Manifesto For A New Cultural Revolution

For sin is just this, what man cannot by its very nature do with his whole being; it is possible to silence the conflict in the soul, but it is not possible to uproot it.
— Martin Buber
You have taught Mogwai to watch television?! I warned you that with Mogwai comes much responsibility, but you would not listen.
— "Gremlins" (1986)

If order is good, how do we achieve it? What impairs the necessary insight into solving this moral dilemma is first and foremost within the mind. The incapacitated public's inability to approach an imposition of order of our own making, through a cultural revolution that services the spiritual needs left unconsidered or vilified by present actors.

Vilified cultures as a result only represent distracting foils for a public becoming increasingly aware of suffering caused by capitalist hegemony. They come and go. Not too many people are worried about "savage Indians" these days! "They" served their purpose to power, and have been replaced by Muslims, Socialists, homosexuals and others. As a less interesting side note, it is no coincidence that sexuality is brought into play as it can be used almost interchangeably with immorality and makes an efficient shorthand: Bill Clinton's foreign policy blunders and Julian Assange's "threat to security" are successfully left un-analyzed by the majority of the disciplined elites, absorbed in deconstructing the intimate details of their personal lives.

Since the hegemonic system appears to have no problem with unethical speculation, we must turn to those ethical welfare systems that are preserved and challenge their promised success of an orderly reality. Rallying around a flag or leader, and it follows, against another in some fashion, is frequently insinuated as the supreme good, or at least, and end to that. There are plenty of examples of this, perhaps the most recent being the "unity government" of Honduras, sponsored by us, which continues to terrorize dissidents in the name of order.

Much of this does not find form until dissidents can be seen as threatening the general welfare of the public. They are  propagandistically painted as insidious, claiming "civil rights" apparently only as a veneer of nobility, covering up the self-interest power hunger (likely another egotistical projection!) That's not to say the system is completely authoritarian. To get people to agree to it, some ideological concessions were made to service businesses, so that they could be free from too much interference. Also, certain rights were put outside not only of the law, but of human reason itself ("endowed by their Creator"), and so power was structured to allow the occasional imbalance.

The large threat of flawed ideology is just as frequently approached within another cripplingly irresponsible conflation -- that of morality and power/money interests,  and of course the old standard cultural/military hegemony being called "national security."

The Vietnamese were "immoral" because they wanted to become something we believed to be similar to Chinese Communists. The appeals to prejudice serve as a smokescreen for corrupted morality, and corrupted uses of tools at our disposal, including capitalism and religion, with our hegemonic power tacitly assumed as benign or even beneficial. This is evident from the perceived harmless nature of Coca-cola plants. The silliness is not so far below the surface, as it was recently claimed that obese children are a threat to military quotas being filled, and therefore, national security. Left unsaid for now obvious rationales are the government's tacit acceptance of fattening corn products through public subsidy, and the reliance on a culture of a passive, spectator population.

A strategy was developed to fool the fools, to allow us to believe that civility was important, so long as we recognized the of worship of power as an overriding principle, a pragmatic "check" on freedom. This was the culture war, and it gave jobs to the very people who possessed the analytical skills necessary for deconstructing the system. It was successful. People are sold on utopia with the rough edges of the non-modernized world used to stand as a foil for immoral socialism (in reality, the result of wealth escaping with the powerful).

Therefore, the reality of the condition of liberty in the world cannot be seen clearly through any ideology without a challenge to the traditions and stereotypes of the past. I tried to do exactly that with examples of assassinations. But while Kennedy and Lincoln led armies, Martin Luther King led peaceful marches.  The evidence is there that revolutions could be started even more successfully with a an idea rather than the a gun. But  many people, for example, don't recall easily that King said the U.S. is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world, nor that Kennedy believed in a spiritual power of poetry, nor that Lincoln believed in moral sacrifice to such a degree that he privately excused his own assassination only a few years before it came about.

Education must therefore be a huge part of the end goal of the ethical person, as it is evident people are not always smartest or best in quite a few important and telling ways. Because of this, it should be protected from corruption in its reform. Law and order, police and elections, should not be opposed to interest in other suppressed cultures or in helping one another.

Unfortunately, the powerful people who enshrined our laws were threatened by angered masses, and created principles to "impose reason" on the population by any means necessary (which were sound enough to keep the system going despite attempted moderation by liberal presidents).  And until people are brave enough, the actual faults of the Founding Fathers, as well as their most noble heirs to the presidential throne, cannot compete with the caricatures.

So as long as there is no change to this, there will always be a new game that will be called something like "a new era" and it must be continually protected from the announced new enemy.

Today, writing about Communism has become passe, and it is the Arabs in the Middle East, the liberals, and the Tea Party who are the acceptable targets. However, Chinese and South American autocrats get a passing mention, with others no doubt to come later. They are "the Bad" and we are "the Good" and we try to go about our lives unperturbed, believing our acceptance of it makes us moral.

Frequently, appeals to "realistic" -- "natural," or even "democratic" ideas based on a "free" and "Great Society" -- are conflated with appeals to traditions, to stereotypes, and to other sources of knowledge that can be corrupted by their use in violence and fraud. The ambiguous nature of the solutions proposed are telling of the deep-seated moral conflict. John Edwards ran a campaign on class antagonism and lost, while the victorious Barack Obama ran on hatred of Bush and bland, patronizing nationalism.

The enemy is required to be both a continuation of the forces of chaos and, if our system is facing threats of reasonable claims of illegitimacy, a much bigger threat to transcendental morality than ever before. Fears of global wars, even in practice involving only parts of the world (i.e. the rich countries), are not only stoked, but are brought into reality through such seemingly noble acts of intervention as "restoring democracy" and "being welcomed as liberators."

It's clearly the last thing we need, and therefore, the first thing people should discontinue in their day to day life. Challenge traditions to bring life to people.

Tracing the game throughout history to test the legitimacy of our current system is frowned upon, because it is only considered valuable if it fits within the current game of vilification. I believe this could be a sufficient explanation for the logical devices currently used to critique, as well as their failure to produce sufficient progress to keep hope alive, untarnished by the irrational despair that surrounds us. This can be no more obvious than in the life of Sarah Palin, a mother who had to raise several kids, and decided to use that to her political advantage with the authoritarian "mother grizzly" ideology.

With all this in mind, I feel no shame in wishing a long life to the revolution!