The Weird Politics Of Aspartame: Conspiracy Theory Or Startling Truth?

Posted on March 30, 2016 by Reid Mukai

050406aspartame3

By Paanii Powell Cleaver

Earlier this month, news wires and Twitter feeds were abuzz with info about the potential danger of certain artificial sweeteners.

Splenda Just Got a Lot Scarier—For Men https://t.co/gjO8VVdkCX pic.twitter.com/PgCsJFYDuD
— Stack Sports (@StackSports) March 16, 2016

In reality, recent reports about the potential perils of low-calorie sweeteners are not exactly breaking news. Almost 20 years ago, on December 29, 1996, Mike Wallace conducted an eye-opening segment about aspartame, also known as NutraSweet, on 60 Minutes.

The segment aired in response to a flurry of reports noting a dramatic increase in brain tumors and other serious health issues following the approval of aspartame for use in dry foods in 1981. Fifteen years after its somewhat dubious approval, (the most controversial FDA decision to date), more than 7,000 consumer reports of adverse reaction to aspartame had been delivered to the FDA. As reported by 60 Minutes, the litany of consumer complaints included severe headaches, dizziness, respiratory issues, and seizures. The FDA countered with a statement that aspartame was the most tested product in FDA history.

Dr. Virginia V. Weldon, a pediatrician from Missouri and Vice President of Public Policy for the Monsanto Company from 1989 through 1998, told 60 Minutes that aspartame is “one of the safest food ingredients ever approved by the Food and Drug Administration.”

Dr. John W. Olney, a neuroscientist at Washington University School of Medicine, vehemently disagreed with Dr. Weldon’s assessment of the controversial super sweetener. Notable for his discovery of the brain-harming effects of an amino acid called glutamate, Dr. Olney was influential in legislating the ban of MSG in baby food. At the time of the 60 Minutes segment, he had been studying the effects of aspartame and other compounds on brain health for more than two decades.

Olney told 60 Minutes’ Mike Wallace that since the approval of aspartame, there had been “a striking increase in the incidence of malignant brain tumors.” The doctor did not directly blame aspartame for the increase. He did, however, state that there was enough questionable evidence to merit reevaluating the chemical compound. He said that the FDA should reassess aspartame and that “this time around, they should do it right.”

Dr. Erik Millstone, Professor of Science Policy at the University of Sussex, told 60 Minutes that Searle’s testing procedures in the early 1970s were so flawed that there was no way to know for certain if aspartame was safe for human consumption. Millstone claimed that the company’s failure to dissect a test animal that died during an aspartame experiment was merely one example of “deficiencies” in Searle’s conduct. He also noted that when test mice presented with tumors, the tumors were “cut out and discarded and not reported.” In addition, Dr. Millstone told Mike Wallace that G.D. Searle and contractors hired by the drug company administered antibiotics to some test animals yet neglected to reveal this information in official reports.

In 1974, after the G.D. Searle company had already manufactured a significant quantity of aspartame, then-commissioner of the FDA, Alexander Schmidt, came very close to approving the chemical for human food purposes. Relying solely on evidence provided by Searle, the FDA allowed a mere 30 days for the public to respond before putting the FDA seal of approval on the now-controversial food additive. Dr. John Olney wasted no time in joining forces with James Turner, a public interest attorney who also worked with consumer advocate Ralph Nader. Just before the allotted time for public response ran out, Dr. Olney and his attorney petitioned the FDA with data that indicated the dangerous similarities between aspartame and glutamate.

In his 1970 best seller, The Chemical Feast, Turner detailed numerous ways the FDA shirked its obligation to protect the American people. At the time of its publication, Time magazine described the tome as “the most devastating critique of a U.S. government agency ever issued.”

In response to Dr. Olney’s allegations that aspartame was potentially as brain-damaging as glutamate, the FDA called for a task force to investigate the matter. By late 1975, the FDA found that Searle’s own research into the safety of aspartame was so flawed that they stayed the approval process, citing “a pattern of conduct which compromises the scientific integrity of the studies.”

Former U.S. Senator Howard Metzenbaum told 60 Minutes that when Searle presented information to the FDA in 1974, the drug company “willfully misrepresented” and omitted facts that may have halted approval of what would soon become its best-selling product. Metzenbaum went on to say that the FDA was so disturbed by its findings, it forwarded a file to the U.S. Attorney’s Chicago office in 1975 in the interest of calling a grand jury to determine whether criminal indictments against Searle were warranted.

When did the grand jury convene? Never. According to 60 Minutes, U.S. Attorney Samuel Skinner requested a grand jury investigation in 1977 but recused himself from the case when he was offered a job at the Sidley & Austin law firm, which also happened to be the Chicago law firm that represented the G.D. Searle company. The investigation was stalled until the statute of limitations ran its course, and no grand jury ever heard the case against Searle’s questionable research standards. Skinner, by the way, did eventually accept the job with Searle’s Chicago law office.

In 1977, a new FDA task force convened in Skokie, Illinois, with the sole purpose of investigating the research methods employed by G.D. Searle in its effort to gain FDA approval of aspartame. The task force examined raw data from 15 studies that Searle used to back up its uniformly positive claims about aspartame. According to journalist Andrew Cockburn, the task force noted numerous “falsifications and omissions” in Searle’s research reports.

In 1980, at the tail end of the Carter administration, the FDA conducted two-panel investigations into claims that aspartame caused brain tumors. Led by scientific and medical experts, each panel concluded that more tests were needed to prove the safety of the sweetener. Both panels concluded that aspartame should not be approved at that time.

So, how does the fellow in the cover picture figure into this equation?

If you do not recognize the face in the feature photo, here is a memory refresher: The man in the pic — and up to his ears in the aspartame controversy — is Donald Rumsfeld. Perhaps best known as Secretary of Defense during the George W. Bush presidency, Donald Rumsfeld also happened to be CEO of the G.D. Searle drug company when Ronald Reagan was sworn in as President of the United States on January 1981.

Regardless of its safety or potential peril, the fact remains that without the clout and political influence of Donald Rumsfeld, aspartame might never have been approved for human use at all.

Donald Rumsfeld, who at one time aspired to be Reagan’s running mate, was a member of the new president’s transition team. Part of the team’s duties involved the selection of a new FDA Commissioner. Rumsfeld et al chose a pharmacist with no experience in food additive science to lead the agency.

On January 21, 1981, Ronald Reagan’s first full day as president, the G.D. Searle company, headed by Donald Rumsfeld, reapplied for FDA approval of aspartame. That same day, in one of his first official acts, President Reagan issued an executive order that rescinded much of the FDA commissioner’s power.

In April 1981, newly appointed FDA commissioner Arthur Hayes Hull, Jr., put together a five-person panel tasked to reevaluate the agency’s 1975 decision to not approve aspartame as a food additive. At first, the panel voted 3-2 to uphold non-approval of the chemical sweetener. Hayes then invited another member to the official FDA panel, and the vote was retaken. The panel deadlocked, and Hayes contributed his own vote to break the tie. Two months later, the product that the FDA refused to approve for seven long years was suddenly approved for human consumption.

Four years later, in 1985, the Monsanto corporation bought G.D. Searle and established a separate division, The NutraSweet Company, to manage the sales and public relations of one of its best-selling and most profitable products. It may be worth noting that when Monsanto purchased Searle and the patent on aspartame, Donald Rumsfeld reportedly received a fat $12 million bonus.

Before reading this, how much did you know about the origins of aspartame? If you’re like most Americans, the answer is “not much.” And, if you’re like many Americans, your interest in a story such as this one will wane as soon as the next hot topic comes along. Perhaps this is the reason that there has been little if any public outcry regarding aspartame or the weird way that it received FDA approval.

Updates:

In 1987, UPI investigative journalist Gregory Gordon reported that Dr. Richard Wurtman, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a die-hard supporter of aspartame during its 1981 rush to approval, had reversed his thoughts on the sweetener. He noted the once-ardent supporter as saying his views had evolved along with scientific studies and his increased skepticism of industry research standards.

In 1997, the U.K. government obliged makers of sweetened food to prominently include the words “with sweeteners” on product labels. Ten years later, U.K. supermarket chain Mark & Spencer announced the end of artificial sweeteners and coloring in their chilled goods and bakery departments, according to the Daily Mail.

In his well received 2007 book, Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall and Catastrophic Legacy, author Andrew Cockburn described the results of the 1977 FDA task force that found “falsifications and omissions” in Searle’s research data. The New York Times called author Cockburn’s biographical tome “quite persuasive.”

In 2009, Woolworths, a South African retailer, announced that it would no long brand products containing aspartame.

On February 28, 2010, Dr. Arthur Hayes Hull, Jr., the FDA Commissioner who hurried aspartame to market and later squelched public fear of Tylenol during the 1982 poisoning scare, died in Connecticut. According to his New York Times obituary, Hayes was employed as president of E. M. Pharmaceuticals after his term at the FDA. Hayes succumbed to leukemia at age 76.

A 2011 report in the Huffington Post noted that 10,000 American consumers notified the FDA about the ill effects of aspartame between 1981 and 1995. According to the article, the use of aspartame elicited more complaints than any other product in history, comprising 75 percent of complaints received by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

In 2013, the EFSA (the British equivalent of the FDA), reiterated its claim that aspartame is harmless. Professor Erik Millstone responded with his own reevaluation of aspartame, in which he noted that every study the EFSA used to approve aspartame was funded by the same industry that manufactures and profits from the controversial sweetener.

Dr. John W. Olney passed away at the age of 83 on April 14, 2015. In addition to his campaigns against aspartame and glutamate, the doctor devoted half a century of his life to finding a cure for Multiple Sclerosis, the crippling neurological disease that claimed his own sister when she was 16. According to the St. Louis Post Dispatch, cause of death of the pioneering brain researcher included complications of ALS, a neurological disorder more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease.

Those interested in learning more about the approval of aspartame are invited to read the FDA Commissioner’s Final Report, published by the Department of Health and Human Services on July 24, 1981. A detailed version of the aspartame timeline is available at Rense.com.

The Control-Matrix is Crashing because the Truth-Seekers are Winning

Posted on March 27, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Phillip J. Watt

Source: The Mind Unleashed

The way the masses view the world is a farce. Every single mainstream perspective is either purposely deceptive, or completely misses the point. Even the people in places of influence who we’re meant to trust have either sold out, or are just plain ignorant to the facts. There’s no need to have a heavy heart though; the matrix of control is crashing because the truth-seekers are dealing heavy blows to the false narratives that have for too long shaped the collective mindset of humanity.

Of course the internet can be celebrated for being the primary mechanism which has amplified the sharing of information across location, race, culture and belief systems. In retrospect, the powers-that-will-no-longer-be would be kicking themselves for not trying harder to institute their insidious plan for humanity prior to the birth and growth of the world-wide-web.

Make no mistake though; they have been very successful on many fronts. For example, try to imagine a world where:

most journalists don’t report the real news;
the majority of doctors don’t truly understand the causes of poor health and how to legitimately resolve it;
a high proportion of politicians don’t know how the money supply works and what the agenda is of those who control it;
many so-called expert scientists ‘believe’ in a discredited philosophy which resembles a dogmatic religion;
the majority of teachers don’t realize they’re teaching a system of indoctrination that nowhere near gets close to the information and critical thinking that should be afforded our kids; and

the masses are not only ill-informed, divided and feverishly fighting against each other over small and irrelevant topics, but they’re also sleepwalking through one of the most majestic and reverent realities that could have ever been conceptualized.

Well, welcome to our world.

As we begin what we call the 21st Century, every system that should be designed to facilitate the health and vitality of the people has been hacked with lies, deception, dysfunction and disharmony. It’s easy to think that this is an embarrassment for our species because it’s beneath our intelligence and ethical capacity, yet there’s no need to lose faith in the inevitable betterment of humanity, including the way in which we organize and economize our societies.

Why? Because all of this dysfunction has been an effective driver of the collective awakening that is rising in the hearts and minds of humanity.

The inspiring fact is that more and more people are slowly waking up and realizing we all have the opportunity to come to our own, informed opinion on the truth, pertaining to both the spiritual and systemic realities. So many more people now understand the mainstream news is not to be taken seriously as its not where we can find information which is aligned with the deeper truths. They’re also acknowledging that we have the choice on what we decide to personally stand and fight for, as well as the legacy we leave for our children and our future generations.

Beware though; once we exit the matrix of control we’re faced with some serious challenges. We have a lot of inner work to do, such as designing a philosophy that ensures we’re at peace, as well as exercising patience in the quest to take back our liberties and design a legitimate and honorable future for humanity.

That’s why we’ve got to feel for those who have been long aware of the many dysfunctions of our world, especially those who have not learned peace and patience. Slowly they’ve watched:

the military-industrial-media-politico-banking complex increase their power and continue their pillage across the world;
pharmaceutical monopolies amplifying the drugging of society, as well as keeping many of us sick so that they maximize their profits;
movements rise up only to be vilified and disassembled, such as the Occupy Movement;
science turned into a corporate institution, as well as further hijacked by an inaccurate and small-minded philosophy of reality;
wars purposely created with millions of people dying for the whims of the shadow empire;
radical extremists massaged into proxy armies to do dirty work for the collapsing power structure;
air, medicine, food and water becoming purposely more toxic;
governmental policy increasingly being determined by corporate/elite interests;
police being militarized all around the globe;
the education model struggling to become less of an indoctrination system; and
the agenda of global governance becoming closer to fruition.

Some people have known about much of this for decades, so we should commend them for continuing to fight the good fight. They might have witnessed some disheartening developments, yet as much as all this sounds dire, they’ve also seen millions of people disengage from the propaganda narratives and align themselves with the systemic and spiritual pathways that will be the next stage of our evolution.

The point is that even though we need to be patient and persevere, we should recognize and celebrate the achievements that have been made so far. As I discussed in a previous article called “Whilst the Old System Crashes a New One is Being Built”, there are:

economists who want to transform the Keynesian model to legitimate alternatives;
teachers who understand the massive holes in the indoctrination system called public education;
scientists who want to evolve the way energy is created and shared;
health practitioners who see the limits of mechanistic and pharmacological medicine and the need for the reintroduction of natural and plant-based therapies;
journalists who demand that the media monopolies need to be disassembled;
environmentalists who want to transition the way food is grown and distributed;
community leaders who aim to reintegrate them to better support its members;
politicians who understand the democratic system has been hijacked by big money;
activists who campaign for revolutions in our value systems; and
futurists who want to change the systemic template for our societal health and well-being.

There are many beautiful souls who are leading the charge by attempting to redesign our society back into alignment with the natural laws of our universe. We should be one of them, regardless of which way we personally decide to contribute.

To do that, we all need to be super clear within ourselves what we believe and what we want to change. There are many ways to do it too, so finding our passions and strengths is critical to playing our own small part in the shift.

It is simply no longer acceptable to keep our heads in the sand; either we’re a minion of the system or we’re not. Of course its difficult to completely disconnect from the way resources flow through the control channels, yet that needn’t stop us from talking about it, sharing information online and somehow contributing, no matter how small, to local and global movements which aim to transition humanity into the new paradigm of abundance.

After all, the truth is what it is, and it is exposing itself to the world by powerfully flowing through all of us.

Ultimately, we needn’t wait for the zombie apocalypse because its already arrived. Most people are good people, yet the masses have been brainwashed into thinking in ways that are absolutely nowhere near aligned to the truth. They might be sleepwalking through a time where the tipping point for the conscious society builds, but that doesn’t mean they’re not salvageable. That’s why we all have a responsibility to help facilitate waking up the collective so that together we’re more empowered and informed to really bring about a future of justice and honor that we can all be proud of.

To do so, let me give you some advice. Don’t get frustrated, don’t be rude, don’t belittle, don’t condemn. We all had to wake up at one stage so its hypocritical if we are. Instead, be calm, be cool, be real, be articulate. Know the information that you advocate like the back of your hand. If we want to be successful in helping others to face the delusions then we need to ensure their defense mechanisms aren’t raised so they’re more likely to be open and receptive to embrace the truth.

And one more thing; hang in there guys and be patient, we’ve still got a long, arduous way to go but we know all the effort will be worth every second.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Phillip J. Watt lives in Australia. His written work deals with topics from ideology to society, as well as self-development. Follow him on Facebook or visit his website.

Mother Earth May Have Good Reason to Slaughter Us

Posted on March 9, 2016 by Reid Mukai

jing-jang-yin-yang-planet-hd-high-definition-fullscreen

By Jack Balkwill

Source: Dissident Voice

Decades ago James Lovelock constructed a principle called the Gaia hypothesis, contending that a biosphere teeming with life works together with inorganic matter to self-regulate conditions for maintaining a livable planet.

The oxygen levels in our air are maintained, and the salinity of the seas – everything that’s needed to keep conditions within the zones which nurture life on the planet. This is a theory embraced by many deep environmentalists because it offers hope for the future of life forms on the planet.

When one creature (such as man) gets to be so out of control that it threatens the other life forms, Gaia, or Mother Earth, pushes back toward a healthy balance, according to some theorists (the Gaia principle has many variations).

In the ancient Greek religion, before Zeus was king of the gods in the classical period, or Zeus’ father Cronus was king of the gods, or Cronus’ father Uranus was king of the gods, there was Gaia, the earth mother, who created the heavens, the various gods, and man. Gaia regulated the growing of crops, healed the sick, and was the earth itself to her followers.

Many of the most ancient religions around the world had as their chief deity a female, and my guess is because they reasoned that since it is the female who gives birth, a creator must be female.

The universe within us

Each of us humans is a microcosm of the Gaia principle. Within us, we have about a hundred trillion unique creatures which do not share our DNA. Cells containing our DNA only number about ten trillion, so they are vastly outnumbered. The microbes within us are in many forms — bacteria, fungi, archaea and viruses.

When our microbes are out of balance, it can be life-threatening, so a major function of our immune system is to regulate them, to keep one species from over reproducing, just as, in the Gaia theory, life forms are regulated within the massive biosphere.

If, for example, Candida reproduces to a high level, our immune system will try to destroy enough of it to get back to a balance. Candida at normal levels may actually be beneficial, and is thought to attack some harmful invaders. At extreme levels of overgrowth Candida may become deadly to us.

Most of the life forms within us are friendly, and we would die without them. They have a great many functions, working together to keep us alive. In the end, if we die, they no longer have a home.

And most of the life forms outside of us are also beneficial, aiding Mother Nature in maintaining a delicate balance.

Symbioses

Oak trees have dropped their heavy acorns for millions of years, right beside their trunks. In such a place, the acorn has little chance of growing with no sunlight under the canopy of mother tree. But squirrels are happy to carry the acorns away from the tree to bury them in case they are needed for food during an extreme winter. The squirrels don’t eat all of what they bury most years, giving the oak an opportunity to spread its genetic material.

In return the oak provides a home for the squirrel, which builds nests in oak trees and eats the acorns. There are interactions between species all over the planet with which we are not yet familiar, but it is clear that species depend on one another for survival, just as the microbes within us are maintained in a balance that sustains life.

A flower may provide pollen to the bee, and in return the bee pollinates other flowers, benefiting both species.

But sometimes man gets in the way

Who would think a massive animal like a moose would rely on the lowly beaver for its well being? When beaver hats were a popular fad, beaver were killed off in such large numbers that moose began to starve. One of the favorite foods of moose is the shoots growing in wetlands, and without beavers to dam streams creating wetlands, moose began to go hungry and started feeding on tree bark, killing trees.

Of course, it was inadvertent that a fad of humans started killing off moose. But we’ve done such things throughout our history and have more control over nature than we realize.

When sperm whales were slaughtered to near extinction, giant squid began to rise up to the surface in the oceans, no longer having to fear their primary enemy, the sperm whales that fed upon them. Giant squid previously stayed in deep parts of the ocean to avoid sperm whales. We have no idea what happens in the long term when a creature like the giant squid, with a ravenous appetite, begins feeding in a part of the biosphere from which it was banned for millions of years, but certainly it must upset the food chain.

It is thought that some animals, such as mammoths, became extinct at the hand of man. Such creatures disappeared in North America about the time it was populated by humans.

Whether directly or indirectly, we are responsible for the extinction of a great many species.

Intelligence, whatever that is

Many people seem to think that humans are somehow superior creatures. We have a formula for determining intelligence which predicts that a species is intelligent when its brain is large enough to take care of all of the functions of its body, with something left over. That something left over is intelligence. So it’s largely brain size in proportion to body size that suggests degrees of intelligence.

There is an old belief that elephants have a pea brain, but it is not true. An elephant has a large brain, but needs most of it for maintaining its massive bodily functions, so what’s left over may not be great intelligence, but the elephant is certainly an intelligent animal.

The cetaceans, the large toothed whales, all have brains larger than human brains. Some scientists have speculated that they may be more intelligent than humans.

When people say, “But cetaceans haven’t invented nuclear weapons,” they are showing, perhaps, a flaw in the human being, not a comparative virtue.

Those who support the theory that cetaceans are more intelligent theorize that they may understand that being more in harmony with nature is the intelligent thing to do for long term survival, rather than making automobiles which pollute the planet and the many other destructive things humans do.

At any rate the other creatures appear to help maintain the balance of life within the biosphere, interrelating in complex ways, while humans have reproduced out of control, crowding out other life forms, taking more than our share of resources, and polluting the planet.

So another way to look at the Gaia theory is to describe it as a kind of immune system for the biosphere. When it has an organism that is overpopulating and causing other organisms to die, that organism must be regulated, just as for a Candida overgrowth or cancer within a human.

The traditional way that Mother Nature has regulated the human population is with disease. It worked well up to the twentieth century, when humans began to poison their drinking water with chlorine or other agents to kill off water-borne diseases, which had previously wiped out the populations of entire cities.

Will humans be brought under control by Mother Nature?

In the 1970’s there was a movement to reduce the human population, quite popular with many. I donated to that cause, and was surprised to see it vanish. I suspected that it was killed by the capitalists, who have a vision that the population must continue to grow for there to be more consumers, hence, more profit. Capitalists insist that “growth” continue without considering finite limits consistent with the size of the planet.

So how will Gaia maintain the delicate balance with the human organism out of control? She might introduce a new disease for which we have no antidote. It was the first thing I thought of when the AIDS epidemic began decades ago. A perfect killer, to destroy the immune function, allowing almost anything to then kill the host. But mankind seems to now have that disease under control.

Or Mother Nature might allow us to commit suicide by climate change from our nasty habit of spewing carbon emissions, and other anti-environmental things we are doing in destroying our little blue planet. We are releasing massive toxins into the environment in the form of dioxins from paper and plastic making, radiation from nuclear power plants and bomb making, insecticides, herbicides, and other dangerous chemicals.

A recent report by The World Economic Forum and Ellen MacArthur Foundation stated that at the current rate, the weight of plastic in the oceans will exceed the weight of the fish. When I heard this a few weeks ago I posted on Facebook, “The epitaph for human beings will read ‘they thought they were an intelligent species.’”

As an old man I take heart that young people seem to be far more aware of the degradation of the planet’s environment, giving me hope that they will find a solution and assist Mother Gaia in her quest for purification and renewal.

The alternative is to leave her no choice but to see us as a cancer that must be eliminated for the good of the whole.

Jack Balkwill is an activist in Virginia. He can be reached at libertyuv@hotmail.com Read other articles by Jack.

There’s an Awakening Happening and You’re a Part of It (with Gregg Braden)

Posted on February 28, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Phillip J. Watt

Source: The Mind Unleashed

Society is slowly evolving into a collective consciousness that has disengaged from the false narratives that have been manipulated into official ‘truths’ for humanity. That’s right, if you don’t know yet; we’ve all been deceived in many ways and we all have a responsibility to do our research and play our small part to help out our fellow man and our future generations.

The good news is that individuals are unplugging from this matrix of delusion at an ever-increasing rate, which is fueling a tipping point for basically the whole world to awaken in a domino-like effect. This global awakening has been a long time in the making and is characterized by two equally important parts.

The first is that we all need to come together to facilitate the social changes we desperately need as a uniting global culture. We have made some great progress and shown some genius qualities to get to where we are today; however the tragic reality is that our collective and environmental health is suffering on a wide-spread scale.

There are epidemics of dysfunctional, disharmonious and destructive realities which have resulted from not just the shadow government that runs our world, but also the fact that we continue to ‘choose’ to organize, collaborate and act on a global scale in the manner that we’ve been provided. For a straightforward introduction to these issues, 11 Toxic Realities Society is Finally Waking Up About is a must read.

The second is a philosophical shift which understands that consciousness, not matter, is the core component of our interconnected reality. Individuals and even entire cultures and traditions have known this for centuries; however for the first time in our known history this is being embraced on a planetary scale.

Given that science has now taken the lead for how humanity views the world, we should expect it to be an unbiased and progressive description of it. The harsh truth though is that science has been hijacked by a false philosophy of reality called materialism, so it has not ethically done its job of bringing this spiritual ‘truth’ into the mainstream mindset.

The fields of quantum physics, psychology and parapsychology have conclusively shown why we need to move to a post-materialist era of human consensus. Scientists and laymen alike are awakening to this fact through not just the art of science, but also the art of experience. Simply, with the right type of perspective, we can open our minds and hearts to the symbolism that exists in our day to day experience, as well as the subtle and explicit synchronicities that occur throughout our lives.

Time for Reflection

Can you feel the momentum building for the conscious society? One in which the masses have awoken to both the spiritual and systemic revolution that is required for humanity’s evolution?

You’d have to be deep in the matrix if you can’t sense it. Yet, even if you are, look within yourself and feel the changes that have been happening in your own life. They are a reflection of what’s happening outside of you; the energy of our era is propelling us towards the inevitable moment when the people take back the power to organize their lives in a way which is actually conducive to their physical, mental, emotional, intellectual and spiritual health, as well as their life vitality.

Beware though; we need to be patient. This is a spiritual process which has been happening for all of eternity.

So, given we’re all a part of this process, you need to ask yourself: “How awake am I?”:

Are your beliefs about the world continuing to be shaped by the matrix-media, or have you accepted that the mainstream channels are limiting your potential in mind and heart?
Do you realize yet that the materialist paradigm is a shallow, dogmatic and inaccurate conception of existence?
What about the fact that our world is run by a shadow order in which the banking sector, along with the media, are their primary control mechanisms?
Do you see that the political framework has been hijacked by big money and big business?
Is it obvious that the wars that our families have been thrown into are part of the agenda of the military-industrial-media-politico-banking complex?
Is the corporate monopolization of our resources obvious to you?
Have you locked it in that the pharmaceutical giants want customers, not cures?
Are you conscious that our food, medicine, water and air is becoming more toxic?
Does the way that we treat our fellow sentient beings through the animal-agriculture industry disgust you?
Do you acknowledge that so-called experts are less hit than miss, including journalists, doctors, politicians, scientists, academics and gurus?

I mean shit, this stuff is clear as day once you’ve been shaken from your slumber. The entire official narrative on life makes those who see right through it feel like they’re living in crazy town. Really, it’s so embrassing for our species that I feel like at any stage now our so-called leaders are going to come out and say “Haha, got ya’s, it was just a joke”.

But it’s not; this is as real as fuck. There’s no need to be afraid though; there’s plenty of amazing people who have designed the progressive and honorable ways forward for humanity.

So, in that light, let’s look forward:

Have you been able to accept that there are radically different ways in which we can organize and economize our societies, so that everyone benefits?
Is it clear to you that your human and animal families deserve justice?
Are you living a life which connects you to the deeper truths of your spiritual nature?
Do you recognize the real values of life such as connection, community, compassion and creativity?
Are you tapped into the real reflections of self-worth such as love, honor, truth, authenticity and giving back to those around you?
Have you compelled yourself to think and act beyond your own personal bubble?

Let’s hope so, but it’s understandable if not, because it is bloody challenging. We live in a world characterized by both positive and negative energy, so unfortunately many people get lost in the victim mentality. If that’s you, I’ll give you a tip; embrace and respect both sides of the duality and contextualize it into the oneness that permeates our entire existence.

Final Thoughts

Ultimately, the truth remains that we’re in a particularly dark part of the macro-cycle right now which is why the mainstream reality is full of fraud, lies, deception, deceit, hypocrisy and treachery. But, it’s moving fast, it’s changing fast, and so should we.

Seriously, you should stand up and be counted as a genuine agent in the transformation of our collective mindscape so that we can make the process of weeding out the social dysfunctions and systemic oppressors as effective and efficient as we can.

Simply, it’s all of our responsibility. Own it.

For a short and sharp account of the ‘choice point’ that humanity is faced with, watch this interview by The Conscious Society Youtube Channel with the renowned Gregg Braden. And for follow up research, there are many articles linked below too.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Phillip J. Watt lives in Australia. He best identifies as a writer, guide and truthseeker. His written work deals with topics from ideology to society, as well as self-development. Follow him on Facebook or visit his website.

FURTHER READING

http://themindunleashed.org/2015/08/we-are-the-people-weve-been-waiting-for.html

http://themindunleashed.org/2015/08/this-is-how-to-create-true-freedom-for-humanity.html

http://themindunleashed.org/2015/07/why-after-a-decade-of-education-are-our-kids-so-uneducated.html

http://themindunleashed.org/2016/01/how-to-say-no-to-war-with-ken-okeefe-2.html

http://themindunleashed.org/2016/01/12-methods-to-unplug-from-the-matrix.html

http://themindunleashed.org/2015/12/information-that-society-needs-to-wake-the-fuk-up.html

http://themindunleashed.org/2015/12/the-problems-and-solutions-missed-by-the-paris-climate-change-conference.html

http://themindunleashed.org/2015/09/the-dirty-secret-about-money-that-is-finally-being-exposed-to-the-masses.html

http://themindunleashed.org/2015/09/what-the-fuk-is-going-on-with-the-world.html

http://themindunleashed.org/2015/07/how-to-reconnect-with-nature-supply-our-own-resources-and-rebuild-local-communities.html

Zika: Why Biotech is Imperative to National Security

Posted on February 12, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Ulson Gunnar

Source: New Eastern Outlook

When we think of national security, we think of tanks, jets, missile defense systems and more recently, information space. But what about the realm of the microscopic, the biological or the genetic?

Whether you think biotechnology, genetics and microbes constitute another plane upon the modern battlefield or not is irrelevant. Someone else already does, and they have a head start on the rest of the world.

Genotype Specific Bioweapons

The Project for a New American Century or PNAC for short, penned a particularly unhinged policy paper in 2000 titled, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century.”

In it, among many other things, it specifically writes:

Although it may take several decades for the process of transformation to unfold, in time, the art of warfare on air, land, and sea will be vastly different than it is today, and “combat” likely will take place in new dimensions: in space, “cyber-space,” and perhaps the world of microbes.

…advanced forms of biological warfare that can “target” specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.

Advanced forms of biological warfare that can “target” specific genotypes sound like the stuff of science fiction, and even if it were developed, it would be by the “bad guys,” right?

Wrong. As a matter of fact, the Western-backed apartheid government in South Africa in the 1980’s under Project Coast, attempted to create genotype specific bioweapons aimed at sterilizing the nation’s black women. PBS Frontline’s article, “What Happened in South Africa?” would recount:

In 1998 South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission held hearings investigating activities of the apartheid-era government. Toward the end of the hearings, the Commission looked into the apartheid regime’s Chemical and Biological Warfare (CBW) program and allegations that it developed a sterility vaccine to use on black South Africans, employed toxic and chemical poison weapons for political asssassination, and in the late 1970s provided anthrax and cholera to Rhodesian troops for use against guerrilla rebels in their war to overthrow Rhodesia’s white minority rule.

While South Africa’s entire CBW program was abhorrent, what is particularly frightening is the use of South Africa’s national vaccination program as a vector for infecting black women with viruses meant to sterilize them. Now that vaccination programs are being pushed globally, there lies the danger that such weapons could be used against entire regions of the planet.

PBS would elaborate further on the CBW program, stating that the South African government:

Developed lethal chemical and biological weapons that targeted ANC [African National Congress] political leaders and their supporters as well as populations living in the black townships. These weapons included an infertility toxin to secretly sterilize the black population; skin-absorbing poisons that could be applied to the clothing of targets; and poison concealed in products such as chocolates and cigarettes.

PNAC’s dream of genotype specific bioweapons then, is not some far-off science fiction future, it is something that has been pursued in earnest for decades, and apparently by interests aligned to the West, not enemies of it.

Zika and GM Mosquitoes

Though it is so far impossible to confirm a link between the two, it is troubling nonetheless to see the mosquito-transmitted Zika virus spreading in Brazil precisely from where GM (genetically modified) mosquitoes were released several years ago.

A 2012 entry in Nature titled, “Brazil tests GM mosquitoes to fight Dengue,” would report:

Scientists in Brazil say an experiment to reduce populations of the dengue-carrying Aedes aegyptimosquito, by releasing millions of genetically modified (GM) insects into the wild, is working.

More than ten million modified male mosquitoes were released in the city of Juazeiro, a city of 288,000 people, over a period of time starting a year ago.

The US CDC (Center for Disease Control) would report that Zika virus cases in northeast Brazil were first officially recognized in early 2015, with international hysteria finally reached early this year. The cases seem most concentrated in the Brazilian state of Pernambuco, upon the borders of which the city of Juazeiro lies.

What could have happened between 2011 and 2016 that might have led to this development? Could the GM mosquitoes designed to stamp out dengue have mutated in some unpredictable way? And could this experiment have caused the Zika virus itself to mutate in an unpredictable way? It already has mutated once, allowing it to spread among humans more prolifically.

Or what if GM mosquitoes supposedly meant to wipe out dengue were serving as a vector for something else entirely? We can only imagine the sort of stories, excuses and feigned ignorance the South African government would have conjured had its genotype specific bioweapons worked, and black women began turning up sterilized in huge numbers after receiving their “vaccines.”

Mosquitoes as a Vaccine Vector

Using mosquitoes as a vector to deliver engineered genetic material to humans as a sort of involuntary, inescapable “vaccine” is already a reality. The London Telegraph in its article, “Genetically modified mosquitos could be used to spread vaccine for malaria,” reported in 2010 that:

Experts believe “flying vaccinators” could eventually be a radical new way of tackling malaria.

The new approach targets the salivary gland of the Anopheles mosquito.

Scientists in Japan have engineered an insect producing a natural vaccine protein in its saliva which is injected into the bloodstream when it bites.

The “prototype” mosquito carries a vaccine against Leishmania, another potentially fatal parasite disease spread by sand flies.

And if mosquitoes can naturally deliver viruses, and scientists can alter what mosquitoes carry and infect hosts with, it is possible to engineer viruses to deliver virtually anything into targeted populations much in the same way viruses are re-engineered into vectors in labs today through a process called gene therapy. In the wrong hands, this technology and these techniques could become terrifying weapons.

For those in the middle of the Zika virus hysteria, perhaps it already has.

How Could They? Why Would They?

To answer “how could they possibly do something so diabolical?” we need only think back to 2003 and recall how the United States intentionally lied to the world, then between its initial invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq, killed upward to a million people. This includes several thousand of its own soldiers and civilians, many of whom it appears were killed by militants armed and funneled into the country by the United States’ closest regional allies, with the US’ resolute backing.

To answer “why” American and European special interests seek to render any particular population sick, weak and they and/or their offspring incapable of perpetuating a viable civilization, PNAC itself sums it up quite clearly:

The United States is the world’s only superpower, combining preeminent military power, global technological leadership, and the world’s largest economy. Moreover, America stands at the head of a system of alliances which includes the world’s other leading democratic powers. At present the United States faces no global rival. America’s grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageous position as far into the future as possible.

A population racked with birth defects, diminishing health and IQs and a lack of physical vitality constitutes the enemy every hegemon throughout history has dreamt of facing both on the battlefield and upon the grand chessboard of geopolitics.

Whether the Zika outbreak is linked to some insidious biowarefare program, an experiment gone wrong or simply the forces of nature, it showcases the danger biology can pose and reminds us of what greater dangers may yet await us if we do not properly prepare and protect ourselves.

Domestic Biotech is Imperative to National Defense

It has been almost painful to watch the rest of the world attempt to catch up to the United States and Europe in the information war. For decades the West dominated information warfare without contest.

Only now have nations like Russia, China, Iran and others finally caught up and in some cases exceeded Western capabilities. Only now are nations finally investing seriously in information and cyber warfare capabilities. Only now does it seem that nations realize the folly of depending on others for both information, and information technology.

Russia recently decided to switch to local computer processor manufacturers to run on all computers used for official business. This is because foreign corporations making processors imported into the Russian Federation had been apparently compromised on the factory floor with the cooperation of these foreign corporations by US intelligence agencies.

We can easily imagine the danger of having US intelligence agencies getting into Russia’s IT infrastructure through these backdoor passes. It doesn’t take much imagination to think about the trouble US intelligence agencies could cause if they could get inside Russia’s human, natural and agricultural genomes.

Developing a viable domestic biotech industry is not only a matter of economic prosperity, but clearly also a matter of vital national security. Foreign corporations should no better be able to access a nation’s “genetic code and files” than it can its computer code and files. After all, genetic information is not entirely unlike digital information.
Brazil and other nations that have invited foreign biotech corporations to meddle with their human, natural and agricultural genomes are likened to those nations who hand their vital infrastructure over to foreign interests only to find out through Wikileaks years later the sort of invasive spying, abuses and other means of self-serving treachery this access has been exploited for.

Let’s not wait for Wikileaks to tell us 10 years from now just how bad the nations of the world had been infiltrated and exploited through biotechnology before we recognize this industry as absolutely vital to national security and begin investing in it domestically, rather than outsourcing it overseas.

Ulson Gunnar, a New York-based geopolitical analyst and writer especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Related Video:

Forget Techno-Optimism: We Can’t Innovate Our Way Out of Inequality

Posted on February 10, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Chris Lehmann

Source: In These Times

Toward the end of his 250-page hymn to digital-age innovation, The Industries of the Future, Alec Ross pauses to offer a rare cautionary note. Silicon Valley may have incubated all the wonders and conveniences one can imagine—and oh, so many more! But for the international business elites looking to remake their emerging market economies in the Valley’s gleaming, khaki-clad image, there’s some bad news: It can no longer be done. A “decades-long head start” has granted too great a competitive advantage to the charmed peninsula along the Northern California coast.

Not to worry, though! On-the-make tech globalists can still make a go of it, provided they’re prepared to embrace “specific cultural and labor market characteristics that can contradict both a society’s norms and the more controlling impulses of government leaders.”

Stripped of the vague and glowing techno-babble, this is a prescription for good old-fashioned neoliberal market discipline. Everywhere Ross looks across the radically transformed world of digital commerce, the benign logic of market triumphalism wins the day. When Terry Gou—the Taiwanese CEO of Foxconn, the vast Chinese electronics sweatshop that doubles as an incubator for worker suicides—plans to eliminate the headache of supervising an unstable human workforce by replacing it with “the first fully automated plant” in manufacturing history, why, he’s simply “responding to pure market forces”: i.e., an increase in Chinese wages that cuts into Foxconn’s ridiculously broad profit margins. And you and I might see the so-called sharing economy as a means to casualize service workers into nonunion, benefit-free gigs that transfer economic value on a massive scale to a rentier class of Silicon Valley app marketers. But bouncy New Economy cheerleaders like Ross see “a way of making a market out of anything, and a microentrepreneur out of anyone.”

When confronted with the spiraling of income inequality in the digital age, Ross, like countless other prophets of better living through software, sagely counsels that “rapid progress often comes with greater instability.” Sure, the “wealthy generally benefit over the short term,” but remember, kids: “Innovations have the potential to become cheaper over time and spread throughout the greater population.”

Ross first stormed into political prominence as an architect of Barack Obama’s “technology and innovation plan” during his 2008 presidential campaign, and he has spent four years captaining his own charmed, closed circle of tech triumphalism as the White House’s “senior advisor for innovation” under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. This renders The Industries of the Future something more than another breathless, Tom Friedman-style tour of the wonderments being hatched in startups, trade confabs and gadget factories. Ross’ book is also a tech-policy playbook for the likely Democratic presidential nominee, who has spared no effort in soliciting the policy input—and landing the campaign donations—of the Silicon Valley mogul set. As such, it should give any Hillary-curious supporter of economic justice considerable pause.

To be sure, Ross raises some vague concerns about how, for example, the runaway growth of the sharing economy drains workers of job security, healthcare benefits, pensions and the like. He avers that “as the sharing economy grows … the safety net needs to grow with it,” but, much like his politically savvy boss, he offers nothing in the way of policy specifics besides the inarguable yet unactionable truism that if the sharing economy “generates enormous amounts of wealth for the platform owners, then the platform owners can and should help pay for added costs to society.”

The larger point for Ross, in any event, is that the innovative megafirms of tomorrow will come to spontaneously serve the public good. Not to mention that many IPO investors “are pension funds,” Ross coos, which “manage the retirement funds for people in the working class like teachers, police officers, and other civil servants.” Never mind, of course, that the neoliberal logic of the Uber model means that we’re creating a workforce that’s unlikely ever to come within shouting distance of a pension benefit again.

This kind of terminal Silicon Valley myopia also accounts for the vast economic and political blindspots that continually undermine Ross’ relentlessly chipper TED patter. To take just one instructive instance, in a book that devotes considerable real estate to the innovations of “fintech” (the streamlining of global digital currency exchanges and investment transactions) nowhere does the author acknowledge the pivotal role that tech-savvy Wall Street analysts—the “quants” as they’re known in Street argot—played in stoking the early-aughts housing bubble that led to the near-meltdown of the global economy.

That’s because it’s an axiomatic faith for this brand of techno-prophecy that innovation can never actually make anything worse—in just the same fashion that the quants were insisting, right up until the end, that there could never be a downturn in the national housing market. If this is the kind of wisdom Hillary Clinton relied on to promote her global innovation agenda at the State Department, one shudders to think of how it might run riot through the White House come next January.

Related Video:

Leviathan and Behemoth

Posted on January 20, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Chris Shaw

Source: Center for a Stateless Society

Introduction

The capitalist economy has gone through another shock, and the potential for another, larger one is on the horizon. While it’s seemingly in its death throes, capitalism continues to fuel growth. Under such a system we have seen a vast improvement in general living standards across the globe, despite rigged markets and the omnipresent power of the state. However, who is this growth for? While absolute poverty has been rolled back, and in many Western nations completely eliminated, we still see a large, indebted underclass, a Global South regularly sold out to the interests of capital and a system of vast wealth that only seems accessible to a privileged few. Economists may say that if we look at BRIC countries we see an equalisation of wealth and growth with the West, but these BRIC markets are used as cogs in a hegemonic state-corporate machine. Third World entrepreneurship isn’t encouraged, but rather sidelined for corporate dominance. This is a system that needs to end. The debt economy, big government, the corporate-state partnership and modern globalisation all need to end. In their place we need truly free markets, where cooperation and exchange are paramount and aren’t controlled by corporate or government interests.

Our neoliberal society is composed of corporate hegemony backed by state power. By corporate hegemony I mean the power modern capital has over governance. This isn’t just found within corporations, but within guild-like occupational boards (Lawyers and Doctors and their licencing requirements) and corporate trade unions that support the maintenance of wage labour at the expense of worker independence from the structure of capital. Any markets we see are rigged in favour of corporate interests. The major monopolies of government control make sure that markets are a tool of big business and the ability of workers to break free from this paradigm is limited if not impossible. The entry barriers to markets, the restrictions on self-employment and the continued lobbying of government for patronage and favourable legislation leads to a corrupt, crony system that relies on the indenture of the poor in favour of employers and business.

There are many libertarians who unfortunately see this system as just and fair. They see sweatshop labour as an excellent solution to Third World poverty. The idea of growth is given religious prescience, without realising cultural antecedents and the importance of community within the realm of the individual. They don’t understand the power dynamics at play, and the continued collusion of corporate and state interests. They fail to see the monopolisation of social institutions and the commodification of culture and life. The destruction of livelihoods all in the name of GDP growth. This is not a free market, but rather capitalism at work. To move away from this we need to understand that free, or freed, markets are economic organisations free from coercive control, where the individual and community are the key players and profit is not reliant on its exploitative features, but rather the ability to meet real demand.

We need to look at the current capitalist system from the anarchist perspective that I put forward in this paper. Modern capitalism is a state-based system, reliant on enforced hierarchies and the provision of false choice. Real choice would confer power on individuals and communities, while under today’s system real choice is in the hands of bureaucrats and corporate oligarchies. Chartier’s definitions of capitalism, “capitalism: an economic system that features a symbiotic relationship between big business and government”[1] and “capitalism: rule—of workplaces, society, and (if there is one) the state—by capitalists (that is, by a relatively small number of people who control investable wealth and the means of production)”[2] shines light on this conception. Rather than capitalism being a system of free markets as posited by some libertarians (Block, Mises, Hayek, etc.) it is instead a system reliant on big government and its institutions and the control of said institutions via capital.

The vulgar libertarians who view the capitalist economy as some form of free market do not understand the forms of power present. If a worker wants to start a collectively-owned business, can he? Not without huge capital requirements and regulatory hoops to jump through. How about setting up a mutual credit system with a different currency? Well there are legal tender laws that in the United State are enforced with more brutality than the punishments given for heinous crimes[3]. When talking of free markets, we need to understand that freedom is only relative to where the power lies. If it lies with the state and its subsidiaries, then freedom is conferred on large employers and corporate unions whom receive forms of state funding and favourable regulation. If it lay with individuals and communities, we would most likely see a move away from one-size-fits-all regulation, the processes of commodification through rentierism and arbitrary entry barriers.

The Regulatory Apparatus

The regulatory apparatuses found within the economy also benefit the capitalist structure. While generally seen as a bulwark against corporate power, the regulations found in an economy create entry barriers to markets and a form of implicit subsidy to big business, as these businesses rent-seek government for more regulation, allowing for a monopoly within particular economic sectors. We can see in the banking, energy, manufacturing and retail sectors that this is the case. Childs noted this in relation to the development of monopoly power in American business during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He states “this, then, was the basic context of big business; these were the problems that it faced. How did it react? Almost unanimously, it turned to the power of the state to get what it could not get by voluntary means”[4]. In particular Childs saw this occurring in the rail industry in America during the late 19th century. Massive competition had begun in the rail industry, which massively sunk profits for established companies and encouraged many start ups and smaller competitors. As large rail companies weren’t competitive enough in this environment, they came to rely on government intervention, where regulatory boards were created staffed mostly by executives from the large rail companies.

This is what regulation is really about. It isn’t a way of protecting the hapless consumer from the ravages of a free market, but is rather a tool of corporate power that forms entry barriers and enforces particular dichotomies of ownership and organisation in an economy. Capitalism becomes a system of patronage, where corporations gain favour due to their money and power, which itself comes from the state in the first place. As Paul notes “the rich are more than happy to secure for themselves a share of the loot – for example, in the form of subsidised low-interest loans…bailouts when their risky loans go sour, or regulatory schemes that hurt their smaller competitors”[5]. Rifkin shows a similar process, describing how “the critical industries that made up the infrastructure…banded together in a mega lobby to ensure…financial underwriting, as well as industry-friendly codes, regulations, and standards to ensure market success”[6].

The regulatory apparatuses also have the effect of distorting economies of scale, decoupling supply from demand and favouring largesse in business and ownership models. Thus we see the development of high overhead costs which restrict market entry to best capitalised of entrepreneurs. By limiting competition, we see perverse operations occurring that favour the interests of business over the worker and consumer. Thus things like planned obsolescence, guaranteed markets and a continuation of private gain and socialised loss. As had been noted by Childs, private cartels were difficult to maintain. Even the rail trusts, themselves built in contrived, government-produced markets, were ravaged by competition from smaller rail providers[7] that favoured more local economies of scale. So these corporations looked to the government, who enshrined their demands into acts and legislation which created cartels that were much more easily enforced. We just need to look where wage laws, licensure laws and planning/zoning laws are coming from and who lobbies for them. Invariably its dome by corporations and their lobbying arms. We also forms of legal privilege, as in the case of limited liability and corporate personhood, which are really only accessible with very high capital costs and a developed shareholder clientele. These systems are purely artificial, and whether they would work voluntarily is not the question. Rather it is, if they are efficient, why do they need the government to provide these privileges and apparatuses. The answer is simple, they aren’t efficient.

Even when there are laws supposedly to ameliorate the effects of marketisation, as in the case of welfare and government-provided services, they are usually built on the back of resilient communities who developed their own systems, and usually end up allowing employers to pay subpar wages and benefits and lessen the strength of community relations. It builds layers onto a poor foundation. Or to put it another way, the corporate-state nexus is putting a cinderblock on toothpicks. Bureaucrats don’t fully understand the problem with this but realise it is unstable. So to stabilise it, they put more toothpicks under the cinderblock, thinking it will stabilise. However, the system is inherently unstable and propping it up denies the inevitable.

This assurance of market success shows that under a truly free market they wouldn’t exist, or if they did it would be on a much smaller scale. The regulatory web is just another power dynamic that allows for capture and control. To describe this as a free market is laughable. These processes are completely involuntary, reliant on extortion through taxation and allow for the redistribution of wealth from the poor and middle class to the rich and privileged.

The Money Monopoly

While regulation, which “far from coming against the wishes of the regulated interests, was openly welcomed by them in nearly every case”[8], is an important part of the corporate state, the original four legal monopolies (as identified by Tucker), money, land, tariffs and patents, allowed for the development of rent-seeking corporations. These four monopolies, or as I see them structural monopolies as they create the structure of the socio-economic paradigm, are fundamentals of capitalism.

The money monopoly allows for the restriction of credit and the development of debt-based models that destroy stores of value and make individuals slaves to the desires of governments and banks through modern forms of debt peonage. As Dowd notes, over the 20th century “the US dollar has lost almost 85 per cent of its purchasing power even by official government statistics; for its part, sterling has lost 98 per cent of its value over the last century”[9]. The restriction of credit coupled with the inflationary tendencies of modern fiat currencies mean the poorest are effectively forced into wage labour, as they rely on pitiable increases in nominal wages and are unable to gain any real credit for self-employment or collective worker-owned enterprises. What happens is a redistribution of wealth from the poorest to the richest. Long shows that “inflationary monetary policies on the part of central banks also tend to benefit those businesses that receive the inflated money first in the form of loans and investments, when they are still facing the old, lower prices”[10]. The pre-inflation money allows investors and banks to capitalise on new production and investment while the poorer elements of a society receive minimal benefits as the inflationary course makes its run, with prices rising and wages following later.

This also leads to massive levels of debt found currently throughout the globe, as credit instruments are used to make up for stagnant wages that can’t afford increasing land prices and subsequently rent prices, as well as an increase in the price of consumer goods that are a significant chunk of working people’s wages. The process of rent extraction via high interest rates follows from this, as “the money monopoly also includes entry barriers against cooperative banks and prohibitions against private issuance of banknotes, by which access to finance capital is restricted and interest rates are kept artificially high”[11]. Carson notes further that the elimination of controlled interest rates would lead to “significant numbers (of workers) retiring in their forties or fifties, cutting back to part-time, or starting businesses; with jobs competing for workers, the effect on bargaining power would be revolutionary”[12]. The current banking system leads to the necessitation of wage labour through restricted credit dissemination and debt-based forms of finance.

The Land Monopoly

The land monopoly is another lynchpin of capitalism. Most modern land is either nationalised or corporatised through state structures, leading to massive land centralisation and the process of land expropriation that is visible in much of the Third World. Alternative land arrangements, such as those organised by tribes and local networks, are swallowed up in this process. Many commons regimes that have existed for centuries are being eliminated in favour of the interests of capital. This process of enclosure of common lands began at “the end of the Medieval Age, when royal and feudal landowners began to enclose common lands, especially in Tudor England and Trastamara Spain. Through legal and political manoeuvres, wealthy landowners marked and hedged off sections of the commons for their own profits, impoverishing many villagers and ultimately destroying their communitarian way of life”[13]. The enclosures have continued into the 20th century, where “common lands have suffered a third, global wave of commodification and enclosure, ‘land grabbing’ spurred by the dominant neoliberal doctrine and competition for non-renewable natural resources and supported now by the evolutionary theory of land rights”[14]. The modern enclosures of land occur most noticeably in Africa and South America. We see the elimination of common land owned by native tribes and the raping of natural resources. The Niger Delta and its oil reserves show this acutely, with oil spills being common and almost no compensation to the farmers and workers who rely on the Delta for their livelihoods.

In effect this is a process of neo-colonialism pushed through via the Washington Consensus that is epitomised in international groups like the IMF and WTO. The plight of Bangladeshi workers is caused by this problem of neocolonial practices. In Bangladesh “wealthy and influential people have encroached on public lands…, often with help of officials in land-administration and management departments”[15] which has led to a result of “Many of the rural poor in Bangladesh are landless, have only small plots of land, are depending on tenancy, or sharecropping”[16]. What follows is a continuation of the development of a landless mass of cheap labour as a result of the nationalisation and corporatisation of land.

Then there are planning and zoning laws and property laws which act as a form of implicit land nationalisation in many Western countries. Among their many effects, they artificially inflate land prices, which has a knock on effect of making housing unaffordable and making the purchase of land extremely difficult for small businesses. This further encourages the process of rentierism and indebtedness as individuals have to get out mortgages or rent accommodation, and individuals looking to start a business are priced out, thus favouring large corporations. If you want to self-build a home or business, it becomes impossible. Instead a series of state-favoured land developers are able to land bank and rent out at extortionate rates. They aren’t subject to competition and making new land isn’t possible, so you create a system of patronage and favouritism, simply adding to the enforced necessitation of wage labour.

These processes of land appropriation lead to the development of land speculation via government-favoured industries, creating artificially high land prices which price out small businesses, community groups and anyone who isn’t able seek rent from the state. This speculation also fuels boom-bust cycles, with much of the credit used by investors and businesses being put into the easy investments of land and housing. This creates economic bubbles through the wide diffusion of mortgages and an increase in house and infrastructure building that isn’t necessarily needed. In London, we see this playing out with high-price apartments and high-rises that don’t address the needs of the wider population and are fueled, at least partially, via QE-induced credit. The development of a rentier society occurs. With land prices held artificially high, rich landowners are able to rent out their properties at high prices, creating economic precarity and stimulating the larger wage labour monopoly that is caused by a combination of this monopoly and the money monopoly.

The Larger Wage Labour Monopoly

As previously mentioned, credit is restricted thus funding options are limited for workers. Add to this high land prices, and the ability to buy a house or develop a business are severely restricted, developing the large pool of wage labour seen today. This obviously favours large-scale employers such as corporations who are able develop to their current size due to this wage labour monopoly. It leads to a means of surplus value, or rent, extraction. As Solow notes “one important reason for the failure of real wages to keep up with productivity is that the division of rent in industry has been shifting against the labor side for several decades”[17].

Alongside the two monopolies, the increase in precarious wage labour is compounded by the restriction of collective action and the development of monopolist unions that complement the centralised economic actors. The legislation governing strikes and the ability to make a union add to this problem, making it difficult for freelance workers to unionise and stopping the development of radical trade unions and company unions. Thatcher’s trade union reforms in the UK created such a problem as the majority of private sector unions are part of the corporate system of economic centralisation. The final nail in the coffin is the minimum wage. This creates a wage ceiling and simply allows corporations to price smaller competitors out of the market while subsequently limiting the hours and benefits workers receive. As most minimum wages aren’t enough to live on, many workers rely on debt-based credit which pushes individuals further into wage labour, creating debt-led wage slavery and maintaining a massive, centralising economic monopoly on the choice of workers.

As Solow explains, in the US “in the past 10 years productivity has increased 12.3 percent in the non-farm business sector of our economy while real compensation of labor has increased by only 5.1 percent”[18]. So what we see is a form of surplus value extraction, whereby the excess product of labour is captured by the interests of capital and removed from the compensation of labour. This can’t simply be explained away by using the marginalist critique. The value of a product is at least partially informed by its labour input. Marshall’s analysis shows that “price was determined, at any given time, by the balance between the demand and supply that actually existed at that moment. As the time factor came into play…price approached closer and closer to cost”[19] thus showing that the equilibrium of supply to demand moves from subjective criteria of value toward the input of labour in that value. Again looking at Solow’s productivity figures, the compensation of labour isn’t in proportion to production.

Hodgskin’s idea of a market artificially privileged with rents, profits and interest becomes a reality in the modern context. The increase in freelancing and labour market individuation means the expropriation of rent and the limitation of choice, particularly as unions are simply a representation of the corporate interest, particularly since the Wagner Act in America and the trade union reforms in Britain. The individualisation of labour serves to increase these artificial privileges, meaning can be paid less and thus become more reliant on debt instruments such as mortgages and credit cards to simply earn a living and have a roof over their head. This system is even more acute in the Global South, with the restriction of choice via the structural monopolies being almost explicitly enforced via the government as land in enclosed and regulations used to restrict microeconomic activity that doesn’t serve the interests of global value chains. Their human capital is monopolised, wages restricted, collective action completely banned and working conditions extremely poor. The main profit garnered from this is simply the mark-up created by internal tariffs and intellectual property (to be discussed later in this paper), which limits domestic market production and serves only the interests of capital and big business, as both the workers and consumers are given low wages and higher prices respectively.

What happens then is the construction of a monopsony situation in wages and labour, where the product of labour isn’t adequately paid, becoming widespread due to companies paying below this level. This is compounded by wage laws favoured by corporate interests, and an inability for the worker to capture this value through collective bargaining or through the means of owning one’s productive capacities due to market entry barriers that restrict self-employment and worker or community ownership. It constrains the real choice of workers and puts the power dynamics upon employers and bureaucrats.

Tariffs

The next two monopolies that Tucker highlighted further the centralisation of economic power toward corporations. Tariffs are simply a form of direct state intervention to favour domestic industry over foreign competitors. There are arguments favourable to this position, such as those by List and Chang. However, there is a significant time limit on the ability of tariffs to produce any sort of growth (usually artificially induced by state policies), and eventually many of the protected industries become bloated and begin to rely on further government subsidy.

The use of tariffs today is much more limited than it was during the mercantile years of the 17th and 18th centuries. However, one area where tariffs are still largely used is modern agriculture in the West, particularly the US and the EU. The Farm Bill in the US creates price distortions within food markets that favours large agribusiness over small, family farms. As Reitzig explains “the farm bill perpetuates the myth of cheap food. It subsidizes Big Ag so that BA can sell its food to the market cheap and you find it at the grocery store for less than you’d pay for it from your local farmer”[20]. However as “it costs the small local farmer about the same to produce the same food as the Big Ag farmer”[21], all the Farm Bill does is redistribute tax money toward large agricultural firms. The economies of scale thus get changed, with farmers forced into retail sector bulk sell offs that are increasingly inefficient and perpetuate the agricultural tariffs and subsidies.

There also forms of internal tariffs that protect large industry through direct subsidisation. For example “between 1973 and 2003, the US government paid out $74 billion in energy subsidies to promote R&D in fossil fuels and nuclear power”[22]. This was despite these companies having huge profit margins, which shows the actual profitability of these industries. They are reliant on institutions of theft to simply develop critical infrastructure as a result of their internal unproductiveness and their falling foul of the economic calculation problem. It creates a system of perverse incentives as these firms aren’t induced to work and develop in smarter, cleaner ways and instead produce the same limited output. This is corporatism at its finest, with government purposefully favouring large firms over small firms, and thus encouraging wasteful practices. Returning to farming, the EU holds similar policies, which in many ways restrict crop diversification and mean that certain farmers are favoured over others. This leads to artificially low prices which allows for retail monopolisation due to farmers being unable to sell their own product due to EU regulations which create this system. It is a continuation of the obstinate incentives that leads to overproduction, false demand and the entrenchment of economic disadvantages and inefficiencies.

Patents

Patents act in a similar way. They privilege large businesses in rigged markets and allow for centralisation and monopolisation. “The patent privilege has been used on a massive scale to promote concentration of capital, erect entry barriers, and maintain a monopoly of advanced technology in the hands of western corporations. It is hard even to imagine how much more decentralized the economy would be without it”[23]. Patents act to lock up innovation in a legal quagmire. It puts new technology into the hands of capital, limiting its distribution and creating a rentier system, where the privilege to use new technology and even knowledge is commodified by large corporations in collusion with the state.

This inability to access new technologies and knowledge creates a form of entry barrier, with smaller competitors being unable to afford this access. Most modern tech companies (Google, Apple, Microsoft) are in effect monopolists of knowledge and technology, limiting its accessibility and collecting the rent they charge on these products. Their market position becomes entrenched with restrictive data laws and copyrights that mean the passage of information is blocked by virtual, artificial toll gates that wouldn’t exist if not for coercive legislation.

Then there is the direct government subsidisation of research and development (R&D) spending that allows for large companies to reap “monopoly profits from technology it didn’t spend a penny to develop”[24]. Modern tech companies then are not only monopolists of patented of knowledge but also rentiers of technology they had no real part in developing. So while small inventors and start ups toil away trying to create a product that can only be sold on a rigged market, large firms benefit purely because of their power and the revolving door of government benefaction. Similar processes occur in military-based R&D spending, where corporations are given large grants and procurement contracts to develop military hardware and weaponry that on a freed market would not even necessarily be required by any customer or business. As Chomsky notes, in the US “the Pentagon system has long been the country’s biggest welfare program, transferring massive public funds to high-tech industry on the pretext of defense and security”[25]. These companies’ profits and growth are not then created in a market mechanism of competition and demand-led supply, but rather in a bubble of government-led protection, where they ride on the coattails of stolen innovation and forms of theft AKA patents and taxation respectively. “If they had to face the market, they’d be out selling rags or something, but they need a nanny state, a powerful nanny state to pour money into their pockets”[26].

Further, this process of patenting becomes a pure form of commodification as they remove products and ideas from their cultural origins. For example, the Human Genome Diversity Project used DNA from certain indigenous tribes in Central and South America. Some of this DNA was patented, and thus removed from the culture it came from without any sort of compensation by the HGDP and the beneficiaries of this knowledge. Biocolonialism and biopiracy are the best terms for this occurrence. By extracting culturally sensitive information and knowledge, a process of commodification occurs, and the whole concept of property, that of the sovereign ownership of the individual or collective, becomes redundant. Further the innovative capacities that supposedly come from intellectual property are limited if not completely negative. In fact the information that was patented was found to be 30% less innovative than the information released for full public use[27].

This analysis is backed by evidence from Scherer, who showed “a survey of 91 companies in which only seven ‘accorded high significance to patent protection as a factor in their R & D investments.’ Most of them described patents as “the least important of considerations.’ Most companies considered their chief motivation in R & D decisions to be ‘the necessity of remaining competitive, the desire for efficient production, and the desire to expand and diversify their sales”[28]. Thus patents and intellectual property “eliminate ‘the competitive spur for further research’ because incremental innovation based on others’ patents is prohibited, and because the holder can ‘rest on his laurels for the entire period of the patent.’ with no fear of a competitor improving his invention”[29].

Transport Subsidies

The fifth monopoly, transport subsidies, is one that has been identified by Carson. As Carson describes, “spending on transportation and communications networks from general revenues, rather than from taxes and user fees, allows big business to ‘externalize its costs’ on the public, and conceal its true operating expenses”[30]. These transportation subsidies allow for the development of large business operations, particularly in the retail and manufacturing sectors. By subsidising the movement of goods by heavy duty vehicles, it means they are given a state-based competitive advantage against smaller, local competitors.

Companies like Wal-Mart and Tesco are able to price their goods artificially cheaply as a result of not adding the transportation costs. Many of these companies actively lobbied for such infrastructure projects. When the interstate system was being built, it “had both an immediate stimulus effect on the industries that participated…oil companies, general contractors, cement manufacturers, steel companies…were among the dozens of industries involved in the building of the great interstate highway system”[31] showing the degree of corporate-state cooperation. It was because these infrastructure projects benefitted their products and models that they lobbied for them.

Of course Carson’s view of this quite US-centric. In much of Europe, particularly the UK, we see other regulations that create a very different kind of transport subsidy. While these nations do subsidise transport via taxation to pay for roads rather than using user fees or road pricing, they also have high fuel duties and regulation on forms of transport, such as regulations on truck design and usage. The fuel duties act as a subsidy in the sense that they destroy small transport firms and simply monopolise the transport industry as only larger companies can afford the higher prices. The forms of regulation mentioned mean that innovation into new vehicle design and competition between firms is limited and simply continues the dominance of particular transport and production companies that aren’t subject to market competition. Thus what we see are two different types of transport subsidies that both act to continue the current economic paradigm.

These subsidies serve to amplify economies of scale, creating national and international markets largely in the control of corporate interests. These large markets create systems of disequilibrium, with monopoly interests being able to develop oligopoly markets from which rents can be extracted. A modern example of this is the creation of HS2 in the UK. It serves as a vanity project for political and bureaucratic elites, who can gain well-paying jobs as political advisors and construction directors. It also allows for the continuation of the North-South divide, with large London-centric firms sucking out talent from the North and Midlands, at little expense to themselves. As Wellings describes it, it’s an example of externalised costs and internalised benefits, with vested interests serving to gain[32]. Economies of scale are created artificially, with competition in local markets suffering due to a project only favourable to London-based businesses. Local economies of scale, which are more natural and more open to individual considerations and supply and demand, are priced out by government intervention. Local transport projects, like roads linking market towns and local rail infrastructure, are ignored due to a lack of political prestige for politicians and their donors and lobbyists.

Road and rail subsidised by the state leads to the current economies of scale that favour large, centralised business entities. It also prices out and discourages private infrastructure projects that could actually make an economic difference by increasing competition and lowering prices, while maintaining local economies of scale which benefit large swathes of areas that currently don’t benefit from the subsidised corporate model. These three monopolies further the wage labour monopoly, by erecting entry barriers against small business and self-employment and by creating feudalistic patent regimes and transport systems that create favourable economies of scale. National markets serve larger companies and hierarchical organisation, and international markets continue to serve and enlarge this. It pushes real costs onto the consumer/taxpayer, and further creates illegitimate profits taken from oligopoly markets.

The Corporate Infrastructure

This wage labour monopoly, with the five structural monopolies feeding it, is the basis of the modern corporate dominated economy. As a result, modern corporations act as oppressive actors on the world stage, using wage slaves and forms of indebtedness to develop the massive growth seen in the 20th and 21st centuries. As Carson states “in a very real sense, every subsidy and privilege described above is a form of slavery. Slavery, simply put, is the use of coercion to live off of someone else’s labor. For example, consider the worker who pays $300 a month for a drug under patent, that would cost $30 in a free market. If he is paid $15 an hour, the eighteen hours he works every month to pay the difference are slavery. Every hour worked to pay usury on a credit card or mortgage is slavery. The hours worked to pay unnecessary distribution and marketing costs (comprising half of retail prices), because of subsidies to economic centralization, is slavery. Every additional hour someone works to meet his basic needs, because the state tilts the field in favor of the bosses and forces him to sell his labor for less than it is worth, is slavery”[33].

Then there is the system of incentives created by this corporate-state monopoly. Infrastructures are developed that maintain the inefficiencies. Rifkin’s analysis of a series of Industrial Revolutions shows this to be the case. The Second Industrial Revolution, the current economic system we live in according to Rifkin, is reliant on state-invested infrastructure and subsidisation[34]. The subsidisation of natural capital is one example of this. Roberts shows that “the total unpriced natural capital consumed by the more than 1,000 “global primary production and primary processing region-sectors” amounts to $7.3 trillion a year — 13 percent of 2009 global GDP”[35]. The term natural capital is obviously a broad, all-encompassing term. The specifics are those of the production of pollutants that is subsidised by specific tax breaks and forms of limited liability. These follow from elements of the land monopoly which means pollution becomes an externalised cost upon taxpayers, furthering the inefficiencies of a particular economic paradigm, which Rifkin calls the Second Industrial Revolution but what I would call capitalism.

The maintenance of this system means most companies that are reliant on fossil fuels and the energy and transport infrastructures that follow from them have no incentive to divest into new market ventures, but instead have an interest in resource and capital accumulation. It creates ‘revolving door’ government, where lobbyists persist in convincing policy makers for subsidies here and tax breaks there all the while relying on the rent extraction they gain from state intervention.

This process within resource extraction and energy use is more widely seen in the general production processes of capitalism. The levels of overproduction and continued consumption are fed by the structural monopolies, as well as justifying the wage labour monopoly. To fund the levels of consumption needed to continue production means people are put into a paradigm of working longer to buy more things to enjoy. Its paradoxical as you spend more time at work, thus limiting the amount of time you have to actually enjoy consumer goods. Further, as goods become more expensive due to increasing cost mark-ups and inflationary policies, and housing prices and rents go up due to land speculation and monopoly ownership, more people become reliant on debt instruments to fund their everyday lives and their increasing consumer spending. This has created a precipitous debt bubble as Steve Keen’s work has shown. It has also meant that much of the current growth seen since the Great Recession has been on the back of consumer spending, as Blanchflower has documented.

Incentives are created which lead to increasing, unnatural growth and increasing levels of debt. In particular, levels of corporate debt have skyrocketed during the recession of 2008. This is due to systemic overproduction and waste that has developed due to mass production systems used by most multinationals. The structural subsidies create this system where large production facilities with forms of guaranteed profit are needed for massive market areas, usually on a national or international level. Carson has pointed out that modern markets are hardly an example of spontaneous order and aren’t reliant on supply and demand[36]. Rather the system is reliant on a system of planning, with codified relations between suppliers and distributors and systems of guaranteed consumption through external market control in the form of internal sales tariffs and the financialisation of the economy.

Internal sales tariffs limit what stores/areas products can be sold in, and are only viable as a result of intellectual property regimes that allow for increased costs and a further disconnect between production and consumption. Financialisation on the other hand simply maintains the production systems as well as processes of commodification. It makes corporate debt a commodity, and puts value into meaningless products, which allows for more accumulation and overproduction as business isn’t rewarded for genuine wealth production and creation, which comes from artificial processes, but is rewarded rather by debt financialisation, unsustainable growth in bureaucracy and the continued expropriation of surplus value, or human capital. This also represents a commodification process, as the social relation of debt, as identified by Graeber and Martin, is put into an economistic context, with debt serving the purposes of profit and capital. The debt relationship, that’s shaped by community relations and gift-giving and receiving[37], is taken as a value of capital. And this debt is allowed to build up and shape other economic activity. Consumer purchase after consumer purchase represents this. It is encouraged, and when it slows the government takes over and funds through quantitative easing programs, allowing for the construction of bigger, more complex bubbles. It shows that corporation and government are two sides of the same coin.

We have to remember that as much as governments, corporations are just as likely to be effected by the knowledge problem. To get around, every relationship and process is effectively planned. Business to business relations, as seen in distribution and supply chains, are maintained for decades by large manufacturers so as to continue guaranteed buyers of their products. In other cases, the supply and warehousing operations are subsumed by the manufacturer, owning every process from production to sale. Global value chains are an outgrowth of this hierarchalised control and planning, with much of their success being guaranteed by government. It is dictatorial governments in the Global South (who usually have the backing of the US government and its interests) that ban collective action among labourers through extraordinarily harsh measures, it is trade agreements with their backing by Western governments that maintain artificial property rights such as patents and it is government that externalises the cost of global transportation of these goods onto the taxpayer, thus distorting economies of scale to favour the large corporations and forms of state-corporate economic planning. In other the words, the commodification and Sovietisation of the economy.

Culture Under Capitalism

A paradigm that enforces this economic hierarchy is created, where life is work and your main identity is around the soul-crushing job you inhabit. Social relations are commodified and local economic activity is strangled. The whole idea of community in the 21st century is being replaced by a centralised state and economic activity that has no interest in that community, but is inward looking, determining profit margins rather building strong societal relations. The ability to escape this paradigm is extremely limited by the coercive hand of the state. It restricts collective organising, eliminates common and private property and develops extremely insufficient systems of economic organisation.

What we’ve seen is the disembedding of markets from their cultural and social origins[38]. Relations of debt and consumption, which were as much in political institutions and based around social relations, have been expropriated by capital. Thus instead of markets forming one of many different idea of economic organisation of which it could complement, we see the neoliberal discourse of praising markets and even seeing marketisation in what have been social relations up to this day. Thus public services such as health and energy are wrapped in discourses of competition and corporate ownership. However, markets aren’t actually like this. If we look to genuinely free markets, which are few and far between, we don’t see large production and corporate ownership. Instead we see markets crafted around local institutions and genuine demand for certain goods and services. Ownership is much more decentralised. However, due to government-based price and scale distortions, culture and its institutions are brought into the marketised economy, creating the marketised society.

It leads to the development of modern consumerism, creating warped identities based around products. It kills culture and intelligence in favour of an advertised individual. Carson shows that “mass production divorces production from consumption. The rate of production is driven by the imperative of keeping the machines running at full capacity so as to minimize unit costs, rather than by customer orders. So in addition to contractual control of inputs, mass-production industry faces the imperative of guaranteeing consumption of its output by managing the consumer”[39]. The consumer is separated from the producer. Mass production means a consumer culture. Rather than supply meeting demand, demand is made to compensate for oversupply. It also creates forms of consumer inequality that mean Third World workers have almost no access to the products they help produce. The development of domestic markets in consumer goods is massively restricted via patents and tariffs.

Within the Western world there is similar consumer inequality, with a creation of an underclass who desire consumer goods that their limited wages can hardly afford. Bauman’s analysis of the London Riots in 2011 saw an element of this consumer yearning, with products like high-end trainers and flat-screen TVs being taken. Bauman notes that “from cradle to coffin we are trained and drilled to treat shops as pharmacies filled with drugs to cure or at least mitigate all illnesses and afflictions of our lives and lives in common. Shops and shopping acquire thereby a fully and truly eschatological dimension”[40]. The cultural backwater caused by modern consumerism creates a form of stigmatisation and symbol status, with haves and have nots developing into distinct classes in a consumer culture. As Bauman states “for defective consumers, those contemporary have-nots, non-shopping is the jarring and festering stigma of a life un-fulfilled — and of own nonentity and good-for-nothingness. Not just the absence of pleasure: absence of human dignity. Of life meaning”[41].

The processes of commodification amplify this systemic crisis. The divorcing of production from consumption leads to the most atomistic forms of individualism. It becomes a process of overconsumption and hoarding, without any appreciation of the product development. Cultural and societal obligations and considerations get uprooted by what is wanted and what can be bought. It puts value squarely into the hands of capital, with the determination of worth being decided in social hierarchies that follow from the enforced economic hierarchies of modern capitalism. It is a symptom of the false choice of employment or death, of work creating one’s value in life and of a market shaped not by workers, communities and cultures but by the interests capital and the state that props it up.

Conclusion

This system is massively unsustainable, and becomes more and more reliant on tax revenues to make it profitable. The price system becomes distorted, encouraging the mass production that “leads to ever-increasing demands on state services”[42]. This then shows the inefficiency of large corporations. They are as much subject to the economic calculation problem as the state. Their reliance on the theft of individual income via the taxation system means in anarchist society they are completely unviable. As a system of economic organisation “capitalism could not have survived at any point in its history without state intervention. Coercive state measures at every step have denied workers access to capital, forced them to sell their labor in a buyer’s market, and protected the centers of economic power from the dangers of the free market”[43].

In systems of anarchy, there would be an end to corporate dominance due to their inability to seek state rent and thus collapsing in their inefficiencies. As noted by Carson, there were two paths that could have been taken to organise industry and the economy. The one that was followed was “centralized production using expensive, product-specific machinery in large batches on a supply-push basis”[44]. However a better system was possible. One of “decentralized production for local markets, integrating general-purpose machinery into craft production and governed on a demand-pull basis with short production runs and frequent shifts between product lines”[45]. This would have required localised industry, networked communities and what Rifkin calls lateral, distributional, collaborative markets. Workers would be independent of capital, and have an ability to take back their surplus value. It would involve voluntary governance structures and self-organised communities. It would be an end to the corporate-state nexus.

By having this centralised system, we open the floodgates to the continuation of boom-bust cycles through monopoly government control. Since the delinking of production from consumption, there has been a development of mass production and the apparatuses that prop it up. Marx noted this particular phenomenon, with “the birth of large-scale industry this true proportion had to come to an end, and production is inevitably compelled to pass in continuous succession through vicissitudes of prosperity, depression, crisis, stagnation, renewed prosperity, and so on”[46]. This process in the end favours the capitalists. It destroys real value in an economy and allows for more government involvement. Further, it leads to capital accumulation through government subsidisation and the monopoly position many modern corporations hold within their respective markets.

It’s a process of artificial wealth accumulation and creation, backed by the five monopolies previously mentioned. High land prices, restrictive credit access and the use of interest rates to effectively distort the value of currency, the use of market entry barriers through regulations and patents and the use of transport subsidies all favour the main monopoly, that of wage labour. Because of the diminishing returns that many of these companies are finding, they are becoming increasingly reliant on the extraction of surplus value from their workers. As mentioned earlier, wage laws allow them to eliminate smaller competitors and the development of varied, precarious work contracts mean a diversification of their workforce, which allows them to reduce hours paid and thus reduce their labour costs. However, the compensation of a worker’s product isn’t necessarily met. Thus the accruing of capital simply means the extraction of rent from workers, which is enforced by the limitation of worker’s to pool their labour value and capital and develop their own industry in a truly free market.

Government is the glue which holds capitalism together. Without it, the economies of scale, the appropriation and centralisation of land and the distortion of inputs and outputs would be impossible. Without a central bank, the destructive tax of inflation wouldn’t be feasible in a competitive currency market. The redistribution of wealth and malinvestment couldn’t occur on the same scale as markets would act as a corrective against these activities. The use of tariffs and patents to lock up technology and create artificial wealth couldn’t happen without the state’s coercive power. Economic organisation is a fluid concept, that changes from place to place and people to people. What is right for one community or tribe is not what is necessarily right for another. A freed market would reflect this, as it would embed markets in pre-existing cultural/social structures and stop the developments of commodification and neo-colonialism that persist presently. This is a world free of state-action and corporate control. This is anarchism.

Bibliography

Bauman, Z. (2011). The London Riots – On Consumerism Coming Home To Roost. Available: http://www.socialeurope.eu/2011/08/the-london-riots-on-consumerism-coming-home-to-roost/. Last accessed 21st Sep 2015.

Carson, K (2007). Studies in Mutualist Political Economy. United States: BookSurge.

Carson, K. (2010). The Distorting Effects of Transportation Subsidies. Available: http://fee.org/freeman/the-distorting-effects-of-transportation-subsidies/. Last accessed 15th Sep 2015.

Carson, K (2010). The Homebrew Industrial Revolution. United States: BookSurge.

Carson, K. (2002). The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand. Available: http://www.mutualist.org/id4.html. Last accessed 25th Sep 2015.

Chartier, G. (2010). Advocates of Freed Markets Should Embrace “Anti-Capitalism”. Available: http://c4ss.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/chartier.anticapitalism.pdf. Last accessed 14th Sep 2015.

Childs, R. (1971). Big Business and the Rise of American Statism. Available: http://praxeology.net/RC-BRS.htm. Last accessed 16th Sep 2015.

de Ugarte, D. (2015). Biomedical patents reduce innovation by 30%. Available: http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/biomedical-patents-reduce-innovation-by-30/2015/09/09. Last accessed 16th Sep 2015.

Dowd, K (2014). New Private Monies. London: Institute of Economic Affairs.

Long, R. (2008). Corporations versus the Market; or, Whip Conflation Now. Available: http://www.cato-unbound.org/2008/11/10/roderick-t-long/corporations-versus-market-or-whip-conflation-now. Last accessed 15th Sep 2015.

Martin, F (2013). Money: The Unauthorised Biography. London: Bodley Head.

Paul, R (2007). The Revolution: A Manifesto. 2nd ed. United States: Grand Central Publishing.

Polanyi, K (2002). The Great Transformation. 2nd ed. Boston: Beacon Press.

Reitzig, L. (2014). Farm Bill 2014 or “The Destruction of Small Family Farms”. Available: http://nourishingliberty.com/farm-bill-2014-just-how-bad-is-it/. Last accessed 21st Sep 2015.

Richman, S. (2013). Bangladeshi Workers Need Freed Markets. Available: http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/bangladesh-needs-freed-markets/. Last accessed 16th Sep 2015.

Rifkin, J (2011). The Third Industrial Revolution. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Roberts, D. (2013). None of the world’s top industries would be profitable if they paid for the natural capital they use. Available: http://grist.org/business-technology/none-of-the-worlds-top-industries-would-be-profitable-if-they-paid-for-the-natural-capital-they-use/. Last accessed 16th Sep 2015.

Shorr, I. (1996). On US Military Budgets. Available: http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/19960211.htm. Last accessed 25th Sep 2015.

Solow, R. (2015). The Future of Work. Available: http://www.psmag.com/business-economics/the-future-of-work-why-wages-arent-keeping-up. Last accessed 16th Sep 2015.

StopHS2. (2013). “Classic Example” of Vested Interests. [Online Video]. 18 November. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r94VP3USOuE. [Accessed: 31 October 2015].

Vivero Pol, J. (2015). Transition towards a food commons regime. Available: http://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=9851100240740070870950101221090931190350100270460840350111130010740820980970930810660540551030481120240140671180910151151060840400590600730100851021250261111. Last accessed 15th Sep 2015.

Notes:

[1] Chartier, G. 2010, 1

[2] Chartier, G. 2010, 2

[3] Dowd, K. 2014

[4] Childs, R. 1971

[5] Paul, R. 2009, 70

[6] Rifkin, J. 2011, 134

[7] Childs, R. 1971

[8] Childs, R. 1971

[9] Dowd, K. 2014, 85-86

[10] Long, R. 2008

[11] Carson, K. 2002

[12] Carson, K. 2002

[13] Vivero Pol, L. 2015, 9

[14] Vivero Pol, L. 2015, 9

[15] Richman, S. 2013

[16] Richman, S. 2013

[17] Solow, R. 2015

[18] Solow, R. 2015

[19] Carson, K. 2007, 50

[20] Reitzig, L. 2014

[21] Reitzig, L. 2014

[22] Rifkin, J. 2011, 134

[23] Carson, K. 2002

[24] Carson, K. 2002

[25] Shorr, I. 1996

[26] Shorr, I. 1996

[27] de Ugarte, D. 2015

[28] Carson, K. 2002

[29] Carson, K. 2002

[30] Carson, K. 2002

[31] Rifkin, J. 2011, 134

[32] Wellings, R. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r94VP3USOuE

[33] Carson, K. 2002

[34] Rifkin, J. 2011

[35] Roberts, D. 2013

[36] Carson, K. 2010

[37] Martin, F. 2013

[38] Polanyi, K. 2002

[39] Carson, K. 2010, 50

[40] Bauman, Z. 2011

[41] Bauman, Z. 2011

[42] Carson, K. 2010, 111

[43] Carson, K. 2002

[44] Carson, K. 2010

[45] Carson, K. 2010

[46] Carson, K. 2010, 256

Keeping The Portal Open: Erik Davis on TechGnosis and the Blurring “Real” & “Virtual”

Posted on December 13, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Michael Garfield

Source: Reality Sandwich

Erik Davis is the author of TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, & Mysticism in the Age of Information (recently reissued by North Atlantic Books with a new afterword). An investigation into how our transcendental urges play out in the realm of high technology, it is a rare treat – both an exemplary work of scholarship and also a delightful read – a florid, fun, and virtuosic play of language. Even more impressive is that in our metamorphic times, this book has aged considerably well. TechGnosis is in ways more relevant today than it was in the rosy dawn of 1998, before The Matrix and the iPhone, Facebook, and Edward Snowden. We’re living in the future. Read this book and learn the territory.

Over a glitchy Google Hangout (you can watch both parts on YouTube), Erik and I discussed our culture’s highest hopes and darkest dreams for our collective future, and how they’ve both become more complicated since the turn of the Millennium.

If you imagine browser windows as a kind of portal in between dimensions – if you wonder when the apes and whales will open social media accounts – if you believe that we can find a way to surf the turbulence of our connected century with grace and humor – then read on…

(Thanks to Terra Celeste and Ivan Marko for transcribing this! This is about one-third of the full conversation. You can also read the transcript in its raw entirety here.)

Erik: I apologize for our developing-world level of internet connectivity. Here in San Francisco! That’s right, folks, you heard it right: I live in the city of San Francisco, the absolute white hot center of the technological creative mutation, and yet my internet’s kind of crappy.

Michael: Well, you know, San Francisco was where Skynet was headquartered in the last Terminator film, so it may just be that your home is becoming ever-more inimical to human existence.

Erik: And the Federation, too! In a way those were the two models, right? On the one hand, you have the Federation from Star Trek, where it’s a liberal, UN, kind of globalist model – we’re no longer fighting nation states, we’re still human beings, we have desires, we get to drink tea and explore the universe. That sounds pretty cool from a humanist point of view, and yet on the other side we have Skynet, which is of course a whole other ball of wax. In a way, isn’t that it? It’s the struggle between the Federation and Skynet.

Michael: It’s funny, ‘cause most of what I wanted to talk to you about today was about how your book -– which is a brilliant piece of writing – has aged since 1998. The new volume includes a new afterword from the 2004 edition, as well as a new afterword from the 2015 edition. One of the things that you discuss is the way that the expectation that we had of boundary dissolution and transcendence at the turn of the millennium has become more complex. Now, it’s more of just a general shifting and metamorphosis of the construction of new boundaries. And so, like in the most recent Star Trek films and Terminator films, we now have good Terminators that believe they are people and are willing to donate their heart to the dying members of the human resistance. You know, the actual human heart that these Terminators possess, in order spoof human security systems. And then, in the latest Star Trek film, the threat comes from within the Federation, from a black box military program. Our culture seems to be getting more and more comfortable with these liminal zones and these ethical complexities. Less naïve with respect to that kind of simple dyadic distinction.

Erik: Techgnosis first came out in ’98. I talk a lot about gnosticism in the book and about these ancient Christian heresies about the spark in us that can escape from this prison that’s run by evil demons who are fabricating reality. That ancient model of mysticism and theology just fits like a hand and glove in our digital era. And then the Matrix films come along and I was like, “Oh my God, so beautiful.” It was just a perfect expression, and I wrote about that in the afterword for the 2004 edition. Nowadays a lot of the topics that I wrote about are even more available and perceivable through popular culture because popular culture has gotten weirder, more full of occultism, more intense, even as, in some ways, it’s become more ordinary. A lot of these sort of topics were very fringe in the ’80s or even the ’90s, in the sense that you had to kinda dig for occultism, for Satanism, for people who believed that they were channeling deities. All this stuff was part of a subculture, an outsider culture. Whether we believed it or not doesn’t matter. In a way, it’s not that there are necessarily more people who believe in these things. It’s just that they’re more available, because of the way that popular culture introduces these ideas. We become fans of shows. Fantasy and science fiction have become the norm.

Michael: I’m sure you remember when James Cameron’s Avatar came out, and the Avatar world immediately took off within the LARPing community. And so you started to see this foreshadowing of a new dysphrenia, a psychological disorder of the possible fragmentation of worldspaces that we seem kind of doomed to experience with the advent of the true landing of virtual reality. These people were so just morose and desperate because they became so immersed in the Pandora world that they couldn’t readjust to their life as human beings. It’s sort of akin to my generation’s wave of acid burnouts, maybe. As we invest more and more of ourselves into this increasingly popular and available and sexy because it’s not just animated by our religious impulses, but it’s actively being advertised, and commercialized and sold to us. We’re really being encouraged to throw ourselves into these alternative worldspaces. And then there isn’t a landing pad for when we get back. So I feel like one of the lasting lessons of your book, one of the reasons that I feel its resonance remains, is because it allows a person to integrate those experiences. In a way, it functions as a manual for understanding our drives and the larger emotional matrix in which we play with new freedoms to explore occult realities.

Erik: That’s very well said, actually, because in conventional society, even very recently, these things have largely been shuttered out. My generation grew up in the shadow of the hippies, and those things were around, but they were very much part of the counterculture. They were either mocked or ignored in the New York Times reality, which is still kind of a good symbol for consensus reality. I’m not even sure if we have a consensus reality anymore, or if it’s not some crazy topological knot, but in the old days, it had a little bit more stability to it, and you would never see these things acknowledged. Or if they were, they were pathologized – it was crazy, it was absurd, it was narcissistic and navel-gazing. This was true for a whole range of things – meditation, esotericism, UFOs, psychedelics, the whole range of extraordinary experience that people wanted to seek and experience.

As someone who basically keeps my feet on the ground, I’m largely skeptical in temperament. I’m very anthropological in my approach, which means I like to go into environments and participate as I observe, that classic stance of participant-observation. And what’s come from that is a realization that you can plunge very deeply into very interesting, rich otherworlds that are full of magic and enchantment and bizarre synchronicities and wonderful downloads, but at the same time you can also trust the ability to return to the body, to the ordinary, to the conditions of human experience in an everyday way, and that those don’t have to be in conflict so much.

I think that these experiences are not only really valuable, but they’re absolutely necessary to understand what’s actually happening. Whether people acknowledge it or not, a lot of the time we are driven by desires to be in dreamworlds, to achieve unusual-states-of-consciousness, to find them inside ourselves and see the way that they’re driving us. There’s a strong kind of rationalist technologized way of thinking about experience that’s very pervasive now, that’s actually carried like a philosophical virus through the widespread notions of tweaking and controlling your experience, of making yourself more efficient or powerful. So for me it’s really important to keep portals open to the unknown, to the mystery, to the bizarre, because it’s precisely in those encounters that we see beyond the rationalistic frame, which often is, in my opinion, benighted. Instead, we can adopt a more open-ended, but not necessarily mystical, attitude to the whole range of otherworldly experiences.

Michael: There’s a through-line here in one of the last chapters of Coming into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness by William Irwin Thompson, someone whom I know that has inspired us both immensely. That books last chapter a chapter is about how the Ramayana tells how humans and animals allied to expel the demons from what we now take as take as mundane, everyday reality. Bill Thompson’s view was that the Electrical Imaginary descending back into our networked global civilization is opening a portal, and that the screen is literally a shamanic window through which these spirits are granted fresh access to our world. And then in your latest afterword you talk about how the irony of these ultra-hyper-realist-skeptic-atheist-revenge-of-the-enlightenment types is that you can’t actually create a complete model of the mundane world. You can’t perfectly map the enlightened cosmos without getting into all of the weird stuff, the out-of-body experiences, the UFO abductions. These things have to be explained in order to cast out all of the shadows, but the naïve attempt to cast them out is really just an invocation. It’s like the topological knot you mentioned earlier, where merely addressing them makes them a more vivid part of our reality.

Erik: Absolutely. I think that that’s part of the deeper logic behind the renaissance of psychedelics. In many ways, “psychedelics” as a topic is a key site in understanding how modern technological scientific people recover, rediscover, and repackage, if you will, these kinds of liminal states and otherworldly encounters, with their potential sources of meaning and spiritual experiences. I also think that one of the reasons we have seen such an incredible renaissance emerge so quickly is because it was an inevitable part of scientific logic. Science has to take the brain seriously, it has to take the experiences in the brain seriously. Psychedelics are clearly physical, material agents that produce somewhat regular phenomenological effects. We have to understand that if we’re going to understand the brain. Any reasonable scientist is going to say that. And, whoa, lo and behold, it actually seems to do some good. So the genie is out of the bottle, and the genie doesn’t mean that we’re going to return to some kind of mystical worldview. I don’t believe we are. I think we’re in a state of tremendous mixing, of a multidimensional view where we have to learn how to move between different kinds of frameworks, including occult and animist frameworks, including mystical or religious frameworks, but also including secular, critical, analytic frameworks – scientific in that classic sense as well. How to do that I don’t know. But I do know that it’s a multidimensional field and I think that that’s why we see this turn towards the very multidimensional psychedelics.

Michael: Yeah, definitely. That is, in the sense of the original articulation of TechGnosis. You’ve got that chapter, “The Path is a Network”. There is something about the way the network allows for this manifold, multifaceted appraisal of reality, that really breeds and encourages and nourishes multiperspectivism. And so, in a way, I think the inherently psychedelic nature of our age, and what’s become really just like much more imminently and vividly obvious and easy to spot about the mainstream culture in general, is that we don’t all agree. It’s a much deeper revelation of the same kind of cultural relativism that we started to experience through the global interchange and commerce a couple hundred years ago, but now it’s to the point where culture has splintered to such an extraordinary degree due to the fact that everyone at the dinner table is occupying their own iPhone reality portal, that the main yoga of at least the first half of the twentieth century seems to be the psychedelic yoga, of being able to take our ontological conclusions lightly, and to be able to juggle them and to adopt them when they’re appropriate but to treat them with the kind of middle-way balance of skepticism and sympathy that you have modeled for your readers.

Erik: Yeah, that’s a really important thing for me. Also, itIt also plays an important role in a lot of the stuff that we haven’t been talking about, which is the dark side of the tale. Probably my proudest thing about TechGnosis is that it first came out in 1998, so the book was written during the first internet bubble. This was the time when a truly millennialist set of ideas were held by many people working in technology, the new rules of the economy of abundance. That kind of utopian thinking.was partly legitimately believed. I knew a lot of these people, I was kinda part of that world, of people who were imagining the potential of virtual reality, of new kinds of political formations, people drawn together in new forms of community, etc. At the same time those ideas were also ruthlessly exploited by capitalist forces, which created essentially a kind of ponzi scheme of IPOs. And so, the sense that something new and different was actually happening was simultaneously exploited.

When I was writing TechGnosis, it would have been easy for someone to write a much more happy, fluffy vision of the connections between spirituality and technology. “Here we are, just around the corner, just about to break through!” But for me, that sense of transformation was always accompanied by a shadow. If you open the portal and you accept the existence of these half-fantastic beings, there are demons there as well. In our future visions now we feel the presence apocalyptic energies. There’s the sense of mass breakdown, of ecological collapse, or the rise of a fascist surveillance state. On some intimate level we know that every time we’re using a device we’re moving through a shadow realm where we don’t know what sorts of agents – entities, algorithms, human beings – are perceiving and making meaning out of our operations. That is an unnerving, uncanny situation, and it’s one that we have to live with.

We have to acknowledge that we do have these fears and terrors, and apocalyptic presumptions inside of us, inside our imaginations, inside our hearts, inside our stories, inside our cultural traditions. And so we have to be very careful about where and how we mix the apocalyptic templates that we carry in our imaginations with the actual real conditions that we find ourselves in. It’s very tricky, but I suspect it takes that same sort of balance of skepticism and sympathy into the shadow realm as well as the utopian, or at least poetic possibility. And in a lot of ways I feel that’s where we’re at. That’s part of why I do what I do, is to try to kind of map that ginger, open, but questioning space, because it seems like one of the places to try to navigate these very difficult issues.

Michael: So many people worship the idea of the return to nature, or Terence McKenna’s idea of an archaic revival, this sort of forward-escape atavism where we go all the way around and end up back where we started, transformed. But we’re also naïve to the lived reality of not being on the top of the food chain, and that’s absolutely part of this that comes back, it can’t be divorced from the rest of it. We long for the community of the tribal life that we left behind, for the openness, the permeability of the self that we experience. The last experiment of civilization was profoundly dissociative, isolated, and lonely, and as consequence, we have a totally pathological relationship to the natural world. But in restoring that, in the humility of science recognizing its ultimate ignorance, we move back into an age where we’re no longer able to kid ourselves quite so successfully about the dragons that we have swept under the map. They’re still there, and they’re in a way even more alive for us now.

In your interview with Vice, you said a god is just a fiction that everyone believes in. So in a way – and this is kind of Information Warfare 101 – even if the NSA did not have supercomputers inside that Utah data complex, the fact that they built it, and that it can be observed on Google Maps, holds this profound power over the human imagination, and so we’re all having to catch up really quickly to these magical concepts. Even if they’re not clothed in the language and trappings of magical traditions, we’re being reacquainted with the power of the symbol and the power of ritual, and the sway that an idea has over the population when it becomes harder and harder to verify things beyond the shadow of a doubt.

Erik: You could call it conspiracy thinking, although that gets defined in all sorts of ways, some of which I think are themselves forms of mind-gaming. Either way, we’re in a realm of mind-games, where perception is reality, and where the crafting of perception takes place on multiple levels through multiple agendas. Multiple agents are crafting reality in a more and more overt way, even as we’re technically learning to craft subjective experience more and more. Here we’re getting into the edge of Virtual Reality 2.0. I think that, again, familiarity with these occult or even animist liminal zones will help us navigate through the jungle that we’re in. I mean, I can totally understand why people want to drop out of this thing. Like, fully drop out – whether into criminal underworlds, into darknet trafficking, or whether they go off the grid, or try to monkey-wrench the show. Those desires makes a lot of sense to me. It’s not who I am, it’s not where I am, but I can resonate with that. So, as long as I’m still participating in this network world that we’re sharing, that we’re fabricating, that the machines are fabricating, that we’re sharing with the machines, we have to develop that kind of light step.

You also mentioned a sense of the larger ecological framework that we’re in. As we look at what’s happening with technology, as we try to understand what’s happening with communication and human civilization, it’s impossible to extricate it from this larger ecological condition of crisis and no-going-back. It really feels like what we’re being asked to do, ethically and imaginatively, is to extend our ability to sympathize, to engage with, and even just to leave a space open for that which is outside of us, outside of the human frame, outside of the human story. That Outside may be technology, in the sense of the algorithmic intelligences that are already beginning to swamp our world, as well as the complex institutions and networks that are distributing these things. But that Outside also supports a more ecological and even cosmic view. We’re on a planet, the planet’s changing rapidly, spinning in space. All of those larger views, I think, are what we’re called upon to connect with.

I think one of my greater fears or concerns – I mean, I have so many, but just talking specifically about technology, and how people use it – is that it’s very easy to stay within a kind of human narcissistic world through media, especially social media, and the internet. I see people putting their energy into virtual or technological information circuitry, getting absorbed into a mass-cybernetic web of media, with its transmission of human stories and human perceptions and human egos and identification and projection. The whole game is so absorbing, so seductive, so fascinating, so enervating, that it can drown out our ability to wrestle with the non-human – whether it’s technology, geology, animals, capital flows. We need to become better post-humans, not narcissistic post-humans seeking our pleasure buttons, figuring out the best way to design some kind of crazy experience. That’s great, it’s part of the whole picture, but we have to also really think about what does it mean to live in a profoundly interwoven cosmos that necessarily draws us out of our narrow human egoic frame.

Michael: I totally agree. So, in light of that, I’m really fascinated by what you might have to say on recent developments on the interspecies internet – have you heard much about this? There was a TED talk about it a year or two ago.

Erik: I think I know what you mean. Why don’t you set it up?

Michael: A couple of years ago, Vint Cerf, Peter Gabriel, and a couple other people – dolphin researchers, bonobo researchers, and technologists – came forward at a TED conference to launch the idea that we can get into the sensorium of other animals and understand the way they experience things well enough to create computer interfaces for them that perform something like “Babel Fish” or Google Translate, so that we can communicate – whether it’s through music, symbols, or something else – with some of these other animals that we know have high intelligence and a sense of self.

I was really excited about being a part of this in some way, just throwing my bid into this process, and then I started thinking about how it got more complex. Because, what’s really going on here is that we can scarcely recognize a world beyond ourselves without immediately attempting to colonize it with our technological bid for control. To reference George Dvorsky of io9, there’s something really beautiful in his fascination with animal uplift, and his vision of our ethical responsibility to involve non-human species in the fate of the planet – which is currently being decided by human parliamentary action. The dolphins should get a vote. The gorillas should get a vote. And the only way that they can get a vote is to involve them in the technological infrastructure that we’re creating that is allows us the hope and the opportunity for that Star Trek world government. At the same time, it enfolds them into our own personal and transpersonal nightmare that we just discussed, and ultimately they may not want to participate in our uniquely human breed of insanity.

Erik: Yeah, that’s very well put. You know, we keep stumbling onto this Faustian bargain. It increasingly seems to describe these kinds of situations. There are people who believe that we can design a good enough system where, even despite its flaws, we’re drawing in others to decisions about the best and most ethical thing to do. And at the same time you’re going to have people who are just, like, gagging in their throats. It’s like, after all of the violence we have exerted on the animal world, to do this is the final, most nihilistic violence – to draw them into this madness! And you could have the same discussion about the desire to colonize planets. How could we not get excited about the idea of human beings on Mars or even robots landing on asteroids? It’s just totally fascinating and wonderful, and yet it’s pretty easy to see what that would look like as an industry, and the kinds of problems that would arise in the way that seems stitched into the nature of human beings. Sometime you can almost be Christian about it. It’s a kind of original sin, a way of, like, always fighting and competing and outmaneuvering and exploiting and trying to create elites. All these things that civilization has been doing since the get-go, since we stepped outside of the Paleolithic life and made a pact with writing and social organization, with pyramidical structures. It’s an old, old, old pact, and it’s deeply religious. Our religion is fundamentally bound up with the mythology of the state.

And so, where I stumble now is…where is the state? Is it everywhere? Is it nowhere? Are we at a point where that whole relationship is shifting? Is it worth extending hope into these things, or is it reasonable to say, “Look, we just keep doing the same horrible thing over and over again, so let’s just tear it down.”

Getting back to the specific question about animals, though. I really buy that radical democratic notion in a lot of ways. Turning to the Outside, whether it’s animals or elements of technology or geological forces, is part of what democracy means. Part of the constitution in Ecuador recognizes the rights of nature. Not just nature, but “Pachamama” – and, as people who are interested in medicine work and indigenous worldviews know, Pachamama is a goddess. It’s a way of understanding and relating to the fecund, beneficent giving quality of the earth, in a spiritual light, or a personhood light, or an animist light, whatever you want to call it. And that’s part of the constitution, part of a legal document. The thinking behind that document is, “Look, it’s just extending the idea of rights, which is a modern construct. The notion of inalienable rights emerges at a certain point in Western history, it gets installed into governmental and legal forms. Initially it’s just for white men with property, then it’s just for men, then women get it, then people of color, whatever – you have this spreading of the notion of rights, so that now we are called upon to spread it into the environment as well.” Very tricky, very complicated, very confusing. What does it mean, to give nature a voice? Is “nature”, or Pachamama, even the right word? And at the same time, that seems like a very vital and significant mutation in the operating system of the state. You’ve got to factor in these others, even though exactly how that happens is so difficult to understand. So again, here we go! Plunging into the Faustian bargain!

Michael: It’s very much related to a book that I feel stands in a fun balance with yours. It came out this last year by Christian Schwägerl. It’s called The Anthropocene, and if you haven’t read it I highly recommend the read (editor’s note: Shwägerl has a number of excerpts published on Reality Sandwich). It ignores the mystical dimensions of things. Schwägerl lives in Berlin, and he’s very much operating from a secular, European Union, modern global ecological sensibility. But the whole idea of his book is that the last remaining wild places are, in a sense, artifacts, because they only exist due to the determination of the human hand to preserve them. That there is no real wilderness anymore on our planet, at least in the natural world. Everything is indoors, and we have to find a way to first recognize that the so-called “Human Age” is actually tilting us into this much more profound, complex, and difficult relationship with the non-human world.

But we do have to find a way to express that world in our own language and our own systems – for example, by honoring what he calls “ecosystem services” in our economy, not factoring out that the water cycle, the carbon cycle, and all of these supporting systems that have an order of magnitude greater economic value than anything we’re trading on the stock market. They must be preserved at literally all costs. But he is ethically divided by the question, “Do we have to talk about the rainforest in terms of its monetary value in order to save it?”

Erik: That’s the crux. I’m glad you brought up this topic of wilderness, because I think it’s a good way to reflect on one of the problems we face. On the one hand, we have the wild – what the wild represents, what it means to be wild, what it means to stumble across the wild in your life, We are talking the unknown, the mystery, the chaos, a kind of Dionysian encounter, an intensity that takes you beyond reason, whether it’s experienced in a natural environment or in your head, or in the city. There’s something about wildness that’s profound to human beings. It has a lot to do with what people seek when they’re spiritual seekers, when they’re religious, when they are plumbing the depths. When people question the autonomy or imperial demands of reason, it’s often in the name of some kind of wild – whether it’s the sacred or the archaic or the nonhuman.

At the same time, you can sit down and go, “But this whole idea of wilderness, of natural wilderness, well, it’s a construct, it’s part of the European imagination, and that imagination is over. It’s not doing anyone any good anymore.” Some very serious environmentalists will argue that ideas of wilderness or even “nature” are actually in the way. The argument is that the religious and spiritual ideas about nature that were such an important part of twentieth century environmentalism actually get in the way of the process of introducing these non-human factors into the system in a way that would actually force the system to recognize and negotiate with them, rather than pretending in this abstract, insidious way that they don’t exist. And I don’t know what to do with that tension between these two “wildernesses”. All I know is that it’s incredibly vital in whatever way that we keep a portal open to the wild.

In that sense I’m very different than rationalist people who think we just need to introduce everything into the system – that it has to be drawn into the logic of capital, it has to be commodified, it has to be seen. That the way to deal with pollution is to create carbon debt and to introduce it into the financial system. But that solution is a house of cards. I have a slightly, perhaps darker view that whatever tumult lies ahead, whatever sorts of forms of chaos we confront, whether they’re through a highly developed technological society that manages to keep things going, or whether society is forced to reorganize in the face of a major hiccups and breakdowns, whatever the thing is, the more that we are actually able to handle the wild, the chaos, the unknown, the mystery, the others, the whispers on the edge of our vision, the better we’ll be able to actually navigate that situation on an individual and a cultural level. There is a problem with the rational, reasonable, incorporate-everything logic, with its call to squeeze everything for its monetary value, to quantify everything, to quantify the self. All of that may be fine and well, but only as long as it keeps a space open for those kinds of encounters, for that kind of imagination, for that kind of risk and vulnerability.

But that’s often what doesn’t happen. So, in a way, my work, not just in TechGnosis, but in all the writing and conversations that I’ve done and continue to do is about riding these edges. I just want to keep those portals open, to keep the spaces open, so that people don’t feel like they have to be fools in order to engage these broader ways of seeing the world. That’s why it’s really important to keep those portals, those edges open.

Read more by Erik Davis here.

Read more by Michael Garfield here.

	Reid Mukai on Saturday Matinee: Wizards
	Lara/Trace on Saturday Matinee: Wizards
	Lara/Trace on Saturday Matinee: From He…
	lobotero on Saturday Matinee: From He…
	Lara/Trace on Saturday Matinee: The Wicker…

After the Crash

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

Category Archives: Science

The Weird Politics Of Aspartame: Conspiracy Theory Or Startling Truth?

Updates:

Mother Earth May Have Good Reason to Slaughter Us