Healing through suspicion and misanthropy.

The philosophy of death:

A stark non deliberate reality exists.  Facts build upon themselves and create a structure of knowable, identifiable events.  The foundation for all knowledge is consciousness.  Consciousness is experience and memory.  Consciousness can be manipulated through manufactured experiences.  All entertainment is manufactured in order to deliver a particualr type of experience.  To what end?  Is it profit?  Is it the promotion of an ideology?  Do the people who manufacture experience expect others to respond a certain way?

100 years of Vague Objective Facts:

Population growth has continued.

Media has constantly expanded since it's inception.

Industrialization is spreading continuously.

Human beings have left the atmosphere and returned alive.

Prison Populations have increased world wide. (population growth)

First world nations have been involved in warfare for an entire century.

Literacy has increased continuously.

Laws have been written and passed continuously.

Conclusions:

America and its constitution are the largest social experiments ever devised.

We are living participants in an experiement in which any of the rules can be changed according to those who participate.  What this does not allow for is a non participatory clause.  You do not have the right not to participate.  Neutrality is not possible in this system.  You do not have the right to exist independently from the system in which you were born.  Does this explain why self sufficiency and security are such large concerns among americans?  The law applies to everyone supposedly.  Why then is there any injustice? Why is there any confusion?  Why are we allowing ourselves to be distracted and what are we trying to remain distracted from?  

I believe that there is one constant that no one wants to discuss and that it is the source of the majority of political and religious belief.  I believe the fear of death, even just the idea of death has roots in every single thought and action of every human who has ever lived.  I think that a personality developes by interacting with the idea of death.  Once a human being realizes that he or she is going to die eventually, inevitably, their actions will reflect this knowledge.  Do you know anyone who does not believe they are going to die?  Do you know anyone who has displayed little or no interest in their own mortality?  

Could you trust a person who did not believe they were mortal?

Could you imagine living forever?

Would you want to live forever?

What strikes me as most important about living forever is the fact that it might be possible.

What else are we doing but trying to defeat death?

Why do we have hospitals and schools?

Is the whole conglomeration of human knowledge and interaction being manipulated by those with access to resources?  

It would almost seem necessary would it not?

Lets get some things out of the way:

You are not going to live forever.

Your identity has been arbitrarily placed upon you by circumstances beyond your personal level of control.

Your personal level of control has more to do with restraint from violence than anything having to do with success.  

You are expected to play by rules that you did not invent and did not agree to.

You will be punished for breaking even small rules.

You are a creation of every human action that has ever taken place.  

In this way we are connected and all seperate.

Our consciousness is similar but removed from one another.  our perspectives cannot be as one.

They can converge and become identical, but even siamese twins display different personalities.

They view the world separately even though they share a body.

Each mind carries with it, the seed for its own death, as well as the knowledge of its own existence.  Consciousness is the cosmic joke.  We cannot escape our perspective.  We live and we define our limitations, our willful cages of possibility and inevitability while there is a part of every one of us that seeks to escape.  We want so badly for there to be god.  We want the afterlife.  This does not mean that there is either.  The bullet will break bone and the brain will die.  If something happens after that...what we describe as consciousness doesn't.

If there is meaning in life, I believe it comes from the continuation of human consciousness.  I believe that whether or not there is a God is irrelevent to the individual human life.  An idea that transcends time and space and is able to manipulate reality at its fundamental levels is something that reason cannot touch.  It is just an idea.  Death is real. It happens, and no one that is alive right now, if history has taught us anything, will be alive 200 years from now.

Malice and Misapprehension.

Drained of energy and losing blood my consciousness dims and my mind slides toward the abyss that will eventually consume the world.  He shouldn't have shot me.  He knows he shouldn't have fucking shot me.

Fuck.

I always knew I'd die like this.  On the concrete, in the dark, a man with a gun standing over me.

He doesn't finish me off...  Does he want to watch me bleed to death?  What is he doing anyway? I'm too busy playing dead to get my bleeding ass up and ask him.  I can't believe this guy shot me.  I'm in shock.  I've been shot before, but this guy really was a surprise.

Fuck.

There aren't words for pain like this.  He definitely hit something important.  The wound feels hot in the cold night and I'm sweating because of it.  I try to imagine what it looks like.   I'm seriously losing blood.  If I could get to a hospital.  If I could make peace with god.  If I could take back all the bad shit I did.  None of that is going to happen.  I'm going to bleed to death, gut shot by a petrified moron.  There's rules tot hese kinds of engagements.  Do not pull a gun unless you are going to use it, well he obviously knew that one.  But the other one is don't ever use it unless your going to go the whole way.  

Fuck.  This guy shot at me like he was trying to get away from a bee.

I hear a car pull up.  I hear my man get in.  I turn my head and I see a yellow car.  stolen probably.  I can't see who's driving, but I get a good long look at my man while he's talking to the driver.  The driver looks over at me on the ground and I see him mouth the magic words.

In slow motion the moron gets out of the stolen yellow car and walks over to me.  I've bled a considerable amount by now, a neat pool starting to form underneath me, soaking into my $200 jeans.

He walk back to me looking like he doesn't want to put two in my head even though he knows thats what he's got to do.  I know it.  The driver knows it.  

He's being slow.  Stalling.  

Fuck it.  

I draw a .45 left handed and put three in his chest at 30 feet.  He never reached in his jacket, lost in contemplation.  Too bad.

The yellow car peeled off and I just started shooting and walking after the car.  I thought I was aiming at the driver's seat.  But I apparently hit a little high and I saw the drivers head go all watermelon all over the cab as the car thunked into a building about 60 yards out from where I was.  

Fuck!

I doubled over in pain and reached in my front pocket and brought out my phone.  Sticky and greasy with blood.  I called Chapman.  

He answered, "What is it Fag?"

I screamed in to the phone, "FUCK!  59 and Westpark, come pick me up ASS! I'm bleeding to death!

He seemed hesitant...I continued to scream at him.  There was no one around except for my two dead buddies and a whole bunch of empty warehouses.  

I was still screaming at the phone when CHap pulled up in his Caddie.  I hung up.

 

Game Theory: The S.E.P.S.

In order for a system to exist there must be rules.  Natural law dictates our most basic rules. We must eat.  We must have water.  We require shelter.  These are necessities.  We will die without them.  Our biological parameters are our most basic rule structure.  A violation of these rules is tantamount to self destruction.  Manipulation of these rules is impossible.  A human must eat, drink and sleep.   

There are many other things that a human being must do in order to survive and they will be discussed in later chapters.  Essentially, I accept Maslow's model.  It does not require elaboration.  

We are all a part of a system now.  Several systems in fact.  We are a part of an Eco system, whether we choose to believe it or not, everything we do affects everything around us in some way.  The typical focus of a belief such as this is on the negative effects of our behavior and industry on the environment, and that we are behaving in a destructive manner towards it.  I do not entirely disagree with this view, but I'd like to offer an alteration.  Our current social system, however you choose to perceive it, was built to be deliberately self destructive.  Why do the rich and powerful barricade themselves away from the masses?  Why do we never see the people who we have elected to be our leaders?  Why are the police the only face to face interaction we seem to have with authority?  Why is it wrong to disobey a police officer?  

Inside the ecosystem we have created for ourselves another kind of system, a socioeconomic political system (SEPS) which has rules that are arbitrary and do not correspond directly with our most basic rules as provided by natural law. The SEPS is a kind of voluntary system.  It requires willful participation and it is punitive towards those who are non participatory.  If you are unable to participate due to an illness or handicap, then your chances of survival are greatly diminished.  Your likelihood of prosperity is almost non existent.  If you willfully opt for a non participatory status  you may go completely unnoticed, but if you declare that the whole system is flawed and that it is not fair, or that the rules are arbitrary and can be changed according to the interests of those who established the system to begin with...You might be declared a criminal or a terrorist.  

Civility and (un) Civil disobedience:

What does it mean for a person to be civilized?  What must a person do so that others will recognize them as human?  It has been argued that the system as we now perceive it has been designed to make us appear as less human to one another, that our identities and personalities are really meaningless and that our accomplishments are what should define us.  It is not impossible that this is so.  I grew up thinking that I was born human and that I was entitled to something in this world.  When I grew up I found out the opposite.  You are born in an arbitrary place.  Your consciousness, pure and infantile, is molded by the people around you and by the pressures that they undergo in feeding you and teaching you and keeping you relatively safe from harm.  Most of us who have made it past the age of 18 did so with considerable effort given on the part of our parents.  It is not difficult to imagine exceptions to this, but the question is about what it take to be a civilized human being, not how much time and effort it takes to raise a child to the age of 18.  

Is it possible for a human being who is considered to be civilized to be a willful participant?

Civilization exists as long as rules are followed.  If we change the rules, we change civilization.  

How do we get to change the rules?

There are many people whom we could pose that question to.  We could ask our congressmen and senators.  We could ask lobbyists, bankers and high ranking military officers.  We could ask the CEOs and board members of international banks and corporations.  We could ask our parents, but what do they know about changing the rules?

There will come a time when authority is recognized only as an illusion and a part of our past.  A system of willful participation that is non exploitative will exist on this planet some day.  Our technological and scientific accomplishments will someday free us from oppressing ourselves.  It may be that one day, the rule of profit no longer matters because there is an abundance of everything.  

If we no longer work to feed ourselves, but only work to feed others, then perhaps we will have developed a purpose.  

If we continue to focus on ourselves the system continues to self perpetuate.  It will grow larger, and it will eventually collapse.  But not in the way some people would have you imagine.  What would have happened if the 2008 bailout wasn't passed? Would the world economy have crumbled?  Would people no longer eat, because banks couldn't collect on their loans?  Would the soil have stopped producing grain?  

A new civilization of abundance must be sought.  We must find a way to feed our great grandchildren that doesn't involve the self destructive behavior of entire populations in order for a few to prosper.  There could be magnificent cities, as they are, they are but grids, filled with cages.  There is nothing to fear.   We can do better than we have.

Peaceful demonstration vs Violence.

Violence is a part of life in as much as you are prepared to use it or have it used against you.  If you are prepared to experience violence from others, then you are probably more likely to inflict violence on others.  Those who are unprepared or unwilling to experience violence themselves might be far more likely to inflict violence upon others in order to protect themselves from it. Self Defense is the only truly justifiable use of violence.  A demonstration is a confrontation.  A confrontation does not have to end in violence, but they often do.  Discussion, while preferable to violence is not what goes on instead.  What usually happens is that each side declares themselves immovable and the more powerful side uses violence to enforce its viewpoint.  This can be seen in the discipline used on children by institutions and parents.  What is the best way to get your point across?  Must the threat of violence always remain?  What could an open dialogue do to improve the functioning of the system?  If we could question all the rules openly would we change anything?  What would you change if you could?

  

New American Factualism

Hedonistic tendencies. (Seeking Pleasure Avoiding Pain)

The American experience is hedonistic.  Pleasure seeking behavior is overwhelmingly the norm.  Unless you consider work an unbearably painful experience, even our daily toil is a kind of pleasure, something we can eventually derive satisfaction from.  We work to live, and we assume that if we did not work, that we would starve.  But is this the case?  If we all stayed home, what would get done?  The daily routine of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain has everything to do with the wider social order.  The status-quo is what is routine.  The mundane aspects of daily life are the most relevant to everyone except when they are trying to avoid them in preference to something else.  I.E. Sometimes people just want to get fucked up.    People want to impress others, want to be seen, want to be loved.  People want things yes, but what are they willing to sacrifice to get them?

Some are willing to sacrifice the well being of their fellow man in order to fulfill even the simplest of pleasures.    I would wager that if you examined the lives of both the very wealthy and the very poor that the levels of substance abuse would probably be similar.  If this were true...would it mean anything?

Decadence and social decay. (The economy of competing values.)

What values have been put forth in this country as core values?  What does value even mean?  I might be confused as to what it really means so I'll attempt to make it all a little less ambiguous.  

Value is either intrinsic or inherited.  Tools and items of basic survival have intrinsic value.  They are either consumed or are used to acquire consumable goods.  Much of the urban population of the united states does not trade in items of intrinsic value.   A person's time is worth what?  One man's time is worth $400 an hour, while an other's is worth $6.  Their inherited value is different from their intrinsic value.  This is the biggest problem with modern capitalism, and depending on where you are in the value system, you may not perceive it as a problem.  If you trust that the end result if the system plays itself out, is an egalitarian and enriched society of free thinking individuals, then things like abject poverty are just casualties of war.  But we know different. Economic activity should not create poverty but eradicate it.  What is happening in America to create such a disparity in wealth?  Who is making all the money and why must some struggle and fear tomorrow?  Why has money become the main focus of human life?  It costs money to eat, to be educated, to get better if you are ill.  Etc.  The only thing you have is time, if your time is worth less than other people's. what does that mean about you?  

The irrelevance of mysticism, prayer, and god.

Look closely at your life.  How often do you think or talk about god?  Every day? Every hour?  

Muslims are supposed to pray five times a day.  Why do you think that is exactly?  

Whether or not any one believes in a god is almost entirely irrelevant when considering the survival of the species.  The human race is either one or many.  The individual should be at the center of all discussion, but somehow it always ends up being god.  If the same reverence were shown to the nature of man that was given to the false purity as proposed by holy books, then things might have already improved past the point where we are currently.  

We already live in an atheistic society.  People give lip service to a number of gods, but do little to help humanity along.  All we have to offer each other is our support.  God does not heal broken legs..given the right set of circumstances, the body heals itself.   If left in a state on neglect or decay...things get worse.

Factual reliance. 

In any discussion a there is an inherent reliance upon factual evidence for there to be any coherence.  Even when speaking about abstract concepts, there is always an inclusion of everyday experiences that the abstract concept explains or is being explained.  Human being are empirical creatures, which means they build knowledge based on experience.  If you are not allowed to experience something, how can you know anything about it?  Why are things forbidden?  Who has the right to forbid anything?  If we could all agree that murder is wrong, then we could all forbid it right?  And what punishment would be suitable for a murderer condemned by those who universally agree that murder is wrong?  Our soldiers kill people abroad, but it is somehow not murder.  The willful taking of a human life should be just that.  It results in death and it is all murder, except when it is an act of mercy.  That is a differentiation that requires factual evidence of consent or suffering.  Those pieces of evidence are fairly easy to come by.  People will tell you if they consent to something and it is often easy to see if they are suffering or not.  

Institutional dependency.

Universities, Corporations, Banks, Prisons and a self perpetuating government bureaucracy that gets larger along with the increase in population.  If we do not expect to enter into another global conflict that will thin the population of working males, then something must be done to accommodate them.  Military service is one of the best ways to institutionalize a man who might otherwise be your enemy or usurper.  You give him every thing he needs, and his responsibility is to be a good soldier.  To obey.  Why would anyone want to sign up to join an organization that requires obedience?  For some obedience is not the issue, but security.  Institutions of all kinds promise security, but in defense of what.  The Military might send you off to die in battle.  A bank might invest your money poorly and go out of business.  A university might build new side walks instead of offering more courses.  There is no over arching authority that can tell us whether or not we are getting a fair deal, except for our own judgment, we are entirely alone.

We rely on institutions to be there and for their goals to be achieved, but are we willing to contribute?  What are any of you willing to do to achieve your goals?

Personality development. (nurturing is natural) (the need for a reordering of psychological study)

There are innumerable sayings and commonly used idioms having to do with raising children.  Since we have not vat grown any human beings yet and every human life that has ever taken place had to do so through the coupling of a man and a woman, or at the very least, the sperm of a man and the egg from a woman had to meet.  Since this is the case, and no outlying statistics may be introduced such as; babies made in laboratories are more resilient to the flu, and so on, we can deduce that personality development is a naturally occurring thing.  Nurturing is natural.  There seems to be a focus on studying disorders instead of studying people. There are rules that govern human behavior, but they are not the central focus of modern psychology.  We want to understand the brain.  We want to understand everything about ourselves and the universe.  How can we do that in one human lifetime? So far I don't think that has been accomplished. 

A good worker.

Avoiding the fall.

Your fellow man.

Predictions and other falsehoods.

 Power, Influence and Hierarchy.

The Atheist

Paranoia and suspicion come off me in waves.  I stare into the fog surrounding everything and look for clarity in all the grey between definitions and meaning.  There isn't a god.  It was all a lie.

40,000 years of lying and faking.  Television has made it easy to lie through the mouths of the most beautiful and convincing of humans.  There is no truth in god.  There isn't one.  

The simplest of explanations may be the hardest to accept.  That the natural world is hostile. 

That human nature is duplicitous.  That death is the thing that rich men fear.  

Why should I fear a lonely death?

Why should I quake at the thought of someone else's ghosts?

You can raise ten generations of humanity to believe in anything...

The reach of authority goes only as deep as individuals allow it.

With the promise of safety and comfort and even an afterlife, how far could it reach?

Into the minds of children no doubt.  Let them grow without being told about god.

And see what they become.

A god provides a reason for disparity and greed.

It gives the wicked a reason to believe they are righteous.  

It confuses the issue..which is of course the same as it has always been.

Survival.

Who's genes get to populate the future of this world?  Who's ideas?

The simple explanation is usually the most frightening.  God is too simple to be believable any longer.  

I reject the spirit world.

I reject the idea of God.

I reject the promise of heaven.

I reject the threat of hell.

I cannot help a man who believes contrary to what he has witnessed.

I will not trust a liar. 

I will not fight for the rights of the wealthy and  powerful.

I will not pray.

I will not bow.

There is nothing to substantiate a belief in any god.  A system of interpreting the world that lifts responsibility from the individual and places it outside reality is just a trick of language.

A corpse is no less a corpse.

And we will all be corpses.

Just wait and see.

A mirror facing it's self.

Hollywood title: Mirror Man 2 

What would anyone do without reflection?  

What if you couldn't see your face?

What if narcissism was declared illegal?

What if self-obsession was the root of all evil?

THE ALL E. GORY of the C.A.V.E.

I don’t know how many of us there were total, but we were moving.  Walking in groups of thirty or forty and unevenly spaced.  The place we were in was a cavern or a bunker and very wide and dark.  I couldn’t see the edges or the ceiling but I had a feeling it was lower than I thought.  The negligent light came from little strips on the ground.  I couldn’t remember why I was there and I was beginning to wonder why I didn’t have an urge to get out of there.  I remember something about not liking crowds.  Nothing else came to mind.  

The people around me seemed like they were in a trance of some kind.  They didn’t look at each other and didn’t notice me looking at them.  It seemed as though we were all close to the same height.  I saw the other groups through spaces between the others in my little group.  They behaved the same way.  A steady rhythmic shuffle, following the little dim lights on the floor.  I realized we were all wearing the same clothing, or at least the same color clothing, like a uniform I guess.  I knew what a uniform was, but I couldn’t remember ever seeing one.  I couldn’t remember my name.  I knew I was human.  I knew that.

I couldn’t say how long I observed all of this taking place.  I couldn’t be sure any of it was taking place at all.  It was like waking up to darkness.  The strangeness of it didn’t reach me, only the gloom.  I had nothing to compare it to.  I was starting to feel frightened.

There were mostly men in my group but I saw some women.  Maybe five or so.  They all looked about my age.  But I didn’t remember what my age was.  I felt blank and tired.  I felt like I had to keep moving.  

I craned my neck to try to see ahead of us and I saw a man in the center of another group hopping up and down every few steps.  He was looking too.  He’d woken up as well I guess.  

We both hopped up at the same time and he was looking at my group.  He saw me.  We both jumped again and I heard him faintly calling.  

It hadn’t occurred to me that I could barely hear anything and that the people walking next to me made no noise.  That’s when I noticed the earplugs.  I reached up and touched my right ear and immediately felt a searing pain rush through my body.  I wanted to stop, but my body kept moving.  I looked through the forest of shoulders over where I thought the jumping guy’s group was.  

I had a sense of something moving over head.  I felt a vibration in the floor.  And I swear I saw something moving on the ceiling.  Some sort of mass about 15 feet above me moved very fast and hovered near the jumper’s group.  I thought I heard him.  I jumped and tried to look.  

I saw tendrils from the ceiling envelope the group, which continued to ignore the man and still managed to keep pace with ours.  The tendrils made no noise and I somehow felt no fear, like all of this was meant to be.  I looked around at my group and no one seemed to be paying any attention.  They were asleep or something.  

The tendrils coiled back up into the ceiling.  I think that I saw a body go up with them.  I can’t be sure.