The Ludic Revolution
Bob Black calls it
The Ludic Revolution. It's the only revolution which
ever will, or can, work.
Revolution cannot
be accomplished by violence. I see nothing morally or essentially wrong with
using violence against the economic and political powers that be. If using
violence were an effective means of bringing about revolution, I'd be all for
it. I do not respect, or even acknowledge, any right to life and property on
their part in the least. When they arrogated our rights to life and freedom
they forfeited their own, and I am convinced that no one has the right to
private property.
I do not advocate
violence against the economic and political powers that be simply and only
because violence against them won't work. They are better at violence
than we.
Moreover, and this
is terribly important to understand, as Gustav Landauer
wrote, so very insightfully:
"One can
throw away a chair and destroy a pane of glass; but those are idle talkers and
credulous idolaters of words who regard the state as such a thing or as a
fetish that one can smash in order to destroy it. The State is a
condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behavior; we
destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward
one another - One day it will be realized that socialism is not the invention
of anything new but the discovery of something actually present, of something
that has grown; We are the state and we shall continue to be the state until we
have created the institutions that form a real community and society of
men". –
Gustav
Landauer
"Schwache Stattsmänner,
Schwacheres Volk!" ("Weak Statesman, Weaker
People!")
Der Sozialist, June 1910
The economic and
political powers that be derive their powers from us – from the permission we
granted them to usurp our basic rights. They are the distillation of the very
worst in us. Violence will not be effective against them. They are far more
effective at terrorizing us than we them because it was our fear that created their
dominion in the first place.
HR 1955 (S 1959)
is legislature aimed at preventing the use of force or violence to effect
social change. All legislation designed to regulate and control behavior is
centered on the prohibition of force and violence.
Have you ever
heard of legislation against laughter?
Love and LAUGHTER
conquer fear. They are both orders of magnitude more powerful than fear and
when we love and laugh, fear is displaced in us. We become more expansive. We
become more creative. We become vastly more powerful.
The economic and
political powers that be do not deserve our love. As the ancient Jewish
teaching has it: "Those who are compassionate toward the cruel will, in
the end, be cruel to the compassionate." The history of Christianity bears
out just how true this maxim is.
They are deserving
of nothing but our ridicule. They deserve to be laughed at.
We can diminish
anything with our laughter.
There is a higher
level of laughter than sardonic ridicule and, if we are to effect
a revolution, we must reach that level of laughter.
When we can laugh at their funny money; when we can look at their concentration
camps and at the double-decker trains equipped with chains and shackles and laugh;
when we can laugh at the electronic turnstiles and the cement floors and the
barbed wire and the gas pipes and the furnaces they've installed in some of the
camps and laugh; when we can laugh at the horrible images the threats of
"mental health" camps in Alaska that can hold 2 million people
conjure up in our minds; when we can laugh at the fear and disgust they try to
induce in us with all the talk of them practicing occult and satanic practices
(the photos of the ceremonies they conduct really are ludicrous), when we can
laugh *at death itself* – we will have conquered our own minds and emotions
and, in so doing, destroyed their hold on us entirely.
The economic and
political "powers" are nothing but the reification of the horrors in
our own minds and the emotions they arouse. When we conquer our minds and those
emotions that hold us prisoner, then and only then will we be free.
Long live The Ludic Revolution!
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan,