13 Towards the re-education of the human race. – Men of application and goodwill assist in this one work: to take the concept of punishment which has overrun the whole world and root it out! There exists no more noxious weed! Not only has it been implanted into the consequences of our actions- and how dreadful and repugnant to reason even this is, to conceive cause and effect as cause and punishment! – but they have gone further and, through this infamous mode of interpretation with the aid of the concept of punishment, robbed of its innocence the whole purely chance character of events. Indeed, they have gone so far in their madness as to demand that we feel our very existence to be a punishment- it is as though the education of the human race had hitherto been directed by the fantasies of jailers and hangmen!
Ever since the invention of computers, we have started to compare how we function with that new invention using analogies.
The brain is the hardware with short and long-term memory, and the processor speed determines how fast we can calculate. You can have all kinds of critiques of this comparison, but that’s nitpicking. Simplifying difficult concepts makes it easier to spread the word, so to speak.
I made this short intro because I read in an old post of mine about the idea that we have to reboot our fleshy internal computer. The idea is that our brain has hardly evolved in the last 100,000 years or so. The way we think, feel, love, solve problems, and go through our daily ups and downs is still the same as the people who lived in makeshift shelters and were hunting for their food. Our brain has evolved over millions of years and still changes, but our modern society exists only in the smallest fraction and at the end of that long timescale. We feel all modern and clever with our fancy phones, but in 100,000 years, they will look back at us like we look at an ape that got hold of a phone in a zoo.
If you use the analogy of computers, then we are a late seventies computer running DOS. It can do most of the things we do now; the difference is that it was made for smaller packages, meaning less input and less demand for results. People look, on average, at hundreds of small videos and posts on social media each day, but studies show that we only “compute” a fraction of what we see. The rest clogs up the computer and prevents valuable processing time from doing other tasks. Now we see a hundred pictures and remember two; in the seventies, we could only download two pictures in the same time, and the excitement after a long wait made you remember both of them for sure. I made these numbers up, but I am 51, and when I was 16, we had no cable TV or computer and only two TV channels to watch. I know for sure that I have more input of information now than when I was younger. The internet can satisfy most of our (knowledge) needs, back then I had to wait till I could go to the library in the hope of finding what I wanted to know. Don’t get me wrong, I like the internet, but if I could snap my fingers, I would change all the phones into nineties Nokias, and the internet was only Wikipedia, text-based homepages of institutions, and ad-free YouTube.
Human societies are complex, and we all feel the need to simplify our lives and understand the world around us. The attraction of leaders who speak understandable “truths” that are easy to digest is still strong, even though our history shows that easy truths almost always end up in misery. The truth is complex, and the solutions to the problems in our society are also difficult. Simplifying helps, as I stated in the beginning, but only in the first school day at school.
In my old post, I wrote, “Our mind needs a reboot and an upgrade to version 2.0, and throw in some better memory and dust it off.” Of course, I have no clue how you could upgrade us, but maybe it is a good thing to realize that we all are not up to speed for the time we live in.
What do I think? What do we do when we think? The thinking I am talking about here are your deepest thoughts, the unthinkable thoughts. Not in the sense that they are immoral or need to be kept away from the outside world, there are just no words to express them. What’s going on in your mind when you feel and have these deep thoughts, the thoughts you can’t hear because there are no words attached, yet. What’s going on inside us has more to do with an abstract painting or music that moves around in your mind. It’s like a rhythmless rhythm that dictates you the words you know from your past and are in your language. The rhythm looks strange, and we try to interpret it, but we are forced to call the parts anger, jealousy, fear, regret, or sadness, all the things that stop us in our tracks of a deeper investigation and understanding. These descriptions of what you seem to feel come and go and mold for you the answer you most need, want. But if you don’t want them, you will be speechless, but your feelings will still be, just that.
History rushes forward, and we like to point at the boulders that seem to cause the most turbulence. We call these disturbers Martin Luther, Albert Einstein, Stalin, or any other famous person from history who left a mark big enough that most of us still know them. These big boulders cause turbulence, but the riverbed, all the little stones, cause the real diversion by being swept up by rushing water and the turbulence, thus changing the direction of what flows forward. A great boulder lying in a dry lake will move nothing, let alone disturb history, and a river without strong currents and disturbing boulders will flow forever with little change.
There can be no true humanity, no true self-respect, without self- reliance. No one can help you if you do not help yourselves. We do not promise to do anything for you, we do not want anything from you, we only appeal to you to co-operate with us to bring about a state of society which will make freedom, well-being possible for all.
To do this efficiently, we must all be imbued with the spirit of freedom, and this – freedom, and freedom alone – is the fundamental principle of Anarchy.
Freedom is a necessary condition to, and the only guarantee of, the proper development of mankind. Nature is most beautiful when unfettered by the artificial interference of man. Wild animals are stronger and more harmoniously developed than their domesticated kind, which the exploiting mind of man makes mere instruments of profit by developing chiefly those parts of them which are of use to him. The same threatens to be the case with the human victims of exploitation, if an end is not put to the system which allows the rich and crafty exploiters to reduce the greater part of mankind to a position resembling that of domestic animals – working machines, only fit to do mechanically a certain kind of work, but becoming intellectually wrecked and ruined.
All who acknowledge this to be the great danger to human progress should carefully ponder over it, and if they believe that it is necessary to ensure by every means the free development of humanity, and to remove by all means every obstacle placed in its path, they should join us and adopt the principles of Anarchism.
Belief in and submission to authority is the root cause of all our misery. The remedy we recommend: – struggle unto death against all authority, whether it be that of physical force identical with the State or that of doctrine and theories, the product of ages of ignorance and superstition inculcated into the workers minds from their childhood – such as religion, patriotism, obedience to the law, belief in the State, submission to the rich and titled, etc., generally speaking, the absence of any critical spirit in face of all the humbugs who victimise the workers again and again. We can only deal here briefly with all these subjects, and must limit ourselves to touch only on the chief points.
Neither Victims nor Executioners was a series of essays by Albert Camus that were serialized in Combat,[1] the daily newspaper of the French Resistance, in November 1946. In the essays he discusses violence and murder and the impact these have on those who perpetrate, suffer, or observe. Wikipedia
Albert Camus
Neither Victims nor Executioners
Toward Dialogue
Yes, we must raise our voices. Up to this point, I have refrained from appealing to emotion. We are being torn apart by a logic of history which we have elaborated in every detail–a net which threatens to strangle us.
It is not emotion which can cut through the web of a logic which has gone to irrational lengths, but only reason which can meet logic on its own ground. But I should not want to leave the impression… that any program for the future can get along without our powers of love and indignation. I am well aware that it takes a powerful prime mover to get men into motion and that it is hard to throw one’s self into a struggle whose objectives are so modest and where hope has only a rational basis– and hardly even that. But the problem is not how to carry men away; it is essential, on the contrary, that they not be carried away but rather that they be made to understand clearly what they are doing.
To save what can be saved so as to open up some kind of future–that is the prime mover, the passion and the sacrifice that is required. It demands only that we reflect and then decide, clearly, whether humanity’s lot must be made still more miserable in order to achieve far-off and shadowy ends, whether we should accept a world bristling with arms where brother kills brother; or whether, on the contrary, we should avoid bloodshed and misery as much as possible so that we give a chance for survival to later generations better equipped than we are.
I am an idealist, and as such, I have no place in this time and world. In a political sense, this means that in my ideal world, everybody understands themselves and thus, the world, and in such a way that it is clear for everybody where to go and who can walk in front. I don’t claim to know what all fits in my ideal world, but I do know that many people in the past had an ideal and tried to force the world to follow that ideal. I think, for example, of the Khmer Rouge 40 years ago in Cambodia. Pol Pot had an idea of how people could live together. He studied in France and probably had some lofty ideas and ideals but never realized that the lessons from history are that you cannot force a society in a certain direction. He persuaded his fellow believers to kill millions of people in the name of progress, an idealistic world.
The list of dictators that moved whole societies into destruction is long, and even our democracies breed ideas and ideals that come with destruction; look at the waste we make and the hatred many people have for each other. People are, for the most part, good, but as soon as they become part of a statistic, they show another color, and in modern democracies statistics rule.
So, I am a revolutionary who doesn’t believe in revolutions. Someone told me once that if you want to catch a butterfly, you can run around and try to grab it, or you can look for the best place to sit, hold your hand up, and wait. The goal is not to catch a butterfly but to be there when it lands and enjoy the place where you sit in the meantime.
“You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.” Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
“That Anarchist world, I admit, is our dream; we do believe – well, I, at any rate, believe this present world, this planet, will some day bear a race beyond our most exalted and temerarious dreams, a race begotten of our wills and the substance of our bodies, a race, so I have said it, ‘who will stand upon the earth as one stands upon a footstool, and laugh and reach out their hands amidst the stars,’ but the way to that is through education and discipline and law. Socialism is the preparation for that higher Anarchism; painfully, laboriously we mean to destroy false ideas of property and self, eliminate unjust laws and poisonous and hateful suggestions and prejudices, create a system of social right-dealing and a tradition of right-feeling and action. Socialism is the schoolroom of true and noble Anarchism, wherein by training and restraint we shall make free men.” H.G. Wells, New Worlds for Old
“Do not all theists insist that there can be no morality, no justice, honesty or fidelity without the belief in a Divine Power? Based upon fear and hope, such morality has always been a vile product, imbued partly with self-righteousness, partly with hypocrisy. As to truth, justice, and fidelity, who have been their brave exponents and daring proclaimers? Nearly always the godless ones: the Atheists; they lived, fought, and died for them. They knew that justice, truth, and fidelity are not conditioned in heaven, but that they are related to and interwoven with the tremendous changes going on in the social and material life of the human race; not fixed and eternal, but fluctuating, even as life itself.” Emma Goldman, The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever
Come inside! And when you do, the first thing you see is a big smile. Big smiles often hide something, and most of the time, it’s something damaged turned into a peaceful look down, with a smile, on all those smalltime problems surrounding the smiler. So you see a smile when you come inside and closer. Also, here, it’s hiding something you can only see when you come really close or if you stay exposed for a longer time.
The smile is a good tool; it protects the surroundings from all the darkness and lowness you feel for them and the words you want use to tell them this; the smile can prevent you from talking, just smile, don’t talk is a motto you will find inside of me and a lot of smilers
There are many different smiles, the one I talk about is almost always there as if it’s grown into your face, as if time and sorrow worked together and carved it out, molded your face into a permanent state of happiness.
Time and sorrow need a tool to carve and ease the pain. Anger is the tool that cuts and eats away your life and flesh and is a great carver for permanently marking a body and, thus, a mind. Grace in mind and body is the anodyne that comes along to ease the pain and brings balance to the life behind the smile.
This gloomy, shiny smiley stench coming from this carved-in face, penetrating my brain, has a soothing effect on my daily life. It calms me down and sands away all the rough edges of this overactive brain that, even I believe, sometimes belongs to a sleepy doofus.
Smiling through life when you have eyes on you. When you are alone, the world is blind, and you just…are…Your face is…just a face without expression because what is an expression without eyes to reflect on?
I just want to share some videos I watched over the last few days. I have written about this subject before, but it still amazes me how people can’t accept how other people live, especially when it doesn’t affect them.
183 Getting angry and punishing have their time. -Getting angry and punishing are our gifts from the animal world. Humans first come of age when they return this gift from the cradle to the animals. -Herein lies buried one of the greatest thoughts that humans can have, the thought of344 an advance upon all advancements. -Let us go forward a few millennia with one another, my friends! There is a great deal of joy still reserved for humans, the scent of which has not yet blown as far as our contemporaries! And indeed, we might expect to have this joy, even promise it to ourselves and testify to it as something necessary, if only the development of human reason does not stand still! Some day, we will no longer have the heart for the logical sin that lies concealed in anger and punishment, whether practiced individually or socially: some day, when heart and head have learned to dwell as closely to each other as they now still stand apart. That they no longer stand as far apart as they originally did becomes fairly visible by gazing upon the whole path of humanity; and the individual who surveys a life of inward work will become aware with a proud joy of the distance that has been overcome, the approach that has been accomplished and he can, upon this basis, risk having even greater hopes.
The best thing you can do in life is to study history and repair what's left of it. This way, in a thousand years, curious minds can only study what we have repaired and not what we have distroyed.
Let's fix the past and don't think about the future. Let's just stop for a while.
The boat you see here is caled Dyrafjeld. I help with the restauration and hopefully this will extend the life expectancy well over what you can expect. You can read more here:http://www.dyrafjeld.no/index-eng.php
Nochrisis 