From: glenne@csd4.csd.uwm.edu (Neuromancer )
Newsgroups: alt.society.anarchy
Subject: Re: warfare
Date: 11 Oct 1992 16:22:10 GMT
Organization: Computing Services Division, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
NNTP-Posting-Host: 129.89.7.4

I wrote:
|> As long as you have property, you will never have peace.  As long
|> as you have people who value themselves by how much they own, rather
|> than how much they love, you will have property.
 
mjw@viper.eng.ufl.edu (Mike Wohlgemuth) wrote:
>This statement is patently absurd.  There are many ways to measure one's value.
>In fact, there are many areas in which someone can have value.  These things may
>be completely unrelated.  Certainly, people who can only measure their value by
>how much they own have a warped value system, but attempting to base society
>on some sort of new age feel good concept is mind numbingly pathetic.  What the
>hell does "love" in this context mean anyway?  And what about it prohibits
>ownership of property?
 
What is love?  I am loath to answer this question of yours, because I
know that I lack the capability to treat this concept without
degrading it immensely.  First of all, you can't slice pieces off of
love to try to fit it into contexts.  You have to tackle the whole
thing.
 
I do not really consider myself an anarchist.  My exposure to the
thoughts of anarchists, both written and spoken, has been minimal.  One
day I just asked myself, what is the most important thing?  What is the
point of my existence?  The answer was obvious.  It hadn't been anything
I'd read or been told, it had been something that I knew from
experience.  The purpose of existence is to become more meaningful.
Love is that which makes existence more meaningful.  (The reason most
people would kill a cow before a person, is due to the fact that the
person's life is more MEANINGFUL than that of the cow.  We are more
aware than the cow for starters.)
 
Levels of meaning
Existence    - A lifeless desolate universe.  Shear existence.
Life         - The struggle for survival.
Consciousness - The joy of understanding.  The ability to recognize
               meaningfulness.
Love         - The ability to make life more meaningful.
 
Gads... there are so many thoughts.. you shouldn't have opened this
pandora's box... I'll try to stop rambling.
 
After I was conscious of the importance of love, I asked myself, what
is love anyway?  After all, if it is the most important thing, there
ought to be all kinds of things written about it, right?  NOT!  Due
to the incredible lack of things written about love, I came to the
conclusion that as soon as someone understood love, they started loving
rather than thinking about it.  I haven't gotten that far yet.
 
To crudely summarize what love is beginning to mean for me:
 
Love means sharing in the emotions of others.  Before I could kill
someone, I would feel the pain that their loved ones would feel, and
so I could not harm them.  When someone else is hungry, I do not feel
their hunger like they do, but I feel a part of it.  I could not eat
sushi flown half way around the world, because I know people are hungry.
I cannot wear fancy clothes knowing other people wear rags. This is why
I believe that property is theft.  (It is far worse than theft.)  This
is why inside I share the same feelings that the 'Lefties' do.
 
Love also means giving people an infinite amount of slack.  On the
practical side, none of us is able to do this, so to love, we have to
give people all the slack we are capable of, and continually work to
increase this capacity of ours.
 
The reason love is about giving people an infinite amount of slack is
due to the fact that above all love is a _choice_.   Love is meaningful
because it's free.  If you do something nice to me because I have a gun
to your head, your action is meaningless.  If you do something nice to me
because you want to, your act was a meaningful one.  It might even be an
act of love.
 
This is why in my actions I side with the 'righties'. I may not agree with
what they do and what they believe, but they have to be allowed to choose
to recognize the needs of others before their property rights.  If we
destroy others property rights, to give to those in need, our actions
are meaningless.  It's the old gun to the head routine.  So also is
attempting to overthrow the government a meaningless act.
 
But I realized that there is something seriously wrong with
government.  Government definitely is not based on the principle of giving
people slack.  In fact all government is quite the opposite.  Whether
you have a capitalist government, or a socialist government, you still
have a government that is based on the principle of putting the gun to
people's heads.
 
I agree with you completely, people have a vast variety of ways to
value themselves.  What I am saying is that no system that you put into
place is ever going to respect all of these different people's values.
Thus the solution is not to come up with a new breed of socialist
system that forces the 'righties' to give up their property.  The
solution also is not to come up with a new breed of capitalist system
that bases power on how much wealth you have.   It isn't the _type_ of
system that is wrong.  What is wrong is the notion that we need a system
at all.  But people will always invent systems because they value
something more than the freedom of love, usually it is their own hide.
Where we differ is the extent to which we value our own hides more than
we value our feelings for other people, and their rights to choose their
own values.
 
Glenn                                 glenne@csd4.csd.uwm.edu

Newsgroups: alt.society.anarchy