On organisation

Any attempts to organise the human herd will necessarily fall into one of two categories : either personal or impersonal (which is to say legalistic). The reason is simply that no alternatives exist, just like a point can either be on one side of a plane or on the other.

The personal attempts, whether they be led by Hitler or Jesus inevitably end in bloodshed. The former case perhaps needs less explanation seeing our friends the Jews have expended so much of their little remaining intellectual strength after the carnage explaining to everyone who'd listen and especially those who won't that HITLER IS BAD MMKAY!!! The latter case is perhaps confusing in that it's a personal attempt turned impersonal after the depersonification of the leader (the artist formerly known as death), and thus the empty hope arises that maybe things could be finagled so the resulting halfbreed only inherit the good parts of both parents. The purity of the nonsense should be apparent to common sense, but fail that it is perhaps best typifed by that Jesus copycatⁱ with a turban (the artist formerly known as Danishface), who came up with the notion of jihad.

The impersonal attempts always end up in playing RPGs. Be it the bureaucratic "any time you want something done here's a quest for you, please collect signed&stamped papers of achievement aka PlotCoupons" so very familiar to East Europeans but now becoming increasingly the in thing across the pond or be it the out and out soma-esque "come to a large building and stay there all your waking hours playing click the farm on Facebook", no legalistic approach can or indeed seems to want to escape this ultimate fate of its ilk.

In short it's either war, which is scary, or peace, which is alienating. Neither approach works, and neither approach is worth two shits in anyone's estimation. The solution often appears to be creating tailored, designer organisational structures, but consider their fate. Buddhism is this personal scheme in which followers sit around in an empty room and play tabletop D&D in their head by themselves millenia after the guy's demise. Are they so very much better than those dudes depicted in Trainspotting, waiting around with their RPG while the baby dies ? I don't see it. Do you ?

Supposedly here's where I explain that if things were just let be and the herd "self-organised" everything would be ok on some arcane considerations of nonsense. Perhaps the contrary tendencies cancel each other out leaving us with pure goodness, or perhaps Adam Smith comes and fucks everyone in the ass with a broomstick to everyone's satisfaction. Well... not so. "Self-organised" still comes down to either personal or legalistic, or some mix of the worst in both worlds. Consider for instance this discussion of citizen justice to get an idea of how it works.

Just pick something. Would you rather be gutted by some foul smelling, fur covered, pox ridden, bad breathed bearded fuckwit wielding an ax, or would you rather have all meaning slowly sucked away from you to the point you'd rather gut yourself with a guitar pick, at some point after you've let yourself go past the point were bad breath and foul smells were an endearing feature ?

Have fun. Life be a gift.

1. This is exactly what Islam is, a poor attempt on the part of some other desert goatherders to copy the originals, a few hundred years late and with all the panache of Joe Smith. [↩]