March 21, 2016
to try to free a people who want to live in slavery as it is to try to enslave a people who want to live in freedom."
Niccolo Machiavelli
If so, then read on, with eyes wide open and with a full heart. If not, it's time to open your eyes, and then rise up with a full heart.
The story of man's enslavement hitherto, is as anarchist Emma Goldman disclosed:
Let's break it down.
1. Property
Property is one of those catch-22 concepts that gets our brains all tied up into knots.
It's a clash of,
Deliciously paradoxical. Delightfully absurd.
Our minds go from 'this is mine!' flaring up with prideful ownership to,
...witch spirals out into nihilism.
It is in this way that the concept of property is proportionately entangled with the concept of mortality. And when the majority of people are unconsciously living their lives in denial of their own mortality, we get a situation where property becomes a hoarding process of egoic pride and overvalued one-upmanship.
Bring economics and a culture that puts a price tag on everything into the equation, and you have a situation where the majority of people have the unhealthy worldview that anything can be bought, anything can be contained and turned into a product, anything can be held captive, and where ownership and a sense of entitlement go to people's heads.
It is then that the dominion of human needs is complete, turning men into slaves using the illusion of their ownership:
Solution - Borrowing
So how do we square this seemingly unsquarable circle?
First of all, we need to make sure we fall into Shaw's,
It's all too easy to remain ignorant.
It's comfortable to just go with the flow of the ownership-based worldview of the status quo: the ninety-five percent that would rather die than think.
The ability to think outside the box is rare for a reason:
Indeed, if ignorance is bliss, it seems knowledge is pain. Especially when it comes to being knowledgeable about our own mortality and thus aware of the ultimate hypocrisy of property and ownership.
But it's okay.
The ultimate question is:
2. Government
Here's the statist's argument in a nutshell:
Huh...?
It's the ultimate tautology:
You get the idea. Classic circular reasoning.
We've been conditioned to believe that the people in government are somehow fit to govern, even though, deep down inside, we all know that the only person anyone is fit to govern is their own person. And even that's debatable.
Here it is, down and dirty:
Government, as it stands, is a giant pot of slow boiling water.
The people governed are ignorant frogs enjoying the warm creature comforts therein.
Now,
...and you have a recipe for authoritarian-craving, populist-loving, state-codependent people who somehow believe that people can't lead themselves so let's vote for some people who can't lead themselves to lead us.
Ding ding ding...!
Solution: We don't need masters, or rulers, or presidents, or queens, or emperors - we need to learn how to lead ourselves.
Solution - Anarchy
What the world needs is more self-mastery, not more obedience.
Democracy through anarchy will always be more superior to democracy through plutocracy. Our problem is not that we have too many bad laws, necessarily, it's that we have way too many people blindly following them. Given enough awareness of state corruption, and enough people willing to practice civil disobedience, those bad laws simply disintegrate.
They only ever meant anything because of an outdated social contract to begin with.
As Mark Passio said,
Don't blindly follow bad laws. Learn them like a professional so you can break them like a master.
Here's the thing:
In fact, we can actually have healthier rules without rulers inadvertently mucking it up by trying to maintain their own power. Plus, the ground-up leadership of anarchy prevents anyone's power from becoming corrupt, let alone from corrupting absolutely.
So liberate your imagination from the prison of,
We must build from the ground up; reestablish healthy, sustainable, and interdependent modes of self-governance. It will be a marathon, not a sprint.
We'll have to struggle against corrupt power. We'll have to tussle with codependent sheep afraid to discard their fur. We'll have to flip the script with a complete constitutional overhaul. Sure, it's easier said than done.
But as Spinoza once said,
3. Religion
What is the function of religion?
Religion attempts to force our minds into transforming mysterious myths into unquestionable facts.
Rather than allowing myths to be mysterious realms where our imaginations can play, religion turns them into fearful facts with serious agendas that end up causing unnecessary anxiety in the real world.
Religion atrophies creativity. It shrivels up the organ of our imagination.
As Deepak Chopra surmised,
Needless to say, religion is a bad use of imagination.
But we shouldn't be too hard on ourselves when it comes to religion. Just as most of us were conditioned to be dependent on the state, most of us were conditioned to think religiously.
And so it's probably best to approach the subject with a similar attitude as Guy Harrison:
Sometimes all we need to do to put things in perspective is to take a deep breath and realize that we are a very young and confused species in an otherwise ancient and fine-tuned universe.
Solution - Spirituality
Where religion clings, spirituality lets go.
Where the religious mind is closed by belief, the spiritual mind is opened by wonder. Spiritual thinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own way of thinking about things.
They are free to be creative, to think past bias, as opposed to the unquestioning religious mind which is subject to the tyranny of belief.
As Salman Rushdie warned:
Here's the thing:
In the end,
The trial and error of it all is arduous at best, and there are prisons and pitfalls galore.
But if we can approach the core issues of our stumbling - property; government; and religion - with courage, a sense of humor, and the ability to sacrifice self-seriousness, then perhaps we can make the journey a little more imaginative and, God forbid, a little more enjoyable...
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