More scattered notes to jot down for later.
- Hypocrisy presupposes what should be original good faith. Political propaganda is not hypocritical by nature, at least from the point of view of its wielder; its function is to act as a weapon. The user of the shaped charge is not a hypocrite for not wanting to be blown up: the explosion should travel a certain direction because the beneficiary has a specific interest.
- So a charge of hypocrisy becomes appropriate from the victim's point of view, that is, when the victim compares the stated aim of propaganda with its actual intent and actions and finds a discrepancy.
- Propaganda functions from the human willingness to trust and believe a legitimate authority, or an authority that wields power with permission.
- Propaganda necessarily draws from and sustains a guiding collective mythology. By its operation it truncates the victim's perception of reality. When a victim seeks to exercise his or her world model to make sense of conflict, the victim is forced to situate all dramas and affairs within a limited constellation of symbols.
- Fascism then, is created in part by this artificial limitation of the symbolic. All of that energy has to go somewhere: the fascist is forced to make use of an impoverished imagination to guide it.
- For the last couple of centuries, we've been privy to administrating our society by building machines. In sharply limiting the direction of travelling energy, they inevitably break down.
- Machines are initially conceived to save labor, but in this twilight era, we want machines because we don't want to deal with each other. We don't want to have to face our mutual dysfunction. Have a mediating procedure, or establish a dominant class so you can escape responsibility.
- Organic administration on the other hand heals, regenerates, corrects itself, as long as there is a steady supply of constituents. But maybe even this breaks down when it grows machinelike in repetition?
- Organic administration requires trust. The presence of baroque regulations and laws signifies a breakdown of trust, a breakdown triggered by the runaway of power accumulation in various connected bodies, which can only be set back again if every powerful individual within the bodies agrees to cede power to the powerless, or are forced to do so.
- Throughout history, you have political writers describing a given utopian ideal as organic in nature, and an undesirable, existing state of affairs as cold and mechanistic. It seems that a birth is organic, hot, and multitudinous, which proceeds to cool and calcify as it repeats, proceeding towards death. Curiously enough though, Soviet revolutionaries seemed to have rejoiced in a mechanistic existence, and then Enlightenment thinkers saw the machine as a sort of god.
- Part of the point of living therefore is responding to external flows of power, that is, of being subject to waves outside oneself and responding in kind.
- Hard individualism is close to pure ideology. In practice, impossible universally: we think and act in groups.
- I thank my lucky stars for other thinkers. Like natural phenomena, they too are nature. A thinker's thoughts bloom forth from his or her being as a flower from its seed and stalk. And so on for artists, musicians, coders, scientists, engineers, and etc.
- I used to think i could hide my inner storm, but I was very wrong. Just as the paranoiac is ironically wrong about hiding his thoughts from the invader. His thoughts are already there, they are part of who he is, the society he is a part of, and the world he exists in. Paranoid behavior produces the same reactions in others regardless of content, because the inside and outside are one. The same could be said of the schizoid.
