Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Mark E. Smith on December 14, 2011 at 10:02pm

The Occupy Movement would be happening, Gisele.

All over the country people would be holding General Assemblies and deciding what to do, just like the old Town Hall Meetings.

What would you do if you were China and the US government had just held an election where only 5% of the people voted? Would you loan the US government the money to use to round up and imprison the other 95%?

I don't think you would. Nor do I think you'd invade. I think you'd tell the US government to immediately pay up all the money it owes you, and every other country would do the same, and the US government wouldn't have that money, so it would collapse.

And the unpaid troops would have to come home. And we'd reopen the closed factories so that they could have jobs. And we'd give them land to farm. And we'd tell the corporations to go to hell and without the US government to back them up, they would.

And we'd get rid of the health corporations and open up the hospitals as free clinics. And we'd feed the hungry and house the homeless because we'd no longer be forced to spend trillions bailing out crooks or waging illegal wars.

I think the people who watch TV would go right on watching TV, but instead of the garbage that is usually on TV they would be seeing livestreams of their local General Assemblies and they'd go out and join them.

I think the workers would go right on working, as they did in Argentina, but without the big capitalists oppressing them, they'd be able to produce more and better quality goods, earn more, and enjoy a better standard of living.

I think we're at least as competent as any other people anywhere. I think the nurses would nurse, the teachers would teach, the cooks would cook, and the writers would write. I don't think they only do things because wealthy capitalists pay them to. I think they do things because people like to do things. And I think they'd enjoy doing things more if they could do more honest things and have a better standard of living.

The US, like all other corrupt empires before it, is already militarily overextended and is doomed to fail whether we do anything or not. What happens if people vote for it to continue, but it fails anyway, which it will? Then what? Does the military take over? Who pays them? If the government had been able to pay them, the empire wouldn't have fallen. Do they take their weapons and just start shooting everybody in sight? Who gives them the ammunition? Who gives them the orders? Why would they be more inclined to shoot their neighbors than to shoot the generals who betrayed them? I think those of them who only joined up so they could go to college, would enroll in college. Those who wanted job skills, would find apprenticeships. And those who just want to kill would probably kill each other off so we wouldn't have to worry about them, just stay indoors until they run out of ammo.

People do like stability, Gisele, so most, even if they knew the world was going to end tomorrow, would just keep right on tending their gardens. And that ancient bit of wisdom happens to be the best possible thing to do, because the empire is going to fall whether we vote for it or not, so the more gardens we have, the better our chances of surviving the collapse. 

If they build another empire, it too will fall. Empires, like capitalism, are based on unlimited growth and this is a finite planet, so, like the cancers they are, they eventually grow too big, devour their hosts and perish.

I've seen many natural catastrophes like New Orleans after Katrina, where government did more harm than good, but people reached out and tried to help each other. Often government prevented them from doing so.

I really don't think that people in the US would continue to finance wars of aggression or try to police the world. I think most of us would be too busy just trying to keep our own lives on as stable a keel as possible. 

I don't think there has to be a power hierarchy. I've seen successful cooperatives and collectives where everyone had an equal voice.

Change is going to come whether we're prepared or not. I happen to fear the status quo more than I fear change. The status quo requires that the government keep murdering millions of innocents abroad and caging millions of innocents here at home, so that the wealthy few can benefit from an unjust and thoroughly corrupt system. There is no way that voters can avert the inevitable collapse of a militarily overextended empire by voting to consent to allow it to continue. It is unstable and it cannot continue. 

We can work on creating sustainable communities that could survive the collapse, or we could work at trying to get out the vote to preserve the status quo. 

When I was a child, I wondered how Hitler could have been elected, how people could have voted for a fascist government that killed millions of innocent people. Now I know because I've seen it happen here. People want stability. They want the trains to run on time. They want to watch TV and put gas in their cars and they don't care how many millions of innocent people are killed so that they can do it. I'm waiting to see all the peace activists who knew Obama was pro-war and, despite my fervent pleas, voted for him anyway, try to tell foreign reporters after the collapse that they didn't know the US was involved in wars of aggression, didn't know we were drone-bombing innocent children, didn't know we had secret torture prisons, the whole nine yards. I want to stand up and say, "They knew, because I reminded them of it every single day. They're lying! They knew!"

I'm just a person, a human being, a fallible fool, Gisele, and I don't have all the answers any more than anyone else does. But when I lived in Afghanistan I learned a little Pushto, and the word "guru" derives from Pushto, where it originally meant, and still means, "we look." I know that if I look at things with you and with others, I'll learn more than I can by looking at things by myself. I know that Afghan babies are just as adorable as US babies or Canadian babies or any other babies. I don't think it is utopian of me to refuse to vote for a government that kills babies, or to imagine that a better world is possible. I know it is possible. I know people who care. I know that not all people are evil and that given the opportunity, most would prefer not to kill innocent babies, and the few who would could be quarantined instead of elected to high political office.

Why not ask the voters what their plan is? After the 2012 election when Obama is reelected, and there is no question that he will be, and perhaps one or two good people like Elizabeth Warren and Norman Solomon are elected to Congress, what's their plan to stop the killing of innocent babies? How do they plan to get, by voting to entrust such decisions to government, from a government that kills innocent babies to one that doesn't?

I don't think they have a plan. I think they'll tell you that killing innocent babies is human nature, the way of the world, that somebody has to do it, that if it wasn't them it would be somebody else so it might as well be them, and that sort of thing. But ask them anyway.

I'll tell you one thing, Gisele. They are not working on a petition to get a Constitutional Amendment to stop the killing of innocent babies. They've got much more important things to do like working on petitions to get Constitutional Amendments to secure their right to vote to allow the worthy people in government to decide whether or not to kill babies. They don't think ordinary citizens are competent to make decisions like that.

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Permalink Reply by Gisele Theriault on December 14, 2011 at 11:44pm

Mark, you are saying the day after the federal “non-vote” people would naturally go to Occupy meetings. Why would they do that? The individual state governments would still be in place. In fact the federal government would still be in place even if only 5% of people voted.

The GAs I’ve attended struggled to make the simplest decisions and it has taken forever but you think that within 24 hours people would be able to run the country through the GA process? You know better than that.

China is a dictatorship why would they care if the US became one? Democratic countries deal with brutal dictators all the time and China isn’t a democratic country. Argentinian workers did not work for free and it didn’t become a direct democracy.

You are speaking of some utopian dream where American citizens would exchange their IPods for the right to attend a GA and make decisions no one wants to make, not even me. If people saw the GA on TV they would come down to the GA to destroy the cameras and demand Jersey Shore. We can work on creating sustainable communities and vote at the same time. It isn’t one or the other.

I think you know that at first chaos would follow an overthrow of the government but you don’t want to admit it. You can’t trick people into overthrowing the government. Not voting alone would not cause the government to fall. State and federal elections do not happen at the same time. Even if the president were deposed the states and congress would run things.

You are suggesting that people who vote and who promote voting secretly don’t really object to innocent people being killed. They just won’t admit it to you. You can’t have it both ways. Either Americans are basically good and would create a beautiful society if they had the opportunity, or they are bad and don’t mind blowing up babies.

Voters believe that while people have died in Afghanistan and Iraq they were dying before the US military arrived and that the military is making things better with the exception of some rogue soldiers.

When the debate was going on over whether or not to invade Iraq Dr. Phil actually said on television that he doesn’t follow politics but people should support Bush because he is the President so we should trust his judgement. This is not an unusual perspective for Americans. Most have very little awareness of what is going on outside the borders of the country. Why do you think it is so easy for the right-wing to decieve them? That you are telling people America is killing innocent babies for no good reason doesn’t mean they believe you.

If you really want to stop the war-machine you are undermining your objective. The US war machine is not on the verge of imploding. Chaos would make it more aggressive not less aggressive.  

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Permalink Reply by Mark E. Smith on December 15, 2011 at 12:08am

There's an interesting article by Robert Jensen in which he says:

Why is it that we must accept an economic system that undermines the most decent aspects of our nature and strengthens the cruelest? Because, we’re told, that’s just the way people are. What evidence is there of that? Look around, we’re told, at how people behave. Everywhere we look, we see greed and the pursuit of self-interest. So the proof that these greedy, self-interested aspects of our nature are dominant is that, when forced into a system that rewards greed and self-interested behavior, people often act that way. Doesn’t that seem just a bit circular? A bit perverse?

Of course in the same article, he wrote:

Rallying around a common concern about economic injustice is a beginning; understanding the structures and institutions of illegitimate authority is the next step. We need to recognize that the crises we face are not the result simply of greedy corporate executives or corrupt politicians, but rather of failed systems. The problem is not the specific people who control most of the wealth of the country, or those in government who serve them, but the systems that create those roles. If we could get rid of the current gang of thieves and thugs but left the systems in place, we will find that the new boss is going to be the same as the old boss.

Jensen has now rejected his own thinking and is now supporting Norman Soloman's candidacy. I don't know if this was due to peer pressure, friendship, or whatever, but now he no longer wants to change the political system, just the players.

He still wants to change the economic system, but I'm sure he'll backtrack on that also soon. In a fascist state, the pressure of the mob is irresistable. You either give in or they kill you and it is a lot easier to give in.

People are influenced by what they perceive to be the majority. I'm sure you heard of the famous Solomon Asch conformity experiment: 

http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/psychology/social/asch_conformity.html

That's how it works. Not that people are good or bad, but that they'll conform to the majority. The few who don't are social misfits, unlikely to be taken seriously, and in many cases severely punished for their dissent. It doesn't matter if they're right, the game is rigged, and everyone else is giving a deliberately wrong answer just to expose them as being a misfit and nonconformist. You either go along to get along or the bureaucracy has ways of dealing with people like you. Not you, Gisele. Just a common phrase. 

Anyway, I know of actual cases where an oligarchy was ousted and the society survived. Maybe it can't happen here, but it has happened.

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Permalink Reply by Gisele Theriault on December 15, 2011 at 12:26am

Thanks for that link, I will save it. I think it can be a positive thing as well as a negative one. "going along to get along" also shows that it is important to people to be accepted. That means positive pressure can be effective too. I also love that the Pushto have a word for "we look".

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Permalink Reply by Victoria Collier on December 15, 2011 at 2:30am

Oh they ARE working on bills to stop the killing of innocent babies. They are anti-abortion bills, Mark! They believe in not killing fetuses. Anything that draws breath is fair game.

But you know what, these people who kill innocent babies . . . they are like you and like me. They aren't different from us. They ARE the 99% -- and we all support the killing of innocent babies, including little animal babies, and human babies, as long as we believe it is in our best interest.

And in that, Mark, we are no different from our ancestors, no different than humans have ever been. We've been enslaving and sacrificing each other since the dawn of time.

So from where does all this utopianism come, I have to ask? Because a few of us are more moral, take more time to think and ponder, have more compassion and empathy -- why assume these traits are dominant amongst all men? 

We've been killing our brothers since Cain slew Abel. 

I am a realist and maybe it's because I'm a woman. You see, when society breaks down, and chaos does result, one of the first things to happen is rape. Women get raped. They get raped in war, they get raped in lawless societies. Maybe its because I don't want to face that situation that I err on the side of stability just like other people. Does that mean I want to live under an evil empire that kills its own people and imprisons them and destroys civilizations abroad? No.

But I also am not going to wring my hands in excessive displays of morality over this. We've been sold a huge bill of goods in this country. We've been told a tremendous lie and fairy tale about who we are -- nobel and righteous, etc. But we are like every other empire, every other dominant tribe.

The tribes killed each other, too. They killed and scalped and beheaded and enslaved each other. They massacred each other in some places.

See, it's hard to learn the truth about humanity and history and then take seriously someone who paints such rosy pictures of "the people" -- the people also lit the bonfires under the heretics and the so-called witches, and lynched black people, and burnt the Synagogues, and threw the Christians to the lions, and cheered and cheered, just like at the bullfights here in Mexico, where the bloodlust temporarily reigns in the stadium again.

Government has at times acted to protect people from OTHER PEOPLE. Grim and sad reality, but true nontheless, and let's just focus on truth. The Voting Rights Act would never have been born in a direct democracy consensus project in Mississippi, now would it?

Anyway. Goodnight all, maybe in the morning we'll have the answers to everything.

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Permalink Reply by Mark E. Smith on December 15, 2011 at 4:14am

Okay, so I know too many Buddhists and vegans and other weird creatures.

You can't have slavery and direct democracy. In a direct democracy everyone is equal and has equal rights. Mississippi wouldn't have allowed direct democracy and it probably never will. Unless, of course, there comes a time when everyone else is doing it, in which case they might.

I must have missed that history class, Victoria. When did government act to protect some people from other people? I thought I knew quite a lot about history, but I can't recall a single instance. Would you be so kind as to name one?

Just because people have done things for tens of thousands of years, doesn't mean they can't change. I know that people existed for thousands of years before the agricultural revolution. And I know people existed for thousands more years before the industrial revolution. And since I've spent more than 25 years of my life living in primitive conditions without running water, electricity, or similar modern luxuries, I know that I can not only exist without them, but I can actually live happily without them. Weird, huh? Anyway, if those revolutions, which I consider to have been unnecessary and in many ways harmful, happened, who am I to say that there couldn't be a peace revolution? So people did things one way for thousands of years and then they started doing things diffferently. Shit happens.

And by the way, I do know the difference between a fetus and a person. And I got banned from Derrick Jensen's website because when some guys were saying that the Supreme Court was right to ban late trimester abortions because "they had to draw a line somewhere," I said that I didn't think they had the right to reach deep inside an adult citizen's body to draw their line.

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Permalink Reply by Gisele Theriault on December 15, 2011 at 11:22am

Okay, so I know too many Buddhists and vegans and other weird creatures.>>

Mark, you have a sense of humour! Who knew!  :)

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Permalink Reply by Victoria Collier on December 15, 2011 at 11:58am

I mentioned the Voting Rights Act as one of those instances. Of course that means nothing to you because you don't believe in voting anyway. 

The Bill of Rights protected citizens from many abuses -- but in the beginning, not everyone was a citizen. So people had to fight for citizenship. 

Human society has a tendency to grow more complex when environmental conditions permit it and technological advances create the means. Every society has had hierarchy, but the more complex societies have extreme stratification. I support all experiments in the development of non-hierarchical societies and systems. We just have to understand this is not our natural state, we are not coded for understanding this and what it requires of us. Just like we are not coded to be herbivores, we are carnivores. We have to make moral decisions not to eat meat, it's a more spiritually evolved condition, and it's a choice. We can't outlaw meat consumption.

When the Tibetans stopped being warriors and became spiritual pacifists, that might have been the single most astounding event in the history of peoples. And yet, it did not stop them from being tortured and decimated by the Chinese who invaded and forced children to kill their own parents.

The question of war and peace will arise in a direct democracy and I can hardly imagine it being resolved in consensus --  many people  will choose to carry arms and form militias or armies for defense against outside forces, and others being more like Tibetans will refuse. 

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Permalink Reply by Gisele Theriault on December 15, 2011 at 12:03pm

I won't reply to the content of this message but thank-you because it contains food for thought.

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Permalink Reply by Mark E. Smith on December 15, 2011 at 12:57pm

Okay, I do know of one incident when government protected people from people--when JFK sent in troops to protect children trying to integrate schools in the south. Of course the schools are mostly resegregated now and people weren't able to protect JFK from government (the real government, not the elected officials who do their bidding or get shot), but that definitely was an incident when the government protected people from people.

Many people in the US are actually opposed to war, and many of those who aren't opposed to war per se, would prefer to see the trillions our government spends on wars and on maintaining a thousand military bases in foreign countries (each with their own pristine golf course, even if the base is located in the middle of a desert or deep in a jungle and it costs more than $200 a gallon to fly in the diesel fuel for the lawnmower to keep the greens pristine), used for urgent domestic needs instead.

I think human nature is peaceful. I think it is so peaceful that patriarchy was able to take over the world by force of violence because people were so naturally peaceful and respectful of life that they were unprepared to defend themselves against the bands of rapists and murderers who had been exiled from their own communities and had no respect for life.

And that would have been the end of it, but for a tiny woman who only learned after she'd been smuggled to safety, how close she'd come to having been turned into a lampshade or a bar of soap, or thrown, despite her doctorates in math and physics, into Ravensbruck to be used as a prostitute by the SS troops in Nazi Germany. I suspect that Dr. Lise Meitner was the greatest genius the human race has ever known, more brilliant even than Hypatia. She knew, as we do of course, that you can't reason with or reach consensus with jackbooted thugs. But she located their Achilles heel, their sole vulnerability: their uncontrollable lust for power. And she exploited it in the only way possible, by giving them a weapon so powerful that they would never be able to control it and it would eventually destroy them along with everything else, and the endless cycles of war and the needless suffering of billions would finally come to an end. Dr. Meitner (not her assistant Otto Hahn who got the Nobel Prize but had never studied math or physics and was totally incapable of having discovered nuclear fission) solved the problem. That's who Einstein was referring to when people called him "The Father of the Bomb," and he replied that there was no father of the bomb, there was a mother of the bomb.

For many decades now college biology classes have taught students ecology by putting two aquariums in the classroom, both with the a small colony of amoebae under the exact same conditions, the same amounts of water, air, sun, nutrients, etc., so that everyone could see the difference between an ecologically viable species, which theoretically can exist forever, and an ecologically nonviable species which overpopulates, dies off due to scarcities, overpopulates, dies off again, in increasing cycles until the entire population dies off, poisoned in its own wastes because it lacks the ability to control its reproductive rate in accordance with available resources. Before patriarchy, we were an ecologically viable species. Since then we have not been and we've been subject to those same biological cycles often called world wars or genocides. After a big die-off, life becomes precious for a while and people reproduce frantically to try to replace all the lost lives. A few generations later we enter another overpopulation peak, like the one we're in now, when life becomes cheap, genocides become commonplace and unremarkable, rinse and repeat.

I think Meitner had expected the warriors to blow up the entire planet quickly, but they weren't as dumb as they looked--they realized that wasn't a great idea. But they had to use their new toy and they did. While the end will come more slowly, as I said, this is the final cycle when we become extinct, poisoned in our own wastes. Previous die-offs left millions, sometimes even billions of corpses, which happen to be biodegradable. Radiation is not. It remains deadly for hundreds of thousands of years. And we simply don't have the technology to locate and safely clean up every one of the billions of microscopic particles of plutonium, uranium, cesium, and other radioactive elements we've scattered all over the planet, on top of mountains, deep in jungles, and throughout the oceans. Each particle will pass through the food chain eventually. There will not be another cycle. You know this, Victoria. You said you posted the pictures so you must know who Doug Rokke is.

How did that conversation between Gurdjieff and Ouspensky go? O asked what would happen if people became conscious. G said that they'd just go on beating each others heads in. If I remember correctly, G continued, "Things are as they are and they couldn't be any other way. If one thing could be different, everything could be different."

I hope he was right. Because I'm different. Ask anyone. I don't think you'll find a single person who has ever met me or seen my writing online who won't agree that I'm different. So maybe everything could be different. Or, then again, maybe G was wrong.

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Permalink Reply by Victoria Collier on December 15, 2011 at 1:07pm

Oh, you're different alright! But you know, Mark, after our few days talking here together, I like you. I was sent on a search and destroy (your philosophy, not you) mission, and now I think we could have a beer in the bunker together while waiting for the shit to hit the fan.

But actually I spent a long time in the bunker, waiting, and now I've decided to give it one last shot out in the real world where thing are pretty complex and the conditions on the the playing field don't allow for the luxury of purist positions.

I think we all have darkness and light in us. Mostly, like Anne Frank, I think people are good, and we have to nurture the best in us, which is not what the culture currently does. I believe in evolution and I think its time for us to make some quantum leaps in evolution both in our physical world and in our spiritual world.

I support your desire to see a new world and I think you'll do better in convincing people of the potential of your vision if you appeal to their best nature, refrain from attacking them, and show by example the potential of consensus by actually seeking common ground at all times.

Also, be realistic. Start with people where they are, don't put them in an ideological choke hold.

Best

V

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Permalink Reply by Mark E. Smith on December 15, 2011 at 2:06pm

Knowing that's why you came here, I was also surprised to find myself liking you too, Victoria. I don't drink beer and I'm not much for cuddlepuddles, but I'd share that bunker with you any day.

It is only in the last ten years that I've had the luxury of being away from the real world if I chose to. For much of my life I was either homeless or living in third and fourth world countries where reality couldn't be avoided or ignored.

I do try to avoid attacking people, even people who are bent on attacking me or my ideas or both, but I'm not always successful. Since I do try to defend myself, even when I am successful, my attempts to defend myself are often misconstrued as attacks anyway. But although I'm nonviolent, I'm not a purist or fanatic about it. I never took nonviolence training because I figured I already know how to let a cop bash my head in. If there were classes in how to avoid getting my head bashed in, I might enroll. And when some maniac spent weeks on an immigrant rights mailing list attacking me, and finally confessed that he'd chosen me at random as as object on which to try out his newly learned non-violent communications techniques (after which the moderator banned him) I learned that people who call themselves nonviolent can be even more vicious than people who don't. But since I was a kid, if I see injustice and there's a chance that I can stop it, I'll try. I've never studied any martial arts, but there's one called aikido that is purely self defense. You use an attacker's own force against them, so you can only do it if you're attacked. I also agree with Ward Churchill's essay, "Pacifism as Pathology." I think the way that Occupy tries to film police brutality and shame the cops is effective, but I don't condemn the Egyptians who burnt down police stations where people had been tortured. There's no one-size-fits-all solution to every situation and flexibility is a survival skill.

Voting is often referred to as doing one's civic duty. It is not a form of noncompliance and cannot be. There are other civic duties. Registering with the military is one. Noncompliance is not registering. Paying taxes is a civic duty. Noncompliance is not paying taxes. In a capitalist system like ours, even consumerism can be a civic duty, as when Bush urged people to "go shopping" after 9/11. Naturally, I did my best not to comply. For a while I even stopped using toilet paper (I've lived in Muslim countries, so I know how to do that--you use water, but being a fastidious westerner, I used soapy water) just so that I wouldn't have to buy anything other than food. Anyway, my point is that doing one's civic duty is not a form of noncompliance or part of a spectrum of noncompliance activities. 

Consensus doesn't mean that if everyone else thinks the world is flat, I have to agree. That's conformity, not consensus. True consensus would allow a pioneer to block any proposal to agree that the world is flat, present their evidence, and even if consensus can't be reached, not be forced to leave the group. And there was a time that all but a few heretics agreed that the world was flat.

At least the nonviolence people admit that sometimes doing nothing is more effective than doing something, particularly if doing something would only make things worse. 

This is a complex world and we live in a complex society. It's enough to give anybody a complex about it. I don't have solutions, but I agree that noncompliance with injustice has the potential to bring about change. Where I won't budge is when people try to convince me that voting is a form of noncompliance. It is not. Refusing to vote is. How complex is that?

What really tears me up, Victoria, is the thought that somewhere in the world there might be a little brown-skinned girl-child who is more brilliant than both Hypatia and Meitner combined, and really could have solved all the problems we never will, but she never had a chance to go to school and is probably being sold into a brothel where she'll die of AIDS within a year. I think we're looking for wisdom in all the wrong people.

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