1. ‘MONEY’ AS A FICTION. ALL MONEY IS DEBT.
All Bank of England notes have printed on them “I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of …”. With or without words like these, all bank notes in all capitalist currencies are ‘promissory notes’ or IOU’s (from the English ‘I Owe You’). A promissory note is essentially a promise. To pay what? To pay a debt. In other words all money is created as debt - borrowed into existence - and all monetary transactions are exchanges of debt. Yet since all debt carries interest the total of all debt cannot possibly be paid by all the money in circulation.
2. ‘NATIONAL DEBTS’ AS A FICTION. GOVERNMENTS COULD ISSUE MONEY DIRECTLY.
National Debts would not exist did not governments rely on taxation and on loans from private banks and financial markets to finance their expenditure, but instead affirmed their own sovereign right to issue their own interest-free money and inject it directly into the real economy. Forfeiting this sovereign right means that the entire money supply of nations exists in the form of debt to the private banking sector. Were all that debt to be repaid, there would be no ‘money’ in circulation in the economy at all, since - as explained above - money itself does not exist except as debt.
The Government should create, issue, and circulate all the currency and credits needed to satisfy the spending power of the Government and the buying power of consumers. By the adoption of these principles, the taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest. Money will cease to be master and become the servant of humanity. – Abraham Lincoln
Greece and countless nations all over the world could solve their national debt problems at a stroke by following Lincoln’s advice. Yet no mention is ever made of this solution in ‘democratic’ parliaments or media, so dangerous is it to the international bankers. Outraged at the very idea of money not being created as debt to them with interest on it, they used all the power they could muster to bring an end to Lincoln’s vision and instead turned America into a United States Corporation ruled by banking creditors. The biggest ‘coup’ of these creditor was the establishment in 1913 of the so-called ‘Federal Reserve Bank’ - itself nothing but a cartel of the biggest private banks which made U.S. governments dependent on borrowing from those banks for every Dollar issued. When President J.F. Kennedy was just on the verge of revoking the powers of the Federal Reserve he was assassinated.
History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling the money and its issuance. – James Madison
It is well enough that the people of this nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning. – Henry Ford
3. BANK ‘LOANS’ AS A FICTION. IN FACT THEY ARE FRAUDULENT AND UNLAWFUL.
Money is created as debt by private banks. But it is created in a way that breaks all the principles of Contract Law. A simple application for a loan is actually a ‘cheque’ for a certain amount of money granted to a bank by the borrower. Why? Because the signature on it allows the bank to create a fictional electronic ‘deposit’ of that sum of money in the borrower’s account - just by keying in the numbers on a computer. Yet besides being purely electronic money this money is fictitious also because it did not exist until the borrower applied for the loan. Putting your signature to a loan application without being told this, without full disclosure of the fact you yourself have signed the money you are borrowing into existence - is a breach of ‘Full Disclosure’ – one of the basic principles of Contract Law. It is also a breach of the principle of ‘Equal Consideration’ – since the banks themselves are offering no ‘consideration’ of their own – nothing of intrinsic value - to the loan contract (for example gold or capital reserves). Finally, since all credits issued by banks are signed into existence by the borrower, and since these loans or credits count as assets on the bank’s account (understandable – since just as ‘money is debt’ so also ‘debt is money’) the borrower has been defrauded by a four-step ‘scam’.
1. The borrower effectively gives an amount of money to a bank by applying to borrow it – effectively signing that money into existence.
2. The bank then demands that the borrower give the bank the same amount of money once again as ‘repayment’.
3. The bank asks for even more money from the borrower in the form of interest on the loan.
4. The bank makes huge amounts money by selling its loans to other banks and the financial markets. In fact people have a right to claim back this money made from loans to them.
Basically however, no one has any legal or ethical responsibility to pay back a bank loan - since the loan is a fraudulent contract. It is fraudulent not only for the reasons given above but also because in reality THERE IS NO CONTRACT. A joint contract requires the signature of two parties. But where is the signature from the bank that would make the loan a mutual ‘contract’? The bank can’t sign such a contract because it only exists as a fictitious legal ‘person’ – a corporation, and not a real person who can be held responsible for their side of the contract. It might be argued that a bank loan is a legal form of unilateral contract established by one party (the borrower) accepting a contractual offer from the other (the lender). This is highly questionable however given that the loan ‘offer’ is not for money that actually exists as ‘Consideration’ before the lender accepts that offer. All that is ‘offered’ then is a so-called ‘financial service’ but one lacking in the Full Disclosure necessary to regard it as a lawful contract. Finally, even the idea of payable ‘interest’ on a loan is essentially a fiction. Thus if an economy consisted of ten friends of yours to whom you loaned £100.00 each with 5% interest there would be a total of £1000.00 in circulation – not enough for all your friends to pay this back plus the interest. In other words, there is not – in principle – any possibility of paying of the Interest on the ‘sum of all ‘Principal’ loan amounts.
‘THE LAW’ AS A FICTION. MOST LAWS ARE UNLAWFUL.
Nobody is bound to follow the ‘legal’ statutes or ‘laws’ of any state. The only true ‘law’ is not Statutory Law but simple Common Law, otherwise known as ‘The Law-of-the-Land’. Common Law is simply ‘common sense’ law – meaning that you are free to do what you want unless it infringes on the life, liberty, property, freedom of movement or rights of another person. Common Law does not grant states and governments any lawful right to demand that you pay them any form of taxes, license fees, that you must have a license to drive or a passport to travel, that you must ‘register’ a business, car or property, birth or marriage etc.etc. In fact most Statutory laws are an unlawful infringement on your lawful rights under Common Law. Where they do so THE LAW IS UNLAWFUL. Indeed most Statutory ‘laws’, created in the form of so-called ‘legal’ statutes are infringements of LAWFUL rights under Common Law. Since they developed out of Common Law however, they stand UNDER Common Law and are not above it. If a judge asks you if you ‘understand’ however, he or she is asking you to place your Common Law rights in a position that stands under Statutory Law – and therefore to forego those Common Law rights. In order for the world’s first capitalist state – Britain - to make Statutory Law higher than Common Law – a language was based on’ The Law-of-Waters’ or ‘maritime’ law rather than The Law-of-the-LAND. That is why a bank is called a ‘bank’ – which means one side of a river or ‘waterway’. That why in English one speaks of monetary ‘currencies’ – a word deriving from ‘currents’ of water. It is also why in England someone accused in court of an offence under Statutory Law has to stand in an area still called ‘the dock’ - the place in a harbour where ships ‘dock’. That is also why so many English words still end with the very word ‘ship’ – for example ‘ownership’, ‘citizenship’, ‘worship’, ‘your Worship’ (‘Warship’), ‘Lordship’, ‘Ladyship’ etc. The Law-of-Waters is also the basis of all words ending in ‘port’ – for example ‘transport’, ‘passport’, ‘export’, ‘import’. Such words are all to do with commercial maritime trade and law, stemming from a time when it was still true that ‘Britannia rules the waves’ and Britain was the greatest maritime trading empire.
4. ‘SOCIETY’ AS A FICTION. WHAT EXISTS ARE ‘SOCIETIES’ OR ‘CORPORATIONS’.
There is another important reason why nobody is bound to follow the Statutes of any ‘state’, ‘nation’ or ‘parliament’. That is because they are all societies. Societies create statutes which are rules or ‘laws’ to be followed by members of that society. But societies need to be voluntarily joined. If you have NOT joined a particular society – or have resigned from that society – then you are no longer a member of that society – and no longer need to follow its rules or statutes. HER MAJESTY QUEEN ELIZABETH II is a corporation. What is called ‘the United Kingdom’ is not a country or nation. It is a corporate society or ‘corporation’. Its true name is THE UNITED KINGDOM CORPORATION – a commercial society in the form of a Limited Company with a listed set of directors. ‘MEMBERS of PARLIAMENT’ is also the registered name of a corporation. The Treasury, the Police Force – you name it – these institutions of the ‘nation’ or ‘state’ are not what their name suggests, simply national or state institutions. They are societies in the form of registered corporations. Yet again, none of the ‘laws’ created by a corporate society applies to you unless you have joined it – and will no longer apply to you if you have resigned your membership.
“The law can give rise to a FICTION, but a fiction cannot give rise to a law. Consequently a legal fiction called THE GOVERNMENT has no power to make LAW. It is, in point of fact, BOUND BY [COMMON] LAW - like everyone else, and including all other legal fictions. PARLIAMENT is another legal fiction entity. Statutes created by Parliament are not, therefore, the LAW. They are 'legislated rules for a society' and ONLY APPLICABLE TO MEMBERS OF THAT SOCIETY. Join a different society, and you would be bound by a different set of rules. (If this were not the case it would be impossible to become, for example, a Freemason and be bound by the rules of Freemasonry). Statutes are nothing more than the ‘Company Policy’ of THE UNITED KINGDOM CORPORATION, or THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA CORPORATION, etc. … A Society is, in essence, nothing more than a grouping of like-minded souls since it is defined as a number of people joined by mutual consent to deliberate, determine and act for a common goal. A society makes its own rules, and its members are duty-bound to follow them. Different societies can exist, having their own unique set of rules. One way of 'choking' the action of a court de facto is to claim membership of a society that only exists in Common Law jurisdiction.” Mary Elizabeth Croft
REGISTERED ‘NAMES’ AS A FICTION. THEY REPRESENT A FICTITIOUS LEGAL ‘PERSONS’.
Unfortunately for most of us however, our parents applied to join our national corporations by registering our birth. Registering a birth in the U.K. turns the NAME - as it is spelled partly or wholly in CAPITAL LETTERS - into a fictitious legal entity or ‘person’, and making this ‘person’ a member of THE UNITED KINGDOM CORPORATION. Registration transfers ownership of something. A Birth Certificate treats the baby as the cargo of a ship that has just ‘berthed’ – ownership of which is thereby transferred to THE UNITED KINGDOM CORPORATION. That is why if you go into a Courtroom, even as a mature adult, you are known as a ‘Ward of Court’ – a ‘ward’ meaning a helpless or imbecilic child that has to be represented (literally ‘re-presented’ in Court) by a legal ‘warden’ in the form of a solicitor, barrister or ‘attorney’. Since these are all members of The Law Society the only laws they need to respect are not Common or ‘common sense’ law but the laws of that society. Thankfully, when one of your parents signed your Birth Certificate they weren’t told this truth – another breach of the principle of Full Disclosure that is part of Contract Law. But be aware that when you receive any official document in which your name is CAPITALISED and begins with MR or MS it is not you as a real person that is being addressed, but the fictive legal ‘person’ created and represented by that NAME.
“Registration” comes from Latin “rex, regis” etc. meaning regal. So think about what occurs to whatever you ‘register’ – you hand legal title over to the Crown. When you register anything with the public, it releases legal title to the government corporation and leaves you with only equitable title – the right to use, not own, and for that use you will pay a ‘use’ tax which is every tax, be it income, sin, sales, property, etc. as opposed to lawful taxes – excise and impost. So that it doesn’t appear that the government now owns the property which you have registered they put it in a name which so much resembles your own that you won’t suspect it, however, the NAME is owned by the government. If you choose rather to record your legal title to your property with the public, you maintain your status as Title Owner. This is one of the most important things you can ever learn for the sake of your commercial affairs. The best example of the effects of registration is the birth certificate. A bankrupt entity – city, state/province, country – cannot operate in commerce. So how do they manage? Since USA/CA have been bankrupt for decades, having no substance such as gold and silver to back it, the only asset it has are men and women and our labour. We are the collateral for the interest on the loan of the World Bank. Each of us is registered, via the application for a birth certificate. The Treasury issues a bond on the birth certificate and the bond is sold at a securities exchange and bought by the FRB/BoC, which then uses it as collateral to issue bank notes. The bond is held in trust for the Feds at the Depository Trust Corporation. We are the surety on said bonds .. The USG/CAG, in order to provide necessary goods and services, created a commercial bond (promissory note), by pledging the property, labour, life and body of its citizens, as payment for the debt (bankruptcy). This commercial bond made chattel (property) out of us all. We became nothing more than ‘human resources’ and collateral for the debt. This was without our knowledge and/or our consent, via the filing (‘registration’) of our birth certificates.” Mary Elizabeth Croft
The process of appropriating the common wealth of the people began in England during the Fire of London, when an Act of Parliament (still in force) was passed declaring all the people dead and transferring their property to the Crown – unless they showed up in the flesh and claimed this property back. Thus it came to be that capital letters are used on birth certificates – as they are on gravestones – thus effectively turning the registration of a birth into a certificate of legal ‘death’ which makes the child into property of the Crown (regis)
5. LEGAL ‘ORDERS’ AS A FICTION. NO ONE CAN ORDER YOU TO DO ANYTHING!
Statutory Law is based on Commerce and Commercial Law (now called the UCC or Uniform Commercial Code). This is important, because it means that when any state bureaucrat ‘orders’ you to do something what they are really doing is presenting you with a commercial order for a service or item. There is no difference in Law between ‘ordering’ someone to show a license and ‘ordering’ an item from a menu or sales catalogue. Like a seller therefore, you yourself can therefore decline to accept the order or else place a charge on any Court or policeman for the order they give you. You can also argue that all Statutory laws under which they assume they can arrest and order you to do something require your assent to be valid, and ask for proof of this assent. Last but not least, you can ask a policeman to recall their oath – which is an oath to uphold Common Law. Therefore if they or anyone else such as a bailiff take any property of yours without your permission, use any form of force on your body or infringe your liberty in any way (for example by seizing you bodily, restricting your freedom of movement or holding you in custody) they are themselves in breach of the very Law they have sworn on oath to uphold – The Law-of-the-Land. Any seizure of property, imprisonment or enforced compensation can only be enforced through a breach of this law - Common Law – a breach which must first be established by any real person with a Common Law grievance against you taking evidence that is more than hearsay or suspicion to a Common Law jury. A Corporation of any sort, being a fictional legal entity or ‘person’ rather than a real flesh and blood person, cannot however make any claims or pursue any ‘orders’ against you under Common Law, just as it cannot enter into lawful contracts with you - which require the signature of real persons as joint parties to the contract.
6. ‘EMPLOYMENT’ AS A FICTION. EMPLOYMENT IS WAGE-SLAVERY
“A society in which people exist for the sake of companies is a society enslaved.”
“The hurdy gurdy grinder's monkey exists for the sake of the organ grinder… Workers are [there] to fulfill companies' needs rather than vice versa.”
John Kozy
Why is employment a fiction? First of all, the very word ‘employment’ is a misnomer. Billions of workers, all over the globe are paid to do work which does not ‘employ’ their unique individual capacities or creative potentials as human beings. Secondly, ‘employment’ is not the same as work – understood as free, creative and productive activity. It is the extraction of corporate profit from workers - workers who are forced to sell their labour time and labour to corporations (perhaps prostitute would be a better word) simply because they do not themselves own the land, building, technical and industrial equipment and other forms of ‘capital’ that make up the ‘means of production’ – for that is the property of the few, the capitalist class – obtained by exploiting other workers. Besides not owning the means of production however, the employed worker does not even own the products of their very own labour - physical or intellectual - which automatically become the property of their employers - the capitalist class. Then again workers must actually pay to become indentured slaves to those corporations – not just through taxes, but even through having to directly pay back the cost of their education or training (not to mention having to allow corporations or pension funds to speculate with their contributions on the financial markets). “Students are being asked to pay for the privilege of becoming serfs.” John Kozy. Finally, since a large proportion of jobs are now temporary or part-time, employment no longer means having a guaranteed or ‘safe’ income, or even one that pays a living wage – and given the fact that even the best and most experienced or capable workers can at any time lose their jobs if their companies cannot meet their debts - we already live in a ‘post-employment’ economy, one in which individuals must compete with hundreds or even thousands of others just to become exploitable and expendable serfs. The absurd irony of so-called ‘employment’ in capitalist economies was sarcastically laid bare by Eimar O’Duffy in his book Asses in Clover:
“Suppose a party of people were wrecked on a desert island, what do you think would be the first thing they’d do? Obviously they would look around for a man with money to employ them in gathering fruit. If there were no capitalist among them, or if he didn’t see his way to make a profit out of the business, they would all remain unemployed and starve to death, no matter how fertile the island might be … If therefore we want to have plenty of employment, we must give every possible incentive to entrepreneurs – encouraging them to get as much of our money from us as they can, so that they can spend it on employing us to make more for them.”
What is all this employment really needed for? To sustain what is called economic ‘growth’ – a necessity for ever-increasing interest on corporate and national debt to be paid off – ‘growth’ attained at the expense of diminishing natural resources and their capacity for re-growing themselves.
7. ‘DEMOCRACY’ AS A FICTION. THERE IS ONLY ‘DEBTOCRACY’.
The Wikipedia entry for ‘democracy’ states correctly that the word ‘democracy’ “comes from the Greek word δημοκρατία (dēmokratía) ‘rule of the people’, which was coined from δῆμος (dēmos) "people" and κράτος (kratos) "power", in the middle of the 5th-4th century BC to denote the political systems then existing in some Greek city-states, notably Athens.” What is often forgotten however is that the only ‘citizens’ eligible to speak and vote in the assembly, which set the laws of the city state “were all-male, born from parents who were born in Athens, and excluded women, slaves, foreigners (μέτοικοι /metoikoi) and males under 20 years old.” As a result, of the estimated 200,000 to 400,000 inhabitants of Athens there were only between 30,000 to 60,000 ‘citizens’. So even though Greek ‘democracy’ did indeed offer a model for modern liberal parliamentary ‘democracy’, it did so also in a highly questionable way – being, like Roman ‘democracy’, a form of purely political democracy based on economic slavery and ultimately influenced most by those with wealth. We see the ‘great’ heritage of ‘democracy’ still today – in which, no matter how many more people are counted as ‘citizens’, ‘democracies’ are still countries ruled by the few and by the wealthiest.
So whilst the root meaning of the Greek word ‘democracy’ is indeed ‘people power’, what sort of ‘democracy’ is it in which millions of dollars of campaign funding from bankers and big corporations are required simply to seek to stand for election as a U.S. President, State Governor or even as Mayor? It is electoral ‘Democracy’ for the ‘elect’ few – as in Athens and Rome. Similarly what sort of ‘democracy’ is it in which the organisations that wield most power on governments and that also effect most people’s lives most immediately and directly – namely the corporations that employ them – are entirely undemocratic if not totally autocratic in nature? Only a tiny number of corporate board members have the power to elect a CEO or managing director. Today’s wage-slaves – workers and middle management – certainly have no say and no vote whatsoever. Modern political democracy is therefore true to its roots - being based on a total lack of economic democracy. Along with this lack of economic democracy goes almost total corporate control of all sources of information in the form of press and broadcast media. Thus even to speak of a ‘free press’ or ‘neutral’ TV channels in today’s ‘liberal democracies’ is nothing but a bad joke. ‘Freedom’ means not offending your corporate owner, advertisers or sponsors. ‘Neutrality’ means reducing political reporting and debate to the most superficial and banal level possible – and shaped by a constant flow of disinformation pumped out by the media. What counts as reporting, news and debate is determined as much by what is not reported, does not make the news - and is not questioned or debated - as by what is. And if what could be but is not reported as ‘news’ or supplied as information vastly exceeds what is reported – thus potentially offering a no less vast choice of news items to air or print - why is it that almost all news channels and newspapers nevertheless offer the same if not near identical fare of lead ‘stories’? Power over media, political parties and ‘elected’ politicians alike by wholly undemocratic corporations and their lobbyists make ‘democracy’ a total fiction. When for example, was the last time the people were ever given the right to vote whether or not to go to war for example – and that without being ‘primed’ to vote ‘yes’ by corporate, political and military disinformation? And in what ‘democratic’ country can employees elect, select, hire or fire those who (mis-)manage the enterprises and corporations that employ them – let alone or exert a majority vote over boardroom decisions that may ruin their lives? For political democracy to be possible at all it must be based on economic democracy and on direct democracy – not on voting for political ‘representatives’ whose principal loyalty is not to the people who voted for them but to their corporate backers, to monarchs or to the fictions of ‘democratic’ constitutions and ‘representative’ parliaments or assemblies – all of which are in turn ultimately ruled by powerful groups of creditors, ‘the 1%’ who hold the purse strings. Democracy is ‘Debtocracy’.
8. ‘EDUCATION’ AS A FICTION. THE MANUFACTURE OF IGNORANCE.
“The integrated core [of education] concerns itself with the universal experiences that are
common to all people, with those shared activities without which human relationships are diminished and the quality of life reduced.” – Ernest L. Boyer
‘Education’ today, whether in the form of public or private schools, colleges and universities, has gradually become nothing more than a set of graded institutions competing in a national and international marketplace to ‘produce’ the best corporate servants - whether in the form of low, middle or upper level wage-slaves or an elite class of politicians. At the same time they provide a necessary day-time depository or parking place for the children of working families i.e. existing wage-slaves and corporate servants. In this process the distinction between teaching what the Greeks called techne (technical skills) and episteme (knowledge) has dissolved. The result is what Ivan Illich called institutional counter-productivity – with many schools no longer able to guarantee even the most elementary skills (spelling or mental arithmetic for example) necessary for ‘further education’ and eventual ‘employment’ as a corporate servant. For such necessary skills include not only accurate literacy and numeracy (something which not even many teachers possess) but also the capacity for independent questioning, critical thinking and articulate communication in speech and writing.
The situation has reached such a point of absurdity that one single technical skill supersedes all other forms of knowledge and learning – the skill of answering anticipated examination questions without needing to possess any true understanding of either the question or the answer. Thus in the realm of English literature, students are mechanically prepared to answer anticipated questions on one single scene of one single play of Shakespeare – yet without any requirement to have either fully read that play – yet alone deeply understood its meaning in a feeling way. The result is that in America more than two thirds of the human products of the educational production line can only read prose writing (even in the form of a newspaper article) at a low or sub-average level. And just as 50% of Americans live below the poverty line, so have 50% of the population never read a single book. Indeed in American colleges, students can obtain ‘credits’ for their degrees from a vast menu of courses on such subjects as ‘The History of American Football’ - yet without knowing anything of the history of their own country, let alone that of the world and other cultures.
“In philosophy, a single naïve question oftentimes suffices for the whole system to collapse.”
Nicolas Gomez-Davila
Science teaching – now promoted more than ever before - has become a form of pure indoctrination which by-passes all critical thinking through a vast web of circular definitions which rule out what appear as ‘naïve’ and yet basic philosophical questions. Thus ‘electricity’ is defined in terms of its relation to ‘magnetism’ and ‘energy’ in terms of its relation to ‘matter’ – and vice versa. No one even thinks of asking questions such as ‘What is ‘matter’ or ‘energy’?’ or ‘What is an ‘electron’ or ‘photon’? – for the answers to such basic questions are all already foreclosed by circular definition, i.e. by defining such unquestioned scientific terms only in terms of other such terms and only within the framework of the unquestioned terminological jargons they constitute.
It used to be thought that students in ex-Communist countries such as Russia were ‘indoctrinated’ by their educational institutions. In fact it was only in these countries that all students (and not just those in elite schools) achieved a real education i.e. one including not only technical skills but broad areas of knowledge – including world history, philosophy and logic, not to mention foreign cultures and languages – all of which were compulsory ‘subjects’ and not mere ‘options’ for the marginal few. Today, the ever-increasing competitive pressures arising from the drive towards the commercialisation and privatisation of education has resulted in ‘curricula’ which turn ‘education’ as such into a fiction – and its institutions into veritable factories of ignorance. For nothing that is taught needs any longer to have any innate interest or value to the student, any innate cultural or spiritual value, any relation to the actual life world and life experience of the student – let alone educate them in the history and nature of the larger world and culture they will enter as adults. Education removes student from the real world around them in order indoctrinate them in the fictitious knowledge and fictitious values that rule that world – only in order to then re-insert them in that world as corporate slaves. It is indoctrination because it teaches no-one to think, question or ‘examine’. The Greeks understood that an ‘unexamined life’ is life not worth living. Today ‘education’ replaces the questioning examination of life with ‘exam’ questions and the fictitious certificates or qualifications of ‘learning’ obtained through them. Educational ‘credits’ are just that – loan certificates which trap their owners not just in monetary debt in the form of loans taken to attend universities or private schools - but also and more perversely trap them in a lifelong indebtedness to their own resulting lack of true, deep and broad ‘education’.
“In an age in which the media broadcast countless pieces of foolishness, the educated man is defined not by what he knows, but by what he doesn't know.” Nicolas Gomez-Davila
9. MEDICINE AS A FICTION. MEDICINE KILLS.
“People who are angered, sickened and impaired by their industrial labour and leisure can escape only into a life under medical supervision and are thereby seduced or disqualified from political struggle for a healthier world.”
“A professional and physician-based health-care system that has grown beyond critical bounds is sickening for three reasons: it must produce clinical damage that outweighs its potential benefits; it cannot but enhance even as it obscures the political conditions that render society unhealthy; and it tends to expropriate the power of the individual to heal himself and shape his or her environment.”
“Before sickness came to be perceived primarily as an organic or behavioral abnormality, he who got sick could still find in the eyes of the doctor a reflection of his own anguish and some recognition of the uniqueness of his suffering. Now, what he meets is the gaze of a biological accountant engaged in input/output calculations. His sickness is taken from him and turned into the raw material for an institutional enterprise ….”
- Ivan Illich
Medicine today is essentially money-driven, a huge source of profit for the pharmaceutical and hi-tech health industry - which rake in more profits than all the Fortune 500 corporations combined. What is conventionally regarded as ‘science-based’ or ‘evidence-based’ medicine is actually nothing of the sort - given the corners cut by Big Pharma in testing new drugs, in informing the public on their true and often minimal efficacy, in warning them of their side-effects and often serious dangers - not to mention the massive sums of money spent not on costly ’R&D’ but purely on marketing the latest drugs and treatments to doctors and surgeons.
The ‘science’ on which today’s medicine is based is one that completely separates the life of the human body and brain from the life of the individual as a whole – from current or recent life experiences, from their life history and from their larger social and economic life world. It researches the ‘causes’ and ‘cures’ of ‘illness’ as if they had absolutely no meaning in the larger context of this life world – not least the stresses of economic life and of living in what can only be regarded as a fundamentally sick and innately sickness-generating society. The fact that individuals may have good reasons for feeling deeply ill-at-ease in such a society is ignored – until and unless this felt dis-ease expresses itself in symptoms of some medically classified and diagnosable ‘disease’. Even then, however, the aim of medicine is to identify the cause of disease solely in biological terms – ignoring the fact that the root meaning of the term biology’ is the ‘speech’ (logos) of the ‘life’ (bios).
Yet instead of seeing the human body as a living language of the human being – and illness as a form of mute but meaningful bodily speech - or even protest – the body is reduced to a biological machine and illness to mere defects in a biological machine and its genetic components. ‘Health’ as such is effectively reduced by the institutions of state to the individual’s capacity for economic functioning and ‘employment’ in a system of wage-slavery – rather than the capacity for creative fulfilment of their own non-monetary values and potentials. Yet loss of income, housing or life opportunities of the sort that lead to disheartenment or loss of heart on the part of individuals count for nothing in medical science – until and unless this loss of heart manifests as diagnosable symptoms of ‘heart disease’. These are then, like all other forms of disease, cold-heartedly treated as if they had nothing to do with the patient’s actual life whatsoever. Last but not least, ‘scientific’ medicine fails - even in its own narrow terms. Thus there is hardly a drug on the market that does not carry the danger of worsening the very symptoms it was prescribed for. Nor can medical ‘science’ provide any evidence that expensive cancer research and treatments carried on over decades have in any way extended the life-expectancy of patients - whereas such treatments invariably damage their quality of life. In fact medical treatment itself has been long acknowledged by the medical profession as being one the top three causes of death – if not the leading cause, ahead of cancer and heart disease. That this fact is ignored is because Illness is Big Business - a profitable commodity produced by patients and exploited for profit whether they live or die.
At the heart of medicine and its ‘science’ then, are countless fundamental fictions - of which I will list only seven (1) that health is innately ‘good’ and ‘illness’ is innately bad (2) that health is merely the proper ‘functioning’ of the body rather than the capacity to lead a fulfilled life (3) that illness is an abnormality rather than a natural part of life - not least in a sick society (4) that ‘death’ itself must be fought to the end - being seen as the end of life (5) that medicine saves or prolongs life, whereas it often kills or reduces quality of life (6) that the human body is a gene-reproducing machine rather than the living speech (bio-logos) of the human being (7) that ‘illnesses’ have ‘causes’ but no life meaning - and are therefore to be ‘fought’ and ‘conquered’ through science and technology rather than understood as an expression of the patient’s life as whole.
“The idea of one basis for Science and another for Life is from the very outset a lie.”- Karl Marx
“That illnesses have meaning, can lead those affected to the meaning of their lives – this is the insight that natural-scientific medicine has fundamentally impeded.”
Viktor von Weizsäcker
10. ‘SCIENCE’ AS FICTION. A NEW RELIGION WITH ITS OWN ‘GODS’.
“One of the worst intellectual catastrophes is found in the appropriation of scientific concepts and vocabulary by mediocre intellects.”
“More irritating than someone's actual stupidity is their mouthing a scientific vocabulary.”
“Stupidity appropriates with a diabolical ease whatever science invents.”
“Replacing the concrete sensory perception of an object with its abstract intellectual construction gains the world for man, but loses his soul.”
Nicolas Gomez-Davila
What we call ‘science’ today is nothing but a new religion with its own pantheon of fictional entities such as ‘quanta’ of energy. It even searches for what it calls the ‘God particle’. What makes science nothing but pure fiction is the way it takes its own purely mental constructs and mathematical equations as more real than the very phenomena they are supposed to ‘explain’. Mental and mathematical fictions are used to explain actual facts. Science denies the simple truth that all the phenomena we actually experience as reality are not abstract mathematical quantities such as ‘frequencies’ or abstract mental constructs such as ‘quanta’ of energy. Instead they are sensuous qualities or ‘qualia’ such as our conscious experience of light and darkness, colour and sound, lightness and heaviness, hardness and softness etc. Science in other words, seeks and yet wholly fails to explain Common Sense – our immediate sensory experience of the world. Yet Common Sense tells us that common human experiences do not need ‘explanations’. We do not need scientists or scientific ‘knowledge’ to ‘prove’ what we directly experience and know as ‘love’, pleasure, pain, mental activity etc. Nor can they ‘explain’ any of our feelings or subjective experiences by showing through brain imaging how they appear to activate different parts of the brain.
The new religion of science has also created a new mythological creation story in which a so-called ‘Big Bang’ replaces the ‘Big Being’ known as God. This new myth is riddled with contradictions and yet preached as ‘God’s Truth’ by a new breed of ‘celebrity physicists’ sermonising with the aid of mesmerising images of the cosmic galaxies on TV ‘info-tainment’ documentaries. Is there not an obvious logical contradiction in claiming, as Big Bang preachers do, that time itself began at a specific and dateable point in time?! Yet perhaps the greatest fiction of science is the way it conceals a fundamental truth – namely that to ‘explain’ any phenomenon at all requires that we first of all be conscious of it. Even the very ideas and concepts that scientist come up with - along with all the measurements they take and the images they create with their hi-tech instruments - would not be possible without consciousness of those concepts, images, instruments and measurements. The problem is that it is impossible to explain consciousness as such by anything that already assumes a consciousness of it – including conscious observations of the structure and activity of the human brain.
Just as Judaeo-Christian religions sees consciousness merely as the private property of beings – including a supreme ‘God-being’ – so does science sees it as the mere property of insentient things or processes. The truth is however that consciousness cannot - in principle - be reduced to the product or property of any thing or being – even a supreme being. For again, whatever we use to explain consciousness already assumes a consciousness or awareness of it. Put simply, there is and can be nothing beyond, before or outside ‘consciousness’, just as there can be nothing ‘before’ time or ‘outside’ space. All individual things, beings and all bodies in space and time can be nothing but ‘souls’ i.e. individualised portions, expressions and embodiments of a universal consciousness. That universal, all-embracing consciousness can be called ‘the Divine’ or ‘God’. The notion of God that science rejects is a totally simplistic notion of some supreme being that has or possesses consciousness and creates the world like a potter creates a pot. In reality the only conceivable God is a God that does not ‘have’ but IS consciousness - not a consciousness that is yours or mine, the product of our brains or our private property as beings, but a consciousness that is universal and ‘divine’ – being the all-embracing and all-pervading source and essence of all things and all beings. The truth is that consciousness is everything – all pervasive and all-embracing, and that everything in turn, whether an atom, molecule, rock, cell or body of any sort is a consciousness or ‘soul’ in its own right - being one sensuous shape and portion of that universal consciousness which IS ‘God’.
11. ‘DEATH’ AS A FICTION. CONSCIOUSNESS CANNOT ‘DIE’.
If, as Shakespeare suggested: ‘We are such stuff as dream are made on” i.e. consciousness - and if, in other words, consciousness is the very medium in which we dwell and of which we and all things are formed - then it follows that no matter in what ways a portion of consciousness - a ‘soul’ – may shift its shape or form or alter its patterns or qualities, and no matter in what way it may fragment into parts and/or mix and merge with other consciousnesses - it cannot ‘die’ in the sense of ceasing to be. Instead the life of the individual as a soul - as a unique, ever-changing and living consciousness - survives eternally - just as it also remains forever both distinct and inseparable from that universal consciousness of which it is an individualised portion and from which it is formed. Each soul or consciousness therefore also remains united with every other soul or ‘living consciousness’ through the very medium of that universal consciousness from which they all arise. Each soul also continues to dwell and grow within the infinite dimensions of that universal consciousness - even if it ceases to manifest and dwell in its limited physical dimensions and limited physical and human form - or in a way that is physically manifest to those whose consciousness is still attached to that physical form. The fiction of death is closely connected with the fiction of the body and the fiction of matter – the belief that bodies are made up of so-called ‘material’ atoms and molecules - rather than of patterns of atomic and molecular consciousness, of inorganic and organic consciousness, of mineral, vegetable and animal consciousness - and of not only human but also pre- and trans-human consciousness. Consciousnesses or ‘souls’ do not ‘have’ bodies and nor are they a by-product of them. Instead consciousness or souls are what body – whether they do so in human and physical form and or in trans-human and trans-physical forms and dimensions. We are indeed eternal spiritual beings (souls) on a temporary human journey or ‘sojourn’ - and not just human beings on a finite spiritual journey, one destined to end either in death or in some a fixed and final state of ‘enlightenment’. Death is a birth into infinite dimensions and infinite worlds of consciousness or ‘soul worlds’, from which the soul may or may not return and re-body itself in physical form - and in those physical planes of consciousness we perceive as ‘planets’.
12. YOU ARE NOT A FICTION. YOU ARE A FREE, LIVING AND ETERNAL SOUL.
This is the fundamental truth that all the fictions described and explained above are designed to stop you from recognising. Once we recognise that we live in a world entirely shaped by these fictions we can stop believing in them (which we are constantly indoctrinated to do) and instead come to recognise this truth. Then we will no longer have to submit to and worship the Gods of Money, Law, Science, Religion and many others – including fictional ‘Employment’, fictional ‘Costs’ and the fictional Media – the media which promote all these fictions. Instead freedom from these fictions will bring us knowledge of truth, and truth in turn will empower us to exercise our innate freedom as beings - as embodied souls or ‘consciousnesses’. There is freedom ‘from’ and freedom ‘to’. Freedom from fiction releases our freedom to do what as individual souls we are most inclined to do, have the best capacity to do and therefore derive the most fulfilment and satisfaction from doing. Instead of ‘working for a living’ our lives themselves can become creative works - giving expression to the unique qualities and capacities of the soul or consciousness that we each are. We will then free ourselves from perhaps the most insidious fiction of all. This is the fiction, already mentioned, that freely chosen and fulfilling human activity or ‘work’ is the same thing as ‘employment’. It is the fiction that if our time and power to do and create (our labour time and labour power) is not sold to a corporation and put to use in the way it orders us to then we are not ‘doing anything’ at all or are not ‘working’. In reality the very opposite is the case – most people ‘employed’ by corporations are essentially unemployed – since what they do is not the free employment of what they are best capable of doing - not an expression of their true potentials or power to. For as well as ‘power to’ there is also power ‘over’. ‘Employment’ is for the most part the exercise by corporations of power over our power to. Its purpose is not the free fulfilment of the individual’s innate potentials - their ‘power to’ - but simply profit for the corporations and banks. Such ‘employment’ – in reality nothing but ‘wage-slavery’ - is legally enforced through unlawful statutes by fraudulent ‘debt-slavery’ i.e. slavery to the need for ‘money’ to buy what we need.
We work for a living to pay for the ‘cost of living’. Even the houses or flats we are forced to buy or rent to live in have long since been paid for by the labour that first went into building them. And since when did life and living have a cost? Energy and life itself is a gift from the Sun and the Earth. Food is a gift of the land – which by nature is Common Land and not the property of emperors, monarchs, feudal lords or modern farming corporations. So since when did the raw materials of all we produce – the sun, the earth, the land and sea, human labour power – and even the very ideas that arose spontaneously in the mind of those inventors who revolutionised technologies of production – have a price on them? Do we have to ‘pay back’ the sun for energy, our bodies for being able to engage in activity - or pay back the creative power of consciousness for ideas? In reality all that we purchase with our money was granted to us free of charge. Its ‘cost’ only arises from the fact that freely granted energy and fuel, land natural resources, technologies and means of production became the ‘private property’ of a few. Why then, do we have to ‘pay’ those who have appropriated for themselves what is freely given to us all to make use of – as if we were still agricultural serfs obliged to pay their feudal ‘lords’ with a portion of our labour or harvest?
Today it is corporate debt and interest which constitute up to 50% of the price of all products. So why, apart from paying off this debt and interest to the banks, do any products need to be paid for at all - instead of just being distributed to others according to their needs?
A MANIFESTO OF SPIRITUAL COMMUNISM
Workers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but the fictions that keep you in chains!
What is common to all the commonly held fictions we need to free ourselves from - and at the same time holds the very key to freeing ourselves from them can be called ‘The Common’ - for the word ‘common’ is also the root of the word ‘communism’. And yet as Marx himself pointed out:
“Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”
As individuals and nations find it ever more impossible to keep up with their growing debt, the global banking debtocracy, oligarchy and kleptocracy can only preserve its own fictional wealth by creating yet more money as debt, by increasing interest on it, or by hoarding it and withholding it from the economy. Yet for money as interest-bearing debt to be paid off – or to simply retain its value for the banksters - requires further exploitation and impoverishment of the people - which in turn reduces consumer demand for products and stalls the constant economic ‘growth’ on which capitalism depends – just in order to pay off the compounding interest to the banks on domestic, corporate and national debt. The only alternative is for new wars to be started - just to boost growth through demand for ever more costly and sophisticated hi-tech weaponry.
What Marx called “the premises now in existence” for a “real movement” - ‘Communisation’ - are the ever more extreme measures now being used to pay off fictional debts to the banks. These include job, wage, pension and benefit cuts of such severity, that (even in supposedly ‘developed’ European countries and American States) threaten not just the livelihoods of the people but their very ability to obtain by means of money what they need to live and survive - whether it be food and other provisions, energy supplies, housing or even that most basic life necessity – water. Thus it is that one million children in America are now homeless, and like countless families live off food handouts.
Ultimately then, it is not ‘Communism’ as an idealised and therefore fictional ‘state of affairs’ but only a “real movement” of ‘Communisation’ that can allow people to survive. Communisation is the re-assertion of ‘The Common’ - of common law against state laws and taxes, the re-assertion of Common Sense of the common human bonds and spiritual values that make up families and communities against soul-less corporate and political structures. Communisation also means the direct re-appropriation of all ‘common wealth’ - whether land, water, energy supplies, food supplies, housing and means of production – by and for the people. Since this cannot be done with debt-money it can only be done directly, through the creation of communal trusts which hold all property in common, and allow local, municipal, regional and national communities to issue their own interest-free money in the form of new ‘scrip’ currencies which by-pass the private banks . This debt and interest-free money would take the form of ‘tokens’ or ‘vouchers’ – material or electronic. These were once issued by English monarchs in the form of ‘tally sticks’ when they could no longer repay their debts to the bankers. So it is no surprise that the bankers symbolically buried these sticks under the building that houses the Bank of England. Communisation is a real process that has already begun by the common people in the heartland of capitalism – the U.K. Its aim is a community of free communities – each based on respect for both the divine rights and absolute sovereignty of all individuals who associate within them – in other words the total sovereignty of the people and not of monarchs, popes or modern states and parliaments. (see www.freetheplanet.net ).
The idea of the so-called ‘Freeman’ movement - namely that societies are ‘in essence, nothing more than a grouping of like-minded individual and sovereign souls…’ and that ‘revolution’ is about nothing more than reminding ourselves of this truth – is both ‘socialist’ and ‘revolutionary’ in a profoundly spiritual sense. For rather than fixating on the political it is simply about re-cognising and coming back to who we really are as individuals, recognising our innate freedom as souls, and creating a society built on ‘societies’ that are indeed nothing more than a ‘free association’ of ‘like-minded souls’. We are speaking of what I have previously termed ‘Socialism with Soul’ (see www.thenewsocialism.org ). What is important however, is that the possibility of understanding and realising ‘socialism’ in this new sense does not arise from an attempt to unite the realms of the spiritual and political - but rather from recognising, opening up and widening even further a decisive cleft between them – a space of true freedom from the fiction of ‘society’ that capitalism has created – a fictitious society that individuals continue to believe in, buy into and in this way also sustain and recreate – yet at the expense of their own spiritual, social, economic and political freedom as individual souls. This fictitious society is built not just on fictitious entities such as legal persons and corporations, not just on fictitious laws and on fictitious money, but also on fictitious freedoms, fictitious education, fictitious medicine, fictitious sciences, fictitious media, fictitious information and fictitious political debates and ‘democracies’. All these fictions in turn however, rest on fictitious languages, fictitious concepts and fictitious beliefs – beliefs however, that have become so deeply embedded in human consciousness that the most fundamental dimension of our nature as human beings – our spiritual essence as free and eternal individual souls - has almost completely fallen into oblivion. This spiritual ‘essence’ of the human being cannot be united with the fictitious society and fictitious ‘politics’ of today but must be ever more firmly distinguished and separated from it.
To simply oppose the fictive politics of today’s fictitious capitalist ‘society’ with a multitude of alternative social and political ‘-isms’ is to attempt to play capitalism at its own game. It not only gives more credibility to its fictions than they deserve. It also reinforces the utterly soul-less and inhumane social and global reality that has and continues to be built on those very fictions. This is a reality in which human beings can be compared to animals in a zoo - animals who have lost the freedom - or even forgotten what it was like - to live in an environment natural to them and in accord with their essential nature. Worse still, the monstrous suffering and distortions of human consciousness and behaviour that result from this zoo-like imprisonment and consequent loss of their essential nature have become taken as ‘normal’ – indeed are even seen ‘scientifically’ as defining ‘human nature’.
Bringing this fiction and all the fictions associated with it to an end is indeed a spiritual aim with a profoundly political dimension. Yet it is also an aim that cannot – in principle - be achieved by socialist political revolution and ideologies alone. No political ideology can anymore undermine ‘the fictitious society’ and its fictions. Only individuals who re-cognise themselves as essentially free and eternal souls - and relate together freely as such – can re-create what we call ‘society’. Only such individuals can replace the fictitious society of today with a new and true socialism - a ‘socialism with soul’. Such a socialism is no mere political ideology or ‘-ism’. For it can only arise from and within the soul itself – and through a fully embodied and fiction-free relation and association of ‘like-minded’ souls with one another. For what defines fictitious ‘corporate’ entities such as parliaments and legal ‘persons’ - like the pure abstraction that is money or ‘exchange value’ - is precisely its wholly disembodied nature. The fictitious society works by dissociating individuals from their own bodies – which are turned into mere instruments or objects. In doing so, it dissociates them also from their own intuitive bodily knowing and from their own embodied souls – replacing them with fictitious bodies of knowledge in which the soul no longer has any place or home. The universal homelessness which Heidegger constantly spoke of is a homelessness of the soul that knows no geo-political or national boundaries. Nor can it be overcome by seeking to once again house the soul in traditional communities or in the traditional architecture – physical and doctrinal - of churches, synagogues, mosques and temples. Instead the soul must learn to feel and find itself at home again in the human body and in learning to feel another human being as ‘some body’ – that is to say, as an embodied soul and not just a ‘talking head’ or labouring body.
Thus for Communisation to proceed, prostitution and slavery must be forbidden under Common Law. This does not mean only banning the sale of bodies for soul-less sex, but also banning wage-slavery and wage-prostitution - the sale of the individual’s soul in the form of their bodily and mental labour power and labour time, thus finally freeing individuals to choose the creative and productive activities they engage in, both alone and in common. Revolution through Communisation also requires leadership however – thought leadership based on a thought revolution.
THE THOUGHT REVOLUTION
A work such as this that seeks to expose lies and fictions is a ‘manifesto’ in the literal sense – seeking to ‘manifest’ or make evident the truth concealed by these fictions. Such a work also lays claim to ‘truth’ or ‘knowledge’. As a result however, it also immediately faces several problems. One problem is: who really wants to know? For it is not simply the case that there are those who know truth on the one hand, and those who don’t know on the other. There are also those who truly want to know – who ‘seek’ truth and knowledge – and those who simply don’t want to know. Yet as Jesus is quoted as saying in the Gospel of Thomas – ‘Seek and ye shall find. Find and ye shall be disturbed’.
Those who don’t want to know therefore prefer rather to stay in their ‘comfort zone’ and simply accept and adapt to fictions. In doing so however, they also let these fictions rule their lives. True knowledge on the other hand, though it may be disturbing, is also a source of empowerment – of true freedom.
Yet if people have adapted their lives to lies, recognising those lies challenges the way they have led their lives and the identity they have built around them.
“If you want to make someone angry, tell him a lie. If you want to make someone furious, tell him the truth.”
“All truth passes through three stages. First it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and thirdly it is accepted as self-evident.”
Arthur Schopenhauer.
“A truth’s initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed. It wasn’t the world being round that agitated people but that the world wasn’t flat. When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic” – Dresden James.
“If the truth is that ugly – which it is – then we do have to be careful about the way we tell that truth. But to say somehow that telling the truth should be avoided because people may respond badly to the truth seems bizarre to me.” Chuck Skoro, Deacon, St. Paul’s Catholic Church
“In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” – George Orwell
Simply thinking and telling the truth is a revolutionary act, because it cannot but bring about a revolution - not just in people’s thinking but in their lives. It is a ‘revolution’ because it literally turns over and upside down (‘revolving’) the fictions they have been taught and taken as truth hitherto.
A second problem however, is that of ‘arguing’ or ‘validating’ the claims to truth and knowledge of those who make it their task to expose what they say are lies and fictions. One obstacle in the face of this is peer pressure and the desire to conform – or at least to stray only within the confines of larger lies and deeper fictions. For in the face of this pressure “… the logic behind an argument doesn’t count as much as the power and popularity behind an opinion.” – Livergood
A third problem is language – words as such. Thus no sooner is a loaded word such as ‘communism’ used than people react to it according to whether they believe it to be something good or bad. Before they do this however, they do something even more important – they assume we all already ‘know’ what the word itself means or denotes.
In the case of the word ‘communism’ for example, they take it as given that the word refers to some old-fashioned ‘Marxist’ ideology. This is associated in turn with totalitarian states controlled by ruthless communist ‘parties’ – for example those parties which ruled the erstwhile ‘communist’ states in Russia and the USSR - and still rule states such as Cuba, North Korea and China. Yet does the fact that China is still ruled by a party that calls itself ‘Communist’ tell us anything about the meaning of the word ‘communism’ – not least given that the Chinese economy has essentially become a form of highly authoritarian state capitalism?
The question of how we understand words is not limited to loaded words such as ‘communism’ however. The question goes much deeper. What is at stake is the assumption that we already know what any words or terms we use mean i.e. the assumption that what they refer to or denote is some well-established and already known ‘thing’ or ‘things’.
This assumption has huge implications for the very way we understand such basic words as ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’ themselves. For it is the basis of a second basic but unquestioned assumption. This is the assumption that knowledge and truth are a property of verbal ‘assertions’, ‘statements’ or ‘propositions’ about reality - for example the assertion that ‘God exists’ or that ‘God does not exist’. The assumption is that ‘truth’ is then simply a matter of deciding which of these assertions is ‘true’ – which of them does or does not ‘represent’ what we call ‘reality’, and which of them can therefore count as true representations or ‘knowledge’.
The reader may have noticed by now that I have begun to ‘bracket’ a lot of words I use in my assertions in inverted commas. There is a good reason for this. For assertions make use of individual words or terms whose meaning is most often unquestioned. Thus endless debates might take place around the question of whether or not ‘God exists’ - yet without any of the participants ever even thinking of questioning the way in which the very word ‘God’ is, has been or could be understood –instead simply assuming that the word refers to some singular and supreme being of some sort.
This typically Judaeo-Christian understanding of the word ‘God’ implies however that ‘God’ is one being among others which in turn would imply that the ‘God’ referred to is a finite entity, and one whose existence would not exclude the existence of other ‘gods’ – both of which are conclusions that would unsettle true ‘believers’ in the existence or ‘being’ of one single omnipotent and omnipresent ‘God’. I refer to this issue in the section of this work entitled ‘SCIENCE AS FICTION’. For scientists, too, whether atheist or not, use words whose meaning is simply taken as given – as referring to some ‘thing’ that has always existed – and that even if the word itself was first created as a concept by scientists themselves. The result is a situation in which most taken-for-granted scientific terms such as ‘energy’, ‘matter’, ‘time’, ‘space’, ‘light’, ‘electricity’, ‘magnetism’ etc. end up effectively being defined in terms of each other. So just as religious assertions about ‘God’ do not begin with the more fundamental question of all – “What is ‘God’?” – so do countless scientific assertions fail to the question the meaning of their most basic terms. No one asks what ‘light’ essentially is – whether an ‘objectively’ measurable and purely quantitative frequency of ‘electro-magnetic energy’ - or a sensuous and essentially qualitative dimension of subjective experience – one we even experience in our dreams.
The revolutionary nature of this work therefore lies first and foremost in the way it seeks to explain and demonstrate a revolution in the way we think and a revolutionary understanding of ‘thinking’ itself – a revolution first initiated by the 20th century philosopher Martin Heidegger. The revolution consists in no longer regarding ‘truth’ as something belonging to or represented in the form of assertions or beliefs, no longer using thought merely to question the truth of particular assertion or beliefs – but instead questioning the very words and terms used in formulating those assertions or beliefs. That is why I first of all bracket in inverted commas such words as ‘money’, ‘debt’, ‘democracy’, ‘science’, ‘education’, ‘employment’ etc. - in this way reminding us that the meaning and use of so many of the common words whose meaning we take for granted is something questionable in itself - and not just statements that make use of that word or beliefs about it. That is also why, although I offer ‘A Manifesto of Spiritual Communism’, I also apply this new method of thinking to each of the three main words used in this phrase – which also need ‘bracketing’ – not just in writing but in thought. For only in this way can we distinguish them from any ‘thing’ we might simply assume they refer too, and instead let the words speak for themselves through their root meanings:
- ‘Manifesto’ - something that is made evident or ‘manifest’, as opposed to being concealed, for example by cover-ups, lies, ignorance or fictions.
- ‘Spirit’ – from the Latin spirare – to breathe. This is also the root of the words inspiration, expiration, and transpiration - that which inspires us and also enables us to breathe and therefore live and communicate freely.
- ‘Communism’ – not an ideology but that which has to do with the ‘common’ or ‘communal’ – as in the terms commoner, common law, common sense, common land, and ‘commonwealth’ – the common ‘weal’, ‘will’ or wish of a ‘community’ as determined though the ‘communication’ of its individual members, and their mutual ‘company’, ‘companionship’ and ‘communion’ – and not by the fiction of parliamentary ‘democracy’ known in the U.K. as ‘The House of Commons’.
What might in general be called ‘The Common’ includes of course all commonly held beliefs - many of which are fictions. The Common’ therefore, also embraces all those commonly practiced modes of ‘communication’ in which all parties tacitly agree to unquestioningly assume what is meant by the very words used in that communication. It is this assumption, the assumption that we already ‘know’ what is meant by a commonly used word - or even a highly specialist ‘term’ – that is itself the biggest and most important fiction of all and the biggest obstacle to the pursuit of truth – leading instead to a parroting of assumed ‘knowledge’. Such fictitious knowledge can only be overcome through a new and revolutionary mode of ‘thinking’. This is a thinking which does not even assume that we already ‘know’ what ‘thinking’ itself is, that does not assume that we are all naturally endowed with the capacity to ‘think’ – and that above all does not assume either that commonly used words and language are a mere ‘tool’ enabling us to ‘express’ or ‘represent’ our thoughts or beliefs – and are therefore not themselves in need of any deeper questioning.
Martin Heidegger was the first thinker to recognise that in order to overcome all these assumptions and to engage in a new and revolutionary way of thinking means first and foremost establishing a more aware and questioning relationship to words and language as such – one which frees us from the fiction that ‘truth’ is a mere ‘property’ of verbal assertions or beliefs and the fictitious ‘knowledge’ arising from this fiction. For “there is a wordless knowledge within the word” (Seth) and there are also many things we ‘know’ to be real and true in more basic and deeper ways – through that wordless awareness, through direct sensuous experiencing and through inner bodily knowing or ‘gut feeling’ – all of which constitute the true foundations of ‘common sense’. Such inner knowing went under the name of the Greek word gnosis – referring as it did to a type of knowing based on an intimate inner relation to the known of the sort implied when we speak of ‘knowing someone’ intimately - through an intimate relation to them. This is also why new and deeper forms of knowing go together with new modes of relating to others and why all revolutions are essentially ‘relational revolutions’.‘Spiritual Communism’ then, is also the recognition that the true locus of revolutionary change lies neither in the individual nor in groups or communities, but, as Martin Buber recognised, in a third realm – that of the immediate relations of individuals to one another within any given community.
