Dear Humanity.
What’s up? Babylon Humanity. What’s up? “It’s fatal development.” Why the need for permanent aggressive expansion? Why such waste? Why the constant threat of war? Why exploitation within a system you devised? You’re cray if you think you’re holding on. Just so you know.
Love,
Precarious Birch
——
From a certain position not desperate, nuclear missiles are actually kind of funny. And awesome, inspiring, poetic, real we made, us, notice our actual, unintended creations and worlds born. We do this. We are this. Who are we and what are we doing? Critical theory endeavors to tell such a story, to paint a version of the Total Picture that must be expressed, that deserves inclusion, formidably, in the All-Mind, frontal lobe penetration, soul poems at the end of life. They made the noise, and now we must tend. Repeat the secret forever! Hitler made Humanity deal. Imagine from that perspective for a moment. Trump makes global noise, he is planetary, the size of the Earth itself. He’ll have a hotel on the moon. And we can’t deal with his Brand. But there it is, in our face, standing screaming smacking us kicking us in the balls. Oh, we’re fighting back! With words and weapons. And counter the word with a counter-word. Politics society, idea wars. These mega-real. But all of this is fucking funny.!
Absolutely. Tremendously entertaining, poetic, a scream. USA-USSR, convergence theory, Communism-Capitalism, the Big Brands, the Statement, the Product, and the Reality, these “formerly antagonistic realms merge on technical and political grounds - magic and science, life and death, joy and misery. Beauty reveals its terror as highly classified nuclear plants and laboratories becomes “industrial Parks” in pleasing surroundings; Civil Defense Headquarters display a ‘deluxe fallout-shelter’ with wall-to-wall carpeting (“soft”), lounge chairs, television, and Scrabble, ‘designed as a combination family room during peacetime (sic!), and family fallout shelter should war break out.’ We do this! This truly the method critical theory employs, and the range of possibilities within Critical Poetry, the paintings, photographs, poems from the critical edge. We are this thing, an us, and watch! Enjoy! I need me a family fallout shelter in my suburban home, the center of the universe. America. As war has broken.
As war renders them insane. “If the horror of such realizations does not penetrate into consciousness, if it is readily taken for granted, it is because these achievements are (a) perfectly rational in terms of the existing order, (b) tokens of human ingenuity and power beyond the traditional limits of imagination.
“This obscene merger of aesthetics and reality refutes the philosophies which oppose ‘poetic’ imagination to scientific and empirical Reason. Technological progress is accompanied by a progressive rationalization and even realization of the imaginary. The archetypes of horror as well as of joy, of war as well as of peace lose their catastrophic character. Their appearance in the daily life of the individuals is no longer that of irrational forces - their modern avatars are elements of technological domination, and subject to it. - Ouch! More smacking us around. As you should sing as you should know. He’s taking his thought to a very interesting place. These pages kill.
Good Imagination has been removed from the society’s dominant paradigm. Its understanding won’t even allow for these thoughts. But they speak to us, a kind of underground. “In reducing and even canceling the romantic space of imagination, society has forced the imagination to prove itself on new grounds, on which the images are translated into historical capabilities and projects. The translation will e as bad and distorted as the society which undertakes it. Separated from the realm of material production and material needs, imagination was mere play, invalid in the realm of necessity, and committed only to a fantastic loin and fantastic truth. When technological progress cancels this separation, it invests the images with its own logic, and its own truth; it reduces the free faculty of the mind.” Here’s another way to understand the thesis of “one-dimensional man,” the idea at the Idea’s core. We don’t think any more. We can’t think outside the box, and we don’t know how to take on Power. But we’re trying anyway.
Fucking family fallout shelter. Please! The power of one-dimensional reality, thinking, society, man, is that it “also reduces the gap between imagination and Reason. The two antagonistic faculties become interdependent on common ground. In the light of the capabilities of advanced industrial civilization, is not all play of the imagination playing with technical possibilities, which can be tested as to their chances of realization? The romantic idea of a “science of the Imagination” seems to assume an ever-more-empirical aspect.”
Our so-called leaders are insane, anxiety-laced, paranoid, freakish. We deserve better than warrior clods who march with guns blazing into political difference. Who build walls and armories and death traps. Who live, and you can psychoanalyze these people, by words and deeds that yield evil. These so-called leaders are obsessed with death, with scapegoats and murder and power and consumption. They are animals of the old direction. “Imagination has not remained immune to the process of reification. We are possessed by our images, suffer our own images. Psychoanalysis knew it well, and knew the consequences. However, ‘to give to the imagination all the means of expression’ would be regression. The mutilated individuals (mutilated also in their faculty of imagination) would organize and destroy even more than they are now permitted to do. Such release would be the unmitigated horror - not the catastrophe of culture, but the free sweep of its most repressive tendencies. Rational is the imagination which can become the a priori of the reconstruction and redirection of the productive apparatus toward a pacified existence, a life without fear. And this can never be the imagination of those who are possessed by the images of domination and death.”
Why must we work so hard to convince people of that last sentence? As concept, as idea, as reality for All of Us, this is the question of our day, our soul existence, the true Answer human who knows the art of joy of living, as to live, to live. It’s a central tenet, it’s a Koan handed from yon minds, all of our saints and religions, our answers to political economic imbalances, to the monarchy and the aristocracy, to imperialism, to racism - all of our issues as issues exists, as do their answers. So why can’t we agree upon and enact the answers?
The actual answer is that we can and we are. But see how noisy the battle, the struggle to change consciousness, to convince somebody set in their framework of understanding. “”To liberate the imagination so that it can be given all its means of expression presupposes the repression of much that is now free and that perpetuates a repressive society. And such reversal is not a matter psychology or ethics but of politics, in the sense in which this term has here been used throughout” - and here he defines politics for us - “the practice in which the basic societal institutions are developed, defined, sustained, and changed. It is the practice of individuals, no matter how organized they may be. Thus the question once again must be faced: How can the administered individuals - who have made their mutilations into their own liberties and satisfactions, and thus reproduce it on an enlarge scale - liberate themselves from themselves as well as from their masters? How is it even thinkable that the vicious circle be broken?” Can you think the unthinkable, and act upon it? He and all of them ask. Voices Class, merge, unite, reinforce, enforce, empower, and which voices rise?
Voices clash and which voices rise.
We accept enslavement. We are trained to be unhappy, to produce, and all other activities must be justified. Again, how can, after being smacked in the head with this, the thing seen and then damn, we not act upon this Dopeness for the Dr. Dopeness parade? I want to know. Family Fallout Shelter, indeed. Marcuse quoted Gastron Bachelard, the French empowered to think wack about living in an actual world in an administered society, and inspired by their culture to seek redress, to locate answers, and to see in original ways, which gives rise to a philosophical type, to a way of seeing. Check out the philosopher’s way! Bachelard wrote that “an entire psychoanalysis of matter can help us to cure us of our images or at least help us to limit the hold of our images on us. One may then hope to be able to render imagination happy, to give it good conscience in allowing it fully all its means of expression, all material images which emerge in natural dreams, in normal dream activity. To render imagination happy, to allow it all its exuberance, means precisely to grant imagination its true function as psychological impulse and force.” I mean, that’s shit a person should check out in a life. Any person, kind or type, and why Harvard sophomores studying a cross-hatch of young-person interests, seated on a couch watching the Super Bowl - do a rhetorical reading of that please - should read, too. Much of Marcuse’s citations from the 1950s, which shows us the bugfest occurring in Europe, in thought, just after the war. I, mean, fuck. We’ve all heard and watched the stories. But have we lived them sympathetically, as able to transport our spirits into their times and minds? Yes, of course we can, and so we do. And me? This mind conjures words in his own and they begin with damn. We do this. We are this. And so to bug is good, is healthy, and the visions lived while bugging worthy of sharing. Endo.
We accept enslavement. Our leisure our cage. “How can administered individuals . . . Liberate themselves . . . From their masters? How we break “the vicious circle”? Marcuse began with some more drops: “It seems that it is not the notion of the new societal institutions which presents the greatest difficulty in the attempt to answer this question. The established societies themselves are changing, or have already changed the basic institutions in the direction of increased planning.” In other words, we’re already coming with the mad planning, let’s solve our ultimate troubles. “Since the development and utilization of all available resources for the universal satisfaction of vital needs is the prerequisite of pacification, it is incompatible with the prevalence of particular interests which stand in the way of attaining this goal. Qualitative change is conditional upon planning for the whole against these interests, and a free and rational society can emerge only on this basis.”
Repression - the always-evil Reaction - steps into the scene to ruin our utopian plans. Our crafting of the divine unity for all of us. “The institutions within which pacification can be envisaged thus defy the traditional classification into authoritarian and democratic, centralized and liberal administration. Today, the opposition to central planning in the name of a liberal democracy which is denied in reality serves as an ideological prop for repressive interests.” Ouch. See what I’m saying? There are some smackdowns in the book. Add these with Barbara Fields’s smackdown in Racecraft, and we notice smoke, because where there’s . . . Fire! Babylon burn. These are the words from the critical voice, the alternative position. There are many positions within this universe. But unifying them all is a desire for purity in life, of love, end of suffering, peaceful coexistence and rolling without shit jobs that pay less than the minimum wage. We demand something else. You know we do. It’s happening. Testify.
Demand. Exactly the goodness that you see. “The goal of authentic self-determination by the individuals depends on effective social control over the production and distribution of the necessities (in terms of the achieved level of culture, material and intellectual).” This framework supports a view of change that removes us from our current insanity, including nuclear weapons global paradigm of anxiety madness. Pull in those primary sources for the lectures - Truman Plan and all the rest. Tell that story, Babylon Studies. Know Atomic Universalism book. Write the book dream on nukes! Anti-nukes! Which side are you on! Where do we go from here? Who are we and what are we doing?
We demand that technology and its expanding total power - as a world life, ideology and system - solve these problems as employed by us to new ends, deal with the complications of resource distribution, growing inequalities and populations growing, and environmental degradation. “Technological rationality,” Marcuse stated, “stripped of its exploitative features, is the sole standard and guide in planning and developing the available resources for all.” The Common, the actual global all of us, saving the world rationally, with the tools in our possession. We possess the idea, already now, and will, we continue to convince - and we have the tools. “Self-determination in the production and distribution of vital goods and services would be wasteful. The job is a technical one, and as a truly technical job, it makes for the reduction of physical and mental toil. In this realm, centralized control is rational if it establishes the preconditions for meaningful self-determination. The latter can then become effective in its own realm - in the decisions which involve the production and distribution of the economic surplus, and in the individual existence.” Dealing with the true matters of life on earth, politically. What do we do with these issues? Do you like the way they’re going? Forget your upbringing for a moment - your nation, school, church, family, ideology - do you like and accept the way things are right now. On our earth now? No. You don’t. From whatever angle. And the way through this is Unity. Solved. And you begin the with a universal quality of life. End of discussion. Endo Zero.
We do not accept our current conditions, in our state, around the globe. That’s the simple matter of the entire thing. Check out the phrase “the living indictment” when we get there. Individuals liberated from all propaganda. “In any case, the combination of centralized authority and direct democracy is subject to infinite variations, according to the degree of development. Self-determination will be real to the extent to which the masses have been dissolved into individuals liberated from all propaganda, indoctrination, and manipulation, capable of knowing and comprehending the facts and of evaluating the alternatives. In other words, society would be rational and free to the extent to which it is organized, sustained and reproduced by an essentially new historical Subject.” Please read Galbraith soon, thanks. And.
Development, growth, humanity. Read “History for an Ecological Age.” Read “The Imagined Global Community and the Struggle to Save the World.” Development and growth and expansion and the organism. “At the present stage of development of the advanced industrial societies, the material as well as the cultural system denies this exigency. The power and efficiency of this system, the thorough assimilation of mind with fact, of thought with required behavior, of aspirations with reality, militate against the emergence of a new Subject. They also militate against the notion that the replacement of the prevailing control over the productive process by ‘control from below’ would mean the advent of qualitative change. The notion was valid, and still is valid, where the laborers were, and still are, the living denial and indictment of the established society.” Ouch. Think the downtrodden working class; also think of slaves. What! You throw like this and hold down a job in Babylon!? Beware, man! The workers in our system, all of us, are the living denial and indictment of the established society. This is the problem we must resolve, to pivot, to change the core of the system and our relationships, our minds. Here exists the very definition of radical. “However, where these classes have become a prop of the established way of life, their ascent to control would prolong this way in a different setting.” True, Bob.
“And yet, the facts are all there which validate the critical theory of this society, and of its fatal development: the increasing irrationality of the whole; waste and restriction of productivity; the need for aggressive expansion; the constant threat of war; intensified exploitation; dehumanization. And they all point to the historical alternative; the planned utilization of resources for the satisfaction of vital needs with a minimum of toil, the transformation of leisure into free time, the pacification of the struggle for existence.” Whoa! Boom! Smackdown, Babylon! What the fuck you gon’ do with that! You ain’t gonna do shit. Why? Because when something is dropped so true, and expressed, it becomes social life, and you’ll never be able to eradicate that voice. And the voices unite and become powerful. This is the kind of paragraph rip that we print and nail to a wall.
There would be no need for this talk, Dear Babylon, if ya’ll didn’t create a universally fucked up system based on exploited labor and outright slavery. Straight up. There’s the heart of the matter. Let’s see if you can extricate your sorry asses from the problem(s) you created. Guaranteed not. Therefore? We have to do it for you. We have to take it from you, the political power, the impulse, the organization. We shall become controllers of our human destiny, and the apparatus will be no more. Dear Babylon, watchyo ass. There would be no need for such critical theory if you had not created the hell-pit we’ve inherited, and nor do you seem to be recognizing the problem. In fact, you’re denying the problem. And so now what? We have to take it from you. You created the problem, thus the need for the Alternative Voice. We look at the Thing you made. We can see it, we live it. And so we say, No more! This is not the way, and certainly not led by you assholes. So we create a new story. And we sing it. Powerfully, united, with lives.
Dear Humanity. What’s up? Babylon Humanity. What’s up? “It’s fatal development.” Why the need for permanent aggressive expansion? Why such waste? Why the constant threat of war? Why exploitation within a system you devised? You’re cray if you think you’re holding on.
Sing the voice and sing it here, in this time. From organic Seeing to a shared possibility, to a conversation. To share. There’s always been something else going on. And this is it. Right here. “But the facts and the alternatives are there like fragments which do not connect, or like a world of mute objects without a subject, without the practice which would move these objects in their new direction. Dialectical theory is not refuted, but it cannot offer the remedy. It cannot be positive. To be sure, the dialectical concept, in comprehending the given facts, transcends the given facts. This is the very token of its truth. It defines the historical possibilities, even necessities; but their realization can only be in the practice which responds to the theory, and, at present, the practice gives no such response.
“On theoretical as well as empirical grounds, the dialectical concept pronounces its own hopelessness. The human reality is its history and, in it, contradictions do not explode by themselves. The conflict between streamlined, rewarding domination on the one hand, and its achievements that make for self-determination and pacification on the other, may become blatant beyond any possible denial, but it may well continue to be a manageable and even productive conflict, for with the growth of in the technological conquest of natures grows the conquest of many by man. And this conquest reduces the freedom which is a necessary a priori of liberation.” Freedom is the ability to live your own quest and realization, your own choices and self-realization, liberation necessary for a person alive, and self-determination is the divine course. For now, one must be revolutionary to work for oneself and not for another’s vision, another’s profit. To step outside is nigh impossible. We all live within this massive apparatus, a matrix, a wealth machine structured for and by other people. Awake to your own day and see what happens to your soul.
Awake to your own hour and realize sweetness nectar. While this band repeats Babylon is a Trap, Babylon is a Trap. Think about that, as an expression of the anti. My God, man! To believe such a thing and to grow your hair opposing the baldhead shitstem. To visualize an alternative. To dream the voice and inhale its expression. The “conquest of man by man,” my goodness, God helps us. “This freedom of thought in the only sense in which thought can be free in the administered world - as the consciousness of its repressive productivity, and as the absolute need for breaking out of this whole.” A Hipster’s Guide to Marcuse, to the Frankfurt School, for those who haven’t read this shit and should, for those who will take this and soul-absorb the message, walk with this vision as their own, carry it to their own expression - this is the point of vision sharing. “But precisely this absolute need does not prevail where it could become the driving force of a historical practice, the effective cause of qualitative change. Without this material force, even the most acute consciousness remains powerless.” (253) Powerless to live the revolution, to change the consciousness, and the structure will follow. A new way of living, beyond this competitive death-way, profit for life, growth beyond forever. Save us from these savages! Laborers as the living indictment of a civilization, individuals liberated from all propaganda; “one-dimensional” because non-dialectical - this is the thesis.