Dear Employers (Hit your own Targets)

Your target goals are meaningless to us. We know that a business needs to make a profit. But your business is a sausage, by which I mean that we have no idea what's gone into it. Huge bonuses to the CEO? That's just part of the payroll budget, and actually means we AREN'T making a profit. That means you feel justified raising targets on the next performance review so we don't get our bonuses down here on the sales floor.

Making a profit is a tricky business of smoke and mirrors accounting. Need to show a profit to shareholders? Do the math one way. Need to show a loss to the tax inspectors? Do the math another way?  And you don't even have to break the law. The only group you cheat is your employees.

We know how much the CEO and other executives make compared to the rest of us. And speaking for myself. I've watched how fast one can swap CEOs in and out. I've worked under three CEOs in less than ten years. That doesn't seem to justify the payroll disparity to me. But maybe I'm bitter.

So. Just to confirm, CEOs have no problem giving themselves credit for any successes, but still giving themselves golden parachutes when the roof of the company falls in. But we don't get a bonus, one that the CEO wouldn't bother to pick up if it were lying on the road, because we didn't match some arbitrary measurement next quarter, just before we've figured out what we need to do to reach those targets.

So no. You performance targets don't impress us. They are capricious and deceptive and you can use them as a rectal thermometer.

Friday Finale: New Friday Thing

I am working to provide updates five days a week. And in the effort to avoid burn out, I have decided to use Friday as a synopsis of what I've been noticing and working on through the week.

Minions, cultists, acolytes and fanatics on my Patreon will get early access to my private Archive Notes. To be honest, as per my open source and free access mandate, these will be made available to all at the end of each Mendasa Luni-solar year. But until then, if you want access to the newest entries in the Harbinger Archives, you will need to be a patron. I need to find some way to strike a balance between open source and giving benefits to patrons. So there you go. Now back to the lies!

Things I've found and liked this Week

• I downloaded and listened to the Buddhist Catechism from Librivox. the book dates itself quite frequently. But as I wasn't reading it as a Buddhist, but as a student of religion and culture, I found it quite interesting. 
• I also tried downloading the Sikh Religion: Its Gurus, Sacred Writings and Authors, but found the audio and narration quality not manageable, and sadly abandoned it. 
• I've been listening to Tim Ferriss' Podcast again. Specifically his interviews with Terry Crews and Kevin Kelly. The Terry Crews interview is worth a listen from the power of Terry's honesty alone. I found The Kevin Kelly interview very interesting, as Kevin is a very smart guy who is thinking about similar subjects to myself and coming to very different (and more optimistic) conclusions. And anything that challenges your own ideas is useful. 
• A nice little article about Lewis Dartnell and his book The Knowledge. This book is already in the recommended reading, so there you go.
• Ryan Holiday writes on the danger that having a strong routine can also make you brittle to shocks and how to address it.
• A listicle (I know, I'm sorry) about Ancient books of Magick that promised supernatural powers
• We now live in a post truth era if this video is anything to go by. 
• The Tropical Fruit Tree Americans Forgot, because being a warrior means providing for yourself. So there are going to be some gardening links now and then!

A Diatribe Against the Alt-Right and the Dangers of Predictions

I meant to write an entirely different post this morning. But I've been unifying all my disparate web presences here and uploading old back ups of other blogs to this blog. And in the process, I found a piece I wrote that feels eerily prescient in the wake of the rise of the Alt-Right and Ascendancy of President Trump and Trump's America.

I called the Post:

The Souls of White Folk?

. . .

And yes, the title was intentionally provocative. In the post, I point out that the legacy of White Europeans throughout the world is not good, to put it lightly. We have colonized and murdered, conquered and raped our way across the globe. I could easily line up a list of indictments and do so in the post itself.

If you are interested in properly educating yourself, I recommend some research into:

• The Congo Free State (The Belgium Congo)
• The Trail of Tears (United States of America)
• The Residential School System (Canada)
• The Lost Generation (Australia)
• The Amritsar Massacre (British India)
• The Middle Passage (The Atlantic Slave Trade)

And obviously this is just a sampling. Back to the original post however, because in the post I argue: " ...if the white folk don't find their soul and reclaim a collective identity that is positive- the world won't survive for much longer."

In the intervening years I have seen a strong case made for cultural identity on a smaller scale, taking pride in things such as Italian or Swedish cultural heritage, rather than white heritage.  This makes a reasonable amount of sense to me, given how diverse the cultures of Europe are, and thus, how diverse the cultural heritage of European descended white Americans would be. However, in the post I was primarily referring to ongoing damage caused to the planet ecologically.

But what is interesting (and not in a good way) is how the rise of the Alt-Right and Trump's America so clearly serves as a rejection of what I was arguing. The Alt-Right and the self-proclaimed deplorables are refusing to re-frame their cultural identities into something forward looking and positive. Rather than address the legacy as Germany did following World War 2 and the Nuremberg Trials, the Alt-Right are taking a stance of denial and pride in their monstrous past and nasty cultural heritage. They are doubling down, and fighting back against the progress made.

So I have to admit, looking back to April of 2010, I was right for the wrong reasons, and things are so much worse than I expected when I wrote those words.

All us Children

The Dreamwalker is the two who are one, connected mystically to man of void and Lady Of Fire. The Dreamwalker represents the first of the three pillars of the free path. The pillar of critical thinking. It is they who first noticed something wrong amongst the heroes who flee from the Glass Tower during the final days of darkness.

First Mother. The daughter of the last king. Sister to the could have been King. The little mother who fled the Glass Tower during the final days of darkness. Who founded the first tribe. Who learned the ways of self-sufficiency from the Weaver, and woe the scavenger folk back into the circle, into the web of the story.

First hero. The stranger, the outsider, the outcast who joins the tribe and proves a True Believer. First hero is the fire in the drive, powered by the great Patron the Great Serpent. First hero is the Mythic embodiment of self-defense.

The free path is supported at its Center by three pillars colon critical thinking, self-sufficiency, self defense as personified and embodied by these mythic figures.

These skills are what gives us the freedom to walk away abd act of our own volition.

Speak out, start Fires, fight back.

If you can't think for yourself, someone is willing to think for you. And they will do so to their benefit.

If you can't provide for yourself, you are a slave to the person who can provide for you. You will work for your daily bread forever.

If you can't defend yourself; then whatever you gain, somebody else can take from you. If you can't defend yourself, then you are a victim, forever.

Without critical thinking, the dreamwalker is just two lost souls toiling as wage slaves in the city. Without self-sufficiency first mother is just a little princess trapped as a sacrifice to the hungry Empire. Without self-defense first hero is just an outcast scavenger and a victim of fate and predators.

Without these skills, none of us are adults and all of us are children.

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Service Update: Importing Old Blogs

I'm afraid that there is nothing fancy in terms of content to be added on this post. I may post again later today, schedule permitting.

This post is to note that I am in the process of mirroring content for other blogs on this blog for unity and continuity purposes. My writing has been spread across the internet. I'd like to unify the body of my work, and so I've spent this morning importing content.

I have marked some of the content as reprints already, however, this is not a finished process. Likewise, there may be dead links on a number of the imported posts. I'm going to continue to work at unifying this.

But for the moment, I'm just advising of the process as it currently stands.

Are you Free? All us Inmates

I will tell you the story of the Man of Void and of the Lady of Fire.

Long ago in the future.... In the last days of the Empire an attempt was made by men and women of science to escape the constraints of Planet Earth and limits of the biosphere. If it did not fail, then the result might have been Man of Void and Lady of Fire.

Man of Void is a mythic representation of the ultimate test of freedom; the ability to walk away, to travel freely.

Lady of Fire is a mythic representation of the ultimate path to freedom; the decision to take responsibility for ones own life, to be "a light unto yourself" (to steal from Krishnamurti) and to act by your own volition.

Imagine two men. They step into a ring and begin to throw punches. If they do this voluntarily, then we would call it a boxing match. But if they do not do it voluntarily, if they are unable to choose whether they start or stop, because of outside compulsion by others, then we would consider it torture.

Imagine a small child, the mother says to the child, "Would you like to clean your room or clean the playroom?" The child does not realize, that by engaging with their mother's question they have given up their freedom. Few of us would consider this malicious, because it is the job of a mother to teach and manage the child until they are able to make such decisions for themselves. But once we are no longer children, this process should cease. But what happens when we are given such false choices by Kings and Prime Ministers and Presidents? Are we not still children being given false choices?

The restriction of volition and mobility is domestication writ large. We have made pets of ourselves. And of course pets and animals kept in zoos live longer than those in the wild. With humans, it took some 2,000 years before this was true. We have packed humans into such sardine dense cities that the transmittable diseases are appalling. Only the advent of modern medicine leveled the playing field, allowing the civilized human to live longer than their wild counterpart. But what good is a long life if you hate it? And yet, we fear the end of life- even the end of a life of torment. Even with the rise of suicide as a feature of modern culture, most of us fear death more than a life we have to medicate ourselves (whether by alcohol or tobacco or marijuana or actual anti-depressants) to endure.

And so our Kings and Emperors use that fear of death in order to extract our submission, to push us into the field and factory and make us work for their benefit. It is this fear to take ownership of our life that is used against us to restrict our volition and our ability to move freely.

The good person may now object that we have an obligation, a duty, to do our share. But this isn't true. A duty or obligation springs from an voluntary agreement. We have twisted this in the modern usage, trying to pretend that duties can be inescapable. What is this but slavery? To be a duty, to be an obligation in contractual sense of the word, both parties must have entered the agreement of their own free will. To say that because one was born within these borders, in a world made of nothing but borders, that one is then obligated to participate as a member of this group; this is still merely slavery disguised. To abstain must remain a genuine option in order for participation to be in any way free.

I can hear the protests now. The land would be filled with freeloaders! Nothing would get done! Then I ask a question. If the work ordered by the Empire is so odious that no free person would do it, why should it be protected? If, for three million years humans were able to find enough people to do what must be done, what have we done so wrong in the last ten thousand? Why, for three million years was the voluntary participation of free peoples enough, and in the last ten thousand years only the forced participation by slaves would suffice?

And why also does the slave defend the slave master? Has the master so completely and effectively removed the slaves ability to stand alone that the slave cannot imagine life without the master? If the master is gone, who will whip me and make me work? Are these the questions we are reduced to asking, as we pretend that we are free men and free women? Perhaps we need better questions.


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Are you Indigenous? All us Colonists

If you are reading this, and I assume you are, then you are interested in the Free Path- sometimes called Mendasa (But ignore that for the moment). The Free Path is built upon the Song of Seven, and the First Song begins with an admonishment to be indigenous.

What does it mean to be indigenous? According to the dictionary definition we like (And thus actually use), being indigenous means to belong to the land in which one lives. But what does mean.

Well, a digression.

All humans are Africans.the evidence is in. If you want to argue go elsewhere. Our DNA, the fossils if our ancestors, the trails of tools and artifacts, and other mountains of archaeological and anthropological evidence that tells us our lineage. We are all African.

And so if you are human and live anywhere but Africa, then you are a colonist. So what does it mean to be a colonist? Honestly, not much more than an awareness of the fact that we're all immigrants or the children of immigrants. But there is another recently emerging factor that tends to immigrate with us.

People tend not to think of the first humans coming out of Africa as colonists or settlers. This applies to the Sami of Finland, and the Franks of France, and the Ainu of Northern Japan, and the Tribes of North America. Why is a Frenchman in Africa a colonist? Why is a Lakota Sioux not a colonist?

Obviously part of the equation is whether the area already had human inhabitants. But we call many a people indigenous who colonized lands already inhabited.

But, leaving our digression, part of the equation is how we live once we settle somewhere. Do we live like that land belongs to us?

Or.

Do we live like we belong to the land?

Do we live like the land is a resource from  which we may extract what like, or do we live like the land is a collaborator with whom we are in a long term working relationship? The first song is an exhortation to be indigenous, and this is mirrored by verse 4.4 of the song: Live for the Unborn Elders. By which is meant that one should live so that ones actions do not harm the livelihood of any of the next seven generations of descendents.

So again, to be indigenous is live as though you belong rather than living as though it belongs to you.

How does one do this? Well obviously, one must live lightly and live in a way that gives back to the land. The Mendasa Story Canon gives us another useful metric. The most mysterious of the Elders of the Shadowlands (which is saying something when you consider that the Elders include the Great Serpent and the Weaver and Mystery), is the Whisperer: the voice of the land and air and sea. Stop and be still, and listen. If one pays attention you will hear a small voice speaking to- giving you the path in a whisper.

It is the Whisperer who gives the discontent that drives the Kudavbin King to give up his Empire like Siddartha or Moses. It is the Whisperer who inspires the Dreamwalker to tell their stories and inspire change like Martin Luther or Paul of Tarsus. It is the Whisperer that connects First Mother back to the Weaver's web and to her story. And here I have no examples within the stories of the Hungry Empire; because while the Empire can assimilate the stories of the Dreamwalker and the Kudavbin King, redirect their attempts at freedom back to the Grey Path, but First Mother is never assimilated. Instead, if caught by the Empire, First Mother is sacrificed. And she is sacrificed because, while the Dreamwalker points to the path of the indigenous person, and the Kudavbin King tears open a path which will lead to the indigenous life, First Mother teaches and walks the path of the indigenous life. And this cannot be tolerated.

But the Hungry Empire has blind spots. And this message seeks to live in such blind spots, and to whisper to those who wish to hear, teaching them how to belong.

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Crabs in a Pot and Freedom in a Garden

This post is inspired by the Time Ferris interview of Terry Crews, found here (which I listened to during on my morning run). Tim Ferris describes in his book: The Four Hour Workweek, his argument that we should seek to decouple to what we do every day with how we earn a living. He recommends seeking to generate multiple streams of passive income. He recommends working on a source of income until it will self generate and then stepping away to do something else (maybe another source of income).

In the interview, Terry describes what he terms 'negotiating with terrorists', giving an example of a time he allowed a football coach to call him Tyrone (rather than Terry) so as not to risk his football scholarship by challenging the man with the power to take away that scholarship. Terry talks about having to do these kinds of negotiations again and again, from negotiating with his abusive father to negotiating with gang members and drug dealers on the streets of Fling Michigan and dealing with egos in Hollywood.

This kind of power imbalance is something I think anyone in the first world middle class with find familiar. The kind of petty bullying and power struggles we hoped would end with graduation, but continued into performance reviews and managerial coaching sessions as failed authors and actors and musicians and athletes and entrepreneurs take out their bitterness on the people they now manage at Wal-Mart and Best Buy and they various cubicle farms where they has brown nosed their way up the ladder enough to abuse power by 'managing' those below them on the org chart.

We are slaves to the people who have power to take away our livelihood. Freedom is all about power and negotiation with the one who has the power to harm us.

In his book The World Until Yesterday, Jared Diamond describes the strategy used by many tribal gardening peoples whereby they tend multiple gardens in different climates and ecosystems as a defense against blight or bug or bad weather. In the Rich Dad, Poor Dad series of books, author Robert Kiyosaki returns again and again to his definition of asset and liability. Kiyosaki like to say that "assets will feed you, liabilities will eat you".  When the weather goes bad, a garden will fail. A bad frost could end your livelihood. If you have only one garden or work in your master's garden, a bad harvest could kill you. Not relying on any one garden is freedom. Having your own gardens is freedom.

Your safety (and mine as I don't do this full time yet) is almost certainly dependent upon your master. A truly free person retains the ability to walk away. A truly free person is responsible for their own life and carries their life in their own hands. How did we get to the point where the term, "taking your life into your hands" is a cautionary saying? How many slave owners had to convince us of how many lies before being in control of our own lives become thought of as a liability? Get a good job with good benefits? how did find a good master to become a slave to become accepted advice to give to young people?

And having a garden or two is not enough. Jared Diamond notes that tribal peoples general had an average of seven gardens (seven is important, you'll see that number a lot here). To switch metaphors to video games such as the Legend of Zelda, multiple gardens are like the health meter or the heart containers in a video game system. They represent your ability to take hits and keep going. The ability to provide for yourself is integral to your person power, to your ability to walk away from a bad situation, to turn down a bad deal, to take a hit and keep going towards a goal.

But more important than having gardens, is having the ability to plant gardens, to make your own livelihood and remake it as needed. This is why the Canadian government worked so "to kill the Indian in the child[.]" when they instituted the Residential School system. This is why kings typically bond serfs to the land and why slave owners don't want slaves learning how to read. If you can make your own livelihood, then escape is possible. 

You need the ability to plant your own garden. 

Anything less and you're a slave.

Most of us are.

And most of us feel threatened when other slaves reach for freedom. People remember failures in the short term and success in the long term. People hide from freedom out of fear of failure. People are afraid of their freedom. Who taught us thus? I think you know by now. 

Terry crews talks about the tear down effect, the crabpot mentality of Flint Michigan which I saw described in Romeo must Die. Slaves fear the success of other slaves. They fear their own freedom. They fear having nobody else to blame for their failure. And so they don't work, because then they'd have to blame themselves for their failures. But it doesn't matter if you beat other people. 

Winning is not competition, not if your win condition is freedom. 

To be untouchable, because you can survive any outside shock and create your own heart containers - that is success. 

That is freedom.

Welcome to the Revolution. Here's your Crown.

Civilized religion and/or political ideology often begins as rebellion and ends as oppression. Look at Christianity and communism. What fights against the king is frequently conquered and then used by the king against his enemies.

Why do rebels become tyrants? Why do movements seeking liberation end up oppressing? Revolution as a word refers to a circle. And revolution keeps rolling back to oppression by tyrants, because nobody from tyrant to rebel to unwashed masses understand another method of living. We know only oppression. Rebels become tyrants because that can't imagine a system that functions without tyrants. They try to be good tyrants or to hold tyrants to some rule of law or to make tyrants democratically elected. But they can't imagine as system without tyrants.

We are all slaves. And we keep asking," if we have killed the master, who will rule us? "

We have spent ten thousand years isolated from the proper way for humans to live. We have spent ten thousand years finding and destroying that knowledge wherever we encounter it and typically destroying the cultures that still possess and preserve this knowledge. These cultures also revolve, circles of cultural transmission, as parents pass on the story and culture to the next generation necessary to rebuild the culture.

Tradition and treason share etymological roots. The empire does not relinquish power. Pharaoh does not die. He ascends to rule as a god. As did Caesar. As did Jesus of Nazareth. The empire is unwilling to admit to the ascendancy of natural cycles. The emperor does not die. The sun never sets on the empire. The kingdom does not decline. No autumn. No winter. Always summer. Always growing.

The Empire accumulates as a basic function, and it does not pass on anything to the next generation willingly. Look at the wars of succession throughout history. Note how new gods steal control of heaven from the old gods, as Zeus did from Chronos. And Zeus was revolutionary liberator and then oppressor, because there must always be a tyrant.

As was Christ. As was Lenin. As was Moses. As was Castro. As was Mao.

Whether political or religious, our cultural discourse has been unable to speak in any language but that of the oppressor since the Agricultural Revolution, the last ten thousand years.

And new concepts are built into the education of young slaves and oppressors (And all oppressors are also slaves). They are taught to believe in a reward and an afterlife following death, to better tolerate oppression while live. They are taught the idea of progress and the idea of the inevitability of progress, to prevent them exploring the old ways which contain the true keys to freedom. They are taught the idea of sin or the idea that humans are flawed and imperfect beings and that the inequality and oppression of modern life are inevitable.

We don't need a new way. We need the old way.


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Why you are probably a Supervillain

Much of the problems regarding human civilized impact upon the ecosystem is due our conditioned response to a now changed environment. We are Neolithic hunter gathers, used to living in group of less than two hundred people, now scrambling to manage in million strong cities supplied by massive mechanized farms. Our responses, honed by thousands of generations of natural selection, are unrelated and unhelpful to the world we have built.

Is the devil our instinct towards the life our ancestors lived for 3 million years? Why is the ability to act independently typically the hallmark of the dark side? Why does the supervillain seek change while the hero seeks status quo?

Why are stories where the hero is a rebel Typically science fiction or history? Why are we still afraid to depict a current revolution?

The answer is scale. A village of one hundred fifty people can be all heroes. All warriors. A city of one million needs workers, peasants, consumers. A village survives on initiative. A city survives o obedience.

Humans as hunters are like wolves. Humans as city dwellers are like sheep. Wolves get hunted. Sheep get sheared. Make your choice.

The hero of one system becomes a supervillain in another.

But we are not all sheep. Some of us are now shepherds. And they do not value the rebel. They do not value the reformer or the activist. That us the path of the dark side. And those who pursue the insights necessary to understand this are aimed towards ascetic pursuits, loke the Jedi.

Be passive or defensive if the status quo. Otherwise risk becoming the villain.

But I think, shifting gears here, that even rebellion is in service of the King. The scale differences mean that the best a rebel can hope for is to create a war nobody can win. Think of the history Afghanistan. The two sequels to the Matrix and the book The Rebel Sell do a good job pointing out how the rebellion serves the Hungry Empire and the Locust King.

So don't rebel. Look at what else is part if the dark side, part of the path of the supervillain.

Independence.

The villain can walk away. The villain can stand alone. If the King needs workers, then abandoning the loom and the assembly line is a more dangerous rebellion. Karl Marx imagined that the workers would seize the means of production. But that has been shown to create new Kings. Look at how many legends depicting the rise of new Kings and gods begins with a humble birth, from King David to King Arthur.

The solution is not rebellion or revolution. The solution is neglect.

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Runaway Slaves and the Empty Portraits of Joseph Stalin

How is the pope going to take this? 

How popes always do. By kicking somebody's ass.
The Exegesis of Philip K Dick

When Stalin decided he could no longer trust a previously favored assistant or other sycophant, he made them disappear. And I don't just mean that the poor fellow was carted off to some horrible fate (likely in Siberia or the bottom of some frozen river). I mean that photos were then altered to remove him from the official party history. I mean that documents were amended and rewritten to exclude him. I mean that Stalin did not cause the man to simply cease to be. I mean that to the utmost of his power at the time, Stalin caused the man to seem to have have never have been in the first place. 

When the Nag Hammadi documents and the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, we learned that the early Christian Church had done something very similar to the rival Christian Churches against which they had competed with for control of the message. 

The motto "In God We Trust", is a recent addition to American currency, but is mean to seem like tradition. The Confederate Statues that litter (good word) the southern US states are also recent additions, despite protests to the contrary by southern Racists. Attempts to control the story are not limited to the present and the future, and indeed are less useful in the future if the past is not preemptively altered.

The past was alterable. The past never had been altered.
Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.
George Orwell, 1984

Drapetomania was what slave owners called the phenomenon of black slaves running away. The word translates roughly to Runaway Slave Madness. And the idea was that black Africans and African Americans were in some way genetically predisposed to slavery. This rubbish was one of the many ways that the slave owners justified their monstrous actions and managed to sleep at night. But slaves who ran away punched holes in their lie that black slaves were disposed to being slaves and were fine with slavery. And so, they told a lie that those slaves who ran away were afflicted with a mental illness. The truth would destroy the lie which the system needed in order to function.

Martin Luther famously got in trouble with the Catholic Church when he began his reform movement, but the big issue was his mass printing of the Bible. Because he didn't print it Latin, which the general populace couldn't read. I printed it in German (being German) which the general populace could read. Suddenly, control of message was gone from the hands of the priest and the bishop. Anyone could read the words of the Holy Scripture and argue against the priest if they chose to do so. The church adapted, clever institutions do. But the point stands. 

Wikileaks. Edward Snowden. Deep Throat. Control of the message, and the concealment of how power maintains itself is essential for Empire to function. The Locust King lives on control of message. And why? Because the path of the Locust King is anathema to human nature. We do not want to live within the bounds of modern civilization. We get anxious and depressed. We rebel and revolt. We flee to frontier. We commit suicide (why do you think suicide is a sin? To steal from Magic: The Gathering "Death is no excuse to stop working.") 

In a word: Drapetomania.

We are being lied to. 

We are being told a lie to justify empire and hide the fact that we are still slaves.

 

As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master.

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

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Why Toilet Paper is not the Enemy and other Tales of Ideological Purity

Eco-Activist Derrick Jensen related a story in which somebody confronted him and demanded to know if Jensen used toilet paper. Now Jensen is an activist committed enough that in the book he co-wrote "What we Leave Behind", he relates stories with using his backyard as a toilet. But at the time, Jensen was using a toilet like the rest of us, and he admitted as much. The man then dismissed Jensen whole cloth, smugly asserting that because Jensen wasn't ideologically pure (my words not the man's) that anything Jensen said on the subject could be safely disregarded.

I've seen this again and again.

"You use a car, you can't protest against big oil."

"You eat Corn Flakes, you can't protest against the practises of the big Agricultural Giants in the third world."

"You wear leather. You eat meat. You go to the doctor."

Again and again.

"You voted, what's your problem?"

"You didn't vote, so you don't get to complain."

Hmm.

What this argument tries to do, is to defang opponents in two key ways. First the argument tries to dismiss the objection on the grounds of an alleged hypocrisy, a lack of ideological purity. This would be like telling a drug addict that he has no right to advocate for changes to drug laws, because is an addict. The argument attempts to turn the fact that the advocate is being harmed by and oppressed by something into a mark against them. It is an attack on the victim.

Second, it attempts to disarm the advocate. If Jensen had said that he didn't use toilet paper, there are alternatives after all, the man would almost certainly have moved on to something else. Did Jensen make the clothes he wore? Did he reach the venue in a manufactured vehicle? And the trick here (while obviously still attempting to exclude the advocate on the basis on impurity) serves to expose its own goal. A person who was as ideologically pure as they want us to be, would be helpless to impact the modern world. And this is their trick.

Advocates in the modern world, must move through that world. Missionaries must adapt to the land they are in. In a very real sense, all missionaries must be sinners to reach the people to whom they minister.

Ideological purity is the purview of the hermit and the saint. The missionary must become comfortable with hypocrisy. Because it's hypocrites who change the world.

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Video Games and Answering the Question of Civilization

I want to torture a metaphor here, so bear with me.

I love "The Matrix Revolutions ", and I do occasionally find myself defending it to others, especially the ending. I find myself doing the same with some of my favorite video games, particularly "Far Cry 3 ". I do on occasion, as a result, find myself telling people that they've missed the point of the story or the ending- going all sanctimonious hipster in my justifications.

And then we get to "The Last of Us ", which I hate. It's been repeatedly referred to with breathless praise as, "the 'Citizen Cane ' of video games ". I've listened to commentators talk about the genius behind the characterization and the ending and the arcs of the narrative. And I have had people tell me breathlessly that I don't understand it.

But I do understand it.

I'm just not impressed by it.

And now, if I'm being honest with myself, I have to wonder if people also did understand my favorite films and video games and such.

And if they also did not care.

I am forced to consider the idea that smart people may consider the same facts as I have, and that they might then come to a different conclusion.

Some questions have provable right or wrong answers. Others have only answers that provide working results and answers that don't provide working results.

Now it's time to get contentious. "The Last of Us " may be given a pass on this basis but civilization does not. After ten thousand years, it has not provided working results. So what is to be done?

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Muddled thoughts about Cathedrals

I'm still reading "Second Nature " by Michael Pollan. And in it, Pollan suggests that cathedrals are an attempts to replicate the feeling of being a sacred grove. The idea being that the tall pillars replicate tree trunks and the hushed sound and subdued lighting replicates the dabbled light through leaves and quiet of the grove.

I don't dispute the similarity. But by contrast the modern civilized ideas of religion are deliberately non-participatory, non-interactive. You sit in the pews and listen to the minister speak to you of God. The idea that the congregation would have something to say about the understanding of the sacred, is itself a blasphemy. Because the worshipper is a sheep and priest is a shepherd.

And the morality of civilization contains a madonna/whore complex regarding wilderness. Note the term: virgin woodland. Again, don't touch. Don't interact. The idea of the witch with her garden of herbs in every village. The idea of personal vision quests. Participation in a living religion is very dangerous to an established power structure.

Hierarchy is a pyramid. And we use pyramids to house dead things. Which tells you everything you need to know. Everything important goes in the pyramid, in the tomb, in the mausoleum. Embalm Lenin. Mummify Pharoah. Build a rendition of Lincoln, carve his visage in stone to stop time.

And we do the same thing with ideas. The idea that new ages might require new ideas is sacrilege. The priest and pharoah  hand down the correct ideas to masses, the flock of obedient sheep. And inevitably these ideological concepts are anthropomorphic, because we assume humans are the top of the pyramid, the Pharoah in the tomb. One step below god in the cathedral. We assume top-down order, a chain of command in a hierarchy, almost without fail.

And because we assume order is hierarchical we also assume that natural laws must be prohibitions and restrictions laid down by some divine creator. If we are forced to live under a king, clearly God must also be a king. And if kings rule by decree, then so must God. And with these incorrect ideas we caused ecological disasters that killed Empire upon Empire. Because the laws are actually laws of cause and effect like the laws of motion described centuries ago. And we don't care that these ideas don't work when applied to the real world, because we have faith in the idea. We are loyal to the doctrine. Heaven gains precedence over earth, scripture overrules skill.

The tyranny of ideological purity, assuming that ideas are more important than the messy physical world, originates from an underlying assumption that ideas predate the physical world rather than the spring from it. And what does this gain the Pharoah at the top of the pyramid?

Control. Control of the medium. Control of the message. This is why the Pope feared Martin Luther, and why the German Princes sought to control and exploit his efforts. Under civilization, power rises up the pyramid, driven by an abstracting of knowledge from nature and an encouraging of a sterility and helplessness masquerading as purity.

And this is why kings prefer cathedrals to sacred groves and why shepherds like sheep.

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Getting Mad at Michael Pollan

A decade ago or so, I don't recall precisely, I read Michael Pollan's book " In Defense of Food ", and it's companion book "Food Rules ". I found it quite interesting, despite not agreeing with some of his more interesting assertions. And a number its basic tenants have added to the form of the grand conspiracy I'm building here. His book "Botany of Desire ", has been used at multiple points in the building of this grand master plan.

So it was with a great deal of confidence that I picked up his book "Second Nature ". I have a horrible black thumb, and have been attempting to correct my deficiency in the garden, given the necessity of being able to grow one's own food as a requirement to be considered independent. And unfortunately I have found that, like cookbooks, gardening books expect a certain amount of base knowledge that most beginners something don't have but which the books assume people have by some inborn natural ability. And I felt that if anybody could demystify the process of learning to garden and point me in the right direction it would be Michael Pollan.

I was wrong.

Pollen uses one of the most annoying and cowardly defenses in this book, that most useless kind of mystification whereby an experienced person acts as though their knowledge isn't something that can be put into words and isn't something that they'd ever learned but something they just knew through an ineffable ...something. That they have a connection to the skill in question.

And of course this is all rubbish. The process of learning a skill has been well studied and is at this point well understood. A self-taught person may well be unable to put into words what they have learned through their long experience, but none of it arrives through some natural inborn talent. None of it arrived through a non physical connection with some magic pool of talent ether.

And skilled people know this, and so does Michael Pollan. And when his book is willing to admit this and point it out, his writing is at its best. But too often, his bias against modern science seem to compel him to back himself into a corner, fists up, and use this cowardly pseudo mystical defense against a strong man caricature of science that he has disingenuously created. And then none of this is useful to the reader.

At this point the reader is probably being tempted to point out that I self-identify as a chaos made, and where do I get off attacking somebody's useless mysticism? And the key word here is useless. As I've often said, I don't care if the fairytale is true, I care if the fairytale is useful. This mystical smokescreen that experts, and Michael Pollan, throw up in the face of questions regarding process is used to defend their position as expert against competition from the beginner. In his interview with Tim Ferris, former Mr. Olympia Arnold Schwarzenegger admitted to giving younger bodybuilders bad advice to prevent them from becoming a threat to him in competition.   And the broad smokescreen put up by Michael Pollan in this book is the same thing, albeit on a lesser scale.

When somebody with experience resorts to such rubbish as the idea of inborn talent, or a mystical connection to some deeper understanding, they are really saying that if you are not the lucky one who just seems to get it then tough beans. But the fact is, that science has learned and dissected natural Talent. And it turns out 'Natural Talent ' is acquired by hard work and time, without fail. Disregarding such factors as height in basketball and weight in sumo wrestling, talent is acquired as a skill little by little. Talent is the accumulation of small understandings adding up to deeper insights.

Now, attempting to be fair to an author who's writing I generally love and the experienced person unable to explain their skill to others, I must point out that being skilled at something is no guarantee that one is able to explain either how that skill was acquired or the pieces that must be assembled for another to display that skill. Many skilled craftsmen for instance- carpenters, auto mechanics, painters, musicians- have acquired the various requisite pieces of their skill tools kit through non verbal linguistic methods. They didn't sit through classes. They didn't read manuals. They didn't write dissertations. They hammered on thumbs. They squeaked their way through embarrassing music recitals. They over tightened bolts. They learn the hard way by trial and error in the physical world again and again. And so when these experienced talented people try to explain the source of their talent, having not acquire their skill through words and potentially not having training in the skill of using words, they fall back on mysticism to try and explain things. Michael Pollan has no such excuse. Words are Michael Pollan's profession. And so if he is throwing up a mystical smoke screen around the gardening profession, and he is, then he's either being a lazy author or he is doing so with deliberate intent. And that is disappointing.

I don't want this to end with a kick at a favored author, so I'll end by pointing out but this is all a very good thing in the broad sense. All skills are acquirable. Most have already been dissected, and most are already available in step by step guys. The basics of most professions takes around 200 hours to acquire. To become competent at most professions takes 2000 hours. Conscious practice on the correct skills is all that is required. No mystical connection or inborn Talent is needed. And barring hard physical traits such as height in basketball maybe setbacks or limitations, very few skill sets are beyond the reach of any individual.

Productivity and laziness and why we hate life

I aim to be productively lazy. I want to get things done. But I want to get things done that are useful. There is no need or use in being busy simply to be busy. There is no nobility in working just to work.

The desire to seem busy is closely to tied to communal peer pressure and the need to be seen as noble. Goodness and obedience are conflated in the Civilized discourse. This is the morality of the slave, and of the busy parent. A good boy or a good girl is one who doesn't interrupt mommy when she's doing something else.

In the tribe, unity and conformity is necessary for survival. However everyone has an equal say in what unity and conformity must be enforced. In civilization, conformity is enforced by those above upon those below for the benefit of those in power. Civilization enforces conformity to remind you of your place, to preempt any chance of rebellion. And modern religions speak in code talking about the unease we feel with this unwilling bargain. Abrahamic religions speak of trying to redeem our sins, Buddhism talks of relieving are suffering.

And this brings us back to the idea that being busy is virtue. Keep us busy and we can't rebel. We dont have time. But busy with what? We chase an abstract platonic ideal of conformity as productivity as success. We are trained to chase show Home Interiors for houses, radioactive green front Lawns, impossible six pack abs and thigh gaps, ridiculous sitcom perfection in our family lives. We trained to chase an impossible suburban ideal, keeping up with the Jones on steroids.

Do we actually want these things? Or more accurately, will they bring us satisfaction? Or are they illusions? Are they, to steal from Derrick Jensen, toxic mimics which will seem to fill the void but only succeed in making it worse? Daniel Quinn argued that civilisation is dominated by a quest to find a replacement for the sense of satisfaction with life which we lost when we became civilized. And since civilization is the cause of these problems, civilization is unlikely to produce the solution.

I want stop briefly here and stress that civilisation is not the same thing as modern technology and learning and science. Civilisation has accelerated humanity's acquisition of science, technology and so on. Civilisation is a cultural technology, like capitalism and democracy and socialism. And these things can be overlaid and combined. Civilisation is the cultural equivalent of chemical fertilizer, enabling growth while depleting natural fertility.

Tim Ferriss has talked at length about tge difference between efficient and effective. Efficient is doing things right, while effective is doing the right things. By keeping us focused on impossible idealized goals; we are kept busy and efficient, rather than effective and (hopefully) well rested. But we are kept in line with dream that one day we will have a house we don't own with a pointless front lawn and two cars we also don't own and a big screen television and a spouse we rarely see and children we don't raise.

We are borg. resistance is futile

Binding of the Roguelike

I've been playing a great deal of the game video game: The Binding of Isaac. This wonderfully disturbing little game has you playing as Isaac, a small child who has been locked in the basement by his religious mother who believed she was obeying God's command.

In the game, Isaac fights his way though the vermin of basement with his tears as his weapon. Yes really. Isaac will barter with curious apparently dead children, make deals with the devil (and possibly fight him), receive angelic gifts, scavenge what resources he can.

What really interests me is that the game is a Roguelike; meaning that when Isaac dies, the game resets and all progress is lost. And further, the game itself randomizes the setup upon starting a new session.

And I've been thinking about life as a Roguelike now and wondering about applying my strategies from Binding of Isaac to playing at life. And of course, wondering why such strategies aren't taught to all children. Of course, if you've been following this page, you probably have a good idea. If not, start reading!

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The Hell Keys

There are numerous minor realms in the Shadowlands. None of them are so well established as the Realms of Fair Folk. Their realms connect to all the major realms and the liminal realms. And the doors to the various demenses in this realm are the Hell keys.

Why conspiracy is the least scary option

There is no conspiracy.

There are many conspiracies.

As soon as there were three people, two were keeping secrets from the other one. Let's be honest, everyone is keeping secrets and everyone is telling secrets about everyone else. Any conspiracies eventually come out, making the possibility of an illuminati conspiracy so very unlikely.

People who imagine an overarching conspiracy are noticing that our myths and cultural assumptions rhyme again and again. Our culture has unspoken assumptions that lead us to behaviours that are destructive, both externally and internally. Our assumptions create a cultural cult that encourages and venerates a kind of societal murder-suicide.

I very much doubt there is an illuminati directing a master conspiracy from the shadows. Even competing master conspiracies seem unlikely. More likely to me, is a realitybof many petty conspirators imagining themselves to be supervillains. I doubt there is any super conspiracy. But if so, well done?

What there is, however, is a contagious set of assumptions driven by our underlying toxic culture. As soon as we internalize these toxic assumptions, we become contagious to others. And so the same damage is perpetrated by unrelated people apparently acting in concert, but really just infected by the same toxic culture.

And because the infection starts by convincing us that no other cultures exist, or are even possible, but the infection is lying to us.

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Why I hate YouTube Ads

Once upon a time I saw an trailer ad on YouTube for an upcoming movie. The movie didn't seem mind shatteringly original or shockingly well made. But it looked fun and decent and maybe worth a watch.

That was the first time I saw the trailer.

The fifth time I saw the ad, I decided I would not see the movie in theatres. I felt intruded upon and wanted to punish the film for its advertising.

The tenth time I saw the trailer, I decided I never needed to see the film. Period. Hard stop. I won't even name the film in question, lest I encourage you to see it. That's how much I want to punish the film's advertising team.

I wonder if I'm alone in this attitude. If I'm not, what does this say about the current advertising model? And what does it say about cultural saturation and blowback against the interruption economy?

The human mind is a finite thing. The pop self-help gurus can go to hell. We have a finite fungible amount of willpower. We have a well-documented limit in how many social connections we can keep track in our heads. And though the information overload economy, interruptions may be an effective way of grabbing our attention briefly, thry are also a direct attack upon our limited resources. Something's got to give, although I have no idea what.

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The New Course Reading

I've added a reading list.

I sat down and began to think about the collective research in have done into this grand problem.

And it's a lot of research. So I started compiling a reading list. I've added the list of the site already. The list isn't even close to complete, but it's already fairly large and I think it's a good start.

So a real blog post will arrive tomorrow. I'm considering the reading list to be today's post.

In Which we speak of Cults

Dissent from Decadence

Anyone who has read my work, here or elsewhere, can't help but know that I don't like the results of civilization. Oh, to be sure, I like the side effects of civilization- the fringe benefits if you will. I like technology. I like modern medicine. I like the modern entertainment industry. I like being in the elite 15% of the world population. 

But, although others might argue that these are the fruits of civilization, I would argue that overpopulation, clinical depression, world poverty, species extinction, mass pollution, climate change and ten thousand years of war and conquest are the actual fruits of civilization.  

And I dissent from the popular view that this is an acceptable trade off.

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Building a Cult

I've been using the above tag line for a week or so now. And the reason is simple. The human mind, as natural selection has crafted it, is drawn towards religion-like social technologies. Philosophy and science are both outgrowths of religion, as is politics and psychology and sociology. Many will take umbrage with this assertion, but the facts are pretty straight forward, all of these subjects are outgrowths of ideas and bodies of knowledge which originated in some religion or in many religions. As hostile as religion eventually became to many of these things, individual religions in some cases and religious thought in general in others, modern abstract thought and epistemology were incubated in the womb provided by religion.

And Cults are what big religion calls little religion.

I have labored some seventeen years now, studying the problem of Civilization. And I have what I believe to be an template for peoples to build their own religion/life philosophies which will be in adherence to the laws of nature and the human mind; religions which will nurture the human condition and protect us from being overwhelmed by our worst impulses. And this, is of course, a mad sounding idea. Hence, I call myself and my idea out preemptively as a cult.

I have studied the destructive nature of what some call cults and others call high control religions. I have built an immune system into my creation to protect against such corrupting ideas. But such temptations are inevitable in systems crafted by man and perpetuated by man. And so the defenses must be visible, and white blood cells must be all members of the congregation.

Another Way

And so, I'm building another way. I've been researching and building and designing for seventeen years. And I'm going to put it out there. And this is my plan. I have enough research and writing, musings and meditations, thoughts and theses to post every day for a decade or so. So watch this space.

If you think another way is necessary, watch this space.

If you want out of the rat race, watch this space.

If you hate Monday mornings, watch this space.

If you have stopped believing in capitalism or democracy, watch this space.

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Why we are Helpless

I have lived on this planet for approaching thirty eight years.

In that time, I've done some pretty cool things. I've written a few novels (not published, but written). I've run several half-marathons (not full marathons, half marathons). I've earned two first degree black belts (first degree, keep your pants on). I've camped without a tent in mid February.

And most of this has nothing to do with my schooling. School has taught me a great many things, how to take tests, how to switch tasks on command of a bell, how to manage a nine to five workday with lunch and coffee breaks. Oh yes, and I learned a bunch of trivia questions answers to random subjects. I have been prepared should I ever land on Jeopardy.

By the age of fifteen, in traditional cultures, I'd have been prepared to live as a self-sufficient member of the tribe. I'd have been a warrior and a hunter, at home in the world. We could do the same job preparing our children for the world we live in. We don't do this. And why don't we? Why was I, instead, still basically a child at eighteen?

Look back a few hundred years for the answer. Peasants and aristocracy could be trained from day one. You knew your lot in life based upon your birth. Hell, the modern rich and powerful still do this frequently, knowing the jobs they will grow into and the path they will take. But the peasants have rebelled enough times, and chopped off enough rich heads, that they are now told they can be whatever the like and whatever they can achieve.

Given the power imbalance, ninety some percent will still end up as what basically amounts to peasants. And this is required for the system to function. So how do you turn children into Peasants, while convincing their parents that you're giving them a sporting chance? Of you're part of the rich and beautiful; how do you convince the poor to do your labour and fight your wars, and do so without dragging you to the guillotine?

If your rich and beautiful of Prussia, you invent the modern compulsory school system for purpose of turning your peasants into loyal soldiers and obedient workers (this is why kindergarten is named using the German word for child garden). The purpose of the schooling is the format of the schooling itself.  The bells and coffee breaks, the changing shifts, and the adherence to authority and the submission to outside testing; these are the real curriculum. But what then should the would be workers and soldiers be taught in the official curriculum, if said curriculum is purely a show designed to keep the adult peasants from rising up in rebellion?

Teach them to memorize jeopardy trivia. Teach them to answer game show questions during the time when they would previously have learned to be a hunter and a warrior. Teach them to answer pointless questions for authority figures on command when the could have been learning how to live free and walk away. Teach them skills thst only work in the class room and instincts that leave them only prepared for life as a wage slave.

Alex, I'll take Capitalist Shell Game for 600.

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God is Dead. Long Live God

I don't like April Fools Day. So I leave it to you to find the trick here.

People seem to have trouble differentiating between the doctrines of a religion and actions of individuals practising a particular religion. People who espouse membership and adherence to a religion are rarely universal in their adherence. We see consumption of alcohol amongst Muslims and Consumption of bacon matzo balls by Jews and Christians wearing tattoos. It might be tempting to dismiss such people as not belonging to the religions they espouse.

And yet. The modern practitioner of Christianity or Islam or Judaism looks very little like practitioners of one hundred years ago, to say nothing of the practitioners of these religions from earlier eras.

But a religion is changed by the actions of it's practitioners. As groups drift apart in their method of adherence, new religious sects form from the difference in application of these religious doctrines.

So it is ridiculous to talk about a religion of peace or a religion of war or a religion of any other ideology. Because a religion is nothing but the actions of the religion's  practitioners.

It is not incorrect to say that none of the people who today identify as Christians practise the same religion as those who identified as Christians one thousand years prior.

So there you have it. Religions are incredibly fragile but incredibly hard to kill. Because religions love in the human mind and reproduce when passed on to another person. But when passed, the old religion stays in the mind that holds it. The new practitioner now hosts the son or daughter of the original practitioner's religion.

Religion is dead. Long live religion.

Why is this? Why is religion so malleable?  Why is religion so resilient and unkillable? Why does religion breed like rabbits and survive like a cockroach?

Because religion is a child of human mind. Because religion is a child built from the needs of the human mind and the history of human evolution. And the human mind keeps going back to religion and keeps reshaping it to suit the needs of the human mind at a given moment in time.

We can't escape religion because it is both a child of and a parasite within our own minds. And so it seems we are destined to give birth to our own religion and let it feed off our own minds. So, if this is the case, you better raise that child right and train it up to serve your needs rather than the needs of some half baked would ve prophet or the needs of some long dead bronze age king.

It's your life. It's your mind. It's your choice. But realize that if you are accepting another's religion as your starting point, you have their ideology to sort through and their intent to overcome. It's the ultimate test and the prize is your mind.

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