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THE-NOT-VOTER
13 How To Nullify Sin

Everyone makes mistakes and learns from mistakes. The greatest mistake ever made was not by Eve handing Adam an apple (today no one can imagine how such a gesture could ever have been imagined a sin), but the event that led to mortal combat between Abel and Cain. While today no one knows what the argument between the two was, we know that it was resolved by a fight that ended in the death of Abel.

I am not of the school who thinks that Cain, the victor, was either right or wrong. When it comes to a naked fight, the outcome is not predictable. Who would have predicted that David would kill Goliath? The victor, to my mind, could have also been Abel.

The result of the mistake made by Abel and Cain was less the fact that Abel was killed, but that Cain for ever thereafter suffered from posttraumatic stress syndrome. It was this syndrome that manifested the power of memory and forced the descendants of Cain and Abel to seek solutions to conflicts that do not end in death.

The answer discovered by our forebears to the problem posed by Abel and Cain was the Sacred King, a figure who could resolve the most difficult of personal differences by taking upon himself the necessity to justify the death of Abel and free Cain from posttraumatic stress, guilt. The Sacred King did this by declaring himself responsible for the death of Able by claiming to have ordered Cain to be the executioner. The Bible calls the Sacred King “Lord”, who said (to Cain and all those within his hearing): “Whosoever slayeth thee, vengeance shall be taken upon him sevenfold. And I the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.” It is only because of the mark on him made by the Sacred King why Cain lived on and was able live with himself.

While the above is a deconstruction of the story in Genesis (4:9-16), the Bible—most likely written in the days of Secular kings (though they still paraded as Popes in their own right)—avoids explaining that the “Lord” (king) frees Cain of blood libel by taking the libel unto himself. This interpretation explains the spirit of the lost civilization of our forebears.

The figure of the Sacred King has been forgotten in our day. It is remembered only by poets, anthropologists, literati interested in mythology, and an occasional proletarian who loses his job. The latter, sometimes feeling that with the loss of the job, goes loss of a dedicated life, may be seized by the spirit of Cain and go on a killing spree. After coming back to his senses, he is as quickly seized by the spirit of the “Lord”—and erases his blood libel by self-sacrificing himself.

Many contemporary philosophers have been so overpoweringly possessed by delusions of the benefits of democracy that they not only not mention the king anymore, but the posttraumatic stress syndrome never enters into and becomes a reality in their philosophy. Full of denial of the Other (Lord, King, God) as real in the space among the stars, they are unable to see the Other within themselves. Thus, our modern “kings” for the most part are known by the name of “president”, whether a Pinochet or X, both in their own distinct way unelected wimps when it comes to comparing them with the Sacred King.

The governments of the civilization that preceded ours proved (at least to themselves and many of their partakers) that to avoid violence does not mean to avoid death either as a subject or in reality. Unfortunately, this civilization disintegrated, because the Sacred King was displaced by the Secular King of out time. With no authority over death except by way of mass slaughter of his own and imagined “other” people, the modern president is the North Pole to the Sun’s son, the Sacred King. In Latvia the President is become the Fisher King, one wounded in the groin and unable to move but to go fish in the River Daugava just outside his residence, the Castle of Riga. Whenever he catches a fish, he remembers that River Daugava’s most ancient name is Yaunava, a virgin girl. Incidentally, it is the partidocratic Saeima through its Speaker who put the chastity belt on him besides.

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In the Latvia of 2010, now 800 years into the era that felled the spirit of the Son of the Sun, John (Jahnis), the Fisher King reigns supreme, paradoxically by not being remembered.

This is sufficient reason why this blogger to advocate NOT-VOTING. To vote in our day means to prolong the agony of suffering a Belgian President of the EU preside as the Fisher-Father over Latvia, while his son becomes Latvia’s de facto Vice-president. To quote Georges Bataille from his essay “Jesuve”:

“The practice of sacrifice has today fallen into disuse and yet it has been, due to its universality, a human action more significant than any other. Independely of each other, different peoples invented different forms of sacrifice, with the goal of answering a need as inevitable as hunger. It is therefore not astonishing that the necessity of satisfying such a need, under the conditions of present-day life, leads an isolated man into disconnected and even stupid behavior.”

On the other hand, if a NOT-VOTE succeeds in Latvia, it will succeed in the rest of Europe. Speaking in political language, this means that the Fisher King’s wound is healing.

Asterisks & Other Readings
* I am using the term in the sense used by Georges Bataille in his 1933 essay “The Psychological Structure of Fascism".
Compulsory voting in the EU Parliamentary elections
http://www.ceps.eu/files/book/1886.pdf
The abstentionist elephant
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/8783/
Electronic polls
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10102126.stm  
On the Meaning of Voting
http://www.strike-the-root.com/92/bylund/bylund1.html
British Government Attempts to Bracket the Constitution
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/election_2010/8681624.stml  
Ground Zero for Thought
http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/146989  
Why Forced Positive Thinking Is A Lot Of Crock?
http://www.alternet.org/story/146940/barbara_ehrenreich%3A_why_forced_positive_thinking_is_a_total_crock?page=2  


These blogs tend to be a continuum of an idea or thought, which is why—if you are interested in what you read—you are encouraged to consider reading the previous blog and the blog hereafter.