Exploitation is what separates the poles of intelligence.
Disagree? Ask the plants and animals that make up your diet what they make of it.
Russell Brand has been active lately, promoting his unique, revolutionary ideology, a blend of eastern mysticism, transcendentalism and other esoteric approaches.
His narrative sounds inspiring and aspirational, even doable at times. His aim is to point out the errors in living intelligence, and to point out when it becomes too manipulative and damaging toward the bottom end of the spectrum.
Practical it may not be (it isn’t, period! — they never are, such mantras) but it’s exactly what we need to snap us out of our slumber at least to take stock of what’s happening.
To reveal the intangible but useful side of Brand’s ideology, let me frame the argument in terms of Love and Sacrifice.
Love
Love is one of the cornerstones of life. Togetherness and harmony, two beautiful and important phenomena/ideas/concepts, stem from love. Caring and sharing are products of love. Family involves love. Love makes the world go round (alongside gravity).
Accomplishment exists independently of love
But only in the wake of accomplishment. Accomplishment — and its derivatives and/or equivalents (achievement, progress, innovation, invention, discovery) — exists independently of love. It doesn’t manifest only on account of love, or because we connect with higher beings, of which we’re ‘physical manifestations,’ and whose primary vibration is ‘love.’ That’s just an old wives’ tale; what the religions of the East claim. Yes, it’s positive-sounding, but it’s partial. It’s a creed, a holistic rathern than monotheistic, interested in social control than transcendence.
In other words, love and all its esoteric and ‘positive’ attributes may sound good, especially in this time and age, when everything feels dry and meaningless, but in the grand scheme of things, they’re just another part of a dogma.
The fact of the matter is that accomplishment and its derivatives come about through…
Sacrifice
Sacrifice involves the pain and suffering of oneself or others. It involves selfish thinking, or righteous thinking, or madness and delusional thinking, sometimes in the defence of others, other times in the defence of a crazy idea.
Whatever the case, sacrifice is the end result, the other cornerstone of life, the ballast to love. Sacrifice enables progress, in the wake of which love assumes meaning.
Sacrifice is as much a part of the narrative as caring and sharing
In other words, sacrifice is as much a part of the narrative as caring and sharing. We focus on caring, sharing and love because they keep our affairs civil, in theory anyway. Our aspirations remain lofty, at least on paper.
Mentioning the utilitarian functions of sacrifice too openly and without reservation, on the other hand, would lead to bloodbaths.
We have enough of those as it is.
But there’s a risk to sweeping sacrifice under the rug all the time. Denying it altogether threatens to turn us into lofty-speaking, dead apes (akin to those Brand often alludes to in his speeches) whose primary function is to hypocritically advance on the back of Technology, which DOES sacrifice things — nature, space, privacy, superstition, ignorance, bliss, God in the form of man with beard living in sky who gets frustrated with his flock of sheep on earth and makes them suffer to teach them eternal lessons — we sacrifice these things all the time, while pretending we ‘love’ everything and harm nothing.
In other words, we lie to ourselves.
Jesus was a fighter, and so were the Buddha and Steve Jobs, Hypatia and Virginia Woolf
Or, worse yet, we’re satisfied with being stuck in one spot, afraid to make a move, lest we hurt things, omming and humming ourselves into oblivion, for fear of causing ripples in the grand vibration — for fear of upsetting a fly, a plant, or another human being, any number of which may pose an immediate threat to our survival, and which we have to deal with in ways that involve their demise.
In times like this I like to refer to a favorite insight of mine: that Jesus was a fighter, and so were the Buddha and Steve Jobs, Hypatia and Virginia Woolf. These visionaries fought tooth and nail for their beliefs to become popular. They destroyed other belief systems in the process, directly or indirectly. They sacrificed those who believed in something contrary to their ideas on the altar of their eventual prevalence.
Beyond Good And Evil
Tolerance has a short life span and a narrow place in the world
In the grand scheme of things, when looked at from a macro-perspective, tolerance has a short life span and a narrow place in the world. It lives as long as the things it tolerates tolerate it in turn.
Incorporation, adaptation, assimilation, mutation, on the other hand, are a different story. They’re what it’s all about, and very different to tolerance. They convey utility: the ability to progress based on raw reality, not noble and abstract ideology alone. They’re what life boils down to.
Destruction and Creation, the two primary forces of life, are embedded in nature, as scientific an arrangement as one could imagine. The sugarcoating of Love comes in order to make the harsh narrative of life more bearable.
What Is Sharing?
We all live in this world, which we have to share between ourselves. Sharing is good, they say. We must engage in it.
I agree. But not for the reasons preached.
Sharing involves the wisdom of knowledge, in the name of which one sacrifices a number of old superstitions, customs and traditions, perhaps even (a) God
See, in my mind, sharing involves sacrifice on one’s part. I’m talking more than the classic teaching – ‘offer half your piece of bread to the one who needs it’ – and such insights. It’s bigger than that, and more unsettling.
Sharing involves the wisdom of knowledge, in the name of which one sacrifices a number of old superstitions, customs and traditions, perhaps even (a) God, doing away Him/Her/It, or upgrading Him/Her/It, or whatever one does with deities in the wake of wisdom.
Sharing is not hugs and kisses and offering one’s coat to the disheveled. It’s living on a planet where people shouldn’t be forced to live in a polluted, out-of-control paradigm, doing everything necessary to rectify the situation, including the destruction of whatever perpetuates the problem.
Sharing is also living on a planet that doesn’t counter out-of-control technology and berserk economics with sub-par, righteous arguments borne out of monotheistic dogma, or with utopian, sugar-coated, shaky arguments borne from holistic dogma. Sharing is giving away part of that righteousness in favor of the colder and more functional foundations of science, from which we may build a sounder paradigm, one that combines the prowess of scientific thinking with the wisdom of spirituality.
Sharing is giving away things no matter who you are and what you believe in, if doing so pushes the cart forward instead of backward.
Sharing is taking away things from those who would do harm, preventing them from doing so. Sharing is living in a way that promotes life, not hinders it.
To survive, after all, life has to succeed. It has to love and sacrifice at the same time.
A New Brand Of Insight
Brand’s revolutionary narrative is dual in nature, like a superpositioned electron
So where does this leave us? Do we apply Brand’s insights or not?
It’s hard to call. Brand’s revolutionary narrative is dual in nature, like a superpositioned electron. Sometimes it’s an intangible wave, impossible to touch or isolate. Other times it’s a physical particle, tangible and unitary. Sometimes it’s centered on love and meditation, other times it focuses on ‘fucking off’ the things that stand in the way of a better, more loving way of life. It’s conflicted and self-contradictory at times, but very, very justified.
When things are too tilted and twisted, like they are today, we have to observe what’s happening, making sure we correct the errors of our ways, plugging up the deficits.
When everything is spread too thin, as things are today, let’s be cautious, discerning.
So where does it leave us? Do we apply Brand’s insights or not?
You decide. I’m not going to make up your minds for you.
What will I do? I plan to apply them sparingly when feeling cautious, with a pinch of salt, and wantonly when frisky, in ample rage.
In the meantime, I’m embracing Brand. He has plenty to offer — and offer it he does with his charmingly incendiary attitude.
I like that!
Like I said, Jesus was a firebrand. And so is Russell Brand. And so is any brand of love that seeks to prevail over other points of view, some of which need to be fucked off so that life may improve.
From your rambling Spin Doctor,
Hearts open, knives sharp.