Faith is necessary. The object of faith is irrelevant. It is the power of the faith itself - the overriding of all the "what ifs" thrown up by the intellect and the ego - which makes the impossible possible. The idol is made by the genuflector, not the craftsman. This is why all initiatory paths which have real power call for total devotion to the Ideal or to a particular Master who embodies the ideal. (The truly enlightened never claim to have spooky powers, but sometimes the disciples will tell stories about the Master's spooky powers. This is a sign of their faith which is not discouraged by a true Master.)
(ETA: There's a wonderful piece in the Doctor Who story The Curse of Fenris. For those who haven't seen it: it's World War Two and the Doctor et al are fighting vampires, for some reason, and of course a traditional way to fight off vamps is with a crucifix. A Red Army soldier who happens to be with them protests that he doesn't believe in Christianity; the Doctor asks him: "What do you believe in?" and he answers "I believe in the Revolution". So - get this - he takes the hammer-and-sickle badge off his cap and fights the vampires off with that. Even faith in the cynical bureaucratic murderer Joe Stalin can move mountains.)
For all we have criticised the Leninist sects, you must admit that their belief system gives them incredible powers to face ridicule, to stand on street corners selling badly-xeroxed papers, etc., for an entire lifetime. The problem with some of them is that they don't teach "loving-kindness", or in other words, integrity - instead they have a half-assed belief in "Bolshevik ethics" which, in practice, boils down to the same kind of Might = Right nonsense that we rightly despise when we hear it coming from the fascists (and would make Trotsky spin in his grave). The problem with others is that they've given up actually changing things in the Big World and have become nothing but a substitute religion.
But are we to say that they have no right to exist or to participate in the movement - that they would be better off individually giving up and getting some bourgeois job? Surely they can be annoying, but is that a problem with them or a problem with us? I'm reminded of secular atheists who curse religious believers for "relying on a crutch". The implication is that secular atheists are both ethically and psychologically superior. But what do they do with that superiority? (Can someone point me to hospitals, schools, charity drives etc. started by humanist organisations? I'm sure there are some.)
"Atheism" and "secularism" are both negatives - no religion - but why do you stay alive in the absence of any metaphysical meaning? Is the answer nothing but "pure hedonism" - or, more likely, "live the capitalist dream, earn money to buy leisure commodities, have a good time, then die?" Many people would rather stay in a cult than accept a lifetime of nothing more than psychic masturbation. As Seven of Nine put it before she was reverse-assimilated, "WE DO NOT WANT TO BE LIKE YOU".
The point is: don't be so quick to tear down someone else's faith before examining your own. And yes, you have one, even if it's not in God. I am increasingly thinking Fripp was right when he said "any act based on principle is a good one".
2011-07-28
Physician, heal thyself
I'm embarrassed to have to admit how much of everything I've done in this lifetime - up to and including writing this blog - has been in the service of a story I was telling myself in which I had to train to become a PERFECT GENIUS SUPERHERO - Noam Chomsky crossed with Frank Zappa crossed with Xena Warrior Princess - or my life would be a complete waste of time. That the world was doomed if I didn't hone my gifts and skills to be able to save it.
Wow, it sounds far less convincing outside my head. And then I come on here and rant about "don't get trapped by identities" and "don't let fantasy be the enemy of making something happen right here right now". I think the word we're looking for is "facepalm". Robert Fripp says that the course he was on at Sherborne House in 1975 was full of people who thought something very similar, and the purpose of the course was to beat that out of them.
Wow, it sounds far less convincing outside my head. And then I come on here and rant about "don't get trapped by identities" and "don't let fantasy be the enemy of making something happen right here right now". I think the word we're looking for is "facepalm". Robert Fripp says that the course he was on at Sherborne House in 1975 was full of people who thought something very similar, and the purpose of the course was to beat that out of them.
2011-07-25
Anonymous: CM prophecy confirmed accurate
"Was Project Chanology for the Intarwebz what May 1968 was for French students?" I asked almost precisely two years ago. The answer appears to be "yes". We now live in an era where Anon is taking on governments, the FBI and major corporations, appears to be actively thriving on persecutions and arrests, and is reported as serious news in the mainstream press. This article from around the same time, suggesting that Anonymous had reached its limits because it could not possibly find a more ideal target than Scientology, is laughable in retrospect - obviously the author couldn't imagine them actually going after the Pentagon or the FBI. (But perhaps it was only the intervention of Bradley Manning and Julian Assange which made that possible.)
Also of note is that Anonymous is a "meme", like al-Qaeda or radical right-wing resistance, so nailing individual participants can't stop the signal. The media have never gotten this - they keep going on about "members of Anonymous" being arrested. Newsflash, guys, a "member of Anonymous" is anyone who does anything under the Anon or associated banners. The Clams' "tech" for dealing with enemies is to nail their leaders personally, but Anon has gone past the individual. This is of course what all radical movements should be doing; however, I think we're still addicted to the "leader / Central Committee" structure, which evolved in the case of a Tsarist police state when the telegraph was the cutting edge of information technology. Networked resistance is the next step. Don't let the 4chan crowd or the fascists out-innovate us.
Also of note is that Anonymous is a "meme", like al-Qaeda or radical right-wing resistance, so nailing individual participants can't stop the signal. The media have never gotten this - they keep going on about "members of Anonymous" being arrested. Newsflash, guys, a "member of Anonymous" is anyone who does anything under the Anon or associated banners. The Clams' "tech" for dealing with enemies is to nail their leaders personally, but Anon has gone past the individual. This is of course what all radical movements should be doing; however, I think we're still addicted to the "leader / Central Committee" structure, which evolved in the case of a Tsarist police state when the telegraph was the cutting edge of information technology. Networked resistance is the next step. Don't let the 4chan crowd or the fascists out-innovate us.
In other death news...
... so what do you think of the argument that "the price of genius is a tortured mind, and more often than not an early death"? I don't 100% buy it. It makes as much sense as arguing that being gay is unhealthy because it makes you want to kill yourself. No, homophobic culture makes you want to kill yourself, and I suggest we live in a creativity-phobic culture.
What is happening is we live in a culture where inspiration is either bullied out of you or commodified. They'll try to destroy you unless you become useful for their agenda, in which case they'll turn you into a brand and a cash cow, which will also destroy you, just with a higher budget. The article also lets off the hook the fact that the music industry has been known to actively encourage drug addiction among its artists because that's a very effect mechanism of control. It used to be quite common in the 80's for club owners in the USA to offer to pay musicians in cocaine.
Robert Fripp knows all about this because he's one of the few people who have been successful enough to be tempted by the Great Deceiver and lived to tell the tale. Of course, he also suggests that truly great artists are channeling a source of power which just burns their human personality away. Was Ms Winehouse a truly great artist? Even a pivotal figure for her generation like Courtney Love's husband? I don't know, never actually heard her work, perhaps you can fill me in in the comments.
What is happening is we live in a culture where inspiration is either bullied out of you or commodified. They'll try to destroy you unless you become useful for their agenda, in which case they'll turn you into a brand and a cash cow, which will also destroy you, just with a higher budget. The article also lets off the hook the fact that the music industry has been known to actively encourage drug addiction among its artists because that's a very effect mechanism of control. It used to be quite common in the 80's for club owners in the USA to offer to pay musicians in cocaine.
Robert Fripp knows all about this because he's one of the few people who have been successful enough to be tempted by the Great Deceiver and lived to tell the tale. Of course, he also suggests that truly great artists are channeling a source of power which just burns their human personality away. Was Ms Winehouse a truly great artist? Even a pivotal figure for her generation like Courtney Love's husband? I don't know, never actually heard her work, perhaps you can fill me in in the comments.
Solidarity
No to fascism.
No to race-hatred.
No to Islamophobia and other religion-hatred.
No to the belief that "words don't have consequences" and that therefore free speech comes with no responsibilities.
No to allowing memes of hatred to survive unchallenged in our media and in our conversation.
If there's one thing that you yes YOU can do without getting out from in front of your internet connection, it's to slap down anyone who tries to make Muslims, non-whites, queers or leftists "the Other" who have no rights. (But try to do that without just unleashing hatred against Christians, atheists, conservatives or people who haven't read as many books as you. The "arty queers vs. rednecks" thing is a false dichotomy to stop us embracing the true diversity of our culture and forging unity in that diversity. Ideas are the enemy, not those who hold them.)
ETA: Amanda Knudsen in Norway writes: "I understand that people just want to show solidarity with those killed in the fascist massacre on utøya and in oslo, but please, understand that using the norwegian flag is not an appropriate symbol for this. Our response to the nationalist nazi violence must be openness and internationalism, not to support the nation borders that divide us."
2011-07-24
I was asked to tell you this:
You can't achieve holiness, enlightenment, transcendence, self-actualisation or become a Good Person by following a set of rules. (So screw religious fundamentalism and its political equivalent, "programme fetishism".) Religions, codes of ethics and ready-made schemas are, at best, good for keeping you out of trouble, or baking a fine cake. But everything that's actually valuable about being a human being on this planet comes from pure, inner inspiration - "the disciple's infidelity is the master's faith". And to be able to bring that into the real world requires (a) TRUST that what comes out of "the real you" not only can be unleashed on the world but should be, because it comes from God / The Better Place / Universe A; (b) DISCIPLINE to stop your learned habits of behaviour, your ego, all the little things you to do to fit in and survive in the World-As-Is interfering what what can be done to make The World-As-Could-Be a real thing, here and now.
And, of course, "you" don't really exist. You are a crystallisation of Humanity, which is a crystalisation of Nature, which is a crystallisation of the Universe, which the theists among us would argue is an emanation of God. You can only realise that when you get to the point where the survival of your biological entity and its privileges among the particular primate troop you belong to are no longer the only motivating forces behind your behaviour. Screw Ayn Rand - altruism is what brings light into the world, the compulsion to give, the sheer joy of "I was a hidden treasure and desired to be known" - although selfishness is necessary in the World-As-Is to be able to promote that light against the conservatism of the primate mind. Acting from the communal interest of the society you live in in the first step, and - as Marx put it - only when we overcome the contradiction between the self's desires and the needs of the species and of the society the species has created for itself will we be truly free.
Let us be clear, though - as the "true self" grows and strengthens, so does the ego / nafs. It's not a zero-sum game. As previously mentioned, the nafs is a booster rocket, and you cannot get rid of it and survive in this world, nor should you try to. But, if your goal is to bring light into the world, you do need to (a) get in touch with your "higher nature", the part of you which does act from somewhere other than selfishness and inertia, heredity and environment; (b) resolve the contradiction between that and your nafs, so that the donkey ends up pulling the cart rather than just kicking you all the time. The really tricky thing is that the nafs is so excellent at fooling you that you are acting from a higher spiritual goal, when really you're just reiterating stupid primate dominance games or acting from scripts your parents or teachers implanted in you. (This is easily observable by the presence of hypocrisy - manipulative, cruel, grasping religious preachers, or political activists who'd rather keep control of a cult than lose control of a mass movement.) Learning to tell the difference really is a thousand miles of broken glass on your hands and knees.
And in the meantime it means that you do miss out on the Valuable Cash Prizes that the culture or your particular subculture offer you - you will not be popular if you're doing something right, let's put it that way. So very very many of us who set out to change the world or do magick end up just settling for a well-paid gig in the heart of the beast, the kind of gig in which we get a longer leash than the other wage slaves so we can pretend we're free, in return for closing our eyes to the misery and blindness we've bought into. Failing that, being a cult leader is at least some kind of identity. But the need to "have an identity", have a social role, is as much a trap as the need for money. Always best, I think, to have an active social life which has nothing to do with your political or religious or social mission, so you don't turn your mission into your social life, which means your nafs just ruining everything.
And, of course, "you" don't really exist. You are a crystallisation of Humanity, which is a crystalisation of Nature, which is a crystallisation of the Universe, which the theists among us would argue is an emanation of God. You can only realise that when you get to the point where the survival of your biological entity and its privileges among the particular primate troop you belong to are no longer the only motivating forces behind your behaviour. Screw Ayn Rand - altruism is what brings light into the world, the compulsion to give, the sheer joy of "I was a hidden treasure and desired to be known" - although selfishness is necessary in the World-As-Is to be able to promote that light against the conservatism of the primate mind. Acting from the communal interest of the society you live in in the first step, and - as Marx put it - only when we overcome the contradiction between the self's desires and the needs of the species and of the society the species has created for itself will we be truly free.
Let us be clear, though - as the "true self" grows and strengthens, so does the ego / nafs. It's not a zero-sum game. As previously mentioned, the nafs is a booster rocket, and you cannot get rid of it and survive in this world, nor should you try to. But, if your goal is to bring light into the world, you do need to (a) get in touch with your "higher nature", the part of you which does act from somewhere other than selfishness and inertia, heredity and environment; (b) resolve the contradiction between that and your nafs, so that the donkey ends up pulling the cart rather than just kicking you all the time. The really tricky thing is that the nafs is so excellent at fooling you that you are acting from a higher spiritual goal, when really you're just reiterating stupid primate dominance games or acting from scripts your parents or teachers implanted in you. (This is easily observable by the presence of hypocrisy - manipulative, cruel, grasping religious preachers, or political activists who'd rather keep control of a cult than lose control of a mass movement.) Learning to tell the difference really is a thousand miles of broken glass on your hands and knees.
And in the meantime it means that you do miss out on the Valuable Cash Prizes that the culture or your particular subculture offer you - you will not be popular if you're doing something right, let's put it that way. So very very many of us who set out to change the world or do magick end up just settling for a well-paid gig in the heart of the beast, the kind of gig in which we get a longer leash than the other wage slaves so we can pretend we're free, in return for closing our eyes to the misery and blindness we've bought into. Failing that, being a cult leader is at least some kind of identity. But the need to "have an identity", have a social role, is as much a trap as the need for money. Always best, I think, to have an active social life which has nothing to do with your political or religious or social mission, so you don't turn your mission into your social life, which means your nafs just ruining everything.
Chaos Marxism is anti-fascist
... to the point where we have been traduced by name in the pamphlets of the extreme Right. However, since fascism / conservative revolutionism / radical traditionalism / radical Rightism is self-confessedly in love with the irrational, they often have a strong appeal to those who have become disgusted with the instrumental rationalism (coupled with gross superstition) of late capitalism. This blog is a damn fine attempt to track exactly how they attempt to normalise their foul politics in artistic subcultures which do take the subconscious, the subaltern, the Other seriously. What we are trying to do is to recuperate the unconscious and the irrational for a political project of liberation; to mutually strengthen the rational, not destroy it.
2011-07-21
I am an authoritative source!
Fresh from one of our regularly scheduled autogooglestalks: first came Cramulus' Primer, and now this blog is being discussed as source material for an e-course and referenced in academic essays in Austria. A bit surprising, a lot flattering, and perhaps a satisfactory return for going on five years of thinking outloud.
2011-07-20
Slowly, slowly
Insight on how the financial question is not only a political question, but a spiritual one (emphases added):
Fashioning coin banks out of bamboo, she asked her lay followers to drop a NT 50 cent coin into the bamboo bank everyday before going to the market. "Why not simply donate NT$15 each month?" one follower asked. The amount was the same in dollars, Dharma Master Cheng Yen replied, but very different in spirit. Dharma Master Cheng Yen wanted each person to think of helping others every day, not just one day each month.
I was also urged to get with the programme, learn how to use the internet, and sign up to alternatives to Paypal. In part, this was to facilitate regular small payments - which I have to admit would be extremely useful - and in part to allow Paypal boycotters to spare me a dime. One of the systems I was urged to try out was Flattr.
...with this alchemy change the copper of the heart into gold, slowly, slowly.
And there came a certain poor widow, and she cast in two mites, which make a farthing. And calling his disciples together, he saith to them: Amen I say to you, this poor widow hath cast in more than all they who have cast into the treasury.
2011-07-18
A vital question for those on a mission
Would you rather be a hero, and everyone think you're a villain; or be a villain, and everyone think you're a hero?
2011-07-01
Ooh, this is good.
Some of my best friends are Gnostics, and this, mutatis mutandis, works for any initiatory path, I think. I think I'm personally still working through stage 3. You do have to make compromises with the Prince of This World to be able to survive in this world long enough to change this world. Perhaps the most important thing - which I don't think I ever truly understood until a couple of days ago - is that the game cannot corrupt you if you remember that it's a game.
I, personally, a long time ago (perhaps age 6) started playing a game called PRIDE/SHAME. The object of the game is to see whether you can get everyone in the world to give you uncritically positive attention. This is a game that any human is designed to lose, but playing the game is a way to be able to participate in the world if you're convinced that what you really are is worthless and rejected by God and everything on the earth. And I played the game for so long I thought it was my personality. I still do if I don't keep up my work of "remembering". It's an addiction and it's like sleepwalking at the same time. It's so much easier.
I, personally, a long time ago (perhaps age 6) started playing a game called PRIDE/SHAME. The object of the game is to see whether you can get everyone in the world to give you uncritically positive attention. This is a game that any human is designed to lose, but playing the game is a way to be able to participate in the world if you're convinced that what you really are is worthless and rejected by God and everything on the earth. And I played the game for so long I thought it was my personality. I still do if I don't keep up my work of "remembering". It's an addiction and it's like sleepwalking at the same time. It's so much easier.
2011-06-30
A dancing, nascent insight
As Stewart Home put it, the essential fallacy of liberalism and lifestylism is that it is impossible to live differently under capitalism. But it is possible to live ethically - i.e., with integrity. And part of that integrity must surely involve putting something into training ourselves and others to live differently. "Starting with the Man in the Mirror" is a cheesy way to put it, so maybe "live as if you were in the early days of a better nation"? Or even - this horrible world of advertising agencies and mechanised death is a university in which we train ourselves to live in the better world. The Kingdom of God, in Reality as it is in the Nice Place We Made Up Inside Our Heads. A world where Love In Action becomes easy, or at least easier.
"It's steam-engines when it's steam-engines time", as a wise man once said, and while you can't stop playing the capitalist game (there is no longer any outside to the money and capital system, which, as Rosa Luxemburg said in 1903, means it's coming near to TILT), if you play the game with integrity - which means accepting that you're not going to win the Fabulous Prizes, and that you wouldn't want to anyway - you will keep enough "soul" (energy + free time + financial spending money) to give you a chance at contributing to building a better world.
At the right time, that is. You can't be a revolutionary in a non-revolutionary time for the same reason you can't be a saint or a prophet by your own volition. The time is not right for most of the world, but - for example - in Greece I think it's getting close. If you and your mates keep doing your exercises and your eyes on the prize, one day the Black Iron Prison might show a chink and you might be able to declare a jailbreak or even an occupation.
"It's steam-engines when it's steam-engines time", as a wise man once said, and while you can't stop playing the capitalist game (there is no longer any outside to the money and capital system, which, as Rosa Luxemburg said in 1903, means it's coming near to TILT), if you play the game with integrity - which means accepting that you're not going to win the Fabulous Prizes, and that you wouldn't want to anyway - you will keep enough "soul" (energy + free time + financial spending money) to give you a chance at contributing to building a better world.
At the right time, that is. You can't be a revolutionary in a non-revolutionary time for the same reason you can't be a saint or a prophet by your own volition. The time is not right for most of the world, but - for example - in Greece I think it's getting close. If you and your mates keep doing your exercises and your eyes on the prize, one day the Black Iron Prison might show a chink and you might be able to declare a jailbreak or even an occupation.
2011-06-25
Further to the below...
... being good, bringing Light into the world, making the Solid World more like Universe A and less like Universe B, is unnatural. It's fighting against gravity, as Robert Fripp puts it. It's contradicting our animal nature, and it contradicts every rational, logical scheme for living and surviving in the World-As-Is. This planet would have gotten along perfectly fine without sentience, hence the Eden myth. Consciousness=the Knowledge of (and therefor responsibility for) Good and Evil, to be better or worse than animals, the ability to make Heaven or Hell real right here right now.
Which is why utilitarianism (in liberal democratic, social democratic or Stalinist flavours) doesn't work - it assumes that good=logical, when in reality all the words and abstract concepts on paper - if not backed up with an effort of Love In Action - just lead to the same primate games, with higher technology. As R. A. Wilson pointed out, most people use words in the same way that a chimp will use a handful of its own shit.
One of the things that appeals to me about the Islamic tradition is that there's no original sin - people are not naturally sinful, but they are naturally forgetful and weak. Bad things happen because it's easier to let them happen, and it's extremely easy to forget about God or Universe A or the Inexpressible Benevolence of the Creative Impulse or whatever.
The power of capitalism is of course that it feeds on our animal nature - greed and territoriality, in particular. But the tragedy of capitalism is that it has trapped us in one of those tiny universes I was talking about in the last post - we have, in other worlds, all entered into playing a game which we can't win and is running down the planet and poisoning us body and soul, but if everyone thinks that The Game is the entire universe, then ceasing to play it and acting like adults is unthinkable. And if thinkable, then too damn hard.
If we can look after our animal selves without giving into every single prompting - if, in other words, we can stay awake, act according with Will (=Love In Action) - in little things, then perhaps we can do so in big things as well. We are what we do, and our political activism will not be worth a damn if we act in our private life like we are entitled to everything we want, that Those Guys Over There have no rights because they're wrong, that our actions have no consequences, etc.
Which is why utilitarianism (in liberal democratic, social democratic or Stalinist flavours) doesn't work - it assumes that good=logical, when in reality all the words and abstract concepts on paper - if not backed up with an effort of Love In Action - just lead to the same primate games, with higher technology. As R. A. Wilson pointed out, most people use words in the same way that a chimp will use a handful of its own shit.
One of the things that appeals to me about the Islamic tradition is that there's no original sin - people are not naturally sinful, but they are naturally forgetful and weak. Bad things happen because it's easier to let them happen, and it's extremely easy to forget about God or Universe A or the Inexpressible Benevolence of the Creative Impulse or whatever.
The power of capitalism is of course that it feeds on our animal nature - greed and territoriality, in particular. But the tragedy of capitalism is that it has trapped us in one of those tiny universes I was talking about in the last post - we have, in other worlds, all entered into playing a game which we can't win and is running down the planet and poisoning us body and soul, but if everyone thinks that The Game is the entire universe, then ceasing to play it and acting like adults is unthinkable. And if thinkable, then too damn hard.
If we can look after our animal selves without giving into every single prompting - if, in other words, we can stay awake, act according with Will (=Love In Action) - in little things, then perhaps we can do so in big things as well. We are what we do, and our political activism will not be worth a damn if we act in our private life like we are entitled to everything we want, that Those Guys Over There have no rights because they're wrong, that our actions have no consequences, etc.
2011-06-23
If there's a shortcut, I'd have found it, but there's no easy way around it
Light of the world, shine on me.
One thing that's very interesting in the Abrahamic religious tradition is this idea of the tragedy of prophecy. The idea that when Universe Central taps you on the shoulder and says "oi! pass on this message!", you are not in for a good time. Prophets are always getting stoned to death, crucified, shot with arrows, betrayed by their nearest and dearest, cursed and slandered, etc, and Universe Central doesn't do anything to help. Even the religious experience itself is portrayed in disturbing terms. The Holy Spirit, in the Christian tradition, is said to descend "like a dove". Have you ever had a pigeon land on your head? It's nothing but feathers and shit. And in this case it's DIVINE feathers and shit.
That's why these modern "You Are The Chosen One" myths fail somewhat because they don't point out that being the hero in the World-As-Is - to be technically accurate, making a commitment to act from somewhere else than your own immediately perceived selfish interests - is not going to end up with you being King and getting the Girl (or whatever gender). Actually, the best modern account of the tragedy of prophecy is Terry Pratchett's Small Gods, which gets it just right despite the fact that Pterry was an atheist until he got sick. And as for our secular prophets of revolution - MLK and Malcolm X were shot, Karl Marx died in poverty and 11 people came to his funeral, Ché Guevara ended up dead in a jungle. Fighting the good fight is not a pleasant lifestyle choice.
===
The more I think about it, the more I think that perhaps my real "religion" (in Sufi terms, my shari`a as opposed to my tariqah) is still the Church of the SubGenius. Yeah. I am sure that Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley would be kind of shocked to know that people are reading this who really, truly are Discordians - but I think Ivan Stang kind of accepts that there are people who really, truly are SubGenii (as long as they keep buying swag). And - let's face it, people - J. R. "Bob" Dobbs is a pretty damn good folk-hero for the lumpen intelligensia and the petty-creatives. Congratulations, Stang, you and Philo created something that works.
A hundred years ago, the freed slaves and children of freed African-American slaves sat around on the porch and told hilarious lies about John the Conqueror, which is pretty much what SubGenii do today WRT "Bob". Big John wouldn't pick cotton, he wouldn't bale hay, he wouldn't take a licking and he wouldn't run away; whereas every time "Bob" screws up, he makes a million dollars. (The Polynesian people's stories of Maui fulfill a similar social function.) Every era and culture and subculture creates its own mythology, its own way of being, its own gods and demigods and folk heroes, its own working religion - practical code of ethics, plus rituals to make sense of the world we live in.
You see, that's the problem for those of us out on the edge - we want to change the world we live in, change the community we came from, but we're not individuals, we live our lives in the matrix of community. But the problem comes when we turn the organisations we build to try to change our world into new communities - that's the basis of sectarianism, a turning away from the Real World of Horrible Jobs into an exciting "pocket universe" where we get to be Big Cheeses and heroes of our own narratives of Great Revolutionary Heroes. (I'm always impressed by how thoroughly the Spartacists and offshoots manage this - obsessively taping all their internal meetings, memorising the history of every ridiculous faction fight in their tradition, and in all other ways behaving as if what happened inside their group was the important thing. But it's common in pretty much all radical groups.)
That's where "small group psychosis" comes from - voluntarily withdrawing into a tiny universe that we created ourselves, and forgetting that it's all just something we made up and that it doesn't really mean a damn thing in real terms. In contrast, a real revolutionary or saint lives in the real communities where they are at and then brings Love In Action to bear in that community. ("Love in Action" is here identical to what Crowley would have called "True Will".)
I think perhaps the Sufi distinction between shari`a and tariqah is useful here. Shari`a, in our own sense, is "how we live our real day-to-day lives in the Real World of Horrible Jobs, how we take care of our needs, have fun, deal with other beings and the real physical world - our Rules for Living". Tariqah would then be "the discipline we accept in order to bring about change in ourselves and in the Real World of Horrible Jobs". The two are orthogonal to one another - they function by incompatible rules. Which is why Hazrat-e-Pir, Dr Nurbakhsh, was fond of saying "the master's faith is the disciple's infidelity" - what you have to do to bring Light or Revolution or whatever into the World-As-Is is completely a separate matter to the rules we follow for surviving and thriving in the World-As-Is.
God or "Bob" or whoever doesn't need you to do rituals - you need you to do rituals, preferably within the matrix of community, otherwise you will never have a solid and healthy basis to work from when "Bob" or God or whoever lands on your head like a big smelly pigeon and asks you to do something impossible. I don't think it matters what rituals you do in your community, as long as your community's practice is for Love and Quality and against braindeath. And I think you also need to have "escapism" - little private worlds where you do get to play pretend and tell stories where you are a hero, like sci-fi fandom or following a football team or whatever. Just as long as you don't start mistaking them for real life, for your tariqah.
As for practical ethics, Frank Zappa never joined the Church of the SubGenius, but he did approve of them, and I think his moral code works well:
And a quote from Grant Morrison, whose work is proving suprisingly helpful to me at the moment: "The Solid World is the only place where an ugly caterpillar can become a beautiful butterfly." Things change into other things. That is the central secret of life in this world - the materialist dialectic, but also the essential spiritual insight of Heraclitus, Gautama Buddha, and virtually every mystic who was worth a shit. All that exists only exists in one time and in one place; only in the depths of consciousness is there anything pure and eternal (or foul and sinful). The question is whether we can overcome the contradiction between the shari`a of daily survival and the tariqah of becoming something more than heredity and environment programmed us for, so we can eventually end up at the haqiqah of... I dunno.
One thing that's very interesting in the Abrahamic religious tradition is this idea of the tragedy of prophecy. The idea that when Universe Central taps you on the shoulder and says "oi! pass on this message!", you are not in for a good time. Prophets are always getting stoned to death, crucified, shot with arrows, betrayed by their nearest and dearest, cursed and slandered, etc, and Universe Central doesn't do anything to help. Even the religious experience itself is portrayed in disturbing terms. The Holy Spirit, in the Christian tradition, is said to descend "like a dove". Have you ever had a pigeon land on your head? It's nothing but feathers and shit. And in this case it's DIVINE feathers and shit.
That's why these modern "You Are The Chosen One" myths fail somewhat because they don't point out that being the hero in the World-As-Is - to be technically accurate, making a commitment to act from somewhere else than your own immediately perceived selfish interests - is not going to end up with you being King and getting the Girl (or whatever gender). Actually, the best modern account of the tragedy of prophecy is Terry Pratchett's Small Gods, which gets it just right despite the fact that Pterry was an atheist until he got sick. And as for our secular prophets of revolution - MLK and Malcolm X were shot, Karl Marx died in poverty and 11 people came to his funeral, Ché Guevara ended up dead in a jungle. Fighting the good fight is not a pleasant lifestyle choice.
===
The more I think about it, the more I think that perhaps my real "religion" (in Sufi terms, my shari`a as opposed to my tariqah) is still the Church of the SubGenius. Yeah. I am sure that Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley would be kind of shocked to know that people are reading this who really, truly are Discordians - but I think Ivan Stang kind of accepts that there are people who really, truly are SubGenii (as long as they keep buying swag). And - let's face it, people - J. R. "Bob" Dobbs is a pretty damn good folk-hero for the lumpen intelligensia and the petty-creatives. Congratulations, Stang, you and Philo created something that works.
A hundred years ago, the freed slaves and children of freed African-American slaves sat around on the porch and told hilarious lies about John the Conqueror, which is pretty much what SubGenii do today WRT "Bob". Big John wouldn't pick cotton, he wouldn't bale hay, he wouldn't take a licking and he wouldn't run away; whereas every time "Bob" screws up, he makes a million dollars. (The Polynesian people's stories of Maui fulfill a similar social function.) Every era and culture and subculture creates its own mythology, its own way of being, its own gods and demigods and folk heroes, its own working religion - practical code of ethics, plus rituals to make sense of the world we live in.
You see, that's the problem for those of us out on the edge - we want to change the world we live in, change the community we came from, but we're not individuals, we live our lives in the matrix of community. But the problem comes when we turn the organisations we build to try to change our world into new communities - that's the basis of sectarianism, a turning away from the Real World of Horrible Jobs into an exciting "pocket universe" where we get to be Big Cheeses and heroes of our own narratives of Great Revolutionary Heroes. (I'm always impressed by how thoroughly the Spartacists and offshoots manage this - obsessively taping all their internal meetings, memorising the history of every ridiculous faction fight in their tradition, and in all other ways behaving as if what happened inside their group was the important thing. But it's common in pretty much all radical groups.)
That's where "small group psychosis" comes from - voluntarily withdrawing into a tiny universe that we created ourselves, and forgetting that it's all just something we made up and that it doesn't really mean a damn thing in real terms. In contrast, a real revolutionary or saint lives in the real communities where they are at and then brings Love In Action to bear in that community. ("Love in Action" is here identical to what Crowley would have called "True Will".)
I think perhaps the Sufi distinction between shari`a and tariqah is useful here. Shari`a, in our own sense, is "how we live our real day-to-day lives in the Real World of Horrible Jobs, how we take care of our needs, have fun, deal with other beings and the real physical world - our Rules for Living". Tariqah would then be "the discipline we accept in order to bring about change in ourselves and in the Real World of Horrible Jobs". The two are orthogonal to one another - they function by incompatible rules. Which is why Hazrat-e-Pir, Dr Nurbakhsh, was fond of saying "the master's faith is the disciple's infidelity" - what you have to do to bring Light or Revolution or whatever into the World-As-Is is completely a separate matter to the rules we follow for surviving and thriving in the World-As-Is.
God or "Bob" or whoever doesn't need you to do rituals - you need you to do rituals, preferably within the matrix of community, otherwise you will never have a solid and healthy basis to work from when "Bob" or God or whoever lands on your head like a big smelly pigeon and asks you to do something impossible. I don't think it matters what rituals you do in your community, as long as your community's practice is for Love and Quality and against braindeath. And I think you also need to have "escapism" - little private worlds where you do get to play pretend and tell stories where you are a hero, like sci-fi fandom or following a football team or whatever. Just as long as you don't start mistaking them for real life, for your tariqah.
As for practical ethics, Frank Zappa never joined the Church of the SubGenius, but he did approve of them, and I think his moral code works well:
Do what you want, do what you will,
Just don't mess up your neighbour's thrill
And when you pay the bill, kindly leave a little tip
To help the next poor sucker on his one-way trip.
And a quote from Grant Morrison, whose work is proving suprisingly helpful to me at the moment: "The Solid World is the only place where an ugly caterpillar can become a beautiful butterfly." Things change into other things. That is the central secret of life in this world - the materialist dialectic, but also the essential spiritual insight of Heraclitus, Gautama Buddha, and virtually every mystic who was worth a shit. All that exists only exists in one time and in one place; only in the depths of consciousness is there anything pure and eternal (or foul and sinful). The question is whether we can overcome the contradiction between the shari`a of daily survival and the tariqah of becoming something more than heredity and environment programmed us for, so we can eventually end up at the haqiqah of... I dunno.
2011-06-09
A new aphorism
If we can forgive without accepting, a lot more becomes possible.
"To forgive", in this context, should be understand in the same word as "debt forgiveness" - which means, nothing will change that you ran up a debt, but I waive my right to collect on that debt. It is not right that you ran the debt up, but I have decided that it's in everyone's best interest not to pursue it.
Note that we can forgive, not that we must or should. We have a choice of actions, we can pursue debts or forgive them. Which ties into the broader mystical frame that "God is both just and merciful". "Just" might mean: "everyone gets what they deserve". Mercy means: "everyone gets more than they deserve". Since we are all sinners and black sinners (or to put in secular language, we are all weak and forgetful and make mistakes), then we had better hope that others practice mercy; and indeed, an eye for an eye leaves the whole planet blind.
"Forgiving without accepting" means "exercising mercy while recognizing that it contradicts justice". In the outcome of that contradiction lies an ethical framework for a free humanity. The whole concept of restorative justice relies on precisely this question of giving the victims of a crime their own free choice as to what blend of mercy and justice should be pursued.
2011-05-26
"Pump Up The Volume" vs. "What Is To Be Done?"
An edited transcription of a rant given by Doloras LaPicho live on transmissionFM, Auckland, New Zealand, 2011/05/24.
...yeah, so, my interview guest of last week was kind of impressed by the transmissionFM setup. "Real Pump Up The Volume" stuff, he said. Now he was not referring to the great acid house hit by MARRS, but to the 1990 movie starring Christian Slater as a high school kid with his own rabble-rousing pirate radio broadcast. I actually just watched that movie the other week, and in honour of it I am, myself, sitting her wearing nothing but a cock ring. And believe me, that's an interesting experience when you're a woman.
But that movie is really, really prescient in a way that only the great artists can be. Leonardo da Vinci designed a helicopter centuries before the technology existed to build one. Frank Zappa, in the 1980s, thought of selling music down the phone lines, long before the MP3 or broadband internet were invented. Similarly, in "Pump Up The Volume", what you see is: Dude gets on the air, rants, does interactive content, leaks embarrassing information that The Man don't want you to know about, foments a social uprising, gets thrown in the jail but not before everyone and their cousin are doing exactly what he did. So what you have there is a pop culture depiction of blogs, podcasts, Twitter, Facebook, flash mobs, Anonymous, crowdsourcing, Wikileaks, and the recent revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, ages before social media made it possible.
Because it is all possible now! And legal! You don't need a shortwave transmitter and you don't need to dodge the cops - at least until the point when you actually HAVE fomented an entire revolution and the state has to shut down the whole Intarwebz to get you. And that's when they get in trouble, because then the really big guns are after them. I've been watching Anonymous as a social movement grow and develop, since the very early days of just taking down people's websites for shits and giggles, to attempting slightly bigger game in the Church of Scientology, to now actually attempting to wreck entire national governments who dare get in the way of the Freedom of the Intarwebz. Because that's Anon's entire political programme. It's not the same as mine, it's libertarian bordering on anarchistic in that it thinks that information is the key to the struggle, when, as I will go on about at length in our second "rant" section, as far as I'm concerned, it's PRODUCTION. But THEY ARE DOING STUFF. People like Julian Assange, no matter whether he might have also done something pretty horrible to a woman, have been doing that kind of stuff as well. Why aren't you doing stuff?
All the technology is there! Technology that pirate radio broadcasters 20 years ago would have shit their pants to get their hands on! When transmissionFM goes on the internet, THEN you will see whether what we are doing here has real memetic potential. But there's always a downside, isn't it? There is SO MUCH information out there these days that it becomes very, very difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff, which is why even the most anarchic online community needs moderation and Wikipedia needs a battalion of unemployed PhDs to keep the bullshit off the system. Getting the information out is no longer the problem - gatekeeping and editing is the problem. Will YOU be a gatekeeper and editor? Will you start your own "channel" which broadcasts NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH as far as you can see it? Because it's not enough to just do something, you have to do something that actively, as T. S. Eliot put it, "purifies the dialect of the tribe".
So the question remains just the same as it was in 1903 in Russia, ladies and gentlemen, comrades and friends. What Is To Be Done?
Back in the old days of political punk, there were two answers to that question, which you could call the anarchist answer and the communist answer. What does a political band, or a radical cultural initiative of any stribe, do when the forces of Big Money come a knockin' and making an offer? Because they will if you're doing it right and getting a response from The People, because YOUR PEOPLE will be ipso facto a "market" which Big Money hasn't managed to sell to yet.
The anarchists would say - tell them to get lost, do everything DIY, for the people, non-commerical, under the radar, subversive. One keeps one's independence that way. One also runs the risk of being trapped into an intellectually inbred little group, becoming the house music of a lifestyle choice rather than becoming a VIRUS which could infect the wider civilisation. Imagine if Neo and Morpheus and that just stayed in Zion all day and went to raves and let the machines alone. I don't think the machines would have had a problem. The other issue is that - sadly, in this $2.99 material world run by capitalism - if it doesn't make a living (in money or goods and services) it's dependent on the good will and energy of whatever you are doing to make a living. People burn out. People decide to sell out individually if they can't sell out together. If you're not commercial, you had better hope that your people are extremely generous, or extremely devoted. You wonder why all those hippies punks and anarchists are now making good money as "creatives", or are Green Party MPs or something even more pathetic. Because they COULD. Because they got a good offer.
Now the communist answer is, take the money! Dumbfuck capitalists want to give us big money and sell our records and our gigs full of communist agitprop, then more stupidity to them! The capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him with, as Michael Moore put it. Now that's a higher risk venture. You find yourself in the logic of The Machine that way. It's trying to change the system from within, which, as Unca Lenny could tell you, sentences you to 20 years of boredom if you're lucky. If you're unlucky, you begin to forget you were going in to drain the swamp and you end up making friends with the alligators. These people will be NICE to you if you play nice. Striking a pose and yelling slogans, yeah, they get that, it's a good "branding" exercise. The thing is that you can yell SMASH THE STATE and it doesn't change anything unless the people you're yelling it at actually decide that's a good idea.
The most vital thing to remember is that no-one but no-one ever changed anything, a damn thing, one iota, by making a consumer choice, by buying product X or not buying product Y or buying product Z instead. CONSUMPTION IS NOT A MORAL CHOICE. It is handing over dollars in return for goods and services and it is what the system is all about. You will remember a while ago that the British record buying public were sick and tired of some manufactured bullshit star from their Idol programme, I think it's called X-Factor, being Christmas #1. So they started a meme to get Rage Against The Machine's "Killing In The Name Of" to the top of the charts. Yeah, "fuck you, I won't do what you told me". The band full of actual communists. But guess what? RATM's record company was the same as the record company which made the X-Factor single. So Sony Music made BIG BIG MEGABUCKS EITHER WAY. And some people got to feel cool. But was the market model shaking in its boots? Was it bollocks.
And if IS THIS THE FUTURE? has a point or a purpose, it's to remind you of this. CONSUMPTION IS NOT REAL. It is neither good nor evil. It means absolutely nothing what you buy, or what you believe, or what you say, IT MATTERS WHAT YOU DO. When I'm performing with Vostok Lake or promoting the Electric Salon, it would be nice if people paid money because that means those ventures become sustainable in the material world of capitalism. But it will really only mean something every if people decide THEMSELVES to start an insane electropop band or host a weird performance night or an anarchic radio show. PRODUCTION IS REAL. Only what you do, and what you make, and what you bring into the world matters. Do it the communist way, or the anarchist way, or some other way - they're both choices with pluses and minuses, risks and potential rewards. Maybe you'll succeed, or maybe you will serve humanity for being the grisly warning of what could go wrong. Like Bono. But remember that only when we can do and make free of the Law of Value and the cash economy, only then will we be ready for the next great adventure in what it means to be human.
...yeah, so, my interview guest of last week was kind of impressed by the transmissionFM setup. "Real Pump Up The Volume" stuff, he said. Now he was not referring to the great acid house hit by MARRS, but to the 1990 movie starring Christian Slater as a high school kid with his own rabble-rousing pirate radio broadcast. I actually just watched that movie the other week, and in honour of it I am, myself, sitting her wearing nothing but a cock ring. And believe me, that's an interesting experience when you're a woman.
But that movie is really, really prescient in a way that only the great artists can be. Leonardo da Vinci designed a helicopter centuries before the technology existed to build one. Frank Zappa, in the 1980s, thought of selling music down the phone lines, long before the MP3 or broadband internet were invented. Similarly, in "Pump Up The Volume", what you see is: Dude gets on the air, rants, does interactive content, leaks embarrassing information that The Man don't want you to know about, foments a social uprising, gets thrown in the jail but not before everyone and their cousin are doing exactly what he did. So what you have there is a pop culture depiction of blogs, podcasts, Twitter, Facebook, flash mobs, Anonymous, crowdsourcing, Wikileaks, and the recent revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, ages before social media made it possible.
Because it is all possible now! And legal! You don't need a shortwave transmitter and you don't need to dodge the cops - at least until the point when you actually HAVE fomented an entire revolution and the state has to shut down the whole Intarwebz to get you. And that's when they get in trouble, because then the really big guns are after them. I've been watching Anonymous as a social movement grow and develop, since the very early days of just taking down people's websites for shits and giggles, to attempting slightly bigger game in the Church of Scientology, to now actually attempting to wreck entire national governments who dare get in the way of the Freedom of the Intarwebz. Because that's Anon's entire political programme. It's not the same as mine, it's libertarian bordering on anarchistic in that it thinks that information is the key to the struggle, when, as I will go on about at length in our second "rant" section, as far as I'm concerned, it's PRODUCTION. But THEY ARE DOING STUFF. People like Julian Assange, no matter whether he might have also done something pretty horrible to a woman, have been doing that kind of stuff as well. Why aren't you doing stuff?
All the technology is there! Technology that pirate radio broadcasters 20 years ago would have shit their pants to get their hands on! When transmissionFM goes on the internet, THEN you will see whether what we are doing here has real memetic potential. But there's always a downside, isn't it? There is SO MUCH information out there these days that it becomes very, very difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff, which is why even the most anarchic online community needs moderation and Wikipedia needs a battalion of unemployed PhDs to keep the bullshit off the system. Getting the information out is no longer the problem - gatekeeping and editing is the problem. Will YOU be a gatekeeper and editor? Will you start your own "channel" which broadcasts NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH as far as you can see it? Because it's not enough to just do something, you have to do something that actively, as T. S. Eliot put it, "purifies the dialect of the tribe".
So the question remains just the same as it was in 1903 in Russia, ladies and gentlemen, comrades and friends. What Is To Be Done?
Back in the old days of political punk, there were two answers to that question, which you could call the anarchist answer and the communist answer. What does a political band, or a radical cultural initiative of any stribe, do when the forces of Big Money come a knockin' and making an offer? Because they will if you're doing it right and getting a response from The People, because YOUR PEOPLE will be ipso facto a "market" which Big Money hasn't managed to sell to yet.
The anarchists would say - tell them to get lost, do everything DIY, for the people, non-commerical, under the radar, subversive. One keeps one's independence that way. One also runs the risk of being trapped into an intellectually inbred little group, becoming the house music of a lifestyle choice rather than becoming a VIRUS which could infect the wider civilisation. Imagine if Neo and Morpheus and that just stayed in Zion all day and went to raves and let the machines alone. I don't think the machines would have had a problem. The other issue is that - sadly, in this $2.99 material world run by capitalism - if it doesn't make a living (in money or goods and services) it's dependent on the good will and energy of whatever you are doing to make a living. People burn out. People decide to sell out individually if they can't sell out together. If you're not commercial, you had better hope that your people are extremely generous, or extremely devoted. You wonder why all those hippies punks and anarchists are now making good money as "creatives", or are Green Party MPs or something even more pathetic. Because they COULD. Because they got a good offer.
Now the communist answer is, take the money! Dumbfuck capitalists want to give us big money and sell our records and our gigs full of communist agitprop, then more stupidity to them! The capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him with, as Michael Moore put it. Now that's a higher risk venture. You find yourself in the logic of The Machine that way. It's trying to change the system from within, which, as Unca Lenny could tell you, sentences you to 20 years of boredom if you're lucky. If you're unlucky, you begin to forget you were going in to drain the swamp and you end up making friends with the alligators. These people will be NICE to you if you play nice. Striking a pose and yelling slogans, yeah, they get that, it's a good "branding" exercise. The thing is that you can yell SMASH THE STATE and it doesn't change anything unless the people you're yelling it at actually decide that's a good idea.
The most vital thing to remember is that no-one but no-one ever changed anything, a damn thing, one iota, by making a consumer choice, by buying product X or not buying product Y or buying product Z instead. CONSUMPTION IS NOT A MORAL CHOICE. It is handing over dollars in return for goods and services and it is what the system is all about. You will remember a while ago that the British record buying public were sick and tired of some manufactured bullshit star from their Idol programme, I think it's called X-Factor, being Christmas #1. So they started a meme to get Rage Against The Machine's "Killing In The Name Of" to the top of the charts. Yeah, "fuck you, I won't do what you told me". The band full of actual communists. But guess what? RATM's record company was the same as the record company which made the X-Factor single. So Sony Music made BIG BIG MEGABUCKS EITHER WAY. And some people got to feel cool. But was the market model shaking in its boots? Was it bollocks.
And if IS THIS THE FUTURE? has a point or a purpose, it's to remind you of this. CONSUMPTION IS NOT REAL. It is neither good nor evil. It means absolutely nothing what you buy, or what you believe, or what you say, IT MATTERS WHAT YOU DO. When I'm performing with Vostok Lake or promoting the Electric Salon, it would be nice if people paid money because that means those ventures become sustainable in the material world of capitalism. But it will really only mean something every if people decide THEMSELVES to start an insane electropop band or host a weird performance night or an anarchic radio show. PRODUCTION IS REAL. Only what you do, and what you make, and what you bring into the world matters. Do it the communist way, or the anarchist way, or some other way - they're both choices with pluses and minuses, risks and potential rewards. Maybe you'll succeed, or maybe you will serve humanity for being the grisly warning of what could go wrong. Like Bono. But remember that only when we can do and make free of the Law of Value and the cash economy, only then will we be ready for the next great adventure in what it means to be human.
2011-04-28
Against anarcho-narcissism
One of the things that strikes me from reading The Invisibles - particularly the later, less interesting issues - is how incredibly naive and short-sighted the argument that the essential conflict is between "order and chaos" is. See, the thing about capitalism and imperialism - the current face of The Black Iron Prison - is that it's always combined the two. As Marx put it, the hierarchical order of the firm is balanced by the anarchy of the free market. And in modern consumer capitalism, the dominance/submission model of the workplace is replaced by the GO HOG WILD mentality encouraged by the advertising industry for after work hours. This is why capitalism is so dynamic (or, to put it in another way, unstable) - that very tension between order and chaos.
Which is, I think, why those of us lucky to have the cultural and social capital and productive skills necessary to join the professional or creative middle classes end up selling out the movement for a better world. Because once they get to be their own bosses - or get a boss who encourages them to be creative - they think they've cracked it. Oh! The current system is wrecking the planet and causing poverty and misery and violence and death and torture on a global scale, but since I get to slack off and still get fed well and buy consumer products which tell me I'm a cool person and bitch and moan and make offensive jokes on the intarwebz, it can't be the same as that evil Black Iron Prison thing I read about in all my favourite books, can it?
Yes it freakin' can. The true rulers and archons of this world want a world where some people are free to go to raves and have kinky sex and to write sarcastic blogs, just as long as they think they've earned that privilege by being superior to the slave classes. The current system not only gives "creatives" a special privileged place, it tells them that the class system is just and meritocratic. So that's why anarcho-capitalism always appeals to SubGeniuses and the other lumpen-intelligensia, because it's a consistent system of individualism and chaos, where the Evil Bad Corporate Monsters are vanquished but you get to keep your precious ego and your illusion that you somehow have a separate existence out of the matrix of your neighbourhood, your bioregion, the human species and the wider ecosystem.
But the sad twist is that anarcho-capitalism is the only social system which is actually impossible. The "free market" can't exist without some sovereign to enforce the sanctity of property rights and contracts. Wilson and Shea's contention that there would be such a thing as "property-2", i.e. property rights that everyone would just agree to respect in an anarcho-capitalist system, is bringing in The Cop Inside Your Head through the back door, to reconcile the irreconcilable contradiction of "individualism without hierarchy and punishment". The sovereign individual of liberal/libertarian theory is just as gross and unreal a chimera as the "New Socialist Man" of North Korean totalitarianism, because it dissolves actually existing social bonds and mutual obligations in favour of an administered totality, either that of the almighty dollar or the almighty bureaucracy (or combination thereof).
Any social system worth a damn has to start from human civilisation as it actually exists - a dynamic tension between individualism and community/cultural matrices. A society of yeoman farmers can't exist in the modern era any more than a society of altruistic, collectivised tree-huggers. We revolutionaries are ourselves similarly for both order and chaos at the same time - just in different places than the current system would have it. Of course "Worker's State" is a contradiction in terms, but then so is "Capitalist State". The next era won't abolish all our problems, it will just - hopefully - give us new ones to solve while safeguarding the individual from oppression and commodification, the species from extinction and the biosphere from devastation.
Which is, I think, why those of us lucky to have the cultural and social capital and productive skills necessary to join the professional or creative middle classes end up selling out the movement for a better world. Because once they get to be their own bosses - or get a boss who encourages them to be creative - they think they've cracked it. Oh! The current system is wrecking the planet and causing poverty and misery and violence and death and torture on a global scale, but since I get to slack off and still get fed well and buy consumer products which tell me I'm a cool person and bitch and moan and make offensive jokes on the intarwebz, it can't be the same as that evil Black Iron Prison thing I read about in all my favourite books, can it?
Yes it freakin' can. The true rulers and archons of this world want a world where some people are free to go to raves and have kinky sex and to write sarcastic blogs, just as long as they think they've earned that privilege by being superior to the slave classes. The current system not only gives "creatives" a special privileged place, it tells them that the class system is just and meritocratic. So that's why anarcho-capitalism always appeals to SubGeniuses and the other lumpen-intelligensia, because it's a consistent system of individualism and chaos, where the Evil Bad Corporate Monsters are vanquished but you get to keep your precious ego and your illusion that you somehow have a separate existence out of the matrix of your neighbourhood, your bioregion, the human species and the wider ecosystem.
But the sad twist is that anarcho-capitalism is the only social system which is actually impossible. The "free market" can't exist without some sovereign to enforce the sanctity of property rights and contracts. Wilson and Shea's contention that there would be such a thing as "property-2", i.e. property rights that everyone would just agree to respect in an anarcho-capitalist system, is bringing in The Cop Inside Your Head through the back door, to reconcile the irreconcilable contradiction of "individualism without hierarchy and punishment". The sovereign individual of liberal/libertarian theory is just as gross and unreal a chimera as the "New Socialist Man" of North Korean totalitarianism, because it dissolves actually existing social bonds and mutual obligations in favour of an administered totality, either that of the almighty dollar or the almighty bureaucracy (or combination thereof).
Any social system worth a damn has to start from human civilisation as it actually exists - a dynamic tension between individualism and community/cultural matrices. A society of yeoman farmers can't exist in the modern era any more than a society of altruistic, collectivised tree-huggers. We revolutionaries are ourselves similarly for both order and chaos at the same time - just in different places than the current system would have it. Of course "Worker's State" is a contradiction in terms, but then so is "Capitalist State". The next era won't abolish all our problems, it will just - hopefully - give us new ones to solve while safeguarding the individual from oppression and commodification, the species from extinction and the biosphere from devastation.
2011-04-25
Out of traction, back in action
I returned to active political service over the weekend. Soon you will get to see the kind of wild-assed, cultural-political ranting you've come to love on this blog on a real live website of a political tendency. Here's a meme for you to chew on: terminal 5.
As to the Greater Jihad, I'm currently up to vol 3 of The Invisibles, and damned if it's not totally synchronistically relevant to my life. I feel like I'm going toe-to-toe with The King Of All Tears at the moment. I'm in a major life transition which, if it succeeds, will pretty much mean my death and rebirth as the human being that I was supposed to be before the personality implants kicked in in my childhood. (And if it fails, I'll end up living in a gutter and standing on a street corner with a sign saying WILL DROP PANTS FOR FOOD.)
In any case, I will not be who I am for much longer. Will keep you posted.
As to the Greater Jihad, I'm currently up to vol 3 of The Invisibles, and damned if it's not totally synchronistically relevant to my life. I feel like I'm going toe-to-toe with The King Of All Tears at the moment. I'm in a major life transition which, if it succeeds, will pretty much mean my death and rebirth as the human being that I was supposed to be before the personality implants kicked in in my childhood. (And if it fails, I'll end up living in a gutter and standing on a street corner with a sign saying WILL DROP PANTS FOR FOOD.)
In any case, I will not be who I am for much longer. Will keep you posted.
2011-04-05
Disregard the below, I give fellatio
Q. Why do things hurt?
A. Because if they didn't you'd walk around like a benumbed zombie all the time. Because you don't really allow yourself pleasure or even real feelings unless they're forced on you, we gotta force them on you until you decide to wake the fuck up on a semi-permanent basis.
A. Because if they didn't you'd walk around like a benumbed zombie all the time. Because you don't really allow yourself pleasure or even real feelings unless they're forced on you, we gotta force them on you until you decide to wake the fuck up on a semi-permanent basis.
2011-04-01
However did it come to this?
"A failed initiation doesn't mean the end of all things, but it means that any future attempts will be even less likely to succeed." - Lawrence Miles
"No god accepted me; no power spoke through me; no-one came to get me out. The suffering was meaningless." - from my personal diary
"No god accepted me; no power spoke through me; no-one came to get me out. The suffering was meaningless." - from my personal diary
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