Liberty Liberally - Vol I Issue VII - August 2021

From the Journal of Joshua Fryfogle

Liberty, Liberally Volume I - Issue VII

August, 2021

Alaska

The Sound of Self Expression

April 17, 2020 Recently there has been a revelation of sorts, that the media uses all manner of tricks in their craft. We act surprised that the tools of a moviemaker and the news media are the same. We are all upset that the media is fake!

We lionize Walter Cronkite, and some bygone era when the media was somehow... not fake.

The “Fake News” brand itself is all that’s really new. The media has been using the technology of their trade for as long as those tools have existed.

Recently, a news outlet was exposed for using footage of an Italian hospital, representing it as a hospital in the US overran with Covid-19 patients, and the so-called ‘alternative media’, which is overtly biased in the opposite direction, claimed that this was some major ‘gotcha’ moment.

People, this is how it works. This is how it’s always worked. We just live in an age where the illusion is not as powerful.

Our recent revelation that ‘fake news’ is a problem is not in concord with the rate at which it has become a problem.

We are way, way behind on this. The media has been this way. This is how content creators create content. The media professionals are illustrating what happened, through craft, and skill, but in the end, they can only illustrate what they perceived. A camera in a room, a microphone capturing sound, these alone do not accurately represent what happens in that room. It requires someone to tell that story, and that’s what media professionals do.

It’s a skill set that can be used to tell the story, from the perspective of the one telling the story, but it does not guarantee that your own perspective and that of the story teller will resonate.

The phrase “Fake News” is, itself, misleading. It implies that, in contrast, ‘real news’ is somehow possible - that we deserve ‘real news’. That is the most dangerous misconception we could possibly have about information.

Because at it’s core, the desire for ‘real news’ is an unrealistic expectation.

Our best hope is to hone our own discernment, to learn to reason, and mostly we need to learn to entertain an idea without accepting it.

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”

- Aristotle Your individual rights, like those described in the First Amendment where freedom of the Press is found, are also responsibilities. Yes, I mean responsibility in the common sense, that it is your duty.

There is nothing in our founding documents that guarantees that a group of corporations will rise up and take on the burden of the first amendment

from the individual. Just the opposite, there is a charge in each clause of the First Amendment, a burden laid on the shoulders of every single one of us, to use our own storyteller capacity to interact with others, sharing our perspectives using every tool at our disposal. Our ability to respond is what is sacred, not some unrealistic expectation that some of us will be champions for the rest of us, conquering their own subjective experience, to bring us ultimate objective truth. This borders on the mystical, and as such, is entirely subjective.

All news is ‘fake news’. It’s just pictures and words on the screen, or the page, or the air. The same people who work in Hollywood, bending lightwaves into immersive and emotional experiences that leave us in suspense, suspending our own realities for far-fetched and fantastic scenes... these same professionals also work to bring you the news. The same basic skill set, the same tools, these same people often move between these two sides of the ‘media’. It’s not subversive, either. It’s overt.

The First Amendment, however, recognizes that the individual’s conscience must be satisfied.

The individual must be allowed to express that conscientious perspective, even and especially if it is incorrect. And each individual stands to benefit from the perspective of each other. They saw this potential with the printing press, the power of speech, the ability to assemble, and most sacred, the right of making up their own mind about what they believe.

It is understandable that people would be angry at the media industry as a whole, if in fact it was reasonable to expect that the media somehow owes us something.

The problem is, they don’t owe us anything. Not constitutionally, not in reality, not at all.

Instead of worrying about so-called ‘fake news’, let’s consider the real problem, false expectations.

The expectation that anyone of us should somehow replace the entire mental process of reason and discernment of every other individual, so that the rest of us don’t have to think - that is just wrong-headed.

The idea that any one of us could ever achieve such a wonder as this, true objectivity, is just unrealistic.

I don’t mind the ‘fake news’ era, because I see it as the first stage of realization about the power of mass communication. I also don’t blame the storytellers out there in the media industry, who simply work within their own individual abilities to tell the stories as they perceive them. But the conflict between these two is inevitable.

This is really just cognitive dissonance, shaking up and disrupting the worldview of millions. It’s a necessary stage.

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Anonymous Flemish Tapestry, Cs. 1650-1700, Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Written June 2, 2018.

I look back over these last 14+ years of publishing, and it hasn’t been easy. It hasn’t been greatly profitable, either.

In fact, at times it’s been a juggle just to make ends meet. Lucky for me, I’m motivated by purpose, and profit isn’t a prerequisite for my behavior. I see great value in a community that is healthy, and I see that healthy community as having healthy communication.

To me, healthy relationships and healthy communication means that everyone has a voice. Everyone is allowed to speak.

Too often in the history of the world, some voices are silenced, while others are amplified. This is not a functional, healthy community, that doesn’t communicate, and instead disseminates information.

As a People, we have a right to communicate. This is what the First Amendment is all about, free expression - but why? What’s the point?

Freedom to communicate allows an individual to accurately assess the thoughts of their neighbors. If we don’t freely communicate, we really don’t know what the consensus is. We can’t gauge our neighbors on the issues, if our neighbors only parrot what a small group of people are paid to express.

“The purpose of life is self-expression.”

- Oscar Wilde Music, for me, is the height of human expression. Words, sang to melody, over rhythm, this triad of sound is able to communicate in a way that is sometimes profound. I love music, and music is holy to me. Every time we vibrate and intone some thought, we lend it special power - power to be heard. We tell the hearer that we’ve worked hard to communicate with them. We’ve made it easy for them to hear it, because we’ve used more than grammar, but also other methods that allow the song to speak to them on multiple levels at once.

I started writing a local music column for the Frontiersman 17+ years ago. I did it for free, never paid a penny. I did it for three years before starting my own paper, Make A Scene Magazine. This was everything I could do, to create a platform for local musicians to express themselves and support each other literally putting the power of the media into their hands.

My own musical efforts were bolstered when I came to understand that professional journalists were just like any other professional - they will usually take the easiest path to clocking out each day. I understood that if I sent out useful information to media people, press releases, recordings, press photos if I did the work for them - I was more likely to get coverage. Not because I was more deserving, but because I made their job easy. I did the work, the work that most musicians falsely assume should be done by the ‘professionals’.

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Now this might seem like this issue is a niche issue, for musicians only, but it’s not. Most of us falsely assume that media is only an industry, and that it’s not our personal responsibility.

The truth is, the reason I saw things in this light was because of a philosophical understanding that I see as sorely lacking in the community at large - and this is why there is so much unhealthy, onesided communication in our community - in all communities.

The freedom of the press, just like the rest of the First Amendment, is definitely a right of the individual person. The People share this right, collectively, but the individual is the true heir of the right to self-express. There is no collective self. Self expression belongs to the individual.

My understanding, that the professional media industry was not the full potential of the First Amendment, and only a partial, incomplete expression of it that’s what made my behavior different.

My approach to the media, when I was working as a musician, was that I was going to make it easy for them.

In fact, many times I would supply these professionals with a press release, and they would simply rearrange what I had written, and put their name on it. This was a real eye-opener for me, seeing that I had so much power over my own destiny. And more, it was the shortcomings of the industry of media that allowed me such quick and direct access to coverage.

Other musicians would guffaw a bit.

They were hurt, emotionally, because they weren’t getting the media attention I was getting. But try as I might, I couldn’t get them to understand - the power was in their hands already. They literally had a lawful right to it. They just needed to use that right. Even now, after those three years of weekly articles, and fourteen+ years of publishing an open-access, crowd-sourced paper, I hardly ever get an article from local musicians - barely a calendar submission.

It’s depressing as hell.

Musicians Are A Microcosm The same is true for our whole community. We all have a legal right to self-expression. The media industry is dysfunctional, because it’s not selfexpression. It’s called ‘work for hire’ under the law. You should look it up. The writers and content creators who work for media companies are not self-expressing. They are expressing on behalf of someone else, who owns the content they create, and who filters that content as they see fit. This is what happens when we don’t use our rights... someone else does.

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From the Journal of Joshua Fryfogle

Volume I - Issue VII

Liberty, Liberally Well I'm about to get sick From watchin' my TV Been checkin' out the news Until my eyeballs fail to see I mean to say that every day Is just another rotten mess And when it's gonna change, my friend Is anybody's guess

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Firing Squad, Stoning, Corporations, and Democracy

- Frank Zappa, 1965, Trouble Every Day, from the album ‘Freak Out!’

February 11, 2020 Deferring liability among a group of people is an ancient form of sorcery.

It’s as old as time, going back to even the Stone Age, when we must assume that stoning began.

THE SOUND OF SELF EXPRESSION CONTINUED “Music, of all the liberal arts, has the greatest influence over the passions, and is that to which the legislator ought to give the greatest encouragement.” Napoleon Bonaparte From a musical beginning, I became aware of this system. I wanted success for myself, as a musician, and I started to achieve it, but I started to lose friends at the same time. The truth was, there were lots of talented musicians in Alaska, and they all deserved to be heard. I wanted them to be heard, too. I wasn’t trying to dominate in a competitive industry I was trying to add to a sorely lacking communication in our community.

I advocated from the beginning for other musicians to receive coverage. I wrote a weekly column, for three years, for free, all about local music. That’s over 150 articles that I wrote about local musicians, at no charge, without being paid. And that’s before I even started Make A Scene Magazine fourteen+ years ago.

None of this was simply to elevate myself, but since others refused to accept their responsibility to do the same - or that it was their legal right to do the same - I found myself standing out from the crowd. Awkwardly at times.

It hurt. I retreated from the music scene some years back, seeing how much work there was to do, and how the music scene just wasn’t ready to do that work. They were convinced, like society at large, that the media industry was somehow willing and able to do this work, when in fact these people were just doing their day job, just like the rest of us. Low pay, few benefits, people in the media industry are always jumping from job to job, trying to get a more stable and established position. Most of them are not using the freedom of the press to add

altruism to the public conversation, but their voices are amplified by the silence of everyone else.

So local musicians and local people have a lot in common. They know in their heart that they have a right to use the media, to make it their own, but they want to believe that someone else will do it for them - and do it better. There’s no way these 9 to 5 employees are ever going to do any more than is necessary to keep their bosses happy. If they do, they’re trying to get a better position.

It’s not about expressing their innermost thoughts, or even trying to regurgitate the innermost thoughts of the people in the community.

It’s their day job, that’s it.

I’m not blaming these professional media folks, either. They are fine people, most of them. No worse or better than the rest of our community.

But that’s the point. They are not any better equipped to express themselves than we are, as a community. They are people, with built in biases, just like everyone else.

Whether you’re a musician, or any other member of the community, it’s important that you understand that you have a legal right to express yourself.

It’s even more important to understand that this legal right is put in place so that everyone around you has the ability to gauge consensus. Otherwise, consensus is manufactured and inaccurate, and we become polarized by a small handful of people - mostly inadvertently.

The majority of these people aren’t trying to deceive you, they’re just trying to get home and eat dinner. Media may be their job, but self-expression is your responsibility.

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The archaic practice of stoning lawbreakers to death is really a prototype for all manner of collective force.

Here’s the problem that stoning is supposed to solve. If someone is a lawbreaker, and that broken law is determined to be worthy of the death penalty, then someone among the community has to carry out that death penalty. However, in the event that the judgement was wrong, that the process for determining the innocence or guilt of the accused is faulty, then person who carries out the death penalty would, from a conscientious perspective, be responsible for that death. Their own conscience would weigh down on them, and them alone, who carried out the will of the collective.

It’s an ethical conundrum that needs resolution. Not a perfect resolution, but one that at least introduces a plausible scenario where the person doing the stoning is not necessarily responsible for the death of the accused.

In order to punish the guilty, the collective takes on the responsibility of the penalty, which creates a situation where it is impossible to tell which of the stones finally kills the person being stoned. Who’s to say, among the many thrown stones, which one did them in?

Since it would be impossible to tell which stone exactly caused the death, then no one person has to carry the weight of having killed a person. This is most important not when the person is truly guilty, but when the individual who was stoned to death turns out to have been innocent.

In other words, the idea behind this collective force is to limit liability.

We see this same concept play out later, with the practice of collective stoning of lawbreakers evolving into the practice of the firing squad. In military circumstances, we see that the accused and convicted traitor would be fired upon by a group of soldiers, all firing at the exact same time, and for the same legalistic, interpretative reason - to obscure the idea of who, in particular, fired the shot that kills.

Both stoning and the firing squad are largely defunct practices, although we certainly see these practices still alive in certain less developed nations.

In more developed nations we see the use of collective force, and deferred liability, take shape in self-governance practices.

Democracy is the natural philosophical evolution of this individual vs. collective dynamic, taking a legal philosophy of diversifying culpability, and applying it to an even larger group, and for proactive governance, rather than reactive justice.

Still, the gist is the same. The group votes, and then they ultimately back up their decisions with a threat of force.

Collective force, of course. No one individual would ever think to enforce laws on one of their neighbors, except that the other neighbors agree. This is no different, legalistically speaking, than stoning a lawbreaker.

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Now, I’m not opposed to collective action, as long as there are certain unalienable rights, rights that are not listed completely in the constitutional documents, where some examples of those rights are given. These unalienable rights represent protections of the Individual, as opposed to the collective.

These unalienable rights are what justifies the existence of government at all, and without those rights, the individual would simply be subject to the will of the collective. This would be just a simple evolution of stoning, without any moral or ethical improvement on the pretense of the situation.

If you’re part of stoning someone to death, you can tell yourself that you weren’t the one who actually killed the accused, but deep down you know you contributed. This imperfect solution to administering justice without making the administer into a lawbreaker was always just a legal workaround of the conscience.

We see this same concept being applied to the economy as well, with the rise of corporations. These golems are conjured up to create a corporate body, a legal fiction, a juridical person - a legal person can never be stoned, shot, or jailed, because they don’t have a body.

The philosophy is the same, although the objective is different. They aren’t trying to administer justice, but make profit.

The corporation creates a safer path to making money without becoming individually responsible for the inadvertent negative impacts on the collective. The corporation doesn’t exist, except to limit liability of the individual.

Still, with Liberty there is always liability. There can be no freedom to act without consequence to those actions. Those who partook in the stoning deaths of the falsely accused, or those who pulled their triggers at the same moment, or those who set up democratic rule over the weak, or those who summoned a corporation from their own imagination, they’ve all engaged in something that is ultimately dishonest. They’ve disconnected their actions from the inevitable balance that must be struck.

Liability can be shared, but it cannot in reality be diluted. Those who see the world through a material lens, and who do not believe in liberty, are also likely to discount or defer liability through these collective conjurings. Those who doubt the sovereignty of the individual soul will, from that same perspective, conclude that moral responsibility of the individual is equally irrelevant.

The ancient and archaic forms of collective actions, like lapidation, fusillading, incorporation, or voting, they are not the vanguard. They are old modes of thought, similar to sorcery in that they declare something to be so.

Through fiat, and self-deception, they claim to remove from the individual any responsibility, by spreading that responsibility out, creating a conundrum of plausible deniability.

Liberty of the individual makes no such contrivance - and liberty of the individual is relatively new. The tack and trajectory of the times are arcing towards freedom, but not away from consequence.

From the Journal of Joshua Fryfogle

Volume I - Issue VII

The next stage, I believe, will be either a calcification of the current, corporate media systems, with it’s self-appointed professionals who purport to be ‘news you can trust’, or... we will take on the burden as individuals to discern and reason together, in an ecosystem of information, becoming the news ourselves. I believe the latter to be the better option, in keeping with the moral mandate of the First Amendment.

Onus On Us All that as it is, and secondary to that understanding, it is our own responsibility to cull and curate our own beliefs. It is on us. We must learn to recognize the difference between someone’s sincere but skewed perspective, and someone else’s intentional deception.

This is the dividing line, where we find a moral dilemma.

Knowing that most people will believe whatever confirms their biases, a person inclined to deceive can certainly do so, simply by appealing to those biases. The so-called ‘alternative media’ does this as well as the corporate media, sacrificing reason for rumor and rhetoric. Likewise,

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a person intent on speaking truthfully their own perspective can also lead people astray, even without realizing it.

The difference - and this is the pressing concern - being that one intends harm and the other does not.

The power of both, however, can be undone simply by learning to discern.

We can be misled intentionally, by those who mean to do so, or we can be misled unintentionally by those who mean well, or...

We can be realistic and rational beings, using reason to weigh all that we’re told, trusting none of it until we’ve thought it through.

In closing, consider the word ‘liberty’.

It is derived from the Latin word ‘Liber’, which means both ‘book’ and ‘free’.

Liberty and learning are inextricably bound together. However, the truth makes terrible television.

Honesty makes for boring headlines. Clarity doesn’t get the clicks. But expecting that the truth of any matter will be easy to understand, and even entertaining and engaging, is an unrealistic expectation.

The Sovereign Soul either exists or doesn’t. Each of us must decide for our Selves if we will accept the evidence of our senses.

A Buzzing Fly, A Firefly

By Joshua Fryfogle

June 1, 2020

A buzzing fly will buzz and fly That’s all they know to do You swat away, their death, decay Is all unclean to you

You are a soul whose sole delight Is to light up like the moon When light goes low, you cause a glow Like gladness in the gloom

A lightening bug will flash and flee That’s their only trick You hope to catch one in a jar As lightning is too quick

You are a blazing point of light A star in heaven’s hold The sun goes down, sets down the crown That’s when the stars grow bold

Do not be a buzzing fly Seeking rotten meat Be a firefly and light The way to nectar sweet

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This is not a new dilemma, but the moral milieu that we all go through.

Individuals have communicated with each other, attempting to approximate their actions to accommodate their sensual experience of reality.

Presumably, reality is objectively real, and there is an objective truth of reality. In theory, we can all exchange information to better define that reality as it really is. We assume, when we exchange information, that the information we receive can be added to and cross-checked with other data, so that the rational individual can deduce more detail from our day-to-day experience.

The Self that we all experience, that feeling of separation, immersion, and being subject to circumstances that completely subject the lower animal kingdom to Nature, that Self is the common soul. We all experience it for our Selves, but we all fail to experience it from the perspective of others. The ability to empathize, then, is the key of the sovereign soul to take charge of their charge. The ability to see things as others mights see them, to put one’s Self in the soles of another, that is what allows for us to transcend nature, and create culture.

When culture is concordant with nature, when if compliments rather than conflicts with nature, that culture can peacefully co-exist with nature in perpetuity. The more that culture conforms to nature - objective reality - the more that culture will flourish as nature does.

The same is true in the microcosm.

The more the single, solitary soul can empathize with other beings, truly empathize and connect, the more peaceful and cooperative that cultural contribution will be.

But when individuals are in conflict with others, and when they refuse to empathize with the perspectives of those who disagree, that is no less cancerous than a culture that ignores natural law.

Thinking that morality is subjective is a higher development of another human failure: the failure to empathize.

“What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self.”

- George Eliot Morality doesn’t come from a political party, or a religion, but from the human

capacity to care. It can be taught through shared communication, which could manifest through organizations like the aforementioned, but that’s not where it comes from. It comes from our inherent feeling of compassion that sometimes manifests as self-sacrifice. Those who sacrifice, great and small, are choosing to communicate their knowledge, rather than accumulate that knowledge for tactical advantage. The materialist mind is amoral, treating morality as irrationality. Their morality is more of a social more, a normative culture, and their conscientious obligation is nothing more than social conformity. This is more like an animal living under nature than an individual cultivating a culture in harmony with nature.

The higher mind that is ready and capable of development must be cared for. First by the family, then by the culture, the higher mind in the new individual life is taught to nurture their special capacity to care for others. This really represents the acceptance that others do exist, even if our understanding is limited to the sensory information we communicate constantly.

Language allows for all of this, but the ability to interpret language as literal or figurative is where morality is really explored. All language is, first and foremost, symbolic. Whether written or spoken, language creates a means for humans communicating complex ideas that animals cannot. Words allow for each individual soul to express it’s Self, and for others to hear that expression, and interpret that along with other data to determine a moral response.

Empathy is the ability to understand the suffering of others, and a refined sense of empathy is the highest level of human development. Unrefined empathy is no different than any other attribute that is prevented from it’s potential.

Those who can use language well will likely better relate to others empathetically.

Their ability to interpret symbolic communication also reflects a capacity for figurative understanding of that language. If one can interpret words in a subtle, figurative sense, then one can also apply parabolic thinking to their own realities.

This is nothing more than compassion through comparison.

This is empathy, infinitely.

“The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?”

- Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

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From the Journal of Joshua Fryfogle

Volume I - Issue VII

Liberty, Liberally

4

The Debasement of Diogenes, From Delphi to the Dollar “We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery because whilst others might free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind.”

- Marcus Garvey, Jamaican political activist, publisher, entrepreneur and orator. 1887-1940

Liberty, according to it’s namesake philosophy of liberalism, is seen as an inherent thing. You can’t shake it, no matter how hard you try, because it’s in you.

They will say that the problems of society, the unfulfilled desires of the society, are proof that no one is actually free. They will gesture to Mother Earth and say, ‘is this enough?’

It is you.

This perspective lacks the wonder and inspiration of the liberal philosophy.

It lacks the belief in the human spirit.

It sees the worst, and doesn’t realize how privileged we are to have time to complain.

Your ability to choose, damn the consequence, is your liberty in potential.

Your choice to be coerced is just that: a choice.

We are inherently endowed with this ability to go against the tribe, to do what we believe in, and to stand for other understandings. This, according to the liberal philosophers, put a yoke on humanity, harnessing them to a higher power.

We could create new things that nature did not. We could reformulate our realities - our reality - through acts of will.

They did not see liberty, as do the Totalitarian and Authoritarian doctrines, as a condition of circumstance.

The Socialist, Communist, Fascists, Despots, and Nazis, they all agree on certain ideas about Liberty.

They confuse liberty made manifest with liberty itself.

“Painting is a state of being.” -Jackson Pollock The free mind recognizes - like an artist - that the boundaries of the canvass create possibilities. Like musicians, the liberal artist makes use of the limitations of their instrument, realizing the potential therein.

The totalitarian perspective is drab and organized. It is the masculine mind, unrefined, dismissive of the Mother, making the material world into a prison.

It lacks beauty and balance, it exhibits extreme disregard for the emotional state of Being.

“Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.” -Victor E. Frankl

Debased Debate

By Joshua Fryfogle, Written July 7, 2020 Diogenes Could barely feed And barely clothed Himself He laid bare His skin and hair And he loathed All wealth Diogenes A banker’s son He barely scraped The face He laid where He did not care And then would dare Disgrace Diogenes A cynic who Would mock the world With wit Did not pay fare Did not play fair Did not mince words To wit Diogenes Could barely feed And barely clothed Himself

Written July 21, 2020 Our money - like most currencies in the world - has been debased. This is the cause of poverty.

Let me say it again, for those who haven’t heard this before...

Poverty is caused by debasement of money.

One more time - printing money doesn’t create wealth, it creates a debt.

And those impoverished souls so burdened by the dollar’s debasement, unlike Diogenes, have not chosen to be poor. Their poverty - our poverty - is the result of people like Diogenes, who debased the currency in the first place.

Diogenes lived a life of poverty, but he was making a statement by doing so.

He was pushed out of his hometown for doing something that, at that time and place, was quite illegal. In the USA and most nations on the earth today, it’s normal practice. But historically, devaluation of currency by clipping coins or adulterating their mint or issuing bank notes for non-existent deposits was a fraud of the worst kind.

Diogenes did that.

He debased the currency!

His dad had a job with the government, minting coins, and Diogenes was his apprentice. Coins themselves served as a measure of wealth, because they were perfectly weighted - the job of the minter was to make sure that each coin weighed exactly the right amount, and was made of a pure metal. But why?

Because each type of coin was made of the same precious metal, and were therefore worth exactly that amount when weighted correctly.

Diogenes, the debaser, decided to change the value of the coins, making them ever so slightly less valuable, and keeping the extra precious metal for himself.

Diogenes was a criminal. He stole from everyone.

The people in his community ran him out of town over it!

I wonder if his later choice to live in abject poverty might have been his response to that early rejection. Those folks in Sinope, Greece, in the fourth century BC, they understood something most modern people do not.

It is a heinous act against everyone to debase the currency.

Did Diogenes decide that he would live in poverty, living with dogs, for no reason? Even today, he is often depicted with a dog at his side. Diogenes, like a stray dog, lived off of society’s scraps, barking at passers by. He also defecated and masturbated in full view of the public. He debased himself.

Checking in with the local Oracle,

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over in Delphi, she told him to “deface the currency”, which he took to mean something more metaphorical, as a directive for his life moving forward.

His life would become a symbol of the devaluation of all life.

Diogenes left a myth of his life behind.

No writings survived, and perhaps never were written. In that mythos, he is supposed to have said “...you do not choose painted figs, but real ones...”. This is ironic, since his early life was a portrait of deception. The debasement of currency was no different than painted figs instead of the actual fruit. Whether myth, or art, or the debasement of currency, all require a bit of deception.

This cynical man became contrary in every way. Imagine the people he offended, as he walked about in the daytime, carrying a lantern, announcing to everyone around that he was looking in vain for an honest man. He had misspent his youth, debasing currency, stealing from everyone. This bad rep followed him around. Now, here he was calling everyone out, pointing out that everyone is dishonest.

Who knows how Diogenes actually lived. This could all be fiction, a mythos leftover from a life that didn’t happen that way. But people prefer the myth, they prefer to idealize what defined a person. For Diogenes, he committed the crime of stealing from everyone, exploiting his position of prestige, being the son of a banker. Later, he chose Cynicism, asceticism, and poverty. He chose these things, reducing his standing even further, debasing himself like he had debased the currency, and then from this lowly lesser life, like a yapping dog, he barked and barked.

I find the juxtaposition of the debasement of currency and self-imposed poverty, and his supposed death by holding his own breath - all of this reads like myth to be conveniently symbolic.

What is that teaching?

The whole world has debased their currencies, not just Diogenes. This is no less self-destructive than Diogenes choice to live as an animal, destroying his own humanity. The whole of humanity is flawed, imperfect, and we do not always know this about ourselves.

Occasionally, some criminal comes along that is honest enough to show us our true nature, to shine a lantern light and challenge us, metaphorically.

The stories of Diogenes the Cynic are conflicting.

Just as our own perspectives on poverty and prosperity are conflicting. Just as our printing of money at interest is in conflict with our own self-interests. We are all implicated in these crimes against ourselves.

When Diogenes was called out in public for his crimes of debasement, he replied: “That was how I became a philosopher, you miserable fool!”

From the Journal of Joshua Fryfogle