January 1 2024 Imagining the Future: the Shape of Our Horizons in 2024

jayofdollhousepark

Jan 1

On New Year's Day we make resolutions of action for the coming year, both for ourselves in our personal lives and for the destiny of our nation, humankind, and the earth. We look to the shape of our horizons in imagining the future and ask ourselves, Who do we want to become, and what can we do to achieve it?

For myself this involves antifascist action, turning over stones and pursuing vile scuttling things from the darkness into the light where they may burn away and vanish into nothingness, to advance the cause of our equality, and revolutionary action, both as resistance to tyranny as structural change and social transformation as systemic change, to advance the cause of our liberty.

We are called to our causes for many reasons, among these being identification and ideology; how we see who we are in relation to others, in terms of membership and belonging, and our beliefs about how the world in which we live works and may become better by the ways in which we live in it.

I am convinced that the central problem of humankind is power and the use of social force, and I interpret and evaluate everything by this measure.

And though I no longer believe the Restoration of America, of our global Humanist civilization and moral order, and the ideas of democracy, human rights, liberty, equality, truth, and justice, or the survival of our species beyond the coming millennium is possible, for the Age of Tyrants has begun, I shall refuse to submit and with every day will claw my way out of the ruins to make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival.

We all of us are like Clairice Starling in Silence of the Lambs now; we cannot know if our actions in Resistance and revolutionary struggle will bring an end to the horrors of unequal power and a Reckoning to systems of oppression, only that we must do so in solidarity with each other if we are to remain human.

What Resolutions of action can I make for the coming year, and urge us all to live by?

Write, speak, teach, and organize change; incite, provoke, and disturb.

Perform the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.

Refuse to submit or to believe the lies of Authority.

Stand in solidarity of action and abandon not our fellows; let us place our lives in the balance with all those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.

To all those who like myself prefer to run amok and be ungovernable to the alternative of submission to authority, who align on the side of Prometheus, rebellion, chaos, anarchy, resistance, transgression, revolution, and the frightening of the horses, I offer here a Manifesto for Bearers of the Torch of Liberty.

As I wrote in my post of March 28 2019, in the wake of the Christchurch white supremacist terror and the direct threat of a copycat atrocity against our local mosque here in Spokane; I've thought about the origins of evil, of violence and power in the relationships between fear, anger, hate, and other negative emotions as illnesses, for a long time now and in many roles and contexts.

Here are some things I have learned:

First, the process by which violence operates as a system is the same for all spheres of action and levels of scale; within personal and social contexts and in intimate relationships and families as well as nations and historical civilizations.

The precondition of violence as hate crime, and of both tyranny and terror,

is overwhelming and generalized fear as shaped by submission to authority.

Structures and figures of authorized power feed on fear and hate, grow stronger by the cycle of power and violence and the negative emotions and forces of darkness to which they give form and through which they subjugate others.

We must question, expose, mock and challenge authority whenever it comes to claim us. These are the four primary duties of a citizen in a free society of equals.

Law serves power, order appropriates, and there is no just authority.

Let us be unconquered, masterless, and free; let us answer tyranny with resistance, control with anarchy and civil disobedience, conformity with transgression, and division with solidarity.

Let us answer hate with love and fear with our faith in each other; let us reach out across our boundaries and become better than we now are, let us join together and break the chain of lies which binds us through our most atavistic passions to enslavement by authority and addiction to power.

Let us dethrone authority and abandon power over others for an empowered self-ownership of identity; that we may reinvent how to be human as autonomous individuals, through and for one another in glorious diversity, democracy, and a free society of equals.

Let us evolve toward a nonviolent and noncoercive society together, become bearers of the Torch of Liberty together, and unite to achieve our dreams of democracy together.

Let us be bringers of chaos, joy, transformation, and revolution.

The Silence of the Lambs