#egoism

The friends of freedom are offended by selfishness, because in their religious striving for freedom they cannot free themselves from divine “self-abnegation,” Egoism upsets libertarians, because an egoist does not care about a thing for the sake of the thing. If he or she cares about anything, it is for her or his own sake. It is egoistic not to ascribe an “absolute” value to anything, but to seek the value of everything in me.

-Max Stirner, Freedom and Self-Ownership

My freedom is diminished if I cannot impose my will on something outside of myself, whether something inanimate, such as a boulder, or something wilful, such as a government or an individual boss. I diminish my self-ownership if I resign myself to the loss of my freedom, give up, yield, or humiliate myself in loyalty or submission. It is one thing to discontinue an enterprise which is not succeeding, or turn off a wrong road, and quite another thing to surrender. I go round a boulder, until I have enough gunpowder to blast it out of the way. I circumvent the rule of a nation, until I have gathered the strength to overthrow it. I cannot reach the moon, but does that mean I must regard it as “sacred”? I do not surrender to you, I only wait. When I can come at you I will; and meanwhile, if I can find any weakness in you, I will draw it to your attention…

-Max Stirner, Freedom and Self-Ownership

A revolution doesn’t guarantee freedom, rather it guarantees oppression under a different system. Insurrection guarantees freedom since no matter who makes what rules, they won’t be obeyed. Saying you’ll only obey just and ethical rules won’t work. You can’t pick and choose since what is seen as just and ethical for one group may be seen in the opposite light by another. The same goes for morality, which we all know should be written in the same book as ghosts, unicorns, elves and dragons.

Rights are spooks. The only “rights” that exist are what you can take and keep for yourself.

THE MILKMAN COMETH!

And the Holodomer was a myth. Change your mind.

Where’s the breakfast, Rick, you fucking nerd!

There’s always a way out.

Max Kirby

Nice spooks, nerd.

fatehbaz:

And so the trees drew my imagination back into the past: Where did all this amazing, diverse sound come from? What stories are buried down there in the soil? And how do they intersect with the everyday human experience of sound – of listening to music and talking? […] Time is the place where kinship comes from. […]

The kinship that you mentioned is a kinship between the living world and what we usually regard as the nonliving world, although the boundaries get somewhat hard to define. So, for example, when we hear the songs of birds that live in forests, particularly dense forests, they tend to be slow, whistled melodies, because that is the kind of sound that transmits well through that habitat. You go out to the prairie, and you hear lots of rapid trills and ups and downs in the frequency suite, because that is the sound that works well there. Go to the ocean shore and you hear cries of gulls and oyster catchers that carry over the tumult of surf. And so the physicality, the materiality of the world, has, in a way, woven itself into the sonic diversity of the creatures that live within that world […]. This applies below the waves as well: fish and whales are making sounds that transmit well over the right kind of distances for the ecology of their own species. This relationship between materiality and the form of songs applies not just in air, but in water and solids as well. […]

Mostly when we hear a birdsong, we just think, “Oh yeah, that’s an American robin,” or whatnot. We don’t think, “Oh, that song has within it the imprint of the forest in which that robin has been living.” We’re hearing the legacy of plate tectonics and great migrations of creatures from one part of the Earth to another just by lying in bed and listening to birdsong in the morning. You don’t even have to get out from under the covers and you can hear this magnificent legacy of kinship, not just in the present moment but in deep time.

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In the rainforest, and indeed most other habitats, the sound is just a lot more intense in part because there are orders of magnitude more species there, but also because the insects have a different evolutionary path from one another. The crickets have a different way of listening and a different thing that they’re listening for in the sounds; different species of birds have different ways of appreciating sound and hearing the sound of their own species; the mammals, the primates, all have different voices. All of that is converging and singing at once in the rainforest […].

So there are all kinds of stories, but those stories are not coming from the mind of one person. […] But to listen in the forest is to belong within a much bigger set of narratives. The narrative of the living Earth is not just about me or, indeed, my own species; it’s about the convergence of multiple narratives that have to make it work with one another […] .

Most of the stuff around us came from places that we have no direct sensory connection to. And, in fact, that disconnection is not just a side effect of the global economy; it is a necessary part of continuing the destruction. Because if you separate people from the consequences of their actions, then those actions will continue and short-term profit and gain will be made, but long-term loss will ensue. […] This all sounds very dire, and there are dire problems, but the great thing about the senses is, they’re joyful. […]  So the senses bring us great pleasure at the same time that they’re orienting us to the important work of ethical discernment.

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Words by: David G. Haskell. “Listening and the Crisis of Inattention: An Interview with David G. Haskell.” Article/interview published by: Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee. EmergenceMagazine. 21 April 2022.