5 December 2015

The Third Voice: reality, morality

and other double-edged words
The importance and unimportance
of metaphysical and ethical concepts
in radical philosophy

So maybe Ive been making a big mistake for the past few years in thinking that I
could achieve my main goal (connection with like-minded radical folk and the development
of a coherent radical philosophical framework) at the same time as communicating - most
often inadvertently, sometime implicitly, but at other times explicitly - to those I have
encountered, that I think there are right and wrong ways of doing things, and right and
wrong ideas, and that this is the biggest reason why I want to find people who share my view
of what the right ideas are. I want to explain once and for all what I mean by words like
right, so I can be done with them; I hope then, that this unpacking will be the ladder, that
Stirner spoke of, that Ill use to climb up, and then throw away.

My aims in this piece of writing are three-fold:

- Firstly, to dispel any misconceptions that might exist or come to exist in the minds of
people Im in contact with, about my views on concepts like morality and even reality' by
better outlining what I mean by such terms; in order to increase the chances I have of
identifying those who are, in fact, of a like enough mind that I would want to build further
associations (and perhaps, enclaves) with them, by creating common reference points, and
using them to outline ways in which I think people can communicate and associate
effectively;
- Secondly, to show that while crucially important in many ways, these concepts are best
used by radicals in building frameworks for future action, and if we want to pursue those
actions, we should not let ourselves become secondary to the ideas; in other words, they
should be a tools in a toolset, not bricks in an ideology;

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 - And lastly, to help realign the way in which I myself communicate, at least in writing,
so as to hopefully make any further meta-analysis of these ideas unnecessary.

Motivation and mobility

Let me first say briefly that the reason I engage in philosophy (thinking about thinking) at all,
and is the reason, I think, why anyone would ever need to, is because of a goal. My ultimate
goal is to live my life equipped with whatever I can find that brings the most value to my life
and those of my kin. My more immediate goal, therefore, is liberation from the control-
complex, a term Im using to describe the array of forces - of both agency and structure -
that restrict and relentlessly oppress my attempts to pursue value with my own autonomy.

I think this seems like a reasonable basis for all instances of metathought. Primitive people (by
which I mean all those non-civilised people that came before me) no doubt had goals
whenever they went beyond the thought processes they needed for their normal lives: goals
such as understanding, problem solving, pattern spotting, and more social goals likes helping
others and engendering community spirit - all of this requires metathought, or thinking about
thinking, or philosophy, as its most often called.

In this sense, all of my own metathought is, by means of feedback loops, both the motivation
for my liberation (as a goal), and my means of mobilising myself and navigating the maze of
pitfalls and dangers - both physical and philosophical - that stand in the way of my
destination.

And that metathought relies on my autonomy, because I cannot rely on anyone to trace this
path for me, signpost the pitfalls, and guide me over them, because that would only beg the
question of how they their self were able to prove the route, and when I ask questions, I
want to be the one that answers them too. If the last four paragraphs seem like total egoist
overkill for you, Id invite you to suggest to me how I can better look at the world and still be
sure that Im not putting myself in unnecessary peril nor smothering anyone elses ability to
find their own path.

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Reality

While I want to get the big one out of the way first, of course, I also dont want to get
bogged down in a long examination of metaphysics, so let me just say, straight up that I will
assume that we cannot locate or demonstrate a deep reality that explains all other relative
realities. And that the best we can hope to even aim towards (not necessarily achieve or
obtain) are relative truths (small t, plural) derived from our gambles as our brain makes
models of the ocean of new signals it receives every second. [Both quotes are taken from
Quantum Psychology by Robert Anton Wilson]
So there, you know from close to the top of the third page of this discussion that I am
not claiming there is an objective, knowable Truth [capitalised for emphatic contrast with
Wilsons lower-case equivalent].
But just as I (think I) understand and appreciate the value of extreme skeptical
approaches to epistemology, and I reject Aristotelian essentialism, I think there is an approach
to these unfathomable questions that is at once honest, humble, and still useful for folk that
have a similar motivation to myself. You could best summarise this as a refusal to hold fast to
either rationalism (purely following logical induction) or raw empiricism (dealing only with
what appears to be true right here and right now).
The standpoint from which I begin my metathought processes is to take all available
inputs and run them through myself holistically. New ideas are therefore juxtaposed with the
full extent of my available existing knowledge, intuition, and senses. I come at them from all
the directions I can find, and dance with them run them through myself, over, under, inside
and out. At the end of this process, ideas are integrated or discarded. And while I will try
quite hard to remember where I leave those I discard (since I can only carry so many and
want to prioritise those that will be most useful to me), there are no doubt countless ideas Ive
passed up on that could yet be truths (small t, plural), just as there are those I have not yet
even encountered and danced with.
Over the course of my life, Ive subjected a great many ideas to greater and greater
analysis. Ive danced with them many times, and when we whirl on the dance floor of
metathought, it may be hard to see where they end and I begin. I dont call them
certainties - I would not sully my dance partners with such a smear - I have begun, and can
begin, to think of them as something in the order of relative certainties. I have no desire to
lay them out and size them up against anyone elses (like some kind of penis-measuring

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ritual), and I know that my judgment of their integrity could very well be wholly wrong. But I
dance with them as is my wont because (as I said in the last paragraph of page 2) I dont
know any other way.
There have been occasions in which I found (or came to believe) that I was dancing with
a complete specter. I have had to take responsibility for this whether the specter was of my
own invention or anothers projection, because it will have been with my own eyes that I saw
her as real, and my own eyes that I one day discovered she probably wasnt. A large number
of the specters I have danced with and felt turn to ether in my arms can be found in my past
writing, which serves in many ways as a kind of spectral dancing memoirs. And while I dont
feel superior to those whom I personally see as dancing with ghosts to a greater extent than I
have done, I feel I have a clearer sight, and for that I feel gratitude - to myself for having the
strength to reach these realisations - and to the others who helped by tapping me on the
shoulder and asking me if they could have this dance.
Now, one more thing about reality: I dont think it makes any difference whether I think
of it as small r, plural (just one of many) or small r, singular (the only one but seen
imperfectly by myself). What difference would it or could it make to me?
Furthermore, I want as a value (which well look more at in a second) simplicity. In
civilising and paving over and devastating the world we live in, weve complicated it beyond
what is natural - and by this I mean beyond our capacity to properly engage with it. Weve not
only lost so much of our perceptive and proprioceptive power (as evidence by our amazement
of the navigational abilities of Australian aboriginals and flying birds, and by how much
certain of us will argue against the idea of extrasensory perception, despite the obvious
evidence), weve not only separated ourselves from the land and the other living things that
inhabit it, but weve created a symbolic order that is so deforming of our minds (that same
faculty that we said earlier was looking for patterns and solving problems) that we struggle
with the metadecision of what is relevant to our goals.
A simpler world - such as my dream of living in a tipi by a stream in a forest and
gathering all of my food and being free to live and love as I please - is a world in which all of
the epistemological questions explored over the last few pages, are substantially less relevant.
Id say were looking at several orders of magnitude less relevant. A freer world is a wilder
world and a wilder mind is a freer mind and a freer mind is a world unto itself in which truths
take less of our energy and that energy - our lives - it itself free

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The morality of values

And if all that was beginning to sound like codshit to you, then I guess were not of a
like mind, are we?
And something that everyone has to confront - regardless of how radical or conformist
they are, how civilised or wild, how healthy or sick - is the question of who are the people
around us. Who are they, really? Are they good for us (more on this in a moment)? Are we
good for them? What is it about their thoughts, and their actions, and our thoughts and our
actions that determine the answer to the previous two questions?
And again, any thinking being, in any world, seeks values, and tries to keep them as long
as they are important. In fact, this is the definition of value, is it not?
And the ability to answer any questions one faces - including the multitude of questions
in this piece of writing - is, for me at least, a value. And since my mind makes gambles all the
time, I do not give myself a hard time for being a gambling man (in a very non-monetary
sense), and I would hazard a guess that clarity and relative-certainty are values for you too.
And since I believe Ive already explained enough about why my autonomy - the
freedom of my own mind - is of paramount importance to me, let us combine these two
simple principles - autonomy and value, and formulate what is, for me, the only further
derivative value we ever need to reference: morality.

The morality of voices

Etymologically (and I know some people dont like to think about this, but I dont care,
because I think its important), morality comes from a linguistic tradition of talking about
character. Character is a worldview in which, rather than seeing people as examples of essence
and label (He is a Jew, a liberal, and a homosexual), we look at their actions, and judge them
accordingly.
As thinking people, our capacity to reflect on our thoughts and actions (as expressions of
autonomy) lasted surprisingly far into our civilisation. This spirit (or impulse) yet lives on in
a very small number of people who have not been completely consumed (or subsumed) by the
world of the specters. For as cheery and whimsical as my earlier metaphor may have seemed,
there is a darker substrate to that danse macabre. Although we humans made it, we live in a
world of ghosts that lurk below the touch of every observable surface, ready to be conjured

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anew by vocal command upon the next ritual invocation. Religion, as Im using the word, in a
broader sense than you may be familiar with, is the delusion by which we forget who we are
(or were) and who we could be (if we were to look through the lenses of our own
imaginations), and we accept from those heterons that push their beliefs upon us (and religion
always requires this push, as the well-known Jesuit proverb itself admits) a corrupted, shitty
effigy as the complete totem of what we are told we are, and a brighter, though no less deadly
or deceptive totem of what we could become, if we follow the prescriptions of the
manipulators, be they shamans, priests, statesmen, capitalists or other forms of controllers.
Always there is a prize that is dangled, and it is always the same, the transformation of our
selves through the ritual.
What does this have to do with character or morality, so much that Id spend so long
unpacking it all? Well, is it any wonder that weve forgotten how to evaluate each others
character when were drawing on collective memory and symbolic language that has been
completely infected with this hideous and horrific alien culture? Religion may not be alien in
the sense that it is not of human origin, but it is alien in the sense that we lived without it for
most of our existence, and what weve had all the while its been around and amongst us, is
not really life, but something markedly different.
In fact, nearly all of the discussions on morality now speak with, and nearly all human
behaviour is controlled by, one of three Voices; such has been the reduction of autonomy in
the modern and postmodern eras.
The First Voice says that morality is a matter of commandment, that a force that is above
and beyond us hath commanded how we ought to behave and what character we ought to
maintain. This voice has written books where scores of pages are given over to every facet of
behaviour this character might lead us to, including how we ought to cook, eat, fuck, sleep,
play, talk, teach and learn. This is the voice of the heavenly ubiquito-heteron, the voice from
another place that is trusted specifically because it is not of us. Subscribers to this story, listeners
to this voice, are those who have so little trust in their own ability to think for their selves, such
disregard for their own autonomy, that they have allowed an alien culture, far worse than any
of the most bizarre sci-fi or horror movies, to become lodged, and loved, in the core of their
own being. My pity for these people is incalculable and infinite.
The Second Voice says that morality is a matter of innate and universal human values.
To the voice that repeats this claim, it does not matter that it can easily be observed that these
values are not innate, but inculcated, or that they are not universal, but are relentlessly

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challenged by the full range and endless nuances of behaviour that result from followship of
the first voice. These values, this character, is the human character, specifically because the
voice says it is so.
The second voice does not reference some distant, unseen, alien source. It speaks only
from within, as if that were proof of anything except that which is within itself. Its followers
suffer simultaneously from an absence of real self-esteem and a narcissistic, spectral
doppelgnger of conceited and zealous self-righteousness.
This is the voice of the earthly ubiquito-heteron, the voice of humanity, and wherever
it is distrusted, as happens everywhere, almost at all times, on a more than many-times-daily
basis, the heteron acts to crush dissent, often physically, and unbearably forcefully, and its
spokespeople speak of prices worth paying even more than the First Voice ever did.
The First Voice spoke of the prize and what you must do to achieve it. The Second
Voice speaks of what must be done AND what you must do to assist it; it is the voice of
progress, of history, of enlightenment, of humanism, of democracy, of intervention, of
charity, and of every minimalistic and pragmatic compromise every made, and of every
major murder of the last few hundred years, at the very least.
Members of this mob, even the quietly complicit, comfortable nothing to do with me
scumbags that live in the suburbs and only indirectly contribute to the echoing of the voice,
accept the voice out of sheer fear. The First Voice may have, initially, contributed to that fear,
to that weakening of character to the point necessary to stop and listen to the Second Voice,
but people now follow it for fear of immediate and more damning reprisal than was ever
threatened by the First Voice. The First Voice spoke of eternal damnation, but you might get
to yet go on living a while before it came. The Second Voice says Look, this person has
betrayed the Group, betrayed the Country, betrayed the Species. They must be eliminated or
otherwise dealt with For The Good of All. My disgust towards, rejection of, and antipathy
towards members of this mob, is consciously and deliberately limitless; such a stance is the
only way I know of surviving its onslaught.
Im quaking now, having written that. Though Ive not been entranced and controlled
by these voices, I am in awe of them. They have built the alien cultures of heaven, and earth
(as a thing to be tilled and plundered), and Leviathan. They have written history. If human
life is to come to an end, it will likely be of their doing. In the end, as in the supposed
beginning, there might be the word, and the word would surely be of these voices.

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The morality of choice

And I quake because I must now recover from the awesome and terrifying sound of
those voices and tell you about the Third Voicewith which so few people speak nowadays.
Except I cant. The Third Voice is not mine to speak of, all the time. If I were to tell
you some Truth (big t, singular) or truths (small t, plural) about the Third Voice, it would not
be a third voice I would be describing. I would have to speak with one of the other two Voices
in order to trick you into believing my message, because
Yours is the Third Voiceit is you, it is inside you, and when you speak your truth(s) as
truth(s), you speak with that Voice.
So as I tell you about my voice, and how it works, and how I want to use it, to help
liberate myself and my kin, I want you to listen to your own voice as well as mine. I know you
can do it.
As I use my autonomy, my owns means of survival and of seeking values, to choose a
path for myself that allows me to seek those values, I have to make choices. My approach to
reality has determined, and will determine, the way in which I evaluate the metavalue of
values.
To cut a long story short, I think that values are neither inherent nor subjective, but
objective and contextual. Let me explain to you exactly what that means.
For a given goal (which might be another value in itself), there are a finite number of
possible value-paths towards that goal. The value of each is determined, contextually, by the
configuration of every other existent and involved part of reality (small r, singular). How
many of these discrete parts are influential, and how, is exactly what context means. Any
value may be of paramount important in one situation, and absolutely irrelevant in another.
Once, while mountaineering, the failure of a GPS receiver, a compass and a map, nearly cost
me my life (or least my health). In other situations, I am sure they have saved lives. Each of
these items, which are a tiny sample of the possible constituent parts of reality that might
influence a situation, are free of inherent value. But in every possible situation, in each
moment of choice (assuming choice is involved), their value is objective. One will be the most
positively influential, and one will be the least, and the others fall on a scale in between.
I would assert that this is true, regardless of the fact that, as I established previously, I
have no way of knowing, for certain, which value is objectively best. Best, of course, is
contextual too. Depending on the goal I want to pursue, what good means will change. But

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this is, I think, a very different approach to saying that all value is completely subjective, and
there are no more truths to say about the choices we make. When I read justifications about
capitalist exchange for example, that say everything is hunky dory provided both parties feel
they got something out of it, I cant help but feel that one of the parties did not get as much
as the other. If you are yourself against capitalism, you probably have some pre-existing
sympathy for this feeling.
When we want to say what is good or not, therefore, we cant point to innate essences or
total subjectivity, because otherwise what then becomes important is the feeling that something
is good, not that it is. Otherwise, we see conjured into being the feeling of empowerment
and the confidence in the market, and ways of behaviour that do not care what might
actually be taking place and whether its good or not.
When I choose what is good for me, when I choose which values I want to seek out or
maintain, I rely in all cases on my autonomy to do so. Since choices are the only way that I
will come to value, I would say that autonomy was therefore, axiomatically good. It is the
prerequisite for all action that might lead to any other values. When you give someone the gift
of liberation, you use your autonomy to reactivate theirs. When you give someone the gift of
love, you use your autonomy to invigorate theirs in ways that we do not truly understand, and
perhaps cannot.
When I speak of morality, therefore, I speak of a worldview based on the evaluation of
available options and possible values, and on chosen actions that aim towards goals. If my
actions ever, in the moment of my choice, limit or snuff out the choices of others by limiting
their autonomy, then I have committed an immoral act.
By means of feedback loops therefore, morality as a process of choice becomes the
examination of the process of choice, in ourselves and others. Just like the controllers study in
order to control, so we can examine, in order to understand.
And to come back round once more to how things can be both important and not-
important (in different ways), I hope that having examined, and understood, that we can now
agree.
Because I simply cant write a piece on reality and morality without mentioning what I
see as the obvious conclusions from any serious consideration of these.
Im talking about principles - those relative truths that Ive chosen to live by over the
years, as much as possible, and which I think bear consideration by all who want to think
radically about how people live now, and how they might, in an ideal scenario.

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 My first principle is nonviolence, because violence makes choice impossible, and cancels
out the processes of reasoning, both internal and interactive, that make metathought and
metadiscussion possible. If you want to argue with me about that, you better hope youre not
clubbed to death by some passing psychopath before you can get your words out!
My second principle is what I call the consentient principle, by which I mean that only
people who share fundamental values are going to be able live together sustainably without
conflict that renders life impossible.
So my opposition to mass society is not just because it was how things were before
civilisation, its because a mass society is a way of life that tries to find a way for all these
people with very different ideas to live together. In this situation, it is not that control of some
by others is a consequential given, its that it is the only means for people with fundamental
values to interact. Even if a person is acting in a way that isnt (with reference to reality, small
or big r, plural or singular) actually motivated by control, Ive seen personally that many
others will view it as such, and make communication, let alone interaction or cohabitation,
totally impossible. History is replete with examples of people that tried to make it work, but
tensions, emotions, and ideologies became too powerful, and the situation disintegrated into
open hostility, security dilemmas, and of course violence.
And I see civilisation and all its constituent elements as inescapably involving the
immoral infringing of the autonomy of some by some others. If you wish to discuss exactly
how this plays out, Im very willing.

I hope you feel you made a good choice by reading this, and I hope youll see value in it,
and keep it as a reference point as you continue to speak with your own voice, and I hope
youll consider speaking to me in that voice, if you feel our goals are comparable or we are
otherwise like-minded and might enrich one anothers lives.
Also, this was difficult to put together and lay out, so I hope youll help me by giving me
the gift of your evaluation.

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