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1514 lines
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________________________________________________________________________
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The ALEMBIC
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second edition / Summer 1989
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a magazine dedicated to superseding pre-fabricated ideologies
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WARNING! Contains controversial material.
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Parental discretion should be exorcised.
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CONTENTS:
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Automobiles: Public Enemy Number One (Rick Harrison)
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The Libertarian as Conservative (Bob Black)
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Everyone Talks about the Weather... (from 'Bentwood')
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On Business (David Castleman)
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Solar Cooker May Help Third World (Laura Wilkinson)
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Nietzsche and the Dervishes (Hakim Bey)
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XORcrypt: Low Budget Data Security (Rick Harrison)
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Retorts (from the audience)
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________________________________________________________________________
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NOTICES AND EXPLANATIONS
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Copyright 1989 by Tangerine Network. Permission is hereby granted for
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non-profit distribution or reproduction of this ascii file, provided it
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remains intact and unaltered. (Compression allowed, if necessary.)
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_The_Alembic_ is simultaneously distributed on paper and as a computer
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textfile which you can download from the more enlightened electronic
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bulletin boards. The paper version can be had by sending two dollars to
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the editor at the address given below. The electronic version is
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presently available from these and other enlightened boards:
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Factsheet Five BBS 518-479-3879 {300/1200 baud}
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(The file is stored here in the 'electronic zines' section.)
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The System <tm> 407-859-2243 {300/1200/2400 baud} FidoNet node 363/69
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(The file is stored here compressed in .ZIP format. Available for
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automatic file request from other FidoNet boards.)
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_The_Alembic_ is made possible entirely by donations of articles,
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publicity, money and distributive technology. Written and financial
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contributions should be directed to Rick Harrison, Box 547014,
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Orlando FL 32854 USA.
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________________________________________________________________________
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AUTOMOBILES: PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE
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by Rick Harrison
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Automobiles are probably the worst thing that has happened to human-
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ity in this century. Car crashes kill more Americans in one year than
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AIDS kills in five years; cars have killed many times more people than
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atomic bombs have killed. The hysteria, protests, fund-raising and re-
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search directed against AIDS and nuclear weapons might be better spent
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on trying to wipe out cars.
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The 45,000 Americans killed by cars every year seem to quietly
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vanish into thin air. It is remarkable that there is so little outcry
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about so much bloodshed. Perhaps this is because cars are considered an
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unquestionable fact of life. Indeed, they are often referred to as a
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"right" and a "necessity."
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Cars are only "necessary" to those who profit from them. People
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lived well enough without cars before World War 1, and in some parts of
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the world they still do. So why are Americans, almost without exception,
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unable to imagine life without cars?
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Car dealers run several full-page ads in every edition of the daily
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newspaper. During local, non-prime-time hours of TV programming, about
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half of the commercials shown are advertisements for car dealers, in-
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surance protection rackets, and lawyers who capitalize on car carnage.
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No broadcaster or print journalist can question our society's fetish
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for automobiles; the editors would never allow it for fear of losing
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their sponsors. In TV shows, cars are pictured as the best vehicles for
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love-making, high speed chases, pleasure cruising, basic transportation,
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and of course for running over anybody who irritates you.
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A large part of the economy is based on assembling, maintaining and
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replacing automobiles. So cars _are_ necessary, but only necessary to
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sustain this style of capitalism, which, like a bureaucracy, seems to
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have no purpose other than perpetuating its own existence. From the
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profiteer's point of view, cars that have accidents are more worthwhile
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than totally safe vehicles would be. Car accidents mean big money for
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towing services, junkyards, repair shops, hospitals, doctors, lawyers,
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insurance companies, municipalities that collect money from fines and
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tickets, funeral homes, cemeteries and the ambulance-chasing news media.
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In the face of all this brainwashing and profiteering, it's no
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surprise that automobiles have come to be seen as indispensable.
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As for the claim that people have a "right" to drive cars, this is
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absurd. Since we all need to breathe, who has a right to spew any amount
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of toxins into our atmosphere? And who has a right to launch two-ton
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unguided missiles that careen crazily through the streets of our cities?
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Considering the fact that almost all Americans use drugs ranging from
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caffein to cocaine, virtually nobody has the mental alertness or unim-
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paired reflexes necessary to drive safely at speeds above 10 miles per
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hour. (I'm sure you think _you_ are the exception.)
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Children, pets, and even adults aren't safe outside their homes
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because there are so many assholes driving four-wheeled death machines
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through the city. (If you live near an intersection or a sharp turn,
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you aren't even safe _inside_ your home!) And, let's face it, _everyone_
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becomes an asshole the minute they put their hands on a steering wheel.
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I've ridden in cars driven by my apparently-rational friends and have
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seen the process of driving transmute them into aggressive, over-con-
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fident maniacs. But perhaps this is the only emotional adjustment that
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can enable people to face the extreme risks of driving. Imagine zooming
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down a highway at 60 miles an hour with about 18 inches between
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yourself and vehicles going equally fast in the opposite direction. A
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foot and half between you and sudden death. If you, or one of the
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oncoming drivers, should jerk the steering wheel to the left just a
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little bit, you'll be squashed like a bug in a head-on collision. I can
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live without that kind of vulnerability and "excitement."
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If motorists didn't make life unsafe for the rest of us, I wouldn't
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complain so bitterly. Streets designed for and filled with motor
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vehicles are unsafe for bicycles, horse-drawn carriages, skateboards,
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and other forms of transportation. Cars squeeze out the competition
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through intimidation and sheer force. Their monopoly on personal trans-
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portation has thus been maintained through coercion, and it is an
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affront to all freedom-loving individuals.
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I have heard people complain about cigarette smoke or air pollution,
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and then these complainers drive away in cars! What hypocrites!
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Motorists should be locked in garages with their engines running. I've
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met a few people who rarely venture out of their homes because car fumes
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make them sick. To these people, the deadly vapors pouring out of your
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exhaust pipe are not something to be shrugged off and forgotten!
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Motorists use various rationalizations to excuse themselves for
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turning the earth into a gas chamber -- excuses like "My car doesn't
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pollute as much as a military jet" or "my modern car doesn't pollute
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as much as older cars do." When I corner these motorist rats with the
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truth, by asking if they would like to put their mouths on their
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exhaust pipes and take a deep breath, they respond by pathetically
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whining "I _have_ to drive a car. I can't get along without it."
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It seems motorists have come to believe they "need" their cars as
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fervently as I believe that I don't need one. For several years I've
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managed to buy groceries, hold down a job, and engage in travel for the
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sheer pleasure of it without ever impoverishing myself by owning a car.
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Folks act like it would kill them if they had to walk, ride a bicycle
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or take a bus. In reality, driving cars is more likely to kill them.
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Cardio-vascular disease caused by lack of exercise is a major cause
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of death. And no doubt driving-induced stress contributes to the death
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toll. Personally, I am willing to go out of my way to support life and
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resist the machinery of death.
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Cars are supposed to be "convenient." Careful thought reveals that
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they are amazingly inconvenient. Look at a traffic jam, for example,
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or examine the facial expression of someone standing on the roadside
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next to their car which has unexpectedly died. As for economic con-
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venience, let's say our hypothetical friend Joe Shmo is a short-order
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cook, earning $4.75 an hour and taking home about $4 an hour. Joe's car
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is already paid for. If he spends $10 a week on fuel and oil, $400 per
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year on insurance and licenses, and $500 a year on repairs, driving his
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car costs $1420 a year. He has to work almost 7 hours per week to sup-
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port his car! What's so convenient about that?!?! If he'd sell the car,
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he could work one day less each week, and he'd be happier and healthier
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as a result, partly for the reasons given above, but mainly because
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work stinks. Generally, people who make more money spend more on their
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cars, so if you sit down and calculate all the expenses involved, you
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might also find that 1/5 of your paycheck goes toward supporting your
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automobile. Is it worth it?
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To drive a car is to be taxed, registered, licensed and watched.
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The entertainment media and high school peer pressure systems, which
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are subsidiaries of the corporate establishment, force young people to
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lust after car ownership because it benefits the police state to have
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everyone's name, address and photograph on file. Leave your driver's
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license at home and try to cash a check; you'll see what I mean. The
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driver's license, like a necktie or work uniform, is a universally-
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recognized symbol of submission to the system.
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To drive a car is also to be at the mercy of mechanics, many of
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whom have questionable ethics. High technology is being used to make it
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more difficult for people to repair their own vehicles, so that car
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manufacturers and chains of repair shops can monopolize the profits made
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from fixing automobiles which are designed to self-destruct at frequent
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intervals. Micro-computers are now part of most ignition systems, and
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unless you're a computer repairman it's unlikely that you'll have the
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necessary tools to diagnose and fix any electronic problems that might
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arise. This means that having a car these days makes you dependent on
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others for transportation -- and that is almost as dangerous as being
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dependent on others for food. (Got your five-year stockpile of food
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ready to last through the coming holocaust?)
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All these arguments against car ownership would be obvious if
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people were capable of thinking about the matter objectively. Thanks
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to religion, TV, lust, drugs, advertising and work, most people have
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been reduced to distracted conformists, so -- fortunately for the
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capitalists -- there is no danger that an outbreak of rational thinking
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will occur anytime soon. As long as the majority of people are un-
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concerned about behaving ethically or creating a better world, cars will
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remain popular.
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{Footnote: After drafting this essay about two years ago, I was
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mugged while bicycling home from work one night, and resorted to obtain-
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ing a motor scooter for slightly safer transportation. It sounds and
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smells like a lawn-mower, but suddenly, when I started riding the
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scooter, the motorists around me no longer honked, threw things at me,
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pretended they couldn't see me, or tried to run me off the road, as
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they had frequently done when I was a bicyclist.}
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----------------------------------------------------------------------
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THE AUTOMOBILE: AN INSTRUMENT FOR SELF-PUNISHMENT
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from _L'Encyclopedie_Des_Nuisances_
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...It is well known that expressway construction and the motoriza-
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tion of the labor force was one of the components of the mobilization
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of the German proletariat under National Socialism. Both the Volkswagon
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and the Panzerwagon could circulate on the expressways, with the
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military excursion constituting the other original blemish that dom-
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inates the modern journey. Everything submits to the same demand for
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speed and efficiency, and to the same reality of slowness and waste. One
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can be certain to lose time, at best, and at worst, life itself. During
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the elaborate maneuvers of going on vacation, which for the great major-
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ity of motorists is the only opportunity for a real trip, everything is
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organized in military fashion. On "D" Day, the general staff organizes
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radio guidance for the legions of vacationers. From the weather report
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to light aircraft reconnaissance flights, from reminders about necessary
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discipline to extrication itineraries in case the offense gets bogged
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down, everything has been foreseen for traversing hostile lands, from
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rescue squads to the installation of special tribunals.
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Then the balance sheet is drawn up. Naturally, the losses are in
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proportion to the undertaking: during one year in a reasonably bellicose
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country like France, fatalities amount to the equivalent of a large in-
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fantry division, and the number of injured to several army corps. Such
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a criminal slaughter is perfectly accepted by the population as a
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natural disaster about which, by definition, nothing can be done. This
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incredible fatalism well demonstrates, once again, the general loss of
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common sense in our era.
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----------------------------------------------------------------------
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newspaper clipping, dated 1988/6/12:
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The automobile was once an efficient way to get around but now
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causes such traffic woes and health hazards that people must learn to
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use other transportation methods, according to a study released Satur-
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day. "Excessive reliance on cars can actually stifle rather than advance
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societies," said the study by Worldwatch, a private think-tank. The
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study estimated the number of passenger cars in use worldwide grew from
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53 million in 1950 to 386 million in 1986. As a result, motorists in
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hundreds of cities creep forward at speeds slower than a bicycle's, the
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study said, adding that more than 200,000 people died in 1985 in traffic
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accidents worldwide. In the United States, 30,000 people die each year
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of diseases resulting from the use of gasoline and diesel fuel. "It is
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time to build a bridge from an auto-centered society into an alternative
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transportation future... in which cars, buses, rail systems, bicycles
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and walking all complement each other," the study said.
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----------------------------------------------------------------------
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"A study shows that commuters who drive the Los Angeles freeways are
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exposed to four times the amount of cancer-causing chemicals normally
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found in the air outdoors."
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- ABC Radio News 1989/05/06
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________________________________________________________________________
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THE LIBERTARIAN AS CONSERVATIVE
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by Bob Black
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(essay based on a speech delivered to the Eris Society in 1984)
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I agreed to come here today to speak on some such subject as "The
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Libertarian as Conservative." To me this is so obvious that I am hard
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put to find something to say to people who still think libertarianism
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has something to do with liberty. A libertarian is just a Republican
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who takes drugs. I'd have preferred a more controversial topic like
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"The Myth of the Penile Orgasm." But since my attendance here is sub-
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sidized by the esteemed distributor of a veritable reference library
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on mayhem and dirty tricks, I can't just take the conch and go rogue.
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I will indeed mutilate the sacred cow which is libertarianism, as
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ordered, but I'll administer a few hard lefts to the right in my own
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way. And I don't mean the easy way. I could just point to the laissez-
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faire Trilateralism of the Libertarian Party, then leave and go look for
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a party. It doesn't take long to say that if you fight fire with fire,
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you'll get burned.
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If that were all I came up with, somebody would up and say that the
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LP has lapsed from the libertarian faith, just as Christians have in-
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sisted that their behavior over the last 1900 years or so shouldn't be
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held against Christianity. There are Libertarians who try to retrieve
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libertarianism from the Libertarian Party just as there are Christians
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who try to reclaim Christianity from Christendom and communists (I've
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tried to myself) who try to save Communism from the Communist parties
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and states. They (and I) meant well but we lost. Libertarianism _is_
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party-archist fringe-rightism just as socialism is what Eastern European
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dissidents call "real socialism," i.e., the real-life state-socialism
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of queues, quotas, corruption and coercion. But I choose not to
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knock down this libertarian strawman-qua-man who's blowing over anyway.
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A wing of the Reaganist Right has obviously appropriated, with suspect
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selectivity, such libertarian themes as deregulation and voluntarism.
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Ideologues indignate that Reagan has travestied their principles. Tough
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shit! I notice that it's _their_ principles, not mine, that he found
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suitable to travesty. This kind of quarrel doesn't interest me. My
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reasons for regarding libertarianism as conservative run deeper than
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that.
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My target is what Libertarians have in common -- with each other,
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and with their ostensible enemies. Libertarians serve the state all the
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better because they declaim against it. At bottom, they want what it
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wants. But you can't want what the state wants without wanting the
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state, for what the state wants is the conditions in which it flourish-
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es. My (unfriendly) approach to modern society is to regard it as an
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integrated totality. Silly doctrinaire theories which regard the state
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as a parasitic excrescence on society cannot explain its centuries-long
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persistence, its ongoing encroachment upon what was previously market
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terrain, or its acceptance by the overwhelming majority of people
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including its demonstrable victims.
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A far more plausible theory is that the state and (at least) _this_
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form of society have a symbiotic (however sordid) interdependence, that
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the state and such institutions as the market and the nuclear family
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are, in several ways, modes of hierarchy and control. Their articulation
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is not always harmonious but they share a common interest in consigning
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their conflicts to elite or expert resolution. To demonize state
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authoritarianism while ignoring identical albeit contract-consecrated
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subservient arrangements in the large-scale corporations which control
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the world economy is fetishism at its worst. And yet (to quote the most
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vociferous of radical Libertarians, Professor Murray Rothbard) there is
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nothing un-libertarian about "organization, hierarchy, wage-work, grant-
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ing of funds by libertarian millionaires, and a libertarian party."
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Indeed. That is why libertarianism is just conservatism with a
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rationalist/positivist veneer.
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Libertarians render a service to the state which only they can
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provide. For all their complaints about its illicit extensions they
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concede, in their lucid moments, that the state rules far more by con-
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sent than by coercion -- which is to say, on present-state "libertarian"
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terms the state doesn't rule at all, it merely carries out the tacit or
|
||
explicit terms of its contracts. If it seems contradictory to say that
|
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coercion is consensual, the contradiction is in the world, not in the
|
||
expression, and can't adequately be rendered except by dialectical
|
||
discourse. One-dimensional syllogistics can't do justice to a world
|
||
largely lacking in the virtue. If your language lacks poetry and para-
|
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dox, it's unequal to the task of accounting for actuality. Otherwise
|
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anything radically new is literally unspeakable. The scholastic "A = A"
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logic created by the Catholic Church which the Libertarians inherited,
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unquestioned, from the Randites is just as constrictively conservative
|
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as the Newspeak of Orwell's _1984_.
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The state commands, for the most part, only because it commands
|
||
popular support. It is (and should be) an embarrassment to Libertarians
|
||
that the state rules with mass support -- including, for all practical
|
||
purposes, theirs.
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||
Libertarians reinforce acquiescent attitudes by diverting discon-
|
||
tents who are generalized (or tending that way) and focusing them on
|
||
particular features and functions of the state which they are the first
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to insist are expendable! Thus they turn potential revolutionaries into
|
||
repairmen. Constructive criticism is really the subtlest sort of praise.
|
||
If the Libertarians succeed in relieving the state of its exiguous
|
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activities, they just might be its salvation. No longer will reverence
|
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for authority be eroded by the prevalent official ineptitude. The more
|
||
the state does, the more it does badly. Surely one reason for the
|
||
common man's aversion to Communism is his reluctance to see the entire
|
||
economy run like the Post Office. The state tries to turn its soldiers
|
||
and policemen into objects of veneration and respect, but uniforms lose
|
||
a lot of their mystique when you see them on park rangers and garbage-
|
||
men.
|
||
|
||
The ideals and institutions of authority tend to cluster together,
|
||
both subjectively and objectively. You may recall Edward Gibbon's
|
||
remark about the eternal alliance of Throne and Altar. Disaffection
|
||
from received dogmas has a tendency to spread. If there is any future
|
||
for freedom, it depends on this. Unless and until alienation recognizes
|
||
itself, all the guns the Libertarians cherish will be useless against
|
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the state.
|
||
|
||
You might object that what I've said may apply to the minarchist
|
||
majority of Libertarians, but not to the self-styled anarchists among
|
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them. To my mind a right-wing anarchist is just a minarchist who'd
|
||
abolish the state to his own satisfaction by calling it something else.
|
||
But this incestuous family squabble is no affair of mine. Both camps
|
||
call for partial or complete privitization of state functions but
|
||
neither questions the functions themselves. They don't denounce what
|
||
the state does, they just object to who's doing it. This is why the
|
||
people most victimized by the state display the least interest in liber-
|
||
tarianism. Those on the receiving end of coercion don't quibble over
|
||
their coercers' credentials. If you can't pay or don't want to, you
|
||
don't much care if your deprivation is called larceny or taxation or
|
||
restitution or rent. If you like to control your own time, you dis-
|
||
tinguish employment from enslavement only in degree and duration. An
|
||
ideology which outdoes all others (with the possible exception of
|
||
Marxism) in its exaltation of the work ethic can only be a brake on
|
||
anti-authoritarian orientations, even if it does make the trains run
|
||
on time.
|
||
|
||
My second argument, related to the first, is that the libertarian
|
||
phobia as to the state reflects and reproduces a profound misunderstand-
|
||
ing of the operative forces which make for social control in the modern
|
||
world. _If_ -- and this is a big "if," especially where bourgeois Liber-
|
||
tarians are concerned -- what you want is to maximize individual
|
||
autonomy, then it is quite clear that the state is the least of the
|
||
phenomena which stand in your way.
|
||
|
||
Imagine that you are a Martian anthropologist specializing in Terran
|
||
studies and equipped with the finest telescopes and video equipment. You
|
||
have not yet deciphered any Terran language and so you can only record
|
||
what earthlings do, not their shared misconceptions as to what they're
|
||
doing and why. However, you can gauge roughly when they're doing what
|
||
they want and when they're doing something else. Your first important
|
||
discovery is that earthlings devote nearly all their time to unwelcome
|
||
activities. The only important exception is a dwindling set of hunter-
|
||
gatherer groups unperturbed by governments, churches and schools who
|
||
devote some four hours a day to subsistence activities which so closely
|
||
resemble the leisure activities of the privileged classes in industrial
|
||
capitalist countries that you are uncertain whether to describe what
|
||
they do as work or play. But the state and the market are eradicating
|
||
these holdouts and you very properly concentrate on the almost all-
|
||
inclusive world-system which, for all its evident internal antagonisms
|
||
as epitomized in war, is much the same everywhere. The Terran young,
|
||
you further observe, are almost wholly subject to the impositions of the
|
||
family and the school, sometimes seconded by the church and occasion-
|
||
ally the state. The adults often assemble in families too, but the
|
||
place where they pass the most time and submit to the closest control
|
||
is at work. Thus, without even entering into the question of the world
|
||
economy's ultimate dictation of everybody's productive activity, it's
|
||
apparent that the source of the greatest direct duress experienced by
|
||
the ordinary adult is _not_ the state but rather the business that
|
||
employs him. Your foreman or supervisor gives you more "or-else" orders
|
||
in a week than the police do in a decade.
|
||
|
||
If one looks at the world without prejudice but with an eye to
|
||
maximizing freedom, the major coercive institution is not the state,
|
||
it's _work_. Libertarians who with a straight face call for the
|
||
abolition of the state nonetheless look on anti-work attitudes with
|
||
horror. The idea of abolishing work is, of course, an affront to common
|
||
sense. But then so is the idea of abolishing the state. If a referendum
|
||
were held among Libertarians which posed as options the abolition of
|
||
work with retention of the state, or abolition of the state with reten-
|
||
tion of work, does anyone doubt the outcome?
|
||
|
||
Libertarians are into linear reasoning and quantitative analysis.
|
||
If they applied these methods to test their own reasoning they'd be in
|
||
for a shock. That's the point of my Martian thought experiment. This is
|
||
not to say that the state isn't just as unsavory as the Libertarians say
|
||
it is. But it does suggest that the state is important, not so much for
|
||
the direct duress it inflicts on convicts and conscripts, for instance,
|
||
as for its indirect back-up of employers who regiment employees, shop-
|
||
keepers who arrest shoplifters, and parents who paternalize children.
|
||
In these classrooms, the lesson of submission is learned. Of course,
|
||
there are always a few freaks like anarcho-capitalists or Catholic
|
||
anarchists, but they're just exceptions to the rule of rule.
|
||
|
||
Unlike side issues such as unemployment, unions, and minimum-wage
|
||
laws, the subject of work itself is almost entirely absent from liber-
|
||
tarian literature. Most of what little there is consists of Randite
|
||
rantings against parasites, barely distinguishable from the invective
|
||
inflicted on dissidents by the Soviet press, and Sunday-school platitud-
|
||
inizing that there is no free lunch -- this from fat cats who have
|
||
usually ingested a lot of them. In 1980, a rare exception appeared in a
|
||
book review published in the _Libertarian_Review_ by Professor John
|
||
Hospers, the Libertarian Party elder state's-man who flunked out of the
|
||
Electoral College in 1972. Here was a spirited defense of work by a
|
||
college professor who didn't have to do any. To demonstrate that his
|
||
arguments were thoroughly conservative, it is enough to show that they
|
||
agreed in all essentials with Marxism-Leninism.
|
||
|
||
Hospers thought he could justify wage-labor, factory discipline and
|
||
hierarchic management by noting that they're imposed in Leninist
|
||
regimes as well as under capitalism. Would he accept the same argument
|
||
for the necessity of repressive sex and drug laws? Like other Libertar-
|
||
ians, Hospers is uneasy -- hence his gratuitous red-baiting -- because
|
||
libertarianism and Leninism are as different as Coke and Pepsi when it
|
||
comes to consecrating class society and the source of its power, work.
|
||
Only upon the firm foundation of factory fascism and office oligarchy
|
||
do Libertarians and Leninists dare to debate the trivial issues dividing
|
||
them. Toss in the mainstream conservatives who feel just the same and we
|
||
end up with a veritable trilateralism of pro-work ideology seasoned to
|
||
taste.
|
||
|
||
Hospers, who never has to, sees nothing demeaning in taking orders
|
||
from bosses, for "how else could a large scale factory be organized?" In
|
||
other words, "wanting to abolish authority in large-scale industry is
|
||
tantamount to wanting to abolish industry itself." Hospers again? No,
|
||
Frederick Engels! Marx agreed: "Go and run one of the Barcelona factor-
|
||
ies without direction, that is to say, without authority!" (Which is
|
||
just what the Catalan workers did in 1936, while their anarcho-
|
||
syndicalist leaders temporized and cut deals with the government.)
|
||
"Someone," says Hospers, "has to make decisions and" -- here's the
|
||
kicker -- "someone _else_ has to implement them." _Why?_ His precursor
|
||
Lenin likewise endorsed "individual dictatorial powers" to assure
|
||
"absolute and strict _unity_of_will_. But how can strict unity of will
|
||
be ensured? By thousands subordinating their will to the will of one."
|
||
What's needed to make industrialism work is "iron discipline while at
|
||
work, with _unquestioning_obedience_ to the will of a single person, the
|
||
soviet leader, while at work." _Arbeit_macht_frei_!
|
||
|
||
Some people giving orders and others obeying them: this is the
|
||
essence of servitude. Of course, as Hospers smugly observes, "one can
|
||
at least change jobs," but you can't avoid having a job -- just as under
|
||
statism one can at least change nationalities but you can't avoid
|
||
subjection to one nation-state or another. But freedom means more than
|
||
the right to change masters.
|
||
|
||
Hospers and other Libertarians are wrong to assume, with Man-
|
||
chester industrialist Engels, that technology imposes its division of
|
||
labor "independent of social organization." Rather, the factory _is_
|
||
an instrument of social control, the most effective ever devised to
|
||
enforce the class chasm between the few who "make decisions" and the
|
||
many who "implement them." Industrial technology is much more the
|
||
product than the source of workplace totalitarianism. Thus the revolt
|
||
against work -- reflected in absenteeism, sabotage, turnover,
|
||
embezzlement, wildcat strikes, and goldbricking -- has far more
|
||
liberatory promise than the machinations of "libertarian" politicos
|
||
and propagandists.
|
||
|
||
Most work serves the predatory purposes of commerce and coercion
|
||
and can be abolished outright. The rest can be automated away and/or
|
||
transformed -- by the experts, the workers who do it -- into creative,
|
||
playlike pastimes whose variety and conviviality will make extrinsic
|
||
inducements like the capitalist carrot and the Communist stick equally
|
||
obsolete. In the hopefully impending meta-industrial revolution,
|
||
libertarian communists revolting against work will settle accounts
|
||
with "Libertarians" and "Communists" working against revolt. And then
|
||
we can go for the gusto!
|
||
|
||
Even if you think everything I've said about work, such as the
|
||
possibility of its abolition, is visionary nonsense, the anti-liberty
|
||
implications of its prevalence would still hold good. The time of your
|
||
life is the one commodity you can sell but never buy back. Murray
|
||
Rothbard thinks egalitarianism is a revolt against nature, but his day
|
||
is 24 hours long, just like everybody else's. If you spend most of your
|
||
waking life taking orders or kissing ass, if you get habituated to
|
||
hierarchy, you will become passive-aggressive, sado-masochistic,
|
||
servile and stupefied, and you will carry that load into every aspect
|
||
of the balance of your life. Incapable of living a life of liberty,
|
||
you'll settle for one of its ideological representations, like liber-
|
||
tarianism. You can't treat values like workers, hiring and firing them
|
||
at will and assigning each a place in an imposed division of labor. The
|
||
taste for freedom and pleasure can't be compartmentalized.
|
||
|
||
Libertarians complain that the state is parasitic, an excrescence
|
||
on society. They think it's like a tumor you could cut out, leaving the
|
||
patient just as he was, only healthier. They've been mystified by their
|
||
own metaphors. Like the market, the state is an activity, not an entity.
|
||
The only way to abolish the state is to change the way of life it forms
|
||
a part of. That way of life, if you call that living, revolves around
|
||
work and takes in bureaucracy, moralism, schooling, money, and more.
|
||
Libertarians are conservatives because they avowedly want to maintain
|
||
most of this mess and so unwittingly perpetuate the rest of the racket.
|
||
But they're bad conservatives because they've forgotten the reality of
|
||
institutional and ideological interconnection which was the original
|
||
insight of the historical conservatives. Entirely out of touch with the
|
||
real currents of contemporary resistance, they denounce _practical_
|
||
opposition to the system as "nihilism," "Luddism," and other big words
|
||
they don't understand. A glance at the world confirms that their
|
||
utopian capitalism just _can't_compete_ with the state. With enemies
|
||
like Libertarians, the state doesn't need friends.
|
||
|
||
|
||
________________________________________________________________________
|
||
|
||
|
||
Everyone Talks About the Weather...
|
||
|
||
Reprinted from the Lammas 1988 edition of Bentwood,
|
||
4807 50th Avenue, Seattle WA 98118.
|
||
|
||
Unless you've been living in a cave somewhere on the astral plane,
|
||
you should be aware of the "Drought of 1988." The images of it are
|
||
everywhere: parched fields with only a stubble of growth; the cracked,
|
||
dried earth of empty river and stream beds; the news reports of
|
||
sweltering temperatures and no rainfall. And while many people just
|
||
seem to take it all in stride, or view it as just another piece of bad
|
||
news on TV (and after all, the news is always bad), as pagans we<77>re
|
||
keenly aware of what's happening, what it means for ourselves, the
|
||
plant and animal life we share this planet with, and for the Earth
|
||
Mother herself.
|
||
|
||
Those who live in the South and Midwest have a most profound
|
||
experience of how our climate is changing. It is most evident in the
|
||
corn, that plant so sacred to Native American cultures. The usually
|
||
broad, lush leaves are instead mottled and curled. And where the corn
|
||
usually stretches towards the sunlight, it is now stunted and
|
||
shriveling, almost recoiling from the burning rays. Even those of us
|
||
who live in areas not so hard hit this year by the drought can see the
|
||
effects: in the Pacific Northwest, intermountain regions, and Alaska,
|
||
forest fires rage this year, blackening thousands of acres.
|
||
|
||
We pagans are growing sensitive to the deeper meanings of this
|
||
drought. We can sense something more profound, more significant in this
|
||
disaster; it is almost palpable. To some, fear is one element; we are
|
||
like a child who is constantly afraid that they will be abandoned by
|
||
their mother. And there is fear of not knowing what is going to happen;
|
||
we see this etched on the faces of farmers and others who live on the
|
||
land. Even though we may feel that we're insulated right now, we have a
|
||
sense that these climactic changes are going to affect us all.
|
||
|
||
And they will. Whether we live in an urban setting, out in the
|
||
woods, or in a rural farming area, these climactic changes are going to
|
||
affect us. The bounty of the supermarket may not be so bountiful in the
|
||
future. Recently there have been news reports of growing concerns over
|
||
intermittent shortages of certain food products as early as next year.
|
||
In the West, water is becoming more and more scarce in some areas, and
|
||
contingency plans for rationing are being drawn up in some urban areas.
|
||
And there is growing evidence that the hot and dry summers of the past
|
||
two years are not just random or freakish occurrences, but rather the
|
||
beginning of a global warming trend. What we<77>re seeing in 1988 could
|
||
possibly be the harbinger of greater climactic extremes to come.
|
||
|
||
While the physical effects of these meteorological changes are
|
||
quite evident, the psychological and psychic responses seem much more
|
||
varied. Some born-again and fundamentalist Christians see the drought
|
||
as part of the wrath of a patriarchal god who will put the Earth through
|
||
great tribulations and suffering as a prelude to the establishment of
|
||
the kingdom of heaven. Others with a "New Age" orientation see what is
|
||
happening as "the Earth Changes," an inevitable period where the Earth
|
||
cleanses or purges herself of the awful things humans have done.
|
||
|
||
While these two responses may seem different, they are in fact
|
||
almost identical. Both presuppose that the tribulation/Earth changes
|
||
are inevitable and unavoidable, (prophecy plays a major r<>le in many
|
||
Christian and New Age philosophies), indicate that only a chosen few
|
||
will survive the great destruction, and that after all the mayhem is
|
||
over, those who remain will live a life of peace, love, and harmony,
|
||
usually due to the influence of some external source (the return of
|
||
God, universal consciousness, or contact with beings from other planets
|
||
or planes of existence). The idyllic ending is as inevitable as the
|
||
destruction to come.
|
||
|
||
Many pagans are taking a somewhat different tack towards what is
|
||
happening to the world. The reason for drought, famine, and environ-
|
||
mental deterioration is not because of some mysterious, supernatural
|
||
force but has a rather simpler cause: human actions. Five thousand years
|
||
of a power-over, domination-oriented philosophy have laid the foundation
|
||
for what we see manifesting in the changing climate, the scarred Earth,
|
||
the poisoned ocean. The results of the last 150 years of irresponsible
|
||
industrial society is the cause of what we're seeing today. As pagans
|
||
we understand the intent and the "mechanics" of the law of manifold
|
||
return: what we put out into the world comes back to us magnified. This
|
||
is true for what we do whether individually or collectively. It may take
|
||
a long time to return, and perhaps it may manifest in a form that might
|
||
not be immediately evident, but return it does. And we're seeing it now.
|
||
|
||
A hundred years of extensive burning of fossil fuels, massive
|
||
deforestation, the establishment of a resource- and energy-intensive
|
||
lifestyle for a small minority of the Earth's inhabitants, are the
|
||
direct cause of the baked fields and dry streams. We don't need a
|
||
vengeful god to send us tribulations. We do just fine on our own.
|
||
|
||
Yet we are discovering that isn't the end of the story. We
|
||
are coming to learn that one of the differences between a pagan
|
||
viewpoint towards this drought and its consequences, and the
|
||
fundamentalist/New Age approach, is that the latter essentially takes
|
||
us out of the equation. In the tribulation/Earth Changes scenarios,
|
||
the environmental destruction we are witnessing is inevitable,
|
||
{Editor's note: maybe this is why so many businessmen and politicians
|
||
promote Christianity.} and has been foretold in prophecy. (After all,
|
||
what is more useless than a prophecy that doesn't come true?) What we
|
||
do or have done is irrelevant. And thus we don't really have to take
|
||
responsibility for what we're doing to the Earth, and can continue our
|
||
destructive ways without a second thought. Of course, the tribulation
|
||
or Earth Changes will interrupt it all at some point, but (fortunately)
|
||
that is sometime out in the nebulous future. Pagans, on the other hand,
|
||
see the climactic changes as a direct result of human activity, both
|
||
material and psychic. Therefore we can have a direct influence on what
|
||
happens to the environment, and ultimately, to us.
|
||
|
||
With this knowledge we're making changes. Some are subtle, some are
|
||
more evident. In our meditations we are visualizing a clean atmosphere,
|
||
lush rain forests, and a land free of industrial scars for the Earth.
|
||
We are visualizing lifegiving rain falling in abundance on the fields
|
||
and filling the rivers and lakes. And we meditate on human change,
|
||
seeing our attitudes change to those of love and harmony with those we
|
||
share the Earth with, living in balance with nature and enjoying the
|
||
rewards that such a life can give to all.
|
||
|
||
Understanding that the internal work alone is not enough, the
|
||
meditative, psychic, and ritual work we do is serving as the energy
|
||
for changes in our material lives. Some of us are beginning to evaluate
|
||
the effect that we personally have on the Earth, our contribution to
|
||
pollution. For some it may mean curtailing the use of our cars. For
|
||
others it may mean making efforts to recycle what we would normally
|
||
throw out. Another response for some is to become directly acquainted
|
||
with the Earth, air, and weather by digging in the ground, planting
|
||
something green, and caring for it. And for still others it may mean
|
||
learning more about the political and sociological aspects of food,
|
||
energy, and resource distribution and becoming involved to change
|
||
them. There is a great variety of things pagans are doing to materially
|
||
turn the tide of human irresponsibility. What is important is that
|
||
we're doing it, and our understanding that we, in fact, can make a
|
||
difference.
|
||
|
||
The Drought of '88 may be just the beginning of changes for all of
|
||
us. Many will feel helpless about these changes, but pagans will see
|
||
themselves as active partners in it.
|
||
|
||
|
||
________________________________________________________________________
|
||
|
||
|
||
On Business
|
||
by David Castleman
|
||
|
||
Our human psyche is like a horse with many masters, and ranked
|
||
among them is Government, and Media, and Business. One master sees that
|
||
the blinders never fail in their task of administering blindness. One
|
||
master investigates the reins constantly, to guard against an
|
||
encroachment by the individual will. One master tests the harness
|
||
constantly, that the servile brute may not forget its allotted and
|
||
proper burden. Other and subtler masters note the aspects of the terrain
|
||
and the feed and the healthy future of the breed: they stand aloof.
|
||
|
||
The facility for business is a reasonably constructed and physical
|
||
extension of the primal hunting instinct of the carnivore, and is
|
||
itself as clearly a tool of physical contest as is a spear, a trained
|
||
dog, a nuclear explosive, or a padded bosom. It is a tool whose use
|
||
extends the power of the animal beyond the borders of naked animality.
|
||
Its function is of acquisition and of destruction. It kills, that the
|
||
animal may eat, and the animal is to eat, that it may kill.
|
||
|
||
All who share the privilege and the responsibility of life, live
|
||
upon this wheel of natural whim. As the mind is the function of the
|
||
brain, so this special tool hidden among folds in the fisted brain, has
|
||
as its function that aspect of the mind which equips the physical body.
|
||
The carnivore without it is doomed to be a brief and sorry meat for its
|
||
fellows.
|
||
|
||
What traits of personality are required for business? One must be
|
||
intelligent and single-minded, and troubled by no untamed conscience.
|
||
Monomania is crucial. Imagination is dangerous and useless. An abundance
|
||
of energy is vital. Scruples are decorative, not functional.
|
||
|
||
The activity of a real and vigorous imagination poisons the will,
|
||
by suggesting too many alternatives, and kills single-mindedness.
|
||
Single-mindedness depends on the channeled presence of the personal
|
||
portion of communal will, and if the channel enlarges, the will can get
|
||
no grip, and flounders.
|
||
|
||
What are the social skills required to participate effectively in
|
||
this chattering session of business? A person must be able to mimic
|
||
the reactions of one's peers, must be malleable as a chameleon, so that
|
||
none will be aware if one chance to have qualms of conscience or
|
||
stirrings of humanity, and so that none will be aware if one chance to
|
||
have a moment of individual awareness. To wake surrounded by the
|
||
inhabitants of a dream, would be dangerous as to swim with sharks.
|
||
|
||
One must lie easily, remembering always the essential falsehoods of
|
||
one's profession, and believing the lies as they are invented on the
|
||
tongue. If you do not believe your own lies as you speak them, nobody
|
||
else will believe them, and you will have withdrawn sufficiently from
|
||
the game that you may not believe the lies of your peers.
|
||
|
||
Truth will never be as popular as lies, because it seems harder,
|
||
and bleaker. Almost invariably, we prefer the phonies among our
|
||
contemporaries, rather than folks of truth or genius. In superficiality
|
||
is happiness, when we fear the truth, and feel belittled by genius.
|
||
Little people love displays of littleness, because littleness allows
|
||
them to feel real, and nobody loves to feel substantial as a bubble.
|
||
|
||
One who perceives the surface clearly enough, will understand the
|
||
depths beneath the surface comfortably, though inarticulably, and may be
|
||
uninterested in those depths. To be a successful seller, one must
|
||
ignore anything beyond the surface of reality. One must believe in the
|
||
surface with unfeigned sincerity.
|
||
|
||
Sincerity is prized, while honesty is abhorred, and sincerity must
|
||
have the appearance of sincerity or it counts as nothing. Every
|
||
intelligent and civilized society values the appearance of sincerity
|
||
more than it values sincerity itself. The appearance of reality is more
|
||
important than is actual reality. Appearance is the only thing that
|
||
superficials dare to trust, the only thing that may be discussed
|
||
easily.
|
||
|
||
The appearance is real and exists on the superficial plane of
|
||
reality, and is the nearest thing of substance that is available to
|
||
normal folks. The appearance of things is the clearest indicator of
|
||
truth and reality and substance, that normalcy is permitted, and this
|
||
is healthy. To ignore the appearance and the superficial, is unhealthy.
|
||
|
||
This plane of the superficial is the domain of those three masters
|
||
we spoke of. Business, and Government, and Media, each has a fine and
|
||
imposing abode on this level, and each has many servants and formidable
|
||
affairs.
|
||
|
||
To be excellent at business, one must enjoy it utterly, and one must
|
||
consider it a fine game to be played well. To be a champion at business,
|
||
beyond mere excellence, it must be religion. Somebody who is so good at
|
||
being bad must pay an awful price for the privilege. Why do so many
|
||
people pay such a devastating price, forsaking conscience, family, and
|
||
self?
|
||
|
||
Every religion requires martyrs, and martyrs work for nothing. Their
|
||
bosses reap the glory.
|
||
|
||
We strive to succeed in business because acquisition is the human
|
||
pursuit, and we would match our fellows. What pleasure would be found in
|
||
life apart, striving for baubles our various authority figures have
|
||
preached against, striven to suppress, and mocked? The fruits of
|
||
acquisition seem tangible. They can be held in hand like Faberge eggs.
|
||
They can be walked upon, like beaches in an earthly paradise. Their
|
||
acquisition permits us to forget the coming and the gnawing precipice,
|
||
the yawning reward, the sleep without rest.
|
||
|
||
Our fear dissolves when we confront the acceptedly real and the
|
||
acceptedly desirable, and if later it proves a mirage, that is
|
||
irrelevant.
|
||
|
||
Pursuing what our fellows pursue, we forget our smallness,
|
||
insignificance and loneliness. What comfort had Galileo though he was
|
||
right? What comfort had Gauguin? What comfort had Christ? The human
|
||
needs went unanswered, and each must have been a focal point of cosmic
|
||
doubt, an arena of the psyche. The loneliness must have been fraught
|
||
with horror, and fear.
|
||
|
||
In the night our terrific human loneliness crawls across the
|
||
ceiling and stares down at us, and though we cannot see it, we feel
|
||
that it is there. It mocks us as we watch it through our closed or open
|
||
eyes, or through our fingers which splay like trembling fans upon our
|
||
faces. We hear it scuttling and we hear it whimpering and whispering
|
||
like the beating of a heart. We are reminded of the basis on which all
|
||
illusion shimmers awhile, and it is unmindful of us, and unkind. We want
|
||
the great basis to confide with us, and its tongue is unmoved.
|
||
|
||
Honorable suffering is humanity's only possible gift to Deity, and
|
||
it is not enough.
|
||
|
||
It is our normal desire to escape the offering of that gift, and we
|
||
attempt this when we choose to remain always on the surface of desire,
|
||
the surface of reality and life. Therefore a reasonable society embraces
|
||
the march of business and of war. War is only business with its sleeves
|
||
rolled up.
|
||
|
||
All of the world's business has one goal, and efforts made in
|
||
business have been attempts pulsing toward that goal. To define the goal
|
||
precisely would require the use of many words, and two aspects would be
|
||
implicit in any definition, and would be explicit in any honest
|
||
definition. Despite any decorative digressions, the goal of business
|
||
and of war includes the enslavement of the human race and the
|
||
destruction of the planet.
|
||
|
||
The best people among the devotees to commerce, these myrmidons to
|
||
Mammon, prefer to pretend that their personal goals are somehow short
|
||
of this grand goal, but in their hearts and brains they know that
|
||
nobody is fooled. Each can tell easily what the others do, and each
|
||
permits a mantle of confusion to settle over all.
|
||
|
||
Lying doesn't bother them. They are good at it. The unluckiest among
|
||
them pale with disgust every morning when they confront the bathroom
|
||
mirror. The luckiest among them are scarcely ashamed at all. The
|
||
proudest among them are frightened because they know they have betrayed
|
||
themselves, and somewhere the almost inaudible voice of conscience
|
||
still murmurs.
|
||
|
||
While it's true that those who are too susceptible to society's
|
||
punctilio may be disgusted by business, it's also true that we are
|
||
easily disgusted by things we are not in sympathy with. For many folks,
|
||
and usually for the poorest of us, business is just the science of
|
||
cheating people, a mindless obscenity; and yet to a business buff, the
|
||
act of being in business justifies one's existence to oneself and to
|
||
one's Deity. Sometimes businessfolks wonder that they are unable to
|
||
appreciate the uncommon, and yet is that truly so odd, since they revel
|
||
so in the common?
|
||
|
||
Does a robber-baron truly believe that a lifetime dedicated to the
|
||
crippling and assassination of whole families by the thousands is
|
||
balanced by building a concert-hall as he is about to die? Do such
|
||
acts of dishonor go unrecorded into the dawn of prehistory and the
|
||
dusk of post-history?
|
||
|
||
"As mere human knowledge can split a ray of light and analyze the
|
||
manner of its composition, so sublimer intelligences may read in the
|
||
feeble shining of this earth of ours, every thought and act, every vice
|
||
and virtue, of every responsible creature on it." Amen.
|
||
|
||
And yet their desperate hope and prayer is for a Ptolemaic and
|
||
all-inclusive silence, silent as a perfectly managed conscience, even
|
||
on Sunday.
|
||
|
||
|
||
________________________________________________________________________
|
||
|
||
|
||
Solar Cooker May Help Third World
|
||
by Laura Wilkinson
|
||
(Associated Press 1989/01/15)
|
||
|
||
A simple box of cardboard, foil and glass is being promoted as a
|
||
means to free Third World women from the time-consuming search for
|
||
firewood and get them out of the unhealthy smoke.
|
||
|
||
The solar cookers, designed by two Arizona women, are being
|
||
introduced in the Third World by Pillsbury Co. "We feel the potential
|
||
of solar cookers is so great that it could truly alleviate some of the
|
||
global problems," said William Sperber, a senior research microbiologist
|
||
at the food conglomerate.
|
||
|
||
The cooker is an insulated box within a box topped with a glass pane
|
||
and a reflector that directs sunlight. It can be made out of cardboard
|
||
or wood, and aluminum foil. Food is cooked in dark, covered metal,
|
||
glass or ceramic pots.
|
||
|
||
The temperature peaks at 250 to 275 degrees F., meaning food takes
|
||
longer to cook than in electric ovens. Users save time by no longer
|
||
having to collect firewood and by not having to stir the food because
|
||
of the low heat.
|
||
|
||
Simplicity may be an obstacle to widespread adoption, supporters
|
||
say. "It doesn't look as high tech as other things that have been
|
||
tried," said Chris Flavin, vice president of research at Worldwatch
|
||
Institute, a private non-profit research group that focuses on global
|
||
resource issues. "There's an actual bias in development agencies
|
||
against anything that's small and decentralized," said Flavin. "They
|
||
like to support big projects because they're easy to manage."
|
||
|
||
Barbara Kerr of Taylor, Arizona, a nurse, and Sherry Cole of Tempe,
|
||
a former free-lance writer and neighbor of Kerr's, created the design
|
||
in the mid-1970s. Since then, Cole said, they've sold about 3,000 kits
|
||
and cookers ranging from $40 to $275.
|
||
|
||
|
||
________________________________________________________________________
|
||
|
||
|
||
Nietzshce and the Dervishes
|
||
by Hakim Bey
|
||
|
||
_Rendan_, "the clever ones." The sufis use a technical term _rend_
|
||
(adj. _rendi_, pl. _rendan_) to designate one "clever enough to drink
|
||
wine in secret without getting caught": the dervish-version of
|
||
"Permissible Dissimulation" (_taqiyya_, whereby Shiities are permitted
|
||
to lie about their true affiliation to avoid persecution as well as
|
||
advance the purposes of their propaganda).
|
||
|
||
On the plane of the "Path", the _rend_ conceals his spiritual state
|
||
in order to contain it, work on it alchemically, enhance it. This
|
||
"cleverness" explains much of the secrecy of the Orders, altho it
|
||
remains true that many dervishes do literally break the rules of Islam,
|
||
offend tradition and flout the customs of their society -- all of
|
||
which gives them reason for _real_ secrecy.
|
||
|
||
Ignoring the case of the "criminal" who uses sufism as a mask -- or
|
||
rather not sufism per se but _dervish_-ism, almost a synonym in Persia
|
||
for laid-back manners and by extension a social laxness, a style of
|
||
genial, poor but elegant amorality -- the above definition can still be
|
||
considered in a literal as well as metaphorical sense. That is: some
|
||
sufis do break the Law while still allowing that the Law exists and
|
||
will continue to exist; and they do so from spiritual motives, as an
|
||
exercise of will (_himmah_).
|
||
|
||
Nietzsche says somewhere that the free spirit will not agitate for
|
||
the rules to be dropped or even reformed, since it is only by breaking
|
||
the rules that he realizes his will to power. One must prove (to
|
||
oneself if no one else) an ability to overcome the rules of the herd,
|
||
to make one's own law and yet not fall prey to the rancor and resent-
|
||
ment of inferior souls which define law and custom in ANY society. One
|
||
needs, in effect, an individual equivalent of war in order to achieve
|
||
the becoming of the free spirit -- one needs an inert stupidity against
|
||
which to measure one's own movement and intelligence.
|
||
|
||
Anarchists sometimes posit an ideal society without law. The few
|
||
anarchistic experiments which succeeded briefly (the Makhnovists,
|
||
Catalan) failed to survive the conditions of war which permitted their
|
||
existence in the first place -- so we have no way of knowing empirically
|
||
if such an experiment could outlive the onset of peace.
|
||
|
||
Some anarchists however, like our late friend the Italian
|
||
Stirnerite "Brand," took part in all sorts of uprisings and revolutions,
|
||
even communist and socialist ones, because they found in the moment of
|
||
insurrection itself the kind of freedom they sought. Thus while
|
||
utopianism has so far always failed, the individualist or existentialist
|
||
anarchists have succeeded inasmuch as they have attained (however
|
||
briefly) the realization of their will to power in war.
|
||
|
||
Nietzsche's animadversions against "anarchists" are always aimed
|
||
at the egalitarian-communist narodnik martyr-types, whose idealism he
|
||
saw as yet one more survival of post-Xtian moralism -- altho he
|
||
sometimes praises them for at least having the courage to revolt
|
||
against majoritarian authority. He never mentions Stirner, but I
|
||
believe he would have classified the Individualist rebel with the
|
||
higher type of "criminals," who represented for him (as for Dostoyevsky)
|
||
humans far superior to the herd, even if tragically flawed by their
|
||
obsessiveness and perhaps hidden motivations of revenge.
|
||
|
||
The Nietzschean overman, if he existed, would have to share to some
|
||
degree in this "criminality" even if he had overcome all obsessions and
|
||
compulsions, if only because his law could never agree with the law of
|
||
the masses, of state and society. His need for "war" (whether literal
|
||
or metaphorical) might even persuade him to take part in revolt,
|
||
whether it assumed the form of insurrection or only of a proud
|
||
bohemianism.
|
||
|
||
For him a "society without law" might have value only so long as it
|
||
could measure its own freedom against the subjection of others,
|
||
against their jealousy and hatred. The lawless and short-lived "pirate
|
||
utopias" of Madagascar and the Caribbean, D'Annunzio's Republic of
|
||
Fiume, the Ukraine or Barcelona -- these would attract him because
|
||
they promised the turmoil of becoming and even "failure" rather than
|
||
the bucolic somnolence of a "perfected" (and hence dead) anarchist
|
||
society.
|
||
|
||
In the absence of such opportunities, this free spirit would
|
||
disdain wasting time on agitation for reform, on protest, on visionary
|
||
dreaming, on all kinds of "revolutionary martyrdom" -- in short, on
|
||
most contemporary anarchist activity. To be _rendi_, to drink wine in
|
||
secret and not get caught, to accept the rules in order to break them
|
||
and thus attain the spiritual lift or energy-rush of danger and
|
||
adventure, the private epiphany of overcoming all interior police while
|
||
tricking all outward authority -- this might be a goal worthy of such a
|
||
spirit, and this might be his definition of crime.
|
||
|
||
(Incidentally I think this reading helps explain Nietzsche's
|
||
insistance on the MASK, on the secretive nature of the proto-overman,
|
||
which disturbs even intelligent but somewhat liberal commentators like
|
||
Kaufman. Artists, for all that Nietzsche loves them, are criticized for
|
||
_telling_secrets_. Perhaps he failed to consider that -- paraphrasing
|
||
A. Ginsberg -- this is _our_ way of becoming "great"; and also that --
|
||
paraphrasing Yeats -- even the truest society becomes yet another mask.)
|
||
|
||
As for the anarchist movement today: would we like just once to
|
||
stand on ground where laws are abolished and the last priest is strung
|
||
up with the guts of the last bureaucrat? Yeah sure. But we're not
|
||
holding our breath. There are certain causes (to quote the Neech again)
|
||
that one fails to quite abandon, if only because of the sheer insipidity
|
||
of all their enemies. Oscar Wilde might have said that one cannot be a
|
||
gentleman without being something of an anarchist -- a necessary
|
||
paradox, like Nietzsche's "radical aristocratism."
|
||
|
||
This is not just a matter of spiritual dandyism, but also of
|
||
existential commitment to an underlying spontaneity, to a philosophical
|
||
"tao." For all its waste of energy, in its very formlessness anarchism
|
||
alone of all the ISMs approaches that one _type_ of form which alone
|
||
can interest us today, that strange attractor, the shape of _chaos_ --
|
||
which (one last quote) one must have within oneself, if one is to give
|
||
birth to a dancing star.
|
||
|
||
|
||
________________________________________________________________________
|
||
|
||
|
||
XORcrypt: 'basically' a low-budget text encryption routine
|
||
by Rick Harrison
|
||
|
||
Many persons have information in their personal computers that they
|
||
would like to keep to themselves. Radical magazines have their mailing
|
||
lists, tax evaders have their financial records, and people engaged in
|
||
adultery, drugs, pornography, or other activities have sensitive records
|
||
and correspondence. The wisdom of keeping vital or incriminating data
|
||
safe from the eyes of cops, spouses, parents, or business competitors
|
||
cannot be over-estimated. Computers make it fairly easy to accomplish
|
||
this goal. Just use an encryption program to encode those sensitive
|
||
documents and they become relatively inaccessible to the unauthorized.
|
||
|
||
Personal computers also make it possible for ordinary people to
|
||
have secure telecommunications. Just type up your correspondence,
|
||
encrypt it, and send it on its way via telephone modem or packet radio.
|
||
There are federal regulations restricting the transmission of coded
|
||
messages, but sneaky people simply compress the encoded file, label it
|
||
as a machine-language program meant to be run on an unspecified type of
|
||
computer, and transmit with impunity.
|
||
|
||
Below is a listing for XORcrypt, a program designed to provide data
|
||
security for users of personal computers. There are slicker, faster
|
||
programs around that do this sort of thing, but if you haven't got
|
||
access to any such programs, here's one you can type in and run.
|
||
|
||
The first step in using XORcrypt is to take the menu option that
|
||
writes a 'key' file to disk. A key file is really just a textfile
|
||
containing random integers separated by commas. Here's an example of
|
||
a key file:
|
||
9, 36, 55, 119, 63, 21, 76, 89, 111
|
||
1, 81, 8, 126, 74, 37, 64, 101
|
||
29, 118, 35, 128, 53, 88, 13, 20, 54 ...et cetera.
|
||
|
||
Next take the 'encrypt' option. You can select any file of the text
|
||
variety and encode it. (You'll have to experiment a bit and see what
|
||
kinds of files you can open on your system. This version, running on a
|
||
Macintosh, will open text files but not binary data files.) The program
|
||
XORs each byte of text against one of the integers from the key file.
|
||
(XOR, pronounced 'exclusive or', is a binary bitwise operation.) The
|
||
resulting output is your encrypted file. After you've tested the program
|
||
and you're positive that it's working to your satisfaction, you can
|
||
erase the plaintext file, leaving only the incomprehensible coded file
|
||
on disk. Decryption is accomplished by repeating the process; the coded
|
||
bytes are XORed against the key, producing the original file again.
|
||
|
||
If the numbers in the key file are sufficiently random and the key
|
||
file is longer than the text being encoded, XORcrypt is similar to a
|
||
"one-time pad" cipher. In a best-case scenario, all possible bytes in
|
||
the encrypted file occur with nearly-equal frequency and the cipher is
|
||
theoretically unbreakable. (Of course the key file needs to be
|
||
physically secured and/or encrypted by some other encryption scheme.)
|
||
|
||
Since the key is a textfile of numbers, it could be disguised as a
|
||
list of statistics or something. Key files can also be entered by hand
|
||
using a text editor program, in case you want a custom-made key file,
|
||
say for example one that contains a perfectly even mix of all integers
|
||
from 1 to 255.
|
||
|
||
BASIC, as a programming language, has the advantage of being
|
||
available on almost all personal computers. It has the disadvantage of
|
||
running with amazing slowness. The version shown here was written on a
|
||
Macintosh using MicroSoft BASIC, and processes about 3000 characters per
|
||
minute. (If anyone gets inspired to translate this into C or Pascal,
|
||
send me the source code and I'll print it.) To port the program to other
|
||
computers, start by deleting lines 10, 14, 110, 122, 142, and 161.
|
||
Then add the following lines:
|
||
110 INPUT "Filename";FIN$
|
||
122 INPUT "Filename";KEYN$
|
||
|
||
If your computer's version of BASIC doesn't have an XOR function,
|
||
you'll have to define it using DEF FN or a subroutine. Functions like
|
||
WHILE-WEND, DEFINT, LOCATE and INPUT$(1, #1) are not available in all
|
||
versions of BASIC, so some improvising may be required. Since the key
|
||
file is stored in a memory array, you may encounter a different size
|
||
limit on your computer; adjust lines 16 and 320 accordingly.
|
||
|
||
5 REM XORcrypt - public domain 1989 - a Tangerine Network production
|
||
10 WINDOW 1,"",(8,28)-(505,332),2:TEXTFONT 0:TEXTSIZE 24
|
||
12 CLS:PRINT CHR$(13):PRINT TAB(11) " XOR Crypt"
|
||
14 MENU 2,0,0,"":MENU 3,0,0,"":TEXTSIZE 12
|
||
16 OPTION BASE 1:DEFINT A-D:DEFINT K:DIM K(30002), A(5000):WIDTH 65
|
||
18 PRINT:PRINT:GOSUB 3000
|
||
20 CLS:PRINT
|
||
21 PRINT TAB(10) "E=encrypt D=decrypt G=generate 'key' file Q=quit"
|
||
25 X$=INKEY$:IF LEN(X$)<1 THEN GOTO 25
|
||
30 IF X$="Q" OR X$="q" THEN CLS:BEEP:SYSTEM
|
||
31 IF X$="e" THEN X$="E"
|
||
32 IF X$="d" THEN X$="D"
|
||
35 IF X$="E" OR X$="D" THEN GOTO 100
|
||
36 IF X$="G" OR X$="g" THEN GOTO 300
|
||
40 GOTO 25
|
||
100 WAY$=X$:CLS:PRINT
|
||
105 IF WAY$="E" THEN CLS:PRINT TAB(12) "Select a file to encrypt...."
|
||
106 IF WAY$="D" THEN CLS:PRINT TAB(12) "Select a file to decrypt...."
|
||
110 IF WAY$="E" THEN FIN$=FILES$(1, "") ELSE FIN$=FILES$(1, "XORC")
|
||
113 IF LEN(FIN$)<2 THEN PRINT "*ABORT*":GOSUB 3000:GOTO 20
|
||
120 CLS:PRINT
|
||
121 PRINT TAB(12) "Select a 'key' file...."
|
||
122 KEYN$=FILES$(1,"TEXT")
|
||
129 C=0
|
||
130 OPEN KEYN$ FOR INPUT AS #1:PRINT "Reading 'key' file."
|
||
131 WHILE NOT EOF(1)
|
||
132 INPUT #1, KN:C=C+1:K(C)=KN
|
||
133 WEND
|
||
135 K(C+1)=-1:CLOSE #1:CLS
|
||
140 IF WAY$="E" THEN PRINT:INPUT "File name for encrypted data";OUTN$
|
||
141 IF WAY$="D" THEN PRINT:INPUT "File name for decrypted data";OUTN$
|
||
142 CALL OBSCURECURSOR
|
||
145 OPEN FIN$ FOR INPUT AS #1
|
||
146 OPEN OUTN$ FOR OUTPUT AS #2
|
||
147 CLS:PRINT "The files have been opened. Please wait."
|
||
148 M=1
|
||
149 LOCATE 10,1:PRINT "Bytes processed so far:"
|
||
150 WHILE NOT EOF(1)
|
||
151 A$=INPUT$(1, #1):REM get one byte of text
|
||
152 A=ASC(A$+CHR$(0))
|
||
153 B=A XOR K(M)
|
||
154 M=M+1:IF K(M)=-1 THEN M=1
|
||
155 PRINT #2, CHR$(B);
|
||
156 D=D+1:IF D/100=INT(D/100) THEN LOCATE 10, 25:PRINT D
|
||
159 WEND
|
||
160 CLOSE #1:CLOSE #2
|
||
161 IF WAY$="E" THEN NAME OUTN$ AS OUTN$, "XORC"
|
||
200 PRINT:PRINT "select: <R>un again or <Q>uit"
|
||
201 CH$=INKEY$:IF LEN(CH$)<1 THEN GOTO 201
|
||
202 IF CH$="R" OR CH$="r" THEN RUN
|
||
203 IF CH$="Q" OR CH$="q" THEN BEEP:CLS:SYSTEM
|
||
300 CLS
|
||
301 PRINT:PRINT "Generate 'key' file...":PRINT
|
||
302 INPUT "Filename for output";N$
|
||
303 OPEN N$ FOR OUTPUT AS #1
|
||
304 PRINT:PRINT "To increase the randomness of the output,"
|
||
305 PRINT "press keys on the keyboard at random intervals."
|
||
306 PRINT "Press the 'Q' key to conclude the operation."
|
||
307 RANDOMIZE TIMER
|
||
308 LOCATE 12,1:PRINT "Number of random integers:"
|
||
309 LOCATE 12, 30:PRINT "1"
|
||
310 X=INT(RND*255):IF X<1 OR X>254 THEN GOTO 310
|
||
320 C=C+1:IF C>30000 THEN PRINT "Finished.":GOTO 390
|
||
330 IF C/15=INT(C/15) THEN PRINT #1, X:GOTO 360
|
||
340 PRINT #1, X ",";
|
||
350 IF TIMER/7=INT(TIMER/7) THEN GOSUB 2000:GOTO 370
|
||
360 H$=INKEY$:IF LEN(H$)<1 THEN GOTO 310
|
||
370 RANDOMIZE TIMER:LOCATE 12,30:PRINT C
|
||
380 IF H$="Q" OR H$="q" THEN GOTO 390 ELSE GOTO 310
|
||
390 PRINT #1, CHR$(13):CLOSE #1
|
||
391 PRINT "Mission accomplished."
|
||
392 GOSUB 3000:GOTO 20
|
||
2000 FOR Z=1 TO X:NEXT:RETURN
|
||
3000 FOR Z=1 TO 2500:NEXT:RETURN
|
||
|
||
|
||
------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
||
------------------------------- RETORTS --------------------------------
|
||
---------- audience contributions to the distillation process ----------
|
||
------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
||
|
||
|
||
Dear Rick,
|
||
|
||
I agreed with the particulars of virtually everything in _The_
|
||
_Alembic_ (except for the anti-intellectual, anti-educational crap on
|
||
page 20), yet on a more abstract plane I am dissatisfied with the
|
||
mentality dominant in the magazine. The message seems to be: "I am too
|
||
smart to participate in any social institution. I can pretend that I
|
||
live in a vacuum, self-determined, immune from the brainwashing that
|
||
holds all the suckers in the world in bondage except my fellow elitist
|
||
buddies and me." People who think like this think they are smart, yet
|
||
this view is as socially determined as any other. It is not a rare
|
||
view; in fact, it is characteristic of many subcultures consisting of
|
||
alienated individualist middle class white males. This elitist phil-
|
||
osophy is itself part of the status quo: such individuals never change
|
||
anything, since they show no interest in educating anyone outside of
|
||
their own race and social class, particularly those who have been
|
||
deprived of the very educational opportunities they take for granted.
|
||
|
||
We can look forward to future "merciless attacks" on everything
|
||
"that the average ignoramus takes for granted." You say you are "open
|
||
to non-dogmatic material from anywhere on the political spectrum." You
|
||
say that you hold no kind of "ism" and that you tend not to respect
|
||
those who do.
|
||
|
||
I find this attitude both dishonest and morally irresponsible.
|
||
Having no philosophy is impossible. You most certainly do have a
|
||
philosophy, and a very typical, philistine one at that. You think that
|
||
you are not a dupe, but you are, a dupe of nihilism.
|
||
|
||
...Since you are open to the entire political spectrum, are you
|
||
open to publishing articles promoting racism and fascism? Do you think
|
||
that such views are deprived of a public forum (eg. on the talk shows)?
|
||
Is the establishment inimical to such views?
|
||
|
||
If you are really offended by liberal hypocrisy, if you are worried
|
||
about totalitarianism and oppression as are some of your writers, if
|
||
you really want to defend the human mind and the quality of life from
|
||
degradation, then you will have to take sides. You can't promote
|
||
fascism and anti-fascism at the same time. Nor intellectualism and
|
||
anti-intellectualism. You ought to think about what philosophies and
|
||
isms make possible an allegiance to critical and rational thinking and
|
||
which philosophies will destroy it. And what social groups one should
|
||
ally oneself with in pursuing such aims. Many smartasses who brag about
|
||
their independent superior minds have hopped on board the fascist
|
||
philosophy of Ayn Rand. Do you want to go that way? Maybe the ignorant
|
||
masses you so despise have some objective interests in common with
|
||
yours.
|
||
|
||
Now here are my detailed comments on the magazine.
|
||
|
||
"Feminism as Fascism." Bob Black's analysis is almost 100% correct.
|
||
Yet his title is too imprecise, as feminism or women's liberation
|
||
encompasses a whole spectrum of political ideologies and stances. He
|
||
should have used 'radical feminism' (in quotes) in the title. The
|
||
particular brand of radical feminism discussed is in fact the creation
|
||
of an elite group of middle-class intellectual women (and men) and does
|
||
not represent the material interests of the vast majority of women who
|
||
really do suffer oppression. Black should have more clearly defined the
|
||
distinctions in the women's movement and especially the middle class
|
||
nature of feminist ideology.
|
||
|
||
The middle class in general lives in a vacuum and is incapable of
|
||
acknowledging conflicting class interests. Hence middle class white
|
||
women (and I do mean white) who themselves have ambitions of advancing
|
||
in the corporate world are not likely to emphasize social class in
|
||
their discussions of power: it is more convenient to speak of
|
||
'patriarchy', of women vs. men in the abstract. Hence bourgeois white
|
||
females eager to gain the opportunity to exploit workers (and who love
|
||
to complain about discrimination suffered by white women but never by
|
||
black people) are not likely to be honest about just who has and has not
|
||
power. And in the universities, the feminist metaphysicians promote the
|
||
same antirational, antiscientific, and antihumanist attitudes as do the
|
||
ruling elite in general. One prominent feminist philosopher of science
|
||
referred to the _Principia_Mathematica_ as "Newton's rape manual." (I
|
||
am getting sick of white women's rape fantasies.) I have publicly
|
||
denounced such thinking, arguing that it will lead us to fascism. Hence
|
||
I love Black's statement "'When God was a Woman' it was already
|
||
necessary to abolish her." Unfortunately, Black has been keeping
|
||
company with anarchist riffraff, so his bad experiences serve him right.
|
||
He still has not relieved himself of his anarchist heritage: "to be a
|
||
Trotskyist or a Jesuit is, in itself, to be a believer, that is to say
|
||
a chump." Anyone who so bad-mouths anyone holding a systematic
|
||
philosophy is himself a fool.
|
||
|
||
"Flush the family" had me in stitches. I largely agree with Smythe's
|
||
debunking. Yet there is still a lack of realism. Some people will
|
||
continue to have children (I vainly hope those who really fit that
|
||
vocation rather than acting out of blind habit), and those children will
|
||
have to be brought up somehow -- letting them run wild is just as
|
||
reactionary as authoritarianism. A practical alternative to the nuclear
|
||
family will necessitate mass organization to realize support for the
|
||
welfare of children (nuclear family or no) who are being crushed to
|
||
death under Reagan-Bush-ism.
|
||
|
||
"The Power of Negative Thinking" is quite correct: ability is not
|
||
enough in the modern corporate bureaucratic form of organization --
|
||
attitude is, because "attitude" is now a necessary totalitarian form
|
||
of social control. You can't be trusted until you have been spayed.
|
||
You must be white, join the appropriate tennis and raquetball clubs,
|
||
and join the good old boys or you will never rise beyond the stray
|
||
middle management position. The argument unfortunately deteriorates
|
||
toward the end of the article with a stupid diatribe against all
|
||
organization. More infantile anarchism.
|
||
|
||
"The coming food crisis in America" -- great article!
|
||
|
||
"Methods as message, or, religion as rabies." As a militant atheist,
|
||
I love this article. I would love to translate this article into
|
||
Esperanto and publish it in the magazine I founded, _Ateismo_.
|
||
|
||
"Language and liberty" is an important topic -- unfortunately this
|
||
extract lacks detail. I would like to see the author's ideas fleshed
|
||
out. I don't know much about the situation in Bonanno's country, but
|
||
there is much to be considered here in the U.S. Differences in language
|
||
are also tied up with differences in access to information (the most
|
||
crucial problem). The language differences between social groups have
|
||
existed for thousands of years. How is the situation different now?
|
||
How are the languages of the different social groups faring these days?
|
||
In the U.S. the great divide is the language of the professional classes
|
||
vs. the language of the ghetto. Are either or both of these language
|
||
varieties and their mutual comprehensibility deteriorating?
|
||
|
||
In conclusion, the magazine has some good material, but its
|
||
limitations exemplify the childish and intellectually vacuous heritage
|
||
of anarchism: the political philosophy of the self-indulgent, decadent,
|
||
escapist refuse of the middle class.
|
||
|
||
Sincerely,
|
||
|
||
Ralph Dumain
|
||
|
||
|
||
reply from Rick Harrison:
|
||
|
||
'Systematic philosophies' are philosophies of the System.
|
||
|
||
I would suggest that if you agreed with the vast majority of the
|
||
particulars in _Alembic_ #1, you have already made half the journey to
|
||
independent thought and the argument really concerns _attitude_
|
||
rather than facts. Instead of wondering about the "difficulties of
|
||
those who are afraid of being swallowed up in theoretical systems,"
|
||
you might investigate the difficulties of those who are afraid to let
|
||
go of such systems. Ideological systems, identified by words ending
|
||
with the suffix "-ism," generally serve as substitutes for religion,
|
||
and the arguments used in defense of the various 'isms are often no more
|
||
logical than those utilized by proponents of, say, Creationism.
|
||
|
||
|
||
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
|
||
|
||
|
||
Dear Alchemists,
|
||
|
||
I was surprised by your sympathetic treatment of the Loglan move-
|
||
ment evidenced in the article "Announcing Lojban." Loglan has been an
|
||
embarrassment to the artificial language movement because of its ad-
|
||
herents' factionalism and their tendency to make major alterations in
|
||
the grammar just when a few people thought they had learned it.
|
||
|
||
Loglan/Lojban is pretty lame compared to other artificial languages,
|
||
and I have to wonder why anyone would study it. It is ugly-looking and
|
||
ugly-sounding, structurally irrelevant to the everyday needs of human
|
||
communication, and riddled with inconsistencies. Those who write letters
|
||
to the editor of the language's newsletters repeatedly point out these
|
||
imperfections, and are repeatedly assured that obvious drawbacks should
|
||
be viewed instead as advantages. Loglan's most rabid promoters come off
|
||
sounding like computer programmers who excuse the defects in their work
|
||
with elaborate rationalizations of how "it's not a bug, it's a feature!"
|
||
|
||
Lojban, now the best-publicized faction of the logical language move-
|
||
ment, has several hundred rules of grammar. Its promoters try to excuse
|
||
this by saying the rules of English are even more numerous and haven't
|
||
been totally elucidated or enumerated. What they overlook, however, is
|
||
that Esperanto only has 16 official grammatical rules, and in practice
|
||
you only need to know about 30 rules to be able to construct Esperanto
|
||
sentences fairly fluently. There are some natural languages, like Malay,
|
||
which have a similarly small number of grammatical regulations. This
|
||
makes Loglan relatively non-competitive among language students who
|
||
would like to get "up and running" as quickly as possible in a new
|
||
language.
|
||
|
||
Loglan claims to be culturally neutral, but it is, in fact, derived
|
||
from the culture of nerds -- most of its advocates are sci-fi nuts,
|
||
computer-philes and other pale white creatures likely to be found wear-
|
||
ing eyeglasses and having college degrees. To actually create a cultur-
|
||
ally neutral language, I would suggest having a computer create words
|
||
from randomly-chosen phonemes. Then _everyone_ would be on an even
|
||
footing as far as recognizability of the lexicon is concerned. Loglan
|
||
and Lojban, however, have shredded the six "most popular" languages to
|
||
create hideous, Chicken-McNugget-style words. This is an acquiescence
|
||
to colonialism and imperialism; after all, how did those six languages
|
||
become so widespread? Mainly through the military subjugation of native
|
||
peoples and the extermination of hundreds of their natural languages.
|
||
|
||
Loglan is doomed to remain obscure because the movement provides no
|
||
compelling reason for people to inconvenience themselves by attempting
|
||
to learn such an irritating language. Some say Loglan provides a means
|
||
of testing the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, a linguistic theory stating that
|
||
the syntax and lexicon of a language constrain the thoughts of the
|
||
people who speak it. Yet, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has been thoroughly
|
||
debunked in the linguistic community, and can be easily shown to be
|
||
false simply by thinking about it. What is a 'thought'? It is a
|
||
combination of experience, information, images and meanings. The average
|
||
thought carries more data and covers more lexical territory than any
|
||
reasonably brief sentence could contain. Using language forces us to
|
||
distill and excerpt our thoughts down to a communicable form. It's like
|
||
trying to draw a picture using a typewriter instead of a pen; cute
|
||
pictures can be made out of asterisks and other typewriter characters,
|
||
but this will never come close to art, just as language will never come
|
||
close to conveying thought. Thought is much more powerful and freer-
|
||
ranging than language could ever hope to be; every poet knows this. But
|
||
the Loglanic Whorfists deny it.
|
||
|
||
Other proposed uses for Loglan include international communication
|
||
and the facilitation of human-to-computer communication. Since inter-
|
||
national communication is being taken care of just fine by languages
|
||
like English and French, it should be painfully obvious that people will
|
||
not trouble themselves to learn an unreal language like Loglan any more
|
||
than they did Esperanto. And strangely, or maybe not so strangely,
|
||
Loglanists have never acknowledged the ethical questions raised by
|
||
trying to constrain human language to make it accommodate the needs of
|
||
our retarded children, i.e. computers.
|
||
|
||
By practically making a religion out of predicate logic, Loglanists
|
||
have demonstrated a hatred of spontaneous human nature. This hatred is
|
||
quite apparent in the way they snarl about "irrationalities" and
|
||
"ambiguities" in natural languages. So they, like religionists, attempt
|
||
to apologize for being human by adhering to rigid behavioral guidelines
|
||
which will ultimately make them something less than human.
|
||
|
||
Sincerely,
|
||
|
||
Mark Tierisch
|
||
Public Ptomaine Software Co.
|
||
|
||
|
||
reply from Rick Harrison:
|
||
|
||
What "sympathetic treatment"?? I reprinted part of their pamphlet
|
||
and allowed them to expose themselves.
|
||
|
||
|
||
________________________________________________________________________
|
||
|
||
|
||
Whew! We made it through another issue without a single mention of
|
||
"alternative music" or other trendy fads which more cynical editors
|
||
use to capitalize on the sheep-like tendencies of their audiences.
|
||
Coming up in future editions of _The_Alembic_: Is music a drug? ~ The
|
||
ideology of "Star Trek - The Next Generation." ~ Henry David Thoreau's
|
||
most radical essay. ~ Is reality an authoritarian concept? ~ and more!
|
||
|
||
|
||
________________________________________________________________________
|
||
|
||
|
||
Thus endeth the second Alembic.
|
||
|
||
END OF FILE
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Another file downloaded from: NIRVANAnet(tm)
|
||
|
||
& the Temple of the Screaming Electron 415-935-5845
|
||
Just Say Yes 415-922-2008
|
||
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|
||
Cheez Whiz 408-363-9766
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||
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||
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||
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||
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||
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||
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||
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