Cast Of Characters
Leads:
The Professor
Jamie
Sundry Supporting Players
1.
State Detention Facility, Northern California
- I heard this story coming here. A gang of girls is killing their boyfriends. The police haven't any evidence yet. You girls know anything about that? No? A girl kills her boyfriend, you know why?
- Why, professor?
- I imagine her saying, you disregard me, take my love, act like I don''t have a right to live. If I don't have a right to live, you don't have a right to rule.
- Cool.
- When girls get out of here, does the State of California care if they live or die? The right to property is more important than right to life. Others property is more important than their lives. The girls don't have any property. They'll get some, or die. They'll just have to die.
- Life's not fair.
- Why do they accept that? Why die for the idea of property? Why don't they say to the State Of California, if I don't have the right to live, you don't have the right to rule?
- They don't know who to kill.
- And if they did, nothing would change.
- The world is a better place without my guy.
- What happened to him? Forget it. We don't think things can change, that's the problem. Boyfriends die right and left, but the right to property is still placed ahead of right to live. Some other guy will come along and try to take possession of some girl. What is property? Can any of you tell me?
- Your things.
- Things you use. Imagine I made you an offer. Keep what you use. But here's the deal: if you give up the right to what you don't use, I will give you what you don't have now, a right to live. Will you take the deal?
- Maybe I want to get rich.
- Or die trying.
- Yeah.
- Why do you want to get rich? Wait, I'll read you something:
For it is certainly nothing new that those who are being violated dream of violence, that those who are oppressed dream at least once a day of setting themselves up in the oppressor’s place, that those who are poor dream of the possessions of the rich, that the persecuted dream of exchanging “the role of the quarry for that of the hunter,” and the last of the kingdom where “the last shall be first, and the first last.”*Girls want to be queens, sure. When they grow up. But right now, would they take the deal?
- Professor, some like their books, some like their fights.
- Would the girls fight for the deal?
- Fight who?
- The people who have more than they can possibly use.
- They'll give some of that extra property to others dying to have it. They'll have an army against us.
- Sure. But some girls like to fight.
2.
State Detention Facility, Northern California
- Where are the rest of you?
- Gone. We're getting out tomorrow. Why are you here?
- They needed teachers.
- Is that what you are?
- A Substitute.
- What do you get?
- 350 dollars for a day.
- How much in your wallet?
- I see. Right to life ahead of right to property. Put my money where my mouth is. Tell you what. I'll set my wallet down on the desk. Take it, if you think it's right. Or take it anyway. Only answer my question.
- What question?
- I don't have a right to property that takes away your right to live.
- You said.
- When you get something, and don't use it, still, you don't you want anyone else to use it. Why?
- Because it's mine.
- What does that mean? "It's mine".
- It's my property.
- Yes. But why do you want it?
- I like it.
- Say I make some money at work, use it to build a house, and live in it. I make some more money, don't have to use it. What do I do with it? If I don't make the mistake of arriving in the wrong classroom with the wrong three girls.
- Put it in a bank.
- Hide it under your mattress.
- Invest it.
- Bank it, or hide it, I might do, for emergencies, or if I had a family I wanted it passed down to. Those are deferred uses. Investment can be a deferred use too. But let's say it isn't. I don't have any use for more money, I don't want more money to do more things. Why would I invest money if I have no practical need for making more money?
- Profit. The game of making money.
- Why would I play such a game? Keep property for myself, and away from others, for the sake of getting more property for myself and keeping from others.
- For the the fun of it.
- As an art. What is the use of such an art?
- For its own sake.
- Children play games to learn about the toys they play with. Artists make models of the world and their experience in it that help them see the world more clearly. What does practicing the skill of making money for its own sake, not to use it, get us?
- We feel strong. Know we can buy anything.
- Is that useful?
- Why not?
- We said the money is invested because we have no use for it. What use is feeling strong because you know you can make money with money? Everyone is superstitious, at least a little, sometimes. Do you know why?
- No, Professor.
- Superstition begins with fear. You do something that is associated with what you are afraid of, and you are afraid of doing it again, lest it come to pass. Why?
- "Lest it come to pass!"
- Leaving the house in the morning a dog barks at you. You're afraid if you go out the same door, more bad things like dogs barking will happen, so next time you go out the other way. Now, what does the banker do?
- What?
- The banker repeats the act of making money. Money suggests to bankers power and safety. What if the repetition got us something not suggestive of money and power, but suggestive of weakness? Remember the money is not used, there is no real reason for repeating the act of making it, as there is no real reason for avoiding going out that door to the barking dog. Superstition is being afraid to repeat an act that has no real reason not to be repeated, as the banker's repeatedly getting more possessions without use is equally without purpose, is done for security from fear.
- You're saying money making is a kind of superstition?
- No. I'm saying both making money for its own sake and superstition are rituals. Rituals are repeated actions that have their purpose in the security we feel in knowing we can repeat them. Because you must pay attention to them, rituals leave you blind to the world outside their practice.
- The blind bankers see well enough to make money.
- They're blind to everything in the world but what they take to use in their rituals. Everything else out in the world is attacked, stripped of resources, then left to fend for itself. The world becomes more and more inhospitable, rituals more attractive. People who believe in the right to acquire unused property treat each other as they do the world in general, as resources of acquisition. They leave each other to destruction. They don't know why they shouldn't.
- Tell me again why they shouldn't.
- They become blind to themselves, to others, and to the world. If there is such a thing as a magical property right, a rule that has a basis somehow in the world, outside of what is good for people who live in the world, it is a destructive magic.
- Bad magic. I like that. So. Professor. Or magician. I don't know if you have more money than you can use. You look rich.
- There's a simple way of finding out. You need to know two things, first, if I employ anyone, second, if I employ money for the sake of making more money. Say I own three houses. If I can't employ anyone I won't be able to take care of the three, they'll fall to pieces. No one has reason to enslave himself to another for wages who has property, who has any choice. But if I collect things I don't use I'll be unconcerned with the needs of others, and have no problem enslaving them for wages. Look for employees or abandonment.
- If I don't have a house and can't get food, I say: you people with house and food, you have no right to stop me from having the same. When I have it, people say to me, you have no right to employ anyone, because no one would accept employment who had a house and could get food, and a right to property can be only what everyone accepts is good for all, and that is house and food. Good, Professor?
- Very good.
- I've got your wallet here, in my hand. I'm the cop, you're the suspect. Do you have investments?
- No.
- Do you employ anyone?
- No.
- Do you have a house?
- No.
- Do you have a way of getting food?
- Uncertain. You tell me this job is over.
- I can take money you can't use, right?
- If you want to be right.
- I'll keep this for now. Invest the money for you.
- In what?
- Tell you out in the yard. Let's go, you guys.
3.
State Detention Facility, Northern California, Yard
- You think they understood that, Prof?
- Can I have my wallet back? No, I don't. They can't watch us here?
- The girls smashed all the cameras before they left. Where are we going?
- Thailand. Bangkok.
- Cool.
- Hot, actually. Don't get into any trouble. See you tomorrow. Outside.
4.
22nd floor penthouse apartment
Bangkok, Thailand
- This is the pornographer?
- Where did you find these girls?
- Calm down. This is the programmer, the hacker. He works for the pornographer. These are the girls. They found me.
- How?
- Jer, here, was at Occupy Wall Street, last year.
- You too?
- Me too. Briefly. Jer met the driver there. He's our way into the building. Tell the girls about your job.
- I'm into the banks. I've got personal data from Amazon, Google, Google, Apple. No problem. It's done.
- Tell the girls how.
- I'm a pornographer, right? With access to personal information about consumers of pornography?
- You blackmailed the CEOs.
- No, the girls are going to take care of the them. The corporate quants had what I needed. Here, I'll play back a chat history on one of the sex sites I work on. Watch. The robot chatting with the customer learns about his likes and dislikes, learns what to say next based on the customer's response, first simply on whether the chat is ended or continued, then whether the customers spends money, then how much money he spends. We've taken this artificial intelligence and applied it to our operation to convince people dangerous to us not to oppose us.
- The army, police.
- Yes.
- Does it work?
- We've tried it out on American soldiers stationed here. Sent girls to chat with them at bars Most were already our customers. We knew their interests in sex, knew what music they liked, movies they liked, books they read. Our girls brought up the subject of social injustice. They responded. We recorded their response, and how the girls responded again, and recorded the response to that. Robot artificial intelligence learned politics chat exactly like it learned sex chat. The more chats, the more the soldiers were convinced.
- Said they were convinced. Only words.
- Well, yeah. There's the money too. That's in the mix. Essential, but not my job. Are we finished here? Take the girls, Professor. Tell them about the money.
- Kick his chair, Jamie.
- Hey!
5.
22nd floor penthouse apartment
Bangkok, Thailand
- This is Mose.
- The pornographer
- Be good.
- My wife, my daughter, playing over there.
- Nice to meet you.
- What made you a pornographer?
- I'm a business man.
- Why are you here, Mr. Israeli?
-Taxes. Don't fight with me. We're on the same side.
- How do you like being a pornographer?
- Cut it out.
- Why is he helping us?
- For the money.
- What are we paying?
- Enough to make him the richest man in the world.
- Are you an idiot, Israeli?
- He knows we will not be using dollars.
- So he's in it for the money. He's staying out. I'm glad. Let pornographers and bankers fight to the death
- I wants my daughter to live in a better world. Look at her. Isn't she beautiful? Wouldn't you make a world for her?
- Come on. We going to the beach.
* * *
Street of outdoor cafes, beach resort
Thailand
- Speechless?
- You're the talker.
- Old men and little girls. Little boys. Walking hand and hand down the street. Romantic couples. 100,000 prostitutes in this one town alone.
- It's a lifestyle choice. That's what everyone says here.
- What do you say, pornographer?
- The girls choose prostitution over starvation.
- And you got rich from it. Rich men like you made the world that gave them such good choices.
- I'm ready to do something about it. Are you?
- I 've been ready for them a long time. I can't wait.
- Won't be long.
- Jamie, kick that old bastard there off his chair.
6.
Service quarters, Park Ave. residence
32 apartments. 2 to each floor, average cost: $110 million
- How do we look?
- Turn around. Where's your name tag?
- My hair is on it. There.
- "Lauren, of APC"
- American Protective Clothing.
- Good. Sit down, girls.
- This is the day the most bodyguards told our appointment scheduler they'd be in the building for their free fittings That means their employers also are in the building. You have your own vests on underneath?
- Without optional attachments.
- Factory originals. First appointment, 2 minutes.
7.
Service quarters, Park Ave. residence
- Stand over here, face the picture there of our president. Relax. Slip your arms through, the right, now the left. Perfect.
- What are the straps for?
- Imagine you are tying shoelaces. Reach behind, take the ends in each hand, cross them in front and lead them behind you. I'll take them now. Thanks.
- What was that? Isn't is too tight?
- Turn around.
- This can't be right. I can't move my arms. What? Put the gun down now.
- Are you going to make me? Step through that door to your right.
- I don't know what you think you are doing, but...
* * *
- You didn't have to do that.
- He'll wake up.
- Drag him into the other room. 19 more to go.
8.
Park Ave. penthouse apartment
- Michael, I told you to wait with the car.
- I brought some people to meet you.
- You what? You must...
- Sit down, Mr. Killen.
- Whoever you are, get out of my house.
- I'm sorry. I would like to stay, for the time being.
- We'll see about that. Michael...
- Hit him, Jamie.
- Professor, I've driven a car for Mr. Killen for almost ten years, and...
- No one is free to make another a slave.
- He's getting up. Help him to his chair.
- You look like an intelligent man. My driver calls you "professor". You must see that you don't have the right to decide what my rights are.
- I said no one is free to make another a slave. You can try, but others will try to stop you.
- No one is free to live life in peace and make another a slave.
- Jamie, my best student. Kick him down.
- Stop! Violence doesn't solve anything.
- Says the man who makes peace impossible by keeping slaves. Kick him.
- What do you want? What did I do to you?
- You gave me a world without peace where I have nothing better to do than indulge myself with childish tantrums. Please help Mr. Killen to his chair. Today we want an account set up with a balance. One trillion dollars. Not much, about the amount of the bailout the government handed you a few years ago. Tomorrow we'll want more.
- That's impossible.
- Jamie.
- No!
- Good. We're done for today.
- But how do you expect to get away with it? Kill me or not, the bank will follow the money.
- We plan on spending it all within a few minutes.
- That's impossible.
- Everything is impossible for you but keeping slaves. Take him to down to the others.
9.
Park Ave, penthouse apartment
- Any coffee around here?
- I'm not your slave. Who else?
- Just go. Bring service for all. Everyone, over here. Tell me. Why violence? Martene?
- People are slaves. Tortured, brainwashed, indoctrinated, punished for thinking, rewarded for obedience. They won't be free until they are given a chance to act free.
- What is that chance?
- A place of their own to live and food to eat.
- A chance to live without constant fear. Why don't people ask for it?
- They'll be told, "Our right to keep property to ourselves we can't use is more important than your right to live.
- And if the whole world of slaves said to their masters, We won't work for you anymore?
- The masters would try to buy them off. If that didn't work, they'd give everyone house and food, but keep them employees, and begin the game again of taking everything back.
- How?
- By controlling the conditions of employment.
- Details.
- Employees have to work to stay in their houses and buy food. Employers, by controlling investment, control how many jobs and how much jobs pay. Day by day employers create more job and pay insecurity. The more the insecurity, the easier it is to frighten employees into obedience. Soon once again employees are slaves.
- Tortured, brainwashed, indoctrinated. The alternative?
- Employment has to be outlawed. Property not used outlawed, considered to be abandoned. House and food are not enough.
- Will the employers allow that?
- No.
- Why not?
- They wouldn't be employers, wouldn't have more property than others.
- So?
- They'd use their money and power to stop it from happening.
- Has there ever been a revolution outlawing employment and unused property?
- Yes.
- Where, when?
- In the 1930s, Southern Spain, during the Civil War.
- And?
- The Ukrainian Free State, during the Second World War.
- And?
- Southern Mexico, presently in power. The Zapatistas.
- Were any established without violence? Without war?
- No.
- Here's the coffee.
10.
Elevator to penthouse, Park Ave.
- Plenty of room. Wheel the computers in. Move back, billionaire.
- You know...
- We know what?
- I have a son your age.
- In a gang?
- No. A student in his rebellious youth of 20th Century anarchism. His doctoral work was on the Paris Commune.
- We know the history, billionaire.
- Then you know in the few times in history anarchism has been tried, the way was prepared by decades of effective organization. You don't have that advantage.
- How do you know?
- Believe me, I'd know. Information is my business.
- We've got our gangs. You haven't considered that.
- Don't talk to him.
- Have you considered that also the threat of war, great disruption of ordinary life, was needed before anyone would listen to radical ideas?
- That's where you come in. We're there.
11.
Penthouse, Park Ave.
- Mr. Menoch. You know your 11th floor neighbor Mr. Seeches. You two have something in common. Financiers both, both also own industries personally. Media is Mr. Menoch's business, banking yours, Mr. Seeches. You own and direct banks and broadcast companies.
- I can advise operating officers...
- No, Mr. Seeches, we don't want to hear it. You will do what I say. You know the alternative. You also, Mr. Menoch.
- What are you going to do?
- You are going to do what you do, finance. Sit down before the computers. Today you will be financing individuals, not other financiers. Access your accounts.
- I will not! I cannot even if I wanted to interrupt daily operations.
- You are under a misapprehension. We already have access. We already have the account information of every soldier, police officer, food stamp recipient in the country. About 50 million people. Your money is already in their accounts. A million dollars each.
- You'll crash the money supply.
- A mere 3 or 4 times the national debt. We can discuss the matter further another time. Your calender has been cleared. We have asked you here today to explain to the cameras - see them standing by the windows - to explain your generous gift to the people of our country most in need and deserving of assistance. Please identify yourself, the names of your most widely known companies. Then say what is written on this board:
It is my hope that with this money no one in our great country will have to work for another. In the future, whether we work alone, or work together, it will be our own choice.You go first, Mr. Menoch.
- I will not.
- Jamie.
- Alright! I'll do it.
12.
Camp David, presidential compound
- Where is the President?
- We didn't think it was necessary to involve him at this stage.
- Have you heard from your father?
- No.
- What did the Center For Disease Control say?
- Their site reports an outbreak at the Park Ave. address.
- Who planted it?
- They don't know.
- What are we going to do?
- Nothing, for the moment. No one is going in, no one going out.
- And the money?
- Your opinion?
- Worst case, we have a lot of new customers.
- Worst case is they outlaw banks and we have no customers.
- General, are you prepared to shut down their internet communications?
- The internet was designed to make that impossible.
- Have you tried? We instructed you...
- We tried. Look. I'll show you what happened. They directed their instruction through this regional node. Pulsing light, there. We shut it down, and they went here, then here, then here. You see? We'll have to shut down the whole system to stop them.
- Adverse affects?
- Which is worse: 50 million new millionaires spending our money, or the internet down, all business disrupted? Not my area of expertise.
- Senator?
- They have no real organization. I allow that their video, Take It Back or whatever it was called, was slick. But without someone holding their hands workers won't throw out their bosses. If we shut down the internet every worker will be on his own.
- If we shut down the internet social services will break down. People will double down on the trouble, take over their workplaces.
- A possibility.
- General: will your soldiers assault worker occupied factories?
- We'll have to see.
- That's not an answer.
- If it looks like the majority of Americans like being millionaires and running their own lives, I don't think our millionaire soldiers are going to kill them.
- And I don't think I like your attitude.
- Your father told me once you were an anarchist.
- He's fond of conveying that misinformation. I studied anarchism.
- Well, you have that in common with that out of work school teacher holding your father hostage. Your education makes you an asset to our team. We'll be continuing to call upon your guidance. General: you have your instructions. Shut it down.
13.
Northern Finland, freight airport, hanger
Hello, Georgyi.
- Where're the boys and girls?
- Outside. Flying around.
- Everything ready?
- Loading.
- Routers and sticks?
- Don't worry.
- I have to worry. What are you watching?
- A lecture from early last year. A philosopher.
- Summarize.
- I know it's little late for theory. A weakness I have.
- I'm worried it won't work.
- Have you seen the video we sent out? Before the internet was unplugged? "Take It From Here".
- Summarize. And cut the sound.
- We show how our kids are there waiting. Willing and able to chase out managers and owners. Only a call away. These scenes show how communications have been re-established. Sticks parachuted for their computers and phones. Orbiting and stationary routers launched. This is real footage, not CGI.
- Working?
- Perfectly. Minimal losses. Don't worry.
- Tell me about the philosopher.
- He begins with this story of attending a conference and asking the billionaire financier who sponsored it, Would he help the new Occupy Wall Street movement? The Billionaire answered, not at this moment, in times of disorder, making a change creates more disorder.
- The timing was wrong. The timing is right only in orderly times, when change can be absorbed without being too disruptive.
- And so that that time never comes a climate of continuous panic is created.
- Does the philosopher say how?
- Yes. The media reports all the problems of the world, with never a suggestion of what to do about them. Problems, new ones all the time, with no solution, give the audience a feeling both that things are bad but nothing can be done about them, and that though bad, very bad, things have been bad a long time and we are still here, so need do nothing. Everything is bad but fine.
- People are panicked into doing nothing. Into being satisfied with doing nothing. Clever.
- Downing the internet will create a panic people will want to do something about.
- And our boys and girls are there to show them what to do. Call them down from their planes. I want to talk.
14.
Northern Finland, freight airport, hanger
- Many of you have seen this video before, our Professor and Jamie's boy...
- Hey, man...
- Recorded by phone in the Silverlake area of L.A. Watch:
- Drinking beer, sitting out on the porch. This is definitely the house where the party is.
- No, Sir.
- Why do you call me Sir?
- So I won't get arrested.
- You're in a gang?
- Yes.
- Sir means father. I'm not your father.
- What do we call you, Bro?
- Call me "Bro".
- You teach?
- I can teach you anarchism.
- What's that?
- People work for others when they own no property. They own no property because others have accumulated for themselves masses of things they can't use. Owning things you can't use is insane. Threatening people who have no property with death from starvation and exposure if they don't slave for you is insane. Do you agree?
- That's the world.
- In fact it's not. Look around you. Just as many people like to get rid of things and like to make gifts of them. People like to share and help those they live with.
- Sounds like a gang.
- Yes. You don't like to own things you can't use, you don't like to order people about. You live under threat of violence, you respond with violence. The insanity of slavery and useless accumulation always produces a violent response. The only society that both isn't insane and doesn't lead to violence is one that outlaws slavery and outlaws ownership of things you can't use.
- That's what anarchists want?
- Yes.
- How will they get it?
- Revolution
- It will never happen.
- What happened to your eye?
- My girl, the bitch.
- Bro, you must be referring to your Sis, Jamie. She invites you to the revolution.
- Quiet down. It's not that funny. Kids! A lot has happened in the three days we've been here. Our 50 trillion dollars bought you novice fliers your helicopters and planes. It bought your teachers too, but let's not dwell on that. Back in the USA it bought a lot of people a lot of houses and cars. Here, watch the internet go down. Traffic chaos, signals down, crowds streaming out of office buildings where work has stopped. And there's our American president, announcing on behalf of the government that the people aren't really owners of their new houses and cars. It was all a mistake. Clerical error. Give it back, people. Some are. Others aren't. Some are moving immediately into their new homes. See that happy waving family? We're going to help them. Jamie, how did you girls do?
- The gangs? The boys are going along.
- How many can we expect?
- If they'd been to prison, we made them a millionaire. We'll have an army of millions. Where are we sending them first?
- Where the food is.
15.
Draper's Supermarket, Beverly Hills, California
- Stay by the helicopter. Direct the curious to the market. Ok?
- Yes, Ma'm.
- Go to hell.
- Girls! Set up the cameras. Get the employees out here.
- Wait. Hand the telephones out while your at it.
- People: where are your supervisors?
- They ran when they saw the helicopter.
- Good. You know who we are?
- Revolutionaries.
- Christmas.
- Gang Christmas.
- You'll see this is no joke. I don't believe in violence.
- Ma'am, if we lived in a world that listened to reason, we'd be reasonable.
- Heard it before. The war to end all wars.
- Maybe this time we know how.
- Maybe not.
- You're welcome to opt out. The rest of you: you own this place. Your job is to give away food. Let no one take more than they can use.
- How will we stop them?
- Call us. Call us if the managers return.
- But the phones are down.
- Our phones work. Who here doesn't have their own place to live? Lives with family, friends?
You, you. You. Let's go shopping. Sami: how'd it go?
- Video looks good.
- Send it out. Come on!
16.
Draper's Supermarket, Beverly Hills, California
- Jamie?
- What.
- Tell Carlo to circle round. I've got a bad feeling.
- Carlo-boy: give us view of the market.
- The workers are leaving!
- Take us back. Can you get the manager's phone number?
- A second. Here.
- Tell him you're the police. The market's clear and he's needed there. Ok?
- Yeah.
- Out. Bring the workers to me at the entrance.
- You're all afraid. Why?
- We'll be charged with stealing.
- Charged by who?
- The company.
- Jamie, let me in. You guys: did you get our messages? Visit our sites? Watch our videos?
- We were ordered not to leave. We've heard nothing.
- Jamie?
- Set the camera up. Schools in session. Here's the deal: we're staying and there are millions of us. We've got guns, we've got communications. Your company is on the run. All the companies are on the run. You're back online. Check it out.
- You can't make an ideal world with violence.
- We don't want an ideal world.
- What do you want?
- A chance for a world that might not, just might not, end in violence.
- We risk our lives for your chance.
- Human beings are made to take the best chance. You'll remember now your slavery's finished. Is that your manager pulling up?
- The company's regional manager. Yes.
- Thank you for coming.
- Where are the police?
- Somewhere else. You locked your employees in the market?
- For their own protection. Put the gun down!
- This is your opportunity to start your new job search immediately.
- What?
- You're fired.
- The prof. is not going to like it.
- We're not going back to that world. This dead guy's dead world.
- And this piece of dead world? What should we do with it?
- Tell the workers to dump him at a hospital. Kick him in the face first, if you want. Cut the last bit before you load the video. And get in the 'copter.
17.
Camp David, presidential compound, video projection in progress: title card: "Home Shopping"
- Where to?
- Bel Air. Shoppers! Anyone have their home repossessed?
- Me.
- Name of the bank?
- Bank of Americas.
- Shoppers! Anyone have their retirement investments wiped out by hedge fund manipulations?
- Me.
- Me too.
- What does Big Data tell us we have down there, girl?
- Smith-Levett on Stradella, 433. Hitchens, Jonah on Roscomere. Both on the boards of banks and hedge funds.
- Set us down at the nearest.
- Hey, there's a guy with a rifle standing on the lawn.
- Drop a stun grenade. Then net him.
- Take him into the house.
- I can't hear a thing.
- It'll all come back to you.
- What do you want?
- Your bank took away the house of this woman's family.
- I'm using this house. Your rules say I'm allowed to keep what I use.
- You kept slaves, bought the government, caused economic misery, were never punished. I wouldn't rely on people being afraid of punishment for taking revenge on you. I suggest China. You have to find another house. On your feet and out the door.
- Me.
- Name of the bank?
- Bank of Americas.
- Shoppers! Anyone have their retirement investments wiped out by hedge fund manipulations?
- Me.
- Me too.
- What does Big Data tell us we have down there, girl?
- Smith-Levett on Stradella, 433. Hitchens, Jonah on Roscomere. Both on the boards of banks and hedge funds.
- Set us down at the nearest.
- Hey, there's a guy with a rifle standing on the lawn.
- Drop a stun grenade. Then net him.
- Take him into the house.
- I can't hear a thing.
- It'll all come back to you.
- What do you want?
- Your bank took away the house of this woman's family.
- I'm using this house. Your rules say I'm allowed to keep what I use.
- You kept slaves, bought the government, caused economic misery, were never punished. I wouldn't rely on people being afraid of punishment for taking revenge on you. I suggest China. You have to find another house. On your feet and out the door.
- Lights. Open the shutters. This is all over the internet.
- Their internet.
- Their internet.
- Their internet, yes.
- I know Smith-Levett. Where did he go?
- He has a house in the South of France. He has many houses. What do you care? What are we going to do?
- Are they really into the NSA database or is that show-business?
- They're in, and what's more, we are out.
- Out the door, like poor Smith Levett. Yes, I know. We're working on it. How many of them are there?
- Gangs? There really appear to be millions. How did this happen?
- Well, Director, how did this slip by the NSA? An organization of thousands of gangs?
- We can only watch sites that are known.
- What do you mean by known?
- Are connected to sites we know about.
- What percent do we know about?
- That's controversial.
- About how many?
- One hundredth of one percent.
- Like you put your 100,000 employees in the shopping center down the road and waited for conspirators to come there and conspire, while the rest of the world was unobserved.
- Have this debate some other time. The conspirators aren't hiding. What are we going to do?
- It depends on whether we can rely on our soldiers and police.
- Your judgment?
- The gangs are heavily armed, and in the cities. They'll fight a gorilla war. We'll have high casualties.
- Can we get to the leaders?
- I'm working on it.
- Very good, General. The President is asking for an update.
- You deal with him.
18.
Bel Air house, video call
- Professor.
- You've been engaging in population control.
- I can't tolerate bosses.
- Stalin, before he became a mass murderer, was a gangster, a bank robber, and a poet. You remind me of him.
- I'll rob all their banks, I'll mass murder their poetry.
- What is their poetry?
- Thinking they are what they have, what they want. Their poetry is the mystery of exchanging what they define themselves by, their things, for what other people define themselves by. Every one of their deals, doubles and dissolves them. Every deal is a rebirth. I'm supposed to tolerate this worship of the mystery of exchange of selves and things. While they...
- Who are they, my little Stalina?
- The money owners, bribers of the government, those who write the rules of who can trade what and with who and who can cheat and who can't.
- You think you know the rules of their mystery?
- You taught me them.
- Indeed I did. What is the poetry of violence?
- Intolerance.
- Very good. Limit it to that. Stalin was the great manager of the mystery of exchange, taking everything away from millions, disposing of the useless bodies, and defining himself as the manager of all things. You are Jamie, not Stalin. I know you. I won't tolerate mystery from you.
- Yes, Professor.
- Go make a revolution.
19.
Finland, Norea Headquarters
- Rough flight?
- Cargo plane.
- Jamie, meet Karl. He formed this company a couple of decades ago.
- Why are you helping us?
- As technology has developed, people without property have been forced to work for people with property. Technology needs organization, but slavery is the worst form of organization it can depend on, slows down development. I'm correcting an historical accident.
- Why am I here?
- First, to report.
- Can't you see what you have on all those screens?
- Just report.
- We hold most supermarkets, food warehouse, industrial farms.
- By "we" you mean?
- The workers, protected by us.
- And? Confrontations?
- "The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue." We're keeping food on the shelves.
- Casualties?
- None. On our side.
- On theirs? You don't know.
- I know the army is deserting, police resigning. They're coming to us.
- And the banks?
- Closed. Cleaned out.
- Karl, preview the new history for Jamie.
- On the screen, you see American military bases around the world. Israel is here, with American bases in countries on all sides.
- Israel?
- Ask yourself, what would you do in their place?
- If I were a monster who believed the purpose of life was selling things to one another? Believed if I had to cause millions of deaths in the process that was unimportant, because the purpose of life was selling things to one another?
- Jamie! What would you do, if selling things to one another, in your own country, was no longer possible? If your money no longer could be spent in your own country?
- I'd take my money to another country and buy and sell things there.
- Which country would want your money, when you can't control, don't own, the actual things that are there in your country, the property, the assets?
- I'd try to buy other currencies and property before the money became worthless.
- They're trying. But property gone, money gone, what is the one real asset left?
- The military.
- Yes. The military. Who, what country, will trade real things like land and property, for military services you can provide?
- Israel!
- Besieged on all sides by enemies. Largest military client of the U.S., major business partner in banking and computer technology.
- And then? When the U.S. military gets there?
- Karl?
- War.
20.
Finland, Norea Headquarters, entrance courtyard
Anarchist Text:
- It's like nothing is happening here, in this far away place.
- God's country, where's it's happening.
21.
Tel Aviv, Israel
- What's that shabby junk doing everywhere?
- It's a Shul, fool. A temple. Show some respect.
- Girls, girls! Sit down, anywhere. The orthodox don't worry about appearances.
- They worry about other things.
- What things?
- We're in Israel. They worry about annihilation and such.
- This is David, my friend, and general in the Israeli Air Force. Do you know, girls, if you ask Israel soldiers what they think of their officers, what they say?
- What?
- That they're all geniuses: doctors, lawyers, engineers, professors...
- So you're an undercover Israeli Officer.
- I know Smith-Levett. Where did he go?
- He has a house in the South of France. He has many houses. What do you care? What are we going to do?
- Are they really into the NSA database or is that show-business?
- They're in, and what's more, we are out.
- Out the door, like poor Smith Levett. Yes, I know. We're working on it. How many of them are there?
- Gangs? There really appear to be millions. How did this happen?
- Well, Director, how did this slip by the NSA? An organization of thousands of gangs?
- We can only watch sites that are known.
- What do you mean by known?
- Are connected to sites we know about.
- What percent do we know about?
- That's controversial.
- About how many?
- One hundredth of one percent.
- Like you put your 100,000 employees in the shopping center down the road and waited for conspirators to come there and conspire, while the rest of the world was unobserved.
- Have this debate some other time. The conspirators aren't hiding. What are we going to do?
- It depends on whether we can rely on our soldiers and police.
- Your judgment?
- The gangs are heavily armed, and in the cities. They'll fight a gorilla war. We'll have high casualties.
- Can we get to the leaders?
- I'm working on it.
- Very good, General. The President is asking for an update.
- You deal with him.
18.
Bel Air house, video call
- Professor.
- You've been engaging in population control.
- I can't tolerate bosses.
- Stalin, before he became a mass murderer, was a gangster, a bank robber, and a poet. You remind me of him.
- I'll rob all their banks, I'll mass murder their poetry.
- What is their poetry?
- Thinking they are what they have, what they want. Their poetry is the mystery of exchanging what they define themselves by, their things, for what other people define themselves by. Every one of their deals, doubles and dissolves them. Every deal is a rebirth. I'm supposed to tolerate this worship of the mystery of exchange of selves and things. While they...
- Who are they, my little Stalina?
- The money owners, bribers of the government, those who write the rules of who can trade what and with who and who can cheat and who can't.
- You think you know the rules of their mystery?
- You taught me them.
- Indeed I did. What is the poetry of violence?
- Intolerance.
- Very good. Limit it to that. Stalin was the great manager of the mystery of exchange, taking everything away from millions, disposing of the useless bodies, and defining himself as the manager of all things. You are Jamie, not Stalin. I know you. I won't tolerate mystery from you.
- Yes, Professor.
- Go make a revolution.
19.
Finland, Norea Headquarters
- Rough flight?
- Cargo plane.
- Jamie, meet Karl. He formed this company a couple of decades ago.
- Why are you helping us?
- As technology has developed, people without property have been forced to work for people with property. Technology needs organization, but slavery is the worst form of organization it can depend on, slows down development. I'm correcting an historical accident.
- Why am I here?
- First, to report.
- Can't you see what you have on all those screens?
- Just report.
- We hold most supermarkets, food warehouse, industrial farms.
- By "we" you mean?
- The workers, protected by us.
- And? Confrontations?
- "The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue." We're keeping food on the shelves.
- Casualties?
- None. On our side.
- On theirs? You don't know.
- I know the army is deserting, police resigning. They're coming to us.
- And the banks?
- Closed. Cleaned out.
- Karl, preview the new history for Jamie.
- On the screen, you see American military bases around the world. Israel is here, with American bases in countries on all sides.
- Israel?
- Ask yourself, what would you do in their place?
- If I were a monster who believed the purpose of life was selling things to one another? Believed if I had to cause millions of deaths in the process that was unimportant, because the purpose of life was selling things to one another?
- Jamie! What would you do, if selling things to one another, in your own country, was no longer possible? If your money no longer could be spent in your own country?
- I'd take my money to another country and buy and sell things there.
- Which country would want your money, when you can't control, don't own, the actual things that are there in your country, the property, the assets?
- I'd try to buy other currencies and property before the money became worthless.
- They're trying. But property gone, money gone, what is the one real asset left?
- The military.
- Yes. The military. Who, what country, will trade real things like land and property, for military services you can provide?
- Israel!
- Besieged on all sides by enemies. Largest military client of the U.S., major business partner in banking and computer technology.
- And then? When the U.S. military gets there?
- Karl?
- War.
20.
Finland, Norea Headquarters, entrance courtyard
Anarchist Text:
- Do you know what class is? What you call "people like yourself"?- Prof, put away the writing. We have to go. Get in the car.
- Tell me what you think it is.
- It's not clothes, offices, houses, possessions, gestures, manners. Class is defined by what it does. Our stronger class buys and sells things, and uses force to hold onto things acquired. The other class, people like yourself, as you put it, are forced to sell their labor to them, and then use the money they make to buy and sell things also. Both classes see private life as recreation from the work life of buying and selling things. Recreation meaning getting your body back into condition to return refreshed to the work of buying and selling things. The recreation takes the form of letting the body do what it wants, whatever that is. Since the purpose of life is buying and selling things, no meaning is to be found in what the body wants once released from work that enslaves it. Classes can go on doing the same things because all the buying and selling and bodily release, as chance would have it, falls into a stable pattern.
- How?
- Supposedly by "laws" of supply and demand. But in practice, various forms of vanity, which is the sense of power gained by putting yourself in a stable relation to other people. In small business, that takes the form of insisting on the highest profit in each transaction, the high profit being a show of power. In big business it takes the form of monopoly, buying up everything, even if that means destruction of markets and lower profit. Responding to supply and demand, serving vanity, creating monopolies are behaviors that fall into a stable arrangement, and allow a class that creates monopolies, expresses vanity, trades things back and forth to continue to exist.
- If the world works that way, what choice do we have?
- The world doesn't work this way. Our world does. Other economic arrangements can create a different class of people.
- People like you?
- No. I'm a monster, a fighter, a transitional creature. I don't like rules. Other classes have rules. I'll give you an example, Ok?
- Yes.
- Anarchism, the idea that government should not be allowed to become the principle of life, has rules that prevent the government becoming the principle of life.
- Anarchist rules? It doesn't make sense.
- Doesn't make sense because we live in a society where the meaning of work is the meaning of life. The rules of doing things with each other, buying and selling things and ourselves, provide all the meaning there is, private life is considered mere recreation, refreshing our ability to work. Anarchist rules prevent this from happening.
- How?
- Rules, like our selling things and ourselves in accord with supply and demand, create stability.The anarchist rules are: No employment, and no possession without use. The rules insure no one can keep too much: without hiring people to take care of your 4th house and 5th car, they fall into disuse, are by rule no longer your property. Property doesn't get concentrated, people don't become property-less, and so don't need to sell themselves into slavery for wages. There's no need to continually redistribute property.
- You're dreaming.
- It's like nothing is happening here, in this far away place.
- God's country, where's it's happening.
21.
Tel Aviv, Israel
- What's that shabby junk doing everywhere?
- It's a Shul, fool. A temple. Show some respect.
- Girls, girls! Sit down, anywhere. The orthodox don't worry about appearances.
- They worry about other things.
- What things?
- We're in Israel. They worry about annihilation and such.
- This is David, my friend, and general in the Israeli Air Force. Do you know, girls, if you ask Israel soldiers what they think of their officers, what they say?
- What?
- That they're all geniuses: doctors, lawyers, engineers, professors...
- So you're an undercover Israeli Officer.
- No. I'm not Israeli. Listen. David was a student of mine, in the old days at the University. Before his decision to return to Israel, David was going to write his dissertation on the subject of "The Two Infinites". The first infinite were the ways each person could combine his habits, his tools, what he knew how to do, to find new ways of do things, like the infinite ways words could be use to say things no one had ever said before. Correct, David?
- Yes.
- The other infinite was the destruction of foundations every time a person was treated as someone to buy or sell or produce things. Every time the habits of the individual, the knowledge of how to live, was not taken advantage, that foundation of knowledge was leveled to the ground never to be used to build something on. Ok, David?
- Ok.
- David quit philosophy because he thought it was making a religion out of nothingness, was a disguised will to power born of the infinite destruction of possibilities. Genius, right?
- He became a soldier to out his will to power?
- David?
- I'm here, representing my country, to coordinate with you. On the screen you can see where the American Forces are now consolidating their bases. Invasion will spread out where you see arrows. They will take control of the oil, neutralize the armed forces.
- Tell the girls what the Israeli Armed forces will be doing.
- Nothing. They'll be doing nothing. We set the whole thing up, invited the Americans in...
- We're also Americans. You also invited us.
- Yes. I apologize. We invited the absconding American Government, running from their fight at home, to come fight for us.
- And why are we here?
- To neutralize our Armed Forces. Win them over to your side.
- Which side are you on, General David?
- David is on our side, mostly.
- Our side doesn't know whether they can trust their allies. Should we run, girls?
- Girls! Other parts of the world have their own stories, but this place, where our civilization began, has always been in a fight between good and evil. My shy ex-student over there came up with a beautiful new expression of the story: the good is the individual using his own limited means to lead out to unknown, unforeseen, unlimited results, cooperating with others doing the same. The evil is the unlimited repetition of acts of destruction of every individual's foundations that could have been built upon. David, finish the story, will you?
- We've brought the American Forces here to be our evil surrogate. We've brought you girls here to help organize all our people, military included, to cooperate with each other again as we once did, and find god, the infinite in what we can accomplish together. Here and now, in Israel, we're at endgame.
- Pure evil! You're going to throw our forces out after you've used us!
- In the Indian Sutras, there's a story. Two aspirants to wisdom went off to meditate on a mountain, and as they were climbing, they met some people from the village coming down. The villagers warned them to take care, there was a ferocious bear up there. The two aspirants said, god will protect us, and made camp on the hillside. In the middle of the night they heard a noise: "It's the bear!". One them got an illumination and started putting on his running shoes. The other was astonished. "Do you think you are going to outrun that bear?" No, the first aspirant to wisdom replied, I really don't. But I have studied the situation. I only have to run faster than you."
- Israel will be purged of evil.
22.
Tel Aviv, Israel
- Dabby is a filmmaker, feminist. The leader of the famous million person peaceful demonstration here in Tel Aviv.
- I'm the killer.
- Who did you kill?
- My man.
- Why?
- Why not? He had the names of the kids he killed tattooed on his arms.
- When was that?
- Killing? He started when was 12.
- You don't think you did good?
- Dabby believes people kill in the name of good. For the good of their group they do what they know as individuals is bad.
- You say I feel good about doing something bad?
- You tell me. Was it a good thing to do? Is that why you are here with us today in Israel?
- Everyone, get in the truck. Dabby, everything arranged?
- Our girls will be at all the houses. I hope yours will be too.
- Armed?
- Everyone, man and woman in Israel is trained in the use of weapons.
- Armed. Ok, Go on.
- We Jews are sensitive on the subject of individuals killing for a group.
- You want me to say I killed for myself?
- Did you?
- Prof., where's that Russian girl you got to talk to the guards and the working girls?
- In the back.
- Get her up here.
- Translators: they're with all the teams.
- Natasha, right? Repeat what you told me.
- The revolution will never succeed. Anarchism is weak. It will be crushed.
- And I asked, anarchism makes people weak? Or is adopted only by weak people who can't protect themselves? And you answered?
- Anarchism has always failed.
- Crushed by armies.
- If it couldn't protect itself, it didn't deserve to survive.
- She's coming with us?
- Quiet. And I answered?
- A strong army can protect dictatorship, communism, fascism, democracy, even anarchism. Military force decides whether a state survives. That's all. Return to your seat.
- I'm with you, Jamie. You killed to give yourself a chance to live. But was it a chance for a fascist life, or a free life? For a life obedient to a group, which can do any evil, or a life as a woman and individual?
- Get that thing out of my face. Do we have to do this on camera?
- Yes.
- Do I have to do this, Prof?
- You have to know what you are doing.
- Jamie! We've got this theory. We feminists in Israel. We grow up with our father's rules, learn them without knowing why we should follow them. We grow up, want to be independent, want to do what we want, not what others want. We rebel against the rules, because though we don't really know what we want, we know for sure we don't want to obey someone else's rules. That rebellion may be our first important independent act, and the world teaches us something. We've gotten somewhere, but the problem is, the rebellion was forced on us, we were driven to it by not knowing what else to do. And what we are driven to do, like we learned our father's rules, we do without understanding why. Father and child learn the rules learned by fathers and children, all without knowing why, all without knowing why they rebel, when they do. Obedient and rebelling, with the group or creating a new group, they do what if they weren't unconscious they'd know was bad.
- A feminist revolutionary doesn't want to rebel against fathers.
- Or boyfriends with tattoos. We please our fathers by following their rules. We please our mothers by doing things worthy of their love. There are no rules to be followed, we try one thing, then another, see what our mother loves.
- Still obeying, doing what your mother wants.
- No. Your mother can love many different things. She herself also tries out many things to find what pleases her family, she can choose one, then another, then another... Why do you girls kill? Rebellion against fathers, unconsciously, potentially evil? Or as an army that can protect anything, but we make sure it only protects our attempts to please mothers, remaining conscious, never to do evil?
- Your mother.
23.
On the road, suburbs of Tel Aviv, Israel
- Anyone know where we're going?
- A strip-club. Called "The World's End". Dabby's choice.
- I've a friend. A regular there.
- A girl? Likes to see girls empowering themselves, dancing naked.
- How long before we're there?
- 40 minutes, Prof.
- Dabby's told me about her friend. You'll like the story.
- He was the subject of my first film, I was still in school. My friend: about 50, an Orthodox Jew. Sometimes he visited the prayer house we were at, that's where I saw him first. He was giving away money. I was standing across the street. I needed money, was desperate, thinking I'd have to work as a stripper. I struck up a conversation with him.
- Is he there to save the girls, or what?
- No. He was a customer, when his friends paid. Wait, I'll get there. He told me he'd been out of control, was saved by a rabbi. Now he tried to be a good man. He liked the neighborhood, he prayed, meditated.
- Where?
- Sitting against the wall, in the parking lot.
- Of the strip club.
- Yes.
- And giving away money.
- 30, 50 dollars, its equivalent in Israeli Shekels, every day.
- Where'd the money come from?
- Family investments.
- In what?
- Bus tours. He asked, what about me? I told him. He offered me a few dollars.
- And you took it?
- No. I saw him looking at my big military watch that'd belonged to my brother.
- Where's your brother?
- Another time. I asked, did he want to buy it? He did. But could only pay 20 dollars every few days.
- So you came back...
- And got to know him. He gave away so much money that he started borrowing the money back from me, five dollars, ten dollars.... And pay that back too, keeping exact account of the balance always. He did the same with others too.
- Wow.
- I got his permission to film him. I went around to his home, where he lived with his 80 year old mother, I filmed him speaking to his desperate clients, sitting outside the strip club, I filmed him in the club with the girls, when his friends took him in with them.
- Dabby's career was made by the film.
- I wasn't thinking about that then. I was fascinated. I was studying the place of women in society, the place of religion in society, I was studying filmmaking, and this man brought it all together for me. I set up the camera, sat down next to him against the wall. I asked the first question.
- He'll be there. First we go to war...
- Leading to peace.
* It is a tradition of Indian spiritualism that ordinary life is experienced as: you, the world, and the relation between the two. Mystical experience removes the relation, leaving only you, and the world. In mystical experience the world is experienced with detachment. In one variety of mystical experience rituals, acted out or merely imagined, draw your sense of your "self" into a role practiced. This "ironic" identification, of your true self to the role practiced, allows you to deny the relation of that ironic self to the world. Relationship is gone. That is the bad meditation. The good meditation does without even an ironic sense of self. Instead, the memory of good actions you've taken that have led in to you allowing yourself to forget yourself persists, are included, as a feeling of good memory, with your detached appreciation of the world.
24.
Outskirts of Tel Aviv, parking lot entrance, strip club.
- Why are you sitting out here all alone?
- You like stripes?
- I don't know.
- Your shirt.
- Oh.
- It suits you.
- Thanks.
- You have nice curly hair.
- Thanks.
- You're too old.
- Sorry.
- They chew you up and spit you out here. They send you to the lions.
- Where are the lions?
- At the Marina.
- Look out!
- Get to your feet.
- Who is this, young lady?
- It's the boss.
- Boss: Where do you live?
- Who cares? Take off these handcuffs.
- Where do you live?
- The Marina, for your information.
- Kick him, Jamie.
- Has everyone gone crazy? They're coming! Keep them away from me!
- Dancers, wait! The club is yours now. Live here. Dance, if you want, when you want. And you, Boss: go home if you have one.
- Occupy it or lose it.
- An American soldier's come, says he has a message for The Professor. U.S. Forces have taken Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, Iran. He's been in Iraq. Oil installations have been secured.
- Can't you find out what he wants?
- He'll speak only with you.
- Alright then.
- Wait.
- Give me back my glasses!
- Get behind me. Mr. Boss, put on the glasses, Ready girls? Send the soldier in.
- Do you have to walk on the bodies?
- Don't have to. Put on your glasses.
- How did you know?
- I didn't.
- I'm afraid to ask: the Russians. The guards. Are they among the living?
- They're with us. Most of the girls too.
- Good. Let's move on.
25.
Tel Aviv, corporate offices
- It's quiet here. Anything wrong?
- Everything's running smoothly.
- Too smoothly. It's uncanny. Where's the revolution?
- Didn't you teach these girls anything, Professor?
- We've been busy. Teach them.
- It was widely debated, among us, how anarchism could be put into practice. Not in rural Spain, agrarian Ukraine, or peasant Mexico, but in the capitalist West. We live in Israel. We had no political organization. We weren't even a group ourselves. We are individualists, entrepreneurs, start up founders. We asked ourselves what we knew how to do. And do you know what we answered?
- You knew how to start companies.
- How did you know?
- Don't be stupid.
- You'll see how smart we were. We implemented a brilliant idea: found a start up that sold the model of anarchism to business as an efficiency method. The most high tech, most innovative method ever devised to get the most productivity out of every worker, who was previously compartmentalized and isolated from contributing his whole human potential to the business.
- You sold it? Actually?
- Yes! Very successfully. Maybe because of our history of Kibbutz. Though we found out later an American company had been ahead of us doing something similar. No one knows for sure, but we think by last month ours was the dominant business model here.
- Then all we have to do....
- Remove the stock holders from the business, and we are left with a ready made, worker owned anarchist enterprise!
- Who figured this out?
- I worked out the constitution based business structure, but...
- The professor.
- Yes. He came up with the trick.
- The trick worked? The managers are out?
- They're out.
- Where did they go?
- To the Israeli government. They're demanding action.
- And?
- We can watch the debate in the Knesset. Broadcast's starting right now. There, at the podium, is our man Avi.
We don't have time for this any more! Falling in love is the proof that it is possible for us to learn consciously. Falling in love, piece by piece, experience by experience, we reorient our relation to the world, putting the world newly in relation also to the person we love. We do this effortlessly, because we want to do it, it is our nature to want to do it. When its done, the period of falling is done. But love doesn't end. No. Love begins! We've constructed out of all these effortless re-orientations a sense of home around the person we love, and we live in that sense of home. The sense of home is detachment from, being safe from everything outside, a mystical experience, nirvana. Falling in love is conscious learning. It gets us a home. We aren't unconscious of home, we know where it came from.
"It won't last. We'll find we don't know very much about the one we love, and have to search for the explanation, or the world will change, and we'll have to remake our home. We'll have to do what we'd done before effortlessly guided by desire, when we fell in love, but now have to do it experimentally, testing out each relation to the world. We'll act on what we know, trying to learn more, at all times consciously.
"Seeing the world in terms of ideology, capitalism, communism, or anarchism, we fell in love with ideas, made ourselves unconscious of personal experience. We betrayed ourselves.
"The world has changed. We need now to fall back in love with the people in our lives. And we will."
27.
Israeli Knesset, Jerusalem
"A pleasure, as always, to listen to Avi's passionate speeches about love. But to practical things.
"In our audience today we have a crowd of very unhappy people. They've come to tell a tale of woe. They once were rich, now they are poor. Or at least no richer than anyone else. What should we say to them?
"Let's begin with a question. Was it true, what they told us, that they gained their wealth by virtue of their extraordinary creativity? I for one have doubts. But let's give them the point. We are building a new politics on a strong foundation. The formerly rich, creative as they tell us they are, can contribute to the creative adaptations we must surely make, day by day. They can invest their energies in as many cooperative enterprises as they wish and have time for. The can create great tools, buildings, arts. They can't create immense piles of things they can't use.
"Say though we take pity on them. They're human beings. They are used to a certain kind of life. They can't live without amassing things they can't use. I thought a moment, and came up with this solution. I'm sure with their creativity they can come up with solutions of their own, better ones. This is my idea:
"They throw themselves into our new economy as executives. For their great creative discernment in which new companies to participate in with their managerial skills, they are entitled to their share of rewards each of those companies hand back to their participants. But they can only keep what they can use. That's the rule. So why not issue a counter, a coin, a marker, a standardized marker to reflect the property they must return? The rich have been satisfied in the past to amass useless metals and stamped paper as symbols of their piling up activity. Let them in the future make a sport of collecting these harmless symbols. That ought to satisfy them. No?"
28.
Israeli Knesset, Jerusalem. Another representative steps up to the podium
- Nothing. They'll be doing nothing. We set the whole thing up, invited the Americans in...
- We're also Americans. You also invited us.
- Yes. I apologize. We invited the absconding American Government, running from their fight at home, to come fight for us.
- And why are we here?
- To neutralize our Armed Forces. Win them over to your side.
- Which side are you on, General David?
- David is on our side, mostly.
- Our side doesn't know whether they can trust their allies. Should we run, girls?
- Girls! Other parts of the world have their own stories, but this place, where our civilization began, has always been in a fight between good and evil. My shy ex-student over there came up with a beautiful new expression of the story: the good is the individual using his own limited means to lead out to unknown, unforeseen, unlimited results, cooperating with others doing the same. The evil is the unlimited repetition of acts of destruction of every individual's foundations that could have been built upon. David, finish the story, will you?
- We've brought the American Forces here to be our evil surrogate. We've brought you girls here to help organize all our people, military included, to cooperate with each other again as we once did, and find god, the infinite in what we can accomplish together. Here and now, in Israel, we're at endgame.
- Pure evil! You're going to throw our forces out after you've used us!
- In the Indian Sutras, there's a story. Two aspirants to wisdom went off to meditate on a mountain, and as they were climbing, they met some people from the village coming down. The villagers warned them to take care, there was a ferocious bear up there. The two aspirants said, god will protect us, and made camp on the hillside. In the middle of the night they heard a noise: "It's the bear!". One them got an illumination and started putting on his running shoes. The other was astonished. "Do you think you are going to outrun that bear?" No, the first aspirant to wisdom replied, I really don't. But I have studied the situation. I only have to run faster than you."
- Israel will be purged of evil.
22.
Tel Aviv, Israel
- Dabby is a filmmaker, feminist. The leader of the famous million person peaceful demonstration here in Tel Aviv.
- I'm the killer.
- Who did you kill?
- My man.
- Why?
- Why not? He had the names of the kids he killed tattooed on his arms.
- When was that?
- Killing? He started when was 12.
- You don't think you did good?
- Dabby believes people kill in the name of good. For the good of their group they do what they know as individuals is bad.
- You say I feel good about doing something bad?
- You tell me. Was it a good thing to do? Is that why you are here with us today in Israel?
- Everyone, get in the truck. Dabby, everything arranged?
- Our girls will be at all the houses. I hope yours will be too.
- Armed?
- Everyone, man and woman in Israel is trained in the use of weapons.
- Armed. Ok, Go on.
- We Jews are sensitive on the subject of individuals killing for a group.
- You want me to say I killed for myself?
- Did you?
- Prof., where's that Russian girl you got to talk to the guards and the working girls?
- In the back.
- Get her up here.
- Translators: they're with all the teams.
- Natasha, right? Repeat what you told me.
- The revolution will never succeed. Anarchism is weak. It will be crushed.
- And I asked, anarchism makes people weak? Or is adopted only by weak people who can't protect themselves? And you answered?
- Anarchism has always failed.
- Crushed by armies.
- If it couldn't protect itself, it didn't deserve to survive.
- She's coming with us?
- Quiet. And I answered?
- A strong army can protect dictatorship, communism, fascism, democracy, even anarchism. Military force decides whether a state survives. That's all. Return to your seat.
- I'm with you, Jamie. You killed to give yourself a chance to live. But was it a chance for a fascist life, or a free life? For a life obedient to a group, which can do any evil, or a life as a woman and individual?
- Get that thing out of my face. Do we have to do this on camera?
- Yes.
- Do I have to do this, Prof?
- You have to know what you are doing.
- Jamie! We've got this theory. We feminists in Israel. We grow up with our father's rules, learn them without knowing why we should follow them. We grow up, want to be independent, want to do what we want, not what others want. We rebel against the rules, because though we don't really know what we want, we know for sure we don't want to obey someone else's rules. That rebellion may be our first important independent act, and the world teaches us something. We've gotten somewhere, but the problem is, the rebellion was forced on us, we were driven to it by not knowing what else to do. And what we are driven to do, like we learned our father's rules, we do without understanding why. Father and child learn the rules learned by fathers and children, all without knowing why, all without knowing why they rebel, when they do. Obedient and rebelling, with the group or creating a new group, they do what if they weren't unconscious they'd know was bad.
- A feminist revolutionary doesn't want to rebel against fathers.
- Or boyfriends with tattoos. We please our fathers by following their rules. We please our mothers by doing things worthy of their love. There are no rules to be followed, we try one thing, then another, see what our mother loves.
- Still obeying, doing what your mother wants.
- No. Your mother can love many different things. She herself also tries out many things to find what pleases her family, she can choose one, then another, then another... Why do you girls kill? Rebellion against fathers, unconsciously, potentially evil? Or as an army that can protect anything, but we make sure it only protects our attempts to please mothers, remaining conscious, never to do evil?
- Your mother.
23.
On the road, suburbs of Tel Aviv, Israel
- Anyone know where we're going?
- A strip-club. Called "The World's End". Dabby's choice.
- I've a friend. A regular there.
- A girl? Likes to see girls empowering themselves, dancing naked.
- How long before we're there?
- 40 minutes, Prof.
- Dabby's told me about her friend. You'll like the story.
- He was the subject of my first film, I was still in school. My friend: about 50, an Orthodox Jew. Sometimes he visited the prayer house we were at, that's where I saw him first. He was giving away money. I was standing across the street. I needed money, was desperate, thinking I'd have to work as a stripper. I struck up a conversation with him.
- Is he there to save the girls, or what?
- No. He was a customer, when his friends paid. Wait, I'll get there. He told me he'd been out of control, was saved by a rabbi. Now he tried to be a good man. He liked the neighborhood, he prayed, meditated.
- Where?
- Sitting against the wall, in the parking lot.
- Of the strip club.
- Yes.
- And giving away money.
- 30, 50 dollars, its equivalent in Israeli Shekels, every day.
- Where'd the money come from?
- Family investments.
- In what?
- Bus tours. He asked, what about me? I told him. He offered me a few dollars.
- And you took it?
- No. I saw him looking at my big military watch that'd belonged to my brother.
- Where's your brother?
- Another time. I asked, did he want to buy it? He did. But could only pay 20 dollars every few days.
- So you came back...
- And got to know him. He gave away so much money that he started borrowing the money back from me, five dollars, ten dollars.... And pay that back too, keeping exact account of the balance always. He did the same with others too.
- Wow.
- I got his permission to film him. I went around to his home, where he lived with his 80 year old mother, I filmed him speaking to his desperate clients, sitting outside the strip club, I filmed him in the club with the girls, when his friends took him in with them.
- Dabby's career was made by the film.
- I wasn't thinking about that then. I was fascinated. I was studying the place of women in society, the place of religion in society, I was studying filmmaking, and this man brought it all together for me. I set up the camera, sat down next to him against the wall. I asked the first question.
- You sit here, meditating, praying. You give away your money. Then you go watch naked girls dance. You don't think that's wrong?- You got nowhere with him. I want to see this guy.
- I don't drool over them. I don't pay for sex.
- Why do you go then?
- I relax, be with my friends. I can control myself.
- You are strong through prayer and meditation. You're not harmed.
- No.
- What about the girls? Don't you think you're harming them?
- I don't touch them.
- Do you think dancing naked in front of strangers doesn't harm them?
- I talk to them, when I go outside to smoke. It's just a job to them.
- And when they go home from the job. Do you think the job doesn't affect them?
- It affects them.
- And you are relaxing with your friends while the girls have to give up their privacy for money, knowing that later, at home, they will have to work hard, maybe fail, to recover themselves as individuals, to be a friend to a friend, daughter to a mother. And you know that your meditation and prayers gave you the strength to do it. Sorry for this, but you know, I'm a student of these things. Can I be hard on you? Very hard?
- Yes.
- The Nazi's liked to play Beethoven's late string quartets after a long day of killings at the extermination camps. How is that different from your prayers and meditation followed by the self controlled visits to dancing girls degrading themselves? Aside from being trivial in comparison. Are your prayers and meditations making it easier for you to be bad?
- No. They saved me. I was destroying myself.
- That was then. Now, how are you using them? Are the prayers real, if they make it easier for you to hurt the girls?
- How do I hurt the girls? I look at them.
- Having no choice but let strangers look at them like that hurts them. You know what I'm talking about.
- The prayers are real. But I'm not perfect.
- I believe you. You really are praying, meditating. I want to ask you a question.
- Ask.
- Are you meditating on your own story? Or someone else's?
- I'm trying to be good. I come here to meditate. I feel peaceful here.
- Good and bad meditation will get you some peace.
- There's no bad meditation.
- There is. Good meditation helps you remember what's good, help you do good. Bad meditation helps you forget what's good and do bad.
- How?
- Bad meditation is imitation. You play the Beethoven late string quartet, throwing yourself into the role of one player playing with the other three players. You forget yourself. The role you play is not your own story. You go back to work refreshed to do some more killing in the extermination camp. Your personal life is not part of your meditative prayerful music, and not involved in your mass murder. The other kind of meditation, good meditation, involves your personal life, and allows you to be at rest with it. Do you understand?
- No.
- There a line in Shakespeare, goes something like this: Let war breed peace, peace avoid war. The Nazis' Beethoven assisted meditation, maybe your meditation, is not a kind of peace that prevents war. It a kind of peace that leads to war. Understand?*
- No.
- He'll be there. First we go to war...
- Leading to peace.
* It is a tradition of Indian spiritualism that ordinary life is experienced as: you, the world, and the relation between the two. Mystical experience removes the relation, leaving only you, and the world. In mystical experience the world is experienced with detachment. In one variety of mystical experience rituals, acted out or merely imagined, draw your sense of your "self" into a role practiced. This "ironic" identification, of your true self to the role practiced, allows you to deny the relation of that ironic self to the world. Relationship is gone. That is the bad meditation. The good meditation does without even an ironic sense of self. Instead, the memory of good actions you've taken that have led in to you allowing yourself to forget yourself persists, are included, as a feeling of good memory, with your detached appreciation of the world.
24.
Outskirts of Tel Aviv, parking lot entrance, strip club.
- Why are you sitting out here all alone?
- You like stripes?
- I don't know.
- Your shirt.
- Oh.
- It suits you.
- Thanks.
- You have nice curly hair.
- Thanks.
- You're too old.
- Sorry.
- They chew you up and spit you out here. They send you to the lions.
- Where are the lions?
- At the Marina.
- Look out!
- Get to your feet.
- Who is this, young lady?
- It's the boss.
- Boss: Where do you live?
- Who cares? Take off these handcuffs.
- Where do you live?
- The Marina, for your information.
- Kick him, Jamie.
- Has everyone gone crazy? They're coming! Keep them away from me!
- Dancers, wait! The club is yours now. Live here. Dance, if you want, when you want. And you, Boss: go home if you have one.
- Occupy it or lose it.
- An American soldier's come, says he has a message for The Professor. U.S. Forces have taken Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, Iran. He's been in Iraq. Oil installations have been secured.
- Can't you find out what he wants?
- He'll speak only with you.
- Alright then.
- Wait.
- Give me back my glasses!
- Get behind me. Mr. Boss, put on the glasses, Ready girls? Send the soldier in.
- Do you have to walk on the bodies?
- Don't have to. Put on your glasses.
- How did you know?
- I didn't.
- I'm afraid to ask: the Russians. The guards. Are they among the living?
- They're with us. Most of the girls too.
- Good. Let's move on.
25.
Tel Aviv, corporate offices
- It's quiet here. Anything wrong?
- Everything's running smoothly.
- Too smoothly. It's uncanny. Where's the revolution?
- Didn't you teach these girls anything, Professor?
- We've been busy. Teach them.
- It was widely debated, among us, how anarchism could be put into practice. Not in rural Spain, agrarian Ukraine, or peasant Mexico, but in the capitalist West. We live in Israel. We had no political organization. We weren't even a group ourselves. We are individualists, entrepreneurs, start up founders. We asked ourselves what we knew how to do. And do you know what we answered?
- You knew how to start companies.
- How did you know?
- Don't be stupid.
- You'll see how smart we were. We implemented a brilliant idea: found a start up that sold the model of anarchism to business as an efficiency method. The most high tech, most innovative method ever devised to get the most productivity out of every worker, who was previously compartmentalized and isolated from contributing his whole human potential to the business.
- You sold it? Actually?
- Yes! Very successfully. Maybe because of our history of Kibbutz. Though we found out later an American company had been ahead of us doing something similar. No one knows for sure, but we think by last month ours was the dominant business model here.
- Then all we have to do....
- Remove the stock holders from the business, and we are left with a ready made, worker owned anarchist enterprise!
- Who figured this out?
- I worked out the constitution based business structure, but...
- The professor.
- Yes. He came up with the trick.
- The trick worked? The managers are out?
- They're out.
- Where did they go?
- To the Israeli government. They're demanding action.
- And?
- We can watch the debate in the Knesset. Broadcast's starting right now. There, at the podium, is our man Avi.
26.
Israeli Knesset, Jerusalem
"We have just begun to think, that is the most remarkable fact of history. Our technology, our science, is nothing compared to the job ahead. To think our way out of where we've got ourselves. A failing system, a new one established.
"Our famous philosophers talked endlessly about the unconscious, being, appearance, negation, void. They constructed models relating the terms to each other. Each term had an "unconscious" aspect, that called upon multiple possible associations to give them meaning, but when they were used, the particular meaning was not settled upon. The multiple possibilities were there "unconsciously". Models constructed out of these elements could say or do anything. They successfully explained our world, successfully explained every world. They explained capitalism, communism, anarchism.
Models can be constructed with words that don't depend on unconscious meanings. Philosopher have been puzzled by the violence of Stalin against not only the Russian people, but also against his own party organization. He killed most of his subordinates. I want to explain this using a model that is testable. A model of ritual. Ritual is:
"Our lives have been similarly ritualistic. We've been told to please ourselves in any way we want, just don't pay attention to economic relations. We've been told to tolerate everyone, just don't do anything to remedy any economic injustice they may be subject to. Tolerance is "love" without individual content, hedonism is pleasure without individual choice of better and worse. A stripped individuality establishes the ritual of the everyday buying and selling economic life. You can't test "ideology" of "unconscious" connection between "tolerance" and "capitalism". We can we test our model of ritual, look for a falsification, the counter example in history or in present societies: regular repetitive action in a group without supporting stripped individuality. Can you think of an organization that was its own justification that was without ritual?
"While the American Forces protect us, we must act to reconstruct lost ritual with a new life, using the very same elements. We must act fast. The new, "anarchist" rules - no hire, no ownership without use - provide regularity. The harder task is replacing fear by love.
"We must fall in love with our new world, this new world we are making, we must be done with the old, unconscious thinking. We used to say, 'private property is theft', meaning it resulted in many people having no property at all. This led us to the idea of sharing, which had its own problems: do we share children, homes? We created solutions, but they held us back, and we were unconscious of them holding us back, satisfied as we were with their past success. We didn't know where the new ideas came from, how we created them. We just did it.Israeli Knesset, Jerusalem
"We have just begun to think, that is the most remarkable fact of history. Our technology, our science, is nothing compared to the job ahead. To think our way out of where we've got ourselves. A failing system, a new one established.
"Our famous philosophers talked endlessly about the unconscious, being, appearance, negation, void. They constructed models relating the terms to each other. Each term had an "unconscious" aspect, that called upon multiple possible associations to give them meaning, but when they were used, the particular meaning was not settled upon. The multiple possibilities were there "unconsciously". Models constructed out of these elements could say or do anything. They successfully explained our world, successfully explained every world. They explained capitalism, communism, anarchism.
Models can be constructed with words that don't depend on unconscious meanings. Philosopher have been puzzled by the violence of Stalin against not only the Russian people, but also against his own party organization. He killed most of his subordinates. I want to explain this using a model that is testable. A model of ritual. Ritual is:
- a regularly repeated actionIndividuality is "stripped" by our running away from what frightens us, running run towards the conclusion of the ritual. Safety is found in the repetition of these actions among your group. Power is the expectation you can go on repeating the same actions safely, that is, without obstacle. No unconscious meanings. Take now Stalin's killing of the people in his own party organization. It can't be explained by a theory of social classes in strife. It is explainable as ritual. If you are already murdering millions of people not your immediate subordinates, and you don't murder your immediate subordinates, what is your relation to them? They work for you. But you are a ritualist. When you stop practicing your ritual you are uneasy with the world. You're not prepared for what's outside. You work with your subordinates, but regular relation in a group is only a part of ritual, the action and resulting sense of power are absent. Why not just say he killed because he was a killer? He killed his own group because he was a killer who found his place in his group.
- that strips individuality
- performed in a group
- concluding with a sense of power
"Our lives have been similarly ritualistic. We've been told to please ourselves in any way we want, just don't pay attention to economic relations. We've been told to tolerate everyone, just don't do anything to remedy any economic injustice they may be subject to. Tolerance is "love" without individual content, hedonism is pleasure without individual choice of better and worse. A stripped individuality establishes the ritual of the everyday buying and selling economic life. You can't test "ideology" of "unconscious" connection between "tolerance" and "capitalism". We can we test our model of ritual, look for a falsification, the counter example in history or in present societies: regular repetitive action in a group without supporting stripped individuality. Can you think of an organization that was its own justification that was without ritual?
"While the American Forces protect us, we must act to reconstruct lost ritual with a new life, using the very same elements. We must act fast. The new, "anarchist" rules - no hire, no ownership without use - provide regularity. The harder task is replacing fear by love.
We don't have time for this any more! Falling in love is the proof that it is possible for us to learn consciously. Falling in love, piece by piece, experience by experience, we reorient our relation to the world, putting the world newly in relation also to the person we love. We do this effortlessly, because we want to do it, it is our nature to want to do it. When its done, the period of falling is done. But love doesn't end. No. Love begins! We've constructed out of all these effortless re-orientations a sense of home around the person we love, and we live in that sense of home. The sense of home is detachment from, being safe from everything outside, a mystical experience, nirvana. Falling in love is conscious learning. It gets us a home. We aren't unconscious of home, we know where it came from.
"It won't last. We'll find we don't know very much about the one we love, and have to search for the explanation, or the world will change, and we'll have to remake our home. We'll have to do what we'd done before effortlessly guided by desire, when we fell in love, but now have to do it experimentally, testing out each relation to the world. We'll act on what we know, trying to learn more, at all times consciously.
"Seeing the world in terms of ideology, capitalism, communism, or anarchism, we fell in love with ideas, made ourselves unconscious of personal experience. We betrayed ourselves.
"The world has changed. We need now to fall back in love with the people in our lives. And we will."
27.
Israeli Knesset, Jerusalem
"A pleasure, as always, to listen to Avi's passionate speeches about love. But to practical things.
"In our audience today we have a crowd of very unhappy people. They've come to tell a tale of woe. They once were rich, now they are poor. Or at least no richer than anyone else. What should we say to them?
"Let's begin with a question. Was it true, what they told us, that they gained their wealth by virtue of their extraordinary creativity? I for one have doubts. But let's give them the point. We are building a new politics on a strong foundation. The formerly rich, creative as they tell us they are, can contribute to the creative adaptations we must surely make, day by day. They can invest their energies in as many cooperative enterprises as they wish and have time for. The can create great tools, buildings, arts. They can't create immense piles of things they can't use.
"Say though we take pity on them. They're human beings. They are used to a certain kind of life. They can't live without amassing things they can't use. I thought a moment, and came up with this solution. I'm sure with their creativity they can come up with solutions of their own, better ones. This is my idea:
"They throw themselves into our new economy as executives. For their great creative discernment in which new companies to participate in with their managerial skills, they are entitled to their share of rewards each of those companies hand back to their participants. But they can only keep what they can use. That's the rule. So why not issue a counter, a coin, a marker, a standardized marker to reflect the property they must return? The rich have been satisfied in the past to amass useless metals and stamped paper as symbols of their piling up activity. Let them in the future make a sport of collecting these harmless symbols. That ought to satisfy them. No?"
28.
Israeli Knesset, Jerusalem. Another representative steps up to the podium
"I'll begin quoting a speech Noam Chomsky made in 1967:
"I've entitled this speech "We The Looters", honoring the words that begin the American Constitution. America, in case anyone has forgotten, is a country that begin with a revolution.
"As our American Allies like to say, Let's be serious, and talk about looting.
"We have a story here of looters and looted. A looter takes away property, maybe breaks a window, a looter doesn't hurt people.
"The looted threatened violence against the anyone who'd loot, and they got looted anyway. The looters now threaten the looted with violence if they try to take it back.
"Like ape to ape, the looters makes faces at the looted, one ape threatening the other. Threats, but no violence. Threat balances threat.
"If we are all criminals, and must stay criminals until the looting ends, engaged in the non violent looting of all by all for the benefit of the few, the only non-violent solution is to end the looting by imposing principles that prevent it from re-occurring. We know those principles, and we have applied them: no wage slavery, no ownership without use. If the looted want to use violence to reapply the old rules, we have the right to use violence to "overthrow that lasting suppression of human life".
"We have the right to meet violence with violence in self defense. What is self defense? Easy to say: it is defending what we have. Defending what you would like to have, an ideal society, raises the question of whether the end justifies the means. And how long will the future society last, how good will it be, and when will it come?
"But we don't need to ask those questions. We act in self defense.
"Aren't the looted acting in self defense to recover their lives of unlimited property ownership? Certainly, but remember self defense is a principle. Principles are rules to replace violent actions with reasonable actions. Looting of all by all for the benefit of a few is a constant application of threats of violence. We are never right to apply reason in the service of violence, do good in the service of bad.
"So far, we the looters are justified, are right. Looting is legal. Threat of violence has fought threat of violence, and won. The looting of all by all for the benefit of few is over.
"No, we will not be corrupted by our defense against violence. No, our defensive violence will not show itself in the society we establish.
"Our present question is, Can We the Looters win? Right in principle, but practically speaking, are we doing a good thing? Are we uselessly leading the world to suffering and destruction?
"Will we succeed? Will we be able to hold onto the looted property, to distribute it according to rules which will end the looting by all for the benefit of a few?
"So far, our police are not fighting to give back the houses and free food we gave them.
"What about our armed forces, and the armed forces of our American allies? Will they leave us alone?
"These are tactical questions and will be discussed in closed session.
"We The Looters welcome you to the new world, and thank you for coming."
31.
On screen: laboratory building, military encampment, desert, Israel
- Hey Prof. We've got good new and bad news. The good news is bad news, and the bad news is good. In a way.
- Quit playing around.
- The good news is that the Pornographer has got his hack working. The bad part of that is that you and me are Americans and our country is stupid: we got right in.
- What is the real bad news?
- The Americans are coming. Not us. We're already here. The American Forces.
- Coming now?
- Now. The good in that is that we're ready. Follow me. Not you Prof., the camera guy. See this bracelet thing on my wrist? Sensors in there monitor heart rate, blood pressure. Inside accelerometers using algorithms determine what kind of activity I'm doing. I've an oxygenation sensor on the tip of my right big toe; I've a posture sensor taped to to my back to monitor my posture. Look? Cut out the wolf whistles. The Russian dancing girls are coming on in a minute. All the American soldiers are wearing the gear.
- Smart.
- Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid! Who worked with the Americans? The Israelis. Who worked with the Israelis? Our Israel house pornographer!
- A Trojan horse.
- We've got the Americans on strings. I show you our tests. Stop, Henrik! Come here.
- Yes, Boss?
- Tell the government in Jerusalem about Skype. You were with the Estonians, the Swedes, right at start up. Tell the story. No, tell the end.
- The end is they did the work for the love of it, no banter, no small talk, no showing off or showing each other up. They sold the company for a couple billion to the American Corporation Ebay, which sold it to another American Corporation, Microsoft, they of memory drain and deteriorating performance, for eight billion. The American corporate executives came to Estonia, a bunch of prancing, bragging lunatics who thought because they could make easy money monopolizing markets they were all time super geniuses. The got Skype such that last time I used it to call one of my Skype buddies I couldn't even get it to work.
- And the moral of the story is?
- Don't be vain.
- What I wanted to hear. Take us to the Vanity lab. You can talk and walk. Talk. First introduce yourself proper. Profession?
- Software engineer.
- Self taught. What are you doing with us?
- Like I went to Skype: it's where the action is.
- How did you know what to do when you got here?
- They handed me a job: identify and respond to elements of moral experience.
- You succeeded. You came up with a system.
- First step, language recognition. Key words, phrases. Trainers receive alerts on their wrist bands.
- Who trained the trainers? You? Sonia! Come with us.
- I trained them. Or the system did. It is simple. Identify the good and bad, reward the good, punish the bad.
- You trained our soldiers like dogs.
- Yes. No time for mommy and daddy's love and kindness. How much do the politicians know?
- They never know anything.
- Of course not. The bad thought was the prancing and posing Microsoft execs who instead of performing their useless theater should have gone home to rest after their day of toil, full of love for their kiddies or if none for the sunset.
- How did programming identify the behavior?
- By monitoring the response.
- The trainer's response? Outfitted in diagnostic sensors like this?
- Yes. The girls.
- The strippers.
- Whoever came up with that idea was a real genius.
- The Professor, of course.
- Girls who make a living from attracting men with their performances are experts in spotting fakery.
- The strippers then respond...
- By punishing the soldiers. Being cold, distant.
- What about girl soldiers?
- They aren't front line troops.
- Next: the programming identified bad behavior.
- More challenging. Key words, of course: "they say" "they expect", linked to wish to satisfy other people expectations and not your own. But in this case, the subject own biometric results were more reliable. Fear is behind the need to do what others want, and the biological signs of fear are strong. Punished the same.
- Rewards now.
- Here is where I did get involved. The girls were trained in dialog. The soldiers were given a task. The girls ask, what have you done already like we need here? How did that work out? What did work out? Does it apply? Why don't you test that?
- Ok. I'm going to play the test video when we get to the lab. Good thinking?
- An easy one. Love, a child's relaxed smile, easy to spot. Biometrics, the trainers, the subjects, all in agreement. Rewarded by trainers
- With childish relaxed smiles. Alright. We're training our soldiers to be creative good guys. What good stuff did they create for us? Don't go away. Come in the lab. Here goes. Tell us what we're seeing.
- Daniel, trained at the military institute in software engineering. Sonie here is the trainer.
- Nice outfit.
- Functional. Watch.
If violence could be shown to lead to the overthrow of lasting suppression of human life that now obtains in vast parts of the world, that would be a justification for violence. But this has not been shown at all, in my view.
As to the question of looting, I myself wouldn't regard that as violence. I don't see why it's more violent for a person to go into a store and take what's there than it is for a person who has money that was achieved by violent methods to go into the store and take what's there by handing over the money. I think one can give a good argument that looting isn't violence at all. In a sense, most of us are looters, or at any rate we are benefiting from others' looting.
"I've entitled this speech "We The Looters", honoring the words that begin the American Constitution. America, in case anyone has forgotten, is a country that begin with a revolution.
"As our American Allies like to say, Let's be serious, and talk about looting.
"We have a story here of looters and looted. A looter takes away property, maybe breaks a window, a looter doesn't hurt people.
"The looted threatened violence against the anyone who'd loot, and they got looted anyway. The looters now threaten the looted with violence if they try to take it back.
"Like ape to ape, the looters makes faces at the looted, one ape threatening the other. Threats, but no violence. Threat balances threat.
"If we are all criminals, and must stay criminals until the looting ends, engaged in the non violent looting of all by all for the benefit of the few, the only non-violent solution is to end the looting by imposing principles that prevent it from re-occurring. We know those principles, and we have applied them: no wage slavery, no ownership without use. If the looted want to use violence to reapply the old rules, we have the right to use violence to "overthrow that lasting suppression of human life".
"We have the right to meet violence with violence in self defense. What is self defense? Easy to say: it is defending what we have. Defending what you would like to have, an ideal society, raises the question of whether the end justifies the means. And how long will the future society last, how good will it be, and when will it come?
"But we don't need to ask those questions. We act in self defense.
"Aren't the looted acting in self defense to recover their lives of unlimited property ownership? Certainly, but remember self defense is a principle. Principles are rules to replace violent actions with reasonable actions. Looting of all by all for the benefit of a few is a constant application of threats of violence. We are never right to apply reason in the service of violence, do good in the service of bad.
"So far, we the looters are justified, are right. Looting is legal. Threat of violence has fought threat of violence, and won. The looting of all by all for the benefit of few is over.
"No, we will not be corrupted by our defense against violence. No, our defensive violence will not show itself in the society we establish.
"Our present question is, Can We the Looters win? Right in principle, but practically speaking, are we doing a good thing? Are we uselessly leading the world to suffering and destruction?
"Will we succeed? Will we be able to hold onto the looted property, to distribute it according to rules which will end the looting by all for the benefit of a few?
"So far, our police are not fighting to give back the houses and free food we gave them.
"What about our armed forces, and the armed forces of our American allies? Will they leave us alone?
"These are tactical questions and will be discussed in closed session.
"We The Looters welcome you to the new world, and thank you for coming."
29.
Israeli Knesset, Jerusalem, conference room
- The Professor will speak first. Afterwards we will have our video interview with the Girls, out at their training camp in the Galilee.
Israeli Knesset, Jerusalem, conference room
- The Professor will speak first. Afterwards we will have our video interview with the Girls, out at their training camp in the Galilee.
- On the screen - Avi, put it on please - a photograph of our American Allies, the government in person, engaged in the most famous of drone attacks.
What to expect from our allies? Clearly we can expect good and evil, much of each. The good is, they destroy our enemies, American territory will be for us an Australia, a place to exile those in our country who don't fit in with our form of government. The bad is, their government.
Governments are not especially the form of political arrangements they practice, they are what the people expect from them. Political arrangements are machines operated with people as parts. For the machine to function, the people have to play their part.
Plato described three basic expectations people have from their government.
- Do we have time for Plato?
- Let the Professor talk.
- They're in contact with their families at home. Re-education in progress.
30.
Israeli Knesset, Jerusalem, conference room
- The story begins with Israel and the Professor. Our spies brought me an essay the professor wrote, We're All Jews Except The Israelis. It was the time of the first social protests, the 2nd decade of the 21st century. Like many people I found myself thinking, nothing like this has happened before. But where did such a thought come from? What about the French Revolution? What about the Jews themselves?
- You have a rabbi's credential, we all know that...
- I went into the Professor's work. He argued in a paper "The Technology Of Good" that we as human beings had never tried to use technology to discover how we should live best. I wondered immediately if that was the answer. Our present revolutionary spirit was that attempt: not simple revolution to change the rules we live under for different, better rules. But for the first time, turn our technology to the problem of discovering what would be the best life for us.
And wasn't that what we Jews were from the beginning supposed to be doing? We were a chosen people, a people to be a machine to produce the right human character. We were god's technology. Would you like to explain this yourself, Professor?
- You're doing fine.
- Character can be seen as defined by what rules are followed, or seen as a tool for living. Character begins with rules. As our politicians picturesquely put it, we are apes making faces at each other, which are the beginnings of attack. Some apes have more discipline that others and aren't as afraid. The one's afraid become obedient. Here then are the basic human characters, unchanged from the beginning: the disciplined, and the obedient. These characters follow rules: be obedient, be disciplined and disciplining. Rules are relations between people.
The third basic human character is something much different. It uses the first two as its tool. The purpose the tool is used for is unchanged: to find security from fear. The people of the lower two characters are managed to produce objects, or a complex relation of activity, that expresses the safety of the organizer from fear. they build pyramids, do large scale farming. Call this third the Pharonic character.
Now the Jews come into the story. They were the revolution we see re-beginning in these days.
The pharaohs used technology of character to establish themselves in the same old, fear based, un-technological human relation with the other two classes.
The Jews were supposed, as a people, to be a machine to love god. Loving god, was code for the right life, the good life, the beautiful, loving, truthful life. Truthful life! Let's be honest. We Jews never made more than a beginning with it and God never stopped protesting.
So what does this look like? The human character as tool, as a technology of good?
I brought the professor over here to work it out. I tasked him with analyzing character into elements we could use to construct experiments. We wouldn't know what character as tool was until we could create it experimentally.
- Impossible.
- No, accomplished. If the un-technological, ritual based character was based on fear, the technological character is based on love. Ritual character aims at security from fear, hi-tech character aims to be able to love.
According to instruction, the professor came up with elements that could be experimented with in their various combinations: self, world, open, closed, action, rest.
The fear based, ritual character acted with no sense of self, managing the world of other people's desires and fears. The fear based character rested from action in the sense of himself as powerful symbolized in those relations established, but no sense of the world outside of that symbolized power.
The loved based, hi-tech character does the reverse: acts with attention to his own habits and skills, seeing the world in progress of change, open to remaking. And then rests with no sense of himself, in the sight of world defined and loved for what is seen in it.
- And you can you test that?
- Yes. More than test. We have applied the technology.
- Successfully?
- Yes. Now we'll go to the girls. It's their work. Get them on the screen, will you?
- Let the Professor talk.
- First expectation that people have of their government, that it would not express any particular idea of what would be a good government. Second, that one group knew what they wanted from the government and they were getting it. Usually that would be money, but it might also be honor, or fighting for honor. Honor is making a show of what your group will do to keep control of the government. Third, is a government that expresses one idea of how life should be lived.
Elections, military takeovers, riots, protests: the actual mechanisms used to form the three types of government are unimportant.
Democracy has one clear advantage: the government knows that killing people is not what people expect, not what people expect from people. Everyone can agree on not wanting to be killed. What they expect from the actual administrators of the government is that they will kill when it's in their personal interest, like all government officials do. When the government kills too many people, people understand that the government is not what they expect. They then might cause it to fall.
A people that expects the government to be of people who seek money or honor or shows of victory, or seek to make life for them on one set pattern, can expect the government to kill them.
Democracy is a matter of expectations. Democracy is the form of government in which its people have the least expectation of being killed. A people that makes money or honor or victory its ideal, has to expect many of themselves to be killed by their government in the service of those ideals.
When we say our country is no longer a democracy but a government of the wealthy, we are not talking about money, or corruptions of electoral mechanisms. We are talking about danger of death by government.- So we know we are the good and our Allies the Americans are the evil. What else is new?
- You wanted to know what we can expect from our Allies, from our own military forces. My answer is, first about our allies: we can expect killing. Do I have your agreement on this?- You do. I think we all agree.
- Next, our own forces: Are they democratic sufficiently not to want to kill us? General? Everyone?- I think we're alright here.
- They're in contact with their families at home. Re-education in progress.
- Then this is our problem. The Americans won't try to annihilate us with their nuclear weapon because we will annihilate them with ours. They will invade us.- How certain are you?
- Certain.- Are we ready?
- The General will answer. General?
30.
Israeli Knesset, Jerusalem, conference room
- The story begins with Israel and the Professor. Our spies brought me an essay the professor wrote, We're All Jews Except The Israelis. It was the time of the first social protests, the 2nd decade of the 21st century. Like many people I found myself thinking, nothing like this has happened before. But where did such a thought come from? What about the French Revolution? What about the Jews themselves?
- You have a rabbi's credential, we all know that...
- I went into the Professor's work. He argued in a paper "The Technology Of Good" that we as human beings had never tried to use technology to discover how we should live best. I wondered immediately if that was the answer. Our present revolutionary spirit was that attempt: not simple revolution to change the rules we live under for different, better rules. But for the first time, turn our technology to the problem of discovering what would be the best life for us.
And wasn't that what we Jews were from the beginning supposed to be doing? We were a chosen people, a people to be a machine to produce the right human character. We were god's technology. Would you like to explain this yourself, Professor?
- You're doing fine.
- Character can be seen as defined by what rules are followed, or seen as a tool for living. Character begins with rules. As our politicians picturesquely put it, we are apes making faces at each other, which are the beginnings of attack. Some apes have more discipline that others and aren't as afraid. The one's afraid become obedient. Here then are the basic human characters, unchanged from the beginning: the disciplined, and the obedient. These characters follow rules: be obedient, be disciplined and disciplining. Rules are relations between people.
The third basic human character is something much different. It uses the first two as its tool. The purpose the tool is used for is unchanged: to find security from fear. The people of the lower two characters are managed to produce objects, or a complex relation of activity, that expresses the safety of the organizer from fear. they build pyramids, do large scale farming. Call this third the Pharonic character.
Now the Jews come into the story. They were the revolution we see re-beginning in these days.
The pharaohs used technology of character to establish themselves in the same old, fear based, un-technological human relation with the other two classes.
The Jews were supposed, as a people, to be a machine to love god. Loving god, was code for the right life, the good life, the beautiful, loving, truthful life. Truthful life! Let's be honest. We Jews never made more than a beginning with it and God never stopped protesting.
So what does this look like? The human character as tool, as a technology of good?
I brought the professor over here to work it out. I tasked him with analyzing character into elements we could use to construct experiments. We wouldn't know what character as tool was until we could create it experimentally.
- Impossible.
- No, accomplished. If the un-technological, ritual based character was based on fear, the technological character is based on love. Ritual character aims at security from fear, hi-tech character aims to be able to love.
According to instruction, the professor came up with elements that could be experimented with in their various combinations: self, world, open, closed, action, rest.
The fear based, ritual character acted with no sense of self, managing the world of other people's desires and fears. The fear based character rested from action in the sense of himself as powerful symbolized in those relations established, but no sense of the world outside of that symbolized power.
The loved based, hi-tech character does the reverse: acts with attention to his own habits and skills, seeing the world in progress of change, open to remaking. And then rests with no sense of himself, in the sight of world defined and loved for what is seen in it.
- And you can you test that?
- Yes. More than test. We have applied the technology.
- Successfully?
- Yes. Now we'll go to the girls. It's their work. Get them on the screen, will you?
31.
On screen: laboratory building, military encampment, desert, Israel
- Hey Prof. We've got good new and bad news. The good news is bad news, and the bad news is good. In a way.
- Quit playing around.
- The good news is that the Pornographer has got his hack working. The bad part of that is that you and me are Americans and our country is stupid: we got right in.
- What is the real bad news?
- The Americans are coming. Not us. We're already here. The American Forces.
- Coming now?
- Now. The good in that is that we're ready. Follow me. Not you Prof., the camera guy. See this bracelet thing on my wrist? Sensors in there monitor heart rate, blood pressure. Inside accelerometers using algorithms determine what kind of activity I'm doing. I've an oxygenation sensor on the tip of my right big toe; I've a posture sensor taped to to my back to monitor my posture. Look? Cut out the wolf whistles. The Russian dancing girls are coming on in a minute. All the American soldiers are wearing the gear.
- Smart.
- Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid! Who worked with the Americans? The Israelis. Who worked with the Israelis? Our Israel house pornographer!
- A Trojan horse.
- We've got the Americans on strings. I show you our tests. Stop, Henrik! Come here.
- Yes, Boss?
- Tell the government in Jerusalem about Skype. You were with the Estonians, the Swedes, right at start up. Tell the story. No, tell the end.
- The end is they did the work for the love of it, no banter, no small talk, no showing off or showing each other up. They sold the company for a couple billion to the American Corporation Ebay, which sold it to another American Corporation, Microsoft, they of memory drain and deteriorating performance, for eight billion. The American corporate executives came to Estonia, a bunch of prancing, bragging lunatics who thought because they could make easy money monopolizing markets they were all time super geniuses. The got Skype such that last time I used it to call one of my Skype buddies I couldn't even get it to work.
- And the moral of the story is?
- Don't be vain.
- What I wanted to hear. Take us to the Vanity lab. You can talk and walk. Talk. First introduce yourself proper. Profession?
- Software engineer.
- Self taught. What are you doing with us?
- Like I went to Skype: it's where the action is.
- How did you know what to do when you got here?
- They handed me a job: identify and respond to elements of moral experience.
- You succeeded. You came up with a system.
- First step, language recognition. Key words, phrases. Trainers receive alerts on their wrist bands.
- Who trained the trainers? You? Sonia! Come with us.
- I trained them. Or the system did. It is simple. Identify the good and bad, reward the good, punish the bad.
- You trained our soldiers like dogs.
- Yes. No time for mommy and daddy's love and kindness. How much do the politicians know?
- They never know anything.
- Of course not. The bad thought was the prancing and posing Microsoft execs who instead of performing their useless theater should have gone home to rest after their day of toil, full of love for their kiddies or if none for the sunset.
- How did programming identify the behavior?
- By monitoring the response.
- The trainer's response? Outfitted in diagnostic sensors like this?
- Yes. The girls.
- The strippers.
- Whoever came up with that idea was a real genius.
- The Professor, of course.
- Girls who make a living from attracting men with their performances are experts in spotting fakery.
- The strippers then respond...
- By punishing the soldiers. Being cold, distant.
- What about girl soldiers?
- They aren't front line troops.
- Next: the programming identified bad behavior.
- More challenging. Key words, of course: "they say" "they expect", linked to wish to satisfy other people expectations and not your own. But in this case, the subject own biometric results were more reliable. Fear is behind the need to do what others want, and the biological signs of fear are strong. Punished the same.
- Rewards now.
- Here is where I did get involved. The girls were trained in dialog. The soldiers were given a task. The girls ask, what have you done already like we need here? How did that work out? What did work out? Does it apply? Why don't you test that?
- Ok. I'm going to play the test video when we get to the lab. Good thinking?
- An easy one. Love, a child's relaxed smile, easy to spot. Biometrics, the trainers, the subjects, all in agreement. Rewarded by trainers
- With childish relaxed smiles. Alright. We're training our soldiers to be creative good guys. What good stuff did they create for us? Don't go away. Come in the lab. Here goes. Tell us what we're seeing.
- Daniel, trained at the military institute in software engineering. Sonie here is the trainer.
- Nice outfit.
- Functional. Watch.
- Daniel. You have been given a problem to solve. What is it?
- I work on aerial micro robots. Little robots that fly in swarms, primarily modeled on insects and birds. I have to weaponize the robot, and devise strategies, offensive and defensive.
- And you understand why I am here?
- To take off your clothes?
- Why would I do that?
- You're a stripper.
- We're both in the army here.
- My job is to program, yours is to strip.
- When you do your job. Only then.
- What am I supposed to do?
- Think of me as your psychiatrist. I'll ask you questions, you answer.
- What is the lie detector stuff for?
- To help with the training.
- To hell with that.
- No Daniel, biometrics tell me vain pride is speaking there.
- "Pride more compassionate than the lost generosities".
- What?
- Paul Valerie. A French poet.
- Good. Tell me about poetry. I reward appreciation of beauty. How would you like me to reward you?
- Take off your clothes?
- One piece. Your choice.
- Jacket.
- When you read poetry, are you reminded of anything you like to do, that you are good at yourself?
- Like what? What is the point of these questions?
- I'm doing my job. My job is to associate the correct elements of behavior with your analysis of your job. What is your analysis?
- Defensive and offensive strategies of little flying robots. I told you.
- Tell me now the elements the strategy will be applied to.
- I don't understand.
- Moral behavior is analyzable into four parts: good and bad thought, good and bad action. What are the parts of your project?
- Swarms can be broken down to Individuals, and collective movement.
- Good. What else?
- I don't know.
- Their soldiers and ours?
- Sure.
- Poetry is creative with the elements of words. What can you do with these elements: individual and collective, their soldiers and ours? What is the array of possibilities?
- Are you asking how individual robots fly in swarms? How individual soldiers swarm together? How swarms of robots can cause individual soldier to form swarms? Individual robots cause swarm of soldiers to act individually?
- Good! Which interests you most?
- Take something off.
- This.
- Yeah.
- What strikes you as the most beautiful, creative alternative of those you listed?
- Individual robots cause soldiers to act individually.
- What interests you particularly?
- The biometrics. The American soldiers have them too.
- Your bioimetrics are promising, very promising. Go on.
- Well, we're hacked in. We can identify them. And even to some degree reverse the flow of information. Instead of receive electronic signals from the soldier's body, deliver signals to the body.
- I am aware of that.
- We have access to files. Individual robots could deliver soldier personalized messages. Scare them. Warn them.
- How?
- The later phases of occupy movement tried out sky writing, using swarms of light bearing robots. I was thinking...individual robots could be equiped with loudspeakers. They'd have to fly practically into the soldiers' ears. And then, with them already scared, reverse the communication, let the soldiers see each other dance.
- Good.
- Now you dance.
- Turn it off. The recording dates from the first day of testing.
- Usable results?
- Why talk about it? We'll know soon. The Americans are coming.
32.
War room, Israel, desert encampment
- It's killing time.
- Settle down. On the screen, left: animation of our playbook, Shakespeare's "The Tempest". Next to it, map showing location and movement of the American forces.
- First Plato, now Shakespeare.
- We're in uncharted territory. Shakespeare was there before us, in this technology never applied in all of human history
- We're relying on fictional technology.
- Hypothetical. We have conventional weapons to fall back on. The other side has more, yet we have better strategy...this is not the time. General, status?
- We're ready.
- Professor, explain Shakespeare and the new applied technology. The technology of good. First give us an overview.
- We're going to use magic to effect a reconciliation. Play the animation. In The Tempest, the magician and deposed leader Prospero creates a storm to shipwreck his enemies on the island where for years he's been living in exile with his daughter.
- Is this really necessary?
- We're at war. We're going to use technology against people. We must, absolutely must, keep in mind why we use technology. The magician Prospero, deposed Duke Of Milan, wants to put down his magic staff. He wants to effect a reconciliation, to go home. His enemy, his usurping brother, will plot against him, as you see in the animation, but his daughter will fall in love with the son of another of his enemies, the complicit king. All this is effected by means of general disorientation and isolation. This is what we are about to do to the American forces.
- The general has told me that once we break into and control the American communications it will be no more than hours before they close the opening and lock us out. Then what?
- We either succeeded or we didn't. Conventional war if we didn't. Are you all familiar with the trolley experiment?
- No.
- Experimental subjects are asked, What would you do if you have control of a switch that shunts a train away from a track on which five people are trapped, and who will be killed of the train is allowed to continue. But on the other track is one person who also will be killed. It is reasonable, if one wants to save the most lives to throw the switch. But most people resist that because it involves doing something yourself, personally, that causes death. Reason, the technology of thinking, says pull the switch, but something in us resists.
- What?
- Our bodies. Our character. The fact that everything we do creates a disposition, a desire to do it again. Creates a habit. Social life, in which we make a habit of predicting what other people want from us, and then simulating that, so as to get ahead, weakens this formation of personal habit: every one of our actions goes in a different direction in accordance with the calculation of what other people want and how to give it to them.
- The trolley experiment is an index of social conformity.
- Not exactly. Doing what is expected of you is learned unconsciously, in childhood. It leaves the moral resistance measured by the trolley experiment intact. What the trolley experiment is correlated with is initiating ritual.
- You lost me.
- You were sleeping in class. We saw how analyzing moral behavior into elements can be used in training. It also gives us an explanation of evil, what it is.
- What is it?
- A closed system of bad behavior. A cycling that drives itself to constant continuation. The American ideal of success, as an end in itself, is a classic case. We look to make a place for ourselves, study how things are done, make an investment, see if that produces a result, then keep up doing the same. Regular result is achieved, we've succeeded, we're proud of ourselves. We look down on how the small change we've made has been institutionalized. Each time we look down on regularity, our profit, we feel safe and powerful. This lasts a while, but in time, the pride wears down. The rest of the world outside of our investment is as unsure as always, and in the world of our investment, everyone else equally benefits from the secure regularity. Really you aren't special. You look around for a new investment, a new ritual to initiate, that when successfully regular and repetitive, will tell again the story of your power over the world. Initiate ritual. Succeed. Ritual repetition. Wear down of pride in power. Re-initiate ritual. Understand?
- We understand very well.
- It is the initiating of new ritual that breaks down the character that resists throwing the switch in the trolley experiment.
- The capitalist has no character.
- Yes.
- The American forces have no character? Is that what you are arguing?
- Some of them. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency gave every soldier the trolley test. They were looking for the brain chemistry of terroristic, fanatical thinking. Found out early it was correlated with resistance to throwing the switch. They measured physiological signs, including brain activity but also blood pressure, temperature, heart rate, perspiration. They wanted and got a pool of experimental subjects.
- We have the data?
- Yes. And we have a switch. Look at the screen on the right. The American forces are advancing toward us. The switch will send out the robot swarms bearing the interference devices. The swarms ID the soldiers and will leave unaffected about 1 percent.
- The soldiers who are the ones in the trolley experiment that felt no resistance to throwing the switch.
- That's right. They will be allowed to advance, arriving at our magical desert shipwreck.
- Where what?
- Who wants to throw the switch? Jamie?
- Calling me evil, Prof? Here's goes.
33.
War room, Israel, desert encampment
- General: tell us what were seeing.
- Most of the advance has stopped. Collisions of vehicles. Air vehicle crashes. Pilot ejections. Here: our one percent advances. When they reach this point, they'll be driving into the dust cloud we create.
- How long?
- Within the minute.
- Jamie, are you ready?
- I can't wait.
- You know what to say?
- We're past that.
- Good. General: status?
- Bulk of American forces, immobilized. The weather modification robots are up. See there. The electronics of the advance are failing. The advance's stopped. There: the holographic projection's up. On the screen, right, how the projection's seen from the position of the American forces. They're out of their disabled vehicles. Operation Burning Bush commences.
- Jamie?
- Already in the studio. On the center screen.
- Visibility in the fog is low.
- They're too stunned.
- No. They're waking up. Return to the war room. You did well.
- Keep a seat for me.
34.
War room, Israel, desert encampment
- The American forces are seeing this?
- In the holographic projection. I'll pull it up. Two scenes, on the left the Shakespeare animation. Prospero's usurping brother plots with the brother of the king to take over the kingdom, Prospero's monster servant plots to take over from Prospero. On the right, rolling change of scenes, conversations of the officers lost "in the cloud" are monitored for key words. Cash, gold, money, jewels, riches, loot. There: the scene sticks.
- They have sound?
- Yes. Want to listen in?
- You knew? About the stealing?
- Gold, cash, art, relics.
- Where'd they put it?
- Some of it, they carry with them. The rest they left behind hidden in the conquered territories. We'll let the American Forces listen a while - the scene's shifted again - then Jamie I'd like you to give your final thoughts. In less than a minute, the dumb show plotters will be forgiven, reconcile with the plotted against, the animation will fade. A hundred feet high words will appear: "Had Enough?"
- Do I have to? I'm talked out.
- What do you want?
- I want to go home.
- What do you want from them? Your fellow Americans.
- Should I say reconciliation?
- Well? Do you forgive? Can you live with them?
- They're killers.
- Yes, they are. And you've lived with killers. They make life a misery.
- We're supposed to have created a home where there won't be killers. Where people don't drive each other crazy hoarding things they can't use and making slaves of each other.
- And where crazy people without crazy people around them can stop being crazy.
- Nazis in Argentina good family guys. Nice everyday people. Reconciliation? Like Shakespeare?
- Address the troops, Jamie.
- Yes, boss.
to be continued
_____________________
* Frantz Fanon's "The Wretched of the Earth"
- Usable results?
- Why talk about it? We'll know soon. The Americans are coming.
32.
War room, Israel, desert encampment
- It's killing time.
- Settle down. On the screen, left: animation of our playbook, Shakespeare's "The Tempest". Next to it, map showing location and movement of the American forces.
- First Plato, now Shakespeare.
- We're in uncharted territory. Shakespeare was there before us, in this technology never applied in all of human history
- We're relying on fictional technology.
- Hypothetical. We have conventional weapons to fall back on. The other side has more, yet we have better strategy...this is not the time. General, status?
- We're ready.
- Professor, explain Shakespeare and the new applied technology. The technology of good. First give us an overview.
- We're going to use magic to effect a reconciliation. Play the animation. In The Tempest, the magician and deposed leader Prospero creates a storm to shipwreck his enemies on the island where for years he's been living in exile with his daughter.
- Is this really necessary?
- We're at war. We're going to use technology against people. We must, absolutely must, keep in mind why we use technology. The magician Prospero, deposed Duke Of Milan, wants to put down his magic staff. He wants to effect a reconciliation, to go home. His enemy, his usurping brother, will plot against him, as you see in the animation, but his daughter will fall in love with the son of another of his enemies, the complicit king. All this is effected by means of general disorientation and isolation. This is what we are about to do to the American forces.
- The general has told me that once we break into and control the American communications it will be no more than hours before they close the opening and lock us out. Then what?
- We either succeeded or we didn't. Conventional war if we didn't. Are you all familiar with the trolley experiment?
- No.
- Experimental subjects are asked, What would you do if you have control of a switch that shunts a train away from a track on which five people are trapped, and who will be killed of the train is allowed to continue. But on the other track is one person who also will be killed. It is reasonable, if one wants to save the most lives to throw the switch. But most people resist that because it involves doing something yourself, personally, that causes death. Reason, the technology of thinking, says pull the switch, but something in us resists.
- What?
- Our bodies. Our character. The fact that everything we do creates a disposition, a desire to do it again. Creates a habit. Social life, in which we make a habit of predicting what other people want from us, and then simulating that, so as to get ahead, weakens this formation of personal habit: every one of our actions goes in a different direction in accordance with the calculation of what other people want and how to give it to them.
- The trolley experiment is an index of social conformity.
- Not exactly. Doing what is expected of you is learned unconsciously, in childhood. It leaves the moral resistance measured by the trolley experiment intact. What the trolley experiment is correlated with is initiating ritual.
- You lost me.
- You were sleeping in class. We saw how analyzing moral behavior into elements can be used in training. It also gives us an explanation of evil, what it is.
- What is it?
- A closed system of bad behavior. A cycling that drives itself to constant continuation. The American ideal of success, as an end in itself, is a classic case. We look to make a place for ourselves, study how things are done, make an investment, see if that produces a result, then keep up doing the same. Regular result is achieved, we've succeeded, we're proud of ourselves. We look down on how the small change we've made has been institutionalized. Each time we look down on regularity, our profit, we feel safe and powerful. This lasts a while, but in time, the pride wears down. The rest of the world outside of our investment is as unsure as always, and in the world of our investment, everyone else equally benefits from the secure regularity. Really you aren't special. You look around for a new investment, a new ritual to initiate, that when successfully regular and repetitive, will tell again the story of your power over the world. Initiate ritual. Succeed. Ritual repetition. Wear down of pride in power. Re-initiate ritual. Understand?
- We understand very well.
- It is the initiating of new ritual that breaks down the character that resists throwing the switch in the trolley experiment.
- The capitalist has no character.
- Yes.
- The American forces have no character? Is that what you are arguing?
- Some of them. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency gave every soldier the trolley test. They were looking for the brain chemistry of terroristic, fanatical thinking. Found out early it was correlated with resistance to throwing the switch. They measured physiological signs, including brain activity but also blood pressure, temperature, heart rate, perspiration. They wanted and got a pool of experimental subjects.
- We have the data?
- Yes. And we have a switch. Look at the screen on the right. The American forces are advancing toward us. The switch will send out the robot swarms bearing the interference devices. The swarms ID the soldiers and will leave unaffected about 1 percent.
- The soldiers who are the ones in the trolley experiment that felt no resistance to throwing the switch.
- That's right. They will be allowed to advance, arriving at our magical desert shipwreck.
- Where what?
- Who wants to throw the switch? Jamie?
- Calling me evil, Prof? Here's goes.
33.
War room, Israel, desert encampment
- General: tell us what were seeing.
- Most of the advance has stopped. Collisions of vehicles. Air vehicle crashes. Pilot ejections. Here: our one percent advances. When they reach this point, they'll be driving into the dust cloud we create.
- How long?
- Within the minute.
- Jamie, are you ready?
- I can't wait.
- You know what to say?
- We're past that.
- Good. General: status?
- Bulk of American forces, immobilized. The weather modification robots are up. See there. The electronics of the advance are failing. The advance's stopped. There: the holographic projection's up. On the screen, right, how the projection's seen from the position of the American forces. They're out of their disabled vehicles. Operation Burning Bush commences.
- Jamie?
- Already in the studio. On the center screen.
- My fellow Americans! Jamie here, from L.A. These are The Girls, from the neighborhood. My girls. On the screens, in back of me, the war room of the forces you've picked a fight with. Over there, you can see his back, the Professor. You all know him. Also American. There, those beauties, the dancers, body guard for the Prof.
So guys: our message to you is: Be free or we'll kill you. You see what we can do. Go home. Freedom awaits. It's our only message, Americans to Americans. But we've arranged a show for you. Look into the burning bush across the desert, see your officers. Your military culture. See who you give up your freedom to die for.- How'd I do? Look at those idiots in the cloud. Like sleepwalkers. Is that according to plan?
- Visibility in the fog is low.
- They're too stunned.
- No. They're waking up. Return to the war room. You did well.
- Keep a seat for me.
34.
War room, Israel, desert encampment
- The American forces are seeing this?
- In the holographic projection. I'll pull it up. Two scenes, on the left the Shakespeare animation. Prospero's usurping brother plots with the brother of the king to take over the kingdom, Prospero's monster servant plots to take over from Prospero. On the right, rolling change of scenes, conversations of the officers lost "in the cloud" are monitored for key words. Cash, gold, money, jewels, riches, loot. There: the scene sticks.
- They have sound?
- Yes. Want to listen in?
- You knew? About the stealing?
- Gold, cash, art, relics.
- Where'd they put it?
- Some of it, they carry with them. The rest they left behind hidden in the conquered territories. We'll let the American Forces listen a while - the scene's shifted again - then Jamie I'd like you to give your final thoughts. In less than a minute, the dumb show plotters will be forgiven, reconcile with the plotted against, the animation will fade. A hundred feet high words will appear: "Had Enough?"
- Do I have to? I'm talked out.
- What do you want?
- I want to go home.
- What do you want from them? Your fellow Americans.
- Should I say reconciliation?
- Well? Do you forgive? Can you live with them?
- They're killers.
- Yes, they are. And you've lived with killers. They make life a misery.
- We're supposed to have created a home where there won't be killers. Where people don't drive each other crazy hoarding things they can't use and making slaves of each other.
- And where crazy people without crazy people around them can stop being crazy.
- Nazis in Argentina good family guys. Nice everyday people. Reconciliation? Like Shakespeare?
- Address the troops, Jamie.
- Yes, boss.
American Forces. Jamie here again. The Professor wants me to give you one last chance. You've seen your leaders stealing, betraying, murdering, fighting over their filthy money. Money to buy you as slaves, money to stop selling themselves as slaves. GO HOME! No one needs money there. The thousands of years of history, it's over. Forget it all. Or don't! Go be free! Go be free or we'll kill you. Over and out.
to be continued
_____________________
* Frantz Fanon's "The Wretched of the Earth"
