For more on Transhuman Erotic Freedom…
También en español In my last post Who Are You Calling an Anarchist? we examined the important distinction between anarchy, as a legitimate and proven approach to governmental organization, and terrorism, a deliberate technique of chaotic social disorganization, that social elites deliberately and falsely equate to the wholly legitimate practice of anarchy. Now we can examine the tools of hierarchical governmental violence directed against its citizens, recognizing that the chief of these tools, invisible to the oppressed, is sexual repression through false religions, failed ideas of government, and corrupt concepts of commerce. In short, we will show how every aspect of organized human endeavor is corrupted at its origin by the universal practice of sexual and erotic repression, revealing the results throughout all phases of human society today to be worthless superstition reinforced by ignorance and compelled by violence.
It would take volumes to discuss the sorry history of erotic freedom in the United States, one of the most oppressive of all modern human societies. Let us examine but one chain of events in the 19th century that became the foundation of organized anti-sexism throughout the 20th to see how great social failures come to celebrated as great triumphs for freedom when, in fact, they were nothing of the sort. The historically erased heroes of this story are Victoria Woodhull and her sister, Tennessee Clafin. The villains of this piece are names our warped US history celebrates as great social leaders of the 19th century—Henry Ward Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and others deluded by visions of power which had displaced genuine human ideals in their consciousness and behavior. Although the actual disgrace occurred at the hands of men like Karl Marx and Anthony Comstock, the Americans who claimed to speak for equality but who opposed Woodhull were simply fascist butchers of reality, empowered by elites, who fought for false and appallingly limited visions of freedom and equality.
The cause of anarchy is linked closely to issues of sexual freedom, for without erotic freedom, anarchy cannot be a stable system of government. Nowhere in US history is the violent suppression of sexual freedom more evident than in the story of the brave social reformer Victoria Woodhull. The International Workingmen’s Association (IWA), later identified by triumphant Marxists as their First International, was founded in 1864 as an international organization which aimed at uniting a variety of different left-wing socialist, communist and anarchist political groups and trade union organizations that were based on the working class and class struggle. The leadership eventually polarized around Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin, representing communists and anarchists respectively. Finally, in 1872, Marx succeeded in expelling his rival anarchists, including Woodhull, from the organization.
Victoria and her sister Tennessee were born into the Clafin family of Homer, Ohio,which included a fair number of carnival workers and professional psychics. Vicky and “Tennie” were trained by their parents in techniques of cold reading. Tennie also mastered psychic reading using techniques based on “frontier wisdom,” a persistent form of neo-paganism that pervaded otherwise nominally Christian communities, of which the early followers of Mormon Church founder Joseph Smith may have been the most notable. Vicky married and divorced an abusive drunkard named Woodhull and thus acquired her surname in history. The sisters traveled across the country plying their trade for the entertainment and seduction of the masses.
Settling in New York, they established a psychic salon and Cornelius Vanderbilt became their sponsor through Tennie’s psychoerotic healing skills. Building on their own success as Wall Street brokers, using Vanderbilt money, they led their entire community into active participation in the IWA. In fact, they became the major proponents in the United States for socialist reformation of the government. They published an extremely liberal journal for six years, advocated the legalization of prostitution, and were the first to publish the Communist Manifesto in English in the United States. They differed strongly from Marx, however, as they advocated free love and other sociosexual changes that were abhorrent to Marx, an emotionally constipated Victorian era German prude obsessed with personal power. The anarchists, led by Bakunin, were friendly to the American perspective; however, after Vicky ran for President of the United States, Marx considered this essentially confirmatory act of established government to be so abhorrent to the emerging international socialist cause that he unilaterally dismissed ALL Americans from further participation in the IWA, declaring them to be anarchists and unacceptable as supporters of the International (which they were, if you think about it). But the persecution of Vicky did not stop there.
Up to her Presidential nomination, Vicky had been arguably the leader and primary spokesperson for female rights and liberties. Vicky bitterly resented Beecher’s refusal to endorse her nomination and carried out her threat to make public his extramarital affair, which she, as a free love advocate, thought ought to be public anyway. Although these interpersonal disagreements disrupted the inner circle of emerging feminism, a few years later she was, essentially, expelled from the suffragist movement she had helped found because of her advocacy for sexual freedom. Stowe, Stanton, Anthony, and others came to believe that getting the vote for women was the important issue and that fighting for sexual freedom (which they had supported in the past) would turn public opinion against them.
Government opportunists, led by Anthony Comstock, then Postmaster General, seized the magazine and imprisoned the sisters for distributing obscene material in the mail. None would rise to their defense. Vicky was also a spiritualist leader and became entangled in a dispute with some sexually repressed bigots who joined the group and drove her from her position by distorting the meaning of her advocacy for free love. Once free of legal entanglements, the sisters moved to England and resumed their trade in lectures and publications. Vicky married a wealthy banker who supported her cause. Tennie married a Portugese nobleman, the First Viscount of Montserrat, of whom Queen Victoria created the Baron Cook. “Very good family.”
What was it about free love that created such a major issue for this broad spectrum of individual attitudes from Karl Marx to Henry Ward Beecher to Susan B. Anthony to Anthony Comstock? The common factor is certainly not socialism or capitalism or women’s rights or social purity. Although all these legacy ideas apply to parts of the spectrum, there are too many exceptions to each classification. You can guess what my answer is—erotophobia—that deeply seated, invisible but all-pervading, blind, screaming, and insanely raging fear to embrace the one thing in your material life that can actually save you from meaninglessness and give power and value to your life experience.
Erotic experience is the simplest inspiration of awareness of transcendent love that erases all conscious objection. Personal and shared erotic experience demands trust and rejects violence. Anarchy requires that there exist no need for government violence against citizens. The balance required for successful and stable anarchy can only be maintained when society is pervaded by the atmosphere of mutual love and trust between all people.
As I have explained in an earlier post, Becoming and Being an Avatar—Uploading Salvation, it is our total rejection of the false myths foisted upon us by religion, society, government, and commerce that free us to find true salvation—freedom from indecision about the loving and true behavior that enables us to participate in the reality called the Kingdom of Heaven.
In a very real sense, universal sexual freedom similarly offers salvation to society—removal of fear and violence as the determinative factors in social development and human progress. Such freedom will, in time, empower true anarchy—the final and ideal form of human government.
The most basic way of achieving and maintaining such love and trust begins and ends with the physically erotic. Certainly people can establish matured bonds of love, trust, and affection without erotic engagement, but those who choose to begin their interpersonal engagement with this ideal, and are sincere in their approach, may look forward to enjoying the realization of the intellectual and spiritual potential that will grow from such engagement if desired.
Erotic engagement is the first real step from the purely material-physical-sensory into the domain of spirit. The joy one experiences is indeed a gift from the cosmic source that leads us onward to higher levels of inspiration. By denying the legitimacy of this first step on the “highway to heaven” the historic oppressors of society would make it virtually impossible for most people to ever engage the path of love and truth, the path of light, their own personal pursuit of happiness, which is unacceptable to the oppressors because it this is the only true path to personal and societal freedom which necessarily dilutes the power of the elite. By trapping humanity in such darkness, religions, governments, and commerce have conspired to destroy all human hope of progress by harnessing human effort for the advantage of a greedy few.
Thus we see that erotic freedom, the foundation of all freedoms, is also the most direct entry for modern humans to the pathways of love, truth, goodness, and beauty. Free love, pan-eroticism, and collective social reversion—the continuing experience of comprehensive personal joy, apart from social and economic duty—are keys to human activity celebrating truth, the active gift of love. And this unity of experience eventuates in the emergence of the brotherhood of all people, and leads to the kind of social network that eventually stabilizes the most desirable form of anarchy.