Messages

[get it]

Captain U: you don't need to read my blog. Your post sums up everything that I've been trying to explain for the last five years in one post. You get it. I'm trying to unify the forces. Well done.

To some degree, the best thing about using contentious words like "magick" and "Marxism" is to watch people who are supposedly Enlightened Psychonauts Who Think For Themselves have precisely the mass-media-approved kneejerk slogan-regurgitation reaction to them. Perhaps said Enlightened Psychonauts can then recognize that they're having that kind of reaction, and question it. Many have suggested that I use more "neutral" words so as to reach a mass audience, but right now I think I kind of like how deep the dog is buried.

On another topic, certainly some of the Aphorisms are badly written and jargon-encrusted. This is because I wrote some of them up to 5 years ago when I was far less cool than I am now. Also, because I never edit anything on that blog, it's just as it is dictated to my mind by my Holy Guardian Angel or the Space Bankers or whoever. Cram's effort in bringing them into book form will always have that problem of taking a synchronous look at a diachronous reality (or is it the other way around?)

[collective]

The problem with being myself in the workplace is that I get fired.

Yeah, that reminds me of the "elementary remark" from the early chapters of Animal Farm: "The farmer feeds us. If he were gone, we'd all starve to death."

The whole thing about compartmentalisation of personality is that it's not only necessary for survival under capitalism, capitalism actively promotes it. If you think capitalism is the best way forward for human civilisation, that's not a problem, but if you think it leads to ecological collapse and mental illness on a planetary basis, that compartmentalisation is something that needs challenging. Of course if you do it on your own you just get fired or whatever. If a collective does it, that's a whole different matter. It's one of our fundamental principles that labor union organisation can and should be an altered state of consciousness... if done right 

[was]

Its funny, but lately I've noticed Yudowsky, Terry Pratchett and Doloras (of the Chaos Marxism blog) all have almost the exactly the same take on stories:

Stories don't tell us how the world work, but they tell us how people think the world should work.  You can use that to tell people better stories.

Of course, with Pratchett, this (along with "headology") is how the witches win practically all their battles.

I actually was Magrat Garlick as a teenager, but now I think I'm Esme Weatherwax forty years early.

[The group makes the individual.]

There's no such thing as "individuals". Individual humans are only partly self-aware refractions of their culture, social and media environment, and DNA programming. So to say "individual humans are good but groups are bad" is not only superstitious nonsense - a verbal sacrifice to the unquestionable God of the Individualist Ego - but is completely bass-ackwards. The group makes the individual. An individual divorced from any group goes nuckin' futs - serial killer, Unabomber, sociopath, dictator.

Saying "social change must start from the individual" is precisely as silly as "changes in the tides must start with the individual water droplet". As above, so below: social changes is always and everywhere the same thing as individual change. One just does not happen without the other.

Which board do you want it on, Apple Talk?

That would be friendly, thanks.

[ETA:]

Hi guys, I've taken an unbreakable Magickal Vow to not be a bitter, negative bitch all the time, so I thought I'd come here and make nice.



ETA: Balls, posted this on the wrong board and can't delete. Mods please move if you would prefer I not look like a dick, kthx.

[them]

I must say, you guys are far easier to talk to than the current crop of ignorant Bobbies who call themselves "SubGeniuses". Anyone who's read the CM blog for a while will remember what happened when we tried to engage them in polemic. I should also make it clear that, while I wrote a tirade on parts of BIP that pissed me off, I think it is a very good thing that BIP exists, in that to my knowledge it's the first piece of original Discordian literature since Illuminatus!. There's only so long that people can rehash the insights of RAW, Mal-2, Thornley etc before it begins to look like early Christianity with more dope-smoking - so kudos for the authors for at least making an effort.

A bit of clarification: I suppose the point I was getting at with "the MACHINE (tm) has only existed for 150 years" was that not that ideology and "soft power" social control didn't exist before then - far from it - but that the rules of the game were entirely different in the pre-capitalist era, when similar processes worked through priesthoods and bureaucracies rather than memetic technology. I think that's what I would consider the unique contribution of Marxism to this kind of cultural/memetic theory - the idea that the rules of the game as we know it are intimately bound in such recent-and-therefore-not-eternal phenomena as transnational corporations, the universality of wage and salaried labour, the mass consumer market, etc, and that therefore solutions dreamt up before the early 19th century are just anachronistic.

Is it wrong for us to be self-directed, or must we let float listless in the sea of humanity, waiting for a revolution to come along?

Well, revolutions don't "come along". Ché Guevara said "if you're a revolutionary, make a revolution". That's a hopelessly optimistic formula in itself (and led directly to Ché getting himself killed), but there's always something that can be done right now to attempt to get rebellious ideas into mass circulation.

I also get a very, very distinct feeling she hasn't actually spent much time here on peedycom, and that she would probably have a good time if she wasn't trying to make us look like asshats.

I only found out that peedycom existed yesterday. And if it looked like I was trying to make you guys look like asshats, then (as I mentioned in my endnote) I was obviously doing it wrong, yet again. Thanks for the invite to hang around, but if you guys think the idea of actually changing things through mass action is ridiculous, I doubt we have much to say to each other.

One point - I think it was Cramulus who said that you can only hope to throw a wrench in the gears of the MACHINE (tm) by getting close to the machine. He's 100% correct, but you don't get that close to the workings if you hope to be one of the guys directing it - only if you're one of the poor grease-monkeys down there getting filthy making it work. Which is exactly why Marxists say that "hope lies in the proles", rather than in sneaking your way into the elite.

*ahem*

I'm glad you guys found the Aphorisms helpful. Feel free to use them however you want, although a link back to the original list would be considered friendly.

Doloras from Chaos Marxism