The pragmatics of love II: Value

 

A tale of two values

Sometimes we just don’t want to hear nothing lasts forever. And yet it’s true (mostly*).

Broadly speaking, Everything – God, All That Is – consists of patternings whose common quality is perpetual change (evolution). Yes, its inmost heart can helpfully be envisaged as the immutable fact and pure experience of existence, but that heart is embedded within the context of perpetual change. By way of a more accessible example, although spring returns every year, each iteration is unique. And ice ages alter spring’s behaviours far more profoundly than the variations human lifespans are currently exposed to. Change, in other words, is (just about) the only constant.

As of this writing, active within All That Is is a concept humanity has dubbed Capitalism. Also active are Socialism, Communism, Imperialism, Fascism, Modernism, Post-Modernism, Post-Humanism and any number of other isms, none of which will last forever. To the extent any of them are guises or outgrowths of Capitalism, the timing of their dissolution will be closely governed by their progenitor’s.

Sometimes we don’t want to face these plain truths. This is because decisions are cumulative investments in the future. Without exception, decisions initiate vectors that then, outside our full control and awareness, intertwine into ever evolving weaves – patternings – that reveal themselves in time as Chinese finger traps binding us in some manner to their inescapable dissolution.

Too often, the modern mind finds this sort of misty-woo rhetoric infuriating. Be that as it may, things nonetheless bubble up, seemingly from nowhere, co-evolve, then dissolve into the nowhere whence they came. How turbulent dissolution turns out to be for us depends on how deeply invested we become – a process beyond our full control – in the myriad evolution-to-dissolution vectors that constitute a particular cycle, be it buying a new pair of socks to throwing them away, or birthing a new civilisation to living through its dissolution. 

Unlike a pair of patterned socks, Capitalism happens to be a vast, planet- and culture-spanning patterning in which billions of souls are deeply invested. The notion that it might dissolve at all, that it is not in fact the most faithful socioeconomic expression of unchanging human nature, is thus itchy intellectualising to most. In response to such resistance, I designed this article’s headline image to illustrate, as simply as I was able, how inevitable and historically imminent Capitalism’s dissolution might be. Its particular lensed window onto my view of things pits one aspect of value against another and tracks both logically forward to the very lip of Capitalism’s end. 

Exchange value (price) is Capitalism’s bedrock, but look where it leads. 

Ineffable value (quality) is anathema to Capitalism; see where it leads.

The former is inextricably related to the latter.

It doesn’t seem to matter which tale we track, Capitalism appears to have an inbuilt shelf life.

Taking the Devil from the detail

Where frightened minds reflexively seek the comfort of certainty, 10-point plans, hot tips for quick wealth, sound predictions for the coming year, etc., I offer what must seem like irrelevant vagaries. My own certainty is that the best way through our current historical turbulence – which is as violent as it is bureaucratically monotonic - is the trinity of wisdom, health and love. I suspect such advice is currently so thoroughly out of vogue because the only way to honour and nurture this vital, fundamental trinity to a living vibrancy is to Know For Yourself. This is no quick fix promised by a charismatic authority figure; it takes patience and perseverance, seems of uncertain outcome, and requires us to take full responsibility for our lives. 

Nothing reports back to us more honestly on the quality of what we have become than our lives. It can take real courage to request an unvarnished report on our progress so far. Embracing wisdom, love and health as a way of being begins with this.

Know for yourself: Evolve in wisdom through mindfulness and patience. Observe attentively as wisdom slowly evolves to house the truth – the True – ever more cosily, exactly as you mature in your ability to humbly, openly allow others their knowings, their pace, their perspectives. This manner of being is the one true and lasting antidote to the divide-and-conquer tactics, to narcissism and its siblings, that infantilise us, censor us, depress us. 

Without wisdom, love and health as our loadstone, when irksome details must be faced, the devil surges up to scatter our potential and hope to the winds.

As old as humanity, this advice is out of fashion for now. But as things continue to unravel, as the choking, noxious dishonour exuded by those in power and promulgated via the useful idiocy of establishment experts infects all pores, personal and societal, so the truth of what I merely repeat here is growing in resonance and appeal. This is what I anticipate and, to some extent, see.

Let’s consider the flowchart up top.

It begins with value. It all begins with value and how a culture handles value.

If we take value in the capitalistic sense of price – in the sense that value can be measured objectively –, the flowchart presents its twin vectors as a particular logical sequence. Because price <=> money <=> market discovery <=> supply and demand <=> endemic scarcity** are necessarily interdependent, they arise/exist as one, from price, as a living ideational dynamic. And from this living dynamic, other things must also be, or come to be. Consumerism is one, so is perpetual economic growth as systemic requirement, advertising is another, wages for labour yet another. All these things belong together necessarily; each element is a necessary descriptor of a larger whole we might call Capitalism.

By contrast, technological advance is, more deeply, a product of human invention and curiosity. Whether it thrives more under this or that ism is a subjective matter not relevant to my efforts here, though it might work its unpredictable magic more rapidly in Capitalism than in other isms, I don’t know. What is clear is that technological unemployment, once again becoming loudly important as AI flexes its rapidly burgeoning muscles, is a problem for wages for labour (I do not mean it is a problem for work itself). Wages are a foundational requirement for Capitalism; they distribute purchasing power, without which markets cannot function; no buyers = no market. 

For the sake of argument, if we only ‘need’ – can we satisfactorily define need? – to employ 20% of humanity to furnish everyone on earth with the essentials plus much else by way of luxury, what hope for a system that requires wages to distribute the purchasing power markets need by way of effective demand for what manufacturers supply? How disruptive to this system would 60% unemployment be? Or 40%?

To ponder this imponderable more coolly, shouldn’t we consider what humans actually ‘need’ to be ‘happy’ – better: healthy? Shouldn’t we consider, humbly and openly, what we require to create life meanings for ourselves that we know are real and authentic? 

If we don’t ‘need’ consumerism and advertising for such things, if most human labour isn’t really ‘needed’ any more … or more persuasively: If human labour is now, or will soon be, too costly to sustain (disruptive, societally harmful) within any system that uses price / market discovery as its guiding light, what would an economy look like that has no consumerism and no advertising? How much less labour might such an economy need than Western economies? What if, furthermore, there were no incentives whatsoever to use builtin and perceived obsolescence in manufacturing? What if no one anywhere was influenced in their desires by the dark arts of advertising? What would such a system look like?

I doubt the result could meaningfully be called Capitalism.

Because we could not reasonably call our imaginary new system Capitalism, would it therefore be worse, or terrible, or wrong, or unnatural, or unfree? If the delights of consumerism are our only real freedom, how free are we?

What do you think value is? What do you want and why do you want it? Is it money, status, power? Are these things not inextricably intertwined with Capitalism and price? There’s theory positing many complicated arguments that deal with government and corporate interference. Then there’s the reality: Money is power is money, and those who feel they must rule society know this full well.

To me, it looks like these idols, for so long now our guiding lights, reveal themselves ever more plainly as unfit for rulership, unfit for the deep formation of societal goals, as wholly incompatible with wisdom, love and health. Those that fixedly worship and advance money, status and power seem wholly given over to their sclerotic venality, dangerously misguided by their narcissistic incompetence, too deranged to see their professional unravelling. As globalist ‘elites’ dare everything to keep control of what’s wrongfully in their possession, as they pore through all data they are willing to accept to predict and manipulate the future they demand, so they ensure their demise. The harder they try, the more certain their fall. They are the rotten vanguard of a rotten system rooted in money, status and power, which are egotistical/Satanic perversions of value, honour and authority. 

The value definitions we have culturally accepted uncritically for too long are tearing us apart.

Surely this train of thought is only upsetting while we can’t imagine anything else. Upsetting to we who adhere to the West’s value system, that is. Surely such adherence is so pervasive because the ‘ruling elite’ of any system is far more invested in that system than anyone else. Any system’s ‘elite’ has at its fingertips, necessarily, the levers and dials that ‘control’ the system that sustains that ‘elite’ in its status and power. Any threat to that system is thus a threat to that which its ‘elite’ values most: the tenets of its system. Ergo, it will pronounce most loudly that There Is No Alternative, and use all manner of statecraft, public relations, NLP and dirty tricks to propagate and nurture this belief in the minds of the hoi polloi, until the system seems as inevitable und irreplaceable as gravity. 

Perhaps this explains why we can’t imagine anything else.

But nothing lasts forever. The clash between sclerotic defensiveness and unstoppable change yields historical turbulence, which is precisely what we see now, right across the planet. Many will argue this turbulence is explained by the dangerous transition from uni- to multipolarity. This is certainly a very large part of it, but deeper than this important geopolitical reality other forces are at work. At least, that’s how it looks to me. My prediction – for what it’s worth – is that the isms governing the likes of Russia and China, as well as other nations now scrabbling to board the BRICS++ bandwagon, will soon experience similar strains to those besetting the West, strains whose causal roots lie in the complex soils of technological advance as it collides with the price-based systems whose time is running out.

The other facet of value explored in the flowchart above is the ineffable, immeasurable, lived experience we all have of how our preference-based relationship with the world around us, and within us, morphs subtly and organically from moment to moment. Deep down, we know we can’t measure value, just as we cannot measure wisdom, love and health. There is something about the ineffable that won’t quite lie down and die, try as we might to reduce everything to number. As important as finely accurate measurement surely is, it is nothing but empty numbers when we strenuously ignore the ineffable. That wisdom is what is coming through now as things break apart, as science, governance, medicine, media, and justice systems are corrupted by money and ideology. 

Wisdom, love and health are as threatening to Capitalism as is price.

Conclusion

My argument boils down to this: Societal systems developed on assumptions of insoluble scarcity, which undergirds price, which requires market-based mechanisms for ‘fairly’ distributing the wealth generated in such systems, cannot accommodate change that breaks any one of their foundational elements. This could not be more obvious. The sort of historical turbulence that follows epochal evolutionary leaps – which are far from unprecedented – is best navigated by humbly embracing wisdom, health and love. 

None of this is to advocate abandoning or condemning measurement, nor in fact anything else, as a target of one’s derision or judgement. Rather, it is to advise letting go, indiscriminately, of attachment to all isms so as to allow what is truly viable to rise to the surface clearly, unhindered by vested interests, be they political, financial or ideological.

And I do not argue that money must be abolished, nor that it will, 100%-no-doubt, gently be rendered redundant by historical processes. What I have been engaged in here at Econosophy for well over a decade now is exploring the ramifications of technological advance. This endeavour has exposed me to pathways of thought and intellectual adventure I had not anticipated. I have also undergone a profound ‘spiritual’ transformation that has greatly altered the tenor and emphases of my approach and outlook. Money, I now believe, is as rooted in ‘spirituality’ – how I hate that word – as prayer. We are consciousness. We therefore live in ideas, are filtered by ideas, see reality itself through ideas as a constellation of ideas. And everything is experience. Physicality is an experience. Modernity misunderstands this, proceeds from the assumption of a mechanical universe. This assumption is rapidly losing coherence and support.

Money is immune to none of this. It is not an immutable, objective force of nature beyond our influence; it is simply a creation of our devising. It can therefore be changed should wiser heads than mine deem it necessary. We have what it takes to navigate our current cultural impasse into whatever brighter future awaits a wise handling of the coming few years.

* Well, almost nothing. In my view, the fact of existence will last forever; existence’s nominal ‘opposite’ or ‘death’ – absolute nothingness – is itself a flat impossibility, so can never occur. Ergo, existence per se cannot die, is eternal. Not only can nothing come from (strict) nothingness, (strict) nothingness – in contradistinction to the concept of nothingness – is in fact a wholly impossible non-thing that can by definition have no properties whatsoever … including the property of existence. Ergo, nothingness cannot ever be, not even for a nano-moment. Existence and nothingness are mutually exclusive. “Nothing lasts forever”, strictly speaking, is thus a very revealing truism, capable of inspiring all manner of paradoxical semantic casuistry. For example: Nothing is a ‘something’ that lasts forever in the very fact of its impossibility as immutable and eternal Truth; that is, in nothingness’ guise as anti-existence.

** It should be pointed out that whatever scarcity remains to be justly distributed can be managed without price discovery.

The pragmatics of love

Please tell me whom to hate

Digital and print ink is being spilled in endless amounts to condemn or defend one side or the other. Atrocities are being committed. Horror floods the world again, biblically, from somewhere else now. Tell me who is the more evil party! I want to know whom to hate and whom to defend. I want to know which side is morally superior to the other. Tell me! Please lead me to the experts who are dispassionately and completely correct in what they say and I shall obey them, wholly give my thinking to them, allow my emotions to be cradled by them. Give me this guidance! I need someone to hate, otherwise I can’t handle the horror, the evil, the unimaginable suffering. 

It is just too much. Too much all over again, while other horrors grind on ceaselessly as if their energy for more and more were inexhaustible.

It looks like we want it this way. Do we really want it this way?

“Structural coupling”, qu’est que c’est?

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

When all you have is a money system, everything looks like a commodity.

When all you have is an army, everything looks like a war.

As we shape the world around us, so our shaping shapes us.

I see us, all of us, joined as individuals in our oceanic togetherness, losing it. Some storm urges up from our totality, gathering us into its fury as we give ourselves to its might. This uprushing hatred is exactly what I write against, over and over, exactly what I try to soothe away, first in me, then in anyone else who will listen. To this end – to this means – I put forward the thinking of those who seem to have produced material we must take into account – and understand – if we don’t want to become massed, unthinking rage, over and over again, if we don’t want to be tied by puppet strings to dark forces that will destruction on everything.

But beneath the complexity of the material I reference is something terribly simple: “Love is the way.” Its simplicity now, as the hate mounts, could not seem more offensive, more insensitive. But this is because we, culturally, in the West and elsewhere, do not understand. We don’t seem to want to. 

Love is what nourishes our tender ability as impressionable human beings to live together respectfully, peacefully, to take the time to heal the wounds that plant the seeds that become hate somewhere down the line. While we fail to respect love, we slowly lose ourselves to wounded fears, until the hate that grows from that soil harvests us all.

How to help each other want to learn to love, to become more loving, to commit as reverently as possible, forever, to becoming love? How!? 

Carefully, humbly, patiently. 

The material I reference is complex because it is needed support for a radically different ontology that has love at its heart, as its fundament, rather than as some chemically generated brain fart whose significance is about the same as any other chemically generated brain fart. It is the “rather than” that must be disassembled, that side of this choice current modernity reflexively believes is The Nature Of Reality: Everything is matter and energy. In this article we look at how the concept of “structural coupling” helps us see reality a little differently to the materialist reflex, and how it offers us conceptual tools with which to dispel certain misapprehensions.

Niklas Luhmann saw systems interactions as governed by structural coupling. Imagine a virus docking to a cell. If no mutually compatible interface is there, no coupling (interaction) can occur. In this event, the virus is irrelevant to that particular cell. With no appropriate cell receptor available anywhere, what is a virus? Effectively, it is non-existent: an imperceivable non-thing.

(When all you have is matter, love sinks into invisibility.)

Scaling quickly up from viruses to ideas as structuring systems, we can state that the way I interact with my environment – a complex system of complex systems – is significantly governed by the system of complex systems I am – including my idea of what reality is, what principles I cherish, what I think wealth, health, value, etc., are. The way I interact, the way I perceive, my behaviour, are all governed by how the dynamic arrangement (or patterning) I am is able to dock with its environment. And none of us creates a single one of our cherished governing ideas ex nihilo. The structuring ideas that determine what proportion of reality we can perceive are planted in us by circumstances more or less beyond our control. 

Ideas are filters. Beliefs are filters. And, as it happens, most belief systems persist in us unexamined, taken for granted, silently structuring how we perceive, how we emote, what we desire. 

Who’s in charge here? Tool, or tool maker? Idea, or idea crafter? Which fashions which?

Well, to make matters still more unanchored, still more vertiginous, still freer of free will, Luhmann’s model conceives of systems as co-emergent phenomena whose boundaries can be defined this way or that, depending on the context; systems are not distinct objects per se, but morphing patterns determined by ever-shifting contexts no one controls. 

I don’t know where you end and I begin.

Today, I don’t know where I end and Google begins.

Systems structure perception, dynamically, shiftingly, but well enough to aid navigation and survival through the ‘world’ that ‘mind’ is part of, otherwise a system perishes by way of maladaption.

In Luhmann’s model, then, it’s as if there were no agency anywhere. It’s almost as if there were no such thing as experience, consciousness, free will. 

I understand reality more or less as described above, and yet I am also a committed advocate of the sanctity of free will. There is agency, and it is, for me, fundamental. 

Luhmann’s descriptive model gives us a tool with which we can pry open the still reigning Newtonian model of clearly defined physical objects, and begin to discern a reality of co-emerging and co-evolving patterns, organically interdependent in a dizzying variety of ways. Luhmann’s is a helpful architecture for seeing reality a little more accurately. It is one potential addition to what we are that can help us perceive a little bit more of All That Is. 

And yet – to repeat – there is also agency. So, how do I justify perceiving agency right down there in the fundament of All That Is?

Consciousness all the way down

While it is true, in my view, that “World and mind arise together” (Varela) – which could be rephrased as: Object and subject arise together, or: Passive and active arise together –, their co-arising is at once spontaneous and an act of will; ‘world’ and ‘mind’ are part of an all-encompassing whole: All That Is. And All That Is is consciousness. All That Is = God. Much flows logically from this bold statement that later accommodates love and agency seamlessly, necessarily, within it.

Free will is, in my conception, a property, or perhaps necessary corollary of conscious experience via the inherent presence of preference. In other words, choice (= preference = an expression of free will) is inherent to consciousness precisely because consciousness can experience, and precisely because of that experiencing, prefer. Can there be preference in the absence of experience? Without experience, what we have is predictable reaction or response to stimuli. This has nothing to do with preference as I mean it here.

By way of example, we could identify fight-or-flight reflexes in biological entities as ‘preferences’, but I would distinguish between autonomic impulse – reflex –, and experience thereof, i.e., why we might prefer calm over life-or-death conflict. To root this preference in genes (chemicals) that mysteriously ‘want’ to ‘survive’ (aren’t genes – chemicals – in fact ‘dead’?) is to put the cart before the horse, in my view. (I am using the horse-cart idiom somewhat inappropriately; it implies a dualistic framing I reject.)

Stepping in a little deeper: Because materialism cannot account for experience – because it cannot account for consciousness –, it is sounder to assert reality itself is consciousness, within whose domain what we call matter and energy are experienced. It is for me self-evidently true that consciousness exists. Failure to account for it thus disqualifies whichever model or paradigm that so fails. Thus, for me, what we call the physical universe must proceed from, and remain of, consciousness, not vice versa. 

Materialism – there is nothing but matter/energy – is logically bound to assert consciousness as an illusion of some kind; consciousness itself can be neither matter nor energy, thus cannot even exist, strictly speaking; on materialism’s tenets, all that exists must be made of matter/energy. Materialism must therefore conceive of consciousness as a noncontiguous something emerging mysteriously from sufficiently complex brains. This position is confounded, however, by the insurmountable challenge of explaining which biochemicals or constellations of neuronal activity could possibly effect, or be deceived into experiencing, this thing we experience as experience. (To put it redundantly. Using my cheeky free will.)

Another explanatory model is dualism: there exists both matter and consciousness. However, each differs fundamentally from the other, such that dualism cannot explain how they interact; no structural coupling is possible, neither domain can perceive the other’s existence. And on this simple problem, dualism falls.

Hence:

If neither Dualism nor Materialism, then There Is Only God (Everything Is Consciousness).

This is my base position. I do not set it out to persuade you to agree, but rather to disclose it as my ontological base, and in so doing demonstrate, however sketchily, it is at least as reasonable as any other. 

Essentially then, what we are examining is the structural-coupling concept as it dovetails with the reality of agency, preference and free will, as I understand them. The hinge between the two is information as it pertains to meaning, where meaning can only exist in consciousness. ‘Dead’ chemicals can neither purposefully communicate nor understand another’s meaning, neither can complex arrangements of chemicals or neuronal nets. Meaning is fundamentally different to mechanical output-input-output exchanges. 

Expressed boldly: Without consciousness, there can be neither information nor meaning. From this I can also assert that materialism – the absence of consciousness – cannot account for meaning and information. 

Conveniently for my purposes here, Luhmann’s model uses communications (of meaningful information) as the medium that enables the continuation or coherence of complex (living) systems through time; structural coupling accommodates communication, both within and between systems, communication of necessarily meaningful information. On my reading of it then, his model thus permits, or perhaps requires, consciousness, albeit without meaning to. If you’ll pardon the crude pun.

(If my logical leaps seem a little threadbare here, that’s because I’m trying to keep this short. This is a fuller examination of these ideas in a previous article.)

This combination of structural coupling and Consciousness-As-Reality explains for me how we humans can produce intractable nightmares like Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Palestine: addiction, cultural habituation, pride, arrogance, fanaticism; how can matter/energy produce such states of being? More hopefully perhaps, this combination also accounts for the impossible beauty of earth’s biosphere, the awe-inspiring poetry of The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, and everything else besides. 

But reality’s potential to creatively express free will through its seemingly infinite vehicles (humans, forests, cultures, multinational corporations, ant hills, climate, etc.) is tightly governed by structural coupling as its all-encompassing effects determine available decision space, where “decision space” represents the ‘amount’ of free will we can bring to bear at any given moment. 

We can reformulate this idea as a question: What spectra of decisions are visible to us as we flow from constraining moment to constraining moment? Any answer is also a description of how much free will is available to us, indeed, how visible our free will is to us, from moment to moment. The broader the spectrum, the more choices we see. The more open our hearts, the broader the spectra we perceive.

Imagine actually being Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, confronted with an attack on the country and people he is obliged to defend, compromised as he is by his colourful history and the yet more colour history of Israeli politics as it fits into the dazzling complexity of modern geopolitics. Imagine learning of atrocities committed to your country and people by your most bitter enemy. Imagine what decision space is available to your free will as the evolving complexity of What You Are structurally couples with your specific environment in this specific historical moment.

At a guess, I’d say you’d face a very narrow decision space indeed. 

Could love possibly be a factor in Netanyahu’s calculations? Forgiveness? 

The more love he could allow to flow through his being, the broader his decision space, his courage, his compassion, his wisdom, would become. This horribly unlikely possibility is what I am slowly trying to tease into focus in this article. 

Is it impossible to love our enemies? May we deduce the impossibility of this hope from the basics of structural coupling set out above?

With this lengthy groundwork now stored soundly in our minds, it’s time to switch gears.

Just stop dehumanisation!

Dr Saffiyah Ally and Rabbi Dovid Weiss in conversation

Does it anger you to see a rabbi and an Islamic woman engaged in a peaceful discussion about Zionism and Judaism? It warms my heart and gives me hope. Here is some of what Rabbi Weiss had to say to Dr Ally, in paraphrase. 

Judaism is in essence about a covenant with God to uphold the Torah, solemnly undertaken 3,000 years ago. Part of this covenant is to be close to and subservient to God. Zionism, by contrast, began about 150 years ago and represents a “transformation from subservience to God, into nationalism”. Had the land chosen as Zionism’s nation state been uninhabited, “it would still be forbidden for the Jewish people to have this concept of sovereignty, of nationalism.” Around 2,000 years ago, the Jewish people were driven from their land for failing to maintain the high level of spirituality required of them by their covenant. A decree from God that the Jews not be a sovereign nation was a corrective measure, a “medicine from God to break our haughtiness”. Instead, the Jewish people were to live loyally in other nation states: diaspora as medicine. No attempt to end diaspora is permitted; its ending is in God’s hands alone. In their great suffering because of their exile, the Jews were welcomed by Islamic countries that gave them succour and safe havens to call home. There they flourished, even without enshrined human rights; there was no need for such rights. Jews and Muslims babysat each other’s children, were good neighbours to each other. They lived together in peace and mutual respect.

If his account is true – I have no reason to doubt it – then it is possible for all peoples to live together in mutual respect and peace. Note that love of God, who is love, lies at the heart of this state of affairs, not arrogance or haughtiness, but the love that breathes life into common decency. Common decency. That decency which is shared by all, which is thus part of our nature as human beings. 

Where has it gone? What conceals common decency from us, makes it seem like a pipe dream, like the foolish fantasy of a teenage idealist?

An Israeli teenager shares her grief and compassion for everyone

You can find common decency in the most shattered of places. In the horrors that burst over Israel, born of the horrors suffered by the Palestinians in Gaza, there it can be found. Despite her anger and grief, despite all she suffered and saw, nothing was more important to this brave woman than to share her compassion for her fellow human beings still suffering as terrible, or more terrible a fate than hers.

Though it can be hidden, love cannot be extinguished. It is fundamental. 

Must I say I do not tolerate terrorism? Surely it goes without saying. It seems to me the strangest of compulsory genuflections, a cynical and bitter form of virtue signalling I find very hard to swallow, though I understand well its fear-filled and rage-powered roots. Horror is extremely hard to bear. But it is so hard to bear precisely because down deep in each of us love moves us towards compassion. Sadly, without the cultural and ideological architecture to facilitate robust and clear structural coupling with this deep aspect of what we are, what existence is, we have developed a malformed relationship with its concealed presence. I hope the horrors of the world, which are so unbearable for so many, break our rigid resistance to the real presence of love within, and free it. 

Part of this process must of course include understanding. I want to understand how Hamas came to want to perform these acts. I want to understand why the Israeli government is so certain collective punishment of potentially millions of fellow human beings is the wisest response. I know such decisions do not represent the deep heart of all Palestinians and Israelis, so I do not support any form of collective punishment or terror. I reject terrorism from any and all perpetrators thereof, while wanting to welcome back into healthy humanity, welcome back onto the path of love, those driven somehow to commit acts of violence and terror. 

None of this means I advocate letting sick tigers roam free to cause whatever harm they are driven to cause, just because I want to understand. What I mean is: first protect people from the sick tigers, then, after calm is restored, understand and address how they became sick. The first part – reestablishing safety and security – is done with love in our hearts. The second part – understanding what went wrong – is done with love in our hearts. There are victims, there are perpetrators. But hate is not a response – understandable as it is – that can address why hate-filled events whelm us as often as they do. Hate only perpetuates the root problem: a malformed relationship with love.

Without the wisdom needed to respond appropriately, i.e. in a manner optimal for reestablishing health, safety, and calm, violence will lead to violence back and forth, seemingly endlessly, until we perish or can take no more.

Do we really want ever escalating spirals of violence? If not, why not? 

Because love. 

We do not repudiate violence because biology says so – i.e. because pain hurts and genes want to survive –, no. We repudiate violence because our preferences are in fact rooted far more deeply in that which has patterned biological evolution on earth: the consciousness that honours the sanctity of free will as it learns how to find its way back to love in the face of the most extraordinary and challenging of circumstances. 

There is of course a hole in this description, this assertion. Why is there biological life on earth, why is there physical existence? We can only guess. I find the metaphor of an impossibly profound and vast journey of evolution – the evolution of God via human experience – very helpful in this regard. Not everyone will agree with me. But regardless of the impossibility of mere humans understanding everything down to the last detail, we will always face choices, we will always offer up alternative explanatory models and choose from among them. 

For me, imagining this perennial process of wanting, of yearning to understand because we marvel at the complexities and wonders of existence… Imagining our striving as wholly predictable, as entirely robotic emissions and belches egested from meat-and-bone machines, in which every word and sentence written or uttered could not possibly occur in any other way, that any meanings we experience in uttering and hearing these attempts to understand are illusory, is as silly an undertaking as I can conceive. My experience of taking and making meaning flatly contradicts this idea. Experience cannot be an illusion; to assert otherwise is a clear contradiction in terms.

Without the wisdom needed to respond appropriately, we respond sub-optimally. What could be more obvious. Decisions made in anger deliver poor outcomes far more often than not. We are human; we become addicted to certain patterns, hate being one of them, anger another, aloof neutrality another. In the absence of cultural architecture supportive of and conducive to wisdom, to love, to common decency, this susceptibility to addiction compounds, becomes a positive feedback loop that runs for generations until all we know is a profound malformation of what we are, and call it normal. 

This is where common decency lies hidden. This is the muck love is buried beneath. This is the world we have co-evolved that makes love look to us like My Little Pony, or pornography, or romance, or chemicals. This is our principle error. It is the fruit of arrogance, of haughtiness. Today, we see its consequences all around, and are horrified.

I pray there is hope in that horror.

Can politics cope?

“I want [my book] to explain how shameful politics has become.” – Rory Stewart

A majority of both Biden (70%) and Trump (68%) voters believed electing officials from the opposite party would result in lasting harm to the U.S.

Roughly half (52% Biden voters, 47% Trump voters) viewed those who supported the other party as threats to the American way of life.

About 40% of both groups (41% Biden voters, 38% Trump voters) at least somewhat believed that the other side had become so extreme that it is acceptable to use violence to prevent them from achieving their goals. 
– From a Washington Examiner report, 18 October 2023

In the interview I link to in the image caption above, Rory Stewart, former cabinet minister and former contender for leadership of the Conservative Party, describes the immoral, machine-like entities politicians are forced to become by how today’s politics structures their world. Above, I used Benjamin Netanyahu as a vehicle for highlighting the problem of a greatly attenuated decision space narrowing the scope of free will, but today almost any politician would serve just as well to highlight this phenomenon. I know it’s a cliché by now, but the mechanistic worldview, as structuring paradigm, has made machines of us all. At the vanguard of that centuries-long development are politicians, managers of a system that has them wholly in its grip. 

Imagine someone susceptible to hypnosis hypnotised into believing he is a robot with no free will. Until the spell is broken, he would await instructions before doing anything. The ‘belief’ imposed upon  him has him under its spell. His decision space has been reduced to a single ‘choice’: obey. Paradigms ‘hypnotise’ too. Cult leaders hypnotise. Advertising hypnotises. The design of shops and department stores hypnotises. The speed and depth at which hypnosis is achieved vary, but the general outcomes are similar. These observations are a graphic way of showing how something as ‘immaterial’ as an idea, or paradigm, can attenuate decision space, in other words, significantly impact how we structurally couple with our environment. Ideas are powerful enough to make free will disappear, and with it consciousness, and with the latter’s disappearance disappears love as it really is.

Stewart is at pains to describe the moral disintegration politicians must subject themselves to if they are to have a chance of a successful career. He states that politics cannot work any other way. I understand that life is harsh for former politicians; they aren’t much good for anything other than party politics, generally speaking; politics demands a highly specialised skillset. Their only utility outside political life is sitting idly on some corporate board lending that corporation a little extra gravitas imagined to give it a competitive advantage. And this attractive career twilight is possible only to the lucky few: the luminaries of politics in any given country. 

Imagine the pressure. Imagine how easily party whips can maintain voting discipline, how obediently a political party will act as one entity, either vying for power or delivering on its manifesto, its members almost emptied of free will, of conscience, as they vie to remain visible and valuable to their party.

Stewart describes a reality of manifestos, of parties, competing for votes, not politicians. The manifesto thus has priority over an individual’s conscience or preferences. Previously, say in the 18th century, political parties were more amorphous, but the upshot was increased corruption, he argues, where votes were bought and sold in Parliament for every contentious element of every bill. This produced gridlock over and over again. Today, things are more disciplined, more efficient, more mechanical. There is less free will. You could almost say there is less ego. Politics would not work out without disciplined obedience, with conscience-based voting reserved for the watershed decisions.

In The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, an article I published here in April 2021, I asked:

Are we being directed towards direct democracy even though we’re not ready for it? Are our amazing communication technologies inexorably herding us towards a challenge most don’t want to face?

My sense then and now is that top-down governance cannot be nimble enough, nor knowledgeable enough, to have a chance of keeping pace with change; can have no chance, therefore, of governing wisely. There is a systemic need to keep pace with the economy, the World Out There that messes itself up faster than politics can identify the cause of the problem – if it is a problem –, a world that changes far faster than an executive can produce legislation to prevent the ‘negative’ outcomes they are duty-bound to prevent. What do political parties understand of ethics, of morality, of viruses, of modern warfare, modern medicine, of the lives of plumbers, school teachers and nurses, of derivatives, high finance, the money system, double-entry bookkeeping, artificial intelligence, and so on? How can a political party, or The Establishment, maintain a meaningful dialogue with The People? Surely the impossibility of this is why The Establishment prefers narrative control, perception management, and censorship. Surely this is why it prefers the power threat of “You’re either with us, or against us”.

Who among We, the People reads the terms and conditions we ‘agree to’ multiple times a week, a day? Who contests them before clicking to agree? Is a click as legally binding as a wet-ink signature? Who cares! Who has the power to do anything about it. We all have a life to live. And it is true that, materially, we in the West live in paradise. Delivered meals, movies on demand, holidays abroad, instant communications with anyone anywhere in the world, incredibly effective machine translations for having a chance of understanding different cultures… And the pace of change keeps on accelerating. Perhaps, a few short decades from now, Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity will be upon us. Despite the often low-quality of much of IT products and services, I sometimes find it easy to imagine Kurzweil’s Singularity happening.

So I believe I’m a little justified in hoping war is quickly becoming unmanageable, or impossibly costly on too many axes. What we can do to each other militarily is more horrific and devastating than it has ever been, even without The Nuclear Option. War’s ‘benefits’ look brutish compared to those of cooperation, dialogue, diplomacy. Is it morally defensible to go to war against a country whose morals and rituals offend us?

It’s not only politicians; I don’t think anyone can keep up. There are competing vested interests funding this, that and the other pet project, furthering some cherished cause, be it an Open Society or The Singularity or The Great Reset, programmable CBDCs, just stopping oil, saving the planet, the rain forests, polar bears, pandas … on and on and on. This is the frenzy, the mind-boggling complexity of human life today. Who can say how these intertwining and competing interests will play out? It would be foolishly dishonest of me to claim I know what the heck is going on.

And there, my friends, is the rub. Things are as they are, yoked to the countless historical momenta that carry us all forwards in the dizzying rush some call progress. From its frenzy, bitter enmities can suddenly erupt as war. Can we hold things together while clinging to power relations as they stand? The world has been teetering on the edge of WW3 for months. I side with humanity, which means for me that I side with multipolarity – if forced to choose between it and unipolarity.

I have come to deeply distrust ideology. I see history making top-down, top-heavy power structures both redundant and catastrophically incompetent. The power that falls to those few who now ‘run’ the world is too great to be distributed such that one culture, one paradigm, one ideology can harshly judge all those that diverge from it. “You’re either with us, or against us!”, said G W Bush a while back. Well, those against us don’t take kindly to being threatened like that. Today, The West wakes up to its increasingly palpable isolation as events spin out of its control, and its ‘enemies’ assert their wills.

Following on from my preference for multipolarity, I further prefer yet more multipolarity, and still more after that, where its localising vector leads to increasingly localised governance, perhaps down to city level. Those processes/structures/institutions that govern (or simply facilitate) interactions between cities should have as little power as possible, if any. Perhaps political power would, in a more nimble and organic system, be reduced to a very low level, simply because politics then ceases to be a domain that requires much power. It would have a fundamentally different role as a result of the vector I prefer.

To minimise the very real dangers posed by current anachronistic power structures as they are dragged by history, kicking and screaming, further and further into the background, to manage this volatile process as wisely as possible, one of the things I believe we need front and centre in our hearts and minds is renewed commitment to love, as it pertains to wisdom, total health and revering the sanctity of free will. Understanding that free will needs as broad a decision space as possible to be healthily creative, to nourish common decency, knowing that our decision space is severely restricted by fear, hate and ossified systems of governance, choosing to prefer an organically free world over a mechanically dystopian one brings with it a requirement to choose love. 

To make that perhaps naïve-sounding sequence imaginable, I argue we need a supportive ontology, one similar to what I have outlined in this article. I hope I have made this seem reasonable.

The tug of power: ‘Elites’ drawn to the fascistic flame

Patrician disdain will out

We so often find ourselves in narrowing cul-de-sacs, don’t we, somehow unable to turn around and extricate ourselves. Whether in lives of insignificance or in positions of great responsibility and power, events grind on around us, favouring or dashing our hopes as they will, far from our immediate control, but so often down narrowing corridors that get harder and harder to escape. When this inevitability befalls the subjects of this article – those seduced by the tug of power – the consequences can be epochal. This is one of those moments, and has been, with growing intensity, for years now, probably decades.

What is power in its negative aspect but the desire and ability to make others act in ways they would otherwise not freely choose? What is fascism but power leveraged to extremes of abuse? Power corrupts cumulatively towards absolute power that corrupts absolutely. In so doing it stiffens, steadily losing its adaptive vitality until it breaks against its own rigidity. 

I have argued here repeatedly that the clothing and paraphernalia with which power decorates itself don’t matter all that much; the State as a process is necessarily about Weberian monopoly (and thus over time, absolute) power at its core, that all institutions established to hold this dynamic in check can be corrupted over time, as history works its magic in tandem with the ambitions and flaws of those in positions of institutional authority. Again: “Power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely.” That tending corrupts in only one direction: towards the acquisition of ever more power. Corruption, in this context, offers no other reasonable interpretation.

None of this should be surprising to anyone. History records many details that can be devilishly hard to interpret, but its broad civilisational sweep tracks this pattern of power.

Can anything be done about this unintended artefact of civilisational advance? Should anything be done? Answering that question has become the primary objective of this blog, crystallised into the call to “Demote money, promote wealth”. It is an objective I abandoned in 2015 as personal events overtook me, but one that was thrust back to the front of my life by the shock of global lockdowns. The first article I wrote on that phenomenon was entitled, “Only the intensity has changed. Nothing will ever be the same again”, a title that draws on the perspective I set out above. Though I published the finished article in June 2020, the title popped out of my mouth in a conversation with my daughter in early April. The phrase emerged from a deep intuition that had flooded me in late March, that the lockdowns were the beginning of something very sinister, and as such filled me with a horrible foreboding. 

Events continue to develop more or less as that intuitive flood intimated, and as historical patterns of decadence and collapse – regardless of timescale and intensity – would suggest. Just a few days ago, the entire Canadian Parliament gave a monstrously unapologetic Nazi named Yaroslav Hunka a standing ovation. Not one single member of Canada’s Parliament remained seated. Mr and Mrs Zelenskyy cheered too. 

Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a jew. He gave Mr Hunka, a Nazi, the honour of an enthusiastic fist pump. And Volodymyr knows very well how riddled Ukrainian power structures are with this vile ideology, the ideology of power and entitlement on the grounds of ethnicity alone, the ideology of dehumanising Untermenschen to ‘mere beasts’, which may then be treated however it pleases one to treat them. 

Trudeau, a man who looks like a dull but dangerous narcissist to me, announced to the press that the House’s Speaker was at fault for this terrible blunder, and that consequently Russian propaganda was to be studiously avoided. A more baseless non sequitur you will be very hard pressed to find, and this one from the mouth of Canada’s Prime Minister. The BBC have assisted Mr Trudeau in his efforts to slide the blame over to Russia.

Any claims of ignorance are pure manipulation. Why celebrate a man in front of cameras recording images that would potentially be shared with the world, a man who surely would have been minutely vetted before being allowed into the House – two heads of state were present –, allowed into the House for the very purpose of that celebration, but about whom you know know very little? Two standing ovations in Canada’s Parliament for a man of whom one knows next to nothing? “A 98-year old Ukrainian-Pole who killed Russians? Hero!!” An organised photo-op of such delicate PR import that was unplanned, or at best egregiously mismanaged? 

It doesn’t add up to me. A quick Wikipedia search would have sufficed.

More likely in my view is that ‘elite’ arrogance and sclerotic venality is at its ribald zenith. Their blunder was getting caught with their hands in the cookie jar.

But blunder or not, it was a very dark day that had been long in the making. Is it of a piece with the censorship, the mandates, the draconian lockdowns, the lies and deceptions, and so much else, that have been unleashed on the Western world in waves, whose onset was late March 2020? I suspect so. Global lockdowns were the very audible starting gun, though preparation for this broad and lasting assault on The People has likely been long indeed. I cannot be sure, but that initiating global event, though inaugurated in China and rolled out globally, appears to me to be primarily targeted at the West.

In its wake, having finally initiated Project New Normal, is patrician disdain for us hoi polloi now so intense and unbridled they can no longer conceal it? Has the deep and abiding revulsion that has festered so long behind their narcissist smiles burst free?

State power becomes toxic over time. (Et: l’État, c’est nous.)

Yes, [covering the Russia-Ukraine war] has changed my world outlook. It has taught me something about the West, something about Britain, which, you know, I’d sort of come to understand up to a certain point, but Ukraine has – let me put it like this – it’s shattered whatever remaining illusions I had. And it needs to be understood that Ukraine is really where it all begins: Russiagate, the response to the pandemic crisis, the disinformation campaigns that we see in the West – which are really purges of dissident views – all of these have their roots, in some respect, in this crisis in Ukraine. And of course it has been the great catalyst, also, of the Americans … I think … of the Americans starting to understand […snip…] the collapse of the unipolar system that the United States created. But what Ukraine has shown is that as far as the West is concerned – let’s talk about the leaders of the West – there really are no boundaries; there are no moral boundaries, there are no political boundaries, they’re perfectly willing to get into bed with Nazis – this is what this Canada business ultimately shows –, they’re prepared to work with the most terrible people, even people they’ve spent the last 70 years rightly condemning for their […snip…] extreme evil in the 1930s and 1940s. There are absolutely no limits, there are absolutely no restraints, there’s no point where these people will stop. And they are also prepared to take absolutely monstrous risks with the survival of humanity.  – Alexander Mercouris in answer the first question asked in the linked livestream (registration required to view)

All the toxins are coming to the surface, oozing from the rot that is the nasty fruit of incestuous entitlement, that ugly perversion of noblesse oblige left too long in its own bubble. But where there is a ‘noble’ ‘elite’, there must also be a hoi polloi, an unwashed mass. The former needs the latter to have meaning. 

Together, we are the State.

We are being shepherded – or are we shepherding each other? – from hysteria to hysteria. In mass hysteria, what is most ugly in us urges to the surface and will out. Our suppressed depths are suddenly on display for all to see. Reason and decorum are jettisoned as the survival instinct takes over. From where I stand, it looks like collective debts have come due; some kind of psychic reckoning is at hand (not to mention geopolitical).

What is it we are party to? How has this horror come to be? How have We, The People become so easy to coax into whatever state of hysteria the ‘elite’ deem useful?

Well, because we have been necessarily dumbed down – for factory work, repetitive manual labour, grunt work, to be reliably manipulatable consumers –, because we are the State, because real history is being made an irrelevance in the interests of durable stability and more financial wealth for our ‘protectors’, our ‘superiors’. These are the essences of the root deal, the “social contract” that is the State, that ‘beneficent’ protection racket. 

Now that a profound bifurcation point is upon us – The Fourth Industrial Revolution – there where history really counts it is being stealthily rewritten. Our past is being rewritten. Our minds are being rewritten. We must fit into what is being installed, neatly, compliantly, willingly.

In Hiroshima earlier this year, Ursula von der Leyen implied that Russia was and remains the planet’s nuclear threat. She failed to mention it was the US that dropped the bombs that devastated two Japanese cities in 1945. 

History and cultural norms are being bent out of shape to accommodate the New Normal. Can’t you see that nazism/fascism is being carefully rebranded into a shiny niceness that translucently gloves autocratic rule? Can you feel how pedophelia is stealthily being made ever more acceptable? Blacks across the US and UK seem to believe slavery is a phenomenon in which white people enslave black people, and that’s all there is to it. Whites are therefore racist. It is as simple and unambiguous as that. 

In the interests of better control, to ensure a lasting stability some time after a period of managed chaos, we are being set at each other’s throats. Culture is being deliberately reengineered while we are endlessly encouraged to bicker and brawl. The stage is being set, the lights dimmed, the exciting new show is about to begin. As far as I can tell, this programme is occurring primarily in the West, but will be extended globally if the ‘elite’ globalists get their way.

In other words, We, The People can be led like sheep from mass panic to mass rage, and back again, for the simple reason that much time and money has been invested – decades and centuries of it – to make sure we are sheep. (Whisper: “Propaganda ends where dialogue begins.”) There’s no more important tool of statecraft than propaganda, right? How good is We, The People at inter-group dialogue these days? Worse than ever. So many topics are taboo, what we are left with, socially, is a pervasive toxic niceness – the misbegotten brat of respectful manners –, a shallow facade that cracks quickly into red-faced rage. 

Triggered yet?

Three quotes I cite regularly: “Power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely.” “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” “Propaganda ends where dialogue begins.” 

I hope it is clear to you how these three quotes belong together. My fear is that the opposing historical current – the endless conveniences delivered by the march of progress and technological advance – has so shaped how we in the West see the world, how we apprehend reality, that the pivotal importance of these three quotes is lost on most today, certainly those under 40. These three vital quotes would have to be animated in rapidly changing saturated primary colours and be spoken dramatically by very cute unicorns and very scary demons to have the slightest chance of making an impression on an entitled and spoiled Western world. Which is precisely why I have argued that deep collapse is a prerequisite to a healthy historical course correction. 

Perhaps this very correction is being part-engineered by Putin’s SMO in Ukraine, an horrific necessity he sorely wanted to avoid. Whatever the truth of this, his is a decision that has awoken the non-Western world to its own potential, its growing ability to loose a weakening global bully from its throat. I understand over 60 nations want to become members of BRICS+. Their desire speaks volumes, as does their willingness to make that desire public, regardless of how viable BRICS+ proves to be. Does this momentous geopolitical shift presage the correction the West so desperately needs?

The West is in steep decline, its credibility and authority disintegrating precipitously. Seeing this, watching on incredulously as the West needlessly eviscerates itself, the rest of the world responds accordingly. Currently, the main vehicle of that response is the BRICS. This battle of the giants spells historical turbulence aplenty, turbulence whose fallout will be devastating for the West, though primarily for the EU and the UK.

Love is always the answer

But one that tiggers most people more than any other. 

Nobody leaps from zero to love just by deciding to do so. Love is a long and winding way that starts small and delivers mysterious fruits whose joys and sustenance are hard to taste at first. 

Love is an emanation, is endemic to consciousness, to the nature of reality, and is both earned and unearned. It is the state of being you become at peak health, or rather when your health – the health that you dynamically are – is rich and complete, from top to toe. Love is thus true wealth that wants for nothing.

I don’t measure friendship by the number of my friends, but by the quality of the moments I share with my fellow earthlings. Friendship emerges from the quality of a shared moment to fade away organically as the moment moves on. As with breathing, one cannot hold on to the in breath forever.

Something deep in the DNA of civilisation, in humanity’s reflexive socialising groupthink, wants to hold on forever to that which secures power, affluence, pleasure. The State is an evolved social technology that structures this possessive desire towards impossible permanence. We are caught up in it more intimately than are fish in the sea. As we fear, so the State fears. As our fears oscillate turbulently, cumulatively outwards and upwards, so the State decays. And so we all suffer. 

So goes history.

This is easy to observe, but far harder to change, to evolve beyond. Logic suggests that as we learn to love, to become love, so will the State. The State may well be breathed away one last time, to be replaced by something else, I don’t know. But if we want something healthy, something deeply good and beyond the rot of today, love is the way that will birth it.

The West stars as Old Mother Hubbard in “The Rape of Ukraine”

Joe Biden’s performance as a senile US president in The Rape of Ukraine convinces to the point that one cannot tell fiction from fact. His commitment to the role borders on the obsessive; apparently, scans of the actor’s brain at work produced data wholly consistent with a man suffering advanced senility. Beneath the senility, Biden hews tenaciously to the core character arc of a street gangster somehow elevated by historical happenstance to Most Powerful Man on Earth. His business interests in Ukraine, that tragic country, embroil both him and the rest of the world in a sequence of events that gathers threatening momentum like a runaway juggernaut. 

Representing Germany, Olaf Scholz is equally convincing as a man of low character bereft of ideas, too compromised to control a government of low-IQ zealots driving an ideological agenda whose only feasible outcome is Germany’s shabby denouement. He acquiesces again and again to every demand made of him by his true master, the United States, no matter its price to the nation that is his charge. 

In France, Emanuel Macron persuades volubly as an unpopular French president inspired upwards on the winds of his own rhetoric into intoxicating delusions of grandeur. These hover him aloft at a quivering zero-point between the conflicting needs and agendas of the French people, the EU, NATO, the US and, of course, his magnificently inflamed ego, from which position he accomplishes precisely nothing but obedience to US demands. All this clothed in a high-priced style that fails to mask his mediocrity. He is the only actor I know of who could pull off such a delicate cinematic feat without over egging his performance. Chapeau!

The formerly impressive United Kingdom stars in an important cameo that might be summed up as a poorly attended parade of unwanted prime ministers, each tasked with bellowing louder and yet more stridently than the US for “more war!”. I hope you can forgive me in forgetting their names, but all actors cast in their roles were as convincingly uninteresting as they were paradoxically pivotal. A job well done, all in all.

And who can forget the EU! Perhaps my favourite scene is The Rape of Ukraine’s most pointedly dramatic. Ursula von der Leyen, played brilliantly by none other than von der Leyen herself, stands astride two gutted washing machines, dominating them completely. Behind her, blue and yellow flames rage, morphing at times to suggest the Ukrainian flag, at others that of the EU. Pinched between the forefinger and thumb of each hand, von der Leyen holds aloft two glinting microchips  that she wields ferociously, using them as razorblades to rip to tatters a red square of fabric, meant, I assume, to represent the Russian economy. Her golden mane remains implacably opposed to the winds of history howling around her no matter how wildly her movements and the winds rage. No matter indeed; the fabric will not tear! Around her, as if emerging from the yellow and blue inferno, grows the booming, menacing laughter of Vladimir Putin, evil Judo Master, Master Geo-Chess-Politician. He haunts the movie’s every scene.

The overall tragedy, recounted by the film’s many principal and supporting actors, is of a once beautiful country – Ukraine – devastated in the clash between Western powers in the right corner, refusing – angrily, destructively, sociopathically – to accept a more equitable balance of geopolitical power, and in the left the non-western world waking up to the tantalising, nay irresistible attraction of shaking off its economic subservience to that now fading Western power, and it is truly a horror to behold. One is of course always a passive spectator at the movies, but this incredibly moving account of a faraway land turns one’s passivity into bitter impotence as the needless savagery builds on itself in ever escalating waves, each more nauseating than the last. It is truly Greek in its inevitability, but at a scale perhaps even the Greeks could not have imagined.

The actor Volodymyr Zelenskyy brilliantly portrays the actor Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a Ukrainian TV celebrity painfully incapable of balancing the external and internal forces that propelled him to Ukraine’s presidency in 2019. Watching on from the warm glow of the movie theatre, we don’t know whether to laugh or cry as his fate turns ever crueler. Real actors from The West flock to his banner in moral support of his gritty performance to defend his beloved country from the Pure Evil of Grand Judo Master Vladimir Putin, Dictator of The Soviet Union, formerly President of the Russian Federation. But their support proves too little as events unfold. Intoxicating hopes burn to ash again and again as Russia’s military-industrial onslaught grinds relentlessly on consuming everything in its path. The bitterness is almost too much to bear. 

With The West mercilessly egging Zelenskyy on from a safe distance, with the deadly and fascistic Banderites openly threatening his and his family’s lives, he cracks. Hard drugs help him cope, but of course with decreasing effectiveness. Not remotely up to the historical challenge, he resorts to type to rely on crass propaganda and low-brow messaging to conceal from his people this increasingly plain and bitter truth; he heads a country being torn apart at the behest of a Western world coldly interested only in its own power, and in the familial wealth of its angrily demented president. As support from The West wanes, as Ukraine’s ability to resist the monster it faces is exposed as too little, so the Old Mother Hubbard aspect of this tale comes to the fore. The West’s cupboard is shown to be bare, emptied too much for too long by the hungry ambitions and grandiose ventures of previous productions.

Though allegedly based on a true story, it is hard to type The Rape of Ukraine. Is it farce? Is it a theatre of the absurd? Tragi-horror? Thriller, war flick, political intrigue, mobster movie? It is all and none of these at once, a unique experience in story telling more entertaining in an easily bored post-modern era than everything that preceded it and prepared the way. It is a veritable Hall of Mirrors for modernity in which image and reality fuse to one. So horrific and terrible is it to behold that I am loathe to recommend it to your attention, but feel I must; it is just that compelling.

The only question is whether humanity can survive much more entertainment of such electrifying quality.

(The Rape of Ukraine is brought to you by Neocon Magical Thinking, Produced by Robert Kagan and Directed by Victoria Nuland.)

UTOPIA

Great city of reason

let loose all your meaning

your soul torn and bleeding:

an opening wound.

I can feel myself sinking

I can feel myself sinking…

Sweet, seductive, craven

rainbow’s tempest raging

the never-ending blaming

flowing from the wound.

I can feel myself sinking

I can feel myself sinking…

Bring all your children

all guilty feeling

that deep imposter syndrome

and feed them to the wound.

I can feel myself sinking

I can feel myself sinking…

Dark sun you are

you are –

you are dark star

dark radiant star you are

we you are

we are

you we are     we are         we are

(With gratitude to an old friend)

Key differences between The Digital and The Real

Source

1.  The Digital is highly controllable (at least in theory). Even when it disobeys or behaves unpredictably, the fix seems to be but a few code tweaks away, the initiating cause human error. The Real is organically, unpredictably defiant, with free will working its magic always. Every living thing has its own idiosyncratic ‘agenda’, expectations and plans be damned.
2. The Digital is measurably precise and fully knowable, governed (in theory at least) by pure logic. The Real is irreducibly ineffable.
3. The Digital deceives, bewitches and seduces. The Real inspires profound awe and could not be more authentic, even while it deceives, bewitches and seduces (on purpose).
4. The Digital belongs to us, is in our possession, and can be infinitely adapted to our will. The Real owns us; we are at its mercy and must adapt to its vicissitudes, or perish.
5. The Digital –

Hold on, aren’t I spouting false dichotomies? Aren’t the above words, at best, an idly provocative exercise in click-bait entertainment? (Click bait? I wish!)

Or perhaps they are a playful-but-serious attempt to understand how we now have a couple of lost generations, those around 30 and under, who have grown up enjoying access to Instant Gratification. The few comparisons above bring into relief various observations we can reasonably tease out of the prevailing milieu that are not wildly off target. I believe something like the above has haunted modernity for centuries and is now doing serious damage.

In my eyes, something is going dangerously wrong for the 30s and under; I 4 1 would like to understand and appreciate as much of the causal phenomena as possible. This article is a tentative foray in that direction.

“Welcome to the desert of the real.”

That’s a (digital) meme. I am composing this text (digitally) on a laptop to be shared soon (digitally) across the internet. All digital, all convenient, all easy peasy and isn’t it lovely all this sharing! But are we (irredeemably) spoiling ourselves with Easy Peasy and instant gratification of our ephemeral desires? Have we spoilt ourselves too much this time? 

To balance the above somewhat, how enlightened, how well informed, have we become?

It depends. Certainly it’s both-and.

The internet is an impossibly vast ocean of every conceivable kind of visual and auditory delight: entertainment; trickery, sobriety, deception, and honesty; science, entertainment and news; delusions of grandeur, unintended and blisteringly open honesty; kittens; the monstrous and the beautiful; self-indulgent victimhood and virtue signalling, and so on. We are so spoilt for choice we could browse forever and a day and barely make a dent on the content yet to be consumed. The day after that we’d still feel restless and empty, empty and unwanted. 

Into what strange paradise have we progressed ourselves? A digital paradise of Ultimate Convenience and high-saturation colours, the next thrill or delight or shock a mere click or swipe away. We consume content, we create content: we spend our attention, we clamour for attention. Doesn’t it feel like something is missing, something very important, something frustratingly hard to define, bottle, mass produce, and control? It feels that way to me.

Am I a luddite curmudgeon, you ask? Actually, I kind of love the internet, computing, programming, all that. However, as with any tool, The Digital can be abused, and in being abused, abuse. As you do unto Other, so you do unto Self. We have progressed ourselves into a miraculous toolshed whose power we understand but dimly. Our dim understanding undermines us unseen … partially unseen.

The Digital is powerful. It is in some ways technology’s latest and greatest armoury, and as such entices humanity’s best and brightest to pursue wealth, power, and immortality ensconced within it. Power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely (Lord Acton said that). Fake news and deep fakes belong to humanity now. Movies look utterly convincing, but all they seem to do is bang our bucks into fireworks of glittering spectacle that sometimes become story – as an afterthought almost –, but mostly do not. And when the lights go back on, we wonder, dimly, what remains that we can still trust. Restless and empty, empty and unwanted, it seems like our one remaining ‘power’ is maintaining peace of mind until the next distracting fix can be found. Our abilities in this regard seem to be quickly deserting us.

What’s that gnawing doubt I can’t quite dispel? Have we left something important behind, some ineffable equivalent of smell, taste, caress?

I’ve been musing of late that ‘community’ (whatever that is) might not be The Answer. Indeed, I’m convinced The Answer is not the answer. Looking for such, as variously as we have done, seems to have progressed us here. Persisting with that search continues to lead astray.

Community is to me a complex social context in which humans existentially rely on their fellow community members, people they know very well indeed. Community evolves organically as a result of very intimate life-and-death interdependencies that are the natural expression of human beings, that very social creature. Community is thus, fundamentally, a stranger-free zone. 

The internet, on the other hand, is a ‘community’ of consumable experiences created in concert with other humans who are (almost) all physical strangers to us; it is a stranger-rich zone in which no one really relies on anyone else, at least not existentially. All the other members of this new ‘community’ are deliciously, bitterly replaceable. 

Are we steadily rendering impossible any chance of a return to a situation in which we do rely on each other intimately and existentially? If that is what is needed for community to be community, what might be the costs of fervently trying to recreate the conditions from which true community can evolve?

On the other hand, if the future continues to be more of today – just more intensely –, in how bad a state of affairs are we? How far are we drifting from what is biologically, or organically, appropriate to humanity?

As part of the answer, is it a valid argument to observe, “I look around and see lost, depressed young people almost everywhere”? Or is it more valid to point at the alarming growth of the antidepressants market? Or the drugs designed to ameliorate hyperactive children? For those who’ve looked into this sort of thing, as for those with children of their own, this is familiar but troubling territory. Surely, in light of both our intuitive impressions and research on such matters, it’s not overly dramatic of me to ask whether something is going dangerously wrong.

If it is a Brave New World we are headed for, do we know what we’re doing?

Fundamental error?

While I’m confident some part of our predicament is the pace of technological change clashing with our far slower rates of cultural and biological adaptation, I suspect it’s fair to say that some of what ails us is rooted in fundamental error. Being fundamental, this is error that intrinsically demands correction; it eats at us from within. Some of the quality of our error is, in my view, reflected in the (surface) differences between The Digital and The Real hacked out into the foreground above. And I assert this specifically as someone who argues that The Real (organic, analog) is composed of The Digital (incorrectly understood by most as mechanical, binary); The Digital, I argue, is in fact organic: neither mechanical nor binary, possibly ternary, certainly mysteriously complex. Likely, that’s quite a confusing confession for you. 

Well, I aim to please.

The Digital percolates up to, or manifests into, our field of perception through particular analytical filters that affect our perception as we try to make sense of reality in particular (mechanical/computational) contexts. And yet The Digital we have thus perceived into existence is not, as a consequence of this filtering, outright illusion; it’s just not the whole story. The mythical 0 and 1 of the binary world, though seemingly very literal and ‘real’ when rendered on a page or screen, depict – not are – foundational yes-no decision-making processes, or logical-gate operations that are nevertheless not as foundational as we might think. There are no actual, physically existing 0s and 1s. Different phenomena are leveraged to act as true-false, yes-no, 0-1 binary elements to run systems built atop such logic-driven procedures. And it is all just as ‘real’ as anything else, like all information, but not ultimately foundational. Not until, that is, we add in the missing ingredient: the ineffable.

Nor are 0s and 1s indivisible atoms, nor can physics find any bits of matter or stuff that are finally indivisible (atomic). The search for an Indivisible Something yields “virtual” entities that defy full understanding (quarks and other sub-sub-atomic phenomena) that are co-existent with an array of interdependent forces and rules all required simultaneously for anything – for thingness – to be possible at all. The search for foundational building blocks has instead unearthed webs of information (mathematical rules) that are anything but indivisible lego bricks that can be reduced no further. It’s will-o’-the-wisps all the way down, where each one of which dissolves as soon as you isolate it (notionally) into the palm of your mind’s eye. 

Nothing makes sense in isolation. Or at least, not for very long, nor ever in some complete manner.

This string of non-controversial observations, for me, hints at the organic foundational underpinning of The Digital. Part of our civilisational exploration into the nature of reality has given us The Digital (in fact centuries ago). The way we peer into the nature of reality determines to some unknowable degree what we discover. The journey is the destination, the means are the ends. The Digital is no exception: Way become Goal, unexamined Mindset become Paradigm. The Digital is a useful, powerful, helpful paradigm or perspective, but not the whole story, and not in fact the ultimate foundation, which is, in my view, ineffable. The Digital thus has its roots in the ineffable and could not persist uprooted from it … cannot be uprooted from it.

(There is nothing but God. Everything is God.)

A car appears to be a purely mechanical entity, but it emerged from the organic and is inescapably subject to it, embedded in it, made of it. Each ‘identical’ car that comes off the production line – even if no human hand touched any part of it during its manufacture – faces a unique destiny. It will be subjected to different owners, be driven every single time on a unique, impossible-to-repeat journey, endure unique moments while parked wherever, each moment impossible to repeat. All cars, all manufactured things – be they pencil sharpeners, razor blades or Jumbo Jet cockpits – emerge from the organic, remain forever in the organic, and are inescapably subject to it. 

The same thing goes for computers, software, tiny little bits of code, everything. It is not possible to separate The Digital from The Real in an ultimate way. Notionally, yes, to a degree, and it is helpful to do so, but the separation achieved is just notional.

(Everything is God. There is nothing but God.)

Just as a thought is of consciousness but is not itself conscious, just as it is finally impossible to fully appreciate consciousness and spirit, so The Digital must always escape our grasp and produce unintended consequences our wisdom will never be able to anticipate. Our pseudo-mastery of this powerful set of tools far exceeds our grasp of its ramifications and meanings. 

We leap forward technologically in mighty bounds, but the great acceleration of our advance is breaking us apart. We are puppets yanked this way and that on the strings of our invention. We are dazed and dizzy, lost and soul-sick, but, strangely, can hardly tell this is so; everyone around us is, more or less, in the same condition. Only if we were to pop back in time, say to the early Middle Ages, would our manic state of being become discernible to us. Potentially, anyway; we would need to be there long enough to truly internalise the stark differences, then pop back to the present day and be horrified.

Now what? 

At whom or at what do we point the finger of blame? Where is the cause of our predicament that is simple, weak compared to us, and rectifiable?

Nowhere. No one and nothing is to blame. This is a very very difficult and involved situation. 

Decisions are investments in the future. Our willingness and ability to change course – should a course change be needed – is directly proportional to the amount of effort and energy the required course change would consume. And we tend to drift into our decisions, which takes very little energy: the infamous slippery slope so many of us reflexively prefer. So regardless of any morality or ideology we might impute to a situation, we become emotionally invested in How Things Are simply because changing them is most often an almighty undertaking. That very emotionality then becomes entangled in some ideology or other, which is itself also an investment born of hundreds of tiny ‘decisions’ that produced it, such that the inertial resistance to change grows over time. Despite the fact that nothing lasts forever.

Such is our entanglement with The Digital, and our modern disaffection with The Real. Such are the deeps roots and the deep soil of this false dichotomy.

My sense of what we can do in the meantime, is that the best we’ve got is noticing, talking about what we notice, taking small measures to meaningfully slow ourselves down, switch off, share with each other how the differences between the Infinite Cornucopia of The Digital compare to the Infinite Cornucopia of The Real, and learn how to really feel the beauty and mind-boggling complexity of the latter. The Real tends to seem drab and slow to gadget-addled minds, frustrates with its vital refusal to submit to our whims, always goes its own recalcitrant way, makes a mess of everything, makes our efforts seem puny and pointless. Learning how to see it with more open eyes, with humility, to feel, appreciate and then love it is one part of how to compensate for the breakneck speed with which modernity keeps bursting out of itself – ever forwards and wilfully blind to the past – into ever more spectacular iterations of itself, without ever really ‘nourishing’ anything other than our manufactured hunger for yet more intensity, yet more saturation, yet more stimulation and (entraining) entertainment.

To repeat, this is a very difficult situation. We had best make our peace with this fact. History is bigger and badder than ever, globally interconnected nations and corporations and organisations and habits of thought and academia and media and all of it are incapable of sufficient decoupling to escape history and go it alone, while we individuals, we fish in history’s violently undulating waters, are stuck to it all, embedded as constitutionally in All That Is as words woven into an incredible story. 

But “make peace” does not mean to accept the decadent insanity, it suggests we moderate our expectations. There is most assuredly a Better Way – probably several of them. However, what lies between now and then will be determined microscopically by our individual efforts at peace of mind, at mindfulness, at love and wisdom as they pertain to how we treat each other, in humility, and so discover in the warm lights of our healthy skepticism, courage and openness what this Better Way might be.