Tag Archives: Morality

A Crisis of the Heart

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By rahkyt

Source: Sacred Space in Time

The loss of life for any reason is always to be commiserated with and in instances of collective horror such as the terrorist attacks that have recently beset the West, the heart of oceanic humanity breaks a bit more.

With that said, our social media feeds become filled with national colors and heartful memes in solidarity with members of the human family hit by unthinkable tragedy. It is right to do so. But it is also right to understand that tragedies are occurring all around us, in our own nations as well as others, every single day.  Middle-aged whites in the US are killing themselves with drugs and alcohol and poor eating habits at a rate never seen before. They are hopeless and despairing as the American dream fades. Blacks remain mired in the same hopelessness caused by the same reasons, economic and social, with the added addition of racism and eugenic tactics centuries in the formation. Native Americans on Reservations continue to experience the effects of genocide, a program running in the collective American consciousness since this nation’s inception. The deaths add up and fade into consciousness as the background cries of the disillusioned and dehumanized.

Inhumanity reigns and the statistics state that people have been growing less and less compassionate toward each other for decades in this nation. These computers and smart phones draw us together but also tear us apart, the virtual world is as real as the real one. People spend hours per day jacked into the matrix, seamlessly moving between one and the other. Death by texting is on the rise,  porn increases objectification and consumer culture further consolidates the banality of social interaction and heart-based intimacy.

These realities indicate a crisis of the soul. Of the heart. When we are upset and outraged about one group of people but care nothing for others, something is very wrong. When there is compassion for those whom we might share something in common with and lack of compassion for those with whom we do not, there is a division of the heart, a dehumanization that speaks to the pervasivity of mainstream media programming of the mind.

Perhaps those who say humanity cannot change are right. Perhaps this is the best we can do. But perhaps it is also true that by consciously examining the memes and events and seeking to understand the issues at levels beyond those trumpeted in the mainstream we will come to realize that we have more in common with the Oppressed everywhere than the privileged so many of us wish to join in their glass mansions and private retreats. It is in the experience of self as seen through the eyes of others and experienced in the visceral engagement of souls on an eternal journey that true empathy and compassion are known.

When life ends, all that matters is the love. The love we give and the love we receive. The divisions dissipate. Living as if each one of us was from Beirut, or Paris, or Chicago, or Kenyan, every, single, day, and sharing our portion of love is how the dogs of war are banished. How the flames of hate are extinguished. The source is never what we are told and the cause goes back so far in the past that the effect is shrouded in mystery.

Share this outpouring of love with the world. Feel the pain of all those sacrificed on the alters of political and economic gain. Those next door, down the street, in the next city and state, and even across the nation. We must stand in solidarity with those who’ve made the ultimate sacrifice, but the war is not just between nations and ideologies. The war is within each of us. Every, single day.

Philip K. Dick’s Moral Vision

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[Editor’s note: on this 34th anniversary of the death of Philip K. Dick, I’m sharing the 10th and final chapter of Patricia S. Warrick’s bibliographical retrospective “Mind in Motion” (1987). It’s a good reminder of what makes PKD’s work so unique and enduringly relevant.]

This critical study of Dick’s fiction is a work without a concluding chapter – and appropriately so. To summarize his ideas, to categorize his work, to deliver the final word would be to violate Dick’s vision. He saw a universe of infinite possibility, with shapes that constantly transformed themselves – a universe in process. He had not delivered his final word when he died on March 2, 1982, because for him the Word was truly the Living Word, the power that creates and re-creates patterns. Trapped in the stasis of a final statement, the Word would have been defeated by entropy and death.

But if we cannot make a final statement, we can at least note the significance of his opus of fiction for the times in which we live. Great creative personalities often see the essence of an age with a clarity denied to the mass of people. their vision is so vivid that when subsequent events confirm it, humanity, slower at arriving at a realization of its present, hails them as prophetic. I believe that Dick may well be one of those creative personalities whom we hail as visionaries. The claim seems a strange one, considering the literary form in which he worked. Blake, Wordsworth, Yeats – the Romantics with the the elegance of poetic diction make up the visionary company, not writers working in a prose form often regarded as trash. But let us for the moment ignore the form in which he was forced to write and consider instead his vision.

He had a remarkable sense of the cultural transformation taking place in the last half of the twentieth century. He pointed out the cracks in our institutions, our ideologies, and our value systems that would inevitably lead to their collapse. He understood that what had been functional in an industrial age would not work as our culture transformed itself and moved into an Information Age. Such changes often march in with violence. As Dick’s fiction declares again and again, the late twentieth century is a time at war with itself, not with an external enemy. To fight against what one abhors without realizing it lies within is to destroy all. Dick warns us against doing this to ourselves. The cloud of chaos inevitably hangs above the Dickian landscape, a reminder that a like chaos will descend on the real world and envelop us if we continue to make war.

Dick’s fiction calls up our basic cultural assumptions, requires us to reexamine them, and points out the destructive destinations to which they are carrying us. The American Dream may have succeeded as a means of survival in the wilderness of early America; it allowed us to subdue that wilderness and build our holy cities of materialism. But now, the images in Dick’s fiction declare, we live in a new kind of wilderness, a wasteland wilderness, because those cities and the culture that built them are in decay. We need a new American dream to overcome this wasteland. Dick’s ubiquitous wasteland landscape is a moral mirror asking us to journey within and explore the universe of mind and psyche where all the forms that shape the outer world are created. The critical journey of discovery is into the mysterious realm of inner space. Just as Dick’s Fomalhaut Cosmos was a universe created by his imagination, so the universe in which we live is constructed of our ideas about it. To change it we must change our ideas.

Dick’s work makes no new declarations about our time; we knew early in the twentieth century that ours was an Age of Anxiety. But the gift of his powerful mythmaking ability is to give us the stories that help us see both what we are and what we may become as we move into the Space Age. His novel contribution is the bizarre images he creates that so vividly picture our anxieties. Phantasmagoric  shapes, the Dickian protagonist calls them, as he muses about the swirl of awesome possibilities sweeping through his mind. They are disorienting images – without clear boundary, inconsistent, contradictory, fragmented, at war with one another. They force us to reconsider our conventional conception of reality. Dick said that “science fiction is uniquely a kind of semi-reality. It is not a statement that ‘this is,’ but a statement, ‘What if this were.’ The difference is crucial in every respect.” Frightening as are some of the futures Dick imagines for mankind, they are not fixed. We are Leo Buleros, we are “choosers,” Dick tells us in the Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch; and The Divine Invasion envisions another future than nuclear destruction that we can choose.

We have noted Dick’s wide acquaintance with the classics. But much as Dick loved classical literature, he did not draw on this source in creating his characters. The Dickian fictional world is a world without Titans or Heroes; instead it is a world cut off from the gods. It is filled with little people lacking in power or wisdom, who daily face the dilemma of trying to survive in the face of the inexplicable destructive forces that constantly try to snuff them out. Yet they are not the conventional antiheroes of modern fiction. Perhaps the oxymoron heroic antihero best describes Dick’s protagonist. finally, the Dickian hero acts. He may writhe and struggle to escape, but in the end he accepts the burden of his existential freedom. Daily, he finally learns, he must once again to push the boulder of moral responsibility up the hill of right action. Freedom thus becomes of highest value in Dick’s code. The individual must be free to make moral choices, even though he may often fail to make the right choice. Dick declares again and again, for the individual to be turned into a machine programmed to carry out the decisions of others is “the greatest evil imaginable; the placing on what was a free man who laughed and cried and made mistakes and wandered off into foolishness and play a restriction that limits him, despite what he may imagine or think, to fulfilling an aim outside his own personal – however puny – destiny.”

Our study of Dick’s writings has traced the journey of his restless mind, watching as it grasped an idea, created a metaphor for it in a fictional pattern of antimonies, discarded it for another idea – always spiraling forward albeit often in a wobbling, erratic course. Yet from the beginning one element remains constant in all the fiction – Dick’s faith in the power of empathy. The idea was not well developed or labeled when it first appeared. We see empathy in two of his early short stories as through a glass darkly. He has not yet given it a name. Instead, his characters act it out, and only later does he recognize what his fiction has said. In “Roog” Dick pictures a dog who guards the garbage can of his owners against the garbage men who come to collect it each week. The dog is driven crazy because he cannot offer protection to his owners against these weekly raids. Years later, Dick commented on the story, explaining that he was describing an actual dog owned by a Berkeley neighbor. “I watched the dog suffer, and I understood a little of what was destroying him, and I wanted to speak for him. That’s the whole of it right there. Snooper couldn’t talk. I could. In fact I could write it down, and someone could publish it and many people could read it. Writing fiction has to do with this: becoming the voice for those without voices. It’s not your own voice, you the author; it is all those other voices which normally go unheard.”

“Beyond Lies the Wub,” Dick’s first published story, also dramatizes the concept of empathy. It tells the story of a pig-like alien captured and eventually eaten be a crew of space adventurers despite the fact that the wub possesses human characteristics. Captain Franco and his men lack the ability to see beneath the wub’s appearance. Twenty years later Dick said of the story”:

The idea I wanted to get down on paper had to do with the definition of “human.” The dramatic way I trapped the idea was to present ourselves, the literal humans, and then an alien life form that exhibits the deeper traits that I associate with humanity: not a biped with an enlarged cortex — a forked radish that thinks, to paraphrase the old saying — but an organism that is human in terms of its soul.

I’m sorry if the word “soul” offends you, but I can think of no other term. Certainly, when I wrote the story “Beyond Lies the Wub” back in my youth in politically active Berkeley, I myself would never have thought of the crucial ingredient in the wub being a soul; I was a fireball radical and atheist, and religion was totally foreign to me. However, even in those days (I was about twenty-two years old) I was casting about in an effort to contrast the truly human from what I was later to call the “android or reflex machine” that looks human but is not — the subject of the speech I gave in Vancouver in 1972 [“The Android and the Human,” included herein] — twenty years after “Beyond Lies the Wub” was published. The germ of the idea behind the speech lies in this, my first published story. It has to do with empathy, or, as it was called in earlier times, caritas or agape.

In this story, empathy (on the part of the wub, who looks like a big pig and has the feelings of a man) becomes an actual weapon for survival. Empathy is defined as the ability to put yourself in someone else’s place. The wub does this even better than we ordinarily suppose could be done: Its spiritual capacity is its literal salvation. The wub was my idea of a higher life form; it was then and it is now. On the other hand, Captain Franco (the name is deliberately based on General Franco of Spain, which is my concession in the story to political considerations) looks on other creatures in terms of sheer utility; they are objects to him, and he pays the ultimate price for this total failure of empathy. So I show empathy possessing a survival value; in terms of interspecies competition, empathy gives you the edge. Not a bad idea for a very early story by a very young person!

Two years after writing “The Wub,” Dick again explored the concept in “The Last of the Masters” (1954) and now he named it and actually called it empathy. In the story a young freedom fighter, Silvia, finally encounters the head of the coercive government and discovers he is a robot. She says in horror, “My God, you have no understanding of us. You run all this, and you’re incapable of empathy. You’re nothing but a mechanical computer.”

By the second period of Dick’s fiction when he writes his great novels of the 1960s, empathy is regularly used as the key element defining the authentic human being. the concept is made concrete most vividly in “The Little Black Box,” published in 1964. Dick then incorporates the black empathy box in Do Androids Dream where those like J.R. Isidore who use it regularly gain the strength to climb up through the difficulties of their daily lives. Beyond that, the power of empathy frees the individual from the prison house of his own consciousness and allows him to slip through the mirror forever reflecting back his own image. Once beyond, he sees the world from an alien consciousness to which he gives the same rights and worth as his own awareness. All life, not just his own, becomes sacred.

At first glance, Dick seems to be a contemporary writer who in many ways espouses an old-fashioned moral view that places him in the long tradition of humanistic writers. From the beginning, his writing insists that each individual has a responsibility to act in a moral way, even though that early fiction makes no reference to God. And of course by the end of his career, the novels focus on the major concepts of the Judeo-Christian tradition. While these concepts are never accepted in their entirety – in fact they are almost always revised – they are never denied or negated.

A closer examination of Dick’s moral code, however, shows us that given the complexities of the contemporary world, the values of traditional Christian humanists are too simple to be workable. He develops a code of valor that is much more demanding. Choice is no longer a choice between good and evil, as the moralist in an earlier age would have declared. Today the problem facing each man is that even when he practices empathy and yearns to make the right moral choice, he often finds himself in a moral dilemma where in order to do right he must also do wrong. Again and again the Dickian hero is faced with this tragic choice: to do the right thing he must violate his own moral nature: for example, Tagomi, Glen Runciter, Joseph Adams, Joe Chip, Rick Deckard. The moral road is not an easy one. The critical metaphor for this arduous journey is the upward climb – Wilbur Mercer on the hill, Joe Chip on the stairs.

In an interview near the end of his life Dick once again reinforced his belief that moral values are the ultimate values: “In a sense what I’m saying is that all life is a moral issue. Which is a very Jewish idea. The Hebrew idea about god is that God is found in morality, not in epistemology. That is where the Almighty exists, in the moral area. It isn’t just what I said once, that in Hebrew monotheism ethics devolve directly god. that’s not it. It’s that God and ethics are so interwoven that where you have one you have the other.”

Dick is an iconoclastic literary figure. His fiction refuses to conform to the characteristics of any particular category. Because he uses many of the techniques of science fiction, he is customarily labeled as a writer in that genre. But the strong, often overwhelming, elements of realism in his fiction – novels Martian Time-Slip and Dr. Bloodmoney, for example – make that label somewhat inaccurate. In many ways he seems to fit into the tradition of Absurdist literature, and he readily admitted the influence in his formative stage of Beckett, Genet, and other Absurdist dramatists. The typical Absurd hero inhabits a grotesque world whose structures violate reason and common sense but are nevertheless true. He is constantly frustrated, muddled, or horrified by the inexplicable events that seem to happen only to him and finally lead him in paranoiac panic to decide that Fate is deliberately playing pranks on him. Not the Fall of Man but his pratfalls are the concern of the Absurdist writer. So, too, are pratfalls often Dick’s concerns. Yet in fuller assessment, we find that Dick does not fit neatly into this category because he refuses to give in to the nihilism of the French Absurdists.

Dick on occasion proclaimed himself a writer in the Romantic tradition who was particularly influenced by German Romanticism. He read Goethe and Schiller when he was young, and the works of Beethoven and other German romantic composers were among his favorites. His intuitive mode of creativity and his emotional excesses characterize him as a romantic, as does his rebellion against all institutions that violate individual freedom. “I’m a Sturm and Drang romantic,” he himself declares in one interview.

When we continue to look for Dick’s literary ancestors, we discover that the ones from which he is rooted most directly are the metaphysical poets. Dick claimed them as among his favorite poets and uses quotations from Vaughan and Marvell and Donne in his fiction. For example, he quotes Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV, “Batter my Heart, three person’d God,” in its entirety in Timothy Archer. His four chambered metaphors resemble metaphysical conceits with their concentrated images that involve an element of dramatic contrast, or strain, or of intellectual difficulty. Like Donne, he uses a colloquial style. Both writers are obsessed with the idea of death and treat it again and again in their works. So, too, do both writers blend wit and seriousness, intense feelings and vast erudition.

A discussion of literary influences is not a discussion of the essence of Dick’s fiction because his literary voice is unique. He is an eclectic, choosing and using ideas, techniques, and quotations from the literary tradition as he creates in his own distinctive form. He is a synthesizer but never an imitator. the bibliography accompanying Timothy Archer demonstrates the wide range of literature that yielded material to him: the Bible, works of Aeschylus, Plato, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Donne, Vaughan, Goethe, Schiller, Yeats, to name the major writers. In this final novel Dick felt free to reveal his debt to and use of the great literary tradition, a use that he hid under cryptic allusions in most of his science fiction.

Time must be  the judge of Dick’s literary worth. If, as some of us suspect it will, Time does declare him one of the major writers of the twentieth century, he will be hailed as the synthesizer of a new literary form yoking realism and the fantastic. The novels to which I have given major attention in this study (with the possible exception of A Scanner Darkly) all succeed in this new form, for which I have chosen the term quantum-reality fiction. Dick’s fiction gives too little emphasis to science to be called true science fiction. It gives too much emphasis to the real world to be called fantasy. It violates common-sense reality too often to be called realistic fiction. He sees with a new vision as he creates imaginary worlds for his reader – a vision that declares all worlds to be fictions, brought into existence by the consciousness of the creator. Man faces the void and keeps it at bay only by the power of his intelligence to create forms.

The universe where Dick’s characters live when they fall out of commonsense reality is built on concepts that are a part of quantum physics. As physicists describe it, quantum reality is evasive and seems forever to hide beyond direct observation. Quantum physicists do not entirely agree about the nature of quantum reality, except in labeling it as bizarre. A contemporary physicist notes, “if we take the claims [of some outspoken physicists] at face value, the stories physicists tell resemble the tales of mystics and madmen… Not ignorance, but the emergence of unexpected knowledge forces on us all new visions of the way things really are.” Quantum theory holds that all elementary events occur at random, governed only by statistical laws. And Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle forbids an accurate knowledge of a quantum particle’s position and momentum. Beyond that, the prevailing quantum theory holds that there is no reality without the act of observation. Dick’s fiction catches the essence of this quantum reality, and he is probably the first writer of fiction to have done so.

In addition to his creation of quantum reality fiction, Dick also deserves recognition for the development of the complex four-chambered metaphor that allows him to picture the dialectical mode of the human mind as it moves in the process of thinking.

Beyond his accomplishments as a writer, Dick merits recognition for his accomplishments as a human. He struggled to live by his code of valor. In the face of great adversity, he survived and created. He was a tortured genius, condemned to live within a brilliant mind that compulsively drove itself to gather up and live out all the anxiety, pain, and torment of our age. Perhaps he needed so to suffer before he could transform our shared experiences into literature. Perhaps he did not choose but worked heroically in the shadow of a mental illness from which he had no escape. He is not the first writer to be so tortured. I recently reread a biography of Virginia Woolf which describes her struggle to write in the face of repeated nervous breakdowns, and I noted how similar Dick’s life was in this respect. He was less fortunate than she; he had no lifetime spouse like Leonard Woolf to shelter him economically and emotionally and to publish his works.

Dick’s life was a quest for meaning, a struggle with the great metaphysical problem of our time – how to reconcile what he knew in his head with what he knew in his heart. He identified himself with his little men, unheroic protagonists who endure in the face of great adversity, going quietly about their work. His work was writing and he, too, went about it quietly, eschewing publicity. Through all the mental and physical illness he never stopped writing for more than a brief time. He never lost faith in the power of literature to create a shared consciousness for the community of men. Looking at our strife-torn world, he said:

The key is this. We must shape a joint dream that differs for and from each of us, but it must harmonize in the sense that it must not exclude and negate from section to section. How this is to be done I can’t of course say; maybe it can’t be done. But… if two people dream the same dream it ceases to be an illusion; the sole prior test that distinguished reality from hallucination was the consensus gentium, that one other or several others saw it, too. This is the idios kosmos, the private dream, contrasted to the shared dream of us all, the koinos kosmos. What is new in our time is that we are begining to see the plastic, trembling quality of the koinos kosmos – which scares us, its insubstantiality – and the more-the-merrier-vapor quality of the hallucination. Like science fiction, a third reality is formed half way between.

In his writing Dick shared with us his private dreams and his nightmares about this new reality in the future toward which we move. He said he was disturbed by those reviewers who found only bitterness and pessimism in his fiction because his mood was one of trust. “Perhaps,” he said, “they are bothered by the fact that what I trust is so very small. They want something vaster. I have news for them; there is nothing vaster.” For Dick all that one could trust was the capacity of the ordinary person to act with courage when courage is required. He explained, “To me the great joy in writing a book is showing some small person, some ordinary person doing something in a moment of great valor, for which he would get nothing and which would be unsung in the real world. the book, then, is the song about his valor.”

Perhaps this book can be regarded at least in part as a song about the valor of Philip K. Dick. For he continued to write over the years, hounded by poverty, often depressed, and ignored by the mainstream literary world where he hoped for recognition. He lived in a sea of emotional disaster, he was often ill, he used drugs, he alienated his friends, he destroyed five marriages… Yet incredibly he wrote well over forty novels and one hundred short stories, and at least eight of those novels, the ones we have examined in detail, seem likely to become classics. He was one of the most courageous of writers, a man who lived by his own code of valor.

5 Reasons Why Anarchy Would be an Improvement in Human Governance

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By Gary ‘Z’ McGee

Source: Waking Times

“Give a man a gun and he’ll rob a bank. Give a man a bank and he’ll rob the world.” –Unknown

Give people just a little bit of knowledge and courage and they will track down those greedy-ass bankers and hold them accountable. All we need is just a little courageous anarchy. The problem, the crux, the fly in the ointment: most people are not courageous enough, and most people don’t want to learn anything that attacks their all-too-precious worldview. Yes, the very worldview that is keeping people indebted to an immoral, unhealthy, unsustainable, unjust system of human governance, is precisely the worldview that the majority of people are clinging to. Indeed, most people, even though they would probably say otherwise, would rather be kissed with a lie than slapped with the truth. They would rather deny facts that tarnish their worldview than reject the deceit that upholds it. But as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable. Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.”

Healthy human evolution requires authentic vigilance. It requires a consistent upheaval of the status quo. This requires proactive human beings who are willing to be authentically vigilant and consistently rebellious. It requires courageous interdependent individuals who dare to recondition the status-quo-junky original condition. It turns out that the wisdom gained from anarchy is precisely the ability to distinguish between sacrifice that is transformative and healthy from mere suffering caused by the state that we’ve allowed because we were too cowardly or too unimaginative to think of a healthier way to live. Like Stefan Molyneux said, “Never, ever underestimate the degree to which people will scatter themselves into a deep fog in order to avoid seeing the basic realities of their own cages. The strongest lock on the prison is always avoidance, not force.”

Here are five reasons why anarchy will improve human governance and thereby cultivate a healthy human evolution.

1.) It Has Inherent Checks and Balances

“Failure shows us the way –by showing us what isn’t the way.” –Ryan Holiday

This one alone is reason enough to give anarchy a try again. The other four are just icing on the cake. I say “again” because human beings lived in hunter-gatherer groups that were characterized by what anthropologists call Fierce Egalitarian Anarchy. They not only shared things, they demanded that things be shared: meat, shelter, and protection… this was simply the best way to mitigate risk in a survival context in a world with limited resources.

Fierce egalitarianism and primal politics (tribal anarchy) worked exceptionally well for the human race for 95% of our existence on this planet. Indeed, it’s one of the only reasons why we’ve survived as long as we have.

In an amazing game theory study by Duéñez-Guzmán-Sadedin on the topic of police corruption, they concluded that once a police system becomes entrenched, nothing can stop it from eventually becoming corrupt, with the result being a population of gullible sheep and hypocritical overlords. But they didn’t stop the study there. They decided to tweak it ever so slightly. In the words of Suzanne Sadedin: “The results were startling. By making a few alterations to the composition of the justice system, corrupt societies could be made to transition to a state called ‘righteousness’. In righteous societies, police were not a separate, elite order. They were everybody. When virtually all of society stood ready to defend the common good, corruption didn’t pay. Similarly, as it turns out, social norms in hunter-gatherer societies are enforced by the whole group rather than any specially empowered individuals.”

This is a critical aspect of anarchy: that everyone is free to be as moral, or as amoral, as they need to be in order to maintain a healthy cosmic, ecological, and social order. Freedom is primary. Health is secondary. Understanding how everything is connected is third. And immorality is not tolerated.

The monumental problem with our Statist society is that we are not taught to be as moral or as amoral as we need to be in order to maintain a healthy cosmic, ecological, and social order. In fact, statism purposefully forces whatever the state decrees to be healthy, as healthy, whether or not it is actually healthy according to cosmic law. This creates an exorbitant amount of problems.

2.) It Would Nullify Debt Slavery and Eliminate Poverty

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living in a society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” –Frederic Bastiat

How does our legal system authorize plunder? It allows banks to create fiat money out of thin air and then charge interest on it, which keeps the poor wallowing in poverty, and entrenches the rich in corruptible power structures based upon immoderate wealth.

How does our moral code glorify plunder? It pushes militarization, creates profit prisons, creates “war heroes” out of violent psychopaths, and makes war itself a profitable endeavor. It puts profit over people, equity over equality, transforms elections into auctions, and creates a fundamentally unsustainable and unhealthy money first, human heart second, mentality. Like Naseem Nicholas Taleb said, “Those who do not think that employment is systematic slavery are either blind or employed.”

How does anarchy flip the tables on the authorization and glorification of plunder? It prevents plunder from ever becoming possible because anarchy-based modes of governance are engineered in such a way that groups never get to the point of concentrated centers of power. The monopolization of power never gets to the point to where it becomes corrupt, because of controlled leveling mechanisms such as reverse dominance and wealth expiation. Like Jim Dodge said, “Anarchy doesn’t mean out of control; it means out of their control.” Whoever “they” may be: monopolizing corporations, overreaching governments, tyrants.

Self-aware critical thinker beware: political propaganda, especially in regards to war, money, government, and law, are designed to keep you conditioned and brainwashed into believing whoever is in power is being moral and just with their power. But as George Orwell warned, “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance to solidity to pure wind.”

Have no illusions: within the current systems of human governance, poverty is a business. Profits are made on the labor of the poor, the consumption of the poor, and the debt of the poor. Anarchy is a system of human governance built to lift people out of poverty and into freedom. It gives people hope for a more balanced future of human prosperity. Like Raymond Williams advised, “To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.”

3.) It Would Be Eco-Morally and Ecologically Healthier and More Sustainable

“The best teachers are those who show you where to look, but don’t tell you what to see.” –Alexandra K.Trenfor

Authority tells you what to see, and therefore must be questioned. Authority is telling you that it’s okay to live immoderate, over-indulgent, violent, ecocidal lifestyles. It’s not okay, because it is fundamentally unhealthy and leads to unsustainable devolution. In a system of human governance that is systematically transforming livingry into weaponry, it is the supreme duty of all healthy, moral, compassionate, eco-conscious, indeed anarchist, people to question authority to the nth degree.

Such audacious questioning has the potential to create robust eco-centric communities based upon permaculture, wellness, creativity, and a sacred economy that takes the interconnectedness of all things into deep consideration. It incentivizes individuals who value human flourishing, environmental flourishing, permaculture, sustainable building, alternative education, and nature-based wellness.

The cornerstone of anarchist modes of human governance is the deep understanding of the interdependence of all living things. As Nikola Tesla proclaimed, “Every living being is an engine geared to the wheelwork of the universe. Though seemingly affected only by its immediate surroundings, the sphere of external influence extends to infinite distance.”

An anarchist society divorced from the oppressive Big Brother bitch-slap of Statism, reveals a society that is capable of preserving the moral Golden Mean and the middle-way, as opposed to the immoral, suffocating greed of state politics. It will uncover a society that exemplifies the Golden Ratio of nature, as opposed to the state’s expropriation of nature and nature-based cultures.

4.) It Would Result in the Expiation of Power and Wealth Through an Ethics of Reciprocity

“A freedom that is interested only in denying freedom must be denied.” –Simone De Beauvoir

The ultimate leveling mechanism inherent within anarchist modes of human governance is the ethics of reciprocity combined with the expiation of power.

Anthropologist Christopher Boehm has proposed a social theory that anarchist, egalitarian hunter-gatherers maintained equality through a leveling mechanism he calls Reverse Dominance: a social system of checks and balances that maintains egalitarian ethos while preventing a dominance hierarchy from forming. Reverse dominance hierarchies are broken down into four different leveling mechanisms: public opinion, ridicule, disobedience, and ostracism. These mechanisms work because human beings are social creatures and hugely influenced by peer pressure and social acceptance.

Anarchist modes of human governance are largely based upon shame as a regulatory method. Within such a society individuals are socially, morally, and ecologically compelled to expiate their power and reciprocate wealth because the alternative is the risk of shaming, ridicule, and/or ostracism. Like A.C. Grayling explained it, “The first task is to win something; the second, to banish the feeling that has been won; otherwise it is a burden.” In order for power and wealth not to become a psychological burden within anarchist systems, the powerful and the wealthy must be able to expiate and reciprocate their power and wealth, lest people become oppressed, and entire systems become corrupt.

But this does NOT mean that skill, courage, intelligence and perseverance are not rewarded. Anarchy does not imply socialism. Ours is a cultural problem. We’ve been raised to believe in the false ideal of greed. We’ve been conditioned to own. Our culture has become ego-centric, as opposed to eco-centric. It has become ownership-based, as opposed to relationship-based.

But prestige and merit can still be highly strived for values within an anarchist society that practices expiation of wealth and the ethics of reciprocity.

As I wrote in Breaking out of a Broken System, “Eco-moralism tames capitalism through holistic checks and balances. Ego-moralism jumpstarts communism through proactive citizenry. What we’re left with is a healthy anarchism with an egalitarian ethos which is less about capital and one-upmanship and more about respect for what is borrowed. It is less about ownership and more about relationships. It is ethical, spiritual, and diverse; as opposed to egotistical, religious, and homogenized by nationalism. Eco-moralism helps us pierce through the smoke and mirrors of hyper-reality and into the way reality actually is: interconnected and interdependent. Ego-moralism helps us become more motivated by revealing that our egos are actually tools towards leveraging a healthy balance between cosmos and psyche.”

Anarchists are crazy enough to think they can change the world, which is precisely why they will.

5.) It Would Create Compassionate, Humble, but Courageous Leadership

“To really understand something is to be liberated from it. Dedicating one’s self to a great cause, taking responsibility, and gaining self-knowledge is the essence of being human. A predatory capitalist’s greatest enemy, and humanity’s greatest ally, is the self-educated individual who has read, understood, delays their gratification, and walks around with their eyes wide open.” –The Four Horsemen, documentary

Anarchist modes of human governance create precisely the type of self-educated, autodidactic individual that predatory capitalist’s and pacifist socialist’s fear. As Louis G. Herman wrote, “When individuals try to balance self-interest with a consideration of the bigger picture, they discover, as Socrates did, that deep self-interest actually includes concern for the good of the whole.” An individual (ego) acting on the good of the whole (eco) is a force of nature first, a person second, which provides them the phenomenal power of standing on the shoulders of giants while also wearing a wide array of masks of self-mastery.

If we can combine fierce egalitarian primal politics along with the type of progressive self-interested people who are capable of considering the bigger interdependent picture, then we have a recipe for a healthy, prestigious anarchic leadership. We have a blueprint for authentically venerated and wise leadership that has the potential to transform the currently unlivable human world into a livable one. Like MLK Jr. said, “The hope of a secure livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists, who are dedicated to justice, peace, and brotherhood. The trailblazers in human, academic, scientific, and spiritual freedom have always been nonconformists. In any cause that concerns the progress of mankind, put your faith in the nonconformist.”

Indeed, it is typically the nonconformist who is the one testing the outer limits of the human imagination: stretching comfort zones, shattering mental paradigms, and flattening status quo boxes that those hooked on conformity so desperately try to think outside of. As Henry David Thoreau said, in true anarchist leadership form, “I was not designed to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.”

 

Related video – This has to be the best 5 minutes ever aired on Fox News (that may seem like faint praise but it’s a rare treat to find such an on point rant anywhere on cable television):

The Root of Support for the Drug War

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By Laurence M. Vance

Source: The Future of Freedom Foundation

Although many states have legalized the use of marijuana for medical purposes, some states have decriminalized the possession of certain amounts of marijuana, and four states (Alaska, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington) have legalized the recreational use of marijuana, bipartisan support for the drug war throughout the United States continues unabated and unquestioned.

Why?

Why do so many Americans think that the property of other Americans should be confiscated, and that some of their fellow Americans should be fined, arrested, put on probation, subject to no-knock SWAT team raids, be treated as criminals, or locked in a cage for growing, manufacturing, processing, buying, selling, distributing, “trafficking in,” using, or possessing some substance the government doesn’t approve of?

Why do so many Americans support a war on drugs that

  • unnecessarily makes criminals out of otherwise law-abiding Americans, clogs the judicial system with noncrimes, and expands the prison population with nonviolent offenders;
  • violates the Constitution, the principle of federalism, and increases the size and scope of government;
  • has utterly failed to prevent drug use, reduce drug abuse, or end drug overdoses;
  • fosters violence, corrupts law enforcement, and militarizes the police;
  • hinders legitimate pain management, hampers the treatment of debilitating diseases, and turns doctors into criminals;
  • destroys personal and financial privacy, and negates personal responsibility and accountability;
  • has been unsuccessful in keeping drugs out of the hands of addicts, teenagers, and convicts;
  • assaults individual liberty, private property, and the free market; or
  • wastes billions of taxpayer dollars and has financial and human costs that far exceed any of its supposed benefits?

I see a number of reasons that Americans in general support a government war on the mind-altering and mood-altering substances we refer to as drugs.

For some the reason is history. As far as many Americans are concerned, drugs have always been illegal and should therefore always remain so. It is simply unthinkable that it should be any other way. Yet, for the first half of our nation’s history there were no prohibitions against anyone’s possessing or using any drug.

For some the reason is society. The use of marijuana — for medical reasons or not — is still viewed negatively. And of course the use of other drugs such as cocaine, LSD, and heroin is disparaged even more. There is almost universal support for the drug war among all facets of society: engineers, teachers, preachers, physicians, clerks, accountants, secretaries, and housewives. But, of course, it doesn’t follow that because a majority of society supports something the power of government should be used against those who don’t.

For some the reason is political. The war on drugs enjoys widespread bipartisan support. Liberals, conservatives, Democrats, Republicans, moderates, populists, progressives, centrists, Tea Partiers — they all generally support government prohibition of certain drugs. The drug war is never an issue in any congressional primary or general election. As long as their party or their political group supports the drug war, most Americans will follow suit. The decision to use drugs should be an ethical, religious, medical, or moral decision, not a political decision.

For some the reason is religion. Support for the drug war can be found across the religious spectrum, encompassing Christians and Jews, Protestants and Catholics, liberals and conservatives, fundamentalists and progressives, and Trinitarians and Unitarians. Yet, there is no ethical precept in any religion that should lead anyone to believe that it is the job of government to prohibit, prevent, regulate, restrict, or otherwise control any substance that any adult desires to ingest of his own free will.

For some the reason is morality. Because, some assert, it is immoral to alter one’s mind or mood with illegal drugs, the government should ban the use of these substances. Do drug warriors likewise believe that it is immoral to alter one’s mind or mood with alcohol? If not, then they are woefully inconsistent in their proscription; if so, then they are woefully inconsistent in their prescription.

Dangers and vices

For some the reason is safety. Because it can be dangerous to use illicit drugs, some think the government should ban them. Yet there is no question that smoking marijuana is less dangerous than drinking alcohol. Alcohol abuse is a factor in many drownings; home, pedestrian, car, and boating accidents; and fires. How many drug warriors propose that the government ban alcohol? There are plenty of things that are much more dangerous than using illicit drugs: skydiving, bungee jumping, coal mining, boxing, mountain climbing, cliff diving, drag racing — even crossing the street at a busy intersection. According to the Journal of Forensic Sciences, there are more than 28,000 chainsaw-related injuries annually in the United States. Shouldn’t governments across the country declare war on chainsaws?

For some the reason is vice. Using drugs is said to be a vice like gambling, profanity, drunkenness, using pornography, and prostitution. But as only the latter is actually banned outright by the government, arguments for government action against select drugs are extremely weak. And what about the vices of pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust? Why don’t drug warriors advocate government action against them? Vices in 2014 are still as the 19th-century political philosopher Lysander Spooner explained:

Vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property. Crimes are those acts by which one man harms the person or property of another. Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others, and no interference with their persons or property.

For some the reason is health. The use of mind-altering and mood-altering substances is said to be unhealthy. The federal government classifies marijuana as a Schedule I drug with “no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.” But even if drugs such as marijuana don’t provide benefits for certain diseases and medical conditions, they are certainly not nearly as deadly as the drugs administered by physicians that kill thousands of Americans every year, the drugs that cause thousands of hospital patients every year to have adverse reactions, and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs such as aspirin that kill thousands every year. The most unhealthy drug is alcohol, which is a contributing factor in many cases of cancer, mental illness, fetal abnormalities, and cirrhosis of the liver. Alcohol abuse is one of the leading causes of premature deaths in the United States. There is no question that smoking marijuana is less dangerous than smoking tobacco. Common sense would dictate that it is tobacco that should be banned, not marijuana. And of course, the greatest health threat Americans face is obesity, not illegal drugs.

For some the reason is addiction. Certain drugs should be illegal, we are told, because they are addictive. The federal government says that marijuana “has a high potential for abuse.” But is that because it is addictive or because some people just want to get high? Legal drugs prescribed by physicians are certainly just as addictive as any drugs that are illegal. And of course, pornography, smoking, gambling, sex, shopping, and eating can be addictive. Drug warriors are very selective about which addictive behaviors deserve government action.

For some the reason is irrationality. Although every bad thing that could be said about drugs could also be said about alcohol, some drug warriors hold the irrational belief that drugs are just different from alcohol. Why? Because they just are.

For all, the reason is government. I believe the root of support for the drug war is simply this: trust in government. Unnecessary, irrational, and naive trust in government.

What’s so disturbing is that nowhere does the Constitution authorize the federal government to intrude itself into the personal eating, drinking, or smoking habits of Americans or concern itself with the nature and quantity of any substance Americans want to ingest. The Constitution is supposed to be the foundation of American government. The federal government is not supposed to have the authority to do anything unless it is included in the limited, enumerated powers granted to it in the Constitution. Yet some of the ardent enthusiasts of the Constitution are some of the most rabid drug warriors.

The war on drugs is a war on individual liberty, private property, limited government, the Constitution, American taxpayers, personal responsibility, the free market, and a free society that has ruined more lives than drugs themselves.

Every facet of government that contributes in some way to the monstrous evil that is the war on drugs should be dismembered, root and branch, and cast to the four winds.

This article was originally published in the January 2015 edition of Future of Freedom.

Are Babies Moral Beings?

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By Leanne Italie, AP

Are we naturally good or naturally evil? Cognitive scientist Paul Bloom argues in a new book that we’re both.

In “Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil” (Crown), the developmental psychologist and Yale professor takes on the nature of morality and vast research spanning evolutionary biology to philosophy, drawing on everyone from Sigmund Freud to Louis C.K.

His conclusion? Babies have the capacity for empathy and compassion, possess a limited understanding of justice and have the ability to judge. Yet they navigate not along colour lines but as Us versus Them, usually landing squarely in the Us camp.

A conversation with Paul Bloom:

AP: What light do you shed on the “moral sense” of babies?

Bloom: We’re born with this extraordinary moral sense. A sense of right and wrong just comes naturally to humans and shows up in the youngest babies we can study. But this morality is limited. I think tragically limited. So we are morally attuned to those around us, to our kin, to our friends, to those we interact with, and we are utterly cold-blooded toward strangers. To some extent I think babies are natural-born bigots. They are strongly attuned to break the world into Us versus Them and have no moral feelings at all toward the Them, and this shows up all through development.

So in some way, although a lot of morality is inborn, I think the great success of humans … is expanding and transcending this inborn morality. You and I believe that, you know, not only is it wrong to kill somebody, it’s wrong to kill somebody from anywhere around the world. We might also agree that we’re obliged to help people in trouble, even if they look different from us or are from a different land.

We have notions of fairness and equity and justice that, again, extend more broadly, and although we might favour our own group in some ways, consciously or unconsciously, we’re probably not racist. We probably think that racism is wrong, and that a good moral system should treat all humans more or less the same, but none of that is present in the mind of a baby.

AP: Is it a revelation that we create the environments that can transform a partially moral baby into a very moral adult?

Bloom: I think in some sense it is not. I think any good parent knows that you raise a kid into a moral kid not by, you know, imparting moral lessons and making moral pronouncements, but by shaping the environment in ways that bring out our better selves. When you want to make people good people you don’t just say, ‘Oh, try real hard.’ You try to structure their environment so as to bring out their better aspects.

AP: Is that surprising?

Bloom: I think it’s surprising the extent to which it works and the extent to which the alternative fails. So, for instance, many people believe that giving people moral stories, expressing through literature moral values, has a profound effect on people’s lives. The actual evidence says it has no effect at all. It’s just zero. In fact, there are some studies showing that if you give kids stories about being generous and kind it paradoxically makes them a little bit meaner, roughly between the ages of 4 and 10. Preaching in general with kids often backfires.

AP: Where do serial killers come from?

Bloom: Serial killers are very unusual people. … We know that there’s genetic differences in people’s empathy, in people’s compassion and how much they care about other people, in their ability to control violent rages, for example, and I’m sure a serial killer is somebody who has the genetic short end of the stick. Then you toss in certain environments. Your typical serial killer had a very unhappy childhood.

AP: What about being hard-wired at birth?

Bloom: Some people are more likely to be serial killers than other people due to accidents of genes. I am far more likely to be a murderer or a rapist or a serial killer than you are because I’m a man. There’s some evidence that people who turn out to be psychopaths, even murderous psychopaths, have the short end of the genetic stick but there’s all sorts of environmental factors. … Fifty years ago, slapping one’s wife or raping one’s wife would be viewed as comical, legitimate, certainly not a crime. Now it’s the sort of thing that only a monster would do, and so we have tremendous evidence for profound changes that have nothing to do with genes.

AP: You discuss “hodgepodge morality.” Is there such a thing in babies?

Bloom: I think we naturally have multiple moral systems, multiple responses. Some of our responses are created by disgust, some by empathy, some by a sense of justice, some by a sense of fairness, some by self-interest. We respond to kin, to our family members in different ways than we respond to strangers in all sorts of ways that don’t fall into any elegant philosophical theory. And I think this is true for babies, too.

Babies are moral beings but they aren’t moral philosophers. They don’t have some sort of coherent theory. Rather they have a series of gut reactions, a series of moral triggers that they respond to. What we find in our research is all sorts of moral capacities on the part of babies. What we don’t find is some kind of careful, contemplative theory.

AP: Is that a bad thing?

Bloom: It isn’t. It’s the way we are, one way or another, but if you set yourself the task of constructing a society where everybody lives and everybody follows the same rules and adheres to the same notions, then you do want to some degree a consistent and coherent theory.

So it may be a good theory of psychology to say that a white person naturally cares a lot more toward another white person than toward a black person, and that’s an instinctive response that could develop in certain societies, but from the standpoint of constructing a theory of what actually is good, how we should live our lives, we would say, ‘Well that’s too hodgepodge for us. It’s inconsistent. It’s actually a cruel way for the mind to work.’

AP: You write about conflicts in research on racial bias in young children.

Bloom: For kids there’s a lot of evidence that they’re very strongly biased on Us versus Them if you get them to do it on the basis of things like different colored T-shirts, for example, but race and skin colour isn’t an automatic way of dividing up the world. So you take a two- or three-year-old and typically a two- or three-year-old shows no signs of being racist in any way. When you get older, if kids are in an environment when blacks and whites interact and they’re totally mellow with each other and there’s not much conflict, they’ll see black and white but it won’t matter at all. If you’re in an environment where it matters then it will matter.

Children are extremely prone and very ready to divide the world into groups, but the groups that they focus on is determined through learning.