Freedom and Liberty, from a "Green Buddhist"

What's the difference between a Green and a Libertarian? They both are advocates for freedom and liberty, but their framework for both is very different. For example, L/libertarians generally think that Ayn Rand "framed issues with refreshing clarity" when she wrote: “What is the basic, the essential, the crucial principle that differentiates freedom from slavery? It is the principle of voluntary action versus physical coercion or compulsion…The issue is not slavery for a ‘good’ cause versus slavery for a ‘bad’ cause; the issue is not dictatorship by a ‘good’ gang versus dictatorship by a ‘bad gang. The issue is freedom versus dictatorship…If one upholds freedom, one must uphold man’s individual rights; if one upholds man’s individual rights, one must uphold his right to his own life, to his own liberty, to the pursuit of his own happiness…Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life…”

This is not "clarity" but is instead merely framing a complex question into black and white. It does not take a genius at logic to see how completely muddied and confused this description of Rand's is. The most obvious problem is that this kind of individualistic definition of freedom completely ignores or glosses over the primary fact that no person exists as an individual and therefore the question of freedom can never be merely a matter of the individual. Rand's formula leads only to the dictatorship by the capitalists in an anarchical economic system of might makes right. A capitalist manipulating markets and creating advantages for the ownership class by government legislation is not exercising "individual" freedom, but is merely using power to infringe on the freedoms of others to their inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The primary delusion of this kind of individualist thinking is revealed in the equation of a person's individual rights with the an imagined "right" to own property exclusive of others. This is what the Jungian psychologist calls the return of the shadow. In a worldview of individualism, the shadow returns to enter our consciousness by being unable to distinguish between oneself as an individual and one's projections onto property, and in doing so, one actually becomes a slave to things, products, commodities, and property of all kinds, and thus in servitude to consumption and its capitalist priesthood, all in the name of the individual's rights and freedom.  This nearly irresistible impulse for the consumption of things as commodities is the shadow side of our individualism and floods our conscious thoughts and feelings by creating our identification with the things of an outside world. Without our conscious knowing, we project our individual identity onto things such as our cars, houses, families, etc. to make their acquisitions into trophies of our success as an individual.

Another example of the illogical positions of L/libertarians is found in the attitude toward taxes. While there are different shades and styles of L/libertarians, it is a common denominator that taxes are considered bad, unless they are used specifically for a program that the individual (L/l)ibertaian supports, such as the military.  In the website quiz asking "What Kind of Libertarian Are You" the third question shows narrow range of the attitude toward taxes:

What is your stance on taxes?

All taxes are theft, and no tax is morally legitimate

Taxes should be low, and should only fund the necessary functions of government

Taxes are a necessary evil, but we are in a fight for survival against Islamo-Fascism! We need a big military!

The only legitimate tax is a tax on unimproved land

There should be no taxation -- government should be funded voluntarily

This aversion toward taxes is also based on the one-sided view of an individual, as if the individual can exist outside of the networks of family, clan, tribe, nation, culture, and society.  The L/libertarian  war against taxes is nothing other than a war against the irrefutable recognition that we are all connected.

The goal of freedom and liberty as seen from the Green perspective is inherently social because it uses the context of ecology to recognize that justice is social, that we are all necessarily connected in the great web of life, and that none of us exists as an isolated individual outside of these living networks. Where L/libertarians see economics essentially as interactions between individuals, Greens see economics as community based.  Therefore, from this view, the Randian conception of freedom as merely an individual right is not only preposterous, but factually untrue.  Thus the individualistic idea of unending unregulated economic growth, either as an individual or a nation, as the measure of a healthy economy is delusional from the Green perspective which sees the measure of a healthy economy as it's sustainability and equity.

The goal of Buddha Dharma is freedom too. Not the freedom "to do what you want and the hell with everyone else," but the freedom, liberation, and emancipation of the mind to see the true nature of itself and be free from the fears and delusions created by the mystery of birth and death. While the Greens approach freedom from the primary standpoint of deep ecological interconnectedness, Buddhists approach freedom from the related standpoint of the interconnectedness of the causes and conditions of everything in the cosmos without externalizing either things or the cosmos, and such freedom is "measured" through the awakening of the person (as the word "Buddha" means an "awakened one"). Buddhism is primarily psychological, not ecological, as the Lankavatara Sutra says, “one’s own mind is the measure of manifestation.” (自心現量)  Though the deep psychology of Buddhism is very close to the deep ecology of the Green view. This deeply psychological orientation of Buddhism is why, on his death bed when he was reading the book Chan and Zen Teachings, First Series by Charles Luk, Carl Jung said that when he read what Zen Master Hsu Yun said, "he felt as if he himself could have said exactly this! It was just it!"

This recognition of the central role of the person's awakening is sometimes confused with the nihilistic individualism of the L/llibertarian view, but it is definitely not the same.   In Buddhism, the freedom realized through awakening brings us back to the immediacy of the social context not away from it, just like rain falls to the ground not up to space. In this metaphor it is the gravity of life that brings the awakened person back to the marketplace of social interaction as depicted in the final image of Zen's 10 ox herding pictures. 

In awakening, we see through the illusions of "the individual self" and have our own realization that all things are only the manifestation of Mind (which goes by many names such as Thusness, Emptiness, The Body of the Dharma, True Suchness, etc.), then we can say with Zen Master Linji, "That which is the Dharma is the Dharma of the Mind. The Dharma of the Mind is formless; it moves unobstructed through the ten directions and is seen functioning in front of the eyes." (法者是心法。心法無形通貫十方目前現用。)

If we stopped here, we could easily succumb to a nihilistic or absolutist idealism, however in Buddhism the awakened person gets up from the site of awakening (菩提場) and goes on to become a being of awakening, a bodhisattva (菩提薩埵) whose primary motivation is compassion for helping others with their sense of bondage and lack of freedom.  In this we can reclaim the foundational idea of "economy" from its usurpation by the ideology of individualistic neoliberal capitalism.  As Fred Kofman wrote, in an article referring to the 10 ox herding pictures, titled "Entering the Marketplace with Helping Hands," even Adam Smith noted that an economy is based on the two primary poles of "benevolence towards others and self-interest." The neoliberal idealism of Randian L/libertarianism only sees one side of the polarity, that of self-interest, and they wholly ignore that "benevolence towards others" must have equal footing and impact in an economy for it to be healthy.  The L/libertarian usually rationalizes that self-interest will inevitably lead to an attitude that is benevolent toward others. The Buddhist sees that the selfless-interest of benevolence toward others is actually experienced by people as the more fulfilling kind of self-interest that actually produces the experience of happiness.   

Tonight the phony debate brought to you by beer.

Tonight when you see the presidential debate, there will be a picture worth 10,000 words: THE MOST SUCESSFUL PRODUCT PLACEMENT by LOGO ever conceived in naitonal politics and the Presidential debates.. The Commission on Presidential Debates is a private corporation and the two co-chairs are both ex-party functionaries and are both corporate lobbyists in their day jobs. 

Please watch the important story by Democracy Now! about how the two-party dictatorship has hijacked our democracy by allowing the Republican and Democratic Parties to contol the presidential debates.

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/10/3/ahead_of_first_obama_romney_debate

George Farah, Founder and Executive Director of Open Debate, and author of the book, "No Debate: How the Republican and Democratic Parties Secretly Control the Presidential Debates." lays it all out for us that Anheuser Busch is the corporation paying the most and the chief funder of our Presidential Debates.

During the interview you can see the stage being setup in Denver.  What they didn't mention is that if you look behind the candidates' podiums prominently displayed on the stage you will see the Anheuser Busch eagle logo. 

 

So when you watch the debate tonight just remember that it was brought to you by beer.

 

I ask all "big D" Democrats: if you truely beleive in "small d" democracy, why don't you demand that your party (1) turn over the Presidential Debates to a public commission and (2) allow any candidate on the ballot in enough states to win 270 electoral college votes to participate?  If you are a Democrat, how can you say you support democracy yet don't allow a true competition in the political marketplace? The American Brand of Fascism is based on the two-party tyranny of our democratic institutions. The single most important first step to fixing the institutional system of democracy in the USA is to take the control of the presidential debates out of the hands of this private corporation controlled by the two parties themselves and return the presidential debates back to the people.

Join the Green Party to challenge the anti-democratic farce of our so-called Presidential debates.
http://occupythecpd.org/

 

Heroes Don't Vote for Criminals.

Rebecca Solnit has written a diatribe in the form of a letter that is being passed around under the title of "We could be heroes."

Yes, we could be heroes, if we were to challenge the two-party dictatorship of the American Brand of Fascism that controls our semi-democratic institutions.

Here is my response.

 

LOL! Poor Rebecca, having to whine about whiners whining about whiners. Where does all the whining begin? Must be the big bang that whines through the ages.

Poor Rebecca says, “I have a grand goal, and that is to counter the Republican right with its deep desire to annihilate everything I love and to move toward far more radical goals than the Democrats ever truly support.”  Now, I’m all for ambiguity as the natural state of reality, for complexity in goals, for aiming at goals that are actually in different directions, for conundrum and paradox in political positions, but the idea that the road to achieving these two goals of Rebecca’s leads through the town of supporting the Democratic Party is just plain wrong.  It is a misreading of the map so fundamentally upside down that it is like driving to Seattle to see the manatees and gators.

Rebecca can call me “rancid” and I could come up with a few choice adjectives for her, but I will just stick with “poor Rachel” as her letter presents both a poor grasp of politics and of human nature.  Poor Rachel can’t see the cosmology of the radical left because she closes her eyes and ears to it, not because it is not presented.

So, Poor Rebecca admits that she does not deplore with a lot of fuss the “bad things” that Obama does because she expects him to do those bad things.  In other words, she expects him to assassinate people as the stated foreign policy and to kill US citizens and to torture and to pay off his Wall Street buddies while foreclosures burn, and the list goes on and on.  She just doesn’t deplore the leader who fiddles while America burns because she expects the fiddling.  That is the attitude of poverty of thought.

STRAW MAN:  Then Rebecca wheels out the straw man argument that she couldn’t talk to her leftist friends about our ex-Governor Schwarzenegger’s positive respects. That is a straw man argument which has nothing to do with the actual positive and negative aspects of the current president.  Basically, all Rebecca presents in her rant is variations on the logical fallacy of the straw man. 

Next, Rebecca tells us as if we are children in kindergarten that “There are bad things and they are bad. There are good things and they are good, even though the bad things are bad.”  Yes, Rebecca we know this truism. We also know where the wild things are.

Rebecca wants to know, what purpose does it serve to point out that a person who claims to be anti-death penalty is condoning the illegal purchase of lethal injection drugs?  Dear Rebecca, the purpose is to point out the blanket label of “anti-death penalty” is qualified not absolute.  You can celebrate the coolness of Kamala Harris; just don’t claim that her coolness gives her a free pass to escape criticism for where she is not so cool. Rebecca acts as if Obama’s saying he is for peace should not be countered with all the examples of his pro-war mongering including drones killing wedding participants and assassination of US citizens. What Rebecca is blind to is the insanity of a man accepting the Nobel Peace Prize and in his acceptance speech talking about how he is a better warrior. 

Rebecca claims she wants to focus on fixing problems or being compassionate, yet her rant is just as uncompassionate as those she rants against.  Her rant is also just as void of focus on fixing problems as she moans about others.  There is not one fix suggested for our democratic system presented.

Poor Rebecca calls unconstitutional and impeachable acts by the president “dimples on the imperial derriere” and says they are not worth discussing.  Yes, Poor Rebecca doesn’t want to discuss such dirty and troubling things; she wants to talk about the things that look good.

If Rebecca votes for Obama with the belief that fewer people will suffer, then that is her choice based on her calculation. If I vote for Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, with the belief that fewer people will suffer then why doesn’t she grant me this choice, but instead says that my belief is wrong and my vote is just “choosing the greater of two evils”?  See? Rebecca is as guilty of left voter suppression as anyone.   The “evils” slogan in this context comes from the Democrats, not from the leftists, but Rebecca adds another straw man argument claiming that it is leftists who coined and push the “evils” meme.

Another straw man argument made by Rebecca is the one that rants against the left for saying “that there’s no difference” between the two parties.  But there is no leftist who makes that argument.  When people say the choice between the Republican and Democratic candidates for president is a choice between Pepsi and Coke, they are not saying “there is no difference.” Everyone knows that Pepsi and Coke taste different.  What is being said is that when it comes to the things of most importance to the voter the differences in taste are not as significant as the similarity in sugar content.  

Yes, Rebecca, we are facing a right wing that has abandoned all interest in truth and fact.  I call them the American Taliban. And yes, to oppose them requires that we be different from them.  They support and reelect their president no matter what crimes he commits, so we must be different and not support and not reelect our president because of the crimes he commits. Calling Obama’s crimes “minor differences” of opinion is just plain disgusting.  Overlooking Obama’s crimes insures that there is no possibility of changing the conditions that allows him to continue committing those crimes. 

Rebecca’s form of defeatism is the fetishism of the politics of hope that blinds her to the actual crimes being committed in her name.  People need hope. But they need hope that is real not just the false promise of hope by a con game played on the voters using the two-party tyranny that keeps the Republicans and Democrats in power switching back and forth.  Rebecca says she want to achieve the goal of countering the Republican right, but that goal can’t be achieved by supporting the very same Democrats who depend on the Republican right for their reason for existence.  Democrats could have countered the Republican right many years ago but have failed to do so becauseit is not in their interests to do so. 

If we want to talk about fixing the problem, about compassion for democracy, let’s talk about fixing the system.  I ask all "big D" Democrats: if you truly believe in "small d" democracy, then why don't you demand that your party (1) turn over the Presidential Debates to a public commission and (2) allow any candidate on the ballot in enough states to win 270 electoral college votes to participate?  If you are a Democrat, how can you say you support democracy yet don't allow a true competition in the political marketplace? The American Brand of Fascism is based on the two-party tyranny of our democratic institutions. The single most important first step to fixing the institutional system of democracy in the USA is for the people to take the control of the presidential debates out of the hands of the private corporation that runs them and is controlled by the two parties themselves and return thepresidential debates back to the people.