the Unlecture, not a lecture, podcast

Some audio ‘differences’ here, one from direct to chip recording, and I won’t be doing that again unless I am “live” in the field somewhere. The rest, the truly clearer parts, are straight to the Mac and I like this much better. Tried to do a ‘To disc’ recording so that I could just run from the hip and edit afterwards. Doubled my work load and made the audio,,, noisy is the better term I guess.

ANywhoos,,, enjoy. Putting up a mirror of this in Substack as well.

Begin transcript

[Music] And welcome back to the Cog Speaks. What a week. What a week. Oh, Lordy. Back problems are pain. Pun intended. A good chiropractor is worth their weight and gold, because when your back is bad life sucks, life,,,Just getting through the days,, yeah,,, yeah,,,, oooh! I got my back taken care of and oh my God I feel like a new man today. Got to spend a little bit of time with my duct tape family, tickled my God son, he’s a goofball. Yeah,,,

 You know one of the things that I’ve run into, with this whole podcast thing is, one coming up with content and I don’t like lectures. I don’t like being lectured. I don’t like giving lectures. And so how do you have a one-sided conversation without being lecturing? Well devil’s advocate right? So,,, you’ll know sometimes that if I’m not just telling a story, I’ll be working one side of the conversation and then I’ll flip around and I’ll start working from the other direction trying to find holes in my own arguments,, and that’s how I do an unlecture. Yeah that’s a good term for it: Unlecture. I like that. Well up at the top of my blog there is a page called what anarchy isn’t. If you hadn’t checked it out please do. I did not write it. I don’t make any claim to it. In fact right off the top it shows that this is free to distribute. Distribute as long as it’s unaltered and original authorship is maintained. So Larken Rose are at that and I like Larken Rose. I like Claire Wolf. You know anarchists! People that do not believe we need rulers. Notice I did not say we don’t need rules. We just do not need rulers. IE voted in divine decree, whatever: we don’t need people to tell us how to be us. I think we’re pretty good at that one. Americans are well Americans used to be really good at it. Every once in a while you meet one. Contrarians, voluntarist’s, anarchist, rebels. Yeah the rebels. Good old South. (SIGHHHHH!!!!) Why would not,, why would anarchy not work? Well it’s a good theory. The whole hell of a lot better theory than Marxism. Never really been tried. The closest we ever came was with the American revolution, Constitutional Republic, an experiment that has just about run its course I think. I don’t like saying that because, I live here.(laughter) But I have a feeling the next 20 years are going to see some seriously radical changes in this country and not all for the better. I would love to see a revivalism but you know hey! wishes and fishes. So why would it not work? Why would anarchism not work? Because we have certain personality types and I’m gonna say that in a generic sense. We have the oligarchs, the power trippers, the do as I say not as I do’s. Then we have the ‘go along to get alongs’ because they’re just gonna bend the knee as long as their life is not messed with too much. They really don’t don’t give a damn: Just let me live.    And then you have people like me the  ’just leave me alone’. Just don’t even. Don’t start none. Won’t be none. Two of those types can get along just fine with no problems. You put all three together and you start running into problems. The go along people can get along with the leave me alones without a whole lot of friction. The go alongs can get along with the power trippers to an extent until there is friction. But power trippers and the leave me alones will never get along. They’re polar opposites. Unfortunately, like anytime you’re working in a foundry, you’re melting metals, you’re creating an alloy, whether that’s melting, aluminum, melting, steel, you’re adding other elements involved to create a certain alloy. And as you’re doing that, there’s this stuff that floats to the top. It’s called dross. And it’s imperfections, oxides, whatever. And you usually scrape them off and you pitch them to the side. Well, in human terms, the dross that rises to the top tends to be elected officials, bureaucrats, the power grabbers, the oligarchs. And we don’t ditch it. We don’t scrape it off and pitch it to the side to keep the pure alloy. It gets poured with the rest. And they that whole mess, you have this perfect alloy sitting in the bottom of the pot, not disturbing anything. Ready to be poured into a mold to become something valuable. And that dross destroys that value. I see the same thing in our human condition. 

No lectures. I’m not lecturing. I’m just throwing out some thoughts.

 But yet from chaos comes order. You take a bucket of water, muddy water, really nasty looking stuff. You stir it up and you just slosh it around. And you come back a day later. And the water sitting on top is clear. It may not be clean, but it’s clear. And if you could drive a pipe or something into the sediment in the bottom, pull it out and look at it, you would find that everything is stratified into layers. You had a bucket of chaos; and entropy, created order.

 Anarchy, the chaos of anarchy, creates order in the same way. It might be scary at first. No rulers. “Oh no, who’s going to tell us what to do?” Well, nobody. But after a month, two months, six months a year, order establishes itself without anybody telling anybody what to do. People will navigate their way through their lives, find the people that are resources, find the people that are detrimental to them, and order will create its own self. Self-segregating, the people that can get along will get along. The people that just decide that they want to be,,, whatever,, burdens, they’ll sort themselves up. They may not be doing too good, but that’s how order is established. In a roundabout kind of way, it’s an evolution, survival of the fittest, the people that can learn to get along without,, strife, sort it out. But the people that get along will stratify. (If)They’re really resourceful people. Be doing very successfully. (If) They’re not so resourceful people. Will be become employees or find a niche where they do find success on their own. The people that want to be burdens will slowly become ostracized or they will relearn and find other ways to become productive. You may end up having that be unlawful, thieves, whatever. Well, in a voluntarist society, people (are)like, well, how would we correct them? We would! We wouldn’t need anybody to come do it for us. Situations like what we’re having here with my cousin. I’m limited on what I can do because we have laws. See, there’s always room for improvement. There’s always room for more. But I recall back in high school, one of my teachers, I believe it was my chemistry teacher. He had a big one, probably two-gallon jar, an old pickle jar from back when people actually had stuff like countertops in stores. It was empty. He took, he had several buckets behind the desk that he was at, the lab bench. He brought one up and it was full of rocks. I mean, this size, baseball sized rocks. And he started putting them in the bucket area in the jar. And you can see them, and he piled them all the way up to the top. He asked the class, “Can I get any more in there?” Of course, you know, we’re all like, yeah, there’s space between the rocks. He can just find stuff to fill that space with. And of course, he pulls up another bucket and it’s full of pea gravel. And he’s able to drop them in and shake it up. And eventually the pea gravel piles up along the rocks. Can I get any more in there? Well, man, that’s going to be tight. But he takes dry sand, just play sand, the white stuff. And he starts pouring it in, shakes the jar, and the sand fills the spaces between the pea gravel. And he looks at us again. He’s like, “Can I get any more in there?” and we’re like,”no, nothing else is going in there”. Next bucket is water. He starts pouring the water in, filling the spaces between the sand. And his point was, there’s always room for more. And the whole point of his lesson was that even in a liquid, there’s room for more. There’s spaces between the atoms. There’s spaces between the electrons. There’s always room for more. You can compress it, you can expand it, but there’s always room for more. There’s space. And space is,,,, Infinite. 

And anarchy is infinite, too. Look at the chaos of the universe. And yet we have galaxies, systems, suns, things organize. Not so chaotic. It’s infinite. The amount of order that can come from chaos. When you start trying to direct that order, then you’re bucking the system. That’s when chaos starts to get little obnoxious. And there’s quite a bit of obnoxiousness floating around in the world today. Just look at the Middle East. Well, it’s been obnoxious for centuries. But it’s people bucking the system, trying to create order from chaos, not letting chaos sort itself out. I’m not going to point at any one person. I’m not going to point at any one group and I’m not going to get political about it. It’s chaos. And it needs to sort itself out in its own way. And let things go from there. See what happens. But go back and look at everything. You know, we have talked about the chaos, entropy, creating order. The Buddhists tell you to look inward. The Hermeticists tell you as above, so below, so below, as above, or as below, so above. Everything,,, it’s not as complicated as government tries to make it to be. It’s not as complicated as organized religions try to make it to be. It’s not as complicated as the sick care system wants you to believe. And no, there is no magic pill to fix everything. All you have to do is listen to their list of side effects to know that there is no such thing as a magic pill. 

What do we do with it all? 

We go about our days. We live our lives. We try to make ourselves a little better than we were the day before. We try to make the world a little better than it was when we grew up. So that our kids growing up have it better than us. And all these things trying to force chaos into order don’t help us. 

Live, 

love, 

laugh, 

learn, 

and load them damn boxes because you never know what tomorrow is going to bring.

 See you next time.

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