Impossible is nothing: a common-sense look at the miracle of existence

(Part I)

Love thine enemy. – Jesus of Nazareth

Love your neighbour as yourself. – Leviticus

Struggle in the way of God. – I understand that this is how Jihad tends to appear in the Q’ran

It is easy to hate and difficult to love. This is how the whole scheme of things works. All good things are difficult to achieve; and bad things are very easy to get. – Confucius

Introduction

I know of no imperative more radical and all encompassing than “Love thine enemy”. Whether the origin of this famous phrase is The Bible, and thus Christianity, is irrelevant; it neatly captures what love actually entails, how profoundly challenging it is.

Can anyone truly love their enemy? Ponder what love-based relations would mean between Ukrainians and Russians, or between Israelis and Palestinians. 

When we cannot love our enemies in our millions and billions, does humanity become volatile, cynical, subject to the endlessly repeating tragedies of massed hate and fear? The terrible energy of compounding, uncorrected cynicism and volatility at cultural and civilisational scale is on ugly display across the world. Love could not seem more preposterous an instruction.

Switching religious rubric, how is your Jihad coming along? How robust is your godly commitment to the evolution and authenticity of your humility? Love without humility is not love. Humility without love is not humility.

Are such musings political or ideological/religious? Both? How about pragmatic?

I do not subscribe to either left- or right-wing politics; I can fathom no healthy reason to be loyal to an ideology. But, it would be naïve of me not to recognise that politics is the art of defending and effecting your principles, mores and morality in the world. One can pontificate all manner of things, and many of us do. But translating ideas into action in the sphere of any kind of governance or bureaucracy or group activity is politics. Indeed, it is as if the raison d’être of earthly existence – more specifically of human existence – is politics: What is feasible and actionable, now, given the irreducibly complex reality of the situation at hand?

The more truly loving you are in your deepest being – in other words, the more authentically you can love your enemies – the richer and wiser your vision of what is pragmatically possible in any given situation. So, wouldn’t love indeed make the world a healthier, happier place? Isn’t it that simple (logically speaking)? Why not, for example, put in the hard work needed to make love and wisdom foremost in our educational processes? Why not make best efforts to develop and nurture as wise and loving a population as we can?

This line of inquiry has become the core of my work here at Econosophy. I would like to see it either thwarted as unreasonable or silly, or, failing that, taken up by people more effective than I am at encouraging others to take this analysis to heart, and run with it.

This article follows on directly from The Power Trap by exploring more deeply the fundamentally cyclical patternings I derive from the best logical deduction my faculties can muster, namely the 

curiosity ➜ slow mastery ➜ automation/internalisation ➜ breakdown/decadence ➜ curiosity …

cycle the previous article briefly referenced (see image above for a little more flesh to its skeleton). In so doing, I attempt to sketch out solid rhetorical ground for seeing such cyclicality as a spiral subject to evolution/progress and thus as a rational spur to taking wisdom, love and total health more seriously at governance and cultural levels.

Buckle up Uncle Buck; Kansas is about to dissolve before our eyes.

A rapid-fire recap of my general position

[Peter Frankopan] looks into hundreds of empires […] over three millennia […] and how they went out, [and finds] aspects of what we’re doing now that are just as insane, whether you’re looking at the Moguls, the Mongols, the Persians, the eastern or western Romans, or the British; they all do really stupid things at the end. […] It’s power pollutes, and absolute power pollutes absolutely, that sort of thing. – Larry Wilkerson in discussion with Professor Glenn Diesen and Alexander Mercouris

I roam this analytical territory because humans do not thrive under the auspices of corruption, and I think this is becoming painfully clear to a growing percentage of the West. Isn’t something gnawing at us, nagging away at the back – or front – of our minds that Things Aren’t Right? Don’t we yearn for transparency, decency, honesty, trust and dignity more than we crave uni-party politics, virtue signalling, untrustworthy media, ever more entrenched polarisation, ever crappier consumer products, ever shallower entertainment, ever less nutritious food, etc.?

Yes, we enjoy cheap and easy thrills for all sorts of reasons, but we’re learning, the hard and squalid way, that this cheapness is profoundly unsatisfying and, in fact, sickening. We’re learning that deep friendship, mature parenting, courageous and honest leadership, healthy communities and ecosystems, etc. are far more important, that these self-evidently good things are in fact the ground on which the more whimsical pleasures become and remain meaningful.

A robustly meaningful life is, in essence, a wisely sustained dynamic balance that continually creates total health. Succeeding at this long term, purposefully and mindfully, requires a good understanding – whether in the form of unconscious reflexes or mindfully developed – of how existence works, especially when the entity that is to remain healthy over time is as complex and unwieldy as a human culture. From the perspective of this article, here is a bare-bones list of the core elements one might ponder when working towards good understanding:

1. Reality includes cyclicality
2. The nature of that cyclicality can only be an expression of the nature of reality
3. Reality also includes evolution* (aka negative entropy) else there would be no life on earth
4. Evolution means historical cyclicality is an uneven spiral, not a revolving wheel
5. Humanity must now learn wiser cultural responses to power’s corrupting vector: we have WMD
6. Because wising up is possible (evolution is fundamental), wising up is clearly the way to go

* In my conception, “evolution” is more than biological; it is fundamental to reality and is fundamentally about wisdom.

The best three words for poetically expressing what I mean by “wising up” are “Love thine enemy”. As Confucius suggested, this is far from an easy undertaking. But seeing as we are increasingly aware of the dangerous pitfalls of lazy submission to our shallower pleasures and appetites, perhaps the attractiveness of this beautifully difficult and fundamentally earthly challenge is growing.

Are we finally ready to want to do the hard work it takes to build a healthier world in tipping-point numbers? I suspect that precarious moment approaches. But you cannot force love in, or hate out. Force is not the way. We have to pay our dues organically; we have to mean it. We are tasked with honestly and fully learning where we’re at with what we currently are. The tipping point will therefore necessarily include sober acceptance of our state of consciousness in all its ugliness and beauty. 

Will we baulk and pull back to double down yet again as the daunting enormity of the task gapes open before us?

Because nothingness cannot be, what good is suffering?

The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism. – Camus

I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos. There has to be some organizing principle. God to me is a mystery but is the explanation for the miracle of existence - why there is something rather than nothing. – Allan Sandage [my emphasis]

(This complicated section progresses from identifying value in inquiring into the question of existence, then moves on to how our ontological convictions affect both our understanding of suffering’s role and what we should do about it.)

What is possible? Constrained by our nature and circumstances, what can humans accomplish? What can we reasonably expect of progress? I believe we cannot properly address such questions without starting from the very bottom: existence itself.

An illuminating thought experiment that can lead anyone who takes it seriously into the depths of reality begins with this simple-seeming (teleological) question: 

Why is there existence? 

More controversially: Can there be such a ‘thing’ as nothingness? 

When you really think about it, it is truly awe inspiring that there is something rather than nothing. For example, is it equally probable, theoretically, that reality ‘be’ nothing, rather than something? Could reality even be real if it were pure nothingness? Is total non-existence possible at all? If nothingness were a realistic possibility, could being even be?

These may seem facile – though tortuous – questions, but they serve an important logical function. I happen to believe that nothingness is a logical impossibility. For me it follows, therefore, that reality cannot not be, and eternally so. In other words, it is 100% certain, eternally, that there be existence. Reality is immortal.

Nothingness cannot be, because to really, truly, strictly ‘be’ nothing – and not merely our conception of or theorising about nothing, e.g. a chaotic void capable of spawning richly complex big bangs –, ‘it’ would have to have zero properties and qualities. Otherwise, ‘it’ would be a something. To exist, to be able ‘to be’ in the first place, one of the properties nothingness would have to include is the property of existing. ‘It’ cannot therefore exist; that would give ‘it’ at least one property, which ‘it’ cannot have by virtue of ‘being’ nothingness.

Nothingness is only ‘plausible’ as a thought experiment that highlights the curious oddity of non-existence and the eternity of existence. It is one of the many domains that science cannot properly address. It is best traversed with rhetoric and poetics.

Impossible is nothingness.

This may seem like disingenuous tautological casuistry, perhaps even simplistic, but, to my mind, the logic reveals something fundamentally contradictory about the notion that nothingness can be a thing, or, exist. Nothingness is a fundamental impossibility, and I happen to find this thought awe-inspiring. To wit: 

If nothingness is impossible, earthly existence is not suspended in any kind of void; nothingness can have no properties, including the ability to accommodate 3d ‘objects’, and being a ‘fabric’ ‘made of’ spacetime. Nothingness cannot change either, therefore time, as change, cannot be a function of or impact on nothingness. If time cannot relate to nothingness, how could nothingness permit light to travel ‘through’ it? Nothingness would then be a thing within which light waves propagated over time. It follows, then, that existence cannot be spatially situated within infinite or dimensionless non-existence.

Nor do I see a vacuum as nothingness; it is the result of extracting air and any other materials from an area defined by some surrounding casing such that forces act on it very powerfully. A vacuum is thus a thing sustained by the context of other things that can act upon it. As the saying goes, nature abhors a vacuum, which means vacuums are acted upon by the rest of nature, and thus things. Non-existent, nothingness cannot be acted upon, cannot be redressed or corrected.

But more importantly to the matter at hand, if nothingness is impossible, so is death as most Westerners appear to understand it. “What happens when we die?” “Oh … nothingness.” What many humans see as death is, on my logic, in fact but one manifestation of change. And yet billions of us fear death viscerally. From this misunderstood – though biologically reasonable – fear of ‘death’, much suffering springs. This is the ontological connection between the nature of reality – the nature of existence – and suffering that interests us here. 

There is an implied but pervasive sense of nothingness at the heart of the mechanistic/humanistic/atheistic paradigm. Materialism proceeds from an assumption of ‘death’, aka ‘dead’ ‘matter and energy’ (whatever they are), from which it somehow conjures mechanical/biological ‘life’ that sinks back into ‘death’ as a result of unavoidable causes like ageing or accident or sickness. Yes, you can argue that ‘life’ and the earth’s biosphere are therefore precious miracles of awe-inspiringly unlikely happenstance, but that argument does not dispel the fact of death dominating a merciless and unimaginably vast universe in which biological ‘life’ represents but a vanishingly small percentage: beautiful, improbable ‘life’ as consolation prize in an oceanic death: fragile, tenuous, alone. This is in essence what materialism implies, and what those who unquestioningly subscribe to it kinda-sorta feel about the nature of existence. 

Is this paradigmatic perspective, which proceeds from death, from nothingness, logically sound?

This question of course alludes to the dualistic dilemma of consciousness and matter as rival fundamental phenomena for ontology. Which of these two phenomena you deem fundamental strongly influences your relationship with, and ideological reaction to, suffering, and also how you value life (whatever you think that is).

All this begets another deep question: Is there any value to asking why? Humanist/materialist science finds teleology (querying the purpose or why of phenomena) anathema, but I believe teleology has real value, if only because grappling with fundamental issues teleologically bears unexpected fruit. For example:

Why is there suffering? 

Our response to this question strongly impacts how far we think we should go – societally, politically, economically – to minimise suffering. Let’s begin with, “Don’t ask why.”

If we fundamentally dismiss purpose from our reasoning, what then is suffering? Is it mechanical and therefore illusory? Is suffering simply irritating grit in the machinery of existence, machinery we then ‘perfect’ in pursuit of efficiency using cost-benefit calculations? This would be suffering understood as a drag on efficiency, an irksome albatross around the neck of economic growth. Or perhaps as a driver of economic growth in the sense of miracle cures of endless variety but low effectiveness; endless suffering is good for business.

While we might being doing very well on this mechanical track in some respects, in others – see rapid-recap section above – things don’t look so rosy. In other words, can we meaningfully address the problem of suffering, with wise compassion, without addressing its purpose? I think not. I think history shows us getting inexorably bogged down in cynicism, and dysfunctionally so.

Luxury makes pain seem even harder, and dulls and weakens one’s pleasures. For the person who is always luxuriating and never touches pain will end up unable to endure any pain at all, and also not be able to feel any pleasure, not even the most intense. – Dio Chrysostom (seen in an Academy of Ideas video)

I do not mean to imply that a teleological approach yields easy answers; quite the opposite. I find suffering extremely hard to tackle. I know sociological inquiry into relative wealth in money and material terms has produced all sorts of statistical correlations between health and success outcomes, but, as is so often the case with academic studies, the findings produced are not teleologically satisfying. What is happiness? What is wisdom? What is health? What are success and failure? What is money and how does it measure worth, wealth, value? These are devilishly hard questions to answer, especially academically, especially materialistically. How rich and wise is our understanding of suffering if we do not properly address such questions?

Obviously, I find the question of suffering pivotal, and I think most humans do. I don’t know anyone not adversely affected by corruption, rampant mendacity, the disappearance of trust-based and vital communities, moral ambiguity, etc. Humans, as all animals in fact, don’t do well in a sick environment. To repeat: Is the current sickness of our Western-dominated global situation inevitable due to historical, dawn-to-decadence cyclicality, which is itself inevitable because Human Nature is immutable, or rather, devoid of free will, robotic? If yes, then perhaps there’s no point trying to respond wisely to cyclicality; it’s inevitable and humans obviously don’t got what it takes. So quit whining. 

On this mechanistic, anti-teleological logic, there is in fact no point to anything, by definition. And yet we respond to reality as if there were; we suffer compounding crises of meaning when our culture tells us there is no purpose, that existence is fundamentally dead.

We appear to suffer fundamentally under the paradigmatic belief (or cultural reflex) that there is no point to it all, that life is a mechanical happenstance in a fundamentally dead universe. Of course humans also suffer in superstitious or religious-authoritarian contexts, but I’d guess for downstream (non-paradigmatic) reasons of corruption; any state system that becomes stagnantly sclerotic exacerbates corruption by virtue of too much power in too few hands; this is a function of power, not of ‘spirituality’.

But I’m not writing this article to announce the winner of The Battle of the Paradigms. What I’m trying to do is defend the possibility of very broad-scale evolutionary progress that passes through vacillating, socially experimental stages. That is, I’m probing why history rhymes, and suggesting the reason for its rhyming is closely connected to suffering’s purpose.

Specifically, I’m arguing that humanist science in the guise of Scientism/Materialism, currently the vanguard of human progress in certain respects, has thrown out too much baby with the bathwater of corrupted, superstitious, authoritarian religion by studiously ignoring immeasurable – but fundamental – phenomena like love and wisdom. Materialism, the hegemonic West’s paradigm, has predictably become moribund and sclerotic as the West’s power corrupts itself into end-stage decadence. Wisdom and love are its blindspots, so to speak, as is health in the rich, all-encompassing way I mean it at Econosophy. ‘Objective’ measurement is materialism’s dogma, its unimpeachable holy of holies. As such, immeasurable and ineffable phenomena have been recklessly demoted in the maelstrom of material progress.

Is it not self-evident that we thrive on awe? Why do we find awe so inspiring, but fundamental nothingness so … emptying?

For example, does the following assertion inspire you? Consciousness is an illusion because reality is mechanical and thus fundamentally dead. Consciously experienced suffering is therefore likewise an illusion. You might think, Yay! No more suffering for me, it’s just an illusion!, but I’d bet good money your initial enthusiasm would quickly exhaust itself.

Alternatively, if the purpose of suffering were to provoke maturation into full adulthood, both of individual humans and, now, of extremely large groups of humans, would that not be more inspiring, more empowering? Would that not cast progress in a different light, lend it a richer, more noble aspect?

The West’s generalised sense of irksome suffering seems to be precisely that aspect of human existence we want politics to mitigate. ‘Progress’ appears to be understood, in essence, as the steady diminishment of our suffering, the cleaning up of our self-made messes by The Powers That Be. ‘Progress’ is an ever easier life for more and more people.

Wouldn’t this make us incompetents who cannot take care of our own business, Hobbesian incompetents who need elite Incredibles to keep us from ruining our world? How do we know our reflexive expectations and demands of progress aren’t turning us into brats spoilt by our ever more convenient lives, as in “good times make weak men?” If we have indeed become brattish, we would first need to acquire a good understanding of what “hard times make strong men” and “good times make weak men” really mean before we can lastingly remedy our brattish oversensitivity to suffering. We would need, at the cultural level, a far more nuanced understanding of the role of suffering.

I discussed some of the issues on the curious matter of how enduring and overcoming suffering adds richness to a human’s character a while ago, but still feel like I am only scratching the surface of this pivotal issue. Below is my current thinking on the role of suffering as a fundamental aspect of reality, which is also a roundabout way of beginning to define it.

It seems fundamental to me that resistance (opposition of some kind) is required for there to be meaningful decision-based action, action, that is, that has the potential to contribute to some sort of evolution or maturation of your character, of your wisdom, as you learn from the consequences of each action you take. Then, in addition to this needed resistance (opposition), the quality and quantity of chance/randomness, namely the unpredictable free-will ingredient a living system needs to evolve meaningfully – that is, in a non-robotic way that can be a conscious, deliberate effort to improve – compounds fractally in the vast melee of life to produce dizzyingly complex diversity, which, I believe, produces ever richer challenges to continued evolution. In other words, suffering evolves too. 

Think tribes to chieftaincies to city states to civilisations to nation states to multinational corporations, etc. These ever more complex human groupings as crucibles of increasingly diverse challenges are mirrored by the ever more powerful enemy bosses a computer-game player must defeat to level up in a given computer game, so it’s not as if this idea is outlandish or even original. I’m just asserting that it is fundamental to the nature of reality and grounding my assertion in the curious impossibility of nothingness.

Finally, when you add in acute human sensitivity, ego, fear, imagination, hedonism, laziness, etc., and mix in a culturally shallow understanding of progress, you get an interpretation/experience of resistance/opposition that translates, in a generalised way, to suffering. 

On this logic, suffering is an immature perception of misunderstood challenges, even though challenge – suffering – is an eternal aspect of reality.

But surely this is violently callous of me. How can it be immature to experience the horrific realities being endured by Palestinians in Gaza as suffering? And there are countless other unbearable intensities of suffering happening right now, everywhere on earth, that are far too many to list, and far too gruesome. We are at each other’s throats and it keeps getting worse.

Such suffering appals me, sickens me, makes me despair for humanity. It makes the phrase “Love thine enemy” seem vicious, fantastical, cruelly naïve. But horrors of genocidal scale happen again and again throughout human history even though the vast majority of us don’t want them to occur. Why? Why are we failing so egregiously in our attempts not to repeat them? 

The key word, for me, is “scale”.

Civilisation represents a massive scaling up of human society from hunter-gatherer bands. We are social animals who, for hundreds of thousands of years, could not manage to band together in larger numbers than the low hundreds (so the theory goes). That we have managed to band together in the billions has increased the complexity of our societies, as of our intra- and inter-group socialising, the complexity and richness of our cultures, and, I argue, massively increased the intensity, scale and horror of the suffering we can cause each other, because we remain gifted at dehumanising whomever we select as our Enemy Other, perhaps more than ever before.

I dearly want us to be more noble than that. I dearly want us to take seriously what loving our enemies involves. I want us to want to move beyond the dehumanisation that enables the hideous hatred that leads to genocide and too many other horrors. This is what my efforts here are all about.

The Power Trap looked at the ‘stabilising’ social technology we call the State, a ‘stabilising’ technology that bands people together at scales that dwarf the low hundreds that was humanity’s lot for hundreds of thousands of years. The article establishes that the Hobbesian power required to set up and sustain a state is in fact a destabilising and corrupting factor. The article identifies power’s ability to forestall correction as the primary reason why power corrupts. From this it is easy to deduce that our short-sighted, reflexive human tendency to seek pleasure and avoid pain, allied with state power, strongly tends to produce terrible historical suffering at genocidal scale: whole peoples against other whole peoples – millions and billions strong – because we tend not to want to do the irksome work of becoming wise, both individually and at group scale. Wisdom begets love and love cannot dehumanise.

Today, we have nuclear weapons and other means of wiping ourselves out. This perennial problem could not be more pressing. 

Is there something wiser for humanity than our history suggests? Is human nature capable of ‘spiritual’ evolution as I suggest immediately below? This is the pivotal question. Certain individuals do choose to walk the love path, and do indeed become healthy, wise, and loving, but throughout history they have been extremely rare. Looking at the raw stats, you’d have to conclude that life is suffering for most of the people most of the time; show me your precious ‘progress’ now, dreamer! 

And yet this dismal characterisation of our lot does not seem to apply to our non-human companions, who lack the capacity to worry about suffering in an abstract, self-pitying way. They just get on with life. Theirs is a biological, or individually unearned, wisdom that sees them through. Incapable of civilisation, they are under no pressure to earn the sort of cultural wisdom humanity so dearly needs to improve.

In other words, humans appear to have a different remit. I believe it to be fundamentally ‘spiritual’, by which I mean primarily concerned with consciously evolving earned wisdom at cultural scale. Humanity’s challenge, I assert, is to learn to love our enemies, but this is a mighty difficult undertaking that must now happen at civilisational scale if we are to avoid self-destruction.

What manner of challenge is this? What happens to group-based power (the state) if love and humility render groupthink impossible? Conversely, what happens if ideological groupthink continues to stiffen – “Don’t bug me with fripperies like love and wisdom, I’ve got a household/company/country to protect!” –, to create ever more defensively rigid power structures across the globe? It’s a terrifying thought.

Love is pragmatic

Five of China’s 17 dynastic collapses over its 2,200 year history were the result of famine. China suffers on average one major catastrophe – drought or flood – annually. Due to its long and almost indefensible northern border, China’s central plain has been conquered at least eight times by nomadic tribes. This is all a consequence of China’s unique geography as harsh taskmaster; this is geography as teacher of the necessity of compromise, diplomacy, tenacity and the importance of a stable people wise and skilled enough to handle that sort of constant challenge. (Source)

We could therefore argue that China has not been permitted to develop the lasting cultural ambition needed to attain the sort of geopolitical hegemonic power that currently corrupts the West. For example, during the Ming Dynasty from 1405 to 1433, Admiral Zheng He ruled the seas for China, and yet despite naval know-how that was centuries ahead of the West’s at that time, China chose not to settle colonies across the Indian Ocean and Africa, etc., chose not to expand its empire across the world. Instead, the Ming Dynasty viewed the threat from the northern nomadic tribes sufficiently grave that it chose to disband its navy and redirect the freed resources to defence of their realm. I view this as a wise choice by a civilisation that was old and mature enough to value stability (harmony) over the risky riches colonial conquest might yield.

Note that this expression of wisdom is not starry eyed or romantic, and is hard won via suffering. It is coldly pragmatic and calculating. “Be ye therefore wise as serpents and gentle as doves.” Love and wisdom are mutually indwelling, give each other meaning and functionality, and co-evolve to sustain health, as health sustains their co-evolving. 

The example I chose is thus illustrative of the pragmatics of love as I mean the phrase. Perhaps my choice seems jarring, but love is not romance, nor is it dewy eyed, nor is it self-delusional. All that stuff belongs to romance, to eros, to cupid’s arrow: a different beast. Love includes the strength of character needed to change course, to admit error, to notice correction is needed and accept it despite the pain, the loss of status, of face, etc. Love is, as I repeatedly state, synonymous with wisdom and health. The three concepts constitute a trinitarian whole whose component parts mutually explain each other by virtue of constituting the trinity they are.

Conversely, power tends to corrupt. However, this does not mean necessarily it must continue unabated. Let’s not be absolutist about this; absolute power is impossible. Let’s also not assert that China is perfect. No governance system is perfect. There will always be more to learn, more wisdom and love to evolve, etc. But the above example demonstrates that civilisational power need not corrupt to self destruction, that its clear tendency to corrupt is very apparent to those with eyes to see, and thus can be mindfully monitored somehow. Whether anarchic or direct-democracy arrangements are superior to China’s systems of governance, or inferior to a constitutional republic, etc., is not my concern here. I’m merely pointing out areas of discussion I consider relevant to the challenge of developing a sustainable cultural awareness of the importance of wisdom and how this relates to suffering. We’re trying to avoid both destroying ourselves and repeatedly committing atrocities against whole peoples in our wilful blindness to viable alternatives to The System so viscerally and violently defended by the West’s current crop of vested interests. I am confident that group wisdom, at large scale, is pivotal to this.

For example, developing further the assertion I made above that earthly existence is politics, a wise approach to preventing horrific suffering would include empathic diplomacy among different national governance systems such that one dispassionately appreciates how mutual tensions inevitably occur between cultures and civilisations, rather than ideologically or competitively seeking to best them. Decisions are investments in the future. At civilisational scale, switching governance system – an extremely complex investment – to accommodate the aggressive demands of some civilisational competitor would be impossibly costly to the point of self-destructive. Deep differences of perspective are the natural consequence of many, many factors, but more importantly it should be plain to each of us how hard it is for us to fundamentally change our perspectives on a dime. Hegemonic ambition, by definition, cannot respect this obvious truth, cannot behave empathically. Wisdom thus includes the requisite humility to empathise with those who differ deeply from us. Domination is thus not a wise posture. Humble co-existence between Self and Other is. (And by the way, humble does not mean weak.)

“Respect existence or expect resistance.”

The fundamental cycle

All that set up, we finally arrive at the purpose of this mighty rhetorical endeavour:

curiosity ➜ slow mastery ➜ automation/internalisation ➜ breakdown/decadence ➜ curiosity …

What does it mean? 

It’s my attempt to sketch out the brightest aspects of how evolution – that which consciousness is about – breathes in and out to continually become, or create, or earn, increasing richness, or continual growth of its beautiful complexity. Because this is a function of consciousness – which is what reality is – it is about patterning as evolving process. 

Patterning is data processing as information perception (aka creativity; meaning is created via perception) in the sense of interpretation (perception is always interpretation). Consciousness self-perceives the data (the potential for pattern) that it is, and in so doing interprets it into information, fractally, iteratively. Consciousness is a meaning-making entity. Preference, which begets value by experiencing reward of some kind, is also fundamental to this ever evolving process.

The cycle I’ve delineated asserts that curiosity – itself a cycle (explorative) – is fundamental because consciousness is obviously eternally curious. Curiosity begets experimentation – itself a cycle (iterative) –, which delivers results that are experienced as successes or failures depending on the intention and value preferences behind the experimentation. This process leads to a kind of mastery, e.g., a human baby learning to walk. Walking is transformed from a curiosity-led and fascinating/obsessive struggle into automated or internalised processes – which are also cyclical (iterative) – that take far less effort than the obsessive struggle towards mastery. Automation thus frees up the resources previously devoted to learning, whereupon curiosity looks around for the next attractive adventure. 

This mini-loop creates an attendant or consequent larger loop – breakdown/decadence (exhaustion, or ageing, or serious accident in the case of walking) – that brings about, and/or is an interface with, interference from the ‘outside’ in a manner that impedes curiosity in an oppositional or challenging way. This exchange with Other/Environment acts to correct (keep healthy) the three-part loop just delineated. It’s called feedback, which I’m casting in the role of opposition, but we could also define it as the constraining structuring (rules, patterning) that inhibits freedom such that action is meaningfully instructive rather than arbitrary and wholly uninhibited* (feedback free). 

*Imagine action wholly without consequence or feedback; you would have no way of knowing you have performed it. Poetically, you could say gravity makes a baby want to walk. Poetically, you could say opposition makes existence possible. Poetically, you could say suffering makes existence meaningful.

Biologically driven curiosity – e.g. learning to walk – sets up internalised/automated (muscle-memory) processes that last a lifetime (assuming constant use). Sociologically and personality driven curiosity sets up (psychological/cultural) processes that can span generational time, or that can repeat multiple times within a lifetime. Dating partners to find your perfect mate can produce several breakdown/decadence stages as each relationship fails to handle the collapse in romance that follows the automation/internalisation stage. Compare this with muscle-memory skills that decay if wholly unused, as in “use it or lose it”. And the sorts of wisdoms that are learned in partnerships and friendships, in family life, in careers, etc., feed into each other. Such experiences and the curiosities that trigger them are not discreet objects, they are interoperating and intermingling patternings that co-evolve dynamically.

To look at a broader, cultural example, a people might tame fire and develop ways to pass the skill on down through generations. In time, this people might develop metallurgy. Later, it might develop steam power, then manufacturing, etc. Each accomplishment is automated into the culture as a cultural wisdom that then initiates different sets of challenges – unintended consequences – that can interoperate over time to produce things like wars, mass formation and dehumanisation programmes, and on to genocidal atrocities.

It isn’t easy to depict all this as a neat drawing. The way I envisage the interrelations between these various (complex) loops cannot be faithfully captured in a Venn diagram; there’s not really a ‘within’ here. Nor is this sort of contemplative reasoning meant to deliver tightly accurate predictive power. It is rather a hobbyist’s thought experiment that hopefully offers a perspective on our challenges as a species confronted with our potential to destroy ourselves and all our civilisations because we’ve forgotten how to talk to each other across cultural differences (diplomacy is a very old cultural/group wisdom). It seeks to construct a plausible view of reality’s fundamentals that meaningfully de-emphasises competitive rivalry in favour of dispassionate and empathic communication at inter-group scales. It is an attempt to explain how, and why, history and evolution do what they do to cyclically present humanity with daunting challenges. Today, our challenges are satanic in character – by satanic I mean a functional insanity that is ultimately dysfunctional – as decadence metastasises into wanton debauchery and accelerating moral breakdown. I believe the profundity of this rot happens to result from the end-of-life stage knocking loudly at the doors of humanism, materialism and Western hegemony, and, perhaps, labour-as-value/money-as-price as well, but this is a global challenge whose timing I am consistently wrong about.

The bolded stage – automation/internalisation – is of particular interest to me. While I see automation as fundamental, there are elegant and inelegant versions thereof. A rain forest is a spectacular example of elegant automation, as is muscle memory. In stark contradistinction, the breathless – historically speaking – rush of factory automation, mass production, consumerism, propaganda morphing into insidious public relations and mass-behavioural nudging is inelegant, clunky, brutish. Describing it so is intended to highlight the incredibly difficult challenge of internalising/automating group wisdom at vast scale, now perhaps internationally, perhaps even species wide. The WEF’s Great Reset is an unimaginative, crass attempt at what is needed in terms of a kind of global awareness of ourselves as one species with a particular ‘spiritual’ remit. We have to do much better than the truly infantile transhumanist fantasies that drive the WEF’s bizarro agenda. Theirs is the predictable product of materialism as it relates to nothingness and nihilism writ large: a kind of toxic froth with garish PR lipstick smeared across it, the barren brainchild of an ‘elite’ that has become wholly divorced from reality on the soul-addling flatulence of its fetid isolation born of its power to forestall correction.

Conclusion

We are not Hobbesian beasts by nature, we are Hobbesian beasts by governance system and paradigm. We are capable of group wisdom; the state and civilisation demonstrate this unequivocally, albeit unevenly, albeit as never ending story. Our nature has adapted to evolutionary development in our governance systems in a number of ways, but we are still having great difficulty with fear-based dehumanisation. Nuclear weapons mean we do not have the luxury of failing this challenge arrogantly and expecting things to settle back down to some cherished Old Normal. But crucible-like pressure is what we need to sober up, pay closer attention to our lot, and wise up. In addition to our regrettable powers of dehumanisation, we are also outraged by them. Our valiant efforts to cast ourselves in the role of victim is a clear sign of this. While it may be cynical virtue signalling, it is cynical virtue signalling that is needed for deeply noble reasons; we care about honour, we care about decency, we care about each other. Humans care.

We are not Hobbesian beasts. We simply face a very difficult transitional trial whose most fundamental character is an unfortunate systemic addiction to power’s lamentable potential to forestall correction, to kick the can down the road. By “simply”, I mean that the nature of the problem is easy to identify. However, I do not mean that it is easy to remedy. We may well fail. Nuclear armageddon could happen, or multiple armageddons simultaneously, imminently.

The atheistic/materialistic worldview has devolved into a godless cynicism marked by a hubris wholly devoid of humility, grace, decency, empathy, etc. Correction of this to something nobler and more humane clearly requires a willingness to again embrace and revere these immeasurable, non-commodifiable properties of existence that are clearly evident throughout nature, not least in the nihilistic depression that takes hold when all trust and decency departs. This yearning need for something truly healthy and beautiful is the unstoppable force now crashing against the immovable object of entrenched Western power. But Western power will break. How much damage the West will do is open to discussion, but the West will break. My hope is that in its ruins a sufficient number of Western survivors recognise the need for decency, empathy, etc., and work hard to build the next round of good times that could lift us into a better Western civilisation than all previous versions. 

Unimportant at this stage are arguments about the Best Governance System. What we need is a rediscovery of how to honour mutual empathy and respect, especially in the West. 

I have argued here that nothingness, as death, lies at the heart of humanist materialism, which is often touted as hard-nosed realism. It is in fact a negative romanticism, a kind of nihilistic reluctance to accept limits. It began with the giddy excitement that the universe, as a machine, was there for the taking, for the perfecting, ours to reshape as the fancy took us. This paradigmatic vector is now long past its honeymoon period, far into late old age and decrepitude. By way of thought experiment, I hope the examination herein of the impossibility of nothingness – of death – and how this impacts on our sense of what is humanly possible with regards to human suffering and historical cyclicality, could be one fillip to taking more seriously the love-wisdom-health trinity we will need to respect again if we are to pass successfully beyond this incredibly challenging transition.

About this blog, anew

 There is nothing more real than information. – Tom Campbell

Introduction

I’ve changed much since I started this blog over a decade ago. This post is an update regarding that change and how I’m now using Econosophy. It’s possible the change in tone and subject-matter emphasis my writings evidence since the covid spectacle burst onto the world stage requires explanation; this article is that explanation.

A core principle of my efforts here at Econosophy is that I do not write to persuade people to agree with me. I cannot emphasise that strongly enough. I write to make some currently controversial matters a little less controversial. Why? To help facilitate constructive conversation between ‘opposing’ camps. 

We are divided and conquered, beaten far down from the natural authority our sovereignty, set free and nurtured, would encourage. The lines of division between our various groupings, as between us as individuals, and even within us, are as several as they are toxic. Rich diversity is one of life’s many prerequisites, but bitter division across multiple fomented fault lines makes social life unnecessarily fractious and barren for most of humanity. The more fractured and barren humanity’s sense of itself and its place in reality is, the more destructive and abusive relationships between Self and Other become, just as between human and non-human worlds. 

Generally speaking, then, it is this impediment, this block to every individual’s loving and natural authority that I try to address, to highlight, to explore. To that end, the root problem to be addressed is, in my view, dualism, the flawed heart of humanism and its unintended offshoots, materialism and scientism (and much else besides). 

For me, dualism’s roots are far older than Descartes’ dictum, “I think, therefore I am”; they reach down into Greek atomism and deeper still, I assert, into pivotal human accomplishments like taming fire and domesticating seeds and animals. I.e., once we have notionally split reality into The Tame and The Wild, we have unwittingly set civilisation in motion and made a ‘dualistic’ reflex fundamental to how we organise, defend and sustain ourselves across generational time. 

Indeed, this Self-Other split is far older still, is in fact a necessary property of experiential existence itself. An experience requires an experiencer. This ‘split’ between subject (experiencer) and object (experience) is the almost irreducible core of reality. However, as Darren Allen is at pains to point out in Self and Unself, the subjective and objective are only possible within a whole he terms “the context”, which for him is the “panjective” perspective that ‘binds’ or ‘unites’ the two apparently opposing functions, subjective and objective. 

Dualism, then, is this fundamental aspect of reality brought into the foreground by Descartes’ dictum and work (and also the work of other contemporaneous philosophers), dug up from some deep cultural substrata and into the light via philosophical analysis. It has subsequently become culturally fixed as the distilled essence of a previously hidden, foundational property of reality favoured reflexively over a fuller and more organic perspective for millennia, that more organic perspective we are now, I believe, bringing into being as a species (see, e.g., The Ascent of Humanity by Charles Eisenstein).

But dualism remains the defining reflex of all global commerce and governance systems. Yes, all: despite Eastern philosophical variations, efficiency has been massively overvalued by the systems instituted globally on dualism’s watch. Efficiency is a logically necessary High Good of dualism. As global players fight over what they perceive as scarce global resources – viewed through the lens of Malthusian analysis, a lens that is the direct result of the measurable material world that is the object of scientific enquiry – efficiently conducted campaigns and strategies win out, commercially and politically. Historically, this strongly favours efficiency over resilience, a dynamic that makes for increasingly fragile and over-complicated systems. We are now at such an advanced stage of this dynamic, that the grossly overweighted ‘efficiency’ of our systems is tripping itself up every which way, finally exposing itself as the busted flush it was always going to be. 

What to do? As always, dig deep and see what we find…

Dualism is the soil I choose to dig. The insoluble conflict I see as inherent to dualism can be captured in a single bicameral question: 

What is mind (“I think”) and what is matter (“therefore I am”)? 

This article sets out, in some detail but by no means exhaustively, my reasoning on this pivotal ontological issue. It is very far from a complete work; its objective is merely to provoke and share rather than brow beat and bedazzle.

Previously

The global financial crisis that surfaced in 2007 ignited in me an overpowering need to understand. But understand what? Money quickly became the answer to that question, which is why this blog, and my life, orbited that subject matter for so long.

From October 2013 on, and in fact earlier though in more subtle ways, a profound spiritual awakening began in force whose effects continue to change me as deeply now as at its outset. I will not detail its individual events, but, in an attempt to convey its profundity, simply list a handful of prior ‘certainties’ that have been refashioned in me already: the nature of reality, science, democracy, authority, suffering, love, trust, expertise. 

By way of disclosure and contextual backstory, I read Capra’s The Turning Point in my late teens (if memory serves). I was romantically attracted to and heavily influenced by its dismantling of key academic disciplines. Being young, I did not see the weighty ramifications flowing from that dismantling in any depth or clarity. About three decades later, I read Capra’s The Web of Life, which added needed muscle to the skeletal intellectual framework placed in me by The Turning Point. 

Very crudely speaking, these two works bookend my intellectual departure from the acquired, culturally reflexive ‘knowings’ I had about reality, which had been essentially Newtonian in the shallowest sense of that term, a departure that guided me towards a more nuanced, systems-theory sensibility of the Santiago School variety, best captured by its famous ontological phrase “World and mind arise together”. 

This information lived in me almost entirely as material I wielded and appreciated intellectually. My spiritual awakening – how I hate that phrase! – has strongly foregrounded my intuitive and feeling-based modes of perception; they continue to deepen and enrich my relationship with and appreciation of that material, as of everything else. 

If I were to choose a phrase to replace the platitude “spiritual awakening”, it would be something like “deepening and broadening of consciousness”, similar to “individuation” as described by Carl Jung. Because we experience consciousness operating in modes, such as intuition or thinking or feeling, it does make more sense to describe our maturation in terms of becoming increasingly familiar with the totality of what we are. Maturation, or individuation, or awakening, is a constant process of expanding your horizons to accommodate ever more of reality, and thus of your self. Expressions like “The more I know, the more I know I don’t know” also capture this process; it is a process that is necessarily humbling.

Right about now

Now, I stand in God, deliberately, with focus, in service, to the best of my ability. I am oh so slowly learning what that entails and how to share it – I feel strongly called to share it. It is a turbulent fits-and-starts process that seems to even out over time.

Among innumerable other effects, my spiritual awakening has settled the dualism issue for me. At least, that’s my experience of it. I now confidently assert the most effective path through this deepest of all modern issues is non-dualistic – unsurprisingly –, one that best begins with a single-faceted question: either “What is matter?” or “What is mind?” Separated out and pursued ruthlessly, these philosophical lines of enquiry quickly lead the seeker to that most hallowed of grounds: I Don’t Know. That’s the ground we must return to if we want to own or develop a take on reality – Wahrnehmung rather than Weltanschauung – that is true to how we are. 

Why take on this odd-sounding task? Because being confronted, moment by moment, intimately and immediately and even deliberately, with the rich and instructive consequences of being who we are authentically and openly is a very healthy state of being. Certainly it is humbling, and Lord knows we need more humility in the world! 

When humble and open, we allow in more information. Obviously, this is required if we are to expand our knowledge of ourselves and reality. But to avoid becoming a weather vane turned this way and that by every new piece of information on the breeze, healthy skepticism and discernment must be developed. This is at least a lifetime’s undertaking; probably it is endless.

(Every time I try to do justice to this nature-of-reality material, to set out my own Wahrnehmung of All That Is, I am reminded how intractably difficult it is. Which is why I increasingly prefer poetic or rhetorical expression over academic or scientific or ‘fact’-based modes of communication. In the end, it isn’t facts that persuade, it’s something else. And that “something else” differs from person to person, moment to moment. But anyway, here I go again…)

In my view, each of us is a living, or organic, expression of our context. You could say: evolving manifestation of our context. We come at the world – perceive the world, relate to the world – constituted of ever evolving ideas we did not create solo and ex nihilo. In other words, each of us is a conscious/semi-conscious constellation of inherited and learned/imbibed interconnecting ideas – aka systems – that determines how we perceive reality. The systems we are structure how we perceive; systems structure perception. Reality is therefore organically constituted of us “perception constellations”, each of which is unique, where “unique” is a necessary consequence of the dizzying complexity of the all-embracing context as it expresses through the dizzying complexity of each ‘individual’ that constitutes it. (What I mean by “us”, as well as how the all-embracing context – All That Is, God – is itself akin to an ‘individual’, I tackle below.) 

The preceding tortured paragraph is tortured precisely because we modern humans are trained to perceive a world of discreet objects rather than one of intimately interconnected and ever changing beings that constitute a conscious whole. Remedying that training is not an easy task. Doing justice to my more ‘spiritual’ perspective in any kind of academic language – rather than poetic or mythical, or as film, etc. – goes against the grain of what academic writing has evolved to do; draw distinctions, analyse, define terms in meticulous detail, compartmentalise, stay ‘neutral’, etc.

To proceed yet deeper into this difficult subject matter and try to draw into relief the all-embracing context, I have to point out that I include the biochemical, and indeed the ‘physical’, as part of the perception constellations that together are reality, while nevertheless deliberately using an ‘insubstantial’ word like “ideas” to encompass those modes, for several complex reasons. 

Firstly, and somewhat impishly, we humans can analyse and reflect on what we feel and mean and experience, and my readership is exclusively human. Hence, the idea of “biochemistry” – by which I mean all that biology and chemistry contains as knowledge and how much each of us knows thereof – structures to some extent how we experience the effects ‘actual’ biochemical processes have on us – eating a delicious meal, for example. (This point is not as peripheral as it first might seem.)

Regarding non-humans: While I cannot communicate with you from the perspective of actually being a wolverine, an amoeba or a rose, it remains true that any attempt I make to communicate their experience of reality – whether scientific or poetic or simulation or National Geographic documentary – must be subject to the same filtering effects that belong to the unique and ever-changing constellation of ideas I am, as must your reception of my attempt. I see this as inescapable; we are what we are at every given moment, human and non-human alike, and our attempts to assert what it is to be a non-human – free will or no free will, conscious awareness or biochemical robots, intelligent or autonomic – must occur ‘within’ our own fields of perception and interpretation.

Essentially then, every experience must occur ‘within’ – as part of – some constellation of ‘ideas’ that wholly defines the experiencer, while also changing that constellation by some amount, minuscule or mighty. I assert that this principle holds all the way down, which brings us to the next complex reason.

Secondly, I argue all the above holds for wolverines, amoeba and roses – and everything else –, despite there being nothing obviously semiotic available to them – such as human language and the type of abstracted analysis it permits – that can structure their perceptions in what we might think of as an ideational way. They are, put crudely, ‘pure’ biology and chemistry untainted by the medium of intellectual/cerebral ideas. 

And yet they do experience their perceptions – their relational interactions with themselves and the rest of reality – in some fashion. Their perceptions are, as ours are, necessarily experiences, and experiences themselves are, for want of a better phrase, non-material, or non-physical. Their experiences thus belong to the realm of ‘ideas’ in the narrow but fundamental sense of their occurrence ‘within’ consciousness, ‘within’ the non-material. 

Further, the biochemical events underway in a rose or amoeba, for example, occur non-mechanistically ‘within’ an accommodating or enabling framework we call God, aka the totality of consciousness as an all-encompassing ‘system’. 

Not dualistically, however! This point is absolutely pivotal. It is not that something fundamentally different to consciousness – matter – somehow occurs spatially ‘within’ consciousness. Nor is it that something fundamentally different to matter – consciousness – rises like steam or ether or energetic fields from matter-energy interactions. Rather, it is that what we conceptualise as matter is in fact of consciousness in the form of information being ‘processed’ by consciousness. I’m arguing that conscious ‘processing’ accommodates, or enables, or sustains, what we call biochemical, or geological, or physical, or astronomical, etc., phenomena. As such, it all partakes of perception to some degree.

In other words, the physical world is an ever evolving constellation of experiences of – or ‘within’ – consciousness.

(This is, you could argue, a rephrasing in modern terminology of that old philosophical chestnut that asserts God as ultimate perceiver enabling and sustaining all reality by His perpetual perceiving. The important but subtle addition is the insistence this is non-dualistic, or monadic, a position that is conceptually supported by modern physics, which can reasonably be interpreted as demonstrating that reality’s foundations are composed of rules, or information, rather than ‘matter’ and ‘energy’.)

Thirdly, information is to data as meaning is to consciousness. This metaphorical pairing exists as a symbiosis, in a manner of speaking. Its fundamental relationship makes ‘ideas’ of everything that can be experienced in our ‘physical’ reality, including mountain ranges, the magma below and the stars above. Consciousness is, in part, the process or ability or even reflex of making meaning out of what happens. And the meaning made is in fact the experience itself, but as an ever changing flow of experience some like to call The Now. Because we so often translate experience into words, we consider language-based meaning to be the very fabric of meaning. But simply asking the question, “What does ‘mean’ mean?” exposes how problematic that reflexive belief is. I feel it is more instructive to see meaning and experience as roughly synonymous.

Thus, if everything is monadically consciousness, and consciousness makes meaning in a constant process of perceiving or interpreting itself through all its manifestations, it experiences ‘being’ mountains, magma, stars and petunias synonymously with how we humans experience our lives.

Finally, our strong impression that we are isolated from the rest of reality (no action at a distance), is a deep misconception. Everything is of consciousness, there is nothing but God, thus we are one: humans, wolverines, amoeba, roses, mountain ranges, Ford Fiestas … everything. Everything is organic, everything is God. A Ford Fiesta is organic in that its totality – its changing through time – occurs as part of the organic, the ultimately unpredictable, i.e. its exact rate and vector of decay, the minute details of its use, its immeasurable effects on its environment, etc.

So to the degree that our minds and interpretation of the data sent to us by our five senses – are there only five senses? – might be repelled by the logical steps and supporting ideas I’ve just walked us through, one way or another we are faced with a stark choice, a frustratingly dualistic choice: Either there is nothing but matter and energy (whatever they are), or there is nothing but consciousness (whatever that is). 

If it’s the latter, we are all one; even mountain ranges are of consciousness and thus experienced ideas in some way, however tangentially. 

Or, if it’s the former (materialism), we are still all ‘one’, but in a very different way. Further, if all reality is composed of matter and energy, there can be no consciousness in the sense of experiencing what happens to us; consciousness, by materialism’s tenets, can only ‘exist’ as some kind of self-deception. The fatal problem with this position is: What is capable of being deceived? What, exactly, experiences the illusion that it is experiencing an illusion? ’Dead’ matter? ‘Dead’ energy? A ‘dead’ network of neurons in the brain?

Making it all seem normal

Calm reflection of the preceding material might lead us to ask, “Well, what’s the difference, then?” And it’s a good question. None of the above equates with solipsism, none of the above means we can instantly turn mountain ranges into cavernous shopping malls with the flick of a thought. The ‘physical’ reality we ‘inhabit’ or participate in is bound by laws, by rules, those that science has unearthed over the centuries. It’s just that dualism falls by the wayside, not the findings of science. It’s just that materialism falls by the wayside, not the findings of science. The sun still rises and sets, I still eat my breakfast just before noon, you still go through your routines. As Einstein put it, it is a persistent ‘illusion’. The rules governing our ‘physical’ reality, however, like all rules, are of consciousness, are information. The foundations of reality are thus ‘made of’ information. 

So “all is of consciousness” does not equate with a free-for-all dream in which everyone is a God commanding all outcomes. Free will is sacred, yes, but as constrained by the all-embracing context. When we fall asleep and dream, we experience a domain of that all-embracing context defined by the rules governing how dreams work. When we wake, we experience a domain of that all-embracing context defined by its rules, and so on. Reality can manifest in several ways; there is also lucid dreaming, for example, and near-death experiences.

Furthermore, asserting everything is of consciousness does not mean everything that occurs ‘within’ consciousness must itself be conscious in the sense of directly experiencing its existence. A simple example would be thoughts; thoughts themselves are not conscious of themselves even though they are self evidently of consciousness.

Note that it makes no sense to describe thoughts as being ‘made of’ something. Indeed, asking what a thing is ‘made of’ is a regressive line of inquiry that quickly highlights the paucity of materialism: What is gravity made of? What are gravitons made of? What are quarks made of? What is a dimension made of? The very character of materialism requires, or at least suggests, the need for a regressive, atomistic sequence of made-of questions that cannot, however, lead the inquirer to anything ‘solid’ or fundamental in the sense of discreet building blocks. What we do discover at the foundations of ‘physical’ reality is a set of rules: the properties of subatomic particles and of the various forces that bind them. We cannot ‘physically’ pick out tangible things or ‘objects’ at that tiny scale; protons and electrons and quarks and photons are far too small to be apprehended as such. Instead, they are deduced via mathematics and experimentation, the results of which yield information in the form of equations and constants one could theoretically program into a computer to simulate – or evolve – a virtual universe from a virtual Bing Bang. To illustrate this metaphorically, a spherical depiction of a photon is about as accurate as a muscular man with a flowing white beard depicting God.

That we have thoughts at all gives rise to fascinating logical derivations. For example, despite the fact that consciousness is not ‘made of’ anything, the fact that we do indisputably think means that consciousness must be capable of patterning, memory retention and recall. In other words, consciousness can arrange and rearrange itself. This begs an obvious question: What is it about consciousness that permits patterning of itself? 

One (metaphorical) answer I’m aware of (from Tom Campbell) that makes most sense to me is the granularity resulting from its ability to focus, a granularity we could metaphorically think of as ‘bits’. This is a slippery concept so I’ll give two examples. Imagine grains of sand so small you can just barely see them. You can therefore work with them, make patterns with them. Anything smaller is invisible to you and is thus unworkable by you; they lie beneath your capacity to focus, to see. We can say the same thing about an emotion. If you feel anger, you could focus on that anger and feel out some number of distinct qualities that compose it, but only up to a point. Beyond that point is beyond the capacity of your focus. Each emotion you feel thus has a granularity determined by your ability to focus on it. For want of a better word, these are the ‘bits’ consciousness can work with to make or experience patterns.

However, these bits (aka the ‘resolution’ of consciousness) do not ‘constitute’ consciousness any more than letters ‘constitute’ thoughts. Consciousness’ ‘bits’ are a necessary consequence of its ability to focus; they are neither cause nor precursor. And its ability to focus, just as meaning making or experiencing, is simply one of several necessary properties or functions of consciousness. I find argumentation of this type to be insightfully simple and richly provocative.

Part of contemplating the ramifications of simple observations of this type is the phenomenon of attention, or directed awareness (I think of focus as the intensity and detail of attention). I can close my eyes and direct my awareness to a memory of being on a beach on Bohol in 2018. Indeed, people can get so good at this sort of reverie that it becomes close to what we think of as ‘real’. Some of my dreams seem as real as waking reality, to put it redundantly. They can even involve mundane things like watching television or brushing my teeth. 

Where we direct our awareness shapes what we experience. And yet there is far more to reality, and to ourselves, than where we direct our awareness. This logic implies the unconscious: those parts of what we are and what reality is of which we are not aware, even though they are of consciousness. It thus also means there is more to consciousness than awareness alone, which is another pivotal point. However, in the interests of brevity, and because it’s not my intention to present a watertight thesis, I’m going to leave that point hanging and wrap things up.

Conclusion

To repeat what I stated in the introduction, I set all this out not to persuade anyone to adopt my perspective, but to present it as an alternative that is at least plausible. My primary intentions are to encourage an acceptance of the exciting “I don’t know” attitude to reality, and more open-minded, open-ended dialogue. It is my conviction that we need far more of that.

Similarly, this article begs more questions than it answers – assuming it answers any. But that’s the point: regardless of how often high priests and scientists and experts have bragged that we are this close to knowing everything, we are still at the exciting foothills of our journey into understanding All That Is. And one delicious reason for this is that our understanding alters All That Is. Everything that happens alters All That Is: change is the only constant; reality is ‘made of’ constant change, while also made coherent by constant rules.

It’s paradox all the way up.

My undertaking at Econosophy is, to a large degree, to teach myself how to communicate what appears to me the most feasible ontology, how that ontology offers riches in the domain of economics and governance, and to reach out to others in a spirit of contribution and mutual discovery. There may well be very hard times ahead, but what I do not want to contribute to is blind acceptance of what the ‘globalists’ are up to as they surreptitiously lead us in a direction most do not want: totalitarianism, hierarchy’s insane swan-song. I prefer open dialogue, experimentation with different money types, experimentation with money-free social forms, with anarchism, etc. as it becomes increasingly apparent history requires this experimentation of us. I don’t want establishment experts wielding The Science to assert through their media outlets what is and what is not ‘fact’. I don’t want the establishment instructing us on what forms of society are and are not going to happen. 

I do want to see their version of events, their narrative, their desired future, publicly put to the test, just as science puts its theories and assertions to the test.

Total control is an illusion, whether of the materialist mechanical-technical variety that transhumanists seem hell bent on foisting upon us, or of the reclusive solipsistic variety, or of the God-will-intervene-and-fix-everything-4EVA variety. We humans are here to learn how to love in extraordinarily difficult circumstances. We do not incarnate on earth simply to submit our freedom to authorities and experts we barely understand. That is cowardice, apathy. We did not incarnate to live cowardly, apathetic lives. 

This blog is one of my contributions to that most holy undertaking; to cooperatively discover our self-governance potential and divine sovereignty in a spirit of open and humble inquiry and deed. Yes, embarking on that journey is a daunting prospect. But rather that than fearful acceptance of our ever shrinking, garishly glittering prisons!

The quality of time is debt penitence

Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And weak men create hard times. – G. Micheal Hopf, Those Who Remain

Any judges, even those sitting at the European Court of Justice or wherever else, would have the whole world against them, were they to decide to be honest and expose what is going on. To rule correctly, they would in certain circumstances have many against them who want to be vaccinated, which makes matters harder still. Not to mention people who have already been vaccinated but do not want to learn what’s in the vaccine and discover they made a mistake. And all others involved are legally liable, so don’t want to find out either. With every passing day, as more vaccinations occur and lockdown measures and powers are extended, the number of judges prepared to risk raising their voice decreases. The guilt that these people have heaped upon themselves can no longer be atoned for within their lifetimes.  – Holger Fischer, German lawyer*

We have to mean it.

Any system can be brought into crisis. Resolution comes either in the form of collapse to lower complexity, or transformation to higher complexity. And while history doesn’t repeat, it does rhyme, and surely reaps what it sows. How could it be any other way. When it comes to the potential transformation of human culture via crisis, debt mounts and mounts as inertia resists. Consequently, cultures tend to accumulate unfathomably large debt loads as needed change is resolutely ignored.

The question is why we modern humans refuse so determinedly to accommodate this simple and obvious fact of life, despite having at our fingertips extraordinary amounts of information. I believe it is because we are children, deliberately kept children by other children who believe they are gods.

Because we have lost our way down neon-lit paths of comfort and convenience, deeply habituated ourselves to them by all manner of collective and individual self-deceptions, history’s correction will be sharp. But now matter how great they are, no matter how ignored, we will repay our debts because debts cannot go unpaid – uncorrected – forever. Systems self-correct, or are corrected, in the end. Each of us is responsible for our unique contribution to All That Is.

Free will is sacred. Penitence can be no mere tactic, however desperate the situation; it has to flow untrammelled and earnest from the soul. It can be no fad, no Next Best Thing, no titillating consumer item. We have to mean it. To mean it, we have to accept what we are. “Know thyself” is our calling, our duty. We have reneged on that sacred duty more often than we care to learn and the debt on our failing has come due. It can only be paid in the coin of penitence.

Debt repayment, in the sense I mean here, becomes wisdom through penitence if we mean it. Know thyself; understand your part in the whole that is God. To this end – which is no end but an ever evolving process – the courage to learn what love and intimacy are is essential. Though the detail appears infinite and we are wont to fear the devil in that detail – and then hesitate indefinitely –, the simple truth is that we exist to learn how to love … how to become love. And because Self and Other are simply two notions that unite All That Is into the co-creativity of Being, love is as ‘outward’ as it is ‘inward’. I have come to understand love as an emanating state of being – we might call it true health – that is as unconditional as sunshine.

Consciousness – reality, God, All That Is – is richer and more complex than we could hope to appreciate. Humanity – modernity anyway – stands at its foothills wholly unaware of the size of the mountain it is just beginning to raise its eyes to see, the mountain of which it is an inextricable, co-creative part. Historically, it could not be more exciting. One way or the other, we will move on, health will reassert its authority, correction is happening. The healthiest way through is courage, precisely the courage required to do true penitence. There is no avoiding this rite of passage.

My posts of recent weeks have been an odd mix, but for a reason. They represent one component of my way of self-exposure, of disclosure, of penitence, while also acting as a kind of journal of my perspective on humanity’s most important historical moment. And though carefully written as always, my attention to writerly detail is meant to serve transparency, not to conceal the (so-called) real me.

For me, honesty is as sacred as free will. Employed by a mid-sized multinational corporation for years, I suffered. The office politics, the ambitions, the recalcitrance, the hollowness, ate at me. I quit my job in 2011, followed my heart and ruined my career. This ‘noble’ act caused suffering to my family. The suffering I caused taught me, painfully, that principles are tricksy things. This correction taught me, in turn, that flexibility is vital, but that humility must be part of everything we do. Without humility, moral flexibility can manifest as cynical opportunism. Without humility, we close ourselves off to the new, refuse to learn we are wrong.

But for all I’ve learned and preached, I am still judgemental, still angry at The Powers That Be. My heart and mind know how interconnected everything is, but I judge others anyway. I am a human being after all. When I write about “us”, “we” and “humanity” as children, as infantilised, I genuinely include myself as a fully involved member. We are one interconnected entity of unique perspectives, each as ‘important’ as the other. I know this to be true because I also know we don’t properly understand importance and success. The measures we primarily use – status via money and property accumulation, historical impact, fame – are almost entirely misleading. It is how we learn to love that counts. 

I have dedicated my life to learning what love is and can report it is a long and winding road! There is far more road ahead than there is behind me.

Earlier this year, washing dishes at the kitchen sink, my rage at the evil I see unfolding all around exploded, and I speared it up at God. The response was immediate: “Have I not guided you to where you need to be?” My rage instantly dissipated on hearing those words in the corner of my mind. 

(It’s worth noting that much of what I have received from God is tinged with the most exquisite, loving, joyful humour, even in reprimand.)

To provide a little background on why I am where I am: I have been shown and have experienced physical miracles that leave me in no doubt at all – and I am by nature doggedly skeptical – that there is only God. As a rule, I do not publicise these details; they prove nothing to anyone but me. The strangest things happen to me, but I am their recipient, not their cause so cannot replicate them. 

For example, I end some of my posts with the line “Let all that is not rooted in truth and love wither and fall away.” It came to me – was given to me – during a particularly powerful, heart-chakra-centred kundalini event. As such, I understand the words as having come from God and feel obliged to share them, in case they prove useful to someone. 

Another example from maybe 10 years ago: My first kundalini event – I didn’t learn about kundalini until 2014 so had no idea what the feelings of ecstatic joy shooting up my spine were – happened in a dream where a tall, elegant man with bright brown eyes said to me, “Never forget: we are becoming one.” It’s up to me to apply my understanding of this and other instructions to my life, using my free will and wisdom, such as they are.

Of course all these experiences affect me deeply. They have germinated in me an irresistible urge to share what I am, what I dare to claim I know. I do not promote what I post on Econosophy anywhere, so reach a very small audience. But seeing as we don’t understand success and importance, I simply share as honestly as I can, and let fate do with my work as it will. It is of the utmost importance to me to protect what I publish here from any possible transformation into – or interpretation as – some kind of consumer item.

Cultural evolution isn’t up to me; it’s up to all of us, jointly, individually: unique entities, as one, rich in diversity. What I post here is but one part of my efforts, though all are aimed at inviting people to honour the sanctity of free will, to notice the corrosive nature of fear, and to explore the liberating yet dutiful nature of unconditional love. I share all of it with that love, and keep my expectations as low as my protesting ego can manage.

* Holger Fischer uses the word “Schuld” in his final sentence of the quote above. In English, it can mean either “debt” or “guilt”. I hope you can see how these words’ meanings blur in the quote’s context, but also generally. This fusion of the two English words within “Schuld” underpins some of the thinking in this article.

“Follow the Science”

The mathematical elaboration of a physical theory can be tied to observable facts only through translation. In order to introduce experimental conditions into a calculation, one must make a version that replaces the language or concrete observation [with] the language of numbers; in order to [turn] the results which the theory predicts into something observable, one needs a theme to transform a numerical value into an indication formulated in the language of experiment. (Duhem in Cassin, Dictionary of Untranslatables: p1,151.)

The history of instruments shows that a general approach to improve the reliability of an instrument is to narrow its application scope, that is, to make it special for a limited range of subjects ... The proliferation of instruments provides a material base for the specialization of science. (Chen, Thomas Kuhn’s latest notion of incommensurability: p271)

The very idea is an abuse, a perversion of reality designed to contort hearts and minds away from a truth so obvious, only the most convoluted casuistry could possibly conceal it. It is as if much of humanity has been bewitched by an illusionist’s cold and practiced sleight of hand.

Science generates data as guided by theories it always strives to disprove. 

The closest science comes to settled facts are those findings it has yet to disprove. Hence, science is necessarily guided by theory, not fact; there are no facts in an absolute sense. Theories are conceived on the basis of other theories that together constitute a framework, without which science simply cannot be. For example, science in the abstract is by definition the theory of falsificationism. Is falsificationism falsifiable? Or: Is science itself an unfalsifiable theory? 

Theories are the soil of meaning that nourishes the body of science, without which science is impossible, unthinkable. And it cannot be truly neutral – neutrality is itself a value – though it is right science makes the attempt to be neutral, albeit in humility, and in particular by maintaining a dispassionate distance from the claims made in its name.

And perhaps above all this, the languages of science’s many disciplines must be continually renewed to effectively translate the data generated within the context of the theories that birth the initiating impulse to seek out that very data, but to an audience that must then interpret those translations from its almost endlessly varied perspectives. 

Where in this maelstrom of interpretation are the immutable facts we should obey? And when you believe you’ve found one, what do you think it means? What a fact means to us determines how we act on it, how we form policy around it, how we let it influence our lives. If it means nothing to us, it is nothing to us. 

Thus, it is meaning that matters in the end, not fact. Claims to the contrary are necessarily appeals to meaning.

The core corruption responsible for the controversial mantra that is the title of this article is materialism. Science – here I mean Science, or Scientism rather than science per se – has been made its slave, though certainly not in the sense of humble service. It should be clear by now that materialism cannot account for reality’s observable starting point: consciousness. Consciousness is life itself, nature, God, All That Is. There is only consciousness. 

Whence so brazen a claim? 

Well, if we assert both consciousness and matter, we choose the impossibility of dualism. That, or we confront the impossibility of materialism; there is only matter. And, because no one can find matter anywhere, we are left with consciousness, proven real by the inescapable observation that we experience our realities. 

The deeper we look into what our senses tell us is the fabric of reality, the more we find ‘mere’ information, rather than discreet matter. Information (a.k.a. meaning) is to consciousness as matter is to materialism. How can there be meaning without consciousness? Ergo, information requires consciousness to be possible. By way of supporting example, the foundation of modern science – physics – is at a loss as to what objects (“things”) are. If there are no objects, what is objectivity? (Isn’t objectivity the stuff of science?)

Spacetime is doomed. There is no such thing as spacetime fundamentally in the actual underlying description of the laws of physics. That’s very startling, because what physics is supposed to be about is describing things as they happen in space and time. So if there’s no spacetime, it’s not clear what physics is about.
 (Nima Arkhani-Hamed)

You understand my words. You follow my meaning. And yet materialism cannot accommodate this most self-evident and fundamental of truths. Its logic compels it to assert that understanding – which is an experience – is illusory. Somehow (materialism is compelled to argue) the complex biochemical interactions, the bioelectrical activity of the neural networks that are your brain in action … somehow such activities deceive ‘you’ into believing, mistakenly, that ‘you’ are conscious. This dead (a.k.a. mechanical) activity supposedly generates the illusion of understanding, of meaning, the illusion of experience itself.

How can experience be an illusion? 

Seriously: How on earth can experience be an illusion? It’s about as far-fetched a claim as it is possible to make.

Ask yourself this: What is the illusory experiencer of the illusion of conscious awareness made of? What dead matter could be so convincingly deceived? Your biochemistry? Microtubules? Neural networks? How can something essentially dead – bioelectrical activity – be fooled into experiencing itself as alive? 

How in the name of logic can matter be deceived into the experience of selfhood?

To recap, the choice we face is: idealism (consciousness is all there is), dualism (the impossible interaction of matter and mind), and materialism (there is only matter). Seeing as we do not find matter when we look deeply for it, and seeing as we undeniably experience our realities, it is eminently reasonable to assert idealism, that there is only consciousness. The details of what that implies are beyond the scope of this article, as of my humble faculties.

Hence, the real deception at play here is, in fact, materialism’s implied claim that life is death. Many of us have fallen for it. I suspect, at root, out of fear.

Fearfully craving certainty, we create human approximations of reality as proxies for All That Is those approximations can only sketch. Then, still fearfully craving certainty, we wilfully confuse our clumsy sketches for The Truth.

Because humans are riddled with repressed and unexamined fears, and fragile with pride because of said repression and self-ignorance, science can and has been bought. This pride-trap is currently constructed from materialism (of course it can be made of other paradigms; fear and pride are almost endlessly manipulatable). Consequently, humanity is suffering most horribly under the auspices of Corporate Science (Scientism’s manifestation in thought and deed), which proliferates in an acidic atmosphere of fragile egos battling for ‘success’ and faux immortality. This situation is, by ways fair and foul, the offspring of materialism. By now, Science (not science) is a whoring hiss of white noise rushing nowhere in pursuit of ‘profit’. Science, purblind with human pride, refuses to see the nose on its face. It has become a coven of posturing priests who deride anyone who deviates even slightly from Scientism’s asserted consensus, termed Settled Science.

Because materialism is Scientism’s foundational dogma, there is a huge blindspot regarding how consciousness guides reality, up to and including the psychological failings of scientists, professors, politicians, think tanks, media proprietors, and other institutional manifestations of authority. This blindspot aids and abets the process by which we are forced to uncritically “Follow the Science”.

This is what governments claim to follow. They mean, in truth, that they “follow” the Science they are instructed to appoint, which then pronounces those ‘truths’ prepaid by Science’s various corporate paymasters. This behemoth is what We, the Uninitiated, the Unordained, are commanded to trust. Blindly. Well, we must! Lacking sufficient training, we simply cannot understand what the experts – of ever narrowing fields of expertise – are saying. 

All that remains for us is to obey … in unison … as one mechanical totality … what they command.

Isn’t it institutional authority we are commanded to follow? 

Do we understand, intimately, what authority really is? Do you know what authority is? Could any science answer such a question for us? Would we be allowed to question its answer?

Though denied by materialism, free will is sacred and a property of consciousness. Meekly permitting its metastasising abuse, we submit inexorably to the tightening illusion of death.

It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.  (Dr. Marcia Angell, NY Review of Books, January 15, 2009, Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption)

The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness…
  […] Journal editors deserve their fair share of criticism too. We aid and abet the worst behaviours. Our acquiescence to the impact factor fuels an unhealthy competition to win a place in a select few journals. Our love of ‘significance’ pollutes the literature with many a statistical fairy-tale…Journals are not the only miscreants. Universities are in a perpetual struggle for money and talent… (Dr. Richard Horton, editor-in-chief, The Lancet, in The Lancet, 11 April, 2015, Vol 385, Offline: What is medicine’s 5 sigma?)