a new understanding of today, time and space.

so once again to return to this question of
our political, philosophical and religious beliefs…
and how we come to hold them…

as I have noted before, we are indoctrinated into a set collection
of beliefs that our society, our family, our religion, our state holds…

as I was born in 1959 in the upper Midwest, because of those very
facts, I was indoctrinated into certain beliefs that others born in
the south or the west or on the east coast wouldn’t hold to…

the question is not whether we are indoctrinated, that is a given,
no, the question becomes what do we do to overcome our indoctrinations…

today I hold X, Y and Z beliefs… how much of those beliefs are
part of my childhood indoctrinations and how much are my beliefs
really my own, given that I have overcome my childhood beliefs to
a point… Now in my own family, my mom believes in some sort of
god, where as three of her kids do not and I am one, one sibling kinda, sorta believes
and one totally and completely believes…how do we get from having
the same family to having such a wide spread belief system?

I must note that the 5 children were born over a 25 year stretch and
three different states… family believer was born right in the middle,
3 of 5…to keep track, I am the second of 5…

once again to keep track, my brother is a science/computer geek,
he has a grad degree from the university of Chicago, I am a philosopher/
historian, the soft sciences, my younger sister is a psychologist… so within
one family, you can have a wide spread belief system…
one is retired trying to become mayor of a small Midwest town,
and the other sells houses, the believer…to complete the history…

so how do we, each of us, reach our belief systems given our shared
family history?

so let us look at me… I hold very liberal values, I was an anarchist for
years… roughly 10 years… no one in my family has been or ever will
be as radical as I was…everyone else in my family holds fairly moderate
values with the possible exception of my mom… who might be the second
most radical person in my family… at 85…but she was born during the
depression and thus lived in times that were radical and the country came
as close as it ever did to revolution…

once again, family history must be understood within the overall history of
the town, state and country that one lives in…

my childhood was during the 60’s… I watched TV and heard
Walter Cronkite report the death tolls during the Vietnam war…
and I lived during the era of school drills that had us hiding
under the desk in case of a nuclear war… as if that would do us much good…

I watched TV and saw the entire 60’s play out… I was old enough to have
seen the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show on Feb, 9th, 1964 and I saw
the riots in the streets and the anti-war protests and the marching for
civil rights for the blacks and the women and the gays…

so how much of that plays out in my belief system?

I am a firm believer in the two basic injunctions of philosophy…

One: know thyself

Two: the unexamined life isn’t worth living…

I believe the two injunctions are connected… to know thyself
is to lead a life that is examined… I can only know who I am
by examining who I am and what I hold to be true…

the election of Ronald Raygun radicalized me in ways that no one
else in my family was radicalized…I had lived in California long
enough to see the damage that idiot left here and I was opposed to
him for that reason…it took years for California to recover from
the damage he left…as it has taken years to recover, and in some
ways we still haven’t recovered from the damage his presidency created…

to understand my beliefs deeper, I hold that the collective
is as important as the individual… I cannot hold that the
individual rights are superior to the collective rights…
but I cannot hold that the collective rights are superior
to the individual rights…

Kierkegaard was right to explore the individual aspect of human existence,
but he failed to include the collective aspect as well… you need both to
have a clear understanding of the individual and the collective existence…

for existence is about both the individual and the collective…

I am one and I am part of many…how do we fit the two together?

that is the question we are faced with today…

the conservative holds to the individual and the liberal
holds to the collective… but what is the right balance?

and how do I use my beliefs and value systems to reach
an understanding of that right balance?

I begin with knowing thyself and I examine my life
and my history and my place within the collective…

how will you undertake your understanding of “knowing thyself”
and a understanding of the “examination of existence?”

if the “unexamined life isn’t worth living” how do you understand
what the “examined” life is?

Kropotkin

let us see every age as an attempt to solve the “crisis” of
that age… what is the crisis of our age?

whereas the “kids” around here believe in conspiracy theories
and pedophilia, I hold that the “crisis” of our age lies in more
normal terrain…

we can see our age in terms of several different types of
“crisis”…

one: in terms of understanding how the individual and the collective
fit into each other?

two: we live in “nihilistic” age where systems like capitalism
and communism and Catholicism/ which stands for religions like
Buddhism and Hinduism… promote nihilism that undermines
the values that we should be seeking… which is the positive values
of love, hope, justice, peace, honor… etc, etc…

whereas the current nihilistic systems encourage the negative
values of hate, violence, anger, injustice… etc, etc…

part of the nihilistic systems is the pursuit of negative and false
goals like money, titles, fame, material goods… seeking goals
like these leads us down the nihilistic path… kinda like in Star Wars
where anger leads one down the road of the dark side…

our internal values should dictate to us our actions, not our actions
dictate our values…and this is important…we need values to
dictate to us what our actions should be… so if I hold to love,
then my actions should conform to my value of love…
if I hold to justice, then my actions should conform to the value
of justice…the values decide the actions…

but in our nihilistic society, our pursuit of baubles like wealth
and titles and fame and material goods, decides our values…

such baubles as wealth and titles are empty, valueless…
because they have no goal to reach, no direction that
engages us…they are simply actions that have no goal…

to seek wealth is to seek wealth… there is no other point
to wealth… to seek titles is to seek titles… there is no other point…
to seek material goods has no other point… you simply seek other
material goods and so on and so forth… what is the final value of
seeking material goods? it has no end or point to it…

so we are seeking the wrong thing and that might be another “crisis”
of our age… as I see it to be…

but we have other “crisis” we must face… for example, our
nihilistic system of the pursuit of baubles means that we
have become alienated and disconnected from others
and ourselves…in our seeking this individual goal of
wealth and power and titles and material goods,
we discredit any pursuit of the collective… we speak of
of one, me… instead of pursuing the collective, us…

and once again, what is the proper relationship between
the “me” and the “we”?

in seeking the “ME” instead of the “WE”, we engage in
a form of “Solipsism” that makes the one, “ME” the primary
focus of our attention… we forget that “ME” does not and
cannot be our sole focus of attention…

we survive because of our existence within society, within the “US”…
we cannot survive alone… that is a fact… alone we die…
and so we cannot engage in the mental game of “I” that
separates us and divides into “ME” and the “others”

we need the “OTHERS” to survive… and so we must in some fashion,
include “OTHERS” in our understanding of the world… hence,
we cannot hold to such “SOLISISTIC” values like capitalism and communism
and Buddhism and Catholicism…

It is about “US” and not about the “ME”…

Kropotkin

I have written about one possible means to escape the
“nihilism” that infects our age…here is another possible escape…

by the act of creation… ART… which is the decision between
two or more choices…to decide which path to take is ART…
It is creative…to choose between two philosophies is ART…

and within the act of creation, especially within a conscience
decision to create, lies one possible escape from the Nihilism
of our age… to create is to exist outside of the nihilism
of capitalism and the nihilism of religions of Buddhism and Catholicism
and the nihilism of the political, communism (which isn’t even the political,
communism is economic, not political)

to escape beyond the nihilism of our age requires us to do something
outside of and beyond our nihilism… that is to create something…
ART is the means by which we can go outside of the ism’s and ideologies
of our age that is nihilistic …

in making a choice, which is ART…
we go outside of ism’s and ideologies…

I create, therefore I am…

that is a cure, one possible cure for our modern crisis…

to see the possibilities that lie outside of our current choices…

that is ART…

I construct my thoughts into a creative pattern, that is ART
and that is done by making choices about which thoughts
I put out there and emphasis…to make choices as to which
of my thoughts I shall present here today is ART… to make a choice…

so to escape our current crisis… we must begin by understanding
that to create ART is to create possibilities outside of our current choices…

it is to include the “ME” and the “WE” into a mix that is create by me…
which is ART…

To discover the “how” that is the point of our continuing relationship
between the “ME” and the “WE”… The connection between the “ME”
and the “WE”… how do we, you and me, the individual and the collective,
act and interact together?

ART can show us the way because it lies outside of the “usual suspects” that
we depend on to answer such questions…ART can show us possibilities that
we might otherwise miss which are possibilities that can lead us out of our
current, modern crisis…

in seeking ART, we no longer seek the baubles of our modern times,
money, fame, power, material goods… in ART we seek the possibilities
of existence and therein lies the TRUTH of ART…

Kropotkin

in the modern world, speech is glorified over writing…
we see this in the love of the young for video’s over
using words/language…

but I am hard of hearing, I cannot put speech over writing…
I must put the writing before the speech… which makes me
“Old school” as it were…

my current situation dictates what format I exist within… and my situation
dictates that I work with words and language before speech and the much
hated video’s…

so I engage with writing…what format do you engage with?

Kropotkin

one thing to note, that I don’t refer to “history” as such…
my words, my pronouncements, as it were, are isolated,
separated, outside of history…

that is in fact, wrong… history underlines every word I write…
the foundation of my writings as it were…

you must see what has come before and what will come after, to
make sense of everything I have written…

I not only seek the past, the beginning of the journey, my journey
as well as your journey, but I seek some sort of goal, both
an individual goal as well as a collective goal…

when I write about the indoctrinations of childhood, that is our
individual and collective beginning and when I write about
possibilities… that is our individual and our collective goal…

I am a amateur historian… I have read as many history books as I have
read philosophy books… my understanding of the world comes
from my understanding of history and philosophy… I just don’t often
mention this fact… but I begin with history and end with philosophy…

that is me…

Kropotkin

I am reading a Biography of Heidegger…by Safranski,
“Martin Heidegger… between Good and Evil”

It is talking about Art around 1913 or so…

“Vision, protest, transformation- this was the holy trinity of Expressionism”

Vision… to seek that which is above the current modern vision of
the ant…we are ants and we see life, possibilities, love and everything
else from an ant’s perspective…when we should, should learn at times to fly,
to look at life from eagle heights… a bird’s eye view of life and love and
existence…

Protest…yes, we should protest more often… express our opposition to
what bothers us and what endangers us and protest the banality of life that
we suffer through in our current life…

and the most important word, Transformation…I see man as yet to
transform into being human… in other words, I await man to become
a butterfly… transforming like a caterpillar to a butterfly…
the method of this becoming/transforming is in our overcoming…

and the path as I have laid out is clear…to being with the two basic,
fundamental principles of existence formulated right at the beginning of
our history… one, to know thyself and two, the unexamined life isn’t worth living…

it is through our examination of our values, our experiences, our indoctrinations,
our education that leads us to an reexamination of our values, experiences,
indoctrinations and education…and in our reexamination of existence that
we, slowly discover who we are, who we really are…what values and experiences
and education, doctrines are really ours and what have been implanted into us by
society, the state, religion, family, media, education…

this is reevaluation of values is our path to a transformation of animal/human
to becoming fully human…

and I await for our transformation to arrive, both individually and collectively…

how how are you going to transform from the current modern Ant existence we
lead to overcoming and by doing so, transforming from ant to human…

vision, protest, transformation… the words that can set us free…

Kropotkin

Husserl phenomenology is a study of consciousness…
and who is at the same time studying unconsciousness?

why it is Freud… the very question of the consciousness and the unconsciousness
are being worked out at the very same time…

this cannot be a coincidence…

these two studies are related to each other, because of the
times they were in… deep into the industrial revolution,
deep into the political and economic and artistic and philosophical
revolution going on at the time…the years from 1890 to the war years, 1914…
and it was during and just after the first world war that phenomenology
became the field of study in philosophy…as Heidegger himself was a
assistant to Husserl from 1920 to 1923…

Kropotkin

we are divided and passionate and yet, and yet,
we find ourselves staring into Nietzsche’s abyss…

we have thrown ourselves into seeking the baubles of
existence… money, titles, fame, material goods, power…
isms like nationalism and catholicism…

we know on some level, that these baubles are simply shiny toys that
we play with today but have no real basis for us in our examination
of existence today…

we seek these baubles to escape the recognition that existence for us,
is pointless and empty…

we exists in “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”

and those bauble are our attempts to hide from that “tale told by an idiot”

our modern existence is built upon the distraction that is our current existence
which act much like the “bread and circuses” acted for Rome and does so today
for our modern masses…look at what that Kardashian did today…or how much
money did Brad Pitt pay for that Hollywood mansion?

distraction and circuses…all designed to keep us from thinking about the big
questions of existences…what is the point of existence?
“what am I to hope for?” “what am I to believe in?” “what am I to do?”

and if we are distracted enough, we forget we are living empty, hollow lives,

“most people live lives of quiet desperation”…

and so we frantically seek those baubles of wealth and fame and titles
and power and material goods… to fill that void that exists within our life…

we long for that certainty which would dispel our empty, hollow lives…

so we practice living within our ism’s and ideologies like nationalism
and hatred of the GOP and we call it a day… we have “lived”…
we think we are whole because of the false, empty promise of the baubles of our time…
which we accept as being a complete and full expression of being human…

and it is not…

if my valuation of who I am is based upon the hatred and vitriol
of the right wing hate machine… I am not living a “complete
and full expression of being human”

and what is our simple explanation of what is moral? doing no harm
and what is our simple explanation of immoral? doing harm…

we could find a true expression of who we are and what is possible by
living “Moral lives”… by avoiding doing harm…we could become
more complete and more whole by engaging in what we might call “Moral”
beliefs, actions, behavior and philosophies…doing no harm…

perhaps instead of seeking baubles of money, fame, material goods, titles,
power, we might begin to seek an escape from our empty and hollow lives
by living our lives, Morally… do no harm…

and of course, IAM will want to engage in what happens as often happens
in life when one is forced to take an action that does harm others… sometimes
we have but two choices and both will harm another… how are we to choose?

if we have engaged with real and honest reexamination of values, a
reexamination of what we truly believe in and try to see what values
have been installed by the state, family, society, the media, the church…
and explore those values to see if they are in fact, really are our values…

and we have done that to the best of our abilities, that might, might give
us the grounds upon which we can then decide upon which course of action
we take that will harm no matter which action we take, we can then
make a “better” choice based upon our own real, true values… not
the indoctrinated values of society/state/family/church/media…

I would rather make a clear and firm choice based upon my own known values
to decide upon which of the two evil’s choices I should make…

in other words, if we are clear and open about who we are and what
we value, it becomes easier to make those tough decisions that are
we sometime have to make in which every choice harm someone…

the certainty I need lies in the certainty I have in who I am and
what my values are, my real values…by becoming who I am, I
can then better make choices and decisions…

so, instead of focusing on the “bread and circuses” of our modern world,
we focus on who we are and what is our possibilities…
and we work out our true, real values by a reexamination of values
to determine what values are really our values… not the indoctrinated
values of society/state/church/media/ education…but our real values…
who I am based upon the values I hold… that can make choices
and decisions much easier because we make those choices and decisions
based upon who we really are…

Kropotkin

_
I’d prefer not to be staring into Nietzsche’s abyss Peter…

I’m in a drôle mood of late and can’t help it, so do excuse me.

K: to each their own…

Kropotkin

in the modern era… we have had “discoveries” about the basic
nature of human existence…

for example, Darwin book came out in 1859… evolution is another
way to look at human existence…

we have distinct looks at the conscious and unconscious mind,
Husserl and Freud…

we have had extensive look at “Being” by Heidegger and his followers…

we have a vast library of what is economics since Marx… and we still
continue to explore this…

we have explore what it meant to exists without a god… for as
Nietzsche points out, “God is dead” and the more important point,
we have killed him… it isn’t enough to point out that “GOD is dead”
we have to notice we have killed him… and that very vital point is
left out…so we had an extensive look at god and theology since N.

the various political revolutions, in the modern era, the American,
the French, the Russian, have forced us to think and rethink what the
political means to us as human beings…

what all this means is that we have had to rethink the foundations
of human existence since the first great modern event, the French Revolution…

we have to rethink the foundations of human existence with the rise of
the scientific revolution… but science travels slowly and we have had time,
until recently, to keep up with science… but today,
we have yet to incorporate modern science into an understanding
of what it means to be human…

we have, as yet, not been able to incorporate Quantum physics into
a what does this mean to be human? And that failure has lead to something
important…

Human beings are and have been, since the inception of the modern age…
say, 1800… we have been fractured…the various revolutions and
the new explorations into such things as “being” and “consciousness” and
“unconsciousness” and “evolution” and to short hand it, “marxism”…
has lead us to become fractured…both collectively and individually…

there has been no collective theory which unifies the whole that we
have been exploring… “being” and “consciousness” and “evolution”
are simply individual terms with no overall understanding of what
they mean to us as human beings…

we are fractured, individually and collectively because we don’t have
a unified theory that can incorporate evolution and being and
consciousness… the very important aspects we have been exploring
since the French Revolution…

but the question arises… can we unify these quite different aspects of existence…
can we incorporate quantum physics and evolution and “being” and
consciousness into one overall understanding of our existence?
of the universe we live in?

if we focus on the individual aspects of existence, say “being” we miss all the rest
of what it means to be a human being in this universe, at this time and place…

or if we focus on the evolution aspect of existence, we miss other aspects of
existence…

we cannot hold to a single vision of our existence… we must
engage with large aspects of existence to explain or understand
what it means to be human…so for Marx to try to explain that
all of human existence is found in the study of economics is simply
false… to be sure economics play a role, but just a role, just
as the political and the social and philosophical and the scientific plays a role in
what it means to be human…

I think being fractured, individually means that one has gone deeply into
what it means as a human being… and seeing our understanding of existence
is fractured, we too are also fractured…

Kropotkin

In my reading, by Safranski, Martin Heidegger ‘Between Good and Evil’,
biography, I came across this sentence…

“According to Windelband, the natural sciences seek general laws, the humanities
seek understanding of the individual”

and I see this statement is incomplete… the humanities should seek the individual,
but it also must seek an understanding of the individual within a collective situation…
the individual yes, but also within with a understanding of how a human being fits
within a society and the state, in such a way as individuals can fit into society/state
in regards to economically, politically, socially and philosophically…

human existence is not only individually but is collectively… it takes a village…

Kierkegaard was right to pursue the individual, but he missed the boat by
not finishing his understanding with a sense of how that “Kierkegaardian
individual” fits into the state and society…

he finished half the mission, but he failed to complete it…

Kropotkin

and the very next line in Sufranski is this:

“Put differently, in Ricket’s words, natural science examines facts,
while the humanities examine values”

we cannot just pursue facts, we must engage with values…
what values are the values that we should engage with…
by the pursuit of IQ45 tilting at windmills, overturning the election,
they miss the vitally important task of understanding why we have rejected
IQ45… because of his failed and dangerous values that negate and deny
what it means to be human…IQ45 pursues nihilism in his values
and we ought to be investigating positive values…

what value is your value?

and why that value?

see yourself in terms of your value, not in terms of actions taken, but
in terms of the values which determine your actions… the values decide
the actions… and by choosing your values, you can then decide in your actions…

Kropotkin

we are beings in time… that is a crucial point of Heidegger
we exists within time…one way to think of being is
“being is time”…

but the fundamental point of our modern existence is
the fact that man, human beings are fractured…
we have been fractured by the various revolutions,
scientific, social, economic, political, philosophical…

the various revolutions have separated human beings from
the certainties of life before our modern times…

in other words, before 1500 and the scientific revolution…
we believed that human beings were X, Y and Z…

The scientific revolution began to change how we thought or viewed
X, Y, and Z… the dual revolutions of the political and economic
revolutions then changed some more of our understanding of
what we believed to be true, that all human beings hold to X, Y and Z…

BUT that understanding of what is X, Y and Z… has changed…

now to put into words, what X, Y and Z might be is this…

X might be our connection to theological understanding…
we are the children of GOD goes X…

and we are the chosen ones of theology… That may be Y…

and Z might be we are intimately connected to the land…
recall that until this century… human beings were rural,
agricultural beings… our most profound relationship with
with the land… something rural America still deals with…

and today, we are fracture because we no longer have X, Y and Z
beliefs anymore…

we cannot return home again…so we must forge new beliefs that
match our current situation… our situation in this modern world
where we are dependent upon each other… where we are alienated
from each other and ourselves due to our political and economic
ism’s and ideologies of capitalism and religions like catholocism…
and communism…

our ism’s and beliefs must match the reality on the ground…
and currently our ism’s and beliefs don’t match the events/ the
reality on the ground…

our entire understanding can be found in one simple slogan…

MAGA… Make America Great again…

and the problem is the slogan, which will fail in it application because
we cannot return to the values of yesterday because our current situation
must be met by values that reflect what is currently happening right now,
not in the past, as the slogan suggests…

we are a urban, technical, scientific society and our values must
reflect that fact… the X, Y and Z that was the basis of human existence
and underlined what it meant to be human in the past, no longer reflects
what it means to be human under an urban, technical, scientific existence
that we have today…

our values must reflect our environment and MAGA does not
match our current and modern situation…which is why it failed…

our values must, must match the times…

we are fractured because we are using old, outdated values meant
for an rural, agricultural society and are no longer valid in our current situation…

we have failed to keep up with the times and the environment that
currently exists…and our values have failed to keep up…

and so we are fractured, alienated, disconnected… perhaps different
words to describe the exact same thing…

so to think about one point, that God is dead and we have killed him…

that is one huge modern understanding of existence right now…

but what does that mean?

it means we cannot in our current modern, technical, urban, environment
hold onto the belief in GOD as was constructed because we no longer exists
in the same environment that held the belief in 'GOD"… we exists
in a different time, a different environment and a different place
and that requires different beliefs, different values…

Kropotkin

does that mean I am pushing for a “universality” of beliefs?

no, not at all… I understand our pursuit as being individual,
but practices collectively…

in other words, we understand our place in the universe as being
an individual understanding of who we are as human beings
and what it means to be human, but we then practice that new
understanding collectively… as part of a group… as human beings
were “bred” by evolution to be social, collective in practice…

we are not and cannot engage as single human beings without some
understanding that we must engaged outside of our individual selves…

we are social, collective beings and any, any understanding of what it
means to be human must be understood collectively, as part of something else…

but we first understand who we are and what it means to be human,
individually, by our own understanding of the human experience…
and then we apply that understanding into our collective practice
of being human…

we understand individually, but practice collectively…

every single value and thought must reflect back to both us
individually and, and collectively…

Kropotkin

so I hold certain values, values that were either indoctrinated into me,
by society, the state, culture, media, church, family…

I can then either maintain these indoctrinated values without
any type of examination or understanding or I can begin
a reevaluation of values and seek out what MY values are,
not what values I was indoctrinated with…

then I can individually understand what those values mean to
me individually but I must engage with, practice those values
collectively…

so, as christian, I might accept that value of love and I understand it
individually, but I must practice that value of love collectively…
and if I fail to do so, then am I really a christian?

where we suffer from an “inauthentic” life is when we fail to
practice our individual values in a collective sense…

if I accept being a christian, then I must accept that values both
individually and collectively… I must act upon those values within
a social and collective manner… if I accept values privately
and fail to act on them collectively, then I am not being authentic…

if I accept the values of capitalism, values of being selfish, greedy,
envy, then to act upon those values publicly, that is might be
acceptable individually, but certainly has no place in a collective
understanding of what it means to be human…

I must practice my values collectively… hence we must practice
positive human values of love, justice, hope, to make our collective engagement
work out… if we disregard those positive values of love, hope, justice,
beauty, then what kind of world are we creating?.. and the world is always
being recreated… my individual actions taken collectively recreates the world…

Kropotkin

Dada manifesto written by Hugo Ball:
Read at the first public by Dada soirée, Zurich, July 14, 1916.

Dada is a new tendency in art. One can tell this from the fact that until now nobody knew anything about it, and tomorrow everyone in Zurich will be talking about it. Dada comes from the dictionary. It is terribly simple. In French it means “hobby horse.” In German it means “good-bye,” “Get off my back,” “Be seeing you sometime.” In Romanian: “Yes, indeed, you are right, that’s it. But of course, yes, definitely, right.” And so forth.

An International word. Just a word, and the word a movement. Very easy to understand. Quite terribly simple. To make of it an artistic tendency must mean that one is anticipating complications. Dada psychology, dada Germany cum indigestion and fog paroxysm, dada literature, dada bourgeoisie, and yourselves, honoured poets, who are always writing with words but never writing the word itself, who are always writing around the actual point. Dada world war without end, dada revolution without beginning, dada, you friends and also—poets, esteemed sirs, manufacturers, and evangelists. Dada Tzara, dada Huelsenbeck, dada m’dada, dada m’dada dada mhm, dada dera dada, dada Hue, dada Tza.

How does one achieve eternal bliss? By saying dada. How does one become famous? By saying dada. With a noble gesture and delicate propriety. Till one goes crazy. Till one loses consciousness. How can one get rid of everything that smacks of journalism, worms, everything nice and right, blinkered, moralistic, europeanised, enervated? By saying dada. Dada is the world soul, dada is the pawnshop. Dada is the world’s best lily-milk soap. Dada Mr Rubiner, dada Mr Korrodi. Dada Mr Anastasius Lilienstein. In plain language: the hospitality of the Swiss is something to be profoundly appreciated. And in questions of aesthetics the key is quality.

I shall be reading poems that are meant to dispense with conventional language, no less, and to have done with it. Dada Johann Fuchsgang Goethe. Dada Stendhal. Dada Dalai Lama, Buddha, Bible, and Nietzsche. Dada m’dada. Dada mhm dada da. It’s a question of connections, and of loosening them up a bit to start with. I don’t want words that other people have invented. All the words are other people’s inventions. I want my own stuff, my own rhythm, and vowels and consonants too, matching the rhythm and all my own. If this pulsation is seven yards long, I want words for it that are seven yards long. Mr Schulz’s words are only two and a half centimetres long.

It will serve to show how articulated language comes into being. I let the vowels fool around. I let the vowels quite simply occur, as a cat meows . . . Words emerge, shoulders of words, legs, arms, hands of words. Au, oi, uh. One shouldn’t let too many words out. A line of poetry is a chance to get rid of all the filth that clings to this accursed language, as if put there by stockbrokers’ hands, hands worn smooth by coins. I want the word where it ends and begins. Dada is the heart of words.

Each thing has its word, but the word has become a thing by itself. Why shouldn’t I find it? Why can’t a tree be called Pluplusch, and Pluplubasch when it has been raining? The word, the word, the word outside your domain, your stuffiness, this laughable impotence, your stupendous smugness, outside all the parrotry of your self-evident limitedness. The word, gentlemen, is a public concern of the first importance.

K: when I read this I think of several posters here…limited types who,
who mistake intensity for clarity and intelligence…who lack the vision to
see what is really important…who total understanding of their self worth is
tied up in their political, social, economic and philosophical choices…

in other words… their self worth rises and falls based on how IQ45
is doing today…or how their favorite football team is doing…
their self worth lies outside of them selves… it is external and not
internal… but imagine someone like Gandhi or MLK… did their self worth
lie in their external images of the world or within their internal image?

if you ask what does it matter, then you to are external driven
and your own self worth is decided by external factors, not
internal understanding of who you are…

and if you want to find greatness, you must be internally driven,
not externally driven…

Kropotkin

as I have noted before, individuals can become stuck
within their own ism’s and ideologies…

we become victims as it were of our own slavish devotion to
the ism’s and ideologies that we use to elevate how we feel about ourselves…

some see their own self worth residing within their ism’s and ideologies…

not internally as a Gandhi or a MLK would, but their self worth is found
externally… as part of the MAGA crowd or as a conservative or as a liberal
or as a fan of Man U…their own understanding of who they are relies on
outside factors in their life…

but the same hold true collectively as it does individually…

we Americans can find our own self worth tied up into how well
or how badly we do as a country…

as a country we get locked up into viewpoints and understandings
of who we are based upon how well the country is doing…

we get locked up in a ism or an ideology that helps us feel
better about ourselves collectively…

did MLK or Gandhi use collective ism’s and ideologies to feel better
about themselves?

no, they had their truths and they held onto their truths to death…
in both cases… till death…

which leaves us trying to understand how does the individual
understanding of ism’s and ideologies fit into a collective
understanding of ism’s and ideologies?

I am Kropotkin… and how do I fit into the collective understanding
of the United States of America? which standard shall we use?
mine or America standard?

shall we understand people as a unthinking, mindless drone of America,
to be used and abused as America see’s fit? or do we have a collective
discussion about the proper place of the individual within the collective?

think about it this way… how shall we view each other here at ILP?

are you a friend, an enemy, how do we fit together as a collective
given our own individual approach to “philosophy?”…

what has greater value, the collective… ILP or the individual, Kropotkin?

and what standard shall we use to make a decision?

what is more important? the collective… ILP or the individual… Kropotkin?

it would seem that we need each other… for clearly ILP has some function
in Kropotkin life… and just as clearly Kropotkin has some function in ILP…

how do we work out this relationship between ILP and Kropotkin?

and we must understand that this connection between ILP and Kropotkin
is far more free and voluntary then our connection and relationship
we have within the state/society/media/educational/ church…

these relationships are much tighter bonds between the individual
and the respective bonding of state or society or media…

my relationship with the state or the society is far tighter then
my relationship with ILP because my relationship with the state isn’t
voluntary… I just can’t go live out in the forest and ignore the state…

for the state makes a strong demand upon the connection between
the state and myself that isn’t voluntary or as easily discarded as my
relationship with ILP… people come and go as they please from ILP
but one doesn’t do that with the state…in my relationship with
ILP, I hold the key to the relationship between myself and ILP
and in the relationship with the state, it seems to me that the state
hold the key/power to the relationship between the state and me…

so we should, perhaps even out the power between the state and the
individual to give the individual more say in the functioning of the state
given I have no choice in my relationship between the state and me…

the less choice one has in a relationship, the more say one should have within
a relationship… but that is to be determined…

so what should the relationship be between the state and the individual?

Kropotkin

the focal point of my philosophy lies in this question of “doing the right thing”

what is the “right thing to do?” how do we know? to give examples,
is supporting IQ45 the right thing to do or is supporting Biden the right
thing to do?

I suspect the clues lie in several different places…we have seen
morality being connected to the law… but as been suggested that
the law and being moral are two, different and distinct things…
for example the morally right thing to do and the legally right
thing to do has been vastly different…

slavery pre-civil war was legal but it certainly wasn’t the right thing to do…
and the holocaust was legal but it wasn’t the right thing to do, it wasn’t moral…
and laws that make women the property of men is legal but it isn’t the moral
thing, the right thing to do…

both Gandhi and MLK spent time in prison because they fought for the moral
obligations to be fulfilled and that violated their legal obligations…

Gandhi time and time again, violated the law to do the right thing
as did MLK… what is part of their understanding of the “right” thing
to do and what is the “legal” thing to do…

they both referred back to “higher” moral obligations…
it wasn’t the law that they referenced, but the values…
the “higher” moral obligations were the values that they espoused…

for both of them, part of the “higher” values was freedom… for Gandhi, the freedom
to the people having sovereignty over their own country in India…
an India:

“for the Indian people, by the Indian people, of the Indian people”

for MLK, to have the African-American people be free of the odious laws
of Jim Crow… to be able to enjoy the exact same rights as the White people…

the higher principles of both men involved values… not ism’s or ideologies…

for Gandhi, the higher principle was called “Satyagraha” (Sanskrit and Hindi word)
“holding onto the truth” a concept introduced in India to designate a determined but
nonviolent resistance to evil…think about it… HOLDING ONTO THE TRUTH…

what truth is that? the higher values of freedom, of peace, hope, of love …
the values that rise us to being better human beings, not lower us into
being animals… those values of hate, anger, lust, violence, injustice…

Ecmandu brings up a point that has always bothered me…

the attempt to negate great soul people by bringing up their human failings…

sure, MLK cheated on his wife… but does that negate his attempt to bring
people into freedom? I say no… but why? every single human being can
be negated in this fashion… oh, him… Jesus hung out with hookers…
negated… it is a very, very, very easy game to negate every single person on planet earth…
with their human failings…why must we tear down those who attempt to
achieve greatness… because we are petty and narrow-minded and shallow…

if we can bring down the great ones, we are absolved from making any
type of attempt “to do the right thing” if the great ones have failed, what
makes me think I can succeed in achieving greatness… it allows us to
avoid trying to reach greatness… it is an escape hatch that prevent us from
trying to reach greatness…

if I see a great person, do I say, oh, he cheated on his wife or he beat his kids…

or do, do I attempt to reach that person greatness while avoiding his very
human flaws…Goethe had flaws and Hume had flaws and Kant had flaws,
does that mean I make no attempt to become greater then them because
of those flaws? I simple cannot become a great philosopher because Socrates
hated going home to his wife? Is that what I am suppose to do?
Avoid reaching for greatness because someone else failed in being human?

I can’t follow the footsteps of Gandhi preaching love and peace and
nonviolence because he wasn’t nice to his wife?

is that the message you are telling me? he failed, so don’t preach
love or peace or nonviolence?

Kropotkin

Both Gandhi and MLK worshipped a male supreme being. That’s acceptable to the propaganda ministers.

As people, MLK cheated on his wife constantly And Gandhi abused his wife verbally and constantly.