Some folks here at caucus99percent have asked those of us who reject mainstream political assumptions to start explaining more clearly what we DO believe. This thread is my response to that. I'm going to use this thread to uncover and piece together my own political philosophy. I also would like this thread to provide a place for everybody's questioning of assumptions, the more fundamental the better--and not just assumptions I want to question! I hope that everybody feels free to bring their own questioning and imaginings to the table.

This week, I'm trying to provide a map of my political thinking before tackling specific issues, which I am very eager to do. I hope this week's essay will start to reveal enough of my basic assumptions to be going on with.

CAVEAT: I do not agree 100% with Hakim Bey's attitude toward cyberspace. Obviously. I'll talk about this next week.

Come outside.

Last week, I introduced the concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone, or TAZ:

Hakim Bey, born Peter Lamborn Wilson, was a Sufi, an anarchist, a poet and a theorist. He published a book in 1991 in which he described a particular social phenomenon he called a Temporary Autonomous Zone:

This is Wikipedia's definition of a Temporary Autonomous Zone, or TAZ:

The book describes the socio-political tactic of creating temporary spaces that elude formal structures of control. The essay uses various examples from history and philosophy, all of which suggest that the best way to create a non-hierarchical system of social relationships is to concentrate on the present and on releasing one's own mind from the controlling mechanisms that have been imposed on it.

The concept of TAZ underlies all my political thinking these days, mainly because the political reality we currently inhabit is totalitarian. If it is not totalitarian in the sense of hauling every dissident to prison, it is in the sense of disallowing any fact or point of view that does not fit into its vetted narratives. The powerful are trying to create an ideology without an outside. Reality will conform seamlessly to the narratives they set, with no facts or lived experience, and certainly no conceptions, allowed to overflow the bounds. Everything, past and present, will be interpreted as they say.

When the powerful try to eradicate dissent these days, they more often assassinate reputations than people; try to kill ideas more often than they kill humans. This is not to say that they don't kill lots of people. I don't want to understate the amount of killing done by the powerful; anyone who watched the Iraq war, witnessed police actions in Ferguson, or listened to a Hillary Clinton campaign speech knows how many people the powerful are willing to kill in pursuit of their goals. But when the eradication of dissent is their aim, these days they less often take out a hit on someone and more often discredit them or the ideas they're expressing. I guess they don't want to have to manage any more martyrs. It took them decades to domesticate the memory of Dr. King enough to eradicate this:

It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin...we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

Do you know how much money and time was invested in making sure people forgot that Dr. King said that? Neither do I, but I bet it would support several families for years.

I realize that the softer abuses of a totalitarian power--propaganda, character assassination, disinformation, the rewriting or erasure of history--pale in comparison to the torture and assassination that power engages in in its more direct moments. I think it's particularly difficult for Americans to understand what a grave concern this softer totalitarianism is. Americans have an unfortunate tendency to devalue anything that involves the mind or the spirit as either unreal or frivolous. Americans generally believe in two things: what you can put a hand on--or money. The answer to problems of the mind or spirit is to have a strong character. Then you won't have problems.

This Puritan mindset persists even in Americans who would be horrified to be identified with Cotton Mather, and in a world where opinion management is an industry and software exists that has the sole purpose of managing human perception, it leaves Americans peculiarly vulnerable to propaganda. We don't think the mind is very important, so we don't bother to protect it, and we don't much credit those who tell us something terrible is being done in the realm of ideas. Much less do we credit those who tell us we are being propagandized. We tend to take that as an insult, a statement that we have a weak character, because, you see, if you have a strong character, you don't have a problem.

Instead, we tend to think that those warning us are just Negative Nancys, weaklings, or losers. If they had strong moral characters they wouldn't have a problem. Quitters never win. In fact, the very act of quitting has come under moral attack recently. An NY Times article I hope to have time to discuss next week spends its entire time attacking, with some bile, literature that suggests that, in some cases, quitting a place, a business, a system, could be a good thing. Quitters are never good. You should be chanting Yes We Can.

Within the confines of that cultural belief system, it becomes difficult even to describe the nature of the injury inflicted by the powerful, even to ascertain what is being damaged, what is lost. Within a frighteningly short period of time, we have forgotten that anything has been lost at all.
A temporary autonomous zone is sometimes necessary just to express that we are losing something, just to say that we are being hurt. That was one of Occupy's main functions. Occupy was a TAZ, a remarkably widespread and vibrant one:

The Occupiers, in my view, forgot that they were in a TAZ and tried to establish a permanent hold on public space. As Bey says, any TAZ that attempts to claim physical space on a permanent basis will get "blown out of the water," and they did. If you want to see what Bey says about this, start the video at 9:00 minutes, but the whole discussion here is good:

If we need a TAZ so that we can tell the story of the injuries done us, we certainly need a TAZ in order to imagine alternatives to the status quo. The prefabricated talking points that serve as building blocks for the billionaires' horrendous version of history currently rise around all public discourse, cutting off the sun. Bey noted something similar as early as 2009, when he said that intentional communities and TAZ were even more important than they were when he first started thinking about them in the 80s. In the 80s, intentional communities and temporary autonomous zones represented a "third way" (neither work nor family), a way of "opting out of the spectacle" and evading the empty binary choices provided by the dominant culture. They were both a source of vibrant community and a sort of middle finger to the mainstream's established binaries:

By 2009, temporary autonomous zones and intentional communities represented not a "third way," but "the only other way:" the only alternative to the downpressing oligarchy. Bey said, "If there's a dialectic of resistance left in America, it would be only possible through intentional community."

Propaganda has become so endemic, message control so great, and the suppression of political dissent so comprehensive--to say nothing of the economic control that proceeds in tandem with that political suppression--that one practically has to establish an autonomous zone simply to disagree. Disagreement can range from disliking all the establishment political candidates to finding the entire political system fraudulent. It doesn't matter. The mainstream, or rather, the powerful who own and manage it, have adopted a zero tolerance policy for anything outside their preferred narratives. These days, the only opposition is managed.

This situation is complicated by the ugly nature of the narrative the powerful want us to accept as inevitable. Their version of history cannot bear the analysis of a rational mind, because its goals are horrendous, and rational analysis would show that in short order. Few people would embrace an aim that resulted in the extermination of 80% of life on the planet, because only a psychopath would consider anything worth that cost. This is why reason itself has been the subject of a decades-long character assassination. If you are willing to read a book by a political insider, Al Gore's The Assault on Reason, is a worthy exploration of this topic.

If reason were still the default method of determining right action, the policies of the last thirty-five years could never have been adopted. The aim of concentrating economic, political, and military control of the planet into very few hands would have been abandoned, if not for its intrinsic immorality, for its extraordinary, unjustifiable cost that would be inadmissible to a rational mind. Therefore reason had to go, leaving Americans, whether they liked it or not, on a long, strange trip.

It took decades completely to expel reason from mainstream American thinking, but from about 2010 onward, reason has only existed Outside the Asylum. Be careful: if you use reason for any extended period, you too will soon find yourself Outside the Asylum. You will know you are there when you say something that seems simple and obvious and the people to whom you're talking look at you like you just started speaking Tagalog. Unless of course you are in the Philippines, in which case they will look at you like you just started speaking Norwegian.

Once Outside, you must decide whether to embrace solitude, which can include retreating with a handful of friends or family, or to find a temporary or semi-permanent autonomous zone.

Next week: Gondolin