in reading Foucault

You wanted an unemotional argument, I gave you one.
[size=85]

No. Just stop right there. I gave you a perfectly rational rationale. His entire basis is deconstructing the conceptual distinction of reason and madness (through the use of a tool called the materialist dialectic of history, which Marx first developed by inverting the Hegelian propaedeutic: I go over that in the three self-excerpts at the end of this post; suffice to say that all Leftists, in one way or another, use this same inverted dialectic to level the field of discourse and make actual dialogue impossible, just as critical race theorists use it to transform the idea of racism into something so nebulous it can be applied to everyone and everything) to the point that neither mean anything anymore and have become entirely ambiguous, and then he formulates the argument that every possible law or moral evaluation amounts to an unjustifiable imposition of logos and reason on human nature. He rejects the idea that there can be any real social function in a law like don’t fuck kids because of how he’s framed this polarity between what he calls madness and reason, and it’s a polarity that no longer makes any sense. It’s like how modern Leftists define racism in such a nebulous way that it allows them to call everyone racist for whatever reason they want, that is what deconstructionism, is. It’s not my problem if you can’t fucking get it, but don’t tell me I didn’t, immediately after leaving my jokes, provide an objective statement about it. This shit is pissing me off, fuck off. Of course, if you accept Foucault’s deconstruction of ‘reason’ as a concept, you can just tell me that anything I possibly say is an irrational imposition of logos on discourse, reducing all dialogue to a mindless game of power.

^ Foucault inherited this from Marx, who did it first. His concept of the species-essence was a deconstruction of the modes of capitalist relation which allowed him to formulate a specious argument in which all division of labor, like that exampled by industrial society, was an arbitrary and therefor unjustifiable imposition of power. I elaborate this at great length in my own books.

As Marx’s use of this materialist dialectic deconstructed and rendered illegible all legitimate social hierarchy and division of labor, so Foucault’s renders unreadable all legitimate distinction between immoral and moral acts, even on obvious issues like child predation being evil, just as the feminist use of the materialist dialectic between male-female relations reduces all gender discourse to an omnipresent patriarchy within which it is not possible to say anything at all without being branded a defender of the patriarchy. Do you not see what this “philosophy” has done? It has turned all discourse into a game of power and made philosophy impossible, made moral values impossible to delimit, even on issues we all instinctively know are wrong.

So as Marx applied this inverted dialectic to master-slave distinction,* so Foucault to madness-reason, so critical gender theorists to man-woman, etc.-- all to the same end; to the end of making the discourse of the Logos unreadable, thereby reducing all dialogue to a game of power and making it impossible to defend any laws or moral values as anything more than arbitrary impositions of power, even moral values as obvious as ‘sex with kids is wrong’.

  • The ‘class struggle’[/size]

There’s no emotion or ad hominem in any of that.

K: and that is fucking fantastic that there is no emotion or Ad hominem in your argument…

the problem is that Foucault really doesn’t engage with Marx… he is much
more engaged with Nietzsche or Sartre…for example Foucault idea about
power is derived more from Nietzsche then it is from Marx… now, with that said,
virtually every single French thinker in the 20th century had to come to some
conclusion about Marx…and thus he did join the French communist party, I
can’t remember the year off of my head, but anyway, he was a member for only
a year or two…Marx didn’t really do anything for Foucault and it wasn’t a
major influence on his thinking as it was for other French thinkers…Sartre for
example…recall the statement that I wrote out…

" I belong to that generation who, as students, had before their eyes, and
were limited by, a horizon consisting of Marxism, phenomenology and
existentialism. For me the break was first Beckett’s ''Waiting for Godot",
that was a breathtaking performance." Foucault in 1983

notice he doesn’t say he was a Marxist, but that was one of the few possibilities
available to him as a student…and he wasn’t a Marxist.

Kropotkin

“the problem is that Foucault really doesn’t engage with Marx… he is much
more engaged with Nietzsche or Sartre…for example Foucault idea about
power is derived more from Nietzsche then it is from Marx”

“his idea of power is derived more from …” No it isn’t. Not that it would matter because Nietzsche’s genealogy of the master-slave struggle is a proto-Marxist manifestation of what became the materialist dialectic of history in the struggle between the genders, the classes, between reason and madness, between the races, black and white, gay and straight, go down the list and plug in whatever bullshit you want into it, it’s still the materialist dialectic of history. And it’s irrelevant if he did not explicitly engage with Marx. None of these critical race theorists explicitly invoke him and his terms but nonetheless, even if they are not aware of where their ‘ideas’ come from, their deep-theory or their wider implications, it is Marxism in a twisted form speaking through them like a ventriloquist and his puppet. Most promulgators of this mind-virus are puppets anyway, by definition. It doesn’t matter if he explicitly engages with Marx, he is doing the exact same mental juggling act Marx and every other subscriber to material dialectics did and does, here, I’ll show you:

[i]Foucault’s analysis of the dialectic of reason and madness amounts to: there’s an instability in the flow of history between these two concepts, because the perfect human nature embodied in all men is limited to material forms based on what time we are born into and the social relations defining it. Those relations privilege one group over another; the privileged group calls their privilege ‘reason’ and deems anything threatening to it to be ‘madness’ so that it can then impose its will upon and restrain that madness, constituting for Foucault an arbitrary imposition of the discourse of Logos on human nature itself. All moral constraint is a manifestation of this materialist-dialectical force, and must be rejected, even something as basic as: children don’t have the fuckin brain capacity to give consent.

Marx’s analysis of the dialectic of the class struggle amounts to: there’s an instability in the material distribution of the productive modes, which expresses itself as the social relations of production. While human nature is perfected within all men as species-essence, (Marx believed all men could simultaneously be poet, scientist, philosopher, mathematician, warrior, hunter, doctor, etc. and the only reason 90 percent of humanity really only does one thing, and poorly, isn’t because of something like they have non-genius IQs, but just this class struggle ‘alienating’ them from their own species-essence.) it is forced to assume distorted limited forms based on the social relations its born into and the emergent ‘division of labor’ in industrialist society. These relations privileges one class which then champion their own distortion and limitation as virtue, hypostasize it as an ideal to strive for, and then immobilize the workers into accepting their own ill fate as a consequence of their own economic failures they could improve if they just worked harder,- a condition of Marx calls the ‘false-consciousness’ that keeps the masses from realizing their own emancipatory potential.

Feminists’ analysis of the male-female dialectic as a gender war amounts to: there’s a sexually undifferentiated ‘liberal human nature’ that gets born into relational schemes formed between the genders throughout history, which in most cases are patriarchal relations constituting subjugation, such that all gender roles or hierarchical organizations of those roles amounts to, as it does in the other two examples, arbitrary impositions of power upon the under-privileged side of the ‘social relations of production.’

Critical race theorists’ analysis of the white-minorities dialectic or race-struggle amounts to … Yeah do I need to go on, or do you see the pattern? [/i]

This is not reason, it’s not philosophy: it is sophism, and those using it are the modern day equivalent of what Socrates called sophists. This device, the material dialectic, is a weapon used to fragmentate society into cross-competing trialist camps all at war with each other. Its proliferation as a mind-virus is encouraged by political-corporate elite to render the masses more amenable to otherwise untenable programmes whose goals are wholly at odds with their own interests as a populace: the varied forms of this dialectic are used to render the malignant goals of the political-corporate elite too ambiguous to be understood by most people, and so the globalist machine keeps marching forward unchecked. Incapable of generating new ideas on its own, the only thing this materialist-dialectic can do is level the field of discourse and reduce all other ideas to material games of power, arbitrary impositions of the privileged on the under-privileged, etc. And that is the crucial point. It cannot create new intellectual content, it can only level, reduce, and destroy the intellectual content whose analysis it is submit to, and if unchecked, will in fact simply corrode the entire Western discourse and reduce our most important institution, academia, to a completely brainwashed mind-melding factory that pumps out politically identical ideologues instead of free thinkers… oh wait, that already happened.

So when you asked me why I get so heated, well I don’t so much hate this stuff as I am disgusted by it. I don’t ‘hate’ dog shit, because hate makes us level with the object of our hate. No, I am just disgusted by it and would rather not step in it. So too, with me toward Foucault: also, his deconstruction of consent law and his actual encouragement of child predation especially irks me, being very close to someone who had that happen to them in the past and still lives with the scars. And as to deconstructionists in general, well I am viscerally opposed toward them for all the reasons I just laid out here, mainly because it’s literally ensuring the extinction of the very idea of freedom of thought and individualism, and guaranteeing the total dystopian future and ‘End of History’.

In reading Foucault, I came to this point…

People talk/write about the transcendental viewpoint… this word, transcendental
means universal…as in a transcendental morality, a universal morality that covers
all human beings…but we are in fact, limited human beings… we are limited
by our nature… our faculties: our senses which are limited… our sight, hearing,
touch, smell, and taste… we need machines to explore that which lies outside of
our senses… thus we have microscopes and telescopes and stethoscopes and
glasses and hearing aids… we need these devices to aid us
in increasing our very limited range of our senses…

we are limited in our ability to gain knowledge… we are not born with all the
knowledge of the universe or even the knowledge needed to survive,
as animals are born with the knowledge needed to survive in instincts…
our instincts are very limited… (there is that word again)

I can only run so fast and I can only jump so high and I can only read so fast,
my abilities are limited… everything about a human being is limited…
at no point can we achieve anything resembling a transcendental/universal
action…

and yet, somehow, given these incredible limitations, we can reach a
universal/transcendental morality… or a universal/transcendental knowledge
of any kind… we are far too limited to achieve any kind of transcendental
knowledge…(now some may say, that is the point of god… to give us
transcendental/universal knowledge of morality/ethics… the problem there
is this… if we are so limited in nature as to not be able to achieve any
kind of transcendental/universal knowledge, how are we able to then understand
god and his transcendental/universal knowledge? I don’t see how a limited
viewpoint can understand a universal viewpoint)…there is no way to connect
our limited viewpoint with any type of universal/transcendental viewpoint…
how would we make that connection give our limited nature?

if we are limited in ability and understanding, then we are limited in
our understanding and knowledge…

no such thing as our having any type/sort of transcendental knowledge…
we simply can’t go from point A to point B.

and our limitation are not just in understanding a universal/transcendental
viewpoint, but we have limitations in language, science, philosophy,
history, ethics, economics, political science… so on…

our very language limits us… do we have a universal/transcendental
language, science, philosophy, history, political science?

do we have transcendental ism’s, religions, prejudices, biases, superstitions?

not in the least…we are not united in our viewpoints but separated in our viewpoints
because we are limited in our understanding of the universe/world…

the world looks fracture and separated because of our limitations in
understanding, our limitations in our senses, our limitations in
how much we can grasp of the world, let me make this clear…
as my hearing loss is based on the higher decibels, which means I cannot
hear, without my hearing aid, higher pitches things like flutes, violin’s, certain phones,
women’s voices, whistles… when not wearing my hearing aid, I have been known
to stand next to a ringing phone and not hear it…I am limited to hearing the
lower pitches in sound range… and that is similar to our limitations we have
as human beings…limitations in understanding and how much we can grasp
of the world…and so, this vast human limitation is why the world looks
so fractured…no matter how hard we try, we are unable to connect the dots
of who we are and what it means to be human…what does it mean to be human?

what is the work around for our immense limitations, in knowledge, intelligence,
senses, understanding? I think there is but one work around, that is of
instead of one, we become two…in other words, we work with others to
fill in our gap, our limitations… whereas I can’t hear, another can hear for me,
and whereas they might not be able to read, I can read for them…

the answer to our limitations lies in human cooperation and working together
to overcome our limitations… I can’t run a 5 minute mile, anymore, but
someone out there can, but maybe they can’t understand Nietzsche, but I can…
we fill in each other limitations… and by adding a third person, we can fill in even more
limitations we have in knowledge, intelligence, understanding, senses, talents…
I cannot sing, but others can sing…thus we find ourselves working within a choir,
and this choir is not just about singing but about filling in our limitations…
I work out problems in philosophy and others use their skills/senses to work
out math and between the two of us, we can increase our understanding, knowledge,
that we cannot do as individuals…

our limitations don’t need to divide us as much as unite us…

Kropotkin

ok, let me try the above post in a different way…

how are we to understand epistemology given our limitations?

how can we “know” something given our limitations in understanding
and in our facilities? If I can’t hear, then how do I tell the differences
between spoken languages? can I tell the difference between Greek
and German given I can’t hear either one? it would all be, at best,
guesswork…and only possible if, if I engage in a learning how to
read both of them…by reading, I might, might be able to sort out
the difference in speaking between Greek and German…maybe?

given our limitations, intellectually, in senses, in understanding,
in facilities, how are we suppose to grasp such ideas in say, philosophy
like Metaphysics? or even in epistemology… how are we suppose to know
what we can’t know because of our limitations? and what about Aesthetics?
or Ethic/morality? our limitations seem to limit us to a very small area of
understanding in such philosophical matters…little else in such matters in
an engagement with the divine? how do work that out given our limitations?

many hold a certainty, in having certain knowledge that isn’t warranted
by these painfully obvious limitations we have…

much of what we do as human beings in overcoming our limitations,
is to make assumptions…we simply assume a god exists that tells
us things that we cannot know because of our limitations…we escape
holding ‘‘certain’’ knowledge of such things as in Ethics/morality…
by assuming that god holds them for us…and we only need to follow god
to escape our limitations, in epistemology for example…how do we ‘‘know’’
what we know epistemological, without being able to be certain due to our
limitations?

given our vast limitations in our senses and understanding and knowledge,
to name a few of our limitations, how do we ‘‘know what we know?’’

how am to make sense of the universe and my place in the
universe/world given my own limitations?

questions without any real answers…

Kropotkin

so let us try this… can we, given our limitations, understand such questions
as, “What is the meaning of life?”

that question, the meaning of life, cannot be understood as an epistemological question,
because we lack the tools/knowledge necessary to to work out what is the “meaning of life”
so we can rephrase this question as an aesthetic problem or an ethics/moral problem…

is the meaning of life to work out a “beautiful” life… an aesthetically pleasing life?
or an life that is a beauty to behold??? seeing how life does seem to be full of
the “evils” of existence, where even being born is considered to be evil, not
to mention the suffering of disease, old age, death… the evils of existence
that the Buddha pointed out and tried to end by getting everyone to negate
existence by not being born again… to return to the void that we all came from
in which case, we are no longer being born again… I for one, believe that
the "suffering’’ that we go through is part of the ticket to existence that we must pay…
the pain and suffering of being born, of growing old, of disease and of death is
the price of admission to existence…think of existence without those “sufferings” …
life would become boring, not worth living, in fact, one could make a pretty good
argument that the reason life is worth living is because of this “suffering”…
life is given depth and complexity and a point because of this “suffering”
life becomes “dear” when it is faced with the sufferings of existence…

how might one create a life worth living through? we create that by
the suffering we face in that life…my life is infinitely much harder
with my hearing loss, but it also makes my life have more value because
it could have been so much worse, then what I did end up with…
my hearing loss has given my life a complexity that makes it something
special… my hearing loss has given my life a depth and struggle that
has forced me to engage with it in much more detail then had I been born
“Normal”…I cannot take my life for granted because I have fought and worked
and suffered through my hearing loss… every day, every single day of my life
is a struggle to hear… and that means I cannot take this life for granted, something
I might have done if not for my everyday struggles to hear…
it might be said, that my hearing loss has given my life its meaning and value…
perhaps…my life has not been an aesthetic problem because of the struggle
of existence I face every day with my hearing loss…

so I ask now, is the meaning of existence an ethical/moral question?
but again, we run into an epistemological question… how do I know
what the “right” thing to do that will make my life an ethical/or moral
life? how am I to know what is the “right” or “Moral” thing to do?
by what standards are we to explore the question of a moral/ethical life?
and standards imply that this question is an epistemological question,
and not a random question of existence…

so what knowledge will I use to ensure my existence is an ethical/moral one?

I cannot know… and thus, I am without recourse, at least for now, to
an epistemology answer…

Kropotkin

a rare day off…and so we begin…

In thinking about Foucault, we see the text, the book, the lectures, in which
he explores his topics, power, sexuality, knowledge, among other topics…

but we are not just our text, our words, our language, we are also, who we
are, by our lives… in other words, we can “read” a life by the actions and the
type of life one has lived…we can see that Foucault wasn’t particularly
political until 1968…but recall that French intellectuals are, with few
exceptions, engaged in politics…that has been the pattern during the
entire modern era…after the French Revolution…the engagement with
the political by the French intellectual…something we don’t have in
the U.S…and that is something of a loss for us… for we could use
some intellectual engagement with the political…

anyway, how are we going to “read” Foucault’s life?

let us think about the “average” person’s life… it has been said,
that “most people live lives of quiet desperation”

and it is true… we are not ‘‘living’’ human lives… we are not engaged
in any type of exploration of what it means to be human…
how can we, when we spend our days working ourselves to the bone…
we engage in propping up capitalism, making profits, "seeking’’ a living, in
other words, we are engaged in Animal behavior, seeking the means of
continuing existence… nothing more…like animals, we seek to put food
on the table and keep a roof over our head’s…that is animal existence,
nothing more…there is no ‘‘human’’ engagement with the questions of
existence…

the so called Kantian questions of existence, ‘‘who am I?’’ ‘‘what am I to do?’’
‘‘What values should I hold?’’ ‘‘What should I believe in?’’ Who has
time to engage in these vital questions when we are too busy
‘‘making a living’’

think of/about those who do ‘‘speak’’ for us? one thing I have noted is that there
are few if any in the public sphere who do as philosophers do, which is
engage in the questioning the the ‘‘status quo’’…questioning the morals, values,
the assumptions, the very direction of the state, the society, the church, and the
family… among other locations of ‘‘power’’…

in other words, dissent is stifled by a cone of silence over their work/voice…
the “official” word offered up by the state/society is the only voice allowed…
those political officials, government agencies, the ones who are “allowed” to
speak, and you never, ever hear about doubt or dissent within the American
landscape… that is forbidden…on either the left or the right…

thus the only system that is promoted is the “failed” system of capitalism…
for that system allows those in power, their power and wealth…
which is the point, not to express freedom or understanding
of what it means to be human, no, the only goal is to
continue the the status quo which allows those in wealth and power to
continue, to remain in wealth and power…

and we never hear about any other choices or possibilities for human
beings…recall that 95% of all media, of ALL media, is owned by
6 media corporations… and those who benefit from owning those
multi billion dollars corporations, will not allow any dissent to
go over the airways, so to protect their massive interest in
maintaining and controlling the economy…

in other words, the corporate overlords will not allow dissent
in any type of platform to give the American people a choice
in what type of government or economy that we have…

there is but one voice and that voice is of those who own
the means of production…and no other voice is allowed…

and that is the value of Foucault… he spoke out, said what
was on his mind… he wasn’t silenced by the official media
that goes out of its way to silence any dissent of business or
capitalism…or any dissent of what it means to be human…
which in the minds of the corporate overlords means to
work for the continue growth of those who own the means
of production…people only have value as workers, producers
and consumers… that is our only value because that puts
money into the pockets and power in the pockets of
those who own the means of production…
and that is what counts, not us human beings or what we might
be or become… our only value is to increase the GDP… and we
have no other value… at least according to the media, which is nothing
more then a means to give propaganda to its workers about what it means to
be human…

Kropotkin

Foucault offers us his life as an example of the possibilities that exists
out there/in here…

I take courage and look at my life…I am not interested as Foucault is in
sexuality as a “limit experience” an experience from which we can learn
what it means to be human…my life, properly understood, isn’t any
type of monument to dissent, for I did engage in dissent for many years,
as an anarchist’s, and the fact is, no one noticed and no one cared…

my life, properly understood is a life where I only had value as an
worker, consumer, producer… and I had no other value… my value
was only as as one of the millions who perpetuated the nihilism of society
only interested in the pursuit of profits… and nothing else…

and I played my role of producer, worker and consumer… now as a
checker in a major supermarket… one of thousands whose only value
is to engage in the pursuit of profits… and I have no other value…
either of being engaged in the Kantian questions of existence, “Who am I?”
“What does it mean to be human?” “what values should I engage with?”
or engaged with the questions of existence that ALL human beings should
engage with…if I meet my goal of basic human existence which is
the procurement of my daily needs to exist, then what is next?

let me explain… I, as a human being, as a member of life, must
seek out food, water, shelter, education, health care… as a condition to
my continued existence…in order to continue to exists, I must meet
my basic bodily needs that all of life must engage with… be it a dog, or a cow
or a cat or a microbe… the drive to continue our existence is the strongest
drive that all of life has…evolution has put into our own software,
the need to continue to exist… that is perhaps, the fundamental drive
of existence… to continue to exist…for all living things…

and I too, have been engaged in that fundamental drive of existence
by working all my life…but I ask… is that all there is to human existence?

is our human existence defined by our basic human/living drive to continue existence?
or, or do we have a larger possibility, availability to us?

or said another way, we have the possibility to ask ourselves/others…
what is the meaning of life? we are, as far as a I know, the only species
that can ask that question of ourselves… but why do we walk away from
our possibilities of questioning who we are? we accept that we exist
for the perpetuation of a deeply flawed economic/political system…
as workers, producers and consumers… but must we accept that is
our only possibility?

my value as a living being isn’t found in being a worker, producer,
consumer… my values as a living being, as a human being, lies in
my ability to question my own existence beyond just being a worker,
producer and consumer…my ability to gather the basic necessities
of existence isn’t the end of my possibilities but rather it is the
starting point of my possibilities…I seek out the basic necessities of
existence, food, water, shelter, health care, education and then I seek
out the next level of existence, which is seeking love, belonging, of
safety/security, of both the physical and mental/emotional necessities
of existence… for we must more human in seeking out
what is possible for us as human beings…in other words, engage
in the possibilities of what it means to be human… to rise above
just being animals and seeking the bare, minimum necessities of
existence which is the physical needs of life… food, water etc, etc…

in being only workers, producers and consumers, we are engaged in the
bottom rung of our possibilities… we are not engaged in anything above
our basic seeking necessities… when we could be engage in something more…
so my life as workers, producer and consumer has been a wasted life because
I didn’t engage with or was seeking that which is beyond just seeking
my bodily needs… I didn’t seek my potential, my possibilities as a human being,
and thus my life as a waste of existence…as I didn’t engage in the important
questions of existence as I should have, the Kantian questions …

''Who am I?" “What am I to do?” ''What values should I hold?“…
''What does it mean to be human?” ''What is the point of existence?"

Because I didn’t engage in those vastly more important questions of existence,
I wasted my life… instead I was just a worker, producer, and consumer…
I wasted my possibilities of becoming something more then just
a worker, producer, a consumer… I could have become something
akin to a human being by seeking out the questions of existence…

thus Foucault and others, those who spend their lives thinking, understanding,
working out the human possibilities of existence, in becoming more then
just a worker, producer, a consumer… that is the value of their life…
in showing us what is possible for us as human beings… something greater
then just being cannon fodder for a society/state that only values
us as cannon fodder… to provide the state/society with profits…
as our only value as a human being according to the state/society…

I, as a human being, have greater value then the dehumanization, the devaluation
of human beings that currently exists in America today as being a worker,
producer and a consumer…

as always, my goal isn’t to provide us with answers, yet, no my goal is to simply
wake us up to what it means, as currently provided, what it means to be human…we
cannot, cannot escape our current fate until we become aware of what the state/society
is doing to us… we must become aware before we can even begin to think about
making changes…to become “woke” to the real possibilities of what it means to
be human… something more then just seeking the basic necessities of existence,
to putting food on our table…we are greater then that… if only we truly believe that…

Kropotkin

K asks :

"or said another way, we have the possibility to ask ourselves/others…
what is the meaning of life? "

youtu.be/vabfV4HRvRY

K: as I have noted before, I don’t “do” youtube… if you have something to say,
say it… otherwise I will ignore anything found on Youtube…

Kropotkin

Sorry K, I didn’t realize, …

let us look at our “hero’s” who do we as Americans celebrate?

let us look at the Current news, we see news about Gates, Buffett,
Bezo’s and we see the fascination with celebrities… almost all of whom,
are vastly wealthier then the average person…the Kardashian’s, Taylor Swift,
bill gates/Buffett, Bezos… are all over 100 million dollars in wealth…

in other words, we can say, all my hero’s are the wealthy…
and this is the same with our “sports” hero’s… Tom Brady is
worth millions as is Messi and Ronaldo, Xavi, Ibrahimovic…
all of our sports “hero’s” are worth millions…
does there seem to be a connection?

the common theme, the lowest common denominator" is wealth in our
“Hero’s”… we value/worship wealth and not the individual person…

do we devote time, money, effort and worship to those who think for us,
or value those who contemplate what it means to be human?

of course not, they don’t ''contribute" to the GDP… and thus are beneath
notice…in fact, anybody who wonders about the questions of existence,
are not even denied, but they are simply ignored… there interest in
what it means to be human is simply ignored and put into its place are
those who value and contribute to the GDP…wealth and the pursuit of
wealth is what is valued in America today and that is what is worth
the worship in America…not the value of contemplation, but of making
money/profits that is values in America today…

my own personal hero’s are not Gate’s or Buffett or Bezos, but
Kant, Socrates, Nietzsche, Spinoza, Foucault… not because of
their contribution to the glory offered by a greater increase in
the GDP, but because they looked at what it means to be human
and what does it take to go from animal to animal/human to finally
becoming fully human…far more important questions than how do
we increase the GDP?

who are your hero’s? and what does that say about you?

Kropotkin

to offer up another perspective, the American understanding of morals/ethics
lies in the pursuit of wealth… those who are wealthy, are moral/ethical…
we see morality and ethics in light of wealth… not in terms of actions or
belief, but in terms of “working hard” and gaining wealth…

we put into ethical/moral terms the pursuit of wealth in which one is “rewarded”
by keeping our nose to the grindstone, to make the nature of human existence
being the strict pursuit of work… we value those who make work, the
necessary/transcendental meaning of existence…
we find our own salvation in the strict value of hard work… and we put hard work,
as close to god as we do in worship… the American vision of seeking
salvation and liberation and redemption in our vision of reaching heaven,
which is the accumulation of wealth by hard work… in other words,
we seek heaven by working toward wealth which is gained by hard work…

wealth is only found in hard work, so say the prophets…
Gates, Buffett, Bezos…we must emulate those who have achieved
the pearly gates of heaven by trying to reach their vast wealth…
wealth is the way of salvation and redemption in the modern world…

those who avoid hard work are forbidden from reaching heaven…
and shunned by the followers of redemption and wealth…

all bow down and pray to the almighty lord, Mammon…
to whom we give thanks and promise our eternal souls…
amen…

Kropotkin

so let us investigate this moral/ethical side of America…

in most of America, Homosexuality has been deemed immoral/unethical…
but why is that?

we can learn a truth about America and its values right here…

Homosexuality is deemed to be immoral/unethical not because the
sexual act between two men is immoral or unethical but because it
doesn’t contribute to the real ethical/moral value of America which
is the pursuit of wealth… in other words, homosexuality is deemed
immoral because it doesn’t contribute to the GDP… it isn’t in the pursuit
of wealth and thus is immoral/unethical… sex is deemed to be moral/ethical
if if helps contribute to the wealth of the nation…

only that which profits the god of Mammon is deemed to be ethical/moral…
if it doesn’t increase the GDP, is is considered to be immoral/unethical…
the highest value in America is to produce, work, consume… any other value
is deemed to be unethical/immoral…

morality/ethics is viewed through the lens of its economic contribution to
America, not by its its own virtues or values… but does it contribute to
the GDP? and we accept or deny actions and values based on whither they
contribute to the highest value in the land, the GDP…

all hail Mammon… the true god of America…

Kropotkin

Foucault from the very beginning of his life, would
think about death… he felt that life was defined by death…
Foucault tried to commit suicide multiple times even while a youth…

unlike Foucault, I don’t praise death nor do I fear it…
I see death as the price to admission of existence…
if you want to exist, you must suffer the “ILL’S” of existence,
as the Buddha said, you are born, grow old, disease, and then finally death…

I see these thing as natural things… nothing to run away from and nothing
to glorify either…they exists and we must deal with them as best we can…

I have "“suffered” as described by the Buddha… and I am not interested in
escaping that “suffering”… it just is… I was born… I am growing old, I have
suffered illness… several surgeries, and I shall at some point in time, die…
I don’t fear that coming death… death is the exact same thing as puberty or
growing old… just another human experience…I could get all worked up
about these natural things that is suffering, birth, old age, illness/disease, and finally
death… but why get worked up about something that I have no control over?

just accept that which is going to happen, regardless of how I feel about it…

major philosophers have suggested that we philosophize to overcome our fear
of death… the entire point of philosophy is to engage with death… I would
rather engage in philosophy in hopes of engaging in something I have some control over,
life…

life is… and who cares what death is?.. I don’t…

waste your days on a fixation on death… I would rather fixate
on what is life… and what does it mean to be human…

Kropotkin

in reading Foucault, one “inches” toward an idea…
that what we consider to be transcendental/universal idea’s, aren’t…

an example of this is the transcendental/universal idea that we have involving
such behavior as incest and pornography and Pedophilia…

we assume that there is an transcendental/universal prohibition/law against
such practices… and yet historically, we know of societies that practiced all three…
incest was practiced by both the Pharaohs in Egypt and the line of the Habsburgs
that ruled much of Europe for centuries…we know that the Greeks practiced
Pedophilia and we can turn on the TV for “pornography”…

so show me how the universal prohibition/law against incest, pornography and
pedophilia? In other words, where is it written that those three things
are universal/transcendental? and I think it was Foucault’s point that what
we take as universal/transcendental is really just a local historical, cultural,
bias that we have assumed to be universal/transcendental…

now should there be laws against all three? Yes, I agree, but let us be clear
on what grounds we are banning them…we disapprove not on
universal/transcendental grounds, but on local, historical, culturally grounds…

which means these laws are not written on stone… they are simply
historical and culturally based laws…which means that, it is possible,
in the future, we might allow one or more of these actions…

as an example, look at what has happened with homosexuality…
within my lifetime, it has gone from being against the law to being
legal in every state…who is to say that won’t happen with
the three topics at hand…and yet, I am not arguing for or against such
laws as a matter of fact… I am pointing out that what we hold to be
transcendental/universal, is in fact, isn’t…as a society, we can
hold beliefs, the same as an individual, beliefs that are prejudiced,
bias, superstitious, illogical and just plan stupid… we must engage
in a reevaluation of values, both personally and collectively…what laws
do we hold on the books that exists because of some collective prejudice
and bias? until we examine, both ourselves and the society, we cannot know…

the unexamined life isn’t worth living…

Kropotkin

so in line with the prior post, I think that we should examine
our “American” values… in other words, what we hold as
purely American values are really just nothing more then
our cultural, local, habits… biases, prejudices, superstitions
pretending to be universal/transcendental…
they could be the values of a local subgroup like the
values presented by Hollywood or values presented by
our media which is 95% owned by 5 corporations…and their values seems to
be pretty monolithic… but they aren’t transcendental… biased, yes, prejudice, yes
but not universal…

so what we hold to be universal/transcendental, for example, the “superiority” of
capitalism is really just superstition, bias, prejudice of the local group pushing
that ism’s or ideology… in other words, the owners of the means of production
also own the media and it is in their best interest to promote and push the
ism of capitalism… not for us, but for them…as to allow them to hold
and maintain power, wealth…their promotion of capitalism has nothing to
do with our best interest, but with their best interest…

to understand that capitalism is a local, biased, prejudice also means
that what we understand as ism’s and ideologies, such as communism,
socialism, Catholicism, Hinduism, any ism, is also a local, historical,
biased, prejudiced, cultural system of the moment… formed by
forces within a cultural and state that is some solution to a local,
problem… in other words, our ism’s that seem to be universal/transcendental
really just began as an “ad hoc” solution to some local, historical, cultural problem…

Marx can pretend all he wants that communism is an universal/transcendental
solution to a problem but is is strictly based on local, conditions and is “ad hoc”
based on problem that Marx saw in his times, but not based on any type of
universal/transcendental rule or law…

the creation of ism’s and ideologies are simply “ad hoc” solutions to
local historical problems…

and once the problem that the ism was meant to solve goes away,
the solution, the ism has no more value…this is one reason why
catholicism seemed like a good solution because it was based
on local, historical problems but once those local, historical problems
went away, catholicism no longer had any value…thus we can explain
the loss of faith in religions and god in the 20th century…

the problems they solved were gone and new problems were created
which meant new solutions were needed… not the old solutions of
catholicism or Buddhism but the new solutions of capitalism and
communism…and they are nothing more then “Ad hoc” solutions
to our current modern problems…and once those problems
go away, our need for those “ad hoc” solutions go away…
thus capitalism will go away as will communism, once the
problems they were meant to solve go away…

Kropotkin

let us look at one aspect of Foucault… his sexuality…

he was a homosexual who also engaged in S& M…Sadism and Masochism…

if we understand the ism’s and ideologies of a time and place to be
none transcendental/universal… then that means how we feel and think
and more importantly engage with sex, is defined by the local, historical,
cultural aspects of the society/culture at hand… in other words, how I
think about sex, is defined by the rules and obligations given
by the society I live in…certain sexual practices are allowed,
certain sexual practices are not allowed and all of it based on
how the society/culture defines it…which has an historical,
economic, social and political aspect to it…

our sexual practices, are not based on transcendental/universal idea’s
of what is “Proper” sex is… because there isn’t a transcendental/universal
idea of sex and what it entails or engages with…

for example, depending on the time, place and culture involved,
Adultery was not only acceptable but was encouraged… but today,
we don’t condone or accept Adultery… given that at times, adultery
was acceptable and at other times it wasn’t acceptable, how can we
determine that Adultery, for or against, has some transcendental/universal law?

to return to Foucault, I would suspect that he felt his practice of sexual actions
an engagement with S & M, is not only acceptable but is in fact, a
philosophical research project…into the far reaches of how we understand
sex…

one way that we can understand philosophical matters is to push those
matters all the way to their conclusion…On ILP, we have engaged
in such a practice when we push the concepts of day to day life into
its extremes… like the very long thread about “Gay incest” that at one time,
was the rage of ILP… we sought to understand an idea by pushing that
idea to the very brink of what it means…
and this was Foucault idea in his engagement with S & M… push the
boundaries of what is acceptable in sexual practices within a society…

recall that all of our idea’s, ism’s and ideologies including matters of sex
are local, historical, based on that society time and place… not
based on what we would think of as transcendental/universal… but historical
based on the society at hand…

we have the Marquis de Sade who created the theory of such practices
as S & M… we can see that he could not have written his works
any earlier because of the local, historical, cultural bias that limited
such writings… De Sade was a product of his times… and he could
not have existed before his time…now days, his writing is boring
and badly written…but again, his writing face the local, historical,
time and place in which we exist… and it seems to be… not of much interest…

so we have passed beyond, way, way beyond de Sade… and that say much
about where we are today socially, culturally and historically…

which “proves” that matters like sex are really just locally, historically,
culturally, politically and philosophically based on how we understand
sex today…there is no transcendental/universal understanding of
sex or homosexuality or marriage or morality or ethics or anything else
we base our behavior or actions or theory upon…all of our understanding
of what it means to be human and human actions like sex are really just
“ad hoc” understanding of the “human condition”…

Kropotkin

in reading philosophy, one notices that all philosophers call
for change… that has been one of, if not the vocation of
philosophers since the beginning of time, since Socrates,
and the call to change has lasted until Marx, Nietzsche,
and of course, Foucault…

change, become something different…but the question then becomes,
change into what? what are we to become?
we know so little as we don’t even understand how change is done…
for example, scientific change wasn’t even a question until Kuhn
write his book, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” written in 1962…
within my lifetime…

we can follow this path of change in reading about the history of evolution,
from before Darwin to such writers as Gould…how evolution itself,
went from being slow, methodical, quiet, to Gould “Punctuated Equilibrium”
which said that there was “sudden” burst of evolution, that evolution
wasn’t as slow and methodical as Darwin painted it…

so, we are here, and how do we go to there? the question then ask,
well ok, where is here and then, where is there? Once again the question
has been asked, where exactly are we going? This question has been quite
frequently asked…for example, Marx wrote that the creation of the
“working state”, one where the workers own the means of production
and not the capitalist, at that point, according to Marx, was the last
day of history… and he was wrong…for Marxism and the workers
state are both just temporary moments in history and will pass on,
leading us to another state and another state and another state…

this thinking about the “last Man” is nonsense… because if there is one,
one thing we know about history, is that it changes, all the time… the question
has been how does it change? and what changes should we embrace and what changes
should we avoid? what is called for and Kuhn got the ball moving is this question
of change itself…

we have seen change in history… for example, the change in France from
the monarchy to the rise of the French Republic to the dictatorship of Napoleon…
so exactly how do we account for the change in France from 1789
to 1801?

recall that Napoleon wasn’t really on the scene until 1796…so we cannot
use him as a springboard to understanding the change in France during those
years…

we could use as possibilities for the change in France as one of several different
factors… the bad weather which caused several famines in France during those
years, the effects of the 1000 year old monarchy which no longer took notice
of, or cared about the vast majority of the population of France, the peasants…
the bewildering array of local and state wide taxes which dominated the peasant’s
life…the effects of the movement of the Enlightenment… where, however dimly,
that the peasant came to realize that they could become something else beside
just being peasants all their lives…the French revolution began as a movement,
not lead by anyone in particular… the beginning action was the storming of
the Bastille… which had no leader and was driven by decades, if not centuries
of “people living lives of quiet desperation” and finally having enough…

“we have been pushed almost to the brink of devastation and we will take no more”

seems to be the attitude of those who stormed the Bastille…all we have left is our lives
and that doesn’t seem to matter to anyone outside of us… “we have nothing left to live for”
might be the belief of the average person engaged in the storming of the Bastille…
whatever the cause or causes, it was enough to cause the death of the monarch
Louis 16, 4 years later…

but were the massive changes in France the changes they needed to make?

clearly the country as a whole agreed to some degree with the wholesale changes
made over the next decade till the return of the monarchy with Napoleon in 1801…

entire books have been written about the French revolution and its causes…
and I certainly won’t solve that issue in one post, but it does offer us a glimpse of
how change works and its nature…

so the question facing us today is this… what change should we engage
with and why that change? if the study of philosophy is to encourage change,
then what change should we engage in?

or should we stick with the Status quo? the amount of the undercurrent of
discontentment in the Status quo seems to preclude any possibility of
standing still… we can see this discontentment with the refusal of
people to go back to the sweat shops of retail and restaurants in which
businesses are engaged in being a poverty exploiters, not a job creators…
where I saw one ad that, as condition of working, required an degree
and several years of working, just to be offered 13 bucks an hour…
your basic starvation level paycheck…

the modern sentiment that one is “lucky” to have a job is no longer
true…why should I consider myself “lucky” to have a job that
doesn’t even pay the rent?
I would walk away from my job in a heartbeat given half a chance…
and I believe so would millions upon millions of people would do the same
if given half the chance… that isn’t a group that is happy and content with life as is…
if we are willing to walk away from jobs…

so right now, right here, change is required, demanded but what change
is deemed necessary… from what to what, becomes the question…

if we don’t have jobs, then what?
the solution seems to be on the easy side, pay people a living wage,
one in which people don’t need to dance on the edge of starvation…
pay at least $25 dollars an hour… but Kropotkin, business will go out of
business… at this point, I really don’t care… if all they do is engage in
exploiting people to hold jobs that won’t even pay the rent, then I am not
interested in keeping those businesses…

so the overall question lies in something more then just wages and benefits,
the question is really this, how are we going to treat people?
are we going to continue to dehumanize and diminish people in the name
of capitalism? are people an end or are they a means? using people to
becoming wealthy off the work of them is using people as an means,
offering them a living wage, enough for them to survive on, that is an
engagement with people as an end…

so, once again, I ask… what changes and why those changes and not
other changes?

Kropotkin

let us think about illness… let us follow Socrates when
he said that a philosopher is an doctor… an doctor of the soul…
let us take that seriously…during those years of philosophy,
the entire Greek philosophical time, one of the critical
points of philosophy driven by Socrates, was this conviction
that a philosophy was a doctor who by “diagnostics”
aim to “cure” a society of its illness… a philosopher was
a type of doctor…

let us use the idea today… we see the “body” of society…
in other words, let us take, as a body, the society, the state…

how do we know when the state/society is ill? as with any body,
including my own and yours, we know a body is ill when it has a fever,
a higher temperature then normal… so how can we know when the society/state
has a fever? a higher then normal temperature?

we look into history… we see that before the French revolution,
the body, the state/society/culture didn’t have a fever which we can
formulate as being actions out of normal… we see the storming of the
Bastille as being a high fever… and the entire French Revolution as
being a high temperature… which didn’t cool until the end of the
Napoleonic period, 1815 and later…we see that return to “normalcy”
as being a return to “good health” and in France as in Europe as a whole,
the temperature was normal until 1848… when a fever once again returned…

we see small spikes of a temperature rise in 1870 and then a
complete illness beginning in 1914… we see such things as wars
and other such events as an illness… the temperature rising causing
an adverse reaction… we can see the Holocaust as being another “illness”
events such as normalizing such events as being ill…
when an event such as the Holocaust seems normal, then is when
one is severally ill…so we can judge the events of the 1960’s as
being ill… when event unfold outside the normal course of events…
think of the street demonstrations and such events as gay rights and
women liberation and the civil rights movement as having an illness,
a high fever… now this isn’t to think of these events as being wrong or
bad or terrible, they aren’t but they exists outside of the normal course of events…
think of the stability of the 1950’s as a base line for being “healthy”… of course
there was the nascent civil right movement and the beginning of the women’s right
movement… but those are surely signs of an illness being formed… as a prelude
to an illness like when we feel short of energy as a prelude to an oncoming illness…

the illness of societies being demonstrated by actions and events outside the normal
course of day to day life…if this were true, then the entire 60’s was an time of
illness and high temperature…we then reduced the fever during the 1970’s
and killed the illness during the 1980’s… but at what cost? that is the problem,
if untreated, an illness will come back stronger and even more deadlier then before…
and we see this coming true…we can see that the actions of one of the worst presidents
in American history, Ronald Raygun, has cause, in part, the illness of today…

we can see the damage done by Raygun during the 1980’s infecting us today…
part of the “modern” illness comes from the full on attack upon the middle class
and working poor, the unions, the complete abandonment of the entire
black community to its fate… we see minorities suffering, even today, from the
wholesale attack upon the minorities communities… the motto, “Just say No” is
one such attack on the black community… tying the drug epidemic
to the blacks for example… to say “just say no” is an attempt to
hold the blacks responsible for the entire drug epidemic… and we
still are suffering, blacks and whites from this casting of blame…

so we come to today… we can see the new high temperature coming into
play during the rise of the racist GOP and their normalizing of bigotry,
prejudice, superstitions, bias, and an all out attack on the beliefs
of the enlightenment… no more do we hold to rational, logical,
behavior and thought…we hold to what we belief in as the “truth”
and this is an illness, an fever…for example, those who hold to the
“truth” that IQ45 won the 2020 election, that is an illness, an high fever…
and so we can see that half the country is sick with fever and illness,
because they have abandoned any attempt to hold to rational, logical,
thought…what they believe in is more important then any attempt to
think of an rational, logical solution…

or to put this another way, the need for emotionalism, to engage
in the Romanticism way of the heart is to engage in
irrationality and that irrationality is a sign of a high fever…

to hold in beliefs that make no attempt to be true or reasonable is to engage
in irrational thought… in other words, to engage in irrational conspiracy
theories that have no basis in fact, for example that the Jews have some
sort of space lazar that causes forest fires is a sign of an illness, of a high
fever…because there are no facts that support such a belief…

think about it this way, when ill, when having a high fever often
brings about in a person, beliefs or hallucinations that can only be explained
by the high fever or illness… and holding to such beliefs as IQ45 won 2020 or
that there is some “deep state” conspiracy theory, means one is in the grip
of a illness cause by a high fever which allow someone to hold such
hallucinations…

the philosopher as a doctor, in curing illness of the soul, should we
then administer new therapies that bring about the health of the
individual/society/state in question or should we simple wait for the fever to break
on its own as fevers quite often do?

this illness will eventual break, that much is clear, and the society/state
will return to its “normal” beliefs and activities of a illness free society/state…

think of the Obama years or the Clinton years… our temperature was normal
and we didn’t have spikes of high fever as we do today…

so the question becomes, how do we reduce the high fevers of trumpism
and the conspiracy nuts who are clearly in the throes of an illness?

Kropotkin