The masks are very off

Trump’s myth attracts my attention regardless of how true it is. Not because I’m attracted to it per se – it’s too cartoonish for me –, but because “draining the swamp” is sorely needed. There is corruption aplenty in every nation on earth. How could it be otherwise; power corrupts. Power attracts those who hunger for power, a civilisational dynamic we must live with. So evidence of voter fraud, properly exposed, would flush out much corruption. So much so, in fact, that few of the horrifically partisan mass-media outlets, social and conventional, will escape unwounded, and many might perish. – Me in November 2020

I thought the bizarro world of lockdowns would be enough to wake people up. I was wrong. I thought the stolen 2020 election would be enough. I was wrong. I think Russia beating Ukraine will be enough. Let's see what happens.

The pressure is mounting. The West's very long-term investment in Project Ukraine looks to be at the edge of collapse. Foolishly, vainly, Trump managed to convince himself over the course of a sweet little golf putt that he could art-of-the-deal his way to a Big Beautiful Peace Settlement between Russia and Ukraine and make beautiful photo-op headlines shaking hands with Putin. He also managed not to notice that the US is basically running the war against Russia, and managed not to notice that Putin has all the good cards. But that's what President Trump managed to believe, and this is the supper he will dine on for the next few years.

The EU (primarily France and Germany) and the UK are deeply into Ukraine with both feet, both hands, the whole of their drooling mouths, and all of their future monies. It could not be a more hideously monstrous and tragic catastrophe. If they don't succeed, they die. So these inbred, deranged co-belligerents are doing their pathocratic best to inflame matters into WWIII, and thereby bomb everything to rubble, to then make mo money rebuilding the world and taking control of Russian subsoil assets.

BUT! What did Trump just promise Putin, for Putin to suggest to the President of the nation he is more or less at war with – the nation that is keeping Ukraine in the fight against Russia – so that Putin would help Trump out with his Iran negotiations? 

What does President Trump have to offer President Putin other than staying out of Putin's way? I suggest that it is a reasonable guess that if Trump stays out of Russia's way while Russia does what it feels it must in Ukraine, Putin will then, and only then, help Trump out in his negotiations with Iran.

Which is but one part of why The West* is sounding even more screechtastic than it has of late. The UK, France and Germany cannot prevail against Russia without the US. The US cannot prevail in its national and international ambitions without Russia. The pathocratic neocon faction in the US cannot survive without toppling Putin and somehow driving a wedge between Russia and China, to then be able to fatally weaken both by all means foul and fouler, to then one day live happily ever after with their Beautiful Global Hegemony bride. Yes, the shrill needle is all the way over to the right, at the very far end of its red warning band ... whereupon Musk and Trump jump head first into the fray to entertain us all with their multibillion-dollar playground spat. Nice.

Back in 2020, I had the strongest intuition that Trump represented an opportunity for bursting The West's self-aggrandising myths, but wasn't able to articulate it clearly enough. Since I started listening to The Duran, Scott Ritter, Garland Nixon, Glenn Diesen, and several others from that big-tent assemblage, and reading very broadly on geopolitics and political ponerology, the detailed nature of that intuition has become much clearer to me. What is far less clear, is to what degree the rot that is The West is global, and thus to what degree its imminent demise will drag everyone else down with it. There is so much that is wrong on planet Earth right now, I dread to think how bad the situation really is.

But anyway, the masks are off. Again! Lower than ever before. Might it be that this time the ugliness that lies behind what has become of the West will stink too badly to ignore? Is a sufficient percentage of the West's citizens capable of identifying that stink, and then wanting to do something positive about it?

Time will tell. And I don't think there's very much time left before we find out.

* By "The West" I mean those Western establishments – intelligence, financial, political, media, education, etc. – that are fundamentally pathocratic, deranged, and fighting for their miserable lives. I do not mean the West, that delightful mix of cultures and traditions I love so much.

Trump card dud

I had hoped that President Trump was the right kind of sledgehammer to bludgeon the US into something more sustainable and healthy than its state today. I had hoped there was a mad and accidental gut-level 'genius' working through him that would prove just about right to rescue what is good about the United States of America from itself. But I also feared the general rot was too deep, the permanent state and military industrial complex too deranged, too drunk on their hubris and insufficiently challenged notions of 'supremacy', and the man himself too vain and insecure. It looks like my fears were right and my hopes wrong. (I'm not going to genuflect here to any side by saying that I love or hate Trump. I have never met the man. Mine is an assessment made from a great distance, one mediated by multiple analysts and experts in such matters.)

It is of small benefit to the West's now ugly future that Trump's overtures towards Russia have, most likely, averted nuclear war. It is of equally small benefit to the West that, perhaps, in time, the hideous truth of the West's rape of Ukraine – that tragic country singled out by geography to be an expendable staging house on the West's greedy rampage to Russia's subsoil riches – will finally come out so that the peoples of the West can learn of the horrors their leaders set in motion. But perhaps the rest of the world will benefit more. Perhaps they deserve it. Perhaps the West deserves its future. In fact I'm sure it does; one thing leads to another. There's nothing 'fairer' than that, even when it hurts, even when it's tragedy, even when you hate it, even when history once again reveals its impartial ruthlessness to perpetrators and victims alike.

The West, just like every other civilisation, cannot escape reality. Hegemony is a prize that hubris whispers is there for the taking, but when you reach out to grasp it, when you ignore all signs of your impending doom, and keep on doubling down on your gambit blind to those signs, self-destruction will be your reward.

The world is bitterly polarised across multiple axes, secular and religious, 'scientific' and 'faith-based', national and international, state and market, and no doubt many others. I'm not defending or attacking one side or the other in this post, nor do I elsewhere at this site. It's just that the uglinesses must be exposed, faced and processed. To my eyes they are primarily the fruit of the West's bitter harvest. The uglinesses are legion, and very human; the energies that drive them live in us all, though I strongly believe they are perversely 'wanted' – or amplified and nurtured – by structural factors of power as power gets bogged down in its own entangling context, forced to believe its own hype by the mounting pressure of runaway circumstances, until doubling down becomes the only option it can see. It is because the West has the most power that it is condemned to do the most evil this time around. But this is a human process, not a Judaic one, nor a Christian one, nor an atheist or Islamic or Chinese one. It's human first and foremost, and it happens over and over again. 

The West is tearing itself and great chunks of the world apart in its rapidly metastasising madness. I dearly hope I am wrong, but it is hard to see any other way through but down. I believe Trump had a chance. Sadly the worst in him has burst forth in the last few weeks and it looks like he will hang himself, and millions of others, in its noose.

[Edited 12 May 25 to improve flow and clarity.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Murderer of calm

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are the roots that clutch?

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

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

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

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

Three earthly possibilities

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

Source (Jeff Snider, Eurodollar University)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In two words: TOTAL. CONTROL. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Non-earthly fundamentals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wise up, humanity!

 

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.

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.
– Professor Jeffrey Sachs in a 5 July 2023 speech to SHAPE (Saving Humanity and Planet Earth). Hat tip to Alexander Mercouris

Introduction

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.

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.

In that vein, this article is a counterbalance to my previous musing.

A blitzkrieg recap of recent times

The seven most amazing events of my life: 

1. Because of a virus, the constitution is suspended and an emergency regime of curfews and general psychological terror is established.

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.

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?)

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Old Normal indeed returned. 

’Twas a mere trifle of billions of euros spent? Sure looks like it. 

But you can't just pull off a stunt like that and pretend everything is normal again. History judges mercilessly. Slowly, but mercilessly.

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.

Maybe not for decades.

But it will happen. 

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.
– German text shared anonymously on Telegram

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. 

Despite their best efforts, their plans fray and unravel all around us.

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. 

Despite their best efforts, their plans fray and unravel all around us. 

Their panic is now plain to see if you but look.

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.

And yet the fact that Professor Sachs, among several others, has noticed and is speaking out, 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.

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? 

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.

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.

The evil that men do

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 visibly waning brute force.

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

Where there is authority, there compulsion is superfluous. 

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.

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. […]

[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. […]

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.
– Ibid, pp61-63.

Resist The West, and it will crush you without mercy. Its vanity demands total obedience, the total subjugation of your free will to its demands.

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 value? How deeply have we internalised this cruel siren song? 

Should we go under? Should we allow ourselves to be culled like Marvel’s Thanos wanted? What are your thoughts on this oddly titillating moral conundrum?

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. 

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.

My own faith, my knowing, is that humanity is here for a reason, and is on the cusp of rediscovering this truth. We are not 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.

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 must 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 always find a way to fight back.

What we need to understand, is what we are fighting for.

The dilemma of dilemmas

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. 

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 afford a shift of emphasis, a shift in the cultural value systems that direct our science, economics and politics. In my analysis, in my intuition, it is precisely this quality of shift that characterises the evolution underway in the cultural soils just beneath our collective perception.

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 we should not try to resolve. 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.

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? 

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 feelings about these things? Subjective impressions about what it all might mean? 

“Commit it then to the flames”! 

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.

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. 

Our digital future of 0s and 1s is upon us!

Back to faith, back to reality

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.

Wisdom cannot be purchased or stolen. You earn 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.

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. 

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 enjoy them, 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. 

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.

Postcard from the ledge

It’s a mess out there. – Me.

Maybe that’s a good thing. – Me.

Introduction

It’s been a while. There has been much for me to do in too little time. 

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.

This is a lengthy postcard from that windy ledge.

A breakdown of categories

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.

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.

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.

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 – there is nothing but God, 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.

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 against collapse?

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.

Or perhaps this time will indeed be different, who can say.

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.

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.

To pontificate, or not to pontificate

The answer is yes. Yes, I shall pontificate. It is my wont.

To recap the core thesis as it once tottered about in my mind:

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. 

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.

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.

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?

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 nobody likes those guys.

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.

What to do?

Communities R Us?

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. 

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. 

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?

Or play online computer games together and have endless fun, with robot slaves cleaning up after us?

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 forever? 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…

So what is the true character of the community humans must have? Play, or self-discipline? Both?

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.

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.

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 “fair” 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?

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.

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?

The more things change, the more they stay the same

And yet and yet and yet…

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 seems 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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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. 

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?

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 misapplied, that I have misunderstood their character. Does this mean that I have likewise misunderstood the character of this historical moment? I suspect so.

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. 

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. 

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.

“Have I not guided you to where you need to be?”

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.

(Note he said “need”, not “want”!)