Snow slide

Townes Van Zant:

"If I needed you would you come to me,
Would you come to me, and ease my pain?
If you needed me
I would come to you
I'd swim the seas for to ease your pain

In the night forlorn the morning's born
And the morning shines with the lights of love
You will miss sunrise if you close your eyes
That would break my heart in two

The lady's with me now since I showed her how
To lay her lily hand in mine
Loop and Lil agree she's a sight to see
And a treasure for the poor to find "

"Loop and Lil were parakeets." --Townes Van Zant

215. The American woman has been far more successfully shaped by the American matrix than the American man—the resulting American male is, from the perspective of creating a perfect Number (cf. Zamiatin), a great failure.

This is completely obvious to the American woman. Look at her smile—it is a smile of victory. It is not a smile of innocuous joy—even the smile has been programmed, Pavlovian, to occur in the context of reading the public transcript of the dominant class. To watch Ron Paul debate a 30 year old woman--her smiles occur at moments when she has perfectly recited the public narrative. It is one thing to say a culture’s women have been degraded (selling themselves to prostitution, for example, as Sorokin describes after WWI in Russia), yet another to say a culture’s women are now dangerous, lost, mutant, the soul of a zombie, the womb of whore, her firm ass jiggling in leggings no different than a streetwalking whore. A man must sleep with the enemy to sleep with ‘his’ women. A man must wander willingly into this pit of zombies all the while pretending to enjoy his favorite beverage as these atrocities gnaw the flesh from his neck, smile, refuel on their cellular devices. This is the great, great secret—this is the hidden transcript which is certainly unmentionable. Man need look no further for such a droning enclosure of hell.

216. Surplus as an attitude, but the common construct goes as follows: When humans no longer directly worked for what they ate and how they were sheltered, when activity, living, and survival were broken apart—man became sick and lost his way. The sickness manifested itself in many forms, but is mostly characterized by organized human coercion in various degrees—powerful systems of human coercion which modify or coerce (some might say control) the thoughts, feelings, and activities of human beings. Money has been but one way man has done this, and clearly it is the relevant topic for men attempting to live amidst the zombies and the men who have constructed the charade of money.

The concept of surplus is identified. Commonly used in American matrix language, surplus implies an excess of some thing, or the difference between what is needed and what is present. According to this way of looking at man's sickness, the concept of time is critical here. If the need is a day of food, yet a man has 10 days of food, there is surplus, and, according to the men who identify surplus as the original sin, this surplus qua surplus is the cancer that has ruined it all for man--murdered his spirits, attacked the earth. If the need is one year of food, and there are 10 days of food, there is no surplus. Let us point to the moose and whale and remember a moose and whale, to use the language of the matrix, 'bought man time.' Yet was there a risk this disconnection of living and effort--this temporary leisure, would so lead man astray, or would it take a certain type of man to abuse an abundance--use it to enslave other men rather than for his own leisure? 

With the whale, hunter-gatherers encountered what is the technical definition of surplus in its sense above—an excess, a difference between what is present and what is needed. Yet immediately the definition is clear—the intersection of wants and means. Time—a concept which may be very different among cultures (and that is to say that this concept could not be intelligible to all cultures) provides pressure to the concept of want. Inuit did dry meat and also did preserve and ferment walrus and seal. Fuel lamps burned whale, walrus, and seal fat. Inuit did not wander aimlessly, grateful at any animal hunted. Rather, time and planning was involved in their culture—the construction of an igloo, tent, or lodge; construction of weapons; preparation of food and storage of food; preparation of clothes. Purity was violated even with the Inuit as man was never truly like the other animals. And hence man needed a grounding to mend each day he was not quite animal and not quite of the earth--his helping and hurting spirits were offered by the earth and its animals to guide man to not sin. Without his spirits, man would do nothing right--man would be sin made manifest. He needed clothing—especially in the arctic. And his clothing came from several animals. Unlike other animals, arctic man—to the distinction of men living in warm weather—needed clothing, needed protection from the elements. He needed to construct shelter. He needed to create spears, arrows, nets, knives, needles, thread. Yet he shared many things in common with the other animals, yet the animals looked upon man as the weakest of those who wandered. Man always needed help; indeed man was pitied by the animals. 

217. Surplus: it is the result of a way of looking at the world. It is a vantage point, the result of a species of man. Surplus has always existed in the world, if we want to use the term of the anthropologists, because the idea of surplus—stored value which can be traded for scarce or non-existent items—is a well-used concept of the anthropologists. The original sin, this vantage point which struck and killed the spirit of man in a violent lightening, is embedded in the word itself We can look to the first group of anthropologists who have used this term to describe what they call ‘progress’ or 'complexity,' but we end up explaining a way of looking at the world with the very tools that are products of this vantage point. To get man out of his hole of misery we have to get back to the problem of when man first looked at the earth and did not see the earth beautiful and full of wonder and energy—what some men call the gods and spirits in conjunction with the earth. At one point man’s world was one—his mountain the spirits, his rivers the spirits—and there were no gods, there was no earth. Separating ‘earth,’ ‘god,’ and ‘man’ is already a degraded vantage point, and this is the problem to be solved.  

So rather than beating the same problem that will not get us anywhere if this false problem is to be solved, we will first state the clear and obvious matter that surplus is the great distraction of anthropology, that anthropology’s attempt to retrace the origin of complexity can be of no use if it is to already have as its vantage point the very first taint of man in his attack against the earth. 

Yet to many this vantage point is intractable—they say that we first must come to terms with complexity and its product, surplus, and then find a way to somehow avoid either the temptations of surplus or the creation of surplus or, perhaps, focus on areas of the earth where ‘surplus’ has a hard time finding its way due to the conditions of the earth, such as with the Eskimo in the North, where, again, the anthropologists will use the economic term of ‘scarcity’ (apparently the counterpoint of ‘surplus’) to describe an environment where things do not get out of order because they have a hard time getting out of order due to the extreme environmental conditions which do not attract, encourage, or foster what the anthropologists call 'surplus.'

But what must be recognized is that there are species of men who look at the world in a different way than other men. Some men do not see earth as a problem to be solved, some men do not see the earth as something to be reshaped, transformed, and processed into something else. We shall set aside this species of man and note that we will not say that these men do not create surpluses because we have already identified the idea of surplus as an idea that originated from a species of man that has already attacked and transformed the world. Once man has hurt his earth, he must do something with his mess, he must do something with his sickness. He then transforms the earth into more things, more problems, more complications (the key here is complication—a problem—not complexity). These men can then note that these transformations of the earth further pollute and mutate mankind and create sicknesses—slavery, government, law, currency, various degenercies, but most importantly various manifestations of coercion, domination, and enslavement.

Rather than speaking of how an already degenerate race of man has damaged his world, let us turn to the race of men who live with their world and do not attack this world. What sort of man is this, and how does he live? Does this man live only where he can't get himself into trouble? Or is he a sort of man who, anywhere, would never commit the sin that other men have committed, that other men have stacked and transformed into the atrocities which have hollowed out and culled the soul of humankind? If we want to look at the abundance of the earth—defined as the earth in its greatest source of power for the forstering of the greatest well-being of man—we should like to call this the greatest abundance of the earth, the greatest source of energy, power and happiness. The earth, in its state before the attack and transformation of a certain species of humans, is indeed, the greatest abundance possible, completely free of pollutions,and mutations which the anthropologists call ‘surplus’ and ‘scarcity.’

We must ask: is surplus a result of an activity or is surplus an attitude?

218. For men to compete with each other, for the men of finance to maximize their extraction from other men, for these men to spend the most on each object they touch—but worse, for these men to idolize their daughters, to spend enormous quantities of money on their daughter’s health, education, clothing, travel—you have put in an ethereal realm a creature meant for breeding, cooking, and caring, incapable of genuine curiosity, greatness, comedy. To create a system of laws to place these feeble creatures to stand in the way of other men—it is one thing to say the oligarchs are creating a disgusting result in the quest to control volatility, but what do we say about these servile men who exploit the labor of other men for the purpose of fickle wastefulness? 

219.  A man makes his mistakes when he is lonely for a woman. A man yearns for a woman. But they have ruined the women, and now a man's yearnings cannot be met by the mutated creatures which men now mistakenly call “women.“ Matrices are created to coerce, brainwash, confuse, and enslave men. Matrices coerce men into routines they would not otherwise undertake. The human race has been reshaped in exactly the manner a race of men had first launched their attack upon the earth. Man attacked his earth, and then he attacked his own people, his own race. The killing of other men does not represent cruelty, yet the transformation of the natural and instinctive mating and the beautiful and natural expression of man and woman, manhood and womanhood, the insanity has then run its course, as a mutated mankind no longer matters in that, such destroyed, humiliated, transformed, neutered, there is no soul, no song, no spirit, no force which wishes to be of the earth and animals. The finality of the matter would be a total decimation of nature. It would be thus that these mutant creatures, so many generations far from their being men and women, would have nothing for which to yearn. Why not nuclear war and robot warriors? Convergence to computer. 

Yet a question remains for investigation: did man first attack earth or did he first send his attack on other men? Furthermore, is there a difference between man's attack on earth and his attack on man?

Man can choose to be guided by a wild, free spontaneous earth.  Yet man's only natural predator is himself. Not only does he coerce and enslave other men, he burns man's bridge to freedom through his attack upon and transformation of earth. In his reshaping of earth, man kills earth's spirit. Yet man changes earth to kill himself. It is a weak and sick man who attacks the earth.  His attack on earth spreads his sickness and thus his weakness spreads as a cancer. For some men, earth is too much. Man thus attacks earth and in doing so kills earth's spirit and in doing so kills his only source of infinite spontaneity. Without this spontaneity man is faced with a deadness, and this deadness we call matrix. Man may have launched his attack on earth for solitary reasons, yet the fallout of his attack is the slavery of other men through the deadness, the product of his attack. Sick man deadens the earth around him and in so doing deadens other men who encounter an earth slaughtered of its spirit. Man then only knows as vocation this attack upon the earth which further grows the deadness. Earth and man die together.

220. Nietzsche says that not only must a man have great insight and genius, he must covey his ideas to other men and convince other men—he points directly to speech. It is problematic. On the one hand we can point to the pre-matrix past of man before his attack on earth and before his wicked tools of language, text—a mutant, cancerous attack on spirit and earth that has continued to coerce and enslave men and destroy the human species to an ultimate convergence to either bomb or computer. And hence, prima facie we should wish to agree with Nietzche and compel men to be good speakers as they share what may well be liberating. Yet the result of the matrix is a complete castration of the listening and feeling that is possible when man has spirit, when man has name, and with his name man speaks and listens to his helping spirits and wins over or commits warfare against his hindering spirits. Yet speech must not only be mistrusted but discarded. The hucksters of hot air blow on the hollowed-out rot of the zombies which wander the matrix. The solution is text—the very evil which arose from the original attack on earth and the spirit of man—man must use this evil against itself, re-writing the software that has coerced his thinking and doing. Beware of men who thus wish to convince, coerce, or otherwise speak to other men. They have nothing to share but more blackened poison that will further entrench man in his zombie state. There will be a man to use a bomb to destroy the bombs, and this man will give text to the world, the world's last text, which, when man has healed, will be discarded.