a new understanding of today, time and space.

Imagine you’re on a battlefield, in the middle of a phalanx unit, thousands of years ago. You’re surrounded on all sides. Your unit is being slaughtered. The men you’ve grown up with, fought in battles before, known for years, gone to training and boot camp with, are dying left and right. Your brothers in arms are succumbing to horrible fates. There is no hope. Your entire unit is destined to die in a painful and gruesome fashion. Your efforts and resistance are wasted. You barely have the strength to hold up your weapon and shield.

Then the horns cry out across the field. The reinforcing cavalry has arrived, unplanned, surprised. Your saviors have arrived. The lord from the next kingdom over has come to aid your own clan. Forces greater than your own, unknown by you, have plotted to ensure this victory. You knew not of the plans of your Lord. But He has come regardless.

It is moments like these, echoed throughout human history, that people form the concept of a Savior.

It is monumental, unforgettable, tales passed throughout the ages.

Real-world actions and consequences. These form the premises and underlying concepts. That is what it means “to be a Savior”.

Imagine in the mix of that that they died tired, fighting until arms became too heavy, legs and bodies beyond sore until their movements became almost mechanical and as they died around you one by one, what little energy they had left transferred to you and that you were more than on your last legs when the cavalry showed up, still swinging the heavy sword, still lifting that heavy shield. For all your muscles and training, even in stamina and endurance, they did not actually prepare you for the emotional and psychological and spiritual strain of continued combat through the day, hour after hour against an unrelenting enemy, nor did you figure yourself the type to fight to your last breath after all your kinsmen were gone and dead. That it surprised you in the midst of combat to be carried on the swell of becoming limitless and still almost dead, almost wishing for it. That as the Lord of the next kingdom enters in, it’s not being saved that crosses your mind, though that crosses your mind surprisingly fresh. Your thoughts are noted for the weariness in them, the actual faded nature of them from a life time of having been yours. You are the last of your people and as you become fueled by the energies of the ‘cavalry’, your enemy breaks and is slaughtered before you, yourself finding feet numb and weary beneath you, and falling down in seeming gratitude.

If they had not shown, would you have won? Would you have continued on just the one to take down the many or would you have been cut down the same as your kinsmen? You would have almost preferred the latter, though wished for the former just to live it. The ‘cavalry’ robbed you of both and have become leeches to you as they put you beneath them. They are no saviors, only pretending to be. And their praise is marked by the lack of detailed knowledge that their supporters and redeemers have. They rely on bad salesmanship to pitch bullshit and spread it around and push it down the throats of others like it was their verbal cock.

Was that too crude and harsh? Did I shred your concept apart, urwrong? I think I did and I think it wasn’t done crudely or harshly enough.

a hero for out times…

we humans… we have to look for hero’s…

For the children of the sea, it was Achilles, Hector, Agamemnon, Odysseus…

For the children of the seven hills, Romulus and Caecus and Scipio

For the children of the cross, Jesus and Paul and Augustine

but who are your hero’s?

We have many different types of hero’s…

of the word and of the sword and of the spirit…

our cities have Monuments listing their great deeds…

we have holidays in remembrance

but who are the true hero’s?

today millions go see CGI hero’s…

and we have a self proclaimed orange hero

from his empty tower he preaches to the blind

and what is his sermon?

he preaches devotion to dead presidents…

but who should our hero’s be?

but really, what are hero’s for?

they exists as examples for us all…

they exists as an path for us to follow…

they exists as possibilities for us to emulate…

Hero’s… rare these days…

for they get shot on balcony’s in Memphis

and in Dealey plaza on a Friday…

and walking toward prayers on a day in January…

do hero’s only have value being dead?

but is that really the best way to remember a hero?

as a martyr to the cause?

look around you, right now, today…

and who would you call a hero?

maybe that is what we are missing today?

examples for us to follow…

someone devoted to a higher ideal

even to the point of death…

so, where are our hero’s today?

rise, show yourself, become who you are…

guide us, lead us, show us the way…

so we can do, what we always do to hero’s…

betray you undo death…

and I promise you, your monument shall rise high…

and we will devote days to your memory…

who are your hero’s?

the one you shall betray…

Kropotkin

if you think about it… physics and science is about motion…
you have the motion of the stars and the motion of man and
the motion of the atom…Einstein’s theory of relativity is
simply a theory of motion… and Newton? it too is about motion…
as is all branches of science… science is about how things move…

Philosophy is about values… values don’t have motion…
values are about justice and truth and freedom and love…

which values are the values we should be living by?
that is not a question of motion…

that is why you can’t use science techniques in philosophy…
science tells us how things move…

science tells us that if we move in space, this will happen…
but philosophy tells us why, what is the value of moving in space…
why does it matter that we go into space, what is the value of that?

when science rises up and tells us why we move in space
and when philosophy rises up and tells us how we move in space…
then we have combined the two… science and philosophy become one…

I am interested in the values of life, not in the motion of life…
and thus, I study philosophy but one day, the two, science and philosophy
shall become one…

Kropotkin

But we do face our fates looking them dead in the eyes and heads held high, for what its worth. Looking life and death both square in the eye and never flinching. We may get shot up; we may get made to look like criminals and told that appearances are damning, damned if you do AND if you don’t, called hypocritic, lied about; have our lives torn apart… But we have our courage, our confidence, our unwavering resolve and determination. We have what fuels all of eternity. Take away everything we are and everything we love, rip it to shreds in front of us, break us… and it will always be the worst mistake you ever make. And when it comes down to our ungrateful protected ones as they turn against us and judge us and shed their respect and begin to claim they see what the world is like and dig into us the same as others not even knowing the fight we fought… It further burns the tragedy in deep beyond removal and we overcome even that. As far as I know, no one gets out of life alive and either you stand for something or you’ll fall for anything and everything.

After a while, the heroes just fight for themselves and the other heroes and eventually others they feel like fighting for, for love; because they are warriors.

I expect my enemies to cut corners, to try to make that stick and last based on so much shit that would work if they didn’t try to Tim the Toolman rig it all.

At the point of knowing I’m not able to dissuade them through violence or other means, I store my revenge for other days, other lives. I turn my back on it all. That is what a Hero does without tears, without pity or sympathy, but just a simple decision. That’s what all of a Hero’s battles buys them. A seeming coldness beyond breaking because they’ve already broken too many times along the way if they’d actually been fighting.

You can look around you at all the stories of heroes, but you only see the abridged stories, the happily ever afters. You don’t see the in betweens, you don’t see them all the time. You base in two hours the sum of an entire person, when their entire life might be a lie, pandering to an audience they might not know is there and can not reach except in abstract thought at best if they do. They don’t show Aragorn popping a squat in a field and shitting while trying to not piss on his feet. They don’t show the Heroes’ insecurities behind the scenes when they’re out of the public eye and all alone.

If they did, you would think them depraved, you would think less of them, for them made into mortal men and women that you can touch and relate to.

the new science came about when man discovered this idea of motion…
the new science was formulated from ideas developed by men like
Copernicus and Kepler and Galileo and all of their ideas are based
on the idea of motion…this moved and that moved and the entire
universe moved…and along came philosophers like Descartes and
Spinoza and Leibniz and Hobbes and Locke and all of them made
motion the basis for their philosophy…if the universe moves such,
then man must act this way…at no point were values such
as justice or truth or love involved…

the idea of philosophy is the love of wisdom…
the pursuit of wisdom…

is wisdom found in the motion of things?

now motion can tell us where we fit into the universe…
our sun lies here within this galaxy and here within the
arm of the galaxy and this location within that spiral arm
and that we exist on the third planet from the sun…
the bright blue planet…

but how does having our location give us wisdom?
how does motion give us wisdom and understanding?

this has been the failing of philosophy…
the thinking that the understanding of our location as giving us wisdom…

if I tell you where I am sitting in my house… at the kitchen table,
near the sliding glass doors leading outside… 7 feet from the fridge
in one direction and 15 feet from the TV in the other direction…
does the knowledge of my location make you or me, any wiser?

and if tell you when I move to the bedroom, motion, does that give you any
more wisdom? no…the understanding of motion or location does not
give us any more philosophy, love or pursuit of philosophy…wisdom…

so we must regroup philosophy around another principle…
and it seems to me, that needs to be an understanding of values…

but perhaps, even that is short sided and too narrow…

under what principle shall we begin to understand philosophy?

Kropotkin

if as I have suggest that fields of study such as history, economics,
sociology, philosophy are simply studies of the various values
of human beings… for example, history is a study of what values
are important in that particular time period… if we read about a society
going to war a lot, that value was important to that society…
in other words, history reveals who we were at that time…
economics reveals another aspect of the human nature…
sociology reveals another aspect of the human animal…

but what about such studies as biology and astronomy…
they don’t seem to be human centric but they reveal
how we exist in relation to these area’s of study…
animals biology is this… and we know from prior
study that human biology is this and we can compare
and contrast our differences… also we can see
how we stand in relation to animals in regards to biology…

and in astronomy, we can see our relationship to the universe…
the sun is 93 million of miles from earth… from us…
and we exist in the milky way galaxy… once again giving
reference to where human beings exist…

our fields of study are simply studies of the relationship
of that field of study to human beings…

we still haven’t escape from our need to study and understand
who we are and where we are and where we need to be…

we shall remain a small and insignificant species until we remove
our human centric vision of the universe…

the universe doesn’t revolve around us, we revolve around the universe and are
a part of the universe…we are a small part of the universe…
we need to understand our small and insignificant role in the universe but
also to understand it is small and insignificant …

Kropotkin

Man is thus…

the pronouncement of a person…

Man is violent or man is greed or man is hateful or lustful

we have heard this…

from preachers and politicians and on the nightly news…

the human creature is defined as one thing, be it hate or greed or whatever

the failure of the pronouncement lies in its narrowness

the human creature is greed and lust and hate and love

and all those other values we believe in…

but that too short sided

we human beings are so much more…

yes, we are greed and lust and hate and love

we are all the values you can list…

but we reach so much more then just a list…

we underestimate all the values we encompass

within each of us lies the possibilities of human expression…

each of us feels hate and love and fear and lust and anger

and on any given day we might show those emotions…

or we might show them all in one day or an hour…

the range of human possibilities lies within each of us…

each of us can become another possibility

each of us could be a killer or lover, a scholar, a mechanic, an actor or a teacher…

all we have to do is make a choice…

because all of those choices is possible for us

whatever lies within the human realm is possible for each of us…

we could be creators of sonnets and plays and symphonies and cities

or we could be destroyers of life and liberty and happiness…

all that is possible and more…

we just have to embrace what is possible within each of us…

and everything human is possible…

we just have to choose…

life, death, creation, destruction, hope and despair…

all is possible once you have make your choice…

and decide which human possibility you are today…

Kropotkin

it has been said that man is searching for knowledge…
that is, a human being, being, is about searching for knowledge…

there are all kinds of knowledge, facts among those…

the sun is 93 million miles from earth…

but this fact means nothing unless we put it into some kind of context,
compare or contrast this knowledge… what does it mean that the sun is
93 million miles from earth?

there is other knowledge that is less certain…
we call this knowledge, opinions, ideologies, ism’s…

God does exist…
Hitler was a leftist…
there is no such thing as global warming…

each of these requires a different argument and a different
argument to disprove…

god does exists… no evidence of any kind supports this conclusion
it is a statement taken on faith without any recourse to evidence or facts…

Hitler was leftist… this opinion takes its basis from simple ignorance…
even a modest reading of what Hitler believed in show us that Hitler was
right wing… I have read Mein Kampf… and it clearly shows its allegiance
to right wing extremism…it even follows right wing ideology in its
use of conspiracies and blaming others for one’s failures and
in distortions and outright lies… it is a perfect right wing manifesto…

that there is no global warming… this just ignores science
and the science is quite clear and a vast majority of scientist
believe in global warming but that aspect is ignored but the real question is why?

each of these opinions and ideologies and ism’s are matter of faith…
and these “Facts” are used to justify these matters of faith…
that Hitler was a leftist is used to justify hate and anger and bigotry
against the left… but the real truth is Hitler was a right wing dictator
but to make your bigotry against the left work, you create lies that
Hitler was a leftist… it has nothing to do with Hitler but everything to do
with your hate and lies and falsehoods against the left… you would happily lie
to make a hateful statement against liberals and liberalism… that is the real target…
not hitler but liberals and liberalism…

to say there is no global warming is to deny science…
to remain ignorant of the world but to what end?

to save the ism that there is a god who is in command of everything…
what is important is not the global warming and not the science but
to do everything to save the ism, the ideology and no matter what lies,
what untruths, denying science, whatever it takes to maintain the ism,
the ideology is what it takes…to save god, one must deny science
and attack global warming…

the question becomes a question of what it takes to
preserve the ism, the ideology… the believe in god,
the belief in conservatism and the hate of liberalism and leftist…
that is what counts, not the courage of convictions, not the truth,
not the facts… but the ism is what is important…
and reality itself will be sacrificed to protecting and saving
the ism, saving one’s belief in god, in saving one’s belief
in the current ideologies be it capitalism or democracy or
AMERICA as an ideology…

this is not a search for knowledge… this is a conformation of previously
held ism’s and ideologies… knowledge exists to confirm one’s strongly
held beliefs and ism’s… that the ism and ideology is more important then
the truth or facts…facts that deny the ism is denied… science is hated…
the left is hated because they deny the faith, the ism and ideologies one’s lives
by…to have faith regardless of the facts or truth… that is what this
alleged search for knowledge means… searching for knowledge that confirms
previously held ideologies like belief in god and the truth of America as an
ideology… not a real search for the truth or a real search for knowledge…

but what does the search for knowledge really mean?

it is about searching for the possibilities that is the human being…
what are human beings real potential and possibilities…
that is what knowledge is for… finding out what is possibly for
a human being…

Kropotkin

Philosophy: love of wisdom…

Love is pursued so love of wisdom means we pursue wisdom…
we find wisdom within knowledge, within experience, within facts…
with these things, knowledge, experience, facts, we are attempting to
discover or interpret this knowledge into wisdom…

all humans die… this is wisdom gained from knowledge, experience, facts…
but what does it mean to face death as a human? for example, I don’t believe
in an afterlife… I think when you die, its just like falling asleep but there are no dreams,
just the silence of being dead with no sensory input going into the body, so the
body becomes unaware and silent…but what wisdom do I gain with this knowledge?

I gain the wisdom not to fear death… it will happen regardless of what I think about
it…when I was much younger, I had an crisis of the soul… somewhere in my twenties,
I became aware of death, not as a abstract theory that the young have, but as a real
question of human existence…I was haunted by the thought I was going to die…
one might call it a spiritual crisis…this crisis took a long time to resolve itself…
but the wisdom I gained from this crisis has been crucial to my understanding of
the world… I gained wisdom from knowledge, experience, facts…I gave up the
traditional beliefs in the metaphysics, god… heaven… hell…angels…the
resurrection and became an atheist many years after my initial crisis but that
crisis helped shape who I am and what I believe about the world… I gained
wisdom… I followed the path of philosophy (even though I didn’t know it at the time)
going from experience to wisdom…

now, in terms of Nietzsche, I overcame, I reevaluated the values of the society
with its focus on spiritual matters…

but what about a believer, a true believer…
a true believer believes they already have the truth,
that they already have wisdom…now this truth might
be religious in nature but it may also be political in nature…

there is a god thinks the religious believer…
there is no greater political system then democracy…
there is no greater economic system then capitalism…

these beliefs are core beliefs that constitute part of a belief system…

so for one who believes that they already hold the truth, that they
already holds wisdom… what do they do with new, incoming knowledge,
new experiences or new facts…they already believe they hold the truth,
they hold wisdom already… what they do with these new facts or new knowledge
is to use these to confirm their core belief system…

so stated in another way, they used facts or knowledge to confirm
already held biases, ism’s, ideologies or paradigms…
god exists… so the way the solar system circles and is a
very rational system is proof of god’s existence…
evidence is used to bolster one’s already held biases and ism’s…

ok, so the search for wisdom doesn’t exist for the true believer because
they already believe they have true knowledge, true wisdom, the truth…

the value of facts and evidence for the true believer is to find support for
their particular ism, bias, ideology…

the so called war between science and faith is really not that science can’t deal
with faith, but that faith can’t deal with science… because science can
show us facts, evidence, experiences that contradicts the “wisdom” of the
true believer…if the earth is 13 billion years old, it contradicts the
“knowledge” of the believer and so to maintain their beliefs, the believer
attacks science and its facts and evidence and experiences…
this is the reason for the war against science… the attack on science
in regards to global warming and evolution and physics is because
faith cannot deal with new facts or evidence that might contradict
faith… this is just as true with the true believer of any ism or ideology,
or paradigm be it religious or be it political or be it social…
this is why those of the true believers of capitalism attacks with such vigor
those who argue against capitalism… because the faith of capitalism
is no different then the faith in god and with the same amount of evidence for
either belief system…

the value of facts, knowledge, experiences for the true believer is to
maintain and support of the belief system… but that is not a search
for wisdom… it is not philosophy… it is religion and nothing more then
religion to use wisdom to confirm one’s bias, ism, ideologies…

Kropotkin

I have at some length discuss the fact that we humans are
problem solving creatures… if you look at history, you see that
we have created our institutions like monarchy and armies and
ideologies in response to some problem or another…

everything you see is a response to a problem, be it medicine to
philosophy to radio to computers to roads and schools and books
and glasses to clothes to democracy to communism to swimming pools…

everything is a response to a problem…so we have problems and we seek solutions
to those problems…but, but what about those people who I described in my last
post… those who by faith believe they have the answers to the questions of life…

we know those people are only interested in facts and experiences and knowledge
by how it confirms their biases and ism’s and ideologies… they don’t see solutions
to problems because they believe the object of their faith already gives them a solution…

an example is when faced with a problem, people will often say, Trust in god…
as an solution to a problem…these people of faith don’t want to react or create
solutions to problems because they believe, have faith, in a god that will solve
the problem for them… why search for solutions for a problem when god
will take care of it? that is having faith… there are no problems that can’t be
solved by faith… that is according to those with faith…but a problem like
global warming cannot be solve by prayer or faith in the divine…

and that is the problem with those with faith…they believe any problem can be
solved by faith and prayer…if you want to solve the problem of
overpopulation, faith and prayer are not solutions… they in fact, create
even more problems…at some point, we must act to curtail our growing
population or we face extinction… faith or prayer isn’t going to solve that…
you must act, we must act…

if you believe that you already have the solution to a problem,
if you have faith, then you won’t be able to hear a real solution
to the problem… because you are so tied into your bias and your ism…
that you think the bias will somehow solve the problem… it won’t…

if we have complete faith in such ism and ideologies like capitalism
and democracy and communism that you might miss the problems
that each system creates… you will fail to see the massive problems
that is caused by capitalism, problems that threaten the human species…
but you can’t see that in your devotion to this particular ism…

and this is where we stand… there are those that are so committed
to their biases and ism’s and ideologies, that they can’t see the damage
that the ism is causing the earth and the human species…they
aren’t open to the problems and any possible solutions to that problem…

those people are too engaged, to invested in their ism’s to notice
the problems of that ism, of those ideologies…they don’t even see
a problem and won’t be looking for facts, evidence or experiences that
might present a solution to those problems… because they use facts
and experience and knowledge to justify or to confirm their biases instead
of searching for truth… and in that truth, we see evidence of problems,
if we are honest searchers for the truth

the beginning of wisdom is to begin to doubt and doubt ism’s and ideologies
and paradigms… to discover solutions to our problems, we must begin
without any bias that undermines the truth… we can only find the truth if
we don’t believe we already have the truth in faith in ism’s and ideologies…

there is a public danger by those who insist that they hold the truth
ever certain because they are in possession of wisdom that exists
beyond the need for doubt or uncertainty… those who have faith in god
regardless of facts, evidence or experience and those who have faith in
an ideology regardless of facts, evidence or experience… like those who
have faith in the ideology of America… America, love it or leave it…
America, the greatest country on earth… they proclaim this because they
have faith…

“that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator
with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness”

and yet, those with faith in the American ideology don’t have
faith to challenge their beliefs as proscribed by Nietzsche…

it is not enough to have the courage of your beliefs…
you must have courage enough to challenge your beliefs…

so this problem and solution issue that we face is render in doubt
by those who are believers and cannot see that a problem exist
because to admit that problems exist might challenge their certainty
in their ism or their ideology… and here we stand today…
the faithful in their determination to keep the faith, threaten
not only America but they threaten the human species because they
won’t even face the fact that there are problems and we must find solutions
to those problems…we must have doubt and uncertainty if we are to
find solutions to our many problems…it is doubt and uncertainty
that allows us to explore the possibilities that exist in finding solutions
to the many problems we have… not faith and certainty…

Kropotkin

As I do my research in philosophy, I noticed that
during the 16 and 17 century, there was much philosophical
investigations of science, the science occurred, then years later
the philosophy began… so you have Kepler and Copernicus
and Galileo first, then you have the philosophers…
so for example, you have Copernicus who lived from
1473 to 1543, a full half century before Descartes, who lived
from 1596 to 1650… you have the scientist who laid the groundwork
and then later you have the philosophers to take the facts and knowledge
and make those facts and knowledge into values…
after Descartes, you have a long list of philosophers who wrote like
Spinoza and Leibniz for an example…

now you compare that with science and philosophy in the 20 and 21st century…

you have a completely new understanding of the universe lead by Einstein but
you don’t have the same philosophical out burst by philosophers trying to turn
these new facts and knowledge into values… which is philosophy…

why didn’t the new scientific breakthrough of the 20 century lead to the
same philosophical outburst that occurred after the scientific revolution
of the 16 and 17 century…

it should have but it didn’t… inquiring minds want to know…

Kropotkin

those who promote the philosophy of hate and anger,
those on the right… don’t have a positive philosophy to offer…
those on the right, disparage such values as toleration and acceptance and
equality…what values they promote is never known because these
philosophers of hate don’t have any values to promote…they just have values
to hate, no values to offer…

the left has values to offer, positive values like tolerance and acceptance
and equality and we can use these values to better improve society and the
individuals within that society…the modern world is based on these
values of tolerance and acceptance and equality, these liberals values
are the values of the modern society…

and they work for modern society… the idea behind tolerance
is basically, we tolerate whatever idea’s you have and whatever you want to be…
that idea is you are free to work out who you are without interference from
society… and you can become who you are in a wide variety of ways, sexually,
intellectually, emotionally…and you then return to society the knowledge of
those experiences you have learned…it is from experience that we learn…
and if we limit those experiences to set ism’s and ideologies, such as limit
sexuality to man and a women with the goal being procreation, we limit our
experiences so much we don’t learn anything new… the experiences of
homosexuality increases the knowledge we have of sexuality…

you can hear someone describe the color red but until you experience
the color red in some fashion, you will never be able to understand what
red means… you can have someone tell you what a concussion is, but
until you experienced a concussion is, you have no real understanding of
a concussion… which I have had, I was unable to function for a month…
or someone explain baseball in exact detail to you but until you try to hit
a round ball with a round bat, you don’t really know what hitting a baseball is…

so the experiences that we allow people to go through by the acts of toleration
and acceptance increases people experiences and that benefits society…

there is no path to becoming who you are without some toleration and
acceptance from the very least your family and from society…

the path to justice also lies here as justice is having people become who they are
and those who attempt to stop people from becoming who they are, are committing
acts of injustice…

we must be free to, not only in theory, but in practice, experience to
engage in acts that explore the human potential even if those acts
are proclaimed… immoral and forbidden by god… the only way we human
can begin to understand what we are and what we can become is by tolerating
and accepting actions that are deemed immoral… animals are limited
by their programming to only act in certain ways… we humans have
much more open programming and that allows us to grow and engage in
behavior and actions that go beyond our programming, our instincts,
and we can only understand who we are and who are we becoming
when we engage in new and quite often unsettling actions and behaviors…

we can only grow when we have the toleration and acceptance of society
that allows us to engage in actions and behaviors…

that is a clear defense of liberalism and it’s engaging in toleration
and acceptance and equality…which allows us to explore our
possibilities and potential…

can those who oppose equality and toleration and acceptance create
a philosophy that promotes their values into an idea of a society?

I doubt it… for the opponents of toleration and acceptance and equality
can only oppose, they cannot create positive values that are useful within
a society… they are the party of no… and have nothing to offer anybody…

Kropotkin

I am eating breakfast, my mass produced breakfast…
I am typing on this computer, this mass produced computer…
on my mass produced kitchen table and chairs…
listening to music on my mass produced Iphone…
I can move over to my mass produced couch
to watch mass produced TV shows…
later the wife and I will drive to the coast
in our mass produced car on mass produced roads…
we will stop at a burger place and
eat mass produced burgers…

tomorrow I will go to work…
as a checker in a grocery store…
I will be one checker in a row of checkers
all of us checking on mass produced scales
using our mass produced bar codes to scan
thousands of mass produced items…

on Thursday, I will get a paycheck
for I am one of over 200,000 people working in this company
and we all want our mass produced paychecks to deposit
in our mass produced banks to pay for our mass produced lives…

what is authentic…
when everything we do and everything we eat
and everything we see is mass produced

my education was part of a mass production line…
my government is part of a mass production line…
my church is part of a mass production line…
my job is part of a mass production line…
my entertainment is a mass production line…

so how am I supposed to be real
and authentic and alive…
when everything in my life is
mass produced…

I am a mass produced person in a mass produced life…

Kropotkin

so yesterday, I spoke of having a mass produced life within
a mass produced world…

and later that day, the wife and I went to a museum in San Francisco,
the Legion of Honor… they had a Degas exhibit she wanted to see…

so, we drove in our mass produced car with a whole lot of other people
to SF and found our way into the museum…

we saw art… not mass produced art or but real one of a kind art…
that wasn’t mass produced or artificial in any way…

it was paintings and statues most glories…

men and women who toiled, sometimes for years to
paint something…create something… build something…
something that wasn’t mass produced and it was the reason we have art…
the need to express something and do it once and then leave it to history to judge…

it was refreshing because it a single human expressing their feelings and thoughts
in a non-modern way… not sometimes the medium is the message and if we see
the same message in the same medium, then we are, in part and parcel, being programmed…

the medium of mass production where we have the same mass produced mediums
of TV and Radio and Movies and advertising and digital… this whether it is meant
or not, to make us conform to a certain message, the conservative has heard that
message… everyone must be the same… wearing the same jeans, smelling the same,
having the same haircut… our own personal message is being programed into us,
by the mediums we listen to and we see and taste… the conformity of
McDonalds is that we are eating a mass produced, same taste, same texture,
hamburger… that is a message sent and received…

art is an attempt to bring us past mass produced things…
art is an attempt to show us something different then our mass produced lives…
art says, there is more to live then a mass produced live, so live it…

so maybe that is the question of our age… how do we live our lives
in a mass produced world without ourselves be caught up in this mass production
world we live in? how do we live non-mass produce lives?
how do we avoid the various mediums telling us the same message everyday,

how do we retain our individuality in a world trying to make us one?

Kropotkin

Everything we do, everything we act upon, every institution
we conceive and every object we create, be it physical or mental,
is a response to a problem… how do we keep food and edibles cold
so they don’t spoil… the fridge… how do we travel to the moon… spaceships
how do we explore the world… science… how do we teach what is and what isn’t… schools…
and how do we pass alone important information about what values we hold… schools…
every thing we see is an answer to a problem…

but and this is important to note… we don’t have to answer every problem…
the history of philosophy is littered with problems that vexed the minds of men…
but we don’t… or I should more correctly state, I don’t consider them to be OUR
problem of our time… for example, the problem of our knowledge in the external world…
that problem vexed philosophers for centuries and Descartes and Spinoza and Leibniz
and Hobbes and Locke all worked on this solution…the mind/body problem left to
us by Descartes also was worked on and is still a problem this day…

and yet, personally I don’t consider them “MY PROBLEMS”…
I am working on other issues and so we don’t have to work on other people’s
problem… we can pick and choose what issue of modern life we choose to
work on… one of the questions I do work on is this… what is the relationship
between the individual and the society… the individual and government…
another problem I work on is what does it mean to be an individual…
and what are our possibilities as individual human beings… what is possible
for human beings to understand or to comprehend or to become…
what does it mean to be human? another question of mine is one of perception and
perspective… we humans have different perceptions and perspectives of time, space,
each other, reality, thought…how does our perspective of reality and the relationship
of things, change who we are and what we want to become…this idea of being and
becoming is important… who we are and who do we want to become…
but the important thing to note is this, my questions aren’t necessarily your questions…
my search for what is important to me is part and parcel of who I am… my questions
tell you who I am as surely as if I told you my life story…

I am on the outside looking in as I have been my entire life… outside looking in…
and that reveals my viewpoint of my questions… I stand here and ask these questions…
whereas you might stand there and by standing there, you get different questions and
different answers…our viewpoint decides which questions we ask…
because I am liberal means I ask different questions then a conservative because
my viewpoint is different… where I ask the question determines what questions get
asked…I am male and that changes what questions I ask… I am white and that
changes what questions I ask… I am 5’8 and that changes the questions I ask…
I have a severe hearing loss and that changes the questions I ask…
it is like using radar to spot objects… we use questions to understand locations…
if we use radar in every direction, we can then understand what is our current location…
asking questions does the same thing…we can tell our location for our questions…

so what questions are you asking?

Kropotkin

Socrates big claim to fame is simple, he brought philosophy down to earth…
what we would call science, was philosophy before Socrates… what is the
earth made of and how do we account for change in the universe…
that was philosophy before Socrates…Natural philosophy is what it would
be called for almost 2000 years… we call it science…

Socrates wasn’t about what happened in space or what things were made of…
he was concerned with MAN and how to live our lives… Socrates spends
a great deal of talking about the soul and how to improve the soul and
by doing so, we improve MAN…

after 2000 years, we must renew Socrates vision…
and return philosophy to MAN… we see how philosophy is about
the deconstruction of sentences and language and the logic of things
and how philosopher tried to give human’s meaning with the connection
of the new science and philosophy… Descartes and Spinoza and Leibniz
mission of taking the new science of motion and measurement and
to deduce “philosophy” from the new science…

We must recover philosophy from the new science and those like
Descartes and Spinoza who have raised philosophy into the heavens…
and return philosophy to the realm of man… how are we to live…
what is important for us to understand about life… is death really
the source of our angst? is the soul really as important as Socrates claim
it was and if so, should we be concern with improving our souls as Socrates
thought we should be…should human beings be concern about improving ourselves
or should we be concern with the gathering of knowledge led by science…

important questions indeed…

Kropotkin

the math problem… 1 + 1 = 2

is a mathematical certainty…it is true regardless of what else happens
in the world… but is it?

you have one, as I am eating pizza right now I shall use pizza,
one pizza…1 and you have another Pizza, 1…
and you have 2 pizza’s… but and this is important…
you have 1…1…2…

you haven’t actually connected 1…1…2…

you have a plus sign + and you have a equal sign… =
there are artificial signs that connect 1…1…to two…,2…
can you connect 1…1…2… without these artificial signs of + or =…

the act of connecting 1…1…into 2 exists in artificially made way…

for without that plus sign or that equal sign, you cannot connect 1…1…into 2…

the three signs…1…1…2 exist separately and independently of each other until
connected by the plus sign and an equal sign…that connection does not happen in nature,
it can only exists within the mind… a child has to be taught about the plus sign and the
equal sign…but the 1… that a child can see… one pizza, one pencil, one TV… and the child
can see the other object, one pizza, one pencil, one TV…but there are not two unless and until
the child can supply within the mind, the plus and the equal sign…this means
that experience teaches us mathematical concepts… they are not innate…because
we don’t automatically supply the plus sign or the equal sign… we must be taught
the plus sign and the equal sign…what we teach in teaching math for instance is not
the 1…1…2 but the signs + and = and -… we teach the means of connection between
1…1…2…we teach how we connect three separate signs or symbols with
made up or created means… +…=…-

in math we teach connections, not numbers…how these numbers connect to
create new numbers…without connection, there is not math…

Kropotkin

so let us return to this idea that math is not about numbers but
how we connect those numbers…

let us take a triangle… one might claim that the idea of
a triangle is innate… but we can come up with the idea of
a triangle without resorting to some innateness in us…

you have line | and you have another line _______

you can connect the two lines |_______

and then you can connect the up and down line with the bottom of the line
to make a triangle…

I am unable to do so with my keyboard but create a triangle in your head…

now that triangle in your head… have you seen it in nature?
in other words, have you seen a triangle on a beach or in the forest?
I doubt it… a triangle doesn’t exists in nature… we have created
it… now about that idea of a triangle is the sum of angles… some
mix that equals, I think its 180 degrees …anyway… the idea that a triangle must
equal 180 degrees is about a connection between the lines, not the math itself…

a triangle is a mix of numbers but we have made the connection, the mix ourselves
and so a triangle is not innate, but created by experience and the connection of
numbers that must be taught… is not innate…

as I must go to work now, I shall leave this to later…

Kropotkin

so, under a quite of bit of time pressure yesterday, I wrote about
mathematical idea’s… you take 1 add 1 equals 2…

“add” and “equal” what kind of word is “add”? what does it mean?

and “equal” what does that mean? two distinct and separate symbols
are equal? this idea of equality is a hard one to understand…
equal in what way? you can add up anything… you have one dog and one
cat and you have two animals but how does a dog and a cat become equal?
by understanding and including the word animal… you have a dog, animal,
you have a cat, animal… but when you say, one dog plus one cat equals…
the dog and cat being animals is unsaid, implied… until you reach the equal
sign… they, dog and cat, are equally animals… add one table and one chair…
you get two pieces of furniture…you have to know ahead of the actual working
out the equality between the symbols, what the symbols are… you have to know
that a table and a chair are furniture or the equality aspect won’t make sense…

a Tisch plus a stuhl equals mobelstuck… is this math? only if you speak German…

the key word here is mobelstruck… furniture…now you can work out what I said…
a table plus a chair = furniture… but it doesn’t make any sense unless you have the word
furniture…

let us say… an airplane plus an elephant equals a …suddenly it doesn’t really make
sense… you can add it but it has to have something in common…they are really just
two random idea’s that cannot be added because they have nothing in common…

so we see the connection aspect of mathematics… you just can’t add two completely
random items… there has to be some connection between the two items for
there to be math involved…

but what does this have to do with me?

exactly…

Kropotkin