Number 89

In this issue:

1. Prisoner 1141183891920
2. Deep Evolution: Communication, Self-Knowledge, Tribe
3. The Great David Graeber Debate
4. Constantin von Monakow: an organic radical inspiration
5. Acorninfo

1. Prisoner 1141183891920

by Paul Cudenec

Hey, you there! Prisoner 1141183891920! How dare you dream of a life outside your cell?

You were born in here, like your parents and your grandparents before you, and you’ll die here too, locked up and locked down at His Majesty’s Pleasure. For ever.

You’ve never known anything else and we’re telling you now that there’s nothing else to know, so stop filling your head with those stupid anarchist fairytales.

There is no world beyond this inclusive and innovative institution. There never has been and there never will be.

That’s why we are proud to provide a climate-friendly window-free environment – it’s a daily reminder that our reality is the only one.

You need this place. You are totally dependent on us.

Look at you! You do nothing for yourself. You sit there all day, lazily chained to that huge metal ball.

Your water is brought right to you, with the medication already nicely mixed in!

Your insect-based gruel is thrown lovingly at your feet by the Care Team officers!

Your mattress, blanket and all-purpose bucket are all lent to you at very competitive rates of interest!

We even send someone to hose you down and save you from your own wretched filth, once a year without exception!

How do you think you could ever cope outside this prison, if indeed an outside even existed?

Do you think food grows on trees? Or that drinking water just spurts out of the ground?

Fool!

You’d soon be dying of starvation, thirst and also of boredom, without ClinkTV24 to compulsorily fill your mind.

How do you think you would get your weekly vaccine boosters without the JailJab Squad at your beck and call?

Do you really think you could live a decent and happy life without the electricity that lights your cell day and night, that powers our safety-ensuring Smart Surveillance System, and that is discharged regularly and benevolently into your brain by our Equitable Educational Experts and their award-winning Corrective Impact Prods?

Your utopian delusions are an infantile disorder, Prisoner 1141183891920!

Freedom can never exist, you naive numbskull!

Or maybe you’re not as stupid as you look. Maybe you’re too bright to really believe in all that childish anarcho-nonsense.

Yes, that could well be it! Deep down, you don’t want to leave the prison, because you know it’s impossible – you want to run it!

All this talk about liberty is just a cover for your own selfish ambition!

You’re just like us, really, aren’t you? You want to be us, you want our power.

So, on top of everything else, you’re a hypocrite, Prisoner 1141183891920!

You’re a liar, a fraud, a would-be tyrant hiding behind a thin facade of ridiculous idealism and prisonphobic hate speech!

Fact-checkers confirm that your disinformation and deceit represent a clear and present danger to the sustainability of the Global Narrative.

You are therefore cancelled.

Security. Servility. Silence.

[Audio version]

Back to top

2. Deep Evolution: Communication, Self-Knowledge, Tribe

“It‘s not just about self-sufficiency and returning to the land!”

by Mark the Mystic Activist

1. Society & Communication

What defines a society? How its people communicate. Why? Because a society is a system of communication.

Different societies have different overarching values, and different, complex codes of interaction that define their particular system of communication – but they are all systems of communication.

Therefore: how we now communicate – the quality of our communication – as we attempt to birth new societies across the globe – societies that are aware, connected, local-community-based and nature-embedded – will define the societies we co-create.

2. Communication & Self Knowledge

However, fully honest, authentic, vulnerable, courageous, felt, conscious communication is only possible when we know ourselves beyond our personalities. Call it knowing one’s self, or essence, or life force, or spirit, or familiarity with a neurological epiphenomenon called ‘consciousness’ – call it whatever we like – but only the felt-knowledge of ourselves as somehow-larger than our individuality, our ‘avatars’, our uniqueness – only this knowedge enables us to let ourselves be seen – to be seen in our guilt, in our rage, even in that of which we are most ashamed. We can communicate the truths of our personality openly – precisely because we know we’re not only it.

Therefore (if we want to co-create our own, conscious, caring, local societies): the way we relate to each other, the system of communication we co-evolve, must include self knowledge beyond our individual personalities.

3. Therefore Tribe

However (again!), most of us, most of the time, do not tend to communicate in such self-awareness and openness. It’s something we need to practice. We need to self-educate. But, obviously, we can’t self-educate alone – we can’t learn to communcate by ourselves! We need each other. We need others who also want to learn to communicate beautifully, gracefully, passionately, openly… How could we practice with people who weren’t interested?!

And so the tribe is born. It is born with a united intention: to not only co-create a new society, but to attend to the quality of its own relating, its own system of communcation. Everyone has understood ‘the means IS the end’. Everyone has understood that their communcation IS the society they are shaping (for themselves and their descendents).

4. The Crucial Agreement

There are many techniques for learning to relate consciously and intimately and authentically – that a tribe could choose from. (I recommend the technique I have developed!) But there is one underlying apparent-truth they all acknowledge: that all anyone ever has, in any given moment, is their own, limited, subjective, unique, direct experience of that moment.

It is important that everyone in the nascent tribe agrees on this. Why? Because then no one makes any pretence to knowing “The Truth”, or even what’s ‘right’ and what’s ‘wrong’ – and we all see each other as equals. (Together, here, in the same existential boat!)

This agreement will not only support whatever shared path of self-education in conscious communication the tribe chooses, it will sustain the unity of the tribe. And the unity of the life-loving society the tribe comes to co-create.

5. Endnotes

So my argument is:

1. Societies are primarily Systems of Communication.

2. Conscious Communication requires Self Knowledge.

3. If we want to co-create Conscious Societies (Communities) we have to Self Educate. And in order to Self Educate we need each other (Tribe).

4. The longterm Unity of the Tribe is sustained by the Shared Recognition of our Subjectivity.

As I said above, “it’s not just about self-sufficiency and returning to the land!” Most of our ancestors lived a more self-sufficient, rural lifestyle – and that didn’t prevent them from being sucked into misogyny, racism, cruel persecutions of all sorts, and hate-filled, ideological invasions, battles and massacres.

Finally – in case “only ever speaking from one’s own, unique, direct experience” sounds restrictive – I would like to add that I find that the more I actually LIVE feeling my own, limited, subjective, unique, direct experience of the moment, the more I feel the mystery of the moment – the miracle of the moment! For me, staying in, and communicating from, my own, limited, subjective, unique, direct experience of the moment has become a path – a path of unveiling, a path of homecoming.

And finally, finally – you might agree or disagree with my argument here – I’m OK with that. I am open. I am happy to hear your opinions. I am happy for my own opinions to evolve. What is important to me, above all, is that we consider how we want to take part in The Big Picture of our collective evolution – very carefully, and very heartfully.

Because we are, already, all of us, whether we like it or not, in action and in inaction, already taking part.

Mark the Mystic Activist, Catalunya, Samhain 2023. http://www.markthemysticactivist.com

Back to top

3. The Great David Graeber Debate

In the small world of contemporary thinkers whose work is in line with the Winter Oak worldview, you wouldn’t expect to find a huge divergence of attitudes towards a specific author.

But this is very much the case regarding the late anarchist anthropologist David Graeber (1961-2020), who has in recent weeks been the subject of strikingly contrasting analysis from our friends Crow Qu’appelle and Darren Allen.

Crow has been enjoying a deep dive into Graeber’s work and declares: “I am convinced that David Graeber was among the greatest minds of his age”.

He finds his analysis “brilliant” and “vitally important”, insisting that “someone really needs to take it upon themselves to make sure that his ideas aren’t forgotten”.

Crow adds: “He really always appears to want the best for everyone, and to not see political conflict as a zero sum game. Over and over, he insists that another world is possible, and that it is largely due to our own lack of imagination that we continue to reproduce political realities that leave so much to be desired.

“There is something pure and charming at the heart of his work, and I even occasionally find myself regarding Graeber as some kind of sage or saint. Certainly, he was someone who had a profound message for humanity”.

In particular, Crow is impressed by the important connection between anarchism and anthropology made in Graeber’s work: “I think that he was aiming to overthrow a disempowering narrative which has been promoted for hundreds of years – that oppression is inevitable because human beings are nasty, brutal savages who would all kill and rape each other if it weren’t for cops keeping us in line”.

He also highlights the way that Graeber “debunked the Myth of Barter”, pointing instead to the existence of a traditional “Gift Economy”. “This is all very fascinating because it suggests that human beings have innate instincts towards sharing”.

And he describes how in “Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology”, Graeber points out that majoritarian democracy – voting – is rarely, if ever, practised by egalitarian societies, who prefer consensus.

Darren on the contrary, insists in his own article: “David Graeber was, like Noam Chomsky, a rationalist, democratic, technophilic socialist who appropriated the radicalism of anarchism in order to distance himself from the conspicious futility of the professional leftism he embodied”.

He says that Graeber “had no real interest in genuine anarchist revolt (continually focusing his ‘activism’ through statist party politics)” and “when push came to shove and state-imposed lockdowns inaugurated a new dawn of subjugation and control, he was strangely silent”.

Darren adds: “He liked civilisation. He believed that cities, states, technology and private property were inevitable. Like other goodies of mainstream socialist-anarchism, he liked fighting ‘fascists’, ‘sexists’ and other right-wing baddies on the other side of the stage; remaining within the theatre that granted him his fame and influence”.

He goes on to accuse Graeber and David Wengrow, his fellow The Dawn of Everything author, of trying to persuade their readers that “domestication, stratification, urbanisation, agriculture, specialisation and technology are natural, right, good for us” by using “meaningless, postmodern definitions” of certain terms so that they can be identified in pre-civilised societies.

For instance, he says, the idea of ‘city’ is expanded to ‘large gathering places’ and “the idea of ‘property’ is expanded to mean possession (even, amazingly, possession in a sacred sense; apparently the idea that a lake ‘belonged’ to a Great Spirit shows that we always had private property!)”.

Crow does mention that Graeber was “an unabashed technophile”, but does not let that difference of opinion prevent him from an appreciation of his overall analysis.

For Darren, however, this is not something to be lightly disregarded.

He writes: “David Graeber doesn’t have a critical word to say about technology, he had no interest in engaging with our greatest critics of technology and he yearned for force fields, teleportation, antigrav fields, jet packs and immortality drugs.

“The idea that technology beyond a limit automatically subjugates men and women to its needs, infects their consciousness with its utilitarian priorities, degrades man’s apprehension of the ineffable, trivialises nature, numbs awareness, forces dependency, supplants free choice and tends towards the colonisation of every sphere of human activity; none of this was of interest to Graeber (as it is not to most socialists)”.

Of course, two reviewers’ opinions of the same work are largely a subjective matter and it’s not necessarily always a question of one of them being right and the other wrong.

For instance, for Darren all of Graeber’s books have a “curiously ‘weightless’ feel. Nothing in it is rooted in the real world”.

Crow, for his part, says Graeber was a “utopian”, adding: “If one delves into his work, one notices a very lovely quality of spirit permeating it”.

Here they are more or less saying the same thing, albeit in different ways.

But there is clearly an unbridgeable chasm between Crow’s view that Graeber was a “brilliant scholar and revolutionary” whose ideas were so dangerous to the system that he was possibly murdered and Darren’s take that he was peddling “a gross misrepresentation of humanity, one that has led, and can only lead, to misery”!

What do Acorn readers think? You are invited to share your views in the comments section at the end of the bulletin…

Back to top

4. Constantin von Monakow: an organic radical inspiration

The latest in our series of profiles from the orgrad website.

“We form ties with animals and plants and also with nonorganic bodies, into which last we merge after death”

Constantin von Monakow (1853-1930) was a neurobiologist who set out an organic scientific theory with important political implications.

He developed the idea of the horme, an all-pervading intrinsic motivating and guiding force which he described as “the primal mother of instinct”. (1)

Monakow explained: “The horme is nothing other than the activity of the universe (Worldhorme), within which we human-children are highly organized necessary parts.

“As such we are temporally and partly also spatially – through free mobility – closely bound up with one another: we form ties with animals and plants and also with nonorganic bodies, into which last we merge after death.

“There is an undeniable glory in the thought that an indelible temporal bond links us, not only with our ancestors and our descendants, but above all also with the whole rest of the organic world”. (2)

Monakow’s aim was “a naturalization of morality” (3) an idea in tune with the nature-based anarchist ethics developed by Peter Kropotkin.

He identified a principle he called the syneidesis or “biological conscience” whose purpose was to intervene in moments of imbalance and nudge the organism back into order.

For him, human conscience – our sense of right and wrong – was nothing less than the conscious aspect of this syneidesis, the highest form of the biological principle of auto-regulation.

Explains Harrington: “For Monakow, recognizing this gave intuitive judgment in moral decision-making an authority that was rooted in the cosmic life drive itself: an authority far above that of reason and sense”. (4)

The answer to humankind’s problems was therefore not yet more technology and social planning, but trust in its own deepest biological instincts.

All the wisdom and goodness that human beings required in life, on an individual and collective level, was already pulsing in the protoplasm of their cells.

“Every tiny living fiber in us” was, according to Monakow, “so much more wonderful than all the wonders of technology and a thousand times more clever”. (5)

He broke down the influence of the horme into a series of instincts, ranging from the most basic biological urges to the highest impulses.

The first was to grow according to one’s inner plan, the second was self-preservation, the third was reproduction via sexuality, the fourth was a feeling of connection with a social group and the fifth was the instinct to strive for holistic unity with the cosmos.

Because these higher instinct were part of our biological reality, the pursuit of morality and ethics did not involve, as was often said, suppressing our natural instincts.

Instead it was a question of allowing our superior instincts for selfless and ethical behaviour to predominate over the lower, basic, self-centred impulses.

This obviously had political implications, placing blinkered individualism and nationalism on a lower rung of evolution than an enlightened universal perspective.

Writes Harrington: “For Monakow, international community was not a thing of human reason but rather of mystical necessity – the ‘natural’ culmination of a holistic world view in which all living creatures were united in the cosmic dynamic of hormic evolution”. (6)

Monakow’s belief in the coherence and purpose of nature as a living organism inevitably led him to oppose the state, with its unnecessary and destructive aim of regulating and controlling a world that was capable of thriving perfectly well, indeed much better, without it.

He warned: “Do you see the marvelous wing-breadth and effortless gliding and sudden directed swoop of wild birds? Compare that to the waddling and anxious hopping-flight in the hen yard! Such a fate awaits a humanity that has been massively provided for through the State!” (7)

The Swiss-Russian Monakow was vehement in his dislike of the Americanization of European culture, which he described as a “triumph of infantilism” (8) and also of the industrial-capitalist Machine Age with which it went hand in hand.

A friend later recalled how he regarded technology as something unfruitful, even destructive. He would counter arguments that it gave human beings more free time by asking cuttingly: “Time for what? Spent how?” (9)

The Swiss novelist Maria Waser wrote of Monakow’s “pure understanding of the divine unity of all that is living”. (10)

In her 1933 tribute to him, she declared: “We had fallen into a state of disorder; he knew the plan and the secret will of the Living Principle. We were alienated from Nature; he stood as one initiated in the middle of her shrine. We were cheerless, but he knew the greatest joy”. (11)

1. Constantin von Monakow & R. Mourgue, Biologische Einführung in das Studiums der Neurologie und Pscyhopathologie (Stuttgart: Hippkrates-Verlage, 1930), cit. Anne Harrington, Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 89.
2. Maria Waser, Begegnung am Abend: Ein Vermächtnis (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1933), p. 265, cit. Harrington , p. 92.
3. Harrington, p. 94.
4. Harrington, p. 97.
5. Waser, p. 274, cit. Harrington, p. 98.
6. Harrington, pp. 94-95.
7. Waser, p. 309, cit. Harrington, p. 95.
8. M. Pusirewsky, Monakow als Arzt und Erzieher. Erinnerungen (Zurich: Orell Füssli, 1953, p. 21), cit. Harrington, p. 76.
9. Ibid.
10. Waser, p. 304, cit, Harrington, p. 72.
11. Waser, p. 196, cit, Harrington, p. 72.

Back to top

5. Acorninfo

“They are attempting to drag us into the realm of the sub-human – below the level of animals – to become subordinated cyborg automatons who lack independent thinking, feeling and willing”. So warns Emily Garcia of Real Left in ‘The Dystopian Cashless Future we must Fight: 5G, the Metaverse, and the Tokenised Impact Economy‘.

* * *

“Leviathan is essentially anti-nature. It’s the human world of artifice as distinct from nature”. In this video, Winter Oak contributor W.D. James has an in-depth conversation with Thomas Lynn, aka Thinking Thomas.

* * *

“Art, hope and resistance from within the collapse” is the subtitle of Beyond the Dark Horizon, a radical green and anarchist journal from the place sometimes known as Australia, whose third issue is now available.

* * *

Ben Rubin, the researcher whose work prompted our article on Tony Blair and the Rothschilds, has spoken with UK Column on the same subject and also about the Common Purpose agenda. Both videos are well worth watching.

* * *

The truth about the way that Greta Thunberg’s prominence was manufactured by the criminocrats to push their fake-green “climate” agenda, as first revealed by Cory Morningstar and then by others, has now reached a much bigger audience thanks to a recent edition of the Jimmy Dore Show in the USA.

* * *

“The U.S. government is planning a rule that allows for America’s protected lands, including parks and wildlife refuges, to be listed on the N.Y. Stock Exchange. Natural Asset Companies (NACs) will be owned, managed, and traded by companies like BlackRock, Vanguard, and even China”. A startling piece by Elizabeth Nickson.

* * *

“There’s something weird going on”. Are global corporate entities seeking to own the rights to the air we breathe? The sinister activities of Natural Asset Companies are explored by Australian researchers Kate Mason and Michael Swifte in this video.

* * *

Calling all Putin fans! Here’s yet more evidence that he’s enthusiastically on board the WEF’s Fourth Industrial Revolution and transhumanism bandwagon, from Edward Slavsquat blog author Riley Waggaman.

* * *

The UK’s Data Protection and Digital Information Bill is a threat to hard-won rights, says Prem Sikka on the Left Foot Forward site. “People are constantly told that they must sacrifice their liberties and freedoms for the greater good of the society, which is equated with greater good of capital and wealthy elites”.

* * *

The system is planning a false-flag hacking take-down of the internet, so as to justify the removal of anonymity and the introduction of digital ID, warns independent journalist Whitney Webb. But what if we were all aware of this plan in advance? Would it still work?

* * *

Music producer Mike Stock explains in this interview with Ash Mahmood that he immediately spotted the Covid scam by knowing from the inside that the music charts were “largely fictitious” and understanding “what they control and how they control it”. In other words, he had seen through the Spectacle…

* * *

It’s easy to know what you’re against in a “dysfunctional, unsustainable and increasingly dystopian world”, says new website At the Grassroots. But what can we actually do about it? This great initiative explores ways of practically building a new world in the decaying shell of the old one.

* * *

Acorn quote:

“So, too, of modern doctrines and discoveries – they may add to the convenience, but not the real happiness of the race. The improvement of mechanism, the piling up of fortunes, the building of cities, even the teachings of science, are of no avail towards hastening the perfection of the human soul or the human body; wonderful as they are, they are for the most part valueless” – Henry Salt

(For many more like this, see the Winter Oak quotes for the day blog)

Back to top

If you like this bulletin please tell others about it. Subscribe by clicking the “follow” button.

—–

Back Issues

The Acorn 88

The Acorn 87

The Acorn 86

The Acorn 85

The Acorn 84

The Acorn 83

The Acorn 82

The Acorn 81

The Acorn 80

The Acorn 79

The Acorn 78

The Acorn 77

The Acorn 76

The Acorn 75

The Acorn 74

The Acorn 73

The Acorn 72

The Acorn 71

The Acorn 70

The Acorn 69

The Acorn 68

The Acorn 67

The Acorn 66

The Acorn 65

The Acorn 64

The Acorn 63

The Acorn 62

The Acorn 61

The Acorn 60

The Acorn 59

The Acorn 58

The Acorn 57

The Acorn 56

The Acorn 55

The Acorn 54

The Acorn 53

The Acorn 52

The Acorn 51

The Acorn 50

The Acorn 49

The Acorn 48

The Acorn 47

The Acorn 46

The Acorn 45

The Acorn 44

The Acorn 43

The Acorn 42

The Acorn 41

The Acorn 40

The Acorn 39

The Acorn 38

The Acorn 37

The Acorn 36

The Acorn 35

The Acorn 34

The Acorn 33

The Acorn 32

The Acorn 31

The Acorn 30

The Acorn 29

The Acorn 28

The Acorn 27

The Acorn 26

The Acorn 25

The Acorn 24

The Acorn 23

The Acorn 22

The Acorn 21

The Acorn 20

The Acorn 19

The Acorn 18

The Acorn 17

The Acorn 16

The Acorn 15

The Acorn 14

The Acorn 13

The Acorn 12

The Acorn 11

The Acorn 10

The Acorn 9

The Acorn 8

The Acorn 7

The Acorn 6

The Acorn 5

The Acorn 4

The Acorn 3

The Acorn 2

The Acorn 1

Follow Winter Oak on Twitter at @WinterOakPress