LOL nice speech you have there
Sounds like it would be at place in one of those comedy movies
Man, this post is pure genius. My eyes have been opened.
We have used many different ways “god” “ideologies” “religion” to avoid
responsibility for our actions or our inactions. It is always someone else’s
problem. Society or future generations or the past. We avoid taking an responsibility
for the world we live in and this can only go on so long before the bill needs to be paid.
To those who say, its not my problem or even worse refusing to acknowledge that there
is a problem or just going through live trying to be happy and ignoring everything going
on. The main role or function of human being is not to be happy, it is to continue the
species. Happiness has nothing to do with who we are or who we need to become or
the survival of the human race. This need to be happy is a false and dangerous idea because
it takes us away from what we need to do. It is a false idea because happiness becomes
a false goal, an unimportant goal, an unnecessary goal. We need to rethink what it means to
be human. What is the human condition?
Kropotkin
What is the human condition?
We are beings who exists in a blind and chaotic universe and we were given
no choice in existing. You have many choices once you exist but in the most
fundamental choice we have, that of existence, we had no choice.
Here you are, you can do no other. Camus thought the most fundamental choice
we had was suicide. That is a legitimate thought. If we were not given a choice to exist,
we, at least have a choice, not to exist. But that is just a another way to avoid responsibility
and accountability.
our universe is random, chaotic, govern by chance. We try to overcome this by establishing
order in our world. Fly over the world and you see cities and farms and dams and levees,
all of which are attempts to establish order in our world. We also have religion and god and
ideologies that are also attempts to establish order in the universe. like any other system,
if we fail to put energy into the various systems, those systems will begin to suffer from disorder
which is another word for entropy. We see this today in which the GOP been attacking
the government as too big and by trying to shrink the government to a small enough size
to drown in a bathtub. This is actually bringing disorder and entropy into the country because
every system needs energy to maintain itself. The government is a system which needs energy
to go on and the GOP is starving the government which leads to growing chaos and disorder
which we see every day on the news. The actions of the GOP is leading to entropy and the death
of not just the government but the death of our American system. We have to rethink how
we see not just ourselves but our various systems such as government and institutions.
We must see systems in terms of entropy and energy and disorder and chaos.
this is why I oppose the GOP because their beliefs bring disorder, chaos, entropy.
We need systems. That is the basic entity of the universe, an system in which basic
functions are performed, be it the function of government or of bringing food to our table
or sports or playing games. Every thing is a system and subject to the basic laws of systems.
this is just another means of connection that the universe has because the universe is
connected and this particular connection is by systems. There are many, many other ways
to be connected.
So what is the human condition? We are connected, we have no choice
in our existence and we exist within systems, many different types of systems.
We must gear our thinking to being within systems and what is necessary to maintain
that system. It is no longer about being happy, but about keeping the system going, regardless
of the system in question.
Kropotkin
Now some systems are “bad”. Slavery would be one system that most
people would agree is “bad”. But how would we “know” if the system
that we exist in is bad or not? Slavery is bad and yet it still exists in
wide parts of the world. What criteria would we use to determine that
a system is not useful or evil or bad? It is my contention that capitalism
is not useful and evil and bad, but what criteria would I use to justify
that belief? By showing how many billions of people that are not helped by
capitalism? Now one may show that those countries with capitalism have
the highest standard of living, but is that the criteria we should use?
Is an high GDP really the best evidence that a system is working? or useful?
do we judge our lives by a measure that by its very nature is flawed?
Do we judge our lives by money or GDP? is that really the standard we should be
using? I say, no and no again. Should we decide to use the number of people
who are happy? We have decided against using happiness as a standard and rightfully
so. So what is left? the only real standard left, which is does this system allow the
preservation and continuation of the species? And on that score, we can clearly answer
a big no. The system of capitalism is detrimental to humans and the planet we live on because
it uses up a vast number of resources and depends on using humans as a means to a goal which
is wealth, vast wealth which only a small number of people get. In capitalism, human beings
are cannon fodder for the wealthy, so they can maintain and get greater wealth. The capitalist
system has only value for the wealthy and has no value for anyone who is not in the 1%.
So we need to rethink how we look at the world and rethink it in terms of systems. Is
this system useful in the continuation of the species? If not, dump it. We can
find a means to determine if a system is good or bad by understanding if it is
useful for the continuation of the species. That is the criteria that matters, not
in terms of happiness or money made or GDP but does that system increase our
chance of continuation of the species. That is the new understanding.
Kropotkin
so let us continue in our understanding of systems.
You have a system such as we have today which is a democracy and
a majority based system. Thus we reach agreement within the democracy
by a vote which is done via the majority. Majority rules. But what happens when
the system is subverted by ideologies. I point to the latest flap which is the kim davis
chick in KY who refused to sign marriage license of Gays on religious grounds. She is a civil
worker, a government worker who was elected to do the job of clerk. Now on what grounds does
she have to subject her religious views on those who do not hold her religious views?
As stated she is a civil servant which not a theological position but a system position and
that system is the political system we have established to conduct “the people’s business”.
Now mike Huckabee who is running for president says that she/others can “obey the law only
if its right” this is his defense of Mrs. Davis. To obey the law only if it is “right” and upon
what grounds are we to determine that a law is right? The whole premise of
what davis and Huckabee argue’s is that there is two laws, one is man’s law and the other
is god’s law and we are to, according to these two, obey god’s law before man’s law.
Now this extremely dubious idea has consequences such as I can obey a law as long as
it fits into my understand of god. So we have made laws subject to a person’s interpretation
of religion/god. In other words, laws are only to obey when it fits into our vision of god.
That is a dangerous ideal to follow because it make the system far more unstable and bleeds
out energy. Energy which can be used to maintain the system is now used for other purposes
and those purposes are not beneficial to the system. Which is to invite chaos and entropy into
the political system which is not able to maintain itself. This leads to the failure of the system.
In other words, this idea of man’s law and god’s law will lead to the failure of the political system
and bring about anarchy and anarchy not in a good or viable way. I for one, do not support the
dissolution of the political system without a viable replacement already in hand. When we
take energy out of the system, we increase the chance of entropy which leads to bringing
about chaos and randomness into the system. We threaten the system and ourselves when we
allow energy to dissipate into meaningless and pointless beliefs like god and religion.
This is an argument against religion and god. It takes away energy from the system and
helps bring about the dissolution of the system in this case our political system. Just as
christanity brought about the end of the roman empire, christanity will help bring about the
end of our current political system which is democracy.
Kropotkin
Ya’ll don’t know nuthin’ about the noble anarchist prince. He rolled with the Big Three.
As an former anarchist, I have read almost all the anarchists including Kropotkin.
I believe in his ideals more so than others and thus comes my self naming of Peter Kropotkin.
I actually believe anarchism is in the future, not in the present or past. I believe
it will occur with the advance of technology and we won’t have to work in the manner we
work today (or in the past). It will follow Marx when he says, (in which book I can’t remember)
In the morning, I work one job and in the afternoon another or maybe a third job or perhaps
I will be learning in school. For marx (in part) alienation comes from being tied to one job
day after day, year after year, for decades on end. Man for Kropotkin was more than
man was for Marx who believed along with Adam Smith that man was an economic person,
whereas Kropotkin believed that man was greater than his economic aspects. Man is not
the sum of economic activity, but the sum of all he/she is capable of and much more.
Kropotkin
Alienation, this ideal of Marx is now present everywhere in the world.
We are not only alienated from our economic selves but we are alienated
from society and ourselves. This is shown by the way the religious right has
tried to influence society with the likes of Kim davis and other far right
evangelicals like Huckabee. They are so alienated from modern society they
actively try to fight such idea’s like gay marriage by any means necessary.
But personally, I believe we are an alienated society because the ideologies
that have been the driver of society for centuries, have become empty and silent.
Ideologies like manifest dynasty is dead given we have no more frontier left.
Ideologies like Catholicism no longer speak to us because the facts on the ground
no longer match the idea’s and ideals within Catholicism. Ideologies no longer
fit the facts on the ground and yet we have nothing to replace those faded ideologies
with anything else. The result is alienation. The old ideologies have failed but haven’t
been replace yet with new up to date ideologies. Think of the Greco-Roman empire from
300 BC to around 300 AD and you will see that the old ideologies that served the Greco-Roman
empire for century no longer fit the facts on the ground and they weren’t replaced by anything
until the rise of christanity, which became the de facto ideology of failing Greco-Roman empire.
As one or more ideologies fail, they need to be replace or we suffer from alienation.
the new ideologies have yet reached our ears. Nietzsche saw this when he wrote how
god was kill by man but the news hadn’t yet reached the ears of man. We, this modern
age, is suffering from massive alienation and yet we still haven’t heard the news yet.
the king is dead, long live the king.
Kropotkin
alienation is also from the modern institutional use of Nihilism in such ideologies as
capitalism and corporatism that exist today. We recognize on some level that
that values that make us human are being actively being hunted down and destroyed
in the modern world. The modern world has no need for love, honest and true love,
no need for honor and no need for honesty and no need for faith or hope or charity
or any other value that makes us human. In the modern world, we just need to be robots
and do our job. any other value reduces our value as a worker. We are alienated on
so many different levels. We are alienated from our work, our values, our ideologies.
At work, we have dozens of older workers like myself who are just wasting time until
we can retire. Our only investment in work is our promised pension plan and given
how corporate America tends to steal pensions plan, we live in fear of working our whole
lives and having nothing to show for it. That is a profound alienation from work.
We are alienated from government because it is obvious government takes it orders from
big business and wealthy individuals. We have no say in our lives in either work or political matters.
We are cogs in the machine without any say or voice in the machine. We not only have no
input in the machine, the machine forces us to only have values that are important to the machine.
Being on time, compliance, quiet. those are the values wanted by the machine.
Recall I am in a union and the only two ways I can get fired is by stealing and
insubordination, failure to comply. The key component of the modern world is compliance
to management regardless of the rightness or wrongness of their orders. The value of religion
in the modern world is, it makes the religious feel like they have some say, some value in a
world that is irrelevant to people’s existence. If you comply to god, you at least get something
out of it, heaven whereas in the corporate world, you only get to keep your job. compliance has
no other value in the corporate world. This institutional nihilism must be gotten rid of before
it kills our world, literally kills the world.
We are alienated from everything and we have no solution so people flee to such
ideas like god even if god doesn’t exist because even a being that doesn’t exist has
more hope to it than the modern world of nihilism and despair and alienation.
Kropotkin
reading up on the scientific method. Can we lay the scientific method
on top of philosophy and get “results”? Is the scientist the role model
for philosophy or as Socrates and Plato believed, the doctor is the role model for
philosophy? Kant tried to make philosophy “scientific” with his method but
by all accounts he failed. Can you take the scientific method and use it on
philosophy? Create a hypothesis and then find an experiment to prove or disprove
said hypothesis? Is it that easy? I would doubt it because generations of philosophers
have come down the pike and I haven’t hear of many, if any at all, using such methods.
Reading about Charles sanders pierce and I am beginning to see. He wrote that people
philosophize not to find the truth per se, but to remove doubt. To remove doubt?
that is not science, but what if we philosophize in a positive manner and use
philosophy to find the truth but who do we follow, the scientist or the doctor.
Nietzsche would use the doctor but then N. always did follow the Greeks.
time to get ready for work and so much to think about.
Kropotkin
What if the failure of philosophy, that is so self-evident, is because of the
failure of philosophy to follow the right role model? Perhaps the
historian is the right role model? Or perhaps a new model is needed?
the strength of philosophy is in its only advantage over science, which
is philosophy ask, why? Why does the universe exist? The scientist can only
say, how the universe exists, but not why. The priest can say why, but there is no
method there, only faith and faith has proven itself to be a failure time and time again.
I had faith that… only to be disappointed yet again. I have seen believers, true believers
turn against their faith because the facts on the ground couldn’t be solved by faith or the
facts on the grounds went to a point where faith could no longer sustain it.
My gut instinct is the role model we want for philosophy is the doctor, but
only by researching the concept can we actually decide which role model is right for
philosophy and perhaps different aspects of philosophy need a different role model. The
area of logic is where the scientist is strongest, so there we follow the scientist. the area
of ethics might require the doctor. So we shift gears and follow the role model that
seems to fit the area being looked at.
Kropotkin
I am breaking my usual habit and writing after work around 9:00 at night,
so if I sound different that is why.
I pose a question in my last post in which should the philosopher follow the
scientist or the historian or the doctor, when the philosopher does philosophy.
Ok, let us try this, following in the path of the historian, the question is;
what was the cause of the fall of the Roman empire?
Now I have studied this and the reasons are many,
among the most common reasons given is taxes (the unfair tax burden on the poor to
cover the wealthy and churches who paid no taxes, sound familiar?)
The economic burden of paying for a standing army.
the rise of Christanity which sap the vitality of the empire. (Edward Gibbon went with this one)
The problem of succession for the Caesars.
the barbarians who invaded Gaul and spain and finally Italy.
The diseases like the plague and other diseases that finally sap the empire.
You can go on for a while but you get the idea.
Now you can do the research and trust me, people have
researched the shit out of this one. But which truth is THE TRUTH about how
the empire fell. Clearly, many reasons contributed to the fall of Rome. so how do you
assigned blame as it were, to maybe one or two reasons? You can write whole books,
in fact, Gibbon’s decline and fall takes up 6 big volumes. You have Bury’s couple of volumes
on the same subject and those are books written centuries ago. So a historian must
take into account multitude of reasons to even come close to adequately covering the topic.
So the philosopher takes note of this. His question “what is the meaning of life?”
must and/or follow the historian. So you need to list all the possible reasons for the meaning of
life. You can almost divide it up into religious and non-religious meanings of life.
To praise god, to devote time to god, to do religious work in search of god, this list can
go on almost forever.
The non religious can go to finding happiness, to finding inner peace, to making a shitload
of money, traveling, to hell almost anything. the list is practically the list of everything
humans do. so you have to somehow narrow the list down or perhaps ask a question that is
not so vague. and so it works itself down. Asking question after question after question trying
to find a way to ask what is the meaning of life without making it so vague that it becomes
almost useless.
ummm, more thinking needed.
Kropotkin
Ok, last night I tried to philosophize like a historian with this sentence,
“What is the meaning of life”, the problem turned on the word meaning
because anything can have any type of meaning. So we change the sentence,
“What is the purpose of life” This brings better clarity I believe.
So purpose is real point and as I spoke of earlier, the purpose of human beings
is to procreate and continue the species. The so called sex drive is really not about
sex at all, but about procreating and continuing the species, so says the biologist.
but the chemistry guy is going to say, that the sex drive is really not biology but
chemistry. It is hormones that power the “sex” drive and hormones are really about
chemistry. Now the physicist might say, not so fast, it is really is about …
So the scientists will say that it is their specialty which drive the purpose, be it
biology or chemistry or physics. but how do we escape the fact that the sciences
are in a better position to show us purpose. Science is more about the how, not the why.
Why something exist is not really up science alley. the how, yes, and where and who and
the what, yes, science does tell us these things, but why? No, science is rather bad at the why.
Science can tell that the BB occurred 13.8 billion years ago, but why, and there science fails us.
the historian can tell us the why, why did Rome fall or why did King John sign the Magna Carta.
Those why’s is something a historian can tell us but science cannot say a word about. Science
is about finding the truth of a physical situation, such as what is the truth about the revolution
of the truth. first science believed that the sun revolved around the earth. then science “discovered”
that the earth revolved around the sun and then we learned the earth revolved around the sun
at around 93 million miles in roughly a circle, roughly. but at no point does a why enter here.
Why does the earth rotate around the sun at about 93 million miles?
So science can answers some of our questions but not all. For example, what is a human being?
So a biologist is going to say, a human is a biological creature that came from other life and
life is billions of years old, or whatever shit a biologist is gonna say. Now the chemist is going
to say, a human being is a series of chemical reactions. The physicist is going to say, a human being
is… and a historian is going to say…and they will all be right about what a human being is,
but none of the scientist is able to say why a human being?
They can in great detail, go into what a human being is made of and what the biological processes
going on and what are the chemical processes going on, but not why?
so for each branch of science and a historian, they have their own definition of what a human being
is and for each, and they are right.
but none of them will be able to embrace the whole of what a human being is and finding that
whole is what a philosopher does. What is the whole of being human?
Next we talk about the doctor and the psychiatrist and their take on the whole business of
being human.
Kropotkin
Ok, now we try to philosophize like a doctor or a psychiatrist.
Each as their own vision of what being human is like. From a psychiatrist standpoint,
a human is all about mind and a doctor is about the body.
As mentioned, the Greeks felt that there was a connection between
philosophy and medicine. Both Socrates and Plato, in fact the entire
philosophical community of ancient Greece, felt that “doing” philosophy
was like a doctor giving a diagnoses to society. Nietzsche carried on this
idea, because that is what N. did, follow the Greeks. So let us return to the question,
of “Why did Rome fall” from a doctor perspective. The doctor cannot make a
diagnoses without some understanding of what is the base condition of the subject.
for example, we cannot tell if someone is sick if we don’t know what their normal
day to day, base condition is. So for a doctor to tell if I am sick, she has to know
how I am day to day and my doctor has seen me for many years, so she
has blood work of me, and test on virtually every part of my body. So I complain
of a fever. She knows my basic operating condition and by testing, she can tell
if something is off, like my blood count or something is different than normal.
The doctor can also tell by knowledge that a flu is going around and that might
affect her diagnoses because of this knowledge. so for Socrates doctor to make
a diagnoses of society, they must know the normal state of society.
What would create an “illness” in society? What would an ill society look like?
A look at Roman history revels that quite often Rome was in some form or
another, civil war. If not Caesar making war on Mark Anthony, it was some
general on the frontier who declared themselves Caesar and then the current
Caesar would battle the wannabe Caesar until one would win and then quite
often on another front another wannabe would declare themselves Caesar and
then the cycle would repeat. This was the history of Rome from around 180 AD to
roughly the end of Rome around 476 AD. So from a illness perspective, is this perpetual
civil war, a sign of illness or a sign of business as usual? I would think that civil war was
a sign of illness. The society was ill and the civil war was a flu or a cold needing to
be fought over. You have to figure out what is the base of society health and then you
can figure out if the society is ill. Nietzsche felt the two healthiest times of humans
was the Greek period and the Renaissance. So we use those two examples as health for
human being and he felt that the sickness in society was during the Dark ages.
So we now have some idea of what we are looking for, are we healthy or are we in this
current time, ill? What would a healthy society look like and what do we look like?
Kropotkin
Ok, to continue on, what would be the base for say, the American society?
Would the time period be during the civil war? No, that would be an illness,
think of a cold or flu. The body fighting itself would be an illness and so would
a nation fighting itself. In reviewing the last say, 100 years, I would say, the healthiest
period was the 1920’s. the next healthiest period would be the years between 1955 and
1965. Next would be the 1990’s. What do these years have in common? I would say, they
were years of hope and years of optimism. They were years of a vitalism. To my mind,
we have really had problems since the closing of the frontier. That moment which was decided
to be 1895, has had a major effect on the American psyche. As a country, the most decisive
moments were the civil war and the closing of the frontier. We have been lost without an agenda
since the closing of the frontier. So to broaden it out, each country has a base period where
it felt good. Just like when you feel good and feel healthy, everything flows and you don’t
have doubts or worries. You just do and the same goes for a country. It just flows and move
with a certainty. the mind and body are one. The agenda and the ideology are one.
A look at this time and place, right now, revels that we are at war with each other.
we are not one. we have no agenda and have lost our ideology. We are alienated from
each other. We have symptoms of an illness and what is the diagnoses? We are apart because
we have no common goal or common fight, so we unite the people with a common goal, common
fight by creating a common goal. That is best done with going into space. We use space as a
common denominator to unite people into a common goal. Not everyone will agree, but enough
will agree that will give us a common and valuable goal that we can achieve on. This common goal
is enough to create a situation where we feel good and healthy and we don’t have doubts or worries.
the mind and body are one and the agenda and ideology are one.
Kropotkin
Wrong…the healthiest this nation was when it was founded…the 13 colonies…
You mourn the closing of the frontier…the frontier…wasn’t those the days where americans slaughtered natives by the droves?
A couple of points before I move on, A, I said in the last 100 years,
B. I believe the loss of the frontier meant that we lost our goal, our mission
and that loss has (in part) created the issues we have today and I stand by
that statement. We don’t have a goal, we don’t have a mission statement as it
were for us, so we don’t have any direction in our society and having a frontier created
that direction, that purpose, that goal for our society. That is what we have lost, our sense
of what is next for us. What is next? More of the same? We don’t have focus because we
don’t have a goal for us to achieve, the frontier created that for our nation for 300 years and
space will create that for us going forward.
We looked at a doctor last time in terms of a philosophy, now we turn to the mind doctors,
the psychiatrists, (now in terms of full disclosure, my sister is a psychiatrist) the problem I have
with them is this idea of normal. What is normal in terms of how the mind works? We have
heard stories of people who were loved in a community and married and they went off either
as a serial killer or with a gun on a rampage. Who is really normal and what does this normal look
like? The truth is we have no idea of what is really normal in the psychological sense, we have
guesses and half truths but nothing I would want to hold anybody too.
I think this lack of knowledge makes psychiatrists a bad choice to follow in terms of
a philosophy, although Nietzsche called himself a psychologist and had insights into
the mind and soul. I suspect a philosopher needs to be part psychologist to be able
to make sense of society, to philosophize. To find motivation in people is part
psychologist and to just understand the world is not enough, we must create a new
path and a new motivation to follow that new path. to philosophize, we must
acknowledge the past, understand the present and lead a path into the future.
We operate in time and space. Looking forward, backwards and sideways, and
we put these into perspective along with working with the space around us.
We, ourselves are the singularity and everything flows from us.
Kropotkin
So robbing land and murdering people…that was gave you purpose, your mission, the direction society needs?
Look, I know you are young and confused but try to read without adding things.
At no point have I said word one about the genocide of the American Indians nor
have I said anything about the theft of their land and there is a good reason for that.
It is not relevant to what I am saying. I am saying that the frontier creates a purpose,
a goal to be achieved. That is all I am saying. Anything else, you are adding.
Kropotkin