Eso’s Chronicles 339 / 15
Odds and Ends 
© Eso A.B.
All comments appearing within brackets [ ] are editorial in origin.

JAIL AS HOME AND CITY (4)!

The advocates of our pseudo-democracy are in the habit of stating that it is infinitely ‘better’ when comparing it to the ‘feudal system’, which they say preceded it. There are various models of the feudal system, but the one that advocates of ‘democracy’ speak of most is where the peasants were forbidden to leave the land of the baron in whose fiefdom their patch of wood was found. This factor made the people living on the land serfs http://www.thefreedictionary.com/serf .

As item 2. at the above link points out, serfs were last to disappear from Eastern Europe and Russia. However, this is due not because other parts of the world had forms of government less pyramidal in nature, but because it was in Russia and Eastern Europe that the ‘tax system’ was first instituted, and had, for this reason, become a ‘tradition’ just as taxes have become an institution today in the rest of the world.

Inescapable as “death and taxes” may be, along with ‘taxes’ comes a system of incarceration.

In America jailing people is a common form of punishment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States .

While a ‘debtors’ prison’ is no longer such a burden on society as in the previous centuries, it persists for the simple reason that the debtor cannot escape into the wood as in the days before deforestation had become a common form of disciplining society. With video scanners and electronic tags, even a labyrinthine city does not make it as a forest. According to one commentator, the debtors prison is on its way back http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-12-26/how-debtors-prisons-are-making-comeback-america and likely to first make its reappearance as a private institution in the U.S.

The recent revelations of spying by the NSA on virtually everyone in the country by way of the internet or cell phone, negates public space and makes government an invasive agency that on the psychosomatic level causes society to think of it as God.

On the positive side, such an experience ought to make the public perceive that the greatest enemy of nature and the environment is none other than government, because it is clearly the wood rather than the Constitution that most protects individual liberties.

In spite of this fact, the invasive nature of modern technology and the vulnerability of internet programming to being hacked  sets the present urban civilization as inferior in nature to the ancient wood where life forms sprung up from an “artifice of eternity” or Mind rather than a digital computer. It is this ‘sense’ of an attempt being made to feel it inferior that gives rise to the cockles of the singular individual and creates mutual accusations of ‘terrorist’ between the government and the individual who opposes the government’s digitized mindset.

Nevertheless, it is this psychosomatic enmity that is the hope of the hominid to escape the controls of kings, princes, oligarchs, bankers, and any system set up by any ‘elites’. It is this undigitizable artifice that makes a poet like Yeats write of the human “soul” as “…a dying animal, it knows not what it is…” and want him to escape “…from any natural thing” (such as computers) “…into the artifice of eternity.”

So, to return to the theme of not paying taxes or getting the government to abolish them! Though human intelligence is slow to catch on to the workings of the Mind, it appears that after much torturous turnings and bloodshed, it does GET IT.

If none of the ‘good greens’ can succeed in stopping the Japanese from killing whales and the world from deforestation, it will become obvious that at the bottom of the problem are not ‘the People’, but the premises of government that deferred violence as continuous armament is the institution that creates the space behind which a once relatively ‘innocent’ Satan becomes a super monster, a Godzilla.

This writer’s guess is that that the problem is uncritical urbanization. I am not speaking of ‘green space’ as Lewis Mumford thought of it, but of urbanization at the basis of the creation of a Mindset that is radically different from the Mindset that exists in nature as an ‘artifice of eternity’ as Yeats sees it. To describe the image in greater detail, when Yeats writes of “sages standing in God’s holy fire” and presents that fire as the “artifice of eternity”, I understand nature itself to be the artifice, or the Garden of Eden, or Heaven, or a ‘still life’. http://www.book530.com/oilpaintingpic/Landscape/pic1/b/Landscape-0459.jpg , never mind that there are many kinds of still lives, including such as in front of my door where there stands a huge birch tree with not a leaf moving except  those at the very top. There is no way that I can think that a city-gen of a cityscape thinks of his-her environment in the same way, nor can he-she think of nature as one who lives in it. These are two separate worlds, of which post-modernity has chosen the urbanscape as the superior one.

The consequence of this ‘the twain shall never meet’ is that nature is being destroyed by humankind, which event occurs aphenomena is the result of taxation, which is the catalyst behind the apparently unstoppable urbanization movement.

Terrifyingly, none of the human beings, all the good and nice ones (think of the 100 million Chinese about to be moved out of the countryside, or the Virginians and Marylanders who have destroyed the Chessapeake Bay), have any perception that in spite of their ‘goodness’ and ‘niceness’ they are the very cause of destruction.

To test this thesis all that needs to be done is for the United Nations to select a nation where taxation ceases. I would make this nation Latvia, where taxation and a blind and willful destruction of the countryside is making itself felt with the speed of a wildfire.

Given that Latvia’s political elites are being directly or indirectly influenced by neo-capitalist interests in the EU or further abroad, the UN would need to guarantee not only a referendum, but an adequate length of time for the issues to be presented and understood. I would (why not?) have a ‘veto’ over what represents an adequate length of time of ‘understanding’. The guarantee that my vote is ‘just’ would be that I would right thereafter step on the other side of the ‘quantum gap’.