my goal, or I should correctly say, one of my goals, is
to free ourselves of the various tyrannies that exists within
our life…
we have political tyranny that gets all the press, but isn’t
the only tyranny we have, I have mentioned multiple times,
the economic tyranny that we American’s now live under…
and we can have internal tyranny… What’ch you talking about Willis?
Simple, we can have internal tyranny by our being dominated by
internal matters that are limiting…
what do you mean, Kropotkin?
we are, as animals, driven by certain internal matters, I might
call them emotions, we are also driven by intellectual matters,
and we are, as human beings, driven to find our connection to
each other and to the human race… and we are internally driven to
become who we are…human beings have several internal drives working
within them… we have our drive to our basic needs, food, water, shelter,
education, health care… the basic needs of human existence…
the bottom row of Maslow’s pyramid…the physiological needs,
the needs every human being has…then we have the next level of
the pyramid, the safety needs…security and safety…
then we have the next level, the belongingness and love needs,
intimate relationships/friends…
then we the next level, the esteem needs, prestige and feeling of
accomplishment needs…
then we rise above our needs but the next and last level,
the self actualizations needs, achieving one’s full potential,
including creative activities…here, we are no longer about needs…
but we also have internal needs like, “the will to power”
as Nietzsche said…the will to dominate others to our will…
this need to make others subservient to us… this need is strong
in conservatives… to dominate others… this is why politically,
it is more likely that right wing ideologies wind up with dictatorships,
such as Fascism and oligarchies and theocracies…
because of this need to dominate others…
Despotism is more then likely to come from right wing ideology
then left wing ideology…
now one may make a counter argument, but if you actually think
about the nature of despotism and the origins of them, you will see
the right wing nature of most despotism’s…….
so we have needs and we attempt to answer those needs…
but we are quite often held hostage by those needs…
our needs come to dominate our actions… like the man
who needs love and then spends his life looking for love…
even if he finds it, it becomes a addiction for him to search for
love… and that becomes the problem… our needs sometimes
becomes our addictions… we search high and low for something
to fulfill our addictions…emotions can become that sort of
addiction as does physical addictions like drugs and booze……
addictions to something is a tyranny… it demands that we devote our time
and energy to suppling that addiction…so, we must avoid all sorts of
tyrannies, be it external or be it eternal………
and that is part of my agenda… to seek out the nature of these
addictions and allow people to understand them……
it is by understanding that we can begin to avoid our addictions…
to become aware of… oh, that sounds like Socrates decree…
“to know thyself”… yes, yes it does…
we cannot be free if we don’t understand the nature of the drives
that propel us… we cannot begin to discover our way to the journey
to become who we are unless we discover the internal drives that
propel us into action……
every single journey begins with an internal moment, not
an external moment…we say to ourselves… let us go somewhere…
even if it is internally, not externally… let us seek out the drives
that influence and propels me into some sort of actions…
let us begin to understand the internal tyrannies that form us
and drive us… the need to dominate, the need to seek out
addictions, the need to answer internal demands instead of
of understanding those internal demands…
to free ourselves of the internal demands that drive us…
to be in control of our demands instead of them in control of us…
do we need to accept the demand to renounce those demands?
as the religious claims that we must renounce the physical demands of
love and sex and other physical needs we have? Is renunciation really the
only recourse we have to free ourselves of our drives?
I don’t believe so… I believe that we can overcome our physical needs, that
we can be in charge of our needs instead of them being in charge of us…
but it takes an understanding of the nature of our addictions that will
allow us to begin to understand what drives us and why……
I believe we have to work out our internal tyrannies before we
can work out our external tyrannies such as dictatorships, either
politically or economically…we must become aware of what drives us
and why before we can free ourselves of such political and economic
tyrannies that exists right now in the U.S…….
now one might argue that I am not being clear or specific…
but I cannot know what internal drives that are within you…
that creates your internal tyrannies…… I can only work on my
internal drives that create an internal tyranny within me and those
internal drives are different between you and me…….
so what drives you? what drives do you have that
has become your “addiction?”
and how do you free yourself of your addictions?
Kropotkin