a new understanding of today, time and space.

someone might say, but Kropotkin we see patterns
and meaning and mathematics telling us that
the universe is not just isolated atoms… but a whole
unified concept of the universe……

however, you must remember that from the first, we
have had the 4 fundamental forces of the universe…
gravitational force, weak nuclear force, strong nuclear
force and the electromagnetic force…
and everything in the universe that exists, flows
from those 4 forces…from what seems to be a
wide and diverse universe actually flows from 4 and only
4 forces… (as I stated earlier, I believe that there are more
then just 4 forces, but that is just me)

anyway, the patterns and logic that seems to come from the universe
actually comes from random application of the 4 forces on
everything in the universe…what we see as a mathematical understanding
of the universe is really just an application to those 4 forces to the universe…

we can chart the three dimensions of the universe and time is the
fourth dimension…so why can’t we also chart the 4 forces of nature?

we can connect the 4 forces of nature to the 4 dimensions…

but science has suggested that there are more then four dimensions,
perhaps as many as 11……. ummmmm, and I have suggested that
there might be more then the 4 forces of the universe…….

But Kropotkin… you are fucking nuts… this is Ecmundu territory…
wild eye schemes with no, NO basis in reality…

perhaps, perhaps… but a little speculation never hurt anyone…

sometimes we human get so little landlock into our own thinking
and thoughts, that we forget to attempt to think beyond our own little box…
even if it sound completely crazy… batshit crazy land…
sometimes, just sometimes… you gotta go there…

Kropotkin

but Kropotkin, we see patterns and meaning and mathematics telling us that the universe is not just isolated atoms, but a whole unified concept of the universe.

Nelson, I seem to recall a time when I asked you to admonish me if I ever showed signs of not being childish! Mr P very often manages to make me smile. One or two posters are too serious by far! It’s good to giggle. We should take laughter far more seriously.

Don’t tell me off!

youtu.be/e7n53nIBb3g

K: why thank you Mr. Derleydoo for your defense…I couldn’t agree more
about laughter… and the ism’s and ideologies we so slavish follow could use
some humor and laughter about them…on of the reasons I so mistrust
Capitalism is its very, very, very lack of humor and laughter about itself…

laugh and the whole laughs with you
cry and you’re probably a capitalist…

Kropotkin

ok, back to atoms……

Ok, Kropotkin, let us give you this idea that we are simply
atoms…But we are atoms that love and laugh and feel with
needs and wants and we search for the beautiful, (aesthetics)
but looking about my room which is full of atoms, the couch and the
floor and the TV, those atoms don’t do what we humans, atoms, do
on an daily, hourly, even minute by minute basis… those atoms don’t
love or need or laugh or have wants…what is different?

I think the problem comes about by the way we approach the problem…
we want a logically consistent and coherent universe with some easy linkage
between what we see and what we feel and what we think…

we want a consistent universe that makes logical sense and the universe
doesn’t work that way…

so from our perspective, either the universe is missing some vital pieces that
prevents us from understanding the universe or (and this is more likely) we
ourselves are some or more then some aspects of the universe that would allow
us to understand the universe and our place within the universe……

and to understand the universe what tools do we have? we have our 5 senses
and we have our minds and our hearts…however, I for one, have been misled
by both my mind and my heart and by my senses…, so exactly what tool can I use
to make of the universe when all the tools available to me have so misled me?

Logic? I don’t trust logic because it can make logical connections, not real connections…

so what are my other possibilities can we use to help us explain and understand
the universe?

I have my 5 senses and you have your 5 senses… while my hearing may be bad,
your hearing may be very good… we can combine the usage of our senses
limit the weaker senses to a point where together we can make better sense
of the universe via our senses…combined we might be able to overcome
our faulty senses and our faulty minds and hearts…this is why I believe in
democracy more then any other political system… for my personal faults
can be corrected by others… whereas I may be emotional about some subject,
those who are less emotional, more impartial, can correct my own
wild overreactions… and I can correct your wild overreactions…

my wife is often very emotional and I am fairly logical… and yet, at times,
we trade places and she is the logical one and I am the emotional one…
we quite often hold the other one in check…

but in the end, all we are is a collection of atoms… we are biological atoms…
and that my atoms can, after my death, become some other collection of atoms…

it has been suggested that our own sun, is a second generation sun…
in other words, in the very spot we have our sun, there was a previous
sun that existed and my have had planets and that my have had life…
but that sun went nova… and all the dust and gasses created by that
nova, later condensed into our sun and our planets and our lives…
we might be a second generation star or even a third generation star…
we just don’t know… but nothing is ever destroyed in this universe…
the stars and planets and all biological life has been born and reborn
and reborn again…the Buddhists is right in that respect…

we are born again and again and again… all of cells which is made
up of atoms, has been something else… tree’s and snakes and water
and mud and dogs and dinosaurs and grass…

but what does this mean?

Kropotkin

K: if you think about it, what is the universe actually made of?

we have atoms… this is the basic, most fundamental substance of the
universe and everything is simply atoms built upon atoms to create
object… the table I am writing at is the same type of atoms that live
within your body and is the same type of atoms that exists in the sun…

the universe is simply made up of atoms…
and the guiding principles of the universe is
the 4 forces of nature…we have electromagnetism, strong interaction/force,
weak force and gravity…

those are the rules by which the universe plays with…
just as baseball has rules, three strikes and your out, tie goes
to the runner… that sort of thing, we have the rules of the universe
and those rules are laid out by the 4 forces of nature…

so we have 4 forces of nature, 4 rules of nature and we have atoms…

the 4 forces of nature tells atoms what is possible for them… what
atoms can do is defined by the 4 forces of nature………

now we have complexity build upon those 4 forces and those atoms,
but the basic level of the universe is 4 forces and atoms…

(personally, I believe that there are more then 4 forces, but at some
point, I hope to see this to happen)

so we have atoms and the 4 forces of nature acting upon those atoms…

everything we see is the result of the interactions between the 4 forces
of nature and atoms… that is why we see patterns… given that there
are only so many things that can happen between atoms and the 4 forces,
that they wind up repeating themselves…

on earth, we see a wide diversity of life, but that life is at heart, only
atoms, biological atoms that react to the rules that govern life…
if we understand the rules, we can then predict the actions, the
form of the actions……… if we understand the rules of baseball,
then we can understand what is really happening in a game…

now I have seen cricket… but it seems dull and pointless to me, but why?

because I don’t know the rules… I don’t know what is happening or why it is happening…

the 4 forces of the nature are simple the rules of the universe…once we
understand the rules, we can understand what is happening and why…

we see patterns in the universe because of the rules of the universe…

different rules creates different patterns…so what are the rules that
make patterns quite common in our universe? the fact that there
are really a very few rules in the universe, 4 forces and only one material…
atoms………

now granted, some rules are very, very complicated… which is why we
have yet to figure them out and this is why the universe seems to be complicated…
but once we have understood the rules, the universe will seem very simple
and uncomplicated…and we will see why the rules of the universe creates
patterns and meanings and the mathematics of it all and we will also know
the rules…in essence, we can really learn to play the game and become…

Kropotkin

now one might, fairly accurately, point out that
Kropotkin is a fool who has taken a fairly complex
idea and reduced it to nonsense and rubbish…

the point I am attempting to bring out is quite simple…

what the human experience is, is really about learning the rules…

what are the rules of human interactions? we call that ethics and morality…

what are the rules of knowledge? we call that epistemology…

what are the rules of understanding beautiful things? we call that aesthetics…

what are the rules of the past? we call that history…

what we think of as the human experience, is really our
attempts to understand the rules of the game we are playing…

the game is called life…now some call life a tragedy and some call
life a comedy and some call it tragicomedy……….

whatever you call it, you have spend years trying to learn the rules
of this thing called life…

science, philosophy, religion, sociology… are all attempts to
learn the rules from different perspectives…

when the world seems to be out of control and chaotic…
it would seem that the rules no longer apply…
and we live in an out of control and chaotic world right now,
soooooo…. the rules we have taken for granted, rules we call
the constitution, the declaration, the laws are no longer being applied…
and thus we see the disaster unfolding in front of us with IQ45
and his complete disdain for the rules that allow us human beings
to function… both individually and collectively…human existence
is really not much more then finding out the rules and then
acting upon those rules…as society gotten more complicated, the
rules have become more complicated… but at the heart of the human experience
is nothing more then an understanding of the rules of existence…

Kropotkin

what I am about to write may not seem to be “philosophical” to you,
but bear with me on this one…

as is known, I work in a very large grocery chain… if I ever mentioned
the name, you would know it instantly, even Derelydoo in Jolly old England,
has probably heard of it…

we sell what is known as “hunger bags” for 10 bucks each…

Now, I know for a fact, a fact, that we make a profit on each bag…
and depending on how we fill the bag, we can make anywhere from
25 cents to a buck on these bags…and that is the point, not to feed
the hungry but to make a buck… how do I know this? two ways, first,
an assistant manager told me and I confirmed it later with another
assistant I trusted……

and the second way I know, both the store manager and the district
manager make a bonus on the number of bags sold… you don’t give
managers a bonus if the bags weren’t making a profit…follow the money,
as they say……

and so every year, every year they push us harder and harder to sell these
dam bags… and plus given the greediness of our corporation, I am not even
sure we actually give the money to food banks or whatever… I wouldn’t
be surprised if my fucked up company just pocketed the money and pretended
to give the money to charity or even gave partial amounts to charities…
and pocketed the rest…

so, these past several years, I just have not helped selling these bags…
and it was so obvious that at times, I was threatened with being written up
for not trying to sell these bags… yeh, written up for that…

and once again, it is that time of year… so the other day, with a supervisor
standing over me, I had to attempt to sell these bags… the first time I
said the words, I almost threw up… “would you like to buy a hunger bag”
and that supervisor just stood there and listened to me… making sure, I
was trying to get customers to buy these fucking bags…

with every attempt, I grew sicker and sicker to the point of customers
asking me if I was ok… I cannot describe the overwhelming despair I felt
with every request I made… I sold bags, but it so horrible that I lost
all my self respect… (not that I had a lot to begin with, but nevertheless)

and the only thought that would come to my head was, “I have joined the dark side”

I sold a lot of bags but I was so miserable in doing so…so, I went to lunch
and gave it a lot of thought…I came back from lunch and didn’t ask a single customer
about it and you know what? I felt so much better about myself…afterwards,
I got dragged into the office and bitched at, but so the fuck what?

my choices were simple, play the game and feel crappy, really crappy
about it or I can keep my self respect and dignity…
I choose my self respect and dignity… and I haven’t pitched
a single person since then and I am more then ok with that…

but here is the point…the pitch they offered me was if I sell enough bags
to win their “contest” I would get a $50 dollar gift card… of course only to
the grocery store… but that is all they are offering me… to keep my job
and to make money… and that is all they offer… money… they don’t
offer us respect or dignity or any kind of self worth… they can only offer
me the least important resource in the world, money…

that is the only thing they can offer me…… and to keep my self respect,
I have not tried to sell these bags since then…I have sold a few, but
I sure the hell didn’t ask them…

and management is still ragging on me to sell these bags, but fuck em……

I am keeping my dignity and self respect by saying silent…

so the question for you is, how far are you willing to go to keep
your self respect and dignity? Are you willing to risk your job?

and at what point does selling your soul to the devil become
a possibility?

Kropotkin

in thinking about it, most people would consider that
the pursuit of happiness would be the “ultimate” goal in life…
but really what is happiness? it is an emotion… it is something
that is not logical and it is not based upon rationality or being rational…

upon asking yourself, am I happy? if you have to even ask yourself
that question, you are not happy… happiness seems to
come to those who are simply just doing things that make them
happy…happiness cannot be analyzed or thought about…it isn’t
a question that can be answered… How do I become happy?

and the thing about happiness, it is so subjective… what makes
one person happy totally repels another…

what some people say make them happy, I hate, with a complete
and udder hate that is sometimes scary…

and what I would consider something that makes me happy, others hate
with the same intensity…

at no point can we make the pursuit of happiness “objective”…
it exists totally within the realm of being subjective to each person…

if the pursuit of happiness is not a rational objective… then do we need
to reconsider happiness as a goal?

and the truth is as we grow older and change, our understanding of
what makes us “happy” changes… what makes me happy today, wouldn’t
have 20 or 30 years ago…today, I am happy when I don’t have to work
and I can just work out philosophical problems and read and write, like this
writing I am doing now…after I am done writing this, I am going to read for
a while… and this doing “nothing” really makes me happy… unfortunately I
have to work in a few hours… but for now, I can be happy just doing what
I am doing now…

but when I was younger, I wanted action, excitement and motion…
I would go out looking for something to happen at night… when
my nights would start at 9:00 at night… today, that is my bedtime…

I am old… what can I say…

I no longer seek action or excitement…

and I am quite content with that…

so if our idea of happiness changes, then why
is the pursuit of happiness a choice for
our goal in life?

Kropotkin

the above also is true of the pursuit of pleasure and
the avoidance of pain…what is pleasure? it is certainly
not about rationalism and the avoidance of pain is certainly not
about being rational…for some, some, they seek pain, often in
a sexual context… Sado masochism is one such sexual approach
in which pain and pleasure play a major role… quite the opposite
of what is normally the case…avoiding pain and seeking pleasure…

but one can say, but Kropotkin, you are seeking pain by
not doing what your corporate overlords demand by
trying to sell those hunger bags…you will be lectured
and written up…if you don’t attempt to sell hunger bags…

that is true… but my self image, my self worth is far greater
when I don’t play the game…and that is worth any type of
“pain” my supervisors or managers might give me…I am seeking
“pleasure” by not selling those bags and I am tempting “pain” by
not asking…

(although I am not sure that trying to keep one’s dignity and
self worth is seeking "pleasure’… it is a rather passive move,
at best, to gain “pleasure” by not asking customers to buy hunger bags)

but our modern lives is full of “dammed if you do and dammed if you don’t”
events…and that maybe one of the defining aspects of our modern world…
something that might not have occurred as much in the pre-modern world…

I am screwed by selling those fucking bags and I am dammed if I don’t sell
them…… to keep my dignity and respect, I choose to say, fuck em……
and there is and will be a cost to this action/belief…

management will make me suffer… make no mistake about it…

so is seeking “pleasure” part of your goal and is avoidance
of “pain” also part of your goal…… it seems to me that
this is not a rational nor logical goal… it is emotional in nature…

to seek pleasure is to seek that which makes on feel good
and that doesn’t seem to have a large rational component…
and to avoid pain doesn’t seem to have a rational component…

these two seem to be emotional and sensitive matters, not
related to rational and logical thinking…

so do you practice seeking pleasure and avoiding pain?

Why?

Kropotkin

much of what we do and describe and think about requires
context… I might say, my father died in 1985…
and because it was so long ago, I have accepted that fact…
but once again, it is all about context…

I didn’t like my father…and I thought he wasn’t a
very good father…… when my older sister called to tell
me he died… she started the conversation with, “I have some bad news”
and when she told me, I said, “and what is the bad news”… she wasn’t happy with me…

I haven’t missed him in any way, shape, or form…

for me, my father being dead is simply a statement of fact…

it has no real context for me because I didn’t like him or cared about him…

as for my mother, she is still alive at 84… I have very mixed feelings toward
her due to our very rocky relationship over the many years

I call her every week and we talk politics… we don’t talk about
feelings or emotions because that wasn’t discussed in our household…

we didn’t hug… I think the last time I hugged my mom, I was probably
5 or 6 years old…I have never told her I loved her because I am not
really sure I do love her…….

and yet, she is my mother…

am I incapable of love? no, I love my wife and daughter very much…

I can’t say I love my sisters or my brother with any great intensity…

and yet, some will proclaim that their love of family is central
to their very existence…it is not for me…

it is about context…my life will continue much as it always has
even if every member of my family from my mother to my siblings
all died…

some might say, how cold and callus you are Kropotkin…
but I am being honest…

and my death… it doesn’t scare me or frighten me…

when I was younger, I became very frighten of death,
especially of my death…today, I really don’t care…

as I grow older, I think about my quality of life as oppose to
the length of my life… I would rather die at 76 in good health,
mentally and physically instead of living to 90 but in bad health and
with mental issues……… for me, it is about the quality of life…
and every year after say, 70, I shall do an examination of my life
to see if it still has quality, and if it doesn’t… I shall end it…

it is about context for me…

examine your life… what is your context?

Kropotkin

that’s because, like me, you are an evolved creature, peter kropotkin. unconditional love of one’s family annuls that power to discriminate for character and attaches one to empty, idealistic notions of the importance of bloodline… that propagater of one of the greatest spooks - culture.

whenever that stupid adage ‘honor thy family’ rears its idiotic head, one is asked to respect one’s relatives despite all their foibles… because, what… they have the same DNA? a few inert chemical molecules? please.

honor and respect and reverence transcends that simplistic nonsense and is gained through an analysis of character regardless of one’s origins. and this involves only the immediate individual, because there is no ‘man’, no ‘nation’, and certainly no ‘state’. these are only imaginary causes elevated above and beyond the individual who through his desire to find something higher than himself to exalt, commits himself to an empty idea and loses himself as a result. one wants to think of themselves as having a history… that there is something profound and scared that has been preserved, and that he is a part of it, a product of it, and has a duty to carry it further. and yet the only thing holding this person together, the only thing that actually endures, is his continuity of memory. he is nothing but a humean bundle of impressions and ideas that for a small eternity didn’t exist… and who will shortly return to that state. everything he currently ‘belongs to’ is already history, already gone or going… and all that is true in the universe are a few useless tautologies. the rest is confused, inadequate and muddled ideas (see spinoza)… and a derridean language game in the company of others for the meanwhile until you perish. this is the art of avoiding what a hopeless putz you truly are… but some gotta play it lest the end up like a french existentialst cafe goer… or a biggs… or both.

now i’m not saying one cannot live a full life as an involuntary egoist, because knowing and accepting the truth isn’t required to live. in fact, a certain number of lies is almost necessary to live. alls i’m saying is that if there wuz an omniscient being out there somewhere who tallied up the score after the human species went extinct, he’d be like ‘these guys over here got it… and these others over there did not.’ but that’s the beauty of it; it can’t matter to an idiot that he was an idiot after he’s gone. everything becomes perfect in the end, peter kropotkin.

wait wtf does this have to do with what i was saying five minutes ago. see you got me on a tangent dude. yeah so i don’t think being unable to feel love for one relatives is necessarily a bad thing. in many ways - i can say for myself - my disgust with my parents actually increased my expectations for greatness in men/women. check this out (you’ll love the irony); i actually became an ultra-authoritarian once i discovered (in my 20s) that my father’s excessive authority was a joke. see it was supposed to go the other way; the over-authoritarian father causes in the child a disobedience and rebellion against authority. but what i got with the old man was an overcharged meathead who thought he knew his shit, but didn’t, and i realized i could do it better. i shoulda been his dad, bro.

with the old lady, i saw everything that was contemptible in women. she wuz a real head-turner in her youth who developed a skill for manipulation in proportion to her undeserved vainity. a petite-bourgeois par excellence and dumb as a rock. now see here i wuz supposed to develop a misogynistic hatred of women, right? right. instead, i became a proto-type feminist; i had a vision of a world of real women who were nothing like the abomination that capitalist/consumerist culture had created in my mother. i began having dreams of bikini clad rosie the riveters. dignified working women who could plow a field for eight hours and then give you a thirty minute blow job. but this vision was just that, a vision, and the world was not ready for it yet.

hey and have you noticed that your indifference toward your family has made you a somewhat more humanitarian cosmopolitan? that’s because you’re less inclined to express immediate prejudice against anyone who ‘isn’t like your kind’. the whole ‘family’ thing is an institution to pass on inheritance and share the task of raising the young, anyway. it ain’t got shit to do with genes and/or culture. read your boy engels. he’ll get you right.

significance…?
… It sure the ‘hell’ got to do with responsibility’ no?

Engels? Predated in accordance of an outdated mode of warfare.

Stop trying to make me responsible, meno.

You know what. I gonna go do something irresponsible right now just because you said that.

as always, I just write for me…

in my pursuit to understand what it means to be human…
I engage in some “idol” speculations…

think about emotions…

we, as philosophers, tend to think about the rational side of
being human, but, we are as much emotional animals as we are
rational animals… and perhaps, we are more emotional/feelings
animals then we are rational/logical beings…

today, we see the conflict in the modern political world,
as being a battle between those who are conservative and they
engage with security/safety beliefs as one of their primary
beliefs…whereas we have liberals who tend to, again, tend to,
to engage in other primary beliefs which is the belief in justice and freedom…

conservatives are the one’s pushing for security/safety laws…
they support such things as “Patriot act” and other self defense
measures as torture to “protect” America…

Liberals push such political agendas as making justice the primary
driver of American political agenda… along with freedom…

we see this interplay as being the primary source of American
politics over the last 20 years… are you in favor of security/safety, conservative
or are you in favor of justice/freedom, liberal…

but where does this come from? I mean how do we get to
the point where the two basic pushes of the political drive comes
from either the need for security/safety or the drive for justice/freedom?

I would suggest and we begin our “idol speculation”
effort right now…

I would suggest that we get our primary drives from our childhood…

and my suggestion derives from Hobbes… who wrote that the basic
fundamental drive of his life comes from fear…he admits to being a man
who lived in fear all his life… and his political philosophy would certainly
suggest this…he argued for the idea that the state/society itself cannot
be secure unless it was ruled by an absolute sovereign/king…

he argued quite strongly that the only way to make the state safe, was
to turn over to the king all of the responsibilities of making the state safe…

to this end, he even defended the right of this “absolute” ruler being able
to enforce all laws and rules in any way, shape or form, that the ruler
wanted to, up to and including the right of the ruler to take the goods of
the subjects which includes the property of the subjects…

a ruler whose word was absolute law…

and we see how the fear that Hobbes felt manifested itself
in his political philosophy……

so let us take that as our starting point…

so what would it mean if we have someone who isn’t in fear about
their security/safety? what would their political philosophy look like?

I would suggest that it would be the liberal viewpoint of society…

if you are always fearful, then making security/safety as your primary
goal, makes sense…but if you are not fearful, then making security/safety
your primary goal makes no sense… it isn’t needed if you feel secure in life…

and we can see how that this security/safety need arises in childhood…
and how the need for justice/freedom can also arise in childhood…

just as Hobbes felt fear which lead him to adapt security/safety as his
primary goal in life, we can see how those who grew up being safe/secure
can make justice/freedom their primary goal in life…

so depending upon how one approaches life, will come one’s political
philosophy… as I am not fearful of life, my political beliefs are liberal,
thus I make as my primary goal justice/freedom…

in a very real sense, the goal we attempt to reach comes from how
we feel about life… I feel safe and secure and conservatives feel threaten
and uneasy about life… and it shows in our respective political philosophy…

and it should be easy to confirm this and it is… reread IQ45 convention speech…
it is one dire and frighten speech… in reading it, one would think
that our inner cites were on fire and the nation was in complete and dire
threat of collapse… and that resonated with some people, conservatives
who live with fear…

as liberals don’t see America that way, we see the positive…

thus we don’t need to pursue security/safety as our primary goal…

now as a thought experiment, try this…

how do you see America?

How do you view society?

are you fearful and scared about what others might do to you?

your answers will tell you if you are a conservative or a liberal…

or said another way, political philosophy is a confession about
your viewpoint of society…

fearful/mistrustful… conservative…

secure/feeling safe… liberal…

now this little thought experiment is not for me, I already know
my own viewpoint/political philosophy…do it for your own benefit…

Kropotkin

so let us change this a bit…

think about your environment…

do you feel safe/secure within your own environment?

personally, I feel very safe and secure in my environment…

I live in a very safe town, within a gated condo complex with
lock doors to protect us… (which isn’t why we decided upon
this particular condo… it had elevators and we didn’t have
to lug stuff up and down stairs)

at my prior store, it too was a fairly safe town…
my new store is in a little more problematic area…

but nothing that dangerous and I feel ok with my wife or daughter
wondering about that area…

so given the fact my own and my family safety and security is not
an issue… I don’t see safety/security as being a major issue
for me…and it doesn’t impact my political philosophy in any way…

so how does your environment impact your philosophy… political
and otherwise?

so said another way… our political philosophy is a confession about
how we feel about our current environment…

so what are you confessing to when you want certain laws to be passed?

what does the demand for passing certain laws mean for us as
as human beings?

what does it mean for us as philosophers?

Kropotkin

so what this all means is this…

how we feel about our environment will tell us what
our political and social philosophy will be…

our engagement with our environment will help us decide
what our goals ought to be as far as our understanding
of what is needed in the world…

so when you read a philosopher, what are they confessing to?

when you read Hobbes, you see and he tells you, that all his
efforts stem from his being afraid all his life… the goals he
pursues comes from his lifelong engagement with being afraid…

so when a politician wants certain laws to be passed,
that tells us about their thoughts and feelings about
about their environment…

a politician who demands that everyone have guns, is a person
who is fearful and is afraid of their environment…

and I for one, would trace our current fearful atmosphere
within America to 9/11 and to the climate for the several years
thereafter…

so how does one work on their fears and phobias?

I would confront them as I did with my own fear
and phobia…I had a serious fear of heights for many
years… I attacked it by doing things that challenges my fears…

I took up rock climbing and I challenged myself to doing things
that challenged my fears… I didn’t let my fear of heights
prevent me from going to the top of buildings and looking down…

for example, the space needle in Seattle… I went up it and
then at the top, despite my fears, I look down at the ground below…
it made me nervous as hell, but I did it…the only way to confront
our fears and everyone has some fears… you wouldn’t be human if
you didn’t have some sort of fears… for fear is an evolutionary
devise meant to protect us from doing really stupid things…

and once again, we turn to our old friend, the three paths to become
human…first, we engage with our knowing ourselves…Socrates
ideal of “know thyself” and then we engagement with an reevaluation
of our values… then we overcome… if we follow this path, we see
that we must first know ourselves and the reason for our fears…

mine fear stems from when I was kid and I really had no fear…
and I had many stitches to prove that… until one day, I tried to
do a somersault off a high diving board and landed straight on my back…
which hurt like hell… and that pain, over years would lead me to
having a fear of heights, not of diving boards, but of the cause of my
pain which was, in my eyes, the height of the diving board…

once I knew the reason, know thyself, the reason for my fear of heights,
I could work to overcome my fears…to this day, heights makes me nervous
but it doesn’t paralyze me like it did before…

I overcame…

so, what fears do you have and why do you have those particular fears?

can you or have you overcome those fears?

and what does all this mean for our philosophy, both political
and our regular philosophy?

Kropotkin

now one might wonder how my “philosophy” is any different
then psychology or the dreaded phrase, “Self-help”…

and I say unto you… does it matter which terms we use
if it allows us some understanding of what it means to be human
and what does that suggest to us about our goals and possible
paths into the future…

I see no difference between philosophy and psychology and “self-help”
and history or economics or sociology or biology…

they are all aspects of our pursuit in understanding what it means
to be human and “what should we believe in” and “what we should hope for”
and “what our values should be?”

those disciplines are simply tools we use to make sense of the world
and to understand what it means to be a biological being in a universe
that is matter, but not biological matter……

Kropotkin

currently I am reading “Upheavals of thought” by
Martha Nussbaum…

Her book is subtitled “the Intelligence of Emotions”

I believe myself to be a rational man… if given a first
reply to a phrase test and the word was “emotions”
my first reply would be “danger, danger, Will Robinson”
dating myself, but what the hell…

I cannot tell if it is because I’m a man or if it is the way I was
raised, but emotions are my Kryptonite…or said another way,
“I don’t do emotions” but that is simply not true…

there is a serious disconnect between my words and my actions…

but it isn’t the massive disconnect that Christians have between their
words and their actions…but it falls into the same terrain…

for many years, because of my failure to grasp or understand emotions,
I would react in the wrong way to situations around me…this type of
reaction requires some sort of emotional intelligence which I didn’t have…

and to this day, I still don’t really react quite like other people…
when people tell me news that should elicit some response like, “I am sorry”
I quite often fail to respond in the “appropriate” manner…
news or information that seems to get people to react, doesn’t seem to
affect me in that manner…

it is a disconnect I have… and as I become more aware of this disconnect,
I am better able to learn the “proper” response…….

in many ways for me, emotions, my emotions are my enemy…
I have a hard time navigating my emotions……

and yet now I get far more emotional at times, then I used to…

we need to approach emotions with the same vigor we attack
other philosophical area’s like epistemology or logic or political philosophy…

what emotions drive you?

anger, hate, love, honesty, despair, sadness, happiness, disgust, contempt…
guilt…which is one emotion that drives religion, especially Christianity…
what do you feel guilty about?

which ones would you say drive who you are?

Kropotkin

existentialism with its emphasis on emotions such as
angst and existential despair and suffering…
with suffering and despair being an emotional
reaction/feeling… to/about life…

as human beings, our responses to life are emotional responses,
not logical, rational responses…

(recall my little post about Jazz music and our emotional response to
Miles Davis being the greatest Jazz player and others think it might
be Brubeck or perhaps Coltrane with the greatest Jazz album being
“Kind of blue” or perhaps Coltrane’s “a love supreme”… the point being
that we respond to such list as the greatest by emotionalism, not
by logical, rational thought…in other words, we judge by our emotional
response to something, not by our rational, logical thought about something)

the problem lies in this fact that we still react emotionally to things
and not logically or rationally…

our first response to something is emotional, we lead with our feelings…
and later we might temper our first initial thoughts by being logical/rational…

that is why philosophers up to now have been wrong… they always began with
rational/logical thinking when we human beings always respond emotionally, at
least at first…what is needed is an archaeology of emotions…
which is something Foucault never did, but probably should have done…

in thinking about it… I would guess that rational, logical thinking is a relatively
recent evolutionary devise…emotions, instinct are the basic, fundamental
means of understanding our universe… and is has been this way for millions,
if not billions of years…at its heart, life is simply emotions being carried down
from generation to generation…life can feel pain and pain is an emotional
response to our environment…and all life can feel pain…

so in a very real sense, rational, logical thought is a higher form of
existence… it is the next step, as it were, of existence… we have at
its base, emotions, feelings… the pyramid as it were… on the bottom
is its base and that base is emotions/feelings…

the next level is thinking

and the third level is rational, logical thinking…

even today, after hundred of thousands years, we still have people,
who deny and refuse to engage with rational/logical thinking…

think about it… those who put religion ahead of science are those
who engage with the base feelings of human existence…

revelations/Jerusalem are emotional, feeling understanding of life…

and Athens is the philosophy/rational thinking about life…

and we return to this old idea of Jerusalem and Athens…

and we note that Jerusalem existed before Athens…
and Jerusalem has always existed within the history of human beings…
whereas as Athens, Athens has not always existed but came into existence
within the last several thousand years…

so in our pyramid, what comes above the rational/logical level?

I would say it is the union of the rational/emotional levels…

but that is impossible… no, no it isn’t, we have had human beings who
have successfully integrated rational/logical thought with their emotional/feeling
aspect of being human… the key one for us is Goethe…
he wrote some of the most beautiful poems in the German Language and
he made scientific discoveries… he was able to unite the two
factions of rational thought and emotional feelings…

we can do no better then to learn to follow Goethe…
and learn to unite the rational and the emotional…

Kropotkin