The good thing...

The good thing about having a blog that doesn't really get read is that you don't have to worry about not updating.  The No Philosophy series will continue in a few weeks with parts 4 & 5.  Until then....silence.

No Philosophy, Part 3

Did you get what you wanted?  If you did, is it okay that a not much smaller segment didn’t?  Is it okay that many smaller fragments didn’t get what they wanted either?  How about that a large segment opted out entirely, and that with or without with these minorities, there was a majority opposition to the group that got what they wanted.  Is that okay?  What exactly is it that you did get when the previous four years of it weren’t actually what you wanted?  From where I’m standing it doesn’t look all that different, but a lot of people have convinced themselves that it is.

Statism is an almost religious way of thinking.  It is built on faith, and anybody critical of it is dismissed outright.  Statism is the conviction of opposites where an entity can get away with saying one thing, doing another, and people believing that the thing which was said is true, even with all the evidence against it.  It’s a system of belief where two different groups involved in it’s mechanics can take something definite like crony capitalism and mold it to be either socialism or free-market economics.  For good or for bad.

Whether the thought pattern is war is peace, taxation is charity, or security is freedom, the most hardened belief of the statist is that they have control of the people that actually control them.

NO PHILOSOPHY, PART 3

MACHINERY OF THE STATE

During the first presidential election in which I had the chance to vote, I had the good sense not to vote for Bush or Gore, but then that just means I supported the campaign for a different person to rule over me, Ralph Nader.  My memory is vague as to why I voted for Nader, maybe during the little attention I paid I heard a blurb or two from him that I liked, but overall I know it had something to do with him not being in the debates and I thought that was wrong.  I believe that I had heard if he got enough votes, third parties would be allowed to debate.  Of course this was all at a time before I knew that Republicans and Democrats owned the debates and made all the rules.  This was also a time where I hardly understood what the differences between the two parties were (coming full-circle now, I actually see no difference).  I remember friends at the time trying to convince me that I was a Democrat and that if I voted for Nader, it was really a vote for Bush.  I’m sure you’ve heard that scam put out there many times in your life, that if you vote outside of one main party, it’s a vote for the other.  That is total propagandist framing of reality.  I’m sure a think tank came up with that one during the early nineties when Ross Perot scared the shit out of the establishment.  If you vote for someone in a third party, that is exactly who your vote is going to.  That’s all there is to it because when a Bush or a Romney or a Gore or Obama wins, the differences are in presentation only.  When an Obama sounds like a more peaceful and just man, it’s only because he’s a better liar than an outright violent monster like Dick Cheney.  They are one and the same, and more importantly, so is the government they are the figureheads over.  It doesn’t change, and of course there is no proof that much else would change if one of these third party characters got elected.

Back to the story of my first vote where my friends were trying to convince me I was a Democrat, the only thing I knew about Gore was that his wife pushed for music censorship in the eighties.  Why would any young person from my era involve themselves with that kind of racket?  So I voted for Ralph Nader during the first election in which the almighty federal government granted me the right to choose my new ruler.  Bush was then elected, and like most people, for a few months I forgot that the president existed.  If you aren’t a news junky, who wouldn’t forget?  When you replace a left-wing authoritarian government with a right-wing authoritarian government, you still have authoritarian government.

But then the World Trade Center fell, and like just about everyone who didn’t pay attention to the world and how America was involved in it, I was completely shocked, and then quite conveniently fell into a nationalistic stupor.  Yes, I had a flag on my car for a long time after.  This silly symbol of the state that I smartly ignored in high school during the Pledge of Allegiance(the name is even offensive) was with me at all times.  I didn’t understand why it happened or what “we” Americans had done wrong.  I didn’t know what Al-Qaeda was and being from Monroe, Connecticut, I hardly knew what a Muslim was.  I was too young and naive to understand that “we” had not done anything, and this attack was not against “us”.  It was all about the central government.  It was a criminal act of aggression against them.  It was blowback for things that they had done.  Individuals were paying the price with their lives for the violent acts of the collective.  I bought the Afghanistan police action that came afterward, but thankfully that’s where it ended for me.

So it was 9/11 when I started paying attention to the world around me.  A definite change was coming over my life.  The world wasn’t just my friends or my home.  It wasn’t just partying or working for a paycheck.  There was a lot of other stuff out there, I wasn’t always sure what, but this terrorist act happened right next door to me, slapped me hard in the face, and told me to wake the fuck up.  It wasn’t just on TV like the Gulf War or the L.A. Riots for example.  New York was a place I spent countless weekends with my friends.  It was where I took my first film class.  In many ways, it was a place that I became an adult.  I started taking the train there by myself at sixteen and it was an exhilarating feeling of independence.  New York City was where I wanted to live.  I’m not even sure I realized it at the time, but after 9/11, I organized my life a bit, moved out west the next year, and didn’t actually return to that city for years after.  Sometimes when I read now about the city New York has turned into, with their militaristic police and statist laws, I really do feel like the world lost more than just two buildings that day, the world lost a great city.

Through this act of violence, I started paying attention to the everything around me, enough that I sometimes wonder who I would be without that horrific event happening.  Change comes in strange ways.  I started watching State of the Union addresses, the news, listening to talk radio, and I used the internet for more than just online chat and reading about movies.  I started to realize that the government actually does something, nothing good, but something, and back then I felt doing something is always better than doing nothing.  After the federal government got involved in another police action, this time with Iraq, I knew that I now had to do something myself because this Bush character had to go.

So what did I do?  What was my big move?  In the next election I voted for the Democratic candidate, John Kerry.  Why?  Because his name wasn’t George Bush and he had more of a chance than one of those third party candidates.  Why, if he was elected, he would have ended those wars and thrown out the Patriot Act.  We wouldn’t be living under the surveillance state that we do now.  Police wouldn’t be militarized!  We would have a stable economy!  The world would be so different!

I’ll tell you what, right after I walked out of that voting booth, I felt sick to my stomach.  I knew I had just done something cheap.  Something I didn’t believe in.  I had no idea who John Kerry really was, but I voted for him and in the end, whether he won or not, it would mean nothing.  I promised myself that during the next election I would be a doubleplusgood citizen and pay extra close attention and pick the candidate I really believed in.

There’s a problem with that though, isn’t there?  All that doubleplusgood citizenry usually ends up meaning is receiving information from terrible sources.  You’ve most likely picked a side and are going to be watching MSNBC or Fox News, both meaningless gestures, just as much so if you watch CNN.  The media loves and protects the state.  All information they give you is bunk, backed by lies, and told with the split-tongues of lobbyists, think tanks, and garbage-mouthed wordsmiths who speak in fallacies and twist history and current events to the benefit of their team.  Of course the team is ultimately the same, a massive government whose tentacles wrap themselves around every aspect of life possible.

I’m not sure what got me, but the presentation of Barack Obama was a winning one.  I was still under the impression that we only needed a Democrat in the White House for a huge change.  He was young black man who played basketball to Bush’s old white guy who played golf.  His name was Muslim to Bush’s Christian.  He also spoke with clarity and seemed to have foresight compared to Bush’s marble-mouthed idiocy.  For a person who had forgotten what politician’s were and ached for some difference in the imperialist ventures of America throughout the world, it was good enough for me.  Of course, Barack Obama was bullshit from top to bottom. And as I would soon learn, though not soon enough, the presidency was as well.

When will the man who killed Abdulrahman al-Awlaki go to trial?

No Philosophy, Part 2

In high school I used to get into trouble for not stopping in the hallway to say the Pledge of Allegiance.  For years before this, I only pretended to say it, either just moving my mouth or mumbling through the jumble of meaningless words that I had been told to repeat every day of schooling since I was in Kindergarten.  I wish I could tell you what I didn’t like about it when I was younger, but I can only say that I had an aversion to it.  As I got older, it was the “under God” part that really stuck out.  How could I be forced to say this if it didn’t mean anything to me?  At the time I was baffled by this because I thought religion was supposed to be kept out of school.  Of course as I got older and i moved on from not only religion, but the state, I saw the real problems with this trite piece of nationalism written by a socialist to help sell flags back in the late 1800’s.

A free people should not have to pledge allegiance to any symbol or centralized authority.  We aren’t even regarded in most schooling situations as a republic anymore, but a democracy.  If you don’t acknowledge a god you certainly can’t be under one.  This country was founded on division and should have stayed that way.  Finally, there’s nothing to really say about liberty or justice as they are just words, often spoken, but without any scratch of meaning in this country.  Not long ago I was at the Republican State Convention in Nevada (I’ll get to that scary piece of info in Part 4) and everyone in the room rose to say the Pledge.  It’s disturbing enough to see children reciting this because it’s not their fault.  They don’t know what they are saying and they are just following the rules for which they will be punished if they don’t comply.  But to see a room full of adults repeating this at an age when critical thinking should be strongest was disturbing to no end.  But this is how it is in a world where reality is a burden, and the comfort of words and symbols are all we need to reassure ourselves that we are right.

NO PHILOSOPHY, PART 2

Institutionalized and Crucified: Logic in Wonderland

I wish I could tell you that my first rejection of authority was during my years of compulsory public schooling, but it really wasn’t.  While it’s true that my friends and I avoided being a part of that system as much as possible, at the time we probably couldn’t tell you why, and we were there attending every day right through graduation.  When I look back, I realize just how unbalanced my life was in a supposedly balanced system.  I was mentally detached from the experience.  I knew I didn’t want to be there.  I did not enjoy the forced association with people I did not enjoy being around.  I did not enjoy taking classes with teachers that I knew were not good people(which of course led to just dropping out of sight in those classes).  Lastly, I didn’t enjoy taking classes that I simply did not enjoy.  All of this leads to a very unhappy person, mostly because you aren’t allowed to articulate these feelings within society as it exists right now.  No matter what one could say, if you expressed the sort of feelings I had about existence back then, I’d be wrong because it wasn’t what everyone else was doing.  There were no resources available for me to even understand what I was feeling.  The only option open was basic teenage rebellion.  Grow your hair long.  Dress different.  Skip class.  Smoke cigarettes.  Record music.  Hang out with your friends as much as possible and ignore the whole damn thing.  Be angry.  If there were grades for being a dropout without actually having to dropout, I would have had an A.

Writing about my schooling experience it’s easy to see why I was so misdirected throughout my younger years.  It’s easy to see why so many young people end up so miserable.  It’s easy to see why so many overdo it with drugs and alcohol.  A twelve year prison sentence is no way to begin your life, especially an incarceration that is not so obvious.

Imagine having your world completely open at the age of ten, having the ability to make decisions of where you want your life to go, what you want to learn, whether you want to make money or not.  But there is a monopoly on youth.  It’s schooling or it is wrong.  The freedom you feel from leaving this system at that late age of eighteen is indescribable, mostly because it is confusing.  Most of us go through our entire lives not knowing that we’ve been locked up.  Though not enough of us come out of the haze of compulsory schooling, when you do, it hurts.  You realize that in a world without the authoritarian state that forces you to attend their schools, you could have been achieving so much more, way earlier on.

It’s sad that in a country that heralds democracy, which is authoritarian no matter how you frame it, children are given absolutely no real choice.  They have absolutely no voice.  Decisions are made for them, even at ages when they should be making them on their own.  Children are pushed to be dependent, putting their individualism at stake.  They are placed in an unrealistic world where everyone is the same age and there is a group of authority figures, completely unearned, that have control over their actions.  School is totalitarianism.  It is indoctrination.  It doesn’t need to just be reformed, it needs to go away completely so that education can take over.

While I was unwittingly detaching my self from public schooling, there was another fabrication of authority that I was attending sort of voluntarily, the Catholic church.  I suppose this is more difficult to talk about because it is so personal to so many that I love, but then I have a hard time being less than honest.  While religion is partly voluntary, nobody really chooses to be involved, we are all taken along for the ride starting at a very young age, and as you get older and older, you really know nothing else.  Religion, like schooling, is indoctrination, and gods, much like presidents and senators, are the made-up authorities in unearned positions that you must listen to and never question.  Through all the hours of religious school, Sunday school, and mass, there is never a point where questioning this indoctrination is open to you, and often if you do, you are scorned.  There is nothing free about a system built on fear and with such a closed dialogue.

It’s a lonely thing to be a young person with your own ideas about the world and how it works, but to only be presented with one reality.  It’s the feeling of being trapped behind bars with the key only so far beyond the cage.  Nobody is there to give it to you.  You’ve got to figure out how to get it yourself.  There is most likely nobody to guide you.  And for me, without a tool like the internet, in most respects it took way too long.

I’m not quite sure if I can pinpoint my decision to stop going to church, but I know that it was some time around my confirmation, a ceremony I performed for my parents, but which I knew was the last major religious ceremony of youth and much like graduating high school, I could be free after it was over.  An anecdote that sticks out in my mind, and I usually consider stories that stick from youth to be transformative moments, is from a complaint my parents received about me by one of my CCD (Confraternity of Christian Doctrine) teachers.  Apparently one day in class I was acting out, being a nuisance, or what I would think of as cutting through the bullshit (urges I still get to this day, but can obviously control a lot better, maybe).  This particular teacher told my parents that I “crucified” him.  To this day that is one of the most exploitive things I have ever heard, and I believe my parents thought so as well.  How deep could this individual’s convictions be if he would compare the jokes of a child to the entity he worshipped being nailed to a cross.  He was using the story that informs his entire belief system to receive sympathy for his paltry situation.  Now you may consider this a small event, but it was huge and eye-opening moment for me to how religion is actually used, as a system of justification and a crutch for ones amorality.

In the previously mentioned crucifixion, religion was used as a sympathy card for an adult who had no idea how to talk to children, but yet was placed in a position of authority over them.  But this is minor when compared to how it is used within the world.  So lets get a scenario going and explore this through actions of the state.

George Bush, the much loved ruler for eight violent years over the American empire, is well-known for being a Christian, but he’s also well-known for holding responsibility over the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Iraq, not to mention American soldiers and all sorts of foreign contractors.  Now we know that Jesus loves everyone, so I have to suppose this includes Iraqi Muslims even though they worship a different god.  So who goes to hell in this situation?  Bush, who has probably been forgiven for his sins by a priest, most likely gets a special ticket to heaven even with all the blood that is on his hands.  Now I’m only guessing, but because Muslims don’t worship the Christian God they would get sent to hell upon their innocent lives being taken from them by a ticket-to-heaven-having-monster like Bush.

Lets go over that one more time to be clear, George Bush goes to heaven after starting a war and murdering hundreds of thousands and asking for forgiveness, while the hundreds of thousands go to hell for being murdered by a Christian, but not being one.  No thanks.  If that is Christian morals and ethics, if that is religious logic, I’ll take my own road and free myself from this contradictory conditioning.  Forget separation of church and state, I’ve got to separate from the church and the state.

Sure, religion is voluntary, but most of us are indoctrinated before we can make the choice to live life within reality or underneath the weight of yet another authoritarian system.  It is always interesting to me to see so many people ready to opt out of the state, but not religion, and so many others ready to opt out of religion, but not the state.  They are one and the same, but we only seem to be able to exit one door.  You may free yourself and feel the sunshine for a day, but it won’t be long before the sun sets below the horizon and your world is covered in darkness.  There is always another door to exit, and then shut behind you forever.

No Philosophy, Part 1

At some point within the last decade, you’ve no doubt found yourself within a crowd of people shouting “USA! USA! USA!”  At times this chant would spark at random, at others it was directed towards an individual or group of individuals as a tool of opposition.  There’s a possibility that you may have been a part of the chanters, and maybe you aren’t even quite sure why.  Whatever it was about, the sea of angry faces shouting at the black wall always filled me with a dark anxiety.  The atmosphere would change and you knew that something awful could happen at any moment.  There was a feeling of hopelessness within that cry of American philosophy.  There was no escape, the people surrounded you, barfing out three meaningless letters with the type of abandon you never wish to see.

The first time this happened I knew it was something bad, but I couldn’t quite figure out why.  There was a force behind that rage and it was built from the rubble of 9/11, but as time went on and we could actually watch ourselves in real time go further and further from any kind of free country, the cry became a lampoon of itself.  It became a mockery that tried to compare the America that is to an America that probably never was.  It was an obnoxious refusal to see life as it actually is.  The ubiquitous we only went on, never forgetting, never trying to understand, and never learning.  There was no reflection.  There was no trying to get better.

It has been more than a decade now since that ugly day and the philosophy has not changed, it’s surpassed the joke and is coming back to its dark place in history simply because it will not go away.  The true believers have only grown more fervent with their screams of jubilee.  They look unto the world with stars in their eyes, never able to see beyond their violent messiah’s who block the way with the blank canvas called progress held high before them.

There is strength in mythology and that is the foundation of America.  There is no learning from the past if it’s a constant lie.  There is no action in the present from a public bewildered by fireworks.  There is no hope for the future without an understanding of liberty.  The following blogs are my personal story on how I found it.

NO PHILOSOPHY, PART 1:

Curiosity Killed the Kitten

It took a lot longer than it should have for me to understand who I am.  While there are still conclusions to be made, the general idea is there, and it’s loud and clear: I am an anarchist.  Why did it take until my thirties for me to get to here?  How could it have been such a long road to the natural ideals of freedom and liberty?  There seemed to be no clear path before me when I was younger, even if I was virtually on the cusp for the entirety of my teens and twenties.   The need for truth is just below the surface for all of us, but how do we reach that when we are disposed of into a system of schooling for countless hours during our most curious period.  That curiosity is schooled out of us all and what we have left at the end of the day is the appeal to authority.  That appeal leaves us only with the truth as they have told us.  Our minds are only what they have been molded to be.  Our uniqueness and individuality is not part of that process.

There is a serious, sometimes painful process involved in detaching your mind from the status quo.  It has been recognized as unschooling, sort of a rewiring in search of truth as it is, not as it is presented.  For all too long I was going the route of the statist, believing that the answers to the world’s problems came down to voting men and women into positions of management and lawmaking.  I thought that a select few elites, known as congressmen, presidents, and judges that were put into in a ruling class known as government were the intellectual stalwarts that could shape morals through legislation.  That is a very scary place to be.  The belief that a government is everybody, you and I, and not just those who work within it to bend it to their own wants is something I now see as a serious lack of philosophy.  To leave the fate of masses to the unsophisticated ideas of a few strangers, rather than the billions that make up the market is probably the biggest blunder in human history.  The end result of this thing called government is disturbing.  You don’t need to look any further than the violence of war and the millions of deaths that come with it.  This is fascism.  This is communism.  This is democracy.  This is government.

When I was eighteen and registered to vote I realized the stupidity of the Republican/Democratic paradigm and found more value in being an Independent voter.  But what does that really mean in a two-party system?  It was just a title with no weight.  In fact, independence itself holds no weight in America because it is an authoritarian collectivist system.  I have eschewed state-defined independence as much as aligning myself with either of the two ruling classes(that really make up one).  As I get older, my ideas feel as though they have become younger.  The spirit of the individual is an invigorating one to embrace.  Once you awaken from the created and managed world and find there is still something worth fighting for, you can almost feel the movement of the earth, because you know that somewhere inside each of us is that unique spirit waiting to erupt from the chains placed around our necks.  There is a movement for liberty that is happening now.  The younger this movement becomes, and the young are embracing it all the time, the greater chance we have at a future free from the cesspool of bad philosophy that is the state.

For somebody in their teens or even twenties to have access to new ideas and champion them is no huge leap, but for those in their thirties and older this is not the case.  We each have a past full of abuses that have gone unrecognized in which we have to face.  Where I began is not necessarily where you will begin.  Liberty is a personal journey, though individualism and freedom may be the ultimate goal, that means something different for everyone.  One thing is for sure, changing the nature and meaning of authority is the common theme.  Authority is not a person in a costume holding a gun to your head.  Authority is not a person who holds an unearned position in society, wears teams colors, and consistently does the opposite of what they say.  Authority is not a group of people who try to shape and manage society with a set of words written on a piece of paper.

Ultimately, you know what is best for you.  That is the goal.  Living life as an individual.  Being your own authority over your own property.  Owning yourself.