Church, Monotheism, Salvation and Welcome the the Machine

Pulled Derrick Jensen's Welcome to the Machine off the shelf this morning. I'm still thinking about the affects of monotheism on our psyches and the Christian fundamentalists I was listening to on the mail route last week. These two quotes will be useful to me some day, I think.

"The policy of the Catholic Church has been and continues to be Nulla salus extra ecclesium, which means 'Outside the Church there is no salvation.' This statement manifests not only the eradication of diversity that characterizes our culture but also inadvertently suggests the misery our culture leads to: outside this oppressive culture there is no need for salvation."[Pg.85, Welcome to the Machine]

"When those in power say that outside the Church there can be no salvation, they are lying. What they are really saying is that you better not escape, because if you are outside of this Church, your continued existence (and happiness) will shake their belief in the notion that the Church is good for them. Thus the one who can be saved only if you remain in the Church is the Church itself. If you leave, it ceases to be the arbiter of all meaning and the source of salvation. The salvation of the Church requires not only your belief and participation, but if you leave it requires your death, and beyond that, your annihilation. In industry, science, religion, and other institutions, diversity must be eliminated.[Pg.85, Welcome to the Machine]

Question answered

It’s funny how things work out sometimes. Less than a week ago I received this article through email. The author used this quote by Anatole France: “The law, in its majestic quality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”

After reading the article I remember asking what does France mean by this? I became busy with something else and didn't give the question much thought after that. Well, this morning, while paging through Derrick Jensen’s “Welcome to the Machine”, the question answered itself.

Jensen says, “Frances point was clear. The poor are not to be free or independent; the rich do not have to beg, as they control the levers of power, which are the privatization of profits and the externalization of costs, or the taking for themselves of whatever material benefits the machine provides, while forcing others (including especially the nonhuman world) to suffer the material consequences.” Pg. 134

I guess I’m on the right path.

The Machine

I've been reading Derrick Jensen's What We Leave Behind and Welcome to the Machine.

"Machinery is the new Messiah,"--Henry Ford

We live in a machine age. To maintain prosperity we must keep the machines working, for when machines are functioning men can labor and earn wages. The good citizen does not repair the old; he buys anew. The shoes that crack are to be thrown away. Don't patch them. When the car gets crotchety, haul it to the town's dump. Give to the ashman's oblivion the leaky pot, the broken umbrella, the clock that doesn't tick. To maintain prosperity we must keep those machines going."--Richardson Wright

Cold and Machines

Yesterday morning it was 25 below zero here in Northwestern Wisconsin. Our car didn't start. I cranked and cranked on it but it wouldn't fire. Pissed off, my dad and I finally towed it four miles down the road to his heated garage. A couple hours later I got it running and Annie was able to use it on the mail route in the afternoon (she is a part time rural route carrier for the U.S postal service).

But while I was sitting in the driver's seat of a car where the temperature inside the cab was well below zero, and being towed down the road in my pic-up being driven by my dad, I couldn't help but think about this quote by Chuang Tzu:

Whoever uses machines does all his work like a machine. He who does his work like a machine grows a heart like a machine, and he who carries the heart of a machine in his breast loses his simplicity. It is not that I do not know of such things; I am ashamed to use them.

False Choices and Voting

I can't help but think about the quote below when following the presidential race of 2008 and the Wisconsin state government state budget bill that hasn't been passed yet.

A classic device of power—and this is true whether we’re talking about emperors or perpetrators of domestic violence—is to present their victims with a series a false choices whereby no matter which the victims choose, the perpetrators win and the victims are further victimized. Nazis, for example, sometimes gave Jews the choice of different colored identity papers. Many Jews then focused, reasonably enough, on trying to figure out which of these colors would more likely save their lives. Of course the color of the identity papers made no material difference: the primary purpose of the choice was to divert victims’ attention from the task of unmaking the whole system that was killing them. In addition, this false choice co-opted victims into believing they were making meaningful choices. In other words, it got them on some level to take responsibility for what was being done with them. If I am killed it is my own fault because I chose the wrong color.

Now, would you rather vote Democrat or Republican? For which major corporation would you like to work? Which shopping mall has the best deals this
weekend? Do you want privacy or security? Derrick Jensen in Welcome to the Machine.

School Days Are Done Now

School Days are Done Now

Graduate, your school days are done now
What did you learn from those days?
Do you know what the system expects of you, Graduate?
Is it what you're heart desires, graduate?
There is a path waiting for you our there
Which one are you going to take?
What role are you going to play?
Clock ticking away
Death one step closer
The paths are waiting for you, graduate
Who are you?
How are you going to fit?
Control and coercion
Freedom and responsibility
Slave and master
Love and life
Machine and predictability
Spontaneity and play
Your free to choose, graduate
This is your day

-Me-

The basis of the panoptic sort is the remote, invisible, automatic and comprehensive sensing of personhood and the classification, evaluation, and sorting of individuals into groups for efficient training, rehabilitation, or elimination, based on their value to the economic and political elite who control the sorting.

The most highly valued are the rich and other rulers; They are given the primary fiscal benefits of the sorting system. Also high in the hieracrchy are those trusted strategists who can make sense of the vast information apparatus. Below them are technicians who are privy to the data by the surveillance machines. Below that are the people of the middle class who enjoy enough benefits so that their sense of privilege out weighs their nagging feeling of never quite reaching the top. (From the point of view of those who run the system, the value of the middle class is to provide the bulk of the surplus value.) Below the middle class are working-class people, who run and maintain the machines that produce consumer goods. They, too, enjoy enough benefits to keep them at work, to give them the illusion that they're living a good life, and to keep them from looking for a different way to live. And as Henry Ford saw early on, it is essential in an industrial system to give at least some of the workers enough pay to buy at least some of what they build, or else the system's inevitable production has no outlet. Toward the bottom of the value scale are those who are "of little substance who carry the sick, bury the dead, clean and do many vile and abject offices."* But even the unemployed and the homeless are of some value to the system. For example, they keep wages low by making sleeping under a bridge seem the only alternative to the treadmill of rent or mortgage. Below the value scale altogether are those who will not partake of the benefits of the system, because they provide the system's servants with alternative visions and lifestyles. Because the existence of these alternatives cannot be tolerated, lest the servants become restless, those who live these alternatives must be banished from the servants' view, or destroyed altogether. Welcome to the Machine pg. 112-113

Welcome to the real world, graduate.