I Didn't Originate the Concept

A More Democratic Democracy pt. 1

The ideas I  present are cribbed.  I have frequently been told I am a lunatic.   That I spout fringe nonsense.  That I am Marxist.. That I want to overthrow “our democracy”.  While I am anti-capitalism, I am about as far from Marxism as I believe one could be. And if I believe in community rights of ownership that does not at all mean I believe everyone has to have an equal x .  What I believe is the opposite.  I believe communities decide who deserves what share and who their own leaders should be.  I do believe in common ownership of land; but I don’t think every community has to be engaged in farming, though I do frequently speak of groups of no more than 250. To be  functional a community cannot be larger than its capacity of being a community where no one person is not known to the entire community. So in this sense I believe in rural communities that are capable of living within its resources.  But that in no way means I think everyone should need be “farmers”.  I think communities in modern society have a multitude of options to choose from on how to employ their efforts.  But basically there are in general two directions for a community to pursue.  It can produce stuff–goods that people need, or it can produce food to supply the sustenance people need.  Or  if a community prefers it can offer both.

Ultimately, however, what creates havoc within human lives is when some attempt to “profit” from others within the community.  When one is profiting from the wealth of the community the one is abusing the citizens of said community; controlling them and determining all of the hows–how they must labor and how much they should need to labor and for what recompense, how they must purchase their needs and what ,  how they must learn, how their houses must be, how the resources they need are limited and/or shared, how their leaders are determined (themselves or their designates), how they should be fed and how much they should be fed, how they are protected and from whom they are protected.

When the hows are controlled this is a tyranny of the community by the king.  It doesn’t matter if he is king by inheritance or king by fiat.  It denies the participation of the community in the decisions of the community and it limits the community from itself making the determination of the hows.  I do not anyway think we must return to pre-neolithic technology, but I do favor looking at pre-neolithic methods of survival because those are the methods necessary that allowed  for human survivability within its environment and even from its beginnings, however far back you want to date humanity or those who evolved into humanity, the ability to develop technology was key to the genetic line of all hominids to be environmentally successful.  Of course we have advanced in our technologies.  The issue is not technology and I don’t believe technology is the cause of conflicts within human groups.  And in fact new technologies always advanced globally, if not completely evenly, even up to and within the modern world.  It is the control of the technologies that creates the issues of conflict.  And the conflict arises when the control of technologies and the resources that should advance human technology are turned into favoring only those who control the resources and the technologies that should be advancing communities are utilized to give power to those who control the resources and the technology, and ultimately, which I believe is the purpose in mind of those said controllers, the members of the community.

I began this article by saying all of my ideas are cribbed and I am only as lunatical as those whose ideas I have stolen from. But I am a huge thief, because I steal my ideas from scientists who study evolution and genetics, astrophysics, and human behavior. I’ve never done any original research in  any of these fields.  I steal appealing concepts from others as well.  I’m not very well educated and don’t really grasp concepts until they are presented to me from others, but I look for innovative thinkers from a multitude of disciplines and crib portions from one and portions from another and try to build a structural framework that relates to my own experiences within  my life.  I seldom wholeheartedly   accept every idea from everyone from whom I crib.  If I have little ability to think creatively or develop originality, I think I have some skill in organization. As a child I had little interest in toys, per se, but a great deal of talent for gathering together others to express their common interests they didn’t even realize they shared.  

I’ve written a bit about my experiences in high school.  I never saw myself as popular but in the four years, always was voted most popular.  But I never hung out with any group, but always participated in all of them.  It was, I thought, not about belonging but about bringing.  I organized weekly dances on the base, and tried to get everyone to attend.  I organized tournaments, poetry tournaments, chess tournaments, basketball tournaments with mixed sex teams.  And I furnished prizes with the money I earned from summer jobs.  And I published a few short stories in magazines that earned me some money during the school year.  I couldn’t play music but I wrote original songs for kids who could play them…as long as they didn’t tell anyone I wrote them.  And my short stories were pseudonymous and not even my parents were informed when they were published.  I wasn’t shy by any means, I liked recognition as much as the next person, but I didn’t want anyone to recognize me for what I saw  as external qualities.  The only recognition I wanted was for people to say we had a good time at the dance, we had fun at the party etc.  

I suppose when I was young I would be angry if I lost a game, but I developed a knack for attempting to always give recognition to others for victories.  I did spend one summer at Phillips Exeter in New Hampshire and I learned to play cribbage and I was pretty good, though for the most part I don’t like card and board games, but they decided to have a tournament and I entered and made it to the finals.  It was a best of seven series and in the seventh game we were both a peg from winning.  It was not my deal so I would count first, and I had the victory.  I threw my hand down and said “Damn”.  In cribbage that’s a disqualification and I lost.  The dealer had the hand to win anyone.  The dorm supervisor who had taught me to play and was the referee, however, picked up my hand and looked at it, but said nothing.    Later he called me into the office and asked why I had thrown my hand away when I could have won.”  “He seemed to need to win more than I did,” I told him. 

It’s in no way because I am shy or don’t want recognition.  But as said I’ve never particularly had a need to stand out from the community because somehow I felt greater satisfaction and fulfillment when others were happy.  And also because I have no capacities for leading others or telling them how they must do what they do.  I often found myself training others in work positions because I had a great deal of patience in letting people learn things at their own pace, but whenever I have been placed in a position of “authority” I simply cannot demand compliance and so the expectations of my bosses who gave me authority were never fulfilled and if those I was supposed to be in charge of fell short,I  tried to take up the slack for those who couldn’t, and sometimes didn’t want to do their share.  Unfortunately the latter would become common when it was  observed I would myself not command but do more of what was supposed to be done; of course more would do less. I didn’t feel resentful at those I was supposed to be commanding, but I was resented by those who commanded me and was replaced.  My feeling is no way should be required to do what they don’t want to do.  Or be required to work at a position in order to survive because it was the only way to survive because they have been denied access to the resources for survival. 

That is not theft.  That is my personality, and how that personality has been affected by the experiences that have been imposed upon it.  So while I am admittedly intellectually inferior to others I am not being negative, I was put under a two-week battery of testing at one point.  The results were highly developed skills adaptation and very low intelligence adaptation and an I.Q. determined to average out to 78.  When at the end of the testing period I was “counseled” on the results and the report had the counselors  baffled. They said my I.Q meant I shouldn't even have had the literate ability to even understand the questions on the mental tests and my skills ability meant I should be very competent at using tools which I am generally awkward at using.  On the other hand,  when they did pure mathematical tests with little or no letters I soared to genius level, but if they tried to present problems with shapes-which shape is different, I sat there totally baffled and got a zero because I couldn’t even guess.  But I wasn’t baffled whatsoever.  Because it is my experiences that determined the outcomes that baffled the counselors.  I wasn’t baffled whatsoever because the results were exactly what I would have been able to suggest.  

Or it is the experiences overlaid on my personality.  It’s not a matter of me “gaming” the tests as was suggested by some of the counselors.  If I am told I can’t then I feel I can.  So of course I do well on skills tests.  But most tools disinterest me because I was told I used them incorrectly. Then I have written about  my experience in learning to write and being told my way of forming them was wrong, so I wouldn’t form them the right way, and asked my mother to teach me to type and I just refused to be interested in shapes whatsoever and the tools necessary to make them.  I remember an assignment in creative writing class to write two descriptive scenes, one an outdoor scene and one an indoor.  I thought I wrote two really great descriptions.  My outdoor scene was about being in a thunderstorm and I described the sound of the thunder, the pelting of the rain  on the body, etc. I described the pushback of the wind as I was trying to power my body through it.  For my indoor scene I described a woman cooking dinner wearing an apron, I wrote about the utensils she was using and the process and ingredients she was using to make the meal, and I even added a fly buzzing around the kitchen\n and her need to shoo him away when he came too close  to her food.  I got an F for my efforts.  The teacher said I described two experiences very well but I didn’t describe the surroundings.  In the kitchen scene, I wrote she was wearing an apron but didn’t describe the apron, I wrote she was using a chopping knife, and a slicing knife but I didn’t describe the knives themselves.  And she said adding the fly indicated I was mocking her assignment and she didn’t take kindly to that.

Well I wasn’t mocking her, I thought the fly was descriptive, but she was probably correct otherwise. While changes have been made in the city around me, lights have been added at intersections, roundabouts have been added, etc, since I have quit driving; nevertheless I almost always know where I am, and I certainly know which direction I am being taken.  I often know which lane the driver is in.  If I went to an address even once I remembered the route and often knew six alternative routes to the same destination.  But if you asked me what the building looked like or the passenger (unless I took them several times), I couldn’t tell you.  And I also know why.  Because my personality has reacted negatively to being chastised for being somewhat slower at recognizing shapes than the norm, my personality has become totally disinterested in shapes.  Since I’ve become visually impaired I know the shape of every knife in our kitchen, but I still probably couldn’t describe the knife.  I do know how to form perfect letters because I go back to the days of using punch cards to feed into the computer and the computer couldn’t recognize letters or numbers not properly shaped and sized.  But I don’t write my letters and numbers “properly” and I refuse to care if someone else can decipher them.  

Personalities are born and they experience and “knowledge” is developed by the experiences that impress themselves on varying personalities.Unless  one suffers severe retardation like a much older cousin of mine who was born and  whose body developed and aged and she was in her fifties when I first met her, nevertheless her mind remained infantile, a newborn who had to be spoon fed and couldn’t never sit upright on her own or even turn herself over in the oversized crib she still lived in.  But unless that is the case it is not about being dumb or being smart it is about personalities and the expectations placed upon those personalities through their experiences.  Even two identical twins, and I’ve known several in my life, will react to stimuli; or simply encounter different stimuli and do not develop into identical carbon personalities.  

So I am an admitted thief of ideas of others and didn’t become a nutcake all on my own. And in the next few articles I am going to blatantly use some very well known and often very well respected thinkers to illustrate I am not that dumb, but also not that originally luniacal in my concepts.  And to do this for a purpose to illustrate that maybe my concepts are not as fringe as they may seem.