a new understanding of today, time and space.

engaging in philosophy might not any more important then asking yourself,

what is important in my life?

what should I engage with?

what values are my values?

What am I to do?

what should I believe in?

are these questions more important to you then
spending time on Instagram?

if those question are not as important to you?

then why not?

begin there… ask yourself why?

a simple engagement with what it means to be you…

can you even do that?

or is your addiction to your phone or to your TV shows or is your
latest fix on movie stars more important?

and why?

Kropotkin

watching the TV the other day and various candidates were
calling other candidates “radical”… Its a thing in the U.S… where
by calling another candidates “radical” you can claim the middle ground,
in any political race…
… which got me to thinking…

the boogeyman of American politics over the last 70 years has
been communism…Richard Nixon won his first senate campaign by
painting his opponent as “communist” and that was in 1950…

so by definition, Karl Marx who “created” communism must also be
a “radical” but let us understand what the word “radical” really means…
with examples from Marx…

one of the key events of the 19th century was the widespread
discontentment that culminated in the attempted revolutions
of 1848 and 1849……

the list of demands that were part of this revolutionary period
are also the demands of one Karl Marx…and this is important to
note… the “party” that Marx lead was basically a workers party…
the entire revolutionary demands were basically workers demands
and what do workers demand?

Even today, we can list off basic worker demands…

better pay, safer working conditions, more benefits, press freedom,
universal manhood suffrage…(more on this one later) freedom
of expression…

these demands were the “radical” demands of the workers who drove
this revolution…and Marx supported each and every single one of these demands…

and in the pages of the newspapers he wrote in, he pushed these demands…

these “radical” demands were the demands of workers wanting basic
democratic rights of voting and liberalism… they wanted the workers
to become something more then just “workers”… they wanted a say in
the things that affected their lives, as workers and as people…

and how is that any different then anything we demand today?

in fact if we actually read the “Communist Manifesto” written by
Marx in 1848, we see how really “radical” he really is…

what are his “radical” demands?

a progressive income tax, abolition of inheritances, abolition of child labor
free public education, nationalization of the means of transport and communication,
centralization of credit via a national bank, and perhaps the most “radical” he had,
which was the abolition of private property…

Let us look at these “radical” demands… each and every one except one, became
a reality in the next century, the 20th…

and the one that didn’t, it is rather obvious……

but how “radical” does a man have to be to want the right to have some
say in his life?..

Marx was so “radical” that a majority of his ideas, once considered to be dreams,
were fulfilled the next century…

some of the ideas of the revolutionaries in 1848 requires some explanation…

for example, one of the big demands of the revolution in 1848 was the
relaxation of and even the elimination of censorship…what that means is
that any book written in say, Prussian Germany, had to be passed by
the official government censor to be allowed to be printed…
and that censorship even extended into the daily writings of
newspapers…and needless to say, that censorship also extended
into private communications, your mail was also examined for
“radical tendencies”… there as no such thing as “private” communication…

the next example was “universal manhood suffrage”… in Europe as was
true in America, laws were passed that allowed voting to occur only if
you had a certain amount of property… so, to vote, you had be male
and own a certain amount of property…

this is the basis of the “radical” demands Marx had for “universal manhood suffrage”

so we have basic worker demands that we can certainly relate to today,
demands like higher wages and safer working conditions and having a say
over the matters that affect us the most…

and so, in this midst of “radical” demands, we find ourselves
with a question?

on whose side are we on? do we stand with the workers and
give them the basic human needs of having their bottom line
needs of food, water, shelter, education, health care being met?

the needs that all human beings have and must be fulfilled
if we are going to rise above being simple, human/animal…

or are you on management side, where to deny people their basic rights
is done to maintain power and wealth of the wealthy who own
the production side of the economic system…

ok, let try this, if we admit that one of the basic rights allowed
to human beings is education, then what is wrong with universal
free admittance to collage… free collage for anyone who wants it…

why is this idea so “radical” when one of the basic rights of being
human is an education?

the answer lies in “it costs to much”…

so, we deny people one of their basic human rights because it
cost too much?

who exactly will it cost? and how can we logically decide upon
the matter of “it will cost to much?”

cost to much to whom and how do we decide if the cost is too “high”?

by what means do we judge this matter of the “cost” being too high?

in whose viewpoint do we make this sort of judgement?

the wealthy or in the eyes of those who have a need to be educated?

these are the “radical” demands that someone like Marx would have
fought over today, if he was still alive… why is free collage education
so “radical” when the cost of ignorance is far greater… see the 2016
presidential election for the cost of ignorance in America……

if the idea of abolishing tuition is so “radical” then why do these
countries practice it, Germany, the Czech Republic, Sweden, Denmark,
Norway and Finland, Iceland, France and Estonia…

this is just one small example of “radical” demands not being so “radical”…

and an example that lead us to think of Karl Marx has being not so “radical” if
his demands were the exact same demands that workers want and still want…

the only question comes down to his most “Radical”
demand, that of the elimination of private property…

I shall approach that in some later posts as it requires a very long,
detailed explanation…

but the question of the demands of the “radicals” really resides on
the question of “values”?

what do we consider important? is having a say in our lives really that
“radical” of a demand? don’t all people want a say in what happens in
their lives? do I personally want my life to be dominated by this
fanatical drive for profits that corporations have?

I can see the cost of this drive in my mind, heart and soul and I can
see the costs of profits in the mind, heart and soul of America…

we have such social problems as alienation and discontentment
and within such actions as Sandy Hooks and rampant drug addictions
as in opioids, which are meant to deaden the pain one feels, sounds
familiar? most of, indeed almost all the problems of modern day America
can be directly or indirectly shown to be the fanatical drive for profits
by corporations…

in Europe, they have far fewer issues because they have
limited the profit motive of corporations and thus they have
alleviated many of the social problems we face in America…

or said another way, Europe is a saner place then America because
it has limited the pursuit of profits………

in 1848, the battle was to gain some rights to be able to have
some say over the forces which dominate our lives, politically…
but the forces that dominate our lives are just political, they
are economic and we must begin to face up to that problem which
has promoted such stress in American’s… and it is this stress that
has lead to many of our social issues… in America you can go bankrupt
if you face a medical crisis, I know because when I had my colon issues,
the total cost was around 360,000 and my share was 20%…
that pretty much cost every single dime of money we had…
we haven’t recovered and most likely will never recover financially,
but what about people who can’t afford that?

that is part of the stress that afflict America…and causes
such issues as I mentioned…

so part of the solution that was a factor in 1848 is also
part of the solution in 2019 and that is this…

the solution cannot be just a political solution, it requires
and indeed, demands an economic solution for it to become
a viable solution…we cannot just fix the political problems
and say, “mission accomplished” no, that is just not enough…
we must fight the economic tyranny that currently exists
in this country…

and what is the solution?

the “radical” Marx had the solution all those years ago,
fight for the right to become who you are and
engage in having a say in our lives……

Kropotkin

as noted, I am reading a biography of Marx…
by Stedman Jones…

and I was thinking about the relationship of Marx to Jesus,
a post is coming on that one, anyway, I was just letting my mind wander
and thinking about Marx… and I suddenly realized that we can use various
historical figures as one possible means to discover who we are…

for example, we can use Jesus as a possibility as a life lived
religiously… and we can use Newton or Einstein as a life lived
scientifically and Nietzsche or Spinoza as a life lived philosophically…
and we can use any number of people such as Bill Clinton as a life
lived politically…and Gandhi as a life lived peacefully…or perhaps
MLK as a life lived both religiously and peacefully within a political means…

in other words we can use people’s lives as an understanding of what it means
to be human in a certain regard…we can use Da Vinci as a life lived
artistically…

but name me someone who lived more then one life, someone who lived
not just artistically but lived politically and scientifically…

because this is so rare we can only name a few people,
the message of what it means to be human that is found
within our lives can be found within those who have
achieved multiple lives…

and the most prominent name I can think of is… Goethe…
he lived artistically both a poet and novelist and Playwright
and even as a painter… but he lived politically as the chief
advisor to the King and held various posts within that state,
and scientifically as a researcher into color and as a mineralogist,
and he discovered a human bone not described before…

and he loved… he poems about his various loves are standard reading
material in Germany…

if any could accomplish half of what Goethe did, they would be
very successful person…

so, who is your hero?
and why?

do you attempt to follow in that “hero” path?
or do you just do nothing?

what is the point in having a hero if you don’t attempt
to emulate that hero, both in spirit and in actions…

what part of your possibility is being used in your understanding of
what it means to be human?

In other words, if you see a possibility that lies within a life, like
Nietzsche, do you then attempt to follow that aspect of life…
the philosophical…or do you admire Jesus and then do you
attempt to follow that aspect of human existence and
follow the religious?

if you want to write, do you follow the writer that you admire
and pursue writing with the same passion as the person you admire?

Do you see the people within history as an example of what is possible for you,
historically, philosophically, politically, scientifically, artistically?

Marx was an economist, and he studied people within the context of economics…

and how radical is that?

Kropotkin

make no mistake, at no point does the following post
consist of any original research or insights…the points I am making
has been commented upon for at least a hundred years…

many times the right has accused the left of participating in
a or creating a religion……. the right is always accusing
the left of turning science or evolution into a religion…
not true, but the truth is not the strong point of the right…

but one cannot deny the strong relationship between Marxism
and Christianity… they share so many aspects as to be very interesting…

for example, the Christian ideal of Eschatology, end of times,
where god establishes his thousand years of peace and prosperity…
and when the Marxist classless society becomes established, we shall
see an endless time of peace and prosperity…

Marx tries to play the role of Jesus… myth making, predictions,
prophet, prophesies…

in Marxism, you had the “true” believers who were those who were to
lead others to the promised land of the classless society…

and you had to have true faith in “dialectical materialism”…
that political and historical events result from the conflict of social forces
and are interpretable as a series of contradictions and their solutions.
this conflict is believed to be caused by material needs…

this all consuming faith in the necessity of “dialectical materialism”
within history and human beings, lead one to be able to sacrifice people
to its whims because “dialectical materialism” was the silent hand of
history driving towards it inevitable ends…that of a classless society…

and thus human beings are sacrificed to historical inevitability of
the “dialectical materialism”… this nihilism is no different then
the Capitalistic nihilism of the invisible hand of god driving the forces
of profits and no different then the Catholicism or any other religion in which
human beings are sacrificed to the necessity of god’s work toward the end of times…

there is always some sort of plan that lies outside of the human ability to
understand and comprehend…….which drove human actions and acted upon
human actions and behavior………

reading the history of Marxism and the following communism societies that
followed, one is amazed with the number of times the charge of Heresy is
leveled against various people within the Marxist world…at one time or
another, every single person in the Marxist world is charged, rightly or wrongly,
with heresy to the “official” Marxist position and that includes Marx being charged
with heresy at times…

the one thing that needs to be understood is the fact that in Marx’s own time,
he was engaged with a very small number of people…his groups never numbered
more then a couple of thousand people………he was the leader of a very small
and unimportant group of people… just like Jesus and he felt he was preaching
the “true” gospel, just like Jesus… he had his disciples that never reached
much more then the number of disciples that Jesus had…

Personally, Marx had a authoritarian personality and he clashed with
just about everybody in his circle including Engels…

Marx was completely and absolutely convinced that he and he alone
held the truth to history and how history has unfolded and will unfold…

and if you disagreed, you were disagreeing with the holder of the truth,
nothing less then Jesus…….

it may sound like a rather odd thing to say, but we need a secular
Marxism… a Marxism that is detached from it religious context…
where there is no final eschatology of Marxism like the forever classless
society…and where we remove Marxism from its authoritarian beginnings….

where we really have Marxism become the so called “scientific” theory it
claimed for itself… when one tries to deviate from the established “Marxist”
theory, they are called “Heretics” and in that is different then established
science, where different theories are compared to the current theories
and seen if they fit into the established theories…for example,
when Gould and Eldredge suggested the “punctuated equilibrium” theory
of evolution…it wasn’t rejected out of hand as being “heresy” against
the accepted theory of evolution, it was studied to see how it worked with
the established theories of evolution……

so, when one proclaims a political theory to be wrong, it is quite common
to proclaim the new theory as wrong and Heresy… but scientific theories
are quite different from political or philosophical or cultural theories…

we should be able to test new scientific theories whereas we quite often
can’t test political, philosophical or cultural theories…

so if Marxism is a “scientific” theory, it should be testable in some fashion

but a simple look into history and the various “predictions” of Marxism
leads us to the simple fact that Marxism is a terrible way to predict the
future…thus it is very, very limited in the way we might call Marxism
a “scientific theory” as Marx thought of it…

but as a religion, Marxism does fulfill the criteria of a religion…

Marxism has its official “texts” like the bible and Marxism has its
official prophets and it official belief system, “dialectical materialism”
and it has its own eschatology …. it is enough for me to declare Marxism
as an religion…

so, to save Marxism from itself, we must disengage official Marxism from
its status as religion…we must engage with Marxism as a secular
theory of history and how people engage with or interact with each other…

if we narrow the theme of Marxism to being about what it means to be
human, Marxism can be a useful tool for us to engage with what it
means to be human and the existential question, “What are we to do?”

and Marxism may give us an answer to that existential question…

Kropotkin

not much time today as I am in a midst of a long stretch of
days where I am working every day…

in reading Marx, one only the one emotion that Marx refers to,
that of alienation… you don’t see love or hope or hate or anger
or any other emotion in Marx…it is a fairly emotionless world
that Marx is thinking about… why?

Well, basically because Marx is an economist… and economists
are not known for their exploration of the cause and effect between
the economic world we live in and the emotions of the world…

an economist world is a dry world of money and production
and labor and consumption…among other things…
but not a world given to love or hope or faith or anger or hate or
any of the thousands of possible emotions…

man/ human beings are simple a unit of measurement…we don’t have
any value outside of our production or consumption…

but we know from our own lives that lives are marked by
the moments of joy and happiness and moments of sadness
and unhappiness… and economics does not and cannot
help us to navigate the many moments of our lives that lies outside
of our production and consumption aspects of our lives…

Marx offers us an economic theory, not a political theory…
he can tell us about what a surplus value is in regards to human labor…

but he can’t tell us what is important in our lives…

so when communism is attacked, you must ask, whose communism?

because what Marx did had nothing to do with the Soviet Union…
that was Lenin trying to stretch an economic theory into a political theory…

so those who attack “COMMUNISM” really have to tell us whose communism
they are attacking… because what Marx wrote was quite different then
the communism of Lenin and different then Trosky and different then
Stalin’s version of communism…

so attack communism if you must, but tell us whose communism you
are attacking so we may be able to understand it…

Kropotkin

Because he’s hard, because he’s gangsta, and because he’s not a liar

once I have time, I shall address the “myth” of Marx…

Kropotkin

a couple of days off… yayyyyyyy

on some thread, can’t find it now, but anyway on some thread,
I mentioned how I flow from the inside to outside…
when I walk into a room, I think that I am the smartest person
in the room… that is my basis for my interactions with the world…

now many people have different basis upon which centers them…
some might have as their basis their looks or their money…
I am better then you because I am rich or I am better looking then you…
that is the center from which they engage the world with…

some aspect of who they are is the center of their understanding
of who they are and from that, they engage with the world…

that center, that core of understanding is ground zero for our engagement
with the world…….

if we somehow lose that center, I might discover I am not as smart as
I thought I was, I am not the smartest guy in the room… I lose my centering
core, from that which I engage with the world…I become lost, disconnected
or alienated from who I am… I have no core anymore from which I then
engage with the world… If I engage with the world as being wealthier then
everyone, then what happens if I lose my money… I lose the core of my
understanding of who I am…

but this single act of engagement that we individually go through, also
applies to us collectively…

we have ism and ideologies that play the same role for us collectively as
my being smart plays for me or wealth plays for someone else or looks…
what happens if we lose our identity? so, what happens to us collectively
when we lose our identity, when we lose our core believe about ourselves…

we become disconnected, alienated from the society…

when I was a kid and for many years thereafter, I heard about how America
was the home of “truth, justice and the American way of life”

what happens to us collectively when we lose that ideal, that core of who
we were… what if being American is no longer about “truth, justice and the
American way of life”… then what does it mean to be an American?
if we have lost our core believes about ourselves, then what are we to base
as our “core”, as our understanding of what it means to be American if we
no longer hold to “truth, justice and the American way of life”?

that is the real danger IQ45 brings to us… because of the lies and injustice
endemic in the IQ45 administration… if the lies and injustice of this
administration has cause us to lose our core values, the values which make
us American’s has been shaken to its very core, then we question what
it means to be an American…….and in the very act of questioning what it
means to be an American, we admit to ourselves we have lost the core, the
basic understanding of what it means to be an American… if we no longer
believe in “truth, justice and the American way of life” as the core basis of what
it means to be an American, then what do we believe in?

as nothing has rising to take its place, we have no other standard or core judgment
as to what it means to be an American, then we are disconnected from,
alienated from what it means to be an American…

over and beyond the obvious damage this administration and the GOP has
done to America, this destruction of the core basis of what it means
to be an American must rank as the highest crime against America
that this administration and the GOP has done…

what are the core beliefs of being an American?

you can’t tell me anymore then I can tell you… that there doesn’t
seem to be anymore core beliefs that hold us together as American’s seems
to be evident, as least evident to me…

and thus we have the rise of the dictator… once core beliefs are lost,
destroyed, then we have no other possibilities to consider as core beliefs
except for the domination of the dictator… this is the clue as to why countries
turn to dictators and dictatorships… they have lost their core values of what it means
in their country and now to hold, to maintain some core beliefs they turn to
dictatorships… it at least allows the people to hold some sort of values…
that they can affirm as being of their country… Hitler rose because the basic
values of what it meant to be German was lost and in floundering because they
had no other values to turn to, so they turned to the loudest voice with the
“answers”…….and that cost millions their lives… the loss of values as to what
it means to be a citizen within any given country
can be quite dangerous to all involved, so we need to take this very seriously…

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
the blood-dimmed tied is loosed, and
everywhere the ceremony of innocence
is drowned; The best lack all convictions,
while the worst are full of passionate intensity”

the centre cannot hold because there are no values within
the centre to hold… the GOP attack upon the basic values that
have hold American together, the centre values, have been denied,
negated, the nihilism of the GOP has destroyed the values of what it
means to be an American…and we shall be a lost people until we find
new values to replace the destroyed values of “truth, justice and the
American way of life”

and in finding new values, we find a new centre from which we can
begin to act and interact with the outside world…if I lose my core
value of being the smartest person in the room, then I must find
a new core, a new basis upon which I can react to and interact with the
world…perhaps I shall take as my central values, my new core, the
values of kindness and love and charity… and these become my
core values, the basis upon which I act with and interact with the world…

so as a people, if the old values have been grounded into pulp,
then we must find new values, a new core from which we can
proclaim ourselves as America’s with…as the old values of “truth,
justice and the American way of life” is no longer our core values, then
what core values should we hold and make as our core values?

the materialism that is the heart of the America experience, the
American way of life is the ongoing and soul crushing values of
America today… if we reject this ongoing materialism of
the ever increasing search for profits, then with what do we
replace this core value with?

if we reject capitalism as the core value of being an American,
then with what do we replace it with?

this is why we are feeling disconnected and alienated from
our society and each other… because the core values that
allowed us to remain connected to each other, has been degraded
and devalued and must be replaced…so if capitalism has been
degraded and devalued, it must be replaced… with what becomes the
question…

if because of capitalism and it relentless pursuit of profits has
meant the rejection of such human values as love and charity
and honesty and hope and justice, then what values should we
then adapt?

and it always become a question of values…what values are
we going to be…what values should we hold as both human beings
and as American’s?

if one loses their values, both individually and as a people,
then what is next? a search for the new values which has begun
even as you read this even though people won’t think of it that way,
that is what is happening… so ask yourself…

what values are my values and what values should I bring to
the collective us?

for we are never alone, we always exists with others and so values
must not only have an individual aspect but it has a collective aspect…

so what values are to become the new “truth, justice and the American way of life”?

Kropotkin

as I have said before, I shall now engage with
the “myths” of Marx…

the basis we have for the “myths” of Marx is the Soviet Union
creation, during the 1920’s and 30’s, of the “myths” of Marx…

in other words, what we know of Marx was the creation of the mythmakers
during the time of soviet union…

we can better understand Marx in light of a comparison between Marx
and Lenin…

Marx was an economist whereas Lenin was a political theorist…
and this makes all the difference in the world…

Now was Lenin a good “Marxist”?

Lenin did take Marx’s idea of the economic basis of human beings
and make that the central basic core belief of his, but his leanings
were toward a political theory, not an economic theory…

Marx did engage with political theory early in his career, say before
1851 or so or just after the revolution of 1848-49 which help create
the modern world…but the failures of the various revolutions in various
countries led Marx to recast his thought from the political to the economic…

in other words, why did the various attempts at revolution fail in 1848-49?

the answer for Marx was not in the political but in the economic sphere…

Marx was very good at describing current events and his attempts to
create a final value which was the end game of a classless society…
but in going from point A, the current events to point B, the classless
society, he didn’t lay out a detailed map of how to get from our current
state to the final classless society………

we could achieve salvation by achieving the final destination of a classless
society, but what steps were needed to go from point A… to point B?

Marx never really says… and that is one of his major flaws…

we can’t see how we are supposed to get from point A to point B…

Marx’s answer was via a small, private ruling structure which was
the means of going from point A. to point B.

the Politburo was the head of the government…
which was elected by the central committee which came
from the party congress… so we have the overall party congress
which elected the central committee which then voted upon
the politburo…the head of government was the general secretary
of the politburo…

so the theory was democratic centralism… but the reality was
a dictatorship led by the general secretary…

what Marx would have supported was the politburo…he strongly believed
in central leadership to reach the ultimate goal, the establishment of
the classless society…

but it is important to understand that Marx didn’t create this system of
government, Lenin did…Lenin engagement was with the political,
not the economic…

so when we talk about “communism” we have to be clear if we are talking
about what Marx was talking about or what Lenin was talking about or what
Stalin was talking about… because Stalin took what Lenin set up and turned
it into a full dictatorship which was all about Stalin… the cult of Stalin…
not very different then the cult of Trump…and with the same idea…

so we can easily follow the path laid out from the soviet union to
the U.S…

we have the theorist who in communism is Marx… and then the economic
theory of Marx is stretch into a political theory by Lenin and that
political theory is stretch by Stalin into a dictatorship…

and how? by the failing of any current theory or ism/ideology which
could compete with communism…we are led to a dictatorship when
current ism/ideologies fail in and people are seeking a new core of values
in which to believe in and those core values are given by the dictatorship…
the dictatorship of either an individual or an party…

and we can follow this path in the west with the original beginnings of
the theory by the economic theorist Adam Smith… who “founded” the
economic theory of Capitalism… he gave capitalism its founding shape
and the language that capitalism uses……

then we have the next step which is to convert
the economic theory of capitalism into a political theory…
that was done over the 20th century but put into full form
in the Raygun administration…the next step came when
the ism’s and ideologies of America failed because they were
not able to work successfully in solving the problems that
America had…economic theories cannot solve political problems…
but we in America have been hoodwinked into thinking so…
going from Marx to Stalin is the same process as going from
Smith to IQ45… the failure of economic theories to solve
political theories lead us, in the failure of other ism’s and ideologies,
to embrace the dictatorship of IQ45 and the GOP…

the methods and the very language of IQ45 and the all-powerful
party, the GOP, which mirrors the politburo, also mirrors
the methods and language of other dictatorships like
Stalin and Hitler…….especially Hitler…

the history of the last 200 years is one of the failure of the ism’s
and ideologies which formed the basis core beliefs of both individuals
and us collectively, in which the ism’s and ideologies have failed…

among the failed systems/ism’s of the last 200 years is the religions…
Catholicism and other religious based ism’s and ideologies have failed…
as has failed other religious based ism’s like Islam and Hinduism
and Buddhism and Confucianism and Protestantism…

the modern world no longer need a religious base belief system,
but we need something to believe in, we are hardwire to have a belief
system, so we substitute one religion for another… we substitute
a political/economic system for a religious system…

the best way to understand this is in thinking about the years after
the birth of Christ when the Roman empire was in the process of failing,
economically and politically… those 400 years of slow, painful collapse,
where the people of the Roman empire lost their belief in the Roman values
that were their core beliefs…the Mos maiorum of the Roman empire…

the custom of the Roman empire to hold to “ancestral authority” as their
core belief was undermined by the events on the ground… but they still
held to this outdated belief into the 4th century as a matter of course but
they acted upon other values instead of the “ancestral authority” beliefs
that drove their ancestors……. in other words, they gave lip service to the
values that their ancestors held as to being the core beliefs of both individual
and of a society…

among the core values that were sacred to the ancient Romans were
values like “fides” which is trust/trustworthiness, reliability, confidence,
and credibility…

Pietas: which was the Roman attitude of dutiful respect toward the gods,
homeland, parents and family… the maintenance of a relationship in a moral
and dutiful manner…

religio and cultus: religio is the bind between gods and mortals
and cultus is the active observance and the correct performance of rituals…

disciplina: which is the military character of Roman society as related o
education, training, discipline and self-control…

Gravitas: was a dignified self-control…
a steadiness or perseverance…regardless of the event or situation…

virtus: constitutes the ideal of the true Roman male… it is virtus
for a man to know what is good, evil, useless, shameful or dishonorable…

dignitas and auctoritas: were the end result of displaying the values of
the ideal Roman and the service of the state, in the forms of priesthood,
military positions and magistracies…

these were Roman values and they were at the heart of what it meant
to be Roman… the core values of a Roman citizen…

but what happens if the core values which define a Roman citizen
become damaged or destroyed by events on the ground…
what if the Roman citizens see the autocracy hold to other values
besides these basic values… what if the values that were meant
to signify what it meant to be Roman became useless or unwanted
or destroyed? the population becomes disconnected, alienated from
the society and themselves…

if these values which we hold dear, that these values which
by which we know ourselves to be Roman are gone, then
what values shall we hold?.. that is the question which
dominated the entire last 200 years of the Roman empire…

what does it mean to be Roman?

if the traditional values no longer hold, then now what?

it makes it easy to the “people” to fall into a personal quest
to find salvation, which is the basis of Christianity…

if the traditional values no longer hold, then what values shall we hold?

that is not just an ancient problem, but a very modern problem…

if our leaders no longer hold to the values of what it means to be an
American, “truth, justice and the American way of life”, then what
values should we hold onto?

we face the exact same crisis that the Roman found themselves in
and I hope we answer it far better then the Romans did…

the Roman failure lies in their turning inward…
the correct answer lies not in going inward,
attempting to find personal salvation but to
find a collective salvation…

the answer is not an economic one or a political answer,
but the answer is to understand where we are and what
is at stake…

the old faiths have died… faith in capitalism and communism
and Catholicism and other such “religions”…

we need new beliefs and a new faith…
a new religion perhaps…
or perhaps we could become adults
and learn to stand on own feet and reject
the need for any type of religion, be it political or
religious or economic…….

we can begin by the creation of new values which
represent who we are and by the search for the values
which we are… and when we discover the new values,
we can begin to become who we are…

incorporate the new values into a new belief system which
answers the question, “who am I”…

what is my personal understanding of who I am and what is my
collective understanding of “who we are”……

what values truly represent what it means to be human
and what values truly represent what it means to be an
American?

we can replace the old failed values with new, vibrant values that
declare to the world who we are as human beings and as Americans….

Kropotkin

I was lying in bed, just now thinking…

I was thinking about those we value… as creators…

I was thinking about Marx for example…he is a hero to many,
a villain to most…but how did a Marx come about?

Marx was born in the middle class… his father was a lawyer…
and Marx was expected to follow his example…

but Marx quickly grew bored with the law, as many do,
and changed his focus to philosophy… but not before seriously
considering becoming a poet…Karl Marx destroyer of worlds,
wanted to be a poet…as a profession…

Marx went to collage and graduated… as a lawyer…but his
real passion was to be, after a poet, was to join the academic
world… become a professor…but because of his “radical” beliefs,
he was rejected from any consideration of any official post in Germany…
He was rejected, he didn’t walk away, he was rejected, sent away…
he wasn’t able to become a professor, so he became a journalist…
and soon, his radical idea’s lead him to flee Germany… he was
officially deemed to be a radical and so risked arrest just by being
in Germany…

he even went to the point of officially renouncing his German citizenship…

but all this came about because he was rejected from any official capacity
within Germany because he was a “radical”… the state rejected him, he
didn’t reject the state and even later in life, he tried to various means to
be part of the official state… journalist and he even considered becoming
a teacher of sorts in rural England…but of course that wasn’t possible because
he was official labeled a “radical” and dangerous…he didn’t leave the state,
the state rejected him from any official position…

and this is true of other like him…most “hero’s” are people who have
been official rejected by the state… take Gandhi… he was a lawyer…
an official of the courts…all he wanted was for the people of India to be
treated equally and fairly… for that “radical” proposition, he was
considered to be a “radical”… a danger to the British order of things…
and he was quite often imprisoned…

let us consider others who were considered to be “radical”…
Martin Luther King… and what was his great crime?

he wanted to fulfill the great requirement in the Declaration of
Independence… “that all men are equal”…

and that is the notion that MLK fought for… to make all men and women
equal…and for his dangerous and “radical” belief he was beaten
and jailed and finally shot to death… for the dangerous and “radical”
belief that “all men are created equal”… he died…those are not just words
on a piece of paper… they are words that define who we are as Americans
and those are words that define us as human beings…

to make the declaration of Independence a factual statement,
“that all men are equal”… the declaration is not a pretty bunch of
words strung together, either the words are taken seriously or they
don’t mean shit… and if they don’t mean shit, then what exactly does
it mean to be an American?

MLK was branded a traitor and a commie and a “radical” because
he took the words of the declaration to be serious, “that all men are created equal”
he acted upon that phrase as if it meant something, as if it was really true…

and for that he was shot to death…

he didn’t leave society, society left him…society rejected him
and jailed him and beat him and finally shot him… and for what?

because he actually believed in those “radical” words, that
“all men are created equal”……

what of other stories we have heard all our life…
the story of Jesus… he was executed… that isn’t the story of
a man who rejected society… that is a story of society rejecting
him…of society rejecting Jesus’s “radical” theories about human beings…
Many have been executed over the many centuries over religious
thought…but do we in the west execute someone over religious
principles? No, and why? because we don’t hold to the faith of our
forefathers… we have lost our religion… even if that message hasn’t
reached all the people, it will and then the people will know true
alienation and disconnection from each other and society…

anyway to return to the message on hand…

for the most part, we have created the radicals that haunt
our society dreams…by our exclusion of people and their values,
we have turned them into the radicals of our time…
if the Prussian state had simply given Marx a professional job,
a teacher or a lawyer or some other job, Marx simple would have
done what millions of others have done… their radical nature would
have faded over time given their stake within society… if you give
people a stake in society, you remove the possibility of their
turning against the state… you make them part of the state
and you no longer have a Karl Marx or a Lenin or a Stalin…
you simply, for lack of a better word, neuter them…
with responsibilities and work and paying the mortgage
and taking care of the family…… which is why the state is so
engaged in making sure you are somehow tied into the state…
it forces one to engage in the state and not try to overthrow it…

the state tries to get one to invest in the state and by doing so,
you reduce the possibility of “radical” idea’s and efforts…

you can only have a revolution if people have nothing to live for…
if you invest them into the state, you simple take away the reason for
any revolution……. that is why the state is so trying to get you to go to
collage and become a taxpayer and buy a house and raise a family…
it forces you to invest in the society…

and it neuters you…

Kropotkin

to follow up on my prior post…

Martin Luther was not on the outside of the “system”,
he was a priest and a professor of theology…
hardly the position of a “radical”…

Luther only goal when posting his “95” thesis was to initiate
modest change within the system…he wasn’t looking for or
trying to be “radical”……….

he was a man trying to create modest change in a large
bureaucracy…

he never used the word “radical” until the church proclaimed him
a “radical”… he wasn’t a “radical”…

the church make him a radical… the church tossed him out of the church…
he didn’t leave… he was removed…

this is important…if the Catholic church had treated him with
even a modicum of understanding… he would have stayed in the church…

but the Catholic church went with the “my way or the highway” approach
to Luther and tossed him…

the church made him a “radical”…

so what I want to discuss is this concept of “radical”…

in my lifetime of 60 years, the very idea of what is “radical” has
changed dramatically…what was very “radical” when I was young,
is not only accepted now, but is placed into law…

to be a homosexual was very “radical” when I was young…
to be a married homosexual was beyond even “radical”…
to have marriage between homosexuals legal in all the states is
so be beyond “radical” for someone who is as old as I am…

I recall a time when marriage between whites and blacks were
illegal in my lifetime… and how “radical” is marriage between whites
and blacks today? not at all…

and that suggest that the very concept of what is “radical” changes with
time and adapts to the conditions on the ground…

so when we think about Karl Marx and his “radical” idea’s… those “radical” ideas
are simply the worker rights that we are quite familiar with these days…
the 8 hour day, 5 work days, overtime pay, equal pay for equal work, safe
working conditions, benefits… anyone who has worked can relate to
these basic and fundamental working themes……

what is radical in one age is a downright basic necessity in another age…

and let us think about the change in thinking about Marijuana for example…

at one time, weed was considered to be the domain of those wacky hippies
and other such “liberals”… now many even in politics admit to smoking…
the very fact that many police departments will hire you even if you have
a misdemeanor Marijuana charge against you… that should tell you volumes
about where we are at as a country in regards to Marijuana…

ubwrong considers it a “radical” notion that we have unisex bathrooms…

we have always had unisex bathroom…as kids… we had one and only one
bathroom to share between 4 kids… 2 girls and 2 boys…
you can’t get more unisex then that…

I have been to sporting events where women have used the men’s bathroom
because the women bathroom had so many women waiting to use them…
it didn’t cause the end of western civilization…

so, think about it… what is “radical” to you? and has that notion
of “radical” change over time… what seems to be normal to you now,
did that seem to be “radical” in some prior point in time for you?

do you consider yourself to be “radical” and if so, how?
and has that notion of “radical” changed over the years?

if you think about what it means to be “radical”… all it means
is that someone drew a line in the sand and said… here lies normal…
on that side lies “radical”…without any proof of any kind that what
they describe is actually normal and what they disapprove of is “radical”…

to understand what is “radical” is simple to understand what
your prejudices are at the moment… nothing more… it is “radical”
if it is different then your own prejudices, biases, superstitions and habits…
that is all, nothing more…

when you proclaim something to be “radical” you are simply confessing
your prejudices…

and as always, philosophy is nothing more then our confession…

so what are you confessing to?

Kropotkin

I have just finished Jones’s biography of Karl Marx and now
am thinking about starting the second, “Karl Marx” his life and thought
by David Mclellan……

and I am left with many thoughts, not just about Marx but the role
of the individual and the role of society…

as usual, I shall use myself as a guinea pig and experiment on me…

I was born in a completely different social, political, philosophical,
historical situation then exists today…

my point of reference is the cold war…
as kids we hid under our school desks in preparation
for a nuclear attack from those evil commies…

my personal milieu was liberal, upper class…
my parents were prominent enough to get invites
to all the see and be seen events of Chicago in
the early and mid 60’s…

less then a decade later, we were poor enough to get
public lunches at school…

one of the major events of the 1970’s was Nixon resignation…
Aug 9, 1974…I was 15 years old…and coming from a political family,
I was very interested in that watershed event even if I didn’t quite
get all the politics involved…

my formative years were spent with Vietnam… watching Walter Cronkite
announcing during the dinner hour how many American troops died that
week in Vietnam… and watching the streets demonstrations on TV and seeing
my father come with blood on his shirt from street fighting during the 68
convention…

there was great social and political unrest in America…

I saw the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show…live…

thinking back upon it… I am taken by the fact that it was a
completely different world… I may has well have lived on Mars
as far as the difference goes between then and now…

I was 42 when 9/11 happened…

that isn’t the defining moment of my social, cultural, political,
historical or philosophical understanding of the world…

I was already middle age then…9/11 didn’t and doesn’t define me…
as it defines the entire younger generation who were children or were born
after 9/11…

my daughter was 16 on 9/11… she doesn’t see how that event defined her,
but it does, just as it has defined every single child born thereafter…

the question for me as it is for every individual, is how do I fit into this
world in which I was born?

and that answer is defined by the person’s milieu one’s find themselves in…

I see a different America then Zero Sum or URwrong because I was born
into a different milieu then Zero or UR………

that which helped defined me and who I became is found in the social,
political, economic, situation I was born into and lived in for my formative
years…

I am the sum of those social, political, economic forces that exists
in my formative years…

but I am also the product of my evolution as a human being…

today I live a fairly comfortable middle class life in a million dollar
condo…I am not wanting for any of my lower needs, the physical needs
of food, water, health care or shelter or clothing…

the next level of security and safety needs are met as I live
in a very safe suburban upper/middle class city and work in
a slightly lower middle class city but still I have no safety or
security fears…

I have love/belonging from my family and I love them…

I don’t have a need for the esteem of friends or co-workers…
I am very self contained…

I have self esteem because I don’t need recognition or status or
respect from others…

I am at the stage of self-actualization…

I am attempting to fulfill my potential of being human…

we have that one track…

we also have another track in our lives…

we exist within a society… we have many, many diverse
systems which we belong to…

I am part of the overall economic system that exists within America
today… I am part of one company overall system… and I exist within
one store which is part of some great whole system…

we have individual man, one human being, me…
and I not only exists within the context of me trying to become
fully human… but I exists within a society, a culture, many diverse political
and economic systems… how do the two distinct and separate aspects
of human existence get along? in other words, I am Kropotkin, trying to
become a better Kropotkin… and yet, I am part of a vast
and widespread number of systems, political, economic and
social……

how does Kropotkin fit into these wide and diverse systems and still
reach an individual understanding of who I am…

how do I be an individual within the context of all those varied
and diverse political, social, economic, cultural systems that we live in?

do I discover who I am within the many social and economic, political
and cultural systems or do I find myself within a individual context?

I am Kropotkin… and my needs are… and how do I fulfill those needs?

do I become who I am within a systems context of the political,
social, economic, cultural… or do I become who I am without
all the widely diverse systems we are entangled with?

I have made the argument before that we cannot be isolated, alone,
and come to a realization of who we are without some context
back to the various systems we reside in…

a man alone on a deserted island cannot become who he is…

a man within the confines of society, family, job, religion,
philosophical… can, can become who he is because you can compare
and contrast what others are doing and believing and thinking to what
you are doing, believing and thinking……

but there does seem to be a line drawn… between the individual attempts
to become who they are and the society needs for worker ants who make
no attempts to discover who they are because that defeats the primary
goal of the current economic system which is the pursuit of profits…

which is just another brick in the wall… where we as human beings are
defined as homo economicus… where we define ourselves as economic beings
without reference to the political, social, cultural and individual milieu
that we finds ourselves in…

so we have several dozen tracks we are engaged with…
we our engaged with ourselves and our own individual pursuit
of our own needs and goals…

we are engaged with the current social, political, economic systems
that we are part of and that aspect doesn’t get as much play as
it should…

we are engaged in the political… what of the impeachment?
what about full voting rights for everyone over 18… regardless of
who they are…

we are engaged in the social aspect which is movies, music, plays, TV
books and media that helps us understands and entertains us

we are engaged in the economic track of working and buying
and consuming and producing… we are economic beings to some extent…

and some have other tracks such as religious tracks in which they engage with
the religious and or the scientific track or the philosophical track where we engage
philosophically…

we have many different and diverse possibilities in which we can engage
with… social, political, economic, cultural… and we can engage with
ourselves in our pursuit of what matters to us personally, to become who
we are…

there are many different possibilities for human beings today…

what is your engagement with?

the social, the political, the economic, the cultural, the philosophical,
the religious?

what possibilities do you engage with?

and that is the human question…

what possibilities do I engage with and what possibilities
should I engage with?

it is all connected…
my childhood milieu and the current milieu I find myself in…
the social and economic and political and religious forces that
are pushing and pulling not only my life, but everyone’s life…
how do I define myself and how do I become who I am
and what ought I to do? it is all, all of it, different sides of the
exact same question… what does it mean to be human?
and “what are we to do?”

the social, political, economic, cultural questions we see are
not different questions but questions asked about the same thing,
what does it mean to be human?

how do I define myself? do I define myself in terms of
existing social, economic, political or cultural terms we
see today or, or do I define myself by my own understanding
of what it means to be human?

so many roads, so many paths, so many different possibilities,
but each road, path and possibility all ask the same question…

what does it mean to be me? and what does it mean to me, to be human?

you and I are not asking different questions or seeking different answers,
we are asking the exact same question with the only difference being our
starting points, the different milieu we grew up with and with the different
milieu we find ourselves in currently…

but the question is still the same…

who am I and what does it mean to be human
while being me……

Kropotkin

day off, but very sick so if I don’t make much sense,
I am going to blame the cold medicine I’m taking…

I kinda have cheated in my studies… I am researching Marxism
and as part of it, I have begun a minor study of Lenin…

as I have noted, Marx was an economist and he would have
identified himself as such…

Lenin was much more about the political…

for Lenin it was the political structure that struck his fancy,
not the role the economic played in our lives…

Lenin accepted the Marxist understanding of the world, but
Lenin didn’t engage in the world economically, he engage politically…

In my reading of Lenin, I notice he doesn’t address the Man/human being
as a single entity…Man/human beings are understood as being part of
a group of some nature…for example, people were part of the Proletarian
or they were part of the Bourgeois… Man/human beings weren’t identified as being
isolated individual human beings…

The Kantian questions of “what am I to do?” or “What am I to believe?”
“what values should I hold?” are not individual questions but
collective questions… “What are we suppose to do?” and “what should
our collective values be?”

but this attempt to list everyone into various social/political/economic
groups fails on a couple of different levels… firs of all, the 20th
century is a monument to the fractured nature of human beings…
we have been atomized, fractured, split into various subgroups
and even individuals because of the loss of faith in our various
beliefs systems… because we have lost faith in the various
religious systems and we have lost faith in god, we no longer
exists within the religious system…we are no longer part
of that group… we are isolated, alienated from the religious
groups/systems that has existed for two thousands years…

we have been atomized into isolated, individual pieces, alienated
pieces or isolated as human beings from the various ism’s and ideologies
that were the glue that held society and individuals together…

once that glue was gone, we went from a unified, collective group
of believers in god, for example, to being isolated human beings…

but for Lenin, he never understood that fact, for him, we were
still part of some unified, collective group of people, be it
proletarian or the bourgeois… and the atomization of
the 20th century ended that identification of who we are…

do you identify with some group or groups of people?

no, and few do…

for example, I self identify with democrats… but what are the exact
beliefs the democrats have? I don’t know either…

do you hold the same beliefs as other democrats do? or the same beliefs
as Republicans hold? or the same beliefs as the libertarians do? I doubt it…

our believes are more of a family association… we hold the same general
beliefs as the large group holds… for example, we democrats hold that
the government is not the problem but the solution… but the specifics
of what is the problem and what is the solution is most likely different for
each of us…we hold to being democrats in a very general manner…
not in a specific manner…we might believe that freedom is to be one
of the main goals of a society, but any specific actions toward promoting
freedom will be understood to be different between you and me…

this Marxist or Leninist idea that we are some unified members
of a particular group is simply not true…

who among you actually identify as Bourgeois or Proletarian?

Hell, I don’t and I am not even quite sure where I would fit into this
small and narrow classification of people……

which is part of the problem, few if any self identify as being
Bourgeois or Proletarian… but we do self identify as Americans
or democrat or religious or workers or management… but not
in terms that Marx or Lenin thought of it…and that comes from
the great atomization that occurred because of the industrial revolution…

that is part of the understanding of what it means to be a modern person…

we no longer self identify as people would have self identified before the
French revolution…before the French revolution, you had only a few
choices/possibilities by which one could self identify as…

you were a Christian, that was not in question…
you may have identify as, for example, as French, but more likely
you would have self identify from some part of France…for example as
being from Normandy or being from Aquitaine, not being from France itself …
most people would have self identified as being peasants, workers in the field
and this is true all over Europe and true until the French revolution……

until the French revolution and the industrial revolution, Europe was
mostly rural and agricultural…and most people would have self identified
as being rural and agricultural…

so what Marx and Lenin thought, that people were of one class was true
until the rise of the industrial revolution…now Russia was basically
one class until the communists began the great industrial revolution
of the 20’s and 30’s… turning Russia into one of the great industrial
countries in the world in a very short time… but that was long after
everyone else in Europe had already gone through their industrial
revolution…all the major countries of Europe had already become
an industrialized countries by the time Russia began its industrialization drive…

this is why Marx thought that the revolution would begin in England first
as it was the most industrial country in the world at that time…1850-1870…

part of the failure of communism lies in its failure to properly take into
account the atomization of people in both Europe and the U.S…

and this atomization means we don’t hold the collective, universal beliefs
as was once held in Europe before the French or industrial revolution…

but you might say, what about nationalism? that is a widely held
collective, universal belief… it is, and part of what Lenin and Marx
fought against… they thought that our self identification as
workers would be greater then our identification as Americans or
French or whatever national identification we might hold…

to self identify as a worker/proletarian meant that we would
self identify beyond any national identification we might hold…
because workers aren’t just Americans or French or British,
but they self identify across national borders…
making it more powerful then just nationalistic identification…
to self identify as American is a rather narrow self identification…
a wider self identification is “worker” or “proletarian”
and a wider still self identification is human being…

the Marxist/Leninist idea was that the revolution would
occur once everyone was on the same page as being self identified as worker/proletarian…
the Utopia was the classless state where there wasn’t anything other then
workers/proletarian…

no longer would people self identify in small units such as family
or American’s or Christian or any other small “minded” unit…

I shall continue in a moment…

Kropotkin

Ok, to continue…

this 20th century failure to self identify within larger groups
beyond, across basic groups…
for example, with the loss of any universal religious belief
system such as being Christian or Catholic or Buddhist…
leaves individuals without any belief system they can hold
belief in… if we loss our faith in god, then we no longer
self identify as Christian or Buddhist or Catholic…this is
one example of the fracture, alienation of people from
groups within society…

since the French revolution, we have fractured into smaller
and smaller groups to self identify with…take philosophy,
for example… we have a general self identification after
Descartes, for example, of philosophers who were for or were
opposed to Descartes… the English philosophers for example, didn’t
self identify as with Descartes… the French did self identify with Descartes…
the philosophical understanding in Europe for decades was one was
either with Descartes or against Descartes… that was how philosophers
self identified for many years…

When Kant came around, philosophers would self identified as
Kantian or anti-Kantians…that was pretty much the possibilities
available for philosophers…

but look at the 20th century philosophies…
you have a wide variety of possibilities to self identify with…
a wide variety of choices to identify with…
Logical positivism, analytic philosophy, phenomenology,
existentialism and poststructuralism for example, they were others…

this atomization of philosophy is systematic of the general
way society as a whole became atomized, alienated from the
overall universal belief system that existed before the 20th century
philosophy… the old system of either for Plato or for Aristotle
was gone or for Descartes or against Descartes…

I do not self identify as worker or consumer as thought
of by Marx or Lenin is a failure on their part…

they have failed to understand how people self identify in this
modern world……

the “revolution” will not come about until we have some consensus
as to how we self identify… and any such revolution now will
come along the lines of our self identification as Americans
or as Christians…

this question of how we self identify will create the fault line
of any coming revolution… on one side of the self identification
will be one side of the revolution and on the other side of the
self identification will be the other side…so as of now, the fault
line in modern society is liberal vs conservative or American vs
say French…so, that self identification of being liberal creates
the fault line of the coming revolution…

liberals vs the conservatives…and the revolution will break down
that way…but because being liberal can mean so many different things
and being conservative can mean so many different and diverse things,
we cannot really reach flashpoint of revolution…we cannot reach critical
mass of having a revolution because not every one will be on the same page…

there is too much difference of opinion between the focal points,
the liberal factions will simply have too many diverse and different
opinions to be able to have a cohesive whole in the coming revolution…

so, to be clear, we cannot have a “hot” confrontation between
the two factions because the two factions within themselves
cannot come to an understanding as to what it means to be
liberal or conservative…

not enough people will agree to a self identification that will
allow a critical mass that will set off the revolution…

too many people will have very different ideas of what it means
to be liberal and the liberal faction cannot come to a unified,
cohesive understanding of what it means to be liberal…and
thus we cannot have a unified and comprehensive liberal front
in any meaningful way…and this is also true of the conservatives…

thus the “cold” war between liberals and conservatives cannot
become a “hot” war between the two…

this is just one example of what it means to we have
become a fractured society… and what it means to individuals
within a fractured society…

Kropotkin

so what does this fracture system or society really mean to us?

for example, philosophers… historically, we have philosophy take
up only a few viewpoints, for example, we could say that philosophy
had only two distinct and separate viewpoints before Descartes…

one viewpoint was Platonic and the other was Aristotelian…

after Descartes the two viewpoints, the “modern” viewpoints,
were Descartes and anti-Descartes…

and after Kant, it was Kant and anti-Kantian
and after Hegel, it was for Hegel or against Hegel…

but this division was mainly of the two viewpoints,
but in the fractured 20th century philosophy, after the
French revolution and after the industrial revolution,
there wasn’t just two viewpoints, but many…
philosophy became atomized, fractured just as society became
atomized, fractured…so we have in philosophy the exact same
fracture that hit society… so we have in philosophy, the various
schools, logical positivism, analytic philosophy, phenomenology,
existentialism, poststructuralism……

this is an example of the division and fracturing that existed
within society…the core beliefs that used to hold sway like
Descartes and anti-Descartes…has now fractured into many
and diverse philosophical beliefs…

this fracturing and atomization of man occurred in philosophy just as it
occurred in society, the political, the social, the economic………

and as a result of the industrial revolution, among the other reasons…
among which was the loss of faith in the ism’s and ideologies that
drove man/human beings and allowed them to be grounded…

we were grounded as human beings by our belief systems,
for most of human history, man/human beings existed
as rural, agricultural members of society…… modern man is
rooted in the industrial/technological/urban understanding of
what man/human beings are………but this new viewpoint is new…
it is not what man/human beings thought of before…if we think
about the viewpoint of most humans in the world, we would be
thinking about the fact that most human beings in history were,
rural agricultural types…the peasants of Europe were in fact,
the most common type of human being we have seen on planet earth…

the hunter-gatherer type of human being lasted longer, but with
less people……… since the beginning of modern society, we have
had the largest number of people being engaged in rural agriculture…
not in urban cities type…and the viewpoint of the rural agricultural
human being is different, far different then the urban human being…

if I self identify as a urban, suburban human being, that is something
new, a new viewpoint that is fairly modern… and far different then
the vast years of human existence…in which for a million years,
man/human beings self identify differently then we do today…

in addition to a fairly small number of viewpoint possible,
pre-modern life is fairly different then modern life…
and the viewpoint was radically different…

so we have Marx and Lenin, they created a “modern” viewpoint…
in which man/human beings are not viewed as individual persons,
but viewed as members of various groups and subgroups…
for example, we have man/human beings self identify in regards to
some political or social or economic or philosophical groups or systems…

I am Kropotkin… I can self identify in a wide variety of ways…
in the modern sense…before the French revolution or the industrial
revolution… in how many different ways could I self identify?

Not that many different ways…the list is indeed rather short…
I could self identify as a citizen of my city or region, or perhaps
as the property of some king or pharaoh as most people were considered
to be the property of the king or Pharaoh…

when the King of France said, “L’etat, c’est moi”… I am the state,
that was in recognition of the prevailing idea that the citizens
of France were the property of the King… and that idea has existed
for many thousands of years………

so to self-identify as being independent of the state or not as property
of another, that was a radical and modern notion…

as society, the modern world has fractured into different
spheres, where in some places human beings are still considered
to be property of another, be it a king or as slaves…

the modern take is that we human beings are no longer property of another
human being…and we reject this notion of human beings being property…

but this is another “modern” idea which still flourishes in many parts of the
world… Where human beings can still exist as property of other human beings…
that is part of the legacy of the Ancient world that still exists…
the viewpoint that hasn’t been erased in our modern times…

but that viewpoint shows us the fractured and atomized viewpoint
of the modern world that we can still hold to such outdated ideas as
people can be seen as property, not as individual, free people…
we haven’t reached the new viewpoint that “all people are created equal”
because if we had, we wouldn’t be able to see people as property…
and this includes the modern version of people being property in
the guise of modern economics… modern capitalism thrives because
it still holds to the viewpoint that human beings are and can be
considered to be property……. if the modern tyranny of capitalism can
still be accepted, then we faced with a contradiction… either were
are a free people who are create equal or, or we are not and we still
hold people as being property in the modern slave state of capitalism…

part of the modern existential dilemma is within the various contradictions
that still exists within the fancy words and proclamations we have among
which is the very fancy words… “we hold these truths to be self evident,
that all men are created equal”…and the reality of modern life in which
we are not create equal and in fact, we are treated very unequal…
and we are treated as property… when our fancy words deny such a fact…

how are we to reconcile the words, the very fancy words of freedom
and equality and justice when our actions are of denying freedom
and denying equality and denying justice…

our words and actions don’t match… welcome to the modern world…

and what of Marx and Lenin? we are faced with another contradiction…

there remedy for existence is to escape into the dialectical materialism
in which man/human beings are simply part of the flow of history
and any one individual is not important or to be sacrificed to the
betterment of the destiny of future man found in the dialectical materialism…

once again, human beings are a slave… this time to the flow of history,
that is called the dialectical materialism…we have no free will or independent
will… we are simply the play toy, the slave of dialectical materialism…

this new viewpoint is new only in it is now in the realm of political
and social and economic… this viewpoint has dominated within
the religious for a very long time… where we are the play things of
god who decides our fate…where we have only the free will to
either say yes to god or we are punished… that isn’t free will…
when you only have one choice… just like those who say you can
quit the modern companies… with that choice, comes death or punishment and
death or punishment isn’t free will… it isn’t a choice to spend eternity in hell
and it isn’t free will to suffer greatly after leaving the capitalistic society…
possibly suffering to the point of death… that is the great choice one has
in our modern society… join or suffer…… that isn’t much of a choice…

Marx or Lenin doesn’t offer us some sort of freedom or free will…
it just offers us more of the same… act as we want or suffer unto
death……. and that isn’t free will or free choice…

it is slavery and the ownership of human beings as property…

in other words, our modern world hasn’t really offered us any
such thing as free will or freedom or even not being a slave…
our modern world is just the ancient world in shiny new clothes…

but we can’t understand this because we are so fractured and atomized…

we see the many tree’s but we can’t see the forest…

and we need to see the forest to understand what is the
reality of our modern times…

Kropotkin

I came across this Paragraph while reading William Barrett book,
“What is Existentialism?” and it suggests something…

….“in the seventeenth century this rational soul falls within the
framework of a universe whose basic features are expressed by the
physical notions of Newton. The fundamental key to the human
situation becomes the relation of the rational soul to this inertly
material universe: Man becomes the epistemological animal”

Our understanding of the universe, our explanation of the universe
becomes an understanding of this “inertly material universe”.
Man become a animal engaged in knowledge… what is knowledge,
what can we know, what are the limits to knowledge…

and lo and behold we have the man who tries to explain the
universe in exactly these terms… Descartes…and from Descartes
to Kant, we have philosophy attempting to explain the universe in
in the understanding of knowledge…

then we have Hegel who place philosophy into a historical perspective…
we now see philosophy having a history and being within history…
before Hegel, philosophy didn’t have a history… it was simply
a study of isolated idea’s that didn’t extend in time…
so the study of being, the basic understanding that the Greeks
had of the universe was a study of being, as of right now…
what does being mean to me right now? it has no past or future
to it…being was study as a stand alone idea with nothing
attached to it…and we could take aim at ancient philosophers for
not understanding being in a historical context… what does being look like
across time? and all hail Hegel for his extremely valuable contributions to
philosophy…but as philosophy lies within history, philosophy itself changed…

the 19th century tried something different then an understanding of
man within the context of knowledge, the epistemology animal…
thinkers and philosophers tried to understand man in a different sense,
and this includes Hegel…the 19the century could be thought of as the
“Ism” century…how do we understand man within the context of the various
“Ism” that exists…this is a good way to understand Marx…how does man/human beings
exists within the context of communism or how does man exists within the context of
capitalism or how does man/human beings exists within the various ism’s of democracy
or Catholicism or Buddhism or ……….what does it mean to be human in the
context of a democratic state? so people were studied and understood in
context of their place within some ism or ideology… but we have Kierkegaard,
who wanted to put man front and center of any understanding of the universe…

what is my role, the individual’s role, within the larger context of the world…

his concerns were the existentialist concerns of what does it all mean to me?

K. rejected systems because man/human beings would be lost, his needs lost
and K. thought religiously, man religious needs would be lost in a world
where we are just cogs in the machine…

and he was right… we are cogs in the machine and we have lost not only
the religious within us, but we have lost the chance to plot our own course
of exploration of who we are and what are we to become… by this I mean,
our course is set when we are young… schooling, perhaps collage, then a job,
a house, two cars, a wife, two kids and a dog name spot… work for 40 years then retire…
that is the “American dream”………

it is a materialistic dream for a materialistic world…the existentialist questions
of meaning or of becoming who you are, are simply avoided, dismissed, driven
away from us with 40 years of nonsense of being in the working world…

we are suppose to be rational, logical, realist, pragmatic… just like Zero…
who prides himself on being a realist, pragmatic… a modern man…
whereas, he has accused me of being a naïve idealist… a dreamer,
not a realist, not a pragmatist… in other words, he is accusing me
of not being a modern man…Zero rails against the modern world and
yet he the representative “modern” man that he argues against…
(now whither he is actually rational, logical, a realist or pragmatic,
is doubtful, but let us take him at his word)

as for me, I am a dreamer for I dream of a better world…a world
apart, separate from the nihilistic modern world that has dehumanized
and devalued human beings and their values… Zero fits into
such a world because his values fit quite nicely into our modern
nihilistic world… whereas I oppose and fight the modern world…

I oppose the notion of man as an “epistemology animal” that
we are animals that seek knowledge and the limits of knowledge…

the last century could be considered to be the “epistemology age”
where “knowledge is power” as they say…personally, I have quite
a bit of knowledge… I know the population of New York and what
H2O means and I know what “epistemology” means… but that
knowledge isn’t what is important nor does that knowledge
allow me to gain what is most important, wisdom…

the pursuit of knowledge, which is the same as the pursuit of profits,
leads us nowhere… if profit or knowledge is the goal, it has to
be used to do something to be of use…by itself, profits or knowledge
has no value… it only has value if it is used to get to some other goal…

that is the problem with profit/money or knowledge… it has no intrinsic value
of its own…profit/knowledge can only be used as a means to some other goal…
it is not an end or a goal… it is a means…

and that is why, in part, why I rail against profit… it has no value…
unless it is in context of something else…

I search for the goal, the end game, not the means to the end game…

and what does it mean to be a human being?

the end game…

Kropotkin

I have a very large library… I have over 5000 books… and quite
a few are fiction books, many of the classics, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky
and James Joyce and Homer and Sherwood Anderson and Andrei Bely…

I have read most if not all of them, the one exception is Tolstoy
“War and Peace” and frankly, I just can’t get into it…I cannot
keep up with the cast of thousands…

the fiction books don’t tell us what man is, they show us…
man as animal… we eat and drink and fuck and fight and hate
and love…

and some, some show us something higher…man as possibilities…
especially Science Fiction books…The Foundation series for example
or Star Trek…we think of ourselves as being fix, set in our being
human beings… but as Nietzsche correctly pointed out, we are
beings going from somewhere to somewhere… and in that going from
and to, we are ever changing…modern man is different from the man
from the enlightenment, I am different then Voltaire because I live
in a far different age…my viewpoint is far different… my understanding
of what it means to be human is different…and in all my books and in all
the thousands of books I have read over these last 50 years, only a few have
profoundly changed me, I shall write of just one, Report to Greco by Kazantzakis

for Kazantzakis, the point of being human is the struggle… he is always
writing of the struggle… for K. his description of being human is the struggle
to met God… and his struggle is always about going up a mountain…
and in going up the mountain to met god, we fall down and we get dirty
and we get distracted and we fight and ague and eat and drink and fuck
and hate and love…….but we must never lose sight of the fact that
we are struggling to met god…but Kropotkin, you don’t believe in god…
you are correct, I don’t… but that doesn’t mean that I can’t accept the idea
of the struggle, but instead of meeting god, we are struggling to
understand what it means to be human and to become more human…

instead of reaching down and becoming animal, we struggle to become
better human beings by reaching to our higher values instead of our lower values…
we struggle to be more just and to be love and to become more charitable
and to limit if not remove the distance between our actions and our words…
to say what we mean and to mean what we say and have our words match
our actions… that is the human struggle… to become more human, not less…

my books show me what it means to be human, in all their flaws and it is
ok to have flaws, I have many, but one must struggle, engage with those
flaws and attempt to rise above them…not to just be an animal/ human who
simply engages day to day without any thought to what it means to be
human and what will it take to rise above that human nature… the flaws…

if I engage with my values, values of justice and love and charity
and hope… among other values… then I engage with becoming more
human…if I engage with my lower animal values of hate, injustice,
anger, lust, greed, then I am engaging with my lower animal values…
I cannot become more human by engaging with my lower animal values…

the quest, the struggle, the path as understood by Nietzsche, is to
grow into something else…the changing of the caterpillar into a
butterfly… right now, we humans are caterpillar… and we must
begin the change into the butterfly…how?

once again, the start begins with becoming aware of…
knowing that there is a struggle to become more human…
the path is often found, once awareness is achieved…

the struggle is not to amass more wealth or in fame or
women sexually, but to find out who you are and become
something more…the mountain awaits you…do you have
the courage to begin the climb?

Kropotkin

I try to reach for the best instead of the most pleasant.
That is very hard in its own way.

K: that works… it is about becoming the best in us, not the worse…

Kropotkin

I have mentioned this before, but it is worth returning to…

our modern notion of superhero’s…why suddenly during the
30’s and thereafter, why do we have this need for superhero’s?

I would suggest that they are a response to the environment that
we found ourselves in…the Greeks created a whole slew of mythic
entities that fulfilled a function for them…the Creation of the Gods,
Hera and Apollo and Poseidon and Zeus were all created to met some
basic Greek need… they also invented hero’s like Hercules and Achilles….
which are no different then our need to invent hero’s like Superman
and Batman…let us engage in some minor speculation about this need
for superhero’s…

If I were to guess, this need for superhero’s is because the feeling of
not having some control over one’s life… we cannot influence or
control what is happening to us, so we create superhero’s as a response
to our lack of influence within our environment…

individually, I have no influenced over the course of human events…
the events of modern times that have dominated and changed my life lies
outside of my influence or control… the Industrial revolution has completely
change what life was about…we have existed for so long under the Industrial
revolution that we cannot even imagine a world without it… but no so long ago,
for the average person, they lived on a farm and lived a rural, agricultural life…
time clocks mean nothing in this life… the seasons of spring and summer and
fall and winter, those were the clocks that farmers used… for over a thousand
years, people didn’t travel more then a 100 miles from their home during their
entire lifetime…if disaster came to these people, it was in the form of bad weather
or crops failing or troop movement over their farm land… and in the winter months,
people didn’t work or they might have gotten small menial labor jobs…you just
didn’t farm during the winter months…then came the industrial revolution.
millions of people left the farmland to get better jobs in the city…
and we have the modern age impact of the modern wars and the great
Depression… Superman was created during the Great Depression, in 1938
and the second world war was on the horizon……. that Superman has been
the focal point of much discussion regarding the Archetype that Superman
represented and that can be easily found on the internet……

but for me, it is why, why do we need superhero’s in this modern age?

the average person wants to see justice done and in this modern world,
we, as individuals, cannot find justice on our own… the world is too big…
if Ford builds cars that kill people, we as individual cannot do anything about it…
we must hope that the government, being the only entity big and powerful enough
to impact Ford… and therein lies the key… for justice to be served, we must have
one entity be larger then the evil entity for justice to be enabled… in other words,
a large multinational corporation commits evil, the only force strong enough to combat
it is something larger and more powerful… we inherently see this… to combat
evil requires something larger and more powerful then evil… the problem lies
with the fact that we see powerful institutions like the Bureaucracies like
congress or the presidency act in a way that seems to us, to be evil
and we have no recourse to overcome such acts of evil… we see the need
for some outside force to bring evil to justice and we turn to not only superman but
we turn to such movie hero’s as Jason Bourne and the Terminator in the later movies…
and the avengers…we find relief that Justice can be brought down upon those who
threaten society… justice that we personally cannot fulfill… and we feel helpless
and vulnerable so we might even turn to the strong man concept in the political…

many turn to IQ45 as a strong man because they feel so weak and helpless
and vulnerable… it is no different then wishing that we had a superman to
right the wrongs we see in modern life…….of course, IQ45 failed us because
he is a con man, a fraud, a cheater and we were the ones he cheated…
so, we were burned and taken advantage of…and those who are cheated often
feel that they can’t trust anyone anymore and so they turn their back on
politics and the political and they hid inside within the world of their own
creation. be it movies or video games or watching shows like Entertainment tonight
or TMZ or E! news… what better way to escape the real world then watching these
fake news shows…and we moderns have a wide variety of means of escaping the real
world either by the creation of a world inside of us or by the taking of drugs or other
addictions like booze or sex or gambling…

if you feel you have no say or influence, no power over your own life, then escape
seems to be the modern route to take……. and this is one function of
having superhero’s…

Kropotkin