In last month's Harper's there was an memoir essay by Lynn Freed that included the following paragraph. It reeks of such a hideous elitism and an egotistic self-righteousness--a consistent underlying theme found as well in the rest of the essay--that i am still dismayed that Harper's published that damn thing. It does however capture an aspect of the power relationship, hierarchical dominionization, to which i was referring previously. It is too good an example to let go unreported:
At about this point it began to dawn on me that the inmates were running the institution. I might have known. I had arrived at graduate school in New York City in the late sixties, right at the onset of the Age of Relevance--a time when, as Isaiah Berlin lamented, a whole generation of youth confused crudity with sincerity. What I was encountering now was simply the logical result of that revolution--the supreme relevance of the self in an institution that had ocme to depend for its continuance on the pleasing of that self. It was a self that took its reference not from history, philosophy, and literature but from psychology, a variety conveniently adjusted to the pursuit of personal happiness.
Her own essay must have come as quite a shock to her current students, if they had any willingness to criticize her work, in revealing her own irony in demonstrating her complete capitulation to herself and her desperate needs to be appreciated and respected. For she has built her writing career on travel reporting, an area supremely devoid of history, philosophy and literature while feigning that it includes snippets of same. But that is just my sensibilities being assaulted.
It is in her disdain for the pursuit of personal happiness that she really pisses me off. She, like so many others in academia, seem to think, that even though the students(yes and parents) pay huge sums to contractually fulfill a receipt of product and services, the students somehow owe they institution some submissive acknowledgement that the institution and its elites are know better than they do what is important in life. I can categorically say that they(the students) do not.
Perhaps the simplest way to address this issue is to realize that the inherent fallacy in the system is the claim made that universities and colleges represent "higher" education. 'Higher' is a hierarchical construct, forcing dominance and submission, rigidly or not, upon anyone who is labeled, or feels that they have been so labelled, or the person that does the labelling. It provides an immediate validation of the "i am better than x,y,z and/or you" statements that speak solely of personal power and not of generating human compassion and happiness. The 'higher' is used to refer to a body of knowledge that enables the person what obtains it to aspire to and acquire economic status and capital wealth. Thus those that serve in those institutions are charged with the responsibility of providing the information that allocates the hierarchical resources of the culture, of the system--knowing this equals this status equals this expected economic benefit and so forth. I have already shown that economic and social power are not providers of happiness, indeed they are clearly detrimental to the right to pursue of happiness by the people. It is in fact the universities and colleges that are coded by language and metaphoric constructs to symbolize and sustain the political and economic oppression of those that are not to be allowed to pursue personal happiness. The block quote above merely reiterates this same message in tones that are superior, classist, and elitist; the author just sounds like a bitch.
when we discover the intimate amazing joys of a romantic loving relationship we realize that in order to maintain the integrity and depth of commitment in that relationship we have to sacrifice some of our own personal happiness. this is well and good in the sense that it takes a while for people to come to terms with the subtleties of converting personal individual pursuits of happiness into acknowledging the cherish the welfare and blessings of the other as part and parcel of one's own happiness. one of the difficulties in attaining that awareness and finally the enlightened compassion which manifests as happiness surpassing that previously thought attainable, is with the manipulation of the details around which that happiness is generated as one party discovers personal power is more appealing and satisfying than pure joy filled happiness.
Personal power is not personal happiness. It is the capacity and ability of one person to express their presence in the world to others; to garner the accolades and appropriate submissive behaviors that are due one who perceives oneself as hierarchically dominant. Power relationships are not loving relationships nor are they producive of happiness, but they are the most common of all forms of human relations. More time is spent in our lives suffering from the manifestations of personal power than we give to our pursuit of happiness. We train our children to understand and experience and acknowledge this. We train those around us to submit to ours, or we learn to submit to theirs. So much time in fact that we lose our own sense of capacity to fulfill our own lives with the blessings of BEING.
No where is this more apparent than when people discover within themselves that they have submissively complied with the personal power of someone they previously felt that they loved in the most committed of ways. The discovery is an important but minor awareness that becomes more of a depression causality than a path to enlightened action. Of the few who make this discovery fewer still find the power to act on it, and remove themselves from their dependency on the other for granting of happiness and compassionate companionship. Parents start their children along this route, that is oft referred to as conditional love. "I love you, but i would love you more if yada yada blah blah blah.." Parents train kids to follow senseless and irrational rules, because the parent knows best(a considerable fallacy), as a way to show their love for their children as long as the child obeys the rules. If we can conceive that a parent who sends a child to a "boot camp for tough love" because the parent loves the child so much, they want what is best for the child, then we are admitting that such human relations are not as horrendously and insanely flawed as they are. Conditional love is personal power politics dictating control over the pursuit of another's happiness, and as such has lasting deleterious effects on the lives of those children and subsequent generations.
more later
Make no mistake, those seemingly well meaning thinkers who craft excellent commentaries, full of thoughtful analysis and sourced citations, about the rights of the people to be free from the control of their own self created governments, are not friends of progessives. They are merely using the progressive forums and other liberalized spaces to argue for their deeply held FAITH in the priority of private property over happiness. They will argue of course that even though the very word property is not mentioned as part of the rights of the people, the inherent liberties endowed to the people, in the constitution that that it is there anyway. We just don't see it. It is imperative for them to insure that everyone fundamentally understand that money and property are more important than human life, more important than freedom and vastly more important than happiness.
They will put the acquisition of property as a right at the top of the pyramid of rights and relegate happiness to an obscure location. Why? Because they construct a reality that requires material possessions as emblems of their values, particularly in relational status with others. Matter is quantifiable and thusly it is easier to ascertain a degree of power as a measure of the quantities one possesses. Happiness and spirit are qualities and cannot be protected or evaluated or determined by numbers, by quantities. The concreteness of numbers is essential to the well being of the libertarian. They feel that they have attained hierarchical imperatives as long as they have surrounded themselves with matter that has numerically quantifiable value. They cannot view the world in any other way. Thus, they cannot possible imagine that their collection, and increasingly necessary protection, of material wealth is fundamentally detrimental to the well being of the planet.
When we hold the pursuit of happiness coequal with life and liberty, we discover that the only possible path to the pursuit of happiness follows from insuring a healthy sustainable species diverse ecologically whole Earth. Libertarians and their corporate conservative brethren see matter as an expendible resource through which they can derive value and power. Destroying the planet is merely evidence for the vast collection of power one has, the dominion over not just the earth, but all the living things upon it, including people. Libertarians are the first to tell you that no entity has the right(get this) to interfer with their right to use their rightful property in anyway they see fit. They are wrong. Their use of their property and their processes of acquiring and keeping it result intentionally in the deprivation of others. They require poverty to exist as a manifestation of their consolidation of material assets. The US is one of the very few nations that privatizes garbage and charges fees to use public lands as a mechanism to deprive the poor from access to possible material resources necessary for survival. Property is the symbolic manifestation of their destruction of happiness as a right of all the people. They demand that happiness be a commodity to be purchased through acquisition of wealth, not as a right of the people to pursue.
The most dreaded enemy of libertarians are happy anarchists, because in every way anarchists represent all that the libertarians cannot use governments to protect themselves from. In order for libertarians to maintain their control over their accumulation of assets they need to compromise their freedom to exist through supporting governmental or private security apparatus and entities. Giving up what they hold to be rights, they complete their own circle of hypocrisy upon themselves. Anarchists do not care about the laws of governments, nor the material assets of the people. Matter is not of the people it is of the earth. Arguing for this or that economic indexed system to maintain control over property, libertarians must argue that anarchists need to be imprisoned for thinking how they think. Their thoughts are dangerous because they are threats to the very core beliefs that the libertarians hold so dear. Anarchists are threats to the stability of maintaining the control of the populations during periods of chaos for the libertarians because no matter how much one has acquired they cannot eat money, the symbols of held assets, or the assets themselves.
What drives this engine of madness is fear; the massive anxiety that somehow, someway the libertarian will lose their tenuous grasp on reality if they cannot claim that they have property in their possession. They cannot be happy without it, and thus they enforce their beliefs, much like the religious fascists of the world enforce their beliefs, on everyone else. It is the fear that they cannot conquer, and the anarchists love to do everything in their power to instill that fear.
Money--it's a shame!How many times in our lives do we encounter parents, our own too, and/or siblings, destroying the potential joy gleaned from pursuing happiness through demanding that the off spring reject that path in favor of seeking wealth. What is it about the pursuit of wealth that makes it hierarchically imperative over one of most important human rights/?? Reframing every discussion between parent and child around the need to accumulate and properly use economic resources, always suggesting that later, much later, if ever, some personal happiness can be derived if all the economic realities are fitting into the perfect life jigsaw. Herein lies the deepest destruction of our rights, our cognitive ones as well. We are told, over and over that we first have to "make a living for ourselves" before we can enjoy the fruits of our labor. This farming biblical injunction is just that, an injunction against the pursuit of happiness, long a staple of the church during the Middle Ages, coming again into the fore during the early 1800's industrial revolution's expansion wherein young children were forced to work in the slave shops, and now found invariably in the religious and libertarian right who hold the view that poverty is a character flaw.
To listen to parents of adult children, tell the child that the parents know all that is best for them, that they don't know what life is about, that they are too ignorant to understand the complications of being alive--is some of the most ironic idiocy imaginable. It is a pure attack on the rights of the child, the rights of cognitive liberty and the pursuit of freedom particularly. Parents of course are often guilty of violating their own children's first amendment rights especially the religious and speech protections. But parents go deeper than that; they actively seek to destroy the will of the child to pursue happiness in order to faciliate the child's participation in the wage slavery upon which this great nation is based.
WE have an obligation to not support this; to actively intervene in protecting the rights of children. Taking away these rights, parents are supportive of everything that is destructive of our constitutional liberties and freedoms. They teach their children that it is irresponsible to advocate for one's own rights. It is in fact proper to interfere with the rights of others. If we can't see this and begin to address it, then we have lost any hope whatsoever of living free.
Another key piece of evidence of the destruction of our right to happiness is the failure of reality to insinuate itself within the minds and culture of those citizens committed to the war and to the christo-fascist agenda. Actively engaged in the most vile of irresponsible attacks upon the pursuit of happiness the reich warriors have used character assassination, insults, slurs, lies, deceipt, false realities, pseudo and totally falsified science, and so forth to instill their unhappy values on the rest of the population. The overt desire to turn the US into theocracy governed by castes of priest within whom reside the sole arbitration of law and rule, has demonstrated for the rest of us that these people have absolutely zero desire to allow any further pursuing of happiness unless and only if it is strictly approved and conducted under their aegeis. Their hands are everywhere in mucking it all up, insisting that their congressional, executive, and judicial cohorts and cadres remove, repeal, and prohibit any and all cognitive liberty, along with all behaviors that give witness to cognitive liberty, from the US.
Why?? Well i think one central commonality of their thought process is the desperate denial of reality. They cannot and will not accept what is true and factual, because to do so they would be forced to admit that none of what they believe to be true about the world, about the US government, about their religion, about their way of life, is real. Many of them know it is all broken, they know that the life sustaining systems of the planet are collapsing, including the economic ones. Yet to admit this would mean that they do not know what is going on or how to fix it or what life means anymore. Therefore the escapist christo-fascist denial of reality predicated on selected literal readings of various versions of mistranslated texts provides the removal of responsibility for reality from themselves. They get to make up who is the enemy, focus their mighty collective wrath upon them, smite them and lock them up throwing away the keys. Then they can go home and still shudder in the dark.
This specific and targeted attack on cognitive liberty is well orchestrated and very well funded. The purveyors of economic acquisition, the neo-feudal lords of capital rise above the laws, insuring for themselves that they retain their cognitive liberties, while funding and regulating the removal of the same liberties for those that they feel will only interfere with their pursuit of wealth at the expense of the well being of the planet. We are in deep shit, and are without voices of protest over this. The war is only one trivial aspect of this march towards a christo-fascist theocracy in the US. Fronts are opening everywhere in all of our daily lives. Removing happiness enables the dramatic increase in endless suffering caused by mass poverty, famine, non-existence of health care, increasing homelessness, and masssive institutionalization of the population. You will either be one of them, living insanely out of touch completely with reality, or y ou will be one of the aware and enlightened and thus forced into servitude and imprisonment for pursuing individual cognitive liberty.
Recently i had the opportunity, if i could call it that in any positive light, to witness up close and too personal the bitter battle over individual happiness in a relationship. The experience for me provided a lesson that i think serves many of us in our quest for cognitive liberty and understanding how our own values take on hierarchical frames that leech into our relations with others.
First let us at least agree that the US was created by people whose understanding of enlightenment philosophy predicated the principle of a citizen taking an active and fully aware role in their responsibility for insuring that their pursuits of their own personal happiness did not denigrate nor fundamentally interfere with other citizens' pursuits. This is the ideal and the core underlying principle of cognitive liberty and the first amendment's civil liberties. Thus one would like to believe that as we have evolved both as a nation and as an "enlightened" technologically freed society, we might have also evolved our responsibilities to suit. This of course is pie in the sky thinking, yet is at the core of the very debate on civil rights and civil liberties we are experiencing now in the US.
Now, for a variety of personal developmental reasons, the two people in the relationship i observed spend a disproportionate amount of their time trampling on one another's pursuit of happiness. Indeed they go out of their way to damage it, to interfere with it. And they justifying doing so through their perceptual constructs that are predicated on their personal values as the hierarchical matrix for judging behaviors. In this case it gets down, quite literally, to: "my gardening is better than your music." Do you see the disconnect here? Reducing another's pursuit of happiness to the targets of ad hominem attacks is justified by equating one's set of personal values with what is "good" for everyone. The examples of this just within this relationship are too numerous even to catalog.
Suffice it to say, the causality of the core dysfunction comes from the parties' upbringing. One experiences excessive degrees of paranoia about their material security in the world, grown from being forced by their own values to make life work along certain preformed patterns. This leads to the overt desperation to demand that others respect them through demonstrating control, power, and mastery of the immediate conditionality. By this i mean, that this person will make immediate verbal negative value judgements of whatever phenomena is being experienced, demanding that others in that event horizon acknowledge this individual's vast wisdom on a variety of subjects, many having nothing to do with the phenomenon, all streamed out in a verbal unending, unlistening assault. The insecurities of this person are palpable and visceral--enough to make one's skin crawl.
The other person, through their own lifetime of relating to dysfunctional upbringing and codependencies of friends and peers, reacts to the world through disengagement and alcohol. Refusing to become involved in "conflict" until it becomes too prominent and overbearing, then consuming sufficient alcohol in order to breakdown the inhibitions against engagement leading to confrontation and bitter rancor, all of which reinforces the now long held construct that one needs to avoid conflict. The circle is vicious and is spiralling more and more out of control i think.
The insecurity of maintaining material possessionship of property drives one to bitterly harangue the other into spending their economic resources on audio/visual reproduction equipment to literally drown out the nagging insults. The nagging then castigates the technology as a flawed path citing their own gardening as a vastly superior path, for no other reason than that there is nothing else for that person to do. It is also where the battle over dollars gets lost. If we allocate financial resources to each, we discover that the gardener has an income of approx $20K while the entertainment freak grosses $70K. Of these two piles of revenue each must expend an equal share for mortgage, utilities, food, etc. Thus the gardner has very little disposable income, and relies, insecurily on the other to provide funds for entertainment, transportation, recreation, commodities, and yes funds for gardening. The entertained receives in return for these funds some degree of domestic support, sexual pleasures, body work, and companionship up to a point--the point of nagging bitter paranoia which happens more than once per day. The entertained has considerable disposable income and chooses to expend it in a variety of ways including the development of the latest and greatest state of the art audio/visual equipment.
The gardner must garden to provide some food resources(zero protein, mostly complex carbohydrates) supplemented by expensive organic and natural foods(which are paid for by the entertained). What the gardner doesn't know, and chooses to ignore when discovered, is that the entertained expends considerable resources going into town each day and purchasing fast food meals to supplement the lack of fats and protein in their alcoholic diet. That hidden behavior, along with the sheer volume of alcohol consumed, increases the gardner's insecurity, and thus bitterness and anger, leading to more nagging and to the entertained seeking to increase the volume of the entertainment and alcohol. Round and round.
Now it has gotten down to whether gardening is more or less valuable than entertainment. At least that is the semantic battle; realistically it is all about using whatever means necessary to interfere with and stop the others' pursuit of happiness. My happiness is more important than your happiness because i say it is so. And like so much of our culture today, neither would recognize this, nor would they accept that they are engaged in this, even when directly pointed out to them from statements they just made. The classic "I didn't say that" response to being called out on what one just said, is all too common here in this little scenario as it is in the culture. The ad hominem attacks, the implications that the other is flawed and damaged while asserting that one is fine and without flaw, reiterates through the core of the relationship.
Is spending $2000 a year on growing flowers and view blocking plants(a real paranoid pattern here) "better" than spending $2000 a year directly on impacting one's own personal happiness? No i think not. Each represents a utilization of economic resources to facilitate the enhancement of one's personal happiness. Each represents efforts to disassociate from the world, hiding within a coccoon of protection from the outside by enveloping themselves in the warm fuzzy environment of happy. Neither serves to enhance the other, nor to provide substance to life outside of the happiness(one might try to argue that the vegetables grown serve some greater good for the other, but that is clearly belied by the endless use of vast resources to acquire fast foods). Both demand that they be judged to be the one in the right, when neither is functioning in a healthy sustainable compassionate manner.
Thus we live in times when we as citizens have completely forgotten our responsibility to not interfere, to not interrupt, to not damage other citizens rights in pursuing happiness.
this happened last night!! can it happen anywhere else, is it happening anywhere else?? why is it happening?? Is it that we now live in a fully militarized police state operating under the auspices of a christianized theocratic authority formed to counter those islamic ones in Southwest Asia??
my friend Nick was one of the musicians at the event, here is what he had to say....
"Tonight, I was booked to play an event about an hour outside of
Salt Lake City, Utah. The hype behind this show was huge, they presold
700 tickets and they expected up to 3,000 people total. The promoters
did an amazing job with the show.. they even made slipmats with the
flyers on them to promote in local shops.So, we got to the show around
11:15 or so and it was really cool. It was all outdoors, in a valley
surrounded by huge mountains. They had an amazing light show flashing
on to a mountain behind the site, the sound was booming, the crowd was
about 1500 people thick and everything just seemed too good to be true
really. Well...At about 11:30 or so, I was standing behind the stage
talking with someone when I noticed a helicopter pulling over one of
the mountain tops. I jokingly said "Oh look, here comes big brother" to
the person I was with. I wasn't far off.
The helicopter dipped lower and lower and started shining its lights on
the crowd. I was kind of in awe and just sat and watched this thing
circle us for a minute. As I looked back towards the crowd I saw a guy
dressed in camoflauge walking by, toting an assault rifle. At this
point, everyone was fully aware of what was going on . A few "troops"
rushed the stage and cut the sound off and started yelling that
everyone "get the fuck out of here or go to jail". This is where it got
really sticky.No one resisted. That's for sure. They had police dogs
raiding the crowd of people and I saw a dog signal out a guy who
obviously had some drugs on him. The soldiers attacked the guy (4 of
them on 1), and kicked him a few times in the ribs and had their knees
in his back and sides. As they were cuffing him, there was about 1000
kids trying to leave in the backdrop, peacefully. Next thing I know, A
can of fucking TEAR GAS is launched into the crowd. People are running
and screaming at this point. Girls are crying, guys are cussing... bad
scene.Now, this is all I saw with my own eyes, but I heard plenty of
other accounts of the night. Now this isnt gossip I heard from some
candy raver, these are instances cited straight out of the promoters
mouth..-
One of the promoters friends (a very small female) was attacked by one
of the police dogs. As she struggled to get away from it, the police
tackled her. 3 grown men proceeded to KICK HER IN THE STOMACH.- The
police confiscated 3 video tapes in total. People were trying to
document what was happening out there. The police saw one guy filming
and ran after him, tackled him and his camera fell, and luckily.. his
friend grabbed it and ran and got away. priceless footage. That's not
all though. Out of 1,500 people, there's sure to be more footage.- The
police were rounding up the staff of the party and the main promoter
went up to them with the permit for the show and said "here, I have the
permit." The police then said, "no you don't" and ripped the permit out
of his hand. Then, they put an assault rifle to his forehead and said
"get the fuck out of here right now."Now.. let's get the facts straight
here.This event was 100% legal. They had every permit the city told
them they needed. They had a 2 MILLION DOLLAR insurance policy for the
event. They had liscenced security guards at the gates confiscating any
alcohol or drugs found upon entry (yes, they searched every car on the
way in). Oh, I suppose I should mention that they arrested all the
security guards for possession.
Oh another interesting fact.. the police did not have a warrant. The
owner of the land already has a lawsuit against the city for something
similar. A few months ago, she rented her land for a party and the
police raided that as well. And catch this, the police forced her to
LEAVE HER OWN PERSONAL PROPERTY. That's right. They didnt arrest her,
but made her leave her own property!!!Don't get it twisted, this is all
going down in probably THE most conservative state in the USA. And this
is scary.. a gross violation of our civil liberties. The police wanted
this party shut down, so they made it happen. Even though everything
about this event was legal. The promoters spent over $ 20,000 on this
show and did everything they had to to make it legit, only to have it
taken away from them by a group of radical neo-con's with an
agenda.This was one of the scariest things I have ever witnessed in
person.
I can't even begin to describe how surreal it was. Helicopters, assault
rifles, tear gas, camoflauge-wearing soldiers.... why? Was that really
necessary?This needs to be big news across the USofA. At least in our
music scene (edm as a whole)... this could happen to any of us at any
time. When we're losing the right to gather peacefully, we're also
letting the police set a standard of what we can get away with. And I
think that's BULLSHIT!The system fucked up last night... They broke up
a party that was 100% legal and they physically hurt a lot of people
there at the same time. The promoters already have 6 lawsuits ready to
file with their lawyers and the ACLU is already involved.I'm sure some
pictures (and hopefully some video) will surface soon. I'll make sure
to post them up here on 404, so you can see the Police State of America
at work."
are they changing??
Over the next few days i want to write about that one little phrase that seems to have been lost on the imaginations and visions of the US populace: THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS. Certainly listed by Jefferson as one of the inalienable rights of human beings, yet mysteriously discarded by those in this society who have developed a fiscal fascination for their personal anxieties. If the pursuit of happiness is right up there with life and liberty, and we see these three principles, not in a hierarchical matrix, but rather as a covalent equal trinity--a foundational triangle upon with the US democratic republic was created--then we begin to understand that the responsibilities of leadership and citizenship require all of us to embrace a deep and passionate concern for our pursuit of happiness. At every point, in every way, pursuing happiness has been attacked, denigrated, misconstrued, ignored, abused, violated, and so forth, particularly by conservatives as well as by some neo-liberals and most of all by libertarians. It is imperative that we understand how our failing to live up to protecting this most sacred of rights has destroyed this nation, and threatens in every way to destroy the planet.
