a new understanding of today, time and space.

I want to find the answers, but answers to what?

some like Descartes believe that philosophy is about finding
certainty and if I follow Descartes in searching for certainty, I miss
the other stuff that is just as important as the search for certainty like
searching for meaning and if I am searching for certainty and searching
for meaning, I miss other stuff that is just as important which is how am I
to live my life, ethics,

in other words, if I search for the parts, I miss the whole and if
I search for the whole, I miss the parts…I can never
satisfactorily approach either the parts of philosophy or
approach the whole of philosophy…

by necessity, I must narrow my search in such a way, that I
get the answers I am looking for but, and this is a big but,
I will never be able to understand or comprehend either the whole
or the parts… I will understand small slices of philosophy but
I will never reach either a big understanding or a number of small understandings
of philosophy…

so, how do I solve this problem?

I don’t because I can’t…

I must on some level accept or know or understand that
I will never find all the answers I am looking for…

as it were, I must leave some truths on the table and walk away…

I cannot ever learn all the truths I want to learn…

and that is a shame… the best I can ever do is connects some small dots
on a very large puzzle and hope someone later uses that connection to
connect even more dots and someone after that builds upon our work
and connects even more dots…and in time, more and more of the puzzle we
call life will become clearer and clearer… larger and larger aspects of the puzzle
will become understandable and someday, far into the future, it will become clear
to someone who will finally connects all the dots and this puzzle of life will become
understandable…

what is your contribution to the solution of the puzzle of life?

Kropotkin

K: so in the above, I note that I can’t ever learn the answers…

but if I put it another way, it might make more sense…

I can learn some “truths” but I can never learn the “TRUTH”…
because the idea that one person can learn the “TRUTH” is false…

we each have our own small, private “truths” that is applicable to
ourselves, but to no one else… so what small “truth” of yours is
worth sharing with the world?

Kropotkin

The day has arrived I have dreaded… with my arrival at “modern” philosophy and
Descartes, I must now tackle that most problematic of issues… Science…

What is Science? What is its relationship with philosophy?
how is Science different and how is science similar to philosophy?
what is an scientific issue and what is an philosophical issue?

There are many who believe that science has driven philosophy for the
last 500 years and so without any knowledge of science, the study of philosophy
becomes impossible…

I am not as concerned with such specific issues as evolution or how does gravity work,
as much as how does science itself interact and change philosophy and how much does
philosophy itself interact and change science…

at one time, what we call science was called natural philosophy and was considered
a part of philosophy… science wasn’t a separate field of study as it is today,
to study science was to study philosophy and to study philosophy was to study
science…they were one and the same…

the question of science was/is a study in method… the scientific method…
what is that and how do we use the scientific method to discover the world around
us… how does the scientific method create knowledge of our world…

many, many philosophers have tried to make philosophy into science…
Spinoza and Hegel and Marx for example have tried to turn philosophy
into a science…their failure is quite evident but is their failure because
you can’t turn philosophy into science or is their failure because of the
method/technique used by them caused their failure? if they had a better
method, would they have succeeded in turning philosophy into science?

I don’t know that…

Science can tell us how breathing works or how the solar system
works, but can philosophy give us the why? science cannot give
us any why’s…it can only tell us how something works for example,
the solar system stays in place because of gravity and science lays
out some scientific “laws” that tell us how the solar system stays in place…

but science cannot tell us “WHY”… why does the solar system stay in place…
does that fact tell us anything about the meaning or purpose of the universe?

Religion would say that “god” put the solar system in place and that is in part,
part of our existence… science says, ahhhh no, god didn’t put the solar system in
place… philosophy exists somewhere between science and religion…
religion can give us a why the solar system exists and science cannot tell
us why, but philosophy can/maybe tell us why… philosophy can give us a
why…

I have studied evolution and I have studied physics but that doesn’t mean I have
studied science…so how does the small study of individual branches of science
give us information about the entire tree of science… and how does that relate
to philosophy and the why? the why of existence is really philosophy’s reason for
existence… we want to know the “why” we have existence and what is existence for, without
recourse to religion or god…the problem is really that religion and science and philosophy,
all have many, many different moving parts and keeping those separate parts in mind
is quite difficult…finding relationships between all those moving parts can drive
a person crazy…but it is not impossible, just very difficult…

is there a method I can use to finding those relationships between science and religion
and philosophy? a method like one used for science? but many believe that
science doesn’t actually have a method, like Popper and Feyerabend, for
example… if science doesn’t actually have a method, then trying to create
a method for philosophy sounds impossible…science is concerned with
measurements… how big, how fast, how small, how heavy, how slow, how, how, how…
there are no measurements for philosophy… you cannot measure why…
just as you cannot measure god…so how do we create method when you don’t
have measurements?

all very difficult questions… but that is the point… there is no point on
attacking very easy questions… it is only in attacking big, indeed impossible
questions that has value…and we approach one aspect in this question of
science and philosophy and religion in the question of “value vs facts”…

science deals with facts and philosophy and religion deals with values…

that is just one question we face during this pursuit…

so what aspect of these questions draws your interest and why?

Kropotkin

In many ways I believe philosophy should have remained “the love of wisdom” - values can certainly be developed in philosophy and most people now believe that all philosophy is there for is to teach or help us to know how to act.

Religion is about worship - worship of what seems to be philosophy’s biggest question regarding religion. Science can neither prove nor disprove the existence of a deity. It seems philosophy has a much better chance of proving the existence of things we can not see . . .

Science to me a just a tool - much like a hammer - or a shovel. Science has no real idea on how we should live or what values are.

Spirituality which can easily be separated from Religion concerns itself with the human spirit or soul as opposed to the material or physical things in life.

The aspect that draws me to your latest post as opposed to the questions is the comment about science driving philosophy - I think this is possible in mainstream academia which in many respects should not even hold the title academia. As far as I am concerned however I plan to break away from the bounded thought modern life has instilled in me and create something new - something that is unified based on things as close to reality and truth as possible with the exception of art whose domain is creativity that is involved with imagination.

So at this moment in time the following represent the list of things that I value:

  1. Spirituality - not Religion.
  2. Philosophy - not just the academia kind either. Ethics being the most important to me.
  3. Art - I especially like story telling.
  4. Science - real science not watered down statistical garbage.

Regarding science - there should not be one method but rather an arsenal of good methods and I think in many ways there are. We will definitely have a few new methods on offer in the future.

If I were to create a new knowledge as mentioned above I would be tempted to give the branches of knowledge different names to distinguish them from some of the modern day labels we use - but it is what it is - it seems we can only but pick and choose from the limited methods, labels and choices available.

Occam’s razor - look at the empirical - see if something is just a trick or real. Oh wait that is how we do it. Seriously though that is where the more than ten types of logic come in useful.

But in saying what I have said I actually find your post interesting - I just do not think that science should be driving anything but itself and institutionalized religion seems to be losing its value in modern life. I would hate to see us lose philosophy and replace it with some “automatonic” existence. Rules as they say are made to be broken - this statement is useful when breaking a false rule to replace it with a true rule. I do get the feeling however that life only has substance when we include the many forms of art alongside the logical knowledge that we aquire.

as I have been very busy of late… I write when I can…

the “Truth” can only lie in two places… inside of us or outside of us…
when someone says, the truth lies with god, that is outside of us…

when I was searching for god for 40 years, I was searching outside of me…
now many believe that the truth is found inside of us…

The Buddha for example…

so we have either the truth lying inside or lying outside of us…

but if I am right and everything is one and connected, then the truth can
exist in us and outside of us… a search outside of us should at some point lead
us back to ourselves and a search within ourselves will lead us back to the outside…

perhaps that is why the most appropriate symbol of life is the Ying/yang…

I would post this symbol but my incompetence in technical matters prevents me…

now one might argue I have gone “mystical”, but I haven’t… just because I
insist that life is best understood as experience and not in a metaphysical sense,
that doesn’t preclude stretching experience as far as it will go…

take an action… for example, throwing a rock… I throw the rock…
then, I mentally put that experience into some sort of context…
I could by the way, do it the other way around, mentally put that experience
into context and then throw the rock…I am throwing the rock to show my arm strength,
or to chase off bears or to impress a girl, many reasons exist for me to throw that rock…

the question becomes, how are we to understand that event?..

there are many such events in life… some past, some present and some future…
history is a study of events in the past, we hear about an event, say, the battle
of Waterloo… we then try to make some sense of that event, mentally…
we categorize those events, put them into some context… we mentally try to
to understand that “truth”… that “truth” of Waterloo which is an physical event
and we try to make sense of it mentally… the truth lies both inside of us and outside
of us…

a search for a truth either inside of us or outside of us, will lead us to the other…
we are mental and physical and our truths lie in both the mental and physical…

now is this like the famous mind/body problem? how does the mind influence the body
and how does the body influence the mind? No, this is something different…
this is an understanding that the “truth” whatever that may be, lies both inside
of us and outside of us, as they are the same thing…

but one might say, we are two distinct and separate things, inside and out,
mind and body… over the course of this thread, many times we have come
across two distinct and separate things and we have come to understand that
two distinct and separate things when understood, become two sides of the same
coin and then they become the same thing… good and evil for example…

to slightly change directions, we have a viewpoint and that viewpoint is
society driven, culturally driven… X, Y and Z are right and A, B, and C are
wrong, this is culturally and society driven… Truth, justice and the American way,
I have heard this all my life and it is culturally driven… we hear a truth and
as enough people belief in this truth, we accept it as our own… American is
the greatest country on earth… this “truth” is society and culturally driven…
this “truth” lies outside of us… but even a cursory look at it shows us that
America is not the greatest country on earth… so how do we understand this…
we have a culturally driven truth that America is the greatest country on earth
and we have a understanding that America is clearly not the greatest country on earth?
how do we reconcile this anomaly? we have two truths, clearly one is wrong,
but how do we understand this as one truth is society and culturally driven and
we certainly don’t want to be wrong in regards to our culture and out society…

how do we find the answer to this quandary?

Kropotkin

now to answer the question, is America the greatest country on earth?

you might resort to such answer such as we are the most powerful country
on earth, but you have to explain what is meant by powerful…

you might say, we are the greatest economic power on earth and we can
resort to facts to prove such a thing… but facts are changeable…
to say for example, there are 8 million people in NY is to put a fix number
on a number that is changing by the day… yes, there might be 8 million people
in NY today, but yesterday with births, deaths and people moving in and out,
there were 8,100,000 people in NY and tomorrow there might be more or less,
depending on how many people die, how many are born and how many move in
and move out… that number of 8 million as a fact is really more of a, around
this number of people live in NY and not as a definite number of people who live
in NY…so we have the US having a economic number of say, 1 trillion dollars
of economic activity, but the actual number can change by billions in a short period
of time…so we are using facts to decide that America is the greatest country on
earth and facts are subject to change, but more importantly, one didn’t
claim America is the greatest country on earth by values… because we
cannot claim to be the greatest country on earth given we have values that
include allowing torture and waterboarding… you cannot make a value claim
that America is the greatest country on earth because you cannot show us
that is true and as facts are subject to change depending on how they are used…
you cannot prove your assertions that America is the greatest country on earth…

you have facts and you have values… what other issues that can be
addressed by facts and what other issues that can be addressed by values?

Kropotkin

you have facts and you have values, two distinct and separate idea’s…

values like justice, hope, love, honor, faith…
facts, like one plus one is two and there are 8 million people in NY…

so, we have two distinct and separate idea’s…
then if we understand it correctly, we have two sides of the same coin
and then… we don’t have two idea’s but we have one…

facts and values are the same thing…

how did we achieve this miracle?

by taking an eagle eye view of facts and values…

facts say something about the world, values say something about us…

we cannot say, the world has love or justice but we can say, human beings
have love and justice…

but that means we have created a distinct and separate understanding of
the world… we have human beings and we have the world… the outside of us…

but we are in the world and really what separates us from the world?

we have a body that is easily absorbed by the world, in other words, our body
is of this world and comes and go from it quite easily…I am born… ashes to ashes,
dust to dust… we are born and reborn a million, indeed a billion times,
our cells are used and reused over and over again…
so how are we different from the world?

as for values, values are a society driven, culturally driven idea…
we value what society values because society has driven it into us…

to philosophize is to challenge this… Philosophers are
a danger to society because we challenge those values which have
been driven into us from birth… as values are really just idea’s and idea’s
have no form, no body to speak, we cannot say that values even exist…

so to suggest that values don’t exist is to say, just the body exists and that
body is temporary and changeable… we are and everything around us is flux…

and that is the commonality that unites facts and values… both are temporary
and changeable… at their heart, neither values or facts have any permanent
existence…they disappear just like our bodies… that is the connection
between facts and values… that makes them the same…

what does this leave us with?

Kropotkin

and we have reached exactly the same point Plato did when he posited that
idea of eternal forms…he thought that there was a temporary world, the world
we live in and an eternal world… that eternal world is where the eternal forms
like the circle existed and what we have is inexact and low grade copies of those
eternal forms…once again we reached this human need to create permanence in
the universe…Artificial permanence… nothing that can be shown to exist…
implied in Plato argument is this eternal world is god and god creates the
permanence in the universe with his eternal forms…once again philosophy looks
to god to hold the world fast and stable… Descartes does the same thing as
does Spinoza and Liebniz and Locke and Berkeley… each of them at some point
bring in god to make good the world’s promise…yet, yet we cannot do so…
because nothing as yet suggest that god actually does exist…
I would like to use a courtroom experience to show that god doesn’t
exist…

what evidence would you take to a courtroom to convince a judge and jury
that god does exists?

there is no evidence that would be admissible in a courtroom to show us
that god does exist…you can’t point to anything and say, that is god…
clear and certain as day… nothing like that exists… and so it goes for
Plato’s eternal forms… there is nothing there that would pass a courtroom
test…

so we have reached the point where Plato needed god
to make his theories work… we cannot resort to such arbitrary means to
get our theories to hold solid and in place… everything is temporary and
changeable and melts into nothing at some point…

our philosophy must reflect this… we have nothing in the universe that
exist permanently and eternally…

even space and time once began, the big bang and so that implies that
space and time are of duration and thus will at one point not exist…
if something can come into existence, it can go out of existence…

our philosophy must reflect this reality that we and everything is impermanent
and temporary… idea’s, matter, reality, space and time, the universe, all of it is temporary
and impermanent…the search for a permanent reality is nonsense, call yourself
Don Quixote if you insist on searching for a permanent reality… such is a fool’s quest…

our idea’s and philosophy must reflect this temporary, impermanent reality we exist in…

so what does this mean for us?

Kropotkin

We have a multitude of questions in philosophy…
one such question is : what is the meaning of life?
and at one time or another, everyone asks themselves that question…
the problem with this question, as often happens with philosophy questions,
is that if you look at the question, I mean really look at the question, the
question itself has issues…

The meaning of life: we have two key words, meaning and life…
but if we look at these two concepts, we see they are two different
concepts, life is facts and meaning is value…so in essence we are asking,
what is the value of a factual existence…

life has many different meanings, there is that word again,
one way to define life is:

life needs to maintain Homeostasis, it is composed of cells, it undergoes metabolism,
it can grow, it adapts to its environment, respond to stimuli and it reproduces…

to be called life, it must follow these 7 things… or at least that is the
current conception of life… it will change because that is what facts do,
they change…and there are more then one theory as to what is this thing
called life…in other words, we have problems with understanding what exactly
is life… one of our two words, we are not sure what it is… how can we
find an answer to, what is the meaning of life, when we aren’t really sure what life
is…life is a process, not a substance…

as to our second word, meaning, there are even more theories as to what is
“meaning”… Wiki lists at least 5 different theories about meaning…
meaning is about values. look up the work “meaning” and you get something along
the lines of this…

Meaning as nouns:

  1. what is intended to be, or actually is
  2. the end, purpose, or significance of something,
    what is the meaning of life…
  3. Linguistics, the nonlinguistic cultural, reference, or denotation of a
    linguistic form… expression by linguistic content…
    (I have no idea what this means)

meaning as an adjective:
4. intended (causally used in combination)
she is a well meaning person
5. Full of significance expressive…
a meaning look…

in other words, even what the word, meaning, means is under dispute
and in questioned…

so we have two words in a 4 word sentence that we don’t even really
understand… how can we find the meaning of life when we don’t even know
what those words mean?

we have interesting examples of the meaning of life even given we don’t
really understand those words…

for example, this is an example of one version of the meaning of life…
the declaration of independence tells us that…

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed with certain unalienable rights, that among these,
are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness…

with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, being the meaning of life…
goals to be achieved… and meaning is in part, is a question of goals to be
achieved… and where does all his leave us?

we have at this point a question that unanswerable because we cannot
agree on the term of “meaning” and the term, “life”…

so does answering these questions become a linguistic questions?
some think so and answer it in those terms but that path is sterile
and cannot meet our flesh and blood demands for knowledge and truth…
a word means this… does that really answer our question…
love is defined as… but that certainly doesn’t tell us what love is
as love is greater then any definition we impose on it…

so we are back in the beginning, wonder what is the meaning of life?

and until we understand what the word meaning and the word life, means,
we cannot begin to answer that question and then all we have are definitions
and definitions are not answers…

so what am I left with? an understanding that we cannot answer our
questions about philosophy unless we clarify the questions and then
that is only part way to finding answers…

Kropotkin

and what of beauty? do we understand beauty?
think of a beautiful woman or man, as you wish…

We automatically think of women as being more beautiful then men…

take two examples, say, Nicole Kidman and Meryl Streep…
are they equally beautiful? Most would say no, but why?

society would say Nicole Kidman was more beautiful then Meryl Streep,
but there are those individuals that think Meryl Streep is more beautiful then
Nicole Kidman… So who is right? is there some sort of census building
in society that is deciding what is beauty and beautiful? I think the problem lies
in how we determine what beauty is… what is beauty? how would you define it?
of course the usual suspects are here, pleasing to the eye and another favorite,
symmetry and what other criteria has been used?

now one thing I have noticed about beauty is this, it is nonthreatening, we don’t feel
threatened by beauty, but we do feel threaten and repelled by ugliness…

(now my last statement about beauty being nonthreatening is not actually true,
I have seen women be threaten by another women’s beauty, but that is about
self esteem issues more then any thing else)

so what is the definition of beauty? and once again we run into trouble,
because there is no actual definition of beauty or the beautiful that would
allow us to clearly understand beauty… but once again, it is not all about
the definition of something that makes it clear but taking the next step
after definition that allows us to properly understand something…
a definition is just one step closer to understanding something, it is not
THE step to understanding…

I would suggest we have a mixed and muddled idea of beauty that prevents
us from understanding what beauty is… so twice we have had misunderstanding
because of our lack of understanding of what our terms are, the meaning of life is
another misunderstanding of what meaning and life is and the search for beauty is
a misunderstanding of what beauty is…
perhaps this is why philosophy has been stagnant all these years, confusion over
what we are actually questioning… we are asking the wrong questions or we
are failing to understand what our questions mean, truly mean…

Kropotkin

It seems to me that beauty and attraction are brain structures.
A structure can be made any which way.
The result is as you can see.

the problem with this is we can “blame” the brain structure for almost
anything then… I didn’t commit this crime because my brain structure
caused me to commit this crime… now I recognize that this brain structure
isn’t really a brain structure but the way the mind categorizes things, but
I would suggest that we are heavily influenced in how the mind categorizes
things by society and the way we are raised… the influence of society in how
we think about things cannot be underestimated… I would argue that our idea of
beauty is really a cultural and society construct and far less a matter of our own
individual brain structure creating categories for us to place individual people
as beautiful… we learn what beauty is from society and not from any
individual brain structure that creates categories for us…

so any answer we might get from the question of the meaning of life might
actually come from a cultural and society construct that has been created for us…
we think that the meaning of life comes from our praise and giving glory to god,
but that doesn’t come from any individual categories we might have inside of us,
but is given to from society and cultural influences…

so what other idea’s you might have are influenced by culture and society influences?

Kropotkin

so in my study of philosophy and my offshoot study of science, I
have encountered an interesting thing…
so we have human beings and they want to know about the world around them…
so to understand the world, we humans look at the phenomenon around us…
for example, we see the sun rising every day… humans have seen this sun rising
every single day of our existence as humans…we have tried to explain this in
many different ways, the Greeks had the god Apollo ride his flaming chariot
across the sky every day for example and many other different examples exist
of the explanation of the sun rising every single day…

this one example of the sun rising every single day leads us to wonder,
about how or why does the sun rise every single day, in the east, no less…

so we have spent a whole lot of years thinking about this going back to the
beginning of time…

how we were able to find a solution to this problem? We connected the earth
to a bigger picture… we put the earth into context… we used the
information of the sun rising every single day, which by itself can tell us something
but not enough to create a picture of earth in context of the solar system…

but the interesting thing is we interpret this even in a context and within HUMAN
values and human understanding… in other words, we see the universe
in terms of our senses and our language and our math… we see the universe
in terms of our human nature… we interpret the universe with human eyes
and human hearing and human math and human language… the universe makes
sense because we have filter it through our human understanding…

today we have a mathematical theory of the universe… but that understanding
is done through and with human thought and understanding… it makes sense because
we have found the laws of nature through human thinking and human math…
in other words, our brain structure which is really a means we use to categorize
our world… is the universe as we think it is or, or does the universe look that way
because of the way we humans have categorized it…we have made the universe
understandable to us, but does that really represent the way the universe actually
works? or has creating the context of our understanding of the universe been
compromised because we have done that context in terms of human thinking
and human math and language…

have we created a clear understanding of the universe or have created
a understanding of the universe that makes sense to us because it was done
by us with language and math done by us…is the picture of the universe
a human construct? humans said, let there be light and there was light,
light being an idea of humans, by humans and for humans…

is the universe really something different then we think?
we have created this idea of the universe using human values and human math
and human language, does that mean we really understand the universe or do we
understand our picture of the universe because we drew that picture and the reality
of the universe is something completely different?

Kropotkin

to follow through this thought, would the universe look the same
to Aliens from space? or do they interpret the universe through the lens
of their existence and come up with a totally different picture of the
universe because their senses and language and math is different then ours?

is the picture of the universe dependent upon the nature and quality
of the senses and language and math of the species looking at the universe?

or is the picture of the universe the one we actually have described through
our senses and math and language?

I can envision an alien species having a different math, a different reality
because they exist in a different environment and have different senses…

math is a human construct and aliens having a different reality would
have a different math…so how much does that influence their vision
of reality?

Kropotkin

what is space and time? however the human sense and human reason and
human math make of it… we create the idea of space/time for our benefit
and our use, by our senses and math…

it is not necessarily what space/time actually is…

Kropotkin

Einstein said that we feel time subjectively. sometimes we
feel time moving quickly and sometimes we feel time
move slowly… usually at work… so time is subject
to our own interpretations…as we call it space/time…
we also feel/understand space in a personal fashion…

in other words, space/time is a function of our perception of it…
we have created space/time with our senses and our reason
and our perceptions…

space/time is a human construct just like math and science
and history and biology and physics… different environment,
different senses, a different reality and we have different math,
science, history, biology and physics…

Kropotkin

so, what does this all mean?

we have to redefine what is the “meaning” of government and the “point”
of our economic systems…

in short, what is the point of life?

what we call science and government and biology
and history is really a function of how we have constructed it…
they are artificial ways of looking at the world… created
by the way we see and understand the world…

so we see the world as a conservative see’s it and the world
is a dangerous place, full of people, events, institutions all trying to
damage us, destroy us…orrrrrrr,

we can see the world as a liberal see’s it, where the world is a positive place,
where we create our own vision of “the pursuit of happiness” and
the world is a social world, not every man for himself/herself…

both are right… because the world is as we see it… dangerous if we see it
that way, and positive if we see it that way…

now one argument for a conservative vision is the idea that
humans are basically selfish and all about their own happiness…
as with all visions, that is only partly true…

at my work, we have a store manager that only concern is to make her
bonus…everything single thing she does is subject to that one goal…
she couldn’t care less if the store burned down as long as she got her bonus…
because of this single minded pursuit of her goal… from a workers viewpoint,
there is no benefit of any kind to do the things needed to help the store…
we don’t clean up the store because that has no benefit for us…
we don’t do customer service because if we do it right, no one notices
or CARES…it makes no difference in how the store is run because the manager
only cares about her bonus…and only cares about customer service if it
affects her bonus (and it doesn’t) she has trashed the store by cutting hours
and never, ever complimenting anybody for a job well done, or for that
matter she isn’t on the floor to even see what happens in the store…
she is in her office talking personal business on her cell phone all day…
that is pretty much all she does…

but what if, what if we got some feedback as workers even if it was negative,
it would be a improvement over what we have now…

where we have no incentive to do anything but show up and collect our paychecks…

a shitty place to work where it really doesn’t have to be that shitty…

so what does my little story have to do with anything…

more on that later…

Kropotkin

as has been stated, I am researching philosophy…
I was going along with the standard Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz
understanding of the philosophers…but as I have gone into my studies,
I must, with some confusion I admit, I must include Newton…
now I did not expect this… but it seems clear that Newton was not
a scientist doing philosophy, but a PHILOSOPHER doing science…
and this I did not expect…one cannot understand philosophy after 1675 without
understanding Newton… it is just that simple…without Newton, Kant for example,
makes no sense…I find it strange that all the “standard” histories of philosophy
do not mention Newton or limit his influence, but his work is absolutely essential
to the understanding of philosophy for 200 years after him…

Kropotkin

[quote=“Peter Kropotkin”]
so, what does this all mean?

we have to redefine what is the “meaning” of government and the “point”
of our economic systems…

in short, what is the point of life?

what we call science and government and biology
and history is really a function of how we have constructed it…
they are artificial ways of looking at the world… created
by the way we see and understand the world…

so we see the world as a conservative see’s it and the world
is a dangerous place, full of people, events, institutions all trying to
damage us, destroy us…orrrrrrr,

we can see the world as a liberal see’s it, where the world is a positive place,
where we create our own vision of “the pursuit of happiness” and
the world is a social world, not every man for himself/herself…

both are right… because the world is as we see it… dangerous if we see it
that way, and positive if we see it that way…

now one argument for a conservative vision is the idea that
humans are basically selfish and all about their own happiness…
as with all visions, that is only partly true…

at my work, we have a store manager that only concern is to make her
bonus…everything single thing she does is subject to that one goal…
she couldn’t care less if the store burned down as long as she got her bonus…
because of this single minded pursuit of her goal… from a workers viewpoint,
there is no benefit of any kind to do the things needed to help the store…
we don’t clean up the store because that has no benefit for us…
we don’t do customer service because if we do it right, no one notices
or CARES…it makes no difference in how the store is run because the manager
only cares about her bonus…and only cares about customer service if it
affects her bonus (and it doesn’t) she has trashed the store by cutting hours
and never, ever complimenting anybody for a job well done, or for that
matter she isn’t on the floor to even see what happens in the store…
she is in her office talking personal business on her cell phone all day…
that is pretty much all she does…

but what if, what if we got some feedback as workers even if it was negative,
it would be a improvement over what we have now…

where we have no incentive to do anything but show up and collect our paychecks…

a shitty place to work where it really doesn’t have to be that shitty…

so what does my little story have to do with anything…

more on that later…

K: so its later, much later then I thought before I got back here…

think of my little store in terms of government as a whole… what if
the government was run in a similar fashion as the management runs our store…

the burden falls on those who have the least ability to deal with it…
by that I mean… think of those on the bottom rung who have little say
or influence into the running of the business, just like employees in my store
have no say or influence in the running of the business… the citizens have
done the same thing we employee’s have done which is do your time, collect your
paycheck and get the hell out of there… management in both business and government
managed to turn off any interest in their “working” team, citizens and workers are treated
the same here… and they have lost interest and have stopped caring about what
happens in both the store and in government and this is on purpose…

45 is a perfect example of a manager who only cares about his bonus and
he doesn’t care what happens to the worker/citizen below him…
higher management in this case, the federal government has made it clear,
it doesn’t care about the average worker/citizen and those workers/citizens
have lost interest in the goings on in the state/company…
management agenda has nothing to do with helping or improving the
average citizens/worker… and so we check out… millions of American’s
have lost interest in the goings on in government simply because they feel, correctly,
that the government couldn’t give a shit about them and so these millions of people,
don’t participate or involve themselves in the going’s on of government…
they don’t vote, they don’t protest, they don’t say a word and actively
avoid paying attention to the news or any information about the government…
and the government like big business loves this… less people involved the better
for those who can implement policy…connect the average worker and the average citizen
and you can see a remarkable similarity between both… and how management treats
them and the workers/citizens reaction to this mistreatment, very similar…

so how do we reengage the worker/citizen?

the answer is very similar… engage the worker/citizen in all the steps of
the business/government… bring the worker/citizen back into the decision
making process… give them some accountability and some voice in the
actions that affect their lives… reengage the worker/citizen in the business
of governing and business… make them part of the business/government, not
just a token level but a real level of engagement… make them part of the business,
not just expendable workers/citizens…

Kropotkin

I haven’t been around much because work has been trying to kill me with
long and ugly hours and because of that, I have been in a state of sheer exhaustion…
which tells a story in of itself… one way to keep the masses down is simply work them
to death… if one is exhausted from work, you don’t have the energy to protest or to
work to bring about necessary changes in the world… this is simply a technique to
maintain the system… now on a second note, not long ago, my nephew, who is an idiot,
got into a flame war with me on facebook… one of his comments was to “fight the man”
and I haven’t been able to get this idea out of my mind for a simple reason, there really
isn’t a man to fight, it is the system that we must fight…there are those who take advantage
of the system, those are the ones we call “the Man”…once again its about gaming the
system to get the results you want and the wealthy and powerful have the resources to
game the system…you have even heard 45 saying he has gamed the system and thus
he is an “expert” on cleaning up the system…another lie in a long midst of lies…
anyway, as a lower middle class person, I don’t have the resources to game the system…
so to connect these two idea’s… I am being worked to death because the system
is being gamed by the company who uses its resources to bribe officials to change
the rules to allow the company to work me to death… it isn’t a “MAN” to fight but
a system to fight and that is far harder to imagine and understand… and to fight…

ok, now we have a second point to cover…
life is a series of problems to solve… and much of what exist today, exists
to solve a problem… philosophy is a means to solve a problem and government
is meant to solve a problem and history is to solve a problem and science
is to solve a problem, in other words, we have created many diverse means
to solve problems, from institutions to government to academic solutions…
schools and universities are a solution to a problem and what they teach
are introductions to the problems that need to be solved and what problems
have been solved already and by what means…
so our system of government was a solution to a problem…but if a system no longer
solve our problems, it is to be changed… and the problem to our system is not
that the system doesn’t work, it does, but it has been hijacked by those who use/game
the system for their advantage… and that is the problem to be solved today…
we must return the system to working for the majority and not the small, moneyed
minority…not to fight the man, but to fight the system that has been bought
and corrupted…

my father believed in work and a fair day pay for a day worked…
I was delivering newspapers at age 9 and I also had a job mowing lawns
along with my paper route…the only stretch of my life where I didn’t have a
job was my first three years of high school…otherwise I have been working all my life…
I have contributed my entire life…to work in a system that takes advantage of
everyone is not in my best interests nor is it in yours…I have no problem with
a honest day pay for a honest day’s work and that is the point… it is no longer
a honest day’s pay for honest day work…what is the solution for getting a honest
day pay for a honest day work? we are no longer being paid an honest wage for our
work… and in fact, those who are gaming the system are trying to steal our pensions,
via dishonest plans like the ones that want to take away our social security and replace
it with market accounts in which wall street will steal most of our money… once
again gaming the system… so we need to understand life is a series of problems
and we need to begin to solving our current problems in order not to leave our
children an unholy mess…

Kropotkin