Concessions

[Negotiation = Compromises + Concessions >-> Agreement/Peace/Mutual-Benefit]

.:.Maybe vacillation is an o9a trait? The Old Guards told me long, long, ago, way back in 2010ish that they were going to leave cyberspace… and they are still around 12 years later. And… I’m still here. Unfortunately, I have emotions. My emotions are what makes me come back and forth to ONA. One emotion is “long-time” sentimental attachment, like how you get sentimentally attached to a certain heirloom your late grandmother may have given to you… or like how as children we were sentimentally attached to teddy bears and dolls… or like how  you grow attached to an old pair of faded jeans with holes in them but you can’t throw them out because you’ve had those jeans for so long, despite the functional fact that such holely [holy? holey? Idk how spell it ((the adjective of “hole”))] don’t function properly in a practical way. ONA is like an old pair of my favorite jeans with holes in them which I can’t seem to throw away.

It would have been easier for me to throw these old jeans away and sever my sentimental ties with ONA, if things were left the way they were, and no new writings or blogs presented themselves. Unfortunately, after clicking on links at theo9away.wordpress.com site, I stumbled upon a new o9a archive, addressed as [gawathan.wordpress.com]. My emotions changed after I read the PDFs on that gawatham blog, one of those PDF’s is an interview of Anton Long dated 2021 called “An Aristocratic Ethos.” The other PDF that influenced my emotions was one called the “Boundaries of O9A Philosophy.”

It’s hard to explain my emotions I feel after reading those PDFs. The emotions are a mix of Sympathy and Guilt. I will explain both feelings one at a time.

By the emotion of Sympathy, what I mean is that I like “Anton Long,” or the person behind that penname. As a human being, I have a certain aspect of my personality and characteristic where I just like helping people out with whatever they are doing, like projects, brainstorming, homework, research, whatever; even if they don’t directly/specifically ask me for help. If they don’t stop me, I will just keep trying to help them. And that aspect of my personality comes from my Brain’s need for stimuli. I just simply love to solve problems and mysteries. It’s the underlying reason why I spend so much time doing Natural Philosophy and studying Nature: because its a huge Mystery that can be solved.

And so its because of that dharma I have for wanting to stimulate my brain by solving problems and mysteries that gives me the emotion of Sympathy for Anton Long. He seems to be wanting to do something or go somewhere with the ONA. I get that impression because: why on earth would a human being from England, on this earth, which is in the middle of nowhere special in the universe, spending so much of his mortal time on such an earth [50 years and counting] putting in the time and effort to make ONA and write ONA shit? It must mean something to him? He must be going somewhere with it? There are so many things a elderly human being can spend their mortal time on earth doing, like find a ladyfriend, travel the world, garden, but Anton Long seems to have a thing for this ONA thing? What’s he trying to do, I wonder? Whatever he’s trying to do: I can help in my own ways by looking for problems and malfunctions, and figuring out how to work out those bugs… “debug” ONA as the computer jocks would say [there are bugs in ONA memeplex: unless you are suggesting to me that Anton Long is – like the Pope – perfect and infallible]. My Sympathy for Anton Long is rooted in Curiosity: I’m just curious what he is doing, when he dedicates 40-50 years of his human life manifesting ONA.

And so, in that curiosity, over the years, I mis-interpreted what Anton Long was trying to do. In the past, during the early years [2007-2009], I thought Anton Long was trying to make ONA into a satanic cult. And so, what I did was write a bunch of stuff about ONA that pulled all of the Satanic stuff to the foreground and pushed all of the other stuff to the background. But Anton Long wasn’t making a satanic cult. And so, I later thought that maybe – given his early years – that Anton Long was trying to make a Nazi cult. I can help with that too. I’m not White or a Nazi… but who cares, I can swing way Far Right rhetorically and talk Hitler shit. But I learned that he wasn’t trying to make a Nazi cult either. Maybe he’s trying to make a philosophical thing? Like his own school/denomination of philosophy? I can help with that too. And so I talk a lot about Buddhism and Natural Philosophy.

And so, that’s what I mean by my emotion of Sympathy for Anton Long. I don’t mean that a pity him.

What I mean by my emotions of Guilt… there are many reasons why I feel guilty. I make mistakes in/with ONA since 2006/2007. I failed many times in my attempts and endeavors to do certain things. For the past year, I have been thinking: ‘If me and all those ONA people [Old Guards and so on] did not (1) talk Anton Long into retiring & (2) did not make it open source… would everything that happened since 2018 ever happened?’

I feel Guilty, because I said that ONA was liberal in neutering and getting rid of Anton Long. The truth is, because of my helpful nature, I had a lot to do with that. The reasoning – back then, as I shared with the Old Guards – that I believed that Anton Long should retire, was that ONA needs to be weened from an ideological source and that ONA should not be become a personality cult. Because if ONA remains dependent on Anton Long to keep feeding them/us “official/authoritative” manuscripts, and if ONA becomes an Anton Long worshiping personality cult and the person behind Anton Long passes away of old age [as we all do in Time], then: ONA will die with him. If you go back and re-read the poem I wrote called Caladrius, which I wrote way back in 2009, before Anton Long retired: you can see where my mind was and that even back then, I saw a problem with Anton Long being the head of ONA. In that Caladrius poem, I said: “So dependent on your nightingale that you become sick and lost without her.” And so, in order to heal the King: you have to remove the King’s dependence on that nightingale.

But, when ONA became leaderless and open source, new problems arose: people randomly, from time to time, began to claim to be the new leader or the new outer rep of ONA; and entryism took place. The most significant entryism in ONA’s recent history would be agents acting thru telegram and the ToB manipulating people. I feel Guilty because I was, and still am a huge proponent of a leaderless and open source ONA. Back in 2013, in my resignation paper I turned into the Old Guards, I specifically wrote, defying growing sentiments in ONA at that time, that the only ONA I recognize is one that is leaderless.

Was this a big mistake I had made? I feel very bad inside, because all those years, I was only trying to help Anton Long grow ONA, and I helped cause big problems.

That feeling of Guilt from making mistakes in the past, gives birth to another Guilt I feel: I feel Guilty for leaving/abandoning a big mess I helped make, and not trying to clean up after myself. It’s like me saying: “So yeah… ONA seems to be fucked up… I don’t like it no more… see ya! You guys can fix it!”

And so in my feelings of Guilt, I came back to try to fix problems I see, which I helped make: the problem of ONA needing ethical boundaries, or needing to get rid of that document “authority of individual judgment.” [*]

Which is when I called a Truce to have an open discussion.

COMPROMISES & CONCESSIONS

I’m familiar with negotiations. Mostly from my many years as a tagger, and working the political side of tagger crews with our shot callers. Rival crews “battle” each other for things like territory, their members, spray cans, weed. After the battle/war, we hold Negotiations. A “negotiation” just means when two rival crews/nations sit down to make Compromises and Concessions, in order that BOTH sides benefit somehow. That’s the Honorable way to do things as the winner of a war: you are considerate of your rival’s needs and wellbeing. It’s dishonorable as the winner to just take everything: it makes you look bad to everybody, and exposes your ignoble character.

For example, this one time, our crew had won a battle with a rival crew. The stipulation of the battle was that the losing crew gives up their best tagger to the winning crew. We won, and so we initially demanded that the losing crew give up their best tagger, per stipulations. The losing crew said: “Come on… he’s our best dude. If we lose him, then how are we going to win battles with other crews?” And so, our crew made a Compromise, we said: “Okay… you keep him. But you give us your spray cans, and Green River street as part of our turf, and if our crew gets into a battle your crew helps us and vise versa. Deal?” The rival crew agreed, and so they made the Concession of: giving us all their spray cans and one of their streets they controlled and promising to help us in future battles.”

And so Compromise just means that you understand that you cannot always have things your way, that you must give up certain demands, that you must meet the other party half way. And Concession means to understand that you need to give the other party things. The honorable end goal is: mutual benefit, which is the desired end result where peace and harmony can arise.

And so, those two concepts [Compromises and Concessions] came to my mind when I read the several PDF’s at the Gawatham O9A Archive blog. It fix problems in ONA, Anton Long and the Old Guards made Concessions, where they brought all the boring stuff of ethos and ethics to the foreground of ONA… made such concept of ethics relevant again. They also, via those PDFs, made it known that ONA is not socially liberal because ONA is still about its Traditions.

Because of those Concessions, which I really like, I feel Guilty for abandoning ONA [the spirit/egregore of ONA], and am happily willing to make Compromises: I understand that ONA can’t and shouldn’t give me all of my demands, just to make me happy. I’m only one person of many ONA associates. I am not an individualist [re: individualism]: my own single person’s contentment is small and subordinate to that of the Collective/Whole Organism [the living entity that is ONA, of which we are cells]. The spirit of ONA was willing, via its OG cells, to meet me in the middle, and I will oblige by meeting the spirit of ONA half way, in that middle ground, and will – if I may – continue to help it in my own ways, as I have been doing.

Neither swinging to the Left or the Right. Neither extremism or extreme intellectualism. Buddhistically: sukkha [peace] is the Natural state of equilibrium where the Pendulum comes to rest. Ultimately, ONA must learn to neither swing in either direction, but to find its center: its natural state of peace and equilibrium. As a memeplex and social order [subculture, school of philosophy], ONA is still young, and has a lot of time to make mistakes, errors, and eventually find its Sukkha.

The various PDFs at Gawatham O9A Archive honestly makes me proud to be associated with ONA. I am hoping that new, future generations of ONA initiates/associates read and study those documents: because every thing that ONA writes [our words] are like fishnets that are cast out [as Christ taught]. And those fishnets bring in fish such fishnets are Designed to catch. Because Realistically [re: Realism] when we say “ONA” or “Order of Nine Angles” we are talking about a reific entity which is an abstract noun that isn’t real [can’t be pointed at or touched]. In Reality [re: Realism] what exists are people who are influenced by or identify with ONA. To catch Honorable fish: you need fishnets that are imbued with concepts of honorable behaviour and aristocratic/noble ethos. Those things need to be brought into the foreground, and what elements of ONA that got us into this mess [since 2018] need to be pushed to the back of the stage.

A few snap shots from Gawatham’s PDF stash:

source: https://gawathan.files.wordpress.com/2022/10/o9a-interview-2021a.pdf

source: https://gawathan.files.wordpress.com/2022/09/o9a-boundaries-philosophy-v9.pdf

source: https://gawathan.files.wordpress.com/2022/09/o9a-boundaries-philosophy-v9.pdf

The Truce was fruitful. Now we can all return to status quo.

[*] My personal opinions/views about this document [the authority of individual judgment] – and this is purely my own fallible opinion – is that the said document was not written by Anton Long in the first place, and so, it is not primary source, and thus, is not even binding. But, at the same time, and in contrast to my individual opinion, a subculture and culture and Tribe has Elders, and such elders [especially in my strict Asian culture] and their elderly views [wise and experienced] are to be honored/respected by those younger [in age or in wisdom or in experience] than they. Our English word “Senator” does come from a certain Latin word with a topical meaning. And so, regarding that text of authority of individual judgment, my personal position is that: it is not primary text, not binding, or defining, but out of respect/honor [one who has the capacity to Honor/Respect/Venerate], being an Elder in this ONA subculture, the author’s text should be held in significant cultural/subcultural regard and thus adhered to.

/Thank You.

Omega 9 Alpha: Beyond The Dialectic