Month: December 2012
The true measure of a man is not his intelligence or how high he rises in this freak establishment. No, the true measure of a man is this: how quickly can he respond to the needs of others and how much of himself he can give.
Philip K. Dick (via yourmaj3sty)
Synchronicity is an ever present reality for those who have eyes to see
Carl Jung (via acideyedrops)
Carl Jung described the phenomenon of synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence, whereby two or more unrelated events occur and evoke a numinous reaction in the observer. For example, you randomly think of a friend you have not heard from in years and that same day receive a call from the friend.
Humans have the remarkable ability to to manifest, to bring to the foreground, meaning and pattern from the chaos of events that surround us. Synchronicity reveals such patterns. Jung, in conversation with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, intuited a deeper ordering principle operating within chaos but originating in life. He and Pauli called the field from which synchronicity emerged Unus Mundus – “One World” – in essence the connections that tie everything together and form the basis for synchronicity, divination and magick.
Synchronicity is the strangely wonderful experience of the outer world intersecting in a meaningful way with our inner selves. Magick and divination involve acknowledging and creating space for a field in which the probability of a synchronicity occurring is heightened.
The magician to some degree is trying to drive him or herself mad in a controlled setting, within controlled laws. ~ Alan Moore
We are wrongly told magick is the ancestor of technology. Not so but the brilliant and skillful use of technology can be in itself very close to magick. Magick is not a predecessor of technology but rather kin to art, a manipulation of the elements around us to enhance the likelihood of an effect. In the same way fine art requires a precise touch, so too does magick. This is different from cause and effect, and more akin to chaos theory. The timing, the inflection and our intent mix together to potentially influence a series of chaotic probabilities which may, or may not, result in a precise point of synchronicity.
The proximity of art and magick cannot be overstated. Failing to see the family resemblance allows advertising agencies and politicians far too much free range I would rather leave to musicians.
We have to resist the temptation to fall into superstition, to propagate popular notions of magick. It is incumbent upon the pagan community to quietly save magick from our fictions at least for the sake of our own understandings.
Want to be invisible? Don’t think like Harry Potter. Think like an owl. The creatures of the forest don’t try to be invisible. Rather, they seek to increase the probability they will not be seen. They hold still, make no noise, silence their breath as you pass. They participate with their surroundings to increase the likelihood they will remain unnoticed.
I am certain you see fewer owls than have seen you.
Magick is not so much a practice but a way of being in the world, a way of living to provide space for synchronicity to proliferate around us. In such a context, everything is connected, there are no coincidences. We don’t “do” magick, we breathe it, move through it and experience everything as part of a unified whole.
We are told ‘no’, we’re unimportant, we’re peripheral. ‘Get a degree, get a job, get this, get that.’ And then you’re a player, but you don’t want to play in the game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.
—Terence McKenna
I think it’s important for any student to keep this in mind throughout the process.
(via nutopiancitizen)
Low wages won’t work
THE LINE typically forms at the door of the Wendy’s in Downtown Brooklyn during lunch hour. Not on November 30. That’s because a picket line circled the Fulton Street sidewalk in front of the restaurant, and organizers with New York Communities for Change (NYCC) stood by the entrance, distributing leaflets and urging costumers to eat elsewhere.
The previous day, on November 29, employees of McDonald’s, Burger King, Yum Brands and other fast-food restaurants across New York City walked off the job in the largest fast-food workers strike in American history. Their demands: $15 an hour and union recognition.
But after walking off the job on Thursday, the workers faced another challenge the following day—walking back on.
Upon returning to work at Wendy’s November 30, single mother Shalonda Montgomery was told not to bother clocking in. “She was the youngest worker,” said Sherry Jones with NYCC, “and she was the newest. They let everybody else go right back. But they tried to make an example out of her.”
When news of the firing got out, fast-food workers from across the city mobilized in Montgomery’s defense. The restaurant quickly became the focal point of the Fast Food Forward Campaign, which the day before had helped orchestrate the strike that saw approximately 200 workers at 27 restaurants across the city refuse to go to work.
The fast-food fightback is part of a growing upsurge in struggle initiated by the working poor in the United States. Last month, a nationwide day of action involving laborers at hundreds of Wal-Marts on Black Friday left a ray of hope on the consumerist holiday for workers and their supporters. Aside from the recent fast-food fight, there have been a number of successful unionization drives among car wash and grocery workers in New York City recently.
“Workers have been talking with one another,” said Deborah Ax of the community-based labor organization Make the Road. “There’s an unprecedented level of organizing going on.”
Make the Road has helped spearhead a campaign among car-wash workers in which strikes have won higher wages and back pay. Four car washes have voted to unionize since the organizing drive began in March.
Ax said Make the Road identified workers ready to lead the car-wash crusade while campaigning in immigrant and working-class communities around health care and housing issues. The organization put the workers in touch with one another, and today, worker councils exist at numerous car washes, coordinating through a citywide steering committee.
Their efforts have been bolstered by an agreement from the Taxi Workers Alliance and the city’s limo drivers (represented by the International Association of Machinists) not to patronize targeted shops, though Ax admits there are really no “good guy” car washes. The going hourly wage is $5.50 in the car-wash industry—the tipped minimum wage—and shifts often last up to 12 hours.
Yet there are bad guys that stand out, such as car-wash kingpin John Lage, who owns 23 washes and is under investigation by the state Attorney General’s office over hourly wage violations. Three of Lage’s washes have voted to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, but so far, he has been unwilling to sit down and discuss terms and conditions. Make the Road is pushing for the city government to follow the lead set by taxi and black-car drivers and cancel existing contracts it has with Lage.
Juan Carlos, an employee at a Lage car wash in SoHo, said that once he began organizing for a union, Lage approached him personally and gave him a 50-cent raise. In the seven years prior to the union drive, whenever Carlos complained about his pay, he was told that if he didn’t like it he could go home—and now, all of a sudden, a raise.
“It was his way of saying, ‘Stop organizing’” said Carlos. But Carlos didn’t stop organizing, and as we spoke last Thursday night, a picket of roughly 300 “carwasheros” and supporters stamped to the rhythm of a brass brand in front of the SoHo car wash, demanding Lage negotiate a fair contract with the newly formed union.
“I’m not fighting just for myself,” he said. “I’m fighting for all of us. We’re only going to win this by fighting together.”
The dead end of liberalism
THANKS FOR the article exposing the weaknesses of the “good Democrats” (“What about the ‘good’ Democrats?”).
It is important to point out the role of even the most left-sounding Democratic politicians who win support to the mainstream of the Democratic Party. As the article discusses, Dennis Kucinich is probably the most notorious practitioner of this art—stressing a broad tent to reel in radicals. His abandonment of his supposed antiwar principles to support Kerry in 2004 should have been a wake-up call to anyone who thought fundamental change could come through the Democratic Party.
Often, people who vote for Democrats as a lesser evil to the Republicans wish and hope that the Democrats could be made into a consistently liberal party. They feel that the problem is conservative or moderate Democrats who dominate the party. However, this view is an illusion. Even a completely liberal Democratic Party would still be pro-imperialist.
Unfortunately, while being clearly in opposition to the Democratic Party, the article leaves some room for inadvertent support for those illusory sentiments. It talks about Senator Baldwin’s “holes in her impeccable liberal credentials” referring to her support of China bashing and Iran bashing. Later it says, “The CHEATS Act isn’t the only issue where Baldwin has been far from liberal.” This implies that liberalism is antiwar or is at least consistently less aggressive than conservatism.
In fact, liberalism is a resolutely pro-imperialist ideology. Liberals dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The war in Vietnam was prosecuted by the Kennedy liberals. From the 1950s through the 1980s, “Cold War liberalism” dominated. The most admired liberal president, Franklin Roosevelt, established the basis of U.S. dominance through the Second World War. Obama increased U.S. troops in Afghanistan and drone attacks over what George W. Bush did!
As Sharon Smith wrote in the International Socialist Review:
[L]iberalism in the U.S. has never forged a principled opposition to U.S. imperialism, given its fealty to the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party, like its Republican counterpart, is a prowar party. The Democrats have never wavered from principled support for the aims of U.S. imperialism—whatever weak-kneed rhetoric they offer to the contrary. Indeed, most of the United States’ 20th century wars were initiated by Democrats, not Republicans.
Here of course one has to deal with the inevitable objection: that utopianism has lead to unmitigated horror, as Stalinists, Maoists, and other idealists tried to carve society into impossible shapes, killing millions in the process.
This argument belies a fundamental misconception: that imagining better worlds was itself the problem. Stalinists and their ilk did not kill because they dreamed great dreams – actually, Stalinists were famous for being rather short on imagination – but because they mistook their dreams for scientific certainties. Thie led them to feel they had a right to impose their visions through a machinery of violence. Anarchists are proposing nothing of the sort, on either count. They presume no inevitable course of history and one can never further the course of freedom by creating new forms of coercion. In fact all forms of systemic violence are (among other things) assaults on the role of the imagination as a political principle, and the only way to begin to think about eliminating systematic violence is by recognizing this.
And of course one could write very long books about the atrocities throughout history carried out by cynics and other pessimists…
David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Against Anti-Utopianism section)