Blind Obedience

But the more significant factor is that one can easily remain free of even the most intense political oppression simply by placing one's faith and trust in institutions of authority. People who get themselves to be satisfied with the behavior of their institutions of power, or who at least largely acquiesce to the legitimacy of prevailing authority, are almost never subjected to any oppression, even in the worst of tyrannies.

Why would they be? Oppression is designed to compel obedience and submission to authority. Those who voluntarily put themselves in that state - by believing that their institutions of authority are just and good and should be followed rather than subverted - render oppression redundant, unnecessary.

The Mystery of Life

These words makes me realized again that more knowledge does not equate with becoming a better person.

- Greater access to knowledge is not the same as greater knowledge.
- An ever-increasing plethora of facts & data is not the same as wisdom.
- Breadth of knowledge is not the same as depth of knowledge.

~ taken from this blog post.

A Companion Star To Our Sun?

"Heavy snows are driven and fall from the world's four corners; the murder frost prevails. The Sun is darkened at noon; it sheds no gladness; devouring tempests bellow and never end. In vain do men await the coming of summer. Thrice winter follows winter over a world which is snow-smitten, frost-fettered, and chained in ice." 

"Fimbul Winter" from Norse saga, Twilight of the Gods

"Why We Don’t Remember: The Gift of This Journey"

There is a gift in not remember who we are when we are born into this lifetime; the gift is the journey. Many of us wonder why we do not remember who we were before we were born. We wonder what it was like to be a soul without a body and what it will be like to be one again. Many of us have a strange sense that we do remember, as if we did experience a bodiless existence, but we can’t quite recall the details. We may remember feeling as if we were flying, or as if we were just incredibly light and unrestricted in our movements. Still, most of us do not recall anything in detail about the time before we incarnated into a human body.

'Hume's Paradox' by Noam Chomsky

The final of four articles by Noam Chomsky that i am putting up for readers to consider.

Taken from "The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many (Interviews with Noam Chomsky)".
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You've said the real drama since 1776 has been the "relentless attack of the prosperous few upon the rights of the restless many." I want to ask you about the "restless many." Do they hold any cards?

'Human nature and self-image' by Noam Chomsky

The third of four articles by Noam Chomsky that i am putting up for readers to consider.

Taken from "The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many (Interviews with Noam Chomsky)".
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Is racism something that's learned, or is it innately endowed?

I don't think either of those is the right answer. There's no doubt that there's a rich, complex human nature. We're not rocks. Anybody sane knows that an awful lot about us is genetically determined, including aspects of our behavior, our attitudes. That's not even a question among sane people.

Life and Liberty

"Nature frequently does not announce in advance her intentions to fundamentally alter the world. Men often do -- and usually such warnings are ignored."
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The above quote is taken from a blog i had been following. i would like to add another sentence towards the end of that one: "The ignorance of such warnings is probably why Nature does not announce in advance her intentions to restore the world to a healthy state, as it was in the beginning."

As someone who believes is faintly aware that life goes around in cycles, the natural karmic law, the statement does make sense in a sort of round-about way.

There is no natural evil. Nature is the constant, the balancing 'force' in the equation of life between good and evil, between our choice either of life or the state of entropy. In its most fundamental, human beings are divided only between those who choose life and those who oppose life. The duality of life. It is manifest in everything in life, if one care to notice.

Superficial traits like 'race', skin colour, eye colour, hair colour, body shape or size, intelligence doesn't matter to them. The intrinsic nature of what is inside a person differentiate humans. And this intrinsic nature can be broken down to its most fundamental of whether a person chooses life or if a person does not choose life. That is all there is. Just like a binary system, on or off, yes or no. Everyone needs to understand and recognize that there exist these group of people who are against life. To them all living things are expendable. That could only mean you, me and all of us.

The universal law that humans are allowed a certain degree of free will in this world, i have come to see that evil exist only in the hearts of men. Two opposing forces of life- one for life, the other against life. And free will is the power (though restricted) which a person has to call upon to choose whether to serve life or otherwise. But, this choice may not be available for the latter group, those who oppose life, for it (the choice) may have already been decided at birth. It is not that they do not have the free will to choose again later in life, but the choice had already been made by them and if they do not want to change then no one else could change them. It is in their genes. This knowledge is known to ancient civilization but it is lost in the transition of time.

Liberty plays an important part in those who chose life. Let me rephrase that. Liberty is the only important concept to understand for those who choose life.

"[T]here are certain things which are common to them all ... What they had in common was the belief that men were by nature, if not good, at any rate not bad, potentially benevolent, and that each man was the best expert on his own interests and his own values, when he was not being bamboozled by knaves or fools; that on the whole men were prone to follow the rules of conduct which their own understanding provided. Most thinkers of the eighteenth century believed that progress was desirable -- that is to say, for example, that freedom was better than slavery; that legislation founded on what was called 'the precepts of nature' could right almost every wrong; that nature was only reason in action, and its workings, therefore, could in principle be deduced from a set of axioms like those of a theory in geometry, or like those of physics and chemistry, if only you knew them. ... The more empirically-minded among them were sure that the science of human nature could be developed no less than that of inanimate things, that ethical and political questions, provided they were genuine -- and how could they not be so? -- could be answered no less certainly than those of mathematics and astronomy, and that a life founded upon these answers would be free, secure, happy and wise." ~ Isaiah Berlin.

The other group of people "when given a choice between liberty and death, would reject liberty". These are the people who are now taking the world to the edge of the precipice.

"In the vast domain of living nature there reigns an open violence, a kind of prescriptive fury which arms all the creatures to their common doom. As soon as you leave the inanimate kingdom, you find the decree of violent death inscribed on the very frontiers of life. You feel it already in the vegetable kingdom: from the vast catalpa to the humblest herb, how many plants die, and how many are killed? But from the moment you enter the animal kingdom, this law is suddenly in the most dreadful evidence. A violent power, at once hidden and palpable ... has in each major subdivision of the animals appointed a certain number of species to devour the others. Thus there are insects of prey, reptiles of prey, birds of prey, fishes of prey, quadrupeds of prey. There is no instant of time when one creature is not being devoured by another. Over all these numerous races of animals man is placed, and his destructive hand spares nothing that lives.

Man kills to obtain food and kills to clothe himself. He kills to adorn himself and he kills in order to attack. He kills in order to defend himself and he kills in order to kill. Proud and terrible king, he wants everything and nothing can resist him ... But who [in the general carnage] will exterminate the one who exterminates all the others? He will kill himself. It is man who is charged with the slaughter of men ... Thus is accomplished ... the great law of the violent destruction of living creatures. The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar, upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death." ~ Joseph de Maistre.

The world has move a step closer to a very dangerous position once again, as could be seen here, here, there, everywhere. The thing is, when we look at it simply, is that this world, the place we called 'home', is being run by people of the latter type.

The people who are 'pro-life', so to speak, are absorbing the values of the other group of forces. And the imbalance in the world could be causing all the terrible things that is happening around us- the looming financial and economic collapse, the (very) real possibility of war and strife. All man-made catastrophe that could only cause one thing- the destruction of lives.

If the good people of this world do not take action to "fix" this impending crisis, then it is inevitable that things will continue on its current course. How do we fix it is another question. Maybe, we could start by recognizing and acknowledging that there are human beings who does not have the qualities and traits of what could be called 'human'. And if we believe that the universe and life is eternal, and we don't do anything to fix this life-threatening situation, then something will intervene to preserve life in this world. That "something" could well turn out to be mother nature herself. It would be ruthless if nature were to do it.

The earth changes happening around us. This may as well be the "balance" to "fix" the "imbalanced" equation we are experiencing now. Life is a struggle. It may as well be for our children to live a better life. It may as well be that life is also a cycle.

"Death is not the opposite of life. Life has no opposite. The opposite of death is birth. Life is eternal." ~ Eckhart Tolle

"Change won't come from governments or the halls of power." ~ Cecile Pineda

"The influences of the senses has in most men overpowered the mind to the degree that the walls of space and time have come to look solid, real and insurmountable; and to speak with levity of these limits in the world is the sign of insanity."~ Ralph Waldo Emerson. 

'The unmentionable five-letter word' by Noam Chomsky

The second of four articles by Noam Chomsky that i am putting up for readers to consider.

Taken from "The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many (Interviews with Noam Chomsky)".

Something i'd known for so long and yet it is only recently that i read something that articulated this so well. Yes, i am a modern slave in the full sense of the word. Somehow, strangely, knowing this and acknowledging it makes me feel freer than the others. Though an enlightened slave is not much better than an ignorant one. On his own, he is still a slave.

'The Roots of Racism' by Noam Chomsky

The first of four articles by Noam Chomsky that i am putting up for readers to consider.

Taken from "The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many (Interviews with Noam Chomsky)".
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All over the world-from LA to the Balkans to the Caucasus to India-there's a surge of tribalism, nationalism, religious fanaticism, racism. Why now?

How the media works

Whether they're called "liberal" or "conservative", the major media are large corporations, owned by and interlinked with even larger conglomerates. Like other corporations, they sell a product to a market. The market is advertisers- that is, other businesses. The product is audiences. For the elite media that set the basic agenda to which others adapt, the product is, furthermore, relatively privileged audiences.

So we have major corporations selling fairly wealthy and privileged audiences to other businesses. Not surprisingly, the picture of the world presented reflects the narrow and biased interests and values of the sellers, the buyers and the product.