Yo dog, I heard you like Marxism. So we put Marxism in your Marxism, so you can Marx while you Marx! Also, evil space lizard chronologists who use chronomancy to devour the pure chronotons of natural mortals by enslaving them with evil clocks!!! That’s right folks, part three of Rhyd’s amazing journey in to time with: The Time of Your Life

Mechanical Laws, Non-Mechanical World

What arose from the conquering of Natural Time has been called the Mechanistic World-view, a crucial aspect of Capitalist thought and a brutal guardian against the return of Pagan religions to the world. In Mechanistic thinking, the world is governed by immutable laws which both predict and constrain everything. Both the basis of modern Science-thinking and the foundation of many political ideologies, including many totalitarian ones (consider that statement about Fascism and punctual trains…).

Oh come the fuck on!

Science, man? You’re really going to claim that Science is evil too? Fucking Hel, I should stop right here and just send you off to Sargon of Akkad or some other Atheist. You have just achieved Fundamentalist Christian levels of anti-scientific thinking here.

For the Gods’ sake, Pagans invented Science! Alchemy, Mathematics, Philosophy, Medicine, etc. All of these things, and their scientific world view, have existed since ancient Pagan Times! Gods damn it, Rhyd I know you hate history books and learning actual facts because they get in the way of your glorious Marxism, but for fuck’s sake.

And the fuck is that about Fascists and punctual trains!!! So they promised the trains would run on time. Have you never had to wait on a late train? do you fucking know how annoying that shit is? It’s terrible. It’s almost as bad as a dude not showing up for work, making you do all his shit for him, and then demanding to know why his pay check isn’t as high as yours. Not that you’d know anything about that, since you seem to be the guy whose always calling in and making others cover your lazy ass.

Iterated by thinkers such as Isaac Newton, René Descartes, and Francis Bacon and eventually filtered out into the rest of Western society as a part of the Protestant/Capitalist Work ethic. Nature and its chaotic tendencies became foes to be vanquished and subdued. Many Pagans make the mistake of equating the Judeo-Christian Bible as having instituted anthropocentric ‘dominionism’ over Nature, but this, like many other things Capitalism has wrought, is several thousand years newer than popular histories ever let on.

Each new layer is more stupider than the last.

I…literally, did not think anyone could be this stupid. I have talked with redneck hillbillies who dropped out of the 3rd grade who had a better grasp of reality and facts than Rhyd does.

I…I literally do not know how to make fun of this.

Machine-thinking provided not just a moral justification, but also a moral imperative for the subjugation of peoples and of Nature. If Time could be known and regulated like a machine, thus, too, could all the world. James Watts, the ‘father’ of the coal-fired Steam Engine and Francis Bacon, the much lauded (but very vile) founder of the Scientific Method, both spoke and wrote of Nature as a passive woman, waiting to be wooed, subjugated, even raped. Naomi Klein, in her book on Capitalism and Climate Change, tells it best:

If the modern-day extractive economy has a patron saint, the honor should probably go to Francis Bacon. The English philosopher, scientist, and statesman is credited with convincing Britain’s elites to abandon, once and for all, pagan notions of the earth as a life-giving mother figure to whom we owe respect and reverence (and more than a little fear) and accept the role as her dungeon master. “For you have but to follow and as it were hound nature in her wanderings,” Bacon wrote in De Augmentis Scientiarum in 1623, “and you will be able, when you like, to lead and drive her afterwards to the same place again…Neither ought a man to make scruple of entering and penetrating into these holes and corners, when the inquisition of truth is his sole object.” -Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything. p.170. [Emphasis mine]

Bloody Hela…I’m pretty sure those quotes are taken out of context. And I know that the person complaining about them certainly doesn’t understand what they mean.

What Bacon is saying here is “when you seek truth, seek it completely, do not hold back because of personal beliefs or scruples.” Or in plan English: “Don’t let your ideology get in the way of finding facts.”

Something Rhyd here would no doubt be terrified of doing.

Even popular notions of the Divine changed with the advent of Machine-time. Deism, which saw the Monotheist’s one-god as a “Divine Watchmaker,” shifted the understanding of humanity’s relationship to the Other not as one of co-creators, but one in which God left all the world to ‘man’ to be regulated, known, and perfected. It shouldn’t surprise us that many of the same mechanistic thinkers who changed civilization’s view of time and Nature were also Deists, including, of course, Benjamin Franklin.

And now Deism is evil too.

Because of course it is.

So let’s see, clocks are evil, time is evil, industry is evil, capitalism is evil, science is evil, Deism is evil, space lizards are evil, and every evil thing comes from ancient Chronomancers who have decided for us that things should be measured and quantifiable based on “reality” rather than allowing us to lay in bed and get up when we feel it is “natural.”

Also, Ben Franklin space lizard confirmed.

Such a mechanistic worldview runs counter to quite a few important threads of Pagan thought, particularly Animism, which sees the world and all things in it alive, breathing with spirit, rather than inert cogs in the machines of progress which churn out human wealth.

It does however work perfectly fine with the various reconstruction religions (especually Greek and Roman ones), ritual magic traditions, and…all the other traditions that Rhyd and co decried as potentially…alt…right…

Huh.

Welp, anyone who believes in empirical evidence, fact based arguments, and scientific and/or logical reasoning is now an alt-right fascist. Controlled by Space lizard in the form of Jews, who made watches which enslaved our pure chronologies for their evil capitalistic desires.

Reclaiming Time

Our pre-Capitalist ancestors were not stupid, nor did they have no conception of time. Societies cannot exist if everyone is late or cannot determine when to sleep, wake up, or plant grains. What’s changed under Capitalist Time is our individual participation in time, our inherent timing of our lives according to natural phenomenon and culturally-constructed needs.

You know, I wonder if he just threw darts at a board to come up with this.

Yes Rhyd, we got clocks. That let us be more specific about meeting up with people and doing things. Some of these things involve jobs. We know you hate it. And how dare society ask you to contribute something.

We get it already.

The birth of Capitalist Machine-time should not be seen as Technological ‘Advance,’ because Enlightenment thinkers and Factory managers were hardly the only ones capable of understanding precise time. Sidereal time, the tracking of the stars over a year, was practiced for millenia before Capitalists came up with time-sheets and punch clocks, and we need only think on Newgrange, Stonehenge and countless ancient monuments in the world to recognize that precisely timing an event is at least 5000 years old. Likewise, ancient chronometers which could precisely tell the positions of stars during any time of the year were what helped many sea-faring civilizations travel thousands of miles long before the British and Dutch ships brought slaves and Capitalism to the Americas.

Hey Rhyd, can you tell me if Marxist countries have clocks? I mean, I’m sure Marxist countries were known for their lackadaisical attitude about when you show up for work and all, but I don’t suppose you could give me a few links or something.

Since, you know, Marxism and its forms of production and compensation are so different from Capitalist ones.

Oh, and by the way, how the fucking hell do you think the Ancient Pagans were so good with mapping those things out without using Science, you myopic manatee!!!!

Machine-time must be inculcated, and Capitalist Time is taught to us in school in almost laughable ways. Shifting from one classroom to the next each hour was a pedagogical innovation not because it would help children learn better, but because it would prepare them better for the factories, the mills, and the assembly lines.

Rhyd…won’t don’t you just move somewhere else? I hear Cuba is nice. It’s Marxist. They just opened it up. You could go there, live a nice Marxist life, find a nice Marxist wife (or husband I don’t care), raise some Marxist kids, and keep the evil scientific capitalism out of your Marxist heaven. If you really hate it here so much, just leave.

Just leave man. You don’t have to keep living somewhere you hate. You don’t have to surround yourself with a world you hate. Just leave those of us happy with our lives to live our lives happily and go find somewhere you can be happy.

In fact, Capitalist industrialists had a very strong hand in the development of universal education in both England and the United States. You may have heard of Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller? Here’s from their mission statement in 1913 as they created and funded educational policy to prepare children for their factories.

“In our dreams, we have limitless resources and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions fade from their minds, and unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning, or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, editors, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have an ample supply…The task we set before ourselves is very simple as well as a very beautiful one, to train these people as we find them to a perfectly ideal life just where they are. So we will organize our children and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way, in the homes, in the shops and on the farm.” – General Education Board, Occasional Papers #1

You know what’s funny?

I’m pretty sure both those men were “Progressive Liberals.”

Yeah, see, this quote is all about helping people to live “Better, perfect” lives. It was a common tag line with Progressives back in the day. Progress, moving society forwards, improving it. Removing the imperfections to create the perfect people, free of the vices and sins of yesterday.

Actually, it’s a lot like Progressives (Such as Rhyd) today. They haven’t really changed much. Sure, they’ve dropped a couple ideas, shifted a few ideas around (Progressives started abortion clinics to help purify society of the “unwanted” but now they start abortion clinics to help “women have control over their bodies.”). So…same actions, slightly different melody.

Universal education is hardly only about enlightening children, but also about making them time-disciplined workers, ever more productive than their parents.  In schools we are punished for being late, our marks on papers reduced just as pay is docked for tardyness, all to systematically continue the War on Time the early industrialists waged against the lazyness of humans.

Actually, universities today are about producing Cultural Marxist Activists.

And papers are docked for being Factually Wrong and having Bad Arguments (or at least they were when I was in school, lately they seem marked down for “wrong think”). Which is completely different from having your pay docked because you were tardy (though I am starting to see why you may have had to beg people to help you pay your rent with a job that is supposed to pay as well as yours does).

Time-discipline is taught in our youth because Capital thinks not with the mind of Nature, but the mind of the Machine. We must be managed, both internally and externally, so that the great cogs and gears of Profit grind on, even as our own time is crushed into death by the logic of the wealthy and powerful.

Yes, how dare they oppress us with their logic and impose it over our feels.

I mean, not like society would fall apart into chaos, anarchy, and bloodshed if we didn’t suppress our natural emotions with logic and facts.

Oh wait.

Internalizing machine-time is not about developing a discipline, it is about undergoing discipline. It is a management, an un-wilding of our nature. We become more like the machines which control us, forgetting who created whom, and like many other modern enslavements, Paganism and Witchcraft stand against it.

Clearly you know nothing of Rome and it’s Paganism.

Or ritual based witchraft.

Or Alchemy.

Wait, are sure his name isn’t really John Snow, he seems to know nothing…

And standing against Capitalist Time is an idea from a very unlikely source, from traditions hardly known for their revolutionary stance. Both Wicca and many forms of modern Druidry have, as core beliefs, the vital observance of the natural cycles of sidereal (astrological) and solar time. The Wheel of the Year and the marking of the Moon’s cycles are, if anything, a radical reminder of what Time means outside the Machine and how humans, in concert with Nature and all its beings, co-create our own conceptions of time.

I find your cultural appropriations of Wiccan beliefs to be offensive Rhyd. You’re not a Wiccan. You have no right to their culture or beliefs, you imperialist.

Come on Rhyd, it’s 2016. Stop with the imperialism already!

To escape Machine Time isn’t to destroy it—we do not need smash the clocks and watches of the world like Protestants smashing pagan idols in the cathedrals (Protestants who, we should remember, also helped create Machine time!)

Sure Rhyd…sure….

Rather, we should challenge those who wield it against our numbered hours for profit. Cheat the time-sheet, abandon the alarm? Those are honorable tactics, and a great start. But it is not always possible for many who are trapped deeper in the machine than others.

Rhyd…if you do not go into work, the someone else has to do your work and their work.

For example the day I’m writing all this I had to change shifts and go into work early, because someone called out. Because they called out, we all had to work a lot harder today and we didn’t get done everything we wanted to. I had to stay late as well, because if I had left when I was supposed to, then that would have made it even harder for those working with me.

What you are basically saying here is “fuck your coworkers, fuck the people counting on you, do what you like so you’re not ‘part of the machine’ man.”

Now, my job is pretty low key and probably not all that important. You, Rhyd, however are a social worker who helps homeless people find places where they can live. If you do not go to work, if you show up late to work, if you make others pick up your slack and they can’t, then that means that someone is not going to have a place to live. They will be stuck, out on the street, possibly to be hurt, killed, or die from natural causes. Now, personally, I don’t care what your job pays you (or the fact it’s what I’d call a nice paycheck). But people litereally count on you for their lives and you want to argue for the right, and even practice the right, to fuck off your alarm, come into work when you feel like it, leave when you feel like it…

…and you justify it because of ancient chronomancers who invented clocks to enslave all of humanity for evil capitalism and science.

And you’re advocating that other people do this too. Regardless of their job, regardless of the people counting on them to both help with the work, and provide the very real services needed by most jobs, to just fuck off, do what they wish, and let someone else pick up the slack, the pieces, or tell people whose lives were damaged or destroyed “well, he’s off fighting ‘capitalism’ through the noble method of not showing up and cheating the time clock.’

That latter of which is actually theft, by the way. So, congrats for being a thief and stealing from people. Pretty sure that is the opposite of honor though. Honor would be showing up and keeping your oaths that you made when you took the job in the first place. Maybe, you should instead quit your job and let someone who would work it happily have it while you go jack off to Marx’s beard.

Unwaging our hours is perhaps a better strategy, one we can do best by finally putting to rest that horrid mantra which encapsulated hundreds of years of Protestant and Capitalist time discipline. We must remind ourselves, repeat endlessly until our time is again our own:

Time is not Money.

Money is Not Time.

And we will never be machines.

You can, however, be unemployed and allow someone else to have your job. Who will be happy to have it, and help people with it. Who will behave in an honorable and honest means. And who knows Rhyd, maybe one day they would help find your “liberated” ass a place to sleep.

You know what, My Time is my own. And I choose to Sell that time to others for pay. To receive that pay, no matter how small, in order to be a part of society and contribute in some small way to making people’s lives better. Maybe it’s the people I help with my job, maybe it’s just to make my coworker’s days a little easier, or to make my bosses smile as my crazy ass does what needs to be done.

It ain’t much, but I can and have found some pride and joy in it. Though I may be a lowly “legionnaire” fighting in the trenches, I can look upon the glory that is my civilization and take pride that I, thou so small as to be invisible, have helped carry on the workings of my forefathers for another day, and that future generations may know even greater things for what I have done.

I suspect that’s a feeling you will never know, Rhyd. You are filled with hatred and bitterness. Instead of seeking something you can have pride in, and in being an honest man to those around you, you seek only to destroy what others have build over hundreds, even thousands of years. To undo everything that is…simply because you are not happy where you are…and will not go to find happiness elsewhere. Your heart is black and bitter, you have fed only the wolf of vengeance. Your Rage has blinded you, until you are but a warrior whipping about a broken sword and a shattered shield, striving for any excuse, no matter how fantastic, to validate your life’s choices and your heart’s hatred.

I pity you Rhyd. I honestly do. But that pity isn’t enough to keep me from laughing at the stupidity you spout. Nor is that pity enough to make me stop fighting off your Marxist imperialism as it tries to conquer everything and remake the world the way you desire it to be.

 

Bellona Invicta