The West stands alone on Ukrainian debris

Having become caught up in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, I have been listening daily to reports from Alexander Mercouris, Alex Christoforou – both individually and as The Duran –, from Colonel Douglas MacGregor, Scott Ritter, Garland Nixon, and Brian Berletic. Never believing they could possibly be correct about everything, I have found them jointly and severally persuasive, especially as events on the ground have panned out in approximate accordance with their analyses. Far more so, I should say, than the fare on offer from The West’s almost unitary media. Seeing as I lost faith in its output in 2008, and lost what was left of that faith during 2020, this is hardly a surprising reaction on my part. That said, I should point out that goodish reporting on Russia-Ukraine does make an odd cameo here and there, but The West’s shrill chorus is most pervasively, determinedly on display, and most directly at odds with reality.

For well over a decade, I have watched The West descend ever more deeply into the bottomless pit of its own godless narcissism. How much this descent pertains to or influences the non-Western world is far from clear to me. As I recently commented, I’m almost certain we are living through The West’s demise – in its current form – and the rise of … well … something else. Time will tell what shape “something else” takes.

(Or I may have been persuaded by the wrong analyses. I doubt it, but am open to the possibility I’m seeing events incorrectly. I am no expert in war and history, cannot see everything that is happening, but do have a fairly detached approach to What’s Going On, so can keep myself from becoming over invested in this or that perspective.)

China has just voiced strong commitment to its growing partnership with Russia. It announced itself impervious to “third parties” seeking to drive a wedge between them. China’s commitment is anathema to The West, which has been loudly proclaiming Russia’s isolation since the war began. The more this lie is revealed, with India and others also drawing closer to Russia, the shriller The West becomes in proclaiming it. As its nihilistic mania oscillates out of control, The West can no longer conceal the smell of its insanity. Why won’t the world do what I want, it seems to howl. Having fallen victim to its own propaganda, having convinced itself of its exceptional specialness, having nothing nobler in its ambition than commanding the rest of reality to conform to its demands, it now stares up at the rising face of the mountainous correction looming before it, and pales. 

Isn’t this exactly how history rolls? Who didn’t feel this coming, at least as a dark suspicion?

What happens next is what really interests humans. At least, that’s what John Cusack’s character reveals towards the end of a TV series (Utopia). There’s much truth in what Cusack says, and are we not royally entertained! Sadly, with the world’s most renowned investigative journalist having published an article detailing how the US – Biden, Sullivan, Nuland, Blinken – cooperated with Finland to blow up the Nord Stream pipelines back in September 2022, which essentially constitutes a terrorist attack on an ally’s vital infrastructure; with the naked Satanism on display at the Grammies; with endless Western fawning around the PR ‘hero’ president of Korrupt Ukraine, so lovingly photographed by Tatler magazine, what happens next to The West should not be too hard to predict. The West is in a state of rampant and open moral collapse, lost to the crazed delirium of its guttering hubris as it devours Ukraine’s life-force in obsessive pursuit of the impossible.

What happens next, ‘win’ or ‘lose’, is ignominious defeat, comeuppance, hard karma, correction. For health to reassert itself in the West, as it will at some point, correction must happen first. We must pay for the things we broke and are breaking.

What happens next in detail is far less clear. How desperate are the neocons? How thoroughly dumbed down are we Westerners? How bitter, how cynical, how angry, how afraid? What chops do we have when it comes to painfully needed dialogue, reconciliation, justice and a return to simple decency? Are we still able to pick out decency from a line-up of possible contenders for that noble quality? In other words, will the West, with all it has to offer, survive its long abuse at the hands of The West, that pompous faction that has dominated too long? I dearly hope so.

Ukraine has become a tragic poem of how wrong things can get. It is its bitter poetry that so occupies me. And Ohio’s dioxin clouds, monstrous elite insensitivity repeated over and over again as if amassed money denotes nobility of spirit, as if brute power can convince us all of anything, forever, no matter how absurd, no matter how evil, simply because it says so. With millions dazed in their fogged twilight of Stockholm Syndrome and idealogical fever-dreams, distracted this way and that, headed every way but love, all The West’s rot descends on Ukraine like a plague. Or erupts from its soil as detonated limbs and burst faces. Why did Ukraine absorb all this, admit all this evil into itself? I will never know. But there it is for all the (non-Western) world to see.

My prayer is that we take this apocalypse, this revelation, this Enttäuschung (German for disappointment, but it means, literally, de-deception) deeply to heart, and learn. If we succeed in that, it won’t have been in vain. If we pass this difficult test, we will have a good chance of fashioning something beautiful from our ruin.

A defence of health

I have repeatedly asserted that reality corrects towards health over time. This appears to flatly contradict how events and ‘things’ are subject to entropy, to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. So it seems at the very least wishful and naïve of me to argue that somehow, magically, health is in fact reality’s driving force. I’m going to address that wishful naïvety in this article, albeit briefly.

We start with a simple observation. In purely ‘physical’ terms, reality has managed to proceed from the chaos – maximum entropy – immediately following the Big Bang, across aeons of uncertainty, to human life on this planet of exquisite complexity. Were there only entropy, this could not have happened. Hence, we need to bear in mind that negative entropy is also at work.

The second observation is more slippery and controversial: Materialism cannot account for consciousness. (I argue that materialism cannot fully explain matter, energy, space and time either, but that would be too much for this article.) This is to say that there is considerable uncertainty in the realm of ontology, generally speaking. Indeed, if we are strict ontological materialists, there can be neither consciousness nor free will. This means, by extension, that there can also be no meaning. And yet here I am making some. And there you are making your own meanings from my made meanings. I take this fact of our being meaning makers as solid, even irrefutable evidence that materialism, in its stricter sense, is fallacious. 

Another way of expressing all this is that there is more to reality than the laws of physics; there’s plenty of wiggle room here.

As a man who believes (knows) there is only consciousness, that there is nothing but God, I make it my business to try to think organically; to use logic, intuition, instinct and reason together, rather than reason alone. I also see the mechanistic aspect of reality as a subset of the organic. I see things very differently to prevailing orthodoxies. 

So how do I understand health? In a nutshell: Health is why we incarnate. 

Sickness – departure from health and yet part of health’s broader vector – is a learning curve that makes our return to health more than a mere return to some immutable root state. Everything is always evolving. Indeed, falls from grace, slides into depravity, collapses into disease and malfunction all enrich evolution, are counterintuitively necessary essences of health as it serves evolution. “Health” is for me a word that poetically captures this dynamic, this fundamental truth.

Fundamental to our experience – to our duty – as human beings is how ego-fears generate the stresses and tensions that inexorably turn our attention toward understanding, toward actively pursuing, health. This mindful pursuit of health, this desire to learn about health at all levels as profoundly and humbly as we can, is what I think of as the Love Path. We could equally appropriately call it the Wisdom Path.

Hence: Health <=> Love <=> Wisdom

And yet sickness is easy to slip into. It is not immediately obvious to the ego that the self-mastery, humility and discipline required to nurture your own health, forever, is worth the effort. The payoff is not only in the (apparently) distant future, descriptions of such dedication initially lack allure. We want an easy life. We want to ‘fix’ problems once and for all. For example, junk food is far easier and more fun than a healthily balanced meal carefully prepared; the latter takes work, might seem less enjoyable, and its benefits are long term. Ergo, the former has more appeal, is more tempting.

So departure from health is the easy option, the likelier option. Wanting to stay mindfully true to all aspects of health, really wanting to pay our dues in hard work and perhaps, in decadent times, even gladly enduring ostracisation, seems first to require plenty of compounded error, exhausted narcissism and clearly diminishing returns from multiple addictions before what health offers becomes sufficiently and meaningfully attractive. And yet there are always corrections nudging us towards the health vector if we but heed them. When we don’t, the corrections get more and more bleedin’ obvious until we either die and move on to our next adventure, or begin our journey over to the love path, in earnest, in our current life.

Because of this sense I have of health, I often publish articles that deliberately expose my failings and weaknesses. Anger is one, self-pity is another, and of course there are yet others. Sometimes I choose to reveal facets of these things as poems or more poetic pieces, sometimes as arrogance or incredulity, but I always share them uncommented. I walk the walk in my life – probably “stumble the stumble” is truer – and talk the walk at my blog. 

Pursuing health, as I understand that process, requires this sort of non-signposted disclosure of me. I do not want to prescribe, do not want to browbeat, do not want to be a hypocrite, and I will not vainly try to present a (seemingly) watertight description of reality. We must each make our own wisdom, which will always be unique to us. It is precisely this uniqueness that makes love so impossibly beautiful, so far beyond mechanical automation, beyond bureaucracy, beyond utopia, that it exists as a wholly different music. Our interdependent experiences in ‘physical’ reality contribute mightily to that music, but as humans we can do little more than deduce this in a fragmentary way, with apparently random blinding insights permitted to us from time to time. 

As the saying goes, God moves in mysterious ways. 

In summary, my sense of All That Is understands entropy as a necessary process serving evolution. It is our great human difficulty in handling our egos that makes this seem violently, brutally cruel, as if we are for the most part unfairly, pointlessly imprisoned in the devil’s playground.

So when I talk about the health-wisdom-love triad, I’m referencing something more fundamental than the human ego and its endless concerns, and also more encompassing and thus beyond materialism’s tenets. The triad is to me something that operates beyond opposites as we experience them. As such, this fundamental triadic unity hovers at a distance from us, a little like the horizon does: an emergent ‘illusion’ resulting from a constellation of interoperating factors, including but not limited to our egos’ perceptions, the tight constraints of ‘physical’ existence, cultural reflexes, and personal habits of thought. 

Like the horizon, health is something we aim for but can never quite reach while seeing through ego’s eyes. As self-mastery and humility begin to find their feet in the quality of our being, as ego fades to translucency, the health horizon moves toward us as an earned and supportive embrace, in whose arms problems become challenges willingly met. 

Well worth it, don’t you think?

When the sky goes

I finally let go in the small hours of February 9, 2023. It was an almost stranger I burned to tell first, though that burn cooled with the risen sun. Curled in her words like a cat in a cupboard, I had waited in vain too long.

For years, I have felt miles removed from what makes me me. The life we designed for ourselves, Annette and I, got bombed by circumstance to become a shatter zone of irksome demands and interruptions. The wholly understandable fact that no one need care – that no one should care – eats at me, which is itself a fact that eats at me. In my perception of my recent past – last decade or so –, I gave everything I have to life in as moral, loving and good a way as was in my power to do, deliberately, diligently, to unexpectedly produce a heap of dissonant events of little value or meaning to anyone but me. What remains is the stubborn sense that, having been broadly right all along, I got everything wrong.

Sometimes being on the right side of history is for the dogs. At least, that’s how it seems. 

My past now embarrasses me. It has amassed more weight than my enthusiasm, my ambition. I embarrass me. Who follows their heart so assiduously only to end up in a bitty, unattractive situation, in half-hearted isolation, as I managed? Maybe most who take on this sort of thing? (Or perhaps my heart is not what I thought.) 

So I gave up, and it took minimal effort. Something slipped off the edge of my life and dropped into oblivion.

My advice would be to follow your heart in secrecy, if you can. But perhaps, when history collapses in on itself, and just before narcissism breaks against the hard truth of its insoluble hollowness, all the air of the world can only be thick with the reek of it, a rot the best makeup artists, fashion designers, directors, producers and SFX wizards can never fully conceal. In times like these, there is no escape. I’d now say there never is.

So if you too saw the pig not the lipstick, if the world makes you soul-sick, you might well be one of those who now feels no pride or joy or satisfaction in having seen straight all these years.

But yes, I embarrass me. Not only can I make no clear sense of anything, I am as far as it is possible to be from knowing or sensing that any attempt to understand the depths is worth it, or could possibly be of value. So here I am with my future stretched out before me, a lifeless road dressed in no scenery, skewering an emptied horizon, under no stars, no sky.

☕︎

It could not be more perfect. How else am I to be made properly sensible to what must be felt, how else properly inured against my many egoic sensitivities?

A disjointed quartet of cartoonish provocations

The perils of automation

When human societies specialise into a fracturing myriad of skills, when they establish money and global markets, when, further, they automate large swathes of global production processes, what they also accomplish is a growing dependence on remote abstractions of what humans actually depend on. 

(Is this a negative of monstrous productivity?)

Instead of being intimately responsible for our survival – instead, in other words, of knowing with organic vitality how to survive and thrive – we drift from the intricacies of our immediate environment and learn how to prosper purely in terms of status, money-profit and power-gain. But such things can only ever be proxies for what we really need: that which yields rich meaning. Moreover, such conveniences seduce us, each from the other, into idiosyncratic bubbles we autistically demand and fashion from modernity’s brilliant but sterile cornucopia.

(Is this a bad thing, a fragile, precarious thing?)

As we automate production and distribution processes, as we make life ever more convenient for ourselves, we forget how to live; we diverge far from immediacy and float blindly into the multi-threaded abstractions that make up modernity’s dazzling web. Its dazzle clouds our ability to discern what is going on, blinds us to our addictions to highly complex networks of automated systems that cannot care about us – except as addicted users –, and so dehumanise us, denature us, plump us up for rot. 

We are Hansel and Gretel afraid to see how caged we are.

What else describes modernity? What am I artfully omitting?

The fruits of automation

I love my slaves. One is taking accurate dictation from my busy fingers this very moment. This, my favourite slave, is so totally obedient to my whims I could not love it more. It is so excellent, so elegant, I can comfortably overlook my dependence on it.

Thousands of years ago, my dependence would have been on the vicissitudes of my jungle home. Today, I am at the mercy of the caprices and techno-organic vicissitudes of my gadgets and the web of remote technologies that sustains them, and connects me to you, stranger.

Today, barring the wildly improbable, I can stroll safely to a supermarket and forage for a bag of pre-picked (and washed!) salad leaves, a loaf of packaged and sliced bread, a tub of fresh humus, and stroll safely back home to make myself a sandwich. 

Is this heaven, or what!

Maybe I’m a member of a gym. At the gym my multifaceted needs for physical fitness and adventure can be almost assuaged by various machines that can put my body through its paces in a variety of ways. I can even admire myself in mirrors as I sweat and bulge. Sweet! (And safe, too!)

And the entertainment, the culture, the art … the cornucopia at my fingertips is endless!

Is there anything else I am deliberately omitting?

Modernity spills out of itself and into itself to become modernity again, forever

It has been modernity since the year dot. 

Way back when, the Big Bang was the very latest technology. Later, flints to tame fire and whittle spears were cutting edge. In between, all sorts of things like cells and vegetation were breathtaking evolutionary accomplishments.

Whichever way you slice it, stuff is always cutting edge right now. But when we look back, we tend to infer “old fashioned”. In a certain light and mood, we can even discern progress. Such are deceptively informative perceptions that reveal much.

I’ve come to understand my efforts here as concerned with wisdom, another word for which would be love. Health is yet another. For me, these three are mutually explanatory synonyms. 

I have come to think that they are very important, pivotal even, to our historical moment. Call me a romantic, but I feel something evolutionary at work in the very fabric of reality. I intuit our position as a species, which is in many ways this universe’s vanguard, situated at a most profound inflection point, a crucible if you will, whose fascinating complex of pressures worry us towards the very maturation in wisdom needed to navigate it well. 

Either we choose maturation, or regression to something ugly, something Orwellian. 

But while both vectors are theoretically possible, my intuition also informs me that we’ve got this. The maturation vector will take everything we have, but the crucible is such that it can only induce exactly that from us; the best and the worst, with the best winning out as it must.

Whereupon we shall want to notice that more care is needed in how we go about living. Whereupon we shall want to notice that the right kind of care, grounded in love, is the best way to treat each other. And it will be from this very noticing, this deliberate mindfulness, that a new way of doing civilisation will arise. 

But, where once in my idealistic naïvety I chose to sense a mighty global awakening, I now welcome the slow and steady growth of this new thing from the fertile rot of the old. I feel its contours and content will surprise us all.

The Way is hard

We have also been accelerating. Bumps in the road, born of unintended consequences, spill much of history’s baggage this way and that. Our load lightens abruptly, regrows slowly, lightens again as we hit another bump. 

Yes, our pace has been accelerating of late, I’d wager as never before. In my eyes, the landscape is now whizzing by like white noise, the baggage heaped atop our crazy vehicle has grown mountainous. 

I want to squeeze my face shut and scream “STOP!” I crave peace, affection, beauty, calm. I want my efforts to have an effect.

I see us as a convolution, a grotesque of locked-in souls bound to what we have become by the exhilarating pace of change, the pressures of life, the glittering distractions, the hurts, the crimes, the spiralling temptations. I find it hard to blame anyone for anything.

To point this out is to wound. 

Today, to be true is to betray. 

If these are accurate, though colourful, observations, we are indeed at a burning crossroads. To select a different vector beyond this point surely requires of us a different quality of being; one quality of being led us here, a different quality will lead us elsewhere.

The journey is the destination, the means are the ends. If the contorted grotesque we have become (who is we?) grew directly from too much fear and greed, then self-correction towards wisdom and love will lead to something healthier, will manifest that different quality of future we long for.

To me, this is coldly logical, not airy-fairy. I am unaware of any sound counter argument. Those that cast human nature as our fixed doom grossly underestimate how flexible we are, and how powerful health is.

(Can a cynic be happy? Why is cynicism sickly? Why does pride suffocate courage?)

One way or the other, we will always be in modernity. We will always perceive problems, fix those problems, and thereby create new problems we will then try to fix. Accepting gladly this is how we are is part of the new way forward. 

But what do I mean by “new?” Well, not love itself, nor wisdom, nor health. I mean the context in which we rediscover their value, their essence, their organic vitality. What will be new is how we relearn that object and context are inseparable: reality as ever changing flow.

Mindfully and culturally holding in our awareness the contorted entanglements we can create for ourselves as a species will require more time for reflection and dialogue, with far less systemic pressure to accumulate more and More and MORE! stuff. And much else besides will need to co-evolve to facilitate that wildly improbable transformation. The task seems impossible, laughable! But surely it will all emerge naturally from a simple desire to find our way back to love, deliberately, over and over again. 

Though easy to identify, the Way is hard. The pressure to walk it is growing by the day, by the hour. Our choice is as bleak as it is magnificent. Things could not be more appropriate.