Fear of Knowing Day
Celebrating the Fear so profound that it corrupts us in mind, body and deed. A fear so deep it seamlessly controls even – or is it especially? – the most intellectual of us all. The holiday’s patron saint is Noam Chomsky, with Socrates at his right hand and Jesus at his left. We celebrate this day to register the bountiful harvest of fears by which we are enslaved. Chief among which is the Fear of Knowing our state, lest we be deprived of our precious ring of power. That is, what seems to us our mortal lives.
Chomsky points to the intellectual control made possible by a state of profound psychological terror. He describes a society literally goverened by Advanced Adaptive Terrorism, commonly known as The State. This State is a perversion of the potential capacity for large scale human coordination. A perversion, in other words, of the Ideal of Kosmopolites, the World City – an encompassing, divinely harmonic community. Kosmopolites provides every citizen with a sacred duty, a meaningful self, an identity within Reality.
Anarchists, of greater and lesser comprehension, have long maintained that perversion of this idea is inherent in the idea itself. The IDEA is the perversion. Here at the conflux Zen, science and activism we encounter the blasphemous notion that the State is and ever has been ruled by violence.
Thus is the man of science conscripted into serving the desires of the State for more effective control, or else cast as an enemy, a non-person. The new legal distinction of enemy combatant simply reaffirms the age old meaning of the term enemy. And this ancient figure of enemy, the non-person, is integral to representation of the fundamental authority of The State: the power of emminent domain, that allows for murder and genocide in the expropriation of territory. All of history, at least from the Bible on, might be construed as a serial rearticulation of this archetypal theme of justified attrocity, i.e. War.
Chomsky suggests to us that mythical justification – in whatever dialect – serves as a necessary complement to the warfare-based State, without which it would not and could not function. Central to his contention is that while this is generally true, it is most important to recognize how it is true of one’s own society. This recognition is the essential act of liberational activism. As without belief in the story of collective sanctity in terms of practice, intent and most importantly authorization, the processes of the War State could not occur. People could not be motivated to kill and die en masse for the enrichment of the few.
And so, in a perverse and even comical way, a people are terrorized into ‘buying into’ their own propaganda. For without its organizing enthusiasm, its spirit, they would be weak, and so easily overrun by a foreign people driven to homicidal fury by their own insidious idolatry. This explains why we despise their fundamentalists while extolling ours.
The fundamental role of the Media, then, in the Terror State is to faithfully broadcast the parameters of expectation engendered by a world of endless war. Media transmits and channels anxiety, putting forth a stream of problems as if a drumbeat – and then offering a host of authorized solutions, from policies to pills.
And essentially, time and time again, of War. What the Persians knew millenia ago we would do well to learn: WAR is the Father of us All.
January 17th, 2005 at 5:51 am
Fear, ever the goad in decision making – especially of the political sort – drives the electoral process. It surely did in this election. I read a news story asserting that Bush represented the ‘fear faction’ and Kerry the ‘hope faction’. Of course, the writer (and the article) fell into the error of the excluded middle and concluded that we as a nation should have elected Kerry. This may be. However, I am far more interested in the unconstitutionality of the politically excluded middle. How did we get gridlocked into the two party system, so that the possibility of a third factor making major headway into the process is remote at best? How can we claim to have free and open democratic elections whiloe the electoral college still exists as a remnant of an elitist past? And, moreover, how do we avoid the use of hope or fear in any effort to open up the public consciousness and conscience so that free elections might become a real possibility in America? How can we make ourselves internally free so that elections free from the goad of free or hope, elections firmly grounded in the willingnes to work for small, slow, and steady gains become a possibility and then a reality? Perhaps hope is the first step.
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January 18th, 2005 at 2:37 pm
Right. Let’s try that again, shall we?
Pursuant to our conversation of the 17th of this month…
Ahh, hang on, loblocks to that.
This piece, and others, remind of Hakim Bey’s attempt to marry Art and politics. Some quotes:
“We take our stand at the nexus where religion becomes æsthetic, festal, ludic, and creative – a source and power for freedom, for both the individual and the group.”
“Is it possible to imagine an aesthetics that does not engage, that removes itself from History and even from the Market? or at least tends to do so? which wants to replace representation with presence? How does presence make itself felt even in (or through) representation?”
“The TAZ is an encampment of guerilla ontologists: strike and run away. Keep moving the entire tribe, even if it’s only data in the Web. The TAZ must be capable of defense; but both the “strike” and the “defense” should, if possible, evade the violence of the State, which is no longer a meaningful violence. The strike is made at structures of control, essentially at ideas; the defense is “invisibility,” a martial art, and “invulnerability”–an “occult” art within the martial arts. The “nomadic war machine” conquers without being noticed and moves on before the map can be adjusted. As to the future–Only the autonomous can plan autonomy, organize for it, create it. It’s a bootstrap operation. The first step is somewhat akin to satori–the realization that the TAZ begins with a simple act of realization.”
“The Universe wants to play. Those who refuse out of dry spiritual greed & choose pure contemplation forfeit their humanity – those who refuse out of dull anguish, those who hesitate, lose their chance at divinity – those who mold themselves blind masks of Ideas & thrash around seeking some proof of their own solidity end by seeing out of dead men’s eyes.”
–Hakim Bey on the Temporary Autonomous Zone or, if you will, the meaning of disciplined liberty.
“Don’t do PT for other artists, do it for people who will not realize (at least for a few moments) that what you have done is art. Avoid recognizable art-categories, avoid politics, don’t stick around to argue, don’t be sentimental; be ruthless, take risks, vandalize only what must be defaced, do something children will remember all their lives–but don’t be spontaneous unless the PT Muse has possessed you.
Dress up. Leave a false name. Be legendary. The best PT is against the law, but don’t get caught. Art as crime; crime as art.”
–Hakim Bey on Poetic Terrorism or Art as criminal, which is to say contra-state and pro-Kosmopolite, act.
A collection of Bey’s work can be found at: http://www.sniggle.net/bey.php
I’d recommend “Temporary Autonomous Zone”, “Poetic Terrorism” and “Chaos Linguistics” to start. Though I think you will find some resonance with all of them.
A word of caution (not that you need it): Bey sometimes seems to let the form of what he wants to communicate overwhelm the substance. I have not, personally, made any call as to whether this is “right” or “wrong” but it did strike me as a notable observation. Essence and Life as our mutual friend would likely say.
Stephen
P.S. Something you may already have seen but it deserves a link on your page I feel:
“Terror isn’t just worrying about a plane hitting a skyscraper…terrorism is being caught in traffic and hearing the crack of an AK-47 a few meters away because the National Guard want to let an American humvee or Iraqi official through. Terror is watching your house being raided and knowing that the silliest thing might get you dragged away to Abu Ghraib where soldiers can torture, beat and kill. Terror is that first moment after a series of machine-gun shots, when you lift your head frantically to make sure your loved ones are still in one piece. Terror is trying to pick the shards of glass resulting from a nearby explosion out of the living-room couch and trying not to imagine what would have happened if a person had been sitting there.
The weapons never existed. It’s like having a loved one sentenced to death for a crime they didn’t commit- having your country burned and bombed beyond recognition, almost. Then, after two years of grieving for the lost people, and mourning the lost sovereignty, we’re told we were innocent of harboring those weapons. We were never a threat to America…
Congratulations Bush- we are a threat now.”
Baghdad Burning:http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/
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