Fear is the primary ingredient for hate. We cannot hate without it. The secondary ingredient is ignorence (sic) a.k.a ignorance. All other ingredients contribute to the flavor of hate, but not to its substance.
I have found through close personal introspection that every time I get angry (a clear symptom of hate), if I look behind the facade of reasons for my anger I will consistently find fear lurking in the subconscious shadows of my mind.
Reasons are the spices that flavor our hate, but they always only serve to mask the putrid flavor of raw fear and rank ignorance. Our capacity to reason has become our bane. It too easily allows us to live in a delusional world, where ravenous monsters of our own creation exacerbate the vast cesspool of reasons we need to spice up our hatred into its many palatable forms; outrage, indignation, irritation, frustration; even lust and desire.
But reasoning, as powerful as it seems for solving our problems, cannot see past its own creations to the very core of its own existence. Reason can not grasp the formless reality of the source of our being. And yet, only by recognizing this source can we overcome our fear, and our ignorance.
Yet, perhaps overcoming fear does not mean being rid of it! Maybe we need fear, and even the various forms of hatred that it substantiates, in order to live life as we know it. Which is to say that without fear and ignorance, there might not be a world for us to live in. The entire universe as we know it could merely be an illusion that must be substained by a balance between faith and fear, knowledge and ignorance, love and hate.
By overcoming our fear we put it „beneath our feet”, compelling it to serve us rather than rule us. This is the message of the Bible, the „Gospel” that saves. It is the knowledge of eternal truth that brings salvation and infinite peace.
But you cannot overcome fear with reason. Reason is fear's invention. Fear is the ultimate master of reason and so reason can never be used to overcome fear. Fear will even deceive us into believing that we can defeat it with reason. This is the falacy of nearly all worldly religions; they seek to justify their beliefs, and to destroy fear (i. e. „evil”) rather than to overcome it.
Fear knows it cannot be destroyed. Fear itself fears only being overcome, and forced to submit to the will of „God” as expressed through women and men. It also knows that it can never be overcome with reason. That is why it has established so many belief systems that seek to either „destroy evil” or otherwise overcome evil with reason.
Only faith can overcome fear. You cannot fight it, you must release it.
We use faith to control our fear, not destroy it.
(Originally written by Joseph E. Duncan III - September 12, 2010 – 12:30 pm)
Sunday, April 29, 2012
Sunday, April 22, 2012
Last Laugh
I wish that you could see me
Right here before your eyes
I wish that you could be me
'Cause then you'd realize
The blackest nights that we flee
Only dream of blacker lies
Loathing we should be free
Lights in darkened skies
I wish that you could see me
In there behind your eyes
Perhaps then you could be me
And laugh at death's goodbyes
Right here before your eyes
I wish that you could be me
'Cause then you'd realize
The blackest nights that we flee
Only dream of blacker lies
Loathing we should be free
Lights in darkened skies
I wish that you could see me
In there behind your eyes
Perhaps then you could be me
And laugh at death's goodbyes
Sunday, April 15, 2012
What Words Will Never Know
I have suggested in this blog that at some point in your life you may realize that you are God. But I think it is important to understand that when this event occures you will probably not actually think, “Oh, I am God!”
Actually, if you think anything at all it will likely be something relatively silly, like, “Oh, the sky is really blue!” or “My gosh, I'm here!”. What you actually think will not by any means express the true realization that you have, not even if you spend the rest of your life writing down what you think about it (as I seem to be doing). :(
When it happened to me the only thing I thought was something like, “I'm not afraid anymore!” (I don't really remember my actual thoughts when it happened, but I do remember that I kept repeating those words out loud). At the time I was on the side of a small mountain in the Montana wilderness with a little girl I had kidnapped and intended to kill. The actual realization I speak of came as I was standing nude in the forest with a large rock poised over my head in my hands that I was about to use to crush the skull of the naked and blindfolded little girl as she stood in front of me.
When the realization hit me – and it had a distinct emotional impact that was anything but “peaceful” - I suddenly turned and threw the rock off into the trees as I let out a primal screem of sheer terror! I had realized, without words, what I had been running from realizing for almost all my life.
I realized, as I have just said, that I am God! And, at that moment, and for many hours hense, I stopped PRETENDING to be god, and for the first time in my life I took responsibility for BEING God.
Of course this is just one way of trying (and failing) to express something that I know can never be expressed, at least not with mere words (though my life and choices I have made since that moment on the mountain have become a form of expression in themselves of what actually happened, but this form requires a lot of intuition to even “hear”, much less understand). I could also say (and have) that I realized that I was directly responsible for everything that was happening (and had ever happened) to me. It doesn't sound as psychotic when I put it that way, but the meaning is the same. In fact, almost everything I have written in this blog has in one form or another been an expression of the realization I had at that single moment on the mountain.
It was not as “peaceful” as some say such a realization should be. And because of this it took me a long time to correctly articulate what it was that I had realized. Not to mention that by the time I was arrested in Cour d'Alene, Idaho, many hours later, I was already beginning to lose touch with what I had realized. I was quickly slipping back down into the muck of my own ignorance that I had somehow lifted myself out of long enough to bring the girl home and let myself get caught.
It has taken me over five years to work my way, slowly and painfully, back up out of that muck to the point where I can at least write these words, if not fully re-embrace that realization of Godhood itself.
I have also come to suspect that perhaps the reason the experience of “enlightenment” was not a peaceful one for me was because I was not ready for it. I was still not mature enough for such a powerful experience. In a sense, it was a premature birth of sorts, and I was fortunate enough to be able to crawl (almost literally) back into the safety and comfort, that the womb of deception provides, before my premature “heart” gave out from the stress of pumping harder than it was ready to.
But, as I always say, I don't know. I probably won't know until I am born once more into the light and what I now believe to be the REAL WORLD. Until then I will keep spouting from the depths of my ignorance, knowing it is not someplace I will remain forever. Someday, I will realize once more that I Am God, and I hope the next time it happens I can leave all words and thoughts peacefully behind.
P.S. When I said that I threw the rock down in terror, I meant in terror of the Truth. But when I started repeating, “I'm not afraid anymore!” I meant I was not afraid of “them” (i.e. the system).
Actually, if you think anything at all it will likely be something relatively silly, like, “Oh, the sky is really blue!” or “My gosh, I'm here!”. What you actually think will not by any means express the true realization that you have, not even if you spend the rest of your life writing down what you think about it (as I seem to be doing). :(
When it happened to me the only thing I thought was something like, “I'm not afraid anymore!” (I don't really remember my actual thoughts when it happened, but I do remember that I kept repeating those words out loud). At the time I was on the side of a small mountain in the Montana wilderness with a little girl I had kidnapped and intended to kill. The actual realization I speak of came as I was standing nude in the forest with a large rock poised over my head in my hands that I was about to use to crush the skull of the naked and blindfolded little girl as she stood in front of me.
When the realization hit me – and it had a distinct emotional impact that was anything but “peaceful” - I suddenly turned and threw the rock off into the trees as I let out a primal screem of sheer terror! I had realized, without words, what I had been running from realizing for almost all my life.
I realized, as I have just said, that I am God! And, at that moment, and for many hours hense, I stopped PRETENDING to be god, and for the first time in my life I took responsibility for BEING God.
Of course this is just one way of trying (and failing) to express something that I know can never be expressed, at least not with mere words (though my life and choices I have made since that moment on the mountain have become a form of expression in themselves of what actually happened, but this form requires a lot of intuition to even “hear”, much less understand). I could also say (and have) that I realized that I was directly responsible for everything that was happening (and had ever happened) to me. It doesn't sound as psychotic when I put it that way, but the meaning is the same. In fact, almost everything I have written in this blog has in one form or another been an expression of the realization I had at that single moment on the mountain.
It was not as “peaceful” as some say such a realization should be. And because of this it took me a long time to correctly articulate what it was that I had realized. Not to mention that by the time I was arrested in Cour d'Alene, Idaho, many hours later, I was already beginning to lose touch with what I had realized. I was quickly slipping back down into the muck of my own ignorance that I had somehow lifted myself out of long enough to bring the girl home and let myself get caught.
It has taken me over five years to work my way, slowly and painfully, back up out of that muck to the point where I can at least write these words, if not fully re-embrace that realization of Godhood itself.
I have also come to suspect that perhaps the reason the experience of “enlightenment” was not a peaceful one for me was because I was not ready for it. I was still not mature enough for such a powerful experience. In a sense, it was a premature birth of sorts, and I was fortunate enough to be able to crawl (almost literally) back into the safety and comfort, that the womb of deception provides, before my premature “heart” gave out from the stress of pumping harder than it was ready to.
But, as I always say, I don't know. I probably won't know until I am born once more into the light and what I now believe to be the REAL WORLD. Until then I will keep spouting from the depths of my ignorance, knowing it is not someplace I will remain forever. Someday, I will realize once more that I Am God, and I hope the next time it happens I can leave all words and thoughts peacefully behind.
P.S. When I said that I threw the rock down in terror, I meant in terror of the Truth. But when I started repeating, “I'm not afraid anymore!” I meant I was not afraid of “them” (i.e. the system).
Monday, April 9, 2012
Video Evidence In The Press
In a video that was displayed as evidence for the prosecution during my Federal sentencing trial over two years ago, I told Shasta that her wish for “a million-billion dollars” was impractical and asked her why she didn't wish for me to take her home instead. We were making wishes and writing them on a piece of wood that we would then burn so that the wishes would be carried to the astral plane for consideration. Shasta and Dylan both wished for money, and then Shasta wished for jewelry and Dylan wished for a fancy car. I wished for forgiveness.
After I questioned why neither of them wished to go home Shasta quickly added, “Oh, ya! And I wish to go home too!”, at which point I said, “At least I wished for something I might get...”
In the video, also at the time it was made, it was clear that I was admonishing Shasta for her first wish (for money and jewelry), not the one (to go home) that she added after I prompted her. And yet when the media reported on this video, on two different local news stations and in the papers, they all reported falsely that my comment, “At least I wished for something I might get...” was directed towards Shasta's third wish, “to go home”.
The intention of this misinformation by the press was obvious. It was to make me seem as cold-blooded and cruel as they could, even though in the video I was being fatherly and kind at the time, and the children were both clearly under no duress. I'm not denying the cruelty of what I did to these children. I'm simply observing that in this particular video no cruelty was evident. Several people who watched this video said that if they didn't know the children had been kidnapped they would have thought it was a video of an ordinary family camping trip. And yet the news media chose to portray a fabricated misconstruction of the events depicted in the video.
And, what's even more interesting is that not just one media outlet chose to run this misinformation. As far as I could tell, they all did! (At least the four sources that I saw for myself – two TV news broadcasts and two newspapers, one local, and one from Spokane). And it wasn't as if all these news sources themselves had the same source. There were several reporters in the courtroom from different agencies. And yet they all reported the same misinformation about this video!
Why? The paranois me wants to scream, “conspiracy!” But the more practical me realizes that the truth is probably even scarier than that. The technical term, I have since learned, for this kind of media distortion is called, “framing”. The idea is to portray the information in “packages” that the viewers expect. How information is packaged (or framed) for viewing is a part of the consumer culture. It allows information to be distributed in a convenient form. If something doesn't “fit” inside the “frame”, such as a serial killer behaving as a compassionate person, then the extraneous information is “shaped” to fit, as it was in the case of my comment in the evidence video.
I site only one specific example of media framing in this blog post. But every story you see, in fact, ever piece of information you see in the media, is framed one way or another. This framing distorts public perception so severely that it allows serious misperceptions to be regularily propagated. Society in general takes certain “frameworks” for granted, such as “sex offenders are less human” or “terrorist are irrational fanatics”, in spite of clear evidence that indicates otherwise. These false presumptions lead to distorted decisions that end up causing a lot of people to suffer unnecessarily. They also – coincidentally I'm sure – produce a greater need for authority, in order to maintain social order.
Of course there are numerous well reputed books written on this topic (e.g. Using Murder: The Social Construction os Serial Homicide, see “Booklist” linkon the upper right of this page), so there is no need for me to expound on it here. I just wanted to shed a little light on it in the context of my own experience; which is what this blog is about. In my case alone I have seen so much distortion of information that I do not consider my “public image” to have anything to do with me at all. Joseph E. Duncan III is a media monster, not a person at all, and certainly not me! My hope is that this blog will help anyone interested in the real person behind the name to see that I am no more, and no less, than a human being. Yes, I have done extraordinarily terrible things. But, nothing I have ever done, dispite how my actions have been packaged and sold by the media, has ever been outside the range of human behavior; not even close.
I'm not saying what I did is somehow acceptable; it is not. But it is human, and the more we deny this (the more we “buy” what the popular media is selling) the more we allow this kind of destructive behavior to continue, and of course, the more we need “authorities” to “protect” us (which is another false framework sold to us by the media because they profit tremendously from it).
After I questioned why neither of them wished to go home Shasta quickly added, “Oh, ya! And I wish to go home too!”, at which point I said, “At least I wished for something I might get...”
In the video, also at the time it was made, it was clear that I was admonishing Shasta for her first wish (for money and jewelry), not the one (to go home) that she added after I prompted her. And yet when the media reported on this video, on two different local news stations and in the papers, they all reported falsely that my comment, “At least I wished for something I might get...” was directed towards Shasta's third wish, “to go home”.
The intention of this misinformation by the press was obvious. It was to make me seem as cold-blooded and cruel as they could, even though in the video I was being fatherly and kind at the time, and the children were both clearly under no duress. I'm not denying the cruelty of what I did to these children. I'm simply observing that in this particular video no cruelty was evident. Several people who watched this video said that if they didn't know the children had been kidnapped they would have thought it was a video of an ordinary family camping trip. And yet the news media chose to portray a fabricated misconstruction of the events depicted in the video.
And, what's even more interesting is that not just one media outlet chose to run this misinformation. As far as I could tell, they all did! (At least the four sources that I saw for myself – two TV news broadcasts and two newspapers, one local, and one from Spokane). And it wasn't as if all these news sources themselves had the same source. There were several reporters in the courtroom from different agencies. And yet they all reported the same misinformation about this video!
Why? The paranois me wants to scream, “conspiracy!” But the more practical me realizes that the truth is probably even scarier than that. The technical term, I have since learned, for this kind of media distortion is called, “framing”. The idea is to portray the information in “packages” that the viewers expect. How information is packaged (or framed) for viewing is a part of the consumer culture. It allows information to be distributed in a convenient form. If something doesn't “fit” inside the “frame”, such as a serial killer behaving as a compassionate person, then the extraneous information is “shaped” to fit, as it was in the case of my comment in the evidence video.
I site only one specific example of media framing in this blog post. But every story you see, in fact, ever piece of information you see in the media, is framed one way or another. This framing distorts public perception so severely that it allows serious misperceptions to be regularily propagated. Society in general takes certain “frameworks” for granted, such as “sex offenders are less human” or “terrorist are irrational fanatics”, in spite of clear evidence that indicates otherwise. These false presumptions lead to distorted decisions that end up causing a lot of people to suffer unnecessarily. They also – coincidentally I'm sure – produce a greater need for authority, in order to maintain social order.
Of course there are numerous well reputed books written on this topic (e.g. Using Murder: The Social Construction os Serial Homicide, see “Booklist” linkon the upper right of this page), so there is no need for me to expound on it here. I just wanted to shed a little light on it in the context of my own experience; which is what this blog is about. In my case alone I have seen so much distortion of information that I do not consider my “public image” to have anything to do with me at all. Joseph E. Duncan III is a media monster, not a person at all, and certainly not me! My hope is that this blog will help anyone interested in the real person behind the name to see that I am no more, and no less, than a human being. Yes, I have done extraordinarily terrible things. But, nothing I have ever done, dispite how my actions have been packaged and sold by the media, has ever been outside the range of human behavior; not even close.
I'm not saying what I did is somehow acceptable; it is not. But it is human, and the more we deny this (the more we “buy” what the popular media is selling) the more we allow this kind of destructive behavior to continue, and of course, the more we need “authorities” to “protect” us (which is another false framework sold to us by the media because they profit tremendously from it).
Sunday, April 1, 2012
The Crime Of Punishment
The threat of punishment has never been, nor ever will be, a significant deterent to crime. The primary criminal deterent has always been social consciousness. And, the primary cause of crime has always been the lack of social consciousness.
The threat of punishment works to undermine social consciousness, and by doing so only ends up promoting the very behavior it purports to deter.
Social consciousness can be instilled in a person's character at any age under proper conditions, though it is most commonly instilled during childhood. In order to instill social consciousness the person's personal experiences must reflect an ability to trust social mechanisms and social structure.
The lack of social consciousness is always caused by social experiences that demonstrate a lack of benefit to the individual while at the same time demanding personal sacrifice and suffering.
The primary benefit of a healthy social system is a sense of belonging and purpose. It is the perceived absence of this benefit that leads directly to criminal behavior. This is also the very first thing that is forcefully and thoroughly stripped from a person as soon as they have any encounter with the so-called Correctional System as an offender. It should be no wonder at all that such people, even if they had a relatively intact social consciousness going into the “System”, rarely have any social consciousness at all coming out of the System.
The only way to restore a person's sense of social consciousness is to restore their faith in the social system. Punishment does the exact opposite. Criminals rarely believe that they deserve to be punished. (Recently corrections officials have figured out that the offenders who genuinely believe their punishment was deserved are far less likely to re-offend. The officials don't seem to realize that this is a cause, not an indicator. The criminal behavior itself is an indicator of the more serious problem of lost social function.)
Punishing the criminal is tantamount to killing the messenger. It doesn't solve anything and usually only makes the problem worse. The only solution (and one that has been proven to work) is to develop a system that promotes, instead of destroys, social consciousness. But that would diminish the need for the government's power, and we couldn't let that happen, could we?
The threat of punishment works to undermine social consciousness, and by doing so only ends up promoting the very behavior it purports to deter.
Social consciousness can be instilled in a person's character at any age under proper conditions, though it is most commonly instilled during childhood. In order to instill social consciousness the person's personal experiences must reflect an ability to trust social mechanisms and social structure.
The lack of social consciousness is always caused by social experiences that demonstrate a lack of benefit to the individual while at the same time demanding personal sacrifice and suffering.
The primary benefit of a healthy social system is a sense of belonging and purpose. It is the perceived absence of this benefit that leads directly to criminal behavior. This is also the very first thing that is forcefully and thoroughly stripped from a person as soon as they have any encounter with the so-called Correctional System as an offender. It should be no wonder at all that such people, even if they had a relatively intact social consciousness going into the “System”, rarely have any social consciousness at all coming out of the System.
The only way to restore a person's sense of social consciousness is to restore their faith in the social system. Punishment does the exact opposite. Criminals rarely believe that they deserve to be punished. (Recently corrections officials have figured out that the offenders who genuinely believe their punishment was deserved are far less likely to re-offend. The officials don't seem to realize that this is a cause, not an indicator. The criminal behavior itself is an indicator of the more serious problem of lost social function.)
Punishing the criminal is tantamount to killing the messenger. It doesn't solve anything and usually only makes the problem worse. The only solution (and one that has been proven to work) is to develop a system that promotes, instead of destroys, social consciousness. But that would diminish the need for the government's power, and we couldn't let that happen, could we?
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