Killing Abstractions: A stance against war and violence

I am almost utterly against violence...I say almost because I know there are potential circumstances wherein I would react with violence. But my strong sense is that this violence would be "momentous" and personally consequential to my vitality and I would extend this to others in proximity to me who are meaningful to me.

For me, violence must be essentially "of the moment".

To be clear--I would not inflict violence on others but rather would be violent as a necessary reaction to physical harm as it is imminent or being acted upon me or those in physical proximity who are meaningful to me.

This is a concrete position. I speak against the abstractions that we have embodied in all of our living.

That a ground for me to stand upon and say this: I will never support a war. A war is an abstraction to serve ends that are well beyond a single individual's knowledge and/or understanding, other than those that are "making" the war.

I support bringing murderers to justice but believe I could only support a killing justice if I in fact were a party to the injustice in a way that made the agent responsible for it something I could not doubt. Our legal jury system is always and only "dubious" in this regard (but this is another argument).

I do not support vengeance but neither do I support forgiveness.

I find all of this ultimately massively confusing and my response to this is to say "NO" to it all. I cannot know the truth of larger actions outside myself. The taking of life that happens outside of "personal self-defense" is an act of blindly trusting a machinery of abstraction.

I refuse your wars and I refuse your interventions. Your machinery of war is an abstraction. Your belief in the "right" kind of war is an abstraction. If you live, you personally, live life as a kind of abstraction then you will be used as such and you will agree to it.

We are killing people. We abstract them in this "global" world and they are "insurgents", or rebels, or communists or jihadis, or any other label you'd like to use. They are dogs in the street by the calculus of abstraction.

And Justice for All

Besides being a pretty good Al Pacino movie, the post title, as you know, comes from the "Pledge of Allegiance". Isn't it funny how you grow up with these things and have no real idea of their inculcating symbolic intention...a flag and allegiance to it. Odd, right, pledging loyalty to an abstraction.

That's not the point though: with the "democratic" challenges to ruling authority in Egypt and Tunisia some have trumpeted the call to liberty (and justice) for all. However, many are asking about the inequality of women in these societies and if that will be addressed in any meaningful way. Will there be justice?

No. To elaborate, equality is a chimera and justice is a legalism of the power structure of systems of government. Power decides what is just and just how equal things need to be in order to be called just. Melville addressed this, as shown in the previous post, with the idea of "fast-fish and loose-fish"; even if a fish is fast this tenet of "natural law" (I have caught it, and I am in possession of it) will be vitiated by the hierarchical law of "civilized" legal systems if Power wants the fish. And this vitiation, this unequal or unfair action will be called "just". And it will indeed be just in civil terms.

We have also heard calls condemning patriarchal systems...I really can't disagree here as I find the psychology of the human male to be the cause of all our ills. Yep, I'm laying at the feet of the biological male animal striving for alpha positions and all the lesser males trying to put one over on the alpha. These "stupid" biology tricks are useful in certain species and social orders do benefit from this kind of organization--but it seems to me that the wrong genes have been in the ascendancy for far too long. The female animal goes about her living in the cycle of care not in the cycle of domination.

Our human reality is dominated by masculine aggression on every level. We pray to the trinity of War, Technology and Money. All of these are masculine ideas. All of these come out of a desire to conquer our very biology--conquer each other--conquer our planet--even conquer our gods. These are our masculine abstractions.

Without a massive alteration in this particular "way" of being there is no hope.

Our only future is in the physical reality of the feminine, body, mind and soul.