The Renewing Dissident’s Notebook

The Renewing Dissident’s Notebook is included in the print anthology Rising in Words with this introductory note: "From 2005, short-form philosophy and three short essays make up a thematic anthology on social change via personal change—the antidote to politics, authoritarianism, collectivism, orthodoxy, imperialism, oppression and war."

Dedication

For those who do not belong.

For solitary ones among the many, but apart from the herd.

For those who follow only to follow themselves.

For the foreigners in every land, ambassadors of cosmos.

For those who dwell underground, nocturnal, taking exception to today.

For dreamers who do not sleep.

For those who rarify what others make mundane.

For those who can laugh by themselves.

For mockers of the mighty.

For those who question idols to hear them answer or know their silence.

For pioneers who test the ground, to build civilization.

For those who shake pillars to topple them or prove them sound.

For the courageous who want to know.

For those who dare suffer pain but never make peace with it.

For those who still let themselves feel.

For wits who tease the jaded, to make them live again.

For the family of critics who call cynics lost relatives.

For transgressors who shrug morals out of conscience.

For psyches fighting inner struggles, to end outer bloodshed.

For warriors who never yield, but to their own changing ways.

For crusaders who never sacrifice means on the altar of ends.

For tricksters who devise new subversions, and new hopes.

For those who dissent in the ancient regime for the sake of a new order.

For those dissidents of the present who create the future.

Paean to Autopoiesis

A man only needs one thing to set himself free inside — the pledge and the knowledge that he will recreate himself. A commitment to improvement, progress, and the future. Time and again, that can set him free, no matter the rest of the world.

The World Revolves on an Autopoietic Axis

To change the world — whatever should this mean to us? Should it and could it mean anything besides changing oneself and living openly in the world, expressing ourselves, taking exception as the mighty conscience of exceptions dictates our dissent? By itself any other means to affect change, whether identifying the right formula or plan, the common ideology or the strategy that can change the world, lacks this inner leap. All externalized ideas for change must live within oneself to become meaningful, and it is only by living them that we may begin to test them, even before we communicate them to others.

Worldly change may very well demand the circulation of certain ideals and following wise plans. But to change the world, to improve it, does not first of all pose a problem of finding the right formula or devising the right plan. Nor does the axis of change simply obey the beholders of the “right” doctrine and reorient regardless of them, despite their innermost compass, or the old beliefs deep as their body. A revolution of outer change demands first of all the sort of man or woman who can change, and even before that the rearing of that sort of child. Change presupposes the right sort of man or woman more than anything else — not simply “right” because they think or do rightly, but right for the task because they embody enfolded change, which they desire to cultivate ever outwards. And as for the question of success in the world after this change — would any outcome really nullify the victory of changing oneself and being strong enough to try?

Why I Did Not Apprentice in the Guild

(or: Toward a Definition of Ontological Qualification via the Diabolic Lexiconography of the Disenfranchised: A Retrospective Hermeneutics Post- Diasporic Autodidaction)

University, n. — an institution where a thinker pays (in labor, tuition, time) to inherit a wealth of ideas, including many mistaken ideas, but where, if he gets his own ideas, he rarely still belongs.

Guilds for Orthodoxies

We should never forget that once, the academic, the priest, and the bureaucrat comprised one and the same caste. We deceive ourselves in our fancy that this state of affairs has entirely changed.

Asking Problems for Solutions

Solutions to the problems of politics will not be found in politics. They will not be found in political measures, political means, political ideologies, political parties or groups, or taking these in all — political thinking. Political thinking is the reason for the accumulated problems of politics. Only thinking transcendent of known politics and able to extend apart from its practices can create and recognize resolutions.

Instinct for Freedom

Ibn Khaldûn noted the stubborn strength of rough nomads who insisted on their freedom until they became corrupted by softer life and yielded it to the princely courts of the world. Nietzsche described Christian domestication of the European barbarian, who had loved his spirited, tribal independence. Today, displeasure with government might not number among the most cerebral, the most educated, or the most “sophisticated” thoughts. We know that many unsophisticated fools astutely reject government’s incursions. When restrictions are placed on their actions, such people may show an essentially instinctive response of discomfort (especially from personal and immediate violations, rather than theoretical ones). They may also rebel against regimentation spontaneously. This instinct does not necessarily imply something less valuable or less instructive than deliberation, or sophisticated, so-called “civilized” mentalities.

In many ways Man is another animal, a different kind of animal who lives culturally and cognitively in a new and more interesting way. And what kind of animal feels comfortable in a cage or pen, after all? Only a painstakingly domesticated animal, of course, with the wildness bred out over generations. And what kind of animal takes to training, but a very tame animal, that is a passive animal dependent upon its keepers and receptive to their suggestion? The sort of person who favors divesting responsibility and yields control over their life, must get “comfortable”, thoroughly “socialized,” and “civilized” in a similar fashion. The question then becomes, what kind of human animal should we become? Compare the majesty and power of wild animals, with their tamed cousins. We humans should not let ourselves be tamed for the yoke, or too trained by each other.

The Promise of the Unpolitical to the Cause of Antipolitics

The greatest weight behind the hegemony of modern rulers, by which I mean the reason that they will seemingly stay in power if the present merely continues in the future, will surprise all those mired in the arena of political contests. It has certainly not been the rulers’ accomplishment of luring the talents of select, dedicated partisans to aid them. These have always numbered far too few to empower rule by themselves. It has also not been the accomplishment of getting some minority of living people genuinely interested in political participation, those who echo the aged canon of hegemony’s necessity and the credo of benign dominion, and indirectly support the current system of rule whether they lean towards one agenda or another. Once, these tenets were not yet tired lies. But now, those unwitting pawns of cold, ineluctable ideals who actively believe them also number too few for commanding influence. Rather, the ballast behind rule supports it through vague relations at most to the rule of the political. In conceptions of politics those who supply such weight could almost be considered juvenile and virtually unpolitical. I refer to the disinterest and indifference of many, many people to politics, and specifically to the rule of the politicals and its form, “democracy.” The uninitiated merely accept, swallow, and follow whatever the politically conscious establish, without quite absorbing what they do, without preparation for noticing.

Yet, can apathy in the face of politics be the worst of all possible signs? The apathetic do not vote. They do not confirm the process, they ignore it. This irks those who carry on the charade to no end. And where there is ignorance there remains the possibility of wisdom, whereas others’ “knowledge” of politics almost inhibits any learning beyond it. However difficult, the numerous indifferent ones can learn (anti-)politics from scratch. They do not even know enough to internalize superstitions in favor of politics, besides the superficial Pavlovian kind of training. They follow the customary superstitions, like majority rule or the Führerprinzip of officials, with no great devotion to them.

The unpolitical are almost fresh, while even the most free-minded politicals usually have “theories” and “opinions” already spoiling them — or rather, these subscriptions usually show outward signs of inner inclinations to politics, clannishness and imitative social conditioning, finding seemingly acceptable, tolerable and “right” ways to vent themselves circuitously. Fighting politics politically only misappropriates counterimpulses yearning to create free, actualized individuals. Respect the instinct to not care for politics, the will to ignorance. Remember, those who rejected understanding politics had no appetite to taste politics. That gut feeling makes the callow almost as valuable as those rarest ones who already care to engage the threats of politics, and to learn all about what they fight, but who also manage to resist reflecting the corruption of political consciousness, that trait ultimately somniferous to all higher callings.

Our Dear Leaders’ fatal flaw to exploit is counting out the ambivalent. Instead, cultivate the ambivalent. Avoid the usual dialogue of scolding for insufficient participation. Brush aside throes of cynicism. Speak to the exceptions, and direct your attentions to the exceptional traits among the ambivalent — the reasons to care about obstacles in the way. Explain from the beginning from their perspective, speak from basics, and handle fundamental questions of relevance to them. Using this strategy we who seek to surpass politics may have success not only with the young but with others too — in sum all who have “never thought about it before.”

Centralized and Decentralized Intolerance for Dissent

Severe intolerance practiced in a regime against dissent may, in the laggardly course of reactive resistance, present a surprising boon to the dissident. The regime pays the dissident the compliment of notice and fear. In less intolerant regimes accustomed to suffer some dissent, dissidents draw far less attention and consequently have less opportunity to change the regime. Moreover, adherents of the regime may pretend it is entirely free of suppression (or that the rule is proved by its exceptions!), when in fact in that case the government has fastened onto the most effective means of suppressing its rivals and philosophical enemies: habituation of public inertia. Typically only one’s rebellion against a graver threat successfully provokes and propagates something like the mass reaction of an immune system to illness, for all are made to see demonstrations that the regime itself disturbs the peace. But compared to the occasional incursion by patiently-paced forces of suppression who seem willing to sometimes bear with dissidents, the extremity and contrariness of dissent itself seems, to most, the more disagreeable; to some it even appears to present the most considerable danger to the homeostasis of “the body politic.”

The Primeval Politics in Human Hierarchy

Humans conceive of a human history full of kings, lords, chiefs, bosses, presidents, popes, and other offices, degrees, honors, seniority, ranks and titles, classes, castes, nations, and clans, states, domains, and territories — the rise and fall of power between and among groups, by relative measures of control over places and material wealth, and conceptual influence over minds. These things, it has seemed to us humans, signify human history. In short, we might say the history of human society has been marked by innovations in hierarchy.

Yet there is nothing essential in that human history of hierarchy that is new. People have been entirely mistaken and quite myopic to imagine there was anything special, novel, uniquely intelligent or human about social hierarchy and political dominance.

Primates developed this sociopolitical system many millions of years ago along with their innovative social consciousness, the most basic example of which is the evolution of facial expression. With expressions, in conjunction with posture and vocal feedback, primates could perform a quick check of others’ faces to size up how they themselves should feel and behave, for example subservient and shamed, or dominant and superior. With such advancements in animal behavior, distant ancestors more like monkeys than men first gave hierarchy what human descendents would assume they invented millions of years later, namely the ‘complex culture’ humans attribute to hierarchical society. But earlier primates did not even really invent hierarchy, they only complicated it, and in the process enriched it from its beginnings among older land animals, so that eventually humans could mistake it for social sophistication, and for their bright idea. Predatory forces far more primal pressured life toward that evolution.

The struggle over food was the essential circumstance behind the development of a sociopolitical hierarchy we can recognize among many mammals, e.g. wolves, whales, primates, etc. Hierarchy linked resources with an animal’s rank, not only food but access to breeding, through rights and territory for raising young. Ultimately survival of young and old require sufficient food, which in the natural struggle is rarely ample for all creatures, and therefore sex typically follows survival in the priorities of animals. Hierarchy offers an advantage for managing opportunities for both food and sex, but especially and most basically, food. Hierarchy enabled the sustenance, procreation and the survival of offspring of the relatively dominant in an order of rank corresponding to degree of status. This avoids undue competition, and imparts a certain degree of stability for a hungry species, particularly via the convention of territory, or space under control of one dominant creature or a hierarchy of creatures.

Eventually, all the same principles produced human political rule, when and where humans still starved sometimes, because they managed scant and inconsistent resources. Of course, human hierarchy applied in advanced, prosperous societies began to show unfortunate weaknesses not shared by animal hierarchy or evident in subsistence cultures. A hierarchical society enjoying a surplus through the efficiencies of civilization will tend to concentrate it higher in the pyramid. Unlike an alpha wolf with the right to tear at the carcass first, a pharaoh can and will take 100,000 times his own needs and can hoard wealth far longer than the wolf’s long-term ambition, to store fat for winter. Still, to the prehistorics and then the ancients, fear of the recurring, if not constant problem of scarcity came before the niceties of individual freedom, the fluid articulation of individuals within social groups, or the cultivated expression of finer accomplishments by all those capable of them. Such things could be and were sacrificed to quite patently unequal privileges, so that hierarchy could restrain the otherwise terrible contest over scarce resources — the very same animal needs. The status symbols of a chief were ultimately not even that he had the most land or anything else besides the fact that he could afford to feed the most supporters, have the most wives, and beget the most children.

Yet modern human society of advanced technology, trade, enterprise and prosperity has no such need to fixate. Humans may produce, exchange and consume resources amply sufficient not only for the sustenance, procreation and survival of great numbers, but also for their satisfaction, sensuality, and enjoyment — provided they do not introduce artificial limitations by destroying or controlling resources. It would be puzzling why anyone might want to do such a thing, except for the antiquated, yet enduring motivations of social hierarchy and political dominance.

Therefore we should reconsider our position vis-à-vis political hierarchy and control. Not only have many humans ceased generally obeying hierarchy with regard to our mating practices, and generally rendered genetic natural selection secondary to cultural and personal evolution, but also in a massive change, we humans have become the only land animal perfectly capable of amassing, trading, and giving copious amounts of food to one another. Humans create such plentiful amounts that the only reason people might consistently fail to have sufficient nourishment is that political interference gets in the way of the free process of production and distribution. This occurs when pork-barrel subsidies pay for waste in food industries and agriculture, when taxation to support government restricts prosperity, when charitable naïves give foreign aid to dictators like Siad Barre, and when rulers use starvation as a genocidal means, or as a weapon of politically-correct war by imposing sanctions and blockades, to give a few examples.

We might compare the factual impact of politics upon survival and nourishment to the way that government, supposedly necessary to protect safety and keep order, not only executes this role unsuitably but directly imposes violence upon its citizens in warfare and civil injustice. For every basic function, politics has outlived any usefulness against obstacles, and become the obstacle itself. This problem is more than antique custom outliving its original logic under the protection of “tradition.” Hierarchy is an aspect of conditioning predating our specific biology, certainly not culture designed by us or anyone, certainly not a tradition upon which we can rely. Rather, it is like a trap spanning across time we keep rearming. Those who cling to hierarchy out of instinct for stability, only grasp mortmain.

Human history now becomes something really unprecedented: the history of individuals empowering themselves, albeit slowly and with difficulty, in fits and starts, with many detours and dead ends, much waste and considerable preparatory losses. Dominating through hierarchy did its job for naturally-selecting and ordering the tailed jungle clans, the savannah walkers, and the rugged ice age individualists who were still more a genus, a kind, a many than an I; why then should we think this practice offers us much, we who now struggle to realize the best potential of I and thus fuse a new ‘we’? What once offered respite and formed backbone might now break us when we only compete against each other — and our common past.

A 21st Century of Individualism

Speaking broadly, the nineteenth century was a century of nationalism in vogue. The twentieth was in addition a century of socialism in vogue. Because of this history and the weight of its burden upon the present, we have not only a desire, but a necessity to strive to make this century one of rising individualism, a time in which we set alight the energies to motivate a new age. For salutary reasons and bare survival itself, the twenty-first century must become a century of connected and augmented individuals.

The Context of Socialism

It is easy now to criticize the blindness of the early socialists for the ramifications and repercussions of what they thought they saw — a fundamental gulf and dialectic between management and labor. But one should also respect them for how much they saw through.

The socialist recognized that the walls built between accidents of birth, nations, races, aristocratic ranks, religious creeds, and ethnicities were essentially immaterial, built on illusions sanctified by having history. ‘Take down these walls between us, brothers,’ said the socialist. But then the socialist reinforces old differences and even builds new walls up from nothing, in reducing life to the material analysis of class (recalling older consciousness of aristocratic class). Wealth and production split up the world in the socialist mentality.

Evidently, in the end a volcanic build of ressentiments colored the socialist view and spoiled its clarity with an angry flush. Grudges were held over from centuries of hating oppression by haughty aristocrats and religious autocrats, most particularly grudges held against conditions obtained under the Tsarism of Russia, serfdom from Eastern Europe through East Asia, and the militarism and general obstructionism of landed conservatives in many places. But aristocracy and autocracy were already relinquishing the stage, grudgingly but inexorably. Imagine something like the French Revolution’s ressentiment pent up for further centuries, and finally left without an enemy! The mighty, inward, practiced grudges of peasants and reformers now looked for a struggle equal to their overweening enormity of force, and with their original fixations already waning, misdirected themselves against the waxing economic and intellectual liberals, capitalists and bourgeoisie who were sweeping the relics away far more often than reinforcing them.

Perhaps more than laying blame at the feet of the old socialists, the individualist should exclaim at how close they came to seeing things with an open mind, and bringing down all borders of misperception. The accomplishment was remarkable not only for error but for accuracy. But that was then, and this is the time to see what is here, in all, and dispense with pretense. This is the time for the antidote of individualism, and in every way, reality understood and interpreted for self-advantage.

Authority as Archetype

In much the same way that in the early 20th century the general consensus held that economic class was the central social issue, and therefore popular culture relied on ‘rich society’ and ‘poor society’ as either backdrops or subjects of storytelling (in movies for example), today popular culture explores archetypes of authority. These archetypes primarily take the form of accessible icons and roles which the media may cast as protagonists, including police, doctors, lawyers, politicians and soldiers, and related guises. In place of ridiculous scenes of the rich debating class struggle at expensive parties, now maverick cops driven by their loyalty to the safety of the community catch unsympathetic criminals, or the president single-handedly defeats foreign terrorists.

In a sense this development reflects a discouraging obsession with authority, in two main forms: celebrating established power as the stuff of heroes, and often, excoriating its usurpation as the stuff of villains. But in another sense this is a somewhat encouraging development, showing that authority is on the agenda, and correctly identifying authority, our relationship to authority, and attitudes towards forms of it as the central social issue of our age.

If you are not sufficiently satisfied of progress on this account, because not enough cultural examples reflecting this issue question authority — or question with sufficient skepticism for our taste — notice instead that the very fact that so many feel the need to advocate, reinforce, and celebrate the establishment indicates that its position is no longer taken for granted. It means that “the establishment” dwelling deep in the echelons of the subconscious has become aware of appearing questionable, and of appearing at all. For it has finally become noticeable as an archetype through its many misdeeds meant to impose its consumptive order on the outer world. It feels its own visibility, and vulnerability, and shifts from its secure slumber. Those dominated by a subconscious insistence on a static condition leap to its defense. The largest part of the cultural counter-revolutionary reaction perhaps consists of nothing more sophisticated than that. Even such allergic conservation gives us a sign, for resistance to a great change must always come beforehand, to foreshadow that transformation. Let even the stupid stubbornness of the archetype give you the courage for patience, Awakeners, and offer you reassurance: do not lose heart!

Terrorists and Tyrants

Terrorists are not dissidents, only politicians out of power. They do not dissent against the establishment by taking exception to it, they only object to their exclusion from it. Give them power, and soon they become “respectable.” Their favored means for aggrandizement, of course, remain similar: amassing popularity through misrepresentation of themselves, public relations (self-congratulation, braggadocio, and advertisement) to acquire attention, and motivation through fear, and force.

La Cosa Nostra

The governments of the world have always encouraged fear of foreign threats among their citizens, to encourage faith in entrusting power and productivity to the government, and to reinforce the tendency to vaunt from behind that imposing colossus one pays for protection. First one resorts to yielding to the local force monopoly out of exaggerated fears of the Other, then one prefers a chaser of pride to wash away the passive pawn’s sense of vulnerability, then one becomes bellicose, and spews many fine words of allegiance and drunken songs of solidarity. To all this I say: why worry about the bully across town, when there is one on every block, including your own?

On Resistance to an Improved Species of Society

You fear change from what you know because of danger, you say. No one can argue that an unfamiliar path guarantees safety. So you continue to negotiate your precipice in accustomed security, afraid to slip on steep paths leading away from the edge.

Parallax East and West

Many Westerners readily recognize the divide in reality between the avowed communism of China and the new entrepreneurial economics. The inconsistency seems jarring. Yet, this is comparable to attempting to unify individualistic freedom and capitalism with democracy and the mass, social State in the West. The West too has “the Party” in the politics and established hierarchy of the State.

Westerners only fail to perceive the incongruity of their schizoid dualism because they live and have lived inside of irreconcilables. As voluntary regulators they dictate the terms of open markets. As communal businessmen they incorporate individuals. As military marketers they force free trade. As people in faceless public-interest bureaucracies they pursue self-interest. As competitive monopolists they expect ensured success. As the private public State they demand all the secrecy they yield. As collective persons they respect the sacrosanct property they seize from each other. As lovers of the mass rights of individuals, they liberate by majority. As passivity’s warmongers they engineer wars against resistance to imposed peace. As independent cogs they take responsibility by voting to give it away. They have no eyes to see their strangeness.

Collectivism at Work

The drama of the individual and the collective, which sounds so abstract and dystopian to those who do not meditate on its meaning and immediacy, may actually be observed every work day in the banal habit of many employees to work as members of a larger, “greater” organization; when they do so with self-sacrifice and subservience, overworking at the risk of health and independent success, in other words working against the personal achievement of their own goals, they subsume their individual selves into a collective for the sake of duty, responsibility, and the “work ethic.” That too involves the moral system of collectivism — sacrificial altruism, writ small.

Collectivist Propaganda

Collectivists are not so considerate of dissent to provide for it obvious ammunition against their propaganda, by calling what they do by unflattering names. They would rarely say centralization, collectivization, nationalization, or (now that the term is also no longer “good”) socialization. Collectivists sell their collectivism by re-branding it with names like teamwork, patriotism, community spirit, family, family values, patriotic spirit, altruism, charity, cooperation, collaboration, common values, community, organization, management, order, traditional ways, union, unification, unity... ad nauseam.

Drafting the Dead for Zion

The Zionist claim to represent the millions of dead Jews in Europe has a special arrogance built on the bones of a specialized victimhood. It stands apart even from the claim made by all national politicians to represent collective millions of living individuals — which Zionist politicians have also taken upon themselves in the State of Israel. For the living, at least, might speak up and object, and say, “they do not speak for me!” The dead stay in the ground, safely unable to contradict. The millions of dead stay most conveniently dead. Whatever they once believed in life (when they did not after all choose to serve the cause by going to Palestine), the Zionists have claimed them (they claim all Judaism and the work of all Jews, minus arguments against them) — though not without a phase of some of the vultures blaming them first for, of all things, their Jewish weakness for the misfortune to become victims! (As if the figures of a Jewish camp survivor or a pacifist victim will not appear infinitely stronger to history than a Zionist colonizer with an Uzi — but it seems cruel ironies must come before hindsight.) With the adoption of Zionism as a nationalized ethic, it seems some of the diaspora of Jews, not to be outdone, have finally invented within themselves their own anti-Semites, similarly insensitive to individual differences and desires, quite as clever at exploitation and manipulation of the past (ignoring contrary facts and embarrassments of course), and just as dedicated to militarist, racialist, statist socialization as any National Socialist German. Now those people truly are out of work — the oppressor’s work is quite done, when victims take it up — alive, and dead!

Collective Barbarism

Collective punishment is the greatest evidence for the barbarous indifference of governments to individual life, which is endemic to all those governments allowed enough power to practice it, and given the occasion. I include not only governments of established states, but would-be governments, like revolutionary parties and terrorist organizations. Israel’s army punishes any or all Palestinians indiscriminately with punitive executions, rocket attacks, water control, and Bantustan imprisonment, for the violent resistance of particular individuals to the occupation. In return, those Palestinians who think along similar patterns pursue the collective punishment of Israelis by violent acts, for the occupation. The discrepancy of power of the establishment of the State in no way distinguishes the principles of either side or the philosophy behind them both. So it is with every side of every political conflict. Theirs is a mindset of manies, not of ones. This many against that many. If ones suffer and die, well, this is all the more reason for the many to punish another many. The political disease of single-mindedness abhors exceptions and the singularities of nature, and cares little for worth among human beings, which comes to us from the individuals among us.

Government then is a relic of barbarism, the dominion of masses, the rule of clans, the psychology of the pack. Let us distinguish progressive civilization as our name for that which first recognized individualism, and provided for the individual some peace, privacy, consideration, ease, and independence. No concept of civilization true to that can be reconciled with government. The civilization of humanity — a process still very much intermediate — can only proceed as government passes away.

States of War

When some glut of power triumphs over rivals in times of scant peace, apologists for the new rule claim that authority imposes order, and therefore we require the State (their way). ‘Strong’ government, they call it, as if to reclaim Roman statism-as-virility. Those who say this can only excuse the breaches of peace pursued by States by likening such events to cataclysms — either unnatural breaks in the natural rule of authority, or the resurgence of violent nature through cracking civilization.

Yet it was no accident that the concept of “total war” occurred to mankind with the introduction of the modern State — or rather recurred, for the same doctrine by any other name was known to the early, ancient military states, and forgotten in the West between the savageries of Rome and Napoleon. The commitment to war among citizens, the imposition of command among them, and their habits of docile obeisance all wax and wane together.

State authority never did exist to bring order to social behavior. (Rather, we should look for its origins in violence.) During war, authoritarian drumbeating drowns out organically-ordered pulses of peaceful civilization. Authority orders the military, and secondarily the subsidiary organs of domestic control, for their own sake. Armies build states and states build armies. The centralized states of ancient times adopted their institutions of bureaucracy, taxation, and allegiance in order to draft, field and support professional armies. Similarly the nation-state of France, the first massive modern State, best served Napoleon’s conquests; upon the people it wreaked havoc: the guillotine, genocide, war with all Europe, and an era of no certainty save impoverishment, tyranny, and deaths by the millions — all quite familiar to us, foreshadowing for the States’ World Wars of the twentieth century. The only order remaining in the madness of total warfare would be the total State of regimentation among perfect citizen-soldiers trained to annihilate enemies and themselves — perfect obeisance to authority, unquestioning contribution, and selfless sacrifice.

“War” does not name the breakdown of authority, but follows from, and describes the state of its extremity, in the absolutism of the military, the patriotism of citizenry, and the resignation of conscience.

Versing the Militant in the Crucible of War

If ancient magics worked by wish, I would invoke Prometheus —

First of forethinkers, kindler of Men

hear my chant, set words alight,

bind mischief to your spark!

Bestow for us a teaching curse

on those who burn down peace with war

and warm themselves by holocaust:

May every flame you light
bring a vision in the smoke
of the fires of the city
in once faraway reports —

May you stand in bombed-out buildings,

feel catastrophe with fingers
and make foreign death your own

like a local, like a neighbor
climbing
crunching
rubble
searching skeletons now torched.

In a clearing find your heartache
see the body of your dearest lover
child, friend, beloved other
shellshocked and the pieces blown
face burned away to ashy bone.

Kneel beside the pitted corpse
touch one last time together
with a lacerating kiss.

Tremble at your helpless cry.

Taste the acid of your own insides.

Let your shrapnel heart stay
trapped in bursting,
breathless.

Scream out emptiness in severed seconds
Hear the sound of screaming silence
...

— blink away these sights burned inward,
but come again in ashen moments
there, in the stillness of death
never ardent for war again.

Branding “Freedom” on America

“If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
— George Orwell

America has been a land steeped in the phraseology of freedom, founded as it was on the utopian dreams of dissidents, exiles, disenfranchised minorities, liberals, and other undesirables. To this day, continually, Americans are told and tell each other that they are free, and America is a land of freedom. But most have little grasp of the reality of freedom. Few know about the numerous past counterexamples to the supposed condition of freedom or care to know. Few monitor ongoing subjugations or denials of freedom, or care to make themselves aware.

Adding to other ignorance and misunderstanding, these Americans especially resist facing the callous betrayal of freedom by many of their political figures, even as these shamelessly employ freedom as a moral lever, and as a modern shibboleth marking those who are “with Us” instead of those foreigners “against Us,” and as the bait in the bait-and-switch illusion that the sideshow of democracy equals freedom. Such carnival preachers of freedom faith do not use their cheap sleight of hand only to manage Americans. They particularly show what really lies up their sleeves when dealing with foreigners. This predictably follows a chauvinist predetermination: foreigners are not American, therefore not as free, therefore deserving of less freedom from interference, in elections, in economic decisions, in resistance to dictatorships installed by American foreign policy and CIA coups. Unbelievably, for the typical American having their government deprive foreigners of freedom does not challenge their favorable image of American freedom, but only reinforces once again that only America is the land of freedom, and confirms that worldview.

It might explain this remarkable state of affairs, and would also be fair to say that in America, freedom has always more often been fetishized in the form of a static political condition already achieved, than recognized as a transformative goal to aim for and reach toward continuously. Therefore those made personally unfree in America, those exploited, suppressed and oppressed (captured slaves, uprooted natives, helpless prisoners) did not fit expectation, and rarely received liberating efforts and attention. Even now a certain brainwashed logic will want to insist: but those never did count, you see, they were not “citizens”! To admit exception might begin to subvert the fixed image of freedom, and this threatens the status an American wishes to feel when he or she considers America, that of free, proud individuality subservient to no one.

The American State certainly advertises freedom. This commercial attitude toward the problem of how to mask demonstrable facts befits a heritage of relatively free economic activity, and a continuing celebration of a once freer market (which has long since become fascized and socialized into state capitalism and corporate capitalism). Some of the militarist hawkers who appropriate and commodify the let-me-alone heritage even have a telling slogan: “freedom isn’t free.” If freedom were allowed on the market, I want to think few would purchase its counterfeits and imitations, even now. But the problem has gone beyond that; many Americans almost no longer have a taste for the real thing they can no longer remember enjoying, even if they remember what to call it. Through insistent advertising, through circulating the meme of freedom until they have mass-produced a dogma, Americans convince themselves that they still love freedom and fight for it, even as they fear freedom, shirk the responsibility required to enjoy it, and clamor to sacrifice their own liberty in order to fight against other people’s.

Nonetheless, only if we misunderstand freedom as a relative tolerance could we ever mistake the US government for its guardian, as the imperial “patriots” do. More accept a weaker assertion, a variation on the same premise of comparison, and consider America a de facto “free country” of individual discretion, despite unfortunate exceptions. Those who continue to presume such fallacies may set the bar very low, since they may still compare the US with other regimes of much more habitual deprivation of life and liberty. Among these are regimes of dictators once installed or supported for some US agenda and then left in power, with only local subjects to suffer for American attention spans — like Saddam Hussein or a hundred similar dictators. But an especially useful comparison is genocidal North Korea, that most grotesque caricature of a totalitarian State (originally established by a wartime Soviet invasion with the approval and encouragement of the US administration, it should not be forgotten).

Compared with foul prisons, America might seem carefree and blessed (although its one-and-one-half millions of incarcerated inhabitants might disagree). Hucksters have a long familiarity with the gimmick of the false choice. But despite the practiced cultural advertising for itself, the whole enterprise of marketing that distinctive “American freedom” rings as hollow as a slogan, without the genuine product — an essential resource no one has yet succeeded in patenting. Americans simply cannot pretend their culture has some special individualistic energy only one brand of freedom brings, nor can Americans imitate a wholly unfettered, unrestrained and shamelessly vibrant group of individuals — the population of any solid bastion of the free enterprise of life. Increasingly, such concepts ring foreign in the same country known for their projection across the whole world as great ideals.

Empire as Orthodoxy

To understand empire it may help to personify it as a closed-minded person of middle age, comfortable with what it knows. An empire believes, “I have already arrived at my reality. What is the point of change?” An empire distrusts change, it shirks change, and resists change doggedly. This is at the bottom of the imperial psyche.

The notion of empire as a stable form is the root of its appeal. Reliability, the ability to continually dwell in the familiar and usual which is known to be common and shared, the eternal idea, the whole world as this or that, safety in perpetuity, these are the sorts of feelings behind empire. It matters much less what constitutes the specifics, as we can see in the near-universality of various imperial forms from land to land, culture to culture, in realms as supposedly disparate as politics, art, religion, and intellectualism.

A sustained body of thought, and at its most concrete, an orthodoxy people refuse to adapt even when they must defines an empire in the general sense more aptly than anything else. To consider political empires without understanding that they merely constitute a subset of the whole picture is to misunderstand completely and miss a sustainable and reliable remedy which depends on nothing more or less than adaptability in thought.

What is called “empire” sociopolitically describes the corruption of a civilization, country, or nation, the latter-stage decadence as a result of clinging to a conception from the past, believed static and permanent. The attempts to defend that idealism doggedly, which manifest outwardly as the classic pattern of imperialist sociopolitics — often militarism, centralization, mercantilism, intolerance, disconnection and superficiality — instead ensure the speedy ruination of its previous realization. People must always replace their past with change, and guarding their culture sternly as though it is a citadel that never crumbles with the years only means that the change will go on, unmarked and without care for what course it takes, as most carefully maintain the illusion of their enduring heritage, denying evidence to the contrary, browbeating naysayers, and dooming themselves to a future in which their culture not only changes, but falls.

Civilizations that build empires might as well seek their fall. Civilizations entering an imperial phase make themselves impotent to weather change. Empire does not mean power, except the fantasy power of the decadent desperate to show proof of health. Imperial thinking hardens the past until the course of change may shatter it. Empire means: a calcified civilization is hard enough to shatter at a blow. The empire that escapes this fate succumbs to erosion.

The history of imperial ideas catalogues not eternal monuments but gravestones. Eternal Rome, aere perennius, fell because of the militant insistence of Romans that some hard Roman ideal should remain eternal. Once almost an entire island perished from tradition, leaving little but great fallen stones and a parable to warn the ages. Israel the thing, the State, finally manifested the ancient insistence that a thing called the Jewish nation should not dissolve, not coincidentally after the most desperate hardship ever endured by Jews in the diaspora which cultivated the greatest among them to reach heights of culture. But by bracing a Masada to endure supposed “barbarians,” with every effort the Zionists have built an empire to fall. Elsewhere, a belabored, tattered myth of old freedom hardly grounded in today remains the static imperial mental state in the American paradigm. And those who craft the whole world as one State, one New World Order on the worn ideal of Unity in political society, also build a Fall into the foundation of their Babel. All the utopian dreams of empire in our future, too, are destined to become the stolid nightmares of those who will not wake to a dawn.

Empire is the name for a culture of would-be fossils desperate to perpetuate. Only living, growing culture contradicts empire, and its perpetual peril. People willing to play in the dynamic streams of change live on, though hazards come. They make themselves more resilient, and thus more likely to survive, but even after they die they survive in their contributions to the future, instead of wasting their time on Earth in dedication to the past. The great ideas live on. The great creations continue. We stand on the shoulders of those who understood this as we remake civilization in every age. When individuals make the fabric they weave between themselves supple, they defeat imperial doom.

Politics Detracts From Culture

“One pays heavily for coming to power: power makes stupid... politics swallows up all serious concern for really spiritual matters. ”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, in Twilight of the Idols

People speak often of the Israeli Army, politicians, State, and politics. We also hear of Zionist ideology. But we in the larger world do not speak of Israeli culture or Zionist culture. We speak of Jewish culture predating all these political phenomena, and with good reason. “Israeli culture” would compare with Jewish culture, as “Soviet culture” would compare with Russian. Likewise no one speaks of “Nazi culture”! It sounds like an oxymoron. It sounds like an appropriation for propaganda. Germans also proved the rule: build Reich, betray Kultur.

Byzantine America

Some of the advocates of American empire, the imperialists in fact if not name, favor a comparison between America today and Rome at its height because it sounds to them somewhat flattering; Rome’s republic was quite large and dominant, after all, and has left behind its propaganda. This tactic first of all shows more than a little ignorance of Roman history; if we likened the experiences of life under the Roman republic to the modern era, few of the apt analogies would endorse their glorious point, among those with modern sensibilities. In fact some parallels between the republics would seem more than a little uncomfortable. In any case a more fitting comparison is probably the late Roman Empire which had burned off much of the private “republican” energy which had made Rome seem the center of the world — or even Byzantium, regardless of varying military prowess the pale shade of earlier Roman cultural depth and economic power, with an even more Byzantine internal political situation of idiotic incompetence, devious, petty scheming of factional rivalry, and the maneuvering of specialized, parochial interests.

Poems for Breathless Activists

couplet:

A thousand eager scattered fingers plug a thousand holes in the dyke,
Meanwhile no new dyke is built.

haiku:

a thousand fingers
plug a thousand holes, meanwhile
no new dyke is built

Changing the World Begins With Ideas

Composing theory is not necessarily abstracted in the sense of impracticality at all; it can function as a means of deferring practical effort to a later time, when influence makes application of certain formerly ahead-of-their-time ideas possible to realize. Theory can provide a way to bind efforts invested in the present to their applications in the future, if efforts we try to make now must either become theoretical in nature, or be blunted by limitations, to our discouragement. Putting energy into theory now allows us to save up and accumulate effort for future projects, to help accomplish change even in the here and now, as long as we design that theory not with purposeless abstraction in mind but with future realization in mind. Not only this, but planning allows us to refine, develop, and test ideas before we fully utilize them, in the same way buildings must be designed by architects and engineers before builders begin (unless it is fine if buildings fall down). The philosopher may introduce new or modified ideas to various fields, and the theoretical thinker within a field may apply philosophy to specifics. But everyone may test these principles and their ramifications as opportunities permit, in the meantime.

In fact it is only through the imagination of theory that any great project or achievement, including purposeful social or personal transformation, may first begin, before it becomes apparent that it is possible, practical or permissible. Certainly, without the ‘leap of faith’ implicit in theory the only change which could occur would be haphazard change, because otherwise only the manifest facts of life at the moment would appear practical, and change contrary to the present would always appear fanciful and unsupported by reality. Without the ability to abstract and theorize and imagine, and without respect for those who have this gift among those who do not, humanity would never have built any kind of civilization. It is also virtually certain that human beings will never improve upon the present without a new relationship with “abstract thinkers,” in particular those “wild dreamers” who imagine a different and greater future many people dismiss as impractical. For though we have accepted complicated progressions of ability within the normal structures of modern society — for example the expected strides made in technical and scientific disciplines, and other applications using informative, accumulative, collectivizing, and concretizing tendencies thoroughly-practiced by many human beings at present — nonetheless any revisions to break outside of normalized structures meet with little acceptance, despite much spiritual hunger for transfiguration.

Censorship

Government censorship is a sure sign of really decadent society. Those hypersensitives who cannot suffer offense, or the discomfort they feel acutely enough to quickly resort to terms like indecency and obscenity, must have an ailing sense of health to refuse any disturbance reflexively, without consideration of its harm or harmlessness beyond their immediate and possibly incidental reaction, and regardless of opportunity for learning and growth. Are such opportunities not always a matter of some discomfort, profounder during a profound lesson, which also requires a profound adaptation? For the unfamiliar may offend, and difficulty may feel indistinguishable from anguish. Finally — can we not make similar observations about personal censorship? How often do the censors in your head protect you from harm, and how often do they insulate your current boundaries?

Validity of Opinion

“I’m entitled to my opinion” — the principle and sense that all opinions are valid, if not equal, offers a retreat from debate, reconsideration, and potential revision. This stops and locks down the possibility of learning and progress. Of course not all opinions are valid, if valid means anything. No one should be confused that judging validity here has anything to do with suppressing speech or quelling dissenting opinion. Validity of an opinion concerns its plausibility, its reason, its informational preparation, its wisdom, and at the very least the interest of the one who holds an opinion in the evaluation of that opinion. All opinions are not valid, all opinions are not created equal. No opinion can be valid if it is not prepared, not examined, not open to change, not further developed, not open to influence from and exchange with others. In short, a premature, ignorant, foolish, or static opinion cannot be valid, and cannot stand up to a valid opinion. When a person settles for such a low rank of opinion, they have already lost all debates and arguments because they refuse to engage. It is important to preserve a sense of rank with regard to opinions. It is important to be able to compare them, to evaluate, learn, grow. One who does not continue to do this almost does not know any point for having opinions.

Youth, Rebellion and Compromise

“I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves.”
— Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Maturity should not mean leaving behind willingness to rebel. After youth, one continues to encounter established powers and institutions deserving rebellion. Keeping an edge of youthful rebellion rather than “outgrowing” it is the reliable, and easiest way to ensure that one does not accommodate the suppression and oppression one continues to encounter. One should never desire to put aside with age whatever contrary and special practices, whatever counter-cultural influences, whatever aesthetics, artistry, music, and subcultures from youth continue to remind and reinforce the spirited will ready to take exception. Preserve a continued capacity for sustainable conflict. As one matures, one learns to join this with discipline and clarity. But above all keep that “chaos within oneself” that might at worst remain juvenile, but might justify itself a thousand-fold with creative power in maturity. Let us confirm the energy of youth by tempering, rather than cooling it. If that worst that comes with this is some foolishness, some naïveté, some wildness, that is preferable to associating maturity with a feeling that one cannot bear to be in conflict with anything, and must acquiesce and “compromise.” For such compromises snuff out future stars in the nursery.

Unpopularity and Greatness

If we look back over a number of cases of cultural concepts which appeared ahead of their time, and compare them with disposable fads that catch on readily, only to disappear like countless millions of like phenomena before them, we can infer a pattern. If in a given case popularity can be read like a barometer, the unpopularity of something new during its social inception — whether it is taken up by the mainstream of its context during its circulation — is often the telling thing in terms of potential greatness. Resistance often correlates with depth, and easy absorption with shallowness.

I would suppose this is due to two main problems with a mob’s opinion. First, to a typical requirement for judging without others’ hints: special knowledge from a privileged (uncommon) education in a field of preparatory experience, in order to identify greatness by comparison, or at least special wisdom to perceive its new implications and ramifications. Second, to the considerable resistance of conformity to something profoundly new, rather than superficially new but not substantially elevated from similar phenomena. Both of these reasons work in tandem to make quick popularity suspect and select approval promising, in many if not most cases. The praise of few years and many people only seems to have weight, and the considered rejection of the ages has much more worth than the rejection of the moment. The chief exceptions to this principle are utilitarian advances, for example a quickly-adopted technological boon with apparent consequences including few drawbacks, but many advantages perceivable by the wise and the foolish, and by various kinds of different personalities and tastes.

Interestingly this test for rejection or indifference by the numbers seems the only sensible correlation we can derive from popularity. The immediate unpopularity of a thing before its circulation cannot be counted in its favor, because it has not been exposed to the memetic test of imitation; nothing becomes popular without such exposure. Continued unpopularity long after sufficient public exposure to observe the result during inception, or popularity among a limited audience, does not necessarily endorse the quality or significance of something, but neither could it imply a failure, merely a limited appeal — for what reason, we cannot say in general; the reason might be a greatness only recognizable by those to whom it applies.

But then, I am assuming a select audience with these qualifications; most usually presume, and all presume at one time or another, that enduring popularity by itself necessarily indicates a strong basis for endorsement. The approval of other faces in the crowd has always been an instinctive check for dangers and problems, among primates, and those who talk did not outgrow this, or the need for it, but merely extended some judgment over time enough to weigh it. But not even the test of time proves the rule of popularity, for war, religions and politics survive and remain common through the endemic aspects of our natures we might prefer were only atavistic. Likewise the argument against the mainstream in itself which attains persuasive force among subcultures reduces the exercise of judgment to reactionary contradiction. Even the great exception may often become mainstream, eventually. Witness the phenomenal artistic rebellion of starving impressionists emblazoned later on the umbrellas and gift shop mugs of museum visitors.

Popularity in Capitalism

The meanest aspect of a free market is its consumer democratization, the tendency to serve a popular choice more than others — fortunately this is balanced by a most precious aspect, the ability to choose among the also-supported, unpopular, yet wonderful things.

An Unpopular Maxim

A special thing begins as a rare thing.

Popular and Unpopular Culture Thesis

Only enduring popular cultures, or enduring strains of culture across popular cultures, with their long developmental periods sufficient to germinate worth and winnow chaff tend to evolve profoundly, to include considerable depth among their more common sphere of content. Otherwise and elsewhere the general principle applies: first, popular culture rarely encompasses much of worth; second, counter-, underground, rare, sub-, and individual cultures evolve, identify, and preserve most of the worthy cultural forms and ideas.

To the more apparent explanations for this I have elaborated on elsewhere (including the unreliability of popular sentiments, and the individualistic basis of human cultural advancement), I would like to add a stranger hypothesis as well, on a syncausal basis: that short-term popular culture depends less than those cultural contexts do on generative subconsciousness. I mean the deep, ever-churning well which in each of us comprises the larger part of our mental capacity, works constantly to create subtle and rich connections of which we are scarce aware unless we analyze them after the fact, and may preserve resources of the past easily neglected by popular culture, with its emphasis on conscious record-keeping over subconscious connotation — including a ‘library’ of resources predating even historical human culture, some reaching far, far back into the past, perhaps including millions of years of pre-linguistic cultural memories, a great part of our mental and psychological inheritance.

Recognizing Genius

It would take a comparable sort of insight, if not a comparable degree of insight to recognize the product of a genius capacity for something. Rare genius of creation or recognition has the characteristic of speedy insight — flashes of intuition, almost even instinct alone. Those of different and lesser capacities must painstakingly decipher the significance of genius in a workmanlike fashion, over time. Thus the importance of great work is almost always learned posthumously, and therefore genius is usually a meaningless word used flippantly, about the living.

Separate Standards

Every culture has its hoard of wealth, amassed by the care of individuals after their own mentality and judgment of value, at first appraisal unappreciable by outsiders.

The Feast of World-Wisdom

We inheritors of all traditions in the world think of all the libraries, collections of knowledge, records of past experiences, art, archaeology and aesthetics from all over the globe and all times, and we think, it is as though all the civilizations of the world have set out great banquets before us, in the flavors and textures of substance and spirit they left behind. “Let us feast! Let us try new dishes! Let us try this with that and taste that with this!” And we do, and we become guests at all tables. Sadly, others still restrict their diets to devouring only a few kinds of food, chiefly staples of their native soil.

Complementing Tradition

Change to improve upon tradition, out of awareness of the past and love of the future, is akin to the accomplishments of our greatest ancestors in inventing traditions, and the greatest compliment and respect to tradition and our forebears.

Tabula Rasa

Our world is yet hemmed in by thicket thought — jammed by jumbled jargon, drawn inside re-and-re-traced lines, marked by perpetual palimpsest, and barred by the iron rules of the tablet of laws, most unwritten yet demarcated. We need many more wayward, erstwhile pupils willing to wipe slates clean in order to write the future anew. We do not lack for those willing to write small, in the margins.

page created on November 13, 2005
page updated May 2, 2008 0:48 EST

This is a publication of promethea.org provided only for personal or private viewing in electronic or print form. Mass reproduction or duplication of the written content of this page in electronic or print form is prohibited without the express permission of the author, including publication on websites. Private and informal circulation among friends and associates of printed or electronic versions of this page or its contents is encouraged, however. Please share but respect the author. Thank you.