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.