Archive for the ‘Anti-establishment’ Category

Links for the Week

Sunday, January 2nd, 2011

I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Idle Theory, but it an interesting school of thought that gels more with the way we used to live as human beings before the advent of civilization.  I’m thinking of devoting a blog post to links every week, as it will be beneficial to get some other outside information, other than my deranged rantings on this blog.   :)  All kidding aside, I truly think having some links on here won’t hurt my blog, and might even help it.

Here is Ran Prieur’s semi-famous essay How to Drop Out.  It is very realistic and also doesn’t do what motivational writers do, which is lie to you.  Sure, you can have a great value system, but if you lie like saying, “Quit your corporate job this minute and hop on over to a straw bale house in the mountains, and you will be alive when everyone else is dead,” that is worse than saying nothing.  This is one of the quintessential essays on how you can balance your physical needs in today’s world while getting out of it mentally.  Here is his Essays page, which has a ton of information that is useful and very against the system, but is also extremely intelligent writing.  This guy is probably the ultimate in practical against the system living.

Dave Pollard’s blog has tons of wonderful information on this type of stuff, and one of my favorites is located here.  There are tons of others, as this man has written for over 8 years.

I hope these three links can get you started.  They all have tons of info on their sites to browse, and I’ll leave you with one last link, which has tons of information, and this is from  the Crimethinc corporation:  Days of War, Nights of Love.  I think this is a pretty good assessment here of some of the core beliefs at the heart of anarcho-primitivism, not to mention gives  you tools for actually achieving the goal of becoming more autonomous and free.  It’s all about getting free of the system that is choking the life out of us.

Have a happy new year.

You Don’t Need It

Friday, December 17th, 2010

In this holiday season, people may go out on spending sprees, going into debt, and spending the rest of the year paying it off.  We are the consumer culture, buying things we can’t afford made by people in third world countries we’ll never meet.  It’s just the newest chapter of exploitation and greed.  Imagine a world where we didn’t do all of this.  Imagine a world where we were happy with what we had, and didn’t constantly need a new product to make our lives feel whole.  Imagine a world where we saved money, instead of frivolously spending it on things we would later regret buying.  We buy and buy and buy for others during this holiday season, when what we could give them is much more meaningful than a gift.  You could cook them a meal, make them some cards, or just tell these people how you feel about them.  You could have a nice family meeting where everyone goes around saying good things about each other.  There is plenty you can do in lieu of gifts.

For the past few years, when people have asked me what I want for Christmas, I’ve often said, “I don’t know.”  The only thing I would possibly want would be maybe an Amazon gift card to add a few more books to my Kindle, or something that I will get continuous value from, like a mug warmer or a new desk for my computer.  But I don’t really need those things, I just want them.  The desk I have is okay, it works, and I would have to get rid of this one in order to get a new one.  What I could really use is a small filing cabinet that could fit where the tower part of a computer would go if I had a desktop computer.  That way I could be a bit more organized.  Ever since the drawer bottom came out of my one drawer in this desk, I’ve been using a box on the floor.  But it hasn’t caused any suffering yet.  It’s just a minor inconvenience.  And I could easily head down to the Salvation Army and find a file cabinet that fits my needs and I could easily afford it.

What is it we actually need?  Food, water, some kind of shelter, people who support us, and fuel for those terribly cold months some areas of the world experience.  That’s pretty much it.  It is not required to have an iPhone or a Sony Entertainment System.  Those are things that can easily be done without.  Most of us would say we need a computer or a television, but that is simply not true.  Even though today’s world is full of them, and many people’s jobs rely on these new technologies, are they really necessary?  No, but they are still worth having sometimes because we all like to use them every once in awhile.  Self-deprivation is no fun, and we should have things we use, but things we do not use or will never use should be donated, or simply thrown away.  Or even recycled.

Many people today are minimalists and they don’t even know it.  There are people who are minimalists by necessity, because they have very little or no money.  Then there are those who are very wealthy who own very little, because they’ve seen beyond the socially-conditioned way of life and choose to only own what is useful to them.  It’s all about the mindset.  Not to mention that it is wise to save money and buy less now before the complete collapse of the economy.  It won’t take long for this to happen, just a few decades at the most.  We have no idea of the times that we are headed for.  Things certainly haven’t gotten any better, and if that’s any indication of how our future will be, then we need to stop spending fast.  I just hope our government stops printing money so that we don’t experience hyperinflation, which will make all the money we saved up essentially worthless.

I’m trying to justify minimalism in these hard times, because it will be best for us when it all comes crashing down.  And that all this spending, all this debt, is exactly the problem.  Stimulating the economy through credit cards and loans is not going to solve the problem, but just make it worse.  Do you hear that, Washington?  Stop all the spending and maybe someday we’ll get out of this recession.  Stop spending all our hard-earned money on things that don’t benefit us, like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Those wars haven’t helped the American people one bit.  In fact, it has crippled them.  So has all this outsourcing to China and other countries that will willingly exploit their people to send up cheaply-made merchandise.  Is this the world we were meant to live in?  I think not.

Why aren’t people willing to do the things that are necessary to creating the world we were meant to have?  It’s going to start on a conscious level, moving down to the physical.  We need to have a global rise in consciousness before we can get anything done.  We need leaders to get those who are not quite there yet up to our level.  We need to educate people about what is really going on in the world, so that they can make informed choices on what to buy and what not to buy.  Not only that, but what to do, and what not to do.  If we stopped buying things from the corporations who exploit other nations and other people, then they would have no power whatsoever.  If we all stopped going to Walmart and Target and Best Buy, then perhaps we would see a change for the better.  If people would actually think of why something is so cheap and think of the people who actually have to produce these things, there would be the start of a consciousness revolution.

It sure is a mad world out there.  And most people would rather be left in the dark about it, because if they don’t know, they don’t feel they are contributing to it.  But that is sheer willful ignorance.  We are all contributing to this world in one way or another, and we can decide in which way we want to contribute.  We can move towards fear or we can move towards love.  We can keep going on this suicidal trainwreck, or we can stop the train and figure out which steps need to be taken to restore the world to what it once was.  For the benefit of all creatures, not just our narrow, unenlightened self-interest.  Why is it that everyone who ever told us to live together in harmony either got shot or killed in some other way?  When are we finally going to be ready to hear this, much less do it?

A Tribute to Bill Hicks

Wednesday, December 15th, 2010

Bill Hicks, one of the lesser known “famous” comedians, has been an inspiration to me and just a truly brilliant man.  He’s dead now, like all the great ones, although he didn’t die from a drug overdose or from suicide.  Sure, he did drugs, and he had a great time doing them, but he was more than clean and sober when he died.  He was called The Dark Poet, and some of his observations and imaginative works about different people on the news and in the media were dark and funny as hell.  He was considered an outlaw comic, and even had his entire set censored out of Letterman’s Late Night show.  It had been approved and pre-approved before, but Letterman didn’t know if  his audience could take what Bill was saying.  He was saying things that people weren’t ready to hear, and he offended tons of people, but he did it in such a way that he became the voice of reason in an increasingly insane world.  He reminds me a lot of myself, but I’m nowhere near as angry or bitter, but I have some of the same thoughts he does about the government and entertainment media.  People say he died way too young, but I think he got his message out in time.

If you don’t know who this man is, I would suggest looking him up on Youtube.  I don’t want to embed any videos on here because I want to keep- my website simple.  He had such a great bit about negative drug stories in the news.  He may have been a bit scathing at times, but he had to be.  To steal a quote from the movie Se7en, “When you have something important to tell someone, you can’t just tap them on the shoulder anymore.  You have to smash their face in with a sledgehammer, and then you’ll see you have their full attention.”  I think that’s why Bill was so offensive, because if he didn’t talk in that way, he wouldn’t be able to get the ideas he was trying to spread into people’s thick skulls.  I love the joke he does in the above link, “Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively.  There is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves…here’s Tom with the weather.”  It’s not just a joke, but it opens your mind to a different experience of looking at the world.

Also in that clip, thankfully, there is his most life-affirming piece of material called, “It’s just a ride.”  Wonderful, enlightening piece of material that totally blows your mind.  That is what all these enlightened teachers have been trying to teach, that life is a dream, or a ride, or something similar, and that to take it seriously, or as if it were real is only going to lead to suffering.  The choice between fear and love.  This guy got it, and he was also funny about it, which sure helps convey the message better.  He made you laugh, and he made you think, and ponder.  One audience member once yelled out, “I don’t go to comedy clubs to think.”  Bill responded by saying, “Where do you go to think?  I’ll meet you there.”  He reminds me a lot of George Carlin, although I feel like Bill went further.  Bill wasn’t afraid to bomb, he wasn’t afraid to express his unpopular opinions.  The guy was Relentless, which coincidentally enough, was the title of one of his DVDs.

The sad part was, however, that he never gained a mainstream audience in America, because he was not allowed to express his ideas on television the way he wanted to and, frankly, most people were not ready to hear what he had to say.  So he went to the UK to perform and his comedy was uncensored on Channel 4, and the people there loved him.  He was allowed to be himself, not some censored, edited version of himself.  He gained a huge following there, and he now has a sizable following in America, but not nearly as big as the Carlin fans or the other really popular comedians.  His ideas were radical and controversial, and they made sense.  He was no sellout, and would call out those who were.  He was one of a kind, and had integrity and was honest.  He told people how he saw the world and he was dead on.  But like all the other people who say, “We should all just get along, stop fighting, become one with the world,” he died young, but not too young, because he at least got his messages out.

He would mock religion, mock these popular, mediocre pop artists, like the New Kids On the Block and Rick Astley.  This was in the late 80s and early 90s, as Bill; tragically died in 1994.  It’s amazing how many people have never heard of him.  I hadn’t heard of him until late 2005.  And it took me awhile to really warm up to him, just like it did with Carlin.  But he has been a part of my life ever since, because listening to him is like getting an upgrade in integrity and consciousness.  He sure had a lot to say.  He used to joke that he was “Noam Chomsky with dick jokes.”  He used to say something like, “I know what you guys are waiting for, and don’t worry, dick jokes are coming.  I editorialize for about one hour, then we go down dick joke highway, because I know that’s why y’all are here.  Don’t worry, they’re coming.”  I’m sure he rubbed a lot of audience members the wrong way and some people probably think he is an asshole, but he was just trying to wake people up.  That’s all.  He truly wanted humanity to evolve to a higher state of consciousness, and isn’t that what we all want?  I’d say so.

In closing, this guy is one of my heroes.  He had morals, he had rebellion, he had such conviction in what he was saying that it just made him either more or less likable, depending on how much you agreed with him.  I have more respect for him than any other comedian, because he was real, he was uncensored, and he would take risks that other comedians wouldn’t even dream of.  I’m pretty sure he was a reclusive type of person, somebody who didn’t quite fit in, but he sure used that to his advantage to call out those who were completely full of shit.  I just wish his work hadn’t fallen on mostly deaf ears during his lifetime.  But today, I think the word is getting out more, and although not as sizable as others, his comedy can still entertain and enlighten us for decades more.  Bill, you are a fucking hero and I hope more people get the word out about you like I’m doing right now.

Here’s some links that may be offensive, but I’m going to add them anyway:

This is by no means an exhaustive list.  There are so many more clips on Youtube of this man and his thoughts, so feel free to browse because I have a feeling you might learn something.  The Rush Limbaugh one is a bit offensive, just to warn you.

Transcending the Ego: Back to Nature

Thursday, November 18th, 2010

The world we live in is full of all sorts of crimes that are perpetrated by a mostly criminal elite, who have bought and paid for this world and who force their agenda down our throats through the mainstream media and through social conditioning.  But we don’t have to subscribe to their belief system, and we don’t have to buy what they are selling.  We don’t have to do their bidding.  We can recognize the media for what it is, a tool of propaganda.  Why do you think the government subsidized a digital converter device for people who could not afford to get cable and were going to lose their analog signal for the regular channels?  It is because television has become almost a necessity in this culture.  People would rather watch a show they don’t even really like than get off their ass and do something.  Why is that?

Television has a hypnotic effect.  I’ve noticed it myself when watching it.  I sometimes sit down with the intention of watching maybe one show, and end up[ watching for a couple of hours, maybe more.  But now I’m much more conscious of the effect television has on me, and also the media.  I watch essentially two to three shows a week, and now that two of them are “no longer in season,” I will be cutting down to one, and I probably won’t even watch in on my television, or I’ll record and and skip through the commercials.  Although I know that even the television shows condition us, I am aware of this and guard against it.  And since I spend most of my time thinking independently or at least soaking up new ideas that are less popular but more true, I am certainly not one of them.  I know what goes on behind closed doors, and I am aware of what us humans are doing to this planet.  And I am quite aware that there is no stopping us unless there is a major crash of civilization.  At least then our capacity for destroying the Earth will be significantly weakened.

Most people are not ready for a crash or collapse, and most people don’t even want to hear that one is coming, but as inevitable as global warming, there will be one in the near future.  It will be hard for us civilized humans to cope, as most of us have zero survival skills.  Most of us, including me, don’t know how to plant vegetables or how to “hunt” for wild edibles.  Never mind cope psychologically with the end of oil, global food scarcities, and the end of water.  Many, or probably most, of us will die, and there will be a bit of a cleansing.  I don’t see it as a bad thing, really.  We are a parasite on this planet, and I would even call us a cancer.  If we cannot live in balance with the rest of life, we don’t deserve to live here at all.  We’ve taken it all for ourselves and now we want more.  And even that won’t be enough.  So, then, what is our purpose here?

I would say our purpose is to live a life where we don’t destroy everything in sight.  Not just that, but a life where we live in complete balance with nature, without a control structure, with complete and utter freedom, and without a shred of civilization’s characteristics.  We need to completely shed the civilization mindset because it has completely destroyed everything around us.  And there are way too many people to live like this, with nature, so if they can’t adapt after the crash, then they will most likely die.  But it won’t be the ultimate worst thing.  The Earth will recover, and humans will be reduced to a population that cannot wreak havoc upon the ecosystem, mostly due to their lack of sheer number, then eventually due to their accordance with nature, not out of a desire to, but out of necessity, and finally they will understand what it is they were destroying.

We don’t see the Earth for what it is today.  We see it as resources and land we can exploit for our own selfish needs.  We see it as how it can benefit us, not how it can benefit all life on Earth.  The Earth would certainly be much better off without us altogether, but human extinction isn’t exactly a popular campaign theme.  Although it would certainly ensure that there would be no more toxic chemicals being created, other than the ones caused by what we’ve left here.  Every other living being would be able to flourish to the extent that nature would allow it.  Sure, complete human extinction is unlikely, at least for some time, and I don’t want it to happen, but a significant thinning of the herd and a moving back to nature over a few centuries would be great, not just for the planet, but for humankind as well.  And if we can keep our population at the level that nature will support, then we will have succeeded.  If we once again resort to agriculture, the same cycle will repeat itself, only with different resources and characteristics.

For two million years, humans, or what we think of as almost humans, lived in balance with nature.  It is only due to the ice age and other psychological traumas, followed by a desperate need for food that made us this way.  We are damaged in some way and we all know it on an unconscious level.  The world is very harsh and it reflects our inner self.  I’ve seen many a documentary on what the magnetic reversal of the poles and the ice age did to our species.  It is what created the ego.

The ego is like the office manager who is placed in charge while the boss is away.  The ego is what allowed our species to survive when all these traumas were taking place.  And instead of using the ego as a temporary survival tool, we adopted it as our identity.  The ego did save us and allow us to cope, but it also will be our undoing.  The ego was so paranoid about its own survival that it started agriculture to ensure that humans would be able to keep up this way of thinking for as long as it can go.  The culture of domination and exploitation was borne from the ego.  The totalitarian governments and control structures were borne out of ego.  Our individual identities were borne out of the ego.  This civilization first started in the mind and can only be transcended by the mind, assisted by a physical crash of the very system our minds and egos are so bent on supporting.  We need to move closer to who we truly are, the self, to truly become what it is we need to be.  And it is either going to happen through sheer force or a conscious choice.  I’m betting on sheer force right now, unless we have a gigantic shift in consciousness very soon.  But either way, the transition is inevitable, unless of course we go extinct, which would be totally against our nature.

I’m dreaming of a world where we don’t have to be the lords of the Earth, where we can still maintain intelligence, but we live as equals with the rest of the species on this planet.  We don’t use our advantages to exploit other beings, but we cooperate with nature’s plan and do not stray from it.  We transcend the ego and become who we truly are:  just another species on this huge planet that tries its best to fit into nature’s mold and not twist nature to fit ours.  We truly become our-self, and not our individual egos.  And if we can’t do that before we go extinct, then we shall go extinct.  So it goes. :)

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Opening Your Eyes

Thursday, September 30th, 2010

Every week now I’m trying to write a blog entry, on either Thursday or Friday, because I work pretty much the rest of the week.  I work nights, so it’s not really practical for me to blog more frequently.  Besides, this is just something I do to express some ideas I have, or expansion on the ideas of others.  I am not someone who is going to post multiple times a day or even more than twice a week, because I feel not only that I would have less memorable posts, but also that it would become a giant time sink.  I would be spending hours, maybe more, every week just to maintain this thing.  And if I’m not making money from it, what is the payoff?  It’s not like I even want to make money from this blog.  I don’t feel like I’m saying anything special, other than the fact that I have a unique writer’s voice.  The ideas are as old as the hills, it’s just I’m expressing them in my own, unique way.  How many people have thought the same things I have and expressed them in their own way?  Millions.  Over the course of human existence, that is.

But I am not my ideas, because those ideas are not mine to begin with.  Nobody can own ideas.  Ideas are fluid.  It is the unique expression of those ideas that can be owned.  That is our gift to the world.  Our own perspective on things, on ideas.  That is what we bring to the table.  That is our uniqueness coming out.  And this is why every human has something to contribute.  (This is another bull shit, everyone is special post, when most people are not special, they are ordinary, but that is only because they have been conditioned not to think for themselves and to let the media and the government do all their thinking for them.)

Now I’m going to lash out at the world at large because that self-help shit really isn’t me.  No offense to those who got value out of  my posts about goal setting and following your passion.  My passion is exposing the world for what it is and how it takes from the wider world without giving back, and allows crimes of epic  proportions and we just sit there and accept it, or remain blissfully ignorant of it.  We accept what we are told by the media because nobody wants to put in the time and effort it would take to prove things wrong.  And when someone does prove that the “official story” or something is wrong, like Bush winning the election, people still believe it.  Or when 9/11 was debunked by quite a few people, they were viewed as heretics and unpatriotic, abominable to think our own government would attack itself.  If you know all the evidence, you’ll know that the WTC was an albatross, inefficient, and would need asbestos removal that would cost more than the original buildings.  Not to mention some guy just bought the building and put an insurance policy on it specifically for terrorist attacks less than a year before the “terrorist attack.”  And let’s not forget that Dick Cheney become head of NORAD, which had never happened before in the history of NORAD.  No elected official was ever put in charge of shooting down planes and for some reason, that was the time and Cheney was all, “Do NOT shoot that plane down!”  They removed all bomb sniffing dogs from the WTC 2 weeks before the collapse.  The buildings fell at near freefall speed, which is impossible for a steel-framed building unless it is being demolished with small charges at ever floor to lessen resistance to zero as the building collapses.

What happened to most of those who said something to the contrary about 9/11?  I’ll tell you what.  The people in high-ranking positions in journalism and politics were made a mockery of, many of them lost their jobs, and were told never to speak of it again.  Others were threatened and changed their official “scientific” findings.  9/11 is not about Muslim terrorists, it is about America wanting a fascist state of control and a reason to attack the middle east to get oil.  The people who are invested in the “official story” have everything to gain, while those who question it have everything to lose.  So it is a risky position, even to say that we trained Al-Quaeda is a risky position.  To say that Osama Bin Laden used to be a member of one of our government agencies is ludicrous.  But all of it is true.  They are hidden truths.  I have this theory that if even 1% of what we don’t know were let out, we would have a revolution.  But most people don’t want to know.  Better avert your eyes.  Why is it so few people truly want to know?

I’ll tell you why.  Because if they lied about that, what else did they lie about?  What other load of crap are they feeding us?  The government lies on a daily basis.  The government is not your friend.  Unless it is a friend who kills people and lies about it.  Big Brother is watching us almost everywhere we go now.  The PATRIOT Act was a total dissolvement of our freedoms in so many ways and we just stood there and took it.  People don’t have critical thinking skills, not even our leaders.  Not anymore.  The public education system, for the most part, creates a population that is a worker  bee, that will go along with the status quo or whatever the government is doing, because in school it is the same way.  Most people get their spirit broken in school.  Imagine 6 year old children forced to sit at a desk for the better part of 6 hours listening to a teacher drone on about mathematical equations when all they want to do is go outside and play and explore their world.  Even things that would be considered fun, such as kickball or singing a song is done under threat of punishment.  We are trained to do what those “above” us say and believe what they say as well.  We are conditioned since birth if our parents were really lousy and placed us in front of the television.  If they actually paid attention to us, we were conditioned since the start of school, the stupidity-manufacturing institution.  No wonder most people don’t really know what is going on in the world.  They don’t know that they don’t know that they are being conditioned and are being brainwashed on a daily basis by all forms of media.  They are told how to think, they believe what the media tells them to be true, even when it could be completely false.

Very few people take the time to question what they read or see on the television.  And that’s the problem.  If we actually did examine and pull the wool off of our eyes, we would see more than we could ever imagine seeing in this socially-conditioned state we are in now.  How the media placates us and gets us hung up on issues like whether or not a mosque should be built at Ground Zero, rather than focusing on the erosion of our freedoms of religion and speech.  The very things that are not reported in the media are the things that bear the most importance.  We never hear about secret societies that control the world on the news.  When was the last time they had the Bilderberg Group on the TV?  Or the Freemasons?  All this secrecy in the name of controlling people, and gaining more and more power, substituted in the form of money and land.  It is a power addiction that has led us to be left in the dark while those in power take everything and maybe throw us a little crumb every now and then.  They commit crimes of epic proportions, right out in the open and blame it on someone else.  As Napoleon said, “To be believed, make the truth unbelievable.”  And he’s right.  Most people can’t believe we attacked ourselves on 9/11 because it would shatter their reality.  It’s easier to believe that someone far, far away that hates us did that horrific act.  Not Uncle Sam.  Not our government, not people who live in this country and have for their whole lives.  It is just easier to believe that some brown people did it who believe in a foreign God that most people in this country don’t believe in or even understand.

It’s just so sad, because human beings have such a capacity for good, but also one for evil.  And when I use the words good and evil, I don’t mean in any religious sense.  I guess you could call them constructive and destructive.  Sane and pathological.  The choice of words is meaningless.  It’s just good and evil are better understood.  Fear and love are also easily understood, and so is love of power.  We have the capacity to create heaven on Earth, but most of us can’t because we would have to quit our jobs and possibly be homeless just to see our visions through.  The system has got us by the balls and we know it.  It is only through transcending the dominant system in small ways to start that we can begin to live autonomously, with the need for less and less from the system.  The system that lies to us and kills people.  Then we can finally begin to do good in ways that are good from every perspective.  For example, buying a piece of land and letting it run wild, like it should be.  That creates diversity and you could also live on it.  But in order to buy that land, you have to spend time in th dominant system earning money to get the land.  But once you have it, it is yours.

Dropping out completely is stupid, but the further you go, the more free you get.  If you no longer depend on your government for subsistence, then you are no longer complicit in what it does.  That is a nice bonus.  It’s not just the government, but those who control most of the world’s wealth.  When you no longer need much money, they can no longer control you either.  They can’t dangle money in front of you to silence you.  You have more integrity than that, now that you are outside the system, although you still take advantage of it in some ways.  I dislike the word dropout, because it still places the primary focus on the dominant, parasitic system, but what’s a better word?  Naturalist?  Minimalist?  Anarchist?  Anarcho-primitivist, although I don’t know if I want to go back that far.  I still want decent  shelter and some form of comfort.  I don’t want to have to try to sleep with bugs all over me.  Yuck.  What I’m looking for is a way forward where we lessen our dependence on government, technology, and hierarchical systems and start focusing on community and truly good values.  Values that come from love, not fear.  Get rid of fear completely and have a world just filled with love.  Will it take time?  Yes.  Are we ready for it now?  No way.  But is it possible?  Definitely.  We just have to make it happen.

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