Compelled

Freedom to work has morphed into compulsion to work; compelled by our stomachs to labor and toil, seldom with pleasure or satisfaction, for mere sustenance and shelter, from the elemental tyranny of Nature, we are abject caricatures of our stronger ancestors. Machines, greed, fear and ignorance are the masters of Mankind. Here we are at WW I again.

International combinations, financial markets, treaties and Alliances, trade agreements and labor pacts, and centuries-old assumptions about wealth and power, democracy vs. Fascism, science vs. Religion, tolerance vs. Racism, environment vs. Exploitation, war vs. Peace, labor vs. Capital, rehabilitation vs. Torture, and the “innate goodness of man,” all are crumbling, like cookies in a clothes dryer.

Selfish, afraid, violent, submissive, greedy, idiotic, aggressive, ignorant, docile, fanatic, overworked, underpaid, entertainment-loving, and leaderless humanity is divided up, like marbles in a child’s game, a game that is the butt of a high-class joke, and made slaves to the job-at-hand, unless they are of the ruling elite. And even they are slaves to their passions; or the lack of them.

Religion is a tired, masturbatory exercise in crowd-control, and a sentimentally absurd belief in impossible magic. Man defines God as an incredible parody of himself, a mean-spirited entity, sentimental and unfeeling, who “needs our help,” and lays down absurd laws, and demands blood for evidence of loyalty. “Worship” is hocus-pocus, and “a loving God” is the fancy of hopeless romantics, who are blinded by the cataracts of wishful-thinking, each holding legal title to “the Word.”

Liberals and conservatives alike stumble upon each other in a jumble of broken mirrors, cutting themselves on the razor shards of their dishonest and outworn “ideals,” and bleeding their toxic nonsense into the minds of all. The vast and silenced throngs of humanity know them for the fraudulent career-politicians that they are, but feel powerless to do a thing about it. Cow-like humans are herded into cities for slavery in various “enterprises,” and are beaten or intimidated into submission for robot-work, which is excused by Science and Economics, sanctioned by Law and Religion, and rewarded by food and betrayal. They slave to fill bank accounts for the high-class rats, who piously posture and pose as “the best and brightest,” that the human race has ever produced, and who are demonically innocent of all criminal activity.

The best of human history, and of human beings, is almost-entirely hidden from view, and the worst is daily drilled into our eyes and ears, by the relentless lasers of technology and media. Politics is the national religion, and religion is no more than politics in robes. Somewhere in the human psyche, the infant in the cradle of conscience is undernourished and cowed. Its crib is a prison where freedom is lost to embarrassment. The concept of Nobility is hidden, lost or misunderstood. The baby has been bayoneted, and the Archbishop, who pleaded for peace and justice, has been slaughtered at Mass.



No one is responsible. No one is guilty. No one has been charged. No one will be charged. No investigation will be made. No remuneration will be possible. No apologies will be forthcoming, or even implied, because the powerful do not apologize, and the survivors think that they are free, and lucky to be alive.

The act of an improbable God has condemned the major portion of humanity to slavery forever. To slavery forever in the stench of a rapidly decomposing swamp, where all the sewage of history has joined to overflow the lawns and roads, and every word of every power stinks, provoking only excrement and vomit.

The artist can do what he likes with reality, because there are no rules in art. Whatever art is, it is not a device which can be crafted into form by a mere persistent desire to make art, and art can never “make revolution.” The artist makes nothing but his own point, and whatever is done, is done against his will, and through him, as something he merely snatched from the air, and threw to a gang of a thousand monkeys pounding on typewriters, because he found it there (and now it’s gone). In his blind man’s peregrination over an obstacle course of lonely choices, none of which can ever satisfy his original vision, the only obligation of the artist is to truth, ever-elusive, in a world where a thing can be both true and false at the same time.

But the citizen must accept the reality of his or her present condition, and decide whether to act, or not to act, to influence events. Action by non-action is a mystery few humans can grasp, like the holding-by-not-holding, or the insubstantiality of solids.

Right action is impossible without courage and nobility. Only courage can overcome dread, and nobility is not a condition of wealth, but a mode of behavior, and it cannot be inherited. Principles are not happened upon instinctively in the immediacy of crisis, but are taught by example from an early age, by principled mentors. Principles are lines-drawn-in-the-sand, long before one reaches the point beyond which he will not go.

The human being is a wild animal beneath a veneer of custom, civilization, and Law. Fear of death robs us of life. But, “death is not an event in life.” In death, there is nothing to fear, and all fear is a fear of death. Competition did not make us the dominant species; mutual aid did that. This knowledge is nearly lost, but it is all that keeps us alive. It is competition which has impeded our progress, and competition that will destroy us. It is ignorance and fear, and selfishness and cowardice, which makes it possible.

“Freedom” cannot be given; it must be taken, seized, and defended to the death.

Until un-free humanity grasps this simple fact, and acts in concert of “all for one and one for all,” it will remain in slavery to the sweathouses and brothels of earth, believing that it is “free,” in this noxious swamp of “liberty,” and “democracy,” where television substitutes for intelligence, and death rules life in unbelievable acts of war. There is no slave more abject or ridiculous, than one who thinks he is free.

The freest spirits are running the rocky, narrow trails of the highlands, past dangerous and hungry predators, risking life, limb and sanity, and shouting with mad joy, to the amazed herds, chewing in the dying fields, “Follow us! We know where food grows out of the ground and falls off of the trees!”

Does anyone hear their shout? Does anyone even care?