“The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work... when you go to church... when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth” – Morpheus.
I may have appeared in the past as a classical anti-communist emerging from the swampy depths of the McCarthy era; continuing the struggle against political and religious extremism. Not so! I care little about the personal beliefs of any individual, providing of course that their adopted system does not seek to affect the lives of others in a detrimental fashion. The core truth about all modern political and governmental systems is that by their very nature they seek to manipulate the ‘people’ and this is as true of Communism as it is of Capitalism; political leaders of all persuasions maintain their lifestyles, authority, characteristics and dynamic by feeding on the energies of the populace.
I am not a political scientist. My views and opinions are all based on personal experience, and from an early age I disliked the political mainstream. I always viewed the politician as a blood-sucker, a manipulator, a base creature that needed recognition and popular assent to pursue his/her vain-glorious career to boost his/her petty and frivolous ego. Politicians maintain their dysfunctional, Babylonian empires through perfectly repackaged lies and deceptions… until everything begins to fray and fall apart from the burden of the nightmare that is bureaucracy and ever increasingly insane forms of indentured servitude. And so I automatically gravitated toward writers and political philosophers such as Henry David Thoreau;
“That government is best which governs not at all” and “Until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.”
My political allegiances hover (idealistically) between anarchism and a sort of tribal-feudalism. To me, democracy is only the illusion of power, where an individual is inspired to imagine that through the act of submitting a name on a piece of paper they have exercised something profoundly sacred. The government is a government; like a ship on a particular course… it cannot change itself, perhaps the captain can be replaced or exchanged for another, but it is still exactly the same vessel pursuing the originally designated destination. In these sorts of arguments I always seem to end up comparing the supervisory management of the modern world to the ‘Mutiny on the Bounty’ (I prefer the Hopkins/Gibson version) and in which, using the analogy of the ship as a micro-cosmic version of the state chaos ensues, the revolution deposes the dictator, as Captain Bligh says;
“The Royal Navy is not a humorous institution, sir, and insubordination is no laughing matter…Now the crew is deeply demoralized and I must accept, as every captain must, the inevitable and theoretical responsibility for that. The actual and immediate responsibility, however, I place on you, my fellow officers who met this crisis with lethargy, impudence and flagrant defiance, publicly uttered. And perhaps for that I am also to blame. I counted on strength of character which you do not possess. However, the cure for our predicament is discipline and I shall apply it with an even hand of course, but most where it is most required.”
Yet even as one power structure is disposed of, another is put in its place… perhaps in this case with one which makes its people destitute exiles on the lost island of their desire. The natural way is not always concerned with order, it need also not concern itself with governance that we as human beings have constructed it. It may perhaps be more construed as a form of anarchy, since much of it is beyond our will and appears to all concerned to be wholly without directorship. I step lightly here, for I am walking through the thickets of religious thought! Omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscience are all terms applied to dictatorial fascism, the ‘1984’ of George Orwell. Of course you are free to express yourself in any way you desire… but, remember that the ‘state’ has wired and tapped your telephones and is now sorting through your personal email account, it is x-raying your letter-box, your name is in a file… just in case you are a terrorist!
I have no answers. I am a no-body. I am deaf and blind. I present no clear or distinct danger to the order. And by the order I mean the notional limitations of doctrines, dogma and laws that we construct in an attempt to explain the universe and our role within it. Such a stance is and of itself very fine… but yet it disallows the very real motion of constant universal change and metamorphosis. The most common and basic experience that one observes in nature is the lack of rigidity, no straight lines, infinite variation, abnormality and a perpetual flux of form and invention. I see subtle connections between these myriad spheres of energy… we are all part of a massive and beautiful web of life, more than anything we must come to the realization that we all have choices regardless of pressure from authority, and a choice is the bed we lie in… even if it is spiraling totally out of control, as Renton in ‘Trainspotting points out;
Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a f……g big television, Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed- interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three piece suite on hire purchase in a range of f……g fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing sprit- crushing game shows, stuffing f……g junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing you last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, f……d-up brats you have spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life... But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life: I chose something else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who need reasons when you've got heroin?
So, I choose myself… the complete package wherein lies all imperfections, obscurity, eccentricities, beauty, ecstasy and ugliness… the right to curse every now and again. I don’t need the proverbial ‘nanny’ state to dictate the rules of life to me or/and attempt to shape me into a mold of absolute perfect obedience. But sadly it seems that these days this is the way things are working in the modern world; basic freedoms are fast disappearing like soluble aspirin in a cup of murky water!
I may have appeared in the past as a classical anti-communist emerging from the swampy depths of the McCarthy era; continuing the struggle against political and religious extremism. Not so! I care little about the personal beliefs of any individual, providing of course that their adopted system does not seek to affect the lives of others in a detrimental fashion. The core truth about all modern political and governmental systems is that by their very nature they seek to manipulate the ‘people’ and this is as true of Communism as it is of Capitalism; political leaders of all persuasions maintain their lifestyles, authority, characteristics and dynamic by feeding on the energies of the populace.
I am not a political scientist. My views and opinions are all based on personal experience, and from an early age I disliked the political mainstream. I always viewed the politician as a blood-sucker, a manipulator, a base creature that needed recognition and popular assent to pursue his/her vain-glorious career to boost his/her petty and frivolous ego. Politicians maintain their dysfunctional, Babylonian empires through perfectly repackaged lies and deceptions… until everything begins to fray and fall apart from the burden of the nightmare that is bureaucracy and ever increasingly insane forms of indentured servitude. And so I automatically gravitated toward writers and political philosophers such as Henry David Thoreau;
“That government is best which governs not at all” and “Until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.”
My political allegiances hover (idealistically) between anarchism and a sort of tribal-feudalism. To me, democracy is only the illusion of power, where an individual is inspired to imagine that through the act of submitting a name on a piece of paper they have exercised something profoundly sacred. The government is a government; like a ship on a particular course… it cannot change itself, perhaps the captain can be replaced or exchanged for another, but it is still exactly the same vessel pursuing the originally designated destination. In these sorts of arguments I always seem to end up comparing the supervisory management of the modern world to the ‘Mutiny on the Bounty’ (I prefer the Hopkins/Gibson version) and in which, using the analogy of the ship as a micro-cosmic version of the state chaos ensues, the revolution deposes the dictator, as Captain Bligh says;
“The Royal Navy is not a humorous institution, sir, and insubordination is no laughing matter…Now the crew is deeply demoralized and I must accept, as every captain must, the inevitable and theoretical responsibility for that. The actual and immediate responsibility, however, I place on you, my fellow officers who met this crisis with lethargy, impudence and flagrant defiance, publicly uttered. And perhaps for that I am also to blame. I counted on strength of character which you do not possess. However, the cure for our predicament is discipline and I shall apply it with an even hand of course, but most where it is most required.”
Yet even as one power structure is disposed of, another is put in its place… perhaps in this case with one which makes its people destitute exiles on the lost island of their desire. The natural way is not always concerned with order, it need also not concern itself with governance that we as human beings have constructed it. It may perhaps be more construed as a form of anarchy, since much of it is beyond our will and appears to all concerned to be wholly without directorship. I step lightly here, for I am walking through the thickets of religious thought! Omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscience are all terms applied to dictatorial fascism, the ‘1984’ of George Orwell. Of course you are free to express yourself in any way you desire… but, remember that the ‘state’ has wired and tapped your telephones and is now sorting through your personal email account, it is x-raying your letter-box, your name is in a file… just in case you are a terrorist!
I have no answers. I am a no-body. I am deaf and blind. I present no clear or distinct danger to the order. And by the order I mean the notional limitations of doctrines, dogma and laws that we construct in an attempt to explain the universe and our role within it. Such a stance is and of itself very fine… but yet it disallows the very real motion of constant universal change and metamorphosis. The most common and basic experience that one observes in nature is the lack of rigidity, no straight lines, infinite variation, abnormality and a perpetual flux of form and invention. I see subtle connections between these myriad spheres of energy… we are all part of a massive and beautiful web of life, more than anything we must come to the realization that we all have choices regardless of pressure from authority, and a choice is the bed we lie in… even if it is spiraling totally out of control, as Renton in ‘Trainspotting points out;
Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a f……g big television, Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed- interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three piece suite on hire purchase in a range of f……g fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing sprit- crushing game shows, stuffing f……g junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing you last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, f……d-up brats you have spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life... But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life: I chose something else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who need reasons when you've got heroin?
So, I choose myself… the complete package wherein lies all imperfections, obscurity, eccentricities, beauty, ecstasy and ugliness… the right to curse every now and again. I don’t need the proverbial ‘nanny’ state to dictate the rules of life to me or/and attempt to shape me into a mold of absolute perfect obedience. But sadly it seems that these days this is the way things are working in the modern world; basic freedoms are fast disappearing like soluble aspirin in a cup of murky water!
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