a new understanding of today, time and space.

as a question of essence, who we are… leads us to the many
names we give to who we are… I am a democrat,
a liberal, a man, an atheist, a rationalist, a humanist,
each name here tells us something about me, about
my essence… who I am… that I exists is a given…

my existence is taken for granted when I am asked, who are you?
and the question of , Who am I, revolves around this question
of what values do I hold…

but forgotten is the simple fact that my existence is of limited time…
I shall exists only for a short time and then I shall not exist…
I am transitory, temporary, impermanent…

my existence is finite… and my essence is also finite… for
my essence depends upon my existence…

and once I am gone, people will say, hopefully, he was a good person,
he was a kind person, he was… he existed and in that existence,
his essence was kind or good or whatever people might say about me…

so in a sense, my essence will live beyond my existence because
people will comment about my essence, he was ________…
and those values which create my essence are descibed… kind,
good, honest, fair, loving… or whatever…

think about names from the past… Julius Caesar for example…
we say he was ruthless…and that is part of his essence, part of his
values…….he was a dictator… and to be a dictator means you accept
certain values…

if I am a doctor, it means I accept certain values of being a doctor…
the Hippocratic oath… I take an oath that I shall use treatment to help
the sick… but never with a view to injury and wrong doing…
Neither will I administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so,
nor will I suggest such a course………I will help the sick and I will
abstain from intentional wrong-doing and harm……

the essence of being a doctor is to treat the sick and not to
injure or engage in wrong-doing to anyone…
the doctor exists but he has values, his essence is to help others…

was he born engaged in the practice of treating the sick
or not to injure or engage in wrong-doing to anyone?
no, he is born, he exists and then later, he
comes to his values, his essence………

so by choosing values, you choose your essence… who you are…

existence is already there, you need to choose what values
you shall live by, thus creating your essence…

Kropotkin

we cannot chose to exist but we can chose our values, our essence…
the essence we have is by choice… we choose our essence but we
cannot choose existence…

Kropotkin

we must choose our essence or have it chosen for us by the
indoctrinations of society/state/church/family…

and what happens if we fail to choose?

if we fail to choose our essence, our values, then when it comes
time to make a choice, to decide upon a course of action,
we are using values that do not reflect who we are,
we are using values that does not reflect our essence, who we are…
this alienation, this disconnect from acting with values that are not
our own, leaves us a with problem… and one possible solution to
our problem is to escape making a choice of values by
engaging in our worship of the material world, of objects…

in other words, to escape choosing our values, our essence, we
chose addictions to material goods like money or material goods…
this addiction allows us to escape our making a choice as what is to be
our essence, our values…

If you are addicted to something, you cannot make a choice outside of
the addiction… you can escape accountablity of the values you choose
by being focus upon your addictions to money or material goods…

in modern society, the goal isn’t to become our values but to
escape responsibility for our values… we hate to held accountable
for our choices and one solution for that escape is to hew to
the values and essences of society/state/church/family…

for if we hold to the values, the essence of society/state/church/family,
we escape responsibility for being accountable for our choices…
if I choose to hold a value, like honesty, then I am held accountable
for the value I have chosen… but what if I don’t want to be held accountable
for my choices… which is the modern way, attempt to escape being held accountable
for our choices, to be held accountable for our essence… the best way we can
do that is simply accept society values and then if called out, we can say,
I simply adapted those values from society… you escape responsibility for
holding values by claiming everyone holds those values and thus you can’t be
accountable for holding values that everyone holds…

escaping responsibility for our essence, our values is the great American pastime…
we hate to be called out for our values… which is why the idea of being “political
correct” is so despise in America… it calls out people for their values and people
want to escape responsibility for their choice in values and others calling out
those values, being politically correct, means you are force to account
for your values, account for your essence…….god forbid we are held accountable
for our values, our essence…

and those who are “politically correct” also escape responsibility for their choice of
values and they escape that accountability by calling out others… being “politically
correct” means never admitting your own responsibility or being accountable
for your own choices, your own values, your own essence…….

again the great American pastime is to escape responsibility for your choices
in values………how do you avoid taking responsibility for your choices in values?

Kropotkin

hold this thought in mind as you read this piece…

“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more
perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility…”

In order to form a “more perfect union”… not to form
a perfect union, but “in order to form a more perfect union”

and the essense of the American ideal as established by the founding fathers,
is to adapt, change, modify to “form a more perfect union” by
“we the people” …now hold onto this thought of forming a
“more perfect union” and how do we go about forming a “more perfect union”?

we now return to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in which in which we understand
the basic needs of the individual… but we must understand that no individual stands
alone… we are social creatures who can only survive within a social context…
the statement that “no man is an island” is quite true in a literal sense…no
human being can survive alone…

we see in Maslow Hierarchy that the physiological needs of the body make
up the bottom, the base of the pyramid… to survive we need the basic
physiological needs of biological beings… food, water, warmth, rest, among
the biological needs of human beings… as an liberal, I am going to add
education and medical needs into this list… and the last thing I am adding is
love… we know that babies deprived of love in their first year quite often
die… so we can add love into the mix of basic physiological needs…

as it true for an individual, is also true of an society… a society must
meet its physiological needs if it is to survive… the society must engage in
providing food, water, warmth, rest and as I have included education
and medical care, we need to include those into our basic understanding of
what a society/state must have to survive…

the next step on his hierarchy is safety needs, which is security and safety needs

the interesting thing about this one is that if one knows history, we know
that both individual and the collective security needs were often neglected
or just outright ignored…we know from history that the average person
personal safety or security was limited at best throughout history…
the threat of violence was never far from the surface during most
of human history and this include our own “wild west” where personal
security was limited to the number of guns one might own……

it can be said that we can judge a society by how much security/safety
it provides for its individual members of that society… a
society that can provide security and safety for its members is
a stronger and steadier society then a society where security
and safety is problematic for the members of that society.

the next level of needs is love/belonging…we are social creatures and
we need to feel a sense of belonging and acceptance among our social groups…

as I work in a system, as a checker, I need to feel a sense of belonging
and acceptance in my engagement with my peers, with other checkers
and baggers and others that I have contact with in my store…

and the next level of engagement is the self-esteem need in which
our ego and status needs need to be met…
gaining recognition, status, importance and respect from those within my
engagement with others, either in my work group or in my day to day group,
any social groups I may belong to…(in which I don’t in fact, belong to any other
group beside my work group and I don’t want to belong to that group because
my fondest goal in life is to retire from my crappy job) but I am a exception to the need
that wants status and recognition and respect from my peers… I just don’t care…

and the final need according to Maslow is self-actualization…
the quote that best defines this is

“what a man can be, he must be”

to discover one’s full potential is the high point of one aspirations in one’s life

and what is true individually, is also true collectively… societal needs are the same…
from the lowest need of physical needs to discovering society’s full potential,

and what is stopping us from reaching our full potential?

I would suggest that our failure comes from our failure to choose
values that bring us to our full potential… now recall my comments
on “we the people, in order to form a more perfect union”

we have held these thoughts in mind as I have written the last few
paragraphs…so how do we go about “forming a more perfect union”?

we choose values that engage us on a higher level of existence…
that is to say, we find values that reach up instead of down…
we don’t choose values that are lower, instinctual values of anger
and hate and lust and greed and violence… we choose values that
lead us to becoming human, even more human…… and this is the case
for us to reach our “forming a more perfect union” we don’t hold values
that are the lower values of instincts, of hate, violence, anger, greed,
lust… we hold higher values of peace, love, charity, justice…

it is our engagement/choice of higher values that will lead us to
“form a more perfect union”…….it is our engagement with higher values
that will lead us to try to fulfill, not only for us but for everyone,
the Maslow hierarchy of needs……

we choose the values that enables us to fulfill the possibility of a “more perfect union”
and we can choose the values that makes it possibility for us to complete for everyone
the Maslow hierarchy of needs………

the values we choose… values that compel us to rise to becoming more human,
not less… thus we must reject such values as nationalism and hatred and
superstition and prejudice and intolerance… these values cannot help us
form a “more perfect union” and these negative values cannot allow us to
achieve our goal of moving up the hierarchy of needs from the basic necessities
to achieving self-actualization…… hate and anger and lust and greed
is not the path to the creation of a “more perfect union”… but justice
and love and charity and peace are the path to the creation of a “more perfect union”.

thus we reject IQ45 values of anti-LGBT and misogyny and racism
and intolerance and sexism and hate and anger and greed among
the values IQ45 supports and promotes… why do we reject?
because those values are in conflict with the goal of a “more perfect union”
and those vile values of hate are in conflict with an attainment of
the goal of achieving Maslow hierarchy of needs……. if we hate,
we don’t care if those we hate have food, water, warmth, shelter,
education, health care… to achieve our individual and collective goal
of “forming a more perfect union” and achieving our collective and individual
goal of rising from one level of Maslow hierarchy to the next level, we
must engage in the inclusive goals of love and peace and hope and charity, to
allow others to achieve their goal of rising to another level of Maslow hierarchy…

we are social creatures… we exists collectively and as such, we must engage
with each other collectively and attempt to rise together to “form a more perfect union”
and to rise to another level of the hierarchy of needs…….and the method of
engagement is to choose values which allows engagement with others on an equal
basis… tolerance and love and peace and hope and non-violence are some of those
values we must choose if we are to form a “more perfect union”

so, choose, which values are going to choose to create a “more perfect union”
and which values are you going to choose to allow both yourself and others
to move up the hierarchy of needs?

Kropotkin

what the Maslow hierarchy does for us is give us
an understanding of a goal, a destination for us to try
to reach…and the goal of every human being should be
the final step on Maslow hierarchy which is self-actualization…

reduced to the statement

“what a man can be, he must be”

the entire human question revolves around this question
of “what can we be?” but that is the final step on Maslow’s
hierarchy… how do we get from whatever step we are on
be it the lowest step of meeting our physical needs, the lowest
level of our needs, the base of the pyramid, our needs for food,
water, shelter, education and medical needs or the next higher step
is the security/safety needs and the next step is the need for
love/belonging and the next step is self-esteem need… then
we reach the final need, the self-actualization need…

so each of us is on a different place in regards to Maslow’s hierarchy,
some are on the basic, lowest level… just trying to meet the physical
needs of food and water and warmth/shelter, education and medical needs

some are on the security/safety needs and some are on the love/belonging
level and some are on the self-esteem level… but the goal for each of us
is to reach the final level of self-actualization level… and we need
to reach it both individually and, and collectively…what would
self-actualization in a society look like? the statement for the self-actualization
level would look like this,

“what a society can be, it must be”

so, collectively, what can we be? as a society, what is our best?

a society where we make sure the lower levels of human needs are met…

we are engaged in making sure individuals needs are met with support
to reach individual needs of the lower levels of the pyramid, society
makes sure the individuals within that society have the lower level
support of the lower levels, we feed and house and educate and
ensure their safety and security and we allow them to love and
feel like they belong and we allow individuals to reach the next
level which is the self-esteem level and then we allow individuals
to reach their final level, which is the self-actualization needs…
a society can be able to support each and every single member
enough to reach their individual level of self-actualization…that
would be a successful society, one that allows its members
to reach the highest level of engagement in being human…

so a society should be engage in allowing its members
to reach their full potential…that is a successful society…

so when we damage individual members of society
by our engagement with the lower levels of human
instincts which is hate and greed and lust and anger and
prejudice… we prevent them from reaching their individual
goal of self-actualization…by our use of myths, biases,
habits, prejudices and superstitions, we prevent people
from reaching the final goal of self-actualization……

Kierkegaard goal was for individuals to reach their full potential,
he place the individual above society and we can within, a societal
context, be able to achieve K. goal with the aid of society/government
to fulfill individuals lower level needs and wants… society engages in
helping individuals reach their lower level needs of food and water
and shelter/warmth and education and medical needs and then
by governmental actions, we can help people feel the next level
which is safety/security need…and even conservatives who reject
every other level needs of people agree that society/government is
best designed to meet the security/safety needs of the population…
that is why they fight so hard for government to meet the
needs of people on the security/safety level… because their lower
physical needs of food and water and shelter and education are met…
but these people fail to account for the higher levels of people’s needs,
the need for love/a sense of belonging, or of people need for
esteem… conservatives focus on the second level of needs when
we must engage with all levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and
society/government can aid in meeting their lower level needs with
actions that ensure the lower level needs are met with the
goal of allowing every single person to reach the self-actualization
level… to become who they can be… that is the goal of society…
to allow people the ability to become who they can be…
and by doing so, we help create a “more perfect union”
by allowing people to reach their full potential… a society/a union
is only as strong as its members and we must remember this basic
understanding of groups at an size or level, the group is only as strong
as its individual members… to ensure the strength of a group/society/state,
we must make sure its individual members are strong… and that is the goal
of our pursuit of equality… to increase the individual strength that then
improves the overall strength of the group/society……

if we create a Kierkegaardian society of strong individuals, we create a
strong and stable society/state………if the individual members of society
are weak is because they are unable to engage in a pursuit of the Maslow’s
pyramid……. to make society strong, we must make the individuals members
strong by allowing them to reach the final goal of self-actualization…
is there a goal above self-actualization? of course, the goal is to discover
and reach that next step and then overcome that step and reach another…
their is no such thing as a absolute and final goal/destination for individuals
or society… there is simply just another goal to reach, once we discover it…

Kropotkin

now one may accuse me of nihilism and that is certainly their
right to make such an accusation… but my thought is engaged
in exposing the current nihilism of the modern age… we, in fact,
could be considered “the nihilistic age”…

we engage with such nihilistic concepts and ism’s as capitalism
and communism and Catholicism and all types of religions that
are nihilistic by the negation of human beings and their values…

any time we see humans or their values being negated, that is
nihilism…and that is what I fight… a nihilism that is so
embedded within society that is it virtually unseen…….

learn to see what is being negated and you will see the beginning of
wisdom…

Kropotkin

Yeah yeah. Every generation of man calls the era that follows, nihilistic, and they’ve been doing this for thousands of years. And yet the world keeps in turning, getting better in many respects, and worse in others. But the general economy of life remains the same; whatever is new and unfamiliar will always be unsettling for the old, because the old cannot be impartial to the concept of change and progress. They see values and virtues as eternally fixed… habits and customs as absolutely and unconditionally good. Behind all this nonsense lies only a single statement; ‘this makes me uncomfortable and I don’t know what to do.’ Even N could not get away from this insipidity when he announced the coming of European nihilism. As if the knowledge that God was dead presented a real problem for anyone that mattered. You can’t judge ages by the sentiments of their masses. Their distress is nothing more than a silly spectacle.

K: I am old granted but I didn’t say what you think I said… I said that this was
a “nihilistic age” and it is, but I wasn’t making the statemtent you think I was…
I wasn’t refering to our age as being less so or more so, then any other age…
I have read the Greeks and Romans complaining about how that particular age
was less then the previous age before it and the kids are mucking things up…
but that isn’t it… we are a nihilistic age because our offical ism’s and
ideologies are nihilistic…we devalue and dehumanized people and their
values in striking ways, new and modern ways… there is no reference to
how the past was nihilistic…they had their issues and we have ours…

your statement is in fact, far more cynical and pessimistic then
my statement was…and to focus on one particular point, the
statement about “god being dead”…the masses for the most part
don’t know and don’t care if god is dead… that is problem for
“intellectuals”, not the masses…because if “god is dead”
then upon what do we base morality upon? the masses don’t
know or care about morality… the masses needs are basic and simple…
it is the intellectual, the well fed intellectual that cares or notices such
things as “god is dead” and what are the implications for us…

people lives are about putting food on the table and getting
little Jon to school and which crappy disneyland resort
they are going to for vacation…most people engage in
the day to day thing, not the “bigger” questions…

people want their lives made safe and secure and constant…
no surprises or change… or said another way…
KISS… keep it simple stupid…if you ask yourself what do people
want, that would be it…KISS…

as for me… me calling this age, a Nihilistic one is to simply name
an age, just like we had a “scientific age” and “the age of Reason”…
we have our own age… and it is the “Nihilistic age”…

Kropotkin

the masses… they are too busy engaging in the lowest level
of Maslow’s pyramid… to busy trying to get and maintain
the basic’s, food, water, shelter, education, health care,
to bother with the intellectual games we play here…

the masses don’t have the time, energy, money, inclination to
engage in the pursuit of values that we engage in…
that is not a knock, it is a statement of fact…

look at some intellectual hero’s… Plato, Descartes, Kierkegaard,
Schopenhauer, they came from wealth as did Russell and Wittgenstein…
because they had wealth, they were able to pursue philosophy in
ways working class people cannot.

we intellectuals create the viewpoint of the working class…
if the working class supports democracy, it is because the
intellectuals working from an Enlightenment perspective,
have taught the working class what it means to
be in and have a, democracy……

I am working for a world where the working class tells the
intellectuals what the working class stands for and is all about…

I trust that day comes soon…

Kropotkin

yeah butcha really can’t say an ‘age’ is nihilistic, though. you could say that an age consists of peoples who are in opposition to each other… and one group calls the other nihilistic because they don’t share their values. but even this isn’t an entirely accurate definition of nihilism because there is no absence of values here, only opposing values. but i know what you mean. you wanna say that the elites don’t give a shit about the averages joes, so the elite are nihilistic. but they aren’t. they just don’t give a shit about your values, that’s all.

any time you get a fundamentalist of some variety or another, he’s going to call any deviation from, or disagreement with, what he thinks is ‘right’, an instance of nihilism. very rarely these days do we find a real philosopher doing impartial diagnostic work like fritz did when he called a stage in history ‘nihilistic’. what i mean is, there’s a huge difference in noticing a crisis at the loss of belief in god and calling that crisis nihilistic, and pointing at an ideology and saying ‘that’s a nihilistic ideology’. the former is a report of the facts… the latter, substanceless complaining. because any ideology is entirely value-laden, it makes absolutely no sense to call one nihilistic. so that’s what i mean; post modern philosophers use the word ‘nihilistic’ as a catch-all phrase to begin a polemic with. what would be more honest and accurate would be to begin the polemic simply with ‘what i think sucks’. but that doesn’t invite any credibility and is much less professional. giving a thesis in sophistry the grand title ‘NIHILISM’ is far more effective. i mean just look at it all in caps like that. it’s positively frightening, isn’t it? all you need now is a sound track… maybe the opening notes of strauss’s thus spake zarathustra.

dun… dun… DUN!!. dun-dun dun-dun dunnn; ((((NIHILISM)))

forget about all those dudes but the last two. then forget the second to last, too. none of these great intellectuals did as much for the working classes as the last one. we’re talking about a heavy artillery full frontal assault on the entire edifice of western continentalism. about the only thing W didn’t destroy was american pragmatism, and that’s only because it was just getting started at the time.

anti-dialectics.co.uk/was_wi … eftist.htm

Indeed, yet Trumpism is reviving the faux dialectics, under differing presumptions of game play, of the naive realism of his conservative fans. Pure transvaluation of his inverted paradigmn.
And , it works pragmatically.

The game play as it has come down through the ages from functional usage. No one claims the absolute as absolutely self ontaoned5, at least not since Leibnitz, resulting in two almost absolute models differing merely by a theoretic indiscernability. The necessity for this reduction set the stage for subordinate language games to the ordinate games of signs through sets. Necessity requires the structural basis to be primordial to the knowledge of it before it can be understood by languages of modal logic.

All determinations’ sources are derivitive of prior resemblances, and their anti derivitive is only an approximated hypothesis reversely.

the engine of evolution is competition between species and species and their environments. danger must be present in order for progress to be made in either respect. what we have today is a particular version of channeling that competition into an outlet that allows it to be expressed without putting the competitors in great danger. the element of competition, the thing pursued and fought over, is property. and think about the strange silliness of this; this competition really translates into ‘compelling another individual of the species to do the work so i don’t have to’. that’s it. the species, having grown fat off its abundance, no longer needs to strive against meaningful dangers. now they simply split up into groups and fight over resources and pushing mops. how paltry, pete. that’s what I’m gonna start calling you: paltry pete.

this is why i don’t get along with your species. where i come from, we had gotten rid of capitalism in the 15,000th year of our evolution, and had collectively colonized every planet in our solar system. while you idiots were still arguing over stupid shit like minimum wage and who has rights to the gaza strip, we were building amusement park complexes as big as your new york city on katalax (its a moon that orbits one of our planets).

really man. i don’t even know why i’m in this cartoon room you call earth. i tried to convince the intergalactic counsel of space exploration to just exterminate you idiots, but they were like ‘nah let’s let em live for a while longer and see if they can get their shit together, first.’

this idea of life being a competition between us and others or the environment
or a zero sum game is wrong…we are not in competition and the real
striving that happens is not about some false competition between
people or states or societies…

the real battle lies within us…I have said this before but it
bear repeating, life is a battle within us…

I ran track in high school, my best for the 440 was 59.3 or so,
the competition I had wasn’t with the other people to win the race,
but the competition was to improve my time and if I won the race,
in doing so, great but the competition isn’t winning the race, its
improving one’s time… the real battle is to improve ourselves, not
to win the race…we have a false mistaken thought about
the point of our existence…it isn’t about coming in first,
it is about bettering ourselves… that is the real battle…

one might say, but Kropotkin, we have staggering poverty
in all the lands… that is because we believe in and act
upon the notion of a zero sum game…there must be winners
and their must be losers… thus we accept that a few people
(it is accepted that 40 people in the world have more wealth then
3.5 billion people or half the world’s population)
the pie that exists that we take from is a fix and set pie,
but that isn’t true…it is a lie that market forces determine
supply and demand… note that during the current economic boom,
that income hasn’t increased to match the demand…
if you want people to join you, one incentive is to increase
pay… and this hasn’t happened…which tells us the income
isn’t tied to supply and demand…there has been small increase
in pay but nothing to match what supply and demand suggest should
be the increase and certainly the pay raises doesn’t even allow one to
remain even with inflation…

in other words, the game is rigged… and that must end if we are to
achieve what is possible for us…

and what is possible is tied to Maslow’s pyramid… if we can solve the issue
of ensuring people the lower levels of needs, food, clothing, shelter,
warmth, education and health care…(to name a few needs) then
we can also engage with the next level which is security/safety needs,
and that is the value of society/state… to ensure that the basic needs of
its citizens are met… to allow the individual to engage with their own
pursuit of the final goal which is self-actualization…

is the goal to allow people to monopolize wealth or is the goal to
ensure that everyone is taken care of? decide that and we decide
the type of society we have………do we have a zero sum society or
do we have a society that lies beyond the zero sum game?

the competition you speak of can be, society ensuring the well being of
its members and not the monetary value of individual members…

by doing so, we then allow members of that society to engage in
their own individual pursuit of self-fulfillment… to become
Kierkegaardian individuals…

in the pursuit of individual wealth, we cannot be engaged in
our pursuit of our own self-fulfillment because we are to focused
on the nihilism that is capitalism… where the pursuit is wealth
and the increase of material goods instead of an engagement with
our souls, our conscience, our individual betterment in terms of
our improvement of who we are… running a 59.0 440 instead
of a 59.3 440… the goal is our improvement, not to gain
material wealth…that is the real competition we face…
to strive for our higher principles of being human, not the lower
levels…the animal, instinctual level…to achieve peace and love
and hope and harmony and charity is the goal of human existence,
not to achieve the lower levels of human existence, greed, hate,
anger, lust,

and entire reorientation of what it means to be human…

not engage in competition for the goal of winning, but
the compete to improve oneself… to become a higher
human being…great wealth means one has engaged in
the wrong pursuit in life…instead of engaging in what is
best in being a human being, great wealth means you have
pursued the lower, instinctual level of being human…
you have engaged in greed and lust, instead of
peace and love and justice……

the battle is to be more human, not be less human, lower level
human of hate and greed and lust and anger……

a reevaluation of values would and must be in order for us, individually
and collectively…we must engage in what does it mean to be human
and what does that mean for us in asking ourselves one of the
existential questions of existence, “What am I to do?” is the pursuit of
wealth really the best engagement we can have with our existence?

I find it hard to believe that what it means to be human is to engage in
the pursuit of wealth and material goods? really… really?

the pursuit of wealth in fact disguises any attempt we face to discover
what it means to be human… a higher level human…

one might say, that the pursuit of the higher level human being, doesn’t lead
us anywhere… and the pursuit of wealth and material goods have gotten us
where exactly?

I can tell you where, with rampant pollution and overpopulation and global
warming and the loss of precious animals and resources that cannot be
replaced… we are despoiling the earth to feed our greed and lust
and that cannot possibly end well…

a reevaluation of values would suggest that our entire American value
system is based upon the lower, animal level of existence and not upon
the higher, human based level of existence… to make war, as America
has done for over 90% of its existence is an indication of our failed value
system…….

we try to force “American values” upon other people, values we don’t even
believe in anymore like voting rights, freedom, equality, democracy…….
in our hypocrisy, we think we are better then others, we are that
shining city on the hill… and reality says we failed that test
years ago when we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, when we tortured
people, when we passed the “patriot act”, when we curtailed freedoms
in order to be more “secure/safe”…

we are a failed society because of our hypocrisy, we are a failed
society because of our devotion to an economic system
that devalues and degrades human beings and their values…

we engage in nihilism and we don’t even see it……. practice
the pursuit of wealth and you too engage in nihilism…
the devaluation of human beings and their values…

“what are we to do?” is the practice of nihilism really the thing
we are going to practice in America today?

Kropotkin

and in my battle to get people to understand how
important it is to being this process of a reevaluation of
values… an understanding of the values you have and
and do those values really represent who you are…
so we must first understand what values you have
and secondly, what values are the values that best
respresent you…

and therein lies the first problem…most people are afraid of
engaging in an honest appraisal of who they are…the masses
for the most part don’t engage in such honest search for who they are…

so, some here believe themselves to be the ubermensch, the overman
of Nietsche… but that is based on a false understanding of
Nietzsche… the overcoming of N. lies in the overcoming of
the indoctrinations of our youth… overcoming the values we
were taught in childhood… to babble about the sheeple of
the masses is to miss the entire point of N… it isn’t about the masses,
the entire point of the overmensch is to overcome his/her indoctrinations
of values from childhood… to become who you are and that has nothing
to do with the masses, the sheeple or anyone else…

for Nietzsche, the entire battle was a battle of one, fought in the mind,
heart and soul of the individual, engaging in a true understanding of
what it means to be human… and that has nothing to do with anyone else…

recall who Nietzsche felt were the “higher” man!
people like Goethe… and the value of Goethe was in
the values he created for himself as example for others…

he was a self made man but we associate that self made with wealth…
but that is not what N. meant by self made… Goethe was an artist who
created himself, who he was and what his values were… and that, that
is what N. means when he proclaims it necessary to “become who you are”

Goethe stood above others in his own understanding of who he was…
that self understanding was his ticket to his being an Ubermensch……
it wasn’t about anybody else…… if you want to understand what N.
meant by ubermensh… understand who Goethe was and what kind of
man he was… that is what is meant by becoming who you are…

it has nothing to do with the masses or being above anybody else…

so you want to become the ubermensch…… begin by a reevaluation of
who you are and what values you hold and what values you should
hold to bring into line the values you hold and the person you are…

our values must match our words and our actions……

if you proclaim peace and then act violently, your words don’t match
your actions and you are not, not an overman…if you practice
hypocrisy, you are not the ubermensch…. your words and your actions
and your values… they will all match up……….

IQ45 is an example of a person whose words, values and action
are all separate and don’t match up… and that is why he is subhuman…
animal like really…

he only values money

his words only preach the lower values of human beings, hate, anger, lust, greed,
thus his words don’t match his true/real values…

and his actions are racist, sexist, anti-human, misogynistic, anti-life…
and they don’t match his values or his words

to be human, truly human… the words, the actions and the values
all need to be in concert, together, of one mind…

and to be an ubermensh… one needs to engage in a union of
values, words and actions……… overcoming requires overcoming something,
the overcoming is the engagement of a reevaluation of values to discover
what values are really your values…and how to become your values…
a human being and their values and the words and the actions must
become one and the same…

if I see an action of a person who has overcome, by that action I can see
their values and the words they speak will confirm the values of a person
who has overcome, become who they are…

so, you want to be an ubermensch…. begin by overcoming the values
you were indoctrinated with and find the values that are truly you…

and that is what it is meant to be an ubermensch……

Kropotkin

a change of pace today… or is it?

I have stated before that when we are born, we are born into a family,
society, state that has certain values it expresses and those values
are indoctrinated into us as babies…but values aren’t the only thing
indoctrinated into us as babies/children…roles are indoctinated into
us…what do you want to be when you grow up… and we see the role models
all around us…firemen, policemen, president, baseball player… and so
we see these as our role models to be when we grow up…

I myself, wanted to be a baseball player when I grew up and I practiced
being a ball player for hours upon end…I would throw the ball, usuall a tennis
ball against the walls of the house and catch it…as I wasn’t allowed to do this in
the house, I spent hours alone, out in the yard throwing the ball against the walls
of the house…I must of broken a hundred windows throwing the ball against the house…

and I am sure you have your own stories of you practicing to become some role
in your future life…and that is what we are practicing, to be some role of some
sort within society…

as we grow older, the possibilities of the roles we can play become larger…
from president to teacher to athlete to news anchor to scientist to soldier to
pilot…… the number of possible roles grew in proportion to our age…

the number of possibilities we have for playing roles is large…
but the roles to be played must fit into certain parameters…
society must approve of the roles one is to play…you don’t see roles
where people sit around and think about things… you don’t see as a
role model, philosophy… scientist perhaps, but not philosophy…

the role models that society permits are roles that “contribute” to society"

and that is a very important notion to understand… the role models that
society praises are role models that in some fashion contribute to society…
and philosophers are not valued because it is felt that the contribution
of philosophers is minimal at best

… Philosophy is a genteel means to poverty…
or so says the t-shirt…

but is our lives really about the roles we play?

when ask, “what do I do” my answer clearly states my role,
I am a checker… but that role is the least important role I play in
my life… I am a husband and father and son and brother…
I am a philosopher… each of these personal roles are far more
important to me then the role of checker…

but I play other roles, citizen, consumer, producer, part
of a target audience, member of a society……

and my role as citizen is clearly laid out for me, if nothing else,
I must, must support my country regardless of what it does…

but, but I cannot in good conscience support a country that
engages in torture, a country that has concentration camps for
children, a country that practices anti-life policies of IQ45…
and a country that in its moral document of the budget, makes
war a higher priority then peace, and makes injustice a higher priority
then justice……

my individual conscience is in conflict with my duties of being
a citizen of the state…I must make a choice… and here lies
the individual of Kierkegaard and Ipsen who claimed that
untruth lies with the masses… I am but one man who must make
a choice between my conscience and my country……

and how do I resolve this conflict?

any actions I take will be met by swift and dire punishment from the state…
any calls I make for an ethical treatment of human beings receives
rival calls of being a traitor and unpatriotic and unamerican…….

so what choice should I make? should I risk the malice of my fellow citizens
or should follow my conscience and denounce my country as having abandoning
the values that make America the shining city on the hill?

where does my individual priority lie? with the state and being a citizen or
with being a human being with an obligation to other human beings regardless
of their being brown or from Mexico or being gay or immigrants to this country?

silence is an abdication of one choice… but for many,
cowardice rules the day and they simply follow the path of least resistance
and they stay quiet……. fearful of choosing between their conscience
and the state………dammed either way they think and so silence
becomes the rule of life…

but choice is all we have as human beings… fail to choose and there
is no point in being human…… fail to choose, so why do you exists?

if you don’t make a choice, you have no reason for living as a human being
choice is the marker of being human…

“What am I to do?” “What should I believe in?” What values should I hold?"
“What should I hope for?” “On what should I spend my energy on?”

all these questions demands one to make a choice…

so who is this Kierkegaardian being I have spoken of?

they are someone who has realized that choice is the essence of being human…

so, what do you choose? your individual conscience or playing the role of citizen?

Kropotkin

now some might claim that I am making life much too
difficult…but life should be hard…making life choices
should be hard and difficult…

being born isn’t a path into easiness… no, no, a million times no…

our very existence should cause difficulty and unease as to what it
means to be human and what our choices need to be as a human being…

and I place being human above minor, petty roles that come with
nationality or religion or sexual identity…

am to act as a human being in a situation or should I
act as a man or an American or citizen or father?

when faced with a situation, what role should I play in making a choice, a decision?

most roles we as we understand roles are artificial roles, being an American is
an artificial role because being an American is a role based on boundaries
that are artificially drawn… the line between America and Canada is a false,
artificial line that only exists in treaties and books…… stand in between Canada
and America, say in Montana and tell me which land is America and which
land is Canadian? the line separating countries are artificial and thus making
the line between an American and Canadian rather blurry…

and the lines dividing a protestant and a catholic are just as blurry…
religious lines are no different then the artificial line dividing countries…
and the line between Catholic and Hindu or Buddhist are just as artificial
as any line dividing France from Germany………

and sexual lines are no different… men loving men, men loving women,
women loving women, women loving men, trans loving men or trans loving
women, it doesn’t matter… for the only word that common to any of those
statements is loving… for the thing that matters is love, not who loves whom,
but that love is happening…and so it doesn’t matter who is doing the loving
as long as loving is happening…

we get hung up on who is doing the loving instead of the word loving…
we miss the important aspect of loving……

we must engage in the process of making choices…
being human means making hard choices…
society has tried to take the making of choices out of our hands…
but it cannot… we are forced by being human to make choices……

the modern version of being human means allowing society/state to make
our choices and that cannot succeed because choice, making a choice
is an individual matter and because the state/society is making choices for us,
we are left with alienation and disconnect because the choices being made
isn’t being made by us… but the choices are being made by politicians
and bureaucrats that aren’t accountable to us and without our direct
approval…………

part of our alienation is because of choices being made without any input or
say from us………. to be human, fully human requires that we make our own
choices about the things that matters to us……….

one might say, but we can’t have 7 billion people making choices for themselves…

why not? to be human is to make choices… otherwise we are just animals……

Kropotkin

and we have reached the Kierkegaardian portion of the
program…

I am reading, or I should more correctly say, I am rereading
Kierkegaard… at one point in time, I read anything by K.
I could get my hands on, of course that was 30 years and I
don’t recall much of it now…….

we know historically that K. was one of the precursors of
existentialism…but what did K. bring to the table that
allowed him to become one of the key fathers of existentialism?

His entire premise was around the basic idea of choice…
what kind of choices are we going to make?

For K. the only real choice was to be a Christian…
but the vapid, tasteless, lifeless modern choice of Christianity was
not to his liking, not at all…

the modern person says he is a Christian with all the passion of
saying, he likes beans and with all the intensity of someone announcing
they like beans… when all you did was simply to ape your parents and
simply continued their bland version of Christianity……
with no though or understanding of what it meant to be Christian…

to K. that was not real faith, real belief in Christianity because
the modern church striped faith of all its passion and fervor and intensity…

you can choose god with all the intensity of picking out some apples
at the store… red apples sound good, no, green apples seem to be
bobby’s favorite this week, maybe I’ll buy bobby some green apples
so he will have something healthy to eat… and that is the same passion
we use to choose Christianity and god……… the biblical anguish and passion
and fire of Job or Abraham is missing……

and that is what K. is fighting… making the choice of Christianity
to actually mean something… to become a real choice… not just
to become Christian because it is what everyone else is just as indifferently
doing… and that is the lesson of K.

to create choices with some passion and fire about the choices
we make…

we are temporary, finite beings… we exists for only a while and then
we are gone… there is not a decision that we make that goes with us
beyond death…every moment has the same impact as every other moment…
but we can create meaning and importance in moments by our choices…

the Japanese tea ceremony is an excellent example of infusing a moment
with meaning and purpose…and an example of how we can infuse our own
moments with meaning and purpose… by infusing our choices with intensity
and fire and excitement and fury……. the choices we make need to become
something more then a simple choice between red apples and green apples…

that is the message of K… making our choices with fire and passion and
intensity……

too often, much too often we simply follow the path of least resistance
and we take the path right before us… and that is how we wind up
miserable and unhappy and alienated and disconnected from society
and ourselves…… because we didn’t make our life choices with
fire and intensity…for the most part, our life choices are made
by simple fallowing the path, the course already laid out before us…

we become Christian because it was the path before us and we
cheer America on because it was the path laid out before us
and we vote Democratic because it was the path laid out before
us and we work our crummy 9 to 5 job because it was the
path laid out before us… and we made these choice, or should
I say more correctly, we simply took the next step without
any understanding or feeling about it… we began our jobs
in corporate America without understanding what it
means to sell your soul to the devil……

our life choices are made with no more passion then
picking out apples…and with no more consideration…
we might buy red apples because that is what our mother
bought… and for no other reason…….

the argument might be made that we cannot value or
have the time to engage with our every decision because
we must make so many decisions every single day…
but most decisions we make are trivial decisions…
what is for lunch? what channel shall I watch?
which baseball game am I watching? and most of the time,
we sleepwalk through those decisions too… but the important
decisions, the really meaningful decisions,
we barely engage in the really big decisions…

“What am I to do?” “what values should I hold?” “What should I believe in?”

we don’t give these life’s meaning and purpose questions any more thought then
we give to choosing a apple in the store……

K. didn’t say this, but I will, begin to give our choices all the passion
and intensity of every choice being the most important choice in life…

but Kropotkin, we can’t… we have hundreds of choices a day… and that is where
we begin… instead of making hundreds of choices, make two but make those two
choices with passion and intensity and fire… stop making quantity choices
and begin to make quality choices… make one decision a day, but make that
decision a powerful one, make that one choice a meaningful and purposeful choice

and approach all your decisions/choices with meaning and passion and fire
and purpose…

Kropotkin

so, what does it mean to choose?

and with what criteria do we choose something?

what standard would you use to decide/choose something?

How are choices made?

Kropotkin

we have literally hundreds of choices we can make every single
day… which cat food to buy? what TV show should I watch tonight?
What book should I read right now? Right now I am reading
Soren Kierkegaard book, “Stages on life’s way” but why choose that
book? why not choose his “Concluding unscientific postscript” or
perhaps “fear and trembling” or “Sickness unto death”
or perhaps I should be reading Nietzsche, perhaps his “Ecce Homo”…

my choices, my possibilities are endless in regards to what I can read
or watch on TV or to eat… why should I choose this over that?

and as part of our choices, we can choose to be kind or fair or just or
we can choose to hate or to fear or to lust or to have anger…

what kind of person do we want to be?

that too is a choice… How do I want to be remembered
by history? although frankly, I seriously doubt history will
remember or note I even existed…

so, my choices are choices made by me in silence with
anonymity guaranteed from history…

so why should I choose to be good… why should I choose to
reach for the higher levels of human beings, instead of lowering
myself to the lower levels of instinct and animals?

5 minutes after I’m dead, no one will remember me and it might
not even take that long, so why should I should want to choose to
be human, the higher level of being human, to love and to hold peace
and justice and charity and hope as part of the human condition?

it won’t and doesn’t matter if anybody else notices my status
of my being a higher human, I notice… and my choice defines me,
my choice gives me my understanding of who I am… even if absolutely
no else notices or cares, I must live with my choices and I must die with
my choices…

I choose to engage with the higher level of being human because
it is a hard, hard taskmaster with no guarantee of success…
it is like Icarus… I must fly as close to the sun as I can get…
because it is a task that is hard…

to overcome… is equally as hard to achieve…
success and failure isn’t about money or fame
or power or influence or time spent on TV…

to take the path of least resistance is human but it isn’t
a path to becoming who you are or overcoming the
childhood indoctrinations or knowing who you are…

the three stages of being human…

the process of “know thyself”
the process of “overcoming”
and the process of “becoming who you are”

with the understanding of what values are really your values
choose your values, don’t let society choose your values,
don’t let your parents choose your values, don’t let the media
choose your values, don’t let the church choose your values………….

make the choice of becoming who you are…
but once again, how do we choose?
and what criteria do we use to choose?

Kropotkin