I struggle a lot with “pure” concepts.  Not only do I not really know what pure fascism and pure communism and pure democracy look like, but I don’t know what their economic equivalents do either.  What the heck is a “free market” anyway?  Is there even such a thing as an “arms-length transaction” in the real world, really?  Does a “meeting of the minds” ever really occur?  In my mind, these are all just fantasies.

Most of the time, the market is not free.  You must pay informational and reputational costs to enter, no matter where and when this market is.  Most of the time, there are significant power disparities between the parties, especially these days.  Economies of scale have produced great big corporations, and you as an individual are just so small, how could it be otherwise?  When you need a couple thousand dollar prescription drug, that your medical insurance only covers 50% of, how could you possibly think that that market was free?  You had informational and monetary and power disparities so huge, it seems they could only be overcome by single-payer healthcare.

Derrick Jensen talks about blind hope.  Would you rather resist and be killed, or go along with the hierarchy, every step of the way into the gas chambers?  Then he points out that the people in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising had a greater survival rate than the people who did not resist.  This goes along well with Nassim Taleb’s concept of risk of ruin.  What is the risk, at any one decision point, that you will die if you do this action versus this action?  You also have to take into account the risk that you will die at the end of the primrose path, not just at a single decision point.  However, things at the end of the primrose path are not always clear.  You can see the close up probabilities more clearly than the ones in the future, in general.

Thus, I can make a decision like this one: If I suspect that I have stress-fractured a bone doing something like too much running for too much time, I don’t actually have to go see a doctor about it.  If I do, I know that I will be out of pocket roughly $1000 due to the high-deductible health insurance plan plus multiple visits and tests.  The chances of me dying are really quite low, and it is a low-risk of nonunion location.  If I so desired, I could order a fracture boot on amazon or other online medical supply provider for far less than a doctor’s office would sell it to me.  Crutches are $20 at the local drugstore, should I decide that I need them to get around.

I then have to ask the question: does the internet change the information disparity in healthcare?  Or only certain types of healthcare?  There are certain things that cost more to do without a doctor’s order than with the high deductible full-price office visit associated with obtaining that order, like specialist blood testing.  These things also have a higher risk of dying if you get the interpretation of the thing wrong.  This means one does not always avoid the medical system as a matter of policy, but wisely chooses cafeteria style when it is useful and when it can be avoided.

Translating this decision heuristic over to politics works as well.  One does not always choose the anarchy option as a matter of policy.  Sometimes, it is useful to choose the hierarchy, when the risk of ruin is lower.  Sometimes it is useful to choose democracy, or fascism, or even vulture capitalism.  Keep in mind that these decisions are not forever, and should the circumstances change, going back to mere anarchy is always on the table.  If you choose to seek all of the government services possible in order to bankrupt it, that’s fine, and so is avoiding government services for the sake of privacy, stillness, and solitude.  We are all still deeply connected, even if it doesn’t feel like it at all.  I am connected to the psychopath just as much as I am connected to the all-loving and nurturing mother.  Giving up hope in any one self-identity as being the salvation of my sense of righteousness has borne fruit.  There is no salvation, there never was.  I will never be righteous or good.  Therefore, I am free to decide, even badly.

In contract law, they teach us, that withholding vital information needed to judge the terms of a contract makes the contract voidable.  You all know, from having watched way too many court dramas, that withholding a material fact can completely change the story, and thus the judgment of the jury or the judge.  Too many secrets can make people commit atrocities, simply because they didn’t know.  It seems that while not knowing the law is not an excuse, not knowing the facts because they have been deliberately concealed, is very much an excuse.

Thus, we come to morality.  People who know more about the story of the planet tend to have different morality structures than those who don’t know as much.  Let’s face it, though, trudging through life as a smart person feels like a hangover.  It honestly feels as though I “should” know more to the story than I do.  Piecing together the puzzle pieces, and looking at all of the myths and the science, knowing that parts were deliberately kept from me, is demoralizing.  I use the word demoralizing in a different sense there; it means that it breaks down the morality I was indoctrinated as a child.  Oh sure, we all were.  Don’t steal, don’t kill, don’t cheat, obey the law, don’t lie, don’t run stop lights.  This basic morality is taught because it must be, because it works, and because it has stood the test of time through aeons of trial and error.

As you grow in power and influence, your morality changes.  Cthulhu’s all-powerful morality is so very different from the one children are taught.  Odin kills the frost giants, and yet he lets the fairies and the dwarves live.  Voltaire knocks a hole in a fishing boat which was ferrying them across the lake, because boats with holes are not taxed and boats without holes are.  Voltaire goes and kills an innocent child, explaining that the child was going to grow up and become a genocidal monster.  How much different from Voltaire’s morality is Haephestus’s?  How much different from Haephestus’s morality is Hera’s or Zeus’s?  They would let the genocidal monster child live, and wipe out all of the non-believers in the next nation over.  They would create ebola, the flu, childhood bone cancer, and all of the sexually transmitted diseases to afflict innocent newborn babies with.  When they said that “God’s ways are not our ways”, they were absolutely right.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely.  Actually, if I remember the story correctly, absolute knowledge of good and evil corrupts absolutely.  Do you really think that I know right from wrong?  Do babies know it?  Of course they don’t.  That’s why we have to teach them right from wrong, and what we teach them is very crude.  As an adult, you know very well that there are times to kill, and times to lie, and times to steal.  The Jewish morality allows all of those to be broken to save a life.  Prosperity Gospel Christianity allows all of those to be broken to make a profit, pumping oil from the ground and destroying ecosystems worldwide to do it, stealing clean water and dumping fracking chemicals and cancer-causing chemicals into it.  It seems the entire pantheon of gods throughout the world allow this.  They allow rape to go on, allowing the entire police force to look the other way when several of their own engage in violence of various types within their homes or on the streets.  Surely you can forgive the atheists for thinking that there are no gods when they never witness gods interfering for the benefit of mankind as a whole.

Humans are pretty bad at foretelling the future.  Oh, granted, far better than chance at the general outlines and probabilities, but the specific details?  Not so much.  We can’t even tell the past, because so very much of it has been kept from us.  We can’t tell even the future, because there is way too much privacy at all levels.  How are we supposed to be held morally accountable for our actions when we don’t know 90% of the story?  Unless we know every material fact, we can’t be held morally responsible for what we do.  We know not what we do.  I would go further, and say, from a gnostic point of view, even if we did know, there is nothing we could do to change the story of the planet.  We are powerless over humanity’s oil addiction.  Even the .01% are powerless over humanity’s oil addiction.  According to leadership boundary theory, if I am powerless over a thing, it is not my problem, and I instead focus my energies upon the problems which I do have power to create and/or destroy with.

Too Many Secrets.  Here we are with access to much more knowledge and information than ever before, than even the kings of old had at their fingertips in their vast libraries of records and messengers and spies.  We still can’t make good moral decisions about where we want the planet to go.  We CAN, however, affect the local scene quite a bit.  Anything within walking distance, you have much more local knowledge than any national level bureaucrat ever will, or could.  That is always the way of things, even in the forest between the vast fungi networks interlinking the trees and shuttling nutrients to and fro.  If you were to decide to kill all the psychopaths and rapists in your local area, or to throw them out, I simply don’t have the information available to judge your decision with.  And why should I bother to judge you anyway?  If you want to bottle feed or breast feed, it really isn’t any of my business.  If you abort babies, it is not my business.  I honestly have enough moral decisions without sufficient information as it is.

What does a snake eating its own tail have to do with freedom?  Freedom is an interesting concept.  Recall that it is one of those things that doesn’t actually exist, or if you had a spectrum between real bricks on one side and bricks made out of skittles that you imagined because you read them on a piece of paper covered with squiggles and your mind created the image on the other, it would be much nearer the brick made out of skittles than the heavy thing that people tend to build walls with.  As more of an unreal than real kind of thing, it is therefore a bit slippery to define or grasp.

When you declare yourself to be something, an identity politics kind of thing, then you are no longer as free as you were to begin with.  So, for example, let’s say that you have declared yourself to be an anarchist, and therefore are not going to be following the rules of hierarchy for as much as you can get away with as a matter of principle.  That means you are not free to support hierarchy.  You can’t become Emperor, and you can’t become CEO of a trans-national corporation which provides Tasers for the human trafficking system.  By declaring yourself to be free from rules, you are less free.

It works all the way on the other side of the spectrum as well.  Let’s say that you have declared yourself to be a Unitarian, and a member of the local Unitarian church.  That means you have decided to be bound by their rules, be bound by their democratic decisions, their bylaws and consensus processes.  That is a tradeoff, you can’t do these dignity-lowering things here, and yet because they are many, you do have more options than you would as a lone individual.

If, on the other hand, you declare that you will never join a group, because you want to remain free?  Then you are not free to join groups.  Or to leave them.  Freedom of association isn’t quite the contradictory statement that one sees at first glance.  If you are free, then you are able to join the most hateful nationalist group out there, and to vote or not vote as your conscience dictates.  If you are free, then you are able to create massive wars, and to change the climate through the efforts of multi-national joint military and drug-running gang efforts, and to lie to the public about what you are doing in complete privacy.  If you are truly free, you can change the way the money works, or you can lead people down the path of their own destruction as The Satanic Bible says you can.  Or can you?

Then we get into the old philosophical argument of free will, wherein POSIWID (The Purpose of a System is What It Does) is used to disprove its existence.  If people truly had free will, then 100% of them would not have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.  The argument is, if everybody makes a particular choice in one direction and not the other, then that is proof that everybody was coerced to make that decision.  Res Ipsa Loquitur.  Are people truly free?  You couldn’t disprove it, because no two people really make all of the same decisions.  Then again, using the same logic, you could disprove that sin exists, by simply proving that not-sin doesn’t exist, and therefore everything is sin, and therefore the definition of sin versus not-sin can’t exist.

Originally, I had told a friend that a group MUST be able to exclude others, or it would not remain a coherent group.  That’s one of those negative axioms: freedom to associate necessarily implies a freedom to disassociate.  Freedom of speech necessarily implies a freedom to remain silent and private.  Freedom to exist as a church necessarily implies the ability to exclude people who don’t obey the membership rules.  Freedom to exist as a tribe necessarily implies the ability to exclude the bastard who beats his neighbor’s wife who he’s been raping.  Freedom to exist as a nation necessarily implies the ability to exclude criminals who don’t obey the membership rules.  Shunning is different than imprisonment.

I thought that these truths were self-evident, but I should have looked around and realized that they definitely are not self-evident.  I can’t bind groups like that.  Groups are free to make stupid decisions, stupid membership rules, and to fail.  There are no “musts” in the world, nor even any “shoulds”.  There is only probability of adverse consequences, and the grinding wheel of time which dissolves all groups and destroys all statues of Ozymandias over time.  It was a form of yelling at the tide to stop advancing, and I’m sorry.  I make lots of philosophical mistakes, and I probably will continue to do so.

It is partly my fault.  I do have to acknowledge my own responsibility for the history that led to this, but it isn’t all my fault.  You see, I have no current real life friends, other than my husband.  Nobody outside of family ever invites me over for dinner, or to go camping.  Nobody ever invites any of my children over for a sleepover.  The birthday party invites for my children are few and far between.  If a bunch of soccer parents are taking their kids skiing?  I won’t be invited.  We don’t go out to restaurants with people, because we’re not invited.  We’ve stopped being invited to Fourth of July BBQs, New Years Eve parties, Super Bowl watching parties, baptisms, weddings, and funerals.  Nobody ever invites me out to coffee.  Nobody ever asks me to come over and help them move, pack, clean up, watch their children while they do something important.  Nobody ever asks me to go to a movie with them.

I have acquaintances, sure.  I have digital friends who used to do the above things.  When they post pictures of the great time they had with their friends doing any of the above, I feel excluded.  It’s just like high school and college all over again, being the last one picked for dodgeball, being the only one in church youth group not invited to the party, being the one not picked for the lighting crew, not picked to sing, having stories told about me behind my back.  I’m sad and hurt.  But not too sad, and not too hurt.

Desperation doesn’t work.  It never did.  The people who practice magic would call it “the lust for result.”  The people who don’t practice magic call it something different.  They blame the victim.  I mean, obviously, I need to do the inviting first, or something.  If you’ve even seen social shunning in action in high school, you know that doesn’t work, and the outcast quickly learns that every invitation leads to a quick “no”.  I already admitted that I am partly responsible.  I have no voice.  I have no friends.  I have no visible presence.

I have ancestors I talk to and listen to.  Oh, don’t look so shocked, a belief in ancestor worship is very common across the globe.  It is only in the western U.S. where it is not practiced much.  You don’t have to believe in the existence of ancestor life after death in order to understand that having conversations with them works.  If the vast majority of people have an imaginary friend called God or Allah whom they talk to and that actually works for them, why would you poo-poo my talking to my ancestors, even if you believe they are imaginary?  Besides, they’re more responsive than high and lofty Gods who have high and lofty plans that involve what He did to Job’s children, what He did to Daniel, and what He did to the daughter of Jephthah.  Ghosts can hug when nobody else ever does.  Ghosts can teach social skills, when the rest of the world is intent on hiding the unwritten rules from me.  It was the ghosts which first taught me to look and listen and feel, to see beyond the surface, and it was the ghosts which taught me to block out others’ pain.  Or are they spirits?  Are they alien spirits?

Does not matter.  Need not be.  It doesn’t matter if they are real or all in my head, like governments and titles of lordship.  It doesn’t matter if I never have any real life dependable friends ever again.  Do you know why?  I’ll tell you why.  Without the bonds of mutual obligation, I am free.  I am free from their judgment of me.  If they think I am arrogant or socially awkward, they can do so, because they are petty and shallow and can’t hear the Earth cry out in pain over the roads and deforestation and monocultured grass.  I have no need to conform to their standards.  I have no need to chase popularity, or that kind of social power.  I can be a bad mom.  That’s right, I can be considered by anybody else to be a bad person, and it doesn’t matter.  My worth is not determined by them.  They lost that right, and they lost that trust when they neglected to show love or even basic decency and respect.