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The Underlying Problem is the Concept of "Nation-State" It's been almost six months since Israel started bombing Gaza. Since then, tens of thousands of Palestinians have died, most of them children. For the first time since Israel was created, a consensus around the world is building that Israel has been breaking international law. Much of the discussion around this topic treats the state of Israel as a given and as a legitimate player on the world stage. But stepping back and looking at the bigger picture, one may start noticing the cracks building on the state-centric international legal order. For the first time since the recognition of the state of Israel, the war crimes committed by Israel over the past 75 years are finally starting to be officially recognized by the international community. This is already huge, but there is more to that. Much more. Despite the ruling by the ICJ and the recognition that Israel might be committing genocide against Palestinians, Israel has completely ignored the recommendations from the ICJ. In fact, Israel has doubled down on the carnage. Furthermore, instead of providing Palestinians with enough food and water, as recommended by the ICJ, Israel and several of the Western powers such as the US, Canada, and the UK eliminated their funding of UNRWA, the main organization that has been keeping Palestinians alive, providing them with food and water. In the process, all these Western powers have become complicit in genocide. This is a huge blow to the international legal order because it calls into question its legitimacy and validity when the most powerful countries on the planet choose to completely ignore it. Before the establishment of the current international legal order, territorial acquisitions by force were seen as legitimate. But under the current international law, it is not. What is unique about Israel is that it is a project of settler colonialism that continues to this day, in the 21st century, contrary to international law. What we observe today in Israel, the war crimes and the genocide committed by Israel's occupation, which observation is only possible through the communication technologies we have today, is the same process through which the majority of nation-states in the world were born. The main difference between them, other than the ability for all of us to watch the gruesome process of nation-building unfold, is that the process is not finished. So long as the project of settler colonialism is not fulfilled, the state of Israel remains incomplete. The state is only completed once the settler colonial process is finished, once all the territories of the state are occupied and the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people is complete so that the Palestinian people don't exist anymore and only the Israeli state and people remain. Hence we see today the process that occurred throughout the planet, how indigenous people around the world were murdered and subjugated, and their freedom and self-determination rejected. In this context, we are told that the nation-states as they are today are legitimate, despite their bloody history. Their legitimacy, now, should be suspect to anyone who is paying attention. How can a global international legal order that was created through a process contrary to the established international law be legitimate? The international legal order is built around principles that must be followed to make it legitimate. Without those principles, the international legal order ceases to be legitimate and states have no reason to abide by the legal rules established by the order. These principles are grounded in universal legal principles of what constitutes justice. As such, they are not subject to negotiation. The whole point of law and justice is supposed to be to protect the interests of those who are not powerful and to protect and provide restitution to those who have been wronged. Instead, the law is used as an instrument for the powerful to further consolidate power. This is what we see on the world stage, as the most powerful nation-states on Earth instrumentalize international law to their advantage. They proclaim to follow international law, and they urge other states to follow it, but they refuse to follow it when the law goes against their interests. Those states use their military power and economic influence to dictate their will to other supposedly sovereign states, which in turn must comply or potentially be "liberated". They use their economic power to sanction states that don't obey them, and they use their veto power at the UN to stop any motion that goes against their interests. The state-centric global legal order is a joke. One of the core principles of the international legal order is the principle of self-determination. The principle of self-determination is crucial for the legitimacy of the legal order. The principle and, in particular, the internal principle of self-determination is that the people must have a voice, the people have the right to be able to run their affairs. Legitimacy comes from states truly representing the people that live within their territory and without self-determination states are not really legitimate. The right to self-determination exists in direct contrast and tension with the idea of state sovereignty and the monopoly of power they have over and above their citizens. The idea of the centralized state implies the domination of those who live under it. Of course one could argue that a state is legitimate if they truly represent the general will of the people, but when does that ever happen? Further, if the state did represent the general will, then it wouldn't need a monopoly of power to enforce the will of the state. The sovereignty of the state and its power over citizens goes directly against the principle of self-determination. We can either have jus cogens and the principle of self-determination or we can have states. We can't have both. So what is more important - to protect the state-centric global order or the right of people to govern themselves? The appropriate response is not to disregard the principle of self-determination but rather to build a global legal order that is capable of fulfilling fundamental requirements of justice such as self-determination. Israel is a great example of how states break the principle of self-determination. The people of Palestine had no say in the Balfour Declaration and the creation of the state of Israel. Palestine was invaded, Palestinians were denied their right to self-determination, and then Israel was created. It's a completely illegitimate state, it's nothing but a colony of the UK and the US. Yet the international community recognizes Israel as a legitimate state. As the international community continues to recognize the state of Israel as legitimate, it legitimizes the way the state of Israel was created as a means by which states can legally be created. It legitimizes colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. It's all absurd! The principle of self-determination means NOTHING to the international legal order! It's constantly shoved aside to protect the interests of the powerful! Wherein lies the Achilles heel of the international legal order. It was created after a global process of globalization and the creation of states through imperialism, genocide, and colonialism. All nation-states on the planet are either former colonies or colonizers. Therefore, if we take the principle of self-determination seriously, it follows that the vast majority of the nation-states on the planet, if not all, are illegitimate under international law because they were all the products of colonization, breaking the principle of self-determination, such as Israel, or they are colonizers who effectively act as rogue states refusing to follow the most fundamental principles of the international legal order. But it gets worse than that. Much worse. The very idea of the "nation-state" is flawed. We can see the problem when we talk about the two-state solution. The whole idea of the nation-state, as a state that is organized around the concept of "nation", is that people organized as ethnic groups should have the right to self-determination. It stands to reason, then, that states could be created along ethnic lines. However, there is a very significant problem with that. Different ethnic groups often claim to be attached to the same territory. This ultimately leads to the creation of states where various ethnic groups fight over control of the territory. Indefinitely. But there is more. This division among ethnic lines also perpetuates a divisive global perspective, in contrast to a cosmopolitan outlook where all human beings are seen as equals, equally valued, and as equally deserving of human rights. Nation-states ultimately sow divisions. We saw the consequences of the creation of nation-states at the beginning of the last century - endless wars. The wars never ended. The world has been in an unstable state ever since the creation of the nation-state. This is thanks to the nature of the nation, as I have just explained, but there is more. The state form of organization itself is deeply flawed. The state has a monopoly on violence which it can use on its citizens. Rather than citizens organizing themselves and being free to live their lives and govern themselves according to the principle of self-determination, citizens are effectively oppressed by their own governments. This is more obvious when we look at states that are governed by authoritarianism, dictatorships, and totalitarianism. But even so-called "democracies" routinely disregard the general will of their people. Democracies rarely, if ever, reflect the general will of the population. In virtually every state on Earth, the population is effectively subjugated by a state composed of "representatives" that represent nobody but the ruling classes of the state and the planet. What we have here, in the state, is a centralized force that routinely imposes its will on its people, against the will of the people. States are, thus, not legitimate legal actors and a legitimate global legal order cannot be formed with states as their legal actors. Israel has repeatedly broken international law multiple times over the past 75 years of occupation with complete impunity, and it continues to do so. Much of the world stands against the occupation, including not only most people in protests against it all around the world but also many countries that were previously victims of settler colonialism and apartheid. Yet, the major Western powers that compose the United States Empire stand together in support of Israel and their immunity from the international laws that this very community created. As such, they expose their international legal order as a farce to consolidate and protect their spoils of war through colonialism, conquests, and territory annexations. The whole purpose of their international legal order is to justify their control over the planet. Every time any country stands up against the United States Empire, international law is used against them as a pretext for the protection of the Empire. But when any member of the Empire breaks international law, they are given complete immunity and allowed to do whatever they please. That exposes their international legal order as an illegitimate theater that is used to justify the domination of the United States Empire over the world and the oppression of all people under its global rule. Nothing makes this any more clear than the power of the United States to veto whatever resolution it pleases against the will of the entire international community. Some of the principles of the international legal order, such as the principle of self-determination, are moral and just. However, it is very clear that the international legal order itself has become a sham. It is nothing but a means for the United States Empire to hold on to its stronghold over the planet. As such, we must consider an alternative global legal order. A new legal order that is not based on the authoritarianism of states but, rather, that emerges from the self-determination and general will of all people on Earth. We must abolish the state and rebuild the global legal order around self-governing communities, establishing a legal foundation that is based on the self-determination of all people. The state as a legal form of organization is a threat to global peace and it must be abolished.

Trying to get included in neurotypical society is an endless struggle that goes far beyond communication There is plenty of academic literature on the role that social structures play in the discrimination of certain groups of people. Discrimination on the basis of race and gender is widely discussed, while discrimination on the basis of ability is somewhat ignored. What is completely ignored in the literature is the structural discrimination that is inherent in the impersonal informal rules of social processes, largely favoring neurotypicals while excluding autistic people. This invisible structural discrimination can be found both in employment and in relationships, especially dating, where there is more complexity and the stakes are higher than in friendships. The pattern is generally the same – the rules that govern certain social processes are self-evident to neurotypicals but are completely invisible to autistic people. As a result, autistic people consistently fail to succeed in these social processes. To make matters worse, these social processes tend to be competitive, pitting individuals against one another. We are all on our own in the process, it's not a process that we can have help with. For instance, in the process of getting a job, an interview is usually required before someone gets hired. Autistic people are generally not good at such interviews as we often fail to follow unspoken social rules and fail to meet social expectations of performance. The same is true in the dating process, though dating is significantly more complex than job interviews. Part of the problem is that, as autistic people, we are unaware of how the social processes work and what the informal rules are. When trying to engage with these social processes, we often make mistakes due to our lack of knowledge. To make matters worse, we not only don't know them, we often don't know that we don't know them. For example, until last week I thought that being a boyfriend was the same as dating. I am almost 40 years old and I didn't know something that any neurotypical teenager knows. I made no distinction between the "dating step" and the "relationship step", or whatever it is called. As a result, when I was interested in girls in the past, I often asked them to "be my girlfriend", completely skipping the dating step. Completely unbeknownst to me, I was unintentionally rushing the process. This perceived rushing gets interpreted as a red flag, which leads girls to reject me and distance themselves from me. After several rejections, I inevitably started wondering if there was something wrong with me. If I had less self-esteem, I would probably have spiraled into self-hatred, like many others do. Lack of knowledge of the informal unspoken rules and social processes is only one way in which autistic people are left out of jobs and relationships. We also miss social cues, which leads us to fail to engage properly within the social processes. An extreme example of that is autistic people who have difficulty with facial recognition. If you don't recognize people when you look at them, how are you going to engage in the "courtship" process? I can't even conceive of the problem because that is not part of my personal experience. Still, while I can recognize faces, I have a difficult time recognizing unspoken social cues. Part of the dating process requires me to be able to recognize when someone is interested in me. While gender norms have changed for the better over the years, one of the persistent gender norms that are still followed by most people is the norm that men are expected to be the ones to initiate a connection with women and ask them out on a date. This means that if a man doesn't initiate it, it doesn't happen at all. To make matters worse, if you try to initiate in the "wrong" way, whichever way that may be, you get admonished. While neurotypical men may know how to initiate, the same is not true at all of autistic men. Autistic men may be socially awkward (which is itself perceived as unattractive) and even socially inappropriate without realizing it. We may behave in a way that is frowned upon and that is perceived as intentional when it is completely unintentional. In the process, we often end up rejected, and may even end up socially reprimanded and ostracized. The result is that we end up excluded, either due to our failed attempts or due to self-exclusion for the protection of others. We mean well and we don't want to hurt or bother people, so we end up excluding ourselves for their sake. All of this is particularly problematic for autistic men because due to gender norms, we are the ones expected to initiate and, if we don't do it successfully, nobody reaches out to us. So we are left completely alone. Autistic women don't have this problem because they are not expected to be the ones engaging, so they are far more likely to end up in relationships than autistic men. There are further complications. We not only have a hard time with these rules and processes, but we are also not like neurotypicals. We may be perceived as "weird" or "awkward". Many of us don't follow gender norms and are often trans or "non-binary". Many of us are also not monogamous, so we don't fit into the largely monogamous society, making it difficult for us to navigate relationships. Since monogamy is considered "natural" and "good", when we reveal ourselves as polyamorists we may be admonished and excluded. But that is not all. Monogamy itself makes the whole dating process more difficult. If everyone can only have one partner, that means that once someone is "taken", you can't date them. That, in turn, decreases the number of potential available partners to us. That is part of the reason that makes the dating process so competitive because everyone is competing for a limited number of possible relationships. Since autistic people are perceived as less socially valuable due to our disability, that makes it even less likely that we will be chosen. But that's not all. It is possible to reach out to someone once they leave a monogamous relationship. But autistic people can't tell when that occurs. Neurotypicals can. That puts us in a disadvantageous position. It's like playing a game of music chairs. All the neurotypicals can hear the music and see the chairs, as they change partners, but autistic people are deaf to the music and blind to the chairs. We can't participate in the competitive dating game due to our disability. All these factors come into play to ultimately foreclose the possibility of social inclusion for autistic people and especially autistic men, thanks to gender norms and expectations. We end up socially isolated, and that social isolation ends up perpetuating itself. Unable to get jobs, we end up never getting job experience. Or we accept a lower paying job that is considered "appropriate" for us because we are supposedly too disabled to work in the field we want to work in. Meanwhile, the same dynamics work in informal relationships. Our lack of relationships also leads to a lack of relationship experience, which exacerbates the problem and further isolates us. I write all of this partially in the dark, of course. I have some logical recognition of what is going on and I have borrowed some words from sociology and made up my own concepts to describe rules and processes that are largely unspoken. That is, in fact, part of the problem for all of us. If we don't have the language to describe social rules and processes, then we can't really know when these rules and processes are, in fact, detrimental to us. As I have observed neurotypical behaviours and relationships, it has become clear to me that the unspoken rules and processes are, in fact, not only detrimental to autistic people but also to neurotypicals. While neurotypicals are capable of engaging with the rules and processes effectively, they fail to realize how these rules and processes shape their behaviours and cause all sorts of dysfunctional behaviours and relationship outcomes. All dysfunctional behaviours in society can ultimately be traced back to our social interactions, which shape our behaviours. The unspoken rules are processes that generate the dysfunctional social behaviours that we perceive. Our perception of these behaviours may be tied to specific individuals, since we cannot see, hear, or touch rules and processes, but these individual behaviours are, in fact, shaped by the unspoken social rules and processes. Therefore, making these rules and processes more explicit in our language is the first step to addressing dysfunctional social behaviours by ultimately changing unhelpful rules and processes. Why do we need these particular rules and processes? We need to question whether they are helpful or detrimental to us. There are also contradictions in the social rules. For example, communication is perceived as important in relationships, and yet a lot of that communication is required by the unspoken social rules to be unspoken and implied, leading to miscommunication and misunderstanding even amongst neurotypicals. It makes no sense. These social rules and processes are not serving any of us and are excluding autistic people by default. Until these social norms are widely exposed as unhelpful and discriminatory and until we finally change these unhelpful social norms, I see no way that autistic people can hope to be truly included in society.

The Bubbles As I have already talked a little bit about in previous blog posts, we can't know anything beyond our own perception. Everything that we perceive is a part of us, because they are all our mental representations, they are constructions of our minds based on our senses. We can think of this boundary between our perception and the world around us as a bubble. This is our individual bubble, the boundary between our perception and the world itself, as it is, independent of our perception. We not only perceive the world around us, we also perceive one another, and we are aware that others are perceiving us. We are each living within the confines of our personal bubble and trying to connect somehow. To connect, we need to spend time together and go through experiences together. In a sense, we need to try to expand our bubbles to create a shared social bubble. We need to have similar experiences, which allows for some level of communication. The problem is that the way we interpret what we perceive is part of our own reality, which is constructed from the collection of all our previous experiences. And other people don't have our experiences, they have their own past experiences which create a lens through which they see others and the world. Therefore, it is not enough to spend time together, sharing present experiences. In order to connect, we need to share past experiences as well. We can never share all our life experiences, so we can never connect fully, but we can share some experiences and create some connection, a social bubble that is only partially constructed from our individual bubbles. We can't erase the bubbles around us but we can get a glimpse of one another through them, as we build our social bubbles and our personal ones become more transparent. Transparency leads to connection. This is essential for communication, for all relationships, and for society as a whole. If we can't create an intersubjective reality that we all share, society is bound to break down as we talk past one another. The Walls We also have walls around us that we cannot see. These walls are the social boundaries that we build to regulate our social relationships. These boundaries exist to keep us separated and to help us define ourselves in relation to others. They are also boundaries that we have built to protect ourselves and which others have built to exclude us. Our social boundaries are a little bit like membranes. Membranes are porous, they allow some people in while keeping some people out. In this manner, they regulate our social interactions. On the other hand, we have a limited amount of time, energy, and attention. For that reason, our social boundaries tend to keep a lot more people out than allow people in. On top of that, even if we do let people in, we never see the world through their perspective, so the best we can do is get a sense of what they think and feel. These factors make the social boundary more like a wall than a membrane. We all have a limited amount of time which we can use. We don't have time for everything and for everyone, so we must make choices about how we spend our time. We can always either spend time by ourselves or spend time with others. We also can't spend time with everyone all the time, so we must choose who to spend time with. Those who we choose to spend time with, we let them into our lives. Those who we don't choose to spend time with, we exclude from our lives. The process by which we choose who we let into our lives and who we don't let into our lives is not very conscious. People often don't even know who they let into their lives and who they don't because all that they know is their perception of others, not others as they truly are. This is especially true about strangers. Most people aren’t even aware of the walls, let alone their choices regarding those walls. They make these choices almost unconsciously, and almost purely automatically, based on a collection of unconscious biases, many of which are socially created and transmitted. Making conscious, intentional, choices takes a lot of time and energy. For that reason, we have evolved ways to automate decision-making processes. We develop habits and biases to speed up the process of selection so that we don't take too much time making choices. These biases are often the result of experiences that we have had in our lives. Unfortunately, these biases are often detrimental to us and they also can be programmed into us through certain social processes. Many biases are passed on to us by our parents and by society around us. We ultimately choose who we let into our walls and who we keep out through a very unconscious and biased process. We may, for instance, choose to let in people who are harmful to us because, at a younger age, we got used to that kind of people. They are who we are accustomed to, so we let them in. Meanwhile, we may exclude people who would be beneficial to us from our lives because we make the wrong assumptions about them. These assumptions are often based on some kind of prejudice which we learned from a young age. For example, someone may choose to exclude someone who is black or someone who doesn't behave in a neurotypical way. Culture plays a significant role in this process, as culture teaches that certain people are desirable while others should be avoided. Perceived social value thus shapes who gets to be influential and who doesn't. People are often not conscious about how their choices are influenced by culture and prejudice. They choose who to include in their lives and who to exclude virtually automatically. The more someone is considered socially valuable, the more likely they are to be included by others. The most extreme version of that is fame. Everyone wants someone famous in their lives, usually someone they specifically prefer. Most people are not famous, but they are generally socially included. Other people find them valuable because they are “normal”. They are “default human 1.0”. Then there are various groups of people who find one another socially valuable thanks to their perceived similarities, so they stick together. Some of those are subcultures, like people who like rock and roll, and goths. Finally, while some people manage to be included in communities of people like them, where the walls are lowered, others are often excluded from all communities and are left alone, with walls all around them. They are not considered socially valuable, so they are largely excluded from other people's lives. They end up spending most of their time alone, which has significant negative physical and mental health consequences. Some examples are people with mental illnesses, people who are very physically ill, and people who are considered disabled in some way, such as autistic people. Those people are generally excluded from social life. The Impact of Social Exclusion People often minimize the impact that our social lives have on our quality of life, but our social life has a significant impact on our lives. Our social lives include friends, lovers, and jobs. People with rich social lives have many friends, lovers, and good well-paying jobs. People with poor social lives have few to no friends, few to no lovers, and bad poorly paying jobs. The richer our social life, the better our lives are. The poorer our social lives are, the harder it is to survive, let alone thrive. The exclusion of some people from social life ends up creating a self-fulfilling prophecy where their social skills worsen from the exclusion and then they are blamed for their own exclusion. Through this process, people can justify their prejudice and claim that the exclusion of certain people is necessary and fair. Walls are built all around those people and they become trapped. When they can’t break through the walls, they are blamed as if their condition is an individual failure rather than a social reality constructed by everyone around them. Escaping is only possible if others see their social value. Only then they can be integrated and finally included in society. This is why it's important to recognize how society tends to actively exclude some people. People who are excluded often become invisible. Others can "see" them and even acknowledge their existence, but they don't include them in their lives. They don't spend time with them. Nobody does. Exclusion occurs not only from a process of active exclusion but also from a passive process of lack of inclusion. If some people are not let into anyone's lives, they are effectively excluded. They are not excluded because an individual excluded them but because many individuals separately excluded them and, thus, responsibility falls on the one who is excluded rather than the social structures that are causing the exclusion in the first place. If nobody wants to spend time with them, and if they always get turned down for good jobs, even when they have the qualifications to get a good job, they are effectively excluded from society. Only with the awareness that some people are, through no fault of their own, excluded from society, only then one may notice people around them who are not included. The walls that we build to let some people in and keep some people out can be helpful to us, but they can also be harmful both to us and to others. We should pay more attention to those walls, and make more conscious choices about who we let in and who we keep out. We should reach out to others, especially those who might not be included, instead of making assumptions about them and keeping them out of our lives, because we don't really know them. We only see our version of others, we don't see who they are. And only if we let them into our lives, we can find out who they really are. People are generally terrible at assessing value, and social value is part of the value that we assess. For example, marketing and personal branding are often used to manipulate people's perception of social value, to make leeches appear socially valuable while people who are actually far more socially valuable than the leeches are perceived to be socially worthless, or generally of lower social value than the leeches. We need to get better at recognizing the good people and including them, and recognizing the people who are not so good and keeping them out of our lives and away from power. Only then we can start improving society. As long as we have harmful people who are considered socially valuable and good people who are not, we will have a broken society. A big part of the reason why society is so broken is because terrible people are given a lot of love, attention, and power, while people who could really help make the world a better place are ignored and forgotten. We all make choices about who we let into our lives, how much we disclose about ourselves to others, and who we exclude from our lives. To a certain extent, some will inevitably be excluded from our individual lives because we all have a limited amount of time, we can't all include everyone in our lives. But we don’t need to exclude anyone from society as a whole. At the end of the day, our finite time and attention only make the subject of who gets attention and influence in society even more crucial.

The Invisible War for Reality We all have a picture of the world in our minds. We have a description of it, a narrative that explains what the world is like. Where does this narrative come from? At first, it seems as though we are the ones who create that narrative. To a certain extent that is true, we do interpret the world ourselves. However, before we learn to create our own narratives, we are taught narratives by others. We are taught certain mainstream narratives from an early age, what is considered "normal". We are taught that there are two genders, that we are all heterosexual, and that we are all monogamous. The whole narrative leads to the ideal of the nuclear family, which justifies the design of society in such a way that benefits a specific group of powerful people who control the status quo. These narratives help maintain the status quo, they help the powerful hold onto their power. We are not supposed to question the mainstream narratives because those narratives support the status quo. The people who benefit from the status quo thus defend those narratives. If you don't fit with what the status quo deems "normal", you are discriminated against and marginalized. You are not allowed to be yourself. If you are authentic, you are punished. The ultimate objective is the protection of the status quo and any deviation that may threaten it is vilified. Narratives shape our perception of reality. Perception can then be manipulated through narratives, like a spell of illusion that is cast on people. We are constantly bombarded by messages. All these messages tell us what to believe. They all shape our perception of reality. This is called "ontological design", the design of our existence. We are taught many things from an early age. Our perception is shaped by the beliefs of our family and culture. In turn, our behavior is shaped by our perception. The end result is that we are programmed to be a certain way from an early age. Sometimes, we resist that programming. When our identity is denied and we are expected to abandon it for an identity that was chosen for us, we may resist it and fight to be who we really are. For example, we are all programmed from an early age to behave in a certain way and follow a certain aesthetic based on our biological sex. That is the concept of gender. You can either be a man or a woman, and you have to dress a certain way and behave a certain way depending on your gender. If you don't comply, you can be vilified and ostracized. When social expectations clash with who we are, with our identity, then we have only a few choices. We may hide ourselves, becoming quiet and distant. This way we can hold on to most of our identity at the cost of social connection. We may also mask ourselves, pretending to be someone who we are not on the surface. This way we hold on to our social connection but at the expense of a stable and unified identity. Or we may choose to fight, to refuse to change ourselves for others. This way we hold on to our identity at the cost of peace. But when we fight for the freedom to be ourselves, we also oppose a dominant narrative that governs society. This is true not only for gender but for everything. We are shaped in many ways by the dominant narratives of society. We don't have to hide or mask ourselves, we can choose to fight to be ourselves. Sometimes a dominant narrative is challenged and defeated, so another, alternative, narrative is constructed to take its place. Many of these alternative narratives are designed by powerful people to try to keep the majority of society under control. They are designed to maintain the status quo, to allow the powerful to keep the wealth and power they have taken from others. These narratives are today propagated through various channels, like social media, that give powerful people information from every individual in society, which allows them to shape many narratives that are tailored to specific individuals, often tricking people into supporting something that they normally wouldn't. This strategy is far more powerful and effective than the old strategy of creating a single dominant narrative. It makes it easier to manipulate people and to hide the manipulation as everyone gets a specialized message tailored to them. The messages may have something the same general narrative and goals, but they are specifically constructed for specific individuals. This makes it easier to make people identify with the narrative, as it is incorporated into their own history and identity. This process of using technology to shape perception and influence behavior, we can call "technomancy" (techno- (Greek τέχνη, tékhnē, “skill, art, craft”), meaning “relating to technology,” and -mancy (Greek μαντεία, manteía, “divination”), denoting “a form of divination” (Wiktionary)). Technomancy is the art of using technology to create perceptual illusions that shape other people's perceptions of the world and behaviors. As people interact with one another, their narratives collide and create a discourse. There is a lot of intentionally caused confusion in public discourse today. People's perceptions are often manipulated and they are often deceived into agreeing with something that they wouldn't agree to otherwise. In the process, we often end up opposing and fighting even with people whom we would normally agree with. As our different perceptions clash, we end up fighting for our specific view of the world. Not necessarily the view that we have created ourselves, not necessarily our own interpretation of reality because our interpretations have been shaped by others. Ultimately, we are in the midst of a "noomachia", a war of realities. This war benefits nobody but the people in power. In order to clear up confusion and find peace, we need to reclaim our narratives and public discourse, reframing narratives in a way that is understandable to everyone. Narratives are engineered to cause divisions in society. We need to take control over the narratives of society and reframe them in a way that leads to reconciliation and unity. What is common to all manipulative narratives and discourse is that they are designed by a few people for a few people to control all of us. The discourse, thus, doesn't recognize our identity. They deny us a say in the discourse. We are not invited to shape it. It's not a cooperative discourse that invites us to co-create reality. It's a competitive discourse that invites us to fight against one another for the power to control society. We can, then, identify manipulative discourse based on its features. For example, manipulative discourse is closed-minded, it is not interested in the truth and in gaining more knowledge, because truth and knowledge are antithetical to effective manipulation. The discourse is thus based on falsehoods that appear to be true and must not be questioned. Those falsehoods are incorporated into people's identities so that people defend the falsehoods as if they are a part of them. Narratives are powerful spells. They shape who we are, how we behave, and how we perceive the world. They control our lives. Behind every socialized behavior is a narrative. We work to survive because we believe in the narrative that survival requires working under a specific framework, where you obey a boss and are compensated a specific amount in a specific way. Most of us don't question any of that. We go to the store and exchange currency for products because we believe in the narrative that both the product and currency are worth something that can be measured and compared. We enter into intimate relationships and become married to them because we believe in the narrative that there must be only a single person we can connect with in an intimate way and we must share all our experiences and ourselves only with them. All these narratives unconsciously shape us and remain unchallenged until some sort of autistic shaman nutcase brings them to light and we see how those narratives have shaped our lives in ways that we don't like. Many people, including children, don't want to accept the narratives that are imposed on them, such as the gender assigned to them by society. They want to shape their own identity, not have their appearance and behaviors be shaped by other people's narratives of who they are supposed to be. It's not a matter of gender, race, sensuality, or whatever other social characteristic that we are told to possess, it's a matter of being free to be yourself, to shape your own identity without having society imposing on you who you should be, how you should look like, and how you should behave. We need to have the freedom to shape our own narratives. All of us. Not just trans kids, indigenous people, or black people. Because the true issue is not with any single one of those social characteristics but all social characteristics. The true issue is our freedom to be and shape who we are. It is that freedom that false narratives attack. And they often attack our freedoms while claiming to fight for them. Just like they oppress children while claiming to protect them. Because those narratives want to shape us from our childhood when we are most susceptible to manipulation. So false narratives are constructed against our fight for our freedom to be ourselves.

We are largely the result of the experiences we have. We are not separate from the world, we are deeply interwoven with it. We are not ourselves apart from the world. It is a part of us and we are a part of it. The experiences that we have in our lives are a part of us. We have incorporated them into ourselves. We can shape ourselves too, by the way we respond to the world, but even that response is based on previous experiences. What we can do is try to consider the experiences of others as well in order to gain a deeper understanding of the world and expand our own existence, expand our very own nature, by incorporating some of the experiences of others. Empathy is the ability to project oneself into the lives of others and try to understand the world through their perspective. Every human being is unique, but every human being also has the same common experiences. We are all born, grow up in a family, have relationships with those around us, and eventually die. We may have a lot of differences, but we also have a lot in common, including minor variations of DNA which we largely share. We are no different from the cells of our bodies, slight variations of the same overarching organism within which and through which we live. We are not separate from one another, we are all a part of this world. If that is the case, shouldn't we all matter? Everyone is just trying to get their needs met, the best way they can. We all have similar needs and we are all shaped by our experiences. Sometimes we develop characteristics that are harmful and unpleasant to others. But we don't develop those characteristics simply because we chose to. We were all greatly influenced by our experiences, which shaped who we are. If everyone is just trying to get their needs met and their behaviors are the result of their experiences, then there are no heroes or villains, there are just people and everyone should matter. Maybe some people can't change for the better, but we shouldn't harbor any ill will or hatred for anyone. Everyone was an innocent baby at some point in their lives, and we are all imperfect. Our experiences made us who we are. We gain nothing from hating each other. The problem is not with humans. It is not that humans are "sinful", as if there is something fundamentally wrong with us, it is the world that we live in that harms us, and our focus should be on changing that world. The world we live in is not at all a world that is governed by love. It is governed by unrestricted self-interest at all costs, regardless of how others are affected. We live in a world where empathy is discouraged and antipathy amongst all reigns. We focus on our differences instead of our commonalities. We compete against one another for scraps while a tiny minority who benefit from this world continue to govern us. But, as I said, the focus should be on changing the world, not on blaming people. People usually don't know any better. They are not aware of how they have been influenced to be the way they are. We can't change them directly. But we can change the world by changing its systems. We can create a world where everyone matters and, by creating that world, we can change the people within it. How do we create such a world? By caring about our neighbors, caring about our community, and the planet within which we live. If our experiences shape us, then we need to take control of them and reshape them. We need to "be the change", as it is often said. That means changing the world by caring about other people's needs and experiences. That means getting together and organizing to fight for a world that is governed by love. That means working together to build organizations that work to create a new world. And, yes, that means flipping some money changers' tables. Universal redemption is the core of my political philosophy. It means that we all have our own imperfections and that we all matter and deserve love because those imperfections are not really who we are. We are spiritual beings who have lost touch with who we truly are. If the world was inhabited by our true selves, it would be a paradise governed by love. But we can't have that without forgiving one another for who we have become in this loveless world. That is just the first step, developing that empathy so that instead of competing against one another we can all work together. Creating that new world will require us to work together to build new organizations that are grounded in that love. It will require us to build social systems and structures that take care of us so that we can take care of one another. That means building organizations that can guarantee us access to everything that we need to survive. Once we have that foundation, we will be free to focus full-time on regenerating our natural world and building a new society for all human and non-human kin.

I've been trying my best to publish one post per month, but this month got too busy. I had a post I was working on but it wasn't quite right. I'm rewriting the whole thing, but it's not ready. So here is my post this month, let's take a break. It's nice outside. Go touch some grass. Unless you are allergic to grass, then don't touch the grass.

"All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players;" - William Shakespeare I was once on TV. I only appeared briefly in the background, but I was acutely aware I was being watched. I was aware of being watched as an object, that on a superficial level, people can't perceive me as I am. The extra layer of perception, of the indirect perception of me through a different lens, magnified my perception and made me acutely aware of myself and how I'm perceived in the world. I was acutely aware of my actions and, due to that acute awareness, I was not being myself, I was instead acting as myself. Through that artificial acting process, I ceased to be myself and became an actor playing a role of myself. But that also made me think about how I "normally" act when I'm not acutely aware of how others are perceiving me. Even when I'm alone, I'm acting as myself, though the differentiation between who I am, who I have been socialized to be, and how I'm perceived to be is not a part of my conscious awareness. Since others don't have access to my internal thoughts, feelings and, ultimately, to my being, then they perceive me as an object and they infer my subjectivity based on their own subjective experiences. Who we appear to be to others is not who we really are. Who we are, only we truly know. What other people see is the image of ourselves we project into the world, whether consciously or unconsciously. In the world, we act as ourselves. We are subjects, our actions come from within. That action is imagined and scripted by us, but it is also largely influenced by the world. Sometimes we even know that we are acting. When we are learning some new way of being and interacting in the world, we may feel like an impostor and become more aware that our lives are an act. But as we become used to it, we forget. As subjects, we interact with other subjects and with objects around our environment. Those objects serve as props, they define who we are, how we interact with the world, and the experiences which are available to us. They help us create our life experiences. We connect with each other through objects. By liking and sharing similar objects, we define ourselves to each other and our social experiences. We are defined by the clothes we wear because they follow some aesthetic that has meaning in the world. Other people understand that meaning and act accordingly. For example, if you see someone dressed as a police officer, you assume they are a police officer and your interactions with them will take a certain shape based on that assumption. The presence of an object, such as a gun, will have a certain meaning within a context, which builds a larger story with other people in it. A gun at a crime scene, for instance, is not only just a gun but also a piece of evidence that can help solve the murder of some specific person. Objects thus have a complex meaning in society because they are part of a larger social context. When we buy an object, we are not just buying an object, we are buying a lifestyle. What is important is not just an object's function but the experiences we get with the object and the perceptions that are conveyed to other people about us based on the objects we use. This is why branding is so powerful, because they are not just selling us objects, they are selling us representations of ourselves to us. They are convincing us that their product is an extension of us, an appendage that we can add to define ourselves to others to give us access to some experience that we seek and produce a certain lifestyle which they also sell to us. They target our most basic instincts to manipulate and sell us their product, associating those instincts with their product. They shape entire cultures that way. In the end, we are just actors, and unaware that we are acting based on their script and not one which we are writing ourselves. We express who we are in many ways. We do this through our actions, the words we use, the clothes we wear, the objects we have, our preferences, and so on. In some ways, those expressions are genuine reflections of who we are. But we are also often not completely satisfied with ourselves. So we may sometimes try to project an image of who we want to be. This is Lacan's "ideal-I", a fantasy image of ourselves that we want to someday completely incorporate into our being. In this sense, we are like actors playing a role, trying to become a future version of ourselves. But it goes deeper than that. Is there a true I? We covered some of this in previous blog posts, how we are almost completely influenced by our environment and circumstances. If someone asks you about yourself, you tell them about your past, your preferences, and many other factors that are not really you but related to you. Perhaps you are the one who has emotions. But your emotions are based on the preferences you gained from your experiences. You could have had other experiences, other stories, and thus, other emotions. You are just acting out your part based on your character development. If you take out everything you appear to be you are left with nothing at all. There are many video games where you can play a character. Some of them, RPGs, allow you to decide how you will look like in the virtual world and some of the characteristics you will have, such as your abilities, your character, and your imperfections. Then, once you decide who you are, you are thrust into the virtual world. At first, you don't know what's going on. You may even know very little about yourself. The first step is to become familiar with how you interact with the world. At first, you may make a lot of mistakes. You may not be very good at interacting with the world. You still need to be very consciously aware of the controls so you can infer how the controls will respond in the game. As you get familiar with the controls, you become more focused on the game. Interacting with the virtual world becomes second nature. It is at that point that you forget yourself in the "real" world and you become immersed in the game. In a well-designed game, you become the character you are playing with. You feel what the character feels as the character goes through experiences in the game. For a moment, you escape "reality" and forget that you are playing a game. You become the character. What if this "reality" we are living in right now is like that? There is no true distinction between acting as a character and acting as yourself. You may point out that, as I explained before, your awareness of how the environment influences you give you some agency, that you imagine a future for yourself, and that you intentionally make choices to create that future. Our capacity to imagine a future different than our past and present is one of the sources of our agency. Different possibilities and different paths toward different possibilities give rise to our decisions and to our indecision. It is the fact that we are different actors in the world, making decisions based on imagined possibilities, that separates us from the world, making us distinct agents within it - subjects rather than objects. But, even then, how can you tell you are not a character? In improv, you don't get a script. You can create whatever character you want from scratch. As you interact with others, you can shape not only yourself but the entire world. It's the ultimate form of agency. The environment doesn't influence you anymore, you influence it. But other actors also influence it, so it still shapes you and your actions, even if you have more power to shape it. You can imagine your future and act it out, transforming the world around you. Still, you are a character. You are not your "true self" (or at least the self you believe is true). Only the awareness of yourself as an actor in the world can paradoxically give you the agency not to be just an "actor". Where is your true self? If you are like a character in a videogame, then maybe this reality is as real as a videogame. Then you are not really "here" in this reality, but somewhere else and interacting in this world through some kind of input in the other reality, just like your body provides you with an input in this reality. Not that this reality is a "simulation", because a simulation implies that it's not real. It makes more sense to think in terms of layers of reality, one contained within another. Each reality feels as real as the other, though different realities have different levels of complexity and access to experiences. You can experience this reality physically, but the reality in a videogame can't be experienced physically. If your true self is not here, then maybe it's in the former reality you came from before you were born. Or maybe it is in none of them and the character in the videogame is no less separate from its environment than you are separate from yours. Maybe you can't be anywhere because you are nowhere AND everywhere. Are we real? Entertain that thought, without accepting it.

Freedom is often thought of as something very simple, such as one's ability to freely act, but that simplicity is clearly not the case when one takes a closer look. For instance, one's ability to freely act doesn’t take into account how the choices were made. It also doesn't take into account how those actions affect others, thus potentially having a coercive effect upon them, restricting their freedom and thus contradicting the claim that freedom is something available equally to everyone. As a result of freedom’s apparent simplicity, many people use the term incorrectly, often without realizing that their conception of freedom is self-contradictory or that it makes it exclusive to them or only to a group of people, to which they often belong. Resolving this matter requires a deeper understanding of what freedom is and what it entails. Freedom is, first and foremost, a feeling and a state of being. In particular, it is the state of being within which one is fully oneself without constraint. This feeling and state of being is extremely fleeting, as one is always being influenced by one's external environment. In order for the self to be truly free, the self needs to be expressed without constraint, and the environment within which the self exists is always in the process of constraining and shaping the self in its own image. Thus, the state of being free as oneself requires lifelong practice and persistence to express oneself as oneself without numerous environmental constraints such as the social performance expected by one’s culture. Since freedom is a fleeting state, it is not absolute in nature. One cannot always be free and nobody is ever absolutely free, nor absolutely unfree. Freedom comes in degrees, there is no such thing as absolute freedom. Freedom exists within a continuum, where one at one time can be more unfree while at another time one could be more free. However, a pattern tends to emerge where one is consistently free or one is consistently unfree. Action tends to reinforce itself. One that is often free is more likely to continue being free, and one that is often unfree is more likely to stay unfree. But one can move in either direction over time. Freedom is complex. In order to understand it better, it may be helpful to break it down into its defining characteristics. Freedom is often characterized in terms of the absence of certain features such as cost, coercion, and constraint. It is also often defined in terms of what it entails, such as the presence of choice, purpose, and awareness. Cost is often associated with the lack of freedom. When one desires to acquire something that has been commodified and is available to purchase within one's market, one is confronted with a cost. Products in markets are not available for access free of charge. In order to gain access to the product, the product needs to be purchased. The person who desires the product need to exchange currency they possess in exchange for access to the product. Since the individual in question has a finite amount of currency, they have an opportunity cost which needs to be assessed. They have to choose between all the products that they can have access to with the currency they have. In other words, they have to forgo access to some products in favour of others. This is part of the mechanism which allows for the wide distribution of products since there is a finite number of products available in any economy. But it comes at the cost of restraining the freedom of individuals to access products. If the economy is functional, it provides widespread access to everyone. If it is not, a few have access to a lot of products and resources to invest while the vast majority have severely constrained access to the economy. This topic of economic functionality is beyond the scope of this post, but it is an important one when one considers the implications for how much freedom we can all have in society. Freedom also implies a lack of coercion. Coercion is a specific kind of constraint where one's choice is artificially limited due to some kind of threat imposed on them. The threat can be overt, caused by another's imposition of their will on the one who is being coerced, but it can also be covert, caused by the implication of one's lack of compliance to another's wishes. Thus, coercion involves the encroachment of one's freedom for the benefit of another. In that encroachment, the individual or organization who is coercing is gaining the freedom of another, turning the other from a subject into an object which becomes the extension of their will. The coercing individual or organization thus extends their selves into the bodies of another's, effectively directing their will. This can be done through direct orders or psychological manipulation. Coercion is usually associated with the threat of violence, but it is not at all restricted to such overt threats. Threats can be by implication, such as restricting one's alternatives to the point they can either obey you or suffer the consequences of not obeying you. It can also be done at the level of social structures, restricting the choices available to individuals in society to the point where they have to adhere to the dictates of the structure or individually suffer the consequences of not doing so. Examples of such structures include police states and labour markets. Another aspect of freedom is the lack of constraint, which can be understood as a more general category. Cost and coercion are two kinds of constraints, but as we saw with coercion, constraints are not always nearly as visible as cost. On the contrary, constraints can be hard to see. The environment constrains us all the time. The environment includes everything around us but also within us. Our own bodies constrain what is possible and, with the external environment, it limits our freedom. We are not free to fly both because the environment makes it impossible due to the presence of gravity but also because our bodies are not equipped to enable us to fly. Thus, our freedom is limited both by the features of our environment and the features of our bodies. Constraints can also be mental. One is constrained in their actions by their environmental awareness but also by their knowledge and mental abilities. One who is more skilled at talking and social interaction than others naturally have more freedom and power than those who don't have those skills. Those skills are also shaped by abilities we are born with or are not born with. One could, for instance, be born with a neurological makeup that makes it harder for them to communicate, while others are born with the converse advantage. Thus, our genetic makeup plays a significant role in shaping the person we become. Our families also play a significant role, as their actions shape our beliefs, values, and preferences based on what our families expose us to. A lot of the characteristics that we attribute to choice are in fact largely shaped by our life experiences, circumstances, biology, and environment. Constraints play a significant role in shaping us and thus restricting our freedom. Freedom implies the presence of alternatives from which one can choose a course of action. It is, however, a necessary feature of choice that the number of choices available to us is always limited. When choices are too limited, they are not meaningful “choices”. When you do something because you have no choice other than doing that, you are not doing that freely. You are doing it because, given the constraints you find yourself with, the alternative is the least worse and least undesirable of all the alternatives available to you. These are often referred to as “Hobson’s choices”, choices which only offer one alternative because the alternative is strongly undesirable. For instance, working full time at a job that barely pays you enough to afford food and shelter, because the only alternative is hunger and homelessness. When alternatives are restricted, especially when they are artificially restricted by the structure and rules of the systems you live under, then you are constrained and you have no real choice. Our social position largely shapes the choices that are available to us. We are born within the social position of our families. This social position shapes the range of experiences that will be available to us through most if not all of our lives. It often takes generations of work for a family to improve their social position, and those who achieved a favourable social position centuries ago are likely to remain in a favourable social position to this day.[1] The experiences that are available to us constrain us but also give us some choices. These choices may include, for example, which prestigious university to go to, or whether to specialize in drug trafficking or prostitution. Choices can shape us, and we can shape ourselves through our choices, but the alternatives that are available to us are limited and shaped by factors beyond our control. When one makes a choice, it is not just the selection of one alternative over another but also the intentional direction of one individual towards a future they imagine and desire. Their imagination and desire are constrained by factors we previously discussed, but it does have a direction which the individual intends to take. Somewhere, within a sea of constraints lies an anomaly, something which cannot be explained by the push and pull of the universe on the infinitesimal self. Through this intention, the self is expressed and claims its freedom to exist within a universe of its own making, unperturbed by the dark waves of the void which surrounds it. Within that intention, a seed of future possibilities can germinate and change the universe beyond the self. That intention is the freedom of the self put into action. Naturally, if one can be significantly more free than another, then the one who is more free has more intention than another and can shape their destiny more than another. But that power to shape one's destiny doesn't start at their intention and ability to shape it but on their awareness of themselves and their environment. Awareness is the key to freedom. If one is largely influenced by one's environment, then it naturally follows that in order not to be further influenced by their environment, to break free, to a certain extent, from the constraints of their environment, then one must be able to distinguish how their environment influences them so that they can properly discern the boundary between themselves and their environment. This boundary is faint, fluid, and difficult to discern. It enables one to distinguish themselves from their environment and thus separate one's intention from one's environmental influences. Inevitably, one may still be influenced by one's environment, but this level of awareness enables one to embrace and accept some of those influences while rejecting others. Depending on one's environment, that can take a significant level of practice, skill, and determination. As it is evident from the discussion above, freedom is a lot more complex than simply the ability of one to do whatever one pleases without constraint. One's freedom can infringe on another's, so we can't be completely free to do whatever we want regardless of how other people are affected. But on a deeper level, even the very structure of our bodies constrains what we are able to do. It gives us the freedom to do certain things but not others. We are enabled by our bodies to crawl and to walk, but not to fly. The structure of our bodies enables us to do certain things while constraining us from doing others. All structures, whether natural or artificial, enable some interactions while constraining others. There can be no structure without a combination of affordances and constraints. The shape of the river enables the flow of the water, but it also constrains the flow of the water to the river. There can be no structure and no existence without certain limitations. Thus, there is no such thing as infinite freedom. Freedom is always constrained by both natural and artificial factors. Therefore, we need to carefully discern the natural constraints that we cannot change from the artificial ones that we can. We then need to determine how to maximize freedom for everyone. One can argue that freedom is the primary objective of politics and that all political values need to be designed to fulfill and preserve that objective. Understanding freedom is thus essential for designing the structure of a political economy that is capable of maximizing freedom for all.

Close your eyes. Doesn't it always feel like you were born just a moment ago? Maybe it's because all there is is the present. I do have memories, but these memories are always remembered and experienced in the present. I can also plan for the future, but the future is never experienced as the future, it is only experienced as the present. Maybe the past and the future are just illusions of consciousness, parts of our imagination. Maybe consciousness is instantaneous and eternal. There aren't different moments, there is just one infinite eternal moment. That's how cause and effect can be connected, because they are not disconnected. They are a whole, not two parts. Same for objects. They are not different objects. All objects are just one whole. They are not separate, they just appear to be. But why do things appear to be in ways that they are not truly? Because perception would not be possible otherwise. Perception requires differentiation. Without differentiation, no perception can take place. So we differentiate between moments, and differentiate between objects. Through these differentiations, we become conscious of our existence and the existence of everything else which appears to be separate from us. Yet, as we discussed with the objects, the separation is illusory. Just as the objects are not truly separate, neither are our bodies and minds separate from the rest of the world. The separate world is just an illusion, it is all just us. But who are we? What are we? And why our consciousnesses are separate even though the world around us is part of us? Where are our consciousness if not within the world around us, that is apparent to us? Is there even a "where" and a "when"? As I write this I have set my alarm for tomorrow morning three times. About every 10 seconds the alarm goes off, telling me to wake up.

The differentiation between us and the universe may seem straightforward but, upon further reflection, it is not as clear where we “end” and the universe “begins”. We became accustomed from an early age to distinguishing between ourselves and everything else based on what we can directly feel and control. We don't have direct control over objects around us, so we are distinct from those objects. We also can't directly feel those objects. We can reach out to them and touch them to feel them, but we can't feel anything beyond the very surface of the object and, even then, we have to reach out, so we are distinct from those objects. In this manner, we have come to recognize our bodies as a part of us and everything else as not part of us. In addition to inanimate objects, there are also other people. Other people are particularly odd because they are just like all the other objects, except they look similar to our own bodies and behave similarly to "us" too. They are subjects just like us. Inanimate objects are not like us, so we don't infer that they are aware of their separate existence from the environment. But we are aware of that separation, and we would expect that other people are also aware of their own separation. They have their own first-person awareness but we can’t access it. But is that separation between us and everything around us, including other people, real? That is not so clear. You Are Nowhere As you may recall, we become aware of our separation from the environment around us because we can't directly feel or control objects around us. However, we also cannot directly feel or control parts of our bodies and even our minds. We can't feel or control our kidneys. We can't feel or control cells moving within us. Their existence feels completely independent from ours. Our heart beats without our conscious control or knowledge. It still beats if we don't know how it works. Our lungs usually work without our conscious control. We do have some control over it but, for the most part, it works on its own. Our brains are also very automated. Many of our reactions, such as the fight or flight reflex, are automated and out of our control. Much of our behavior with our phones is also largely automated. It's habitual and addictive, they are designed to hook us and control our behavior. Some complicated actions such as driving a car or playing the banjo, have many steps that change depending on the environment. Those are difficult, so they require a greater degree of awareness and manual control. But once we practice those steps repeatedly and there is a clear logic to which step to take given each environmental input, then they become habitual and largely automated as well. We are also largely influenced by our environment. Where we live, the family we are born in, the body we live within, the experiences we have as babies and children, all of those environmental influences shape who we become - our characters, our preferences, our memories, and our beliefs. We have little to no control over all those influences that shape us without our input, and they become parts of us that we identify with and think we have complete control over. Sure, even as children we do consciously think and act on those thoughts, but are those actions and thoughts really our own when the environment influenced them in the first place? Finally, it's not clear if even our free will is our own. Research has shown that we can predict a decision that is going to be made seconds before it is made based on a subject’s brain activity. If the synapses that determined a decision occurred before the decision, then the decision was caused by the synapses and not the other way around. Given all those factors, it appears that we are nowhere to be found. Our bodies are just a part of our environment. It, in fact, exists even once we die. When we die, the environment just reclaims it as its own. Our bodies are just our internal environment. They are like the external environment, not really a part of us. We are thus not located within our bodies and neither within the parts of our minds that our brains control. We thus each exist within an existential void within which we are nowhere. Nothing that we perceive is part of us. We are nowhere to be found. You Are Everywhere If we are nowhere, then where are we? Are we really nowhere? Can we exist nowhere? Well, yes and no. We can't directly feel and control objects around us, but we can still perceive them in relation to us. That perception is done through our senses. Our senses connect our minds and bodies to the world around us and, thus, when we perceive those objects they become extensions of us. They are not separate from us because our perception of them is a part of our minds, it is not independent of our minds. We can't perceive anything independently from our minds, so everything that we perceive is part of our minds, not part of the environment around us. Therefore, everything is an extension of us. Well, but you could reply that we don't control everything around us. We have no control over the universe so it must be separate from us. But as we discussed before, we don't control parts of our bodies either. Our bodies and minds are largely automated. That automation is intermediated by the interactions that happen between (a) our minds and bodies and (b) the universe we perceive. That means that our minds and bodies are inseparable from the universe around them. More importantly, we are entirely dependent on the universe to exist. We can't be aware of our own existence and thus exist as individuals if there is no universe within which our bodies and minds can exist so that we can have awareness. Even from a purely biological point of view, our existence is completely inseparable from the existence of all life on Earth. All organisms on Earth share the same DNA system. We have the DNA of all life within our DNA. In addition to most of our DNA being remnants of the DNA of all other lifeforms on Earth, our own bodies are composed of cells that are mostly not our own. Human cells make up only 43% of the cells in our bodies. The rest is composed of microorganisms. We are holobionts. We are walking aquariums for microbes. The boundary that separates us from the universe is much thinner than it looks at first glance. We are a part of the universe, inseparable from it. The individual is more of a useful fiction than a reality. All of this can be clearly understood when we look at, for example, our lungs. Our lungs work largely on their own, and thanks to them, we can breathe and thus survive. But our lungs only work because of oxygen. Oxygen has to come from somewhere. It comes from trees. Therefore, we are just as dependent on the trees exhaling oxygen as we are dependent on our lungs inhaling it. Like our lungs, we have no control over the trees and they are automated. If our lungs are automated and we are dependent on them, and if trees are likewise automated and we are equally dependent on them, then the trees are just as much extensions of us as our lungs. They are an inseparable part of us. And if this applies to the trees, then it applies to the universe as a whole. We thus each exist within an existential void within which we are all there is. Everything that we perceive is part of us, it is all extensions of our own awareness. We are everywhere and part of everything. You Are Your Self-Awareness How can we be both anywhere and everywhere at the same time? Because where we are is dependent on our awareness of who we are. If we perceive ourselves nowhere, we become aware of our non-existence everywhere. If we perceive ourselves everywhere, we become aware of our existence everywhere. Whether we are one or the other is dependent on the focus of our perception at any given point, it's dependent on our awareness. Whatever you are focused on, whatever you are doing at any given moment with intention, becomes you. When you play piano well and you really feel the music, it's not you playing piano, your body and mind play the piano automatically. But it’s also you playing the piano because you feel the music. You become part of the piano, it becomes an extension of you. The music is not just the notes that are played, it is also the emotions that the music elicits in the listener and the player, so the music you play is also a part of you. Other people are just you having different experiences from different perspectives. We are all having the human experience. If you were born in place of someone else, you would become that someone else, through their position in the human network and through the experiences they have. How can we claim to be free when we have so little awareness of ourselves, of how the environment influences us? Even if we make an effort to become more self-aware, there are still parts of us that have been shaped by past events which we don't even remember anymore. The consequences of those past events have shaped our behavior and that behavior has been, in turn, internalized through habit, becoming a part of our character and of our conception of who we are as individuals. We have control over everything immediately around us, but only if we are perfectly self-aware. Only if we have complete knowledge of the world around us, we can control it. Therefore, we can’t possibly fully control it, we can only have partial self-awareness and, thus, partial control. We also can't change it overnight, but we can influence it instead of allowing it to influence us. Still, very few people are even aware of anything that I have just said, let alone aware of how they are influenced by their environment, so they are not self-aware nor free in any real sense. I've tried to write about this many times before but I've never been fully satisfied with it and probably will never be. The issue is that talking about this being as self-awareness, and the individual as being in itself is insufficient. Language is not sufficient to describe this reality, it must be experienced, because being requires experience to be understood. Experience has information that cannot be transmitted through linguistic representations, it can only be transmitted through the direct subjective awareness of the relevant experience. As such, the best I can do is to guide you. It's like the old Chinese tale of the finger and the moon. When I point my finger at the moon, my finger is not the moon but it's referring to it. In the same way, words refer to experiences, so you don't fully understand a word until you experience what it represents. You are nowhere AND everywhere. You are being in itself.

A prison is a place where certain people can’t leave because they are not allowed to leave and are trapped. But the idea of prison is not that simple. The person in prison, the prisoner, can disregard their lack of permission to leave and find a way to escape their prison. They may be recaptured or killed in the process, but that is a risk they are willing to take to regain their freedom. Therefore, the degree to which someone is a prisoner is related to the ability of others to maintain them contained. This ability can be exercised either by breaking the prisoner’s will to escape, by designing the prison in a way that is harder to escape, or both. The prisoner is generally understood as someone who committed a crime and, thus their imprisonment is morally accepted and considered legitimate. But suppose the case of a prisoner who did not commit a crime but was charged and convicted of committing a crime. We may not be aware that they are innocent, but the prisoner is aware. In another case, an innocent person could be abducted by a criminal and imprisoned by the criminal in a secret place. Thus, a prisoner does not need to be a criminal. The definition of prison and prisoner conveys a certain phenomenological pattern in the mind, one where the individual who thinks about the prison sees, in their minds, a certain image of a prison and a prisoner. Those images are associated with certain patterns, such as a large building with numerous cells, each cell with one or maybe two individuals, prisoners, which can be observed through their prison doors because they are made out of bars, spaced out enough to allow someone to see inside without allowing the prisoners to escape. Here we see another pattern in prisons, the fact that prisoners often have no privacy. This pattern is fairly widespread, but it is not true for all prisons and is not required to imprison the prisoner, so it is not a necessary condition for the definition. It is, however, a possible pattern with all its respective consequences for the condition of the prisoner qua prisoner. Having established this working definition of prison, its epistemology, and phenomenology, we can then start breaking it apart. Perhaps there are other places that could be prisons, given our working definition. If we focus on epistemology and set aside our working phenomenology, we can maybe find other places that are prisons. Let’s consider the example of an airplane. An airplane is a place where the people within it can’t leave because they are not allowed to leave and are trapped. That is the situation within which the passengers of the airplane find themselves, which is identical to the prison. Once the plane is flying, the passengers can’t physically leave. They could open a door and jump out, but they would certainly die. They are also not allowed to leave, as opening the door could endanger the plane and other passengers. The airplane, thus, fits the definition of a prison. Perhaps one could object by pointing out that the passengers agreed to enter the airplane while the prisoners didn’t agree. It is true that, usually, prisoners don’t agree to enter the prison, but there are times when they reach deals with law enforcement where they agree to go to jail, perhaps for a smaller sentence, for instance, if they release some valuable information that they have, testify against someone, or whatever other deal they could make with law enforcement. Thus, disagreement to enter prison is not a requirement to be a prisoner. What this reveals, however, is that the will of the individuals in question is important. As we have discussed previously, the will of the prisoner plays a role in their imprisonment. We can thus set aside prison as a place and explore the idea of prison as being a state of mind. As we discussed previously, breaking a prisoner’s will to escape is one way in which their existential status, as a prisoner, can be maintained. That means that the state of mind of the prisoner is relevant to their status as prisoners, and the degree to which they are a prisoner. Their state of mind is one where they feel trapped. The feeling of being trapped, of feeling constrained and unable to move, is part of their state of mind. This state of mind is created not only by the prisoner’s inability to leave their location but also by the general sameness of the moments they experience. It is not just a spatial phenomenon but also a temporal phenomenon. The walls of the prison don’t change over time. There isn’t much to experience in the prison and there isn’t much to do. For those reasons, every moment in the prison is very similar to every other moment. This creates within us an incredibly unpleasant and harmful state of mind. We have been built to experience a lot of stimulation. Our minds require that stimulation to be healthy. Therefore, without that stimulation, over long periods of time, it becomes more unpleasant and harmful to us. This is why, for instance, in the airplane, we have a wide range of entertainment to choose from. We are given a wide range of music to choose from, movies, the internet, and food. We are kept mentally stimulated so that we can mask our physical imprisonment. That tells us that the degree of imprisonment is as mental as it is physical if not more mental than physical. It also tells us that imprisonment can be masked. We will address the mental degree of imprisonment first. We have established that a prison is a place where we are not allowed to leave and we are trapped. However, as we further established, a prisoner can enter a state of mind within which they can’t leave. But that state of mind doesn’t have to be one where their will to leave is broken. It can be a state of mind where they are willing to stay imprisoned because they are being mentally stimulated and they are better off choosing to stay than choosing to leave. First of all, their mental stimulation distracts their attention from their condition. It is better for their state of mind to forget their existential state than to be aware of it, so they choose to be blind to their imprisonment. Second of all, this tells us that there are no limits to the size of the prison so long as the mind is distracted by stimulation. We thus find ourselves trapped on this planet, but stimulated enough throughout our lives to not notice our imprisonment. We have such a range of options to experience, such a degree of space, and such limited time to experience everything that we usually don’t notice our existential state. Furthermore, our own bodies are prisons. We can’t escape our experiences of the world through our bodies. It is only when we have problems with our bodies that we generally become aware of this. We always experience the world through embodied experiences because those are the only experiences we can have so long as we are alive. Finally, let’s address the masking of our imprisonment. We have established here that a prison can exist that is as big as the planet and more mental than it is physical. It is thus possible to imprison someone without their awareness. The prisoner has their will restricted, but they are stimulated enough that they don’t notice their imprisonment. They may be willing to go along with their imprisonment not just because they are distracted from it but because the alternatives are worse so they are left with no better choice. Let us consider the case of the employee. Nearly every day, the employee goes to work when they are assigned to go to work. Once they arrive, they are told what to do by their superiors. Their job is often not very stimulating and is repetitive. Some people have more stimulating jobs, which are considered better. The employee stays at work and does their job for as long as they are told. Their will is completely restricted by their “superiors” and, ultimately, every employee’s will is restricted by their employer for the entire duration of their work. The employee then goes back home and gets distracted by some kind of mental stimulation. Maybe they watch Netflix, or scroll down on Instagram, on their phone. Perhaps they work more than one job and all they have time for is to take care of their most basic necessities such as eating and sleeping. They feel completely trapped in their situation, but they don’t have the ability to leave. They are prisoners. Some are more trapped than others. Some have more time for themselves and more money to work with, so they can get more distracted than other employees. But every single one of them experiences what we have covered here. They are all prisoners.

The current oppressive systems that govern our lives only have power over us because they control the resources that we need to survive. We all need food and shelter. In order to get food and shelter, we need money to pay for them. Most of us are not born with the possession and ownership of income-producing assets. We need to work in order to get money so that we can use that money to pay for the food and shelter that we need to survive. In addition to that, food and shelter have become increasingly more expensive while our income from the jobs that are offered to us has not increased. This forces us into a position of submission to those who own the means of our subsistence. How can we free ourselves from this position? The solution that is promoted by the people in power is, of course, to either participate in their system as an employee or participate and become one of them. Both "solutions" involve participating in their system as if there were no possible alternatives. According to them, there is nothing wrong with the way our society works. In order to pay for food and shelter all that we need to do is to earn more. Therefore, we have the option to get a higher-paying job or to start our own business, eventually joining the people in power. These solutions, of course, completely disregard the fact that this is a problem for every one of us who is dominated by those who control the resources we need to survive. Getting a higher-paying job doesn’t give us control over those resources. It may make them more abundant to us, by making them more affordable, but it doesn’t solve the underlying problem that they are not under our control. Once we get higher-paying jobs, we are also encouraged to get into debt so that we become trapped working for someone else while paying the debt. As for starting a business, new businesses very rarely succeed, and without a lot of resources at one’s disposal, starting a new business is very risky. At best, one may find themselves working even harder than before. Still, even if one succeeds against all odds, joining the ranks of the people in power, that doesn’t solve the problem at all. All it does is further perpetuate the problem by becoming yet another oppressor that governs our lives and has power over us because they control the resources that we need to survive. One may hold that immoral attitude, but that certainly doesn’t solve the problem. Another typical solution that is proposed to this problem is the union. Through the union, we can come together and gain the bargaining power that we need to regain control. But there are fatal flaws to the union model. First, it does not change the power dynamics. We are still begging those who have power over us to give us enough to survive and to give us some physical and financial security, but it does nothing to change that power dynamics. The fight goes on, indefinitely. Second, our ability to exert this collective power is very limited. The typical way we accomplish this is through a strike. But a strike requires us to stop working, which stops the flow of money. We typically don’t have a lot of money saved because we are only paid enough to just barely survive, so we can’t strike for long. That is a fatal flaw in this strategy. Finally, unions typically function through a hierarchical body that organizes workers. This hierarchical body is as susceptible to corruption as any other hierarchical body. Thus, union organizers may be bribed and co-opted. In order to truly solve this problem, we need to address the hierarchical structure that creates it. The hierarchical structure empowers a few to have control over our means of subsistence. The solution, then, is to create a structure that empowers us and gives us control over the means of our subsistence. First, we need to recognize that we are embodied beings, living in a specific physical location. If we are to gain control over the means of our subsistence, we need local control over our food and shelter. That means that we need to produce all our food locally, and own our shelter directly, without private landlords or banks. Second, we need community self-sufficiency. We can’t individually grow all our own food and build our own housing. That would not only be cumbersome but would also be inefficient, not to mention most of us don’t have sufficient skills to do everything. The alternative, then, is for us to create local cooperative organizations that are designed to pool our skills, time, and resources so that we can, together, become self-sufficient and stop relying on corporations to gain access to our means of subsistence. We can thus own and control access to the food and shelter that we need to survive, giving us the bargaining power that we need to free ourselves from corporate rule. We need to work together to free ourselves. We need to organize ourselves into city-wide cooperatives where each and every one of us owns and controls the systems that we need to survive. In these cooperatives, each citizen would hold one share of the equity that we build in our community, with an equal say in it. Each citizen would thus be a partner in all the organizations that they participate in within their city. They would hold the claim to one share of the equity in the cooperative partnership, and one vote toward every decision that is made that affects them. They would not be required to participate in debates about the decisions being made and they would not be required to vote on every decision, but, unlike the current system, they would be allowed to participate in the decision-making. In this manner, we can share control over the systems and resources we need to survive. We can each be a partner in a food cooperative that produces all the food that we need. We can develop an online platform where we can organize ourselves. We can decide which foods we want to be produced and those who are interested in participating in their production can work on producing them. We can pool our resources together to build systems to improve both the quality and the efficient production of food. We can, for instance, build vertical farms, to increase the proximity of the food and minimize transportation time. Providing shelter can also be done through a cooperative or through a network of specialized cooperatives, but that is a specialized discussion for another time. Ultimately, the idea is that we can free ourselves from corporate rule by working together for ourselves, without relying on them to supply us with our necessities. The source of power in the current system, the reason why most of us are poor and only a few are rich, is due to our dependence on their systems for our survival. We need money to purchase food and shelter. In order to get money, we need to work for a corporation. Therefore, in order to gain our freedom, we need to gain independence from corporations. We can only do this by organizing ourselves and working together to produce our own food and shelter. Our corporate rulers keep us separated, isolated and competing against one another so that they can take advantage of us. They remain in power by individualizing us and making us dependent on them and their systems in order to survive. They remain in power by focusing on us as individuals, keeping us separated and competing against one another. All their narratives are specifically designed to disempower us by keeping us apart and fighting against one another instead of working together to overcome their rule. We must reject their narratives and their systems. We must work together to create our own systems so that we can free ourselves from our dependence on their systems and, thus, free ourselves from their control over us.