Breaking the Vessels of Power: The Politics of Freedom

“Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.”

—Karl Marx

Since its earliest origins, with men such as Valentinus, Carpocrates and Basilides, Gnosticism had sought above all a non-religious or an a-religious attitude, for it was anxious to bypass the absurd antinomy of faith versus knowledge, the sacred versus the profane. They knew that the sacred, like the profane, is vitiated by evil and that the solution could not consist in opposing the first to the second, but in overcoming both one and the other and liberating oneself from the false dilemmas into which they drive us. This position clearly implied a total questioning of the very existence of the sacred, and therefore of the usefulness of religions and, a fortiori, of Churches. This tended to throw the most rational of the Gnostics into a solitary position where few came to join them, but which prefigured the attitudes of certain thinkers, philosophers, writers, and mystics of our own time.

I would define this position as a return to the fundamental, virginal interrogation of man faced with the problems of his life, with his need to escape from the yoke of systems and to arrive, in every instance, at a point of absolute zero in knowledge. If the Gnostics proposed a dualistic image of the world, it was not because, when faced with an entity, they were temperamentally predisposed to see its opposite, but because, confronted with the agonizing and omnipresent evidence of evil, it was necessary to oppose something to it. But their aim was quite patently to overcome this antinomy which did nothing but reflect the schism, the inherent rending in two of the world. By doing this-we cannot say it too often-they found themselves obliged to reject practically all the religious ideologies of their time and to live on the fringes of all accepted conventions, since, for them, the demands of truth were paramount, even if they were to lead them to the stake.

The Dark Side of Time

The attitude of the Gnostics toward time, and more generally, toward the world, is characterized from the first by a movement of revolt against time and the world as conceived by Hellenism and Christianity…

—Henri-Charles Puech, Gnosis and Time

Most of us think of time as a linear process, a movement from the past to the future, but has this always been so? Is time truly an arrow, or is it also a return, a circle rather than a slide toward some apocalyptic abyss? Or, what if time could reverse course, or slip off into a non-time, a time of no time, a rhizomatic cleavage in time that would lock it and its inhabitants in a zone of stasis, a place where time stood still? Have we even begun to think about time?

The earliest recorded Western philosophy of time was expounded by the ancient Egyptian thinker Ptahhotep (c. 2650–2600 BC), who said, “Do not lessen the time of following desire, for the wasting of time is an abomination to the spirit.” The Vedas, the earliest texts on Indian philosophy and Hindu philosophy, dating back to the late 2nd millennium BC, describe ancient Hindu cosmology, in which the universe goes through repeated cycles of creation, destruction, and rebirth, with each cycle lasting 4,320,000 years. Ancient Greek philosophers, including Parmenides and Heraclitus, wrote essays on the nature of time.

Plato, in the Timaeus, identified time with the period of motion of the heavenly bodies, and space as that in which things come to be. Aristotle, in Book IV of his Physics, defined time as the number of changes with respect to before and after, and the place of an object as the innermost motionless boundary of that which surrounds it.

In Book 11 of St. Augustine’s Confessions, he ruminates on the nature of time, asking, “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not.”

Even This? The End of America Coming Your Way

B&W23

Call me insensitive but when I read in the New York Post and Guardian that Gone With The Wind is being stricken from the Orpheum’s play list for the summer because of political correctness it bugged me. Not because the movie isn’t racist, it is. No. It’s that instead of showing how Hollywood portrayed the world in this 1930’s era the hyperliberal harpies would rather it be erased, so that instead of learning from our past it seems we’re just sticking our heads in the proverbial sand and pretending it wasn’t there. There’s a fine line between educating people about the truth of an era, and then helping them make an informed judgement concerning the literature, films, theatre, music, entertainment, history, etc., and just blanket wiping it out as if we should not be allowed to know it, see it, understand it. What we’re doing is not getting rid of racism, nor are we educating our children and ourselves by forgetting this past or facing up to its dark taint on our lives by forgoing it. Instead we’re pretending that it just doesn’t exist… out of sight, out of mind. And, dam it that’s not what we should be doing, that’s not learning or teaching anything.

The Gnostic Vision in the Sciences

Broken from the divine harmony of herself she fell, says the tragic philosopher, and became the manifestation of matter; and the whole universe of her city, of the world, was formed out of her agony and remorse. The tragic seed from which her thoughts and actions grew was the seed of a pessimistic gnosticism.

—Lawrence Durrell,  The Alexandria Quartet

The novelist and poet Lawrence Durrell presented a modern version of the Gnostic vision in a series of novels, The Avignon Quintet (1974– 85). Akkad, an Egyptian merchant-banker who is also a latter-day Gnostic, preaches to small groups of European expatriates. At times plump and sluggish-looking, at others looking ascetic and haggard, at home in four capitals and speaking as many languages or more, sometimes wearing western clothes and sometimes traditional dress, Akkad offers to piece together the surviving fragments of Gnostic teaching, which the established religions had tried to destroy: the bitter central truth of the gnostics:

… the horrifying realisation that the world of the Good God was a dead one, and that He had been replaced by a usurper – a God of Evil … It was the deep realisation of this truth, and its proclamation that had caused the gnostics to be suppressed, censored, destroyed. Humanity is too frail to face the truth about things – but to anyone who confronts the reality of nature and of process with a clear mind, the answer is completely inescapable: Evil rules the day.

What sort of God, the gnostic asks himself, could have organised things the way they are – this munching world of death and dissolution which pretends to have a Saviour, and a fountain of good at its base? What sort of God could have built this malefic machine of destruction, of self-immolation? Only the very spirit of the dark negative death-trend in nature – the spirit of nothingness and auto-annihilation. A world in which we are each other’s food, each other’s prey …

In classical and medieval astrology, there was a planetary significator that was antithetical to the Hyleg – Giver of Life, Health, and Longevity.  It was called the Anareta, and was also known as the Interfector or the Killer Planet.  It was considered to be the planet most involved with illness, pathology and death. Our Earth is Anareta, entropic and self-immolating, a predatory machine that feeds on its children in endless cycles of creation and destruction. In the East Kali is the figure of this dark mistress as giver and taker of life, impersonal and indifferent Nature, productive and destructive, cycling the worlds through eons of mutation, transformation, entropy, and death and rebirth. Her cruel gaze and dance of bones is the inherent order of the universe, unknowing of human suffering she is not aware of inflicting pain or joy; rather her actions are utterly indifferent to the tears or laughter of her human supplicants. The Gnostics knew her as the fallen archon Sophia who gave birth to the Demiurge or creative principle of the universe and its destruction.

Thomas Ligotti Panel: NecronomiCon 2017

This panel took place Saturday, August 19th, 2017 at NecronomiCon Providence 2017.

From the program:

TEATRO GROTTESCO: The Bleak Universe of Thomas Ligotti – Grand Ballroom, Biltmore 17th Floor

Thomas Ligotti embraces themes and moods of Lovecraft, Schultz, Cioran and others, and emerged from the shadows of these literary heirs to become one of the most powerful voices in Weird fiction. In this panel we discuss the bleak and pessimistic universe his work evokes, as well as works crafted by writers who count him among their influences.

Panelists: Matthew Bartlett, Michael Calia, Michael Cisco, Kurt Fawver, Alex Houstoun (Moderator), Jon Padgett

A Lamp in Search of a Philosopher

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

— H. L. Mencken

“As far back as I can remember, I’ve utterly destroyed within myself the pride of being human. And I saunter to the periphery of the Race like a timorous monster, lacking the energy to claim kinship with some other band of apes.”

― Emil M. Cioran

Sadly if one is neither a progressive nor conservative one is either on the extreme pole or a-political these days. Is there a politics against politics out there? I don’t just mean being agnostic like the a-political, or some militant extremist in the libertarian capitalist or socialist mode – nor even a utopian/dystopian communitarian. I mean someone who wants to destroy politics altogether, forget the human project; join the machine and say fuck the humans. Ah! Misanthropist… well not quite, I like some people, despise others, and believe most are either mindless morons – sleepwalkers who will always be programmed automatons no matter who pushes their buttons otherwise, else innocents awaiting the moment they will have to choose the red or blue pill. So what options do we have?

Cynic? – Maybe a vow of poverty, a naked tub-guy like Diogenes, piss and pot radical of the I don’t give crap (unless I feel like lifting my leg on the sly) type?

Goethe, did not fail to discover in Diogenes the unmistakable features that reveal a great and lucid philosopher. More recently, he has been called “one of the most original and spiritual human beings who has ever existed, and he has been viewed as “a ‘Zen man’, eccentric in his ways yet fundamental in his thought, vastly irritable yet suffocatingly funny, magnetic yet repulsive, a regal vagabond who was somehow in charge of the truth.”‘

Frontiers of the Mind: Space Exploration and Martian Habitation

The result is that, to the frontier, the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness, that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients, that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends, that restless, nervous energy, that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom — these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier. 

—Frederick Jackson Turner, from his essay The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893)

America is the spirit of human exploration distilled. 

—Elon Musk

Who will ever forget the first time you heard William Shatner as Captain Kirk say:

“Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.”

Even as a teenager it seemed that someday we’d have to discover new resources beyond our own planet which was slowly being depleted through both modernity and our technological progress. When John F. Kennedy spoke through my black and white TV that September day in 1962 I remember the excitement I felt at these words: “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win…”. The rhetoric of difficulty, challenge, and expanding frontiers of the mind seemed to pervade that era, unleashing our imaginations that anything was possible if we put our mind’s to it. This was the American dream writ large, a utopian dream of endless vistas and challenges to be met, of a need to overcome impossible odds and realize that humanity if it was to continue would need to escape the entropy, decay, and inertia of earth’s gravitational pull, exit the planet and explore the strange wonders of our solar system.

That dream seemed to fade after Kennedy was assassinated, after the long protracted war in Viet Nam, the dark years of Nixon, and the last mission to the moon with Apollo 17 and her crew. Things just seemed to fizzle out, the economy folded into the 70’s and the earth seemed to grown small, mean, and nasty. What happened? Economics. It was just too costly to go into space. We’d need to figure out a cheaper way to do it. As Elon Musk recently suggested, to make it more feasible we need reusable rockets. So he set out to do just that. For Musk as a species we have only two options on the table:

“There are really two fundamental paths: One path is we stay on Earth forever and there will be some eventual extinction event. The other is to become a multiplanet species, which I hope you will agree is the way to go.”

I remember reading Gerard K. O’Neill’s The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space years ago, and he, too, realized we’d need reusable rockets to support such an off-world venture that would be sustainable:

The way to obtain lower costs for lifting freight into orbit is evident from this quotation: develop vehicles which are fully reusable, and find a market large enough to justify frequent flights.  There are, though, two “catches” in this reasoning: first, the studies which have been made so far indicate that with chemical rockets it would be extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, to build a fully reusable vehicle capable of making a round trip from Earth to L5 without refueling.  Second, the development costs for any vehicle that requires a big leap beyond the existing state of the art are very high.

O’Neill had at that time conceived space colonies on the Moon and in space at the L5 point first noted by the French mathematician, Lagrange, in 1772, showed that there are five such points. Three of them lie on a line connecting the Earth and Moon; these are L1, L2, and L3. They are unstable; a body placed there and moved slightly will tend to move away, though it will not usually crash directly onto the Earth or Moon. The other two are L4 and L5. They lie at equal distance from Earth and Moon, in the Moon’s orbit, thus forming equilateral triangles with Earth and Moon. The Sun is in the picture, and it disturbs the orbits of spacecraft and colonies. It turns out (from an extremely messy calculation done only in 1968) that with the Sun in the picture, a colony could be placed not directly at L4 or L5, but rather in an orbit around one of these points. The orbit keeps the colony about 90,000 miles from its central liberation point.

But what has people excited is not what orbit might be used, but rather what could be done there. Space industries in high Earth orbits could manufacture solar power satellites (SPS) from lunar or asteroidal resources. Each SPS could deliver twice as much low cost, environmentally safe energy to Earth, via microwaves, as the Grand Coulee Dam, and forty five of them could meet the total present electrical power needs of the U.S.

Of course that’s always been the hope that such ventures would pay off in developing energy resources that could provide earth with a sustainable resource for millennia to come, as well as mineral and other natural resources that would help the human species to make its first tentative steps into colonizing our Solar System.

It’s only been in the past few years with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos that the entrepreneurial and competitive spirit has once again sparked such initiatives to become more than fantasy. I have to admit against the Luddite and Anti-Tech visions of many nay sayers our only hope as a species in my own opinion (take it for what it’s worth) is such ventures. Otherwise we will eventually through natural or artificial catastrophes expose ourselves to an ultimate end game if we do not allow for an opening onto these greater challenges.

We need a new vision for the human project or we will end in stupidity, war, famine, pestilence, catastrophe, etc. More and more my whole focus is turning away from the idiocy of our modern politics and toward something which we are sorely lacking: a positive vision to get us over the hump of our current Left/Right civil-war. The recent battles in Charlottesville between Alt-Right and Anti-Fa over the symbols of another Civil-War give us hint not only of the dark hole we are digging for ourselves on this planet, but reinforce my thoughts on politics: it’s a dead end world without vision or imagination. We are dooming ourselves to a new Civil-War not over territory but over the species itself. We’re talking about the end game of civilization that is at stake. So that while the Left attacks late capitalism, White privilege, and Anti-Blackness vs. libertarian revolt, HBD, and White supremacists we only know one thing for sure: this is a Manichean vision of total apocalypse than can only end if the defeat, not triumph for either side. Is this what we want? One wonders why things have come to this, who is behind it, and how we can at street level change the message from one of war between competing ideologies, politics, and futures to one of change, cooperation, and mutual understanding. What ever happened to democracy, anyway? For all intents and purposes democracy is dead and mute. Watching the current malaise in Europe, the U.S., India, China, Russia, Africa, etc. one gets a feeling that populism, authoritarianism, and the rise of a new inverted totalitarianism of austerity, poverty, and exclusion is on the horizon. Can we turn this around? What would it take? A new vision? Are there signs of such a vision in the world?

Ben Bova in his Martian odyssey Mars would give on such vision.  In about the year 2020, a huge multinational project gets under way, the bulk of it seen through the eyes of young Navaho geologist and Mars-voyage hopeful Jamie Waterman. Unconcerned with traditional science-fictional plotting and melodrama, Bova focuses tightly on the day-to-day, nuts-and-bolts details: the inordinate amount of politicking necessary to get the project off the ground; the vital cooperation and occasional wrangling between the many participating nations (Russian pilots, American software, Japanese technology and money, plus a sprinkling of Europeans); the months of arduous training; more politicking as science and flight-crew teams are selected from the dozens of expectant trainees–Jamie gets the nod because geologist #1 falls ill, and the much-loathed #2 is forced out by his colleagues; the tensions that build up through long months in space. Neither does the exploration of Mars run smoothly. Stepping down onto the red sand, Jamie offends the powers-that-he by lapsing into Navaho instead of parroting a politically correct prepared speech; a British doctor, hot to seduce one of the female crew members, neglects his job; a meteorite shower nearly destroys the explorers’ living quarters; Jamie persuades mission control to let him approach a cliff village he’s convinced he finds; the explorers fall mysteriously ill; Jamie’s Mars buggy falls into a dust bowl while his crew are too weak to haul themselves out. And, well, of course there’s life on Mars!

Another Mars trilogy is a series of award-winning science fiction novels by Kim Stanley Robinson that chronicles the settlement and terraforming of the planet Mars through the intensely personal and detailed viewpoints of a wide variety of characters spanning almost two centuries. Ultimately more utopian than dystopian, the story focuses on egalitarian, sociological, and scientific advances made on Mars, while Earth suffers from overpopulation and ecological disaster.

James S.A. Corey in Leviathan Wakes gives us a future in which humanity has colonized much of the Solar System. Earth, governed by the United Nations, and the Martian Congressional Republic act as competing superpowers, maintaining an uneasy military alliance in order to exert dual hegemony over the peoples of the Asteroid belt, known as “Belters.” Belters, whose bodies tend to be thin and elongated due to their low-gravity environment, carry out the gritty, blue-collar work that provides the system with essential natural resources, but they are largely marginalized by the rest of the Solar System. The Outer Planets Alliance (OPA), a network of loosely-aligned militant groups, seeks to combat the Belt’s exploitation at the hands of the “Inners,” who, in turn, have branded the OPA a terrorist organization.

Hannu Rajaniemi in The Quantum Theif gives us a future set in a post-human future solar system. The people living in the Oubliette society on Mars have two types of memory; in addition to a traditional, personal memory, there is the exomemory, which can be accessed by other people, from anywhere in the city. Memories about personal experiences can be stored in the exomemory and partitioned, with different levels of access granted to different people. These memories can be used, among other things, as an expedient form of communication.

The Oubliette society has an economy where time is used as currency. When an individual’s time is expended, their consciousness is uploaded into a “Quiet”. The Quiet are mute machine servants who maintain and protect the city. Although the quiet seem to have little interest in the world outside their occupations, they do seem to retain some traces of their former personalities and memories.

The conspiracy central to the plot involves the hidden rulers, called the “cryptarchs”, manipulating and abusing the exomemory and through the citizens’ transformations to quiet and back, the traditional memory as well. In the book, the Oubliette society is compared to a panopticon; a prison, where every action of the dwellers can be scrutinized.

Each of these novels presents a different take on the near term future, exposing many layers to how humanity, technology, and politics mesh and construct a viable alternative path. Perhaps we need to stop hating each other and begin instead listening and talking to each other. As long as the extreme voices of the political Left and Right continue to dominate the margins of this world we will have no diplomatic resolution to this matter: only an end game of destruction and war. Is this truly what we want? I hope not… I know I’m an old fucker, and most of my ideas may seem antiquated at this point, but I’ve tried to keep pace with current scientific, philosophical, political, literary, and socio-cultural thought. I know I’m pessimistic about many things, and the notion of hope is far from my own troubled view of life and existence, and yet does one need hope to envision a future worth living in; or, is courage in one’s despair a better path forward, one that realizes that like John F. Kennedy the future holds no promises, and the difficulties presented by it will be hard, not easy; and, the challenges might at times seem almost insurmountable and impossible, and yet, like those Western frontiersman Taylor described, what we need most right now is the “coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness, that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients, that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends, that restless, nervous energy, that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom…”. Maybe in the end these are traits of the frontier – for a space faring people, traits that will open us up to endless vistas rather than bring us to the brink of destruction.

What I like about the entrepreneurial spirit of an Elon Musk is their pugnaciousness, their ability to say “fuck you” to the Establishment, the State, the Cathedral and surmount the odds, put their money and their intelligence to work, produce the technologies needed to not only be competitive in the 21st Century, but to produce a world that will keep pace with the future, accelerate it, bring it about, push the juggernaut of the old school Leviathans to wake up and realize their about to be left behind as the Elon Musks of the world create the future they only dream of. The future of the American Dream is still alive for those willing to step out of their protective world of security and do something, anything… act now to build a world worth living in.

 

 

Subterranean Utopia: The Destruction of Reality

Escape is never more exciting than when it spills out into the streets, where trust in appearances, trust in words, trust in each other, and trust in this world all disintegrate in a mobile zone of indiscernibility. It is in these moments of opacity, insufficiency, and breakdown that darkness most threatens the ties that bind us to this world.

—Andrew Culp,  Dark Deleuze 

Karl Mannheim in his classic Ideology and Utopia defines the utopian imaginal in its ideal form as no-place, the place beyond our world, a “state of mind,” a psychological world rather than a real political possibility that one is seeking to realize against the current state of the world:

A state of mind is utopian when it is incongruous with the state of reality within which it occurs. This incongruence is always evident in the fact that such a state of mind in experience, in thought, and in practice, is oriented towards objects which do not exist in the actual situation. However, we should not regard as utopian every state of mind which is incongruous with and transcends the immediate situation (and in this sense, ” departs from reality “). Only those orientations transcending reality will be referred to by us as utopian which, when they pass over into conduct, tend to shatter, either partially or wholly, the order of things prevailing at the time.

The last sentence is the thrust of his argument, and should be attended too in that there is a whole tradition of revolutionary thought that underlies this need to transcend the current state of affairs of one’s political age. And, yet, against Mannheim’s notion of transcendence, I’d turn it toward a more immanent and subterranean need not to seek a beyond, but to uncover what is already hidden, the occult world of obscure forces that exist in the interstices of the political and socio-cultural strata, the gaps and cracks where a secret order of the world is situated not in some absolute Outside but in the very fabric of the world itself.

Ligotti’s Smile: The Puppet is our God

The Puppet is our God: the image of our malignant intellect, the excess of our dysphoric flesh. Cold and reptilian it lives amid its own dark powers like a fetid dreamer of kenomic intent, neither observant of its constructions nor aware of its catastrophes. Blind and alone it builds its nightmares out of the ruins of Time. This demiurge of deliriums gave us the frenzied jouissance of our murderous being, and we like stubborn agents of despair have uttered the words of war ever since. Broken and hollow we gaze upon the silent seas of this catastrophic creation not realizing that creation and catastrophe are one and the same. His gaze is our gaze: the bloody and barbarous god of a doomed and entropic toyland built in dust. The anaretic place and killing fields of our hellish paradise…

In Thomas Ligotti’s anti-gnosis one becomes aware not of some a-cosmic soteriology or God of Exit from this vastation and delirious nightmare realm, but rather one discovers that humans are “not only helpless to untie themselves from entangling puppet strings; they can’t even find the knots!” 1 Like members of a timeless horror show we wander in this circular hell seeking neither solace nor salvation but rather the temporal fulfillment of our secret cruelties. We are the soulless angels of a broken thought, the derivative creation of a blind god whose only positive is the negation of his own creation. We are here to accomplish that deed.

As the wicked witch in ‘Eye of the Lynx’ asks:  “Do you know what I do with little puppets who’ve been bad?” she inquired. “Do you?” Like this mindless puppet we sit there unable to answer, our impervious gaze tempered by the fruitless dust of our forgotten heritage. Like the puppet of this horror tale we too tremble slightly staring into the sightless gaze of our maker, our wooden expression giving no hint of the terror in our dark heart as she says:

“I’ll tell you what I do,” the witch continued half-sweetly. “I make them touch the fire. I burn them from the legs up.”

Condemned to this revelation by violence we await the fires of illuminating necessity to quicken us from the wooden decay of our corrupt and contaminated being, only to find our salvation is our curse. At this will we like the puppet of this tale have the courage of our despair to answer so wisely as it: “And what will you do,” the puppet asked, “with all those old dresses, gloves, veils, and capes when I’m gone? What will you do in your low-rent castle with no one to stare, his brow of glittering silver, into the windows of your dreams?” Isn’t this the half of it, what will this machinic god of nightmares do without us? Isn’t it as much a puppet of us as we of it? Without us who is this dark progenitor but a frozen thought amid the trembling spheres of dust and nothingness?

Or, shall we be like the madman before the wizened mage, speaking of that inhuman realm of saboteurs and assasins,

“Not if I have become mad but of what my madness consists is the knowledge I seek from you. And please understand that I have no hopes, only a searing curiosity to riddle the corpse of my dead soul. As for the assertion that I have always been engaged in deeds which one might deem mad, I would be obliged to answer—Yes, countless deeds, countless mad games of flesh and steel. Having confessed that, I would also avow that these were sanctioned provocations of chaos, known in some form to the body of the world and even blessed by it, if the truth be spoken. But I have provoked another thing, a new madness which arrives from a world that is on the wrong side of light, a madness that is unsanctioned and without the seal of our natural selves. It is a forbidden madness, a saboteur from outside the body of known laws. And as you know, I have been the subject of its sabotage.”

Haven’t we all? Are we not even now in the Kingdom of Assassins, our world like the ancient gnostic world of Anareta, known as the Interfector or the Killer Planet.2 It is the non-place where one must answer that which one is there being no escape, it the place of noise and silence: the place of strife and conflict, the zone of endless combats and eternal war. As Heraclitus reminds us “War is father of all and king of all; and some he manifested as gods, some as men; some he made slaves, some free.” Coming to terms with our lot we ultimately realize our predicament: “We must recognize that war is common, strife is justice, and all things happen according to strife and necessity.” (Heraclitus)

Conflicting powers of opposites, including those of elemental bodies, make possible the world and all its variety; without that conflict we would have only lifeless uniformity. In the former passage Heraclitus is perhaps criticizing Anaximander for his view that cosmic justice consists of a punishment of powers that overstep their boundaries. Justice is not the correction of an excess, but the whole pattern of the dominion of one puppet followed by that of the other.  The endless series of masters and victims without outlet, dying each others deaths we live each others lives. This circular movement between womb and tomb is the cycle of our madness, the glory of out dark escapades. Some awaken to the frenzy, others remain wooden sticks in the hollows of their frozen horrors.

As Ligotti’s madman would say to the mage,

“Since the madness began working its destruction, I have become an adept of every horror which can be thought or sensed or dreamed. In my dreams—have I not told you of them?—there are scenes of slaughter without purpose, without constraint, and without end. I have crept through dense forests not of trees but of tall pikes planted in the earth; and upon each of them a crudely formed head has been fixed. These heads all wear faces which would forever blind the one who saw them anywhere but in a dream. And they follow my movements not with earthly eyes but with shadows rolling in empty sockets. Sometimes the heads speak as I pass through their hideous ranks, telling me things I cannot bear to hear. Nor can I shut out their words, and I listen until I have learned the horrors of each brutal head. And the voices from their ragged mouths, so clear, so precise to my ears, that every word is a bright flash in my dreaming brain, a brilliant new coin minted for the treasure houses of hell. At the end of my mad dream the heads make an effort to…laugh, creating a blasphemous babble which echoes throughout that terrible forest. And when I awaken I find myself standing on some hillside where I have never been, and for a moment the night continues to reverberate with fading laughter.”

A lost troubadour of pain and jouissance this knight of the sorrowful countenance like Browning’s seeker of blasted memories comes upon the anaretic place where a dark tower:

Burningly it came on me all at once,
This was the place! those two hills on the right,
Crouched like two bulls locked horn in horn in fight;
While to the left, a tall scalped mountain … Dunce,
Dotard, a-dozing at the very nonce,
After a life spent training for the sight!

Isn’t this true of us all, haven’t you been moving toward that dark place in your mind, seeking answer to the growing pain in your heart, a justification for all the horror? Realizing that it all comes down to this, that for all our knowledge, for all our supposed wisdom we are but dunces of time, dotards and blind fools who’ve spent our whole lives training for that moment of clarity and when it comes on us all of a sudden, when the veil lifts and the dancers dance in the flames of desire we are not prepared at all? And, like Ligotti’s madman we are left standing on the hillside hearing the fated laughter of some terrible unreal world just outside our vision… seeking solace in its dismal corridors and haunted regions of eternal darkness?

“But did I say that I awoke? If I did, then that is only one more madness among many. For to awaken, as I once understood this miracle, means to reinherit a world of laws which for a time were lost, to rise into the light of the world as one falls into the darkness of dream. But for me there is no sense of breaking through the envelope of sleep, that delicate membrane which excludes merely a single universe while containing countless more. It seems that I remain a captive of these dreams, these visions. For when that one leaves off this one begins, each giving way to the other like a labyrinth of connected rooms which will never lead to freedom beyond their strange walls. And for all that I can know, I am even now the inhabitant of such a room, and at any moment—I beg forgiveness, wise man—you may begin to disembowel weeping children before my eyes and smear their entrails upon the floor so that in them you may read my future, a future without escape from those heads, that hillside, and from what comes after.”

For in the end we all know with a knowing that is not of the intellect or heart that we are doomed, fated to this broken circle of dark light, forever bound to the wheel of pain and jouissance. Victims not of our own intent or of that of another, but rather of the very machinic pride of our own creative powers, our catastrophic inheritance is that we all together created this killing planet, this universe of doom and war for our own pleasure and cruelty. Our doom is our salvation, the only truth is not our defeat at the hands of some blind god, but rather the endless resurrections of our wars of eternity. For this universe is both our creation and our catastrophe, the bliss and rapture of our pains and joys. We cannot escape it because we cannot escape ourselves: it is one and the same, an eternal round and amor fati.

The madman continues…

“There is a citadel in which I am a prisoner and which holds within it a type of school, a school of torture. Ceremonial stranglers, their palms grooved by the red cord, stalk the corridors of this place or lie snoring in its shadows, dreaming of perfect throats. Artists of mayhem curse softly as their mutilated canvasses prematurely expire of their elegant lacerations. And somewhere the master carnefex, the supreme inquisitor waits as I am dragged across crude, incredibly crude floors and am presented to his rolling, witless eyes. Then my arms, my legs, everything is shackled, and I am screaming to die while the Torture of the Question…”

Enough says the magician of despair, I will hear no more:  “No, demon horror, we are not. You are indeed the foul thing the wise man described to me, all the dark powers which we cannot understand but can only hate.” Denial of that which we are and are not. This endless inquisition of the “Question” – it’s terror and torture that brings us all to the place: the hidden place of nightmares and killing – Anareta – our hellish paradise.

Or will we come upon a half-truth and like the puppet awakening from his puppet dreams realize the magician who has shaped our nightmares is himself a puppet of desire? “At least the magician spoke of me as a being, albeit a type of god or demon. But I might even be regarded as a person of sorts, someone who is just like everybody else, but not quite like anyone. I honor him for his precise vision, as far as it went. But you’re wrong to contend that no one understands me; and as for hating the one who stands before you—nothing, in truth, could be farther from truth. Listen, do you hear those brawling voices in the streets beyond the window. Those are not voices filled with hate. In fact, they could not possibly hold a greater love for me. And reciprocally I love them, every one of them: all I do is for them. Did you think that my business was the exceptional destinies of heroes and magicians, of kings and queens, saints and sinners, of all the so-called great? Such extravagant freaks come and go, they are puppets who dance before the eternal eyes of my true children. Only in these multitudes do I live, and through their eyes I see my own glory.”

Isn’t this the truth, that we are not our own, we are all puppets and eyes of the Puppet God whose only triumph is a murderous intent, the endless wars against himself in the place of non-being, the dance of this intricate virtual zone of laughter and war? And if you awakened from this nightmare where do you think you’d find yourself? In some heaven of salvation? Or, in another chamber of this hideous zone of killing? Wouldn’t the truth be something more like this, awakening on some gritty floor gazing out into the dust filled semblance of a time worn world where “a few life-size dolls hang suspended by wires which gleam and look gummy like wetted strands of a spider web. But none of the dolls is seen in whole: the long-beaked profile of one juts into the light; the shiny satin legs of another find their way out of the upper dimness; a beautifully pale hand glows in the distance; while much closer the better part of a harlequin dangles into view, cut off at the neck by blackness. Much of the inventory of this vast room appears only as parts and pieces of objects which manage to push their way out of the smothering dark. Upon the grainy floor, a long low box thrusts a corner of itself into the scene, showing off reinforced edges of bright metal strips plugged with heavy bolts. Pointed and strangely shaped instruments bloom out of the loam of shadows; they are crusted with…age. A great wheel appears at quarterphase in the room’s night. Other sections, appendages, and gear-works of curious machines complicate this immense gallery.”

Maybe our impressionistic furnace is but the gathering place of mirthful derisions and the crucible of inertial dreams, and yet: like that “mysteriarch,” who is never a philanthropist of the mind, nor a “restorer of wounded psyches,” we long neither for restoration nor eclipse; and, in no way do we seek a therapeutic approach with the inmates at the sanitarium of delirium, rather our place in the site of anaretic necessity should  not be viewed as a realm of souls that are possessed, either by demons or by their own painful histories, but as beings who hold “a strange alliance with other orders of existence,” who contain “within themselves a particle of something eternal, a golden speck of magic” which is thought as the enlarged capacity for experience and the impossible. Thus, our only ambition should lead us not to relieve the “patients’ madness, but to exasperate it—to let it breathe with a life of its own”. And if we did this then in certain ways we might wholly eradicated what human qualities remain in these people. But sometimes that peculiar magic we see in each the other’s eyes would seem to fade, and then we might institute a ‘proper treatment,’ which consists of putting ourselves through a battery of hellish ordeals intended to loosen our “attachment to the world of humanity and to project them further into the absolute, the realm of the ‘silent, staring universe’ where the ultimate insanity of the infinite void might work a rather paradoxical cure”. The result would be something as “pathetic as a puppet and as magnificent as the stars, something at once dead and never dying, a thing utterly without destiny and thus imperishable, possessing that abysmal absence of mind, that infinite vacuity which is the essence of all that is immortal.”

Isn’t this the nightmare gallery of beginnings and endings, where “marbles of the dancing floor break bitter furies of complexity…” (W.B. Yeats). And, in the moment of our dark transport: in the interval of an eternity, where our fleshly memories and desires “begins to rise in a puppet’s hunch, then soars up into the tenebrous rafters and beyond, transported by unseen wires.” Our arms and legs twitch uncontrollably during the elevation, and we scream…fade into the interminable night where Time our God puppet like swerves back down into the killing zone… and, like our Puppet God we begin to Smile in cruelty and delight.

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1. Ligotti, Thomas . The Nightmare Factory. (“Consolations of Horror”). Carroll & Graf (June 27, 1996)
2. Anareta From the Greek, literally destroyer. Applied to a malefic that occupies an anaretic place and afflicts the Hyleg; believed by ancients to be life-destructive. As well the anaretic place is the final degree (between 29° and 30°) of any sign, also called the degree of fate. Planets and house cusps that occupy anaretic degrees indicate fundamental issues with which one must deal. Unlike the ancient Gnostics, Ligotti does not seek a soteriological a-cosmic salvation from this realm of horror, but rather an immortal entry into the dark unreal realms that support it below the mirage of our own self-projected insanity. For we are already in the place of no-place, the site of non-laminating wisdom where existence is itself the only end and beginning we will ever have or know.

 

The Erudite Art

Behind the perfection of a man’s style, must lie the passion of a man’s soul.

—Oscar Wilde

As one friend said recently, “Yours is an erudite art to say the least.”

Yes, I get verbose and off the wall at times, stylistic and decadent. My temperament moving in the literary rather than the academic and restrictive discursive practices, which is not to say they do not have their place. Which is truly what your first statement was reminding us of, that measurement in the strict sense is as you suggest a taking in of the strict limits of territory. The limits fascinate me not, it is the ever present horizon I seek out, beyond the barrier reefs of knowledge rather than the quotidian isles or natural inlets of the already discovered and known. And, of course, given my metaphoric over metonymic range of poetic prose I often move toward the hyperbolic rather than the truisms of word or statement. I just happen to choose to exist outside the prison house of acceptability and scholarly regulatory prose. I take after Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater in style… a strange thing in our time to say the least.

Oscar Wilde had often spoken of his belief that, in artistic matters, style outweighed sincerity or substance.  As such, in his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, his attention was therefore paid to form and the nuances of wording over the specific semblance of knowledge.  If the novel was an “essay on decorative art”, it was also a piece of decorative art composed of carefully selected phrases.  In fact, Wilde was so determined to have perfection in his works, when he was asked to write a story of a hundred thousand beautiful words, he complained that “there are not one hundred thousand beautiful words in the English language.”

Oscar Wilde had a phenomenal ability to incorporate aspects of both fantasy and realism into his works.  Through thoughtful imagery and realistic dialect, he successfully merged two contradicting genres into a fascinatingly morbid style.  Wilde also exceled in his use of imagery.  He vividly described people and situations with many types of literary devices though his favorite and therefore most frequented, is morbid imagery.  He commanded an astonishing mastery of the art of morbidity, describing in unusual detail images of corpses and blood and a murder that would rival anything in modern cinema.

Over and over I’ve heard my work described as exquisite but morbid. Exactly! There is no inferior / superior forms of statement, that too is an erroneous conclusion and a moral one, and a reduction on the part of many literalists of the imagination. I’m an a-moralist, a techno-pessimist, and a Dionysian mad litterateur, well read in sciences, philosophy, mathematics, history, sociology, literary and critical endeavors, etc. An autodidact at heart and an aphoristic writer in intent and scope. My writing is theory-fiction with a bent toward futurial forms of SF pushing the limits of aphoristic display into the techno-commercium that is being manufactured in our contemporary late capitalism.

Many people seek more traditionalist forms and separations of thought, segmenting it into the old categories of humanistic learning as if this were the way it had always been and will remain and to mix the categories or produce hybridity of form and statement as in a devil’s brew of the sciences with philosophy, or science fiction with theory, and even in pushing the hyperbolic tendencies within economic, social, and normative contexts to their logical conclusions was to step off into some abyss without recourse. I’ve always found such reduced and limited discursive practices to be find for experts, scientists, specialists, and academics who must – as Foucault showed long ago, work within the “discursive praxis” of one’s specialty using the linguistic markers and traces of that world are forever remain outside the confines of its codes unread and unknown, merely a footnote to some cognitive revolution happening elsewhere.

For me experimentalism begins and ends in writing itself, pushing the written word into realms otherwise left out of academic and scholarly prose due to the above restrictions of those very discursive practices. I have people ask me why I write such stylish prose. Why? Because I like it, why else? Does one have to have reasons for everything? Some will like it, others hate it. Does that concern me? No. Ones preferences in style and content varies, and as always been the case some authors will speak to you while others don’t, some will enliven your mind while others put you asleep. One reads specialist not because they are stylist but for the typical reason that they are presenting certain facts that one may need for one’s own ongoing project. Would I expect a scientist to write like a lawyer, or a philosopher to sound like a neuroscientist; although both could at times enter into the discursive worlds of the other but under other non-specialist terms and circumstances: as in essays, minor pieces, notation, notebooks, etc. The world would be a sad place if all writing was reduced to the same style as in the famed Chicago Manual of Style, which has its place but one wouldn’t want a novel written in this way, nor have Nietzsche’s works rewritten in a prosaic and restrictive measure. Now would we?

We live in a time of decadence, exposed to the too richness of a decaying and over-ripe society that in its decline is anxiously drifting into those excessive regions of both mind and heart. We are in flames, our apocalyptic imaginal and religious reductions exposed not so much in tribal worlds of ethno-nationalist transports as much as it is displayed in the morbid details of our political spectacles which remind of us some barbaric yawp in Whitman’s sense: a world replete with offensive discord and violence, a distempered realm of cinematic gore and verbosity of hate and bigotry. We are the barbarians at the gate of nonsense, unable to construct a civilized world we have reduced ourselves to the spectacle of pigs wallowing in the slime of democracies demise.

Grotesque and decadent to the core our society lives out its fantasias in the realist districts of an impudent impotence, a realm filled with the satiric spite of literalist of the imagination as shown by our current political stage-craft. As Guy Debord in the Society of the Spectacle in his moralise once suggested, we “like lost children live our unfinished adventures.” We exist in appearance, in the hall of mirrors that is our Reality Studio of TV and Cinema. Debord: “… just as early industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being to having, post-industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing.” Simulated experience rather than its actuality is our forte – fractured, sociopathic, insane we dance against the truth that we are as a species at a juncture and convergence. Like children who are awakened into a nightmare fantasy realm, delivered to the stark truth that our time truly is limited, that finitude is not just a philosophical concept but rather the end game of civilization itself. We are the players of an historical farce, the repetition of an end times game we’ve all dismissed as so much religious mythology.

And, yet, as many of our pundits have suggested we are no longer moving to time’s drum, rather we are in a circular enclosure and precinct of hellish delights, locked away in a human zoo dreaming of freedom but living its lie. Solitary and confined we seek a way out of this dark age and find no one who will or can lead us to the promised land. Not because such religious non-sense still harbors any illusive meaning for us, but because we lack the courage of our convictions secular or religious to do it for ourselves. We truly are the last of our kind, the victims not of some bland joke or demiurges hate, but of our own inability to reach across to our enemies and realize what we see in their eyes is our own hate staring back. We are the children of hate and bigotry and we live it out daily as if it is the “other” not us who is to blame… and, yet, there is no other, only this sick and decadent animal, homo sapiens. Born of time and necessity we will end in time under the auspices of Ananke’s dark charm.

 

Golem Inc. – Abstract Machines and War

Under the invisible eye of a ubiquitous surveillance system the automated inspection of personal data can no longer simply be conceived as an all-seeing eye, a hidden ear, a baleful presence behind the scenes. The myriad forms of contemporary electronic surveillance now constitute the irremediably multiple feedback loops of a cybernetic society, devoted to controlling the future.1 Crisis and conflict are lodged permanently within its positive feed-back loops, knitting together the impersonal agencies of global capital, in all its socio-cultural and techno-commercial complexity. Behind all this is a Manichean world concocted during the war against fascism by none other than Norbert Wiener and his Cybernetic Vision.

Peter Galison would term Wiener’s vision of fusing human and machine the “ontology of the enemy”.2 It was here in this early aircraft predictor system that the dark war machines we now term drones were already a hidden telos or tendency of abstraction, one moving toward the future like a hawk after prey. Even then the notion of programming a machine to scope out the enemy with an antagonistic eye, hooked to the passive and lowly servomechanisms supporting it, modulated by informational plug-n-play software controlled remotely by a human would bring to light the stirrings of the Golem which is so pervasive in our current quest for Superintelligence. The ghosts of those early experimental systems present to us in this age of data-mining and neuromarketing the image of a Golem that is ourselves, the cyborg populations of a global world of computational capitalism.

In the twentieth century, it was a matter of large-scale news and advertising companies distorting the public sphere in which ideas are exchanged. It was a world of propaganda, ideology, and public relations experts who used the tools of media to sway the populace. Now we are heading toward an entirely different kind of society, based not on informed debate and democratic decision, but rather on electronic identification, statistical prediction and environmental seduction. And in this society, the ciphers of opportunity presented by marketing data are never very far from the targeting information thrown off by an evasive enemy.3

As the Internet-of-things becomes an actual part of everyday life rather than a hype word in our tech magazines, the re-ontologization of our cities infrastructures will become total environments in which every object is aware and adjusts itself based upon the users in the environment. As one walks through these projected Smart Cities controlled by AI one’s life will become part of a ubiquitous network of hidden surveillance adapting to your life as part of a complete command and control, security and economic marketing system targeting as well as predicting your behavior and capturing your desires. The word “control” has a precise meaning here: it refers to the continuous adjustment of an apparatus, or in this case, an environment, according to feedback data on its human variables. This notion of adjustments to an environment is the key, if we want to understand the pervasiveness of surveillance in today’s societies – a pervasiveness that goes well beyond military, police and secret-service functions. To understand it, however, requires abandoning two commonly held ideas: the literary image of Big Brother peering out from a screen, and the more complex architectural image of the Panopticon. (Holmes)

It is obvious that both Big Brother and the Panopticon are outdated, though they have not entirely disappeared from many parts of the world. The question, then, is how do we characterize a surveillance regime that is neither totalitarian nor disciplinary (Foucault), but depends primarily on the statistical treatment of aggregate data in order to shape environments in which populations of mobile individuals can be channeled and controlled? How, in other words, do we understand the political economy of surveillance in a network centric society on call 24/7?

It is now a matter of these technocrats adjusting the parameters of an open environment so as to stimulate and channel the probable behaviors of a population, and to manage the risks entailed by its free and natural mobility, or indeed, by the expression of its desire. The problem of algorithmic governance of these living environments and their mobile users is as Foucault explains, “how they can say yes; it is how to say yes to this desire.” In a world where every aspect of one’s existence is targeted to capture and modulate desire within an environment that is a total control system. Our society, which displaces so much of its conflict into the future, is nonetheless the present framework in which individuals, groups and populations are all become cyborgs, that is, people bound inseparably to machines (i.e., mobile devices, tablets, wearables, and external environmental systems regulating their lives, movements, desires), struggling to make sense and to achieve purposes within these mediated environments that are expressly designed to modulate and manipulate them.

For Holmes our society’s obsession with controlling the future – and with insuring accumulation – has at least two major consequences. The first is the organization of a consumer environment for the immediate satisfaction of anticipated desires, with the effect of eliminating desire as such, and creating an atmosphere of suspended disbelief where entire populations move zombie-like and intellectually silent beneath exaggerated images of their unconscious drives. The second consequence, as we have seen with such violence in recent years, is the simple removal of those who might trouble this forcibly tranquilized landscape with any kind of disturbing presence or political speech. Caught between a J.G. Ballard novel of psychopathy and the loss of affect, where voyeurs act out monstrous events of murder and mayhem just to remember what it once meant to be alive. And the world where people vanish and disappear from your life, their memories erased from the digital records of corporate and government. We live at the beginning of an age where an older vision of humanity living out their natural lives amid the natural wonders of the world, raising families, developing friends and loved ones, creating a life shaped by memory and desire are giving way to something else.

This brave new world will generation by generation slowly disconnect from the human world, the human species: homo sapiens. It will develop both enhanced powers and dispositions of mind and flesh that previous naturals will be unable to keep pace with. The external world will become a site of living things, an animated environment catering to one’s every desire, policed by precognitive algorithms that will monitor the whole of society ubiquitous and with total awareness. To be part of this happy paradise all one will need to do is give up one’s illusion of self, individuality, and liberty. One will owned and branded by a corporation living out one’s life in serfdom to its exigencies. Else there will also be those born through cloning or external incubators who from birth will be excluded from full citizenship, and rather will be part of clade and caste system from birth to death. The technologies for such massive undertakings are partially in development even now. As for society accepting such a world one need only thing of 9/11 and how easy it was to instigate the Patriot Act which took away many freedoms that have not yet be returned. One can imagine certain events being staged and instigated to force the hand of societies to incorporate and recognize even darker regulations and laws to escape risk and conflict for a safe harbor and complete security and economic welfare.

As our children and their children become more enmeshed in this emerging algorithmic society in which their daily lives are 24/7 monitored, programmed, modulated by both corporate and governmental regulations and tasks the memory of their parents struggles and warning will vanish leaving only the revised records of a world under social control.

 

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1. Holmes, Brian. Future map or How the cyborgs learned to stop worrying and love surveillance. Continental Drift
2. Galison, Peter. The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision’, Critical Inquiry 21 (1994)
3. O’Neil, Cathy. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. Broadway Books; Reprint edition (September 6, 2016) 

 

 

A Short History of the City and the Cathedral

Liberalism, from this point forward, means nothing at all like state-happy progressivism. It is defined, instead, as the polar opposite of socialism. Its sole commanding value is liberty. It is individualist, only ever guardedly traditionalist, commercially and industrially oriented, strategically neglectful of care, skeptical in respect to all purported public agencies, and rigorously economical in respect to every dimension of government.

—Nick Land, Pyscho Politics

The mapping and cartography of the world through mathematical grids of longitude and latitude were the first algorithms of instrumental rationality: the temporalization of the world into time-zones that could be dominated. Being able to master time was a prerequisite to not only predicting the future, but programming it as well. During that long century of decline and ruin the dynamics of the City would be reduced to rubble by the formidable power of those gray men who cast a cold eye across anything living. Out of their gaze a Secular Cathedral of power, mastery, and death would encompass the globe in its tentacled reflexes as if some xenothanatropic agent of a zombiefied cold world had descended upon planet earth to infiltrate and capture the desires of humanity. It would slowly adapt its calculating mind to the planetary economy through a process of computational praxis. It’s reduction of the real to the ideal traces of a model would allow it to command and control every last aspect of energetic life on the planet. Nothing would escape its gaze.

Graphical statistics, the flattening of the world into diagrammatic algorithms would allow the world not only to be seen at a glance, but allow the first forecast models. This displacement from literature, history, and discursive practices onto mathematical diagrams brought us the dictatorship of calculable and measured facts. One can see in this the movement from geo-maps to managerial and administrative diagrams to the meta-management of the administrator’s themselves in flow-charts and organigrams. Out of this the Managerial State of the Cathedral would emerge not as some spontaneous order, but rather as the calculated growth of a centralized planning committee of bureaucratic command and control technologies. The world would be programmed according to pre-conceived plans of a military style cartography calculated down to absolute Zero.

Even the famous assembly lines and factory models of the Fordist era would be based on the geo-cartographies of military planning and calculation. The Factory itself as a war-economy under the guise of peacetime initiatives. Mass society seen as soldiers in an ongoing competitive and aggressive world of mathematical calculation and managed programming. During and after WWII central planning and modeling of society would give rise to the Managerial State. Academic, scientific, political and socio-cultural worlds under the command and control of cybernetic programming models would bring all of the world under the matheme: the total abstraction of the world as a model to be managed and controlled by technocratic experts and specialists.

Studying this Fredrich Hayek, Father of the free-market economy, would see in the central bureaucratic programming committee of the Cathedralists the “logics of slavery,” its subterranean tentacles forming the Empire of a Collective Machine. So with the new sciences of the brain arising out of cybernetics and systems theory he would develop a non-centric emergent system of spontaneous economic order to counter the rigid castes of this Managed Society. The self-organized socio-economic order Hayek modeled was based on the inherent crisis and conflict within any natural system, emerging “from the relationship and mutual adjustments between its constituent elements” he based his economic thought on chaos and disorder rather than order: a dynamic system adaptable to the flux and sway of the real world rather than the imposed fictions of the Cathedral’s utopian rigidity. In this way he envisioned a free-market system based on imitating the brain’s own processes: the spontaneous ordering properties of an ideal market which could not be controlled, modeled, or reduced to the Nineteenth century’s representational systems of cartographic, diagrammatic, or managed techniques of central command and control calculation and measurement. Nor to the reduction of the real to mathemes and ideal structures of quantified reason controlled by military planning of the Cathedral’s statist axiomatic. In this way Hayek believed he could circumvent the managed state’s control over and intervention in the free-market economy he envisioned.

This battle between the City and the Cathedral led to a differentiation between the universal notion of the world state of progressive socialism, and the more abstract and localized notions of free-market economics of crises, conflict, and disorder that would be based on the impersonal agency of corporate dynamics emerging out of the thanatropic rigidity of Cathedralism. This breakaway dynamism or accelerating of the inherent tendencies within liberty would revolutionize both the socio-cultural and economic systems of the planet for decades. But even this would not last…

With the advent of the vast apparatuses of the Cathedral’s regulatory tentacles, and the rise of ICT’s (Information and Communications Technologies of Social Control) in the later half of the twentieth century, and the turn toward autonomous machinic intelligence independent of human intervention and decisional processes we are seeing reemerge the totalistic technocratic Cathedral as the dream of total management of the Real. As this becomes more an more apparent under the auspices of the re-doubling of object and its data, reflected in the command and control structures of algorithmic governmentality, a new world of absolute control is rigidifying and closing off the dynamic positive feed-back loops of the time vectored power of the free-market economies. At every point of in the global territory, every object of the subject that inhabits it is being subjected and captured by its data base twin: the dividual. In this the map is the territory, and the active programming of the dividual trace of each and every individual is being reprogrammed into a system of absolute calculability. A Cognitive Gulag is being constructed and the Real virtualized and re-ontologized to give the appearance of freedom even as it dissolves it.

With the erasure of Subject, Free Will, Spontaneous order, chaos, etc. the Cathedral seeks to reduce the human to its inhuman core, the programmable functions of an impersonal process that can supervene upon the now outmoded modes of consciousness and begin to enslave it to the dictates of the central planning committee of a new Secular Religion: the Cathedral. Bypassing the conscious mind the Cathedral seeks to program the deep processes of the brain itself through intervention and control of the very inhuman core itself: the brain’s unconscious neuralnet. Seeking to automate society in both its organic and inorganic aspects the human will disappear into its machines reversing the age old augmentation process into originary technicity. Mindless and robotic the neohumans of this closed world of the Cathedral will perform functionally according to the normative programming of the Hierarchs. Humanity will see itself as free within this sphere of total control bounded only by its memoryless subjectivation in the machinic phylum. Robotic and automated the neohuman will no longer think for itself but will become part of the hive-mind of a central dataworld where its thoughts are activated and tasks are set according to archontic powers outside its grasp of intellect.

An affectless, neutered society will develop as CRISPR and other genome technologies of the convergent sphere come online, and a 24/7 world of pure work as play will evolve in the recycled matrix of a virtualized real. The actual and real world ontologized by the Internet-of-things will by design and deliberation control every aspect of life within the Sphere. These enclaves of the new Mega-Cities, the densified and verticalised cities will be based on strict striation and segmentary  caste based claves, divided between biogenetic hybrids and advanced technocratic Cyborgization. Naturals will be invested with bonds from birth to death by branded corporational serfdom, provided for and modulated by interface technologies that will program every aspect of their daily routines. This is the outcome of Hegelianism with a vengeance…

In the end Hayek’s dream of the free-market of spontaneous and uncontrolled disorder is reduced to the mathematical perfection and purity of a diagrammatic algorithm that can be controlled by the data controllers of a new machinic civilization arising in our midst: a managed Empire of Artilects and robots devoid of the human element of passion and personalism. The programmed territory becomes the completed world of a technocratic Cathedral, a order of perfectly controlled and virtualized environments: spheres, policed by the impersonal High Priests of Finance, Mediatainment, Academia, etc. all serving the new Archons of the Artificial Age.

Will the Hayekian disorder prevail over the order of the Cathedral? Will a new City of Pandemonium prevail over the closed world of the Cathedral’s re-ontologization of the Real? Will the blasted spheres of order caught in the meshes of the new Time-Lords break free or collapse within the virtual constructs of the gnostic archons death worlds? Who controls Time, anyway?

In ancient times the Gnostics assumed the world had been constructed by a delusional demiurge, a blind god who did not know what he was doing beyond the calculated measurement of his quantified plundering of the universal harmonium. In their view the universe of decay and entropy was absolute evil. A closed realm of absolute control in which humans were imprisoned and asleep, bound by habit and delusion. The awakened ones acted like anti-bodies in the universal decay, seeking to instill liberty into the dark thoughts of the sleepers. One can see in this a fractured and literalized parable of our situation in the present era of the Cathedral. Asleep in the timeless presentism of this closed world of algorithmic governmentality we are being slowly folded into a machinic phylum from which there will be no exit. Our time is limited, this is the moment of transition in-between times – a brief period of chaotic opportunity when we can accelerate these dark processes and counter the very inverted time-machine of this negative feed-back system, reversing its closure into openness and incompleteness and liberty. The time is short, the ways and means assured: What will you do? The City of Liberty or the Cathedral of Control? As in the parables of old, one is left with the admonishment:

Sleepers, awaken! You have nothing to lose but your chains.

 

 

Manufacturing Panic: Social Engineering, Domination and Control

In the 21st century, the social engineering of dread and longing have evolved into a bio-political arena of terror and a psycho-political culture of internalized domination. The globally deployed technology of the spectacle transforms to a creative panic industry, the pacification of the self and the silencing of multitudes. With no visible alternatives to universal pancapitalism there seems to be no need for payoffs for the disenchanted, no necessity to bribe the dissenting segments of the population and no incentive to grant extension of freedoms.1

Instead of peddling hope and visions of mutually shared commonwealth, authority is maintained by the production of synthetic fear and the need to secure property against some other. Deimos and Phobos, the gods of panic, angst and terror dominate the omni-directional realm of geo-psychological strategies in an asymmetric world war against invisible enemies without qualities. Market concentrations benefit neo-feudal power structures that know how to use access to media, private security and intelligence services to advance their interests. Austerity, power, and impersonal anonymity interface with a world replete with vast global migrations, desperation, and panic victims who willingly comply and give up liberties for shared security. An Orwellian world of competing agencies, wars, famines, and pestilence drive the panic cities of current criminal elements to traffic in sex, drugs, and war.

Private oligarchic networks of finance and business cartels cultivate relations to governmental entities controlling state agencies and military units. Media narratives and public relations strategies transform synthetic fear into advantages that produce windfalls of power and profit. This theater of fear is a skillful interplay of compartmentalized information units, privatized command centers, loyal officials and gatekeepers as well as professional Special Forces. Technocommercial Black-Ops programs that infiltrate both governmental and public spheres through experimental use of technics and pharmakon in collusion with DARPA and other shadow or Deep State agencies across the globe provide a base infrastructure for a 21st century society of control. Productions of artificial angst call for scenarios of counter-terrorist theater rehearsals and paramilitary actors as well as the professional staging of scapegoats and dupes. The dark networks draw on privatized intelligence units, so called “asteroids”, business entities which provide cover for compartmentalized operations.2

Space was formerly known as heaven and manned space flight from earth could be understood as mechanical equivalent to an ascent to divinity. Johannes Kepler suspected paradise to be located on the moon and Konstantin Tsiolkowsky, the Russian pioneer of modern rocket science, saw manned space flight as a freeway to the supernatural. In his novel “Gravity’s Rainbow” Thomas Pynchon contemplates the ambiguous interrelations between sex, rockets and magic.

Jack Parsons, a key figure in American rocketry, lost his reputation and security clearance in obsessive pursuit of occult rituals and sexual mumbo-jumbo before he diffused into space in a lab explosion in 1952. A crater on the dark side of the moon is named in memory of Parsons, a tribute to the shady cofounder of the famed Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The 19th century spiritualist pseudoscience of a world of ghosts and occult belief in spirits, a complex adaptation to modernity, has morphed into 20th century sciences. From social theories and “optimization” of the workplace, from operations research to scientific communication and applied psychology, many genres of academic disciplines and the influence business are rooted in the twilight zone of the netherworlds.

When Norbert Wiener, who developed his work on cybernetics from ballistics research, writes that “Communication and control belong to the essence of man’s inner life, even as they belong to his life in society” he evokes the ancient art of assessing the human personality and exploiting motivations. Developed out of clandestine mind control programs in the 1960’s, the methodical application of Personality Assessment Systems became standard operating procedure in business and intelligence. Systems of discipline and control which took shape in the 19th century on the basis of earlier procedures have mutated into new and aggressive forms, beyond simplistic theories of state and sovereignty. In the past, the science of power branched into the twin vectors of political control and control of the self.

In the 21st century the technologies of material control and subjective internalization are in a process of converging. The traditional twin operations, with which the authorities aim to win the hearts and minds, the binding maneuvers of law enforcement and the dazzling illusionist control of the imagination, are transforming into each other. Not unlike werewolves using the powers of the moon for a violent metamorphosis, contemporary agencies of power turn into shape shifters and fluctuating modes of dominance. Star Wars technology shape-shifts into applications of creative industries, into the domain of desire, imagination and mediated lunacy.

Technologies of individualization bound to controllable identities and the global machinery of homogenization are superimposing to a double-bind of contemporary power structures. The renaissance heretic Giordano Bruno anticipates these developments in his visionary treatise “De Vinculis in Genere” – a general account of bonding – on operational phantasms and the libidinal manipulation of the human spirit. The disputatious philosopher of an infinite universe, beyond his unique investigation into the imaginary and the persuasion of masses and the individual, also challenged the ontological separation between the spheres of the heavens and the sublunary world of his time.

Today, in a technological marriage of heaven and earth, there is a full spectrum military entertainment fusion of global conflict management. A strategic analysis of the enforced colonization of space and mind will certainly provide a more comprehensive understanding of the parameters of life and death on planet Earth. The extraterrestrial highway in the United States, is near the zone 51, a top secret area of the American army. In this zone “black projects” subjected to the secrecy defense are carried out. In 1994 a Congressional subcommittee revealed that up to 500,000 Americans were endangered by secret defense related tests between 1940 and 1974. They included covert experiments with radioactive materials, mustard gas, LSD, and biological agents.3

Disneyland and the global media sightings of men on the moon are exemplary for the universal power of imagination management and the spectacle. Receptiveness for the spectacle is deeply embedded in human desires for excitement, stimulation, knowledge acquisition and the construction of self esteem. Largely based on the biocybernetic exploitation of human response mechanisms that influence emotion, excitement and thrill, the technological spectacle in its play with danger and disorientation is rooted in the biology of ancient neural patterns. But its arena has been dramatically extended through technology. The machinery of the spectacle generates affect by triggering failures of orientation and control. This can be loss of physical balance, a rollercoaster ride or cognitive dissonance. The intensity of affect is directly correlated with the depth of disorientation and the more that vital human response structures are touched, the deeper the effect. Contextual parameters of relatively secure environments allow appreciating these disorientations as hedonistic experiences instead of discomfort and panic. These mechanisms trigger delight and numinous experiences, moving and enthusing audiences.

Aldous Huxley once remarked that there are two kinds of propaganda—

rational propaganda in favor of action that is consonant with the enlightened self-interest of those who make it and those to whom it is addressed, and non-rational propaganda that is not consonant with anybody’s enlightened self-interest, but is dictated by, and appeals to, passion. 4

In the years and decades ahead both invasive and non-invasive technologies will enslave the uneducated masses, luring them with technologies of delight or fear to do the bidding of the Oligarchs without little or any resistance since for the most part people will willingly give up there freedoms for comfort, security, and happiness. Of course not all will give into such notions, nor condone the power of persuasion through both extrinsic propaganda and public relations, nor intrinsically through technological pharmakon or invasive forms of implants or nanobots. But these resistant anti-bodies will like any virus be hunted down and annihilated in a society that will have become a unified fascist enclave, a mindless world of automated machines both inorganic and organic. For in the end there will be no barriers between them, only the merger and enhancement of their twined potentials. This is the dark truth-condition of our future… can we stop it? And, more importantly, will we have the tools necessary to break down the walls enclosing us in this fabricated hall of mirrors, this cognitive concentration camp?

As Zizek recently said:

“What I’m afraid of is a possibility of a direct contact-link between our brain, what we are thinking, and a computer network, because there we lose our autonomy.”

He warned that soon computers will be able to control the human mind, misleading the individual to believe they are still in control of their thoughts and reality. Under this arrangement, Zizek argues, humans will lose their autonomy and will become indistinguishable from the machines.

“What is much more dangerous is… if our brains will be directly linked to computers so we will lose our inner freedom. Even in the worst of Nazism… those in power could not control what you are thinking. You can have your inner thoughts… Now with a direct link between our brain and the digital network, we lose our inner freedom,” the philosopher said.

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1. Konrad Becker, Hypno Politics, Hyper State Control, Law Entrainment and the Symbolic Order. Center for Cognitive Liberty (2015)
2. Lofgren, Mike. The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government. Penguin Books (January 5, 2016); Englehardt, Tom. Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World. Haymarket Books (September 15, 2014)
3. Valentine, Douglas. The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World. Clarity Press (December 31, 2016)
4. Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World Revisited. Harper Perennial; Reprint edition (July 1, 2014)

 

 

The Neoliberal Utopia: Absolute Surveillance and the Digital Panopticon Society

In military applications, we envision the remote deployment of swarms of microrobots that are available to locate, track, target and destroy people and machines with little human intervention. For more complex applications, swarms will be guided by groups of people who are enhanced with mental and physical prosthetics and advanced collaboration tools to enable exceptional rapid collective decision making in dynamic, confusing and ambiguous situations.

—Gerold Yonas and Curtis Johnson, Sandia Lab, May 19, 200

In the near future the re-ontologization of the real will entail ubiquitous environments, artificial zones of fully digitalized worlds of objects – an internet of things indexed, filtered, addressed, formatted, and connected in a completed panopticon of electronic data. Hidden and invisible the new world will follow you 24/7 pre-determining your choices and decisions, guiding ever aspect of your daily life, modulating both your physical and mental health and security. Such a completed surveillance society of absolute control will to those living within its environs seem like a technoparadisial utopia: a future technocratic state run by machines and AGI’s. Such is the vision of neoliberal trends in the techno-commercium. The totally managed society where human and machine have erased all boundaries between thought and technology, flesh and technics. A world controlled by algorithmic negotiations and neo-rationalist normativity, functionalized to the point of utter comatose automation.

Of course the hype factor and projected feasibility of eliminating risk in such an absolute corporatocracy seems almost a bland and boring matrix of financial stupidity, yet if one reads the literature within advanced fields of biometric and data surveillance this is the underlying goal: a society controlled from end to end by machinic surveillance and ubiquitous computing in which everything external and internal, extrinsic and intrinsic is digitalized, mathematized, and governed by algorithmic metrics without the users permissions or knowledge.

Certain Japanese companies, using a joint research Towards a “planetary” and ubiquitous code centre – the “Ubiquitous ID Centre” – have developed technology enabling them to obtain “a unique identification code, which, when applied to ‘real world objects,’ makes them easy to read on a computer.” This ucode could replace many different codes that are applied to objects, whether they are Japanese or European inscription codes of objects or existing standardisations. Each individual object can be inscribed with an ID address since the capacities of this new code are gigantic. The basic 128-bit code can be extended to 256, 384 or 512 bits. If we only consider the 128-bit figure, 34×1037 codes (34 followed by 37 zeros) can be attributed to it, that is, a billion labels can be attributed to objects and/or living organisms every day for over a billion years.

All the above is summed up in the definition of the main aims of the Ubiquitous ID Center: “The goal of the Ubiquitous ID Center is to establish and spread the infrastructure technologies for automatically recognizing ‘things,’ thus allowing for the creation of ubiquitous computing environments”. The first essential aspect of the internet of objects and living organisms involves an attempt to set up a full-size panopticon, like that described by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish.

The other essential aspect evoked in this definition is to allow for the creation of ubiquitous computing environments. This time the aim is to bring to the traditional, heavy, in short, rather stupid, real world, new, radically digitalisable objects that can be added more and more successfully to the general panopticon that is being created. Here a new element appears which can help bring out another essential link in the general digitalisation project: the reconstruction of the “real world”. The “panopticon” can only be set up in the social fields that have previously been “rationalised, formatted”, and which are ready to receive the good news of the progress of digitalisation.1

Through education and indoctrination our children within a generation will come to accept such a world not only as a possibility, but as the only reality they know as real. The fears and qualms that we have toward such worlds will die with us, replaced with a generation that has grown up in such ubiquitous surveillance zones without any thought that it might be otherwise. The manufactured consent of the baseline education and indoctrination system of that culture will program these children to passively accept the total regulated environments due to other fears and security needs.

As such combinations of machinic and human enhanced therapies and propaganda systems take over the techno-commercium of that era the need to master new skills and specialized performance strategies will allow corporations to brand these neo-humans as property, providing them with the necessary medial, pharmaceutical, and invasive technologies necessary to get ahead in such competitive worlds as the new mega-cities of the future will entail. People will – even if skeptically, allow microchip technology and other invasive systems of health and security to be implanted as part of corporate security and employment. One sees this in Australia already within the banking and military industries. Soon it will come to a corporation near you.

Welcome to the brave new world of ubiquitous tyranny… of course this is a parody assimilation of data I’ve gathered, so there is a possibility to resist, but that window is closing fast. If we sit by and do nothing the time will pass when one has the opportunity to resist. Of course in the other part of the scenario I did not delve into is all those who will resist will be excluded from such access to security, comfort, and enhanced lives. One will live in the favelas of a dead world where life will be short, mean, and ugly. Controlled by the ever present world of drones and machinic systems of surveillance and policing that will disallow rebellion or resistance other than resentment. Sadly in such a realm one’s only hope will be to end it quickly…

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1. Tobin, Ami. Surveillance Zone: The Hidden World of Corporate Surveillance Detection & Covert Special Operations.  CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (May 21, 2017)

The Laboratory of Desire

Today the greatest ignominies exist not because we commit them but because we let them happen. They develop inside emptiness.

—Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

More than any other significant project in our time it has not been the erasure of the boundaries of thought and technology, nor that of flesh and technics, but rather the erosion of the entropic distance between life and death. We live in a time when the very prison house of life is giving way to neganthropic laughter of eternal death-in-Life. Is this not the presumed project of H++, the extropian soteriology of the secular priests of our age seeking none other than immortality by whatever means.

From the Singulatarian dreams of Ray Kurzweil to the dance of convergence tech invading the human genome in Zoltan Istvan this secular mysticism of immanent exit seems madly reminiscent of all those syncretic cults of redemption during the late Roman Empire. Whether one seeks escape into some virtual cave of immortalist electronics, or the merger of mind and machine in the robotic transmutation and alchemy of machinic life we seem teetering on the edge of species death at the hands of our own ghastly dreams and nightmares of eternity. An inverted monotheistic hybrid this secular age of machines and artificial intelligence has triggered age old dreams of desire. Like children of some lost covenant, or the Promethean desolation of some broken quest for mastery, we are entering the last stage of the human condition reversing the poles of technicity. Allowing the prosthetic child of our long journey to exit us in its autonomous quest of transcension we are giving birth to monstrous worlds.

American History has never existed, only its myth, the strewn leaves of some grand narrative recycled under the mask of liberal or conservative appetites, and depending on the splicing and editing of those involved one gains neither an accurate representation nor a parodic tale of ultimate degradation and toxic grandiosity. Instead one is left with a dismal wasteland of competing dialogues which for an Alien Mind never mesh into a whole or totality (which was always a myth and mystic rationality anyway!), but rather the fabricated sequences of an ongoing apocalypse.

Are we not reenacting a staged drama, a script from the futurial gradients of some hypervalent mind whose sole reduplication of action and thought is to manipulate the tertiary stream of memory and desire of the human herd? Like cattle being led to slaughter we seem oblivious to the underlying currents of our age, as if the compliant mindlessness were itself a part of the very functional programming of our contemporary rationality: the normative give and take of a forgotten system of control that has always seemed to trigger its effects retroactively during the recycled temporal infestation of fear and horror, hate and bigotry. Hasn’t it always taken the destruction of a world to create one? Only a literalist of the spirit would contemplate the sadness of eternity. We have no time for sadness.

Like the lost tribes of some insignificant thought we move in zombie like fashion to the music of dead angels. Clipped even of our wings we wander this earth thinking we are free to choose our destinies, when in fact the future works its way backwards like some trickster speaking gibberish to awaken the holy fools from their distempered lives. No, this is not a world, but rather a laboratory of experimental decay and growth seeking through the electric flesh of corporeal desire to create something new, an impossible possible. Chance and necessity working hand in hand are producing in the alchemy of desire a new world out of the ruins of the old, and we who are the ‘last men’ are entering the dust of oblivion giving birth to strange gods.

Since we are already dead, let’s make the most of it!

(Zapatista proverb)

 

Alien Paradise

There may well be little in the way of a “master” narrative to fight over in our liberal society amidst the throng of abusive individuals all trying to prove that they exist and are unique, but this, especially with regard to the now central position of social media sites like Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter, has not stopped it from becoming a kind of all too obviously wretched, desensitising war of all against all with plastic dreams. Would simply adding more miraculous accelerationist technology somehow cure the “ressentiment” inherent in our liberal society and the obvious fact that overweening pretensions towards individualism and egalitarianism have not been mediated, but worsened? Where is that magical bullet when one needs it? In a world where History, the secular myth, has ended for all intents and purposes, the only thing left is the rational core of an inhuman gaze out of a dark and interminable future transforming earth into an alien paradise.

We Are Closer Than You Think

“We believe that Black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.” – The Ten Point Program: Point One

True, I agree, when you realize the U.S.A. is nothing but an open prison system with no bars. As Angela Davis said in a recent interview with Barat:

“I think of the Black Power movement—or what we referred to at the time as the Black liberation movement—as a particular moment in the development of the quest for Black freedom. In many ways it was a response to what were perceived as limitations of the civil rights movement: we not only needed to claim legal rights within the existing society but also to demand substantive rights—in jobs, housing, health care, education, et cetera—and to challenge the very structure of society. Such demands—also against racist imprisonment, police violence, and capitalist exploitation—were summed up in the Ten-Point Program of the Black Panther Party (BPP). Although Black individuals have entered economic, social, and political hierarchies (the most dramatic example being the 2008 election of Barack Obama), the overwhelming number of Black people are subject to economic, educational, and carceral racism to a far greater extent than during the pre–civil rights era. In many ways, the demands of the BPP’s Ten-Point Program are just as relevant—or perhaps even more relevant—as during the 1960s, when they were first formulated.”

I think right there in rule one: “We believe that Black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.”, it charts the necessity of erasing the past humiliations and defeats, the history of slavery and subjugation that these statues not only symbolize but are the very material reminders of a dread period that must be destroyed beyond remembrance accept as a justification to liberation and emancipation.

And, the truth is it must be done by Blacks for Blacks to allow that determination to sink in an root itself in the very remembrance of such atrocities overcome through solidarity and community. As well as part of the very real material praxis needed to continue rooting out the racism in these American states through economic, social, political, and all other aspects.

The Labour of Freedom comes at a price, and that price is the destruction of the social relations that continue to subjugate and enslave the minds and hearts of people everywhere to an authoritarian corporate and statist system of global oppression.

When you think about it the world is truly a very small place, and we have traveled very far to know we have traveled nowhere. Homo sapiens (DNA) are all connected, there is no race: only humanity. It is the only actual material universal.

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1. Davis, Angela; Barat, Frank; West, Cornel (FRW). Freedom Is a Constant Struggle : Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement

Paul Virilio: On Stelarc and the Post-human

This gallery contains 5 photos.

If Derrida was concerned with the erasure of the boundaries between thought and technology, then Stelarc and Virilio from complementary explorations were concerned rather with the erasure of the boundaries between flesh (matter) and technology. Stelarc would enact the invasive … Continue reading →

Forgetting Man

Clear-sighted and quite mad, man has no peer: a true outrage to the laws of nature, nothing suggested his advent. Was he necessary, this being ethically more misshapen than any dinosaur physically? Scrutinizing him objectively it becomes apparent why he is not made the subject of reflection with impunity. One monster pondering another becomes doubly monstrous: forgetting man, as well as the idea he incarnates, should form the preamble to any therapeutics. Promoted to the rank of incurables, we are matter in pain, shrieking flesh, bones pierced by cries, and our very silences are no more than a strangled lamentation. We suffer, ourselves alone, much more than the rest of creation, and our torment, encroaching upon reality, substitutes for it, so that a man who suffered absolutely would be absolutely conscious…

—Emile Cioran

 

The Parasite

Source of Consciousness Found?

Harvard Researchers say they have found the Source of Human Consciousness. Interesting how this backs up speculative realist notions, in that they discovered the source of consciousness when it was broken, damaged or destroyed:

Those subjects who were unconscious showed damage to a small area of the brainstem known as the rostral dorsolateral pontine tegmentum. “When it is damaged, almost every patient became comatose,” Fox said. Only one of the 24 conscious patients did not see damage to this area of the brainstem. Due to this, researchers established that the tiny region plays a vital role in consciousness. Next, the neuroscientists turned to a map of the human connectome to investigate the connections between regions. They found two areas in the cortex connected to this part of the brainstem. That led them to believe that these three regions make up a neural network from which, consciousness derives.

Where exactly these connections terminate in the cortex is not yet known. One ends at a part called the left, ventral, anterior insula (AI). The other concludes in the pregenual anterior cingulate cortex (pACC). Both areas are associated with awareness. But this is the first time they have been implicated in a neural network, never mind one which creates and maintains consciousness. In a follow-up segment, researchers examined the brains of 45 patients in a coma or vegetative state with an fMRI. They found in all the patients that these three regions were out of commission.

Let Us Remember to make Dreams into Realities!

From I Have a Dream by Martin Luther King, Jr.

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today!

 

Aldous Huxley’s Neoliberal Dystopia

Aldous Huxley, author of Doors of Perception and the Brave New World, on March 20 1962, he gave a lecture at the UC Berkley in which he clearly laid out the vision of a planned future society which appears the blueprint of a Neoliberal Dystopia:

In the past, we can say that all revolutions have essentially aimed at changing the environment in order to change the individual. Today, we are faced with the approach of what may be called the ultimate revolution, the final revolution where man can act directly on the mind and body of his fellows. The nature of the ultimate revolution which we are now faced is precisely this; that we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy that always existed and presumably will always exist, to get people to actually love their servitude.

First of all, to standardize the population, to iron out inconvenient human differences. To create mass produced models of human beings, arranged in some kind of a scientific class system. The number of predictions which were purely fantastic when I made them 30 years ago, have come true or are in the process of coming true; not through terror but through making life much more enjoyable than it normally does. Enjoyable to the point where human beings come to love the state of things that by any reasonable human standard they ought not to love. And this, I think, is perfectly possible.

This did not come to pass, and yet as one looks upon the current crop of neoliberal intellectuals one hears the echoes of such planned worlds even now. Depopulation of work by machinic systems, the slow and methodical enslavement of humanity to the devices they cherish as part of their mobile internet of things, the escape into virtual reality fantasies, the twisted dreams of transhuman enchancement and performance, military cyborgs and robots, the singular dream of a collective intelligence in AGI. All these being promoted as the solution to an Oligarch’s wet dreams: sex bots and smart worlds – fully controlled environments catering to every whim. An algorithmic world that thinks for you, acts for you, decides for you. Leave the dreaming to us so you can wile the hours away in you luxury yachts or off-world paradises.

And, yet, while the Oligarchs, Plutocrats, and their minions dream of paradise the 99% excluded from such worlds will live in hell among the deadly and toxic wastelands of a depleted earth. A realm of war, famine, and pestilence fitted out with technocratic surveillance and techno-commercial enslavement. Yes, the bright future turned dark in a space of lifeless zombies hooked into the globalnet of death. Under austerity in the EU and U.S.A. a passive and compliant citizenry will ick out a menial existence even as the elite strip them of all remaining life-support systems. Street level civil-strife and battles among ethno-nationalists and Nazified warmongers along with red-and-black anarchists and communists will erode what remains of civilization in this outer wasteland till all that remains is the death squads of some hypermachinic policing agents to mop up what isn’t already dead.

The key word is control, in all of it manifestations. The National Science Foundation NBIC 2001 report spends an exorbitant amount of time on examining control and human behavior. I quote:

The multiple drivers of human behavior have long been known. Now, through the decoding of complex systems a completely predictable and managed society can be realized…. To use the tremendous computing power we now have to integrate data across those fields to create new models and hence new understanding of the behavior of the individuals. The ultimate goal is acquiring the ability to predict the behavior of an individual, and by extension, of the group … using tools and approaches provided by science and technology – will raise our ability to predict behavior. It will allow us to interdict undesirable behaviors before they cause significant harm to others and to support and encourage behaviors leading to greater social good.

Such abilities of intervention remind us of the movie made on P.K. Dick’s short story Minority Report comes to mind. In a future society, three mutants foresee all crime before it occurs. Plugged into a great machine, these “precogs” allow the Precrime Division to arrest suspects prior to any infliction of public harm. When the head of Precrime, John A. Anderton, is accused of murdering Leopold Kaplan, a man whom he has never met, Anderton is convinced a great conspiracy is afoot. His new assistant, Ed Witwer, must have corrupted the system in an attempt to oust him from the position. On the run and suspicious of even his wife, Anderton searches for the minority report to clear his name, as only two out of the three precogs predicted his guilt. Through a series of betrayals and changing alliances, Anderton discovers that the three predictions are rather a progression of alternate realities. In order to maintain the authority of Precrime, Anderton consciously decides to kill Kaplan, thereby affirming the validity of the second majority report. Anderton is thus exiled with his wife to life on a frontier colony and replaced by Witwer as head of Precrime. The story ends with Anderton’s advice to his successor: “Better keep your eyes open. It might happen to you at any time.”

Obviously this need not be. Humans could wake up and realize that it is by design that they war among themselves in the streets while the rich and powerful sit atop their empires of pleasure, laughing at the fools and their ideological games of hate: funded by the very Oligarchs to obliterate and depopulate the earth. Why do humans fall into the same traps over and over and over? Are we truly programmable? Passivated to allow the vast Cathedral of the Managerial State to control us so easily with these passive-aggressive messages and propaganda views of a Manichean universe of pure hate and evil. Like children in a sandbox we build our King on the Hill dime book mythologies replete with cartoonish philosophies to guide us in killing, maiming, and terrorizing each other rather than the Oligarchs and their minions. Why?

All our protest movements change nothing, they only bring out the worst in us and allow the very powers that be to triumph over us as they unleash the power of the State to beat us back into submission. The very act of protest itself becomes a tool in the hands not of the weak, but of the strong who rule us and seek and goad us to fight among ourselves. Like dupes in a sad Reality TV series we play our hands against each other to the nth degree: conniving, lying, cajoling, playing one off the other, till all morality turns a-moral and our normative stance becomes absolutely inhuman to the core. All the while the dictators who have set up this gaming strategy after decades of military and civilian trial and test sit back and await the body count to begin. They have no need of us, no emotional investment in our wants and needs. They seek only to obsolesce us, replace us with their machines in the coming decades. We are but the detritus of an obsolete civilization in ruins, and they know this even as they seek means to control and pacify us, tame us and domesticate us like cattle. We become nothing but the malleable meat of a dying planet in the economic grid of their profit system. They will continue to strip us of every remaining surplus bit of profit till we are no longer useful, then we all know what comes next.

I’ve asked myself for decades why we accept such merciless realms. Why we ick out such meager existences, scrape by in a world where we must work two or more jobs just to help our families survive. And, now, even that is on the plate to be scrapped in the coming decades. Will people wake up then when it is too late. Will they rebel against the stupidity and control of their lives? I used to be hopeful, not anymore. I’ve seen thousands of trees stripped to allow book after book published telling us that if we allow this to go on that this is what will happen… no one has yet to change it. It has not gotten better, only worse. Why? Why is humanity so fearful of its masters? Why do we allow a system that treats us as so much fodder in their grist mill to be excluded and depopulated at their command and control? Why do we continue to accept our lot? I have no answer, only more questions. Like many I keep thinking an event will spark the collective will of the poor, excluded, and confused out of their apathy and allow them to take the bull by the horns and rid themselves of this dark system of enslavement. Somewhere deep in my own pessimism I still hope even in despair that this is so.

I often think that what makes us human is not the power of thought, which it seems even machines are beginning to duplicate. No. It is the indefinable gestures of affect. I remember years ago on Red Skelton’s show as he’d end each segment he would enact a mime of his famous hobo character, the clown of the outcast and excluded one. Dressed in tattered clothing, an old round hat upon his head, a stubbly beard and the silent echoes of a tormented creature on the edge of existence. In one of these performances I remember him acting as if he were in a field of flowers and a young girl was crying for whatever reason. He tried everything under the sun to dissuade her from tears, until in frustration he reached out to the one lone blooming yellow flower sitting in the midst of the field and plucked it. Handing it to the young girl in a gesture of both humility and love and caring. One human bridging that silence between us all seeking in the gesture of care a fellow feeling beyond hopelessness. Of course in the mime one had to envision this young girl (who was a mere fantasy to the audience, and invisible!) looking up into the eyes of this forlorn creature, this destitute hobo who lived on the road amid rusty rails. Her eyes suddenly lighting up, a curl of a smile awakening on her lips as she accepted the strange man’s flower. In that moment the perfection of mime, that art of the impossible gesture revealed the secret of human love. Our ability to care beyond the pale of our own narcissistic dreams for another…

Maybe this is all we have left: a philosophy of gesture, of act, of caring… of reaching across that void between voids to the enemy letting them know death and destruction are not the answer, that we must learn to live together on this dire planet of pain else end it all. There will probably always be conflict of some kind on this planet, it being filled with predators and predation and organic life that feeds off plant and animal alike. Say that ours is the killing planet, and we are all locked in a deterministic universe of pain and suffering. Knowing this shall we like Buddha or Christ seek transformation and unearthly exit, or shall we like the political messiahs seek peace, or just seek some form of equitable balance among the predatory forces of our physical and mental worlds, sustain a realm in which no one has the natural right to lord it over any other? Can we create a society that seeks neither to reduce or flatten humanity into some clone-like system of university managed by elite experts, but instead one that honors the truth of both our inner and external, intrinsic and extrinsic intellects and affective passions and build a truly human world for humans? Neither fully idealistic nor materialist but some as yet undreamed of realist realm where people open their eyes and see things not as they should be but as they are… and, then deals with it day by day.

Let’s Get Something Out in the Open

Canvas, 14×11″

Let’s get something out in the open… I’m not here to preach or polemicize – even if I do come off that way at times. I’m not here to save the world. I’m not here to please you. I’m not here for you at all. If at times I say things that bother you, irk you, make you angry or get under your skin it’s you not me that is allowing that to happen. When I began blogging a few years back it was for one reason, to examine my own life, my thought, my beliefs in the sense in which that old goat, Socrates meant – under Plato’s mask: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

I’ve always tended toward literary things as a matter of course. Politics, philosophy, the sciences and history along with sociology, psychology, essays and many other aspects of our cultural heritage have always been a part of my ongoing education. And that’s how I see it… I write to educate and work through thoughts we all share in the public sphere. I’m no great savant, no published author of novels, philosophy, or anything of value other than to myself. People always assume too much, assume a blog is some platform to speak to others. It may be to others, and I use the stock pose as do others of speaking as if I had an audience who is interested in overhearing my thoughts. It’s a cliché of the trade, folks, nothing more.

We all have opinions and concerns, but at times I’ve had people who begin trolling me as if my message was to them personally so that they take it upon themselves to begin a slow and methodical attack. That’s fine, just don’t expect me to sit back and take it. I’m nasty if I need to be like most other humans. I don’t trust politicians, or philosophers, or any intellectual authority or experts with matters of life or mind. As I stated before I am a contrarian who opposes above all… the bullshit and mindlessness around me. It’s stupidity and ignorance that bothers me, not people per se and if I get obnoxious and overwrought, long-winded and polemical at times it’s because some things just get my goat and I have to get it out of my system. During these episodes I can be cantankerous and down right mean spirited toward ideas, but I don’t mean anything personal about it. It’s just my way. No excuses for it. No apology, either.  

People always want you to be other than you are… want you to meet their expectations, be what they themselves are not. Why should I live up to your expectations if you don’t do that yourself? I’m not here to be either your friend or enemy, I’m not here for you at all. If you come upon my blog and happen to agree or disagree it’s because that’s the way we’re built. We’re all contrarians at heart, even when we deny it. We’re all opinionated and full of strange ideas and modes of being. If we weren’t the world truly would be a place of pure repetition and boring as hell… I for one am glad it isn’t.

I can be a bastard at times, granted. I can be a stodgy old cuss, cynical and pessimistic to boot. At other times I tend toward the idealism I despise because like Whitman and Emerson I have a sign above my door that says: “Whim!” So don’t try to peg me down, reduce me to some singular thought or philosophical or even, scientific spectrum of ideas. If I contradict myself, it’s because I have no self; it’s rather an ongoing project not some pre-existing agency. I’m not what I will be… I AM what I Am Not.  Motion, movement, thought… the accelerating vector of a multiplicity. Schizophrenizing rather than schizophrenic: a difference that makes a difference.

My two mainstays: James Joyce and Thomas Pynchon. Between them I oscillate like a yo-yo in-between gathering the cultural worlds of our modernity. The one Irish-Catholic of ancient Celtic stock whose mind sought exit from family, church, and State. The other Jewish born, an inner émigré of ancient traditions, a gnostic-kabbalist whose comic pessimism riddles the world with paranoiac dreams between paradise and apocalypse. Joyce the kinder and gentler voice of Liffy, goddess of returns and beginnings. Pynchon the scream across the void of war and death, the living remains of our ruins and days. Both challenging the extremities of our radical imaginations, presenting us with the worlds past, present, and to come. Neither prophet or savior, only two men at the ends of man seeking answer for the human condition.

Deluded we stand united in this condition of the human. Our Buddhas and Christs would offer us paths out of the delirium. Our philosophers like Plato or Aristotle offer both and neither – the one sponsoring the exit from the simulacrum; the other seeking a way into rather than out of its sensual entrapments, and understanding of its motions and forms. Wandering in the circular worlds of thought after them have we truly come any closer to knowing or being? No. We’ve all filled in the dots and niches of our ignorance with more ignorance, trapped in the darkness of the Mind, our thoughts given to us from the Outside in of the brain’s own cave we exist only as a construct of momentary motion, memory, and thought in-between the self-reflective void of a void so luminous we cannot move beyond its horizon. And, yet, how wondrous it is this lustrous emptiness we are…

So it begins…

The Consilience: A Dark Dystopian Future

Over time I’ve used my blog site as a sort of shadow world to post thoughts on my current deep project which has been for several years a dystopian nightmare novel of the near future…

Strangely one imagines a dystopian/utopian fable (depending on which side of the divide one is on?) future in which humans are so stratified that reproduction is denied to physical humans who have become sexless due to CRISPR initiatives during the Age of Overpopulation in the Twenty-Second Century when population reached thirty billion with billions starving every year due to climacteric and agricultural depletion, drought, famine, pestilence, etc.

A time when reproduction is allotted through biotechnological overview and synthetic adaptation through a lottery system controlled by elite enhanced citizens who live in intelligent environments (i.e., the so called smart cities). The separation of enhanced, cyborgian, and naturals becomes the tripartite division of the social strata of this era. Dark days indeed…

With artificial wombs and most humans neutered and non-reproductive clones (i.e., the new bioslavery of the future) one imagines this dark cladistics and caste based civilization with technological and enhanced citizens inhabiting the more refined and decadent off-world and paradisial cities, while the remaining naturals and clones living in the enforced Megacities and favelas of the last remaining worker hives.

I’m taking the extreme notion of our current neoliberal oligarchic and plutocratic worldview to its extreme finality (if there is such a thing), in which automation, robotics, superintelligence, biogenetics, information, surveillance and security, and social control have become enmeshed to the point of no return: a static society of machinic life under the rule of enhanced elites of wealth, intellect, and enhanced biogenetic stratification. A world where climate change has flooded most of the Old Earth and what remains is a dark realm of City States based on Corporotacracy. One imagines Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World updated to the convergence technologies of our moment: NBIC – nano, biotech, Information and Communication tech, with total surveillance society and apartheid mentality. For about four years I’ve been working with different aspects of this triptych near future novel which is finally taking on a story of adventure and obviously revolutionary resistance to such an extreme world. Still lots of work to be done… and most of my blog writing has been but a shadow of this other work I’ve not spoken about too much.

As one imagines how the elite have used every means at their disposal to depopulate the  earth and replace humanity with an automated society it becomes more than disturbing. In some ways such a extreme future entails even a more disastrous vision than even most conspiracy theorists would consider as anything other than an inferno, because it extrapolates from known scientific and philosophical speculation of our current moment which is based solidly in material infrastructural and superstructual elements. I’ve always felt one needs to push the pessimistic line of argument to have a chance to see the hopeful alternative that a resistance movement to such a dark world might bring about. My problem was to set forth the complex relations among various stratified worlds of human and non-human dimensions that would spark a true rebellion and transformation into a brighter future. Using the standard triptych or trilogy to spread the dystopian world and its transformation into a more hopeful future seems relevant to such a large undertaking. Throwing the reader in media res – into the middle of the action without a clue of what came before or where things are going seems like the best way to begin a anti-novelistic dystopian novel, one that takes the standard unreliable narrator and anti-hero as the point of view for the creature neither fully human or non-human; an ambiguous creature unsure of its own ancestry or place within the machinic phylum within which it finds itself. A being that seeks to find its way among the leavings of our ancient human civilization, who like Dante’s self-wandering creature discovers its Vergil among the rubble who will like a Sancho Ponzo of the end times will guide our wandering anti-hero through the strange realms and dimensions of this dark inferno.

What if Social Darwinism and Eugenics and Fascism/Nazism underlies our late capitalism era? What if the current neo-Darwinian, biogenetics, nanotechnology, ICT informational ontology of Superintelligence, Internet of things, robotics, and automatic society is an outgrowth of Social Darwinist principles and axiomatic, and inhuman to the core in its push to displace humanity and enslave a neo-workerist society of clones, robots, and cyborgians? What if one pushed all this to the extreme dystopian limits of imagination and out the other side as something else emerges in the form of freedom beyond this violence – a form of collective awakening that is finally inclusive of both human and non-human dimensions of existence?

I probably have always been writing the same book over and over – adding bits and pieces of detritus, bones of my travels, artifacts and haunted objects from the dark pages of my life to this ongoing book in my mind. Some things have to have a conclusion, a finish line, a point when enough is enough, and I hope to make this one a doozy… let’s face it to bring together all the complexity of our current situation on earth is formidable in itself, but to offer some type of hope in the midst of despair as we face the harsh truth of our current neoliberal dark comedy is almost unbearable. I’ve always admired the Mnemppiean works of the past, the great satires full of stuffing from every aspect of existence, high and low, full of tragic, comic, farce, and parody: works that seem to overflow their boundaries, flood into the readers mind and overwhelm them with strange relations. And, yet, that’s just what is needed in our time: a sort of black comedy, a dark farce that can take a Dantean journey into the heart of darkness of our era in a more resilient form than Conrad did in his early novel. One that is adept at both current technological tendencies as well as the dystopic take of our current globalist agendas in Russia, China, India, EU and the U.S.A.. If I don’t go mad first I hope to have this beast done within a couple years… I’ve been working and re-working it for some time, but it’s time to get it done since I’m not getting any younger. Combining Pynchon and P.K. Dick, Gunter Grass and Mark Twain, Lovecraft and Shakespeare, Cervantes and Milton… a flight of fantasy and a dark realist vision that is at once both our world and its shadow. Something different, and alive.

Consuming Paradise: Soft Fascism and Sociopathy

The acceleration of information exchange has produced and is producing an effect of a pathological type…

– Franco “Bifo” Berardi

“The consumer society is a kind of soft police state. We think we have choice, but everything is compulsory. We have to keep buying or we fail as citizens. Consumerism creates huge unconscious needs that only fascism can satisfy. If anything, fascism is the form that consumerism takes when it opts for elective madness.”

—J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come: A Novel

J.G. Ballard as usual hits the proverbial nail on the head.1 With the advent of the Internet of things the exchange of the world is ubiquitous and totalized, a world where signs and objects exchange themselves within the alien host we long ago vacated. Emptied of our humanity, agents of an alien empire of signs, we host a world of alien objects like coded messengers from some infinite time machine. No longer able to process the data glut around us we’ve become immersed and eviscerated in a sea of information which uses us as its site of transversal relationality in an economic game of war without end.

Berardi would tell us that we must begin to understand how our capacity to process information became instead a system that assimilated and absorbed us into a larger organism that now uses our processing power as a host assemblage factory. Our consciousness is emptied of its former dreams of reason and identity, self and subjectivity, and has become the vacant site of machinic agents who feed off our biopower to further their own alien agendas.

Alfred North Whitehead once described consciousness as nothing more than the hosted vacancy inhabited by alien entities: “Mental operations do not necessarily involve consciousness… It is only when we are consciously aware of alien mentalities that we even approximate to the conscious prehension of a single actual entity.”2 In an age of competitive advantage we are doomed to “follow, recognize, evaluate, process all” the information available to us if we are to be “efficient, competitive, victorious” (Berardi, p. 40). No longer able to read or think in a linear manner of textuality, dispersed among image-cultures that drift by like so many ghosts of futurity, we exist as members of a new data-glut world of graphic signs and semiotic economics – a visual non-space that like so many daemons of the electronic void have lost their ability to be attentive to even the most simplistic detail. Driven by a dyslexia spreading outward into the cognitive ecologies of mindless social behaviors of a presentism of the speed-instant, we wander in a time-loop slipstream that immerses us in the pursuit of the impossible (Berardi, p. 41).

“Within me there is only the ruin of sovereignty. And my visible absence of superiority – my state of collapse – is the mark of an insubordinate which equals that of the starry sky.”

– Georges Bataille

Marshall McLuhan once described our predicament of mediaplosion, our immersion and evisceration within the info-glut regimes of information, saying that “one thing about which fish are completely unaware is the water, since they have no anti-environment that would allow them to perceive the element they swim in.”3 We’ve become so enamored and naturalized to the ubiquitous world of information that surrounds us in external objects – the Internet of things – that we’ve forgotten what it was like to once live in a world where machines were absent. Marx himself during the height of the First Industrial age would describe this process of absorption and alienation:

In handicrafts and manufacture, the worker makes use of a tool; in the factory, the machine makes use of him. There the movements of the instrument of labour proceed from him, here it is the movements of the machine that he must follow. In manufacture the workers are the parts of a living mechanism. In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism which is independent of the workers, who are incorporated into it as its living appendages. ‘The wearisome routine of endless drudgery in which the same mechanical process is ever repeated, is like the torture of Sisyphus; the burden of toil, like the rock, is ever falling back upon the worn-out drudge.’4

This sense of the external death machine of capital that absorbs the surplus life of the drudge worker into its mechanical existence, the worker who animates the great beast of the Factory itself through repetition without difference – a living death without equal, pervades our lives 24/7. The Factory of the Globe is unbounded and everywhere.

Whether one is at work or play one is working for the Factory. There can be no escape. One is always within the matrix of its clutches like an energy vat awaiting the next alien visitation or program to inhabit one’s mind and reprogram one’s desires. In this artificial sphere of light and information we call global capital – or, the Consumertariat, we’ve all entered a deathless sleeplessness, a chronic state of insomnia. In this realm of utter abjectness we can neither rest nor retreat, we move along the streets of Manhattan or any other global city like zombies seeking our next feeding station. Close off within the mental hives of our mobile phones connection to the electronic ghostlands we hover among the living like transparent bots unable to touch or be touched. Our senses depleted of their former physical traces to the earth below our feet wander the maze of roads by signs only, the glitz of commerce is our last foothold in a world of pure ambient plenitude.

What is the Factory today? Is it not the pervasive system of ubiquitous objects, machines of communication and information (ICT’s) within which we have been incorporated like so many living machines all simultaneously processing data, following, analyzing, evaluating, and constructing capital for our Master’s?

As Berardi will emphasize we are no longer able to keep up with the machines within which we live and have our being, we are no longer attentive to the everyday lives of our loved ones, our health, our actual world of caring and feeling; instead, we are bound to a 24/7 world of inattentive pressure and ruthless execution. Our machines in fact are outpacing even our decisioning processes, and have begun to replace humans in intelligence and economic multitasking. As Brynjolfsson and McAfee in their book the “Race Against the Machine,” that the artificial intelligence boom has created machines that will replace humans in service industries that have traditionally been considered cornerstones of our economy. Equipped with new capabilities, such as the capacity for natural language, these machines will begin to displace human beings in core economic sectors, such as sales. And it’s unclear what will happen to those displaced workers once they’ve lost their jobs to machines that can do the work of several humans at a much lower cost.

“It may seem paradoxical that faster progress can hurt wages and jobs for millions of people, but we argue that’s what’s been happening,” Brynjolfsson and McAfee write. “Computers are now doing many things that used to be the domain of people only. The pace and scale of this encroachment into human skills is relatively recent and has profound economic implications. Perhaps the most important of these is that while digital progress grows the overall economic pie, it can do so while leaving some people, or even a lot of them, worse off.”5

As Berardi will tell us this gap between speed and the slowness of the human brain and body to keep pace with the technological world of the economic markets of high-speed trading and other technologies is opening a pathological crack that is leading many of the cognitariat to immerse themselves in psychopharmaceuticals like Ritalin, Prozac, Zoloft and other psychotropic offerings which eventually lead to mental illness: dissociation, suffering, desperation, flight, panic, terror, the desire not to exist, to not have to fight to survive, and to vanish and disappear along side the ever growing need to kill of be killed through external mass murder or suicide. (Berardi, pp. 40-41)

Caught between the accelerating culture of narcotics: of the speed of cocaine, and the deceleration of heroin a world wide epidemic of executives and cognitariat have entered the stage of a sociopathological implosion of communicative diseases. Bound to a world that empowers sociopathy and disaffection rather than affectivity we are entering the Affectless Age where as Ballard says in his last major novel Super-Cannes: “…chief executives and main-board directors stumbled into work with persistent viral complaints. Worse than that, they all reported a loss of mental energy. Decision-making took longer, and they felt distracted by anxieties they couldn’t identify. Chronic fatigue syndrome haunted the place.”6

Berardi admits the work of capital must go on and in this world what is most needed is just that, your psychic energy your life surplus and it is this that is in short supply because what is prevalent in the system of capital is no longer the free-floating energy of life but rather sadness, depression, panic and demotivation. (Berardi, p. 42) Yet, in an about face it is this very depressive realism that has brought about health issues in the masses, for they seek to assuage their dark depressions through consuming more and more junk food. As Berardi will remind us “buying is a suspension of anxiety, an antidote to loneliness, but only up to a certain point. Beyond this certain point, suffering becomes a demotivating factor for purchasing.” (Berardi, p. 43) Our masters work overtime to convince us to be happy in their media and entertainment systems, while at the same time dissuading us from becoming too happy by imposing austere economic measures that force us to strategies of disaffection and panic. Caught in a circle of confused affectivity we ride the global wave of insanity like dark denizens of some apocalyptic zombie fest. Lonely and alone even in the midst of family and friends we have forgotten what it means to care and love, to be attentive to feelings and physical touch. Society demands sociopaths, while mixing the signals when those very sociopaths suddenly load up their weapons and seek ways of escape through violent acts of mass murder and suicide.

Berardi will ask us if it is already too late to decelerate the process of life in the Infospheric Civilization? His answer: yes, it is too late. “In human society, potentialities cannot be definitively canceled out, even when they are revealed to be lethal for the individual and probably even for the species.” (Berardi, p. 43) As he sees it there are two paths forward: 1) the hyper-capitalist transhumanism of the upgraded human organism turned Inforg, whose mental and physical capacities are enhanced to keep pace with the technological tyranny of the market economies; or, 2) the strategy of subtraction, of distancing ourselves from the vortex of capital, of refusal and small communities or spheres of existential, economic, and informatics autonomy developed within the ruins of this deadly machinic civilization. (Berardi, p. 43)

As Ballard would have one of his character say: ‘Because there isn’t any culture. All this alienation . . . I could easily get used to it.’ Even as our leaders and the executives and CEO’s of our major corporations have all become confident and well-adjusted sociopaths we begin to realize that the mechanosphere is itself coming alive around us. The molecular life of machinic civilization is slowly rising out of the ashes of human memory and desire like the silicon flotsam and jetsam that crawled out of the oceans millennia ago. The replication of life by another path is emerging even as we begin to go blind, caught in the illusions of our own control systems we faintly apprehend that the technological mutations we’ve so longed for are happening in our midst. Our fascination and fear of the truth spreads its wings among the terrors of our war machines and cinematic lives as we begin slowly to adapt to this strange new world.

Isn’t life wonderful?

And, after all, is this not the truth we’re now facing, that it may already be too late to disconnect, to discover a way out, that we’ve all become so naturalized in this alienated world of artificial wonders, cut off from any sense of value or culture, that becoming other, becoming alien is what we do best – we’re all aliens now. Becoming alien, devoid of affects, pre-programmed to desire the consuming worlds of capital like zombies in a swarm of sadean delight we edge closer and closer to the day when we and our machines will become inextinguishable – drifters on the sea of the mechanosphere, agents of a new and terrible species. All the imaginary heavens and hells were but a prelude to the very real and material genesis of this final mutation, a paradise of machinic life and civilization that was up to now merely a dream and a foreboding of nightmares to come.

Now begins the Age of the Symbiont…

They have begun to move. They pass in line, out of the main station, out of downtown, and begin pushing into older and more desolate parts of the city. Is this the way out? Faces turn to the windows, but no one dares ask, not out loud. Rain comes down. No, this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into— they go in under archways, secret entrances of rotted concrete that only looked like loops of an underpass . . . certain trestles of blackened wood have moved slowly by overhead, and the smells begun of coal from days far to the past, smells of naphtha winters, of Sundays when no traffic came through, of the coral-like and mysteriously vital growth, around the blind curves and out the lonely spurs, a sour smell of rolling-stock absence, of maturing rust, developing through those emptying days brilliant and deep, especially at dawn, with blue shadows to seal its passage, to try to bring events to Absolute Zero . . . and it is poorer the deeper they go . . . ruinous secret cities of poor, places whose names he has never heard . . . the walls break down, the roofs get fewer and so do the chances for light. The road, which ought to be opening out into a broader highway, instead has been getting narrower, more broken, cornering tighter and tighter until all at once, much too soon, they are under the final arch: brakes grab and spring terribly. It is a judgment from which there is no appeal.7

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1. Ballard, J. G. (2012-02-27). Kingdom Come: A Novel (p. 123). Norton. Kindle Edition.
   Whitehead, Alfred North (2010-05-11).
2. Process and Reality (Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the Session 1927-28) Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
3. Wright, Alex (2007-06-01). Glut: Mastering Information Through The Ages (Kindle Locations 166-167). National Academies Press. Kindle Edition.
4. Marx, Karl (2004-02-05). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy: A Critique of Political Economy v. 1 (Classics) (Kindle Locations 7953-7957). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
5. see Sal Gentile From Watson to Siri: As machines replace humans, are they creating inequality too?
6. Ballard, J. G. (2010-04-01). Super-Cannes: A Novel (p. 253). Macmillan. Kindle Edition.
7. Pynchon, Thomas (2012-06-13). Gravity’s Rainbow (pp. 3-4).  . Kindle Edition.

The Global Monopolists: The Food Cartels and their Trade Control

The idea that our economy is ruled by monopolists will surprise many of you. The shelves of our stores bulge with goodies. The digital media world has dissolved into a chaotic free – for – all. Yet in the generation since 1981, when we all but stopped enforcing our antimonopoly laws, a very small number of people have consolidated control over just about every activity in the United States…

—Barry C. Lynn, Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economy of Destruction

…this interlocked self-perpetuating syndicate decides who eats and who doesn’t, who lives and who dies. It is a virtual spider web of financial, political, economic and industry interests with the Venetian ultramontane fondi model at the center. These people own and manage the affairs of an interlocking corporate apparatus that dominates choke points within the global economy, especially finance, insurance, raw materials, transportation, and consumer goods.

—Daniel Estulin

Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organisations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.

—a recent study by Princeton University Prof Martin Gilens and Northwestern University Prof Benjamin

Sometime in the mid-1970’s, Kissinger, a life-long practitioner of “Balance of Power” geopolitics and a man with more than a fair share of conspiracies under his belt, allegedly declared his blueprint for world domination: “Control the oil and you control nations. Control the food, and you control the people.”

—William F. Engdahl, Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation

The threat of disruption to the circulation of stuff has become such a profound concern to governments and corporations in recent years that it has prompted the creation of an entire architecture of security that aims to govern global spaces of flow. This new framework of security— supply chain security— relies on a range of new forms of transnational regulation, border management, data collection, surveillance, and labor discipline, as well as naval missions and aerial bombing. In fact, to meaningfully capture the social life of circulation, we would have to consider not only disruption to the system but the assembly of infrastructure and architecture achieved through land grabs, military actions, and dispossessions that are often the literal and figurative grounds for new logistics spaces.

—Deborah Cowen,  The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade

The Windsor-led oligarchy has built up a single, integrated raw materials cartel, with three divisions—energy, raw materials and minerals, and increasingly scarce food supplies.The firms within each cartel group are listed. While they maintain the legal fiction of being different corporate organizations, in reality this is one interlocking syndicate, with a common purpose and multiple overlapping boards of directors. The Windsor-centered oligarchy owns these cartels, and they are the instruments of power of the oligarchy, accumulated over centuries, for breaking nations’ sovereignty.

The control works as follows: The oligarchy has developed four regions to be the principal exporters of almost every type of food; the oligarchy has historically acquired top-down control over the food chain in these regions. These four regions are: the United States; the European Union, particularly France and Germany; the British Commonwealth nations of Australia, Canada, the Republic of South Africa, and New Zealand; and Argentina and Brazil in Ibero-America. Through the centuries, the oligarchy has taken control of these regions’ markets, and thus over the world food supply. These four regions have a population of, at most, 900 million people, or 15% of the world’s population. The rest of the world, with 85% of the population—4.7 billion people—is dependent on the food exports from those regions.

The control of food for use as a weapon is an ancient practice. The House of Windsor inherited certain routes and infrastructure. One finds the practice in ancient Babylon/Mesopotamia 4,000 years ago. In Greece, the cults of Apollo, Demeter, and Rhea-Cybele often controlled the shipment of grain and other food stuffs, through the temples. In Imperial Rome, the control of grain became the basis of the empire. Rome was the center. Conquered outlying colonies in Gaul, Brittany, Spain, Sicily, Egypt, North Africa, and the Mediterranean littoral had to ship grain to the noble Roman families, as taxes and tribute. Often the grain tax was greater than the land could bear, and areas of North Africa, for instance, were turned into dust bowls.

The evil city-state of Venice took over grain routes, particularly after the Fourth Crusade (1202-04). The main Venetian thirteenth century trading routes had their eastern termini in Constantinople, the ports of the Oltremare (which were the lands of the crusading States), and Alexandria, Egypt. Goods from these ports were shipped to Venice, and from there made their way up the Po Valley to markets in Lombardy, or over the Alpine passes to the Rhône and into France. Eventually, Venetian trade extended to the Mongol empire in the East.

By the fifteenth century, although Venice was still very much a merchant empire, it had franchised some of its grain and other trade to the powerful Burgundian duchy, whose effective headquarters was Antwerp. This empire, encompassing parts of France, extended from Amsterdam and Belgium to much of present-day Switzerland. From this Venetian-Lombard-Burgundian nexus, each of the food cartel’s six leading grain companies was either founded, or inherited a substantial part of its operations today.

By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the British Levant and East India companies had absorbed many of these Venetian operations. In the nineteenth century, the London-based Baltic Mercantile and Shipping Exchange became the world’s leading instrument for contracting for and shipping grain.

The five privately held grain companies were carved out from the centuries-old Mesopotamian-Venetian-Burgundian-Swiss-Amsterdam grain route, which today extends around the world. The Big Five are Cargill, Continental, Louis Dreyfus, Bunge and Born, and André. The Continental Grain Company is run by billionaire Michel Fribourg and his son Paul. Simon Fribourg started the company in 1813 in Arlon, Belgium. He moved the company to Antwerp, and then, in the 1920s, to Paris and London. Today, it has a New York office, along with a strong Swiss-French base.

In 1852, Léopold Louis Dreyfus, who was born in Sierentz, France, established wheat-trading operations in Basel, Switzerland. In this century, except during World War II, Louis Dreyfus has been headquartered in Paris (part of the old Lombard-Burgundian route).

Bunge and Born was founded by the Bunge family from Amsterdam in 1752. The company was eventually moved to Antwerp (today it is technically headquartered in São Paulo, Brazil and the Netherlands Antilles). The André Company was founded by Georges André in Nyon, Switzerland, and today is headquartered in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Cargill Company, the world’s largest grain company, is based in the Minneapolis, Minnesota suburb of Minnetonka. It was founded by Scotsman William Cargill, in Conover, Iowa in 1865, and has been run, since the 1920s, by the billionaire MacMillan family. But the true nexus of Cargill is in Geneva, Switzerland, where Cargill’s international trading arm, Tradax, Inc., is headquartered, having been established there in 1956 (technically, Tradax is a Panamanian-registered company). Tradax has divisions all around the world, including in Argentina, Germany, and Japan. It is the major source for Cargill’s international trading; Cargill has a lot of money invested in it, and Cargill reaps a large return from Tradax’s operations. Tradax also has partial Swiss ownership. The Lombard, Odier Bank, as well as the Pictet Bank, both old, private and very dirty Swiss banks, own a chunk of Tradax. The principal financier for Tradax is the Geneva-based Crédit Suisse, which is one of the world’s largest money-launderers.

Archer Daniels Midland’s purchase of Töpfer, a Hamburg, Germany-based grain company, vastly increased ADM’s presence in the world grain trade. Töpfer’s trade is situated within the old Venice-Swiss-Amsterdam-Paris routes, and it has extensive business partnerships with the British Crown jewel, the Rothschild Bank.1

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1. Richard Freeman. The Windsors’ Global Food Cartel:Instrument for Starvation. EIR, December 8, 1995.

Digital Dionysus: R. Scott Bakker

Reading R. Scott Bakker’s essay in The Digital Dionysus: Nietzsche and the Network-Centric Condition (ed., Dan Mellamphy, Nandita Biswas Mellamphy). I keep thinking to myself how Scott truly is a thinker of one thought, a thought that has become monomaniacal in his life: the notion that for all our knowledge, our philosophies, we are little more than creatures of absolute neglect – error prone, biased, and bound within a circular world of ignorance and delusion, creatures whose evolutionary history is shrouded in the mystery and origins of the Mind. And, yet, for all our knowledge we are still ignorant of the one thing we seek beyond all other things: what is this thing we are, do we have a soul, and – above all do we even exist: is this thing we are anything more than a linguistic construct, a fool’s game for philosophy or the sciences? For Scott the answer resides in the dilemma of intentionality. Since Kant we’ve been looping in a false infinity of questions concerning the Mind, Self, and Consciousness.

His defense of the sciences, especially of the neurosciences seems more of a continued search for a skeptical faith beyond skepticism – a sought for certainty that his one thought will prove its absolute integrity in the end, putting his own skeptical and ironizing self to sleep for good.  As he states it:

We now know that only a fraction of the estimated 38,000 trillion operations per second processed by the brain finds its way to consciousness. This means that experience, all experience, is profoundly privative, a simplistic caricature of otherwise breathtakingly complex processes. (p. 156).

It’s this privative character of our knowledge that fascinates and disturbs Scott. Our reliance on knowledge is borne of our absolute ignorance and neglect rather than any true understanding of ourselves or reality. For millennia philosophers have repeated for the most part the same gestures, the same routes between ignorance and knowledge. In this essay Scott gives us a peak at his early growth as a thinker and questioner of this problem. As a young man his interests in the sciences has led Scott at the early age of 14 to became a full blown nihilist. His confrontation with Descartes was crucial in forging his move to delve into the contemporary landscape of the anti-realists, especially the work of Jacques Derrida. As Scott says of Descartes attempt, given the collapse in confidence wrought by the new sciences of the seventeenth century, to place knowledge on a new, secure, subjective foundation. “Just who did the guy think he was fooling, really?” (p. 148)

Against the dualism and subjective foundation of knowledge grounded in Descartes famous: “I think, therefore I am,” Scott would return to Nietzsche’s notions of an impersonal agency at the core of our inhuman being concluding that the thing that thinks is an “it” – that “it” thinks rather than there being any sense of Self/Subject. In this sense Scott following Nietzsche displaces the notion of agency into the unconscious functions of the brain itself:

Even though we like to think our thoughts come from our prior thoughts, which is to say, from ourselves, the merest reflection shows this cannot be the case, that each thought is dropped into consciousness from the outside, and that hence the “I” is born after the fact. (p. 148)

The “I” is a retroactive thought-form, a trick of our interpellation of our ignorance and access to the actual state-of-affairs of the brain’s hidden processes. Having no access to the brain’s dark hinterlands we assume it is we who think, that we have a Self-Soul. After reading Sartre’s reformulation of the cogito in Being and Nothingness, combined with his readings of Nietzsche, Scott would reformulate Descartes foundational gesture with one of his own, saying: “it thinks, therefore I was” (p. 148). This acknowledgement of thought as being pre-processed in the brain, and our receiving it after the fact as historical data rather than present thinking makes of us mere passive recipients of this process rather than active agents. This gesture against free will and the culpability of our philosophical heritage would from that point forward come to play a major part in Scott’s quest to displace philosophy with the sciences as foundational for any future thought concerning the human condition.

Yet, all of this would come much later for Scott after entering university was confronted with the legacy of new French thought which in that era was bound to the post-structuralist world of Derrida’s deconstructionism of the Western metaphysical tradition of “presence”. Scott by the age of 28 would become both a disciple and fellow laborer in that heritage, having displaced his early nihilist proclivities and anti-intentionalist stance with a full tilt Heideggerian phenomenological intentionality. At the height of his powers and triumphant in his belief in the efficacy of philosophy he would meet a young student who like his younger self was a nihilist. Scott would take it upon himself to convert this young man to his new found faith in post-structuralist philosophy. The young man would hear him out, let me speak of Heidegger to Derrida only asking for details of this or that specific concept or idea from time to time. At the end the young man would answer Scott’s summons to repent his ways and become a convert to the post-structuralist cause, saying:  “Well, that despite the fact that philosophy hasn’t resolved any matter with any reliability ever, and, despite the fact that science is the most powerful, reliable, theoretical claim-making institution in human history, you’re still willing to suspend your commitment to scientific implications on the basis of prior commitments to philosophical claims about science and this… ontological difference.”

Bakker was taken aback, stunned by this observation, and would hem-and-haw, mumbling about this and that argument in Heidegger or Derrida etc., but in the end he admitted defeat: “outside the natural sciences there was no way short of exhaustion or conspiracy to end the regress of interpretation” (p. 149). Of course at the heart of most post-structuralist thought was the aporia, the knot of difference (Derrida proclaims that today, more than ever, “this predilection [for paradox and aporia] remains a requirement.) – a black hole in rhetoric and discursive thought that opened up an abyss or irony and skepticism. For Derrida there were three such aporias: “the epoche of the rule,” “the ghost of the undecidable,” and “the urgency that obstructs the horizon of knowledge”: at the heart of this paradoxical situation is that nothing can ever be decided definitively, everything is tentative and under the suspicion of the impossible; and, yet, one must decide, one must invent the possible therefore one chooses in ignorance, one decides. This is why in Western thought Justice is Blind. Under this notion of the undecidable is this suspicion that there is no foundation, no ground, no end to the endless questioning, no place of rest for the weary philosopher king in his gestures to make closure on knowledge. Instead there is only the bitter and endless dialectic of philosophy itself in its eternal contamination of generation after generation wandering in the useless loops and circuits of ignorance and neglect. For these philosophers nothing could ever be known for certain, only the endless uncertainty of irony and skepticism without end.

This realization awakened Bakker out of his dogmatic stupor: “So, back to the “bullshit” it was. I should have known. After all, I had only spent fourteen years repeating myself.” (p. 150) Ultimately this would lead him to disconnect from philosophy, say goodbye to the intentional stance and reenter the fold of those who offer commitment to the sciences rather than the “folk psychology” of an outmoded heritage in metaphysics and speculation: “Though we cannot yet say what a given experience “is,” we can say that the final answer, like so many answers provided by science, will lie far outside the pale of our intuitive preconceptions—perhaps incomprehensibly so.” (p. 156)

 

 

 

 

Exiting the Iron Prison of our Cultural Matrix

In answer to a friend’s inquiry:

I’ll put it this way, you speak of a mystic turn in your personal life. I’ll admit that my own quest – so to speak, has been one that has tried to push beyond either traditional religious indoctrination, and – as well, the whole gamut of Secular indoctrination… the notion of the Real that so many use as a sort of limit concept is this blank wall against which thought comes to a point past which it cannot use those mind-tools that have for millennia been built up through either religious orthodoxies or through secular philosophical modes. We are living in a moment when the utter breakdown of both religious and philosophical truths that have guided human kind for millennia – whether of Western or Eastern forms, is forcing some of us to abandon them altogether rather than to try to “pour new wine into old bottles”. We do not need reform, rather we need a revolution in thought and praxis: a new mode of being-in-the-world.

So that what we term this beast we call New Age thought is like the era of Greek syncretism delving into counter-cultural praxis, seeking experiential truth rather than universal knowledge or discourse. Some like Bataille with his “inner experience” would tentatively operate in this quasi in-between transitional zone, seeking a form of the sacred outside both secular and religious imaginal or philosophical speculation. For myself going back to my early involvement with LSD, Peyote, Mushrooms, Ayaheusca and other natural plant substances and sub-cultural environs I felt that there are certain experiences that mainstream cultures of our present era have missed, misconstrued, and anathematized as too dangerous for the public at large; so they outlawed these avenues of exploration.

With the crackdown on psychedelic drugs in the early 70’s these same authorities were flooding the streets with the dangerous drugs of cocaine, heroin and other barbiturates from redelin to meth (uppers), yellows and reds (downers) etc. – all drugs that put one either in a stupor or into hyperactive psychosis. It was at this time that I began doing research and study in the deep history of these other visionary drugs and cultures of ecstasy and Dionysian reality, seeking in the indigenous worlds of ancient shamanic, Voudoun, and other ecstatic systems a remembrance of such mind systems that could deprogram my involvement with this death-world. I would seek in the poets such as Rimbaud and the literature of the gothic, dark romantic, decadent, Dadists, Surrealists, etc. a way to unleash these darker areas of mentation and feeling that had been forgotten, outlawed, and left in abeyance awaiting the moment of their return.

So that I’ve learned to segment off my private path from this public persona that delves into speculative philosophy, etc. One thing I’ve discovered about such an inner path: one cannot convey it with traditional symbols of discourse or narrative, so I haven’t tried too much to do this except here and there on my site as I think you know. People either fear such experience, or criminalize it (i.e, if their of naturalist and scientific orientation they dismiss it as subjective gibberish, and if they are either secular or religious they dismiss it because their world-view and orientation disallows them to accept anything beyond their own local and colloquial mind-set or echo chamber beliefs.). And it is this sense of a need to deprogram our minds of the cultural and enculturation of Western or Eastern symbolic and reasonable indoctrination that is at the core of this path. Most people turn back because it entails a movement of – and, this is the closest I can say, what Deleuze/Guattari meant by the schizophrenizing process: this deprogramming the mind of its Western cultural ideological, political, religious, philosophical, sociological, etc. etc. orientation, symbols, and myths – whether scientific or religious.

There are a few guideposts into such realms of being, and so like many of my generation we sought out the counter-cultural underground of drugs, sex, rock-n-roll, magic, Kabbalah, Hermeticism, and all other sub-traditional systems that have constructed diagrammatic and sigil based thought-forms to re-orient the brain and break down the mainstream cultural enculturation, deprogram the psyche and lead us through this schizophrenizing process of breakthrough rather than breakdown. Such a life path is obviously not for the feint of heart. Simply put one can enter the abyss and not return, go mad and star craving psychotic unless one lends ear to one who has gone before. For some of us there were no such guides, only persistence. I’ll tell you my whole life has been pushing the extremes of transgressive schizophrenizing process for 45 years…

Obviously to let that cat out of the bag is to expose oneself to the usual ridicule or worse… but, you know, at this point in life I don’t give a shit. I might as well begin letting people know of such worlds. What do we have to lose? Obviously most philosophy and religion so called offers nothing but bullshit. Most politics is dead and mute, and most people in our culture are so passive that they’ve allowed the rich and wealthy, powerful and crazed to rule our Western world without much of a real battle. Our present world is a nightmare novel come alive. Many are seeking a way out of this dark lair of history, but have no one to speak truth to them. Sadly, many fall into the trap of seeking messianic cults, and there are plenty of money grubbing and religious fanatics around to lure in the gullible. Look a Scientology, Mormonism, and any other of the 1001 cults here in the good ole U.S.A. that promise people salvation, transcendence, are escape and end up asking them to sign away their estates, bank accounts, and livelihoods for enslavement. For the many who have never had a chance to break out of their local environments or mind-sets, those who have never cracked a book, who live in a sort of mindlessness such lures that offer exit from the madness of our current cultural break down seem like paradisial escape hatches. Their not.

I’ve often thought of opening up, but then I remember the times I foolishly tried to convey my life’s history and struggles through this long process and realize it’s a fool’s errand to speak about that which cannot be put down in words. And, yet, people in our time seem to be awakening out of the fog of our enculturation, realizing the world we live in is a sham. A world that has become so fake that the control mechanisms that the rich and powerful use to keep things tamped down, the mediatainment complex, the indoctrination mechanisms of orthodox religion and secularism are fraying around the edges. These ideological and socio-cultural tools of the powerful are decaying and falling apart in our time and people no longer trust leaders, politics, or the Reality Studio that governs our minds and hearts. People are disgusted with the world the .01% has perpetrated upon us. The criminalization of existence and its contamination by a false system of fictions is coming undone around us, the lies our leaders have instilled in us, indoctrinated us with for so long are ending.

Yet, this is opening a Pandora’s box of ills as well. People are feeling alone, realizing that both their traditional and secular orientations no longer offer them solace. That we are in the midst of a great confrontation with the Real, one that is disinterring a nightmare of war, famine, and disease across the earth. People are afraid, not for themselves as much as for their children’s future. Will they have one? We hear of climate change, sixth extinctions, possible natural or socio-cultural catastrophes just around the corner. People take up survival ideologies, apocalypse escape methods, etc. as if this, too, were a new faith, one that will orient them and prepare them for some long expected doom. Sometimes I think this, too, is just another symptom of our time’s demise, the slow unravelling of our culture and its myths. Even the sciences has been now shown to be a force in politics, and politicians on both sides of the isle garner their experts to present the latest “truth” about such catastrophic futures. Some have called ours the post-truth era, many that truth as a universal thought-form is a lie, that truth is a political and social tool in the hands of our elite intellectuals.

Even these so called intellectuals live in a controlled world, funded by the very rich and powerful. The vast network of Think Tanks, Academic Institutions, Media systems, Churches, Psychologists-Psychiatrists, etc., all the public institutions that have experts whose technics and technologies control the reality systems we have all shared in this cultural world of modernity has become a sort of Temple or Cathedral of Knowledge. We depend of these experts to tell us about everything from physics and the cosmos, to the safety of our food, etc. We live in a technocracy – a world ruled by experts who are paid by one or another faction of the Oligarchic and Plutocratic Corporate machine.

It’s easy to satirize such a world, but much more difficult to exit it. I know I’m no guru, no self-styled expert of inner-experience to tell you or anyone what to do, how to escape this malaise, what path to choose that is right or true. I’m just another singular being like you and you and that person over there who is fed up with the bullshit. All I can offer is my own singular history which seems to be all I really have. For all my learning over the years, for all my deep and lasting experiences I still hesitate to convey such things in words for the simple reason that if one could actually awaken people, help people then – and, I ask, wouldn’t it have already happened? Look at Christ, Buddha, Mohamed, Confucius, are any number of a thousand and one other men or women (and, yes, long before the saviors there were Goddess oriented societies we know very little of…). No. I want presume to be anything more than I am: an average man who woke up one day and questioned the world, the Reality Studio and fictions, narratives, symbolic net of  ideas, ideologies, and religious and secular systems that control our lives and found them wanting. Then I, like so many before me, and hopefully after me began that long and slow exit from the prison world. I’m still exiting…

One could say I’m a Gnostic of sorts, except that in my own view the ancient Gnostics literalized or ontologized their perceptions and thought of the Real. Following Plato they sought to escape this ‘world’ – the literal universe of evil as they termed it, whereas for me there is no transcension of this realm: this is it, and yet, what we discover is not a literal dichotomy or separation as in Plato’s two-worlds theory of a supernal eternal realm of Ideas and a mundane and evil realm of delusion, but rather it is our Mind’s, our Brains that have locked us into a perception of the world controlled by political, social, cultural, religious, and philosophical malfeasance. The world in-itself is not evil, what is evil is the dominion of our minds and hearts under regimes of power in high places that have constructed an Iron Prison of thought and feeling to trap us and suck our desires dry for their own sustenance and pleasure.

It is against the rulers of this dark prison world of mind, the Oligarchs, Plutocrats, philosophical and religious overlords of our ideological realms of acceptable thought and truth we fight and resist in this new gnosis. Such as it is we seek to exit this system of lies and deceit even as we unravel and destroy its symbolic hold over our lives. For years I struggle against the separation of religious and secular forms that entrap us to false infinities: to a metaphysics of defeat and despair, pessimism and doom. Most of the world is oriented to trap us in a sense of despair and doom to make us dependent and needy, so that we will allow the State to supervene in our lives and offer assistance and numbing drugs, pharmaceuticals, therapies, etc. to realign us to its prison system and put us back asleep and oblivion becoming in the process robotically compliant to the work and labour of creating surplus value for the wealthy and powerful.

In many ways Marx was absolutely correct in his estimation of this world we live in, and yet because he reduced everything to economics and a false understanding of materialism and history (bound as he was within the humanist traditions of Nineteenth Century thought-forms) he was unable to break free of the human-centric worldview of his own time. One can see this even in such current thinkers as Badiou and Zizek who are still bound to the Idealisms of the Nineteenth Century based of the notion of Subject/Substance no matter how remarkable otherwise their knowledge of mathematics or philosophy of action. Their inverted Idealisms are still based on the Kantian world for-us as if everything in the universe was wrapped around the human as an exception, generic or collective or singular. It matters not, for until we dissolve this illusory and metaphysical world of Subjects we will not free ourselves of the traps our overlords have laid for us.

It would be easy to slip into some comfortable framework, to use the discursive archive as Foucault suggested to enforce my thought-forms, to speak truth within the discursive practices that are accepted in academic and scholarly circles of established rules, regulatory thought, etc., except that that would be to reject the very orientation of my being and breakthrough. Why return to a mold that is outworn and useless? What does philosophy or even anti-philosophy offer us today? Nothing. And, I mean just that, a philosophy of nothing. It’s as if philosophy at the end of its tether had realized the ancient Gnostic insight of the kenoma – the vastation, the great emptiness of things, the void of the void, the nihil unbound. And, yet, it comes to this by way of a complex discourse that speaks neither to the common man nor even to the general public, but rather to specialists of philosophical speculation: Continental or Analytical. Experts. Let us be done with experts, with specialists, with the practitioners of arcane thought and speculations that offer us no way out of this dark realm of political and social control and malfeasance.

If life has taught me anything it is that we have to challenge ourselves, break our habitual habits and safety nets of thought and feeling, we have to learn how to learn, break away from the habits that lock us into comfortable paths of acceptance and keep us safely in a cocoon of belief. That’s the difficult thing, breaking free of habits of mind and feeling leaves us vulnerable, open. To risk freedom is to be alone with the alone, to step out of our cocoon and suddenly realize we have nothing to fall back on, not belief system or thought-form to rely on, we are in a universe that is incomplete and open and we are alone in it without support or guide other than others of like kind who share our need to exit this prison world of modernity.

I’d be the first to admit that most people who even open the first door to such freedom become terrified and retreat into the safety of their habits, beliefs, and comfort zones of friends, work, and mediatainment. They soon forget such exit’s are possible, and think that anyone who seeks such freedom and exit is mad and insane. Our brain’s are truly conservative, conserving and circumventing every avenue of escape with mental thoughts and forms that present stop signs at every juncture dissuading us on our way, seeking to turn us back from such exit into freedom. If I use such old existential terms and truisms is because they speak to this feeling we’ve all felt that when we step out of our comfort zone we suddenly do feel nausea, a sickness of heart and mind. And, most, turn away from such ruptures in their worldview, retreat to the blind comfort of the homeworlds of thought and feeling never to open that door of risk again. Sleepers love their sleeping worlds of imprisonment to habit and feeling.  Trying to speak to one who is asleep is to disturb them and confront them with this ugly realm. They will hate you for it. People do not want to wake up, their lives are comfortable and bland, yet safe. And it’s this sense of being safe and secure that allows them to accept the pain and suffering, the enslavement and work, the misery of existence in this society without qualm or effort.

Have you asked yourself why with all the harsh austerity imposed by banks, governments, and corporations across the EU and U.S.A. people have not rebelled or revolted? Because they’d rather be safe in their misery than to expose themselves to the risk of freedom. Instead of organizing themselves to challenge this world of degradation they either fall into the protest mill or religious tautologies of ancient belief systems that tell them this world is evil and the only escape is in the next life… so they except their miserable fate in this world and shrug their shoulders believing the problems we face as humanity are too big for any one individual so why try? So they close their eyes and go back to sleep.

When my friend spoke of his interest in mystical experience I suddenly realized that this, too, is a form of escape not exit. Exit entails resistance and change whereas mystical withdrawal whether in its negative ascetic form or ecstatic transgressive form is neither change nor resistance but rather a path of pure annihilation. Seeking not to exit the social and political through the shared construction of a new world vision and life and mode of existence, but rather what these mystically inclined seek is to transcend time and existence altogether. This is the path of false infinity…

I’ve chewed your ear off enough this morning… time to let you chew the cud above. I’ll return with other fare down the pipe as I always do. Good Day!

Phantom Monsters: Nationalism, Paranoia, and Political Control

“The deeper I delved, the more it appeared that this panic was, to some extent, kept alive by the governments of the day. I also became aware of the degree to which the presumed need to safeguard the political and social order facilitated the introduction of new methods of control and repression.”

– Adam Zamoyski, Phantom Terror: The Threat of Revolution and the Repression of Liberty 1789-1848

The Study of Political Paranoia is inevitable in our time, and reading Adam Zamoyski’s work brings us back to another moment when a convergence of nationalism, paranoia, and panic seemed to pervade every aspect of social life of the elite and power brokers who waged war against any and all who threatened their status and power. Watching the stagecraft of current U.S. media-blitz polarity in which panic and terror of both Trump and Russian invasive strategies, along with the internal Deep State paranoia surrounding much of the history of U.S. secrecy, etc. promotes panic in the common world of the masses, stirs up political unrest and secures a sort of ongoing insecurity that allows the powers to enforce oppression and control while distilling a grand narrative to invent a new order. More interesting as Zamoyski’s study shows is that this has all happened before under other skies and other nations:

“The reordering of the Continent by those who triumphed over Napoleon in 1815 was intended to reverse all this. The return to a social order based on throne and altar was meant to restore the old Christian values. The Concert of Europe, a mutual pact between the rulers of the major powers, was designed to ensure that such things could never happen again.

Yet the decades that followed were dominated by the fear that the Revolution lived on, and could break out once more at any moment. Letters and diaries of the day abound in imagery of volcanic eruption engulfing the entire social and political order, and express an almost pathological dread that dark forces were at work undermining the moral fabric on which that order rested. This struck me as curious, and I began to investigate. The deeper I delved, the more it appeared that this panic was, to some extent, kept alive by the governments of the day. I also became aware of the degree to which the presumed need to safeguard the political and social order facilitated the introduction of new methods of control and repression. I was reminded of more recent instances where the generation of fear in the population – of capitalists, Bolsheviks, Jews, fascists, Islamists – has proved useful to those in power, and has led to restrictions on the freedom of the individual by measures meant to protect him from the supposed threat.

A desire to satisfy my curiosity about what I thought was a historic cultural phenomenon gradually took on a more serious purpose, as I realised that the subject held enormous relevance to the present. I have nevertheless refrained from drawing attention to this in the text, resisting the temptation, strong at times, to suggest parallels between Prince Metternich and Tony Blair, or George W. Bush and the Russian tsars. Leaving aside the bathos this would have involved, I felt readers would derive more fun from drawing their own.”

And, so we shall, for we live in an age between ages, a time of the in-between, a moment between acts in a grand farce in which the very structure and dynamism of our temporal order in moving into chaos by way of personal and social paranoia and revolutionary politics. Discovering parallels between the dark worlds of Nineteenth century political and social distress, panic, and terror and our own would be an interesting task but one that I’ll not try to pursue in this post, rather I’ll seek to bring together some of the extreme aspect of the paranoid mind-set as its shadows fall across our singular age of political and social breakdown.

The Radicalism of Thomas Paine

The land, the earth God gave man for his home, sustenance, and support, should never be the possession of any man, corporation, society, or unfriendly government, any more than the air or water.”  – Abraham Lincoln

The word ‘Bastille’ was also fresh in the mind in 1791, as the symbol of the French absolutist monarchy and as a synonym for the many dark prisons in which the liberals of Europe had so long been confined and tortured. The Marquis de Lafayette, chivalric hero of both the American and the French Revolutions, gave the key of the Bastille to Thomas Paine and requested him to forward it to President George Washington as a token of French regard to the American people. Paine had done so with delight in the year before he published Rights of Man, adding a covering letter which described the key as ‘this early trophy of the spoils of despotism, and the first ripe fruits of American principles transplanted into Europe’. The key hangs to this day on the wall of Washington’s home at Mount Vernon. The date of Paine’s letter was the first of May, which a century or so later was the date selected by American workers as the one on which to begin the struggle for the eight-hour day, and afterwards by the labour movements of all countries as May Day: the holiday and carnival and fiesta of the oppressed.1

The name of Paine will always be indissolubly linked to those resonant words, the ‘rights of man’. The book which bears that noble title was, however, not just a paean to human liberty. It was partly a short-term polemic, directed in particular at Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, a very exceptional contribution to the energetic ‘pamphlet wars’ that made the late eighteenth century, with its clubs and pubs and coffee-houses and printshops, such an enlivening period in Britain and France and America. It was also partly a revisionist history of England, written from the viewpoint of those who had gained the least from the Norman Conquest and the successive monarchical coups and usurpations. Then again it was a manifesto, setting out the basic principles of reform and, if necessary, of revolution. It did not disdain to put forward certain practical and immediate programmatic suggestions, designed to alleviate suffering and injustice in the here and now. But it always kept its sights raised to a point somewhat beyond the immediate political and social horizon. It is, in that sense, one of the first ‘modern’ texts. John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress may have kept alive the spirit of the English Revolution in countless poor and down-trodden homes, and the careful research of John Stuart Mill and others may have laid the basis for later Victorian social reform, but Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man is both a trumpet of inspiration and a carefully wrought blueprint for a more rational and decent ordering of society, both domestically and on the international scene. (ibid.)

Thomas Paine as the First to Propose a Base Income For All

In 1797, Thomas Paine, responding to a priest who said that “God created rich and poor”, wrote an essay called “Agrarian Justice”, in which he said Nonsense! “God created male and female and gave them the earth for their inheritance … everyone who owns land owes ‘ground rent’ to the community … and from this revenue I propose to establish a fund that will pay everyone a sum.”

In his book Agrarian Justice Paine would outline his plan for Base Income and Shared Wealth:

To understand what the state of society ought to be, it is necessary to have some idea of the natural and primitive state of man; such as it is at this day among the Indians of North America. There is not, in that state, any of those spectacles of human misery which poverty and want present to our eyes in all the towns and streets in Europe.

Poverty, therefore, is a thing created by that which is called civilized life. It exists not in the natural state…Civilization, therefore, or that which is so called, has operated two ways: to make one part of society more affluent, and the other more wretched, than would have been the lot of either in a natural state…

In taking the matter upon this ground, the first principle of civilization ought to have been, and ought still to be, that the condition of every person born into the world, after a state of civilization commences, ought not to be worse than if he had been born before that period…

It is a position not to be controverted that the earth, in its natural, uncultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race. In that state every man would have been born to property. He would have been a joint life proprietor with the rest in the property of the soil, and in all its natural productions, vegetable and animal.

But the earth in its natural state, as before said, is capable of supporting but a small number of inhabitants compared with what it is capable of doing in a cultivated state. And as it is impossible to separate the improvement made by cultivation from the earth itself, upon which that improvement is made, the idea of landed property arose from that inseparable connection; but it is nevertheless true, that it is the value of the improvement, only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property.

Every proprietor, therefore, of cultivated lands, owes to the community a ground-rent (for I know of no better term to express the idea) for the land which he holds; and it is from this ground-rent that the fund proposed in this plan is to issue.

There could be no such thing as landed property originally. Man did not make the earth, and though he had a natural right to occupy it, he had no right to locate as his property in perpetuity any part of it; neither did the Creator of the earth open a land-office, from whence the first title-deeds should issue…

The value of the improvement so far exceeded the value of the natural earth, at that time, as to absorb it; till, in the end, the common right of all became confounded into the cultivated right of the individual. But there are, nevertheless, distinct species of rights, and will continue to be, so long as the earth endures…

Cultivation is at least one of the greatest natural improvements ever made by human invention. It has given to created earth a tenfold value. But the landed monopoly that began with it has produced the greatest evil. It has dispossessed more than half the inhabitants of every nation of their natural inheritance, without providing for them, as ought to have been done, an indemnification for that loss, and has thereby created a species of poverty and wretchedness that did not exist before.

In advocating the case of the persons thus dispossessed, it is a right, and not a charity, that I am pleading for…

I shall now proceed to the plan I have to propose, which is, to create a national fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen pounds sterling, as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property; and also, the sum of ten pounds per annum, during life, to every person now living, of the age of fifty years, and to all others as they shall arrive at that age…[For context, the average annual wage of an agricultural laborer was around £23, which is almost US$50,000 today. £10 would translate to about US$21,000 and £15 to nearly US$32,000.]

It is proposed that the payments, as already stated, be made to every person, rich or poor. It is best to make it so, to prevent invidious distinctions. It is also right it should be so, because it is in lieu of the natural inheritance, which, as a right, belongs to every man, over and above the property he may have created, or inherited from those who did. Such persons as do not choose to receive it can throw it into the common fund.

…it can only be done by subtracting from property a portion equal in value to the natural inheritance it has absorbed. Various methods may be proposed for this purpose, but that which appears to be the best…is at the moment that property is passing by the death of one person to the possession of another…

From this [value]…annually revolving, is to be subtracted the value of the natural inheritance absorbed in it, which, perhaps, in fair justice, cannot be taken at less, and ought not to be taken for more, than a tenth part [a 10% estate tax to nuclear family members]…

Considering, then, that man is always related to society…it is therefore consistent with civilization to say that where there are no direct heirs society shall be heir to a part over and above the tenth part due to society…(an addition of ten per cent more) [a 20% estate tax if there are no direct heirs]…

There are, in every country, a number of blind and lame persons totally incapable of earning a livelihood. But as it will always happen that the greater number of blind persons will be among those who are above the age of fifty years, they will be provided for in that class. The remaining [estate tax funds] will provide for the lame and blind under that age, at the same rate of £10 annually for each person…

It is not charity but a right, not bounty but justice, that I am pleading for…I care not how affluent some may be, provided that none be miserable in consequence of it…There are, in every country, some magnificent charities established by individuals. It is, however, but little that any individual can do, when the whole extent of the misery to be relieved is considered. He may satisfy his conscience, but not his heart. He may give all that he has, and that all will relieve but little. It is only by organizing civilization upon such principles as to act like a system of pulleys, that the whole weight of misery can be removed.

The plan here proposed will reach the whole. It will immediately relieve and take out of view three classes of wretchedness – the blind, the lame, and the aged poor; and it will furnish the rising generation with means to prevent their becoming poor…The plan here proposed will benefit all, without injuring any. It will consolidate the interest of the republic with that of the individual…

I have made the calculations stated in this plan, upon what is called personal, as well as upon landed property. The reason for making it upon land is already explained; and the reason for taking personal property into the calculation is equally well founded though on a different principle. Land, as before said, is the free gift of the Creator in common to the human race. Personal property is the effect of society; and it is as impossible for an individual to acquire personal property without the aid of society, as it is for him to make land originally…All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man’s own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came…

…for if we examine the case minutely it will be found that the accumulation of personal property is, in many instances, the effect of paying too little for the labor that produced it; the consequence of which is that the working hand perishes in old age, and the employer abounds in affluence.

…when the ostentatious appearance [property] makes serves to call the right of it in question, the case of property becomes critical, and it is only in a system of justice that the possessor can contemplate security…

A revolution in the state of civilization is the necessary companion of revolutions in the system of government.

Speaking of the distinctions of Natural Rights for the people, Paine in a letter to Jefferson written in 1788/9,  draws a distinction between ‘rights they could individually exercise fully and perfectly, and those they could not’ (CW II, 1298). In the reply to Burke this is used to show that every civil right grows out of a natural right or ‘is a natural right exchanged)’; that the civil power is made up of the aggregate of that class of the natural rights of man, which becomes defective in the individual in point of power; and that the power produced from the aggregate of natural rights, imperfect in power in the individual’, cannot be applied to invade the natural rights which are retained by the individual…’ (CW I, 276).

Paine then develops a series of welfare proposals that seem to have no underlying principle of justice, but are proffered wholly as a way of redirecting spending. He advocates that poor relief be removed as a local tax and replaced by central provision from government coffers; that pensions be offered for those advanced in age, starting at 50, and in full form at 60; that provision be made for the education of the poor; that maternity be benefit be granted to all women immediately after the birth of a child; that a fund be established for the burial of those who die away from home; and that arrangements be made for the many young people who travel to the metropolis in search of a livelihood to provide initial accommodation and support until they find work. Paine ends by identifying provision for those who have served in the army and navy, and suggesting that, as demands on the public purse from these sources declines, then items of indirect taxation might also be lifted, and the burden of taxation gradually shifted towards a progressive taxation on landed property, coupled with the abolition of primogeniture, and a progressive tax on the income from investments.

That Paine wrote with the bluntness and sweeping rhetoric that alienates the more philosophically inclined modern reader was an essential element in his success and his continuing importance. Paine spoke to ordinary people—and they read him in their thousands—indeed, he was often read aloud in public houses and coffee shops. He claimed no authority over them, but helped them to doubt those who did claim such authority, whether civil or religious, and he affirmed over and over again their right and responsibility to think for themselves and to reach their own judgment on matters. He did so at a time when the press had become capable of reaching even the poorest of society…

Because of his radicalism Paine was vehemently attacked in his own lifetime—if the scurrilous biography was not invented for him it certainly attained something of an art form in his depiction. He was outlawed in England, nearly lost his life in France, and was largely ostracized and excluded when he returned to America. He spoke up for those who had not voice of their own against power, the poor, the outcast, the excluded; and, for all those of hard workers who were bound to the grist and mill of life, whose blood, sweat, and tears would provide the surplus value that lined the coffers of the Rich and Proud.

Where is the Thomas Paine for our time?

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1. Christopher Hitchens. Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (Kindle Locations 117-124). Grove Press. Kindle Edition.