Let the Anarchy Begin... Again! (repost)

From "Joan Danvers' College Years" (davidchess.com)

A TV TALKSHOW HOST* once asked me point-blank during a panel discussion if I were an anarchist.

“Of course,” I unhesitatingly replied, which took him aback. He quickly changed the subject. I guess the talkshow host, like most people I meet, was unaware what “anarchy” actually means.

My Oxford Concise Dictionary tautologically defines anarchy as “a society or political system founded on the principles of anarchism.” And how does it define anarchism? “Belief in the abolition of all government and the organization of society on a voluntary, cooperative basis.”

The Concise Oxford Dictionary is a bit off the mark here. It fails to distinguish between internal and external government. There’s a vast difference between self-imposed discipline and discipline enforced upon us by those who claim to know what’s best. The true anarchist is a self-governing entity who attains freedom from external dictates through rigorous integrity and transparency. As Bob Dylan wryly observed: “To live outside the law you gotta be honest.”

And how does one become honest?

Very simple. First you have to replace the concept of a judgmental and punitive parent-deity with an essentially loving, non-judgmental and extremely friendly notion of divinity - sort of a best buddy and trusted confidant(e). The problem is that souls evolve at different rates – and at this point in time the grossly immature ones appear to outnumber the ones who have made it through to self-governance.

(Incidentally the word “govern” comes from the Latin gubernare - “to steer or rule” – borrowed from the original Greek word kubernan, which simply means “to steer.”) This makes anarchism a difficult, if not impossible, ideal – and that’s why the word “anarchy” has been commonly misinterpreted as “disorder and general unruliness.”

In truth, anarchy is the final state to which monarchy aspires. How so? An enlightened ruler’s essential function is to be a shining example of dignity, nobility, and self-control for his or her subjects to emulate (just as a real teacher would be fulfilled to watch his or her students graduate as teachers in their own right).

Governance begins with monarchy and evolves through a whole gamut of isms before it finally achieves anarchism – the glorious state wherein “political parties” are defined as grand public celebrations at which everybody eats, drinks, and makes merry – and the human race transforms into the human dance.

As children we learn to lie in order to avoid punishment from grown-ups who would never understand why we do the things we do. Remove the punishment and – voila! – the crime disappears. But... but... but... I can hear the vociferous objections from the peanut gallery.

My old pal Socrates postulated that one sure way of telling true from false authority is simply this: false authority inevitably resorts to coercion, while true authority has all the patience in the world, since it emanates from the timeless realm.

Politics is fond of posing as a self-improving system of governance but we all know it actually boils down to who calls the shots. People mistake FORCE for POWER. If you disagree with me, I’ll nuke you! That’s FORCE of the crudest order. If you criticize my management style I’ll throw you in jail! That’s FORCE too, even if it takes the form of a threat.

So how does TRUE POWER reveal itself?

It encourages and inspires. It loves and loves. Note that the words "encourage" and "inspire" have powerful etymologies. Courage derives from corage, to give heart; and inspirare means to “breathe or blow into” (and that’s how we get the word spiritus).

To inspire is to fill others with spirit, semangat. That’s the proper definition of TRUE POWER. Love as a verb, not just a noun.

In short, politics as it is practiced on this planet is largely a grotesque travesty of real (and royal) values. Look what’s happening in America (“Home of the Brave, Land of the Free”) – electoral fraud and skullduggery got Dubya the presidency twice. And when Barack Obama replaced George W. Bush as POTUS, did things significantly change? When business jumps into bed with politics guess who gets thoroughly screwed?

Taxpayers of the world, start governing yourselves! George Harrison once sang about the ones “who gain the world and lose their souls.” Well, do you fancy being governed by the soulless? I bet not! However, no need to rush out into the streets to get water-cannoned, tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, bludgeoned, finger-printed, incarcerated and tortured.

Evolution, not revolution!

Deactivate your reptilian fear programming in the privacy of your own mind! The fewer fears you cling to, the more you’ll be able to empathize, understand, and love. When you mature as conscious souls, you’ll find you actually have no enemies. You’ll outgrow the need to scapegoat, to pin the blame on somebody else. You’ll no longer create demons to appease, obey, or be tormented by - or a Big Brother to protect you from your own shadow self.

For a start, wean yourself off your addiction to that lethal dose of daily news from the mainstream media – you know who controls the programming, don’t you? The stuff is psychically toxic, designed to slowly, imperceptibly poison your sense of well-being like arsenic mixed into the paintwork.

When you finally locate the innermost core of your being, you’ll find your sovereign self regally seated on your own throne. You’ll know the meaning of dignity, integrity, nobility – and, above all, compassion. As each individual attains this blessed state of divine sovereignty, the brutal stupidity of politics will be expelled like so much stinky flatus by the transmutative power of internal, chromosomal, genetic change – the only real (and royal) change there is.




*That TV talkshow host, incidentally, was a smooth-talking young fella named Khairy Jamaluddin, who subsequently married a former Prime Minister's daughter and became an extraordinarily rich shit-stirrer in Umno Youth (the Malaysian version of Mussolini's Blackshirts).

[First published in VIDA! - January 2005 © Antares. Originally posted 16 May 2007, reposted 23 June 2014, 1 May 2016 & 16 April 2020]

RECLAIM YOUR POWER NOW! (reprise)

The pheromonal reek of political fever is in the air. It's as if the entire body politic turns into a bitch and goes into heat once every four or five years, and the streets are overrun with growling, salivating mutts each desperate to lay genetic claim on every fecund female in sight. Apart from the maddening noise at night, mating season amongst canines is really a routine affair and can be fairly entertaining to watch. In the human sphere, unfortunately, these ritual mindfuckfests often have dire consequences.

As polling day approaches, opinions fly around the blogosphere and in coffeeshops everywhere. The only place where meaningful debate is conspicuously absent is, alas, the mainstream media. You will find no alternative views on the pages of the national dailies or on any TV channel (all controlled by the incumbent political party, Barisan Nasional, through its capitalist cronies). But that's pretty obvious to anybody with even half a brain cell to call his or her own.

Last week in a coffeeshop I heard someone say something utterly inane: "In Asian countries only a dictatorship will work. We need a strong leader like Dr M!" This was no daily-paid menial laborer, mind you, this man was obviously well educated and from a comfortable middle-class background. We were discussing the tragic and ruinous legacy of Dr Mahathir and the sorry mess the country is in today, largely owing to his megalomanic ambition to crown himself emperor of an evil empire ruled through fear and greed.

Granted, the carrot-and-stick management method has been effectively utilized since the Year Dot: wave a carrot at the donkey to appeal to its greed; and if it refuses to succumb to temptation, wield the stick, inflict pain and instil fear. This approach to government assumes the intrinsic asininity of the electorate.

Judging from the geopolitical state of affairs on this planet, the bulk of humanity certainly appears to be no more than a beast of burden. The word "sheeple" - though overused to the point of ineffectuality (since a great number of humans who subscribe to Christian doctrine seem perfectly content to be likened to a flock of woolly white sheep guided by a Good Shepherd) - is still particularly apt.

Nevertheless I choose to accept the occasional disappointment of overestimating - rather than risk underestimating the intelligence of others. It is in this spirit that I offer my own insights on the true nature and purpose of power, and why each of us has no real option except to consciously reclaim our power from all existing institutions and external authorities.

The whole idea of needing a strong guiding hand - whether you call it dictatorship or shepherding - is in effect a handing over responsibility to somebody else to decide your destiny and future. Now that's fine if you're a child who hasn't reached voting age and you have to depend on Mummy and Daddy for food and shelter. But sooner or later you're going to outgrow your dependency and claim your adulthood. No harm lending an ear to whatever good advice your parents might have to offer - but the ultimate choice is yours.

NO CRIME NO PUNISHMENT

Take the absurdity of drug laws, for instance. Has declaring various substances illegal effectively curbed "substance abuse"? On the contrary, drug addicts now form a growing subculture worldwide - more than 13 million injecting drug users reported, plus an unknown number of unregistered addicts probably ranging in the tens of millions - enough at any rate to fill the continent of Australia to the brim.

The criminalization of any substance serves one purpose only - and that's to inflate its market price a hundredfold. Declare soap illegal and the cost of a single bar could shoot up to RM50. Any streetwise individual can tell you that almost every consignment of marijuana that hits the streets has passed through police hands. On the global level one can state with a fair amount of certainty that the biggest distribution network for cocaine and heroin is controlled by covert agencies like the CIA, working with powerful triads and underworld syndicates, in many cases laundering the staggering profits through Vatican-owned and Mafia-operated banks. Do I have "concrete proof" of these wild allegations? Of course not. However, use your common sense: the drug trade is massive and involves precisely the sort of cloak-and-dagger operation that covert agencies are designed to carry out.

What would happen if trading in all sorts of substances was decriminalized? Well, prices would fall so dramatically that dealing in drugs will no longer be as lucrative. Within a matter of years the supply will fizzle out - along with the demand. Why? Because drug addicts are for the most part rebellious types for whom the prime attraction is the element of danger associated with drug use. Without the romantic appeal of doing something very naughty a lot of drugs will lose their glamor. I mean, if I tell you there's a chemical in chichak* shit that can get you high, you might try it a couple of times out of curiosity. But picking chichak shit off the table and ingesting it isn't a particularly adventurous notion. You might as well get off on sniffing bicycle seats or women's underwear stolen off clotheslines. These might be habit-forming behaviors, it's true - but ones easily outgrown and forsaken. In any case, they pose as much threat to national security and personal health as nail-biting, nose-picking, and masturbating. Imagine: if wanking was declared a criminal offence, our prisons would be bigger than cities like Bangkok, Jakarta and Tokyo. I'd be blogging from jail for sure!

In effect, external government (as opposed to self-government) rules through fear to enforce the outward appearance of Law and Order. At the same time it forces the spirit of freedom underground where it turns into a variety of antisocial tendencies, mostly destructive. Most people have been brainwashed into believing that without strict laws governing social behavior there would be sheer chaos everywhere. Little do they realize that the chaotic or disruptive behavior is a direct result of law enforcement. Authoritarian rule breeds mindless rebellion on all levels. Autonomy, on the other hand, only exists when an individual or organization has attained sufficient self-awareness and maturity to monitor its own behavior and make constant adjustments towards achieving coherence and integrity. In short, you can govern yourself only when you've become a master navigator and are able to steer yourself safely through life.

The ultimate goal of self-governing autonomous individuals living symbiotically within self-governing communities requires that we constantly strive to reduce the influence, dismantle the machinery and abolish the concepts of external authority and government. Part of the process requires that we replace dysfunctional government with one that functions well enough to choreograph a conscious evolution towards the day when its job is done and it can go on permanent vacation, leaving us to govern ourselves as sentient adults.


_____

* chichak (pronounced "chee-chak") = common Malaysian household lizard

[First posted 16 February 2008]

Dean Johns and Malaysiakini to the rescue!

Bless you, Dean Johns, for saying all the things so many of us would like to say about the stinky stuff that passes for local politics these days - and for saying it so engagingly. And thank you, Malaysiakini, for saving me the trouble of having to come up with something original for today's blogpost!


Umno boys protest too much

Dean Johns
Feb 24, 2010
12:00pm

As an Australian and a critic of the Umno/BN regime, I was both delighted and disturbed by last week's protest by Pemuda Umno Malaysia and others against interference in Malaysia's business by 50 of my country's MPs.

Most immediately delightful, of course, was that the rally outside the Australian High Commission in Kuala Lumpur (left), was just one more demonstration of the deceit and double-dealing behind ridiculous slogans like '1Malaysia' and 'Umno Juara Rakyat'.

While this regime denies most Malaysian citizens their constitutional right to peaceful public assembly, Umno/BN positively supports and sponsors protests against its opponents.

No threats of arrest under the ISA as for the rest of the rakyat, not a water cannon in sight, and the police and FRU on hand not to disrupt the performance but to see that it all goes smoothly.

And this bias is absolutely blatant, as when, following last year's outrageous 'cow's head' protest against a Hindu temple, Home Minister Hishammuddin Hussein defended the culprits with “in this day and age, protests should be accepted in this world as people want their voices to be heard. If we don't give them room to voice their opinions, they have no choice but to protest.”

But then within hours he gave the lie to this self-serving liberal sentiment by condoning the arrest of a handful of people holding a peaceful candle-light vigil in protest against the government (right) And in a similarly disgraceful display of the same double standard, he initially downplayed a rash of attacks on churches by firebrands opposed to the use of the word 'Allah' by Christians, by suggesting that the culprits were just a bunch of naughty boys.

Naughty boys, juvenile delinquents, mat rempit, whatever, it's patently and painfully evident that protest is only permissable as long as they're Umno/BN boys, as in the recent rally against us nosey Australians.

No objection

Not that I have the slightest objection to the protest itself. I'm as avid a fan and supporter of peaceful public protest as you could get. And in this case I'm especially all for it, as any protest against me or my countrymen by the likes of Khairy Jamaluddin and his boys I take as the greatest compliment.

As I said up front, I'm delighted to excite the enmity of anyone so immoral, misguided or moronic as to support a regime as mendacious, malevolent and outright un-Malaysian as Umno/BN.

What I find disturbing is what might be secretly motivating some of these lads as well as the men behind them. In short, not to beat around the bush here, I find myself wondering how many of these people are gay, or at least trying to hide their fears that they may be.

Lest this seem to some an outrageous accusation, let me hasten to state that it's not an accusation at all. Living as I do in Sydney, one of the most openly-gay cities on the planet, I'm accustomed to celebrating sexual diversity, not condemning it. So 'gay' to me is no more or less a label to be ashamed of than 'male' or 'female' might be.

In fact, as hopelessly heterosexual as I am, I've often wished I was at least bisexual so I could, as Woody Allen once famously remarked, “have twice the chance of a date on Saturday nights”.

But no luck, I'm afraid. The fact is, however, that as many as ten per cent of adult humans are either bi or gay, though a great many either deny or pretend they're not, especially in countries like Malaysia where it's against the law.

The uncomfortable truth about homophobia, however, and an obsession with practices like sodomy or buggery as evidenced by the repeated charges against Anwar and the banners carried by some of the Umno boys in the recent anti-Australia protest, is that it's often a cover for covert homosexuality.

Overly macho

So is coming on mucho too macho. Like wearing wira-style headbands as so many Umno Youth and their pals did outside the Australian High Commission that they looked more like Village People contingent in a gay-pride march than serious political protestors.

As for Khairy (left) himself, though doubtless he doesn't have a gay bone in his body, he's always seemed to me to smack more of Oxford Street Sydney than of his alma mater, Oxford University.

And what about those signs, guys, all printed-up nicely in matching type-faces? A bit too designer-looking to come across as convincingly butch, don't you think?

Which brings us to some highly dubious statements about the protest. Reading Rocky Attan's blog, as I do religiously these days now he's back editing the Malay Male – oops, Mail – and finally come out of the closet as a chum of Umno/BN, I was amazed to see him openly embracing the cause.

In a posting titled 'We walked and waltzed, Australia...Mind Your Own Business,' he named a handful of fellow bloggers and writers who accompanied him on the protest, threw in a few Chinese, Indians and a dog, then proceeded to quote himself in an interview he gave.

He wrote: “Basically I said, the bloggers are not here to support BN, Perkasa or other political entities, we are here because we want to convey a message to the Australian people that what their lawmakers are asking us to do is to compromise the integrity of our courts and the rule of law.”

Integrity of our courts? Rule of law? Who did think he was kidding? But there was more: “We are a sovereign nation just like Australia is. We are not barbarians. We don't kill the native people of this country and we don't murder foreigners and get away with it.”

Official custody

Huh? What about rape of the Orang Asli and the Penan? And the killing of hundreds of 'suspects' in official custody? And as for not murdering foreigners, does the name Altantuya Shaariibuu ring a bell?

Still, nothing daunted, he continued: “I was not there to support Anwar Ibrahim or Saiful Bukhary. I was there to express my disgust at the Australian MPs who have asked us to stop our process of justice and democracy.”


Justice and democracy my ass, pardon the expression. But never mind. The truth always prevails in the end. And the end is hastened when the guilty parties publicly parade their true colours by protesting too much.

As Khairy and his boys did once again last week, and as Umno/BN big-boys Nazri Abdul Aziz, Abdul Gani Petail, Abdul Hamid Mohamed and Jamaluddin Jarjis are unwisely planning to do this today in Washington DC.

Where Malaysia is headed (Part 8)

Reclaiming your sovereign power as an individual is the greatest gift you can offer your nation and your planet. Only when you cease being a mere statistic and become whole and real (or royal) as a person do you begin to add value to your community.

Every ignoble and discordant act you might possibly commit that classifies you as less than an exemplary citizen is prompted by either fear or greed or both.

Fear of the stick and greed for the carrot is how you and your ancestors have been subject to external control for countless generations. This time-tested management approach can only work if your level of consciousness is approximately that of a beast of burden. It has little or no effect on those who can think independently and originally.

How, you may ask, does one achieve independence and originality of thought after decades of conditioning via our parents, our schools and universities - indeed, our entire cultural matrix which serves to format our minds so we can't help but identify with a specific race, religion, football club or political party?

KNOW THYSELF: this admonition inscribed in gold on the portico of the Apollo Temple at Delphi has existed for perhaps 25 centuries and has been variously attributed to Pythagoras (right), Socrates, Solon and Heraclitus. Some authorities say the inscription ought to read: "Know Thyself - and thou shalt know all the mysteries of the gods and of the universe."

In any case, Gnothi Seauton or Know Thyself is central to the teachings of the Hermetic philosophers whose tutelar spirit, Hermes Trismegistos, was revered as the incarnation of Thoth, Egyptian god of scribes, and Hermes, messenger of the Olympian pantheon. Thoth and Hermes form the axis of the Western esoteric tradition and the mystery schools they established have much in common with the Eastern esoteric schools initiated by Gautama Buddha, Patanjali and, later, Padmasambhava.

They essentially teach that the path to liberation is very narrow and admits only awakened individuals, not the sleeping masses. What this implies is that you can only arrive at a true understanding of the divine by becoming a fully conscious human - in other words, a Buddha.

You can't do it by subscribing to a religious doctrine or prepackaged belief system - no matter how devout or pious you appear to be to others - or believe yourself to be. Being generally law-abiding, driving on the "correct" side of the road, and strictly adhering to a set of prescribed observances doesn't make you a fully conscious human being.

Whether you're a church-going Christian, sutra-chanting Buddhist, bhajan-singing Hindu or Koran-reciting Muslim, you're unlikely to break free of your cultural and social formatting unless you turn your attention inwards, towards your own core being where you can reconnect with your Essential Self - which is what makes you unique as well as universal as an incarnate soul.

In the 13th century the famous Sufi poet, Mowlana Jalaluddin Rumi (left), kept these esoteric teachings alive in his works, effectively bridging the Eastern and Western mystery traditions. And yet, Rumi is more popular in the West than in the Middle East or Malaysia where Islam predominates. Why?

Most orthodox religions frown on and often vigorously persecute the mystical cults within their midst. Public behavior can be monitored and regulated by external authority but not private investigations of the numinous and the transcendental.

That's why these ancient practices are branded as "deviant" and those caught are subject to harsh punishment - the way "heretics" were severely tortured before being burnt alive at the stake by the Spanish Inquisition (which, incredibly, lasted from 1478-1834). It's revealing that in this day and age even harmless, peaceable cults like Ayah Pin's Sky Kingdom in Terengganu or Li Hongzhi's Falun Gong in China have been viciously attacked by governments insecure about the power they exert over people's private beliefs.

Ayah Pin and the Sky Kingdom he anchored for a while in Terengganu

But how relevant are these mystical notions in the frenzied hurly-burly of the post-industrial age?

For those who feel trapped in the 3D Matrix of endless production and consumption, the way out is really the way in. It's more a process of unlearning old programs rather than learning new techniques or disciplines. Each program you manage to manually override, bypass or uninstall is one impediment less to your own enlightenment and liberation from the soul-destroying, will-sapping treadmill of business-as-usual.


Now that ancient esoteric wisdom and cutting-edge science appear to be converging, we have the benefit of a whole new range of conceptual tools in the form of more precise terminologies with which to remodel our perceptions of reality.

Terence McKenna ranks among the most eloquent of spokesmen for the emerging vision of a world radically transformed by the alchemical union of science and mysticism. Described as a "writer, philosopher, psychonaut and ethnobotanist" by Wikipedia, McKenna dedicated his life to researching plant-based entheogens, sensory and neurological exciters like psilocybin and ayahuasca - and achieved a consummate understanding of the intimate links between art and shamanism.

Allow me to quote at length from Terence McKenna as he discusses his classic work, The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History: 


"...what we need is a new myth, what we need is a new true story that tells us where we're going in the universe and that true story is that the ego is a product of pathology, and when psilocybin is regularly part of the human experience the ego is suppressed and the suppression of the ego means the defeat of the dominators, the materialists, the product peddlers. Psychedelics return us to the inner worth of the self, to the importance of the feeling of immediate experience - and nobody can sell that to you and nobody can buy it from you, so the dominator culture is not interested in the felt presence of immediate experience, but that's what holds the community together.


And as we break out of the silly myths of science and the infantile obsessions of the marketplace, what we discover through the psychedelic experience is that in the body, IN THE BODY, there are Niagaras of beauty, alien beauty, alien dimensions that are part of the self, the richest part of life. I think of going to the grave without having a psychedelic experience like going to the grave without ever having sex. It means that you never figured out what it is all about. The mystery is in the body and the way the body works itself into nature. What the Archaic Revival means is shamanism, ecstasy, orgiastic sexuality, and the defeat of the three enemies of the people. And the three enemies of the people are hegemony, monogamy and monotony!

And if you get them on the run you have the dominators sweating, folks, because that means you're getting it all reconnected, and getting it all reconnected means putting aside the idea of separateness and self-definition through thing-fetish. Getting it all connected means tapping into the Gaian mind, and the Gaian mind is what we're calling the psychedelic experience. It's an experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet. And without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies. But with that experience the compass of the self can be set, and that's the idea; figuring out how to reset the compass of the self through community, through ecstatic dance, through psychedelics, sexuality, intelligence, INTELLIGENCE. This is what we have to have to make the forward escape into hyperspace.

Now you may be wondering what all this trippy stuff has got to do with the way ahead for Malaysia...

Well, the universe is an interconnected, interdependent network of dynamic interactions. Our identities are not at all static. They evolve as we mature. Even as we attempt to define ourselves as individuals, we are being defined - or confined - by our immediate environment, our familial and societal ties, our national ideologies, and everchanging geopolitical scenarios.

Terence McKenna's personal obsession with "escape into hyperspace" is just his way of investigating possible escape routes from the entropic 3D Matrix.



McKenna's switched-on way of thinking illustrates the unpredictable non-linearity of evolutionary solutions. Our so-called future may resemble nothing of our so-called past - indeed, it rarely ever does!

Many of us are in the habit of driving towards the future while gazing into the rearview mirror of the past. This might explain why humans rarely notice until it's way too late the 20-wheeler truck coming straight at them from the opposite direction. Isn't that reason enough to start acquiring 360-degree peripheral vision?

Where Malaysia is headed (Part 9)