If Nation is a myth then so is Self

The obvious way forward for the arguments about organisations and collectives - which are fairly easy to understand and to see in the news how they cause human misery - is that the nation we call ourselves is identically a myth.

The danger of these Anarchist arguments - it has not escaped me - is that if people were generally told to disobey authority then chaos would break out. Most people would start by disobeying the established order, but then would become fearful and start looking to new alliances. The weak (and therefore power greedy) would miss the opportunity for world peace and would capitalise upon peoples' insecurities and fears herding them together into factions and then setting factions against one another to gain control of the area. Then protection rackets set up and its back to systems of government again.

The process only works if it is internalised first (as I think Buddha said) [p.s. its good this spell checker actually - if a word is underlined as wrong I can take that as assurance that it is actually spelled right :-)].

Arguments so far stem from the absurdity we have in this world of people - who are at root the same - seeing themselves as fundamentally different because of their nationality. And worse the government calling upon them to behave as different. Britain for example doesn't exist. If it does exist it is only the union of tribes created by a king - who became a parliament of commoners - who uses this same Britain to justify their authority. A circular argument. The absurdity is most obvious when countries force their people to fight one another. And the reasons why? because we are under threat. Except we are only under threat because the people in the other country think they are under threat from us! Name a war where the soldiers thought they were fighting an innocent people to plunder them? They either thought they were freeing them from some great evil, educating them, or protecting their own people. Odd that we can be made to believe that killing humans ever helped the human race!

Anyway apply that argument to ourselves and it is identical, tho harder to see. We commonly believe ourselves to be like a soverign state with ourselves as the master giving orders over a land we own.

The homunculous argument is well criticsed almost everywhere - because who then takes on mastery of the self? Another smaller self? That is the first critique of such a model (both of psychology and government).

If we look at ourselves tho there is absolutely nothing there. We simply cannot point to any thing in the world and call that us. We are like an invisible being looking out of a darkened room from behind a pane of hemetically sealed glass, hidden both to ourselves and everyone else. Of course this is the homunculous argument starting up again - because is their a pane of glass separating the self behind the self.

This hidden self, never seen, and never to be seen, absolutely no evidence at all ever - is what I have suggested would be created by a Being unable to perform full self reference. It does help meditation considering the self to be something hidden in the very act of experiencing the world (very Heideggar if you are familiar).

Buddha never denies the self - he only says that we should recognise all outer things as non-self. All phenomena are transitory - they become and they then eventually fade even mountains - this he says makes them unworthy of being self. What he is pointing to obliquely is the undivided eternal self that I believe backs, in one way or another, all religions - what some call God (where god is the manifestation of God or G-d or just " ").

The belief we have in this divided self (losely modelled upon the body, having birth and death) which is separate from other people and owns this body, and its experiences like the land of a nation giving commands to the limbs like the king and commanders. This is Hobbes' Leviathon in reverse. All the myths that surround us of property grow out from this fabrication - this fabrication is supported by the myths that surround us (or both).

It is pathetic to see Locke trying to justify the concept of property in his essays. Apparently these ideas were influential and back the American constitution! But obviously these myths are essential to authority so Locke was pleasing his masters well. (I've a book to write on the rise of authority and the not so innocent execution of Socrates).

So Locke argues: when a man eats a morsel of food and it lies in his stomach we must say that it is his food and not belonging to anyone else simply because to get at it another person would have to commit all kinds of other offenses. And if we agree that this is his food, then we may as well have an agreement that food is not to be taken from the mouth, and if we accept this then ... and so on - roughly from memory.

Well in a world of organ transplants and things it's not so obvious what "belongs" to who anymore.

I always thought that if we were to define ownership it must stem from creativity. We only own that which we make. But as Kropotkin would argue that nothing is original everything drawing upon the work, skill and experience passed down generation after generation.

Yes property is a myth, and the self that commands this property neither does it own the body or the experiences or the thoughts that supposedly issue from it.