We are looking for new scientific recipes, new ideologies, new control systems, new institutions, new instruments to eliminate the dreadful consequences of our previous recipes, ideologies, control systems, institutions and instruments. We treat the fatal consequences of technology as though they were a technical defect that could be remedied by technology alone. We are looking for an objective way out of the crisis of objectivism.

-Václáv Havel

If ever I write a manifesto, the introduction will say this: “Listen to your heart and act rightly; theory is no substitute for conscience.” By developing Abandonism into a workable theory, I intend to address the  failures of reformist and revolutionary thought in confronting oppressive power structures. Yet I fear repackaging the same mistakes into something all the more insidious for its apparent novelty. The danger of ideology, of all ideologies, is that they are more significant as a structure of thinking than for the content of the thoughts.

I sometimes wonder how I would react if I were to meet an Abandonist, say, five years from now when the theory is cogent and I am involved in some serious projects. The first thought I notice when posing this question to myself is, Yeah, you’d prolly hate ‘em. Wait, what? You know, elitist intellectuals who think they’ve found the final cure for society. You hate those people. Shit. I do. And I sure as hell don’t want my theory to be lotion on the palm of intellectual masturbation.

So how would it get to that point, and how I can minimize the risk? See, at the outset Abandonism is very straightforward: use local resources to address local needs, in the process circumventing institutions and renegotiating power. But what happens when your local projects achieve success? Shouldn’t they grow and be implemented elsewhere? What’s the difference between that and an institution and shouldn’t we then abandon a giant before it turns leviathan? Now Abandonism becomes tricky, because we must never abandon simply for the sake of abandoning. And if we start doing that, we’ll have to abandon Abandonism for whatever is emerging to address its failures in confronting oppressive power structures.

Ideologies are mistaken as descriptions of reality. They are not. They are tools for operating inside an ambiguous context. They offer us general principles, and a decent idea of what to do in a given situation. When we take an ideology as an understanding of truth, we lose perspective. We begin to find evidence in support of our ideology more in the very actions informed by that ideology than in the world itself. At that point many people allow ideologies to become self-fulfilling, to act out their dictates and ignore external evidence in a desperate grasp to thrust meaning upon a confusing and unrestricted world. I strive, however, to see ideology in its context and use it solely for its capacity to inform action.

So when I write about Abandonism, that is what I am offering–not a description of reality, but a tool for operating inside an ambiguous context. The limits of Abandonism lie at the edge of truth: the closer you get to one, the further you get from the other. Ideology, which has nothing to do with truth, is a tool of the intellect precisely because the latter alone cannot fathom truth. We must trust our deeper senses at every step, and act according to what we feel is right. We may use Abandonism along the way, but the moment we allow it to use us is the moment we must forsake it.

One of the reasons this blog went to sleep for many months is I wanted to escape my own pedantry and commit myself to working on a different brand of wordsmithing–poetry. That’s what I believed at the time, anyway, because after I made that choice I didn’t put energy into any wordsmithing of any sort, I just went to work and played video games.

Now that I’m writing again, I don’t want to see this blog as interfering with my time and energy that might otherwise be used to write poetry. I’m going to be posting more under the new category of spitting. I aspire to have full length pieces that provoke introspection and expound the mysteries of the human condition, but, until those come out, I’ll be posting shorter verses of whatever I’ve been working on that day.

Be free to critique anything I post; such is the nature of public offerings. For now, here is a short one I put together today (jacked beat from a Wu-Tang instrumental):

This verse is a joke, mostly comprised of what I can remember from on-the-saddle freestyles.