another response to the BBC blog, re: "morality" (see first below)

The BBC asks:
do you believe in the notion of ‘moral authority’? Are some people or countries morally superior to others?

Are there some countries or people who do behave in a way that give them an ‘authority’ to pass comment on the actions of others? Or do we all have our hands dirty, and to take a stance about someone’s conduct is to embrace hypocrisy?

My given response:


"if the standards of the Nuremberg trials were applied [to the u.s.a.], then every post World War II American president would have been hanged as a war criminal."--Noam Chomsky (http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/rage/ ...see question #5)


I don't want to say that the u.s.a. is the "only" immoral state in the world, but in its current position as "global enforcer state" for those whom have used deceit and lies to now "own" the entire world (i.e. through financial hegemony), the country I find myself in is quite the apostle of severe alienation, incorporated. Including the origins of the u.s.a.

But I think every state is an "immoral" organization, no matter how allegedly democratic. Every state forced, in one way or another, to subordinate to nato and the wto, and so on and so forth. The very idea of entrenchable hierarchy vying for positions of *power over* others! The very idea of *forcing* people to "the will" of the majority or any portion there-of; the very idea of formalized dualities, where people's humanity gets squashed under the weight of a very alienated idea of "the common good". And the very idea of war as we have been manipulated to believe is any sort of "solution."

States and all the coercions that come with them (i.e. propaganda as considered by Jacques Ellul) are obsolete if we wish to be frank about "morality." It all comes back to *severe alienation* and the perpetuation of that.

To evolve beyond the same old again would mean to re-learn the values of living in harmony not only with Mom Earth, but also each of our own powers which scream within us to speak our truths. For me, this would mean exploring "radical" strategies that allow our hearts to speak our depths.

Others have said that "morality" changes with time and place; but i say that all depends on how the hierarchy (or state) of each era plays its perpetual alienation games. The bottom line goes beyond each era's propaganda, and settles upon informal humanity's intuitive longing to speak truths unallowed by whichever hierarchy. For me, this brings us towards societies *wanting* input from its dissenters, say, in the form of the *vision quest* (as articulated by indigenous people the world over) and similar openings.

-----(end of letter to bbc's blog)------

NOTE: To keep to the "radical" underpinnings of this site, i'd like to also include the ideas of post-left anarchist ways of seeing "morality". Excerpts:

"Compulsory morality involves self-subjugation to a system or set of values that are, for one reason or another, believed to require mandatory compliance-even if the person believing this is unable to-as the cliché goes-"live up to them." Although compulsory morality can potentially be grounded within an individual's subjective experience, it is almost always instead grounded somewhere outside the realm of directly lived human experience."

(...)

"Science is one example of a source of many forms of modern, enlightened compulsory morality. I have capitalized it above to indicate that it is not the actual practice of experimental exploration of nature in pursuit of knowledge (science) of which I'm speaking, but an ideological construct (Science) of particular fetishized scientific ideas taken out of their finite, experimental contexts and elevated into general, quasi-religious principles....The formal structure of the various scientific moralities is, once again, the same as that for religious morality: sacred values from an unseen source to be followed by a relatively worthless human being whatever the context. Like religious morality, scientific versions of morality attempt to limit and determine what is supposed to be humanly desirable and possible, narrowing the choices that can be made by true believers."

See his article:
Demoralizing Moralism: The Futility of Fetishized Values
http://www.insurgentdesire.org.uk/moralism.htm