Archive for » January, 2006 «

Tuesday, January 31st, 2006

Man’s obsession with trinitarian concepts has lasted for thousands of years. Indeed, when presented with two distinct choices – both of which are considered inadequate – we often look for a third alternative. In the late sixth century BC, the famous Buddhist sage, Prince Gautama, rejected a life of opulent complacency and experimented with self-disciple and denial. Consequently, after driving himself to the very brink of starvation the Prince realised that there was -a middle way- beyond both luxury and asceticism. In this case, it was the path of meditation and detachment, a process in which both lifestyles were transcended and overcome.

An interesting parallel can be drawn between the example of Gautama’s rejection of hereditary privilege and the search for an alternative to Capitalism during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The solution, as we know only too well, was Communism. In fact the last century may be rightly perceived as having been a furious historical battleground for two highly adversarial and bitterly-opposed ideologies. But as Hilaire Belloc observed in The Restoration of Property over sixty years ago, the differences between the two are not as distinct or clear-cut as their supporters often like to contend: The only economic difference between a herd of subservient Russians and a mob of free Englishmen pouring into a factory of a morning is that the latter are exploited by private profit, the former by the State in communal fashion. The motive of the Russian masters is to establish a comfortable bureaucracy for themselves and their friends out of the proletariat labour. The motive of the English masters is to increase their private fortunes out of proletariat labour. But we want something different from either. Thus Communism is considered, not as the antidote, but as a symptom and a product of Capitalism. Belloc-s own quest for a genuine alternative to both Capitalism and Communism was represented by The Distributist League, which he founded in 1936 with G.K. Chesterton. Both were famous converts to Catholicism and were inspired by Rerum Novarum, a timely encyclical in which Pope Leo XIII replied to the challenge of atheistic Communism by proposing that property be distributed more fairly and workers treated with more dignity. As we shall see below, Belloc and Chesterton were to become two of the chief ideologues of the new Third Position.
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Monday, January 23rd, 2006

by Prof. Arnold Keyserling and his American student, Ralph

Wisdom is the natural quality of old age. It develops through experience and social action, transforming consciousness into Awareness.

At the dawn of human history, in the clans and tribes, political authority was vested in the wise elders of the community. The elders were given the authority to guide the community because they understood the meaning of existence in all four worlds: the waking world of living people; the dream world of animals, plants and elemental spirits; the world of the dead; and, the world of the Ancestors who have attained immortality. In those times the teachings of Wisdom were founded on vertical hierarchies, absolute obedience to the master of initiations, and loyalty to the prevailing social-cultural tradition.
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Thursday, January 19th, 2006

Unfortunately, today a political organisation has no future. There are many people that have been encaged in such organisations or movements and in the end they gave it up or “unexpectedly” found themselves in prison. Reality is very hard, but harder when you are not prepared for things like this.

But as someone who comes from Greece, I am prepared and will give you an example. Here there are two or three nationalist organisations and parties that are clearly tools of the System, full of secret agents, brainless extreme right-wing and xenophobic people.

Well these organisations have no future (which is as it should be). Not because they don’t have many people, and neither because they are “extreme”, but because the State itself has set the limits of their existence. They are part of the System, and they are not an alternative solution to the one-way street of Capitalism. And I think it is the same in other countries, too. So when many of these people meet with them and begin to understand their dirty role, in the end they give it up altogether. Many times they are compromising with the system, and they are becoming increasingly bourgeois or apolitical.
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Friday, January 13th, 2006

The subject of race and racial difference is something a lot of people avoid. Some consider it bad manners or impolite. Others say it is offensive and discussion of it should be suppressed by legislation. One spin-off from that category goes as far as to deny the existence of races, claiming any number of religious, philosophic, scientific (sic) and moral theories in support of the proposition. Then, some fellow travellers might conclude that races exist in some narrow, almost meaningless sort of way and may conclude that, for ‘human-universalist’ reasons – they should be abolished.

Of course, there are people – amongst all races – who believe their particular origin renders them wise or good or superior. The fact this class of human beings exists might condition the attitudes of those who prefer the matter not bedevil us further. Sometimes this group is downright offensive and some amongst them have a genocidalist frame of mind. However, that does not make the existence of races as such – invalid. The old Chinese who spoke of others as barbarian or the Hitlerite who took refuge in false aesthetics or the Zionist Jew who believes some peoples are lesser entities are used as an excuse by many to refuse to entertain any theory of race that proclaims a virtue in their existence.

I am not afraid to discuss race. Because I am prepared to accept races exist, I must therefore say: “Where did they come from? What does it mean?”
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Thursday, January 05th, 2006

Capitalism sucks, most people know that whether they say so or not. The vast majority of the problems that people suffer from are somehow attributed to the system we live under. Who has a crappy job? Who finds daily life boring? Who doesn’t have enough’ free time’ (that very phrase says it all)? Who wants more out of life than pointless commodities? People who become anti-capitalist usually do so by having some sort of association with the monolith that is the Left. But they’ll tell you that they came to the persuasion of anti-capitalist because of the way capitalism exploits the farmer in Colombia or the peasants in Chiapas and most people in the”privileged” West find it hard to relate to the abuses of that system. While I certainly agree that capitalism is a horribly malicious system that is based off the exploitation, by any means necessary, of workers (especially those in the Third World) to create profit, why do we think only to use those reasons to explain our disgust? Isn’t it as equally valid to say I hate capitalism because I can’t go to Larz Anderson park at night without some cop coming and telling me to leave because the park is closed (as if Nature hasvisiting hours).

Obviously the oppression of the Iraqis or Palestinians or Colombians at the hands of empire and capital is far greater than my conflict with the uniformed defenders of private property over my right to happiness but why prioritize to the point that my claim would seem petty or illegitimate in the eyes of most card carrying leftists. The game of objective importance is forced upon us everyday. Work is important, play isn’t. What is reported on the news is what’s officially important but what we personally find interesting isn’t. Securing for the future, becoming morally responsible, Doing well at school to get a good job, “growing up”, blah blah blah blah blah. No one wants to hear that. People could figure out what they wanted and what makes them happy if they actually had time to think and weren’t constantly being told what to like and what to want from politicians and the mass media. Do that many people really want a SUV, a Mc Mansion in the suburbs and an eternity trapped in the hell of wage labor and the constraints of the nuclear family? I don’t.
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