Theory Nerds!

[JesusLooksLikeMe]

SO what you're saying then M - and please correct me if I'm wrong - is that Marxist/anti-capitalist beliefs are of value to the ostriches amongst us who can live in complete denial of what's about them and the confines in which all our choices and transactions are made? Like a prisoner saying "At least I have the freedom to choose when I'm going to shit in this bucket".
It's a futile position, surely?

[Rit]

bah! Marx was a semi-hermetic mystic who fell into the wrong field of work. He became a political revolutionary.

[Rit]

the primary distinguishing feature of mystics is their (either) overt or implicit belief in impending apocalypse on a grand scale, and their association of real world indications of social change with a private myth filled with ciphers and allegories which conform to their egotistic understandings of how the new world in the wake of the apocalpyse will look like.


... ladies and gentlemen, i present to you one Mr. Karl "the Prole" Marx ;D

[Rit]

actually, i don't know where else to post these, so i'll post them here,
Three quotes from philosopher John Ralston Saul:

"In the context of the technocratic mind, truth, like history and events, is what suits the interests of the system or the game plan of the man in charge."

"The undoubted sign of a society well under control or in decline is that language has ceased to be a means of communication and has become instead a shield for those who master it."

"The Inquisitors were the first to formalize the idea that to every question there is a right answer. The answer is known, but the question must be asked and correctly answered. Relativism, humanism, common sense, and moral beliefs were all irrelevant to this process because they assume doubt. Since the Inquisitors knew the answer, doubt was impossible. Process, however, was essential, for efficient governance and process required that questions be asked in order to produce the correct answer."

[Rit]

here is a post from a reader who read Saul's invective ("Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West") against the abuses of Reason:

"Unbelievable. I am dismayed that this work is taken seriously. If you think that the idea of reason and rationality is constructed as a tool for political purposes you are frankly insane. Reason stands above any side's political purposes. This book itself is a failed attempt at reason. This book's value is as a humorous testament to what extreme lengths people can take fundamentally absurd ideas and how people can believe it is profound. This book sets out to argue against reason? Did the other reviewers miss this astounding contradiction?"


i presume many would side with the reader.
but that's to miss the point of Saul's book. Reason can be misused like any other tool.

[Thorngrub]

ritalinpants said:

bah! Marx was a semi-hermetic mystic who fell into the wrong field of work. He became a political revolutionary.

Have you read any of the works of Michael Bakunin, Rit-? I've recently discovered this "Father of Anarchists" by having had the good fortune of stumbling across his tractate "GOD AND THE STATE".

Look it up immediately, and read it. Here is a direct link to the entire text, actually:

dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bakunin/godandstate/godandstate_ch1.html

I have found it to be indispensable.

Here are some highlights: [underlines mine]

(He was the guy who referred to SATAN as "The first Freedom Fighter"):

"Yes, our first ancestors, our Adams and our Eves, were, if not gorillas, very near relatives of gorillas, omnivorous, intelligent and ferocious beasts, endowed in a higher degree than the animals of another species with two precious faculties-the power to think and the desire to rebel.

These faculties, combining their progressive action in history, represent the essential factor, the negative power in the positive development of human animality, and create consequently all that constitutes humanity in man.

The Bible, which is a very interesting and here and there very profound book when considered as one of the oldest surviving manifestations of human wisdom and fancy, expresses this truth very naively in its myth of original sin. Jehovah, who of all the good gods adored by men was certainly the most jealous, the most vain, the most ferocious, the most unjust, the most bloodthirsty, the most despotic, and the most hostile to human dignity and liberty-Jehovah had just created Adam and Eve, to satisfy we know not what caprice; no doubt to while away his time, which must weigh heavy on his hands in his eternal egoistic solitude, or that he might have some new slaves. He generously placed at their disposal the whole earth, with all its fruits and animals, and set but a single limit to this complete enjoyment. He expressly forbade them from touching the fruit of the tree of knowledge. He wished, therefore, that man, destitute of all understanding of himself, should remain an eternal beast, ever on all-fours before the eternal God, his creator and his master. But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge.

We know what followed. The good God, whose foresight, which is one of the divine faculties, should have warned him of what would happen, flew into a terrible and ridiculous rage; he cursed Satan, man, and the world created by himself, striking himself so to speak in his own creation, as children do when they get angry; and, not content with smiting our ancestors themselves, he cursed them in all the generations to come, innocent of the crime committed by their forefathers. Our Catholic and Protestant theologians look upon that as very profound and very just, precisely because it is monstrously iniquitous and absurd. Then, remembering that he was not only a God of vengeance and wrath, but also a God of love, after having tormented the existence of a few milliards of poor human beings and condemned them to an eternal hell, he took pity on the rest, and, to save them and reconcile his eternal and divine love with his eternal and divine anger, always greedy for victims and blood, he sent into the world, as an expiatory victim, his only son, that he might be killed by men. That is called the mystery of the Redemption, the basis of all the Christian religions. Still, if the divine Savior had saved the human world! But no; in the paradise promised by Christ, as we know, such being the formal announcement, the elect will number very few. The rest, the immense majority of the generations present and to come, will burn eternally in hell. In the meantime, to console us, God, ever just, ever good, hands over the earth to the government of the Napoleon Thirds, of the William Firsts, of the Ferdinands of Austria, and of the Alexanders of all the Russias.

Such are the absurd tales that are told and the monstrous doctrines that are taught, in the full light of the nineteenth century, in all the public schools of Europe, at the express command of the government. They call this civilizing the people! Is it not plain that all these governments are systematic poisoners, interested stupefiers of the masses?

I have wandered from my subject, because anger gets hold of me whenever I think of the base and criminal means which they employ to keep the nations in perpetual slavery, undoubtedly that they may be the better able to fleece them. Of what consequence are the crimes of all the Tropmanns in the world compared with this crime of treason against humanity committed daily, in broad day, over the whole surface of the civilized world, by those who dare to call themselves the guardians and the fathers of the people? I return to the myth of original sin.

God admitted that Satan was right; he recognized that the devil did not deceive Adam and Eve in promising them knowledge and liberty as a reward for the act of disobedience which he had induced them to commit; for, immediately they had eaten of the forbidden fruit, God himself said (see Bible): 'Behold, the man is become as one of the gods, to know good and evil; prevent him, therefore, from eating of the fruit of eternal life, lest he become immortal like Ourselves."

Let us disregard now the fabulous portion of this myth and consider its true meaning, which is very clear. Man has emancipated himself; he has separated himself from animality and constituted himself a man; he has begun his distinctively human history and development by an act of disobedience and science-that is, by rebellion and by thought.

Three elements or, if you like, three fundamental principles constitute the essential conditions of all human development, collective or individual, in history: (1) human animality; (2) thought; and (3) rebellion. To the first properly corresponds social and private economy; to the second, science; to the third, liberty.

Idealists of all schools, aristocrats and bourgeois, theologians and metaphysicians, politicians and moralists, religionists, philosophers, or poets, not forgetting the liberal economists-unbounded worshippers of the ideal, as we know-are much offended when told that man, with his magnificent intelligence, his sublime ideas, and his boundless aspirations, is, like all else existing in the world, nothing but matter, only a product of vile matter.

We may answer that the matter of which materialists speak, matter spontaneously and eternally mobile, active, productive, matter chemically or organically determined and manifested by the properties or forces, mechanical, physical, animal, and intelligent, which necessarily belong to it-that this matter has nothing in common with the vile matter of the idealists. The latter, a product of their false abstraction, is indeed a stupid, inanimate, immobile thing, incapable of giving birth to the smallest product, a caput mortuum, an ugly fancy in contrast to the beautiful fancy which they call God; as the opposite of this supreme being, matter, their matter, stripped by that constitutes its real nature, necessarily represents supreme nothingness. They have taken away intelligence, life, all its determining qualities, active relations or forces, motion itself, without which matter would not even have weight, leaving it nothing but impenetrability and absolute immobility in space; they have attributed all these natural forces, properties, and manifestations to the imaginary being created by their abstract fancy; then, interchanging rôles, they have called this product of their imagination, this phantom, this God who is nothing, "supreme Being" and, as a necessary consequence, have declared that the real being, matter, the world, is nothing. After which they gravely tell us that this matter is incapable of producing anything, not even of setting itself in motion, and consequently must have been created by their God.

At the end of this book I exposed the fallacies and truly revolting absurdities to which one is inevitably led by this imagination of a God, let him be considered as a personal being, the creator and organizer of worlds; or even as impersonal, a kind of divine soul spread over the whole universe and constituting thus its eternal principle; or let him be an idea, infinite and divine, always present and active in the world, and always manifested by the totality of material and definite beings."

You should really check this guy out . . . dig deep.

He is a new hero of mine.

[Thorngrub]

He is most well known for having inverted Voltaire's famous saying "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." by countering it with the far more interesting, and, at least to my mind, more truthfully accurate, "If God existed, it would be necessary to abolish him."

An extremely important figure in philosophical & political revolutionary circles.

[Thorngrub]

Not to mention, the man responsible for nudging me awake towards the dawning realization that I am an anarchist.

[Thorngrub]

And most certainly not in the crude sense that your average joe thinks of that term...

[Thorngrub]

Anarchy: *Look into it*

[Artknocker]

Did you say "anarchist" or "anti-christ"?

[Thorngrub]

artknocker said:

Did you say "anarchist" or "anti-christ"?

There don't seem to be much of a difference, huh- ?

[Thorngrub]

Although I must state, for the record, I'm certainly not comfortable with such terms as "anarchist" or "satanist", 2 things I have never really considered myself to be, at all.

I don't like anything with an "-ist" at the end of it, I suppose.

I am not a follower of Satan any more than I am a follower of Christ. But I do see eye to eye with both of them, more or less. I consider Satan to be a fallen angel . . . and more pointedly, to be the AVATAR of "fallen angels" everywhere. The "poster boy" of all those who have been held in high regard at one point of their lives, only to be condemned by their fellow zealots later on, for not "keeping with the program" they have instituted. In that respect, I truly do relate with the one referred to as "Lucifer".

Jesus's situation was kind of the inverse, if you think about it. Rather than "falling from grace", he rose to it, after suffering a torturous death at the hand of the Romans, an act allegedly planned and conducted by his own Father, who art in Heaven.

There are obviously so many disparaties and incongruencies in the Bible, that I no longer feel the need to "debate" them with Believers. In fact, I'd rather allow the Believers to keep their Faith, because everyone needs Something to believe in, and I don't want to be the one to take that away from them.

But it is plain to me that "the Bible" is naught but remaining parchments penned by human poets and historians, chroniclers of the earliest days of recorded history, passing along their knowledge to be set into POETRY, which to me has always been the avatar of TRUTH, or at least a vessel by which truth can be shown.

Hence I agree with Bakunin's assessment of the Bible being "here and there a very profound book", indeed. I can also see through a lot of the BS, allowing me a broader perspective of what's really going on, here.

And what is going on, in a nutshell, is the propagation of TYRANNY by the few who would seek to pull the proverbial wool over the eyes of the many, so as to gain Control and Profit over them. The Church and State have always "buddied up" to this petty, criminal endeavor, and I believe it might be time to put a stop to it.

*don't look at me!* Heh, I ain't gettin in the line o' fire, Hoo-dawgiez! No; I'd rather bemusedly sit on the sidelines and enjoy the ruckus. Cuz these twopenny thieves and powermongers are going to get theirs, you just wait and see.

[Thorngrub]

Isn't it ironic that the very United States of America - that lofty institution which dared to wrest Tyranny itself from the hands of the few Warlords and hand it back to the People only a couple of centuries ago -- that we have come to this-? *koff*BUSH*koff*

Not really . . .not when you sit down and consider that all this administration is guilty of, is the very human foible which possessed the Old Tyrants in the first place: The adrenaline rush of POWER (and you do recall what they say about that stuff, right?)

That's why they call it "Revolution" . . . . . . What Goes Around, Comes Around . . .

*stay Tuned to the Streets . . . for the Revolution will Not be Televised...*

[chrisfan]

Bumping for Mary ...

Individual liberty - What makes the US unique? Or a crock of flag-waving crap?