Why are we still thinking and talking in terms of “revolution”?
The only revolution we need is the one that soon will happen in our heads and in our hearts.
None of us will have much choice about that, because such is the nature of information spread. Like one ancient writer put it, “The way of the good person is like the light of dawn, growing brighter and brighter until full daylight.”
Good information gets spread by good people. Good information also gets spread by bad people, due to the simple fact that if it were all bad it wouldn’t be the least bit credible. Good information spreads effortlessly, due to the nature of our wiring. It takes a lot of work to lie or deceive or defraud credibly and manipulate facts, people, and situations to keep the lies going and keep them convincing. Good information’s allies are everywhere. Bad information stands against all those allies like a grain of sand trying to withstand serial tsunamis.
At the most basic, factual level, bad information is doomed and still-born, destined for extinction except as a footnote here and there or a cautionary tale.
This is why honesty is in no way a “policy”. Policies are elective and arbitrary. Honesty isn’t something you can opt in or out of, no more than you can “opt” in or out of suicide. Lie, and die. Try, and live. Informational suicide is not a policy, it’s dumbshit idiocy.
This is why bad information has no shred of hope standing against good information, nor lies against honesty. The clout just isn’t there.
But light as a metaphor for information has a failing. If there were a type of light that shone through and rendered everything transparent, the metaphor would be perfect, because information casts no shadow unless dishonesty blocks it. So, once past a certain extent, information spread makes hiding and secrets impossible.
Short of that revolution – a genuine enlightenment of heart and soul which will necessarily and unavoidably trigger an enlightenment of relationship, community, culture and, finally, society – any other kind of revolution that might happen will wind up pretty much where every other revolution that’s ever happened wound up: “new” bosses, “new” rules, a new “economy”, a “new” government, a “new social order”, “new” systems and institutions, “new” methods of control and punishment.
Sorry, I’m lost. What, exactly, is new in that?
Are we talking new model of new design, new approach to modeling, new design principles, new rationale – or just another new boss, same as the old one?
Revolution doesn’t go nearly far enough or deep enough. What’s worse, revolution is aimed in the wrong direction, at symptoms thrown like anti-missile countermeasures out the asses of our FUBARed souls – otherwise known as behavior and its results, lying everywhere festering, polluting, toxic, and sickening – that is, those very bosses, rules, economies, governments, “social orders”, systems, institutions, and methods of control and punishment which revolutions overthrow.
Change all the works of all the devils all you like – you will not by that have changed the devils and their evil scheming one whit.
I've been calling this revolution of heart and soul – even spirit, if you will – the ReLOVEution, because it starts with two things that will reunite and heal our battered, broken psyches.
The idea that we can fix a broken world while refusing to fix our broken souls is probably the epitome of hubris and hypocritical posturing. Before we can make even nominal use of our primary implement for creating a new world, we first must fix the implement itself so that it’s at least nominally functional – which, at this point in time, now, after witnessing the collective, abject failure of honesty and sanity that was COVID, it absolutely is not.
First, we’ve got to stop fucking lying.
We’ve gotten to the point of absurdity where all that people in this gaslit, “perception is truth” world think they need to do is act as if something is “the truth”. It’s become a bullshit world, a gaslit planet.
As Harry Frankfurt put it, in his wonderful little book On Bullshit,
It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.
…
He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.
– pages 55-61
As long as a person can come up with a plausible story or explanation and “sell it”, they think they’re golden. As long as a brain fart seems credible and it’s attractive enough to be “sold”, no one cares about facts or evidence, anymore.
In the sense that buying and selling always involve inordinate amounts of bullshit (aka advertising), we could indeed agree: sold ‘em is golden. And they’ve got the receipts to prove it.
Once we’ve accepted bullshit (I prefer gaslighting) as “truth”, if someone objects to all this plausible, credible, “beautiful” flatulence gassing the place up and demands factual basis as demonstrated by evidence, we chuck them out like a foul pariah so that we can continue, nonplussed, steeping in the reek of our own self-serving narratives which, pretty much, once the bullshit’s boiled off, amount to peanuts.
But what if someone dared press the point, insisting that some reasonable, tangible connection to what’s really going on be shown?
“How dare you?!! I’m so offended that you’d attack my opinion, my ideology, my theory, my beliefs, my faith – my precious, sweet little lifeboat!”
Someone, anyone, please help!
Explain to me how requiring factual basis is tantamount to “attack”.
Our situation – quite literally, clinically, narcissistically – has become hysterical and insane.
Not even fooling.
Second, head from heart, intelligence from love, perspicacity from empathy, our souls have been split in two and the halves divorced. We need to reconcile and reunite them. I use “soul” to denote a reintegrated psyche in contrast to a broken, bifurcated, fractured one.
So, we need to stop lying that we’re not broken. We need to stop lying that all we need to do is change our environment, change our systems, change our cultures, institutions, methods, ideologies, leaders, “educate” the “mindless masses”, etc., without radically repairing the only apparatus we have for making any change of any kind. We need to stop lying that we know how to and are in any condition to tame a rabid dog by grabbing its tail. If we had a clue which end to deal with and how to deal with it, we wouldn’t be trying to wag the dog, and we’d have succeeded by now.
The only reason we haven’t succeeded yet is that we’re still stuck in the self-abnegation that was mind-fucked into us as if it were truth.
No, it’s obviously not true – otherwise mind-fucking wouldn’t have been necessary.
Our primary, indispensable engine of creation, imagination, and change has been radically compromised – and it’s gone on so long we’ve come to consider it normal. We have come not only to expect no better, let alone much better – we have come to deny any better than just barely better.
As soon as someone suggests a radically better life in a radically better world, out whip the Guns of Raging Scorn firing one after another automatic round in long chains, several shots per second, of nonstop mockery.
How much more maniacally perverted could we possibly get than to deliberately obliterate our own hopes?
When I say FUBAR, fucked up beyond all recognition as being human instead of psychotically compromised is exactly what I mean.
So, in light of how far we’ve fallen, I think it makes sense to delve into an old, much maligned, veritably and completely misunderstood idea: sin.
I don’t care what you think about religion, moral beliefs, or your opinions about what “sin” really is or really is not, because I’ve been through all the usual suspect definitions with a fine-tooth comb and found out that it was futile.
They’re all bald.
So, I advocate rethinking our concept of sin – like or hate it, relevant to you or not – because in your thinking, like everyone’s thinking, there are things that other people just fucking should not do, things which arouse your empathy and grief and indignation and rage because they hurt persons who are precious to us. Whether or not you like the term, replete with all its baggage, you hold a concept to which you well could and probably would have affixed the label, if only it hadn’t been loaded with venom, dead weight, and triggers by your personal history of familial, religious, educational, and social conditioning.
“Sin” is relevant here, just as relevant as the reality of evil, which we’ll get to later.
Sin has nothing to do with failing to abide by some universal cosmic or natural or divine “will” articulated in laws or commandments or rules or revelations. Sin has nothing to do with guilt incurred by opposing, breaking, or violating any such will or laws or commandments or rules or revelations. On the contrary, violation is the very essence of law itself.
Short of violating all humanity in decreeing by fiat the definition of “criminality”, i.e., which things are “against the law”; short of the unsolicited, forcible imposition of this elitist scheme on all “common” people, good and evil alike; and without punishing them under the pretense that they “broke the law”, making them “criminals” – it might be a rule or a guideline or a principle or advice, but it’s not remotely a law at all.
Sin certainly has nothing to do with the brain fuck that is the demon Law that leaps out of the heads of self-aggrandizing, elitist, OCD psychopaths, whether governmental or religious, in almost every age and place we so piously dub “civilized”.
Sin is the massive serial fuckery raging inside our heads and the demons running around in there with dildo dicks the size of Trident missiles shooting off every which way they can find a target, wiping out our integrity, destroying our sense of peace and safety, obliterating our creativity and imagination and joi de vivre, intimidating us into silent cowering and, eventually, disintegrating our identity and very sense of self.
Sin is our internal state of FUBAR which we variously try to work, fuck, drink, shoot down, shoot up, cheat, scam, defraud, extort, or brutalize our ways out of – or instead, in our infantilistic helplessness, pray and grovel and weep to saviors, heroes, saints, gurus, priests, “leaders”, “authorities”, or even the Invisible Pink Unicorn and her merry band of magically fantastical friends, begging and pleading that they, someone, anyone, would rescue and save us from our ever-apocalyptic inner chaos.
Sin is not the usual suspects you learned about, because the usual suspects are all behavioral symptoms of our internal FUBARness. Sin is the shit that’s fucking up our souls beyond all recognition. And, in a far more basic sense, sin is our refusal to rectify the situation when, no question, rectification is entirely possible.
We aren’t “sinners” because we fail to obey God or the Emperor or the Pope or the President or Mom or Dad or their rules and laws. We aren’t “sinners” because we fail to do what’s right and good.
We’re sinners because we’re fucked up and fucked over and, instead of fixing what amounts to society-wide, normalized levels of PTSD, we lie. We pretend we’re “just fine” – competent and smart and successful, in fact – despite limping along with compound fractures, bones sticking out through bloody, mutilated flesh all over our soul-bodies, which everyone sees except (or so we swear to kingdom come) us.
So, if we’re guilty of anything, we’re guilty of living lies and conspiring together to pretend they’re not lies. Because we all know we’re lying, and we all know everyone else is lying, and we all secretly agree to stay as far way as we can from calling each other on our bullshit until, finally, we just can’t take it anymore and blow that shit wide open.
If everyone else is FUBAR, then we are, too – because every single one of us is included in someone else’s “everyone else”.
So, the only “penitence” we need to show, the only “repentance” we need, the only “penance” we need to do is:
STOP FUCKING LYING.
That’s it and that’s all.
Anticlimactic, right? Maybe you thought that I’ve been pretending to have a super-ace up my sleeve, but it turns out instead that all I’ve got is what your momma told you when you were four years old.
Well, right back at ya: what makes you think that radical honesty intended to eradicate evil is not the super-ace?
I think you should honestly consider the likelihood that you see it as a blank card only because you were inducted, indoctrinated, and imprisoned in the cult of brute violence, the cult of war, where everyone believes that the only force strong enough to bring about revolutionary change lies in the very same kind of power they’re revolting against, the kind of power that violently crazed, warmongering psychopaths have always dealt in: powers of dread, destruction, and death.
Your eyes, now acclimated in your psychic dungeon to its pitch black broken only by intimidating figments, fiends and monsters and heroes, can no longer see what’s happening right in front of your nose, as the CONVID scamdemic proved beyond reasonable doubt.
Do you know for a fact that the path of peace cannot succeed against evil, or is it that you have no more familiarity with it than tyrannical psychopaths do?
Destruction and misery are in their paths, and the path of peace they have not known.
– Romans 3:16-17
Or is the real rub that you do not, under any circumstance, want to find out?
Is the fact of the matter that you have no intention of finding out, because you pretend to already know what you’ll find?
Is the truth that you hate the truth and hate anyone who “threatens” to expose the truth, like kidnappers whose blood pressure and heartrate and stress hormones rise and fall in precise reflection of how close a would-be investigator gets to the door hiding the dungeon cages they locked their souls into?
We all know where we are, where our souls are, where the door is, and what it leads down to, don’t we?
Our bodies, at least, don’t lie.
So, what’s the solution for such mind-fritzing, unbearable dissonance?
Confess?
Not according to the slogans and choices and actions of the vast majority.
No – shoot the investigator.
“CONSPIRACY THEORIST!”
This is how you know, if you want to be honest, that you've been lying.
There’s another perjurious tell that’s a bit cleverer than that thinly disguised, “Fuck you for questioning!”
After hundreds, maybe thousands of people I’ve heard give the likes of a plaintive, juvenile wail, “But what can we do?” I’ve had it up to here. Now that I’ve realized and see for myself that all we need to do to eradicate evil is to stop fucking lying about it, they get no quarter from me.
A variation on that venal pretense of impotence is the conniving, rhetorical, “But how would that work?” as if it’s our job to remediate their feigned ignorance. Clueless about what “that” actually involves, nonetheless flattering themselves that they’re in a position to predict whether “that” will be “viable” – eyes wide and full of “innocence” and devoid of sincerity – they staunchly refuse to drop the charade and try “that” out and see how it in fact does work.
“What? Try it? Why would I do that when I already know what will happen?”
Ashamed for anyone so willing to debase themself, I can only shake my hanging head.
Like I said, lying takes a helluvalot of hard, soul-grating work.
When I see shenanigans like that, it’s very difficult for me to avoid the conclusion that these clowns know exactly what would happen, but they emphatically do not want it to happen. So, they resorted to a sham of dumbshit stupidity to avoid getting outed as liars committed to the unendingness of evil, because in our feckless culture in false praise of virtue, it’s just not cool to refuse to eradicate evil for no better reason than they don’t want it eradicated. Naw, they need cover better than that.
Liars like this pretend incompetence by cluelessness, banking on an idiotic but strangely compelling ruse: ignorance implies innocence. They’d have us believe that they are unaware of the terrific and terrifying power that has always been right there in their hands, in their mouths, in their eyes, and in their souls. But woe to them if they were to admit that they hold it, see it, and could say it, since they know it. They’re aware and have been aware ever since childhood, frighteningly aware – which is why they banished their awareness of the knowledge of their own power, the power of honesty, into those dank psychic dungeons.
If the power of honesty is so feeble, insufficient, impotent, and ineffectual, why all the pretense and subterfuge? Why the passion in denial and refusal? Why the melodrama? They doth protest too much, methinks.
No, they know exactly where their power is, but if they admitted it, they’d be outed as liars, enablers of evil, and therefore, accessories to evildoing. So, rather than come clean, they sin. They choose darkness, piling lie upon lie, doubling and tripling and quadrupling down to get away with playing convincing ignoramuses to themselves and the rest of us.
At this point in my lifelong journey to find a way to understand what the fuck is really going on, I will no longer entertain “opinions” and “discussions” and “arguments” which contend that honesty is not all we need or not powerful enough to eradicate evil from Earth, forever.
If that’s you – if that’s your opinion, your belief, your contention – then this is for you:
No. You fucking do not know that. You have no way of knowing that.
You’re gaslighting.
And, yes, it fucking is all we need and powerful enough.
You speak from ignorance and inexperience. I speak from experience and the understanding it’s formed.
If you would just try it, (avoiding the which is precisely what your interminable opinions and discussions and arguments serve to do,) you would find out for yourself that it’s not just true, but wildly, astonishingly, flying-colors true.
Your very resistance to trying it proves you know there’s something to it, something that scares you enough to stand against it and fight it, stupidly.
I’m happy to say: that particular guest parlor in the home that is me, where I used to let visitors yak on and on about the possibility and viability and advisability of being honest in order to eradicate evil, has been permanently closed to them. I never liked those guys, anyway, but I gave them plenty of space and time to bloviate their contentions. I found out they just stink the place up, and I’m right back to zero after it airs out.
I’m so sorry (not) that ReLOVEution won’t enable you young studs to show off your fists and brawn and axe-kicks, or yell your war cries, or pink- mist countless fiends for “glory and honor and freedom”. I can’t believe kids are still so stupid and gullible, especially since the lessons of the 20th century were so hideously clear, that they’ll still believe “patriotic” military recruitment bullshit. Run all those fucking obscene, horrendous, treasonously false, “Come and Die!” recruitment ads off the networks and off the billboards. Of all the types of recruiters and salespeople across the spectrum, military con artists are the only ones who don’t take some thing from you, but sell you on giving up your very life on your own volition, sacrificing yourself to a war machine that knows it might very well, by design, intentionally and deliberately, kill you.
Talk about mind-fucks.
But don’t whine or cry. ReLOVEution won’t merely take your shit candy away – it will give you something far better, way more ballsy and daring, and inestimably more meaningful and fulfilling. You’ll still get to be part of something greater than yourself. You’ll still get to take on the vilest of the vile knowing that you’ll beat it down and out. We haven't done ticker tape parades for veterans in this country since the early 90s, and you won’t get one either, nor will you hear, “Thank you for your service,” from people feeling obliged to say so.
You won’t need any of that, because everyone will already know. Jubilation will become the norm, the baseline, foundational. You’ll watch a completely different kind of freedom on a completely different level and know that you had a part in eradicating its incarcerators and their prisons, releasing it. It will be unmistakable and undeniable, because it will clearly and obviously reflect the liberation you already experienced yourself.
We don't need guns and grenades and RPG's. We don't need tanks and bombs and missiles. The obscenely abhorrent military spending of the United States proves the abject, moronic lunacy of a nation which knows nothing of real peace and how to get it. Safety and security can’t be found except among friends, so what should we say about vicious, conniving idiots who pretend to look for peace at the business end of a gun? Extorting and terrorizing everywhere we go, inducing dread, destabilizing, rendering survival itself precarious for billions – as if that makes for security?
What numbskull would take a crock of shit like that seriously?
A crock of evil, evil shit which almost no one truly believes we can overcome and eradicate.
You want to be different, special, a one-of-a-kind, a genius even? You’ve got it in you. We all do.
But we all have betrayed ourselves. We’ve degraded and denied ourselves, nixed ourselves, debased ourselves.
How can we self-betrayers be true, devoted, and loyal to anyone else?
Our true enemies reeve within.
Inner space is the final frontier, the key battleground.
That’s where we start.
Once we’ve overcome our foes in that theater – as Paul the apostle put it so well, “against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” – and what places are higher or more important than our own souls? – the bodies and the works of the elevated and celebrated and reviled ones on thrones and “seats of power” in towers and cathedrals and capitols, monoliths of concrete, glass, and stone, will be a cinch.
You have no way to imagine that yet. I trust that the vision will jell for you as we continue.
You say you want a revolution
So many striking thoughts it's hard to pick one. It feels like a sauna of the sole, a purge, a cleanse. To see with such clarity. If there is one bottom line it is this one - Our true enemies reeve within. Inner space is the final frontier, the key battleground. How well you capture it. It all begins inside. And that will have the effect of changing the projection on the cave wall.