a new understanding of today, time and space.

not many see existence as being a problem or an issue…

but understood correctly, existence is a problem and the
Kantian/Kropotkin questions explore those problems of
existence…What am I to do? Are my childhood indoctrinations
really the values I want to act upon? What values should I have?
What can I hope for? What should I spend my energy on?

I exist and that very existence forces me to try to understand what
I am to do for my 70 or so years of existence. What should I believe in?
What values should I hold? Should I simply adapt the values I was
indoctrinated with as a child or should I attempt to discover values
that reflect who I am and what I believe in. Part of this question of
existence is this question of ism’s and ideologies.

If I discover that the society choice of an economic ism is nihilistic,
what can I do about it and even if I should do anything about it…
what are my options to fight an nihilistic and destructive economic
system which has corrupted the political system and thus we face the
frightening prospect of having a political tyranny and an economic
tyranny… and this is what is meant by a “modern” society… we
are forced for the first time in history to become aware of the
economic tyranny that exists in the world today…political tyranny
has always existed and will always exist but an economic tyranny?
that is purely a “modern” state of affairs…

So faced with this duel tyranny, what am I to do?
where do I find freedom in a world that has multiple forces
dominating its individuals? We are held captive by natural forces
such as evolution and gravity and we are held captive by social,
political and economic forces too. so this question of finding freedom
in the modern world becomes another Kantian/Kropotkin question
of existence… How do I find freedom in a world that is determined to
dominate you and forces you to play a role within the various systems
regardless if you have agreed or not… Capitalism doesn’t require nor
ask for permission to act… it just does…our representative democracy
which is beholden to those who can buy it, no longer listens or cares
about what you desire or want or need… our democracy just doesn’t care…

so I am faced with this question of existence, of finding freedom in a world
that has already taken your freedom away. if there is no choice, there is no
freedom… and how many choices do you have right now, today? very, very few…

can you walk away from this modern tyranny of the political and the tyranny of
the economic?

No, no you can’t. you have bills and property and cars and student loans
and a family… all those things that tie you down to, forces you to accept
the current tyranny because you have no other choice…where can you go
that is an escape from the modern tyranny/nihilism of capitalism?

the modern industrial world is the home of the economic and political
tyranny…… where would you go to escape our modern tyranny? Maybe
Africa or perhaps parts of Asia… but the number of places where one can
escape too is small and growing smaller every day…….

If one cannot escape, then you have but two choices, accept or fight…
and my choice is clear. What is your choice about your existence?

what will you do? What can you do? acceptance or fight.

Kropotkin

one response to existence is ART…

we use ART to explain and understand existence…

for one of the possibilities of existence is the act of expression…

we can express our nature, our feelings, our possibilities within the
act of expression which is ART…

I can paint a picture and it can serve many different, diverse
functions or roles within my life or the life of others……

one possibility in the course of our existence is to think about existence…

thinkers, philosophers, theologians have all thought about what
existence can mean individually and collectively, but artist can
also express what existence means by their art…………

ART is simply another example of the possibilities within existence…

Kropotkin

This question of existence varies and changes with the person
asking it… a person who lived 35,000 years ago has different
questions about existence then someone who lived in the
Greek city of Athens around 425 BC and someone who lived
during the medieval age understanding of existence is far
different then my understanding of existence in this year of 2019…

the question of existence is different in the stone age then it is
now because the environment is different. The stone age person question
of existence was about survival… the question of existence was far more
basic then the questions of existence I face now…The stone age man
was directly involved in the procurement of the substance that keep them
alive… if he wanted to eat, he had to hunt and kill the animal that
would have fed him…his mate would have gone out and hunted for
berries or other things needed to eat…the question of existence
was directly in front of them… engage like an animal or die…
but think about the limitations of these stone age people……
their limitations are contained by their environment……
they had limited choices in what they could do…….
basically being a hunter was the choice for
men… how many other roles could men play?
As ART was just beginning, that was becoming a possibility
for people to engage in……. it wasn’t all about the search
for food to eat…another possibility existed… the creation of Art…
this hunter gatherer environment lasted for hundreds of thousands of years…

we traveled with the animals we used for food so we could survive…
humans lead a nomadic existence…civilization simply wasn’t possible
until humans could stay in one place and still survive… not until
humans began the agriculture society could human beings could engage
with civilization as we know it……

in the stone age, the possibilities were limited… one could become a hunter,
one could be the one who made the tools needed by the hunters, one
could be the one who cooked and cleaned and keep the camp where they
lived organized…the very possibilities for being human were limited…

think about the possibilities of the Greek human being circa, 425 BC…
What choices were available for human beings? they were far greater
then the stone age man… you could be a stone mason or a priest or
a warrior or a playwright or a politician or a philosopher or a farmer… one of the
many possibilities that existed for the Greek person who lived around 425 BC…

in the Greek world existed far more possibilities for human beings to act upon
then existed in the stone age world… the Medieval world had less possibilities…
the possibilities that existed for someone in the medieval world were warrior
and priest and farmer… because in the medieval world, the possibilities of
the city were far less then in the Greek world because the cities were fairly
small… it is estimated that around 1328 AD, Paris for example had roughly 200,000 people…
and the numbers of people for Paris say, around 800 AD would have been much smaller…

The growth in the city created greater possibilities for human beings…
In 1328 Paris, Humans can be builders and priest and stone cutters and
the thousand different possibilities that existed in 1328 Paris

think of today… how many possibilities exist for us? there are quite
literally hundreds of thousands of possibilities for us today from writer to
warrior to waiter to welder to washroom attendant……… and that is the W’s…

but is our existence defined by what we do? does being a warrior, a soldier,
define my existence, define who I am?

I am born and I, hopefully, will exists for 70 plus years… does being
a soldier define that life I hope to lead? It seems to me that we define
who we are by our choices…I will live for 70 years and the choices I make
over those 70 years, defines who I am…and among those choices we make
that define us, is our choice of values……. we are indoctrinated in childhood
to hold certain values which family/society wishes to pass on to the next
generation, but are those values worth passing on?

inherent in our possibilities is our possibility for choices…
but those choices we make, must make sense given the
environment we find ourselves in…as our environment
changes, our choices change and the possibilities of choices
change…… if I find myself in a country that is at war, my choices
must adapt to the fact that the country is at war…….

If my environment is violent and chaotic, then my choices
must reflect that fact…if I lived in the stone age period,
given the limited nature of choices, I have very little choice as
to the nature of my existence…as to what possibilities existed for me…

given the nature of the current existence we find ourselves in today,
we have only certain possibilities available to us…the environment
dictates to us our possibilities……….

if the question of human existence is to explore the possibilities available
to us, then we must create the greatest number of choices that is available
to us……. but as I have noted before, we are limited by forces beyond
our control to be able to create the greatest number of choices possible…

we cannot escape the forces, both natural and manmade, the forces
of gravity and the force of evolution are two such forces that limited
our choices… we cannot go beyond our genetic programming
to be able to breath like fish under water or to fly like birds in the air…
we are limited in this fashion…we are also limited by the
manmade possibilities, the forces of man’s choice…
the ism’s and ideologies that control our lives, limit our choices…

these questions of existence, what am I to do? what should I believe in?
what should I hope for? what values should I hold? what can I live for, die for?

all these choices, possibilities are limited by the environment…

what am I to do for the 70 years of my existence?

but for me the question changes… I have roughly 15 years of existence left
to me… what should I do in the next 15 years of my existence?
and as important as to what should I do, I must ask, why? why should
I pick this possibility over other possibilities? every day is a multitude of choices,
of possibilities, I can choose not to go to work at 12:30… and risk getting fired
and having a very, very, very unhappy wife…it is a possibility not to go to work,
but the results aren’t that desirable…so what possibilities exist for me,
both today and over the next 15 years? that is the question.

Kropotkin

and it is this question of possibilities that we try to understand…

is it possible for me to act “morally” of course, but then it becomes
a question of what “moral” means in terms of our possibilities…

I am born into a world, Tabula rasa, a blank slate as it were…
and so society fills up that blank slate with myths, prejudices, superstitions,
biases of that society… there is a god… a bias of a society… why would I say that?
given the nature of the various religions, they seem to have answer for same needs
that human beings have… why am I here? what is the meaning/purpose of life?
what am I to do? What should I hope for? we can see various religious
answers in this list. why am I here? to worship god… what is the meaning/purpose
of life? to worship god and get to heaven… to find “salvation”, to be saved,
by doing X, Y and Z……… of course the question left unsaid is, why do we need
to saved? What exactly are we being saved from? Or what is the point of being saved?
and different religions have different answers to the question of how to be saved…

The Buddhist believed to be saved, one must escape the continuous reincarnation
that entraps all of us… but again, the question left unsaid is, why is it so important
to escape reincarnation? I can think of worse things then being reincarnated over and
over again……. for example, spending eternity in heaven worshiping god… yikes,
what a fucking nightmare or spending eternity in hell, to be honest, eternity in
hell sounds better then a eternity in heaven…….

the question asked in religion is simple, how are we to be saved?

and I for one, don’t believe in that question. I believe in other questions,
that I have raised over and over again in this thread…….

does that make me or religions wrong? nope, just asking different questions…

so how am I to spend my 70 years of existence if I eliminate religious
questions from the mix? UMMMMMMM……… how are we to find meaning
in a universe without a god? that was Nietzsche question… and so we return
to philosophy…

what are my possibilities if we eliminate religion from this question
of, what are my possibilities in my 70 years of existence?

How do we find the “secular” answers to this question of, what are my
possibilities during my 70 years? or as Nietzsche stated, how do I find meaning
in a world without god? in what possibilities I have, do I find meaning?
Doing what actions will bring me close to the answer of finding my
meaning/purpose in life? or even more basic, I ask, can I find meaning/purpose
in life given the possibilities that exist right now?

ask the stone age man and given his possibilities, the answer to that meaning
question is different then for me because the environment for both of us
is different and our question of possibilities changes with the different
environments……

thus we can change the question of our possibilities with our choices…
but what choices should we make that will influence our possibilities?

and I have stated that by pursuing the positive, the higher possibilities of
being human, changes the possibilities for all human beings……

in other words, the values we choose changes the possibilities we have…

the higher values gives us more possibilities then choosing the lower values…

values like justice, hope, love, peace give us greater possibilities then
anger, hate, lust, greed…… the creative values create greater possibilities
for us…………

Kropotkin

I woke up today exhausted from the last several days of work…
Last night I was so sore I could barely move… I couldn’t even sleep
I was so sore…

I had today off and I finally feel good enough to write…

and I ask myself, how did I get here?

I have a job I completely hate and with no way to escape it, outside
of homelessness and starvation…I cannot retire and I cannot go back…

I was born… and in that birth presented certain possibilities…

I am now 60 and those possibilities have all been exhausted…

looking back, I see choices, paths taken and not taken…

but in looking at my choices, I see something else…

I see those choices not really being my choice, but being the
possibilities allowed by society… I could have gone to collage,
but that is another choice given by society… as I have followed my life,
I followed the choices offered by society… I became a good citizen,
I worked a job, paid my taxes, got married, we own a couple of condo’s
and a house…we, my wife and I are solidly middle class home owners…

and at every step, I followed the course laid out by society… I didn’t question it,
I didn’t fight it, I simply followed the path allowed by society…

the only exception was my anarchist years, that several years where I didn’t do
what society told me that which was my role, my expectations, my obligations, my
responsibility…….

otherwise, I went to school, I got a job, I married… the well worn path
of adulthood… the path traversed by men since the beginning of time…

but today, today after I have no longer any chance to change my possibilities,
I question that path taken since the beginning of time… I question my path…

I question and I doubt and that is the beginning of wisdom……

I am trying to think of a suitable analogy for what is only a feeling in
my soul……….

society is like a play…… the fixtures and furniture are the same for
everyone… but as the play goes on, the actors change… we have a continuous
play going on but every generation a new cast takes over the play…
but the play itself, the plot remains the same and the actors have
to navigate a plot that has been going on for thousands of years…….

Goethe entered the play in in 1749 and left it in 1832…
He was a writer, a scientist, a poet but his roles in life,
varied as few people’s life ever varied, but he still existed within
the allowed possibilities of the play he was in……
His actions and writings never outgrew his societal
possibilities… the closes he came was with Faust…

Goethe stayed well within the boundaries of what is possible
for his society… as we are now well within the greater possibilities
of our “modern” society… but is playing roles, really exhaust our
possibilities… as long as I engage in what society wants, I am left
alone, as long as I fulfill the myths and prejudices and biases of
my society, be a good citizen, work hard, keep your nose to the grindstone,
create profits, increase our “Gross domestic product” and thereby
make America great… again… but really is that all that is possible?

to follow roles preestablished for us by society and
and approved by and for society……… we must find our
possibilities within the confines of social approved roles…

we cannot disrupt or disagree or challenge…

(recall the greatest crime of humans since the bible…insubordination…
we were tossed out of paradise for insubordination and in my union job,
I can only be fired for stealing and… yep, insubordination)

it is demanded of us that we comply… as children, listen to your mother or else,
listen to your teachers or else, listen to your boss or else……. listen to society or else…

we are trained since birth to comply to the demands of others
that is in fact the point of a good deal of our “education” as children…

we are forced to submit to the demands of others and we
are forced to play certain, given roles of society………

we can become doctors and lawyers and policemen and
actors and mechanics and society says, it is good, because
we can, society needs those roles played by people…
but don’t think outside of any roles we, society, doesn’t approve of…

I see people walking around with t-shirts and sweats saying,
one word, Obey……. and that is certainly the watchword of society,
Obey, follow traditions, never go outside of the possibilities we have
laid out for you………

and if you Obey, we might reward you with titles and a few bucks
and the gratitude of society… and I proclaim them to be lies, falsehoods,
traps…….to spend 40 years working for the sole benefit of those who own
the means of production is wasting our lives to benefit those own these things…

I engaged in the possibility of work and have spent 43 years working for corporations,
and I got nothing out of it… those were wasted years spent improving the wealth of
those who owned the corporations……. but I was a good citizen, I was a capital American
who believed in the lies of the possibilities they offered…those possibilities
are a shame meant to entrap one into spending a life working and benefiting those
who own the means of production………in all those years of working, did I improve
my possibilities? no, did I have any hope to become something besides a worker?

No, the lies I was told as a child was meant to entrap me into the role of worker
and producer and consumer… it had nothing to offer me but lies… the possibilities
of childhood is a lie…comply to the demands of a society in which you are nothing
more then cannon fodder… that was my possibility to fulfill…… and engaging in
any other role given by society still leads me back to becoming cannon fodder…
be it a baseball player or a doctor or a lawyer or a plumber… each role leads one
to having no possibilities outside of what is allowed by the society…… we cannot become
anything more then what the society wants to keep itself in business and then the
question arises……… have we reached the stage where we no longer need society
to entrap us into roles designed to keep us into slavery…………

the great possibilities of my youth are simply lies designed to keep me
in line and engage only as a worker, consumer, producer… we really only
see a few possibilities when understood by the lies of society and its need
to fool people into thinking that society/tradition is the only possible path
to us to engage with in regards to how we live our lives…… to find our possibilities
let us begin with the lies of the ism’s and ideologies we are taught as children
which are meant to enforce the lies of a society only interested in maintaining
itself and does not have any care about you… live or die… that is irrelevant
in our modern society because you individually don’t matter… you are
just another cog in the machine and as long as the machine continues
to work, you don’t matter…as long as the machine makes its owners
money, you don’t matter……. you are irrelevant and disposable…
I just don’t recall that possibility of being when I was growing up…
but that is the only being we have as “moderns” until we discover
our real possibilities, our real purpose for being…and the beginning is
to learn to exists without ism’s and ideologies that are meant to
place you within society needs… not yours…

what will make you special?

understanding what your real possibilities are…

outside of the lies of an society that couldn’t care less about you……

Kropotkin

The world is fake : both the material and the spiritual.
It runs upon cycles of death.
Earth is a bad planet.

K: ummmm, the world is only fake if you define the world as such…

I don’t comment upon the spiritual because seeing the spiritual,
the metaphysical in the world is to anthropomorphize the world…
seeing things that aren’t there…

as for the world running on cycles of death… recall the notion
of an equation…the universe itself has an equation, we just haven’t
found it yet, but we have other equations and this equation goes like this…

Life = death… it is a pretty simple equation as far as equations go,
but it is effective… the amount of life must be balanced by the amount
of death…for if one side of the equation becomes to lopsided, we have too much
life or too much death, we risk becoming too unbalanced and that is the path to
extinction… life must balance death…

is earth a “bad” planet? as the Earth is the only planet we can
compare and contrast, we cannot actually say if earth is a bad planet…
but the very idea of a “bad” planet is to anthropomorphize earth…
The earth isn’t good or bad, it simply is… and we make judgments
on the goodness or badness of it based on some criteria we have created,
and that criteria is artificially created……… we decide if something is good or
bad if it helps us, good, if it harms us, bad… usually it is just that simple…

rethink, reevaluate your terms and a completely different understanding of
the universe will happen… and that just means we see the universe through
colored glasses… and the colored glasses are the various ism’s and ideologies,
myths, biases, prejudices and superstitions we were indoctrinated with
as children…have you begun the path of reevaluation of values… which
really just means, have you thought if the values of your indoctrination
are really your values or have you just simple accepted those values as
yours even though they might not be… you just don’t know, do you?

are the values we have, really the values we believe in and the values
in which we are… if you are taught values of hate, anger, greed, indoctrinated
as it were, and those values are still your values, then you haven’t really gotten
anywhere, have you? you are still living values of your childhood, values of
your parents, society, media, the state…… what about your values?
what do you value? you don’t know because you haven’t discovered them…
you haven’t reevaluated your values to see if those indoctrinated values are
your values…….

to say, the earth is bad…is that your reevaluated values speaking or
is that the indoctrinated values speaking?

until you know, you don’t know……

Kropotkin

the Kantian/Kropotkin questions… what am I to do?
what should I believe in? what should I hope for?
what values should I hold? how does one find meaning?
How am I to be saved? In my 70 years, I have a certain amount
of energy, upon what should I spend that energy on?
what are my real values?

you have X number of years in your life… for most, it is 75 years…
and if you are not asking yourself these Kantian/Kropotkin questions,
then what are you doing?

Kropotkin

for me, right now… I am asking myself, what are my alternatives besides
playing the roles that society deems to be necessary?

To find my meaning in life, must I engage in an occupation like
firemen or lawyer or doctor, as society as deem it to be or do I find
my meaning outside of the economic roles society forces me to play…
I am not just a consumer or a producer or a worker…
I am Kropotkin…those roles don’t define who I am, as society
wants those roles to define me… I am more then just a worker…
I am a human being… being just a worker means I only have
value if I working, my meaning is found working for 40 years damaging my
body and crushing my soul and who exactly am I working for? sure the hell
isn’t me I am working for, for the entire capitalistic system demands I
work for less then what I am producing, in other words, I create 10 dollars
of economic value and the company pays me $5.00 and they pocket the
difference and my entire economic value is in the creation of that $ 5.00
of profit… my entire value lies in the creation of that $ 5.00 per hour of profit…
my existence has no other meaning, no other value then that…

no wonder people consider life to be cheap, according to capitalism,
life is cheap, $ 5.00 per hour profit cheap…

but I say no… no, my life has value beyond the creation of profit…
but to find that meaning, I must engage in those Kantian/Kropotkin
questions…How do I find meaning in a world where there is no
god…How do I find meaning in a world where my value is only as much
profit as I can create…once I fail to create profit, my value to society
ceases…is that what being a human being really means?
to only exists to create profit?

what am I to do? what should I believe in? what should I hope for?
what are my values? How am I to find meaning?

we can far better use our time to understand those questions of existence
instead of just creating profits which doesn’t profit us at all… for those profits
goes to those who own the means of production……

question the very basis of your life…… but beware of the journey…
for during the journey of understanding, the mountains will dance
and the sea’s become wild and ferocious and the river banks will
overflow…

but once the understanding has occurred, the mountains will
be solid and stable and the sea’s calm and peaceful and the river’s
will flow peacefully down to the sea…….

engage…… become human, fully human…

Kropotkin

This is all then elaborated further.

But, basically, it becomes my point. In order to understand [more substantively] what motivates someone and drives their intentions in the is/ought world of value judgments, you have to understand how their own life actually unfolded such that the particular variables embedded in their experiences, relationships and access to ideas predisposed them to think one way rather than another.

Existentially, you came to construe corporations and capitalism one way while the lives that others lived predisposed them to go in other directions instead.

Now suppose a particular liberal and a particular conservative come to recognize that. They begin to wonder if there is in fact a way to react to corporations and capitalism in the most rational and virtuous manner. Is it all just embedded in these “existential contraptions”?

So, sure, they can sit down, think it all through as thoroughly as they possibly can and come up with arguments like this: economicshelp.org/blog/5002 … apitalism/

Conflicting goods. So, extrude the part where “I” is fabricated and refabricated existentially in the life that you lived and pin down the optimal frame of mind.

Is this possible?

And that’s before we get to the part where the “show me the money” nihilists out there flush all that “conflicting goods” crap down the toilet and merely make the assumption that whatever they have come to believe furthers their own interests, is moral enough for them.

And, by and large, it is folks like this who run the global economy.

From my frame of mind, that which is true “universially” for all of us is embedded in the either/or world. In those things that we are able to demonstrate as in fact true objectively for all of us.

And, sure, with respect to the multitude of conflicting goods strewn throughout the is/ought world, there are certain sets of facts that can be established in regard to social, political and economic structures.

But, in my view, as soon as our reaction to those facts shifts the conversation from what is true to what we ought to do given what can be established as true, the points of view become increasingly more subjective. And subjunctive.

I on solid ground begins to reconfigure into “I” on shakier ground. Then it just becomes a matter how “fractured and fragmented” any particular “I” becomes. Me, I am down in my hole. So, I can only come into places like this and consider arguments that might reconfigure me again.

On the other hand, I have had any number of experiences in places like this where it actually turned out to be more the other way around. My argument begins to reconfigure the argument of others instead. And the reactions to that have been all over the board.

Thus this…

…becomes just another “general description” that, once brought down to earth like this…

…becomes just another subjective leap to a particular political prejudice rooted existentially in the life that you lived.

Freedom revolves entirely around the political right of women to choose abortion. Why? Because sans that right how can women ever hope to achieve gender equality with men in a world where only women become pregnant.

The freedom of the unborn embedded in what others deem to be a “natural right” to life is simply subordinated [politically] to the woman’s right to choose. The unborn have no choice in the matter. So many in the pro-choice ranks rationalize this by insisting that the unborn who are aborted are not really human beings at all.

And then on and on that particular argument about what is “in fact” true here is sustained into an indefinite future.

I am not ignoring you Iambiguous, I just have limited amount
of time today…

As existence creates its own questions, who am I? what am I to do?
what should I believe in? what should I hope for?..……

we understand life as a question of becoming…… in other words, I
am born a baby, what is my next becoming? why infant, then toddler,
the child, then teenager, then young adult…you see the ever present
becoming in growing up…

Today we are… tomorrow we will be…
but what will we be?

and that is the question of possibilities… every single human being is in
a state of flux, from being one thing to another, every minute is another
movement of being to becoming… to finding our possibilities…

but the problem in our going from being to becoming is we think in terms
of economics, of what should we do, in terms of a job or career or profession…
but that becoming is a small part of who we are… our possibilities are far
greater then simply what job should we have?..how do we support ourselves
has less significance then what should I become? the values we have and then
values we should have is another question of possibilities, of being to becoming…

we have these values, should we hold other values and why?
I am and I am becoming…….should be part of the question of existence
and the question of values is partly about this becoming…

what are my possibilities? I can become a doctor or a lawyer or
a cop or a politician or a checker in a grocery store but what other
possibilities exists for me, outside of what my job is?

for example, does being a checker preclude me from being a nice person,
a mean person, a loving person, a funny person…the search for
profits has devalued human values like justice, truth, love, peace and
hope… it doesn’t matter in my job if I am nice or kind or smart or
evil… as long as I make profits, that is my only value at work…
there are no other possibilities inherent in my job…

but how do I engage in finding my possibilities if my worth is
measured in terms of making profit? Let us take the political…

one man, one vote is the basic, fundamental principle of democracy,
but that principle has been subverted by money which has bought
our elected officials from main street to Pennsylvania ave in Washington DC…

Money has corrupted our entire electoral process, so how can I find my possibilities
given money has corrupted our entire political process?

and economically, the lie that anyone can “make” it given they work hard,
there is millions upon millions of people working hard, very, very hard and
they are still making minimal amount of money… for most Americans,
they are three paychecks from being homeless… how is that square with this
idea of working hard and “making it”? the average median income was $56,516…
and these people work very hard for that money… the mean household income
was roughly $79 thousand dollars a year…

(the median means the amount
which divides the income groups into two groups, half above that number
and half is below that number and the mean income is the amount
obtained by dividing the total aggregate income of a group by the number
of units within that group… so in the median income group… half of America
is below $56,516 and half is above that number, so roughly the monthly income
of those who are at $56,516 is $4,709… or roughly $1,200 a week and missing
three paychecks is roughly $3500… and that is the breaking point of most
Americans)

but there are other possibilities besides economically, what job should I have?
we can discover our possibilities in sports, ARTS, reading, writing, imagination,
and fantasy…what is needed is less focus on making our lives about
the creation of wealth/profits that never go to us, but go to those who
own the means of production…

there is nothing to be gained by the average person to engage in the
the economic system of America, capitalism… unless a lifetime of
working until the body collapses and the soul is crushed, really floats
your boat… then rock on…….

our possibilities isn’t found in the pursuit of wealth or profits,
our possibilities is found engaging in some action or event that
allows us to answer this question of being to becoming… we are
and what should we be… working 40 hours a week for 40 years
isn’t going to answer the question of becoming…what should we become…
the engagement with work only solves the question of, how am I going to eat?
How can I support my family? and that answer can be found in other ways,
other possibilities that lie outside of capitalism… for capitalism has
proven itself to be a failure and we must rethink our economic system…
which is another form of engaging in being to becoming…

what is more important, the GDP… the Gross domestic product or
finding the answer to the question, what are my possibilities?
and if you have to ask which one is more important, then
you are in clear need of an reevaluation of values…….

why is the need for goods we don’t need to survive outweighs
the question of what is really important in our lives?
we don’t need TV’s or fancy cars or nice couches for our fat asses to
survive, the basics necessities of life is really quite minimal,
and we can get to understanding what is our possibilities
without the lifetime engagement with capitalism that
destroys our soul and body………

that is why ART is so important because it tells us what possibilities exists
for us… we can become brave or strong or smart or loving, values that mean
something far greater then just our engagement with our job/work and
we can become those values through our engagement with ART…
we can see what is possible through ART… and we can see what is
possible through sports, where we can see how strong we are or how brave
we are or how we face adversity in sports tell us much about how we face
adversity in life…….

we must engage in those activities like ART and sports and travel
and learning because they push the being in us into becoming…
and we must, must make ART and sports and learning and travel to
a much higher level of our engagement in life… much more then
just work/the pursuit of profits… which doesn’t engage in
finding our possibilities that we must engage in…

what about our other possibilities, such as religion, philosophy,
history? more about that boys and girls later…

I must get ready to go to that body destroying/ soul crushing
job…

Kropotkin

so given the questions of existence, what am I to do?
what should I believe in? how should I act? what should I hope for?

Now these important questions of existence, questions we face once we are born,
these questions can be expanded to include us… what are we to do? what should we
believe in? How should we act? what should we hope for?

for example, the question of, how should we act? Is really a political and
moral question. the begining of political science begins with a question,

what is my relationship with others? we are individuals who live and die within
a complicated social context… I am born and I am faced with the question of
how do I act with my sisters and brother? our parents dictate our actions
and behavior we have with each other…and then we enter school
and we discover other complicated behaviors that our classmates have…
and all the while we have teachers who watch over us and dictate our
actions and behaviors we have toward each other…and we
act and interact with each other, this behavior is both individual
and is collective/social…….it is a very complex series of rules we
learn in order for us to engage with each other… you can touch people
in certain places and you can’t touch them in other places,
you can say some things to some people but not certain things
to other people…and sometimes the rules we play by, are
vague and incomplete…and then we enter adulthood,
where we should have learn societies rules by now…
and sometimes, we have some who don’t understand the rules
and why there are so important for us to have rules……

in fact, we could call political science and morality, the rules we
collectively decide to live by…the question becomes this,
why these set of rules instead of another set of rules?
society/the state seems to take the easiest road of actions,
in other words, society choses to follow the path of least resistance…
put into place the rules that will get the least amount of resistance…

so the individual question, what should I hope for? collectively becomes,
what should we hope for? indeed, what should we hope for?
this idea of what should we hope for, becoming a religious question
as Kant understood it, doesn’t seem to make sense because of the vastly
different understanding of the religious that each of us has………

so what should we, collectively, hope for? this is political science…
which is guided by history, philosophy, economics, biology……
history tells us what previous people tried and we can see their
success and/or failure written in the history of said people…

one thing there is not, a universal understanding
of what it means to be human and we don’t have
a universal rule book that can guide all of us…
why not? because universal rules can only work when the
situation is equal for everyone, universally. When the environment
is the same for everyone, then and only then can a universal rule book
be applicable……. we cannot expect the rules for one group, say an Eskimo tribe to
be the same rules as people living in New York or even a tribe living in Africa.
different environments require different rules for human beings…….
if I were to move to the frozen tundra of the north and live with the Eskimo’s,
the rules of behavior would be different for me, then if I stayed here in
sunny California…or the rules would be different if I moved to say, New York,
or if I moved to London… and yet, we run into a interesting thing, human beings
are human beings the world over… we have the same needs, wants, desires, hopes
as all other human beings……but given different environments, different possibilities,
we must change our behavior to match the different environments, the different possibilities
we find ourselves in…this suggest a certain malleability of human beings…

we can adapt and change given the different situations and circumstances and
environments we find ourselves in…

so this question of “what can we hope for” can and does change given the
different situations and environments we find ourselves in…

so it seems to me that what we might be looking for is not the changing,
adaptable part of us as human beings, but we are looking for the
permanent fixtures of human existence and by that I mean,
what exactly does it mean to say, human being? is there some
permanent, fixed aspect of being human that we can point to and
say, yes, yes that is a human being.

does the question of “what can we hope for” change with each changing
situation, with each new environment? or does the question of “what can
we hope for” remain the same for us individually and collectively?

the fact that I have all questions and no answers doesn’t really help me…….

Kropotkin

we have rules, given by ism’s and ideologies and those rules
are valid as long as the situation governed by the ism’s and ideologies
remain the same…… once the situation changes, the ism’s and ideologies
meant to be rules for that situation, the rules, ism’s and ideologies are
no longer valid… those rules, ism’s and ideologies are meant for
certain conditions and situations, once the conditions and situations change,
the ism’s and ideologies are no longer valid…

and that is where we are now… we have ism’s and ideologies that were
created for another time, other situations and conditions and those conditions
and situations no longer apply and thus we are living with rules that no
longer apply to our current situation…

we must change and adapt our rules to fit our current situation and conditions,
our ism’s and ideologies must change to adapt to our new needs and situation…

“what should we hope for” changes because of our changing situation…
“what we should hope for” it is not fixed in time and space…and we must
change and adapt our understanding of “what we should hope for”
with a new understanding of “what we should hope for”

Kropotkin

It is also the question of probabilities. It is far more probable that we will answer the question “who am I?” in a particular manner given the particular historical and cultural contexts into which we are born. And given the particular confluence of interpersonal experiences, relationships and access to ideas that we encounter on our one and only entirely unique trek from the cradle to the grave.

Thus when a particular individual reads this…

…they will react to it from a particular point of view rooted in the manner in which I construe “I” here: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=176529

Instead, what you provide us with [in my view] is another “general description” of the possibilities/probabilities that those at one particular juncture of the political spectrum will react to very, very differently from the reaction of those at other junctures.

Thus, from my frame of mind, nothing really changes with respect to the arguments made by the liberals and the conservatives regarding Trump’s agenda. One side is right from one side, while the other is right from another side. It’s only a question of the facts that can be agreed upon.

You have your view of capitalism, others have their own. Then what? Most of course are able to “think themselves” out of the hole that I am in because they have convinced themselves that their value judgments are just enough in sync with the “real me” in sync with “the right thing to do” that they don’t experience being fractured and fragmented much at all. They might come to change their minds about one or another issue, but only because they have come closer to the truth.

And that [psychologically] is what is most at stake here for them. Not whether they are right or wrong but that they are convinced that, above all else, there is a right and a wrong.

Thus your own sense of this revolves around a particular set of political prejudices predicated on a particular set of assumptions about human interactions:

And on and on.

This seem reasonable to you. Okay, but the libertarians and the boys in the boiler rooms have their own set of assumptions. And that’s before we get to those 1% that care only about sustaining their own wealth and power. Do you honestly imagine those who own and operate the global economy from New York, Moscow and Beijing give a shit about what “the people” living paycheck to paycheck think abut all of this?

In my view, you are not really addressing the points that I make here regarding “I” as an existential contraption. Instead you provide me with your own existential assessment of the man that you have become – given the points I make in my argument.

The bottom line is that I have a great deal of respect for your contributions here at ILP. You are clearly compelled to think about all this in a way that goes much deeper than most.

But I have simply come to different conclusions regarding the existential relationship between “I” and “out in the world”. In particular regarding the world of conflicting goods at the intersection of identity and political power.

I thank you for your kind words… I cannot say if I “think” deeper
then most, but I can say that at least I attempt to think about
things that should matter to people………and I respect you for your
attempts to get to the heart of what it means to be human…

let us try this…………every society, every culture, every family,
has a set of assumptions… the assumptions I was born into
were about how America is the greatest country on earth, capitalism
is what makes America great and democracy is the best thing since slice
bread and that there is a god…….

when we are born, we are born into a set of assumptions… and those
assumptions are codified into ism’s and ideologies…My parents were moderate
democrats and I was born into that set of assumptions…now someone who is born
into republican household will be born into a conservative set of assumptions…
and being white and male, I was born into the set of assumptions of white males…

we cannot escape being born into a set of assumptions, the British have their set
of assumptions and the French have theirs and the Russians have their assumptions
and so on and so forth… within each society, we have separate and diverse
cultures… in America for example, we have the Amish, and they have their own
set of assumptions which exists within the larger set of assumptions of America…

Now at no point can we say, this set of assumptions is right and that set is wrong…
we simply have no way of knowing which set of assumptions are the right set of
assumptions… now the Amish for example have their set of assumptions and it
seems to work for them, but those Amish assumptions don’t work for me, does
that make the Amish assumptions wrong? Not at all… it simply means those
set of assumptions are not for me,… now I have called these set of assumptions
that we are born into, childhood indoctrinations…….

we are indoctrinated with the society’s/family/state assumptions…
and we call them our own because we have no other context to compare
those assumptions/indoctrinations with……… ism’s and ideologies are great as long
as we don’t compare them to other ism’s and ideologies…my brother studied
economics at the University of Chicago just after Milton Friedman had left… he would call
me and ask me about communism and it’s economics because at the University of
Chicago, they wouldn’t teach anything at all about any other form of economics
outside of capitalism…so I would fill him in on communist economics……
and other forms of economics…the university would teach the students the
basic assumptions of both academics and the society……….

so we are born into a set of assumptions and those assumptions are taught to us…
as ism’s and ideologies, myths, biases, superstitions and prejudices…….

and we grow into adults with some or all of those assumptions intact…
for me, I lost the belief in god quite young, before high school…and perhaps
even before middle school…….but I still believed in some of the basic assumptions
of democracy and capitalism and the exceptionalism of America………

but as I enter my adulthood years, I began to notice that the advertising
of those assumptions didn’t match the reality of those assumptions…
I discovered millions of people were poor and starving and barely able
to survive…… and at no fault of their own…I was radicalized by the
election of Ronald Raygun…. I slowly became an anarchist…….
being a young lad of 21, I wanted to change the world… to make it
a better place… with my own set of assumptions that I was coming
into…….I outgrew my childhood indoctrinations and discovered a new
set of assumptions that I adapted as my own……….

after many years of being an anarchist, I slowly began to
lose my faith… I wasn’t changing the world and it seemed
that no matter what I did, the world wasn’t going to change its
basic assumptions… which in reality is what I was fighting…
not the society, but the set of assumptions that our society had…

it took me a while to understand the difference… when we charge after
those windmills, it is the assumptions we are fighting……

today, 40 years later, I have a set of assumptions that more closely match
who I am, my assumptions don’t match the society assumptions… said
another way, my ism’s and ideologies don’t match society ism’s and ideologies…

but then, I discovered that assumptions/ism’s were a burden as they
are artificial and can be constructed out of anything……

now I am trying to reorganize my life without any set of assumptions or
ism’s/ideologies that most people/ society has……….

how do we live without a set of assumptions or without an ism’s or ideology?

that is the question I am trying to understand right now……

at no point do I believe any particular set of assumptions is “right” or “true”
or even real……. to my ever changing way of thinking, the battle is not
to find the “true” assumptions but the battle is to learn to live without
assumptions/ism’s and ideologies……

so to answer your question, I am not engage in any particular set
of assumptions, I am attempting to engage with “reality” whatever
the hell that means, by understanding “reality” outside of any set
of assumptions or ism’s/ideologies…so it may seem like I am engaging
with “reality” with some set of liberal ideology, but I am not… I am attempting
to understand outside of a set assumptions or ism’s…

Kropotkin

so given what I just wrote…I am not objecting to
capitalism based in ideological grounds, I am objecting
to capitalism based on the damage that capitalism
has done to both people and the planet earth…

I stand witness to the nihilism of capitalism based
on my own experiences with capitalism…
my experiences of 40 years with capitalism that has
left me with pain all over my body and a soul that
has been crushed……

I am not objecting to capitalism based on some far off
idealistic assumptions… every single day, I see the damage
of capitalism as given by the news, given by the ever growing
pursuit of profits/money, by the people I talk to every single
day whose lives have been altered and not for the better by
the pernicious influence of capitalism…….

I am also attacking democracy based not on ideological grounds,
but on how our democracy has been hijacked by the wealthy, for
the wealthy and of the wealthy……

I can see this ever single day by just watching the news…….

my understanding of modern day America is driven by
the world I see and not by the ideological ism’s and biases
that I was born into or have developed in the years after I
began my reevaluation of values……….

and that is where I am really going… instead of
our evaluation of the world based any given set of assumptions or
based on ism’s or ideologies, I say we try something different…

let us evaluate the world based on values…let us adapt values
like love, justice, honor, peace and use those values to judge
and understand the world…now we don’t need ism’s or ideologies
to adapt values… we can assume the value of love without any reference
to any sort of ism or ideology or bias or myth or superstition……

we can adapt values without any recourse to ism’s or any set of assumptions…

why love? love is a positive value, a value which we know from personal
experience that love can grow, love can bring out the best in us, love
can be used to reach greater heights then we thought possible…
love binds us and love is creative and love enriches us…
so we can adapt love as a value through which we can
understand the world………

we should we use hate as a value? because hate is a negative,
destructive value… hate cannot help people, hate cannot create,
hate cannot bind us or unite us……. hate can only destroy… it cannot build…
that is why we cannot use hate as a value from which we understand the world…

if I use justice as my lodestar, then every action of mine is focused upon
reaching justice for myself and, and others…justice is simply equality…

and if we reach justice, that is positive and we can build upon justice to
reach even greater heights of our possibilities………

and that is the point… our values can lead us to discover possibilities
that we never thought about…… I dream of a society where every single
person is equal, politically, socially, economically……….
I dream of a just society…

but Kropotkin, what are we suppose to drive for if we are equal?
our inequality creates possibilities for us… no, no it doesn’t…

our inequalities denies possibilities to millions… because we
use money as a means to judge the value of people instead of using
values to judge people… profits as a means of judgement means
we don’t need to be good or honest or just or even free as long as
we have money, we are gold… which denies the possibilities
of human existence and having money means it doesn’t matter if
we are good or just or honest or loving… money as a value denies
human beings and their values… using money as a value for human beings
is outright nihilism…it is a denial of human beings and their values…

if we judge people based on values, we are no longer practicing nihilism,
for we are not denying people or their values… we are judging
people based on their values…and then we discover that if we
have values instead of money, we no longer even need to judge people…

our values speak for themselves as we allow our values to speak for us……
if I am just, my justice will speak for itself………

so Kropotkin, what are we to drive to if we are simply about values?

I say unto you…we discover what our possibilities are outside of
society’s set assumptions…… we don’t need society to tell us what is
possible or what is not possible…… we judge for ourselves what is
possible…we no longer have a set assumptions telling us what
is or isn’t possible… we have values…

but Kropotkin… what values should I hold?

and therein lies one of the questions of existence…

one of the Kantian/Kropotkin questions of existence…

What values should I hold?

Kropotkin

Not that this has anything at all to do with what I have
been writing about… but, thinking about the analogy of
the watchmaker being the example of the universe…
the universe is created by god because it is so similar
to a watch……

the problem with that understanding is that it assumes the
universe to be like a watch…a built thing like a watch
but the universe can be explained without any recourse to
a watch analogy because the watch is a mechanical thing
whereas the universe is a natural process taking billion of
years to develop…given enough time and energy,
you can explain every single thing in the universe in terms
of a natural process like evolution or other forces like gravity…

the equation for the universe goes something like this…

energy which is a force like gravity or evolution EF…
…matter/ M… time/ T…

so you have EF + M + T = our current universe……

the two sides must equal each other or be fairly close……

the universe is simply an equation and we have to figure out
the nature of the equation………

Kropotkin

ok, we have these questions of existence,
what should I believe in? what should I do?
what should I hope for? as examples……

and we have the Kantian question of freedom…
(god, freedom and immortality)……

but as we have understood it, we are determined
by various forces, both natural… evolution and gravity among those
and manmade forces of ism’s and ideologies such as capitalism
and democracy… leaving modern man with very little room for
freedom………

within the Kantian/Kropotkin questions mentioned earlier,
we can find our freedom by asking and then answering those
fundamental questions of, what am I to do? what values should I hold?
what should I spend my energy on?

the question of freedom can be answer in answering those questions
within the Kantian/Kropotkin questions…

by answering the question, what am I to do? I explore my freedom…
in answering the question, what should I believe in? again, I
explore my freedom……

by escaping ism’s and ideologies of society and asking, what values should I hold?
one escape the determination of society and explores freedom…
with ism’s and ideologies and prejudices and myths and biases
and superstitions, society attempts to determine what is possible for
an individual, what is possible for an individual……

one can escape that determination by leaving or walking away
from ism’s and ideologies by answering the question, what values
should I hold? and then living life with those/that value.

freely chosen values which represent who I am… become who you are
by choosing values which are you… if you are peaceful… choose peace
as a value and then live within peace and judge everything via the value
of peace……….if you are about justice… choose justice as a value and
then live and judge with justice in mind…

that is the freedom that is possible for us… by choosing our values
and then living those values… not ism’s or ideologies, but values…

Kropotkin

Now one might say, Kropotkin, it doesn’t matter what values you choose,
you have no way of deciding which values that exist, exist within
a certain context… in other words, choosing values are simply
arbitrary… and values are simply arbitrary values that cannot
be justified…you cannot defend choosing justice as a value because
justice is simply something that you pick because of your political/economic
understanding of the world… you had no choice in picking justice
because of your specific world view that is the result of your place in the
socio-economic world………. in other words, I picked justice because
of my specific socio-economic standing in the world… if I had
another socio-economic place, I would pick other values………
a dubious idea… but nevertheless a possible idea……

our chosen values are not necessarily the result of our socio-economic place
in the world, the values we pick can be chosen for other reasons besides
our socio-economic place in the world……….

I choose the values I choose because they are what I want to become…
I want to have justice as my guiding principle because I think justice
is a value that is worth holding onto… now one may object saying, that
value of justice is simply an arbitrarily chosen value, chosen because of
your socio-economic place in the world… or we can choose values
because they are values that represent who we are or who we want to be…
not necessarily because of our socio-economic place…

choosing a value isn’t a bad thing nor does it mean anything more then
a chosen value… or own individual “contraption” can allow us to
escape and choose values of our own choosing…… we don’t have to
be held hostage by our own values or our particular position in life or
our socio-economic place in the universe… we can simply choose values
outside of our own individual understanding of the world because
that is the freedom we have… we don’t have many other freedoms…

I can escape my own individual, particular understanding of the universe by
choosing values that lie outside of my particular place in the universe…

we are not held hostage by the ghosts of the past which determines us
yes, we cannot fly or we cannot turn into horses or run faster then
a lion… but those are determined by evolutionary forces that we have
no control over and by natural forces we have no control over…

we can grow and change and become and adapt… we do this all the time
in many different and diverse ways… we can become something other
then what our particular station in life is currently………. we are not
determined by the confluence of our individual circumstances…
the “I” that is Kropotkin isn’t fixed by his circumstances or his particular
childhood or past… it is changeable and adaptable ……………

we can rise above our current situation in life regardless of that situation…
but I cannot hear again… that is a natural influence, a natural event
that has determined my life… but given that, I don’t have to be forever determined
by that event… I can rise above it… it is me, but I don’t have to let that decide
who I am or what I can become…what my possibilities are, are not determined
by my hearing loss or my particular socio-economic status right now…
but by the choices I make… by the possibilities I embrace…by the values
I choose……yes, we are determined but we can choose freedom within
that determination of forces like evolution and gravity and forces like
communism and capitalism… we can choose values that allow us to escape
those forces that determine us………

Kropotkin

we have people like Schopenhauer who thought the universe
was not “rational” and thus not understandable and we have
people like Plato who believed that the universe was rational
and thus understandable…but both are wrong…

the universe is or isn’t rational because the universe just is…
we human place values, terms on things like the universe…
the universe just does its thing and then we call that some value or
term… good and evil… just terms to describe the universe… while
the universe is… just is…

Think of a tree… any tree will do…

and think of all the connections that tree has… connections to the ground,
connections to the air and animals and to us…but from the tree or the earth’s
prespective, the tree just is… and while it is connected to the whole… that isn’t
the point of the tree… the tree just lives and does it thing and it is we humans
that create the names and functions of those connections that tree has…
the tree doesn’t know or care about its name or its functions, the tree just
does its thing… the rest is irrelevant…it is humans who classify and name
and creates graphs about the tree but all the while, what does the tree do?

we can follow a drop of water as it flows from one enviroment to another,
from one event to another and we can see the connections that the one drop
of water becomes and we see the inner connections that fill our world…
but from that one drop of water prespective, it doesn’t matter… that
one drop of water is just doing its thing… the rest is irrelevant…

the water lives without ism’s or ideologies or without prejudice or myths or
superstitions… because those are all human creations… with nothing to do
with that drop of water or that tree…

does an external reality exists? yes, of course it does…but outside of
human beings, that reality just is and has no values or terms attached to it…
no values or terms like good or evil or just or loving or honest or misguided…

life just is… and then we humans spend our time declaring that “is” as being
something… no, it just “is”…and we need to just “be”… but what does that mean?

what does this “is” or “being”… exactly mean?..

the question of human existence isn’t about the “is” or the “being” of human existence…
the question of human existence is the ever changing, the becoming of humans…

for human beings, there might not even be an “is”, a “being” present for us…
for everything in human existence is about becoming… we know that cells in
a human body die off and get replaced, some cells last only days and others last
for a human lifetime… my body and your body is in a constant state of
of cells dying off and being replaced at a rapid pace throughout our lives…
the “is” that is us, changes quite often over a lifetime……. we continue to
become…the “is” that wrote the first sentence of the post has already changed…
so tell me, with so many changes going on, how do I know when I am “being” or “is”?

for that “is” “being” can only last for a split second and then cells die and are replaced…
every single second is another second hurtling us toward death… we have only so
many seconds of existence and then existence is over for us… the only real being we ever
have is the final state of being, death…that is the only time in our life that
we stop becoming………and even then we still are in a state of becoming…
our bodies and cells and muscles all begin to decay and that is just another state
of becoming…

so tell me… what are you in a state of “is” or a state of “being”?

Kropotkin