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It's not enough to not mean it to have happened, or later, to mean it to not have happened; it's not enough to not really have known, you have to take responsibility for the things you didn't see, that you weren't able to see, that you missed, as hard as you tried to see everything. Or relinquish all responsibility. And that means determining who or what to relinquish that responsibility to; that's where most religions begin their hold on human things. So the choice, above the decisions we all have to take to go on living, is to accept responsibility for the choices we make, not just insofar as we can see their outcomes and effects, but for all their outcomes and effects, and that means taking responsibility for the way each action moves on past our intentions, the way everything moves toward the infinite and the eternal. Or giving up the choice and the responsibility and the worry it brings. And that means it all comes back to a kind of chance, fortune, the larger patterns concealed - a dealing out of complicities and circumstances by a hand or hands we can't see or know. In that way the responsibility ultimately is like biology, the rules of mutation and survival, the insistence of the transitory individual on its particular rightness, its fitness, and the other side of that, the failure that loss becomes, the seeming complete failure of annihilation, softened by kinship, that can be made vital by sacrifice and can be made irrelevant by simply living long enough, but that before that irrelevance, outside the healing arc of sacrifice, is one of the most serious human immoralities - causing the death of another; the kinship matters because it's the joining of fates, the survival of the individual linked to, though not necessary for, the survival of the larger thing from which it takes its being. So that individual lives are made significant or meaningless by the investment of the self in something larger; or by the importance of the self to itself; or by the designation of importances by the deferred-to authority that individual responsibilities were relinquished to. It sits there, individual importance, being small, being everything, precious and ephemeral, we're destined to not be no matter what we do, at least until very recently that was true - we were born to die, yet all we know of existence and each other is in that temporary being. It's the loss of that which becomes not just an individual failure but the loss of what the individual is part of, representing - the potential thing that would unfold from that individual life if it went on, that dies with it when it dies prematurely, the way the future would look, how things would be. That's a very big responsibility, that our lack of awareness only protects us from accusations about, not from its results, the way a blind man may be protected from fear of an unseen drop he walks right next to, or blame if he falls, but not from the consequences of his fall. The stress laid on individual intentions that most of us have been raised to accept as truthful instructive emphasis can be viewed in that light, that while true as far as it goes, it's less guidance than guidance into, toward, a kind of coercive slant, that makes it easier to convince people to shrug off the intense burdens of being responsible for things they can't see or understand, for the consequences of actions whose effects reach toward the infinite themselves. The ease of placid acceptance, bovine docility, sheep in flocks moving like clouds across the hills of possibility. It's the choice between blind faith and independence, and in that way it's a mechanism of separation, between the sheep and the wilder creatures gathered into the fenced pasture with them. - And if you want the real picture, what the battle really is about for me, you have to take on the seemingly impossible. Because what I'm facing, what I faced when it was on the line, is an enemy who can go back and forth through time, whose vindictive self-importance transcends human imagination, whose sense of itself isn't represented accurately in the given cosmologies of religion or science either one; and that's the baseline - the extension of it, the largest picture, is infinite, beyond my or your reach - the way all the largest things are infinite, and thus outside the scope of human understanding. What I work toward constantly now is the hope, and it's a kind of faith as well - and like other real faiths it's there my struggle is most vulnerable to doubt and confusion - that there are layers to the infinite as there are to the finite, that the realms of power that transcend the ones I can see around me are similar in construct to what they transcend, and that in the same way that I've been a kind of privileged captive in this hellish place, while powerful men strutted through their lives like small-hearted gods in some ancient play - their stage the political world of bent laws and intrigue, the abstract fist of money - the way I've always known without being able to say why or how, the way others have known without being able to tell me, less certainly but with the same hope I believe that the larger symptoms are of that same disease - the extension of the self into the purity of the selfless, where it corrupts and becomes corrupt, and falls apart. Eventually. When I say "hellish" I don't mean my adult experience of the world - which has been a nightmare of vengeance and trickery and smug omnipotent bitchiness in retaliation for things I've both done and not done, or threatened to do - that's all personal and may or may not have a lot to do with what's happening in the greater arena of the human present: when I say hellish, I mean the world of my childhood, the 1950's in America, when the streets were on fire and there was burning iron and poison gas everywhere, when atomic bombs were thrown like firecrackers into the air of the desert - where people lived, where my first love lived, and died from sudden cancer in her brain; and the adults - who shared the increasingly centralizing power of life and death over all our futures - were themselves on fire, in flames, breathing smoke and radiating strange harsh ideas like blasts of combustive heat that burned the innocent and sent cascades of unnecessary harm into the world. There were small groups and lone individuals who raised their voices against that hellishness then, of course there were, as there have been all along - I wouldn't be here if there hadn't been; but where is their place now, as we mill around in these pastures of selection - where do they belong? Not among the sheep, not there. the rumbling comfort of the engine's hum still here - 4:23 PM The original documents for these antique statements are too linked with racist agendae for it to be beneficial to cite them. But as representative of the mentality of some if not most of the men and women who have gathered most of the world's political and financial power into their own hands, the words stand well and accurately. It's as a framework for reply that I find them worth repeating.1. He argued that LAW was FORCE only in disguise. He reasoned it was logical to conclude 'By the laws of nature right lies in force.' But it's an eminent force, the LAW - it says what it is, and in that sense it's a kind of dialogue, it happens within the inclusive boundaries of something larger. It's human beings talking to each other and to the future. Deception, manipulation, trickery, all those working-around-the-rules kinds of non-forceful coercion take place outside the boundaries of that agreement. It's the difference between a family and its internal rules and the natural environment which, until it's known, is full of constant surprises. The surprising difference between a poisonous insect and a non-poisonous one, between the camouflaged poisonous snake and the brightly-marked one. There, in "nature", things have to be experienced and cataloged, remembered and communicated, they aren't part of a locally immediate conversation or agreement, not without the too-rare inclusion of spiritual guidance and esoteric "natural" humility to make them part of the dialogue. That FORCE is the anything-goes permission slip, it doesn't mean necessarily force per se, it means coercion, attainment - whereas the law is specifically about that dialogue, that conversation; the law is overtly stating its demands. These are the rules, here are the punishments for violation. It has nothing to do with trickery and manipulation in its abstract presence.Yet in the context here the plainer definition is used to rebut the argument against the use of the more complex one; as though force meant simply dominance through any means. At some indefinable point this marks a separation from within the species. The heirs of this mentality, who now occupy the shadow government and wield most of the power in the artificial environments we inhabit, are separating from the human mass - even as they plot to transform it according to their own template, they way they have the physical world, to bring it into subservient posture. 2. Political freedom is an idea, not a fact. In order to usurp political power all that was necessary was to preach 'Liberalism' so that the electorate, for the sake of an idea, would yield some of their power and prerogatives which the plotters could then gather into their own hands. Trickery as a way of life. The extended ramifications of that, what it looks like cast against the stars, is inhuman. The insect beak thrust into the skin of who-cares-what as long as it gets its fill of blood. Again it's not about the moral background, it's about the division; the non-embrace, the refusal to embrace and accept the responsibilities of human things. Self-love demanding obeisance to the self. Worship your Insect Masters, or they'll eat your children right before your eyes. 3. The speaker asserted that the Power of Gold had usurped the power of Liberal rulers.... He pointed out that it was immaterial to the success of his plan whether the established governments were destroyed by external or internal foes because the victor had to of necessity ask the aid of 'Capital' which 'Is entirely in our hands'. This speaks adequately enough by itself. 4. He argued that the use of any and all means to reach their final goal was justified on the grounds that the ruler who governed by the moral code was not a skilled politician because he left himself vulnerable and in an unstable position. The beginnings of this for me were when I realized that all the way back in history there were men and women who had refused compromise and surrender, and who had been destroyed and thqt all record of their having been had also been destroyed with them. A truth without any provable foundation - but an undeniable and obvious thing. So then the debate, which lasted years for me, was whether compromise was superior. Because all we have with us are the succesful results of compromise and a kind of conjectural reconstruction of the ones who didn't compromise to survive and therefore didn't survive. Yet it's too easy to admire them, love them, honor them, even though they're gone. So easy that it's hard to think of what they did as failure. I'm not speaking of those who sacrificed themselves so that others could live - that's simple and fits with the larger, selfish utilitarian picture. I'm talking about those who chose death before dishonor, whatever the consequences. And this is the point of these occult statements, and it's also the ultimate moral justification of the men and women who now run this world. All decisions are alterable in the face of the promise of death, every compromise, every deceit, every watering-down of moral truth is justified, if it means survival. Survival is all. And yet the shine of the honorable seems to have more in it than anything these men and women are capable of saying or doing. 5. He asserted that 'Our right lies in force. The word RIGHT is an abstract thought and proves nothing. I find a new RIGHT... to attack by the Right of the Strong, to reconstruct all existing institutions, and to become the sovereign Lord of all those who left to us the Rights to their powers by laying them down to us in their liberalism. The beauty of these claims is that they come directly out of the mouths of men and women who would not exist except as the most marginal of creatures, if the human agreement hadn't been to allow the weak and the infirm equal standing, or relatively equal standing. Out of the civilized environment with its rules that protect the weak come these brave new warriors insisting on the validity of strength and power - but it's power and strength they have only because the rules were altered to create a barrier between the human and the naked warfare of the inhuman. Now that they've become central and powerful they want to return to those rules, now that the "natural" has been driven to its knees and they've become the top predators in a recontextualized environment. Again it's the lie as strategy, cunning as a kind of force, trickery as one more evolutionary gambit. I'm not attacking it on moral grounds so much as pointing out that it's inhuman, and closer to the manifestations of a parasitic insect than of a human being. 6. The power of our resources must remain invisible until the very moment when it has gained such strength that no cunning or force can undermine it. Well there it is I guess. The layers of intrigue waiting to unfold, into the new creature. Slavery, cannibalism, all the perverse realities we know about, that we've experienced and drawn lines against - none of it matters in the face of survival versus extinction, we should compromise with anything and anyone in order to achieve that platform; we should be so morally flexible that anything in its time, if it promises survival, will be acceptable - the edge of immortality taking shape in the labs, even as the well-springs of life go dry outside them. The randomness of the universe, the patternless chance of evolution, these are misunderstandings ultimately - there's order in the universe, there is a kind of tip, a lean away from the dead-center median neutrality - the universe has just that much more joy in it than bleak emptiness, and all your rationalized cowardice won't change that. There is no love in this game but grandiose self-love, and it's the same with the modern descendants of this way of being in the world. This is the inhuman thing, an illness in the human form, a malformation, a mutancy. Without a love that transcends the self what's left of the human is an empty carapace, a machine, a soulless thing - more or less evil depending on the reach of its power and influence. So what's invisible - hidden, crawling behind the scenes until its moment arrives, in this self-centered forecast - is inhuman. And so what? That's the big ticket ride right there. Answering that. the rumbling comfort of the engine's hum still here - 4:23 PM  
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