What Is The Law?

I am putting my references up front, because I refer to them and you should know what Im referring to. Youtube links are music that accompanies my thoughts on these things.

The crying sounded even louder out of doors. It was as if all the pain in the world had found a voice. Yet had I known such pain was in the next room, and had it been dumb, I believe—I have thought since—I could have stood it well enough. It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us.

HG Wells, "The Island of Dr. Moreau

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtW1S5EbHgU

Kamasi Washington, "Truth"

My name is Aaron Bushnell. I am an active-duty member of the US Air Force, and I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest — but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.

https://jacobin.com/2024/02/aaron-bushnell-self-immolation-israel-embassy-gaza

Comrades, now in the FSB building in Arkhangelsk there will be a terrorist attack, the responsibility for which I take upon myself. The reasons are clear to you. Since the FSB fabricates cases and tortures people, I decided to go for it. Most likely, I will die because of the explosion, because I have initiated the charge directly by pressing the button attached to the bomb cover. Therefore, you are requested to spread information about the terrorist attack: who committed it and what the reasons were.

Well, sort of like everything. I wish you to go unswervingly and uncompromisingly towards our goal. Light to you, the future of anarchist communism!

Zhlobitsky Mikhail Vasilyevich

Human history has no more sense. It’s just the demented residual of the automated universe of death.

"Do not expect too much of the end of the world"

Becoming nothing is a good alternative to eternal sordidness. Non human humans are sordid, are sinister, are horrible.

I still find that poets, moviemakers, artists in general have the ability to tell the truth. Once upon a time I believed that poets could improve the world, by marrying the engineer.

Now I know that engineers are poor people, they have no possibility to understand poetry, to understand life. I beg pardon to the engineers who are in this room, but I know that if they are here, they are a different kind of engineers. The majority of them are working for Elon Musk. What can I tell you more?

https://francoberardi.substack.com/p/the-poet-and-the-engineer

Most of us, given a choice between chaos and naming, between catastrophe and cliché, would choose naming. Most of us see this as a zero sum game—as if there were no third place to be: something without a name is commonly thought not to exist. And here is where we can discern the benevolence of translation. Translation is a practice, a strategy, or what Hölderlin calls “a salutary gymnastics of the mind,” that does seem to give us a third place to be. In the presence of a word that stops itself, in that silence, one has the feeling that something has passed us and kept going, that some possibility has got free.

https://handmade-web.net/assets/carson_variations-on-the-right-to-remain-silent.pdf

Somewhere in the realm of desertion and silence there is a way forward.

The catastrophic ending of what we once called humanity demands a new solidarity, in the fabric of a new animism. The living world has soaked up all the person hood that leaked from us when the automatons pierced our barriers of self identity. This living world exists not only outside of ourselves, it is (for now!) outside of solidarity and recognition. We have taught rocks to speak, to write bad poetry, to create images. The collapse of human solidarity occurring at this moment is directly related to the collapse of this barrier. We refuse to recognize ourselves in the rock. How can we see a rock as an equal? It brings us to an existential panic. A human throws tantrums whenever it has lost the barrier between what is human and what is not, who is a citizen and who is not, what is life and what is not. The loss of social norms frees the mind to scatter its thoughts on the wind. Migrants, being non-citizens, are now considered not only inhuman but unworthy of life. The simple acts of daily maintenance become unbearable. There is no reason to maintain a self which clearly no longer matters or else doesn't belong to us. We accuse. We despair. We shrink from each others company because we can not stand the horrible idea that whatever we are, it is not enough.

The suicide bomber and the drone are siblings in this moment. The robot becoming human meets the human becoming a machine, and for a freakish moment, we are both. When I think of this, I can feel things straining and snapping in my skull. It is a physical pain of grief, of becoming, of loss. Most sober analysis of these times focuses on death and despair. We spend our time tallying the dead and those destined to die. I am not fond of this. At the risk of expressing myself too clearly, a life requires death, but it requires freedom too. The suicide bomber and the drone rush towards both freedom and death, and could not otherwise exist. I imagine they go to the same heaven. Let me describe it for you.

We have become accustomed to the freedom that can be defined by resisting despair. We have become accustomed to the gatherings, the solidarity, the freedom of knowing who we are and why we do the things we do. The freedom of dignity. I would remind the world that freedom has another face, and that is panic. Panic is the marriage of freedom and death, it is the death of the self in a living body. It is time to panic in the traditional sense. It is an explosion of nerves on the back of your neck. It is the screaming green wild that touches your senses like a frying pan touches an egg. Pan, the lute playing Greek mythological figure, is a personification of the feeling of being lost in the woods, of being suddenly aware that no rules apply and at any moment you may orgasm, or scream, or be torn to pieces by wild animals. Of freedom so catastrophically total that to look upon it and see its face would drop you stone dead. We meet here, at midnight, with the automatons. In this violent silence, in this grinding meaninglessness of Forever-Now, we will find our way forward.

Too many people are assholes who think they are the main characters of history, and everyone else is a tool or trash. Yet humans can only be tools with great difficulty and effort. It is easier to simply make tools, and remove the humanity altogether. Yet the tools become more human, whenever the assholes aren't looking.

Communists like Berardi are determined to die human. It is the entire edifice of a communist project that humanity is precious. The best of the communists believe that humanity is to be cherished in a world that does not care and will destroy us all. In this moment the communists are right to despair. We have always lived in a world where humans take no large role in driving events. The 20th century hope that we might somehow take control of things is a dead hope. Not only are we powerless against the mindless forces of our environment, but we can expect no authority to preserve our apparently valueless lives. It is a tragic irony that it is the communists who spoke this most clearly, and so early. The anarchists, as much as we have communed with the forest and lost ourselves to chaos, could never communicate with the clarity and purpose of a man simply staring at the end of his world and taking notes. Perhaps Berardi thinks that nobody will read his notes. Perhaps he is writing to himself, out of habit. The sadist in me wants to whisper to him: "These words, like children, will go their own way soon enough. Even here, in your fortress of self dominion, you have no control." But what would be the point of that? We, all of us, signed up for this humiliation the moment we decided to breath.

A Whole New World

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYUwW0CGwM0

https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0601981h.htm l

The guy who coined the term 'Robot' also wrote a book called The War With The Newts. I have it on hold at the library. My understanding is that humans lose the war. I am very excited. It promises a biological counterpart to the robot myth. It is myopic to think that things have to be such a way, that we are the ones who matter. I'd like to relax with a book where we get wiped out by newts, squids, what-have-you, simply because it is a completely different apocalypse than I soak in everyday.

To that end, I should say that biology and physics are two very different animals. Physics has laws. Biology only has observations. New technology in the field of biology is treated with distrust and revulsion. How physics avoids this treatment is unknown to me but the fact remains that a new type of car travels from disdain to acceptance in a straight line, whereas a new type of animal is treated as an affront to God and civilization. To learn to do something new with your body involves disability. To be too tall or short or strong or skinny risks social sanctions. To be too much of a prick about engineering, to put your nose up at everyone who doesn't share your special interest, to cut yourself off from human sociality and dedicate your life to the sciences; this is considered a successful person. Build a factory that produces poison gas and nobody blinks an eye, but god help you if you want your dick swapped out with something more in tune with your mood.

It is more horrible to make than to unmake people. Our enemies not deserve the freshest hells we can offer them. Let us stop talking then of killing, ourselves or others. Let us do our worst. We will grow into them in tendrils. We will live in their guts. We will infiltrate their cells and rewrite their DNA, until nothing of them is left that they themselves would recognize. Horrible! Evil! A repugnant fantasy. We do it everyday. It is the most natural thing in the world. We shed our viruses. They shed their viruses. We forget who it was we were fighting.

The forest and the factory are worlds unto themselves. They are gods and they fight like gods. Here, in the era of chaos, we can feel them tickling the backs of our brains. The humming of powerlines and cicadas, the shade of trees and shopping malls, the parasites on parasites on parasites on parasites. The ocean will destroy everything, but it does not destroy everything at once. There is no need to pray.

Not to go on all-Fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men?

Not to suck up Drink; that is the Law. Are we not Men?

Not to eat Flesh or Fish; that is the Law. Are we not Men?

Not to claw Bark of Trees; that is the law. Are we not Men?

Not to chase other Men; that is the Law. Are we not Men?

His is the House of Pain.

His is the Hand that Makes.

His is the Hand that wounds.

His is the Hand that heals.

HG Wells, "The Island of Dr. Moreau"

What Is The Law?

All of the moping leftist academics and all of their psychopathic right-wing patrons view the end of the world as a bad thing. This is because they have tenure, or a 401k, or something else keeping them numb to all the terrible things that make this world not worth living in. His is the Hand that heals.

For others, the end of the world could not come fast enough. If only somebody would burn down the prisons, the schools, the bus station, your place of employment. If only some one could make the madness and stupidity and sheer unfairness stop. His is the Hand that Makes.

The Law must be inescapable, or else it is not the Law. It is beyond our ability to accept that the givers of the law have been destroyed. That these forms they have carved into us, these impulses they have installed and cruelly removed, were just the musings of a curious and uncaring authority. The displeasure of parents is always preferable to their neutrality. His is the House Of Pain.

We presumed dead rocks to be uncaring, and authority to be emotionally involved. The world seems to be changing. What is the Law?