a new understanding of today, time and space.

[Peter Kropotkin]

one might ask, given the structure of the world and its
just is what it is, how are we to find meaning, purpose in the
world? if the world is nihilistic, then how are we to find meaning?

I would suggest that we find meaning in the attempt to better ourselves...
I believe that meaning can be found in our search to attempt to find
our best time in the mile.... meaning is found in trying to get from 4:58
to 4:50... in that attempt we find our meaning, our purpose.... in finding
our better nature, our better angels of Lincoln, we find our meaning,
our purpose....if I am less angry, if I have less greed today then yesterday,
I can find meaning and purpose in that....... it isn't much, I agree, but
given all the other choices, it might be the best we have.....

given all the nihlism out there, moral and otherwise, we can rise
above this nihilism with our attempt to achieve some goal or destination.....

given the dehumanism of capitalism and communism and Catholicism,
(putting god ahead of humans denies, devalues human beings)

we must reject ism's and ideologies for something else and perhaps that
something else is our attempt to rise above nihilism, rise above instinctual
actions and become who we are by a reexamination of our values......

it is in that reevaluation, a reexamination of our values, that we find our
meaning, our purpose......it is no different then trying to go from
4:58 to 4:50 in the mile...... or perhaps being able to climb a mountain
in Tibet or just climb that big hill in the county park..... it is about
achieving or accomplishing something that we haven't done before..
it is in the effort to achieve or accomplish that gives us our meaning,
our purpose......if I overcome some childhood indoctrination, I have
achieved or accomplished something of value, I have understood values
that are more appropriate to my age, my values must grow with me.....
in other words, childhood values of believing in Santa Claus is fine while
being a child, but not useful or necessary when an adult.... my values
must correspond to my place in life....my values must match my current
experience in life....when I am an adult, I must have adult values....
I must engage with values that are needed by an adult.....
childhood indoctrinations do not help me cope with or understand
or allow me to engage with being an adult.... adult values for adults...…

and that is the meaning and purpose of life, to find values that we can engage
with that works for our particular experience or position in our current place in life.....

the time of 4:58 is my childhood time, trying to get to 4:50 is my adult time....it is
that engagement that I must expend my energy on...….

but Kropotkin, you are wrong, as wrong as wrong can be....
but by what values do you judge me by?

as every value is relative, why not pick a value that encourages us to
engage in bettering ourselves...… for in bettering ourselves, we improve
society...…..

Kropotkin, you are foolish and wrong... perhaps, but how do we judge
values? by what standard can we agree to judge values? Our choices of
what standard we choose is flawed and relative....no matter what values,
we pick or choose, it is flawed or relative.... there is no place
where we can stand and be objective about anything.....there is no
standard we can choose and say, this is "objective"... there simply isn't
such a place... and this means whatever values we choose is the values
we choose...…… and I for one, have set as a value where meaning and
purpose is found in trying to get from 4:58 to 4:50...…….

I am now old and can no longer run very far, back issues prevent me
from really running, but I can make my choice in some other area....

I can choose to become a less angry person or I can choose values
which include love, peace, hope or charity..... and when I go from
hate and anger and violence to peace, love and charity... I am going from
4:58 to 4:50... I am improving my times and thus helping the team...
individual improvement such as seeking our better angels is an improvement
to the team, the team of the human race, the team of life.....

Kropotkin.... you are being childish, corny, maudlin, sentimental.....
perhaps in your viewpoint, but your viewpoint isn't the final standard
by which we decide such matters and my viewpoint isn't the final standard
by which we can decide such matters... that there is no final standard
viewpoint or some way to judge such matters "objectively" is the point.....

my viewpoint is just a valid as your viewpoint and there is no way to "objectively"
judge between them..... so why not choose to improve your time from 4:58 to 4:50?

Kropotkin

[iambiguous]

Peter Kropotkin: a perspective that is just arbitrary as my perspective? all values, all viewpoints are
just as arbitrary as the next value or the next viewpoint.....you cannot give me
any more of a reason to "believe" your viewpoint, then I can convince you of my
viewpoint.....

It never ceases to amaze me how folks reconfigure the manner in which I construe individual values judgments as being rooted by and large in the confluence of experiences one has encountered over the course of the life they live, into insisting that I am arguing just the opposite: that value judgments are "arbitrary".

In other words, how can someone read the points that I make here -- viewtopic.php?f=1&t=194382 -- and then make the claim that I argue that "I" here is embracing sides arbitrarily? As though I am suggesting that we pluck our own values at random from value tree.

Instead, my point is that those on both sides of an issue can think the conflict through thoroughly and come up with reasonable arguments for or against abortion, for or against gun control, for or against Trump's wall.

And that narcissists and sociopaths, in rejecting the existence of God, are not being necessarily irrational in insisting that morality revolves around that which they construe to be in their own selfish interest.

I am merely suggesting that political prejudices are derived at least as much from the lives we live as from any wisdom that philosophy might impart to us.

Instead, people choose philosophy or God or ideology or political idealism or accounts of nature precisely because psychologically this allows them to jettison once and for all the idea that values are either arbitrary or all equally valid. "I" then comes into sync with some "core" self that is then able to think through to the optimal frame of mind.

Unless of course I'm wrong. And I am certainly not suggesting that if you don't share my own assessment here that you must be wrong.

...and at no point do we reach a point where we can definitely say,
yes, these are the values of mankind and for all time.....
it is just another mountain we stand upon and shout for our
arbitrary values..... yes, yes, we get it.... but what is our alternative?

There have of course been hundreds and hundreds of moral and political objectivists down through the ages that would level this precise charge against me.

I must be wrong. Why? Because they have already found "the values of mankind for all time". And even though they have plopped themselves down all along the political spectrum, to the objectivist they will insist that they and only they have come to embody the true values able to bring "mankind" in sync with their own rendition of The Republic. All the others are still grappling with the shadows on the cave wall. Only they see the light shining bright from outside the cave.

Unless I am simply misunderstanding you.

...to call everyone who doesn't agree with you "objectivist", doesn't solve
anything...

That's not why I call them an objectivist. Agreeing with me isn't the point because I clearly recognize that even my own point of view here is no less an existential contraption rooted subjectively/subjunctively in dasein.

Instead, my argument is that with regard to "I" at the intersection of identity, value judgments and political economy, I deem someone an objectivist if they insist that their own moral and political values reflect either the optimal conclusions or are in fact the only rational conclusion there can be.

at some point, we must act upon values which are arbitrary and debatable,
ok, so be it.....we cannot hold everyone/anyone to our standards, be it
liberal or be it desein or conflicting goods or political economy...
for every standpoint we take is arbitrary... make no mistake,
your viewpoint is just as arbitrary as mine... the question becomes
do your answers solve the questions that need answering?

Again, from my frame of mind, arbitrary is the wrong word. Instead, our values are situated -- situated existentially -- out in the particular world that we were "thrown" into adventitiously at birth: historically, culturally and experientially.

My own difficulty here is that in thinking of all this as I do, I have thought myself down into a hole I am now unable to extricate myself from.

[Peter Kropotkin]

Iam: Again, from my frame of mind, arbitrary is the wrong word. Instead, our values are situated -- situated existentially -- out in the particular world that we were "thrown" into adventitiously at birth: historically, culturally and experientially.

My own difficulty here is that in thinking of all this as I do, I have thought myself down into a hole I am now unable to extricate myself from.[/quote]

K: Do not think of me as being unmindful of your situation... I too have
been down the rabbit hole (more then once) and oftentimes the solution
looks dam near impossible, but I think that the answer lies in the act of
allowing all possibilities... which really means, rethink your position,
rethink all possible solutions, or in fact, do as I have done on some occasions
is to simply ignore the difficulties and move on and then the solution/solutions
presented themselves after I had moved on....

in other words, don't exclude anything... solutions are often hiding
in places we don't think of....

or you could go completely the other way, and go over every single
possibility and as you dismiss them, you, by process of elimination
are left with the only solution left.....

I like to think of it as a detective story... a crime has been committed
and as a detective, it is your job to answer the question of who, what, when,
where, how and why? you are researching all possibilities into the crime....
beginning with what crime was committed? use this devise as a tool to
reexamine your thinking...… or as Nietzsche said, reevaluate your values,
your understanding of what is important and what is unimportant....

begin your tale from the beginning and leave nothing out... the funny thing
quite often, for me anyway, the solution I was looking for was already there,
I, for whatever reason, missed it.... usually because of ego reasons.....
my ego is the biggest roadblock I have to some understanding of I am looking for....

maybe the roadblock you are in is because you are in a different place now
and it is a roadblock because you haven't adapted or changed to meet
the new conditions? I can't say, I can only say, I am on the same road
you are on, just in a different place along the road...….

maybe the values that once drove you are no longer values you need
or want? I have discovered that I have gradually lost some values simply
because I am in a different place now, I am old and being old, I don't
need all those extraneous values... as I grow older, my needs, wants,
desires are becoming simpler, less complicated, really, pretty basic.....
and I must adapt to the ever changing reality of Kropotkin...…

remember the old saying, grow or die.....

Kropotkin

[Peter Kropotkin]

seeing the existential hole Iambiguous has found himself in,
I find myself in sympathy to his plight....I too have found myself
in a existential hole with no visible way out..... it isn't a pleasant
feeling and at time have left me with the profound wish to be just like
everyone else...this life is constructed so that one can travel your entire
life without the need to have a single philosophical thought....one can go from
birth to death and never see the underlying philosophical issues that
surround us on a daily basis.......

these underlying philosophical issues have encompassed my entire life,
but for most people, they are unnoticed, unseen, unrecognized...
but for me, they are the key issues I have to grapple with,
the Kantian/Kropotkin questions of existence.....
what am I to do? What should I hope for? What can I know?
Upon what should we expend our energy upon? What values should we hold?
The key question I pursue aren't just individual questions but are questions
about what values should we hold collectivly? It is not enough to engage with
our own values but we have to engage with the values of society, the state.....

it is not just me, but us.....for if was just me, the question of philosophical
underpinnings of human beings wouldn't be that big of a deal, but it isn't about
me, it is about all of us and the question of existence becomes far more
complicated when we bring in the rest of humanity, in fact, I have even
brought up the idea that we are not just human beings, but we are a member
of that tribe called life........and I hope this idea that we are part of something
bigger continues to engage us more and more..........

Kropotkin

[Peter Kropotkin]

let us try to recap to see where it exactly puts us.....

we are born into a complex system of ism's and ideologies.
these ism's and ideologies can be social or economic or political....
or some combination of all three...…..

I was born in 1959 and thus I was born into an American society that
was capitalistic (but had socialistic additions to it and it still does)
I was born in the Midwest which means I was born into a religious culture,
my parents were not that religious but believe me, everyone else was....

because of the crisis of the Great depression and the second World War,
society was rigid, this means everyone had their place and people
goal was to fit into this rigidity.... the path people took was the same path
and they had the same goals...... the goal was called "the good life"
which meant a house in the suburbs, two cars, a TV, kids...(lots and lots
of kids, I grew up in a family of 4 and we had one of the smallest familes
in the neighbood) a white picket fence and a dog name spot and a cat named
missy..... the idea of the stepford wives comes from the fact that it
was based on the this goal and everyone went all in on this goal......

and we know from our understanding of equations, that the sides
must be equal... so on one side you have everyone attempting to conform
to this "ideal" and what is the other side of the equation? The beatniks and
that entire group which called bullshit on the American "dream"....
the beatniks didn't exactly create an alternative vision, but
they certainly opposed the 1950's conformity to values and goals
which seemed to be empty and sterile, according to the beatniks....

the 60's came which really didn't happen until 1966 or so and lasted until
1974.....the dream of the 60's was to build upon the opposition of the
beatniks.... it was to find your own dream and follow it...…
and it was easy because of the various forces in operation at the time....
which came about because of the general understanding/feeling that
society was corrupt and didn't care about the "people".....
many factions came into being, the civil rights movement which
had started in the 50's and thus was the driver of the women's
movement and the Gay's, the Stonewall riots was in 1969, no coincidence,
at every point people rebelled against what they perceived as
injustice against certain people because of their race, color,
sexual orientation... ( a drive that continues to this day)

what this really means is that people have been fighting for their own
vision of what it means to be human (at least in the U.S) since
the 50's and still the battle continues...…

and today we have the ongoing battle.... still being fought....

but why? Why should the battle be ongoing? I am quite certain that
the battle should have been won decades ago.... but it took
a great deal of time before certain battles were won....

for example, homosexuals have the same rights and privileges as I do, to
marry and love whomever they want and yet, the battle continues,
but once again, why? why should some have rights and privileges
that others do not have?

for example, take the attempt by the right to disenfranchise voters....
voting, the basic political principle for which American fought and died
for over 200 years, and the right wishes to take this right away... but why?
the answer is simple, the attempt to maintain and control power which
is money...…. the right doesn't even attempt to hold itself to the same
"lofty" ideals of the Nazi's in trying to control and dominate its citizens.....

and where does all this leave us?

the lesson in all this is really that the need and desire for power and money
leads one group of people to attempt to control and dominate the other
segments of society. It is just another example of what this drive
for money/power leads us to, the attempt to disenfranchise people.
the need to create inequality to maintain power/money...…

and this is done in various names, capitalism is one such name,
and American exceptionalism is another such name...….

ism's and ideologies which drive people to attempt to
create inequality which is injustice.....

but that leaves us with the question of how to escape this inequality/injustice
which we have called ism's and ideologies?

but that isn't the only question here.... how to gain freedom not only from
ism's and ideologies but from all forms of the forces that dominate our lives?

I have noted other aspects of these forces which control our lives,
natural forces such as gravity and evolution and religious forces such
as Catholicism and political forces such as our representative democracy
which is a false form of democracy and must be destroyed, and
economic forces such as communism and capitalism which demand
the individual be sacrificed to allow that system to achieve its
goal, be it the accumulation of wealth or the creation of the worker state,
(the religious is no different in that the individual is sacrificed to allow god
to achieve the final goal of creating the achievement of a paradise in heaven)

each system is more then willing to sacrifice individual members to achieve
its final goal, be it religious or political or social...…

and how are we to gain our freedom in the midst of these
forces that demand our sacrifice and dominate our lives?

that is the real question! how is freedom possible when we
are born, live and die in the midst of various forces that
we have no control over and have no say over and is more
then willing to sacrifice us in the name of that system!

the modern question is simple, how to achieve freedom from
the modern forces which we know as ism's and ideologies,
capitalism and communism and Catholicism.

and I haven't even listed the other natural forces of evolution
and gravity among others which also take away our freedom...

for I can't see how we can even escape these natural forces for which
we have no control over or no say over...…

modern life is very limited by these forces, both natural and
social that have left us with virtually no freedom.... how do we find
freedom from those social forces such as capitalism
or communism or natural forces such as evolution and gravity?

One might suggest that this domination of these forces that
doesn't allow us any freedom or escape is the reason we feel
trapped or in despair in our modern times...if there is no escape from
these forces and no possible freedom, what might be the possible
reaction of people? Why it is clear from many of our modern social
problems such as drugs and other addictions... we attempt to escape
the modern straightjacket of ism's and ideologies via the addictions and
the millions of people who have simply stopped caring because they
realize on some level that they have no power, no influence, no control
and no say in the forces that control and dominate our lives.....

millions lead lives of quiet desperation because they know they
have no influence and no control or no say in the forces that
exist in their lives..... think about your life..... do you really
have any say in what happens to you? No, no you don't....
and as long as we exists within the ism's and ideologies
of representative democracy and capitalism and communism
and Catholicism, we won't have any say and have no control
over our lives.... we are simply disposable pieces of flesh
that are sacrificed in the name of the ism's and ideologies
of our times...……..

so, the question still remains, how to become free given
the nature of forces that control and dominate our lives?

so, how do we escape capitalism and Catholicism and communism
and all the other forces of social/political/economic forces
that control and dominate us today?

that is the question for our modern times.....

and that is why this is called the "modern" times because
we are the first group of people to finally understand that
we are held hostage by the ism's and ideologies of our time....

never before have people understood that they were dominated
and controlled by the forces of ism's and ideologies of their time.....

so how do we escape?


Kropotkin

[Peter Kropotkin]

I can hear some say, OK, Kropotkin we get your point, so what
is the solution?

and even asking that question leads us the wrong way.....

the "solution" doesn't lie within my hands or my answer,
it lies within you!

the question is to awake you to where exactly you are.....

it isn't about me or what I say, but it is about you.....

what are your possible solutions to this questions of
how do we escape the domination of the ism's and ideologies
that dominate our lives...….

what possible answers might you have to escape
the ism's and ideologies of the modern age.

Kropotkin

[Peter Kropotkin]

Now for many, the escape from some limitation or ism is to
escape into another ism or ideology.... for example,
for many the escape from the force of evolution is to
escape into the ism of religion... but that is one escape
from one ism to another and it cannot achieve freedom.....

for example, to escape evolution in which we are programmed
by evolution to have certain fairly fixed operating principles...
for example, evolution has programmed us to be social, have
certain needs and desires which all humans have, to have fairly
similar growth... which means we evolve as we age in roughly
the same way, my childhood indoctrinations are similar to yours
and we enter our teenage years with in the same way and
our adulthoods is roughly the same, we try to find and create
a family situation... home and hearth as it were....
and as we age, we face similar growth and changes...…

the human existence is far more alike then it is dissimilar....
and that is caused by evolution... but how do we escape that
similarity caused by evolution? we escape into another ism,
religion... in which we are also "chained" to certain factors.....

think of a religion at random, Buddhism for example,
one is reincarnated over and over and over again,
we have no choice or control over this, but to escape
reincarnation, we must become enlighten and that allows us
to escape the burden of reincarnation..... or think of Christianity....
we are given only two choices... to accept god/jesus or to become
condemned for all time to exist in hell...… that really isn't a choice, is it?
how do we escape this?

or take capitalism, we exists as pawns of large scale capitalistic forces,
the invisible hand of god as it were, and how do we escape that impersonal,
damaging force of capitalism? we can't... at this moment, there is no alternative
ism that allows us to escape capitalism... but any escape into another ism is to
simple leave us in the exact same place as capitalism.... we have not control
or say within capitalism and that is true of any alternative ism we might suggest.....
including communism or any religious escape or any other social escape we might think
of...…….

No, the answer cannot be just another ism or ideology like escaping
evolution force into a religious ideology/force...…..

so, what is next?

I have suggested that we might find meaning in overcoming personal challenges
such as my track suggestion which is finding meaning in turning to our challenge to
go from my best mile time of 4:58 to 4:50.... we can find meaning here in
overcoming personal goals and destinations......

we can find meaning in gaining mastery over some aspect of our life...
such as learning a new language or to travel to new lands or to
study math or philosophy..... personal goals/destination such as this
is one possibility to escape the ism's and ideologies that control our lives....

and the personal goal/destination is certainly one possible method to
gain escape from the ism's/ ideologies of our lives.....

but let us group think.... what other possible means of escape from
the ism's and ideologies that we might turn to?

we could begin by understanding the dangers and damages that
conforming to ism's and ideologies brings.....

we cannot escape the natural forces of gravity or evolution....
but we can reject the conforming forces of social or economic
or political forces that dominate and control our life...…

not by escaping into another ism or ideology but by rejecting
ism's and ideologies...….

we simply learn to live without any ism's and ideologies....

imaging life without isms or ideologies....

we simply exists to achieve our own personal goals of
improvement.....we raise a family, not to benefit
society or some cultural goal, but to simply raise a family.....

we reject ism's and ideologies to something else..
which is to live without any ism's or ideologies....
we cannot escape ism's and ideologies by escaping
into other ism's or ideologies...….

the next step of human evolution is to live life without
ism's and ideologies...….

we respond to human needs of basic necessities by simply
working, not to some artificial goal of making money or
to gain status, but to simply allowing us to gain the necessities of life
without sacrificing ourselves to some ism or ideology as we do today....

I go to work simply to gain the essentials of living and my meaning, my
purpose in life is found by pursuing such personal goals as lowing
my mile time from 4:58 to 4:50 or some other personal goal...….

the meaning/purpose of life is found not in the acquisition or the ism
of materialism, but in my choice...…… the possession of wealth or materialism
as practice today is a hinderance to the real goal of finding out what it means
to be human and to practice/achieve our own goals/destination.....

what this means is that the burden of the question of what is important
falls to the hands of people...… no longer are you forced to reduce
your needs or desires or wants to the greater needs of the ism or ideology that
is in practiced right now...… you no longer become a tool of that ism or ideology
or a pawn to be sacrificed if necessary to the goal/destination of that ism or ideology....

in other words, we drop the unnecessary and soul crushing demands
of ism's and ideologies..... we simplify life.... by removing
ism's and ideologies and return to live life for the benefit of
individuals and society...….

so, we now see what this does.... as we are, by evolution, social
creatures and we have no choice over this, but we can accept this
and take control over this by making our actions to be accountable
to be a benefit to society, to the polis which exists to, as the Greeks
understood it to be, the polishing stone of becoming human...
we do not become human independently, apart from other human
influence, we become human by our comparison and contrast to
other humans.....it is in our interaction with other humans,
that we become humans and we must engage with other humans
to become fully human....and this is what the Greeks knew to be true....

and so any actions we take must be understood within the confines of
the benefit or gains to the society/polis that helped us become human....
so if I spend the day cleaning up the trash in a park, I directly benefit
society and by extension, myself...….. for we cannot become without
the direct influence of society and so our actions, however personal,
must influence and improve society, so that we gain as individuals
from that...……… if I make society better in some fashion, I make it
easier to become fully human because I need society to become fully
human...….but this can be done without, without any need or recourse
to any ism or ideology...…. it can be freely done once we understand
that we cannot exist without society, we cannot become human without
society and the polis..... social creatures that we are...…..

so I have a dual goal, one of personal nature and one of a society's nature...
and if we benefit both, we gain as a single individual and as a society...…

so by helping the old lady cross the street, we help the lady
and we benefit society... by cleaning up the neighborhood
park, we benefit personally because we have benefited society....

and all this is done without any recourse to any ism or ideology..
without any claim to god or some other ism or ideology like
capitalism or communism...…

we simply see a need and we answer that need.....
if people are homeless, we answer that need by helping
them get housing because if we in some fashion improve
or help society, we directly help ourselves...….
no ism or ideology necessary...…..

if people are starving, then we aid them however we must
and this means we must, must take the overall needs of society
into account and this means, we no longer allow individuals massive
wealth or to bow our needs to the ism of materialism... which is the
goal of achieve massive wealth to the destructive overall health of society...…

to achieve personal wealth is to damage society.... for to achieve
such massive wealth in the name of some impersonal ism such as
capitalism is to declare an ism to be of more importance then
our individual lives...… to make people the means instead of the goal.....

to engage in the pursuit of such wealth is to engage in creating
income inequality which damages society.. by putting the individual
above the needs of society..... personal goals/destinations which put
the individual above the needs of society must be discouraged and stopped....
for it is only within the aid of society that we can achieve our human nature,
to become human, fully human..... we must not engage in ism's or ideologies
but engage in what is both best for us personally and what is best for society
at large..... for we are connected directly in the society and if society
suffers, we suffer, and if society flourishes, we flourish... it is that direct...

but to accomplish such a goal, we must become aware of and have
a understanding of what it means to exist within a society, within
a polis.....we can achieve nothing on our own, we cannot become human
without society, without the polis...… for we are forced to do so by
millions of years of evolution.... we cannot escape that fact....

so let us work with that fact, that certainty of evolution.....

we can find freedom within the choices allowed to us by the various
forces that dominate our lives.... we must accept evolution and gravity
as a force in our lives because we have no choice, but we can change
the human forces such as capitalism and communism by negating that
which negates us personally......by working toward something positive,
by creating, to avoid nihilism that is capitalism and communism,
we discover our possibilities in the act of creation... this is the power
of ART...… another brick in the wall.....too many people
only see one brick or maybe two, but the fact is, we are
captives of many different and diverse bricks like evolution
and gravity and capitalism and religion and other ism's.....

but we can escape the many and diverse bricks by
removing the chains of ism's and ideologies...…
living without any recourse to a ism or ideology.....

it is difficult to envision oneself without any recourse to
an ism or an ideology, but that is the quest..... to reevaluate
oneself without any recourse to ism's or ideologies....

are you brave enough?

Kropotkin

[promethean75]

i dunno what to tell ya, man, so i'll just drop a quote that can move mountains if you understand how and why it is so powerful:

"The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem." - wittgenstein

now ya can't do this until you have an understanding of what language is doing in philosophy, and ya can't know this until you let go of philosophy. this is what W meant when he posed the problem of getting beyond the limits of language in order to be able to see where those limits are. we have to accept that some things are 'unspeakable' on that account, and this is largely what philosophy tries to do; declare that it is able to be clear about what it attempts to do, without being able to get beyond itself and identify what can be clearly said.

i say simplify... but that's the anarchist-nihilist in me speaking after having spent twenty years traversing the maze of philosophy. if you want a simple thinker who you can trust, see maximus stirner. and in fact, it was W who led me to stirner after i watched him systematically strip philosophy of everything it was worth. i was that fly in the bottle that W showed the way out.

yeah so there are no 'isms'. these things are spooks in your head. we have a positively charged void that we call a universe, and things move and bump around in this void, and that's the whole story. elegantly simple, yes? it's no mystery why democritus laughed and heraclitus cried; democritus wasn't a philosopher... heraclitus was.

vanish the problem of life, krackpotkin. vanish it, and cry no more!

*ninja smoke bomb*

[Peter Kropotkin]

I understand what you are saying Promethean....

let us continue: let us reevaluate this....

we have both humans and life having the same needs and desires
and wants.... as programed by evolution.. for that is what evolution
is, a program listed in our DNA...…

we, humans and life, must have food, water, shelter, and education and procreation ...
we humans, because of our complexity have a complex education system
but animals too educate their young, lions educate young lions
and dogs educated dogs to be dogs and some life like tree's are
already programed by evolution to be tree's

we cannot achieve our program that has been programed into us alone...
that is a basic fact of life, we cannot get our basics of life without
assistance from society... we cannot acquire food or shelter or an education
without society.... that is what is meant to be dependent upon society, the polis...
we achieve such basic drives as demanded by evolution and we have no control over this.....

so how do we achieve this? the answer is not within the ism's and ideologies
of our life... we can achieve this without recourse to ism's and ideologies...
without recourse to some dehumanizing, nihilistic ism...…

but Kropotkin, how do we achieve our goals without some ism like
capitalism which forces people to do the dirty work of society for
little pay and even less status...… we recognize that society is the
only way for to become human, fully human and so, we help society
to be able to aid us in becoming human by aiding society....

what exactly does that mean?

One day a week or once every two weeks, we take on the ugly jobs
of civilization.... we sweep the streets, we can be the policemen of society,
we become the agents of the society needs by playing a role within that society.....

as some people are for whatever reason, unable to act in certain roles...
as I am hard of hearing, I cannot be a airplane controller, you need to hear
to do that, but I can do other roles within society..... and that is what is important...…

as Marx pointed out, to be a farmer in the morning and to be a policeman
in the afternoon... for one day a week and given our current population.....
even one day every two weeks or possible one day every month.... but we
can do the roles necessary for society to exist, to do the dirty jobs in return
we get the essentials of life, food, water, shelter, education, the ability to
procreate.... and we also get to engage in the personal quest we have to
become ourselves...… but this means we must not engage in the
ism's and ideologies that demand us to be certain roles and it is within
these dehumanizing and negation of who we are, that must be fought....

the goal is no longer personal covetousness that marks modern society today,
the goal is no longer the accumulation of materials such as property or wealth,
but in achieving personal goals such as going from 4:58 to 4:50.... this
but we need society to achieve our personal goals, we cannot survive without
society...that is a statement of fact....

and so in return to our being able to achieve our personal goals,
we must return to society enough of our time and goods that
allow society can provide to us the security and ability to reach our goals.....

we achieve our goals by aiding society in reaching its goals....

we are not subject to society and society isn't subject of us...
we are simply partners in a mutual achievable goal of
reaching a point where we can help each other achieve our
respective goals.....

we give up and in return society gives us the ability to achieve
our personal goals...…. but we cannot achieve our goals if
only a few people have 90 percent of all the wealth in the world.....
that is not sustainable and certainly doesn't put us in a position to
reach our personal goals...….. we must reevaluate what it means
to be a part of society...….

we must once again, work within what we really need as
human beings... we really only need certain things....
food, clothes, shelter, education, the ability to procreate....
the reality is, that human needs are really quite simple.....
but we cannot include the rampant materialism of today...
that isn't one of the basic needs of human beings and by
reducing, we can then achieve something far more important
then just a new couch or a new car or a new TV.... For they
aren't necessary, they are simply part of an addiction we have
to greed....

we must rethink what is the goal of human beings...
is materialism really a necessary for human beings?

NO, most definitely not...…. but then what is important?
the necessity of life... food, water, shelter, clothes...….

and so, we can achieve the basics, we must reject the
current addictions we have to materialism, to goods.....

and after that, we can find meaning without recourse to any
ism or ideology...…. simplify our lives by removing the all that
garbage we have collected in ism's and ideologies...…

return to the basics...……...and find meaning within
our own personal objective of engaging in what is important to us.....

by finding our own personal meaning or goal within the confines
of achievable goals that can only happen without the
nihilism of ism's and ideologies...…

Kropotkin

[Peter Kropotkin]

For those who argue that everything is fine and nothing needs
to be changed, I point out that we have millions on the edge of starvation
and millions more two paychecks away from being homeless and we have
a massive addiction problem in this country...… all of this seems to suggest
that our problems aren't just individual, single issues... but that the issues
we have stem from a system wide failure... that the issues we have are the result
of the nihilism that exists because of the political and economic system that
negates and leaves people without any say over their lives or any control
over their lives..... the apathy in this country is also a result of people
being denied any control over their lives...……… via ism's and ideologies like
capitalism and religions like catholocism and the political via representative
democracy which only represents those who can afford it.....

we often blames individuals for their individuals problems and yet,
we clearly have systems, both political and economic that negate
and dehumanize human beings and their values.....and those systems
inpact upon our lives cannot be denied...a CEO in New York decides to
cut cost by eliminating 10,000 jobs and people due to forces beyond their
control and without having any say in the matter lose their jobs.....
and the invisible hand of god proclaimed by Mr. Smith, that hand sweep
people into poverty and despair.... but it wasn't the hand of god, it was
the greed of the CEO... when will we blame the person who committed
this act of greed?...... it was man, a human being who caused despair
and confusion and anger to those who lost their jobs...... but it was
the system that allowed the CEO to cut those jobs and send those people
into a bleak future..........because the CEO can blame the rising cost
of workers to cause the downturn in his business.... but here again,
we see workers sacraficed to the alter of mammon, to the alter of
profits/money.............when will we put human beings ahead of profits/money?

And capitalism role in all this is to give the CEO cover to send thousands
into despair.....

and how exactly does this concept of living without ism's or ideologies
help this?

if we no longer live with ism's or ideologies, as a practical matter,
how are we to make judgments?

If we walk away from ism's and ideologies and prejudices and superstitions,
all the childhood indoctrinations, how do we engage with morality?

The question of Morality isn't really rocket science..... we can engage
with morality with values..... I would treat someone differently if I
engage with that person with the higher, more human values of love,
justice, hope, peace, charity, humility or one of the hundreds of higher
values that exists...…… if we treat people with justice for example, that
means we treat people equally, we are fair to people...…
Justice means equality.....or if we treat people with kindness....
we no longer have ism's or ideologies dictate our actions, but we use
values...… using the higher values tells me that sexual relations with minors
is wrong because they are unable to defend themselves from adult predators....
but we can flip the argument.... we can argue against people being predators
against children because those same predators would object to being the
object of another predator as children...….or people who would
murder others would object to being murdered themselves...…...

we can state that if people will not agree being the victims of
predators themselves, they cannot somehow state that being a victim
is somehow right or just...…… if you steal, then you agree to the fact
people can steal from you...…. the conclusion of this is that
people will treat others as well as they want to be treated.....

this is one possible way to understand "morals".....

how do you want to be treated? that would suggest to us that
morals is simply a means of understanding how we should act toward
others... because what if that act or action were directed to us?

which leads us to another question?

for the higher morals to be achieved, we must become aware of
and have compassion for others...……. it is easy to be an asshole if
we don't "see" others as human beings.... to many people go through
life seeing only their needs, wants and desires.... traveling through life
as if they were the only people that existed in that life...………

this awareness of others is fundamental in our awareness of
morality..... it takes two to tango as it were...……

how can we lose a sense of other people in this existence?

it is easy when we make as our primary goal, materialism and
the pursuit of profits/money.....if we place materialism and profits
first, then we lose sight of people and their values, this
pursuit of an ism or ideology allows us to neglect or negate
other people....

people are used in the engagement with the lower values of greed
and lust and envy.... whereas if we engage with the higher values,
we treat people as we ourselves would want to be treated...

Ah the philosophical among us would say, you are talking about Kantian
ethics, but Kant would make it a duty for us to treat people ethically,
and it is not a duty, it is an awareness of others as human beings with
the needs and wants and desires as we have needs and wants and desires....

in other words, we see other people as we see ourselves...…
within the equality that people need and deserve....
it is a viewpoint that understands people as being our equals,
if we treat people with equality/justice, we treat them morally.....

if you want a "moral" society, then we must begin by seeing others
as being equal to ourselves, not higher or lower, but equal...…

the process of morality begins once we see others as we see ourselves...…

am I first in the universe? no, I am simply equal to everyone else and
this equality means I treat others as I would treat myself, as I would want
to be treated......morality begins once we see others, once we become
aware of the equality of other people...……

now with that said, we can be sure that many will not begin this
process of treating or becoming aware of others..... never underestimate
the solipsism of people.... the only thing a lot of people are aware of
is themselves.... they have no idea others even exists in the universe...
others who are valid, equal human beings just as we are...……

"I think therefor I am" is not only a philosophical theory, but
it is the starting point of those who can only envision their needs,
their wants and their desires before, indeed being the only people
on planet earth with needs and desires and wants..... you see many people
who have no vision of others, "I think therefore I am" is all they see.....
their viewpoint doesn't allow for the existence of other people as people..
as living, breathing people who needs and wants and desires equal their own...…

solipsism allows us to negate all others as being less or nonexistent in value to us...…
and what is the dominant viewpoint of capitalism? the idea that my needs
and wants outweigh your needs and your wants..... that regardless of the
consequences to our society, I must engage with materialistic behavior...
for I am the only one, the only person who matters in the universe...…..
and capitalism is the perfect ism for those who practice solipsism...…

but how do we exist without these ism's?

we begin with the understanding that others are us, in fact,
there is no such thing as others, there is only us.... morality
begins once we see that "others" is really us... how would we act
if the situation, any situation, were to be us... we no longer see
our acting upon others, we see others acting the same way to us...…
and how would we feel if others treated us any differently then we
treated them?

the beginning of morality is once we see and become aware of
the fact that others want to be treated equally as we treat ourselves.....

Kropotkin

[iambiguous]

Again, from my frame of mind, arbitrary is the wrong word. Instead, our values are situated -- situated existentially -- out in the particular world that we were "thrown" into adventitiously at birth: historically, culturally and experientially.

My own difficulty here is that in thinking of all this as I do, I have thought myself down into a hole I am now unable to extricate myself from.

Do not think of me as being unmindful of your situation... I too have
been down the rabbit hole (more then once) and oftentimes the solution
looks dam near impossible, but I think that the answer lies in the act of
allowing all possibilities... which really means, rethink your position,
rethink all possible solutions, or in fact, do as I have done on some occasions
is to simply ignore the difficulties and move on and then the solution/solutions
presented themselves after I had moved on....

Actually, it's just the opposite of a rabbit hole. If by rabbit hole you meant "to enter into a situation or begin a process or journey that is particularly strange, problematic, difficult, complex, or chaotic, especially one that becomes increasingly so as it develops or unfolds."

The hole that I am in is derived instead from construing it to be an entirely reasonable way in which to think about value judgments in conflict.

Solutions are ever evolving points of view wrapped around particular sets of political prejudices yanked from the life that you live. Sure, you can convince yourself that after "moving on" a solution will present itself, but it is no less entangled in "I" given the manner in which I describe it above. In other words, those who embrace opposite values can have "moved on" as well and seen the "solution" as entirely contrary to yours.

There does not appear [to me] to be a way to resolve this philosophically. Just the opposite. The manner in which I construe "being rational" here has become synonymous with being in the hole.

It's the way in which I react to how reasonable this seems to me that precipitates this sense of being "fractured and fragmented" when confronting moral and political conflicts. Otherwise, like everyone else in the either/or world, I am on solid ground.

in other words, don't exclude anything... solutions are often hiding
in places we don't think of....

or you could go completely the other way, and go over every single
possibility and as you dismiss them, you, by process of elimination
are left with the only solution left.....

As a pragmatist, I don't exclude anything. But the process of elimination is no less entangled [for me] in "I" as "for all practical purposes" an existential contraption. You eliminate all the possibilities and react to Trump's policies as you do, while those on the other end of the political spectrum, have done exactly the same thing and arrived at theirs. But: to what extent is one of you actually closer to the solution? For me, there is no "the solution", there are only solutions that individuals have come to be predisposed towards given the life that they have lived. In a No God world, there is no one to take the conflicts to for "the solution".

committed
and as a detective, it is your job to answer the question of who, what, when,
where, how and why? you are researching all possibilities into the crime....
beginning with what crime was committed? use this devise as a tool to
reexamine your thinking...… or as Nietzsche said, reevaluate your values,
your understanding of what is important and what is unimportant....

Yes, this works where there is an actual accumulation of facts to solve the crime. Like a bank robbery. But suppose abortion is construed to be the crime. Suppose the folks in Trumpland want to make it a capital crime. Then from my point of view it's back to the hole. Your understanding of what is important or unimportant to take into consideration here is an existential assessment. The Trump folks have an entirely different set of assumptions.

maybe the values that once drove you are no longer values you need
or want? I have discovered that I have gradually lost some values simply
because I am in a different place now, I am old and being old, I don't
need all those extraneous values... as I grow older, my needs, wants,
desires are becoming simpler, less complicated, really, pretty basic.....
and I must adapt to the ever changing reality of Kropotkin...…

remember the old saying, grow or die.....

Yes, I understand what you are telling me here, but we do not connect the dots between "I" and "value judgments" in the same way. What you deem to be growth is seen by me to be that which your lived life has predisposed you toward. Just as those in Trumpworld construe growth to be the opposite behaviors.

You can all agree on certain facts in any particular context, but you react to those facts [re abortion or immigration policy or gun control or the role of government] in very different ways. The objectivists all insist that only their own reactions are "the solution".

But [in my view] it is in believing this that motivates them by and large.

[Peter Kropotkin]

I hope to continue on and while doing so, speak to Iam concerns...…

it is a bit complicated and complicated by its very nature is confusing.....

I am a sole individual... my aim is to survive as best I can.....

any "solutions" I discover for me, are by definition, my solution....
so, when faced with the discovery that my attempt to rise through
the corporate world, was ego driven and doomed to failure... I
no longer took that path... I simply tried to have jobs that allowed me
time to think and read and write...for those things are what important to me....
thus my solution was to my problem, I wasn't interested in making money or
rising through the corporate ranks to get a "title"... that had no interest for me....
(granted, given my attitude toward corporate America, I had little chance of going
anywhere in the corporate world) but given that, I had to find a solution the
ongoing problem of making enough money while still leaving me time to engage
with what matter most to me.... now that was my solution to my problem,
for many, indeed most people that particular solution wouldn't have worked
for their problem.... I am not engaged in finding specific solutions for specific people...

I have a different task, one that involves understanding our possibilities and
and thus present the case for being human as being one, ONE, possibility
for people to aim for....... I am just laying out possibilities for people to
consider... and that is certainly isn't meant to suggest that there is one solution
for all problems... hardly... our answers must work with our current situation....
I am 60... and as such, solutions that were useful when I was 6 or 16 or 26
or 46, are not longer useful.... any solutions must be able to adapt to
my current situation..... I can no longer hope to "become" anything useful
in society...I can not hold any other job outside of checker or management.....
and management is no longer a solution as it sucks me even further into
the nihilism of capitalism...… I have no solutions for my situations involving
work or a career... the only solutions left to me is retirement or death....

but that "solution" does not work for those who have more possibilities
then I do..... one solution for one person doesn't mean it works for
people or even anyone in particular... it is simply one solution for
one person...… but we have to understand that my individual problem,
and my individual solution does have universal context because
because I stand as one of millions of baby boomers who are facing
the exact same choices as I do...…..there is a universal context for
human beings and their problems because even though problems
might be an individual problem, still we humans because we are human
still face these problems.... we have individual choice in our solutions
but the problems are of a universal nature.... I am going to die at some point....
that "problem" never bothered me when I was younger, it was so far away...
but today, the problem of death is staring me in the face... my mortality
isn't some vague or abstract issue.... I write with some urgency because
I can never be sure if my latest words will become my last words.....
this is an urgency I have never felt before.... it is an "old" person problem....
and my solution might work for some because we human are born and live
and die with many of the same issues that plagued previous generations and
plague us "moderns"..... individual solutions have a universal impact because
we humans are by the forces that dominate us, nature in the guise of
evolution and gravity and social forces like capitalism and communism...
I too am searching for some measure of freedom against these forces...
that search is of a universal search.... individually I exist within the universal...

any "answers" I find to my problems are within the context of those forces
that have dictated terms to me... evolution has forced me to exist within
certain boundaries, boundaries I cannot escape..... I must eat and I must have
water and I must die and I must have air.... any solutions I find, must
operate within the confines of these forces that have determined who we are.....
and have to a great extent, determined what are our possibilities...…
I cannot fly like a bird... that is evolution limiting my possibilities...…
I cannot exist in a capitalistic society and work outside of the forces
of capitalism, I cannot work in a situation where profit is not the dominant
factor..... the universal of capitalism decides my possibilities so my
"solution" to the universal of capitalism is my solution and it may not work
for anyone else, but it is a solution that others in their individual actions
within a universal context....

I am one, an individual but I also exist within a universal context
of social, political, economic structures which are also bound
by the forces of nature, gravity and evolution for example...…

and how do we find freedom in the midst of all these tightly held
forces that determine and shape us? My solution is just that, but
you and I, we live and breath within a universal context that
has existed for a very, very long time before we were born.....

any individual solution to any individual problem still lies within
a universal context, for I exist within a universal context of society
and the state and nature and the religious and all the other forces
that exist...…………

I think what it means to be a "modern" is to finally realize what
the universal context really means and how do we find freedom
given the universal context which controls virtually every aspect of our lives....

so given this, I see abortion as a way to discover freedom....
if women are forced to give birth to children they don't want,
where is the freedom for the woman? taken away by a universal context
where only one solution exists for all situations, the one solution is to
force women to give birth regardless of the situation.... there is no freedom
here, only coercion by the state to its individual members, to force them to
give birth no matter what the circumstances....so women must find the
individual context to their universal problem... in which one possible solution is
contraceptives and another is the morning after pill... the individual solution
is given within the context of the universal problem...…..

this is one example of individual problems and solutions that are
within a universal context...…….

Kropotkin

[Peter Kropotkin]

let us try this:

ask yourself, why did you go to school? what was the reason you went to
school? well elementary school, we had no choice. It was not an option to
do something else but go to school..... so, why did you go to high school?
For most, it is not an option... when ask, most people would say they
went to high school because it was the only way to get to college....
so why go to college? because if you want a good paying job or a career,
you went to collage.... at some point do you ask, is there some other option
besides college? well, you can go to work in some job.. but the end result is
still the same, a job, a career.....let us say you want to heal people,
and you spend years in school becoming a doctor... and being a doctor
is still a job, a career.....

every path we take still takes us to the same place, a job, a career...
where we spend decades working and for what? ask yourself, why am
I working for 40 years? to be able to retire? logically, it doesn't make sense
to work for 40 years to just be able to retire... and then live a fairly short time
afterwards, say we retire at 65... the statistics suggest that the average male in
America today will pass away at 76... thus we are only able to retire for 11 years
before we die... this is course statistics and meant for a large number of people,
not an individual like yourself....and we have other issues, I am 60 and I already
have some health issues that will affect my old age... back and hip and knees
problems that really affect my quality of life... what will it look like at 70 or 76?

so, I am suppose to spend 40 years working then spend 11 years in retirement,
quite often in ill health.... that doesn't seem to be fair or right.
But Kropotkin, that's the way it is.... that the way it has always been,
why fight what has "worked" for generations...……….I have worked
for 43 years and I still can't see the point... what to feed myself and my
family. I spend 40 years in the bondage of a system that exploits me
and abuses me and for what? a few bucks in the bank that supposed to last
11 years before I die. it makes no sense from an individual standpoint to
endure 40 years of enslavement to have 11 years of ill health before I die....

why would any sane person go through that?

but Kropotkin, that's the system.... yes, that is the system...
the universal context that everyone must go through...
our individual context may differ, but our universal context
is the same for everyone...… but is that true?

it has been estimated that people in the middle ages, medieval man
had more leisure time then we "Modern" people do...…….and the numbers suggest
that the numbers aren't even that close.....the "average" medieval person worked
about 150 days a year, while they were off roughly 215 days..... or roughly the
average person had half the year off.... I had three weeks off last year....
plus given days off... and add up the number of working days for us moderns,
roughly 260 and that there are roughly 104 weekends...so, including vacations,
I worked roughly 239 days last year....so in my 40 years, I worked roughly 9,560 days....
and recall, I have been working for 43 years, and in 76 years are 27,740 days...
so, I spend more then a third of my entire life working.... and you sleep roughly
25 years of your life or 9,125 days...so that is another third of your life....
so two thirds of your life is accounted for between work and sleep...….

so when can Kropotkin become who he is if he is spending roughly
two thirds of his life either sleeping or working...…


questions to ask when wondering about the meaning of life.....

Kropotkin

[Meno_]

All I can say Krokoptln at this point is to repeat the wisest thing anyone said to me, my philosophy prof. "Don't compare".

[Peter Kropotkin]

hang in there.. I am trying to assemble thoughts into
some coherent pattern.....

we have a loss of religious judgments..... for a thousand years
judgements was based on a religious consideration....you are acting
immoral based upon religious considerations..... but our modern age has
repudiated that understanding..... we no longer judge based on religious
grounds, in a religious context..... we have secularized judgements.....
we feel that moral issues such as homosexuality and aberrant
behavior have a secular basis..... but we have found that homosexuality,
for example, cannot be judge to be "harmful" or "dangerous" or "sinful" outside
of a religious context... given our secular nature and secular judgements,
we have, upon purely secular reasons, to allow such "sinful" actions as
homosexuality and drug use....

So, we judge actions based on a secular reasons, not religious.....

we have social, economic and political structures, ism's as it were.....
I believe, not on a religious basis, but on a secular basis that
ism's such as capitalism and communism should be judged
as we would judge "Moral" behavior......think about it....

we see a couple fucking on a park bench and we would make a
moral judgement.. and call the police.... and we can make individual
moral judgements on individuals..... I see a man beating a woman
and I make a judgement about that action, a moral judgement.....

but can we hold groups and corporations and even a society by the same
judgement as we would hold an individual accountable?

In New York, a CEO see's the books going into the red and so he
decides to fire 10,000 people.... it isn't anything personal, it is
this "hand of god" in economics that make this judgement
and the CEO is simply the acting agent of the "hand of god"....

now in the eyes of conservatives, this action, this economic
decision to increase profits has no moral judgement... it is
not a moral statement or judgement.... it is a impersonal, objective,
dispassionate judgement which has no moral implications because
the judgement is so impersonal, "lay off 10,000 people to increase
our profit margins". How can that be judged morally?

it is an act that is justice because it is done equally without regard to
any accidental properties like race or gender or the color of a person's skin....
and we demand justice to be equal and there is nothing more equal then
laying off 10,000 people regardless of their status...…

it is an institutional, group decision done for the best of the group....

and as such, it lies outside of our moral judgments... it cannot be judge
based on such moral decisions that we would use on individuals as the one's
making out on a public bench.....there is no good or evil based on this
decision of laying off 10,000 people... it is simply good business
and good business is not judge on any criteria of morality....
good business has only one criteria, to make money....that is
how we are suppose to judge business, based on profits/money, not
on moral judgments...…… but we have an issue and we have discussed
time and time again, the judgement of business based solely profits is
the negation, the dehumanization of human beings and their values.....
business has made the gaining of capital more important and more
vital then the health and safety of both customers and workers.....

if we practice the nihilism of business and put money/profits over
human beings and their values, then the laying off of 10,000 workers
to increase profits is clearly nihilism..... the practice of making
profits more important then customers and/or workers...…..

and based on this idea, we can judge as immoral the business
practices that allows business to value profits/money over
human beings, customers/workers......businesses do not escape
moral judgement because their decision claims to be objective,
impersonal, dispassionate... those businesses practices are
nihilistic and must be viewed that way....

if the act of acquiring money/material goods is to be view as nihilistic,
then then the entire capitalistic system is nihilistic because the entire
system is predicated upon the acquisition of profits/money..... yep, the
entire system is nihilistic because the entire system depends upon the
negation and dehumanization of human beings in order to make profits.

and we can judge the entire capitalistic system based upon this nihilism.....

and liberals have judge the entire system as being negative, wrong,
damaging...…. and conservatives do not believe that..... for conservatives, corporations
and businesses operate within the "hand of god" thus ensuring corporations will do
the right thing and the "impartiality" of the system will help
corporations do the "right" thing......

but how can businesses do the "right" thing if they are nihilistic and
pursue profits over people?

so how do you judge businesses and corporations? are they to be judge
morally? Can they be judge morally?

Kropotkin

[Peter Kropotkin]

not many see existence as being a problem or an issue....

but understood correctly, existence is a problem and the
Kantian/Kropotkin questions explore those problems of
existence...What am I to do? Are my childhood indoctrinations
really the values I want to act upon? What values should I have?
What can I hope for? What should I spend my energy on?

I exist and that very existence forces me to try to understand what
I am to do for my 70 or so years of existence. What should I believe in?
What values should I hold? Should I simply adapt the values I was
indoctrinated with as a child or should I attempt to discover values
that reflect who I am and what I believe in. Part of this question of
existence is this question of ism's and ideologies.

If I discover that the society choice of an economic ism is nihilistic,
what can I do about it and even if I should do anything about it.....
what are my options to fight an nihilistic and destructive economic
system which has corrupted the political system and thus we face the
frightening prospect of having a political tyranny and an economic
tyranny... and this is what is meant by a "modern" society..... we
are forced for the first time in history to become aware of the
economic tyranny that exists in the world today....political tyranny
has always existed and will always exist but an economic tyranny?
that is purely a "modern" state of affairs.....

So faced with this duel tyranny, what am I to do?
where do I find freedom in a world that has multiple forces
dominating its individuals? We are held captive by natural forces
such as evolution and gravity and we are held captive by social,
political and economic forces too. so this question of finding freedom
in the modern world becomes another Kantian/Kropotkin question
of existence..... How do I find freedom in a world that is determined to
dominate you and forces you to play a role within the various systems
regardless if you have agreed or not... Capitalism doesn't require nor
ask for permission to act.. it just does.....our representative democracy
which is beholden to those who can buy it, no longer listens or cares
about what you desire or want or need.... our democracy just doesn't care....

so I am faced with this question of existence, of finding freedom in a world
that has already taken your freedom away. if there is no choice, there is no
freedom.... and how many choices do you have right now, today? very, very few.....

can you walk away from this modern tyranny of the political and the tyranny of
the economic?

No, no you can't. you have bills and property and cars and student loans
and a family.. all those things that tie you down to, forces you to accept
the current tyranny because you have no other choice...where can you go
that is an escape from the modern tyranny/nihilism of capitalism?

the modern industrial world is the home of the economic and political
tyranny...… where would you go to escape our modern tyranny? Maybe
Africa or perhaps parts of Asia... but the number of places where one can
escape too is small and growing smaller every day...….

If one cannot escape, then you have but two choices, accept or fight...
and my choice is clear. What is your choice about your existence?

what will you do? What can you do? acceptance or fight.

Kropotkin

[Peter Kropotkin]

one response to existence is ART.....

we use ART to explain and understand existence....

for one of the possibilities of existence is the act of expression...

we can express our nature, our feelings, our possibilities within the
act of expression which is ART.....

I can paint a picture and it can serve many different, diverse
functions or roles within my life or the life of others...…

one possibility in the course of our existence is to think about existence...

thinkers, philosophers, theologians have all thought about what
existence can mean individually and collectively, but artist can
also express what existence means by their art...………

ART is simply another example of the possibilities within existence.....

Kropotkin

[Peter Kropotkin]

This question of existence varies and changes with the person
asking it.... a person who lived 35,000 years ago has different
questions about existence then someone who lived in the
Greek city of Athens around 425 BC and someone who lived
during the medieval age understanding of existence is far
different then my understanding of existence in this year of 2019....

the question of existence is different in the stone age then it is
now because the environment is different. The stone age person question
of existence was about survival.... the question of existence was far more
basic then the questions of existence I face now.....The stone age man
was directly involved in the procurement of the substance that keep them
alive... if he wanted to eat, he had to hunt and kill the animal that
would have fed him....his mate would have gone out and hunted for
berries or other things needed to eat.....the question of existence
was directly in front of them.... engage like an animal or die....
but think about the limitations of these stone age people...…
their limitations are contained by their environment...…
they had limited choices in what they could do...….
basically being a hunter was the choice for
men.... how many other roles could men play?
As ART was just beginning, that was becoming a possibility
for people to engage in...…. it wasn't all about the search
for food to eat...another possibility existed.. the creation of Art....
this hunter gatherer environment lasted for hundreds of thousands of years....

we traveled with the animals we used for food so we could survive...
humans lead a nomadic existence...civilization simply wasn't possible
until humans could stay in one place and still survive..... not until
humans began the agriculture society could human beings could engage
with civilization as we know it...…

in the stone age, the possibilities were limited... one could become a hunter,
one could be the one who made the tools needed by the hunters, one
could be the one who cooked and cleaned and keep the camp where they
lived organized....the very possibilities for being human were limited....

think about the possibilities of the Greek human being circa, 425 BC....
What choices were available for human beings? they were far greater
then the stone age man..... you could be a stone mason or a priest or
a warrior or a playwright or a politician or a philosopher or a farmer... one of the
many possibilities that existed for the Greek person who lived around 425 BC...

in the Greek world existed far more possibilities for human beings to act upon
then existed in the stone age world..... the Medieval world had less possibilities..
the possibilities that existed for someone in the medieval world were warrior
and priest and farmer... because in the medieval world, the possibilities of
the city were far less then in the Greek world because the cities were fairly
small... it is estimated that around 1328 AD, Paris for example had roughly 200,000 people...
and the numbers of people for Paris say, around 800 AD would have been much smaller...

The growth in the city created greater possibilities for human beings.....
In 1328 Paris, Humans can be builders and priest and stone cutters and
the thousand different possibilities that existed in 1328 Paris

think of today... how many possibilities exist for us? there are quite
literally hundreds of thousands of possibilities for us today from writer to
warrior to waiter to welder to washroom attendant...….. and that is the W's....

but is our existence defined by what we do? does being a warrior, a soldier,
define my existence, define who I am?

I am born and I, hopefully, will exists for 70 plus years... does being
a soldier define that life I hope to lead? It seems to me that we define
who we are by our choices....I will live for 70 years and the choices I make
over those 70 years, defines who I am....and among those choices we make
that define us, is our choice of values...…. we are indoctrinated in childhood
to hold certain values which family/society wishes to pass on to the next
generation, but are those values worth passing on?

inherent in our possibilities is our possibility for choices.....
but those choices we make, must make sense given the
environment we find ourselves in......as our environment
changes, our choices change and the possibilities of choices
change...… if I find myself in a country that is at war, my choices
must adapt to the fact that the country is at war...….

If my environment is violent and chaotic, then my choices
must reflect that fact....if I lived in the stone age period,
given the limited nature of choices, I have very little choice as
to the nature of my existence....as to what possibilities existed for me.....

given the nature of the current existence we find ourselves in today,
we have only certain possibilities available to us......the environment
dictates to us our possibilities...…….

if the question of human existence is to explore the possibilities available
to us, then we must create the greatest number of choices that is available
to us...…. but as I have noted before, we are limited by forces beyond
our control to be able to create the greatest number of choices possible....

we cannot escape the forces, both natural and manmade, the forces
of gravity and the force of evolution are two such forces that limited
our choices..... we cannot go beyond our genetic programming
to be able to breath like fish under water or to fly like birds in the air....
we are limited in this fashion....we are also limited by the
manmade possibilities, the forces of man's choice.....
the ism's and ideologies that control our lives, limit our choices....

these questions of existence, what am I to do? what should I believe in?
what should I hope for? what values should I hold? what can I live for, die for?

all these choices, possibilities are limited by the environment.....

what am I to do for the 70 years of my existence?

but for me the question changes.... I have roughly 15 years of existence left
to me.... what should I do in the next 15 years of my existence?
and as important as to what should I do, I must ask, why? why should
I pick this possibility over other possibilities? every day is a multitude of choices,
of possibilities, I can choose not to go to work at 12:30... and risk getting fired
and having a very, very, very unhappy wife....it is a possibility not to go to work,
but the results aren't that desirable......so what possibilities exist for me,
both today and over the next 15 years? that is the question.

Kropotkin

[Peter Kropotkin]

and it is this question of possibilities that we try to understand.....

is it possible for me to act "morally" of course, but then it becomes
a question of what "moral" means in terms of our possibilities.....

I am born into a world, Tabula rasa, a blank slate as it were.....
and so society fills up that blank slate with myths, prejudices, superstitions,
biases of that society..... there is a god... a bias of a society... why would I say that?
given the nature of the various religions, they seem to have answer for same needs
that human beings have... why am I here? what is the meaning/purpose of life?
what am I to do? What should I hope for? we can see various religious
answers in this list. why am I here? to worship god... what is the meaning/purpose
of life? to worship god and get to heaven.... to find "salvation", to be saved,
by doing X, Y and Z...…… of course the question left unsaid is, why do we need
to saved? What exactly are we being saved from? Or what is the point of being saved?
and different religions have different answers to the question of how to be saved....

The Buddhist believed to be saved, one must escape the continuous reincarnation
that entraps all of us.... but again, the question left unsaid is, why is it so important
to escape reincarnation? I can think of worse things then being reincarnated over and
over again...…. for example, spending eternity in heaven worshiping god... yikes,
what a fucking nightmare or spending eternity in hell, to be honest, eternity in
hell sounds better then a eternity in heaven...….

the question asked in religion is simple, how are we to be saved?

and I for one, don't believe in that question. I believe in other questions,
that I have raised over and over again in this thread...….

does that make me or religions wrong? nope, just asking different questions....

so how am I to spend my 70 years of existence if I eliminate religious
questions from the mix? UMMMMMMM...….. how are we to find meaning
in a universe without a god? that was Nietzsche question... and so we return
to philosophy..

what are my possibilities if we eliminate religion from this question
of, what are my possibilities in my 70 years of existence?

How do we find the "secular" answers to this question of, what are my
possibilities during my 70 years? or as Nietzsche stated, how do I find meaning
in a world without god? in what possibilities I have, do I find meaning?
Doing what actions will bring me close to the answer of finding my
meaning/purpose in life? or even more basic, I ask, can I find meaning/purpose
in life given the possibilities that exist right now?

ask the stone age man and given his possibilities, the answer to that meaning
question is different then for me because the environment for both of us
is different and our question of possibilities changes with the different
environments...…

thus we can change the question of our possibilities with our choices.....
but what choices should we make that will influence our possibilities?

and I have stated that by pursuing the positive, the higher possibilities of
being human, changes the possibilities for all human beings...…

in other words, the values we choose changes the possibilities we have....

the higher values gives us more possibilities then choosing the lower values....

values like justice, hope, love, peace give us greater possibilities then
anger, hate, lust, greed...… the creative values create greater possibilities
for us...……..

Kropotkin

[Peter Kropotkin]

I woke up today exhausted from the last several days of work.....
Last night I was so sore I could barely move... I couldn't even sleep
I was so sore.....

I had today off and I finally feel good enough to write.....

and I ask myself, how did I get here?

I have a job I completely hate and with no way to escape it, outside
of homelessness and starvation.........I cannot retire and I cannot go back.....

I was born.... and in that birth presented certain possibilities....

I am now 60 and those possibilities have all been exhausted.....

looking back, I see choices, paths taken and not taken....

but in looking at my choices, I see something else......

I see those choices not really being my choice, but being the
possibilities allowed by society... I could have gone to collage,
but that is another choice given by society... as I have followed my life,
I followed the choices offered by society... I became a good citizen,
I worked a job, paid my taxes, got married, we own a couple of condo's
and a house.....we, my wife and I are solidly middle class home owners.....

and at every step, I followed the course laid out by society.... I didn't question it,
I didn't fight it, I simply followed the path allowed by society...

the only exception was my anarchist years, that several years where I didn't do
what society told me that which was my role, my expectations, my obligations, my
responsibility...….

otherwise, I went to school, I got a job, I married... the well worn path
of adulthood.. the path traversed by men since the beginning of time....

but today, today after I have no longer any chance to change my possibilities,
I question that path taken since the beginning of time.. I question my path...

I question and I doubt and that is the beginning of wisdom...…

I am trying to think of a suitable analogy for what is only a feeling in
my soul...…….

society is like a play...… the fixtures and furniture are the same for
everyone... but as the play goes on, the actors change.. we have a continuous
play going on but every generation a new cast takes over the play...
but the play itself, the plot remains the same and the actors have
to navigate a plot that has been going on for thousands of years...….

Goethe entered the play in in 1749 and left it in 1832....
He was a writer, a scientist, a poet but his roles in life,
varied as few people's life ever varied, but he still existed within
the allowed possibilities of the play he was in...…
His actions and writings never outgrew his societal
possibilities.... the closes he came was with Faust.....

Goethe stayed well within the boundaries of what is possible
for his society..... as we are now well within the greater possibilities
of our "modern" society.... but is playing roles, really exhaust our
possibilities.... as long as I engage in what society wants, I am left
alone, as long as I fulfill the myths and prejudices and biases of
my society, be a good citizen, work hard, keep your nose to the grindstone,
create profits, increase our "Gross domestic product" and thereby
make America great.... again.... but really is that all that is possible?

to follow roles preestablished for us by society and
and approved by and for society...…… we must find our
possibilities within the confines of social approved roles.....

we cannot disrupt or disagree or challenge...

(recall the greatest crime of humans since the bible.....insubordination..
we were tossed out of paradise for insubordination and in my union job,
I can only be fired for stealing and..... yep, insubordination)

it is demanded of us that we comply... as children, listen to your mother or else,
listen to your teachers or else, listen to your boss or else...…. listen to society or else.....

we are trained since birth to comply to the demands of others
that is in fact the point of a good deal of our "education" as children..

we are forced to submit to the demands of others and we
are forced to play certain, given roles of society...…..

we can become doctors and lawyers and policemen and
actors and mechanics and society says, it is good, because
we can, society needs those roles played by people...
but don't think outside of any roles we, society, doesn't approve of....

I see people walking around with t-shirts and sweats saying,
one word, Obey...…. and that is certainly the watchword of society,
Obey, follow traditions, never go outside of the possibilities we have
laid out for you...…..

and if you Obey, we might reward you with titles and a few bucks
and the gratitude of society.... and I proclaim them to be lies, falsehoods,
traps...….to spend 40 years working for the sole benefit of those who own
the means of production is wasting our lives to benefit those own these things.....

I engaged in the possibility of work and have spent 43 years working for corporations,
and I got nothing out of it.... those were wasted years spent improving the wealth of
those who owned the corporations...…. but I was a good citizen, I was a capital American
who believed in the lies of the possibilities they offered.....those possibilities
are a shame meant to entrap one into spending a life working and benefiting those
who own the means of production...…...in all those years of working, did I improve
my possibilities? no, did I have any hope to become something besides a worker?

No, the lies I was told as a child was meant to entrap me into the role of worker
and producer and consumer... it had nothing to offer me but lies... the possibilities
of childhood is a lie...comply to the demands of a society in which you are nothing
more then cannon fodder... that was my possibility to fulfill...… and engaging in
any other role given by society still leads me back to becoming cannon fodder...
be it a baseball player or a doctor or a lawyer or a plumber... each role leads one
to having no possibilities outside of what is allowed by the society...… we cannot become
anything more then what the society wants to keep itself in business and then the
question arises...…… have we reached the stage where we no longer need society
to entrap us into roles designed to keep us into slavery...………

the great possibilities of my youth are simply lies designed to keep me
in line and engage only as a worker, consumer, producer..... we really only
see a few possibilities when understood by the lies of society and its need
to fool people into thinking that society/tradition is the only possible path
to us to engage with in regards to how we live our lives...… to find our possibilities
let us begin with the lies of the ism's and ideologies we are taught as children
which are meant to enforce the lies of a society only interested in maintaining
itself and does not have any care about you... live or die... that is irrelevant
in our modern society because you individually don't matter.. you are
just another cog in the machine and as long as the machine continues
to work, you don't matter...as long as the machine makes its owners
money, you don't matter...…. you are irrelevant and disposable...
I just don't recall that possibility of being when I was growing up...
but that is the only being we have as "moderns" until we discover
our real possibilities, our real purpose for being......and the beginning is
to learn to exists without ism's and ideologies that are meant to
place you within society needs... not yours.....

what will make you special?

understanding what your real possibilities are.....

outside of the lies of an society that couldn't care less about you...…


Kropotkin

[Dan~]

The world is fake : both the material and the spiritual.
It runs upon cycles of death.
Earth is a bad planet.

[Peter Kropotkin]

The world is fake : both the material and the spiritual.
It runs upon cycles of death.
Earth is a bad planet.

K: ummmm, the world is only fake if you define the world as such...

I don't comment upon the spiritual because seeing the spiritual,
the metaphysical in the world is to anthropomorphize the world....
seeing things that aren't there....

as for the world running on cycles of death.... recall the notion
of an equation....the universe itself has an equation, we just haven't
found it yet, but we have other equations and this equation goes like this...

Life = death..... it is a pretty simple equation as far as equations go,
but it is effective.... the amount of life must be balanced by the amount
of death...for if one side of the equation becomes to lopsided, we have too much
life or too much death, we risk becoming too unbalanced and that is the path to
extinction... life must balance death......

is earth a "bad" planet? as the Earth is the only planet we can
compare and contrast, we cannot actually say if earth is a bad planet..
but the very idea of a "bad" planet is to anthropomorphize earth...
The earth isn't good or bad, it simply is..... and we make judgments
on the goodness or badness of it based on some criteria we have created,
and that criteria is artificially created...….. we decide if something is good or
bad if it helps us, good, if it harms us, bad..... usually it is just that simple.....

rethink, reevaluate your terms and a completely different understanding of
the universe will happen... and that just means we see the universe through
colored glasses.... and the colored glasses are the various ism's and ideologies,
myths, biases, prejudices and superstitions we were indoctrinated with
as children.....have you begun the path of reevaluation of values... which
really just means, have you thought if the values of your indoctrination
are really your values or have you just simple accepted those values as
yours even though they might not be... you just don't know, do you?

are the values we have, really the values we believe in and the values
in which we are..... if you are taught values of hate, anger, greed, indoctrinated
as it were, and those values are still your values, then you haven't really gotten
anywhere, have you? you are still living values of your childhood, values of
your parents, society, media, the state...… what about your values?
what do you value? you don't know because you haven't discovered them...
you haven't reevaluated your values to see if those indoctrinated values are
your values...….

to say, the earth is bad.....is that your reevaluated values speaking or
is that the indoctrinated values speaking?

until you know, you don't know...…

Kropotkin

[Peter Kropotkin]

the Kantian/Kropotkin questions.... what am I to do?
what should I believe in? what should I hope for?
what values should I hold? how does one find meaning?
How am I to be saved? In my 70 years, I have a certain amount
of energy, upon what should I spend that energy on?
what are my real values?

you have X number of years in your life... for most, it is 75 years...
and if you are not asking yourself these Kantian/Kropotkin questions,
then what are you doing?

Kropotkin

[Peter Kropotkin]

for me, right now... I am asking myself, what are my alternatives besides
playing the roles that society deems to be necessary?

To find my meaning in life, must I engage in an occupation like
firemen or lawyer or doctor, as society as deem it to be or do I find
my meaning outside of the economic roles society forces me to play....
I am not just a consumer or a producer or a worker.......
I am Kropotkin....those roles don't define who I am, as society
wants those roles to define me... I am more then just a worker....
I am a human being...... being just a worker means I only have
value if I working, my meaning is found working for 40 years damaging my
body and crushing my soul and who exactly am I working for? sure the hell
isn't me I am working for, for the entire capitalistic system demands I
work for less then what I am producing, in other words, I create 10 dollars
of economic value and the company pays me $5.00 and they pocket the
difference and my entire economic value is in the creation of that $ 5.00
of profit... my entire value lies in the creation of that $ 5.00 per hour of profit....
my existence has no other meaning, no other value then that.......

no wonder people consider life to be cheap, according to capitalism,
life is cheap, $ 5.00 per hour profit cheap........

but I say no... no, my life has value beyond the creation of profit...
but to find that meaning, I must engage in those Kantian/Kropotkin
questions......How do I find meaning in a world where there is no
god......How do I find meaning in a world where my value is only as much
profit as I can create........once I fail to create profit, my value to society
ceases.........is that what being a human being really means?
to only exists to create profit?

what am I to do? what should I believe in? what should I hope for?
what are my values? How am I to find meaning?

we can far better use our time to understand those questions of existence
instead of just creating profits which doesn't profit us at all... for those profits
goes to those who own the means of production...…

question the very basis of your life...… but beware of the journey....
for during the journey of understanding, the mountains will dance
and the sea's become wild and ferocious and the river banks will
overflow.....

but once the understanding has occurred, the mountains will
be solid and stable and the sea's calm and peaceful and the river's
will flow peacefully down to the sea...….

engage...… become human, fully human.....

Kropotkin

[iambiguous]

I am a sole individual... my aim is to survive as best I can.....

any "solutions" I discover for me, are by definition, my solution....
so, when faced with the discovery that my attempt to rise through
the corporate world, was ego driven and doomed to failure... I
no longer took that path... I simply tried to have jobs that allowed me
time to think and read and write...for those things are what important to me....
thus my solution was to my problem, I wasn't interested in making money or
rising through the corporate ranks to get a "title"... that had no interest for me....
(granted, given my attitude toward corporate America, I had little chance of going
anywhere in the corporate world) but given that, I had to find a solution the
ongoing problem of making enough money while still leaving me time to engage
with what matter most to me.... now that was my solution to my problem,
for many, indeed most people that particular solution wouldn't have worked
for their problem.... I am not engaged in finding specific solutions for specific people...

This is all then elaborated further.

But, basically, it becomes my point. In order to understand [more substantively] what motivates someone and drives their intentions in the is/ought world of value judgments, you have to understand how their own life actually unfolded such that the particular variables embedded in their experiences, relationships and access to ideas predisposed them to think one way rather than another.

Existentially, you came to construe corporations and capitalism one way while the lives that others lived predisposed them to go in other directions instead.

Now suppose a particular liberal and a particular conservative come to recognize that. They begin to wonder if there is in fact a way to react to corporations and capitalism in the most rational and virtuous manner. Is it all just embedded in these "existential contraptions"?

So, sure, they can sit down, think it all through as thoroughly as they possibly can and come up with arguments like this: https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/5002 ... apitalism/

Conflicting goods. So, extrude the part where "I" is fabricated and refabricated existentially in the life that you lived and pin down the optimal frame of mind.

Is this possible?

And that's before we get to the part where the "show me the money" nihilists out there flush all that "conflicting goods" crap down the toilet and merely make the assumption that whatever they have come to believe furthers their own interests, is moral enough for them.

And, by and large, it is folks like this who run the global economy.

I am one, an individual but I also exist within a universal context
of social, political, economic structures which are also bound
by the forces of nature, gravity and evolution for example...…

and how do we find freedom in the midst of all these tightly held
forces that determine and shape us? My solution is just that, but
you and I, we live and breath within a universal context that
has existed for a very, very long time before we were born.....

From my frame of mind, that which is true "universially" for all of us is embedded in the either/or world. In those things that we are able to demonstrate as in fact true objectively for all of us.

And, sure, with respect to the multitude of conflicting goods strewn throughout the is/ought world, there are certain sets of facts that can be established in regard to social, political and economic structures.

But, in my view, as soon as our reaction to those facts shifts the conversation from what is true to what we ought to do given what can be established as true, the points of view become increasingly more subjective. And subjunctive.

I on solid ground begins to reconfigure into "I" on shakier ground. Then it just becomes a matter how "fractured and fragmented" any particular "I" becomes. Me, I am down in my hole. So, I can only come into places like this and consider arguments that might reconfigure me again.

On the other hand, I have had any number of experiences in places like this where it actually turned out to be more the other way around. My argument begins to reconfigure the argument of others instead. And the reactions to that have been all over the board.

Thus this...

I think what it means to be a "modern" is to finally realize what
the universal context really means and how do we find freedom
given the universal context which controls virtually every aspect of our lives....

...becomes just another "general description" that, once brought down to earth like this...

so given this, I see abortion as a way to discover freedom....
if women are forced to give birth to children they don't want,
where is the freedom for the woman? taken away by a universal context
where only one solution exists for all situations, the one solution is to
force women to give birth regardless of the situation.... there is no freedom
here, only coercion by the state to its individual members, to force them to
give birth no matter what the circumstances....so women must find the
individual context to their universal problem... in which one possible solution is
contraceptives and another is the morning after pill... the individual solution
is given within the context of the universal problem...…..

this is one example of individual problems and solutions that are
within a universal context...…

...becomes just another subjective leap to a particular political prejudice rooted existentially in the life that you lived.

Freedom revolves entirely around the political right of women to choose abortion. Why? Because sans that right how can women ever hope to achieve gender equality with men in a world where only women become pregnant.

The freedom of the unborn embedded in what others deem to be a "natural right" to life is simply subordinated [politically] to the woman's right to choose. The unborn have no choice in the matter. So many in the pro-choice ranks rationalize this by insisting that the unborn who are aborted are not really human beings at all.

And then on and on that particular argument about what is "in fact" true here is sustained into an indefinite future.