Category Archives: Environment

Saturday Matinee: Koyaanisqatsi

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Young Life Out Of Balance: The Impact and Legacy of ‘Koyaanisqatsi’

By Michael Grasso

Source: We Are the Mutants

Throughout the latter half of the 1970s, ex-seminarian/political activist Godfrey Reggio and cinematographer Ron Fricke shot, assembled, and edited film footage from all over the United States—from the yawning chasms of southwestern American deserts to the teeming mechanized metropolises of New York and Los Angeles—creating a feature film that would speak to the overwhelming complexity of late 20th century life in the West. This film, Koyaanisqatsi, debuted at American film festivals in 1982 and quickly became an arthouse (and eventual home video) favorite. The frequently eerie score for the film, composed by Philip Glass, provides the only aural accompaniment for this 86-minute montage showing the collision of nature and technology, of mankind and the planet. The word koyaanisqatsi, Hopi for “corrupted life” or “life out of balance,” provided a mission statement for the film; while Reggio has been cagey about not wanting to either imply or explicitly provide any specific meaning for the film, both the title and the Hopi prophecies of doom sung over the film’s final act make Koyaanisqatsi‘s point of view more or less explicit: something is dreadfully and fundamentally wrong with the way the settler inhabitants of America and the industrialized world as a whole relate to both the planet and themselves.

Koyaanisqatsi arrived with much fanfare as part of the PBS “Great Performances” anthology series in March of 1985. Given my love of all things PBS, I was absolutely there to see it in one of its initial broadcasts or repeats in ’85 or ’86. I’d heard about it most likely due to the hype around the film’s arrival on broadcast television for the first time. I do remember watching it at night, alone, possibly while my parents were out or in bed. When I found Koyaanisqatsi on a streaming service this year, I realized that I hadn’t watched it in its entirety since I was 10 years old. As I watched, I found myself thinking about how 10-year-old Mike responded to these overwhelming images. The process of meaning-making for a 10-year-old kid watching a film containing a sophisticated symbolic critique of modern life fascinated me. I decided to watch Koyaanisqatsi in 2019 with a close eye towards the images and sounds that had stuck with me subconsciously in the intervening third of a century, the sequences that offered today’s me a direct connection to my younger self. In childhood I was surrounded by films, cartoons, and other educational programming that transmitted the profundity and complexity of human existence and the universe directly into my growing brain. What did Koyaanisqatsi‘s sensory bombardment, its sometimes overwhelming contrasting of nature and technology mean to me then? And how did that meaning change for me as an adult, now fully conscious of and conversant with the issues Reggio raises?

It’s absolutely the first 15 minutes of the film that I remember most vividly from childhood. It begins with the juxtaposition of ancient petroglyphs at Horseshoe Canyon in Utah against slow-motion, almost abstract closeups of the Apollo 11 launch in 1969. This kind of meaning-through-montage connected with me on an intimate level at the age of 10; this was precisely the kind of respect for the pageant of human “progress” that electronic media teachers such as Carl Sagan had inculcated in me in my early years. Sagan did not necessarily privilege the Western, “scientific” worldview in his works; understanding that the ancient astronomers of the American West were precisely as clever as their European and Asian counterparts was an important part of Sagan’s pedagogy. And in this sweeping montage of the natural environment of the American West, Reggio offers a simultaneously calming and stunning view of the untouched majesty of nature. This is the same “blank screen” of desert that would thrill Baudrillard during his sojourn in North America at about exactly the same time. Even on a relatively tiny 1980s television screen, these aerial shots were breathtaking; it wouldn’t be until I first saw an IMAX projection in 1987 when the Omni Theater opened at Boston’s Museum of Science that I felt something similarly awe-inspiring.

These images of nature and the elements—earth and clouds and crashing waves—soothe the viewer; Glass’s musical accompaniments for these sections are tellingly titled “Organic” and “Cloudscape.” But just as we are lulled into a sense of security and a naturally human sense of awe at the landscape, Reggio (and Glass) throw us violently out of our idyll, showing us what man has done to these landscapes. We see engineering on a massive scale: strip mining, power plants with huge cooling lakes, massive dam projects. Glass’s hectic, pulsing aria, titled “Resource,” says it all. Natural rhythms and flows are subsumed under black clouds of pollution from earth-moving equipment; natural landscapes carved by millions of years of river and wind are carved into regularly-repeating, Cartesian geometry. “Resource” is horrifying, punishing: every trumpet blast announces the coming of something horrible. Again I am reminded of Cosmos: Sagan opines in Episode 5, “Blues for a Red Planet,” where Sagan imagines how an alien species will be able to determine that an intelligent species inhabits Earth—by how we change and adjust our natural environment. To Sagan, this is a largely joyful sign of our ingenuity and a necessary contrast with the natural “canals” of Mars. To Reggio, these marks are a constant, painful scarring, and his depiction of them on-screen has an immediate and negative emotional impact on the viewer, even a young one. Pollution was, of course, something I’d been made aware of from an early age: not just from the constant bombardment of PSAs on television, but from the plumes rising from the smokestacks every time I’d cross the Tobin Bridge in the family station wagon to go into Boston.

For much of “Resource” we are denied the opportunity to see sky: despite the grandeur of the landscapes, the camera angles and editing completely remove the context of said landscape with its cycles with nature and climate. The only blue we are offered is the reflection of the sky in the slightly sinister pools of the power plants’ cooling waters. And it’s here that we start to see humans for the first time as well, first dwarfed by the enormity of the dams and power plants around them, then briefly a few individuals populating the background of a sequence in a metal foundry. These figures are the reason behind all the scarring and carving of industry. Here is mankind. The glowing metal of the foundry reminds us of the original technological myth: fire tamed by Promethean man.

And there Reggio brings forth the myth’s ultimate expression: nukes. Stock footage of nuclear explosions would not be a symbol that needed much in the way of interpreting for a 10-year-old still scared bone-deep of the prospect of nuclear war. In this section we begin to see how all of these technological “advances” impact humanity. We see beachgoers enjoying a hot sunny beach—but with a huge looming power plant behind them. We see the mighty Boeing 747 taxiing on a runway, another testament to human ingenuity—sheathed and shimmering in an uncanny petroleum haze. Highways and cloverleaf overpasses are shown, overflowing with traffic; new cars are lined up in a holding yard, soon juxtaposed with Soviet tanks, American fighter jets, ICBMs, and more Apollo footage. Production and consumption, the war machine, and the nuclear arms race: all part of the same insane global system. The film footage of cluster bomb blasts, de rigueur as a signifier of the American war machine since the days of Vietnam and thus intimately familiar to 1985 me from various expressions on television and in pop culture, have a new and shocking impact when shown as part of the unnatural system that digs resources from the ground and turns them into immediate, instant death.

For many, the segment near the center-point of the film where the viewer is treated to an aerial survey of the abandoned Pruitt-Igoe housing projects in St. Louis is the film’s most brutal and emotional. Bookended in Koyaanisqatsi by other images of the failure of social housing in the South Bronx, and very much of a piece with the worldwide midcentury penchant for Brutalist “urban renewal”, the tale of Pruitt-Igoe would be resolutely familiar to an adult in the early 1980s. For me at 10, a sheltered white kid who’d grown up entirely in the suburbs, the sequence’s eerie ruined majesty held complete mystery. What were these huge repeating buildings shaped like boxes? Why were they in such disrepair? And why were they being totally and completely annihilated with explosives in such a dramatic fashion? I was insulated through much of my youth (by express design of the white power structure, as it turns out) from the living and educational conditions of Black Americans in both my own home city of Boston and around the country. The wages of centuries of American apartheid were nothing but a vague unease at the periphery of my consciousness. The power demonstrated in both choosing to build and choosing to destroy these buildings, over a period of a mere three decades—little more than one human generation—was accurately and shockingly conveyed by the film, but its ultimate meaning was lost to me. As an adult, with all the context and knowledge present upon my re-viewing of the film, “Pruitt-Igoe” stands as a testament to midcentury liberalism’s best intentions, naturally sabotaged by the white violence inherent in American capitalism. This is the one sequence of Koyaanisqatsi that I look back on today and wish I’d had an adult—a wise, sensitive adult—to guide me through.

At the film’s halfway point, we really begin to see mass man. At first in slow motion, urban crowd “B-roll” shots of a type I would have been intimately familiar with from television in 1985, shot in slow-motion, cut with close-ups of individual human beings in front of vivid backgrounds: the whooshing of an urban subway, a military officer in front of a jet engine, a group of casino workers with the lights of Las Vegas flashing behind them. In a concerted way, these “portraits” arrest us as viewers after the sensory assault of the first 40 minutes of the film, getting us to begin seeing the individuals behind the mass movements and incomprehensible destruction we’ve seen so far. As an adult I find them almost unbearably poignant; I found myself wondering what happened to all these folks after Reggio and Fricke finished filming them. As a kid, their slightly outdated fashions (from the mid-to-late-’70s, by the looks of it) consigned them to the more recent past of the only context I could understand: sitcom reruns in syndication, that forever-lagging-behind-the-present that ensured I was in some ineffable way a nostalgic even at the age of 10.

“The Grid” is the section of Koyaanisqatsi where Reggio and Fricke first use time-lapse photography for, I would argue, its greatest achievement in film history. As much as we’ve been given a key to understanding the impact of technology and so-called progress on the natural world, this section, full of glittering cityscapes and the pulsating grid of traffic in Los Angeles at night, are heartbreakingly beautiful. The flow of traffic through midtown Manhattan, so expertly regulated by traffic lights, is yet somehow unnatural; these highway and street scenes, sped up, remind us (and certainly would have reminded the young me who’d grown up with educational programming) of microphotography of blood cells in arteries and capillaries, but somehow off: constantly halting and resolutely inorganic. In contrast, one of the film’s trademark shots (featured on the home video box and posters) of the moon’s movement through the sky as it is eclipsed by an office block is so sure in the lens of Fricke’s innovative time-lapse cameras, so machine-precise, far outstripping in elegance and power the stuttering processes of automobile and pedestrian traffic regulated by human-created technology.

Possibly the most homely, familiar, and comforting section of the film involves the juxtaposition of manufacturing, industry, and food processing with the crazy-quilt of consumption that completes industrial capitalism’s cycle. Hot dogs and Twinkies, blue jeans and televisions and automobiles roll off of assembly lines; as an adult in 2019 all I could think was “look at all those human workers!” There were so few robots in sight in each of these sequences, and the factory workers themselves looked so humble yet so proud. I also thought back to me at age 10, and how Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood would have primed me to look at these time-lapse sequences of production as something wondrous, something to be proud of. The flip side of all this production is seen in Koyaanisqatsi‘s views of Americans enjoying their leisure time: playing video games (I spotted Ms. Pac-Man, Q*bert, and Defender among many other video cabinets in the arcade sequence), bowling, going to the movies, visiting the mall food court, and especially watching television. The time-lapse photography zips through banks of televisions airing the prime-time advertisements and network news breaks of the kind I’m obsessed with and hunt down on YouTube in 2019. As a kid, this would have been the segment of the film that would’ve been the most immediate and identifiable to me. The people in these sections looked like me: they were suburban, not urban, dressed in casual clothes, not hats and suits and trenchcoats. They were young! There were younger kids sipping on milkshakes and having burgers with their families at the mall. These people were me. Did I understand how my consumption made me an accomplice to the black billowing smoke and scarred landscapes seen earlier in the film? At that age, I’m sure not.

Reggio always returns to people, not only to give the viewer (whether 10 years old or 43 years old) that sense of identification, a sense of their stakes in the modern “life out of balance,” but to return to the dignity of the individual human being. Reggio’s intellectual origins both in post-Vatican II Catholic conceptions of social justice and human dignity as well as Christian eco-anarchism demands this kind of attention to the individual humans behind these teeming visual landscapes. The final sequence is titled “Prophecies.” Glass’s musical accompaniment for this final sequence features a chorus singing three Hopi prophecies, interpreted by academic consultants Michael Lowatewama and Ekkehart Malotki, and translated on-screen at the end of the film. These prophecies are ones that would be familiar to anyone raised in the Western Christian tradition: tales of the death of the world thanks to mysterious poisons falling from the sky. As the choir chants these predictions of chaos and confusion, we see people wandering the streets, crushed by their surroundings: a homeless man gazing down at the change in his hand, a sick man put onto a litter by EMTs, someone in a hospital with a bloody wound resulting from an intravenous injection of fluids. The combination of Hopi prophecy on the soundtrack with the kind of lost people that Christ tried to minister to is devastatingly effective; even as a child, this section evoked pity and empathy in me rather than the disgust from seeing out of control pollution or technology. Bookending this is a lengthy sequence in slow-motion of an Atlas-Centaur rocket disaster, one of its thrusters tumbling back to earth slowly. The name of the star might have been Wormwood, but a year after this PBS airing, both a Challenger disaster and a nuclear disaster at another Wormwood half a world away would offer yet another Promethean lesson to both the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

I can’t remember exactly what I felt like immediately after viewing Koyaanisqatsi all those years ago, but its indelible images and sounds remained firmly in my subconscious all through my adolescence and adulthood. Now I’m middle-aged, the same age as all those scurrying New York City businessmen who seemed so weirdly uniform and alien to me as a kid. As I watch now, I of course am able to see that we are all lost in the life out of balance now. I wouldn’t call Reggio prophetic because anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear knew what was happening to us in the years since the end of the Second World War. And while art can absolutely point out injustice, fraud, exploitation, and abuse, it can very easily be used to recuperate these ideas into a more comfortable idea of the inevitability of “progress.” I don’t feel like any later misuse of Reggio’s praxis is his fault per se; whether or not he expressly provides meaning for us, his words and actions in the years following Koyaanisqatsi‘s release are clear and obvious.

I’ve never bothered to watch the two “Qatsi” sequels released in the years following the original. Their dual focuses were on life in the developing world and “life as war,” focusing on the modern world’s war with itself over technology. I’m not sure if they could achieve the mythic status and impact which Koyaanisqatsi had on my developing brain as a kid. Was 10 years old too young to consider these kinds of issues of modern life? I’m not sure. All I know is that I’m grateful I was given the opportunity to internalize these images and thoughts, to consider my place on a planet, both blessed and cursed by my surroundings, to ponder my role both as an individual and as part of a societal collective. While the televisual instruction of my childhood idols Sagan and Rogers may have in some small part normalized the mindset that brought us to this point (all while being steadfast advocates of social justice and peace, of course), Reggio’s camera, untouched by words, conveys the meaning of this life out of balance directly, resolutely, fearlesssly. A prophet Reggio himself may not be, but his filmic prophecy, and through it the prophecy of the Hopi, lives on.

 

Watch the full film on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/product/koyaanisqatsi

 

Embodied Spirituality: The Truth Shall Set You Free

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By Jack Adam Weber

Source: Collective Evolution

For myself, spirituality means aligning with what is true, or most likely true. This means looking at what is true through the lens of my unique experience and self-reflection (subjectively) and what is true in the world (objectively).

Living in accord with what’s true means I have to confront lots of things that are tough to stomach and that I’d prefer weren’t true. I practice resiliency by enduring this discovery process. It takes courage, humility, sensitivity, insight, intellectual rigor, emotional intelligence, and flexibility—in essence, all of me.

Why does it require all of me to be honest?

Because we humans have evolved to stick to our beliefs, even though many of them are false. We, in fact, experience a dopamine rush (a feel-good neurotransmitter in our brains) when we affirm our beliefs, even if they are wrong. So, confronting false beliefs about myself and the world means I have to endure some degree of feeling badly, some emotional turmoil, cognitive dissonance, and reorientation of my world. When I challenge many of my false beliefs, I encounter nothing short of transformation on all levels. Sounds like a bona fide spiritual path to me.

The Power of (False) Belief

This being human is a guesthouse,
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

—Rumi

When we don’t align with what’s true about ourselves, interpersonally, and in the world, we develop false beliefs. And we like to assert these false beliefs. Using evidence and acknowledging reality can help us let go of our false beliefs. We receive this information subjectively through self-reflection and what others share with us (which we also need to sort through for false projections). We receive true information about objective reality by direct observation and through evidence.

Ascertaining inconvenient truths means we have to let go of our self-administered dopamine addiction (by lying to ourselves and others when wrong) and experience feeling badly temporarily. We have to accept new visitors to the guesthouse of our psyche if we want to be more honest. If we can’t do this, we cut ourselves short of our potential.

We can’t be as loving and kind when we’re deluded about what’s true, subjectively and objectively. If I can’t accept that I am more self-serving than I think I am, I will continue to unconsciously put myself first at the expense of others. If I can’t acknowledge that smoking cigarettes, synthetic chemicals in perfumes, or spraying RoundUp is harmful, I am more likely to condone their use, which causes harm.

To change belief structures includes a collapse of our sense of self, trust, safety, belonging, and our perceived survival. This is also why many cling so dearly to their beliefs; even war can seem like a better option than to adjust ourselves to reality. Reality seems pretty powerful this way! If we adopt reality as our guru, we have a powerful teacher on our side to wake us up. So, a willingness to embody our humanness can be a path to greater compassion and peace. Embodied spirituality means being fully human—accepting and working skillfully with all our thoughts, emotions, physical issues, and relationships.

When we don’t embody our spirituality, we don’t take as good care of the Earth, which is the extension of our own bodies. In the age of environmental collapse, an earthy and embodied relationship to life that apprehends what is true helps us heal what’s ill. Like missing a medical diagnosis, how can we treat what what we can’t bear to admit and accurately diagnose? Honesty is therefore the first step to healing and embodying our lives.

Being Human is Very Spiritual

We, in fact, need nothing more than everyday honest living for spirituality to put us on a path of massive transformation.The more we can let go of spiritual loftiness and encounter our ordinary humanness, the more resilient and honest we become. Ironically, it is precisely this difficult growth that has given rise to many spiritual and religious paths that abandon the ordinary, grounded world of embodied living, as complex as it is. These spiritual paths thrive on what is highly likely untrue. They try to escape the pain of everyday living by denying what’s painful, which is called spiritual bypassing. With skillfulness, wisdom, and support we can navigate what’s honestly human while not bypassing.

Learning to welcome and tolerate all manner of emotions and inconvenient truths to our guesthouse allows us to align with reality, especially welcoming what makes us feel badly. It’s important to align both with the good and the ugly because when we ignore the ugly and painful, it goes unhealed and untended. Our precious biosphere suffering under the weight of our pollution is a prime example. What we don’t want to look at, we can’t address. Turning our heads and hearts away from it creates more pain and ugliness.

The New Age dictum, “What you put your attention on grows,” fails to acknowledge the importance of embracing what’s ugly and painful. A wiser, more embodied version might go: “The negative things you put your attention on allow you to see reality and address it before it takes over beyond the point of repair.” Look at the plastic pollution issue or climate change as examples. Acknowledging both sides of the coin is more important than choosing only the bright side of life in order to remain happy, which is short-lived when we’re in denial of the dark side. Wanting to remain happy at the expense of not seeing reality (except when we need a recharge break from honestly facing it) is fear in disguise that ultimately comes back to bite us. It also bites us in the moment because this denial cuts us off from our deeper hearts—our compassion and empathy—which are stirred by painful realities.

We can’t know everything, of course. Nor can we be right all the time. But we can be aligned enough with everyday reality (what matters at the end of the day) to make a difference and eliminate unnecessary suffering. We just have to be willing to be selfless enough to stop avoiding necessary pain to the degree we do.

Science & Critical Thinking

Scientific consensus is the primary arbiter of what’s objectively true in the world; what we subjectively experience is not as good a measure of what’s objectively true. “I like apples” is a subjective truth. No one can disprove this; it’s a personal truth. It is not the purview of science to disprove a subjective experience. Yet, if I claim that everyone likes apples just because I experience their yumminess, this is imposing a personal truth onto external reality. And, it’s not true—we know not everyone likes apples, and nothing is wrong with them for not liking them. It is the purview of science to demonstrate that not everyone likes apples, and simple common sense will do in a pinch.

Of course, there is bad science, like the junk (dishonest) science produced by many corporations such as Big Pharma and Bayer-Monsanto with regard to GMOs. So, when I say science, I mean good, peer-reviewed (and not conflict-of-interest and corporate-funded), consensus science. And yes, many scientific truths are always in flux, but many scientific discoveries do not change because they have stood the test of many challenges. Think about the law of gravity and the laws of thermodynamics. Many who want to protect their sense of self and ego deem all science to be manipulative, dishonest, and just another belief system. This is just not true. If it were, the device on which you are reading this article would not function because it’s constructed as a result of the collaboration of many scientific laws that have not been debunked and instead stood the test of time.

Consider another example: If I experience a vision during a medicine journey or receive a message in a dream one night that has personal meaning to me, I might conclude it’s true for everyone, or true in the world. Let’s say a blue dragon with white polka-dots tells me that aliens are communicating to humanity by way of trees. Well, before I know if this is true or not, I’d have to investigate its veracity. I don’t deem it true simply because I had a subjective experience that conveyed it was. This way, I can tentatively receive this bit of intuitive knowledge and seek to determine if it’s true. Intuition tips me off to what is possible, not necessarily what is true.

Confounding subjective and objective truth is one of the biggest faux pas we make, especially in spiritual circles.

Science shows us what’s most likely true beyond our own intuition, beliefs, and biases. Even with science’s errors and its dishonest publishing politics, good scientific consensus is still the best tool we have for determining what’s true about the natural world, not our subjective experiences. We have to be skillful and aware not to automatically deem our subjective experiences as objective truths. This helps us align with reality, keep an appropriately open mind, and helps everyone get along better because we’re not feuding over what’s objectively true.

“What’s True for Me”

When everyone feels entitled to their opinion—”what’s true for me”—we end up with lots of personal beliefs and memes that aren’t true. “Personal truth” or “what’s true for me” is a subjective truth. Your like of apples doesn’t mean anything about the external world, such as my opinion of apples. If I don’t trust politicians or my landlord, this doesn’t mean they are untrustworthy. I need objective evidence to prove or verify my distrust. Or I can just own this hunch and honestly call it so, while knowing it might not be true. This discernment between subjective and objective truth helps prevent assumptions and dogmas. This also sounds pretty spiritual to me.

If someone sheds distressing light on a politician I like or my best friend, I’m likely to become defensive because my sense of self and orientation in the world, as well as my emotional security, are invested in these beliefs. If my belief structures are challenged, all of what that belief system keeps in place becomes shaky. And this is just too scary for most of us, so much so that we defend against it or attack and assault others because of it. We often make the mistake of imposing “what’s true for me” onto what’s true for everyone or what’s true in the world.

“What’s true for me”  beliefs can’t automatically be extended to external reality unless we have evidence beyond our own subjective perception to deem them so. If I believe the world is flat and this is “what’s true for me,” that doesn’t fly. This is to make a subjective truth objectively factual. This is what leads to conflict and living in fantasy. Just look at religious and many New Age beliefs as examples. They are not different from our personal beliefs about the nature of reality that are also false and cause us to act in egoic, violent ways.

What’s True “Out There”

Good science to determine the mostly likely and factual objective knowledge offers us the opportunity to dismantle our egos and illusions. Science and critical thinking show us that many of our “what’s true for me” opinions about the world are wrong. Notice I am not talking about personal feelings and preferences, but rather our statements of fact about the world.

Objective truths implicitly challenge us to change, to transform ourselves. It takes spiritual-emotional courage to accept these facts, which builds resiliency the more we practice aligning with what is both subjectively and objectively true. The sun appears to go down over the horizon; the Earth appears flat. Via science, we know these subjective observations are not true. Using my intuition to make such conclusions is a wrong use of this faculty. If my intuition tells me there is more to the story, then I can investigate it for other evidence. This, in fact, is how many scientific discoveries occur. Intuition and science are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they are allies as long as we don’t assume what’s subjectively true to be objectively true, and vice versa.

Many people dismiss science precisely because its conclusions fly in the face of what they’d prefer to believe. This results in intellectual dishonesty and spiritual delusion. Our emotional bents and grudges—especially those resulting from our hurt and wounds that have generated anger, fear, pain and thus, bias—prevent us from being intellectually honest, unless we recognize the dynamic by which we deceive ourselves and we set about to be more honest. This requires enduring the discomfort of being humbled and sacrificing a temporary dopamine rush for the truth.

To be able to accept truth therefore requires that we deal with our emotional baggage and triggers, because this is the primary driver for our intellectual dishonesty and spiritual laziness. Many of us would fall apart if we discovered that parts of our worldview are untrue. That could result in a spiritual emergency, akin to a healing crisis, which ultimately improves us and makes us more effective in the world.

Warriorship

This is why spiritual warriorship—aligning myself with what is most likely objectively and subjectively true—requires I be emotionally and intellectually rigorous and courageous. It means that I listen to scientific consensus and not discard it because I’d like to believe something else. It means that I listen to the opinions of others and gain perspective on myself (while also honestly and humbly sorting out projections and displacements of other people’s biases). It means that I genuinely and honestly consider interpersonal facts about which I might have an incorrect opinion. And it means that I notice the whispers inside me that tell me when I am being dishonest or hiding from the truth, with white lies tolerated now and again.

Many spiritual paths involve giving over one’s will and beliefs to a guru. Yet, that guru can be corrupt and deluded and conflate subjective and objective truths. For example, feeling “one with all” in meditation doesn’t mean that we are all one in a black or white way—without appropriate boundaries, individual needs, and different tolerances and sensibilities. In this sense, aligning ourselves with what is most likely true, subjectively and objectively, is a robust spiritual path—because, much like a guru, it forces us to align with truth and withstand the breakdown of some part of our existing paradigm. This is death and rebirth work, for sure. Again, this sounds pretty spiritual to me.

Detachment from reality by remaining stuck in one’s self-centered and deluded beliefs doesn’t help the planet or help us show up for one another. Consider our government’s failure to acknowledge the widespread harm of key pesticides, or the neurotoxic chemicals in perfumes and scented products, despite the scientific evidence and the fact that many of these products are banned in the EU and other, more sensible places than America. This creates crimes of global proportion because of the actions (and inactions) and resulting injury that a denial of the facts causes. Or consider a smaller-scale example. If someone doesn’t appreciate you, despite evidence to the contrary they choose not to see, they will treat you poorly and create unnecessary suffering for you and themselves.

Embodied Spirituality

To live an embodied spirituality—where we are in alignment with reality and what’s as true as we can glean— means we have to give up many of our fantasies and wishful thinking. It means we have to tend intimately to our emotional lives and the hidden aches and wounds that hide us from the truth. We find these hidden places when we descend into and become more conscious of our bodies (this is a key aspect of the “body” part of “embodied spirituality”). We have to practice critical thinking to align with external reality, what’s known as “intellectual honesty.” Emotional and intellectual honesty are the pillars that produce spiritual honesty.

When we practice emotional healing, good thinking, and care for the greater good, we inhabit our bodies more fully. Belonging to ourselves this way connects us to the body of the Earth, so we can treat it with the same integrity with which we treat ourselves . This way, spirituality begins with our (extra)ordinary humanness and self-healing and extends to the ordinary, extraordinary world around us in the same vein of integrity.

It’s easy to live in a fantasy world, believing what’s convenient, what feeds our biases, puffs up our superiority, denies what makes us uncomfortable, and propels our hate. These convenient, false beliefs also protect our core wounds and our need to belong in the world at any cost. The problem is that believing in what’s untrue damages the world because it guides our actions and inaction.

Science and everyday evidence are beautiful because they bypass our bias and opinion; they don’t care what we believe or what injures our ego. They’re impartial. Sounds like the work of a good guru to me. When we get humility, courage, honesty, good thinking, and passion all working in harmony and assuming their appropriate roles for truth-discerning, we get integration, which begets integrity. These psycho-spiritual capacities are the cornerstone of an embodied spirituality, which is simply to be an exquisitely integrated and aware human being who genuinely cares about oneself and the world . . . enough to be willing to suffer disillusionment to align with and serve it.

When we align our subjective and objective truths, we live in more harmony, not only with ourselves but with every other precious, living thing. What better path could we take than to strive for an embodied, earthy life in the age of environmental collapse? For, the collapse of the natural world may indeed be due to our collective, personal collapse of integrity—the abandonment of our own embodiment.

The Disintegrated Mind: The Greatest Threat to Human Survival on Earth

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“Triple Portrait” by Sophie Kahn

By Robert J. Burrowes

Like many people who have struggled to understand why human beings are driving the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history, which now threatens imminent human extinction as well, over many decades I have explored the research and efforts of a great many activists and scholars to secure this understanding. However, with many competing ideas from the fields of politics, economics, sociology and psychology, among others, this understanding has proved elusive. Nevertheless, I have reached an understanding that I find compelling: Human beings are driving the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history because of the disintegrated nature of the human mind.

While the expression ‘mental disintegration’ has been used in a number of contexts previously, for the purpose of my discussion in this article I am going to redefine it, explain how it originates, describe several ways in which it manifests behaviorally and the profoundly dysfunctional outcomes this generates, and suggest what we can do about it.

Given that the expression, as I am using it, describes a shocking psychological state but also one that is so widespread it afflicts virtually everyone, it can be described as posing the greatest threat to human survival on Earth. Why? Simply because it caused – and now prevents virtually everyone from thinking, feeling, planning and behaving functionally in response to – the multifaceted threats to humanity and the biosphere.

So, for the purpose of this article: Mental disintegration describes a state in which the various parts of the human mind are no longer capable of working as an integrated unit. That is, each part of the mind – such as memory, thoughts, feelings, sensing capacities (sight, hearing…), ‘truth register’, conscience – function largely independently of each other, rather than as an integrated whole. The immediate outcome of this dysfunction is that human behaviour lacks consideration, conviction, courage and strategy, and is simply driven compulsively by the predominant fear in each context.

The reason this issue first attracted my attention was because, on many occasions, I observed individuals (ranging from people I knew, to politicians) behaving in ways that seemed outrageous but it was also immediately apparent that the individual was completely unaware of the outrageous nature of their behaviour. On the contrary, it seemed perfectly appropriate to them. With the passage of time, however, I have observed this dysfunctionality in an enormously wide variety of more subtle and common forms, making me realise just how widespread it is even if it goes largely unrecognized. After all, if virtually everyone does it in particular contexts, then why should it be considered ‘abnormal’?

One version of this mental disintegration is the version usually known as ‘cognitive dissonance’. The widely accepted definition of this state, based on Leon Festinger’s research in the 1950s, goes something like this: Cognitive dissonance theory suggests that we have an inner drive to hold all of our attitudes, beliefs, values and behavior in harmony and to avoid disharmony (or dissonance). This is known as the principle of cognitive consistency. When there is an inconsistency between attitudes, beliefs and/or values on the one hand and behaviors on the other (dissonance), something must change to eliminate the dissonance.

The problem with this approach to the issue is that it assumes awareness of the inconsistency on the part of the individual impacted and also assumes (based on Festinger’s research) that there is some inclination to seek consistency. But my own observations of a vast number of people in a substantial variety of contexts over several decades have clearly revealed that, in very many contexts, individuals have no awareness of any discrepancy and, hence, have no inclination to seek consistency between their attitude, belief and/or value and their behavior. Moreover, even if they do have some awareness of the inconsistency, most people simply act on the basis of their predominant emotion – usually fear – in the context and pass it off with a rationalization. For example, that their particular work/role is so important that it justifies their excessive consumption on a planet of limited and unequally shared resources.

Consequently, to choose an obvious example, most climate, environmental, anti-nuclear and anti-war activists fail to grapple meaningfully with the obvious contradiction between their own over-consumption of fossil fuels and resources generally and the role that consumption of these resources plays in driving the climate and environmental catastrophes as well as war. The idea of reducing their own personal consumption is beyond serious contemplation (let alone action). And, of course, it goes without saying that the global elite suffers this disintegration of the mind by failing to connect their endless acquisition of power, profit and privilege at the expense of all others and the Earth, with the accelerating and multifaceted threats to human survival including the future of their own children. But the examples are endless.

In any case, leaving aside ‘cognitive dissonance’, there are several types of mental disintegration as I define it in this article. Let me briefly give you five examples of mental disintegration before explaining why it occurs.

  1. Denial is an unconscious mental state in which an individual, having been given certain information about themselves, others they know or the state of the world, deny the information because it frightens them. This is what happens for a ‘climate denier’, for example. For a fuller explanation, see ‘The Psychology of Denial’.
  2. The ‘Magic Rat’ is an unconscious mental state in which a person’s fear makes them incapable of grappling with certain information, even to deny it, so they completely suppress their awareness of the information immediately they receive it. For four examples of this psychological phenomenon, which President Trump exemplifies superbly, see ‘You Cannot Trap the “Magic Rat”: Trump, Congress and Geopolitics’.
  3. Delusion is an unconscious mental state in which a person is very frightened by certain information but the nature of the circumstances make it impossible to either deny or suppress awareness of the information so they are compelled to construct a delusion in relation to that particular reality in order to feel safe. For a fuller explanation, see ‘The Delusion “I Am Not Responsible”’.
  4. Projection is an unconscious mental state in which a person is very frightened of knowing a terrifying truth so they ‘defend’ themselves against becoming aware of this truth by (unconsciously) identifying a more palatable cause for their fear and then ‘defending’ themselves against this imagined ‘threat’. Political leaders in Israel do this chronically in relation to the Palestinians, for example. But the US elite also does this chronically in relation to any competing ideas in relation to political and economic organization in other countries. See ‘The Psychology of Projection in Conflict’.
  5. Lies arise from a conscious or unconscious mental state in which a person fears blame and/or punishment for telling an unpalatable truth (such as one that will self-incriminate) so they unconsciously employ tactics, including lying, to avoid this blame and punishment (and thus project the blame onto others). When people lie unconsciously, it means they are lying to themself as well; that is, constructing a lie without awareness that they are doing so. For a fuller explanation, see ‘Why Do People Lie? And Why Do Other People Believe Them?’

So why does this mental disintegration – this disintegration of the mind so that its many components are essentially unaware of the others – happen? In brief, it happens because, throughout childhood, each individual is endlessly bombarded with ‘visible’, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence in the name of socialization, which is more accurately labeled ‘terrorization’. This is done to ensure that the child is obedient despite the fact that obedience has no evolutionary functionality whatsoever. See ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

A primary outcome of this terrorization in materialist cultures is that the child learns to suppress their awareness of how they feel by using food and material items to distract themselves. By doing this, the child rapidly loses self-awareness and learns to consume as the substitute for this awareness. Clearly, this has catastrophic consequences for the child, their society and for nature (although it is immensely profitable for elites and their agents). For a fuller explanation, see ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’.

Beyond this, however, this terrorization ensures that the human mind is so disintegrated that virtually all humans have no problem living in denial, delusion and projection and using ‘magic rats’ and lies on a vast range of issues because they simply have no awareness of reality in that context. Different parts of their disintegrated mind simply hold one element of their mind separately from all others (thus obscuring any denial, delusion and projection and the use of ‘magic rats’ and lies), consequently precluding any tendency to restore integrity from arising.

This is why, for example, most people can lie ‘outrageously’, including under oath, without the slightest awareness that they are doing so and which, as an aside, is why oaths to tell the truth in court, and even lie detector tests, are utterly meaningless. If the person themself is unaware they are lying, it is virtually impossible for anyone else – unless extraordinarily self-aware – to detect it. And, of course, judges and juries cannot be self-aware or they would not agree to perform their respective roles in the extraordinarily dysfunctional and violent legal system. See ‘The Rule of Law: Unjust and Violent’.

In essence then, the process of ‘socializing’ (terrorizing) a child into obedience so that they will ‘fit into’ their particular society has the outcome of scaring them into suppressing their awareness of reality, including their awareness of themself. In this circumstance, the individual that now ‘survives’ does so as the ‘socially-constructed delusional identity’ (that is, obedient and, preferably, submissive individual) that the significant adults in their childhood terrorized them into becoming.

To reiterate: Because social terrorization destroys the emergence of an integrated mind that would enable memory, sensing capacities, thoughts, feelings, conscience, attitudes, beliefs, values and behaviours to act in concert, the typical individual will now invariably act in accord with the unconscious fear that drives every aspect of their behavior (and ‘requires’ them to endlessly seek approval to avoid the punishment threatened for disobedience when they were a child).

Moreover, this disintegrated mind has little or no capacity to ‘observe reality’ in any case, such as seek out genuine news sources – like the one you are reading now – that accurately report the biodiversity, climate, environmental, military and nuclear catastrophes and, having done so, to be truly aware of this news in the sense of deeply comprehending its meaning and implications for their own behaviour.

So, to elaborate one of the examples cited above, even most individuals who self-identify as climate, environmental, anti-nuclear and/or anti-war ‘activists’ go on over-consuming (which is highly socially approved in industrialized societies) without any genuine re-evaluation of their own behaviour in light of what should be the observed reality about these crises (or, if their mind allows a ‘re-evaluation’ to commence, to dismiss it quickly with a rationalization that their over-consumption is somehow justified).

One obvious outcome of this is that elite-controlled corporations and their governments can largely ignore ‘activist’ entreaties for change because activist (and widespread) over-consumption constitutes financial endorsement of the elite’s violent and exploitative economy. In other words: If people are buying the products (such as fossil fuels for their car and air travel, and hi-tech devices), made possible by fighting the wars and exploiting the people in countries where the raw materials for this production are secured, then why pay attention to calls for change? Dollars speak louder than words.

So what can we do?

Well, given that the above describes just a small proportion of the psychological dysfunctionality of most humans, which is why we remain on the fast track to extinction despite overwhelming evidence of the profound changes that need to occur – see ‘Human Extinction by 2026? A Last Ditch Strategy to Fight for Human Survival’ – I encourage you to seriously consider incorporating strategies to address this dysfunctionality into any effort you make to improve our world.

For most people, this will include starting with yourself. See ‘Putting Feelings First’.

For virtually everyone, it will include reviewing your relationship with children and, ideally, making ‘My Promise to Children’.

For those who feel readily able to deal with reality, consider campaigning strategically to achieve the outcomes we need. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy or Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy. The global elite is deeply entrenched – fighting its wars, exploiting people, destroying the biosphere – and not about to give way without a concerted effort by many of us campaigning strategically on several key fronts.

If you recognize the pervasiveness of the fear-driven violence in our world, consider joining the global network of people resisting it by signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

But, most fundamentally of all, if you understand the simple point that Earth’s biosphere cannot sustain a human population of this magnitude of which more than half endlessly over-consume, then consider accelerated participation in the strategy outlined in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’.

Or, if this feels too complicated, consider committing to:

The Earth Pledge 

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

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

Conclusion

There is a vast array of ‘professional help’, literature, video material, lecturers and other ‘resources’ from a wide range of perspectives that advocate and ‘teach’ one or a variety of ways that people can use to change their behaviour to get improved outcomes in their lives (whether from a personal, economic, business, political or other perspective). Virtually all of these constitute nothing more than psychological ‘tricks’ to achieve a short-term outcome by ‘working around’ the fundamental truth: As a result of terrorization during childhood, virtually all humans are unconsciously terrified and this makes their behaviour utterly dysfunctional.

The point is this: there is no trick that can get us out of the catastrophic mess in which we now find ourselves. Only the truth can do that. Psychological and behavioural dysfunctionalities notwithstanding, if we do not address this fear as part of our overall strategy, then this fear will destroy us in the end. And the evidence of that lies simply in the fact that the daily updates on the already decades-long but ongoing horrific biodiversity, climate, environmental, nuclear, war and humanitarian crises are testament to our ongoing failure to respond appropriately and powerfully. Because our (usually unconscious) fear prevents us from doing so.

So if you believe that human beings are going to get out of our interrelated social, political, economic, military, nuclear and ecological crises with a largely psychologically dysfunctional population, I encourage you to re-evaluate that belief (paying attention, if you can, to how your disintegrated mind intervenes to prevent you doing so). And I encourage you to ask yourself if the value we get out of improving the psychological functionality of our species might not be worth considerable effort as part of our overall strategy to avert human extinction.

 

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.

Stick to the Plan

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Illustration by Mike Faille

Reclaiming central planning from the clutches of corporations

By Brendan James

Source: The Baffler

What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state—Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.

–CCA Chairman Arthur Jensen, Network

WHAT DO JEFF BEZOS AND JOSEPH STALIN have in common? A certain supervillain chic. Cold-blooded austerity. Iron discipline. A penchant for back-breaking output targets. A healthy appetite for terror.

Yet perhaps their most surprising overlap is that the General Secretary and the chairman of Amazon, Inc. built two of history’s largest centrally planned economies. Then again, maybe it’s not so surprising: What embodies the trademark Bezos-ethos of “Get Big Fast” better than the Five-Year Plan? Thanks to its cutting-edge logistics and coordinated supply chains, Amazon last year clocked a GDP of $230 billion[*]. To Jared Kushner’s recent demand that “the government should be run like a great American company,” let all communists raise a fist of solidarity!

In fact, write Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski in The People’s Republic of Walmart, Amazon is just one of thousands of firms, big and small, that centrally plan their inputs and outputs. Of the top hundred global economies, around sixty-nine of them are businesses, not countries; most, if not all, are internally planned. (Sears, which over the last decade broke its firm into an “internal market” of competing units thanks to CEO and Ayn Rand-devotee Eddie Lampert, is conspicuously absent from this list.) Despite the collapse of the USSR and the global gospel of markets that spread in its wake, it seems planning is still working all around us.

The problem is that planning is not working for most of us. Yes, automation and “Big Data” have conjured cheaper goods for consumers—unfortunately, most consumers are also laborers who remain ruthlessly exploited. As the promise of new technology expands each day, workers sleep while standing or collapse from heat exhaustion. Planning, once a revolutionary tool meant to reduce labor time and eliminate exploitation, has become just another vulgar mechanism for maximizing the profits of unelected, authoritarian, union-busting, planet-cooking, superrich vampires. The People’s Republic of Walmart makes the case that the left should reclaim the radical demand for a democratically planned economy and repurpose this corporate apparatus for the flourishing of all. Far from a dry pamphlet on logistics theory, the book raises crucial questions about justice, technology, and our capacity to build a new world in the face of economic and climate catastrophe.

The planned economy was supposed to have gone extinct three decades ago. The Soviet Union gasped its last breath, American capitalism sprayed a bottle of Cristal, European social democracy ordered another latte, and China pressed a big button labeled “Market Socialism.” But if you really put the time in, you could probably get a wonk from the Hoover Institution to grudgingly accept that government planning still beats the market in the realm of certain public services, such as health care or fire departments. The knives come out, though, when this approach is proposed for things like housing, pharmaceuticals, energy, or, heaven forbid, consumer goods in general.

What may surprise newcomers, however, is that many self-described Marxists are wary of planning, too. Despite being thanked in Phillips and Rozworski’s acknowledgements, Bhaskar Sunkara, editor of the left-wing magazine Jacobin, identifies as a market socialist. In a 2013 essay sketching an agenda for the left, Jacobin’s executive editor Seth Ackerman conceded that markets are necessary, so perhaps we’d best just find a way to socialize them. Vivek Chibber, professor of sociology and, along with Sunkara, one of several co-authors of The ABCs of Socialism, dismisses planning as a dead-end: “We can want planning to work, but we have no evidence that it can.” One of the left’s “worst legacies” has been to “identify socialism with central planning.” Market socialism, we’re told, is communism for grown-ups.

Everyone from the market socialist to the Austrian economist has taken one side of an incredibly sexy academic exchange known as the “socialist calculation debate.” The argument should be familiar: market transactions provide producers with essential information about what consumers and other producers need, and therefore how much to make. To try and calculate (that is, plan) this galaxy of interdependent inputs and outputs is impossible in a fluid economy. It’s a matter of information, you fool. And like it or not, market prices are the best way to collect the information we need to map out supply and demand.

A rich tradition of heterodox economics, mathematics, and computer science has materialized to answer this problem of calculation. But it is modern processing power, dwarfing the bandwidth available in the twentieth century, that truly rebukes the argument above. Consider computer scientist and economist Paul Cockshott who, in about two minutes, using only university equipment, claims to have run models that were able to optimize an economy “roughly the size of Sweden.” You get the feeling that the mammoth data centers at Amazon, Ford, or Foxconn might be capable of even more impressive calculations. And besides, to insist communist theory prove some perfect equation is either disingenuous or missing the point. The question is not whether planning is mathematically pristine, but whether it can allocate better than the market.

The answer, to return to the material world, is yes it can. It’s true that under capitalism firms plan internally but compete with each other, a dance that keeps companies innovating new ways to capture surplus and, sometimes, inadvertently benefit regular people. This dynamic would not occur naturally in a planned economy; one cannot just seize Amazon or Walmart, socialize it, and call it a day. Phillips and Rozworski apparently recognize this (there is an entire chapter in The People’s Republic of Walmart titled “Nationalization Is Not Enough”) and point to an interesting line of thought from economist J. W. Mason: Banks tend to operate as a privatized Gosplan, where the slush fund of finance capital flows to whichever firm a group of Brooks Brothers-clad planners decide deserves investment, regardless of profitability. Market competition, in other words, is hardly the divine engine of innovation if so many firms are, as Mason writes, “born new each day by the grace of those financing it.”

Even so, could planning replicate the market’s capacity to innovate? Ford’s former CEO Mark Fields certainly seemed to think so, declaring in 2016 that his company would soon “be able to use analytics to anticipate people’s needs, as opposed to people trying to tell us what they want.” And to the perennial taunt of the lizard-brained conservative—“I love seeing idiot millennials protest capitalism on their Apple-made IPHONES”—one may point out it was largely the market-immune Pentagon and Department of Energy, not Apple, that developed the batteries, algorithms, touch screens, and microprocessors our right-wing friend uses to tweet about the Muslim Caravan. Once again, none of this is to celebrate the actual decisions or practitioners of planning as it exists under capitalism, but to recognize its power and how else it might be put to use.

So much for feasibility. Still, the left has good reason to harbor deeper techno-skepticism. When most of us hear the phrase “data collection,” we think not so much of social justice but of Facebook selling our personal information, NSA surveillance, and racist models of “predictive” policing. In Automating Inequality, Virginia Eubanks catalogs state policies that placed welfare applications, housing allocation, and child welfare investigations under algorithmic control. The results have been catastrophic for the poor and working class, of every race and gender. Algorithms, after all, are written by humans, and prejudices operate just as easily in digital form as they do in twentieth century analog—perhaps even more so. Phillips and Rozworski acknowledge this reality and rightfully urge vigilance. If planning is to make use of such technology, we must make sure not to bake this poison into the cake.

But hope lies in the very recognition that technology is a political construct, rather than some transcendental, neutral force. If we can program the reinforcement of hierarchies, we can certainly work to program their destruction. (There’s already encouraging research as to how to account for problems such as “disparate impact.”) As Eubanks writes, “if there is to be an alternative, we must build it on purpose, brick by brick and byte by byte.”

Beyond algorithmic justice, the real specter haunting socialism is, naturally, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, whose record in planning was less than exemplary. While capital-C Communism brought about modern industry, literacy, and social security, Phillips and Rozworski don’t deny the ultimate failure of the Soviet experiment. The October Revolution was contorted and compromised by a world war, a civil war, imperialist invasion, economic backwardness, another world war, and a half-century of military competition with the United States. For the sake of the revolution, democracy was indefinitely postponed. Even if Soviet and East German firms were just as or more efficient than their Western counterparts, this arrangement still resulted in workers resisting work and managers lying about output, i.e., bad information. (In a particularly cruel irony, Gosplan bureaucrats even took to sabotaging new computerized approaches to planning, lest they personally lose their political clout. Their unlikely co-conspirators were “reform” minded crypto-capitalists who worried the algorithms would actually succeed, leaving planning in place forever!)

For Phillips and Rozworski, it wasn’t communist planning that led to authoritarianism and disaster, but authoritarianism and disaster that led to bad planning. “Democracy,” they write, “is not some abstract ideal tacked on to all this, but essential to the process.”

A few years ago. Francis Spufford’s novel Red Plenty cast the very idea of Soviet planning as its hero, wherein it falls from grace, as all tragic heroes do. There’s no need to understate that tragedy, but it ispossible to overstate it. Let’s not forget what happened after the victorious arrival of the market in the former USSR: production of consumer goods, industrial output, and human life expectancy all cratered. A new class of homeless citizens emerged, frozen to death in streets, alleyways, and parks. We often discuss the millions of deaths in the Stalinist 1930s. We don’t discuss the millions of deaths in the post-Communist 1990s. Unsurprisingly, recent polling revealed that a majority of those surveyed in Russia still regret the collapse of the USSR and its planned economy. (In 1996 they nearly voted in Communist presidential candidate Gennady Zyuganov until—get this—right-wing hucksters colluded with a hostile foreign government to help install a widely unpopular and corrupt buffoon through a media campaign that peddled rank propaganda.) The Soviet experience was a lesson, all right, but not quite the one many smug market fetishists would have us believe.

And if all that can happen to a superpower, imagine what faced Chile, the would-be socialist alternative to Soviet technocracy: in 1970, buoyed by the support of the working class, Marxist president Salvador Allende was elected and set about building a nation-wide, participatory planning network. This novel approach was predictably stymied by a U.S. economic blockade and finally snuffed out by a CIA-backed military coup in 1973. Still, the pioneering spirit of this moment was poignantly captured by Eden Medina in her wonderful study Cybernetic Revolutionaries. What happened next is a depressing cliché: Chileans were placed under the rule of a distinctly not-left-wing dictatorship and enrolled as fresh test subjects in the mad laboratory of the market.

How will that same market treat the workers of tomorrow who fall victim to imminent waves of automation? Is the market really compatible long-term with progressive policy goals like universal basic income, or full employment? Will the market really permit the end of mass incarceration? Then there’s the C-word: last month we learned that potentially catastrophic climate change is now beyond prevention, and that even if we swore off carbon tomorrow, by 2099 the Arctic will still be 5°C hotter. The expression “glacial pace” doesn’t quite mean what it used to. In light of this, The Atlantic, official mouthpiece for the death god Nyarlathotep, predictably suggests that “any realistic plan to decarbonize the U.S. economy will almost surely require the sort of commercial technological breakthroughs that tend to come from private entrepreneurs.” Not to be outdone, the New York Times last month published an op-ed titled—no shit—“Can Exxon Mobil Protect Mozambique From Climate Change?”

It doesn’t have to be this way. Converting industries to renewable energy, Phillips and Rozworski argue, is wholly within the power of America, India, and China. But, wouldn’t you know it, the principles of commerce just aren’t incentivizing them fast enough! Carbon-free agriculture is a trickier feat, but certainly less tricky as a state-sponsored venture freed from market meddling, à la Sputnik or the Manhattan Project. Climate reporter Kate Aronoff suggests: “If you create a successful drive to nationalize [the fossil fuel industry] or rapidly scale back their power that will create a real precedent for other industries . . . then you can nationalize Monsanto. Have that be the crux of a populist demand of a climate movement.” There are different schools on the left when it comes to ecology (Phillips, science writer by day, has been criticized for consumerist, growth-happy “ecomodernism”), but one hopes we can all agree that smashing the existing energy market is a necessary step.

More than any other crisis of capitalism, ecological calamity is the most self-evident reason to abandon the dumb, short-sighted, animal logic of the market for a rational and humane plan. It has been, to quote the superior critique of capital, Gremlins 2, “a complete failure of management.” And if the history of capitalist crises is any guide, the odds are that climate change will produce a bigger, bulkier, more controlling state no matter what. Before things really start to crack up, we may want to pick whether that state runs on egalitarian principles or the fascist death drive. Does anyone who doesn’t own a yacht called Fountainhead truly want to cede that decision to the invisible hand of the market?

To their credit, Phillips and Rozworksi return throughout the book to the necessity of mass mobilization. Planning is not One Weird Trick to Achieve Socialism. Unless we simply want state-capitalist profit optimization, the real thing will require continuous and brutal class struggle. It will require experimentation, failure and, as Marv Alpert once said, tenacious defense. Any hope of success lies in a rejuvenated, robust and, yes, global people’s movement to shatter the political, legal and physical barricades put up by governments and capital. But planning must be part of the agenda.

Here the cybernetic concept of feedback is useful: the very idea of a plan, of giving everyone control of their own lives, is just the kind of revolutionary notion that can energize, inspire, and keep such a movement alive. The final line of Spufford’s Red Plenty need not be read as the end of a dream, but the real beginning of history: “Can it be, can it be, can it ever be otherwise?”

Hope for the best, of course. And plan for the worst.

Tackling the ‘Impossible’: Ending Violence

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By Robert J. Burrowes

Whenever, in ordinary circumstances, the subject of violence comes up, most people throw up their hands in horror and comment along the lines that it is ‘in our genes’, ‘nothing can be done about it’ or other words that reflect the powerlessness that most people feel around violence.

It is true that violence is virtually ubiquitous, has a near-infinite variety of manifestations and, at its most grotesque (as nuclear war or run-away climate catastrophe), even threatens human extinction in the near-term.

Nevertheless, anyone who pays attention to the subject of violence in any detail soon discovers that plenty of people are interested in tackling this problem, even if it is ‘impossible’. Moreover, of course, at least some people recognize that while we must tackle each manifestation of violence, understanding the cause of violence is imperative if we are to successfully tackle its many manifestations at their source. To do all of this effectively, however, is a team effort. And hopefully, one day, this team will include all of us.

In the meantime, let me start by telling you a little about some of the people who are already working to end violence by tackling one or more of its many manifestations. These individuals are part of a worldwide network set up to focus on ending violence – ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’ – and they have signed a pledge to do so.

Concerned about US government threats to Iran and Venezuela, several Charter signatories were part of one or both recent peace delegations to Iran and Venezuela respectively. These delegations were designed to open more lines of communication and to demonstrate solidarity with those who do not submit to US hegemony.

The 28-member US peace delegation to Iran from 25 February to 6 March 2019 included long-term nonviolent activists Margaret Flowers, Kevin Zeese and David Hartsough. Unfortunately for David, author of Waging Peace: Global Adventures of a Lifelong Activist and director of Peaceworkers, his trip didn’t go as planned. If you would like to read a compelling account of his time in Iran with some wonderful Iranians, while learning something about what it means to be on the wrong end of US sanctions, you will find it here: ‘An American Casualty of U.S. Economic Sanctions on Iran’. Glad you got the lifesaving medical treatment from our Iranian friends that you needed David, despite the sanctions! And it is a tragedy that Iran has recently suffered even more, as a result of the devastating floods that have hit the country, with the sanctions cruelly denying them vital emergency assistance. See ‘Stop the ongoing U.S. economic terrorism against Iran and help its people!’

In relation to Venezuela, a 13-member peace and solidarity delegation from North America landed in Caracas, Venezuela on the weekend of 9-10 March 2019. The delegation included leaders of antiwar groups from the US and Canada and, once again, Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers of ‘Popular Resistance’ and ‘Clearing the Fog’ podcasts. You can read an account of this delegation’s findings in Kevin and Margaret’s highly informative report ‘Venezuela: US Imperialism Is Based On Lies And Threats’.

Another initiative to support Venezuelans was outlined in the article ‘A Nonviolent Strategy to Defeat a US Military Invasion of Venezuela’.

Traveling widely to witness and demonstrate solidarity with those on the receiving end of US military violence, another long-term nonviolent activist, Kathy Kelly, recently wrote an article pointing out that ‘Every War Is a War against Children’ in which she evocatively documented examples of what this means for those children living in the war zones we call Yemen and Afghanistan. In an earlier article, Kathy questioned the morality of those corporations – such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics and Raytheon – that profit from the killing their weapons inflict. See ‘Can We Divest from Weapons Dealers?’

Environmental journalist Robert Hunziker continues to fearlessly research and truthfully document the ongoing assaults that humans are inflicting on Earth’s biosphere. In his most recent article ‘The Blue Ocean Event and Collapsing Ecosystems’, Robert straightforwardly explains the content of a recent interview of Dr. Peter Wadhams, the world’s leading Arctic scientist. Robert notes that ‘Currently, the Arctic is heating up about 4 times faster than the rest of the planet… the temp difference between the Arctic and the tropics is dropping precipitously… thus, driving the jet streams less… creating meandering jet streams… in turn, producing extreme weather events throughout the Northern Hemisphere, especially in mid-latitudes where most of the world’s food is grown.’ Robert also notes that the study of ancient ice cores by a team from the British Antarctic Survey, University of Cambridge and University of Birmingham found ‘major reductions in sea ice in the Arctic’ which will crank up (via temperature amplification as a result of no Arctic sea ice) Greenland regional temperatures ‘by 16°C in less than a decade’ with horrific implications for life on Earth. Thank you, Robert, for reporting what the corporate media won’t touch and even many activists find too terrifying to seriously contemplate.

In Chile, Pía Figueroa continues her heavy involvement in efforts to network those committed to peace and nonviolence and to develop media channels that report the truth. Pía reports that ‘Pressenza International Press Agency’, which celebrated its tenth anniversary last November ‘in more than 40 places of the world’, continues to advance its contribution ‘with a journalism focused on peace and nonviolence, to a world in which all human beings have a place and their rights are fully respected, in a framework of disarmed and demilitarized societies, capable of re-establishing the ecological balance through governments of real and participatory democracy.’

Since attending the Media Forum organized in the city of Chongqing, China, by CCTV+ and CGTN, in October last year, Pía has been busy organizing the upcoming Latinamerican Humanist Forum in Santiago with the objective of ‘Building Convergences’, as its slogan points out. It will be held on 10-12 May with the participation of many grassroots and social organizations involved in more than twenty networks of nonviolent action and inspired by the European Humanist Forum that took place in Madrid, Spain, in May 2018.

Anwar A. Khan was born into ‘a liberal Muslim family in Bangladesh’. As a 16 year old college student, he participated in the ‘Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, which resulted in horrendous loss of life, genocide against Bangladesh’s intelligentsia and systematic rapes.’ This experience taught him the nature of the US establishment as he was ‘on the battle field along with so many friends of mine and Indian soldiers to fight back the obnoxious nexus of the Pakistani military regime and the Whitehouse establishment’ to create Bangladesh. Khan Bhai went on to complete a post-graduate education, before embarking on a 43-year (so far) business career, involving many different levels of corporate engagement and which took him to many countries of the world, including Venezuela in 2010 where he met both Hugo Chavez and Nicolás Maduro.

He also writes regularly in his spare time and recently wrote an article highlighting the adverse impact of the lack of infrastructure under which many impoverished countries suffer, given the way in which the global economy functions to exploit them. In the article, he describes an inferno that started on the night of 20 February 2019 in a building at Chawkbazar, a 300-year-old Dhaka neighbourhood, ‘where chemicals for making deodorants and other household uses were illegally stored’. The fire ‘quickly spread to four nearby buildings where many people were trapped. Hundreds of firefighters rushed to the scene but traffic jams in the narrow streets held them up. It took almost 12 hours to bring the fire under control….’ The horrific inferno claimed about 100 lives and more were injured. For the full account, see ‘After Nimtali, now Chawkbazar inferno hell, a crisis of humanity’.

Commenting on the current project that she is organizing with friends, Lori Lightning outlines the rationale behind ‘Bear Bones Parenting’:

‘There’s no course or exam to pass to become a parent, and most try to figure this out once a parent, and usually in an exhausted overwhelmed state. Bedtimes, meals, chores, and healthy open communication all become a task without a trusted framework in place.

‘Based on 51 years of combined wisdom as educators, counselors, health practitioners, moms, step moms and foster moms, Bear Bones Parenting offers an intuitive formula to demystify the basics of parenting and a workbook with tools for reflection and wellness practices to take you actively through day to day living no matter where you are at in your life. You dedicate 15 minutes a day and in trade stop being overwhelmed. A “do it yourself” workbook filled with tools to turn life into what you envision for yourself and your family.

‘Our cast of puppets help to inspire playful reflection on our children’s temperaments and our own. Eventual creation of short videos will be easily accessible for busy parents and provide some examples of how things typically play out with temperaments and inspiration of the Bear way, which is curious, intuitive, firm and loving.

‘We hope that BBP can help reduce parental stress and frustration so there is time to connect in joy and curiosity with our children and foster their independence.’

For more information, you can contact Lori at this email address: <BearBonesParenting@gmail.com>

Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh is volunteer Director of The Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability (PIBS) and the Palestine Museum of Natural History (PMNH) but he is also actively engaged in the Palestinian struggle for liberation from Israeli occupation. As he evocatively noted in a recent Easter reflection: ‘This is the tenth Easter I celebrate after returning to Palestine in 2008. When we native Christian Palestinians have a few moments to meditate and reflect in this season, we reflect that some 2.5 billion human beings believe in a message that originated with a Palestinian baby born in a manger here and was crucified for being the first revolutionary Palestinian to push for caring for the sick and the poor.

‘We reflect on the real message of Jesus, a message of love and coexistence. The harsh reality on the ground reminds us of our responsibility to shape a better future.

‘We are hopeful because we take a long view of history. Some 150,000 years ago, humans migrated from Africa using Palestine as the passage way to Western Asia and then the rest of the world. 12,000 years ago, this area became the center of development for agriculture (the Fertile Crescent). This was where we humans first domesticated animals like goats and donkeys and plants like wheat, barley, chickpeas, and lentils. This transformation allowed our ancestors time to evolve what we now call “civilization”. Hence, the first writings, the first music, and art, and the first thoughts of deities. From our Aramaic alphabet came the Latin, Arabic, Syriac, and Hebrew alphabets. Aramaic was the language of Jesus and much of our current Palestinian Arabic is still Aramaic words.’

Mazin continues to travel regularly, lecturing about initiatives of the museum but also about the political reality in Palestine. If you would like to volunteer to assist the museum’s projects, or to donate money, books, natural history items or anything else that would be useful, you are welcome to contact Mazin and his colleagues at <info@palestinenature.org>

Finally, we are deeply saddened to report the passing of Tom Shea, a long-time stalwart in the struggle for a better world and one of the original team of individuals who launched ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’ on 11 November 2011. We include below the testament of his great friend and fellow nonviolent activist, Leonard Eiger:

‘For Tom Shea, Peace WAS the Way

‘My dear friend and fellow Ground Zero member Tom Shea passed away peacefully in the early morning hours of April 3rd surrounded by his family.

‘Earlier in his life Tom had been a Jesuit, a high school teacher, and had started an alternative high school and Jesuit Volunteer Corp: Midwest. He had also been involved in social justice issues on the national level with the Jesuits. Ground Zero member Bernie Meyer remembers Tom with great fondness, from being a student at St. Ignatius High School in Cleveland where Tom was teaching, to resisting together at Ground Zero many years later.

‘Tom was 47 when he left Cleveland for Traverse City, Michigan in 1977. There he met his partner Darylene, and they were inseparable from then on. Together, they participated in the Nuclear Freeze movement, and were part of the Michigan Peace Team. They traveled to New York for the second Conference on Disarmament in 1982. They protested both the first Gulf War and the war in Iraq. They also engaged in war tax resistance.

‘At Darylene’s suggestion, they attended a course in conflict mediation in the early ‘80s at a time when there was little written on the subject. That experience led them to a course taught by Quakers at Swarthmore College in 1986. In 1990 Tom and Darylene founded the five-county Conflict Resolution Service in Northern Michigan and trained the first group of volunteer mediators. Their mission was to promote peace and civility in the community through the use of mediator guided dialogue. In the early days of the program, volunteers met in church basements and around kitchen tables to train, role play and share experiences. They would travel to the homes of people needing mediation, focusing on resolving family and neighborhood conflicts.

‘Tom and Darylene moved to Snoqualmie, Washington in 2007 to spend more time with Darylene’s children. Tom got involved in community issues and continued his war tax resistance work. You could find him every April 15th, in front of the local post office, offering tax resistance information.

‘I was still leading a social justice ministry at the Snoqualmie United Methodist Church when one day Tom called the church office and asked who was doing social justice work in the area. We connected immediately due to common work and friends. Soon, Tom and I were making the pilgrimage together across the water to Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action, and the rest (as they say) is history.

‘I have spent countless hours with Tom and Darylene, discussing world affairs and working together on strategies and tactics for our work with Ground Zero. Tom and Darylene have been inseparable as both life partners and co-conspirators for peace. Tom once said that Darylene is like a Jesuit herself: “Jesuits are taken as very scholarly people and she’s very scholarly.”

‘In addition to working on media and communications for Ground Zero, and planning vigils and nonviolent direct actions at the Bangor Trident nuclear submarine base, Tom put himself on the line many times, often entering the roadway blocking traffic, both on the County and Federal sides, symbolically closing the base and risking arrest. Tom also created street theatre scripts that have been used during vigils at the submarine base to entertain and educate people.

‘Robert Burrowes, who cofounded ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’, said that “Tom was one of the true legends in my life. A long-standing symbol of, and nonviolent fighter for, everything that could be in our world.” When all is said and done, Tom’s life can be summed up by A.J Muste: “There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.”

‘We will be scattering some of Tom’s ashes (per his wishes) at Ground Zero Center during our August Hiroshima-Nagasaki weekend of remembrance and action.

‘I invite you to honor Tom’s memory by supporting the work of the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee. There are many ways we can engage in war tax resistance in the context of a broad range of nonviolent strategies for social change.’

While diminished by the passing of Tom, the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action continues ‘to explore the meaning and practice of nonviolence from a perspective of deep spiritual reflection, providing a means for witnessing to and resisting all nuclear weapons, especially Trident. We seek to go to the root of violence and injustice in our world and experience the transforming power of love through nonviolent direct action.’ You can read about their ongoing efforts on their website, Ground Zero, which also features a ‘Current Action Alert: Stop the “Low-Yield” Trident Warhead!’

Each of the individuals mentioned above is part of the ongoing and steadily expanding effort to end the violence in our world. They refuse to accept that violence cannot be ended, and each has chosen to focus on working to end one or more manifestations of violence, according to their particular interests. If you would like to join these people, you are welcome to sign the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

If your own interest is campaigning on a peace, climate, environment or social justice issue, consider doing it strategically. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy.

If your focus is a defense or liberation struggle being undertaken by a national group, consider enhancing its strategic impact. See Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy.

If your preference is addressing the climate and environmental catastrophes systematically, consider participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’.

If you would like to tackle violence at its source, consider revising your parenting in accordance with ‘My Promise to Children’. If you want the evidence to understand why this is so crucial, see ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

If you are aware enough to know that you are not dealing effectively with our deepening crisis, consider doing the personal healing necessary to do so. See ‘Putting Feelings First’.

It may be that ending human violence is impossible, as many believe. But there are a great number of people around the world who do not accept this and who are struggling, relentlessly, to end violence before it ends us. What about you?

 

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.

 

Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, and The Deepwater Horizon

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By Greg Palast

Source: GregPalast.com

Five years ago this month, on the 20th of April, 2010, the BP Deepwater Horizon drilling rig blew itself to kingdom come.

Soon thereafter, a message came in to our office’s chief of investigations, Ms Badpenny, from a person I dare not name, who was floating somewhere in the Caspian Sea along the coast of Baku, Central Asia.

The source was in mortal fear he’d be identified ”“ and with good reason. Once we agreed on a safe method of communication, he revealed this: 17 months before BP’s Deepwater Horizon blew out and exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, another BP rig suffered an identical blow-out in the Caspian Sea.

Crucially, both the Gulf and Caspian Sea blow-outs had the same identical cause: the failure of the cement “plug”.

To prevent blow-outs, drilled wells must be capped with cement. BP insisted on lacing its cement with nitrogen gas ”“ the same stuff used in laughing gas ”“ because it speeds up drying.

Time is money, and mixing some nitrogen gas into the cement saves a lot of money.

However, because BP’s penny-pinching method is so damn dangerous, they are nearly alone in using it in deep, high-pressure offshore wells.

The reason: nitrogen gas can create gaps in the cement, allow methane gas to go up the borehole, fill the drilling platform with explosive gas ”“ and boom, you’re dead.

So, when its Caspian Sea rig blew out in 2008, rather than change its ways, BP simply covered it up.

Our investigators discovered that the company hid the information from its own shareholders, from British regulators and from the US Securities Exchange Commission. The Vice-President of BP USA, David Rainey, withheld the information from the US Senate in a testimony he gave six months before the Gulf deaths. (Rainey was later charged with obstruction of justice on a spill-related matter.)

Britain’s Channel 4 agreed to send me to the benighted nation of Azerbaijan, whose waters the earlier BP blow-out occurred in, to locate witnesses who would be willing to talk to me without getting “disappeared”. (They didn’t talk, but they still disappeared.)

And I was arrested. Some rat had tipped off the Security Ministry (the official name of the Department of Torture here in this Islamic Republic of BP). I knew I’d get out quick, because throwing a reporter of Her Majesty’s Empire into a dungeon would embarrass both BP and the Azeri oil-o-crats.

The gendarmes demanded our film, but I wasn’t overly concerned: Before I left London, Badpenny handed me one of those Austin Powers camera-in-pens, on which I’d loaded all I needed. But I did fear for my witnesses left behind in Azerbaijan ”“ and for my source in a tiger cage in the USA: Pvt Chelsea Manning.

Manning could have saved their lives

Only after I dove into deep water in Baku did I discover, trolling through the so-called “WikiLeaks” documents, secret State Department cables released by Manning. The information was stunning: the US State Department knew about the BP blow-out in the Caspian and joined in the cover-up.

Apparently BP refused to tell its own partners, Chevron and Exxon, why the lucrative Caspian oil flow had stopped. Chevron bitched to the office of the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice. (George Bush’s cabinet member should not be confused with the 129,000-tonne oil tanker “Condoleezza Rice”, which Chevron named after their former board member.)

The US Ambassador in Baku got Chevron the answer: a blow-out of the nitrogen-laced cement cap on a giant Caspian Sea platform. The information was marked “SECRET”. Apparently loose lips about sinking ships would help neither Chevron nor the Azeri President Ilham Aliyev, the beneficiary of millions of dollars in payments of oil company baksheesh.

So what about Chelsea Manning?

Manning has been charged with “aiding the enemy” ”“ a crime punishable by death.

But Manning’s sole and only purpose was to get out the truth. It wasn’t Manning who wrote the cover-up memos, she merely wanted to get them to the victims: us.

And since when did the public become “the enemy”?

Had Manning’s memos come out just a few months earlier, the truth about BP’s deadly drilling methods would have been revealed, and there’s little doubt BP would have had to change its ways. Those eleven men could well have been alive today.

Did Manning know about this particular hush-hush cable about BP’s blow-out when she decided she had to become Paul Revere and warn the planet?

That’s unlikely, in the thousands of cables she had. But she’d seen enough evidence of murder and mendacity in other cables, so, as Manning, under oath, told a court, she tried to give it all to the New York Times to have knowledgeable reporters review the cables confidentially for life-saving information.

The New York Times immediately seized on this extraordinary opportunity”¦ to ignore Manning. The Times only ran it when the Guardian was going to scoop ”“ and embarrass ”“ the New York hacks.

Though there are limits. While reporter David Leigh put the story of BP’s prior blow-out on page one of the Guardian, neither the New York Times or any other major US news outlet ran the story of the blow-out and oil industry cover-up. No surprise there, though ”“ the most “prestigious” US news programme, PBS Newshour, was sponsored by”¦ Chevron Corporation.

Hanging their source while taking his applause

As a working journalist, and one whose head is likely to be in the foggy gun-sights of some jet jockey or a dictator’s goon squad, I have more than a little distaste for toffs like New York Times‘ former executive editor, columnist Bill Keller, who used Manning’s documents to cash in on a book deal and land star turns on television while simultaneously smearing his source Manning as, “troubled”, “emotionally fractured”, “vague”, “inchoate” and ”“ cover the children’s ears ”“ “gay”.

Furthermore, while preening about their revelations from the Manning documents, the Times had no problem with imprisoning their source. I do acknowledge that the Times and Keller did editorialise that a sentence of life imprisonment without parole would be “overkill”. How white of them.

When it was mentioned that Manning is no different from Daniel Ellsberg, the CIA operative who released the Pentagon Papers, Keller reassured that the Times also told Ellsberg he was “on his own” and did not object to their source being charged as a spy.

And the Times‘ much-lauded exposure of the My Lai massacre? My late good friend, the great investigative reporter Ron Ridenhour, who gave the story to Seymour Hersh, told me that he and Hersh had to effectively blackmail the Times into printing it.

Manning: aid to the enemy?

Times man Keller writes that Manning, by going to “anti-American” WikiLeaks, threatened the release of, “information that might get troops in the field or innocent informants killed”.

Really?

This is the same Bill Keller who admits that he knew his paper’s reports in 2003 that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction were completely false, but that he ”“ as editor ”“ covered up his paper’s knowledge their WDM stories were simply bogus. Those stories validated the Bush propaganda and helped tip the political balance to invade Iraq. Four-thousand US soldiers died. I guess the idea is that releasing information that kills troops is criminal, but that dis-information that kills troops is quite acceptable.

Maybe I’m just cranky because I wouldn’t have seen my own sources vanish and my film grabbed if the Times had only run the Manning facts about BP and Caspian when they had the chance.

Look, I’m only picking on the New York Times and PBS Newshour because they are the best in America, God help us.

What other lives could have been saved by the Manning revelations? Lots. Watch this space: I promise more aid to the enemies of the state ”“ which is YOU.

 

* * * * * * * *

Greg Palast investigated the BP Deepwater Horizon deaths for Channel 4 Television UK . Those dispatches are contained in his highly acclaimed book Vultures’ Picnic, named Book of the Year 2012 on BBC Newsnight Review.

 

Capitalism, Empire, and the Infernal Gloom Machine

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By Jason Holland

Source: Dissident Voice

Depression is built into this machine and the evidence is plastered on the morose faces of people caught in the clutches of its business as usual activities. Depression is found in the insurmountable debts we owe for spending a lifetime of preparation and labor to serve the machine. In addition to debt, the machine awards us for our servitude with trinkets, gadgets, doodads and gizmos that provide a moment of hollow amusement and then sit on shelves in garages and decay. They represent the planned obsolescence of the human heart. The sacrifice paid for our fetish with materialism is the actual quality of our lives.

The gloom machine tells us the quality of our lives is defined by the machine in the driveway, and the machine that flushes away our excrement, and the machine that chills the tortured slaughtered animal flesh for later consumption, and the machine that flashes pornographic images and supplies numbers detailing how much we are liked by our so called friends. But to us humans it seems that quality of life is more appropriately measured in the amount of disposable time we have to pursue that which we want, and the quality of the community around us, and living without being chronically stressed with threats of being displaced from the land upon which we live for not working hard enough for the machine.

Depression is waking up at 6 in the morning in darkness to sit in traffic for an hour to arrive at a job that we don’t want to be at, only to serve the machinations of people with nothing but greed in their overstuffed bellies. And we go to these jobs so that we can pay rents that are unaffordable, and to service debt we’ll never escape, and we go home in darkness to our lonely lives in places where community is absent with a view of an equally lonely tree or a man-made retention pond which is an upgrade over the view of staring directly at your neighbor’s domicile. Depression is the realization there is no vacation on the horizon, no respite, just more of the same. Depression is knowing that such a life is better than many others have it.

Depression is recognizing the cynics were right about this society, that Cohen spoke truth when he sullenly moaned:

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows

Depression is watching art die. The surrealist, the bohemian, the rock ’n roll, and the anti-authoritarian soul has lain down and pledged fealty to the dollar. For money, they’re now all willing to become ready made predictable cubes to be packaged and sold in plastic wrap placed in cleverly designed boxes which deliver to the depressed public what they want, more of something that’s pretty on the outside and vacant within. We are left with monthly subscriptions of more tales of self aggrandizement for the throngs of temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

Depression is watching the worst of us rise to legitimacy and awarded iniquitous riches for it. The popular is depressive, musical hack Cardi B sings about her money money money and she is loved. Jordan Peterson sells cheap self help stolen from better written material decades ago amalgamated with misogyny and dictates of hierarchal subjugation and becomes wildly popular. Trump purveys hatred of people of color and a love of authoritarianism and the depressive people, oh do they eat it up. This is sickness, depressive sickness.

Depression is acceptance of the violent now. The grossly unhappy men with their armaments spread their gloom and horror across the planet and claim righteousness for doing so. Depression is watching society applaud murderous hearts for their crimes who don badges and camouflage and have holidays to celebrate their violent history, while villains are made of those who simply don’t want to stand up for songs of oppression. Thank you for your service to the machine.

Depression is watching notions of resistance and revolution take form in slightly altered subservience. The great reformation desired now is for a “green new deal” that doesn’t come close to mitigating the impending culling of humanity from soon to be ecological catastrophes. Their plans offer only more endless work at the behest of the gloom machine while promising healthcare that will never happen, less debt it will also never deliver, and affordable housing that still won’t solve homelessness. They don’t want to break the machine, just tweak it, and they lack the ability to do that even. Never have I borne witness to such eager slaves and such depressive aspirations. The people seem to adore their cubicle lives, their environmental destruction, their corporations, their debts, their corrupt leaders, their prisons, their banks, and their taxes.

They want to continue to be put to work under the thumb of the status quo western civilization authoritarian mind and this is all the depressed mentally dominated masses can think of as a possible improvement. Instead of wanting to taste real liberty and be actual equals, their dreams are limited to being better treated servants. The gloom machine chugs along fueled with dimwitted ideas sold by boxed-in thinkers without any possibility of escaping the darkness, rather simply offering a more cushy seat for viewing the end of everything.

The machine bellows out demanding more, more, you owe me more, and somehow those wearing red, white, and blue agree and celebrate the demands of the machine. These debts we owe are servitude. The numbers held in digital machines are immoral which demand one must wake up to a dreary existence to do more of what is killing our souls along with the flora and fauna around us.

Depression is the downtrodden plebs who celebrate their corrupt democracy, which is in reality a thinly veiled oligarchy that should be obvious to all. They prop up a system of voting that allows the election of the presidency, a position that shouldn’t exist in the first place in an egalitarian society, to be awarded to candidates who don’t capture the most votes. What little democracy there is in a representative system is lost in totality when the winner of elections need not win the majority of votes. The gloom machine is straight up tyranny.

A non-depressed society would reject being served faux democracy. They’d reject a system absent of reason or compassion and disdain would be for ideas of continuing to support such a destructive way of being. But instead, within the gloom machine shame is reserved for those who don’t want to take part in the busted system, and it venerates those who cast votes for imperialist conquerers and planet destroyers, and those voters are lauded as doing their civic duty for taking part in open public corruption.

Depression is the insincere know it all crowd who are incapable of honest debate and have rarely endeavored to open a book of substance or engage in critical thought, but they know trivialities which they mistake as facts and wisdom. They know arrogance well and emanate it with aplomb. They know how to believe all they see in the corporatized media, but thinking without boundaries or limitations is beyond their capacity. This is not even depression, this is tragedy.

Depression is watching the trees be plowed down for more tract housing, a portion of which will sit empty for years because no one can afford to move there, and even if they could it’s a heinous boring life that awaits which is only significantly better compared to being homeless. Depression is knowing this is the reason why we are rapidly destroying our habitable environment and commencing a 6th mass extinction event which is now accelerating.

Depression is to know there is nothing we can do to stop the country we live in from mercilessly killing innocent people all over the world for no reason other than more economic expansion and our sadistic ideas of exceptionalism that entail spreading pain and hardship so a few elites can have more of what they already have more than enough of.

Depression is the powerlessness to change anything of significance. There is no other way they say other than the desolate gloom machine, they say this is how it must be. And so we remain here waiting for the horror that is soon to approach us all as the gloom descends in ever quickening waves.

A zombified indoctrinated populace can see no other way than capitalism and beating each other over the heads to satiate egos in needless competition that is unnecessary for survival and deleterious to the common good. Capitalism is the primary tool of empire, and a word that should be synonymous with depression. It’s the accumulation of resources in an effort to gain more power in man-made markets to leverage that power over other people and get them to do what the person with the most power desires. Capitalism’s depressing ideology is defined by the lecherous desire for more for the sake of it so the winner can pound their simian chest in victorious celebration of the devastation they’ve created.

Capitalism is inherently unsustainable due the way it allows power to coalesce via the leveraging abilities given to money to buy land, the means of production, elections, and advertising. It allows the whims of the few to overrun the needs of the many where those with the worst intentions aspire to gain more than others because they will attempt to fill the void in their hearts with self importance expressed via power over others. This is why it cannot be used.

If there is no central currency or advantage to collecting huge amounts of resources then the motivation to hoard would evaporate, as those resources would simply rot or become a burden to maintain. There’s no fun in that kind of hoarding. The “fun” comes to the simpleton power seeker when they acquire power to make others do what they want and thus gain the ephemeral validation they so desperately seek.

If one runs the math on players competing for money at different rates of gain over a certain amount of time, there will be a doubling effect which becomes exponential. And this effect will accelerate as it plunders along due to gains in leverage which allows for ever greater amounts of money to be made at faster rates. Eventually it always ends the way a game of monopoly ends, someone has all the power and everyone else is subservient to that entity/person.

These dour thoughts manifest from the recognition of the stranglehold empire has over our lives. The depression is the result of the myriad of expectations I can’t let go of that wants to see a kinder more egalitarian and sustainable world emerge while knowing how unlikely it is. Our collective depression is rooted in the foundations of social hierarchy and its economic tools of control, and understanding what a perfect trap it is, and so it goes, and everyone doesn’t know, but they feel it, though.

Art and Dreaming: Realizing our Power to Co-Create Reality

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By Ruth Gordon

Source: Reality Sandwich

“True creativity doesn’t just make things; it feeds what feeds life. In modern culture where people are no longer initiated, the spirit goes unfed. To be seen, the uninitiated create insane things, some destructive to life, to feel visible and powerful. These creations are touted as the real world. They are actually forms of untutored grief signaling a longing for the true reality of village togetherness.”

Martín Prechtel, Secrets of the Talking Jaguar, p.232

These words, from a book detailing Martín Prechtel’s initiation as a Mayan Shaman, accurately sum up our modern world. In the humanitarian, ecological, and political crises we are facing, we are witnessing the effects of a severe spiritual hunger.

We in the Western world are a deeply wounded culture; our Indigenous traditions long destroyed, our common land stolen by the rich and powerful, we often now desperately seek comfort by any means possible – over-consumption of food, of social media, of drugs and alcohol, of our natural resources.

This way of being is known among North American Indigenous people by the name of “wetiko,” or the “disease of the white man.” In the traditional Algonquin myth, the “wetiko” is a rapacious spirit who lives in the dark forest and possesses people, filling them with an insane compulsion to consume and destroy. This spirit makes monsters out of humans, filling them with an insatiable drive to devour everything that crosses their path.

Today, we see wetiko everywhere – in our cruel systems of governance that refuse sanctuary to refugees fleeing conflict, while at the same time escalating those very conflicts, mostly for the single purpose of the highest possible short-term profit, in the disintegration of human community through separating and atomizing social structures and the corresponding upsurge of loneliness and despair, and in the continued addiction to economic growth despite clear and repeated warnings that this kind of globalized industry is killing our planet.

Wetiko functions like a virus – it’s highly contagious and most of us are infected with it to some degree. It’s at the root of the human conflicts that often derail attempts to create alternative ways of life. It’s not enough to simply wish for a better world, it’s not even enough to work hard at creating one. We need to be ready to transform our entire mode of perception, to boil down our ways of thinking and being and reconstruct ourselves from scratch, with consciousness of the wetiko-ized habits we often fall into.

In Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil, Paul Levy writes:

“The evil that is incarnating in our world simultaneously beckons and potentially actualizes an expansion of consciousness, all depending on our recognition of what is being revealed. It is as if hidden in the darkness is a spark of light that has descended into its depths, and when recognized in the darkness, this light returns to its source.”

(Levy, 2013, p. 145)

Levy’s idea, that hidden in the poison of wetiko lies its own antidote, offers a healing reference for how to approach what Prechtel calls “untutored grief”: the fecund raw material that, if not used to grow something new, becomes destructive. However, when we are educated, or “initiated” into ways of transforming our grief, of understanding what the darkness in us wants to bring to light, we often find we have stumbled upon a store of incredible potentiality – an almost boundless source of energy and power that we can refocus towards healing, if we choose to do so. Our collective shadows are potential treasure, showing us wounds that need healing, the deep behavioral structures that create conflict, and pushing us to grow beyond our self-limiting patterns. We find the light by going through the dark, not by avoiding it. We can only unfold our full potential for love, beauty, and creativity by recognizing the life-force that’s bound up in our trauma. It’s releasing that closed-off and separated aspect of ourselves that will make us whole.

There’s an interesting symbolic parallel in the human compulsion to dig, mine and extract precious metal. If we instead dug into the fertile ground of our consciousness and our imagination rather than into the physical Earth, would we then finally be able to create a sustainable form of the “treasure” we long for – the “true reality of village togetherness,” so overcoming our addiction to exploiting the Earth?

Consciousness and Creativity: We are the Universe Observing Itself

In Quantum Revelation: A Radical Synthesis of Science and Spirituality, Paul Levy describes how the science of quantum mechanics, although yet to really inform our everyday mode of being, could be a gateway for us: enabling us to understand the dreamlike nature of the world, to reconnect with the divine and infinitely creative aspects of existence. The central insight of quantum mechanics is that quantum particles respond differently depending on whether we are observing them or not. They are waves when we do not observe them and become particles when we do. This implies that quantum matter somehow knows when it is being observed, and subsequently changes both its form and behavior. This points to an astounding idea: that the world we perceive not only perceives us, but also manifests itself depending on our very mode of perception. Or, to put it another way, that the world we encounter depends on how we dream it up. It seems as if there are infinite possibilities of reality. The one that is activated depends only on our capacity to envision it, on the expansiveness and daring of our imagination.

Levy goes even further, asserting that we are living in a world that consciously responds to our consciousness, that, in fact, has created us for the purpose of understanding itself:

“[T]hrough us, the universe questions itself and tries out various answers on itself in an effort parallel to our own to decipher its own being. In the process of observing and reflecting upon our universe we are actually changing the universe’s idea of itself.”

(Chapter 5, “Cosmogenesis,” 2018)

If Levy is right, we are part of a cosmos that is self-creating and self-understanding. It is as if, through consciousness, the universe is craning its neck around to look at itself. We are its eyes, and its senses.

If we want to escape the hold of wetiko, to transition to a way of life that serves all beings, we need to value the power of our own creativity, and to understand that we are always creating the reality we experience, whether we are aware of it or not. The more conscious we are of our creative power, the more we can use it to dream up a world we want to live in; to orchestrate our lives with the same skill and precision as a highly trained conductor.

For this, we need to build a network of communities, (as in Tamera’s Healing Biotopes Plan), where we can study the raw matter of our cultural grief, where we can learn to compost it, and use it to grow new life, where we can discover how to create the “village togetherness” we all long for. We need spaces where we can experiment with and test out our powers of dreaming, encountering, understanding and interacting with the dreamlike nature of reality. We need spaces where we can build the self-confidence and courage that a “life artist” needs. We need public forums where our “life-art” is seen and honored. And all this needs to happen in a large enough group of people for our actions to hold weight, gather momentum and give courage to others.

As Paul Levy writes:

“The universe is a collectively shared dream that is too seemingly dense and solidified for any one person’s change in perspective to transform, but when a critical mass of people get into alignment and consciously put together what I call our “sacred power of dreaming” (our innate power to dream the universe into materialization), we can, literally, change the (waking) dream we are having.”

(Levy, Chapter 5: “Self-Excited Circuit,” 2018)

This is why it is so vital to build communities of trust – we will not be able to change the reality we are currently experiencing alone. However, by cooperating with others we will find the power to co-create paradise on Earth: a reality in which war and violence will be completely unthinkable, where we honor and respect the Earth as the sacred life giver it is, where we are able to fully use the creative potential that lies coiled within each of us. The field-creating power of a group of people can both activate our imaginative potential and provide the vessel in which to create the life we long for.

Waking Up to the Dreamlike Nature of Reality

Paying attention to our powers of dreaming is a simple first step towards comprehending the dreamlike nature of reality, as even those of us who believe that we are “not artistic” still dream each and every night, effortlessly creating symbols and stories that resonate through and inform us, if we take the time to remember and listen to them.

In the Tzutujil culture that Prechtel describes, families gathered each morning to share their dreams, which they saw as being the other half of waking life – just as real, and just as important:

“To a shaman a dream is not a creation of the mind, psyche or soul. It is the remembered fragment of the experience of one’s natural spirit in the twin world, the dreamworld … Although the landscape of dreams may seem different than the landscape of the awake world, it is actually the balanced opposite, reversed version, where our souls live out our bodies’ lives reenacted as if in a complex kind of mirror. Like the two opposing wings of a butterfly, the dreamworld is one wing and the awake world is the other wing. The butterfly must have both wings connected at the Heart in order to fly and function. Neither wing – dreams or waking – contains all of life. Real life occurs as a result of the interaction between the two. The life is the butterfly’s heart, and both dreaming and awake life are necessary to keep the heart alive.”

(Secrets of the Talking Jaguar, pp. 169–170)

As Prechtel goes on to say, “dreams read life back to us like a storyteller” and as such, can be excellent and often uncanny guides in life. I’m sure all of us have had the experience of a dream that seems wiser than we are, a dream that gives an answer to a problem, or that seems to foretell future events.

I’ve experienced personally how dreams can come into creative play with waking life. I once had a powerful dream in which a man, who in my waking life I was on the brink of falling in love with, guided me as I climbed down a building. He was agile, he knew the structure well, as it was his parent’s house, and he helped me down, showing me where to put my hands and feet. After I had this dream, I felt a deep certainty that I could trust this man. I understood that his role in my life right now was to accompany and guide me so that I could move forward, leaving behind the old structures of thought and being that no longer served me (structures he knew well, that he’d also “climbed down from” before). In my waking life, I had very little basis for such a deep trust at that point. I’d known this man a few months. And yet the indication of this dream turned out to be true. It encouraged me to trust him as a guide, and in turn, this faith allowed him (perhaps even prompted him) to actually play out this role in my waking life.

Was this dream reality not only informing but actually creating waking life? I think so. By believing in the certainty this dream instilled in me, I was able to act with faith and courage, which then allowed trust and intimacy to develop in waking reality.

For me, this is an example of those twin butterfly wings of the dreamworld and the waking world meeting at the heart’s center. Both dreamworld and waking life kept my heart alive at that time, nourishing and feeding it. These dual realities prompted me to be an artist: to act on my desires and impulses, to paint the world as I wished it to be.

Consciously Shaping Reality

The consequence of accepting our own creative powers and the dreamlike logic of existence are that we can begin to consciously shape reality. This is a deep responsibility – not anything we can take lightly.

Wetiko disrupts our natural experience of unity with all life. But in truth, we are inextricably interrelated with all other living beings, in the same way that a whirlpool is both identifiably different and part of the river it forms in. This knowledge comes with an immense duty to everything else that exists.

Our every thought, our every action, has an effect on the whole, unavoidably altering everything else in some way, however subtle. We do not need to become megalomaniacs about this – we are no more and no less important than any other human, plant or animal being. But we must understand, if we are to overcome wetiko’s hold on us, that all life, and all activity, constantly shifts the pattern of the whole.

Once we realize this, our everyday lives become imbued with a new sense of purpose and responsibility. Knowing that what we think, say and do alters the whole, guiding a new form of reality into being in each and every moment, means considering carefully how we want to exist in this world. It’s much easier to believe that we are powerless; then we can escape any sense of responsibility. Victimhood is much more comfortable than agency. But if we want to realize the role human beings can play in global transformation, we must be willing to step into agency. We must understand that our inherent creative powers are a divine gift. We’ve been given the capacity to make drastic alterations to the world – in the natural environment, in human society, perhaps even to outer space. Now we must choose whether we want to use these gifts in service of life or continue using them against it—and so push ourselves off the brink of abyss.

Let’s choose to use the wetiko virus rampaging through our human system to actualize an expansion of consciousness, to shine a light deep into the roots of our “untutored grief,” and begin to dream into our potential as deeply creative beings with the ability to create the reality of togetherness that we all long for.