I had caught a glimpse of Corporate State "People Patrol" on Horseback in Texas beating back hungry ones from Haiti seeking water, food, shelter, and basic care (i.e. "asylum") with whips of some kind. It reminded me of how the Spaniards would ride horseback to intimidate Los Indios de Americas way back when.
(
NPR)
Back around 2007 in Matawan, Dirty Jersey, I had met a Spanish/English speaking dark-skinned man of African descent from the
Dominican Republic. We befriended one another upon discovering we had similar senses of humor (sick yet kind). While researching slave rebellions, I learned that it was the slave populations themselves, namely in Haiti, who were their own liberators. There was no emancipator or so-called "white savior" (such as the courageous
John Brown). Was it not the Haitian Revolution from 1791 to 1804, the only successful slave revolt in history, that instigated the global abolishment of slavery?
What I want to interject here is simply a reminder that, while the basic necessities are surely vital to any potential reduction of suffering, if one follows the trajectory into a "white privileged" lifestyle, say of one like
Mitchell Heisman, it does not appear to lead anywhere but Death. Prosperity does not always lead to Happy-Ever-After.
The following is an excerpt from something I posted on the xhentric.wordpress.com blog which begs to be "bumped up" to front & center at this time:
What is One to Do?
I prefer writing about day to day thoughts and anxieties rather than make up some story about some high brow who marries into a politically powerful family but never Shits or pisses. What about the real creature as it is, the animal thing that doesn’t care about the Olympics?
What about all the refugees without access to clean water? Surely it shames me to complain about having been born into this world when so many are suffering far worse fates.
And so I just keep reading like a patient locked up in a psychiatric ward … Survivor’s guilt?
The very well educated Mitchell Heisman shot himself on the steps at Harvard University. Evidently, having all one’s primitive needs satisfied is not enough to make life worth living.
“If the literature we are reading does not wake us why then do we read it? A literary work must be an ice axe to break the sea frozen inside us.” (Kafka)
“Overcoming the will to live, then, represents one of the final steps in overcoming the provincial and ‘primitive’ life instincts probably inherited from our evolutionary past, i.e., inclinations toward patriarchy, authoritarianism, sexism, kinism, and racism.” (Heisman)
Mitchell Heisman’s suicide note was 2000 pages. I humbly admit I can only skim through it.
This phenomenon forces me to be less judgmental of people by appearances as I can not know how each person really feels. Some people go insane with drugs. Others go insane with books or philosophical concepts. As Thomas Metzinger argues, there are solid grounds for maintaining that the phenomenological subject of appearance is itself a phenomenal appearance generated by neurobiological processes. I am the thing-in-itself observing itself, questioning itself, doubting the representation of itself …
I remember out in Seattle drinking with an elderly black dude, and he started getting very angry while he was shaking his Bible around, yelling at me about how he wrote the Bible. In a strange way, now I understand what he was saying. When I read Schopenhauer’s The World As Will and Representation or some of his essays, I find a part of me saying just that: I wrote this. I am this thing that wrote that. I am still that self-same thing writing this.
Damn it to Hell, I am still here … there is no way out, not even in death! How does this end?
What is this metaphysically transcendent empirical entity?
What is this I THINK? What is this that Husserl called Pure Phenomenological Consciousness?
When we go extinct, nothing will have happened. Tick tock tick tock … Do you understand how easy it is to go insane? When someone digs deeper and deeper into the mechanisms of their own mind, when one considers these bones and this blood we have become so attached to, the teeth, the stomach, the intestines, the veins, the sinews … and there is no switch to turn it off … So many people complain of racing thoughts, insomnia, migraine headaches, toothaches, every day angst … How to explain it?
No wonder there is an epidemic of addiction to pain-killers, opiates, alcohol … It is no wonder! And yet do these chemicals bring genuine relief?
The case against hope: Hope makes people feel worse. What happens to the long-term unemployed when they reach retirement age? They experience relief in the end of hoping to find a suitable job. Giving up hope sets you free. And so I give up hope in ever feeling at ease about existing. I am this THING, this self-same thing that was Arthur Schopenhauer.
Since ‘reality’ is itself a transcendental concept, Kant’s usage of a distinction between appearance and reality suggests a critical difficulty with his project. Every attempt to formulate a relation or distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal realms must itself fall back upon conceptual and abstract thought! Why bother trying to explain reality when all we end up doing is chasing our tails?
Can we blame the poets like Georg Trakl who fail to keep a job, become addicted to opium, become enmeshed in alcoholism, fail to defeat their psychoses, and die of a cocaine overdose?
Trakl’s traces are the ruins of a horrific failure – a failure to adapt or conform, a failure to repress, a failure to produce, a failure to come to any conclusions.
Lunatic? Werewolf? How many of us on a similar trajectory and just don’t know it?
We do not know what we want. If we have a strong death instinct and find daily existence ridiculous, how long do we go on philosophizing about it before our death instinct manifests itself?
What did Nietzsche learn from Schopenhauer?
Anti-humanism; anti-academicism; misogyny; the distrust of mathematical thinking.
It is great to have broken through so many mental barriers throughout my life, but once breaking through to the Dark Side, there really is no turning back. One can’t unsee what one has seen. Have I come to value my mental faculties enough to resist self-destructive impulses?
Do not be in public when intoxicated! It’s like full fledged demonic possession!
Maybe the real reason I write is because the process consoles me. I give advice to myself. Doing nothing all day, day after day, is not as easy as it sounds. It could be that writing down one’s thoughts in a free flowing manner gives access to a secret reality below the surface of consciousness. Who keeps track of the mundane details of The Thingly Presence? I observe the creature-in-itself … I don’t feel ashamed of the creature’s nature, because the creature is life itself, a microcosm of Nature. It’s very nature hardwired into the sinews of being: anxiety, paranoia, want, dissatisfaction, fear.
“We are all created to be miserable, and that we all know it, and all invent means of deceiving each other. And when one sees the truth, what is one to do?” (Leo Tolstoy)
What is one to do? Think deep thoughts. Avoid marching.
Does one courageously refuse to “man up”?
That isolated men kill themselves because they don’t seek help is a redundant excuse. Men are shamed into marriage by playing on the fear that they will die alone, but who does not die alone? We, each of us, is in our head alone.
This shaming is a snide way to pressure someone to conform to idiocy. The corporate world want obedient workers … they don’t want deep thinkers. They will make snide remarks like, “ … that’s a little bit too much information …” or “ … OK, Mr. Philosopher, are you taking your medication?”
There is no brotherhood. If a living man does not remain a slave to the Machine, he is ostracized, viewed with disdain and contempt. When I am able to view myself as a living phenomenon, my capacity for introspection grows, and I will not subject myself to the denigrating judgments of a systematically stupid society.
What is there to do at this point? Breathe? Eat? That seems automatic. For me it’s automatic, but maybe some lose the will to live. I read somewhere that some chattel slaves were able to stop their own breath. I’m sorry if I can’t get all worked up about some play-offs. From the sidelines, it all looks rather absurd. Circuses and cake. Ah, to be an outsider living in an almost mythical dimension …
On the one hand you have the sports fans. On the other hand you have the renegade thinkers. There is mutual disdain, I’m sure.