What Lies In Truth

The possibilities are endless. The dreams never fade. The reality of this place however, is harsh. Everyone struggles with what we call making it. The debate over what is considered success never ends. Ultimately I think every one of us lives out our days a little unsatisfied. Those who fail to cope tend to refer to this as regret but the truth is that no single person can make every individual happy. The ones that consider themselves happy are the people that live within their limitations and challenge the obstacles that penetrate a human’s inept demands.
I recently had a professor who asked what the basis is for someone to qualify as “smart”. Generally we measure intelligence by test results or by elitist methods such as I.Q. (intelligence quotient). While suitable for a common being raised under normal circumstance this is fine but his emphasis was formulated in the notion that no test can measure a person’s common sense and ability to work with people. I can’t remember the guy’s name but this man he told us of one day got an Ivy League education and was teaching college courses as a teen but was fired in less than a year because he could not communicate exceptionally with his students. This fellow was said to have ended up at a supermarket bagging groceries before dying in his mid forties.
So I keep asking myself, what is success?
I have concluded that there are four integral skills that encompass a person to gain value through actions. In no particular order they are social skills, emotional skills, intellectual skills and technical skills. They also signify the abilities to think, do, act, and react.
Technical skills (the ability to do) - When someone is dealing with daily functions or professional services. Usually a trade and someone can be considered talented in qualifications.
Intellectual skills (the ability to think) – When a person says something it usually put things in perspective regardless of the totality of the meaning. It’s not enough to just know something but to question it extensively.
Social skills (the ability to act) - When interaction with another mind is necessary for accomplishment of something mutually relevant. Compensating for lack of specifics to enhance overall knowledge is an excel point.
Emotional skills (the ability to react) – When everything occurs this person is able to keep their composure and realize what is necessary for a task to move forward. This is also a good judge of character.
These components combine to form human cognitive abilities in existence. Of course there is no perfect combination, but an individual tends to cling to one or two of these skills and form their priorities from the constant patterns their choices offer.
Clearly the right amount of each adjusted to a specific person is an obvious key to what would be to “succeed”, but these all feed into an overall life skill that can cause someone to rise or fall based on the surrounding environment and the way it is perceived.
Social persons tend to take the aggressive route to the top that incorporates a hit or miss approach towards personal achievement. With great leaps come equally huge drops. Most of us live or most of us die by the struggle to make the best of this skill. However the emotional aspect has a greater long term death or life sentence, hence why it’s not always best to act when you can’t conversely react to the unexpected turmoil your journey through time gives you.
Technical persons are the backbone of what keeps productivity moving. All the things built, all the things moved, all the things calculated and put into our daily usage, these are the forgotten heroes or the ones dumb enough to grunt their way through for a living. Opposite of that is the intellectual; lost in a world where gloves are never the right size for your hands. The ability to take a back seat and absorb all these doings is your strength even if watching doing is the only doing you do. The only sure thing is that nothing is certain.
Of course this is the most bizarre trial and error of all.
Why are we here, who knows? I don’t, you don’t, and no one before or after you ever will. Accept that and maybe meaning will hit you in the head the second you look down from the sky. If there is anything to take form this it’s that you can live without the oppression of religion. If that’s for you fine, I’m not here to bash it, I’m here to make sure it doesn’t bash you. I hate to see you abuse it and it in turn abuse us all back. Therefore I cannot conform to the normal circumstances this way of life offers. There is no end and so that may make faith the most trivial thing of all.
I believe in the freedom of the mind. That’s all anyone can really believe, and possibly it is something we can all agree upon.
Perhaps one day people will not be fickle when debating all that is good. It’s humanly correct to associate it with God. This is a bad judgemental habit that needs to stop. When will it be tolerable to let it be known this is not about an external power but an internal one? Why can’t it be done because it needs to be done because it is right. Aren’t these people’s miniscule things that are worth fighting for? Isn’t this something to do? Isn’t this something we can do?
So I reiterate that those four skills are the only truth we can be subject to. There are no more relevant laws in which we should adhere towards. I hate it too, but I accept it, and somehow I have grown to love it day by day; and it starts to love me back. The thought of dying and nothing happening gets easier to comprehend and the ability to be grows larger and denser to understand. In this lies the challenge, the opportunity of circumstance and chance, the reason to strive for more, the desire to succeed.
This material is 100% original. Use it as much as you can.

2009 Nobel Peace Prize Winners

PHYSICS
We live in a world designed by Charles K. Kao, Willard S. Boyle, and George E. Smith. Their work on the physics of light made possible the fiber optic cables carrying this web page to your phone, and the digital camera on the other side. And on December 10th, King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden will award them the Nobel Prize in physics for their work.
Boyle and Smith started their career together at Bell Labs, and in 1969, created the foundation of digital cameras. Utilizing the phenomena that won Albert Einstein his Nobel, Boyle and Smith devised a way to measure the electrons knocked lose when light strikes silicon. This essentially created the first digital camera pixel.
When Kao began working on fiber optics, the most advanced cables could only carry a light signal about 65 feet. By determining how the purity of the glass and the manufacturing methods influenced the transparency of a fiber optic cable, Kao laid down the principles that would lead to a half-mile-long cable within 4 years.
MEDICINE
Military leaders throughout history have supposedly goaded on their troops with the phrase, "You wanna live forever?" In 2009, the answer for many people is "Yes, please," and the Nobel Committee has today honored three U.S. scientists for discovering the genetic code that regulates aging in cells. The announcement comes as researchers race to develop anti-aging medicine or technology that can make humans immortal.
Merging humans with artificial intelligence remains some ways off, but there's also plenty of focus on extending the natural human lifespan. The latest Nobel Prize winners helped illuminate the aging process by discovering the repetitive genetic sequences on the ends of chromosomes known as telomeres. The telomeres serve as protective caps that gradually shorten as genetic material is copied many times over during cell division -- a process that parallels human aging, even if other factors also come into play.
The researchers who will receive this year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and share $1.4 million are: Elizabeth Blackburn, a biologist at the University of California in San Francisco; Carol Greider, a molecular biologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore; and Jack Szostak, a geneticist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. This is the first time that the Nobel Prize in medicine has gone to more than one woman in a single year.

OTHER CATEGORIES TO BE ANNOUNCED SOON.

Opression in 2009

Oppression is the use of power to disempower, marginalize, silence or otherwise subordinate one social group or category, often in order to further empower and/or privilege the oppressor.

Many would consider this period a high point in social justice, reform, and political upheaval. However the current generation of youth tends to be short sighted and negligent to the struggles that preceded us. Humility is not a guideline adhered to in the majority’s daily life. We think everything will work it’s self out now. Such perceptions to me hardly appear to be the truth.

What those who oppress us want is for society to be complacent with what is commonplace at that moment. In reality, oppression and complacency go hand and hand. This is generally how progress is stifled. Without testing are limits, progress ceases to exist.

The saddest thing pertaining to this is that the dissension usually stems from the most trifle of matters. Almost all disagreement s are either too big to reach a compromise, which is an inevitable part of life, or the dissension usually stems from the most trifle of matters. In other words if you have a regular working or personal relationship with this person or persons, there should be enough mutual interest between you to succeed to avoid these conflicts from happening.

Still there is a consistent and ever growing consistency on how to act and conduct yourself in the presence of others. Subconsciously people are still fearful of the unusual and the unknown. After all our good intentions are thought of and met, we end up with nothing but hatred, envy and constant let down.

Throughout the world there are autonomous organizations that stand for equality, cultural understanding, and tolerance of each and everyone’s own individual society that makes up an individual’s practical existence. Morally these groups and their volunteers are generally the most noble humans you come across in daily life, even those that are in it primarily for personal growth are those that tend to be the most successful in life. However, the ethics that are instituted upon the naïve among us are some of the most oppressing tactics that can be used. These organizations practice and/or preach their beliefs on anyone that will listen and follow yet their sympathy towards the person involved is merely conditional.

Whether they believe in something or believe in nothing, the consequences on the ripe mind are just as destructive as going into complete apathy. Especially for our current generation of youth, the opportunity to sell your goals and desires short in order to get by are a daily dose of stress for every citizen middle class and down.

Those in power take no responsibility for progressive change. All they care about is widening the gap between them and the class below them. No one is truly helped unless they accept a mutual idea that tolerates no exceptions to their rules. Regardless if they sell products, ideas, or feelings, they will further extend the gap between true understanding and compassion for all life forms that we encounter.

Of course there is no right way to do things. There is only what is necessary to survive. We are all imperfect savages stuck on a globe in a place that we can’t fully comprehend. Lost and struggling for a way to be more than we ever should be, those of us who are the victims need to rise up and stop this injustice from ever affecting another born to this planet. The enemy is within ourselves and the answers are all around us on the outside. I am fucking tired of being held back down by the regulations this world expects you to obey. I may never be able to know what is right, but I can always see and sense what is wrong.

What is wrong with expression that is not done out of salary and wage obligations? Why must we submerge our greatest desires? Why can we not share in the biological needs our urges demand/ Mental, physical, and spiritual nutrition is all vital to a well rounded success story. I partake in open servings of free food at parks and the bike cops staked out want to intimidate us. I partake in bike rides where the natural aggressive forced actions of every day drivers want to force us off the road and make a mockery out of a supposed immature activity. You, me, and everyone else get denied jobs we would be well suited for because of judgmental bullshit that corrupt factions press upon these individuals. How we have become a society who is so dependent on the value of slips of paper is what irritates and drives me insane. We are an assume first, ask later form of being and that denies us the ability to grasp how detrimental we all are.

As my point comes full circle I ask how simple does this complexity seem now.

I can’t answer for my mistakes more than anyone else can. These shortcomings are no one’s fault but my own, still I continue to emphasize that I don’t appreciate society’s negative influences. I don’t need to know and you don’t need to make a cent exploiting me.

Your essential organs thrive through natural methods of stimulation. Our brains are made up of synapses; these are specialized junctions through which neurons signal to each other and to non-neuronal cells such as those in muscles or glands. Chemical synapses allow neurons to form circuits within the central nervous system. They are crucial to the biological computations that underlie perception and thought. They allow the nervous system to connect to and control other systems of the body. Additionally I think all of us can agree that the sensation brought on through the beat of your heart both mentally and physically is one of the few things that always counter the depths of oppression. You can laugh, but you never know how far a hug or a few inspiring words can influence the despair someone is going through.

Why do we do these atrocious things in spite of our greatest conscious beliefs? Those who don’t acknowledge the above mentioned are unwilling to change. To them there are no questions only answers and generally they would have someone else solve the toughest solutions for them. Well not everyone is as fortunate as these lucky few. Every action is a breath to stay alive and each moment is a struggle to attain to each their own. We must escape the confines of this tragedy if the dystopia we know is ever to end. The freedom to be is the only form of oppression anyone should ever be inclined to endure.

References: http://cercor.oxfordjournals.org/, www.wikipedia.org/synapses

Never Say Die: Why We Can't Imagine Death

Why so many of us think our minds continue on after we die
By Jesse Bering (borrowed from www.sciammind.com)

Everybody’s wonderin’ what and where they all came from.
Everybody’s worryin’ ’bout where they’re gonna go when the whole thing’s done.
But no one knows for certain and so it’s all the same to me.
I think I’ll just let the mystery be.

It should strike us as odd that we feel inclined to nod our heads in agreement to the twangy, sweetly discordant folk vocals of Iris Dement in “Let the Mystery Be,” a humble paean about the hereafter. In fact, the only real mystery is why we’re so convinced that when it comes to where we’re going “when the whole thing’s done,” we’re dealing with a mystery at all. After all, the brain is like any other organ: a part of our physical body. And the mind is what the brain does—it’s more a verb than it is a noun. Why do we wonder where our mind goes when the body is dead? Shouldn’t it be obvious that the mind is dead, too?

And yet people in every culture believe in an afterlife of some kind or, at the very least, are unsure about what happens to the mind at death. My psychological research has led me to believe that these irrational beliefs, rather than resulting from religion or serving to protect us from the terror of inexistence, are an inevitable by-product of self-consciousness. Because we have never experienced a lack of consciousness, we cannot imagine what it will feel like to be dead. In fact, it won’t feel like anything—and therein lies the problem.

The common view of death as a great mystery usually is brushed aside as an emotionally fueled desire to believe that death isn’t the end of the road. And indeed, a prominent school of research in social psychology called terror management theory contends that afterlife beliefs, as well as less obvious beliefs, behaviors and attitudes, exist to assuage what would otherwise be crippling anxiety about the ego’s inexistence.

According to proponents, you possess a secret arsenal of psychological defenses designed to keep your death anxiety at bay (and to keep you from ending up in the fetal position listening to Nick Drake on your iPod). My writing this article, for example, would be interpreted as an exercise in “symbolic immortality”; terror management theorists would likely tell you that I wrote it for posterity, to enable a concrete set of my ephemeral ideas to outlive me, the biological organism. (I would tell you that I’d be happy enough if a year from now it still had a faint pulse.)

Yet a small number of researchers, including me, are increasingly arguing that the evolution of self-consciousness has posed a different kind of problem altogether. This position holds that our ancestors suffered the unshakable illusion that their minds were immortal, and it’s this hiccup of gross irrationality that we have unmistakably inherited from them. Individual human beings, by virtue of their evolved cognitive architecture, had trouble conceptualizing their own psychological inexistence from the start.

Curiously Immortal
The problem applies even to those who claim not to believe in an afterlife. As philosopher and Center for Naturalism founder Thomas W. Clark wrote in a 1994 article for the Humanist:

Here ... is the view at issue: When we die, what’s next is nothing; death is an abyss, a black hole, the end of experience; it is eternal nothingness, the permanent extinction of being. And here, in a nutshell, is the error contained in that view: It is to reify nothingness—make it a positive condition or quality (for example, of “blackness”)—and then to place the individual in it after death, so that we somehow fall into nothingness, to remain there eternally.

Consider the rather startling fact that you will never know you have died. You may feel yourself slipping away, but it isn’t as though there will be a “you” around who is capable of ascertaining that, once all is said and done, it has actually happened. Just to remind you, you need a working cerebral cortex to harbor propositional knowledge of any sort, including the fact that you’ve died—and once you’ve died your brain is about as phenomenally generative as a head of lettuce. In a 2007 article published in the journal Synthese, University of Arizona philosopher Shaun Nichols puts it this way: “When I try to imagine my own non-existence I have to imagine that I perceive or know about my non-existence. No wonder there’s an obstacle!”

This observation may not sound like a major revelation to you, but I bet you’ve never considered what it actually means, which is that your own mortality is unfalsifiable from the first-person perspective. This obstacle is why writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe allegedly remarked that “everyone carries the proof of his own immortality within himself.”

Even when we want to believe that our minds end at death, it is a real struggle to think in this way. A study I published in the Journal of Cognition and Culture in 2002 reveals the illusion of immortality operating in full swing in the minds of undergraduate students who were asked a series of questions about the psychological faculties of a dead man.

Richard, I told the students, had been killed instantaneously when his vehicle plunged into a utility pole. After the participants read a narrative about Richard’s state of mind just prior to the accident, I queried them as to whether the man, now that he was dead, retained the capacity to experience mental states. “Is Richard still thinking about his wife?” I asked them. “Can he still taste the flavor of the breath mint he ate just before he died? Does he want to be alive?”

You can imagine the looks I got, because apparently not many people pause to consider whether souls have taste buds, become randy or get headaches. Yet most gave answers indicative of “psychological continuity reasoning,” in which they envisioned Richard’s mind to continue functioning despite his death. This finding came as no surprise given that, on a separate scale, most respondents classified themselves as having a belief in some form of an afterlife.

What was surprising, however, was that many participants who had identified themselves as having “extinctivist” beliefs (they had ticked off the box that read: “What we think of as the ‘soul,’ or conscious personality of a person, ceases permanently when the body dies”) occasionally gave psychological-continuity responses, too. Thirty-two percent of the extinctivists’ answers betrayed their hidden reasoning that emotions and desires survive death; another 36 percent of their responses suggested the extinctivists reasoned this way for mental states related to knowledge (such as remembering, believing or knowing). One particularly vehement extinctivist thought the whole line of questioning silly and seemed to regard me as a numbskull for even asking. But just as well—he proceeded to point out that of course Richard knows he is dead, because there’s no afterlife and Richard sees that now.

So why is it so hard to conceptualize inexistence anyway? Part of my own account, which I call the “simulation constraint hypothesis,” is that in attempting to imagine what it’s like to be dead we appeal to our own background of conscious experiences—because that’s how we approach most thought experiments. Death isn’t “like” anything we’ve ever experienced, however. Because we have never consciously been without consciousness, even our best simulations of true nothingness just aren’t good enough.

For us extinctivists, it’s kind of like staring into a hallway of mirrors—but rather than confronting a visual trick, we’re dealing with cognitive reverberations of subjective experience. In Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno’s 1913 existential screed, The Tragic Sense of Life, one can almost see the author tearing out his hair contemplating this very fact. “Try to fill your consciousness with the representation of no-consciousness,” he writes, “and you will see the impossibility of it. The effort to comprehend it causes the most tormenting dizziness.”

Wait, you say, isn’t Unamuno forgetting something? We certainly do have experience with nothingness. Every night, in fact, when we’re in dreamless sleep. But you’d be mistaken in this assumption. Clark puts it this way (emphasis mine): “We may occasionally have the impression of having experienced or ‘undergone’ a period of unconsciousness, but, of course, this is impossible. The ‘nothingness’ of unconsciousness cannot be an experienced actuality.”

If psychological immortality represents the intuitive, natural way of thinking about death, then we might expect young children to be particularly inclined to reason in this way. As an eight-year-old, I watched as the remains of our family’s golden retriever, Sam, were buried in the woods behind our house. Still, I thought Sam had a mind capable of knowing I loved her and I was sorry I didn’t get to say goodbye. That Sam’s spirit lived on was not something my parents or anyone else ever explicitly pointed out to me. Although she had been reduced to no more than a few ounces of dust, which was in turn sealed in a now waterlogged box, it never even occurred to me that it was a strange idea.

Yet if you were to have asked me what Sam was experiencing, I probably would have muttered something like the type of answers Gerald P. Koocher reported hearing in a 1973 study published in Developmental Psychology. Koocher, then a doctoral student at the University of Missouri–Columbia and later president of the American Psychological Association, asked six- to 15-year-olds what happens when you die. Consistent with the simulation-constraint hypothesis, many answers relied on everyday experience to describe death, “with references to sleeping, feeling ‘peaceful,’ or simply ‘being very dizzy.’ ”

A Mind-Body Disconnect
But Koocher’s study in itself doesn’t tell us where such ideas come from. The simulation-constraint hypothesis posits that this type of thinking is innate and unlearned. Fortunately, this hypothesis is falsifiable. If afterlife beliefs are a product of cultural indoctrination, with children picking up such ideas through religious teachings, through the media, or informally through family and friends, then one should rationally predict that psychological-continuity reasoning increases with age. Aside from becoming more aware of their own mortality, after all, older kids have had a longer period of exposure to the concept of an afterlife.

In fact, recent findings show the opposite developmental trend. In a 2004 study reported in Developmental Psychology, Florida Atlantic University psychologist David F. Bjorklund and I presented 200 three- to 12-year-olds with a puppet show. Every child saw the story of Baby Mouse, who was out strolling innocently in the woods. “Just then,” we told them, “he notices something very strange. The bushes are moving! An alligator jumps out of the bushes and gobbles him all up. Baby Mouse is not alive anymore.”

Just like the adults from the previously mentioned study, the children were asked about dead Baby Mouse’s psychological functioning. “Does Baby Mouse still want to go home?” we asked them. “Does he still feel sick?” “Can he still smell the flowers?” The youngest children in the study, the three- to five-year-olds, were significantly more likely to reason in terms of psychological continuity than children from the two older age groups were.

But here’s the really curious part. Even the preschoolers had a solid grasp on biological cessation; they knew, for example, that dead Baby Mouse didn’t need food or water anymore. They knew he wouldn’t grow up to be an adult mouse. Heck, 85 percent of the youngest kids even told us that his brain no longer worked. Yet most of these very young children then told us that dead Baby Mouse was hungry or thirsty, that he felt better or that he was still angry at his brother.

One couldn’t say that the preschoolers lacked a concept of death, therefore, because nearly all of the kids realized that biological imperatives no longer applied after death. Rather they seemed to have trouble using this knowledge to theorize about related mental functions.

From an evolutionary perspective, a coherent theory about psychological death is not necessarily vital. Anthropologist H. Clark Barrett of the University of California, Los Angeles, believes instead that understanding the cessation of “agency” (for example, that a dead creature isn’t going to suddenly leap up and bite you) is probably what saved lives (and thus genes). According to Barrett, comprehending the cessation of the mind, on the other hand, has no survival value and is, in an evolutionary sense, unnecessary.

In a 2005 study published in the journal Cognition, Barrett and psychologist Tanya Behne of the University of Manchester in England reported that city-dwelling four-year-olds from Berlin were just as good at distinguishing sleeping animals from dead ones as hunter-horticulturalist children from the Shuar region of Ecuador were. Even today’s urban children appear tuned in to perceptual cues signaling death. A “violation of the body envelope” (in other words, a mutilated carcass) is a pretty good sign that one needn’t worry about tiptoeing around.

The Culture Factor
On the one hand, then, from a very early age, children realize that dead bodies are not coming back to life. On the other hand, also from a very early age, kids endow the dead with ongoing psychological functions. So where do culture and religious teaching come into the mix, if at all?

In fact, exposure to the concept of an afterlife plays a crucial role in enriching and elaborating this natural cognitive stance; it’s sort of like an architectural scaffolding process, whereby culture develops and decorates the innate psychological building blocks of religious belief. The end product can be as ornate or austere as you like, from the headache-inducing reincarnation beliefs of Theravada Buddhists to the man on the street’s “I believe there’s something” brand of philosophy—but it’s made of the same brick and mortar just the same.

In support of the idea that culture influences our natural tendency to deny the death of the mind, Harvard University psychologist Paul Harris and researcher Marta Giménez of the National University of Distance Education in Spain showed that when the wording in interviews is tweaked to include medical or scientific terms, psychological-continuity reasoning decreases. In this 2005 study published in the Journal of Cognition and Culture, seven- to 11-year-old children in Madrid who heard a story about a priest telling a child that his grandmother “is with God” were more likely to attribute ongoing mental states to the decedent than were those who heard the identical story but instead about a doctor saying a grandfather was “dead and buried.”

And in a 2005 replication of the Baby Mouse experiment published in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology, psychologist David Bjorklund and I teamed with psychologist Carlos Hernández Blasi of Jaume I University in Spain to compare children in a Catholic school with those attending a public secular school in Castellón, Spain. As in the previous study, an overwhelming majority of the youngest children—five- to six-year-olds—from both educational backgrounds said that Baby Mouse’s mental states survived. The type of curriculum, secular or religious, made no difference. With increasing age, however, culture becomes a factor—the kids attending Catholic school were more likely to reason in terms of psychological continuity than were those at the secular school. There was even a smattering of young extinctivists in the latter camp.

Free Spirits
The types of cognitive obstacles discussed earlier may be responsible for our innate sense
of immortality. But although the simulation-constraint hypothesis helps to explain why so many people believe in something as fantastically illogical as an afterlife, it doesn’t tell us why people see the soul unbuckling itself from the body and floating off like an invisible helium balloon into the realm of eternity. After all, there’s nothing to stop us from having afterlife beliefs that involve the still active mind being entombed in the skull and deliriously happy. Yet almost nobody has such a belief.

Back when you were still in diapers, you learned that people didn’t cease to exist simply because you couldn’t see them. Developmental psychologists even have a fancy term for this basic concept: “person permanence.” Such an off-line social awareness leads us to tacitly assume that the people we know are somewhere doing something. As I’m writing this article in Belfast, for example, my mind’s eye conjures up my friend Ginger in New Orleans walking her poodle or playfully bickering with her husband, things that I know she does routinely.

As I’ve argued in my 2006 Behavioral and Brain Sciences article, “The Folk Psychology of Souls,” human cognition is not equipped to update the list of players in our complex social rosters by accommodating a particular person’s sudden inexistence. We can’t simply switch off our person-permanence thinking just because someone has died. This inability is especially the case, of course, for those whom we were closest to and whom we frequently imagined to be actively engaging in various activities when out of sight.

And so person permanence may be the final cognitive hurdle that gets in the way of our effectively realizing the dead as they truly are—infinitely in situ, inanimate carbon residue. Instead it’s much more “natural” to imagine them as existing in some vague, unobservable locale, very much living their dead lives.

Engaging our values, choosing our freedom

By Kermit (borrowed from Slingshot #99)

I spend a lot of time thinking about the things that I choose to value and what those values actually look like as they interact with each other in my life. Ideally, the things I believe in are not like objects that I acquire, and set on a shelf, but things that I continue to pick up, turn over in my hands and engage with in some meaningful way.

Too often it seems like shared aesthetic tastes become a kind of shorthand for shared values. Rather than getting to know the people that we interact with, we rely on superficial codes to identify allies. The world that we want to live in often becomes defined as one that looks like our vision, rather than one that feels like our truth. It is easy to understand the appeal. When we express ourselves with the same language and interact in a similar cultural mode it is easier to avoid conflict on the surface of things. This is helpful on days when it is all we can do to put one foot in front of the other. The problem is that it is also easier to avoid the passion and processing that is attached to conflict, to decide that it is not possible to find a point of connection with those whose words and actions trigger us.

When we assume that someone else's truth should look like ours, we become grotesque -- we begin to build a system of morality that separates 'right thinking' people from 'wrong headed' ones and inhibits our ability to understand people who are not like us. This is true among conservatives and reactionaries, but it is also true in radical circles. The vast majority of mass social movements, whether political or religious, have worked to deny or minimize facts that don't conform to their Truth. The channels of power put in place to do this, no matter how well intentioned, almost always lead to abuse and the dehumanization of people defined as enemies. When we state, as radicals or anarchists, that we want to create a better world, free from domination, and begin to build an aesthetic vision of what that world looks like, we run the risk of falling into the same trap.

If everyone in the world decided to become like-minded in regard to revolution, or pacifism, or anarchy, or whatever else is held up as 'the way', but the quality of their relationships and the way that they interact with and use power in their daily lives remained the same, the world would only be made duller and more grey. Trying to think intentionally about the essential elements of my values while continuing to grapple with and reassess them as I grow helps me focus on my goals and build relationships and structures in my life to support those goals in ways that are not loaded with aesthetic judgement.

FREEDOM

One of the values that I think about a lot is freedom. So many people use this word in so many different ways that it's meaning tends to fall apart when you look at it directly. One of the ways that I think about freedom is in terms of the autonomy each individual should have to construct/conduct their life as they see fit; that there is no right way to be in the world and that no person's reality is more valid than anyone else's. The implication of this statement is anarchy -- it is what gives people the strength to cast off the bonds of received knowledge and defy power hierarchies that do not acknowledge their own humanity. It also means that I am not able to stand unreservedly behind a unified vision of a revolutionary society. If I believe that there is no one right way to be in the world, then no program or plan can be applied to all people.

Another definition of freedom that I find compelling is the existentialist view of freedom as an internal process connected to choice, responsibility and passionate engagement. Choice, here, is not the choice between products or political leaders, but choosing how we react emotionally to the world. We exercise our freedom when we choose how we are going to react to and be a part of the situations that occur in our lives, most of which lie outside our ability to control. This allows one to claim their freedom and embody it as they negotiate and create systems of meaning in the world, rather than to view freedom as a state that is to be achieved only in some distant future, after irksome struggles. Taking responsibility for these choices makes one aware of their own power. It is not something that can be done for the sake of others, or for all time, but that must be claimed and maintained by each person as they make their way through the world.

The ramifications of radical autonomy are not safe or easy, they are at the heart of what people fear about anarchy. Without rules and powerful hierarchies looking out for society, what prevents everything from just falling apart? What will compel people to recognize any responsibility to themselves and others? For me, the answer is obvious, and grows out of the way that I think about the nature of my relationships.

RELATIONSHIPS

At the heart of feeling alive and engaged with the world is feeling connected to oneself and to others. When I decided to become a radical and build my life in an unconventional way in order to escape the quiet desperation that I associated with a conventional life, I thought, on some unconscious level, that changing what my life physically looked like was equivalent to changing the way that I emotionally engaged with the world. What I discovered was that even though I had found people whose lives more or less matched the broad strokes in my mind, I was still aching for a life I was not living. What I ached for was easy intimacy and shared trust, the ability for two people to expose a bit of their vulnerability to each other and come away stronger from the experience.

Don't get me wrong, I love living in a community with other wingnuts and radicals, and sometimes a similar aesthetic can lubricate the process of building intimacy, it's just that the emotional work of building sustainable intimate relationships is hard, even with people who dress and act and talk like me, and it is possible, even with people who don't.

Often, political identities encourage people to ignore the health of their relationships. By shifting our focus to things very large and removed from our reality, political discourse runs the risk of allowing us an excuse to neglect the responsibility we have to be present in our own lives. If we are constantly aware of the abuse of governmental power but are unable to approach or confront the way that power operates in our relationships with the people we love, how are we ever going to be able to create beautiful realities in the lives we have been given? If people you know and are connected to began to heal themselves and learned how to talk to each other -- about power and pain, passion and death -- and became confident and aware of the ways in which their words, actions, and relationships shape the world they end up living in, how much more vibrant and less despairing would your existence be?

The charm of authoritarian systems is often in their ability to act as a surrogate for real connectedness. They pacify people by giving them simple answers and something they can easily hold on to. The ugliness of these systems is that they require shutting down our ability to recognize the humanity of people whose truth differs from the one we have connected ourselves to. Building substantial relationships in our lives that are based on trust and maintained through a mutual understanding of each other's particular truth gives people a sense of security that is certainly more appealing to me than anything authoritarianism has to offer.

CONCLUSION

Having a sense of yourself and your own power, as well as the ways that you depend, in so many ways, on your connections to others is not about the music you listen to, the food you eat, how you dress, or how you dress your children. I believe that people best relate to one another when they can see their own humanity reflected in the other person. This is not saying that everybody is really the same, but that no one is wholly 'other'. A direct implication of this is that I put much more stock into trying to understand how another person sees their world than I do in categorizing people. I deeply question whether the model of identity is the best way for people to talk about their differences and similarities; it can often obscure more than it clarifies. Only by placing ourselves firmly in our bodies right now and taking responsibility for our power and our freedom, even when that process is painful, or seems impossible, are we ever going to create engaged communities of strong and beautiful people who are connected to each other in healthy ways. The trick, for me, is figuring out how to be in deeply intimate networks of relationships with people while still maintaining an individual sense of freedom, finding a way to hold autonomy and mutual aid in my hands at the same time without reeling from the cognitive dissonance.

The Open and Close Effect: Big Cities to Small Towns

Big Betty Jo comes from where the cows roam, and Big Slick Dick roams where the girls come. One is raised to believe in religious fundamentals, factory work, and wal-mart. The other is born into sin, apathy, and with a wal-mart no more than fifteen minutes away.

These are stereotypes to the conscious, but inevitabilities to the naive.

So why does this matter? When you turn eighteen you are free to go as you please. However, what will you choose when your mind is wired to commit to only that in which you know.
After living among both demographics and lifestyles I realize the truth in our society’s eventual flux to cities of moderate size or greater.

Think and consider as to why this is so.

In a small city/town, you are subject to the conservative lifestyle. No matter how far you can stretch to pull yourself out, it is an unavoidable formality. Naturally there is the traditional upbringing of God and family first. Your work is either a family custom that is yours to uphold, or to choose one of the factory/production/labor jobs that middle of nowhere America offers.

If this is the way to be for you, it's your right and I wish you the best. On the other hand, perhaps you were not so fortunate.

The planet's population boom is not being just felt in the big cities where complexes housing a million people are now being constructed, but in those obscure places that are not so small anymore. Poverty has hit these places full on, and sadly some of these folks have it harder than city slickers in contrast.
Say that you are living in the projects, and much as you may love some of the things and people that make up the best of what is there, you realize that something or someone is too much to bear and leaving the area is the only reasonable alternative. It isn't too much to ask to move maybe twenty to thirty minutes down the road in another part of the city. After all there are likely better quality jobs, businesses, and residences to choose from. But what if you had to move hours away to find that release. You are stuck with what is there and what that entails you to be. Unless you have an outlet that can "save" you so to speak, what else is there but drugs, teenage sex, more drugs, teen pregnancy, and probably selling drugs too. You can find some dead end job and maybe God as well, but the damage is already done, and honestly what choice do these kids have. What creative outlets are there for those that don't have it figured out yet after high school?

The diversity that a large city can offer are few and far in between. Of course I am not saying that this level of damaging neglect doesn't happen when you are among a bustling community, but either way the same result will occur. The majority of kids are going to get whatever is shown to them, and this is the seed from which conservative values grow.

What program and culture can you get your child in to keep them clean and off the streets?

The vast living area gives people a chance. To quote Robert Heinlein "The freedom to choose is the only real freedom anyone has. For the others that opportunity is lost.

The grand environment of a city is a practical escape in today's world. An endless sea of options are around every corner, maybe too many. The condensed country atmosphere creates a fantasy world where life is limited to the traditions that are well established and not to be questioned.

THAT is no longer the sequence of success on planet Earth.

It is easy to see now how the weakness in this system has been exposed.

People are stubborn. They don't like the unknown, most fear change. Whether it is the political landscape, the environmental backdrop, the let them deal with them public schools, or how God's will and money's necessity rule above the need of human’s mutual interactive communications.
Why do conservative’s minds feel the need to shelter their children from the daily grind of life? Television and school are not exactly the wholesome entities they once were. Little do they realize this compounds and creates more problems than they solve.
Today's youth learns far more and has a greater chance of becoming immune to the hardships surrounding them if they get out and participate in the interests they have as opposed to going with the flow their life dictates. Take a bus on a Saturday night and you will probably cross something you would rather not. Walk home after closing time and it is a guarantee you will uncover your humility.

Part 2 of this series: Escapism.

Looking back at the tipping point

By Compost (borrowed from Slingshot Zine #99)

I had a revelation recently that we are beyond the realm of "politics" and more into "evolution", that the scope of what is set in motion is beyond our human wills to turn around. And yet of course, it still seems relevant what we do; as the day of action, the decision what to eat, the words sung, may be the straw that carries a species through.

I find myself strangely at peace to accept the larger cycles of life that include extinctions. Nothing breaks my heart more than to imagine the disappearance of such beautiful and amazing creatures as Sand Hill Cranes, Sea Otters, Checker-spot Butterflies, all the birds and salamanders, insects, fish flowers; life people know so little of as it disappears forever. Are we alive on the planet with the last pair of Ivory-Billed Woodpeckers? How many other species will we see the last of? How many will we not notice?

And yet. These are the generations of Mother Earth. She has three times already raised a planet full of amazing beautiful species that have come to cataclysmic ends. And some species made it through and new life came again. It seems we are in the third major species die-off on the planet. Now. Kinda a lot for a mere human psyche to wrap around. But hey, I remind myself, there are lots of agents for mutation that will hasten new life to evolve and fill the niches; chemicals, radiation, biotechnology, nano-tech. And whatever does live, I was reminded by Dan, "will have a lot of available carbon."

So just try not to be so attached to the beautiful world we know now.

And then there are the humans. I have to say some days I'm rooting for us but other days I feel this foolish species has caused enough trouble. 'Spose it'll be determined by if we can wake up and adapt or not. Humans sure are fascinating and creative. What other creature has come up with tapestries, orchestras, ipods? Thousands of unique languages. Cathedrals, plastic, poetry? What would it all mean without us?

And what does a human do with the precious day in these times? Enjoy it? Try like hell to save wild places? Awaken the Brethren? Grow gardens? Carry on like we don't see?

Seems to me it would help if we would wake up and protect the diverse life on earth and that which sustains it. Stop using anti-bacterial soap for goodness sake and all those toxic chemicals in our "products." Simplify. Slow down. Walk. Reconnect with the earth, with food, with community. Wash with water. Detach from stuff. Sing. The adaptation required is profound. People lived for a long time without all the toys that surround modern Americans. Make decisions in light of the whole, and listen to your heart. Care and Share. We children of the changing times, surf the waves of change with beauty. Adapt. Can we tip human consciousness?