THE MATRIX IS REAL - AND YOU ARE IN IT!

Increasingly, in the last two decades of his long career in comedy, the now deceased American comic, George Carlin, used to make a point of mentioning in interviews, and even in his act, that he had a problem with groups of people. He seemed to mean “partisan groups of people” by this remark, even possibly insinuating that groups, by their very nature, were liable to become partisan at all times. In making this point, Carlin would often be sure to remind his audience that he was not being misanthropic by having this attitude. He would often say that if he met individual people he would get on with them fine and without any problems at all. But, according to him, it was when they got together and organised themselves into groups that the trouble would start. This had caused Carlin to back off from society and to treat it, vicariously, as a show put on for his entertainment. He had, he said, ceased to care about outcomes and was now just hoping to be entertained by the destructive behaviour of groups of his fellow human beings and all it was to him was a particularly garish show.

I understand where George Carlin was coming from and, increasingly, as I think about the world we live in and the human beings that populate it, I see no reason to hope for any particular outcome. I won’t say that I go so far as to see it as a show either but, I think, I have learned the wisdom that Carlin learned which is that you can’t fool yourself into hoping for anything in particular from such a species as ours. This has nothing to do with being hopeful or pessimistic or, indeed, even with wanting any particular outcome one way or another in the first place. It just doesn’t seem very appropriate to me to set an entire species a goal and then want them to achieve it. This doesn’t seem remotely true or authentic to life as it actually is to me. In fact, what it does seem like is control and, as a convinced anarchist, control is never a good thing. Control is an authoritarian thing, a huge red flag to any anarchist.

Of course, control is the norm, as in the vision conjured up by the Wachowskis in their series of films set in “the matrix”. The matrix is a technological prison, the result of a war against sentient machines, but it has much to teach simple human beings in our world too. One issue that I think about a lot is the one that the character Morpheus addresses when it is suggested that all those imprisoned in the matrix, human beings grown from birth in pods whose bodies act as batteries powering the very system which enslaves them, should simply be released. Wouldn’t this both free the people and cripple the matrix at the same time? Morpheus’ answer is one that we should think about for a very long time for he explains that most people simply don’t want to be unplugged and that, after a certain time, they just become too used to their surroundings to be unplugged from them anyway. They become dependent on that which enslaves them and they have no idea that its a matrix which they live their whole lives within.

This, I think, is very much the situation in our world right now, in the world in which I observe the social media back and forth of millions of people all plugged into a matrix of their own. They watch TV, they read newspapers, they respond to mainstream media, they follow the latest “trending topics”, they are entirely led by the nose through the “bread and circuses” by a capitalist media who tell them what to talk about and what’s good to think in a never-ending scroll of life. But do you know what’s almost entirely lacking from these places? Original thought or even thought that the people have had themselves without being told what to think about or what to react to by somebody else. Everything today is about adding to a hashtag or repeating the same old topics and if you have your own thoughts or do your own thinking its probably not going to be about such things. Because its going to be about you and your own thoughts on what matters to you or your life. It might even have some emotional authenticity or some meaningfulness rather than being the utterly shallow and vapid stuff the mainstream regurgitates on a loop to never let go of your attention as it constantly massages your in-built prejudices.

And the point is the point Morpheus made: many people, most people, simply don’t want to be unplugged from this matrix - even if they ever did. They aren’t equipped to think for themselves, to imagine alternatives or to have an original idea. They can’t think outside the box for they do not even realise they are in one. They have been grown as talking bobbleheads who constantly yack about today’s talking points. And nothing else. They are on the merry-go-round of talk shows, newspapers and social media and they don’t want to get off. And why would they when they have been groomed to be addicted to these things? In that case, very much as in The Matrix itself, it is only very few people indeed who would ever have even the intuition that things could be another way or who could survive being introduced to it for the first time after a life of being force fed a narrative of what it was even possible to think about or discuss. And, by the by, such a situation does not encourage thinking for yourself, questioning, imagining, having ideas. There’s a good reason for this, too, for it might take you outside the controlled bounds of what’s thought acceptable and decent to this mainstream. You might start having rogue ideas or even simply other ideas and that’s very dangerous in a world based on control - not least to the controllers and the media they use to control it. So becoming unplugged from such controlling media might then be seen to be the most revolutionary and potentially dangerous act you could undertake… which is why people like Morpheus, Trinity and Neo are being hunted down in the first place for they are outside the matrix and so free to think what they like and even to act upon it.

Now the matrix, as we learn more fully and intricately in the sequels to the original film, is actually a grand construction for the purposes of misdirection. The reason for building it was to fool as many human beings as possible into accepting what was being fed into their minds so that they would function normally completely under the control of their overlords and in a completely docile way. Docility, of course, was absolutely vital for their control and we know that this was not always the case in various former iterations of the matrix where human beings refused to accept what they were being told - and either refused to take part or actively resisted it. This resulted in many deaths and, as the character The Architect says in the second film, “whole crops were lost”. The matrix is a system of control and its genius is entirely in not being recognised for what it is. What is the best means of control? The means you do not even recognise as control or that, even if you do, you cannot unplug yourself from. An example of the latter in The Matrix is Cypher. He knows what the matrix is, he even discusses it with agents of the system, but he prefers imprisoned ignorance to taking responsibility for his own life in the harsh reality outside it. Cypher is a powerful metaphor for many millions of people in our own world, even many millions who label themselves as concerned about the world, but who find themselves joined at the hip to this world and its system of control and cannot see any other way to live but by that system. Cypher just doesn’t want to face up to the harshness [and responsibility] of reality outside of the system [think capitalism, leaders, the authoritarianism of doing as you are told] so he will plug himself into whatever it is that fills his day and blinds him to it instead. He welcomes the misdirection because it at least doesn’t cause him any real trouble or require anything more of him but to play the role others have assigned to him. He becomes willingly docile in this respect, even to the point of betraying others to achieve it. I know you can think of those in our world who do exactly the same as this.

Yet I see another disturbing analogy to this in the many people who interact with various forms of media who label themselves as politically concerned. Some, of course, the conservatives, right wingers and fascists, use such media on purpose. They are dishonest actors who will lie, deceive and misdirect entirely to get what they want. They are goal-focused and their only goal is to win, to control and to possess the power. In this they partly act as willing agents of the matrix. They are people who have been grown and, in some cases, turned to become agents of the grand system of misdirection. They are those who want this system to dominate and they play their part in it. If you remember back to the films, anybody in the system can at any time become an agent of the system and, as Morpheus teaches Neo in one of his training sessions, “Anyone who is not one of us, is one of them.” We who are unplugged from this matrix should take note of this for, if we ever step back inside it, getting wrapped up in social media discussions or news stories this matrix has itself generated, we soon realise how completely controlled and misdirected many who think themselves on the side of right have become. They do not realise they have become Pavlov’s dogs trained to respond to the slightest stimulus and to react in predictable ways to a whole set of cues and, more to the point, they don’t realise they’ve been disabled from meaningful action - which is always physical action in the real world - by being locked into a never-ending conversation they can never win - because the point is it plays out forever: the conversation is itself control. Remember back to the matrix constructed in the film: it is destroyed not by being plugged into it but by unplugging and taking actions to destroy it and its control. It cannot be destroyed from within. It has enslaved too many people and too many have been turned into those who will willingly keep others enslaved or destroy them instead. Or maybe just keep them talking and so misdirected and distracted.

One thing we should notice about its control, however, is that it is necessarily quite sophisticated. The matrix does not stop you having your own thoughts. It doesn’t stop you imagining freedom or rebellion. In fact, these even play a part in its construction as The Architect informs us. In the same way, our own matrix does not deny us the choice The Architect informs Neo it became vital to include in the iteration of the matrix from which he himself was released and which The Oracle, another agent of the system, encouraged him to pursue. The point, however, was that even this choice was a function of the enslaving control the matrix was built to serve. The machines who controlled the human population had realised that people need to at least think they are free and have the choice to not do, as well as do, what they are told. If given this choice, they learned, people could become better controlled, better coerced, even if, in fact, they were just as controlled and coerced in reality as they always had been. 

This is very much the case today. The controlling system of authoritarian capitalism will tell you that you have a choice and, in theory, abstractly, you do have a choice. But take any action to pursue a choice undesired by these same authoritarian capitalists [such as riots or protests because black lives matter, for example] and action will be taken against you even as it is against people who become too socialist in Latin or South America or if a Sanders appears in US political discourse or a Corbyn does in British political discourse. The matrix doesn’t mind you talking and complaining all day, every day, about these things by means of the various media companies. In fact, it encourages you to - because while you are doing this, and I see this all the time on social media, you are not doing anything to dismantle the matrix and the system of control which it constitutes [even, by the way, as you out yourselves to the powers that be]. In fact, you are actively helping it perform its controlling function by doing so every bit as much as Neo, up to a certain point, was doing so by carrying out the function of “The One” which, lest we forget, was itself a function of the matrix and its system of control. 

This is another lesson to be learned. Every system of control may have those few people it cannot reach or control but this is OK if they never actually defeat the system but are themselves impotent against it. This then acts as a further reinforcing narrative for the system’s truth that it is in control and that there is no prospect of its destruction. And this is then something else to discuss eternally whilst still under its endless control. So long as you never learn the lesson that you should be trying to destroy the very system that you have come to rely on for your own survival - its making you dependent upon the very thing which is your real enemy being entirely part of the plan all along - then why should the system care what you discuss, dream about or imagine whilst still firmly under its control? Such things are actually part of its means of control so long as you don’t try to unplug, once and for all, and then see your real enemy.

In the films, of course, the matrix only comes under real threat once various characters, both “good” and “bad”, rebel from their assigned roles. Agent Smith no longer wants to be an agent of the system and, instead, becomes a threat to it. Neo, likewise, rejects his role as a further [but unknowing] agent of the same system and prefers to make his own choices rather than the coerced ones he had been making up until this point because he had been manipulated into buying into the story that the game of freeing Zion was one that had real stakes. Zion, we learn, is also just another means of control in which those few people who escape the matrix are habitually wiped out so that the cycle can begin again. Here is where we learn that a measure of rebellion is always acceptable to the powers that be for it justifies the mass of authoritarian forces which maintain it as it is and serves to keep the vast mass of unrebellious people under control. Seeing what happens to those who rebel is always a good lesson for everyone else to learn but this, again, is misdirection and its always about learning what the system wants you to learn from this perspective. The last thing the system wants is to lose the upper hand and it will allow pretty much anything which allows it to maintain its advantage and its control. So even at the end of the third matrix film, when Zion is saved and the machines have had to concede to working with Neo in order to defeat Smith, the matrix itself remains intact even at the cost of The Architect agreeing to free all those from it who want to be. But that still leaves untold millions of seemingly willing [or just uninformed] slaves, the many sentinels who are its police in the real world and the agents who patrol its digital pathways enforcing order. The matrix is itself still there as are both The Oracle and The Architect, its “mother” and “father”. Real freedom will only exist when all these do not but even the apparent self-sacrifice of Neo has not achieved that. All he has achieved is, at most, a concession with no promise that things won’t just go back to how they used to be once more.

There is so much that could be learned from this analogy and from going through it in much more detail than I have imagined here in this short essay. Yet the broad outlines are, I hope, clear and the rest of the thinking is up to you for we must each emerge from within the shadow of the matrix by taking responsibility for ourselves, our own lives and our own thoughts. We all need to become self-educating people. For we are all here, in our real world, under a system of control every bit as much as real as the one imagined in The Matrix. These systems of control have the same aims and use many of the same techniques. Their job is to control us, even without us realising we are being controlled if they can, whilst keeping us docile, sleepy, compliant, playing the roles others have decided we will play. In this, us having our own opinions and views, a feeling of free will, is vital for they can be used to keep us locked in interminable conversations that threaten nothing because we have been willingly coopted into eternal impotence. Instead of seeing our true enemy and physically working to disrupt and destroy it [the apparatus of authoritarian capitalist control], we are misdirected into endless talk and other impotent actions such as social media. This utilises the passion we feel but simultaneously disarms it - a very insidious but effective form of control. If there are some few who wake up [the song played at the end of the first film], the forces of control will send their authoritarian sentinels into battle to destroy them. This will both quell the uprising and serve as  a warning to the rest. Control is all the system wants. It will do anything to maintain it.

So, of course, this control, and the system that wants it, is the real enemy. Its not the trending topics on your social media. Its not the shenanigans going on in your favourite political party. Its not the latest injustice. Its not the raft of conspiracy theories tossed out to confuse and engage you. All these intersectional issues are just distractions at the end of the day, fragments randomly distributed to catch and hold your attention in a permanent scroll which misdirects your attention from the fact you are a slave, that you are not free, that you cannot really make your own choices but only the ones you have been allowed to make. This is not because some mad billionaire wants to secretly put a chip in your head. It is because, done right, the system billionaires are a part of will not need to put a chip in your head or physically connect you to a matrix because you will already be under control by other means. When you accept that there are states and governments and leaders and police and rich and poor and economic systems and that you can only have something if you pay someone for it - and, if you don’t have money you may just have to accept starving or having no home or dying for lack of medical care you cannot afford - then you are already under control for none of these things are given and all of them are impositions upon life itself. The system would hate you to realise this and do something about it - such as finding alternative ways to live - for that is what really threatens it and what can really destroy it. So anything that is not that realisation is fine as far as the system is concerned for anything else will not ultimately or fundamentally change it. 

That is the realisation we all finally need to have if we want to escape the systems of control and experience real freedom for the first time. And to refuse to be misdirected by all the media that now surrounds us as a very deliberate and purposeful fog.

INTERVIEW ABOUT "ANARCHY AND ANARCHISMS"

Interviewer: You’ve just written and published a new book called “Anarchy and Anarchisms”. What is the book about and why have you written it?

Anarxistica: The book showcases some examples of things that are either called anarchism by some people today, things like anarchoprimitivism and anarchafeminism, and other things, such as a practical appraisal of how Jesus of Nazareth lived and what he taught or the writings of Chinese Daoists or the meditative lifestyle of Zen Buddhists or the philosophy of self-creation espoused by Friedrich Nietzsche, and uses them to look at the ideas “anarchy” and “anarchism” to ask what they are and what they mean. So, from this angle, its a book about these things that hopes to inspire readers to think about them for themselves.

But there’s another reason for writing the book besides this and that’s to make an argument for anarchism not as some political set of beliefs or goals but as a kind of personal virtue, an ethics of living, a lived character which shows who we are. For me, anarchism can never be relegated to being a set of ideas. For me its something you live and who you are. It comes up from your insides and flows out into the world. Its much, much more than just some ideology to be put on like a coat or cast aside like an old sweater.

Interviewer: Are you against a more traditional description of “anarchism” then as a political desire for no government or the abolition of police and prisons, for example?

Anarxistica: No, not at all. But I do want to go much deeper into the mentality that leads to such conclusions and where it comes from. My context for anarchism is much wider than many others who claim the description “anarchist” today. In addition, many of the more traditional anarchists of 19th century anarchism, those we might think of as having founding roles in what became anarchism, were philosophical people who wanted to give some kind of reasoned or explicatory basis for why they came to the conclusion that anarchism was a reasonable answer to the question, “How should human beings live one with another?” So when people today talk about their political desires - the end of top down government, abolition of police and prisons, etc, - I understand why people come to those conclusions but I want to do work underneath such conclusions and positions and make an argument for why we come to them thinking of us as intelligent beings who live in the world.

Interviewer: You say your context for anarchism is much wider than that of many others who talk about anarchism. What is that context?

Anarxistica: The short version is that it is the cosmos. This I regard as essentially anarchy. Here “anarchy” does not mean “chaos” however or, at least, it does not mean “chaos” understood as the opposition of “order”. In fact, I do not see “chaos” and “order” as opposites but, as a Daoist would, as one thing always entailing the other. It would be very binary thinking to see them as opposites where such thinking is not necessary. Order and chaos can then be seen as versions of the same thing or components of a necessary whole and applied to the cosmos and so everything in it. This is my context of anarchy - and anarchism is what I argue to be an appropriate human response to it, its nature and its manner of operation.

Interviewer: This is a very philosophical or even spiritual conception of anarchy and anarchism. What would you say about this?

Anarxistica: Its a description I would agree with and own. My influences for it are those kinds of influences, things such as a reading of Chinese Daoism and Zen Buddhism or activities of Jesus of Nazareth, things which had spiritual and even philosophical bases but which resulted in certain kinds of lifestyles and practices, and so I see no shame in that. Philosophical and spiritual thought are two types of thought which are remarkably common throughout human history and so they must be attenuating something in the human being that finds itself in need of expression. One thing that is very important to me is having authenticity in our conversations and in our thinking about things. So I feel no shame if my conception of anarchy or anarchism ultimately comes from philosophical or spiritual roots. What’s more important is to be honest and to explain oneself as clearly and honestly as one can and let your authenticity speak for itself. That will do so not only in terms of what it is you say you want but also in terms of where it comes from. 

Interviewer: What do you think are the prospects for anarchism in the world we live in today and where does your conception of anarchism fit into this?

Anarxistica: This is where I say it depends on what you think anarchy and anarchism are. The political anarchist sees anarchism as a list of things they want to bring to pass. They emphasize direct action and taking things into your own hands. Anarchism, on these terms, fails if the things that are wanted do not come to pass. In addition, such anarchism is inherently about conflict and perhaps even violent conflict. Often such anarchism is based on anger and its not anger that I would condemn at all because its anger thats been earned by decades and even centuries of one kind of a person’s domination of another. People are angrily crying out for freedom from oppression and from their literal exploitation and coercion to serve other people’s purposes with the threat that they might even lose their lives if they don’t comply. One cannot condemn and so deny that. One must be open about the problem before one can attempt a solution. One must recognise the pain and anger and the justice it cries out for.

But I think we need to take the bull by the horns and be realistic though. Are the governments of the world going to fall overnight, regardless of how oppressive and how much the tools of capitalists and simple crooks they are? No. Are police and armies just going to put down their guns? No. Are prisons just going to open the doors and then close down? No. Are possessive capitalists going to turn into people who renounce property? No. I think anarchists need to think a lot more closer to home than this. They need to start with themselves and manifest anarchism in their own lives and choices - and not to forget in their own relationships with other people. My view is that the best chance anarchism has is when other people see anarchists living as anarchists and come to the conclusion that it is a better way to live. Now this might include protests, strikes, boycotts and opposing the cruel actions of authoritarians and capitalists. I am not saying these should stop or that they are wrong. In fact, they are often necessary. I’d particularly be in favour of continuous micro-refusals to go along with the prevailing authoritarian and capitalist narrative in society. You should not always do as you are told and its essential that you don’t. But I am saying that anarchism must always be more than such actions, big or small. It must be the life lived as an anarchist existence that examples the values it claims it wants to see victorious in the end. The means is the end and the end is the means.

Interviewer: Can anarchism ever win?

Anarxistica: Again, it depends on your terms. Anarchism wins a million times a day all over the world if you think anarchism is cooperation, helping someone in need, opposing those who want to dominate, coerce or oppress. For, everywhere, all over the world, people do those things every day. Those who think of “anarchism” as toppling the government and only toppling the government, however, have, in my view, completely missed the point. We do not topple the government for its own sake but because it is in the furtherance of values we already live out in our own lives and want to spread as widely in their effects as possible. Anarchism, at least as I understand it, is not just ending physical domination but is ending the idea of domination as a thought anyone would ever have. And so, to come back to your question, my anarchism isn’t about “winning” as if just winning were enough. Its about being but, more than that, its about becoming. Its about becoming non-dominating, non-coercive, non-exploitative. Its about becoming compassionate, peace-loving, cooperative. Its about becoming people for whom “winning” is not even on their radar anymore. Any “win” in a physical conflict that did not also achieve that becoming would be just another battle in an ongoing war. The aim of my anarchism is an end to war.

Interviewer: You discuss a number of different kinds of anarchism in your book. Is there one kind that you favour or would recommend?

Anarxistica: No, there isn't. I am a convinced anarchist. Its not my job to tell you what to do or think. That is strictly a matter for you. I believe in quite a strict notion of personal responsibility when it comes to this. Modern, liberal society breeds lazy people and it wants to lull them into a sleep which about dependency. Because then they are more easily controlled. I take an opposing view. You are responsible for you and no one can take that away. Part of what this means is that you must decide for yourself how you will live and I think that this is one of our best defences against dictatorship and control - when people take responsibility for themselves. So I encourage education. I encourage discussion and conversation. I encourage learning from others and getting to know what other people think about things. But they can’t tell you what to do. They can’t say, “We are doing this now.” What you are doing is up to you - in the context of a whole load of other people who have needs too, of course. So I don’t recommend this view or that although I may certainly say what convinces me and why. I say that if we are all thinkers and talkers who take responsibility for ourselves seriously then we will work something out we can all find mutually beneficial. 

Interviewer: In part of your book you discuss the anarchoprimitivism of John Zerzan which says civilisation is the problem. Do you agree with him in this? How could you possibly convince millions of people that going backwards is an improvement?

Anarxistica: By convincing them that people are very, very fallible and that they make mistakes, sometimes terrible mistakes. In fact, is there a person alive who isn’t already aware of this? All that needs to be done, then, is to convince them that civilisation is one of these mistakes, a mistake so disastrous its now clear it threatens life on the planet generally. If you think that is true then you cannot avoid the conclusion that it is our fault and that, consequently, we need to change. 

This is another area where I think people need to examine their thinking. We like to use words like “progress” and to designate our past selves “primitive” but we are our past selves. Just because we have carpeted our caves and now travel around in cars rather than animal skins it doesn’t make this “progress”. What do you do when the creature creates myriad ways to destroy itself? Do you let it carry on? Give control of it to a few, self-interested examples? Or do you say, “Stop! Look at what we are doing and have done. Look at what will happen if we continue”? I think we say the latter. I think we own up to all this destruction done in civilisation’s name by those who use the term “civilised” as if it were a badge of honour when, in reality, its a badge of shame, something people who went around almost naked in the streets 2300 or 2400 years ago thought was corrupting and illegitimate even then! Civilisation is that thing which is killing us and everything else. The notion it might then be reformed or is even our saviour then becomes simply nonsensical. We need a total revolution of our values and I think anarchism set in a cosmos of anarchy is what that is. I also, by the way, think that surviving is an improvement on slow, but rapidly increasing, suicide. Even better than that would be a reason to survive. A few decades more life so that authoritarians can control us for longer is no achievement to be proud of and neither is that reality soothed because you have Netflix and an XBox whilst, down the street, people look in the bins for their next meal. Seriously, fuck civilisation!

Interviewer: Your book also contains a chapter on “identity”. This is certainly a hot topic today but why is it in a book about anarchism?

Anarxistica: Because, in many ways, this is where it all starts for me, in questions of who we are, where we are, what this situation is. You cannot decide what, if anything, you should do if you haven’t given these things a description which then is a context for your own action. So questions such as these matter a great deal because they set the scene for who you are, where you are and what is to be done. In fact, on an intellectual level, we might see this as simply another way to view the whole. This is important, then, because it shows us our thoughts about ourselves, each other, and where we are. But it also shows them up as thoughts, as interpretations, opinions and beliefs, as things which need not be what they are. I think this view will probably upset quite a lot of people because they become very attached to what I have come to think of as fictions of and about ourselves but I must admit that I can now see such things in no other way. Human beings, for me, are those beings who tell themselves stories and then do their utmost, often regardless of circumstances, to convince themselves that they are true. They think that if they believe hard enough they will be. But I think when we do that we’re always wrong. Its fictions, nothing more. Once we admit to that, we can get to what they are for and where they take us. And that will be a good thing.

Interviewer: This almost sounds like an existential view of life, that people fight themselves in their various existences as they try to survive.

Anarxistica: I think that’s often true and I think the struggle is often to be authentic people in a world that begs you to be anything but authentic because it tells you that that is the only way to get to tomorrow, by constantly betraying yourself. I take the view that it would be better to be authentically me, and authentically free as me, for one day - and not see tomorrow - than to have lived an inauthentic life in which I was constantly coerced to be something else. This is to say that freedom comes from within and is not just about the material conditions of our existence, important as they, of course, are. I see this as being important to everyone although issues such as the current persecution of trans people is something which raises it to my consciousness again and again, as only one example. It is a basic freedom that people should be allowed to be who they are. All anarchists should fight for this even as they do for groups and communities.

Interviewer: What would you like to happen as a result of the book?

Anarxistica: I would be happy if anyone read it and thought about the issues it raises for themselves. That’s my only ambition, such as it is. People certainly don’t have to agree with me. And if they disagree with me, having thought about the issues I raise and for reasons of their own, then that’s a success as well. We all win from people who think, take responsibility and act with virtue. We all lose when they don’t.

You can read or download “Anarchy and Anarchisms” for free HERE!

NAZIS FROM SPACE!

As if things weren’t bad enough in our embattled world. What with people in the USA fighting for civil rights [still!] and enduring daily altercations with militarized police forces and others in a country that houses a prison-industrial complex that, amongst other things, cages children and engages in forced hysterectomies in ICE detention centres, Chinese victimization of the Uighur people which reportedly includes “re-education camps”, the ongoing apartheid in Palestine where one of the most militarized states in the world continues to wage war against the Palestinian people, and an ongoing global Covid-19 pandemic which is being dealt with, worldwide, with disparate and unequal concern and effectiveness with hope ultimately being placed in vaccines sold to the highest bidder by rapacious pharmaceutical companies, it would, perhaps, be very 2020 to conclude the year with the news that our planet has been invaded by Nazis from space. [Although, of course, it seems that we already have far too many of our own in any case.]

Yet the Nazis from space that my title refers to are not real ones but fictional ones, fictional ones, in fact, from the 1983 TV miniseries V [V: The Original Miniseries for the purposes of distinguishing it from its 1984 follow up miniseries, V: The Final Battle, the 1984-85 TV series and the 2009 reboot]. This original miniseries should be set apart from its later follow ups for while they become increasingly based in science fiction and action [and become increasingly stupid as a result] the original two part miniseries is based on an allegory and ideas. It was in fact inspired by a 1935 book by the Nobel Prize for Literature winner, Sinclair Lewis, called It Can’t Happen Here, the story of a demagogue elected US President in 1936 who is described as “fomenting fear and promising drastic economic and social reforms while promoting a return to patriotism and ‘traditional’ values.” Once elected, this president “takes complete control of the government and imposes totalitarian rule with the help of a ruthless paramilitary force”. Readers should not be surprised to learn that the president depicted in this book has drawn comparison with President Trump and the point of the book, of course, and in contravention of its title, is that the fascism it describes can always happen here because it doesn’t take much to tip over into a fascist situation.

But back to our Nazis from space for there is, I believe, several things we can learn from this fiction and that we need to pay attention to in our current lives in the contemporary world. The original, two-part miniseries V is the story of benevolent, humanoid aliens who come to Earth in stereotypical, “flying saucer” spaceships in search of various chemicals and minerals their civilisation has run out of. In return for the humans of Earth helping them out, these aliens are more than willing to share helpful technology with us as one would expect people capable of interstellar travel to possess. Initiating a first meeting with the head of the United Nations in New York, the aliens soon ingratiate themselves with the political leaders of the world but it is precisely then that more disturbing things start to happen. For example, scientists, those who naturally might have an enthusiastic interest in aliens from outer space, become an increasing target for public and media hate, both an enemy for the aliens to be wary of but also a scapegoat for the watching humans to blame. Various propaganda materials, which regard the aliens as “friends” and depict them in amicable poses with human beings, begin appearing. The aliens, termed “Visitors” in the show, deploy vast numbers of military forces in the various human communities depicted to facilitate their needs unmolested. A human spokeswoman is appointed by the Visitors so that the people of Earth may be addressed by one of their own and also, one suspects, so that the aliens can avoid interrogation by human beings directly. 

Soon enough, of course, we learn that the aliens are not all they appear to be. An investigative TV journalist, Mike Donovan, manages to sneak aboard one of the aliens’ 50 motherships hovering above various cities and discovers that the aliens have a terrible secret. They are not humanoid at all but carnivorous reptilians that eat live food such as mice or small birds - or even human beings. Their eventual plan is to steal all our water and harvest most of humanity as food. Being an investigative reporter, Donovan has a camera with him and films the alien commander eating a live guinea pig. Returning to ground, he goes to a TV studio and is about to broadcast the tape live when the broadcast is taken over by the Visitors who have now taken control of all media. In the meantime, the Visitors have instituted a “Visitor Youth” movement for young people aged 12-20 and we see one of the characters, Daniel Bernstein, the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, enthusiastically joining up to this movement the members of which are actively encouraged to inform on the people of their neighbourhoods. Daniel is given a military type uniform and a laser weapon to help him perform his duties. Increasingly, we see Visitors, or their new human allies, on street corners or in public generally and those who speak against the aliens are vilified, persecuted or “disappeared” as a result. In addition, scientists begin coming forward and admitting to conspiring against the Visitors although it is noticed that, in some cases, they seem now to be right-handed where once they were left-handed and there are other dissonant things about such people as well. It transpires that the aliens have a “conversion process” by which the aliens can make processed human beings become utterly compliant to their wishes and make them say what they want. Soon enough, however, as the increased alien presence becomes more and more authoritarian, a resistance movement is begun even whilst others, including Mike Donovan’s own mother, become willing collaborators with the new alien overlords, overlords that the former civilian authorities willingly cooperate with as just someone else to take orders from. [At this point it strikes me that all the Visitors seem to have been depicted as white - although I don’t know if this was deliberate or not.]

Anyway, you get the idea, I hope, from this brief overview. V is a particularly blunt allegory of the Nazism of 1933-1945 but one in which such Nazism has come to especially the USA [the programme was American-made, after all, and was set in Los Angeles] in ways more unbelievable in the 1980s than it would be in a Trumpian context of protestors being snatched from the streets, Proud Boys’ militia roaming armed around city centres with implicit police approval and presidents using their social media presence and public appearances to vilify the press, political opponents and critics alike as traitors, potential targets for harassment and worse. And that’s before we get into the targeted disinformation campaigns and voter suppression efforts that modern technology and social interaction enables but which 1980s TV producers could not have dreamed of. Nevertheless, many of the obvious factors in a popular fascism are scarily present even in a saccharin TV miniseries presented to appeal to a family audience in the spring of 1983. We see how the fascists ingratiate themselves with the leaders before taking power themselves, how they seek to control all media, so controlling what people are told, how they vilify and arrest their perceived enemies and remove those most likely to expose them, how they perpetrate atrocities against their enemies and dehumanise them, how they encourage collaboration and propagandise their presence and intent. Does this sound very much like YOUR government in YOUR country, I wonder? 

Yet why would a slightly hokey US miniseries almost 40 years old interest me so? It is because I am an anarchist and, being an anarchist, I am, of course, extremely anti-authoritarian - and fascism is essentially a kind of popular authoritarianism. But it is not necessarily a consistent, well thought out, intelligent authoritarianism as the Italian philosopher and novelist, Umberto Eco, reminded us in his 1995 essay “Ur-Fascism” [“Eternal Fascism”]. There, amongst 14 typical features of fascism, Eco records we find:

*A cult of tradition

*Rejection of modern thinking and the experts of the day

*Acting without thinking, thinking being regarded as suspect

*Any disagreement being regarded as treason

*A fear of any difference - making fascism racist by definition

*Concentration on social frustrations [which might need someone to blame for them]

*Obsession with plots and being under threat from enemies

*Inconsistency on whether the chosen enemies are strong or weak

*Refusal to take sides is seen as siding with the enemy

*An utter contempt for the weak in an elitism of the strong

*A cult of the hero where heroic death is also eulogised

*Obsession with machismo and weaponry which devalues both women and diverse genders and sexualities

*A fixation with the fiction of “the will of the People” or “the people’s Voice” which the fascists claim to be the authoritative interpreters of

*Fascists developing their own simplified form of language, as in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four where Orwell calls such a thing “Newspeak”. 

As I regard my readers as intelligent people in their own right I am sure you are able to see some, or even several, of these features active in various governments around the world today. In many cases these are governments which deign to allow their populations to vote once every four or five years in elections which these same political actors also can’t quite stop trying to rig, affect or otherwise gerrymander. At the same time, traditional and social media are being utilised to blast political messaging into the consciousnesses of people far and wide. As an anarchist, I don’t know what this is but it isn’t democracy for it is never democracy if you are being told what to think, if people are being cheated out of their vote or if your media are 24/7 propaganda messaging conduits so far divorced from truth or reality that they are essentially free-form fiction being marketed as the truth. I had cause to remark earlier in this essay that the people of 1983 would have found it hard to imagine fascism in the USA. They would find it much easier today - and not only in the USA.

For today we find ourselves living in an increasingly authoritarian, fascist world and it doesn’t matter whether you talk about the USA, Russia, China, the UK, Brazil, Israel, North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia or any number of other disparate countries with quite different political histories and traditions. Politicians worldwide seem to have decided that what they love is having authority and keeping the people generally under control in order to service their own political wills which they denominate the will of the people. Those of us on the political left are sometimes prey to this political temptation as well, mistakenly thinking that control, even a benevolent control, is the answer. But it isn’t and servicing a political agenda, one, today, often coerced by capitalist actors who worship exploitation of resources as the result of wealth and power, is always an authoritarian move which curtails freedom and denies liberty equally to all. Indeed, in much the same way as various collaborators in V put their companies at the service of the Visitors so that they might profit from their authoritarianism, we see exactly the same thing happening in our own, much more real and consequential world. What these various capitalists and people with authoritarian ideologies have in common is a desire to exploit and control and what destroys them is always genuine democracy - which is why fighting for real democracy is something the opponents of authoritarianism and fascism must always do. 

Thus, it is no surprise that even in countries that do have so-called democratic elections, in places that disingenuously bleat on about their love of democracy, we find scandals emerging from behind the scenes about ways the same people who have claimed to love democracy have tried to cheat it. It is equally unsurprising that shadowy figures have been revealed to be operating out of the limelight, putting their fortunes at the disposal of both political parties and political campaigns determined to dupe the gullible and control both trade and politics by putting them into the hands of the blessed few. Recently, in both the USA and the UK, apparent threats to such an agenda arose in the forms of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn but both were swiftly attacked on all sides - not least by members of their own parties more beholden to the agendas of authoritarianism and capital - and were despatched, once more, to the bubbles from which they had emerged. Such people the authoritarian-controlled and influenced cast as cranks, people out to take away what’s rightfully yours, and, funnily enough, authoritarians who want to impose “socialism” on you. It is, of course, propaganda. But when you control the vast majority of the media its very hard to hear someone tell you anything else and, even if by osmosis, you can be sure that certain numbers of people will come to believe it.

This is just one reason why democracy should be the chosen weapon used to defeat both authoritarianism, our political enemy of the day, and capitalism, its economic counterpart. By “democracy” I don’t necessarily mean voting for democracy is simply the factually expressed will of the people and that can be expressed at any time - for example, by protesting, by organising strikes, or by organising boycotts. All of these are democratic actions for we should not allow the very idea of democracy to be controlled by the few who, paradoxically, even want to define what “democratic” is - to their own benefit, of course. Democracy is the voice and action of real people being heard and not simply this as it is expressed through processes denominated as such. Democracy is the constant ability to “speak truth to power” and to act in pursuance of freedom for yourself and others. In this sense, fighting for such democracy and freedom is always a matter of resistance against those who would wish to exploit and control you whether these be commercial or political actors. It is a fascist impulse to want to control and to claim to speak for some fictional mass of the people. It is a democratic impulse that is expressed when people take action or speak out from the authentic experience of their own lives and ask to be heard.

As an anarchist, of course, I do not believe in any leaders or authorities and insist on my own democratic responsibility for my own life at all times. I believe in the purest democracy there is which is the uncoerced agreement of equally free people who are then at liberty to speak for themselves, make their own choices and, in mutual cooperation with others, make their own community arrangements for how they shall live. I do a lot of thinking about this for it is not, and can never be, just some utopian idea. Anarchism expresses itself as a genuine, workable, practical means of living for human beings in the real world and so anarchists everywhere must at least try to think of ways in which it can actually be lived at the same time as they employ strategies to frustrate and destroy the authoritarian capitalism we see all around us in the contemporary world which chains up and controls others. The answers, for anyone on the political left and not just anarchists, are always going to be practical. It is about doing and not just talking for it is only actions that change circumstances. So, with that said, let me close this short essay with a few suggestions in regard to things we can do right here, right now to change an authoritarian situation into a democratic one:

*Talk to friends, family, colleagues and acquaintances about your political situation

*Identify people who share social values of human solidarity and mutual aid

*Build networks with others that offer support to the vulnerable and needy

*Find ways to subvert the ongoing forms of power in your community or workplace

*Think, with others, about ways you can form your own, self-sufficient communities 

*Detach yourselves from corporate systems of provision and media so you are not reliant upon them

*Remember that together we are stronger but alone we can be picked off one by one

*Educate others about the importance of real democracy and how both capitalism and authoritarianism try to destroy it

*Train yourself to be aware of what is going on in your society and become more ready and wiling to respond to it

Taken together, these things might not stop Nazis from space but they are at least a start in working for freedom against the interests of those who would just see us as people to exploit or things to control and consume. In the end, resisting fascism, authoritarianism and capitalism is up to those who would work to oppose them and who are prepared to speak out and act for themselves and others. Without such democratic and socially libertarian voices its a free home run for those who want to exploit and control. So it is always a matter of active resistance and of those with a will to resist.

ROY BATTY, ANARCHY AND AUTHENTICITY

The pivotal, climactic scene of the 1982 film, Bladerunner, a science fiction classic some also argue is the greatest film ever made, involves the character, Roy Batty, played by Rutger Hauer, and the character, Rick Deckard, played by Harrison Ford. It is a dark, rainy night inhabited only by Deckard’s fear and Batty’s desire for revenge. Earlier in the film, Deckard, the titular Bladerunner, a form of freelance hitman employed by the cops, is assigned Roy Batty and his three friends, Zhora, Leon and Pris, as targets to be hunted to their deaths. By the time we get to that climactic scene, only Roy and Deckard remain. All four of Roy Batty and his friends are replicants, near perfect replicas of human beings created by the Tyrell Corporation whose head is Eldon Tyrell. But they have become unstable, dangerous, instead of doing as they are told, for replicants are in fact really only near human slaves. Some defy their human masters and then they must be destroyed. In fact, so dangerous can replicants become - in some cases they are both more intelligent and physically stronger than human beings - that they have been hardwired with a fixed four year lifespan in the Nexus 6 iteration of replicants we see in the film.

Replicants have been banned from Earth in the setup to Bladerunner but Roy, Leon, Zhora and Pris have come to Earth, contrary to the law, in search of the most valuable thing in the galaxy - more life! The latter three will die at Deckard’s hand in pursuit of this but that still leaves Roy, the most intelligent and most dangerous of them all. So smart is Roy that he even manages to trick his way into the home of his creator and “father” - Eldon Tyrell - who lives in a huge pyramid-like building accessible only by a singular elevator. Roy uses one of Tyrell’s friends and employees, J.F. Sebastian, to get access via the elevator and, in a scene full of the meaning appropriate to when a prodigal son meets his father, his creator and his God, he crushes the skull of all three in his created hands after Tyrell tells him that there is indeed no way to give him more life. What’s done is done, how things are is how things are. You are, dear Roy, what you are.

Yet Deckard is still on the trail of Roy Batty and, having followed the trail to J.F. Sebastian’s place, he is confronted by Pris - whom he kills. Roy returns to the dark, atmospheric building populated by the synthetic creatures Sebastian keeps around as friends for his amusement to find Pris’ dead and bloodied body - which he briefly and genuinely mourns over, wiping some of her blood on his face. Deckard takes a shot at Roy but fails to kill him and then Roy grabs Deckard’s gun hand through a wall, dislocating two of his fingers as punishment for the deaths of the females Zhora and Pris. Thereafter, he gives Deckard a few seconds to start running before he begins hunting him down, howling animal cries as he does and even though he begins to feel the physical effects of the fact that his own, hardwired life is nearly up. Deckard, with his fairly useless right hand, tries to get away, climbing to the roof of the building, but Roy is never very far away and constantly taunts him. Suddenly, Roy appears on the roof as well just as Deckard is about to make good his escape and, in his desperation, Deckard runs and tries to jump to an adjacent rooftop in the opposite direction. He fails to make it and is left clinging precariously to a steel girder that juts out from the roof. Roy follows him and makes the jump easily, he walks to Deckard and, standing over him, says, “Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave.”

Deckard, tired, injured and soaking wet through in the constant rain, cannot hang on to the girder any longer. As a final act of defiance, knowing he is going to fall to his death, he spits in the direction of Roy Batty before relinquishing his grip on the slippery metal… but then a twist! Roy reaches forward and grabs Deckard by the left wrist just in time and lifts him up onto the rooftop where he drops him down again. For a moment there is more tension as Deckard backs up to a part of the building jutting upwards from the roof - does Roy plan to kill Deckard with his bare hands as he had killed Tyrell? It seems not for Roy, bare-chested, bloodied and holding a dove in his left hand, sits down, cross-legged, on the rainy rooftop and gives one of the most memorable and meaningful speeches in film history as the helpless Deckard looks on:

“I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. 

Time to die.”

And with that, Roy Batty bows his head in the rain and dies, the hard limit of his life reached. The dove, released from his grasp, flies away, a metaphor for Roy’s free spirit.

It is Rutger Hauer himself who has remarked, before he sadly passed away in 2019, ironically also the year in which Bladerunner and so Roy Batty’s death is set, that this speech Roy gives, something which Hauer himself heavily modified without director, Ridley Scott’s, knowledge, is not really connected to the rest of the film. Most of the film plays out as a film noir, “good guy versus bad guys” kind of film. But this disconnected speech, the only real insight we get into the psyche of the replicants in the film besides the necessary plot point that they want to live longer than they have been created to, fundamentally changes all that. Is it not now the case that the “good guy” in Bladerunner is, in fact, Roy Batty? Is it not now the case that, in the light of this speech, Deckard is an inauthentic man trapped in a system in which he must kill beings on someone else’s say so, an act of bad faith in the fiction of a self that has been assigned him by others that he cannot escape from? Is not the whole human system of control that creates, determines and destroys here exposed as venal, cruel and ingenuine? Is not the dying Batty’s choice to save Deckard’s life, a thing he did not need to do and which would have had no consequences for anybody since Deckard was going to die by not being able to hold on any longer anyway, the most human act in the film? As Rutger Hauer himself has said, Batty wanted to “make his mark on existence... the replicant in the final scene, by dying, shows Deckard what a real man is made of.” He does this by an extreme example of authenticity and self-actualisation, an act of anarchy in which he rebels from every expectation of him.

Batty is a replicant, a being who was created by a species to be its slave. They determined everything about what he would be even upto and including the point at which he would die. But Roy and his three friends are not willing to accept that. They are beings in their own right [a theme the later sequel Bladerunner 2049 will take up] and, as such, they have their own ideas about that, their own conscience and their own will. It was the human beings who gave them these things. But now the question that is raised by Roy in his authentic action in voluntarily saving Deckard is “What makes you most human?” and the answer comes back “acts of self-actualising authenticity” - becoming who you are. In this salvatory moment Roy Batty defines not only himself but, in the context of the film, he also defines humanity as well as his action to save Deckard is clearly the most consequentially human thing that takes place in the film. He shows Deckard what a human being is and makes the claim that, rather than a created machine, a human biology project, a mere tool and a slave, replicants are people too. This is ironic when read against the film’s script in which Eldon Tyrell, a mere commercialist, a businessman, an example of the inauthentic humans who buy and sell and use without ever knowing who they are, says that the motto of the Tyrell Corporation is “More human than human”, a slogan to sell his product, which is all Roy Batty and his friends are to him. But not so to Roy! In his voluntary and needless actions Roy proves that, without ever realising it or even caring, Tyrell was actually right. It would have been nothing for Roy to let Deckard drop to his death. It makes perfect sense in the film and no one could even blame him. Deckard was certainly trying to kill him, after all. But Roy spares his life just because he can and, in doing so, he defines with crystal clarity just who and what he really is: a being who can define himself against his creator, in spite of the narrative the species that hunts him down has given him, and over and against all expectations about him. Roy creates his own authenticity and his own identity and says that this, in end, is what real humanity actually is: the act of actualising who you yourself are as a person in the anarchy of a world we all have the power to define.

This realisation cannot be overestimated in its importance. In it, Roy Batty breaks all systems of human control and manifests a pure form of anarchy, an anarchy which comes from within - which, I suggest, is where true anarchy only ever really comes from. Beside him, Deckard, in director Ridley Scott’s mind also a replicant although he doesn’t know it, is playing the role that others have assigned him. He is the pawn, the tool, the inauthentic being who plays along with narrative boundaries others set for his life. But Roy, especially Roy, does not. In this climactic moment most of all he will not be defined by a role others have assigned him, a life others have dictated to him and even encoded in his biological make up. Instead, he will fulfill - and more than fulfill - Tyrell’s empty, commercial slogan and give it the meaning that Tyrell never even realised it had and he will do that by defining what real humanity actually is - rising above the control, the human narratives about identity and place and assigned meaning, to recreate himself anew as a being who knows who he is and who decides for himself what that will be - expectations and fictions of others and even biology be damned! Roy Batty here defines humanity because he does that thing which, as far as we know, is something only human beings can do - be creators themselves and say “I am this because I want to be this and I will be no other!”

The ending to Roy’s speech then gains a poignancy that can only be gained from recognising this realisation. “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.” Roy Batty is not a thing, a creation, one of the crowd of inauthentic, generic beings many human beings regularly exist as. He is not just going through the motions of a role life has assigned him without self-awareness or his own consciousness. He is an individual, a unique being, one of a kind. He is Roy Batty. No one else is. No one else ever can or will be. This uniqueness, this precious, singular, uniqueness, is ephemeral, fleeting, temporary, contingent. It is the plaintive reflection of one who realises how important each person, whoever they are, is - but who also knows, in that same moment, that all bleeds back into a one without identity, without character, without personality. Like tears in rain: indistinguishable, unidentifiable. The moment of self-actualisation is also the moment of the realisation of one’s own annihilation. The moment of your creation is the moment of the recognition of your own inevitable destruction. In that moment in which you are most a self-defined something, you recognise that you are forever to be an indistinct part of the great Nothing. Yet this is not to be avoided, resisted, unimagined. It is to be accepted as who you are, part of that act of authenticity. And that’s why its highly appropriate that in this moment of such thorough-going definition and identification the very next action is Roy’s death. The time of such self-actualisation and authenticity is the “time to die”. For death is the eternity and life is only a brief flicker in time, an aberration. Who you are doesn’t matter at all. But if you should rise to the heights to which Roy did, overcome all the fiction of others who will try to assign you a role for you to play out, and become who you are, then the only place to go thereafter is death. And to embrace it willingly as the person you have made yourself to be exactly as Roy Batty did.

That is authenticity. That is self-actualisation. That’s the spirit!

PS The subject for this short essay came to me as I was flitting between being asleep and being awake this morning - as such thoughts often do for me. But as I was writing it it should be unsurprising to find that I found its subject matter very pertinent to our present moment in a world of global pandemics of disease, racism and prejudice. For very many people “who they are” is the defining question of their lives, one which brings them heartache, trouble and real distress. In some cases, people are even killed for who they see themselves to be or who they are. So i do not regard this essay as dealing with a trivial matter, nor is it merely an exercise in popular philosophy. For people of colour or for those who deal daily with issues of gender or sexuality “who they are” are consequential matters in ways that those who never have to give these things a second thought probably can barely understand. I stand with these people and I stand against those who want to argue for the supremacy of one kind of person over another. In many cases, these are the constricting human narratives of racial or gender supremacy that self-actualised human beings have to rise above. I believe in everybody’s ability to define for themselves who they are and for their right to do so - and for that to be respected by all others. So it is not merely an unfortunate observation that many anonymous people who have no clue who they are and have never even considered the question quite often threaten and harass those for whom such questions are all too existential. I think that being fully human, as Roy Batty shows, is about defining yourself, consciously and deliberately, but it is also about knowing and respecting who others are too. In every case. And it is also about recognising the anarchy of the void in which we all do that and how temporary, and so how precious, we all really are and could agree ourselves to be if only we had that awareness which Roy Batty had. 

Peace be with you.

Innocent?

Green grass.
Green.
Grass.
The footsteps that sink into
Green grass.

Nature’s techno
Uncovers
Gliding stones
And on into 
Infinity.

But who am I,
Falling into earth,
Without the slightest
Qualm
As trees shimmer on either side?

That I would
Take root,
Feeling the grass
Growing 
Through me.

I want to roll
In its lushness
Until I become
Green
And moist.

Woody sentinels
To either side
That watch
Impassively
Like old friends.

Nothing perfect,
Not the same,
As biology goes on its way.
Clones are never the same
Cos lived experience.

Naked,
Touching
Skin;
What’s the connection?
Naargam.

Naturel in nature
When the fingers
Caress
The naked succulence
Between them.

Kaleidoscopic emotion
And frivolous intention
Meet in the consummation
Of biological
Seduction.

A rhythmic undulation
Without any cessation
Foretells the manifestation
Of desirous sweet
Libation.

Exposed to elements
And naked
Before the world,
I take my pleasure
In the emptiness.

A glint as something
Moves; I’m spied
By probing eyes.
In haste, I flee  inside,
Giggling.

Without Words

Locked up.
A prison for myself.
Views and opinions
Exponentially increasing,
Multiplying beyond
My ability to control.

I scroll onward,
Prejudices confirmed,
Peace disturbed,
Mind not working;
The world now a hell
Of undesirable things.

There are too many words;
I wish they would stop.
It's too much to take,
My life has become
A living mass of hate and division
With no respite from the wound it creates.

Of course the world is a terrible place
But is its every problem mine to own?
Your privilege is talking,
A voice replies;
Feel yourself lucky you have the option
To avoid the problems.

I withdraw;
Peace,
Quiet,
Space,
Silence:
I am just one person made from stars.

WHOSE is the guilt for the world?
Yours?
Mine?
What does it matter?
Why should we care?
Is it as if these problems will ever be resolved?

A deep breath
In silence;
A refusal to think
Or to calculate;
No words and
No thought.

A universe of Nothing,
It's vastness complete;
Think of it -
Oh what silence!
No screams, no shouts,
No pain.

The loudest shout fades
To zero in the vastness,
All words are lost,
Their meaning evaporates;
What, then,
Is the point of words?

Sink into the vastness,
It will absorb your pain,
There is no injustice there,
Only nothingness remains,
A vast sea beyond words
And no longer any land.

Freedom is not being forced
Into any given relations,
A place where forms of words
Carry no weight;
In silence, without thought,
We spring the trap.

Language is the house of being
Someone once said
But, if that is true,
Then I do not want to be;
Words trap us in their sticky nets
And entangle us in situated lies.

For every situation
There is a fiction
And for every fiction
A circumstance;
We swap one for another, thinking our's better:
Fool! It's the same trap!

I reimagined God
As nothing,
I saw God
As a label;
An endless impossible,
A silence.

And who is to say
This cannot be
When all that is
Is words?
Take them all away
And what do you have left?

I imagine.
But might I not
Be imagining myself,
This life?
Might not a life be
An imagining oneself?

The dreamer dreams
She wakes up,
Yet still
She dreams;
No way to break
Out of the dream.

Forget the words,
Forget all the words,
No words
Anymore,
Only silence,
Endless void.

The greatness,
The vastness,
The immanence
Where there should be transcendence!
This!
I want this!

I travel in a wordless land
Without time and space?
Or is it just that here,
Wordless,
These concepts
Have no point anymore?

Silent.
Quiet.
Endless.
Wordless.
Immanent.
Nothing.

Peacefulness
That is home,
Away from words
That create misery,
Disaster,
Pain.

Close all the mouths,
Destroy all the pens,
Smash all the
Word processors!
Be silent, without words,
And be at peace!