Industrial Society and Its Future:
This text written by Theodore Kaczynski, more commonly known as the Unabomber, serves to give us an explanation behind his crimes. Also known as the Unabomber Manifesto, he gives us his argument on the reasons to reject modern society’s comforts and return to a more primitive way of life. It’s interesting to me as although he attended very prestigious universities and had promising job prospects because of his qualifications, he disavowed the luxuries of the 20th century. Another interesting item is that he bashes the leftist movement in his manifesto, even though he attended decently liberal establishments. In the beginning, he shows quite a distaste for the modern left establishing that they are weak and powerless, but I think that can stand as a metaphor for his situation of living in a cabin in Montana without the trappings of modern-day life, his final demand was for his manifesto to be published by a major newsletter. This demand shows that in a way, he was voiceless in his movement as well and could not accomplish his goal without the assistance of the “system” he wanted to destabilize.
S.C.U.M. Manifesto:
The S.C.U.M. Manifesto, or Society for Cutting Up Men, is the most radically feminist text I have ever read in my life(granted I haven’t read that many). After getting through the first three paragraphs, it seemed as though the author, Valerie Solanas, had been hurt by a man in some way. With some minimal research, I was able to find that she had in fact come from a troubled childhood so as far as her manifesto goes, I think it may be more personal than general. It’s like she’s talking through a megaphone where deep down, she wants this message to reach one person but ends up projecting it onto the whole of society. With all that being said, I am going to have to disagree with most of the things she says. Although there will always be exceptions, I do believe men are capable of feeling compaction, love, and friendship. As someone part of a male sports team, I will always share a close friendship with my teammates. Contrary to her beliefs, men are capable of feeling love for other men, even if it is not of homosexual foundations. There is a different kind of love within our team, it is more of a trust/bond between brothers who have suffered and become victorious with each other. The act of team-wide punishment breaks a man down to his core values, demolishing the last of his defense mechanisms and leaving a core. This core is what each male on the team has seen before, and if they are still on that team, they are there because their values are true and won’t be broken by frivolous misdeeds. Yes, a different kind of love, this bond within men is unbreakable as each individual on the team would sacrifice for the other without hesitation.
Paper Abstract:
After reading The Anarchist Cookbook, the use of Psilocybin spurred my memory, reminding me of some of the outrageous stories I’ve heard about the CIA. The CIA, being an intelligence agency, is obviously always scouring the earth for evidence and proof of certain events. One primary tool they used was espionage and what better time to be a spy than in the midst of the Cold War? This led to the conversation that a spy, if captured, would have no recollection of their instructions, therefore, making the perfect spy. This introduced LSD, a type of psychedelic drug that could alter one’s mental state or memories, perhaps fulfilling the CIA’s secret agendas. My paper will serve to inform and elaborate upon the mental experiments that the CIA implemented in the Cold War era to gain an advantage in the age of espionage. With that being said, a brief introduction to the Cold War and its relationship to the high tensions may cause a nation to look to “acid,” as a viable means of warfare. The fact that the Central Intelligence Agency left no stone unturned when it came to developing MK-ULTRA. This project was the flagship program when it came to weaponizing hallucinogens, and hopefully creating the perfect soldier.
Anarchist Cookbook:
I found this to be quite interesting actually(not in a bad way). The Anarchist Cookbook is exactly what it sounds like, and the information it contains is exactly what you would think to be in it. It pertains to the production of essentially anything that can harm or incapacitate our fellow man. Now although I may be double-dipping a little bit in terms of journal entries because my abstract has a similar topic, I have always found the use of psychedelics interesting. In this “book,” I found it almost amusing that it gave me the exact ingredients and supplies necessary to produce my own Psilocybe concoction. With that being said, I do not find interesting the weapons of mass destruction depicted in this book and don’t think that this information should be freely open to the public. It quite literally took one search to find half the recipes found in this book, meaning any person with the means and capabilities can develop some heinous weapon with little to no prior experience.
The Original Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest:
In my opinion, both the movie and the book follow a very similar storyline, where we follow the life of a young deer and how it communicates with the forest. Now Bambi’s relationship with the forest changes in tandem with his aging, where we see a playful “young prince” at the beginning of his life, a testament to the book and movie’s use of also young animals that help shape Bambi. It creates a playful atmosphere that I could rest in for the beginning of the book, but the movie moves through this zone rather quickly into our first look at the Meadow. One of the biggest realizations in the book is very closely related to the Meadow as it gives Bambi the first look at what he really is, prey. Now, although he technically was prey, Bambi was always treated as royalty because of his bloodline, and we really only see him as prey when his father shows him to the hunter’s village. To me, this village kind of reminded me of Hong Kong where although they are technically separated from China by the government, the mainland still has influence in Hong Kong by way of a police station. Although they would lay dormant for a while, they could very easily pounce on an unsuspecting ecosystem. Now the hunters did pounce forcing Bambi to face his morality after being chased by dogs and men with guns. Another controversy of this book could be brutality on the hunter’s side where we see them burn down the forest and essentially wipes an entire ecosystem. Now although I might have missed out on some of the political/religious undertones, hunting is something that I understand fairly well. When hunting, the goal is to remain as safe as possible and only use what is absolutely necessary to complete the goal. For example, one cannot shoot into a crowd of deer nor should they blindly discharge their weapon into a forest with no regard for where the rest of their hunting party is or if there are other animals in the crossfire. A target should be picked, and that target should be the only casualty, not just hunters trying to get lucky by firing into a forest. This also brings up the conversation that this could be an environmentalist book as the hunter’s village ultimately sets the forest on fire.
The DC Holocaust Museum:
Although I did not have the opportunity to go on this trip, I was, however, able to view the website. Even the website was highly eye-opening, especially in the “One Thousand and Seventy-eight Blue Skies” exhibit. In this exhibit, there are one thousand and seventy-eight pictures of the sky taken directly above every concentration/killing camp that the Nazis occupied. This number by itself is frightening if two thousand people alone were killed, it could be considered a national tragedy. With that obviously not being true and the real number of Jewish people killed is known to be around six million, a number completely unfathomable to me. This exhibit is even more surreal as it attempts to show the helplessness of these oppressed people by grounding us in these camps. By looking at the sky above the camps, we get a glimpse of what the prisoners saw, and I am fortunate enough to have never experienced the same level of helplessness that holocaust victims endure. I can stand to only imagine looking up at the sky, bound by concrete and barbed wire, knowing that my fate would certainly decide for me, with no way out. This exhibit is truly sobering to the fact that real people behind these large figures existed and really experienced this cruelty.
The Marquis De Sade Pt. 1:
In The 120 Days of Sodom by Marquis de Sade, he goes in-depth into his sexual fantasies and darkest perversions. This book allows the reader to get inside the mind of a “libertine,” where Sade divulges what most find a series of disgusting acts upon other humans. Although I completely disagree with the acts spoken upon in the book such as the “little girls affair,” where he and his wife spent a winter in a chateau in the company of very young girls and boys. We do see acts that take place beyond just blind obsession, but in reality a commitment to an extreme form of hedonism through commitment and patience. For example, in the little girls affair, after badly bruising some of the servants, Sade waited for their wounds to heal so as to not raise suspicion of his nefarious deeds committed during the winter. This eventually didn’t because one of the girl’s fathers came forward about it, but this I think is a testament to a “loose end” rather than to his impatience. With that being said, do not take this article for any sort of compassion towards Sade, but rather as an analysis of his commitment to a cause. Also, take a look at where he would impregnate an animal as well as other incapacitated life forms, and then wait the full length of the fetus period to then impregnate the offspring, an act that is repulsive and terrorizes the mind when thought of.
The Gospel of Judas:
The Gospel of Judas is another lost and somewhat buried text similar to that of the Gospel of Mary of Magdala. It is also a fairly difficult text to read as it led me multiple times to the middle of a paragraph only to have lines not available. With that being said, this gospel reading is also not very widely taught because it shows Judas in a different light. Judas, the universal “bad guy,” is almost depicted as a cow for slaughter. From what I was able to extract from the broken text, it seemed as though Jesus knew from the beginning that Judas would be the one to betray him. This foresight created a different relationship between the two that I didn’t see with the other disciples. From this Gospel, Judas makes it seem as though Jesus gave him the fertilizer and nutrients so that he could blossom into the perfect demise. It’s odd though, this part is a widely known fact that Jesus accepts Judas before he is killed which makes perfect sense now because of their history.
The Gospel of Mary of Magdala:
My eyes have been opened. Having attended a Catholic school in Texas for a brief time in middle school and throughout all of my high school, I have never been thoroughly taught about The Gospel of Mary. Although we have heard stories about her exorcism and how she was a prostitute, I was under the impression that that was her real significance. Having focused on the main topics of the Bible, and learning about other forms of ethics/moralities, we must have skipped over her writings. After reading that eleven-page introduction, I can see why. The first reason being and one that I have sort of forgotten was the fact that Catholicism is old. Having the internet now, I don’t think I’ve had to really struggle for information, and seeing how hard it was to preserve teachings before is amazing. It’s crazy to believe that just neglecting a book could deem it unreliable or illegible forever and that there are not really any substantial hard-bound books, just papyruses to base entire cultures off of. The second reason is that I think she might have experienced a little bit of gender bias. Oddly enough, the Church in her conception was not as organized as it is currently, and the fact that you had a council of male Bishops essentially doing anything they can to bring order to a religion that didn’t really have a framework, may lead to some details being left out.
