I remember when I first realized that the notions I had regarding politics and social affairs could most closely be called Anarchy.  I was in one of my Spanish literature class (to my delight my second major, Spanish, was filled with all the exciting peripheral fight-the-power ideas that I had been so disappointed to learn that my original major, English, lacked), taught by my favorite professor, an Argentine.  He lectured about three recent political structures:

1st – The Nation/The People - The Nation is ruled by a government that represents the will of The People.  Top-down.

2nd – The Leader/The Masses - Coming from Argentina my professor was especially familiar with Peronism and this form of organization.  The Leader is one who sweeps to power through the overwhelming support of The Masses .  Not empowered by the national sovereignty such as Rousseau talked about…but instead representing a more coarse group outside the structure of government, one that fills government with its exploding will.  Also top-down.

3rd – The Multitudes/Sporadic Potential – He said this was what truly excited him.  The Multitudes combine to create Sporadic Potential which in turn affects the direction of decisions and policies.  Bottom-up. 

Many in my class, especially one young woman, were furious about his teachings.  She called him a communist.  But what I realized was that his political leanings were something even more taboo, which he was understandably loathe to openly admit – an anarchist.  And for the first time I understood Anarchy and it slotted completely into my misgivings about power, government, corruption and subjection.  It all made so much sense then…although this realization made me distressed and uncomfortable at first. 

 As I read further I came to realize that Anarchy had been developed over centuries, and was not as scary as I had once thought.  It seemed that above all other political theorists, the Anarchists had the most beautiful vision of human potential, the most heartrending devotion to what so many others scoff at.

The following conversation stems from an excellent post on one of my favorite blogs on WordPress, Speak Now Peace Works.  It was specifically in response to the post Positively Deviant, which talks about the success observed when ideas come from within groups instead of from outsiders providing guidance, however well-intentioned. 

It was a good opportunity to try and elaborate further on what, for me at least, Anarchy is.  It also raises some very difficult questions that an ideal conception of the world with sporadic, independently-functioning beings would have to address.  But those are the topics for further posts…

• That is why I am mostly an Anarchist!

People can solve their own problems, if we give them a chance. The human brain is more amazing than any machine could ever be…

I believe in bottom-up solutions always and hope that these ideas catch fire throughout the world!

Great to see you have been writing a lot lately, this is one of my favorite stops while my brain is fried from staring at reports and contracts, ugh…

I am not the most devout person - but I hear this music and I wanna roll down the car window and jubilantly sing heaven’s praises!!!

Naomi Shelton & The Gospel Queens – By Your Side

Naomi Shelton & The Gospel Queens – Lift My Burdens

 Naomi Shelton & The Gospel Queens – What More Can I Do?

We reached 10,000 views this morning!

Thanks to everyone for checking us out – here’s to building a more thoughtful world.

I have been reading Fichte’s The Vocation of Man, and have come away impressed, especially by Book III - Faith. 

Fichte is known for promoting a so-called philosophy of solipsism, penned in an an impenetrable style, but I found neither to be valid.  On the contrary, his writing is lucid and painstakingly addresses the greater social condition.  He starts from inquiring mind outward, in a Cartesian style, avoiding peripheral concepts.

Book III addresses several important issues – free determination and action (the soul), and the distinction between the two; the path of humanity and progress; and finally the individual will.

 I will have a post on each topic and want to begin with free will.  Revelation is inspired by a skepticism – how can we have any assurance that there is a real world, with any other selves in it? 

Fiche seeks to resolve the seeming contraction of a natural world which follows a set of physical laws in which an independent will can somehow operate and effect the appearances.

I believe this begins to address the question of: “How can an active philosophy succeed?”

“‘Not merely TO KNOW, but according to your knowledge TO DO, is your vocation’ – this is loudly proclaimed in the innermost depths of my soul, as soon as I recollect myself for a moment and turn my observation upon myself.  ‘Not for idle contemplation of yourself, not for brooding over devout sensations – no, for action you are here; action and action alone, determines your worth.’

This voice leads me out from presentation, from mere cognition, to something that lies beyond it and is entirely opposed to it; to something greater and higher than all knowledge, containing within itself the end and object of all knowledge.  When I act, I doubtless know that I act and how I act; nevertheless this knowledge is not the act itself, but only the observation of it.  This voice thus announces to me precisely what I sought: a something lying beyond mere knowledge, and, in its nature, wholly independent of knowledge…

…There is within me an impulse to absolute, independent self-activity.  Nothing is more unendurable to me than to be merely by another, for another, and through another; I must be something for myself and by myself alone.  This impulse I feel along with the perception of my own existence, it is inseparably united to my consciousness of myself. 

I explain this feeling to myself by reflection, and, as it were, add to this blind impulse the power of sight by means of thought.  According to this impulse I must act as absolutely independent being: thus I understand and translate the impulse.  I must be independent.  Who am I?  Subject and object in one – the conscious being and that of which I am conscious, gifted with intuitive knowledge and myself revealed in that intuition, the thinking mind and myself the object of the thought, inseparable and ever present to each other.  As both, I must be what I am, absolutely by myself alone – by myself originate conceptions, by myself produce a condition of things lying beyond these conceptions.  But how is the latter possible?  With nothing I cannot connect any being whatsoever; from nothing there can never arise any something; my objective thought is necessarily mediative only.  But any being that is connected with another being becomes thereby dependent; it is no longer a primary, original, and genetic, but only a secondary and derived, being.  I am constrained to connect myself with something: I cannot connect myself with another being without losing that independence which is the condition of my own existence.

My conception and origination of a purpose, however, is, by its very nature, absolutely free – producing something out of nothing.  With such a  conception I must connect my activity, in order that it may be possible to regard it as free, and as proceeding absolutely from myself alone.

In the following manner, therefore, I conceive of my independence as I.  I ascribe to myself the power of originating a conception simply because I originate it, of originating this conception simply because I originate this one – by the absolute sovereignty of myself as an intelligence…

…Here then, it appears, is the point at which consciousness connects with reality; the real efficiency of my conception, and the real power of action which, in consequence of it, I am compelled to ascribe to myself, is this point.  Let it be as it may with reality of a sensible world beyond me; I possess reality and comprehend it – it lies within my own being, it is native to myself.

I conceive this, my real power of action, in thought, but I do not create it by thought.  The immediate feeling of my impulse to independent activity lies at the foundation of this thought; the thought does no more than portray this feeling and accept it in its own form, the form of thought.  THis procedure may, I think, be vindicated before the tribunal of speculation.”

A quick – and poor – recap:

Knowing is not enough, action is also at the heart of being.

This takes us from the sensory world of appearances and raises the question of the independent mind: we know our own actions, but that knowledge is a mere observation.  Something stands beyond knowing/observation itself.

Within ourselves is the impulse to “absolute, independent self-activity” – free will, despite all evidence of cause-and-effect.  The soul proclaims itself – our own independence strikes us as true. 

We stand independent, and yet observe our own actions - “subject and object in one.”

However, it would appear that this independence is lost as soon as it becomes contingent with the greater world.

A sense of purpose must be absolutely free, otherwise it would lose its quality of independence.  The notion of “I” – the ego – comes to light.

It is with the notion of self that ”consciousness connects with reality.”  Thought is conceived, but is not its own engine.  To think, to act, we must have free will. 

The independent motor is independence itself.

This cannot be validated by any power less than faith, which ameliorates all hesitancy and misgivings.  Fichte’s independence recalls Descartes’ pineal gland, but instead of being the place where mind and body unite, it is the point where thought and action intersect.

Fichte elaborates further, topics for future posts.

The older I get, the more I realize that happiness is the absence of feeling, rather than any sort of fleeting euphoria.

“Empty And Marvelous”

Patagonia

I have been writing the script for the documentary, and was thinking about what some of our modern concerns are.

Some are obvious – climate change, globalization, overpopulation, poverty, hunger.  The energy crisis. 

Some are psychological – detachment from nature, from experience and spirituality.

Others are more subtle – paranoia from being sardined into ever bulging cities, loss of individuality, loneliness, lack of kinship groups.  A rift between art and our modern concerns and the ”media.”  The constant changing economic landscape where the old ways continue to be squeezed.  

Of course there is the universal human question of  – why are we here?

I feel that somewhere at the bottom of this is something crucial, and that can be worded simply, and can’t quite put my finger on it.

Please anyone with any ideas please share!

We float with little sense of boundaries.

I feel like this doubt is not acknowledged or appreciated enough in day-to-day life. 

Convention dictates certainty in the most bizarre places…what we know is very confusing. 

Even in quantum mechanics – existence at its most atomic known level – uncertainty is a basic truth.

How science works is less interesting than that it works at all.

Don’t Worry!

Let anxiety pass through you like wind through the trees.

Painting by Skip Lee

Yesterday I left this comment on this article from The Economist: A “new normal” for the world economy: After the storm. 

I love how for years Economist decried any sort of government intervention as the macro-economy deteriorated, but as soon as the capitalist status-quo was threatened fell all over themselves to contradict their neo-liberal philosophy and all but demand intervention.

This once-haughty now-humbled publication Economist didn’t see the storm coming and have zero credibility, mirroring capitalism. The promises of growth through privatization and increasingly open flows of capital have not been realized. Marx however, called it:

“…these three necessary conditions [capitalism is growth oriented, growth in real values rests on exploitation of labor, and it is necessarily technologically and organizationally dynamic] of a capitalist mode of production were inconsistent and contradictory and that the dynamic of capitalism was necessarily, therefore, crises-prone. There was, in his analysis, no way in which the combination of these three necessary conditions could produce steady and unproblematic growth. In particular, the crisis tendencies of capitalism would produce periodic phases of overaccumulation, defined as a condition in which idle capital and idle labour supply could exist side by side with no apparent way to bring these idle resources together to accomplish socially useful tasks. A generalized condition of overaccumulation would be indicated by idle productive capacity, a glut of commodities and an excess of inventories, surplus money capital (perhaps held as hoards), and high unemployment. The conditions that prevailed in the 1930s and have emerged periodically since 1973 have to be regarded as typical manifestations of the tendency towards overaccumulation.

The Marxist argument is, then, that the tendency towards overaccumulation can never be eliminated under capitalism. It is a never-ending and eternal problem for any capitalist mode of production. The only question, therefore, is how the overaccumulation tendency can be expressed, contained, absorbed, or managed in ways that do not threaten the capitalist social order. We here encounter the heroic side of bourgeois life and politics, in which real choices have to be made if the social order is not to dissolve into chaos. [devaluation of commodities, of money value, of productive capacity perhaps coupled with outright destruction; Macro-economic control through institutionalization of some system of regulation - see today, absorption of overaccumulation through temporal and spacial displacement]“

- David Harvey, in 1990 in The Condition of Postmodernity, notes paraphrased by myself.

Not much has changed since Marx’s day, and never will, unless we change our economic philosophy.

 A strange thing…not being able to remember a word.

 You rack your brain for a few minutes, and then give up.

In the middle of the night you wake up and it hits you.

Somehow active thinking creates a passive process – like running a search on your desktop.

And then it returns to the forefront. 

“The words are like an acorn from which an oak tree can grow.” – Wittgenstein.

Imagine the power of recall employed in other arenas of thought.  This is a subtle, everyday application of active philosophy.

This is illustrated in the following quote from James Allen in As A Man Thinketh  - one of my favorites.

“The aphorism, ‘As a man thinketh in his heart so is he,’ not only embraces the whole of a man’s being, but is so comprehensive as to reach out to every condition and circumstance of his life. A man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts.

As the plant springs from, and could not be without, the seed, so every act of a man springs from the hidden seeds of thought, and could not have appeared without them. This applies equally to those acts called ’spontaneous’ and ‘unpremeditated’ as to those which are deliberately executed.

Act is the blossom of thought, and joy and suffering are its fruits; thus does a man garner in the sweet and bitter fruitage of his own husbandry.

Thought in the mind hath made us. What we are
By thought we wrought and built. If a man’s mind
Hath evil thoughts, pain comes on him as comes
The wheel the ox behind . . . If one endure in purity
of thought joy follows him as his own shadow – sure.”

- James Allen