Right, fucking, on, Brother!!!
love…
My right-wing friend, within the last couple of days, sent me an e-mail titled “Friend of Yours?” with a link to an article about a Russian man who was shot to death in the process of a debate concerning Kant. And given the heated melees that tend to erupt on these boards, it’s easy to see how an innocent language game could escalate to such a fatal conclusion. And I for one would not want to see anyone on here, friend or foe, shot over this. So it’s hard to question the wisdom of shutting my string down.
And even though I still had legitimate issues to cover, and would still like to do a thorough critique of Satyr’s essay, I’ve come to realize that I can more effectively deal with these issues by referring to the more general “authoritarian personality” and that even if there were anyone I specifically wanted to go after, I can be reasonably confident that they’ll recognize themselves in what I’m describing.
(However, should they read this, I want to publically apologize to Ecclesiast for referring to them as “Ick”. It was a cheap tactic resorted to in the heat of the moment. It was wrong. And I hope to avoid it in the future.)
That said, I want to deal with references to nature and how they can often be abused by the authoritarian personality. First of all, let us admit that almost everyone turns to nature to underwrite the rightness of their assertions. This would seem perfectly natural (huh?) since we, and everything about us is rooted in nature. It is what we as a society have evolved from. Nor do I see any reason that we shouldn’t lay it on table as one kind of tactic in a language game among others. But the problem starts when we start to act as if it has some kind of privilege, a privilege that could only rest on a circular assumption that I would refer to as The Perfectly Natural Criteria of the Natural. And like most assumptions I have seen, it is a human construct and, by virtue of that, floats on thin air.
For one thing, for all our throwing around the term nature, it’s never really clearly defined. It’s always understood in terms of difference. A tree would seem to be natural. A canoe cut out of it would seem to be a little less natural. And a canoe made out of fiberglass would seem to be less so. However, if we approach it from Ambig’s emphasis on Dasein, we have to ask what could be any more natural than kayaking in a fiberglass vessel in a natural environment. Since there is no clear point at which human ingenuity has gone from the nature it is rooted in to the unnatural, there is no clear distinction between the natural and unnatural. And for good reason, some thinkers such as Gary Snyder (poet, naturalist, and Zen scholar) have argued that the distinction does not exist.
Yet the authoritarian personality acts as if such a clear distinction does exist without ever really clarifying where that threshold in the continuum is –that is outside of what they feel it to be. For instance, I have many times heard it argued or implied that because there are alpha males throughout nature, apes for instance, it would be perfectly natural for certain human individuals to accumulate power and use it as they see fit. Of course, the response we could pose against this is that by that same token, since power seems to be the main criteria of right and the “natural”, it would be equally natural for weaker members to pool their power to act as a check to the power of the alpha male, thereby insuring circumstances that are better and more just to the weaker members. Of course, the authoritarian personality will immediately resort to this threshold or dividing line they can never truly pinpoint by acting as if the group exercise of power is somehow not natural. It is this fallacy that underlies such notions as the feminization of man and the leveling of mankind. And it is what underlies this popular notion among right-wingers that Capitalism is somehow natural while socialism is somehow the unnatural construct of man –the hypocrisy of it being that the rules of Capitalism are as much a human construct as anything.
Of course, always piggybacking this questionable notion is a kind Social Darwinism that TlBs use to justify their nonsense. The argument is that competition is essential to intellectual growth. In other words, it rides on the Nietzscheian notion that what doesn’t kill you makes you strong, that you can only grow through opposition. The thing is, I tend to find, on these boards, that my most productive moments come from interacting with people who have the same live and let live attitude I do. What I mainly find or get from interactions with TlBs is myself too busy swatting off flies to actually engage in anything that might prove intellectually productive. At bottom, when you truly look at it, all the TlB’s reference to nature proves to be is little more than an alibi to act like assholes –that is while hiding under the banner of authentic intellectual inquiry.
But even without all that, even if I was inaccurate in my description, we still have to look at the naturalistic fallacy of assuming that because something seems to be in violation of nature or our nature, we are obligated to base our ethical, social, and political decisions on it, a notion which hangs itself on the perfectly natural criteria of the natural: a human construct if there ever was one.
I don’t recall all of the significance of Satyr’s arguments on nature, if you’d like I’ll reread them and respond to that. But, right now I want to address the idea of the weak being strong in numbers with out a strong hierarchy. That issue goes directly to human nature. I just can’t imagine the apes having evolved into humans without this constant necessity for every male to prove he’s worthy to breed. You may notice that all supposedly charitable organizations’ focus turns from charity to maintaining itself in competition against other charitable organizations and the people running it are in fierce competition to be on the top. It’s because we naturally feel we must dominate, obviously no matter how weak any individual is and how weak his father and his father and so on for several generations may have been, if one goes beyond 5-10 generations then nearly every father from then back to the dawn of humans was one who fought for his right to breed and succeeded (occasionally a weak one gets lucky even in the most hostile environment). So we have a nature to compete and to be on top that is impossible to ignore.
Those who consider themselves to a part of the organized weak feel proud and strong to be a part of that group. Their rhetoric is that they are proud to not be a stereotype of the typical overly masculine male. They believe they are strong through their numbers and their shared ideals and have no need to form hierarchies when they can instead vote on their group’s actions. But, it is an illusion that one is proud to be weak and not will their power. They are actually willing their power when they are a part of a group with ideals for which they agree with. This group may maintain a unity as long as all the members agree on the ideals behind it, but they will not be able to merge with other groups of weak individuals to create further strength in numbers unless the other groups share the same ideals. If they don’t share the same ideal, the members will use the rhetoric that the other group has wrong or evil ideals, but the real issue would be that their will is their ideals and to compromise them would be to lose power.
Then the group itself will disintegrate as the members begin to disagree on the interpretation of the original ideals, because each member was only happy to a part of the group with equal standing as each other member because he felt that the ideals of the group were his own, almost as if he thought of them himself. So if others begin to differ each individual will feel his power being diminished, and fight for his ideals within the group itself, even if the differences are actually very petty, because it’s not about righteousness it’s only about power.
The scenario I just described doesn’t even mention the fact that many members of the group will never even have the illusion of ideals separate from their will to power, but will have no ideals except that they wish to take control of the group. If they are smart they will be the ones to create confusion among the members as to what the original ideals it was founded on really meant. Furthermore, my scenario didn’t mention that the strong are often quietly controlling this group of weak individuals and only letting them think they are making progress through strength in numbers.
Strength through numbers in a democratically run group was an idea I once thought made sense, but the more I think about it and the more I experience human nature for myself the more of a mess it seems. The cold hard reality that is living naturally is all that seems coherent to me. And within that context one may still show strength through more subtle means, almost as if it was strength through weakness, and can love one’s friends and family. One simply has to get over the idea that no one in the world should be left behind.
In these last post utopian stages of ideology whether be it how we define capitalism or socialism, fascism or whatever, spengler comes to mind, the decline of the west.
Universals or not, new world or not, the sleeping dragon china, is rising, and the east beckons at the door. The authoritarian personality is not really inherent in the east, the extended family is the thing of the future, social darwinism has brought us to the era of great phallic symbols of rocket power and atom smashing.
Technology may be a natural progression of ideas, but is it the way nature intended it to be? Intentions are like yesterday’s paper, we cast them aside for what’s upcoming and new, existentialism’s only remaining function is in the ontology of bundling phenomenon: vis: the last bastion against total disintegration. It’s a comfort, a psychological comfort come necessity. We can not let go of our primal perceptive processes. But that is all.
Beyond that, the natural/artificial anomalie brings fort the possibility for the leaders to emerge, now on this twilight, perhaps existentially and exponentially, at an ever increasing rate. There will come a time, and it is probably in the near future, when the east will meet the west head on, the quietism of letting go with the aggression of conquest by the alpha male.
At this point confusion will reign except in the supreme authority, will apparently be able to draw the lines. The uncertainty principle can rule only up until the critical moment, and. Then, divisive action will either further divide the world, or, the two sides meeting head on can quietly and subtly let go, inter penetrate and avoid the ultimate power struggle that an evil genius can manipulate. Total eclipse, regression to descartes’s absolute doubt would again bring in a new, catastrophic reign of terror.
Before I go in to your posts, I’m getting about ready to tackle the original Deleuze text of Difference and Repetition. I may be ordering another secondary text on it, Jeffry A. Bell’s: Philosophy on the Edge of Chaos… But before either, I’m going to start a study, tomorrow, of those online lectures that I and you, Obe, talked about. I’ll start with his lecture on Spinoza:
gold.ac.uk/media/deleuze_spinoza_affect.pdf
Then I’ll go on to:
deleuzelectures.blogspot.com/200 … chive.html
Hopefully this will give me some useful information and background before I go into the original text.
I hope you guys will join me.
I’ll be carrying it out on my Deleuze string.
“I don’t recall all of the significance of Satyr’s arguments on nature, if you’d like I’ll reread them and respond to that. But, right now I want to address the idea of the weak being strong in numbers with out a strong hierarchy. That issue goes directly to human nature. I just can’t imagine the apes having evolved into humans without this constant necessity for every male to prove he’s worthy to breed. You may notice that all supposedly charitable organizations’ focus turns from charity to maintaining itself in competition against other charitable organizations and the people running it are in fierce competition to be on the top. It’s because we naturally feel we must dominate, obviously no matter how weak any individual is and how weak his father and his father and so on for several generations may have been, if one goes beyond 5-10 generations then nearly every father from then back to the dawn of humans was one who fought for his right to breed and succeeded (occasionally a weak one gets lucky even in the most hostile environment). So we have a nature to compete and to be on top that is impossible to ignore.”
Really? And by your description, it would equally be within the perimeters of human nature to rape and kill. Should we base our ethical and moral systems on that as well? If we are to give in to the notion that our primal nature is the last word in social policy, would it be alright for me to grab any girl that struck my fancy, bend her over, and give it to her doggie style? It really doesn’t matter how we got here. In terms of evolution, all that matters is that we are at a quite different point than back then, that we have evolved beyond such social arrangements.
Plus that you’re forgetting that mankind, for some time now, has primarily evolved through the social systems they have created. In other words, it may well be that humans have survived, as much as through competition, through cooperation. Nor would this surprise most social biologists since most of them have evolved beyond the rather obsolete point your making here to recognize that nature is both cooperative and competitive.
Not that it would matter anyway, since what you are basically courting here is the naturalistic fallacy of assuming we are somehow obligated to make nature the last word on social and ethical policy. As romantic and as appealing as it may seem to you, and the jackals you got it from, it’s based on a purely human construct: the circler assumption of the perfectly natural appeal to the natural.
Sure, it is hard to ignore. All you have to do is question everyone in prison to get an affirmative answer to that one. But the answer will come out quite differently if you put the question to most rational and civilized people.
Just be careful what Kool-Aid you’re drinking, Stuart.
“In these last post utopian stages of ideology whether be it how we define capitalism or socialism, fascism or whatever, spengler comes to mind, the decline of the west.
Universals or not, new world or not, the sleeping dragon china, is rising, and the east beckons at the door. The authoritarian personality is not really inherent in the east, the extended family is the thing of the future, social darwinism has brought us to the era of great phallic symbols of rocket power and atom smashing.
Technology may be a natural progression of ideas, but is it the way nature intended it to be? Intentions are like yesterday’s paper, we cast them aside for what’s upcoming and new, existentialism’s only remaining function is in the ontology of bundling phenomenon: vis: the last bastion against total disintegration. It’s a comfort, a psychological comfort come necessity. We can not let go of our primal perceptive processes. But that is all.
Beyond that, the natural/artificial anomalie brings fort the possibility for the leaders to emerge, now on this twilight, perhaps existentially and exponentially, at an ever increasing rate. There will come a time, and it is probably in the near future, when the east will meet the west head on, the quietism of letting go with the aggression of conquest by the alpha male.
At this point confusion will reign except in the supreme authority, will apparently be able to draw the lines. The uncertainty principle can rule only up until the critical moment, and. Then, divisive action will either further divide the world, or, the two sides meeting head on can quietly and subtly let go, inter penetrate and avoid the ultimate power struggle that an evil genius can manipulate. Total eclipse, regression to descartes’s absolute doubt would again bring in a new, catastrophic reign of terror.”
Zizek makes a very disturbing point concerning China:
It’s not that China works under an authoritarian political system that should concern us. It’s that such an authoritarian system is beating all other non-authoritarian countries at the game of Capitalism. In other words, we can no longer rest on the erroneous notion that Capitalism (and competition) must be supported by a free society. There is no longer a necessary connection between the two.
However, like Johannesburg where 5% of the population lives in wealth while the rest live in abject poverty, the only reason China gets away with what they do is because democratic societies provide enough of a consumer base to allow it to go on. But you have to ask how long it can go on when that base is dwindling.
Then you have to deal with a point Chris Hedges makes:
Right now we are dealing with an inverted totalitarian regime in which market forces, given privilege over state, justify the power of those at the top. But what happens when those market justifications are no longer there? Isn’t there the possibility that, rather than just give up their power, the more powerful among us will turn to the classical totalitarian state to maintain their power?
Capitalism is the Beast: that which must consume more and more until it becomes like a snake eating its own tail. And unless we confront it, it will destroy us.
Thanks for that, I skimmed through it: and the problem of territoriality is fascinating and the correlation perhaps productive toward an analogical approximation to where post modernism is heading , if you can give credence to some sort of parallelism. Fascinating and certainly worth while. I will certainly try to be on board. Thanks.
The world has not evolved beyond atrocities at all. American society has laws and education that stop atrocities from happening nearly as often as they normally would, but only within its jurisdiction, which is of course America itself. The atrocities that happen around the world has always bothered me a little, but I have never lost any sleep over them, because it’s not in my nature to care, no matter how hard I once tried to. Likely 299.99 million of America’s 300 million would be more likely to go to a therapist to complain about personal relationships than the atrocities around the world. It seems that says a lot about the present state of human nature; our sympathies always have been and always will be towards those we know personally.
Yes, people cooperate within hierarchies and much is accomplished by those hierarchies, 99 percent being in favor of those in the hierarchy itself, 99 percent of that being in favor of those at the top of the hierarchy. I know very well how cooperation is in my nature as much as competition, but the two always go together for me. For example, once I was worked very hard to get a promotion and I even could have been accused of being less of a team player, being that my concern was always what my employers thought of me not my coworkers.
Once I got the promotion I understood that my former coworkers who now worked for me weren’t overly inclined to be cooperative with me and that others in middle management weren’t inclined to be very cooperative being that I may one day have surpassed them, but what I found infuriating was that those in the highest ranks of management itself weren’t being cooperative. They failed to understand my potential to help them to increase productivity and thereby get them the respect and promotions of their superiors (not to mention help keep the company afloat, thereby helping everyone who worked for it) and instead were focused on seeing how much shit I would take from them while remaining subordinate. They had no reason to fear I would ever surpass them, they simply were so simple minded that they put meaningless displays of power over their own ambitions. I consider it to be a positive trait to be able to know when and how to combine competition and cooperation.
As Americans I don’t believe we’re obligated to concern ourselves with policy at all. But, when we do it only makes sense to let our only concerns be what is best for ourselves, friends and family. If we were in a third world country and asked to choose between taking sides between rivals competing to maintain authoritive control then it would be foolish for us to let our criteria be anything other than what side we would most likely survive under, which would likely be the strongest of the two. But, as Americans we have the luxury of letting our loyalties towards politicians be affected by ideals rather than necessity.
For that very reason I don’t spend much time concerning myself with politics, but if I did and was to actively support a politician the last word for me would still be about my own interest. I think our leaders should be strong, but only if they put the interest of Americans over that of others. So I’m not appealing to what’s natural in itself, as if nature were separate from me, but I’m appealing to what is natural for me, such as the desire to live well.
Interesting points, Stuart. And sorry if I came off a little too strong. My main concern is that, as many people, you might get a little too attracted to the radical nature of what I call The Neo-Nieitzscheian Gospel of the Fanciful. Right now, I came on here with a post in mind, so I have to be brief. It seems to me that the main thesis in it is the notion that man, because they have chosen to act like something a little more evolved than brutes, they have somehow deprived themselves of their natural essence. And it is this so-called “natural essence” that I think we have to have to question. Furthermore, I think you have to look at the discrepancy between the end result being described and our actual reality. For instance, how is mankind less creative in their supposedly softened state than they would be in a more primal state with the whip of nature always cracking at their back? And all you gotta do is look at college football every Saturday and the armed forces that fought in Iraq and Afghanistan to recognize that there isn’t any real lack of Spartan men (and women) that satisfy the criteria of masculinity in the classical sense that the ideology seems to pine for.
Anyway, back to the plan I came on here with.
I think what’s more relevant than the need to be creative or willful in a society that doesn’t tolerate it is the need for self-respect (which of course isn’t helped when one must be conformist and submissive). If you have been given enough respect by others in your life, then you will have enough self-respect for yourself that it will be easy to overlook the aspects of lesser importance that you and most others are deprived of.
Need and creativity go together. And it’s true that there is much need in the modern world. But, when there’s need, creativity is usually the last option. In the modern world conformity rather than screativity is usually the easiest way to overcome basics needs.
Satyr has a very specific way of defining masculine and feminine, that is in certain sense far removed from the standard definitions. I agree with his conclusions based on his definitions. I would be happy to take the challenge of explaining them in my own words, you only need ask. But, I prefer to discuss the issues that I have put much independent thought on. That is the issues that I have felt the need to personally address. I agree with most of not all of Satyr’s ideas, but I have yet to find the same import in all of them.
I don’t think their is anything outstandingly masculine about athletes, no matter what definition of masculine you’re using. If we were to use the most common definition, then athletes would rank slightly above average at best. But, when using the most common definition of masculine, soldiers certainly rank very high; no one is easier to respect and desire to emulate than one who has been in combat. Perhaps part of your issue with Satyr’s essay is that he is seemingly demeaning soldiers and others who risk much by not including all of them as the most masculine. Even though he’s using a particular definition I can still see how it can be insulting to those who pride themselves as being masculine based on other definitions of the term.
But, what would it matter if Satyr was to include all soldiers in his definition of masculine? The fact is that there are relatively very few soldiers, especially in the first world. So if you wish to call the desire to avoid combat soft, then the first world has become very soft.
Also, it is understandable that this conversation be allowed to progress at what ever pace comes naturally, even if it should be left idle indefinitely.
His definition of the feminine, Stuart, is homosexuals and anyone that proposes anything that might give less powerful people a break -such as socialism. That’s all I need to know about it. He clearly longs for a day when men were men and women knew their place. I mean his whole argument in the essay reeks of sexual frustration. And he has this fantasy of himself as some lone Zarathrustrean prophet ushering in the Overman whom no one else can truly understand. And he resorts to the Cassandra complex of assuming that anyone who attacks his position is somehow mediocre. He’s not even that original.
I mean what else would he mean by the “leveling of mankind” but anything other than a cheap alibi that might allow other people who happen to have an upper hand bully those that don’t? He’s basically arguing that every intellectual out there, all these college educated people, have yet to reach his level. This is why you never hear him referring to any other philosopher outside of Nietzsche. And it’s easy to understand why since Nietzsche’s so easy to read -and, as Satyr demonstrates, equally easy to misinterpret. It’s why, out of all other philosophers, Neitzsche gets more mention in popular culture. Satyr thinks he can ride on his own instincts about what philosophy is. This is why he is a better writer than he is a philosopher: he writes and thinks a lot while taking in little from others. In this sense, he’s a lot like Herbert Spenser who gathered his knowledge piecemeal, just bounced around and adapted whatever suited his fancy, in order to produce Social Darwinism. My guess is that Satyr never attempts to push beyond himself because he is always right where he needs to be. This is because he can draw in people who are at an early point in their process with the seduction of the radical and the rationalization of all sociopathic impulses.
He, as far as I’m concerned, is little more than a piss-ant of a philosopher who is more concerned about his status than he is the advancement of understanding or his process. He writes good. But underneath that style is every wrong move an intellectual can make.
And I prefer we minimize any direct reference to Satyr or KTS since I don’t want my other discourses locked down. I don’t need his name to rip through his nonsense.
Less powerful people never get breaks, unless they are aligned with those who are powerful. I could never truly grasp liberal ideals, let alone socialism, because I always realized on some level that there was very little sincerity in the idea that people are embracing various ideas of inclusion out of altruism. It would have been easy if the liberal inclusiveness had provided me with a life to live, but my disadvantages never qualified as those which should be mitigated.
What I’m speaking of right now has nothing to do with that website. I’ve been expressing these thoughts from time to time this last year; hundreds of my posts were dedicated to this subject and I had probably made over 15 threads on related subjects. The only things that have changed are that I no longer humor liberalism by making the pretense that I only wish to change it or better it, and I no longer on occasion take a step back from my positions on the subject and nihilistically say that none of it means anything. Perhaps, I have a poor memory, but I don’t recall many people on ilp directly addressing the drastic inconsistencies with all forms of liberalism. It seems they either wave their hand at liberalism altogether as if it was too obviously incoherent or they fail to understand (or pretend to fail to understand) exactly what inconsistencies I’m talking about.
This is the first topic on liberalism that I made here, if you find the time please take a look:
One thing I’d like to add is that I know that many people I would call liberal minded, such as yourself, are very willing to show inclusiveness and much kindness to whomever may politely ask, but that is where many go wrong. One who is in need, does not have some higher transcendent value if he is outgoing and very forgiving of the society for which his unpleasant state could be blamed. Those who bear their misery and disadvantages silently are so easy to ignore, especially when a first world liberal is still young and healthy and wishes to experience all that life has offer him in this rare state of existence. The expression about the cake comes to mind; he wants his good life and he wants to feel good about himself and never have to develop the emotional callouses that the vast majority of people, since humans first evolved, had to develop.
I don’t embrace socialist or liberal ideas out of altruism, Stuart. My motives are actually quite selfish. I embrace them because I am honest enough to recognize the vulnerability of my own situation and would prefer to know that if things do go really wrong, I have a fallback position that is not the catastrophic one offered by the do or die approach of Capitalism.
However, in a secondary sense, I also embrace it because I consider myself lucky. Given the resources I have, I really am a lot luckier than a lot of other people. But I could enjoy it a lot more with the full confidence that there are not other people suffering in the world when they actually do not need to. So, even in this case, my motives are selfish.
Furthermore, I would oppose to the notion that strife is necessary for self transcendence the a certain level of comfort is as well. Like Marx, I believe that Capitalism, and its do or die nature, stands in the way of most people achieving their full potential, that it is not the feminine aspects of society that do so, but rather the masculine ones.
Hi d63, Stuart:
To get to the bottom of any social/political point of view, it is useful to approach it from the vantage of ideology. Capitalism is least ideological, right? And socialism is most. Marxism for all ppractical purposes failed, as capitalism also is apparently failing, or soon to fail. Could conceivably, a mixture of ideology and laissez fair be a way to get the benefits of both? A mixed economy based on private/public sector interaction be applicable on a need by need basis? Isn’t this what Obama is trying to do with his startup medical insurance plan? Or do you think capitalism as it stands is doomed to follow it’s self destructive course?
A precedent can be seen in the policies under Woodrow Wilson, and I think WW1 was somewhat a progenitor of the policies or lack of, as well as Deleanor Roosevelt’s New Deal, prior and during WW2. To a certain extent under both Kennedy and Johnston, and all others excepting Ronald Reagan, efforts were made.
I think these stop gap measures di not make much of a difference, they only afforded cosmetic, psychological damage control, too little, too late.
Apart from another world war bringing on drastic ideological changes, do you see any effort by any administration or national and/or international entity to be able to bring on effective change?
It is even conceivable that internally revived , grass roots movements such as occurred with the vigilantes, the New Left of the 60's could arise, but the effect of those movements had mostly changes relating to equal rights. The paradigm borderline states of capitalistic/schizophrenic derivation as connective to social-psychological-economic paradigms, have yet to offer a definitive analysis, capable to stand up to the onslaught of the pleasure machine of capitalism to internalize, de territorialize and de personalize every attempt at social change. That much is history.
The politics of experience connecting social psychology’s derivation of this anomalie, has devolved to a simple deterririalization of say Ronald Laing’s works, simply by declaring questionable relevancy, or simply out of fashion. Politics of experience has been expropriated to benefit those who saw the relevance and effective use of the concept,and working it toward their advantage. It is politics and the manipulation of politics,and it can go either way.
Do or die capitalism doesn’t exist. Societies have always used moral and ethical considerations and laws to prevent it. Very few people want 100% capitalism.
Even a 60% capitalism is too much for D63. 
It must be, Phyllo, because it isn’t working.
If you say something is not working, then you must have an example of something else that works. Or at least works better. What is it?
Here’s something for you to chew on, Stuart. It’s an excerpt from the Deleuze lectures I’ve been reading online:
“There are people who are so impotent that they are the ones who are dangerous, they are the ones who take power (pouvoir). And they can take power (pouvoir) ˜ so far away are the notions of power (puissance) and of power (pouvoir) ˜ the people of power (pouvoir) are the impotent who can only construct their power (pouvoir) on the sadness of others. They need sadness. They can only reign over slaves, and the slave is precisely the regime of the decrease of power (puissance). There are people who can only reign, who only acquire power (pouvoir) by way of sadness and by instituting a regime of sadness of the type: repent’, of the type hate someone’ and if you don’t have anyone to hate, hate yourself, etc.”
There are 2 ways to go about this: authority or force. Authority is when you have enough confidence in your process that you just do what you do and let others decide what they want to do with it. Force is what you do when you lack the confidence in your process to do what I previously described.
Satyr validates his beliefs on the misery of others. That’s all there is to it.
I believe an expansion of the public economy, that which eliminates the profit motive from providing basic needs, is the only response to global Capitalism. Capitalism needs to know that we are never fully dependent on it. Until it does, it will continue with the arrogance that underlies its exploitation. And if we don’t, we will become slaves.