(no subject)

[symbioidlj]

Been reading about fascism lately. I dunno why. I think I'm curious about the history of it... The history of World War I and II and the movements of art and culture and politics that led to them. I've been thinking about my nihilism lately, too. For all intents and purposes, I truly am a nihilist. That doesn't mean I'm about to go and destroy everything, or hell anything for that matter. I choose to create my own purpose... So I guess, I'm somewhat existentialist in that regards, yet I believe in chaos, so I can't believe in any sort of ultimate morality. Ethics is ultimately a combination of personal and social constructs.

Musollini's father was an anarchist/libertarian socialist, and Musollini started as an anarchist, but the shift towards nationalism and a state of "permanent war"(which is part of the fascist credo) drew him further to the right and to collude with the industrialists and the catholic church.

I had been reminded of a fact I knew long ago, that my birthday, July 29, is the same as Musollini's.(Musollini's first name was actually given in honor of a Mexican leftist revolutionary)...

The second disturbing fact I found about July 29th is the fact that in 1921, Hitler became the leader of the Nazi Party in that date.

I think the more I read about these things, the more I find I believe in chaos, and the more I believe that we humans aren't truly equipped to really handle what we're doing. Modern technology as a tool of liberation and enslavement. Media that seems liberating being co-opted, as it always has, by the government, in collusion with capital. This is not just a tirade against capitalism. Technology reinforces the ponzi pyramid of power. It reinforces the collective cultural illusion that we are all immersed in. I truly believe that even the so called revolutionaries are still bourgeois. It is our heritage as Americans and as citizens of the western world.

I think a lot of these tendencies are evolutionary throwbacks. I don't/can't hold culture separate from biology.

Let it be known, however, that I don't believe in "scientism", that dogmatic religion that founds itself upon the so called immutable principles of scientific hypothesis and verification. It is true, it works. But these bastards don't realize they're just as dogmatic about their philosophical underpinnings as the, for example, theocratists are with theirs. It is not, however, a call to disregard everything that science has shown us about reality. Many people who rip into science don't have a firm grasp of what science is.

What I mean by saying that our current condition is delineated by evolutionary factors is that, in the long term, it's about "property" or economics, or game theory. Space/time is really what is being fought over. Nationalism is a poison. So is "inter"-nationalism. They are both ideologies that guarantee the existence of the nation-state. Nationalism has, at its roots, the necessity of land for a particular group. As humans, we've divided ourselves into competing groups/races/cultures/tribes/religions/etc... and we all want a share of the finite space available. So we wage war in the name of the collective, with promises towards the individual of a greater share of wealth and power.

Have we come further towards peace than the past? I don't think so. Desmond Morris postulates that with every advance of technology that removes the rulers from the battle, it becomes easier and easier to declare war. The tribal leader used to be at the fore-front of the battle, but he moved to the back, then he installed generals and protects himself with a wall of seclusion. Bill Maher was exactly correct when he calls the U.S. Military "cowards". The president cowers in a bunker, dictating orders away from the actual point of destruction.
Modern technology not only removes the soldier from the battlefield (how often have you heard of American soldiers killed by enemy fire, now contrast that with how many accounts of American soldiers killed by failing technology/human error, ie: helicopter crashes, etc...), but it also creates a much cleaner sort of death. When you were on the field, hacking an opponent to death with an axe, you were face to face with death. As a warrior, you truly understood what it meant. But then you move to guns, and you can shoot from far away, the enemy isn't hacked to death, but is only riddled with tiny holes and filled with metal inside. A cybernetic corpse. An alien/foreigner not of your own kind. It becomes more "humane" and somehow, more justifiable. When it's just you on the battlefield hacking to death an enemy, you know who the fuck you're killing. There's no chance that the person you're killing isn't an innocent bystander. Perhaps they're slaves for the ruling class. But with primitive tech, it isn't possible to destroy innocents. That's not taking trebuchets and the like into account.

Let's admit I'm making generalizations here, but I think most statements are in some degrees, generalizations. Never take what I'm saying as an imperative absolute.

The question could be brought to bear against weapons of either point(if we are to ascribe a humanistic morality to our consciousness): If you hack to death a hundred soldiers with your axe, you are intimately observing the most horrific effects of war. That is true. But are you then "desensitizing" yourself to those effects? Does it become easier to perpetrate these acts and thust perpetuate them, with each death? Each way, the intimacy of yore, or the sequestration of today, lends itself to a psychology that makes it easier to kill.

We kill. We are human. We are living. We are dead. We litter the body of Mother Earth with our corpses. We litter the body of Mother Earth with degenerate pollution, we rape her, and feed her poison, we feed her shit, the excretia from her own body. The tumorous, cancerous growth of humanity and cancer gnaws away at her flesh. The collective psyche is troubled by something deep. Some call it original sin, some the primal void that lies yawning before us as we gaze off the precipice and into the horizon. The struggle to survive is exactly that. It's utopian to believe that life will be made easy someday. That there will ever be a day with no war. That there will ever be a day when there are no rulers, no kings, no gods. Heirarchy is engrained in the collective psyche. Competition for limited resources drives us to expand our sphere of influence. We don't see it standing there. The event horizon of our own collective oblivion is out there. We are creating it as we stroll along this artificial path that we create.

Our great leaders believing in the myth of technology, our blindsided fascination with the future, leads the majority to believe in some sort of utopian solution, while still fearing the frankensteinian ramifications inherent in technology. They rightly understand the peril, that much is true. Whether it is justified, their fear, that is another issue altogether which I pathetically won't even attempt to answer. Is it a cop-out. Fuck yeah. I don't give a shit.

My own opinion is two fold. Being the humanist that I am, deep down, my desire for collective emancipation of the human race, my desire for freedom for all lifeforms, human and non, my desire for equality, liberty to achieve the ultimate expression of myself, and allowing others to do so in their own way, having a society where people are allowed to find out just who the fuck they are(again, is this a myth? the "true"self cannot be divorced from the socially constructed/programmed entity that is you, we spend our lives searching in vain to find out who we are, to die another death like the other billions of people on this planet)... Being the humanist means I have hope. That I strive to create a "better" world. Semantics, I know. I shall have to find out what, exactly, I mean by "better". That technology can be liberatory. That we can find ways to break out of conditioned patterns, that the system can be turned in on itself.

Two, being the nihilist, I think there is no hope. No hope, at least, for individual freedom. That the long term holds only oppression and containment. The desire for liberation will be ultimately subdued by the aggregate forces of power, wealth and control that reside at the top of the pyramid. The pyramid that resides on the back of the dollar bill is certainly not an accident, whether one believes in conspiratorial theories of the Illuminati and European Bankers and Freemasons and all that jazz or just the simple concentration of wealth by the few who lord it over the masses. Is this not befitting the current scheme of things? Ultimately, when I say the tools of the system can be used against itself, I believe I'm talking of a sort of feedback system built into the biosphere. That the laws of nature will allow us to kill ourself. That as a cancerous growth, the pollution that we cause engenders our own micro-cancer and disease that destroys us. The mechanisms that have built up over 4 bililon years are designed to sustain the planet for it's lifecycle. Whether we live or die doesn't matter. And in the grand scheme, it doesn't matter whether Gaia lives or dies. My personal ethics causes me to desire both humanities survival as well as Mother Earth, but I recognize the universe doesn't give one cold blind fuck to whether we exist.

People don't like it. They want to have meaning. They want to feel important. Their ego attaches them to the survival game. It makes them miserable in their actions. I'm a little self-righteous asshole who thinks he's always right. And I'm indignant, that's right. I'm a boisterous, ornery, opinionated jack-off who's always gotta have the last word. An anti-moralist who believes that *his* morality is the only right morality. A contradiction that enforces its illogic by these obnoxious means. A dichotomous structure lies deep in my brain. Not truly schizophrenic, but schizomoral. A pathos which declares there is no truth, yet seeks to find truth in that statement. A pathos which cannot rid itself of the Judeo-Christian heritage and belief in "truth" no matter how hard it tries. A pathos that refuses to be a complete nihilist in the ultimate face of things, because for personal survival, for survival of the biological entity known as dave, it must act on some sort of premeditated ethics. The ethics are boundary constraints placed by an invisible social structure. I cannot call for the complete and utter destruction of all that surrounds me, because as much as I despise it, I still see some utter, tragic beauty in it all.

The lord Shiva, the lord of destruction and creation. Death is indeed part of the cycle of life. And being a living entity, I ascribe some sort of virtue to the animate state. But a rock doesn't give a fuck if I live or die. Life is just energy, and it's bound to wind down. So the physicists tell us. I don't know if there's ultimately a heat death or a big crunch at the final end of time.

Ultimately, in fact, I know only one thing. Each and every second of my existence exists unto itself. It is somehow chained to two others in an apparent act of meaning and linearity. The future is unknown, and the past is but a memory, but every instant that I perceive is all that I can truly know. Whether illusion or not, it seems real, so I must act as if it is. And I must believe in the apparent continuity of experience whether factual or not. I do not know whether any entity I converse with is an actual being or mythic in some sense. But I act as if they have the same feelings and perceptional apparatus and desires as myself. I believe through my interaction with them, as I go through this life, that it is real. That my memories aren't false.

So now that I've written all that I feel a bit better for some reason. If you've read that, thanks for indulging in my cathartic fantasies. If not, well you're not reading this, then, are you? Unless, of course, you skipped ahead, then naught you, ya missed the most interesting parts...(?) Yeah, I know it's huge, but tough. Bye.