Thursday, February 7, 2008

The Ludic Revolution

Bob Black calls it The Ludic Revolution. It's the only revolution
which ever will, or can, work.

Revolution cannot be accomplished by violence. I see nothing morally
or essentially wrong with using violence against the economic and
political powers that be. If using violence were an effective means of
bringing about revolution, I'd be all for it. I do not respect, or
even acknowledge, any right to life and property on their part in the
least. When they arrogated our rights to life and freedom they
forfeited their own, and I am convinced that no one has the right to
private property.

I do not advocate violence against the economic and political powers
that be simply and only because violence against them won't work.
They are better at violence than we.

Moreover, and this is terribly important to understand, as Gustav
Landauer wrote, so very insightfully:

"One can throw away a chair and destroy a pane of glass; but those are
idle talkers and credulous idolaters of words who regard the state as
such a thing or as a fetish that one can smash in order to destroy
it.  The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human
beings, a mode of behavior; we destroy it by contracting other
relationships, by behaving differently toward one another - One day it
will be realized that socialism is not the invention of anything new
but the discovery of something actually present, of something that has
grown; We are the state and we shall continue to be the state until we
have created the institutions that form a real community and society
of men". - Gustav Landauer

"Schwache StattsmĪ“nner, Schwacheres Volk!" ("Weak Statesman, Weaker
People!")
Der Sozialist, June 1910

The economic and political powers that be derive their powers from us
- from the permission we granted them to usurp our basic rights. They
are the distillation of the very worst in us. Violence will not be
effective against them. They are far more effective at terrorizing us
than we them because it was our fear that created their dominion in
the first place.

HR 1955 (S 1959) is legislature aimed at preventing the use of force
or violence to effect social change. All legislation designed to
regulate and control behavior is centered on the prohibition of force
and violence.

Have you ever heard of legislation against laughter?

Love and LAUGHTER conquer fear. They are both orders of magnitude more
powerful than fear and when we love and laugh, fear is displaced in
us. We become more expansive. We become more creative. We become
vastly more powerful.

The economic and political powers that be do not deserve our love. As
the ancient Jewish teaching has it: "Those who are compassionate
toward the cruel will, in the end, be cruel to the compassionate." The
history of Christianity bears out just how true this maxim is.

They are deserving of nothing but our ridicule. They deserve to be
laughed at.

We can diminish anything with our laughter.

There is a higher level of laughter than sardonic ridicule and, if we
are to effect a revolution, we must reach that level of laughter.

When we can laugh at their funny money; when we can look at their
concentration camps and at the double-decker trains equipped with
chains and shackles and laugh; when we can laugh at the electronic
turnstiles and the cement floors and the barbed wire and the gas pipes
and the furnaces they've installed in some of the camps and laugh;
when we can laugh at the horrible images the threats of "mental
health" camps in Alaska that can hold 2 million people conjure up in
our minds; when we can laugh at the fear and disgust they try to
induce in us with all the talk of them practicing occult and satanic
practices (the photos of the ceremonies they conduct really are
ludicrous), when we can laugh *at death itself* - we will have
conquered our own minds and emotions and, in so doing, destroyed their
hold on us entirely.

The economic and political "powers" are nothing but the reification of
the horrors in our own minds and the emotions they arouse. When we
conquer our minds and those emotions that hold us prisoner, then and
only then will we be free.

Life and death are just a game, but the name of the game is life and
death. Those who have understood this, really understood it, were all
set free by the understanding. Until the moment we realize this, we
are all the slaves of anyone who has more control over their minds and
emotions, and thus our minds and emotions, than we do.

Long live The Ludic Revolution!

Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel

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