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Title: The anti-Semitic Origins of Postmodernism and Other Essays on Anarchism
Author: Pierrot Lunaire
Date: October 11, 2021
Language: en
Topics: postmodernism, fascism, anti-fascism, anarcho-syndicalism, phenomenology, anarcha-feminism, feminism
Notes: For a collection of surrealistic horror poems and short stories: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09HQ184KM]

Pierrot Lunaire

The anti-Semitic Origins of Postmodernism and Other Essays on

Anarchism

The anti-Semitic Origins of Postmodernism and Other Essays on Anarchism

The Benefits and the Deficits of Political Correctness: An attempt at

an unbiased analysis 2. The anti-Semitic Origins of Postmodernism: A

brief genealogy 3. A Summary of Michel Henry's Phenomenology 4. The

Aesthetization of Politics 5. The Phenomenality of Gender and Toxic

Masculinity 6. Anarcho-Syndicalist Economics and a Realistically

Effective Strategy

****

The Benefits and the Deficits of Political Correctness: An attempt at an

unbiased analysis

I think it is important to be more accommodating in the way one speaks

about oppressed individuals. I do think it is important to criticize the

manner in which we represent oppressed individuals. Positively, I think

diversified casting is actually wonderful. I think rights towards

transgendered individuals is a good step forward. I like Dave Chapelle’s

comedy, but I wish that he had a more progressive attitude towards the

transgendered, rather than demeaning their genitalia as “fake meat.”

Political correctness has also led to the recognition of the sexual

assault of women. Hermeneutics, ie how we interpret things, is useful. I

think there’s always room to improve upon our sense of morality. We

should always be cognizant of our biases, this is true.

There have been good things that have resulted from political

correctness that we should not dismiss or throw away moving forward. I

don’t want to go back to the 90’s, where instead of political

correctness, there was the Satanic Panic. Where homophobia was the norm.

Where African Americans were ignored when they would bring up police

brutality and the complete injustice of the crack pandemic. Where, when

women brought forward sexual assault, they were told they wanted it.

This isn’t a world we should wish to return to. It was ugly, it was

brutal, it was shallow, it was callous, it was arbitrary in its judgment

and ruthless in its execution of it (Waco).

But, we can still yet improve further upon how we address the issues

oppressed individuals face.

Postmodern nihilism - the theories of Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Deleuze,

Althusser, even Žižek, Badiou, and, ultimately, Martin Heidegger - is

ballast. It is holding us back. It is not effective. The proof is in the

pudding.

Bill Cosby’s release. George Floyd’s death. Gabby Petito’s murder and

the praise of her murderer. The election of Donald Trump. The alt right.

It’s rise and hold over the unfortunate imaginations of countless

imbeciles.

Is there not room for improvement?

Yes. We can do better. Instead of nihilism, we need hope. Optimism not

despair. Courage not paranoia.

The way forward is not backwards, as Donald Trump thinks, nor is the way

forward giving up, as this nihilism whispers to us. We shouldn’t try to

make America great again nor narcissistically delude ourselves into

thinking we are what makes America great. We need to make America

GREATER THAN IT HAS EVER BEEN!

The anti-Semitic Origins of Postmodernism: A brief genealogy

“But Chomsky’s critique goes further, in a direction that doesn’t get

nearly as much press as his charges of obscurantism and overuse of

insular jargon. Chomsky claims that far from offering radical new ways

of conceiving the world, Postmodern thought serves as an instrument of

oppressive power structures. It’s an interesting assertion given some

recent arguments that ‘post-truth’ postmodernism is responsible for the

rise of the self-described ‘alt-right’ and the rapid spread of fake

information as a tool for the current U.S. ruling party seizing power.”

[1]

With the coming approach of what many like Andrew Yang call the “Fourth

Industrial Revolution”, there is an increase of panic and a feeling of

existential dread when it comes to political and social issues. The

manner in which we’ve been doing things is not something that any of us

wishes to see extend itself into a future where even thoughts can be

read. Everyone is worried about an approaching dystopia.

And there is an entire industry of clickbait within journalism and

American academia that is profiting off of this fear. This industry is

what is typically called “Postmodernism.”

And, coincidentally, the theories that are used to peddle this

clickbait, were created an anti-Semitic Nazi named Martin Heidegger.

Heidegger was a huge influence on Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault - and, as

I will show, his anti-Semitic way of thinking can still be seen not only

within the theories of these philosophers, but also within the clickbait

journalism that relies on this way of thinking called “Postmodernism”.

Not because they are anti-Semites or Nazis. No, they were all unaware of

the true extent of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism, because, while it was

known that he was a member of the Nazi Party, we now know today with the

relatively recent publication of his Black Notebooks in 2014, that the

entirety of his philosophy was nothing but an apology for anti-Semitism.

[2]

Let us look at this video “What other countries are told us is

‘American’” [3], Mr. JJ McCullough presents this term “exoticized.” He

shows a photo of the American food section in a European grocery store

and he asks: “is this an accurate portrayal of American food or simply a

heavily ‘exoticized’ one? ‘Exoticism’ is a term used to describe the

tendency of thinking of foreign cultures only in terms of how they

differ from your own. This then leads to the habit of wrongly assuming

that the weirder some foreign thing is, the more culturally traditional

it must surely be.”

This is a deconstruction of the manner in which grocery food aisles

presents foods from other nationalities, rooted in the theories of

Jacques Derrida, the founder of this method of deconstruction.

“Although deconstruction has roots in Martin Heidegger’s concept of

Destruktion, to deconstruct is not to destroy. Deconstruction is always

a double movement of simultaneous affirmation and undoing. It started

out as a way of reading the history of metaphysics in Heidegger and

Jacques Derrida, but was soon applied to the interpretation of literary,

religious, and legal texts as well as philosophical ones, and was

adopted by several French feminist theorists as a way of making clearer

the deep male bias embedded in the European intellectual tradition.

(...) To deconstruct is to take a text apart along the structural ‘fault

lines’ created by the ambiguities inherent in one or more of its key

concepts or themes in order to reveal the equivocations or

contradictions that make the text possible.”[4]

The implication is that there is something that is racist as a result.

If we are to fight racism, we have to fight the manner in which we

represent other races to ourselves.

Why?

Well, let’s back up a bit.

Why do we think that there is racism within our representations? Why do

we think that our ideas, our culturally constructed representations,

shape our lives?

Jordan Peterson will say it is “cultural Marxism”, even calling Derrida

a Marxist on Joe Rogan’s podcast. [5] Derrida was not a Marxist. He did

not write about Marx until 1993. This was one of the most controversial

aspects of his philosophy.

No, Derrida was not a Marxist. But he was a Heideggerian. As was

Foucault.

Dreyfus: “(...) that on the French scene, that since Derrida had taken

up Heidegger, that in order to clobber Derrida, Bourdieu wrote (...)

denouncing Heidegger, but Bourdieu is a Heideggerian in two ways: one,

he told me that his first love in philosophy was Heidegger and, two, he

told me that he thinks he’s applying Merleau Ponty to the social field

and since Merleau Ponty was applying Heidegger he was applying Heidegger

secondhand, he was just clobbering Heidegger because that was how he got

ahead on the French scene (...) and, Foucault, on his deathbed said the

biggest influence on his life was Heidegger (...)”[6]

Heidegger: “The Fuhrer alone is the present and future German reality

and its law. Learn to know ever more deeply: from now on every single

things demands decision, and every action responsibility.”[7]

Heidegger: “The question of the demand for world change is listed in the

often quoted sentence of Karl Marx in the Theses on Feuerbach (...) ‘The

philosopher has hitherto interpreted the world, the point is to change

it.’ By citation of this sentence and by the following sentence one

overlooks the fact that a world change presupposes a change of the

world’s conception, and that a conception of the world can be won only

by the fact that one interprets the world sufficiently. That is, Marx

bases it on a completely certain world interpretation to demand his

change. And thereby, he himself knows that this sentence is not a sound

sentence. He works the impression that it is spoken against philosophy,

but in the second part of the sentence just as unspoken is the

philosophical claim that is presupposed.”[8]

“In 1933, Nazi students at more than 30 German universities pillaged

libraries in search of books they considered to be ‘un-German.’ Among

the literary and political writings they threw into the flames were the

works of Karl Marx.”[9]

“Although Karl Marx's own attitude toward Judaism has been characterized

as ambivalent at best and hostile at worst, his books were burned in

1933 because of both his Jewish heritage and his socialist ideology.

Marx was already named an ideological enemy in Hitler's early writings.

Unsurprisingly, he received special mention in a ‘fire oath’ as

promulgator of class conflict. His books Das Kapital and The Communist

Manifesto, blueprints for a Communist world order and among the most

frequently translated German texts, were among those incinerated by the

students.”[10]

"In Heidegger's case, it is a type of anti-Semitism that could be

qualified as ‘religious,’ ‘cultural,’ or ‘spiritual.’ In a letter to

Hannah Arendt, in which he comments on the rumors about his

anti-Semitism, it reads: ‘As to the rest, in matters related to the

university I am as much an anti-Semite as I was ten years ago in

Marburg. This anti-Semitism even found the support of Jacobstahl and

Friedländer. This has nothing to do with personal relationships (for

example, Husserl, Misch, Cassirer and others).’ When Heidegger speaks of

‘Judaization’ (Verjudung), he does so from a given cultural

context.”[11]

Let’s rewrite that statement from Heidegger, with everything we now

unequivocally know for certain he meant: “The question of the demand for

world change is listed in the often quoted sentence of Karl Marx in the

Theses on Feuerbach (...) ‘The philosopher has hitherto interpreted the

world, the point is to change it.’ By citation of this sentence and by

the following sentence one overlooks the fact that a world change

presupposes a change of the world’s conception, and that a conception of

the world can be won only by the fact that one interprets the world

sufficiently. That is, Marx bases it on a (Jewish) world interpretation

to demand his change. And thereby, he himself knows that this sentence

is not a sound sentence. He works the impression that it is spoken

against philosophy, but in the second part of the sentence just as

unspoken is the (Jewish) claim that is presupposed.”

Foucault: “Yes, there is a certain danger here, if you say that a

certain human nature exists, that this human nature has not been given

in actual society the right and the possibilities which allows it to

realize itself (..) and if we admit this, don’t we risk defining this

human nature which is at the same time ideal and real and has been

hidden and repressed until now, in terms borrowed from our society, from

our civilization, from our culture? I will give an example (...) Marxism

(...) admitted that in capitalist societies mankind had not reached its

full possibilities for development and self realization. That human

nature was alienated in a capitalist system. And Marxism ultimately

dreamt of a liberated human nature. On the other hand, what model did

Marxism use to conceive, project, and eventually realize this dream? It

was the bourgeois model. Marxism considered a happy society a society

that gave room, for example, a sexuality of a bourgeois type, to a

family of a bourgeois type, to an aesthetic of a bourgeois type. And in

fact this is what happened in the Soviet Union!”[12]

So, this is how we fight racism according to these philosophers under

the influence of a paranoid anti-Semite unaware of his paranoid

anti-Semitism, because Heidegger’s Black Notebooks were not published

until 2014.

Let’s rewrite this statement of Foucault, if you want to clearly

understand what is being taught in American universities:

“Yes, there is a certain danger here, if you say that a certain human

nature exists, that this human nature has not been given in actual

society the right and the possibilities which allows it to realize

itself (..) and if we admit this don’t we risk defining this human

nature which is at the same time ideal and real and has been hidden and

repressed until now, in terms borrowed from our society, from our

civilization, from our culture? I will give an example (...) Marxism

(...) admitted that in capitalist societies mankind had not reached its

full possibilities for development and self realization. That human

nature was alienated in a capitalist system. And Marxism ultimately

dreamt of a liberated human nature. On the other hand, what model did

Marxism use to conceive and project and eventually realize this dream?

It was the (Jewish) model. Marxism considered a happy society a society

that gave room, for example, a sexuality of a (Jewish) type, to a family

of a (Jewish) type, to an aesthetic of a (Jewish) type. And in fact this

is what happened in the Soviet Union!”

So, when Heidegger said that language is the house of being [13], what

he was saying is that we cannot see outside of our representations and

since our representations were created by the culture we are living in,

we will end up having biases as a result of the culture we are living in

even when we are unaware of it. This was, what they felt, went wrong

with the Soviet Union. Karl Marx was Jewish. He could not see outside of

his Jewish biases. Hence the reason why he developed a totalitarian

doctrine.

What a great excuse to send the Jews to the gas chambers! Their cultural

background that makes them, without being aware of it, problematic and a

threat to society. Therefore, none can be trusted, because we are in our

cultural environment, not outside of it.

Karl Marx and Wittgenstein had a completely diametrically opposed

viewpoint.

“Since the Young Hegelians consider conceptions, thoughts, ideas, in

fact all the products of consciousness, to which they attribute an

independent existence, as the real chains of men (just as the Old

Hegelians declared them the true bonds of human society) it is evident

that the Young Hegelians have to fight only against these illusions of

consciousness. Since, according to their fantasy, the relationships of

men, all their doings, their chains and their limitations are products

of their consciousness, the Young Hegelians logically put to men the

moral postulate of exchanging their present consciousness for human,

critical or egoistic consciousness, and thus of removing their

limitations. This demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to

interpret reality in another way, i.e. to recognise it by means of

another interpretation. The Young-Hegelian ideologists, in spite of

their allegedly ‘world-shattering’ statements, are the staunchest

conservatives. The most recent of them have found the correct expression

for their activity when they declare they are only fighting against

‘phrases’. They forget, however, that to these phrases they themselves

are only opposing other phrases, and that they are in no way combating

the real existing world when they are merely combating the phrases of

this world.”[14]

For Marx in his German Ideology, our ideas do not shape our lives, our

lives shape our ideas of it. Or Wittgenstein in his Philosophical

Investigations said - there is no inherent meaning to a word, the

meaning of a word is in the way it is used.

“But what is the meaning of the word ‘five’?—No such thing was in

question here, only how the word ‘five’ is used.”[15]

When someone is a racist, they are feeling animosity towards the idea of

a person from another race. This animosity was not shaped by the

culturally constructed idea. This animosity existed first and then was

applied to the idea. We do not just comprehend our ideas, we also feel

them. So, when our material conditions are dire, people will end up

feeling their ideas with the same stress and anxiety that they find

themselves living in. This was in fact the reason why Marx wanted to

develop socialism, so that our material conditions no longer shape our

ideas.

Is it useful to look at grocery food aisles? Yes. Let’s improve upon our

biases. But, is this the only way to fight racism? Why do we think this

is not only the most effective way, but the only way of ending the

oppression of minorities?

Because, it’s a flashy headline that’ll get you to click on their hit

piece or, in academia, get you to read their periodical.

We are expected to go through absolutely every little concept and idea

we have, “deconstruct” the cultural bias, and then, once we do that,

we’ll put an end to racism. It may take hundreds of years, but we’ll get

there, don’t worry. We’re starting off first with - the grocery store

and how they present their food and how this presentation of their foods

reflects their colonialist racist bias.

It is amazing what Mr McCullough has done, he and other hipster

douchebags have accomplished an even higher treason than what T.S. Eliot

could imagine. They are not only doing the right thing for the wrong

reason, they are doing the right thing in the wrong way for all the

wrong most narcissistic self indulgent reasons. Let me ask you, is it

fair to tell minorities to be paranoid - racism is even in places where

you didn’t expect! Is this not academics and journalists profiting off

of oppressed people’s oppression and their fears?

Who cares what the author says, the author is dead! There is nothing

outside of the text! We are taught in our universities that the only way

to fight for the rights of women and for the rights of minorities and

for the rights of homosexuals and for transgendered individuals is by

looking at media representations - how we represent these oppressed

individuals to ourselves. Let me tell you something: yes, let’s have

better depictions of oppressed individuals, but we can still have the

best depictions of oppressed individuals and they will still face the

same kind of oppression. This is because oppression is real and

apparent, not abstract and obscure. It isn’t something that needs to be

deconstructed. There is nothing to deconstruct in the way that George

Floyd was ruthlessly murdered in cold racist blood. Is it complicated to

not be a racist? Or, at least for me, I wanted to shake that police

officer and tell him how could you do something so brutal for the

dumbest reason imaginable? There are fascists at our doorsteps. They

aren’t hiding. We don’t need to uncover them. Is it fair to spread this

paranoia? Let me ask you something - when you were in college did you

feel a sense of paranoia? Like all the movies you once enjoyed you

couldn’t enjoy anymore because there may be biases you weren’t aware of.

All food turns to ash in your mouth because you are worried about

whatever implications lay behind your eating of it. Is it colonialism

after all to enjoy Thai food? Does it matter? When we had a president

threatening to send the national guard throughout American streets? Is

this really the best way and the only way to fight to end these issues?

Because to me it ultimately distracts from how to more realistically end

these issues which aren’t hidden but are actually quite clear and

distinct and most importantly observable. Rape culture - did you know

that rape cases dropped by thirty percent when prostitution was

legalized in Rhode island [16]? How much did rape cases drop by

criticizing the trope of the manic pixie dream girl in the Garden State?

How much did rape cases drop by thinking it is appropriate to bring up

these issues with people who are in distress and suffering from mental

illness as Susan L Morrow at the Department of Educational Psychology at

the University of Utah thought was appropriate [17]?

Let’s be aware of misogynistic biases in artworks, I agree. Let’s be

sure to try to not harbor continuing forward in future works of art.

But, I don’t think this means we should dismiss all artists and their

artworks, because quite a few of them were deeply misogynistic.

Let’s not dismiss looking at the manic pixie dream girl. We should

improve upon media, so that we can have a society that is more open

towards women. But, how we interpret the idea of women to ourselves, ie

this hermeneutical phenomenology, is not all that we should be doing.

Furthermore, our culturally constructed biases are not all that we are.

We can see past them. We have an affective subjectivity that is both

imminent within and transcendental to our biases.

It would be better to have a single class, solely about our biases,

rather than have our biases be all that we talk about - even in therapy.

I’m not saying this because I am alt right. I am saying this, because

this overemphasis on our culturally constructed biases was first done by

a Nazi named Martin Heidegger who did this in order to justify hating

Jewish people.

This is what I have studied independently a different type of

phenomenology than what we are taught. One created by a French

resistance fighter named Michel Henry. I also studied a lot of the works

of a man named Benjamin Fondane who was a Jewish poet and philosopher

killed in Auschwitz. [18] I have been passionate about understanding his

way of thinking and his poetry. I even wrote a film scenario like he

used to. Anyways, there is a different way of approaching these issues

than this approach reliant on a type of phenomenology created by an

anti-Semite. And being against this kind of Postmodernism in the media

and academia does not make you alt right or a fascist. I think rather

the opposite.

We need a new sense of feminism, one that does not just address the

misogyny that is hidden, but takes women seriously when they say that it

is actually very real and apparent. That doesn’t just look at the

misogyny that needs to be uncovered, but also the misogyny that is right

there and in your face. As it is real and apparent, it can be observed

and as it can be observed, it can be resolved. Misogyny isn’t an issue

that needs to linger on for decades to come while we futilely pick apart

every single cultural representation we have, examine it, make sure it

is free of misogyny, and then no more will women face oppression. The

assumption is that misogyny needs to be unveiled. There’s nothing to

unveil about the way that paparazzi tried to take upskirt photos of Emma

Watson the moment she turned 18 years old. [19] And there’s nothing to

unveil about the way that Brown University made her paranoid, telling

her that this misogyny is even in the literature she once thought she

enjoyed perhaps like Lord Byron who is filled to the brim with this

“male gaze”. Yes, there’s a “male gaze” in Byron - does that mean we

should cease to read him? Throw him out completely! Because of his

biases! When, in my opinion, there is a subjectivity in Byron that wrote

his poems, a subjectivity that is no different than any women out there,

so, while he did have culturally constructed biases against them, there

are still poems of Byron women can relate to. Women can even relate to

August Strindberg, though he would have absolutely hated the thought.

But, hey, at least this hermeneutical approach to feminism, that says

Byron and Strindberg are now forbidden, has at least led to wealthy

women being taken somewhat seriously when they bring forth their very

real experiences with very real and violent assault. Poor and middle

class women have yet to enjoy such a privilege, but we’ll get there. JJ

McCullough is currently picking apart the grocery store on behalf of

minorities. Once he’s done freeing minorities from grocery stores, he’ll

free women from them. And once he’s done liberating women from grocery

stores, he’ll free homosexuals and the transgendered. That’s when

grocery stores will be free and a safe space for everyone to enjoy. From

there, JJ McCullough will go through all aspects of life - not just the

grocery store, but your house, your place of business, your favorite

restaurants, he’ll get to it all in due time.

Heidegger felt we live within our representations and our

representations were created by the culture we are living in. This is

also the exact same reason why we are taught in our universities that

you can be racist without knowing it, misogynistic without knowing it,

and a fascist without knowing it. Gayatri Spivak, Judith Butler say that

the primary problem women suffer from is the manner in which they are

represented in media and the manner in which we represent the idea of

“woman” to ourselves. Why do we think our representations have the kind

of hold they have? Why do we think this is the way to fight for women’s

rights? Because these feminist writers were writing under the influence

of thinkers like Foucault and Derrida who were in turn Heideggerians.

They’re the reason why we see political and social issues in places

where we normally wouldn’t see them and why we think that the problems

we primarily suffer from are the result of our cultural representations

and that the only way to bring an end to misogyny is by uncovering it in

media representations, not, for instance, where it is clear and apparent

like Frat Houses. If you see misogyny everywhere, racism everywhere,

fascism everywhere, homophobia everywhere, or transphobia

everywhere...replace each of these issues with Judaism. Do you see what

I am getting at? We’ve been trained by our universities to look at the

world like a paranoid anti-Semite, because this hermeneutical version of

phenomenology that was later adapted by thinkers like Foucault and

Derrida and Lacan was created by a paranoid anti-Semite. I am not

opposed to fighting racism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia. I

want to be crystal clear that I think that these are problems that need

to be resolved. I just disagree with the manner in which we’ve been

fighting these issues, because our universities are teaching us to fight

these issues using a mentality created by an anti-Semite. There are no

hidden biases within a book. If you want to find them you can, you can

interpret anything anyway you want. You can have biases you are not

aware of. But, that doesn’t make you racist, misogynistic, homophobic,

or transphobic without being aware of it. If your biases are pointed out

to you and you still persist with them, then, yes, you are intolerant.

But, if you are open to having your biases pointed out, then I don’t

think you’re racist, misogynistic, homophobic, or transphobic.

Media shouldn’t have the manic pixie dream girl any longer, but, if it

so happens that I am inclined to (God help me) and I wanted to watch the

Garden State and I enjoyed it, I don’t think that makes me misogynistic.

I can still enjoy it, while being aware not to try to sleep with Zach

Braff. There was something a little creepy about him, I’m not going to

lie. I have seen Scrubs, so I already knew that.

I don’t expect to get along with every artist whose art I enjoy.

Legalizing prostitution is a very real and effective way to end a lot of

suffering for a lot of women. In Rhode Island, where they decriminalized

it briefly, rape cases dropped by 30%. Certainly, there needs to be more

done, but this could put an actual dent in rape culture at the very

least. It could save so many women from assault. It could realistically

make streets safer for women to walk down. It’s not a great thing that

this is what has to be done. Men need to be taught to get a hold of

their sexual urges. But, this is something that can be done that can

make the world a better place for women. Talking about the manic pixie

dream girl in the Garden State, sure there may be a misogynistic bias,

but how much did it really help out anyone by pointing it out? What did

that really do to fight misogyny and rape culture?

It seems more like a way of keeping us distracted from how to really put

an end to these issues once and for all.

But, let’s not sidestep the issue of men and what men are experiencing

when they seek to assert power and control over women or other men. What

is going on here? What exactly is the phenomenality of this “toxic

masculinity”? You would think a basic ontological description of toxic

masculinity would have been given, but, no, sadly, there is nothing but

ontics here. Only descriptions of what toxic masculinity does, not what

composes it.

Wokeness is what happens when an industry of online blogs and academic

periodicals centered around clickbait end up themselves believing in

their own clickbait. Slavoj Žižek - “Hitler wasn’t violent enough!” [20]

And then, hypocritically, decrying Jordan Peterson for making similarly

flashy exclamations: “The feminists want the Muslims here, because they

wish to be dominated by a strong man.” [21] It’s all clickbait. Samuel

Beckett and Masculinity. The Male Gaze of Lord Byron. All of this is

done to get people to read their “academic” journals. Slavoj Žižek’s the

king of this. And also to get people to read their stupid online vlog

like Buzzfeed does - using the philosophy of people like Derrida,

completely unaware of the anti-Semitic implications of solely attacking

culture, traditions, and cultural norms.

There is nothing inherent within your culture or anyone’s culture that

leads to biases you cannot see outside of. Islam is not the casue of

misogyny in the Middle East. Judaism was not the cause of the Soviet

Union. Christianity’s not the cause of homophobia. All cultures can be

interpreted in a tolerant way. This doesn’t mean we have to beat our

chest and say my culture’s better than everyone else’s. But, let’s be

clear here, so that we can avoid the anti-Semitic implications of this

line of reasoning, all cultures can be interpreted and misinterpreted

and no culture is responsible for the actions of individuals.

Individuals oppress individuals. Individuals oppress other individuals

typically to release built up frustration. This built up frustration I

think is the result of this endless struggle for recognition called

capitalism. When people’s material conditions improve and when people

have more opportunities to show who they are to the world, then they

will become more tolerant of other people’s differences. Subsequently, I

estimate our representations of oppressed individuals would change on

their own. Speech would naturally flow in a more accommodating manner

without journalists and academics needing to get involved with their

dated theories.

Minorities, homosexuals, transgendered individuals, and women suffer

doubly first because of their very real and apparent oppression

alongside universities and journalists telling them to be paranoid. It’s

also in the places where you least suspected. Like the grocery store!

Not even the grocery store is safe! Aren’t you glad you clicked on JJ

McCullough’s video? (I’m not)

Summary of Michel Henry’s Radical Phenomenology

Being and Time was a groundbreaking work in phenomenology, so before I

criticize this work, I have to obviously first discuss what on earth

phenomenology is.

It is quite simple. Phenomenology is about phenomenon. If we are to

question, for instance, what the phenomenon of gender is, we would be

doing phenomenology.

There are three different types of phenomena. Affective, Intentional,

Ideological.

Intentionality, as Jean Paul Sartre said, in its philosophical sense

means to be conscious is to be conscious of something. This is to say

that I am an independent thinking subject that encounters an object

outside of myself. So, when I refer to intentional phenomena, I am

describing phenomena wherein a subject encounters an object. There are

many people who assume this is the only phenomena there is. There is, to

them, nothing else besides a subject encountering an object. This

assumption is implied when people say that the only things that can be

known are things that can be known intentionally, i.e. when we observe

evidence of it happening outside of ourselves. As Descartes said...I

think, therefore I am...meaning that the beginning of philosophy and all

experience is when I, a subject, begin to think of a world of objects

outside of myself. Or as someone like Richard Dawkins would say,

extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. A good and clear

illustration of this kind of mentality can be seen with gender. There

are today two prevailing opinions concerning gender. There are people

who argue that gender is a biological object with specific

characteristics that we can observe and use to represent gender to

ourselves as a concept and then there are those that argue that gender

is a social construction. Those who emphasize intentional phenomena,

consider gender to be a biological object. They regard the idea of the

truth of something being considered a social construction as absolute

pure nonsense. If you want to believe that truth is a social construct,

then as Richard Dawkins said, you should try to jump out of a window and

see what happens. [22] The only truths are truths that are supported

with evidence. There is no arguing against evidence.

But, what happens when someone jumps out of a window, according to

Richard Dawkins? Is it not the case that he assumes that bones break,

blood is spilled, organs fail, perhaps even a brain ceases to work? To

him, the only phenomena is that which we can observe, phenomena with

characteristics that we can use to represent a specific phenomenon to

ourselves. What he doesn’t realize is that this implies that our

experience with the outside world is mediated by these representations.

After all, what is a bone? What is an organ? What is blood? They are

words, representations of the things taking place outside of ourselves.

Here I am as an independent thinking subject encountering a world of

objects that are outside of myself. But, what happens when I encounter

another thinking subject? Do I not myself become an object that they can

represent to themselves? This is in fact the beginning of Hegel’s

dialectic (the struggle for recognition) and what Hegel called

alienation. [23] When you become an object outside of yourself, you

become alienated from yourself. For Hegel this was a good thing.

Interestingly enough, so was the case for Ayn Rand. In her book Anthem,

she quite clearly demonstrates what Hegel meant by alienation. At the

end of the book, the main character sees the letter I and finds himself

liberated. [24] He only became an individual once he was able to

represent himself to himself as an individual, i.e. only once he had

found the word I, this was when he was able to truly be an individual,

according to Ayn Rand. An individual is an individual when an individual

is abstracted from their individuality. Her “axiom” A is A means A as a

representation of A is the same as the A that it represents. In fact,

only by being represented can A truly be said to be A (again, according

to Ayn Rand). [25]

Heidegger was Hegel in phenomenological guise. Heidegger called this

alienated individual dasein. He criticized in his Being and Time the

previously mentioned subject/object distinction implied by an assumption

of phenomenality based purely upon intentionality. Because, for

Heidegger, we are not individuals outside of the world, we are in the

world and to inhabit the world, means to inhabit a language. We cannot

see things outside of our representations, for Heidegger. And since our

representations were created precisely to be able to communicate with

each other, what happens to me as an individual? For Heidegger, our

language shapes our thoughts, not vice versa. The only reality of an

individual thus becomes how an individual appears before other people.

How an individual is represented is what matters the most. An individual

determining how they appear before others is what Heidegger called care

(sorge). The only reality that exists then is that which exists within a

society. I cannot know myself until I am able to see myself through the

eyes of another person. I cannot know anything except through other

people’s eyes. This is what Heidegger called our “hermeneutic circle.”

[26]

Slavoj Žižek frequently uses Ernst Lubitch’s Ninotchka to illustrate how

it is that our ideas shape our reality. In this film, a man goes to a

cafe to order coffee without cream. The waitress informs him that they

do not have cream, but they do have milk. Can she bring him coffee

without milk? For Žižek, the two different coffees have two completely

different tastes. [27] This is what Hegel called determinate negation.

To summarize Jean Wahl, determinate negation means that which is

nonessential is as essential to the essence of something just as much as

what is essential to it. [28] The color red changes when it is placed

next to the color blue, even if there is no change in its hue.

I feel that Žižek describes 9/10’s of the truth. This is what I call

ideological phenomena, but I disagree with Žižek when he says that this

is the only phenomena that exists. This is the quintessence of the

social assumption of phenomenality that a lot of people call

“postmodernism.” These are the people that say that gender is a social

construction. That I can be a racist without knowing it, because I exist

and live within a racist society, using racist terms that ultimately

shape and mediate my experience with reality.

This assumption is ultimately implied by the assumption that was made

previously by people like Richard Dawkins (and Descartes) when they feel

that the only truths, the only phenomena are those that we can observe.

People like Žižek, Hegel, and Heidegger have done nothing but taken this

idea to its logical conclusion.

Because, when someone jumps out of a window, are we not forgetting

something? While it is true we can observe externally to us...and I am

not denying the reality of things taking place externally to us...a body

falling apart, this reality we observe is not the reality that you or I

or anyone else actually experiences and lives in. Is it not the case

that in the reality that anyone truly actually experiences that bones

don’t actually break, that no blood is actually spilled, that no organs

fail, and there is never a brain that ceases to function, rather a

person is hurt?

The only thing that occurs when someone jumps from a window is pain.

What does this pain look like? How can we represent this pain to

ourselves?

We can paint a picture of what we look at. We can even paint someone

looking at something. But, how can we paint sight?

Are these phenomena not real, because we cannot observe them? No, I

argue otherwise. This is what I call affective phenomena, which is

pre-intentional phenomena that is felt inside of one’s subjectivity. All

of phenomenon is essentially pre-intentional and invisible, since

everything, intentional phenomena and ideological phenomena, must first

emanate from the subjectivity of lived life, i.e. from affective

phenomena. Without eyes, nothing would look like anything, without ears,

there’d be no sound, without minds, there’d be nothing to comprehend,

etc

By ignoring the subjective experience of life and by placing

the only source of knowledge as being that which occurs outside of

ourselves, this viewpoint of people like Dawkins clears the way for

“postmodernism.” “Postmodernism” is ultimately the idea that the

individual is nothing, that the subjective experience of life matters

little. For Derrida, there is nothing outside of the text, the text

cannot be felt. The author is dead and the only thing that matters is

any social implication that can be drawn out of the text. (if you want

to find a social implication you can, in our universities, we are taught

to read literature in the exact way that Evangelicals read Harry

Potter...Žižek finds ideology in toilets even just like Evangelicals

find Satanism on Monster cans...without realizing there is more to life

than politics...more to our experience of being alive than our

experience within our society) [29]

Ideology is not everything. Politics is important, but it is certainly

not the most important thing that there is. It is not the air we

breathe. Social norms do not affect who we are deep down inside. To know

what is right and wrong, we don’t need to read Foucault, Derrida, Lacan,

Althusser, etc. We don’t need to meditate and do yoga. We already know

what is right and wrong deep down inside. We have nothing to do but to

be brutally honest with ourselves and separate what we want to be true

from what we know in our heart of hearts to be true. Ideology has a

presence in our life, because ideas are not just comprehended, they are

also felt. This implies that there is an affective subjectivity that is

imminent within and transcendental to Ideology as Michel Henry said.

[30] Therefore, not all aspects of who we are and our experience of life

can be said to be a social construction. As Karl Marx said our ideas

come from life, our life does not come from our ideas. Misogyny,

homophobia, racism, are ideas about individuals not the result of actual

interactions with individuals. The content of what they are angry about

matters little. What matters is the rage and the frustration. In the

same way that in a dream if you are to see a ghost come into your room

and are afraid, while the ghost may not have been real, the fear was.

For misogynists, homophobes, racists, the figure of their hatred matters

very little to them. It is arbitrary the object of their animosity. The

animosity nonetheless is there and, as I said, this is because of the

lack of opportunity presented to them. This certainly does not excuse

their actions or behaviors or attitudes. Just because you are in pain

and frustrated does not mean everyone else has to be. But, the lack of

opportunity presented for many people today is nonetheless deeply

painful and frustrating and you can’t expect people to act rationally in

these dire Kafkaesque circumstances many find themselves trapped in. The

problem is...that these circumstances are so nightmarish, people can’t

stare at it directly. They need something to unleash their anger onto

since they feel that they can’t actually make a difference or even make

something of themselves and this is not something they wish to confront

and acknowledge. They’re losers.

But, this shouldn’t be something to be ashamed of. It is understandable

not being able to succeed! Who can win against the kind of odds that are

currently placed before us! Doesn’t mean we can’t try and make something

of ourselves. We as human beings are capable of doing incredible things.

Including surviving stranded on a desert island.

That doesn’t mean this is the type of society we should be living in, of

course.

The two different cups of coffee Žižek mentions...he is mistaken in

thinking that the coffee tastes differently when the idea attached to it

is different. It is that the idea of “without cream” tastes differently

than the idea of “without milk.” The taste of the coffee itself remains

unchanged.

We live in a world of hardened objectivity, like someone whose hopeless

face is pressed against a brick wall on the other side of which is the

paradise Shestov said we all have a faint distant memory of...what is

the objective world? The world of objects that are outside of us and our

subjectivity. The world that we supposedly share. The world that we can

represent to ourselves. The world with definable characteristics,

convenient for our ability to represent these objects to ourselves as

concepts that we can use to communicate with each other. Thus we are

told our experience of this world is mediated by such concepts. After

all, if something happened to me and only me, then whatever this

something is is not objective. Objectivity is something that belongs to

all. Therefore, objective reality is in the very language that we use,

the language that we use to talk about this objective reality. Heidegger

took this to its logical conclusion. Feeling that since we are in this

world and not subjects outside of it, our subjectivity itself becomes an

illusion. I am who I am because of the world I inhabit. Since the world

I inhabit is the language that I use, there is no separating my

experience from my ability to represent this experience to myself using

concepts created by the society within which I am living.

This is the quintessence of “postmodernism”. It inevitably leads to a

social assumption of phenomenality that is shared by both the alt right

of the Republican Party and the Postmodern leftism of the Democratic

Party. It is based on decades of gaslighting people in denying them the

validity of their subjectivity and the life that exists internally in

individuals. It is not the external world of appearances that we share.

The external world of appearances is precisely what we do not share,

what we experience differently and individually. It is our subjectivity

we share and experience commonly. “We are all one thing experiencing

itself subjectively.” [31] It is our subjective experience of words and

language that allows for us to communicate, not our experience within a

society. We are not social animals, we have only been able to get by

because of our ability to be anti-social. The most important issues we

confront are not political. The only major political issue we ever truly

face is that of removing politics from our lives.

Being and Time was a book written by a Nazi in order to justify Nazism.

It was this book that laid the foundation for the type of philosophy

that is taught in our universities and in the humanities. It espouses a

social assumption of phenomenality that is also something that the alt

right and Alexander Dugin, openly and consciously, embrace. [32] The

Postmodern/academic/journalistic left and the alt right agree on many

things and this is not a coincidence. Cultural appropriation. Respecting

other people’s traditions. Yes...each must stick to their kind. If

phenomena is primarily social then politics becomes the most important

subject we can be discussing. The individual means nothing, the idea,

everything. Žižek says that behind the mask a person wears, there is

nothing, the only reality is the masks that individuals wear. The idea

of determinate negation. This is the foundation of the nihilism that

totalitarianism operates in. Nothing appears to be more than something.

When in contrast I feel our lives are more than everything.

The Aestheticization of Politics

We need to take individualism more seriously than the people who

advocated for it only abstractly (like Spencer or Bastiat or Ayn Rand or

Von Mises) while materially embracing feudalism in its economic form.

To study phenomenology is to ask what a phenomenon is. We have to

establish the phenomenon of rights. That is because the only life that

is lived is the subjective life of individuals, I argue that the only

reality of rights lies within individuals and are felt only in their

absence, when they are taken away. Life should live according to its own

laws, not ours. This is to say that we should have no ideological

representations that we should sacrifice our lives for.

Our representations are felt, this is the reason why we have such a

fixation with them, because we feel our ideas, we don’t just comprehend

them.

We have no conception of individual freedom, because no one is defending

the individual. People are only interested in defending traditions on

the one hand and in defending social groups on the other. We don’t need

someone to tell us what is right and wrong. We need to permit another

way of knowing things, not just intentionally, but affectively, in the

same way that we feel ourselves to be ourselves. I am not an individual

because I am able to represent myself to myself like in Ayn Rand’s

Anthem. I am an individual, because I feel myself to be an individual in

this living body that is my only reality.

We are taught in our universities that the only reality is that of

appearances. Dasein is not Miguel de Unamuno’s man of flesh and bone,

dasein is the being that appears before others, in this world, which is

to say, not one’s internal world, but in the world that exists outside

of themselves. The interpellation of Althusser, the mirror stage of

Lacan, the notion of ideology according to Žižek, how our ideas shape

the world. As I said, this only is 9/10’s of the truth. Žižek

overemphasizes ontics at the expense of ontology like Freud

did before him according to Michel Henry. [33] Slavoj Žižek presents no

description of what exactly ideology is, only its characteristics.

Ideology is felt. The felt nature of the idea of women in incels and the

felt nature of the idea of race in racists...it has nothing to do with

women or with people of another race. This is the reason why the last

thing you would ever want to do is argue with an incel about women or a

racist about minorities.

You will only end up sounding as ridiculous as they sound. Because, they

don’t actually care about women or minorities. They are merely angry and

frustrated and they are repressing it and by doing so, make it worse for

themselves and everyone else.

We are trying to run away from how life is felt. Because life is felt

painfully and when one is in pain, one is in pain precisely because in

that moment they can be no one but themselves. Our knowledge of our

death makes us feel stuck with ourselves that much more. This is why we

seek to represent ourselves through someone stronger than ourselves,

since this makes us feel bigger than the way we represent our mortality

to ourselves. Hence the aestheticization of politics.

We have no appreciation of art. This is our problem and what is truly

wrong with American society. Our anti-intellectualism. We think that art

is vain and superfluous. And we are paying the price for this mistake.

The humanities matter. Individual freedom depends upon it, because the

only real way in which individual freedom can be argued for today is not

based on a mathematical equation, but on what we know is right and wrong

deep down inside, knowledge we can only know when we are forced to

confront what is truly important, which is life, not abstractions about

life like politics.

We are not social animals. The only way that we have survived is because

a few loved life more than everyone else. Most people are not concerned

with being an individual. They are mostly concerned with how they appear

before others. They try to find themselves outside of themselves and

thus lose themselves. We cannot expect a free society. This isn’t what

we should be fighting for. We should be fighting instead to be free from

society.

If the outside world is all that matters, then what matters the

invisible lives of individuals? It is because we do not even recognize

the reality of affective phenomena, we find ourselves questioning the

dignity of living individuals. When in reality the only life that is

lived is lived by individuals and no one else. The only entities that

should have rights are individuals. And it is because we do not feel

like there is something behind a person’s face, we feel like there is

nothing that individuals can really accomplish or continue to strive to

do besides what it appears that they are doing. So if someone appears to

be sleeping on the street, we consider this to be everything this person

is capable of being. This is certainly not the case. We need to allow

individuals to be free in order to create a functioning society, since

we are currently a shadow of who we are as a species not because we have

had too much sympathy but a complete lack of it. We did not evolve

because of our violence and cruelty towards one another as Robert Ardrey

felt [34], but because of our co-operative nature, since we can

recognize something in each other that is taking place within ourselves

too. This is what has allowed us to communicate, not vice versa.

In Deserto Rosso, Giuliana says that if I bleed, you do not feel it.

[35] What I am saying is that this is not true. I am able to talk to

you, precisely because when you bleed, I can also feel it. No one feels

pain differently than anyone else. We may live different lives, but no

one lives their life differently than anyone else.

Ethics is about our bond with life. Not just our own, but to

transcendental Life. Art is ethical since art forces us to confront our

lives and who we are and subsequently forces us to recognize what is and

isn’t important. I repeat we have no art today, only distractions. And

it’s because our culture is determined by people who buy their education

from universities. They don’t study for it. And so it is because of our

lack of art, we have no bond at all with life. We have completely

forgotten what is and isn’t important.

Our thoughts come from life and are felt. The more we know, the more we

feel. The more we feel, the more our passions determine our thoughts.

And thus, we are never able to clarify things. We always get in our own

way, always preventing ourselves from knowing the truth since we can

never escape ourselves and who we are.

We are like dogs trying to chase our tails. We are doing nothing today,

but seeking ourselves outside of ourselves. We are unbalanced. We know

too much about the external world and ignore our internal world. In this

complete sea of vanity that authenticity drowns in, we have no grasp of

what is important. No awareness of the bond that unites us with Life.

It is not the external world that we share and inhabit. No one is in the

same place at the same time. What we share is an internal world. Life is

lived not objectively, but subjectively. The invisible nature of our

subjectivity...that feels pain and suffering...no one feels this

differently from anyone else. The irrational side of ourselves matters

just as much as the rational side. It is because we have ignored this,

our irrational side is getting the upper hand of our rational side (the

death drive).

You can lie to yourself, but you can never truly lie to others. The felt

nature of representations means that representations can be repressed,

but the emotional content of them cannot be. The author is not dead. In

fact, it is impossible for the author to die. Whether the author wants

to or not, the author will always reveal their secrets in the things

that they write. Dostoevsky liked to tell himself that he was a devout

Orthodox. But, reading him you can see his doubts concerning his faith.

It is because we feel a word in a similar way we are able to understand

what that word means. It isn’t that we grasp the specific meaning of

each word in order to comprehend what is being said. Otherwise, a

construction worker couldn’t yell out the word “slab!” and be understood

that he wanted someone to bring him a slab as Wittgenstein pointed out.

[36] If you were to look up the word slab in the dictionary, it would

not say that this word means “bring me a slab.” But, the construction

worker somehow miraculously communicated this all by yelling one word

“Slab!” This is because there are no fixed meanings to words, the

meaning of a word is in the way it is used, i.e. the meaning of a word

is in the way it is felt. After all, how something is said always

matters as much as what is being said. Most communication is nonverbal

even when it is verbalized.

A is not A. Even the two letters A occupy two different spaces in the

previous sentence. A can only be able to represent A, precisely because

A is not the A that it represents. A representation of a flower is not

at all the same thing as the flower it represents. A representation can

only be a representation precisely because it is the presence of the

absence of what it is supposed to be representing.

As Mallarmé said, the flower I write about in a poem is not going to be

found in any bouquet. [37] This is because poems are written with words,

not with ideas. To write a poem is to use words for the sake of the

words themselves. These words have a physical effect on people. They are

felt. Just like music is directly felt, so is poetry. The only

difference between a poem and music is that music is felt by the

presence of the sound created by the musician. Meanwhile, a poem is felt

by the presence of the absence that the poet creates.

Lacan felt that the subconsciousness is structured as a language. [38]

At the bottom of every dream image is a sentence that we can uncover

that will be able to make the dream image intelligible to ourselves.

This is not the case at all, in my opinion (and Michel Henry’s). [39] If

you are to look, for instance, at a common dream that people with

anxiety have...which is where their teeth are falling out...how can this

bizarre image be rendered into an intelligible statement? Rather, the

content of the dream image matters little. What matters is the emotion

behind it. The reason why people with anxiety have this dream is because

when someone dreams of their teeth falling out, this is felt with

anxiety, which just so happens to be the very anxiety that they carry

around with them in their waking life. The word salads of schizophrenics

also begin to make sense when you cease to focus on the content of what

they are saying, but instead focus on the emotions behind what it is

they are saying. The words they are uttering are not being uttered to

convey a meaning. They are being uttered, because of the way the word

feels. (e.g. the word mom is felt with comfort and the word dad is felt

with severity...“I woke up in my mom this morning and dad was yelling at

me”...could mean “I woke up in my bed and got a call from work”...when

you try not to make sense of what the words mean, but how they’re felt)

A mathematician once went to a concert and at the end of it, he wondered

what the point of it all was. What was the point of seeing all these

people sitting on stage, plucking at instruments or blowing into them,

just to make a bunch of sounds? What did that accomplish? So bewitched

are we by nihilism, we approach music in the same way. This is the

reason why most songs today need to have lyrics. They need to have a

meaning that we can represent to ourselves. If there’s no words making

the music intelligible, we seem to think that we’re just listening to

meaningless sounds. When we see abstract art, even if it is painted with

the virtuosity of Kandinsky, we are apt to mock it, since again, there

is no meaning that we can derive out of it. We are approaching art and

music in a terrible way, not understanding these things

are meant to be felt. They have no meaning as an intelligible statement,

because for it to be as such, it would have to have an effect outside of

ourselves that we can observe, implying the distance of intentionality.

But, art is supposed to have an effect inside of us. The purpose of the

artwork is the emotion that it hits you with, an emotion felt inside of

your subjectivity. Music is supposed to be felt subjectively, not

observed objectively as we attempt to do with our lyrics.

The problem is not how one represents the world to themselves. The

problem is not our conceptions, but how these conceptions are felt. If

you think more positively and have happier thoughts, this doesn’t mean

one feels happier. The content of our representations matters little to

us subjectively. What matters is how these representations are felt and

how these representations are felt cannot be repressed. You can distract

yourself from the idea of death, but you’re not going to cease to feel

it. In fact, by doing so, by trying to distract yourself from the idea

of death, you will feel it much more even when you are not consciously

thinking about it.

Thinking differently about the world doesn’t change it...as Karl Marx

said in response to Max Stirner. Or like the way

Samuel Johnson disproved Bishop Berkeley’s subjective idealism (that our

thoughts create our reality), by kicking a rock [40]...you can do the

same thing in order to argue against cognitive behavioral therapy and

the Secret and Eckhart Tolle and all these other assholes whose self

help bullshit I am, frankly, sick of.

Since I cannot see your pain when I strike you, this means that when I

strike you, I am doing nothing but getting rid of my stress. I am not

causing you any pain, because there appears to be no pain to me. The

shallowness of everyone’s mentality...and the empty feeling that

everything is insignificant...especially this invisible part of

myself...that no one else can see...where I have a face and nothing

behind it. The world we live in treats this part of ourselves as a

hallucination with significance to only you and not anyone else. You

have to deal with your own problems. There is no one who will help you.

When my pain is your pain and the pain I cause unto others is pain I

cause to myself. We cannot ignore the laws of life and expect to

progress. But, how do we know these laws? We don’t need anyone to teach

them to us. We have to be honest with ourselves, brutally so. It is the

idea of death and the confrontation with tragedy that makes us truly

appreciate life and love life and value life. The idea of death in our

subjectivity, when thought about deeply enough instead of evaded and

repressed, is felt as an appreciation of life, since it forces us to be

honest with ourselves. Most today, though, try to ignore their deaths

and their mortality. They are trying to ignore their lives subsequently,

which is the essence of nihilism. The nature of our music and our

movies, all of it is a form of escapism...we like only to pretend we are

someone else (usually some Scarface kind of character) and therefore we

have no appreciation for life. A politician like Trump is someone who we

can live vicariously through. Authoritarian Capitalism is resulting in a

politics that is a pure spectacle, that is purely aesthetic and is

nothing else, but something we can get lost in. People are not concerned

with Trump. Only the narrative that they are hearing about and

representing to themselves. It makes them feel different than who they

are. And this is the case for both the right and the left. We have to

learn to come to terms with ourselves and how life feels. This is why

art is important. These aren’t things you can run away from just like

gravity cannot be run away from. If you run away from how life feels, it

will come back in a much stronger form that will ruin you until you are

forced to feel it except even more painfully.

We try to forget that we’re going to die and as a result we have lost

all sense of what is and isn’t important. Since it is in the awareness

of death...how the representation of death feels to us...makes us feel

our lives more strongly. We are forced to be more honest with ourselves.

At which point, paradoxically, we come to feel life not as something

painful, but life as beautiful and worth living. No one, when

interrogated by the idea of death, comes out saying otherwise.

In order to continue, we have to affirm life. Even if this is

irrational. It is not irrational to our interior selves. We consider it

to be irrational, because we consider the truth to only be something

that we can represent to ourselves. The only truths we can consider to

be truths are those that are supported with evidence we can observe. If

this were the case, though, then what we represent to ourselves would

have no meaning, since we are doing the representing and the

representing is taking place for ourselves, if we are nothing because we

cannot represent ourselves to ourselves, would this not mean that we

cannot also truly be said to be able to represent the external world to

ourselves? Life has meaning and purpose, even if we cannot see it. Even

if there is no evidence. We have to have the courage to embrace this

martyrdom of existence...and to suffer life...while believing that the

suffering has a purpose. Because we know this to be true deep down, in

spite of all the evidence presented before us.

We are not social animals. In any way at all. We have only survived as a

species, because of how anti-social we can be. Because, some of us have

loved life while everyone else was wanting to give up. Those who have a

stronger will to live, will always find themselves in the periphery of

the majority. Having love in your heart for your fellow human beings

surely does alienate one if you live amongst half savages who privilege

how loudly they thump their chest over what’s inside of it. Christ was

killed because of His love. To love, in fact, He had to become

anti-social.

To be an individualist does not mean to have no heart. To be an

individualist means to have the heart of a lion.

What we share is our subjectivity. No one feels life any differently

from anyone else. It is by recognizing ourselves

as one that we end up as true individualists. The crowd doesn’t want to

feel itself as alive. Because the feeling that life has of itself is

painful. This is the origin of cruelty. Not even animals are as cruel as

we as human beings can be. We know what we’re doing and yet we still do

it. Because we want to forget ourselves as feeling alive. Harming others

is another way of harming one’s self, it is a way of forgetting one’s

self. The only truths are not external ones...and are not socially

constructed. The only truth is our inward subjectivity. Forgetting this,

we have established dictatorships. We need a new sense of humanism to

get out of these dark ages. We need a new sense of the importance of

real life. It is a curse and painful to live with, but we need artists

to give us the courage to live it. The awareness that Peter Wessel

Zapffe said is a biological defect [41] is also our greatest blessing.

The humanities are incredibly important and it is there that we find the

epicenter of this disease of nihilism. Because they are precisely the

ones who insist that human life means nothing. It is not that the

humanities are being taken too seriously or that the sciences need to

change. We need to take the humanities as seriously as we take the

sciences. Human life needs to mean something even if we can’t figure out

the meaning of our lives as a representation...as something outside

ourselves that we can observe. We need to establish individual liberty

not as the epitome of a logical conclusion like a mathematical

equation...but by looking inside ourselves and by being honest with

ourselves.

We are mistaken in thinking that our senses project outward phenomena to

ourselves. I think rather our senses filter out the external world of

appearances. This means that when we die, we do not lose our awareness.

We gain awareness. If our senses did not filter out the world, we would

be so overwhelmed by the beauty of life we would not be able to do a

single thing to ensure our survival. But, while we are mostly unaware of

this beauty, I do think on a deeper level we all are aware of how truly

awe-inspiring life is. We live our lives painfully, because we live our

lives in the shadow of a lost paradise. We would do anything to escape

this painful feeling. Drugs, fashion, sex, money, all of these things

that we extol are nothing more than distractions, ways of forgetting

yourself as yourself. That is why the more one hungers for these things,

the more one ends up starving no matter how much of these things you

consume. It will never be enough. We are looking in the wrong direction

for the meaning of our lives. It is not outside, but inside ourselves.

There is no difference between my awareness and your awareness even

though we are aware of different things.

Every single living individual has worth and value, because every single

living individual is a child of God. Every single living individual

should be treated as such.

Marx’s philosophical writings were not published until the 1930’s. This

includes the German Ideology, which I think, along with Michel Henry, is

the key work of Marx’s philosophical thought. [42] It was here that Marx

differentiated himself most clearly from Hegel and also from Max

Stirner, who Marx criticized for being too much of a Hegelian. Marx as a

philosopher was a philosopher of subjectivity like Kierkegaard, who also

wrote in defense of the living breathing individual. Max Stirner felt

that the only reason why something is your property and not mine is

because I have declared it to be as such. If I had enough power and

reached over and took whatever belonged to you, then it is mine.

Ultimately how we represent the world to ourselves determines for Max

Stirner what the world is. But, as Marx pointed out, while Stirner and

the other young Hegelians were making these brave statements, the world

remained unchanged. So many revolutions took place - only in thought,

the world went by without noticing. The reality of our lives isn’t

something that can change because we think differently about it. This

was what Marx meant when he said: “The philosophers hitherto have

interpreted the world, the point now is to change it.” [43] Our lives,

our reality is our subjective affectivity that feels labor, that feels

hunger, that feels cold, etc. This subjectivity that we all share and

that no one experiences differently although we each live it

individually. Marx was a philosopher of individualism like Ayn Rand,

with the difference that Marx’s individualism was based on the reality

of living individual in our subjectivity while Ayn Rand’s was an

abstract individualism, that, like Max Stirner, considered our ability

to represent the world to ourselves to be all that we are. This abstract

individualism - it is very easy to take a word like an “individual” and

twist it around to mean whatever you want it to mean when you abstract

it the way she did - to the point where having “individual freedom”

becomes nothing more than Orwellian doublespeak for wage slavery, in

other words, painting chains with gold.

Lenin and Engels (who was not philosophically inclined [44]) and others

like Gramsci created and elucidated an idea called “dialectical

materialism”. This theory has nothing to do with Marx. This theory was

created in the absence of Marx’s philosophical works. It is nothing but

rendering Hegel a bit less idealistic and more materialistic, while

retaining Karl Marx’s economics and politics. The dialectic between

master and slave becomes the manner in which our material conditions are

defined and thereby - everything we know. In the purview of “dialectical

materialism”, just like with fascism, everything becomes a social

construction. This isn’t a coincidence. Fascism was developed as a

theory by a Hegelian philosopher named Giovanni Gentile (who Lenin wrote

fondly of). [45] Indeed, Lenin even referred to the first Il Duce -

Gabrielle D’Annunzio - the first fascist figurehead - as the “only

revolutionary in Europe”. [46]

“Dialectical materialism” is Red Fascism. We cannot ignore how Leninism

arose theoretically alongside Fascism. The founder of the Nationalist

Socialist Party of Germany, Georg Strasser, wanted to have closer

relations with the Soviet Union and felt that their conservative

revolution coincided with the kind of collectivism that Leninism

exalted. Georges Sorel and other prominent socialists like Mussolini

also eventually became Fascists. [47] Their primary enemy was the

individualism and materialism engendered by liberal democracy and

capitalism. This shouldn’t be surprising. Lenin, being ignorant of

Marx’s philosophical works, embraced Hegel like the Fascists did and

like Heidegger did. Every single aspect of life became political in both

Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and Mao Zedong’s China also. If we are

anti-fascists, we have to be opposed to this Red Fascism as well as

Nazism. It has nothing to do with Marx.

Socialism was founded on the idea that life is not political, that the

only reason to be political is to remove politics from life - so that

life is allowed to function the way it is meant to. In freedom. Real

freedom, not abstract freedom.

Socialism is an affirmation of the invisible life behind an individual’s

face, not just how an individual appears to everyone else (in contrast

to Althusser, Lacan, and Heidegger)

To study phenomenology is to ask what a phenomenon is. We have to

establish the phenomenon of rights. That because the only life that is

lived is the subjective life of individuals, I argue that the only

reality of rights lies within individuals and are felt only in their

absence, when they are taken away. Life should live according to its own

laws, not ours. This is to say that we should have no ideological

representations that we should sacrifice our lives for.

Facts don’t care about feelings, but facts are felt. Ignore this at your

own peril.

We have no sense of what is important. People only hear what they want

to hear and what they want to hear is what Esther Hicks tells them, that

all you need to do is change how you represent the world to yourself.

Change your thoughts and you’ll start to feel better! This is nothing

but repression and is the problem in the first place for many people.

A social assumption of phenomenality inevitably leads to

totalitarianism. Politics becomes the most important thing that one can

think about. This is precisely what Heidegger intended with his Being

and Time which is the textbook for “postmodernism”. Heidegger like Hegel

wanted to think outside of the Cartesian subject/object distinction.

But, the way they both did this, was through emphasizing the object, at

the expense of the subject. This is a problem. Because the only true

phenomena is our subjectivity, everything emanates from it. What we have

to fear from the humanities is not cultural Marxism like Jordan Peterson

and the alt right say. It is cultural Fascism. The alt right and the

Postmodern leftism of the Democratic Party are Heidegger’s legacy in

America. The idea that my personal problems are primarily political

issues. How does this not lead to totalitarianism? Especially since this

is nothing more than the active repression of feeling ourselves as

mortal. By focusing on abstract issues like politics, people escape

themselves and become a part of something bigger. Politics has taken the

place of religion in providing our lives with meaning. (“It is because

human beings always think of living for some kind of ideal, and they

soon get bored of living just for themselves. It is because of this that

the need to die for something arises. That need is the ‘great cause’

that people talked about in the past. Dying for a ‘great cause’ was

considered the most glorious, heroic, or brilliant way of dying.

However, there are no ‘great causes’ now. This is natural because the

democratic political system does not need ‘great causes’” - [48]) this

leads to the state turning into an aesthetic object, that we use to

distract ourselves from our lives. This is the reason why we have the

kind of leaders we have. Because it is through them that we want to see

ourselves and identify ourselves. This is why I say that ideas are felt

and not just comprehended. The more we run from life, the more life will

haunt us. The more we try to run from ourselves, the more we feel stuck

with ourselves. Ideology functions like a Chinese finger trap.

Gulags. Concentration camps. Colonialism. The barbarity of the 20th

century. Can be accounted for because we have ignored the needs of our

internal lives. We have lost a sense of humanity and a sense of

sympathy. We do not understand each other, because we have no art that

we relate to. Just distractions.

Philosophy, art, literature, poetry (we are not even taught how to read

poetry in our schools), we have ignored these things to our detriment.

We are not taking these things seriously at all. Few literature

professors care about literature. Most care about how they appear before

everyone else. And it is amidst their carelessness, their narcissism,

their self indulgent hedonism, all of it is the result of class, the

result of them being wealthy - it is amidst them narcissistically

inflating their egos that we find ourselves suffering and only talking

about politics in literature classes. Talking about Joseph Conrad, one

of the most apolitical writers who has ever lived, and guess what? All

that can be discussed - politics! And the reason, after all, they

primarily bring up race and other social issues in literature classes,

is because of a Nazi named Heidegger who intended precisely for this

very thing to happen, for our experience within our society to take

precedence over our experience as individuals. These academics are so

careless, they aren’t even aware of this. It is they who are responsible

for Donald Trump and the alt-right and it is they who are responsible

for America falling apart.

Perfect example - I saw a book in my college’s library about Samuel

Beckett and masculinity. [49] This book did nothing to fight rape

culture. It in fact perpetuates it. Because, how can we truly have a

grasp of the moral importance of fighting rape culture, if we continue

to neglect our affective and subjective existence? And are not writers -

especially writers like Samuel Beckett - supposed to have their words

felt? Is that not why they write?? This book on Beckett and masculinity

was written, because there’s a popular notion that says “The author is

dead.” There is nothing outside of the text. Just any implications you

want to find in it. I’m sure you can interpret Samuel Beckett to make a

statement about gender. But, as Mallarmé said - we write with words, not

ideas. What Samuel Beckett said does not matter. The content of the text

is not important at all. The only thing that rather matters, is the

emotion that is not observable, but, nonetheless, is created by the

text.

This sterilization of “postmodernism” creates the boredom, the ennui

that Benjamin Fondane talked about in his book on Baudelaire - the ennui

that is the root of all evil. As Fondane said - it’s not the boredom of

a Sunday afternoon, figuring out how to spend your time. It is the

complete and total absence of significance to anything. [50]

We need art that has the courage to tell us what we need to hear, not

what we want. That embraces life, not runs away from it.

You can in capitalism say individuals abstractly are free - but this

does not make individuals free. Just because Max Stirner would want to

say that something is his own, doesn’t make it so. It will be out of his

grasp, because he refused to look at the situation that he was actually

living in, which was shaped by the material conditions we all live in as

a result of class warfare. Wanting to turn the entirety of life

political is not Socialism. It is Fascism. This was something Marx

rejected. We shouldn’t seek to create a utopia, but rather seek what is

just. Justice in a true sense does not and cannot live alongside

standard liberalism, since it sacrifices lived life for the sake of

abstractions - like property - we should seek to remove politics from

life - we should seek as Socialists to let life function as it is meant

to - in freedom.

The Phenomenality of Gender and Toxic Masculinity

Gender is not a social construction. Gender is not a biological object

with distinct characteristics with which we can use to represent it to

ourselves either. Our problem is that we think that the only things that

we know and come to an understanding of are things that we can represent

to ourselves. People like Heidegger took this a step further by saying

that our representations ultimately determine how we understand

phenomena. But, I argue that there is a different way of knowing things

that doesn’t imply the distance of intentionality. As Maine de Biran

said, before we can feel an object outside of ourselves, we must first

be able to feel ourselves to be ourselves. [51] To know yourself as

yourself is a form of knowing something without the distance between a

subject and an object. In other words, before we can see there must

first be sight, otherwise how else could we see if seeing is not done

with sight? But, while we can depict and represent to ourselves what we

look at and we can even depict and represent to ourselves what someone

looking at something looks like, we can not represent sight to

ourselves. Sight is a phenomenon that has no appearance whatsoever and

yet if this phenomenon did not exist how could things appear to us?

Gender is known affectively in our subjectivity in the same way we know

ourselves to be seeing, by feeling ourselves seeing. We feel ourselves

to be a man or a woman. As such, gender can have no characteristics with

which we can use to represent it to ourselves as a concept in the same

way sight has no characteristics. A person’s gender is not a social

construction. Nor is it a biological object. Some people may have a

penis and feel themselves to be a woman. Telling them that they’re

feeling themselves as a woman is a lie is tantamount to gaslighting.

Gender is like temperature. Some people feel 60 degrees F is hot. Others

feel it is cold. That’s their feeling and you can’t tell someone how

they feel. So, just like the temperature, you can’t tell someone how

their gender feels. Gender is not something we can conceptualize to

ourselves. It is not represented by genitalia, by personality

characteristics, etc. This does not mean it does not exist either and is

purely a social construction as we are taught in our universities. Just

because we cannot depict the feeling of being hot or the feeling of

being cold does not mean that these feelings do not exist.

Fast food feminists like those on Buzzfeed will harp on about how gender

is a social construction and then pat themselves on the back because

they feel like they’ve mastered critical theory with such a brave and

daring declaration. Until the transgendered person approaches and asks

well if gender is a social construction then am I doing nothing but

merely delusional by feeling my gender differently than everyone else?

What is a social construction is how we conceptualize gender. The

problem with gender norms are the characteristics that we affix to

gender. But, gender in it’s affective and subjective reality has no

characteristics. Trans activists and feminists find themselves in

disagreement precisely because they do not understand that gender is

real, but is felt. What we should be saying is that if you feel yourself

to be a man, no one can tell you how your masculinity feels. If you feel

yourself to be a woman, no one can tell you how your femininity feels. I

feel myself as masculine wearing pink and I don’t care what anyone

thinks (this is an example, I don’t actually wear pink). A woman can

feel herself as feminine even with a high earning job. A woman can even

feel herself as feminine if she has a penis. This topic has become

overly complicated unnecessarily, because upper middle class White

narcissists aren’t actually thinking very seriously about it. Their

“theory” is nothing more than their fiddling with themselves while we’re

burning beneath them. In other words, hypocrisy.

The political is personal. That’s a problem, not a solution! The

political needs to stop being so personal! That’s the only reason to be

politically engaged!

Spivak, Helene Cixous, Judith Butler, Kristeva, etc. were intelligent,

even if I fundamentally disagree with them, I do have to recognize the

depth of their thought. Because hermeneutics, how we interpret external,

intentional phenomenon, is important. But, the fast food feminism in

America today? It is not actual feminism, it is a joke - it is easily

manufactured soundbites from social media that, like everything else on

social media, feeds the delusions of whoever is consuming it, positively

or negatively. American feminism is poorly thought out because the white

men who’ve created its discourse in our universities are only inflating

their own egos in front of their classrooms. “Ah! Everyone! Look at how

intelligent I am! Look at how brave and daring I am! Telling you the

truth that the man doesn’t want you to hear! In a literature class! Oh

that wonderful matriarchal paradise that existed before patriarchy

created the agricultural revolution!” The absolute decrepit nature of

our universities has created this degenerated form of feminism. Just

imagine - how an idiot interprets feminism for their own narcissistic

ends. That’s exactly the nature of both feminism and the reaction

against it here in America. They say that men rape, because they want to

seize control of female reproductive organs, that this is all about the

arranging of people like they’re animals, something that has been going

on since the agricultural revolution. We now live in a society using

terms from this archaic past that make people - without their being

aware of it - perpetuate patriarchy. So we have to look at the terms we

use, the media we consume, etc in order to liberate women.

I think Spivak, Cixous, all of the major feminist theorists would be

horrified and shocked by what their thought has turned into in America.

I really wonder if ALL that women suffer from are media representations

when they are harassed, belittled, not taken seriously, assaulted, etc.

Even if there were the greatest possible depictions of women in video

games, there’d still be rape culture. Even if there were the greatest

possible depictions of women in our media, women still would face the

exact same ills they are currently struggling against. Because the

reason people rape isn’t because of video games. The way women are

depicted has nothing to do with how they are treated. I’m not saying

that we shouldn’t be more accommodating and more open. We should seek to

depict women better so that women feel like they also have a place

within our society. Of course! This is common sense! But, will it really

bring an end to rape culture? Let’s discuss the phenomenality of rape.

Many people say that it’s about power and control. I think this may be

the case, but there is of course male sexual frustration. After all, men

undoubtedly assault women far more than women assault men. Who knows

where this frustration comes from. Perhaps it’s the result of hormones

and biology that men want to have sex more often than women. Perhaps

that is the reason why women are more selective about the men they sleep

with. For charlatans like Jordan Peterson, we’re nothing but lobsters

and we should embrace this, the alpha males on top, the beta males on

bottom. It’s just nature. I think differently. Like Hesiod said, let the

animals act like animals, we’re human beings. We should be better than

them. There’s a reason why lobsters are still at the bottom of the ocean

and why they’re on our dinner plates as the mere instrument for the

enjoyment of butter (all that lobsters are). Another possibility...who

knows!...maybe...just maybe women are more selective about the men they

sleep with, because men are not selective at all in the women they sleep

with. These neanderthals online complain so much about how horrible it

is that there are studies saying women are only receptive to 20% of the

men that they encounter on apps - meanwhile, they swipe right on every

woman that pops up without even looking at their profiles! Regardless!

Women are more selective about the men they sleep with and this leaves a

lot of men sexually frustrated. It is not at all a good excuse for

raping someone, being sexually frustrated. But, the assault of

strangers, drugging and taking advantage of women, harassment of women

by people they don’t know, this would go away if male sexual frustration

went away. And wouldn’t you know it, in places where they have legalized

prostitution, rape has gone down dramatically [52]. This is something

that we could fight for that could actually save a lot of women from a

lot of pain - we can legalize prostitution. This would decrease the

demand that is placed on women, so instead of being constantly and

perpetually harassed by a buch of thirsty men online or in real life who

just want a brief moment of gratification, these thirsty men could

direct all that attention to women they can pay for this brief, stupid

moment of gratification. To put things in perspective, just imagine how

much more prevalent sexual assault and harassment would be if all these

idiotically thirsty men didn’t have access to pornography! I imagine it

would be far worse!

But again, of course, nothing can truly get resolved without addressing

economic inequality. When a man feels animosity towards a woman to the

point where he beats her or rapes her for a feeling of power and

control, it is typically the result of economic anxiety. Women suffer

the most from capitalism and they always have. Not the men who work, but

the women who raise their children and look after their households.

They're affected by capitalism far more than their husbands. Especially

since, if a family is economically desperate, more often than not, this

is precisely when women face the most violence from their husbands. We

need a new wave of feminism. That radically demands an end to capitalism

for true freedom - not this poorly thought nonsense from Buzzfeed,

writing about the male gaze on their blogs, without even being able to

clearly state what they mean by the male gaze! They’re feminists,

because it’s a fad. These same exact people twenty years ago would be

Christian fundamentalists. Instead of finding misogyny and racism

everywhere, they would have found Satanism and black magick everywhere.

It’s nothing but the upper classes feeling of moral superiority. Women

suffer doubly because of this. (I only write what I as a man have

observed encountering the experiences of my sister, my mother, and

previous girlfriends - this is of course something that a woman needs to

elaborate upon and I whole heartedly open this as an invitation to any

women out there who is daring enough to pursue this discourse further)

Rape culture should be a fixture of our past. Domestic violence

shouldn’t at all be as prevalent as it is. Going to a domestic violence

shelter would be enlightening for these bloggers complaining about the

male gaze in video games. Rape culture and patriarchy isn’t abstract. It

is only for the wealthy - because the wealthy do not experience social

prejudices and social injustices, at least not at all like the poor -

they experience it mostly abstractly, which is why their theories always

sound so off. It isn’t based on direct experience. The wealthy can’t

complain about racism or misogyny or homophobia or (especially!)

transphobia, because it is nowhere near at all the same in nature to

what the poor encounter. These narcissistic online bloggers are not at

all concerned about the economic inequality that is exactly what creates

racism, rape culture, homophobia, transphobia - the economic inequality

that has poisoned the character of everyone fighting each other like

wolves over scraps of meat. By not fighting economic inequality with the

same animosity as they fight other social issues, these wealthy elitists

in LA, the most obnoxious snobs imaginable, are guilty of perpetuating

so many of these issues that they claim to be against. And they do this

for the most hypocritically narcissistic reasons - they don’t want to

look in the mirror, they want to criticize everyone else, without

criticizing themselves. All of these problems are going on for their

benefit, for their cushy lifestyles, for their partying, for their drug

abuse, for their alcoholism, for their gross hook up culture, for the

idiotically graphic nature of the music they like, for the pride that

they have like pigs rolling around in their filth - it’s disgusting to

look at - for the wealth that their parents have, that these adult

children have benefited tremendously from - everyone else must suffer,

but them.

Social media has turned into a social credit system, a surveillance

state except we’re the ones surveilling ourselves. It appeals to our

basest and lowest instincts. The things that become popular are the

things that are easily digestible. Society ends up taking on the

characteristics of the people who proliferate online. In real life, they

are outcasts and losers, but online - they take on a new form. As a

troll, they feel much bigger and stronger. This need to escape one’s

self into someone who is bigger and stronger - this is the “red pill”

people choose to take when they click on a youtube video that does

nothing but reinforce their delusions and defense mechanisms. Male

hysteria is a better way to characterize this rather than “toxic

masculinity”. Hysteria, for Freud, was essentially a female issue that

resulted from women feeling uncomfortable with the way that they

represented their gender to themselves, since they subjectively felt

their gender differently. Is this not a better way to describe men who

put a ball sack on their trucks, men who eat only red meat, who abuse

women, who call themselves “alpha”, since this is an obvious

manifestation of their own insecurities surrounding how they feel their

masculinity? Women tend to feel their femininity as being stronger than

the way we represent femininity and men tend to feel their masculinity

as being weaker than the way we represent masculinity. This is the way

in which these ideas are felt - they are felt with insecurity. Just look

at all these Neo-Nazi groups going to extreme lengths to try to shock

people and instill fear, all to make themselves feel much bigger than

they actually are. This is the death drive. This is a running away from

life, not the embracing of it. We cannot change reality by just changing

our thoughts about it. Changing how we represent it to ourselves. We’d

love for that to be the case...consequently that is usually the truth

that we wish to consume. The Jews functioned for the Germans in the same

way women have functioned online for men for the past ten years. As a

scapegoat. Something to unleash your anger onto, since you refuse and

are repressing what is truly causing your problems and what is truly

unbearable - and that is our material conditions and the absolute truth

of our complete equality. We are not lobsters. Evolutionary psychology

is a pseudo-science. Evolution has no bearing at all upon who we are

psychologically. Some animals are physically stronger than others. The

reason why men are more aggressive is nothing more than the result of us

being physically stronger and blind to what we are doing. I believe in

the unity of knowledge and action like Wang Yangming and Socrates - that

to sin is to error. If you know something is wrong, you will not do it.

We as human beings though - we are incredible at keeping things hidden

to ourselves even. We are incredible at making ourselves unaware of

things. Libertarians, for instance, wish to be unaware of the

insignificance of life and thus seek to escape into fantasies of wealth

and fantasies of a bigger, stronger man like Elon Musk who they can live

vicariously through. Hence also the absolute antipathy towards

socialism. This is the reason why culture is important, why art is

important - and an even bigger reason why we should abolish capitalism.

We have no understanding of ourselves because our art and culture is

completely controlled by corporate monopolies that don’t have to create

incredible artworks to survive - they don’t even have to create a decent

product, since they have monopolies. Our universities do not take the

humanities seriously. We have no understanding at all of ourselves and

who we are. This is what has allowed for the death drive to proliferate.

Art is supposed to be where these poisonous things are expunged. Art is

supposed to be where we release these things. Instead - we have become

cultural relativists and sophists - thinking that we’ve radically

reconceptualized the world when we’ve done nothing but advance a

position that Socrates was already disputing thousands of years ago. Man

is not the measure of all things. The language we use to discuss reality

does not shape reality. If you think this is the case, then be careful -

you’ve just permitted yourself the complete freedom to delude yourself

on whatever you wish you want to be deluded - you’ve just permitted

yourself the ability to repress certain ideas, which will make you feel

them even more strongly. Marx’s radical phenomenology is a lot more

advanced than Lenin’s dialectical materialism. Socialism is a stripping

away of illusions - boldly staring at reality as it is not as we’d wish

it was. This class struggle has derailed us, set us off our course. We

would be much bigger and grander if everyone had the ability to show who

they are. Each and every single individual is divine and has worth and

value - none more so than anyone else. Everyone will be remembered as

equally as everyone else. Which is to say they won’t. Death is the great

equalizer.

All in all, I think it is apparent that this escape into the fantasy of

a stronger man is nothing more than a way for some people to feel bigger

than their mortality.

If we want to lead the world again, this is the attitude that we in

America, especially men, need to take: “Hazrat Ali, the last of the

divinely guided caliphs, the Lion of Allah, the symbol of knowledge,

generosity, and loyalty, the father of the grandchildren of the Prophet

(s.a.w.s.), was also known as the invincible warrior of his time. In one

battle he had overpowered an enemy warrior and had his dagger at the

man's throat when the nonbeliever spat in his face. Immediately Hazrat

Ali got up, sheathed his dagger, and told the man, ‘Taking your life is

unlawful to me. Go away!’ The man, who had saved his life by spitting in

the face of the revered Lion of Allah, was amazed. ‘O Ali,’ he asked, ‘I

was helpless, you were about to kill me, I insulted you and you released

me. Why?’ ‘When you spat in my face,’ Hazrat Ali answered, ‘it aroused

the anger of my ego. Had I killed you then it would not have been for

the sake of Allah, but for the sake of my ego. I would have been a

murderer. You are free to go.’ The enemy warrior, moved by the integrity

displayed in Hazrat Ali, converted to Islam on the spot.” [53]

Anarcho-Syndicalist Economics and Realistically Effective Strategy

The typical criticism of socialism usually first pertains to the labor

theory of value and then to property rights. Economists like Böhm-Bawerk

and Carl Menger and others from the Austrian School, criticize the labor

theory of value by stating that the only value an object has is derived

from the utility it provides to whoever wishes to consume it. [54] They

feel that the amount of labor expended on a product is irrelevant to its

value. After all, someone who labored for hours upon hours making mud

pies doesn’t subsequently christen thereby these mudpies with a lot of

value. So, the main socialist criticism of capitalism, that since labor

is the sole source of value, labor should own all the wealth in society,

becomes erroneous, because labor, to them, is not the sole source of

value. Furthermore, to be a socialist means to seize control or cease

the recognition of property rights in some way. Property rights are

intrinsic to our individual sovereignty. Without them, then how can I

truly be said to have control over myself and my life?

First: labor is the sole source of value. This is because an exchange is

supposed to be an exchange of costs - so that it doesn’t cost me more to

exchange with you than it does for you to exchange with me - labor is

the source of value since what is supposed to be taking place in the

market is a voluntary, mutually beneficial exchange.

The theory of marginal utility is nothing more than a justification for

theft. Charging someone $1,000 for a cup of water in a desert is not a

mutually beneficial voluntary transaction. It is exploitation.

A simple explanation of the socialist criticism of capitalism is this:

property should not provide someone with an income. The only means to

wealth should be through working not just through merely owning (like

that person in the desert with the outrageously expensive cup of water

making an absurd amount of money through doing nothing but owning a cup

of water).

Further elaboration: Surplus value exists because capitalists have

organized production in such a way as to make labor increasingly less

and less relevant. This is because capitalists consider labor to be a

cost. This was what Marx considered to be capitalism’s saving grace. By

considering labor to be a cost, capitalists had to develop newer and

more innovative forms and methods of production that would reduce the

amount of labor necessary to produce a product. It is estimated that the

Ancient Romans did not develop an industrial revolution, precisely

because their labor was done by slaves, who were not considered

similarly as a cost. [55] The problem with capitalism, though, is that

the capitalist class and they alone are the only ones who benefit from

this, no one else. Surplus value exists, because exchange value has

nothing to do with the product that is being sold. Labor should

determine its own value - it cannot be measured in an abstraction like a

price. Labor is subjective. It is not an object that we can observe.

When labor is taking place, it is taking place within the invisible

subjectivity of individuals. There is no way we can represent something

like labor to ourselves. It is also not something that can be measured

in terms of hours. The laborer alone knows the value of his or her

labor. This is why socialists call for workers to control production. So

labor can determine its own value, not have this be determined for it by

a capitalist.

What was not created by labor has no value, since no cost went into

making it and an exchange in the marketplace is supposed to be an

exchange of costs. What is called surplus value is not real value. If

robots were doing all the work for everyone, it surely would be theft

for a price to be attached to the products they create. They are not

created by labor and therefore - are worthless. Labor is the sole source

of value. When you buy a product, you are doing nothing but buying the

labor that went into that product. When you are buying a car, you are

buying the labor that went into making that car. The idea is that

everything you own is the equivalent to the amount of labor you’ve

contributed, because in a transaction it is implied that both parties

are exchanging equivalent amounts of labor. If you made 100 mudpies,

just because you labored arduously over this task, doesn’t of course

suddenly mean that the mudpies have an inestimable amount of value. This

is a blatant misunderstanding of the labor theory of value on the part

of Bohm-Bawerk and other Austrian economists. Because no one wanted the

labor to go into making these mudpies, this was a destructive activity

because the labor was wasted. Indeed, here we can regard this as rather

a waste of value. It is because labor is the source of value that this

labor was a waste in much the same way that it would be a waste of value

to build a car people really want to buy and then destroy it immediately

afterwards rather than selling it. This is what you are doing when you

make 100 mudpies. If labor was not the sole source of value, then how

would this be a wasteful activity?

Charging someone $1,000 for a cup of water in the desert doesn’t create

value. It wastes value in the same way. A lot of labor was done for no

purpose at all besides to drink a cup of water. It is theft. The labor

spent earning that $1,000 could have been spent on something that also

might have cost the same amount of labor to make. Instead, it was

wasted. All those hours working were done solely so that a guy could

turn on a faucet and put a cup under it. Thinking this creates value, do

you also think it creates value to break someone’s window, because the

window repairman made money as a result?

So, if there was no labor at all involved in the creation of a product,

then it should have no price. Because of this, because labor is the sole

source of value, labor should own all the wealth that it creates - what

is currently surplus value should belong to everyone and should not have

any value whatsoever. This is essentially the socialist criticism of

capitalism.

The reason people criticize capitalism is not that people want something

for free, something for nothing. Socialists criticize capitalism because

capitalism is not a system where people have the right to the fruits of

their labor. To support capitalism, you have to support a system wherein

those who produce the majority of wealth own very little of the wealth

that they created with their physical hands. Rather, the ones who own

the vast majority of wealth do not make their money laboring. They make

their money because they own property. The fact that property generates

such a grotesque income, this is the injustice of capitalism.

Now, onto property rights. I don’t know if you could tell, but I agree

with people on the right that we have the right to the fruits of our

labor. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be a socialist! If I make a chair, let’s

say I spent ten years making this chair, and a thief comes along and

takes it from me, those ten years of labor were also taken away from me.

Ideally, yes, I would support a free market. There are indeed people who

call themselves free market socialists - mutualists like Kevin Carson or

Benjamin Tucker - who think we should do precisely this, have a free

market in order to create a socialistic economic system. Because,

capitalism is not at all today the result of the free market nor has it

ever been. The wealthy are not wealthy because they obtained their

wealth fairly. These authors have gone into quite great detail showing

this and showing also that as a result of the state’s intervention in

the marketplace, we are almost completely incapable of owning our own

tools of production and employing ourselves. We have to be dependent on

someone else. But, to me, this is precisely the reason why we should

cease having a market system and embrace a socialist planned economic

system - this is precisely why I believe in ending the market system.

We do not live in a free market. The free market is a myth. It has never

existed. As G.D.H. Cole said economic power precedes political power.

Right wing libertarians consider the private ownership of production to

be a non-invasive activity and instead they argue that the people who

own production privately are public servants, creating the jobs that

everyone needs. A capitalist’s magical ability to intuit how to invest

their wealth in the most advantageous ways - it is an overrated quality

that could be done as well, if not better, by a directly democratically

elected, mandated, and instantly revocable official (on the condition

that such an official is bound by democratic decree - something which

was not present in the management of the Soviet Union’s economy). The

wealthy are wealthy as a result of state privilege, as a result of the

state neutralizing competition for their sake. Indeed, so heavy is this

state intervention on their behalf it seems to me that we are already

living in a centrally planned economic system except it benefits the

capitalist classes instead of everyone. It does this through the

protection of unoccupied land, through the protection of a monopoly of

credit creation, through the protection of patents, and through a system

of licenses and regulations and taxes imposed onto productive activity -

the state separates us from production - it is because of the state,

production is not in our hands and is not taking place for our sake and

benefit. Our survival is in the hands of someone else. This system of

forced dependence creates the exploitation I mentioned that deprives

labor of its fruit.

In school, I remember being taught that the problem with Marxism can

best be exemplified by the classroom. Should the students who have

straight A’s share their grades with the students who are failing?

Should everything be evened out and everyone get the same grade? This is

not at all what Marx was about, as I’ve said. Rather - the problem with

capitalism can also best be exemplified by the classroom. Should the

students that pay the teacher off be the ones awarded the highest grade?

Should the students who have no money have no chance of succeeding,

because they haven’t got anything to put in the teacher’s wallet?

Let’s look, for instance, at the record industry, which is the clearest

example of this state privilege. Because, with the internet, you can

release and share music at no cost whatsoever, without needing in any

way to purchase a cd or a cassette or a vinyl record like you used to.

Artists now no longer need to be supported through the sale of their

music, instead, they have the ability to be supported directly by their

fans through things like patreon or through fans buying their

merchandise or seeing them play live. And yet, record labels are still

around and are massive corporations, polluting our air waves with

garbage music. Why are these disgusting and parasitic record labels

still around when they don’t need to be?

The publishing industry – writers can release their work online and

people can gain free access to their works. And writers again can

receive an income through things like patreon. And yet publishing

corporations are still massive. And certainly they make a lot of money

at the expense of college students who spend hundreds of dollars on

their textbooks, when these textbooks could instead be distributed

online for free.

Which brings me to universities. Why do we have these universities when

professors could teach online? A professor could even charge the

students directly to learn from them and charge a much smaller and

fairer price than what universities currently charge for their courses.

Instead of needing to get a degree, you could have these professors

verifying with employers that you did indeed take their course and they

could even recommend you to prospective employers if you proved to be a

hard worker while learning from them. As we’ve seen with the

coronavirus, the internet has the potential to completely change

education. We don’t need to be sitting around in classrooms, we don’t

need the buildings these classrooms are in – and I, for one, think we

don’t even need the entirety of the university that these buildings were

built for. No more do we need libraries. We can instead now upload and

access all these books online. We have the potential to give everyone

the ability to learn anything that they have ever wanted to learn...but,

we instead nonetheless have these decrepit institutions still lurking

around, like an unwanted guest. And, because of them, many people in my

generation are tens of thousands of dollars in debt. And to add insult

to injury, most of the idiots running them decided it was in the best

interest of everyone to open up again in the middle of a pandemic.

Universities are, at this point, becoming a threat to our physical

safety.

Universities, publishers, and the record industry – all institutions

that rake in billions upon billions of dollars each year. And none of

them are necessary.

The health insurance industry, which is the main reason why our

healthcare costs are so expensive. We have a great healthcare system in

this country, the only problem is the cost. It is absurd the costs we

have for healthcare and, to a large extent, these massive HMO

corporations are responsible. I don’t think anyone disagrees with this.

Furthermore, the technology that we use in our healthcare system could

be produced by things like 3d printers. People used 3d printers in fact

to create ventilators during this pandemic for only $1 per ventilator.

And yet, hospitals nonetheless spend $11,000 on ventilators and insist

on spending tens of thousands on these kinds of technologies – on things

like MRI machines, on X-ray scanners, on surgical equipment, etc. [56]

And not to mention the fact that the pharmaceutical drugs that we buy

are being sold for outrageous prices, when they sell in other countries

at a far lower cost. Why?

It’s easy, the answer to all these questions is not the free market and

competition taking its course. All that I have described above, all the

industries I mentioned, are industries solely because of the government.

The government has organized a monopoly for these corporations and

subsequently have forced us to become dependent on what these

corporations provide - very similar to how a centrally planned economy

would try to organize production.

Patents and copyrights do not incentivize innovation. Most innovation

has come from the public funding of research and development (which I

think is a much more freer alternative compared to patents and

copyrights – if the government is going to be involved in innovation, it

would be far less invasive for it to either directly fund research and

innovation or provide large prizes for anyone who produces a new artwork

that a lot of people admire or a new technology that a lot of people are

utilizing, rather than have patents and copyrights). Pharmaceutical

corporations, the corporations that own healthcare technologies, are not

using their patents for innovative reasons, but rather they are using

them to exploit people. Patents are not intellectual “property”. They

are intellectual monopolies. Owning a patent means only you and you

alone are able to use an idea to produce a product. But, limiting

people’s abilities to use ideas isn’t helping anyone out. It’s rather

hurting us. The ones who produced ventilators for $1 were sued by those

who have a patent on them and are selling them for $11,000. [57]

If I am using an idea without your permission, how have I affected you?

How have I harmed you? Let’s say we’re back in the caveman days and you

figured out how to start a fire and so I look over and figure out how to

make a fire also, do I owe you anything? What have you lost? Have you

suddenly lost the ability to make fires also? No. You have been deprived

of nothing.

Infringing on someone’s patents or copyright is a victimless crime.

Intellectual property is the only thing maintaining the publishing

industry, the record industry, the pharmaceutical industry, along with a

whole host of other industries I cannot possibly think of right now – so

seemingly infinite is it’s number. And patents exist only through the

force of the state.

Furthermore, we also have the state regulating businesses. This used to

be a good thing. These regulations were created in order to make sure

that private capitalists aren’t taking advantage of anyone. Now, though,

there are things like capitalization requirements, which means that in

order to start a business, you have to show the state that you already

have a certain amount of money. If you don’t have this certain amount of

money raised, it becomes against the law to run your business. A group

of 1,000 people in the state of Pennsylvania, for instance, wanted to

provide themselves with health insurance for only $100 a month to just

cover extreme circumstances. But, in the state of Pennsylvania, in order

to start a health insurance company, you need $1 million in

capitalization requirements. These 1,000 people only had $100,000. [58]

It became illegal for them to provide themselves with health insurance.

The ones who produced ventilators for $1 were sued by those who have a

patent on them and are selling them for $11,000. [59]

By law, they have to rely on HMO corporations and by law can’t create

their own co-operative versions of health insurance. Also, by law,

professors cannot certify someone’s expertise on their own, only

universities can acknowledge people’s learning, since the state gives

only them and a few of them accreditation. And, on top of this, the

state also has things like licenses and requirements needed to have

certain jobs. You need a Bachelor’s degree and a certificate by the

state in order to teach. You need a certain level of education, provided

by a small number of people, in order to become a doctor, a lawyer, an

engineer, by law. Universities are being maintained through nothing but

the state. It used to be a progressive thing for the state to try to

give everyone an education and allow people more access to universities.

Now, since universities are irrelevant and all the services that they

provide can be done online at a far cheaper cost, they are only being

maintained by force.

We also insist on relying on fossil fuels – when we can have solar

panels, when we can have electric cars, why do we continue to produce in

this manner? Because, utility companies have monopolized the creation of

electricity through state regulations – regulations which initially were

created to ensure fairer and more decent business practices are now

being used to get rid of any competition and any new way of producing

things. [60] The electric car is another example. Oil corporations, the

automobile industry all colluded together to again manipulate state

regulations in order to secure for themselves a monopoly. [61] I am not

saying that these regulations have made these kind of practices illegal.

After all, Elon Musk, who makes electric cars, is incredibly successful.

But, these regulations certainly make it harder for him to run his

business and makes it far harder for us to transition to newer and

different ways of doing things. If it weren’t for the state regulating

businesses, I sincerely believe we’d see more solar panels and more

electric cars.

To criticize the Federal Reserve and banking has typically been the

hallmark of anti-Semitism, but what I wish to illustrate is that there

is no evil cabal of Jews (in fact I’ve heard most wealthy bankers are

Irish) manipulating the strings of our financial system. This system is

simply poorly thought out. There is no malice at the bottom of it, only

stupidity (and this stupidity is still being indulged in because it

happens to drastically increase economic inequality as I will explain).

The following is a summation of E.C. Riegel’s monetary theory[62]:

To put things simply and clearly, I will first have to clarify what

exactly money is. Money is a ticket very much like a movie theater

ticket. The amount of money in circulation should match the amount of

goods and services available in the marketplace in the same way that the

amount of tickets a movie theater has should match the amount of movie

theater seats available. If there are more tickets compared to seats,

this is akin to inflation. The tickets have less value, because they

will not necessarily be able to redeem a seat within the theater. If

there are too few tickets compared to seats, this is akin to deflation.

The tickets have more value than they should, because they can redeem

more seats than just one within the theater. Now, each ticket is created

along with a seat and once the seat is redeemed with the ticket, the

ticket is cut up and withdrawn. This is what happens when you get a loan

from a commercial bank. Let’s say you’re an insurance underwriter. When

you get a loan from a commercial bank, you are not getting the

accumulated savings of a private depositor (which is what happens when

you go through a savings and loans institution), but rather what you are

getting are tickets, freshly and newly printed, saying with these

tickets, you will be able to redeem my services as an insurance

underwriter. When you pay back the loan, the tickets are being redeemed

for your services. Money is, in other words, loaned into circulation by

private banks. Your credit score is your creditworthiness, ie your

trustworthiness - that determines whether or not you can actually

provide a valuable good or service within the marketplace that people

would want to redeem these tickets with.

You see, the way this works is let’s say A wants something that B has, B

wants something that C has, and C wants something that A has. Are they

stuck and incapable of trading? No, what A does is this: he prints out a

ticket, saying you can use this ticket to redeem this valuable good or

service that I provide. You might not want it, but someone else will, I

can assure you of this (this is where your credit score comes in). So, B

accepts this ticket and exchanges what he has for it, B then gives the

ticket to C in exchange for what he has for it, and then C finally

redeems the ticket with A.

It’s very simple. The problem, though, is that within capitalism, there

is a natural tendency towards deflation and overproduction, ie you can

always expect within a capitalist market system that there will be too

few dollars circulating compared to the amount of goods and services

available. According to many economists, this is because people save

money and by saving money, they are withdrawing it from circulation. So,

a man by the name of Silvio Gesell suggested that in order to keep money

circulating, it should disintegrate gradually over time. What was a $1

bill at the beginning of the month, at the end of it would be worth

$.99. People would still be able to save money, but they would have to

save money in a way that doesn’t withdraw it from circulation - to save

money, people would have to lend it. And because the incentive for

lending someone your money would be derived from this being your sole

means for saving it, no one any longer would charge interest on the

loans that they give. Also, he felt that people no longer would invest

in a business in order to derive profit at the expense of the people

working there, but rather they would invest in order to save their

money. In this way, he was what John Maynard Keynes called a

“non-Marxian socialist.” [63]

John Maynard Keynes, though, while he devoted a chapter to Silvio Gesell

in his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money and was

sympathetic towards many of Silvio Gesell’s sentiments, felt that the

currency could disintegrate through simply inflating its supply. This

has subsequently been the solution that has been adopted in the 20th

century in order to resolve the crisis of overproduction.

And it is ridiculous. Why? Well, I’d like to point out that while the

currency is losing value by the Federal Reserve inflating it’s supply,

there is still interest on loans, capitalists are still deriving profit

at the expense of their workers, and in fact, it rather seems that

economic inequality has rather been exasperated instead of contracted as

Silvio Gesell would’ve hoped. The reason for this is debt. This solution

that has been adopted does nothing but keep the poor and the middle

class stuck in debt and incapable of climbing out of it. Small

businesses end up financially crippled and unable to compete with much

larger corporations that can afford the debt that is loaded onto them.

The market has tended towards monopolization as a result and opportunity

and upward mobility has all but disappeared. This is because as I said

money is created by private banks as loans. Money is also created with

the expectation that interest be paid back along with the principal that

was created. These private banks are, by the way, very few in number,

since by law only a few people are able to participate in the business

of banking. In some states, you need millions of dollars to satisfy

capitalization requirements, which means you need to already be a

millionaire and already be successful to participate in this industry.

The Federal Reserve, to put things very simply, perhaps too simply, they

are the ones who control how much money is circulating, since they

determine interest rates. Higher interest rates means less money is

circulating, while lower interest rates means more money is circulating.

The Federal Reserve in this way determines how much money banks create

(by the way, the Federal Reserve is also a private business and not a

public institution). So, anyways, to resolve the crisis of

overproduction, the Federal Reserve permits the creation of more money

as interest bearing debt by banks in order to inflate the currency and

thereby keep it circulating. But this begs a very obvious question

doesn’t it, a question that the people who designed this system didn’t

even think to ask themselves: what happens when people have to pay back

the debt (this debt that they shouldn’t have even been given and doesn’t

even need to be paid back, this debt was created to inflate the money

supply)?

Isn’t...this...what...happened...in 2008??? [64]

But, is it surprising? Look at our university system. It functions in

almost the exact same way as our monetary system. There are only a few

private businesses that are able to satisfy the requirements necessary

for accreditation, which is to say to be able to provide us with the

diplomas that we all need. In the same way, there are only a few private

businesses that are able to create the money that we all need. These few

private businesses that create our diplomas, along with the monopoly

given to them by the state, are provided the luxury of a guaranteed,

secure market, which means that they also don’t have to provide a decent

product. All in all, a lot of people have thus found themselves paying

far too much for a diploma which is worth very little. In the same way,

we pay absurd amounts in interest on money that also, because of

inflation, ends up worth very little. This is what happens when

something we all need is, by law, something only a few private

individuals can provide.

The creation of money could instead be done without this money needing

interest. I would like to point out that there are some people who would

hear 0% interest on loans and say that having 0% means runaway

inflation. Well, there are two ways to lower the price of a product. One

way is indeed through flooding the market with the supply of it, thereby

decreasing its value (which is what the Federal Reserve does when it

lowers interest rates). Another way, though, is to eliminate the

monopoly that allows people to overcharge for something. We all need

money just like we need water or air. There should be no gatekeeping

toll in order to breathe in the air in the same way there should be no

gatekeeping toll affixed to creating money (which is what interest on

loans is).

The interest that is charged on the lending of private deposits is fair

and decent, I have no problem with this. You are indeed incurring a risk

by lending your money and you do deserve compensation. But, the interest

created on newly printed money is absurd. No risk is incurred by merely

printing money. These private institutions just simply have a monopoly

on the printing presses and are able to overcharge for their use in the

exact same way we now universities excessively overcharging for a

diploma.

And it is even more absurd that we paid the Federal Reserve $400 billion

last year in interest for the simple service of printing money for the

Federal Government! [65] Today, as we’ve seen in Greece and other places

that have been cash strapped within the past 10 years, people on their

own created their own currency cooperatively through mutual credit

clearing networks like Local Exchange Trading Systems. [66] They have

created their own money for themselves with no interest at all. And yet,

nonetheless, today people are stuck in debt, not just paying off the

principal for the loans, but the interest on top of it. Why? The state.

The state has created this Federal Reserve system which restricts us

severely and make us dependent on the money that they and the few

private banks (that are allowed, by law, to participate in their

business) create and has now done nothing but gotten a lot of people

unnecessarily into a lot more debt than they should be. It is absolutely

criminal and severely limits the amount of competition going on in the

marketplace overall. How many more small businesses could we see out

there if it weren’t for them being stuck in debt, paying off the

interest on their loans?

Furthermore, let’s say that you’ve started a business and it’s doing

incredibly well. You are doing so well that you even draw more

businesses into the area you are in and people end up making a lot of

money. Then, you notice there’s an empty building across the street from

you. It might strike you as strange, given that all around it, every

plot of land is being utilized to start more businesses and to build

apartments, but, other than that, you might not think anything of it.

But, then you also notice that you are making less money. People are

spending less and, when you look at your bills and see what your rent

has become, you can start to understand why – your rent has gone up. The

reason – is because of that empty building across the street from you.

It is sitting on a plot of land that someone has bought for speculative

purposes. They are keeping it out of use, to drive up the value and sell

it at a higher price. After all, land is a commodity that is privately

bought and sold for profit, regardless of whether it’s being utilized or

not. Land speculators keep tens of thousands plots of land out of use in

cities, for instance, where a lot of economic activity is going on,

where a lot of people are making money. [67] They don’t have to do

anything with these lots. It is their private property. They can make

money regardless of what they do with it, people are paying only for the

ability to access a location where a lot of good things are happening.

Land speculation is in this way very similar to highway robbery. And

land is limited in supply, it’s not as though you can make more of it.

This means that since land in this area is not being utilized to make,

for instance, more buildings, more apartments, the costs of running a

business goes up, the costs of paying rent goes up, because the

opportunity to run a business and live in this area has become more

valuable. The ability to run a business has become limited in this city,

because there is less area within which one can start a business, a

situation that these parasitic land speculators have created, solely so

they can make a fortune at the expense of what everyone else is doing.

This is the reason why rents in cities like San Francisco or New York

are so astronomically high. Land speculation. And let’s think about it.

No one creates the Earth. Land, by it’s very basic economic definition,

is anything mankind did not create. And yet it is privately owned and

bought and sold for profit. If you believe that people have the right to

the fruits of their labor and that this right is the foundation for

private property rights, then why is land privately owned like this?

To illustrate what land value is, just imagine for instance a house in

the middle of New York City. This would probably be a very expensive

house to buy. But, if you were to take the same exact building and put

it in the middle of nowhere in Kansas, suddenly it becomes a lot less

expensive.

There are two ways that land value can increase. The first way is

through land speculation - keeping land out of use and thereby

artificially increasing its value. The other way is through increasing

economic activity. When land value increases as a result of economic

activity, this does not result in poverty, since the costs of living

increase along with an increase in the general wealth of the area. When

land value increases as a result of land speculation, the situation is

different. The costs of living increase, but with no increase in the

general wealth of the area, this results in inner city poverty. When

land value increases as a result of land speculation, this leads to an

inflation of rent, like what we see in New York City or San

Francisco.[68]

The claims to the ownership of land that people are not using and are

holding onto for purely speculative purposes is the result only of the

state protecting and enforcing such claims. There is no reason or

justification for the private ownership of land based on people having

the right to the fruits of their labor, just as there is no

justification for the private ownership of the air or water. It is

ridiculous.

Indeed, how many small businesses would proliferate in the market if we

didn’t have patents, if we didn’t have land speculation inflating rents,

if we didn’t have intrusive regulations and licenses, and if we didn’t

have to pay interest on loans?

Am I crazy - or is it not the case that every city in America has the

exact same stores, the exact same businesses, the same exact same

restaurants?

What would you call this? Is this not a centrally planned economic

system?

A corporation like Walmart has perfected how to plan centrally an entire

economy worth $500 billion, which is even bigger than the Soviet Union

at its height in 1970 [69]. There are some as I’ve mentioned, like Kevin

Carson and Benjamin Tucker, who think that therefore, the state should

cease to intervene in the economy and as a result have an economy where

workers directly employ themselves and create their own jobs. The

problem with this, though, in my opinion, is that this would mean

reverting to inefficient small scales of production similar to what

existed before the advent of capitalism. It would mean forsaking the

advances in technology we’ve made since the industrial revolution purely

to adhere to the abstract ideals of classical liberalism. Real life

should not be sacrificed for abstractions.

Let’s say that a criminal had created a machine that would produce all

the food people in a city would need. He developed this machine by

robbing everyone in this city and in order to continue robbing them he

made them all dependent on him by paying off their politicians. This is

very similar to the situation we find ourselves in with capitalism.

While this machine this criminal developed had unjust origins and was

being used for unjust purposes, it is nonetheless something that eases

the struggle to survive. Should the people of this city destroy this

machine? And go back to the way things were before it was built?

Because, abstractly, it is more just? Or wouldn’t it in reality be far

more just to utilize it for their own sake and benefit?

Also, such a change in the manner we produce things always almost

inevitably leads to some kind of social collapse. The Soviet Union and

Mao Zedong’s China both faced widespread famine as a result of them

imposing onto the masses a rapid industrialization of their rural

countries.

This isn’t something we have to worry about anymore today. Capitalism

already has developed the American economy’s production into a large

scale megalithic entity that can efficiently and effectively planned.

The problem that was usually seen with the planning of the economy was

how to predict consumer demand without prices. Prices convey information

and the information prices convey is what is wanted and how much is

wanted. The state has crippled competition so much so for the sake and

benefit of a few, that Walmart and Amazon have developed algorithms that

can actually anticipate consumer demand even better than a private

capitalist could! A planned economic system is already the economic

system we are living in.

How do we get it to work for our sake, then? Should we wait a couple

years so we can vote someone in as President? Well, the Greeks tried

electoral politics. They elected their Bernie Sanders in the form of

Alexis Tsipras. He wasn’t able to do anything. His hands were tied

completely behind his back by the people who own production privately.

He was incapable of doing a single thing for the Greek people. And

Bernie Sanders wouldn’t be able to do anything for us.

Political systems, as you can see, are nothing but instruments of class

warfare. Governments are the whip that the capitalist uses to keep us in

the working class in line.

Well, there is an alternative: a union. More specifically an

anarcho-syndicalist union.

It was unions that created the middle class. It was unions that ended

child labor. That created the 8 hour workday.

A union can have many different forms. It’s not just the assholes making

your job a little more difficult. Unions are where individuals come

together to defend a common interest.

And let’s think...wouldn’t this be better than a government? I’d rather

be in a union with other individualists, freely and voluntarily

organized, defending individual freedom and liberty. I think such a

union would do a better job protecting individual freedom than a

government founded on the violation of such freedom.

How well are governments defending even children? Wouldn’t a union

organized freely and voluntarily to protect and defend the rights of

children do a better job?

And, of course, there’s a lot of grey area. Gun rights, abortion, etc.

Well, I think we can come to an understanding and figure out a way of

doing things better ourselves than some politician hired by the wealthy.

Perhaps there’d be a union defending gun rights and a union fighting

against gun ownership. I think resolving disagreements between an agreed

upon third party would be a better way of finding common ground instead

of relying on a politician to resolve this for us.

Let’s say I notice you’re abusing your child. I call a union I trust

(and there could be many) devoted to the protection of children. This

union then will do whatever it takes to ensure the protection of that

child if they investigate and determine there is abuse taking place. And

since these unions would be composed of freely and voluntarily

participating activists and not reliant on forcibly appropriated wealth

like governments are reliant upon taxes, they would be incentivized to

resolve these disputes in the best manner possible. If the union

protecting the parent is corrupt, the union I called to report what I

mistakenly thought was abuse is corrupt, then there is no reason at all

why another union devoted to protecting individual rights and civil

liberties would not intervene to try to stop this.

This is not an abstraction that I am imposing onto a future society. We

already have unions doing what I have described above. We have the

American Civil Liberties Union. We have the National Association for the

Advancement of Colored Peoples. We have unions detected to the rights of

women, to the rights of minorities, homosexuals, and the transgendered.

There are also unfortunate unions dedicated to the defense of

unspeakable things. They do not have any power, because their ideas are

not reasonable in the slightest. Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties

Union is incredibly powerful, because civil liberties makes sense.

So, yes, I do think we can organize things pretty well ourselves. If

there is a problem that needs to be resolved, we can organize fixing it

ourselves.

We shouldn’t be meekly begging AOC and Bernie Sanders to create

socialism. We need to get off our knees. Form a union. Doing what these

corporations are already doing. Except - utilizing these systems of

production for our sake.

What I propose is this: we don’t need gulags, we don’t need censorship,

we don’t need a cultural revolution, we don’t need labor camps like the

Soviet Union and Mao Zedong’s China had in order to realize socialism.

We don’t need to have more taxes. We don’t need to seize control over

businesses and private fortunes. It is a lot simpler and easier.

David Schweickart and Paul Cockshott both developed highly advanced,

well thought models of what a socialistic economy can look like. I

propose a mixture of the two. David Schweickart wants a market socialist

economy. The state would be the sole capitalist that would give grants

to worker owned cooperatives and small businesses that in turn have to

pay a rental fee for the use of public capital and compete with each

other in the marketplace. [70] Paul Cockshott, on the other hand, feels

that centrally planning of production could be far easier today with the

kind of advantages that algorithms and advanced computers (that the

Soviet Union and Mao Zedong’s China did not have) afford us. [71]

This is how a general strike could work: rather than just standing

outside your place of work with a picket sign, we could actually begin

to create a new society within the shell of the old. Do you need

maintenance done on your house? Call a union member. Do you need a new

car? Buy it from a union dealership. Do you need groceries? Don’t go to

the store, buy it from a union backed co-operative. Are you feeling like

you’re being oppressed at your place of work? Are you struggling to get

your business off the ground, because of debt and because of absurd

regulations? Call the union! We’ll help you with finances, we’ll help

you with legal advice - if you’re oppressed at your place of work, we’ll

provide legal representation for you and an ultimatum to your boss

telling him or her to shape up, while also informing you and your

co-workers that you don’t need to work for someone else, we in the union

can provide you with the capital necessary to employ yourself. This is

something that can be done if we in the working class and the middle

class organized together and pooled our resources together. Imagine the

productive capital we’d be capable of organizing if we brought together

everyone in the working class and the middle class!

To implement socialism and a planned economic system, I believe it has

to compete with capitalism. Corporations like Walmart, Amazon, Tesla,

Apple, etc all of them can still operate, but we’re not permitting any

of the privileges given to them by the state any longer. No more patents

and copyrights. This is why there’s power in a union. We cannot at first

be threatening capitalism by doing things like counterfeiting goods and

services...until we grow big enough to have as much of an influence in

our political system as the capitalist classes do. Once we do that, we

can also afford to have politicians representing our interests and

defending us as we seek to revolutionize the economy. The capitalist

classes have always throughout history utilized the state on their

behalf in order to squash any worker’s attempts to manage things

themselves. And we can’t react in the way that they want us to. They

would want us to counterfeit items before we are legally able to do so.

This is why a union is necessary, so we can influence our political

representatives in our favor the way the capitalist classes have done.

We should cease the recognition of the private ownership of unoccupied

and unused land and protect only occupancy and use. If you have a house

you have built on a plot of land, your claim to the plot will be

protected, because you are using it. If you have bought an empty house

to profit from the plot of land it is sitting on, your claim will not be

protected, because you are not using it, but rather seeking to

parasitically derive a profit at the expense of someone who is wanting

to use it. Also, we’ll take over the creation of money. We’ll use our

own currency. Created by this union. It will create money as a grant to

finance these worker controlled enterprises that would be doing the

exact things that these corporations are already doing, with the caveat

that they are not seeking a profit. The people working in them would

retain the full fruits of their labor, democratically determining in

each workplace how to split up the money each workplace made. If a

workplace is automated, then the goods and services it provides would be

redeemed with a basic income given to everyone (free on behalf of the

union!) until all of production is automated, at which point, we would

have complete free access to goods and services. Where labor is still

necessary, each worker controlled, but union owned enterprise would be

tasked with having to pay back a certain amount each month as a rental

fee. Failing to pay this would mean this co-operative or small business

would have to close. The amount this rental fee would need to be would

be based on inflation. This rental fee would be what determines how much

money is in circulation, since it would be the means by which the money

introduced as grants would be withdrawn. If money is circulating too

much, then the rental fee increases. If it isn’t circulating at all,

then the rental fee decreases. Walmart, Amazon, Tesla, etc would still

be allowed to exist, but they wouldn’t be able to outcompete these union

backed, but worker controlled enterprises, especially without any access

to easy credit. Why would I work for Amazon when I can work in a worker

controlled enterprise doing the exact same thing for far more? After

all, the profits this enterprise would enjoy would be split by the

people working there. And, why would I shop at Amazon when I can shop at

a worker controlled enterprise that is providing the same thing at a

lower cost? These worker controlled enterprises would have, as their

focus, satisfying everyone’s needs and also preserving worker’s rights

and end the exploitation that the private ownership of production has

permitted to proliferate. Also, taxes should be gotten rid of. The

financing of the state would be done with the rental fee I mentioned. To

replace the welfare system we have, I think in this kind of economy, an

unconditionally guaranteed basic income would be a much better

alternative. This is because as production is getting more and more

automated, you can expect more deflation to occur without the union

doing anything. People in such a situation would be spending far less,

since they wouldn’t be working, since artificial intelligence would

replace them. To distribute the goods and services created automatically

and with no labor, we should provide everyone a basic income, until all

of production is automated.

These union backed enterprises, once they outcompete capitalism, will

then morph into a planned economic system. But, without any of the

bureaucracy associated with the Soviet Union or Mao Zedong’s China - or

America currently.

In third world countries, instead of people working for a private US

Multinational Corporation, they would be provided with the capital

necessary by this union to employ themselves and they would then be able

to compete with these private corporations producing the exact same

things they are already producing and doing the jobs they are already

doing. Why work in a textile factory in Haiti when I can work in a

factory, controlled by the people working there, who also retain the

full fruits of their labor? All the wealth that is currently being

produced by these third world countries would go back to them and here

in America, we would still pay the same price for the exact same

products. All we would need to do - is cut out the capitalist middlemen

who have contributed nothing and yet pocket most of the money that

should rightfully belong to people in third world countries.

Is this unrealistic? Because, to me, it seems more the case that

expecting things to continue on as they are is far more unrealistic!

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