The West has Performed a “Philosophical Coup” Against the Left
Andre Vltchek
French anti-Communism poster, c. 1930.
It has been happening for quite some time, but no one has been paying much attention: Western academia, mainstream media, and the most visible propagandists, were trying to convince the world that 1) ideology has died, or at least became irrelevant 2) in case it did not die, the Left is actually… hold your breath…right-wing!
Especially the Left that is holding power, particularly in Asia and in Latin America, is being ‘re-defined’ in London, Paris and Washington. The Western propaganda gurus are apparently rejuvenated, lately, as there are great budgets available to them, in the United States, United Kingdom, and elsewhere. They are openly told to go after certain countries, particularly Russia, China and Iran.
This is an extremely complex but important development. You see, the West has been losing, and so has capitalism and especially imperialism, which is synonymous with neo-colonialism.
People all over the world had enough. Even certain groups inside the imperialist countries, have had enough.
The main problem is that after decades, during which philosophy has been locked up, imprisoned, inside the decaying aulas of the toothless universities, most people have lost any idea what really disgusts them; what they are against, and what they desire.
Philosophy and such deep and essential topics like ‘in what direction the world should be evolving’, are not discussed at UNESCO meetings, anymore, as they are not debated by talk show hosts and ‘public intellectuals’, at least not in open.
Light pop music, horror movies, the promotion of selfish, often infantile values and desires, never really deeply satisfied the masses, but they damaged them, reducing people’s ability to think freely, to analyze and to make sober and well-informed conclusions.
‘-isms’ have been spat at, particularly the left-wing ‘-isms’. Increasingly, the left was smeared and then compared to the extreme right, even with fascism. In fact, pronouncing Communism and fascism in one breath, became tremendously well rewarded. In the West, thousands of ‘thinkers’ and ideologues made a great living doing nothing else than that.
*
This essay has been inspired by an exchange with an Irish academic, who called, in his email to me, one of ‘my’ publications (NEO – New Eastern Outlook), an ‘extreme right-wing Russian nationalist magazine’.
I exploded, wrote back, clarifying that NEO is a left-wing, internationalist magazine, and that the people who are running it have nothing to do with anything right-wing, whatsoever. But I soon realized that this was not about the evidence, but about something very different.
Bizarre and unpleasant exchange did not end there. The academic declared, after watching my film (which I describe as a ‘poetic documentary’) about North Korea (Faces of North Korea), that I am wrong and that the DPRK is not Communist, nor socialist.
I was supposed to participate in his book project, but I withdrew. My friend Eduardo Galeano used to say about such people: “I don’t know for whom he works, and he wouldn’t tell”.
Similar, confusing messages are coming from everywhere, whenever I go to Europe or North America, or whenever I tune in to their television or radio channels. Something twisted is being broadcast, day and night. Political reality gets extremely fuzzy. Great left-wing political leaders are called names: demagogues, populists, even worse. And those constant, insane Cold War propagandist comparisons of Stalin and Hitler (any logical comparisons never appear, like Hitler = Churchill, German Nazism = European colonialism, etc.).
The biggest problem is that a great majority of Western citizens have succumbed to this propaganda. They are not capable of questioning anything related to these issues, anymore, and were they to want to question, they don’t even know where to search for the sources that could effectively challenge the official dogma.
They are indoctrinated, but they think that they are free. Not only that, they don’t realize that they are deeply conditioned and brainwashed: they actually think that they are in a position to preach, obliged to enlighten others, instructing the world with what they have been taught. And so, they speak and write, get paid for it. They join the U.N., ‘international cultural institutions’ and the NGOs, universities, and they continue spreading all those dogmas developed by the Western ideologues for one and the only purpose: to exploit and to control the world. They do not present these fabrications as theses, but as facts. Of course, there are no facts behind what they are preaching, as there is no hard evidence, but who would search for the evidence, and how? Even the Internet is not so easy to navigate, anymore, and Western bookstores are nowhere as diverse as those in China or Russia.
*
Back to the main issue: it is essential for the West to discredit socialism, Communism, and also all anti-imperialist movements that are now getting stronger all over the world.
In fact, many propagandists in London, Paris and Washington, are clearly realizing that the West and its control over the world, is almost finished. The more they are aware of this fact, the more aggressively they go after their adversaries (their jobs often depend on that control, and the privileges of their nation, of course, too).
Attacking socialists or Communists who are holding power in Asia or Latin America, is not enough, anymore.
Now the Empire is spreading pessimism, defeatism and dark nihilism, both at home and abroad (please read my latest book: Revolutionary Optimism, Western Nihilism”). “All people are the same”, it says. Sounds nice, but what it means is actually extremely sinister: “All people are maniacal egotists like us, mass murderers like us, and of course, thieves!”
Terms and definitions get all mixed up, confused. Nothing is defined precisely.
For instance, when the left-wing governor of Jakarta, ‘Ahok’, began cleaning the most polluted city on Earth, building public transportation, providing the poor with social housing, several Indonesian NGOs paid by the West, as well as countless individuals, began calling ‘Ahok” a ‘right-winger’, because he was evicting petite capitalist street vendors and thugs who were shamelessly blocking the few sidewalks that the turbo-capitalist Jakarta has in its possession. Thugs and street vendors, who flourished during the fascist, anti-Communist dictatorship, have been terrorizing the city and its mainly poor dwellers for decades. But the argument went: “The Governor is against the little people”.
There was actually a ‘great danger’ that this deeply popular governor could make it to a much higher post, even the highest one in the country. That would be unacceptable, and the servile ‘city planners’, academics and ‘civil society’ groups shamelessly teamed up against him. First, he was discredited (being called right-wing), then accused of insulting religion (Islam) and finally, thrown into prison. He is rotting there until now, for being a true socialist (a word that is even still illegal to pronounce in Indonesia, as it is being connected with Communism).
The Jakarta scenario is of course no exception. The same is happening in the Philippines. The West and its local lackeys are attacking, with the same twisted ‘logic’ and zeal, countries such as Venezuela, Brazil, but especially China, Iran and Russia.
To call China by what it really is: ‘Communist (with the Chinese characteristics) and presently the most successful country on Earth”, would be totally unacceptable, anywhere in the West or its ‘client’ states. That would greatly boost China’s popularity. Why? Because even deep in the dark belly of the capitalist and imperialist beast – Europe and North America – the common people actually want something ‘left-wing’, something socialist, even Communist. They were told to hate it, to trash it publicly, and they do. But deep inside, many are still longing for it.
The Empire knows psychological warfare extremely well: to discredit China, it really has to be called capitalist. Or call it imperialist. Say it is ‘like us’. (“Like us” is definitely not good. The people on all continents hate ‘us’). Say that China is not helping African people by building infrastructure, hospitals and schools (although that is precisely what China is doing, if you ask Africans – something that no Western journo is bothering to do). Say that China is ‘following its own interests’, and that it is doing business (again, these days, a dirty word, except in a few Southeast Asian helplessly corrupt and servile ‘client’ states).
The same is true when it comes to Russia. The foreign policy of Russia is clearly anti-imperialist. In many ways, it is still that good old Soviet foreign policy – internationalist, egalitarian, based on humanism. Present-day Russian diplomats are brilliant, soft-spoken philosophers. The West can never match them. Therefore, it smears them, their country and everything that it stands for.
President Putin is portrayed as some right-wing strongman and lunatic, and Russia as a capitalist state. It is thorough nonsense, as Russia is in many ways, increasingly, similar to its close ally – China. Russia counts on a mixed economy with a great accent on social welfare, and it is a country that is ready to defend and protect those who are brutalized by Western neo-colonialism. It occupies nobody, overthrows no governments. It is increasingly a good, solid and compassionate country, but the more it is, the more demonized it gets. The better it behaves, the more it gets smeared, mostly by being called ‘capitalist’, ‘right-wing’, an ‘oligarchy’. Well, great propaganda barks for sure; the Western demagogues and intelligence officers certainly know their trade.
Syria, oh how is it being defined by the Western demagogues? How it is being defamed! It is never called by what it really has been for decades – a Pan-Arab socialist state! Its ‘regime’ (a favorite British derogatory term, which I actually love to use against their own, British fascist, stale, passive-aggressive monarchy) is constantly branded as ‘dictatorial’. You will never hear expressions like ‘socialist’ or ‘internationalist’. You know why? Because, let me repeat it again, these terms, deep inside, evoke sympathy in the ears of people worldwide, even in the hearts of some Westerners, subconsciously.
‘Socialist’, ‘serving the people’ – you may smear it, but that is what people really want, and wanted for decades and centuries. That is what they have fought for, were dying for; on the barricades. Some instincts are still there, in people’s hearts, or do you think that they were sacrificing their lives in order to be governed by individuals like Macron or May?
Therefore, the socialists, not some European pseudo-traitors-socialists, but true socialists and Communists, are constantly branded by the West as ‘populists’, demagogues and often, even as right-wingers.
This negative, nihilist, depressing propaganda blurs and confuses the people everywhere. It calls white, black, and black, white. It labels Communists as fascists, and then declares that both fascists and Communists are the same.
Now the people, at least those who are the most exposed to the Western mass media, are ‘unable to commit themselves’ to anything, from political labels, to revolutionary ideals, and even to each other. They go ‘by issues’, arrogantly selfish (hundreds of millions of atomized centers of the universe) in both personal lives and in politics. In London or Paris, not to speak of New York City, those who are believed to be the ‘most educated’, are sadly the most conditioned, indoctrinated and feeble.
It is quite remarkable that in some parts of the world like Southeast Asia, the West has managed to create an absolutely bizarre West-lookalike-but-not-really-alike ‘upper class’, by injecting an idiotic type of education and cheap ‘cultural values’ (I will address this issue soon, in my upcoming essay). The result is – obedient and soulless countries unable to create anything new and substantial.
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All of this, just in order to prevent the world from following its instincts – from choosing socialism and Communism.
You see, the task of the Western regime is tremendous: to break, to pervert, the natural reflexes of human beings. Whenever people anywhere in the world have been given a true opportunity, they voted, or fought for, some type of socialism, or Communism.
Basically, all the countries of Latin America selected, democratically, left-wing governments. And they were overthrown by the West and by their lackeys. It is happening to this day. Millions have been dying in the process.
In Africa – precisely the same. It began with Patrice Lumumba and his murder, and it never stopped. Fascist monsters and mentally sick individuals were injected from abroad, and paid to govern.
Asia? Absolute horror: from the socialist Iran in 1950’s to internationalist, Communist Indonesia before 1965, people wanted Communism and got murdered, raped and in the end, robbed of everything. By whom: by the West and its apparatchiks and local spooks from the colonial era. Countries that resisted and won, like China, and Vietnam, are now much better off than others.
They all wanted socialism, all over the world: The Middle East, too, and yes, Europe as well! It truly takes great discipline and continuous brainwashing, to forget that the US and UK intelligence services prevented Europeans in France, Italy and even West Germany, from voting in Communists after WWII. Nazis were employed to intimidate and to murder left-wing candidates. Then they were shipped to South America, where they either ‘retired’, or began collaborating with the fascist pro-Western regimes. I know it: I spoke, couple of decades ago, to those old beasts who were allowed to escape with their loot of gold teeth from the concentration camps – to Paraguay, Argentina, Chile.
Destroying the natural human longing for socialism is the main task of the Western regimes, be they ‘constitutional monarchies’ or ‘guided multi-party hoaxes’.
The result is total global schizophrenia. Intuitively, people desire something, but they are told that it is wrong, and then they are ordered what to desire (unless they want to become unemployable).
It is the same with love and sex. We, men, are told that our bodies should be longing for certain types of women. Women are instructed what type of man to desire.
It is the same with jobs, or how people pass their free time: banging into mobile phones, playing degenerate video games, and studying some nonsense at university, just to get a diploma that certifies them as some good future servants of the regime.
What did they do to people, really? Adults, fathers and mothers, ‘respected’ individuals are moving their fingers all over the phone monitors, playing infantile games and making babyish faces, while taking their own photographs at every corner. European intellectual cinema has collapsed, as well as literature. And everyone is grinning like idiots. And almost everyone is suicidal.
It is clearly a post-coup situation. It is abnormal.
Pathological. Almost nobody is happy. Everyone pretends to be happy.
You see, deep inside, people like to dream about a better world, they like to commit, even sacrifice themselves for another being, or for an ideal, or revolution.
This insanity, which the West has spread, just so its dear capitalism and neo-colonialism stays in control of the planet, will not last much longer.
Soon, people will realize that there is nothing more glorious than to build his or her country, to improve conditions all over the world, to clean up our environment, to love and to fully commit to that love.
Before that, however, the lies have to be exposed. White is white and black is black. War is war, peace is peace. Aggressors are aggressors and victims are victims.
The West has immobilized people all over the world with its filthy, depressing lies. It stares at humans, like a cobra stares at a tiny, poor mouse.
Soon, I am sure the world will rise and demand the truth! With the truth, the psychological balance will return. People will learn how to dream again. With dreams, the insanity that the West has been spreading will be confronted. Imperialism will shout, howl; it will try to bite everything that moves, but relatively quickly, it will lose all its power and, hopefully, kick the bucket. I believe in it. Millions are now, again, ready to fight for it.
Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Three of his latest books are Revolutionary Optimism, Western Nihilism, a revolutionary novel “Aurora” and a bestselling work of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire”. View his other books here. Watch Rwanda Gambit, his groundbreaking documentary about Rwanda and DRCongo and his film/dialogue with Noam Chomsky “On Western Terrorism”. Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website and his Twitter.
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Anti imperialism is not solely associated with the left. Right libertarians and paleoconservatives are staunchly anti-imperialistic, more so than the “international socialists” who envisaged world social justice and were also prepared to fight (that is, kill) for it. Some argue that these Trotskyists morphed into neoconservatives.
I can’t see that the world is as binary as left-right as the author imagines, or that the left is so squeeky clean either.
That was meant as a reply to Bevin and Gary below.
I can see neither of you bothered to read Professor Bond’s proposal “Toward a Broader Theory of Imperialism”. If you had, you’d see that he was broadening the definition of imperialism to credit and financial imperialism. To focus on just military imperialism only gives a partial reflection of the dehumanizing effects of super-exploitation. Sub-imperialism is a perfectly viable term to explain the corporate rape. BRICS countries are no less exploitative: hence the global neoliberal order.
Rather than expand your thinking to embrace a broader definition of imperialism: you choose to denigrate me instead …well hey ho, if it makes you feel good?
Denigration indicates lack of substance or unwillingness to engage.
Imperial as relating to empire or domination applies also to medical and technological as the result of distorted science.
The dominion of mind-capture, narrative control, identity management operates deceits that we are attracted to or induced to choose as a result of the study and manipulation of the human personality construct. To some degree we all already do this to ourselves – as self-illusion given priority over true relation – but the intent to gain private self reinforcement or gratification by manipulating others is to a large extent what social behaviours are – beneath the masking. Those whose study of humans does not include their self (intimacy of being) perceive mechanical golems or fear, guilt or greed driven mechanism – as the basis of humanity – and elect to use and exploit and dominate it.
This may be framed in definitions of good intention or outcomes – such as world without war, or the eradication of any other perceived evil, but its means are war, no matter how ‘justified or sanctified’ by its apparent goal.
To what degree do we use ‘identity’ as a masking of weapon and shield of hiding or defence?
And to what degree are we possessed and used by what we thought to use?
Does it not all arise from a perceived evil from which to escape or overcome?
Is that evil our own unrecognized shadow of feared truth – generated by exclusive identification in self image?
Can Narcissus hear the call to wake?
A good old ding-dong spat is going on below, too technical for me to follow but I gave everyone an upvote for persuasive argument. My own tendency is more in line with Schlueter’s blog Beware Fragmentation, “We´re too easily getting involved into minor conflicts about tertiary contradictions”. Tó my nose BigB does not smell like a Trot. He presents hard data and invites us to follow the money. Re the S in BRICS, he is right: my native Land may have turned into the Rainbow Nation (which is wonderful) but its money still flows into the deep pockets of Anglo-American Co in London’s Zio City.
The fixated fascination of focus within the dynamic of conflict operates the fragmentation of identity. Loving to hate is hating to love. Its a clear choice that is clearly invisible to those whose choice is given to accept hate as if it is love – or false as if true etc.
There is no ding dong spat, but only the projection of conflicted identity in mutually reinforcing entanglement. The nature of the self-conflicted is to seek self-reinforcement. This can be in shifting alliances as much as rivalry or enmity.
The models of thought by which to ‘understand’ the problem, tend to persist the problem while seeming to escape or overcome it. The intent to define, predict and control is the underlying usurpation of a wholeness of being that is inconceivable to the fragmented or split off identity investment.
The conflict operating system or matrix, is also known as divide and rule – but I prefer to see it as division that rules out – or fear that ‘possesses’ or captures a mind of reaction to focussing there. Not unlike identity theft resulting from a phishing ruse. Love of truth cannot co exist with love of self-imaged identity and the attempt to shift between them makes an inability to tell the difference.
The presumption of a capacity to judge ourself and others and believe and defend it as true – is a war on truth. Whatever we seek to stuff into the sense of lack that then ‘templates’ the drive our behaviour is a substitute for wholeness of being – which is a state of balanced communication and not an exclusive rejection of feared, hated, unwanted self. However, the behaviour of such a ‘self-conflicted lack’ is the urge to GET for itself – be that possession of others, objects or ideas. This becomes the strategy of masking deceits by which to induce others to dependency or subjection. Equally the use of others and world to GET rid of – such as the scapegoat, the enemy, the pharmakoi.
Giving and receiving is of a different order. To know your purpose and to live it is not the notional security of secrets, lies and plausible deniability.
Human freedom – is the human IDEA of freedom?
Animals will seek to free themselves from danger but is that simply instinctual or inherent to biological response?
Humans operate a subjective mind in a virtual environment which is not only a modelling of reality, but an augmentation of ‘machine learning’ – ie: the development and evolution of past learning.
This ‘freedom’ to imagine is the development of the ego as the adaptation to the inherited construct.
The reason we do not communicate on this is because we are predicated in completely different assumptions. You think of freedom in a body. I think freedom is mind – that includes the identification IN a body – as distinct from through it.
Thus I hold for the freedom to see the mind in act – rather than identify in the scripted character being acted out. However, existing self-definitions will frame and determine what can then be perceived or conceived and therefore limits perspective and reaction. Without presence we are free only to repeat the past as a result of imposing it on the present into the future.
Existence has one quality that is perfectly shared with all that is. It is the embrace of unconditional love. The concept of existence is an expression of self-image taken as an exclusive self differentiation. Concept carpets, curtains and blinds to the knowing of our existence by the fear of death or non existence and the defences generated to delay and evade it.
So you are free to think but as you think in your heart so will you experience yourself and world. and you are free to be still and know – that opens to the movement of unconflicted being.
The attempt to think our way out of conflicts that are generated by mis-thought or mis-identification is really a development of the capacity to persist in mis-identity while seeming to be escaping or overcoming evils or adversity/adversary.
The fight or flight response is an instinctual inherence to the body that has become the framing predicate of a negatively self reinforcing split identity. How does that fit with the ‘Left’?
The predicated misidentification in self-lack seeks what it lack by getting from others and defending against being dispossessed by others. This is ‘power struggle’ that generates reinforcement in negatively defined self and world and and unfolds every kind of defence including combination or alliance of separate interests to a collective that demands sacrifice of freedom in order to attain the power and protection against being denied or used by others.
The movement of a true solidarity is the freedom to embody an integrity of being. It is giving true witness to an honesty of being. The capture or subversion of this movement as an organisation defined in terms of the escape or overcoming of judged evils is a polarised identity construct that may be free to question its own thinking – but not while identifying in its assertion, agenda or defence.
Thinking is where the attempt to change the world operates. The thinking of philosophers is marketised and weaponised to control agenda, just as the discoveries of science. But the control agenda is the ‘established order’ of those who operate upstream as insiders to the ability to leverage personal advantage relative to any changing situation. This is enshrined in institutional and legal protections. Everyone defends their investments unless writing them off. Most are also invested in their grievances and revenge. Are we free to discern the underlying patterning of archetype that persist in a futility that is never recognized as such?
See also:
“Beware of Fragmentation!”: https://wipokuli.wordpress.com/2017/12/25/message-for-the-new-year-beware-of-fragmentation/
Regards
Actually, the most interesting issue is how brainwashed individuals deal with the impulses of decency still within them when confronted by reality which contradicts their brainwashing.
They are often faced with a collapse of their societal niche or an immediate repression of reality.
I have worked for and with scum psychopaths who seriously believe they have the right to put those with tertiary degrees under surveillance at work because they are for some reason superior. If they were superior, it never manifested itself in their sexuality which was either repressed or BDSM in nature.
Clearly these tools would lose their careers if required to justify their utterly unjustifiable actions. Almost all were typical working class first to university types, correlating ambition with scumbaggery. Pointing out unpalatable facts about how their children responded to such types as parents drew ferocious destructive responses: hell hath no fury like women scorned, after all.
Biggest problem is actually the lies leading to employment and the mafia networks found therein. No one was ever told the truth before signing up, almost all accept the evil as the trade to become middle class.
It is interesting how some prefer to ignore Vltchek’s central arguments about the death of a “left” in the West in order to focus on whether China or Russia are definably “neoliberal” or to question how many in the West might actually prefer socialism. Kind of misses the point I’d say. In fact such thinking suggests the very narcissistic focus that now defines the West in toto. Any discussion in the West of socialism / communism and anti-imperialism as an alternative to the standard militarized neoliberal plunder of course can only be dismissed as a pipe dream, while our neoliberal nirvana rapidly renders the planet uninhabitable – except of course for those blessed by the “invisible hand” and therefore wealthy enough to build their own bunker.
The truth of Vltchek’s “death of the Western left” I can see quite clearly here in the U.S. The very same people I shared the streets with in protest of the first and second gulf wars now mindlessly repeat the “Russia, Russia, Russia, Putin” mantra as if they were brain dead zombies. The same people I actively opposed U.S. training and support for the death-squad democracies of Latin America through the 1990’s now revere the murderers and torturers of “Bush the Dumber’s” reign since those monsters are the official attack dogs against our orange haired clown president – all as if eight years of Obama’s psychopathic grinning brutality and mayhem never happened – and as if removing Trump would put the world back in proper order. “Reality” in it’s current form in the U.S. is quite “surreal” I must say.
These same friends and former activist colleagues who stood against the second gulf war by taking to the streets now revere and honor it’s very architects and apologists from the deep state agencies like the CIA and FBI as if history doesn’t exist, or at least doesn’t matter! I find this all quite amazing, and rather disorienting at the same time.
The closest thing the U.S. has experienced as a collective even moderately “progressive” moment recently is the grassroots support for Bernie Sanders. His campaign of course was domestically “progressive” (by U.S. standards): i.e. free college, healthcare for all, etc. But of course it never ever considered challenging the idea of ongoing American militarism, empire, imperial violence and international lawlessness. Today Sanders dutifully repeats the “Russiagate” nonsense like a puppet. A truly “left” position on these matters of militarism and imperialism can’t even be conceived much less uttered in the U.S. – where even “progressive” media like Counterpunch and Democracy Now repeated the CIA’s “Assad must go” regime change propaganda shamelessly.
If there is an “anti-imperialist left” movement that exists in Europe, please, someone tell me about it. I’d love to see Vltchek proven wrong on this, but all I see is in the West is ever growing narcissism, increasing intellectual infantilism, decreasing empathy and compassion, and mass collective denial and rationalization when it comes to facing the reality of the military mayhem carried out by the U.S. and its NATO satellites.
Gary, I like your post and agree there is much zombification in the EUSA; nevertheless I believe that reports about the Death of the Left have been greatly exaggerated; and by the same people who spread that rumour about the End of History.
To email:
So then what succeeded the New Left and the liberation movements of the 1960s-70s? I saw none. All the liberation movements turned into identity politics. Granted, there are individuals and small groups (the remnants of Black Panthers, radical socialist feminists, Weatherman Faction, etc., but they do not a movement make. Even the Wobblies have been overtaken by millennial identitarians.
geoffreyskoll – I quite agree that “identity politics” became the pill used to poison the Left – in the U.S. at least. Here it is the ONLY thing that differentiates two imperialist neoliberal war parties. In the U.S. voting choice has been reduced to the the question: “Do you want your illegal invasions, torture, drone murders and regime change ‘with’ or ‘without’ gay marriage and gender specific bathrooms at home?”
I think in many ways the Obama years ushered in the final death of any “hope” for “change” in the U.S. as Occupy Wall Street was crushed during those years, and Black Lives Matter was vilified as somehow “terrorist” by opposing the cold blooded murder of unarmed black men by police all over the nation.
‘Identity Politics’ is just ‘Divide and Rule’ taken to its end-stage extremity. But everything in human society has reached its End-Stage as the Fermi Paradox is solved right before our, mostly, uncomprehending eyes.
Yes those who choose to be identified AGAINST their own shadow bring on their own destruction by attacking it in others.
Only ‘attack’ on Self can set up the division from which all subsequent conflict and limitation proceed.
The reversal of the Fermi paradox is a mind devoted it its OWN alienation from All That Lives – such as to redefine life in terms of an alien will – to be suppressed and dissociated from as a sense of personal salvation or temporary existence.
Such a mind literally cannot see or interpret anything Living but through the lens of threat to itself or a sense of self-exclusion. While divide and rule pertains to the nature of an exclusive assertion of identity, its own true source and nature such as can come into awareness at all – are distorted by the lens of fear and interpreted as demonic or overwhelming threat.
An old saying is that the force that sends a prepared man straight to Heaven is the same force that sends an unprepared man straight to hell. That is our conscious relation to the qualities and energies of our very being are the determiners of our outcome of experience.
What passes off as consciousness, set in survival adaptation to such negative experience is Un-conscious of its true relations and of its attempt to use relationships as a means to get its own identity from – rather than recognize another in shared or unconflicted being. Conflict is division and the identification in struggle is the set of a mind in polarised reaction – as if self interest. True control rises unconsciously from being consciously on purpose – that is – truly knowing our purpose.
The purpose of a wish to be separate from and set over life is a dissociating will. Because such a separation is only conceivable in the denial of the Living, now such as to frame it in terms of past and future as an interjecting sense of ‘control’.
Attempts to escape or overcome an insane premise, demonstrate or teach that it is is real to the mind that does so.
@Geoff. Old and frail but not dead. Michael Hudson, one of the old Missouri Trotskyists, interviewed by the Chinese University of Sustainability:
http://michael-hudson.com/2018/08/life-thought-an-autobiography/
I thought that socialism/communism was incorporated into systems management a long time back and as such is a captured opposition that can be used strategically as a front end to statism – of an essentially global dictate.
I see that the environmental movement has been effectively captured and diverted into Co2 demonisation and self-enforced sacrifice in penitence for carbon-guilt and appeasement of the End Of The World – depending on the simulation parameters. History as often said is made by the victors or the dominant established power of the day. The importance of narrative control as a means of mind capture cannot be overstated. It is possible now to access historical information outside the official reality bubble of mainstream acceptance but it may not be possible to discuss it with anyone but those willing to listen outside the boundaries of social acceptance. Such information may also be associated or mixed up with disinformation or hateful bias but the core information that I see is in the opening and propagating of ideas by which to generate the conditions to advance a global agenda of development and dominance that I suspect only uses proxies while they are useful and discards or diminishes their influence.
The infrastructure for the Internet (of things) was rolled out at great expense globally regardless of apparently conflicting political characteristics and before anyone knew what to do with it or had a way to make a return on the investment. The global ‘Medical’ model of pharma and biologicals (vax) is a convergence of political power interests in the guise of accountable science. The ability to diagnose disorders with no biological test basis or measurement and apply psychoactive drugs (neurotoxins) that are known to degrade brain chemistry so as to make coming off them very difficult of too difficult for many – quite apart from ‘advancing’ the diagnosis of a worsening condition to disease instead of drug effects. the ‘Left’ generally scream to be supplied with sickness management by the State (taxpayer). While the late Tessa Jowell recently pleaded in the House of Commons (to whom exactly?) for more flexibility in cancer treatment than the standard of ‘care’ allows. You know where the power lies and it is not in parliament excepting such as can fit within an impossibly narrow remit. Once the ‘Trade deals’ are pushed through International lawyers determine the fines for loss of profits due to political obstructions – ie fracking – as well as removing protections to ‘equalize’ markets.
The ‘progressive’ movement is A.I, bio-tech and the mutation and replacement of humans. Solutions to any problem are only developed in terms of maintaining and increasing control over the farmed and managed. My sense of ‘political thought’ is of being hopelessly ‘behind the game’ relative to the manipulative deceits that operate fake polarities of carrot and stick, good and bad cop or indeed left and right.
I have a solidarity with human being – irrespective of personal political or ideological or religious/spiritual backgrounds.
The intent to control like IS a death wish and operates AS a death wish while promising a personal sense of power and protection. Generally you have to be willing to sell out, write off or discard your fellow beings to qualify in the ‘real world’ of ‘do you want to be the predator or the prey?’ False framing operates deceit. re-education as to the nature of deceits – and our targeted guilt, shame, fear and anger, is part of reclaiming the capacity for connected thinking and true feeling. Emotional reactivity is not the dimension of feeling the Life that you are – and recognizing it in others. Living from shallow roots cannot abide the territory of a deeper self honesty but is defended against it. Yet that is where ‘shadow power operates through. Out of sight is not out of mind. Denials put us our of our own right mind and render the idea of wholeness of being inconceivable. Protecting self-illusion against truth is a pervasive defence of our own personality structure or ‘identity’. Yet that is where the ‘market is’ and that is where power can be leveraged like a captured botnet of emotionally reactive or emotionally numbed compliance.
Gary: if you title your piece “The West has Performed a “Philosophical Coup” Against the Left”; you have to define your terms. Comrade Vltchek defines “the Western Empire” or “regime” indirectly by defining, inter alia, “Russia-China”. He defines China thus: “To call China by what it really is: ‘Communist (with the Chinese characteristics) and presently the most successful country on Earth”: and Russia: “Russia is in many ways, increasingly, similar to its close ally – China.” – i.e. a socialist “mixed economy”. He posits Russia’s foreign policy as: “clearly anti-imperialist.”. So, central to his thesis is his definition of Russia-China as a socialist and a communist state: both anti-imperialist countries (he speaks of other socialist countries, but I have no desire to go through the whole list).
This is clearly absurd and groundless conjecture: neither country is either socialist, communist or anti-imperialist. Both countries are neoliberal globalist and corporate capitalist. The whole BRICS bloc is. Andre does not rely on the slightest empiricism to show the money flows of imperialism: Professor Patrick Bond, Ana Garcia, John Smith, David Harvey, and others do. This reveals a globalised neoliberal and imperial/sub-imperial capital integration; and corporatist super-exploitation system. A very different picture from the one the author portrays: and one that negates his central thesis
Andre makes the point: “Say that China is not helping African people by building infrastructure, hospitals and schools (although that is precisely what China is doing, if you ask Africans)”. Patrick Bond is South African, he says: “The bilateral investment treaties that facilitate these transfers from Africa to the BRICS are just as notoriously one-sided as those with Western powers, according to the main scholar of this problem, Ana Garcia” [to whose paper he links]. His takeaway line is:
“The rise of subimperial [BRICS] powers and their domination of hinterlands is taking place decidedly within and not against imperialism, “
http://roape.net/2018/04/18/towards-a-broader-theory-of-imperialism/
Ergo: I am not ignoring the central argument: I’m tackling it head on. There is no East/West divide: there is a neoliberal global order. There is no imperialist West: in as much as there is a sub-imperial BRICS that “amplifies” its imperialism:
“by more clearly naming the BRICS threat as an amplifier of imperialism, not an alternative bloc, a critique of the subimperial location will pave the way for a better understanding by the world’s anti-capitalist forces, so that no further confusion need be spread about the potentials for allying with BRICS elites” Vivek Chibber
There is a singular – with regional variations – global corporatist elite enriching themselves at the cost of humanities future. The left is dead because it is, by and large, part of the project. There are very few real pockets of resistance: but they are not about to form anything called an “anti-capitalist alliance”. Talk of such is dangerously obscurantist. If the People want to end the exploitation, humiliation and dehumanisation – where they will not be killled for doing so (also few and far between) – they will have to use cooperation, imagination and critical consciousness to resist neoliberalist capitalism. They will have to form their own broad church international solidarity anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist alliance against globalism …not cheer for it.
BigB – I appreciate the passion of your contention that there is – “There is no imperialist West: in as much as there is a sub-imperial BRICS that “amplifies” its imperialism” – whatever that is supposed to mean. However, I find it so out of touch with the everyday realities of life in many of those nations Russia and China are sheltering from the 500+ year project of Western imperialism that it seems absurd to even engage on this. Libya, Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, Honduras, Iran in the gun sights, Venezuela in the gun sights, North Korea in the gun sights – all the focus of Western imperialism, but you see a united neoliberal world?
Syria still exists today as a nation because your thesis is wrong. N. Korea exists as a nation because your thesis is wrong. I dare say the same is true of Iran. Russia and China are not the imperialist West and have not been during the course of my lifetime no matter how many Western imperialists, projecting their own intentions, have tried to paint them as such.
With every inch that Brazil, Venezuela, Honduras, Nicaragua or any other Latin American nation move toward independence, and the lessing of the domination of Western finance and militarism, the U.S. steps in with support for coups, assassination attempts, and economic blackmail – perhaps you can point out the BRICS nations also engaged in this mayhem.
Brazil moves left as a BRICS nation, and the U.S. moves in to undermine and destroy that progressive direction. Venezuela moves left, more aligned with the BRICS than the U.S., and the U.S. quickly in engaged in a coup, and non-stop attempts ever since to destroy that progressive movement. The same story with Honduras and the U.S. supported coup against a progressive government there. Your contention that “there is no imperialist West” is simply laughable.
“Your contention that “there is no imperialist West” is simply laughable…”
It is worse than that: it is the ideology of the imperialists themselves. The last line of defence “oppose us and what comes next will be worse. At least we speak your language. The Chinese and Russians, Brazilians et al would take our place, make their own empire, out of their ‘sub imperialisms’, and, being more deprived, would be even greedier than we are. Best stick with us. You lose any way.”
BigB’s message is the last whine of an expiring neo-trotskyism which teaches us that there is no hope because there are no alternatives to the Empire’s domination.
And yet the Empire is crumbling. Its power is daily diminishing. The dawn of a new age in which Wall St and The Pentagon will not dictate to those we elect to govern us is approaching.
There could not be a worse time- except for the ruling class- for ordinary people to give up hope of change or succumb to the adolescent cynicism which teaches that there is no hope because there is no infalllible saviour.
bevin – “BigB’s message is the last whine of an expiring neo-trotskyism which teaches us that there is no hope because there are no alternatives to the Empire’s domination.” – thank you for that succinct and satisfying observation. His nonsense posts remind me of the rather odious Louis Proyect over at Counterpunch – another flaming neo-trotskist to the bitter end who is always ready and eager to critique the sins of those who oppose the empire, rather than the empire itself.
These are the same ilk of “progressive” who for decades constantly criticized Castro from their cushy penthouses in the U.S. – labeling him a “dictator” because his prisons harbored “political prisoners.” Never mind that throughout that time the U.S., the most powerful nation on the planet, was busily at work from only 100 miles away trying to kill Castro at every turn. Still these “leftists” could not comprehend that the CIA collaborators bent on overthrowing the revolution should somehow require incarceration to protect the nation. The West is filled with such “imperialist-progressives” who always can only seem to see the speck in the eye of those under attack and fighting the Western empire. This apparently is their rather surreal notion of exhibiting – “balance.” I appreciate your comments.
Bevin; Gary: thanks for the replies.
I linked to an article “Towards a Broader Theory of Imperialism”: that is in itself a critique of the Smith-Harvey debate on imperialism. If you had bothered to read it, or followed up on its links, you would see there is a strong case for sub-imperialism being an amplifier of imperialism. The proposition that offends was itself a quote, with a link to its own article by Vivek Chibber. Clearly you did not read it?
Instead, you value your own cherished opinions above data; ignore the dialogical by dismissing mine and others reasoned (and empirically linked) arguments; and project your own dominance stricture on me; ad hom-ing my intention, which you both misrepresent. You label your own views “progressive” to denigrate me …well, so what: you have done little to rebut my, or anyone else’s argument: in doing so, perhaps you prove my point?
If you read the links: the view of imperialism Professor Bond is trying to advance is credit and financial imperialism. This is not to discredit, or lessen the impact of military imperialism: but broaden its definition. Imperialism is the very DNA of capitalist expansionism: to focus solely on the militaristic developments is to miss the wider super-exploitation that drives credit expansionism. Within the broader definition of imperialism; my argument stands – and Ana Garcia’s data speaks for itself.
When we narrowly define imperialism: we overlook the breadth of alienation and dehumanisation that sub-imperialism causes. Do we disavow our international brethren because of a too narrow definition? No, we address the full implications of a neoliberal global world order – or ‘global governance’ as the BRICS themselves call it – by broadening our conception and definition of imperialism?
Russia-China’s expansionism and vying for multilateral dominance has brought an increased meta-democratic balance: but it is not the whole picture. They are no less neoliberal for this dynamic imbalance: all it augers is an eventual Pax Neoliberalis and redefined “international rules based order” under the ex-Bretton Woods institutions – such as the WTO. This would be the death of a human scale self-sovereign and participatory democratic society. Do either of you dare to imagine what balance could be achieved without the geopolitical hierarchical hegemonic dominance within a globalised structure: I do. But first, we have to recognise the supra-national dominant system of violence already in place, before there can even be a praxis of resistance. I ask you both to honestly reflect on how the dismissal of dialogue can progress anything: let alone a broad anti-capitalist movement? If we choose to perpetuate the old sectarian identitarian dominance patterns (by labelling an anti-imperialist ‘imperialist’ for instance): what sort of future society are we proposing?
If you do not agree with a broader theory of imperialism, or share my wish for dialogical progression, that is absolutely fine …only, please rebut me with a reasoned argument: not supercilious snide (Proyect, please?). That gets no one anywhere and only favours those who benefit from an atomised society. If we wish to resist: first we need to get along – whether we agree or not. Thank you.
[Previously posted on the 8th, if a duplicate shows up.]
This is also called ‘full spectrum dominance’ – and in my view the USA is an asset – that may believe it is what it is led to believe by its handlers. Self-specialness is the nature of the lure – as is its threat of loss and the need to defend self-illusion ‘made real’.
To extend the old say;
steal a loaf and they hang you. Steal a kingdom and they call you king. But to steal the mind of the Sovereign will in ‘king’ or ‘people’ is to frame their thinking and run a human botnet while people call each other anything you direct – unaware of the nature of their predicament and vigilant to defend and maintain it against the threat of exposure in pain of loss that truth is assigned by false thinking.
Sanders was ALWAYS a phony, a Trojan Horse to lead the Left opposition to the blood-soaked Harpy, Clinton, into the desert. But he did better than expected, so the DNC ‘interference’ and ‘meddling’ had to be pronounced, and then Sanders, the good sheep-dog, rolled over to Clinton’s larceny without a murmur.
‘There is no greater misnomer in our Western world than calling our systems of electoral representation ‘democracies’. This misnomer -or illusion – began to take hold around 1800. Before then ‘democracy’ was understood to mean the opposite of electoral representation. It meant citizens participating in government in three ways : by voting directly on issues and appointments; by acting as part-time public officials themselves; and by being members of parliament-type assemblies selected (as juries are) by lot. These practices are all opposite to electoral representation.’
Ivo Mosley -‘In The Name of The People’
The myth that the West was dedicated to ‘spreading democracy’ has usually been (rightly) countered with a catalogue of its violent interventions. However, the word itself has been inverted in meaning. White is black, black is white, democracy through representation was called ‘natural aristocracy’ by the very people generally credited with cooking the whole thing idea. The writings of the Founding Fathers show clearly their revulsion at the idea of genuine, participatory democracy. Thinkers before that time were remarkably consistent in pointing out that representative systems are the anti-thesis of genuine democracy.
I am more interested in this, than political ideology in the conventional sense. The East (and the Left) have imported this deranged concept – that a representative system will somehow look out for the best interests of the population as a whole, just as they continue to adopt the Neoliberal consensus of growth and fossil fuel expansion. All the while people,like Naomi Klein continue to boost the myth of American democracy and the false hope of eco-socialist representatives gaiing power. All in a system that is designed to ensure that they never will.
”Besides, I think it’s time to abolish politicians entirely and let everybody participate in self-government via Internet. We needed representatives in the 18th Century, because we couldn’t all go to Washington. Meanwhile, times changed and our “representatives” have sold us out to the corporations, as we in the majority party all agree, whatever our differences in other matters. And we don’t need “representatives” any more; we have the Net technology to represent ourselves.’
Robert Anton Wilson
You cannot meld capitalism in any form, let alone Market Fundamentalist neo-liberalism, with ‘democracy’ in any meaningful sense. The two are utterly antipathetic.
I’m not going to write a Tractatus: but the only one trying to pull a “philosophical coup” is Andre himself. Russia-China are full paid up members of the neoliberal globalism Club: economically employing the Liberalise-Privatise-Globalise (LPG) mantra of debt-fuelled expansionism. Regular commenters can take this – or not – from my previous comments (with links): I refer anyone else no further than the “longest suicide note in history” of the recent BRICS 2018 Johannesburg Declaration. This commits them to “global governance” under the aegis of the current post-Bretton Woods institutions. There really is no argument to be made against this POV: it is epistemologically sound and based on what is there in black and white in the Declaration. Even the Saker has admitted that “Putin is a neoliberal”, and the Saker is hardly a pro-Western propagandist? PCR and Michael Hudson have been saying as much for 18months or so. The invitation of Christine Lagarde to the plenary panel at the recent SPIEF should have been a confirmation. The proof is in their own declared intent toward globalised growth, liberalisation, and free trade integration.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201807/27/WS5b5a7e22a31031a351e90845.html
The only rebuttal is of the abstract conceptual type; such as Andre’s. Then, abstract theoretical constructs are the basis of Western philosophy
So, the East v West; capitalism v socialism/communism; is a proliferation of the old absolutised sectarianism. Philosophy, and humanism, need to move beyond the old philosophical regime’s instrumental and mechanistic principles of violent organisation around the mode, means, and relations of production. This is the codified principle of organisation around the mode, means, and relations of Rule. Humanity is neither Eastern or Western; capitalist/socialist/communist/liberal or libertarian – it is human …a fact that the application of discriminatory categories and hierarchical Rule has allowed us , thus far, to oppress and violently deny.
What people really want is the end of the linguistically generated dialectic of hatred and dehumanisation, and the perpetual cycles of Rule and violence. Discriminatory categories are the impediments to the dialogical method toward a deeper understanding, leading to eventual peace. Difference is the taxonomy of hatred. Neoliberalism is an extremised and violently unequal economic differential. Calling it communism or a ‘Tianxia’ or ‘Ecological Civilisation’ is a specious soteric negation. It does not generate hope, but is a capitulation unto hopelessness.
East and West: the People are in the same boat. Our leaders are leading us, not to Hell, we are already there …what lies beyond Hell? We will find out soon enough if we continue to allow ourselves to be led. We need to recognise the need to cooperate, which is the desired ends of communism. But so was the stateless state: which is an unnecessary entity within fully functioning community of reciprocal mutual aid. Has the state withered away anywhere? Then we have something other than communism masquerading under its banner. Unless we reveal this truth for ourselves – as Gramsci said “we are all our own intellectuals now” – we are being duped into lulled silence by the age old proliferation of violent hierarchical Rule. It is now or never for the application of critical consciousness to the powerplays that are inherent in the world of ideology. The ability to differentiate between neoliberal globalism and a fully functioning communism might be a good place to start?
Ni Dieu, Ni Maitre.
Yes, there was never anything other than a commitment to a neoliberal global order from the emerging Eurasian bloc spearheaded by Putin and from a slightly different position vis-a-vis Xi Jinping. The notion of a rules-based free trade area stretching from Vladivostock to Lisbon (sounds utopian, and is) was the Russian position in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall. This was the goal of both Gorbachov and more latterly Putin. Although Jinping’s model had more of a statist, mercantilist element than Putin’s. The real bone of contention, however, was the assumption by the US to being the hegemon morally mandated (by whom we might wonder) to rule the world with Russia being one of many subalterns in the existing structures.
”The contemporary subaltern challenge is an ambivalent phenomenon. Russia and China are not revisionist powers in the classical sense; but neo-revisionist. They do not challenge the foundations of international society and globalization, but repudiate the practices of the hegemonic power system. Neither Russia nor China wish to create an alternative international system, but they do question the practices of the liberal world-order in that system.” (Russia Against the Rest – Richard Sakwa, pp.59/60).
This is to say that the west (i.e., the US and its vassals) and its professed liberal democratic world policy doctrine is so much cant, its practices on the ground are, however, both Hobbesian and Machiavellian.
It is highly unlikely therefore that Russia and China will ever accept this ultimatum which explains the global geopolitical situation.
As to the economic structures of both these neo-revionist powers you rightly state that they ‘ are full paid up members of the neoliberal globalism Club’ – true enough but they have never pretended to be anything else. They are basically all oligarchies with Gini coeffecients of China 42% the US 41% and Russia 38%. So we should not expect a commitment to democratic socialism, any time soon.
That being said, however, and viewed from a realist position the United States is unquestionably by far the more dangerous in this new Great Game of machtpolitik. The Anglo-Zionist/NATO war machine is threatening a war of massive destructive consequences. This is no time for equidistance. Just as we (I hope) supported the Red Army against the Wehrmacht 1941-45. As well as subsequent national liberation struggles against the AZ empire ever since.
Your reference to Xi Jinping as ‘Jinping’ seems overly familiar, particularly as you address all the others by their surnames.
“What people really want is the end of the linguistically generated dialectic of hatred and dehumanisation, and the perpetual cycles of Rule and violence”.
Do people know what they really want? Do they dare to feel it or know how to get in touch with feeling it.
If you ask what people want you will get all kinds of answers that may of course be symbolic of deeper desires. Those who feel compelled to sacrifice what they want for what they feel they have to do or be instead may want an improvement in terms of the devil they know rather than risking deeper change.
I don’t know that many have an ability to articulate or understand their situation nor perhaps the desire to know. Simplified good v evil narratives operate in place of a complex entanglement. Including avoidance of the disturbing and dispiriting.
Focusing in what’s wrong does not serve the sharing in what is right or worthy or healing. Problem or fear based thinking is always seeking answer in some other future moment and justifying itself in terms of a future that never comes. Or the ‘answers’ that turn out to generate more complex problems.
How much of our problem is the refusal or incapacity to face our own fears and inner conflicts by instead seeking to resolve them upon others or the world? How many bring wholeness TO their relationships instead of using relationships to get what they think they lack or need?
It is necessary to wake up to the need to wake out of a negatively self reinforcing loop rather than trying to become more ‘comfortable’ by limiting consciousness.
People are conditioned or trained to ‘want’ all kinds of substitutes for life in exchange for a temporary sense of fantasy that doesn’t heal, fulfil or last. That is a broad brush generalisation but we are not bound to persist in our patterns of adaptation or coping strategies throughout our adult life. Unless our fear of change is greater than our love of life?
Admit it….deep down we all want communism. Issue the concrete slippers and sling the ruling class off a bridge. Happy days.
O.K. That’s a bit OTT. I’ll meet you half way. Give them swimming lessons first.
Communality in free willingness would uncover common creative potential – but communism requires a ruling class under whatever name, to enforce itself upon the people ‘for their own good’. As does any other imposed ideology.
Most are very content to let others take responsibility for them when it suits and blame them for their lives when it doesn’t. I find that the true meaning of response-ability is lost to the equation or co-fusion with a blame based economy which predates the Co2 version of it by a few millennia.
Equality of worth is something to claim by living FROM the gift of it rather than tearing down everything to a lowest common denominator.
Power envy is not righteous – and the intent to nurture resentments and target them to others is not honest.The true of power is corrupted by the false or usurping mind. So sweep out the false thinking that works division and conflict within you under disguise of power and protection.
You prefer to see nurses and care workers queuing up at food banks in order to feed their children? Nice person aren’t you James Graham.
Seamus. I was a care assistant in a care home, a sort of “nurse,” and I worked voluntarily in addiction services. I have also been sanctioned 3 times, twice when I was doing voluntary work and I have also used a food bank. I just gave you my word. You are wasting your breath trying to be smart. I would bring the ruling class down the first chance I got. Your emotional blackmail is in the post….return to sender.
To call China by what it really is: ‘Communist (with the Chinese characteristics) Luckily Marx & Engels are dead because they would get major fits on calling today’s China Communist. It is neither classic Capitalist. It is State supported Capitalism for Chinese benefit only – so no fair competition. Lenin & Stalin would have liked it: totalitarian and very powerful. Some in the US might be jealous of it.
Why do the US/K deep states vilify Russia, Iran and China now: habit, fear of power competition, lack of imagination, financial interests in having fake bogeys.
Trump is on another path: unfair trade by China, and he is correct there. All other nations suffer too cheap Chinese imports: nice in the short run, deadly on the long term.
You Zionists REALLY hate China, because it is the one great global civilization that you will not be able to penetrate, buy up the elites as Sabbat Goyim stooges, and have them dance to your tune. Of course the Chinese are so disrespectful as to see you as just human beings like the est of us, and Israel as just another state, like all the others. And you hate that, don’t you.
Speaking of coups:
As SKWAWKBOX warned, a #CoupOfCowardice is underway. #NoPasaran
by SKWAWKBOX
Yesterday, as the attacks on Jeremy Corbyn’s video message to the Jewish community was cynically attacked, the SKWAWKBOX warned that the response removed any reasonable doubt that a new coup had begun:……
The #CoupOfCowardice is surely on: only, who is the coward? The ending of disciplinary proceedings against a vile unrepentant Hodge leaves no room for doubt (except to the SKWAWKBOX mentality). Anyone can accuse any anti-Zionist, anti-racist, BAME-activist, anti-capitalist or 9/11 truth-seeker, of anything in full knowledge that they will be expelled. They are pre-indemnified from anything other than support – so long as they are Jewish. Labour has capitulated to Zionist exceptionalism, betraying its heritage of universalism. And the SKWAWKing parrots flock together in defence of the chief coward? Hodge, Mann, Smeeth, Austin, and the ‘honorable member for Tel Aviv’ Ellmann have to go or the coup will be never ending….. only, if you point out that Labour only has its own self-generated problem: you are part of the problem …thus ended the freedom of speech.
The Zionazis, allied to their Blairite servants, their Tory friends and allies (NO support for the evil Palestinian ‘tewworwists’ there)and the filthy sewer of the Rightwing media led by the filthy Fraudian, have won. The rest is commentary. Corbyn may or may not have been a dupe all along, but Labour is finished, Momentum is now a Zionist-controlled yeshiva for adoring Israel, and the party will split with the Blairites inundated by cash from grateful Zionists. May will remain PM, perhaps as long as Thatcher, and all those fools who thought that you could reverse neo-liberalism through mass ‘democracy’; will, hopefully, have been taught a lesson as to where ALL real power lies under capitalism-with the rich, the few, the Chosen few, NEVER the many.
The author throws out “left-wing” and “right-wing” as if those are meaningful terms. No, I won’t read your books if they’re as crappy as this article.
A pip just squeaked.
We’ve All Been Fooled! SHARE THIS! from Truth Warriors on Vimeo
https://player
This a very long and poor article that epitomises the warped, confused and deficient ideology and manners of a left that has infiltrated and destroyed the Working Class movement around the world. Essentially, it is based on a profound misunderstanding of Socialism and Communism, that leads the author to a trite an irrational ‘racist’ or ethnicist Third World ideology that is, sadly, very widespread and drives underdeveloped countries to disaster. The raving hate of the West, is an infantile, ignorant and extreme distortion of international solidarity that has enabled the exploiters of the Third World, to maintain and reinforce the captivity of their subject populations and prevented the union of workers around the world, allowing the false resentment of ‘colonial’ and backward peoples, to be projected against fake Western populations imagined by corrupt, conservative and sectarian minds. As a matter of fact, it is the West, through its genuine Socialist and Communist movement, that has stirred the conscience, fighting spirit and organisation of underdeveloped countries and instilled in them the craving for progress and liberation. This Thirdworldism tries to dump the blame for the fate, exploitation, passivity, ignorance and backwardness and even cowardice of most of the world, on a West that does not exist and on a Western Working Class that not only has nothing to do with them, but that is, in reality, the highest model for liberation.
I read the article from start to finish and Vltchek is very clear in his support for socialism and those socialist policies and programs that improve people’s lives and well-being. He is clear in his opposition to the fake Left you refer to.
You should read the article again and you’ll see Vltchek speaks up for the oppressed and the exploited, as he has always done. But I think you will not do so.
1 Judge not, that ye be not judged.
2 For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.
3 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
4 Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?
5 Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.
Book of Matthew, Chapter 7, verses 1 – 5, King James Bible
It is clear that the author of this article is no Socialist/Communist and no amount of ‘red’ flag waving will transform him into one. We are not denouncing the fake left, but saying that ALL left, in the Third World or in The First, is fake and that its mission was to destroy the Working Class Movement. Something that it has done to perfection.
This article shows, without any shadow of doubt, that the writer, like you, has not grasped the essentials of Marxism and Communism in general and that he has not been able to move from a superficial, anti-Western and preposterous, ‘populist’, racist and ethnicist type of logic that is very common in the Third World and among those that have converted their hallucinations about the West into impotent hate.
It will be too long to explain all this to people that is obsessed with anti-Western rhetoric and, surprisingly, truly believe their own prejudices and therefore we will abstain at this moment in time from doing so, but it is easy to point out at least, a few blatant fallacies and exaggerations: the DPRK is neither a Socialist nor a Communist country, it is a Juche Monarchy, that is, a Chinese colony allowed to function under monarchic rule. The West has not been defeated in the sense portrayed in the article. China is an extreme case of ultraliberal capitalist economy, based on cheap labour and it is not an allied of a Russia that is not the USSR, etc, etc… It is true, it would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a leftist to pass as a Communist…
comite’s tripe, Jen, was replete with Racist and Orientalist condescension, even contempt, crude pathopsychological projection, grandiose ignorance and laughable egotism. It really does encapsulate the racism and cultural supremacism that drives Western aggression and genocide, however.
This is a peculiar contribution.
It is certainly not ” a matter of fact, it is the West, through its genuine Socialist and Communist movement, that has stirred the conscience, fighting spirit and organisation of underdeveloped countries and instilled in them the craving for progress and liberation….”
It is certainly true that socialists and communists in the imperialist countries -‘the West’- played a role in inspiring the national liberation movements. But theirs was a marginal contribution which pales in significance beside the complicity of ‘socialists’ and trade unionists in imperial rule.
Or did you think that India achieved independence because Nehru had friends in the Labour party?. And the Indian Raj ended-in the blood of partition and the transfer of power to a new bourgeoisie- the same year that our socialists handed over Palestine to their zionist comrades.
In reality it was from the east-China, Korea, Cuba and above all the USSR -that military and material assistance flowed to the colonials struggling for independence and sovereignty.
And things haven’t changed much: ‘the West’ crushes every flowering of social advance in the peripheral countries- it did so in Indonesia, Honduras and at least six dozen other countries during the past few decades. It is busy now in Venezuela, Brazil and Argentine, Nicaragua and Antigua. There is no end to it. And the ‘socialists’, in the US and the UK have shown very little in the way of determination to control their native imperialists. Indeed…. (everyone knows the story, and the sad truth is that where the western working class is enfranchised imperialist governments, warmongering to the point of approaching genocidal, rule the metropolis and plunder the peripheries.
It doesn’t have to be this way but as long as ‘socialist parties are dominated by the twin scourges of Blairism /Hollandeism,/Shroederism on the one hand and NATO Marxism on the other they will play no positive role as humanity seeks its dignity and freedom.
You simply show a complete lack of understanding of the situation at hand, sir. The movements for independence, self-government or revolution in the colonies, either were supported, organised or created by the Socialist/Communist movement, from which many colonial peoples took example an where many of their leaders were trained in Western methods of struggle and politics. After the Komintern was created (and the USSR was nothing but a massive effort at Westernisation of the Russian Empire and the East), the struggle for independence took another decisive dimension.
Nehru was a product of Western education, private Western tutors and Harrow School (like Eton), Trinity College, Cambridge, sir. He was a high flying lawyer in London and was close to the Fabian Society of the Labour Party. And yes, India achieved independence because of the PM Clement Attlee of the Labour Party, an expert in India and committed to Indian independence in spite of the ‘treacherous’ Quit India Campaign of the Congress during the WWII, with the Japanese Imperialist Fascists knocking at the door in Burma.
All that you see, including ‘Communist’ China and Vietnam, are the Western products of Socialist thinking and acting, sir.
Your utter racist contempt and condescension towards non-Westerners is that of a creature of the racist Right, not any ‘Left’ in any meaningful sense. At least you are blatant, but that would be your White Man’s Ego Burden acting out.
We’re dealing with a troll and a boringly repetitive one at that, blathering on and on about how the White Socialist / Communist / Western Man’s Burden benefited non-Westerners and how ungrateful the non-Westerners are for throwing their colonial masters out of their countries.
At least kicking Louis Proyect around with other Off-Guardian commenters was entertaining, not least because Proyect kept insisting on drowning in his own idiocy the more we kept on at him.
If I were to be in the purpose of trolling division I would seek an alloy of token truths and lies within the framing of blame-guilt appeals. The appeal to victimism as the power of guilting is a manipulative evasion in displacement and diversion.
Regardless mumblebrain’s knowing or unknowing status, the framing in smear, innuendo and blame-hate makes such a noise as to distort any signal that may or may not be intended. Much of this may be invisible because many here are often willing to join in hate where they feel it justified.
Exclusive self-reinforcement in pet-hate terms for others is more of a mythologising into personal/group terms, that generates a bubble ‘reality’ to indulge in a sense of righteousness gained from assigning blame away.
The intent to not use such linguistic distortions, can on the other hand by unintelligible to those conditioned and adapted to operate within the group-think of identity politic or ‘narrative control’. This always operates on the stick of terror and the carrot of self-specialness in one form or another.
I feel for the revealing of the false as false rather than the demonisation of those who cling to it as if their life. Thus opens freedom to know that only truth is true instead of defending the false against self-exposure to feared and hated truth. Humiliation is the loss of the face of our ego (self) but humility is the alignment of the ego within a true service of focusing within the world as the expression of true desire. In this sense it becomes transparent to unified purpose – or in colloquial terms; we get out of our own way. But first we have to stop using others (external conditions) as an excuse for choosing not to bring our presence into our relationships (world). Presence is always un-coverable in our now but finding willingness to let it be is counter (and offensive) to our past learning habit. But where ELSE can intra or inter communication possible occur?
The attempt to make the past in support of a projected presentation is a freedom to ‘trap’ ourselves in self-illusion. It may start out promising…
His product is ‘proyectile vomitus’.
I thought it was about your input!. What you manage to project onto others who do not support your worldview is of course all the stuff you want to get rid of.
You cannot engage in the issues and so attack the person.
What if new information was actually of real benefit to you instead of a threat to what you currently think?
What would real benefit feel like?
Expansion, integration, connection, appreciation, gratitude.
What are the benefits of persisting in your current mindset – apart from always being right?
You have a big problem now. You have been found out and uncovered, not by leftist wishy-whasy philistines, but by a true Communist international group (this is the Komintern talking), and you can run with your delirious minoritymongering and thirdworldist racist rhetoric, but cannot hide anymore in a free publication. No matter how much ethnicist bile and scorn you throw on the West and its peoples, it will still remain the centre of gravity and reference point for the liberation of all mankind, East, West, North and South and the sooner you understand that, the better will be for your psychological health.
A very Churchillian point of view. And a very mistaken one.
Racist, Orientalist, tripe-to be generous.
I like this. Vitchek turns capitalism into a “philosophical” problem of knowledge, “psychological warfare” and a problem of “deeply conditioned and brainwashed” people. It’s not that. Marx believed capitalism represented an alienated form of pseudo-existence defined by the legal institutions of the ownership and control of land, labour and capital and law enforcement. All of those interests are legally documented and easily verifiable. However, contrary to the claims of the ruling class, Marx found that is irrational and unreasonable…commodity production is fetishistic.
In the arena of class struggle law enforcement includes the use of armed force. So. there are material forces at work to support this irrational system and that is why the “literary or moral critique” of capitalism is no match for it. All of this philosophy and psychology is whistling in the wind and does not get at the source of ruling class power and control over the working class.
It is never a case of anyone being fully conscious or unconscious of their class membership. Nobody exists in a vacuum. They discover that in the economic and social environments they inherit and inhabit, more or less. Marx was never the crude and vulgar economic determinist who ignored the lessons of history. His concept “political economy” proves the point.
This “left and right” is represented by mainstream party political organisations, by and large. Yawn! Yawn! So what? That arena has been infested by dimwits since capitalism was invented in England. Religious dimwits dominated in the past. Today it is business studies students reading PR, sales, marketing, promos, branding and behavioural psychology. How many New Labour people had an MBA? Who cares? None of that stops or undermines the exercise of ruling class power and control because that has legal status and that is what is enforced.
The idea that working class people…wage workers….know nothing of this is “brainwashed” self delusion itself. The working class operate at the point of production in ruling class workplaces. They have vast experience and know fine well what is going on. The influence of ruling class media and assorted other sources propaganda, over and above their fundamental relations of production with the working class, are hugely exaggerated, magnified and overrated.
Sure, they told people “We live in a classless society.” Sure, they told people “We are all in it together” when the banks crashed. But the working class are not so naive and gullible and infantile to believe the likes of that ruling class hogwash and more besides. Lies only work when you are deceived. The working class, free men, are not so easy to fool. They have a history they learned from as well. All Hail The Scarlet Banner.
clydebanktuc.org
” Terms and definitions get all mixed up, confused. Nothing is defined precisely. ”
That’s a summary of what I felt about the article.
Solidarity with each other in a sense of shared worth that refuses the framing terms of the manipulators would be something of a movement FOR humanity rather than ‘against evil’ and defined in its terms.
@binra (one mind inmany). I think you will find a greater sense of solidarity and shared worth in Vltchek than in 300 Neo-Falangist Spartans.
Solidarity in victimism is a form of sacrifice to a blind and cruel god – perhaps seeking to make hell a little less hot (metaphorically speaking). My sense of a living movement is that which both inspires and arises from a genuine willingness of communication – as opposed to and framed by emotion-backed prejudice. In this sense I see the movement that steps out of a fear-framed sense of self and world to embody and meet a new world. The ‘mind habit’ seeks to re-interject itself and its sense of ‘control’ as a new set of clothes for the naked emperor. The subversion of the living to the marketisation and weaponisation (control) agenda goes on in every mind. Why then be surprised to see it as the dominant theme of our world?
Where we get or receive identity from is the determiner of the nature of what then issues forth.
The wielding and manipulation of conflict ‘identities’ is the inevitable result of choosing to manipulate identity instead of a true witness of self-acceptance.
The hate that IS in our heart operates ‘special love’ as its masking, both to hide in and as a means of hiding from. Sets of rules and conditions in which it will allay attack and extend ‘love’ in special forms of access or attention. But as with the Stockholm syndrome, this is not love, but an attempt to make a life under hate – as a bubble reality in which NOT being attacked or hurt is seen as safety, protection and love.
Of course we look at our world and see hateful and destructive actions masking under all kinds of self-defined bubble ‘realities’ of personality entanglement. Of course the hateful and destructive should be inhibited so that society can hold some balance and order in which learning can occur. But the truly positive or reintegrative must be dis-inhibited for the undoing of the mask of hatred that runs like ‘shadow power’ of psychotic or dissociated bubble-fear – as reactive compulsion of a sense of self-survival under its own unrecognised fear-framed identification.
The form of anything and everything can be faked or used to mask in – including care and concern for victims. Manipulators know where to hide – it is a matter of their ‘survival’ to do so. Uncovering ‘manipulative mind’ is generally short-circuited from occurring by blame-hate and the attempt to self-righteously wield it. The ‘resource of blame-hate’ has been nurtured, farmed and multiplied such that the extension of a truly human recognition becomes a ‘revolutionary act’, but not as intent to destroy – so much as shifting the premise upon which we thought to live and the bubble world we thought real that operates a ‘destructive or anti life agenda’ regardless how cleverly it masks in image and instruments of thought.
Toxic debt runs a tyrannous thought system upon and at expense of sharing in true worth. Release and be released remains an open door, that some come to recognize and align in, while others elect to take hell with them at any cost – because they want to be right – in their very own right. What is this but a driven compulsion of a sense of self-wrongness that then sees its vindication and ‘identity’ in the wrongs of ‘others’ – that it cannot abide in itself and so MUST see outside.
One cannot communicate with words, but only through the shared willingness of opening a channel of communication – which is ‘relationship’ accepted and extended or a solidarity in shared purpose.
Communication is the nature of Life and Existence, where blocks, filters, rules and distortions upon communication operate the human ‘bubble reality’ in all its entangled reactive fragmentation – and of course all the king’s horses and all the king’s men of the power-struggle to enforce ‘order’ upon perceived chaos by the act of domination that generates reinforcement of ‘chaos’ and the demand, need compulsion to enforce ‘order. Order and chaos are two sides of one coin operating as if polarised exclusive realities (operating as our ‘thinking’). A higher willing opens to greater embrace – but not while self-rejection has our allegiance of invested identity.
@binra: “Comunication is the nature of Life”. Agreed; only connect. But that Committee of 300 Neo-Liberal Would-be Spartans is not trying to connect with the rest of humanity — “Lesser breeds” — except in the sense of a predator connecting with its prey.
Vltchek means WolfCub in Polish, but he is a Lamb.
The presumption in verbal mental tramlines is that communication means words.
As a recent contributor intimated, (I think) language has developed as a way to limit, filter and rule the flow of communication. But expand the idea of communication to the energetic communication of shifting resonantly charged vibrational states and you are at one with the underpinnings that we ‘dance to’ unheeding of the music beneath our narrative identity and world. Taking this energetic as an informational carrier opens to the word or definitional structure beneath the appearance. The word in your heart is not the word of the mouth – though of course you can be congruent in thought and deed.
How do you communicate with anything that comes into your field of relation? Do you not ‘feel your way’ – or do you operate as a fight-flight mechanism based on past associations?
I recall a radio interview with a cyclist who was trekking across Africa and was ‘taken’ in by drunken and violent guards late one night in danger of losing his life to the sport of men already inured to violence. He essentially extended humanity to them whilst giving off nothing of the victim in fear or pleading – as a moment by moment discipline throughout a very long night, and he lived to tell the tale.
In a similar but possibly less dangerous way I decided to come out of my stall one night when robbing was underway at a large festival instead of hiding in fear. (This in the time when no police were inside the festival and certain elements predated openly at night while the security guards locked themselves into their cabin). Walking the area about my stall I say the gangs roaming and when approached, I engaged in communication from a place of fearlessness which they thought was because I had the handle of a weapon sticking out of my jacket. I showed them it was the handle of a bell, and that I would ring it in witness if I saw anything loveless being done in the dark. One or two of them sought to bait me with insults but I was not about to give them a reason to attack me physically. They moved on and a small area was kept clean that I expanded through the night to eventually include the ‘security guards’ locked in their portacabin with terror in their faces. My then wife was at home and up all night with nightmares that I was in danger. perhaps she prayed (extended love) rather than being preyed on by worry. A couple of weeks later at a Womad festival the security guards there tried to take these same people on and were hospitalised.
I have many testimonies firsthand of stepping into the field of communication in stead of reacting in the fight-flight. It is common for those who don’t see any other option than fight-flight to seek to undermine what to them seems threatening to ‘Notional security’ or simply vengeance. What would you do if – and then the horror scenario is rolled out. I say that I have no idea what I would do if… anything – but what I desire is to communicate WITHIN… FIRST, so as to be present with and in communication with what is – whatever the appearance. Running on the MODEL of reality – as if true – is anything but open, present and fully engaged with. Discernment and vigilance are the qualities needed – and these are both purposefully serving and aligning communication, relationship and fulfilment. To NOT choose fear and experience an expansion is a transformative event – but choosing fear feeds a sense of self disgust that soon projects to others. In this sense a sense of self-betrayal serves the courage to step out of it – come what may.
The need to know is what calls forth ONLY what is needed when it is needed. There are innumerable accounts of those who in emergency have acted ‘heroically’ but instead they simply did what they had to do – as if anyone would have done the same.
Communication – like all of our word-meanings needs to be expanded and freed from the utility of the ‘getting’ and defence agenda. Running on false currency (of thought) give rise to experience of a fake world. I neither have the capacity nor the permission to sort anyone else’s thought, still less the power to project my own into your intentions and make it so. But I am responsible for what I think and value by giving energy and attention to – and I have a feedback system called ‘experience of world’ by which to rebalance in what I truly prefer. The trap comes from seeking to eradicate or demonize and deny facets of ourself instead of giving the ‘thanks but no thanks’ of a positive disregard. Positive because we wholly embrace what we do want and so are no longer carrying around what we don’t want under the sense of defending against its re-living. Fear thus becomes a call to align in higher willing rather than engage in conflict of wills. This is like saying when you go off-kilter you get dissonance. If you deny the communication you can interpret that to support your dream rather than awaken from it – ad-absurdum.
Symptoms are often unwelcome guests, violators of our peace or ‘something to be denied, ignored or eradicated, cauterised, poisoned, cut of, purged, excommunicated. But they are effects, not causal. Beneath appearances is the underlying cause or indeed the underlying conflict packaged in concealment. Listening is the key to communication. When we be-live as if we already know (locked in the model or narrative) we do not stop to listen for what we truly need to know when we need to know it and everything goes out of kilter – leading to a retrenchment in ‘control’.
hence the urgency is to stop and truly receive – instead of fuelling the ‘dynamic’ of conflict that actually operates a sort of paralysis (amygdala capture).
I don’t know where I might meet this bunch of neo liberal spartans ?? but I hope I meet the true of who they are the freedom to discover rather than the presentation of an ‘identity’ seeking reinforcement. We all have to start with where we are at – regardless what or where that is. I am learning to give in the measure I would in truth receive – whoever you seem to be. So honouring you and what you have made – but not joining with what isn’t true. Of course this is not something you can manufacture (and be real) but something you are moved to align in. Why? Because you are coming back into the realm of communication from a sense of struggle in isolation.
I cannot imagine ‘neo liberal’ Spartans! – what is your sense of Sparta?
They did not worship victimhood as the basis for their strength or power.
Well Macron was legally a child when his much older piano teacher got in his pants.
“Back to the main issue: it is essential for the West to discredit socialism, Communism, and also all anti-imperialist movements that are now getting stronger all over the world.”
Not simply, discredit. To also bomb the shit out of countries, such as Yugoslavia for daring to be seen as successful.
What else should we have expected? At about the same time (1956) Comrade K (compare to Kafka’s Joseph K) betrayed the workers’ revolution in the USSR, the “philosophical” Claude Levi-Strauss was fitted out by the French academic ruling class to efface Existentialism (you know, the philosophical movement that addressed what was important in life and which had the unfortunate genealogy of coming from an avowed Marxist–Jean Paul Sartre). When Levi-Stauss’s simplistic so-called structuralism didn’t quite do the trick, the same French ruling academics found a reactionary academic out in the hinterlands named Michel Foucault, and brought him to the College de France to give his obscurantist lectures. Needless to say, American and British intellectual poseurs fell in love with Foucault’s nonsense along with a few other so-called post-structuralists and postmodernists (the latter a true academic, but far from intellectual, abomination. Americans, Brits, and all the Anglophone academies just love the French, as long as they either A,don’t say anything sensible, and/or B. undermine peoples’ liberation. Ask them, and the self-proclaimed lettered classes about Alain Badiou (who is a communist and advises everyone to take up the project), and you’ll probably get a blank stare.
The process you describe reached its ludicrous apotheosis in the carnival huckster and clown, Zizek.
And Bernard Levi. A sad comedown for a nation that once”baked the intellectual bread for the world”.
Bernard-Henry Levy is, in my opinion, nothing but a racist war-monger, the highlight of whose career was basking in the glory of the jihadist victory in Libya, and the 50,000 dead Libyans murdered by NATO terror bombing, all mitzvot to Levy’s psychopathic God-himself.
Agreed.
Geoffrey: Claude Levi-Strauss was the prototypical cultural anthropologist – and a very good one. His fieldwork on the basic pan-cultural psycholinguistic structure of experience; kinship; binary oppositions; and cultural universals (echoing Joe Cambell’s ‘Monomyth’) lays the basis for a universal essential humanity. You might as well include Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who shared CL-Ss’ “Eurocentism” critique of Sartre. Formerly, they were all friends (Simone De Beauvoir worked with CLS and MMP; and included his work of the importance of women to kinship in “The Second Sex”). Though they did fall out with MMP – I do not recall a “French academic ruling class” plot – merely a heated difference of focus. Perhaps you could elucidate me?
MMP was the first to ’embody’ Husserl’s phenomenology: between them (with others) this is bringing the focus of science and philosophy back to the ‘first person experiential’: which objectivity, logical empiricism, and the Western ontotheological canon of philosophy had ignored (and, indeed, continues to ignore). This is the basis of a new cognitive science, and the likes of Varela, Maturana, Thompson, who developed the embodied mind theory – which includes the mind states ’empirical’ science views as unscientific …ie in Daniel Dennet’s classic “Consciousness Explained [away]”
Foucault had at least one cogent thought – “As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.” – which Derrida picked up on in “The Ends of Man”. Man, as a conceptual construction of the inhumane humanism of the Enlightenment project has indeed, IMO, outlived ‘his’ (and it is patriarchal) evolutionary usefulness. So there is a ‘sense’ there; and the “principles of liberation” – and a universal essential humanity (based in the first person experiential) – can be grounded in the work of CLS and MMP, Derrida, Barthes, etc. I’m not going to denigrate Sarte, his ‘radical responsibility’ is spot on, but I will suggest he was too grounded in Husserl and Heidegger to break free of the Western ontotheological canon: and, perhaps unwittingly, continued it? Perhaps the structuralists and post-structuralists had more merit than is currently being afforded them? They have been scapegoated for the inherent civilisational crisis and violence of the Enlightenment project itself (and some of the more outlandish statements of lessers and followers have merited this misplaced vilification). The ‘New Humanism’ must seek to break down the psycholinguistic constructivist ‘differance’ to regain our essential core humanity that language comes to explain away and replace with encultured sectarian identitarian isolationism. No better place to start than with Structuralism?
I haven’t followed (studied) the evolution of thought that you describe but I resonate with your core message.
The use of language to undo linguistic mind-trapping is of course liable to further empower the ‘separative’ sense of consciousness set against Life, Nature (Cosmos) and as if in power over it.
The interjection of a ‘middleman’ between the need and its fulfilment operates the scarcity principle when used as a point of control. Keeping ourselves in the dark is essential for the false to pass off as if true and who has not got skin in the game?
I find the metaphor of fig-leaf thinking over a sense of self-lack (lack of separate self-authorship), to demand the setting up of ‘external authorities’ by which to associate and align in as a sense of self-empowerment or protection (against true exposure).
Perhaps the archetype-ture of our mythic personality construct is indeed a fairly recent historical activation and conditioning that the ‘mind’ of a subjective dissociation is purposed to escape and deny – while persisting the re-enactment of its own ‘predicate’ in division and conflict.
I see plasma cosmology and ancient petroglyphs (Peratt), as well as the uncovering of catastrophic events in the not so distant past and the translation of the mythic record from local symbolic representations to universally witnessed events (varying in perspective but not in core content).
Perhaps it does not matter ‘how’ we got here so much as how we accept definition Now and live from it. But the revealing of the unconscious or denied self (shadow) is a necessary step to its transformation or release. When currently accepted facts are too sacred to challenge, we are running scared of the truth under false narrative and likely to misinterpret and misapply everything – no matter its original intent or meaning. Then the teaching or whatever becomes diluted, subverted and corrupted and of course rejected. I haven’t read Sartre – but I have read that Pol Pot applied his ideas.
A true intellectual capacity is as valid and valuable as a true intuitive capacity. To be still and know is also to be moved or guided in finding the expression, embodiment or translation of a formless knowing into forms of reflection, exchange and interactive transformation. IE we are changed by the renewal of our mind rather than chained to its fixation as the persistence of the past.
PS: The ‘end of man’ is in his beginning – but known for the first time. (paraphrasing T.S Eliot). The revealing of what we have made (and be-lived) to our Self is the disentegration of the masking. All are called but few choose to listen… at this time.
We could have an interesting dialogue, but this is not the forum for it. Maybe we could do it on academia.edu. You could message me, and we could set up something. Search for Geoffrey R Skoll.
Have you seen/read this, this is sick beyond believe. If this doesn’t wake up People massively nothing will.
France Passes Law Saying Children Can Consent To Sex With Adults
President Macron’s government has voted against having an age of consent in France, becoming the latest nation to give in to pressure from an international network of liberal activists determined to normalize pedophilia and decriminalize sex with children across the world.
Federal law in France now has no legal age of consent, meaning adults who have sex with children of any age will not be prosecuted for rape if the child victim is unable to prove “violence, threat, duress, or surprise.”
https://yournewswire.com/french-law-children-consent-sex/amp/?__twitter_impression=truth
All age-based laws are arbitrary and should not exist.
Just checked around Google and DuckDuckGo and found that the age of consent in France is 15 years of age. This was set in March 2018.
That YourNewsWire.com website is not a reliable site.
To abrogate the age of consent (below 15) is part of a longterm campaign that all the French intellectuals – including De Beauvoir, Sartre, Derrida, Barthes, Foucault, etc – backed. What is it with the French?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_petition_against_age_of_consent_laws
Thanks Jen for correcting the record.
I do not know a ‘reliable site’ so much as diverse perspectives that suffer different blindspots.
My sense of the assertion being made was that it made such an appeal to guilt-hate that I didn’t trust the package.
There is no age related protection against corporately contrived social engineering – which is a kind of mind-grooming sedition into a managed ‘identity’ in place of true relationship lived. Excepting such residual parental and societal protections of real relationship that ARE being lived.
I suspect adult/child sex is part of the capture and control of persons of influence. The abuse of others for private fantasy gratification is pervasive in many other forms that may not attract censure – or in old terms some sins are made sacred while others are normalised.
The dissociative and destructive effect of using others or being used by others is poison in the well from which we drink. But when enough people get stuck in the same place, they call it reality (and defend it as their own).
There are no limits to the imagination, but not everything imaginable is worthy of being lived. It takes one to know one. The wretched and lost grasp at anything to ‘save’ them and become more wretched an lost. To them that have not, more shall be taken – even the little that they have. However, it is impossible not to have something and thus possible to identify in having and being instead of being fixated in the polarity of self-lack. I don’t say this is ‘easy’ but is it really ‘difficult’ or actually so very different from the way our mind is trained to ‘work’ – and insulting to our sense of ‘control’? How much of this ‘control’ is in fact a fantasy running at cost of true?
The idea of the ‘self’ is a work in progress. I sense that the diversity of facets of who and what we are is a richness to embrace and reintegrate within ourself, rather than a hateful world full of hateful people associated with shameful or sick and aging bodies upon which to get some sense of self-gratification in fantasy – aka judgements acted upon as if true. My implication is that the resort to judgement generates the ‘separation trauma’ of disconnection, abandonment, rejection, treachery and betrayal and ALL the defences that rise up to ‘cope’ with the intolerable. No one can release the judgement they are unaware of reacting to as if true. And no one can access the simple noticing of the mind in act while guilt-driven in the attempt to escape blame. Zero tolerance is another term for merciless. And the tar brushing of all that the parameters of the law define (in that particular jurisdiction) is more of a terror campaign or Inquisition upon the minds of the people than any kind of desire to heal, correct or even hold in check the persistence of such behaviours – whatever the underlying propensity of self-definition that is liable to engage them.
I truly wonder if Main Street citizens in Amerika will ever wake up?
Thanks for the article.
The truth concerning the ecological Holocaust does seem to be percolating out, and The Great Awakening is at hand. Today a group of ‘mainstream’ scientists have published research that shews that the ludicrous, voluntary, pathetic ‘Paris target’ of keeping global average temperature rises to 2 degrees Celsius is insufficient to stop the world passing a ‘tipping point’ to runaway, unstoppable rises to four, five or more degrees Celsius increase.
The current burning and baking of the entire Northern Hemisphere and a number of other weather and climate disasters clearly shew that which any interested observer has known for some years-that the IPCC Reports have downplayed the extremity of our predicament, in the search for consensus’ with denialist scum regimes like Austfailure and the Sordid Barbarians. The ‘tipping points’ and, more to the point, ‘points of no return’ were passed some time ago, most particularly the loss of Arctic sea ice and the consequent ‘albedo flip’ there. The resultant positive feed-backs eg the loss of Greenland ice and the consequent slowing of the AMOC and global thermo-haline circulation, the radical disruption of the jet-streams and the melting of permafrost and submarine methane clathrates indicate that the process is ALREADY beyond human intervention. Even if we totally de-carbonise the economy overnight, we’d still suffer millennia of climate destabilisation, and probably an excursion to six or more degrees Celsius increase in temperatures, and our annihilation as a ‘civilization’ and, almost certainly, as a species, too. When the drones wake up to that fact, it will not be nice.
Down in the woods and undergrowth of the Alternative Media something is stirring. Andre Vltchek here and Rami Mazaheri on Saker Vineyard. Coincidence? Don’t think so. Capitalism has made a muckup just like in the 30s, poverty, financial insecurity and endless war.
Vltchek’s video on North Korea is beginning to drop pennies in the telephone of my head, and I am beginning to get the message about efficiency. All those new housing blocks are free: no rent to pay, no electricity bills, no income tax, no mortgage firms, no insurance forms, fewer middle men.
And I can’t forget these uncrowded trains, unjammed roads, fit young adults and clean, brightly dressed children. Too clean, tots too well dressed? Never been to Korea, but my family are sending me wotsups from India and it doesn’t look as clean and bright as Vltchek’s Korea — except for the Taj Mahal.
”They are indoctrinated, but they think that they are free. Not only that, they don’t realize that they are deeply conditioned and brainwashed: they actually think that they are in a position to preach, obliged to enlighten others, instructing the world with what they have been taught.”
I’m not sure that this is absolutely true, or it is at least a little overstated. Talk to ordinary folk about the society and system they live under and they will tell you it’s a racket. They know money talks, politicians are corrupt, much of the entertainment output of the media is crap, and all the ‘white man’s burden’ stuff is to them so much irrelevant bullshit. Social mobility is a day dream. Lived experience is a strong counter-tendency to propaganda as the East European communist states found out. How else do we explain the populist movements in Europe and the US.
The real problem is that the ordinary folk simply accept this believing that change is either not possible or at best a remote possibility. Like Orwell’s characters in Coming Up For Air, (George Bowling) 1984 (the proles) Keep the Aspidistra Flying (Gordon Comstock) of the tragic case of John Flory in Burmese Days who was posted in Burma, but grew to hate British imperialism, but did not have the fortitude to change, or at least attempt to confront the Empire on Which Never Sets.
As Orwell intoned ‘If there is any hope it lies in the Proles’ will they rise and throw of the yoke of Big Brother? Maybe, but there’s the rub.
I consider it a compliment when a writer reminds you of Orwell.
This is what Orwell said in his essay ‘looking back on the Spanish civil war’
When one thinks of all the people who support or have supported Fascism, one stands amazed at their diversity. What a crew! Think of a programme which at any rate for a while could bring Hitler, Petain, Montagu Norman, Pavelitch, William Randolph Hearst, Streicher, Buchman, Ezra Pound, Juan March, Cocteau, Thyssen, Father Coughlin, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Arnold Lunn, Antonescu, Spengler, Beverley Nichols, Lady Houston, and Marinetti all into the same boat! But the clue is really very simple. They are all people with something to lose, or people who long for a hierarchical society and dread the prospect of a world of free and equal human beings. Behind all the ballyhoo that is talked about ‘godless’ Russia and the ‘materialism’ of the working class lies the simple intention of those with money or privileges to cling to them.
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All that the working man demands is what these others would consider the indispensable minimum without which human life cannot be lived at all. Enough to eat, freedom from the haunting terror of unemployment, the knowledge that your children will get a fair chance, a bath once a day, clean linen reasonably often, a roof that doesn’t leak, and short enough working hours to leave you with a little energy when the day is done.
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The major problem of our time is the decay of the belief in personal immortality, and it cannot be dealt with while the average human being is either drudging like an ox or shivering in fear of the secret police.
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The question is very simple. Shall people like that Italian soldier be allowed to live the decent, fully human life which is now technically achievable, or shan’t they? Shall the common man be pushed back into the mud, or shall he not? I myself believe, perhaps on insufficient grounds, that the common man will win his fight sooner or later, but I want it to be sooner and not later — some time within the next hundred years, say, and not some time within the next ten thousand years. That was the real issue of the Spanish war, and of the last war, and perhaps of other wars yet to come.
Everyone protects their investments until they recognize the cost to them and disinvest of it, write it off or abandon it.
Equality is something to live from. There is no communication excepting between equals – for otherwise it is merely a form of communication used to mask or manipulate in power struggle, self-reinforcement or justification.
The use of language to manipulate or set the narrative extends to philosophy and ideology. One could say that the mind in its own spin, has subverted the true movement of communication – or life.
The idea of sovereignty as true freedom of will is lost to the idea of overriding the will or suppressing and conforming it to ‘rules’. The latter is a slavery that believes itself free – and defends against true freedom as a feared and threatening loss of control or ‘face’.
While many simply want enough to live a human life – with work, a home, and family – the true inheritance or indeed Inherence of our being is more than crumbs from the tables of the wealthy.
The ‘West’ is a blunt term unless qualified. Do we mean the ideas that have developed in particularly European culture? The corporate hegemony that took a more global reach with its earlier technological development and possession? Including the ability to ‘set’ the narrative for the ‘world order through the last century and this one?
Is the ‘West’ a free agent for its own discovery or effectively infiltrated and manipulated by ‘mafia’ of financial and corporate cartel-combination – aka fascism – but more than able to operate a collectivist ‘front end’?
Freedom can be defined negatively in terms of freedom from threat. Or positively in terms of freedom to act. But I believe that freedom is coincident with our mind – that is with our freedom to accept or not, the idea that we then MUST act from.
The predatory intent to gain freedom to ‘do’ at the expense of others is the disposition of attack relative to others under masking strategy of private self interest. This Hobbesian world of kill or be killed is feared and believed by many to be the ‘truth’ running beneath a masking of moral wishfulness, make-believe and weakness. And so the ‘moral’ mind is mined for the leverage by which to manipulate the ‘weak-minded’ who lack the discipline that ‘honest’ fear-driven greed ensures.
In a sense I see they act as a purifying agency for the emergence of a consciousness of awakened responsibility – because the resort to moral superiority or self-specialness is a deceit by which ‘truth’ is used as a weapon of war – and so true freedom is lost to the image and symbol of ‘justified’ hate.
Rise up and throw off the shackles of doublethink – without which tyranny cannot find a place in you.
Yes – like Winston Smith you will meet your deepest fears – but unlike Winston you will not be framed by Orwell’s narrative. True thinking is not tyrannous but arises from a wholeness of unconflicted being. In this sense Orwell wrote a treatise on the nature of the crucifixion of the Hu-man – without leading to, uncovering or revealing of the resurrection. The Boot FOREVER stamping on the face of someone who will NEVER rise up to live. 1984 (Orwell wanted to title it 1948) has been called a prophetic warning – but may operate more as a preconditioning or reinforcement for the passive acceptance of impotence against terror and deceit. On the other hand the willingness to truly look at the horror is the freedom to then look past it – instead of being captive to a fixated fascination within the framework of its symbol and narrative extension.
‘People rise up’ when they are programmed or conditioned to do so, and are used by those who set up the ‘charge’ differential of polarised reaction, as a means to engineer society.
But awareness ‘rises up’ to the releasing or falling away of the blocks to awareness – that in this context I call ‘doublethink’. What we accept into our mind by acting as if true is our witness. When the many can be phished into a false flagged reaction, the mind-capture can be used as a bot-net.
The primary basis of a false flag is WANTING to deceive or be deceived so as to persist in self-illusion given power (sacrifice).
Human freedom just means not under any orders or master. You can invoke it when you like or not.
All thought given attention, acceptance and belief operates the ‘master’ from which actions proceed.
There is no independence of self or experience from Idea – but there are self-contradictory concepts that generates a tyrannous thought system – as there are living Ideas that create in the image and likeness of their source and communicate the primary qualities of being.
It is always up to you, where you look to find your self, but what you vote for will veto what you disregard.
The authority problem is the root of all evil. The idea that we create our self is a self-contradiction. But that does not mean it cannot be given power, and suffered as if real.
The decision to be free is aligning with a core truth of our nature, but letting that nature into our awareness is blocked by giving away of power to conditions. In other words we are free to challenge our experience and uncover beliefs that effectively create it. But this is more an undoing than an efforting.
binra I just told you human freedom is not under orders or in any order. It is not equivalent or “aligned with a core truth of our nature.” That is in order. Also I would not confuse the existence of anything or being with the natural properties and qualities they may or may not possess at one time and not at another. Existence is not a property. Although I’m a Marxist I know Hegel quite well. He says action or movement springs from the confrontation in conscience between what it is of and what it is not. There is no Kantian unknowable thing in itself in Hegel….true knowledge expresses relations between one existence, their properties and their others. What appears to be “contradictory” is explained away in terms of what it means to exist. A=A is not a movement. A to B is. Lenin referred to “the Hegelian pearl in the manure of contradictions.” The contradictions would include ideas like “the conditions of freedom” and his ideas about authority….he was a constitutional monarchist. Hegel has 3 dialectics although he hardly used that word. a) a dialectic of knowledge. b) a pseudo-historical dialectic and a c) power or vertical or hierarchical dialectic that moves from the lower grades to the higher grades of mind. Marx is better though. Hegel had no idea of the forces of power and control of capitalism. I think Hegel’s main aim was to reinstate reason post-Kant. Philosophically he does in a way….but capitalist relations are irrational or unreasonable and they’re impervious to any philosophical treatment as Marx says. It’s going to take a revolution to move the legal institutions of capitalism.
Hegel. Action or movement arises from the confrontation in conscience between what is or what we are and what is or what we are not. A to A is not a movement. A to B, an other, is. Action has no master. The human spirit is not natural…nature is in order.
“Action or movement arises from the confrontation in conscience between what is or what we are and what is or what we are not.” (says Hegel?)
In having learned to act out from beliefs that we are what we are NOT – (by the covering over and overriding of an original nature), we set up a reversal ‘consciousness’, where true Cause is effectively hidden and denied, by substitution of a narrative or mythic set of ’causes’ derived from meanings we assigned TO conditions and events outside an immediate sense of ‘mind – control’ that becomes the focal point to the defence of what we are NOT, (but believe true) against change perceived as destructive to
The construct of a self and world is a virtual consciousness construct – but that is not to say it is not physically experienced as real. Without acquiring such a model the human organism itself does not participate the human ‘experience’ of a learned self and world.
The nature of creation is the extension of self to all or to wholeness. This is the same as saying the nature of thought is to extend the qualities and meanings of its expression within wholeness of being.
Joy is the nature of such radiance.
The establishing in the mind of a counterpoint to ‘being’ is conceptual framework of oppositional experience, conflict, and segregative or separative defence around the attempt to regain an integrity of self to a self-conflicted mind. However, being simply is the nature of awareness being – which is prior to any mental framework of partial self-definition and effectively hidden or out of range of the consciousness arising from such definitions.
So within a given framework, certain rules will seem to apply. But only to the extent that definition is actively operating.
The discernment of art or being from artifice or persona, is an innate quality OF being that the ‘mind’ of the personal sense overrides in self-assertive ‘survival’ and adaptation and acquiring of such a participation. That we are already participating in the human experience indicates that we give and find meaning in doing so – and this also includes the basic motivation of any behaviour. But behaviours are responses to stimuli or perceptions that are necessarily interpreted beliefs and definitions. Such can indeed be in accord with awareness of what is or obstructive to such awareness.
The idea of ‘conscience’ is a development arising from an awareness of self-dis-integrity. Without conscience is the conviction that all enemies or evils are outside. and MUST be attacked there.
The mind ‘performs a philosophical coup over an original nature that now becomes a CHOICE to align – or not yet – in the line of its OWN creation. The nature of wholeness is not defined in action, reaction and synthesis, but the EXPERIENCE of wholeness rises from the embracing of the other as self – and this will arise from an honesty of communication that rests or desists from defensive reaction in willingness to listen – which is always also listening WITHIN.
Wholeness is thus the true foundation of implicate order rather than :
“All the king’s horses and all the king’s men, Couldn’t put Humpty together again”.
And so cannot be ‘philosophically or theologically or scientifically’ proven in terms OF a split-minded conceptual framework. But love or unified purpose can be wholly accepted and aligned in – whereas any oppositional sense of conflicted purpose can by definition never become whole – even if the 99% manage to generate a consensus reality in which any voice for truth is attacked as ‘discordant’ and and walled out or denied expression.
However our capacity to bear the pain of loveless and isolating conflict is only as far as an ingenuity of mind can persist in passing off a hollow parody of life as in some sense meaningful, desirable or true.
No. No. No. The line is from Alasdair MacIntyre, “Hegel on Faces and Skulls” “A Collection of Critical Essays-Hegel,” Edited by MacIntyre, Anchor, 1972. Page 232. Hegel claims existence is not a property…they’re not equivalent or synonymous. If I say I exist….then the OTHER of me is properties that may or may not be attributable to me at one time and not at another and OTHER existences. It’s about the historical development or movement of knowledge or the conscience of mind. To be reasonable you have to provide for some conception of movement or development…..or history.
At the end of the “Philosophy of Mind,” Miller and Findlay, OUP, 1971, Hegel says, “it is the nature of the fact(of existence), the notion, which causes the movement or development, yet this same movement is equally the action of cognition.” Page 314
Hegel has 2 natures. The common one about the world of organic and inorganic materials that is external or outside of human interference with it….and a philosophical one to do with the nature of knowledge. In that instance, the nature of the fact, what exists, are it’s properties that do not exist and OTHER existences.
Human existence can’t be what it is not or the other of itself. But that doesn’t mean that man has a monopoly on existence or nothing else exists on the outside and there are no natural properties or qualities. Reason may be as subjective as it is objective, and it is the unity of these that Hegel calls absolutely true knowledge….which is the opposite of the fixed or static “absolutes” people often dismiss or reject.
In any event, how is it possible to know anyone or anything unless we know what exists means in the first instance…before everyone drags everything else bar the kitchen sink, fact and fiction, into it? “Wholeness” is a property…a quantity. “Wholeness” doesn’t exist. Hegel insisted on the ultimacy of concreteness. The existence of apples isn’t dependent on wither they are part or whole in terms of quantity.
Don’t forget there is a Sheriff/legal authority in town and you don’t live on a lawless planet. You could get people locked up with the stuff you write.
Summary:
We know our OWN existence in everything and everyone we ‘meet’ but while we hold ourself separate from Existence, ‘other-self’ is simply assigned ‘not self’ and is thus ‘other’ or ‘world’ of relations. That Self is NOT under control, is its Reason of Sanity or Wholeness.
Wholeness is simply nothing added and nothing taken away. You can use the same term for transparency or direct and unobstructed knowing/being. The capacity of mind or thought to operate as doublethink or ‘split perception’ is the capacity to accept what is not (true) and act as if it is (true) to thus experience it as believable reality. This ‘false flag’ is a device by which to then operate an oppositional sense from artificial or arbitrary divisions when associated with fear and threat of pain (conflict) and loss (disconnection from or denial of sustenance and support).
Once we assign the virtues, qualities and functions of being, to symbols or attributes of being, we are ‘invested via external dependencies’ instead of expressing a direct relationship to our source nature. Mind thus become a ‘defence’ instead of a channel of relational being-in-expression.
Regardless who said what about whatever, all properties of existence witness TO its condition and nature. They do so as direct expression and embodiment – OR – through the lens of (acquired and conditioned) human definitions of mental-emotional interpretation. Of course the wholeness that embraces and balances both under single unified purpose is the transcendence of ultimately arbitrary divisions. (This is similar to the uncovering of synthesis but is really a Prior unity revealed as a reintegrative perspective resulting from genuine communication).
The idea of non existence is conceptual, but who can even imagine, let alone experience something that doesn’t exist?
Orders and levels of ‘reality’ can be assigned and acquire ‘consensual’ or collective belief so as to give conscious or official acceptance or deny it. But denial must apply to something existing in order to operate, as must a fake or substitute for ‘real’. No one forges eleven dollar bills. But ‘falling into the spell’ of a false Word sets the conditions for NOT KNOWING our own existence as a result of being usurped by a ‘philosophical coup’ (false thinking given power). That is, by experiencing reality THROUGH a false framing set of filters and distortions or ‘living under a lie and the father of it’.
The state of an effective denial provides the A to B of a necessary ‘journey’ or curriculum of discovery and experience. Because truth wills not to be shut out – being simply Given in any and every moment of Existence to all that Is. Such an innate Reason or Nature of creative expression and experience is thus made obscure in any mind that elects to deny or shut out true relation, in order to have a ‘bit on the side’ or a fantasy gratification that dilutes or adulterates the true of being in attempt at overcoming of a sense of self-lack that is induced BY giving power TO fantasy in place of honouring the true.
The nature of our self-definition is critical to resulting perceptions and behaviours and thus our politics and social structure – and psychic emotional adaptation. I am interested in identifying and illuminating acquired and accepted currency of beliefs that underpin a joyless and hateful self and world because I see this as a step into the freedom to change our mind. I don’t find that thinking uncovers truth, but rather the reverse, and in that sense I use words only to clothe the territory of what I am moved to share in. The meaning that I seek to share pre-exists the thinking that gives it expression.
The quality of existence is ‘Is’. You are quite right that ‘A’ has no EXPERIENCE of process or action without definition by which to open relational perspective as ‘states of being’. In that sense the chosen idea of self definition has a reflection and interaction with its relational reinforcements and extensions (‘B’). So asserting “I Am here” is immediately differentiating “I” from ‘there’ or ‘everywhere’ or ‘anywhere else’ – if the term ‘HERE’ is given locational and temporal specificity. (For otherwise the word ‘here’ is simply redundant to the meaning.
“I Am” leaves everything open – especially when the emphasis of the statement is awareness of being, (Am) as Self-aware rather than awareness within the focused attention in perceptions about the nature, forms and attributes of being. Derivatives are NOT things in themselves. No more is our self or the coffee crop next year. We may gambol in thinking and acting ‘AS IF’ they are, and take the trip of fantasy invested identity.
However, all our considerations about being, or awareness of existence, are already pertaining to a sense of mind that is already split in focus from its root verb “To Be”. Being, is not a linear construct of operation or actions pieced together as a chain of cause and effect – but of everything happening All At Once. To such being, I can but yield what seemed ‘my’ understanding, so as to stand under and be aligned in the revelation of the moment as a current unfolding, instead of running under the blinkers of a mind-construct that presumes to have determined what reality is from a sense of separateness from it.
In that sense ONLY Wholeness exists – and everything that seems concrete and real as a thing-it-itself witnesses to the wish to experience or become a power unto ourself. The intent to subject reality to a private self judgement IS the subjective and concretised state of suffering our own Word. This is no punishment from ‘beyond’ or outside’ but the logical outcome of the Law that Mind Is – which can be expressed in modern terms as GIGO; or as you sow so shall you reap, or as you give, so shall you receive.
The seeming ability to cheat the system is really the ability to cheat ourself of a true life under illusion of a systemic and rule-bound substitution for life. A true accounting would of course reveal the true cost – and so is NEVER allowed into conscious acceptance. of course one of the ways to effect this is to ‘lock it away’ – but that is a last resort because to even interact with anything true, is dangerous to the pack of lies that depends on keeping a mind engaged ‘elsewhere’.
But that said, while we are invested and identified in the untrue, we are in need of a process of recognition, re-evaluation and release – and not of destruction. And so I am not seeking evils to destroy or seeking self-reinforcement by opposing, so much as illumination in awareness of where we are currently blocking our own Good and therefore at the threshold of transformation.
You like to give yourself more work to do, don’t you?
The words are in order. Just observe the order of what it is to know. You can invoke your freedom any time you like. You’re not under orders or a slave.
Exists and property are 2 words and they’re not equivalent. You don’t OWN your existence…it’s you. What you OWN or possess is particular properties or attributes or interests. It’s because they are particulars that they do not exist. You can’t part exist just a bit…either you do or you don’t exist. And it has nothing to do with the measure wither it’s whole or in part or a property…it’s because you EXIST…that is the word and that is the order.
Hegel is reconstituting REASON post-Kant’s critique of pure reason and…”the unknowable thing in itself.” This is Hegel’s proof that we truly do know. He’s not saying we can’t be deceived. He’s just saying we are capable of being reasonable and falsehoods can’t undermine that….even if we do get duped from time to time.
So we exist and we possess properties which are many and varied. Like apples….the numerous varieties don’t undermine their existence…little, large, green, yellow, red…they’re still apples, concrete facts or universals and not particulars. We’re humans.
Now, to be sure, Hegel has problems in other respects but he gets round Kant with that. He’s a Christian, a constitutional monarchist and he has an elitist interpretation of history.
Also he calls his philosophy “speculative philosophy.” He can’t tell you what the relations and causal explanations are between existences and their properties and one never has a monopoly on the others. They are historical. But if you are saying or know what a property is, a possession, then that is not what exists and reason is a combination of knowledge about what does and does not exist….and you know it and it’s true. Properties are non-existent.
Words can be taken to mean different things. If we can recognize the meanings in their context, then we don’t take them as an affront to our own preferred usage. The undefinable is also an Intimacy of being – or a transparency to being. In that sense everything you have experience of relation with is the having of your being – but of course language just separated having from being. It is a conceptual ‘separation’ only.
I don’t apply or adhere to philosophical systems so much as reach for the word or phrase for the currently felt movement of a desire, that is both an ask and an answer.
If Hegel speaks truth to my recognition, then great! If my handicapped daughter speaks truth, to my recognition, then great! Gratitude is a great attitude.
So the true as I use the term is a relational coherence within a wholeness without gaps or separable parts and not a codified system. To be truly moved MUST be to know the movement of being but may not be able to (or need to) articulate it to oneself after the event or to others. In this sense Life is already perfect communication, but our definitions operate a limiting, filtering and distorting perception or interpretive experience, or ‘point of view’
Existence cannot indeed be in part – even if invested with properties or ‘possessive’ characteristics by self-reflective thought and believed as if true. A truly unselfconscious joy knows without self-inhibition.
The intent to possess or define and control, introduces a separated self-sense.
While the ability to engage in self-reflective thought can make philosophy, it can also make conflict and suffer it as real. Or make fears real and sacrifice its true awareness under the attempt to defend against them.
Elitism is a variation of self-specialness – which is part of the developmental establishment of a self-differentiation as personality construct. The idea that Everyone is Special is meaningless to the fear of lack that seeks to be more. But insofar as we have or develop talents, do they serve self-specialness or do they serve a relational coherence that has the quality of wholeness in all its parts?
Until we know the movement of a wholeness of being, we have no consciousness of anything but a default of conditioned or learned reaction. But who has never known joy in being?
I may at some point look at philosophy – and Hegel et al. But I find that aligning in joy in the moment and the day is not a search for something else – but an alignment or orientation of being. And in a sense I trust this to attract and align what I need to know when I need to know it – with knowing, being infinitely more than acquired information – because it is a quality of resonance within the Infinite.
Alienation is not only sociopolitical but of becoming a stranger to our self. I like the sense of Field of which the wave is a movement and the particle is a ‘frozen take’ or imaged state. Losing the ‘Field-awareness’ is the cost of a fixation in the ‘taken’ for granted.
…or you could just try to exist and stop trying to be some other different person, trying to talk their way out of it. All existences or universals are infinite in Hegel.
Say I write a book about 20 varieties of APPLES. Each time you come across that word you know it…because it exists. In order to attribute properties you’re required to have an existence to attribute them to. It’s the properties that bring the APPLES into the finite…their nature on the outside. So you have cox’s pippins, mac reds, golden delicious and granny smiths etc. The context changes….but they are still APPLES….and there is more than one.
Conception is an actuality in Hegel…it’s practised, the mind or spirit works. If there’s going to be difference and movement from one state to the next you need separation. But that doesn’t mean there are no relations. On the contrary, if one was identical with another then there would be no separation and no relation.
Reason means a UNITY or the associations we make between existences or universals and their particular properties. But, as I said, he leaves these relations open to question in terms of their causes and explanations.
On these points he’s trying to consider knowing, as such, without imputing or imposing ideas that are not there. Elsewhere, he comes back with a vengeance with his Christianity and constitutional monarchy.
He does use the word “system.” But in these respects REASON is existential or systemic. His main objective was to get round Kant’s “unknowable thing in itself.”
James. I feel an understanding in what you have said. Thankyou.
A point I feel to offer is that an identity in separation (as conceiver), perceives only explicit relations to a subjective view as a self-referencing result. The subject-object split is also the self other-split and the dynamic of relation is the explicate ‘world to which the conceiver adapts, develops and defines as the intent to prevail over it or indeed survive it.
To the mind of such an ‘order over chaos’, the apprehension of an Implicate order or wholeness in all its parts of no true separation, is unthinkable or unsupported by the experience in the physically (externally) defined sense.
But to an awakened reference point from which a conceit can be evaluated as such, is a basis from which to ‘bracket’ or suspend beliefs, and definitions of presumed reality, so as to be re-aligned or repurposed to a reintegrative within wholeness.
In this sense the separation of differences is a segregative movement of self-differentiation as the nature of perspective, or experience – but the nature of experience is a beholding rather than a subjection to an actual externality.
However, within the framework or thought system OF a subjection, or judgement, is the power of belief and identity given to the idea that is thus returned as perspective or experience – but as the creation of an I-other split or struggle.
The practical aspect of such thought is of re-cognising the segregative as a tool, instead of identifying in or as the tool.
Behold a world of relation for we act in and of such relation, but as Grand Division or Projection of embracing Idea.
The embracing idea is somewhat represented by a holographic image, or a self reflecting multifaceted crystal, and the segregative idea is a concept that divides to rule out wholeness, so as to operate a personal bias. Or the development of the idea of a personal embodiment of fixed and specific exclusion leading to self-exclusive assertion.
I don’t write in an intent of convincing a reader, but as the considering of the themes arising from my appreciation of this – our – relationship. Which can be seen to have a personal aspect and an impersonal interplay or attunement in idea.
I haven’t studied philosophy or the history of philosophers – perhaps in part because my life has an experiential current that abides free of the framing of the thinking of the world and thus obliges my thought system to realign on a different basis if I am not willing to deny such a quality of ‘intimacy’ or not two-ness.
In this sense attempts of an outside in approach were predicated to fail, and so I learn to think as an expression of a receptive or listening to the discernment of a balance within wholeness – that may be seen as an integrity of thought, word and deed to the movement of being or the felt quality of existence – which I certainly do not create and yet in the acceptance or standing under of, and I likewise creative.
Whether any sense of this comes to you or another, I am grateful for what I experience as shared purpose in the aligning of thought to coherence and congruency – even if we have differentiated systems or configurations of approach.
Even as I asked you to feel past the first word-impressions of my post – so did I of yours. Giving is receiving at the level of Idea.
“…or you could just try to exist and stop trying to be some other different person, trying to talk their way out of it.”
There is no trying to exist!
You but chase your own tail!
For NEVER have you created your own existence.
The pseudo problem of ‘trying to exist’ is the ‘different’ person, narrative controlling their way into KEEPING the problem.
If you would yield to that you already are, you would come back into your true inheritance – which because your creation is timeless, is your Inherence.
But you cannot accept what you are unwilling to give.
Nor will you escape the result of what you choose to give instead of an equal love.
For love based on conditions is the hierarchy of levels, and the struggle within it for the escape from rejection and exclusion.
The attraction of guilt is its use in pushing others down so as to seem guiltless in relation because relative guilt is the nature OF asserted self-specialness, exceptionalism and the seduction under the idea of power as a personal capacity – independent of its true source and nature.