Category: Journal

Retract yourself from the familiar circles and wait to see how many come looking for you; you will be startled at how easily you are forgotten and how unimportant your presence is. You are forgotten in an instant and the people only feign concern once you are formally dead, once you are in the papers or pronounced in a cell phone message. These sycophants feign concern because they are expected to and only recall your life and deeds by spitting generalities as though they were profound insights into your person. “He was a father, a husband, a community leader, he will be missed.” Save your pretend tears. Who will speak the truth of me?

The small sounds you make are inaudible from space. The greatest scream you can muster is less than a whisper in the course of time. You may scream the truth but it will not be received, it will not be heard by the deaf mob. Sincere love will be traded for caprice. You may be virtuous and true and be smeared as a villain, you will die as such, there is no justice in the world, no equity, no returning balance to set things straight. You will behold vile men branded as saints instead. The greatest of the past are not known to the people of today; great empires and emperors lay smashed to dust, forgotten as if they never existed. As the coming generations are not educated in the ways of the past they repeat a cycle which has always been: the stage is the same and the emperors have different names, but they kill themselves in vain the same. The people continue to cry and lie over the same as they always have, even when wisdom holds a flame to the absurd, they trudge forward to defeat themselves. In a life so meaningless and so irrelevant, how are you so distressed, so concerned, why do you feel loneliness from your isolation when your breath is ever present?

No need to feel distress as this will be over soon. Time destroys everything and nothing can resist it: entropy will crush what is false and cleanse the world of the minds which are plagiarized.

You can still be a good man even if no one realizes it.

The true love of virtue is in all men produced by the love and respect they bear to him that teaches it; and those who praise good men, yet do not love them, may respect their reputation, but do not really admire, and will never imitate their virtue.

– Plutarch

A girl in my sociology class said my life would be wasted as a librarian and that I should put my powers of oratory to use; that my skill with words and rhetoric must be applied or else I would be doing myself a disservice. Her words rose in me an immediate concern over what my place in this city is. She suggested I become a lawyer or a teacher. As I would find myself at the front of revolutionary deeds espousing supposedly dangerous ideas in either charge…

to be continued, class begins.

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years.

Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.

Political isolationism is the only legal policy for the United States Republic. Wars should only be defensive in nature and even then, must be declared by the congress, not by the president. The president committed treason by going to war without the approval of congress and he also violated the principles of federalism and international law by perpetuating an offensive war unilaterally.

The solution is an immediate removal of our troops to avoid further blowback and to hold officials accountable for regressive or illegal activity.

Our people missed an extremely important lesson from 9/11.

The attacks of 9/11 were not done because individuals hated our freedom, or were jealous of the way we live. 9/11 was blowback from our continued bullying, raiding and exploitation of the Middle East.

We need to stop pursuing international policy which leads to blowback and instead return to political isolationism. There is no solution to Iraq – the massive damage we have inflicted to the national infrastructure has crippled the ability of the nation to regenerate its losses, it is in a ungovernable state, solely because of the destructive military tactics we employed.

The modern country of Iraq’s borders were arbitrarily created by the British Mandate system of the inter-war period of the 1920s. Prior to the Iraq mandate the area was divided into several autonomous regions with tribal alliegances (Basra, Mosul etc). This political system worked. The British imposed an ungovernable system of unifying the entire region into one country. The result was chaos, only really brought under control by the heavy-fisted reign of Saddam.

I need to run to class, but as a final note, I think we should let the country disintegrate into whatever end will satisfy the population and REMOVE OURSELVES. Only Saddam was able to hold together Iraq, and we hung him. Without a charismatic, powerful leader who represents the collective will of the people, there will be no victory. Iraq needs a strong man to hold the country together or it needs to return to it’s original tribal divisions.

Pasting from a previous commentary I wrote:

Societies will always evolve organically to whatever end will satisfy its population.

Interrupting that natural chain of events (or even worse so, forcing your own morality and government upon an alien culture) unnaturally upsets the path of change. Internal problems should always be attended to internally with no influence from outside agents. The society will adapt to survive and maintain order. If the society cannot adapt it will collapse, and rightly, so that a new order may rise from the ashes of failure. When a dog is sick and can no longer perform it’s duties it must be put out of its misery. A order that cannot keep itself alive must be allowed to die. There is an illusion of health that is created by the interference of outside ‘peace keepers’ who decide to brace their backs against the collapsing roof. When these ‘heroes’ leave the dog once more cannot stand on its own and suffocates under its own decaying mass. But then an amazing thing happens: the soil is enriched by the rotting flesh and flowers begin to bloom upward through the rib cage. Soon a civilization exists on the skeleton of a diseased one that came before it.

This life is getting to me – no matter how much temperance and magnanimity I try to wield I am getting crushed by this world. Everything I say, every word I utter is in vain, lost on deaf ears and dead hearts. I am sick of this struggle to find even the most remote semblance of fellowship with others and I am sick of the truth being marginalized. I am sick of all you sycophants, cowards, liars and whores that I am forced to continually endure. Perhaps the cause is lost, perhaps the cause best lie with dead men, perhaps I am not strong enough or compromising enough to maintain this illusion of acceptance. I don’t accept you – I fantasize about your enslavement and obliteration. I’d rather die than live like you.

Why am I even trying? What possible future could there be for me? I have tempered isolation as best as I could and failed. I don’t relate to your drinking stories, drug abuse, buying extravaganzas, fashions, caprice and superficiality. I am not you – and never will be. I used to tell myself “this path is in vain, but it must be done none the less, as this is what is required of a man” but I wonder now if there is not another alternative: shrinking away and hiding in the mountains, abandoning this world and living in my own, giving up the Republic. I feel worthless when I do not at least try to speak the truth – but I wonder if that feeling would fade with time and a new perspective. This world is too cold and too uncaring; I can’t relate to your rudeness, callousness, greed, self-importance and apathy – I can’t relate to your hollowness of human affairs and how little you care for the wellbeing of others.

Is it so much to ask for a single person to trust and relate to? I have given myself in that capacity to so many others but have never met someone who I could trust who was not within 40 years of my age, and even then, seldom few. This society is a great wasteland of wasted human decency and the older I get the more disillusioned I get. People seem to become more and more vile the farther away they get from the womb – my peers are shit panderers, ruthless careerists, concerned with things which are meaningless, content to glorify their depravity, apathy and stupidity. The supposed “college” kids are frauds who I can barely look upon without feeling disgust and contempt – more concerned with drunken excess, sexual deviancy and mall prowling than anything approaching academic or moral causes, nothing with passion or ideals, just mediocrity and consumption. Die all, toads.

Alas, as usual, I waste my breath and exhaust myself with hope.

More to say, no one to hear, I shall converse with myself, or with virtuous figures from the past, now nothing but dust.

While visiting an online forum I ran across an instance of power abuse in which a moderator banned an individual for thought crimes.

I do not believe removing “politically incorrect” thinkers from any group improves it. In a healthy society all manner of discussion must be protected. While all opinions are not equally valid, all opinions should be protected by those who wield power. It must be left up to the individuals within a group to decide the validity of an opinion, and then they on their own must decide to adopt it or reject it – the leaders must create an environment where this is possible.

The removal of the national socialist individual did not improve the group but only weakened it by furthering a big problem in the hardcore punk community which is a type of thought exhibited by group members who try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically testing, analyzing, and evaluating ideas. During this process, members of the group avoid promoting viewpoints outside the comfort zone of consensus thinking.

A variety of motives for this may exist such as a desire to avoid being seen as foolish, or a desire to avoid embarrassing or angering other members of the group. This process may cause groups to make hasty, irrational decisions, where individual doubts are set aside, for fear of upsetting the group’s balance.

A solution to this problem is to promote an environment where no thought or idea is taboo.

Why is being a racist a bannable offense? How does the group improve by banning people of different opinions? He wasn’t disrupting the group by spamming, making threats or trolling, he simply had a thought crime, and his thoughts were different than those acceptable by your standard of how people should think.

I want to again re-iterate that wise or just leaders do not decide what thoughts the group is “ready to hear” – and especially do not eliminate people who have “controversial” or “politically incorrect” ideas. The concept of any functional group is one which is free to evolve in the consideration of all ideas, even when those ideas are antagonistic to the group’s common ideals.

HR 1995, legislation legalizing prosecution of thought crimes, passed today.

“They see a race of law-makers legislating without knowing what their laws are about; to-day voting a law on the sanitation of towns, without the faintest notion of hygiene, to-morrow making regulations for the armament of troops, without so much as understanding a gun; making laws about teaching and education without ever having given a lesson of any sort, or even an honest education to their own children; legislating in all directions, but never forgetting the penalties to be meted out to ragamuffins, the prison and the galleys, which are to be the portion of men a thousand times less immoral than these legislators themselves.”
-Peter Kropotkin

Sam Harris against “atheism”

in response to the Cynic’s Hall of Fame

While I disagree with most of the entries on the list, and could think of some much more worthy individuals to be included (Penn and Teller or James Randi anyone?) – some of them seem to be truly absurd, anti-cynics even.

Nixon? Oscar Wilde? Machiavelli?

Did the author who created this list even read any of Oscar Wilde’s works? Read the “The Picture of Dorian Gray” for a book in which all of his philosophies are succinctly summarized. Wilde’s virtues are promiscuity, decadence, deception, dishonesty, excess consumption, impulsiveness, intrigue and materialism. These virtues are antithetical to anything considered Cynic or Socratic.

Machiavelli idealized a man who panders to the lowest common denominator in people in order to control and fleece them. Most alarmingly for the sake of this discussion, Machiavelli also argued that the Prince should always try to APPEAR virtuous and religious but need not be in reality, and that he should use the vices as needed to propel himself and his regime forward. Machiavelli did not strive toward the virtues: he lived as thing are, not as they ought to be. Since the pursuit of virtue is the foundation of Cynicism, I’m not sure how Machiavelli could be considered a “great cynic.”

Machiavelli also promoted the use of fear as a tool to control society, arguing that its better to be feared than loved, and this backward modern thought is what has fostered an extremely dysfunctional western society, as the government is not of the people, but rather, seeks to control and fleece the people. This idea of government comes straight out of Machiavelli. Strangely the founding fathers were proponents of civic virtue and duty, having been influenced greatly by the Hellenic philosophies, yet somewhere along the line we have lost that noble heritage and degenerated back to Machiavellian ideals.

The core of Cynicism is extreme, uncompromising honesty wrapped inside an austere, temperate, fortified, prudent, just character. Few people other than the original Cynic philosophers on the list could match that definition.

I don’t think Cynic philosophy should be confused with the modern definition of cynic, as the former is a noble tradition and the latter is for buffoons.