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2681

the above also is true of the pursuit of pleasure and
the avoidance of pain…what is pleasure? it is certainly
not about rationalism and the avoidance of pain is certainly not
about being rational…for some, some, they seek pain, often in
a sexual context… Sado masochism is one such sexual approach
in which pain and pleasure play a major role… quite the opposite
of what is normally the case…avoiding pain and seeking pleasure…

but one can say, but Kropotkin, you are seeking pain by
not doing what your corporate overlords demand by
trying to sell those hunger bags…you will be lectured
and written up…if you don’t attempt to sell hunger bags…

that is true… but my self image, my self worth is far greater
when I don’t play the game…and that is worth any type of
“pain” my supervisors or managers might give me…I am seeking
“pleasure” by not selling those bags and I am tempting “pain” by
not asking…

(although I am not sure that trying to keep one’s dignity and
self worth is seeking "pleasure’… it is a rather passive move,
at best, to gain “pleasure” by not asking customers to buy hunger bags)

but our modern lives is full of “dammed if you do and dammed if you don’t”
events…and that maybe one of the defining aspects of our modern world…
something that might not have occurred as much in the pre-modern world…

I am screwed by selling those fucking bags and I am dammed if I don’t sell
them…… to keep my dignity and respect, I choose to say, fuck em……
and there is and will be a cost to this action/belief…

management will make me suffer… make no mistake about it…

so is seeking “pleasure” part of your goal and is avoidance
of “pain” also part of your goal…… it seems to me that
this is not a rational nor logical goal… it is emotional in nature…

to seek pleasure is to seek that which makes on feel good
and that doesn’t seem to have a large rational component…
and to avoid pain doesn’t seem to have a rational component…

these two seem to be emotional and sensitive matters, not
related to rational and logical thinking…

so do you practice seeking pleasure and avoiding pain?

Why?

Kropotkin

2682

much of what we do and describe and think about requires
context… I might say, my father died in 1985…
and because it was so long ago, I have accepted that fact…
but once again, it is all about context…

I didn’t like my father…and I thought he wasn’t a
very good father…… when my older sister called to tell
me he died… she started the conversation with, “I have some bad news”
and when she told me, I said, “and what is the bad news”… she wasn’t happy with me…

I haven’t missed him in any way, shape, or form…

for me, my father being dead is simply a statement of fact…

it has no real context for me because I didn’t like him or cared about him…

as for my mother, she is still alive at 84… I have very mixed feelings toward
her due to our very rocky relationship over the many years

I call her every week and we talk politics… we don’t talk about
feelings or emotions because that wasn’t discussed in our household…

we didn’t hug… I think the last time I hugged my mom, I was probably
5 or 6 years old…I have never told her I loved her because I am not
really sure I do love her…….

and yet, she is my mother…

am I incapable of love? no, I love my wife and daughter very much…

I can’t say I love my sisters or my brother with any great intensity…

and yet, some will proclaim that their love of family is central
to their very existence…it is not for me…

it is about context…my life will continue much as it always has
even if every member of my family from my mother to my siblings
all died…

some might say, how cold and callus you are Kropotkin…
but I am being honest…

and my death… it doesn’t scare me or frighten me…

when I was younger, I became very frighten of death,
especially of my death…today, I really don’t care…

as I grow older, I think about my quality of life as oppose to
the length of my life… I would rather die at 76 in good health,
mentally and physically instead of living to 90 but in bad health and
with mental issues……… for me, it is about the quality of life…
and every year after say, 70, I shall do an examination of my life
to see if it still has quality, and if it doesn’t… I shall end it…

it is about context for me…

examine your life… what is your context?

Kropotkin

2683

that’s because, like me, you are an evolved creature, peter kropotkin. unconditional love of one’s family annuls that power to discriminate for character and attaches one to empty, idealistic notions of the importance of bloodline… that propagater of one of the greatest spooks - culture.

whenever that stupid adage ‘honor thy family’ rears its idiotic head, one is asked to respect one’s relatives despite all their foibles… because, what… they have the same DNA? a few inert chemical molecules? please.

honor and respect and reverence transcends that simplistic nonsense and is gained through an analysis of character regardless of one’s origins. and this involves only the immediate individual, because there is no ‘man’, no ‘nation’, and certainly no ‘state’. these are only imaginary causes elevated above and beyond the individual who through his desire to find something higher than himself to exalt, commits himself to an empty idea and loses himself as a result. one wants to think of themselves as having a history… that there is something profound and scared that has been preserved, and that he is a part of it, a product of it, and has a duty to carry it further. and yet the only thing holding this person together, the only thing that actually endures, is his continuity of memory. he is nothing but a humean bundle of impressions and ideas that for a small eternity didn’t exist… and who will shortly return to that state. everything he currently ‘belongs to’ is already history, already gone or going… and all that is true in the universe are a few useless tautologies. the rest is confused, inadequate and muddled ideas (see spinoza)… and a derridean language game in the company of others for the meanwhile until you perish. this is the art of avoiding what a hopeless putz you truly are… but some gotta play it lest the end up like a french existentialst cafe goer… or a biggs… or both.

now i’m not saying one cannot live a full life as an involuntary egoist, because knowing and accepting the truth isn’t required to live. in fact, a certain number of lies is almost necessary to live. alls i’m saying is that if there wuz an omniscient being out there somewhere who tallied up the score after the human species went extinct, he’d be like ‘these guys over here got it… and these others over there did not.’ but that’s the beauty of it; it can’t matter to an idiot that he was an idiot after he’s gone. everything becomes perfect in the end, peter kropotkin.

wait wtf does this have to do with what i was saying five minutes ago. see you got me on a tangent dude. yeah so i don’t think being unable to feel love for one relatives is necessarily a bad thing. in many ways - i can say for myself - my disgust with my parents actually increased my expectations for greatness in men/women. check this out (you’ll love the irony); i actually became an ultra-authoritarian once i discovered (in my 20s) that my father’s excessive authority was a joke. see it was supposed to go the other way; the over-authoritarian father causes in the child a disobedience and rebellion against authority. but what i got with the old man was an overcharged meathead who thought he knew his shit, but didn’t, and i realized i could do it better. i shoulda been his dad, bro.

with the old lady, i saw everything that was contemptible in women. she wuz a real head-turner in her youth who developed a skill for manipulation in proportion to her undeserved vainity. a petite-bourgeois par excellence and dumb as a rock. now see here i wuz supposed to develop a misogynistic hatred of women, right? right. instead, i became a proto-type feminist; i had a vision of a world of real women who were nothing like the abomination that capitalist/consumerist culture had created in my mother. i began having dreams of bikini clad rosie the riveters. dignified working women who could plow a field for eight hours and then give you a thirty minute blow job. but this vision was just that, a vision, and the world was not ready for it yet.

hey and have you noticed that your indifference toward your family has made you a somewhat more humanitarian cosmopolitan? that’s because you’re less inclined to express immediate prejudice against anyone who ‘isn’t like your kind’. the whole ‘family’ thing is an institution to pass on inheritance and share the task of raising the young, anyway. it ain’t got shit to do with genes and/or culture. read your boy engels. he’ll get you right.

2684

significance…?
… It sure the ‘hell’ got to do with responsibility’ no?

Engels? Predated in accordance of an outdated mode of warfare.

2685

Stop trying to make me responsible, meno.

You know what. I gonna go do something irresponsible right now just because you said that.

2686

as always, I just write for me…

in my pursuit to understand what it means to be human…
I engage in some “idol” speculations…

think about emotions…

we, as philosophers, tend to think about the rational side of
being human, but, we are as much emotional animals as we are
rational animals… and perhaps, we are more emotional/feelings
animals then we are rational/logical beings…

today, we see the conflict in the modern political world,
as being a battle between those who are conservative and they
engage with security/safety beliefs as one of their primary
beliefs…whereas we have liberals who tend to, again, tend to,
to engage in other primary beliefs which is the belief in justice and freedom…

conservatives are the one’s pushing for security/safety laws…
they support such things as “Patriot act” and other self defense
measures as torture to “protect” America…

Liberals push such political agendas as making justice the primary
driver of American political agenda… along with freedom…

we see this interplay as being the primary source of American
politics over the last 20 years… are you in favor of security/safety, conservative
or are you in favor of justice/freedom, liberal…

but where does this come from? I mean how do we get to
the point where the two basic pushes of the political drive comes
from either the need for security/safety or the drive for justice/freedom?

I would suggest and we begin our “idol speculation”
effort right now…

I would suggest that we get our primary drives from our childhood…

and my suggestion derives from Hobbes… who wrote that the basic
fundamental drive of his life comes from fear…he admits to being a man
who lived in fear all his life… and his political philosophy would certainly
suggest this…he argued for the idea that the state/society itself cannot
be secure unless it was ruled by an absolute sovereign/king…

he argued quite strongly that the only way to make the state safe, was
to turn over to the king all of the responsibilities of making the state safe…

to this end, he even defended the right of this “absolute” ruler being able
to enforce all laws and rules in any way, shape or form, that the ruler
wanted to, up to and including the right of the ruler to take the goods of
the subjects which includes the property of the subjects…

a ruler whose word was absolute law…

and we see how the fear that Hobbes felt manifested itself
in his political philosophy……

so let us take that as our starting point…

so what would it mean if we have someone who isn’t in fear about
their security/safety? what would their political philosophy look like?

I would suggest that it would be the liberal viewpoint of society…

if you are always fearful, then making security/safety as your primary
goal, makes sense…but if you are not fearful, then making security/safety
your primary goal makes no sense… it isn’t needed if you feel secure in life…

and we can see how that this security/safety need arises in childhood…
and how the need for justice/freedom can also arise in childhood…

just as Hobbes felt fear which lead him to adapt security/safety as his
primary goal in life, we can see how those who grew up being safe/secure
can make justice/freedom their primary goal in life…

so depending upon how one approaches life, will come one’s political
philosophy… as I am not fearful of life, my political beliefs are liberal,
thus I make as my primary goal justice/freedom…

in a very real sense, the goal we attempt to reach comes from how
we feel about life… I feel safe and secure and conservatives feel threaten
and uneasy about life… and it shows in our respective political philosophy…

and it should be easy to confirm this and it is… reread IQ45 convention speech…
it is one dire and frighten speech… in reading it, one would think
that our inner cites were on fire and the nation was in complete and dire
threat of collapse… and that resonated with some people, conservatives
who live with fear…

as liberals don’t see America that way, we see the positive…

thus we don’t need to pursue security/safety as our primary goal…

now as a thought experiment, try this…

how do you see America?

How do you view society?

are you fearful and scared about what others might do to you?

your answers will tell you if you are a conservative or a liberal…

or said another way, political philosophy is a confession about
your viewpoint of society…

fearful/mistrustful… conservative…

secure/feeling safe… liberal…

now this little thought experiment is not for me, I already know
my own viewpoint/political philosophy…do it for your own benefit…

Kropotkin

2687

so let us change this a bit…

think about your environment…

do you feel safe/secure within your own environment?

personally, I feel very safe and secure in my environment…

I live in a very safe town, within a gated condo complex with
lock doors to protect us… (which isn’t why we decided upon
this particular condo… it had elevators and we didn’t have
to lug stuff up and down stairs)

at my prior store, it too was a fairly safe town…
my new store is in a little more problematic area…

but nothing that dangerous and I feel ok with my wife or daughter
wondering about that area…

so given the fact my own and my family safety and security is not
an issue… I don’t see safety/security as being a major issue
for me…and it doesn’t impact my political philosophy in any way…

so how does your environment impact your philosophy… political
and otherwise?

so said another way… our political philosophy is a confession about
how we feel about our current environment…

so what are you confessing to when you want certain laws to be passed?

what does the demand for passing certain laws mean for us as
as human beings?

what does it mean for us as philosophers?

Kropotkin

2688

so what this all means is this…

how we feel about our environment will tell us what
our political and social philosophy will be…

our engagement with our environment will help us decide
what our goals ought to be as far as our understanding
of what is needed in the world…

so when you read a philosopher, what are they confessing to?

when you read Hobbes, you see and he tells you, that all his
efforts stem from his being afraid all his life… the goals he
pursues comes from his lifelong engagement with being afraid…

so when a politician wants certain laws to be passed,
that tells us about their thoughts and feelings about
about their environment…

a politician who demands that everyone have guns, is a person
who is fearful and is afraid of their environment…

and I for one, would trace our current fearful atmosphere
within America to 9/11 and to the climate for the several years
thereafter…

so how does one work on their fears and phobias?

I would confront them as I did with my own fear
and phobia…I had a serious fear of heights for many
years… I attacked it by doing things that challenges my fears…

I took up rock climbing and I challenged myself to doing things
that challenged my fears… I didn’t let my fear of heights
prevent me from going to the top of buildings and looking down…

for example, the space needle in Seattle… I went up it and
then at the top, despite my fears, I look down at the ground below…
it made me nervous as hell, but I did it…the only way to confront
our fears and everyone has some fears… you wouldn’t be human if
you didn’t have some sort of fears… for fear is an evolutionary
devise meant to protect us from doing really stupid things…

and once again, we turn to our old friend, the three paths to become
human…first, we engage with our knowing ourselves…Socrates
ideal of “know thyself” and then we engagement with an reevaluation
of our values… then we overcome… if we follow this path, we see
that we must first know ourselves and the reason for our fears…

mine fear stems from when I was kid and I really had no fear…
and I had many stitches to prove that… until one day, I tried to
do a somersault off a high diving board and landed straight on my back…
which hurt like hell… and that pain, over years would lead me to
having a fear of heights, not of diving boards, but of the cause of my
pain which was, in my eyes, the height of the diving board…

once I knew the reason, know thyself, the reason for my fear of heights,
I could work to overcome my fears…to this day, heights makes me nervous
but it doesn’t paralyze me like it did before…

I overcame…

so, what fears do you have and why do you have those particular fears?

can you or have you overcome those fears?

and what does all this mean for our philosophy, both political
and our regular philosophy?

Kropotkin

2689

now one might wonder how my “philosophy” is any different
then psychology or the dreaded phrase, “Self-help”…

and I say unto you… does it matter which terms we use
if it allows us some understanding of what it means to be human
and what does that suggest to us about our goals and possible
paths into the future…

I see no difference between philosophy and psychology and “self-help”
and history or economics or sociology or biology…

they are all aspects of our pursuit in understanding what it means
to be human and “what should we believe in” and “what we should hope for”
and “what our values should be?”

those disciplines are simply tools we use to make sense of the world
and to understand what it means to be a biological being in a universe
that is matter, but not biological matter……

Kropotkin

2690

currently I am reading “Upheavals of thought” by
Martha Nussbaum…

Her book is subtitled “the Intelligence of Emotions”

I believe myself to be a rational man… if given a first
reply to a phrase test and the word was “emotions”
my first reply would be “danger, danger, Will Robinson”
dating myself, but what the hell…

I cannot tell if it is because I’m a man or if it is the way I was
raised, but emotions are my Kryptonite…or said another way,
“I don’t do emotions” but that is simply not true…

there is a serious disconnect between my words and my actions…

but it isn’t the massive disconnect that Christians have between their
words and their actions…but it falls into the same terrain…

for many years, because of my failure to grasp or understand emotions,
I would react in the wrong way to situations around me…this type of
reaction requires some sort of emotional intelligence which I didn’t have…

and to this day, I still don’t really react quite like other people…
when people tell me news that should elicit some response like, “I am sorry”
I quite often fail to respond in the “appropriate” manner…
news or information that seems to get people to react, doesn’t seem to
affect me in that manner…

it is a disconnect I have… and as I become more aware of this disconnect,
I am better able to learn the “proper” response…….

in many ways for me, emotions, my emotions are my enemy…
I have a hard time navigating my emotions……

and yet now I get far more emotional at times, then I used to…

we need to approach emotions with the same vigor we attack
other philosophical area’s like epistemology or logic or political philosophy…

what emotions drive you?

anger, hate, love, honesty, despair, sadness, happiness, disgust, contempt…
guilt…which is one emotion that drives religion, especially Christianity…
what do you feel guilty about?

which ones would you say drive who you are?

Kropotkin

2691

existentialism with its emphasis on emotions such as
angst and existential despair and suffering…
with suffering and despair being an emotional
reaction/feeling… to/about life…

as human beings, our responses to life are emotional responses,
not logical, rational responses…

(recall my little post about Jazz music and our emotional response to
Miles Davis being the greatest Jazz player and others think it might
be Brubeck or perhaps Coltrane with the greatest Jazz album being
“Kind of blue” or perhaps Coltrane’s “a love supreme”… the point being
that we respond to such list as the greatest by emotionalism, not
by logical, rational thought…in other words, we judge by our emotional
response to something, not by our rational, logical thought about something)

the problem lies in this fact that we still react emotionally to things
and not logically or rationally…

our first response to something is emotional, we lead with our feelings…
and later we might temper our first initial thoughts by being logical/rational…

that is why philosophers up to now have been wrong… they always began with
rational/logical thinking when we human beings always respond emotionally, at
least at first…what is needed is an archaeology of emotions…
which is something Foucault never did, but probably should have done…

in thinking about it… I would guess that rational, logical thinking is a relatively
recent evolutionary devise…emotions, instinct are the basic, fundamental
means of understanding our universe… and is has been this way for millions,
if not billions of years…at its heart, life is simply emotions being carried down
from generation to generation…life can feel pain and pain is an emotional
response to our environment…and all life can feel pain…

so in a very real sense, rational, logical thought is a higher form of
existence… it is the next step, as it were, of existence… we have at
its base, emotions, feelings… the pyramid as it were… on the bottom
is its base and that base is emotions/feelings…

the next level is thinking

and the third level is rational, logical thinking…

even today, after hundred of thousands years, we still have people,
who deny and refuse to engage with rational/logical thinking…

think about it… those who put religion ahead of science are those
who engage with the base feelings of human existence…

revelations/Jerusalem are emotional, feeling understanding of life…

and Athens is the philosophy/rational thinking about life…

and we return to this old idea of Jerusalem and Athens…

and we note that Jerusalem existed before Athens…
and Jerusalem has always existed within the history of human beings…
whereas as Athens, Athens has not always existed but came into existence
within the last several thousand years…

so in our pyramid, what comes above the rational/logical level?

I would say it is the union of the rational/emotional levels…

but that is impossible… no, no it isn’t, we have had human beings who
have successfully integrated rational/logical thought with their emotional/feeling
aspect of being human… the key one for us is Goethe…
he wrote some of the most beautiful poems in the German Language and
he made scientific discoveries… he was able to unite the two
factions of rational thought and emotional feelings…

we can do no better then to learn to follow Goethe…
and learn to unite the rational and the emotional…

Kropotkin

2692

as philosophers, we deal with the rational/logical aspect of human
existence, but at some point and we must give existentialist their due,
for finally bringing emotions to the table…now does this human/animal
understanding of people, events and things that first come from
emotionalism and feelings, should we ignore it because it is our first
response to people, events, things?

in other words, I experience something and I will react to it
emotionally, with feelings before I can react to it with rational/logical thought…

hence we get advise like, never judge a book by its cover… which is to
imply that we must “read” the book before we can judge the book, and
reading is a rational/logical activity……

when I first encounter something, experience it, I react emotionally…
as do we all… we must learn to temper our immediate “emotional”
reaction to something and learn to bring in our rational/logical side
to our every experience………

so when you encounter something, do you react emotionally?
of course, you are human so every experience you have, is experienced
emotionally, with feelings… at first

and later we might engage with that experience rationally, logically…

so, we must learn to pause our first immediate “emotional” reaction to
experiences and we must bring in our logical/rational aspect to judge
every experience… this will take time and effort for us to finally train
ourselves not to react emotionally at every experience………but to react
with some semblance of rationality and logic… but it will take time……

now the real question becomes, why? why should it matter that we change
how we react to first experience by emotions and not by rational/logical thought?

I am not advocating renunciation… for that becomes a different story…

I am simply suggesting that we pause our first initial reaction, which will be
emotional, to thinking about it, being rational about it… this will
help temper our emotional side of existence which very often leads us
to a wrong understanding of things because we were emotional and not
logical/rational………

Kropotkin

2693

so we approach a religious problem,
that of the renunciation problem…

so many religions demand that people renounce
their desires and emotions……

but the fact is, we human beings, a definition of being human is, a creature of
desires and emotions… we cannot escape that which is built inside of us,
that which we have inherited in our genes and in our blood…….
desire and emotions…

we do not need to renounce desires or emotions…

we just need to learn to place desires and emotions
into the mix as part of, part of the means we use
to explain and understand the world and the universe…

we human beings, we desire… it doesn’t make that desire bad or wrong
or dangerous, no, it just means we must learn to control it…
desire by itself isn’t bad or evil or wrong… it just is…
but how we answer the question of desire is where we
find out the intention of desire…if it is bad or evil or wrong…

desire quite often isn’t even what we really desire… it is quite often a symptom of
something else… I feel a loss or isolation or alienation and I substitute desire
to somehow compensate for that feeling of loss or isolation or alienation…

it might, might explain our current mania for desire by the fact that we
really are compensating for some other emotion or feeling like isolation or
alienation…

but Kropotkin…you are engage in psychology… not philosophy…
and as I have stated before, I don’t see any division between
psychology and philosophy and history and economics and sociology…….

to my mind, they are all simply different aspects of the same thing…

Kropotkin

2694

the book I am reading, “Upheavals of thought” has
given me new thoughts about such matters as
compassion and kindness and empathy……….

I am not by nature a compassionate person…
whereas my wife is always a compassionate person…
to a fault actually…

I am forced to come to grips with my “viewpoints” on
such matters…

I see injustice and I become mad… I want revenge… on those
who practice injustice… but it calls into question why?

I want revenge more then I want those people to receive justice…

it calls into question my own understanding of who I am…
am I a “kind” person… perhaps, am I a “just” person?
I like to think so, but if I demand revenge before justice,
am I really a 'just" person or am I just someone looking for revenge?

I have been “wronged” in my life and my response has been
to dream of revenge… I’ll teach those “idiots”… but in the end,
what exactly am I thinking about?

what is the value of the pursuit of revenge as oppose to the pursuit
of justice?

is pursuing “revenge” really a pursuit of justice?

somehow I don’t think so…have I actually been able to get my revenge?
once, and frankly, it wasn’t as much “fun” as I had hoped it would be…

to engage in the pursuit of revenge instead of the pursuit of justice says
something very fundamental about me……….

am I a “kind” person? I would like to think so, but and this is important,
I can see myself and have done things that wouldn’t by any stretch of
the imagination be considered to be “kind”……

I am a typical human being whereas I have some sort of self image
but at times, at times, I even conduct actions that confirm my
own self image, but what about the other times?

what about those times, I don’t conduct myself in accordance to my own
self image? I usually consider myself the smartest person in the room,
and usually I am, but what about those times, I am not?

emotionally, how do I handle this? do I deny, do I make excuses?
do I just pretend that I am still the smartest person in the room?

well, emotions are the same thing…I see someone being kinder then
me, which frankly is just about everyone, and how do I see that
being reflected back to me? I don’t… and that is the point…

I don’t…it becomes two distinct and separate acts… my kindness
becomes one distinct and separate act and other people kindness
become another…I don’t make the equation at all… and by doing so,
I can still maintain the pretense that I am kind and loving and all that stuff…

and in the end, it is about maintaining the pretense that I am still what my
ego demands of me…my ego wants me to believe that I am a “kind”
“decent” “warm” “humane” “lovable” “justice seeking” human being…
but what is the reality? am I who I “believe” I am? the honest answer is
sometimes, sometimes…….

and the question becomes, am I ok with being the person my ego wants me to
be “sometimes”?

but let us take this even further… should I make being a “kinder” person
a value to be achieved? in other words, what values should I pursue?

“Kindness”? “humane”? “just”? “loving”? “decent”? among the thousands of
value’s possibilities? which values should we engage with and why?

why should I desire to become more “kind”?

for whose benefit does that desire help? me or the society?

in other words, what is the goal here? to what end does my pursuit
of “kindness” involve? why should I want to become “kind”?
what is the end result of my increased “kindness”?

that will depend upon what sort of society we are aiming for?
if we want a cold, angry, mean society, then “kindness” is not the goal,
for “kindness” doesn’t get us our cold, angry, mean society…

but if we want a kinder, more loving, a gentle society, then we
should and must emphasis “kindness”………

should the bottom line becomes this, what kind of society do you
want to see and more importantly, why this type of society?

you have to be able to justify any type of choice you make in
deciding why type of society you are working toward…

so the question is asked, what is your vision of what a human being is?

ultimately, what are we working for? what kind of society should we have
and why that society? and if we are working toward a certain type of society,
then what type of people should we have in that society?

Kind? mean? angry? loving? happy? just? honest? responsible? insightful?
dependable?

what values are we really trying to become?

what values are you striving for?

and why?

as always, comes the question of why those values and not another set of
values…

strip away your ego driven idea of who you are and come to grips
with the person you actually are…few, few if any can begin the
honest search for the “real” person that lies within us…take away
your ego and see the person you really are…

do you like what you see?

Kropotkin

2695

we look at emotions and we judge them to be
“irrational” and we consider that to be bad on some
basis or grounds, but why?

we see emotions as being Irrational and we see that
as being bad, but why are emotions being irrational, bad?

emotions being “irrational” is kinda the point of emotions…

recall, everything but everything must be part of an equation,
and if we correctly understand emotions, then we
can create an equation…

emotions = rationality…

the two are equal… their role is the same…
they are two means by which we navigate and understand
the world…

I am a checker in a supermarket… I have to be able to spot
what kind of person I am dealing with very quickly…
is this person going to give me a hard time or work with me
or does this person want some “engagement” or
does this person want to get the hell out of the store?

I have to decide very quickly and I use my emotions to make
that decision… and that is the value of emotions…
we can make very quick decisions based on nothing more
then how a person is standing in line and quite often,
we are correct in our “understanding” of that person…

we make judgement based on intuition and experience
and instincts… or just a feeling about someone…

and we are quite often right…

people can sense other people… again, intuition or instincts
or whatever you want to call it… but it is quite often far more
reliable then our “rational” self…….

are we sometimes wrong? yep, recall that saying, don’t judge a book
by its cover…sometimes our instincts is really, really wrong…

but we cannot simply discard our evolutionary and quite often life-saving
instincts because we “think” that we should be “rational” or “logical” when
being “rational” or “logical” isn’t as quick or as effective as intuition or instincts…

we must learn to temper our rational/logical self with our intuition
or instincts and we must be able to temper our intuition/instincts with
our rational/logical self…

it is a balance, an equation that we must learn to engage with…

emotions aren’t bad and neither is our rational self…

an excess of one or the other cannot be of use because we need
both of them in equal parts to become fully human…

we are millions of years of instincts and we must be able to
use that because it is the reason, one of, that we human beings
have become who we are… we survived a million years of
living in nature by our instincts, our intuition… and we
need them to continue to survive… but we need to equalize
our rational/logical part…

Kropotkin

2696

a couple of points…

should we consider IAM constant demand that we look at
“conflicting material goods” emotionally or should we engage
in it rationally?

by what means are we to understand the world and our place
within it? emotionally or rationally?

and the choice we make, either emotion’s or being rational,
will decide how the matter is settled… for our emotions lead
us one way and being rational will lead us another way…

but the goal is understand ourselves enough to the point,
where if we choose being emotional or to be rational,
we still wind up in the same place…

emotions and rationality are so attuned to each other that
making a choice for one, doesn’t, doesn’t lead us away from the other…

that is the goal, where we have emotions and rationality become so attuned
to each other where one choice doesn’t mean we deny or ignore the other
possibility…we see emotions and rationality as two sides of the same coin
and later, the same thing… simply as means to understand and, AND
as means to achieve whatever goal we are engage with… some goals
require, demand emotions to achieve and some goal require, demand
rationality to achieve…what goal we decide upon then requires us to
decide upon the means to achieve… either emotions or rationality…

if I pursue the quest of understanding math and the higher goal of
understanding higher math such as geometry, trigonometry and calculus…
we do not use emotions to achieve an understanding of that higher math,
no, the method of understanding the world via emotions will not help
us in understanding the higher math… rationality will help us, logic will
help us…if my goal is to fall in love, then rationality will not help me…
love is not rational, love is not logical…that doesn’t mean that the two,
emotions and rationality is opposed to each other, in some weird attempt
of one to dominate the other, no, we cannot have either to become dominate
over the other because we need to two, emotions and rationality, to
to engage with each other equally…and at the right times… to engage
the emotions when it is necessary and engage in rationality when it is
necessary……

so, you want to become a “complete” human being, a human being
where the emotions and rationality are equal… study someone
who has mastered having equal use of both the emotional and
the rational… study Goethe…

Kropotkin

2697

in our understanding of the world, we base
it upon certain unstated assumptions that we hold…

the point is to bring out those unstated assumptions into
the open and then decide about them…

in other words, the conservative viewpoint is full of unstated
assumptions about the world and the people within that world…

as is the liberal viewpoint full of unstated assumptions about people
and the world…

for example, one of the unstated assumptions of liberals is that given
a chance, people will be able to make something of their lives…
if we create equality then people will be able to build upon that equality
to make “something” of their lives…

the conservative doesn’t hold to these assumptions…
if we “give” people the basics, then they have no reason
to strive to “become” something…we give people no
incentive to do anything if we fulfill their basic needs…

now, conservative believe that my assumptions
are “weak” and “softhearted” as if believing in equality means
one is weak or softhearted…

we base our “liberal” or “conservatives” values upon certain
assumptions of human beings, and we act upon those assumptions
as if they actually exists within reality… now they may or they may
not actually exists… but we certainly act upon them as if they exist…

my assumptions are based upon certain idea’s and your assumptions
are based upon certain idea’s… first of all, where do we get our
assumptions? secondly, are our assumptions correct? do they correspond
to the “reality” out there? are we just projecting the fact that
within us, the idea that we want to be “good” or a “just” or a
“kind” person influence our assumptions of what people are…

in other words, are our assumptions about us influence
our assumptions about other people?

if we want to be “good” people, does that influence our
assumption that “all” people want to be “good”?

I want to think, assume, that I am a good, decent person,
does that mean I assume everyone wants to be a good and decent person?

this question of our basic assumptions of who we are and
our basic assumptions of who people are and what they
ought to be, haunt our understanding of who we are
and what is the point, meaning of human existence…

to become who we are means we must bring out the assumptions
that haunt our understanding of what it means to be human…

what are you doing to bring out your assumptions into the open?

Kropotkin

2698

if we have assumptions that we base our decisions upon
as individuals, then we can assume that we base our collective
decisions also based upon collective assumptions, so, what
are our collective assumptions? and is America’s assumptions,
different then the UK assumptions and different then
French assumptions and different then other people assumptions?
perhaps it isn’t the truth we should be seeking, but the collective
assumptions that we live for, by and make decisions about?

Kropotkin

2699

now one might suggest that I should be a “philosopher”
and give my proscriptions about what a “proper” society
should entail, both individually and collectively…

but that isn’t the role I see for myself, I am simply the guy
who points out the issues, and it is for you to make
the decisions about what you want to do about it…

I can lead you to water, but I can’t make you drink it…

the battle to become human ultimately is a personal, private
one that engages us in an individual level and then after that,
can we engage on some sort of collective level…but one might
say, but my pursuit of understanding my assumptions may take my
entire life… and it might…so what?

what else are you doing that is so important?

earning money? gaining titles? getting fame?

those are just another set of assumptions that
we strive for…

are they really worth the effort we make to gain them?

you already know my answer…

but what say you?

Kropotkin

2700

as we have so far covered our individual understanding of
our assumptions, but we really haven’t covered our collective
understanding of our assumptions…

the basic political structures we have today are based
upon long standing assumptions…

in other words, democracy is based upon basic assumptions that
people hold… and a monarchy is based upon another set of
assumptions and dictatorships is based upon another set of
assumptions…

the political process that we work for and base our lives upon,
is simply a series of assumptions that we collectively agree to…

if I, and I sincerely do, believe in freedom as the key goal to
what is necessary for a human being needs, then that belief
in the value of freedom, is based upon an assumption that I hold…

and If you hold to capitalism as the defining goal of human achievement,
then you hold a certain set of assumptions…… assumptions that I believe is
wrong… but those beliefs I hold is also set upon assumptions…

we have assumptions based upon assumptions based upon assumptions…

at what point shall we begin the task of working out our assumptions to
begin the task of holding beliefs that are not just a set of assumptions?

this collective task of holding certain political and social beliefs
must be tied into the task of breaking our assumptions…
upon which we base those certain political and social beliefs…

the battle to be human starts with us… with us beginning to
understand the basic assumptions that we hold to be dear to our lives…

“that we hold these truths to be self-evident” ……….

and that those truths we hold to be “self-evident”
are truths and beliefs to be nothing more then a set of
assumptions…

the battle to be human means we must first do battle with the
assumptions that we engage with and operate with as a matter of course
in our lives…….

Kropotkin