6 Comments
Nov 18, 2023Liked by laughlyn (johan eddebo)

"This is arguably especially the case when we’re meting out violence in a more or less conscious defense of that very social order, of the myths, narratives, roles and relations that characterize our trauma, yet which we have submitted to and depend upon."

This also applies to religious myths, equally damning as the current myths that keep people asleep believing in an unknown.

“Belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence.” - Robert Anton Wilson

Expand full comment
author

Yet belief is indispensible for even asserting anything. There's no proposition of any sort that can even be asserted without one tacitly believing in the basic certitudes of immediate knowledge.

The step from these basics into complex doctrines is another matter, and much depends on the character and epistemology of these doctrines. The theoretical predictions of science make one sort of truth claim, the precepts of logic another one, and the principles of a school or art or of a certain craft or trade yet another.

All can be approached dogmatically in the negative sense - yet what does dogma mean? That's another discussion of some complexity. Even the Catholic Church includes many levels of dogma proper, several of which are supposed to be open for discussion, deliberation and reflection.

I think you would be interested in Feyerabend's work if you haven't already come across it. Three Dialogues on Knowledge is great, as is Science in a Free Society.

Expand full comment

"Yet belief is indispensable for even asserting anything."

Including the belief there is nothing to believe in. For example : I've always been amazed at how much time some atheists spend thinking and talking about God who they claim does not exist.

Thanks for the article. The poem made my heart ache. In a good way and a sad way.

Expand full comment

Yet there is truth. It exists. We can believe in truth but first we have to discern how to identify it. That can easily take a lifetime and still never result in the truth. Ah...

Expand full comment

Thanks for making this clear:

“With this in mind, what we call fascism is a deep-seated and ubiquitous tendency within the social order of modern civilization. It’s in the source code; it’s in the DNA of our society and its constituent roles and relations of production. It’s in the stories we tell to make sense of ourselves and the world. It’s in our very identities. Yeah, what’s probably most important of all, it’s an essential part of the authority structure to which we as semi-infantilized denizens of industrial society are attached and submit to. Yet this part is hidden in plain sight. The deeper structural facts do not align with the more palatable stories we like to tell ourselves and our children, no matter how important those fundamental facts happen to be.”

Expand full comment

https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-chris-hedges-report-with-reporter#details

Inverted Totalitarianism?

Come on, Israel deploys Nazi tactics, for sure, and now, EuroTrashLandia, instead of turning Bavaria into Isra-Hell, the Zionist Fascists want EuroTrashLandia to take Palestinians?

Is this just beyond dystopia? Of course. The plan is grenade the world with the sickness of Goebbels and Eddie Bernays and the other fucked up Mad Men and Mad Women.

In a jointly penned opinion… two Israeli Members of Knesset recently urged Western nations to welcome Palestinian refugees from Gaza amid the Israel-Hamas war…

’Hamas’s unprovoked terrorist attack on Oct. 7 has endangered not only Israel but the more than two million people who live in the Gaza Strip. Although Hamas won 2006 elections in Gaza and took control of the area from the Palestinian Authority the following year, the group has said that it bears no responsibility for the people living there,’ the two lawmakers wrote…

Danon and Ben-Barak stressed that Europe has a long tradition of helping migrants fleeing from conflict zones such as former Yugoslavia and Ukraine.

‘Europe has a long history of assisting refugees fleeing conflicts. The wars in the former Yugoslavia displaced millions, most of them from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Germany, Austria and Sweden accepted large numbers. When the Kosovo war erupted, hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Albanians fled to neighboring Albania and the country now called North Macedonia.’

Expand full comment