POLITICS

 

FROM NOTEBOOK H2: SUMMER 1994 - LATE SPRING 1995 (AFTER 8TH GRADE TO LATE 9TH GRADE)^[1]

            People create problems for themselves even when they don’t have any real ones.

            People should focus on the basics: food, comfort, warmth, shelter. The point is to do as little as is needed to get by comfortably, and then to relax. 

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            Entertainment is a drug - an insubstantial high followed by the lingering discontentment of not being able to be happy with your own thoughts. Friends feel the need to constantly entertain each other, and it gets quite tiring and competitive.

            Power, money, status, knowledge, these are also drugs - you can never get enough and they will never really make you happy.

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            Unnecessary jobs and products should be eliminated.

 

FROM NOTEBOOK H4, DECEMBER 1995 (MID 10TH GRADE) - EARLY FALL 1996 (BEGINNING OF 11TH GRADE)

            Utopia for me is a society where people don’t have to be so selfish, where people don’t have do be so selfish just to survive.

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            Technological progress and economic growth are less important than happiness. Could you have a progress based on people’s inherent desire for progress rather than a system which motivates people by desire for cash and fear of starvation? If nobody feels the need to change things, and are content with their lives as they are, then maybe no progress is necessary.

 

FROM NOTEBOOK H6, LATE SUMMER 1997 TO JANUARY 1998. DARK RED COVER

            It would be good to have a class at school that went into detail about the options available in the work force at that time.

/           Wrestling and fist fights should always be allowed if both people truly consent to them.

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            How does a government control a populace? Who has power? How does the perception of who has power lead to the reality?

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            There should be a choice between different types of education, different paces of living.

 

FROM FOLDER "MID 1998"

            The inevitable imperfection of society’s laws standards and ideals etc.

The benefits of following a code: more simplicity, decrease a certain kind of friction and struggle.

            Benefits of constantly changing the code: Ability to change things for the better, to ascend, to adapt. Flexibility and originality are important.

            Maintaining a single code of behavior is ultimately impossible. Any set of laws or standards of behavior are inevitably imperfect.

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            The money system is part of the social contract, not something natural or inherent.

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            Schools should respect kids’ opinions instead of only forcing them to regurgitate those of others!

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            There should be a choice between different types of education, different paces of living.

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            Human beings are sucky at judging other human beings and there is probably no way around this. Consider the justice system, school grades, college applications, job applications, evaluations.

            Therefore also it is difficult to know who to trust for advice / direction, who is really wise (of schools of thought, politics, etc.).

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            I am uncomfortable with religions and political movements that tend toward extreme polarity of individuals being subordinated to a larger being. These kind of masochistic structures create a false resolution of the paradox of existence and non-existence, investing the religious or political absolute with full existence, and losing the individual subject into non-existence.

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            Technological development has involved a series of tradeoffs. Ending one kind of pain and beginning another. Creating one kind of pleasure and losing another.

            These are the decisions humans have made. And sometimes, perhaps always, the decisions have consequences that were not foreseen, often evil. But it all begins with the struggle, the ascension, and this is inherent enough in life itself.

            If we refuse to focus on quality of life and the individual’s peace of mind, the level of craziness is likely to rise and become increasingly dangerous and destructive.

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            We should have a multi-party system with a ranking based voting system, and of course get rid of the electoral college.

 

PHILOSOPHY FROM CHARLESTON FOLDER, SPRING 2001

            Hooray for sweatpants!

            I think that most chairs in this country are appallingly bad for people's backs. I think that requiring children to sit in these chairs in school is an intolerable cruelty.^[2]

            I think that people should care more for their bodies, pay more attention to their bodies. I think that people should encourage each other to be as healthy as possible. It's not that I expect a healthy state where there is no pain, but at least that all unnecessary barriers to health should be cast down.

            I think that people should be encouraged to be extremely sensitive to life. Including to bodily sensation, to them in their appropriate function of guiding towards health. I think that people's ideas of pleasure have been skewed such that the pleasurable is unhealthy and vice versa. Actually when one develops wise sensitivity I think that the pleasurable and the healthy are the same!

            I think that many things in this society encourage de-sensitivity rather than sensitivity. I think that this is hideous kind of oppression! I think that many aspects of this culture introduce an unnecessary steady discomfort-pain, which one learns to turn one's mind off to, even when it is alerting to a genuine damage to the organism. I think that culture should be such that a human is encouraged to be utterly sensitive to life, to fully wake up to life. People should seek the truth of their only lives instead of seeking distraction.

 

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY FROM CHARLESTON, SPRING 2001^[3]

            The search for pleasure develops into the search for health.

/           The domination of an elite class often employs divide-and-conquer strategies. For example creating competition among the oppressed (competition being a fundamental element of capitalism). Offering marginal rewards to one group or class in exchange for their participation in the oppression of another group.^[4]

/           Looks prejudice and people’s insecurity over their appearance has a devastating impact on people’s happiness, especially teenagers. Perhaps the harshness of the beauty standards is reinforced by the competitiveness of people, trying to rise above one another in some way.

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            Positive freedom: A basic joy in life and health, a basic compassion and intelligence.

/           It would be interesting to have media figures elected using a proportional representation system on local and national levels. That is, collectives journalists who don't pretend to be value neutral (although they must still be factual), and who have a certain amount of resources at their disposal to discover and distribute information.

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            The work week, vacation lengths, time allotted for education, and retirement age can be manipulated freely to cope with unemployment.

            People should be able to split time between different jobs more easily.

/           The great duality and the great nonduality. Both are so deeply real. I think it’s important to be strongly aware of both. To miss one is to misunderstand the other. The duality and nonduality between heaven and hell, life and death, sickness and health, being and nonbeing.

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            Power is a primary motivation in human politics. Individuals with power often tend to support a social system because it gives them power.

            I wonder how all the controlling forces tie together. State and capital. Capital ownership, education, media, work, entertainment, advertising.

            It seems like working conditions and the education system can choke out people’s life, their air supply... socially, intellectually, spiritually, morally, physiologically. In this weakened starved state, people are delivered to the entertainment industry. They are given the illusion that this is a respite, something beneficial. But is it actually the other arm of the same trap? Does it serve to further render them incapable of healthy psychological and social functioning, through misleading models and reflections of human life?

            The media has a bad influence on people, especially youth who have nothing meaningful or hopeful in life to turn to, embrace a culture of violence, empty and antagonistic sexual relationships, materialism, obsession with self-image, rabid competitiveness, backstabbing, aggression, hatred, sadism. But could these things make a crucial link in a cohesive system of oppression?

            Are the consumers of media responsible for this toxic content, or are the owners and upper management of media conglomerates responsible? (Note that the elites of the media industry are heavily involved with other business elites, partly because of their reliance on advertising for revenue.)

            People tend to assume that consumers are responsible, since they consume toxic media voluntarily, but how much of a genuine choice to they really have, given the intense concentration of media ownership and they way it ties together to promote itself?

            Also, dominant media productions are incorporated into social hierarchies such as those in high schools, and consuming alternative media can push someone towards the outside of the group.

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            I am amazed at the scope and nakedness of unflinching evil on the part of the American government after World War II. The historical pattern looks eerily like the construction of a one-world government. One can see it closing in, becoming all the more subtle and invisible, yet all the more inexorable and invincible, able to crush resistance with a minimum of effort, or more accurately, to crush it even before it begins.

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            Indeed human selfishness, aggression, etc. are natural and organic. But so too is cooperation, the social process of forming reciprocity, morality. There is nothing particularly natural at all about the first part without the second.

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            In many human situations compassion has been in tension with the urge for power, the project of aligning oneself with power. For a good society to form, compassion must find its power; the power of compassion must become prevalent.

/           I think that it makes more sense to view the quest for power as a situational fact than an instinctive fact.

# March 3-4

            Life, exactly as it is, is boundless. Its meaning and mystery are infinite. Effort has no form to cling to. This is not the rejection of forms, but the freedom of changing forms.

            To courageously open up and engage the realization of the light of being. Trying to shut out the light of being is a kind of illness. How many fear the silence, fail to nourish their wish for happiness? What are the consequences of this in terms of harm and suffering?

            When we pay attention we feel how much pain we are in, how much pain others are in. We feel the sickness. But instead of looking for anesthesia, we should search for a cure.

            Are there economic, political, social functions to this sort of unconsciousness? A drive for overproduction and overconsumption? Willingness to accept the status quo through a lack of sensitivity to its problems? Is compassion blocked by a system of oppression? By unintentional ramifications of other social structures? Or is human compassion always this limited?

            Do the identity politics of dividing people into categories and interest groups serve as some kind of divide and conquer tool?

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            Joy should be the source of revolution, the wellspring.

            The desire for joy, the desire to live fully is present in all living humans. To fully awaken this aspiration is to awaken a revolutionary consciousness.

            Engaged in the aspiration for infinite joy and liberation, a human becomes increasingly sensitive to oppression, falsehood, pain, alienation.

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            Treating the economy as this utterly fragile thing justifies so many kinds of oppression! I believe that the economy is not so fragile, that it can be made to conform to human happiness to a greater extent, thus to decreasing the extent to which humans are forced to struggle to meet certain poorly-defined economic goals.
            In the face of rising unemployment, there is no talk on the news about further socializing the economy, but there should be. The war against socialism has been very violent, it has been fought around the world, for example in Guatemala and Chile. There may be different ways of setting up the incentive structure. Getting a job can be an endeavor in which one gets a lot of help. People can come closer to the optimum job which is the most desirable job for which they are the most desirable available applicant.

 

SUMMER 2001

          In the reflection of the mass media, too many people are superficial. They do not have intelligence or real feeling. They don't have wisdom or self-awareness. They are insentient, foolish. I don't know exactly why this is the case, but since people seem to be rather heavily influenced by mass media, it's a real problem.

 

FROM INDIA NOTEBOOK (C6): FALL 2001

            Structuring the economic system to make late adolescents and young adults less financially dependent on their parents might make that relationship less severely strained.

            For example, a highly progressive tax system that actually establishes a trust for every young person such that they can live on their own at a certain age while continuing their education.

            Also, more affordable higher education, and affordable housing set aside for young people might help.

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            Technology should make less work for people, but instead it seems like we keep working like crazy. Why?

            Natural explanations: Life's need for constant motion to stay afloat.

            Or, perhaps although a given product is apparently produced with less effort, for that production to take place there is a huge amount of other production that needs to take place; when we look at all this, does it still look like we actually saving ourselves trouble?

            Abusive explanations: The more commerce there is, the more the rich profit in terms of money and power. The more people work, the less time they will have left to challenge the distribution of wealth-power-information, the status quo. The more commerce there is, the more people are tied to the commercial institutions, and the more power those people have who have a high position within those institutions.

/           Perhaps greater human self-awareness would threaten the political-economic system, by giving people a greater familiarity with their free will. More sensitive people may be more apt to detect oppressive forces... unjust class stratification, a lack of democracy. They may develop a basic organic sense that we are living in a state of ill health, and that the way to better health may involve changing the status quo.

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            It would be good to have the material for full college courses on the internet as a public service (including lectures that can be downloaded in audio and video formats). 

FROM NOTEBOOK C7: SPRING 2002

            Independent non-commercial media where funding can be based on a transferable vote system, can be introduced first as a special program, an addition to all existing media forms. The total funding would not be so big at first; it would only grow if a lot of people registered to vote, and a lot of people actually voted.

 

FROM NOTEBOOK C8: MID 2002

            Someone who doesn’t believe in an afterlife is perhaps less likely to risk their life in a revolution.

 

FROM NOTEBOOK C9: LATE 2002 AND SPRING 2003

            Widespread internet-video hybridization might be able to open up public media to a wider range of producers, perhaps depending on exactly what the arrangement is.

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            Internet TV presents some interesting possibilities for increasing the number of media producers (hence increasing the democracy of the media).

            It might be good to have a certain amount of money available for grants to non-commercial programming, and to divide the grant money by means of a popular vote, probably based on the transferable vote proportional representation system.

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            Well-funded libraries are important for democracy, and at this point it is clear that they can provide computer and internet access to those who can’t afford it otherwise.

/           The only possible democratic drawback to internet TV, aside from the obvious problem of whether everyone can afford it, is that the degree of narrowcasting will decrease cultural exchange between groups with different viewpoints. But I’m not even sure that this would happen.

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            What is democracy? It should include some degree of economic equality, equality with regard to access to media, information, education. These are all important elements of public decision making.

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            Raising district magnitude in STV-PR does not actually deny local representation to people. If a geographically defined group of people with a size equivalent to a would-be single member district all rank a set of candidates over all other candidates, then at least one candidate from that set is guaranteed a seat.

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            Down with purposeless rules for their own sake!