Monday, August 26, 2013

We Own You

One of the common fall-back points of apologists of various of our great social ills like religion or corporations is the argument of exclusivity.

"But look at all the cool stuff it's made! You want to get rid of religion or hierarchical capital accumulation? What're you nuts? Look at all those pretty cathedrals and those shiny laser beams in the latest summer blockbuster. You couldn't have any of those if you didn't surrender society to irrational belief or blind instinctive power-mongers!"

Well, yes, let's look at those things. Let's look at sculptors, musicians and painters re-painting the same Levantine mother of a newborn future Rabbi for centuries on end, being denied all other sources of inspiration. Let's look at modern-day brilliant individuals slaving away for half their lives in dead-end jobs, ass-kissing their way up some corporate ladder for the slim hope of getting the most tenuous chance at the funding to actually make something of their own.

But ignore the fact that such control is most commonly actively detrimental to creativity for a moment. Why would it be necessary? The fact that human creativity can shine even from under such restraints does not make creativity the exclusive domain of those restraints. What does art lose by removing the pyramid schemes breaking its back in past and present societies? The resources used by creators in their craft would still be available on our planet, all the more so for not being whittled down by layer upon layer of parasitic bureaucrats before they can reach the individuals who can use them. The brains are still there. Our ability to plan and distribute those resources to those creators is still available. Coordination does not imply co-optation.

All we must surrender is our idiotic social-ape dependence on social hierarchy, our slavishness, our fear of individuality. Religion is not inspiration; nor do corporations enable creation.
Imagination is inspiration, the same imagination which created the myriad pantheons of the world.
Science and technology enable creation, not the parasitic power-structures which lock the majority of the world's resources in destructive competition for its own sake, which mire technology in planned obsolescence and hobble science with the demands of, not scientists, but the mindless glut of mass-market demand, of not what can be taught in a half-year university course but what can be advertised to Joe-Schmoe in thirty seconds of television.

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