It’s a beautiful reminder of why our existence is so amazing.

Well guess where I found it being sold as a t-shirt? On Alex Jones Infowars t-shirt store.

How many times is this piece going to come back and haunt me? If I recognized intellectual property as a valid concept, I might just consider suing him. And then I’d sue him for mental anguish. I don’t know if I can deal with accidentally helping the truther movement.

Let this be a lesson children. No propaganda goes unpunished.

Videos

My introduction to North Korea was through the Vice Guide to North Korea.  It still remains my favorite because it is a good mix of entertaining and informative.  It doesn’t go as deep as the other sources of information do, but it does give you a tourists perspective of this country.  It piqued my curiosity and was the reason I decided to continue learning more about North Korea.

They also just released a different version of the same trip where they explored the North Korean Film Industry.

Shortly after finishing the Vice Guide, I found this special from National Geographic.  It’s a slightly deeper look into the brainwashing that the North Koreans suffer.

Audiobooks

Nothing to Envy:  This book chronicles the lives of several different citizens of North Korea and their escapes from the dictatorship.  It was a painful but inspiring read.

The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag:  Thanks to Casey for recommending this to me.  This is one mans story about growing up in a gulag and escaping from North Korea.  I have never heard of more cruel conditions than the ones that these gulags inflict upon its political prisoners.  I think it’s the most important book to read to gain more insight into how terrible and destructive to humanity the concept of government is.

Articles

Worse than 1984.  Christopher Hitchens wrote an interesting article about North Korea. 

Let me know if you recommend any other reads or watches that relate to North Korea.

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I recently watched the movie “Into The Wild” and it effected me deeply. So deeply that I sobbed harder than I have in awhile while thinking about the main character’s life. I decided that a reaction like that deserved all of my attention, so I next turned to reading the book this weekend while hiking through the forests of Georgia. I just finished it and wanted to express some thoughts and feelings about why this story effected me so deeply.

If you haven’t seen the movie yet and hate spoilers, you might not want to read further. Although the telling of this story stands strong on its own I know that some people do not like spoilers, so here is the obligatory warning.

“Into The Wild” is Jon Krakauer’s (great author) telling of a true story about a 24 year old man named Chris McCandless. In short, it is a story about his adventure away from his family and eventually into the wild of Alaska. It is difficult for many people to understand why someone who came from an affluent family, graduated with a high GPA from Emory University and had all of the wealth available to him decided to give all of his money away and wander the earth.

I am not convinced that it is as difficult to understand if you are in touch with your true desires. At least for me, it made perfect sense to me why he acted in this manner. In both the book and the movie you quickly learn that he came from a family that did not try to understand his desires but rather tried to project their own onto him. When he did not fit the mold that his father and mother expected they rejected him. They did this by trying to shame him for who he was. He made an effort for awhile to fit into their mold by going to school, getting good grades and succeeding at multiple ventures. Eventually something inside him could no longer take the lie and he fled to discover who he really was.

I think that more people have this desire more than they would like to admit. Admitting something usually means that action is just around the corner. I know that is my biggest fear in admitting my desires out loud. It means that I’m no longer ignoring the desires of the multitude of personalities in my mind and allowing them access to the wheel of my fate. I think this is why most people hide their desires and keep them in their mind or deep within the pages of a journal.

To hide from others is to kill who we are as humans. What’s even more frustrating about that is that we usually suppress our own desires because it brings to light the regret others feel about suppressing their own.

Chris surpressed his desires for 22 years. Once he was done with college he donated $22,000 in savings to a charity, burned all of his identification and hit the road. He renamed himself Alexander Supertramp and spent the next three years of his life trying to find himself. He canoed down treacherous parts of the Colorado River all the way to Mexico, hitchhiked back to The United States, met other tramps of all different walks of life (and effected each one deeply) and then set out to Alaska for his greatest adventure. This is where the story took a deep turn and one that I had to face in myself due to the outcome. Alex went into the Alaska wilderness fairly unprepared and died there from starvation.

That’s where the unconscious can be tricky. If you go against the grain of society without understanding why, then I think the programming in your brain, that your parents instilled in you, sets off a time bomb that leads to some form of self destruction. It’s programming that is your parents harshest way of saying, “I told you so.”

It’s not tragic that he died. Tragic implies that it was just a random uncontrollable act of nature. It’s extremely sad that he died because he did not have to.

I spent a lot of the movie and book feeling anger towards Alex’s parents. They set up that time bomb in him to keep him in their mold. This effects me personally because I decided to take a break from my own family a number of years ago. I know the early programming that my parents instilled in me is activated every time I do something that deeply connects to my desires and is against their own. Even though my parents are not in my life to tell me what I should and should not do, they still have a deep unconscious effect on me. Where this shows up most in my life is when new relationships are brought into my orbit. It’s an effect that I spend much of my time and money in therapy trying to counteract. I also counteract this through having conversations with myself to figure out what is true and not.

Although I feel a great amount of anger and frustration with the knowledge that I would not have to go through this effort on my own if my parents had have just dealt with their own issues before having children, I want to emphasize that it is exhilarating to achieve personal freedom through this process. Unlike Alex, I understand the necessity to continue to face the demons of my past before I throw myself into my desires.

One of my biggest desires at the moment is travel. I would like to quit my job for a year or two and explore this country (and eventually the world). I think and feel that it would be a healthy and enlightening experience. It’s one that I plan on continuing to explore with an open mind and heart. But before I set forth to make the most of this short existence, I want to make sure I defuse this bomb in the brain.

To Alex… I’m deeply sorry your parents never tried to understand you. From what I read, they still refuse to understand you to this day and are in their own personal hell because of it. I’m happy you made the effort to escape and am sad that your history caught up to you in such a cruel way.

And to those who connect to Alex like I do… Learn from Alex and defuse that bomb (and keep defusing it). After that, life is yours.

“An idiot repeats his mistakes. A smart man learns from his mistakes. But a genius learns from the mistakes of others.” -unknown

I have my own revision to this quote: “An unconscious human repeats his mistakes. An awakening human learns from his mistakes. A conscious human being learns from the mistakes of others. Each is a stage of the journey to truth. Each is important in its own right.”

I went through 5 years of college without forging one friendship that has stood to this day. Come to think of it, I went through all of school without one relationship lasting. I probably would only have a group of acquaintances that I would call friends if it were not for the Internet. I hold the word friend to a higher level than most. To me, a friend is someone who I feel connected and alive with. Someone who I can truly explore who I really am with. Someone who will let me explore who they really are. It sounds cliché. I wish it was. I think many people go through life with that hope but don’t achieve it.

The Internet has enabled me to seek out and forge those relationships. I don’t think it’s very conscious at the moment, but I think most people on social networks are on for that same reason. I think that it’s part of our social evolution and a key part.

Without the Internet I would not have been introduced to Ayn Rand’s philosophy, atheism, anarchism or any other ideas that have completely changed the way I think about life.

My generation is sitting on a potential energy bomb of social connection and are hooking into it at an exponential rate. There are flurries of true human connection here and there but I don’t think that it is even close to being fully tapped.

That’s what excites me about the Internet. The potential for human connection. That’s why I blog. That’s why I Facebook. That’s why I Twitter. That’s why I use deviantArt.

I just thought I’d make it conscious and hope to make it conscious for others. I’ve seen a lot of shaming (self and external) going on lately about using social networking. I don’t want it to become another excuse to shame ourselves for being human. These tools are meant to be embraced and used to connect with people who will help you become who you are. And by natural exchange, you will help them become who they are.

I call people like this scrambled egg brains. They took their active minds and stimulated them in such a way that made them more connected with their thoughts and emotions than connected with reality. Philosophers like Nietzsche and Krishnamurti come to mind when I think of great people who have been inflicted with this condition. It is this condition, this kind of uncontrolled stream of data, with nuggets of genius, that lights me up.

I don’t show this part of me openly in my day-to-day, or at least I don’t think I do, but I consider myself as a carrier of this condition. I think this is where my fascination and fear of these people comes into play. I love to tap my own creativity and let myself spill out onto paper (or pixels) and get a tea leaf reading of who I really am as a person. That coupled with disconnection with reality, however, is what I have observed leading into self destruction with myself and others. I don’t think it’s a conscious self destruction by any means. I think it is in our programming from our childhoods. It is the illogic that was inflicted on us as children. Being told stories about hell and sin and then given no answer to a simple question, “Why?”

Many of us grew up with parents who were completely mind fucked from the hippy movement (aka Vietnam War), coupled with the superstitions and bigotries of the past. Even if our own parents didn’t do drugs themselves, they were still inflicted by the type of thinking.

Everytime I see someone else with scrambled egg brains, I feel deeply sad that they were unable to connect their beautiful creativity to reality. I feel joy in their self-expression through their art, but I also feel the pain in their utter confusion with the world.

Part of my personality wants to take me down to the end of that road. Down the road of letting down all barriers and letting my mind explode open into whatever form feels most natural. I fear that form will take on a self destructive quality because of the twisted thoughts that were inflicted upon me by my parents, teachers and other hurt people when I was a child.

I have been trying most of my life to develop a methodology to combat this unconscious desire to live in my own head and escape from reality through subjectivism. So far what has kept me grounded is the scientific method. I know that as humans we are pattern recognizing machines. That unfettered can lead to making connections that don’t really exist in reality. That in itself is not really a problem. That is what helps us to abstract and understand the world and our interaction with it. However, patterns can be created in our own minds that do not correspond with reality in any way. That is what leads to false-concepts such as god, the state and other self destructive thought processes. We can trust our senses, but only to the point that they are actually able to interpret reality. The rest we need to leave up to trial and error and leave conclusions aside until we can be sure enough to function in reality.

It’s a fine line I walk because I love deep thinking philosophy as I love deep feeling psychology. However, both left without a methodology will leave you disoriented, confused and ultimately destroyed. Worse than that, it’s a disease that can be passed onto your children. There’s nothing more self destructive than participating in the destruction of a young mind.

Here’s a video that helped me to understand the brain better:

And here are some videos from artists that I appreciate but also think have the momentum towards scrambled egg brains.

I’d love to hear others thoughts on this because I think it’s a topic that is close to the surface for most people but one that is hard to admit because letting people know you have that potential often makes them treat you like a time bomb. (I think because they feel that own potential in themselves and have that fear about themselves)

My earliest curiosity in propaganda was sparked by a street artist named Shepard Fairey that started a street art movement called Obey Giant.  If you haven’t seen this sticker or poster plastered up somewhere, you haven’t been paying attention to your surroundings.

I saw was this poster and wondered what it meant.  At the time the Internet was limited to AOL and Prodigy so I didn’t have the information sources that I have today.  I happened into a strange bookstore in San Diego county called Ducky Waddles.  I noticed that they had posters with Andre the Giant’s face all over the place.  They also had a book that talked about Fairey’s purpose for the Obey Giant street campaign.  As far as I remember it was to evoke a curious response and have people question their surroundings and the advertisements they are subjected to.  I flipped through the book and found other pieces that Fairey had done, such as this one:

I found these pieces powerful and the idea behind them powerful.  One simple image was able to evoke so much curiosity and excitement in me.  I started to learn more about propaganda and its use throughout political history.  If you doubt how powerful this imagery can be, just do a Google search on North Korean Propaganda and see how full of emotion each piece is.

I started to notice more street art around me.  Around this time I was also becoming interested in philosophy.  I was slowly drifting towards atheism and moral relativism.  A Christian friend of mine, who was also a philosophy major, pointed out some pro-Christian street art that was around.  One piece in particular gave me the chills:

It also angered me to see this.  It was a reference to the most hotly debated topic in the religious versus secular realm: abortion.  I was angry mainly because the message was so trite for a topic that was so complex.  But I also realized what an emotional impact that this trite message could have on people.  How it could shut down thought so quickly and shut down debate.  I played around with the idea a bit and produced my first anti-propaganda piece.

I thought it was amusing, but didn’t ever feel like I made the impact I wanted to with it.  It didn’t really evoke the same deep emotions and certainly didn’t spark much curiosity.

I would travel up to Santa Barbara during my college years to go to parties.  While walking off a hangover one day I came across this painted on a sidewalk:

I was starting to get into Objectivism at the time and again felt angry and personally insulted by this piece of propaganda.  I countered it with my own:

This piece had emotional impact.  When I posted it on my blog, I received floods of hate comments.  I also was shocked later to see it on a bumper sticker, and then another, and then somebodies avatar, and then another.  It spread virally to some degree.  I still see it to this day pop up around the web and on peoples cars.  Unfortunately it is mainly being  used now by conservatives.  But that’s what I get for not fully understanding Socialism and Capitalism.  That’s the danger of spreading an idea.  If you don’t fully understand it, it will be used to further evil agendas.  Part of me is proud that I created an emotionally impactful piece of propaganda but I also worry about any consequences it may have in the future.

I tried to counter my own mistake with yet another piece fairly recently:

Better.  But, still not sure about its future impact.  Time will tell.

The propagandization of my own image is something I derive more joy than any other form of propaganda.  I’ve used it as an expression of one part of my personality or another.  The first part of my personality that emerged in the form of propaganda was one that I named MAF.  This was an acronym for Mini American Flags, which was a blog I used to have.  I used it to express my ideas in an over-the-top, humorous sort of way.   Here was the most prominent image that I used of myself:

MAF is the part of me that desires attention and has strong opinions on every topic.  He’s sort of Lewis Black sort of character that I use to express my frustrations about the world in a funny way.  I think this part of my personality bloomed because I was sick of being propagandized by my parents and my culture.  It was my first rebellion against the norm.

During this time I posted the following to try to evoke emotions in others.

I had a lot of fun with these images and spent hours on them.  They did evoke response, especially the Bush ones.  It’s what I wanted from my world.  Feedback and response.  Both things I finally had the freedom to control in my own life rather than be subjected to at the hands of my family and teachers.

I had a lull after that, sometimes producing a piece just for my own entertainment.

Neither really inspired anything in me, but were fun to play around with.

Last night I had insomnia pretty bad.  For some reason I picked up my mouse again and produced the following.

I’m not really sure where this came from, but I was proud with the result and others enjoyed it as well.  It’s another self-portrait.  Possibly another awaking of part of my personality.  I hope so, because whenever a new part emerges I spill out onto this world with so much creative passion.  Hope to post more soon.

Let me know what you think about propaganda and the emotions it evokes in you.  Is it an art form that you appreciate?  Hate?  Can it be used for good?  I’d like to think so.  The medium is the message.

*AFTERTHOUGHT*  Shepard Fairey went onto produce one of the most infamous pieces of propaganda of our time.  I find that disturbing because he knew the power of propaganda and seemed to be against it.  And yet he will go down in history as helping Obama get into power.  Wow…

If you have kids and you’re putting yourself in danger of being arrested: stop now. Given the choice between “Dad in prison for ‘freedom’” and “Dad who’s around” I guarantee your kids would choose a present father. Figure out what’s going on for you to make you want to put yourself in danger. You don’t have to get arrested in order to be free. You can free yourself without being a martyr.

Freedom starts with your personal relationships, and if you are in jail, you most likely aren’t serious about being free.