V is for Vanquishing
J is for Jousting
M is for Masquerading
Q is for Quelling
R is for Resisting
R is for Recurring
F is For
F is for Facing
F is Forcing (ov)
N is for Nothing
N is for No things
N Other Lphabet: A pequeño LteratioÑ
Y is for Yearning
Y is for Youthanizing
An Asymmetry
A is Against
T is for Titrating
notes 4 today: 2017-02-09 (Sanctuary Tierras; Trance And Kervranian Biological Transmutation; Paradoxes Of Uniformity; Musings On What Revolution Is)
title: Sanctuary Tierras
Since speak of sanctuary cities is commonplace these past several weeks with what is going on in the USA, I would like to in brief suggest an alternative and longer lasting sanctuary that needs to be established. Cities, despite having become havens for diversity and a logical place to resist racist/xenophobic/fascist policies, are themselves at the forefront of ontologically establishing the necessary background for totalitarian control; cities funnel people in to narrower movement patterns, they make them hyper-dependent on oppressive supply chain dynamics, and they severely lack in ecosystems. The history of cities coming in to existence is predicated upon imperialism and domination, and it is only sickened magical thinking that they are somehow separate or above this bloodbathed historical conjuring. Cities are now globalized places and globalized means dependency; cities try to justify an inter-dependency, but this inter-dependency is only a feign—cities are not needed by those who live in a balanced relation with the land. Everyone is to some extent in equal danger in a city, and equally displaced from the location(s) that they harm by their very existence continuing in a city. The leap from cities to concentration camps is not very far, the gap to jump is not even as noticeable as a crack in the pavement. A fascist house will soon be inhabited by fascists, whether intended or no.
Real sanctuary is to put ourselves—human animals—back in to a balanced relationship with the land that does not have civilization’s concrete/asphalt/agriculture scars all over it. Being spread out over the land, immersed in connectivity, there is much great natural security against all manner of problems that beset people, INCLUDING social problems such as racism and fascism which are a natural outcroppings of exploitative and extractive Western capitalism and the dynamics involved in exchanges between the urban and the rural.
Racism will come to mean little when starvation sets in, or the specter of starvation is hung over a people. Sanctuaries that are in places which were built upon centuries of human, lifeform, and land/resources oppression and alienation are not good long term places. They are at best temporary rendezvous spots, but they will fail in this particular regard as well as in their general capacity to “support life” because they were built to fail. Land and its natural abundance, on the other hand, is very modulating to the extreme swings on which a diseased living situation ensnares us. It supported us long before we clustered ourselves (or were clustered by) in to cities.
The immigrants undergoing increased oppression would be best served by those who have land to open up to them to practice agriculture/permaculture and/or to establish intentional communities that build up a community immune system prophylactically before diseases like fascism and racism have the chance to emerge. Too much is happening in reaction, and sanctuary cities are part of that reflexive unreflected reaction.
¡Tierra y Libertad!
Related Writings: Globalization Does Not Exist and The City Is Dead, And We Have Killed Him
—
title: Trance and Kervranian Biological Transmutation
Why is it and how is it that music can make you feel so good? What does music provide in the vibratory energy that expresses upon our bodies? Among other things that emotionally moving music (such as high quality euphoric trance… not easy to come by!) gifts us, I believe that music exudes subtle vibratory energies to be absorbed by energetically open humans (perhaps other energetically open lifeforms as well) so that they (we!) may alter atomic structures to create elements that we need out of other atomic elements available. Kervran showed that plants, at least, are “bioavailers” that have the ability to create elements that are in short supply, and I see no reason that other lifeforms should not be intrinsically capable and active at doing this. And for the reason/mechanism by which they are enabled to do so, I see no reason that it cannot be at base some beautiful vibratory force(s) that are moving these lifeforms to be self-healing and internally growing. Why biological transmutation should be restricted to a certain class, family or kingdom of life, would in my view only be the sophomoric restrictions that science places upon itself. As I’ve asserted before [note 2], I think ideas the imagination produce are true and it’s the burden of science to prove them false.
Music has real power to heal and provide nutrient needs, something especially valuable in our lands of quickly eroding soil that will see the Earth’s biomass decline even more steeply if we do not start rapid restoration. Allowing music to do its work, just as acupuncture and other healing modalities, is as important as ever.
—
title: Paradoxes Of Uniformity
The ease of uniformity is concurrently the disease of reality. Things (not to focus on humans per se, yet) are made uniform by human artifice, to align them in a straight rigid fashion. Though on the surface it may be justified as such, imposed uniformity is never about establishing connection, instead it’s about making things the same, so that they are the same frequency and adhere to the same leveraged manipulations. When such simplified manipulating frequencies are not there, the things lie dormant, very inactive and pulled from an ecosystem that would have had them actively becoming. Perhaps bridging to sociological phenomena, think of the perfectly trained unit of soldiers without their commanding officer present to direct them. What is their existence if not to be lead by a commander, these perfectly trained soldiers bereft of their past life experience by a perfect training regimen?
Human the organizer rather than human the steward forgets the invaluability of diversity in a landscape, and fancies that uniformity is an end in itself on many forages. Humans ontologically treat the rest of the world this way, and they so too treat each other in this fashion. This fashion needs to change, I fashion.
—
title: Musings On What Revolution Is
Revolution, just like any other term in our languages, is a reified term. Being reified it is by necessity imprecise and distracting, but revolution is one of the few words in my mind that is truly attracting as well. It is a potency, and is worth investigating, a touch of which I will do here:
Revolution should not be thought of as spread over hundreds of thousands of square miles: this is an extrapolation that humans all too often do for our activities and false assumptions about how reality on this Earth is governed (or that it is even governed!). Revolution is a desperate (and often beautiful) attempt at qualitative shifts of evolution when there has been a long quantitative drift of devolution. Revolution—for if nothing else it is a human convention—is something that happens within ourselves, our habits, and our relationships to others. The change that revolution might bring us in such deadly and dystopian times as the ones we are now in, are to treat ourselves better and habitually be good for and aware of our connection to the Earth. We might move and grow at a balanced pace, and move without attention, or attachment to, consequences imposed by contextually external entities. One does not ask permission from the old world to revolt and create a new world; if such revolution happens under these circumstances, it is revolution in name only, named by the overseers.
Revolution within will have us loving our enemies, our lords, as our friends, and as in need of help to come down from the heights of responsibility which hierarchy has elevated them to. Money and other legalities returned to mere paper, a banal crime against a tree and an insane crime against immediacy. Reality mediated no more, this is revolutionary given where we are…
My Thoughts Inexactly: N is for No things
Every surplus is its own deficit misunderstood. Seedless are the fruits that civilization grows.
Change is far more fundamental than any particle or force it chooses to elaborate itself with.
Choosing words over music is one of humanities greatest mistakes. We need far more than a moment of silence to absorb this tragedy.
As we’ve gained possession we’ve lost our bodies. Who really possesses who? What webs we’ve woven!
People don’t grow food or not grow food—land grows food, or doesn’t grow food. And it’s land that grew humans; if land is lacking, so will humans follow. ¡Tierra y libertad!
When thinking about the Universe, our minds are trying to grasp something that already completely grasps our minds.
The recurring affinity humans have to words that rhyme and sound similar for punning acts as a proof that vibrational sounds are at least as important as the meanings they are contrived to symbolize. Words connect better to other words than to their arbitrary meanings.
If a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away there existed a force that blessed some with the ability to move objects with their minds, now an inverted anti-force persists that has cursed us to be controlled—minds and all—by objects.
In capitalism you have hills with a king on each, in anarchism you have mountains with villages of kings.
Individualism is to see with only one I.
A business suit is the clothing worn to embody inauthentiCity.
If things seem backwards, break their seams.
Conquering without conquest appears only paradoxical in this civilized age where there are conquests without any quenching. Red water drank makes one the thirstier for red water lost. But I say—blood is for dancing, not for digesting.
Stability is not just the death of death–it is the death of life.
Quotes and aphorisms will carry the day, for in your head alone you might carry them away.
A paradox in language is not a paradox in matter. Language doesn’t matter—it is immediately contradicted when things of actual importance happen to supplant it.
Power that cannot create itself but must dress itself in the power of others is very weak; this is the state.
Political correctness is policing yourself for another’s benefit.
It is the end of history if no one remains to write its continuation. There can be no closing to history, just a possible closing to our story.
Life artificially extended is a farewell to faring well.
Possess yourselves, let the big boxes possess the rest.
We are more subject to change than the objects we surround ourselves with. Therefore, it must be asked—what really possesses what?
Related Previous Aphorism Posts:
R is for Resisting (my thoughts inexactly)
When you give politicians the benefit of the doubt they do indeed benefit.
One does not gather arrows when the bow is broke. Perhaps one should.
The medical industrial complex will keep you on the floor instead of under it.
If we put our heads in the clouds, then at least our bodies might be out of the pits of hell. When malevolent forces put them there, they have surely decapitated us.
There is no single place so beautiful that the eyes of the beholder won’t eventually get restless with boredom.
When life opens a new door, many other doors are opened concurrently. The more new doors civilization opens, the more other doors are shut forever.
Money is a proxy by which those who have little of it are enslaved by those who have amassed (and created) lots of it.
There will be no posthumous publications writ large, no histories of our genocides published in the future. The Earth’s story will not be concluded—it will be precluded.
Entrepreneurs and central bankers both know how to make money; one group uses their brains, the other uses a printer.
You cant see the consequences of past bad decisions when you are the consequence. You are the shattering mirror, and yet in your lowest state you are now freer to reflect any new light unforeseen by the breakers.
As we lean towards hell on Earth, the best remedy is to grow heaven on Earth. Don’t think of your hopes for utopia as naive, think of the thoughts against it as unnecessarily jaded.
No evil is necessary, there is only the evil we have wedded so deeply to ourselves that we are stubbornly at union with it. If such is our disposition, we have to ask ourselves if we are necessary.
A culture that taboos sexuality is dangerous to, among other things, its own existence.
Without behaving different, thinking different leaves one as alienated as one who thinks the same. A good apple on a rotten apple tree will rot with the worry of catching rot.
Christmas deals in fake trees or dead trees. If we want a holiday that celebrates live trees, we would want to forsake the idolized super-natural for the natural.
Praying will not save you—it will save the oppressors their energy to repress you, because you are electing to do it yourself.
The eucatastrophe is only seen by those with eyes still blinking.
Despite the vast bleakness to modernity, there is still space for great beauty and sublimity. I can think of nothing more stirring than the overcoming and destruction of the banal and life-suffocating artifices, an epic turnaround just around the corner. Thus the allure of revolution, which in its authentic expression has at its core the love of the other outside and inside of us that is oppressed.
A choir that wants to sing many different songs is not a choir for long; nor is it a choir that always sings the songs of one member.
Literacy is the foundation of all propaganda.
There is no finer a foundation for a fascist subject than a religious upbringing that requires strict adherence. High technology is the new religion, and it holds its subjects spellbound.
If we keep killing multiple birds with a single stone, we will run out of birds. The Earth’s dreams of flight will then be grounded, and the ground’s dreams of Earthing with other animals will fail next, buried in an unwaking nightmare.
Think for yourself—you’re the only one that ever will. If not, others will have you thinking for them.
Get caught up on history and you can leverage your power in to the future; get caught up in history and your power will be eclipsed as you are bent over a text.
We are far more likely to leave this planet by extinction rather than by spaceships, and the more of our precious time we invest in global and super-global solutions, the more quickly the human problem will be solved.
We cannot heal the wounds of the world if we do not first feel the wounds of the world. Mourning is essential for a new dawn.
Half of the battle is getting people’s hearts in the right place, the other half is getting their heads in the right place. The whole battle is lost if this is done in the wrong order, for a head that is fully aware of oppression combined with a malevolent heart is quite a deadly foe.
Politicians can’t help themselves but help themselves at the expense of others. We can help ourselves not helping politicians (at our own expense).
What is called the acceleration of efficiency is truly the hastening of a deficiency.
Independence for a day, what of the other 364?
Related Previous Aphorism Posts:
https://subversesjournal.wordpress.com/2016/12/07/q-is-for-quelling-my-thoughts-inexactly/
https://subversesjournal.wordpress.com/2016/12/06/m-is-for-masquerading-my-thoughts-inexactly/
https://subversesjournal.wordpress.com/2016/12/05/j-is-for-jousting-my-thoughts-inexactly/
https://subversesjournal.wordpress.com/2016/12/03/v-is-for-vanquishing-my-thoughts-inexactly/
https://subversesjournal.wordpress.com/2016/11/03/my-thoughts-inexactly-w-is-for-willing-otra-vez/
https://subversesjournal.wordpress.com/2016/10/16/my-thoughts-inexactly-w-is-for-willing/
https://subversesjournal.wordpress.com/2016/09/20/my-thoughts-inexactly-e-is-for-escalating/
https://subversesjournal.wordpress.com/2016/08/07/my-thoughts-inexactly-g-is-for-gathering/
https://subversesjournal.wordpress.com/2016/07/20/my-thoughts-inexactly-z-is-for-zeroing/
https://subversesjournal.wordpress.com/2016/07/04/my-thoughts-inexactly-l-is-for-lamenting/
https://subversesjournal.wordpress.com/2016/07/02/lternate-lphabet-lliteration-training-regimen/
https://subversesjournal.wordpress.com/2016/06/28/my-thoughts-inexactly/
Free Markets vs Ayn Rand?
Most of the followers of Ayn Rand that I’ve encountered are also supporters of the Libertarian Party, and they desire a market free from government interference as the entity that will ensure most of the ideals Rand herself was an advocate of. Free markets are paired in their thought with the idea of putting one’s self first and letting others figure themselves out; selfish pursuits and worries only about oneself lead to the best possible outcome for humans, and everything will work itself out if this reorientation is undergone.
Contrary to their desires for this human initiative of self-involvement, what I find to be the case with markets is that they do quite a lot to have people constantly obsessing about the wants and needs of others to where their very own identity and vocations are lost in the process. Things sold in the marketplace are precisely things created in the hopes that someone else will choose to buy them. The market has become a place so utterly obsessed with what others are doing and thinking that probably more money is spent on propaganda attached to consumable goods and services than the actual goods and services themselves. The market encourages people to be constantly looking for trends outside of themselves rather than any sort of inner-calling to fulfill. Globalization seems to destroy any realization of the self by spreading it across too wide of an area, rather than enabling a self to go to a subtle niche where it can truly realize itself (if such a self is undergirding us that can potentially be brought to the surface, a separate debate).
The other half of the equation that might seem to redeem markets somewhat for a Randian is that any person gets to buy whatever they want to fulfill their self needs and wants, but of course the choices from which they are buying a good or service are completely limited by what others besides themselves chose to create. Thinking of myself, just about every thing I’ve ever purchased was also a thing I found some flaw with or something I’d like to be tweaked, but not being the manufacturer and not having the skills, I just had to settle for someone else’s design of the widget.
The dynamics of the market to pull a person apart have little to do with the fact that the government is fairly heavily involved in the markets in a variety of capacities ranging from corporate welfare and bond market manipulation to regulations and protectionism. This tendency of markets to make people obsess about everyone else is endemic, and any good Randian that sees this would henceforth want to distance themselves from such a mechanism. For the moment, a subsistence economy is called to mind as the modality in which Randian principles would more likely be realized; the creation of things that one themselves knows to be of value and will be sustaining and reaffirming of their energies, kept close to home and not diluted out in to the world of the masses.
Related (somewhat) Posts:
The Critique of Money, a part of
“We are being too idealistic”: The Critique of Money, b part of
In Defense of Libertarians (TMLF part 2)
J is for Jousting (my thoughts inexactly)
Systemic reform is a handshake with those whose hands are covered in blood.
The lack of a public searching for an ulterior motive is precisely the ulterior motive that public relation’s branches most hope to accomplish.
Only among children—our sane counterparts—does it make any sense to use the saying “one step at a time”. It is otherwise absurdly misplaced, for we have brought upon ourselves the absurd world we do 30 miles at a time.
Good people coerced to do bad things: also known as capitalism.
That we think we are privy to the chess game of the elites is itself part of their larger chess game. We are not the interior decorators of their throne rooms but they the decorators of ours. They decorate our minds with fanciful ideologies of control, and laugh at the comedy.
Contemporary class warfare is not so much about the rich stealing from the poor, but the rich engineering a poor that freely gives to the rich their land, their labor, their possessions, and pretty soon their children. Government plays the role of a pump medium to keep this exchange generally moving in one direction, and banks seem to be the benefactors.
We all need a god to believe in, and we all need to believe in ourselves. Why not combine the two?
At what point do we call the diluted soup water?
Circumstances don’t have to get to the point of being lifeless, to realize the grave danger of less life.
The inclination to put off fighting the battle, is the one of the most prominent aspects of the battle that we have to fight.
An individuated life is only a step away from death; fortunately for the individual they have some say in the direction of their next step.
We must begin to work frantically if we are to regenerate all the vastness that we have lost, to give our children a chance in this hell.
An unsuccessful genocide gets blamed on the disease responsible—people; a successful genocide gets blamed on a different disease, smallpox.
People who believe everything they are told are a haven for those who profit on lies.
The IOU that outlives you, outlives itself. The untimely mortality associated with the IOU is what makes it an immortal weapon of the powerful who use it as an immediate denial of resources. We masses similarly have the ability to deny others access to resources, but for we don’t see ourselves as masses but as individuals.
To pardon the world’s sin is not to take it away, but to give it millennia to flourish unchallenged.
The nature of our crimes tells of how far from nature we have strayed.
Representative democracy is the human version of a dog run—we use up all of our own energy in a space narrowed by those who we let be our masters. While the oligarchs promise they’ll take care of our shit, they leave it there long enough for us to run through it and get infected by it.
The livestock industry milks, bleeds, and slaughters all the other herd animals—why should it be any different for we humans?
Related Previous Aphorism Posts:
https://subversesjournal.wordpress.com/2016/12/03/v-is-for-vanquishing-my-thoughts-inexactly/
https://subversesjournal.wordpress.com/2016/11/03/my-thoughts-inexactly-w-is-for-willing-otra-vez/
https://subversesjournal.wordpress.com/2016/10/16/my-thoughts-inexactly-w-is-for-willing/
https://subversesjournal.wordpress.com/2016/09/20/my-thoughts-inexactly-e-is-for-escalating/
https://subversesjournal.wordpress.com/2016/08/07/my-thoughts-inexactly-g-is-for-gathering/
https://subversesjournal.wordpress.com/2016/07/20/my-thoughts-inexactly-z-is-for-zeroing/
https://subversesjournal.wordpress.com/2016/07/04/my-thoughts-inexactly-l-is-for-lamenting/
https://subversesjournal.wordpress.com/2016/07/02/lternate-lphabet-lliteration-training-regimen/
https://subversesjournal.wordpress.com/2016/06/28/my-thoughts-inexactly/
In Defense of Libertarians (TMLF part 2)
In response to Capitalism is Cruelty and this facebook discussion which indicates fundamental differences and problems of reconcilability between two general camps—anarcho-capitalists and anarcho-communists—I’ve decided to republish my responses to a fellow “ancom” where I don’t think it makes sense to try at this juncture to unwed the people from the political identity of “ancap” that they dress themselves in. I like to think that I’ve undressed down to a naked animal, and my skin and inner organs are all “ancom”, but whether this is ontologically accurate, and important to conceive of at this juncture, I throw in doubt. When an important alliance looms between our two groups, which is arguably always an important alliance to make so long as these two groups of people exist, I am quite fine with putting these differences aside, no matter how much the idea of private property “gets under my skin”, to mix metaphors! So, here is my responses to what he said on facebook and in his one article:
[sic]
I read Cap is cruelty, and I agree fully with all you are saying (though I am doing theoretical anthropology and am guessing that the seeds were sown more than 10,000 years ago, but no matter property is an ancient burden that has been unsuccessfully challenged heretofore). I guess I just feel a time pressure and if we hold the bar so high for full on mental revolution to a sense that mutual aid and sharing are the ideals that we are ready to unbag all the cultural baggage we’ve inherited, we will lose many people along the way that might have been a few years away from that leap, and might be turned off to the ideas if they are too much of a radical leap. I’ve visited some intentional communities where, to me, they seem at the forefront in western culture towards retribalizing in a sharing, horizontalist as possible fashion. some are only a couple of generations away, in my opinion, of realizing your and my dreams for people. obviously that collides and is not enough given the speed of the holocene extinction event/desertification, a real crisis indeed. but the teacher in me would rather “chunk” mental revolution and i see being a libertarian that doesn’t like global expansion, itself the most harmful general trend to the environment, to subaltern people, to dangerous new military arms weaponizations, i would rather these people be included than excluded in this movement and perhaps their culturally acquired ideas of rabid individualism will start to soften as they find the comraderie with others that the culture was unable to provide them with beforehand. Psychological barriers are so deep, I have found this true within myself, and they generally need to be crawled out of, so as to slowly stretch them. It’s taken me a long time to get to the latent content and fully be conscious of this nightmarish reality, and break down the self-inner-monologue bs narratives. I give a lot of credit to people even being libertarian and having a sense that imperialism is wrong. it to me is a huge leap in the right direction, one that should not be admonished by any who have had a lifetime to think deeply and move their mental states further along. But I think your article might argue against what you’re proposing here, which is “the first step is to get more people talking about it.” I completely agree with this sentiment. Peace!
and lastly wanted to say there still are indigenous and psuedo indigenous people who are farther ahead than intentional communities, and surely should be learned from. the difference is they possibly never lost the core of sharing going back tens of thousands of years, whereas westerners really have to go to some core instinct that private property is wrong and rebuild from that, aided of course by ideology of anarchists or revolutionary marxists.
and lastly lastly, ha I keep having add ons, or new ideas (which may work to support what I’ve been getting at) – private property is not just solely something that exists in human minds and therefore perpetuates because of their ideas. property is outside of humans in historical Alien archaeological visitors viewing our planet shortly after we all were extincted would be able to decipher that we were “thing obsessed” people by noting both how our skeletons were gathered and separated in our dwellings, but maybe even more by our infrastructure and mass strewn about separatized possessions. It is a battle of ideas in our minds for sure, but it is also a battle against hard and individualized matter that has suffered us and our recent ancestors who industrialized and thingified so much of the physical planet. Though I call myself an anarchocommunist, how often do my habits unawares stray back to the default of being possessive, spiteful, paranoid? Not infrequently enough! And how often does an an cap do something cooperative, or feeling something mutual? Probably more often than would be given credence. We are all works in progress/regress. Let us throw out the gray bathwater, but certainly not any comrades rinsing and refining, or polluting their halfway decent ideas. We need all the comrades that we can get in this lopsided, terrain destroyed battle for the ecosphere to survive this human-led extinction effort.
Related Post:
https://subversesjournal.wordpress.com/2016/10/21/to-my-libertarian-frienemies-tmlf-part-1/
Subverses 