Get Ready For An Economic Wake-Up Call This Holiday Season

Posted on December 24, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Brandon Smith

If we are to measure the concept of “economic recovery” in real terms, then we would have to look at the fundamentals (not stock markets) and whether or not they’re improving. Unfortunately, not all economic data is presented to the public honestly. Very often it is mired and obscured in a fog of disinformation and false standards.

I would point out, though, that there is relatively accurate information out there in certain areas of the global economy, and it tells us our economic structure is destabilizing. Beyond that, even the rigged numbers are moving into negative territory. But what does all this mean for the holiday retail season, one of the mainstream’s favorite gauges of US financial health? And, if 2019’s holiday profits sink, what does this tell us is going to happen in 2020?

First, let’s start with what we know…

Since we live in a “globalized” economy where everything is supposedly “interdependent”, it helps to examine international export numbers. The US doesn’t manufacture and export much of anything anymore beyond agricultural products, but global markets do expect us to consume the goods of other nations. A decline in exports indicates a failing global economy, but in particular a failing US consumer economy.

The obvious example would be China, which has seen plunging export data at least the past three months, though many will argue that this is merely due to tariffs and the trade war. However, it’s not just China that is showing signs of collapse.

South Korea, another major manufacturing and export hub in Asia (5th largest in the world) has seen declining exports for 11 consecutive months. South Korean shipping is crumbling in November and the media is blaming the trade war, as some SK companies would be “hit indirectly” because they sell intermediate goods to China are are linked to US companies in China. But this makes little sense. Tariffs are highly targeted to specific companies and specific goods, and so far the US has not directed major tariff attention at South Korea beyond the auto market. Also, the new KORUS deal between Trump and SK is different only cosmetically to original trade agreements, yet, South Korean exports continue to fall.

The same situation can be seen in Japan, with Japanese exports witnessing a 9.2% year-over-year drop in October, the largest decline in 3 years. Japan has seen three consecutive months of declines in exports.

And what about Europe? While Germany, the manufacturing powerhouse of the EU, finally saw a jump in exports to the US this past month, overall the European Union has seen consistently poor export performance for the past year, and Germany itself is hovering on the edge of recession with 0.1% official GDP growth. Many economist already consider Germany to be in recession, as official GDP numbers are constantly manipulated by governments to the upside.

But let’s not forget about the US. Remember how Trump promised that the trade war would result in a renaissance for US manufacturing and that millions of industrial jobs would be returning to our shores? Well, as I’ve warned consistently for the past couple years, there is NO WAY corporations will be bringing manufacturing jobs and factories back to the US without ample incentives. Trump already gave companies tax cuts without demanding anything in return, and the cost/benefit ratio of building new factories and paying American workers top dollar versus keeping existing factories in Asia and dealing with 10%-25% tariffs just doesn’t add up to a new US rust belt renaissance.

While manufacturing jobs have increased, US manufacturing activity has declined. Meaning, there simply isn’t enough demand for the goods being produced. US manufacturing ISM index just sank this month and has been sinking for the past four month into negative territory. While US PMI manufacturing data jumped this month, it is still well below the 10 year average and is also very low compared to past holiday seasons, which almost always see a spike in manufacturing. US manufacturing remains at a historic low of 11% of US GDP and production output has decline steadily since January of this year.

The question is, will the vast decline in global manufacturing translate to a crash in consumer demand? We know that US credit dependency has skyrocketed in the past few years, but will more debt result in more profits for retailers? This is highly unlikely, as US retail sales growth, for example, has been in decline at the same time that consumer debt has been rising. Why? Credit delinquencies have been relatively stable (so far) this year, so my theory is that people in the US are paying off previous debts by taking on new debt. They are kicking the can on their insolvency.

We have seen this kind of destructive credit death cycle before – Right before the crash of 2008.

So what does all this mean? And why is the media portraying the trade war with China as the cause of the global export and shipping crisis when clearly most of the world is not directly or even indirectly tied to the tariffs?

As noted above, the narrative that is being pushed is that we live in an “interdependent” and globalized world, and that nations cannot function economically without cooperation. The trade war, I believe, is a smokescreen designed by the globalist establishment to do two things specifically:

1) It is being created to hide a crash in the greater economy. Notice that almost no one in the mainstream is talking about a collapse in global production and multiple fundamentals due to DEMAND; instead they constantly talk about the trade war and exports. The trade war is becoming the scapegoat for the implosion of the market bubble engineered by globalists and central banks through a decade of stimulus measures.

The collapse of the economic bubble is being caused in part by massive debt and a lack of consumer demand due to lack of consumer savings and cash flow. The trade war has little to do with it, and I suspect we would be seeing sharp declines in the US economy in particular even without the trade war.

2) The trade war creates a false dichotomy in which many Americans will be lured into blaming China and other nations for their economic ills, and China and the rest of the world will be lured into blaming America. It also reasserts the globalist propaganda argument that when nations and economies “go rogue”, they hurt everyone; therefore, more global controls and centralization will have to be established in order to prevent nationalism from harming the rest of the world.

And what does this all have to do with the Christmas shopping season? Like the end of last year, I think we are in for another ugly holiday retail event – Perhaps far worse than before. All the manufacturing and export data indicates that this will be the case. If so, then the mainstream narrative of recovery, long perpetuated as fact by the media and the Federal Reserve for the past several years, will finally die.

The only thing that might elevate holiday numbers would be increased price inflation in goods, but I predict that even inflation misrepresented as “profits” will not save Christmas stats this year. Some skeptics of the ongoing crash will argue that Black Friday numbers this year were the best since 2013, therefore the holiday season will be a good one. These people don’t know their economic history. In most cases, holiday seasons that start off with a high traffic Black Friday end with poor overall sales data, including 2013. This is because consumers that are cash strapped are more likely to buy early during Black Friday sales and spend far less over the rest of the season.

In the mind of the average American consumer, holiday retail sales are a primary indicator of the health of the economy. A dramatic crash in Christmas retail will end the delusion of a stable US system and cause the public to start asking questions. Economics is 50% math and 50% psychology. The math in the US economy says we are in the middle of a crash. The psychological orientation of the public has been on the opposite end of spectrum, but is now slowly moving to meet with reality. When the psychological delusion ends, the game is over. And, for the globalists a new game begins.

Order out of chaos is their motto for a reason…

The global “reset” as they sometimes refer to it, has already been triggered. Going into 2020, the question is will the fantasy fall completely away to reveal the grotesque economic swamp our foundation has been built on top of? Or, will the delusion drag on for at least one more year? Given the current data, I suspect the party is over. But it is difficult to predict how the public will react to a financial crash. Sometimes people have no choice but to acknowledge the danger in front of them, but sometimes they simply bury their heads in the sand deeper and hope that by dragging out the inevitable the inevitable will become forgettable.

This holiday season, American workers have little to celebrate

Posted on December 23, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Danny Haiphong

Source: Intrepid Report

Every year, much of the U.S. population celebrates Thanksgiving and Christmas to show appreciation for their families and friends. Thanksgiving normalizes the colonial origins of the United States and erases the brutality of the English settlers who massacred indigenous people to prepare the land for capitalist accumulation. Christmas is the annual holiday of big business. On no other day are workers more encouraged to spend their wages on the latest consumer product to gift to their loved ones. The holidays bring with them a deep pressure to be merry. Yet on this holiday season, workers have little to celebrate.

A new study by Brookings Institution provides a snapshot into the devastation wrought on the working class by American capitalism. Forty-four percent of all workers between the ages of 18-64 are employed in low-wage sectors and earn an average of $16 or less per hour. The study excluded workers who logged over 98 hours per week over the last year as well as certain sections of the college-educated population such as those living in dormitories and attending graduate school. Had these groups of workers been counted, the percentage of low-wage workers out of the total population would likely be even higher. This verifies prior datasets which proved that around half of the U.S. population makes less $30,000 per year.

The growing poverty of the American worker is a major contributor to the growth of toxic stress and mental illness. Half of all U.S. adults will develop a mental illness over the course of their life. Serious mental health conditions afflict nearly ten million people in the United States and over a quarter of these individuals live below the official poverty line. Suicide rates are at a thirty-year high. An obvious connection exists between rising poverty and the worsening mental health of the American worker.

Workers in the United States see no future under the current stage of capitalism. They struggle to afford rent in a nation where the federal minimum wage cannot pay for a two-bedroom apartment anywhere in the country. They indebt themselves in the trillions to attend college and obtain healthcare. They work in redundant, service sector jobs where hours are long and mistreatment, abuse, and injury are all too common. The American worker is increasingly alienated from themselves and each other. Union density rates in the U.S. have fallen to just ten percent of all workers since World War II.

The shrinking labor movement has followed a larger trend in U.S. society. Privatization has decimated the public sector. Workers have few places to socially convene independent of the machinations of consumer capitalism. Workers are competing for fewer jobs, most of which are not worth competing for at all. Homelessness, mass incarceration, and endless war remind workers that they can easily be turned into cannon fodder if they step out of line. In such an environment, addiction and self-destruction is encouraged while organizing for justice is discouraged.

Economic insecurity and alienation place more pressure on families to make up for stagnant wages and exorbitant amounts of debt. More young workers are living with their parents than at any other time in the last one hundred years. Older workers are not only forestalling retirement but also finding themselves without family or community support as siblings and adult children chase the highest paying jobs and the lowest rents and property values. Couples feel compelled to remain in toxic relationships for economic reasons. A strong link exists between domestic violence and poverty.

Contrary to the messages in Hallmark cards or the corporate media, the holidays are far from a time of celebration. Many workers view the holiday season as a harsh reminder of the loss, alienation, and despair that they’ve experienced over the course of their lives. Holidays place added pressure on workers to dismiss the ills of capitalism and the personal stressors associated with them. It should come as no surprise that most workers already struggling with mental health conditions report that the holidays only worsen their symptoms. Instead of embracing humanity, the holidays encourage workers to embrace rampant commercialism and the nuclear family.

To break from a culture steeped in the profit motive, workers will need to create their own traditions based upon solidarity and social transformation. Not everything about the holidays needs to be thrown out in the process. Spending time with family and friends during a day off from work can and should be rewarding to the psyche and to society. The conditions of capitalism prevent the holidays from serving a social purpose. Holidays under capitalism breed despair but brand themselves as moments of pure joy.

While workers may have little to celebrate this holiday season, there are reasons for the working class to be optimistic in the years to come. Teachers in cities such as Chicago and Los Angeles have won key gains in 2019 by using the most powerful weapon at the disposal of organized labor: the strike. At the beginning of the year, the Los Angeles Teachers won smaller class sizes and more support staff. The Chicago Teachers Union massively increased the number of nurses in the school district by forcing the city to hire nurses rather than continue the inefficient and harmful practice of hiring private contractors. The UAW’s strike of General Motors (GM) earlier this Fall made global headlines even if it was unable to win every demand that the workers put forth. These strikes reflect a growth of class consciousness in the United States. The continued growth of class consciousness will be critical toward building the kind of struggle capable of bringing about massive political and economic change for the working class.

Furthermore, workers around the world are leading the way in the struggle against class inequality and foreign-sponsored wars. Massive protests in Haiti, Chile, Honduras, and Algeria are just a few of many occurring around the globe. The protests have mainly targeted repressive U.S.-backed governments and their neoliberal economic agenda. China is leading the world in poverty reduction. Cuba is the most sustainably developed nation in the world. A vast majority of workers around the world want to see an end of the miseries imposed by global capital and are actively fighting to make their demands a reality.

The question is whether workers in the United States can decisively break from the despair, the racism, and the extreme alienation shaping their current condition. Being determines consciousness. At this moment, the neoliberal race to the bottom has rendered most workers too fearful, disorganized, and full of self-blame to fight back. However, millions of workers have rallied behind the political campaign of Bernie Sanders. Labor unrest is likely to continue as neither political party appears interested in implementing Bernie Sanders’ social democratic agenda. Workers in the United States are in desperate need of a revived labor movement to quench their thirst for a better life. Putting our energies into building this movement will go a long way toward shaking the Holiday Blues and giving workers something to really celebrate: a society run by workers, in the interests of workers.

The Need for a Greater Vision: Recognizing Reality

Posted on December 8, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Jennifer Ladd

Source: Resilience

Question Beliefs

We live in a culture that is embedded in unquestioned beliefs passing as truth. These beliefs are the source of our current crisis. We attempt to solve the problems of degradation of our environment and climate disruption, but we do not look at these core beliefs. We hold on to the idea that capitalism is the only right way to organize an economy, that democracy is essential to our freedom, that freedom itself is a core ingredient to our happiness. We believe corporate slogans such as “Progress is our most important product” (General Electric), and subscribe to the belief that technology will solve whatever problems we have, even the ones caused by technology.

Grasp the Scope of the Crisis

Most of us are unable to back away far enough to grasp the whole picture. We are like a tourist with a flashlight trying to get a view of a huge mural that covers a block-long wall. The news media can only focus our attention on a tiny fraction of the image at any one time. We read daily reports of record temperatures in the arctic, of ice sheets melting in the Antarctic, of floods, forest fires all over the world, political gridlock, and recession fears. We are deluged with information. Most of us have been touched directly by at least one aspect of the crisis. Today I am breathing the smoke of fires in British Columbia and Alaska hundreds of miles away. These are direct experiences, yet there are still those who deny that climate change is real or that it is a problem. And worse yet we do not have the political will or mechanism to respond. Many scientists clam we are beyond the tipping point. They say the damage done to the ecosystem is so great that further decline is assured, even if we drastically reduce our impact in the next 5 years.

We are confronting a confluence of issues – environmental degradation, climate disruption, political tension and economic instability – that create an unprecedented risk to future generations. Climate disruption is getting all the headlines, but talk to a fisherman anywhere on the coast and he will point to depleted fish stocks making it impossible to earn a living fishing. Some of that is due to climate, but over-fishing, water pollution and destruction of spawning grounds also play major roles. Agricultural runoff is creating large dead zones at the mouths of rivers, areas that used to be some of the most productive.

Insect populations are plummeting with some reports of 75% loss in the last 50 years¹.Insects are the base of the food chain for many creatures. If they die off then we will all go. The cause is not simple but insecticides on farm land and habitat destruction are major factors.

Fresh water is another resource in critical decline. We have been pumping water from aquifers at rates that far exceed the rate of recharge. Worldwide, 40% of our food grown on irrigated land.² Without irrigation we will face severe food shortages. In addition, much of the remaining irrigated land is dependent on snowpack that feeds reservoirs in the mountains. As the climate warms there is less snow and it melts sooner, reducing the amount of stored water available.

If we listen to the economic news we cannot help but be aware of the rapid increase in the US national debt. Politicians seem incapable of holding the debt in check, especially the Trump administration that established policies and tax cuts that have dramatically increased the debt at a time when the economy is doing relatively well and we should be reducing the debt. Despite the ignorance of some lawmakers, debt cannot continue to rise indefinitely. Many countries have tried that. In the end it leads to hyper inflation, and in extreme cases, a collapse of the government.

A more subtle and less talked about issue is that of resource depletion. True, Malthus warned the world of this 200 years ago during a time when energy resources in the form of wood were being depleted.Then we discovered coal, then oil, and the industrial revolution sparked a new level of development and environmental destruction on a level Malthus could never have foreseen. The issue is that while technology has kept the price of raw materials from increasing dramatically, metals like copper, and energy sources like oil and gas are finite. The deeper we have to mine or drill and the more complex the extraction process, the smaller the final product derived from the energy expended to get the material. When oil was first discovered it took roughly one barrel of oil’s worth of energy to extract 100 barrels. Now that one barrel might get us 10 barrels. The costs are multiplied throughout the system. In other words if it now takes 3 times as much energy to mine a ton of copper as it did 50 years ago, because the high quality and easily extracted ore are gone, and that energy is derived from oil which itself requires 10 times more energy to extract, then the two factors multiply the real cost of the copper. In our example it now “costs” the equivalent of 30 times more oil to produce a ton of copper. Again, we run into limits.

I am proposing that the solution is a radical redesign of our civilization based on a more sustainable model. To do that we need to examine the core beliefs of our society to see which ones are compatible with a new vision and which ones need to be abandoned. This requires that we face our fear of change, grieve for the losses, clear our nervous systems of intergenerational trauma that blinds us to seeing the reality of our time and open our hearts to living in connection. This cannot come about by any rational decision by a governing body. Those in power have a vested interest in keeping the current system alive as long as possible. Call it a form of corruption, but it is also simply a matter of self preservation. We can, however, make changes on a personal and local level. We can have working models established on a small scale that can replace systems on a national level as they fail. We either cling to the existing paradigm as it implodes, or we can place our attention and focus our energy on creating new systems that support life in harmony on the planet.

Look Below the Symptoms

A partial list of these beliefs was mentioned already – that our prosperity depends on capitalism, democracy, and progress through technology. Let’s go deeper to see how these structures of society evolved, and how they affect us today. The core belief that underlies our current civilization is the idea that we are separate from nature and superior to other creatures and even other races of human beings. It leads to a distrust of nature which shows up even in the fables we tell our children, which are filled with images of the dark and dangerous forest and the merciless ocean depths.

Another belief is that security consists of having enough food or money stored away to last through hard times. In itself the belief is true, but it becomes dysfunctional in a world of finite resources when each person is focused on maximizing their own resources without consideration for the whole. To justify our actions we convince ourselves that there are no limits, we can have it all and, through technology, everyone can be raised up to the lifestyle we enjoy in the USA.

We are embedded in the psychology of capitalism, and we live in a world shrouded in fear. The combination is lethal. Fear leads to contraction and thinking only of one’s own survival. Capitalism promotes the value of gathering resources for our own use and enjoyment. When capitalism is combined with the Puritan work ethic, it allows us to justify income inequality because of the unspoken belief that if we have more than our neighbor it is because we worked harder or smarter and therefore deserve the rewards. We may feel no obligation to share our good fortune because those who are less well off obviously did not work hard enough. The result is a society that is fundamentally adversarial, pitting the wealthy against the poor, those in power against those who would like to be in control.

That leads to us versus them thinking that pervades our culture and shows up on all levels, particularly in public arenas like politics. The two party system has devolved into two conflicting ideologies that feel irreconcilable. Each party has become more isolated and rigid in their doctrine to the point that many people only listen to information that supports their point of view or their party’s view. Where is the middle ground that allows for a cooperative solution? Problems that require dramatic solutions like climate disruption cannot be effectively addressed.

Capitalism has been the driving force behind the industrial age. It has brought us technology that was unimaginable 200 years ago. The problem is that it is fundamentally incompatible with a sustainable world. The core precepts – private ownership of goods and land, a competitive market for labor and materials, emphasis on capital accumulation – lead to a society that is made up of a few wealthy “owners” and a large number of “workers”. The system is dependent on keeping the wages paid to labor low enough that the owners can produce products that are competitive in the market place. When labor unions were strong there was a balance of power, but the advent of free trade and multinational corporations has robbed labor unions of their bargaining power because of the availability of cheap labor in the developing world. The result is an ever increasing disparity of wealth between the owners and the workers, and an ever increasing number of workers at the lowest level of the economy. Until the last 10 years, this has been partly disguised by an overall improvement in living standards through technology, but when one compares the hours worked in 1950 to support a family, when one person’s income was adequate, compared to the present when both adults of the family have to work, it’s clear that the average working family has to work harder simply to pay for the necessities of life. Free time to enjoy life has evaporated. We do not account for that in the statistics of progress like GDP.

To facilitate the transactions of a capitalistic economy we invented money and a banking system to manage the creation of money. In our system, money is created by the banks in an equal amount to the loans they make. In other words the creation of money is dependent on the creation of debt. Debt, however, once created, tends to grow faster than the money supply because of the effect of compounding interest. Debt will tend to accumulate with those members of society that are unable to pay it off, and capital will accumulate to those who have wealth already and are free from debt. At first it works well, but as debt accumulates to the workers, they have less money to buy the goods produced by the owners and the economy goes into recession. Debt is reduced through bankruptcies and foreclosures. Capital is reduced by the downsizing and failure of businesses. Eventually a new cycle begins. Historically, the cycle often becomes extreme and outcome is revolution as the tension between the wealthy and the poor becomes intolerable.

Capitalism is a natural outgrowth of our survival instinct in disconnected world. If we do not feel supported by our fellow humans, by the natural world, and by a greater presence, then there is a level of insecurity that we continually try to appease by building protective shells around us. In modern times this translates into ownership of land, house, and enough money and other resources to allow us to feel secure. Unfortunately in the rush to acquire these items we have sold our soul to the banks which in effect own our homes and often our cars. We end up feeling even less secure because we now have even more to lose if the economy turns down and we lose our job. We crave a sense of control over our lives, but we can no longer hunt for our food or harvest it directly from the earth so even to eat we are dependent on a complex web of corporate-run systems of transportation and production that we do not control or even understand.

Healing the Wound Of Separation

In order to live in harmony with each other and with the earth we need to heal the core wound of separation from a close community, separation from the earth and the natural world, and separation from the spiritual ground from which all of this manifested world arises. Without resolving all three levels of separation we will continue to live in fear and grief, maybe depression. It is that core sense of not enough that drives the Euro-American addiction to doing, to trying to get somewhere or get something that we think will cure that sense of not enough. We invent better technology, more powerful machines to get us there faster, but the result is that we find out ever sooner that the goal we had set is not going to satisfy the sense of lack. We may accumulate more wealth at the expense of the community around us and defend that wealth with all our strength, but it does not bring us the security we seek.

In order to heal, let us acknowledge the true state of our own life and of the world. Let us fully feel the grief of the separation and fully feel the rage that lies hidden. We may have a sense of being betrayed by the society that we were taught to trust as a child. We accepted the promise of perpetual progress and came to expect that we should have a better life than our parents.

On a global level, can we feel the pain and destruction this has caused to the earth? Can we acknowledge and feel the horrors of genocide against the native population of this country and other colonized places in the world? Can we feel the full impact of enslaving millions of African natives to work our fields? The grief is immense. We have kept it suppressed for centuries, but it must be felt. Let us clear the intergenerational trauma so we can come into our hearts and truly feel the connection with the earth and with each other.

Only then, free from clinging to a failing system, in the hope of preserving the status quo, can we reconnect with source and make the leap to a new way of living. We do not have to invent better ways of living on this planet. There are models of aboriginal societies that have lived here for more than 10,000 years without destroying their environment or collapsing from internal dysfunction. They have evolved sophisticated systems of government and economic systems that allowed the wealth that was accumulated to be redistributed to those in need. They held their land in common for the benefit of the whole tribe. We have much to learn from their societies.

1. In 2017, scientists reported a decline of more than 75 percent in insect biomass across 63 nature areas in Germany between 1989 and 2016. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/as-insect-populations-decline-scientists-are-trying-to-understand-why/

2 .http://www.fao.org/nr/water/aquastat/infographics/Irrigated_eng.pdf

Our Vanishing World: Wildlife

Posted on December 2, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Robert J. Burrowes

Throughout its history, Earth has experienced five mass extinction events. See, for example, ‘Timeline Of Mass Extinction Events On Earth’. It is now experiencing the sixth.

The Ordovician-Silurian Extinction, which occurred about 439 million years ago, wiped out 86% of life on Earth at the time. Most scientists believe that this mass extinction was precipitated by glaciation and falling sea levels (possibly a result of the Appalachian mountain range forming), catastrophically impacting animal life which lived largely in the ocean at the time.
The Late Devonian Extinction happened about 364 million years ago and destroyed 75% of species on Earth. Possibly spread over hundreds of thousands of years, a sequence of events that depleted the oceans of oxygen and volcanic ash that cooled the Earth’s surface are believed to have driven the extinctions. It was to be 10 million years before vertebrates again appeared on land. ‘If the late Devonian extinction had not occurred, humans might not exist today.’
The Permian-Triassic extinction, which occurred 251 million years ago, is considered the worst in all history because around 96% of species were lost. ‘The Great Dying’ was precipitated by an enormous volcanic eruption ‘that filled the air with carbon dioxide which fed different kinds of bacteria that began emitting large amounts of methane. The Earth warmed, and the oceans became acidic.’ Life today descended from the 4% of surviving species.
The Triassic-Jurassic extinction happened between 214 million and 199 million years ago and, as in other mass extinctions, it is believed there were several phases of species loss. The blame has been placed on an asteroid impact, climate disruption and flood basalt eruptions. This extinction laid the path that allowed for the evolution of dinosaurs which later survived for about 135 million years.
The Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction, best known of ‘the Big 5’ mass extinctions, occurred 65 million years ago, ending 76% of life on Earth including the dinosaurs. A combination of volcanic activity, asteroid impact, and climate disruption are blamed. This extinction period allowed for the evolution of mammals on land and sharks in the sea.
The sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history is the one that is being experienced now. Unlike earlier mass extinctions, which helped to pave the way for the evolution of Homo sapiens, the precipitating cause of this extinction event is Homo sapiens itself and, moreover, Homo sapiens is slated to be one of the species that becomes extinct.

Let me explain why this is so by touching on the diverse range of forces driving the extinctions, concepts such as ‘co-extinction’, ‘localized extinctions’ and ‘extinction cascades’, the ways in which extinction impacts are often ‘hidden’ in the short term, thus masking the true extent of the destruction, and the implications of all this for life on Earth, including Homo sapiens, in the near term.

But before I do this, consider this excerpt from the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind written by Yuval Noah Harari, commenting on the expansion of ancient humans out of Africa:

‘If we combine the mass extinctions in Australia and America, and add the smaller-scale extinctions that took place as Homo sapiens spread over Afro-Asia – such as the extinction of all other human species – and the extinctions that occurred when ancient foragers settled remote islands such as Cuba, the inevitable conclusion is that the first wave of Sapiens colonisation was one of the biggest and swiftest ecological disasters to befall the animal kingdom. Hardest hit were the large furry creatures. At the time of the Cognitive Revolution [which Harari argues occurred during the period between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago and probably involved an internal restructuring of the Sapiens brain to facilitate learning, remembering, imagining and communicating while also, in the case of the earlier date, coinciding with the time when Sapiens bands started leaving Africa for the second time], the planet was home to about 200 genera of large terrestrial mammals weighing over fifty kilograms. At the time of the Agricultural Revolution [about 12,000 years ago], only about a hundred remained. Homo sapiens drove to extinction about half of the planet’s big beasts long before humans invented the wheel, writing or iron tools.

‘This ecological tragedy was restaged in miniature countless times after the Agricultural Revolution’ with mammoths, for example, vanishing from the Eurasian and North American landmasses by 10,000 years ago as Homo sapiens spread. Despite this, mammoths thrived until just 4,000 years ago on a few remote Arctic islands, most conspicuously Wrangel, then suddenly disappeared with the arrival of humans.

While there has been some debate about the full extent of the human impact compared to, say, climate and environmental changes including ice age peaks – see, for example, ‘What killed off the giant beasts – climate change or man?’ and ‘What Killed the Great Beasts of North America?’ – the archeological record provides compelling evidence of the role of Homo sapiens as, in Harari’s words, ‘an ecological serial killer’. There is further well-documented evidence in Professor Tim Flannery’s The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and People an excerpt of which in relation to New Zealand, where the megafauna survived until Maoris arrived just 800 years ago and then rapidly vanished, can be read here: ‘The Future Eaters’.

And the onslaught has never ended as the inexorable encroachment of Homo sapiens to the remotest corners of the Earth (including virtually all of the thousands of islands of the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans) has inevitably led to the extinction of myriad local species including birds, insects and snails. In fact, following the Industrial Revolution about 270 years ago which enabled the development of killing technologies on a scale unheard of previously, the human assault on life on Earth has accelerated so effectively that 200 species of life are now driven to extinction daily.

Whatever other claims they might make about themselves, human beings are truly the masters of death.

So where do we stand today?

According to one recent report, the Earth is experiencing what could be described as ‘just the tip of an enormous extinction iceberg’. See ‘Co-extinctions annihilate planetary life during extreme environmental change’. ‘Just the tip?’, you might ask.

Extinction-causing Behaviours

The primary human behaviours that are modifying Earth’s biosphere, with catastrophic outcomes for many species, are readily apparent and well-described in the scientific literature: destruction of habitat (such as oceans, rainforests, grasslands, wetlands, mangroves, lakes and coral reefs) whether through military violence, radioactive contamination, industrial activities (including ecosystem destruction to build cities, roads and railroads but a vast range of other activities besides), chemical poisoning or other means; over-exploitation; biotic invasion and the effects of environmental modification, including climatic conditions, leading to temperature rise, more frequent droughts, ocean acidification and other impacts which so alter a locality’s environmental conditions that tolerance limits for inhabiting species are breached causing localized extinctions. Unfortunately, however, there are other, more complicated, mechanisms that can exacerbate species loss.

‘In particular, it is becoming increasingly evident how biotic interactions, in addition to permitting the emergence and maintenance of diversity, also build up complex networks through which the loss of one species can make more species disappear (a process known as ‘co-extinction’), and possibly bring entire systems to an unexpected, sudden regime shift, or even total collapse.’ In simple language, a species cannot survive without the resources (the other species) on which it depends for survival and the accelerating loss of species now threatens ‘total collapse’ of ‘entire systems’.

This is because resource and consumer interactions in natural systems (such as food webs) are organized in various hierarchical levels of complexity (including trophic levels), so the removal of resources can result in the cascading (bottom-up) extinction of several higher-level consumers.

Summarizing the findings of several studies based on simulated or real-world data, Dr. Giovanni Strona and Professor Corey J. A. Bradshaw explain why ‘we should expect most events of species loss to cause co-extinctions, as corroborated by the worrisome, unnatural rate at which populations and species are now disappearing, and which goes far beyond what one expects as a simple consequence of human endeavour. In fact, even the most resilient species will inevitably fall victim to the synergies among extinction drivers as extreme stresses drive biological communities to collapse. Furthermore, co-extinctions are often triggered well before the complete loss of an entire species, so that even oscillations in the population size of a species could result in the local disappearance of other species depending on the first. This makes it difficult to be optimistic about the future of species diversity in the ongoing trajectory of global change, let alone in the case of additional external, planetary-scale catastrophes.’

In an attempt to emphasize the importance of this phenomenon, Strona and Bradshaw note that ‘As our understanding of the importance of ecological interactions in shaping ecosystem identity advances, it is becoming clearer how the disappearance of consumers following the depletion of their resources – a process known as “co-extinction” – is more likely the major driver of biodiversity loss’ [emphasis added] and that ‘ecological dependencies amplify the direct effects of environmental change on the collapse of planetary diversity by up to ten times.’ See ‘Co-extinctions annihilate planetary life during extreme environmental change’.

In their own recently published scientific study ‘Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines’ the authors Professors Gerardo Ceballos, Paul R. Ehrlich and Rodolfo Dirzo document another frequently ignored element in understanding the accelerating nature of species extinctions.

‘Earth’s sixth mass extinction is more severe than perceived when looking exclusively at species extinctions…. That conclusion is based on analyses of the numbers and degrees of range contraction … using a sample of 27,600 vertebrate species, and on a more detailed analysis documenting the population extinctions between 1900 and 2015 in 177 mammal species.’ Their research found that the rate of population loss in terrestrial vertebrates is ‘extremely high’, even in ‘species of low concern’.

In their sample, comprising nearly half of known vertebrate species, 32% (8,851 out of 27,600) are decreasing; that is, they have decreased in population size and range. In the 177 mammals for which they had detailed data, all had lost 30% or more of their geographic ranges and more than 40% of the species had experienced severe population declines. Their data revealed that ‘beyond global species extinctions Earth is experiencing a huge episode of population declines and extirpations, which will have negative cascading consequences on ecosystem functioning and services vital to sustaining civilization. We describe this as a “biological annihilation” to highlight the current magnitude of Earth’s ongoing sixth major extinction event.’

Illustrating the damage done by dramatically reducing the historic geographic range of a species, consider the lion. Panthera leo ‘was historically distributed over most of Africa, southern Europe, and the Middle East, all the way to northwestern India. It is now confined to scattered populations in sub-Saharan Africa and a remnant population in the Gir forest of India. The vast majority of lion populations are gone.’

Why is this happening? Ceballos, Ehrlich and Dirzo tell us: ‘In the last few decades, habitat loss, overexploitation, invasive organisms, pollution, toxification, and more recently climate disruption, as well as the interactions among these factors, have led to the catastrophic declines in both the numbers and sizes of populations of both common and rare vertebrate species.’

Further, however, the authors warn ‘But the true extent of this mass extinction has been underestimated, because of the emphasis on species extinction.’ This underestimate can be traced to overlooking the accelerating extinction of local populations of a species.

‘Population extinctions today are orders of magnitude more frequent than species extinctions. Population extinctions, however, are a prelude to species extinctions, so Earth’s sixth mass extinction episode has proceeded further than most assume.’ Moreover, and importantly from a narrow human perspective, the massive loss of local populations is already damaging the services ecosystems provide to civilization (which, of course, are given no value by government and corporate economists and accountants).

As Ceballos, Ehrlich and Dirzo remind us: ‘When considering this frightening assault on the foundations of human civilization, one must never forget that Earth’s capacity to support life, including human life, has been shaped by life itself.’ When public mention is made of the extinction crisis, it usually focuses on a few (probably iconic) animal species known to have gone extinct, while projecting many more in future. However, a glance at their maps presents a much more realistic picture: as much as 50% of the number of animal individuals that once shared Earth with us are already gone, as are billions of local populations.

Furthermore, they claim that their analysis is conservative given the increasing trajectories of those factors that drive extinction together with their synergistic impacts. ‘Future losses easily may amount to a further rapid defaunation of the globe and comparable losses in the diversity of plants, including the local (and eventually global) defaunation-driven coextinction of plants.’

They conclude with the chilling observation: ‘Thus, we emphasize that the sixth mass extinction is already here and the window for effective action is very short.’

Another recent study examined ‘Experimental Evidence for the Population-Dynamic Mechanisms Underlying Extinction Cascades of Carnivores’, and was undertaken by Dr. Dirk Sanders, Rachel Kehoe & Professor F.J. Frank van Veen who sought to understand ‘extinction cascades’. Noting that ‘Species extinction rates due to human activities are high’, they investigated and documented how ‘initial extinctions can trigger cascades of secondary extinctions, leading to further erosion of biodiversity.’ This occurs because the diversity of consumer species is maintained due to the positive indirect effects that these species have on each other by reducing competition among their respective resource species. That is, the loss of one carnivore species can lead to increased competition among prey, leading to extinctions of those carnivore species dependent on prey that loses this competition.

Another way of explaining this was offered by Dr. Jose M. Montoya: ‘Species do not go extinct one at a time. Instead… ecosystems change in a kind of chain reaction, just like in bowling. The impact of the ball knocks down one or two pins, but they hit other pins and this ultimately determines your score. Likewise, when in an ecosystem one species goes extinct many others may follow even if they are not directly affected by the initial disturbance. The complex combination of direct and indirect effects resulting from species interactions determines the fate of the remaining species. To predict the conditions under which extinctions beget further extinctions is a major scientific and societal challenge under the current biodiversity crisis…. Sanders and colleagues… show how and why initial extinctions of predators trigger cascades of secondary extinctions of the remaining predators.’ See ‘Ecology: Dynamics of Indirect Extinction’.

To fully grasp the extent of the crisis in our biosphere, we must look well beyond Earth’s climate: There are a great many variables adversely impacting life on Earth, many of which individually pose the threat of human extinction and which, synergistically, now virtually guarantee it absent an immediate and profound response. As reported in the recent Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services researched and published by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) – the scientific body which assesses the state of biodiversity and the ecosystem services this provides to society – ‘Nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history. The IPBES Global Assessment ranks, for the first time at this scale, the 5 direct drivers of change in nature with the largest global impact. So what are the culprits behind nature’s destruction?’ Number 1. on the IPBES list is ‘Changes in land and sea use, like turning intact tropical forests into agricultural land’ but, as noted, there are four others. According to this report: one million species of life on Earth are threatened with extinction.

And in their latest assessment of 100,000 species, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) concluded that not one species had improved prospects of averting extinction since their previous ‘Red List’ report. See ‘News Release’ and ‘F rom over 100,000 species assessments in IUCN update, zero improvements ’.

Of course, separately from the systemic extinction drivers noted above, including the unmentioned destruction of Earth’s oceans through its absorption of carbon dioxide, pollution with everything from pesticides to plastic, and chronic overfishing which is pushing many ocean species to, or over, the brink of extinction as well, humans also engage in yet other activities that drive the rush to extinction. Hunting wildlife to kill it for trophies or pet food – see ‘Killing Elephants “for Pet Food” Condemned’ – and trafficking wildlife: a $10-20 billion-a-year industry involving illegal wildlife products such as jewelry, traditional ‘medicine’, clothing, furniture, and souvenirs, as well as exotic pets – see ‘Stop Wildlife Trafficking’ and ‘China must lead global effort against tiger trade’ – play vital roles as well.

In summary, the tragedy of human existence is that the Cognitive Revolution gave Homo sapiens the capacity to plan, organize and conduct an endless sequence of systematic massacres all over the planet but, assuming that we have the genetic capacity to do so, our parenting and education models since that time have ensured that we have been denied the emotional and intellectual capacities to fight, strategically, for our own survival. And the time we have left is now incredibly short.

So what can we do?

Given that the ongoing, systematic industrial-scale destruction of Earth’s wildlife has its origin in evolutionary events that took place some 70,000 years ago but which probably had psychological origins prior to this, it is clearly a crisis that is not about to be resolved quickly or easily.

‘Why the mention of psychology here?’ you might ask. Well, while many other factors have obviously played a part – for example, abundance of a species in a particular context might mean that the issue of killing its individual members for food does not even arise, at least initially – it is clear that, given the well-documented multifaceted crisis in which human beings now find themselves, only a grotesquely insufficient effort is being put into averting the now imminent extinction of our own species which critically requires us to dramatically stem (and soon halt) the tide of wildlife extinctions, among many other necessary responses. See, for example, ‘Human Extinction by 2026? A Last Ditch Strategy to Fight for Human Survival’ and ‘Doomsday by 2021?’

It is psychologically dysfunctional, to put it mildly, to participate in or condone by our silence and inaction, activities that will precipitate our own extinction, whether these are driven by the insane global elite – see ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’ – or by our own dysfunctional overconsumption. See ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’.

For that reason, after 70,000 years, we must finally ask ‘Why?’ so that we can address the fundamental drivers of our extinction-threatening behaviour as well the several vital symptoms that arise from those drivers. Let me explain what I mean.

The fundamental question is this: Why are humans behaving in a way that will precipitate our own extinction in the near term? Surely, this is neither sensible nor even sane. And anyone capable of emotional engagement and rational thinking who seriously considers this behaviour must realize this. So why is it happening?

Fundamentally it is because our parenting and education models since the Cognitive Revolution 70,000 years ago have failed utterly to produce people of conscience, people who are emotionally functional and capable of critical analysis, people who care and who can plan and respond to crises (or even problems) strategically. Despite this profound social shortcoming, some individuals have nevertheless emerged who have one or more of these qualities and they are inevitably ‘condemned’ to sound the alarm, in one way or another, and to try to mobilize an appropriate response to whatever crisis or problem confronts them at the time.

But, as is utterly obvious from the state of our world, those with these capacities have been rare and, more to the point, they have had few people with whom to work. This is graphically illustrated by the current failure to respond strategically to the ongoing climate catastrophe (with most effort focused on lobbying elite-controlled governments and international organizations), the elite-driven perpetual (and ongoing threat of nuclear) war as well as the other issues, such as the use of geoengineering and the deployment of 5G, that threaten human survival. See ‘The Global Climate Movement is Failing: Why?’, ‘The War to End War 100 Years On: An Evaluation and Reorientation of our Resistance to War’ and ‘Why Activists Fail’.

Given the preoccupation of modern society with producing submissively obedient students, workers, soldiers, citizens (that is, taxpayers and voters) and consumers, the last thing society wants is powerful individuals who are each capable of searching their conscience, feeling their emotional response to events, thinking critically and behaving strategically in response. Hence our parenting and education models use a ruthless combination of visible, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence to ensure that our children become terrified, self-hating and powerless individuals like virtually all of the adults around them.

This multifaceted violence ensures that the adult who emerges from childhood and adolescence is suppressing awareness of an enormous amount of fear, pain and anger (among many other feelings) and must live in delusion to remain unaware of these suppressed feelings. This, in turn, ensures that, as part of their delusion, people develop a strong sense that what they are doing already is functional and working (no matter how dysfunctional and ineffective it may actually be) while unconsciously suppressing awareness of any evidence that contradicts their delusion. See ‘Why Violence?’, ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice ’, ‘Do We Want School or Education?’ and ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’.

So if we are going to address the fundamental driver of both the destruction of Earth’s wildlife and the biosphere generally, we must address this cause. For those adults powerful enough to do this, there is an explanation in ‘Putting Feelings First’. And for those adults committed to facilitating children’s efforts to realize their potential and become self-aware (rather than delusional), see ‘My Promise to Children’ and ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

Beyond this cause, however, we must also resist, strategically, the insane elite-controlled governments and corporations that are a key symptom of this crisis – see ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’ – by manufacturing and marketing a vast range of wildlife (and life)-destroying products ranging from weapons (conventional and nuclear) and fossil fuels to products made by the destruction of habitat (including oceans, rainforests, grasslands, wetlands, mangroves, lakes and coral reefs) and the chemical poisoning of agricultural land (to grow the food that most people eat) while also using geoengineering and deploying 5G technology worldwide. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy.

But we can also undermine this destruction, for example, by refusing to buy the products provided by the elite’s corporations (with the complicity of governments) that fight wars (to enrich weapons corporations) to steal fossil fuels (to enrich energy, aircraft and vehicle-manufacturing corporations) or those corporations that make profits by destroying habitats or producing poisoned food, for example. We can do this by systematically reducing and altering our consumption pattern and becoming more locally self-reliant as outlined in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth ’ or, even more simply, by committing to The Earth Pledge (below).

In a nutshell, for example, if we do not travel by car or aircraft, NATO governments will have much less incentive to invade and occupy resource-rich countries to steal their resources and corporations will gain zero profit from destroying wildlife habitat as they endlessly seek to extract the resources necessary to manufacture and fuel these commodities thus saving vast numbers of animals (and many other life forms besides) and easing pressure on the biosphere generally.

You can also consider joining those working to end violence in all contexts by signing the online pledge of ‘The People ’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World ’.

The Earth Pledge

Out of love for the Earth and all of its creatures, and my respect for their needs, from this day onwards I pledge that:

I will listen deeply to children (see explanation above)
I will not travel by plane
I will not travel by car
I will not eat meat and fish
I will only eat organically/biodynamically grown food
I will minimize the amount of fresh water I use, including by minimizing my ownership and use of electronic devices
I will not buy rainforest timber
I will not buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles, containers, cups and straws
I will not use banks, superannuation (pension) funds or insurance companies that provide any service to corporations involved in fossil fuels, nuclear power and/or weapons
I will not accept employment from, or invest in, any organization that supports or participates in the exploitation of fellow human beings or profits from killing and/or destruction of the biosphere
I will not get news from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television, radio, Google, Facebook, Twitter…)
I will make the effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing, that makes me more self-reliant
I will gently encourage my family and friends to consider signing this pledge.

Conclusion

Perhaps the key point to be learned from the evidence cited above is that just as we have triggered a series of self-reinforcing feedback loops that ‘lock in’ an ongoing deterioration of Earth’s climate which we are now virtually powerless to halt (if we were even trying to do so), we have also precipitated a biodiversity crisis that is self-reinforcing because the loss of each and every species has an impact on those species that are dependent on it, precipitating chains of events that make further extinctions inevitable. This is one of the ‘negative synergies’, for example, contributing to the Amazon rainforest’s rapid approach to the tipping point at which it will collapse. See ‘Amazon Tipping Point’.

Hence, we are approaching the final act of a tragedy that had its origins in the Cognitive Revolution some 70,000 years ago and which we have not been able to contain in any way. The earlier acts of this tragedy were the countless species of plants, birds, animals, fish, amphibians, insects and reptiles that Homo sapiens has driven to extinction.

Now, in the final act, we will drive to extinction 200 species today. 200 species tomorrow. 200 species the day after….

Until, one day very soon now, unless you and those you know are willing to commit yourselves wholly to the effort to avert this outcome, the human assault on life on Earth will reach its inevitable conclusion: the extinction of Homo sapiens.

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.

The Wounded Mind

Posted on November 17, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Kingsley L. Dennis

Source: Waking Times

There’s something fundamentally wrong with how the world is right now. Don’t you see it – feel it? We are a species with noble character, with a great spirit, and with a sacred soul. In our hearts we wish only for the betterment of all people; for love and justice and communion. And yet what we see going on in the world is nothing less than complete madness. We have to say it exactly as it is – there is a sickness going on and this pathogen is being perpetrated on a vast scale.

I propose the possibility for the existence of some kind of infection/invasion/contagion that produces a form of mental ‘madness’ that is so normalized within us that we hardly recognize its presence. That is, this ‘presence’ has embedded itself into our various forms of social conditioning (or perhaps even produces this conditioning) in order to veil its existence. This normalized madness then usurps genuine thinking patterns, with the result that when everyone shares the collective psychosis then the madness of the world appears to be a ‘normal feature’ of human civilization. And those people who are ‘awake’ to the genuine human spirit and mind are considered the crazies – the anomalies – as the following tale shows:

There was once a wise and powerful king who ruled in a remote city of a far kingdom. And the king was feared for both his might and his love of wisdom. At the heart of the city was a well whose water was cool and crystalline, and all the inhabitants drank from this well, even the king and his courtiers, because there was no other well in the city. One night, while everyone was asleep, a witch entered the city and poured seven drops of a strange liquid into the well, and said:

‘From now on, anyone who drinks this water will go crazy.’

The next morning all the inhabitants drank the water from the well, except the king and his lord chamberlain, and very soon everyone went mad, as the witch had foretold. During that day, all people went through the narrow streets and public places whispering to each other:
‘The king is mad. Our king and his lord chamberlain have lost their reason. Naturally, we cannot be ruled by a mad king. We must dethrone him!’

That night, the king ordered a golden cup of water from the well to be brought to him. And when they brought the cup the king and his lord chamberlain drank heavily from it. Soon after that there was great rejoicing in that distant city of a far kingdom because the king and his lord chamberlain had regained their reason.

The King and his love of wisdom (Genuine Mind) was corrupted by the poisonous drops of the witch’s liquid (virus/pathogen) that resulted in the mass epidemic of craziness (psychosis/Wounded Mind). This corrupted mind then became the dominant narrative that influenced social behavior. This Wounded Mind is like a contagion that infects.

Our collective ‘cultural mind’ is continually being shaped by dominant social-cultural narratives that normalize our mental and emotional behavioral patterns. These norms are then transferred into cultural myths that serve to transmit and reinforce these mass-minded belief systems. We end up validating our own corrupted thinking through unconscious affirmations. Once this seed of psychosis is planted then it aims to propagate and strengthen through diversions and manifestations that legitimate its own ‘logical’ existence. Like a mental cancer it ingratiates itself into our own neural pathways as an insider rather than an outsider so that we fail to notice its toxic presence. Yet there remains a niggling sense of something being ‘not-quite-right’ deep within any sensible/sensitive person.

This strange reality of ours becomes internalized so that we adapt to a form of ‘normality’ and anyone who speaks up or questions this ‘paradigm of normality’ is considered either odd, eccentric or, at worst, crazy. A more recent category for such people is now to be designated as a ‘conspiracy theorist’ which is a quick brush to dismiss people with ideas or thinking contrary to this ‘norm.’ And those people who appear to accept and encourage such norms are quickly brought ‘into the fold’ and supported in their career paths. The majority of those manifesting the Wounded Mind are not in psychiatric care but running most of our social, political, and financial institutions. Positions of great power necessitate their own specific mindset, one that is generally provided by the corrupted mind.

A Disturbance of Mind

The presence of the Wounded Mind is like a sickness of the soul, and it manifests as a disturbance in the collective unconscious. Just like any other virus or pathogen, it seeks to spread itself by infecting as many carriers as possible. Those people who carry the Wounded Mind (whether knowingly or not) act as transmitters and amplifiers for it, strengthening its frequency within the collective nonlocal field of consciousness. A collective possession is what we refer to as a psychic epidemic, or a disturbance in the field. Such disturbances can have varying affects upon people’s mental health and well-being.

People who suffer from a Wounded Mind may carry it as an ‘undefinable’ trauma within them, and it is common to turn to alcoholism or drug dependencies as a way of coping (or of escape). When a person feels stressed or traumatized they are like an open wound for further mental invasion. And it can be quite subtle at first as our modern societies have devised endless ways for our interference. We are distracted to look away from our own minds and thus miss the psycho-pathogen in action. As a person further integrates the Wounded Mind they may find themselves vulnerable to victimization; such as through social harassment and bullying (especially online nowadays), or as addicted-consumers of sexual deviancy, pornography, and socially-sanctioned extreme experiences. The monk Thomas Merton said that our modern societies suffer from a crisis of sanity:

‘The problems of the nations are the problems of mentally deranged people, but magnified a thousand times because they have the full-straight-faced approbation of a schizoid society, schizoid national structures, schizoid military and business complexes.’¹

If all modern institutions are infected by a corrupted system of mental thinking patterns then, as Merton suggests, this instability will be amplified and made worse. Individual neuroses are given institutional sanction and support within a culture that has based its social norms upon such irrationalities. The irrational has broken through and implanted itself as the rational standard rule. It is perhaps little wonder that people can be so susceptible to this mental pathogen when it comes to us dressed up in sheep’s clothing. As is always the case, those people most vulnerable are usually those who are conditioned to authority and/or passivity. This trait, unfortunately, is one that is first implanted through compulsory schooling.

Likewise, people who are easily influenced by external opinions, and whom are prone to group-thinking, are amongst the first to give away their mental independence to external sources. The virus of the Wounded Mind preys upon such ‘group-think’ individuals as they are the mass open playing fields for psychic epidemics. The ‘mass mind’ of humanity helps in the transmission and proliferation of the psychic pathogen – the wounded mind. As the famous psychiatrist R.D. Laing once said – ‘The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man…normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.’² Conscious awareness is perhaps our greatest antidote.

If we are to see human history from a wider perspective then it is important we view major events, human actions, propaganda, social disturbances, power struggles, and the rest, from this standpoint of the wounded mind. The modern human mind has been formed from many traits that include greed, lust, ambition, materialism, insincerity, and a ‘split’ personality. In all, these are traits that mark a lack of authenticity. The Wounded Mind seeks to develop greater degrees of inauthenticity and lack of empathy within the individual. We can see such personalities walking across the world stage.

The peril of the Wounded Mind is that resistance may also help to spread it. That is, people who often start out resisting and fighting against this corrupted mindset often find themselves adopting it’s values in order to survive. It’s the ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ type of thinking. And this cliché too is very likely to have been a product of the Wounded Mind intending to verify itself. It may seem that we are struggling to awaken against our very own spell of sleep.

Under the Pathogen Spell

It has often been said – by mystics, sages, and wisdom traditions – that humanity is collectively asleep. Our ignorance over our condition, and the absence of real knowledge, indicates we are asleep. Similarly, the Gnostics viewed humanity as being ‘asleep’ under a trance – a form of material spell – that has severed us from contact with a genuine divine source. Instead, we are ruled by a false or ‘flawed god,’ a demiurge, that has malevolent intentions to keep us trapped within the material realms.

The more we breed this Wounded Mind within our societies and cultures the more people will behave and live like automatons. We will live within a tighter range of conditioned stimuli that programs specific opinions and thinking patterns that validate the pathogen. A person who is more conditioned to obedience is more susceptible to receive the mental virus. Perhaps this is why our modern societies are establishing rigid orders of control and obedience, such as when we travel, pass through airports, etc. It can be likened to a preparation for automated behavior as a requisite for an automated mind. The mystic George Gurdjieff wrote:

‘Contemporary culture requires automatons. And people are undoubtedly losing their acquired habits of independence and turning into automatons, into parts of machines…. Man is becoming a willing slave. He no longer needs chains. He begins to grow fond of his slavery, to be proud of it. And this is the most terrible thing that can happen to a man.’³

By adopting the mentality of the Wounded Mind, we participate in our own suppression and further the behavior of an automaton. We need to recognize that many of our incumbent social systems are set-up to corroborate and reinforce the consensus mind-set. Any genuine resistance cannot come from any ‘mass movement’ but only from those persons who can think and act independently.

It is important to recognize that the Wounded Mind is a field phenomenon, and that our own mind and thoughts do not exist securely guarded within our heads. Since we are all interconnected within the non-local field, we are all susceptible to the infection of this predatory virus. The first step we can take is to accept the possibility that the pathogen virus exists. The Gnostic text The Gospel of Philip says: ‘So long as the root of wickedness is hidden, it is strong. But when it is recognized, it is dissolved. When it is revealed, it perishes…’ The danger lies in our distraction.

We must guard against being diverted away from our authenticity and lured into the modern distractions of hedonistic pleasure-seeking, greed and materialism, and the running after shallow satisfactions. After all, this illusive psychosis offers false promises. Our modern cultures appear to want to prevent the majority of people from pursuing their own genuine developmental paths. This is no doubt because our capitalist-consumer based societies require a regular mass of workers and consumers whom live a regulated, predictable, and conformist life.

Yet it is now necessary to see the Wounded Mind for what it is – recognition and acknowledgement is key. If we cannot bring harmony and good sense to the world around us, then we should at least bring it upon ourselves. We are the wounded ones who can become our own wounded healers.

Phantom Performances – The Rise of the Spectacle

Posted on November 3, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Kingsley L. Dennis

Source: Waking Times

ˈspɛktək(ə)l/

noun

a visually striking performance or display

an event or scene regarded in terms of its visual impact

“Now the death of God combined with the perfection of the image has brought us to a whole new state of expectation. We are the image.” ~John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards

“Magical thinking is the currency not only of celebrity culture, but also of totalitarian culture.” ~Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion

Welcome to the spectacle. Or perhaps I should say the kind of spectacle that has become the face of entertainment that pervades our westernized cultures. The way that the spectacle succeeds is that it isn’t so much about fooling us into believing its lies as real, but rather that it is we who ask to be fooled. We seek to suspend our sense of reality, to pursue a space of escape. The spectacle pulls us in because we lend our willingness to its agenda. If we are honest, in this post-truth age, we will admit to living in an age of spectacle. And it is from this that many of us receive our interpretation of reality. Since the middle of the 20^th century onwards the ‘western spectacle’ has been in the form of media advertisement and propaganda. We may think that we’ve only recently arrived at the age of the spectacle, where Disneylandification is becoming the norm, and Super Bowls are interspersed with scantily-clad singers, and TV programs appear in the slots between advertisers. Yet the whole spectacle show has been a form of function creep ever since telecommunications first emerged as a social phenomenon. The image has been with humanity since the first dawn of our arising; from cave paintings to hieroglyphics to cuneiform clay tablets. The major difference is that today the spectacle of the image has not only gone global, but it has also gotten inside of our heads.

Western cultures especially (and the US specifically) have now made the image, the spectacle, and hence the illusion so grand, so vivid, and so persuasively realistic that they are becoming our basis of reality. We swing from one illusion to the alternative, which is still yet another grand spectacle; just as we swing from the political left to the right, believing each side is distinctly different. Yet each is a part of the same bubble that customizes our lives – they form a part of our news, our heroes, our tragedies, and our dreams. We now serve a mosaic of ideals carefully crafted as a patchwork of phantom performances. Nothing is ever real anymore except the painful extremes that pervade our daily existence: the violence, the suffering, the deprivation, the inequality, the disease. Only these fragments that create great pain become the real, and from these many of us seek refuge in a plenitude of diversions, distractions, and triviality.

Western civilization has chosen to be played out upon a grand stage where the performance – of invented storylines and scripts – runs the show. We move through social realities that are an entanglement of signs, virtual connections, and social media status. It’s all about who is going to be the next ‘influencer’? We are encouraged to project back into the world our entertainment-mediatized fantasies. People begin to act out their imaginary landscapes, often in violent and distorted ways, as young students massacre their classmates before going to eat at McDonalds. This is the hyperreal that distorts a stable reality, making it harder to gain a grounded perspective on things. People are increasingly being guided by the false totems of media-militarized-entertainment.

The media spectacle gives us our modern guiding images. This is similar to how in the Middle Ages images depicted in stained glass windows and paintings of religious torment or salvation acted to control and influence the social behavior of our ancestors. For many of us the white-bearded god above is dead, so we have media depictions of heroes, adventurers, McGyvers, celebrity-cosmetic makeovers, beauty pageants, talk shows and reality television to be our social guides. An illusory sensate reality has been erected that runs on pseudo-lives and phantom performances. Such phantom performances mask our personal failures and conveniently hide them behind a curtain of the unreal. People prefer to watch the rich and famous on television rather than face the domestic unhappiness of their own lives. Why have ice when you can have bubblegum-flavored ice-cream?

Luckily for those of us who live in the west we inhabit a world of easy-correction where we can make ourselves better if we buy certain products, ingest certain foods, and hang-out in the right yoga gyms. For every situation there is seemingly a commercial solution. We have not been abandoned, after all. In the realm of hyperreality, our fantasies are no longer an impediment to success. On the contrary, our fantasies are the portals through which we enter. All we need is for the world of the media to give us our dream. Everybody has talent, as the reality shows tell us – ‘Britain’s Got Talent,’ ‘America’s Got Talent:’ in fact, we’ve all got talent! We are all of us hidden unique performers, and the world ‘out there’ is begging for our arrival. This is not to be confused with the manipulation by greedy commercial enterprises that are ready to discard you as soon as your ‘talent’ no longer sells.

Yet the truth of the matter is that the spectacle of celebrity culture seeks commodities, not real individuals or souls. It doesn’t want that we seek for any form of transcendence, illumination, or real growth. It is a world that seeks only those that feed the phantom and encourage others to do the same. It is the ‘real’ that gets pushed into a black hole – to become a figment of the imagination, whilst imaginary dreams take its place. Celebrity culture thrives from the very lack of inner reflection. There is no ‘going within’ unless it is a form of medication going down our throats. If we are brutally honest, the celebrity spectacle is an ugly specter that can be as cruel as it is superficial.

The Spectacle of Celebrity Culture

No one achieves celebrity status on their own. It is a stage performance that requires a hoard of cultural enablers; from media, marketers, promoters, agents, handlers, and a host of hungry and gullible people. It is a veritable stage of actors, with each person in it to gain something for themselves. They either seek attention, satisfaction, fame, wealth, or a combination of these. Celebrity culture has come to dominate how many of us define our sense of belonging. It has come to define how we relate to the world around us, and in this respect has disfigured our notions of social belonging and community. Celebrity culture funds and feeds our own movies inside our heads as we invent our roles and behavior. It is a culture in which very few participants are even real for a day.

We idolize celebrities and often project them as idealized forms of ourselves. And yet through this substitution we move further away from any real self-actualization. The transcendent – the Real – does not do substitutes. By throwing our fantasies onto others we are diminishing our own power. In the words of one serious journalist,

We are chained to the flickering shadows of celebrity culture, the spectacle of the arena and the airwaves, the lies of advertising, the endless personal dramas, many of them completely fictional, that have become the staple of news, celebrity gossip, New Age mysticism, and pop psychology …in contemporary culture the fabricated, the inauthentic, and the theatrical have displaced the natural, the genuine, and the spontaneous, until reality itself has been converted into stagecraft.¹

We are subtly pushed through the well-structured stagecraft whilst all the time thinking that it is real. Our contemporary ‘death of the gods’ has been replaced by a divine adoration of celebrities and celebrity culture. Celebrity items, like holy relics, are paraded, idolized, and sold for vast sums. People rush for autographs, only to sell them later on eBay to make an unhealthy profit. Celebrity personal possessions are sold off at prestigious auction houses for astronomical prices, so aging people can wear the clothes of their idols. The glitzy suit that Elvis wore before dying in a Las Vegas toilet; or the dress that Marilyn Monroe wore to show her knickers to the world above a subway vent. Everything is up for grabs – the profane is made sacred, and then sacrificed as celebrity talismans. It all engenders a performance of hysteria, leading sometimes to stalking, or what is nowadays referred to as ‘trolling,’ as celebrity private photos are hacked and shared online. It’s happened to Emma Watson, Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, Jessica Alba, Kate Hudson, Scarlett Johansson…and the list goes on, and on, and on.

The world of celebrity culture thrusts us into a moral void. People are valued by their appearance and their skin-deep beauty rather than their humanity. Such a culture focuses upon onanistic desires and ways for self-gratification. The cult of self ‘has within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity, and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, and manipulation, and the inability to feel remorse or guilt.’² The cult of self also promotes the right to get whatever we wish, and celebrity media plays into this, often at the cost of the celebrity who suffers from social media harassment and online trolling. Celebrity public life is not a sacred space; instead, it has become a theatre of performance that is open for all spectators. And those spectators who surround themselves with celebrity culture tend to live in the present, fed by an endless stream of packaged information. They live by credit promises, ignorant to the future prospect of unmanageable debt. They are hostage to a culture that keeps them enthralled, like a television commercial replete with pleasing jingles. They navigate their purchases through well-known brands, eyeing the famous logos as guides. It is an image-saturated reality, bright and tantalizing, offering comfort and satisfaction upon all levels – until the credit runs out. Then the person becomes an outlaw to the very system that fattened them up like foie gras ducks.

These are the trivial diversions that for many are necessary, and which exist in cultures that prize shallow entertainment above substance. We may wonder whether the consumerist celebrity culture is a compensation for the loss of our true freedom regarding the human spirit and our well-being. And celebrities too are often trapped within their own fairy-tale prisons. They are skillfully controlled by their handlers and pushed in front of the media – all this to compensate for the insatiable appetites of those thirsty spectators that swarm upon celebrity culture. We are tantalizingly shown that even us, the humble spectators, can triumph in fame through the lens of reality television. The celebrity machinery oils itself on the media-creation of third and fourth-rate celebrities that have their fifteen minutes of fame – crammed together on desert islands, stuffing insects into their mouths as they bad-mouth their once beloved ‘best-friend’ and vote them off the show. Reality survival, it seems, comes at a cost. And then when they finally emerge into the ‘real world’ of the hyperreal they throng and mingle with other reality-stars under the glare of media spotlight in the vain hope that together they can populate an illusory world of the celebrity.

The world of reality television is another limb on the body of phantom performance. In the last decade a multitude of reality shows have cropped up on our television screens; and they all have one thing in common – they involve being constantly watched. Popular shows such as Big Brother put strangers to live together with round-the-clock constant surveillance. These strangers are even videoed in their beds as they sleep or fondle and kiss with other contestants. Sex lives are ogled over alongside the tears and on-screen breakdowns. Then the television psychologists are wheeled out to offer ‘expert commentary’ on the contestant’s state for mass consumption. Yet underneath all this glamour and glitz is the subtle message that intrusive surveillance is a normal feature of contemporary societies. In fact, it even masquerades as something cool that can be shared online, and which can make us famous. However, the brute reality is that such reality shows normalize what would otherwise be blatant non-constitutional intervention. And yet such shows make surveillance not only routine but a potentially enjoyable part of our modern lives. We are being conditioned into monitoring and sharing our own lives for others to see. Our phantom performances can make any one of us into an enviable star.

Social media is now rife with home-grown videos where everyone from toddler to teenager to retiree is making their performances visible to the image-hungry collective. Selfies too are the new fashionable rage as we perform in front of ourselves. This trend has become so pervasive that each year the number of selfie-related deaths has been increasing. In 2015 more people died from taking selfies than from shark attacks.[i] A dedicated online Wikipedia page has been established to record some of the ongoing ‘selfie-deaths.’ Here are a few examples:

Two young men died in the Ural Mountains after they pulled the pin from a live hand grenade to take a selfie. The phone with the picture remained as evidence of the circumstance of their deaths. (Russia, January 2015)

An 18-year-old died when she attempted to take the “ultimate selfie”, posing with a friend on top of a train in the north-eastern Romanian city of Iași when her leg touched a live wire above which electrocuted her with 27,000 volts. (Romania, May 2015)

A 19-year-old from Houston died after trying to take an Instagram selfie while holding a loaded gun to his head. He accidentally fired the gun and shot himself in the throat. (USA, September 2015)

A 17-year-old student, Andrey Retrovsky from Vologda, Russia, fell to his death attempting to take a selfie while hanging from a rope from a nine-story building. The rope snapped. Retrovsky was known for taking ‘extreme’ selfies and posting them to his Instagram account. (Russia, September 2015)

Selfie deaths, it seems, are global – and not a rare occurrence. Our phantom performances come at a cost. In a world where the image is iconic, more and more people are losing themselves in a reality where a sense of achievement comes from catching the ‘ultimate selfie.’

The drive for inner fulfilment, transcendence, and growth has been wavered aside in favor of the pixilated image. We fear not being seen. We dread being anonymous. Even being a spectral ghost is preferable to being dead.

We Are the Image

The new perspective on the world is pixilated. We are awash with images without substance and which are routinely fetishized as iconic. Signs are lacking immanence; they are fleeting and transient like never before. That is why corporations spend millions trying to find an image logo that will stick around long enough to be implanted into our minds. Images are becoming signs to the disappearance of the real. Images are the new believable reality; now no one cares that the original behind the image has quietly slipped away. The world exists as if in a play of phantom appearances. The image has taken centerstage within the space of the new real. We are now the image.

Yet the danger here is that in being given the image with its glamour and glitz we are in return giving up our critical and intellectual tools that help us cope with a complex world. Where once we had the faculty of separating illusion from reality we now have a simplified hyperreal world where everything can be explained away by a platitude of post-truth phrases. Does it even matter anymore that Las Vegas with its illusion of France with the mock Eiffel Tower, or its pseudo-canals of Venice, are far from the reality of France or Venice? How many people care? Or that the fantasy worlds within the various Disney theme parks are merging with the entertainment-saturated lives outside? Would it truly matter if we were all living within a controlled environment as depicted within the film The Truman Show? Or maybe, just maybe, such films are actually trying to tell us something – to wake us up?

The danger now is that our cultural spectacles – our celebrity culture and spectral images – are making any other alternative seem dull to us. It may be that in an age of simplified gratification any complex reality is boring. What the ‘real’ presents us with may no longer be enough. In its place we are perhaps seeking a false magic.

We have lost touch with that essential something that can work like magic in our lives. As one thinker recently stated:

We live in changing times whereby humanity is undergoing a transformation…We need to understand phenomena at deeper levels, and not just accept what we are told, or what is fed to us through well-structured social institutions and channels. We must learn to accept that our thinking is a great tangible spiritual force for change.²

The notion that our ideas, our vision, our projections onto the world can be a ‘great tangible spiritual force for change’ is eluding us. Never before has it been so important to trust in the power of the human spirit, and to put forth, with honesty and integrity, the innate human power. The alternative is that we slide into the slipstream of our own phantom performances – we become the image.

Extract from the book Bardo Times: hyperreality, high-velocity, simulation, automation, mutation – a hoax?

Endnotes

¹Hedges, Chris. 2010. Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. New York: Nation Books, p15

²Gulbekian, S.E. 2004. In the Belly of the Beast: Holding Your Own in Mass Culture. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads, p251

[i] See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/11881900/More-people-have-died-by-taking-selfies-this-year-than-by-shark-attacks.html

The Global Climate Movement is Failing: Why?

Posted on October 1, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Robert J. Burrowes

It has been satisfying to note the significant response to two recent climate campaigns: the actions, including the recent Global Climate Strike, initiated by school students inspired by Greta Thunberg and the climate actions organized by Extinction Rebellion.

While delighted that these campaigns have finally managed to mobilize significant numbers of people around the existential threat the climate catastrophe poses to life on Earth, I would like to briefly raise some issues for consideration by each of those involved in the climate movement as well as those considering involvement.

I do this because history provides clearcut and compelling lessons on how to make such movements have the impact we need and, so far, the climate movement is not doing several vital things if we are to indeed be successful. And I would like to be successful.

So here are five key issues that I would address as soon as possible.

Analyze the climate catastrophe within the context of the ongoing and broader environmental disaster that is currently taking place.
Analyze the climate catastrophe and environmental disaster to better understand the political, economic and social systems and structures, as well as the individual behaviours, that are driving them.
Based on these analyses, reorient the movement’s strategic focus: that is, who and what is the movement trying to change?
And then identify the nature of the behavioural changes we are asking of people and their organizations, and how these will be achieved.
In what timeframe?

Let me briefly elaborate why I believe these issues are so important.

Earth’s biosphere is under siege, not just the climate.

There is no point mobilizing action to halt ongoing destruction of the climate while paying insufficient attention to the vast range of other threats to key ecosystems that make life on Earth possible. I understand that most movements, whether concerned with peace, the environment or social justice, for example, tend to confine their concern to one issue. Unfortunately, however, we no longer have the luxury of doing that given the multifaceted existential threats to life on Earth.

The biosphere is under siege on many fronts with military violence, radioactive contamination (from nuclear weapons testing, nuclear waste from power plants including Fukushima and Chernobyl, depleted uranium weapons…), destruction of the rainforests and oceans, contamination and depletion of Earth’s fresh water supply, geoengineering, 5G and many other assaults inflicting ongoing and uncontained damage on Earth and its species. See, for example, ‘5G and the Wireless Revolution: When Progress Becomes a Death Sentence’.

This has critical implications for the strategic goals we set ourselves in our struggle to save not only the climate but the many vital ecosystems of Earth’s biosphere. In short, if we ‘save the climate’ but rainforests are destroyed or nuclear war takes place, then saving the climate will have been a pyrrhic victory.

Politicians are a ‘sideshow’ with negligible power.

Hence, it is a waste of time lobbying them to do such things as ‘declare a climate emergency’, ‘phase out all fossil fuel extraction and transform our economy to 100% renewable energy by 2030’, ‘recognize indigenous sovereignty’ and ‘implement a Green New Deal’.

The global elite, which is insane, is ‘running the show’, including the key political, economic, military and social structures and the bulk of the politicians we supposedly elect. This means that the global elite holds the levers of power over the world capitalist system, national military forces and the major international political and economic organizations such as the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. For brief explanations of this, with references to many more elaborate accounts, see the section headed ‘How the World Works: A Brief History’ in ‘Why Activists Fail’, as well as ‘Exposing the Giants: The Global Power Elite’ and ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’.

But separately from the role of the global elite in managing the major political, economic and social systems and structures in order to extract maximum corporate profit, individual behaviours, particularly the consumption patterns of people in industrialized countries, are also driving the destruction of Earth’s biosphere. Why? Because our parenting and teaching models are extraordinarily violent and leave the typical human living in an unconsciously terrified, self-hating and powerless state and addicted to using consumption as a key means to suppress awareness of how they feel. See ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’ and ‘Do We Want School or Education?’ and, for more detail, ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

3 & 4. If we understand the above two points, we can reorient our efforts.

This means that instead of powerlessly lobbying politicians, we can change our strategic focus to maximize our strategic impact. So, on the one hand for example, we can tackle corporations profiting from the manufacture, sale and use of military weapons, the extraction and sale of fossil fuels or the manufacture and sale of the poison glyphosate (‘Roundup’), by designing and implementing thoughtful strategies of nonviolent action to end their manufacture and sale of these life-destroying products. For comprehensive guidance on campaigning strategically, see Nonviolent Campaign Strategy. For a list of the strategic goals necessary to effectively tackle the climate catastrophe or end war, for example, see ‘Strategic Aims’. And for a brief explanation of how to make a nonviolent action have maximum impact, see ‘Nonviolent Action: Why and How it Works’.

On the other hand, we can encourage responsible and systematic reductions of consumption in all key areas – water, household energy, transport fuels, metals, meat, paper and plastic – while dramatically expanding individual and community self-reliance in 16 areas in industrialized countries as outlined in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’. Or, more simply, we can encourage people to make the Earth Pledge (below).

Once enough people commit to one or the other of these two approaches (to substantially reduce consumption and increase local self-reliance), then three vital outcomes will be achieved:

it will progressively reduce resource extraction from, and pollution of, Earth’s biosphere,
it will functionally undermine capitalism and the ongoing industrialization process, and
it will remove the fundamental driver of the global elite’s perpetual war: our collective demand for the goods and services made available by the elite’s theft of resources from countries they invade and exploit on our behalf.

I am well aware of the captivating power of turning up in a shared space with a vast bunch of other people with whom we agree. Unfortunately, while it might be a lot of fun, it is usually a waste of time strategically. Even the largest worldwide mobilization in human history (against the imminent US-led war on Iraq) on 15 February 2003, in which 30,000,000 people participated in more than 600 cities around the world, was ineffective. See ‘Why Activists Fail’.

Of course, if you still want a large public action, then you need to make sure the gathering has strategic focus. For example, instead of using it to powerlessly beg politicians to fix things for us, make it an occasion where participants can publicly commit to taking powerful action themselves by signing the Earth Pledge.

The Earth Pledge

Out of love for the Earth and all of its creatures, and my respect for their needs, from this day onwards I pledge that:

I will listen deeply to children (see explanation below)
I will not travel by plane
I will not travel by car
I will not eat meat and fish
I will only eat organically/biodynamically grown food
I will minimize the amount of fresh water I use, including by minimizing my ownership and use of electronic devices
I will not buy rainforest timber
I will not buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles, containers, cups and straws
I will not use banks, superannuation (pension) funds or insurance companies that provide any service to corporations involved in fossil fuels, nuclear power and/or weapons
I will not accept employment from, or invest in, any organization that supports or participates in the exploitation of fellow human beings or profits from killing and/or destruction of the biosphere
I will not get news from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television, radio, Google, Facebook, Twitter…)
I will make the effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing, that makes me more self-reliant
I will gently encourage my family and friends to consider signing this pledge.

To reiterate: It is delusional to believe that we can sustain the existing levels of consumption and preserve Earth’s biosphere. Because, in the end, it is our over-consumption that is driving the destruction. As an aside, this is also why the various Green New Deal proposals being put forward are misconceived: each of the versions that I have checked is essentially a wish-list of desirable changes ‘demanded’ of governments while missing the fundamental point that if people still want to fly, drive, eat meat and fish, or food that is poisoned, use electronic devices…, they are paying the elite to maintain existing structures of violence and exploitation, to continue killing people (to steal their resources) and to destroy the biosphere. And this, of course, means that we are directly complicit in the violence, exploitation and destruction. After all, why should the elite listen to our demands for change when we spend our money supporting their existing profit-maximizing, people-killing and biosphere-destroying behaviours?

If this all seems too challenging, then I invite you to consider doing the emotional healing necessary so that you can act powerfully in response to this crisis. See ‘Putting Feelings First’. If you want to help children to do so, consider making ‘My Promise to Children’ which will require capacity in ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

The timeframe to which we are working is vital.

Given the ever-increasing body of evidence that suggests human extinction will occur by 2026, there is no point working to the elite-sponsored IPCC timeframe, designed to maximize corporate profits-as-usual for as long as possible. We do not have, for example, until 2030 to contain the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees celsius above the pre-industrial level or, say, mid-century to fully reign in carbon, methane and nitrous oxide emissions. We have nothing like this much time. Moreover, anyone paying attention to the state and ongoing destruction of the world’s rainforests and oceans, the ‘insect apocalypse’ and the accelerating rate of species extinctions (with one million species now under threat) should perceive this intuitively unless (unconsciously) terrified and hence delusional.

But for a fuller elaboration of the short timeframe we have left, if we take into account the synergistic psychological, sociological, political, economic, climate, ecological, military and nuclear considerations that each play a part in shaping this timeframe, see ‘Human Extinction by 2026? A Last Ditch Strategy to Fight for Human Survival’.

Conclusion

By now, of course, many people will be overwhelmed by what they have read above (if they got this far). So this is why those who feel able to grapple with the evidence presented are also the ones most likely to have the courage to join me in taking the action outlined and gently encouraging others in the movement to reconsider and reorient movement strategy too.

It also means that the climate movement and those with whom we must work, such as those in the labour, women’s, antiwar, indigenous rights and environment movements, have considerably more work to do if we are to achieve the outcomes we all want.

Unless enough of us are able to embrace the path outlined above, human extinction in the near term is inevitable because our efforts will be wasted on actions that cannot have the necessary impact given the full dimensions of the crisis.

What happened to individual empowerment in the internet age?

Posted on August 25, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Kurt Cobb

Source: Resilience

Apple Computer’s 1984 Superbowl commercial—one of the most iconic television commercials ever made—announced two things: the introduction of the Macintosh computer and that this computer could in some fashion allow each of us to escape a future of tyranny and social control prophesied in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984.

The computer age and the coming of the internet have certainly moved more power into the hands of the individual, giving him and her access to social and professional connections around the world, information on every conceivable topic, and awareness of events in real-time or near real-time across the globe. The possibilities of the combined computational power of the modern computer and the connectivity of those computers across the globe are still being explored and expanded every day.

So, how is individual empowerment faring? Not so well. It turns out that practically every device, piece of software and internet platform not only holds the promise of enhancing the individual’s power but also can be weaponized to undermine it.

We somehow forget that for every thing and every person we can look up on the internet, those things and people can look back. Naturally, we can try to protect ourselves with antivirus programs and firewalls. But as with any arms race, there is a never-ending back-and-forth struggle to create better tools and strategies for snooping on and disrupting computers and their networks and simultaneously to build defenses against the newest methods of attack and surveillance.

But I am less concerned with this battle than I am with the voluntary things we do that undermine all the individual empowerment that was supposed to come our way.

The single most important power humans have is their ability to pay attention. It’s our focus that allows us to do not only our daily tasks but also to perform progressively better at tasks we choose. Now the most important thing to know about our attention is that it is a limited resource. There are only so many hours in a day and only so many of those when we are not sleeping and only so many of those when we can pay attention to something outside our basic needs of eating, getting a livelihood, staying safe.

I have noticed a distinct generational divide between those who have grown up with cellphones and computers and those who purchased their first cellphone and personal computer after age 30 when their daily habits and outlook were already well-cemented. Those who joined the computer, internet and cellphone age as adults tend to see these devices and networks as tools for accomplishing certain tasks they had previously accomplished some other way such as keeping a calendar, holding meetings and writing and sharing documents.

Those who grew up in the age of the computer, cellphone and internet view these technologies as portals to experience. The most important things that are happening in their lives, social, cultural, and economic, are happening online and via cellphone. Experiences mediated through electronic means have become primary and more important than direct immediate experience.

I am most struck by this when I walk the streets and see person after person listening to something coming from their cellphones as they walk, run or bicycle. People can listen to whatever they like as far as I’m concerned. But it occurs to me that they cannot simultaneously pay careful attention to the world right in front of them AND to whatever they are listening to.

It reminds me of the quote attributed to then California gubernatorial candidate Ronald Reagan about the cutting of the state’s redwood forest: “If you’ve seen one redwood, you’ve seen them all.” That’s not exactly what he said, but his opponent captured Reagan’s view all too well.

In any case, we now have a segment of the population which apparently believes that there is little to notice in any environment and for whom the physical world is just a concept and not at all the endlessly complex, differentiated, nuanced and ever-changing place that I experience.

Today, we have virtual reality to entertain us, complete with virtual reality goggles. Does it not occur to those putting on the goggles that they are limiting their reality rather than expanding it? That they are limiting it to what the creators of that particular virtual reality wish to convey? And, all this is undertaken when the reality that is right in front of them in their homes, workplaces, and outdoors has barely been explored or understood.

Every modern communications device, cellphone, computer and virtual reality machine gives us a highly edited version of the world, one designed especially to meet the goals of those who created the devices. The primary goals are making money and controlling our behavior in order to get us to pay more attention (so our attention can be sold to advertisers) and/or to get us to make additional purchases.

The addictive quality of these technologies has been well-documented. But it is in the nature of the addict to believe that he or she is being nourished by the very things to which he or she is addicted. And, that is the most devilish trick of modern networks: the idea that our futures and very well-being will be enhanced—when, in fact, our autonomy is simply being dissipated as we give our attention to things which sap our own power and health and enslave us to marketing and programming executives who themselves are caught up in a system that does not value individual autonomy in the least.

There are, of course, the myriad ways in which individual empowerment has backfired and put us into far more danger than ever before. The ability of a small group of hackers to tap into critical networks which service power generating stations and water and sewer plants is a rising concern. Especially concerning are nuclear power plants.

Miniaturization technology is making it possible to put more and more destructive power in smaller and smaller packages. Combine that with the ready availability of drones and you get a lethal combination.

The rise of designer viruses, though not yet open to those without sophisticated laboratories, threatens an unstoppable epidemic.

Empowering the individual sounds great when you say it. But it helps to be specific about what kind of power you want the individual to have and how that power might be used in nefarious ways or simply dissipated by absorbing a person’s attention in ways that undermine that empowerment.

The centers of official power—economic and political elites, corporations, and the government security apparatus of police, intelligence agencies, militaries—are all petrified at the vast destructive power flowing to the hands of individuals and small groups. And, they are equally petrified at the individual economic, political and social empowerment available to the individual through the very technologies these elites have unleashed.

The first threat they use as an excuse for blanket surveillance, preventive detention and secret prisons. The second threat they hope will be dissipated by the myriad distractions that the commercial interests which now largely control the internet provide to the public.

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Category Archives: Consumerism

The Need for a Greater Vision: Recognizing Reality