Letters

Dear comrades,

I write this letter to demonstrate my abilities as a contralogician, but also to provide you with theoretical knowledge that could help you in your everyday lives. This work will redefine the popular notion of the practice known as meditation and place it on a contralogical foundation.

If I am handing this to you, you are likely aware that some of us assume as a hypothesis that our entire reality is based on contradiction, or the unity of opposites. If this is correct, we should be able to take any existing phenomenon and break it down into its bi-unitary components. In the case of meditation, the fundamental contradiction is the bi-unity of work and rest.

Be aware that this is a work derived from my practical experiences. I was a Buddhist for six years of my life, at my peak skill spending whole days completely absorbed in meditative practice, for weeks at a time. When I explored the core Buddhist texts more deeply, I began to disagree with certain parts of the doctrine and eventually abandoned it altogether.

Because I had lost faith in the theory, I lost my motivation to practice. This isn't surprising if we consider that it is our ideas which shape our worldview that frames our daily activities. The rejection of those ideas will lead us to a different path even if we still recognize the value of the actions they generated. If we want to continue pursuing these actions after their justification was lost, we will have to find a new and higher justification that is in accordance with our new and higher level of personal development.

This is my attempt to rescue what I perceive to be the good aspects from the bad aspects of my Buddhist experience. I'm in desperate need of reincorporating meditation in my life due to the amount of stress that the current moment is calling for, and I'm here to share my synthesis of a secular meditative practice which I believe to be an invaluable tool for anyone who dares to struggle for a better future.

The words we use to define concepts and experiences are very important, but there is a complexity to our understanding of language that makes it necessary to redefine words to achieve desirable results in any given context. These definitions will never be precise but ultimately what matters is that they effectively serve the purpose that they were designed for. For our purposes we will be giving specific meanings to stress, work, rest, and meditation.

We can think of stress as a property that we possess which determines our physical and mental motion. It acts in the way that momentum does in the context of Newtonian mechanics. The more active we are, the more stress we experience. Our voluntary and involuntary actions generate stress, and so does our environment. Reducing our action and changing to a more relaxed environment can reduce our stress. A body completely at rest is a body without movement, which is equivalent to death. Thus, we can say that there is no life without stress.

From stress as the foundation of our perspective we will derive definitions of work and rest. Work is anything which increases stress, and rest is anything which decreases it. There are two types of each: the passive type and the active type. Passive work is the physical actions that generate stress which are independent of our will. If we apply our willpower to act in a way which generates stress, this would be considered active work. The same idea follows for passive and active rest.

Work and rest are not mutually exclusive here. There are things that happen which have both a component of work and a component of rest. One will likely dominate the other or even switch places depending on the context of the situation. It is possible for restful activity to become stressful, and vice versa. It is also possible for physical rest to generate mental stress, mental rest to generate physical stress, physical stress to generate mental rest, and mental stress to generate physical stress. The complexity of the topic is worth noting, but we won't elaborate on it here.

The way that meditation is commonly thought of in the popular sense is what we could consider a highly focused form of active resting. The practitioner attempts to bring the body and mind to a lower level of stress using various highly efficient techniques. Exerting willpower is a form of active work, so all active rest contains an element of stress, but in the case of popular meditation the work is always directly or indirectly aimed at constantly reducing stress. Though useful as an example, we are going to be abandoning this sense of meditation for now. I want you to think that I am here to teach you how to rest, not how to meditate.

If we are going to choose to live our lives as highly effective active workers, it would only make sense that we also become highly effective active resters. Many of us have suffered from burnout, the imbalance of work and rest in the ultimate favor of work, and continue to do so in an endless cycle. In the long-term this makes us highly ineffective or even counterproductive in the same way that we should not operate heavy machinery when we are deprived of sleep. We rise to the demands of our circumstances, but we neglect to adjust our self-care accordingly. This should stop.

There are many ways to induce rest, but the engineer inside of me is telling you that we should learn how to do it as efficiently and effectively as possible. We want to reach a state of being fully conscious active resters. When we choose to rest without knowing the best possible way to do so, we are only partially conscious. Why? Because, with few exceptions, if we knew a better way we would be pursuing it. This is the rational action of individuals skilled in their practice.

I'm out of time. Please let me know if this interests you and I will continue. I would like to go into detail on the mechanism of rest, some techniques that can be employed to maximize it, and how Buddhist concepts translate to secular experiences.

All the best,

[REDACTED]

Dear comrades,

Sorry, I decided to take a break from focusing on continental strategy to talk about something a little more intimate, concrete, immediate: the transformation of ourselves and each other. I want to consciously form new types of friendships that are a gateway to a better world.

Very few people in this world know that communist philosophy causes a psychological revolution. The philosophy consists of theories of reality, mind, and knowledge. These are theories in the sense that they will produce results if you accept them as hypotheses and attempt to apply them to your everyday life. After testing and validating the theories for yourself, it becomes nearly impossible to reject something that you have direct evidence of. The transformation is irreversible.

So, what are the results? If you understand the theory of knowledge, you will become a master of learning and teaching others anything you desire. If you understand the theory of mind, you will become a master of ideas, their analysis and their creation. If you understand the theory of reality, you will become a master of your willpower, of transforming yourself, others, and the rest of the world around you. When you understand how these things work at their most fundamental level, you become the future human being, the future of humanity.

This is completely independent from the political and economic aspects of communism. We can forget the rest of that for now. What use is political and economic theory when we live so disconnected, so alienated from each other? Weakly connected and socially dysfunctional, we don't have the broad and deep communal connections to put any of that theory to practice. We've been skipping steps for decades and it hasn't brought us much further than we started.

We should go in a different direction. That's just my opinion. I want to start small and build the revolution within us, between us. No "activism", only dialogue. Just hanging out, spending time together. We should get to know each other and, in the process of discovery, transform ourselves.

I mentioned a psychological revolution caused by philosophical knowledge, but how would you know such a thing factually happens? I am not asking you to put your faith in me and believe what I say. I am asking you to investigate me, to judge my actions and to determine for yourself whether what I'm telling you is plausible. There is nothing uniquely special about me; I'm just like every other communist who has put in the necessary work and study to become a communist. I also make terrible mistakes which could completely invalidate everything I am saying to you. Excuse the mess, I am only human.

The reality is that you can never know a revolution has occurred until you go through one yourself. You can witness some compelling evidence but nothing will be as qualitatively affirming as direct experience. That means you must study the theory and you must apply the practice. If you already understand it well enough, we can apply it together. It would be our collective responsibility to discover and create a new form of social connection based entirely on the most socially progressive philosophical foundations.

At the end of this we'd emerge as a communist relationship, in as far as our collective knowledge can currently take us. A label is just an idea that may or may not be an accurate representation of reality, so call it whatever you want. What matters is what it contains, how it functions, and what effect it has on us and on others. I call it communist because it is the smallest possible social structure entirely based on communist psychology that could function as the elementary vehicle to communist society. It will also not be explicitly communist in the sense that it will have its own characteristics unique to our psychological makeup.

Now we can think about the most important part. Culture is applied psychology. Everything that comes out of us is a manifestation of what's within us. When I write these words to you, I am expressing my psychology to you. It is a cultural product. I am laboring to share a piece of myself with you, and you are laboring to internalize it. Everything that goes into us becomes a part of us, a small contribution to everything that we are and what we do. My culture becomes part of your culture. When we share our time and energy, we create a culture together. Every culture emerges from the mixing of psychological expressions of the people that it represents.

A psychology shared between people becomes a culture. A psychological revolution shared between people becomes a cultural revolution. Do you see where I am going with this? If it can happen between me and you, it can happen between us and them. We could create a new community, based on a new culture, based on a new psychology. Following the creation of this community it finally begins to make sense to talk about building community organizations.

If we don't do this, everything will still be largely determined within the domain of the old society. You should already know my feelings about this: that domain is unworkable. Consider that my previous writing about Turtle Island describes my top-down plan, and this writing describes my bottom-up plan. There's some more work to do to combine the two into a cohesive whole.

All of this needs to be elaborated upon and re-written, but I am out of time. Please feel free to reach out to me with ideas, feedback, and criticisms. I hope there is something in my words, at least one idea, which will have value to you.

Love,

[REDACTED]

Summary

The "American" nation is incapable of reforming itself to align with the progression of humanity. Its current collective psychological profile makes it near impossible to course-correct away from its imperialist structure. All progressive-minded "Americans" will reach a contradiction with this national identity that will not be resolved from within the acceptable bounds of the nation.

Instead, it will be necessary to perform a national negation. A new collective identity must be established that is the antagonistic opposite of the "American" identity and eventually supercede it. It must be consciously constructed on foundational principles that are objectively anti-"American" or, in other words, it has to be the collective vehicle that represents the real anti-colonial struggle and history of the continent.

It is impossible to be an "American" and be on the right side of history. Several groups within the "American" entity have correctly recognized this fact and have organized meaningful opposition, but only in a partial manner that peaked in its effective several decades ago. What has not yet been tried is a united identity which encompasses the entirety of the land and with the potential to include all people who consciously separate from the "American" nation.

The objective of this new identity, which is yet to be defined but will be temporarily referred to as the Jaguar, is to guide people through an inevitable national crisis that will give birth to a new society that is capable of resolving all the problems caused by "America" internally and externally. These include the fundamental problems of racism, sexism, and settler-imperialism.

What will follow is a detailed explanation of everything mentioned above.

Introduction

I am sick of searching and waiting for a convincing strategy to solve our historical problems and being continuously disappointed, so I will attempt to propose my own solution.

I will start by saying that it was a terrible idea for a nation to take its name from an entire continent. This decision alone could have been enough to send it to an early grave because it is a mistake that it cannot recover from. It is what I believe to be the root cause of an identity crisis that I will explain in detail over the course of this writing.

When thinking about the names of continents it should be obvious that we are not talking about technical, geographical names but about socially-defined concepts. Why are Europe and Asia considered two different continents? The geographical boundaries seem arbitrary. How many continents exist? The answer to this will change based on where you live and what you were taught.

Consider the land that is called the American continent. There are places where people are taught that North America and South America are two different continents. Sometimes there is a recognition of a region called Central America which would be located on the so-called North American continent, and while the region we know as Mexico is considered part of North America it is sometimes a part of Central America. The Caribbean is also considered a part of the Americas, or just America. What is going on here?

Now consider that there is a nation called "America" that is located in North America, which is a part of America. I use quotes to distinguish between the nation and the continent. There are "Americans" and there are Americans and they are not the same. For example: The first American Pope is Francis, but the first "American" Pope is Leo XIV. This is because Francis is from South America, and South Americans consider themselves to be Americans just like "Americans" consider themselves to be Americans.

This is confusing, and it gets far more complicated. It is both a personal identity and a collective identity, referring to people who may or may not identify with it. We have to think about what it means when someone, born or living on this land, does or does not identify with being an American — and this will reveal a fundamental problem that is hindering our historical progress.

Background

Before beginning, there are some concepts that require detailed explanation so that we can make sense of what's going on in our past and present.

Identity

Human identity is complicated because it is a psychological experience. We are more than machines which answer yes or no to determine whether we are something or not, despite this mostly being the way things work from a legal perspective. Identities, which are almost entirely inherited from society, influence our thinking and eventually our perceptions of and interactions with the world.

We describe identities with ideas that represent something real. If we relate to any identity, it means that there is a part of this idea which agrees with our lived experience, and likewise we reject those identities that we don't feel a real connection to, or even consciously reject because of a negative perception.

An identity can even have different meaning to different people who share it in common. The greater the amount of people sharing an identity and the longer its history, the more likely it is that its meaning will become unclear or even contradictory. We come to relate to our identities from a wide variety of perspectives and levels of analysis: from shallow to deep, from superficial to radical.

Let's begin our analysis of the American identity.

The land we refer to as America, or the Americas, was given its name by Europeans. It is derived from the name Amerigo, which has Italian, Germanic, Proto-Indo-European roots. The name comes externally, but there are internal indigenous names as well: Abiayala from the Guna language, Cemanahuac from Nahuatl, and countlessly many more.

The name I will be adopting for future reference of this land will be Turtle Island. The idea of Turtle Island was a conscious construction by indigenous activists in the English-speaking regions of the continent. It is derived from the creation stories of several indigenous cultures, but the name is far from widespread adoption as it has not quite left its activist circles. I hope that I can convince you to adopt the name Turtle Island by the end of this exploration.

A name and its origins only tell a small part of the story. A continent can have many names and the impact of such various names on humanity can be insignificant. The greater meaning is discovered in its history and the context in which it is used. We should be more interested in the people of the land. From America descended the word American, but the original inhabitants of Turtle Island were not Americans except as an uncontested logic that is enforced as "common sense". Many that live here are still not Americans, or once considered themselves as such but no longer do.

If I take as objective truth that this land is named Turtle Island, than its inhabitants will be known as Turtle Islanders. This is the common sense that I establish here, enforced only by my conviction as an individual. I do not have the power to change the encyclopedias, the media, the schools, and the rest of the institutions to reflect my perspective in the way that has already been done with the concept of America. That power resides almost exclusively to the nations which dominate this land.

Nationality

I think it would be fair to say that nations are something that most of us do not understand very well. We may walk around and see or hear evidence of their existence, but having a complete and decisive picture of a nation is nearly impossible. Many of us come to the conclusion that they are not real, or are only real in the imagination of the minds of their believers. Let's break down what a nation is so that we can see exactly how they affect individuals, society, and humanity in general.

A nation is a large community, a group of people united around something that they believe. What makes a nation different from other communities is that it is also an organized economic structure that provides the necessities of life to its members. A nation reproduces its own membership by giving their members everything they need to reproduce themselves. This includes food, shelter, education, governance, protection, quality of life, and all the beliefs necessary to sustain the national identity.

So when we are born into a nation, there is a process which is supposed to fill our brains with everything necessary for us to assume this national identity and work to perpetuate it ourselves. It is not a perfect process, its effectiveness varies on each individual, but we have to consider that a nation is typically composed of millions of people. Even just getting a job and producing wealth for our own survival is contributing to the growth of the nation in some way. When we purchase food or have children who will one day purchase food, it contributes to the nation, and so on.

We may not believe in the nation, but our money and contributions will eventually reach someone who does. The true believers of the nation will likely be the ones taking the responsibility to organize and mobilize the community. They will be the ones seeking and attaining positions of power, and that power will shape our environment and eventually ourselves. It is nearly impossible to escape this influence as it is nearly impossible to survive without coming into contact with someone or something that isn't connected to a national community.

It may be helpful to think of a nation as a superorganism. We as individuals are like biological cells that belong to a larger creature. We don't necessarily need to be aware of the larger creature to carry out our functions and live a normal life, but everything we do fits into a larger context that dominates most aspects of our life. We have a degree of freedom and independence that is always bounded by an external authority with greater power over us. Nationality, then, is not necessarily a personal identity, but it is a condition of our existence.

National Identity

If the nation creates the conditions for its continued existence then that means it is responsible for creating the type of individual who will carry out this task. Since the national community is united around common beliefs, it would be reasonable to assume that these are the same core beliefs which will be passed down to each person born under the jurisdiction of the nation. However, the reality is far more complex due to the feedback loop of being exposed to the national culture and environment.

An entire psychology develops which influences the greater society and ultimately the development of the nation itself. The identity of the nation is always in development because the human beings which it is composed of are always changing and being exposed to new experiences and situations.

A nation that is internally healthy is one where each of its members recognize that they share some core aspect of their psychology with the other members of their nation. This recognition leads to at least a minimal sense of trust that enables cooperation within the community. Since a nation provides you with life, it would be reasonable to assume that your national siblings have an interest in helping you because it also helps themselves. This would ultimately lead to the recognition that the community shares a common destiny: we are headed in the same direction because we are a part of the same structure that sustains our way of life.

When a nation is internally healthy, the national identity forms the core psychology of most individuals within the community. This minimal bond would be enough to promote cooperation and benefit the nation as a whole, increasing the collective well-being. When a nation is unhealthy, communal trust fades away, national life becomes alienating or even hostile, and there is a loss of national identity.

National Conflict

Since communities are made up of individuals with their own unique experiences and perspectives, there will always be major disagreements on the path of national development. If we have to share a common destiny with these people, there will be a struggle to take control what direction we are headed toward. The unacceptability of the current direction in any given moment of time is the primary driver, the awakener, of political participation among the members of the nation.

This is essentially what politics is: it is impossible to make everyone happy because we all have different, competing desires. What one group of people finds beneficial, another finds harmful, and this leads to a struggle for power. A nation is a manifestation of the psychology of its constituents, so the political situation of a nation is also a disagreement over psychological development: the future of the national identity.

As part of their governance and organization, nations provide ways of resolving these internal conflicts and reintroducing stability. Conflict is an inherently destabilizing force: any conflict that isn't resolved will grow stronger and threaten the existence of the nation from within itself. When the methods of stabilization fail or are otherwise made unavailable, it becomes a crisis that can escalate to war and national separation.

History

Now we will generally analyze the dominant nations of our continent. By dominant, I mean that they have a state which is in control over their own territory that does not in reality belong to another nation. There are several more, particularly indigenous, nations which exist, but their sovereignty and independence is questionable or nonexistent due to the physical presense of another nation that shares or surrounds their territory.

Almost all of these nations are descendants of the European nations that had inhabited the land through the process of colonization. In their beginning phases, though separated by an ocean, the European settlers of Turtle Island were still a part of the nations that had their primary power and constituency centered in a distant land. This inequality between colony and host was the root cause of national conflict, which led to struggles for independence.

These nations had separated and formed their own identities because the British, Spanish, Portuguese, and French were unable to resolve the national crises in their favor. To varying degrees, each new nation engaged in a process of decolonization to establish their own unique psychology and culture separate from Europe. Each new nation has had to struggle with the incorporation of indigenous identity into their national psychology, and continue to do so.

Imperialism

The European nations were (or still are) empires and it was their imperial nature which led to their expansion to Turtle Island. This was not due to any innate psychological tendency which makes one group of people more naturally disposed to domination. It is in actuality a product of the economic reality that every nation experiences in the current era of humanity.

A nation functions more or less to prioritize the needs and desires of its own people over anyone else. In the capitalist era this leads to inevitable economic competition between nations: conflicts over trade, territory, resources, and even people. This competition is a reflection of the internal economic structure of every nation when it is primarily organized around the acquisition of capital.

As the capitalist era matured, the world entered into a phase of capitalist-imperialism, or simply called imperialism. Imperialism is a global system that is organized around national hierarchy. Nations at the bottom of this hierarchy are exploited by the nations at the top, and every nation fights to secure a better position or to avoid being forced into a worse position.

National hierarchy can be thought of as a racial hierarchy that exists at the international level, or the highest level of human organization. Very roughly speaking, the European nations are at the top, the African and Indigenous nations are at the bottom, and everyone else is in some ambiguous position inbetween. This hierarchy is enforced through economic, political, military, judicial, and mediatic methods.

In fact, racism at the local level is enabled by imperialism at the global level. The way that we as individuals are treated is highly related to the relative strength of the nations which claim to represent us. If no nations represent us, or the ones that do are weak on the international stage, we are more likely to be perceived as inferior and to experience injustice.

Anti-Imperialism

Of course, human beings do not accept injustice forever, especially if they are in the unfavorable position. It should be reasonable that people would recognize the unfairness inherent in this imperialist system and begin acting to escape it or eliminate it entirely from the earth.

As it has historically played out, the nations at the top have rarely struggled against this unfairness because they largely benefit from it. These nations also, as a condition for their self-reproduction, shape the personalities and worldviews of their populace so that they will largely uphold or maintain their dominant position. It is only ever an insignificant minority that comes out against their own selfish interests for the benefit of humanity at large, and if it ever crosses into significance, the nation adapts to maintain internal stability, finding some way to make it insignificant once more.

There has been more hope for the nations all the way at the bottom, when the majority realizes that not only are they in a position of oppression but that they will also never be able to come out on top, no matter how hard they struggle. Under certain conditions and situations of daily life for these people it becomes obvious that the only position is to break free from the system. The nations that have attempted this have so far been severely punished or even reintegrated into the imperialist global order.

It is often the case that the oppressor nations, when faced with the need to resolve their internal problems, will transform the situation and turn it into an external problem that the rest of the world has to deal with. It is done by shifting the burden of an economic crisis, or by invading and seizing territory of another nation, or even simply trying to wipe another group of people off the map. The burden almost always, ultimately, falls to the weak and powerless.

Anti-Capitalism

This hierarchical struggle is always in motion because of the economic laws of the capitalist system that drives the entire planet. Everyone who has had to interact with it will understand this very simple aspect of it: for someone to gain, another must lose. You will either make money or take money, and with enough insight you will realize that none of it will ever be morally clean. Entire belief systems are constructed and propagated just so that one individual or group of individuals comes out on top over others. To escape from the bottom, someone else must take your place. Violence is always involved, usually indirect and hidden.

What this does on a physical level is create a chaotic instability in our societies that many of humanity's greatest intellectuals have reasoned to be causing greater harm than benefit to the existence of people and nature in the long-term. This chaos can and likely will lead to the extinction of our species, through pollution, depletion, or war. We participate like vibrating atoms in the creation of instability for our own survival, but those economic vibrations will eventually kill us or our children.

On the other hand, every national crisis, which is always driven by economic forces mentioned above, creates the possibility of a reorganization that can change the economic foundation of the nation. This is only possible if the nation's people are in the right position and condition to make it possible, and some have been. The post-capital society is still yet to be discovered in its entirety in practice but many nations have tried and many have failed.

Turtle Island

With all of that in mind, let's observe the current national configuration of our continent. We have "America" and Canada at the top, both geographically and hierarchically, and everyone else at the bottom. Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina appear to be somewhere in the middle of the global economic ladder, largely due to the size of their territory, but in difficult moments they are always pushed downward by "Western", largely "American", forces.

Sometimes within these national territories there exist other nations that coexist with the dominant nation, the one controlling the state. Some countries have developed movement and progress on the possibility of multiple nations sharing the same state, called a plurinational state, with Bolivia and Ecuador being the most advanced in this endeavor.

Several of these nations have also gone through internal crises which led to attempts at removing their capitalist orientation. These include, but are not necessarily limited to, Cuba, Nicaragua, Grenada, Venezuela, and Bolivia. They all commonly referred to this transformation as socialism, but they varied in their methods and implementation.

"America"

In contrast to these examples is the "American" nation. Its territory includes indigenous nations which have round up into concentration camps known as reservations, small territories which have very little natural resources and are thus unable to provide a basis for sustainable independence. These nations are kept in obscurity, often times completely absent from "American" consciousness, with the whole system set up so that their people are slowly exterminated — slow enough for it to go largely unnoticed. The sovereignty they have on paper is never truly respected.

A couple of decades ago there were many national liberation movements that had taken place within the country. These were led by indigenous, afro-descendant and latine-descendant communities that declared themselves as separate, sovereign nations and demanded their independence. These uprisings, triggered by the racial hierarchy which has been rooted in the "American" nation since its inception, were violently suppressed and their leaders were imprisoned or assassinated. The racial system was transformed just enough to manage racial tensions but keep the hierarchy intact.

Following this, the economic reality of "America" and the rest of the world changed dramatically. It invested so deeply into its position of global dominance that it restructured its economy around subjugating the rest of the world to its government, military, culture, and money. "America" does not just thrive off of imperialism, it is now a deeply embedded and irremovable part of its existence. There is not an anti-capitalist bone in its body.

Many continue to argue to this day that, because there were once significant movements for socialism within the nation, it will eventually see a resurgence due to the cyclical and catastrophic economic nature of capitalist-imperialism. I remain unconvinced due to a lack of hard evidence and sound strategy. Even those who work for the resurgence of the national liberation movements, beyond also having no evidence or strategy, never have an answer to what will happen to the rest: the capitalist, imperialist "American" nation.

The Plan

I will propose a new alternative to the currently existing goals and strategies regarding the future of the people within this territory, which will be compatible with an anti-imperialist vision of continental integration where the entirety of Turtle Island will exist under a single plurinational government.

[To be continued.]