07 October 2024

When redlines collide, truth and trust die

[Freedom of speech] stands as a major block to the ability to be able to hammer [disinformation] out of existence. – John Kerry (source)

Introduction

War is a continuation of politics by other means – Carl von Clausewitz

Politics is a continuation of war by other means – Me

The first casualty when war comes is truth – Hiram Warren Johnson

War is a crime against humanity – Colonel Douglas MacGregor

Am I a fool to want a life of honesty and meaning for all? 

Nowadays, I’d guess over 99% of human beings are born and live in one civilisation or other, each built and sustained through war, whether economic or kinetic, over scarce resources. Many argue our lives are a permanent state of war whether we live in a civilisation or a hunter-gatherer band (this is the Hobbesian perspective). Others argue biological life itself is endless warring. 

So, if truth is indeed war’s first casualty and all life is war, is honesty among human peoples viable as a guiding social principle? If we cannot sustain honesty because life is war, can we run society with anything other than subterfuge, public relations, and propaganda? 

Perhaps, ironically, this dismal truth is why we can’t handle the truth – despite the opposing and apparently incongruous fact that we seem to value honesty so highly. Fundamentally incapable of handling the truth, perhaps we really are best served by whatever confected narrative the elites deem best suited to each evolving historical moment. Perhaps the widespread human gullibility that sustains our generalised Stockholm Syndrome really does create the best of all possible worlds (where a complex society must be kept functional). The elites are, after all, on the front lines; surely they know what it takes to keep civilisation humming. It’s not that they’re perfect or superior by nature, it’s just that any hierarchical system – especially those of high social specialisation – is systemically constrained to spawn an elite. Their systemic presence at the top is a kind of natural proof they know what’s best for that system, more or less, most of the time. It’s not a competition, it’s not some better-than/worse-than judgement, it is simply a function of specialised hierarchies; elites command, plumbers plumb, runners run. While civilisations and states are hierarchical, how could it be otherwise? We plebeians should not expect to be able to handle the truth en masse and, left to our own ill-prepared devices, manage the system well; our view of what’s really going on is simply insufficient to the task, generally speaking. 

As a realist who is clear eyed about his idealistic yearnings, I both agree and disagree with this bare-bones rhetoric. Of course there’s far more to it than the cartoon version set out above, but does that matter? Would a faultless, honest, complete and correct critique or defence debunk or verify it to the extent a mass awakening or mature acceptance would follow? I don’t think so. Things will change towards healthier governance systems when people are ready for such change, and words are but a small part of this. As Victor Hugo once put it, nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come. But for the time to be right for a radically different idea, events must first break the cultural soil, and profoundly.

Most of civilised humanity still appears incapable of handling the truth; societies are currently not constituted to create such a state of affairs, though the details of how this manifests will vary in emphases from culture to culture, from state to state. We pampered Westerners get by, on the whole, in a corrosive fog of uncertainty and free-floating anxieties, too confused and afraid to tell our arses from our elbows. I can’t speak to the rest of the world with any authority, but from what little I know would humbly suggest that the inability I reference is indeed at work elsewhere, albeit at different stages of the dawn-to-decadence vector, that surely develops with different cultural nuances in each civilisation/culture. In other words, the worldview driving this article is primarily Western.

My own cherished hope – a maturation into true adulthood for societies across the planet – could only come to pass if social processes were designed from the ground up to be honest and transparent all the way through. Getting to that possible future society from where we are now would require a rolling sequence of shocks so culturally and mass-psychologically upsetting, the survivors would finally want to put in the inner work required to be able to start handling the whole truth.

Is something along those lines happening right now? I’m not sure. What do you think? If it is, it’s going almost exactly as I would expect: turbulently, painfully, tragically, horrifically.

But getting from here to a healthier there – rather than to some dystopian future, or nuclear annihilation – would require that life itself can accommodate such a state of full public openness. What follows herein probes the feasibility of my idealistic yearning.

The nature of fundamental war

O, what a tangled web we weave/When first we practice to deceive – Sir Walter Scott

The very word “secrecy” is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. – John F Kennedy

It’s not so much culture wars that bedevil us; such are somewhat manageable, at least over great tracts of time. What I’m positing here is a war of fundamentals, namely: how fundamental subterfuge mutually excludes the trust social life fundamentally requires. Is this an intractable problem that’s built into the very fabric of reality?

Subterfuge is fundamental to biology; think Venus fly traps, spider webs and the behaviours inspired by human sex drive. And yet trust is fundamental to social life. Because of the vital importance of trust to social life, whether civilisational or primitive, each instance of subterfuge must undermine society by undermining trust to some degree. Thanks to mass communication, and especially instant international communication, social life – in which I include trade, law, politics, banking, journalism … in short all information-based exchange – has become truly international and mind-bogglingly complex. Does this mean international openness, transparency, and honesty have become fundamental to human survival? Does this mean we must now be structurally and culturally aware of, and thus more alert to, the details and perils of subterfuge? Is the nation state – a creature of secrecy and subterfuge (see below) – thus under threat, or no longer fit for purpose?

(Procreation is also fundamental to biology; life without procreation is impossible. It entails selfish-gene-based strategies, that include nurturing, parenting, the formation of social groups, etc., that add nuance to the warring angle I’m foregrounding in this article. Such strategies are, however, downstream of and thus serve ‘selfishness’ and the primacy of the survival instinct. In the interests of brevity, I am not going to probe this aspect any more deeply than this.)

Accepting that subterfuge is fundamental, knowing that states have official-secrets acts, knowing that corporations make money on proprietary secret sauces for every conceivable product and product component, knowing that intelligence agencies deal in all manner of deception and wrongdoing (see below), etc., how can I possibly know what’s really going on, e.g. in the war in West Asia and between Russia and Ukraine / NATO / the West? How can I trust that vaccines are “safe and effective”? How can I know pesticides and herbicides and fertilisers and GMOs are good for human health? Knowing that I am deemed a “domestic terrorist” for questioning any state-sanctioned narrative, knowing that “follow the science” means no such thing, knowing that scientists can be corrupted by money and prejudice just as all human beings can, what and whom can I trust? 

When I am mandated to believe a thing, I cannot trust that thing, nor the person or entity mandating it. I suspect most humans are like this, somewhere deep down, otherwise honesty would not be such a highly valued quality, otherwise Stockholm Syndrome would not be a syndrome but a perfectly healthy response to power. 

I want to know the truth but cannot; governance structures forbid it, foster war, foster hatred. To foster hatred (dehumanise), war must first murder truth. It takes a lot of persistent effort to train a soldier to kill, to hate, but hate is everywhere. How is this so? Labour supporters hate Conservative supporters, Democrats hate Republicans. The AfD is hated by the German establishment, and so on and so on. In such a polarised and generalised state of war across so many fronts in so many modalities, what can we trust? Without trust, what becomes of society? And who actually wants societal breakdown?

The powers that be have done terrible things both to become and stay the powers that be, and we are all a part of this devil’s pact. Wittingly or unwittingly it does not change the core dynamic; we are in it together, thick as thieves, with nowhere left to hide. The tension between the fundamental nature of subterfuge and our fundamental love of truth appears to have created a kind of glass ceiling we do not know how to break, or even clearly discern.

We admire honesty, but resort to subterfuge

We developed a CIA in order to carry out the subversive side of the political struggle – William Colby, former Director of the CIA

There are doubtless similar examples from every nation, but the following story of political subterfuge at international scale is both clearly documented and powerfully illustrative of how systemic subterfuge is, and also originates in that shining city on the hill, that bastion of truth, justice and freedom: The United States of America. (Hat tip to Mike Benz.)

To ensure the Italian Communist Party did not win the 1948 general election in Italy – 60% of the vote was predicted for that party –, the CIA spent $10m on propaganda and other underhand methods, including recruiting mafia thugs and Hollywood stars, to persuade that nation’s electorate to vote for Italy’s Christian Democrats; the US deemed Italy’s geopolitical importance too great to allow it to fall to communism. 

The CIA endeavour was successful; the Communist Party was not elected. Recently declassified documents reveal its success was fully capitalised on, namely by inaugurating the Office of Special Projects (aka The Department of Dirty Tricks), an act its sponsor, George Kennan, later said was “the greatest mistake I ever made”. In a nutshell, it plans and oversees covert operations designed to sustain US hegemony. Below is the document’s definition of perhaps the most important powers granted to it:

As used in this directive, “covert operations” are understood to be all activities (except as noted herein) which are conducted or sponsored by this Government against hostile foreign states or groups or in support of friendly foreign states or groups but which are so planned and executed that any US Government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons and that if uncovered the US Government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them. Specifically, such operations shall include any covert activities related to: propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups, and support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world. Such operations shall not include armed conflict by recognized military forces, espionage, counter-espionage, and cover and deception for military operations. – National Security Council directive 10/2 formalising the creation of the Office of Special Projects

Perhaps, in terms of the threat at that time, the CIA was right to establish the practice of political warfare by covert means, perhaps not. It doesn’t really matter; duplicitous is the opposite of how people and nations prefer to appear to others (honesty is revered). Action of this type must therefore be both secretive and plausibly deniable to be lastingly effective. It must, therefore, be an ever growing web of lies:

This is the problem with diplomacy through duplicity. Because you lie to the outside world, you need to also lie to your own citizens, to keep the outside from finding out. So while the lies may help you to successfully acquire an empire, you now have to maintain an empire of lies. – Mike Benz

Otherwise known as: “O, what a tangled web we weave/When first we practice to deceive.“ Or: Decisions are investments in the future. Or: The means are the ends. One ends up believing one’s own propaganda, one’s own hype, because one gets caught up in its entangling momenta, the compounding nature of deception. Today, “domestic terrorists” are the new hostiles the state must also monitor and deal with. Subterfuge builds on itself like an insatiable hunger that corrodes trust and weakens the interwoven fabrics of affected societies. 

This is the truth we cannot handle. But, as implied above, statecraft of this type is as old as the state; subterfuge is a fundamental part of reality which statecraft cannot escape. Perhaps Stockholm Syndrome is the most rational response; fighting all-powerful fundamentals is futile. 

And yet things change, history happens. Today, the potential cost of not properly addressing subterfuge and the bitter enmities that thrive in its wake could not be higher; our combined destructive potential could end life on earth. 

I would be stunned if there were a nation on earth of sufficient size that has not granted itself similar powers. To cut a very long and complex history short, the upshot of what is now an international frenzy of such statecraft – in the wake of past ‘crimes’ being covered up and compounded by ever greater ‘crimes’ – is a stormy sea of disinformation and polarised mistrust. Redlines square off against opposing redlines, across multiple geopolitical axes; every flashpoint one examines seems existential. Consequently, causatively, fundamentalism and fanaticism abound. This is the predictable outcome of rampant dishonesty and the pervasive mistrust it births.

And yet, come what may, we revere honesty; stories of courage, decency and nobility always move us, especially in the worst of times. We hunger for them. We suffer under the weight of pervasive corruption, sicken from existential dread, crave news of true decency and honour, are horrified by depravity. And while we can float arguments of pragmatics and realpolitik to cast these dangerous historical junctures as predictable and natural, it is always with a sense of regret, of sadness. 

Why? Why do our hearts beat against the grain of the very biology that evolved them? Because we fear death? I think not. People yearn for death as escape from oppression, psychological torture, persecution, criminality, etc. So I feel I am justified in asserting that our need for honesty and decency is in fact more fundamental than subterfuge, and, further, that subterfuge, dishonesty, deception, betrayal, etc., come in very different flavours, and can serve very different ends. 

There are important and rich distinctions to be drawn here; i.e., playfully wearing lipstick and eyeshadow to attract someone on the one hand, and going behind a friend’s back in hurt anger and betraying her, are obviously qualitatively different acts. There are important differences, contexts, justifications when it comes to deception. When we expose some instance of cruel or malicious dishonesty, we want all the details, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so we can assess how to react, so that the right type of healing atonement can happen, both in the victim and the perpetrator. When someone engages in playful deceptions to please or entertain us, the opposite is the case. The mysterious deception spices up our life.

Truth heals wrongdoing, but not all deception is wrongdoing. It takes wisdom to be able to tell the playful from the cruel.

In other words, what we need is wisdom, equanimity, humility. This, in turn, requires freedom of speech, access to all public information, zero secrecy for public affairs (means are ends). And, because wisdom would be needed throughout a population, we need, for starters, educational processes that are primarily concerned with instilling in our young – or rather encouraging to robust fruition – how to handle the richly complex vicissitudes of human life, this before subjects like chemistry, geography, physics, etc. Not to their exclusion of course, but as an underpinning: wisdom acquisition as a fundamental goal of schooling. Once something like this is established, democracy would truly flourish.

(Do you think nation states would welcome such educational processes? If they wouldn’t, why not?)

Mike Benz’s broader commentary on the CIA and other intelligence agencies (“the blob”) closely matches what my portrayal of power as forestaller of correction predicts. Diplomacy through duplicity is only feasible when you have sufficient power to wield it successfully. It is also very seductive to groups whose primary raison d’être is power, i.e. nation states. Attempts to constrain systemic subterfuge will fail over time, assuming that the state continues to grow in power. The logic of deception – ever more entangling webs of lies – all but guarantees this. Folded into this equation is that trust is under threat when the system you live in includes in its institutional fabric the need for monopoly power, as is the case with nation states and, I argue, civilisation. And propaganda is necessarily a part of state-based governance architecture; there is simply no way of creating the deep, reflexive cultural sense of being a people except by propaganda, myth making, etc. Which, as I echo elsewhere (referencing Ellul), ends up propagandising its propagators

In a winner-takes-all battle, whose timescale seems perpetual, one side may well defeat one enemy group, but in doing so will create others. If one side manages to destroy all its enemies, it will have become so large it would instantly start to fracture into warring groups upon its final ‘victory’, if not before. The means are the ends; enmity ensures continuing enmity. If we perceive reality as war, we will create war as our reality. 

The problem is thus one of perception, and also noticing it is a problem of perception. This makes it extremely difficult to address, but not impossible. But to repeat, the stakes are high, which means the pressure to take on this challenge may well be sufficient to get us started and asking the right questions.

Conclusion

Are we not threaded by the same weave/By the wind, terra firma and unparted sea?/Whether by accident or fortune/You and I, we are matter, and it matters. – The Oh Hellos

Curiosity killed the cat. Satisfaction brought it back. – Anonymous

We are social animals and moved by love. We thrive in love and sicken in enmity. And we are both endlessly curious and (thus) subject to endless change. Even phenomena as ancient as nation states, as ancient as power itself, are subject to our curiosity, as to the endless invention and experimentation curiosity drives.

What is more important to healthy societal functioning than trust? When we no longer trust our neighbours, and our neighbours no longer trust us and can destroy us, we are emotionally justified in wanting to destroy our neighbours preemptively (dehumanisation thrives on such tension). This is an incredibly difficult situation to handle wisely; fear inhibits impartial analysis, existential fear yet more so.

But no matter how difficult such tensions are, if we don’t want to destroy each other and perhaps all life on earth, radical honesty and openness are the way forward. Perhaps the love-wisdom-health trinity I advance here at Econosophy is not as soppy as it seems at first glance. But to embrace it properly, deeply, from the top to the bottom of societies right across the planet, will take enormous courage and radical change. Nothing is more threatening to the system than love.

While I was writing this, Charles Eisenstein published a beautiful article that eloquently sets out how the habit of blaming the ‘bad guys’ for the evil in the world chains us to the very problem we hope to solve by identifying the guilty party; fear-filled/hate-filled blaming perpetuates enmity; it is driven by dehumanisation. Drawing on a Chris Hedges article, he argues that not blame, but total truth is the way forward. Total truth unearths what must be unearthed and processed before deep healing can occur. Without deep healing, both individually and at societal scales, the cycle of violence continues, as we witness across history.

Of course individuals cause wildly different amounts of death, destruction, injury, malfeasance, etc. Of course peoples and societies and cultures have very different qualities of atonement to endure. But blame is not the point. Compassionate, determined unearthing of the truth is. True dialogue affords this, where dialogue means a willingness to discover where you err in your understanding, and to own up to wrongdoings you have committed or abetted. Done properly, dialogue heals. Truth heals. Of course it hurts, disrupts, upends, but better that than total annihilation.

Think of it this way. If my basic position at Econosophy is wrong – namely that meaning is obviously fundamental to life because humans become cynical and/or despondent without it – then there is no point struggling against war for something better. If materialism is correct and I am wrong, I predict history would proceed as follows: 

Those humans who become despondent because their lives are meaningless will be selectively bred out of existence. ‘Fitter’ humans will become progressively more and more narcissistic, sociopathic, psychopathic – such types do not hunger for meaningful lives. This will destroy society as trust corrodes. When trust corrodes to zero, society will atomise into non-existence. Human life will finally become a war of each against all until disparate lone survivors, the ‘winners’, die of old age.

If such a prognosis does not inspire you, does not fill you with joy, why not? Are you one of those deluded fools who wants a meaningful life? If you are, how do you need this immeasurable, undefinable thing, meaning? Because of your bio-chemistry? Because of neuronal-electrical webs that experience clouds of meaning-chemicals? Can you explain to your own satisfaction how bio-chemistry and electricity together produce both the need for meaning and meaning itself?

We have been led by the logic of power, scarcity and subterfuge to drift, culturally, so far from love, wisdom and health, the latter grouping appears, to so many today, like a rainbow-surfing unicorn. The truth is that power, scarcity and subterfuge breed enmity, which breeds mistrust, which leads to today’s world in which very, very few lead truly meaningful lives. And we all suffer for it.

That we suffer is, for me, absolutely pivotal to my argument. If we are Hobbesian beasts biologically wired to war, each against all, then why does warring, each against all, depress us?

Here’s the thing: “You and I, we are matter, and it matters.” In my view, what we call matter is an experience in consciousness. Being human is, fundamentally, being subject to matter’s merciless and disciplining immediacy as it constrains and oppresses our deeper nobility through fear, self doubt, meaninglessness, etc., or alternatively, ego inflation, mania, hubris, narcissism, etc. Our suffering in matter is a sign of our deeper nobility; otherwise all would be robotically functional. 

We are human, I believe, to learn grace under pressure, to discover, adore and sustain the beauty of what we experience as physical existence. Nothing teaches grace more profoundly, more richly, than matter. As society grows in complexity, so the challenges we face grow in difficulty. We might fail the tests we currently face, but we may well succeed. 

Wouldn’t that be beautiful.

30 August 2024

Dear Future

 Dear Future,

I’m writing this to you – sending these words to a possible Thereafter – not knowing if you will be, or if you will stumble upon me, or if you will ever understand my words. Now is most certainly not your time, but perhaps your time will come; perhaps things are not so bleak as they look.

It is late August 2024. I anticipate a collapse into totalitarianism over the next few years, primarily in the West, but perhaps also globally; these things are infectious. Since late March 2020, I have been trying to make sense of whether such a collapse is underway, and if yes, what chances it has of coming to pass. But the pace of events has been electrifying and I am but a humble man making my way with a family in tow, in Leeds, on a very low income. I have put my shoulder to the grindstone of various endeavours and found the veracity of both my efforts and theirs sorely wanting. 

My assessment, for what it's worth, is that we are too far gone, that our humanity has atrophied too much. Totalitarianism is the obvious consequence, given other factors such as global mass media. To the degree this slide into debauchery and mob violence was planned, it is an incompetent plan. So if it is indeed a conspiracy, it is a conspiracy of idiots crashing down on the society of idiots that spawned them. We are all variously to blame.

Something about humanity, especially in the West, gave up. One reason for this must have been the curious juxtaposition of convenience and abundant consumer goods on the one hand, and ever more squalidly busy lives on the other. Another aspect is undoubtedly the grotesque wealth disparities between the many peoples and classes of the world. Another is the rapidly accelerating breakdown in our ability to engage in healthy and productive dialogue across personal and cultural divides. Another is defensive and hubristic arrogance. Another is our ugly tendency to dehumanise. There are many other reasons.

All this fused together in the world pot to poison trust and decency, wisdom and love, in its foul brew. No one knows anything any more. Everyone has their own hot and bubbling opinion. Everyone else is controlled opposition, not to be trusted. A world without trust is ripe for catastrophe.

What has remained doggedly resistant to my own analysis is specialisation. Are societal/civic trust and specialisation mutually exclusive over the long term? I’m not sure, but suspect this cannot be answered unless money’s influence, as civilisation’s dominant measure of value, is taken properly into account. There is a simple reason for this; money cannot measure the value of trust, love, wisdom, etc. While money-value decides the vast majority of what a society does, these deeper values atrophy so slowly it is extremely hard to detect. At some point, human-cultural sensibilities become so dysfunctional, insufficient self-awareness is available to the broader public to identify the root cause of what ails them.

So, if you are reading these words, dear Future, if you are indeed dear and you are a healthier time and place than ours, please learn most deeply the importance of trust and how it grows healthiest from the good soil of love and wisdom. If you get this foundation right, I’m sure the rest falls sweetly into place.

25 August 2024

Impossible is nothing: a common-sense look at the miracle of existence

(Part I)

Love thine enemy. – Jesus of Nazareth

Love your neighbour as yourself. – Leviticus

Struggle in the way of God. – I understand that this is how Jihad tends to appear in the Q’ran

It is easy to hate and difficult to love. This is how the whole scheme of things works. All good things are difficult to achieve; and bad things are very easy to get. – Confucius

Introduction

I know of no imperative more radical and all encompassing than “Love thine enemy”. Whether the origin of this famous phrase is The Bible, and thus Christianity, is irrelevant; it neatly captures what love actually entails, how profoundly challenging it is.

Can anyone truly love their enemy? Ponder what love-based relations would mean between Ukrainians and Russians, or between Israelis and Palestinians. 

When we cannot love our enemies in our millions and billions, does humanity become volatile, cynical, subject to the endlessly repeating tragedies of massed hate and fear? The terrible energy of compounding, uncorrected cynicism and volatility at cultural and civilisational scale is on ugly display across the world. Love could not seem more preposterous an instruction.

Switching religious rubric, how is your Jihad coming along? How robust is your godly commitment to the evolution and authenticity of your humility? Love without humility is not love. Humility without love is not humility.

Are such musings political or ideological/religious? Both? How about pragmatic?

I do not subscribe to either left- or right-wing politics; I can fathom no healthy reason to be loyal to an ideology. But, it would be naïve of me not to recognise that politics is the art of defending and effecting your principles, mores and morality in the world. One can pontificate all manner of things, and many of us do. But translating ideas into action in the sphere of any kind of governance or bureaucracy or group activity is politics. Indeed, it is as if the raison d’être of earthly existence – more specifically of human existence – is politics: What is feasible and actionable, now, given the irreducibly complex reality of the situation at hand?

The more truly loving you are in your deepest being – in other words, the more authentically you can love your enemies – the richer and wiser your vision of what is pragmatically possible in any given situation. So, wouldn’t love indeed make the world a healthier, happier place? Isn’t it that simple (logically speaking)? Why not, for example, put in the hard work needed to make love and wisdom foremost in our educational processes? Why not make best efforts to develop and nurture as wise and loving a population as we can?

This line of inquiry has become the core of my work here at Econosophy. I would like to see it either thwarted as unreasonable or silly, or, failing that, taken up by people more effective than I am at encouraging others to take this analysis to heart, and run with it.

This article follows on directly from The Power Trap by exploring more deeply the fundamentally cyclical patternings I derive from the best logical deduction my faculties can muster, namely the 

curiosity ➜ slow mastery ➜ automation/internalisation ➜ breakdown/decadence ➜ curiosity …

cycle the previous article briefly referenced (see image above for a little more flesh to its skeleton). In so doing, I attempt to sketch out solid rhetorical ground for seeing such cyclicality as a spiral subject to evolution/progress and thus as a rational spur to taking wisdom, love and total health more seriously at governance and cultural levels.

Buckle up Uncle Buck; Kansas is about to dissolve before our eyes.

A rapid-fire recap of my general position

[Peter Frankopan] looks into hundreds of empires […] over three millennia […] and how they went out, [and finds] aspects of what we’re doing now that are just as insane, whether you’re looking at the Moguls, the Mongols, the Persians, the eastern or western Romans, or the British; they all do really stupid things at the end. […] It’s power pollutes, and absolute power pollutes absolutely, that sort of thing. – Larry Wilkerson in discussion with Professor Glenn Diesen and Alexander Mercouris

I roam this analytical territory because humans do not thrive under the auspices of corruption, and I think this is becoming painfully clear to a growing percentage of the West. Isn’t something gnawing at us, nagging away at the back – or front – of our minds that Things Aren’t Right? Don’t we yearn for transparency, decency, honesty, trust and dignity more than we crave uni-party politics, virtue signalling, untrustworthy media, ever more entrenched polarisation, ever crappier consumer products, ever shallower entertainment, ever less nutritious food, etc.?

Yes, we enjoy cheap and easy thrills for all sorts of reasons, but we’re learning, the hard and squalid way, that this cheapness is profoundly unsatisfying and, in fact, sickening. We’re learning that deep friendship, mature parenting, courageous and honest leadership, healthy communities and ecosystems, etc. are far more important, that these self-evidently good things are in fact the ground on which the more whimsical pleasures become and remain meaningful.

A robustly meaningful life is, in essence, a wisely sustained dynamic balance that continually creates total health. Succeeding at this long term, purposefully and mindfully, requires a good understanding – whether in the form of unconscious reflexes or mindfully developed – of how existence works, especially when the entity that is to remain healthy over time is as complex and unwieldy as a human culture. From the perspective of this article, here is a bare-bones list of the core elements one might ponder when working towards good understanding:

  1. Reality includes cyclicality
  2. The nature of that cyclicality can only be an expression of the nature of reality
  3. Reality also includes evolution* (aka negative entropy) else there would be no life on earth
  4. Evolution means historical cyclicality is an uneven spiral, not a revolving wheel
  5. Humanity must now learn wiser cultural responses to power’s corrupting vector: we have WMD
  6. Because wising up is possible (evolution is fundamental), wising up is clearly the way to go

* In my conception, “evolution” is more than biological; it is fundamental to reality and is fundamentally about wisdom.

The best three words for poetically expressing what I mean by “wising up” are “Love thine enemy”. As Confucius suggested, this is far from an easy undertaking. But seeing as we are increasingly aware of the dangerous pitfalls of lazy submission to our shallower pleasures and appetites, perhaps the attractiveness of this beautifully difficult and fundamentally earthly challenge is growing.

Are we finally ready to want to do the hard work it takes to build a healthier world in tipping-point numbers? I suspect that precarious moment approaches. But you cannot force love in, or hate out. Force is not the way. We have to pay our dues organically; we have to mean it. We are tasked with honestly and fully learning where we’re at with what we currently are. The tipping point will therefore necessarily include sober acceptance of our state of consciousness in all its ugliness and beauty. 

Will we baulk and pull back to double down yet again as the daunting enormity of the task gapes open before us?

Because nothingness cannot be, what good is suffering?

Muhammad Ali, "Impossible is nothing"

The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism. – Camus

I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos. There has to be some organizing principle. God to me is a mystery but is the explanation for the miracle of existence - why there is something rather than nothing. – Allan Sandage [my emphasis]

(This complicated section progresses from identifying value in inquiring into the question of existence, then moves on to how our ontological convictions affect both our understanding of suffering’s role and what we should do about it.)

What is possible? Constrained by our nature and circumstances, what can humans accomplish? What can we reasonably expect of progress? I believe we cannot properly address such questions without starting from the very bottom: existence itself.

An illuminating thought experiment that can lead anyone who takes it seriously into the depths of reality begins with this simple-seeming (teleological) question: 

Why is there existence? 

More controversially: Can there be such a ‘thing’ as nothingness? 

When you really think about it, it is truly awe inspiring that there is something rather than nothing. For example, is it equally probable, theoretically, that reality ‘be’ nothing, rather than something? Could reality even be real if it were pure nothingness? Is total non-existence possible at all? If nothingness were a realistic possibility, could being even be?

These may seem facile – though tortuous – questions, but they serve an important logical function. I happen to believe that nothingness is a logical impossibility. For me it follows, therefore, that reality cannot not be, and eternally so. In other words, it is 100% certain, eternally, that there be existence. Reality is immortal.

Nothingness cannot be, because to really, truly, strictly ‘be’ nothing – and not merely our conception of or theorising about nothing, e.g. a chaotic void capable of spawning richly complex big bangs –, ‘it’ would have to have zero properties and qualities. Otherwise, ‘it’ would be a something. To exist, to be able ‘to be’ in the first place, one of the properties nothingness would have to include is the property of existing. ‘It’ cannot therefore exist; that would give ‘it’ at least one property, which ‘it’ cannot have by virtue of ‘being’ nothingness.

Nothingness is only ‘plausible’ as a thought experiment that highlights the curious oddity of non-existence and the eternity of existence. It is one of the many domains that science cannot properly address. It is best traversed with rhetoric and poetics.

Impossible is nothingness.

This may seem like disingenuous tautological casuistry, perhaps even simplistic, but, to my mind, the logic reveals something fundamentally contradictory about the notion that nothingness can be a thing, or, exist. Nothingness is a fundamental impossibility, and I happen to find this thought awe-inspiring. To wit: 

If nothingness is impossible, earthly existence is not suspended in any kind of void; nothingness can have no properties, including the ability to accommodate 3d ‘objects’, and being a ‘fabric’ ‘made of’ spacetime. Nothingness cannot change either, therefore time, as change, cannot be a function of or impact on nothingness. If time cannot relate to nothingness, how could nothingness permit light to travel ‘through’ it? Nothingness would then be a thing within which light waves propagated over time. It follows, then, that existence cannot be spatially situated within infinite or dimensionless non-existence.

Nor do I see a vacuum as nothingness; it is the result of extracting air and any other materials from an area defined by some surrounding casing such that forces act on it very powerfully. A vacuum is thus a thing sustained by the context of other things that can act upon it. As the saying goes, nature abhors a vacuum, which means vacuums are acted upon by the rest of nature, and thus things. Non-existent, nothingness cannot be acted upon, cannot be redressed or corrected.

But more importantly to the matter at hand, if nothingness is impossible, so is death as most Westerners appear to understand it. “What happens when we die?” “Oh … nothingness.” What many humans see as death is, on my logic, in fact but one manifestation of change. And yet billions of us fear death viscerally. From this misunderstood – though biologically reasonable – fear of ‘death’, much suffering springs. This is the ontological connection between the nature of reality – the nature of existence – and suffering that interests us here. 

There is an implied but pervasive sense of nothingness at the heart of the mechanistic/humanistic/atheistic paradigm. Materialism proceeds from an assumption of ‘death’, aka ‘dead’ ‘matter and energy’ (whatever they are), from which it somehow conjures mechanical/biological ‘life’ that sinks back into ‘death’ as a result of unavoidable causes like ageing or accident or sickness. Yes, you can argue that ‘life’ and the earth’s biosphere are therefore precious miracles of awe-inspiringly unlikely happenstance, but that argument does not dispel the fact of death dominating a merciless and unimaginably vast universe in which biological ‘life’ represents but a vanishingly small percentage: beautiful, improbable ‘life’ as consolation prize in an oceanic death: fragile, tenuous, alone. This is in essence what materialism implies, and what those who unquestioningly subscribe to it kinda-sorta feel about the nature of existence. 

Is this paradigmatic perspective, which proceeds from death, from nothingness, logically sound?

This question of course alludes to the dualistic dilemma of consciousness and matter as rival fundamental phenomena for ontology. Which of these two phenomena you deem fundamental strongly influences your relationship with, and ideological reaction to, suffering, and also how you value life (whatever you think that is).

All this begets another deep question: Is there any value to asking why? Humanist/materialist science finds teleology (querying the purpose or why of phenomena) anathema, but I believe teleology has real value, if only because grappling with fundamental issues teleologically bears unexpected fruit. For example:

Why is there suffering? 

Our response to this question strongly impacts how far we think we should go – societally, politically, economically – to minimise suffering. Let’s begin with, “Don’t ask why.”

If we fundamentally dismiss purpose from our reasoning, what then is suffering? Is it mechanical and therefore illusory? Is suffering simply irritating grit in the machinery of existence, machinery we then ‘perfect’ in pursuit of efficiency using cost-benefit calculations? This would be suffering understood as a drag on efficiency, an irksome albatross around the neck of economic growth. Or perhaps as a driver of economic growth in the sense of miracle cures of endless variety but low effectiveness; endless suffering is good for business.

While we might being doing very well on this mechanical track in some respects, in others – see rapid-recap section above – things don’t look so rosy. In other words, can we meaningfully address the problem of suffering, with wise compassion, without addressing its purpose? I think not. I think history shows us getting inexorably bogged down in cynicism, and dysfunctionally so.

Luxury makes pain seem even harder, and dulls and weakens one’s pleasures. For the person who is always luxuriating and never touches pain will end up unable to endure any pain at all, and also not be able to feel any pleasure, not even the most intense. – Dio Chrysostom (seen in an Academy of Ideas video)

I do not mean to imply that a teleological approach yields easy answers; quite the opposite. I find suffering extremely hard to tackle. I know sociological inquiry into relative wealth in money and material terms has produced all sorts of statistical correlations between health and success outcomes, but, as is so often the case with academic studies, the findings produced are not teleologically satisfying. What is happiness? What is wisdom? What is health? What are success and failure? What is money and how does it measure worth, wealth, value? These are devilishly hard questions to answer, especially academically, especially materialistically. How rich and wise is our understanding of suffering if we do not properly address such questions?

Obviously, I find the question of suffering pivotal, and I think most humans do. I don’t know anyone not adversely affected by corruption, rampant mendacity, the disappearance of trust-based and vital communities, moral ambiguity, etc. Humans, as all animals in fact, don’t do well in a sick environment. To repeat: Is the current sickness of our Western-dominated global situation inevitable due to historical, dawn-to-decadence cyclicality, which is itself inevitable because Human Nature is immutable, or rather, devoid of free will, robotic? If yes, then perhaps there’s no point trying to respond wisely to cyclicality; it’s inevitable and humans obviously don’t got what it takes. So quit whining. 

On this mechanistic, anti-teleological logic, there is in fact no point to anything, by definition. And yet we respond to reality as if there were; we suffer compounding crises of meaning when our culture tells us there is no purpose, that existence is fundamentally dead.

We appear to suffer fundamentally under the paradigmatic belief (or cultural reflex) that there is no point to it all, that life is a mechanical happenstance in a fundamentally dead universe. Of course humans also suffer in superstitious or religious-authoritarian contexts, but I’d guess for downstream (non-paradigmatic) reasons of corruption; any state system that becomes stagnantly sclerotic exacerbates corruption by virtue of too much power in too few hands; this is a function of power, not of ‘spirituality’.

But I’m not writing this article to announce the winner of The Battle of the Paradigms. What I’m trying to do is defend the possibility of very broad-scale evolutionary progress that passes through vacillating, socially experimental stages. That is, I’m probing why history rhymes, and suggesting the reason for its rhyming is closely connected to suffering’s purpose.

Specifically, I’m arguing that humanist science in the guise of Scientism/Materialism, currently the vanguard of human progress in certain respects, has thrown out too much baby with the bathwater of corrupted, superstitious, authoritarian religion by studiously ignoring immeasurable – but fundamental – phenomena like love and wisdom. Materialism, the hegemonic West’s paradigm, has predictably become moribund and sclerotic as the West’s power corrupts itself into end-stage decadence. Wisdom and love are its blindspots, so to speak, as is health in the rich, all-encompassing way I mean it at Econosophy. ‘Objective’ measurement is materialism’s dogma, its unimpeachable holy of holies. As such, immeasurable and ineffable phenomena have been recklessly demoted in the maelstrom of material progress.

Is it not self-evident that we thrive on awe? Why do we find awe so inspiring, but fundamental nothingness so … emptying?

For example, does the following assertion inspire you? Consciousness is an illusion because reality is mechanical and thus fundamentally dead. Consciously experienced suffering is therefore likewise an illusion. You might think, Yay! No more suffering for me, it’s just an illusion!, but I’d bet good money your initial enthusiasm would quickly exhaust itself.

Alternatively, if the purpose of suffering were to provoke maturation into full adulthood, both of individual humans and, now, of extremely large groups of humans, would that not be more inspiring, more empowering? Would that not cast progress in a different light, lend it a richer, more noble aspect?

The West’s generalised sense of irksome suffering seems to be precisely that aspect of human existence we want politics to mitigate. ‘Progress’ appears to be understood, in essence, as the steady diminishment of our suffering, the cleaning up of our self-made messes by The Powers That Be. ‘Progress’ is an ever easier life for more and more people.

Graphic from the movie, The Incredibles, Pixar

Wouldn’t this make us incompetents who cannot take care of our own business, Hobbesian incompetents who need elite Incredibles to keep us from ruining our world? How do we know our reflexive expectations and demands of progress aren’t turning us into brats spoilt by our ever more convenient lives, as in “good times make weak men?” If we have indeed become brattish, we would first need to acquire a good understanding of what “hard times make strong men” and “good times make weak men” really mean before we can lastingly remedy our brattish oversensitivity to suffering. We would need, at the cultural level, a far more nuanced understanding of the role of suffering.

I discussed some of the issues on the curious matter of how enduring and overcoming suffering adds richness to a human’s character a while ago, but still feel like I am only scratching the surface of this pivotal issue. Below is my current thinking on the role of suffering as a fundamental aspect of reality, which is also a roundabout way of beginning to define it.

It seems fundamental to me that resistance (opposition of some kind) is required for there to be meaningful decision-based action, action, that is, that has the potential to contribute to some sort of evolution or maturation of your character, of your wisdom, as you learn from the consequences of each action you take. Then, in addition to this needed resistance (opposition), the quality and quantity of chance/randomness, namely the unpredictable free-will ingredient a living system needs to evolve meaningfully – that is, in a non-robotic way that can be a conscious, deliberate effort to improve – compounds fractally in the vast melee of life to produce dizzyingly complex diversity, which, I believe, produces ever richer challenges to continued evolution. In other words, suffering evolves too. 

Think tribes to chieftaincies to city states to civilisations to nation states to multinational corporations, etc. These ever more complex human groupings as crucibles of increasingly diverse challenges are mirrored by the ever more powerful enemy bosses a computer-game player must defeat to level up in a given computer game, so it’s not as if this idea is outlandish or even original. I’m just asserting that it is fundamental to the nature of reality and grounding my assertion in the curious impossibility of nothingness.

Finally, when you add in acute human sensitivity, ego, fear, imagination, hedonism, laziness, etc., and mix in a culturally shallow understanding of progress, you get an interpretation/experience of resistance/opposition that translates, in a generalised way, to suffering

On this logic, suffering is an immature perception of misunderstood challenges, even though challenge – suffering – is an eternal aspect of reality.

But surely this is violently callous of me. How can it be immature to experience the horrific realities being endured by Palestinians in Gaza as suffering? And there are countless other unbearable intensities of suffering happening right now, everywhere on earth, that are far too many to list, and far too gruesome. We are at each other’s throats and it keeps getting worse.

Such suffering appals me, sickens me, makes me despair for humanity. It makes the phrase “Love thine enemy” seem vicious, fantastical, cruelly naïve. But horrors of genocidal scale happen again and again throughout human history even though the vast majority of us don’t want them to occur. Why? Why are we failing so egregiously in our attempts not to repeat them? 

The key word, for me, is “scale”.

Civilisation represents a massive scaling up of human society from hunter-gatherer bands. We are social animals who, for hundreds of thousands of years, could not manage to band together in larger numbers than the low hundreds (so the theory goes). That we have managed to band together in the billions has increased the complexity of our societies, as of our intra- and inter-group socialising, the complexity and richness of our cultures, and, I argue, massively increased the intensity, scale and horror of the suffering we can cause each other, because we remain gifted at dehumanising whomever we select as our Enemy Other, perhaps more than ever before.

I dearly want us to be more noble than that. I dearly want us to take seriously what loving our enemies involves. I want us to want to move beyond the dehumanisation that enables the hideous hatred that leads to genocide and too many other horrors. This is what my efforts here are all about.

The Power Trap looked at the ‘stabilising’ social technology we call the State, a ‘stabilising’ technology that bands people together at scales that dwarf the low hundreds that was humanity’s lot for hundreds of thousands of years. The article establishes that the Hobbesian power required to set up and sustain a state is in fact a destabilising and corrupting factor. The article identifies power’s ability to forestall correction as the primary reason why power corrupts. From this it is easy to deduce that our short-sighted, reflexive human tendency to seek pleasure and avoid pain, allied with state power, strongly tends to produce terrible historical suffering at genocidal scale: whole peoples against other whole peoples – millions and billions strong – because we tend not to want to do the irksome work of becoming wise, both individually and at group scale. Wisdom begets love and love cannot dehumanise.

Today, we have nuclear weapons and other means of wiping ourselves out. This perennial problem could not be more pressing. 

Is there something wiser for humanity than our history suggests? Is human nature capable of ‘spiritual’ evolution as I suggest immediately below? This is the pivotal question. Certain individuals do choose to walk the love path, and do indeed become healthy, wise, and loving, but throughout history they have been extremely rare. Looking at the raw stats, you’d have to conclude that life is suffering for most of the people most of the time; show me your precious ‘progress’ now, dreamer! 

And yet this dismal characterisation of our lot does not seem to apply to our non-human companions, who lack the capacity to worry about suffering in an abstract, self-pitying way. They just get on with life. Theirs is a biological, or individually unearned, wisdom that sees them through. Incapable of civilisation, they are under no pressure to earn the sort of cultural wisdom humanity so dearly needs to improve.

In other words, humans appear to have a different remit. I believe it to be fundamentally ‘spiritual’, by which I mean primarily concerned with consciously evolving earned wisdom at cultural scale. Humanity’s challenge, I assert, is to learn to love our enemies, but this is a mighty difficult undertaking that must now happen at civilisational scale if we are to avoid self-destruction.

What manner of challenge is this? What happens to group-based power (the state) if love and humility render groupthink impossible? Conversely, what happens if ideological groupthink continues to stiffen – “Don’t bug me with fripperies like love and wisdom, I’ve got a household/company/country to protect!” –, to create ever more defensively rigid power structures across the globe? It’s a terrifying thought.

Love is pragmatic

Five of China’s 17 dynastic collapses over its 2,200 year history were the result of famine. China suffers on average one major catastrophe – drought or flood – annually. Due to its long and almost indefensible northern border, China’s central plain has been conquered at least eight times by nomadic tribes. This is all a consequence of China’s unique geography as harsh taskmaster; this is geography as teacher of the necessity of compromise, diplomacy, tenacity and the importance of a stable people wise and skilled enough to handle that sort of constant challenge. (Source)

We could therefore argue that China has not been permitted to develop the lasting cultural ambition needed to attain the sort of geopolitical hegemonic power that currently corrupts the West. For example, during the Ming Dynasty from 1405 to 1433, Admiral Zheng He ruled the seas for China, and yet despite naval know-how that was centuries ahead of the West’s at that time, China chose not to settle colonies across the Indian Ocean and Africa, etc., chose not to expand its empire across the world. Instead, the Ming Dynasty viewed the threat from the northern nomadic tribes sufficiently grave that it chose to disband its navy and redirect the freed resources to defence of their realm. I view this as a wise choice by a civilisation that was old and mature enough to value stability (harmony) over the risky riches colonial conquest might yield.

Note that this expression of wisdom is not starry eyed or romantic, and is hard won via suffering. It is coldly pragmatic and calculating. “Be ye therefore wise as serpents and gentle as doves.” Love and wisdom are mutually indwelling, give each other meaning and functionality, and co-evolve to sustain health, as health sustains their co-evolving. 

The example I chose is thus illustrative of the pragmatics of love as I mean the phrase. Perhaps my choice seems jarring, but love is not romance, nor is it dewy eyed, nor is it self-delusional. All that stuff belongs to romance, to eros, to cupid’s arrow: a different beast. Love includes the strength of character needed to change course, to admit error, to notice correction is needed and accept it despite the pain, the loss of status, of face, etc. Love is, as I repeatedly state, synonymous with wisdom and health. The three concepts constitute a trinitarian whole whose component parts mutually explain each other by virtue of constituting the trinity they are.

Conversely, power tends to corrupt. However, this does not mean necessarily it must continue unabated. Let’s not be absolutist about this; absolute power is impossible. Let’s also not assert that China is perfect. No governance system is perfect. There will always be more to learn, more wisdom and love to evolve, etc. But the above example demonstrates that civilisational power need not corrupt to self destruction, that its clear tendency to corrupt is very apparent to those with eyes to see, and thus can be mindfully monitored somehow. Whether anarchic or direct-democracy arrangements are superior to China’s systems of governance, or inferior to a constitutional republic, etc., is not my concern here. I’m merely pointing out areas of discussion I consider relevant to the challenge of developing a sustainable cultural awareness of the importance of wisdom and how this relates to suffering. We’re trying to avoid both destroying ourselves and repeatedly committing atrocities against whole peoples in our wilful blindness to viable alternatives to The System so viscerally and violently defended by the West’s current crop of vested interests. I am confident that group wisdom, at large scale, is pivotal to this.

For example, developing further the assertion I made above that earthly existence is politics, a wise approach to preventing horrific suffering would include empathic diplomacy among different national governance systems such that one dispassionately appreciates how mutual tensions inevitably occur between cultures and civilisations, rather than ideologically or competitively seeking to best them. Decisions are investments in the future. At civilisational scale, switching governance system – an extremely complex investment – to accommodate the aggressive demands of some civilisational competitor would be impossibly costly to the point of self-destructive. Deep differences of perspective are the natural consequence of many, many factors, but more importantly it should be plain to each of us how hard it is for us to fundamentally change our perspectives on a dime. Hegemonic ambition, by definition, cannot respect this obvious truth, cannot behave empathically. Wisdom thus includes the requisite humility to empathise with those who differ deeply from us. Domination is thus not a wise posture. Humble co-existence between Self and Other is. (And by the way, humble does not mean weak.)

“Respect existence or expect resistance.”

The fundamental cycle

All that set up, we finally arrive at the purpose of this mighty rhetorical endeavour:

curiosity ➜ slow mastery ➜ automation/internalisation ➜ breakdown/decadence ➜ curiosity …

What does it mean? 

It’s my attempt to sketch out the brightest aspects of how evolution – that which consciousness is about – breathes in and out to continually become, or create, or earn, increasing richness, or continual growth of its beautiful complexity. Because this is a function of consciousness – which is what reality is – it is about patterning as evolving process

Patterning is data processing as information perception (aka creativity; meaning is created via perception) in the sense of interpretation (perception is always interpretation). Consciousness self-perceives the data (the potential for pattern) that it is, and in so doing interprets it into information, fractally, iteratively. Consciousness is a meaning-making entity. Preference, which begets value by experiencing reward of some kind, is also fundamental to this ever evolving process.

The cycle I’ve delineated asserts that curiosity – itself a cycle (explorative) – is fundamental because consciousness is obviously eternally curious. Curiosity begets experimentation – itself a cycle (iterative) –, which delivers results that are experienced as successes or failures depending on the intention and value preferences behind the experimentation. This process leads to a kind of mastery, e.g., a human baby learning to walk. Walking is transformed from a curiosity-led and fascinating/obsessive struggle into automated or internalised processes – which are also cyclical (iterative) – that take far less effort than the obsessive struggle towards mastery. Automation thus frees up the resources previously devoted to learning, whereupon curiosity looks around for the next attractive adventure. 

This mini-loop creates an attendant or consequent larger loop – breakdown/decadence (exhaustion, or ageing, or serious accident in the case of walking) – that brings about, and/or is an interface with, interference from the ‘outside’ in a manner that impedes curiosity in an oppositional or challenging way. This exchange with Other/Environment acts to correct (keep healthy) the three-part loop just delineated. It’s called feedback, which I’m casting in the role of opposition, but we could also define it as the constraining structuring (rules, patterning) that inhibits freedom such that action is meaningfully instructive rather than arbitrary and wholly uninhibited* (feedback free). 

*Imagine action wholly without consequence or feedback; you would have no way of knowing you have performed it. Poetically, you could say gravity makes a baby want to walk. Poetically, you could say opposition makes existence possible. Poetically, you could say suffering makes existence meaningful.

Biologically driven curiosity – e.g. learning to walk – sets up internalised/automated (muscle-memory) processes that last a lifetime (assuming constant use). Sociologically and personality driven curiosity sets up (psychological/cultural) processes that can span generational time, or that can repeat multiple times within a lifetime. Dating partners to find your perfect mate can produce several breakdown/decadence stages as each relationship fails to handle the collapse in romance that follows the automation/internalisation stage. Compare this with muscle-memory skills that decay if wholly unused, as in “use it or lose it”. And the sorts of wisdoms that are learned in partnerships and friendships, in family life, in careers, etc., feed into each other. Such experiences and the curiosities that trigger them are not discreet objects, they are interoperating and intermingling patternings that co-evolve dynamically.

To look at a broader, cultural example, a people might tame fire and develop ways to pass the skill on down through generations. In time, this people might develop metallurgy. Later, it might develop steam power, then manufacturing, etc. Each accomplishment is automated into the culture as a cultural wisdom that then initiates different sets of challenges – unintended consequences – that can interoperate over time to produce things like wars, mass formation and dehumanisation programmes, and on to genocidal atrocities.

It isn’t easy to depict all this as a neat drawing. The way I envisage the interrelations between these various (complex) loops cannot be faithfully captured in a Venn diagram; there’s not really a ‘within’ here. Nor is this sort of contemplative reasoning meant to deliver tightly accurate predictive power. It is rather a hobbyist’s thought experiment that hopefully offers a perspective on our challenges as a species confronted with our potential to destroy ourselves and all our civilisations because we’ve forgotten how to talk to each other across cultural differences (diplomacy is a very old cultural/group wisdom). It seeks to construct a plausible view of reality’s fundamentals that meaningfully de-emphasises competitive rivalry in favour of dispassionate and empathic communication at inter-group scales. It is an attempt to explain how, and why, history and evolution do what they do to cyclically present humanity with daunting challenges. Today, our challenges are satanic in character – by satanic I mean a functional insanity that is ultimately dysfunctional – as decadence metastasises into wanton debauchery and accelerating moral breakdown. I believe the profundity of this rot happens to result from the end-of-life stage knocking loudly at the doors of humanism, materialism and Western hegemony, and, perhaps, labour-as-value/money-as-price as well, but this is a global challenge whose timing I am consistently wrong about.

The bolded stage – automation/internalisation – is of particular interest to me. While I see automation as fundamental, there are elegant and inelegant versions thereof. A rain forest is a spectacular example of elegant automation, as is muscle memory. In stark contradistinction, the breathless – historically speaking – rush of factory automation, mass production, consumerism, propaganda morphing into insidious public relations and mass-behavioural nudging is inelegant, clunky, brutish. Describing it so is intended to highlight the incredibly difficult challenge of internalising/automating group wisdom at vast scale, now perhaps internationally, perhaps even species wide. The WEF’s Great Reset is an unimaginative, crass attempt at what is needed in terms of a kind of global awareness of ourselves as one species with a particular ‘spiritual’ remit. We have to do much better than the truly infantile transhumanist fantasies that drive the WEF’s bizarro agenda. Theirs is the predictable product of materialism as it relates to nothingness and nihilism writ large: a kind of toxic froth with garish PR lipstick smeared across it, the barren brainchild of an ‘elite’ that has become wholly divorced from reality on the soul-addling flatulence of its fetid isolation born of its power to forestall correction.

Conclusion

We are not Hobbesian beasts by nature, we are Hobbesian beasts by governance system and paradigm. We are capable of group wisdom; the state and civilisation demonstrate this unequivocally, albeit unevenly, albeit as never ending story. Our nature has adapted to evolutionary development in our governance systems in a number of ways, but we are still having great difficulty with fear-based dehumanisation. Nuclear weapons mean we do not have the luxury of failing this challenge arrogantly and expecting things to settle back down to some cherished Old Normal. But crucible-like pressure is what we need to sober up, pay closer attention to our lot, and wise up. In addition to our regrettable powers of dehumanisation, we are also outraged by them. Our valiant efforts to cast ourselves in the role of victim is a clear sign of this. While it may be cynical virtue signalling, it is cynical virtue signalling that is needed for deeply noble reasons; we care about honour, we care about decency, we care about each other. Humans care.

We are not Hobbesian beasts. We simply face a very difficult transitional trial whose most fundamental character is an unfortunate systemic addiction to power’s lamentable potential to forestall correction, to kick the can down the road. By “simply”, I mean that the nature of the problem is easy to identify. However, I do not mean that it is easy to remedy. We may well fail. Nuclear armageddon could happen, or multiple armageddons simultaneously, imminently.

The atheistic/materialistic worldview has devolved into a godless cynicism marked by a hubris wholly devoid of humility, grace, decency, empathy, etc. Correction of this to something nobler and more humane clearly requires a willingness to again embrace and revere these immeasurable, non-commodifiable properties of existence that are clearly evident throughout nature, not least in the nihilistic depression that takes hold when all trust and decency departs. This yearning need for something truly healthy and beautiful is the unstoppable force now crashing against the immovable object of entrenched Western power. But Western power will break. How much damage the West will do is open to discussion, but the West will break. My hope is that in its ruins a sufficient number of Western survivors recognise the need for decency, empathy, etc., and work hard to build the next round of good times that could lift us into a better Western civilisation than all previous versions. 

Unimportant at this stage are arguments about the Best Governance System. What we need is a rediscovery of how to honour mutual empathy and respect, especially in the West. 

I have argued here that nothingness, as death, lies at the heart of humanist materialism, which is often touted as hard-nosed realism. It is in fact a negative romanticism, a kind of nihilistic reluctance to accept limits. It began with the giddy excitement that the universe, as a machine, was there for the taking, for the perfecting, ours to reshape as the fancy took us. This paradigmatic vector is now long past its honeymoon period, far into late old age and decrepitude. By way of thought experiment, I hope the examination herein of the impossibility of nothingness – of death – and how this impacts on our sense of what is humanly possible with regards to human suffering and historical cyclicality, could be one fillip to taking more seriously the love-wisdom-health trinity we will need to respect again if we are to pass successfully beyond this incredibly challenging transition.


24 July 2024

The Power Trap: a common-sense look at power and natural authority

(Part II)

The face of humanity’s most powerful nation (left image from CNN, right from Evan Vucci / AP Photo)

The use of coercion is the sign of a lack of authority. – John T. Sanders

[The state is the] only human Gemeinschaft which lays claim to the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force – Max Weber

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. – John F. Kennedy

Power is, in part, the actionable potential to forestall correction. – Me

Preamble

Our planet’s most powerful nation has been able to pull the wool over its own, and much of the Western world’s eyes for so long (one of many risks that come with propaganda), Biden’s performance in 2024’s first presidential debate ‘shocked’ US legacy media outlets; at the time of writing they are in protracted meltdown, as is the Democratic party itself. For those to whom it has been clear for years that Biden has been suffering severe cognitive decline, the fact of US-legacy-media publicised shock is itself a shock (or at least a surprising oddity). From still another perspective, this inter-folded shock demonstrates how the power to forestall correction – the power to sustain self- and group-deception – must unravel at some point; reality bats last. 

At the level of the individual bully, fallout from correction to his/her precious alpha status can be bad. At the level of a mighty colonial nation enjoying (almost) monopoly power over geopolitical realities for decades – and in terms of Western civilisation, for centuries –, the fallout from correction is historic, epochal, maybe even Biblical. I believe we are living through such a moment, and have been arguing this for the last two years or so, far longer with a more generalised perspective on potential global change. And while I have erred in timing details – put that down to my idealistic wishful thinking – I’m confident I’m right about the broader trend, on which I am far from alone.

Is this merely part of a cyclical process that is historical in a fundamental way? If yes, can we learn from it and improve society despite this cyclicality, such that a manner of spiralling or ‘progress’ is effected? If not, would a nihilistic or even satanic mindset – it’s all just a game; do whatever you want! – be a more rational response?

(In what follows, I cast “power” as Bad, “natural authority” as Good. Others cast “authority” in the bad role, as in authoritarianism. This is semantics. What matters is the effectiveness of the definitions in terms of how they are then developed and what light that development throws on the whole.)

Introduction

Assertion: A state requires (almost) monopoly power to act as the state. Without (almost) monopoly power, the state cannot survive across generational time. However, the power required by a state to act effectively as a state inexorably corrupts that state towards collapse.

In theory, state power comes from the people. Those who actually wield and jealously guard state power, however, represent a tiny percentage of said people. Should all available power be distributed evenly across all individuals of a people, that people could not constitute a state; states are hierarchical. And while an individual of John F. Kennedy’s sensibilities can indeed become president and seek to expose how power corrupts and relinquish much state power to the people, look what happened to him. Moreover, the right to bear arms in the US, enshrined in its constitution precisely to mitigate the state’s power, is not truly effective in that purpose. The US state is, in my view, a de facto monopoly on power because, despite several constitutional provisions designed to constrain it, it has had to become far more than merely “Government of the people, by the people, for the people” to remain cohesive and effective. Today, the (US) state is: 

corporate-governmental interconnectivity and thus mass media and attendant propaganda/PR operations, 

  • ‘elite’ control of money creation and financial institutions and corporations, 
  • intelligence agencies and the infamous MIC, 
  • the education/university establishment, 
  • colonial interests and investments, 
  • etc.,

which amounts to a partly fractious but sufficiently cohesive whole whose establishment was possible precisely because the US state had sufficient power to establish it. Armed citizens cannot properly constrain that breadth and depth of interconnected power – much of which is insidious, all of which is ferociously defended – at least not to the degree that that power is prevented from corrupting everything it touches, by degrees, mostly unnoticed, over time. I’m arguing that power – as defined herein – is the systemic ‘heat’ that slowly absorbs power from the people. No one notices clearly enough as corruption stealthily, cumulatively, and in part unintentionally, perverts what the people most cherishes. 

This pattern of creeping perversion is discernible in a concomitant and slow erosion of quality across multiple spectra (e.g. “crapification”):

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative[s] who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions. – Source (my emphases) (I would add that all organisations have a bureaucratic facet.)

As I put it in a recent post, “Mediocrity metastasises in the absence of meaningful corrective feedback.” In my view, Pournelle’s law reflects power’s core dynamic, a dynamic that ensures both the establishment and subsequent corruption of an unaccountable/unelected permanent state within the broader state, which then corrupts the host nation as a whole. This dynamic is a predictable – because systemic – consequence of the mechanics of self-preservation (fear), where “self” in this case is a very large group.

  • To be permanent – to preserve itself across time –, a permanent state needs ever more power to: 
  • conceal its inevitable wrongdoings, 
  • demonstrably prevent accidents and tragedies to prove its utility, 
  • command respect from those it instructs and so maintain national stability/cohesion, 
  • castrate or destroy inevitable radical opposition (more below), 
  • etc. 

In essence, these and other factors keep the state functional, alive, effective. Self-evidently, the state fears that any erosion of its power – its lifeblood, its effectiveness – would be the beginning of a slippery slope to its eventual demise. And though this instinct may initially be rational or proportionate to the systemic pressures generated by a large hierarchical society, it can become paranoia, especially as the state’s propaganda, censorship and narrative-control actions boomerang on it and blind it to reality (power as ivory tower). What happens, I sense, is that a kind of negative wisdom – instincts, skills, dark arts and statecraft, knowledge – develops that ensures the accumulation of the vast amounts of power needed to keep the state project going.

That a permanent state must emerge for a state to remain successfully effective over generational time is surely non-controversial; this is, after all, what “permanent state” means, and explains why a people would compose a constitution precisely to prevent abuse of accumulated power. It is similarly clear (at least to me) that a civilisation’s or state’s instinctive conception of power – apparently encoded in its ‘DNA’ as a consequence of its hierarchical structure – necessitates this corrupting patterning. (See Graeber and Sahlin’s On Kings for the deep history – you could even say basic group psychology – behind all this. See also Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy to get a clear sense of the inevitability of bureaucracy and how it interconnects with power.)

I do not hold that any of this is inherently good or bad in an unequivocal way. It could be, for example, that humanity cannot do significantly ‘better’ than the US constitution. It may well be that civilisational ascent and decay will continue to describe the fate of all forms of governance (more on cyclicality below). Obviously, the survival of the United States of America as a representative democracy cannot be guaranteed simply because it has a well composed constitution; moral decline towards tyranny will surely remain possible regardless of any constitution humanity can produce. It is similarly possible that other governance forms, e.g. that in China or in Russia or in Thailand, are ‘superior’ to Western models, though deciding how to weight the relative merits of each form can only be a subjective process: Gross Domestic Product, or Purchasing Power Parity, or Gross National Happiness, or some other measure?

Furthermore, technological, historical and paradigmatic change cumulatively present challenges to human governance systems that are, from time to time, epochal. That this is such a time is the position I examine at this blog. To reiterate the components of this thesis: 

among many other factors, jointly apply enormous pressure on existing governance structures, such that radical change will be forced upon us whether we like it or not. In my view, these phenomena constitute the deep backstory for today’s epochal historical turbulence. I also believe that materialism is on its last legs.

Whatever the case, this last point is why I write in the first place: 

Wisdom, love and health should be systemically prioritised across the Western world. 

Should mindful and conscious promotion of this trinity (wisdom, love, health) to a prominent position in Western culture require radical change, I’m fine with that. If not, that would be even better. 

This article is attempt to shed slightly different light on this pivotal subject matter.

Signs of the times 

The recent Biden-Trump debate is exemplary evidence of this article’s opening assertion. 

The DNC, a political organisation tightly allied with most Western media outlets, gaslighted the Western world for almost four years by insisting, aggressively and relentlessly, that Biden was fit to be president. His nomination in 2016 was, allegedly, part of an effort to keep Bernie Sanders from becoming the nominee, and this despite concerns around Biden’s cognitive fitness explicitly raised by US legacy media and Democratic politicians at the time. Similar DNC manipulations – e.g. preventing any serious challenge to Biden, preventing debates between candidates, changing primary rules midstream to keep Robert F Kennedy out of the race – almost fused Biden to the 2024 nomination, and yet that abuse of democratic processes backfired; a strange ‘coup’ has just forced Biden from the race, perhaps illegitimately: How legally binding are tweets? Can we prove who issued them? And these actions may well be unconstitutional as well as illegitimate – is government by tweet constitutional?

(“In 2024, democracy is on the ballot.”)

Taking this and the attempted assassination of Trump into account, it is not unreasonable to assert a multifaceted coup is underway in the US, co-belligerents including but not limited to: the president’s political party, its major donors, and a US legacy media now so habituated to anonymous sources it may as well be an uncritical mouthpiece for the government.

Let all that sink in. When it sinks in, imagine what this is doing to the credibility of the United States of America.

These events are self-evidently the fruit of corruption, of a power struggle, which – I’m arguing – is itself the fruit of amassing excessive power in pursuit of self-preservation for its own sake, as opposed to fostering and celebrating natural authority (more below).

Acts of this sinister character could destroy the Democratic party, at least in its current form, and perhaps the United States itself through civil war. Massed power will not lightly relinquish its power, and self-destruction is virtually assured if you manage to forestall needed correction to your behaviours for too long. That much of the Republican party has played along with Democrat/establishment/permanent-state plotting and intriguing – though the recent assassination attempt on Trump, and Trump naming Vance as his vice-president for the 2024 presidential race have rallied the Republican party firmly to Trump’s more ‘populist’ – slightly less establishment – banner, and thus against what is termed the RINO (Republican in name only) faction – speaks volumes about an establishment cadre that has lost touch with reality. That Europe and the UK have also hitched their fortunes to this reckless insanity – a geopolitical posture on which the UK’s Prime Minister Kier Starmer recently doubled down when he vouched for Biden’s perspicacity and sharp political skills in mid July this year – speaks equal volumes about their wisdom and levels of corruption, and may well cost them dearly in coming years (depending on how events play out over the next incredibly dangerous 18-24 months). 

The assassination attempt on Trump is equally redolent of too much power in too few hands. As a conspiracy theorist, I’m prepared to accept the possibility that some conspiring by some people in power was involved in the attempt, people in power who deem Trump too unpredictable and vengeful to trust. As a conspiracy theorist, I am also prepared to accept that the corruption that attends monopoly power could suffice on its own to explain the astounding incompetence of the security services in securing the venue at which Trump gave his speech, though this is the less likely explanation in my view. At the moment, there is too little information to know for certain. Whatever the truth as to how and why this attempt took place, some manner of corruption, caused by an excess of power in too few hands, has again been on naked display for all the world to see.

The way Western legacy media reported the assassination attempt in its immediate aftermath is also evidence of power-based corruption. By downplaying its significance, they have further damaged their credibility in the public’s eyes. Had the attempt been on Biden, MSM reporting would have been very different. The pervasive anti-Trump bias is egregious, and is not journalism; it includes reckless assertions that Trump is an existential threat to America and democracy (in my view, J6 was clearly not an attempted insurrection), reckless because of how polarising and exaggerated such assertions are. Metastasising use of anonymous sources – narrative control by leaks to a compliant press – further destroys MSM credibility. The general rot is illustrated by BBC journalist David Aaronovitch, who tweeted that Biden should “murder” Donald Trump. If this was indeed satire as Aaronovitch claims, it would still not be commensurate with neutral journalism as I understand it; an attempt on Czech president Fico’s life occurred in a similarly polarised atmosphere just weeks ago, an ugly event of which Aaronovitch, a journalist, should have been properly aware.

We have a right to expect neutral reporting from all media outlets; partisan reporting polarises. I find it wholly inappropriate for journalists to announce their love of, or revulsion for, a president or politician, or any public figure. And there should be no hint of derision or support for viewers’ opinions and biases from any news-media outlet, no suggested tribal camaraderie, no virtue signalling, etc. Obviously, each of us is best able to form intelligent and well-informed views by being well informed. This requires neutral reporting, being widely read, and engaging in dispassionate discussion with others. I am deeply suspicious of all agenda-driven journalism that does not repeatedly disclose its biases and make attempts to mitigate them, that does not go out of its way to foster dispassionate discussion of all cogent and rational perspectives.

Consequently, journalistic decline lies behind another power-based and ugly sign of the times; people are at each other’s throats on matters like Biden and Trump, as well as many others such as vaccines, viruses, lockdowns, masks, etc. Partisan, agenda-driven reporting is culpable here, among other factors such as increasingly politicised education, and corporate vested interests. That dispassionate discussion of such issues is impossible to find speaks clearly to the quality of wisdom available culturally across the Western world, a quality of wisdom apparently willing to risk nuclear war, and with it humanity’s extinction, in ‘defence’ of Western hegemony, aka power. 

How easy it is to find dispassionate discussion on hot topics in the non-Western world is unclear to me. I suspect from my limited exposure that state-based, religion-based and monied power holds similar sway over public discourse, if not more, in the non-Western world. But its historical/national contexts are different. What is ugly about the West’s creeping propensity to censor and attack non-establishment views is its continued crowing about its enshrined freedoms as a moral accomplishment it continually references as justification for its policing of the non-Western world. To my knowledge, the non-Western world does not make similar claims to moral superiority as justification for interference in the affairs of other nations.

For the record, I am strongly in favour of freedom of speech; it ensures corrective feedback from others. In other words, your opportunities to correct towards healthier, wiser approaches to life are richer and more plentiful where freedom of expression is respected. Freedom of speech is how a people can speak truth to power, which is a dialogue that lowers the chance that any person’s or grouping’s power will become excessive. Speaking truth to power is how a people can stay in touch with itself and its quality of wisdom, its state of health. It helps to ensure that cultural skills involving dispassionate discussion of difficult topics and issues are kept honed and effective, meaning correcting problems or developing social dysfunctions is likely to occur before enforced correction becomes destructively turbulent and costly on multiple levels.

There is so much more I might reference to illustrate my point, but I think it reasonable to assert on the evidence presented that there is something about power – not natural authority wisely managed – that encourages group-based, irrational, visceral enmity, enmity that becomes almost impossible to heal as corruption roots itself ever deeper into a given society or culture. 

Why might this be so? 

One short answer could be that only low-wisdom types hunger for power. Power is a manifestation of low wisdom at the cultural level. Low wisdom equates to low humility. Low humility suggests high insecurity, concealed low self-esteem (imposter syndrome) and a consequent cowardly addiction to social status. This quality of wisdom will choose to forestall correction if it possibly can; increasing your power over others raises the probability you can successfully forestall correction by having more and more control over your world. Successfully blocking feedback from reality (correction) in this way, sustained for long enough, will slowly drive you mad, so slowly you won’t notice. This is, of course, equally true at the level of nation state, internationally, and at bloc level, i.e. the dangerous tensions between NATO and BRICS. What is interesting – and unanswered in my view – is whether the BRICS bloc is somehow wiser, collectively, than the Western hegemon, because the power it has at its disposal is further from absolute than the West’s; are they less able to forestall correction, and thus more sane, and thus wiser? And, if the BRICS bloc actually becomes hegemonic, will it too go mad in roughly the same manner as the West, and other states/civilisations before it (see historical cyclicality below)? Or will its advertised intention to remain a loose, trade-based affiliation of nation states kept together by mutual advantage – multipolarity – prove more effective at impeding hegemonic power than, say, the US constitution? Time will tell. If we’re lucky and Trump’s mercurial capacities allow it – such as they are –, his administration might manage to stop the West’s insane drift towards global nuclear war. I am far from confident that Harris has the ability or even desire to steer the US away from this horrifying outcome.

Power is a positive feedback loop

Based on the above, I think it fair to say that power coddles and protects, shields us from the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”. It turns us into spoilt brats; we become emotionally volatile, paranoid, entitled. But is it also a positive feedback loop?

Any monopoly on power breeds determined opposition to that power; who wants to be forever under the boot of some other entity’s whims and wisdom? Just watch as a baby grows into childhood, and then into adulthood; its will to independence is almost unbreakable and utterly unmistakable. This is true for all life forms, whether as ‘individual’ animals, or hive insects and flock animals as masses, or even as vegetation. Sustained power over others, therefore, cannot help but become a red flag to the determinedly opposed bull it must birth merely by virtue of its existence. 

As the saying has it: “Respect existence or expect resistance!”

For any opposition to oppressive power to be effective in its ambitions to break free, it must acquire sufficient power to mount an effective challenge. Power is thus necessarily insatiable in its systemic need to defend itself against the opposition it cannot help but inadvertently create; this is a classic positive feedback loop. Furthermore, as the price of losing power grows because of so much energy and resources invested in accumulating that power, and so much booty appropriated by means of that power, and so much corruption caused that needs to stay hidden, so the need to defend it at all costs grows. Decisions are entangling investments in the future, especially in the absence of corrective feedback.

In simpler words: If I have power over you, you are going to want to break free. To break free, you will seek to gain sufficient power to do so. Because I ‘need’ to have power over you – why else would I go to the trouble? – your growing power threatens me existentially. I then strive to acquire more power to effectively defend my position. Rinse and repeat = positive feedback loop. Monopoly power is a long-running positive feedback loop that must corrupt itself until it collapses under its own consequent imbecility.

(If, instead of contest, an oppressed person adopts something along the lines of a Stockholm Syndrome response, that would establish a fragile, unspoken pact in which the involved parties ‘conspire’ to forestall correction. The severity of the collapse of this pact would be proportionate to how long the parties manage to forestall the inevitable correction, among other factors.)

In the human realm of the state, part of this feedback loop is how the social body is poisoned by increasingly mendacious propaganda as a state’s inevitable self-corruption (Pournelle’s Iron Law) requires ever tighter narrative control to conceal its corruption, its mendacity, its creeping betrayal of its duty to its people. The tighter the narrative control, the less accurately that narrative reflects reality; ever more of reality must be filtered out, denied, rejected, censored. If a state is ‘successful’ in this endeavour, it inadvertently cuts itself off from reality through its fierce control over what is permissible subject matter, and the full truth becomes more and more toxic to permanent-state interests and survivability. Though a state does not intend it, though a state may make best efforts to keeps its finger on society’s pulse, the more control it exerts over its population, the less able the population is to honestly communicate to state power how it feels; speaking truth to power becomes riskier and riskier. This state of affairs is neither pleasant nor healthy for all involved. As the situation worsens – as it must – so determined opposite becomes inevitable. “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

It follows, then, that power, as I define it here, is constrained by its nature to loathe wisdom and natural authority, and pretty much everything else that is healthful and health-restoring (correcting). Power’s most fundamental patterning is to sustain itself in order to expand itself, indefinitely, for the systemic reasons set out above. It is in effect an addiction perpetuated by its own fundamentally unhealthy compulsion to control everything, precisely because it is constrained by its nature to prize itself over everything else. It must perceive Other as enemy; power is necessarily about opposition, and oppressing that opposition indefinitely. Opposition, in this sense, includes correction, i.e. paying your debts. (That we can also, cartoonishly, paint narcissism, sociopathy and psychopathy in these colours is more than coincidental.)

If, then, civilisation and the state are systemically constrained to create the desire for, and subsequent reality of, power over others, must humanity remain subject to power’s cyclical dawn-to-decadence vicissitudes while we perpetuate the state and our civilisational vector? 

Is it naïve and utopian of me to expect something healthier?

Is historical cyclicality inevitable?

Polybius’ cycle of history (anacyclosis)

Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times. – G. Michael Hopf

Nothing ever goes away until it teaches us what we need to know. – Pema Chodron

[This section is something of an excursion you may skip if you agree with the point I’m trying to defend in it, namely: History is cyclical and includes cultural wisdom as a form of (very fitful) progress.]

Chaos (not in image) ➜ monarchy ➜ tyranny ➜ aristocracy ➜ oligarchy ➜ democracy ➜ ochlocracy ➜ chaos …

Curiosity ➜ slow mastery ➜ automation/internalisation ➜ breakdown/decadence ➜ curiosity …

My aims in this section are: to argue for the veracity of cyclicality generally (though more narrowly in human history); that cyclicality (of various hues) is fundamental to reality; and that wisdom is a real, albeit not guaranteed, fruit of challenge and shock. I argue that the very fact of wisdom implies a wisdom-evolution potential to historical cyclicality, i.e. history rhymes more than it repeats. However, history’s ‘spiralling’ can of course cause wisdom’s erosion – wisdoms can most assuredly be forgotten –, as well as its evolution (progress), in both cases very unevenly across individuals of a given culture. Which is the more prevalent character of history’s spiralling I leave to the reader.

Historical and other types of cyclicality are discernible, many argue, in all cultures’ literature, story telling and myth making. How important is this if true? Are there fundamental exceptions? If there are, do we find a mutually exclusive difference of perspectives that indicates arbitrary interpretations of reality, from which it would be unreasonable to deduce universal truths?

Polybius’ anacyclosis is perhaps the first academic identification of a grand historical cycle. Each of its stages manifest a dawn-to-decadence pattern that drives it onwards individually towards collapse into the next stage, as does the cycle as a whole. In essence, some discomfort (chaos or historical shock/breakdown) forces creativity that births a new system and thus an initial flowering period or golden age, which slowly fades in honour and vitality to lead back into breakdown/chaos/shock, which initiates another cycle or a subsequent stage within the larger cycle. 

The second arrow-connected cycle above is my feeble attempt at boiling anacyclosis down to something yet more fundamental (the bolded stage will be explicated in a subsequent post). Its appearance here is to thought-provoke.

The Hero’s Journey, in evidence across much of human mythology, is another fundamental cycle suggestive of a somewhat similar cyclical patterning. Seasons are another cycle, though they differ at different planetary latitudes. Then there are lunar cycles, menstruation cycles, and so on. In other words, cycles are not difficult to discern. If anything, they are hard to miss.

But not everything is cyclical, even in Western literature: Hamlet is a flat, linear progression that does not result in a transformation of character. Kishōtenketsu – a Japanese story vector – is an example of a non-cyclical structuring: Ki = introduction. Shō = development. Ten = twists, the unexpected. Ketsu = the ending. This structure sets things up, causes a shock, the characters absorb the shock, the end. Whether or not we, as readers, can impute satisfactory meaning to the story is left entirely to us, is thus external to the story itself. Whatever readers learn from such stories, the characters do not mature from their experiences; they simply undergo one or more odd events, events that need not make any sense. The story’s attraction is its oddity, not some implied or explicated transformational meaning. Westerners seem to want to impose meaning on events, to imbue their literature with explicit meaning, with instructive moral lessons, etc. This appears to be far less the case in Japan, and I would guess elsewhere in the non-Western world, but I am far from expert in this subject matter, so will not go into it any deeper. (Though I do note Germany’s Kleist adopted a similar story pattern for his literature, and that much modern German literature adopts similarly non-heroic, non-transformational story vectors.) 

Do such exceptions suggest that observed historical cyclicality is in fact an arbitrary and misleading observation that is culturally subjective rather than universal?

On what little I know of this subject matter, I’m going to make a bold assertion. Such philosophical postures, or perhaps cultural reflexes manifesting as distilled observations, or techniques for encoding wisdom across generations, are not mutually exclusive; I suggest they don’t even clash. In Kishōtenketsu, for example, a shock stirs things up. This forces a reaction. For the reaction to be effective in some way, it must be intelligent and coherent, which is synonymous with meaningful, “meaningful” in the sense of appropriate to the broader context. Any successful or health-restoring response to a shock must fit well to the situation, must be accepted by the environment that has to host it, sustain it. This includes, I suggest, sanguine shrug-like responses that sweep things under the rug and so afford a full return to the old normal, with characters learning nothing more than a re-confirmation of their “shit happens” philosophy. These, too, are meaningful responses, albeit the nadir-deep antithesis of heroic, character-transforming responses. 

Regardless of story pattern, fitness of response – in the sense I’m aiming at here – is an ‘evolutionary’ element requiring coherent meaning making within the constraints of some environment, an environment necessarily composed of competing/cooperating meaning makers that somehow create a story’s tension and relief. Historical cyclicality at the scale implied by Polybius – which I am suggesting is evolutionary or spiralling rather than non-progressively or flatly cyclical – is thus the unaddressed context that serves as a hidden backdrop or meta-environment, which is required to accommodate Kishōtenketsu literature in a meaningful way, i.e. to make it palatable, valued, enjoyable, by a culture. We could argue that the shocks are containable due to the background wisdom available culturally to the story’s characters and readers, and thus net neutral where wisdom is concerned. That such shocks do indeed occur in life does not preclude the occurrence of shocks that cannot be contained by the cultural wisdom available, that therefore a step up in one’s wisdom, skills or character is required to process and survive them, otherwise collapse/failure is the result.

Another style or facet of Japanese literature I am aware of, that also reenforces my point, is where a very specific crescendo serves as a story’s entire purpose. Events conspire to drive a character or characters to some extremely unusual and rich momentary expression of what they are. I touched on this in a previous post. What matters here is not logical/intellectual meaning, or evolutionary transformation, or heroic accomplishment, but rather amazement, a demonstration of impossible beauty, an incredible and almost hypnotising Wow! moment that leaves you, as reader or audience member, speechless. These moments are the very point of the story, rather than some conclusion that answers all questions and restores comfort. They are designed to cause awe, to expose you to wonder such that you are reminded of the great power of reality. They are thus humbling experiences that also delight and inspire. But such crescendos, either presented in literature or occurring in real life, must also happen in a broader context. That context will be cyclical in some way, although that cyclicality need not be instrumental to a particular story or story structure.

In other words, there is no clash here, except perhaps in terms of cultural emphasis, style, and expectation.

So, even including non-cyclical patterns that appear to me to be just as fundamental as the cyclical – or co-fundamental –, a domain of questions now raises its head and begs to be answered: 

Must humans suffer epoch-changing suffering and violent brutality from time to time? If yes, does it therefore behoove us to ‘accept’ evil to be better able to respond to evil wisely?

Unpacked into more detail: Does complex society, aka civilisation – supposedly superior to primitive social forms and thus evidence of historical progress – require the specialisation that logically includes specialised leaders, and thus hierarchy, and thus systemic inter-group mistrust and enmity, and thus systemic scarcity as generated value is distributed unevenly, and thus a Hobbesian/Weberian monopoly on power to keep this fissiparous structure ‘stable’ over great tracts of time, monopoly power that is paradoxically constrained to bring about its own destabilisation via corruption as discussed above? 

Or, might we be justified in envisaging a healthier relationship with this cyclicality, and so a healthier – less turbulent – system at civilisational scale? Is China, for example, already like this (for all its faults)? Has China got the balance of individual and group interests about right after wild historical turbulence over the last 100 years or so, not to mention the last 5,000? 

I don’t know. 

I suspect we ought to be very careful when seeking out The Best Possible Social Structure; the exercise is too subjective, too intellectual, too academic, to translate cleanly to some globally realised Best Possible Outcome. The relationship between how individuals develop and mature within a culture, and the dizzyingly complex effects this has on that culture’s and nation’s historical progress, are so interwoven, inseparable and interdependent, the notion of cleanly exporting The Best System Out There to every other different nation/culture makes no sense to me. Which is why I am for multipolarity. 

The relevant question, in my view, is whether humans at the vast scale of nation or geopolitical bloc or indeed as a species can teach themselves to notice that wisdom has value beyond power, such that wisdom merits prominent and transparent attention and inquiry. If historical cyclicality of whatever stripe does indeed progress humanity in a spiralling manner, rather than simply repeat indefinitely without meaningful progress or evolution of our collective wisdom until some civilisation-ending cataclysm reboots the whole process, wisdom has to be real, capable of growth, and communicable – be encoded in myths, customs, stories, politics, etc. – from generation to generation.

At this blog, I have repeatedly argued that the West’s materialist paradigm is constrained to deem wisdom (and love, and health) as somehow inferior to hard, measurable phenomena, e.g. monetary profit, longevity, GDP and average IQs. This constellation of cultural reflexes that strongly prefers the measurable seems incapable of finding its way to an earnest, sustained and nuanced assessment of the trinity I have come to advocate at Econosophy after years of writing and research. By my logic, this tends the West to a kind of nihilistic/satanic quagmire of moral decay that is the rotten harvest of its systemic/structural obsession with power, as rooted in the way it manages its hierarchical structure, which, ultimately, is rooted in its humanistic materialism. A nihilistic wasteland of ugly emotions and potentially horrifying outcomes is what I see around me in an increasingly deranged Western world. And while mine is a poetic or aesthetic appeal rather than scientific or academic, humanity’s undeniable ability to experience and profoundly appreciate beauty – as suggested in the brief look at Japanese crescendo stories above – gives my advocacy a hint of ‘scientific’ validity (I like to think!). 

The sickness of moral decay is deemed sick for a reason; humans overwhelmingly prefer decency, trust, honesty, and dignity over mendacity, betrayal, tyranny, etc. We do not seek out bloody and destructive war at every conceivable opportunity and revel delightfully in it. The infamous Powers That Be are obliged to drag us kicking and screaming into the horrors of war, into its psychology-destroying terror. The infamous Powers That Be are forced by our nature to conceal their corrupt ugliness in skilfully crafted veneers of honour, loyalty and moral superiority to have a chance of initiating the wars they hunger for. Why? If humans are Hobbesian beasts, why does it take so much effort to corrupt us, deceive us, into war and violent debauchery?

In other words, I’m suggesting our very human longing for peaceful relations between nations and blocs is indicative of an (almost) inherent wisdom that we yearn to honour and further develop, just as we yearn for beauty for and good will amongst all. 

It seems to me that all we lack is a clear vision of how to go about it.

An alternative to power-based control?

Councillor Mothin Ali tackles a wheelie bin on its way to a bus-turned-pyre. Photo: Craig Gent/Novara Media

I see one group of British Asian men blaming Romanians for the disorder, which leads another group to chant “Romania! Romania!”. A Romanian woman and her neighbours argue back, saying they are trying to stop people joining in with the disorder, not contributing to it. A white English teenager comes away from the fracas claiming, apparently on the basis of a hunch, that the woman is some kind of Romanian nationalist. – Craig Gent, from a report on a recent riot in Leeds.

Though it seems impossible, the historical turbulence engulfing the world continues to intensify. Just when you think things cannot possibly get crazier, they get crazier. The whole world seems stretched taut, hyper-fragile, on the brink of collapsing into chaotic mania. (Or a mass awakening? Perhaps I have suggested this possibility too often.)

A recent riot in Leeds is a small example of how explosive things are. On the back of almost nothing, a bus and delivery van were set alight and destroyed, a police car seized and attacked. There appears to have been no sufficient trigger; apparently, a fairly innocuous event, which would normally pass unnoticed, somehow entangled itself in others that together managed to set things in motion that resulted in a wild and destructive riot.

But more important than the background tension that must have been largely responsible for all this, is how the Harehills community came together to deescalate the situation after riot police had withdrawn. Instead of falling victim to anger and recrimination, instead of shrinking back from the roving gangs of rioting youths, the community came together to take care of business. Wheelie bins were filled with water to help extinguish the various fires. Two of the ward’s councillors, Mothin Ali and Salm Arif, were instrumental in mediating between the various parties, chasing people away from adding fuel to the fires, and generally organising people into effective, spontaneous teams capable of keeping things under control.

Why do I find this relevant to this article? Because in a community of relative power equals, nobody can forestall correction for very long; corruption is much harder to sustain. Despite depression, grinding poverty and loneliness impacting negatively on the vitality and cohesion of a modern city’s community, it remains easier for those who do not fall victim to such dangers to stay sane, grounded, and wisely effective in a small community; it is impossible for anyone to amass monopoly power where intimate dialogue reigns.

Propaganda ends where dialogue begins”. Power seeks to divide and conquer, to atomise communities such that their wisdom – i.e. cohesion, vitality – is destroyed; success in this ignoble endeavour creates a richly varied attack surface on which fears, uncertainties and doubts can be sown and grown using multiple propaganda techniques. Healthy communities are thus non-state, non-power-based environments in which people’s natural authority can be nourished and used for the good of all; there is no monopoly on power threatened by it. By definition, no person or group can attain monopoly power; their presence would mean a small state of some kind, not a community. Power and natural authority are mutually exclusive. Even gang leaders must contend with intra- and inter-group competition that keeps them grounded, exposed to reality. At intimate scales, people know too much about each other for deceptive, myth-making propaganda of lasting effect – a requirement for establishing a state – to be possible. Propaganda is required to create the necessary cohesive sense of a people at scales approaching or beyond a nation; face-to-face dialogue is a wholly inappropriate method for establishing a state.

This does not mean small communities are perfect, that states are pure evil and without benefit, etc. It does not mean all riots the police abandon will play out as the recent Harehills’ riot progressed. But there is something about this one, with its mix of immigrant ethnicities and cultures mingling with Anglo-Saxon locals, a mix which should, if the parts of MSM are to be believed, be a potentially uncontrollable cocktail of aggression, suspicion and fear, that stands out for me. Instead of a generalised collapse of order and decency, this particular community came together and successfully handled a chaotic and dangerous situation in an anarchic way (natural authority is cherished in anarchist thought). Furthermore, there is something about the rich multi-ethnicity of Leeds generally, just as in this more local community specifically, that is at least somewhat redolent of our global challenge as a species. For me, this little story is evidence that humans, regardless of their cultural background, prefer peace, decency, natural authority, and dignity over the narcissistic, power-greedy, corrupt and loveless Western system that is the subject of this article. 

This is but one of many signs of hope for our long-term prospects as a species, and supportive evidence that the will to do what it takes to promote wisdom, love and health to the centre of social governance systems exists. I am convinced that humans are not Hobbesian beasts that can only revel in a permanent war of each against all. It’s just that the state’s powerful influence on human behaviour over several millennia sure does make it seem that way.

Conclusion

Addicted to dominion, power forestalls correction for as long as it can and is thus dysfunctional. Revering love, wisdom and health, humility welcomes correction and begets natural authority.

Mine is a very generalised perspective. Nothing in this article can be translated to policy. But as the world grows crazier in the wake of the West’s demise, two things become clearer and clearer to me. The first is that interdependent historical momenta are highly determinative of future stability in the sense of inertia. The second is that the combination of advanced societal specialisation and low-wisdom and low-free-will populations on the bedrock of that specialisation mean human imagination at large cultural scale is like historical inertia: almost immovable. But, like tectonic plates, explosions can occur. The safe bet is that change is slow and incremental. But epochal upheavals happen. We are living through a major upheaval, which is the implosion of accrued negative wisdom.

What I do not know is how it will play out. I’m just some guy. However, I strongly suspect there is a very large loss of credibility on the part of Western establishment, that this loss of credibility is precisely because of too much power and concomitant negative wisdom that have resulted in an ugly betrayal of those societal essences most precious to most humans: honour, dignity, decency, trust, etc. For me, the logic that flows from these strong intuitions points clearly to wisdom – as it related to love and health – as a good bet for a valuable future commodity in high demand. It’s simple: wisdom is at a very low point, and the yearning for societal health and decency is strong. Wisdom is needed for a return of beauty, for a life on earth most of us love to live.

If we want to minimise corruption, we have to hold power in check by mindfully developing our own humility. This is not a remotely startling or controversial statement, and yet the imminence of global catastrophe in the form of nuclear war suggests humanity has failed to honour this truth at sufficient breadth and depth. What startles is how power-based, corrupt dominion lords it over peoples everywhere mostly unchallenged by those so ruled. I speculate that a kind of generalised Stockholm Syndrome is responsible for our dissonant state of affairs, but that its hold is now quickly weakening. But, because the effort to minimise state power that is the US constitution is on the cusp of catastrophic failure, we Westerners – perhaps all humans – are compelled to face the sobering fact that taming power is not remotely easy at state level, just as the historical events that led to writing the US constitution were not easy. And yet we are called to tame state power nonetheless. 

These and other sobering facts open me to earnest contemplation of the viability of all humanity’s attempts to tame power and the corruption it must deliver. My openness obliges me to consider i.e. Chinese and Russian systems of governance, the former because of how long that nation has not been colonial, the latter also because of its longevity but also its recent experience with societal collapse. That said, my own preference is anarchism. My respect for humility, my intimate knowledge of my very limited capacities demand of me, however, that I not be an ideological zealot; I am open to all viable cultures and the wisdoms they must contain by virtue of their longevity, their hard-won successes. For example, I recall hearing the aboriginal Australian culture is 80,000 years old. Not too shabby!

Is civilisation possible without state power? I believe it is, but cannot prove it. I can only present my best reasoning on how to deal with corruption effectively. My reasoning unequivocally points to love, wisdom and health as fundamental to progressing beyond our many historical challenges. 

To repeat, sustaining humility mutually excludes amassing power; states must amass power. Including humility as a civilisational reflex or wisdom surely requires explicit governance architecture that reveres and nourishes it. What might this look like?

I only know that answers begin with genuine dialogue, which requires genuine humility and that this is something of a tautology. But how else could it be? The need is great because our cultural reflexes where humility and wisdom are concerned have atrophied greatly. We are constrained to begin with what we have and are.

Typically, it takes deep shock to break open defensive psychologies and calcified emotional states into the kind of openness a robust commitment to humility requires. Perhaps the shocks exploding about us like artillery shells, perhaps the horrors of war and the hideousness of state overreach are the shocks we need.

Which actual social-governance forms should or should not emerge in the wake of growing wisdom and humility should be left unaddressed for as long as possible; the first critical stage should be studiously ideology free. If we can manage that, at least in critical-mass numbers (5-20% of any given community or population), the practical bits and pieces of what we need to do will become apparent with mysteriously sweet timing.

(Part II)