Only a small percentage of the materials at InfoAll.org have yet been re-posted here at my InfoAll blog. None of my background philosopher writings have been. This post, newly penned this hour, will precede the re-posting. It's an email just sent to the social worker the fed assigned to me after releasing me from jail. More explanations of what follows will follow after:
Sandy, we talk and talk, and the more we talk about the more there is to talk about. The more said—the more understood, the more left out, the more not understood.
Coming into your office yesterday I commented on your cute Frog: No Perfumes sign, but repressed my urge to say anything further, my mind being already jumping balks about
2) Ahn giving me authority over my idea for ballroom lessons, then taking it away from me in the middle of the Social chaos of Wed. July 8.
blog readers, note:
Sandy's "House of Wellness" ask visitors not to enter wearing any chemical scents.
I asked if she herself was allergic. She said she was.
Sandy's "House of Wellness" ask visitors not to enter wearing any chemical scents.
I asked if she herself was allergic. She said she was.
At our next meeting there will again be too much to talk about pressing against me, so let me scratch this itch over a missing detail by sending your this (quick I hope) email:
You know I'm a disciple of Ivan Illich, you know Ivan Illich is a disciple of Christ, I think you already knew a little bit about Illich before I came in, but of course, due to my being a disciple of Illich and Illich and all his ideas being anathema to the kleptocracy, you, like everyone else, did NOT know a thing about me: except that I'm a convicted, confessed, "felon": more kleptocracy-imposed delusion, the confession having been tricked out of me by a combination of threats and mild but continuous tortures (refrigerating prisons, stripping us naked at 55 degrees — a friend joked, "I'll plead guilty if you'll just send me back to my cell, where it's 60 degrees, not 55.")
[The thieves band together, 90% unconsciously, to sift through facts, blocking, shading, blackening, those facts that contradict their illusion of legitimacy. The magicians' illusions will work (on a stupid-enough, conditioned-enough audience) IF the ushers have a free hand to silence the rational skeptics.
What there's never been time to add to my introduction of myself to you is that long before I was a disciple of Illich (and long after I was a (yet-minor) disciple of Christ), I was an enthusiastic disciple of George Bernard Shaw. Now: Illich is not normally associated with Shaw, Shaw is not normally seen as related to Illich: but the relationship is there: even if only through me (and I'll relate this where it belongs, next to the idea of No Perfume, in a moment).
I was the better ready to read and understand Illich thanks to my long-trained reading and interpreting Shaw (AKA: GBS).
It's seems odd, but it's not really. GBS was the famous atheist, the famous socialist.
Well I loved Shaw DESPITE that. Because he is the great humorist: who, Twain-like, looks at conventional compositions Up-Side-Down!
It's a good exercise, should Always be done. Take an argument, don't either believe it or disbelieve it until you're pondered it: right side up, as given, and ALSO upside down, as Not given.
That's essential for the reverse engineering behind Illich's deconstruction of contemporary society's institutions:
The school system is supposed to "educate"; look at it: the school system takes potential individuals, potentially fit for democracy, and machines them into robots for industry, with the occasional privileged-robot-executive for industry.
The schools fail to make us literate, numerate, rational ... but succeed in making us conventional, bland, easily foolable ...
Now: things upside down are not automatically true (though things not examined through every possible orientation are, almost automatically, probably false).
But look it over, check it out,
And enjoy laughing at us fools.
OK, now what about perfume?
I love Shaw, that doesn't mean I necessarily agree with him on much: I agree with his comic procedure: look at the idea dressed in a clown suit, as well as posed for the executive portrait.
Now, specifically:
Shaw, acknowledging that majorities rule, accepted society's right to disregard the discomforts of minorities. (I wish I could afford to find the specific literary reference among the plays and prefaces I have in mind — I haven't read any Shaw since 1965, but till then I'd read more than sixty of the plays, most of the prefaces, and lots of letter: meantime, just believe me.)
I disagree, I don't believe that, I don't think it's automatically OK for the majority to blink at booze production and distribution just because only a minority of people are noticed to become drunks. I don't think it's OK for the majority to profit from tobacco while only some start showing symptoms of emphysema, cancer, etc. I accept that the society does not care for the discomforts of minorities; I do not accept that the society has any right to not care about what's toxic. If the one canary dies in the coal mine, get everybody out of the coal mine, don't wait for a million canaries to die.
I also differ from Shaw's acceptance that "government" is a necessary evil. I don't want to accept any evil as necessary. (Unavoidable and necessary are not the same concept.)
(I did my Shaw reading before 1965. In 1965 I too accepted the right of society to make rules, believing that groups could behave rationally; now I don't accept that assumption, at all: I vehemently deny it. I'm an anarchist now because I'm a total atheist with regard to the possibility of any society larger than 200 individuals doing anything whatsoever that is not destructive. THAT may be why I was arrested!)
There are many more distinctions to draw, but this isn't bad for a first draft, written as fast as I can type. (There are also contradictions not yet addressed: I say "get everybody out of the coal mine"; but I do not mean by coercive authority!) (How? except by coercive authority? Simple: just wait for nature to kill us off so no society exceeds 200 members: if there are no such societies, we'll be extinct: and that might be the best thing in the end.) (I don't want it to be up to Stalin, Hitler, Nixon. I don't want it to be up to you. I don't want it to be up to me!) (I don't want it to be up to Jehovah, planning to give every privilege to the Jews, I don't want it to be up to Jehovah, planning to give every privilege to the Christians; I want it to "be up to" nature! Uncapitalized!)
OK OutSide World: the above is better than nothing. If I live long enough, once I've reposted everything of mine that the fed censored (and that the public accepted the censorship of), I'll come back to to recompose the above as a coherent relationing of GBS, Illich, and
.
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