oops

i forgot willam t vollman...there is no way to adequately describe his writing...check out rising up, rising down...if you can find it...there are more i've missed i'm sure, but you get the idea

dystopian or anti-social?

maybe both...i was thinking about authors whose books i re-read on a regular basis ( all, or a portion, on say a yearly basis, if not more often) and as far as sociabillity goes they are a scurvy crew at best...so here's a list (in alphabetical order not by favorite) and something of a reason why...sam beckett...because death renders life absurd and there's nothing funnier than unhappiness...isaiah berlin...because he loathes a teleology and says why...hank bukowski...the only real poet--ever...anthony burgess...he's hilarious because he wants to be orwell and can't...william s burroughs sr. & jr....they know dependency and its issues like only insiders can...celine...he is the most theraputic writer, when i am sick of life all i have to do is open "journey to the end of the night" anywhere and start reading and i will feel much better about myself...crates the cynic...all social conventions are synthetic...thomas homer-dixon because he taught me that people will kill for water just as quickly as for oil...thomas de quincey..."confessions of an english opium eater" might be the closest thing to a bible i have, he goes the burroughs boys one step better...epicurus...for the difference between kenetic and katastematic pleasure and the enjoinment to live simply... gunter grass for bring a fearless social critic...robert kaplan for being a conservative with a realistic worldview...g.e.moore for telling the philosophical world to cut out the dualism and get a grip...fred nietzsche for being difficult about everything...george orwell for distrusting intellectuals and being true to himself no matter how wrong or unpopular he was, he loathed a teleology too...mark reisner for "cadallac desert" and reinforcing my views about water and people...bertrand russell for making me think out if my depth and expand my horizon ( the anthropology faculty at iun gets kudos for this as well)...hunter thompson for being so acidically right when he wasn't out of his mind...kurt vonnegut for being so damn funny...ludwig wittgenstein for saying philosophy can't explain anything, just describe...yevgeny zimyatin for loathing a teleology ( sense a pattern?)...and jan svankmajer the czech surrealist film-maker for being so surreal

eqanimity

there isn't any...well...not much, and that's to be expected when you're trying (please emphaize trying, i don't really know how much success i'm having...may never know...then again may discover altogether too much) to deconstruct a system of beliefs that have accumulated over fifty odd years...descartes says that to be a true seeker of wisdom (and let's not assume i'm going to find any of that in the end either...or, perhaps it's philosophy he's talking about) you have to make the attempt to question everything you know at least once....take your beliefs down to the bare bones of what's there just to find the basis...what if you find nothing? then there's the question of what is troubling me so much that i find this necessary...i have some idea, but i am not prepared to go public with them...so there will be a barrier of lies by omission between us...there are others involved...some don't know they're involved so i have to protect them...and by logical extention myself ( or, perhaps, it's the other way round) so the level of psycological discomfort is fairly high...i have a basic grasp of what's up intellectually...it's the emotional part that's difficult...i look around at all this stuff i've accumulated and wonder why...it's fast becoming apparent to me that the bulk of it is unnecessary...that it's someone else's idea of a cultural norm...i don't use half of it...but there it is anyway...and i'm damned if i can explain why except that i've been as conditioned by the advertizing and aquisition norms as anyone and that just makes me more unhappy...we all have unclear pictures of ourselves i suppose....i would like to think i'm above this...but i'm not..sucked in like everyone else...so i'm getting a clearer picture of what i'm doing wrong...am i doing anything right? well i don't know, and that's the crux of the problem...need to do more housecleaning to see if i can find out.

so...what do i own?

world financial markets are pretty much collapsing, and no-one can get a calculator out and add it all up beause: 1.) no-one really wants to, and 2.) there's so much obfuscation going on about financial instruments as those who run the economy try to dodge responsibillity for all this that no-one may be able to. i could be deeper into my austerity program much more quickly than i thought...i'm looking at contingencies...i have enough to pay off the oustanding balance on the house, and i was thinking i'd at least be out of the elements...but then i thought about taxes and the distinct possibillty that local government might take the house if i defaulted on the taxes (how would they sell it?)...from there i began pondering about exactly what it is that's truly mine...all the big investment items i have ( the house and the vehicles) are subject to taxes...failure to pay those taxes ends with the seizure of ther real-estate, and the vehicles are rendered useless by increasing levels of negative sanctions in the form of fines and possible jail time for continued driving with expired plates, false and ficticious registration, etc. so the catagory of things i "own" are contingent on my abillity to continue paying for their use even after the original "seller" has been paid-off and i hold the "title" to them...i "own" them, but the government can take them away if i stop paying taxes...odd...so what constitutes ownership? in a broad sense i own nothing material because i won't physically be here forever...it's more like i have exclusive rights to their use until then...so what do i own? what do i control? we're left with thoughts and actions- how i relate to others and how i think about those relationships...this is ample enough to satisfy me and keep me busy...i'd better start paying more attention.

disengagement

since this past summer i've been reading a number of viewpoints on culture, economics, social structures, slums, refugees, architecture, design, food economics, food production ( if you get the chance to see the film King Corn take a look at it)and trying to digest how it all fits together( i need to take some more anthropology classes)...there's a broad spectrum of thought, from thomas friedman's globalization sycophancy, through willam volman's rejection of "citizens", and out the other side to wendell berry and derrick jensen. wendell and derrick both want to see humans return to a pre-industrial existence via the demise of urban living.( babylon is the mother of harlots for them both) in "The Unsettling of Anerica: Culture and Agriculture" wendell advocates a retun to a jeffersonian "republic of townships" based on labor intensive, non-industrial organic farming. cities would be depopulated to provide the labor for these farms and we'd all lead happier, healthier lives closer to nature and god. like all utopians wendell is blind to the fact that not everyone shares his vision. there may be people who like to live in cities as opposed to rooting around in the dirt ( for the record, i would much prefer to rusticate...but not on wendell's terms) these would become the "other" for wendell...heretics..wreckers...dissent has no place in utopia and anything you do to reach the final end is permissable ( not that i can see wendell actually advocating force...he seems a bit kinder than that...but there are a lot of zealots out there waiting for a message, and it's a short step from the rejection of urban living to the khymer rouge)...if wendell is content to adopt a system based on a form of social hierarchy ( someone's the farmer, someone's the help)derrick is not. (let me say here that i have not completely read derrick's book, so there may be sone refinement[or retraction] of this) in "Endgane, Volume 1: The Problem of Civilization" he seems to be advocating a return to a hunter/gatherer society with nothing more technologically advanced than stone tools. a bit extreme. what's the hunter/gatherer carrying capacity of the planet at the moment? will it support the nine billion people projected to be here by mid century? if you completely abandon industrial civilization how many will die? who is it that gets to decide? derrick? or those with the most guns? (civilization may vanish but guns aren't going anywhere) when derrick says we need to build a new morality based on a glass of clean drinking water i am with him...you can't hope to survive by destroying what sustains you...when he proposes the death of civilization and its inherent convulsions i am not...wendell and derrick are right about the depredations of industrial manufacturing and its denial of its destructive (and self-destructive) use of resources, and the way it uses and degrades humans...but the alternative they are proposing are as stultifying and destructive of humans as what they propose to replace. they will, of course, counter that the way we're going now is equally self-destructive, and i have ro say they would be correct...my issue is not with their starting premise, but with their utopian conclusions...utopia is unattainable ( there's a reason for the garden of eden story) all the attempts at it so far have degenerated into authoritarian horrors...i doubt that will change.

influence

I sometimes wonder at the mechanism that allows congress to believe that i am naive enough to think that the bailout plan they're considering is something they're doing to preserve my wellbeing...while the plan has "vauge reassurances for homeowners" the reassurances for wealth are concrete. no doubt some people who find themselves in financial difficulties over mortgages they could not really afford are there because of their own choices...they are the ones who signed the papers...but the idea of living within one's means is a difficult one to support in a society where all the media is a sales tool and desires are engineered. there are, unfortunately. entire university departments devoted to the intricacies of convincing people that superfluous material goods are the stuff of life, and that feelings of sadness, inadequacy, or loneliness can only be relieved by the act of buying something. living within your means, making do, ignoring the incessant clamoring of the consumerist utopia may lead you to find a self-reliance and resillency that would not do corporate cash flow any good. I'm not trying to excuse myself from this ( in general there are few foibles or weaknesses i can excuse myself from...i am capable of recognizing them in myself however, and that is the first step to recovery)...i struggle with the consumerist imperative too...i've learned to turn off the television and the radio...but advertizing and the subtle (and not so subtle) psychological manipulation still find their way to me. television may be the advertizer's main weapon, but i'm stunned by all that there is outside it. it pervades this life...just walk down the street...why are the urban and suburban landscape so ugly? let's start with the "golden arches" and work our way back to our(or at least my) discontent...it may not be inescapable, but you almost have to be culturally illiterate to avoid it. advertizing and the consumption it implies are the bedrock of this society...we all need material goods to survive...are rolex watches and cadallac espalades necessities or manifestations of peoples need to prove they exist by validating the imperative?