Protecting the Commons

The clash between sophistry and philosophy is a very old story in the western world. It's depicted very concisely in Plato's Gorgias (400ish BC) for example. For the sophist, there's no philosophy because there's no truth. There's only word tricks and con games that can provide an advantage to a person or a group so they can obtain more. Therefore any argument about the greater good is a rhetorical pose and a ruse to dupe the audience.

Science, modern science, that is "Novum Organum" age of reason science is a formalized mechanism for ascertaining the truth, that is, the truth that can be tested by formal means like lab experiments. However we often see it used for propaganda purposes, which are, as many authors point out, completely alien to the underlying philosophy. Lifetime actor "scientists" end up promoting various NWO/corporatocracy ideas in the name of "science".

Similarly, "science" can help the corporatocracy seize the commons, or manage the commons for its own ends. In this form, "science" is just sophistry in a lab coat. A good example of this is promotion of GMO's, that is, industrial agriculture, by sciencey people like Neil Tyson or Bill Nye.

Our treatment of "the commons" is really inextricably linked with a way of life, that is the set of conscious decisions people make about how to live well, or justly, and those ideas about what's good or just come from people's gods, and from an ability to ~see~ the commons at all. In the United States, for the most part, the natural world is paved over and out of mind. It only becomes visible when there are serious problems--such as toxic algae blooms in Florida or the Great Lakes.

Photo of Florida Algae Bloom
Greg Lovett/The Palm Beach Post via AP

A Bridge for New Gods

The world of symbols is a lie.

Ours is a world of accountants and bureaucrats, of ledgers and laws and numbers. The imagination is polluted and paved and the connection with the gods is jammed with piles of garbage. Mind is trapped in an overcast sphere of dreary symbols instead of burning with the radiance of the Sun's light and the authors of the leaden words are mere copyists and scribes repeating old stories for the thousandth time.

We're not going to move out of the world of symbols--the lies of the world of man, or certain men anyway--into the sunlight over a road of symbols or take care of the houses of new gods with ledgers and numbers.

Writing a blog about this topic, indeed writing about this topic is a complete paradox. This is an idea I've wrestled with for about twenty years. The trick is that this non symbolic world is right out there, well it's actually everywhere even in my own brain. This world finds an expression, not in words, but actually in a different way of life where ledgers and calendar give way to goods and seasons and knowledge.

Building Culture

The Death of Roland

I'm writing this the day after the Nice attack where a Tunisian man drove a truck through a crowd of people, killing 84.

It's apparent to me that the culture of the Western world has been systematically undermined by Empire builders. This is not a new phenomenon. It's happened again and again and again. Old religions are periodically replaced with new ones, old beliefs are strained and break against new technology and new conditions.

The culture, the way of life of people is like the set of attitudes and practices of a large extended household. It forms the walls of the structure and defines what's inside and outside and how the people inside the walls should behave. How are the walls undermined and destroyed?

Well, the wall analogy--brick and mortar walls is misleading, maybe strands of spider web silk is a better one. Cultural walls are made out of stories, songs, rituals, analogies, images and relationships. The thought experiment of mythmademan is that these entities are actually alive and have their own form of consciousness. They're the expression of the local gods, or maybe are the gods.

The gods of the West's new technocratic empire are the disembodied math god and the history god. In their ascent, they subverted and set aside all the other gods in the minds of their followers and subjects. They paved over the wilds of imagination and replaced the songs of the people with accountant's ledgers.

Culture is built by connecting with the gods. Replace the concerns of the accountant with a story about a local tree, for example.

How to "Fight Back"

This has been a milestone week in the decline of the United States. James Comey's press conference was very strange. He laid out the case that Hillary Clinton broke the law, then refused to recommend prosecution. It was like Marc Anthony's funeral speech from Julius Caesar--"Brutus is an honorable man" just like Hillary's an innocent woman. Comey's presentation was more like a question, "well, what are you going to do about the rampant corruption in your government."

This morning, the news is many police officers were killed by snipers in Dallas. That event's the punctuation on a long campaign to stoke racial tension in the USA and to provoke violence. (See "Ladder of Radicalization" and "Divide and Conquer and Religious Ideas".) The US is on the receiving end of the divide and conquer bullshit that we've seen all over the world.

The American Revolution's a really bad analogy for the present situation. The Reformation is a much better analogue. It's a battle of ideas and really rancid and corrupt public institutions and hidden mafias that guide them.

The model for "fighting back" probably doesn't involve violence, as much as a massive counter-intelligence operation to map and root out the plotters, but more importantly, it's necessary to establish ideals and social and political organization. It's a as trivial as getting to know neighbors (if you already don't) and establishing networks of friends. That's really it. 

Promotion

In recent years it seems PR firms have perfected the art of establishing personality cults for business people like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, or that lady who ran the fraudulent company Theranos, or a cult for brands of products, like Apple or Tesla. The methods for establishing these cults are touched on in many prior articles in this blog.

The art of promotion is not confined to human beings. Flowering plants and fruit producing plants are also promoters. They have to advertise their products to get what they want--attention from pollinators or dispersal of their seeds.

Animals, it seems, co-evolved with plants and we imprinted this relationship and set of signals on each other. The lovely and seductive colors of flowers and fruits stayed with humans and found their way into art and design.

No Check Lists or Ledgers

Do you need a watch if you tell time by the sun?

Do you need a calendar if you notice the position of the constellations year after year, and note the location of the sunrise and sunset?

Calendars and watches are abstractions of natural phenomenon; symbolic representations of reality that eventually become their own reality. A man made, man purposed reality, sometimes instruments of domination and conquest; the means for the will of remote rule.

When you're in the woods, if you're a woodsman, you don't necessarily need a paper plan for the plot of land you're taking care of. The place is the plan, except rather than a piece of paper or a spreadsheet, it's life sized and three dimensional and completely dynamic.

Religion, Knowledge, Preparation versus Damn Dirty Dollars

Religious ideas, that is, ideas about man and his relationship with the cosmos, are the ultimate motivators and ultimate boundaries of behavior. They completely trump man made motivators like money, and man made restraints like law. New religious ideas are kind of like a bubble, or a tuft of dandelion seeds in the wind. They enable men to float up and away from the status quo and drift away to somewhere new.

From the mythmademan perspective, ideas are where the unseen gods, the egregore, potentially get a toe hold in our world. Man's world, today, is the world of commerce and computers, which are the mini temples of the Disembodied Math God. The electronic financial system is the ghost of an electronic model of the "economy", that is men and women buying and selling and making things.

Other gods--perhaps old ones, perhaps new ones--are always reaching through the void into our world. When the institutions and customs of the world of man begin to feel stale, perhaps they have more opportunity to make contact, even through the static and noise of day-to-day life.

It's a good question if man can act and think on his own behalf and be self sufficient and live thoughtfully, or if we're always just puppets in an invisible game. If it is possible, thoughtfulness, knowledge about the world and our place in it, and wise preparation seem like decent foundations for freedom and self sufficiency.