BLG-007
You are going time fail. Repeatedly. That is why it is so important that you start now. As a child you have a parachute in the form of you parents or guardians, your teachers and family, the social safety network. As a child, your mistakes are forgiven more easily. As a child, a misstep is unlikely to follow you everywhere. This is not easy to do, and society has made the process of forging your freedom as difficult and embarrassing and shameful and nasty as they can. Once you are an adult they will add all sorts of financial nooses and hurdles to make it even worse. So fail now.
My art teacher used to say that everyone has ten thousand bad drawing in them, so you had best get started now. Experience is a great teacher, but the lessons can hurt, because failure is the lesson. If you start failing now, the distance that you fall when you fail is much much lower than if you wait until you are an adult.
Start failing now, or get used to living your life as a failure who has compromised all of their dreams.
And after you fail?
Examine the failure. Ask yourself; why? Ask yourself what you missed, what didn’t work, what needs to change in order for you to succeed next time.
Then give yourself a pat on the back for the attempt. because most people are far to scared to even try. And then given yourself credit for examining your failure.
People keep failing because they don’t like to admit that they failed. Own your failure. Revel in it. Stephen King had a big metal spike pounded into his bedroom wall on which he stuck all his rejection letters. Revel in your failures, only people doing great things fail frequently. Everyone else fails by never trying.
So you’ve given yourself credit for trying, for having the guts to fail, once you’ve examined your failure. Now get your tribe together and build a new plan, use the experience you gained from the previous failures. And make something that will fail better. Because everything fails.
To quote fight club: “On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.” So fail well. Fail often. Learn from your failure. And then fail better.
BLG-008
Civilization cannot survive without the use of fossil fuels and no feasible alternatives exist. Civilization cannot survive the effects of fossil fuel use on our ecosystem. Civilization cannot survive in its current form and still mitigate the effects of climate change. Civilization cannot survive in its current form against the worsening effects of climate change.
Weapons in the hands of private citizens enables the commission of violent crime. Weapons kept from the hands of private citizens enables government oppression. Strong privacy protection for private citizens enables organized crime. A lack of privacy protection for private citizens enable government oppression.
Socialism results in corruption and inefficiency. Capitalism results in corruption and inequality. Failure to increase food production will mean starvation for much of the growing population. Increasing food production will increase population, thus increasing starvation later.
BLG-009
I am wearing sweatshop labour. I drive strip mining and tailing ponds on my daily routine. I sit down and turn on my television to watch casual sexual objectification and racial profiling.
How do I consider myself a good person, when this is my life?
“Hope is the last thing a person does before they are defeated.”
Henry Rollins
I hate Weekends. They almost make me think that I have a life. I hate my day to day routine. Even if I don’t hate my job, I hate my day in and day out routine. I suspect that I could do better as a homeless man. Worst case scenario, I could rob several homes and go to jail.
When I was a teenager one of my part time jobs was as a little league umpire. And standing behind home plate, watching kids play their guts out, I learned something. Things are better when you are able to walk away. What do I mean? I mean this: if you can’t choose to not participate then you are a prisoner.
My family loved baseball. I could take it or leave it myself, but I couldn’t avoid being aware of it. And as a result I know the game well and played it on and off throughout my childhood, a little bit of organized little league, a little bit of school physical education class, a family gathering here, a group of friends there. And I couldn’t help but notice a difference between those games played by children under the rules and authoritative eyes of adults and the games played independently.
When children are required to participate, even in things that they enjoy, there is a tension and a viciousness unseen in voluntary games. Children will argue more in games they play with each other uncoordinated by adults, they will fight- sometimes like hungry dogs. But The difference is in the viciousness of the fight. When children choose to play, they are free to choose not to play at any time. When children are made to play, and are not free to walk away at any time- then they are cornered rats. And when the game turns against them or feels unfair, they behave in the way that cornered rats behave.
I do not know a single child who dreamed of growing up to be the adult that actually became. I am certain that a number of children managed exactly that. But I do not know any of them. My mother dreamed of being a naturalist. She spent her life selling insurance. My brother wanted to make video games, now he repairs slot machines. My childhood friend wanted to be a composer, he now teaches music at a small community college and may have come the closest of anyone I know. I know so many people who would have chosen to be writers or film makers. I know many more who would have been activists or politicians. I know many who would have been outdoors man and woman or worked in some way out in nature. Some number of these people have found acceptable compromises. Many more have not.
I noticed something very interesting. School takes up the vast majority of the time where a child would learn how to live as an adult. This would, of course, be fine if the children exiting school upon graduation were able to live as adults- but I can find few people who don’t scoff when I bring this up. In fact, the trick of school is that it provides us with a lot of information that is definitely interesting to know, real and potentially useful information, but useless when one wishes to make ones own way in the adult world. I personally have a degree in literature, would you like fries with that?
“There’s nothing more reassuring than realising the world is crazier than you are.”
-Thor: The Dark World
BLG-010
Fight Club is a work of satire, that much is painfully obvious. And yet, when I watched this film it resonated and kicked me in the guts. Reading the novel I got a better handle on the satire, but I couldn’t shake the resonance that I had felt from the film adaptation and engaging the narrative in an earnest fashion- broken characters, failed logic and all. The Matrix had a similar effect on me.
And apparently I was not alone in this. Despite the fact that the Wachowskis have explicitly said that they wrote the Matrix as a transgender metaphor, the chauvinists in the Men’s Rights Movement has latched on to the narrative and both they and the Alt-Right have co-opted the use of the red pill metaphor.
So what’s going on here?
Well let’s listen to the works speak for themselves.
Morpheus tells Neo, “Let me tell you why you’re here. You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me.”
Tyler Dirden makes that feeling more explicit in Fight Club, saying, “I see all this potential and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaves with white collars, advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of the history man, no purpose or place, we have no Great war, no Great depression, our great war is a spiritual war, our great depression is our lives, we’ve been all raised by television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won’t and we’re slowly learning that fact. and we’re very very pissed off.”
A few years back, I read Iron John by Robert Bly and was impressed by the ideas he expressed. I have found less to agree with and be impressed by in his other works, but I found something that struck a chord in his depiction of the rootlessness that has become epidemic in the lives of young men, myself included at the time. Bly seemed to see feminism as a kindred cause to what he was talking about in Iron John, and so it is frustrating for me to see the so called Men’s Rights Movement and the damage that they do.
The film Mad Max: Fury Road tapped into a similar vein but from a decidedly feminist perspective. So we see the same rumblings from multiple sources. Again and again we see a sense of rootlessness, a sense of not belonging. We see a discontent. And this is not new, Freud did write Civilization and its Discontents recently, but the book reads as though he did. And from all sides there is a sense of being oppressed, even among members of groups that are very clearly some of the most privileged groups in the world.
So what is going on here? Why do we all feel like slaves?
BLG-011
Let’s start with the obvious.
We spend the first twenty years of our lives getting screwed. We’re screwed by parents who want us to have time to be kids and who aren’t home to look after us. We’re screwed by a school system designed to nanny us and turn us into wage slave employees, to make us employable (but just barely) and to leave us with no other option upon leaving school but to seek employment. We’re screwed by politicians who are attempting to mandate against our futures, and by church leaders more interested in keeping us intellectually pliable. None of this is done maliciously. Well, very little of this is done maliciously- there are always a few true jerks.
As an example I include a story about something that my Grandfather gave me that stuck as strange. He knew I wanted to be an astronaut. He told me of a boy who wrote a letter to NASA explaining everything he knew about astronomy and science and space flight and so forth. And apparently NASA wrote back and told him that they would be happy to have him as an astronaut when he was old enough and ready. And so I sat down at my mother’s electric typewriter to write the same letter. And I was horrified at how little I could muster in order to amaze NASA with my science know how. And it crushed me. I never finished the letter. And I basically gave up on the idea of being an astronaut at that moment. I don’t know what the says about either my grandfather or me. But it hit me in the soul and became a part of who I am. But sitting there in the center of the story was my helplessness. Keep that in mind and let’s move on.
Moving beyond the obvious, let’s ask a few questions. Why was trigonometry required learning, but accounting was optional? I assume that accounting is the more useful skill to a greater proportion of the students for a greater portion of their lives. Why was the history of Ancient Greece a required course, but Law remains an optional course? I am required to adhere to the law, and (as my optional law course taught me) ignorance of the law is not an excuse. So why was learning about the time Athena sprung from a hole in Zeus’ head more important then learning when necessity is a reasonable legal defense (“I had to drive without insurance officer, my son was bleeding to death in the back seat”). Why was I taught to analyze Shakespeare and write essays, when the only people with a pressing need to understand Shakespeare and assess essays are English Teachers? I might have better spent my time learning how to write letters, or speak in front of crowds. I did roughly one speech per year, hardly enough to remove the fear of public speaking- and yet that skill might actually help me succeed as an adult. Why, in Science class, was I taught to memorize dry useless facts, when I could have been taught the scientific method as a skill and technique of thinking? Perhaps because science does not accept argument from authority and demands evidence and repeatable experiments? Perhaps because a science class that taught science instead of the knowledge that results from science would leave teachers with students who could see right through their lies?
Why? Why? Why?
Author and social critic Daniel Quinn argues that, far from failing in their purpose, schools are actually suceeding, but that their purpose is other than we like to pretend. Quinn argues that schools are designed to hold students until they are old enough to work, and to make it look like the students are learning important things. But that the students are deliberately not taught how to survive without a job, so that when the leave the school system they are thus dependent upon the system of employment as it currently exists for their survival. Quinn is bolstered in this assessment by the existence of the Canadian Residential school system, used to remove from Native American children their culture, which included the ability to make a living for themselves without joining industrial civilization. Quinn is further bolstered by the original creation of public schooling, which was explicit in it’s goal of turning Prussian children into loyal soldiers and obedient workers (that’s why kindergarten is a German word).
To use a favored anaology of mine: baseball. I used to work as a little leagure umpire as a summer job. As an umpire, I noticed that little league was more petty and vicious that the baseball games I played with friends (or more often watched, my brother liked to play the game). Little league had far more poor sportsmanship and far more cheating. Sandlot games played amongst friends had more arguments, but less cheating and less pettiness. And I suspect this was because people could leave the sandlot games and go home if they didn’t enjoy how everyone was playing- they could stop playing. The children enrolled in little league couldn’t stop playing, their parents were there to enforce participation (and were often the worst sports of the whole thing, but that’s another story).
Why do I bring this up?
It is my assertion, that the right to abstain is the key to preserving freedom. The tone in college, where students are treated like adults and may drop a class or not attend; compared to high school- which treats students like inmates. The difference in each case is the ability or lack of ability to walk away. If you cannot choose not to participate, then you are not free.
I have come to the conclusion that day job is a synonym for death sentence. Like a mortgage, which literally means ‘an agreement unto death’, day job is a definition that reveals the devil’s bargain that civilization foists upon us. We are to trained to divert our days towards things that benefit somebody else, and to see that as normal. Once upon a time, the actions we performed were to benefit the group and ourselves and it was easy to see how this was so. Now the game that we play is so complex and opaque that we cannot see directly, and whole sub classes of parasites called bureaucrats have arisen to feed upon the vast and bloated system we all supposedly depend upon, but which of course benefits a small group far more intensely than the rest.
So what does this mean for you?
People stay in jobs they hate. People stay in lives they hate, because they feel incapable of walking away. They don’t know how to function without a steady job, without a pay cheque, without the support systems of civilization. But the more things that one can choose to do without, the more power one has to choose one’s life. If you need a steady job, you are in no position to negotiate for a better job- because in the end you have to get a job. If you are dependent upon a steady pay check then you will never make that jump to whatever sporadically paying dream job you want, because in the end you need the pay cheque.
More than anything else, you need the ability to walk away in order to be free. And that ability comes from the ability to provide for yourself. A person who can’t obtain food without a credit card is much less free than one who can grow their own. It doesn’t matter if the second person never actually grows anything, the ability to do so confers power, because it means that the second person is never dependent on the methods that they do use to obtain food. And this applies to everything from clothing and shelter, to transportation and first-aid, to salaries and day jobs. You will always get a better deal when you have the power to walk away.
And that’s why we are placed in a position where our ability to walk away is minimized. Somebody is trying to use that power against us.
BLG-012
I don’t enjoy the modern day to day life. Do you? Nine to five is where it starts. Television or video games to decompress. mindless monotony and a complete lack of purpose. To steal from ‘Fight Club’; “This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.” And worse, this mindless space monkey assembly line of rubbish that we all have to put in our nine to five is driving us headlong towards total destruction. We aren’t just wasting our lives on pointless bulls**t, we’re collectively destabilizing the planet’s ecosystems and damaging the future of ever child both born and unborn. We are doing rubbish work that we hate, five days a weeks, in exchange for the privilege of being the generation who destroyed the world.
That’s not good.
That’s not good and I want no part of it.
I want something better. But nobody is offering better.
Faced with this stark reality, I’ve gone through several stages. I got angry. I got depressed. I got anxious. I got nihilistic. And in the midst of all of this happy fun time, I occasionally get inspired.
That’s now, If you’re wondering.
I’ve been obsessively researching, thinking and collecting for the last decade and a half on how to deal with the problem of civilization. I call it the problem of civilization, because there really isn’t one discrete problem. The problem isn’t income inequality, or pollution, or unsustainable use of non-renewable resources, or crony capitalism, or or or or or or…
The problem is that the system we live in is broken. Based upon the idea of limitless growth (and more growth each year than the year before no less!), and worse, the idea of limitless growth with the decidedly limited laboratory that is planet Earth. I wanted to save things, to solve things, but that isn’t going to happen.
We aren’t going to change until change is forced upon us, and then it will be far too late to escape significant consequences for our inaction. It is already far to late to avoid significant consequences.
So. What are you trying to do?
I’m trying to do three things. I’m trying to work out and then spread the word on an alternate method of living, one that doesn’t depend upon an endlessly gluttonous sustainable system
The problem with depression medication, is that it assumes that the problem is an internal problem.
Even those medical practitioners who look at a patient’s persona life are likely to only look at the immediately obvious indicators of happiness or success. Does the patient have a loving family? Do they have a job that pays the bills? Do they have a TV and a computer and the necessary distractions that we are supposed to have?
If so, then the problem must be internal, add medication, as though we were collectively suffering from an anti-depressant deficiency.
None of this of course, is meant to say that anti-depression medication can’t do its job. My concern is that the real job of anti-depression medication is improve our moods without changing the problem that caused our moods. And nor improve it by a lot mind you, just improve it enough that we don’t try and change things in any concerted manner.
That’s the problem with anti-depression medication. It assumes the world is perfect, so the problem must lie with us. It assumes that keeping us in line is more important than solving the problem.
It prevents us for having to examine ‘the problem’.
that’s the problem with anti-depression medication, but that’s the problem with virtually every feature of modern life.
George Orwell and Aldous Huxley’s nightmares got together one evening, got very drunk and had a horrible love child. And that love child of ‘1984’ and ‘A Brave New World’ is modern life.
Welcome to desert of the real.
Professor Harbinger's School for Villains 