Radical Priorities, Pages 119-120:

In attempting to assess a new Administration in the United States, it is important to bear in mind the extraordinarily narrow spectrum of political discourse and the limited base of political power, a fact that distinguishes the United States from many other industrial democracies. The United States is unique in that there is no organized force committed to even mild and reformist varieties of socialism. The two political parties, which some refer to, not inaccurately, as the two factions of the single ‘Property Party,’ are united in their commitment to capitalist ideology and institutions. For most of the period since the Second World War, they have adhered to a ‘bipartisan foreign policy,’ which is to say, a one-party state as far as foreign affairs are concerned. The parties differ on occasion with regard to the role of the State, the Democrats generally tending to favor slight increases in state intervention in social and economic affairs, the Republicans tending to favor greater emphasis on private corporate power. Thus, under a Democratic Administration, there are likely to be some moves toward ‘welfare state’ policies along with a more aggressive foreign policy, as the State pursues a more interventionist program at home and abroad. But these distinctions between ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’ are only marginal in their significance and are at most slight tendencies rather than serious alternatives.

The domestic sources of power remain basically unchanged, whatever the electoral outcome. The major decision-making positions in the executive branch of the government, which increasingly dominates domestic and foreign policy, remain overwhelmingly in the hands of representatives of major corporations and the few law firms that cater primarily to corporate interests – thus representing generalized interests of corporate capitalism as distinct from parochial interests of one or another sector of the private economy. It is hardly surprising, then, that the basic function of the State remains the regulation of domestic and international affairs in the interest of the masters of the private economy, a fact studiously ignored in the press and academic scholarship, but apparent on investigation of the actual design and execution of policy over many years.

In fact, if some Administration were to depart in a significant way from the interests of highly concentrated private corporate power, its behavior would quickly be modified by a variety of simple techniques. Basic decisions concerning the health and functioning of the economy – hence social life in general – remain in the private sector. Decisions made in this realm set the conditions and define the framework within which the political process unfolds. By modifying the economic factors under their control, business interests can sharply constrain actions within the political sphere. But the issue rarely arises, since, as noted, the government, including those who manage the state sector of the economy, remains basically in the hands of private capital in any event.

Extra-governmental sources of ideas and programs are also, naturally, dominated by those who control the basic institutions of production, finance, and commerce.

He wrote those words in an article examining the prospects of an incoming Democratic Administration… in 1977.

But a man with a gun is told only that which people assume will not provoke him to pull the trigger. Since all authority and government are based on force, the master class, with its burden of omniscience, faces the servile class, with its burden of omniscience, precisely as a highwayman faces his victim. Communication is possible only between equals. The master class never abstracts enough information from the servile class to know what is actually going on in the world where the actual productivity of society occurs. Furthermore, the logogram of any authoritarian society remains fairly inflexible as time passes, but everything else in the universe constantly changes. The result can only be progressive disorientation among the rulers. The end is debacle.

The schizophrenia of authoritarianism exists both in the individual and in the whole society.

I call this the Snafu Principle.

From Never Whistle While You’re Pissing, by Hagbard Celine.

(Celine is a fictional (?) character in the Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Bob Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. Celine’s treatise appears in the second book of the trilogy, The Golden Apple.)

[Click above to download a PDF of this poster]

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was so moved by [Thich] Nhat Hanh and his proposals for peace that he nominated him for the 1967 Nobel Peace Prize, saying, “I know of no one more worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize than this gentle monk from Vietnam.” Largely due to Thich Nhat Hanh’s influence, King came out publicly against the war at a press conference, with Nhat Hanh, in Chicago.

Thich Nhat Hanh is a true teacher:

Peace is present right here and now, in ourselves and in everything we do and see. The question is whether or not we are in touch with it. We don’t have to travel far away to enjoy the blue sky. We don’t have to leave our city or even our neighborhood to enjoy the eyes of a beautiful child. Even the air we breathe can be a source of joy.

We can smile, breathe, walk, and eat our meals in a way that allows us to be in touch with the abundance of happiness that is available. We are very good at preparing to live, but not very good at living. We know how to sacrifice ten years for a diploma, and we are willing to work very hard to get a job, a car, a house, and so on. But we have difficulty remembering that we are alive in the present moment, the only moment there is for us to be alive. Every breath we take, every step we make, can be filled with peace, joy, and serenity. We need only to be awake, alive in the present moment.

In 1952, the American scholar Carl Mayer, a Jewish man with German heritage, spent a year living and teaching in West Germany. He explains why in his Foreward (page xvii):

I wanted to see this monstrous man, the Nazi. I wanted to talk to him and to listen to him. I wanted to try to understand him. We were both men, he and I. In rejecting the Nazi doctrine of racial superiority, I had to concede that what he had been I might be; what led him along the course he took might lead me.

The book is devastating in the way that it speaks to us, today, in the United States.

Page 166:

“What no one seemed to notice,” said a colleague of mine, a philologist, “was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.

“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

“This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

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Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.

“But which is the stone that supports the bridge?” Kublai Khan asks.

“The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,” Marco answers, “but by the line of the arch that they form.”

Kublai Kahn remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: “Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.”

Polo answers: “Without stones there is no arch.”

Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino, 1972. Translated from the Italian by William Weaver, 1974.

Arguably one of Kurt Vonnegut’s greatest novels:

Pages 76-77:

“Mr. Constant,” he said, “right now you’re as easy for the Bureau of Internal Revenue to watch as a man on a street corner selling apples and pears. But just imagine how hard you would be to watch if you had a whole office building jammed to the rafters with industrial bureaucrats—men who lose things and use the wrong forms and create new forms and demand everything in quintuplicate, and who understand perhaps a third of what is said to them; who habitually give misleading answers in order to gain time in which to think, who make decisions only when forced to, and who then cover their tracks; who make perfectly honest mistakes in addition and subtraction, who call meetings whenever they feel lonely, who write memos whenever they feel unloved; men who never throw anything away unless they think it could get them fired. A single industrial bureaucrat, if he is sufficiently vital and nervous, should be able to create a ton of meaningless papers a year for the Bureau of Internal Revenue to examine.”

Page 163:

“The lieutenant colonel realized for the first time what most people never realize about themselves—that he was not only a victim of outrageous fortune, but one of outrageous fortune’s cruelest agents as well.”

Page 169:

The only controls available to those on board were two push-buttons on the center post of the cabin—one labeled on and one labeled off. The on button simply started a flight from Mars. The off button was connected to nothing. It was installed at the insistence of Martian mental-health experts, who said that human beings were always happier with machinery they thought they could turn off.

Page 176:

“Any man who would change the World in a significant way must have showmanship, a genial willingness to shed other people’s blood, and a plausible new religion to introduce during the brief period of repentance and horror that usually follows bloodshed.”

Pages 182-183:

“Their wish, when they died,” said Rumfoord, “was not for paradise for themselves, but that the brotherhood of mankind on Earth might be enduring.”

“To that end, devoutly to be wished,” said Rumfoord, “I bring you word of a new religion that can be received enthusiastically in every corner of every Earthling heart.”

“National borders,” said Rumfoord, “will disappear.”

“The lust for war,” said Rumfoord, “will die.”

“All envy, all fear, all hate will die,” said Rumfoord.

“The name of the new religion,” said Rumfoord, “is The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent.”

“The flag of that church will be blue and gold,” said Rumfoord. “These words will be written on that flag in gold letters on a blue field: Take Care of the People, and God Almighty Will Take Care of Himsef.”

“The two chief teachings of this religion are these,” said Rumfoord: “Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and Luck is not the hand of God.”

Pages 216-217:

“You come and tell me the big news,” said Boaz. ” ‘Boaz—’ you say, ‘we’re going to be free!’ And I get all excited, and I drop everything I’m doin’, and I get set to be free.”

“And I keep saying it over to myself about how I’m going to be free,” said Boaz, “and then I try to think what that’s going to be like, and all I can see is people. They push me this way, then they push me that—and nothing pleases ‘em, and they get madder and madder, on account of nothing makes ‘em happy. And they holler at me on account of I ain’t made ‘em happy, and we all push and pull some more.”

“And then, all of a sudden,” said Boaz, “I remember all the crazy little animals I been making so happy so easy with music. And I go find thousands of ‘em lying around dead, on account of Boaz forgot all about ‘em, he was so excited about being free. And every’ one of them lost lives I could have saved, if I’d have just kept my mind on what I was doing.”

“And then I say to myself,” said Boaz, ” ‘I ain’t never been nothing good to people, and people never been nothing good to me. So what I want to be free in crowds of people for?’ ”

“And then I knew what I was going to say to you, Unk, when I got back here,” said Boaz.

Boaz now said it:

“I found me a place where I can do good without doing any harm, and I can see I’m doing good, and them I’m doing good for know I’m doing it, and they love me, Unk, as best they can. I found me a home.”

“And when I die down here some day,” said Boaz, “I’m going to be able to say to myself, ‘Boaz—you made millions of lives worth living. Ain’t nobody ever spread more joy. You ain’t got an enemy in the Universe.’ ” Boaz became for himself the affectionate Mama and Papa he’d never had. ” ‘You go to sleep now,’ ” he said to himself, imagining himself on a stone deathbed in the caves. ” ‘You’re a good boy, Boaz,’ ” he said. ” ‘Good night.’ “

Pages 279-280:

Once upon a time on Tralfamadore there were creatures who weren’t anything like machines. They weren’t dependable. They weren’t efficient. They weren’t predictable. They weren’t durable. And these poor creatures were obsessed by the idea that everything that existed had to have a purpose, and that some purposes were higher than others.

These creatures spent most of their time trying to find out what their purpose was. And every time they found out what seemed to be a purpose of themselves, the purpose seemed so low that the creatures were filled with disgust and shame.

And, rather than serve such a low purpose, the creatures would make a machine to serve it. This left the creatures free to serve higher purposes. But whenever they found a higher purpose, the purpose still wasn’t high enough.

So machines were made to serve higher purposes, too.

And the machines did everything so expertly that they were finally given the job of finding out what the highest purpose of the creatures could be.

The machines reported in all honesty that the creatures couldn’t really be said to have any purpose at all.

The creatures thereupon began slaying each other, because they hated purposeless things above all else.

And they discovered that they weren’t even very good at slaying. So they turned that job over to the machines, too. And the machines finished up the job in less time than it takes to say, “Tralfamadore.”

Page 294:

At first glance, the laboratory-gowned scientist seemed to be a perfect servant of nothing but truth. At first glance, one was convinced that nothing but truth could please him as he beamed at his test tube. At first glance, one thought that he was as much above the beastly concerns of mankind as the harmoniums in the caves of Mercury. There, at first glance, was a young man without vanity, without lust—and one accepted at its face value the title Salo had engraved on the statue, Discovery of Atomic Power.

And then one perceived that the young truth-seeker had a shocking erection.

Page 302:

“Whatever we’ve said, friends, we’re saying still—such as it was, such as it is, such as it will be.”

Page 320:

“You finally fell in love, I see,” said Salo.

“Only an Earthling year ago,” said Constant. “It took us that long to realize that a purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”

In “Consent Without Consent,” from Profit Over People, Professor Noam Chomsky offers clarity and insight into the workings of our modern democratic system (pages 43-44):

The issues were addressed 250 years ago by David Hume in a classic work. Hume was intrigued by “the easiness with which the many are governed by the few, the implicit submission with which men resign” their fate to their rulers. This he found surprising, because “force is always on the side of the governed.” IF people would realize that, they would rise up and overthrow the masters. He concluded that government is founded on control of opinion, a principle that “extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular.”

Hume surely underestimated the effectiveness of brute force. A more accurate version is that the more “free and popular” a government, the more it becomes necessary to rely on control of opinion to ensure submission to the rulers.

That people must submit is taken for granted pretty much across the spectrum. In a democracy, the governed have the right to consent, but nothing more than that. In the terminology of modern progressive thought, the population may be “spectators,” but not “participants,” apart from occasional choices among leaders representing authentic power. That is the political arena. The general population must be excluded entirely from the economic arena, where what happens in the society is largely determined. Here the public is to have no role, according to prevailing democratic theory.

Page 52:

Madison soon learn differently, as the “opulent minority” proceeded to use their newfound power much as Adam Smith had predicted a few years earlier. They were intent on pursuing what Smith called the “vile maxim” of the masters, “All for ourselves, and nothing for other people.” By 1792 Madison warned that the rising developmental capitalist state was “substituting the motive of private interest in place of public duty,” leading to a “a real domination of the few under an apparent liberty of the many.” He deplored “the daring depravity of the times,” as private powers “become the pretorian band of the government—at once its tools and its tyrant, bribed by its largesses, and overawing it by clamors and combinations.” They cast over society the shadow that we call “politics,” as John Dewey later commented. One of the major twentieth century philosophers and a leading figure of North American liberalism, Dewey emphasized that democracy has little content when big business rules the life of the country through its control of “the means of production, exchange, publicity, transportation and communication, reinforced by command of the press, press agents and other means of publicity and propaganda.” He held further that in a free and democratic society, workers must be “the masters of their own industrial fate,” not tools rented by the employers, ideas that can be traced back to classical liberalism and the Enlightenment, and have constantly reappeared in popular struggle in the United States and elsewhere.

There have been many changes in the past 200 years, but Madison’s words of warning have only become more appropriate, taking new meaning with the establishment of great private tyrannies that were granted extraordinary powers early in this century, primarily by the courts. The theories devised to justify these “collectivist legal entities,” as they are sometimes called by legal historians, are based on ideas that also underlie fascism and Bolshevism: that organic entities have rights over and above those of persons. They receive ample “largesses” from the states they largely dominate, remaining both “tools and tyrants,” in Maidson’s phrase. And they have gained substantial control over the domestic and international economy as well as the informational and doctrinal systems, bringing to mind another of Madison’s concerns: that “a popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy, or perhaps both.”

Let’s now look at the doctrines that have been crafted to impose the modern forms of political democracy. They are expressed quite accurately in an important manual of the public relations industry by one of its leading figures, Edward Bernays. He opens by observing that “the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.” To carry out this essential task, “the intelligent minorities must make use of propaganda continuously and systematically,” because they alone “understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses” and can “pull the wires which control the public mind.” Therefore, our “society has consented to permit free competition to be organized by leadership and propaganda,” another case of “consent without consent.” Propaganda provides the leadership with a mechanism “to mold the mind of the masses” so that “they will throw their newly gained strength in the desired direction.” The leadership can “regiment the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments the bodies of its soldiers.” This process of “engineering consent” is the very “essence of the democratic process,” Bernays wrote shortly before he was honored for his contributions by the American Psychological Association in 1949.

David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous is absolutely delightful. From vantage points as diverse as the forests of Bali to the mountains of Colorado, with insights gleaned from magic, religion, spirituality, and science, Abram breaks it down.

Page 264:

Ecologically considered, it is not primarily our verbal statements that are “true” or “false,” but rather the kind of relations that we sustain with the rest of nature. A human community that lives in a mutually beneficial relation with the surrounding earth is a community, we might say, that lives in truth. The ways of speaking common to that community—the claims and beliefs that enable such reciprocity to perpetuate itself—are, in this important sense, true. They are in accord with a right relation between these people and their world. Statements and beliefs, meanwhile, that foster violence toward the land, ways of speaking that enable the impairment or ruination of the surrounding field of beings, can be described as false ways of speaking—ways that encourage an unsustainable relation with the encompassing earth. A civilization that relentlessly destroys the living land it inhabits is not well acquainted with truth, regardless of how many supposed facts it has amassed regarding the calculable properties of the world.

Pages 265-266:

The apparently autonomous, mental dimension originally opened by the alphabet—the ability to interact with our own signs in utter abstraction from our earthly surroundings—has today blossomed into a vast, cognitive realm, a horizonless expanse of virtual interactions and encounters. Our reflective intellects inhabig a global field of information, pondering the latest scenario for the origin of the universe as we absently fork food into our mouths, composing presentations for the next board meeting while we sip our coffee or cappuccino, clicking on the computer and slipping into cyberspace in order to network with other bodiless minds, exchanging information about gene sequences and military coups, “conferencing” to solve global environmental probelms while oblivious to the moon rising above the rooftops. Our nervous system synapsed to the terminal, we do not notice that the chorus of frogs by the nearby stream has dwindled, this year, to a solitary voice, and that the song sparrows no longer return to the trees.

In contrast to the apparently unlimited, global character of the technologically mediated world, the sensuous world—the world of our direct, unmediated interactions—is always local. The sensuous world is the particular ground on which we walk, the air we breathe. For myself as I write this, it is the moist earth of a half-logged island off the northwest coast of North America. It is this dark and stone-rich soil feeding the roots of cedars and spruces, and of the alders that rise in front of the cabin, their last leaves dangling from the branches before being flung into the sky by the early winter storms…

Page 267:

The alphabetized intellect stakes its claim to the earth by staking it down, extends its dominion by drawing a grid of straight lines and right angles across the body of a continent—across North America, across Africa, across Australia—defining states and provinces, counties and countries with scant regard for the oral peoples that already live there, according to a calculative logic utterly oblivious to the life of the land.

If I say that I live in the “United States” or in “Canada,” in “British Columbia” or “New Mexico,” I situate myself within a purely human set of coordinates. I say very little or nothing about the earthly place that I inhabit, but simply establish my temporary location within a shifting matrix of political, economic, and civilizational forces struggling to maintain themselves, today, largely at the expense of the animate earth. The great danger is that I, and many other good persons, may come to believe that our breathing bodies really inhabit these abstractions, and that we will lend our lives more to consolidating, defending, or bewailing the fate of these ephemeral entities than to nurturing and defending the actual places that physically sustain us.

This is an amazing book, and it’s difficult to get the feel from the excerpts. As they say on teh internets, read the whole thing.

Alan Watts remains one of my favorite philosophical authors of all time. This is from a chapter of Become What You Are called “Tomorrow Never Comes,” page 121:

When we say that all things in the universe are the creative activity of God, this is really like putting legs on a snake or painting the reflection on a mirror. It is not to be compared to seeing that activity as it is, although we say that it is God’s activity to draw attention to it in a particular way. But the trouble is that people spend so much energy looking for the God that they fail to see the activity, which is surely a sad state of affairs. What is this activity? The rivers flow; the flowers bloom; you walk down the street. Really we should need to say no more than this, but it is sometimes called the activity of God to point out a certain understanding to the sort of person who might retort, “The rivers flow; the flowers bloom; you walk down the street—so what?”

So what? Well, what else are you lookoing for? Here is someone who eats out the grocer’s store and still complains that he is starving. But the word and concept God, Brahmin, Tao or what you will, was really introduced for such unappreciative stomachs. It is a way of emphasizing actual life to draw attention to it in much the same way as we underline words or put them in italics. Thus we call the universe the activity of God to induce the so-whatter to pay some attention and reverence to it, because he always bolts his life instead of rolling it appreciatively round his tongue. He always thinks of the second and third pieces of cake while he is eating the first, and thus is never satisfied with any of them, and ends up with a thoroughly disordered digestion. This is called the vicious circle of having lunch for breakfast, or living for your future. But tomorrow never comes.

A new / old idea… dog ear the pages of books as you come across interesting passages, then transcribe them when you finish the book.  I just finished Accelerando by Charles Stross, and here’s what I marked:

Page 63:

“Since the 1980s, it has been possible - in principle - to resolve resource allocation problems algorithmically, by computer, instead of needing a market. Markets are wasteful: They allow competition, much of which is thrown on the scrap heap. So why do they persist?”

Manfred shrugs. “You tell me. Conservativism?”

Gianni closes the book and puts it back on the shelf. “Markets afford their participants the illusion of free will, my friend. You will find that human beings do not like being forced into doing something, even if it is in their best interests. Of necessity, a command economy must be coercive - it does, after all, command.”

Page 132:

“You want my honest opinion, you wouldn’t like it in Paris after a bit. Your Dad and the frog bitch, they’re swingers, y’know? No time in their lives for a kid. Or a cat like me, now I think of it. They’re working all day for the Senator, and out all hours of night doing drugs, fetish parties, raves, opera, that kind of adult shit. Your Dad dresses in frocks more than your mom, and your Tante ‘Nettie leads him around the apartment on a chain when they’re not having noisy sex on the balcony. They’d cramp your style, kid. You shouldn’t have to put up with parents who have more of a life than you do.”

Page 256:

“You’ve got to wonder where the builders of that structure came from. And where they went. And whether they realized that the destiny of intelligent tool-using life was to be a stepping-stone in the evolution of corporate instruments.”