Murderer of calm

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stoney rubbish? Son of man, / You cannot say, or guess, for you know only / A heap of broken images – T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. – Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History

Introduction

For how much longer must we poor Westerners endure this ever-intensifying turbulence? Change is now so fast, and so profound, reduction of our confusion and fear – as the storm pushes us closer to the edge – feels like an existential need. My own emotional-psychological state craves people who deliver a sense of calm, of balance, of stability. Noticing this as a ‘peculiarity’ of these Interesting Times, I note too, on reflection, that it was always this way – is always this way – though less strikingly in calmer times.

Any supporter of my calm becomes a champion of that calm. Those who provide this essential service must therefore deliver perfect analyses; my need for calm demands it; any slip in rhetoric, any weakness of logic threatens my equilibrium, now fragile and taut. By extension, any criticism of my carefully chosen champions likewise threatens the calm I crave. Criticism is thus emotionally impermissible. 

Caught up in this dynamic of reflexive and fevered construction of those trenches we deem surest for our sanity and survival, ideology can become an unnoticed uniform we don to identify those others who will help us improve our chances, while we identify and do battle with all enemies that threaten it. 

In times of unending uncertainty, fear rules, and understandably so; we’re only human. Uni-Form, one shape, one mind, total: totalising fear dividing and conquering as it stalks the land.

And we are exhausted. What is not in crisis? The breakdown of categories underway all around has sent me from pillar to post, and back again, more times than I care to count. I don’t want to be an ideologue. I don’t want any ideology to have me in its clutches. I don’t want to be left or right wing, or anything other than free and humble in thought and deed. But I do so want peace of mind! Which, clearly, is a very hard thing to sustain solo, especially when that which threatens is as far from my power to control as it is possible to be: History.

So choose a side, likeminded Worrior [sic], and man the ramparts!

History murders calm sometimes. This time, in the 2020s, more divisively, explosively, rapidly and thoroughly than ever before. At least, that’s my dramatic sense of it. I wish I could call it exhilarating. Soul-sickening is closer to the mark.

In my fear and uncertainty and surrounded by the fear and uncertainty of others,  I incessantly revisit and reexamine my position. In addition to noticing my human need for calm and peace of mind, I notice too how my perspective and habits of thought are gradually altered by any material I imbibe. Slowly, I become a proponent (ideologue) of that in which I am currently immersed, and lose sight of the humility such times as these so sorely need. 

This article examines how we might make mindful allowances to ameliorate this process. It is dialogue we need, not tyrannical diktat from on high, or aimed at each other. To effect meaningful dialogue, we must familiarise ourselves with our own inner tyrants so as to become more effective at calming the tyrannical beast in those who (seem to) oppose us.

What are the roots that clutch?

There’s a storm blowing from Paradise, that’s how Walter Benjamin saw it. In Eastern philosophies, however, it is not Paradise that describes reality’s root, but Being itself: a neutral, indissoluble fact from which proceeds All That Is. Westerners typically seem more romantic and nostalgic in their character, see something virginal, clean, and ideal as reality’s Ur-State, its uncaused Initial Condition, and then go on to find everything else wanting by contrast. 

A Westerner myself, my own sensibilities are of this quality. I am a romantic battling valiantly to become a Humble Seeker After Truth, while romantically engaged in that undertaking as if a knight on a Grail quest. Seeing as humility is the quality I perceive as most essential to this task, I accept the need to kill all my darlings, to slay the doe-eyed dragon romance is, to clear my eyes sufficiently that I may know the Grail when she stands before me. Without true humility, how can we distinguish truth from lies, deceptions, untruths? For no matter the origin of deception, though perhaps especially when its origin is oneself, wisdom is, in part, knowing how to keep what is true in focus regardless of historical and personal circumstances. A romantic character surely undermines wisdom by its nostalgic attachment to cherished things. Humility is surely the best antidote, for only it can sustain a mind properly aware of the influence of its own beliefs, opinions and preferences.

Perhaps humility requires strong roots above all else. Perhaps roots stabilise us enough to give humility a chance to flourish. As we strip ourselves of that which we idly cherish in pursuit of true nobility of spirit, we suffer pain, disorientation, regret. To weather such trials, we need to know how to plant our roots in good soil. In other words, we need to identify and accept sound fundamentals, and to recognise and reject the “broken images” that lead us astray.

Well, what are those sound fundamentals? We’ll start by probing some earthly possibilities.

Three earthly possibilities

1. Money: It makes the world go around, and waged labour is its engine

Source (Jeff Snider, Eurodollar University)

Over the last three decades or so, the percentage of the available US workforce actually in work has never reached even 66%, and is currently at around 60%. One could argue this equates to a US ‘unemployment rate’ of 35-40% over the last 30 years! And yet despite this eye-watering ‘unemployment rate’ (unused labour), there is no shortage of goods, no starvation, no Great Depression. Life is good, materially speaking. Why even the poor are fat and happy in the US of A! Of course manufacturing of tech, automotive, and white goods happens overseas, primarily in China, but nowadays the percentage of any nation’s workforce needed to manufacture all these goods is low and getting lower: technological advance proceeds apace, increasingly so, as automation (now with AI) continues to make its presence felt. 

Yes, technological unemployment is a real thing, though obviously somewhat mitigated by the services sector, consumerism, and state-based employment, not to mention the money’s systemic need for waged labour.

My phrase for the corrosive effects of technological unemployment (“TE”) is this: “Humans don’t need humans economically like we used to.” If I am right and waged labour is needed for today’s money systems to operate stably, the gradual effects of TE – a societal pressure steadily transforming how we need each other – means we need a profound cultural evolution in how we ‘measure’ and relate to value itself, something I have argued often.

Now please imagine how far below 60% the employment-population ratio would fall were there no consumerism, no advertising, and consequently all goods were built to last. What would such a world look like, economically speaking? And then ask yourself whether consumerism and advertising are foundational requirements, without which humans could never be happy or content.

Could money be one of the foundations we’re looking for?

2. Historical momentum: The world is global and getting globaler

The West is in obvious demise, and the non-Western world agitates to occupy the West’s vacated spaces, albeit fitfully. Meanwhile and as usual, all nations and peoples remain joined at their economies in great and increasing complexity. National economies must fit together to a significant degree for trade to be adequately efficient to eke out needed profit margins, and, in theory at least, to be mutually beneficial. 

By extension, then, when a major nation’s GDP suffers, likely all people globally suffer along with it to some degree. Further, while TE is potent in its effects primarily where technology has advanced and can continue to advance, where it has not and still cannot its effects are nonetheless felt due to disadvantageous national technological disparities on the one hand, and on the other downstream suffering from Western TE and other demand-suppressing factors (of which see more below).

Can any nation escape history’s powerful, interlocking momenta? The oft attractive idea of national autonomy is currently experiencing something of a resurgence in several countries, but how viable a pathway out of what ails us might this be? If, through technological means, a nation were able to decouple from fossil fuels, build vertical farms and produce enough of all foods for its population, not to mention enough white goods, automobiles, telephony and communications gadgetry, etc., would it then master the deep challenge of technological unemployment? And how many nations could accomplish such a feat? Further, what economic and geopolitical turbulence would this unleash and how would that turbulence disrupt those very efforts at achieving self-sufficiency? 

I don’t know the answer of course, but a resurgent Donald Trump (and even RFK Jr), the AfD in Germany, to a lesser degree Georgia Meloni in Italy, more significantly Farage in the UK with his fightback against having been debanked by Coutts/NatWest, the Farmer’s Party in Holland, Putin’s now very self-sufficient Russia, and no doubt other nations, all seek to varying degrees to decouple from certain global interdependencies – become more self-sufficient – while forming new types or qualities of alliance and partnership (BRICS++) to counterbalance their remaining economic/geopolitical weaknesses. These developments represent a mighty geopolitical upheaval that is gaining in force.

We can view this interconnectivity from another angle. Global lockdowns (with too few national exceptions) – that bizarre, hysterical experiment on all human society – was as a giant asteroid striking the ocean of the global economy. The resultant waves are still mighty, still turbulent, still radiating out and changing everything in their wake. And this on top of the ravages of The Fourth Industrial Revolution outlined above. 

The inflation that has bedevilled the West of late is the result of: lockdown-caused supply shocks, The West’s xenophobic and cynically avaricious attitude to Russia, its ‘elite’ and professional-managerial hubris and stubborn sense of entitlement, and lockdown-driven over-stimulation of Western economies, all of it into the teeth of the technology-driven turbulence touched on in point 1. Consequently, when China finally ended its insane zero-covid policy to great expectations, it proved too little. We see no robust recovery of global economic activity, let alone of China’s; as argued, all nations are joined at the economy (evidence below from Jeff Snider’s Eurodollar University YouTube channel):

Together, these charts tell a tale of diminishing global demand, but, more importantly perhaps, how enmeshed in each other’s economic successes and failures the nations of the world have become. They suggest the global system has every nation in its grip. The question this begs is an obvious one: Who has the global system in their grip? A second might be: Is the “global system” a distinct and knowable entity that can be in anyone’s grip? After all, history’s powerful interlocking momenta move where they will, and we are all, tiny and mighty alike, blown about by their winds.

Historical momentum is indeed mighty, but its wild gyrations tell us all we need to know: it is not foundational, just inevitable once civilisation is up and running.

3. Banking: The more globally interlocked nations become, the more power banks demand to keep our global Ship of State afloat

We tend to establish the equivalence with cash, and there is a huge difference there. For example, in cash we don’t know, for example, who’s using a 1,000 dollar bill today, we don’t know who’s using a 1,000 peso bill today. A key difference with the CDBC [Central Bank Digital Currency] is the Central Bank will have absolute control [of] the rules and regulations that will determine the use of that expression of Central Bank liability [aka money]. And also, we will have the technology to enforce that. Those two issues are extremely important, and that makes a huge difference with respect to what cash is. – Agustín Carstens, General Manager of the Bank of International Settlements

It is authority alone which is the true and unique power of law. Compulsion is only an expedient to which one takes recourse in order to remedy a lack of authority. Where there is authority […], there compulsion is superfluous. – Anonymous, Meditations on the Tarot, 1972 (2019), transl. Robert Powell, pp77-79.

Commercial and central banks across the world are pushing CDBCs as if their lives depend on it. To my eyes, of the types of people we might group together as the professional-managerial class, its subset of bankers would be the most exemplary. One of their leading lights, Mr Carstens (pictured above), is quite clear about why CDBCs are their current darling: Banks “will have the technology to enforce” spending behaviours they approve, and inhibit those they frown upon. 

In two words: TOTAL. CONTROL. 

Despite Carstens’ openly expressed ambition to seize tyrannical control of the world, I argue the following (as a conspiracy theorist!): I don’t think bankers reach for this power cynically, nor even primarily with greed in their hearts; witness Agustín’s earnest-teddy-bear features! I feel he bureaucratically expresses what is natural to him professionally, but not evilly. It is surely non-controversial that bankers’ group-based or collective darlings are also children of bureaucracy: measurement, hard data, predictability, stability, control. Controlling the Wilds Out There, taming the madness of crowds, managing animal spirits and gyrating markets are thus to them High Goods. Whole societies depend on bankers’ competence and expertise. Governments of every possible hue come and go, but banking is the mountain range that stands tall through human history implacable, resolute, dependable! They are that state of the world more permanent than the now infamous Permanent State; they are the very bedrock on which civilisation stands.

This depicts something foundational, but it’s a veneer. The bureaucratic ‘soul’ that cannot see living human beings, that must instead see statistics to analyse and problems to rectify, seeks to make us its puppets. What value can free will have, or the pursuit of wisdom, or self discovery through devotion to higher truths? In bureaucracy’s calculus it must surely equal zero.

Yes, of course, those of us not privy to the data central bankers amass and analyse – now including data harvested from our social-media blurts and rants –, those of us not of the right character to man ships as complex and unwieldy as nation states, multinational corporations and international organisations may well moan and protest about how unfair it all is – such is only natural to our class –, but we ordinary folk cannot know what needs to be done, nor, if we did know, would we have the stomach to do anything about it. It just isn’t in us.

So they will ignore our protests, as is ‘right’ for them to do, and push on with what must be done.

From the tension between bureaucratic and unaccountable overlords, and us normal folk, all manner of historical momenta flow. To return to the point I raised in the introduction; I read Mr Carstens’ words and want to fight that which he champions, just as I have been fighting this obsession with Total Control since about 2010. Albeit very fitfully. 

But more and more I wonder which of my darlings I need to kill, which of my own Champions of Calm I must abandon to see more clearly. I mean, I still have to make a buck every now and then, right? And there – oh boy! – is the rub.

We are back to money, which, if my reasoning above is sound, cannot really be considered a fundamental. However, there is something about the constancy of banking as an institution that enables the trading that creates and brings nations together, which in turn is the stuff of historical momenta, that strongly seems foundational – inevitable to civilisation. Does this make the above two possibilities foundational, too? I’m really not sure. This is one difficulty of analysing phenomena in isolation; it always produces misleading findings.

So are our granite-grey technocratic overlords right in their ambitions? Does their lofty perspective – afforded by unimaginable amounts of data and IT wizardry we can but dream of – present them with a picture of sufficiently accurate detail and nuance to justify their impending control over all we do? 

Perhaps not. Perhaps something deeper is afoot, something truly foundational that lies beneath civilisation. 

But I would say that, wouldn’t I! In my case, it’s not bureaucratic control that motivates; pursuit of wisdom is my folly, my lonely calling. I see things very differently to the bankers and other professional-managerial people of this world.

The desire that rises in my heart in response to the above three (asserted) fundamentals is to penetrate beyond the earthly, the ‘dismal’, the ‘data-driven facts’ (whose data, interpreted using whose models and assumptions?), a desire fed and fired by the observation that the professional-managerial class have been screwing things up royally for a long time now. They too are human, after all. And all they have left nowadays, it strongly seems to me, is perception management, NLP, and behavioural nudging (increasingly behavioural bludgeoning). That, and heaps of money and power.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had about enough of this crap.

Non-earthly fundamentals

It’s the non-earthly that riles people. Most just don’t want to admit it into their calculus, especially when times are as tense as they are now. It’s certainty we crave, peace of mind, not unmoored speculation on ontology and God!

However, my central point is this: fear hyper-accelerates and stiffens us – sustained too long it plunges us in panic. We flail around for something solid, at the societal level it leads to authority figures who tell us what we want to hear. We have seen how ugly that can get, both in recent history and, in my view, today.

I know the need well; this age-old dynamic is the focus of the introduction above. But though most often we think we shouldn’t, though most often the very idea of admitting the non-earthly into our calculations threatens to invite in woo-woo and wishful thinking, it remains true that developing our inner stillness, improving the sobriety of our thought and building robust balance into our emotional-psychological state are the surest routes to a genuine and lasting transformation – not just of us as individuals, but of society as a whole. This cannot be accomplished scientifically, nor can it be mandated, legislated, or taught.

My sense is that we can only mature into true adulthood once we have welcomed both the earthly and the non-earthly into our being; wisdom, that other exquisite immeasurable, is what adulthood is all about. When we remain as children throughout our lives, our societies will remain childish too: volatile, needy, easily divided and conquered – the perfect playground for tyrants, where tyranny itself is an infantile relationship with power. Eternal vigilance, the price of liberty, can only be sustained by a society of adults; the eternally childish (I do not mean young at heart) cannot handle freedom wisely. Instead, it’s FreeDumb they demand, and with it the distracting pleasures of consumerism that are its empty heart.

In the image I chose to head this section, a snail sits almost dead centre on a painting my eldest daughter and her friends created many years ago. We are about to throw it away; it’s been waiting beside our front door for us to take to the bin. But then, lo, a snail became the final touch! Nature completed the painting, and I was moved by this happy accident to use a photograph of the event for this article. Now strangers will see this ‘art’ and perhaps ponder the meaning of its backstory. 

Was all of this predictable from the Big Bang? If we could account for every single detail, could the sequence of events that led to me posting this article, with this image and these exact words, each have been precisely predicted from the moment of the Big Bang? 

No way. No matter how all-inclusive our data gathering, no matter how accurate our models and methods for making predictions based on that data, we will never be able to predict everything. 

Why on earth not? Because reality is not mechanical, and this ‘fact’ is of fundamental importance. This is not a mere frippery for salon, academic or religious pontification; if we have our foundations wrong, all subsequent calculations will produce errors. It is thus highly advisable that we get our foundations right.

For example, how should we value – that word again! – this “Snail, the Artist” story? (Note we tend to be underwhelmed by predictable stories.) Pondering value in this very particular context, is it not right to ask how fundamental to reality value itself is? 

If reality is fundamentally mechanical, value is a very downstream phenomenon, and obviously of mechanical origins (to me an impossibility).

If reality is fundamentally organic, or living, or of God, value – in essence subjective reactions to perceived phenomena – becomes foundational.

Which is why I chose possible economic fundamentals for the earthly variety, rather than those of physics or chemistry. I wanted to draw our attention to value again, that exquisitely subjective thing. Economics asserts it has identified societal processes that objectively measure value, namely those of market-based price discovery. This is a powerful discovery (or identification) that itself has much value, and yet it is a particular type of value (exchange) rooted in particular societal conditions that are each mutually fundamental to the very economics that studies scarce resources clashing with infinite human demand, and how the resultant tension is handled by homo economicus. 

But its foundational assumptions are rooted in civilisation, not reality itself. Humans are far more complicated than the economics caricature homo economicus, scarcity is in fact in the eye of the beholder – look at how important advertising is –, and humans are not vessels of infinite demand. Lots of demand, yes, but not infinite; that’s too colourful, too provocative a word for the dismal science. Economics’ foundational assumptions are thus erroneous, which means the calculations and methodologies erected upon them are likewise erroneous, or at best temporarily applicable in a limited way. 

Which is not to say, of course, it’s all without value. Money, markets, price and the economics that describes and examines them are real phenomena rooted in the reality of civilisation. But things change. Not only do civilisations come and go (250 years per experiment on average), technological development is cumulative, despite (and because of!) the consistency of money and its valuable influences across civilisational time.

Cumulative change – what else – has led us to our current set of epochal challenges, each of which feeds into each of the others to form a dynamic web, an ‘organic’ constellation of factors that apply inexorable and unceasing pressure on existing institutions and power structures. Primary among these factors are:

1. No elite is wise or intelligent enough to handle societal complexity as it now stands, even (especially?) with the advent of AI. The professional-managerial class, no matter how expert, cannot be up to the task.

2. Money and power tend to corrupt, and we are highly corruptible beings, especially while infantilised. Corruption corrodes society wherever it takes hold. Money accumulated is power accumulated.

3. Consumerism is neither a High Good, nor a fundamental without which civilisational life could not function. Neither is economic growth as currently understood, neither is advertising.

4. Biospheres have a carrying capacity, very difficult to calculate, but there as a constraint to one degree or another. I don’t mean this in a Malthusian sense – humans are endlessly inventive – but more in the sense of a Law, like gravity, that must be taken into account to some extent. Besides, abusing everything around us cannot produce endlessly good outcomes.

5. The scientific method is pivotal but has limited applicability; there is far more to reality than that which can be measured. We should make best efforts at a kind of generalised humility in this and all other regards such that openness and skepticism are culturally familiar to, and appreciated by, all of us. As we begin to notice that Western civilisation has fallen prey to the religion of Scientism and its asinine mantra “Follow The Science”, so spaces open that slowly generate a cultural thirst for Something New.

6. Technology advances cumulatively and thus accelerates over time. Watershed developments are disruptive to existing institutions. Robotics, automation and AI, as part of the information revolution, are about as disruptive as it gets; they are crumbling the foundations of modern orthodox economics and power politics as that percentage of a population needed to manufacture and provide us with both necessities and luxuries steadily shrinks. Humans don’t need humans economically as we once did. Which means we need to learn to need each other in some other way. Or handle wisely this dangerously seductive possibility: we don’t need each other all that much any more. Robot slaves will take care of it.

7. Power and control are seductive illusions. Life will always slip out from under our attempts to control it.

Given the above (limited) list, which I hope includes the major facets of a broader organic constellation working its magic on us all, it is hardly surprising that historical turbulence is mightily afoot, that power players are jostling for position as they variously interpret the writing on the wall. Conspiring is part of this; ignorance, fear and incompetence are part of this; ego is part of this. Outcomes are not predictable in detail, though they are perhaps somewhat predictable in general outline. 

So there is no comforting certainty to be found anywhere externally; these are difficult times one way or the other. To return to the question at hand: What are folk like me to do? 

Try to fear a little less, try to dehumanise others less to learn how to see things from other people’s point of view. Learn how strength and confidence are soils for the humility that is itself the soil needed for strength and confidence to blossom. And learn, experience, taste how all such processes work together to advance us in our wisdom, our capacity for love. 

The way out is not escape – there is none –; more beneficial outcomes will be the reward of a different kind of engagement with history and environment, of a new way of being in The System that introduces fresher, more vital perspectives on value, wisdom, love, consciousness and, yes, the nature of reality, which is organic and vital. All this to prepare good soil for the necessary redistribution of power away from the ‘elite’ professional-managerial class and its institutions, down to a more individual granularity as far as is practicable and healthy. Away from the broken images of mechanistic nihilism, technocratic bureaucracy and scientistic hubris. This is the healthier vector for the fourth industrial revolution. The far less healthy vector is towards Panopticon Planet run by bankers and intelligence agencies on behalf of mega-corporations nudging (bludgeoning) our behaviours along lines they deem best from their lofty, patrician disdain.

For me, the change here is my tentative but strengthening conviction that there is no outside The System from which to accomplish this. Only dialogue and exchange can bring the healthier vector to prominence.

Finally, we must accept, as happily as we can, that this undertaking is not easy at all.

There can never be certain success; success cannot be measured, it is an organic outcome of how we interact with ourselves and others that must remain adaptively wise and resolutely humble. And while we all like hearing that this or that external solution will deliver prosperity and peace, on the whole it’s up to us to do our bit with whatever courage and wisdom we can bring to the table. We all have a part to play in preparing our many cultural soils for the new roots we need to put down, but can never know the value of our role in full detail. With luck, we will get to feel that value as we become more accomplished at being healthy contributors to the whole. 

In the world there are therefore two different kinds of arriving at a conviction: one can be illumined by the serene clarity of contemplation, or one can be swept away by an electrifying flood of passionate arguments aiming at a desired end. The faith of the illuminated is full of tolerance, patience and calm steadfastness […] [The] faith of those who are swept away is, in contrast, fanatical, agitated and aggressive – in order to live it needs conquests without end, because it is conquest alone which keeps it alive. The faith of those who are swept away is greedy for success, this being its reason for existence, its criterion and its motivating force. Nazis and communists are of this faith, i.e. that of those who are swept away. True Christians and true humanists can only belong to the other faith, i.e. that of the illuminated. – Anonymous, Meditations on the Tarot, 1972 (2019), transl. Robert Powell, pp271-272 (emphases in original)