More Cold On Its Way

The thermometer let me know it's 30 degrees warmer than it was yesterday morning about this time. It sounds like it's going to be a brief warm up. It's not suppose to be much above zero while the Packers face the 49ers tomorrow. The Governor of Minnesota has already called off school statewide because of projected cold temperatures. More on the cold theme:

"Tom Brown once asked Stalking Wolf why the cold didn't bother him. Stalking Wolf answered, 'Because it's real.'"--Ran Prieur

Feeling Fortunate

The other day Ran Prieur posted this excerpt from an interview that Oprah did with author Cormac McCarthy. It resonated with me and I've thought about since.

Oprah: Are you just not interested in material [things]?

Cormac McCarthy: I'm really not. I mean, it's not that I don't like things. Some things are really nice, but they certainly take a distant second place to being able to live your life and do what you want to do. And I always knew that I didn't want to work.

Oprah: How did you manage that? Most people want to know how to do that.

McCarthy: Well, you have to be dedicated. But it was my Number One priority.

Oprah: That you didn't want to have a nine-to-five job?

McCarthy: Yeah. I thought, 'You're just here once, life is brief, and to have to spend every day of it doing what somebody else wants you to do is not the way to live it.' And I don't have any advice for anybody on how to go about that, except that if you're really dedicated you can probably do it.

Oprah: So you worked at not working.

McCarthy: Absolutely. Yeah, it was the Number One priority.

There isn't a day that goes by where I don't feel fortunate that I don't have to go to a 9 to 5 job. One of my biggest fears is to be systematically coerced back into doing it again. And I work hard at not having to do it again. I also have never really been interested in material things. Eric Hoffer was right when he said it takes leisure to mature.

Digging Up The Past

Why is it, that after listening to Rush Limbaugh for about ten minutes on the mail route yesterday, that I felt the need to turn on this computer and dig up this perspective that was written almost 3 years ago about President Obama:

"It is said that Obama is wearing a mask, being a deceiver, as if he carefully pretended to be a progressive activist for a quarter of a century because a time traveler from the future told him that would get him elected president in 2008 so he could pursue his secret right wing globalist agenda. "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss" -- but it's hard to imagine two presidents more different than Obama and Bush. The fact that the country is moving the same direction under each of them should tell us something else: the president is not the boss. Obama has never worn a mask -- Obama is the mask, and not a very good one. It has never been more obvious that America is an ossified dying empire with a suicidal inertia that no leader or movement can stop. If Sarah Palin, Dennis Kucinich, or Carrot Top were president, the system that the president pretends to run would still be bailing out banks and insurance companies, escalating wars, hiding atrocities, and generally chugging along to its ruin."--Ran Prieur, December 14, 2009

It's Already Happened Once

This excerpt has given me something to think about before bed:

"Our culture of expansion and achievement has projected its own mythology onto the universe, giving it a spectacular beginning and a linear progression to some kind of end. If, instead, the universe has always existed, then anything that could possibly be done has already been done an infinite number of times. If it's possible for you to win a Nobel Prize, then if you go far enough back, there's a world exactly like this one where you already did it. So there's no point doing anything just to accomplish it, only to enjoy it."--Ran Prieur

Nature and Understanding

Putting together some ideas from others here. The other day I posted a quote by Ran Prieur in which he paraphrased the Tao Te Ching. Ran wrote: "This reminds me of a verse from the Tao Te Ching, which I would paraphrase as: 'When you lose touch with the Tao, there is nature; when you lose touch with nature, there is human morality; when you lose touch with human morality, there is law.'"

I was paging through Daniel Quinn's "If They Give You Lined Paper Write Sideways" and found this quote: "The received wisdom [Of our culture] is that such a thing as Nature EXISTS, that it is a veridical entity out there--as real and substantial as the US Congress or the Roman Catholic Church--enjoying a separate existence from our own. This is the entity people are thinking of when they say that they 'love Nature' or would like to be 'closer to Nature.'"(Pg.79) He then goes on to say later on in the dialogue, "The distinction between 'us' and 'it' [Nature] is a cultural construct, and a very old one."(Pg.80)

As a culture, we've lost touch with alot more then just the Tao. The gulf between mind and matter is vast...

Caught My Attention

This quote from Ran Prieur's blog caught my attention:

"This reminds me of a verse from the Tao Te Ching, which I would paraphrase as: 'When you lose touch with the Tao, there is nature; when you lose touch with nature, there is human morality; when you lose touch with human morality, there is law.'"

Some day soon I'm going to pick up an interpretation of the Tao Te Ching.

Obama and Politics

Ran Prieur has had some really insightful political posts on December 14th, 15th, and 17th. I especially like this part:

Obama's moral failure was running for president in the first place. He should have known he was not going to be able to keep his campaign promises, and knowing that, he should not have made them, and then there's no point in running. But you know who also runs for president? Ralph Nader, Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul. They are all feeding the lie, and they probably believe it themselves, that the Emperor rules the Empire, and not the other way around.

Pushing Boundries

I’m frustrated.

I have been following Ran Prieur’s posts about money and the economy. They’re amazing. A few thoughts come to mind after reading them: Most people never have or never will learn about this in or out of school, or if they do they will never see the value in it. As Ran says:

Specifically, I don't expect one in ten economists to agree that interest causes inflation, because interest is to economists as water is to fish. Because of their training, they are simply unable to imagine a world without it.

Another thing that I hear Ran saying is that the whole idea of borrowing money and being expected to pay back more than what you borrowed is one of the main problems with our economic system.

It's true that the payment of interest is now only a minor part of the growing money supply, but he misses the deeper issue: without the idea of interest, the custom that borrowers pay back more than they borrowed, banks would have no incentive to loan money, and banks as we know them would not even exist.

Can you imagine a world without banks?

I picked up my local newspaper yesterday. I rarely ever do this because I don’t have much time to read, and when I do have the time to read I’m either reading books or reading articles like Ran’s on the internet. But what I fantasized about before picking up the paper was seeing an article in the Readers Opinion column talking about alternative money systems like demurrage currency and the Brakteaten money system. After all, those money systems appeal to someone imagining a money system that is not driven by the idea of interest. To my mind, using those money systems would be one of many practical solutions to the economic and other problems we are facing.

Well, I didn’t notice any mention of the demurrage currency or the Brakteaten money system. Perhaps a lack of imagination is the problem. Maybe there was no mention of this because those alternative money systems are still blind spots to most of us, perhaps we need to shine more light on them.

That last thought leads me to an image of John Trudell in Trudell: The Movie sitting in a chair talking about how amongst us there is just not much clear and coherent thought about the problems we are facing. He’s right. In my day-to-day life outside of the internet no one really talks about the problems we are facing, and if they do the conversation doesn't last long. If we’re not going to talk about them we’re surely not going to think about them.

That's why I'm frustrated. I know a better world is possible but we're not close to yet.

Teaching and Building

We're in the process of building a cordwood house right now, and I'm interested in the methods of teaching tracking and nature awareness through mentoring. So, I think this quote by Ran Prieur is absolutely essential to keep in mind for both of these activities.

In hindsight, it would have been better for my hut-building project if I'd never read any books about building, or accepted any technical advice... because instructions destroy motivation. The best teachers understand this, and don't instruct their students at all but seduce them into figuring things out on their own. How-to books, nine times out of ten, are not an aid in doing but a substitute for doing -- the spiritual energy gets burned up in the imagining. And now I'm almost at a dead end, because so many ways of building have been killed for me by reading about them. The only way I can proceed is to do something that (as far as I know) is totally new.

The Heroes Journey

This is going to be sort of a vent and journal entry.

The Heroes Journey: I don’t want to follow the prescribed paths that have been laid out for me by this culture. And I’m really surprised more people don’t feel this way.

Reading other peoples accounts (missionaries, anthropologists, pioneers) of how other cultures lived it’s pretty obvious this culture is pretty pathetic. Most of us have to pay taxes just to live on land. Most of us spend 13 years of our life in a school building learning information we don’t need or want to learn. Most of us work at a job that is so monotonous and mind-numbing that we have to drug ourselves just get through the process. Most of us have to buy and eat foods that have been poisoned with pesticides and herbicides that will eventually give us cancer. Most of us contribute to an economic system that is making the planet uninhabitable for future generations. Most of us will have to use all the assets we accumulated at the job we hated to pay for medicines and housing in our old age (Hell, some of us won’t get the chance to watch out assets dwindle away in our old age. We’ll die before that happens).

This culture really is a death trip. Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”

There I said it. It’s documented for the world to see. Most people won’t allow themselves ever to say it.

It’s going to be a tough journey. But I won’t go down those prescribed paths. And this isn’t going to be a selfish journey. I would like to see as many people as possible take the heroes journey and reject the prescribed paths too.

Ran Prieur writes: For me, the point of dropping out is not just to selfishly escape while others are still suffering. The point is to get myself in a position from which I can fight better and build the foundation for a society where everyone's free. This world is full of people with the skills and knowledge to build paradise, but they can't even begin, because they would lose their jobs. The less money you need, the more powerful you become.

Ishmael was the catalyst for this journey. It showed me there are other ways to be outside this cultural prison’s walls.

See you on the other side.

117 Months

I suppose you could call this a journal entry.

For 117 months out of my childhood I had to sit in a classroom for close to eight hours a day. I didn’t have a choice about this; it was the law of the State of Wisconsin. And my parents couldn’t home school me because they were wage slaves.

I’m 32 years old now. And now that I’m in my thirties I’m really starting to realize and wake up to the effects of that 13 year process of schooling. Ran Prieur puts this well here:

I think the answer is that power isn't actually being taken but being blocked, in nonhumans by simply killing them and in humans by socialization that begins in infancy, punishing people for having a will of their own, for being aware, for channeling any bottom-up power, until by age 30 most of us are barely alive, almost as Philip K. Dick wrote: "Not a person but a sort of walking, hiding symptom of their way of life."

I’m reading A Language Older Than Words probably for about the fourth time. The book just keeps getting better the more times I read it. These two small sections jumped out at me this time around.

In order for us to maintain our way of living, we must, in a broad sense, tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves. It is not necessary that the lies be particularly believable. The lies act as barriers to truth. These barriers to truth are necessary because without them many deplorable acts would become impossibilities. Truth must at all costs be avoided. When we do allow self-evident truths to percolate past our defenses and into our consciousness, they are treated like so many hand grenades rolling across the dance floor of an improbably macabre party. We try to stay out of harm’s way, afraid they will go off, shatter our delusions, and leave us exposed to what we have done to the world and to ourselves, exposed as the hollow people we have become. And so we avoid these truths, these self-evident truths, and continue the dance of world destruction. pg.2

He had a point. Newspapers lying to serve their own interests go back as far as newspapers themselves. The turn-of-the-century historian Henry Adams put it as clearly as possible” The press is the hired agent of a monied system, and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where the interests are involved.”

Newspapers manifest the culture as a whole. Just as it is true that any father who would crush a child’s will would not be able to speak of it honestly, so, too, a culture that is snuffing out life on the planet would necessarily lie and dissemble to protect itself from the truth. Environmentalists lie, industrialists lie, newspapers lie. Parent’s lie, children lie. We all lie, and we are all afraid. Afraid to not know what is going on, and even more afraid of finding out. The opposite is true as well. Honest discourse is the first and most important step in stopping destruction. Pg.68

This is one of the main reasons I had to sit through all those hours in a classroom being cut off from beautifual and dynamic community of life. It was to perpetuate the lies!

Now I’m going to go sit quietly in the woods and listen to birdsong. Something I should have been doing over twenty years ago, or at least playing out there.

Why oh why wasn’t there someone around in my community to offer something like an Invisible school?

I hate this culture.

When I Grow Up

I'm 32 years old. And looking back to when the question started being asked of me of, "What do you want to do when you grow up?" My answer would've been that I want to help people escape from our cultural prison*. And to help me make my case I would've dug up these question and answers with Ran Prieur.

1.Question: Dropping out is elitist because not everyone can do it.

Ran Prieur: People who make this criticism are failing to grasp the basic situation. This society is a prison. If we're all in prison, and you have a chance to escape, do you refuse on the grounds that not everyone can escape? If you find yourself in an unusually thin-walled cell with good digging tools, you have a moral obligation to escape -- and then to come back and help others escape. That's the key, and the difference between what I call "dropouts" and the elite. The elite don't want us to be free because they depend on our enslavement. I never stop fighting to get people free even when it goes against my shallowest interests. I want my friends to quit their jobs, even though they'll have to move out of their places where I now sleep free on the couch. Life will get more challenging but I'll have closer allies.

2. Question: Isn't it hypocritical, or contradictory, to use the resources of a society you despise?

Ran Prieur: No. What's wrong with taking advantage of something you despise? If you were in a prison camp, would it be hypocritical or contradictory to steal food from the guards? To find ways to avoid forced labor but still eat? If you're Frodo in Mordor, do you refuse to disguise yourself in an orc's uniform because orcs are bad?We are in Mordor. We are in a big prison camp[*] that's very subtle. As I said in the essay: it's not about being pure or avoiding guilt -- it's about getting free. If you're a swallow, living in the woods, and they cut down your beloved woods and put up a bunch of barns, what do you do? You live in a barn! Scavenging is a temporary tactic, an adaptation to this wasteful society. When we can't scavenge, we'll adapt in other ways, surf whatever wave keeps us free.

3. Question: Hey, you preach about separating from the system, but you're on the internet!

Ran Prieur:See the swallow metaphor above. The reason to avoid connections to the system is to maintain autonomy, not to avoid guilt. So I'll use any by-product or resource I can, as long as there few or no strings attached. I'll especially use a resource like the internet, a powerful tool to find allies and to transform human consciousness. As William Kötke says, not only is it OK to use the resources of the present system to build the next one, ideally all its resources would be used that way.For me, the point of dropping out is not just to selfishly escape while others are still suffering. The point is to get myself in a position from which I can fight better and build the foundation for a society where everyone's free. This world is full of people with the skills and knowledge to build paradise, but they can't even begin, because they would lose their jobs. The less money you need, the more powerful you become.

*Daniel Quinn talks a lot about our cultural prison in his trilogy of: Ishmael, My Ishmael and The Story of B.

*To learn more about why Ran is calling our society a prison camp, I would recommend reading The Culture of Make Believe, by Derrick Jensen. This book will forever change the way you see this system that we are a part of.

Advice

I really hate the effects schooling has on most people. And if I had the chance to put together a small booklet or pamphlet explaining why school is what it is I 'd include this advice Ran Prieur gave to a 19 year old college freshman on Feb. 20th.

I really like this part: If you're not going into debt, college isn't so bad. The main thing you're learning is not the content of the classes, but how to think and act like an "educated" person. For that reason, college is much more valuable for lower class people than for higher class people who already know how to act like that.

Evil

In A Language Older than Words, Derrick Jensen said something like hell is when one forgets that all life is interdependent. Welcome to our culture. Anyway, Ran Prieur had what I thought was a really good definition of what evil is on his blog yesterday.

My definition of evil is a compulsive withdrawal or reversal of empathy. Empathy is simply the extension of the sense of "self." The root of evil is in the original splitting of the One Mind into many perspectives, which, I'm guessing, was done to create free will and surprise. So, when you have the option to move back toward the One, to expand your sense of "self" from, say, your material wealth to your body, or from your body to the bodies and feelings of the people around you, and you refuse, and that refusal becomes compulsive, that's what we call evil.

What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire

This film looks like it is going to be one of the best I've watched in a long time. You can watch the trailers HERE.

VisionQuest Pictures presents a Storkboy Film WHAT A WAY TO GO LIFE AT THE END OF EMPIREA middle class white guy comes to grips with Peak Oil, Climate Change, Mass Extinction, Population Overshoot and the demise of the American Lifestyle.

What is it doing to us as thoughtful human beings as we face the overwhelming challenges of:

• Dwindling fossil fuel reserves?
• Critically degraded ecosystems?
• A changing climate?
• An exploding global population?
• Teetering global economies?
• An unstable political climate?
• And what is it doing to the rest of the life on this planet?

Featuring interviews with Daniel Quinn, Derrick Jensen, Jerry Mander, Chellis Glendinning, Richard Heinberg, Thomas Berry, William Catton, Ran Prieur and Richard Manning, What a Way to Go will look at the current global situation and ask the most important questions of all:

• How did we get here?
• Why do we keep destroying the planet? and
• What do we truly want?
• Can we find a vision that will empower us to do what is necessary to survive, and even thrive, in the coming decades?