#the god of his own religion/self imposed values as the machine

[archduke-enver-gortash]

need to finish that gort is simultaneously great and terrible at being “religious” essay some day

[ill-will-editions]

The Economy or Life

First published in Lundimatin #236, March 30th, 2020.

Cannot you see, cannot all you lecturers see, that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives in the Machine? We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralyses our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it.

—E. M. Forster, "The Machine Stops" (1909)

Not every official transmission is fake news. Amidst so many disconcerting lies, today's rulers appear genuinely heartbroken when detailing the extent to which the economy is suffering.  As for the elderly left to choke at home alone so they don't cause a spike in official statistics, or clog up our hospitals...of course, a thought for them too. But that a good corporation might die: this really forms a lump in their throats. Just look at them rushing to its bedside. It's true, people everywhere are dying from respiratory failure -- but the market must not be deprived of oxygen. The economy will never be short on the artificial ventilators it needs; the central banks will see to that. Our rulers are akin to an aging heiress who sees a man bleeding out in her living room and frets over the stains on her carpet. Or like that expert of national technocracy who remarked in the recent report on nuclear safety that, "the true victim of any nuclear disaster would be the economy."

Faced with the present microbial storm, one that we were warned of by every wing of government since the late 1990s, we are awash in conjecture about our leaders’ lack of preparation. How could it be that masks, hairnets, beds, caretakers, tests, and remedies are in such short supply? Why all these last-minute measures, all these sudden reversals of doctrine? Why all these contradictory injunctions -- confine yourself but go to work, close the shops but not the large retail outlets, stop the circulation of the virus but not the goods that carry it? Why all these grotesque impediments to mass testing, to drugs that are so obviously effective and inexpensive? Why the choice of general containment rather than detection of sick subjects? The answer is simple and ever the same: it's the economy, stupid!

Rarely has the economy appeared so clearly for what it truly is: a religion, if not a cult. A religion is, after all, no more than a sect that has taken power. Rarely have our rulers appeared so obviously possessed. Their mad cries for sacrifice, for war, for total mobilization against an invisible enemy, their calls for unity among the faithful, their incontinent verbal deliriums no longer embarrassed in the slightest by overt paradox—it’s the same as any evangelical celebration. And we are summoned to endure every single sermon from behind our glowing screens, with mounting incredulity. The defining characteristic of this brand of faith is that no fact is capable of invalidating it. Far from standing condemned by the spread of the virus, the global reign of the economy has made use of the opportunity to reinforce its presuppositions.

The new ethos of confinement, wherein "men derive no pleasure (but on the contrary great displeasure) from being in the company of one another", wherein everyone appears to us in our strict separation as a potential threat to our life, wherein the fear of death imposes itself as the foundation of the social contract, only fulfills the anthropological and existential hypothesis of Hobbes' Leviathan — Hobbes, whom Marx reputed to be "one of the oldest economists in England, and among the most original philosophers". To situate this hypothesis, it’s worth recalling that Hobbes was entertained by the fact that his mother gave birth to him while terrified by lightning. Born of fear, he logically saw in life only the fear of death. "That's his problem," we’re tempted to say. No one is obliged to make such a sick worldview the basis of their existence, let alone of all existence. And yet here we are. The economy, whether liberal or Marxist, left or right, planned or deregulated, is the very illness now being prescribed for general health. In this, it is indeed a religion.

As our friend Hocart remarked, there is no fundamental difference between the president of a "modern" nation, a tribal chief in the Pacific Islands, or a pontiff in Rome. Their task is always to perform the propitiatory rites that will bring prosperity to the community, that reconcile it with the gods and preserve it from their wrath, that ensure unity, and prevent the people from scattering. "His raison d'être is not coordination but to preside over the ritual" (A-M Hocart, Kings and Courtiers): the root of our leaders' incurable imbecility lies in their failure to understand this principle. It is one thing to attract prosperity, and another to manage the economy. It is one thing to perform rituals, and another to govern people's lives. How much of power’s nature is purely liturgical is amply demonstrated by the profound uselessness, indeed the essentially counter-productive activity of our current rulers, who view the situation only as an unprecedented opportunity to excessively expand their own prerogatives, and to ensure no one tries to take their miserable seats. In view of the calamities befalling us, the leaders of today’s economic religion really are truly the last of the deadbeats when it comes to propitiatory rites. Their religion is in fact nothing but infernal damnation.

And so we stand at a crossroads: either we save the economy, or we save ourselves. Either we exit the economy, or we allow ourselves to be drafted into the great "army in the shadows” of those to be sacrificed in advance. The whole 1914-1918 rhetoric of the moment leaves no room for doubt: it's the economy or life. And since it’s a religion we’re dealing with, what we're facing now is a schism. The states of emergency decreed everywhere, the expansions of police power, the population control measures already enacted, the lifting of all limits to exploitation, the sovereign decision on who lives and who dies, the unflinching praise of Chinese governmentality—such means are not designed to provide for the "salvation of the people" here and now, but to prepare the ground for a bloody "return to normal", or else the establishment of a normality even more anomic than that which prevailed before. In this sense, the leaders are for once telling the truth: the afterwards [l’après] is indeed being played out now. It is now that doctors, nurses, and caretakers must abandon any loyalty to those attempting to flatter them into self-sacrifice. It is now that we must wrest control of our health and wellness from the disease industry and "public health" experts. It is now that we must set up mutual-aid networks of autonomous supply and production, if we are avoid succumbing to the blackmail of dependency that aims to redouble our subservience. It is now, in the extraordinary suspension we are living through, that we must figure out  everything we will need in order to live beyond the economy, and all that will be required in order to prevent its return. It is now that we must nourish the complicities that can limit the impudent revenge of a police force that knows it is hated. It is now that we need to de-confine ourselves---not out of mere bravado, but gradually, with all the intelligence and attention that befits friendship. It is now that we must elucidate the life we want: what this life requires us to build and to destroy, with whom we want to live, and whom we no longer wish to live with. No care should be given to those leaders currently arming themselves for war against us. No "living together" with those who would leave us for dead. We will trade no protection at the price of submission; the social contract is dead, it is up to us to invent something else. The rulers of today know well that on the day of de-confinement we will have no other desire than to see their heads roll, and that is why they will do everything they can to prevent that day from coming, to diffract, control, and delay our exit from confinement. It is up to us to decide when, and on what terms it happens. It is up to us to give form to the afterwards. It is up to us to sketch technically feasible and humane routes out of the economy. "We’re standing up and walking out" said a deserter from Goncourt not so long ago. Or, to quote an economist attempting to detox from his own religion: "I see us free, therefore, to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue: that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanor and the love of money is detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who take least thought for the morrow. We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honor those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin.” 

Translated by Ill Will Editions

[itsuhtrap42]

The Last Jedi and Nonviolence

Peace and Purpose:

The Philosophy of Nonviolence in Star Wars: The Last Jedi

   Evan M. Banks

   Spring 2019

 “And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; and where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.”

-Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

 “Death is a natural part of life. Rejoice for those around you who transform into the Force. Mourn them do not. Miss them do not. Attachment leads to jealousy. The shadow of greed, that is.”

                                                       -Yoda, Revenge of the Sith

 “Let the past die. Kill it, if you have to.”

-Kylo Ren, The Last Jedi

  “Your weapons, you will not need them.”

“What’s in there?”

“Only what you take with you.”

Yoda and Luke, The Empire Strikes Back

    Studying religion and philosophy in the Star Wars universe has been a time-honored tradition among eccentric scholars with a penchant for all things geek since the first film debuted in 1977. What is widely regarded as one of the best qualities of the franchise is that it follows relatable characters and tells relatable stories in a fanciful and faraway place. Moviegoers from all over the globe identify with these characters as they face Earthly problems—love, betrayal, slavery, loyalty, devotion, religiosity, pain, loss, anguish, and triumph. It is in this reality that the developers of the franchise discuss complex philosophical, religious, and moral questions that humanity has struggled with since time immemorial. However, what sets these conversations apart from the human condition as we know it is the ever-present existence of the mysterious energy field that is commonly referred to by Star Wars’ pantheon as, “The Force.” At no period throughout the experience can a viewer reasonably argue that in the Star Wars universe, the Force does not exist. Yet, to what degree does the Force affect itself upon actors within the universe? This is a question that, throughout the stories, the creators of this morality play try and tackle—or at least use to explore the possibilities of what truth is. The existence of an interconnective power that may or may not influence actors’ decisions, thoughts, and actions comes with it the necessity of religions and philosophies within the universe itself that attempt to explain or interpret this phenomenon. These in-franchise vehicles are necessary to characterize the feasibility of the otherwise impossible feats carried out by benevolent or nefarious space-wizards who can harness and observe this powerful Force.

           For over forty years fans and scholars have discussed the subtle and overt nuances in Star Wars and it does not take much to get two fans together to begin arguing about the nature of the Force, the role of government in society, what makes goodness and evil, and even the intrinsic value of a life, i.e. was Han justified in shooting Greedo in Episode IV? But by 2017, forty-one years later, the narrative started to take a turn. Filmmakers were criticized for rehashing the same old stories over and over again—which is wholly ironic considering that George Lucas derived a great deal of his inspiration from Joseph Campbell who posited that many of the Earth’s great myths were of independent invention yet held the same truths, and every great epic story since their advent were variations and derivations of these same morality plays. In light of these criticisms it was essential that the filmmakers explore new ideas and communicate a new message—at least one they had not communicated before. And in Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, that message pertains to how effective nonviolent action can be in the face of extreme tyranny. To discuss this relationship, a foundation in established Star Wars philosophy is essential.

There is no better place to start than Joseph Campbell. As a prominent and influential scholar, Campbell posited many theories regarding the nature of myths and their relationships with culture and even one’s own being. George Lucas is known for utilizing Campbell’s mythological models of storytelling.

Star Wars became an immediate, global phenomenon in large part because it portrayed a cosmic struggle between good and evil that was vivid enough to resonate with the audience but general enough so that any person, from any religion or background, could identify with the heroes and root for their struggle against the villains. This universality was completely intentional; George Lucas, adhering to Joseph Campbell’s concept of the mono-myth, believed that all moral teaching share certain core messages about good and evil. Lucas envisioned Star Wars as a galactic version of this one mythic story that would crystalize the basic truths that he believed resided in the heart of every religion or philosophy. For Lucas this was the idea that we all face an internal struggle between kindness, selflessness, and compassion, on the one side, and greed, corruption, and cruelty, on the other.[1]

Campbell himself even cites Luke Skywalker specifically as a mythic hero that the audience is to learn with.[2] Campbell illustrates that aspect of humanity—the need for society to have rightness modeled for it, what that rightness looks like, and how good and evil interact with that rightness. In Star Wars, evil and good are elements brought upon by actors but evil does not exist within the Force itself. Nature does not have the capacity for evil. Nature just is. The Force is. But when individual actors or actors en masse begin to learn to manipulate nature—manipulate the Force, that power is capable of being abused. And out of that abuse, a perversion of the nature of The Force is born—an Evil that is not only physical, but structural, and spiritual. This perversion must be combatted. How best to combat it, not whether one can win against it, is the question posed in TLJ.

Star Wars presents a dilemma in how one associates themselves with power balances and the role of an individual within these power structures.

Darth Vader has not developed his own humanity. He’s a robot. He’s a bureaucrat, living not in terms of himself but in terms of an imposed system. This is the threat to our lives that we all face today. Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes? How do you relate to the system so that you are not compulsively serving it? It doesn’t help to try to change it to accord with your system of thought. The momentum of history behind it is too great for anything really significant to evolve from that kind of action. The thing to do is learn to live in your period of history as a human being. That’s something else, and it can be done.[3]

Considering this, Campbell comments on the accessibility of such a humanist philosophy and states that Star Wars asks the question, “…are you going to be a person of heart and humanity—because that’s where the life is, from the heart—or are you going to do whatever seems to be required of you by what might be called ‘intentional power’?”[4] In this question lies the heart of the nonviolent argument that Rose in TLJ articulates. She states plainly explaining the moral lesson of the film, “That’s how we win, not by fighting what we hate, saving what we love.”[5] Campbell argues further that this idea of the “heart” is what is effective at challenging the machinations of evil, or in the case of TLJ, an extrajudicial tyranny. That positive change starts from within oneself and only once one achieves this balance and contentment with humanity and its role in love against tyranny can evil be triumphed over and redemption had.[6]

Campbell is very clearly speaking in the vein of nonviolent resistance much in the same way that Gandhi purports that the means and ends are one—that in order to truly achieve peace through nonviolent means one must embody the principles they preach. “We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him…We need not wait to see what others do.”[7] This concept of embodying change through a personal and in an inwardly-focused fashion is rife throughout TLJ. This message of inward change permeates throughout the franchise but reaches its most tumultuous as Luke Skywalker suffers a crisis of self when he turns from nonviolent means for a fleeting second as he stands over a sleeping Ben Solo with an ignited lightsaber assuming he can deny his nature and take a life in the interest of goodness. Luke had already learned the effectiveness of nonviolence from his encounter with The Emperor in his quest to change the Satyagraha—Gandhian “Soul Force”—of his father, Darth Vader. When Luke fails his own humanity, his own nature, and betraying his love, the galaxy is once again occupied by a systemic evil promulgated by a betrayed and confused power figure. While Luke fails in this respect, what he has passed on from his experiences with Vader, continue throughout the leadership of The Resistance in Leia.

It is important to note that The Resistance is not a state-sponsored entity but one that stands in protest to The New Republic’s appeasement of The First Order. The aptly named, Resistance’s primary focus in the films has been to flee as they work to destroy weapons of mass destruction. While not entirely nonviolent, these fighters do not entirely belong to the order of the Jedi and are thus not required to adhere to the tenets that Luke Skywalker purports. Which means there are elements of evil among them. Scholar Charles C. Camosy in, Chasing Kevin Smith: Was It Immoral for the Rebel Alliance to Destroy Death Star II, argues that it is a matter of motivation in determining whether taking lives in the interest of removing a WMD from the arena is moral. Essentially, the difference is that while Grand Moff Tarkin in A New Hope, and thus like the First Order in The Force Awakens, is pleased with the destruction of whole planets as a symbol of power with the intention to subdue whole populations to the will of The Emperor and the machine, the Rebellion akin to The Resistance are primarily concerned with the saving of lives and indeed mourn the mass death that came from the destruction of these weapons. In the opening sequence in TLJ, Poe takes out the deck cannons of the dreadnought and as soon as the evacuation is complete, Leia commands that he returns—intending only to secure the escape. A disarming tactic. Poe is to learn that engaging with violence beyond what is completely necessary is unjust. But doing violence even as a defensive countermeasure comes with it some intrinsic badness in that there is harm done. In this line of argument, Camosy is supporting the notion of Just War Theory. Yet, he does acknowledge the conflict inherent to Just War Theory in that there are no clear distinctions between good and evil on Earth as there are in Star Wars.[8]

From the opening scenes of A New Hope, the “culture” of Star Wars conditions us to root for the Rebels. Looking at the movies through this lens can blind us to the questionable decisions of those we are told are the “good guys.” The ability to challenge the dominant cultural lens through which most of us look at the world and ask critical questions of our own “side” is as rare today as it is important.[9]

And here viewers can see the crux of the argument in TLJ. The unnamed Benicio Del Toro character, “DJ,” very blatantly demonstrates to the protagonists Finn and Rose that The First Order does not have the monopoly on evil. Evil permeates society and even their own organization—the Resistance. Finn and Rose had just escaped from the casino city of Canto Bight that that was filled with arms dealers flaunting their spoils. Its not enough that they harm in business but even these arms dealers’ hobby involves enslaving children and harming animals.

After Rose communicates a personal connection to the harm that developing weapons can cause, she shows Finn the dangers of the military industrial complex—a true perversion of nature: metal twisted to destroy as quickly and efficiently as possible. As viewers are enraged with the idea of these developers testing weapons on the same people that built them, they are momentarily ripped from the idea of “good guys” and “bad guys” when DJ illustrates that The Resistance has been buying weapons from these same people, thus perpetuating the cycle of violence. “Good guys? Bad guys? Made up words…Finn, let me learn you something good, it’s all a machine partner, live free, don’t join.”[10] Barry Gan in Violence and Nonviolence takes an in-depth look at “The Myth of Good Guys and Bad Guys.”[11] He deconstructs the notions of the two types of individuals and illustrates that as one perpetuates this myth, they feed a beast that treats others as less than human and in turn justifies the maltreatment of individuals who are, more than likely, just like themselves. And in an interest of defending groups against a “bad guy” that does not actually exist in logic, “we become convinced that it is wiser to spend money on arms rather than education, on training people to destroy communities instead of build them.”[12] By choosing to juxtapose arms with education, Gan is demonstrating that society’s most powerful tool in the promulgation of nonviolent interests is education. This is something that the Jedi religion and indeed, Luke Skywalker’s crisis touches on extensively during the experiences he has in TLJ.

The morality and nature of myth explored throughout Star Wars is typically dichotomized between two entities in conflict with each other wherein either persuasion is plainly categorized as “good” or “bad.” The goodness and badness of entities and actors is more or less hand-fed to the viewer. It is clear who one is supposed to root for in the story. Yet, as the characters become more complex through their story arcs, so does the philosophy and differing opinions on the nature of the Force and its relationship with goodness and badness or good and evil. Indeed, they vary in opinion regarding the nature of good and evil itself. The Last Jedi attempts to bridge gaps in conflicting interpretations of the Force and brings with it the approaches to violence supported by two competing cosmological arguments—cosmotic and acosmotic.

These concepts lend themselves to the conversation regarding evil itself in such a way that is quintessential to Star Wars’ in-universe philosophies that support or denounce the use of violence. In “Balance through Struggle: Understanding the Novel Cosmology of the Force in The Last Jedi” Terrance MacMullan characterizes cosmotic beliefs as holding “that there is really only one true thing or order in the universe, that is morally good and that evil is just a corruption of this one true thing.” This is best demonstrated by the fact that while the Jedi submit to the will of the Force, the Sith harness The Dark Side. The Jedi do not submit to the will of the light side but just the nature of all that is The Force. The Dark Side is a delineation of the natural and thus requires a modifier. Never once has the term “the light side” been mentioned in the films. Service to the Force is understood by the old Jedi Order to perpetuate the continued dominance of good. This is opposite of the acosmotic.

Acosmotic beliefs consider good and evil both being natural phenomenon and while not necessarily diametrically opposed but exist in tandem as encouraged by Daoist beliefs surrounding the Yin and the Yang.[13] So what does this have to do with Star Wars? In the cosmotic interpretation of Luke’s new Jediism, the struggling Jedi Master is attempting to come to terms with the idea of balance between good and evil instead of inherent good. He is moving the conversation away from the inherent goodness of the Jedi and the inherent badness of the Sith and discussing a more nuanced balance of the Force. “…And this is the lesson. That Force does not belong to the Jedi. To say that if the Jedi die, the light dies, that’s vanity.”[14] Luke is demonstrating that as actors within a violent system, the promulgation of Star Wars’ equivalent of the Yin, as if the Jedi have agency over it, has resulted in their hubris and this their diminished ability to affect good on the galaxy. That in this, the Yang would also require agents. Supreme Leader Snoke mirrors this sentiment when he encouters Rey aboard his flagship, “Darkness rises and light to meet it.”[15] But the film does not end on this notion of balance; it takes a turn to a different lesson.

This film is not only Luke teaching Rey, it also has a component of him learning that he does indeed, as an actor in The Force, have the ability to affect change in a positive way. And he calls upon his past experiences to draw wisdom. Yoda, when Luke attempts to burn down the tradition of the Jedi, appears as a teacher, and in standard Yoda fashion, delivers yet again, a very powerful lesson—that he need not try to uphold the traditions that he believes damaged the galaxy but simply, “pass on what [he] has learned,” and strongly consider his failures.[16] As Luke reconnects himself with the Force it is possible that he looks back on his greatest successes—times when he was present, yet takes no violent action at all. For instance, when he destroys the first Death Star, he allowed the Force to do it for him. When he defeated The Emperor through Darth Vaders’ redemption, he did nothing but throw his weapon away. These occurrences demonstrate that the nature of the Force is interested in the vanquishing of evil and Luke’s greatest victories came when he released control of his weapons and turned his mind to the Force. But Yoda required he consider his greatest failures. Every time he failed, the Force seemed to very obviously return the harm back unto himself. When Luke turns to weapons and conflict as a means by which he could do good, such as confronting Vader in Cloud City and losing his hand, and when he takes up arms against Ben during his training and loses everything, The Force is telling him that courting violence comes with consequences. It is during these realizations in TLJ that Luke seemingly retracts from the acosmotic and embraces yet again the cosmotic with a newfound understanding of how effective his nonviolent actions can be. So Luke astral projects himself in front of the First Order army and performs the greatest feat ever displayed by a Jedi on screen. It is one of extreme nonviolence and in so doing humiliates those that would do harm and removes entirely the value the First Order places in violence and destruction. This story is the last thing that the next generation of freedom fighters tells—one of “peace and purpose.”[17]

As Rey says those final lines while she and Leia consider Luke’s broken weapon, Leia responds to Rey’s concern about how to move forward suggesting that with the weapon broken, “we have everything we need” thus mirroring Yoda’s warning to luke when he enters the dark side cave in Episode V when he tells him, “your weapons, you will not need them.”[18] While it may have taken 37 years for Luke, Leia, Rey, and the rest of Star Wars fandom to actually heed Yoda’s powerful words, it seems that the overwhelming message in Star Wars: The Last Jedi is that active political resistance through nonviolence and the destruction of weapons is the best way to resist tyranny and promote peace and justice throughout the galaxy. Indeed, that only the Force should be the deciding factor on whether a life is to be taken, or harm done. There is no telling whether this narrative will continue in December 2019, but it is sincerely the opinion of this author that this message needs to be carried through to its ultimate conclusion and that peace come not at the hands of destruction and death but by the promulgation and promotion of passive political resistance.

 [1]Terrence MacMullan, “Balance through Struggle: Understanding the Novel Cosmology of the Force in The Last Jedi,” The Journal of Religion and Pop Culture 31, no 1, Spring 2019, 103.

[2] Joseph Cambell, The Power of Myth: With Bill Moyers, Apostrophe S Productions, 1988, 23.

[3] Ibid, 178.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Johnston, The Last Jedi, 2017.

[6] Ibid, 23.

[7] M.K. Gandhi, “General Knowledge About Health,” Indian Opinion 13, chapter 153, New Delhi, India, 1913, 241.

[8] Charles C. Camosy, “Chasing Kevin Smith: Was It Immoral for the Rebel Alliance to Destryo Death Star II,” in The Ultimate Star Wars and Philosophy: You Must Unlearn What You Have Learned” ed by Jason T. Eberl and Kevin S. Decker,” 2016, John Wiley and Sons, 67.

[9] Ibid

[10] Johnston, The Last Jedi, 2017.

[11] Barry Gan, Violence and Nonviolence: An Introduction, Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham MD, 2013, 25-38.

[12] Ibid, 37.

[13] Terrence Macmullan, “Balance through Struggle: Understanding the Novel Cosmology of the Force in The Last Jedi,” The Journal of Religion and Pop Culture 31, no 1, Spring 2019, 101-102

[14] Rian Johnston, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Los Angeles, 20th Century Fox, 2017

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Irvin Kershner, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, 20th Century Fox, 1980.

[observenature]

Where magic and science meet.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. -- Arthur C. Clarke

In the context of my professional scientific training and the personal value I place in the Scientific Method this is a heretical post. While I am a strict physicalist, there are limits to what Science can tell us, at least in part because there are things that are, as far as we can tell, unknowable. In fact (so to speak), there are different classes of unknowable things. At the top of the ignorance food-chain one might reference Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, colloquially put: Godel proved that there exist true statements which are impossible for us to know are true using any normal mathematical/logical system; he effectively proved the inherent ignorance of deductive reasoning . In his book The Moral Landscape, Sam Harris describes the concept of factual realities that can, for all practical purposes, never be known.  For instance, you can ask: between exactly 12:01 am and 11:59 pm today, how many people on Earth were bitten by mosquitoes (assuming some reasonable definition of “bitten”)?  There is a single number that is the right answer -- let’s say 3,223,541 people were bitten. We can estimate this value (we won’t here), but humanity could devote virtually limitless time and effort and never truly know exactly how many people were bitten -- there are just too many variables and much of the data required to actually know this value simply does not exist, it was never recorded. Then there’s uncomputable numbers, that is, numbers whose exact enumeration would take an infinite number of operations on a perfect Turing Machine. There are proofs that show that certain physical systems cannot be described analytically by a closed mathematical form (e.g. the states of 3D Ising Model) and the related larger space of problems in computational complexity (i.e. P vs. NP).  And then there’s chaotic systems, the simplest of which is the double pendulum. The dynamic trajectory of such systems is, frustratingly, deterministic, but depends so sensitively on initial conditions that predicting the motion over long time periods is impossible.  These are all concrete physical and/or mathematical examples of unknowable and/or unprovable, but true things; or said differently, physical systems for which precise information about the system exists but is unknowable.

To be clear, this does not mean that we are completely ignorant about these systems. Indeed, we can compute / simulate many measurables about them, but the amount of work (read: actual energy or number of computational operations) to reach those answers depends on the desired level of precision. Whatever the limitations, we can conceptualize ‘the space of all knowable things’, that is, the contiguous information space of all knowledge accessible with our current methods, limited energy for computation, and understanding of what is possible. The point is that from the logocentric perspective of our human-sized, neurologically wired brains, it appears that that knowledge space has limits.  Accordingly, from our point of view that space is all that can be known, even though we know that there is hypothetical knowledge beyond those limits. Many people would assert that this post should stop there, with a kind of ontological circular argument that all that can be known is all that can be known, and thus considering anything past that is folly.  Let the heresy begin -- let’s now consider, against the proofs and assertions of people much smarter than me, that there is a body of information (call them ‘facts’, ‘algorithms’, ‘technologies’ etc) that in a grander sense could be known if we had better tools, bigger brains, massively expanded intuition, or a fundamentally different understanding of reality (ignoring the very real possibility that we are simply wrong about what we think can and cannot be known). 

As an attempt to illustrate this concept let’s consider two examples.  I have three wonderful cats:  Zorro, Purry, and Handsome.  Sometimes I imagine that if I could speak ‘Meowish’ I might try to explain new concepts to them and see what they think about them.  “Hey Zorro, did you know that we live on a rocky spherical planet orbiting an average-sized star that we call the Sun in a galaxy about 100,000 light years across?”  I have serious doubts that no matter how fluent I am in Meowish, no matter how masterfully I explained these concepts, no matter how small I broke down the ideas, their brains are incapable of understanding nearly every abstract concept in that question.  Second example:  very soon we might create artificial intelligence whose ability to integrate the sum of human knowledge and rapidly test hypotheses through simulation endows it with an intuitive understanding of reality that dwarfs that of any single human, maybe even humankind.  From the point of view of my cats, the average human is god-like in their understanding of the world and is capable of knowing, understanding, and controlling reality in a way that no cat can.  From the point of view of my (reasonably) speculated AI, we are cat-like in our understanding of reality -- its cognitive capabilities place it on another plane of existence, god-like you might say.  

Cats and humans are biologically essentially identical and in terms of our definition of sentience and agency, humans are just barely past the dividing line between Life that can understand its place and move with agency in the Universe and Life that is blissfully unaware of all but the most salient features of its environment and the corresponding influences on its survival. That fact should humbly remind us that we, and our offspring (liberally defined), have a lot to learn.  I wonder if even that understanding, that I / we perceive to be so important -- between what we conceive of as sentient living systems and unconscious self-reproducing goo -- is actually its own opaque barrier between our current state and a far deeper, more holistic, and penetrating view of physical reality -- i.e. to potential god-like lifeforms, we are the unconscious, self-replicating goo.  

In the search for the existence of that deeper truth, understanding, or a chance to touch the unknowable, people turn to all kinds of systems of belief.  Broadly, my personal classification is that those systems are either falsifiable or unjustifiable.  Reasonable examples of the former include believing that the alignment of planets or division of the heavens (the Zodiac) have, through their gravitational effects or other mechanisms-at-a-distance, anything to do with who you are as a person.  Put that in contrast to a back-of-the-envelope calculation showing that who was standing around you at birth is far more gravitationally important than planetary alignments, or simply skipping over the obvious fact that the time of year you were born has many other salient correlates like light levels, temperature, or available foods, all of which affect your development and propensities. Another example is the erroneous notion that water has any kind of molecular memory for, or health relevant qualities from, a now absent molecular species. For the latter classification, I gloss over the largest can of worms and roundly put theistic religions in the ‘unjustifiable’ category without further discussion -- you can keep your faith, I’ll employ my evidence and mechanism.  (I like this possibly apocryphal quote from Laplace)  All that said, anything -- be it religion or psychedelic drugs -- that alters how your neurons fire might well bring with it a noticeable expansion of one’s personal knowledge space. I wager practitioners of either school would attest to such -- I certainly do.

The point in all this posturing and discussion is that our knowledge space has bounds, likely imposed by the very structure and capabilities of our brains, yet maybe there is far more that can be known by entities with greater capacities. Consider then that in terms of biological structure and mechanisms, the cat brain and the human brain are essentially the same, and thus if the relatively minor differences in brain size and connectivity produce god-like differences in organismal consciousness, how easy would it be to imagine a life form with god-like capabilities above ours and how much larger and qualitatively distinct might the differences in comprehension and control of physical reality be?  And if sentient Life emerged elsewhere in the cosmos, a billion years ahead of us, it could be incomprehensibly more advanced in its technology and understanding of reality, so much so, that it would not be possible for us to understand, replicate, or even use its technologies, anymore than a cat can consciously surf the internet or a chimpanzee can comprehend regular perturbations of non-linear partial differential equations.  In that context, now consider Arthur C. Clarke’s quote ... “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”  These beings, their methods and capabilities, and their influence on our reality would be magical, and because it might employ knowledge that we could never attain or comprehend (i.e. on the time scale of human civilizations), it would remain magical and mysterious no matter how much effort we put into understanding it.  The real mind fuck is that it would (or could) still be rooted in physical reality, meaning: a true source of magic, as far as we can ascertain, whose fundamental workings are still and will always remain real and physical.

With all this in mind I begrudgingly admit that these concepts force me to consider the possibility of (physical) beings so advanced that they are effectively gods -- relative to us their knowledge gives them omniscience and their technology gives them omnipotence. If we haven’t met them yet, let’s hope they are also omnibenevolent. Though, mostly likely (imo) they simply will not give us much consideration -- benevolent or malevolent -- in much the same way that we rarely try to have meaningful conversations with an ant colony. We may not even comprehend their presence, in much the same way that I doubt ants are aware of our presence beyond basic notions of threat and large scale environmental influences. To my mind, the other interesting possibility is that, like the plants we tend in our gardens, we are, right now, being tended without awareness of our conscious minds, in the same way that a plant can have so much care put into its cultivation and never have any ‘idea’ that there is a gardener -- it just ‘sees’ its version of physical reality:  it’s hot or cold, dry or wet, nourishing or starving, competing or cooperating -- the plant lives in the only physical realities it has ever known.  My personal hope is that if such beings exist, they are capable of communicating their presence in a way that we can understand ... oh, fuck, may that’s what supernatural is?! :\ 

The ability to test a hypothesis, to measure a difference between an idea and reality is, for the physicalist or anyone else that values objective reality, the definition of knowledge and the defining line between mechanistic and predictive understanding and the realm of the unknowable and the uncontrollable that we call magic. Therefore, I assert that when our ability to perform measurements and gain the knowledge that empowers distinction between science and magic disappears, science and magic cease to be separate -- physical reality and magic are one and the same at the edge of what can be known.  

And as for possible implications for an afterlife, in some form, let me get back to you ... 

(photo credits: Mr. Wuffles)

Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination. – Edward Abbey

[mikeyd1986]

MIKEY’S PERSONAL BLOG 161, June 2019

Last Saturday night, I celebrated my cousin Nathan Dunkling’s 21st birthday at The Comic's Lounge in North Melbourne. Social gatherings like birthday parties can often be huge anxiety triggers for me but somehow my anxiety was under control tonight even being in a large group of people and inside a crowded live comedy venue. Yes it filled up very quickly which meant that the volume levels of conversation gradually rose up and it was very difficult to hear what was going on even at my own table.

Some of Nathan’s friends were sitting at my table and so it was hard for me to engage in conversation with them. Thankfully I had a solution to this, pulling out my phone and playing Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery to curb my boredom levels before the show actually began. Some people might pull out the “anti-social” card but I really don’t care as I see it as a coping mechanism and way of feeling comfortable when I can’t connect with the people around me. Plus waiting for our meals did take a long time so I didn’t have much else to do.

Finally around 8.15pm, the MC for the evening Josh Earl began his comedy routine whilst I began chowing away at my entree, salt and pepper calarami. I also ordered an Atlantic salmon for mains which was really delicious. There were four comedians in total including an American lady named Eve, an Australian named Claire and the main headliner Dave Thornton. Honestly it was a very hit and miss affair for me.  Plus I felt like there were too many breaks in between and it seemed to stretch the night out a bit too late for me (We were there for over 4 hours).

Admittedly, some jokes simply soared over my head perhaps because I missed the context of what they were talking about. Others I basically didn’t find funny at all. It’s not to say that I don’t have a sense of humour, more I can only stomach so many jokes related to Sex - poo, dicks, vaginas, masturbation, circumcision, vasectomies. Religion - Jewish people. Christian people, believing in God. Children - dealing with being a parent, being able to handle kids, changing nappies. I’ve pretty much heard it all. I think a lot of it depends on the delivery of the joke too. If it’s too forced, I’m most likely not going to laugh at it. Still it was an enjoyable night out and good value for money.

On Sunday morning, we checked out of our hotel room at Best Western Melbourne City Hotel - Formerly Pensione Hotel and had breakfast downstairs at Oliver's. Then we drove down to St. Kilda to visit the Esplanade Market and walked along the pier. Even though the air was fairly cold, eventually the sun broke through the overcast clouds and it become a lovely morning to check out the scenic views. I do get a little nervous when it comes to passing by stalls in a market which some sellers trying really hard to get my to buy something but it’s nice just having a browse and watching the people walking their dogs along the footpath.

On Monday morning, I had an appointment with my support worker Seb at Jamaica Blue Cranbourne. A couple of weeks ago, I was feeling pretty conflicted and disheartened about the service Mentis Assist was providing to me. There was a lot of being messed around with lack of communication and no confirmations being made over the past few weeks besides having one fill in support worker. Everything felt like it was in limbo. I sent a text message to Seb yesterday but I had no idea if he would even turn up today.

Eventually he did reply and things got back on track again today. What was alarming to me though was the fact that he wasn’t informed about what was happening with me over the past few weeks. Nobody at Mentis Assist told him that a replacement support worker would be organised for me or that my appointment would be switched to Tuesday afternoon. It was almost enough for me to pull the plug but honestly none of this is Seb’s fault, just the broken system that had left me hanging.

On Monday afternoon, I had my second last Creative Writing class at Balla Balla Community Centre in Cranbourne East. I have to admit that I was stuck in a rut of sorts after the last class and really struggled on the previous homework task of coming up with five different endings to a short story I began in Week 3. I was feeling a little uncertain about what I’d come up with but at least I gave it a go.

ENDINGS HOMEWORK EXERCISE

Ryan is determined to escape the trappings of his old life and even in these dire circumstances, he will make it to Fiji one way or another.

Ryan decides to build friendships with the locals in New Caledonia and eventually settles there.

Ryan sends a distress call back home to Australia in order to be saved from the ordeal he has been through. He managed to escape the plane crash with only minor injuries, however it has had a major impact on him psychologically. He makes contact with a counselor to find strategies to overcome his trauma.

Ryan ends up in a local hospital wired up to machines - life support, oxygen, heart rate monitor. The experience of the plane crash was too much for him and has taken a tool on him physically as well as mentally and emotionally.

Upon landing in New Caledonia, Ryan ends up getting himself captured by a tribe of warriors, clad with wooden spears and shields, deep inside the bushland. Will he manage to survive?

During today’s class, we looked into scenes vs. chapters, improving your draft, killing off your darlings and the habits of successful authors. Scenes are more complicated and more important than chapters. They are very specific building blocks within your story. They also need tension and conflict. Each scene can be divided into two parts: ACTION (Goal, conflict, disaster) and REACTION (Reaction, dilemma, decision).

Chapters are arbitrary divisions within a book. They impose order and create a certain sense of structure. Chapter breaks are more about pacing and must be placed strategically. They leave readers with a question or a reason to know more. Scene structure has nothing to do with chapter breaks.

Improving your draft. Your first draft is the writing equivalent of running a marathon. You need to take a step back, question the structure and the characters, ask whether all the characters want the same thing, does the story contain enough conflict. After draft two and beyond, you need to be a little more critical with your work. Hire a professional editor and get your manuscript copy edited. Then finally have the manuscript proof read.

Killing off your darlings. Cut out any elements that doesn’t serve to further the work as a whole, in order to enhance the story. Darlings can be words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs or characters. The main benefits of killing off your darlings are: it strengthens your characters and plot, improves the overall quality of your writing and refines your self discipline. Things to cut: weak characters, extraneous plot lines, backstory and prologues.

The habits of successful authors include write everyday, finish your stories, learn the rules, break the rules, create their own inspiration, don’t slack off on the hard stuff, follow their hearts and not the market, develop a thick skin, set their stories free, love what they do, write with joy and embrace fragments of writing.

On Monday night, I went to my Boxing small group fitness class with CinFull Fitness. Tonight was a very small group with just myself, Rodney Sack and Ben Milton. We each got our measurements taken before we actually started. It’s been something of a fleeting thought for me, particularly the scales and weighing myself. It’s not longer been an unhealthy obsession. In fact, I hardly ever weigh myself at all these days. I used to get really fixated on THE NUMBER but now I’m able to let it go more easily considering it’s not a true representation of how “fat” or “overweight” I am. There are so many other factors that go into it like muscle mass and water weight.

Tonight’s class consisted of drills and partner work, push ups, plank holds, ground and pounds, sit up punches, V-ups, Russian twists, star jumps, walking lunges and squat holds.

Being paired up with a hard-hitter like Rodney certainly got me out of my comfort zone. I was a little nervous about not being able to handle it (and be accidentally punched in the face) but I wasn’t going to let that fear stop me. I needed to release all of those negative labels that have been given to me in the past (weak, slow, incapable, incompetent, useless, a loser). I’m not any of those things. Sometimes I really do surprise myself in being able to overcome a struggle such as physical fatigue or being out of breath. I know that I’m not as fit as some of the others but that fact shouldn’t stop me from participating in the class.

On Wednesday morning, I attended the funeral of Rita Hartney at Tobin Brothers in Berwick. I knew Rita from a few years ago when she began hosting her radio program Hot Topics With Rita at Casey Radio - 97.7FM as well as her motivational talks and appearances at places such as Balla Balla Community Centre and U3A Cranbourne. She also ran a short course called Speaking Before The Public which helped me work on self confidence and oral presentation skills. It was only a few weeks ago that I learned of her decline in health and subsequent passing on Facebook.

After signing the guest book and taking a copy of Rita’s book It’s Time For Women to Take Control, Mum and I made our way into the main service room which was packed with Rita’s family, friends and other guests. We were really lucky to find a couple of spare seats to sit down in. It was a really beautiful service which highlighted the many strengths and achievements that Rita had gained over the years. She really had a significant impact on many people’s lives.

The speeches were both funny and moving, painting Rita as a strong, determined woman trying to make her mark in a male dominated world. The music selection was very fitting as well, reflecting Rita’s colourful and flamboyant personality. Songs included Elvis Presley’s Devil in Disguise and Helen Reddy’s I Am Woman.

Attending someone’s funeral seems to give me a gentle reminder about how precious life truly is. That you really do need to be grateful for what you have and make every moment count. It also forces me to think about my own funeral. Not just the kinds of arrangements that I will have but questions like: Who will be attending? What will I be remembered for? What kind of mark will I leave behind? I never used to be this philosophical about funerals until more recently when I realised how important it is not to let my life go to waste.

On Thursday morning, I decided to take myself off to Casey Smiles Dental Clinic after experiencing more annoying dental pain, this time on the right hand side of my mouth. I was really hoping that the pain would subside with some simply remedies but after having a restless night with this agonizing toothache, it was time to face the music and the dentist once more.

The good news was that I didn’t have to get my x-rays done like last time as they were already on my patient record. It was also easier to explain to Dr. Mohamed where abouts the pain was coming from and not simply guess which tooth it was. He gave me two options: first would be to exact it like last time, which would be easier and more cost effective. The second option was to have a root canal done in order to potentially save the tooth. However, he warned me that he could cost me up to $1500. So obviously I went with option one.

Thankfully the process was a lot quicker this time around. There was a young female dental assistant doing some training and learning about all the different surgical instruments and how to use the suction hose. It provided a nice distraction for me. Dr. Mohamed reminded me to keep breathing as he applied pressure to the decayed tooth. It was over and done with within a few minutes. The anesthesia needle probably hurt more than the actual tooth removal did. Plus it only cost me $160 as it was a basic tooth removal and it didn’t need to be surgically removed like last time.

https://caseysmiles.com.au/dr-mohamed-massaud

[testinbeta]

The Age of Speed

“The revolutionary contingent attains its ideal form not in the place of production, but in the street, where for a moment it stops being a cog in the technical machine and itself becomes a motor (machine of attack), in other words a producer of speed.” - Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics

What is at stake in our world today? Should we align ourselves with what one Japanese poet sang: “I pray for the music of the citizens walking.” Is this it? Movement, speed, the future as the force of acceleration? Has accelerationism become the order of the day? Maybe we need something on the order of what Mark Fischer describes, quoting Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: “Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to ‘accelerate the process,’ as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet.” Against all those like the Italian Autonomists who as Bifo Berardi (After Future) remarks that the ‘future is over’ we should think differently.1 But to give him his due, Berardi was not speaking of temporality, but of ‘psychological perception’, which ‘emerged in the cultural situation of progressive modernity, the cultural expectations that were fabricated during the long period of modern civilization…”(AF 18). So it is against ‘progressive modernity’ that he speaks of future as progressive, as some unending temporal order of succession as a radical Enlightenment Project projected into an endless future of possibility and hope. He says this is over, caput, dead and buried amid the wastelands of modernity strewn around us on this dying earth we all inhabit.

Nick Land was one of the first to take up the battle cry of accelerationism.  For him it was all about thanatropics: “labour is far harder to control than the live stuff was, which is why the enlightenment project of interring gothic superstition was the royal road to the first truly vampiric civilization, in which death alone comes to rule” (TA, p. 79). Continuing his inquisition he remarks, echoing Nietzsche:

“This is the initial impulse into capital’s religious history; the sacrifice of all dogmatic theology to the ascetic ideal, which is finally consummated in the death of God. The theology of the One, rooted in concrete beliefs and codes that summarize and defend the vital interests of a community, and therefore affiliated to a tenacious anthropomorphism, is gradually corroded down to the impersonal zero of catastrophic religion” (TA, p. 79).”

It is in this absolute zero of capital religion that we discover Land’s accelerationism, wherein capital “attains its own ‘angular momentum’, perpetuating a run-away whirlwind of dissolution, whose hub is the virtual zero of impersonal metropolitan accumulation. At the peak of its productive prowess the human animal is hurled into a new nakedness, as everything stable is progressively liquidated in the storm” (TA, p. 80). Benjamin Noys in his own variation of this interesting doctrine tells us that it is “an exotic variant of la politique du pire: if capitalism generates its own forces of dissolution then the necessity is to radicalise capitalism itself: the worse the better. We can call these positions accelerationist.” (Accelerationism) The point that Mark Fischer makes is that all our contrary dreams for organic wholeness, our slippage back into some primal time of peace and tribalism, some paganistic mishmash of communal habitability is a fantasy, an unreal possibility. Instead we should accept the accelerationist movement forward. And, for him, it entails three things: 1) Everyone is an accelerationist; 2) Accelerationism has never happened; and, 3)  Marxism is nothing if it is not accelerationist. In a reversal of intent he says we need to return to aspects of both Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy and Deleuze and Guattari Anti-Oedipus: “the resources of negativity” that the left desperately needs to energize its programs effectively. Doing so we must emphasize “politics as a means to greater libidinal intensification: rather, it’s a question of instrumentalising libido for political purposes”. Fischer moved on from their to Land’s cyberpunk capitalism: “an accelerationist cyber-culture in which digital sonic production disclosed an inhuman future that was to be relished rather than abominated. Land’s machinic theory-poetry paralleled the digital intensities of 90s jungle, techno and doomcore, which sampled from exactly the same cinematic sources, and also anticipated “impending human extinction becom[ing] accessible as a dance-floor” (Fanged Noumena, 398)”. Fischer sees in Land something the Left needs desperately, because it was the failure on the Left’s part “to foresee the extent to which pastiche, recapitulation and a hyper-oedipalised neurotic individualism would become the dominant cultural tendencies” that lead to a “fundamental misjudgement about the dynamics of capitalism”. He tells us that Land’s failure was to collapse “capitalism into what Deleuze and Guattari call schizophrenia, thus losing their most crucial insight into the way that capitalism operates via simultaneous processes of deterritorialization and compensatory reterritorialization. Capital’s human face is not something that it can eventually set aside, an optional component or sheath-cocoon with which it can ultimately dispense. The abstract processes of decoding that capitalism sets off must be contained by improvised archaisms, lest capitalism cease being capitalism.” The problem is here that Fischer himself could not have foreseen that Land’s abrupt turn to the Right, to a neo-reactionary worldview and ideology that would no longer try to subvert the forces of capital, but would in fact enter into the very accelerating instrumentalism that Fischer himself feared. One sees in many of Land’s works of present note in his current blog Outside In a neo-reactionary stance, as well as a foray into what is termed the Dark Enlightenment (organized on Matt Leslie’s site) here. Without realizing this inner logic of accelerationism as an entry point onto reactionary forces rather than the radical Left Fischer remarked: “accelerationism can function as an anti-capitalist strategy – not the only anti-capitalist strategy (other anti-capitalist strategies are available, as it were) but a strategy that must be part of any political program that calls itself Marxist.” But can this truly be so? Toward the end of this post Fischer tell us that “capitalism has abandoned the future because it can’t deliver it. Nevertheless, the contemporary left’s tendencies towards Canutism, its rhetoric of resistance and obstruction, collude with capital’s anti/meta-narrative that it is the only story left standing”. Yet, isn’t the opposite true, capitalism has not given up on the future, it has only given up the ‘progressive future’, not the hyperintensive future of  climatology, biotechnology, nanotechnology, bioinformatics, and genomics and the transhumanist dreams of a technocapitalistic global empire. That seems very much alive. At the moment it looks more like the future is only over for the Left, that they are more and more failing to gain a foothold in this venture of the future, and for all intents and purposes are living in the past of dead glories, fantasies, and revolutionary rhetoric that is no longer viable in any measure or deed. Why is this? Why has the Left failed? Why is the Left left on the Ouside looking in rather than leading the vanguard into the hope of a future worth living? Is it truly as Derrida suggested that it is the ‘Specter of Marxism’ that haunts us rather than Marxism itself? Are we left with only provocation in such philosophical hijinks as Badiou and Zizek? Is there a Left left? One critic of Land’s Accelerationism, Jehu Eaves, a self-styled  “marxist-in-recovery” on Gonzo Times, states that for Land “the determinant factor in a capitalist economy are the exchange relations, not production relations. This effectively puts him in the same bed with underconsumptionists and he seems simply to be an underconsumptionist perversely turned inside out. If you think exchange is the determining factor in the mode of production, the logical conclusion is that the mode of production can be ‘accelerated’ simply by the most rapid extension of exchange relations. Land’s leading critics seem to agree that this is the chief defect of Landian accelerationism — it absolute emphasis on expansion of the world market and commodification of all human relations.” (here) This same critic says that one argument against such an accelerationism is that there is a fifty-fifty chance that it might lead into an “onrushing catastrophe” rather than some revolution in the system. He also says of Land’s critics, the very Leftists that use his accelerationism to other ends that “we must stop the collapse of civilization, but the working class must first be goaded to do this through an increasing deterioration of its conditions of existence. And none of these cowards wants to be the one to deliver the bad news to the worker as she is just getting off her third job.” He continues stating that the “defect of Land’s argument is to realize it inverts the actual relation between the mode of production and the mode of exchange. Land proposes the mode of production can be accelerated toward its demise by imposing uninhibited commodification on every aspect of social relations. In fact, the opposite is the case: the mode of production is accelerated by compelling capital to become ever more productive, by compelling a constantly rising organic composition of capital.” (ibid.) But I wonder if this is a defect in Land or a misprisioning / misreading of Land by others? Jehu, in one final bite, remarks: “The possibility of an entirely communistic accelerationism is already given by labor theory in the very conception of capital as the production of surplus value - the self-expansion of capital being the motive of capital and its only concern. One of the most important empirical observations Marx makes in Capital is that once society imposed limits on hours of labor in England, the introduction of machinery and intensive employment of labor power accelerated… The conclusion has to be that reduction of hours of labor not only has the effect of freeing the proletariat from the destructive impact of the value form, it actually accelerates the demise of capital. The demand for a reduction of hours of labor, therefore, completes the connection between critique of the value form and elaboration of a practical communist program.(ibid.)

From Land we turn to Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek who have taken up once again the banner of the Accelerationist cause in their

“Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics”

. They seem to envision a terroristic age of climatic upheaval, mass unemployment, terminal resource depletion, and continuing catastrophes in both human and planetary scales unimaginable during previous eras except for the global catastrophes of asteroids, etc. Because of this, they, too, join forces with such as the Autonomists and spouting an end to the future: “In this paralysis of the political imaginary, the future has been cancelled.”

They describe a neoliberalism 2.0 that is reinventing itself, something Land and his neoreactionaries call the ‘Cathedral’. The idea of the State as encompassing Academia, Think-Tanks, Finance, Governance, etc. etc… to the nth power as an all pervading octopus with its tentacles everywhere in our lives with no escape other than that of ludicrous gestures of comic subversion or pathetic terrorism based on mindless and meaningless gestures of inertia. They seem to feel that all of this is the Right’s fault: “In the absence of a radically new social, political, organisational, and economic vision the hegemonic powers of the right will continue to be able to push forward their narrow-minded imaginary, in the face of any and all evidence.” As if the Left were not a part of this neoliberal world (Clinton, Obama) as well. As if the supposed democratic party were absolved of its complicity in this state of affairs. It’s not, it’s as guilty as hell. There can no longer be any justification for either party in its complicity as it allows such a hypercapitalism to slowly cannibalize the world. All the breast beating in the world will no stop this. The Left has failed itself and cannot continue to blame some imaginary Right, when its very own parties enact neoliberal agendas.

W & S tell us that that present capitalistic 2.0 system “in its neoliberal form, its ideological self-presentation is one of liberating the forces of creative destruction, setting free ever-accelerating technological and social innovations.” They situate their own discourse within the slipstream of Landian thought, saying, even his “myopic yet hypnotising belief that capitalist speed alone could generate a global transition towards unparalleled technological singularity” is not enough. They criticize him saying that “Landian neoliberalism confuses speed with acceleration. We may be moving fast, but only within a strictly defined set of capitalist parameters that themselves never waver. We experience only the increasing speed of a local horizon, a simple brain-dead onrush rather than an acceleration which is also navigational, an experimental process of discovery within a universal space of possibility. It is the latter mode of acceleration which we hold as essential.” But is this true? Have we not seen many of the new City-States as neocapitalist laboratories, prime examples of the neoliberal vision that seems to be overtaking us in accelerating speed, as sites of possibility that the neoliberals are using as experimental labs of capitalism, allowing the future to permeate their secret lairs as they build their free-trade (criminalized) zones? Isn’t there something like a dark enlightenment going on in this process? Think of Shanghai, Land’s on home base, where creative destruction by capital has been an ongoing project for a while now. As Land once remarked: “Philosophers have only ever interpreted the world, but architects get to build it. Although still inchoate, a neomodern architectural landscape is quite unmistakably under construction. This is especially evident in Shanghai.” (Land, Shanghai Times) The reemergence of Shanghai as a sort of City-State of the neoliberal future beckoning all to drift between a Confucianism stabilizing the secular modality of the populace with the petulance of a neomodernist revivalism in architecture, art, culture, and the liquid movement of an accelerating future mobilized in each moments awareness is telling.

W & S seem to be stuck and fixated in the ‘progressive futurism’ of the past, rather than in accelerationsm as it is – a future coming at us, rather than as some progressive accumulation of past successes and transformations. “Even worse, as Deleuze and Guattari recognized, from the very beginning what capitalist speed deterritorializes with one hand, it reterritorializes with the other. Progress becomes constrained within a framework of surplus value, a reserve army of labour, and free-floating capital.” How could progress become constrained, when accelerationism is about the implosion of the future in accelerating speed upon the present? Isn’t it Williams and Srnicek themselves who have misunderstood Land, accusing him of myopic vision, when in truth it is they themselves who have become fixated on outdated tools of critical appraisal an Marixian discourse that is no longer viable for what they see in front of them? This notion of free-floating capital, immaterial, wandering the networks of the new nomos of earth, a transnationalized flow valve of monetary bits channeled to the desires of an incomplete machinic unconscious? Progress never stopped, it just changed directions: innovation moved out of the national and into the global world where biotechnology, robotics, nanotech, artificial-intelligence… all the current drift toward transhumanism and a notion of Singularity (Kurzweil). Progress stopped only for the older Industrial systems in a America and EU. The creative destruction of the older technologies as such purveyors as Wal-Mart enforced new global regimes of production of on-demand, supply-side economics on a moment by moment basis have demonopolized the unions and the capitalist classism of old. The Left targets a world that no longer exists, and has yet to actually see the new world in all its fractured success. The world has changed but the Left has remained the SAME. In a void of ideological in-fighting and resuscitation of outmoded conceptuality it blindly moves forward espousing its epithets of derision and calls for a return to beginnings. A beginning is something New not a return…

W & S would even have us believe that the neoliberal forces have “progressed, rather than enabling individual creativity” and eliminated “cognitive inventiveness in favour of an affective production line of scripted interactions”. What they describe is more like a Ballardian future of affectless psychopaths who have become cyborgs of the new cognitariat of intellectual production who having absolved themselves of freedom live in gated cities secured by the RFID tags stapled to their DNA. They remind us that along with Land we should remember Marx, not as our contemporary Left seem to remember him, but as the prophet of accelerationism he was: “we must remember that Marx himself used the most advanced theoretical tools and empirical data available in an attempt to fully understand and transform his world. He was not a thinker who resisted modernity, but rather one who sought to analyse and intervene within it, understanding that for all its exploitation and corruption, capitalism remained the most advanced economic system to date. Its gains were not to be reversed, but accelerated beyond the constraints the capitalist value form.”  Should we assume from the above that Marx is still Sacred Writ, that he is still providing the Left with the adamant script to be enforced? Is the capitalist world the same as in Marx’s time. Should we not finally begin thinking for ourselves, and incorporate Marx’s insights without following him as if by the letter of the law?

They even bring Lenin in on this accelerating future: “Socialism is inconceivable without large-scale capitalist engineering based on the latest discoveries of modern science.” Why this need of a large-scale Social Engineering project? Is not already what the Neoliberal Thought Collective has done for the past 50 years? From the days of Mount Pelerin Society to now so well documented by Philips Mirowski in The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective. As well as in such works as Angus Burgin’s The Great Persuasion, and/or Masters of the Universe by Daniel Steadman Jones. For Lenin it the central motif of Communism that what was required of capitalism was the ‘planned state’ as the driving force behind it, that otherwise it would be impossible to maintain. But isn’t this in itself an admission of failure and stasis, that someone would need to control and govern such energies, that without the iron fist of some central committee to drive such forces they would accelerate beyond reasonable control? Was Lenin always already defeated? That humans could control such impersonal forces? Isn’t this at the heart of what W & S mean when they tell the Left that it must embrace “suppressed accelerationist tendency” within Marxism itself freed of the entrapments of a planned state?

In their manifesto Williams and Srnicek call for an end to the divisions in the Left, for a folk politics based on “localism, direct action, and relentless horizontalism”, and instead they tell the Left that they must embrace instead “an accelerationist politics at ease with a modernity of abstraction, complexity, globality, and technology.” Does this not remind one of the earlier Italian futurists who embraced modernity to the point of “ruinous and incendiary violence”? They tell us that everyone wants to ‘work less’, but that instead we’ve seen the “progressive elimination of the work-life distinction, with work coming to permeate every aspect of the emerging social factory.”

They complain that instead of real freedom and inventiveness the neoliberalism has brought in its wake constraints that have narrowed the possibilities of work and production in a endless round of the same iterative inanity because of monopolization of those very forces. They tell us a return to the industrial style societies (Fordism) of the nineteenth and early to mid twentieth century are foreclosed to us, that we there is nothing essentially wrong with neoliberalism other than that it needs to be ‘repurposed toward common ends’: “the existing infrastructure is not a capitalist stage to be smashed, but a springboard to launch towards post-capitalism”.

“Who amongst us fully recognizes what untapped potentials await in the technology which has already been developed?” A question W & S ask. They remind us that the true potential of such technologies have yet to be ‘exploited’, that what is needed an acceleration in the ‘process of technological evolution’. Yet, they remind us that this is not some techno-utopian dream, but a way to resolve the current malaise within our world and provide a way to overcome our real ‘social conflicts’. But on the other hand they seem to fall back into old habits of thought telling us that this post-capitalist endeavor will require ‘post-capitalist planning’, that ‘we must develop both a cognitive map of the existing system and a speculative image of the future economic system’. How would that help? Wouldn’t any such effort be a totalizing gesture, a symbolic fiction of simulated mappings in some computer modeling algorithmic constellation based upon outworn Platonic representationlism of past economic systems? This would be to reenter the world of representation by the back door, a return to the past rather than some accelerating future. A sort of have your cake and eat it too methodology. A control system that totalizes everything through some centralized planning committee that leaves nothing to chance. Just another totalitarian regime of knowledge and power controlling the destiny of the earth and her inhabitants.

They even hint of such a tyrannical gesture when that tell the Left that they “must develop sociotechnical hegemony: both in the sphere of ideas, and in the sphere of material platforms”. In fact they tell us that democratic processes are not enough, that “direct action is sufficient to achieve any of this,” that the “habitual tactics of marching, holding signs, and establishing temporary autonomous zones risk becoming comforting substitutes for effective success.” In fact, more pointedly that tell us that the “overwhelming privileging of democracy-as-process needs to be left behind”. Is this so? Hmmm… Instead of an open society they tell us that “secrecy, verticality, and exclusion all have their place as well in effective political action”. Again, is this so? Is this the future of the Left? In a bold statement they reiterate: “Real democracy must be defined by its goal – collective self-mastery.” Such Nietzscheism seems quite different from what the Left has usually been associated. Yet, in a gesture of equivocation they try to wiggle out of such totalitarian centralization, saying:

“Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”

(note the above quote refreshed in my mind by Jehu)

Craig Hickman

2013

[cabiba]

In The Welfare of Nations, the decade-later follow-up to his The Welfare State We’re In, James Bartholomew – former leader writer for the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail – takes us on a tour of the world’s welfare states.

It’s fair to say he isn’t a fan. He argues that the welfare state undermines old values and ‘crowds out’ both our inner resourcefulness and our sense of duty to one another – including our own families. Instead of aspiring to be self-reliant, the welfare state makes us self-absorbed. People aren’t encouraged to exercise responsibility anymore; instead, they are handed a plethora of ‘rights’. Welfare states ‘have diminished our civilisation’, Bartholomew concludes.

The welfare state has always been a problematic entity, from its modern beginnings in the nineteenth century with Bismarck’s cynical ‘state socialism’– built as much to placate the increasingly politically active masses as to attend to their welfare – to the vast systems maintaining millions of economically inactive citizens across the world today. The welfare state, as its advocates contend, always promises a better society, with higher levels of equality, but, as Bartholomew counters, it also tends to foster unemployment, ‘broken families’ and social isolation.

Some versions of the welfare state are better than others. Wealthy Switzerland has a low unemployment rate despite generous social insurance-based benefits. But, at the same time, the Swiss state imposes tough conditions: there’s no minimum wage and workers can be fired on the spot. Sweden’s benefit system is generous, too, but if you can’t afford the rent on a property, you have to move out.

In the UK, matters are equally complex. For instance, shared-ownership schemes, ‘affordable housing’ and planning regulations contribute to distinctly unaffordable house prices. Indeed, housing costs have risen from 10 per cent of average UK household income in 1947 to over 25 per cent. For the poorest sections of society, it is worse still. This is despite the fact that the state subsidises dysfunctional, workless households on bleak public housing estates.

And what of state education? Nearly one-in-five children in OECD countries is functionally illiterate. The best performing advanced countries have autonomous schools, ‘high stakes’ exams, quality teachers and a culture of discipline and hard work. Compare that to the US, where you can’t get rid of bad unionised teachers in the state schools.

Bartholomew convincingly argues that state schools’ ‘shameful’ inadequacy, for all the rhetoric to the contrary, breeds inequality. He fears that the success of the free- and charter-school movement is at risk, too, from ‘creeping government control’. Bartholomew is upfront about his own old-fashioned conservative views. He’s a kind of evidence-based Peter Hitchens, using ‘bundles of academic studies’ to show what he suspected of the welfare state all along. The care of ‘strangers’, he argues, is bad for children and aged parents alike, and damages the social fabric. Over half of Swedish children are born to unmarried mothers, whereas the family in Italy, he says approvingly, is ‘the main source of welfare’, with charity-run ‘family houses’ (no flats or benefits) for single mothers. At a time when Conservatives aren’t really very conservative, it takes Bartholomew to ask important questions about social change.

Again, southern Europe offers a useful contrast to the situation in northern Europe. Over half of single people aged 65 or over in Italy, Portugal and Spain live with their children. Just three per cent of single Danes do. Should individual autonomy trump the burden of caring for children and family members? What role should the state play? UK social workers are office-based, writes Bartholomew, and contracted care workers follow ‘rules rather than doing things from an impulse of loving care’.

By 2050 over a third of the European population will be aged over 60. Even though the age at which people are eligible for pensions is increasing, state pensions can’t be sustained, says Bartholomew. In Poland, Greece and Italy, pensions account for more than a quarter of public spending. The UK spends nine per cent of its national income on healthcare, the US an insurance-fuelled 18 per cent, and Singapore just five per cent (though Singapore has to put twice that into ‘personal’ health-savings accounts). ‘Wealth leads to better healthcare’, says Bartholomew, but the monopolistic UK system, despite the NHS’s officially cherished status, is one of the worst of the advanced countries for health outcomes, including, for example, cancer-survival rates. ‘Obamacare’ notwithstanding, millions of uninsured Americans – neither poor enough for Medicaid nor old enough for Medicare – struggle to pay for healthcare.

Democracies, says Bartholomew, are susceptible to the fantasy that welfare states can solve our problems without consequence or cost. This is despite US public spending increasing from seven per cent of GDP in 1900 to 41 per cent of GDP in 2011. In 2012, France revealed that public spending accounted for 57 per cent of its GDP.

But it’s Bartholomew’s critique of the wider welfare culture, rather than his carps at benefits systems, which provides an important corrective to what can be a narrow and mean-spirited discussion. He also offers practical solutions: let’s increase housing supply but abolish public housing; let’s have a system of ‘co-payment’ for healthcare between state and individual; let’s allow schools and hospitals to compete in markets; and let’s give individuals the opportunity to save and insure themselves to pay for social-care needs and pensions (albeit through Singapore-style compulsory bank accounts).

So what do we do with the welfare state? As Bartholomew puts it, the welfare state, rather than capitalism or communism, was ‘the ultimate victor of the turmoil of the twentieth century’. But Bartholomew makes clear that this is a hollow victory with many millions left idle and communities undermined. So yes, let’s cut the welfare state down to size and stop infantilising its dependants. But we also need to get more ambitious than Bartholomew allows. He thinks it’s too late to get our freedoms back and argues for a minimal ‘welfare’ state only. But why stop there? If the architects of the welfare state have anything to teach us, it is to be bolder in our visions.

Dave Clements is a writer, public servant and convenor of the Institute of Ideas Social Policy Forum. Follow him on Twitter: @daveclementsltd. Visit his website here.

Aquinas • 2 years ago

The Welfare State is the product of rationalism and the loss of religious faith. Man cannot live thinking that he is alone in the world, that he’s facing the cosmos on his own. For centuries, people lived under religious hope, but at the same time they knew that God helps those who help themselves and so the trust in God went together with a life of self-reliance and resourcefulness. Then religion was forsaken and all faith was transferred to science. The wonder of scientific discoveries made people think that if we can master the physical universe, we can also master our lives. Just like we can improve a machine through the use of the laws of science, we can perfect our lives through scientific evidence based social planning. The rearing of children, the planning of cities, the care of the elderly, the education of the young, everything is left to the central authority of the state. They have the knowledge, they have the expertise and they will act in the best interest of people simply because that’s what their job description says. We think that a God that cares about humanity is a religious superstition and we seriously expect state bureaucrats and politicians to benevolently and rationally do what is best for us.

The Welfare State is a great folly, a monumental case of self-delusion that has emasculated the whole of the West. It turns people into helpless serfs, it ignorantly treats human affairs as amenable to scientific programming. It has been a moral disaster that destroys families and civil society and an economic catastrophe that has left a mountain of debt. Its legacy is that of political activism, the cult of victimhood, effeminate emotionalism and generations of schooled ignoramuses.

Politicians make for poor gods and the only hope for a good life rests in one’s own unaided effort. Calvin Coolidge expressed it perfectly: “Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: Nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not: Unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not: The world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent”

Aquinas Guest • 2 years ago

I never said it was a Bible quote, I just said that's how people interpreted it. The Bible addresses individual people, it doesn't ever address institutions of authority like the government. It is your duty to help others but you must do it ethically. Forcing others under threat to help people is neither charity nor just. The history of the Welfare State has absolutely nothing to do with helping others in a moral sense, that's just a fantasy, There is never any attempt to actually elevate people, it's just cold bureaucracy and it is a tool of social control clothed in an array of cosy words. Why should David Cameron care more about the poor than you or me? By all means, go and help others, just do it with your own time, in your own way, help only those who you think are deserving and with your own money. That is always going to be far more beneficial for both the donor and the recipient. Just like the Salvation Army is much better than Social Services and me taking care of my mother in law is much better than her being looked after by the department of pensions.

[archduke-enver-gortash]

g. g…

gort

[archduke-enver-gortash]

having real normal ‘god of his own religion/fervently self-imposed values as the machine. the light as a blinding, all-encompassing, conquering terror. the creator and destroyer, hands as divine instruments. metal and flesh as his material. learn the system of the world to its fullest extent, to its tiniest detail and shapes as the core of the machine, the only one functional for such a feat, everything else his tools/herd, until the world resembles its design.’ thoughts

[cabiba]

Though it may seem strange, Karl Marx was not always a communist. As late as 1842, when Marx was in his mid-20s, he actually said he opposed any attempt to establish a communist system. In October 1842, he became editor of the Rheinische Zeitung [the Rhineland Times], and wrote in an editorial:

The Rheinische Zeitung ... does not admit that communist ideas in their present form possess even theoretical reality, and therefore can still less desire their practical realization, or even consider it possible.

In 1843, Marx was forced to resign his editorship because of political pressure from the Prussian government and ended up moving to Paris. It was in Paris that he met his future lifelong collaborator, Friedrich Engels (who already was a socialist), and began his deeper study of socialism and communism, leading to his full “conversion” to the collectivist ideal.

Feuerbach and the Worship of Man Perfected

From his student days in Berlin, two German philosophers left their imprint upon Marx: George Hegel (1770-1831) and Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872). From Hegel, Marx learned the theory of “dialectics” and the idea of historical progress to universal improvement. From Feuerbach, Marx accepted the idea of man “perfected.” Feuerbach had argued that rather than worshiping a non-existing supernatural being – God – man should worship himself.

The “true” religion of the future should, therefore, be the Worship of Mankind, and that man “perfected” would be changed from a being focused on and guided by his own self-interest to one who was totally altruistic, that is, concerned only with the betterment of and service to Mankind as a whole, rather than only himself.

Marx took Feuerbach’s notion of man “perfected” and developed what he considered to be the essential characteristics of such a developed human nature. There were three elements to such a perfected human being, Marx argued:

First, the Potential for “Autonomous Action.” This is action undertaken by a man only out of desire or enjoyment, not out of necessity. If a man works at a blacksmith’s forge out of a desire to creatively exercise his faculties in molding metal into some artistic form, this is free or “autonomous action.” If a man works at the forge because he will starve unless he makes a plow to plant a crop, he is acting under a “compulsion” or a “constraint.”

Second, the Potential for “Societal Orientation.” Only man, Marx argued, can reflect on and direct his conscious actions to the improvement the “community” of which he is a part, and which nourishes his own capacity for personal development. When man associates with others only out of self-interest, he denies his true “social” self. Thus, egoism is “unworthy” of a developed human being.

And, third, the Potential for “Aesthetic Appreciation.” This is when man values things only for themselves; for example, “nature for nature’s sake,” or “art for art’s sake.” To view things, Marx claimed, only from the perspective of how something might be used to improve an individual’s personal circumstance is a debasement of the “truly” aesthetic value in things.

Capitalism Keeps Man from Perfection

Feuerbach believed man was “alienated” from himself when he was not “other-oriented.” To change from self-interest to altruism was mostly a state of mind that man could change within himself, Feuerbach argued. Marx insisted that the problem of “alienation” was not due to a person’s “state of mind,” but was conditioned by the “objective” institutional circumstances under which men lived. That is, the political, social, and economic institutions made man what he is. Change the social order, and man would be changed. “Capitalism,” Marx declared, was the source of man’s alienation from his “true” self and his human potential.

How did this “alienation” manifest itself?

First, there is the Stifling of Autonomous Action. In the marketplace, forces “outside” the control of the individual determine what is produced and how it is produced. The individual “reacts” to the market, he does not control it. Thus, market forces are external constraints on man. He responds to the market out of “necessity,” not out of free desire.

Furthermore, to enhance production and productivity, man is “forced” to participate in a division of labor to earn a living that makes him an “appendage” to a machine, a “slave” to the machines owned by the “capitalists” for whom he is “compelled” to work.

Second, there is Diminished Other-Orientedness. In the market, the individual sees others only as a means to his material ends; he trades with others to get what he wants from others, merely in pursuit of his own self-interest. Work is not considered a communal “cooperative” process, but an antagonistic relationship between what the individual wants and what is wanted by the one with whom he trades.

Third, there is Limited Aesthetic Appreciation. In the market, people see nature, resources, and the creations of man not as things to be intrinsically valued in themselves, but as marketable objects – as means – to personal ends. Acquisition of things – possessiveness – becomes the primary goal of economic activity for making a living.

Communism’s Liberation of Constrained Man

Communism, through collective planning, would make work an “autonomous” act, rather than “constrained action.” When democratically regulated by the workers as a whole, Marx asserted, collective planning would emerge from the desires of all the members of society as their communal choice and consent. It would be consciously planned and directed through the participation of all the members of society, thus generating an “other-oriented” sense of a “common good” for which all worked.

No one would be forced and constrained to do what another made them do in the division of labor anymore. Indeed, communism would free men from the “tyranny” of specialization. In Marx’s words, from The German Ideology (1845),

In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow; to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind.

In this new communist world, no one will have to work at anything he did not like or want to do. In addition, under communal planning, production would rise to such a height of productivity that the work day would be shortened to the point that each person’s time would be free to do only the things he enjoyed doing.

Communism would also enhance social consciousness and other-orientedness. All that was communally produced would be distributed on the basis of “need” or “want.” No longer would scarcity impose constraints on man’s desires. As a result, the urge for “possessiveness” and acquisition of “things” would diminish and finally disappear. Selfishness would be eliminated as a human trait.

Others would no longer be viewed as “competitors” for scarce things, but as social collaborators for attaining “higher” ends of social importance. Altruism would become the dominant trait in man.

In addition, communism would result in the flowering of aesthetic appreciation.

Man would not create so he could earn a living, but for the pleasure of the activity itself. Work would not be a source of “alienation” but an activity reflecting the free – the “autonomous” – desires of man for the “beautiful."

Communism would liberate man in all ways and all things, said Marx:

With a communist organization of society, there disappears the subordination ... of the individual to some definite art, making him exclusively a painter, a sculptor, etc. ... In a communist society, there are no longer painters, but only people who engage in painting among other activities.

With the end of capitalism and the arrival of communism, there would come a heaven on earth. There would be enough of everything for all. Man would be freed from working for survival, he would be unchained from the division of labor, he would be liberated to follow whatever gave his heart pleasure. With Communism, man becomes like God – free and powerful to do whatever he wants.

Marx’s Denial of Self-Oriented Human Nature

Let me suggest that what Marx was objecting to – revolting against – was human nature and the existence of scarcity. Man can never escape from or get outside of being an individual “ego.” We exist as individual human beings; we think, remember, imagine, choose, and act as distinct and unique individual men and women.

Our experiences are our experiences; our thoughts and beliefs are our reflections and ideas; our judgments and valuations are our estimates and rankings of things of importance to us. Even when we try to put ourselves in another person’s shoes, to try to sympathize, empathize, and understand the meanings, experiences, and actions of others, it is from our perspective and state of mind that we do so.

It is the individuality of the person in these and other facets of our distinct nature and character as conscious, conceptualizing creatures that make for the unique differences and diversities of our minds as self-oriented human beings. This is the source of the creativity and plethora of possibilities that can and have emerged from seeing the world in the distinct and different ways of self-oriented and self-experiencing people when pursuing their own improvement. As they consider what is most advantageous for themselves and others they “selfishly” care about, they support and encourage an institutional setting of peaceful and voluntary market association.

Marx’s Denial of the Reality of Scarcity

Marx also objects to the reality of the necessity to have to produce in order to consume and to have to view one’s own labor as a means to various ends, rather than simply being somehow provided with all that we want and our labor being “free” to be used as a pleasurable end in itself.

Likewise, he revolts against men viewing each other as a means to their respective desired ends rather than as purely human relationships, a “club” in which all get together and freely associate for “good times” with no concern for how or who provides the things without which good times cannot occur.

Nor can he abide men looking upon nature and man-made objects as the means or tools of producing the necessities, amenities, and luxuries of life, with the assignment of a “money value” to a house, a work of art, a waterfall, or a sculpture being “dehumanizing” for Marx.

However, the only reason such things are given values by people in society is that they are wanted but also scarce and because the means to achieve them are scarce as well. As a consequence, we must decide what we consider to be more or less valuable and important to us since all that we would like to have cannot be simultaneously fulfilled at the same time.

Marx’s hatred for the division of labor is an outgrowth of this worldview. Man is seen as somehow less than whole by specializing in a task and selling both his labor and his fraction of the total output to achieve the ends and goals he considers more important than what he has to give up in return.

Marx’s Misconception of Action and Choice

The entire Marxian conception of man, society, and happiness can be conceived, therefore, as a flight from reality. It can be seen in Marx’s distinction between “autonomous action” and capitalist “choices.”

“Action” is, in fact, nothing more than choice manifested: we undertake courses of action only after we have decided what it is we wish to do. That is, we decide which among the alternatives available to us we shall try to bring about, and which shall be set aside for a day or forever because not everything we desire can be had, due to the constraints of nature and the existence of other human beings.

Marx talks of people fishing in the morning and hunting in the afternoon – does that not mean that the person’s time is scarce? Is he not “frustrated” that he cannot do both at the same time, or be in two places at once?

If every man is to be “autonomously free” to hunt and fish whenever and to whatever extent he desires, what happens when the various members of the community wish to kill the forest animals or catch the fish at such a rate that they are threatened with extinction? Or what if several people all want to fish from the same place along the river or lake bank at the same time, or from the same “cover” position while out hunting?

Marx might say that a “societal orientation” on the part of everyone would result in some form of “comradely” compromise. But is that not just other language for “mutual agreements,” “trade-offs,” and “exchanges” concerning the use and disposal of scarce resources – the disposition of the communal property rights among the members of society?

There is no certainty that all of the members of such a society will always like the communally agreed-upon outcomes, with some of them considering themselves “exploited” for the benefit of others who have out-voted them. And, therefore, they may be “alienated” from their fellow men and from nature even in the communist paradise to come.

Nor can there simply be the idea of art for art’s sake or nature for nature’s sake.

Resources for art and gifts of nature (unless cultivated to expand them) are always limited. The use of forests for primitive contemplation versus industrial use versus residential housing would still have to be made in Marx’s magical communist society. And, certainly, not everyone in the bright, beautiful communist society may agree or like the decisions that a majority of others in the blissful societal commune make about such things.

The paint for the artist’s pallet is not in infinite supply, so some art would have to be forgone so other art might be pursued; similarly with the ingredients going into the manufacture of paints versus being used for other things. To assume that men would never conflict over how to dispose of these things is to escape into a complete fantasyland.

Also, it is a physical and psychological fact that men differ in their relative capacities and inclinations in terms of various tasks needing to be performed. It is a physical and psychological fact that men tend to be more productive when they specialize in a small range of tasks as opposed to trying to be a “jack-of-all-trades.”

The Reality of Communism Versus the Reality of Capitalism

As a result, the division of labor raises both the productivity and the total production of a community of men, standards of living rise, leisure time can be expanded, and more variety and quality of goods can be produced.

Indeed, it has been free market capitalism that has provided humanity over the last 200 years with that actual relative horn-of-plenty wherever a fairly free rein has existed for self-interested individual action in pursuit of profit in associative relationships of specialization based on the peaceful use of private property.

Capitalism has been the great liberator of ever more of mankind from poverty, want, and worry. It has freed people from the hardship and drudgery of often life-threatening forms of work. The free market has shortened the hours of work needed to generate levels of material and cultural comfort for a growing number of people and provided the longer, healthier lives and increased leisure time for people to enjoy the wealth that economic freedom has made possible.

The “de-alienation” of man from his everyday existence, in the sense that Marx talked about it, has also, in fact, been brought about through the achievements of capitalism. It has relieved more and more of mankind from the concerns of mere survival and subsistence through the capital accumulation and profit-oriented production that has raised the productivity of all those who work and expanded the available supply of useful goods and services. The free market has enabled people to have the means to fulfill more of the enjoyments and meanings of life as ends in themselves.

Furthermore, as Austrian economist F. A. Hayek and others have pointed out, the advantage of the free market system is precisely that it does not require all of the members of the society to agree upon and share the same hierarchy of goals, ends, and values. Each individual, under competitive capitalism, is at liberty to select and follow their own purposes and pursue happiness in their own way. Using each other as the voluntary means to their respective ends in the arena of peaceful market exchange allows a much larger diversity of outcomes reflecting differences among people than if one central plan needs to imposed on all in the name of the interests of a collectivist community as a whole.

Marx’s flight from reality, on the other hand, was the wish to have everything capitalism, the division of labor, and competitive exchange can produce, but without the cost of work, discipline, specialization, and selecting among alternatives. It is like the cry of the child who refuses to accept the fact that he cannot have everything he wants, right there and then and, instead, expects someone or something to provide it to him and everyone else in a blissful fairyland of material plentitude.