Category Archives: philosophy

philosophy, politics

>The End of the Apocalypse

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What will it take for you to finally call these last days what they really are: The end of the apocalypse.
The extermination of six hundred species per day? The starvation of one billion people?
Do you really  believe our culture will undergo a voluntary transformation to a sane way of living?

The problem is that we who benefit from the industrial economy – the civilization that must be destroyed in order for things to be created – are the ones that are destroying the planet, and we won’t accept having our benefits taken away from us. Our role as participants in the industrial economy is more important to us than being human, thus having our benefits taken away is like threatening our very existence. This is the downward spiral. This is why we’re doomed.

Lewis Mumford defined civilization’s main features as such: ”the centralization of political power, the separation of classes, the lifetime division of labor, the mechanization of production, the magnification of military power, the economic exploitation of the weak, and the universal introduction of slavery and forced labor for both industrial and military purposes.”
Most dictionaries define civilization as ”a high stage of social and cultural development, an advanced state of human society”.
Obviously, these two definitions don’t synch, and the dictionary definition makes the common mistake in presupposing our present civilization is the best, and that there is only one way to live. Oswald Spengler had a few things to say about that…

Derrick Jensen puts it best in Endgame: ”Ultimately, then, the story of this civilization is the story of the reduction of the world’s tapestry of stories to only one story, the best story, the real story, the most advanced story, the most developed story, the story of the power and the glory that is Western Civilization.”

On another note: ”The civilized notion of ownership is in truth based on force: the aquisition and maintenance of the property of the rich is the central motivating factor impelling nearly all state violence.”
Because when speaking of ownership in a ”civilized” society we mean we have the right to do whatever we want with what we own. We have the right to destroy it, if we please. However, as Spengler also put it, with ownership comes responsibility. If the farmer owns and nurtures his land it becomes his blood and flesh, and he is responsible for the continuation of that land and its health. And he will take that responsibility. We’ve forgotten all about that in this civilized capitalist part of the world, where industrial economy and technology rule.

In Man and Technics (1931), Spengler predicted that coloured people of the Earth will use the very technology of the West to destroy the West. We’ll see how that goes…

literature, philosophy, religion

>The meaning of the curse

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Cut off from the world, having broken with all his friends, he read me – with an almost indespensible Russian accent, given the situation – the beginning of the Book of Books. Reaching the moment where Adam gets himself expelled from paradise, he fell silent, dreamily staring into the distance while I thought to myself, more or less distinctly, that after millenia of false hopes, humanity, furious at having cheated, would finally receive the meaning of the curse and thereby make itself worthy of its first ancestor.

A flame traverses the blood.
To go over to the other side, circumventing death…

To withdraw indefinitely into oneself, like God after the six days.
Let us imitate Him, on this point at least.

Between Genesis and Apocalypse imposture reigns.
It is important to know this, for once assimilated, such dizzying evidence renders all formulas for wisdom superfluous.

Since our defects are not surface accidents but the very basis of our nature,
we cannot correct them without deforming that nature, without perverting it still more.

If the Hour of Disappointment were to sound for everyone at the same time,
we should see an entirely new version, either of paradise or of hell.

No fate to which I could have adjusted myself.
I was made to exist before my birth and after my death, not during my very existence.

I anticipated witnessing in my lifetime the disappearance of our species.
But the gods have been against me.

philosophy

>The Falsification of Man – To What End?

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Civilization is a conspiracy of noise, designed to cover up the uncomfortable silences.

John Zerzan

The ongoing process of the collapse of modern mass society must be welcomed, not resisted. The longer the process, the more we will suffer. Ultimately – and most desirable, in true, basic humanist fashion – the solution to all our problems would be the total extinction of the human race. Unfortunately, that kind of peace of mind will have to wait until one of our beloved leaders decides to push the button.

Until then, what’s important is to rise above, ride the tiger and claim the individual will to power. Black Flag, Julius Evola and Friedrich Nietzsche all rolled into one. And no, the will to power is not the will to dominate. People who preach these misinterpretations are most often people who say Nietzsche was a Nazi, even though they haven’t read one single text by the man. Ignore the ignorants.

We should acknowledge the laws of society and act as loyal citizens, to a certain extent, but since the real revolution starts within (Refused told me that sixteen years ago) we shall strike from the inside, like a samurai having taken advantage of the power of his enemy for so long, patiently awaiting the final blow to be executed with perfection and precision against the  modern dying world. We shall rise from the abyss, out of the dark into the black light by means of occult warfare. Legions arise! To the death!

Well, maybe not that romantic and heroic, but one must be able to dream. Because, seriously, what kind of world awaits our children? They will inherit a culture of high anxiety, fear, stress and depression that constantly borders on a state of panic disorder. This is a world that offers no future, but fails to admit this fact. And all this chaos stems from civilization itself, a civilization that passively accepts its own decline. Hence, modern civilization is worth nothing but death.

Neurosis – To What End

‘Progress’ is not progress, it’s everlasting destruction
Technology is backwards

Born of machine
Worship machine
Slave to machine
Become machine

Modern civilization, a contradiction in terms
In terms of survival

Are we alone?

Man is made to obey thee… Are we nothing but living…
MACHINE

A dead hand, it’s work expresses death
No spirit in it’s skeletal framework
The falsification of Man, to what end?
To what end?

Perverted ingenuity of Man
Fools, we’ve lost our earthly wisdom

Not the way of nature
In a man-made state of disarray

philosophy, politics

>Earth Hour

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Earth Hour makes me sick. It’s straight up hypocrisy, the masses being orchestrated by the media to turn out the lights for one hour once a year. Wow. Big deal. Everybody at the same time: We did it! We love life!
Earth Hour does practically nothing but speaks to our bad conscience.

Also, Earth Hour always starts at an hour where all big businesses are shut down. Instead of the big businesses taking responsibility for the destruction of the Earth and shutting down in the middle of the day, the joke’s on us: Turn out the lights on your free time, please, and welcome back to work tomorrow. Work, eat, consume, sleep.

Usually, I’m all for small actions leading to big change, but this, as well as the International Women’s Day and such manifestations, is like spitting in the face of real change. One hour, or one day, and then it’s all back to normal, i.e. the mindless egotistic destruction we always occupy our time with.
Mankind will never learn.

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Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals
But then how did that other “gloomy business,” the consciousness of guilt, the whole “bad conscience” come into the world?—And with this we turn back to our genealogists of morality. I’ll say it once more—or have I not said anything about it yet?—they are useless. With their own merely “modern” experience extending through only a brief period [fünf Spannen lange], with no knowledge of and no desire to know the past, even less a historical instinct, a “second sight”— something necessary at this very point—they nonetheless pursue the history of morality. That must justifiably produce results which have a less than tenuous relationship to the truth. Have these genealogists of morality up to now allowed themselves to dream, even remotely, that, for instance, that major moral principle “guilt” [Schuld] derived its origin from the very materialistic idea “debt” [Schulden]? Or that punishment developed as a repayment, completely without reference to any assumption about freedom or lack of freedom of the will?—and did so, by contrast, to the point where it always first required a high degree of human development so that the animal “man” began to make those much more primitive distinctions between “intentional,” “negligent,” “accidental,” “responsible,” and their opposites and bring them to bear when meting out punishment? That idea, nowadays so trite, apparently so natural, so unavoidable, which has even had to serve as the explanation how the feeling of justice in general came into existence on earth, “The criminal deserves punishment because he could have acted otherwise,” this idea is, in fact, an extremely late achievement, indeed, a sophisticated form of human judgment and decision making. Anyone who moves this idea back to the beginnings is sticking his coarse fingers inappropriately into the psychology of older humanity. For the most extensive period of human history, punishment was certainly not meted out because people held the instigator of evil responsible for his actions, and thus it was not assumed that only the guilty party should be punished:—it was much more as it still is now when parents punish their children out of anger over some harm they have suffered, anger vented on the perpetrator—but anger restrained and modified through the idea that every injury has some equivalent and that compensation for it could, in fact, be paid out, even if that is through the pain of the perpetrator. Where did this primitive, deeply rooted, and perhaps by now ineradicable idea derive its power, the idea of an equivalence between punishment and pain? I have already given away the answer: in the contractual relationship between creditor and debtor, which is, in general, as ancient as the idea of “legal subject” and which, for its part, refers back to the basic forms of buying, selling, bartering, trading, and exchanging goods.

movies, philosophy, politics

Collapse

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Collapse is one man sitting in the basement of an abandoned meatpacking plant in downtown Los Angeles, smoking a cigarette and explaining why human civilization in its present form is doomed. The ambience, the music (a Philip Glass-styled score) and the way he is portrayed – like a prisoner in a cell, or like a monk in confession – makes me think of The X-Files. However, this is not fiction.

Michael Ruppert, a former Los Angeles police officer and investigative journalist, is probably most known for dealing with conspiracy theories. However, I’d rather say he’s in tune with reality and facts, because he has learned how to connect the dots. He was one of the first to talk openly about CIA dealing drugs in America, as well as starting the very influental newsletter From The Wilderness, which exposes governmental corruption.
Before you dismiss Ruppert’s “conspiracy theory” as the brainchild of an old tin foil hat, we need to understand what a conspiracy theory really is. I wrote about what Noam Chomsky had to say on the subject of conspiracy theories here. Please read that article as well.

In Collapse, Ruppert talks about peak oil (”People have felt what a 145 dollar a barrell of oil feels like”, ”In the case of oil or any other substance like that, no matter how much money you throw at it, you’re never gonna be able to increase oil production above where it was at peak”) and the war against time that the United States are waging in their desperate pursuit to find and exploit more oil. This war has been going on since the mid 1970’s, as shown by declassified CIA documents from that era. They were perfectly aware of peak oil even back then.

From here on, he goes on for 80 minutes speaking about electricity, energy, food, the CIA’s drug dealing business, economics, money, population growth, the law of the crash, local food production, moving out of the city, communities and tribes… It’s pretty much Oswald Spengler and Overshoot rolled into one. I love it.

However, I do not agree with everything Ruppert says. ”There is no such thing as clean coal, and there never ever will be” – he makes a lot of these statements. We don’t know what will be invented in the future. Things might change to the better. Even though I personally believe that it’s way too late for science to save us from doom, one cannot be certain that it’s not gonna happen. We might just be saved by the bell in the very last nanosecond.

Here are my humble predictions for the near future in one crazy incoherent rant without word wrapping:
In a near future (five to ten years) one thing should be perfectly clear: The gap has become too wide to fix. I’m talking about the gap between rich and poor, men and women, left and right, within extremist groups, races, countries, cultures, political parties, extra-parliamentary opposition, between the digitally informed and the digitally unaware, between Zionists and Jihadists, young and old, freaky Christians and freaky Muslims, between the average Joe and plain Jane… The gap will be the keyword of the future. America will be at more wars than ever (but will at the same time lose much of its power), Jihadists too (but they will gain power) and the world won’t be able to do shit about it. And China, let’s not even talk about China… All we can do is watch the world collapse on our computer screens. Good friends will disagree vehemently on political issues, because politics have gone too far, become too extreme, and it will ultimately tear friendships and relationships apart. Most people won’t even talk politics or care at all to get involved, because of fear of losing friends, or fear of saying the wrong things. People who are rather well off in society will part with friends who are or have been subjects to (for example) racism, violence, discrimination, poverty, depression etc – the extreme political situation will not allow them to interact with each other anymore since politics is in everyone’s face and cannot be avoided. Lots of people won’t make the effort of even trying to understand – let alone accepting – what another person has gone through. People won’t understand that one can condemn the Zionist brutality, but still be in favor of certain Israeli policies. Feminism will rise, and so will its enemies. Hate crimes will be more brutal than ever. Even the mainstream will start to clash with the police. A lot of people who’ve been politically active and always spoken out will turn silent, while some will become even more agitated and more extreme. These “extreme” people will sooner or later be forced to go underground and act anonymously to be able to carry their message. The left will split into myriads of small fractions, as will the right, and the extreme fractions are those that will be heard about in the media. In these extreme times ordinary people won’t be able to tell left from right, since left- and right-wing politics will pretty much be the same, only fighting for slightly different causes, but still using the same tools. In 2015–2020 the world will know for sure that the environment is beyond repair, because the environment don’t care if we close our eyes and turn away. It will just simply destroy us. There will be worldwide chaos, massive unemployment issues, economical collapse, famine even amongst previously wealthy people (the Western world), pandemics like the HIV/AIDS and Ebola, lots of people will die, the future will have to be revalued… What once was considered conspiracy nut theories will be mainstream knowledge, but people still won’t give a fuck. In short, the gaps will be shockingly wide in a near future, and we won’t ever understand that it’s been too late to fix for far too long. What we’ve created for so long will be destroyed in seconds.

Here lies the greatest problem of mankind – we will never learn. We do not understand or care about the most basic equations of life and death. When we cannot even solve the most fundamental problems in our daily lives, how are we supposed to save the world? We are living with the dying. Our children will look down and whisper “No.”

Hegel:
But what experience and history teach is this, – that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.

I see no change in our way of thinking, and that’s why we deserve this collapse. It’s already happening all around us. Nothing strange about that, really. In the mind frame of Oswald Spengler:
Every civilisation in history has collapsed. Why should ours be any different?

literature, philosophy, politics

>Derrick Jensen: Endgame

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I just started reading Derrick Jensen‘s Endgame (thanks to Pierre) after having read bits and parts in A Language Older Than Words and The Culture of Make Believe. Here are the twenty premises of Endgame.

Premise One: Civilization is not and can never be sustainable. This is especially true for industrial civilization.

Premise Two: Traditional communities do not often voluntarily give up or sell the resources on which their communities are based until their communities have been destroyed. They also do not willingly allow their landbases to be damaged so that other resources—gold, oil, and so on—can be extracted. It follows that those who want the resources will do what they can to destroy traditional communities.

Premise Three: Our way of living—industrial civilization—is based on, requires, and would collapse very quickly without persistent and widespread violence.

Premise Four: Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.

Premise Five: The property of those higher on the hierarchy is more valuable than the lives of those below. It is acceptable for those above to increase the amount of property they control—in everyday language, to make money—by destroying or taking the lives of those below. This is called production. If those below damage the property of those above, those above may kill or otherwise destroy the lives of those below. This is called justice.

Premise Six: Civilization is not redeemable. This culture will not undergo any sort of voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living. If we do not put a halt to it, civilization will continue to immiserate the vast majority of humans and to degrade the planet until it (civilization, and probably the planet) collapses. The effects of this degradation will continue to harm humans and nonhumans for a very long time.

Premise Seven: The longer we wait for civilization to crash—or the longer we wait before we ourselves bring it down—the messier will be the crash, and the worse things will be for those humans and nonhumans who live during it, and for those who come after.

Premise Eight: The needs of the natural world are more important than the needs of the economic system.

Another way to put premise Eight: Any economic or social system that does not benefit the natural communities on which it is based is unsustainable, immoral, and stupid. Sustainability, morality, and intelligence (as well as justice) requires the dismantling of any such economic or social system, or at the very least disallowing it from damaging your landbase.

Premise Nine: Although there will clearly some day be far fewer humans than there are at present, there are many ways this reduction in population could occur (or be achieved, depending on the passivity or activity with which we choose to approach this transformation). Some of these ways would be characterized by extreme violence and privation: nuclear armageddon, for example, would reduce both population and consumption, yet do so horrifically; the same would be true for a continuation of overshoot, followed by crash. Other ways could be characterized by less violence. Given the current levels of violence by this culture against both humans and the natural world, however, it’s not possible to speak of reductions in population and consumption that do not involve violence and privation, not because the reductions themselves would necessarily involve violence, but because violence and privation have become the default. Yet some ways of reducing population and consumption, while still violent, would consist of decreasing the current levels of violence required, and caused by, the (often forced) movement of resources from the poor to the rich, and would of course be marked by a reduction in current violence against the natural world. Personally and collectively we may be able to both reduce the amount and soften the character of violence that occurs during this ongoing and perhaps longterm shift. Or we may not. But this much is certain: if we do not approach it actively—if we do not talk about our predicament and what we are going to do about it—the violence will almost undoubtedly be far more severe, the privation more extreme.

Premise Ten: The culture as a whole and most of its members are insane. The culture is driven by a death urge, an urge to destroy life.

Premise Eleven: From the beginning, this culture—civilization—has been a culture of occupation.

Premise Twelve: There are no rich people in the world, and there are no poor people. There are just people. The rich may have lots of pieces of green paper that many pretend are worth something—or their presumed riches may be even more abstract: numbers on hard drives at banks—and the poor may not. These “rich” claim they own land, and the “poor” are often denied the right to make that same claim. A primary purpose of the police is to enforce the delusions of those with lots of pieces of green paper. Those without the green papers generally buy into these delusions almost as quickly and completely as those with. These delusions carry with them extreme consequences in the real world.

Premise Thirteen: Those in power rule by force, and the sooner we break ourselves of illusions to the contrary, the sooner we can at least begin to make reasonable decisions about whether, when, and how we are going to resist.

Premise Fourteen: From birth on—and probably from conception, but I’m not sure how I’d make the case—we are individually and collectively enculturated to hate life, hate the natural world, hate the wild, hate wild animals, hate women, hate children, hate our bodies, hate and fear our emotions, hate ourselves. If we did not hate the world, we could not allow it to be destroyed before our eyes. If we did not hate ourselves, we could not allow our homes—and our bodies—to be poisoned.

Premise Fifteen: Love does not imply pacifism.

Premise Sixteen: The material world is primary. This does not mean that the spirit does not exist, nor that the material world is all there is. It means that spirit mixes with flesh. It means also that real world actions have real world consequences. It means we cannot rely on Jesus, Santa Claus, the Great Mother, or even the Easter Bunny to get us out of this mess. It means this mess really is a mess, and not just the movement of God’s eyebrows. It means we have to face this mess ourselves. It means that for the time we are here on Earth—whether or not we end up somewhere else after we die, and whether we are condemned or privileged to live here—the Earth is the point. It is primary. It is our home. It is everything. It is silly to think or act or be as though this world is not real and primary. It is silly and pathetic to not live our lives as though our lives are real.

Premise Seventeen: It is a mistake (or more likely, denial) to base our decisions on whether actions arising from these will or won’t frighten fence-sitters, or the mass of Americans.

Premise Eighteen: Our current sense of self is no more sustainable than our current use of energy or technology.

Premise Nineteen: The culture’s problem lies above all in the belief that controlling and abusing the natural world is justifiable.

Premise Twenty: Within this culture, economics—not community well-being, not morals, not ethics, not justice, not life itself—drives social decisions.

Modification of Premise Twenty: Social decisions are determined primarily (and often exclusively) on the basis of whether these decisions will increase the monetary fortunes of the decision-makers and those they serve.

Re-modification of Premise Twenty: Social decisions are determined primarily (and often exclusively) on the basis of whether these decisions will increase the power of the decision-makers and those they serve.

Re-modification of Premise Twenty: Social decisions are founded primarily (and often exclusively) on the almost entirely unexamined belief that the decision-makers and those they serve are entitled to magnify their power and/or financial fortunes at the expense of those below.

Re-modification of Premise Twenty: If you dig to the heart of it—if there were any heart left—you would find that social decisions are determined primarily on the basis of how well these decisions serve the ends of controlling or destroying wild nature.

philosophy, quotes, religion, swedish

>Nietzsche: Ny moral

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 ‘I haven hört, att det var sagt de gamle: Du skall ej röva, du skall ej dräpa. Men jag frågor eder: var på jorden fanns det någonsin värre rövare och dråpare än just sådana heliga ord?’ Dessa Nietzsches ord har i kälkborgarens ögon en djupt omoralisk klang, fastän de blott säga, att den, som vigt sitt liv åt ett stort och ädelt mål, ej får låta sin handlingskraft söndersmulas av de tusen hänsyn, som trycka den kortsynta och egoistiska vardagsmänniskan ned i gruset. En sådan idealism är allt annat än immoralisk; den ställer tvärtom betydligt högre och hårdare krav på sin man än de kristna husdjursdygderna, och den smutsas aldrig ner av tankar på tack och vedergällning.
Bengt Lidforss, 16 december 1902