Reading ERIC HOFFER's The True Believer

This book has been around since 1951 and there are many copies very affordable at Amazon and I guess elsewhere.

Hoffer outlines the variables necessary and sufficient for recruiting members to a MASS MOVEMENT.  The US has none of these variables and is immune to being recruited. 

What about the homeless! They have nothing. Well when people are in this mode of survival - not living, survival - they spend the day trying to find a safe place to rest, maybe eat their lunch if they have found food, or a safe place to sleep, etc. The day to day survival precludes and takes their energy for any time for thinking, contemplation, solidarity, or plans to resist. It is just day to day and just that's the way the world is for me now. They have no communal support and are in competition with each other every day. 

Equality is not a variable, and this is what Americans demand and yell for all the time. Equality is divisive and leaves people wanting more and more seeing that their neighbors have more than they. So as Americans demand equality they are becoming more alone, frustrated, desperate, passive and helpless. And competitive.

But the good news is that US policy abroad is creating refugees, maybe manufacturing refugees is a better word, in apparently unlimited numbers as they keep increasing.

When people are torn from their country, their tribe, their groups, their families, their homes, their hopes and dreams invested in their traditional way of life, and the complete loss of all communal financial and emotional support they are RIPE for recruiting into a 

MASS MOVEMENT 

that will offer them what they have lost.

China will not have to wean them away from their homes, work at disrupting their family life (Marx), as it is all being done for them by the US military. China will be able to arrive on the scene offering hope and a purposeful future of cooperative activity, just as they are doing in Zimbabwe. BTW China knows this and is just playing the Waiting Game. 

Their history is to NOT have to fire a shot. 

And their history is to order all into a harmonic world peace. They have been to boot camp on all this in their 4000 years of chaos,wars, aggressions, conflicts, dynasties, competition of rulers, etc. And each dynasty studied the failures and successes of the past ones so they would not be repeated. 

Also China has been able to embrace and obtain the strengths of their conquerors and the ones they have conquered. This is exactly what Marcuse said of the capitalistic machine. It devours its opposition - like Pac-Man - and makes itself stronger. 

This is going to be very interesting as China's challenge - reading through Toynbee now - is deterritorialized corporate capitalism. Will China be able to meet that challenge and continue on a path of growth.

Enter China and its Communistic, Socialistic Culture. As the US creates ever more people for China to win over they have no idea they are sowing the seeds for the future of the world that is coming at us like an unseen tractor trailer down the highway. 

We should be reminded that the US has multitudes of Chinese citizens already solidly in the Universities, businesses, the arts, etc. They are formidable, educated, obedient and disciplined. The strength of China has been in the order of the families laid down by Confucius. 

Already world finance is lining up in China. We received the Gift of 9-11 in the Symbolic Order as expounded by Jean Baudrillard. A Counter-Gift is required. Not right away but it must be returned and it must be greater than the Gift or the receiver of the Gift must commit suicide. So we are seeing the US committing suicide now. Killing Bin Laden occurred in the Order of Production not the Symbolic Order and it doesn't count.

So here we are fussing about who released emails that told the truth which we didn't want released of course, and fussing about Biden smelling a woman's hair a few years ago and touching another one.Well Nero fiddled his fiddle while Rome burned, didn't he?

REREADING PIRSIG'S ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE

Rereading this 1974 blockbuster novel of its time is an astonishing experience. Pirsig has gone his solitary way through all of Continental Philosophy of his time and beyond without referring to Foucault, Baudrillard, Zizek, Lacan, walking along in their footsteps without knowing of their existence. He arrives at the same conclusions and consequences by a parallel path not an identical one. And he digs even deeper than Foucault, something I had never expected from anyone.

Pirsig is grounding his thought concretely by alternating between motorcycle maintenance, a journey on his motorcycle with his young adolescent son across the midwest and north of the US to California. While Foucault is digging in dusty old archives, tattered and yellowed papers, Pirsig is whizzing through mountainous landscapes, desert valleys, campgrounds and highways as he pieces fragments of his alterity and continued musings of his past and present thinking.

He begins with the perception of landscape through an automobile's windows and the difference as it surrounds one on a motorcycle. The car frames the scene - turning it into the screen - as it changes, displaying what the frame frames. The motorcycle puts you in the landscape making you a part of it, not an observer of it. The scene through the auto window is a simulacrum, the surround on the motorcycle is the REAL. And this is the thought of Jean Baudrillard. 

Is Baudrillard a Simulacrum here?

The great danger of our time felt by Pirsig and articulated by Baudrillard. The loss of the REAL and the worship of the Simulacrum. The Hunger Games. Panem and the Districts. The REAL and the SCREEN.

Reading through McLuhan the motorcycle is the MEDIUM and the MESSAGE is invisible. Or the GROUND is invisible. The auto is the MEDIUM and the MESSAGE is different. The GROUND is now the inside of the car which is invisible as one looks out the window at the passing screen. Pirsig has lifted the curtain of invisibility so we now see the once invisible MESSAGE of the cycle and the auto. He has waved the magic wand, Dorothy has clicked her red heels three times and she is in Oz then back to the canvas of Kansas again. Has Baudrillard or McLuhan ever been so clearly understood before?

This is what is troubling him all through his journey. Small patches of lawn a plastic faking of open green spaces, plastic toys of artificial style to deceive. None of this is escaping his eyes as he sees through the cultural faking that passes for authenticity by those who cannot see or recognize QUALITY.

Read it again and go with him again on the wild trip you once breathlessly accompanied him on. There is much more I have to say about this wondrous journey of his.

END of PART ONE

STEFAN SIMCHOWITZ Enters the Art Market and Changes the DISCOURSE.

STEFAN SIMCHOWITZ

http://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/qa/a-word-from-the-devils-advocate-54458?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=121416_magazine_simchowitzredux_master&utm_term=Master

Quoting Jean Baudrillard on 9-11 the bombers had a PACT with each other, not a contract.In the Order of  Symbolic  Exchange and Death there is not a legal contract. That belongs to the Order of Production in which CAPITALISM is its prime subject.

Simchowitz has begun a new model for entering into a relationship with artists, helping to manage their careers and sell their work so they can be supported on a regular basis to be able to keep "playing" with their imagination.

How does he do this? He simply buys a lot of a new unknown artist's work. How much do you want for it, and then he pays it. From there he will go on to hook the artist up with a gallery/galleries, print a book, promote them in his original way. He may sell to a collector a piece he wishes to be in the collection of a particular collector.

He builds the relationship over time. Some are more intimate and deep than others. But what is significant and infuriating to the big player dealers in the commercial art world is what is invisible to them. Simchowitz is successful, his artists slowly grow to recognition and Simchowitz makes his fees from the art he bought at the beginning. Although he will buy in the middle and the end also. 

And that is his relationship with the artist. He OWNS the work of the artist and this allows him to be aligned with the desire of the artist. The artist wishes to have his works known and so does Simchowitz.

WHAT IS STARTLING AND WONDERFUL TO ME IS THAT SIMCHOWITZ'S RELATIONSHIP WITH THE ARTIST TAKES PLACE IN 

THE SYMBOLIC ORDER

OF PASSION,LOVE,LIVING,SEDUCTION,SACRED,REVERSIBILITY,PACT,SINGULARITY

As the Order of Production is taking over all our lives, turning all the territory into a MAP (Borges:The Map and the Territory) here is a hero standing alone in a world of elegance, affluence,bureaucracy,fascism in a smaller sense than world domination.

AND HE IS FUCKING WINNING!

The artists he chooses get to stay in the studio and do what they love.They don't have to tour,go to fairs, and all that hoopla.They just get to do their work and stay PURE. 

SIMCHOWITZ IS THROWING THE MONEY CHANGERS OUT OF THE TEMPLE!

WE NOW HAVE OUR VERY FIRST CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHER ART PATRON IN OUR ERA. 

The Great LEO STEINBERG would have been thrilled.John McCoubrey would have been thrilled. And many others still alive who studied with them will also be THRILLED.

The beauty of all this that he does is THAT IT CANNOT BE REPLICATED, MANUFACTURED,TURNED INTO AN ASSEMBLY LINE OF ART FROM AN ARTIST.

WALTER BENJAMIN THE WORLD IS HEARING YOU AT LAST.

https://www.amazon.com/Illuminations-Reflections-Benjamin-published-Paperback/dp/B00ES28DO6/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1481847953&sr=1-2&keywords=walter+benjamin+illuminations

In Illuminations is that gold standard essay Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

 What Andy Warhol took apart in a way that CUT into the DISCOURSE of art history and put a slice deep enough to challenge all artists.

A dress which is more than a dress: Kristen Stewart, Cannes 2012

I hear the question upon your lips: What is it to be a color? Color is the touch of the eye, music to the deaf, a word out of the darkness. Because I’ve listened to souls whispering — like the susurrus of the wind — from book to book and object to object for tens of thousands of years, allow me to say that my touch resembles the touch of angels. Part of me, the serious half, calls out to your vision while the mirthful half soars through the air with your glances. I’m so fortunate to be red! I’m fiery. I’m strong. I know men take notice of me and that I cannot be resisted. I do not conceal myself: For me, delicacy manifests itself neither in weakness nor subtlety, but through determination and will. So, I draw attention to myself. I’m not afraid of other colors, shadows, crowds, or even of loneliness…

 “My dear master, explain red to somebody who has never known red.” — “If we touched it with the tip of a finger, it would feel like something between iron and copper. If we took it into our palm, it would burn. If we tasted it, it would be full-bodied, like salted meat. If we took it between our lips, it would fill our mouths. If we smelled it, it’d have the scent of a horse. If it were a flower, it would smell like a daisy, not a red rose.”

Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red pg. 186-8