Taking Control

Alienation is a teleological principle of materialism: the presupposition that there is a world out there necessitates alienation of human endeavor — I intuit within I am a living, laboring thing with a minimal sense of purpose, therefore, I think about other things.

Without a sense of perspective of matter in motion, even though our species may concede that it too is a part, though apart from, humanity loses its innate commanding position over the environment which is essential to the meaning of the human species. One need only to view TV commercials for a time to grasp the theme of getting hold of yourself with the contradictory elements of being overloaded with meaningless control.

Tomfoolery of Atheism

Atheists may lobby — as feverishly as right-wingers — for a limited currency series that states "In "God we do not trust," or a postage stamp that shows a black hole with the inscription "Godless."

The Four Noble Truths

The first of Buddha’s Noble Truths is the glaring fact of life — pain and suffering. The second faces up to the reality that this suffering is conditioned by the matrices of nature, culture, society and ancestry: there is no enduring metaphysical self, samsara, one need protect. This logically leads to the third which remedies the first two by obliterating the pain altogether. The fourth is the manner in which this suppression is obtained: here one begins by suppressing lust completely which in turn destroys samsara, or aims for nirvana, the mental complex leading to the obliteration of consciousness; the entire province of pedestrian existence coming to a halt.

Capital Punishment

Murderers should be murdered by survivors of the victim; if they are gutless, then the relatives of the murderer should be asked; if they refuse, then it is the responsibility of the state to re-enact the crime. However, this does not solve an even greater problem: what if there is nagging doubt that the accused is not the murder? For when we say one is guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt even when evidence is circumstantial, it does not remove the nagging shadow.

The Significance of The Middle Class

Believing that private property makes men happier, enabling them to cultivate the virtue of generosity, Aristotle, however, would restrict accumulation of wealth and property in order to relieve the wants of others. The economy was to stay within the limits of the natural order; artificial or "coin" wealth, he wanted strict limitations on.

The political matrix of Aristotle’s city-state is very definitely constitutional government, administered by the middle class — consisting of the "deliberative body" (legislative), "distribution of offices" (executive) and the judicial body — a mean between democracy and oligarchy. This middle class is what constitutes the citizenry. The citizen is more than a denizen.

Obviously he possess political power. How he wields that power depends on how closely he attains the ultimate objective of the state. He knows both how to rule and how to obey. Citizenship is thus moral training, leading to the "good life" of enlightenment.

Myth of Capital

Capital does not grow on trees. Behind its fetish drips the blood and sweat of accumulated and living labor. Gone are the days when one could proudly imprint his seal on the result of his knowledge of social needs. Gone is the supreme satisfaction that his labor is totally his, the total input of which can be transvalued into his own individual needs. Once labor became alienated by the development and ownership of the instruments of labor, man had to thrust himself onto the market as a commodity. The bourgeois had "liberated" or expropriated labor forces from feudal rural areas to amass them for exploitation and the furtherance of capital. Capital is not some innate mystery hold away in archives waiting to be discovered: it is an aggressive accumulation of wealth at the expense of others' labor. Partly since the dawn of civilization it has always been this way. Whether in the building of pyramids or the Parthenon, hordes of slaves or second-class citizens were coerced into laboring for the unique fetishes of the few. But monuments are static; capital is symbiotic, relentlessly feeding upon itself to unlimited proportions. Had the pyramids been capital they would be by now scraping the moon's bottom. Had the pharaohs gone into the construction of affordable mini pyramidal homes for the laboring masses, their dynasty might never have ended.

Zeno Fallacy

In the field of motion Zeno is not a paradox at all but rather lends to the reality of things. The first step the baby takes is very definitely completed—brought to actuality—by the three-dimensional overlap of potentials. Just as the musical note in the process of becoming, its kinetic energy, necessitates its successor to move into position of energy as its predecessor has moved into the position of work before it joins the rank and file of the unemployed—more accurately, the boys in the band are returned to a position of potential energy—so too does this unceasing dispersion of energy take place in all fields of multi-dimensional action. The baby moves from point A which in itself is infinitely inversed so that point A = a 1+a 2+a 3, and steps onto point B=b 1+b 2+b3; thus the finite step A to B is actual by virtue of the sub-atomic pulses that have dispersed multi-dimensionally by the work performed inherent in the kinetic energy of the child's step. Furthermore, because of this displacement the child has already incurred into the second step by overlapping point B on the way to C. If this funneling of becoming did not leak multi-dimensionally the sub-atomic structure would crowd up at some remote point and arrest the child's foot in flight. The essential principle of becoming would be farcical. Since Zeno was thinking two-dimensionally and not three obviously there would result an impenetrably viscous gang-up.

Copyright © 2005 Richard R. Kennedy All rights reserved. Revised: December 20, 2005.

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