a new understanding of today, time and space.

If you chanted, LOCK HER UP, LOCK HER UP…

you are not a “Christian”…for one of the guiding principles
of “Christianity” is forgiveness… and if you chant “LOCK HER UP”
you are not engaging in forgiveness or any other “Christian” practice…
You are not engage with forgiveness or love or charity… all “Christian”
principles or beliefs………….

that is what I mean by practicing what we preach……. if we preach
Christian idea’s, we must practice Christian ideals and if we preach
American ideals, then we must practice American ideals…….

and you might ask, legitimately I might add, what are “American”
ideals?..and therein lies the problem… we can say without
any fear of contradiction, that we have no idea what American
ideals really are………

so what are your values, your principles, your beliefs?

and what do you practice that is in support of your values, your principles,
your beliefs?

Kropotkin

let us rethink, reevaluate philosophy as we know it……

Let us understand philosophical works as, as spiritual documents…

So let us take Descartes method, not as an quest for knowledge but
as a spiritual document……

Descartes doesn’t unify man, he separates him into body and mind…
as a document to live by, Descartes book, “Discourse on method”
tells one how to achieve certainty, but doesn’t tell one how to
engage in life…I think therefor I am… isn’t a spiritual message,
it is a knowledge understanding…and what of Spinoza, “Ethics”…
is that a “spiritual” book, no… it too instructs us in certainty
and doesn’t tell us how to engage in life…and Hume and Kant
and Hegel, they are instruction manuals about philosophy, not
in how to live… modern philosophy of about “what to know”
and not “what to be”… What you should know is the rational,
philosophical things you should know to be a philosopher,
but the real quest of philosophy is “what to be”……
what shall I believe in and what shall I practice?

that is the true statement of philosophy…….

what is to be our engagement in our lives and in our society’s life?

In what beliefs should we have and how do we practice our beliefs is the
real engagement in philosophy………

What values are we to hold and how do we practice those values… is just
another way of saying “how do we practice our beliefs”

How is Nietzsche for example, to be read as a spiritual document?

How is Hegel or Foucault or Heidegger to be read as spiritual documents?

One might ask, what does it mean “spiritual documents”?
and by doubt, you can achieve wisdom…

Kropotkin

ask someone of the MAGA crowd about why they favor IQ45
and quite often they will say, it pisses off the “libtards”.
That is an rather astonishing statement. If you mean it,
and conservatives seem to lead with their anger and hate
and fear and greed, it means the entire concept of MAGA,
Make America Great Again, is a entirely false objective…

For the entire reason for MAGA is to make America “Great”
(and we will for the moment, not ask how America is not great or
how IQ45 particular course of actions will make America great again)

No, we will point out that if, if the entire point of the exercise, of electing
people just to piss of “libtards”, then we are not dealing with making
America great again, no, we are dealing with the right’s anger
and fear against the left. The hatred of the left is so great that
the entire point of electing IQ45 is to piss off the left, but that
has nothing to do with making America great again…

a fairly good argument can be made that it was liberalism
that made America great. For the operating ism of the United States during
the years of greatness, from 1945 to 1980, were years of liberal beliefs
and actions… the one blemish on those years, Nixon’s Watergate which of
was driven by Republicans. Starting with the election of the conservative’s
darling, Raygun, in 1980, we begin to see cracks in America’s greatness. We have
the Iran-contra debacle which was run out of the White house, the Vice-president
office, in 1986, by the recently deceased Bush Sr, a Republican.

We have in 1992 a fairly conservative democrat, Clinton, still following
a mild, tamed down Liberalism. His blemish was the Lewensky affair
(and if have to impeach him for that, then you must impeach IQ45 for
the far more serious crime of federal election laws, you cannot engage in
selective enforcement of the law, for that is not justice, which is equality,
but that is the beauty of being conservative, you just cherry pick your beliefs
and their enforcement )
but then after Clinton, we have Bush Jr. (who is looking better every day)
and his crimes were about the full frontal attack upon the rights of every single
American…and then Obama, who was a far more conservative president then
Clinton, in fact, I would say that Obama was right of center, not even center
of the profile, but right of………

But we have conservatives who will defend the election of IQ45 as
being about pissing off “libertards”…but what exactly has IQ45 done
or accomplished? You can only point to one thing, the massive
tax give away to the wealthy and corporations. That was his only
accomplishment in the last two years, even with a GOP house, a
GOP senate, a GOP supreme court… and yet, yet, we are expected
to make America great with zero accomplishments? I don’t see how
we can make America great given the complete failure of the conservative
agenda which is clear in its welfare for the rich program as its only
accomplishment. Virtually every other thing IQ45 has done has
been by executive order. He has been doing the agenda of the
wealthy and the corporations by making profits, the pursuit of
money as the primary goal of the political agenda. The pursuit
of profits, as I have noted is nihilism and if you support it,
you are also engaged in the pursuit of nihilism…
which is the negation of human beings and their values…
To support the conservative agenda is the pursuit of nihilism…
and that is the real point of my topic today… conservative values
are nihilistic values because they negate human beings and their
values… And it is quite clear if one looks at the political
actions of the GOP over the last 40 years, since 1980, that
the goal of the GOP has been the negation of human beings
and their values… for example, we have the attack upon
the freedom of women to choose what happens to their bodies,
which is under attack by the GOP… taking away freedoms
is a negation of values and that is the GOP agenda,
taking away freedoms…The GOP is trying to take
away the freedom of voting, as exhibited by voter suppression
laws in many states and taking away democracy as exhibited
in states like Wis and NC. in which the GOP is trying to
suppress democracy after losing the 2018 elections…

It is clear that the GOP is anti-democratic…
look at their actions and yet, yet, people still
still support them because it “pisses of the Libtards”

yes, support anti-democratic policies because if pisses
of liberals but perhaps should engage not in just
“pissing off libtards” but engage in some concern
about what will actually make America great again…

which is a strong dose of liberalism in public policy
and public actions… because that is how America
became great the first time… before American values was destroyed
by conservative Icons like Raygun………

Kropotkin

As I sit here, just thinking… and how many people do that?

I am thinking about my relationship with philosophy.
I have been reading philosophy for over 40 years… looking, seeking,
searching and for what? I don’t know, perhaps I may never know…

I am thinking about philosophy and using philosophy as a way of life……

But as I think about my engagement with philosophy, I remember my past
readings of philosophy… I began with the Greeks and Romans…of ancient
philosophy, the schools of philosophy… of Stoicism and Epicureanism and
Platonism and Aristotelianism……. As I read them, they did not engage with
me, with who I am…They were cold and sterile, at least to me and I
did not find a home in ancient philosophy……

So I recalled my readings in medieval philosophy… and they left me even colder…
The medieval philosophers left me cold because they engage in a topic in which
I could find no respite from life…….

I recalled my readings from the Renaissance writers and they too didn’t engage
with my heart… The Renaissance writers were about rediscovery, they were
at heart, Librarians…and that left me cold………

Next came the enlightenment writers… and for the first time, I was engaged…
They at least were about trying to find a new path, an individual path,
a path that didn’t depend upon the old authorities like the bible or Aristotle
for guidance…
But in the end, the enlightenment writers seemed, at least to me, unfinished,
incomplete…they hadn’t finished their studies and then, I reached the German
idealism that I am now engaged with… and after two months of study,
I am left cold by them………I have read them and my heart is left as cold
as my head……. I cannot engage with them as we don’t talk about the same
things………

As I have stated, I have read philosophy for over 40 years and although I haven’t
reached them in my studies yet, I have extensively read Kierkegaard and Nietzsche…
I have almost all their books and have most of what they have written…of
what I have read of “modern” philosophy, most of it leaves me cold, but not
Kierkegaard or Nietzsche…….I have “engaged” with both over many years
and I shall do so again, shortly…

What do I demand from philosophy?

I demand engagement with philosophy with both my head and my heart.
Philosophy has to engage in the past, present and the future.
For philosophy to engage with me on a personal level, as a way of life,
it must engage with me on a very personal level.

Kierkegaard once wrote this

“What I really need to get clear about is, what I must do,
not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede
every act. What matters is to find purpose, to see what it really is
that God wills that I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth
which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to
live and die”

Remove the word god and this could be me………

I sit here, all alone in my condo, wife and daughter have gone to work…
I sit here with my headphones on listening to music, as I do at every chance I get…
As I listen, I attempt to hold a conversation with my soul………
In a crowded room, where every one congregates in the middle, you will
find me by the wall, headphones on, listening to music……
In fact, I suspect if you ask people to give one image of me, they
will say that I keep to myself and isolate myself, either with headphones or
with a book………And yet, and yet, I try to engage with myself in what
I am to do, even in my old age, I am still trying to find my “purpose”……

one might say, Kropotkin, you are full of contradictions… yes,
a thousand times, yes… but to say I am full of contradictions is
to say, Kropotkin… you are human… yes…

Perhaps I have confessed too much, perhaps I haven’t confessed enough…
for all of writing, all of philosophy is a confession of the soul…

my philosophers of choice is a confession……. I am a man…
the person I most resemble is Goethe… not in talent, for I will
never have that kind of talent, but in the reserve I show people
and yet my inner soul is in torment… I contain my emotionalism
under a cold exterior……. I laugh and cry and fall in love, in silence,
out of sight of other people……… I watch a movie the other day,
and I cried, but silently, inside of myself……………

How can I find a philosopher or philosophy that engages me on
several levels, mentally, emotionally, psychologically……

and so I keep looking…………

Kropotkin

As I read Hadot, I am beginning to wonder if, as he claims,
that Philosophy itself is a spiritual exercise!..…

This notion intrigues me…Is not the point of spiritual exercises to
allow one to rise to the level of becoming acceptable to god…

Let us secularize this and make the goal of philosophical spiritual
exercises to become the best possible human being one can become…
It has nothing to do with god or heaven or hell or Satan, but with
one becoming who they are………isn’t that the philosophical goal!

Not only to understand but to remake one into a better person…
As Marx once stated, it is not enough to understand the world,
one must remake it…….

so let us put this into context…

You are born into a world with already preset ism’s and ideologies
biases and prejudices and habits and superstitions…
You are indoctrinated into those ism’s and biases by family,
society, media, church, state…

You grow up in those indoctrinations… then at one point in time,
whatever age, you learn that those indoctrinations are not or do
not adequately explain what you are seeing on the ground…
they are contradictions, discrepancies, incongruities, anomalies,
that are not explained or understood by your indoctrinations…

What are you to do?

For most people, they sweep it under the rug, just write it off.
For some, the anomalies are enough to get one to reexamine,
reevaluate one’s indoctrinations… they become thinkers, philosophers…

for example, we have been lead to believe that capitalism is the
“greatest” economic theory ever, and yet, capitalism is flawed,
severely flawed to the point where it has threatened to
destroy everything it touches…including America……
The rhetoric of the greatness of capitalism is denied by the
anomalies that capitalism creates. The massive poverty it creates,
the wonton destruction of the earth to the point of massive
extinction of plants/animals/species is in progress…
we have pollution and global warming which is the “cost”
of capitalism and I as well as many others, believe to be
to high a cost to pay for the 1% to enjoy the good life…

The problem of capitalism, the system of choice, is that
there is no other choice besides capitalism…capitalism
doesn’t allow any other choices, you cannot exists within
the capitalistic system without making the pursuit of
profits/money as your primary goal and that pursuit is
what is damaging and destroying the earth and, AND
our souls…….

And this is the point of thinking about philosophy as being
a spiritual exercise… At no point must we or should we
reference god or any other metaphysical concept, we don’t have
to, we can use philosophy as a spiritual concept without any recourse
to metaphysical concepts…

Philosophy as a spiritual exercise means we use philosophy
as a tool of diagnosis of our “illness” and as a tool to
find our means to the path of recovery from our “illness”…

By philosophy, we understand the failure of capitalism
and by philosophy we then find another economic system
that is not so destructive to either our planet or to us……

We make choices based on our philosophical understanding of
what it means to hold a capitalistic system opposed to
a non-capitalistic system or some combination therein…

In other words, we shall follow the ideal of the French revolution
and instead of falling into our choices, we make our choices,
we create our future instead of just accepting whatever comes
around… we actively participate in the creation of our future,
which is quite a change of pace from what has actually occurred
over the course of human existence…We have said “god wills it”
or “historical materialism wills it” which is the same thing and
then we just simply accept without comment or reaction to this
rather passive accepting of our fate…I want an active, not reaction,
to the events and actions of our time… and the organ of our understanding
of the events and actions of our time is or will be, philosophy……

Instead of being passive in our future, we engage with and
create our future…we engage in creating our own future
and philosophy as both a branch of rational thought and
as a spiritual exercise is a means of doing this……

we become “enlighten”, to become better people, which
in turn allows us to bring about a better future…

You want a better future? you must work at it, you must
become the person you want to be and that takes
effort and work and that work is philosophy…

To become who you are……. that just doesn’t just happen
overnight………we have the template of becoming…
we just have to have the courage of practicing what we preach…

How will you become?

Kropotkin

I am listening to music, as is my wont,
and right now I am listening to a full orchestra playing
Canon in D Major by Pachelbel………and I wonder
at the genius of the person who stripped down the canon
into just piano and violin or even just the piano…

To take the richness of that piece and by stripping it down, to
give it even more beauty, more power…….

Life has an existential property that most people won’t acknowledge…
life has an existential aspect that is hard to understand, little less to explain…

Many have attributed to life the question of its being…
Is life “being” made up of suffering as the Buddha said, or is life
the philosophical preparing for death as the main thing or is life the pursuit
of “truth” whatever that is or the pursuit of wisdom or perhaps something
else all together…

The very fact that after thousand of years, we still don’t know, leads us
to wonder if the question is even the right question…

Now one particular theme of life’s being has been stated over and over,
and it goes like this………It is better not to have been born then to be born…
or as the noted philosopher C-3PO said, it is our lot to suffer…
thus meaning it is better not to have been born at all…

And after 40 years of thinking about this point, I still can’t tell………

In reading Plato’s apology, at the end where Socrates says to Critio,

“Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius. Please don’t forget to pay the debt”

And Asclepius was the god of medicine and thus Socrates was asking
Crito to pay the debt for being healed from some illness……

Now a rather common interpretation is that Socrates was implying
that life is an illness and death is some sort of cure and he wanted
to thank Asclepius for being “cured” with his death…

That being was an illness and the only cure was death………

and it certainly does seem sometimes that we suffer and that
our time on earth is full of pain and misery and horror and all the
other words to describe our days on earth……

I cannot deny that we suffer and that I personally have suffered…
I was born handicap and have had my fair share of suffering
and misery……… and the existential question is rather simple,
does our life, such as it is, worth all that pain and suffering and misery?

One can see the point of those who claim that it is better not to have been
born then to be born… and one can see the point of life is to prepare for
the inevitable death that is sure to come… and death with dignity is simply
a false idea… there is no death with dignity, in the end, we drool on ourselves
and then unload a pile of shit… and it is over… our last act of being human
is dropping a load of shit… and that seems to me to be very appropriate
final act of life…

and in all of this sound and fury, signifying nothing, what can we find that
will make all this effort worth our while?

We can claim that life is worth the effort because of friends, family, country,
faith, fame, materialism, or any number of combinations of those factors that
we have listed or might list………

And each of these factors has had their defenders, faith and country and
nationalism or some very narrow factors like being white or being a man…

What has given our life meaning and purpose has been fought over
since time began and that battle surely will not end because of anything
I have written…

If life is not an illness that only ends with the cure of death, then
what is this thing we call life?

Kropotkin

We hear of philosophy and religion whose goal is to create
peace of mind and serenity and tranquility……… especially
in philosophy……… we are suppose to use philosophy to gain
that serenity and peace of mind……. in the same way that
the Buddha tried to create a peace of mind by making people
aware of their desires which is the cause of suffering…
we suffer because we cannot achieve what our desires demand…
by removing desires, we no longer chase after the empty
and unfulfilling objects of our desires………and that eliminates
suffering…

Or said another way, we are addicted to our various objects of
desire, we are addicted to our materalism, we are addicted to
our need for more and more and more in our life…

to achieve peace, we must eliminate the desire for those
things like materialism and sex and drink and food and fame and money,
that we pursue and crave…

It is kinda an all or nothing thing… this demand for peace and serenity…
to achieve it, you must give up all you desire…then, then you can
achieve tranquillity and serenity…

But I offer up a different solution… We can say yes to materialism
and to lust and to greed and to desire… if, if we find a balance in
our lives… a place where we can naturally act upon our desires without
turning that desire into suffering by having balance in our lives…
that there is a place for desire cannot be doubted, but we also must
be able to say no…….when the time is right…… sometimes desire is
right and appropriate and sometimes it is not………

to find our balance we must become aware of who we are and
our surroundings… The very act of desire is not by itself bad or
evil, it is in how we desire that become the question… does
that desire take over our actions and thoughts? Does achieving
that desire become the only goal? then desire has become bad,
unwanted…… but I desire and you desire and it is in the way
we respond to our desire that make it either right or wrong…….

I desire understanding, knowledge and in so desiring, even
though money is rather tight right now, I still am buying books
on philosophy and history and what it means to be “modern”…
my desires has influenced my shopping habits but it hasn’t overwhelmed
me, it hasn’t caused me to spend our food money on books…… I am
still in balanced with regards to my buying books……
gaining knowledge, understanding is a priority for me, I desire it,
but I still try to keep balance in my life……… My desire hasn’t
taken over my life…….I can say yes to buying books as long as
I understand, recognize that I cannot buy as many books as I so desire,
I must limit my book buying to what we can afford… I have balanced
my desire for knowledge with the realities of my life…I have said yes…
in a practical and balanced fashion…………

I can achieve peace of mind within the boundaries of what I desire
and what I do as a father, husband, breadwinner…………

My desires are simply one aspect of my life, the desires have
a set and organized place in my life and I can say yes, as long
as I practice moderation in those desires…….I have peace of mind,
serenity, tranquility because my desires are part of, part of my
existence, not desires denied and not the totality of my existence, just part of…
and that part is practiced in moderation…

We can achieve our desires without causing suffering if we
engage with our desires with moderation and balance…

Kropotkin

This question of the human existence,
the human condition is puzzling…

In reading the ancients, the ancient schools of philosophy,
The Platonist, Aristotelian, Stoic, Epicurean and Skeptic…
one see’s that they each agree in that we are too attached
to things, either physical or emotional… we are too attached/addicted
to things like TV’s, Cars, the so called “finer things in life” and we are
too attached/addicted to such ephemeral things like fame, money, titles…
things that are short lived, transient… things that come and go like a fart in
the wind…

Read the Buddha and his message was exactly the same…
and by being attached to such transient things, we set ourselves
up for the suffering we see in the world…

Read Jesus and he says the same thing… He suggests (as does the Buddha)
that we must reject the material world in favor of something more substantial,
something that is of value not just today, but for all the days to come…

The two differ on the question of what is the thing of value, the Buddha
suggest that we focus on the present, right now and Jesus suggests
that we focus on the coming of the lord which will take us to heaven
if, if we believe in him… this belief that the answer lies in the future for
Jesus and the answer for the Buddha is today, right now… and that is the main
difference between them…

But both believe that the answer lies in improving ourselves…
one for the trip to heaven and one to improve man’s soul…
The answer for Jesus is a personal, individual matter…
and that is the failure of Christianity… its focus on the
one, the individual instead of the focus on what the one
can do to improve society which is by becoming a better person…

Jesus doesn’t say anything about how to improve society, the whole,
whereas the Buddha does and that makes the Buddha’s message far
greater and more important……….it is not enough to ensure our
own passage to heaven, we must be engage in all mankind, in fact,
all life…We engage in Jesus message of improving ourselves to go to heaven,
but the reality is we must engage in improving ourselves to aid society, to
improve society… to make the world a better place to live…
that is the reason for our engagement with improving ourselves…
not to selfishly go to heaven, but to help others… personally, I would refuse
to go to heaven if others can not go to heaven, it must be an all
or nothing for me… if all cannot get to heaven, I won’t go…although to be
honest, given my track record, my chances for heaven is a bit on the slim side…
but you get the point……… it is not enough to ensure ourselves personally, of
salvation, we must engage with others so they reach salvation…it is more
important that they reach salvation then if I reach salvation………

and one possible way of achieving salvation is by refusing to engage
in the modern fixation of materialism…our attachment to things, material
and immaterial…we already know the answer to how to improve ourselves,
we have heard this message all our lives… we have been indoctrinated with
the words of Jesus our whole live and yet, yet we continue to ignore that
fundamental message that not only Jesus gave us but the schools of
ancient philosophy and the Buddha gave us……….that we must free
ourselves of attachment to values that have no real meaning……
materialism as a value is worthless, addiction to such transitory things
as fame, money, goods, respect are values not worth having because
they don’t answer the fundamental needs of the human being……
they answer the empty needs of a hungry man who would eat anything
in some attempt to fill his empty stomach… the hungry man would eat
anything if hungry enough and we are like that hungry man…
we are starved and we will eat any values that seems to appease
that hunger…… but the values offered by modern society are empty
calories… may has well be eating the cardboard those values came in,
which is just as filling as the modern values we are given……

In rejecting those empty calories, we call modern values,
we then are faced with the choice of what values are not
empty calories…… cardboard values……….

among those empty values, the empty calories is any possibility
of future salvation and any possibility of replenishing our souls
with the empty calories of fame, money, materialism, respect,
the modern nihilism of the pursuit of profits,
those are empty values, empty calories……

it is the values we engage with, that make life worth living…
the positive values of love, peace, charity, hope, honesty,
it is these values given in the present that offer us any hope
of filling our souls, of enriching our souls with values that
feed our soul…….

we can no longer believe that the empty promise of
modern values, nihilistic values can feed our souls……… only
positive values can offer us any hope of not starving to death in
this nihilistic world………

we must escape the transient world of modern values
and begin to reach for the more lasting and edible values of
the positive values that we need…love, peace, charity…….

Kropotkin

The dichotomy of our lives is easily understood…
good vs evil, mind vs body, real vs imaginary, male vs female…
that list can be extended……………….

We have another dichotomy that has been plaguing human beings
since time began…… that of the individual vs the collective………

the one, the individual and the many, the collective…….

Depending on the civilization, the emphasis has been either the
one or the many…Greece fell in part because of its emphasis
on the one, the individual…and Greece fell to Rome who emphasized
the many, the group……

We have had many champions of the one over the many…
The Greek play “Antigone” is one such play…
Of course in modern times we have Kierkegaard and Ibsen
and Nietzsche……….

and the list of those who have championed the many over the one is
a long and lengthy list…from the declaration of independence
to Marx to the French revolution……

Religious founders tend to favor individuals, Jesus and Mohammed and the Buddha
speak to the needs of the individual, not the collective…

But Confucius speaks to the many, the collective…

It has been an ongoing question of the one vs the many…
It even has been referenced in movies like the Star Trek movies…….

“the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one”

America has been the home of the individual, the philosophy
of the “rugged individualism” has been present in all of American
history… and even today, conservatives has advocated the one
over the many… the individual over the collective…

whereas liberals argue for the many over the one…….
the group over the individual…….

and who is right?

Well that depends upon when we are talking about?

For example, when the America was young and there was
a lot of land to be colonized, it was the movement of
the single person, the one that moved west and colonized the west…

But today, this philosophy of the “individual” no longer can
work…… We no longer have the time or space to allow individual
actions that were the norm a century ago………The larger and more
complex a system is, the less able it is to enable a single individual action,
as we grow larger and more complex, we cannot have random, single individual
actions within that system…… everyone has to move in the same direction
in a large complex system or the system gets bogged down……

Think of the solar system, it works as long as all the moving parts
are moving the same way in a circle, if Mars were to escape its orbit
and wander freely across the solar system, massive chaos would
occur in our solar system… large and complex systems must have
all the parts going in the right direction or the system risks failure,
risk coming apart……

and that is true of our very complex, moving system we call the modern world……
everyone has to be moving the right direction or the system risks failure…

there is certainly a time and place for individualism and a time and place
for collectivism and today, in the here and now, the system requires,
demands that we engage in the system as a collective because of
our large and complex system that we have in place………random actions
of the individual threatens the complexity of our modern system which
demands that we all play our role in the specific way we are supposed to…

but that conflicts with the goal and aspirations of the individual…
me included… for I too chafe under the modern world need for collective
action…for I stand with the individual, but I also recognize the need for
collective action… how do I successfully integrate the individual needs with
the society, collective needs?

and that becomes the question of the day…….we must allow the individual
the scope and freedom to become who they are and yet we must protect
the integrity of the group, the collective, society……

This clash between the individual and the group has been the basis
of much of human history, see the clash between Socrates and Athens,
where the individual lost and that individual had to commit suicide,
Socrates drank the hemlock and society was saved or was it?

We have Jesus’s clash with the state and we have
Spinoza clash with the Jews…

History is replete with examples of the ongoing clash
between the individual and the state/collective……….

My natural instinct is with the individual, recall I was an anarchist
for many years… and yet, yet I can see the need for collective
actions and responsibility…hence the communist part of me…

Within my soul lies the battle, the ago old battle between the needs
of the individual and the needs of the collective/state…

and we can see this ago old battle being fought out today between our society
and the individuals within that society…

I wish I had some answers, but I don’t… I do not see any answers between
the needs of the one and the needs of the society/collective…

Kropotkin

I have inside of my mind, many idea’s and thoughts and images
and I am trying to make sense of all of it… trying to put together
the puzzle as it were… without any sense of what the overall image
should look like or what it might look like…….

I was born into the world… just as you were………
we are born naked and dependent…
the “world” that is made up of family, friends, media,
church, state… the “world” spends the next 20 years indoctrinating us with
the myths, biases, prejudices, habits, ism’s, superstitions of that “world”…

But what exactly are those indoctrinations? one way to think of those
indoctrinations is that they are the prism, the values through which we view
the “world”… In other words, the indoctrinations are the perceptions through
which we view the “world”. We are taught, indoctrinated with the viewpoint
that all men are evil, conservative viewpoint, and then we perceive the world
through that lens of all men are evil. The indoctrinations are a method of
perceiving, seeing, the world……. we use those indoctrinations as a means
of seeing… the Greeks viewed wisdom as a means of seeing… wisdom was
connected with sight, the act of seeing……. so we can think about
those indoctrinations as a means of how we see the “world”.

When we begin the process of knowing thyself, it comes about because
we begin to see ourselves differently then we earlier saw ourselves…
in other words, the image we have of ourselves that is dominated by
the indoctrinations of our childhood, change because of life’s experiences…
as we grow older and “wiser” we see ourselves in different terms then
the indoctrinations of our childhood…
again focus on this act of sight, seeing, vision, perception……

we experience… and in that experience we see things differently…
for example, the first time we fall in love… that experience
changes how we see the word love… for we have heard of love all our lives
but once we fall in love, we see what love really is and that changes
our perception of the world…this new found understanding comes from
a new perception of “reality”, a new vision of experiences, we experience
love for the first time and it changes us, for many of us, it radically changes us…
and that change is the act of changing perceptions…

so it is important to think about change as changing perceptions,
we view things differently and in that difference we become something
else………

In high school or shortly thereafter, I tried reading “Zen and the art of
motorcycle maintenance” The book had just been published and I was
curious… I didn’t get through the book because my perceptions wasn’t
ready, I wasn’t ready to read the book… it was gobblygook for me…

at some point in the 1980’s, I tried again, I got through it this time
and it seem to me to be profound and deep and I didn’t understand
its greatness…my perception had change about the book,
the book itself hadn’t change, I had change since the last time
I read it…

at some point in the 1990’s, I read it again…and I was disappointed
because it seem shallow and incomplete, unnecessary……
the book still hadn’t change, but I had dramatically changed
with each passing decade… by the 90’s, I had read a lot
of philosophy and I have had a lot of life experiences…
the book hadn’t change but I had change…

now if I were to read it again, my understanding
of the book would once again be dramatically different.
my perception, my seeing the book would be very different.
In the 40 years since I have first read the book, I have become, I am
a completely different person…… I am now old… where I am
in my place in life changes how I read and/or understand idea’s,
books, movies, people……. I see things differently because I
am different…….

it all becomes a question of our perception of events, experiences,
people……… it actually has nothing to do with the actual event,
experience or the person in question, it has everything to do with
how we see, how we perceive these things……

I see IQ45 as a village idiot and another person might see Jesus
walking on water and we might see the exact same event or
experience… and yet we perceive events and experiences far
differently…

the question of life is not in the event or experiences we have
but in how we see them or how we perceive them…
it is in our perceptions of things that matter, not in the things
themselves.

In this regard, Kant was right… it is in our perceptions that
make all the difference in the world, not in the experiences
themselves………

So how do you perceive the world?

and that answers everything about who you are and
what it means to be human to you………

Kropotkin

In light of my previous post, what is philosophy?

It is a vision, a way of viewing the world, it provides
us with a lens in which we can perceive the world.

So what does this mean for us?

It means we must think about what indoctrinations we
enforce upon our children………… if we force
negative indoctrinations upon our children, they
will view the world negatively, through the negative
instincts of lust, hate, anger, greed…….

if we indoctrinate our children with positive values,
the values to see the world through the positive
values of love, charity, hope, justice, peace………

and so we now attempt to connect the “modern” world with
seeing, with vision………

If you compare art through the ages, especially Art before 1880,
we see art as fairly straight forward. Art was pictures of
scenery and of people and was the building were built
along classical Greek or Roman styles and statues were
also based along classical Greek or Roman style…….

You can easily follow Art as it progressed from the Middle
ages to 1880 as it evolved but it didn’t radically change…
why? Because the way people viewed the world didn’t radically
change… yes, you had science and the new philosophy which was
different, but it didn’t change the basic values of people from the
Middle ages to 1880…… You still had people believing in god and
tradition and the right of kings… the basic vision of
who we were really didn’t change much from the middle ages to 1880…

Then the industrial revolution occurred and that changed our vision of who we were…
we saw ourselves differently after the industrial revolution…….
for the first time in history, we had concepts like alienation and that
alienation came from what the industrial revolution did to our vision,
to our seeing the world differently……

Art changed starting in 1880 as a response to the changing
vision, the changing “seeing” that we had of people and
institutions and experiences…

The radical changes in art reflect the way we changed
in seeing ourselves… the paintings of Monet for example
reflect the way we change in our seeing who we are and
what is possible…….

Look at impressionist paintings… see the new style was
the atomization of art which reflects the atomization of man…

we were no longer connected to the system, we were disconnected,
alienated from society and our fellow man by the industrial revolution…
and this seeing, this vision is reflected in our art…art can be considered
to be a vision, a way of seeing ourselves and that vision changed because
we saw ourselves differently and this is also reflected in other aspects of art…
Literature and sculpture and painting and architecture all changed because we
now see ourselves differently… and our ideologies, our ism’s changed
because we see ourselves differently… our indoctrinations changed because
we see ourselves differently… it is about our perceptions, our vision of ourselves
that matters………

change our perceptions and change the world for the world…for the world is
a reflection of our perceptions, not our perceptions is a reflection of
the world…….

how we see the world changes the world………

change your perceptions and you change the world…
the world may be exactly the same but if you change
how you view the world… the world changes…

see the world differently and the world becomes different…

Kropotkin

so when a person, a human being says the world is this and this
and this… what that person is really saying is, my seeing, my vision causes
me to see the world as this and this and this…

we see the world as a prism/lens of our ideologies and ism’s and indoctrinations…
the world is the exactly the same for everyone, but our seeing, our
indoctrinations, our vision of the world is different and so the world
looks different, but it really isn’t different… a tree is still just a tree
and the sky is blue and the earth is still round, but our vision, our seeing
the tree or the sky or the earth changes how we see the tree, the sky
or the earth… change your ism, change your ideology and the world
will change too……. want a happier, healthier, more understanding
world… just change your ism, your ideologies, your vision of
the world and the world will become happier, healthier, a
more understanding world… all it takes is to change our
perception of the world… and the world changes

Kropotkin

Agreed , but to what extent does our perceptions of the world pre-set, wherein opportuning only limited change?

Since presetting reality subtracts from autonomy and adds to determinancy into any capacity to change? That’s the crux of it, otherwise any real change may fail.

I can get fed up with life and like in the film ‘mosquito coast’ end up in even more unfavorable circumstances then the one escaped from, for individual change is only culpable as getting away from unfavorable ones.

I can go out into the street carrying banners but in most cases it would make little difference.

I think that this idea of why bother to act because it
will not “change” anything is really irrelevant…
It doesn’t matter if carrying banners on the street changes anything or not…
the point is to carry the banners regardless if anyone notices or not…

The point is to become aware and that is the real value of carrying the
banner in the streets. By carrying the banner, you create awareness
in people and the change if any, occurs there… in the changing
of our perceptions…the value of the banner in the street is not
to convince people, but to create awareness, to create an perception…

The change we create is not a physical one, but a mental one…
we become aware of injustice as a mental act, not a physical one…
It is in the changing of the perceptions that create change, not
necessarily in the carrying around the banner…

Does this mean that the world is a mental world?
an “idealist world”?

Not at all, physical matter exists, tree’s, stoves,
cars, plants, dogs and stars all exists…

but what the “meaning” of each of these is the question…
You can view, perceive a dog as an animal or a pet or food
or a working animal or………You can create your own meaning
as to what a dog means…… Most people view dogs as animals,
but that doesn’t mean dogs must be view, seen as animals…
we can view a dog in a wide variety of ways and all of them will be right.

How do you view human beings? Are they evil or good or food or
thought or possibilities or sons or daughters or victims or
godlike? does it matter? You tell me…….

I see human beings as beings that have possibilities…
I see the past, present and future in every human being……

Now you may see human beings differently and that is fine…
does that mean human beings don’t exists because we see them
differently? no, not at all…we perceive human beings differently
due to our childhood indoctrinations and then we view them
differently after we our overcome of those childhood indoctrinations
and we overcome and become who we are…….

think of Dickens “Christmas Carol” Scrooge changed
because his perceptions of the world change, the world
itself didn’t change in any way, shape or form……
How he viewed the world changed and it made all the difference
in the world…… So please feel free to carry those banners
on the street because all you are doing is getting people to
become aware, aware of what injustice is or what hate is or
what is the nature of god is…………

The point is not to change the world but to make it aware…
change will come after awareness happens…

Kropotkin

Again right on, except it has do begin with self awareness then extend to public awareness and the public is very if not impossibly resistant , if it were not the case, we wouldn’t be in the situation that we are in.

if we think of human beings as a means to a goal, such
as human beings only value is to create wealth, human beings
are the means to achieve wealth, then we have devalued human beings
to just being a means to an end, an unhealthy and dangerous way of
thinking about human beings……

the rise of capitalism and the rise of the industrial revolution
came about at the same time, you can make arguments that
one caused the other, but the point is that both capitalism
and the industrial revolution atomized man……. in other words,
human beings were alienated, disconnected from the past thinking
about human beings… human beings on some level were connected to
each other, either by religion or history or associations or economic
means and that connection allowed human beings to be connected
to each other…the rise of capitalism, the industrial revolution
disconnected people from each other, atomizing people into
single atoms floating through the universe with no connection to
each other or to any ism, ideology, bias, superstitions………

in our atomization, we became alienated from ourselves, other
human beings, history, other systems………….

the point now is to reunite ourselves in some way that
connects us or no longer alienate ourselves from each
other or to any ism or ideology or history………

History for example, no longer unites people into a “common cause”
because history has no bearing in a world that is focus on
using people to create profit/money…… how does knowing history
help create profit for a corporation? It doesn’t and so it isn’t valued
anymore and thus we become alienated from history, we are no longer
connected to history, to our past……. and that is where we are now…
alienated and disconnected from history and each other and social structures
like government and other systems because to connect us to any of these
social systems is to reduce or eliminate profit/money and we certainly can’t
have that, can we?

Until we remove the pursuit of profits/money as our primary
function of human beings, we shall continue to be alienated
or disconnected from society, each other, even disconnected/alienated
from ourselves…not until we begin to have a new vision, a new way
of seeing human beings can we reconnect to who we are or no longer be alienated
from each other or society or from ourselves………

How we view ourselves and each other is simply another function of
our childhood indoctrinations… we must overcome and become
who we are which means we will no longer be disconnected
from each other or from ourselves…… we must overcome and
no longer be alienated from each other or our system or our lives……

Kropotkin

Ok Peter.

Lets say such is within the realm of possibility given today’s short comings.

How would anyone attempt to achieve such a goal, in short of a revolution to overthrow Capitalism and institute another from of governance. Communism? (Which has been a trampled upon consequence of socialism, with more than enough certainty that in this respect IT Will Happen Again-because no one understands or, remembers history, and thereby are condemned - to repeat it)

And I wonder why everyone can be so short sighted?

That leaves only one conduit- National Socialism , and that too has been tried.

Can anyone think of anotherr way out except cyber-political necessity? Is this maybe what really is happening right here right now?

Ok Peter.

Lets say such is within the realm of possibility given today’s short comings.

How would anyone attempt to achieve such a goal, in short of a revolution to overthrow Capitalism and institute another from of governance. -Communism? (Which has been a trampled upon consequence of socialism, with more than enough certainty that in this respect IT Will Happen Again-because no one understands or, remembers history, and thereby are condemned - to repeat it)

And I wonder why everyone can be so short sighted?

That leaves only one conduit- National Socialism , and that too has been tried.

Can anyone think of another way out except cyber-political necessity? Is this maybe what really is happening right here right now?

after several ugly days at work, I can finally post…

I am not ignoring you Meno… But I am going in a slightly
different way today…

our word today boys and girls is…

Teleology

is a reason or explanation for something in function of its end,
goal or purpose… It is derived from two greek words,
telos (end, goal, purpose) and logos (reason, explanation)

We humans understand things better when we can create a
story or a narrative about things…so we create stories
about how humans have their goal or purpose in reaching heaven
or avoid hell… that becomes the reason for or the explanation
of why we human exists…….god created us to serve him
and if we fail to obey, we go to hell… that an teleology
explanation for why humans exists, the final goal or purpose
of human beings is how we are to reach heaven or to avoid hell…….

everything is explained in terms of its final goal or purpose…

Before Darwin who published his “On the Origins of Species” in 1859,
it was easy to create a story, a narrative about humans goal or purpose…
and that goal, purpose was the creation story of the bible or the
Buddhist narrative or the Hindu narrative or the Muslim narrative about
the beginning or what was the goal or purpose of human beings…
that was the value of religion… it created an easy to understand
story or narrative about human purpose and human’s goals and purpose…

But then Darwin came along and we are unable to create a story,
a narrative about the goals and purpose of human beings because
Darwin’s evolution, his story or narrative doesn’t allow one to easily create a
a story about the goal or purpose of human beings……

In the last 160 years since Darwin’s book came out, what historically
has happened? You have the full bloom of the industrial revolution
and the events of the 20th century, the two world wars and the Holocaust
and the dropping of nuclear bombs and the Great Depression……

Now can you make a direct connection between the “One the origin
of Species” in 1859 and what has happened since then? Perhaps, but
more as bricks in the wall type of thing…… in other words, as
part of our overall action and understanding of the world and human beings…

This understanding of goal and purpose helps create a better story or
narrative about ourselves and what is our “meaning of life”.

Now Marx in his writings help create a goal or purpose in life
with his theory that the substructure of human beings was
economic in nature and that we are economic creatures…
and his theories was that as we pass through the various
economic phases, we shall reach the end phase which was
the worker paradise, the end of the class structure where
everyone was equal socially because everyone was equal
economically… remember, for Marx everything was
seen through the lens of economics and class structure…
so Marx, in his own way, created a goal, purpose for human beings……
It was Marx that brought about the term, “the end of history”…
that has been the topic of conversation over the last century
and half………

Now compare Marx’s vision with capitalism vision……. There is no
final goal or purpose in capitalism… you just keep buying stuff forever…
Capitalism is an economic theory, just like Marx, but without a goal
or purpose…….Capitalism is the understanding of human beings
through an economic lens… we are seen as economic beings,
just as Marx saw people…the only difference between communism
and capitalism is communism has a goal, a purpose which isn’t in
capitalism………

Let us put this into different context, what kind of story or
narrative would you need to describe capitalism?
No matter what story or narrative you use, at no point would
you be able to come up with a goal or purpose that worked………

Human beings want a story, a narrative about, well everything…
we work best when we have a story or narrative that we can
use to justify our actions or our beliefs…….

so what story or narrative about today, right now, that
you can use to create a goal or a purpose for human beings?

Today, right now, we don’t have a story or a narrative to tell…
we just have policy differences, build the wall vs don’t build the wall…
but those policies difference doesn’t lead us to any understanding
about what is our goal or our purpose as individuals, a people,
a culture, a society or as a nation………

so what story or narrative can we tell that will give
us some sense of not only who we are but what is our
goal, purpose?

It is not enough to say, we must increase our GDP by 10% every year,
we must say why, why do we need to do such a thing. If we were to
understand things in their why, we might be better able to
understand our goal, our purpose……………

Kropotkin

To continue this idea about a story or narrative,
when the Buddha says that life is suffering and the point
is to end the suffering, that is a story, a narrative……
and when it is said that the point of human existence is to
pursuit happiness or to search for certainty or to seek wisdom,
that is a story, a narrative we use to help us understand
who we are and what is possible and what is the goal, purpose
of life…………

Now one of my things is that the search for wisdom begins, not
as the Greeks claim by wonder, but by doubt. I believe the beginning
of wisdom is doubt………… The reason I have a hard time “selling”
this idea of doubt being a major driver of human existence is that
there is not a very good story or narrative about doubt. If I had a story or
narrative about doubt, I could use that to better “sell” this idea of
doubt being a prime reason for our search for knowledge and understanding…

Sometimes the problem lies not in the idea but in the creation of a story
or a narrative about the use of the idea that will allow people to better understand
that idea…sometimes the need for a story or narrative outweighs the
value of the idea even if it is a great idea… without a valid or decent
story the idea becomes far less important…

so sometimes we hold unto stories or narratives even though the idea
behind the story/narrative is not a very good idea…… the narrative/story
is what keeping the idea in play……….not the idea itself………

This is true about capitalism with its fiction about the “rugged individual”
and the Horatio Alger stories that still live on in America…… the stories,
the narratives help keep alive a bad idea…………

Because of its nature, the stories/narrative about capitalism is better
then the stories/narrative about communism…the narrative/story about
political systems is also better with democracy then it is with socialism……

equality/socialism/communism as a story/narrative is less interesting then a story/narrative
about individuals striving for something as with democracy or capitalism……

but does that make the idea of socialism/communism to be of less value because
it doesn’t tell a good story?

We have to become aware of the stories/narratives in our lives because sometimes
we become so enamored with the story, we forget to see the value of the point
or reason of the story…just because capitalism can tell a better story doesn’t
mean capitalism is a better system then communism…….it just means capitalism
has better stories/better narrative… nothing more………

Kropotkin