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In the early part of the decade I spent a few years working on my 800 Page Crackpot Manifesto™, titled “Things I Have Learned”. Ever since then I have been eating off of it. Whenever I can’t think of anything to write, and I’m not quite shameless enough to reprint something from my other blog or similar source, I dip into Things I Have Learned for some wisdom to share. Here’s some gems for you from different points along my spiritual and intellectual development. Original content again next week, folks. Probably.
1. The Ruling Class
The ruling class is comprised of two factions: the “conservatives” and the “liberals.” The conservatives believe that the people can not be trusted and so must be kept firmly under control. The liberals believe the same thing — the only difference between factions are the proposed forms of control. That the people must be kept controlled is never in question. The alternative to this false dilemma — the evolution of consciousness, both in the individual and in groups, so that the people can learn to take care of themselves without control — is marginalized and dismissed. And why not? If people did not need to be controlled there would be no need for a ruling class to control them.
2. The Money And Pussy Theory Of Politics
People enter politics for one of two general reasons. Selfish reasons (aka money and pussy) or altruistic ones. The system is set up to cull out all those who are altruistic- either by removing them from the political process or corrupting them to selfish purposes. In the long run, the only people who wind up in the field of politics are those who are in it for the money and/or pussy.
3. The Global Village
The problem with the Global Village is that the number of village idiots the village has increases exponentially the larger the village gets. By the time the village is global the crowds of idiots chanting nonsense all but drive out anything intelligent or even intelligible. Indeed, this is exactly what we have seen happen with the Internet. It is perhaps this sense that the barbarians of nonsense are perpetually at the gates of one’s conscious world that leads to the obsession with things being “real” or “natural.” (Note the popularity of “reality TV”, hip-hop’s cultural obsession with being “real”, and even the marked demographic increase in the natural foods market as a few examples of this trend as it appears in different forms.)
4. Vice
The rulers pass laws against certain behaviors and activities called “vice.” Vice means “everybody does it but no one is supposed to admit it.” These are a convenient set of laws for the rulers: as they control the justice system they need not worry about their own vices while at the same time they can use the vice laws to imprison people when necessary. On an individual scale dissenting voices can be discredited or silenced; on the scale of entire populations this provides for a large and booming prison labor business.
5. Satan
Satan’s failing wasn’t in rebelling, it was in being ignorant enough to think he COULD, possibly, rebel against GOD. As Douglas Hofstadter put it “…if you think of ‘the system’ as being ‘whatever the computer had been programmed to do’, then there is no doubt that the computer had no ability whatsoever to exit from that system.” Satan is too full of himself, and would prefer to sulk in Hell (though he calls it “reigning,” not “sulking”) than accept that he too is just part of God’s plan. Too much pride and arrogance, too much taking it personally. If anything he should be proud that HE was the one selected for such a difficult role when other angels, weak and simpering, would never have been able to play that part as well as he has done. Remember the story in Lieh Tzu about the two friends who are such friends with such understanding that when one doesn’t suggest the other for a ministerial position he honestly doesn’t think the other is suited for, there is no taking-it-personal and the two remain close friends. Satan could reign in hell and still be accepted and loved by God. In fact, he already is. He just might not know it.
6. The True Conspiracy
Conspiracy theories fall apart because they assume conscious human decision where unconscious human behavior is a simpler and more probable explanation. The true conspiracy is the conspiracy of self-deception, which we’re all in on. Every character is a part of the Order.
7. I Am A Pronoun
Where we got messed up was when we gave the verb “to be” a different special conjugation for the first person pronoun. “I” is just the pronoun that is used to indicate self-reference, a point that is lost in the transition from “I is” to “I am.” This helps reinforce the illusion that there is some sort of concrete, constant “I” when in fact it seems quite clear there is not.
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