Wisdom is apolitical and immeasurable. This is part of its deep value.

Two chaps smiling mo money into the right folks' pockets (source)

"I just watched a video tape of Katz, the [Israeli] defence minister, and several other generals around him, as they surveyed the humanitarian operation in Gaza. What were they surveying? This morning, the UN said 675 people were killed in the last couple of days around these humanitarian food-dissemination points. That's what they are: They're killing grounds. [...] Every day Haaretz says: well 75 people died today at the food place ... a hundred died today ... 35 died today... That's all they're doing: murdering people, continuing the murder of Palestinians while they're trying to get food and water. It's the most unconscionable thing you could possibly conceive of, and here's the minister of defence chortling in the video, laughing in the video with his generals as he watches this destruction take place." – Col Lawrence Wilkerson (ret.)

Just as God is not a high priest of any religion, so wisdom can never be a blind supporter of any political party, religion, or ideology. And yet in the name of some Higher Good we kill each other in defence of the ideologies and religions we create. We bow our heads in fake service to Something Or Other to justify our deeds, our hatreds, our monstrosities, over and over again. It is a tale as old as time and I for one would dearly like to see the back of it. But how? 

Well, there is one thing I'm aware of that could conceivably guide us in that direction: wisdom. Not AI, not some silver-bullet technology, not some big-tent political party promising Change You Can Believe In 4 Real This Time, not socialism, not capitalism ... none of that. What we need is wisdom; we need to learn to love wisdom again. Wisdom is true wealth. 

I've said it before and am saying it now: You cannot measure wisdom. This is a pivotal point, no matter how trivial it may seem. It is of immeasurable value that there is no WQ. And even though IQ seems to be a powerful predictor of an individual's 'success' in life, due to the deep interrelationships between wisdom and intelligence, an IQ score is far from being the whole story about intelligence. Indeed, one of the things that most excites me about AI is that I believe it is bringing us face to face with the profound richness of intelligence, its livingness, its endless interconnections and capacity for change.

One of the deepest melodies in wisdom is its sociality, its other-oriented nature. To be wise you must know thyself. To know thyself, you must know Other, and also as much of the character of the interrelationships in which we swim and are swum. This takes time, patience, engagement, stillness, and courageous honesty. This is, in a way, the process of becoming intimately familiar with what it is to know, a process that never stops evolving.

By way of a real-world example, there is no shame in being manipulatable; being a team player means submitting to the requirements of the team, for the good of the team. Our highly social natures make this sort of self-sacrifice possible, this submission to the needs and influence of others. But our superpower comes with risks, including but not limited to blind obedience, and hence the risk of fascism, nazism, totalitarianism, and forever wars. Only full acknowledgment and ownership – in a mindful way – of that which hides in each of us can lead us to properly discern insidious, or cheap and cynical, manipulations by vested interests, perhaps in supermarkets and department stores that need us to buy cheap crap, or perhaps as artfully concealed in the propaganda that legacy media outlets beam into our minds 24/7. In noticing and then learning about such manipulative techniques, we are better equipped to resist them. Learning this sort of discernment is part of wisdom; it's good to be responsive to the needs of others, but it is very unwise to be a sucker. 

The health of our future calls to us to wise up; our 'rulers' are insane for the most part and, sadly, incapable of acknowledging this is so. We 'ruled' are also insane, but a little better placed to notice this unhappy fact, and adapt accordingly.

The West, in its end-of-empire insanity, talks big, bloviates endless bellicose nonsense through its media megaphones in a desperate attempt to distract us from the obvious collapse within, a collapse we will navigate better when we understand it better. Part of its bloviating is a grift to keep NATO and other MIC monies flowing, via higher taxes, just to further gild the gilded nests of those who crave such things, those who hold ostentation sacred. But it is a very risky act of self-preservation on the part of a power 'elite' now systemically addicted to hegemony. The risk is WWIII and nuclear annihilation. Understanding the psychological and cultural dynamics of all this is therefore critical. And the WWIII risk remains non-zero, despite the oddly vaccuous 'deal' Trump and his European 'partners' appear to have kinda-sorta agreed to, but not really.

To repeat an observation I have made here often and heard made in many places by people in a better position to know than I, we are 'ruled' by a class of people boiled mad in the stew of the power The System manifests. They see the rest of the world through the noxious fog of that power, and could destroy the world in their petulant fear if they don't keep their grip on said hegemonic power. This grotesque greed is obviously extremely unwise. We need to know it, deeply, for what it is; hubristic insanity as the rotten fruit of believing you can measure value, that money can store wealth, and only that which can be measured is real. The tragic story of King Midas is rooted in this brand of hubris. Our modern iteration of this civilisational folly includes 6,000 nuclear warheads in the hands of our insane 'elite'.

Here is a very stark way of putting it: What do you do against enemies who have enormous power, and will do absolutely anything to anyone who opposes them, no matter how depraved or evil? Become just as evil, become the very elite you fear?

I can think of only one reasonable response: Change our relationships with political power, deepen our understanding of how it works and accumulates. Then structurally correct how our social-governance systems attain and wield power.

In other words, it's time to value wisdom again, that ineffable, immeasurable reward for living your life right, doing right by others and owning your shit. Only then can we tell the mad folks to step away from the levers of power, tell them to put down their guns and submit to the law. To get this done, we all have to do our bit. We all have to wise up. 

For more detail on the why and how of it all, visit my new site: Truth Transparent.

Worship at the altar of your servitude, or understand how the altar was made?

Source

The steam of outrage rising from the turd of the Trump administration’s neck-snapping 180 on its Epstein promises comes as something of a relief. As readers of this blog will know, I have been trying to draw attention to the nature and causes of corruption for well over a decade. When I started, I thought I was late to the party, a slow learner. As the years dragged on, I took the generalised refusal to see how structurally baked into the system corruption is in two ways: 

• Perhaps I was wrong all along, and so were those who influenced my thinking.
• Even if I was right, the time was not. 

Then the lockdowns happened. Surely the obvious totalitarian stench of that global abomination had to be amplified, screamed from the rooftops. Many did so, but the censorship against even the most eminent global experts – virologists, epidemiologists, medical doctors, pathologists, etc. – was chillingly effective. I came away with two main impressions:

• People are easy to fool when they’re afraid, at which point the most important thing to them is their fear, not facts that show their fear to be unnecessary.
• The challenge of learning how to talk to each other in times of deep polarisation is great. All one really has is patience and fortitude. Meanwhile, the bricks and mortar of a surveillance state get combined into higher and higher walls.

The Ukraine war – the tragic fruit of the accelerating collapse of Western hegemony and the Western elite's consequently existential need to break up Russia so as to get sufficient control of that country's immense subsoil wealth and thus prevent their own collapse, recapitalise their economies, and fuel their hegemony for another couple of centuries – is not going to plan. Trump became president of the US in part due to growing impatience with US forever wars, but he is not competent enough to get done what needs to be done to stymy neocon/colonial/European ambitions. The collective West absolutely must break Russia to bits to survive as a global hegemon into the distant future. Trump is too shallow, too ignorant, too insecure, too weakly vain; the task is far too big for him. So … on and on it grinds. More and more people are angered by this.

Israel-Iran and Israel-Palestine are another hot potato of tragic ugliness. The suffering being endured by the Palestinians is indescribable. Because Western hegemony depends in large part on its control of that region, Israel, perhaps the West’s most important proxy, is a colonial project that must not fail. So this is yet another forever war. Iran knows this, Russia knows this, China knows this, BRICS++ knows this. Ergo, the West cannot win. The West is going down. Its manic desperation grows and grows, its insanity deepens.

On top of all this, the Trump administration pulls a nauseating about face on its Epstein promises. Apparently, that list was not. They didn't. No one went there and did anything, and if they did, they didn't, you know... There was no list, no clients. J. Epstein is simply one disgusting man who trafficked thousands of minors to himself using Ghislaine Maxwell and the billions of dollars he mysteriously made, for no other reason than self pleasuring. The crass stupidity of this new Big Beautiful Narrative, the total moral bankruptcy it betrays, the thuggish imbecility of a class of people who have for too long got away with far too much, all beggar belief. 

And yet how else could it go? Do we really want to know how systemic this is? Our outrage is justified, but many other things justify our outrage. Real children get killed in wars against our ‘enemies’. Babies too. “War is a crime against humanity,” said Col. Douglas MacGregor.

So if we hate it so much, why is there war? Human nature? Sure, but there is far more to human nature than warring violence. If you believe humans are essentially violent, then outrage is unwarranted. Surely outrage in response to moral depravity is a clear sign that we are more than aggressive beasts who just want it all our way, all the time, beasts who can only slaughter those who stand in our way. 

What else are we? Perhaps we should build systems that bring out the best in us, not the beast.

We live in a world shaped to an alarming degree by the so-called elites. Look at what they do. Look at the Epstein case and how those very same elites handled that case. How are they the elites? How is it that people of that character are in charge? Could it be that the system is structured to generate elites of that character? You cannot have this sort of thing going on and on and on across the centuries unless it is systemic. 

So, what is it about The System that does this, and keeps on doing it? That is the question. I try to put meaningful flesh on its bones at my new website, Truth Transparent.

Truth Transparent

“The lie is not for you and me. The lie is for those implicated, to say: No matter what, we will protect you. Then we have to start asking the question: Why?” – Saagar Enjeti

Why are the corrupt powerful being protected at the cost of We, the People, and at the cost of nation states across the planet? This is the question of our times.

There is, in my view, a lot of naïvety in Tucker Carlson’s interview of Sagaar Enjeti. Both parties to the interview yearn for a world of national interests, of international cooperation where national interests intersect, cooperation which is then transactional – which means money-based, which means profit-based. We could then all get along in a much happier and more prosperous world. 

But despite what is to me wishful thinking in this regard, at least they, and others like them, want to expose the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, of the Jeffrey Epstein story. They are prepared to take very serious public heat, including from the most powerful players on Earth, to pursue this pivotal story where its facts lead them. I commend them both for their courage, perseverance and sincerity, and agree with their sense that the Epstein case goes all the way to the infamous top, that suppressing it and thereby protecting those implicated by it, rots America’s moral fibre, and by extension the moral fibre of all other nations that aid and abet suppression of the relevant facts of this case.

For the record, I don’t care who is found guilty or innocent, I just want the truth. Which of course, in a different way, also applies to me; perhaps I am the naïve one. It is freedom of speech that sorts the wheat from the chaff. 

The world is corrupt because power corrupts. It takes mighty power to run nation states, corporations and international institutions. And while absolute power is impossible, and absolute corruption is therefore also impossible, corruption is always bad, does great damage including brutal world wars and all manner of unthinkable atrocities. Corruption should therefore be fought every step of the way. “The first casualty when war begins is truth.” “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.” 

Please note: that’s eternal vigilance. That would be freedom of speech. And that would address all of us. Have you noticed how this basic foundation for holding power in check is not honoured, not nourished, not maintained, but left to rot, and even derided? The powerful are behind that, because who else would be; it’s their power that’s on the line. We non-powerful are too busy, demoralised, poor and desperate for distraction, to do very much about the slow rape of our soul and dignity. 

The stink of corruption mounts and mounts. Are more of us noticing the stench? I like to think so. Carlson’s interview of Enjeti has garnered over a million views in its first 21 hours, and that’s just on YouTube.

The Epstein story is the poster child par excellence for the nature and repugnance of Corruption Left Unchecked. “No further revelations of criminality from on high should surprise us anymore; it is now clear corruption reigns.” I wrote that line on 6 January 2011. How wrong I was. My sensitivity to corruption is obviously far sharper, perhaps to the point overactivity, than most normal folk. Perhaps far more still has to happen for people to notice the stench. Whatever the truth of that, I smell it everywhere I look. Acting on my disgust has cost me plenty, but taught me far more, primarily the value of humility.

Which brings me to transactional national interest. What is “interest”? Wealth. What is wealth? Money. But if we pursue wealth as measured by money, we walk a path that can only corrupt, because when you Just Know that value can be measured in numbers that are preceded by squiggly symbols – how many dollars is the Amazon rain forest worth, how many dollars for your young daughter? – slowly but surely far too much of value that cannot be measured is left to rot. 

When the pursuit of happiness is the accumulation of wealth-as-money, you have at the very base of your operations this governing logic: Having more is better than having less. You bake worship of quantity into the core dynamic of your system, which is in fact an evolving entity. As such, quality withers on the vine of your nation, your corporation, your international institute. We are now, I hope, tasting how bitter and vacuous is its fruit.

Econosophy has been a long-running scratch pad which I used to develop my ideas into some firmness, making plenty of mistakes along the way, some of which still embarrass me. Sensing their firmness but patchiness across too many articles, I have been developing a new website, which is fully under my control. There, what is strong from Econosophy makes a cleaner reappearance in the form of fuller articles that are, I hope, easier to follow. 

My strong intuition that the West is quickly approaching its denouement is shared by a large number intellectual big hitters across the planet. There is, therefore, the serious matter of what comes next. I have no answers, but I am persuaded I have some of the more important right questions correctly phrased, as well as the healthiest angle of approach for developing next steps, or next attitudes of engagement with the world.

My new site is called Truth Transparent, and I would be delighted to see you there. It will grow slowly; I have other writing projects on the front burner. But grow it will.

Peace set this truce on fire

Events bubble up from history's cauldron faster and faster. The flames of politically motivated ceasefires spew their gathering heat into each turn of the screw, push hard on each tick of the doomsday clock. President Trump – jester, huckster, peacemaker, empath – struts bombastic peace-through-strength Performances Of The Fourth Kind from the social-media wing of the World Stage, where alien cultures begin (again) to dialogue at each other, turning their volume knobs up and down in baffled irritation at the other side's inability to understand. The theatrics drip drama. The Global Keyboard timidly passes on the output of its endless batterings like a dutiful wife. Who needs an exclamation mark when the caps-lock key is locked down. Who needs freedom of speech when the loudest mouths on earth bellow at your command.

The Great Western They want to protect us, they do. They want to secure their legacy as guardians of all that is Right, Mannered and Civilised (that would be them, by the way). They want to keep the wolves of history at bay, stay out of jail, not be hanged from lampposts by the lumpen proles (that would be us, by the way), etc. And all of this is a storm of its own making – autopoietic – and a storm of more than that besides. Hyperbole is hard to resist, errors of judgment are our daily bread. Even equanimity sounds shrill these days, or sociopathically sanguine; it's hard to tell the difference in the globular (not a typo) media frenzy, the whiplashing news maelstrom that just will not weaken, come hell or high water.

My disbelief gulps every word and image down deep. My skepticism stays knocked off balance, frozen in a strangely dumbfounded stasis, as wave after wave of glitteringly azure historical folly crashes over us, laced with ribbons of blood, slaughtering the destitute of the world's trouble zones, and leaving no one wholly untouched. These are satanically interesting times.

Again I feel compelled to reassess. What on earth is going on? Trump's Big Beautiful Bombing obliterated Iran's nuclear programme, he angrily claims. Intel leaks and reports to the contrary are dismissed as heresy. As the distance between that bombing raid and the present expands, the President's bombast looks more and more threadbare. And yet it stopped the escalation, cooled hot heads, of that there is very little doubt. There is Trumpian rhetoric and bombast as lampooned above ... and there are events on the ground. There is fanfare, distraction, news maelstrom ... and there are the actual events on the ground.

Again: What on earth is going on? 

As I have mused in recent, and in more distant, Econosophy posts, my hope has been that the creature Donald J Trump is a maverick one-off of essentially decent impulses that are at root anti-war and anti-violence. He is also a mysteriously narcissistic character – this is not a clinical but a poetical judgment – who is, to my eyes, deeply insecure. But he also has truly heroic courage, or so it seems to me from this great distance. But, again, he is also dangerously illiterate in terms of history and geopolitics, and thus via his insecurity and narcissistic leanings vulnerable to insidious flattery. But, again, I suspect his instincts about people are, at a certain intensity of crunch – that is, when the shit really is about to hit the global fan – eerily accurate. At which point he appears to have a creative and impish political nimbleness that dazzles the mind.

This highly unusual mix of characteristics makes, I'm sure we can all agree, for an extremely unpredictable fellow. I intuit a deeply caring man, one who is a misfit in DC, albeit a controllable misfit. At least up to a point. But what is the manner of that point where his inner compassion kicks in, just when what he is being finessed into doing becomes too ugly for his taste? Well, who can say. But the facts speak for themselves.

The US is pulling out of Ukraine. Yes, it is a hideously ugly and tragic slaughter, but Western hegemonic ambitions of the Halford Mackinder variety are to blame, not Putin's Russia. The slaughter will be ended sooner if the US backs off and leaves the corrupt Ukrainian regime to its inevitable denouement. Had Trump been seduced by The Coalition of the Sniffing – Starmer, Macron, Merz – we would be heading towards WWIII and nuclear conflagration. In my mind there is little to no doubt about this. Further, Putin would not have announced at Minsk roughly a week ago that Russia will be reducing its defence spending next year if he did not trust Trump. As I speculated about a month ago in this article, it looked to me like Trump was backing away from Ukraine for real, albeit in exchange for certain assurances from Putin with regards to Iran’s nuclear programme and the sort of deal the US wants with Iran in this regard.

As stated above, Trump's bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities led to a pause in hostilities without killing anyone, as far as I can tell. True, this resolves no core disagreements, but by taking the nuclear-threat card off the table, and insisting angrily that it is truly off the table, Trump buys time at zero cost in human life, time with which to effect a more peaceful negotiated outcome than the ugly path that regime change would have set in motion. And he has clearly stated that he is against the messiness of a regime-change operation, which would lead to the closure of the Straits of Hormuz by Iran, and the severe economic consequences of that and similar moves Iran would have carried out, not to mention further unnecessary loss of human life. This is not to be sniffed at. Time will tell whether Trump's gambit will lead to better outcomes, or if he is sincere, but on the evidence before us at the moment, this broad interpretation seems at least as viable as any other.

Bottom line: The old power elites in Europe and the UK no longer have anything solid to offer the US in a world that is unstoppably (absent nuclear conflagration) becoming multipolar. The old Western powers have little more than artifice (the media) and deranged inbred arrogance. They desperately need Russian subsoil wealth to recapitalise their banks. The US, on the other hand, has subsoil wealth, but can no longer afford to militarily police the whole world on behalf of, essentially, the old Western powers. It therefore makes far more business sense, which is one of Trump’s primary instincts as a politician, to partner with Russia, help develop and thus mightily benefit from its subsoil wealth, and so remain a major player on the world stage. But this means leaving the EU and UK to their entwined and sorry-looking fates. “Nothing personal, old boy!”

(Main sources for the above: this, this and this. I also want to draw your attention to this X post from Douglas MacGregor, which represents a powerful and eloquent counter argument to the more pro-Trump interpretation outlined above.)

One way or another, we are walking and being walked through a very fraught period of history. I find Putin, Xi, Fico and a few other national leaders to be humanity’s best allies for navigating the very real and grave dangers that always attend epochal shifts in global power balances such as this. When it comes to Trump, I'd rather have him as US president than Harris, but in my case the jury is still vacillating on what role he is playing, on what he, beneath the news maelstrom, is actually bringing to the table, and in which direction he is truly tipping the scales. 

More generally still and at the level of the whole human family, my intuitive sense remains unchanged and, in my assessment, is increasingly supported by historical and technological developments. Basically, we need to wise up. I intuit that we in fact feel a growing need, or hunger, or yearning to do just that. And so, to that end…

Towards re-enchantment by way of disenchanting all our mis-enchantments should be our direction, and knowingly. Imagination is not ours to control, it is ours to allow, our scared duty to learn, our most creative dance partner. Open properly to All That Is, everything we live in and through can only enchant us, if we learn to always "kiss the joy as it flies" on and away into history's soil. This is the royal road to individual and cultural maturity, the maturity that would boil off all the excess of all professional-managerial systems of bureaucracy, corporatism, and shallow consumerism, which seek to pin everything down, which would lock everything down for fear of chaos, of vitality, of raw life. Not that we should be aiming ourselves at Neverland, not that we should want to party on in perpetuity, but that we should find the courage to grow through the pains and guilts that hold us back by allowing them up and out. And I mean all of us.

We are mightily invested in multiple interlocking systems of control. Their collapse would be truly terrible. But sustaining these control systems in enmity with a fanatical conviction that There Can Be Only One (hegemon), with the weapons and armies and technologies humanity now has at its disposal, there for us to abuse in pursuit of the impossible, is more terrible still.

There is a middle way: the peace that comes through honesty and transparency. I ask all of us to knowingly want this radical middle way, for yourself and for those around you, but in gentleness and patience, in forgiveness and love. There is too much hate and mistrust in the global air, too much threat, too little humility. If each of us works on ourselves while keeping the evolving qualities of love and forgiveness in mind, this middle way has a chance to right much of what is currently far off balance, and tipping further and further towards collapse.

“Let all that is not rooted in truth and love wither and fall away.” – A line given to me in a dream.

“Therefore God becomes as we are, that we may be as He is.” – William Blake

“Opposition is true friendship.” – William Blake

“Love thine enemy.” – Jesus Christ