Reimagining the Middle Class

Posted on November 19, 2018 by Reid Mukai

In her new book, Alissa Quart chronicles what happens when capitalism and families collide

By Ann Neumann

AS THE ECONOMIC STATUS OF MANY in the United States has declined over the past several decades, journalists have often focused on the challenges faced by the working poor. In her new book, Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America, Alissa Quart writes about how economic inequality has also drastically changed the middle class, destabilizing what was once considered a secure class and sending families into the tailspin of debt, overwork, underemployment, and precarious financial states. Squeezed demonstrates that inequality is not just a problem of those left behind in the lowest financial brackets, but a feature of our current economic system characterized by working professionals who are unable to pay for child care, declining job salaries, shifting work hours, and unaffordable housing. Families too often wrestle with “penalizing” factors, like women’s depressed salaries and unaffordable health care, making success unattainable for a formerly comfortable, educated, and skilled demographic of society.

The book challenges us to reimagine our prior understanding of what it means to be middle class, even as legislators champion “traditional values” that contradict the needs and responsibilities of families—and erode a safety net that once supported U.S. workers. Some of the factors that have upended the middle class are obvious—declining salaries, for instance—but others remain masked by corporate and social portrayal of them as a benefit to today’s workers. The gig economy, which, we’re told, gives workers young and old more flexibility and independence, turns out to be a contributor to what Quart calls the forever clock, a twenty-four-hour schedule that has usurped family and free time by keeping workers on constant call. Squeezed recounts the lives of the teachers who work second jobs, the professional mothers who struggle to pay for day care, the paralegals and adjuncts who have to moonlight to pay the rent, the well educated who never found a job in their intended profession that provides a livable salary. And the book causes us to ask why so many suffer in isolation, too ashamed to acknowledge their economic plight and too belabored to politically address it.

Quart is executive editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, a nonprofit organization founded by Barbara Ehrenreich (a contributing editor for The Baffler) that supports journalism examining economic inequality, its causes and solutions (EHRP has funded my own work and that of others published at The Baffler). Quart is the author of four previous books: Branded, Republic of Outsiders, Hothouse Kids, and the poetry book Monetized. She also co-writes, with Maia Szalavitz, a column for The Guardian titled “Outclassed.”

This month, Quart stopped by The Baffler office to talk to me about Squeezed. We’ve known each other for several years and I read the book in manuscript, so our conversation was casual, touching on individuals in the book, our own squeezed lives, how we can counter economic decline, and a necessary new definition of self-help.

Ann Neumann: Squeezed straddles the Trump election and very often people on the left—and the right, to be honest—are using this as a clear demarcation. I think one of the things the book does really well is point out that the mechanisms in place that harm working class families have been long in coming.

Alissa Quart: The reason Sanders and Trump could tap into anger are the numbers of those economically squeezed; it’s what I was seeing anecdotally. And you can feel that. You can feel when you go sit in people’s living rooms, when you talk to them on the phone. I went to a conference called iRelaunch that was all about helping people to start their careers over and the room just rippled with shame and fear. And acidic humor.

AN: How did the election change this book project?

AQ: I think it gave it new urgency for me. Just as it gave urgency to the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, the organization I run. I think everyone in journalism felt like we have to tell these stories. The Trump effect has made me feel like I have to keep a laser focus on the things people are ignoring and try to find a way for readers to pay attention to them. We’re all focusing on Ivanka and whether she’s the c-word or not, which is fine, there are all kinds of things happening around us and in our own lives politically that have nothing directly to do with what Trump is tweeting, but the effects of his administration and long-term trends are real and we just need to keep looking.

We just published an article at EHRP about a journalist who lives in a $17 a night Airbnb, places below what you usually scroll to. But this person was a working journalist who was getting six-figure advances fifteen or twenty years ago. There are all these human examples that constantly show this decline. Fine, maybe the job numbers are up, but how many jobs are people working and are they jobs in the professions? Are they jobs that pay enough for people to live in cities? Or they’re working three different jobs which leads us to things like, as in this book, twenty-four-hour day care.

AN: Day care centers that are open twenty-four hours to accommodate parents with nontraditional work hours or multiple jobs.

AQ: And they are growing in number. I wrote a piece on this; I called it the dystopian social net. I feel like that’s part of my life’s work. I love dystopian fiction and science fiction, probably because it seems a few clicks away from the life we’re leading. It’s a markedly different life and childhood than the one you and I had. It may be horrible, or maybe not, but we’re seeing a palpable transformation in what childhood can be in the course of twenty years.

AN: And that’s really just the decline of income?

AQ: It’s people working different hours, it’s corporations using algorithms to find out what times of day are most profitable—when they’ll have the most foot traffic in retail, for instance—and demanding that employees work those times. It’s increasing nightwork. Nontraditional could mean 11 to 3 or it could mean working in the evening, or working in different jobs, hither and thither. That alone points to a huge transformation in things like time. A lot of the issues I address in the book are really about time, how we spend it. In the twenty-four-hour day care section I use the term the forever clock. But that’s true of the upper middle class too, they feel squeezed because they’re also on a forever clock. They’re working in IT, for instance, and they’re working unusual hours and they have the expectation that they should be better paid for it.

AN: Your work has been focused on economic inequality for a long time.

AQ: Every single one of my books is in some way about economic inequality. I used to teach at Columbia J-school and I always told my students that every writer has a central question they spend their career trying to answer and your job is to find out what your question is. It’s like a parlor game. So I think mine is: what happens when the family—or childhood—hits capitalism? What are the deformations and the formations? I read so many nineteenth-century novels as a kid that I’m fascinated by that intersection. Naturalism is ascetically but also politically and intellectually appealing to me. I think I just like the texture of family, love, money, and how they all meet.

AN: That comes out in the writing of the book because, I’ll tell you, there are economics books that I have no interest in reading because they’re a slog, a data dump. You also coin terms that give us a way to think about worker’s plights. You just mentioned the forever clock but there’s also the middle precariat.

AQ: I was trying to explain the shift in the middle class as an imaginative category. The middle class used to equal solid, fixed, stable. Temporally it was about gratification later, but your life wasn’t miserable while you were waiting for it. It wasn’t like OK, total slog, but you’re going to get that pension. We have to now think of it as a shaken category, an unstable category, and that’s a big shift. When we visualize the middle class, we’re visualizing the white picket fence, like the blue sky on the cover of the book. But it’s really this truck being squeezed between two houses.

It’s an unsettled identity, and you can fall out of it, you can barely get into it, you certainly can’t rise above it very easily. Guy Standing coined the term precariat in 2011 to describe the proletariat, which is a Marxist way of understanding the working class, crossed with precariousness. And people get that. Every time they ride an Uber or they have a gig economy Task Rabbit person come to their house they’re like, OK, that’s the precariat. But I was seeing the same thing among paralegals or those who have law degrees but were still doing temporary work.

AN: Getting a law degree can be like selling your soul to the banks.

AQ: All these people are in debt. Some of it is because they went to for-profit colleges and those colleges were really expensive and they didn’t have a good rate of placement. Which can be traced to for-profit colleges and grad schools that have very little oversight—and are sometimes indeed federally funded. It can also be traced to fewer law jobs overall and too many people imagining that law is a secure profession. This is about reimagining. Once you can reimagine a profession, even if you choose to do it—you choose to be a journalist, you choose be a lawyer—we should understand that we’re choosing something unstable. Awareness is a huge part of survival and I guess part of what I want with this book is to increase awareness. This is your self-help: Don’t blame yourself. We have to come alive to this recognition. You can still do what you love, so long as you know what it can mean.

This is a personal journey for me too. When I was younger, as a freelancer, I had some recognition that journalism was starting to fragment. It was around 2006 or 2007—but it was before that too, the’90s. The word rates used to be consistent and for freelance writers those rates became lower or stayed the same while inflation rose. I remember talking to someone and they said, “just think about us as post modern.” Now you do lots of things, it’s a hustle here and a hustle there. That person was a boomer who had a steady job, who would get social security. I remember feeling an incredible resentment.

AN: So precarious employment has been described to us as a beautiful thing. We’re not chained to a factory job, we get to think and move around, but it doesn’t pan out.

AQ: I personally came from a middle class background. As I describe in the book, my parents were college professors, originally community college professors, and they could afford to send me to a private school. They didn’t have any inheritance or anything. That’s the sort of the world I thought I’d be living in. All of us, our generation, Generation X, had an idea of the world we thought we’d be living in. The generation after us has come to understand some of these things.

AN: That they’re fucked? So do you think this is a moment in capitalism, as we watch continued market decline over the next years, when we either do something about it or devolve into a disordered society?

AQ: Yes, I think so. But this book isn’t depressing because it points to some solutions—not in a pat way, but things that will work. It’s a way to think about what kind of family safety net, federal and local, we need to make sure people aren’t falling through. For instance, a few of the people I write about in the book are on food stamps and other kinds of support, but many of them are a little above that in terms of earning power and they can’t get help. There’s a labor organizer I spoke with who tries to lower her salary to be able to get some sort of subsidized day care, some sort of health insurance program. It’s that edge: people who are middle class in terms of education, but working class in terms of earning. They’re on the edge of being working poor and not being able to access any of those services. That’s most of the people in this book. Once we understand that they’re precarious we need to find a safety net for them.

AN: What this book does is lay out the many ways that people are hurting at the moment and it kind of gives a blueprint as to how precariousness could be addressed. Subsidized day care, for instance. I had no idea about how expensive child care is.

AQ: Child care can be 30 percent of many salaries. Or more. I think for us it was 30 percent of our take-home pay.

AN: How do people do it? In the book you show us. We spend a lot of time with individuals, we get a look at their lives and there’s a revelation for a reader to think, Oh, it’s not just me. There are things that I go without, there are resources that I don’t have access to, there are crises that I lose sleep over or pray will never come my way. There’s something about this book that brings this issue to light and I wonder if that was what you thought you’d get out of the stories? Is that why you used a storytelling approach?

AQ: That’s the chick lit, soap operatic part of me. And there is something of that in these stories. You think, What’s going to happen next? Sometimes I was surprised because they did have the messy amplitude of ordinary life. The people I write about aren’t just symbolic though. Some of them I followed for years.

AN: I think of the co-parenting section where you spend time with families who are trying to come up with creative solutions. In some cases, over time, things were better; in some cases they were worse. But readers still get the sense that nothing is fixed, no one really knows what’s working.

AQ: Or like the nanny who was separated from her son when I first met her and it was one kind of story. It became a story about them reunited, but then it became a story about school choice, and then it became a story about a mixed outcome at the end. She was actually happy, but I think the reader would want her to have a more middle class life given how hard she’s worked and all the effort she’s made to make the right choices.

AN: The anxiety of her life stayed with me. There are so many things that thwart her from getting ahead. She just needs the smallest break, trying to bring her son here, trying to find an affordable place to live. She’s doing everything right and she doesn’t deserve to go through this. That’s what comes out in the story. So when you were doing this reporting, did you get a sense of relief that we’re all going through this at the same time?

AQ: I definitely did. I felt relief. I say that this book is self-help because it makes you realize that it’s not your fault. And that’s how I see self-help. I see it as awareness, really granularly understanding all the ways that systems have made it impossible for you personally to overcome financial challenges—so that you’re no longer blaming yourself.

AN: Thank God someone’s redefining self-help.

AQ: [Laughs] But that’s it. How do you not feel stigmatized, how do you not feel isolated? So many of my friends feel ashamed that they can’t figure out the school system, can’t figure out how to own their home.

AN: The various penalties—for being a woman, for having children, for having debt—stack up. Shaming has abetted this erosion of rights and financial stability.

AQ: Time, day care scheduling, and other demands mean people can’t organize. They’re ashamed of where they are and so that becomes another debilitating factor. The adjunct in one chapter feels ashamed even though she knows politically she shouldn’t. There are people like the teachers who drive for Uber, who feel ashamed even though they know they shouldn’t. And it goes on and on. I don’t want to put it back on individuals, but the personal thing that people can do is start talking openly about their monetary situation. People are startled when you do that. It can erode social norms in a weird way, but I also think it’s important that people stop fronting with one another.

I write in one chapter about the 1 percent media, about the social media where people pretend to live in more expensive places than they do. I call them wealthies, not selfies. So it’s not your imagination when you’re in any of these circumstances and you see people in a sun dappled villa. People are representing themselves in this inflated way and then you feel terrible and isolated. There are so many ways in which the stigma, the isolation, around your class position gets underlined.

AN: Has it always been shameful to be poor?

AQ: Probably.

AN: It’s not a fair question!

AQ: But let’s be clear. A lot of these people are not poor. Most of the people in this book are earning between $45,000 and $125,000. Working class is $35,000. They’re not at the poverty level.

AN: So the shame then comes from not being able to make ends meet.

AQ: The shame comes from having debt for the education that you got in order to be middle class. The shame comes from not doing as well as your peers. The shame comes from not living up to your potential. The shame comes from not owning your home, defaulting on your mortgage. Not giving your kids as good a life as you had. I’m not writing about the working poor. I’m writing about the middle poor.

AN: We still operate under the myth that as a society we can continue to lift people into middle class and lift middle class into other class brackets. We no longer have any of that upward mobility. We cannot anticipate that our children will be better off.

AQ: No, we cannot anticipate that.

AN: But that’s still the American dream, isn’t it? And that American dream has been tied to, say, home ownership or a vehicle or not having debt.

AQ: In New York it’s like what school your kid goes to. What college your kid goes to.

AN: You use the word reimagining; it’s a word that I don’t hear often enough in politics, particularly not applied to class.

AQ: I mean reimagining what it means to be successful, reimagining what it means to be middle class. In a dream scape kind of way, like, This is what we would like to see in this country. But also reimagining middle class in its truth, what it actually means now? Let’s tear the veil and not just say, Oh, it means stability or security. It doesn’t.

CEOs should have been the fall guys; why are they still heroes?

Posted on November 7, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Carl Rhodes

Source: aeon

On 15 September 2008, the giant financial services firm Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, starting a chain reaction that saw the global economy spiralling toward total collapse. The global financial crisis that ensued revealed just how fragile and unstable the world economic order really was. If there was ever a time that neoliberal capitalism should have faced a legitimation crisis, this was it.

One only needs to think back to December 2008 when the then US president Barack Obama scolded the heads of the largest US auto firms for flying to Washington in private jets to ask for financial bailouts. As one Democratic Party representative added: ‘Couldn’t you all have downgraded to first class or jet-pooled or something to get here? It would have at least sent a message that you do get it.’

For a short time after the crash, those on the top of the corporate ladder seemed as powerless as those on the bottom. The failure demonstrated that neither chief executive officers (CEOs) nor their financial advisors had much of an idea of how the market worked or how to control it. All that was left for modern citizens was to brace themselves as a runaway global free market fell off the proverbial cliff. The CEO suddenly appeared like a fall guy for the crash rather than as a hero.

Fast-forward 10 years, and it’s hard to believe that the economic and political supremacy of the CEO could have even been put into radical question the way it was in 2008. CEOs never really lost their stride and, now more than ever, they are considered to be visionaries and idealised as leaders. Nor did they lose their corporate jets. Other than for a brief symbolic belt-tightening immediately after the crisis, CEOs were soon flying high again on company planes.

Today, business founders such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg or even Larry Fink epitomise a new class of celebrity CEOs, seen by so many as personal heroes who can save the world, and the same goes for the larger array of employee CEOs such as Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase or Tim Cook at Apple. Yet all the while, CEOs participate in a world economy wracked by increasing inequality, as epitomised by the kind of obscene CEO remuneration that sees the likes of Amazon’s boss Jeff Bezos earning almost a million times that of the workers in his warehouses.

More ominously, millions of Americans voted for an ostentatiously super-rich CEO, electing Donald Trump as their president. In his acceptance speech, Trump praised his own business acumen as being key to his political success: ‘I’ve spent my entire life in business, looking at the untapped potential in projects and in people all over the world. That is now what I want to do for our country.’

The barely interrupted veneration of the CEO as a hero, marked most expressively by the Trump presidency, has brought us to a point today where CEOs are not just valued for their skills in business but have become role models in all walks of life. We now live in what we call a ‘CEO society’: a society where corporate leadership has become the model for transforming not just business, but all human activity, where everyone from politicians to jobseekers to even those seeking love are expected to imitate the qualities of the lionised corporate executive.

The contemporary adulation and admiration of CEOs raises the question of what enabled their continued idolisation, given what could well have been their fall from grace 10 years ago? At the time, many hoped that the sad devastation of the crisis might open the door for an economic and political paradigm shift that would usher in a fairer, more equal and just society. It’s not that this promise of change has not arrived, it’s that it seems farther away than ever.

After 2008, for a brief time, people clamoured for CEOs to be held accountable and be prosecuted. This was, not least, a practical matter. With jobs being lost, shop fronts being boarded up, and politicians crying austerity, what people wanted above all else was economic recovery. Yet with the world’s top executives in disgrace, who could lead such a dramatic economic revival?

What arose from peril was a novel fantasy of executive-led recovery that allowed the shattered reputation of the CEO to stage a prompt, if not miraculous, comeback. This played into an appealing crisis narrative. With such a narrative, all faith must be invested in the recuperation of an imaginary golden past that existed before the upheaval. Most recently, this has manifested in Brexit’s investment in the promise of a renewed British sovereignty, as well as in populist political rallying cries such as ‘Make America Great Again’.

These desires for recovery and return are of course perfectly understandable, and they clearly shed light on why ideologies of free-market heroism thrived again after crisis. But this still only scratches the surface of why CEOs continue to be idolised by so many. Whereas individual executives from Martin Shkreli of Turing Pharmaceuticals to Harvey Weinstein of Miramax might be reviled for their greed, corruption or abuse of power, the CEO – as an ideal – has been reinstated with a solid-gold allure.

The financial crisis pointed to a deep insecurity rested in the fear that it was futile for humans to control the economic world that we had created, and this reverberated with a more general fear that we lack agency more widely. Suddenly, people were pushed into facing the possibility that their lives were lost to the whims and unpredictable fate of a supernatural market. Where since the advent of the 20th century it had been righteously condemned that ‘money is the secular God of the world’, now it was feared that finance had become an even more reckless God, one who cared little for the humans who worshiped at his gilded altar.

The quick rehabilitation of the image of the CEO in the popular imagination was not just a practical matter of wanting to hold on to the material benefits afforded by neoliberal capitalism. It was a psychic measure needed to counteract the fear of dehumanisation at the hands of a runaway Frankenstein economy. In other words, we just wanted to pretend that someone was in control, even if all the facts and evidence were telling us that this wasn’t the case. Everything could be forgiven if hope could be returned.

The retention of the CEO myth was an assertion of the power of individuals to shape events and control their destiny. To achieve this meant holding on to the heroic character of the CEO such that people might regain a sense of control over their own lives too.

Maintaining faith in the CEO was less a matter of empirical fact and more a symptom of a human need to find something to believe in at the end of a hard-earned day; with the reality too hard to bear, the fantasy had to return. Held out was the promise that everyone could receive grace if only he accepted the modern CEO gospel. This is the very same faith that allows people to believe that the business acumen of an impetuous, loud-mouthed, misogynist bully is able to lead America to greatness. When Trump said that he would run the US like a business project, ‘under budget and ahead of schedule’, enough people believed him to pave his way to the White House.

CEOs represent the ability to be in control of a market that appears uncontrollable and uncaring of its profound human costs. This desire for control belies the reality for too many people of being on the wrong side of the rising tide of inequality, and of being subjected to the tyranny of a new singleminded political authoritarian intolerance. Let’s hope that with the next crisis we learn that we need to let go of the fantasy of the CEO.

Your Life Is Not Limited To One Path

Posted on October 7, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Joe Martino

Source: Collective Evolution

It is no secret that life can sometimes feel like a limited paved road laid out before us that we feel the need to stick to. Look at how we are brought up. Most of the time we come into the world and begin gaining our perceptions from those closest to us –our parents. As time goes on we find ourselves in school. Throughout that time we also begin watching what others do around us, what we see on TV and in movies.

What is happening is we are observing and creating an idea of how life should be; the best way to play the game. But what is ‘best?’

How many times have we heard “That’s not the best decision” or “That’s not the best decision for the whole family.” When you look at either statement you realize that “best” is subjective. What the “best” is to one person may not be the “best” to another. Even further, both of the perceptions of “best” are created from whatever belief systems each have created in their own lives. This is the key factor to realize.

We Get Trapped in Belief Systems

In either case, both scenarios have one thing in common, a belief system of what the “best” choice or decision is. When we create a belief system like this, we limit how we view things. We no longer feel what is “best,” but instead we analyze and define “best” based on a story; often a story from the past, based on entirely different times than the present moment.

Let’s take the example of a child coming out of high school today. 9 times out of 10, that child will be told, and may even believe, that the “best” decision they can make for their life is to continue their education at university or college. It does not matter that they do not know what they want to study, or that the education system will potentially cost them $100,000+, many will state that is best -and even have pride about it.

Next, they would be told to get a job so they can buy a house, as owning and buying a house is a smart decision. Should this child begin their life based on these belief systems, more often than not they will take this idea of what is “BEST” throughout the rest of their life. They will judge their decisions by this, express emotions based on this, develop self-esteem based on this and so forth. From then on, every decision they make will be based on this belief system handed down and taught to them.

Even getting specific, what to study in school, what type of job to get, what type of car to buy, how to spend and save money, what type of house to buy and so on. What is really happening with all of this? We are defining the ideal life or what’s “best” and then we limit our life to a small scope of how things should be.

The Deep Truth

Here is the absolute truth, ready? None of it has any real truth to it. It’s just all a belief system. Perception, ideas! But we often live by this and it becomes so real in our minds that we become stuck thinking this is the way to do it. Then when depression and anxiety follow, as we may believe we are stuck, we forget to look back on the belief system that is often caging us and our reality into a small tight space we often don’t deeply resonate with.

Look at our world. We often all chase the same thing, the same stuff because that is what we have been sold as the ideal life. Each area of the world has its own version of this. Who’s life are you really living? Whose dreams are you chasing and carrying out? We take on these beliefs and we begin to sacrifice ourselves, our health, and our soul desires so we can carry out someone else’s idea of “best” that we grabbed onto.

Back to the child from the example above. Now they have grown into a young man or woman and are in a job they don’t truly like. But it pays the bills and lives up to the idea of “best” that has been given to them. Most of the time, people around them will all reinforce that their decisions are the “best” because they have all been sold on the same belief system. “You have to make sacrifices, you have to work really hard to have a good life!” is what we are told. But who says what is “good?” Even when that grown up child is expressing their sadness or frustration for the reality they are in, we continue to reinforce it to protect the idea of ‘the best.’

We take this entirely expansive creative individual playing in an expansive playground called Earth and we confine them to this tiny little narrow path of what the “best” is. Instead of spending their life being able to make any choice they choose, they stay limited to what they have been sold as the “best” even if they don’t truly love it.

Even Deeper

Then you have the even deeper part, we then look upon and judge others when they make “the wrong decisions.” Look at how we view those who change their minds about what they want to play with all the time. What do we say about those people? “They need to make up their mind and get their life on track.” What track? There is a track? Says who? “They didn’t make a smart decision with their money or their house so they are going to pay for it later.” Who says some decisions are better than others? Is it not an experience either way?

You are the creator of your life and reality. You can choose to play and create whatever type of life you choose. And guess what? If you make a decision and start creating a particular life then you realize you want to create something new, you are free to do this!

No matter what story we tell ourselves like: “it’s too late, I can’t change this now, it’s too costly” etc. know that these are all egoic illusions. You are never limited to whatever life you have created even if you have been doing it for 30 years. Remember to ask yourself: the life you are chasing, the goals you have set, who’s goals are they really? Where did you first hear of them? Are they from your heart? Or are they what you have been sold?

Look inside yourself at what YOU TRULY want and how you wish to express yourself and create. Start there, and create from that space. You will see very quickly that you can create anything you choose.

Remember, there is no right or wrong path here. It’s about looking back on what we choose, where we are at and saying “Is this where I want to be? Am I feeling peace? Expressing my deepest self? Am I inspired about where I am at?” and if you aren’t, you create a new path and see how that feels. Follow how you FEEL, not what you seek as right or wrong. Our life reflects our state of consciousness.

OUR NEW, HAPPY LIFE? THE IDEOLOGY OF DEVELOPMENT

Posted on August 5, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Charles Eisenstein

Source: Waking Times

In George Orwell’s 1984, there is a moment when the Party announces an “increase” in the chocolate ration – from thirty grams to twenty. No one except for the protagonist, Winston, seems to notice that the ration has gone down not up.

‘Comrades!’ cried an eager youthful voice. ‘Attention, comrades! We have glorious news for you. We have won the battle for production! Returns now completed of the output of all classes of consumption goods show that the standard of living has risen by no less than 20 percent over the past year. All over Oceania this morning there were irrepressible spontaneous demonstrations when workers marched out of factories and offices and paraded through the streets with banners voicing their gratitude to Big Brother for the new, happy life which his wise leadership has bestowed upon us.

The newscaster goes on to announce one statistic after another proving that everything is getting better. The phrase in vogue is “our new, happy life.” Of course, as with the chocolate ration, it is obvious that the statistics are phony.

Those words, “our new, happy life,” came to me as I read two recent articles, one by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times and the other by Stephen Pinker in the Wall Street Journal, both of which asserted, with ample statistics, that the overall state of humanity is better now than at any time in history. Fewer people die in wars, car crashes, airplane crashes, even from gun violence. Poverty rates are lower than ever recorded, life expectancy is higher, and more people than ever are literate, have access to electricity and running water, and live in democracies.

Like in 1984, these articles affirm and celebrate the basic direction of society. We are headed in the right direction. With smug assurance, they tell us that thanks to reason, science, and enlightened Western political thinking, we are making strides toward a better world.

Like in 1984, there is something deceptive in these arguments that so baldly serve the established order.

Unlike in 1984, the deception is not a product of phony statistics.

Before I describe the deception and what lies on the other side of it, I want to assure the reader that this essay will not try to prove that things are getting worse and worse. In fact, I share the fundamental optimism of Kristof and Pinker that humanity is walking a positive evolutionary path. For this evolution to proceed, however, it is necessary that we acknowledge and integrate the horror, the suffering, and the loss that the triumphalist narrative of civilizational progress skips over.

What hides behind the numbers

In other words, we need to come to grips with precisely the things that Stephen Pinker’s statistics leave out. Generally speaking, metrics-based evaluations, while seemingly objective, bear the covert biases of those who decide what to measure, how to measure it, and what not to measure. They also devalue those things which we cannot measure or that are intrinsically unmeasurable. Let me offer a few examples.

Nicholas Kristof celebrates a decline in the number of people living on less than two dollars a day. What might that statistic hide? Well, every time an indigenous hunter-gatherer or traditional villager is forced off the land and goes to work on a plantation or sweatshop, his or her cash income increases from zero to several dollars a day. The numbers look good. GDP goes up. And the accompanying degradation is invisible.

For the last several decades, multitudes have fled the countryside for burgeoning cities in the global South. Most had lived largely outside the money economy. In a small village in India or Africa, most people procured food, built dwellings, made clothes, and created entertainment in a subsistence or gift economy, without much need for money. When development policies and the global economy push entire nations to generate foreign exchange to meet debt obligations, urbanization invariably results. In a slum in Lagos or Kolkata, two dollars a day is misery, where in the traditional village it might be affluence. Taking for granted the trend of development and urbanization, yes, it is a good thing when those slum dwellers rise from two dollars a day to, say, five. But the focus on that metric obscures deeper processes.

Kristof asserts that 2017 was the best year ever for human health. If we measure the prevalence of infectious diseases, he is certainly right. Life expectancy also continues to rise globally (though it is leveling off and in some countries, such as the United States, beginning to fall). Again though, these metrics obscure disturbing trends. A host of new diseases such as autoimmunity, allergies, Lyme, and autism, compounded with unprecedented levels of addiction, depression, and obesity, contribute to declining physical vitality throughout the developed world, and increasingly in developing countries too. Vast social resources – one-fifth of GDP in the US – go toward sick care; society as a whole is unwell.

Both authors also mention literacy. What might the statistics hide here? For one, the transition into literacy has meant, in many places, the destruction of oral traditions and even the extinction of entire non-written languages. Literacy is part of a broader social repatterning, a transition into modernity, that accompanies cultural and linguistic homogenization. Tens of millions of children go to school to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic; history, science, and Shakespeare, in places where, a generation before, they would have learned how to herd goats, grow barley, make bricks, weave cloth, conduct ceremonies, or bake bread. They would have learned the uses of a thousand plants and the songs of a hundred birds, the words of a thousand stories and the steps to a hundred dances. Acculturation to literate society is part of a much larger change. Reasonable people may differ on whether this change is good or bad, on whether we are better off relying on digital social networks than on place-based communities, better off recognizing more corporate logos than local plants and animals, better off manipulating symbols rather than handling soil. Only from a prejudiced mindset could we say, though, that this shift represents unequivocal progress.

My intention here is not to use written words to decry literacy, deliciously ironic though that would be. I am merely observing that our metrics for progress encode hidden biases and neglect what won’t fit comfortably into the worldview of those who devise them. Certainly, in a society that is already modernized, illiteracy is a terrible disadvantage, but outside that context, it is not clear that a literate society – or its extension, a digitized society – is a happy society.

The immeasurability of happiness

Biases or no, surely you can’t argue with the happiness metrics that are the lynchpin of Pinker’s argument that science, reason, and Western political ideals are working to create a better world. The more advanced the country, he says, the happier people are. Therefore the more the rest of the world develops along the path we blazed, the happier the world will be.

Unfortunately, happiness statistics encode as assumptions the very conclusions the developmentalist argument tries to prove. Generally speaking, happiness metrics comprise two approaches: objective measures of well-being, and subjective reports of happiness. Well-being metrics include such things as per-capita income, life expectancy, leisure time, educational level, access to health care, and many of the other accouterments of development. In many cultures, for example, “leisure” was not a concept; leisure in contradistinction to work assumes that work itself is as it became in the Industrial Revolution: tedious, degrading, burdensome. A culture where work is not clearly separable from life is misjudged by this happiness metric; see Helena Norberg-Hodge’s marvelous film Ancient Futures for a depiction of such a culture, in which, as the film says, “work and leisure are one.”

Encoded in objective well-being metrics is a certain vision of development; specifically, the mode of development that dominates today. To say that developed countries are therefore happier is circular logic.

As for subjective reports of individual happiness, individual self-reporting necessarily references the surrounding culture. I rate my happiness in comparison to the normative level of happiness around me. A society of rampant anxiety and depression draws a very low baseline. A woman told me once, “I used to consider myself to be a reasonably happy person until I visited a village in Afghanistan near where I’d been deployed in the military. I wanted to see what it was like from a different perspective. This is a desperately poor village,” she said. “The huts didn’t even have floors, just dirt which frequently turned to mud. They barely even had enough food. But I have never seen happier people. They were so full of joy and generosity. These people, who had nothing, were happier than almost anyone I know.”

Whatever those Afghan villagers had to make them happy, I don’t think shows up in Stephen Pinker’s statistics purporting to prove that they should follow our path. The reader may have had similar experiences visiting Mexico, Brazil, Africa, or India, in whose backwaters one finds a level of joy rare amidst the suburban boxes of my country. This, despite centuries of imperialism, war, and colonialism. Imagine the happiness that would be possible in a just and peaceful world.

I’m sure my point here will be unpersuasive to anyone who has not had such an experience first-hand. You will think, perhaps, that maybe the locals were just putting on their best face for the visitor. Or maybe that I am seeing them through romanticizing “happy-natives” lenses. But I am not speaking here of superficial good cheer or the phony smile of a man making the best of things. People in older cultures, connected to community and place, held close in a lineage of ancestors, woven into a web of personal and cultural stories, radiate a kind of solidity and presence that I rarely find in any modern person. When I interact with one of them, I know that whatever the measurable gains of the Ascent of Humanity, we have lost something immeasurably precious. And I know that until we recognize it and turn toward its recovery, that no further progress in lifespan or GDP or educational attainment will bring us closer to any place worth going.

What other elements of deep well-being elude our measurements? Authenticity of communication? The intimacy and vitality of our relationships? Familiarity with local plants and animals? Aesthetic nourishment from the built environment? Participation in meaningful collective endeavors? Sense of community and social solidarity? What we have lost is hard to measure, even if we were to try. For the quantitative mind, the mind of money and data, it hardly exists. Yet the loss casts a shadow on the heart, a dim longing that no assurance of new, happy life can assuage.

While the fullness of this loss – and, by implication, the potential in its recovery – is beyond measure, there are nonetheless statistics, left out of Pinker’s analysis, that point to it. I am referring to the high levels of suicide, opioid addiction, meth addiction, pornography, gambling, anxiety, and depression that plague modern society and every modernizing society. These are not just random flies that have landed in the ointment of progress; they are symptoms of a profound crisis. When community disintegrates, when ties to nature and place are severed, when structures of meaning collapse, when the connections that make us whole wither, we grow hungry for addictive substitutes to numb the longing and fill the void.

The loss I speak of is inseparable from the very institutions – science, technology, industry, capitalism, and the political ideal of the rational individual – that Stephen Pinker says have delivered humanity from misery. We might be cautious, then, about attributing to these institutions certain incontestable improvements over Medieval times or the early Industrial Revolution. Could there be another explanation? Might they have come despite science, capitalism, rational individualism, etc., and not because of them?

The empathy hypothesis

One of the improvements Stephen Pinker emphasizes is a decline in violence. War casualties, homicide, and violent crime, in general, have fallen to a fraction of their levels a generation or two ago. The decline in violence is real, but should we attribute it, as Pinker does, to democracy, reason, rule of law, data-driven policing, and so forth? I don’t think so. Democracy is no insurance against war – in fact, the United States has perpetrated far more military actions than any other nation in the last half-century. And is the decline in violent crime simply because we are better able to punish and protect ourselves from each other, clamping down on our savage impulses with the technologies of deterrence?

I have another hypothesis. The decline in violence is not the result of perfecting the world of the separate, self-interested rational subject. To the contrary: it is the result of the breakdown of that story, and the rise of empathy in its stead.

In the mythology of the separate individual, the purpose of the state was to ensure a balance between individual freedom and the common good by putting limits on the pursuit of self-interest. In the emerging mythology of interconnection, ecology, and interbeing, we awaken to the understanding that the good of others, human and otherwise, is inseparable from our own well-being.

The defining question of empathy is, What is it like to be you? In contrast, the mindset of war is the othering, the dehumanization and demonization of people who become the enemy. That becomes more difficult the more accustomed we are to considering the experience of another human being. That is why war, torture, capital punishment, and violence have become less acceptable. It is not that they are “irrational.” To the contrary: establishment think tanks are quite adept at inventing highly rational justifications for all of these.

In a worldview in which competing self-interested actors is axiomatic, what is “rational” is to outcompete them, dominate them, and exploit them by any means necessary? It was not advances in science or reason that abolished the 14-hour workday, chattel slavery, or debtors’ prisons.

The worldview of ecology, interdependence, and interbeing offers different axioms on which to exercise our reason. Understanding that another person has an experience of being, and is subject to circumstances that condition their behavior, makes us less able to dehumanize them as a first step in harming them. Understanding that what happens to the world in some way happens to ourselves, reason no longer promotes war. Understanding that the health of soil, water, and ecosystems is inseparable from our own health, reason no longer urges their pillage.

In a perverse way, science & technology cheerleaders like Stephen Pinker are right: science has indeed ended the age of war. Not because we have grown so smart and so advanced over primitive impulses that we have transcended it. No, it is because science has brought us to such extremes of savagery that it has become impossible to maintain the myth of separation. The technological improvements in our capacity to murder and ruin make it increasingly clear that we cannot insulate ourselves from the harm we do to the other.

It was not primitive superstition that gave us the machine gun and the atomic bomb. Industry was not an evolutionary step beyond savagery; it applied savagery at an industrial scale. Rational administration of organizations did not elevate us beyond genocide; it enabled it to happen on an unprecedented scale and with unprecedented efficiency in the Holocaust. Science did not show us the irrationality of war; it brought us to the very extreme of irrationality, the Mutually Assured Destruction of the Cold War. In that insanity was the seed of a truly evolutive understanding – that what we do to the other, happens to ourselves as well. That is why, aside from a retrograde cadre of American politicians, no one seriously considers using nuclear weapons today.

The horror we feel at the prospect of, say, nuking Pyongyang or Tehran is not the dread of radioactive blowback or retributive terror. It arises, I claim, from our empathic identification with the victims. As the consciousness of interbeing grows, we can no longer easily wave off their suffering as the just deserts of their wickedness or the regrettable but necessary price of freedom. It as if, on some level, it would be happening to ourselves.

To be sure, there is no shortage of human rights abuses, death squads, torture, domestic violence, military violence, and violent crime still in the world today. To observe, in the midst of it, a rising tide of compassion is not a whitewash of the ugliness, but a call for fuller participation in a movement. On the personal level, it is a movement of kindness, compassion, empathy, taking ownership of one’s judgments and projections, and – not contradictorily – of bravely speaking uncomfortable truths, exposing what was hidden, bringing violence and injustice to light, telling the stories that need to be heard. Together, these two threads of compassion and truth might weave a politics in which we call out the iniquity without judging the perpetrator, but instead seek to understand and change the circumstances of the perpetration.

From empathy, we seek not to punish criminals but to understand the circumstances that breed crime. We seek not to fight terrorism but to understand and change the conditions that generate it. We seek not to wall out immigrants, but to understand why people are so desperate in the first place to leave their homes and lands, and how we might be contributing to their desperation.

Empathy suggests the opposite of the conclusion offered by Stephen Pinker. It says, rather than more efficient legal penalties and “data-driven policing,” we might study the approach of new Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, who has directed prosecutors to stop seeking maximum sentences, stop prosecuting cannabis possession, steer offenders toward diversionary programs rather than penal programs, cutting inordinately long probation periods, and other reforms. Undergirding these measures is compassion: What is it like to be a criminal? An addict? A prostitute? Maybe we still want to stop you from continuing to do that, but we no longer desire to punish you. We want to offer you a realistic opportunity to live another way.

Similarly, the future of agriculture is not in more aggressive breeding, more powerful pesticides, or the further conversion of living soil into an industrial input. It is in knowing soil as a being and serving its living integrity, knowing that its health is inseparable from our own. In this way, the principle of empathy (What is it like to be you?) extends beyond criminal justice, foreign policy, and personal relationships. Agriculture, medicine, education, technology – no field is outside its bounds. Translating that principle into civilization’s institutions (rather than extending the reach of reason, control, and domination) is what will bring real progress to humanity.

This vision of progress is not contrary to technological development; neither will science, reason, or technology automatically bring it about. All human capacities can be put into service to a future embodying the understanding that the world’s wellbeing, human and otherwise, feeds our own.

Unsouling From the Wilderness

Posted on July 22, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Kingsley L. Dennis

Source: Waking Times

“Crazy Horse dreamed and went into the world where there is nothing but the spirits of all things. That is the real world that is behind this one, and everything we see here is something like a shadow from that one.” ~Black Elk, Black Elk Speaks

“Modern man, I dutifully noted, is in search of a soul, and the age is an age of longing.” ~Theodore Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends

Perhaps the reason some of us are feeling a sense of loss and longing is that we are, as Black Elk informs us, living in the shadow world. Our reality on this side may only be the fleeting ghosts of a place that is more real somewhere else. On this side we have broken our commitment to the earth and have unsouled ourselves from the wilderness. By the first century CE, the essayist Plutarch was asking, “Why is it that the gods are no longer speaking to us?”

For a long time now, we have been trying to create a new and different image of ourselves. It is an image where modern humanity is placed at the center of its own universe. We learn by observing, probing, experimenting, and finally dissecting and destroying the dynamic world we live within. From this, the modern mind started to develop a new reality for itself.

The collective reality in which we now reside does not take kindly to opposing perspectives. We have inherited an alienated consciousness that views the world as an outside entity – a world of objects that move in mechanical motion. This alienated consciousness has substituted the enchantment and mystery of living within a dynamic and animated world with a dream of the artificial, and ultimately the unreal. The modern landscape is now more scattered with administration than adventure. The central image of our modern age has been that of consumerism: the ability of the average person to buy the material goods they require in order to have a decent standard of living. A standard of living albeit promoted to us through our mainstream media and glamorous propaganda.

Only recently have some of us come to realize that consumerism has now become a contemporary form of crash therapy for unsatisfied people wanting to buy their way into happiness to escape from the very system they are simultaneously supporting. The easy acquisition of things has become more about trying to cover up anxiety as a substitute for contentment. Modern life, especially in the highly-developed West, is now rife with people parading their false selves in place of authenticity.

The modern history of the West has been about the removal of mystery, mind, and magic from the world around us. In the past there were realms of wilderness that existed outside of the social order, and each culture had these ‘wild zones’ where people danced with the little folk in the woods, undertook initiations in caves, circles, and hard-to-find corners. There were pagan rituals, crazy ecstasies, and unknown zones where primal energies were released. These were the places of wilderness, where dreamtime reigned, and clock-time was banned. And now these wild places are fewer and fewer as a new ‘reality order’ becomes the manifesto of the day. Now it is many of us who are feeling haunted. We have lost the presence of the ‘transcendent’ within our modern societies.

We must now recognize that something has happened – a break, a mutation, has occurred that has placed us in an ‘intermediate’ stage between eras. Modern life is being not so much rewritten as reconfigured. We are seeing odd things occurring in relation to time, speed, and distance. It’s as if right now the clock, and our sense of timing, is malfunctioning. This ahistorical period is out of time, until it resets itself. And here, the possibility of transcendence lingers like a phantasma.

We are in a time of carnivalesque distortion where ‘fast food’ is a parody of our normal food preparation and consumption; mediatized sport is a spectacle of its original form; and the music industry is one huge commercial carnival that mocks genuine creativity. In the pop music industry, the spectacle, the live show – the ‘carnival performance’ – is often more important than the actual merit of the song (even when the performer mimes, as they often do). We are in a different world right now – or at least a seemingly different reality.

In this new world of different relations, symbols, and meanings we have become unmoored from our harbors. We are talking about the fractal, the quantum, the molecular, the nano, the bots, artificial intelligence, and the singularity – yet we find we have no soulful connection with any of these terms or their significances. Perhaps we have entered a void-time.

The Sense of the Void

With human life having lost its reference to transcendence and the notion of the sacred, there is the ever-present danger that we may descend to a form of human morality that lacks any real meaning or higher principles. It is not hard to believe that a degree of inertia has crept into our modern societies. The result is that many of us may now be finding ourselves with a hollow space inside. This space becomes the perfect seedbed for the consuming desires, distractions, and attractions of modernity’s excesses. Within such an environment we wonder whether we may find ourselves waking up to a world where the dream is still dreaming itself and we can no longer distinguish what is real.

An age of the quantifiable has been ushered in and everyone, and everything, gets given a mark or a measurement. Ever since the industrial age brought in the points system – the marking scores – into mass education we’ve been carrying numbers around with us. Before then, students were known as apprentices and they spent time embedded in their discipline learning its skills. They either learnt great skills or they didn’t; now they get an 85, a 78, a 66, or a 45. Now all modern institutions think in numbers and our social status is quantified by such numbers, or grades, that allow us into other specialized zones – such as the members clubs, the elite institutions, or even into the ‘good credit’ rating books. The organic nature and capacity of a person has been stripped down to the quantifiable, and this measures the worth of an individual according to such grades. These associated numbers then follow the person around for the rest of their lives, influencing their careers, associations, and social freedoms. Society is now painting-by-numbers.

The mesmerizing void that is modern life tries to appease us with simulated pleasures. Through our unsouling from the greater transcendent wilderness we have become all too easily appeased by seeking inadequate answers to life’s meaning. By not seeking for the essential, we cannot hope to be anything other than temporary. Within the past century millions of people in developed parts of the world have distanced and divorced themselves from nature. We are negotiating how to adapt to a world structured within an increasingly artificial environment. The mutational shift is well underway, and new arrangements will need to be sought.

A potential lack of understanding can disconnect us from a world that is at the same time becoming increasingly connected. For thousands of years our ancestors lived alongside natural forces, learning from environmental cycles, and reading the world around them. This uncoupling from the wilderness is not only in favor of urban settings but eventually artificially constructed settings that will soon be made ‘smart.’ The profusion of what are called ‘mega-cities’ are set to implement ‘smart’ technologies which will be a combination of connected information and communication infrastructures.

A Moment of Reflection

We are, it is said, the most highly-developed and articulate species on planet Earth, and yet we live in a world of reflections. We are doomed never to be able to see directly our own faces. Our face, as well as our ‘true face’ as they say, is non-visible to us; and so we are guided by reflections and their appearances.

There is a short-story from Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges entitled ‘Fauna of Mirrors’ that tells of a time during the reign of the Yellow Emperor when the world of mirrors and the world of men were not, like today, cut off from one another.[i] Both kingdoms lived in harmony and each could come and go through the mirrors. Yet one night the mirror people invaded the earth and a mighty battle ensued until finally the magic arts of the Yellow Emperor prevailed. The mirror people were pushed back and imprisoned into their mirrors, and punished by being forced to repeat, as if in a dream, all the actions of the world of men. They were stripped of their power and their forms and reduced to mere reflections. A day will come, however, when the magic spell will be broken and little by little these reflections will awaken and will slowly differ from us. Then they will stop imitating the world of humans and eventually they will break through the glass once again to enter the earth.

They say that life imitates art far more than art imitates life. Upon reflection, every culture and society claim a portion of our private psyche as its own. With the narrowing of our sensibilities comes not only a much-diminished reality but also a contracted perspective whereby this condensed form of perception and visibility becomes as hyperreality to us. If it’s true that modern life has muffled the call of transcendental mystery, then it is equally true that it has made transcendence both a more needed and yet more difficult promise. The cry for the ‘death of the soul’ and the unsouling from the wilderness has helped to pave the slippery path toward a simplified hyperreality that is now stealing the show. Fasten seatbelts…

A Bardo Chat with: Aranyani, Hindu Goddess of the Forests

Author (A): Hello Aranyani. Are you there?

Aranyani (Ai): (short pause) Hello…hello!

A: Hello Aranyani. How are you today?

Ai: Today? Why today? I don’t have days like you do.

A: Ah yes, sorry. I was thinking in my own terms of time. It’s a frequent trap!

Ai: That’s okay, we understand. Traps are there to break out of. I am good, thank you. I am well.

A: That is good to hear. I am glad to know you are well amidst all this disconnection going on right now.

Ai: Disconnection? I am gently strolling through my forests. There is no disconnection (another short pause). All is well here.

A: Sorry, I should have been more specific. I meant disconnection between us, humans, and the natural world. It seems that we’ve done a terrible job of respecting Nature and our environment.

Ai: Mmm, yes, that is so. I am not fond of strolling too near to your civilizations. But why do you call it a job? You see, already you show a wrong way to look at things. Your way of words shows how your mind thinks. Looking after the natural world, as you put it, is not a ‘job.’ It is a recognition of respect, or mutual interdependence, and of compassion and love.

A: Sorry again. I know that I use my words too loosely. It is the way we use phrases here.

Ai: Yes, I know how your species is. For one thing, you don’t listen at all very well. You consider yourselves as a separate species. My dear, nothing is separate. You see space between bodies and you label this as separation. You think and behave like children, and Nature is your forgiving mother.

A: I know, we’ve got a lot of things back-to-front. Would you care to explain more on this relationship?

Ai: (a soft sigh) Maybe a little. Everything communicates here, it always has. You don’t necessarily need a mouth or words or letters to communicate. It all communicates energetically, and you humans are also attuned to this. Every part was supposed to work together. You are strange in that you forgot how to properly listen. And now you build devices outside of yourselves to wrap around the earth – but you don’t need them. And there will be a time when you shall know this, and learn to communicate correctly, as you were always meant to – and not with your machine things. All of nature is alive, don’t you know that?

A: Yes, some of us do; but not enough, unfortunately.

Ai: You knew better before, a long time ago.

A: Yes, I have a feeling we did. Yet we now need to learn how to know in a different way.

Ai: Well….. (long pause)

A: Hello, are you there Aranyani?

Ai: Oh yes, sorry, I was dancing. I have a tune in my head. It’s been given to me from the trees.

A: Wonderful! I was saying that we need to learn how to know in a different way.

Ai: That’s not really how it is. Learning, knowing, and all these things – it’s all head stuff. You live too much in your heads. You always think you need to grab onto something – to know better, and the like. I would say you have to open up more, and to remember everything that was placed inside you. You are coming to a different place now…

A: Yes, thank you. And what do you mean by ‘coming to a different place’?

Ai: I mean you are not in your little tribal units anymore. You are now all over the earth. You grew and connected as you should, and now you are coming to a time when you can really be of help to the earth.

A: You mean as a global species?

Ai: (laughs) You and your fancy words. Yes, you are connecting more strongly with the body of Gaia now. Soon you will find your minds being changed for you. That should be fun!

A: Ah, and what do you mean by that?

Ai: (hums to herself) I don’t feel I should reveal too much just now. Not too many of you have realized that your minds are attuned to Gaia, your planet consciousness. Consciousness is not only those thoughts in your head, silly! (laughs). This is the true language, the natural language, and it is everywhere. This language flows through the trees, the plants, the animals, and through all of Gaia. There is a language that connects, and the humans are disconnected from this. Yes, that is the true disconnection. You talk about disconnect from Nature, but really it is disconnection from your shared language. You speak in tongues but only babble silly words.

A: Yes, true – we do babble a lot.

Ai: Babble, babble, yes you do! Like that story you tell yourselves. You call it the Tower of Babel, right?

A: Yes, that’s true. And it’s a perfect analogy. We tried to build a tower to our Creator and we ended up being divided in languages through our ignorance.

Ai: Yes, that’s it right there. You were disconnected through your ignorance.

A: Mm…yes (sighs)

Ai: Don’t worry, dear. You still have it all inside of you. Your connection to Origin and the universal language is still there. And you are not disconnected from us either. You are always with us, and you always have been.

A: Okay, sure. And thanks. But by being with you always are we not making the balance of Nature worse?

Ai: Oh, dear ones – it’s always about you, isn’t it!? Let me tell you that Nature is far more capable of taking care of herself than you are. Things change, yes. And you are making a mess and not clearing up your mess, like children. This is true too. Yet so many more things come to pass that are not in your hands – that is Nature. She is so far beyond your comprehension of her. You think of these separate things within Nature, like the trees and the forests, and the rivers. But you cannot yet see them as being all together as a wondrous Being. She is a Being far beyond your little minds. And she cares for you. Little children, wake up!

A: Yes, yes.

Ai: Be more joyful and love the things you have, and which surround you. The disconnection you speak of is less from Nature and more from yourselves (starts to sing)

A: That is so true – thank you.

Ai: I have to go now…byeee (voice fades into distance)

A: Yes, thank you Aranyani – bye!

About the Author

Kingsley L. Dennis is the author of The Phoenix Generation: A New Era of Connection, Compassion, and Consciousness, and The Sacred Revival: Magic, Mind & Meaning in a Technological Age, available at Amazon. Visit him on the web at http://www.kingsleydennis.com/.

References:

[i] See his short-story collection The Book of Imaginary Beings.

Humanity’s ‘Dirty Little Secret’: Starving, Enslaving, Raping, Torturing and Killing our Children

Posted on June 25, 2018 by Reid Mukai

© UNICEF/UN0126672/Brown
A drawing by a Rohingya boy reveals the horrific experiences he endured while fleeing from Myanmar to Bangladesh, October 2017.

By Robert J. Burrowes

In a recent article titled ‘Challenges for Resolving Complex Conflicts’, I pointed out four conflict configurations that are paid little attention by conflict theorists.

In this article, I would like to discuss a fifth conflict configuration that is effectively ignored by conflict theorists (and virtually everyone else). This conflict is undoubtedly the most fundamental conflict in human society, because it generates all of the violence humans perpetrate and experience, and yet it is utterly invisible to almost everyone.

I have previously described this conflict as ‘the adult war on children’. It is indeed humanity’s ‘dirty little secret’.

Let me illustrate and explain the nature and extent of this secret war. And what we can do about it.

Every day, according to some estimates, human adults kill 50,000 of our children. The true figure is probably significantly higher. We kill children in wars. See, for example, ‘Scourging Yemen’. We kill them with drones. We kill them in our homes and on the street. We shoot them at school.

We also kill children in vast numbers by starving them to death, depriving them of clean drinking water, denying them medicines – see, for example, ‘Malaria is alive and well and killing more than 3000 African children every day’ – or forcing them to live in a polluted environment, particularly in parts of Africa, Asia and Central/South America. Why? Because we use military violence to maintain an ‘economic’ system that allocates resources for military weapons, as well as corporate profits for the wealthy, instead of resources for living.

We also execute children in sacrificial killings after kidnapping them. We even breed children to sell as a ‘cash crop’ for sexual violation, child pornography (‘kiddie porn’) and the filming of ‘snuff’ movies (in which children are killed during the filming), torture and satanic sacrifice. And these are just some of the manifestations of the violence against children that have been happening for centuries or, in some cases, millennia. On these points, see the video evidence presented at the recent Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Human Trafficking and Child Sex Abuse organized by the International Tribunal for Natural Justice.

The opening statement by Chief Counsel Robert David Steele refers to an estimated eight million children trafficked annually – with 600,000-800,000 of these children (excluding both those bred within the USA without birth certificates and those imported without documentation) in the United States alone – and mentions such practices as ritual torture and ritual murder as well as training dogs to rape children and toddlers. He mentions the range of organizations involved from Oxfam and the Boy Scouts of America to ‘child-service’ agencies and police forces as well as various United Nations organizations, where pedophiles (those who prey on children) rise through the ranks to exercise enormous control. He also points out that many of the children bred or kidnapped into this system usually last about two years before dying (often after being raped several times each hour for some of that time) or being killed outright. He also mentions (with evidence provided in other video presentations) the forced removal of body organs from children of Falun Gong practitioners in China.

Steele, who is a former CIA operations officer, also points out that the 1,000 US military bases around the world are ‘not there for national defense; they are there to serve as lilypads for the smuggling of guns, gold, cash, drugs and small children’. The obvious and clear inference to be drawn from his statement is that the US military is heavily involved in child trafficking (as well as its well-known involvement in drug and weapons trafficking, for example), which means that vast numbers of US military personnel know about it too. And do nothing.

The compelling testimony at the Commission of Inquiry of survivor/perpetrator Ronald Bernard will give you a clear sense of the deep elite engagement (that is, the 8,000-8,500 ‘elite’ individuals running central banks, governments, secret service agencies, multinational corporations, terrorist organizations and churches) in the extraordinary violence inflicted on children, with children illegally trafficked internationally along with women, weapons, drugs, currencies, gold and wildlife.

In a particularly poignant series of moments during the interview, after he has revealed some of the staggering violence he suffered as a child at the hands of his father and the Church, Bernard specifically refers to the fact that the people engaged in these practices are terrified (and ‘serving the monster of greed’) and that, during his time as a financial entrepreneur, he was working with people who understood him as he understood them: individuals who were suffering enormously from the violence they had suffered as children themselves and who are now so full of hatred that they want to destroy life, human and otherwise. In short: they enjoy and celebrate killing people and destroying the Earth as a direct response to the violence they each suffered as a child.

There are more video testimonies by survivors, expert witnesses, research scholars in the field and others on the International Tribunal for Natural Justice website and if you want to read scholarly books documenting aspects of this staggering violence against children then see, for example, ‘Childhunters: Requiem of a Child-killer’ and ‘Epidemic: America’s Trade in Child Rape’.

For further accounts of the systematic exploitation, rape, torture and murder of children over a lengthy period, which focuses on Canada’s indigenous peoples, Rev. Kevin Annett’s evocative report ‘Hidden from History: The Canadian Holocaust – The Untold Story of the Genocide of Aboriginal Peoples by Church and State in Canada’, and his books ‘Unrelenting’ and ‘Murder by Decree: The Crime of Genocide in Canada’ use eyewitness testimonies and archival documentation to provide ‘an uncensored record of the planned extermination of indigenous children in Canada’s murderous “Indian residential schools”’ from 1889 to 1996.

Apart from what happened in the Indian Residential Schools during this period, however, the books also offer extensive evidence documenting the ongoing perpetration of genocide, including child rape, torture and killing, against Canada’s indigenous peoples by its government, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Catholic, Anglican and United Churches since the 19^th century. Sadly, there is plenty more in Kevin’s various books and on the website of the International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State which also explain the long-standing involvement of the Vatican in these genocidal crimes against children.

Of course, Canada is not alone in its unrelenting violence against indigenous children (and indigenous peoples generally). The United States and Australia, among many others, also have long records of savagery in destroying the lives of indigenous children, fundamentally by taking their land and destroying their culture, traditional livelihoods and spirituality. And when indigenous people do not simply abandon their traditional way of being and adopt the dominant model, they are blamed and persecuted even more savagely, as the record clearly demonstrates.

Moreover, institutional violence against children is not limited to the contexts and settings mentioned above. In the recently conducted Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse undertaken in Australia, childcare services, schools, health and allied services, youth detention, residential care and contemporary out-of-home services, religious activities, family and youth support services, supported accommodation, sporting, recreational and club activities, youth employment, and the military forces were all identified as providing contexts for perpetrating violence against children.

Over half of the survivors suffered sexual violation in an institution managed by a religious organization such as places of worship and for religious instruction, missions, religious schools, orphanages, residential homes, recreational clubs, youth groups, and welfare services. Another one-third of survivors suffered the violence in an institution under government management such as a school, an out-of-home care service, a youth detention centre or at a health service centre. The remaining 10% suffered violence in a private organization such as a child care centre, a medical practice or clinic, a music or dance school, an independent school, a yoga ashram or a sports club, a non-government or not-for-profit organization.

Needless to say, the failure to respond to any of this violence for the past century by any of the institutions ‘responsible’ for monitoring, oversight and criminal justice, such as the police, law enforcement and agencies responsible for public prosecution, clearly demonstrates that mechanisms theoretically designed to protect children (and adults) do not function when those same institutions are complicit in the violence and are, in any case, designed to defend elite interests (not ‘ordinary’ people and children). Hence, of course, this issue was not even investigated by the Commission because it was excluded from the terms of reference!

Separately from those children we kill or violate every day in the ways briefly described above, we traffic many others into sexual slavery – such as those trafficked (sometimes by their parents) into prostitution to service the sex tourism industry in countries such as Thailand, Cambodia, the Dominican Republic, the Philippines and India – we kidnap others to terrorize them into becoming child soldiers with 46 countries using them according to Child Soldiers International, we force others to work as slave laborers, in horrific conditions, in fields, factories and mines (and buy the cheap products of their exploited labor as our latest ‘bargain’) with Human Rights Watch reporting over 70,000,000 children, including many who aren’t even, technically-speaking, slaves, working in ‘hazardous conditions’ – see ‘Child Labor’ – and we condemn millions to live in poverty, homelessness and misery because national governments, despite rhetoric to the contrary, place either negligible or no value on children apart from, in some cases, as future wage slaves in the workforce.

We also condemn millions of children, such as those in Palestine, Tibet, Western Sahara and West Papua, to live under military occupation, where many are routinely imprisoned, shot or killed.

In addition, while fighting wars we cause many children to be born with grotesque genetic deformities because we use horrific weapons, like those with depleted uranium, on their parents. See ‘“Falluja Babies” and Depleted Uranium: America’s Toxic Legacy in Iraq’ and ‘Depleted uranium used by US forces blamed for birth defects and cancer in Iraq’.

In other cases, we cause children shockingly debilitating injuries, if they are not killed outright, by using conventional, biological and chemical weapons on them directly. See ‘Summary of historical attacks using chemical or biological weapons’.

But war also destroys housing and other infrastructure forcing millions of children to become internally displaced or refugees in another country (often without a living parent), causing ongoing trauma. Worldwide, one child out of every 200 is a refugee, whether through war or poverty, environmental or climate disruption. See ‘50mn children displaced by war & poverty worldwide’.

We also inflict violence on children in many other forms, ranging from ‘ordinary’ domestic violence to genital mutilation, with UNICEF calculating that 200 million girls and young women in 30 countries on three continents have been mutilated. See ‘Female genital mutilation/cutting’.

And we deny children a free choice (even those who supposedly live in a ‘democracy’) and imprison vast numbers of them in school in the delusional belief that this is good for them. See ‘Do We Want School or Education?’ Whatever other damage that school does, it certainly helps to create the next generation of child-destroyers. And, in many countries, we just imprison children in our jails. After all, the legal system is no more than an elite tool to control ‘ordinary’ people while shielding the elite from accountability for their grotesque violence against us all. See ‘The Rule of Law: Unjust and Violent’.

While almost trivial by comparison with the violence identified above, the perversity of many multinational corporations in destroying our children’s health is graphically illustrated in the film ‘Global Junk Food’. In Europe, food manufacturers have signed up to ‘responsibility pledges’, promising not to add sugar, preservatives, artificial colours or flavours to their products and to not target children.

However, the developing world is not in Europe so these ‘responsibility pledges’ obviously do not apply and corporations such as Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Domino’s Pizza sell their junk food in developing countries (with the video above showcasing Brazil and India) loaded with excess oil, salt and sugar and even using fake cheese.

The well-documented report reveals corporations like these to be nothing more than drug dealers, selling toxic food to ill-informed victims that deliver a lifetime of diabetes and obesity to huge numbers of children. So, just as weapons corporations derive their profits from killing children (and adults), junk food corporations derive their profits from destroying the health of children (and adults). Of course, the medical industry, rather than campaigning vigorously against this outrage, prefers to profit from it too by offering ‘treatments’, including the surgical removal of fat, which offer nothing more than temporary but very profitable ‘relief’.

But this is far from representing the only active involvement of the medical industry in the extraordinary violence we inflict on children. For example, western children and many others are rarely spared a plethora of vaccinations which systematically destroy a child’s immune system, thus making their health ongoingly vulnerable to later assaults on their well-being. For a taste of the vast literature on this subject, see ‘Clinical features in patients with long-lasting macrophagic myofasciitis’, ‘Vaccines: Who’s Allergic To Thimerosal (Mercury), Raise Your Hand’ and ‘Vaccine Free Health’.

And before we leave the subject of food too far behind, it should be noted that just because the junk food sold in Europe and some other western countries has less fat, salt, sugar, preservatives and artificial colors and flavours in it, this does not mean that it is healthy. It still has various combinations of added fat, salt, sugar, preservatives and artificial colors and flavours in it.

Separately from this: don’t forget that virtually all parents are systematically poisoning their children by feeding them food grown by the corporate agribusiness giants which is heavily depleted of nutrients and laced with poisons such as glyphosate. For a taste of the vast literature, see ‘The hidden truth about glyphosate EXPOSED, according to undeniable scientific evidence’. Of course, in many countries we are also forcing our children to drink fluoridated water to the detriment of their health too. See ‘Research Exposes How our Water is Making us Depressed, Sick: Fluoridated water is much to blame’.

Obviously, organically/biodynamically grown food, healthily prepared, and unfluoridated water are not health priorities for their children, according to most parents.

As our ultimate act of violence against all children, we are destroying their future. See ‘Killing the Biosphere to Fast-track Human Extinction’.

So how do we do all of this?

Very easily, actually. It works like this.

Perpetrators of violence learn their craft in childhood. If you inflict violence on a child, they learn to inflict violence on others. The child rapist and ritual child killer suffered violence as a child. The terrorist suffered violence as a child. The political leader who wages war suffered violence as a child. The man who inflicts violence on women suffered violence as a child. The corporate executive who exploits working class people and/or those who live in Africa, Asia or Central/South America suffered violence as a child. The racist and religious bigot suffered violence as a child. The soldier who kills in war suffered violence as a child. The individual who perpetrates violence in the home, in the schoolyard or on the street suffered violence as a child. The parent who inflicts violence on their own children suffered violence as a child.

So if we want to end violence, exploitation, ecological destruction and war, then we must finally admit our ‘dirty little secret’ and end our longest and greatest war: the adult war on children. And here is an incentive: if we do not tackle the fundamental cause of violence, then our combined and unrelenting efforts to tackle all of its other symptoms must ultimately fail. And extinction at our own hand is inevitable.

How can I claim that violence against children is the fundamental cause of all other violence? Consider this. There is universal acceptance that behavior is shaped by childhood experience. If it was not, we would not put such effort into education and other efforts to ‘socialize’ children to fit into society. And this is why many psychologists have argued that exposure to war toys and violent video games shapes attitudes and behaviors in relation to violence.

But it is far more complex than these trivialities suggest and, strange though it may seem, it is not just the ‘visible’ violence (such as hitting, screaming at and sexually abusing) that we normally label ‘violence’ that causes the main damage, although this is extremely damaging. The largest component of damage arises from the ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence that we adults unconsciously inflict on children during the ordinary course of the day. Tragically, the bulk of this violence occurs in the family home and at school. See ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice ’.

So what is ‘invisible’ violence? It is the ‘little things’ we do every day, partly because we are just ‘too busy’. For example, when we do not allow time to listen to, and value, a child’s thoughts and feelings, the child learns to not listen to themSelf thus destroying their internal communication system. When we do not let a child say what they want (or ignore them when they do), the child develops communication and behavioral dysfunctionalities as they keep trying to meet their own needs (which, as a basic survival strategy, they are genetically programmed to do).

When we blame, condemn, insult, mock, embarrass, shame, humiliate, taunt, goad, guilt-trip, deceive, lie to, bribe, blackmail, moralize with and/or judge a child, we both undermine their sense of Self-worth and teach them to blame, condemn, insult, mock, embarrass, shame, humiliate, taunt, goad, guilt-trip, deceive, lie, bribe, blackmail, moralize and/or judge.

The fundamental outcome of being bombarded throughout their childhood by this ‘invisible’ violence is that the child is utterly overwhelmed by feelings of fear, pain, anger and sadness (among many others). However, mothers, fathers, teachers, religious figures and other adults also actively interfere with the expression of these feelings and the behavioral responses that are naturally generated by them and it is this ‘utterly invisible’ violence that explains why the dysfunctional behavioral outcomes actually occur.

For example, by ignoring a child when they express their feelings, by comforting, reassuring or distracting a child when they express their feelings, by laughing at or ridiculing their feelings, by terrorizing a child into not expressing their feelings (e.g. by screaming at them when they cry or get angry), and/or by violently controlling a behavior that is generated by their feelings (e.g. by hitting them, restraining them or locking them into a room), the child has no choice but to unconsciously suppress their awareness of these feelings.

However, once a child has been terrorized into suppressing their awareness of their feelings (rather than being allowed to have their feelings and to act on them) the child has also unconsciously suppressed their awareness of the reality that caused these feelings. This has many outcomes that are disastrous for the individual, for society and for nature because the individual will now easily suppress their awareness of the feelings that would tell them how to act most functionally in any given circumstance and they will progressively acquire a phenomenal variety of dysfunctional behaviors, including some that are violent towards themself, others and/or the Earth.

From the above, it should also now be apparent that punishment should never be used. ‘Punishment’, of course, is one of the words we use to obscure our awareness of the fact that we are using violence. Violence, even when we label it ‘punishment’, scares children and adults alike and cannot elicit a functional behavioural response. See ‘Punishment is Violent and Counterproductive’.

If someone behaves dysfunctionally, they need to be listened to, deeply, so that they can start to become consciously aware of the feelings (which will always include fear and, often, terror) that drove the dysfunctional behavior in the first place. They then need to feel and express these feelings (including any anger) in a safe way. Only then will behavioral change in the direction of functionality be possible. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

‘But these adult behaviors you have described don’t seem that bad. Can the outcome be as disastrous as you claim?’ you might ask. The problem is that there are hundreds of these ‘ordinary’, everyday behaviors that destroy the Selfhood of the child. It is ‘death by a thousand cuts’ and most children simply do not survive as Self-aware individuals. And why do we do this? We do it so that each child will fit into our model of ‘the perfect citizen’: that is, obedient and hardworking student, reliable and pliant employee/soldier, and submissive law-abiding citizen. In other words: a slave.

Of course, once we destroy the Selfhood of a child, it has many flow-on effects. For example, once you terrorize a child into accepting certain information about themself, other people or the state of the world, the child becomes unconsciously fearful of dealing with new information, especially if this information is contradictory to what they have been terrorized into believing. As a result, the child will unconsciously dismiss new information out of hand.

In short, the child has been terrorized in such a way that they are no longer capable of thinking critically or even learning (or their learning capacity is seriously diminished by excluding any information that is not a simple extension of what they already ‘know’). If you imagine any of the bigots you know, you are imagining someone who is utterly terrified. But it’s not just the bigots; virtually all people are affected in this manner making them incapable of responding adequately to new (or even important) information. This is one explanation why many people are ‘climate deniers’ and most others do nothing in response to the climate catastrophe.

Of course, each person’s experience of violence during childhood is unique and this is why each perpetrator becomes violent in their own particular combination of ways.

But if you want to understand the core psychology of all perpetrators of violence, it is important to understand that, as a result of the extraordinary violence they each suffered during childhood, they are now (unconsciously) utterly terrified, full of self-hatred and personally powerless, among another 20 psychological characteristics. You can read a brief outline of these characteristics and how they are acquired on pages 12-16 of ‘Why Violence?’

As should now be clear, the central point in understanding violence is that it is psychological in origin and hence any effective response must enable both the perpetrator’s and the victim’s suppressed feelings (which will include enormous fear about, and rage at, the violence they have suffered) to be safely expressed. As mentioned above, for an explanation of what is required, see ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

Unfortunately, this nisteling cannot be provided by a psychiatrist or psychologist whose training is based on a delusionary understanding of how the human mind functions. See ‘Defeating the Violence of Psychiatry’ and ‘Psychiatry: Science or Fraud? The professor’s trick that exposed the ongoing Psychiatry racket…’ Nisteling will enable those who have suffered from psychological trauma to heal fully and completely, but it will take time.

So if we want to end violence (including the starvation, trafficking, rape, torture and killing of children), exploitation, ecological destruction and war, then we must tackle the fundamental cause. Primarily, this means giving everyone, child and adult alike, all of the space they need to feel, deeply, what they want to do, and to then let them do it (or to have the feelings they naturally have if they are prevented from doing so). See ‘Putting Feelings First’. In the short term, this will have some dysfunctional outcomes. But it will lead to an infinitely better overall outcome than the system of emotional suppression, control and punishment which has generated the incredibly violent world in which we now find ourselves.

This all sounds pretty unpalatable doesn’t it? So each of us has a choice. We can suppress our awareness of what is unpalatable, as we have been terrorized into doing as a child, or we can feel the various feelings that we have in response to this information and then ponder (personal and collective) ways forward.

If feelings are felt and expressed then our responses can be shaped by the conscious and integrated functioning of thoughts and feelings, as evolution intended, and we can plan intelligently. The alternative is to have our unconscious fear controlling our thinking and deluding us that we are acting rationally.

It is time to end the most fundamental conflict that is destroying human society from within – the adult war on children – so that we can more effectively tackle all of the other violence that emerges from this cause too.

So what do we do?

Let me briefly reiterate.

If you are willing, you can make the commitment outlined in ‘My Promise to Children’. If you need to do some healing of your own to be able to nurture children in this way, then consider the information provided in the article ‘Putting Feelings First’.

In addition, you are also welcome to consider participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’ which maps out a fifteen-year strategy for creating a peaceful, just and sustainable world community so that all children (and everyone else) has an ecologically viable planet on which to live.

You might also consider supporting or even working with organizations like Destiny Rescue, which works to rescue children trafficked into prostitution, or any of the many advocacy organizations associated with the network of End Child Prostitution and Trafficking.

But for the plethora of other manifestations of violence against children identified above, you might consider using Gandhian nonviolent strategy in any context of particular concern to you. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy or Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy. And, if you like, you can join the worldwide movement to end all violence by signing online ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

In summary: Each one of us has an important choice. We can acknowledge the painful truth that we inflict enormous violence on our children (which then manifests in a myriad complex ways) and respond powerfully to that truth. Or we can keep deluding ourselves and continue to observe, powerlessly, as the violence in our world proliferates until human beings are extinct.

If you want a child who is nonviolent, truthful, compassionate, considerate, patient, thoughtful, respectful, generous, loving of themself and others, trustworthy, honest, dignified, determined, courageous, powerful and who lives out their own unique destiny, then the child must be treated with – and experience – nonviolence, truth, compassion, consideration, patience, thoughtfulness, respect, generosity, love, trust, honesty, dignity, determination, courage, power and, ideally, live in a world that prioritizes nurturing the unique destiny of each child.

Alternatively, if you want a child to turn out like the perpetrators of violence described above, to be powerless to respond effectively to the crises in our world, or to even just turn out to be an appalling parent, then inflict violence – visible, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ – on them during their childhood.

Tragically, with only the rarest of exceptions, human adults are too terrified to truly love, nurture and defend our children from the avalanche of violence that is unleashed on them at the moment of birth.

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.

Robert J. Burrowes
P.O. Box 68
Daylesford, Victoria 3460
Australia

Email: flametree@riseup.net

Websites:
Nonviolence Charter
Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth
‘Why Violence?’
Feelings First
Nonviolent Campaign Strategy
Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy
Anita: Songs of Nonviolence
Robert Burrowes
Global Nonviolence Network

Billionaires Want Poor Children’s Brains to Work Better

Posted on June 13, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Gerald Coles

Source: CounterPunch

Why are many poor children not learning and succeeding in school? For billionaire Bill Gates, who funded the start-up of the failed Common Core Curriculum Standards, and has been bankrolling the failing charter schools movement, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, it’s time to look for another answer, this one at the neurological level. Poor children’s malfunctioning brains, particularly their brains’ “executive functioning”–that is, the brain’s working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control–must be the reason why their academic performance isn’t better.

Proposing to fund research on the issue, the billionaires reason that not only can executive malfunctioning cause substantial classroom learning problems and school failure, it also can adversely affect socio-economic status, physical health, drug problems, and criminal convictions in adulthood. Consequently, if teachers of poor students know how to improve executive function, their students will do well academically and reap future “real-world benefits.” For Gates, who is always looking for “the next big thing,” this can be it in education.

Most people looking at this reasoning would likely think, “If executive functioning is poorer in poor children, why not eliminate the apparent cause of the deficiency, i.e., poverty?” Not so for the billionaires. For them, the “adverse life situations” of poor students are the can’t-be-changed-givens. Neither can instructional conditions that cost more money provide an answer. For example, considerable research on small class size teaching has demonstrated its substantially positive academic benefits, especially for poor children, from grammar school through high school and college. Gates claims to know about this instructional reform, but money-minded as he is, he insists these findings amount to nothing more than a “belief” whose worst impact has been to drive “school budget increases for more than 50 years.”

Cash–rather, the lack of it–that’s the issue: “You can’t fund reforms without money and there is no more money,” he insists. Of course, nowhere in Gates’ rebuke of excessive school spending does he mention corporate tax dodging of state income taxes, which robs schools of billions of dollars. Microsoft, for example, in which Gates continues to play a prominent role as “founder and technology advisor” on the company’s Board of Directors would provide almost $29.6 billion in taxes that could fund schools were its billions stashed offshore repatriated.

In a detailed example of Microsoft’s calculated tax scheming and dodging that would provide material for a good classroom geography lesson, Seattle Times reporter, Matt Day, outlined one of the transcontinental routes taken by a dollar spent for a Microsoft product in Seattle. Immediately after the purchase, the dollar takes a short trip to Microsoft’s company headquarters in nearby Redmond, Washington, after which it moves to a Microsoft sales subsidiary in Nevada. Following a brief rest, the dollar breathlessly zigzags from one offshore tax haven to another, finally arriving in sunny Bermuda where it joins $108 billion of Microsoft’s other dollars. Zuckerberg’s Facebook has similarly kept its earnings away from U.S. school budgets.

By blaming poor children’s school learning failure on their brains, the billionaires are continuing a long pseudoscientific charade extending back to 19th century “craniology,” which used head shape-and-size to explain the intellectual inferiority of “lesser” groups, such as southern Europeans and blacks. When craniology finally was debunked in the early 20^thcentury, psychologists devised the IQ test, which sustained the mental classification business. Purportedly a more scientific instrument, it was heavily used not only to continue craniology’s identification of intellectually inferior ethnic and racial groups, but also to “explain” the educational underachievement of black and poor-white students.

After decades of use, IQ tests were substantially debunked from the 1960s onward, but new, more neurologically complex, so-called brain-based explanations emerged for differing educational outcomes. These explanations conceived of the overall brain as normal, but contended that brain glitches impeded school learning and success. Thus entered “learning disabilities,” “dyslexia,”and “attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)” as major neuropsychological concepts to (1) explain school failure, particularly for poor children, although the labels also extended to many middle-class students; and (2) serve as “scientific” justification for scripted, narrow, pedagogy in which teachers seemingly reigned in the classroom, but in fact, were themselves controlled by the prefabricated curricula.

In the forefront of this pedagogy was the No Child Left Behind legislation (NCLB), with its lock-step instruction, created under George W. Bush and continued by Barack Obama. Supposedly “scientifically-based,” federal funds supported research on “brain-based” teaching that would be in tune with the mental make-up of poor children, thereby serving to substitute for policy that would address poverty’s influence on educational outcomes. My review of the initial evidence supposedly justifying the launching of this diversionary pedagogy revealed it had no empirical support. However, for the students this instruction targeted, a decade had to pass before national test results confirmed its failure.

The history of “scientific brain-based” pedagogy for poor children has invariably been a dodge from addressing obvious social-class influences. In its newest iteration– improve poor children’s executive functioning–billionaires Gates and Zuckerberg will gladly put some cash into promoting a new neurological fix for poor children, thereby helping (and hoping) to divert the thinking of education policy-makers, teachers and parents. Never mind that over three years ago, a review of research on executive functioning and academic achievement failed to find “compelling evidence that a causal association between the two exists.” What’s critical for these billionaires and the class they represent is that the nation continues to concoct policy that does not deplete the wealth of the rich and helps explain away continued poverty. Just because research on improving executive functioning in poor children has not been found to be a solution for their educational underachievement, doesn’t mean it can’t be!

Now that’s slick executive functioning!

Gerald Coles is an educational psychologist who has written extensively on the psychology, policy and politics of education. He is the author of Miseducating for the Global Economy: How Corporate Power Damages Education and Subverts Students’ Futures (Monthly Review Press).

Overcoming the Myth of Authority

Posted on June 5, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Gary Z McGee

Source: The Mind Unleashed

“For thousands hacking at the branches there is one striking the root.” ~Henry David Thoreau

If, as Albert Einstein said, “unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth,” then it stands to reason that we should think critically toward, rather than blindly believe in, authority. No matter who or what that authority might be.

Whether it’s an eccentric physicist with wild hair or an authoritarian president demanding respect without giving it. Whether it’s a flat-earther challenging the very foundations of physics, or an overreaching cop high on false power. Belief in authority is a huge psychological hang-up for our species. It’s an evolutionary impediment of monumental proportions.

Even as we daily self-overcome, so too should we daily overcome the myth of authority. It’s a myth because it’s foremost a story. It’s a story we’ve all fallen for –hook, line, and sinker. It’s a story that most of us were culturally conditioned to believe in. It’s a story that most of us take as a given, but certainly should not. For, ultimately, “it’s just the way things are” is a cowardly copout.

Rather than cowardice, rather than willful ignorance, complacency, and intellectual laziness, we should challenge the myth of authority –across the board. We should be ruthless with our skepticism, like a scientist regarding his own hypothesis, like peer-reviewed interrogators keeping the science of others honest.

Because the art of life, especially an examined life that’s well-lived, is scientific, logical, and reasonable. It strikes at the heart of the orthodoxy, whatever that may be. It undermines the Powers That Be, whoever they may be. And that’s likely to upset more than a few blind worshippers, myopic rule-followers, and willfully ignorant law-abiding citizens. So be it. Upset their precious apple-cart anyway. Especially if that apple-cart is outdated, violent, and based upon parochial reasoning and fear. As Oscar Wilde stated, “Disobedience was man’s original virtue.”

Overcoming authoritarianism:

“As soon as the generals and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it. Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail, the way you didn’t go. Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection.” ~Wendell Berry

The problem with belief in authority is that it leads to the idea that we need to give a group of people permission to control us. And, as Lord Byron taught us, power given to an authority tends to become corrupt.

The problem with power is not the intent behind it. The problem with power is that it tends to corrupt the one wielding it regardless of their intent. So, since we all know that power tends to corrupt whether one has good or bad intentions, and since we know that we will all seek power anyway, it behooves us to be mercilessly circumspect both with our own power and against the power of others.

It stands to reason that we should not ignorantly give power to an authority by blindly believing it. We should instead challenge authority first, and trust it second, if at all. The best way to use our power is to use it against authority by ruthlessly questioning it. It’s a social leveling mechanism par excellence. As a wise, young sixth grader once said, “Question authority, including the authority that told you to question authority.”

Otherwise, people will fight and murder and commit genocide and ecocide for the so-called authority that they “believe” in. But they might not have fought so violently and thoughtlessly had they simply taken the power dynamic into deep consideration, nonviolently challenged that perceived dynamic, and then moved on smartly with their lives.

The best way to maintain a healthy skepticism, and not devolve into an ignorant, sycophantic, violent mess, is to take things into consideration and question them rather than blindly believe in them.

Overcoming tribalism:

“To be modern is to let imagination and invention do a lot of the work once done by tradition and ritual.” ~Adam Gopnik

By becoming worldly patriots instead of patriotic nationalists, we turn the tables on xenophobia, apathy, and blind nationalism, and we become more compassionate and empathetic towards other cultures. When we celebrate diversity instead of trying to cram the square peg of cultural affiliation into the round hole of colonialism, we turn the tables on the monkey-mind’s one-dimensional moral tribalism and we usher in Joshua Greene’s multi-dimensional concept of metamorality.

By reinforcing global citizenry rather than nationalism, we turn the tables on both our lizard brains and the Powers That Be. Like Joshua Greene says in Moral Tribes, “We need a kind of thinking that enables groups with conflicting moralities to live together and prosper. In other words, we need a metamorality. We need a moral system that resolves disagreements among groups with different moral ideals, just as ordinary first-order morality resolves disagreements among individuals with different selfish interests.”

Going Meta with morality launches us into a big-picture perspective. We’re shot out of the box of outdated tribal thinking and into a realm of higher consciousness, where our inherent tribalism gets countered by an updated logic and reasoning. We gain the holistic vision of “over eyes” (like the astronaut Overview Effect), where societal delusions and cultural abstractions dissolve into interconnectedness and interdependence.

Overcoming magical thinking:

“Every fact of science was once damned. Every invention was considered impossible. Every discovery was a nervous shock to some orthodoxy. Every artistic innovation was denounced as fraud and folly. The entire web of culture and ‘progress,’ everything on earth that is man-made and not given to us by nature, is the concrete manifestation of some man’s refusal to bow to Authority. We would own no more, know no more, and be no more than the first apelike hominids if it were not for the rebellious, the recalcitrant, and the intransigent.” ~Robert Anton Wilson

Overcoming magical thinking is vital for the healthy and progressive evolution of our species. Healthy progress depends upon courageous individuals capable of challenging authority. Especially authorities that are based in magical thinking.

If we don’t have the courage to challenge an authority that preaches magical thinking, then we are doomed to become a victim to their magical thinking. It’s for this reason, above all, that authority should be challenged.

Refusing to bow to an authority is not without its consequences. But upsetting an authority should not be avoided at the expense of progress. Progress should be embraced at the risk of upsetting an authority.

Otherwise, there would be no progress. We would remain stuck in parochial, magical thinking. We would become a stagnant –or worse, devolving– species. To avoid unhealthy stagnation and entropic devolution, we need courageous individuals who refuse to bow to authority and instead choose to ruthlessly question and nonviolently challenge that authority.

Without those who are willing to disobey, we are lost. Without them, we are left with cowardly conformists, xenophobic nationalists, complacent pacifists, dogmatic believers relying upon blind faith, and tyrannical powermongers using their power to control others. In short: we are left with magical thinking over logic and reasoning.

So, I implore you, if you would be courageous, reasonable, healthy, progressive human beings: challenge Authority. Strategically disobey. Nonviolently revolt. Lovingly crush out. Tenderly recondition the cultural conditioning of others lest they collapse in upon their own cognitive dissonance. Dare to pull the blindfold from your brother’s eyes lest they unwittingly force the blindfold back upon you.

Above all, practice self-overcoming. Otherwise, power –either yours or someone else’s– will overcome you. Be just as circumspect with your own power as you are toward the power of others.

Authorities will come and go. As they should. Your own authority will wax and wane. As it should. The balance of power within the human condition is vital for the healthy and progressive evolution of our species. And nothing balances out power better than the courage to challenge authority. The biblical courage of David pales in comparison to the individual who bravely challenges the modern-day Goliath of entrenched authority.

	Reid Mukai on Saturday Matinee: Wizards
	Lara/Trace on Saturday Matinee: Wizards
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After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

Category Archives: education