The Dangerous Innocents
 
 
   Living for a couple of years in a simple sheet plastic shelter in the
woods, I discovered a dark side to winning the trust of wild animals.
   The deer, squirrels and birds turned out to be quite as emotional and
emotionally expressive as any person. I originally thought that their
conventional expressionless appearance was due to having a hairy face or a
vacant mind, but the truth appears to me now to be that they are painfully
shy. The real turning point was a young dear one day making striking odd
faces at me, in apparent playfulness. The look of sentient intelligence was
a bit frightening to me, and totally genuine. The deer was self-aware and
had specific feelings about me. The formality of species was broken.
   That by itself would have been attractive to me, but the deer was no
brighter or emotionally intelligent than an average dog or mentally
retarded person. Some of the squirrels and birds began to invade likewise,
initiating intense expressive exchanges with me that made clear their
managerial oblivion. A small herd of cattle also lived in those woods and
gave me the impression of shy friendliness when they came by, but shattering
all subtlty of the terrain as they passed.
   My fragile camp and minimal equipment seemed under seige in a manner of
speaking. I saw no trainable appeal in the creatures. I had to maintain
formality or face the nusiance and destruction of the common puppy. The
image of Saint Francis with the birds landing on him took a very different
meaning for me then.
   In later years with rather senseless (but human) roommates, I have been
inclined to greatly appreciate the difference that being able to talk can
make, in shaking down harmlessness with an associate. I also have
recognized a range of competence in people that sets limits on how
unguarded I need to be with each of them. Some have a tenatious commitment
to predatory playfulness, similar to a dog, wherein any attractive item is
open to pillage if it's not locked down and covered. For simplicity I
generally keep potentially troubling items hidden or upstaged by more
striking things, but intimidation has sometimes been the only option with
some people. I also tend to be Machiavellian about it, refereeing a
convenient offense by my antagonist to third person, to avoid backlash
against me for having so much political authority.
   Some of my neighbors have become likewise saboteurs of my household, due
to cultural embarrassment or real estate speculation, inspiring me into
formality with them as well, to redirect their attention away from the
details of my life that get them upset. Years of being friendly with some
of them served to build up an intense unspoken antagonism rather than the
deepening trust that normally results.
   So the sunny presumption of harmlessness painted onto wild animals and
ordinary citizens by leftist writers of all sorts, and reintroduced more
recently by the Zeitgeist Movement and related efforts, looks to me now
like a very dangerous illusion and a guarantee of failure in the progress
towards a kinder and saner social tradition. The present stratification of
dignity and resource access among sentient beings is to me a vital balancing
act of managerial deception and coercion used by the more clever
participants to minimize senselessly destructive hysteria and predatory
playfulness on the part of a majority of both people and animals.
   The social deception is normally attributed to rich people and presumed
to be motivated by differential advantage, but I am one of the deceivers and
I am quite poor, so I don't see things that way. I view wealthy culture as a
kind of crippledness, a dependency like a cigarette habit, not a matter for
me to wish for at all. What I observe being formally defended with trickery
in my city looks to be mostly about keeping an orderly babysitting spell on
the regular citizens, to keep them from wrecking their own infrastruture.
Because babysitting is something I feel oppressed by, I view the people who
require it as being exploitive, rather than the people doing the control.
And I am highly doubtful of being able to end the use of social trickery of
delinquents, both in my personal life and on the big scale.
   I note a striking absense of women in the Zeitgeist Movement and in the
related online forums. I am imagining that women are far more likely to
have direct experience of doing delinquent crowd control of adults, and thus
recognize the huge crowd control value of the monetary system, and the
impossibility of replacing it with the educating of the delinquents and
having lots of informational meetings. I've seen this quandry expressed by
women most profoundly in relation to the actual life conditions and possible
remediation for homeless men. Twice I've been offered money by women my age
who believed that I was a miserable unfortunate, and who clearly saw a need
to maintain a stratified social relationship to me.
   I recognize three levels of social stability maintenance; I call them
threat based, ownership based, and resource based. It is evident to me in
the Zeitgeist Movement forums, and in common household arrangements, that
ownership based stability gets too little overt conscious respect to be an
effective safety net that prevents deliberate injury and tragedy. In my
view, the honoring of ownership on the neighborhood scale and up to at
least the national scale has facilitated considerable wealth establishment
worldwide, with a real hope that honoring of ownership on a world scale may
virtually end deliberate injury and tragedy worldwide, in my lifetime.
   But ironically the Zeitgeist Movement website is not at present backing
that kind of world government development, based on the idea that no-one
within the Movement's members is actually a genuine threat to anyone else,
and that ownership is a primitive and disgusting form of social relation.
Most families overtly express this premise in any discussion of their own
internal politics as well. Thus real progress in evolving world stability
has to occur outside of overt verbal public recognition of the present
threat based stabilizing aspects and present ownership based possibilities.
   My own political theory begins with the premise that all social
stability, at all scales and both human and animal, can be described in a
kind of pyramid form, with a system of threats at the bottom supporting a
smaller system of ownership. In my view only a basis of clear stable
ownership can support a mutual advocacy or resource based stability. This
may be in concurrance with Jacque Fresco's idea of resource based economy,
but he puts no emphasis on it, and I'm sure that Mr. Joseph and his
membership is totally opposed to any honoring of coercive threats or
ownership.
   To complicate matters, nearly all public political discussion excludes
the factors of hurt feelings and predatory ambition as a factor in
outcomes, so meaningful verbal addressing of real threats is often
paralyzed or forced into ridiculous substitute theatrics like the "terror
threat". I see the next basic step in worldwide political development as
being public establishment of honest discussion, wherein no-one is forced
to disguise their outlook or seek results by indirect.
   There are a lot of people, such as the admin people on the Zeitgeist
Movement website and seven of my neighbors, who will overtly shut me out of
access to any social unity that they have political power within, and will
engage in direct sabotage of creative effort on my part. Living in a
resource based system with such people would be quite oppressive for me,
and for the many other people whose creativity and idealism draw fire this
way.
   Justfortheloveofit.org has an introductory video depicting a young woman
seducing and brutally exploiting a friendly helpful young man. She makes an
offer to pay him off with money, but he is committed to seeking real
emotional accountability so he refuses. She makes him vanish and then goes
back to her original solitary narcissistic focus. I took the video as a
warning not to stay available on the website. I studied the profiles of
several of the other people in my area but was not inspired to meet any of
them.
   I attribute the heartlessness of all these people to a market tradition
of making the customer, and the boss, always right and welcome even if they
are emotionally unaccountable. The deliberate questioning and erratication
of this one ethic in market activity may be a prerequisite to exploring
resource based economics. Having employment be something everyone is left
to there own devices to arrange, and having no emotional accountability
expected and demanded of a customer, invites people to embrace an identity
like the woman in the video.
   Zeitgeist members inspired this way makes the moderator position on the
Zeitgeist Movement website a brutal thankless job that inspires being an
emotionally unaccountable moderator. The admin people clearly state their
feelings of being abused this way in forum posts, but make no attempt to
reach out to their antagonists for emotional accountability. Most of the
admin people in fact remain completely faceless and anonymous. Peter Joseph
refers to himself as introverted and encourages both the anonymity and the
ethic of emotionally unaccountable entitlement, limited only by obeying
creativity suffocating choregraphic rules.
   One member whose pet programming focus on Mumble got censored on the
forum, resulting in hurt feelings all around, made a farewell post after
his permanent loss of membership, in which he listed all the other members
who he had established feelings about, saying a specific farewell to each.
   Not even the Zeitgeist women propose deliberate development of emotional
ethics on the website. TVPchallenge and zmchi overtly feed the brawl and
the others just offer timid diplomatic remarks that make them not a direct
target. Since their identities don't compel conceptual origination, they
have no real stake in resolving this. They write nothing original in the
wiki and, like me, they mostly just stay out of participation in the
forum.
   

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