What is to be Done?
How to get along and also make revolution
Are you too loud? Too rowdy? Get too loose sometimes?
"What is to be Done" is the name of the novel by N. G. Chernyshevsky,
which served as the manifesto of the 19th Century Russian Nihilists.
It served the same purpose to them that "On the Road" did for the Beatniks,
or "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" did for the Hippies, in later times.
It was a unifying literary statement serving to define a secular subculture,
consisting in each case of self-consciously revolutionary youth.
From the "New Men" of 1846 to the "New Left" of 1964, and to the present,
these movements are largely continuous and identical.
They collectively are the rebel intellectual tradition of modern times.
I assert with my predecessors that ours are the best minds humanity can produce.
We have the greatest breadth of vision as the eyes of our time,
so we are the ones who can really see what's going on.
Unanimously, we report that we're not too happy about what we see.
As the leading edge of human consciousness, we are acutely aware
that we need to represent more than just the interests of our own species.
Responsibility and honor require us to peal out the alarm of danger to all of life.
That is what we have all seen and that is what we have all told.
We have diagnosed a malignant pathology in the way we humans have structured our public life.
Note that this is our observation and not our opinion.
Our awareness subsumes the Western intellectual tradition,
so we have knowledge of the requirement for objectivity in the accuracy of our analysis.
We've been to the finest schools, where we were the brightest,
and we left them because they were hoplessly slow.
We know all that.
When we tell you we see this world is sick and dying you had better damn well listen.
We report with extreme precision and insight.
As it happens we know what the fuck we are talking about.
The previous habit of our societies to respond by attacks on us personally,
vilifying our preferences and tastes, slandering our intellectual integrity,
isolating us into sets of individuals, and persecuting us with death, pain and prison,
I'm deleting that option.
You'd better get over it in a hurry.
This old world is going into emergency mode.
We intend to show every person who has the brains to care
what is wrong with the world.
Matters of opinion, bias, persuasion, politics, subjectiveness and of agenda
will be swept all away by the stunning magnitude of first-hand realization
of the absolute concrete reality of our problem and the threat it presents.
It's true.
That's the problem.
Social pressures such as guns and handcuffs have forced us heretofore
to operate our communications in clandestine mode.
Anarchist speech has contained the surrealistic elements
of concept encoding adopted for our self-preservation in hostile society.
Thus we became aware of our confraternity with secret religious movements and orders,
who use the same metalanguage for the same reasons.
To sustain our communication while preserving our security,
we had to minimize the exposure of certain elements of our knowledge,
requiring some indirection in our language.
As many of us were scholars, we realized our peculiar linguistic patterns
were distinguishing features of other active and extinct secret societies.
Our thought as anarchists runs along secular lines: we are strongly skeptical.
Yet our quest for echos of disestablishment thought
through the shadowed realms of history,
has shown us that prior mass movements,
with viewpoints we can claim as kin to our own,
could be found more readily in religious guise.
Some anarchists will suavely deny any connection with Hermetic religious tradition.
They will also disavow association with secret revolutionary acivities,
simplistically claiming open agitation as their only endeavor.
These statements are formalisms, encoded concepts for the Statist environment.
Each of these anarchists, even some devout pacifists,
would find their places on the barricades at the instant of opportunity.
We know which of our brothers and sisters would be there for us.
We are not bewildered by the diversity of opinions and viewpoints among anarchists.
We can feel who's with us even while they're yelling denials.
It's all good, things will come together just right, watch it happen.
The Appearance of Paradox
"What is to be Done" is the name of the novel by N. G. Chernyshevsky,
which served as the manifesto of the 19th Century Russian Nihilists.
It served the same purpose to them that "On the Road" did for the Beatniks,
or "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" did for the Hippies, in later times.
It was a unifying literary statement serving to define a secular subculture,
consisting in each case of self-consciously revolutionary youth.
From the "New Men" of 1846 to the "New Left" of 1964, and to the present,
these movements are largely continuous and identical.
They collectively are the rebel intellectual tradition of modern times.
I assert with my predecessors that ours are the best minds humanity can produce.
We have the greatest breadth of vision as the eyes of our time,
so we are the ones who can really see what's going on.
Unanimously, we report that we're not too happy about what we see.
As the leading edge of human consciousness, we are acutely aware
that we need to represent more than just the interests of our own species.
Responsibility and honor require us to peal out the alarm of danger to all of life.
That is what we have all seen and that is what we have all told.
Note that this is our observation and not our opinion.
Our awareness subsumes the Western intellectual tradition,
so we have knowledge of the requirement for objectivity in the accuracy of our analysis.
We've been to the finest schools, where we were the brightest,
and we left them because they were hoplessly slow.
We know all that.
When we tell you we see this world is sick and dying you had better damn well listen.
We report with extreme precision and insight.
As it happens we know what the fuck we are talking about.
The previous habit of our societies to respond by attacks on us personally,
vilifying our preferences and tastes, slandering our intellectual integrity,
isolating us into sets of individuals, and persecuting us with death, pain and prison,
I'm deleting that option.
You'd better get over it in a hurry.
This old world is going into emergency mode.
We intend to show every person who has the brains to care
what is wrong with the world.
Matters of opinion, bias, persuasion, politics, subjectiveness and of agenda
will be swept all away by the stunning magnitude of first-hand realization
of the absolute concrete reality of our problem and the threat it presents.
It's true.
That's the problem.
to operate our communications in clandestine mode.
Anarchist speech has contained the surrealistic elements
of concept encoding adopted for our self-preservation in hostile society.
Thus we became aware of our confraternity with secret religious movements and orders,
who use the same metalanguage for the same reasons.
To sustain our communication while preserving our security,
we had to minimize the exposure of certain elements of our knowledge,
requiring some indirection in our language.
As many of us were scholars, we realized our peculiar linguistic patterns
were distinguishing features of other active and extinct secret societies.
Our thought as anarchists runs along secular lines: we are strongly skeptical.
Yet our quest for echos of disestablishment thought
through the shadowed realms of history,
has shown us that prior mass movements,
with viewpoints we can claim as kin to our own,
could be found more readily in religious guise.
Some anarchists will suavely deny any connection with Hermetic religious tradition.
They will also disavow association with secret revolutionary acivities,
simplistically claiming open agitation as their only endeavor.
These statements are formalisms, encoded concepts for the Statist environment.
Each of these anarchists, even some devout pacifists,
would find their places on the barricades at the instant of opportunity.
We know which of our brothers and sisters would be there for us.
We are not bewildered by the diversity of opinions and viewpoints among anarchists.
We can feel who's with us even while they're yelling denials.
It's all good, things will come together just right, watch it happen.
Anarchists are the only humans to achieve truly scientific objectivity.
In matters of society and culture, every other person is bound in invisible,
unacknowledged bias of culture and convention and tradition,
unknowing, swearing they're not, but skewed.
Anarchists do not have investments in the status quo.
They are uniquely liberated from the common perceptual distortions of society.
This is an immense intellectual empowerment.
As an example, follow this uncomplicated observation,
which could only derive from the anarchist's perceptual independence.
What is the most evil act of man?
Quantitatively and qualitatively, the greatest evil humans have ever done
was the imperialist conquest of Africa, the Americas, Australia and Oceana
by the Europeans.
No one but an anarchist could have the detatchment to make that simple observation.
Those dependent on Western or Westernized culture are blind to that obvious perception.
A reaction which starts with "But.." or "Yes, but..." betrays your subjectivity.
One element of humanity stole the birthright of the rest.
Robbery.
The white man's burden.
Burden of guilt, now it's done.
The culturally-biased excuse is that it made the world a better place.
False..
Western "Christendom" twisted the new possibility of worldwide information exchange,
these past five centuries, into an opportunity to steal.
The dellusion that its religion was superior was self-hypnosis.
The bewilderment you feel about human progress can be settled thus.
The world would be a much richer place today,
if all of the cultures thus repressed by European conquest
had been left to develop independently, without interference.
That is undeniable.
Now the rationale concerning progress:
There does exist a real principle of progress, meaning there is at least one true criterion
which qualifies as a positive determinant of human history,
and that is that communication will increase.
The general law of sapience seems to be that information increases.
That is a characterisic of life and its consciousness, with an inverse relation to entropy.
Let us examine what evil means to the anarchist.
Not only unfair, in the universal transactional sense,
but wrong. Wrong to an anarchist is more than merely an ethical judgment,
it means an error, an action detrimental to the interests of the species, and of life.
Were it not for European conquest in recent centuries,
the world would be in a better shape today.
There would be a greater diversity of cultures in the world,
giving a larger total information pool to enrich our concept formation
as we enter the current emergency situation in which we're fighting for life.
Our idea pool is severely diminished when we need all the ideas we can get.
The problem with a monoculture in genetics is that it's not robust.
A monocultural species, like the cheetah, has no fallback position genetically.
In an environmental extreme or other severe stress, monocultures are vulnerable
to instant extinction.
The fatal weakness in the Western culture is in its silent presumption of religion,
which may be generalized to monotheism.
In other words, rational dialog within a Westernized context
implicitly includes a background compatible with discourse among Christians,
or more broadly among monotheists.
This implicit understanding is broadened to allow for Deism, agnosticism, even atheism,
just as long as you understand that you are only considered rational on sufferance,
just as long as your ethical stance is compatible with monotheism,
and you understand that your quaint faith is merely tolerated,
by the main stream which remains stoutly monotheist,
as long as you keep it to yourself and don't rock the boat.
You can be any faith you like, as long as it's "monotheist-compatible".
On this issue, I have shown that monotheism is inextricably bound up
with the concept of infinity. The two concept are ingrown, inbred, inseperable.
I have shown in my Refutation of Infinity that infinity doesn't exist
in the observable universe, and by a simple derivation involving gravitation,
cannot exist in any physical universe.
Quite consciously and deliberately, I draw the corollary concerning monotheism,
making monotheism the one and only metaphysical belief structure
proved false by sheer logic.
Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.
An ideational monoculture is comparable to its genetic counterpart: it's not robust.
After the initial bloodletting, and the religious imperialism, finally the economic enfilade
completed the task of making the world a thoroughly Westernized place.
No person in this world can escape the bane of pervasive money valuation.
Only anarchists want to.
To the extent the world is a thoroughly Westernized place,
it is an ideational monoculture and is therefore not robust.
Analysis of Western society shows it is suseptible to delusion by self-hypnosis.
That is an undesirable trait under emergency conditions.
We've got a problem here, folks.
That is what white Christian men of European descent have left us with.
We are not in good shape to deal with a crisis.
We are not ready.
Nevertheless, the crisis is here.
Ready or not, it's time for us to fight for life.
The Western world persists in deluding itself.
It's like we're about to join battle with our troops hallucinating.
I'm one anarchist who isn't very happy about our prospects.
We told you we didn't like what we saw.
We told you it wasn't a matter of opinion.
Welcome to the real world.
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