Revisionist Authority

Propaganda for the Doomed

Where do we get off claiming "law and order" while standing on stolen territory? spouting stolen ideas?

In college I complained to a friend of my frustration in trying to drive across town, midday, through the garment district. Offering solutions didn't seem to be too difficult to me, my intelligence being greater than average (and my practicality being simultaneously (and relatedly) somewhat below average). "They can't," Anton insisted. "If they paused to fix anything, they'd be out of business."

To me is seemed then, and still seems now, that unless we pause to improve things, we won't have any business to be in.

Could the difference between my view and others' view be honest? I don't think so. On this issue I believe we're either Damned or Saved: with the preponderance, too late, mired on the side of the Damned: the would-be-Saved held helpless.

I complain about kleptocracy. My son says, "Nothing can be done about it." My son knows that he was kidnapped from me when he was five. He knows that I say it was to prevent my having any say in his schooling, me being the deschooler: having offered cybernetic librarianship, digital data bases (not government regulated), social networking (not government regulated), as a solution to kleptocracy – in which all kleptocrats admit that, under the circumstances, no one legitiamately owns anything! We'd have to find an honest zero and start over for property to become a legitimate concept. My son, the kidnapped, who to this day won't listen to what I say without having already dismissed my critiques by misstating them, says dismissively, "Nothing can be done about it."

Surely not: not if you jump on the guy with solutions and hold him helpless!

OK. The US sent Custer. Crazy Horse and his Lakota beat Custer's army. The US sent more armies, jailed Crazy Horse. Now we all sit in school, under compulsion, the state having stolen my internet – to pervert it, to be in charge, to regulate what it doesn't understand and didn't invent, tells the captive children, the captive trainee-executives, the lawyers-, the teachers-, the doctors-in-waiting, that we're a free society, a society of laws. It's all lies, but if you want to catch income from the managed markets, you'll go along with the lies. In a terrarium, only the artificial survives.

What about Crazy Horse? Should he agree, while in jail?

What about those who'd like less traffic in the garment district? Sorry. The kleptocracy keeps no records of what people said, only which records the kleptocracy's executives-in-effect choose to preserve.

Notice: the New Testament was written decades after the Crucifixion. University, media, government records of the internet omit key elements of the history: Ivan Illich, me ... Jesus.

In 1959 no one in the city government, no one in the garment district hear a single one of my ideas for improved order. And no library corrects them.

Without an abundance of fossils, and honest scientists, not regulated by kleptocrats, by bureaucrats, to interpret them, we'll never know what really happened: about anything.

Every one knows that gold was found at Sutter's Mill. Not one in a million realize that the mill and the gold was Sutter's! It's ignorance that allows us to think it's ours. If the US can last another decade or two, there will be no memory left of Crazy Horse. Or: it will be all revisionist memory. Propaganda for the doomed.

Law and Order

Law and Order: synonym for state terror

Royalties

Everyone loves VanGogh. Everyone knows that VanGogh painted a lot of paintings, but that none sold: and also that now a VanGogh auctions for $60M. The museums are full of VanGoghs: pk has long asked by what right they show them.

Now pk additionally asks: how many ideas spread at universities have paid the proper royalties? How well was Kepler paid? or Copernicus? By what argument does a kleptocracy's institutions have a right to unpaid-for ideas?

Do Christian churches have a right to talk about the Jews' God? Any other God? Which royalties were due? Which got paid?

Ivan Illich talked about cybernetic record keeping unregulated by the state to correct state power. He talked about social networking as potentially fostering conviviality. He got defrocked from the Church, then his best-selling books disappeared from our free marketplace and from the libraries of our free institutions. I seconded his ideas, offered to do them, asked the public to volunteer the infrastructure. The kleptocracy today uses cybernetics galore, touts social networking: where is its proof that Illich and I got our royalties?

How dare any human talk about being nice after what happened to Jesus?

Sins of the Fathers

The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children through the generations. That's what the bible says – in more than one place, that's what Euripides said (and a jillion lost sayings too I bet), that's what a great deal of experience says. Ditto for the sins of the mothers. Henry VIII's first wife had syphilis: therefore Henry had it, therefore Anne Boleyn had it, therefore Elizabeth was born with it. Catherine of Aragon had probably been born with it too.

A generation or two ago Christians were supposed to believe in Original Sin: the sins of Eve, the sins of Adam. Can you find enough Christians today, from any sect, that believe in Original Sin, to form a bridge foursome?

Ivan Illich pointed out, I've been trying to second for decades, yesterday's religions have been supplanted by one religion: America: the US, democracy ... the schooled schooling the schooled, professionals, experts ... the meritorious meritocracy: secular hypocrisy crowding out sacred hypocrisy. My landlord expresses an important aspect of this new faith that's swept up and jumbled all previous faiths (I've been telling landlord stories in the PaulKnatz blog, see in the date slot starting 2010 August 01) with the line "I'm not responsible for anything my grandfather did." Dan has explained further: if his grandfather sold liquor to Indians or kept slaves, that's no business of his.

Many another American would agree: and there are zillions waiting for a green card who would agree if it would help them get one: and maybe in this contemporary world they'd agree even without the prospect of a green card. But let me continue the implications: How about if your grandfather did the Brinks heist? Do you legitimately inherit the loot? How about if your grandfather deforested North America? If we're running out of resources, does the earth owe you an exemption?

Or how about this: what if there's a God, and a Judgment: and what if God agrees with that line in the Bible? How are you going to shut him up? What team of lawyers will be able to interrupt God and prevent his judgment?

Never mind God: if your grandfather despoiled the earth, how are you going to get resources? by magic?

Incrimination

No judge censored me until 2007, but the culture has made sure nothing I say gets heard all my life. It was only at age sixty-nine that the silencing became official; till then it had merely been factual, manifest.

The illusionist holds a deck of trick cards and says to his audience, "This is deck of ordinary playing cards." Lying is just one thing that illusionists do. This kleptocracy which calls itself the United States says it has free speech. It's written into a amendment to the Constitution. Note: it's not found by objective alien scientists; it's claimed: by the lawyers, the illusionist.

Information in a kleptocracy must be controlled: so nothing incriminating the illusionist can reach the audience.

DDD versus Klep

DDD has recently been coined for the purpose of being added to pk symbology. I added it via my deschooling blog, InfoAll. The deed has given me another self-appelled nickname, General DDD.

Kleptocracies amass power by regulating information. This deschooler not only founded the world's first offering of a low-cost digital library, a low-tech social networking internet, all in 1970, but seconded as well Ivan Illich's curse against kleptocratic regulaion. DDD abbreviates a series of "De"s. DeSchool is perhaps the most obvious: but only if you understand Illich's deschooling will you see the rest. "School" was the first in a series of "professions" that Illich attacked: as non-Christian, incompatible with conviviality. His worst trouble came when he attacked his fellow priests (he got defrocked, put in Coventry, stripped of financing). His most far reaching trouble came when he attacked the health industry. The priests hadn't take it lying down, neither had the school teachers, but it was the doctors who really aroused themselves to finance his erasure. I allied myself to Illich after he'd already been disposed of by the church: just in time to get myself eclipsed as well: by the teachers, the lawyers, the doctors, the nurses, the pharmers ... the media! all with the connivance of the public.

DDD: DeSchool! DeRegulate! DeProfessionalize. It might be best in this order: DeRegulate – DeProfessionalize — DeSchool.

The General in General DDD is also significant: I echo Bucky Fuller's plea for generalists to repair damage done by over-specialization! (I also refer to General Sutter, the developer of California whose gold as well as land and livestock we stole in 1849. He promoted himself to Colonel, then General: I think that's a riot, especially since deschooling requires that I not so much as admit to a BA let alone an MA let alone a Ph.D.!) (I carry the reverse snobbism of Dr. Sagan's fellow doctors calling each other "Mister" to a new level.) (Carl Sagan addressed me as Doctor Knatz. So did Rollo May! I love it. They took correction from me!)

Back in the 1960s, Monseigneur Ivan Illich, a Roman Catholic priest, the most famous in the world apart from the Pope, said that if the Roman Catholic Church wished to become Christian, it would have to

1. Give up its property
2. Deprofessionalize its priesthood.

Illich pointed out that mass should be said by members of the congregation: the butcher, the baker ... not by someone paid to do so. (In my words: Property is incompatible with the imitation of Christ, so is making a living from it. St. Paul was a tent maker, Peter was a fisherman, Jesus was a carpenter ... Mary was the professional: she subsidized Jesus and Peter.) Illich applied the same liberalism to all professions. Parents and neighbors and skilled amateurs should teach children. If professionals are hired as teachers they should be hired via a free market place, not politically imposed, and paid by state controlled theft of public funds. Skilled butchers and bakers might kill fewer patients if they did our health care. I cure headaches, untwist backs: I've never charged a penny, neither have I killed anyone with my treatments: why pay $30,000 to a hospital that kills people every day? So they can cut off your left leg when you asked for your right breast to be X-rayed? The more expensive the treatment, the more lethal it's likely to become.

Tow Away Zone

Monotheism imagines many devils, myriad humans, multitudes of creatures for one God. I imagine a bell curve with similar numbers of devils at one end of the spectrum and similar numbers of gods at the other with zillions of ordinaries in between.

There is always a multitude of teachers ready to oppose a Galileo, just as there are many rabbis to sabotage a Jesus, and many more theological morons to back the rabbis. There are always many more priests than saints, more teachers than geniuses, more morons than teachers: though total morons, genuine basket cases will be as sparse as the true geniuses. Still: homeostasis prevails, if nature wanted humans to be smart, nature would have to smarted up the average human, not just the occasional Jesus, Bucky, pk ...

I've said all that a zillion times before, have been saying it since the 1960s at least. Today I want to add a different textured foundation stone to the structure. Half a century ago I saw a New Yorker cartoon that tickled me: cars were lined up behind a car being towed away to take the illegal double parking space as soon as the racketeering cops removed the incumbent illegal.

So, pk, what's your metaphor? What does that, gettable only by a New Yorker a mere few decades ago, have to do with homeostasis? Well, there isn't much that doesn't have to do with homeostasis, if only we would see it: the sighted can teach and teach and the blind still won't even know that teaching is being attempted: the blind have their own teachers to prevent learning!) The answer also answers why I place this post at pkKlep. We're thieves, we live on stolen land, thinking stolen ideas, believing stolen faiths.

My son says nothing can be done about it, decades after he's joined the mob in refusing to consider proposals that might have done something about it: his father's proposals, for example. So: here I am: a disciple of Ivan Illich. I wanted the schooled to give up their (perceived) privileges, so all might ascend to liberty. No, no: the schooled want their own perceived liberty, while the markets' victims continue as slaves. Put even more metaphorically, I want to give the land back to the Indians: then we might be able to begin to own land in justice, under law. Thieves making up laws, then remaking them, don't count. I wanted to take Jesus down off the cross, to end his suffering: then we might possibly find a path by which we could try to become Christian. I want to end coercive schooling, then we might find our own intelligence, our own path to learning, and survival.

But the thieves knock me down, put me on my own cross, shrieking their lies all the more hysterically: while the Third World waits in line to immigrate, to take their own place on the stolen land, repeating by rote the stolen lies, feverishly repeating false faiths: kleptocrats are so sincere in their false posturings.