[the power of people] separate yet together

Firstly, Ordo asks today:

Are we seeing the beginning of another Great Depression?

We're certainly on the brink of one, but whether we totter over the edge or not depends on how world governments respond to the current financial crisis. Unfortunately, nobody really has a clue what to do.

Martin Kelly has similar thoughts.

Ordo, I see it, not as being dependent on what governments do but on what WE do, as people. Guthrum's and Wat Tyler's piece touch on the matter and David Farrer quotes Vox Day:

This isn't a failure of free market capitalism. It's precisely the opposite, it's the failure of government-controlled faux market capitalism.

An example of good intervention, on the other hand, is the way that a threatened blogger can be supported. Read Alwyn's piece on this:

Last year there was a blog consensus that the blogosphere would stand up to rich people trying to bully individual bloggers when Asmanov went after Bloggerheads, where is that blog support for Kez [Kezia Duggdale ]?

There are other issues as well, such as social engineering [read Richard Havers on this] and people out there who can put things so much better in one paragraph than I can in five strung out posts, such as:

Ultimately a Fabian State will be a “Failed State”, under UN current definitions, given the administration costs associated with a deliberately destabilised civil society, and the absence of industry and jobs resulting from a high taxation bureaucratic regime that administers lorry-loads of “sand” to the economic “cogs”. The nature of this failed state must necessarily be militaristic.

Here is another beauty:

Incompetent state structures have been put in place, at monumental expense, to substitute for the State Destroyed structures, those of the “family”, primarily, and continue to grow their legal mandate for ever more state intrusion into the personal lives of the citizens, all in the name of social cohesion, which the Fabian thought processes have set out to, and succeeded in, destroying/undermining in the first place.

Anon now waxes lyrical but also to the point:

Imagine that, like some kind of science fiction dictator, you intended to rule the world. You would probably have pinned over your desk a list something like this:

[1] Eliminate personal knowledge.
Make it hard for people to know about themselves, how they function, what a human being is, or how a human fits into wider, natural systems. This will make it, impossible for the human to separate natural from artificial, real from unreal. You provide the answers to all questions.

[2] Eliminate points of comparison.
Comparisons can be found in earlier societies, older language forms and cultural artefacts, including print media. Eliminate or museumize indigenous cultures, wilderness and nonhuman life forms. Re-create internal human experience—instincts, thoughts, and spontaneous, varied feelings—so that it will not evoke the past.

[3] Separate people from each other.
Reduce interpersonal communication through life-styles that emphasise separateness. When people gather together, be sure it is for a prearranged experience that occupies all their attention at once. Spectator sports are excellent, so are circuses, elections, and any spectacles in which focus is outward and interpersonal exchange is subordinated to mass experience.

[4] Unify experience, especially encouraging mental experience at the expense of sensory experience.
Separate people's minds from their bodies, idealise the mind. Sensory experience cannot be eliminated totally, so it should be driven into narrow areas. An emphasis on sex as opposed to sense may be useful because it is powerful enough to pass for the whole thing and it has a placebo effect.

[5] Occupy the mind.
Once people are isolated in their minds, fill the brain with prearranged experience and thought. Content is less important than the fact of the mind being filled. Free-roaming thought is to be discouraged at all costs, because it is difficult to control.

[6] Encourage drug use.
Recognise that total repression is impossible and so expressions of revolt must be contained on the personal level. Drugs will fill in the cracks of dissatisfaction, making people unresponsive to organised expressions of resistance.

[7] Centralise knowledge and information.
Having isolated people from each other and minds from bodies - at this point whatever comes from outside will enter directly into all brains at the same time with great power and believability.

[8] Redefine happiness and the meaning of life in terms of new and increasingly uprooted philosophy.
Anything makes sense in a void. Formal mind structuring is simple. Most important, avoid naturalistic philosophies; they lead to uncontrollable awareness. An emphasis on sex as opposed to sense may be useful because it is powerful enough to pass for the whole thing and it has a placebo effect.

They may well be the Statist's Standing Orders but in Britain, say, there is also a strong innate, quiet determination within the indigenous people to passively resist this seemingly all-powerful push and ultimately one has to believe that the human being will win out and here's where I part from my humanistic brothers in that I firmly believe in that biblical expression 'ye are gods'.

This expression does not say, IMHO, that each of us is an island in him/herself but rather that there is a bit of the deity in each of us, connected to the whole and unable to exist on its own, just as the hand or foot cannot exist without the rest of the body and mind. I believe that that is what caused all the trouble way back when it was discovered what G-d was up to - recreating really good things in a package called Man.

I believe the primary purpose of a certain force I nether fully understand nor wish to understand was to separate man from his higher self, to bestialize him, to do dirt on him and this force has legions of accolytes because it is the province of the weak-willed, the ones who prefer the easy solution and are attracted by bells and whistles.

That explains a lot, such as why Man sees himself as controlling his destiny when he can't, why he sees himself at the centre of his universe, when he's not, why he destroys so easily but can only build under certain circumstances. We don't like to see ourselves as mere cogs in the machine but people like the Australian aborigines find no problem in that, in being at one with the whole of nature. We don't like to see ourselves as the star's tennis balls, do we?

Why are we satisfied with staying in our little boxes and not relating neighbour to neighbour? Get down to specifics and look at WW2 or any other conflict where the people have ultimately won out, [only to go under again].

Right here is where some of us part ways, I suppose.

The socialist construct is that social cohesion, being such a powerful force, is best served by mindless Socialism, as Anon described above, of forcing people to combine in ultimately unproductive and inefficient ventures, whilst killing off incentive.

Some of us, though, point to two things:

1. the silent [divine?] power which is produced when humans combine for good purposes, such power, by definition, only operating well when it is free of constraints and yokes and is a voluntary combining of individual powers;

2. the vital importance in humans being able to pursue personal goals in an atmosphere which encourages that and supports it without applying constraints. So if you've worked all your life for certain things, the politics of envy is abandoned. Rather than glance enviously across at our neighbour, we try to do well ourselves and find people are willing to help people who try to help themselves.

The State is powerful and creates it's own new autocratic entity to sustain itself but the divinity inside people who combine for good always ultimately wins out, though at a terrible cost.

Phew! [What did I just have for breakfast?]