Category Archives: Psychology

Franco Berardi on the Digital Colonization of Human Experience

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By Franco Berardi

Source: Adbusters

The Spanish colonization of Mesoamerica was essentially a process of symbolic and cultural submission.

The “superiority” 
of the colonizers lay on the operational effectiveness of their technical production. The colonization destroyed the cultural environment in which indigenous communities had been living for centuries: the alphabetic technology, the power of the written word overwhelmed, jeopardized and finally superseded the indigenous cultures. The conquistadors re-coded the cultural universe of nowadays Mexico and Central America.

Before the arrival of the Spanish invaders Malinche (Malinalli in Nahuatl language, Marina for the Spaniards), the daughter
 of a noble Aztec family, was given away as 
a slave to passing traders after her father died and her mother remarried. By the time Cortés arrived, she had learned the Mayan dialects spoken in the Yucatan while still understanding Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. As a youth she was given as tribute again, this time to the invaders.

She became the lover of Cortés and accompanied him as interpreter. She translated the words exchanged by Cortés and Moctezuma, king of the Aztec population of Tenochtitlan, and she translated the conqueror’s words when he met crowds of indigenous persons. She translated for Nahuatl-speaking people the words of Christian conquerors and of Christian priests. The Christian message melted with pre-colonisation mythologies, and the modern Mexican culture emerged. She and Cortés had a child, Martín, the first Mexican. She betrayed her own people by linking with the invaders. By the moral point of view, however, she owed nothing to her own people who had sold her into slavery, and treated her as a servant. She betrayed the conquerors, too, though they did not realize it as such.

Malinche is the ultimate symbol of the end of a world, and also the symbol of the formation of a new semiotic and symbolic space. Only when you are able to see the collapse as the end of a world, can a new world be imagined. Only when you are free from hope (which is the worst enemy of intelligence) can you start seeing a new horizon of possibility. This is the lesson that Malinche is teaching us.

DEMOCRACY

On 31 October 2011, George Papandreou announced his government’s intentions to hold a referendum for the acceptance of the terms of a Eurozone bailout deal. He wanted the Greek people to decide if the diktat of the financial class that was strangling Greek society would be accepted or rejected. Overnight, the elected Prime Minister of Greece was obliged to resign. In the very place where it was invented and named twenty-five centuries ago, democracy was finally cancelled. It will never again come to life. Financial abstraction has swallowed the destiny of billions of people. European workers’ salaries have been halved in the last ten years and unemployment and precariousness are on the rise. Meanwhile, profits skyrocket.

WAR

The Eurasian continent is heading toward a proliferation of fragmentary conflict. At the same time, the infinite war launched by Cheney and Bush has paved the way to the establishment of the Caliphate. In Japan, the Prime Minister travels the world looking for allies against China. In India, a racist mass murderer (neoliberal of course) has been elected Prime Minister. In Europe, a Euro-Russian war is in the making at the Ukrainian border. In Ferguson, Missouri, another racialized killing reveals the American police state and the poverty industrial complex — two million homeless in the US and counting. In Gaza, Israel bombards the world’s largest open air prison and blames the victims, most of them children, for dying while the world looks on. In Northern Africa, Western powers prepare for the next season of Gaddafi blowback. In Liberia, Ebola fans the flames of civil and regional war, one bleeding eyeball at a time. In Mexico, a momentary silence shrouds the bloodiest drug war humanity has ever known, with cartels ranking among the wealthiest corporations.

While capitalism will continue to thrive thanks to massive slavery and eco-catastrophe, the next 20 years will be marked by the clash between financial abstraction and biofascism. A social, cognitive breakdown is estranging the masses from the body, so the decerebrated body is taking the form of aggression. Those who have been lost in the competition react under the banners of aggressive identification. We can even see fascism revived by the vengeful spirit of the dispossessed.

BIO-FINANCIAL POWER

Nation states are over, stripped by the global machine
 of finance, computation and all-pervading behavioral Big Data algorithms. Global corporations are replacing nation states as holders of power. We now embrace the first stages of the automation of mind, language and emotions … the architecture of bio-financial power. Power, in fact, is no longer political or military. It is based more and more on the penetration of techno-linguistic automatisms into the sphere of language. Soon, life will be based on the automation of cognitive activity. Who cares if the US military machine is running on empty because of Bush’s self-defeating strategy — it’s a remnant of geopolitical thinking now dead.

THE CIRCLE

Mediocre as it is, Dave Eggers’s novel 
The Circle is a metaphor for the relation between technology, communication, emotion and power. “The Circle” is the name of the most powerful corporation 
in the world, a sort of conglomerate of Google, Facebook, Paypal and YouTube. Three men lead the company: Stockton 
is a financial shark, Bayley is a utopian and Ty Gospodinov is the project’s hidden mastermind.

The main character of the book is Mae, a young woman hired by The Circle during “the Completion,” the final phase in the implementation of TrueYou, a program intended to enforce the recording of every instant of life for pervasive, ceaseless sharing. Mae becomes the corporation’s spokesperson, the face that appears every day on the infinite channels of The Circle’s television network — the ambassador of the new credo.

The Circle is all about the utter
 capture of human attention: ceaseless communication, mandatory friendliness and creation of a new neediness — the obsessive need to express and share. One may remark that Eggers is simply re-enacting Orwell more than 60 years after the publishing of 1984. That’s true, but in the final pages of the novel, Eggers goes further than Orwell, when Ty exposes the transhuman potency of the totalitarian nightmare.

In the last scene of the novel, the inventor and founder of The Circle manages to covertly meet Mae, the newbie seducing
 the global audience. He has lost control of his own creature, the project he originally conceived, and is deprived of all power in its unstoppable self–deployment.

“I did not intend any of this to happen. And it’s moving so fast. I didn’t picture a world where Circle membership was mandatory, where all government and all life was channeled through one network … there used to be the option of opting out. But now that’s over. Completion is the end. We are closing the circle around everyone. It’s a totalitarian nightmare.”

The automaton cannot be stopped, as even the creator himself becomes overpowered by his own invention: the circle of continuous attention, the circle of perfect transparence of everybody to everybody, the circle of total power and of total impotence.

PLEASURE, AFFECTION AND EMPATHY

At the beginning of the 21st century we are in a position that is similar to the position of Malinche: the conqueror is here, peaceful or aggressive, functionally superior, unattainable, incomprehensible. The bio-info automaton is taking shape from the connection between electronic machines, digital languages and minds formatted in such a way to comply with the code. The automaton’s flow of enunciation emanates a connective world that the conjunctive codes cannot interpret, a world that is symbolically incompatible with the social civilization that was the outcome of five centuries of Humanism, Enlightenment and Socialism.

The automaton is the reification of the networked cognitive activity of millions of semio-workers around the globe. Only if they become compatible with the code, the program, can semio-workers enter in the process of networking.

This implies the de-activation of old, subconsciously engrained, modes of communication and perception (compassion, empathy, solidarity, ambiguousness and irony), paving the way to the assimilation of the conscious organism with the digital automaton.

Will the general intellect be able to disentangle itself from the automaton? Can consciousness act on neural evolution? Will pleasure, affection, empathy find a way to re-emerge? Will we translate into human language the connective language of the automated meaning-making machine buzzing and buzzing in our heads?

These are questions that only 
Malinche can answer, opening to the incomprehensible other, betraying her people and reinventing language in order to express what can not be said.

—Franco “Bifo” Berardi is an Italian Marxist theorist and activist in the autonomist tradition. He writes about the condition of media, mental breakdown
 and information technology within post-industrial capitalism. His next book, Heroes, dedicated to the suicidal wave provoked by financial nihilism, will be out in the first months of 2015.

Social Schizophrenia, Social Depression: What does TV tell us about America?

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Dangerous Minds

The difference between what we experience and what we’re told we experience creates a social schizophrenia that leads to self-destructive attitudes and behaviors.

What can popular television programs tell us about the zeitgeist (spirit of the age) of our culture and economy?

It’s an interesting question, as all mass media both responds to and shapes our interpretations and explanations of changing times. It’s also an important question, as mass media trends crystallize and express new ways of understanding our era.

Those who shape our interpretation of events also shape our responses.  This of course is the goal of propaganda: Shape the interpretation, and the response predictably follows.

As a corporate enterprise, mass media’s goal is to make money—the more the better—and that requires finding entertainment products that attract and engage large audiences.  The products that change popular culture are typically new enough to fulfill our innate attraction to novelty—but this isn’t enough. The product must express an interpretation of our time that was nascent but that had not yet found expression.

We can understand this complex process of crystallizing and giving expression to new contexts as one facet of the politics of experience.

The Politics of Experience

It is not coincidental that the phrase politics of experience was coined by a psychiatrist, R.D. Laing, for the phrase unpacks the way our internalized interpretation of experience can be shaped to create uniform beliefs about our society and economy that then lead to norms of behavior that support the political/economic status quo.

Here’s how Laing described the social ramifications in Chapter Four of his 1967 book, The Politics of Experience:

“All those people who seek to control the behavior of large numbers of other people work on the experiences of those other people. Once people can be induced to experience a situation in a similar way, they can be expected to behave in similar ways. Induce people all to want the same thing, hate the same things, feel the same threat, then their behavior is already captive – you have acquired your consumers or your cannon-fodder.”

For Laing, the politics of experience is not just about influencing social behavior – it has an individual, inner consequence as well:

“Our behavior is a function of our experience. We act according to the way we see things. If our experience is destroyed, our behavior will be destructive. If our experience is destroyed, we have lost our own selves.”

How the media shapes our interpretation affects not just our beliefs and responses, but our perceptions of self and our role in society. If the media’s interpretation no longer aligns with our experience, the conflict can generate self-destructive behaviors.

In other words, mass media interpretations can create a social schizophrenia that can lead to self-destructive attitudes and behaviors.

Social Analysis of TV

By its very nature as a mass shared experience, popular entertainment is fertile ground for social analysis.

Here’s a common example: what does a child learn about conflict resolution if he’s seen a thousand TV programs in which the “hero” is compelled to kill the “bad guy” in a showdown? What does that pattern suggest, not just about the structure of drama, but about the society that creates that drama?

Analyzing entertainment has been popular in America since the 1950s, if not earlier.  The film noir of the 1950s, for example, was widely deemed to express the angst of the Cold War era.  Others held that the rising prosperity of the 1950s enabled the populace to explore its darker demons—something the hardships and anxieties of the Depression did not encourage.

Many believe the Depression gave rise to screwball comedies and light-hearted entertainment featuring the casually wealthy precisely because these were escapist antidotes to the grinding realities of the era.

Even television shows that were denigrated as superficial in their own time (for example, Bewitched in the 1960s) can be seen as politically inert but subconsciously potent expressions of profound social changes: the “witch” in Bewitched is a powerful young female who is constantly implored by her conventional husband to conform to all the bland niceties of a suburban housewife, but she finds ways to rebel against these strictures.

Laing saw the potential conflict between what we experience and how we’re told to interpret that experience not just in social terms but in psychiatric terms: such splits open a gulf that can lead to a form of schizophrenia.

Diagnosing Our Disease with TV

What can we make of the popular TV series of the present era? What do they say, beneath the surface, about American society?

I contend that popular TV expresses three key aspects of U.S. society and economy that are at odds with the core idealized values espoused in civic classes and the media. The three idealized values are:

1.  America is a meritocracy—selections, admissions, etc., are based on the candidates’ merits

2.  Anyone can get ahead if they get an education and work hard

3.  America is the wealthiest nation on earth in terms of opportunity, fairness and capital

TV expresses three aspects that confound these idealized values:

1.  Life is a game in which the winner takes all

2.  The opportunity to “get ahead” via conventional means—getting educated, working hard, etc.—is a joke; only those who skirt conventions and the law get rich

3.  Life is a tortuous endurance course where those in charge demand the cruel and the impossible

Winner-Take-All Talent Shows

Let’s start with the genre that has been a dominant force in American TV since the 2000s: the winner-take-all talent show (reality and game shows).

The long-running Survivor series, for example, was a winner-take-all contest of physical prowess and political guile, while the many programs staging singing/dancing contests (American Idol, etc.) put entertainment skills to the competitive test.  A wide range of other entries stage competitions in cooking, entrepreneurship, losing weight, negotiating obstacle courses, and so on.

What interpretations of our experience do these highly competitive winner-take-all reality shows promote?

We could start with the fact that the stars (other than the hosts/judges) are apparently ordinary “every man/woman” Americans, i.e. people not unlike us.  Watching them, it is not too much of a stretch to imagine ourselves on stage, in the kitchen, etc., trying to impress the judges with our talents. It’s easy to identify with the contestants.

These shows enable us to vicariously experience the fantasy that we, too, could be on national TV and could win the accolades of the judges and fans and be the winner who takes it all.

This natural empathy with the temporarily famous with whom we can vicariously share the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat is clearly tapping a deep cultural desire to taste celebrity and the implied financial rewards of winning in an increasing winner-take-all society/economy.

Could the financial/political marginalization of the average citizen and the widening gulf between the typical household and those at the top of the fame/wealth pyramid have something to do with this fascination for winner-take-all competitions on the public stage?

Since there have been game shows on TV for decades, it could be argued that this proliferation of winner-take-all contests is nothing new. But this fails to account for the difference between a game show in which the correct answer is a fact and the subjective votes of judges, other players and the audience that count in winner-take-all contests.

I would argue that this recent explosion of competitions (“modern gladiator,” anyone?) is an expression of deeply held shared cultural values: we accept that ours is a highly competitive society, and that it is becoming even more so as the top “winners” skim the vast majority of the winnings (media visibility, wealth, adulation, social status. etc.), leaving a few morsels for the top 5% and nothing but crumbs for the bottom 95%.

But these TV programs also project the fantasy that our fight-to-the-figurative-death society is still a meritocracy—the best guy/gal wins, as judged by “experts” (or celebrities claiming expertise; the judges’ expertise is structured to be unassailable, just like all the other “experts” in our society).

But if we can’t win it all on merit, there is an alternative way to win: display superior political guile or greater popularity with the audience. (Interestingly, this echoes the coliseum audiences of the late Roman era, who also had some sway over who lived to fight another day on the choreographed battlefield below.)

Perhaps this helps explain our collective obsession with celebrity and the many measures of popularity available to everyone now—Instagram, Facebook likes, Twitter followers (for sale in lots of 10,000), Klout scores, and so on.

In other words, as success in the real world grows increasingly distant, vicariously competing and “winning it all” becomes very compelling. Rather than deal with the vast injustices of our system, we cling to the idealized norm that meritocracy matters, even as “winning” in real life is increasingly a game of cronyism, guile, gaming the system, misrepresenting the truth, etc.

And so we thrill to these play-acting displays of meritocracy in action, as it confirms our cultural value system that that despite the predations of Wall Street and Washington, merit still counts.

And when all else fails, we have a fallback source of identity and “winning”—our popularity. And if we don’t have enough of our own, then we can share vicariously in the popularity of TV show winners and celebrities who have reached the pinnacle.

This is the core message of an interesting and erudite half-hour talk on celebrity given by Games of Thrones actor Jack Gleeson:

“During a recent visit to the Oxford Union, Gleeson took the opportunity to dismantle the ‘religious hysteria’ of celebrity worship with an appropriately epic rant, breaking down the economic, psychological, and sociological catalysts for public reverence of celebrities and their negative impact on society as a whole.”

Gleeson draws upon a number of intellectual sources (Weber, Baudrillard, et al.) in his discussion of the contemporary culture of celebrity, and concludes that celebrity fills the void left when development of an authentic self is stunted.

The parallel with Laing’s “lost self” is striking.

In effect, when the opportunities for developing an authentic self have been reduced to popularity, public visibility and the status that flows from these forms of recognition, then the worship of celebrity and the aching desire for a moment in the spotlight become rational substitutes for a True Self.

As these wispy contingencies can never form an authentic selfhood, even those who do “win” the competition for celebrity are ultimately dissatisfied and disillusioned.

My conclusion: the popularity of competitive winner-take-all TV programs reflects the paucity of opportunities for selfhood and the substitution of celebrity worship for the difficult task of forging an independent identity in a society that marginalizes all but the top players.

If this isn’t a form of cultural schizophrenia, then what exactly is it? The claim that this is all just good clean fun is absurd, as is the claim that it’s perfectly healthy to sacrifice one’s identity in a competition for recognition that 99.9% of us are sure to lose.

Awakened Warriors Arise

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By Zen Gardner

Source: ZenGardner.com

Life is a struggle. How much more then is the spiritual life, the fight to remain conscious in an illusory world where deviant forces vie for control more than caring, battering your very body and soul day in and day out on top of your struggle to survive. Oh, we’re going peacefully downstream in the conscious dimensions. There we learn to let go and follow the flow of the Universe and synchronicity. But in this physical, lower density world, we’re fighting directly upstream.

In addition, we’re living in a time of increasingly turbulent waters. Our kayaks hit all kinds of eddies and crosscurrents, never mind the rocks and rapids we have to navigate–all while idiots, enemies and doubters, prodded on by the propaganda whores, are screaming obscenities from the shore and trying to hit us with anything they can get their hands on! But alas, grasshoppers—we have powers they know not of!

The Call to Battle

We’re in a warfare, any way you look at it. Only it’s not a warfare of hate, but of love. It’s not a warfare of physical violence, but a spiritual one of intention and a Truth directed life. The inherent cause and effect of Universal consciousness is the dissolution of the ways born of ignorance and darkness by means of the all powerful exposing and enlightening weapons of Light, Love and Truth.

The medieval matrix, no matter how fancy and hi-tech it has become, is dissolving and losing its grip. We need to actively help it on its way to oblivion, identifying its lies and blatant agenda for control and subjugation.

Don’t forget, non-compliance is a decisive action, not inaction. Inaction is going with the current of the matrix.

There is no sitting still. We’re all doing one or the other. Complying, or rejecting and countering their flow.

That’s the choice. That’s the battle.

In A Time of Imbalance the Call to Rise is Natural

Similar to the poetic beauty of martial arts, the Truth warrior uses his weapons skillfully and with great discretion. While many argue we need evil for good to exist and all that esoterica, we happen to be living in a time of great imbalance.

Do you enjoy having lords of darkness rule over you and yours, exercising more death dealing, spirit quelling control over humanity by the day?

I didn’t think so. Will it collapse under its own weight? In many ways it has to. Will it do it all by itself? We have to play our parts. As long as we’re here we’re integral to the Great Design and clearly need to do our part.

All I know is that what I am finding out and tuning in to calls me to participate, as so many are experiencing. It’s as real as the sun and water hitting a seedling and the organism responding. If it’s not evident to you that our planet and civilization are under attack I do wonder how you got to this article. It couldn’t be any clearer. That’s why they direct the angst people are feeling, the knowing that something is wrong, towards fabricated “outside” enemies to divert attention from the real perpetrators and agenda. Hence the daily “scare” headlines, whatever they are.

Similar to how religion co-opts, steers and contains the human soul’s hunger for the spiritual, the Controllers arouse, channel and misdirect humanity’s sense that it is being attacked and they literally harness what they themselves have aroused, using it for their own parasitic, vampiric purposes.

Cattle prods and sheep dogs driving humanity into the slaughterhouse, mentally, spiritually and physically.

Sorry, not on our watch. It’s long been time to sound the alarm and awaken as many as we possibly can. The spiritual, mental and physical arousal has way more effect than we can begin to imagine. Only your mind and low level system programming diminish its importance.

Trust your heart.

There is No “They”…They Said.

The old “tell a big enough lie” ploy is at work here. Their biggest tool is to say there is no “they”. There are no dark forces according to mainstream understanding in this dumbed down world. In fact, we’re told the “they” are the good guys looking out for us. It reminds me of the adage that the biggest lie Satan ever told is that he doesn’t exist. Pretty clever these demons. Just laugh at them.

Yet their all usurping lie remains:

There is no negative, destructive, usurping parasitic force in the Universe other than far away safely distanced religious concepts. Most feel humanity just has other controlling humans to worry about. The powers that be are here to simply save us from each other then becomes the most believable option, and into the cattle chute they go.

After all, that’s the mantra of the anti-conspiracy camp. ” THEY? Are you crazy? You really think there’s some ‘secret cabal’ running things from behind the scenes? How insane are you? If that were the case we’d be hearing all about it in the mainstream media! No way they could hide something that big!”

Same old, same old.

A very dark time right now indeed. All the recent pandemic scares, terrorism stagings, and economic and phony political rattlings attest to it. And if those fade they’ll create some new ones.

Consciousness Calling

If you feel the call to participate more it’s consciousness calling, any way you slice it.  Take your place on the great mandala and all that, but there’s a bulldozer headed for your house. Are you just gonna sit there?

No doubt you’ve given all of this serious thought. And I know many of you have activated and it’s absolutely beautiful. I’m proud to be associated with so many amazing, loving committed people. I think we just need to be adaptive and prepared for more. The winds are picking up and the battlefield is becoming more fluid, more challenging and more demanding.

And for those on the sidelines: It’s time to choose your course of action – or let it choose you.

I’m not gonna tell anyone what to do. If people don’t learn to choose for themselves, consciousness is not at work and back to the old paradigms we go. But do something. Get the boat in motion or the rudder can’t take effect. Find and take your calling seriously and step it up. We all have to.

Meditate, intend, pray, affirm, that’s great…but act! Change your life, change the etheric world around you by your loving actions and intentions. Try new consciousness technologies while changing your lifestyle. And perhaps move to a smarter and safer location away from this obvious steamroller coming at many of you. Why just sit there?

Meanwhile write, talk, show up, contribute, speak to groups, attend gatherings of active and motivated individuals or just get honest with your loved ones. Find the opening and jump in. The rest will follow. Time is too short to do otherwise.

Contribute we must. Hopefully with our whole lives. It’s all we have for all we’re worth.

It’s not a time to get frantic by any means, but take this as a loving alert, something I know many of you are also feeling. Our old views of just weeks and months ago are shifting and will continue to do so. It’s subtle, but it’s profoundly real. We have to step it up and yield to what consciousness is calling each of us to do and let go of the baggage holding us back.

A purely inspired and motivated heart will always find the way.

Again and again.

Much love,

Zen

www.zengardner.com

The Light Side of the Dark Night of the Soul

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By Kim Hutchinson

Source:  In5d.com

The phenomenon known as the Dark Night of the Soul is something which many spiritual seekers experience on their journey to re-enlightenment. It can be a painful and frightening process, but it can also be liberating and empowering. It all depends on your perspective and your ability to remain detached.

Peeling the Onion

The word ‘night’ is misleading. This is a process, and thankfully so. I doubt you would want to experience the purification process all at once. My own Dark Night journey began in 1994 and culminated this year (2013). While that may seem like an inordinate amount of time, I didn’t go through the process continually, thank heavens, but rather in stages. The length and intensity of the process is determined by the degree of purification one requires.

Think of this as peeling an onion. Each layer you strip away brings tears to your eyes. You stop for a while in order to recover, and then you proceed to the next layer. Once you reach the core, you are at the heart of your angst. This is often the toughest part of the process which is why it comes last. You build up your strength and your ability to face your core issue(s). Your higher self will not let you access this core until you are ready.

The good news is you have already faced the worst. Nothing that you unearth during this process will ever be as bad as the original pain you experienced. You were strong enough to face it once, so you are more than capable of releasing it now. And, once it’s purified, it is gone for good.

Ego Death

Essentially, the Dark Night of the Soul is the death of the (malignant) ego. I say ‘malignant’ because the ego is not inherently bad or in need of extinguishing. The ego provides the soul with the illusion of separation so that we may explore creations that differ from the unified field of Love from which we originate.

The ego in its present form, however, is overly dominant. We live in an egocentric era. The Cult to Self is celebrated through our worship of celebrity, fame, fortune, superficial beauty and power. Narcissistic behaviours are often rewarded in this ego-driven climate. The external world is a projection result of the malignancy of our collective ego state.

Needless to say, the ego does not take kindly to the awakening and enlightenment process. It sees the spiritual awakening process as a threat to its very existence and, in many ways, it is right. As you begin to remember more about your spiritual origins, the allure of ego lessens. This eventually breaks ego’s hold over you, and the ego begins to shrink away.

From the ego’s perspective, this equates to death. It, therefore, isn’t going to surrender without a fight. The key is not to resist the ego. That being said, non-resistance is not easy. In fact, your ego will do everything in its power to cling to the old, but your higher self knows better.

Existential Crisis

As we awaken from the shadows of our dream life on Earth to the limitless, formless, eternal nature of the Soul, the form and thought-based illusions of our life begin to dissolve. The very foundation of one’s human existence crumbles, leading to an existential crisis of faith.

Symptoms Include:

  • Deep introspection and angst
  • Questioning the meaning and purpose of life
  • Feeling that life is meaningless
  • Isolation; feeling alone, cut off from others
  • Facing mortality
  • Feeling empty, devoid of joy

Your existential crisis can cut you off from others. The battle you’re fighting is internal. It’s akin to depression, except that it is spiritual rather than mental in nature. The ego is fighting for its life, and thus it resists the purification process.

Remember though, these symptoms stem from the ego’s perspective on life. The soul knows that everything has meaning, pleasure and beauty. Once you supplant your ego with your soul, life becomes vibrant again.

Purification by Fire

As your ego’s domain is dismantled, your external world will reflect this internal process. That which does not serve your highest good falls away. While this stage may seem destructive and painful, it is actually helping to break ego’s hold over you by forcing it to surrender everything it holds dear.

It’s like the old adage says: “Beware the man who has nothing left to lose”. That man is absolutely fearless. When you lose everything your ego values, its fear-based hold on you shatters.

Please note, I’m not advocating that you must lose everything. I’m just explaining what sometimes happens during the process. For instance, if you find yourself facing loss (i.e. divorce, job loss, and bankruptcy) know that this has helped to shatter your ego’s hold over you. The more dramatic the loss, the more rapid the purification process.

As you empty yourself of ego/fear, you create more room to house your soul’s love, light, wisdom, beauty and joy.

The Phoenix Rises

At this point, things may appear bleak and hopeless; but, to quote another old gem, “It’s always darkest before the dawn”. I liken this to sinking into the murky depths. You feel like you will never see the light of day again, and that all is lost. Then, suddenly, your feet touch ground and you are able to push off the bottom giving you the momentum propel you back into the light.

You’re almost through this learning curve, and when you emerge on the other side of the Dark Night, you will rediscover the joy and beauty of the world. You are the phoenix, being purified by fire. Once you have rid yourself of the ego fears, you will be ‘reborn’ or transformed as a freer, happier higher-vibrational version of you.

Sanity-Saving Solutions

  • Higher Perspective: Understand that darkness, fear and ego are all illusions. You’re a child of Love and Light. Your current experiences are simply a dream that your soul is having. It wants to better understand Love and Light but it cannot do so without contrast. Since the ego isn’t real, try changing its nature from a narcissistic dictator to a small, frightened child. Then, when it acts up, love and nurture it instead of fighting it or being controlled by it.
  • Non-Resistance: Do not resist the process. The greater the resistance, the more painful the symptoms. Remember, that which you resist persists. Don’t give your ego anything to push against. Just go with the flow. And remember, the ego is fighting for its life. Rather than seeking to destroy it, love it instead and teach it to trust your spirit to keep you safe. The ego can be retrained.
  • Non-Attachment: Release everything that no longer serves your higher good. No matter how scary it may seem, until you let go of the old ego-based elements in your life, nothing new and spiritually-uplifting can come in. Think of it as cleaning house. You’re ridding your vessel of darkness and density to make way for lightness.
  • Spiritual Guides: Enlist the help of the spirit realms. Call on your spirit guides; soul family; soul group; departed loved ones; the angels; ascended masters; animal totems; Mother Earth; Father Sun; the Creator/God/Goddess, and with whomever else you resonate. Be open to receiving help in all forms.
  • Kindred Support: Find like-minded souls with whom you can share your experiences. You are not alone. There are many others who are currently experiencing, or have recently gone through, the Dark Night of the Soul. Ask your spirit guides to help you find these people, or they you. Then, pay attention to the messages you receive intuitively. If a stranger stops to talk to you, s/he may be a kindred spirit.
  • TLC: You need extra love and gentle care right now. Be your own best friend. Talk gently and lovingly to yourself. Release obligations and commitments that are draining you. Set healthy boundaries with others. Treat yourself with kid gloves. Eat a healthy diet, drink plenty of pure water, sleep when you’re tired, and practice mindful exercise such as yoga, Tai Chi and Qigong. Energy medicine can also help alleviate the severity and duration of the symptoms. Above all, never forgot, you are a precious child of the divine.

War, Media Propaganda, and the Police State

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By James F. Tracy

Source: Memory Hole

The following essay is intended to provide a brief overview of topics addressed in a discussion graciously recorded by Julie Vivier at the offices of the Center for Research on Globalization in Montreal Canada on August 5, 2014.-JFT

Modern propaganda techniques utilized by the corporate state to enforce anti-democratic and destructive policies routinely entail the manufacture and manipulation of news events to mold public opinion and, as Edward Bernays put it, “engineer consent” toward certain ends.

Such events include not only overt political appeals, but also acts of seemingly spontaneous terrorism and militarism that traumatize the body politic into ultimately accepting false narratives as political and historical realities.

Western states’ development and utilization of propaganda closely parallels the steady decay of political enfranchisement and engagement throughout the twentieth century. Upon securing a second term in 1916, the Democratic administration of Woodrow Wilson plunged the United States into the most violent and homicidal war in human history. Wilson, a former Princeton University academician  groomed for public office by Wall Street bankers, assembled a group of progressive-left journalists and publicists to “sell the war” to the American people.

George Creel, Walter Lippmann, Edward Bernays and Harold Lasswell all played influential roles in the newly-formed Committee on Public Information, and would go on to be major figures in political thought, public relations, and psychological warfare research.

The sales effort was unparalleled in its scale and sophistication. The CPI was not only able to officially censor news and information, but essentially manufacture these as well. Acting in the role of a multifaceted advertising agency, Creel’s operation “examined the different ways that information flowed to the population and flooded these channels with pro-war material.”

The Committee’s domestic organ was comprised of 19 subdivisions, each devoted to a specific type of propaganda, one of which was a Division of News that distributed over 6,000 press releases and acted as the chief avenue for war-related information. On an average week, more than 20,000 newspaper columns carried data provided through CPI propaganda. The Division of Syndicated Features enlisted the help of popular novelists, short story writers, and essayists. These mainstream American authors presented the official line in a readily accessible form reaching twelve million people every month. Similar endeavors existed for cinema, impromptu soapbox oratory (Four Minute Men), and outright advertising at home and abroad.[1]

With the experiences and observations of these war marketers variously recounted and developed throughout the 1920s (Lippmann, Public Opinion, The Phantom Public, Bernays, Propaganda, Crystallizing Public Opinion, Creel, How We Advertised America, Lasswell, Propaganda and the World War), alongside the influence of their elite colleagues and associates, the young publicists’ optimism concerning popular democracy guided by informed opinion was sobered with the realization that public sentiment was actually far more susceptible to persuasion than had been previously understood. The proposed solutions to guarantee something akin to democracy in an increasingly confusing world lay in “objective” journalism guided by organized intelligence (Lippmann) and propaganda, or what Edward Bernays termed “public relations.”

The argument laid out in Lippmann’s Public Opinion was partly motivated by the US Senate’s rejection of membership in the League of Nations. An adviser to the Wilson administration, a central figure behind intelligence gathering that informed postwar geopolitical dynamics laid out at the Paris Peace Conference, and an early member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Lippmann increasingly viewed popular democracy as plagued by a hopelessly ill-informed public opinion incapable of comprehending the growing complexities of modern society. Only experts could be entrusted with assessing, understanding, and acting on the knowledge accorded through their respective professions and fields.

Along these lines, journalism should mimic the then-fledgling social sciences by pursuing objectivity and deferring to the compartmentalized expertise of established authority figures. News and information could similarly be analyzed, edited, and coordinated to ensure accuracy by journalists exercising similar technocratic methods. Although Lippmann does not exactly specify what body would oversee such a process of “organized intelligence,” his postwar activities and ties provides a clue.

Edward Bernays’ advocacy for public opinion management is much more practical and overt. Whereas Lippmann suggests a regimented democracy via technocratic news and information processing, Bernays stresses a privileged elite’s overt manipulation of how the populace interprets reality itself. Such manipulation necessitates contrived associations, figures and events that appear authentic and spontaneous. “Any person or organization depends ultimately on public approval,” Bernays notes,

“and is therefore faced with the problem of engineering the public’s consent to a program or goal … We reject government authoritarianism or regimentation, but we are willing to be persuaded by the written or spoken word. The engineering of consent is the very essence of the democratic process, the freedom to persuade and suggest.[2]

Bernays demonstrates an affinity with Lippmann’s notion of elite expediency when pursuing prerogatives and decision-making the public at large cannot be entrusted to interpret. In such instances,

democratic leaders must play their part in leading the public through the engineering of consent to socially constructive goals and values. This role naturally imposes upon them the obligation to use educational processes, as well as other available techniques, to bring about as complete an understanding as possible.[3]

Written in the early 1950s, these observations become especially apt in the latter half of the twentieth century, where the US is typically a major aggressor in foreign (and eventually domestic) affairs. Yet what does Bernays mean by, for example, “educational processes”? An indication may be found by noting his central role in the promotion of tobacco use, municipal water fluoridation, and the overthrow of the democratically-elected Arbenz regime in Guatemala.[4]

With the advent of the national security state in 1947, secret programs emerge where the people are as a matter of course intentionally left unaware of the state’s true rationales and objectives.

Indeed, a wealth of contemporary historical examples suggest how the “engineering of consent” is wholly calculating and anti-democratic, and where the crises requiring such drastic and immediate public relations and military measures are themselves the result of the same leadership’s policies and actions. The US economic provocation of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the Tonkin Gulf incident precipitating US military occupation of Vietnam are obvious examples of such manufactured events.

Similar techniques are apparent in the major political assassinations of the 1960s, where to this day the public is prompted to partake in the false reality that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole culprit in the murder of President John F. Kennedy, much as Sirhan Sirhan was responsible for the death of Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

In fact, in each instance overwhelming evidence points to Central Intelligence Agency involvement in orchestrating the assassinations while training and presenting Oswald and Sirhan as the would-be assassins.

The US government’s assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., probably the most influential African American public persona of the twentieth century, is not even open to debate, having been soundly proven in a court of law.[5] Yet as with the Kennedys, it is a genuine public relations achievement that much of the American population is oblivious to the deeper dynamics of these political slayings that are routinely overlooked or inaccurately recounted in public discourse.

Along these lines, in the historical context of Operation Gladio, the Oklahoma City Murrah Federal Building bombing, the events of September 11, 2001, the London 7/7/2005 bombings, and lesser episodes such as the “shoe” and “underwear” bombers, the engineering of consent has reached staggering new heights where state-orchestrated terrorism is used to mold public opinion toward acceptance of militarized policing operations, the continued erosion of civil liberties, and major sustained aggression against moderate Middle Eastern nations to cartelize scarce resources and politically reconfigure an entire region of the world.

Again, the public is essentially compelled to believe that political extremism of one form or another is the cause of each event, even in light of how the sophistication and scope of the Oklahoma City and 9/11 “attacks” suggest high-level forces at work. If one is to delve beneath the public relations narrative of each event, the recent Newtown massacre and Boston Marathon bombing likewise appear to have broader agendas where the public is again purposely misled.

Conventional journalists and academics are reluctant to publicly address such phenomena for fear of being called “conspiracy theorists.” In the case of academe this has severely curtailed serious and potentially crucial inquiry into such deep events and phenomena in lieu of what are often innocuous intellectual exchanges divorced from actually existing social and political realities that cry out for serious interrogation and critique.

The achievements of modern public relations are further evident in the Warren and 9/11 Commissions themselves, both of which have spun the fantastic myths of Allan Dulles and Peter Zelikow respectively, and that today maintain footholds in public discourse and consciousness.

Indeed, the “conspiracy theory” meme, a propaganda campaign waged by the CIA beginning in the mid-1960s to counter criticism of the Warren Commission report, is perhaps as little-known as Operation Mockingbird, the CIA program where hundreds of journalists and publishers actively devoted their services to spread Agency disinformation. The overall effect of these combined operations has been an immensely successful program continues to shape the contours of American political life and mediated reality.[6]

The present socio-political condition and suppression of popular democracy are triumphs of modern propaganda technique. So are they also manifest in the corporate state’s efforts to engineer public acquiescence toward such things as the colossal frauds of genetically modified organisms masquerading as “food,” toxic polypharmacy disguised as “medicine,” and the police state and “war on terror” seeking to preserve “national security.”

Notes

[1] Aaron Delwiche, “Propaganda: Wartime Propaganda: World War I, The Committee on Public Information,” accessed September 28, 2014 at http://www.propagandacritic.com/articles/ww1.cpi.html; George Creel, How We Advertised America, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1920. Available at http://archive.org/details/howweadvertameri00creerich

[2] Edward Bernays, Public Relations, Norman OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1952, 159-160.

[3] Ibid. 160.

[4] “You can get practically any ideas accepted,” Bernays reflected on the campaign to fluoridate New York City’s water supply. “If doctors are in favor, the public is willing to accept it, because a doctor is an authority to most people, regardless of how much he knows, or doesn’t know … By the law of averages, you can usually find an individual in any field who will be willing to accept new ideas, and the new ideas then infiltrate the others who haven’t accepted it. Christopher Bryson, The Fluoride Deception, New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004, 159.

[5] William F. Pepper, An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King, New York: Verso, 2003.

[6] James F. Tracy, “Conspiracy Theory: Foundations of a Weaponized Term,” Global Research, January 22, 2013.

 

Beyond Palliative Care

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By arranjames

Source: Synthetic Zero

Not all that long ago the curators of this blog started talking about the possibility of the palliative care of the Earth. Recently dmf posted up a podcast dealing with the same topic. I haven’t listened to it yet so won’t be drawing on it in this post. I wanted to take a few minutes to experiment with the senses of the phrase “palliative care of the Earth”.

First of all, what is palliative care? Like all attempts at sense it is a contested battleground rife with bullet holes and no-man’s lands with various armies massed and pressing on it. One such army is the global institutional Roman legion that is the World Health Organisation. The WHO loves definitions. One could almost assume it employed nothing but glossophiliacs who spent their days and night writing endless variations on definitions who, in their frenzied madness, ended up trying to murder the words they were seeking to play midwife to. The WHO definition is long. And vague. You can read it here. Operationalising a little we can extract the fundamentals: palliative care seeks to make life as liveable as possible for the dying body and for the bodies who will mourn it.

The Earth as a system of ecosystems, an ecological metasystem, is considered as a body composed of bodies that play habitat and inhabitant, catalyst and anticatalyst, metabolism and metabolite, and so on, to one another [1]. Not all of these bodies are living but as with any machinic assemblage this Earth emerges as a necessarily heterogenetic improvisation (the imposition of unpredictability) that depends on both organic and machinic kinds [2]. A cyborg of a different order than Robocop the Earth is more akin to the Half-Faced Man, a machine that wants to be human. This isn’t to say the Earth wants to be human, or that it wants anything in any way we’d recognise as desire, although interspecies sexuality clearly indicates a queer promiscuity among nonhuman organisms, but that the Earth has assembled in such a way that the organic has come out of the inorganic. From a certain perspective: so what? It’s all just interlocking mechanism. Well, fine. But its dying is what.

But the Earth won’t die. Not yet. Far more likely- and if we stop being so anthropophobic- we’re talking about ourselves. It is us that is dying. It is the palliative care of the human that we should really consider. We open with a discussion of the dying Earth because it is this dying that is killing us: a vicarious species-suicide? These are dark thoughts that imply a loathing so great in our species that we’d take out everything else just to slit our own throats once and for all. But we’re not that grand, we’re all too limited, all too human still. Like smokers in the 1950s we didn’t know what we were doing, then we did and did nothing about it, then everyone said it was too late. We’re not quite sure of the periodicity. We don’t know if it is too late. What we do know is that we’ve had a mass terminal diagnosis and there is no consensus on the prognosis. What are we dying of then, if not some anthropathology [3]?

Does the species have a body? Or is the species also a hallucination? Hallucinations can die too- ask a “schizophrenic” on Clozapine. The WHO is an ensemble of equipment and technique in the same way Guattari once spoke of the unconscious. It is almost as if the WHO invented health (“a total state”) and must administer it. What is it that the WHO wants to say about palliative care? It has things to say about the reduction of suffering; the affirmation of life and death; it seeks neither the hastening nor the postponing of death; it looks to psychology and spirituality; produces support systems; is multidisciplinary; is life enhancing; it’s never too early to start.

How does this map onto humanity? We’re just scale in a sense, where “humanity” stands in for “person”. So it is the reduction of the suffering of species and the enhancement of its existence. This follows nicely from Lacanian ideas that we live both by the reality-principle and jouissance, by both aversion and hedonics. We’re also not talking about killing ourselves off, so no reproductions of Zapffe’s conclusion to ‘The Last Messiah’- we aren’t about to go forth to be fruitless and let the Earth be silent after us (as if it would be). I think it’s safe to say fuck Messiahs, especially last ones.

We’re also looking to the psychology and spirituality of humanity? Doesn’t this translate quite well to looking at the cognitive biases and metacognitive illusions and the affects and emotions in their normativity and pragmatics? Support systems like what? New technologies and alternative energy sources? Sure. But it can’t be limited to that- what if extinction is much closer than this than we think? Well think about it for a second. The process has already begun. And I’m not just talking about Tim Morton’s plutonium, or irreversible glacial melting, or any other particular doomsday protocol. If we’ve been paying attention to the three ecologies then we should have spotted multiple extinctions have been in process for a long time now. Systems of systems have been disintegrating within whatever it is- or was- that we called the human for decades. By 2050 or so even the strange hominid form will have been eradicated, recorded in images that no creature surviving us will care much about.

So palliative care is about easing our way into dying off. It is about quietly doing our best to assemble societies in which we can humanely coexist with wild being until our time’s really up. That was certainly my feeling two years ago when I wrote a post on extinction. Back in 2012 I declared that

Any post-nihilistic pragmatics will require that we operate consciously within catastrophic time and that we surrender the impossible task of removing precariousness from the human condition. These are the same project in fact, given that the former reveals to us the anthropocentrism of the latter…the benign revelation that precariousness is the condition of all things. IF this garners the accusation of privelging the perspective of extinction and heat death then this is a necessary part of the pragmatic ethics of a self-management of extinction. As I have said before, the task now is to think the ethics of palliative care for the species. The dream of species-being is realised at last.

Today I wonder at the sadness of that post. At the time I’d thought of it as realistic, hard-headed, unsentimental. All that. But ultimately, I think it was a depressive position. If 2050 is the time limit then maybe it is too late, and maybe we should be looking at harm-reduction and palliation. But for me this could lead us to a politics of the worst in which we try to stave off the ‘least of all possible evils’, a mode of thought that Eyal Weizman has convincingly shown to be at work in some of the worst atrocities in modern history. In trying to create the conditions of the least possible harm the scale of the species we might actually end up with a resigned sigh in the face of forces we might be able to do something about. As such, the only way to “self-manage our extinction” has to be truly palliative in that it doesn’t just avoid suffering but also seeks jouissance. In fact, I’d concretise the program into what David Roden has been talking about in terms of a speculative posthumanism in which posthuman beings that emerge out of the human bear as much intuitive relation to us as we do to our ancestral forebears. The jouissance of this is less Lacanian and more about a sweeping mutative recombinatory innovation in the normativity of posthumanity.

In fact the pessimist and transhumanist programs belong together when we view harm reduction without the depressive targeting system, when in fact we dare to accelerate palliative philosophy into a praxis of assisted dying. What is born from the uneven unity of these programs is what I’m (stupidly; deliriously; in a state of panic) calling transpessimism: the speculative conviction that humanity must become extinct by becoming something else.

—

[1] From wikipedia:

System of systems is a collection of task-oriented or dedicated systems that pool their resources and capabilities together to create a new, more complex system which offers more functionality and performance than simply the sum of the constituent systems. Currently, systems of systems is a critical research discipline for which frames of reference, thought processes, quantitative analysis, tools, and design methods are incomplete.[1] The methodology for defining, abstracting, modeling, and analyzing system of systems problems is typically referred to as system of systems engineering.

[2] I’ve stolen the term “heterogenetic improvisation” from David Malvinni’s study of Roma music: “heterogenic improvisation…the divided interval where improvisation orginates out of otherness while identifying with itself…grows out of a desire for a purely involved performance, a symbiosis of listener and sound, via an identification of the same with its unpredictable mutation” (p. 47-48).

[3] The term “anthropathology”, a neologism of the “anthro” pertaining to the human and “pathology” pertaining to disease, was coined in 2007 by a practicing counselor and counselling theorist, Colin Feltham, turned pessimist philosopher. Feltham defines the condition of anthropathology at length in his book treatment of the “condition”- as valid as most psychopathological categories- but also presents a condensed definition as follows:

‘the marked, universal tendency of human beings individually and collectively towards suffering deceptiveness, irrationality, destructiveness and dysfunction,including an extreme difficulty in perceiving and freeing ourselves from this state’ (What’s Wrong With Us? The anthropathology thesis. 2007. p.256).

Dancing with The Bride of Dracula at the Ebola Debutante’s Ball

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By Les Visible

Source: Reflections in a Petri Dish

Dog Poet Transmitting…….

May your noses always be cold and wet.

What Really Happened has got a s-load of Ebola news up at the beginning of the articles list today, from yesterday and that might change in a few hours but you can find them. Yes, the government invented it and the government is disseminating it and if their usual policies hold true they will soon be taxing you for the privilege of catching it. However, if you are rich you will not have to pay for hosting Ebola in your system because the rich don’t pay taxes. That’s why God made so many poor people, so that they could finance the system, which is designed to make things go real smooth for the rich. In fact, the gears that turn the mechanical assemblies that pump out financial profit for the rich are designed to run on human blood. Not only is human blood the fuel that runs the machinery but human blood is also what lubricates the gears. You would have to say it is seriously multipurpose, especially considering that people (people?) like Little Georgie Sorrows, David Rockefeller, Lloyd Blankfein, Michael Bloomfield and many others also drink it as a cordial, aperitif, general cocktail and food supplement served up in smoothies. This is as it should be because they are smoothies. They slide through existence, like a lizard on a greased, inclined mesa.

A short while ago, the government propaganda agency, also known as the Crass Media, was mentioning how Ebola was created by the Russians but… since the completely Zionist owned American government owns the patent on Ebola and since GKS and the CDC and others are blockading all natural means for treating Ebola, it is to be presumed that this is a multifaceted assault on the public. On one hand they want to kill off as many useless eaters as they can in Africa and they’ve been killing Africans for profit and sport for decades now, while also testing whatever toxic diseases they can think of on them so that they can screw them over with pharmaceutical vaccines and, of course, they tested AIDS on them and of course they test all their jungle warfare weapons on them too.

After awhile, depending on when they need access to whatever resources they intend to steal, from whatever country their professional thieves, lawyers, bean counters and Zionist overlords decide on, they jump right in and do what they do. They are joined at the hip with the IMF (Bride of Dracula Christine Lagarde country) and the most powerful Satanic family bloodline in the world, The Rothschilds. How bad are these last? The matron of the family once said if her sons didn’t want war there wouldn’t be any war. Familiar with war are you? War is when people get blown up into small pieces, women and children get gang-raped by two legged animals. Mass graves get filled with hundreds of bodies that were first tortured. All this takes place under orders from BANKERS. Bankers own the governments because they print the money. In any case, you are not dealing with human beings here. You are dealing with hollow shells inhabited by real demons. This is why and how they can do what they do and have no regrets, remorse, or twinge of conscience whatsoever. The nastier the enterprise, the more tumescent they get. The screams of the defenseless work upon their libido like Viagra.

These seemingly civilized men and women in expensive suits provide nothing of any value whatsoever. They are a plague upon existence. They don’t care who they hurt and they don’t care how many they hurt. I am incapable of finding an adjective that accurately describes them. The toxicity of a soul like Binliner WackoffYahoo, Skull Olmert, 9-11 Barack and the rest of these mass murdering crocodile swine, is as vile and poisonous as any poison or virus on the planet. There is no if and or but about these characters. For thousands of years these contemptible densities of darkness have been adding (life after life) to the black marks upon what might have once been their souls. They are so far past the boundaries of the ring pass not, of what composes anything human that it is only the costume they are wearing that conveys the impression that they are human. They ARE NOT human. Human beings do not behave as they do. These fiends just announced that their next assault on Gaza will be worse that the last one. Think about that. They intend to wipe The Palestinians from the face of the Earth because the Palestinians ARE the people that they are fraudulently pretending to be. The Palestinians are Semitic. They are not.

Take heart in the fact that everything going on these days is all part of an extended and complex demonstration of the good, the bad, the ugly and the beautiful. How are YOU carrying yourself in these times? WHAT are you up to? What do you say? What do you think? What do you do? What are you? The quality or lack of quality expressed in these actions defines you. Every moment of your life you are defining yourself. If you want to know what you are, look back the way you came and you will at least see what you thought you were. Look within and do it with the proper degree of intensity and perpetuating determination and you will see what you really are and there will be no concern about in what manner it gets expressed because it expresses itself without the need for thought or action, yet is bleeds through every single one.

I have screwed up any number of times. For a long while my judgment and level of self control were not what they should have been; in the ideal sense that is but… I have never stopped trying. I have never sugar coated my own behavior, in my own mind, so as to locate justification for anything. It is what it was but we are fluid creatures, unless we allow ourselves to become so stratified that change has become more difficult than we were capable of. That’s Curmudgeon Country. You don’t want to live there. Nothing has to be the way it is. Either we are stronger than our patterns or they are stronger than we are and that is singularly dependent on the degree to which we have surrendered to Material Nature.

The problem is that so many things passed off as spiritual behavior these days, are simply just another permutation of Material Nature. This can be determined by whether one operates according to self interest or not. Unless you have developed a sophisticated infrastructure of lies by which you have convinced yourself of what is not, in place of what is, you should be able to see through yourself. Self deprecation and humility are powerful tools. Don’t leave home without them.

If too much of your focus is outward it can’t help but impact on your inward view. Just because the mass of humanity is marching toward perdition does not mean you have to, nor does the mass create any kind of a measure for your own being. Simplicity is a killer app. It automatically engages as a continuing feature of an ‘uncluttered mind’, We’ve already discussed how you come into possession of one.

I am not here to tell you not to live in a city. I have no idea of the condition and direction of your personal Karma. There are countless tales of men in combat who moved completely unscathed through terrible circumstance, while everyone around them bought it. I will say that generally… generally, that is the location where the worst of what is coming will hit and you are remarkably dependent on the heat and other utilities; the trucks and trains that bring in the food and water. If you are resident in the pressure cooker of countless lives all compressed into a small space, the odds are… the odds are you had better be able to think on your feet.

It takes a very, very short period of time for formerly civilized, seemingly civilized people, to revert to ‘beast mode’. I submit that you will be stunned at the velocity at which this happens. For most people, the patina of civilization is very thin. It is a kind of Formica that is extremely heat sensitive. This laminated surface can burn off in no time and leave something truly terrifying. When it expresses itself in mob behavior well… good luck with that. I have been in several mob scenes and seen what happens. It ain’t pretty. You can forget reasoning with anyone. You have to go directly into toreador mode. There are things a person needs in times of great uncertainty and it is a certainty that you will experience the reality of whatever it is that you rely on so… make absolutely sure you trust whatever that is. You need both courage and restraint. These two have have a deep relationship with each other. Those who study the nature of desirable qualities, soon learn that there are all kinds of symbiotic relationships that exist between one quality and another. Raw courage is more of a liability than anything else if it isn’t tempered by other qualities.

My friends; Push and Shove are on the marquee and Howling Chaos is in the orchestra pit. Our job is and always has been to weave harmonics out of discord, to refine our Love to its most comprehensive and efficient expression and to understand that often enough, simple and sustained endurance is all you need. Before I go off on yet another tangent, let me go off altogether. Have a wonderful day!

End Transmission…….

Propaganda, Brainwashing, Playing Dumb to Avoid the Truth

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By Prof. Edward Curtin

Source: Global Research

“And we are all mortal” JFK – June 10, 1963 – American University

Not long after uttering those words in his startling and prophetic commencement address, President John F. Kennedy was publicly executed by terrorists operating from deep within the shadows of the secret state. A symbolic universe was shattered that day and a sense of fear and terror was unleashed into American society. The natural human fear of death was multiplied a thousand-fold as post-traumatic denial settled over the country and the Warren Commission released its fabrications fifty years ago this September 24th. (Did it win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction that year?)

That fear is the air we breathe today. We are choking on fear; trembling.

In a previous article,, I suggested that Americans are propagandized on two levels: culturally and politically. The elite work to scare and discombobulate regular people in various ways. Call it propaganda, brain-washing, mind-control, double-speak, etc. The result is to try and reduce people to muddled, frightened messes. These manipulative machinations generally work.

But there is a crucial flip side to this. Many, many people want to be deceived. They choose to play dumb, to avoid a confrontation with truth. They want to be nice (Latin, nescire, not to know, to be ignorant) and to be liked. They want to tuck themselves into a safe social and cultural framework where they imagine they will be safe. They choose to live in what Jean Paul Sartre called bad faith (mauvaise foi): He put it as follows:

“In bad faith it is from myself that I am hiding the truth.” But with this “lie” to myself, “the one to whom the lie is told and the one who lies are one and the same person, which means that I must know in my capacity as deceiver the truth which is hidden from me in my capacity as the one deceived.”

Such bad faith allows people to fabricate a second act of bad faith: that they are not responsible for their ignorance of the truths behind governments’ and corporate media’s lies and propaganda.

But why? Why this widespread flight from seeking truth? What is at the core of this denial?

For while the mainstream media does the bidding of the power elite, there is ample alternative news and analyses available on the internet from alternative sources. It doesn’t take a genius to learn how to research important issues and to learn how to distinguish between bogus and genuine information. It takes a bit of effort, and, more importantly, the desire to compare multiple opposing viewpoints and untangle the webs the Web weaves. We are awash in information and both good and bad reporting, but it is still available to the caring inquirer. The problem is the will to know. But why, why the refusal to investigate and question; why the indifference? Stupidity? Okay, there is that. Ignorance, there is that. Willful ignorance, ditto. But there are many very intelligent people who adamantly refuse to entertain alternative possibilities to the reigning orthodoxies.

I, as do many others, know many such people who will yes me to death and then never fully research issues. They will remain in limbo or else wink to themselves that what may be true couldn’t be true. They close down. Why? To take one example of sound, rational advice usually dismissed, last year Professor James Galbraith of the University of Texas at Austin wrote, concerning the JFK assassination – and without foreclosing the issue – that one could readily arrive at a fair conclusion by a slow, careful study, including close attention to sources and footnotes. But few dare to follow such advice for an event that is paradigmatic for so much that has followed. Why this lack of will? Why the excuses?

This is a great dilemma and frustration faced by those who seek to convince people to take an active part in understanding what is really going on in the world today, especially as the United States wages war across the globe and the Obama administration expands and modernizes its nuclear weapons capabilities.

I believe there is a way to simplify the seeming complexity of this issue without being simplistic.

I think the answer was given forty years ago by Ernest Becker in his 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning (non-fiction) masterpiece, The Denial of Death. In that book Becker wanted to simplify a great deal of “needless intellectual complexity” about why people behave as they do. He felt we were “choking on truth” as a result of a plethora of brilliant writing and discoveries. He wanted to get to the heart of the matter, to cut through verbosity while “the mind is silent as the world spins on its age-old demonic career.” He wanted to simplify without being simplistic.

His book is far from simplistic. It is deep and complicated. His conclusion, however, is simple.

It is the terror of death and the consequential denial of that reality that motivates so much human behavior. People kill out of this fear, they shrink from life and truth because of it, and they live in bad faith because of it. Born dying and knowing it, humans devise a thousand and one ways to shield themselves from this truth. And in the forefront of this great fear lie so many smaller “deaths.” Becker uncovers them all. The fear of ultimate death generates many children: the fear of disease and health obsessions, of terrorists, of the powerful, of standing up for oneself without experts, of speaking out, of being an individual, of disagreeing emphatically with government propaganda about major events, etc. The person powerfully motivated by death fear refuses to seek truth; it’s too overwhelming. Excuses are always at hand. Becker writes:

He accepts the cultural programming that turns his nose where he is supposed to look; he doesn’t bite the world off in one piece as a giant would, but in small manageable pieces, as a beaver does. He uses all kinds of techniques, which we call the ‘character defenses’: he learns not to expose himself, not to stand out; he learns to embed himself in other-power, both of concrete persons and of things and cultural commands; the result is that he comes to exist in the imagined infallibility of the world around him. He doesn’t have to have fears when his feet are solidly mired and his life mapped out in a ready-made maze. All he has to do is plunge ahead in a compulsive style of drivenness in the ‘ways of the world’ that the child learns and in which he lives later as a kind of grim equanimity – the ‘strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting’ – as (William) James put it. This is the deeper reason that Montaigne’s peasant isn’t troubled until the very end, when the Angel of Death, who has always been sitting on his shoulder, extends his wing. Or at least until he is startled into dumb awareness.

In The Denial of Death Becker distills all manner of exculpatory reasoning to its essence: fear. Fear of death leads to cowardly submission to unjust authority and untruth. The modern person, he writes, “is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing.” We need, he concludes, the creation of new heroisms that affirm life. Drawing on Soren Kierkegaard, he suggests that we need to become “knights of faith.” This is easier said than done. He doesn’t say how to do so because he doesn’t know how.

But there are people who do; who have. President John Kennedy was one of them, as James Douglass makes clear in his brilliant work, JFK and the Unspeakable.

“In his final months, the president spoke with his friends about his own death with a freedom and frequency that shocked them. Some found it abnormal. Senator George Smathers said, ‘I don’t know why it was, but death became kind of an obsession with Jack.’ Yet if one understood the pressures for war and Kennedy’s risks for peace, his awareness of his own death was realistic. He understood systemic power. He knew who his enemies were and what he was up against. He knew what he had to do, from the turn away from the Cold War in his American University address, to negotiating peace with Khrushchev and Castro and withdrawing troops from Vietnam. Conscious of the price of peace, he took the risk. Death did not surprise him.”

It is a rare person who will say with JFK, “I have no fear of death.” His favorite poem was, “Rendevous,” by Alan Seeger, whose first and last lines run as follows: “I have a rendezvous with Death….And to my pledged word am true, I shall not fail that rendezvous.” Jackie memorized it and would recite it back to him over the years. Five year old Caroline once surprised him in the Rose Garden during a meeting with the National Security Council by reciting by heart the poem to him and a stunned group of advisers. Kennedy was a rare and very courageous individual, one of Kierkegaard’s knights of faith. In his struggle against the forces of war and death, he adopted Lincoln’s prayer as his own which he kept on a slip of paper, “I know there is a God – and I see a storm coming. If he has a place for me, I believe that I am ready.”

Maybe those of us who flee from truth out of fear would do well to meditate on such a man’s courage. And on the cowards who killed him. And on the Warren Commission, accomplices after- the-fact who wrote the fictional account of his murder.

Ernest Becker told us the truth: fear of death is for cowards. But even cowards are responsible. There is no escaping that.