Zeno's Martial Truth

"Zeno stretched out his fingers, and showed the palm of his hand, - 'Perception,' - he said, - 'is a thing like this.'- Then, when he had closed his fingers a little, - 'Assent is like this.' - Afterwards, when he had completely closed his hand, and showed his fist, that, he said, was Comprehension. From which simile he also gave that state a name which it had not before, and called it katalepsis. But when he brought his left hand against his right, and with it took a firm and tight hold of his fist: - 'Knowledge' - he said, was of that character; and that was what none but a wise person possessed."

How might I read this? The world remains formless and flows undistinguished. There is no use but only the witnessing of appearances. The hand remains without purpose; it is a crystallization of its nature. Then the world takes form slowly as things are ripped from the flow of appearance to be dissected; the hand begins to form into something of use. Finally the fist is clenched; things are known, a thing is distinct, a truth emerges from the flow of appearances. What do we do with this fist of truth? We attain it, as wise people, strike out and use it in the world. Truth is not truth if it is as useless as an opened, unmoving hand. For knowledge and truth are not abstractions removed from the body and the world, lofty, feathery things to drift in some deaf, dumb and blind dream. Truth and knowledge command us to act, to use them, and a truth that does not demand action, is nothing but the meaningless, useless flow of appearance. Only in the use of truth do we find out if its fist is strong and healthy enough to shatter the fallacious; without this exercise of truth, this pugilistic match, knowledge and truth remain the fallacies of sickly cowards.

But are the fists rough and brutish like a boxers? No, while the striking out in the name of truth may require a degree of crudeness and a willingness to become dirty, the pugilism of truth can be sheer starkness of a lived ethic in the face of a spiteful crowd of denouncers. Our truth is measured by the strength of a the fight, the strength of the truth, not by the brutality of the fighter.

Humanism Wanting

Often we are commanded directly by threat or didactically through the judgment of others to act humanely. What is threatened? What is being judged? Your essential nature, a secularized soul, that is grounded in the assumed qualities of what forms a human; to act in a way that is inhumane is to risk your status as a human. As you deny the rights guaranteed humans, so you go on to deny your own humanity in the eyes of others.

For example, consider what you have thought and have heard others say about arraigned killers -- all acts become permissible in conversation against the dehumanized "it" that was once a person. Our own behavior reveals a startling irony. We go about requesting the decency of being humane, to subscribe to the core properties that compose a human as a full social being, but how can one request a nature?

A nature is static, permanent and self-sufficient, producing a deterministic teleology. The very request to be humane, to subscribe to a type of humanism, tacitly reveals there is no nature. For how do you request a person to choose his or her nature? There is not a human soul, a human nature, or a true humanism in which to subscribe to. The request uncovers a nothingness in the human. His obsessive concern with being human points to his true composition. He is paradoxically naturally unnatural. The nothingness as if a vacuum hungrily sucking up anything in the outside world to fill it and form it into something more tangible to humanity. Humanism, those that request you be humane to others, it comes from the initial nothingness of the person that desperately seeks out something.

Did I just tell you to go out and slaughter everybody because there is no humanism to build a system of rights and ethical behavior? Unfortunately for the more violent members of our species, no. A denial of human nature and the revelation that humanity's core is a "nothingness seeking outward" allows for a host of new ways for humans to relate. A more truthful analysis and thus a better practice concerning daily human interactions can be achieved if we rid ourselves of the abstractions in the humanism of nature and right. Has it not been so dishonest that we acknowledge a worldly humanism, but at the first opportunity, tear our enemy's children into bloody ribbons and excuse it with the call "war"? Isn't the idea of world love between all nations so insincere it is nauseating? A truer understanding of humanity allows for something like a love to exist in a purer sense. Love can exist without a humanism though that may sound strange. Love is actually strangled and blinded by the false notions of a human nature. To end a sham marriage, two lovers must reveal their true "selves" to each other -- that they are both grasping nothings desperate to be affirmed by each other -- and human touch becomes more real than it has ever been before.

Opiate of the Masses? More like White Trash Turpentine Cocktail!

Christianity, and any revelatory religion, have been the meeting ground of two distinct types of people -- psychotics and conformists. A few individuals encounter god, daring enough to break rules and declare their waking dreams a reality. Then those who are unwilling to protest by the decency of their intelligence go to work organizing and establishing the new religions and communities. All religions and all traditions not based in sensible purpose start as mendacious, indecent, violent cults; it is only through the hardening of history, even, surprisingly, an illuminating, embarrassing history of unprecedented human folly and shame, that these cults becomes proper, acknowledged religions and traditions. The cult of the weak, sick and dying known to the Ancient world as Christianity is the inescapable, pervasive glue of Western society for nearly 2000 years -- this is our legacy!?

And those few that are not psychotics and conformists, must sit hopelessly with their nausea from the cursed fortune of intellectual decency, knowing their culture is the Scientology of a glaringly observable past.

Post-Luddite

Through the scalpel of love, its undisciplined brutality as a general abstraction, the monotheist severed the Earth from himself. Could history have birthed itself as merely a first, accidental thought of history in humans, blooming forward by the strength of its own roots -- "there is history" -- a thought, and so, it came to be from humans, but instantaneously hardened as a thing-in-itself. Such an idea as a linear history of progression could not be un-thought. The idea hardened and grew in the fertile soil of humanity's collective consciousness as an especially virile meme.

The idea of history simply needed to be thought, and, like a spark in a dried, golden forest, everything became ablaze and forever altered. Was it the monotheist that thought beyond the polytheist's circularity of nature which tore the world into a beginning and an end? The love of God denies the material world, and in doing so, allows space for the idea of history to exist supernaturally. The idea of history itself was enough to propagate history through the humans who believed in a history and acted as physical vessels for the idea to express itself. The idea was created through one material brain, but upon its creation, it became a self-sufficient creator by the very composition of the thought; and, as Hegel philosophy illuminates, the Idea finds itself revealed through acts of man that formulate history, leading to the eventual fullness of the Idea -- Providence.

For a moment, let us suppose all of this is true. We can say the accelerating advancement of humanity since the formation of a progressive history through a first, creative, accidental thought of history distinct from earlier pagan or tribal notions of repetitive, circular history is actually not the Godless, absurd and meaningless age of science and technology as it is popularly thought. We live now in the highest ascent and fulfillment of Providence. For doesn't modern man find himself slowly disappearing as a thing of nature, doesn't he forsake the Earth, the body, and death in the name of ideas and abstractions? The many ways we can alter the body through technology, the way we can manipulate the Earth to our goals, and the way we exist as a disembodied mind throughout the globe through the Internet are defining features of our age. Is not all technology the manifestations of ideas beyond the material? Do we not find that this technology of the abstract is also rapidly taking up less and less material space and doing more and more immaterial, abstract things? The days of vacuum tubes have been replaced by an age of microscopic chips. Within only a few decades, the physical size of technology has shrunk to unprecedented proportions.

We are not in Godless times (!) to contradict most believers that scream about secularism and dwindling attendance at church. We have become so pious, and abstraction has become so powerful that it has been normalized; we are so blind and removed from a pre-historical and non-monotheistic world that we deem ourselves Godless and atheists out of sheer inability to see with eyes that are monotheistic but cannot glance upon themselves to see who the bearers really are. Science and technology as they are today are the unveiling of an idea that began with the love of God. These silent, silicone saints that appear in every human space and room now, sanctify them, connecting them to something greater -- this may be the unrealized legacy of the monotheist's God. Technology's highest pursuit is the development of more, refined technology, and science's is the development of an pure science -- technology for the sake of technology and science for the sake of science.

Then what does it mean to really be an atheist? Atheism has one virtue and one belief, which is the belief and desire to experiment. It is no longer the senseless adherence to science and the hope of technological salvation, nor was it ever. Any notion of salvation, a belief found in modern conception of technological advancement, is undeniably monotheistic. It founds itself on the belief that there are things in the world that must be rebuilt (redeemed), and tacitly, there are things that are broken (sinful). Atheism in its true sense should be the daring, the striving to live without the societal monolith of God and his many hidden, faceless angels that populate our world in the most beguiling of forms. Atheism must be a willingness to find through experimentation what few pockets remain of an untouched, unhistorical, old-yet-new world exist and to grow these pockets.

How will we receive the Earth again? It is not with a belief in technology and science as redeemers. The atheists that proselytize in the name of science are the purer Christians that harbor such disdain for their old world brothers thumping their Bible's. How will we reunite ourselves with a Godless nature and the purest witness to the material we can achieve? Can we stop the eventual outcome of our total convergence with technological Providence and absolute loss of our material selves, becoming so pious that we no longer have eyes to see that which is beyond pious?

The modern day needs barbarians, not of the North, South, East or West, but barbarians of the spirit that are willing to lose everything in the name of what modern man and his technology has deemed worthless -- dust.

Part I: Escapist's Care

What is the greatest act of political revolution? To cease being yourself.

Joining political movements, solidarity amongst the disenfranchised, acts of terrorism and violence, they will continuously come short of their goals. History of the past 150 years have told that story much better than I. Do we even really know our transgressors anymore? There is no longer a boss to strike against but only pathetic lackeys of the management class, that deserve pity sooner than revolt; the state dissolves daily under the pressure of globalized capitalism's transnational corporations and no longer does it make sense to hold your own government accountable for what are now global problems, far outreaching the abilities of the state; our "comrades" are hungry imbeciles assembling poisonous toys for our children in the pursuit of an anonymous currency. Knowledge, where once a bringer of enlightenment and freedom, is now revealed as the cruel servant of vicious powers that extend the vision and space of exercised power.

Power and the powerful are vanishing horizons rapidly disappearing, and we are the senseless cartographers scrambling to capture the outlines of our enemies. But we can still grasp one thing in the darkness and revolt against it -- the self. One's own identity, the self, the I is taken traditionally to be natural manifestation of an essence; originally, a person's essence came from the Christian notion of the soul, now, in the age of Scientism, the new, unbridled dogmatism births identity from the genome. The resulting layperson's response to Scientism is that "I do these things because it's essentially my biological nature." This person, in his mind, cannot cease to be himself or herself; they are without control of their identity. They reject the call to cease to be yourself.

But biological essentialism cannot explain identity truly. Biology can explain why a human eats eggs instead of rocks, but it cannot explain why a person would choose to eat rocks instead of eggs. Biology and the rigorous sciences wrongly assume that their development and success have been the death knell and eventual destruction of philosophy or Wissenschaft (i.e. soft science). Biology is limited by material facts which are finite, and must have ideally one causal explanation to remain rigorous and objective; the rigorous sciences will, given enough time, develop an ultimate mathematical theorem to explain everything, ending science, but an unwritten conclusion of the theorem will be it was written. The conclusion of science in its final, complete theorem will end with drinking and conversation -- philosophy in its purest mode!

Identity is comprised of the accidents, the choices, of history and culture. Identity has no natural history, but rather, it is a secondary physical reality, a mode of the material, that exists in a near imperceptible way between people that offers no proper quantities to be measured. As the qualitative experience of a color does not make itself measurable to science, history and its resulting formation of identity is qualitatively relational and does not offer itself up to a rigorous science.

(More to come -- like a good torturer I add an artistic pause between the pain)

Iraq War: A Crusade

Are we not to blame for the Iraq invasion regardless of political affiliation? Conservative or liberal, and the blurriness between that is so often polled senselessly by the media, the independent -- what are their responses, what is their response in total to the question: what government is best? They speak democracy in varying degrees of quietness realizing the looming trickery in such a simple question. Why is it the best? It manifests the ideals of freedom and fairness. All citizens vote, each vote counts equally, and the majority wins.

But, leaving this initial sketch of democracy uncriticized, to what extent should we support a democracy or a move toward democracy outside of our own country? If a country has a totalitarian regime, should it be replaced by a democracy? Most Americans would answer with a variance of yes, but emphasize their wariness of ambiguousness of "replaced." Most are pro-democracy but fearful of the ironies of forcing democracy on others.

While many abhorred Bush and his foreign policy, the neo-conservative force in this country, now in its wanning phase, was partly the end result of liberals being unable to clarify their position. What kind of government is best? A democracy. How do we achieve this for other countries? A question never honestly answered.

While some talk of education, others of economic improvements, others of international communities to provide networks of support for democratically developing countries, the underlying fact remained that to "give" an undemocratic country a chance to be democratic, sovereignty is ignored and the freedom of the nascent democrat is considered merely senseless ignorance that must be stomped out by the truth of democracy; the irony is rich when democracy must first be given by force.

Neo-conservatives took this ideology of international democracy and militarized it. Democracy is the best form of government, and the most effective way to provide a country an opportunity to become a democracy is to overthrow the country's government by military force. Would this have been an existent ideology and resulting foreign policy if we were more honest about the nature of power in democracy?

The first intellectual step towards avoiding another Iraq war is to begin a sincere analysis of democracy and its relationship to power. The religiosity, the dogmatism, the idolization of democracy brings about justifications for violence on both symbolic and physical levels. Democracy needs to be pulled from the naiveté of Enlightenment thinking from which it was born in its current conception. Because of its god-like status in the West, its untouchable secular holiness, a truth and a belief for all regardless of tribe or religion, a total system as if a mathematics or science of government, people have left it unscathed as an ideology for hundreds of years. The revelations from Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, to name the big names among many, have contributed to the total annihilation of Enlightenment thought's universally rational, ahistoric, bodiless, individualistic chooser. In most contemporary thinking and academic thought, those that are not regressive in their ideologies, talking about the individual and their mind can no longer be free from the contexts of power, history, biology, economy, among other pertinent issues. Yet, democracy asks us in bad faith to suspend all that we have learned about the human being, and to assume, that we are all freely rational agents choosing without coercion by any force outside the self. But, even beyond the initial problems of outside power undermining the free chooser, can we be so sure that the self, the foundation from which all choices, all thoughts are made, is anything beyond a manifestation of or a discovery by coercive power?

And it seems more and more, upon reflection, that democracy, like church, asks us to suspend all knowledge in the glimmering hope of belief. What new crusade awaits its believers?

In The Big Leagues Now

Can you say sixth place -- sixth place (!) in the resulting pages for the google search: "penis brutalism hitler"? Looks like I finally made it.

Check it out yourself

Looks like we need a PARTY!!!!


UPDATE: I lost my spot...