against his story
against his story – fredy perlman (1983) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredy_Perlman]
Fredy Perlman (20 August 1934 – 26 July 1985) was an American author, publisher, and activist. His best-known work, Against His-Story, Against Leviathan!, retells the historical rise of state domination through the Hobbesian metaphor of the Leviathan.
(still reading/writing notes on tablet.. but adding page because/while tweeting a bunch from ch 20)
from kindle version from anarchist library [https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/fredy-perlman-against-his-story-against-leviathan]
history ness et al (all data to date non legit.. because from whales in sea world.. so we have no idea what legit free people are like)
notes/quotes:
ch 20
We’ve already seen that commerce or trade, what the Burghers will call Business, is the practice of treating fellow human beings as enemies..t
marsh exchange law et al
Burghers reduce people as well as land to saleable commodities, and Scientists will further reduce both to atoms manipulable by power-artists.. The scribes of this movement call their nature-hatred Rationalism and their misanthropy Humanism..t
Until the Renaissance, a proposition or a deed was reasonable if it was in harmony with the human and natural context. Irrational, Unnatural and Inhuman were kindred terms if not actually synonyms. Yet now that human powers of reasoning are placed at the service of the most inhuman and unnatural as well as irrational propositions and deeds, the accomplishment is hailed as Rationalism.
The later so-called Enlightenment will sever reason from every human and natural context, and the full harvest of this triumph of the irrational masked as reason will be reaped when atoms of Hiroshima living beings as well as their environment are splintered by the next-to-last invention of this irrational “reason”
Reason, the human power to comprehend meanings, becomes degraded into an instrument for dissolving meanings. The reasoner, instead of aiming to grasp the cosmic context of seemingly isolated phenomena, now aims to isolate phenomena from any context. Meaning is replaced by definition, reasoning by analysis, mythology by science.
The artists of isolation will call themselves Natural Scientists, but their Naturalism is as bogus as their humanism. Nature is no more the reason for analytic acrobatics than human community is.
The Renaissance is something new, but it is not a rebirth. The Rebirth is as bogus as the Humanism, Rationalism and Naturalism..t
The Renaissance is not a birth but debut. It is Leviathan’s coming-out party. It is the beast’s first public appearance in its own clothes, namely with nothing on but its fangs and claws. The Renaissance is Leviathan’s naming ceremony. It is a feast celebrating Leviathan in its own name and for its own sake.
Da Vinci, not satisfied with the incomparable beauty of the canvasses with which he decorates the palace walls of great profiteers and murderers, runs to his patrons with sketches of submarines, flying machines and killing instruments designed to raise mass destruction to a level of perfection achieved by his paintings.
The Renaissance artist’s self-abandoned to the beast is so total, the artistry is so consummate, that it seems to reach a limit of what is humanly possibly. Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael and the other greats have no real forerunners; they will also have no real heirs.
Those capable of such total devotion to Leviathan will not be able to master the artistry, and those capable of the artistry will not be able to annihilate their humanity so totally. The devotees of Leviathanic power will eventually degenerate into the artistic morons we will know as advertisers and propagandists, the self-styled “commercial artists,” while artists will become so incapable of Leviathan-worship that they will be regarded by Leviathan’s good people as degenerates and will be called “Bohemians.”.. t
another art world ness
The wall separating power-servers from “Bohemians,” like the wall separating Science from Art, will start to rise already during Quatrocento.
The scouts and instrument-makers, so-called Savants, soon to become Bureaucrats and Scientists, will never turn against the hand that feeds them. These power-servers, although no longer painters and sculptors, will be the true heirs of the Renaissance. They will remain carriers of the specious Humanism, Rationalism, and Naturalism of the great men of the Renaissance. The power-servers will make it increasingly difficult for their former colleagues to find human or natural subjects, for they will systematically and with consummate artistry reduce all human and natural subjects to manipulable Leviathanic objects. They will be Leviathan’s claws and fangs.
Or rather, the so-called Humanists will become Leviathan’s claws and fangs after they replace the priestly bureaucrats who have been exercising these functions for over a millennium.
The new bureaucrats call themselves Humanists precisely because they are not similarly encumbered by any relics of human freedom or community..t
The new power-server is a tabula rasa on which only the pseudo-thoughts of Leviathan are written. He is a State-made, State-licensed and State-employed psudo-man, a phenomenon Hobbes perceptively recognizes as a spring or a wheel.
The State-servers naturally hasten to appropriate for themselves the Chruch’s scribe-training centers, the universities. These centers, already factories for the production and licensing of power-servers, now begin to mass-produce Renaissance men..t
no train ness.. not any form of m\a\p
Every prince, banker and merchant can now purchase clerks who are not clerics, servants who are loyal to no one but the boss who hires them, exectuives and executioners who do not try to reconcile the boss’s will with the god’s will.
The Church is no longer needed as universal trainer of bureaucrats since each State begins to operate its own factories for the production and licensing of power-servers.
In this rush, the bureaucrats complete the rape of the human populations encased in the Leviathanic segments. Lords have already appropriated all pastures and forests, merchants have appropriated every object that can be moved from its source to a market. State-licensed experts now proceed to appropriate the very talents of the unlicensed population and to render Leviathan’s “subjects” totally denuded and dependent objects..t
Healers, navigators, builders, story-tellers and even visionaries are displaced and then silenced by State-licensed Masters and Doctors of Medicine, Astronomy, Architecture, Philosophy, MetaPhysics. Everything human beings did by themselves and for themselves is taken over by State-licensed monopoly..t
well.. before that.. via any form of m\a\p.. but yeah
Neither merchants nor commercializing nobles protest the burning of their competitors, nor do doctors of Medicine protest the burning of healers.
The Doctors will later wield a machinery less spectacular than the Inquisitor’s fire to eliminate the unlicensed, but this silencing machinery is as yet no more than a distant project. And the Doctors need to remove the popular healers as urgently as merchants need to remove commercially-experienced former Muslims and Jews. The so-called witches, heiresses to the informally transmitted knowledge of herbs and illnesses, are known to be healers, whereas the Doctors, notoriously ignorant of all this lore, are intent on establishing a State-licensed monopoly over illness so as to police the sick. The Doctors will eventually appropriate some of the herbal knowledge of the exterminated witches, but the healing will always be incidental to the policing. They will persecute illnesses even if they have to turn human beings to vegetables or cut them to shreds.
forbidden cures et al.. bush immune system law et al
Medicine is only one of the human domains over which the State-licensed Masters and Doctors establish their monopoly. In every domain, human talents and powers are transformed into powers wielded by a police. Everything people did for themselves comes to be done against them by Leviathan’s licensed agents. Human beings as well as the Biosphere fall under continual police surveillance..t
And Leviathan does not use its policing to enhance life but only to further enhance its policing powers, to fatten the artifice, to enlarge the realm of the dead.
Leviathan’s licensed agents even move to expropriate radical visionaries of their memory of human freedom, kinship and community. .t State-licensed visionaries, Masters and Doctors of Letters, Philosophy and Metaphysics, send their tentacles probing among the last traces of memory’s remembered humanity. The lettered Doctors appropriate the witches’ healing arts. The licensed scribes display the “Golden Age” in official tracts and poems. They appropriate the Age in which there were neither Doctors nor Patients, neither Lawyers nor Criminals, neither Lords nor Serfs. They display their conquest the same way a hunter displays the antlers of a murdered deer, as trophies.
The Golden Age becomes the private property of Men of Letters,..t and like the private domain of a Lord, its owner has dominion over its fish and over its fowl and over every living thing that moveth in it. The Golden Age becomes a piece of real estate, a literary commodity, a dead thing. The State-licensed Men of Letters who corner this commodity establish their monopoly over it the same way merchants and Medical Doctors establish their monopolies: by eliminating competitors.
lit & num as colonialism et al
When the monopolies of the Golden Age come face-to-face with communities of free human beings who have never left their Golden Age, the Savants are on the side of the merchants condemning Unbelievers and the Doctors condemning healers to death by fire. Like the preachers of Sin who turn on the sinless with instruments of torture, the licensed Savants turn on free communities with Leviathanic claws and fangs. The first Anthropologists, like the later ones, are not anti-Leviathanic radicals. They are Leviathan’s agents, its eyes and ears. Their aim is not to live in human communities but to live off them. They are head-hunters. Their Calling, their specific Profession, is to shrink human communities to trophies which hang alongside deer antlers in Leviathan’s gameroom, its Museum of Natural Science.
The discovery is a Leviathanic Dis-covery. The European Leviathan, recently fortified by Scientists, Bankers and Doctors, is the entity that dis-covers a new world. The notorious Columbus and his murderous successors do not cross the water as free human beings but as Leviathan’s claws and fangs, as armored beastly tentacles.
ch 24
The two feuding Interests are not persons but personifications; they will eventually call themselves Corporations. These are not human beings who feud because they are personally touched, insulted or harmed. It is the Savings that are threatened or harmed..t
The whole task of eloquence is to present the needs of these inhuman processes as urgent human needs. Preserving/Furthering the sequence that yields super-savings from expropriated lands/animals is identified with Independence, Freedom and Happiness..t
The cosmos itself is nothing but a vast artifice, a machine, a clock wound up by the Great Artificer, the Mathematician. Terms like force and fraud cannot be applied to clockwork, and terms like inhuman and unnatural lose all autonomous meaning if the human and the natural are also mere clockwork..t
Today, the unhappy inmates go on hurling themselves toward the happy Tommorrow. t
back to original notes from tablet:
4
ch 1
6
Who, then, is the wrecker of the Biosphere? Turner points at the Western Spirit. This is the hero who pits himself against the Wilderness, who calls for a war of extermination by Spirit against Nature, Soul against Body, Technology against the Biosphere, Civilization against Mother Earth, god against all.
Marxists point at the Capitalist mode of production, sometimes only at the Capitalist class. Anarchists point at the State. Camatte points at Capital. New Ranters point at Technology or Civilization or both.
If Toynbee’s protagonist, Mankind, is too diffuse, many of the others are too narrow.
They fail to see that the Anti-capitalist mode of production wants only to outrun its brother in wrecking the Biosphere.
Anarchists are as varied as Mankind. There are governmental and commercial Anarchists as well as a few for hire. Some Anarchists differ from Marxists only in being less informed. They would supplant the state with a network computer centers, factories and mines coordinated “by the workers themselves” or by an Anarchist union. They would not call this arrangement a State. The name-change would exorcize the beast.
7
Modern graverobbers have been digging up these god’s bones and displaying the bones in glass cases of Positive Evidence. The graverobbers use these bone cases to bully all stories other than their own out of human memory. But the graverobber’s stories are duller than myriad other stories, and their cases of bones shed light only on the graverobbers themselves.
8
The smug, conservative majorities, happy with their capacities, fulfilled by their environments, remained what they were.
11
Instead of abandoning ourselves, instead of savoring what little we can of their powers, we define and categorize.
We speak of Matri-archy. The name is a cheap substitute for the experience. It is a bargain, and we’re always on the lookout for bargains. Once the name is on the door, the door can be closed. And we want doors to stay closed.
The name Matri-archy is on the door of an age when women knew themselves, and were known by men, as the conceivers, as the creators of life, as embodiments of the first being, as first beings.
To know the name on the door is to know nothing. Knowledge begins on the other side of the threshold. Even the name on the door is wrong. Matri refers to mother, but archy comes from an altogether different age. Archy refers to government, to artificial as opposed to natural order, to an order where the Archon is invariably a man. An-archy would be a better name for the door. The Greek prefix “an” means “without.”
When the mother shares the experience, she also shares the thousands of generations of vision and insight, the wisdom that helped make her experience so meaningful, so frightfully profound. She doesn’t apply chalk to a blackboard. She doesn’t write a textbook. She hops. She sings. She begins the “lurid dance,” the “orgy” that will one day terrify the Christians.
12
Photographs show what we’re most interested in: the surfaces of things. They don’t show qualities, spirits.
They remembered — but vaguely, foggily. Surrounded by things, they lost the ability to express the qualities. They knew the age they had left was more valuable, more pure, more beautiful than anything they found since. But their language had gone poor. They could speak of what they lost only by comparing it to things of their world. They called the forgotten age the Age of Gold.
13
ch 2
16
The Lugal, which means strong man in Sumerian, may or may not learn from the beavers, and he may or may not do the planning. He certainly does the supervising. Wasn’t he designated by the elders?
When the ditches and canals are dug, the Lugal returns among his peers, proud but not yet haughty. Nothing has changed yet. Such cooperative ventures were infrequent but not uncommon in communities of kin.
But this is Erech, a place where the gods obviously don’t want people to live. A single flood carries the whole works into the sea. The women call the old men to another council. This time the elders choose a yet stronger young man and urge him to study the beavers more conscientiously or dream more profoundly. And this time the banks and dikes hold, at least initially.
But Erech remains a materially wretched place, and before long the banks begin to crumble. The experienced Lugal is called to repair the banks and dikes. The Lugal and his cousins complain that they should have called a moon sooner, when the banks were still repairable; now they have to rebuild the entire works. This happens twice, at most three times, before the Lugal insists on having a seat in the council of elders, so as to have a say in choosing the time to repair dikes.
22
The Ensi cannot yet visualize a watch. The more advance Hobbes will no longer be able to visualize nature or human beings. He will ask “what is the heart, but a spring; and the nerves, but so many strings; and the joints, but so many wheels…?” In a world of watches, the Leviathan will not appear as strange to Hobbes as it appears to the Ensi.
Hobbes will picture the Leviathan as an artificial English man: masculine, blond, with a crown on its head, a scepter in one hand and a sword in the other, its body composed of myriads of faceless human beings, zeks.
24
ch 3
The first Leviathan does not revolutionize the material conditions of production, for it institutes these; it is itself synonymous with material conditions of production. The first Leviathan revolutionizes the conditions of existence itself, and not only of human beings but of all living beings and of Mother Earth herself.
The surplus product makes its appearance together with the vessels that hold it. Human communities have long had baskets and vases, although rarely more than they could carry from winter to spring camps. They did not need them. With the rise of the first Leviathan there is a virtual technological revolution in vessel production. Turner, and Mumford before him, mention the proliferation of bins, storage jars and clay vats that now makes its appearance.
In fact Ur, enclosed by walls and stocked with grain, is itself a large vat, a town-sized storage bin.
testart storage law et al
The surplus product is merely another name for Leviathan’s material contents, its entrails. It can hardly exist by itself, suspended in mid-air, “ripe” for the beastly carcass to form around it.
Communities of free people had usually stored enough food to last them through an average winter, and although some of their dreamers were excellent weathermen, they often had to skimp and squeeze when the sky outwitted the dreamer.
The first Leviathan stores enough for the worst possible winter and then some, since free people no longer do the work. A living being so stuffed would suffocate and explode. There are hoards of every conceivable product. And where there are hoards, there’s trade.
Trade is very old. In the state of nature, trade is something people do to their enemies. They don’t trade with kin.
A person gives things, just as she gives songs or stories or visions to her kin. The receiver may or may not reciprocate on some other occasion. The giving is the source of satisfaction. We will be so far removed from this, we will not understand. That will be our shortcoming, not hers.
She trades only with enemies. If a hostile group, whether near or distant, has something she wants, she and several well-armed cousins go to the hostiles with something the hostiles might want. She offers her gift, and the hostiles had better offer the thing she wants on the spot or she’ll carry her gift right back to her village.
Soon after the rise of the first Ur, trade becomes extensive. Virtually everyone is now everyone else’s enemy. When you give someone a gift, you expect what you went for; you keep careful records on your clay tablet, and woe to him who defaults.
27
Why do the resisters fail? This is an important question, the question of Life against Death. Norman O. Brown will make it the title of a very informative book.
Pre-state communities were gatherings of living but mortal individuals. All their secrets and all their ways were passed on directly, by word of mouth. If the keeper of important uncommunicated secrets died, her secrets died with her. Enmities and grudges died with their holders. The visions and the ways were as varied as the individuals who experienced and practiced them; that’s why there was such a richness. But the visions and ways were as mortal as the people. Mortality is an inseparable part of Life: it is Life’s end.
We will keep projecting modern institutions into the state of nature. There were no institutions in the state of nature.
Institutions are impersonal and immortal. They share this immortality with no living beings under the sun. Of course they are not living beings. They are segments of a carcass. Institutions are not a part of Life but a part of Death. And Death cannot die.
Ensis die and zeks die, but the labor gang “lives” on. Generals and soldiers die, but Ur’s army “lives” on and in fact grows larger and deadlier. Death’s realm grows but the living die. This creates problems that resisters have not, so far, been able to deal with.
[no history for alivenes.. (graeber unpredict law).. but institution not alive.. so no death]
28
But a permanent division of labor is compulsory simply by being permanent, and compulsion is soon as common on the banks of the Nile as on those of the Tigris. What was done voluntarily by one generation is expected of the next, and is imposed. Egypt is no longer a place where people share ways; it is now a place where some impose laws on others. Ways were always living ways; laws are not ways of free people. Laws are Leviathan’s ways.
29
The death of Egypt’s gods is recorded. After two or three generations of Pharaoh’s protection, the figures on the Temple walls and pillars no longer jump or fly; they no longer even breathe. They’re dead. They’re lifeless copies of the earlier, still living figures. The copyists are exact, we would say pedantic; they seem to think that faithful copying of the originals will bring life to the copies.
A similar death and decomposition must pale the songs and ceremonies as well. What was once joyful celebration, self-abandon, orgiastic communion with the beyond, shrinks to lifeless ritual, official ceremony led by the head of State and his officials. It all becomes theater, and it is all staged. It is no longer for sharing but for show. And it no longer enlarges the participant, who now becomes a mere spectator. He feels diminished, intimidated, awed by the power of Pharaoh’s household.
Our painting, music, dance, everything we call Art, will be heirs of the moribund spiritual. What we call Religion will be another dead heir, but at such a high stage of decomposition that its once-living source can no longer be divined.
30
People never become altogether empty shells. A glimmer of life remains in the faceless Ensis and zeks who seem more like springs and wheels than like human beings. They are potential human beings. They are, after all, the living beings responsible for the cadaver’s coming to life, they are the ones who reproduce, wean and move the Leviathan. Its life is but a borrowed life; it neither breathes nor breeds; it is not even a living parasite; it is an excretion and they are the ones who excrete it.
The compulsive and compulsory reproduction of the cadaver’s life is the subject of more than one essay. Why do people do it? This is the great mystery of civilized life.
36
Human communities regress while the worms progress. The Leviathan’s greatest achievement, as L. Mumford will suggest, is to reduce human beings to things, to remake men into efficient mechanical fighting units.
All this is depressing. The realm of Death expands. And since Death is to Life as Night is to Day, when Death’s realm expands, Life’s contracts. The inhuman tale truly signifies nothing human.
Having mentioned some of the main protagonists who set themselves up against human communities and against Mother Earth herself, I’ll turn to a small group of people who who withdrew from the entrails of one of the great Leviathans. These people were insignificant to everyone but themselves at the time of their withdrawal and would have remained insignificant if their Jewish, Christian and Islamic heirs had not carried the shadow of their withdrawal to every previously safe refuge on the globe.
These people are, of course, the Israelites who withdrew from Egyptian Civilization, and at this point I have to say that I’m surprised the armored questioner who smugly threw the positive wonders of civilization in my face, since part of his armor is made out of the detritus of this small group who walked away from the wonders.
37
ch 4
43
Moses is challenged. He can respond by going to them, by listening to their voices. He’s still Moses the man, the potential human being. He’s free. He can let the living glimmer inside him open up, like an egg; he can choose to come alive.
But Moses responds by turning his back to them. He lets the armor take over. He stiffens. W. Reich will say he becomes rigid. He chooses to let the potential remain Nothing, to let the armor extinguish the little glimmer of Life there was. He lets Leviathan speak through him. And the voice that speaks is not that of Akhenaten, the Sun, but that of Lugalzaggizi, the Lord of Lords.
The armor speaks of no garden. It expresses “a vision of life that is spiritually light years removed from the mythic community,” as Turner will put it. The voice of Leviathan speaks of Commandments and Punishments. It does not speak of ways, of paths to Being, but of laws, of closed gates. It does not say: Thou canst and Thou shalt Be. It says: Thou shalt not.
And woe to those who disobey. Just as the thing, Leviathan, has its police to persecute, torture and execute those who stray from its justice, so the concept of Leviathan, Yahweh, has its police.
But the concept’s police is not itself a concept. Moses gives this task to the life-giver herself, to Nature—not all of Nature, but only her irruptions, only her violence, all condensed and concentrated as in Lugalzaggizi’s own god in the Ziggurat. Earthquakes, storms, floods and plagues are Yahwehs’s instruments of persecution, torture and execution. The goddess worshiped in the calf is turned against her worshipers.
And now comes the crowning touch. Now Moses becomes an actual forerunner of Lenin. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” This is something Moses may well have learned from Akhenaten. This is modern. No Sumero-Akkadians have yet been able to impose the “no other.” Moses does not put on mere bits of armor; he wears the whole thing.
This massacre is the first Holocaust perpetrated in the name of Yahweh. And there is neither human recourse nor human justification. “I am that I am.” This is Dogma.
The anti-human, anti-natural face of what will later be called Totalitarianism, has to be worn together with the rest of the armor. Every last speck of human skin has to be concealed. Leviathan has neither life nor soul. It is that it is. It is its own sole goal. It is Death, unmitigated, unjustified, unexplained.
We will get used to Science, Technology and the Secular State; we will not be horrified by the inhumanity of this man’s vision; some of us will even be impressed by the progressive, nay prophetic, character of it.
But those who left Egypt, those of them who are still alive, cannot stomach the monstrous regression, and Moses knows it. If he doesn’t act quickly, the mass murder will be followed by mass suicide or by an Exodus of those who are left. “I am that I am” is not enough for people who still remember.
So he brings out the famous Covenant. He has already told them, “if ye will hearken unto My voice… then ye shall be Mine own treasure…” Now, like a horse trainer, he tells them how they will be treasured, what reward their obedience will yield them. They will reach the Promised Land. But in this land they will remain zeks. The curse of toilsome labor will not be lifted from them. The land will not be Eden, a place which no longer exists for this armored man (just as women don’t exist for him; only the sons exist; women are nothing but childbearing machines, vessels which might as well be made of clay, the stuff to which Earth herself has been reduced, stuff which is to be manipulated and mutilated).
46
ch 5
52
Hesiod’s remembrance of things past gives him a power Moses had lacked: the power to remove his Leviathanic mask while still enmeshed in a Leviathanic web. We will call such a power “critical theory,” an insipid name for it. This power will later be shaped into a dagger with two edges, but not by the Greeks to whom Hesiod gives it.
[critical theory]
53
ch 6
The Phoenician octopus and its later Greek, Venetian and other offspring will come to be seen as something altogether different from the Assyrian worm. There will even be those who will see the octopus as a form of human freedom. I intend to show that this is an optical illusion.
There is no doubt that the two Leviathans differ. The artificial worm’s claws and fangs, its armies, are usually attached to the body, whereas the tentacles of the artificial octopus detach themselves from the body and can be said to move about freely, especially if the tentacles are ships. The worm is largely landborne whereas the octopus tends to be seaborne.
There is no doubt that two different types are in question. The point is that these are not types of human community but types of Leviathan. Both are what Hobbes will call “artificial men.” Each of them is an automaton, a machine, and like other machines it can sometimes be converted or adapted to do what the other does.
The main difference between them does not lie in the way the tentacles move nor in the medium through which they move nor in the size of the head, but rather in the way the two automata use the already-mentioned surplus. Both live off the surplus product of zeks’ labor. But the worm uses most of its surplus to enlarge its head and body, its officials and armies, whereas the octopus keeps most of its surplus continually circulating between sources and destinations.
This different treatment of the surplus gives each a specific advantage over the other. The one tends to have greater wealth, the other greater power.
54
We will have to keep reminding ourselves that the landed worm is a coherent and efficient entity only in the wishful thinking of a Hobbes. Continual decomposition is the normal state of artificial worms in the field. The human beings reduced to springs and wheels never cease to resist this reduction. The beast’s military campaigns against external as well as internal resisters, namely its attempts to halt the decomposition, are in fact the stuff of His-story.
Assyria’s third Tiglathpileser, called Pulu the Restorer by his contemporaries, was another of those great innovators along the wide path that leads from Barbarism to Civilization. Inhuman cruelty had been practiced by the Civilized before. This progressive monarch’s innovation was to deport entire populations from their familiar places of refuge to strange places where they had to depend on the conqueror’s generosity even for food.
57
ch 7
58
In distant China people are saying that the armor and the mask of Leviathan are not the Way. They are learning to experience joy from the rising of the sun and the gushing of a brook from a source, not from the fall of an enemy and the gushing of blood from a wound. They are starting to shed the armor. They are saying that the human being, who was so much, is becoming very little.
In India people are saying the Leviathan and its artificial distinctions and hierarchies is not the ultimate reality, is no reality at all. They are breaking all their ties to the Leviathan and concentrating on burning out the armor that has wrapped itself around their innards. They are intent on removing every last splinter, for they too remember that human beings were much, that human beings used to fly.
From one to the other extremity of the wide continent, circles of women are dancing around fires celebrating the emergence of new human beings out of the ashes. All of Eurasia is dancing.
If we must label the dance, we can call it a generalized rejection of Civilization and all its masks and armors.
We cannot call the dance “religion.” The way of a free human being is All; there is nothing above it. Religion is a part of a Leviathan; it may have started as a way but it is no longer one; it has been mangled and turned into a part of a Leviathan’s armor.
We do not learn of the revulsion or of the expectation of human renewal from the dancers themselves because ignorant armies, Cyrus’s foremost among them, break up the circles.
We learn from the children and grandchildren who have not themselves danced, but who have heard.
60
But the Persians, with all their Assyrian and Babylonian armor, have forgotten just how fleet the steppe people used to be—and still are. The Persians catch a raider here, another there, but can find no city, no palace, no temple, not even a central camp. The armored men cannot imagine how people can live like that: in the woods, without labor gangs. This, to Leviathan’s armored men, is Wilderness. And Darius decides that his army, big as it is, is not yet big enough to swallow the wilderness.
61
ch 8
65
Shang Yang’s ideal polis has none of Plato’s frills. The philosopher-king of this Republic starts things moving by making the land of peasant communities a marketable commodity. Next, merchants impoverish the peasants and drive them into debt. Now the Duke expropriates the defaulting peasants, or else the peasants themselves sell their land to get out of debt. Either way, the ancient community based on kinship is broken up, the land passes to the Duke and his henchmen, and a large number of landless former peasants is available for labor gangs and armies. On this solid basis, Leviathan is constructed. It is bonded by coercion. Its elders are the secret police. Its argument is terror. Music, poetry and morality subvert its ends and are totally liquidated. The purpose of the machine is to enlarge itself by perpetual war and preparation for war.
67
There are some, called Cynics, who go even further. They say there’s nothing at all human about Leviathan, and the only human alternative is to disregard Polity altogether and live by one’s conscience.
Not since Hesiod’s age have Greeks turned their backs on Civilization so completely.
The resistance, rejection and withdrawal are either skipped in accounts of His-story, or else they’re compartmentalized and explained away as “religion.” Yet these are the only parts of the story tat have any human meaning. All the rest is a tale of worms, a tale of huge, maneating, earthwrecking artificial worms.
68
ch 9
75
ch 10
77
Soldiers overthow their commanders; at times they desert in mass. Peasants leave their lands untilled in order to keep food from Roman tax gatherers. Urban people move to the country so as to avoid all participation in official activities. The well-known Jewish dropouts called Essenes stay away from Roman as well as Judaean burdens and obligations.
The forms vary. The withdrawal is vast and it keeps on growing. We would call it a generalized resistance with revolutionary overtones.
By having all things in common, the resistors are melting the beast from within its entrails.
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ch 11
It must be remembered that machines have the perverse ability to do the same thing the same way for as long as they operate. The ability is built into machines. But people do not have this ability. They change, they die, they are replaced by others who perceive and behave differently.
The Leviathan places human beings in a situation they do not meet anywhere else in the Biosphere except in rare places like Sumer. In Sumer, the weather dried the fields up or else washed them away, not once or twice in a lifetime, but over and over again. Nowhere else, not in lands that border on ice nor in lands that border on sand, does Nature force human beings to become mirror images of their disasters. The Leviathan places every person it can reach in such a situation. Its tribute collectors, recruiters, procurers, rapists and cheaters beat on people with the regularity of a clock, forcing them into constant defensive responses which gradually also take on the regularity of a clock.
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Hounded out of Persia by the Zarathustrian priesthood he exposes, Mani finds refuge among Indian Buddhists who confirm what he already knows, namely that the Leviathan is not the ultimate reality, that it is no reality at all.
(decide sin in people.. moses et al)
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(now some say sin not in poor but in oppressors)
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But the Christians, instead of expressing their gratitude to the merciful god, spend their time philosophizing about whether the god is one or three.
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Unlike their reduced Byzantine neighbors, the Muslims do not persecute ways that have become religions, such as Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism or Buddhism, because their realize that religions are ways that have come to terms with Leviathan.
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The types of technologies developed by a Leviathan depend primarily on the type of Leviathan in question, not on the “state of developmednt of global productive forces” cited by artifice fetishists.
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ch 14
Lying becomes necessary and then compulsive because the people who fall heir to the rubble of the westernmost edge of the Roman Empire are so dehumanized by their struggle against their adversary that they forget not only their initial intentions but also their very origins and identity. All that remains of their former selves is the violence of their struggle to preserve themselves, and sheer violence cannot view itself in a glass; it must prevaricate; it must cover itself with masks and then with more masks over the initial masks, because the violence keeps showing through.
Some few people may be inhospitable and warlike, but no people can make a portion of the world off limits to a single bird, animal or person. The very notion is repugnant to free people. Not even gods have the power to keep people from going where they please.
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People dehumanized by the Leviathan are playing with the artificial beast’s decomposing segments, they are playing with the artifices we call technologies. This is some form of play; it is some kind of dance. But it is not a dance found anywhere in nature, either among animals or among human beings. It is the death rattle of a decomposing Leviathan.
The lie alone is incredible in its magnitude. What is even more incredible is the extent to which these manipulative prevaricators succeed. They do not succeed right away. They bide their time. Their patience is inhuman, it is demonic, it lasts from generation to generation, it persists the way only a Leviathan can persist. For this patience, all the early Vicars of Christ will be proclaimed saints by their later heirs.
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The Christianized human beings who are shackled with bonds of servitude — bonds which some of them had shaken off and others had never before experienced — do not passively reconcile themselves to the serfdom imposed on them. Their resistance becomes massive.
The Church tries to preclude this resistance by working on the violence so central to what Turner will Call the Western Spirit. We’ve already seen how the Pope’s agents used the doctrine of sin to lodge the blame for oppression within the immiserated victim.
After Charlemagne’s conquests, priests go everywhere, they turn every village, manor and hamlet into a parish, and the notorious training camps and prisons known as monasteries begin to do the landscape.
Disinherited Knights as well as frustrated resisters are recruited to the monasteries and transformed into adepts of the faith. In these establishments, which are nothing but early schools, human beings are systematically broken, the way horses or oxen are broken, to bear weights and pull loads. They are separated from their own humanity, from all natural activities and sequences, and taught to perform artificial activities and identify with Leviathanic sequences. They become disciplined springs and wheels engaged in a routine that has no relation to human desires or natural cycles.
The clock will be invented by monastic beings because the clock is nothing but a miniature monastery whose springs and wheels are made of metal instead of flesh and blood.
Such total repression rarely succeeds among beings not made of metal. The forms in which the repressed humanity returns are not recorded by the monastic scribes, although inmates and graduates of monasteries will invariably attribute a practice they will call “sodomy” to infidels unfamiliar to them; this may or may not be a clue to the contents of a monk’s unrepressed night life.
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No previous Leviathan had so completely degraded its human contents. Never before have people turned the Leviathans’s violence on themselves. The Popes and their establishment have achieved an unprecedented victory. Their Lugalzaggizi-Optimus Maximus, a synonym of Death, has mastered the feat of imposing its dominion over the living by means of their own minds and hands, the feat of making human individuals commit slow and torturous murder against themselves.
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ch 17
In Brittany, dispossessed peasants are heirs to a long tradition of glorified violence. They are capable of sweeping parish priests, abbots, bishops and the Pope himself out of Europe, and the prelates know it.
That’s why the priests talk about Sin: to make people turn the violence inward, against themselves.
That’s why the Pope proclaims a Crusade against Unbelievers: to deflect the violence, to turn it against others. A violence that could in the past be deflected away from Rome toward communities of Saxons can also be deflected away from Catholic prelates toward local Jews and distant Arabs. The Church will even turn the violence of the resisters against resisters themselves, but this feat will not leave the Church unscathed
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Cohn’s peers, professors who will massacre Vietnamese peasants from desks at a State University will pretend to be appalled by atrocities of Calleys who turn the professors’ words into deeds, but the professors’ real rage will be against the resisters who turn their weapons against the Calleys. The serious professors will heap all the deflected violence, Authority’s own violence, on the heads of the rebels resisting Authority’s violence.
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The Albigensians have no use for the guilt-inspired doctrine of the pseudo-Apostle Paul, the doctine of Sin. Thus they are immune to the entire repressive apparatus of the Church, the apparatus consisting of confessions and pardons, of imminent and promised salvations, of threatened excommunications and marketed absolutions. In their eyes, the greatest Sin is the misery of the dispossessed, and this is not caused by Adam’s fall but by the rapacity of commercializing Lords, priests and monks, whom they call evil.
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An individual intimately familiar with the daily rapacity may remain unmoved by critics of the rapacity. She or he must make a choice, she must decide to turn against the authorities and to join the circle of resisters. Sucha a decision disrupts a person’s whole life, and it needs to be motivated by very good reasons. The good reasons are expressed in the language of the time, not in the language of some future time. A revelation or a visitation is a very good reason. The revelation might come in a dream, or in a vision, or in what we will call a complete mental breakdown. Before this experience, everything was noise and nothing had meaning. After the experience, everything is clear. Now the individual wonders why others are so blind. She might become impatient with the others and leave them to their blindness, or she might decide to return to the others to help them see.
All this is very understandable, very human, and it has been taking place in human communities for a long time. But such sudden disruptions of individual lives are also disruptions of Leviathanic existence. After such experiences, an individual abandons the sequence of meaningless intervals of Leviathanic Time and recovers some of the rhythms of communities in the state of nature.
This is why Leviathanic His-storians will discount, malign and try to exorcise such experiences. Contempt and ridicule will be favorite weapons of the serious scholars who will pretend to give unbiased accounts.
Norman Cohn, for example, will go out of his way to talk about the revelations of millennarian resisters. He needs say no more. Equally armored readers will immediately share Cohn’s contempt towards individuals who are so pathological as to be guided by their own dreams and visions. The scholar and his armored readers will take it for granted that only the revelations of judges and scholars have validity.
Cohn’s ridicule will reach heights of scholarly contempt when he tells of individuals who consider themselves Messiahs, who convince themselves that their efforts can help save Mankind from Leviathanic dehumanization, enslavement and doom. Cohn need not exclaim: How naive! How criminal! how well deserved the jailing, the torture, the hanging, the burning! Such exclamations will come automatically to readers who consider their duly constituted authorities the only possible saviors of mankind and Leviathan the only possible Messiah.
Cohn will condemn the resisters only on paper, and too late to harm anything but our memory of them. The Church and its long secular arms do the actual arresting, jailing, torturing, burning and killing. With a millennium of experience in prevarication, deflection and repression, the Church is no novice as hangman.
The first act is to sponsor a certain Giovanni de Bernardone, nicknamed Francesco, who would have been a resister similar to many of the others if he had not let himself be turned into a tool of the Church.
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Already during the lifetime of the nature-worshipper, Innocent the Pope demonstrated how well he understood and appreciated Francis by simultaneously launching an altogether different Order, the Dominican. The founder of this one was a human clock, its recruits flesh-and-blood filing cabinets, its aim to impose on social life the regularity of clockwork. This is the Technological Order, the Order of the Inquisition. Its members approach nature with instruments of torture. Correct faith, like correct time, is a matter of adjusting certain springs and wheels.
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Unlike the recuperated St. Francis, the radicals know that they do not need a Church, priests or sacraments to mediatte between themselves and deity. The Church is nothing but an obstacle; it makes separations where there was unity; it overturns kinship and usurps community. The separations are the only real sin, and the agents of separations are the evil ones. The aim of the radicals is to overthrow the separation, to remove the masks and armors, to return to the original unity, the lost community of free loving kin.
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There seem to be two movements which pull in diametrically opposed directions. The first movement is a withdrawal from the entrails of Leviathan, the second is a self-defense agaisnt the monster’s attacks.
The withdrawal movement is a time of self-abandon, of mask and armor removal. Daring radicals and visionaries are embraced as kin, every new sect has its day, all are heard and absorbed, and everyone ventures into undiscovered realms.
All this abruptly ends when the self-defense begins. Self-abandon gives way to a new rigidity, masks and armors are put on, exotic visionaries are distrusted, then ostracized, finally eliminated.
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The Taborites, like the Sumerians, become a mirror image of what they’re fighting. They turn into an impregnable fortress. And they impose on themselves all the constraints the invading Leviathan fails to impose on them.
Defense remains a priority in Tabor, and the Adamites clearly disrupt Tabor’s defensive apparatus. Soon the exotic but attractive Adamites become exotic but dangerous in the eyes of many Taborites, especially in the eyes of Hussite priests who associate more readily with Hussite Barons than with anti-Christian Pikarti.
Hussite priests elect an elder to arbitrate theological disputes. In practice this elder is a bishop who is charged with judging the correctness of the views of erring Taborites. The Hussite priesthood becomes a church. The Bishop’s judgments are excommunications. Adamites, Free Spirits, Beguines, Beghards and their numerous sympathizers are condemned as heretics, and several hundred are expelled from Tabor
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But the victorious Tabor is not the Kingdom of Heaven, it is no longer even a league of free cities. Tabor is now an independent city-state provisioned by a dependent countryside. It has more in common with the Leviathan it opposes than with the free communities its radicals announced . It may be the first modern state with a popular army driven be patriotism instead of fealty, but it has ceased to be a beacon of freedom.
The extermination of radicals is followed by the extirpation of radicalism. The initial heterodoxy of the “five cities” is replaced by an increasingly narrow and conservative orthodoxy. Defense remains the priority, and for its sake, Taborite priests keep narrowing even their religious differences from Hussite barons, merchants and Prague theologians whose religion differs from Catholicism only in the meaning given to the rite of drinking wine and eating bread.
The final confrontation is not between Taborites and Catholic Crusaders, but between Taborites who merge with the conservative Hussites and Taborites who only now decide that the compromises have gone far enough. It is too late for such a decision. The resisters have nothing to stand on but the previous day’s compromises.
During a generation of spectacular victories, Tabor as a community of free human committed slow suicide. The Reformation of Christianity has begun.
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[mostly quoted/noted on top of this page.. but will add these too just in case missed some]
ch 20
A millennium of Christianity has taught Europeans that fallen human beings live in Sin. The dictum is not passively accepted by Christian Europeans. It is actively implemented. Those who do not live in Sin shall not live at all.
[huge .. esp toward end]
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We’ve already seen that commerce or trade, what the Burghers will call Business, is the practice of treating fellow human beings as enemies.
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Burghers reduce people as well as land to saleable commodities, and Scientists will further reduce both to atoms manipulable by power-artists.
The scribes of this movement call their nature-hatred Rationalism and their misanthropy Humanism. Naming things the opposite of what they are is a talent inherited from the Church.
Until the Renaissance, a proposition or a deed was reasonable if it was in harmony with the human and natural context. Irrational, Unnatural and Inhuman were kindred terms if not actually synonyms. Yet now that human powers of reasoning are placed at the service of the most inhuman and unnatural as well as irrational propositions and deeds, the accomplishment is hailed as Rationalism.
The later so-called Enlightenment will sever reason from every human and natural context, and the full harvest of this triumph of the irrational masked as reason will be reaped when atoms of Hiroshima living beings as well as their environment are splintered by the next-to-last invention of this irrational “reason”.
Unprecedented misanthropy is clothed as Humanism by masters of inversion schooled by a millennium of Vicars of Christ.
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Reason, the human power to comprehend meanings, becomes degraded into an instrument for dissolving meanings. The reasoner, instead of aiming to grasp the cosmic context of seemingly isolated phenomena, now aims to isolate phenomena from any context. Meaning is replaced by definition, reasoning by analysis, mythology by science.
The artists of isolation will call themselves Natural Scientists, but their Naturalism is as bogus as their humanism. Nature is no more the reason for analytic acrobatics than human community is.
The Renaissance is not a birth but debut. It is Leviathan’s coming-out party. It is the beast’s first public appearance in its own clothes, namely with nothing on but its fangs and claws.
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Da Vinci, not satisfied with the incomparable beauty of the canvasses with which he decorates the palace walls of great profiteers and murderers, runs to his patrons with sketches of submarines, flying machines and killing instruments designed to raise mass destruction to a level of perfection achieved by his paintings.
The Renaissance artist’s self-abandoned to the beast is so total, the artistry is so consummate, that it seems to reach a limit of what is humanly possibly. Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael and the other greats have no real forerunners; they will also have no real heirs.
Those capable of such total devotion to Leviathan will not be able to master the artistry, and those capable of the artistry will not be able to annihilate their humanity so totally. The devotees of Leviathanic power will eventually degenerate into the artistic morons we will know as advertisers and propagandists, the self-styled “commercial artists,” while artists will become so incapable of Leviathan-worship that they will be regarded by Leviathan’s good people as degenerates and will be called “Bohemians.”
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The new bureaucrats call themselves Humanists precisely because they are not similarly encumbered by any relics of human freedom or community. They drink much from the Church’s millennium-deep well of experience, but they have no fear that their institution will cause weeds of Eden to crop up in stone palaces. Their institution is Leviathan, a beast that decomposes all seeds of Eden.
The new power-server is a tabula rasa on which only the pseudo-thoughts of Leviathan are written. He is a State-made, State-licensed and State-employed psudo-man, a phenomenon Hobbes perceptively recognizes as a spring or a wheel.
Every prince, banker and merchant can now purchase clerks who are not clerics, servants who are loyal to no one but the boss who hires them, exectuives and executioners who do not try to reconcile the boss’s will with the god’s will.
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Lords have already appropriated all pastures and forests, merchants have appropriated every object that can be moved from its source to a market. State-licensed experts now proceed to appropriate the very talents of the unlicensed population and to render Leviathan’s “subjects” totally denuded and dependent objects.
Healers, navigators, builders, story-tellers and even visionaries are displaced and then silenced by State-licensed Masters and Doctors of Medicine, Astronomy, Architecture, Philosophy, MetaPhysics. Everything human beings did by themselves and for themselves is taken over by State-licensed monopoly.
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Witch-burner Torquemada’s fires are lit, not for Humanists, but for converted Muslims and Jews, and for healers. Neither merchants nor commercializing nobles protest the burning of their competitors, nor do doctors of Medicine protest the burning of healers.
The Doctors will later wield a machinery less spectacular than the Inquisitor’s fire to eliminate the unlicensed, but this silencing machinery is as yet no more than a distant project. And the Doctors need to remove the popular healers as urgently as merchants need to remove commercially-experienced former Muslims and Jews. The so-called witches, heiresses to the informally transmitted knowledge of herbs and illnesses, are known to be healers, whereas the Doctors, notoriously ignorant of all this lore, are intent on establishing a State-licensed monopoly over illness so as to police the sick. The Doctors will eventually appropriate some of the herbal knowledge of the exterminated witches, but the healing will always be incidental to the policing. They will persecute illnesses even if they have to turn human beings to vegetables or cut them to shreds.
Medicine is only one of the human domains over which the State-licensed Masters and Doctors establish their monopoly. In every domain, human talents and powers are transformed into powers wielded by a police. Everything people did for themselves comes to be done against them by Leviathan’s licensed agents. Human beings as well as the Biosphere fall under continual police surveillance.
Powers wielded by living beings to enhance their lives are appropriated by a dead thing, the almighty edifice, Leviathan. And Leviathan does not use its policing to enhance life but only to further enhance its policing powers, to fatten the artifice, to enlarge the realm of the dead.
Leviathan’s licensed agents even move to expropriate radical visionaries of their memory of human freedom, kinship and community. State-licensed visionaries, Masters and Doctors of Letters, Philosophy and Metaphysics, send their tentacles probing among the last traces of memory’s remembered humanity. The lettered Doctors appropriate the witches’ healing arts. The licensed scribes display the “Golden Age” in official tracts and poems. They appropriate the Age in which there were neither Doctors nor Patients, neither Lawyers nor Criminals, neither Lords nor Serfs. They display their conquest the same way a hunter displays the antlers of a murdered deer, as trophies.
The Golden Age becomes the private property of Men of Letters, and like the private domain of a Lord, its owner has dominion over its fish and over its fowl and over every living thing that moveth in it. The Golden Age becomes a piece of real estate, a literary commodity, a dead thing. The State-licensed Men of Letters who corner this commodity establish their monopoly over it the same way merchants and Medical Doctors establish their monopolies: by eliminating competitors.
When the monopolies of the Golden Age come face-to-face with communities of free human beings who have never left their Golden Age, the Savants are on the side of the merchants condemning Unbelievers and the Doctors condemning healers to death by fire. Like the preachers of Sin who turn on the sinless with instruments of torture, the licensed Savants turn on free communities with Leviathanic claws and fangs. The first Anthropologists, like the later ones, are not anti-Leviathanic radicals. They are Leviathan’s agents, its eyes and ears. Their aim is not to live in human communities but to live off them. They are head-hunters. Their Calling, their specific Profession, is to shrink human communities to trophies which hang alongside deer antlers in Leviathan’s gameroom, its Museum of Natural Science.
Europe’s Civilized head-hunters, witch-burners and world-eaters are already face-to-face with vast new fields in which to exercise their Leviathanic powers because, while merchants and bureaucrats were consolidating their initial monopolies, Spanish seamen “discovered” Europe’s long-sought America.
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The discovery is a Leviathanic Dis-covery. The European Leviathan, recently fortified by Scientists, Bankers and Doctors, is the entity that dis-covers a new world. The notorious Columbus and his murderous successors do not cross the water as free human beings but as Leviathan’s claws and fangs, as armored beastly tentacles.
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The Council concluded with an unprecedented resolve. Banishment was unheard of. It was doubtful if the Council of gathered Neshnabe had the authority to banish a member of the community; each person was free to follow her own dream wherever it led. Yet the Council banished Wiske.
The free people of the lush woodlands of Kichigami were happy without an Archon. They were happy because they were free. The good uncle was told to take his gift-giving disposition to a northern land of ice or to a southern land of fire, to a place where, it was thought, he might find people who were destitute, trapped and lost.
Armored Europeans will be interested in learning if this Wiske actually existed, and when he existed.
This was not what interested the Potawatomi. Wiske existed in the present. The story was reenacted in songs and dances, at ceremonies and festivals. Wiske was always a member of the community and he was always exiled.
The paradox will be problematic to people trapped in linear, Leviathanic time. The Potawatomi knew linear time as well as rhythmic time, and they also knew that what mattered, what was humanly important, did not take place in linear time.
Wiske’s gift-giving, his elevation and his banishment were rhythmic events, like the heart’s beat, like the sun’s rising, like vegetation’s rebirth. Rhythmic events were the subjects of songs, of dances, of the frequent ceremonies and festivals.
To know that Wiske “actually existed” was both impossible and trivial. Such events will be considered ‘facts’ and “raw data” by the Leviathanized because the linear progression of such events constitutes Leviathanic time, namely His-story. The Leviathanized will remember only fragments of the sole events they consider worth remembering because the memory of such events will not be lodged in living human beings but on stone tablets, on paper, and eventually in machines.
The Potawatomi were not data-processing machines nor computers for the storage of trivial information. They needed “raw data” about as much as they needed Wiske. They made Wiske the butt of many of their jokes. Among the Potawatomi, the almighty Archon got no further than to be the subject of funny stories.
Part-human, part-beast, and possessing the Leviathanic virtue of existing forever, Wiske the gift-giver reappeared in the jokes as the long-eared, long-membered and long-tailed Trickster, forever setting traps for animals and people and forever trapping himself.
Jokes were for laughs. Linear events, namely unexpected disruptions of life’s rhythms, were usually funny. Sometimes they were tragic.
If the tragedy was repeated, then the event was not linear but rhythmic, and it was already known. Rhythms were grasped with symbols and expressed with music. Musical knowledge was knowledge of the important, the deep, the living. The music of myth expressed the symphony of rhythms that constituted the Cosmos.
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The newcomer provided a missing rhythm. The name expressed the community’s embrace of the missing rhythm and also some expectations about the music that might be heard.
But the specific rhythm of the newly-named could be foretold no more than the final shape of a tree can be foretold from a seedling. The child was placed in no school to stunt her growth to the expected size and shape. On the contrary, the girl-child as well as her newborn brother were left free to emulate, or ignore, uncles and aunts, cousins among the animals, everyone and everything under the Sun, not excluding the Sun.
The grownups watched, not to close doors, but to open doors, to let the children wander where they would unharmed.
By the time the Potawatomi children were old enough to have expectations of their own, they were prepared to be their own guides. Dream lodges were set up in the forest, one for the girl, another for her brother. The youngsters fasted until a Totem spirit visited them. The spirit usually appeared in the form of an animal, and was usually not the same spirit whose name the child wore. The spirit promised to guide the child along a specific path, namely to give the child an individual rhythm, and the spirit offered the child certain powers with which to achieve the rhythm, powers with which to light the path.
Henceforth the children were on their own, bound neither by laws nor by the community’s expectations. Their own dream spirit helped them decide whether or not to live up to the ancestor whose name they carried. If they decided not to, they would be renamed after the first act that revealed the children were determined to follow distinct paths.
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If we knew all this, we wouldn’t ask why the man resisted encasing himself in our linear, visionless Order. Isn’t it our longing that expresses itself in a story about a European called Faust who turns his back on respectability, on the esteem of his colleagues, on law as well as religion, so as to have access to a personal guide and personal powers available to every Potawatomi?
The man’s older sister, in the meantime, created a music that will sound less ‘romantic’ to our ears. She too followed her own dream, but she found it possible to fulfill her own guide’s expectations as well as the community’s. She lived up to the Totem ancestor whose name she proudly continued to carry. She threw herself into the Totem’s activities, perhaps reacting against her lonesome brother; perhaps she, too, thought him excessively ‘romantic’.
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Like her name-ancestor,
Like her ancestor
Like her ancestor, she gathered herbs and became familiar with their general uses, but when her son was attacked by something he ate, she had to learn from her own spirit how to combine and administer the herbs while singing him back to health.
Her son as well as her daughter later took after her lonesome younger brother, but she was neither disappointed nor surprised; she knew that the children were following their own dreams, as she herself had.
To some of us it will be crystal clear why the Potawatomi woman as well as her younger brother were repelled by the prospects held out to them by the generous Wiske. But we will ask how people who were never encased in a Leviathan’s entrails could know enough of such a condition to be repelled by it. This question has been given numerous answers, all of them speculative, all songs or stories. The quality of the songs has been declining ever since written words began replacing living voices, ever since Leviathanic records began replacing human memories. The story I’ve been telling is not from the heyday but from the decline, yet I’II go on singing it because at least some of its cadences disrupt and even wreak havoc on the stupefying, passively-accepted official tunes.
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I’ve come to some of the last human communities swallowed by Leviathan, and I find them resisting the beast already before it reaches them. How do these people already know what they are up against? Is it possible that the beast is not one but many, that Ur is not in Sumer but wherever people gather, that Leviathan is as natural to human beings as hives to bees? Anything is possible, but the admission of such a possibility is cynically misanthropic and it precludes envisioning any exit from the trap. Such a possibility cannot be admitted into a song of freedom, because its admission is a prognostication of Earth’s doom.
I cannot deny that human beings on all the world’s great islands are able to encase themselves in Leviathan’s entrails, since they’ve all demonstrated this ability. I can deny that such a condition is as natural to them as hives to bees, and the rest of my story will affirm that it is not.
How could the Potawatomi have had any wind of the Leviathanic currents stirring in other parts of the world? The Great Lakes were as far removed from such currents as any refuge on the globe. Stories have been told about Leviathanic currents that blew from continents called Atlantis and Mu, but the stories of sunken continents raise more questions than they answer, and most of their tellers place Leviathan, not living beings, at the Origin.
The breezes need not be sought on sunken continents; they could have blown to the Great Lakes from every one of the four directions. I know as little about these four winds as about Mu, but my story can soar more easily on the winds than on sunken continents.
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Vikings actually left a saga describing their trip across. Biscayan, Basque and other European fishermen did not ask Ferdinand and Isabela’s permission to fish for cod near shores inhabited by cousins of the Potawatomi. The easterners’ contacts with Eurasians were apparently no rarities, but our knowledge of them is as poor as our knowledge of Mu.
The south wind carried more substantial news, and our knowledge of it is not so sparse. Across a narrow strait from the Potawatomi villages there were large villages of Iroquoian speaking people who lived in long rectangular lodges, people later known as Wendats or Wyandots. These longhouse people, as well as their linguistic cousins further to the east, remembered having migrated northward from a far-away land. They had fled from stone giants, flying heads and maneaters. These dreaded beings are of course mythological subjects, airy creatures of the imagination, not solid historical entities like Nero, Caligula and Constantine. The Wendats who told of these beings were not interested in His-story, but in their own cosmic context.
The cosmos of the Wendats, who were peaceful corn and bean cultivators in northern woodlands, included monsters that did not exist in the north. With poetic accuracy and succinctness, Wendat myths gave an outsider’s view of beings uncannily similar to stone pyramids taller than jungle trees, to feathered serpents, to masked priests who sacrificed human beings. The Wendat cosmos included a Leviathan, most plausibly the Leviathan that stirred in Yucatan already before Frankish tribesmen stormed the walls of the Roman Leviathan in Eurasia.
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The ruins of abandoned architectural wonders will be found in our day by so-called Archeologists, who will be dazzled by the grandeur of what they find, and even more by the abandonment of places so ideally suited to being university campuses. The Arche- and Anthropologists will fill libraries explaining the abandonment in terms of every cause except human resistance. The prospect of their own academic centers reverting to what they call weeds will fog the Anthropologists’ imaginations.
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ch 22
The idyl is gone now. Nothing is left but the dirty realities. Leviathan is all there is. These very words, written words, are inventions of the Lugal’s scribes. They cannot convey dream time.
Every meaning has been inverted.
“Central Africa,” “Australia,” “America” are not the names of places where free human beings ever lived. They are names of unprecedented holocausts, of gigantic colonies, of monstrous Leviathanic trophies. They are Leviathan’s “empty continents.”
From the vantage point of Death, all Life is an aberration. The languages of the two protagonists are mutually unintelligible. The very vocabularies are untranslatable. Leviathan’s world is a Wilderness to free living beings. The freedom of living beings is a Wilderness to Leviathan.
Free human beings were able to encompass Leviathan in their horizon and still remain free.
The Leviathanized cannot encompass free beings in their horizon and still remain Leviathanized. Once they grasp freedom they become Renegades. And the stiff-necked spokesmen of Leviathan know it. The questions: Who would abandon the amenities of Civilization? and Who would go back to the digging stick? are rhetorical questions practiced in front of a looking glass.
The Renegades from Civilization are notorious. They shed masks. They shed whole armors. They separate from previously indispensable amenities and experience a shedding of an insupportable burden. Mere contact with a community of free human beings gives them insights no Leviathanic education can provide. Nurturing contact stimulates dreams and ultimately even visions. The Renegade is possessed, transformed, humanized. Psyche-manipulators aware of Civilization’s discontents will try to induce such transformations within Leviathan’s entrails, but their most vaunted successes will be miserable failures. Civilization does not nurture humanity.
Communities were able to possess the Leviathanized.
But Leviathan cannot possess communities, it cannot possess living subjects. Leviathan can only possess things, dead things, objects.
Communities could remove masks and armors. Leviathan removes the scalp, the skin and the flesh.
Communities could help the repressed recover their humanity. Leviathan dis-covers unrepressed humanity and consumes it. Dis-covery, the removal of Earth’s cover, the liquidation of free beings, is in fact Leviathan’s central project, and communities that nurture free beings are its greatest enemy
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The names are not only projections. They are also definitions. Once defined, the obiects can be manipulated.
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Many join villages of equally displaced and disoriented survivors, gatherings of fragments of communities.
The united fragments do not constitute a whole. The gatherings are refugee camps, melting pots, not communities. The beat of the drum is arhythmic. The music is discordant. Continuities preserved since the Beginning are broken off, and the few remembered myths no longer speak of any shared beginning because the gathered fragments are not a Totem and share no common Beginning.
The myths of displaced persons are mere stories and the great enactments are mere ceremonies. Ways of living become ways to spend time. Time that can be spent without being lived is Plague time, Leviathanic time, His-storic time. The His-story of the Potawatomi and of all their cousins and neighbors begins with the plague, and this story is its story.
The countless ages that preceded the Plague are henceforth inaccessible to memory. The communities who remembered their entire trajectory since the Beginning are irretrievably gone. Their time is henceforth Dream time, unreal time, imaginary time.
Even the words we will use to describe what was lost, words like music, myth, ceremony and community, will be as empty as the continent becomes, because they will refer to no lived experiences accessible to any human being trapped in His-story. What is lost is of much greater human import than the things Economists will include on their ledgers.
Henceforth, namely after the initial landing of the invaders and their rats and bacilli, the invaders confront only Plaguesurvivors, fragments of communities, displaced persons.
Yet the fragments go on resisting, the Plague-survivors go on ejecting Leviathan from their midst, the displaced persons refuse to patch their wounds by covering themselves with the masks and armors of the Civilized.
The resistance persists from generation to generation, in the face of plagues, poisons and explosives. The story of that resistance has been repeatedly and powerfully told. It is a story that does not show Leviathan to be as natural to human beings as hives are to bees. It is a story that shows Leviathan to be an aberration which cannot be imposed, by wile or by force, on human beings who retain the slightest link with community, even a link as tenuous as the remembrance of a Dream Time.
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ch 23
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The first Quakers in America oppose the extermination of the continents original inhabitants, but few Quakers become Renegades, and the rest gradually acquire the dishonesty and hypocrisy they once denounced. Whether they were peasants or artisans in England, they all become businessmen in America, and like other invaders, they get their first windfalls from the expropriation of the original inhabitants. Renouncing arms as well as the incendiary methods of the Puritans, the Quakers resort to legal maneuvering and outright cheating, and they empty the Quakerland called Pennsylvania of its original inhabitants as thoroughly as the violent invaders of the Empty Continent. Like Moses, they intended to find a new world only while they were inside the old one; when they leave, they carry the old world with them.
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ch 24
The English speaking Aguirres who spread death, slavery and ever-bleaker misery across the Dis-covered continent speaks eloquently of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Opposites merge, antonyms become synonyms on the Frontier, where all conflicts are reconciled. Zeks fight alongside their keepers, debtors alongside their creditors, borrowers alongside their bankers, suckers alongside their hustlers, in the most fraudulent extravaganza since the First Crusade.
Desolation beyond imagination’s grasp is carried to uncountable Jerusalems. In the northern woodlands alone, where General Washington’s orders to General Sullivan are “to destroy totally the villages of the Iroquois,” Anthony Wallace will tell that
The roster of destruction is a long one (and it earned Washington the name of Town Destroyer): Three towns on the Chemung River; three towns on the Tioga River; all of the dozen or so Cayuga and Seneca towns on Cayuga and Seneca Lakes; the half dozen Seneca towns on the route westward to the Genesee River; and the complex of settlements at Genesco itself… Before the Revolution, the Six Nations and their dependents had lived largely in some thirty thriving villages scattered from the Mohawk River to Lake Erie and the Ohio country. Of all these towns, by the spring of 1780 only two survived undamaged. The others were in ashes or empty, moldering in rain and wind…
To the Greak Lakes Ojibwa, Potawatomi and Miami who are not reached by Washington’s armies, who are the next Frontier, this terror that calls itself America is no carrier of life, liberty or happiness; it is Wiske gone totally mad. After eating the French, the victorious English declare a war against themselves and, under the guise of fratricide, set out to kill and expropriate the continent’s remaining original inhabitants.
The ostentatious Declaration of Independence, like the proclamation of the First Crusade, is a maneuver in a confidence game, a banner designed to align zeks alongside their keepers. The freedom it offers to zeks is not freedom from labor-camp zekdom, but freedom to kill with no holds barred. Happiness comes, like Salvation to the Crusaders, from the bloody sacrifice of victims. Devotion to such freedom becomes a synonym of Patriotism. The active Patriot is a mass murderer, the passive Patriot an enthusiastic voyeur of his team’s killings.
The beast behind the banner is not concerned with life, liberty or happiness, is in fact their greatest enemy. Hobbes has already published his Leviathan, thanks to which the beast does not only know itself by name, but also possesses a self-consciousness unavailable to Churchmen or to Lope de Aguirre. The beast knows that it cannot speak in its own name without losing the confidence of its human entrails. It knows that it must speak in terms of Life, Liberty and Happiness, and it acquires unprecedented eloquence in the use of such terms.
The fratricidal war of English against English, most viciously perpetrated by both sides against the continent’s surviving communities, has nothing to do with freedom, independence, happiness or anything else that is human. It is a purely internal, Leviathanic affair, a readjustment of the artifice’s levers and springs, a retiming of the machine’s valves. One set of springs and wheels, the Fur Interest, wants to keep the new continent’s woodlands and communities as its own preserve, while another set, the Land Interest, wants to enlarge its preserve.
[oi.. al o.o.. to bottom on undersand ability ness]
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The two feuding Interests are not persons but personifications; they will eventually call themselves Corporations. These are not human beings who feud because they are personally touched, insulted or harmed. It is the Savings that are threatened or harmed.
[on us 3 kids.. oi]
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The whole task of eloquence is to present the needs of these inhuman processes as urgent human needs.
[huge.. tweeted]
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The cosmos itself is nothing but a vast artifice, a machine, a clock wound up by the Great Artificer, the Mathematician. Terms like force and fraud cannot be applied to clockwork, and terms like inhuman and unnatural lose all autonomous meaning if the human and the natural are also mere clockwork.
[tweeted]
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The Enlightened have boundless confidence in their machine.. The Progress of the machine is first of all an unrelenting war against everyone and everything that is not a machine.
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the unhappy inmates go on hurling themselves toward the happy Tommorrow.
Contrary to the bedtime stories told by the rattled to their apprehensive children, free people simply do not line up at the recruiting posts of factories to apply for jobs.
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And the deportations themselves are yet another way of killing the foe without having to confront him in battle. The deportees, whose wellbeing along the route is entrusted to the emotionally obtuse and predictably corrupt American Army, die on route of starvation and disease because the enterprising military con men profitably sell the food and supplies intended for their charges to pioneering settlers along the routes to the concentration camps.
Settlers with titles rush to devastate the evacuated areas and to raise, on former councilgrounds, schoolhouses where the settlers’ children are taught to recite “Why I’m proud to be an American.”
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The cycle has come round again. America is where Anatolia was. It is a place where human beings, just to stay alive, have to jump, to dance, and by dancing revive the rhythms, recover cyclical time. An-archic and pantheistic dancers no longer sense the artifice and its His-story as All but as merely one cycle, one long night, a stormy night that left Earth wounded, but a night that ends, as all nights end, when the sun rises.
________
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_________
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be you. 