Friday, 18 April 2008

SURFING ON A ROCKET -AIR

Religion and Revolution by HakimBey

Real money & hierarchic religion appear to have arisen in the same mysterious moment sometime between the early Neolithic and the third millennium BC in Sumer or Egypt; which came first, the chicken or the egg? Was one a response to the other or is one an aspect of the other?

No doubt that money possesses a deeply religious implication since from the very moment of its appearance it begins to strive for the condition of the spirit -- to remove itself from the world of bodies, to transcend materiality, to become the one true efficacious symbol. With the invention of writing around 3100 BC money as we know it emerges from a complicated system of clay tokens or counters representing material goods & takes the form of written bills of credit impressed on clay tablets; almost without exception these "cheques" seem to concern debts owed to the State Temple, & in theory could have been used in an extended system of exchange as credit-notes "minted" by the theocracy. Coins did not appear until around 700 BC in Greek Asia Minor; they were made of electrum (gold and silver) not because these metals had commodity value but because they were sacred -- Sun & Moon; the ratio of value between them has always hovered around 14:1 not because the earth contains 14 times as much silver as gold but because the Moon takes 14 "suns" to grow from dark to full. Coins may have originated as temple tokens symbolizing a worshipper's due share of the sacrifice -- holy souvenirs, which could later be traded for goods because they had "mana", not use-value. (This function may have originated in the Stone Age trade in "ceremonial" stone axe-heads used in potlach-like distribution rites.) Unlike Mesopotamian credit-notes, coins were inscribed with sacred images & were seen as liminal objects, nodal points between quotidian reality & the world of the spirits (this accounts for the custom of bending coins to "spiritualize" them and throwing them into wells, which are the "eyes" of the otherworld.) Debt itself -- the true content of all money -- is a highly "spiritual" concept. As tribute (primitive debt) it exemplifies capitulation to a "legitimate power" of expropriation masked in religious ideology -- but as "real debt" it attains the uniquely spiritual ability to reproduce itself as if it were an organic being. Even now it remains the only "dead" substance in all the world to possess this power -- "money begets money". At this point money begins to take on a parodic aspect vis-à-vis religion -- it seems that money wants to rival god, to become immanent spirit in the form of pure metaphysicality which nevertheless "rules the world". Religion must take note of this blasphemous nature in money and condemn it as contra naturam. Money & religion enter opposition -- one cannot serve God & Mammon simultaneously. But so long as religion continues to perform as the ideology of separation (the hierarchic State, expropriation, etc.) it can never really come to grips with the money-problem. Over & over again reformers arise within religion to chase the moneylenders from the temple, & always they return -- in fact often enough the moneylenders become the Temple. (It's certainly no accident that banks for along time aped the forms of religious architecture.) According to Weber it was Calvin who finally resolved the issue with his theological justification for "usury" -- but this scarcely does credit to the real Protestants, like the Ranters & Diggers, who proposed that religion should once & for all enter into total opposition to money -- thereby launching the Millennium. It seems more likely that the Enlightenment should take credit for resolving the problem -- by jettisoning religion as the ideology of the ruling class & replacing it with rationalism (& "Classical Economics"). This formula however would fail to do justice to those real illuminati who proposed the dismantling of all ideologies of power & authority -- nor would it help to explain why "official" religion failed to realize its potential as opposition at this point, & instead went on providing moral support for both State & Capital.


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Note on Nationalism by HakimBey

Viewed as the quintessentialization of hierarchy & separation, the State can replicate itself on any level of experience -- from the individual psyche to the laws of nations. And yet society can exist in theory without the State -- & did so in fact for nearly a million years, 99% of the time span of the human species, thanks to the persistence of customs & institutions -- and mythemes -- that appear to have been designed for just this purpose, i.e. the suppression of the State & realization of the Social. War itself can be one of these institutions of "Society against the State", since (in its "primitive" form) it acts to disperse power & wealth rather than concentrate it. On another level we might say that shamanism also tends toward centrifugality of power in its emphasis on direct experience rather than mere symbolization (i.e. the shaman must "really" heal the patient, the medium must "really" be possessed, otherwise their prestige evaporates: -- in some tribes shamanic failure was punishable by exile or death). The proto-State then must emerge in the moment of breakdown of centrifugal force in war & religion. Changes in economic structure appear to follow upon this breakdown rather than cause it. [Note: The "breakdown" itself may have had economic causes but we cannot perceive them -- certainly overpopulation and climatic change are inadequate "explanations"!] For instance, the replacement of hunting/gathering by agriculture failed to produce the proto-State. We cannot even blame the State on specialization of labor, since we are perfectly capable of imagining (with Fourier) a State-less Society based on fairly complex economics. The State seems almost sui generis -- its birth is shrouded in a certain mystery. Something went wrong somewhere -- the old myths (based on reciprocity & redistribution) collapsed before the power of a new "story" based on separation & accumulation. The precise instant is lost, although the true State lurches into archaeological view sometime around the 4th to 3rd millennium in Sumer & Egypt. In both cases the realms of war & religion seem to have coalesced to produce figurative & literal pyramid-structures impossible to conceive without tribute & slavery. The centrifugality of the social is gradually supplanted by the centripetality of power & wealth till a crisis point is reached in the catastrophic emergence of a "priest-king" & a nascent bureaucracy -- the infallible signs of the true State.

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The Post-Larval Must Be Very Cautious in Communicating with Larval Humans

Exo-psychology holds that the human larval exists in a reality defined by the four survival imprints. Although the brain receives 100 million impulses a second, mundane consciousness is limited to signals which have been conditioned to one of the four imprinted game-boards.

Unconditioned sensations, the raw swirl of an unfiltered reality, exist as background noise.

In communicating with larvals the following points must, therefore, be remembered:

The larval has no interest in you, you do not exist, unless you can hook into Hir limited reality-island, transmit on Hir narrow mind-band, unless your behavior offers meaning in terms of possible benefit or threat to Hir:

1. cellular well being
2. emotional-hierarchical status
3. artifact manipulation game
4. socio-sexual security; domestic reassurance

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Political Ponerology

THE GENESIS OF EVIL
The ultimate cause of evil lies in the interaction of two human factors: 1) normal human ignorance and weakness and 2) the existence and action of a statistically small (4-8% of the general population) but extremely active group of psychologically deviant individuals. The ignorance of the existence of such psychological differences is the first criterion of ponerogenesis. That is, such ignorance creates an opening whereby such individuals can act undetected.

The presence of such “disease” on the individual level is described in the Almost Human section of this website. However, depending on the type of activity of psychopathic and characteropathic individuals, evil can manifest on any societal level. The greater the scope of the psychopath’s influence, the greater harm done. Thus any group of humans can be infected or “ponerized” by their influence. From families, clubs, churches, businesses, and corporations, to entire nations. The most extreme form of such macrosocial evil is called “pathocracy”.

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THE PSYCHOPATH - The Mask of Sanity

Imagine - if you can - not having a conscience, none at all, no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense of concern for the well-being of strangers, friends, or even family members. Imagine no struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what kind of selfish, lazy, harmful, or immoral action you had taken.

And pretend that the concept of responsibility is unknown to you, except as a burden others seem to accept without question, like gullible fools.

Now add to this strange fantasy the ability to conceal from other people that your psychological makeup is radically different from theirs. Since everyone simply assumes that conscience is universal among human beings, hiding the fact that you are conscience-free is nearly effortless.

You are not held back from any of your desires by guilt or shame, and you are never confronted by others for your cold-bloodedness. The ice water in your veins is so bizarre, so completely outside of their personal experience, that they seldom even guess at your condition.

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The Power of Nightmares

The Power of Nightmares, subtitled The Rise of the Politics of Fear, is a BBC documentary film series, written and produced by Adam Curtis. The series consists of three one-hour films, consisting mostly of a montage of archive footage with Curtis's narration, which were first broadcast in the United Kingdom in late 2004 and have been subsequently aired in multiple countries and shown in several film festivals, including the 2005 Cannes Film Festival.

The films compare the rise of the American Neo-Conservative movement and the radical Islamist movement, making comparisons on their origins and noting strong similarities between the two. More controversially, it argues that the threat of radical Islamism as a massive, sinister organised force of destruction, specifically in the form of al-Qaeda, is in fact a myth perpetrated by politicians in many countries—and particularly American Neo-Conservatives—in an attempt to unite and inspire their people following the failure of earlier, more utopian ideologies.

The Power of Nightmares has been praised by film critics in both Britain and the United States. Its message and content have also been the subject of various critiques and criticisms from conservatives and progressives.

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The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom

The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom is a BBC documentary series by English filmmaker Adam Curtis, well known for other documentaries including The Century of the Self and The Power of Nightmares. It began airing on BBC Two on 11 March 2007.



The series consists of three, one-hour programmes which explore the concept and definition of freedom, specifically "how a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures led to today's idea of freedom."

FURTHER READING http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_%28television_documentary_series%29

PART 1


PART 2
Adam Curtis - The Trap Part 2: The Lonely Robot


PART 3
Adam Curtis - The Trap Part 3: We Will Force Them To Be Free

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