JohnHenry.US

Tag: revolution

  • You Say You Want A Evolution…

    You say you want a evolution, well, you know. We all want to change the world.

    There can be no serious question that right-wing authoritarian structures like fascism and autocracy are on the rise around the world, even in places once thought to be resistant or impervious to them like the United States.

    This isn’t merely happening within governments but also in the media, both news and entertainment.

    There can be no serious question that the interests not only of human liberty but of human survival lie in resisting those structures with all our energy.

    I need you to listen to me now:

    The best way to fight fascism is, first and foremost, to simply not be a fascist.

    To not be a fascist means doing the hard work of understanding that human thinking has been broken since day one, and it means understanding what we can do within ourselves and out in the world to fix it, as best we can with whatever resources and ability we may have.

    Not being a fascist means being consistent and firm and honest within ourselves about how and what we think. It means being the voice in our own head that asks hard questions like “wait…that’s a little racist, isn’t it?” or “am I really being fair here?” and answers them honestly, even when we don’t like the honest answer.

    Not being a fascist means resisting that urge to “go along” with microaggressions that aren’t targeted at you…or that may even benefit you.

    It means not allowing yourself to fall into the trap of believing that your freedom lies in your ability to imitate those who enslave you by enslaving others, by declaring others less than (or greater than for that matter) by virtue of some ridiculous external characteristic like skin color, gender or gender identity, or sexuality.

    It means not merely “class solidarity” or solidarity with some other identity group like our ethnic heritage, gender expression, or sexuality, but life solidarity: understanding that we are all nodes in an incomprehensible mesh of interacting interactions interacting with interactions ad infinitum, and fundamentally we *must* all work together, as best as we can understand how, to ensure that life exists and persists. 

    That IS the “meaning of life.”  To create and propagate more life.  It’s what we’re “here for,” one way or another, and as a much wiser man than I once wrote, “all things serve The Beam.” Sagan: “We are a way for the universe to know itself.” Hicks: “We are all one consciousness, experiencing itself subjectively…we are the imagination of ourselves.”

    The grand procession of Life is all about keeping live alive and evolving so we can imagine ever more wonderful selves as we grow and evolve over time, always knowing that fundamentally there is no finish line to evolution. Either you keep evolving, or you go extinct. (Except you, mister horseshoe crab. Contrary bastard.)

    It’s fairly ludicrous to suggest that in an effectively infinite universe, intelligent life only exists on this one backwater rock…but it’s also a non-zero possibility. 

    We may be IT. We and our companions here on this rock, could be the only developing intelligent life in the universe.  I’d say it’s much more likely given the span of time that we’re not, but it’s possible – *someone* had to be first.

    It is our duty to life, to do our best to keep life moving forward. That is what we’re here for, in whatever ways our individual lives present the possibility.

    You know this, and we know this together, but we are steeped in literally *our entire history* of thinking differently. We’ve gone through all the things we’ve gone through from the caves and treetops through all manner of strife and abuse and thousands of years of struggle, and now we are here. This is the moment when humanity becomes Next. It’s happening around you, and to you, every minute.

    Keep moving forward. We are breaking the chains of the past and writing the direction of the future all at once, and we owe it to ourselves, to all who came before us, and to all who will come after, to get it right as best we can.

    Part of that process is eradicating fascism and the dark human tendencies that fuel it as completely and irrevocably as possible.

    That starts with each one of us, in our own minds, every day.

    Don’t be a fascist.

  • The Right People

    We have bad policies for combating homelessness and poverty for one reason: because the very wealthy need the very poor to keep everyone else in line.

    The Right Policies

    During my usual daily searches through the news for things to be worried about, I came across this letter to the editor from Jake Trimble in the Salt Lake City Tribune titled “Latest abatement shows Salt Lake City is plagued by bad homeless policy.”

    Jake makes a number of excellent points and is clearly writing from a place of compassion and genuine concern. My primary issue with his letter is simply that it circles around the biggest issue – homelessness and what we’re failing to do about it – without addressing it directly. According to the latest Federal Reserve data there are about 15 million empty housing units and about half a million homeless people in this country. Perhaps another 2-5 million are housing insecure, depending on how you measure.

    That means there are enough homes to not just give every homeless person two, but also every housing insecure person, and even in the “worst case scenario” you’d still have five million empty housing units left over for those who can afford two or more.

    So let’s just kill this whole narrative right now: we have plenty of housing. We choose not to use it.

    Why would we make that choice? Because the people who sit at the very top of the pile – the Musks and Bezoses and Waltons and Gateses – have taught us that’s the right choice to make, and it is…for them. It’s just not for anyone else.

    The very wealthy, you see, need the poor to exist.

    Not just “poor” but visibly oppressed, hopeless, wasted lives must be present, because they’re the biggest weapon the wealthy have to keep everyone in between them and the poor properly controlled to perpetuate the power and wealth of those at the top.

    The poor must exist because without them, you wouldn’t be afraid to stand up to your abusive employer, or the broken local school system, or whatever else might be an option for you if you weren’t trained to believe, fundamentally, that doing so would cause you and those you love great harm.

    The truth is the owners – the five or six hundred people who really do own nearly everything – need the poor and destitute and hopeless to exist, to keep you in line.

    The Right Charities

    The social, cultural, and business leaders of our world don’t want “good homeless policy” in the sense this writer means it. They only care about “good homeless policy” to the extent of “people who aren’t homeless aren’t forced to look at and deal with homeless people.”

    There are BILLIONS of dollars in that valley, and plenty of room too. The only reason you don’t have a robust public housing system that more than adequately covers everybody’s needs is that you. don’t. want. one.

    You can’t sit around patting yourselves on the back for how you charitably used a millionth of the available resources that you could to help some poors, if there aren’t any poors.

    You can’t prop up the performative and often profit-motivated private ‘safety nets’ if the people choose to ensure all are provided for through the mechanisms of their duly elected government.

    You don’t get that warm, fuzzy, patronizing feeling of cutting that check, if nobody needs it.

    To actually solve these problems would end an entire system of funnels for making sure the “right people” are given the accolades and social reinforcement necessary to keep the money flowing in their direction.

    The extremely wealthy *need* the very poor, because the very poor are how they keep the rest of us (the rest of YOU – I *am* very poor) complying with their prerogatives.

    “You’d better stick to the program, you don’t want to become one of THEM, and we can make you one of THEM any time we want, so you keep your happy little head down and your happy little mouth shut and keep consuming AND generating profits for the producer on the products by selling your labor to them for far less than it’s worth, or else.

    “Now here’s a bunch of home security systems and motion-trigger cameras and alarms and guns to keep yourself safe from all those filthy poors. Aren’t you glad we’re protecting you? Wouldn’t it be a shame if we stopped? So yeah, it’d be cool if you just cooperate. It’s so much easier than fighting back, isn’t it? Yeah, it sure is.

    “Here’s a few thousand articles of pointless but emotionally stimulating bickering over the same old nonsense we’ve known how to fix for at least several generations but refuse because it’s not profitable for the ‘right people.’

    “Here’s some vapid celebrity worship and pointless archaic pseudo-competition to keep your attention and a gambling industry so THAT can be used to further extract value from you too!

    “Ooh and ahh at this news article about the plucky fifth grader who built a dialysis machine out of coffee cans, aquarium, tubing, and a hamster wheel because his mom can’t afford to pay for the dialysis that keeps her alive.

    “Awwwwww, what a champ!”

    Capitalism is nothing if not thorough.

    The Right Systems

    Since only the “right people” are allowed to run things and make decisions, none of it’s ever going to change, because they’re only ever going to make the most selfish decisions they can plausibly explain to the public – often with the cooperation of that segment of the public who don’t care to be bothered having to look at filthy poors.

    The kicker is, for those of us who really do want to help, the only available options are those that cooperate with the whole charade.

    There’s no way for someone like me to put together the knowledge I have in a way that is meaningful and accessible and available, unless I, too, go through the process of setting up a whole series of systems replicating the function of “the right people” while trying to keep the whole process honest. That’s why I created Musk For A Minute – not simply for myself but for others in my odd but not entirely unique position of being extraordinarily gifted at nearly everything except being financially stable.

    Because there simply is no other way for people like us to survive and add our humanity to the world, and the world needs our humanity in it. The more of us can do our thing, the better off we’ll all be.

    There’d be no need for it if we had meaningful structures in place to ensure those among us who produce non-material value are able, literally, to do so. If we were in a sane economic system – with a universal basic income + job guarantee administered by the same governments who own the money – what we call “charity” wouldn’t need to exist.

    To be clear, in these hypercapitalist days what we call “charity” doesn’t simply mean “giving from the kindness of your heart to some cause which matters to you,” I’m not talking about girl scout cookies here.

    I’m talking about the degree to which those who have more than they absolutely need are willing to part with some of it to help those who have less than they absolutely need because the systems and processes which are supposed to make sure everyone has what they absolutely need are badly broken and maladministered by those whose primary fealty is to the machinery of profit and exploitation.

    So What’s Left?

    You’re in a position of having to decide whether to support Musk For A Minute or the Red Cross or the Ukrainian military or COVID relief – or for most of us, how to effectively support them all and ourselves, just like I’m doing – because that’s how the people who own everything including the vast majority of information consumed by the average person in an average day want things to be.

    The “right people” need the poor to keep everyone between them and the poor – and that’s most of you who read this – under control.

    The most effective way they do this is to ensure that within that big chewy center, “right people” – people who are cooperative with the whole mess because they perceive the material or other personal benefit to them as being of more value than the ethics they’re compromising to gain that value – are nearly always selected to manage and govern and make decisions and be the foci of our attention, to create social proof for the validity of the whole system that keeps us all from being who we wanted to be back when we still believed we could.

    The more willing you are to turn a blind eye to the very crimes and excesses and sins and mendacity and avarice necessary to maintain such a system, the more of a “right people” you are. The more you push back against that and demand equality of opportunity and justice and privilege (i.e. “human rights”), the less likely it is you will ever be allowed to become a “right people.”

    If you get too mouthy about it, the right people will make sure you can’t even eat, so you end up with starving, unemployable geniuses running around. We’ll just dismiss them as “insane” and let them rot, we don’t need ’em. I mean after all, there’s a whole new series about Joe Exotic and that damn Carol Baskin!

    And that’s what we’re calling a “free country” these days.

    What can you do about it? Stop propping up clickbaiters and profiteers, and start supporting genuine voices of leadership and evolution. Having my own biases, I of course recommend Musk For A Minute.

    As always: the revolution you’re looking for starts in the mirror.

  • On The Futile Delusion Of Anarchy

    Mixing Messages

    I completely agree with the first sentence. I resent it being used to manipulate me into spreading the second.

    A page I follow on Facebook recently posted the image you (should) see at the beginning of this article among some other images generally promoting the ideology of anarchy and insisting that “government” – no qualifiers – is “dangerously evil.”.  Included was the hashtag #GovernmentIsTheEnemy.

    (Note:  Under ordinary circumstances the image would be intact and properly credited, including the creating page’s name that was on the original. In this case however I want to avoid both provoking a direct confrontation (because there’s no point in it and it’ll just seem like petty personal crap rather than a principled criticism) and, frankly, advertising for someone this careless about their messaging, so I’ve cropped it out.)

    Those of you who have been following me for a minute can probably already guess where this is going.

    I commented to the effect that if this was what was going to pass for substantive dialogue, I would go ahead and see myself out…and of course, the poster immediately challenged me to provide some substantive dialogue.

    And so here we are.

    There are a couple of things I want to point out before we get too deep into this:  first, I don’t disagree with a single letter of the first sentence.  I am wholeheartedly behind the sentiment and in fact it wouldn’t surprise me if I wrote it ten or fifteen years ago and have since forgotten, that’s how much it resonates with me.

    The second sentence, however, and the hashtag, render the whole thing about as basic and banal and entirely un-revolutionary as a thing can be.

    The second thing I want to put up front is that my comments are predicated on the core assumption that we’re discussing life in a democratic system of some kind, and that system is at least somewhat functional – enough so that it’s not a dog and pony show to validate a dictator, such as we see under Putin in Russia.  Obviously the subjects of a totalitarian government cannot take responsibility for that government short of open rebellion.

    So with that said, let’s nail a few things down about this recurring fantasy – which seems to inhabit mostly young, white, fairly affluent men between 15 and 25 – that all you have to do is get rid of that darned ol’ government and everything will be a beautiful anarchist utopia.

    Government: Is-es and Isn’ts

    First, government is not an external entity, nor a mysterious overlord, nor an unyielding and ineffable omnipotency. If you live in a functioning democratic system – a system in which, one way or the other, the people’s voice controls who represents them and how – the government is you. If your government is acting in a way contrary to what you think best, it is up to you to get up and fix it.  You vote.  You lobby your representatives.  You organize public demonstrations.  You run for office yourself.  That’s how this is supposed to work.(*)

    This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it. – Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address

    – Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address

    This insipid abuse of stupidity by picking words to artificially demonize is obnoxious to critical independent thought. “Government” is not some outside actor imposing its will on people. If you live in a democratic system and your government is not governing to your satisfaction, you change the government.  That’s literally what democracy is for, the reason our form of government exists, to ensure that “the government” – that is, the citizens elected to represent their fellow citizens in the processes of determining the details of being a successful country – is always responsible to its citizens.

    This idea that anyone does, or even CAN exist without some form of government outside a single-person vacuum is as frankly ridiculous as it gets. I’ve gone into the question of anarchy itself in a previous article that I’ll resurrect when I find it, but the key point is the simple reality that “anarchy,” this notion of free people freely choosing to live in peace without government, is a delusion.  It literally can not exist.  See now:

    There are two people. Those two people meet. Those two people carefully approach each other, find they can communicate effectively, and arrive at some basic agreements to avoid displeasure.

    You now have two governments and an international treaty. If you decide that guy is better at chopping logs but he sucks at hunting meat so you’ll trade him some of your excess meat for his excess logs, you now have an international trade agreement. You agree not to kill each other, you now have laws.

    That is “government.”  I’m quite sure someone reading this, and probably many of them, are thinking well you just don’t get what they mean by “no government.”  That’s not my problem, frankly; what they said was “no government,” and if that’s not what they mean then they should speak more accurately.

    (* After publication, a reader pointed out that any number of exigent circumstances might prevent someone from taking any of the actions I described, running for office, voting, etc.  I do understand this and probably should have clarified that in the absence of an ability to do these things, at the very least you can support organizations and individuals working in your interest by sharing their content on social media, talking with your friends about these issues, and other activities that are free, easy, and take little time.  Really, the effort to be a genuinely good citizen isn’t much.  It just gets built up that way by the ownership class to discourage participation.

    The point is, in a democratic system the government is by definition responsible to the people, and the people are responsible for their government.  For instance in the 2016 election it’s pretty fair to say that at least an effort was made to subvert the process, but it wouldn’t have worked nearly as well as it did if people hadn’t cooperated by backing a status-quo candidate in a rebellion election, by tolerating the obvious dirty pool on behalf of the DNC with regard to Sanders, by not pushing back against those stunts.

    The degree to which any one person in your democracy may be disenfranchised, excluded, or subverted in their political choices is precisely the degree to which you do not live in a true democracy.  Even in a republic, the job of the elected representatives is to work on behalf of the best interests of the people.  If they’re not doing that, get rid of them before they break the system to the point you can’t.)

    Words Matter

    As my late friend Sam was so fond of pointing out, words matter. I should HOPE their opposition is not to “government” but to “abuse of power.” So say that. Because the two are not equal, and attempting to equate them just makes you look like an ignorant hand-waving agitator with little if any understanding of what government even is at its most basic level.

    As long as there are people, there will be government. Inescapably as there will be wetness as long as there is water and it’s above 32*F somewhere the water is. Trying to ignore or “work around” or protest that is the absolute definition of Quixotic.

    It’s not that I’m telling you “you can’t because I say so,” I’m telling you “you can’t because it’s functionally impossible,” like trying to create a one-sided three dimensional object.  This isn’t about “I don’t like what you’re saying,” or about “I think you” anything.  It’s about the basic impossibility of the premise of having “no government.”  The very second there are two sentient beings interacting, there is some kind of government, no matter how rudimentary, and that government is going to do exactly the same things in terms of function as any other: work to ensure its own survival through the easiest means available.  That means you have to work out SOME kind of rule for your relationship with that other person you inhabit your planet with, even if that rule is “there will be no other rules.”

    Yes, even that is a form of government.  Even a two-person world in which the only rule is there will be no rules, has government.  It also has authority; you just exercised your authority to negotiate “no rules” with your co-planeteer.  They exercised theirs to negotiate with you.  Their authority extends only over themselves inherently; to extend it over you requires either your cooperation or force.  But it’s still authority; it’s still the privilege to make a decision and commit to it, and it’s still the responsibility for bearing the consequences of failing to live up to that agreement – or for that matter the consequences of succeeding – even if that consequence is nothing more formal and organized than a punch in the eye.

    So we now see that simply poo-pooing government and making aggressive anti-government generalities just doesn’t float.  To put it more formally it’s an ineffective, dead-end tactic for genuine reform or even revolution.  All it does is mark those who fall for it as easily manipulated and not real careful thinkers.

    Of course, it’s very easy to agitate people into the streets to make anger and break things. Doing the hard work of actually crafting a better idea and implementing it is a much more daunting process, and it often doesn’t fit easily into a meme or bumper sticker.

    Ours is a world in which words matter, and the chest-thumping pronouncement of inflamed passion untempered by wisdom or depth of thought creates nothing but the same old stupid escalations and abuses they always did.  If you’re going to take on the system, you need to know that before you even leave the house.

    This is precisely why so many revolutions end up becoming tyrannical themselves.

    Either you want to be rid of Orwell’s Boot, or you want to wear it. If you want to be rid of it, engaging in doublespeak and agitprop is pretty much the opposite of doing that.

    That makes you no different from the power you’re supposedly fighting.

    No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

    George Orwell, “Animal Farm”
    Any revolution predicated on the idea of “eliminating government” is automatically self-terminating.