028 an emphasis on exuberance

From: starstuffharvestingstarlight [e-mail] Date: 2010-04-20 21:11:44 Title: an emphasis on exuberance

following the motto of inspiration, i thought i'd also provide a perspective of my personal references and what i'll be standing for at SPCC.

though i've been involved politically since my teens, my main references are philosophy and mathematics. here is a short list. 1) Kurt Gödel, the german mathematician. I'm profoundly influenced by his Incompleteness Theorem, and use it as a basis for most of my reasoning. it states:

If the system is consistent, it cannot be complete. The consistency of the axioms cannot be proven within the system.

2) the second law of thermodynamics, discovered by many, but probably most famously enunciated by Rudolf Clausius as "The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum.". though this might seem odd, to me it provides two main things any group of people should consider: their actions are useless because the universe will end in a cold death and entropy always increases but can have locally negative values. personally, i like to think of this as the evidence for a) life as a pointless process and b) humans (and life) as agents of negative entropy. negative entropy, or order, or Exuberance like i like to call it, is when the mess of a pile of rocks becomes a cathedral, or when jars of paint become a painting. that, to me, is the deepest truth about our cosmos and to understand the value of the second law, is to understand how a) we need to be generators of negative entropy and b) we should fight the generators of entropy that are not providers for negative agents of entropy. for example, we should always make things more beautiful, and should fight whoever destroys of hinders the exuberance of our planet. obviously, an entropic energy source like the sun, being the provider for the negative entropy agents, is a necessity (you can't macroscopically break the second law). my focus is, and has always been, to promote this negative entropy behavior, or, as i like to call it, to be a promoter of exuberance. when we started SPCC, we were to make it a test case for the Exuberantist ideology. since then, our group has become more diverse. but the focus remains, at least on my part, to make SPCC an Exuberantist organization, or at least, to make it the most Exuberant possible.

3) the greek philosopher Epicurus. root of Utilitarianism, he might sound like a strange source for an Anarchist ideology, but they are not incompatible at all. i believe that our life is lived to the fullest when we seek and enjoy the advancement personal and group knowledge, and that this should be our main focus. i practice many of his principles, mostly on promoting knowledge, critical thinking, meaningful discussions, non-materialism, justice and friendship.

4) the scientific method as a key to critical thinking. this needs no explanation, but it is common for communities to use other knowledge-seeking systems. i personally favor scientific knowledge, and will promote it at SPCC. besides the Anarcho-Syndicalist organization, we are also saying that it was meant to be an Atheist Anarco-Syndicalist. for now, i think this principle is holding up.

despite all these intellectual issues, my main focus is on getting the place to work properly in every way and making it as sustainable and legal as possible, so in practice these references are little more than that. as for communities, i am mostly driving my work from the knowledge i accumulated from my previous project, escotilha8.

godspeed starstuff ☆★☆☆★★★☆☆☆☆☆