With most of the world raving about the presidential election in the US, it can seem that your fate rests in the hands of a sociopath who thousands of miles away. The truth is, unless you’re being harassed by bureaucrats or police officers every day, you probably still have a lot of freedom in your life. Every breath and every step is an act of liberty, so choose them wisely.
Watch the full episode here: 2016 election: The two clown show.
Psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis as schools of thought are less than 150 years old, and we shouldn’t be surprised if such young sciences have gaps of knowledge, questions that are still left open, or even questions that are outright ignored. It’s possible, even likely, that the modern psychiatric model of mental illness is incomplete, and could learn things from other schools of thought.
Many people have the conception that being diagnosed with a mental illness means that you have a chemical imbalance. However, such “illnesses” are normally diagnosed by looking at behaviour, rather than blood tests or other chemical tests to determine amounts of chemicals in one’s brain. So, at least in the majority of cases, the “chemical imbalance” idea is just an assumption.
In contrast, there are shamanistic traditions which stretch back hundreds or even thousands of years. Shamans have been helping people through the strange times in their lives even before recorded history. Is it possible that psychiatry and psychology still have a lot to learn from shamanistic methods?
This is a clip from an interview that Andrarchy (Andrew Levine) did with Kurt, and more clips will be coming over the next couple of weeks.
To download this episode in audio, right click here and press ‘Save as’.
“Mental Illness” – how and what to learn from your mind breaking
Andrarchy’s post on Steemit introducing his show
What a shaman sees in a mental hospital
A traditional approach to mental illness – Phil Borges TED talk
Healing with communication, conversation and love by Sterlin Luxan
In the evolution of money, first comes barter, then goods like silver, gold and conch shells, then comes fiat currency, then cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin. What comes next? At each step of the way, people trade something which represents an idea – the idea of labour, or the idea of value provided. What if we could trade ideas themselves?
Anam Paiseanta explains his ideas on why rights don’t exist, and why keeping firearms can be so important – especially when negotiating with violent gangs.
Anam Paiseanta: To have maybe an educated opinion about [gun control], we have to look at some of the other ideas we’ve inherited. It seems natural for anarchists to be pro-gun, because we understand that there are no such things as rights, right. There’s only what you negotiate.
The idea of rights – who gave us this idea of rights? Like there’s a package of benefits that you just ‘get’. Who gave us that idea? There’s not, that’s an illusion. And if we just started to see the world as – there’s just this playing field and then the results are whatever you negotiate.
Like a soccer team or a football team enters. There’s a field, it’s level, there’s a goal on either end. There’s lines that segment the field. There’s a team that opposes you, this could be seen as the obstacles in life. Then there’s the ball, there’s your effort, and there’s the network of people you can form who support you in your goals – literally in your goals – there’s a metaphor for you.
Which team has the rights to a goal? The idea doesn’t even make sense. There’s no goal unless you negotiate one. As we’re going through life, there are no rights, there’s only what you negotiate. When you’re negotiating with people in voluntary relationships, you have to come by adding value. And when you’re negotiating with gangs, even really organized gangs, that all wear the same color clothing, and have insignias that they all belong to the same gang, and they all have guns, and they come to the negotiation not with words, not with pieces of paper that are promises – they come to the negotiation with guns. And a lot of times, they act to take away your right to your body, your right to your product, your right to your free movement. So these are the three aspects of the self – your present, your future and your past self, right. Your body, your movement, and your product – things you spent labor or time on yesterday in order to acquire.
So how do you negotiate with these people? Because there’s no rights – there’s only what you negotiate.
So although I am all for peace, and I seek to contribute to a society that generates peace because it’s just, and it’s just because it’s voluntary – I recognize that, we don’t yet live in that society. And just like every eagle has claws and every gazelle has horns, and the ability to run away from its predators, and every animal on Earth has some kind of mechanism or apparatus to defend itself, I think that humans should not be the only animal
*Holds up rifle*
that gives away its ability to defend itself to its only predators – which would be other humans.
For those of you who are too busy to watch an hour long interview, we decided to take out some of the best bits for you to enjoy.
In this clip, Andrew Levine (a.k.a. @andrarchy) describes some important concepts relating to his idea of a massively multiplayer OFFline game. It’s a kind of roleplaying game, with a limited set of rules, which the participants may change as they go along. The players decide what the prize is, and what one must do to achieve it. Andrew also explains how roleplaying games like this enable us to indulge in impulses, such as dishonest, which we couldn’t necessarily get away with in our regular lives, and finally he mentions how cryptocurrency and Steemit make these kinds of ambitious projects possible.
An extract from episode 3 where Kurt asks Aaron some tough questions about what taxation is and how a government operates. Are governments inherently violent?
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