We Are Given The Choice Between Genocide And Genocide

 

We built a compromise world by negotiating an agreement with the corporations. We permitted them to keep the power in return for some concessions. We gave them our support to do what they wanted abroad if they treated us decently here in the heart of empire. They gave us a certain degree of choice in who and what we might vote for, along with the illusion that by voting we might make things better and better with time. We didn’t know the other side was biding its time, until any opposition governments around the world fell. Until they no longer had to make capitalism look pretty. Until the populace gradually lost any memory of morality and virtues that weren’t rooted in selfishness and obedience and apathy. We let them keep the power and in turn they gave us all kinds of toys to play with to keep us amused, to keep us distracted, to keep us as children.

And all this time we imagined the future was going to keep getting better. That we were progressing somewhere that we might want to go. Even when things started getting worse, we imagined such problems were just bumps along the road of progress. Even when we voted in the party we thought best represented our ideals and things still got worse, we thought we could fix our party, that our party cared for us. Even when our party and the other party started taking hundreds of millions of dollars from corporations, we still thought they cared for us, shared our values on the sacredness of democracy. Even when the corporations started writing the bills our representatives then signed into law, we just thought if we voted harder we could set things right. If we just hated and blamed the other side enough, we could have a country based upon human values and not corporate values.

And now the choice our corporate government gives us is that we can vote for genocide or genocide. That we can vote for war or war. That we can vote for censorship or censorship. That all housing will soon be owned by Blackrock. That the entirety of the internet will soon be in the hands of a few billionaires, and what is not outright owned by them will be controlled and censored by them. We thought the internet was going to save us, would permit us to share information and ideas across the world. We thought technology would bring us freedom. And community. But now we are screaming for big tech to censor us. Well, not us, exactly, just those we disagree with.

Our last rationalizations for supporting the system we have permitted are wearing out, but there’s a new Deadpool movie that will soon drop. And there’s a new Call Of Duty that will be out just in time for us to celebrate the birth of the Prince Of Peace. And in it you can save the world from Nazis by killing whatever people anonymous authority tells you to kill. Because killing is wrong unless some voice in your ear tells you to. Just do what the voices tell you to do and you will never have to worry about anything. You will never have to make a difficult moral decision. You will never have to hold your own government to account. You will never be alone no matter how lonely you feel. And the magic of the market will guarantee that whatever you spend your money on will be good for the environment. And will make you a better human being. Because the TV said so. Because the economic professors said so. Because I’m pretty sure The Bible and Declaration Of Independence say so.

Once our grandparents fought fascism. And oligarchy. And corporate capitalism. They spilt their blood on foreign shores and in front of padlocked factory gates. They walked across Pettus Bridge, rode buses across the South, provided mutual aide in Oakland’s slums. But they only managed to fight it to a standstill. But the forces that wanted to control and exploit us were never going to be satisfied with sharing power. That’s not what fascism is about. They plotted, and waited, and positioned their pieces on the chessboard. And they lulled us to sleep. But we’re having dreams that we are awake. And fighting for freedom on the beaches of Normandy, fighting for the environment on Pandora, fighting empire with light sabers. In our sleep we claim that we are woke. In our sleep, we are screaming “Wake up, sheeple” to people conjured by our sleeping minds. In our sleep, we are arguing with AI, repeating all the wisdom that has been pumped into us by the corporate media.

Even at our desks at work, performing mindless and unrewarding tasks, we secretly know we are Neo, fighting the matrix.

An Explanation For The Way The World Is (An Excerpt From The Association)

If you're like a lot of people right now, you may be asking yourself what the hell is going on, how can the world be so messed up? This little section from my book The Association which I wrote a few years ago may help you understand:

“But I don’t get—“

“There is a lot you won’t get right now.” The voice came from the television screen, which had been positioned so that everyone in the room could see the image of Russell, and he, them. “That is the very essence of seeing beyond the collective consciousness, to be made aware of just how much you do not know. The artificial world that surrounds us is filled with answers we believe we possess. It is important that you hear what is being said now. Understanding will come later.”

Russell continued, his voice sounding thin through the television speaker, “What you need to understand now is this: every era, every culture, suffers under the delusion that it, and it alone, has a correct understanding of the world around it. They are, all of them—to a great extent—wrong. Generally, a society clings to the simplest narrative it can find to explain the world outside and its relationship to it. It stumbles upon it rather clumsily, each of its members working more or less blindly, unaware that they are working towards a common purpose, cells oblivious to the organism they are part of. As long as this narrative works, it doesn’t matter how accurate it is. Life went on for those who believed the earth to be flat. Newtonian physics explained the universe quite well for centuries. The problem is that no story adequately explains reality. Eventually, the differences between perception and fact tear apart the perception. Eventually, every society is undone by its inability to correctly grasp life as it truly is. Like a building that sooner or later crumbles due to some weakness in its infrastructure, every society collapses by the sheer weight of its own incomplete understanding of itself.”

As Russell spoke, Dave noticed that Doug was quite willing to let him speak for the group. While Doug was in some way the leader of this group, he deferred to Russell as one who had the greater understanding.

“What you are witnessing now are glimpses of the larger world beyond the smaller dome that encapsulates our current cultural understanding. The cracks in our imperfect little bubble reveal things we cannot even comprehend, things we have sought to protect ourselves from. We have built for ourselves a little ark where we are safe from the storms of a great ocean, but the ark is not capable of protecting us forever.”

Sensing Russell had said what he wished to say, Doug continued: “When a certain manner of thought is working for a group, those within it are quite willing to see the world through the parameters of the existing narrative. Thus a successful paradigm tends towards a sameness of thought, for who can argue with success? In the last century or so, our society has achieved unprecedented success. Never in the history of the world has a paradigm led to such advancement of the human race. And success, as it always does, leads to an unwillingness to have a different opinion. We begin to accept as fact what we once realized was only a perspective. Why mess with or question what is working so well?”

“More than an unwillingness for different opinions,” it was Johnny’s turn to have a say. “An intolerance for opinions that differ is more like it.”

“At any rate,” said Russell, “the very success of our present generation has led to its inability to perceive of different ways of looking at things. In past ages, in other cultures, people that perceived reality differently than the rest were often persecuted, martyred.”

“And now?” asked Mindy.

“Now? Now they simply do not exist.”

“Don’t exist?”

“There is no place for alternate views to exist. Who can argue with success.?”

“What you describe sounds like what could have happened in the Soviet Union,” said Dave. He was not trying to argue, didn’t believe he was in a position to argue. But he did seek to understand, and so was unafraid to question. “Or Europe under the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages. But life isn’t like that now. Nobody can control the information we receive, nobody can control the way news is reported. We’re free, in our country, at least. I mean, more free than most.”

“You tend to overestimate the role of force in such matters,” said Doug. “Or will, for that matter, or even awareness. People assume that since there is no dictator that sits over us that we are all free to be individuals. But we’re not. Maybe we don’t realize it, but we’re not.”

“We’re sheep in wolves’ clothing,” laughed Johnny. “All products of a Madison Avenue campaign that makes us think we’re acting in our own best interests when all the while we’re part of the machine.”

Doug was about to continue, but Johnny was just starting. It seemed as though, while they were all speaking from a shared pool of knowledge, each of them had their own interpretation of things. Dave was curious what Izzy might have added to the conversation.

“A century ago, all houses were made individually,” Johnny continued, taking his turn at attempting to explain. “Then someone standardized the process in order to make them easier to build, and suddenly we all end up living in cookie cutter houses. And with modern automation came mass-produced goods. To produce such goods, tasks were broken up into simplistic little blocks so that the people who were put into their roles could be interchangeable. Of course, to buy the standardized products made by standardized workers, the system needed standardized consumers. It didn’t do any good to mass-produce an item when you had many people desiring many different things. So you needed to market to the masses, create a common desire for everyone. And since the whole concept was predicated on the idea that mass production called for mass consumption, material goods were sold as the cure for all our ills. Have a headache? Take an aspirin. Insecure about your place in the world? Buy a fancy car. Tired from working too much? Take a pill or buy a comfy chair to relax in.

“And since manufactured goods were what our paradigm did well,” again inserting his own perspective, Johnny added, “questions of spirituality were of little use. What good was meditation or contemplation or prayer when the real problems of the world were halitosis and waxy yellow build up?”

“So you’re suggesting the industrial revolution created monsters?” asked Dave, incredulously.

“No, he’s saying that it caused us to forget them, for a time.” It was Russell who answered. “If we did not wholly forget them—because, after all, not seeing something does not make it go away—if we did not forget them then we did not perceive them as clearly as we once did. But if we were distracted from such monsters, it was only for a time. The walls of our perception kept them from us, but the cracks are already beginning to show.”

“Don’t forget, Dave,” said Doug, “that what other times may have called spirits, demons, ghosts, are merely their description of what they perceived through their own perspectives. In truth, they may have seen such things more clearly than our generation does, but they are inexact descriptions that show the bias of their times. The past had numerous absurd notions. They’re just a lot easier to see when one is not in the midst of them.”

“So you’re saying the paradigm that our age has been built on has seen better days, is that it?” asked Dave.

 “You think we’ve built as high an edifice as we’re going to build on an imperfect foundation. So what are we supposed to do about it? What do you expect from me?”

Doug was in charge, once again. While Russell and Johnny had knowledge and opinions, it appeared that Doug was the one with a vision. “Dave, you know what it feels like to be free, do you not? In order for you to have developed the ability to see in your dreams, you must have transcended your personal biases, the calcified thought processes that adulthood gradually builds around our life force the way a shell forms around a snail. You know the feeling, of emerging from the protective cocoon, and the fear of a world outside that is so much larger than your little mind could ever understand. You have experienced the joy and fear of the fall as you’ve leapt from the perch of safety of your paradigm, prison, home, shell, rut…whatever you want to call it. Imagine an entire society, an entire world experiencing such a feeling at the same time. Imagine a world where all the belief systems break down at once. The dangers are twofold. One, that people will stare into the depths of things their minds aren’t prepared to comprehend and their deepest fears will walk around in broad daylight. You two have witnessed this, to a small degree. You have seen a group of people summoning powers beyond their ability to control. But this is nothing compared to what large groups of people could do.

“The second concern is that you will have the true believers, those who cling to outmoded forms of belief for fear of what lies beyond. Their lack of vision will be just as dangerous. They will close their minds to even the most obvious of truths because they cannot allow their simple beliefs to be challenged. In calmer times, believers are willing to admit somewhat to a lack of certainty, but in times such as are to come, the rigidity of their cages will be unyielding. But their very beliefs, devoid of the spirit of believing, will make them victims of malevolent forces. Again, you’ve witnessed such circumstances, though only on the smallest scale. Imagine a nation of true believers.”

Dave cringed at the remembrance of the events on Devil’s Island. If such nightmares could be produced by a mere hundred people, he could not conceive of the evil that could be done by an entire country.

“You speak as if such things happen with the rise and fall of every society,” said Mindy. “I don’t recall reading about any of that in my history book.”

“Many things are lost in the passing of a people’s belief system. They are lost and fallen to the wayside, sometimes to be rediscovered centuries later by people looking to plug the gaps in their own imperfect models. But mankind has always had an answer to such times as we are now approaching: kill. Kill to the best of your ability. Kill until the stress is relieved, until the energy is spent and new societies are able to build themselves up.”

“But our world cannot accept that answer.” It was Johnny. “In times past, it was horrible enough. Now we have such weapons that humanity would not survive such bloodletting.”

“A new world is coming,” said Doug, “but we must first survive the dissolution of the current one. With the breakdown of all our current paradigms, where all our assumptions are tossed aside, we will need to find touchstones independent of logic and even knowledge. In the sleep of reason, we will not be able to have beliefs or even convictions until some sort of framework exists.”

“And what the hell do you expect we can do about all of this?” Dave couldn’t begin to fathom the implications of such knowledge, if such things were true.

“We must contain what we can of it, as you and Mindy have already successfully done twice now. We must lessen the shock for society as best we can so that people do not retreat from one another, or a total breakdown will occur. We must be able to allow people to see what lies beyond their present perceptions in a way that doesn’t cause them to contract. They must be led to open their eyes, to see what is rather than what their prejudices and misconceptions lead them to believe.”

“We need to understand the world as it is,” said Russell. His meekness seemed to momentarily vanish. “As much as possible, we need to expand our understanding of reality in order to begin to build the next paradigm on as solid a structure as possible.”

“And why us?” asked Dave. “Why you? Who elected you to do anything about this? What makes you think you’ve got answers?”

“Because we can see, just as you can see, in our limited ways,” said Doug.

“Because nobody else is doing anything,” added Johnny.

“Because if we don’t, someone else will decide for us,” said Russell.

The Monkey In The Race

Any relation to actual people or events is purely coincidental:

Like a lot of people, I was amused when the monkey got up on stage at the first Republican Debate and started flinging his own filth at the other candidates. Sure, it was a guilty pleasure, like watching Jerry Springer, but it was hard not to enjoy watching the way the other candidates reacted. You couldn’t help enjoy seeing Jeb Bush covered in the bloody stool of his brother’s ill-advised war. And to see Marco Rubio climbing his podium in imitation of the monkey and getting filth on his own paws was priceless.

You see, politicians always try to act like they’re in charge, like they are above any kind of criticism. But put a monkey in the room and it’s hard for anyone to seem dignified, especially when the monkey hits you where it hurts. And the monkey was not afraid to hit anyone where it hurt, even women and old prisoners of war. The monkey wasn’t playing the game usual politicians play. Most politicians like to play up the differences between each other, as if there was real consequences whether you voted for Coke instead of Pepsi, when neither one of them is good for you. So politicians play up the little differences, what Sigmund Freud referred to as der Narzissmus der kleinen Differenzen, in order to pretend like the voter has a choice. In truth, the politicians are all working for a few special interests. Those differences that do exist, they’re just there to distract you.

Politicians don’t talk about the big issues, which they mostly agree on, issues like shipping your job oversees or voting for disastrous wars. But the monkey has no such scruples. The monkey will do anything to get a rise out of others. The monkey will poop onstage if it gets everyone’s attention. He was willing to poke his Republican rivals in areas even the Democrats would not poke, because after all, the Democrats also have very vulnerable areas, many of the same ones as the Republicans.

So the monkey made the politicians look ridiculous, and rightly so. And a lot of us cheered the monkey for exposing them for what they were, just like the little child who pointed out that the emperor had no clothes.

But nobody thought the little boy who pointed out the emperor’s nakedness should take his place; after all, he was just a child. And yet somehow we think that the monkey who pointed out the flaws in all the presidential hopefuls should now be elected to the highest position on the planet. But he’s just a monkey! No matter how hard he bangs on his chest it doesn’t make him a gorilla. In fact, once he gets done throwing his poop and poking people in the privates, he really doesn’t have that much left in his box of tricks.

But, you say, he is an incredibly wealthy businessmonkey. Surely that qualifies him to be president of the United States. Yes, I would say, but he acts like a monkey. To which you would reply, that’s just an act he puts on in order to advance his agenda. Well, I would ask, don’t you think if he had some genuine talent beyond the ability to poop tremendous quantities and fling it all around that we would have seen some of it first-hand by now? For all the time he’s been on television wouldn’t we have caught a glimmer of the intelligence behind the monkey façade, if a façade it is? And even if there was an intelligent man hiding within the monkey costume, doesn’t it make you wonder what kind of person would dress up in a monkey costume and fling poop at others?

We’re all hopeful when it comes to voting. We couldn’t do it otherwise. They say no one is so foolishly optimistic as they are when buying a lottery ticket or voting for a political candidate. But there have to be limits to the lies we tell ourselves even though there are none on what politicians are willing to tell us. We never got a kinder and gentler nation, we never got a thousand points of light, and we never got hope or change. And whatever you are willing to believe, sometimes a monkey is just a monkey. Look at the matted hair and the OOH OOH expression on his face if there’s any question.

Caligula has been known through history as an example of an insane emperor. He had incestuous relationships with his sisters, forced parents to witness the execution of their sons, and conversed with the moon. So insane was he, according to Suetonius, that he attempted to make his horse a senator. But we the American electorate are about to do him one better, by attempting to elect a monkey to the office of President of the United States. If we do so, we are destined to go down in history along with the maddest of the mad. And that’s something only a monkey could be amused at.

Adulthood’s End Part 3 (The Illusion Of Choice)

     If there is one thing capitalism provides it’s choice. Go to your typical supermarket and you’ll find more options for frozen French Fries than is good for you. Seriously, you could waste the better part of an hour making sure you get the best value and the best option available. Same with the soda aisle: the variety screams out to us from the bright colors that decorate every box of cans. True too of bottled water. This is where it gets kinda weird: Why does anybody need 100 different varieties of bottled water? Can anyone tell me the difference? Nevertheless, this is America and you deserve 100 varieties of waters to choose from. Anything less would be socialism.

     But while 100 varieties of bottled water may seem like far more choices than we could possibly want, perhaps it is less than we actually need. Perhaps the mountain of plastic bottles blinds us to the option we’d actually prefer.

     Who having an option between clean, cheap tap water would prefer lugging home cases of the stuff from the supermarket? Who would prefer polluting the environment with plastic when we could totally eliminate the waste, again by providing drinking water through the tap? Who would prefer wasting our precious resources—in this case oil used in the production of plastic—when we could avoid all that? Especially when the Middle East is such a mess, it seems a shame to send our troops over there to fight and die for plastic bottles we really don’t need. Or for the fuel required for the trucks to unnecessarily ship bottles of water across the country.

     So who would come up with such a crazy system? Someone out to make a buck. Nobody’s going to get rich providing cheap tap water, especially when the government tends to stick its nose into such matters and make sure water will be available and affordable to even the poorest of us. So in the long run, those various different bottled water companies are not competing against each other, how can they? How can one of them make the claim that their water is better than the next guy’s? You can only do so much with a picture of a snow-capped mountain. There are only so many buzz words such as “pure”, “natural”, “life”, and “healthful” you can slap on the label and still keep them large enough to attract the eye.

     Of course, some try to argue they use less plastic than the typical bottled water, as if conservation of plastic were an argument they should bring up. Nestle’s Pure Life package proudly states it has an “eco-bottle”. Re-read that sentence just to drive home the idea of how screwed up we as a society are. If you wonder why people can’t think anymore it’s because vapid advertisement has broken our brains. Words don’t mean anything anymore, they’re just supposed to sound nice. And reassuring.

     So whose water you buy doesn’t matter, just so it comes in a bottle. Same with soda. Pepsi doesn’t mind if you buy Coke and Coke doesn’t care if you cheat on it with the occasional Pepsi. The important thing is you consume teeth-rotting diabetes juice because, after all, a rising tide floats all boats. And it works the same way with politics, only in reverse. In politics, hundreds of millions of dollars are spent not to entice you to buy but to turn you off from the entire process. They don’t care if you vote Democrat or Republican, their goal is to make you so disgusted with politics that you don’t vote at all.

     That’s the system we’ve worked out as a society. These are the choices you have. Well, not really, they are the choices that are laid out for you. These are the choices they want you to make, the world they try to fashion for you. But your choices are as vast as you can imagine them to be. You don’t have to buy their vision, you don’t have to fit your mind inside of the box they have prepared for you. It’s a small world offered and in the end we humans deserve better than the world they envision. Next time you are presented with a choice of a bottled of water or a can of soda, remember there’s always beer ;)

The Left Wing And The Right Wing Are Not Working

I am occasionally reminded we have this thing in our house called a television and that my wife pays some satellite provider money to supply us with channels for this audio-video apparatus. Such was the case today while I ate lunch before returning to playing on Facebook—er, I mean writing. I turned the thing on and sought something to amuse me while ingesting calories. Since the news channels are so spiritually degrading, and since my wife doesn’t pay extra for the naughty channels, I ended up on C-Span. What I saw was an author named Jay Cost discussing his book, A Republic No More. The event was hosted by the Cato Institute, a conservative think tank. As he spoke I could not help but admit that his grasp on American History was vastly superior to my own. And as he sat and discussed issues with two representatives from the Cato Institute, I realized that they too spoke from a wealth of knowledge beyond mine. And from their conversation they did not look to promote any agenda or to obfuscate the truth but endeavored to get to the facts of the matter.

Now at this point I have to admit that on the scale of things, I’m pretty far to the left of the spectrum. And when I say “left”, I’m not talking Vote For Hillary left. But beyond the political sides of an issue, I am first and foremost interested in the truth, rather than what information best supports my biases. And the speakers at this event spoke the truth, were clearly digging for facts rather than trying to heap arguments upon a faulty premise. That’s the sort of thing I can respect, the sort of thing all of us should respect.

When the author was done with his presentation, there came a time for questions from the audience. Again, I beheld thoughtfully asked questions with an earnest desire for truth rather than confirmation bias. And towards the end there was a woman from some left-wing organization that asked an intelligent question. And that intelligent question was asked respectfully. And then, and this was perhaps the most astounding thing of it all, the conservative writer from the Weekly Standard, brought to speak by The Cato Institute, cited Ralph Nader as the man he has been reading the most lately, stating that Nader had been the earliest critic of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, long before the 2008 financial meltdown. He then mentioned that perhaps it would be up to the far left and far right ends of the spectrum to come together under a new coalition (an idea, by the way, that Ralph Nader has also been espousing).

The truth can sometimes be so obvious that you hardly see it, but occasionally it takes the time to smack you upside the head. Those talking heads and politicians that you see and hear all the time through corporate media are not the real representatives of either the left or the right. They are demagogues put there by the powers that be to create straw men for the hard-working but underserved to cast their rightful anger at. The left and the right do in fact have much in common if they’d get beyond the leaders who are allegedly speaking for them. If we began to once again accept the idea that there is a universal truth that we could all reach some sort of consensus about, if we discuss the issues both critically and respectfully, we could work on solving many of the problems that are affecting this country, and by extension, the world. Rather than have our politics resemble two kids in the back seat on a long trip, we could be an example of how a republic could be run. And lastly, and this cannot be overstated, if we were to do this we would never again have a Bush or a Clinton in the White House again.

Random Thoughts Part 3

Facts, like living things, have a value in and of themselves and demand respect. People who use them for their own ends and dismiss them when they are no longer of use will likely treat people in the same manner.

They say it is not the destination but the journey. And yet we struggle through traffic to wait in lines at the airport, only to go through demeaning searches and then be shoved into undersized seats. We have compromised too much, and so are unable to enjoy whatever destination it is we seek.

This is the sum total of the knowledge I have obtained in my thirty years of work experience: The ranting of an idiot, overheard by an intern and reported to his superior, will always spell trouble for the honest worker.

Only the very stupid are ever certain of anything.

Most animals sleep in a hole in the ground or hanging from a tree. Man alone has made for himself an elaborate resting place. And yet he is the only one to have developed the alarm clock to rouse himself from it, the only species to spend sixteen or more hours of each day away from it.

In the same way that youth is wasted on the young, retirement is wasted on the old. We should not grow old but young, to gradually increase into a naïve idealism rather than calcify into cynicism and disillusionment, to end our lives in the womb rather than the tomb. Our eyesight slowly growing keener, our skin becoming more sensitive, our appetite increasing as we rush to feel experience, keen in the knowledge that we truly must seize the day.

The world belongs to those with a single idea who are able to repeat it unendingly. You may charitably call them single-minded, but they are more often simple minded.

Where does alienation most manifest itself in our society? Whenever science, government, or business develops a really bad idea and we just shrug and say: “That is progress. It is unavoidable.”

Man has always sought to be a part of something larger and so has tried to change himself in order to fit that larger thing. What he seldom realizes is that he is a part of all that is merely by being uncompromisingly himself.

It takes a brave man to go to war, but it takes a nation of cowards to send him.

We tend to want to remake the world in our own image which why it is best to seek our own happiness. The best gift we can give others is to be happy.

The big events of our youth have profound influences on the rest of our lives. Similarly, the earliest events of our history (e.g. Troy or the American Revolution) play a major role in our society.

We build elaborate theories on a single narrow idea, like a pyramid balanced on a tin can.

In a sick society, no institution is untouched. No psychiatrist can diagnose the disease without being disbarred, no politician can point to the truth without being shouted down or gunned down. The poet, musician, filmmaker, or artist who attempts to define the problem will be ignored, left without a source of income or a way to have his work reach the masses.

Science is the process of obscuring the marvelous with explanations.

The mind can no more understand the heart than science can ever understand nature.

Stupid is never quiet. It is never modest, nor patient.

It is a fine distinction between permitting and promoting.

There is a third choice besides being busy and killing time, something profound.

No one has ever been paid to speak the truth. True, some people who speak the truth can wrangle out a living by doing so amusingly, but the real money is to be found in making lies sound good.

If you’re looking for the road to success, you only have to look behind the stack of excuses.

A child needs a parent or role model to believe in him, but to become a man he must learn to believe in himself.