from one uncle tom to another: we should choose different names! like "progressives"

people take shits on uncle toms all the time.

i see it kind of like affirmative action, in that it was begun with good intentions and good results and then failed to adapt to changing times. it must be noted that slave in cahoots with the master is likely to be treated better than one who is obviously against him (house negros versus field negros). aside from this, it can also be interpreted as a sign of agency among slaves, and their attempts to escape captivity.

but think about it. everyone hates uncle toms. uncle toms were treated as "race traitors" by both blacks and whites. a domesticated native shows two things:

1) foreign peoples can be dominated, showing that their capacity for knowledge was not limited by their bodies,
2) there was never anything intrinsic about the white man's ability to perform his duties in the world. the meaning of his existence did not turn out to be particular about him, and exposing that all he was capable was only an expression of a general human capability, thus killing his ability to see himself as a god.

the leaders of peoples used to be considered gods! on another plane, unreachable. emperors are a watered-down version of this, although they can be backed up by a strong religious conviction (exhibit I: the vatican). monarchs are a little further down, since it starts to matter who your family is, as opposed to pharaoh dominating their family life. that's evolutionary power. 2,000 wives? hello?? Let's call this what it is: someone using power explicitly to have as many children as possible. Or to act out satisfying the craving of fucking tons of virgins, without realizing that his was acting dialectically.

that's what power is. reproduction. that's a big secret but it's soo true. check it: "i am the state." no politician can claim that today, and if they can, it's a big secret. no one accepts total domination point blank anymore. which makes power more insidious, because it becomes more fluid. another effect is that any one person on the planet today cannot wield as much power (whatever that means) over another as was possible in the past. we have gotten more social. it's what we evolved to do and goddamnit, we're doing it.

i believe "uncle toms," domesticated slaves (t can't believe I have to use that word in basic history. slave? what the FUCK, CATHOLICISM. you make me think about slavehood, i should never have had to know such a thing could ever exist. my life is beset by the contradictions i perceive, and is motivated only by a militaristic need to stand by my fellow man, and be strong in their face.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rNPooTVM3Q

clearly, this is not a human aspect that's particular to slaves. everyone feels the things a slave feels. our brains are wired to feel them, no matter what our stimula, for the regulation of our bodies! enhanced emotion is a higher evolutionary function, people!),

were the plot of a revolutionary movement of slaves. we don't usually think of slaves as being capable of planning things, down to deliberately not explaining government policy to citizens. down to sterilizing people of color. but all these things are the same "racism." slaves were just as smart as we are. maybe smarter (i'm trying to sneak my way into goldman sachs but it's not going too well).

the reason a revolutionary organization would want to create uncle toms is to facilitate the infiltration of the masters house and find out more about him. that's the first thing you would need to do, as a prisoner. try to see if you should be trying to fight or make friends. as more is learned, that benefit starts to go down. If you learn the language, you can try to trick them into giving you information about them if you're nice, which might help you get better conditions or find out how to escape. thinks the slave: show me the riverroad. so the infiltration method is only the first step of a larger process.

the only thing that can keep you from getting to the second step is:

- Persuasion.

yep, just one. as long as you don't go over to the other side, you remain part of the group and resist their reality. but this exposes itself as a general approach to reality (which requires the internal/external divide):

as long as you stay inside yourself, inside conceptions of what's happening in your body, regulating your emotions as your first priority, you are yourself. when you choose to allow the outside world into your thought process, and don't think about what comes in to see if it makes sense of not, given your experience, you give yourself over to an authority. author-ity. get it? within this metaphor (these are all but signs), it is up to you to write your own story of the world.

so the slaves have created a community amongst themselves. they are aware of different personalities among their members, remember complex emotional histories, and construct projections of what consequences their actions can have. when they leave that history, they join the other group.

but in fact, every person is a group. you can be as literally biologically as you want, but even as far as ideas are made up of many voices. all the variety of human expression can only begin to express the plurality and infinite of human emotion. today i am happy adam and tomorrow i am sad adam. where is "adam"? and yeah, organs? cells? ribosomes? where is the "individual"? this is but an image of humanity- if you squint, you can't see it anymore. so here's the news:

ALL SOCIETY IS SLAVERY.
ALL COMMUNITY IS SOCIETY.
ALL COMMUNICATION IS COMMUNITY.
ALL MEANING IS COMMUNICATION.
ALL INFORMATION IS MEANING.
ALL PERCEPTION IS INFORMATION.
ALL IS PERCEPTION.

in that vein, working with the idea that there's some slavery of each group of people to the others, here's one of the central ideas behind the "savage"/ "noble savage" idea:

(by the way, what a fucking stupid idea.

actually, consider this: colonizers were also noble savages. clearly they were winning people from the other clan. that's all it is: getting followers to have your group win in case of a war, which happens when there's too many people and resources are scarce. the only difference now is that in business, the leader is not personally connected to his workers, but ideologically. the same leaders ride the companies over the sea of the economy (and this is one of the purest metaphors for the economy that exists, along with ripples on a pond and vibrations of a string), and all the sailors fancy themselves as pirates, and can't wait to become a captain and do their thing.The threat of an other is that they will win over members of your own sect. a "noble slave" is thus hated by both the masters and the slaves, because they tread the no-man's land between the two groups' competing interests. by doing what is best for the individual, community with others is destroyed for the noble savage, and everyone else.


as far as moralizing goes, there are a couple pressing questions. the most important of these is:

were other societies of slaves hierarchical? and what does that say about humanity as a whole, and both the races as members of that existence?

which leads to another deciding question: were other slave societies inclusive?

we hear about the killings of twins, of cannibalism. but could ancient societies truly have been respectful to everyone? "maybe with fewer people..." we think. but maybe that emotion was an evolutionary signal to start wars and curb population growth? why are we so sure the past was not in harmony, and the present is? what is that special property of the present that makes it special to us? it seems controllable, we can do something about this. the past is the past is the passed.

when an other is created, the domestic is defined. the boundaries tell us what we think of ourselves, where we choose to end our sense of familiarity. we now become acquainted with tens of thousands of people in our lifetimes, ethnic cabdrivers, to fellow banished smokers at a bar. think about how any people we have to become, the ways our identity is fractured. every picture, every product of human presence. this is not home. this is a frighteningly partially engineered environment.

so for an individual labeled an uncle tom while not actually having been persuaded by the masters to renounce his former history, the experience is quite complex. "loyalty" is a word simply thrown around, but here the double slave has three perspectives: their own, that of their slave collective, and that of the masters. on top of that, every level has its own politics. as fluid as we are, so are our environments and fellow people. "active" and "passive" are arbitrary designations, defined by "power," an extremely nebulous concept.

being persuaded to the master's point of view (rejection of self and clan) or not (either embracing clan membership as a voluntary extension of self or rejecting self and embracing the clan's ideology (Weltanschauung)) is an equally imaginary binary. Is it wrong to see the master as a human being? does this betray the revolutionary movement? And how do you deal with being an effective actor? you become a double agent, a triple agent, a quadruple agent, trying to convince everybody, and getting confused about whom you're convincing under pretext and whom you're convincing because you really identify with them. no to mention being frustrated because what if there are no communities you want to join?

what would you do if you had to watch tv and there was nothing on you wanted to watch?

this is the life of a slave, of everyone.

i'm trying to show that "uncle toms" are what we all are, caught in a place with many authorities who want us to join their society. the thing is, though, that we are all our own gods. our bodies mean something. we're not in an ether, swimming with everyone else.

YOU ARE YOU AND NO ONE ELSE IS YOU.