tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-73785685758853879422024-03-18T20:39:22.705+00:00Econosophy and other musingsEconosophy examines interconnections between all factors relating to economics as wise husbandry, but from the core perspective that Everything Is God. Tobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16258136994278139356noreply@blogger.comBlogger317125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7378568575885387942.post-51037735635545551652024-03-06T09:10:00.004+00:002024-03-06T09:10:51.120+00:00No one knows. Know this, and dissolve your inner fanatic.<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipkv6hEkI0Hpmz5vlpeVApAJtsb4hvs9Tg_9TDMCnqhtql3SKW-u_xYLu5AcOOHh6cmL7i-JrCFCXWUpZ8hnyDbC0zzw9Awc78qq6JWEuT_4lE6_09YchhFirPdY3QBGLE6UE6bI-v-4cAlAk_8VgxqKGKzEcpev_ituffdDKpyIzAXDxpGtpy92Thj8aK/s1196/Screenshot%202024-03-06%20at%2008.49.42.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Walking on water, from the Netflix series "Messiah"" border="0" data-original-height="1040" data-original-width="1196" height="348" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipkv6hEkI0Hpmz5vlpeVApAJtsb4hvs9Tg_9TDMCnqhtql3SKW-u_xYLu5AcOOHh6cmL7i-JrCFCXWUpZ8hnyDbC0zzw9Awc78qq6JWEuT_4lE6_09YchhFirPdY3QBGLE6UE6bI-v-4cAlAk_8VgxqKGKzEcpev_ituffdDKpyIzAXDxpGtpy92Thj8aK/w400-h348/Screenshot%202024-03-06%20at%2008.49.42.png" width="400" /></a></div><blockquote><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Look around you. What do you see? Is your world good? Is it evil? Ask yourself, who is guilty? Who is innocent? What are you? Now look at your neighbour. Look at your neighbour! Be brave enough to see yourself; your own reflection cast back at you, each reflected in each. Look where you stand: in a shining city on a hill, in the land of the free and the brave, standing for Liberty and Justice. How true do those words ring for you? When did you bring Liberty? Where did you cause Justice? I stand at the gate of a nation, a nation where power is not invited. I stand at the gate and I look out upon you. And you look back to me. But all I can do is reflect what I see. If you have come to receive, you will go away poor. If you come here to understand, you will leave here lost. For those who have understood, for those who have received, it is time. Returning to your scripture will not save you. Bending to your knees will not please anyone. That time is passed. This time is now. You are the judged. You are the chosen. I am here to break the mirror so you will see on what side you stand. <i>What you see will be your choosing</i>. – <i>Messiah</i>, episode 6, Netflix [my emphasis].</span></blockquote><p></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Propaganda ends where dialogue begins. – Jacques Ellul</span></blockquote><p></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Introduction</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Jesus failed to persuade most of us. What chance do we ordinary mortals have?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Is an incarnation as a human being on Earth a trial on a training ground where, necessarily, incarnated souls have relatively low wisdom? That is why we incarnate; to grow in wisdom. There is no point incarnating on Earth beyond a certain level of wisdom. Does it follow, then, that things will never improve on Earth if those that incarnate are necessarily low-wisdom souls? It’s a mechanical question.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">If this metaphor for what earthly existence is fundamentally about is close to true, must Earth only and always be a place where beginner souls are suckered into hellish suffering, until they finally wise up under the pressure of such weary toil?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Or, assuming incarnation is a soul-level, pre-birth <i>choice</i>, is it fair to ask if earthly existence is a sacrifice taken on by the bravest souls? For example, incarnating as Ukrainian or Russian, as Israeli or Palestinian is not something that would attract most. Incarnating into environments of almost insurmountable challenges, which are likely to cause the most terrible human experiences possible, would be a choice to take on great sacrifice, to risk agonies of every kind, in the faint hope it does <i>some</i> good, or that <i>some</i> success is achieved that is positive for All That Is in <i>some</i> way. The potential for soul-growth , this argument suggests, is directly proportional to the degree of suffering risked.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">How horrible this sounds! I am writing airily about the slaughter of men, women and children, about terrible wounds, dismemberment, destroyed lives, the bitterest and most belligerent intergroup hatreds. But this is the exact horror that drives me to try to understand.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Going a little deeper, we turn to contemplate free will as a foundational fact of reality. Because I have free will, I can choose to turn my back on God, on Jesus, or, more simply, on love. If every one of us can fail to persuade the other, just as Jesus failed to persuade most with the full wisdom of God at his disposal, what hope for us immature, unwise humans of lowly relative capacities in persuading others that love is the answer? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">The evidence around us suggests that it is <i>very</i> hard for humans to commit to love.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Am I on track with such speculation? Or is Materialism the sounder ontology? Are our efforts on Earth no less the result of mechanical processes than the hot air pumped out from the rear side of a refrigerator?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">My own ontology is that everything is God, everything is Consciousness. From this I choose to respect the sanctity of free will and so find myself compelled to ask: Is persuasion the right attitude, the right approach, the right starting point for furthering Right Action and the earthly evolution of wisdom? Does persuasion risk a violation of another’s free will? Direct instruction would be worse of course: Can a man’s wisdom evolve at all while other people make all the difficult decisions for him? Isn’t persuasion <i>also</i> an interference, albeit subtler? What of the subtle influences of NLP, behavioural programming, propaganda, bureaucracy, legislation, mass media? How respectful of free will are these processes and entities? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">How respectful of and sensitive to free will is ideological extremism, fervent belief, the desire to help others?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Inversely, isn’t taking on the pains of the world – extreme empathy – an act of inverted hubris? It is a grand delusion to think we are somehow morally obligated to save the world, or to absorb its pain in noble co-suffering. Isn’t the most noble undertaking to strengthen (nourish?) your ability to identify and then nurture your humility? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Perhaps this is what Jihad describes.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">But how does all this square with protecting the weak? What happens if we don’t even bother? Perhaps these are misleading questions, just as the goal of persuading others is the wrong way to go about <i>dialogue</i>. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">“Propaganda ends where dialogue begins.” </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">I believe a healthier societal vector would be one deeply rooted in robust humility, in the sincere conviction that <i>no one knows</i>, that <i>healthy</i> dialogue – conversation aimed at <i>learning more</i> – is crucial to healthy governance, and that true honour is rooted in the complex and challenging undertaking to become humble. In precisely this vein, respecting free will means <i>not seeking to persuade</i>. Power – in contradistinction to <i>natural authority</i>, which is humble – is the antithesis of such respect, respect being an organic quality that is created and sustained by humility.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">This helps us understand why power corrupts. Because power can forestall correction, it can attenuate its dialogue with the rest of reality. <i>True dialogue invites correction</i>. The more power you have, the longer you can forestall unwanted correction: hubris. You end up believing your own propaganda, you end up entangled – invested – in your poor, dialogue-free, propaganda-driven, low-wisdom decisions until it all comes crashing down around your ears. The poor (weak) bear the brunt of this: those who became dependant on and thus addicted to your power. Rulers require ruled just as ruled require rulers.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">So, what is the loving, wise response to suffering, victimhood, and power?</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">If I love <i>x</i>, must I accept all <i>x</i> entails?</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">If I love the cat, I must accept the agonies of the creatures that suffer on its claws. If I love humanity, I must accept the suffering it is doomed to create in the wake of its low wisdom. If I truly love humanity, in other words, I must honour its free will: its right to act in accordance with its wisdom. I am required to accept the truth of this as graciously as I can.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Is this a callous position, no matter how it is intended?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Love entails acceptance. What we are challenged to accept upon a commitment to love and humility can be truly horrific at times. Obviously, it can be very hard to handle this truth, to pay the price such a commitment exacts.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">One way or the other, decisions are investments in the future, and each decision is made with a specific quality of wisdom. Wisdom is something we enrich or degrade by our decisions. Feedback from the quality of our decisions can educate us on the current quality of our wisdom. With dedication and humility, feedback advances our wisdom. So goes the argument I’m borrowing for this article.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">To interrupt that decision<->wisdom spiral – which I see as synonymous with evolution –, to puppet or nudge, in other words, a fellow human using your ‘superior’, ‘elite-level’ wisdom, is an interference that dishonours love and risks downstream unravelling of the best-laid plans of mice and men, an unravelling that can, at epochal junctures, become catastrophic. Indeed, the very idea of measuring one person’s wisdom against another’s is a low-wisdom folly, a contradiction, an exercise in futility.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">This is my sense of it, a growing awareness that increasingly informs my reactions to my world and my sense of what <i>could be</i> constructive ways of responding to the great suffering and horror that comes to my attention. I experience this continuous process of reassessment as an evolving attempt to understand the <a href="https://thdrussell.blogspot.com/search/label/the pragmatics of love" target="_blank"><span style="color: #cc0000;">pragmatics of love</span></a>.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">I am not against justice, nor am I against atonement. Wrongs happen and must be wisely remedied to the best of our wisdom; societal health depends on it. But enmities embed and compound. Divisions emerge and deepen and are far harder to handle than wrongs committed. Perhaps the most famous division today is that between ‘elite’ and ‘non-elite’. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">As lovers of humanity, is this division, like all divisions, something we are required to accept? Yes, which means “do not hate it”. If our wisdom sees it as a cause of unnecessary suffering, our healthiest response must be to learn deeply why it exists and whether it is avoidable, or how best to handle it. My guess is that such a response is broadly appropriate with all such divisions.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">The ‘elites’ are products of their world, just as ‘non-elites’ are products of theirs. Each one of us is an organic expression of our world, where “our world” includes our biology, history, culture, environment, psychology, memories, soul, etc. Indeed, the vague dichotomy I’m using – ‘elite’ versus ‘non-elite’ – is a lazy platitude from my world I use rhetorically, even though it misleads. In other words, what and how I communicate is necessarily determined by my world.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Why is this banal observation important?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Because changing one side of the ‘elite’-‘non-elite’ divide, as perhaps with all others of its like – Russian-Ukrainian, Israeli-Palestinian, etc. – , requires changing the other side. For the ‘elite’ to not be elite-like and to not do elite-like things requires that the ‘non-elite’ no longer be non-elite and no longer do non-elite things. Each is one half of a unified whole; each co-creates the other. This is an unwanted but necessary correlate of enmity itself; enmity <i>requires</i> enemy. Money requires scarcity. These truths are systemic and thus organic.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Necessarily organic expressions of our worlds, lasting change of expression requires lasting change of world. As you zoom in on this truth, it becomes impossible to separate “expression” from “world”. All that “world” is, ultimately, is a dynamic network or web of evolving “expressions”. There isn’t really anything else. This is a different formulation of the truth “There is nothing but God”.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Similarly, then, it becomes impossible to distinguish between ‘elite’ and ‘non-elite’. I’m going to try to tease into clearer relief via an example: <a href="https://tuckercarlson.com/uncensored-the-national-security-state-the-inversion-of-democracy/" target="_blank"><span style="color: #cc0000;">Mike Benz expounding the corruption of democracy in the US</span></a>, and thus in the West:</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"></span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">What I’m essentially describing is military rule. What’s happened with the rise of the censorship industry is a total inversion of the idea of democracy itself. Democracy draws its legitimacy from the idea that it is rule by consent of the people being ruled. It’s not really being ruled by an overlord because the government is just our will expressed by our consent with the people we vote for. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">The whole push after the 2016 election, and after Brexit, and after other social-media-run elections that went the wrong way from what the State Department wanted – like the 2016 Philippines election – was to completely invert everything we described as being the underpinnings of a democratic society, in order to deal with the threat of free speech on the internet. And what they essentially said is: “We need to redefine democracy from being about the will of the voters to being about the sanctity of the democratic institutions.” And who are the democratic institutions? “Oh, it’s us.” It’s the military, it’s NATO, it’s the IMF and the World Bank, it’s the mainstream media, it is the [largely State-Department- or IC-funded] NGOs. It’s essentially all of the elite establishments that were under threat from the rise of domestic populism, [establishments] that declared their own consensus to be the new definition of democracy. If you define democracy as being the strength of democratic institutions rather than a focus on the will of the voters, then what you’re left with is essentially: Democracy is just the consensus-building architecture within the democratic institutions themselves. And from their perspective, that [consensus building] takes a lot of work!</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">The amount of work these people do… For example, we mentioned the Atlantic Council, which is one of these big coordinating mechanisms of the oil and gas industry in a region, for the finance of the JP Morgans and the Black Rocks in a region, for the NGOs in a region, for the media in a region. All of these need to reach a consensus. And that process takes a lot of time, a lot of work, a lot of negotiation. From their perspective, that’s democracy! Democracy is getting the NGOs to agree with Black Rock to agree with the Wall Street Journal to agree with the community and activist groups who are onboarded with respect to a particular initiative. That is the difficult vote-building process from their perspective. If, at the end of the day, a bunch of populist groups decide that they like a truck driver who’s popular on TikTok more than the carefully constructed consensus of the NATO military brass, well then from their perspective that is now an attack on democracy.</span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">I sympathise with their perspective and appreciate the various processes by which it emerged into being.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Specialisation is now so advanced – the human mind is endlessly restless and inventive, subdivides its prior subdivisions into ever more complicated subdivisions – only highly trained specialists have a remote chance of knowing what they’re doing in their particular niche. One’s specific combination of specialisations flows organically from one’s past decisions, each made with whatever quality of wisdom was available. Over time, we become more and more invested in – rooted to – our specialisations, our situation, and so become dependent on those who have specialisations we do not, just as they may become dependant on ours. Trust in each other gets harder as effective communication about what is going on is undermined by the generalised lack of mutual expert knowledge.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Societies are held together by trust. Trust is hard in highly specialised societies. This is a problem.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">As if to replace the trust that once held hunter-gatherer bands and early tribal societies together, money emerged. Money – in the form of market-based price discovery – could be said to automate trust. As such, it holds societies together. But money also corrupts; it is power accumulated. You can accumulate money indefinitely and grow mighty defensive about your hoard. I’d even argue that money corrupts itself: Where does money end and banking begin? Where does banking end and bankers begin? Bankers corrupt banking corrupts money system corrupts everything else. To repeat, money is one of power’s most effective levers.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">The fish rots from the head down, they say. But this hardly matters; it is one organism that is as organically rooted in its environment as any other. Shifting to the particular, when we ponder the mutual antipathies between, say, the proletariat and political class, is it really fruitful to hold one side more guilty than the other? Is not each group as enmeshed in The System as the other? Everyone has a responsibility to wisely handle what he/she is, but blaming others, virtue signalling and playing victim are low-wisdom games.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">So should we stop specialisation? I don’t think so. That would be like stopping curiosity and inventiveness. If you love the cat, you must accept the agonies of those that suffer on its claws. Excising from humanity that which created specialisation would be to kill humanity, to hate it.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Anecdotally, I’m involved in building grassroots movements and activist companies, an endeavour that entails liaising between a (low) number of likeminded people with a (nonetheless) wide divergence of perspectives. Reaching creative and positive compromise on delicate matters all parties are happy with is a lengthy and energy-intensive process.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">When you invest time building such enterprises, you do so because you believe fervently in them, or in something like status, or power, or wealth. They are, then, invariably labours of love <i>of something</i>. When ‘outsiders’ to the process – ‘non-elites’ – threaten one’s fragile progress, say likeminded activists groups who are attracted to the cut of your jib, that influx of new perspectives – aka the addition of larger democratic processes – threatens to break your rhythm and undo all your fine work. What do <i>they</i> know about what <i>we</i> – the ‘elites’ – have achieved! What right to <i>they</i> have to <i>our</i> precious hoard/work/status!</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">So if we can’t avoid specialisation, might we avoid us-and-them tensions, and thus avoid enmity? Well … <i>yeees</i> … but by learning humility … which is patience … which is wisdom … which is how we learn that avoidance, like oppression and suppression, is futile. The ‘solution’ is patient acceptance that seeks to learn wiser ways through unavoidable tensions and enmity. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">There is a deep but banal pragmatics to all this that is as obvious as it is irritating – and now <i>existentially threatening</i> – to a system that simply has no time for it. The Western world is systemically incapable of wanting to embrace the profound value of humility. And yet it is blindingly obvious that what bedevils the ‘elites’ bedevils ‘non-elites’ just the same, at least in essence. The ‘cause’ is how a mix of structural factors in tandem with our value system together determine our cultural relationship with fundamental phenomena like wisdom, love and humility.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">If your inner fanatic requires, or even <i>creates</i> one or more bitter enemies by virtue of its nature, these observations might not be what you want to hear. You might be addicted to (invested in) your enmity, your enemies.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Revolution, oppression, resistance, blame, narrative control, democracy, tyranny, are all concepts that belong to all flavours of ‘elite’-versus-‘non-elite’ (us-and-them) divisions, or <i>patternings</i>. These patternings structure us all. If we don’t like the outcome of a particular patterning, we have to change it. This requires <i>profound</i> self-change, in some kind of harmony with each other, with the structuring guidance of some kind of loose-consensus vision regarding why we should take on such an insanely difficult challenge in the first place.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">But, sadly, “Netflix and Pizza” is the easier path. Temptation is everywhere. Spies are out to get you. ‘They’ have all the power. It’s all part of The Plan. The MSM is not your friend. Lost in fogs of confusion, tired, cynical, afraid, we will exhaust every easy-looking escape until none are left.</span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggbbU1BUxaW9FvfPt78MfPGbcNynJL_nwIAPRUVvyBASt5EI0VHElBGrthiqmCprGOfafepY8vOlZXgmpwCOo-yyXVt7nhrq-SA4pdBrjQkBATjcXni-koSVSOJTjUeXMQhzuhbn0ml1grwIOJKnwRAE1yzv-cwdQk860SUKvVzd9ClEEwVPrzy79Krw5u/s669/mesmerised.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Meme: A young girl mesmerised by a few banal words" border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="669" height="299" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggbbU1BUxaW9FvfPt78MfPGbcNynJL_nwIAPRUVvyBASt5EI0VHElBGrthiqmCprGOfafepY8vOlZXgmpwCOo-yyXVt7nhrq-SA4pdBrjQkBATjcXni-koSVSOJTjUeXMQhzuhbn0ml1grwIOJKnwRAE1yzv-cwdQk860SUKvVzd9ClEEwVPrzy79Krw5u/w400-h299/mesmerised.png" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Enmity is the enemy</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Love knows no enemy, though hate hates it and fear fears it.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">I opened above with “Jesus failed to persuade most of us.” But, in truth, he did not try to <i>persuade</i> at all. He spoke in parables, debated matters of theology and philosophy with the Pharisees, performed miracles and later made the ultimate sacrifice. Through it all, he was clear the choice of interpretation lay entirely with us. What we believe is up to us. (“What you see will be your choosing.”) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">I suspect this explicit element of his life, this lived expression of the sanctity of free will, was an epochal departure from what we might term the Old-Testament Way that included vengeance, retribution, a chosen people, and other such elements not wholly appropriate to Jesus’ message, his <i>raison d’être</i>.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">In that vein, the chance we have with ourselves and each other is directly proportional to the quality of our humility, of our wisdom. Our <i>human</i> potential to do better, to evolve meaningfully, is directly proportional to how authentically we are <b>not</b> motivated by a desire to persuade. We must be motivated by a truly humble desire to learn. This challenge is precisely the challenge of becoming a truly loving human being.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">We need each other’s help in this. This maturation of our humility, of our wisdom, simply cannot happen in splendid isolation. Diversity, then, is as much the cure for, as it is the cause of, what ails us. This is a fundamental paradox of existence. Utopia is dystopia. Escape into idealism can never work as hoped. The world will not listen to us – <i>cannot</i> listen – while we are wild-eyed fanatics speaking hot riddles no one wants to understand. Power monologue is not humble dialogue.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Until we learn how to stop terrifying each other, we will continue to watch on helplessly as we destroy our world, mutually shocked by how ugly and terrifying our enemy has inexplicably become.</span></p>Tobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16258136994278139356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7378568575885387942.post-14198017764345075652024-01-24T10:01:00.006+00:002024-01-26T08:28:08.087+00:00Progress! We can kill millions in a moment<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjS8cvfZ3ItlPcW3DvFynxAiEw0ep-MApQCIO8noNhyphenhyphenrWJ-X4eG_aUjk5CJyDqbt_Ve111YyJPMRbZJGnwVD17v8feOV2cI_lna2SCXRAUZLsOrRHsOkSlhM6Uqr4cZuDboQYH3j_do1PvUWSMDKI3XSqWvNCxqtfBOgnbJBMsRSHLYDr1Z-LJIRNFUd-xW/s1372/Screenshot%202024-01-24%20at%2009.49.14.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Daily Mail graphic of Russia attacking Europe in 2044" border="0" data-original-height="1304" data-original-width="1372" height="304" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjS8cvfZ3ItlPcW3DvFynxAiEw0ep-MApQCIO8noNhyphenhyphenrWJ-X4eG_aUjk5CJyDqbt_Ve111YyJPMRbZJGnwVD17v8feOV2cI_lna2SCXRAUZLsOrRHsOkSlhM6Uqr4cZuDboQYH3j_do1PvUWSMDKI3XSqWvNCxqtfBOgnbJBMsRSHLYDr1Z-LJIRNFUd-xW/w320-h304/Screenshot%202024-01-24%20at%2009.49.14.png" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12983961/Long-range-missiles-strike-civilian-targets-Europe-Baltic-states-invaded-AI-controlled-tanks-rule-battlefield-NATO-warns-Russian-attack-20-years-terrifying-prediction-unfold.html?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email" target="_blank"><span style="color: #cc0000;">Daily Mail</span></a>: Be afraid. Be very afraid.</span></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Putin is killing Ukrainians and Russians to stop The West / Ukraine killing Russians and Ukrainians. The West armed Ukraine to become NATO’s third largest army (after US and Turkey) because Russia is a threat (<a href="https://www.rt.com/russia/591158-nato-no-russia-threat/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Email" target="_blank"><span style="color: #cc0000;">or maybe not</span></a>). Russia feels threatened by The West’s insistence that Russia is a threat. Russia apparently tried to join NATO to ease tensions, twice. NATO said no, twice. (What’s the point of NATO if Russia is an ally?)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">If I were Russia, I would feel threatened.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">So then war, because Russian-speaking Ukrainians may not speak Russian in Ukraine and Putin Is Evil. And perhaps also because there’s no point to the infamous MIC (military industrial complex) <i>unless</i> there are regular wars with reliably belligerent enemies, or with unwitting scapegoats who can be made enemies.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Thinking beyond these obvious tropes, what historical vectors were set in motion after Russia declared that Ukraine joining NATO is a Red Line? It was surely clear to Russia that The West’s NATO Machine <b>must</b> expand ever eastwards. Unstoppable force meets immovable object? What can Russia realistically do to protect its perceived interests other than reabsorb Ukraine so as to keep NATO out, thereby preventing NATO from being at Russia’s borders, there where it <i>really</i> matters, <i>but thereby putting NATO at Russia’s new expanded borders?</i> Quite the conundrum.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">What would happen if NATO were to defeat Russia, then China? What is the point of NATO’s existence after it defeats all its (required) enemies? Needing war to exist, should NATO set out to defeat all enemies until it no longer has a raison d’etre (other than alien invasion)? Would total victory be its death knell? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">In a similar vein, if the WEF/globalists were to control all nations on earth, what then? Would the ‘elites’ be content and sane at last with nothing left to do but loaf about on expensive jets and yachts? Would we fractious proles finally be respectful, obedient underlings?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">When you win the ‘complete control’ you always dreamed of, what happens next?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Is utopia dystopia?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Israel/Palestine is just as ugly, just as dumb, just as horrific. What if Israel kicks all Palestinians out? Would that mean lasting peace? Or would Israel’s neighbours feel existentially threatened? Would Israel feel threatened by its neighbours feeling existentially threatened by its existence?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">In Germany, the vice president of the SPD <a href="https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/spd-vize-serpil-midyatli-ueber-die-aengste-ihrer-familie-ein-afd-verbot-und-olaf-scholz-a-5bbd6f22-0473-4ee2-aa74-8ed081c5a4e3" target="_blank"><span style="color: #cc0000;">feels threatened</span></a> by the AfD. She has joined calls to ban the ‘far right’ party. To protect democracy and celebrate diversity, we must first ensure we are all on the same page, and censure those whose views threaten us. But then those deemed threatening by The Good Guys feel threatened. People tend to think they’re the good guys, that those odd folks over there who speak funny can’t be trusted.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Though there are layers of intellectualising and party-political rhetoric between us and the core, it seems to boil down to the drab banality of human groups mistrusting each other because they can’t not. We are very adept at perceiving ‘fundamental’ differences in each other – because skin colour or ethnicity or culture or religion or nationality or class or rank or profession or IQ – and choosing enmity over humility and compassionate curiosity.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">We can’t not; we don’t know how to stop; decisions are investments in the future and tangle us up, bind us in ever tightening ideological straitjackets. We become massed machinery going through the motions, dully horrified at what we’re doing. But, wholly unwilling to look in the mirror and say “<i>I’m</i> the bad guy!?”, we scream that it’s the fault of the other guy. The Enemy Other, the Hated Despicable Unhuman Monster Other. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Humility is the most difficult of all virtues to achieve; nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of self. – T. S. Eliot</span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">We have become that ugly, that dumb, that dulled. To save face, to keep a machinery going that we don’t know how to stop, we are doing monstrous damage to self and others but desperately do not want to know this. <i>We</i> are the victims! <i>They</i> are the bad guys! Our visceral desperation to not know how monstrous we have become is tearing us apart. It powers us on with the self-replenishing fuel of its hot and horrible emotion to do yet more of the same horrors; we are, in effect, <i>addicted</i>.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">It can be very hard to back down. Narcissism tends to escalate to sociopathy tends to escalate to psychopathy tends to escalate to … coloniopathy? This is the escalator that flows ever upwards from too much power in too few unwise hands. (I think it fair to say narcissism is an early infatuation with power over others.)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Some days, the noxious stench of it all turns my soul to ash. On others, I <i>know</i> we are about to snap through it to some other thing. Sometimes knowing that it can be no other way, but that this horror too shall pass, is enough to keep me sane. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Dear Humanity, how much more tragically stupid can we get? How much more of this before we just can’t do it any more, break open, and burst into tears at what we have become?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">The fury of history is now a whirlwind sucking all air from our lungs. We are stringless puppets tossed about, gasping to survive, rabid with fear and loathing but tasked with imagining something different. It is an impossibility that at times makes me rage at God so bitterly I am ashamed; it all feels so mechanically inevitable. It’s not about blame and guilt, but inevitability and what history can deliver by way of mutually reenforcing unintended consequences. Accepting this means accepting horror. Accepting horror, however sagely, turns my soul to ash.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">And yet I know without doubt there is nothing but God, that I will always choose love and make the best of learning how. Again and again I ask myself on the solidity of these certainties: What is better than what we have? My best answer is to replace our current guiding principles of market, price and money (mechanical) with wisdom, love and health (organic). We know the price of everything, but the value of nothing. Our mechanical mindset turns beauty into widgets and manufactures insatiable hunger for more and more <i>meaningless</i> consumer items.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Humans are restless, that won’t change. We are curious and burn to know what lies over the horizon of every possible Normal du Jour. That won’t change. And there will always be tragedy because no rigid bureaucratic perfection guaranteeing Nothing Will Ever Go Wrong Again! is possible. But surely the current model is broken because it is at the end of its life. That’s all it is. It’s not about blame or Left versus Right. It’s not that Pure Capitalism isn’t Crony Capitalism, or that True Socialism isn’t Marxist or Leninist or Statist, it’s simply that we aren’t humble and loving enough to see straight. Not yet, anyway. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Another of my convictions is that we have solved the problem economics deems insoluble: scarcity. We can produce enough of everything (if we drop Consumerism). On top of that, we no longer need each other economically as we used to. Technology and AI – neither is a panacea, both are misunderstood – have made the human predicament <i>different</i>. Economics ought to evolve accordingly to retain its veracity. We face fundamentally different challenges, structurally speaking, but our institutions and cultural reflexes, I suspect across the planet, are constitutionally incapable of perceiving and handling said challenges wisely.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Progress has progressed us here simply because it has. We can kill millions in a moment, find our way into real horrors we delighted and hated to imagine decades ago, but we can also create wonders. A team of hundreds, or even tens, or solo geniuses, can work for days or weeks or months and produce masterpieces that delight and inspire billions of us for decades, centuries. Or manufacture yet more oddly named pharmaceuticals that ruin lives or make no difference at all … because profit. Or produce bizarre financial instruments that enrich the few at the cost of the many … because money is what it’s all about. Or build AI overlords to censor and monitor us all, forever, because all trust is gone and nobody knows what’s ‘real’ any more.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">These are the structural elements I believe power the noxious storm I describe here and elsewhere. These elements are no longer fit for purpose, but accepting this simple truth is anathema to the ‘elites’ – those structurally obliged to perpetuate the status quo – just as it is anathema to most of the ‘non-elite’ who are as attached to the familiar as the next guy. The banal obviousness of this is as ugly as it is hopeful. At some point we are not going to be able to take the stench of it any more, ‘elites’ and ‘proles’ alike. When that happens, when Tipping Point tips over on history’s pivot, the obviousness of what ails us will shine though our rage, hurt and tortured self-justifications like the sun, and we’ll be able to start healing, atoning, and imagining anew. </span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWJtfYaeQ3frSvqY2Zs4UezPiTf9o_W13gcvS5ZZVcYkpSeG6Uq9uthTzDEIsGwx8jttLGM73_gsLXFPZBVs5fClTAWoBSS9S8CM9d2g6e4xL5dKXaH2iKIvP0aObx7LibMIhCYo0K6j2I86w7q7oZaYLGp1XW_C0rwWlg6aXU5rU75Rxtk6EjZckpBGKP/s1024/Looking_upwards_into_a_pool.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Girl looking upwards into pool" border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="768" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWJtfYaeQ3frSvqY2Zs4UezPiTf9o_W13gcvS5ZZVcYkpSeG6Uq9uthTzDEIsGwx8jttLGM73_gsLXFPZBVs5fClTAWoBSS9S8CM9d2g6e4xL5dKXaH2iKIvP0aObx7LibMIhCYo0K6j2I86w7q7oZaYLGp1XW_C0rwWlg6aXU5rU75Rxtk6EjZckpBGKP/w300-h400/Looking_upwards_into_a_pool.jpeg" width="300" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">One of my early experiments with AI art</span></div><br /><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;"><br /></span><p></p>Tobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16258136994278139356noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7378568575885387942.post-3469981179659525912024-01-14T11:10:00.005+00:002024-01-21T12:13:22.264+00:00Today is ash<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgw5C8_eFBPGobqf0IvyJvgWhCxLPRrxhw2FEDbDyjA0k9olS_4IWw3nwJGlg1qGw1BIdUH29pcVbF4DERJIdFDS7V5YoeaPGbQhfsoO2XJoCh6Y2cQVSXXU9IKtXGbd_jnYr2GogkKKNQWDMCoLg0c7XezDeY85dBG84qTWM0upVAJcO8Viy31altLFE0k/s1920/eye-of-sauron_orig.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="The Eye of Mordor" border="0" data-original-height="796" data-original-width="1920" height="166" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgw5C8_eFBPGobqf0IvyJvgWhCxLPRrxhw2FEDbDyjA0k9olS_4IWw3nwJGlg1qGw1BIdUH29pcVbF4DERJIdFDS7V5YoeaPGbQhfsoO2XJoCh6Y2cQVSXXU9IKtXGbd_jnYr2GogkKKNQWDMCoLg0c7XezDeY85dBG84qTWM0upVAJcO8Viy31altLFE0k/w400-h166/eye-of-sauron_orig.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><span style="font-family: "Cormorant Garamond";">I read the news today, o boy. One million Ukrainians dead or horribly wounded, <a href="https://twitter.com/MariaMateiciuc/status/1743658029893984735" target="_blank"><span style="color: #cc0000;">said one commenter</span></a>. Israel, tried for genocide at the ICJ, accuses the Palestinians of crimes justifying Israeli actions, said another. </span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Pathetic, that’s what I am. Pathetic for wanting it to end. These words are not crocodile tears. When will the hatred stop!?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Somehow, something mechanically compulsive grinds on unaware of its essential ugliness and destroys trust, decency, honesty, dignity everywhere it moves and acts. Or is it aware? Could it be truly aware and carry on? This is what I ask, this is what consumes me: How is so much ugliness possible?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">But I’m tired of dreaming up yet another writerly angle on the same theme. To what end? My efforts too feel like compulsion spawned between the horns of an insoluble dilemma: “I must do something!”, and “Doing nothing beyond sustaining a loving peace of mind leaves more space for that ugly machinery to dominate”. In response to the mechanical monstrosity I want to dissolve, I react mechanically. Cause => effect => cause => effect. On and on it grinds, turning everything into itself.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Another commenter speculated history is about to consign the Palestinians to history’s dustbin. Might makes right. I am no mighty nation; what can I do to stop it. Peoples have been wiped out before. History is merciless. What difference will two more peoples, Ukrainians and Palestinians, make. The list stretching back through time is countless because ultimately unknowable. Such cool pragmatic rhetoric is as familiar to me as it is discomfiting, ugly, soul-sickening.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">On and on it grinds.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">I am pathetic. I want people to notice love is the way forward, love is the mystery that can dissolve this wheel of historical enmity and hatred, but when rage and outrage reign, nobody wants to hear it, precisely when we need to heed it most. Vengeance fills hearts, throats and eyes across the world, and its appetite is insatiable, feeds and feeds and feeds upon its flesh until…</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Until what? Until it stops because of some mix of exhaustion and realised goals, some calculation that the utility of this historical phase has been bled white, so now switch gears to ‘peace’. Twas ever thus. This is how civilisation rolls. Better the devil you know. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">It is all we know.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">So why, dear Toby, why do I and millions of others yearn for something more? Because we are pathetic? I loathe my own impotence, an impotence that has its nose rubbed in the tawdry fact of its existence as it watches events develop, a permanently remote observer. This fact tells me plainly there is nothing I can do. It is a horrible thing to swallow, like watching a child tortured through a glass darkly. If I were not separated from the child, I could save it. On the clear evidence that the torture goes on, it is clear none of the actions available to me work. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">And it is yet more horrible still that whatever suffering meted out to me from this sad fact is nothing compared to the suffering of that child: the Ukrainians, Russians, Israelis, Palestinians, and so many others dealt far more terrible fates than mine. My concern is to not virtue signal, to not just bleat the platitudes I hear bleated around me, to not beat the drums of hatred and war. This tiny thing, in conjunction with my urge to gently persuade whomever will listen that there is far more to love than meets the modern mind, this pallid comfort is all I have. There are days when it feels like ash in my heart. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Today is one of them. Something about the news of Gonzalo Lira’s death hit me hard.</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Cormorant Garamond; font-size: large;">Malady, meet tortured reason</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">What are the ramifications of faith? What is the price of knowing “God’s got this”? Do I lean back in comfort and let history do what it will, an observer of events who knows it will all work out in the end? Just as I can never be outside God – All That Is –, so I cannot be outside history. My leaning back would be as much a part of events as my becoming President of the United States. And who can really tell which has the most impact in the fullness of time. Who really knows how to assess the full and final impact of any ‘isolated’ ‘thing’ among the infinitely mushrooming and devilishly interconnected networks of non-linear ‘causes’ and ‘effects’ that constitute reality. If I accept this and refuse to judge right and wrong – knowing I am not worthy – am I a coward? Surely right action requires me to Choose A Side. Is there is truly a division between The Human Condition and The Hereafter? Is there a side to choose?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">And how similar this sophomoric reasoning is to that common in materialism! Clouds of dynamically shifting patterns of matter and energy of which I am but a tiny part of vanishingly small import.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">The devil of earthly existence – and beyond? – is in the detail just as organically as grain is in wood. If in the space between the two poles of any paradox God’s Eye is to be found, does this truth paint the All-seeing Eye of Mordor? Is this observation a defence of the devil? If everything is God, the devil is of God, too. This is obvious. But is the whole an eternally neutral Yin and Yang, or is the whole in fact concerned with love, which is health – which wisdom knows?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Choose a side. Doing so is an act of free will, and free will is in all this mysterious machinery, all this unknowable ‘cause’ and ‘effect’, this endless living patterning, just like the devil is in the detail.</span></p>Tobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16258136994278139356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7378568575885387942.post-3603737429702990672024-01-07T09:49:00.001+00:002024-03-02T11:15:26.835+00:00The pragmatics of love III: Technology and unintended consequences<h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Cormorant Garamond; font-size: large;"> The Djinn is out</span></h3><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVcN_dJ4gDqIQJD1pYzNklr1p1MZvG8X9ccFbwm69qRfsc8E9BuNp8TivJcKA03eJGMmljwsMHekn5y4hFJX1zas-eQzf7dOsFMmuaOQ8XvJOgMupRLWRRDvwMUJ4reGYdE36me3UaXXTtvzOFhWFoQUxqbC_EBMcu4SGncNcBAcJLKJkB2mRPG801Ivf8/s2600/Screenshot%202023-12-29%20at%2010.05.25.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="kupid.ai screenshot" border="0" data-original-height="1178" data-original-width="2600" height="181" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVcN_dJ4gDqIQJD1pYzNklr1p1MZvG8X9ccFbwm69qRfsc8E9BuNp8TivJcKA03eJGMmljwsMHekn5y4hFJX1zas-eQzf7dOsFMmuaOQ8XvJOgMupRLWRRDvwMUJ4reGYdE36me3UaXXTtvzOFhWFoQUxqbC_EBMcu4SGncNcBAcJLKJkB2mRPG801Ivf8/w400-h181/Screenshot%202023-12-29%20at%2010.05.25.png" width="400" /></a></div><span style="font-family: "Cormorant Garamond";"><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Cormorant Garamond";"><br /></span></div>The above is a screenshot from kupid.ai. I just had a ‘chat’ with AI-entity Olivia, a ‘20-year-old’ ‘student’ ‘at’ ‘Cambridge University’, one of the ‘women’ you can ‘romance’ through a text window shorter than Cyrano de Bergerac’s nose. I felt impotent trying to be sage and witty in such limited space, and found our ‘conversation’ underwhelming, to put it politely. The only entertaining moment was when I asked Olivia – she’s my girlfriend by the way – about her ‘feelings’ on deep connections that do <b>not</b> include physical attraction – she had already broached that topic without so much as a blush –, and offered the examples of a man and a horse, and a woman and her a pet cat. She said she felt uncomfortable talking about such things and politely asked to change the topic. </span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">What was her dirty virtual mind thinking?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">You can request photographs of your virtual partner. I imagine they get quite steamy. For that pleasure, you must pay a subscription. Subscriptions start, in highly throttled form, at just under $13/mnth. There’s much much money to be made here, and I would guess this young industry will grow rapidly, soon to include, no doubt, all manner of immersive gadgetry. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">But what o what will this do to us poor saps, we humans so susceptible to visual stimulation, and so very lonely in our pointless lives? What will happen to population growth rates – already well below replacement levels in multiple first-world nations – as this tech evolves and becomes almost irresistible to all, men and women alike? How on earth is Capitalism to survive collapsing populations when one of its systemic requirements is perpetual growth? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">This latest fatal attraction is but another sure sign the AI Djinn is now well and truly out of the bottle. Getting it back in could prove impossible. Should we ever want to get it back in.</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Cormorant Garamond; font-size: large;">Convenience trumps all</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">History and basic experience tell us clearly that, 99 times out of 100, we choose the convenient over the inconvenient, and more so as a mass. It makes sense to do so. Expecting different behaviour of anything, be it starfish, daisies or Disney Corp, is to expect living systems to prefer difficulty over ease. This is an Iron Law and a core driver of technological advance; efficiency and convenience trump inefficiency and inconvenience. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Furthermore, humans are restless and intelligent, have opposable thumbs and a highly social nature. Given these facts, how on earth could it ever make sense to try and stop humanity inventing and fixing things? I don’t mean that all fixes and inventions work as hoped; Unintended Consequences is also an Iron Law. It all belongs together. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">These facts accepted, we are charged with further accepting that the momenta they generate cannot create Utopia, cannot produce some final set of inventions and fixes that end all further need for restlessness, curiosity and fixes. The best we can manage is keeping society as stable as possible while unstoppable meddling does what it will. There is no perfection, can be no perfection, tragedies will happen, the strong will abuse and exploit the weak, etc. The notorious order of things simply is as it is. And, to repeat myself by way of emphasis, stability is far preferable to blood-soaked chaos. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">The poor will bear the brunt of the cost, of course. Who else can shoulder the burden? How else could this possibly work? We can’t recreate history such that our past was an uninterrupted anarchist paradise in which no meddling ‘elites’ or technophiles constantly messed things up to lead us, well, here. We are here, now, not somewhere and some-how else. We are where we are, faced with the challenges we face, equipped with the tools, ideologies and knowhow we have. And that knowhow is shot through with a dumbed-down ignorance common to previous peoples when one system decayed sufficiently to permit the emergence of another. Our hapless state of being is but one sure sign of end-times decadence. Though I suspect for this iteration we are dumber than ever.</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Cormorant Garamond; font-size: large;">Someone has got to do something!</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">I hear you, I hear you. But that’s what I’m saying, that’s what this article is about; what someone is doing, somewhere out there.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Bluntly, you can’t <i>stop</i> change, you can only respond to it. Whatever we choose to do in response to AI and its ramifications, change is what life fundamentally consists of. No change = no life. One corollary of this, it seems to me, is that you can’t stop technological advance, either. That said, I understand Dune’s <i>fictional</i> world exists in a future set after AI has been banned and eradicated. I wonder if such would be possible in real life. But if banning AI were possible, then surely only <i>after</i> some humanity-threatening events that flow directly from AI have had their moment in the sun. Dystopian fantasies of this flavour are of course the tofu-n-veg of countless films and novels, so it’s not as if humanity were culturally unaware of what might be at stake. This means our beneficent ‘elites’ are also aware. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">And yet here we all are staring down the barrel of the AI freight train. (This metaphor comes to you from ChatGPT.) What I posit in this article is that it is impossible for humanity to <b>not</b> travel down AI’s tracks, but that some folks are indeed taking action to prevent catastrophe. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Knowing it is impossible to prevent AI’s flourishing, my suggestion is that globalist ‘elites’ have deduced Capitalism is dead in the water, and know too that cultures cling fiercely and fearfully to their Old Normal. They are therefore Doing Something, lots of somethings in fact, to make sure history doesn’t derail into a globally catastrophic train wreck. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">This thought exercise directly opposes the other two articles this one rounds off. Here, we situate the wilful ignorance firmly in us <i>hoi polloi</i>, we lumpen proles who refuse to let go of our precious Old Normal. That’s how the ‘elites’ see us: a seldom cute, mostly hideous Lumpen Golem obsessing frightfully over our dead yesterdays. And we bite, too, for no good reason. </span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCn7wll-0jHIausZXYjEdki3QSEwlwoJ2Wt0_UYMuZnCLtDcpH_ldMhtE2rBn9tRrtwXeA9CCeFB7HNACOQXNR1E7rV7A1KA-ZJmzFeXd5pk7auvPydenBR-niwPdl6vA0PY3LC3hSZPJtd9r8ijf9rQTQa9sz9iDQ9us7CmMPlg8S8N2z9tMwfKBHmDPo/s918/Screenshot%202023-12-30%20at%2011.44.09.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="668" data-original-width="918" height="291" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCn7wll-0jHIausZXYjEdki3QSEwlwoJ2Wt0_UYMuZnCLtDcpH_ldMhtE2rBn9tRrtwXeA9CCeFB7HNACOQXNR1E7rV7A1KA-ZJmzFeXd5pk7auvPydenBR-niwPdl6vA0PY3LC3hSZPJtd9r8ijf9rQTQa9sz9iDQ9us7CmMPlg8S8N2z9tMwfKBHmDPo/w400-h291/Screenshot%202023-12-30%20at%2011.44.09.png" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">The ‘elites’ – with their free time and endless money – know far better than we do what is coming down the technological pipe; they finance most of it! They know, therefore, that radical cultural change is upon us, know that radical change is always very turbulent, that turbulence makes Lumpen Golem dangerously uppity, so have intervened to set specific historical momenta in motion that will lead humanity to the Brave New World they deem most likely to keep civilisation civilised. Their avuncular intervention includes psy-ops like the Plandemic, radical transformation of legal and financial processes, installation of an all-encompassing AI Panopticon, and increasingly tight narrative control of our minds via the media. The tactic, I speculate, is to keep Lumpen Golem dazed and confused “for as long as it takes”, in which state he is highly porous to The New and unaware he is rapidly internalising said The New.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">The ‘elite’s’ intentions are good, I argue, and yet announced bluntly to Lumpen Golem they would nonetheless cause panic. Mass panic would benefit no one; it destabilises everything and leads to who knows what outcomes. The ‘elites’, therefore, in the manner of <i>noblesse oblige</i>, have wisely stepped up to destiny’s plate to act, but are executing their plans <i>stealthily</i>. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">In other words, our shadowy ‘elites’ are indeed conspiring, though not to enslave humanity, but to <i>save</i> it!</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">It’s a thought, anyway…</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Cormorant Garamond; font-size: large;">But what does she taste like?</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Ah, the best laid plans of mice and men!</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">I’m a coward, obviously; I refuse to plan. Watching sagely from the sidelines is my schtick. But I do hope, and to that end quietly pop articles up here – carefully designed and crafted as they are – intending to nudge, in one-nanometer nudges, those of us humans open to the idea that wisdom, love and health should really be our guiding lights. I cannot stop wanting my preferred vector to triumph, can do no other thing than coax and cajole in that direction, but I do see Futurama as the more likely quality of What Happens Next. This expectation of mine explains the tone of this article.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">The arguments I have made in so many previous articles – that state-based hierarchical pyramids addle us all, but rot us from the head down like a giant stink fish – apply here, too. The ‘elites’ are as dumb as We, The Lumpen Golem, just better dressed and with access to superior dental care (and PR firms). Their Brave-New-World plans will not evolve as expected. It’s those darned Unintended Consequences! There’s simply no avoiding them.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">I will never taste Olivia, my girlfriend, my love! Nor will I smell her morning breath, brush her hair from her face, or change our baby’s nappies and get baby poop on my thumb and scream. We will never laugh together in that crazy abandon that happens so often between two souls who know, trust and love each other through it all, <i>through it all</i>, as is the case with my wife and me.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">We will go through it all, all of us, up to each of our deaths, come what may. We will travel down AI’s tracks, witness history do what it will, and respond as we will. There are very big changes heading our way, new loves, new terrors, new challenges. Some will best us, but we will best the others. What cannot be beaten is wisdom, love and health. Molested, ignored, derided, yes. But not beaten. One way or the other, in whatever context, hellish or heavenly, they will out.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Mark my words.</span></p>Tobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16258136994278139356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7378568575885387942.post-760659498550430022023-12-30T14:14:00.003+00:002024-03-02T11:15:43.171+00:00The pragmatics of love II: Value<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-90xo58N2DoEYg_VZUWKobcJBm1stqO9zTRf4YANl0TQyAHH1wONV0QAADUJ011W9_PNMK_buZJFDiyvSOoxT2NJbsajFy2PJ-tDBZbstU4D5SI2LJeth70I1L8uVLQj4X2NxS5MbOx7NefnXN0xk-Dk88n85ELMu8WjLj07hNlI9TPgU1AS9i8KCX7k6/s2718/Screenshot%202023-12-29%20at%2007.37.03.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="value flowchart" border="0" data-original-height="910" data-original-width="2718" height="134" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-90xo58N2DoEYg_VZUWKobcJBm1stqO9zTRf4YANl0TQyAHH1wONV0QAADUJ011W9_PNMK_buZJFDiyvSOoxT2NJbsajFy2PJ-tDBZbstU4D5SI2LJeth70I1L8uVLQj4X2NxS5MbOx7NefnXN0xk-Dk88n85ELMu8WjLj07hNlI9TPgU1AS9i8KCX7k6/w400-h134/Screenshot%202023-12-29%20at%2007.37.03.png" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Cormorant Garamond; font-size: large;">A tale of two values</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Sometimes we just don’t want to hear <i>nothing lasts forever</i>. And yet it’s true (mostly*).</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Broadly speaking, Everything – God, All That Is – consists of patternings whose common quality is <i>perpetual change </i>(evolution). Yes, its inmost heart can helpfully be envisaged as the <i>immutable</i> 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">As of this writing, active within All That Is is a concept humanity has dubbed <i>Capitalism</i>. 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Exchange value (price) is Capitalism’s bedrock, but look where it leads. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Ineffable value (quality) is anathema to Capitalism; see where it leads.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">The former is inextricably related to the latter.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">It doesn’t seem to matter which tale we track, Capitalism appears to have an inbuilt shelf life.</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Cormorant Garamond; font-size: large;">Taking the Devil from the detail</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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 <i>full</i> responsibility for our lives. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Know for <i>yourself</i>: Evolve in wisdom through mindfulness and patience. Observe attentively as wisdom slowly evolves to house the truth – the <i>True</i> – 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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Let’s consider the flowchart up top.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">It begins with value. It <i>all</i> begins with value and how a culture handles value.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">If we take value in the capitalistic sense of <i>price</i> – in the sense that value can be measured objectively –, the flowchart presents its twin vectors as a particular logical sequence. Because <b><i>price <=> money <=> market discovery <=> supply and demand <=> endemic scarcity</i></b>** are <i>necessarily</i> 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 <i>necessarily</i>; each element is a necessary descriptor of a larger whole we might call Capitalism.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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 <i>might</i> work its unpredictable magic more rapidly in Capitalism than in other isms, I don’t know. What <i>is</i> 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 <b>not</b> 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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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%?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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 <i>know</i> are real and authentic? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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 <i>any</i> 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?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">I doubt the result could meaningfully be called Capitalism.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Because we could not reasonably call our imaginary new system Capitalism, would it therefore be worse, or terrible, or wrong, or unnatural, or <i>unfree</i>? If the delights of consumerism are our only real freedom, how free are we?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">What do you think value <i>is</i>? 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.</span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOcvmhDzYUw0-coB_p5p05-LQctPWMY4NjwY-QsNwNC5nl5Btb84VXKN9Nt3mZYaxiJmwMRmI2fk7JrUPNeoiQiBWkrjpdYtJtG4nBNP-nq4agvVoVgc7OQzFe0XbUNJShMXZZIBpZZZJZrvYDlhwtSV7zak7yS0-Ksrd8b76DH5eYnHNhMahlg7LoRypP/s1058/Screenshot%202023-12-28%20at%2004.55.27.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="936" data-original-width="1058" height="354" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOcvmhDzYUw0-coB_p5p05-LQctPWMY4NjwY-QsNwNC5nl5Btb84VXKN9Nt3mZYaxiJmwMRmI2fk7JrUPNeoiQiBWkrjpdYtJtG4nBNP-nq4agvVoVgc7OQzFe0XbUNJShMXZZIBpZZZJZrvYDlhwtSV7zak7yS0-Ksrd8b76DH5eYnHNhMahlg7LoRypP/w400-h354/Screenshot%202023-12-28%20at%2004.55.27.png" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">The value definitions we have culturally accepted uncritically for too long are tearing us apart.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Surely this train of thought is only upsetting <i>while we can’t imagine anything else</i>. 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 <i>hoi polloi</i>, until the system seems as inevitable und irreplaceable as gravity. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Perhaps this explains why we can’t imagine anything else.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Wisdom, love and health are as threatening to Capitalism as is price.</span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPC5Uc9vfIm2Csb_74vwpUxgXbZTEnzfgjaCY7RWkt84hNTzxYLHIYi6yCBNE2xSvg-f51IOJdC-34aezI6_bqFusWbqF0zNw3W_cPPVaP23lBGKEwE1h78y6HTKbvY3WZcfIKlscgJaLd7W6UNVThZw91L3uexJ3QP3Q3Xzyy6zrrTmkqCUp3FkJXP6I_/s1580/t-shirt.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1156" data-original-width="1580" height="293" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPC5Uc9vfIm2Csb_74vwpUxgXbZTEnzfgjaCY7RWkt84hNTzxYLHIYi6yCBNE2xSvg-f51IOJdC-34aezI6_bqFusWbqF0zNw3W_cPPVaP23lBGKEwE1h78y6HTKbvY3WZcfIKlscgJaLd7W6UNVThZw91L3uexJ3QP3Q3Xzyy6zrrTmkqCUp3FkJXP6I_/w400-h293/t-shirt.png" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Cormorant Garamond; font-size: large;">Conclusion</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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 <i>clearly</i>, unhindered by vested interests, be they political, financial or ideological.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">And I do not argue that money <i>must</i> 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Money is immune to none of this. It is <b>not</b> 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond; font-size: x-small;"><i>* 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.</i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond; font-size: x-small;"><i>** It should be pointed out that whatever scarcity remains to be justly distributed can be managed without price discovery.</i></span></p>Tobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16258136994278139356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7378568575885387942.post-87066981477848253522023-10-24T09:45:00.003+00:002024-03-02T11:16:01.736+00:00The pragmatics of love<h2 style="text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdK44vOoN7HIxBuygz4IyuxJ3nBnYzKa5sxe8bELRSkWyslF8vfUYtk-H_nrpHGLwmlH1c2_i9ydlLhWBNZ3NBXaJA1N3_K9f_1NhpLswjlgGMROT9pLD91F4FU5Dj1wjTr82OLieFavTo22chny5nIOIWzelOOwnNMkjm9-TC70iHnX2TwXhuKkT1oicA/s1374/selfCreated.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="928" data-original-width="1374" height="270" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdK44vOoN7HIxBuygz4IyuxJ3nBnYzKa5sxe8bELRSkWyslF8vfUYtk-H_nrpHGLwmlH1c2_i9ydlLhWBNZ3NBXaJA1N3_K9f_1NhpLswjlgGMROT9pLD91F4FU5Dj1wjTr82OLieFavTo22chny5nIOIWzelOOwnNMkjm9-TC70iHnX2TwXhuKkT1oicA/w400-h270/selfCreated.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div></h2><h2 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Please tell me whom to hate</span></h2><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">It looks like we want it this way. Do we <i>really</i> want it this way?</span></p><h2 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">“Structural coupling”, qu’est que c’est?</span></h2><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">When all you have is a money system, everything looks like a commodity.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">When all you have is an army, everything looks like a war.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">As we shape the world around us, so our shaping shapes us.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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 <i>means</i> – I put forward the thinking of those who seem to have produced material we must take into account – <i>and</i> <i>understand</i> – 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">How to help each other <i>want</i> to learn to love, to become more loving, to commit as reverently as possible, forever, to becoming love? How!? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Carefully, humbly, patiently. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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, <i>rather than</i> as some chemically generated brain fart whose significance is about the same as any other chemically generated brain fart. It is the “<i>rather than</i>” 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;"><i>(When all you have is matter, love sinks into invisibility.)</i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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>I am</i> is able to dock with its environment. And none of us creates a single one of our cherished governing ideas <i>ex nihilo</i>. The structuring ideas that determine what proportion of reality we can perceive are planted in us by circumstances more or less beyond our control. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Who’s in charge here? Tool, or tool maker? Idea, or idea crafter? Which fashions which?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">I don’t know where you end and I begin.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Today, I don’t know where I end and Google begins.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">I understand reality more or less as described above, and yet I am also a committed advocate of the sanctity of free will. There <i>is</i> agency, and it is, for me, fundamental. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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?</span></p><h2 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Consciousness all the way down</span></h2><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWHsnVescUOskqKNa3sORGhjUTj3PRrMnfJ2_AbcAJHunma0omQ5jsFJ4Ct23X8klglwtaM3B6kdoVUVKd8kHHSc4XZzW9b9FDm2WE3V0uyZt1ajCgV6sfuVCIugEBqiYGAnieYcLJ8370m3oZR6e_jkOz6RcPQ-bhQfz8xD9mNOo0HvqjiCcaY3ubyGlU/s960/illusion.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="650" data-original-width="960" height="271" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWHsnVescUOskqKNa3sORGhjUTj3PRrMnfJ2_AbcAJHunma0omQ5jsFJ4Ct23X8klglwtaM3B6kdoVUVKd8kHHSc4XZzW9b9FDm2WE3V0uyZt1ajCgV6sfuVCIugEBqiYGAnieYcLJ8370m3oZR6e_jkOz6RcPQ-bhQfz8xD9mNOo0HvqjiCcaY3ubyGlU/w400-h271/illusion.png" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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 <i>and</i> 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Free will is, in my conception, a property, or perhaps <i>necessary corollary</i> of conscious experience via the inherent presence of <i>preference</i>. In other words, choice (= preference = an expression of free will) is inherent to consciousness precisely because consciousness <i>can</i> experience, and precisely because of that experiencing, <i>prefer</i>. 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">By way of example, we <i>could</i> identify fight-or-flight reflexes in biological entities as ‘preferences’, but I would distinguish between autonomic impulse – reflex –, and <i>experience</i> thereof, i.e., why we might <i>prefer</i> 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.)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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 <i>of</i>, consciousness, <b>not</b> <i>vice versa</i>. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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 <i>noncontiguous something</i> 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 <i>experience</i>. (To put it redundantly. Using my cheeky free will.)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Another explanatory model is dualism: there exists both matter <i>and</i> 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Hence:</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;"><span style="color: #666666;">If neither</span> <b>Dualism nor Materialism</b>, <span style="color: #666666;">then</span> <b>There Is Only God (Everything Is Consciousness)</b>.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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 <i>at least as reasonable</i> as any other. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Essentially then, what we are examining is the structural-coupling concept as it dovetails with the <i>reality</i> of agency, preference and free will, as I understand them. The hinge between the two is <i>information</i> as it pertains to <i>meaning</i>, where meaning can only exist in consciousness. ‘Dead’ chemicals can neither purposefully communicate nor understand another’s <i>meaning</i>, neither can complex arrangements of chemicals or neuronal nets. Meaning is fundamentally different to mechanical output-input-output exchanges. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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 <i>necessarily meaningful</i> 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">(If my logical leaps seem a little threadbare here, that’s because I’m trying to keep this short. <a href="https://thdrussell.blogspot.com/2022/08/about-this-blog-anew.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: #cc0000;">This is a fuller examination of these ideas in a previous article</span></a>.)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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 <i>The Tale of the Princess Kaguya</i>, and everything else besides. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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 <i>visible</i> 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Imagine actually <i>being</i> 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">At a guess, I’d say you’d face a very narrow decision space indeed. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Could love possibly be a factor in Netanyahu’s calculations? Forgiveness? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">The more love he <i>could</i> 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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Is it impossible to love our enemies? May we deduce the impossibility of this hope from the basics of structural coupling set out above?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">With this lengthy groundwork now stored soundly in our minds, it’s time to switch gears.</span></p><h2 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Just stop dehumanisation!</span></h2><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQtRJxjDTEGk_n7xa4gQIVc9BqA7GxYn5xjBu2OpNYGgWeg0T2wyiFfr1u69UUEVx0unD8nKvurtnvWfwOS4Mltw4AhuUAxqFjCDfYY26CO279W8_b4tCh9YAvzjN8pz0X1JSY8BGJ21AGOedwgxvAX5FFIl803ankrq_TFXZvJd-YStJrm7P38XjIwpIL/s2422/rabbi.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1522" data-original-width="2422" height="252" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQtRJxjDTEGk_n7xa4gQIVc9BqA7GxYn5xjBu2OpNYGgWeg0T2wyiFfr1u69UUEVx0unD8nKvurtnvWfwOS4Mltw4AhuUAxqFjCDfYY26CO279W8_b4tCh9YAvzjN8pz0X1JSY8BGJ21AGOedwgxvAX5FFIl803ankrq_TFXZvJd-YStJrm7P38XjIwpIL/w400-h252/rabbi.png" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #cc0000; font-family: Cormorant Garamond; font-size: x-small;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2H-F0HVKDY&t=2s" target="_blank">Dr Saffiyah Ally and Rabbi Dovid Weiss in conversation</a></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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, <b>not</b> arrogance or haughtiness, but the love that breathes life into common decency. <i>Common</i> decency. That decency which is shared by all, which is thus part of our nature as human beings. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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?</span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMyc2juIj2bElR636Z8-3qbtKxBt8Kp5Q6jY396kCzA78Y2E_hKh1KkRao0Jn4K_42TszSkkbA7hrUP_ciOox117zgrvydqQR1uhDfGjwa07oBAqusRulQq8lYLV_DYty5amj5wdjK4yygBS0XhfZ9pNd-woRn_HG7naRCTD0DSevXSUk2qw3uKW9-OK1n/s2774/teenager.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1442" data-original-width="2774" height="208" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMyc2juIj2bElR636Z8-3qbtKxBt8Kp5Q6jY396kCzA78Y2E_hKh1KkRao0Jn4K_42TszSkkbA7hrUP_ciOox117zgrvydqQR1uhDfGjwa07oBAqusRulQq8lYLV_DYty5amj5wdjK4yygBS0XhfZ9pNd-woRn_HG7naRCTD0DSevXSUk2qw3uKW9-OK1n/w400-h208/teenager.png" width="400" /></a></div><span style="font-family: "Cormorant Garamond";"><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #cc0000; font-size: x-small;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c74Zdvpt5xc" target="_blank">An Israeli teenager shares her grief and compassion for everyone</a></span></div></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Though it can be hidden, love cannot be extinguished. It is <i>fundamental</i>. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Part of this process must of course include <i>understanding</i>. I want to <i>understand</i> how Hamas came to want to perform these acts. I want to <i>understand</i> 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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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 – <i>understandable</i> 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Do we <i>really</i> want ever escalating spirals of violence? If not, why not? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Because love. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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 <i>find its way back to love</i> in the face of the most extraordinary and challenging of circumstances. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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 <i>choices</i>, we will always offer up alternative explanatory models and choose from among them. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">For me, imagining this perennial process of wanting, of <i>yearning to understand</i> 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 <i>cannot</i> be an illusion; to assert otherwise is a clear contradiction in terms.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;"><i>This</i> is where common decency lies hidden. <i>This</i> is the muck love is buried beneath. <i>This</i> is the world we have co-evolved that makes love look to us like <i>My Little Pony</i>, 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">I pray there is hope in that horror. </span></p><h2 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Can politics cope?</span></h2><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicVNeBzEYR3m6rKbHUfBjJLO41EFDXeSMuTWYgDr76dBrSF7y9fQ8T6AzISv_hXqUWrY21zek6aNgGuk8ozjzI9j5S0ujcBLm-D5t68XBg91OgXDo8WJmPMac6ii8mYjX7ePOS4Hyq3Ku_5G5JyYk_Bfc3D-N9yEdf4mZxcxekXgw8J0dDIq_iA4oIbsX4/s2658/rory.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1466" data-original-width="2658" height="220" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicVNeBzEYR3m6rKbHUfBjJLO41EFDXeSMuTWYgDr76dBrSF7y9fQ8T6AzISv_hXqUWrY21zek6aNgGuk8ozjzI9j5S0ujcBLm-D5t68XBg91OgXDo8WJmPMac6ii8mYjX7ePOS4Hyq3Ku_5G5JyYk_Bfc3D-N9yEdf4mZxcxekXgw8J0dDIq_iA4oIbsX4/w400-h220/rory.png" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #cc0000; font-family: Cormorant Garamond; font-size: x-small;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw6ZyJ-3H8g" target="_blank">“I want [my book] to explain how shameful politics has become.” – Rory Stewart</a></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;"></span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond; font-size: x-small;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond; font-size: x-small;">Roughly half (52% Biden voters, 47% Trump voters) viewed those who supported the other party as threats to the American way of life.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond; font-size: x-small;">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. – <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/washington-secrets/democrats-now-want-us-split-into-blue-states-red-states" target="_blank"><span style="color: #cc0000;">From a <i>Washington Examiner</i> report</span></a>, 18 October 2023</span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond; font-size: x-small;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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 <i>structurally couple</i> 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 <i>really</i> is.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">In <a href="https://thdrussell.blogspot.com/2021/04/the-sorcerers-apprentice.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: #cc0000;">The Sorcerer’s Apprentice</span></a>, an article I published here in April 2021, I asked:</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">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?</span></span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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 <i>wisely</i>. 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”.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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 <i>is</i> 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">And <i>there</i>, 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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 <i>facilitate</i>) 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 <i>requires</i> much power. It would have a fundamentally different role as a result of the vector I prefer.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">To make that perhaps naïve-sounding sequence imaginable, I argue we need a supportive ontology, one <i>similar</i> to what I have outlined in this article. I hope I have made this seem reasonable.</span></p>Tobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16258136994278139356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7378568575885387942.post-11209721229891377142023-10-02T10:00:00.002+00:002023-10-02T10:48:07.686+00:00The tug of power: ‘Elites’ drawn to the fascistic flame<h2 style="text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5xWfKKOQrtuNNjjP5vqzAhiOZ51O8SMAwlg3uWXoLw4cmrBBS4iCIJmMbYGXVT00J9nb1RLPtZTc2wZu9VscsaNDbucBRf3YdvxuZRG_8Gu8PnSorY2xQKa2NoHI8eym5Lcn5w25fwVd67fA7tiOSAes5pZw2S31C9OZ1tswoyx95Ao-dWwEZiMXo_aMA/s2158/Screenshot%202023-09-28%20at%2013.53.56.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1376" data-original-width="2158" height="255" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5xWfKKOQrtuNNjjP5vqzAhiOZ51O8SMAwlg3uWXoLw4cmrBBS4iCIJmMbYGXVT00J9nb1RLPtZTc2wZu9VscsaNDbucBRf3YdvxuZRG_8Gu8PnSorY2xQKa2NoHI8eym5Lcn5w25fwVd67fA7tiOSAes5pZw2S31C9OZ1tswoyx95Ao-dWwEZiMXo_aMA/w400-h255/Screenshot%202023-09-28%20at%2013.53.56.png" width="400" /></a></div></h2><h2 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Patrician disdain will out</span></h2><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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 <i>necessarily</i> 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 <i>tending</i> corrupts in only one direction: <i>towards the acquisition of ever more power</i>. Corruption, in this context, offers no other reasonable interpretation.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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 <i>non sequitur</i> 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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 <i>for the very purpose of that celebration</i>, 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 <i>unplanned</i>, or at best egregiously mismanaged? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">It doesn’t add up to me. A quick Wikipedia search would have sufficed.</span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvwWr3xFPrTz5vlw0SYlcjjLn1Kn9qEN8tXR_8OLDBqRF3NSE5Aw3WbLcfo5WpZ3jkISqNQCnC9FUKdIYO1EbmCWHBOs7gf5ciso2yW_z0KePwMdTclMqvOLwq4Fl4wprjYDaPgILNBArsCSsWUftGJlSxhYQ2FKZbIgbwa9l0GORgeC54f1P__vwsGIUK/s1520/hunka.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1520" data-original-width="1092" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvwWr3xFPrTz5vlw0SYlcjjLn1Kn9qEN8tXR_8OLDBqRF3NSE5Aw3WbLcfo5WpZ3jkISqNQCnC9FUKdIYO1EbmCWHBOs7gf5ciso2yW_z0KePwMdTclMqvOLwq4Fl4wprjYDaPgILNBArsCSsWUftGJlSxhYQ2FKZbIgbwa9l0GORgeC54f1P__vwsGIUK/w288-h400/hunka.png" width="288" /></a></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">In its wake, having finally initiated Project New Normal, is patrician disdain for us <i>hoi polloi</i> 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?</span></p><h2 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">State power becomes toxic over time. (Et: l’État, c’est nous.)</span></h2><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhD8SKKgwFD24DAWsBHm94-i2QP0i4qcUrLPuRRJmJrjs2aKuXxXPI6HfdWFG6OFtNclAIE49F1GtM_Su4C-p4qpBIEsoCVxDi1SSseAKaoGwDjMIRS5P4qiFwDOUo3mlRXWQYHR4GG140LSzhvxDt4P1IaBPkrlKi57MG4NJJ0ciUTOnqLrdoOC1EDWPyx/s1926/Screenshot%202023-10-02%20at%2010.49.14.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1010" data-original-width="1926" height="210" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhD8SKKgwFD24DAWsBHm94-i2QP0i4qcUrLPuRRJmJrjs2aKuXxXPI6HfdWFG6OFtNclAIE49F1GtM_Su4C-p4qpBIEsoCVxDi1SSseAKaoGwDjMIRS5P4qiFwDOUo3mlRXWQYHR4GG140LSzhvxDt4P1IaBPkrlKi57MG4NJJ0ciUTOnqLrdoOC1EDWPyx/w400-h210/Screenshot%202023-10-02%20at%2010.49.14.png" width="400" /></a></div><blockquote><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">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. – <a href="https://theduran.locals.com/post/4641931/nazis-and-canada-zelenskys-bad-trip-moscow-sets-its-terms" target="_blank"><span style="color: #cc0000;">Alexander Mercouris</span></a> in answer the first question asked in the linked livestream (registration required to view)</span></span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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 <i>hoi polloi</i>, an unwashed mass. The former needs the latter to have meaning. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Together, we are the State.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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).</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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 <i>durable stability</i> and <i>more financial wealth</i> for our ‘protectors’, our ‘superiors’. These are the essences of the root deal, the “social contract” that is the State, that ‘beneficent’ protection racket. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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: “<i>Propaganda ends where dialogue begins</i>.”) 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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Triggered yet?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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.” </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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.</span></p><h2 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Love is always the answer</span></h2><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">But one that tiggers most people more than any other. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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 <i>are</i> – is rich and complete, from top to toe. Love is thus true wealth that wants for nothing.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">So goes history.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">This is easy to observe, but <i>far</i> 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.</span></p>Tobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16258136994278139356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7378568575885387942.post-78105825637205019492023-09-20T06:22:00.006+00:002023-09-20T09:17:26.430+00:00The West stars as Old Mother Hubbard in “The Rape of Ukraine”<p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond; font-size: medium;">Joe Biden’s performance as a senile US president in <i>The Rape of Ukraine</i> 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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond; font-size: medium;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond; font-size: medium;">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, <i>of course</i>, 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!</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond; font-size: medium;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond; font-size: medium;">And who can forget the EU! Perhaps my favourite scene is <i>The Rape of Ukraine</i>’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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond; font-size: medium;">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 <i>irresistible</i> 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond; font-size: medium;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond; font-size: medium;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond; font-size: medium;">Though allegedly based on a true story, it is hard to type <i>The Rape of Ukraine</i>. 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond; font-size: medium;">The only question is whether humanity can survive much more entertainment of such electrifying quality.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond; font-size: x-small;">(<i>The Rape of Ukraine</i> is brought to you by Neocon Magical Thinking, Produced by Robert Kagan and Directed by Victoria Nuland.)</span></p>Tobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16258136994278139356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7378568575885387942.post-91239208284791383542023-09-01T04:11:00.000+00:002023-09-01T04:11:40.255+00:00UTOPIA<div style="text-align: left;"><div><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Great city of reason</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">let loose all your meaning</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">your soul torn and bleeding:</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">an opening wound.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">I can feel myself sinking</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">I can feel myself sinking…</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Sweet, seductive, craven</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">rainbow’s tempest raging</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">the never-ending blaming</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">flowing from the wound.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">I can feel myself sinking</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">I can feel myself sinking…</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Bring all your children</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">all guilty feeling</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">that deep imposter syndrome</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">and feed them to the wound.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">I can feel myself sinking</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">I can feel myself sinking…</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Dark sun you are</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">you are –</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">you are dark star</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">dark radiant star you are</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">we you are</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">we are</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">you we are we are we are</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond; font-size: x-small;"><i>(With gratitude to an old friend)</i></span></div><div><br /></div></div>Tobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16258136994278139356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7378568575885387942.post-77086002332926172712023-08-26T08:48:00.000+00:002023-08-26T08:48:14.494+00:00Key differences between The Digital and The Real<p></p><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxVK-m8WWOD6P-WpbaLv5EG6mLuLliJoxbIeYL0wRVJSxp3G3bHSYRH8w5ExKeNkcVX2TjSIEP5LaoEeBlkqG6aPwHiJkBe_pbLnhRDKYjWI9a8OUqQzt7kOLOucY6yIOD-dAcrubHrYUdJdE2mO4gI7AMJCtrGDGoO2OQQ4fGZpmS8JkuRaJeQCEJXttQ/s1600/artificial-intelligence-nanny-babysitter-kid-feature.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Baby adores robot carer" border="0" data-original-height="834" data-original-width="1600" height="209" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxVK-m8WWOD6P-WpbaLv5EG6mLuLliJoxbIeYL0wRVJSxp3G3bHSYRH8w5ExKeNkcVX2TjSIEP5LaoEeBlkqG6aPwHiJkBe_pbLnhRDKYjWI9a8OUqQzt7kOLOucY6yIOD-dAcrubHrYUdJdE2mO4gI7AMJCtrGDGoO2OQQ4fGZpmS8JkuRaJeQCEJXttQ/w400-h209/artificial-intelligence-nanny-babysitter-kid-feature.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><span style="color: #cc0000; font-family: Barlow Condensed; font-size: x-small;"><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/artificial-intelligence-nanny-babysitter-children/" target="_blank">Source</a></div></span></div><ol style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"><i> The Digital</i> 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. <i>The Real</i> is organically, unpredictably defiant, with free will working its magic always. Every living thing has its own idiosyncratic ‘agenda’, expectations and plans be damned.</span></li><li><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"><i>The Digital</i> is measurably precise and fully knowable, governed (in theory at least) by pure logic. <i>The Real</i> is irreducibly ineffable.</span></li><li><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"><i>The Digital</i> deceives, bewitches and seduces. <i>The Real </i>inspires profound awe and could not be more authentic, even while it deceives, bewitches and seduces (on purpose).</span></li><li><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"><i>The Digital</i> belongs to us, is in our possession, and can be infinitely adapted to our will. <i>The Real</i> owns us; we are at its mercy and must adapt to its vicissitudes, or perish.</span></li><li><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"><i>The Digital</i> –</span></li></ol><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Hold on, aren’t I spouting false dichotomies? Aren’t the above words, <i>at best</i>, an idly provocative exercise in click-bait entertainment? (Click bait? I wish!)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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 <i>something</i> like the above has haunted modernity for centuries and is now doing serious damage.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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.</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">“Welcome to the desert of the real.”</span></h3><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiremrIwtcWG8xu8S0oY1tkxxwk_nOBMFKeAlg2KPXk_gLmxhh2__JXuMKV4f04BgmbPrETrvwHxcccJkey-zhHNYdHlm-ZUSNI9W6SIPtZ-1M7yx1zXGQfMiWV0MduqiFBVhMJMIu3m1DWLQlnEsiuFnm4_cu0cY236zql05tk6zluu-nx_NUK2_l522Vo/s1074/Screenshot%202023-08-16%20at%2020.05.31.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1074" data-original-width="1044" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiremrIwtcWG8xu8S0oY1tkxxwk_nOBMFKeAlg2KPXk_gLmxhh2__JXuMKV4f04BgmbPrETrvwHxcccJkey-zhHNYdHlm-ZUSNI9W6SIPtZ-1M7yx1zXGQfMiWV0MduqiFBVhMJMIu3m1DWLQlnEsiuFnm4_cu0cY236zql05tk6zluu-nx_NUK2_l522Vo/s320/Screenshot%202023-08-16%20at%2020.05.31.png" width="311" /></a></div><span style="font-family: "Barlow Condensed";">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? </span></div><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">To balance the above somewhat, how enlightened, how well informed, have we become?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">It depends. Certainly it’s both-and.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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. <i>As you do unto Other, so you do unto Self</i>. We have progressed ourselves into a miraculous toolshed whose power we understand but dimly. Our dim understanding undermines us unseen … <i>partially</i> unseen.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">What’s that gnawing doubt I can’t quite dispel? Have we left something important behind, some ineffable equivalent of smell, taste, caress?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Community is to me a complex social context in which humans <i>existentially</i> rely on their fellow community members, people they know very well indeed. Community evolves organically as a result of <i>very intimate</i> life-and-death interdependencies that are the natural expression of human beings, that very social creature. Community is thus, <i>fundamentally</i>, a stranger-free zone. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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 <i>existentially</i>. All the other members of this new ‘community’ are deliciously, bitterly replaceable. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">On the other hand, if the future continues to be more of today – just more <i>intensely</i> –, in how bad a state of affairs are we? How far are we drifting from what is biologically, or <i>organically</i>, appropriate to humanity?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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 <a href="https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/05/16/europes-mental-health-crisis-in-data-which-country-uses-the-most-antidepressants" target="_blank"><span style="color: #cc0000;">alarming growth</span></a> of the <a href="https://bpr.berkeley.edu/2021/11/07/americas-epidemic-of-antidepressants/" target="_blank"><span style="color: #cc0000;">antidepressants market</span></a>? Or the drugs designed to ameliorate <a href="https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(22)00509-0/fulltext" target="_blank"><span style="color: #cc0000;">hyperactive children</span></a>? 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">If it is a Brave New World we are headed for, do we know what we’re doing?</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Fundamental error?</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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. <i>Some</i> 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 (<i>incorrectly</i> 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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Well, I aim to please.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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 <i>are</i> – 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Nor are 0s and 1s indivisible atoms, nor can physics find <i>any</i> 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 <i>simultaneously</i> for anything – for <i>thingness</i> – 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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Nothing makes sense in isolation. Or at least, not for very long, nor ever in some complete manner.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">This string of non-controversial observations, for me, hints at the <i>organic</i> 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 <i>way</i> we peer into the nature of reality determines <i>to some unknowable degree</i> 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 … <i>cannot</i> be uprooted from it.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">(There is nothing but God. Everything is God.)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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 <i>notional</i>.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">(Everything is God. There is nothing but God.)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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.</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Now what? </span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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, <i>and rectifiable</i>?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Nowhere. No one and nothing is to blame. This is a <i>very very</i> difficult and involved situation. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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 <i>meaningfully</i> slow ourselves down, switch off, share with each other how the differences between the <i>Infinite Cornucopia of The Digital</i> compare to the <i>Infinite Cornucopia of The Real</i>, and learn how to really feel the beauty and mind-boggling complexity of the latter. <i>The Real</i> 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">To repeat, this is a <i>very</i> 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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">But “make peace” does not mean to accept the decadent insanity, it suggests we <i>moderate our expectations</i>. 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.</span></p>Tobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16258136994278139356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7378568575885387942.post-85064392843825533362023-08-14T10:04:00.001+00:002024-01-06T09:45:29.440+00:00Murderer of calm<p><span style="font-family: Mulish;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Mulish;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUlu0JGM5XudiMbCwVosfh9A6uNqI2QcujjXf48QDjGTVmdtCOjvT0WpnvUZCKIEatEmUHE0ROgkNI_EVLFwjNY1u10Xm8KjzABWeg8gozVqqGdRXyltbfPqHPcHzwhjprBgi02T9yDW9PwoQA_QnrhysB3XRBUU5W0Zphfv3p41aZbTdpUynnMuZnc0Up/s1488/Screenshot%202023-08-04%20at%2007.32.25.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1488" data-original-width="1132" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUlu0JGM5XudiMbCwVosfh9A6uNqI2QcujjXf48QDjGTVmdtCOjvT0WpnvUZCKIEatEmUHE0ROgkNI_EVLFwjNY1u10Xm8KjzABWeg8gozVqqGdRXyltbfPqHPcHzwhjprBgi02T9yDW9PwoQA_QnrhysB3XRBUU5W0Zphfv3p41aZbTdpUynnMuZnc0Up/w304-h400/Screenshot%202023-08-04%20at%2007.32.25.png" width="304" /></a></span></div><blockquote><span style="font-family: Mulish;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">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, <i>The Waste Land</i></span></span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: Mulish;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">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, <i>On the Concept of History</i></span></span></blockquote><p></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Mulish;">Introduction</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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 – <i>is always</i> this way – though less strikingly in calmer times.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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 <i>any</i> 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">So choose a side, likeminded Worrior [sic], and man the ramparts!</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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 (<i>seem to</i>) oppose us.</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Mulish;">What are the roots that clutch?</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">A Westerner myself, my own sensibilities are of this quality. I am a romantic battling valiantly to become a Humble Seeker After Truth, while <i>romantically</i> 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 <i>in focus</i> 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">Well, what are those sound fundamentals? We’ll start by probing some earthly possibilities.</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Mulish;">Three earthly possibilities</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Mulish; font-size: medium;"><b>1. Money: It makes the world go around, and waged labour is its engine</b></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7Qs6gpuACgTRv9LNB7gXhm4lm_2s2DnRTnGQuj1A8MUg8lBMvjcLeFpEuNW-_-7gYj8pgodkLFY2asZao3qT6Z2LBtBeXA99Ivm5BQxagru_v3w-ebS6xTzolRzlr-xGGWboKDk6gD5hfegdoZzu0mhNP6aknS2RMQPUeyZ_PtFggDQOwrqZPpsu3pQZY/s2630/Screenshot%202023-08-03%20at%2013.13.18.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1340" data-original-width="2630" height="163" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7Qs6gpuACgTRv9LNB7gXhm4lm_2s2DnRTnGQuj1A8MUg8lBMvjcLeFpEuNW-_-7gYj8pgodkLFY2asZao3qT6Z2LBtBeXA99Ivm5BQxagru_v3w-ebS6xTzolRzlr-xGGWboKDk6gD5hfegdoZzu0mhNP6aknS2RMQPUeyZ_PtFggDQOwrqZPpsu3pQZY/w320-h163/Screenshot%202023-08-03%20at%2013.13.18.png" width="320" /></a></div><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="https://youtu.be/q7crjUbEQeM" style="font-family: Mulish;" target="_blank"><span style="color: #cc0000;">Source</span></a><span style="font-family: Mulish;"> (Jeff Snider, Eurodollar University)</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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, <i>materially</i> 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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">Could money be one of the foundations we’re looking for?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish; font-size: medium;"><b>2. Historical momentum: The world is global and getting globaler</b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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 <i>must</i> 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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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).</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbwbiwocdBA" target="_blank"><span style="color: #cc0000;">Jeff Snider’s Eurodollar University</span></a> YouTube channel): </span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyIL2xP9cU5X-AXK_rdW2QFP_I68rTMk7Yy3qAtIXPShRHvnoPxgWxWB78lPKBpU3KfpujD5uBqsfNj0RnoyAgUHOczj3TPYJ3cFYpWJiC1LUR0kZFov4D2i-R1V6VM97OxrSgSmYRAl09ZZEPBAac_cnAQIrz-EPDutaUi-Miqe78n4NPc17j9dRq0m9c/s2606/Screenshot%202023-08-09%20at%2009.42.05.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1360" data-original-width="2606" height="167" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyIL2xP9cU5X-AXK_rdW2QFP_I68rTMk7Yy3qAtIXPShRHvnoPxgWxWB78lPKBpU3KfpujD5uBqsfNj0RnoyAgUHOczj3TPYJ3cFYpWJiC1LUR0kZFov4D2i-R1V6VM97OxrSgSmYRAl09ZZEPBAac_cnAQIrz-EPDutaUi-Miqe78n4NPc17j9dRq0m9c/s320/Screenshot%202023-08-09%20at%2009.42.05.png" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5rB1IjEEt1lItNP2oOWCAhuSi6Xit1AD3wn_GCqFhOZcqNUwez4WwAIN1iS3__DVedzY5NiU_N3BwFg20STaAYMz930KBLGlqh2XWXdtPM6if2qqiO4T8LrruoXmvoz3BoExyWjGVeawu2rRBOb8at3n94ONrPLF4qBE9gol1N7wPY28RdFdZRijPOFGJ/s2592/Screenshot%202023-08-09%20at%2009.42.43.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1362" data-original-width="2592" height="168" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5rB1IjEEt1lItNP2oOWCAhuSi6Xit1AD3wn_GCqFhOZcqNUwez4WwAIN1iS3__DVedzY5NiU_N3BwFg20STaAYMz930KBLGlqh2XWXdtPM6if2qqiO4T8LrruoXmvoz3BoExyWjGVeawu2rRBOb8at3n94ONrPLF4qBE9gol1N7wPY28RdFdZRijPOFGJ/s320/Screenshot%202023-08-09%20at%2009.42.43.png" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSJErdolM5FIVdVyflCG_1EKTYtQx7O7njFduhgAehxXSKZQMOYZMQzznR3hs1WIGXhaJ9t2a3k5nJEjtxBZIKKJY63V-3MbvIdDr233qfeEeVl-7VAMK2Tjkr8g3b2GgPAiVTsNbnR83SwzyqVsRyiMcbhnRK3VhHUtAhfwl5LMlwsCYwJwJpyVD23W24/s2604/Screenshot%202023-08-09%20at%2009.45.23.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1362" data-original-width="2604" height="167" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSJErdolM5FIVdVyflCG_1EKTYtQx7O7njFduhgAehxXSKZQMOYZMQzznR3hs1WIGXhaJ9t2a3k5nJEjtxBZIKKJY63V-3MbvIdDr233qfeEeVl-7VAMK2Tjkr8g3b2GgPAiVTsNbnR83SwzyqVsRyiMcbhnRK3VhHUtAhfwl5LMlwsCYwJwJpyVD23W24/s320/Screenshot%202023-08-09%20at%2009.45.23.png" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWVAxczEJ6h8r7wNDC4VOUXhdmRNqkMZd9Umux6KeLFL2VaNCHh33ViYnDmTVVO4XnGOj-6sl9E-s6M6WwuMyl8kqz4VRIZzp9u1tzf2uQLl5E2cfhImRRcwlOzxRzwHe2jbT8vMuO8DpGIEsu5GX5XRSqUf3Z8iL0wy3s7Vag6r6d2qBioXij0rBeNdXT/s2654/Screenshot%202023-08-09%20at%2009.46.33.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1360" data-original-width="2654" height="164" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWVAxczEJ6h8r7wNDC4VOUXhdmRNqkMZd9Umux6KeLFL2VaNCHh33ViYnDmTVVO4XnGOj-6sl9E-s6M6WwuMyl8kqz4VRIZzp9u1tzf2uQLl5E2cfhImRRcwlOzxRzwHe2jbT8vMuO8DpGIEsu5GX5XRSqUf3Z8iL0wy3s7Vag6r6d2qBioXij0rBeNdXT/s320/Screenshot%202023-08-09%20at%2009.46.33.png" width="320" /></a></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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 <i>their</i> 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish; font-size: medium;"><b>3. Banking: The more globally interlocked nations become, the more power banks demand to keep our global Ship of State afloat</b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish; font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Mulish; font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAsKvPZksdCVgeRAsVZ90lUgyd-KtDh05L8vXjf5iYU_Z5-XBuQMYEBTZPSvnzEZnB0u16BZdtbg9dcjXGH6d98Y9_LFxUzR2Uss44NKicygE91AHkko22COI0r4-4oRvIl-iYyCTnAxWNwq4jNFLVSBBiL54WQMKXdgiaaAqzsp0Pnt7bHfIl0Z6xCTD3/s1020/Screenshot%202023-08-09%20at%2012.36.42.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1020" height="282" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAsKvPZksdCVgeRAsVZ90lUgyd-KtDh05L8vXjf5iYU_Z5-XBuQMYEBTZPSvnzEZnB0u16BZdtbg9dcjXGH6d98Y9_LFxUzR2Uss44NKicygE91AHkko22COI0r4-4oRvIl-iYyCTnAxWNwq4jNFLVSBBiL54WQMKXdgiaaAqzsp0Pnt7bHfIl0Z6xCTD3/s320/Screenshot%202023-08-09%20at%2012.36.42.png" width="320" /></a></span></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: Mulish;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">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</span></span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: Mulish;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">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, <i>Meditations on the Tarot</i>, 1972 (2019), transl. Robert Powell, pp77-79.</span></span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">In two words: TOTAL. CONTROL. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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 <i>bureaucratically</i> expresses what is natural to him <i>professionally</i>, but <b>not</b> evilly. It is surely non-controversial that bankers’ group-based or collective darlings are also children of bureaucracy: measurement, hard data, predictability, stability, <i>control</i>. 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">This depicts something foundational, but it’s a veneer. The bureaucratic ‘soul’ that cannot see <i>living</i> 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">Yes, <i>of course</i>, 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">So they will ignore our protests, as is ‘right’ for them to do, and push on with what must be done.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">But more and more I wonder which of my darlings <i>I</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 <i>there</i> – oh boy! – is the rub.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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 <i>seems</i> foundational – <i>inevitable to civilisation</i>. 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">Perhaps not. Perhaps something deeper is afoot, something truly foundational that lies <i>beneath</i> civilisation. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">The desire that rises in <i>my</i> heart in response to the above three (asserted) fundamentals is to penetrate beyond the earthly, the ‘dismal’, the ‘data-driven facts’ (<i>whose</i> data, interpreted using <i>whose</i> 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 <i>bludgeoning</i>). That, and heaps of money and power.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">I don’t know about you, but I’ve had about enough of this crap.</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Mulish;">Non-earthly fundamentals</span></h3><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6BBVVEyUPug71TBAHoxg4X2ROozyHwb_D1PU_NlddkWVpuMMGtlX97CPU9AYV1GCF9t_NgWo-mMFhVBIYNwoOJkItCA99CL9CljicxOf08ETzXvML77X3Ivpp5MAQW7VQingTx1T_fYzlRKzooBTuM9tTwF2JElVjF7mQNas7m6U-puEpTgkI8KY6Ir9w/s1280/snail.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="960" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6BBVVEyUPug71TBAHoxg4X2ROozyHwb_D1PU_NlddkWVpuMMGtlX97CPU9AYV1GCF9t_NgWo-mMFhVBIYNwoOJkItCA99CL9CljicxOf08ETzXvML77X3Ivpp5MAQW7VQingTx1T_fYzlRKzooBTuM9tTwF2JElVjF7mQNas7m6U-puEpTgkI8KY6Ir9w/s320/snail.jpeg" width="240" /></a></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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!</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">For example, how should we value – that word again! – this “Snail, the Artist” story? (Note we tend to be underwhelmed by <i>predictable stories</i>.) Pondering value in this very particular context, is it not right to ask how fundamental to reality value itself is? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">If reality is fundamentally mechanical, value is a very downstream phenomenon, and obviously of mechanical origins (to me an impossibility).</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">If reality is fundamentally organic, or living, or of God, value – in essence subjective reactions to perceived phenomena – becomes foundational.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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 <i>objectively</i> 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 <i>homo economicus</i>. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">But its foundational assumptions are rooted in civilisation, not reality itself. Humans are far more complicated than the economics caricature <i>homo economicus</i>, 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 <i>infinite</i>; 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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">Which is not to say, of course, it’s all without <i>value</i>. 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 (<i>and</i> because of!) the consistency of money and its valuable influences across civilisational time.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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:</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">1. No elite is wise <i>or</i> 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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 <i>humility</i> in this and all other regards such that <i>openness</i> 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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 <i>economically</i> 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">7. Power and control are seductive illusions. Life will <i>always</i> slip out from under our attempts to control it.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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 <i>in</i> 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">Finally, we must accept, as happily as we can, that this undertaking is not easy at all.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: Mulish;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">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 <i>swept away</i> 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 <i>success</i>, 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, <i>Meditations on the Tarot</i>, 1972 (2019), transl. Robert Powell, pp271-272 (emphases in original)</span></span></blockquote><p></p>Tobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16258136994278139356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7378568575885387942.post-49594925053076247852023-07-17T12:18:00.003+00:002023-07-24T10:09:56.471+00:00Wise up, humanity!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzbfZW7XCa60bcvqeEwLwJi1Acoj5e-Yg8AXiHkysWZPgtXOEpNqC8MEaV3fsTsjYN5QQHJblTODcSxq7zsbvTU1uJAcKEjVCmcIMMdjAyyTDwPCRVrIPNPsZ6yc1RtH7gQSTUdKTeMybHRhQunjKrcLY-UJ-XwwsqNcW6WpE2yEeUHo68RVBPEE1_ecw-/s1572/Screenshot%202023-07-17%20at%2013.03.34.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1056" data-original-width="1572" height="270" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzbfZW7XCa60bcvqeEwLwJi1Acoj5e-Yg8AXiHkysWZPgtXOEpNqC8MEaV3fsTsjYN5QQHJblTODcSxq7zsbvTU1uJAcKEjVCmcIMMdjAyyTDwPCRVrIPNPsZ6yc1RtH7gQSTUdKTeMybHRhQunjKrcLY-UJ-XwwsqNcW6WpE2yEeUHo68RVBPEE1_ecw-/w400-h270/Screenshot%202023-07-17%20at%2013.03.34.png" width="400" /></a><span style="text-align: left;"> </span></div><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"></span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">There’s something profoundly disheartening about the politics of our countries right now. The deep madness, I’m afraid, is British imperial thinking that has been taken over by the United States. My country, the United States, is unrecognisable now compared to even 20 or 30 years ago. I’m not sure – to tell you the truth – who runs the country; I do not believe it is the President of the United States right now. We are run by generals, by our security establishment. The public is privy to nothing. The lies that are told about foreign policy are daily and pervasive by a mainstream media that I can barely listen to or read any more. The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and the main television outlets are 100% repeating government propaganda by the day, and it’s almost impossible to break through.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">What is this about? Well, as you’ve heard, it’s about a madness of the United States to keep US hegemony, a militarised foreign policy dominated by the thinking of generals who are mediocre intellects, personally greedy, and without any sense, because their modus operandi is to make war. And they are cheerled by Britain, which is unfortunately, in my adult life, increasingly pathetic in being a cheerleader for the United States, for US hegemony, and for war. Whatever the United States says, Britain will say it 10 times more enthusiastically. The UK leadership could not love the war in Ukraine more. It’s the Great Second Crimean War for the British media and for the British political leadership. <br />– Professor Jeffrey Sachs in a 5 July 2023 speech to SHAPE (Saving Humanity and Planet Earth). Hat tip to <a href="https://youtu.be/CYOw4HFMW34?t=3874" target="_blank"><span style="color: #cc0000;">Alexander Mercouris</span></a></span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"></span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #666666; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Introduction</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">I watch on in growing hope as establishment figures from the highest levels of society slowly morph into “conspiracy theorists”. Of course they would not call themselves that, but those invested in and thus loyal to establishment (aka ‘mainstream’) narratives would not hesitate to label them so. RFK Jr., US presidential hopeful, currently doing surprisingly well in the polls, strikes me as an honourable man on a journey quite similar to the one Professor Sachs is walking. Both are men with open minds, a clear positive that, nowadays, will quickly get you labelled “conspiracy theorist”. And that the knives are now clearly out for Biden tells us The West knows Biden cannot win. With no one viable to replace Biden, and with RFK Jr. playing the independent-media circuit with aplomb, Kennedy may well be the next President of the United States.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">In times of historical decadence, it seems, dark ambitions kept hidden – because not quite ready for prime time, because still held somewhat in check by institutions established to that end – are suddenly forced into the open by a combination of hubris, ignorance, and event-driven desperation. Conspiring is but one facet of this revelatory process, incompetence another. How to precisely weigh the relative importance of each – and other factors – is beyond my pay grade, though I do hope to appeal to your hearts by drawing attention to interconnections between the bleeding obvious but wilfully ignored, the not-so obvious, and the mysterious.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">In that vein, this article is a counterbalance to <a href="https://thdrussell.blogspot.com/2023/07/postcard-from-ledge.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: #cc0000;">my previous musing</span></a>.</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #666666; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">A blitzkrieg recap of recent times</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"></span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">The seven most amazing events of my life: </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">1. Because of a virus, the constitution is suspended and an emergency regime of curfews and general psychological terror is established.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">2. Anyone who questions this state of affairs is no longer a citizen, but a “Schwurbler” [transl. someone who talks rubbish, used synonymously with “conspiracy theorist”], or even a Nazi.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">3. The suddenly omnipresent slogan "New Normal" is accepted uncritically, almost fervently. A return to the Old Normal – one hears and reads everywhere – will never happen. (How do they all know this with such certainty?)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">4. A leaden silence settles over the country. Those who think the new situation is wrong better keep their mouths shut, otherwise their social status will immediately drop to that of doggie doo-doo. People talk behind closed doors and meet conspiratorially.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">5. When a vaccine is rolled out, there is no general sigh of relief; instead we get the next mass hysteria. Those who, upon sober reflection, decide not to take the jab are mobbed in public, have to fear for their jobs and become social lepers.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">6. And then, just like that, the whole thing is over. Compulsory masking, compulsory vaccination, compulsory testing are but a distant memory, a disturbing dream receding into the shadows.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">7. Did anything even happen? Was there something? Everyone is acting as if nothing happened. Now there’s a war, and in the media disaster always travels alone. As if triggered by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, suddenly there is no more reporting of infection rates in the newspapers, and no one wants to be reminded of Corona.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">The Old Normal indeed returned. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">’Twas a mere trifle of billions of euros spent? Sure looks like it. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">But you can't just pull off a stunt like that and pretend everything is normal again. History judges mercilessly. Slowly, but mercilessly.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">I, for one, will never forget what happened and what an extremely ugly side society put on display. And I will share what I know. In books and films and wherever I can. My bet: this affair will be dealt with.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Maybe not for decades.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">But it will happen. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Because the critical mass of those who had to watch on aghast as the world around them went mad is large enough. I notice it every day and everywhere I go.<br />– German text shared anonymously on Telegram</span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">The WEF / WHO / Davos Crowd bet the farm on their desired utopian/dystopian vector set in motion with covid lockdowns. Part of that was of course continuation of preceding shenanigans, doings that include sufficient control of midwit ‘leaders’ – the Build Back Better Brigade – placed in positions of ‘authority’ across the Western world by this malicious grouping of deranged, wannabe Global Rulers. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Despite their best efforts, their plans fray and unravel all around us.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">About a year and a half ago, The West’s specially selected ‘leaders’ (narcissistic, ambitious, controllable, not very bright) have managerially, obediently doubled down on that bet, this time giddy with the belief that Russia is weak, corrupt, a paper tiger, a gas station masquerading as a country. This particular exciting venture is the neocons’ Grand Obsession, or more accurately that especially visceral gaggle of ideologues among them who Hate Russia! so blindly, they seem ready to destroy humanity in pursuit of their grubby Eurasian dreams. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Despite their best efforts, their plans fray and unravel all around us. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Their panic is now plain to see if you but look.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">What now characterises The West as a result of all this is the ideologically fanatical leading the vain, ambitious and shallow on ugly missions of destruction, with the bought-and-paid-for Western media acting as stenographers amplifying the ever deepening madness that has the West in its grip. Currently, most of the West’s peoples are some combination of too busy, too tired, too cynical or too paralysed by their angsty Stockholm Syndromes to respond with robust, meaningful protest. And of course there’s the vast institutional inertia grinding on and on and on.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">And yet the fact that Professor Sachs, among several others, has noticed <i>and is speaking out</i>, and also that there are multiple grassroots and professional fightbacks underway in the UK and US, as indeed across the world, is part of the evidence I draw on when arguing that the cultural soils beneath the now-panicked clown show propagated so garishly by Western media outlets are – though still mostly out of sight – now richly fertile, ready to birth new forms of governance in the West.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Meanwhile, we find ourselves confronted with a tragic mess of epochal proportions, utterly devoid of charm, grace or glory. I will never be able to convey how disgusted I am by what I am witnessing. After earnest and repeated promises to do “whatever it takes”, The West slammed NATO’s doors in Ukraine’s face at the recent Vilnius summit. They may enter those hallowed halls after they beat Russia. But if they can beat Russia, why would they so desperately want NATO membership? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">The West ‘wants’ (needs) a way out, but the only way out appears to be the blunt correction of abject defeat. It will try to stealthily shift the narrative away from Ukraine to The Next Scary Monster, or it will escalate yet again; perhaps today’s the attack on the Kerch bridge was that escalation. My gut and intuition tell me, however, that if they do indeed risk escalation, they will be thwarted by an adult response from Russia/China that stop events boiling over into WWIII.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Ultimately though, the quality of The West’s madness is so tawdry, so malign, so devoid of decency and compassion, it is simply beyond comprehension. The non-Western world watches on, incredulous, trying to keep as far from our crazed insanity as it can, and assiduously gets on with the business of setting up alternative international systems in which one day – I hope – a healed West will participate.</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #666666; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">The evil that men do</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">What The West has primarily squandered is its authority. Grown spiritually bankrupt, materialistic, pompous and narcissistic, The West has come to confuse raw power for authority. Blinded by its hubristic error, it has seduced itself into catastrophic overreach and destroyed yet another nation. It is also destroying itself. Its power, no longer rooted in true authority, is simply the repeated application of brute force, which is now <i>visibly waning</i> brute force.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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. <br />– Anonymous, Meditations on the Tarot, 1972 (2019), pp77-79.</span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"><i>Where there is authority, there compulsion is superfluous. </i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">And yet perhaps The West’s malfunction is not evil, perhaps it is something duller, less romantic than that. It is a very human madness of vain pride whose roots clutch deep into decades, centuries of entitlement and privilege, drawing on dynastic belief systems spawned in the slow heat of too much power, too little corrective feedback, too little wisdom.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"></span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">The “evil spirits” which deprive man of his freedom are not at all beings of the so-called “hierarchies of evil” or “fallen hierarchies”. Neither Satan, nor Belial, nor Lucifer, nor Mephistopheles has ever deprived anyone of his freedom. Temptation is their only weapon and this presupposes the freedom of he who is tempted. […]</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">[P]erverse human tendencies can deprive us of our freedom and enslave us. Worse still, they can avail themselves of our imagination and inventive faculties and lead us to creations which can become the scourge of mankind. […]</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Resist the devil, and the devil will be your friend. A devil is not an atheist; he does not doubt God. The faith which he lacks is faith in man. <br />– Ibid, pp61-63.</span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Resist The West, and it will crush you without mercy. Its vanity demands <i>total</i> obedience, the total subjugation of your free will to its demands.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">This is the pivotal question: What, in all this noise, has become of our faith in ourselves? How persuaded are we by the unceasing waves of dogwhistle messaging informing us we suck; we are vermin; useless eaters; greedy, porn-addicted breeders procreating too much, but producing nothing of <i>value</i>? How deeply have we internalised this cruel siren song? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"><i>Should</i> we go under? <i>Should</i> we allow ourselves to be culled like Marvel’s Thanos wanted? What are your thoughts on this oddly titillating moral conundrum?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">In my previous post, I presented that part of me that forever vacillates, forever ‘progresses’ from one seemingly solid analysis to another. Like all such traits, such vacillation is boon and bane. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">We need faith and skepticism both. The former without the latter leads to fanaticism and machine-like obedience. The latter without the former leads to Hamlet-like inaction and erodes our courage.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">My own faith, my <i>knowing</i>, is that humanity is here for a reason, and is on the cusp of rediscovering this truth. We are <b>not</b> pointless. But because free will is sacred and we are trusted with it, we are free to go wildly astray. Astray, our adventures teach us much – though very slowly at the collective level –, and one means of their teaching is great suffering. Sadly – cries the ego – it is a rinse-and-repeat process.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Note, however, that it is “great suffering”, not “great pleasure”! Something in us yearns for nobler lives, something more fitting to our destiny. As the saying goes, “Respect existence or expect resistance!” We resist because something noble in us <i>must</i> resist. We resist because we perceive something profoundly dysfunctional in tyranny. Of course it is never all of humanity resisting as one, but enough of us do resist, and ever more fiercely as times grow ever darker. Human nobility is a flame that can never be fully extinguished. We will <i>always</i> find a way to fight back.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">What we need to understand, is what we are fighting <i>for</i>.</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #666666; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">The dilemma of dilemmas</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Apparently, it costs $20 to $30 to recycle one solar panel, but $1 to $2 to leave it in a landfill to rot. This factoid is a numerical reflection of the image that heads this article. The reason we ‘value’ the latter over the former method for dealing with old solar panels is because we measure value with numbers. In other words, we appreciate value in too coarse, too cumbersome a way at the cultural level. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">A science rooted solely in intelligence seems to tend to destructive technologies. Rooted also in wisdom, it would tend to the constructive. Consequently, one could argue (as I do) that some kind of return to God, to the primacy of consciousness, to the ineffable, is required to <i>afford</i> a shift of emphasis, a shift in the cultural value systems that direct our science, economics and politics. In my analysis, in my <i>intuition</i>, it is precisely this quality of shift that characterises the evolution underway in the cultural soils just beneath our collective perception.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">My argument is that this is but one manifestation of that old dilemma, quantity versus quality. It is a very specific dilemma that is not easy to resolve. Or, better perhaps, is a dilemma <i>we should not try to resolve</i>. Part of the Western way seems to me to be a dialectical need to tease out dilemmas in order to choose one side at the expense of the other, as if compelled by an unseen urge to put one half of reality to shame while idolising the other.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Etymologically, a dilemma is a choice between two accepted assumptions or propositions. Positing such between “quality” and “quantity” is usefully illustrative, precisely because one should not want to shame the one and idolise the other. But isn’t this precisely what the West has done these last few centuries? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Quality is ineffable, unmeasurable. Quantity is its ‘opposite’; we love to grade everything, set endless milestones and benchmarks, we worship precision, admire suspension bridges and internal combustion engines, respect the hard fact of money in the bank and solid trade surpluses, etc. But <i>feelings</i> about these things? Subjective <i>impressions</i> about what it all might mean? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">“Commit it then to the flames”! </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">If a thing cannot be measured, if it contains “nothing but sophistry and illusion”, it is a thing to be banished from our attention. This 18th century call to action from David Hume is surely emblematic of how the West has treated reality for about three centuries. This approach has produced engineering marvels and astonishing increases in material wealth, but also much to lament. There is plainly more to reality than that which can be precisely measured. Dignity springs to mind, as do love, honour, friendship, trust, wisdom, to name but a few. None of these could be thought of as unimportant. None can be measured.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">We are therefore faced with what I’m provocatively calling the dilemma of dilemmas, by which I mean a cultural inflection point in which the consequences of having idolised quantity for too long, and of having no cultural means, or wisdom, for taking quality effectively into account, are coming home to roost. We have paired reality into a bewitching array of dilemmas, a process whose advantages – precision, clarity, predictability, certainty – have somehow morphed into a soul-smothering quagmire whose ugliest poster child is Ukraine, closely followed by the bureaucratic nannying and paranoid fear mongering of lockdowns, compulsory vaccination and medical tyranny. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Our digital future of 0s and 1s is upon us!</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #666666; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Back to faith, back to reality</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">How backward and inappropriate this concluding subheading must seem to most. What sort of charlatan, what manner of snake-oil salesman would dare headline a phrase that equates faith with reality!? But I go further still. I dare to advocate a re-embracing of superstition. There be gold in them thar hills, the gold of encoded wisdom.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Wisdom cannot be purchased or stolen. You <i>earn</i> the Holy Grail; you cannot win it by chance. Nor can you, by logical extension, earn it and then gift it to others unearned. Accepting this is so, accepting further that wisdom resists measurement and definition, if we do want to make our culture alert to the value of earning and appreciating wisdom, if we do want to draw attention to wisdom as a most noble quality, generally and across time, we are consequently tasked with encoding the many pathways to wisdom in our initiatory and preparatory customs, habits, rituals and, yes, even superstitions. I suspect this set of solutions to the problem of preserving wisdom across time is broadly familiar to all cultures.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">This is not to say superstition and its friends should usurp rationality or the scientific method, rather that it be newly understood, welcomed even, as a valued partner in establishing the many interweaving processes of social governance. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">But our centuries-long focus on quantity has sped us up into a white-noise frenzy of perpetual economic growth, 24/7 entertainment and narcissistic abandon. We are cynical, exhausted, emptied. Slowing down to taste the gentle pleasures of mindfulness, the calm solidity of patience, and more importantly to <i>enjoy them</i>, will be challenging, to say the least. I note, however, that Robert Kennedy’s campaign has wisdom and love as foundational elements. I note too that Charles Eisenstein is one of Kennedy’s campaign advisors. All that I write here is thus finding its way into the mainstream via powerful channels. Seeing as the meat and potatoes of this article are more than a little Eisensteinian, and seeing too that this perspective is, one way or the other, as old as time, I hope you can begin to feel the inevitability of wisdom’s return. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Unbalance wants to correct, disease to ease. Mysteriously, reality always finds the right vehicles for effecting needed correction. I believe Robert Kennedy is one of the more prominent, though there are tens of thousands of less known advocates of what needs to be done. It is my firm conviction that we cannot be stopped.</span></p>Tobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16258136994278139356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7378568575885387942.post-85870900672019707642023-07-11T08:21:00.005+00:002023-07-23T11:04:18.209+00:00Postcard from the ledge<p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"></span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">It’s a mess out there. – Me.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Maybe that’s a good thing. – Me.</span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"></span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #666666; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Introduction</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">It’s been a while. There has been much for me to do in too little time. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Today is Sunday. I’m alone in the house, and my project work is done, for now. Though insanely busy these last three months or so, I’ve been deep in thought whenever space and quiet allowed, and while in that quiet noticing further elements of the body of my thought disintegrating with the disintegration of the Western world.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">This is a lengthy postcard from that windy ledge.</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #666666; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">A breakdown of categories</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Charles Eisenstein’s career is aimed at inviting as many of us as possible to notice and then advance “the more beautiful world our hearts tell us is possible”. It is a romantic line, and a romantic vector, one that attracts me deeply. Lately though … less and less. I spy many ‘problems’ beneath its pretty surface.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">The first has been visible to me for a while: “more beautiful” on whose definition? Beauty lies infamously in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps this is not a problem, perhaps this is in fact part of the solution, a strength. Diversity is the spice of life, right? But don’t we have that already, anyway, and in abundance? Yes, there is homogeneity and groupthink aplenty, but not to the point of an outright grey-washing of everything Out There. The tensions, the disagreements, the endless cultural fault lines speak of a very spicy, very interesting period of history. Multiple ideas of what we find beautiful are in ‘competition’ right now. Some favour safety, others risk. Some favour escape from limitation into who knows what digital utopia, others yearn for a return to tradition and immutable categories. I am drawn to love as it relates to wisdom and health while others enjoy the creature comforts modernity provides. Some are engineers, some accountants, some are corporate career folk, others mavericks. On and on the diversity goes. There is enough diversity in evidence to occupy whole oceans. To argue otherwise is to wilfully overlook the obvious.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">And yes, of course there are terrible, terrible problems, and, yes, it’s very hard to deny that humanity stands trembling and afraid before a mighty historical crossroads – or mighty historical spaghetti junction – but this is not an unprecedented state of affairs.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">These simple observations eat at me. They always have. I am by nature a doubter who doubts the very ideas I doubt into temporary existence. There are certain certainties in me – <i>there is nothing but God</i>, for example – but how to honour them, which constellation of ‘solutions’ is practical and fitting to the times … these are different challenges entirely to identifying Good Principles. And while there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come, nothing is more impotent than one whose time lies far in the future.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Categories are indeed in breakdown, and yet our past is riddled with such turbulence. This is nothing new. Well, not 100% new; history doesn’t repeat, it rhymes, as the saying goes. There are, despite such emollient platitudes, very reasonable grounds for concern This Time, such as the complex supply chains and just-in-time delivery processes that, in the event of a broad collapse, would present unprecedented societal challenges. But perhaps this very risk keeps things tied securely together? Perhaps this existentially important complexity – deadly over-complication? – is our best insurance <i>against</i> collapse?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Furthermore, civilisational collapse is a misunderstood creature. Imagination has space to blossom in the dearth of information civilisational breakdown leaves in its wake. Apparently, “collapse” is now seen as too dramatic a word. Affairs simply transition to less documented times in which new ways of doing things have a greater chance of winning out than during more stable periods.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Or perhaps this time will indeed be different, who can say.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Catastrophists enjoy imagined (or real) approaching doom. Which mostly never comes. We have all watched countless dread predictions come and go unfulfilled. Who remembers the buzz around Y2K? Not only does catastrophism sell books and papers and movies, we humans are often darkly fascinated by catastrophe and can magic ourselves into a bewitching array of collective hysteria, when mood and moment permit.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Categories are breaking down once again, but nobody knows where this particular iteration will take us, nor how turbulent it will be, nor how much of humanity is bound up in it, nor how deeply. Some folks love to pontificate – I’m one of them –, but an embarrassingly high percentage of our output is just excited chatter on the wind.</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #666666; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">To pontificate, or not to pontificate</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">The answer is yes. Yes, I shall pontificate. It is my wont.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">To recap the core thesis as it once tottered about in my mind:</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Money is a cultural technology required by the dissolution of trust that is but one consequence of civilisation-scale ‘communities’. When communities are sufficiently small, when specialisation has not taken hold, when social affairs are intimate and all-including, money (as unit of account and store/measure of value) is not needed. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">But things change. Societal evolution of a civilisational stripe includes the establishment of technologies such as private property and a state of some kind to protect it. This in turn produces class hierarchies, the consequent need for statecraft, and the need for money to glue it all together. As such, money effects trust among a community of strangers where far earlier there were no day-to-day strangers to speak of.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">But things change. It just so happens money requires scarcity. This is a technological artefact of money in my view, not an immutable consequence of so-called ‘infinite’ wants dismally abutting finite resources to produce tedious supply-demand-price intersections so beloved of economists.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Things change. Scarcity appears to become ‘solvable’, slowly loses its dark charisma. Meanwhile, consumerism’s charms age and wither. And yet money remains the glue that holds all things together. What to do?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Things change. Digital technologies make (potentially all) information available to everyone at all times. This punches the dark arts of statecraft right in the solar plexus. When your chances of success at a Very Difficult Job Indeed require almost watertight and perpetual control of The Narrative, and that now at virtually global scale, the internet is a beast you must tame, pronto. But how? Censorship is what nazis do, and <i>nobody</i> likes those guys.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Things change. People dumb down because dumbness breeds further dumbness as society iterates forwards generationally. Wisdom cannot be handed over neatly to our progeny. To make matters worse, the danger and adventure humans need to grow in wisdom recedes inexorably as the hunger for ‘safety’ and Predictable Outcomes radiates ever outwards like a slow storm. The human crop harvested to produce the ‘leaders’ needed to usher in the glittering dystopian technotopia that will solve all ills via Change You Can Believe In is not remotely of sufficient quality. The human crop is now almost wholly infected by the narcissism that has been running rampant for decades. Those unaffected are unwanted, and anyway want nothing less than leading us dumbed-down oiks to some New Jerusalem.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">What to do?</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #666666; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Communities R Us?</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">What is community? I don’t know, but what it once was and what it might be in future are likely two very different things. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">We need each other differently now. In days of yore, we needed each other existentially. Today, it’s as if we need each other as consumer items. Is this a bad thing? I’ve argued repeatedly that it is, that “meaning” is what humans need, not shallow, throw-away pleasures. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Humans need humans, this is certain, but how? Meaningfully, and in unchanging ways? To raise barns for each other? To harvest each other’s crops? Stitch each other’s wounds? Rear each other’s young?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Or play online computer games together and have endless fun, with robot slaves cleaning up after us?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">In a rain forest, the animals and vegetation take care of each other’s waste. One entity’s waste is another entity’s food. There is in fact no waste. By stark contrast, the domestic world brings with it, unintended, the need to clean up after ourselves. This is kind of against the grain, biologically speaking. No other animal does this. So why should we want to? Self-discipline? Maybe, but <i>forever</i>? Foreverever?? Aren’t we always striving to head back to our ‘perfect’ (idealised) jungle-forest home where our mess was cleaned up after us by other beings, whom we often thanked by gratefully eating them? Only this time around, we aim to recreate that ‘paradise’ with robot slaves, and gaze out across forests of mechanised vertical farms from our climate-controlled, sky-high apartments…</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">So what is the <i>true</i> character of the community humans <i>must</i> have? Play, or self-discipline? Both?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Much of civilisational effort is the manufacture of solutions to this irksome issue of waste and work, from animal and human slaves to mechanical and robot slaves. What’s wrong with that vector? I see a certain beauty in the minimalism of a disciplined life of low waste and simple living, but I’m not ethically against robot slaves. I’m not against ‘solutions’ to the ‘problem’ of ‘waste’. I’m not against technology, at all. I’m not against ‘sloth’ either, except in the context of a civilisational phase that requires its opposite as a matter of survival. After all, the animal sloths that live well enough are not immoral creatures. They’re just doing their thing. And there is a place for their thing.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Another ‘problem’ of civilisation that dovetails with the above is one-size-fits-all ‘solutions’. Because communities that take care of each other disappear as states grow in skill and size, intimate knowledge of each and every citizen disappears, and each citizen grows increasingly dependent on the state. At some point, case-by-case remedies for each and every unique injury are utterly unaffordable. Thousands, millions, pay a bitter price for this harsh reality, which is also the soil of much corruption and nihilism. Bureaucratic, form-based, statistics-based ‘solutions’ predominate. We become Kafka cogs in a dystopian machine, anonymous, meaningless, quietly desperate. As this progresses, so we dumb down, increasingly dependent on remote ‘experts’ who know the best ‘solutions’ to our (infantile) ‘problems’. And it’s horrible. But also not really. We seep into our situation like spilled coffee into an old sofa, to get stuck there forever, too timid to dare anything different. For the most part.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">This is the price we pay for the richly complex journey civilisation is. Except “we” is a very wide scattering of outcomes that is far from ‘fair’ to most. But who really knows what </span><span style="font-family: "Barlow Condensed";">“fair”</span><span style="font-family: "Barlow Condensed";"> means? And those who claim they do, can they deliver their ‘fairness’ without accidentally spawning yet another dystopia, as the dream-crushing momenta of civilisation’s autonomic behaviours reassert themselves?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">And can we really insist on a deliberate return to a context in which we need each other existentially, just so as to recreate the communities that are our healthiest social context? If indeed they are our healthiest social context.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Or can we become mature enough to produce graceful responses to these dull and terrible horrors, this overly mechanical time that is the post-modern era? Is this, my romantic prayer, simply too much to ask?</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #666666; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">The more things change, the more they stay the same</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">And yet and yet and yet…</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">I am a man who for ultimately unknowable reasons chose a ‘spiritual’ set of ambitions over those on offer from the world of corporate careerism. At least, that’s how it <i>seems</i> to me at the moment; I’m increasingly unsure the dichotomy just implied really exists anywhere but in my labyrinthine reasoning. I am also a man with a family, four cats, and a dog. This rare combination of factors is not without its considerable stresses. So much so, I find myself wondering too much what’s what, repeatedly reassessing everything as the world around me decays. The answers I produce may be logically and rhetorically sound, but they are also wildly at odds with Life Out There. This practical dissonance appears to strip them of (functional) validity. Who’s right here? Yours Truly The Weirdo, or, in the ‘opposite’ corner, The Great They?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Like everyone else, I do not know how to measure success. In the absence of clear feedback, I plod on, do what I can, and struggle manfully to learn from my repeat-pattern ‘mistakes’. All to grow in grace and wisdom. On the whole, I’d give myself maybe a 4 out of 10 so far.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">In my eyes, there can be nothing more ugly, more terrible, than the Russia-Ukraine war, nothing more darkly moribund than the WEF’s plans, the WHO’s pandemic treaty, the “safetyism” and compulsive virtue signalling that characterise the burgeoning totalitarianism that is corporatism’s Frankenstein monster. For the love of God I cannot make my peace with any of it! Why not? Have I correctly reasoned and intuited myself to the wiser, healthier take on all this, or am I but a stubborn old goat?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">I have a memory that I now believe was one of my first dreams. I used to think it really happened, but my mother never mentioned the event while alive, so I think it must have been a dream. That I had it is incredible, considering who I am and these times the adult me is living through.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"><i>I am a toddler at a party, in a room playing with other toddlers. We ‘telepathically’ agree to go downstairs to visit our parents. We toddle and crawl to the stairs in our seeming multitude, but can’t descend them with skill. A small waterfall of screaming toddlers tumbles down the stairs and piles up at the bottom. I am the only one who manages to hold on to a bannister spindle. I hold on for dear life as if clinging to the edge of a cliff. From this vantage point, I see the shadowy shapes of our parents hurrying to the smoked-glass door of the room they are in, and let go. As I start to fall, the memory/dream ends.</i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Obviously, the tumbling toddlers represent those who just go along with societal moral decay, incapable of mounting any resistance. I am a lone but pointless exception holding on grimly against the flow of events. When I see authority figures about to remedy the situation, I yield and go with the flow, though I think I wanted to hold on until rescued, as if that would have been a noble accomplishment worthy of their praise. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Am I about to yield ‘in real life’? The pressure of the flow of events is mighty. Resisting it, when you are essentially a lone wolf, as I am, is quite thankless, and draining. For me, there is no community out there that holds any lasting attraction. I have looked around, volunteer all my spare hours to those who want my technical help (IT skills), but am not attracted to fully join up. And it seems to me that no one is. We all like our customised creature comforts too much. We don’t need each other all that much. A little, perhaps, but not much. Aren’t we faking it?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">More and more, this does not bother me. But one outcome of this cool observation that people, generally, are happy enough in their own four walls, is a growing conviction that my spiritual endeavours are misplaced, or <i>misapplied</i>, that I have misunderstood their character. Does this mean that I have likewise misunderstood the character of this historical moment? I suspect so.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">I suspect that events are going to morph in unexpected ways that are both wildly anticlimactic and yet powerfully subversive, with a mix of contradictory ‘returns’ to several traditions, though as altered by evolved perceptions thereof. At the same time, these changes will produce, almost stealthily, new technologies and solutions that will bring about deep change. Much of what is ‘needed’ to effect all this is likely already embedded, but the wisdom of those ushering all this in is gravely limited, so limited in fact that their expectations will be dashed. Here I’m thinking of AI and its many Kafkaesque applications. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">I am one of those whose wisdom is simply not up to the task of seeing how things are about to play out. There may well be much turbulence across all societies on earth, but also perhaps not. There will be, I suspect, a re-separation of cultures, but one that mysteriously fosters renewed and deeper communications. Our lost youth will want to learn, and be able to do so, the new skills and social-governance methodologies required by changing circumstances. There will be incredible technological breakthroughs that seem par for the course: revolutionary, but oddly seamless. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Some mix of these and other such things. Our many cultural soils are growing fertile just beneath our perception, their features and cracks opening to new germination and seeding that will prove Just So for how they have evolved, for the wounds that have enriched them.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">“Have I not guided you to where you need to be?”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">God said that. To me, when I was at my most desperately angry, when I raised my fist against Him like a spear. By “you”, I think He meant us all. And I could feel His deeply disarming smile course through me like a river.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">(Note he said “need”, not “want”!)</span></p>Tobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16258136994278139356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7378568575885387942.post-67024526546411532542023-04-15T11:41:00.007+00:002023-07-23T11:05:15.139+00:00Of cats, cones and painkillers<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjWNts0Q-_iiakNU3d3td4kkoTWBsNjMZ4NME1p95bPas-M6ww6WpKvkqn6ayNSrcRqrx81nEsZ4KYkk4d_SLEbDSL_zuyH0-MO-MMhA0TxrHyBatS-S3wyEO0wP-EWARqUFT_LKqOKPvbfTXKvfCkdba2OytENnBU1X9HUaHi71jPzsk60vpc4CDb0w/s1862/Screenshot%202023-04-15%20at%2012.31.47.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="530" data-original-width="1862" height="108" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjWNts0Q-_iiakNU3d3td4kkoTWBsNjMZ4NME1p95bPas-M6ww6WpKvkqn6ayNSrcRqrx81nEsZ4KYkk4d_SLEbDSL_zuyH0-MO-MMhA0TxrHyBatS-S3wyEO0wP-EWARqUFT_LKqOKPvbfTXKvfCkdba2OytENnBU1X9HUaHi71jPzsk60vpc4CDb0w/w378-h108/Screenshot%202023-04-15%20at%2012.31.47.png" width="378" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: "Barlow Condensed";"><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Ashitaka and Kashmir proudly sporting our Wolfdog-Malamute’s cone (and as kittens furthest right) </span></div></span><p></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #666666; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Introduction</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">We have four cats. One is the mother of the twins above, the fourth a rescued black tom called Nokoribi. We’ve known the twins since birth, so, perhaps more than Firefly (mother) and Nokoribi, they feel like our own children to us. Caring for living beings, providing them with everything they need to survive and thrive, is a sacred and daunting duty. When it comes to caring for non-human animals, one is often obliged to do things to them they most definitely would rather did not happen. What is in your heart when you grievously intervene to curtail another’s free will is very important to how those interventions are experienced by those you care for, and thus how they recover.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">This is a true musing about lockdowns, medical interventions and what quality of care might bring them about. </span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #666666; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Too many cats!</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">We have four cats. The small street we live on is home to about 10, and neighbouring streets are home to many more. So there are lots of cats around these parts, and all across the UK; we don’t need them breeding like flies, to put it crudely. When their time was due, we had the twins – boys both – neutered. Ashitaka’s operation ran smoothly. Kashmir’s followed a rather different course.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">The vet’s fondling informed her that only one of Kashmir’s testicles had descended. <i>Bring him back in six weeks</i>, she said, <i>and we’ll take another look</i>. Six weeks later, his second testicle was still nowhere to be found. The more expensive, hunt-the-ball operation would begin that very morning, but first a few questions. How was his most recent stool? <i>Soft</i>, I replied, <i>mousse-like</i>. <i>Ah … well … better not operate, just in case. Reschedule, please</i>. So we drove Kashmir home, unscathed, for a second time. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">He must have wondered why, randomly, we took him to see an odd-smelling woman who fondled his scrotum, only to drive him back home again. Twice.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">10 days later, though, the fondling was finally followed by an operation. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">When we collected him, the vet seemed a little discombobulated. She wasn’t sure if she had found the second testicle. She had sent a sample to the lab and would find out within two weeks if it was indeed testicular matter she had cut out. We would not be charged for a subsequent operation if such were needed.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Unnerved, we drove poor Kashmir home. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Still heavily sedated, he was in no pain. Back in his familiar environment, as soon as I opened the door of his carry-cage, he bolted out and ran up the stairs. He was by turns exuberantly playful and excessively affectionate, behaviour we had seen before, after Firefly’s spaying, while she was still sedated. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">When we saw his wounds, we were alarmed. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Of course he was trying to clean them. We did not want to cone him, as both his brother and mother had reacted wildly when coned after their operations, and we figured he would react similarly. We let them deal with their situation cone-free. After gentle correcting, both learned to leave their wounds alone. We felt it safer to take the same approach with Kashmir. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">But the larger of his three scars, right down the middle of his belly and about three inches long, started pumping out a clear, pinkish liquid we later learned was plasma. It was horrible to watch. Had he been properly stitched up? Was it a botched operation? When we then coned him, he thrashed and writhed, causing more plasma to pump out. He left pools of it wherever he stopped. So we removed the cone again and resolved to be by his side, in shifts, to gently stop him licking his wound, until it had properly closed. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">This did not work. The leaking plasma matted his fur, which he desperately wanted to clean. This made it very hard to police his cleaning effectively, to make sure he was not cleaning and worrying his wounds. The hours crawled by but the wound would not close. And he was too playful, active, insistent … uncontrollable. We had enjoyed success with this policing strategy with Nokoribi after a cat-fight wound had become an abscess. Not so with Kashmir. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Finally, though not trusting the competence of the veterinary surgery much at all, we called up and asked for advice. We were told not to worry, that weeping wounds were not uncommon, that we really had to cone Kashmir and wait out his thrashing and writhing. We followed these instructions and, after about 20 minutes, he accepted the cone and settled down somewhat.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">But his wound would not stop weeping, even through the next day. In no pain, he was still too physical, we thought.</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #666666; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">To kill pain, or not to kill pain, that is the question</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Pain is information, feedback from our body about how to behave, what precautions to take. Sedated, Kashmir behaved far too recklessly – it seemed to us – for his wound to heal. We had been given fairly potent painkillers we were to administer 24 hours after the operation, then repeatedly in 24-hour intervals until they ran out. We discussed whether to use Kashmir’s pain to control his behaviours for his long-term benefit instead, and decided this was, on balance, the wiser course.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Next day, coned and miserable, his pain made its presence felt. He hunkered on the blanket we had prepared for him and slept, rousing only when thirst or hunger became too strong to ignore. Coned throughout, in serious pain, we brought water and food to him. He was with us in bed for days. We surrounded him with love, and it was clear to us our love, our deep care, gently eased its way through his balled defensiveness. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">The wound stopped weeping. Every opportunity we had to inspect his wounds told us he was healing beautifully. It was a very moving experience, though one shot through with concern.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Our three-way bond grew deeper. Kashmir knew, as all non-human animals know, that we meant him no harm, that our emanations were loving, that he was being bathed in love from morning to night and back around again. But we don’t want to put him through another operation again. The results from the lab were inconclusive: Whatever it was that the vet had partially cut out of Kashmir, it was not testicular. In Germany, vets use an ultrasound device to locate the undescended testicle before operating. Not so here in the UK. So not only was the operation three times more expensive than it would have been had both testicles descended, it was an ugly failure. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Our experience with the medical profession, especially after lockdowns and ‘vaccine’ mandates, after being on the receiving end of its opprobrium and icy disdain for daring to disagree with its assessments, has been badly negative more often than not. This includes an almost fatal mishandling of my wife’s hyperactive thyroid that went undiagnosed throughout an entire pregnancy, and the non-diagnosis and arrogant disinterest in my own extreme shoulder pain, which turned out to be a very bad case of frozen shoulder and bursitis. There are good doctors of course, but one has to find them. It is worse in the UK than in Germany, and I can’t speak for other countries, but our experience has distanced us from the medical profession. Our trust in it has been cut to the bone.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Watching Kashmir manage his healing as guided by his pain was, as said, a beautiful thing, though also fraught. I dealt with my own potentially deadly illness, possibly c19, which I think became pneumonia, without any help at all from any doctor or hospital. I allowed my body’s communications to guide me. I stayed calm throughout. People who care about me were around me. I made a full recovery. Perhaps this was reckless of me, but my personal conviction is that we moderns are too afraid of pain, and of death. There is most certainly a place for the wonder of modern pain-management drugs – I would never argue otherwise – but who can put their hand on their heart and say we have not coddled ourselves too much?</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #666666; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Wisdom is the doctor</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">The body knows. When we freak out, our body cannot be heard. Any kind of hysteria is a wildfire-malfunctioning that burns all useful information to ash. The more we are exposed to learning how to handle our pains and illnesses, the wiser we become, the more seriously we take risks to our health, and the more confidence we have in what the body can do. Health-for-profit is bound by its own economic logic to interrupt this, to intervene, to exploit.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Specialisation makes wisdom seem remote from us; we outsource most of what we could do ourselves to others. If we perceive this dynamic as counter to our interests, we can choose to learn how to help ourselves where possible. While I do not advise anyone on their own health concerns, I do humbly suggest my reasoning here is generally warranted. <i>An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure</i>, goes the saying. Wise prevention and wise self-management harm health-industry profits. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Imagine a world without junk food, imagine populations everywhere thriving from meaningful contributions to their communities. Imagine a world of healthy soil, water and air, of social governance structured by transparent knowledge accessible to all, a world in which the bling and glitter of consumerism were a distant memory. What kind of health industry would fit such a world? One very different to the one we have.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">It is its very difference, so easy to picture in broad brushstrokes, that is so redolent of what ails us today. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Fear does not foster health. I did not feel the interventions of lockdowns and mask and ‘vaccine’ mandates during the ‘pandemic’ to be healthful, or loving. Corona measures were both fear inducing and induced, and thus as far from wisdom as it is possible to be. Kashmir knew my wife and I were wholly concerned with his wellbeing as we locked him down and coned him. Sometimes these things must be done. But I know management of whatever c19 is/was was not similarly intentioned. It felt sinister from the start: totalitarian, designed to herd people into something … into more obedience and away from wisdom and love. Towards more fear. And now 15 minute cities feel the same, like a continuation of sinister intent. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Am I allowed to ask whether global warming is a bad thing? Is there truly such a thing as “runaway” global warming? Or is the fear too great to permit disagreement, to admit discussion. Why is “anti-vaxxer” a pejorative? When I try to discuss such things, I am told there is only one side: Science. “If you question me, quite frankly, you question the science.” I cannot imagine a more religious, or more chilling, statement.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">In what kind of system are we living when there is only one side?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">In fear, it is as if our fear is the only thing keeping us alive. Those who question our behaviours and beliefs are thus dangerous fools. We need our precious fear to make it through! But <i>all</i> emotions feel justified. Indeed, while felt, all emotions <i>must</i> be justified – i.e. have a cause –; otherwise they wouldn’t occur. Earned wisdom penetrates this sense that an emotion triggered by an issue is somehow The Truth of that issue. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">It is utterly non-controversial that fear is bad for health. Why were/are we kept in fear, why do we seem to want to remain afraid? I look around me and see no imminent danger, but almost everyone seems existentially afraid. Why? This state of affairs hasn’t materialised out of nowhere, uncaused. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Kashmir is not afraid of me. He knows I love him and want what’s best for him. He trusts me totally. Being forced or finessed via a generalised Stockholm-Syndrome into ‘trusting’ authority has very different psychological colours. You can <i>feel</i> (<b>not</b> emote) the difference between genuinely earned trust, and ‘trust’ forced upon you by whomever, just as you can feel the difference between an imagined health-care system rooted in wisdom and love, and one rooted in the profit motive.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">This, for me, is the lesson of the pain of this historical moment. This, for me, is the cultural wisdom these horribly interesting times can yield. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"><i>Will</i> yield; as the pressure mounts, our hunger for something wiser, something truly organic, is becoming irresistible.</span></p>Tobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16258136994278139356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7378568575885387942.post-63959134346070027052023-04-10T10:50:00.003+00:002023-07-23T11:06:19.949+00:00Ideology: the enemy within<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjulY3jaU4xoHdhB0aFzNdyRHCVd5e8nFoF2LrD_MrVFr15XJwbpEyGnyvuP-1x4Wgc18U4hliTykkRYE9jsv5RH4FqDkZG9uitoyEOboeaY5NTdvd5kRTmKAXE3gte3amw7iYQNc6tkPGLJlmw-pWmQD75t9K8Z2KSeK7wsaLi4g18WTgJLYCoAVPIkQ/s1362/Screenshot%202023-04-10%20at%2010.43.46.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1316" data-original-width="1362" height="386" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjulY3jaU4xoHdhB0aFzNdyRHCVd5e8nFoF2LrD_MrVFr15XJwbpEyGnyvuP-1x4Wgc18U4hliTykkRYE9jsv5RH4FqDkZG9uitoyEOboeaY5NTdvd5kRTmKAXE3gte3amw7iYQNc6tkPGLJlmw-pWmQD75t9K8Z2KSeK7wsaLi4g18WTgJLYCoAVPIkQ/w400-h386/Screenshot%202023-04-10%20at%2010.43.46.png" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #cc0000; font-family: Barlow Condensed; font-size: x-small;"><a href="https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1645071996802269184" target="_blank">Source</a></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">When you <i>know</i> with stainless-steel conviction you are wholly right in your worldview, any disagreement with your position is evil and may not be countenanced. Without knowing it, <i>you</i> have become the enemy within, but can only see enemies, potential or actual, everywhere else. This is the state of being of the ideologue.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Ideological fervour blinds us to nuance, causes us to react to any disagreement as unforgivable heresy, to react to pragmatic subtlety as malicious subversion, and so on. It has an hysterically narcissistic quality, as if the rest of reality must orbit our needs and wants as obediently as planets orbit the sun; anything less than total subservience is a flagrant attack. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">This is how I see <i>The</i> West. It is not, I should point out, how I see <i>the</i> West, which is in my view suffering, mostly unwittingly, a kind of <a href="https://thdrussell.blogspot.com/2018/05/stockholm-syndromes-r-us.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: #cc0000;">mass Stockholm Syndrome</span></a> as it struggles to survive and appease the insanity of its leaders, an insanity the West is still too afraid to face. I believe events are now overtaking us, though, and will soon force our eyes open.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Barlow Condensed";">“Free will is sacred” is a </span><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">refrain I use perhaps too much. I also say “there is nothing but God”, also perhaps too much. These statements do not constitute ideological fervour; they instil in me a profound reverence for other people’s godliness, and a humble conviction that everyone must develop their own wisdom <i>their</i> way. </span><span style="font-family: "Barlow Condensed";">“</span><span style="font-family: "Barlow Condensed";">Grass does not grow faster when you shout at it.</span><span style="font-family: "Barlow Condensed";">”</span><span style="font-family: "Barlow Condensed";"> Each of us is the creator of their own wisdom. The result is a uniqueness that makes us impossibly beautiful, beautiful beyond comprehension and description. This is what supports my assertion, or position, that </span><a href="https://thdrussell.blogspot.com/2023/02/a-defence-of-health.html" style="font-family: "Barlow Condensed";" target="_blank"><span style="color: #cc0000;">Health <=> Love <=> Wisdom</span></a><span style="font-family: "Barlow Condensed";">, a ‘trinitarian’ unity or symbiont that is the dynamic essence of reality, of “there is nothing but God”. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">What I see behind the rapidly collapsing West is a sickening or perverted rejection of this deepest truth. The collapse is bringing to the surface, for us all to see, accumulated poisons and bile we must confront and process before we can evolve to something healthier. It is a lengthy and horrible ordeal.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Barlow Condensed";">This deepest truth situates in each of us final responsibility for our own wisdom, our health, for the quality of our love. This responsibility is our duty, the service we can offer to the world, that we can offer to God, in glad reverence and humility, if we so choose. But the last thing this commitment is, is easy. We can only fail, repeatedly, to then be helped back to our feet to find our own unique way back to our path once again. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Always find your way back to love.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">“Love is unconditional. If it isn’t unconditional, it isn’t love.” (Tom Campbell) I cannot think of a more revolutionary truth.</span></p>Tobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16258136994278139356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7378568575885387942.post-19840197825506854522023-03-14T22:35:00.006+00:002023-07-23T11:07:03.353+00:00The perils of certainty in an uncertain world<p> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcU1K9Y9YZ6pi8aDULTs-K8QBb1DL5jdg0sEm9FymfCBoM750NSOMXASnX79CWXXzUfflWRCA7Q1r_76hdBM7ovwUO5WlGy8_SOOiDaPxrCeD9vWf_Ftv_EUBUdGYV3gf43mkKXWIB-h8HparSuim7i6P57F57IDoWUY44Sh_FRoLTj4n5CKukinfF9g/s474/thisIsThis.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img alt="DeNiro: This is this" border="0" data-original-height="201" data-original-width="474" height="170" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcU1K9Y9YZ6pi8aDULTs-K8QBb1DL5jdg0sEm9FymfCBoM750NSOMXASnX79CWXXzUfflWRCA7Q1r_76hdBM7ovwUO5WlGy8_SOOiDaPxrCeD9vWf_Ftv_EUBUdGYV3gf43mkKXWIB-h8HparSuim7i6P57F57IDoWUY44Sh_FRoLTj4n5CKukinfF9g/w400-h170/thisIsThis.jpeg" width="400" /></a><span style="font-family: Baskervville;"></span></p><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Baskervville;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">“This is this. This is this!” Robert DeNiro in The Deer Hunter. </span><span style="font-size: x-small;">But how helpful is Michael’s certainty? After all, even though </span><span style="font-size: x-small;">a bullet is indeed a bullet, the USA lost the Vietnam war </span><span style="font-size: x-small;">after firing far more bullets than their enemy.</span></span></div><p></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #666666; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Introduction</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">This article examines how decisions are investments in the future, and how consequent systemic inflexibility can lead to very ugly outcomes as we double- and triple-down on prior investments when refusing to read the writing on the wall. It posits wisdom, that unquantifiable, uncertain phenomenon, as the main ingredient needed for best navigating this inevitable pattern.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">This is an article of two halves joined together by an examined thought. We begin with a look at the long-term challenges of industrial war, currently a hot topic for NATO and very relevant to US dreams of perpetuating its cherished unipolar power, and then proceed to revisit some issues surrounding money that I have begun to reconsider.</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #666666; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Bogged down in the world The West built</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Power can paint you into a corner as surely as any lack of foresight can. Because of various complex realities pertaining to munitions manufacture, The West is now in a bind in its Ukrainian misadventure. Below in list form the considerable challenges of long-term shell manufacture as recently expounded by <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/02/14/vladimir-putin-win-ammunition-war-against-west/" target="_blank"><span style="color: #cc0000;">Dr Jack Watling in The Daily Telegraph</span></a> (hat tip to Alexander Mercouris for discussing Dr Watling’s article):</span></p><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Ukraine’s rate of shell consumption is many times higher than the West’s shell-manufacturing capacity: the West’s defence industries are thus in the spotlight</span></li><li><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">NATO has been hollowed out since end of Cold War</span></li><li><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Shell manufacture consists of five separate processes, with explosives production being highly demanding: expensive, significant quality-control and regulatory restrictions; each shell must be close to perfect to be safe to use</span></li><li><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Ukraine uses 17 different artillery types of both NATO and Soviet designs</span></li><li><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Economics: Shells used in vast quantities during war, but hardly at all in times of peace. Must be produced at slim margins during war to keep cost to state low. Incentive to mass produce shells in peace time thus very low. A shelf life of approx 20 years makes stockpiling shells problematic. Excess capacity requires companies to keep factories idle for decades. It is a serious challenge to keep a skilled work force available in own population, and very demanding to keep machinery in good working order when kept mostly idle, etc.</span></li><li><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">The West’s focus economically is mostly services, having outsourced its manufacturing for the most part. For this and many other reasons, the West is in no position to quickly establish the correct economic conditions to even begin to meet Ukraine’s munitions demand.</span></li><li><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Defence industry incentivised to manufacture high-profit munitions such as complex, high-tech missiles, fighter jets, etc. (see Mercouris quote immediately below). This over time governs what type of war the West is best at waging. In conjunction with other factors, this slowly evolving character becomes increasingly difficult to change, until it becomes effectively impossible, especially within the timeframe (a few months) required of the West by the Russia-Ukraine war. </span></li></ol><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Western ideas of fighting wars with a limited number of highly trained troops operating ultra-sophisticated but extremely expensive weapons [has been] shown to be wrong. […] The West has disastrously <i>over-invested</i> in air power. – <a href="https://youtu.be/3jFh-pT7VX4?t=3092" target="_blank"><span style="color: #cc0000;">Alexander Mercouris</span></a> (my emphasis). </span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">In other words, The West has a catastrophically inaccurate perception of Russia, one on which it has gambled its own prosperity and Ukraine’s viability as a nation. Its miscalculation flows directly from prior decisions, which themselves flowed directly from earlier decisions all flowing from the West’s foundational values and assumptions. My argument is that the West has failed to favour wisdom and quality over narrow intelligence and quantity-based ideas of value in a very particular way. It is this deep character trait that has led it to its current crisis.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Russia is fighting a war of attrition, <b>not</b> a war of rapid territorial gains The West prefers, a strategy aided and abetted by domination of the skies and the long-range naval projection of that dominance. Victory in wars of attrition are decided by who has artillery/missile dominance. As Stalin put it: “Quantity has a quality all its own.” This is not troop size or the myth of “human-wave tactics”, this is industrial prowess imposed militarily over an opponent.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">The Russia-Ukraine conflict is thus an <i>industrial</i> war as much as (or more than) it is a technological war; mass-production of munitions looks to be the decisive factor. It is thus a war that is exposing the West’s inability to keep up with Russia <i>industrially</i>, and therefore more so with China should China choose to engage. Furthermore, the likelihood that Russia deliberately and carefully opted for this strategy without having the industry to back it up must be vanishingly small; the stakes are too high, and Russia is too cautious and conservative a culture to fluff a decision of such existential importance. Ergo, The West has gravely miscalculated its way into a fight it cannot win. The bitter tragedy is that Ukraine is paying the price for The West’s hubristic arrogance. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">For me, then, the Russia-Ukraine war is a darkly brilliant example of how a civilisation’s foundational value system steadily percolates up to control almost everything, slowly setting everything in place in a particular constellation of institutional and business power structures. In the West’s case, value is determined almost entirely by money/price/markets, and is thus essentially associated with number, with <i>quantity</i>, but in the abstract rather than the physical sense. If a thing does not generate a sufficient quantity of money profits, that thing is not worth pursuing. The West’s sense of what it can and should do is therefore governed almost entirely by pure number-quantity considerations, where numbers can be increased to infinity (and beyond!). The West’s consequent hubris leads it wildly astray. The real world can only fail to disappoint The West’s heady ambitions.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Such folly is, I believe, less true of Russia and China, who are reflexively wary of market-based price-discovery, seeming to prefer top-down command processes to ameliorate what they likely think of as market instabilities and excess. How effective or wise this is, is not for me to say. Equally, Russia and China favour manufactured hardware, food production, functioning infrastructure etc. as engines of growth, over service and FIRE sectors and the quick, heady money-profits the latter can generate.</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #666666; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Blurring the boundary between quantity and quality</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">By now you should have noticed an apparent contradiction in my position, best captured perhaps by Stalin’s words: “Quantity has a quality all its own.” The point I’m trying to bring into relief is a subtle one: The West now has a <i>crass relationship</i> with quantity that has been stripped of any wisdom it might once have had. In obsessive pursuit of efficiency of value creation and throughput, The West has outsourced its wisdom to airy automated processes – i.e. The Market – via endlessly proliferating number measurements in the now reflexive certainty there is little more to value than number/money. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Russia and China <i>appear</i> to me to have a more nuanced and wiser relationship with the complex interplays between quantity and quality, as Stalin’s famous quote implies, as the delicate avenues of Confucian thought suggest. By this I do not mean China and Russia are as wise as it is possible for a culture to be, merely that they appear to me wiser than The West on this point. I take my evidence from how they are better handling their respective relationships with the rest of the world, while acknowledging that another factor could be how historical timing favours their current roles as rising powers benefiting from The West’s decline.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">(I’m well aware of the argument that The West is in fact statist and not a ‘purely’ capitalist enterprise – ignoring for the sake of brevity the many subtly different interpretations of ‘market economics’ applied by the West’s different nation states –, but this is not an argument I take especially seriously. I’m more persuaded by reasoning that casts money as a creature of the state, not some neutral, natural emergence from an Adam-Smith-like, trucking and bartering <i>homo economicus</i>. As such, I see the state-market dichotomy as at best misleading. Each entity interferes with the other; they are in my eyes two halves of a very complex symbiont, Siamese Twins eternally joined at the money system, <a href="https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/03/13/the-eus-qatargate-scandal-just-keeps-getting-worse/" target="_blank"><span style="color: #cc0000;">each as concerned with power as the other</span></a>. Money-as-power is for me the issue of concern, not how ‘purely’ capitalist or socialist or communist a state might be.)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Of course there are also all sorts of international-trade interdependencies adding their dizzying array of complexities – the West as China’s source of insatiable demand, for a simple example. These factors closely tie nations of differing socioeconomic preferences and prowess to broadly similar economic vectors, such that each enjoys and suffers the other’s trade turbulence to varying degrees, with the US still top dog in this regard. That said, a careful decoupling is now underway, as the non-Western world gently frees itself from the West. But as gently as they try, it is of course proving a turbulent process, as all epochal change is. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">But beneath these economic factors, nations can be in competition with one another in more fundamental, culturally reflexive ways, as we currently see between The West and Russia, and between the US and China. These sorts of tensions develop unpredictably in the fine detail, as determined by the character of whichever governments happen to be in charge, and by each permanent state’s geopolitical sensibilities and ideologies. This is extraordinarily complicated territory that is only partly determined by economic considerations. Here things like ideological fervour and personal psychological profiles are very significant factors. Add in the unavoidable rise and fall civilisations are subject to, which determines how venal a civilisation and its states are … well, we can see that wars bubble up from very murky pools, and are of uncertain outcome. There is much more to it than a bullet being a bullet.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">How wars shape up and play out is, as we’ve just touched on, determined by a huge number of factors, but relative defence-industry prowess turns out to be, once again, one of them. When the US attacks countries of the industrial calibre of Iraq or Libya, the balance of power favours The West. When it comes to Russia and China as opponents, things are significantly different. With an increasingly senile president ‘in charge’ of the US, with the UK and EU struggling with their own difficult economic realities, with Russia facing significant growth potential domestically and in international trade, it’s clear why unbiased and well-informed observers are increasingly advising The West – with a capitalised “The” I mean essentially the neocon cohort’s influence on the West – to find an exit strategy as quickly as possible. Recent insinuations against the Ukrainian regime in a New York Times article that sets out, very vaguely, how six “pro-Ukrainian” people in a yacht blew up the Nord Stream pipelines constitute a very redolent and, for The West, profoundly embarrassing case in point. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">The panic levels must be at fever pitch among neocons; the story floated in the NYT and repeated only somewhat elsewhere is being treated with chill and biting skepticism in Germany, where the Seymour Hersh article setting out with more detail who more likely lies behind the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines is making serious waves. These waves are in turn piling pressure on Scholz, who is a weak leader of a fractious coalition government that has pledged fanatical support to what it bills “Ukraine: Europe’s Eastern Bastion of Freedom and Democracy”. If the German people is persuaded that the US was indeed behind the terroristic destruction of its prosperity, it will not bode well at all for NATO, nor for Germany’s decades-long and fervent atlanticism, regardless of how fervent their loyalty is. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Events are overtaking them. The West’s deeply held certainties are turning soft in its increasingly anxious grip.</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #666666; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Certainly uncertain: the value of value</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Let us return to our main theme; decisions are investments in the future, and cumulatively so. In many ways, money and compound interest reflect this fundamental truth. It is why I so repeatedly promote organic wisdom over intelligence, over automation and any other mechanical or computerised system. If we fail to regularly clear out the crap (malinvestments) earned from our less wise decisions – a process that requires wisdom, which itself requires <i>humility</i> –, we face an unmanageably large correction when events overtake us. I believe this is what is happening to The West. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">If we fail to value wisdom, which can be neither measured nor quantified, our chances of catastrophic corrections are far higher. Without wisdom, how can we recognise when best to self-correct? We are in effect leaving it up to fate, and fate can be a brutal task master.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">This leads to a question I am increasingly asking myself: Can money as market-based price/value-discovery system indeed be the ‘automated’ or ‘organic’ cultural wisdom some seem to want it to be (“Hand, The Invisible” as Zarlenga wittily put it)? I’m beginning to waver on this point. Does my uncertainty here mean I favour Russian/Chinese over Western cultural reflexes on this issue? No; I favour anarchic solutions that systemically encourage wisdom both individually and thus, necessarily, culturally. On the whole, though, I try to <i>describe</i> what I see without then <i>prescribing</i> the best solutions.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Civilisations are built on certain operating assumptions that must be treated as sacrosanct for its vision of How Things Should Be to be realised. Building a civilisation is far from easy. As a civilisational vision beds down over decades and centuries, so systems become less and less adaptive, more and more institutionalised – in the absence of sufficient cultural wisdom, that is. With insufficient wisdom, what was once clearly the foundational reason for greatness slowly and <i>invisibly</i> becomes the cause of decay. As argued above, one of the West’s foundational assumptions is <i>value as number as money</i>. In seeming direct consequence of this, money now appears to be our god. I see this as one of the root causes of our impending demotion.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">So what is money, then? Here is Alan Greenspan talking about the slippery difficulty of pinning it down:</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">This is not to say that money is not relevant to the economy. For a central bank to say money is irrelevant is the deepest form of sin that such an institution can commit. The problem is that we cannot extract from our statistical database what is true money conceptually, either in the transactions mode or the store-of-value mode. One of the reasons, obviously, is that the proliferation of products has been so extraordinary that the true underlying mix of money in our money and near-money data is continuously changing. – Alan Greenspan, FOMC Transcript, June 2000.</span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">It might seem a small leap to think that holding up a dollar bill and shouting “This is this!” into the face of some good-for-nothing layabout tells us all we know about money. But, just as with bullets, money is more complex than such gestures can capture. We may well like simple certainties, but our preference does not make simple certainties helpfully accurate descriptors. Furthermore, holding up a gold ingot rather than paper money does not really improve the picture. In fact, it might well exacerbate our difficultly in penetrating a fog we refuse to acknowledge. So I believe Greenspan is voicing a generalised exasperation still prevalent among his peers that will in fact never be solved. Money will never be that certain thing our reflexes currently want it to be. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">In the tension between wilful expectation and reality, things are falling apart. Our power structures have become morally moribund and brutish, and thus wholly incapable of navigating the challenges before us with anything remotely approaching wise foresight. Our core value system has steadily selected for icy ambition and greed as required qualities for promotion, rather than wisdom and humility. I see this as a crass quality-versus-quantity issue.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">To go over old ground, there can be no objective or falsifiable store of value. Value is relative. The proposition that we can have the objective unit “<i>1 Value</i>” is meaningless. More meaningless, in fact, than looking for discreet millimetres in an object by cutting it open. And while there are indeed institutes of units and measures that set standard specifications on what constitutes a meter, a gram, the speed of light, etc., these measurements become fuzzy at very fine granularity, so even here objectivity has its limits. Leaving that irreducible fuzziness to one side and to return to value, value cannot be specified like weights and measures can. To repeat, unlike meters, value is fundamentally relative; you don’t need to know what inches are to understand and use meters, nor do you need to understand wood and metal.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Were we to attempt to specify <i>1 Value</i>, it must then equal some other thing, very differently to the standardised “from here to there” of distance. But what other thing should <i>1 Value</i> equal? <i>1 Gram of Gold</i>, perhaps? But what do we do with that gram of gold, what utility does it have, what is the purpose, the <i>value</i> of measuring value? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Well, we would use gold as <i>money</i> to buy things. This means that “1 Value = 1 Gram of Gold” can only have value in a <i>market</i>. In other words, there must first be market-based trading – which includes dynamic price discovery (value discovery!!) – before an effort to fix value to a specific measurement (money) can have any use in the first place. What happens in markets? Truck and barter. Truck and barter cannot happen over metres and kilograms. Look at how gold prices and currency exchanges fluctuate over time. Ergo, neither gold nor any other money can be an ‘objective’ store or measure of value <i>other than we reflexively, culturally believe it to be</i>. And I don’t mean any of this disparagingly, nor that this is some new observation. My point is that Western cultural reflexes seem not to take it sufficiently into account. On the contrary, they lionise money with a stubbornness that blows my brains.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Nevertheless, Greenspan knew we do not understand money. He also knew we are culturally invested in it, and deeply so: “to say money is irrelevant is the deepest form of sin”. Money is a creature of culture, of power, of belief, of symbols. To my eyes, it is a societal magic. It is a part-designed, part-evolved system that guides societal action right across the planet, as if by magic (Hand, The Invisible moves in mysterious ways). It is thus existentially important that money ‘work’ (whatever ‘work’ means), and that it be at least somewhat <i>controllable</i>. With insufficient control, our ability to correct in the face of financial troubles <i>before</i> correction becomes unmanageable diminishes cumulatively. The FED and other central banks are thus, in essence, necessarily under-equipped guardians of the existentially important <i>belief</i> they have sufficient control, despite the fact that it can never really be so. (Hat tip to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZFQWhnW4CI" target="_blank"><span style="color: #cc0000;">Jeff Snider</span></a> for laying this out in such a clear way!)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">But while I’m not convinced markets ‘know’ better, I do tend to feel they cope better when allowed to decentralise via innovation and general historical turbulence than any centralised state apparatus could; they deliver more immediate corrective feedback. This possibility applies no matter the origins of money, and no matter how inextricably intertwined the state-market symbiont is. Markets are a technology one way or the other, a technology that delivers benefits and risks as all technologies do. The same goes for statecraft. With a wise handling of both sides of this complex pairing one should enjoy the best of both. Balance in all things, as they say.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">The eternal danger is how money equals power and how power corrupts. Knowing that there is no ‘perfect’ system – where “perfect” tends to mean “nobody need suffer ever again, and especially not me” –, knowing also that there is no “perfect competition” to prevent the emergence of monopolistic or oligarchical power in <i>real-world</i> markets, I do accept that idealistic sensitives like Yours Truly ought to be very wary of slipping into ideological certainties. What does seem clear, though, is that ideological certainty is one of the root causes of The West’s current predicament, and it has befallen power players of a very different character.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">I continue to believe that additional fundamentals are being ground down by historical change, these more global in scope. They remain in my thinking as warnings advising me to stay loose in my loyalties to this or that ‘solution’. We’ll touch on those fundamentals in passing as we close out this tricky article.</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #666666; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Conclusion</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">When we have a mid-50% labour-participation rate in the US, flourishing obesity in many Western nations despite similar labour-participation rates, recalcitrant inflation, rapidly improving robotics and AI, computerised market trading, etc., it is easy to see that money itself should be in the spotlight, whether fiat, crypto, gold, vouchers, etc. Money is an issue because we are so heavily invested in it, and, far more importantly, in over our heads with our poor understanding and therefore poor relationship with it. We want to have a “This is this!” money, but I suspect we can never have it. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">We, the People should therefore insist on more suppleness and wisdom in our power infrastructure, as systematically as we are able to embed it there, and consequently allow, via decentralisation and localisation, the best mix of alternative monies to rise to the surface.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">For the moment, it seems we simply do not want to know how uncertain and magical money really is. The exact same dynamic is at work regarding materialism and the nature of reality, I believe. This paradigmatic crucible is exactly what this blog fumbles to understand. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">We know full well that we pay an horrendous price when we lose control at the civilisational scale. My hope is that the <i>core</i> reason for current crises is our over-investment in an erroneous understanding of the nature of reality, an error that yokes us to control itself as a culturally reflexive imperative. This reflex blinds us to feedback from left, right and centre, bellowing at us to change course.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Dauntingly for us, it is somewhere in the process of letting go that wiser, more supple solutions will emerge – not before; only a Fool’s Leap can reveal such treasures. As Ukraine is ground down by forces it does not want to understand; as international trading systems groan once again under the multiple strains generated by lockdowns, bossy governments and hubristic organisations like the UN, WHO and WEF; as we suffer at the hands of fervent ideologues in power positions; and as our cultural addiction to certainty in a fundamentally uncertain world condemns us to inappropriate knee-jerk reactions to events, so the need for clear and bold out-of-the-box thinking mounts. I suspect for most this sort of thinking is still anathema. But I strongly sense that for a small and quickly growing minority, this need is becoming clearer and clearer. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Though terrible storms lie just ahead, more distant signs of the times are improving solidly. The outlook just over the horizon looks brighter and brighter. Let’s not forget that when the storms land.</span></p>Tobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16258136994278139356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7378568575885387942.post-46419162167854696402023-02-25T07:03:00.001+00:002023-02-25T07:03:39.119+00:00The West stands alone on Ukrainian debris<p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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. <a href="https://thdrussell.blogspot.com/2022/10/cooking-on-gas.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: #cc0000;">As I recently commented</span></a>, 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">(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.)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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. <i>Why won’t the world do what I want</i>, it seems to howl. <a href="https://thdrussell.blogspot.com/2023/01/propaganda-and-true-myth-of-progress.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: #cc0000;">Having fallen victim to its own propaganda</span></a>, 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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Isn’t this exactly how history rolls? Who didn’t feel this coming, at least as a dark suspicion?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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 (<i>Utopia</i>). There’s much truth in what Cusack says, and are we not royally entertained! Sadly, with the world’s most renowned investigative journalist having <a href="https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream" target="_blank"><span style="color: #cc0000;">published an article</span></a> 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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.</span></p>Tobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16258136994278139356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7378568575885387942.post-270235577097322982023-02-22T07:31:00.000+00:002023-02-22T07:31:50.443+00:00A defence of health<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhePoJPG4Bgouh1xbCscJJc3I9hd-oxfni3vhYKYNRnLDCIELZAY8f4EdZfi7nx1kGWDoCWHc1SgEoGrY_bQtq9V9lcg7Uf1z15s2h1a8mjXYdBWp62Mi9_7i0SuUGERpTrlNzn3rq6-X2dn_iUQDhjZa1uis9w1uQZXIlOXlHLZIyfBifNj2CnizDZZQ/s1800/chakra-healing-background.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1800" height="175" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhePoJPG4Bgouh1xbCscJJc3I9hd-oxfni3vhYKYNRnLDCIELZAY8f4EdZfi7nx1kGWDoCWHc1SgEoGrY_bQtq9V9lcg7Uf1z15s2h1a8mjXYdBWp62Mi9_7i0SuUGERpTrlNzn3rq6-X2dn_iUQDhjZa1uis9w1uQZXIlOXlHLZIyfBifNj2CnizDZZQ/w350-h175/chakra-healing-background.jpeg" width="350" /></a></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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 <i>also</i> at work.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Another way of expressing all this is that there is more to reality than the laws of physics; there’s plenty of wriggle room here.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">As a man who believes (<i>knows</i>) 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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">So how do I understand health? In a nutshell: Health is why we incarnate. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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 <i>enrich</i> 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Hence: Health <=> Love <=> Wisdom</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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 <i>tempting</i>.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">So departure from health is the easy option, the <i>likelier</i> 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 <i>if we but heed them</i>. 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Pursuing health, as I understand that process, <i>requires</i> 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 <i>precisely</i> 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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">As the saying goes, God moves in mysterious ways. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Well worth it, don’t you think?</span></p>Tobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16258136994278139356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7378568575885387942.post-22670245250904830952023-02-17T08:42:00.002+00:002023-03-31T15:46:14.494+00:00When the sky goes<p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">Sometimes being on the right side of history is for the dogs. At least, that’s how it seems. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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.) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">So I gave up, and it took minimal effort. Something slipped off the edge of my life and dropped into oblivion.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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.</span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond; font-size: x-large;">☕︎</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Cormorant Garamond;">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?</span></p><div><br /></div>Tobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16258136994278139356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7378568575885387942.post-17061055147617728142023-02-06T16:18:00.000+00:002023-02-06T16:18:09.878+00:00A disjointed quartet of cartoonish provocations<h1 style="text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimPZHEvKynkLOAPqPeakC03W1zjsbMpOkBxqKyx3bLWU8s-R0OIlwaNFlKlydQFb3iIGqe6D6n0vvDZ00Q9BGC56DTrH-EO96NkfEwTfpiXkM402XgEVREd-Ai8jJL4_PRVMW5lsLS0mprKGmXmwat_65u0nx6mtjmoy6OkdGFiYEzPuInmBXYoK13lg/s3488/IMG_0008.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2640" data-original-width="3488" height="279" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimPZHEvKynkLOAPqPeakC03W1zjsbMpOkBxqKyx3bLWU8s-R0OIlwaNFlKlydQFb3iIGqe6D6n0vvDZ00Q9BGC56DTrH-EO96NkfEwTfpiXkM402XgEVREd-Ai8jJL4_PRVMW5lsLS0mprKGmXmwat_65u0nx6mtjmoy6OkdGFiYEzPuInmBXYoK13lg/w369-h279/IMG_0008.jpeg" width="369" /></a></div><span style="color: #3d85c6; font-family: Mulish;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #3d85c6; font-family: Mulish;"><br /></span></div>The perils of automation</span></h1><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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 <i>remote abstractions</i> of what humans <i>actually</i> depend on. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">(Is this a negative of monstrous productivity?)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">(Is this a bad thing, a fragile, precarious thing?)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">As we automate production and distribution processes, as we make life ever more convenient for ourselves, we forget how to <i>live</i>; 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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">We are Hansel and Gretel afraid to see how caged we are.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">What else describes modernity? What am I artfully omitting?</span></p><h1 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #3d85c6; font-family: Mulish;">The fruits of automation</span></h1><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">Is this heaven, or what!</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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!)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">And the entertainment, the culture, the art … the cornucopia at my fingertips is endless!</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">Is there anything else I am deliberately omitting?</span></p><h1 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #3d85c6; font-family: Mulish; line-height: 1.625;">Modernity spills out of itself and into itself to become modernity again, forever</span></h1><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">It has been modernity since the year dot. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">I’ve come to understand my efforts here as concerned with <i>wisdom</i>, another word for which would be <i>love</i>. <i>Health</i> is yet another. For me, these three are mutually explanatory synonyms. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">Either we choose maturation, or regression to something ugly, something Orwellian. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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 <i>exactly that</i> from us; the best and the worst, with the best winning out as it must.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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.</span></p><h1 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #3d85c6; font-family: Mulish;">The Way is hard</span></h1><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">We have also been <i>accelerating</i>. 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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">I want to squeeze my face shut and scream “STOP!” I crave peace, affection, beauty, calm. I want my efforts to have an effect.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">To point this out is to wound. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">Today, to be true is to betray. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">The journey is the destination, the means are the ends. If the contorted grotesque we have become (who is <i>we</i>?) 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">(Can a cynic be happy? Why is cynicism sickly? Why does pride suffocate courage?)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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 <i>gladly</i> this is how we are is part of the new way forward. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">But what do I mean by “new?” Well, not love itself, nor wisdom, nor health. I mean the <i>context</i> 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Mulish;">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.</span></p>Tobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16258136994278139356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7378568575885387942.post-35443670975130566052023-01-31T14:38:00.003+00:002023-02-05T18:54:52.044+00:00Propaganda and the (true) myth of progress<p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="color: #666666; font-family: Barlow Condensed; font-size: x-small;">[Edit 5.2.2023: Added link to tweet of Ret. Col. Richard Black explaining decisive US involvement in Ukrainian politics via Maidan coup in 2014.]</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizuYkJ_phgXtQ8TMGMiNShnrIeZRZ3MsAD1m-KkwpkK024L8iQTNkNXWqMysLRdATAdKp7RU4C4K_r-UWqWB-o_4Itd-Obhf2am_Q8X3gKXGWohPzkabTugDdyNFSmm-b7WIgf-aiOZKFVYiEjdC10oRdumhqfJb_h56_i_-pJAItCc_eV7krunwGB5w/s1946/Screenshot%202022-12-29%20at%2009.47.10.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1316" data-original-width="1946" height="267" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizuYkJ_phgXtQ8TMGMiNShnrIeZRZ3MsAD1m-KkwpkK024L8iQTNkNXWqMysLRdATAdKp7RU4C4K_r-UWqWB-o_4Itd-Obhf2am_Q8X3gKXGWohPzkabTugDdyNFSmm-b7WIgf-aiOZKFVYiEjdC10oRdumhqfJb_h56_i_-pJAItCc_eV7krunwGB5w/w396-h267/Screenshot%202022-12-29%20at%2009.47.10.png" width="396" /></a></span></div><blockquote><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">I think [judges] have an instinctive prejudice […] They’re either open to the case, or they have an instinctive prejudice against it. I think that’s what you’re seeing in courts. Because, remember, a lot of Trump judges threw out Trump challenges. It was just instinctive prejudice. If you were in front of them, you could tell. Same in the vaccine context, same in the lockdown context. This is the professional-managerial class and the prejudice they share as a class regardless of their party, regardless of what president or governor put them in positions of power, regardless of their own political ambitions. They’re just very arrogant, very condescending, they think they were born to govern the rest of us, they have these special degrees and certifications to do it, they’ve been acculturated through the American education system; they’re just not well equipped to govern the rest of us. The professional-managerial class, as a class, has failed, mostly. You could make some arguments for some doctors, […] you could make some arguments for <i>some</i> lawyers and legal advocacy and professional expertise, but as a general rule I think they’ve failed. I mean, how many people died in the 20th century! Again, these were governments and societies ruled by the professional-managerial class. Fascists are overwhelmingly professional-managerial class, communists, overwhelmingly professional-managerial class; corporatists, overwhelmingly professional-managerial class; our deep-state apparatus since the 1950s, overwhelmingly professional-managerial class. What they’ve done is they’ve co-opted every single branch of government. Even the legislative branch is now professional-managerial class; you’ve got to be a professional politician to win! If anybody challenges it, they’re portrayed as a whacky, crazy, dangerous outsider with a bad personal history. It didn’t work against Trump, but it did work against Herschel Walker and Blake Masters. It’s a systemic disease in the method and manner of governance. They’ve taken over the media, they’ve taken over our educational systems, they’ve taken over human resources and marketing in corporate departments that help shape the way corporations work internally and broadcast messages externally. And they’ve taken over the legislative branch, the judicial branch and the executive branch, and we’re seeing the negative consequences of it. This is a class conflict, because this is a class that should not be governing the rest of us. It should have a role, but not a monopolistic, dominant role, because they’ve proven themselves incapable of governing effectively. That’s reality. – <a href="https://vivabarneslaw.locals.com/post/3199859/live-bourbon-w-barnes-monday-december-12-2022" target="_blank"><span style="color: #cc0000;">Robert Barnes</span></a></span></blockquote><p></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. – Attributed to Thomas Jefferson</span></blockquote><p></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Introduction</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">This article sees a return to a style a little more academic than lately on display here. My sense remains that academic rigour is often less persuasive than imagined, but the material we explore below requires a certain deference to that rigour and its several benefits. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Much about the corona years has challenged me deeply, to the degree in fact that I have found myself questioning everything all over again. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, as I look back from time to time at my last three years’ output, I feel a strong need to bring more clarity and coherence to what I’ve learned and written while drifting through the moony twilight that is, for me, the mark of this historical moment. This article is another attempt to effect that clarity.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">I recently stumbled across Ellul’s <i>Propaganda</i> (Kindle edition, English translation published in 1965), and am convinced it sheds very helpful light on what’s happening Out There. Of interest to us here is how Ellul firmly situates propaganda in technology, an observation that owes the power of its insight, I believe, to how civilisation <i>totalises</i>. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Civilisation seems compelled to expand ever outward territorially and/or ever inward psychically and spiritually – despite exceptions to this rule that seem held in check or are swept aside by those driven by it; big fish dominate little fish. Perhaps it is helpful to see civilisation’s expansionary urge as a gene that may or may not express, as determined by environmental and historical circumstances. When it does express, <i>particular</i> technological prowess is cumulatively selected for as civilisations evolve in bloody contest and prideful schismogenesis; that prowess, namely, that aids expansion. One of the countless results of technological evolution, then, is civilisation’s <i>apparently</i> existential need for propaganda, obviously a pivotal technology in this regard.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">What we’re going to attempt in this article is to cohere the four observations immediately below into an analysis that reveals something fundamental about power – in contradistinction to natural authority –, which, once revealed, helps us to handle power more wisely than before.</span></p><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Initially in very crude form, propaganda becomes a necessary evil once civilisation gets up and running. Until humanity has hit the brick wall of propaganda’s anti-life vector, it will develop no meaningful solution to propaganda’s pervasive presence.</span></li><li><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Propaganda is a state-craft technology present in very crude form since forever, but has been rapidly improving since the advent of mass-media technologies and societal atomisation.</span></li><li><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Propaganda’s very effectiveness is its doom. By its nature it breeds mediocracy, mediocracy that cannot help but drag itself ever lower, inexorably, until collapse.</span></li><li><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Community, and perhaps more importantly the love that is community’s healthiest soil, will be one part of humanity’s health-seeking response to the collapse propaganda must deliver.</span></li></ol><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">These individual observations and claims appear in each section with different weighting, either explicitly or implicitly. With luck, the article will prove successful in bringing them together with the hoped-for clarity.</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">A brief cost-benefit analysis of propaganda</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Propaganda is called upon to solve problems created by technology, to play on maladjustments, and to integrate the individual into a <i>technological</i> world. […] Propaganda must be seen as situated at the center of the growing powers of the State and governmental and administrative techniques. – Ellul, <i>Propaganda</i>, ppxvii-xviii (my emphasis)</span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Propaganda is a more complex technology than most imagine. Ellul distinguishes between what he terms “agitation”/“vertical” and “integration”/“horizontal” propaganda, among other distinctions. The former is conspicuous, strident, purposed to effect a specific action, i.e. support for a war. By contrast, the latter is hard to detect, subtle, socially totalising, normative over time, “seeks not a temporary excitement but a total moulding of the person <i>in depth</i>” (<i>ibid</i>, p76, my emphasis). Each mode depends on the other to a degree, with the very effective yet glaringly obvious war propaganda (“agitation”) around Russia-Ukraine being a case in point; its effectiveness rests on years of preparatory “integration” propaganda. Henceforward I leave Ellul’s distinctions otherwise unaddressed and treat propaganda as a lump for reasons of brevity and simplicity of expression.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Propaganda, then, is a suite of techniques whose overarching purpose is to keep the overwhelming majority of its several target audiences – if audience is the right word – adequately integrated into the machinery, operations and ambitions of the state. This integration is a paramount requirement for smooth and coherent state action over time; could there be a permanent state (“deep state”) without it? Perhaps, but a far less powerful one. And power seems always to want more power.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Civilisations and their states – it could therefore be argued – are technical works of normative machinery, machinery that does, however, enable culture to flourish to incredible richness. An infamous and pivotal question emerges from the tension between beautiful culture and over-powerful state machinery, one that guides this article from the shadows: Is trading in some of our freedom for the state’s protection adequately compensated by the culture it affords and the wealth it generates? Rephrased: <i>Is propaganda an inescapable and, on balance, ‘beneficial’ evil?</i> There may well be no final answer to this provocative question, but contemplating it is instructive and, I feel, <i>very</i> important.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">More immediate to our task here, however, is the following reasoning on mediocrity: Propaganda skills, just as any skill, improve with practice. One perhaps unavoidable consequence of the growing power afforded to states by ever-improving propaganda techniques is this phenomenon: </span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"><b><i>Mediocrity metastasises in the absence of meaningful corrective feedback. </i></b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">The us-and-them mindset that must increasingly bunker itself in the halls of power, precisely because power <i>increasingly</i> accumulates there, slowly pressures those tasked with guarding that power to surround themselves only with people implacably loyal – whether cynically or passionately – to whatever the group’s <i>raison d’être</i> is – which becomes mere survival at some point. Implacable loyalty is seen as essential; it protects the group against infiltration and dissolution of purpose. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">This dynamic, however, corrupts the halls of power from within – an insidious form of corruption that is difficult to discern as an insider –, while those without are forced by continuous threat to develop the skills they need to supplant the top dog that so threatens them (e.g. Russia, China versus The West at national level, though no less importantly The West’s increasingly subjugated peoples fighting for their survival). As a result of this dynamic, the pressure to develop effective propaganda systems to mitigate strain and dissent spreads virally from state to state, civilisation to civilisation, above and beyond the systemic need for propaganda the control of millions and now billions of souls demands.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">I see this general observation as a direct corollate of the immediately preceding question – Is propaganda a beneficial evil? –, a question that in my view anticipates, or drives, despite itself, the dawn-to-decadence cycle that is the fate of state power, just as it is of civilisation. As freedoms are given up in pursuit of culture, which becomes over time pursuit of convenience and comfort (decadence), growing state power cumulatively seals the ‘elites’ off from the people it is their function is to serve … until collapse. If propaganda is the <i>necessary</i> corrupting worm born of the genuine cultural ‘progress’ (more on ‘progress’ below) that is civilisation’s gift, must civilisation be reborn with deep awareness of this foundational self-destruction pattern guiding that rebirth, so as to inhibit or ameliorate the worm’s effects?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Is such a rebirth now inevitable? For how much longer can humanity bear propaganda’s weight? Charlie Chaplain’s iconic image from <i>Modern Times</i> of a man contorting himself to the unbending demands of monstrous machinery captures our predicament well. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Interestingly, though, it is not the working but professional-managerial class – comfortably convinced they were “born to govern the rest of us” (Barnes) – whose “maladjustments” (Ellul) have been most seamlessly adjusted. After all, it is the professional-managerial class that is the most important to those who effectively own the state’s power machinery. Propaganda’s development is thus likely to be heavily skewed towards controlling this class; they are the executives of “the growing powers of the State and governmental and administrative techniques” that butter their bread – which is precisely where Ellul situates propaganda’s beating heart. Perhaps this causes the prejudice that is the target of the Barnes’ above-transcribed rant. As is so often the case, it is a prejudice they cannot see; they are, after all, only “following the science”. We might say, <i>obeying the machine</i>.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">But at what cost? Is even the professional-managerial class now noticing the true price of its loyalty to the establishment? These are thoughts we pursue in more detail below.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">One final point to bring into clear relief in this section, is that because some propaganda is tailored to this, some to that segment of a population, most individuals fancy themselves immune to its charms. In fact, <i>none of us is;</i> the propaganda tailored to us <i>must be invisible to us to work</i>, for obvious reasons. We all know it is there, yet the propaganda with the real payload remains invisible, by definition. Perhaps it hides behind the decoy propaganda to which we are proud to announce ourselves immune. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">While matters remain this way, the worm that rots us from within goes mostly unnoticed. Noticing we are <b>not</b> immune is, paradoxically, how we begin to minimise propaganda’s effectiveness. I strongly suspect this is happening now, especially in The West.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Let’s turn to how effective propaganda is.</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Propaganda: doomed by its great success</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">The most generally held concept of propaganda is that it is a series of <i>tall stories</i>, a tissue of lies, and that lies are necessary for effective propaganda. Hitler himself apparently confirmed this point of view when he said that the bigger the lie, the more its chance of being believed. This concept leads to two attitudes among the public. The first is: “Of course we shall not be victims of propaganda because we are capable of distinguishing truth from falsehood.” Anyone holding that conviction is extremely susceptible to propaganda, because when propaganda does tell the “truth,” he is then convinced that it is no longer propaganda; moreover, his self-confidence makes him all the more vulnerable to attacks of which he is unaware. – Ellul, <i>Propaganda</i>, p52 (emphasis in original)</span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">The global oligarchy uses media influence to subjugate governments. For example, Germany did not want to get involved in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and against (the will) of the German people or the majority of Germans, the government decided to send more weapons to Ukraine. – Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (<a href="https://www.urdupoint.com/en/world/mexican-president-condemns-germanys-decision-1631616.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: #cc0000;">link</span></a>)</span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Propaganda is alive and well, and as favoured by the state as it ever was. Why? Because it works. The effectiveness of the corona propaganda pumped out day and night for years, right across the planet with <i>very</i> few national exceptions, was so successful we have barely begun to recover from it. It is in fact still very much in evidence today. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">For me, the most notable aspect of the so-called ‘pandemic’ – will we ever really know how many died of covid, how many of those deaths might have been prevented using standard medications already available, etc.? – is how dangerous it became to question orthodoxy. Because medical orthodoxy is <i>indisputably</i> beyond criticism as a function of its very orthodoxy and the power that label affords, questioning it “risks lives”. But quashing discourse with the virulence of autocratic diktat in evidence disconnects that orthodoxy from corrective feedback. The careers of countless relevant experts have been negatively impacted or derailed. Doctors have been de-licensed. Trust in orthodoxy has nosedived. Calm discussion is a thing of the past.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">The vitriolic, almost hysterical opprobrium aimed at dissenting voices was as uniform and pervasive as it was shrill and unrelenting. Instructive here is that dissenting voices offered a well-founded message of <i>hope</i>, and yet fear, even hysteria, was preferred. “Hate, hunger, and pride make better levers of propaganda than do love or impartiality” (<i>ibid</i>, p38). This unhealthy preference is a clear sign high-powered propaganda was in force.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Surely the self-evidently false dichotomy that saving lives is more important than protecting the economy – an argument wielded in defence of extremely expensive lockdowns – could not possibly have spread virally across the western world as influentially as it did <i>without</i> propaganda beneath its wings. Today, as health systems struggle to cope, as excess deaths surge, economic conditions are blamed … a mere two years after such self-evident reasoning was cause for defamation and ejection from polite society. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">“Two weeks to flatten the curve”! </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">We were also told to stay indoors to save lives. Then told to go outside to save lives. We were told masks were ineffective, then that they were effective. No doubt there are other examples.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Now it is as if authorities want to have it that such crassly contradictory propaganda never took place. We only sense its aftertaste. But this sort of on-again-off-again pattern, or alternating sequence of flat contradictions, is in fact one of the hallmarks of persuasion techniques whose desired outcome is the subject’s blind obedience to authority. Subjects are kept perpetually off balance, while some implacable authority subtly informs them only it has command of the solution that brings (temporary!) relief. All we need do is obey, indefinitely, totally.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Propaganda is <i>glaringly</i> effective. So effective, this fact cannot be gainsaid without deliberate and strenuous effort to ignore its obviousness. Nowadays, people fall over themselves demonstrating how immune they are to propaganda. Each side accuses their opponents of propagating “fake news”, but in so doing reveals its ignorance of how propaganda actually works, that the fanatical certainty each side displays is in fact a direct consequence of unquestioning obedience to a cause, a cause likely instilled by skilled propagandists. It is this sort of programmed obedience that fuels the “effort to ignore” that so marks victims of cults, one of which a friend of mine fell victim to. The techniques used by that particular cult’s leader included these flatly contradictory changes of message and purpose. A conversation with an official of the Berlin office overseeing incipient and active cults in Germany brought this detail to my attention.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">(Parenthetically, narcissists have an <i>insatiable</i> hunger for total, adoring obedience. The insatiable nature of their hunger stems from an inner void, produced by their total disconnect from anything meaningful in their lives other than their hunger. This means that whim and sudden shifts of impulse characterise their ‘rule’, which is utterly visionless, pointless even; it is in fact the dysfunction of narcissism itself that is self-destructively, compulsively, insatiably in charge.)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">In a similarly radicalising way, Western propaganda has also been astoundingly effective at instilling in a large majority of its people the equation “Russia = bad”, and “Putin = bad”. So irredeemably bad are this nation and its leader, any dialogue with them is seen by The West as appeasing evil. Diplomacy between the two nations is now unthinkable. Any communication sent by Russia into the world is brazen propaganda that must be rejected outright. Russia’s security interests are utterly irrelevant; it is apostasy to suggest Russia even has a right to such concerns. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">The “Russia = bad” equation is propagated so fervently, it is almost as if The West derives its messianic goodness <i>from</i> Russia’s evil; the fervour has an addictive, needy feeling-tone to it. As I see it, The West’s identity and self-respect have become existentially entangled in this barbaric equation. To lose now against Russia in Ukraine is to lose all credibility and to become, on the dizzying turn of a dime, the Bad Guy. This is a known risk of fanatical over-commitment. Film’s have been produced to highlight this human foible.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDxGxqiCPlqFtLR6TztyoBKHLSyvEpomqQhYYy-r0oygusfxKYnjWmtawLuh455BseNUJjzxB8x4ATw0mML79eq0fz0NgUxqKbrBVOsga_KfONOVg7VNhEpJRJxipL-59JDL4Kjcw9OKUGuGzhYj5ECPMa77vDmKRb8akGCEzoKQ92FcvFsctjT3nsPA/s1338/Screenshot%202023-01-31%20at%2014.04.36.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Michael Douglas, Falling Down" border="0" data-original-height="1014" data-original-width="1338" height="304" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDxGxqiCPlqFtLR6TztyoBKHLSyvEpomqQhYYy-r0oygusfxKYnjWmtawLuh455BseNUJjzxB8x4ATw0mML79eq0fz0NgUxqKbrBVOsga_KfONOVg7VNhEpJRJxipL-59JDL4Kjcw9OKUGuGzhYj5ECPMa77vDmKRb8akGCEzoKQ92FcvFsctjT3nsPA/w381-h304/Screenshot%202023-01-31%20at%2014.04.36.png" width="381" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Mulish; font-size: x-small;">Michael Douglas’ character realises he is the bad guy (Falling Down, 1993)</span></div><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">The West has fallen for its own messianic hype on multiple fronts. As a result, it has become so far stepped in blood – to paraphrase Macbeth – it cannot countenance <i>any</i> course correction for fear of allowing in the terrible information it has done Bad Things. This fear lies behind the compulsive, now hysterical doubling down currently on display. When we invest too much, too inflexibly, in a doomed venture, we risk having to deceive ourselves about events to cope with the pressure of things slipping out of our control. In seeking to stay sane, we persist in defying reality by insisting on that version of events we so desperately <i>need</i> to be true, and disconnect from reality without noticing. It’s called “bunker mentality”. I believe highly effective propaganda is one of the several required causes of this very unfortunate phenomenon.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">As a direct result of blinkered overcommitment to an ideology, a grotesque debacle is unfolding in Ukraine. Ukraine is paying a terrible price as a result, and for its own infatuation with nationalistic fervour, <a href="https://twitter.com/MelaniePodolyak/status/1614263831546499075" target="_blank"><span style="color: #cc0000;">Russophobia</span></a>, and infatuation with Western bling; I’d wager various sources of propaganda are responsible. To make matters worse, the only path to ‘victory’ for The West is now nuclear war; in terms of conventional weaponry, Russia decisively outmatches The West where it counts in this particular theatre of conflict. The West’s gross miscalculation, a miscalculation it does not want to face, is the fruit of messianic hubris left uncorrected for too long. Our very human susceptibility to propaganda is again at the root of this war, just as is the case with the bureaucratically vicious debacle of lockdowns and “warp-speed” ‘vaccinations’.</span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGI2yioP7RxB2Xrfy8Bq698qOQzZ11YFMwhmkVhoOKC9p8gnsP8bN_b1fTQwrvNlC2OD8rm6zx5tXV3kpwQFPK16aVJNvjyHkn1BdMwLHClguJvY3EyY8R50dDCBIw8ehab5FiJWJh-YFF4aUei3LW3jNJpf9z7UtcYP4oRiKiOkW_OJzVTsPmZnutZQ/s1602/Screenshot%202023-01-31%20at%2014.09.00.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="686" data-original-width="1602" height="168" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGI2yioP7RxB2Xrfy8Bq698qOQzZ11YFMwhmkVhoOKC9p8gnsP8bN_b1fTQwrvNlC2OD8rm6zx5tXV3kpwQFPK16aVJNvjyHkn1BdMwLHClguJvY3EyY8R50dDCBIw8ehab5FiJWJh-YFF4aUei3LW3jNJpf9z7UtcYP4oRiKiOkW_OJzVTsPmZnutZQ/w387-h168/Screenshot%202023-01-31%20at%2014.09.00.png" width="387" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Of course Ms Podolyak meant 14.01.2023, referencing destruction of a residential building in Dnipro, allegedly by a Russian missile. To my mind, she, like Ukraine, has been granted too much latitude in racist thinking and sentiment, with insufficient corrective feedback, for too long.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">This sort of tragedy happens in war; it’s the very reason we should avoid war with all means possible. The US killed hundreds of thousands if not millions of Iraqis in 2003 for the erroneous and dubious reason that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and was about to use them. Madelaine Albright said the cost in Iraqi lives was “worth it”. For me psychopathic, genocidal behaviour, but I do not wish all US citizens and the USA wiped off the face of the earth. Of course I understand Ms Podolyak’s emotions are boiling over; she is witnessing the destruction of her beloved country in real time! If Ms Podolyak had responded to an Israeli missile hitting a Palestinian residential area like this: “I wish for all jews and Israel to be wiped off the face of the earth!”, how would that make you feel? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Whether this horrible tragedy in Dnipro was deliberate and thus a war crime by Russia – which I find highly unlikely: Why would Russia jeopardise the support it needs from of much of the Global South for <i>zero</i> military gain? –, whether the result of a missile shot down by Ukrainian air-defence systems or an errant Ukrainian air-defence missile, it remains a tragedy of the sort that can happen when two cultures stop understanding one another – and these are sibling cultures. Ukraine has been shelling civilian areas in Donetsk for years, has passed laws banning Russian-language use in Ukraine, etc. Propaganda drives and sustains all such monstrosity.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">In the particular case of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, I am persuaded that The West (more precisely, those strongly of the neocon mindset therein) <a href="https://twitter.com/ElectionWiz/status/1622305316581908483?s=20&t=FvhMs5R7PMmfh2v29bi9cA" target="_blank"><span style="color: #cc0000;">is primarily to blame for this unspeakable tragedy</span></a>. It refused for decades to take Russia’s security concerns seriously regarding NATO’s eastward expansion. As I’ve hinted elsewhere, The West fears “Russmany” (full Russian and German cooperation) and China – Eurasian economic cohesion – more than anything else. This fear lies behind NATO’s eastward expansion, the very expansion that has crossed Russia’s red lines. But, in miscalculating Russia’s ability to withstand the sanctions levied against it, and indeed in overestimating a Ukrainian army handsomely armed and financed by The West, it has condemned Ukraine to a most horrific fate. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">But despite all of the above, my intuition remains strong that level heads will prevail, that nuclear armageddon is not humanity’s immediate future. Level heads are starting to make their voices heard, are taking great risks to point out that The West cannot win this one. The fewest fanatics think nuclear war is a viable option, and though some of them are in positions of power, many who know better hold power positions, too.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">And for the future we do face, what is perhaps most hopeful about this terrifying ugliness is that the fewest of propaganda’s victims think of propaganda as a good thing. No one wants to be fooled or thought of as a fool, nor are acts of cynical deception seen by anyone as honourable – clever maybe, but never <i>honourable</i>. Moreover, people seem to share an innate desire for fairness, truth and transparency, especially from authority figures, none of whom brag publicly about their powers of deception and narcissistic cynicism when vying for, or while in, power. What else explains our reflexive love of the unselfconscious authenticity babies and infants cannot help but express if not a profound love of truth?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Despite this obviously natural shared desire for truth and authenticity – indeed it is a bi-partisan party-political promise we are invariably seduced with (“Change you can believe in”) –, what we have instead accomplished in The West in the wake of its astoundingly successful propaganda of the last three years is collapsing trust, bitter acrimony, mounting despair. Opposing sides can barely communicate with one another beyond mutual jeers of derision. Various topics that should be innocuous are hotly, oddly taboo (vaccines, viruses, Big Pharma, lockdowns, Russia, Russiagate, etc.). Such a netherworldly social environment does not simply pop up out of nowhere, unassisted. Highly effective propaganda is required.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"><a href="https://thdrussell.blogspot.com/2022/12/tyrannys-harvest.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: #cc0000;">But none caught up in propaganda's corrosive effectiveness appears to be thriving</span></a>. We yearn for something <i>healthier</i>.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Perhaps this unbearable state of affairs is cause for hope. Things are so bad, the pressure towards healthier ways of being could not be more coiled for dynamic release. The mere fact of increasing depression, suicide, cynicism, hopelessness, etc., is clear evidence that humans cannot function healthily in such a poisoned environment. We are, it seems, lovers of truth, of love, but are also tragically vulnerable to the many temptations and traps set for us by fear, pride, loneliness, etc. The opportunity to now learn that uncritical obedience to authority in response to these weaknesses leads in fact to very bad outcomes, and also for that learning to occur at mass level, is surely higher than it has ever been.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” Maybe we stand at the threshold of learning how to remain eternally vigilant, systemically, psychologically, compassionately. Do the following quotes fill you with with feelings of hope, of joy? If not, why not?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">[P]ropaganda must not concern itself with what is best in man—the highest goals humanity sets for itself, its noblest and most precious feelings. Propaganda does not aim to elevate man, but to make him <i>serve</i>. […] Hate, hunger, and pride make better levers of propaganda than do love or impartiality. – Ellul, <i>Propaganda</i>, p38 (emphasis in original)</span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">[P]ropaganda will take over literature (present and past) and history, which must be rewritten according to propaganda’s needs. We must not say: this is done by tyrannical, autocratic, totalitarian governments. In fact, it is the result of propaganda itself. Propaganda carries within itself, of intrinsic necessity, the power to take over everything that can serve it. – <i>Ibid</i>, pp12-13</span></blockquote><p></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Mediocracy: the mechanical product of the totalising urge</span></h3><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Propaganda cannot be satisfied with partial successes, for it does not tolerate discussion; by its very nature, it excludes contradiction and discussion. – Ellul, <i>Propaganda</i>, p11</span></blockquote><p></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">In March, I wrote that German politics is a machinery of mediocrity created in a milieu of mediocracy that pervades the party state, and seals itself off within. At some point this results in institutional failure; the relevant institutions are staffed from this milieu, primarily according to power-political loyalty – as for example in the Berlin election disaster. – <a href="https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/mensch-metropole/corona-debatte-die-verantwortungsfluechtigen-li.296963" target="_blank"><span style="color: #cc0000;">Michael Andrick, Berliner Zeitung</span></a>, 12.12.2022 (my translation)</span></blockquote><p></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">The stupidity of governments should never be underestimated. – Helmut Schmidt, German Chancellor 1974-82</span></blockquote><p></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely. – Lord Acton</span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Is there something in the nature of the totalising urge – that prodigal offspring of civilisation’s expansionary DNA – that leads to mediocracy? Despite itself, this urge is necessarily constituted, in part, of an imperative to dumb down its ruled subjects by means of the propaganda it must wield to maintain power, so as to prevent the feared chaos its absence would unleash. As this process develops and embeds itself systemically, it drags the lowest common denominator ever lower – in terms of critical thinking, love of freedom and individual sovereignty, ethical and civic maturity, etc. – in part due to the propaganda it soon cannot do without: “He who acts in obedience to propaganda can never go back. He is now obliged to believe in that propaganda because of his past action” (Ellul, <i>Propaganda</i>, p29). That which will brook no meaningful opposition is doomed to close itself off to meaningful corrective feedback. As I phrased it above: “Mediocrity metastasises in the absence of meaningful corrective feedback.” </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Meaningful opposition (corrective feedback) is an existential threat to power. All must conform, or be seen as a threat and treated accordingly.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">As I have argued elsewhere, the state is a jealous god, as money and power tend to be. Indeed, Ellul is at pains to highlight propaganda’s totalising impulse, and in so doing also implies, more interestingly, how this impulse leads to mediocre outcomes. Propaganda “does not seek to create wise or reasonable men, but proselytes and militants” (<i>ibid</i>, p27). The implication of Ellul’s analysis explains my decision to quote the lengthy Robert Barnes rant above. It is a rant on how standardisation and an almost maniacal focus on efficiency combine to monopolise control of a society’s power levers into the hands of the unimaginative, the ambitiously loyal, the technocrats, the inflexible few who know too well on which side their bread is buttered. They <i>integrate</i> better than the rest, are gifted at playing the game as they find it, know better than to rock the boat that keeps their status afloat. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">This is about pride, <b>not</b> intelligence. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">What hope then of wisely and thus humbly taking proper account of corrective feedback from the out-groups at the receiving end of their mushrooming diktats, decreed from an increasingly bunkered mentality?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">For me, this core dynamic is a necessary consequence of the technological/materialistic mindset that dominates modernity, ontologically and epistemologically. This paradigmatic domination is a predictable – with hindsight – outcome of the nature of civilisation in its aspect as set against The Wild, as master of The Wild – ‘mastering’ it, of course, <i>technically</i>. Civilisation then becomes increasingly bewitched by its technological prowess, but at the cost of the rest of the organic reality it feels compelled to package into controllable mechanical operations. This self-bewitching reappears, fractally it seems, in the way propagandists seem doomed to believe their own hype in the end, if only to maintain their sanity, their sense of their own decency, their existential conviction they are on the right side of history.</span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Western newspapers are tragically funny. They keep saying, “Russia is isolated! Russia is isolated!” But when we look at the votes of the United Nations, we see that 75% of the world does not follow the West, which then seems very small. – Emanuel Tod, unknown provenance, translation from French by an unnamed source, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ma1vma5pH8" target="_blank"><span style="color: #cc0000;">read out by Alexander Mercouris</span></a> (at approx 1:07:30). <a href="https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/01/31/imf-reverses-negative-2023-forecast-for-russian-economy-a80096" target="_blank"><span style="color: #cc0000;">With the IMF now predicting weak growth for Russia in 2023</span></a> in the face of extreme sanctions (soon to be 10 sanctions packages) imposed by The West, the fact of Russia's non-isolation could not be more apparent.</span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">That said, even though the propaganda employed in Russia and China is likely as effective as that of The West, I am not aware of an as significant slide to mediocracy in those states’ professional-managerial classes. Perhaps it only appears that way to me due to The West’s more rapid decay. Or perhaps the reason is that neither nation has enough power to be a global hegemon. Perhaps, then, in their case the external threat posed by The West is such that it encourages dedicated focus. The threat keeps more grounded and alert the internal workings of its state apparatus, regardless of how free its press is. Perhaps, too, with their intimate and bloody experiences of totalitarianism in living memory, they are more <i>effectively</i> aware of the need to not become deaf and blind to corrective feedback; whence their “Fair World Order”, whence the multipolar world they advocate with increasing self-assurance. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">In truth I am ill equipped to make a serious assessment of this <i>apparent</i> anomaly. Decadence, rot, encroaching mediocracy are hallmarks of civilisations and states as they approach their sell-by date. Perhaps Russia, China and others are sufficiently in the ascendant to have this outcome further in their future than does The West, now past its peak. It is also possible that these and other nations are not as systemically and culturally committed to materialism/atheism as is The West. Is it possible, therefore, the <i>illusion</i> of hegemonic power – an illusion perhaps better sustained by ever more sophisticated and effective propaganda techniques, as by the spiritual void of materialism’s and atheism’s tenets – corrupts absolutely <i>despite</i> being illusory?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">What appears to me to be universal is that living beings want effective command of their own destinies, their own decision making. Living beings seem not to like being manipulated, deceived, to repeat a point made above. There is something about the life force that urges towards freedom of expression, and that expression seems infinitely varied. Trust is pivotal, betrayal a universally horrible experience. What hope then for propagandists, for power, to honour this fundamental property of living existence, of All That Is? Power tends to want more power, corrupting itself in that slippery positive feedback loop. Consequently, when it becomes insatiable in this way, power cannot help but come up against that which it must then see as its opposition; those that must refuse to submit simply because they are alive. This seems fundamental to me, and no propaganda can overcome it.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Life is necessarily stronger than folly, and there is no greater folly than hubris. Which means, to me at least, that the myth of progress is good grounds for hope; it honours something fundamental about life. Perhaps mediocracy quickly peters out despite itself, is the cause of its own demise.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Perhaps we are not destined to live in <i>Idiocracy</i> after all.</span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8lylODh8dKok_uV0MbigiqM481RI4yJuEKUFXIuTGjKg36tQ7wRGPrgqfF5UKLs_54dhF8ANPlT1WOPuORCRpj1HssHp2boceJHlS6YDV3KzFlMVwpX9uteUSWVx2mRyWIvTK2Iyv-lz8Bg6A_0wJlREMCfSbBw48YLstILFBcMVrlsGPKVgr2KHj1A/s2538/Screenshot%202023-01-23%20at%2013.47.32.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1414" data-original-width="2538" height="205" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8lylODh8dKok_uV0MbigiqM481RI4yJuEKUFXIuTGjKg36tQ7wRGPrgqfF5UKLs_54dhF8ANPlT1WOPuORCRpj1HssHp2boceJHlS6YDV3KzFlMVwpX9uteUSWVx2mRyWIvTK2Iyv-lz8Bg6A_0wJlREMCfSbBw48YLstILFBcMVrlsGPKVgr2KHj1A/w380-h205/Screenshot%202023-01-23%20at%2013.47.32.png" width="380" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Mulish; font-size: x-small;">From the movie, <i>Idiocracy</i>.</span></div><p></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Progress is a true myth</span></h3><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">[To] warn [man] of his weakness is not to attempt to destroy him, but rather to encourage him to strengthen himself. – Ellul, <i>Propaganda</i>, pxvi</span></blockquote><p></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian Ramble with them there is no persuading him ever to return, and that this is not natural merely as Indians, but as men, is plain from this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoner young by the Indians, and lived awhile among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them. – Benjamin Franklin, quoted in <i>The Dawn of Everything</i>, p32, Graeber and Wengrow</span></blockquote><p></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">By far the most common reasons [for preferring life with Native Americans], however, had to do with the intensity of social bonds they experienced in Native American communities: qualities of mutual care, love and above all happiness, which they found impossible to replicate once back in European settings. ‘Security’ takes many forms. There is the security of knowing one has a statistically smaller chance of getting shot with an arrow. And then there’s the security of knowing that there are people in the world who will care deeply if one is. – Graeber and Wengrow, <i>The Dawn of Everything</i>, p33</span></blockquote><p></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">If you push a dog, it resists. – Tom Campbell</span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">I wonder if communities like those described in the two middle quotes directly above can ever be recreated by westerners. We seem culturally so removed from them, so enamoured of our loose IT-mediated ‘friendships’, I’m not sure we even really want to, or could, find our way back to those earlier ways of being. But I’m confident this is not necessarily a bad thing. It is more that history’s twists and turns have outcomes good and bad, and yet health always finds a way to re-express. The outer appearance health adopts when it does reappear may not be predictable, but the contours of the body beneath are unmistakable. This is what I think of as progress. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">It is not that dawn-to-decadence-to-dawn cycles orbit a fixed point and thus net out to a zero-sum game. Rather, it is like the Earth orbiting the sun while the sun travels the universe housed in its galaxy, a galaxy that drifts around countless other galaxies, nothing ever in the same place twice. In this manner, history marches ever onward in an ever-changing, yet ever-rhyming and turbulent spiralling. And though ostensibly entire cultures can be lost to this repetition, it appears to be a total loss only to the materialist mindset. Sheldrake’s “Morphic Resonance”, no matter its actual constitution and workings, is at the very least a beautiful metaphor that reflects something true; <i>something</i> is always learning, even as individual egos, and entire civilisations, come and go, some seemingly lost forever.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Many of us feel called to do what is best for humanity and its environment. Human health is sustained by healthy human societies and the healthy environment that nourishes them. Modernity is now far from that happy track. The communities described above are a far cry indeed from us; we look sick to breaking point by contrast. The argument I find most persuasive at explaining the root cause of our predicament identifies mechanical technology, that socially atomising vector, as primarily responsible.</span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">The most favorable moment to seize a man and influence him is when he is alone in the mass: it is at this point that propaganda can be most effective […] [T]he structure of present-day society places the individual where he is most easily reached by propaganda. – Ellul, <i>Propaganda</i>, p9</span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">In my view, Native American communities were healthier than modernity’s. One feature of their health is their relative imperviousness to propaganda, following Ellul’s reasoning, and thus their perviousness to corrective feedback. Propaganda requires atomised individuals, the only type that can make a mass, a crowd in which each member is in some fundamental way alone. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">The following summary logic is pivotal:</span></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">If successful propaganda both depends on atomised societies and then grows stronger due to that atomisation; </span></li><li><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">if, further, the increasing powers afforded to the state by successful propaganda tend it toward mediocracy; </span></li><li><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">if, further still, increasing mediocracy, diminishing freedoms and shrivelling individual sovereignty act together as a positive feedback loop driving loneliness, cynicism and despair ever deeper into a civilisation’s soul, </span></li><li><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">then surely some kind of stronger community is one part of the antidote to the narcissistic emptiness unbridled state power seems to propagate and require. </span></li></ul><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">In a simple sentence: Stronger community is surely one part of what is required for “eternal vigilance” to be possible.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">A mass is only possible where there is no real community, no intimate connections binding together souls who know each other well. Individuals as a mass know only surface appearances: status-symbol cues, ranks, relative affluence, etc. Thus they cannot relate to each other <i>intimately</i>, beyond formal, polite exchanges, do not really know how to comfortably and affectionately assess relative values beyond the shallow aspect of surface appearance. As a result, they can become hounded by free-floating anxieties, compulsive and thus fanatical inter-group rivalries, multiple taboo subjects, loneliness, defensiveness, confusion. To repeat, this state of affairs aids and abets the propagandist. “Propaganda ceases where simple dialogue begins” (<i>ibid</i>, p6). </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Modern technology, then, seems to be a key causative factor of the atomised society that propaganda, and thus the state, <i>require</i> to thrive. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">And yet I do not believe some form of primitivism, or any luddite rejection of technology, can produce the cure to what ails us.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Technology per se is not the enemy, not remotely. So, <a href="https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/what-is-the-next-story" target="_blank"><span style="color: #cc0000;">like Eisenstein</span></a> and many others, I argue the need for a progression from mechanical to what I like to think of as organic technology, a profound change that would require a civilisational shift. To my mind, mechanical technology is concerned almost exclusively with <i>efficiency</i> (per Ellul), while organic technology is also concerned with efficiency <i>but as moderated by a similar focus on robust resilience</i>. It would be guided by a profound need to <i>consciously</i> develop itself in harmony with natural rhythms and laws. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">As I understand it, organic technology would have as its attractor – that quality around which it evolves – steady-state growth and the mindful development of wisdom generally, albeit while being comfortable with quantum technological leaps. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Mechanical technology, on the other hand, has as its attractor endless state-power expansion as served by the efficiency and money-profit gains its advance has evolved to deliver. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">In other words, organic technology would be long sighted and patient, where mechanical technology is short sighted and agitated. Yes, these are cartoonish stereotypes, but the point is to bring into relief ‘mythical’ emphases by way of focussing attention on distinguishing differences as we look around for healthier ways of governing or organising society, and mindfully bringing forth, in service, a new <i>quality</i> of civilisation.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">An evolution of the state, perhaps even its dissolution, is a prerequisite to progress from mechanical to organic technology.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">From this logic, then, it is not hard to see that organic technology would also foster healthy community, would in fact <i>require</i> it. How such communities are structured, however, would be a matter for each community. What will prove equally vital, I’m sure, is establishing and then protecting international bodies that promote and facilitate inter-community and inter-cultural exchange, a very challenging task not to be underestimated. These bodies should never agitate towards utopian perfection and unanimity, nor be seats of power. Rather they should be focussed on facilitating mutual understanding. We are currently witnessing, yet again, what damage messianic conviction in one’s Ultimate Superiority can do. I dearly hope we have soon had enough of it.</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Conclusion</span></h3><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority. – Benjamin Franklin</span></blockquote><p></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science. – Anthony Fauci</span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">What, if not propaganda, that manipulator of groupthink, keeps us at each other’s throats? Even in the deep past – in prehistory – crude, organic ‘propaganda’ we might think of as groupthink may have compounded at times into hysteria or frenzied inter-group conflict. Perhaps we have been demonising the Enemy Other since we were capable of speech and reason. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">What, if not love of wisdom and a humble awareness that submitting to escalating groupthink is dangerous, offers a workable check on our very human susceptibilities? How else might we learn to perceive abundance Out There for all to enjoy? How else might we learn to transcend defensively-aggressively exploiting the perception of scarce resources as justification for perpetuating conflict <i>ad nauseam</i>? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Isn’t the slow and painful journey from fear to love what progress ought to be about, however challenging, however imperfect, however endless? Who begins a garden expecting one or two weeks of work to be enough forevermore? Love is a garden we tend forever. <i>This</i> sort of progress cannot be automated. <i>This</i> sort of progress requires our organic involvement and rewards us with riches of meaning. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">There is no purely mechanical vector whose character is love. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">There is no purely mechanical vector.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Which is why modern states, including democracies, are “<i>burdened</i> with the task of acting through propaganda” (my emphasis). Ellul tells us that states “cannot act otherwise.” If there exists no people convinced they <i>meaningfully</i> constitute a state, there is no state. Propaganda is mightily constrained by this simple truth, and must act in accordance with how people <i>are</i>, a fact that “burdens” its ambitions and appetites. Caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, caught between systemically opposed pressures – state ambition and The Way Things Are –, propaganda must ultimately fail to deliver the meaning humans need.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">I believe we are seeing the bitty and precarious end of propaganda’s power to control whole peoples, and that its demise is a direct result of its effectiveness. The western establishment’s increasing use of outright lies and deception, which directly contradicts central tenets of effective propaganda, is clear evidence of this. The West has soared extravagantly into the heights of its own hype, manic on the vapours of its triumphs. There is now no escape as it watches its great success morph into ignominious defeat.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">People <i>need</i> to lead meaningful lives. Fake meaning confected by mechanical propaganda is not good enough; no smart-city safety zoo can be rich enough. No one is healthy and thriving when they feel their life has no value, no purpose. A meaningful life can only come through meaningful, active participation in how society develops over time, through involvement in community, career, family, friendship, civic duties, etc., involvement created in partnership with those around us, but most assuredly <b>not</b> mandated, <b>not</b> automated, <b>not</b> mechanised. In other words, people want an <i>organic</i> stake in their lives, a stake in decisions made by government, by governance. If a governance system fails to deliver this, that system will lose its legitimacy. Instability – leading to societal breakdown if the rot is left uncorrected – will follow. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">In other words, propaganda is a ‘necessary evil’ that nevertheless cannot exert total power over a mass, no matter how atomised by poor education, stress, techno-distractions and “bullshit jobs” that mass might be. A human being’s inalienable need for meaning cannot be ignored for ever; it is just too fundamental. Canada’s flourishing but macabre flirtation with assisted dying (aka voluntary euthanasia) is a chilling case in point.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Things are terrible Out There and will likely get more terrible still, perhaps even to a messy collapse of the EU and UK that I cannot rule out. But, in keeping with my fluttering intuition in August 2020 that things have taken a turn to the upside, I still sense the western world will soon pull out of its current tailspin. How much damage is done, how long it takes, I do not know. But I still fancy I can feel health poking up through the thick expanse of malaise and cynicism that has been suffocating it for so long.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Each of these very human, bitter-sweet facts is genuine cause for hope. Health, like life, is opportunistic. No matter what tools any power grouping has at its disposal, it cannot effect control over <i>all</i> outcomes, cannot be in <i>full</i> control even for a moment. Wise approaches stand the test of time, unwise do not. Yes, history is fraught with tragic bouts of hubris and moral decrepitude, but its vector, viewed from a broad enough perspective, must over the millennia favour wiser responses, wiser policies, wiser conventions, etc. History is, after all, embedded in nature. If a system is not fit for purpose, it will fail. Nature, life, All That Is, God, entails this obvious truth, is in part ‘made of’ it, we could even say, <i>is governed by it</i>.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">None of this means that a person (or any living being/system) can live recklessly with zero regard for healthy outcomes and expect health to be the magical result. Death, that deepest of corrections, is also a lesson from which life, All That Is, can learn repeatedly, forever. None of us will avoid <i>that</i> feedback. And, one way or another, we must each put in the hours, pay our dues, and tend the garden of our wisdom, our love, if we want the sweet rewards of that endeavour.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Death is not a final ending, just the turning of a page. Fear of that turning is one of many factors that mire us into these historical inflection points. Fear of death, of humiliation, of being exposed for a fool, and other fears of this type must be faced before we can walk the healthier road we yearn for. Yes, it is hard and narrow, but the views are breathtaking.</span></p>Tobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16258136994278139356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7378568575885387942.post-18910077216797001772022-12-27T18:53:00.000+00:002022-12-27T18:53:51.840+00:00Numberless<p><span style="font-family: Baskervville;">Somewhere under redding light<br />something sinks into mire – becomes</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Baskervville;">the mire its sinking is.<br />Numberless eyes swivel down<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Baskervville;">straining to the very dark<br />their seeing fears.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Baskervville;">Limbs knot to gristle<br />in the slippery fight to break free</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Baskervville;">but fear</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">’</span><span style="font-family: Baskervville;">s weight</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">’</span><span style="font-family: Baskervville;">s the gravity<br /></span><span style="font-family: Baskervville;">that sucks it into me.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Baskervville;">–</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Baskervville;">Days drift away<br />liquid as flame</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Baskervville;">glance back<br />then curl to their ends.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Baskervville;">Weakened by numberless irrelevance<br />I gaze on afar</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Baskervville;">mind in close phase<br />wandering on empty ...</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Baskervville;">wandering ... wondering<br />what to have done</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Baskervville;">with time so spent<br />my face sunk, ashen, reverent.</span></p>Tobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16258136994278139356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7378568575885387942.post-35700221421613007242022-12-01T15:18:00.001+00:002022-12-01T15:40:46.382+00:00Tyranny’s harvest<p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Dose anyone suffer with anxiety and panic like me this all started with the COVID-19 I’m still struggling to get well getting out alone is not easy I’ve been on different medication over 2years I would love to do all the things again like walking crafts going on a bus to town all these things I panic with been at home alone been in shops it never ends. I blame Boris Johnson. The mental Heath are struggling to support those that need help to get there lives back. what do you think?. – Carol C.</span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Hi, I agree. I won't go into my political stance or beliefs but I'm struggling to get back to how life was before the whole lock down. Everything for some reason just feels different. I hope you find your normal again. – Sami S.</span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Till my first panic attack, I was nice and happy boy.Drinking, smoking, going out, and in perfect health, then everything get change. Now no drinking, no smoking, only doctors and medications that made me sick. One day I was on the street enjoying, and in a moment hit my nose by accident and little blood bleak. And a one simple think passed by my head. Im dying. I baaaam. My first panic attack. Short of bread, tight in chest, the world started to circle, I was nearly fold down. From this moment to now, doctors and medications. I understand how you feelling and wish from my heart to win this battle. And then tell me :) . If you know some manly or mixed groups, I want to join :) My English is not so good, sorry if many mistakes in the words. Thanks :) – Spas M</span></blockquote><p></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Introduction</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">I copied the above quotes from an online neighbourhood forum. Carol C. initiated the thread with her plea for help, the other two quotes are replies that most closely echo Carol’s fears, though there were tens of other comments in a similar tone, too many to deal with here. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">For someone like me who advocates love, the fear voiced in their words is, to say the least, a challenge. This is an attempt to address it.</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">What chance love?</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">I hope it is obvious from the above that fear is not a sustainable solution for navigating society’s challenges; a life lived in fear is neither healthy nor joyous, where joy is the fruit of health. Ego – “consciousness in the service of fear” – is gifted at seducing us into distractions that so often become addictions aggressively defended, gifted at enmeshing us in tangled webs of self deception, of seeing bounty in playing the role of oppressor or victim, and so on, all to keep us safe from and unmolested by dangers lurking Out There only fear can guard against. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Ego’s perpetual refrain might be phrased as: <i>Life is deadly, fear your most loyal ally. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread!</i> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">This is the reflexive-instinctive substratum state power mines in its systemic need to (fearfully) control its subjects, so as to keep day-to-day life on an even keel and itself in power. Similar mechanisms of control are used by multinational corporations and organisations. Fear is the go-to choice for stressed-out rulers and ruled alike when facing the difficult challenges of keeping an entire people on the same page, or simply making ends meet. But freed to run its course, fear leads to corruption, decadence, misery, endless power struggles, grotesque inequalities, and so on.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Love, by contrast, is very difficult to attain; it requires a lifelong commitment to ruthless self-honesty, courage, compassion, humility, ego dissolution, <i>while avoiding collapse into escapism and victimhood</i>. How many individuals are ready to take on this task <i>before</i> their world falls apart? How many peoples, nations, corporations? It is rare indeed that individuals commit to love before devastating corrective feedback forces their hand, and yet more unusual that entire nations do so. In fact I’m not aware of the latter having ever happened.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">It seems covid19 has distilled this age-old and very human dilemma into painful focus for wave upon wave of people, including Carol. The coming fallout from the disastrous Russia-Ukraine war will represent another distillation of this choice, and further intensify fear, already at fever pitch throughout entire societies. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">And yet, were I to run this foundational fear-love choice past any of the three people quoted above as an invitation to a healthier way of being, how could I be sure I was not unintentionally luring them onto a road they are not ready to travel?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Whom should we blame for our messes, who should make things right for Carol? What I see beneath Carol’s fear, and beneath that of others like her, is the system that promotes and sustains it. But in truth I believe blame misses the point; only Carol can walk her unique path to health, and by walking it, create it. For all of us within a broader system that promotes and sustains such fears, however, staying true to the only path beyond often seems impossible. Indeed, most succumb to the devil they know, at best seeking help from professionals and drugs that almost never address the root of the problem. This is too familiar a lament. The work that needs to be done is too hard, too exhausting, too against the grain of The Way Things Are.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">In other words, the only way out seems so hard it hardly bears mentioning; it is almost cruel to suggest it, however gently. Is a commitment to becoming love a bridge too far for frail humanity?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">I feel the intense need in Carol’s words and am instantly on the other side of reality, heart and mind. How can power be so cruel, so implacably violent yet remain oblivious to its impact, grind relentlessly on as if its measures were Ultimate Good? I find no satisfactory answer, see explanations referencing sociopathy and psychopathy as cartoonish, skeletal, misleading. I watch power’s effects unfold but have a minimally detailed sense of its root cause as generalised fear teamed with ego’s comfy allures. Stunned again and again by events, I am now like a light neither off nor on, my switch stuck between two binary poles, waiting for something to make sense. I suspect many feel the same way.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Love is clearly the only way, but almost nobody dares learn what this really entails. I take stock of my own situation, of what I am and feel, and come up wanting, even though I can find no flaw in the foundations of what I flatter myself I know. I want to do something effective, anything at all, but watch on dumbly as one event seeps into the next, on and on and on.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">The powers of mass manipulation humanity has acquired in pursuit of state power, of status, stability, safety, are far beyond its wisdom. We do not deserve them, and yet we have them. We wield them relentlessly, wanting to know no better. We are The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and our world has run amok.</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">How cruel is love?</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">The cruel, stubborn thought that will not fade away is that things <i>must</i> be this way, that I must accept – does “accept” mean <i>love</i>? – the horrors we have unleashed. <i>These horrors</i> – something whispers to me – <i>are the only way we can learn</i>. Without free will there can be no learning. With free will <i>anything</i> can happen. To accept free will and humanity as they are is to <i>accept</i> horror, evil banality, the most profound corruption and perversion, long dull lives of quiet desperation … all of it. The state of the human world is necessarily and always the truest reflection, indeed embodiment, of how we are as a species.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">The third quote at the top of this article is from a non-native speaker obviously struggling to find his way. He is culturally at sea here, out of place, perhaps delivered here by processes beyond his control: the ebbs and flows of history. Carol is no doubt working class, did not receive an education beyond, I guess, age 16, is of a nervous disposition and has slipped into a confused state of crippling fear. Her view of the world is shared by Sami S. There are, I’m confident, millions more like them across the UK, and elsewhere in the world. And I sense their number is growing. They are all real human beings living real human lives the broader system cannot care about. They are ‘useless eaters’ from the system’s point of view: history’s detritus. I see myself as one of them by virtue of not fitting in, of not agreeing with the system’s base value system.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">History is cruel and there is no stopping it. Systems become established, enjoy some period of success, lose their way, then collapse at some speed and are replaced. When civilisational systems emerge, and when they thrive, and when they fade away, some percentage of the human beings that constitute them ‘fail’, while others ‘succeed’. How can it be any other way? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Does it follow from this, then, that love is cruel? Yes. No. Both.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Do you really understand ‘failure’? Can you value Carol’s suffering and aching loneliness for what it is, for the rich experience of futility it delivers, its contribution to the maturation of her wisdom as soul, and thus to humanity’s wisdom generally? If we are to choose love knowingly, willingly, we need to explore and exhaust the potential of <i>every</i> other way of being as well. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">In the Grail legend, Parsifal easily finds the Grail (wisdom/love), but does not value it. This is the fool’s early success, beginner’s luck. Undeserving, he loses the Grail and drifts into multiple experiences of failure, of suffering. These are the trials we must complete to truly earn love, to be capable of being a vessel for its expression through us. Only after we have travelled all paths that are not love, are we are ready to find and appreciate the Grail. This seems to be how reality works, fundamentally.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Must we accept evil, then? Yes. No. Both.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Yes, in that to squash free will out of existence in pursuit of utopia would create far more evil than it attempts to defeat. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">No, in the sense that evil leads to terrible suffering, and the only path towards a healthy relationship with suffering is the one that appears before us as we dedicate ourselves knowingly and willingly to love. The wisdom of accepting that we do not control all outcomes, all decisions, all emotional reactions Out There does not preclude encouraging love in ourselves and others, as our means allow. ‘Failing’ to be The Shining One who defeats evil for all time is no failure at all, no cause for self-doubt, self-hate, feelings of impotence, no reason to slip back into fear. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Love is as cruel as we want it to be. While we yield to ego, to fear’s easy seductions, love seems idealistic, foolhardy, reckless, even terrifying. When we give ourselves in humble service to love, we learn through very difficult challenges that the rewards and outcomes of our service are fruits whose goodness is beyond our wisdom to know (for some unknowable length of time). This is a very difficult lesson to learn and its pains are directly proportional to the power of our fear, our determination to cling to what we think we know, to old comforts, ideologies, habits of thought and emotion.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">It follows, then – if I am right in this –, that my own pain in the face of the world’s horrors is just that. I have yet to learn how to let be that which I cannot change so as to remain calm and effective for those things I can. No doubt most of us experience some version of this challenge. It is a very human state of being to be stuck in; nothing could be more ordinary.</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Conclusion</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Perhaps love is too much to ask. Perhaps this is true, but also false. Perhaps love’s daunting, unsurmountable challenge, rooted in its unconditionality, is precisely why we finally choose to walk willingly towards it, and delight in how it evolves within us as we learn.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">God/love is the sole ‘perspective’ – state of being – from which we, while humans, can get a tiny sense of how it might be possible there is nothing to forgive, there are no enemies, nothing to fear. Human successes in this spiritual endeavour are fleeting; it is a state of being that cannot be sustained for very long in our realm, the realm of opposites. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Love has no opposite. God has no opposite. From the human perspective, then, there is a cruelty to our situation, not only from the real pain our (necessary?) suffering creates, but also from the teasing potential each of us has to evolve into our maturity, grow closer to love while somehow never quite making it. Perhaps attainment of this state of being really is impossible in this realm. If true, this is precisely why we need guidance and faith, and, equally importantly, patience with ourselves and each other.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">To the degree that there is evil, or even an entity we call Satan, that entity or quality of being is <b>not</b> God’s opposite. Ego/Satan wants desperately, compulsively to demonstrate it is indeed God’s opposite – and therefore equal – and so with luck prove that the real God is Ego/Satan. But God/love is beyond this dualistic hubris, this oppositional state of being. Ego is therefore barking up the wrong tree, fighting a futile war, a war whose battles can all be ‘won’ yet deliver ‘total defeat’ when all is said and done. And yet the battles are real and humanity carries their burden, reaps the mounting harvest of fear, that quality of being ego serves.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Humanity is necessarily embedded in, is perhaps a function of, dualism, but perhaps precisely in order to earn the quality of wisdom needed to progress beyond it, to evolve into whatever follows. Some argue this scales to a cyclical collective process, and talk of ages progressing one to the next until collapse back down to the beginning of the next cycle, with each iteration delivering vital lessons. Why this must be so will remain mysterious until we shed our bodies and reside fully in the non-physical, the non-dualistic, but I think it safe to say our incarnations on earth are not pointless; if they were, I’m sure incarnation in the physical realm would not happen. Something about what we go through on earth as physical beings positively affects the quality of how God/love evolves, it being eternal and ever changing in its fundamental changelessness. This paradox can only resolve for us when we are once more fully soul or spirit no longer thickly veiled by our humanity, when we can again know All That Is <i>fully</i> open to its splendid riches.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">As humans, then, we need faith to have a chance of ‘accepting’, however briefly, what history delivers – history, that is, as the experienced manifestation of human evolution, an evolution irremediably shaped by the realm of opposites which is its sacred host.</span></p>Tobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16258136994278139356noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7378568575885387942.post-9393095157008519782022-10-20T06:51:00.002+00:002023-01-27T12:18:56.649+00:00Cooking on gas<p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed; font-size: x-small;">[Edited "Credibility gap" section in hope of improving clarity, 27 Jan 2023] </span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">They wouldn’t spend all this time lying to us if our opinions didn’t matter. – Robert Barnes.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Never let a good crisis go to waste. – Winston Churchill</span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"></span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Introduction</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Germany knows who sabotaged Nord Stream 1 and 2 but will not disclose this information, citing national-security interests. So reports Alexander Mercouris of The Duran <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65saUjbbNLM" target="_blank"><span style="color: #cc0000;">in response to a question</span></a> from his partner Alex Christoforou at The Duran earlier this week. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">I’ve failed to find a press report confirming this news, but trust both Christoforou and Mercouris enough to take it as true. By way of supporting evidence, it follows <a href="https://www.rt.com/business/564697-sweden-reject-nord-stream-probe/" target="_blank"><span style="color: #cc0000;">an announcement from the Swedish government</span></a> that its own findings are too sensitive to be shared with the world, and further that no joint investigation into the event will take place. It looks like the entire geopolitically critical affair is going to be quietly dropped. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Were Russia guilty, would that news be too sensitive to share?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">The West has unobtrusively let it be believed Russia blew up its primary bargaining chip with the EU, albeit without giving any substance to that argument; Russia could have simply turned off the gas supply at source. In fact, the “Russia did it” narrative is a very difficult, perhaps impossible, sell. For example, Anthony Blinken has in a matter of days switched from asserting the attack was “<a href="https://www.rt.com/news/563626-blinken-nord-stream-sabotage/" target="_blank"><span style="color: #cc0000;">in no one’s interest</span></a>” to it being a “<a href="https://twitter.com/aaronjmate/status/1576326018893492225?ref_src=twsrc^tfw|twcamp^tweetembed|twterm^1576326018893492225|twgr^c82ed14fe0c5e42669546b5b8357ae66f1800a56|twcon^s1_&ref_url=https://www.globalresearch.ca/blinken-calls-sabotage-attacks-nord-stream-pipelines-tremendous-opportunity/5795297" target="_blank"><span style="color: #cc0000;">tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come</span></a>”. Opportunity for whom?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">What does this nakedly suspicious handling of the sabotage event imply? What are the implications of the horrifyingly low-quality leadership on display across The West as its peoples are lulled towards a precipitous economic downward spiral, and perhaps ruin? </span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Credibility gap</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Cui-bono logic tells us clearly the US was responsible for the attack. The US has been implacably against any geopolitical/economic partnership between Germany and Russia for decades, and was particularly troubled by the advent of both Nord Stream 1 and 2. Biden stated publicly in February 2022, with Germany’s Chancellor Scholz standing quietly at his side, the US would end Nord Stream 2 should Russia invade Ukraine. As if to confirm this, Blinken reasons this “tremendous opportunity” as a plus <i>precisely</i> because it ends Germany’s dependence on Russian gas. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Obviously, Germany’s dependence has yet to miraculously resolve itself; Germany has nothing like sufficient internal gas reserves under its own soil. On whom will Germany now depend? Well, a cursory analysis suggests the US will make up the shortfall, albeit at eye-watering prices; liquid natural gas (LNG) is far more expensive than pipeline gas. However, Turkey’s recent deal with Russia to become the EU’s gas hub could well turn Turkey into Europe’s lone gas middleman, seeing as Turkey would be able to compete on price against US LNG. That said, Germany’s industrial competitiveness globally is over without cheap Russian gas, whether it is replaced by US LNG or Turkey-distributed pipeline gas. This of course means the EU’s strength as a bloc is also on a downward spiral. And the last thing Germany <i>should</i> want is to be at Turkey’s beck and call.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">And yet despite knowing that it has been economically emasculated by its ‘loyal friend and ally’, Germany is meekly accepting its fate as US lapdog. What Germany’s people would think of all this might well diverge from what its political overlords are prepared to swallow, but <i>active</i> divergence will depend on whether ordinary Germans are given clear information on the matter, actually proceed to act decisively on that information and oust said overlords.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">So the EU’s doe-eyed loyalty to US diktat now looks certain to reduce it to an economic backwater. If this transpires, the globalists’ dreams of a one-world technotopia will have revealed themselves as hot air. (The UK is in equally perilous shape.)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Unless, of course, this is all part of the theorised globalist plan to use the BRICS’ imminent ascendancy over The West as a mechanism for installing the UN, with its Agenda 2030, as the cohering entity binding all nations on earth to the BRICS’ “fair world order”; the BRICS block repeatedly swears fealty to this UN agenda.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">If this nefarious plan is real and afoot, The West’s demise must be exploited to secure The West’s willing embrace of what it has for decades been conditioned to hate: Russian and Chinese power. To succeed, the plan’s conspirators must be in <i>sufficient</i> control of an astounding number of variables, including: the powerful Western MSM that is currently engaged, with all its hundreds of thousands of employees, in virulent opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; the entire internet through ABC-Google and its censorship activities; current and future anti-globalist populist leaders, such as Bolsonaro, Gabbard, Trump; all The West’s current political parties; street-level political sentiment in the US as Ukraine’s chances of victory visibly diminish; etc. And <i>all</i> of</span><span style="font-family: "Barlow Condensed";"> these exceedingly complex domains of control must jointly steer The West into an <i>engineered</i> cultural denouement of apocalyptic proportions, one that would destroy its self image, and with it, potentially, respect for all institutional authority. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Would the peoples of The West trust their respective globalist cohorts <i>after</i> impoverishment at their hands, when those cohorts proffer the UN and the BRICS as The West’s bright new saviour? Will there be any existing homegrown and trusted authority left standing to spotlight as having been right all along about the ‘pandemic’, the ‘vaccines’, the Russia-Ukraine-NATO war, digital IDs, digital currencies, The West’s financial future, etc.? I imagine an institutional wasteland, trust as dust blowing away over the horizon, impossible to retrieve, impossible to reconstruct.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Or – this assuming this plan is indeed afoot and proceeding as hoped – will the shock be so great that the then broken peoples of The West, lost between worlds with no viable alternative in sight, will only be able to weakly accept the “fair world order” presented to them?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">In truth I do not know. Theorised plans of this enormity seem highly improbable to me, but things have become so bizarre I simply cannot rule it out. My own sense was of a push towards global totalitarianism on the back of a managed ‘pandemic’, which afforded a narrative simple and coherent enough to sustain, with measures economically destructive enough to initiate a manageable financial crash across a nominally ‘unified’ world. That seems to have failed, or to have been an erroneous assessment on my part.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">A more complicated narrative has an even lower chance of success, in my view. Russia’s war against Ukraine muddies the narrative waters considerably, delivers too much hardship in defence of too tenuous a vision – ‘Ukraine, the underdog bastion of Freedom!’ – and risks hobbling the very financial infrastructure the globalists will need to erect their technotopia, even if their CBDC system is up and running in the next few months.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">So, if Russia has indeed pitted itself against what Putin calls “neoliberal totalitarianism”, and in so doing set in motion a sequence of events that is critically demoting The West’s, and in particular the US’, standing in the eyes of the rest of the world, and if this sequence of events is organic (not planned), then we are looking at the fall of one civilisation to the benefit of two or more others. In this case, how The West responds to this is up to The West, and <b>not</b> a coterie of sinister plotters who have been in control all along.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Either way, we in The West are facing what I’m calling a credibility gap. If this whole affair is indeed about to burst, if indeed our leaders and all our institutions are about to be exposed as rank failures when Russia secures unconditional surrender in Ukraine in coming months, as the UK and EU sink into severe recession or even depression with no obvious way out, how will any existing power structure maintain control with their credibility in irredeemable tatters?</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">At stake</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Putin’s recent answer in Astana to a journalist’s probing questions as to the future of the Ukrainian state was revealingly open ended. <i>Russia had had no plans to end Ukraine as a state, but now, well, Ukraine did attack Crimea’s water supply and the Kerch bridge to the Russian mainland. Things have changed</i>. His answer did not make any definitive statement or announce any change in policy, but it did not rule out Ukraine’s imminent demise as a state at Russia’s hands. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">The West’s ability to militarily support Ukraine is quickly drying up. Russian mobilisation is almost complete, its defensive lines are solidifying and holding well, repelling Ukrainian attacks at great cost in hardware and human life to Ukraine. Russia has spent the last eight days destroying about a third of Ukraine’s power infrastructure. Financial crisis looms in that sorry country. For all these reasons, both troop and civilian morale in Ukraine is apparently declining.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">In the US, the ruling party looks sets to incur something of a wipeout in the upcoming mid-term elections. The UK just witnessed the sacking of its new Chancellor of the Exchequer, a mere six weeks in the post. Prime Minister Truss’ position looks lost to fate, and she has been in her post for the same short period of time. Macron has no parliamentary majority. Scholz’s party (SPD) is haemorrhaging support. Europe is facing economic meltdown, as is the UK, despite what temporary upward blips in currently volatile markets might suggest.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">The West’s ability to support Ukraine is at the end of its rope. I have no doubt that Kiev and Moscow know this full well. We may well see one last desperate push into Kherson by Kiev as Zelenskyy’s time runs out.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">At stake, as argued above, is the collapse of The West as global hegemon should Russia win. This likely outcome is set to transpire despite the belligerent and bellicose fervour with which The West demonised Russia and promised Ukraine certain victory. All of it to win far, far less than nothing.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Is this what the Davos/WEF crowd wanted? Is this the bloody royal road to the global technotopia of which they dreamed? It doesn’t look like it to me. It looks like a typical hubris-driven comeuppance, at great cost in blood and treasure to Ukraine.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Alexander Mercouris and Alex Christoforou of The Duran suggest that Germany’s and Sweden’s tightlipped handling of the Nord Stream sabotage means the US has given up on its ambitions to deconstruct Russia and China. If true, this leaves the US with the EU and UK as its prize, which it already had anyway, though now a broken EU and UK not really of all that much utility. And with Turkey in control of whatever gas makes it to the EU/UK, how effective would the US’ control be [edit: with reserve currency and petrodollar gone?]? Would some sort of impoverished technocratic-superstate vassal to the US be a fun or satisfying outcome for all future US leaders after all the fine work put into accomplishing so much more?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZltdPfal5x0" target="_blank"><span style="color: #cc0000;">Mattias Desmet was recently in conversation with Tucker Carlson</span></a>, a one-hour conversation I highly recommend. He points out – and this is of pivotal importance – that totalitarian elites are first and foremost ideologues. They are not cynical pursuers of total power, spoilt rich overlords with nothing better to do. They passionately believe in some ideology so unshakeably they are prepared to do and risk anything to see it installed. He shares with his host Carlson that Hannah Arendt predicted as far back as 1951 that the ultimate totalitarian system would be technocratic/bureaucratic. The ideology driving dreams of a technotopia (my word) is materialism, or rationalism, the atomist worldview that is modernity’s paradigm. The totalitarian state predicted by Arendt in 1951 is the logical outcome of that paradigm: a perfected global system of perfected humans in perfectly run cities and businesses. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Only fervent belief in a vision of this kind can drive people to risk everything as ‘incompetently’ as we currently witness happening in The West. The question is, does the rest of the world, and do, in particular, the BRICS nations, share this cultural fervour for technotopia? This question has driven the probing articles I’ve published here since I started addressing the Russia-Ukraine war. I suspect the answer is a soft yes on the part of Russia and China; I’m not sure how deep that sympathy for utopian dreams goes, especially considering Russia’s deep Christian Orthodoxy and China’s Confucian reflexes. But I am simply not sufficiently informed to hazard a guess beyond my intuitive sense that life – which is not mechanical in essence – wins out in the end. Hence, to whatever degree the BRICS bloc and the Global South share in materialist reflexes, and however solemnly their leaders may advocate Agenda 2030, no pure rationalist/materialist impulse can produce a healthy society, just as this applies to The West.</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Conclusion</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Things are quickly coming to a head. My own read on what is taking place is firming, but events change so incessantly it is impossible to keep up. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Nevertheless, love, not fear, is always the answer. If Desmet is right that speaking out inhibits the depth of any given mass-formation process, I will continue to speak out in support of love and free will, and in so doing play my small part, come what may.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">While materialism dominates, love, as I express it at this blog and elsewhere, will continue to seem like a ninny teenage fantasy of minimal utility. But if we humans do in fact despair when lonely, and if in fact we do hunger for meaningful lives, if we love to love and earnestly want contribute to the health of all those around us, then love is the path we will have to turn to sooner or later. </span><span style="font-family: "Barlow Condensed";">Of this I remain sure, and on this point I will continue to write for as long as my fingers allow!</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Barlow Condensed";">Let's not let this crisis go to waste.</span></p>Tobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16258136994278139356noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7378568575885387942.post-56350777700313068152022-10-10T13:09:00.003+00:002023-01-02T09:15:55.343+00:00Taking stock II: Fitting in<h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Barlow Condensed;"> Introduction</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">This is a short-form article fitting geopolitical realities to the worldview I have been developing for over a decade. A non-academic exercise to be sure, on several levels, but for what it’s worth an attempt to test its explanatory power. As I have laid out in recent articles, my confidence in my position has weakened considerably over the last few weeks, though certain events in my personal sphere, and others of similar intimacy elsewhere, strengthen it again. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"><i>Key points</i></span></p><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Scarcity, cultural differences and specialisation</span></li><li><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Love and consciousness evolution toward global consciousness</span></li><li><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Love and acceptance</span></li><li><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Right, wrong and moral relativism</span></li><li><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Kittens</span></li></ol><p></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Scarcity, cultural differences and specialisation</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Cultures evolve within defined territories, whether geographical or ideological. So separated, they diverge. Languages, traditions and customs differ to varying degrees, making empathic/sympathetic communication between cultures challenging, while dehumanisation/demonisation is a significant temptation in times of tension, when scapegoats are sought. Tensions develop over some combination of perceived scarcities and said communication problems.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Advanced social specialisation exacerbates this; only a tiny percentage of any people can become ‘expert’ in alien cultures. This makes the rest easy to manipulate in times of tension, hence the irresistibly attractive tool of dehumanisation for those who stand to gain from escalating tensions war.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;"><i>If </i>we want prevent war, surely we must address these issues. But how?</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Love and consciousness evolution toward global consciousness</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">A couple of days ago, I saw an image that was claimed to be from Hunter Biden’s laptop. I won’t elaborate on its content, but its depravity shocked me. Regardless of whether it was a fake, depravity of unimaginable horror happens. That’s one thing that should humble anyone hoping, as I do, for an evolution in human consciousness toward love. And yet the fact that it is perhaps universally perceived as horror by all healthy humans alive suggests, strongly, that love is the answer, weak as that sounds in today’s bitter turbulence.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">The presence of horror, depravity, evil, etc. repeatedly throughout civilisational history suggests to many that its continuous manifesting is due to human nature. My own take is that situation is the driving factor, not biology. Biology is indeed a powerful factor, but exactly how our biology translates into action in the world, how that action is perceived, anticipated, handled, etc., is cultural. Modernity, in my view, handles ‘psychopathy’ very poorly. One example of this poor handling is the curious idea that money-profit should remain a society’s deciding measure, i.e. that ‘free markets’ governed by price discovery produce the best of all possible worlds.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">The oldest ‘culture’ I am aware of is that of Australian aborigines, who have been walking their walk for 80,000 years. They fight amongst themselves, kill each other in times of heightened tension and misunderstanding, albeit in better harmony with their environment than does modernity, and with a far healthier relationship, marked by deeper wisdom, with what we think of as psychopathy, sociopathy, etc. This does not mean we moderns should seek to recreate that culture as our own. It means simply that humans are culturally adaptable, less constrained by our biology than, say, cats. This is couched, for the sake of argument, in a dualistic intellectual framework; this is meant to be brief, so I’m keeping it brief.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">One of my core knowings is that love is health is wealth, that, therefore, love will prevail over time. However, the cultural impediments to the idea of global consciousness evolving toward love, regardless of the power of love as a universal truth that undergirds the nature of reality, are significant. Cultural inertia is highly significant. It is folly to underestimate it.</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Love and acceptance</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">If we try to be loving, what must we learn to accept … Cultural inertia? Moral decay? Horrific abuse of abductees? Pedophelia? War?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">When we learn to be loving, one thing we learn we cannot do is impose our wisdom on others. When we project our power onto an other and force them to “Become wise</span><span style="font-family: "Barlow Condensed";"> now</span><span style="font-family: "Barlow Condensed";">! That is an order!”, we fail. Allowing free will the free rein to do what it must is the only way I know of in which wisdom can develop as it should. And yet…</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Just as cultures steadily calcify into what they are, so too do individuals. Constraint liberates. In my conception of All That Is, our ‘physical’ reality is specifically set up to effect direct consequences. Our free will is severely constrained by the ruleset that defines our reality. We are not free to fly around at will, to walk through walls, read minds, heal our wounds at will, make that woman love us, etc. More importantly, we makes choices that become the investments in our future selves and systems that narrow and narrow toward correction. This complex of earthly limitations is exquisitely instructive (karma). Earning wisdom in this environment is instructive because its corrections are experienced so intensely.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">So, what must we accept? Rephrased: Is it wise to demand perfection? Well, everything is always perfect, so must we accept that we are here to learn this truth, come what may? Jung said, “Free will is doing gladly that which we must do.” If we successfully accept this, and deeply, right through our being, what then? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Then we learn to love our enemies, to have a better idea of how to prevent abuse organically rather than autocratically. But can we poor humans accomplish this?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">I don’t know. The process is painfully slow, and very difficult; ego is at the helm for this journey until we learn the very lesson ego does not want to learn. I think this is the point, a point that is very hard to accept because it seems to require terrible suffering until we learn better.</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Right, wrong and moral relativism</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">So, now we’re here. Out There, as I write, Russian missiles are raining down on Ukraine. My heart goes out to those suffering there, as it goes out to abused abductees, to the crippled and terminally sick. Despite all that suffering and our hunger to end it, to heal it, one way or the other we always end up here.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">I do not believe that acceptance is moral relativism, that right and wrong are somehow equivalents. My wisdom is that free will teaches best, with constraints operating as structures that effect a certain immediacy, or directness, particular to our ‘physical’ reality. We cannot grow up into true maturity unless we are free to experiment, then taste, fully, the feedback from those experiments. This scales up to the reflex towards autocracy, totalitarianism … to utopias of every hue striving heroically, hysterically, to end or minimise real suffering for real people. From that messy struggle, civilisations rise – which is a bloody process – only to fall later – which is a bloody process.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">“Strong men make good times. Good times make weak men. Weak men make hard times. Hard times make strong men.” But this is <b>not</b> moral relativism. This merely describes part of history’s rhyming, of the necessary <i>experimentation</i> of what works when humans try to govern thousands, millions, and then billions, of souls.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">This is only <i>part</i> of what human reality is all about. A deeper part is that love is <i>unconditional</i> and foundational. Which brings us neatly to kittens.</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Kittens</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">We have two tom kittens – born of our sole female cat, Firefly – named Ashitaka (brighter tomorrow) and Kashmir: cute little killers oblivious to the horrors of the human world Out There. My family and I abide with them, watch them playing, eating, sleeping. We are responsible for their health and love them unconditionally. One day they may torture rodents and birds to death. We will continue to love them unconditionally. Otherwise, our love would be conditional.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Their trials and tribulations reach us as endearing life lessons they must pass through. We provide the structure that enables their growth. The more freedom they have within the structure we provide, the healthier their growth will be. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">I know the ‘gap’ between humans and God dwarfs that between humans and kittens. To God, our trials and tribulations are never horrors. We are loved <i>unconditionally</i>. What I know through my love of my many family members, human and non-human alike, is that humans <i>can</i> love unconditionally. The challenge is to extend that loving embrace ever outward until we love our enemies unconditionally. But this cannot be rushed, not even by me and my idealistic fervour.</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Conclusion</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">Is it possible that despite our humanity, we can love our enemies? Or is it human to err forever? One of my own many failings is my idealistic, delusions-of-grandeur aspiration to Save The World. Failing at this – as I must – I feel impotent. I hate to watch on as horrors occur. I become angry, frustrated, sick. It’s why I write this blog, now a journal of my spiritual journey to nowhere in particular.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">(The kittens are now on my lap.)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">I shall leave this open ended, which is best, I think. Love is the way, of that I have no doubt. But we travel at different speeds, scale different heights, endure different appetites and ambitions, push history relentlessly on. And cannot measure our successes and failures, or even tell them apart.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Barlow Condensed;">What do you want to do now?</span></p>Tobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16258136994278139356noreply@blogger.com0