Something Is Happening

Posted on March 4, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By William Hawes

SOMETHING IS HAPPENING HERE, but you don’t know what it is: Do you? No one knows, really, as this something is still evolving. As we look back to 2016, though, it is abundantly clear that history has awoken from its slumber. We’ve had a couple events in the West last year: Brexit and Trump.

Politically-charged, dynamic events (as Alain Badiou might define them) have been rare in the West since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the USSR. Capitalism made it seem as if neoliberalism was winning in the 1990s, even as the US wantonly murdered in Iraq and took perverse pleasure in helping to dismember Yugoslavia, among other things.

In fact, one could argue there have only been four notable Western political events in the post-Cold War era: the 9/11 attacks, the 2003 protests against the Iraq War, the 2008 banking crisis and following protest movements of 2011 (Occupy and 15-M Movement), and the populist, anger-driven aforementioned events of 2016.

You see, authentic, spontaneous political events (in the form of uprisings or popular revolts against the elite) are a no-no in the West. History is supposed to have ended, remember? Max Weber called this the Iron Cage, and for good reason.

Now, though, the meaninglessness and rootlessness of our lives trapped inside the cage have become too obvious to ignore, for most of us. As each day passes, our political discourse glosses over how lazy, ignorant, mean-spirited, and numb our society has become. We import luxuries from all over the globe, but can’t be bothered to cook or grow our own food, assemble our own electronics, expand renewable energy projects, provide clean water to inner cities, organize high-speed transport, or educate our youth without drowning them in debt, etc.

So, many have lashed out against the system, and our more vulnerable members of society, in anger, defiance, out of sheer ignorance. Could it be because, deep down, we know how helpless, sheltered, and out-of-touch our society is, compared to the rest of the world? What are the root causes of this disintegration of public discourse?

One cause is our utter dependency on the capitalist system to clothe, feed, and shelter us. What we used to inherit from our mothers and fathers, important agricultural knowledge, artisanal and cultural wisdom, a sense of place and belonging, have all been traded in for money, the privilege to be exploited by capitalism, toiling in jobs that alienate us from ourselves, families, the Earth. Paper bills and electronic bank accounts are a pitiful substitute for self-reliance. This loss, this grief, isn’t allowed to be expressed in public. Logical positivism tells us that progress will prevail, the future will be better than the past, and anyone who thinks otherwise must be some sort of Luddite.

Since real income has fallen and social services have been slashed in the last 40-plus years, many have seen their loved ones’ lives cut short (lack of access to health care and quality food and produce, air and water pollution), their dreams defiled (steady jobs gone, factories shuttered), their entertainment homogenized and dangerous (sports mania has become normalized, “Go Team!”, alcohol, painkiller, and opiate addiction is rampant), their hopes for the future shattered (community and public space swallowed by corporations).

There are those, as well, still too plugged into the system (both Trump and Clinton voters), too attached to their gadgets, to the hum of their slave-labor appliances, to the glow emanating from their screens. They will cry incessantly about the turning away of Muslims from flights, but there is only silence for the millions killed abroad by the US war machine. Mainstream liberals are just as likely as the meanest, most selfish conservatives to fall prey to emotional pleas, demagoguery, and pathetic attempts to see themselves as victims in this Age of Anger.

The urge to resort to the myth of a righteous, homogenous, “pure” social group, to denigrate the other, is strong in such dire, despondent situations. In America, though, material poverty cannot be said to be the only, or even the main causal factor, behind this return of nativism and tribalism. Rather, it is undoubtedly a spiritual malaise that has swept over the West. Ever since the rise of the Industrial Revolution, it has been technology which has provided the underlying weltanschauung for our culture. Sprouting from this, an inhuman and Earth-destroying morality has formed. Jacques Ellul explains:

“A principal characteristic of technique … is its refusal to tolerate moral judgments. It is absolutely independent of them and eliminates them from its domain. Technique never observes the distinction between moral and immoral use. It tends on the contrary, to create a completely independent technical morality.” (1)

Thus, Western society, through the use of mass-produced electronics and disseminated in what some call our “Information Age”, has now seemingly accelerated the pace of change and ecological destruction beyond the scope of any group or nation which could possibly control it. We are then confronted with the thought that only an economic collapse or series of natural disasters could possibly provide the impetus for revolutionary change to occur. This only leaves us feeling helpless, depressed, and passive in the face of government oppression and capitalist exploitation.

Not only that, but capitalism has quite literally dulled our senses and disconnected us from our source of being, planet Earth. Don’t believe me? Read this amazing paper on how Polynesian wayfinders discovered islands thousands of miles apart without any modern technology. This is part of what Morris Berman means by Coming to our Senses. To re-establish our unity with nature, the Western notion of an ego-driven, domineering and reductionist search for truth, meaning, and creativity must be thrown out. Here, Berman invokes Simone Weil:

“‘decreate’ yourself in order to create the work, as God (Weil says) diminished Himself in order to create the world. It would be more accurate to say that you don’t create the work, but rather you step out of the way and let it happen.” (2)

This isn’t really discussed among wide swaths of leftists, the social-justice crowd, or with mainstream liberals. It’s anathema to a materialistic, dead world where freedom has been traded for comforting lies, money has been substituted for the ability to provide for ourselves and our communities, and the abundance and resiliency (truly a miracle!) of the Earth is taken for granted as we chase our next fix for consumer goods, our next chance for drugs or gadgets to dim our perception.

What you’re not supposed to say in public, of course, is that our world is falling apart, and we are doing nothing to stop it. The reactions are too raw, the reality too grim, even as we know, for example, that 10% or more of the total species on Earth will be gone by 2050.

Yet we can do something: there is an opening now in political discourse which has been previously denied to us. The Republican and Democratic parties have thoroughly delegitimized themselves by offering up Trump and Clinton as their figureheads: these were widely considered the most widely disliked candidates in recent memory, if not the history of our republic. There is room for Libertarians, Greens, and Socialists to gain power: yet only if they avoid their own regrettable sectarianism, organize, and promote an inclusive, broad-based platform.

To do so, citizens will have to gain some perspective on their lives. A slow pace of life needs to be seen as a virtue, not a sin: many on the right and left are quick to denounce the hedonism of the jet-setting, parasitic globalists, the Davos men; yet refuse to see their own lifestyles and actions as smaller examples of such outlandish consumption.

If we are open to life and our environment as part of a greater whole, an unfathomable mystery, we can refuse our culture’s siren songs of death, misery, and destruction. While modern technology can be useful if reined in by an Earth-conscious, responsible morality, some things are better left unknown, undiscovered, if it risks destroying the Earth in order to find the answer. Rather than running a cost/benefit analysis to determine the land’s worth, some aspects of the planet and the universe are better Left Sacred.

Also, acknowledging our mortality, and accepting the basic fact that death could come for you at any moment, can liberate our souls and propel them to unimaginable heights. Joe Crookston explains this quite well:

“And then when I turn dry and brown
I’ll lay me down to rest
I’ll turn myself around again
As part of an eagle’s nest
And when that eagle learns to fly
I’ll flutter from that tree
I’ll turn myself around again
As part of the mystery”

Notes:
1.) Ellul, Jacques. The Technological Society. Vintage Books, 1964. p. 97.
2.) Berman, Morris. Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West. Simon & Schuster, 1989. p. 337

William Hawes is a writer specializing in politics and environmental issues. His articles have appeared online at Global Research, Countercurrents, Dissident Voice, The World Financial Review, Gods & Radicals, and Counterpunch. He is author of the ebook Planetary Vision: Essays on Freedom and Empire. You can reach him at wilhawes@gmail.com

How the Super-Rich Will Destroy Themselves

Posted on February 8, 2017 by Reid Mukai

HangTheBankers

By Paul Buchheit

Source: Nation of Change

Perhaps they believe that their underground survival bunkers with bullet-resistant doors and geothermal power and anti-chemical air filters and infrared surveillance devices and pepper spray detonators will sustain them for two or three generations.

Perhaps they feel immune from the killings in the streets, for they rarely venture into the streets anymore. They don’t care about the great masses of ordinary people, nor do they think they need us.

Or do they? There are a number of ways that the super-rich, because of their greed and lack of empathy for others, may be hastening their own demise, while taking the rest of us with them.

1. Pandemic (Because of Their Disdain for Global Health)

“A year ago the world was in a panic over Ebola. Now it’s Zika at the gate. When will it end?” –Public health expert Dr. Ali Khan.

It could end with a global pandemic that spreads with the speed of the 1918 Spanish Flu, but with a virulence that kills over half of us, rich and poor alike. Vanderbilt University’s Dr. William Schaffner warned us a decade ago, “You’ve got to really invest vast resources right now to protect us from a pandemic.” Added infectious disease specialist Dr. Stephen Baum, “There’s nobody making vaccines anymore because the profitability is low and the liability is high.”

The flu is just one of our worries. It has been estimated that less than 10 percent of the budget for health research is spent on diseases that cause 90 percent of the world’s illnesses. According to a study in The Lancet, of the 336 new drugs developed in the first decade of this century, only four of them were for diseases impacting third-world peoples. World Health Organization director Margaret Chan lamented the long decades of disregard for the African-centered effects of the Ebola virus: “Ebola has historically been confined to poor African nations. The R&D incentive is virtually non-existent. A profit-driven industry does not invest in products for markets that cannot pay.”

The super-rich had better make sure their anti-chemical air filters are also anti-viral.

2. Terrorism (Because of Global Inequality)

In The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett document some of the most frightening effects of inequality: higher levels of crime and violence, impacting all classes of people.

Inequality is worst at the global level, and the victims of global greed are getting more violent. The World Protests report concluded that the most recent decade represents one of the most agitated periods in modern history — comparable to pre-Civil-War days, World War 1, and the Civil Rights era. According to expert Scott Atran, terrorism primarily appeals to young men who are bored and underemployed; for them, “jihad is an egalitarian, equal-opportunity employer.”

The terrorism of the future could easily take the form of the viral killers mentioned above. As Dr. Khan notes, “A deadly microbe like smallpox — to which we no longer have immunity — can be easily recreated in a rogue laboratory.”

3. Drought (Because of Their Denial of Environmental Destruction)

National Geographic’s 2012 Greendex Survey reveals a remarkable human response to environmental damage: “[Those] demonstrating the least sustainable behavior as consumers, are least likely to feel guilty about the implications of their choices for the environment.” Citizens of Mexico, Brazil, China, and India tend to be most concerned about climate change, pollution, and species loss, while American, French, and British consumers are more concerned about the state of the economy and the cost of energy and fuel.

Even worse than denial is the outright suppression of climate-saving technologies, as, for example, by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which wants to charge the “freeriders” who install solar panels on their roofs.

The result of this environmental contempt, according to a Columbia University study, is the prospect of “drought beyond the sub-tropics and into the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes, regions of globally important agricultural production.”

The super-rich can while away the hours in their underground bunkers watching videos of the good old days when the earth was cool.

4. Atrophy (Because of the Debt-Induced Collapse of Innovation)

A Small Business Administration study found that only 2% of the Millennial Generation are entrepreneurs (self-employed or business owners), compared to 6.7% of Baby Boomers and 5.4% in Generation X. According to the Kauffman Foundation, 20- to 34-year-olds made up over a third of all new business startups in 1997, but less than a quarter of them today. The super-rich have manipulated the financial system to the point that would-be entrepreneurs, many of them young and deeply in debt, are unable or unwilling to take chances on new startups.

Yet on a global scale youth entrepreneurship is on the rise. America is exceptional in its entrepreneurial decline.

5. Decay (Because of Their Disregard for Our Crumbling Infrastructure)

The corporate elite may face further business collapse if they continue to ignore the breakdown in our nation’s infrastructure. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that every American household is losing $3,400 per year in disposable income due to infrastructure deficiencies.

The tens of billions of dollars already being paid for additional transportation and storage costs may not kill the capitalists, but the losses to China and other fast-developing nations will surely deflate their stock prices and their egos.

How the Super-Rich Could Help Themselves

Amidst all the talk of unity and prayer and peace, a solution exists: job opportunities and affordable housing. The super-rich could prolong life for all of us, including themselves, if they recognized the need to support a strong society. If not, they’ll be ensconced in their bunkers with their children at their sides, with nowhere to go and nothing to do.

Soylent Burgers and Cockroach Milk

Posted on January 29, 2017 by Reid Mukai

Source: The Hipcrime Vocab

“The profitability of production cannot expand indefinitely. Any increase in the quantity of soil, water, minerals, or plants put into a particular production process per unit of time constitutes intensification. It has been the burden of this book to show that intensification inevitably leads to declining efficiencies. That declining efficiencies have adverse effects upon the average standard of living cannot be doubted.’
-MARVIN HARRIS, ‘Cannibals and Kings’

This comment made me chuckle: “The futurology future is starting to look worse than the collapse future.” This was on Reddit in response to an article about cockroaches providing the “milk of the future”:

Scientists think cockroach milk could be the superfood of the future (Science Alert)

This really does seem like The Onion at this point. Someone suggested that Reddit’s collapse and futurology boards should merge at some point. Believe it or not, they aren’t all that far apart.

We’ve already been treated to an endless litany of articles about how insect ranching will provide the protein of the future. Then there’s the meat grown in a petri-dish, and the nutrition shake cheekily named Soylent scarfed down by the Silicon Valley crowd so they can cram in a few more hours of work after popping their Ritalin. Now people are questioning whether the government should step in and force us to eat less meat.

And yet we are still simultaneously told that overpopulation and resource depletion are not a problem, and that more growth is good.

This is progress???

One of the things I’ve written about over the years is this idea that technological innovations are inherently good. But it’s clear what’s really going on: desperately trying to maintain the status quo in the face of increasing population pressure and declining resources. There’s a technical term for this: intensification.

Marvin Harris, whose works serve as a guidepost for this blog, warned us that intensification always leads to lower living standards for the majority of people in the long run, while only benefiting a tiny handful. This is a law of history. Over the years, I’ve tried to point out the difference between true innovation which solves problems or allows us to do things we could not do before, and intensification, which is essentially squeezing blood from a stone. In the former category are things like antibiotics and radio, which solve problems (killer infections) or allow us to do new things (communicate globally). In the latter category are things like electric cars (attempting to keep the unsustainable automobile infrastructure alive) and aquaculture (to make up for stripping the oceans bare of wild fish).

For the majority of people, there is no difference, since both are “growth” and growth is always good, full stop. GDP, the yardstick by which we measure progress in the modern world (which even its creator warned us against) is agnostic as to the source of growth, whether it is producing more food to feed hungry people or asthma inhalers to deal with the lung irritants from air pollution.

People tend to forget we’ve been here before.

Back during the Ice Age (late Pleistocene), we H. sapiens lived primarily off of herds of large fauna, especially reindeer, mammoth and bison. This was supplemented with wild salmon in season. The fattiest parts of the animal were the most prized and sought after. Bones were cracked and boiled to extract the grease. Most calories came from nutrient-dense meat and fat, while plants were consumed for their beneficial vitamins and minerals (plants are less calorie dense).

Then the large fauna started to die off. They died off due to a double-blow of a changing climate and increasing human predation. Scientists debate about which was the primary cause, but it’s pretty clear that whenever humans showed up in a pristine environment, the large animals went extinct shortly thereafter. Many of these animals had survived previous climatic changes, so it’s doubtful that climate change alone was responsible. Skeletons riddled with spear points provide more damning evidence for our species.

In response, we launched a broad spectrum revolution – using our omnivorous diet to exploit a wider variety of foodstuffs, particularly plant foods. This began with acorns and pistachios, but soon moved to grass seeds, sedges and pulses. Meanwhile, the prey animals got smaller and smaller, from reindeer and bison, to gazelles and fallow deer, to hares and waterfowl. Instead of the nutritious and diverse food sources of their ancestors, we became more and more dependent upon eating pulverized grass seeds, obtained at the cost of backbreaking labor for harvesting, threshing and grinding.

The human population became mostly vegetarian by necessity, and remained so for roughly the next 8,000 or so years. The problem is, a vegetarian diet doesn’t provide a lot of necessary vitamins, minerals and nutrients for optimal health. Today’s vegetarians can choose from a plethora of foods year round that simply weren’t available to ancient people. They don’t have to worry about what is in season and have the entire world as their larder. In the past, however, the vast majority of people ended up subsisting on a diet of weak beer and gruel. Regular meat consumption became a privilege restricted to the wealthy upper classes, while everyone else went begging. Hunting, an activity once done by all humans everywhere since time immemorial, became the exclusive provenance of kings and princes – society’s rulers. While it is true that too much meat can be detrimental to health, too little is perhaps even more damaging. Humans are meat-eaters, and a certain level of fat and protein is required for optimal health. The protein in grains and legumes is incomplete (the body needs 22 different types of amino acids to function properly; adults can synthesize 13 of those internally, but the other 9 must be obtained from food), and there are no fats (the human brain is over 60 percent fat). Grains produce an over-abundance of omega-6 fatty acids, poisonous lectins to prevent their consumption, have low nutrient density, and high acidity. They are actually a terrible thing to base a primate diet around. But we had no other choice, thanks to intensification.

And this is dramatically reflected by the skeletons of ancient peoples, who show major signs of malnutrition, disease, and stunted growth. At the same time, arthritis and other signs of wear and tear make their appearance on the bones of people who now have to spend hours a day grinding grain in a saddle quern rather than fishing and chasing after wild animals. This gruel also breaks down into simple sugars in the mouth during digestion, meaning that cavities and premature tooth decay became endemic as well.

As population pressure grew, grains, pulses and sedges, once “unpalatable” dietary supplements cultivated by hunter-gatherers for times of extreme scarcity or fermentation into medicinal beverages, became the chief dietary staple for most people. At the same time, humans found themselves preyed upon by a new class of predator: their own kind, which continues unabated to this day.

In order to keep large herbivores from going totally extinct, we embarked upon what Harris called “the greatest conservation project in history”: animal domestication. Meanwhile, cheap carbohydrates from grain are what kept most of the human population alive from day-to-day for thousands of years, such that “bread” is synonymous in all ancient cultures with “food.”

All this came from attempting to exploit resources more intensively from our environment in the face of increasing population pressure.

This sad tale, memorably spun by Jared Diamond some years ago, reflects Harris’ principle: intensification inevitably leads to benefits for the few; misery and oppression for the many.

During periods of deintensifcation, we actually recovered some of the losses. This was due to either 1.) a reduced population or 2.) new lands and resources opened up for exploitation. For example, signs of health improve after the Black Death in Europe for the survivors, due to the reduced population pressure. There were more resources to go around per head. Also, the opening up of the new lands due to colonization (and the dieoff of the native peoples), brought vast new areas of virgin land under cultivation. This led to more wealth, as well as political freedoms. Serfdom waned after the black death, and the American Revolution put Enlightenment principles of representative democracy and justice into practice. Perhaps the most dramatic result came from the harnessing of millions of years of stored sunlight in fossil fuels, combined with the scientific method. This allowed many more people a higher standard of living, even in the face of increasing population and intensifying resource use. It was during this period that “economics” became the guiding principle of our civilization, and it chalked up all benefits to “institutions”–typically capitalist market institutions–rather than a temporary superabundance of energy and resources.

Thomas Jefferson once noted that the Americans in the room were all a head taller than their European counterparts. That’s what happens when you have plenty for everybody. The first Europeans in North America also noted how much taller the Native Americans were. As this article notes, in the past, Americans ate more meat than today, and were healthier as well:

How Americans Used to Eat (The Atlantic)

Eventually, the Malthusian cycle kicked in again. Population grew, the empty spaces filled up, and the frontier was closed. Increasing competition caused wages and purchasing power to drop. People gradually lost what self-sufficiency they had, allowing the elites to consolidate power. People once again began working longer, harder, for less. Sound familiar?

We intensified again – in order to keep up with the demand for meat, we crowded animals together into feedlots in unsanitary conditions and fed them cheap corn (maize), which they are not adapted to eat. To cope with the inevitable sickness which resulted, we pumped the animals full of antibiotics (which has a side effect of increasing growth). It is these miserable and tortured animals which most of us are forced to eat now, thanks to intensification.

However, domesticated meat is less nutritious than the wild variety. The Omega-3/Omega-6 profile is altered, and there are less antioxidants. Omega-6 fatty acids reduce inflammation, which is increasingly being pinpointed as the root cause of just about every disease you care to name, from autoimmune diseases, to Alzheimer’s, to arthritis, to chronic pain, depression, and cancer. At the same time, it’s been shown that grains actually increase inflammation, and are implicated in a host of metabolic diseases:

This Is Your Brain on Gluten (The Atlantic)

While grass-fed, hormone-free beef is still available, it costs more, meaning it is restricted to those with high incomes, just like in the past. And hunting is still primarily an elite sport for the rich in many places (especially outside North America). Just like in the past, the poor people trapped in “food deserts” feed themselves with cheap carbohydrates, now in the form of processed corn and sugar products made by the industrial food system, while the wealthy can purchase boutique ‘lifestyle” products at Whole ~~Paycheck~~ Foods.Malnutrition now takes the form of obesity as well as starvation, although much of the non-industrialized world still deals with empty bellies, stunted growth and vitamin deficiencies, including many of those who produce export crops for the West. That’s on top of poverty and pollution.

When we scraped the oceans clean of fish and poisoned our air and waterways due to industrial pollutants (e.g. mercury ash is a side effect of coal power generation) we turned to fish farming, (aquaculture) – one of the favorite high-tech “innovations” of the futurist crowd. But farmed fish are nutritionally inferior to wild ones. Wild fish travel widely and get their food from a great variety of sources. This means that they have a much better Omega-3 fatty acid profile (which prevents inflammation and helps brain growth). But farmed fish have to be fed. This means their diet is far more restricted, and hence their meat less nutritious (more Omega-6’s). In fact, salmon needs to be fed a pill in order to turn them pink so that consumers will buy them since their meat does not develop its natural color from their diet. As Spencer Wells notes in Pandora’s Seed, were now doing for fish what we did for ungulates some 8000 years ago: a desperate attempt to preserve what remains. Farmed fish is replacing wild fish in supermarkets. As with grass-fed meat, the wild variety is now sold at a premium affordable only to those with high incomes (sound familiar)?

In each and every case, intensification had led to far more work for ultimately inferior products. This is always the result of intensification in the long run.

We are constantly told we can’t go back to hunting and gathering (even if we wanted to). Why is that? What’s left unsaid is the reason: too many people and too much environmental degradation as the result of 6-8,000 years of intensification, which also brought about disease, governments, wars, taxes, poverty, inequality, and so on. Now we’re told we’ve got to eat less meat (which means more grains), live in small, tightly sealed houses, use less water, take shorter showers, and so forth. In essence, that we will “innovate” our way to success. But all of these are signs of lower living standards. And no wonder: seven billion-plus people, all quarters of the earth occupied and brought under the plow, rain forests being chopped down, the most easily accessible fossil fuels plateauing, toxic pollution of the air, land and water, overpumping of ground water, and the stable climate of the Holocene threatened by carbon levels. Intensification caused all of these things; it is not the solution. The next phase of intensification isn’t going to lead to better living standards any more than the last few rounds. Yet we’ve been tricked into thinking it will, because we don’t realize that fossil fuels are what are ultimately responsible for our current living standards (us Westerners, that is), not intensification. And even then, given the levels of stress, overwork, social dysfunction, health maladies and mental disease in industrialized societies, we might be tempted to wonder if even our living standards are all that great to begin with.

Furthermore, we are told that a healthy diet centered around pastured meat, plants and nuts is just not possible because it’s too damaging to the environment, or too “expensive.” That is, “we” need to “feed the world!” But according to the elites (the ones who benefit from intensification, remember) the answer isn’t less people, or curtailing economic growth. No, instead it’s new “innovations” that are profitable to the parasitical corporate owners of this planet: lab-grown meat, hydroponics, vertical gardens, meal-replacement shakes, protein powder from ground-up crickets, steel-and-glass human anthills. “The futurology future is starting to look worse than the collapse future.” Maybe that’s because the collapse future has more room to grow actual real food, live in a house you built yourself with your friends and family, spend time in nature, work less, play more, and get in touch with what we really are, deep down, instead of what industrial society wants to mold us to be.

Now, for the record, I have no problem with eating bugs. The Permaculturist in me says we should exploit all sources for sustenance in our environment such that they work together in a sustainable, harmonious way in line with the earth’s natural ecosystems. Raising insects, as we now do with bees, makes sense. And, yes, the overconsumption of Americans is grotesque and makes us unhappy, and we’d be better off ditching it (which I already do voluntarily). So to be clear: what I am criticizing is not eating insects or deriving milk from cockroaches per se. Nor am I defending the overconsumption produced by status-driven consumer capitalism. Rather, I am critiquing the idea that these futurology trends are signs of progress rather than collapse. Which is why r/collpase and r/futurology increasingly appear to be turning into the same thing.

P.S This comment nails it.

Hybrid Landscapes – From Posthistoric to Posthuman

Posted on December 26, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Kingsley L. Dennis

Source: Reality Sandwich

The collective psyche seems to be in the grip of a powerful archetypal dynamic in which the long-alienated modern mind is breaking through, out of the contractions of its birth process, out of what Blake called its “mind-forg’d manacles,” to rediscover its intimate relationship with nature and the larger cosmos.
Richard Tarnas

Reality, it seems, has been deregulated, and nothing is business as usual anymore….as ancient mapmakers used to mark on the watery unknown, “Here be dragons”
Erik Davis

Here be dragons, indeed. Our human exploration is swinging through a momentum that includes knowledge of the finer forces at work within the cosmos, which includes how we experiment in our interactions with not only the environment but also our bodies. In this article I will explore these themes, looking at memes of meta-programming to post-body scenarios – all in the framework of a human search along the sacred path of understanding our very selves.

American writer Philip K. Dick is famous mostly for his science-fiction books that question the nature and validity of our reality-matrix. In “The Android and the Human,” a speech that Dick gave in the early 1970s, he spoke about this blurring of the boundaries between body and environment:

[O]ur environment, and I mean our man-made world of machines, artificial constructs, computers, electronic systems, interlinking homeostatic components – all of this is in fact beginning more and more to possess what the earnest psychologists fear the primitive sees in his environment: animation. In a very real sense our environment is becoming alive, or at least quasi-alive, and in ways specifically and fundamentally analogous to ourselves.1

The human-body-environment is increasingly being reconfigured as a site for a new magical animism, as distinct from the previous archaic notion of animism. Writer-philosopher Erik Davis has referred to this as a sort of ‘techno-animism’ whereby we give life to our technologies based on our imaginations.2 This new configuration is no longer anymore about technologies and us, but rather our technological bodies that now inhabit our ‘techno-imaginal’ realm. The body is becoming back into vogue as a site for experience and experimentation, as a vessel that interacts, intercedes, and interprets the sacred-mystical reality-matrix that encloses us. As modern quantum science has now aptly demonstrated, we do not inhabit a subject-object type of us-and-it world.^[1] All materiality is enmeshed within a quantum entangled universe, and our bodies are somatically communicating with this energy field simultaneously.

Much of the western spiritual (Gnostic) mystical practice is interpreted as a somatically felt experience. The body is the instrument that receives and grounds the experience, whether it be in terms of the ‘great flash’, ‘illuminating light’ or the ‘bodily rush.’ The body is the human instrument for attracting and centralizing (receiving, transcribing, and sometimes transferring) the developmental energy. There are many ‘bodies’ in spiritual-mystic traditions, including the etheric, the spiritual, the ecstatic, the subtle, the higher, and others, so that the purely physical-material body is recognized as the densest and least mobile of them all. As cultural historian Morris Berman has noted, the body in history has always been a site/sight of focus.3 It has helped define the experience of the Self/Other, the Outer/Inner, and to be a material vessel for the spiritual impulse. Our earlier ancestors, who exhibited more of an animist relationship to the world, saw less distinction between the physical body and its environment. The rise of the philosophy of dualism and the mind-body split, which was supported by the mechanistic worldview, saw our modern societies further strengthen the mind/body rift. This was publicly endorsed by Orthodox/organized religions that have been quick to spurn and even demonize the body. Many so-called ‘modern’ societies around the world have, at one time or another, attempted to suppress the power and expression of the human body. The body has always been a site for the convergence of power and control. Perhaps no one in recent times has done more to expose this body-power relationship than the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault.^[2] Foucault has deconstructed, in the body of work that he refers to as a critical history of modernity, how the body has been fought over as a site of power. The physical body is a location of resistance against the establishment; it is a fixed place where an individual can be located, found, and held accountable. If we cannot escape from our bodies then, it seems, we are forever within the system. The body-in-system has always been taken to represent the form of something, as a socially tangible entity. We have bodies in terms of social institutions, such as the body politic, or the social body, the scientific body, the medical body, or the body of an organization, etc. The once sacred site of the body, which was the vessel for somatic spiritual experiences, has become the subject of control and suppression.

In Gnostic terms the body’s site of power has been referred to as those of the ‘sleepers’ and ‘wakers.’ The ‘sleepers’ being those whose conscious self has yet to break through the layers of the body’s social conditioning. The spiritual-somatic experience has been seen as a threat to hierarchical societies because it exists beyond their bounds of power. This is one reason why ecstatic experiences – whether through spiritual or other means – have been suppressed, outlawed, and discredited by religions and mainstream institutions alike. Ecstatic experiences that can break down human thinking patterns and conditioning structures are unnerving for institutions of social-political power. How can you control, regulate, and discipline a body/energy/experience that has no physical location? Such intangible forces, such as the power of baraka,^[3] is positively infectious and beyond bounds. As Berman notes,

The goal of the Church (any church) is to obtain a monopoly on this vibratory experience, to channel it into its own symbol system, when the truth is that the somatic response is not the exclusive property of any given religious leader or particular set of symbols. 4

The spiritual-occult renaissance of the 20th century strove to rejuvenate and strengthen the presence of the somatic experience. This intangible flow of spiritual blessing, grace, and power is also a resurging undercurrent in the sacred revival.

In more recent times there has been an increasing focus on what is termed the innate consciousness (of the body), and which has been revealed through such techniques as muscle testing. It is innate because it is inborn (born in and of the body), and it is instinctual. Somatic consciousness then is another word for our intuitive intelligence. As I discussed in a previous book,^[4] many of those now being born into the world are displaying a stronger sense of intuitive intelligence. However, in our modern haste we have, in the words of French philosopher Bruno Latour, never really been modern at all since we continue to exist in an anthropological matrix where nature and culture cannot be neatly divided. As Latour points out, this matrix is composed of hybrids where natural/cultural, real/imagined, and subject/object merge. Moreover, this hybridity is being further enforced and coalesced through genetic engineering, implants, virtual reality, and NBIC sciences (Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information technology and Cognitive science). Latour is right in saying that humanity has never exited from what he refers to as our pre-modern ancestors’ world. We are, and always have been, a hybrid of body-mind-environment. Yet unlike Latour, I contest that we are modern – or rather we are past the post of post-modern, in how we are merging our lives into a new hybrid fusion.

Our ancestors made no such division between nature and society because their state of consciousness did not allow them to – they simply did not perceive it. However, the state of human consciousness today is far different in its capability and lucidity to perceive and acknowledge the relationship with our external world. Saying this, of course, in our development ‘to be modern’ we left behind the sacred component of perceiving just how entangled our reality truly is. Yet the succeeding ‘post-modern’ stage then worked on breaking down these ‘perceptions of containment.’ As William Irwin Thompson says,

The project of Modernism was to expel preindustrial magic and mysticism and stabilize consciousness in materialism, but the projects of postmodernism have broken down the walls that once contained us in a solidly materialistic and confidently middle class worldview. 5

This breakdown has now moved into a more advanced stage with the advent of the internet and digital technologies. We have now entered what Thompson refers to as the ‘astral plane, a bardo realm, in which everything is out there at once, a technologized form of the collective unconscious…a place where the physical body is either dead or absent.’ 6

Thompson prefers to view this technologized-bardo realm, where the physical body is either dead or absent, not as post-modern but as postcivilization – or even posthistoric.7 We are in a new phase of planetary culture where we are no longer simply reacting to emerging technologies, but rather our evolving state of consciousness is drawing forth these new technologies. In other words, it is as if new technologies come into being in accordance with shifting states of human consciousness. Like a good magician, we are pulling new technological innovations out of the hat of our collective consciousness – archetypes into manifestation. Whereas modernity was about ‘coming to our senses’ in a rather conservative way, the posts we have passed now – whether they be modern, civilization, or historic – are about shifting beyond our senses. As one well-placed commentator put it,

The human being’s organism is producing a new complex of organs in response to such a need. In this age of the transcending of time and space, the complex of organs is concerned with the transcending of time and space. What ordinary people regard as sporadic and occasional bursts of telepathic or prophetic power are…nothing less than the first stirrings of these same organs.8

As a new historical phase unfolds within the human species – as part of a shift toward a planetary civilization – it appears that new needs are pushing out – or birthing – novel organs or faculties within the human being.

This brings to mind the Richard Tarnas quote that headed up this article, where he stated that the once alienated (read ‘sacred’) mind is now breaking through, as if in a birth process, out of what Blake called its “mind-forg’d manacles,” to ‘rediscover its intimate relationship with nature and the larger cosmos.’ Note that Tarnas said ‘rediscover,’ suggesting it is a recovery, a revival, and not a new birth. The sacred revival of which I speak is literally carving out a new topography for itself.

Hybrid Landscapes

Our millennial era is still trying to decide how to define and view the physical biological body. At this stage the landscape is literally littered with a thousand voices, all howling ‘for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.’^[5] Some voices see the human body as a hindrance upon the evolutionary journey toward an immortal society that is destined for the stellar neighbourhood. Others view it as a field for experimentation; to tinker and adapt toward a genetically modified hybrid. There are still others who see the body as a site to blur the boundaries between the digital and physical worlds. And then there are those voices who view the biological body as undergoing its own intrinsic in-built modification, or upgrade, through a self-adapting nervous system, programmed by emerging DNA programs hitherto latent.

In the latter part of the 20th century we had a wave of trends that all converged upon the body-mind-spirit matrix. These streams included the physical (bodily) research fields of cybernetics, computer programming, and artificial intelligence. These streams then interwove with the mind-spirit tropes of psychedelic experimentation (LSD, peyote, etc), mystical philosophies (Gurdjieff, Castaneda, etc) and transcendental movements. You would literally need a whole book dedicated to this topic alone to even begin to make a credible dent into this yellow brick road bricolage of body-mind-spirit convergences. Just to give a slight taste from the tip of the iceberg I will ever so briefly mention how the computer metaphor gave rise to notions of programming – and meta-programming – the human body as a biocomputer. This image was reinforced by Dr. John C. Lilly’s bookProgramming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer that described some of his experiments on human consciousness and human-dolphin communication. Meta-programming became a core theme of the writings of Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson who produced such works as Exo-Psychology: A Manual on the Use of the Human Nervous System According to the Instructions of the Manufacturers and Prometheus Rising respectively. Both these works discuss an eight-circuit model of consciousness that is part of a path in neurological evolution. Both authors, Leary especially, took it upon themselves to evolve a philosophy stating that the future evolution of human civilization was encoded in our DNA. Hence, the new sacred technology is our nervous system itself, and our DNA is already hard-wired for evolutionary mutation. Similarly, running through some of these streams were the ideas of Caucasian mystic G. I. Gurdjieff who spoke of the human being in terms of a ‘man-machine’ that was asleep to life and could be triggered into wakeful activation. Leary, as if in Gurdjieffian overtones, would call for humanity to ‘wake up, mutate, and ascend.’9 The new sacred magic had mutated into practices (rituals) to reprogram the apparatus that receives, according to the authors, our biofields as well as human consciousness; namely, DNA. Interestingly, recent advances in quantum biology have outlined how DNA emits biophotons that produces a coherent biological field that may be susceptible to impact and influence (read ‘reprogramming’ here).10^[6]

Whether or not the new game in town was actively to epigenetically re-program the DNA through a fusion of transcendental and/or psychedelic practices, it was very much about work on oneself. Gurdjieff’s program of study – called The Fourth Way – was a kind of blend of Eastern dervish yoga with western scientism. As Gurdjieff famously proclaimed – Take the understanding of the East and the knowledge of the West and then seek. This blend of eastern understanding and western knowledge became known amongst its adherents simply as The Work. The western melting pot of sacred angst and survivalist spirituality saw an emergence of similar tropes such as E.J. Gold’s The Human Biological Machine as a Transformational Apparatus. The western playing field in the second half of the 20th century was open to the new Great Game – and it involved inner spaces and the body-mind matrix. Robert S. de Ropp aptly called it the Master Game in his book Master Game: Pathways to Higher Consciousness Beyond the Drug Experience. For a sense of what was bubbling up around this Master Game sacred revival, in the US especially, one needs to understand a history of the Esalen Institute, co-founded by Michael Murphy and Richard Price on the Californian shores.^[7] An excellent, if exhaustive, study of the body-mind matrix based upon the fizzy, fired-up tropes of the time is Michael Murphy’s Future of the Body: Explorations into the Further Evolution of Human Nature. These explorations, however, were all based upon expanding and amplifying the potentials of our current human biological body-mind. That was before the computer trope really got going – and science-fiction became research grant.

The rise of the robots literally happened after the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence (AI), in the summer of 1956, announced the beginning of the AI field. College campuses and defence departments suddenly began the earnest journey along the stony research road that finally spawned the controversial concept of consciousness upload. One of the more vocal supporters of this ‘mind-in-machine’ notion is robotics researcher Hans Moravec. Moravec, whose books include Mind Children and Robot, outlines a future where the human mind can be uploaded as a precursor to full artificial intelligence. Similarly, cognitive scientist Marvin Minksy (who was one of the 1956 gang who coined the AI field) espoused a philosophy that saw no fundamental difference between humans and machines – as put forward in such works as his Society of Mind. Artificial Intelligence is uncannily consistent with the Christian belief in resurrection and immortality – does this make AI research into a sacred, god-like enterprise? It does make us wonder. Historian of technology David F. Noble notes also that the AI project is imbued with its own trajectory of transcendence:

The thinking machine was not, then, an embodiment of what was specifically human, but of what was specifically divine about humans – the immortal mind…the immortal mind could evolve independently into ever higher forms of artificial life, reunited at last with its origin, the mind of God.11

Other streams have been quick to spring up around this fertile theme, including several futurist movements and their manifestos. These have included, but not limited to, the Upwingers (F. M. Esfandiary), Extropians, Transhumanists; and then later came the high-profile members that announced the Technological Singularity.

F.M. Esfandiary’s ‘Upwingers Manifesto’ (by now Esfandiary was known as FM-2030) announced in the 1970s our glorious moment in human evolution. According to their manifesto:

We UpWingers are resigned to nothing. We consider no human problems irreversible – no goals unattain-able. For the first time in history we have the ability, the resources, the genius to resolve ALL our age-old problems. Attain ALL our boldest visions.^[8]

Similarly, in the 1980s Max Moore and Natasha Vita-More expounded on Extropian principles which later came to be formulated as: Perpetual Progress; Self-Transformation; Practical Optimism; Intelligent Technology; Self-Direction; and Rational Thinking. And for the Moores, Intelligent Technology meant ‘Applying science and technology creatively and courageously to transcend “natural” but harmful, confining qualities derived from our biological heritage, culture, and environment.’ ^[9] The Transhumanist movement is still going strong and is not definable to any one particular group, although Humanity Plus (H+) is one of its most recognized institutions. There are streams and sub-groups under the transhumanist umbrella, and yet they all share a similar goal in viewing the human condition as being open to transformation through the use of sophisticated technologies. In other words, the goal is to give humanity a technological upgrade to its current bodily and mental capacities.

From Gurdjieff’s ‘man-machine,’ to Moravec and Minsky, to Max and Natasha Vita-More and Ray Kurzweil, the list goes on. And recently we have had the call for a new speciation along the homo sapiens evolutionary line – into Homo evolutis. In their TED talk and subsequent book Homo Evolutis Juan Enriquez and Steve Gullans present how we have already gone through twenty-five speciation events before arriving at our current species. Enriquez and Gullans consider it an anomaly to think that no other humanoid will ever evolve; and so they ask the question – ‘what would the next human species look like?’ They say that ‘We are transitioning from a hominid that is conscious of its environment into one that drastically shapes its own evolution…We are entering a period of hypernatural evolution…Homo evolutis.’12 This brings us back again to Latour’s concept of the anthropological matrix where nature and culture is mixed together without clear boundaries. With the NBIC sciences of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science we are meshing our genetic and cultural DNA. We are 3-D printing buildings as well as human body parts. We are now as a species consciously and deliberately experimenting, shaping, and morphing our environments, as well as journeying and mapping our inner spaces. We are the inhabitants and psychonauts of hybrid landscapes. And yet why should all this be part of an observation on the sacred revival? Because this transmutation of the human condition is what we, as a sentient sapien species, have always been doing.

Our early ancestors were obsessed with the transmutation of the human body-mind as far back as 35,000 years ago. The existence of rock paintings of therianthropes (shape-shifting forms from human to animal) that date back 35,000 years are speculated to be the early origins of human religious traditions. The symbolic paintings and drawings on cave walls and traces of ancient rituals which appear throughout the Palaeolithic era display a ‘primitive’ people in touch with the unseen realm. They display a fascination with a creative world beyond that of the human reality-matrix. These numerous examples of sacred, ritualistic art show how early humans were communing with a transcendental realm which modern humans have never stopped attempting to access. Noted anthropologist David Lewis-Williams has built a theory which explains how the people of the Upper Palaeolithic era harnessed altered states of consciousness to fashion their society, and used such imagery as a means of establishing and defining social relationships.13 The rock art of shape-shifting therianthropes also suggests a ‘primitive’ spiritual belief in the human soul as being connected to that of an animal or another being. Here we have a clear indication of our early ancestors creating sacred ritual around the transmutation and transcending of the human body-mind matrix. And this, in a nutshell, is part of the wisdom stream of shamanism.

It appears then that the human body-mind matrix has always, since earliest known cultural records, been a site for practicing sacred transcendentalism not far off from current transhumanist notions. As a species ‘in-transmutation’ we are increasingly having out-of-body experiences that meld cosmic consciousness with cultural artefacts. From the published out-of-body flights of Robert Monroe^[10] to the rise in channelled texts and audio, we have passed beyond our senses into a totally different multifaceted realm. We are not wanderers in an anthropological matrix but waves and particles in a holographic field where each flash and speck contains and reflects the whole. Enmeshed and entangled within this field-matrix we are akin to the famous Buddhist Indra’s Net analogy:

Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net that has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each “eye” of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in all dimensions, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering like stars of the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring.14

We are also reflections of ourselves in other universes as our reality-matrix bends and curves throughout countless cosmic contortions. According to physicist Paul Davis we co-exist alongside countless billions of other universes ‘some almost identical to ours, others wildly different, inhabited by myriads or near carbon-copies of ourselves in a gigantic, multifoliate reality of parallel worlds.’15 We no longer know what it means to live in a dualistic subject/object type of world. Our dualistic prison walls have disintegrated around us like a simulacrum or, in more popular parlance, like a rebooting video game.

We have already passed the post into a posthistoric era. Almost everything is up for grabs, which makes this era one of spectacular possibilities as well as gravest dangers. It would appear to any off-world observer that we are in the midst of a western slipstream of creative nihilism that is creeping its way around the fringes of tech-geekism and apocryphal-apocalyptic mysticism that says Take Nothing for Granted! As the ancient mapmakers used to scribe over unknown watery territories, Here be dragons – and here indeed they be, like lounging lizards waiting to lick at our heels. These are adventurous times as we innovate with outer form, and forge ahead into the inner spaces of essence. These are the features that adorn the sacred – the multifaceted faces of the body-mind-nature matrix that weaves the cosmic with the social, and which collapses the wave of duality. Lifepass the post is where we experiment with ourselves, as a species, and as a vessel of consciousness. And this, if done in a right relationship within our reality-matrix, is at its core a sacred art. Our cultural canvas is a palimpsest upon which new fictions and artefacts are engraved. And these fictions are the channels through which the sacred revival is raising its head and smiling the seven rays of emanation.

1 Cited in Davis, Erik (1998) Techgnosis: myth, magic and mysticism in the age of information. New York, Three Rivers Press, p187

2 Davis, Erik (1998) Techgnosis: myth, magic and mysticism in the age of information. New York, Three Rivers Press

3 Berman, Morris (1990) Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West. New York, HarperCollins.

4 Berman, Morris (1990) Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West. New York, HarperCollins, p146

5 Thompson, William Irwin (1998) Coming Into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness. New York, St. Martin’s Griffin, p307

6 Thompson, William Irwin (1998) Coming Into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness. New York, St. Martin’s Griffin, p307

7 Thompson, William Irwin (1998) Coming Into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness. New York, St. Martin’s Griffin.

8 Shah, I. (1982) The Sufis. London: Octagon, p54

9 Leary, Timothy (1988) Info-Psychology. New Mexico, New Falcon Publications.

10 Ho, Mae-Wan (1998) The Rainbow and the Worm: The Physics of Organisms. Singapore, World Scientific.

11 Noble, David F. (1999) The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention. London, Penguin, p148-9

12 Enriquez, Juan and Gullans, Steve (2011) Homo Evolutis. TED Books – ebook only.

13 Lewis-Williams, David (2004) The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art. London, Thames & Hudson.

14Cited in Davis, Erik (1998) Techgnosis: myth, magic and mysticism in the age of information. New York, Three Rivers Press, p319

15 Cited in Thompson, William Irwin (1998) Coming Into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness. New York, St. Martin’s Griffin, p217

[1] See Dawn of the Akashic Age: New Consciousness, Quantum Resonance, and the Future of the World by Ervin Laszlo and Kingsley L. Dennis

[2] See especially Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish.

[3] Baraka, a prominent concept in Islamic mysticism, refers to a flow of grace and spiritual power that can be transmitted.

[4] See The Phoenix Generation: A New Era of Connection, Compassion, and Consciousness

[5] Taken from part 1 of Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl

[6] See also Dennis, Kingsley L. (2010) ‘Quantum Consciousness: Reconciling Science and Spirituality Toward Our Evolutionary Future(s)’, World Futures, 66: 7, 511 — 524

[7] See Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion by Jeffrey J. Kripal

[8] http://transhumanism.org/index.php/WTA/more/upwingers/

[9] https://web.archive.org/web/20131015142449/http://extropy.org/principles.htm

[10] See https://www.monroeinstitute.org/

Life on Earth is Dying

Posted on December 14, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Robert J. Burrowes

On the day that you read this article, 200 species of life on Earth (plants, birds, animals, fish, amphibians, insects, reptiles) will cease to exist. Tomorrow, another 200 species will vanish forever.

The human onslaught to destroy life on Earth is unprecedented in Earth’s history. Planet Earth is now experiencing its sixth mass extinction event and Homo sapiens sapiens is the cause. Moreover, this mass extinction event is accelerating and is so comprehensive in its impact
that the piecemeal measures being taken by the United Nations, international agencies and governments constitute a tokenism that is breathtaking in the extreme.

And it is no longer the case that mainly ‘invisible’ species are
vanishing: those insects, amphibians and small animals about which you had never even heard, assuming they have been identified and given a name by humans.

You and I are on the brink of driving to extinction some of the most iconic species alive today. For a photo gallery of threatened species, some of which are ‘critically endangered’, see ‘World’s wildlife being pushed to the edge by humans – in pictures‘.

If you want to read more about some aspects of the extinction threat, you can do so in these recent reports: ‘World Wildlife Crime Report: Trafficking in protected species‘ and ‘2016 Living Planet Report‘ which includes these words: ‘The main statistic from the report … shows a 58% decline between 1970 and 2012. This means that, on average, animal populations are roughly half the size they were 42 years ago.’

And if you want to read just one aspect of what is happening in the world’s oceans, this recent UN report will give you something to ponder:
‘New UN report finds marine debris harming more than 800 species, costing countries millions‘.

Of course, some of what is happening is related to the ongoing climate catastrophe and there isn’t any good news on that front. See ‘What’s Happening in the Arctic is Astonishing‘.

But not everything that is going badly wrong is well known either. Did you know that we are destroying the Earth’s soil? See ‘Only 60 Years of Farming Left If Soil Degradation Continues‘.

And did you realise that even nitrogen is now a huge problem too? See ‘Scientists shine a spotlight on the overlooked menace of nitrogen‘.

Of course, military violence has devastating consequences on the Earth’s ecosystems too, destroying land, water and atmosphere (not to mention killing human beings) in the fight over resources. You will get no joy from the article ‘Iraq’s oil inferno – government inaction in the face of eco-terrorism‘
or the website of the Toxic Remnants of War Project. But every single aspect of military spending is ultimately used to destroy. It has no other function.

While 2.5 billion human beings do not have enough to eat. See ‘One in three people suffers malnutrition at global cost of $3.5 trillion a year‘.

As you read all this, you might say ‘Not me’! But you are wrong. You don’t have to be an impoverished African driven to killing elephants for their tusks so that you can survive yourself. You don’t have to be a farmer who is destroying the soil with synthetic poisons. You don’t have to be a soldier who kills and destroys or a person who works for a corporation that, one way to another, forces peasants off their land.

You just have to be an ‘ordinary’ person who pays your military taxes and consumes more than your share of world resources while participating without challenge in the global system of violence and exploitation managed by the global elite.

‘Why is this?’ you might ask.

This is because the primary driver of the human-induced mass extinction is not such things as some people hunting a particular lifeform to extinction, horrendous though this is. In fact, just two things drive most species over the edge: our systematic destruction of land habitat – forests, grasslands, wetlands, peatlands, mangroves… – in our endless effort to capture more of the Earth’s wild places for human use (whether it be residential, commercial, mining, farming or military) and our destruction of waterways and the ocean habitat by dumping into them radioactive contaminants, carbon dioxide, a multitude of poisons and chemical pollutants, and even plastic.

And do you know what drives this destruction of land and water habitats? Your demand for consumer products, all of which are produced by using land and water habitats, and the resources derived from them, often far from where you live. The most basic products, such as food and clothing, are produced on agricultural land, sometimes created by destroying rainforests, or taken from the ocean (where overfishing has savagely depleted global fish stocks). But in using these resources, we have ignored the needs of the land, oceans and the waterways for adequate regenerative inputs and recovery time.

We also participate, almost invariably without question or challenge, in the inequitable distribution of resources that compels some impoverished people to take desperate measures to survive through such means as farming marginal land or killing endangered wildlife.

So don’t sit back waiting for some miracle by the United Nations, international agencies or governments to solve this problem. It cannot happen for the simple reason that these organizations are all taking action within the existing paradigm that prioritizes corporate profit and military violence over human equity and ecological sustainability.

Despite any rhetoric to the contrary, they are encouraging
overconsumption by industrialized populations and facilitating the inequitable distribution of income and wealth precisely because this benefits those who control these organizations, agencies and governments: the insane corporate elites who are devoid of the capacity to see any value beyond the ‘bottom line’. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane‘.

If you want action on the greatest challenge human beings have ever faced – to avert our own extinction by learning to live in harmony with our biosphere and equity with our fellow humans – then I encourage you to take personal responsibility.

If you do, you need to act. At the simplest level, you can make some difficult but valuable personal choices. Like becoming a vegan or vegetarian, buying/growing organic/biodynamic food, and resolutely refusing to use any form of poison or to drive a car or take an airline flight.

But if you want to take an integrated approach, the most powerful way you can do this is to systematically reduce your own personal consumption while increasing your self-reliance. Anita McKone and I have mapped out a fifteen-year strategy for doing this in ‘The FlameTree Project to Save Life on Earth‘. You might also consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World‘ which obviously includes nonviolence towards our fellow species.

One of the hidden tragedies of modern human existence is that we have been terrorized into believing that we are not personally responsible. See ‘The Delusion “I Am Not Responsible“‘.

For a fuller explanation, see ‘Why Violence?‘ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice‘.

It isn’t true but few people feel powerful enough to make a difference.

And every time you decide to do nothing and to leave it to someone else, you demonstrate why no-one else should do anything either.

Extinction beckons. What will you do?

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

—
Robert J. Burrowes
P.O. Box 68
Daylesford
Victoria 3460
Australia
Email: flametree@riseup.net

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

A Nonviolent Strategy to End the Climate Catastrophe

Posted on October 17, 2016 by Reid Mukai

emgnpollution2

By Robert J. Burrowes

As the evidence mounts that we are fast approaching the final point-of-no-return beyond which it will be impossible to take sufficient effective action to prevent climate catastrophe – see ‘The World Passes 400 PPM Threshold. Permanently‘– the evidence of ineffective official responses climbs too. See, for example, ‘Climate Con: why a new global deal on aviation emissions is really bad news’.

Even worse, we continue to be given response options that, even when they are well meaning, are naïve and inadequate whether they are suggested by individuals – see, for example, ‘Committing Geocide: Climate Change and Corporate Capture‘– or major environment organizations such as Greenpeace, 350.org and
Friends of the Earth.

Moreover, given the myriad indications of progressive environmental breakdown in domains unrelated to the climate catastrophe, one must be terrified and delusional to suggest or even believe that anything less than a comprehensive strategy, which goes well beyond anything governments and corporations will ever endorse, gives us any chance of averting the sixth mass extinction event in planetary history. A mass extinction that will include us.

As an aside, if you believe the ‘end of century’ scenario (for human extinction) being driven by the same corporate interests that drove climate denial for so long, then you are simply a victim of their latest attempt to drive ‘business as usual’ while delaying action for as long as possible at any cost.

Another problem, if you understand anything about human psychology and political organization, is that mobilizing people in large numbers to act strategically and powerfully is not easy. Of course, if it wasn’t so difficult, this crisis would not have arisen in the first place. We would have responded intelligently and strategically decades ago as some aware individuals, starting with Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi 100 years ago, suggested.

To briefly recap the wider nature of the crisis we face: Consider our synergistic and devastating assaults on the environment through military violence (often leaving vast areas uninhabitable), rainforest destruction, industrial farming, mining, commercial fishing and the spreading radioactive contamination from Fukushima. We are also systematically destroying the limited supply of fresh water on the planet which means that water scarcity is becoming a frequent reality for many people and the collapse of hydrological systems is now likely by 2020. Human activity drives 200 species of life (plants, birds,animals, fish, amphibians, insects, reptiles) to extinction each day and 80% of the world’s forests and over 90% of the large fish in the ocean are already gone. Despite this readily available information, governments continue to prioritize spending $US2,000,000,000 each day on military violence, the sole purpose of which is to terrorize and kill fellow human beings.

So what are we to do?

Well, if you are inclined to assess the evidence and to design a response strategy that has the possibility of success built into it,then I invite you to consider the strategy outlined on the Nonviolent Campaign Strategy website. This strategy identifies all twelve components of a nonviolent strategy to end the climate catastrophe, including the myriad of strategic goals for such a strategy to be comprehensive and effective. You are very welcome to suggest improvements in this strategy and to invite other individuals and groups to participate in helping to implement it.

If you are happy to leave strategic responses to others but still wish to contribute powerfully, then you and others you know are welcome to participate in the simple fifteen-year program outlined in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth‘. You might also consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World‘.

One final point: a tragic outcome of modern humans terrorizing their children into obedience (to maintain social control) is that most of the human population is (unconsciously) terrified, self-hating and powerless. For a full explanation of this, see ‘Why Violence?‘ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice‘.

So don’t wait around waiting for others to act first. It is your leadership that is required in this circumstance. And it is your leadership that might ultimately make the difference.

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

Robert J. Burrowes
P.O. Box 68
Daylesford
Victoria 3460
Australia
Email: flametree@riseup.net

I Participate

Posted on October 16, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Jonathan Bessette

Source: Adbusters

Recall that you’re sitting in a rapid transit vehicle, carried along the sky-line above cement highways, paved in homage to the Romans, who designed a system of militarized paths stretching everywhere, causing everything to lead back to one place. Here we are everyone, the year of the Monkey, 2016, 98 years after The Great War … too bad it isn’t the year of the Dalmatians … Mickey Mouse recently Tweeted that Disney is working on buying the rights to the Chinese lunar calendar. Imagine 12 animated classics framing each and every year for the remainder of humanity’s existence.

At this point human society is so vast, so complex, so multilayered, that it is impossible to stay updated, engaged, and participating in every area of local and global importance. Education takes us from a place of innocence, creativity and joy, forcing us to fall into the institutional lines of desks and faced forward attention. As a nodal point of knowledge each new person will be filled to the brim with information that makes them useful to the status quo.

Neuroscience now tells us that the brain has plasticity and the neurosynaptic networks that are created through nurturing, which become identity and personality, can be changed and overwritten. Newer pathways can be formed and strengthened and older ones can be reduced. Does this mean that our free-will has a physical manifestation as identity, as culture, and every choice affects the people, animals and objects around us? Everything we think and do reinforces everything we think and do, creating a strange logical loop which justifies our lives as ourselves. Without any major impetus, what reason do we have to change? Why compromise our internally consistent narrative and accept the narrative of someone else? What stands to be different?

Surreality is becoming a more constant state as life in the present starts to look like Science Fiction of the future from the past. The last historian wandering around Paris in the 21st Century, forgotten by a technologically advanced world that cares only for materialism. A beguiled Case, the lead character of Gibson’s Neuromancer, disenfranchised because he can no longer participate in the romance of cyberspace, looking something like a hacker barred by the law to approach or touch a computer. Of course cyborgs, robots, virtual reality and AI dance at the periphery, the momentum of current technological trends, yet we titillate ourselves with the practical possibility of these totems nearing our hearts and minds.

Information overflows like never before. Some cry Apocalypse! End Times! The Rapture! But most of the world is still filling up their gas tanks, believing that the day when Climate Change will actually affect them is the day that it will be clearly outlined in a power point presentation, at their offices or wherever they work, explaining the equity found in maintaining current profit margins while in the same breath rearranging the economic vehicle of prosperity.

“Change without Changing!” might be the Party Slogan for whoever runs for the Presidency after Obama sputters to a close.

Take my hand and run through the ever-increasing fields of soya beans, where we can hear the Monsanto genetically-modified breeze blowing the answer in the wind, whispering corporate sonatas, proving that commercial capitalism is a system of religion. Faith in Profit! The Gospel of Endless Progress! Join our Church of Business! Maybe Monsanto can use its private militia to assassinate Thomas Piketty, because of the seeds he’s sowing about capitalism being a mechanical beast that needs regulation because its fuel is the disparity between rich and poor … the larger the gap the more efficacious the fuel.

Then I think whether or not you’ll be reading this on paper or a flat-screen … whether either will be made from recyclable resources, and the argument that the printed word is less sustainable than the digital, so let’s put them to the test, right here, right now:

What can you do with a single piece of printed paper? Read it, eat it, burn it, re-write on it, make origami, a paper airplane or a boat, use it as a funnel, snort powders with it, wipe our bums? What can we do with a tablet? Access every possible available medium via the Internet and software?

It takes at least a lumber, ink, metal, and print industry to create the basic elements to manufacture printed media on a large scale. The average printed matter, kept in modest condition, can last up to 100 years and still be usable. The space that a single printed work takes up is quite large, creating the need to provide space of the material itself. When recycling an old book there are few components to worry about, making it rather simple.

It takes at least most types of mining and the processing of raw materials (petroleum, silicon, zinc, aluminum), software and hardware development, manufacturing, and the assembly of components to create a tablet. The average tablet, kept in modest condition, can remain functional until it’s obsolete. It certainly will not last 100 years, and even if it did the components, chips and circuitry would be so worn down that anything you might have used it for would no longer be possible. Of course you can store a million, a billion, even a zillion books on a single tablet, but will everyone have equal access to it? Tablets are extremely difficult to recycle, their components don’t just make up another tablet. The loss from entropy alone assures destruction, and we cannot grow more zinc, petroleum, or aluminum.

But really none of this matters, we don’t have any control over what corporations choose to do with our futures, or what medium we will use. These new, futuristic developments, intended to define human culture, are being devised and formed inside of grand boardrooms, in tall skyscrapers, by CEOs and shareholders. They, the 1%, are only concerned with whether the product they create for us will become a necessary commodity, like food, like water, like shelter … like Subway, like Coke Cola, like Single Room Occupancies (SROs).

You hear someone talking about the protest on Burnaby Mountain. People don’t want Kinder-Morgan expanding the capacity of an already existent pipeline because it will significantly increase the traffic of oil tankers in the Burrard Inlet. Someone else discusses the unrest of activist groups in Vancouver; about the substandard living conditions; the war on the poor; the two new prisons … they care about housing those who arise from poverty and have been given nowhere else to go. Anger overtakes you for a moment and you think, I don’t like this, why is there so much injustice, maybe I can do something about it…

A flabbergasted voice backtracking intellectual missives comes on over the radio, you’re not sure if it’s in your head or not:
“Revolution is just going around and around, it’s a cycle, it begins with violence and it ends with violence and it only achieves the same power structure that precedes it.”

You think about the French Revolution, the Arab Spring, Anonymous, and realize grass-roots change can rise up from the ground, from the dirt, from the dust whence we came, to challenge the oligarchical deities of the political / corporate aristocracy. We can sell everything we own and buy whole streets collectively, live there together, change the land and what’s on it together. We can join all kinds of innovative communities. We can gather in massive groups and walk through the streets, calling attention to everything corruption has built up around us. We can participate in Civil Disobedience, because the obedience that is asked of us causes harm to someone or something that is alive and is not fairly allowed to defend itself.

No matter how much Ayn Rand and Alan Greenspan and Justin Trudeau tell you that the money will trickle down, no matter how much they tell you that they are the ones who created the railroads, produced the banks, developed the industries that sustain our economies … they didn’t do a damn thing. We laid the tracks, we hammered the spikes, we drove the trains, we maintained the services, we built the buildings, we painted the walls, we fitted the plumbing, we opened the doors, we mopped the floors, we surveyed the land, we mineral tested the rock, we operated the drills, we processed the crude and we shipped the products. None of these things that they presume to own did they make or build. They didn’t put one brick in the wall, they didn’t dig one trench, and they didn’t turn one switch. It’s all ours…

Now an unsettling feeling might skitter across you when you realize that you are implicated in this whole thing. Why do we feel so disenfranchised? Why does the 1% own so much more influence, so much more than we little peons? I feel powerless but every day I participate in the construction of human society. Every action contributes to a massive effect called the singularity of my life. Don’t fall into the kinds of aporia that Jacques Ellul observes in The Technological Society, where no one claims responsibility for the projects of technology. Who made this computer? Was it the engineers, or the design team, the software developers, the hardware makers? Or was it the companies who mined the silver, the petroleum, the zinc, the aluminum, the silicon? No single person in the process can take responsibility for the whole … so no one does, they just accept it, and its justification is its presence.

Well then … we are in a pickle aren’t we? But maybe revolution is the act of taking responsibility? Clips of revolution flicker through your mind-film, you see riots, Molotov cocktails, police lined up with transparent plastic shields. You realize you do not want to risk your comfort, your coziness, your conformity, so you fit in and play nice and salute whoever is in power. Or maybe you are just not interested, you have your soma, your serial monogamy, your fair trade Americano. Besides, you’re too busy, you’ve got kids, you work 60 hours a week, you recently bought a home in one of the most expensive housing markets in the world, you already have enough responsibilities …

Positively Thriving Through the Collapse of Civilisation

Posted on September 18, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Open

Source: ZenGardner.com

Have you ever watched something happening in slow motion? You can quite clearly see the end result, but nevertheless, you can’t quite believe in your mind what your eyes are seeing. Like when the twin towers ‘collapsed’. The demolition was happening there right in front of you, but you had to pinch yourself to make sure you weren’t just dreaming. I feel exactly that way about modern society right now. The collapse is already happening, but in slow motion, so you can’t quite believe the entirety of it. What will it look like as the ‘buildings’ topple? More importantly, how can we not only survive the shift, but positively thrive in it?…

Slow motion free fall

Have you seen the film “Collapse” yet? It’s a grounded, real and at times very emotive interview with the late whistle-blower Michael C Rupert. I believe everybody on the planet should watch it (I’ve included it below). You hear the calling of a soul, put here for a purpose. Never so clearly have I witnessed a man express so eloquently, the destiny that drew him here.

He sums up so marvelously the reason why society is going to collapse. Let me correct myself: why it is already collapsing, just that it’s in slow motion, and not everyone has yet pinched themselves out of the dream that prevents them seeing the reality of it.

Society is built on the foundation of ‘infinite growth’, the need to continuously expand in order to service a surging ocean of debt. It depends on the ever burgeoning exploitation of natural resources. Which is why governments and corporations are more concerned with the last pockets of oil under the pole, rather than the ice on top of it. It’s why they’re stripping the tar from the sand, and fracking the earth into oblivion. Therein lies the problem. That’s why society is already in a state of slow motion free fall. Because we live on a planet of finite resources, and the two ends no longer meet. We’ve built foundations on sand and now the tide is fast flowing in.

Nevertheless, I am an optimist. Where others might slip into fear, I see the light shining through the shadows. There’s a way to survive what is to come. No, there’s a way to positively thrive in it!

Thriving the meltdown

You first have to accept what you see. That’s a challenge in itself. Watch the film, especially towards the end, because it’s fascinating. The interviewer suggests all manner of information can be presented to support the view you want to put across (like the ‘debate’ on global warming for example). And he’s right. But that’s not what Michael is about and neither am I. For me, and for others I work with, the debate is not necessary – such intellectual pontification is a pointless waste of time. We’ve already seen the towers collapsing. I can feel the energies of higher benevolence instigating the collapse mechanism. The earth needs to be saved from the wanton, consumeristic destruction. The debate – if ever there was one – is over. And until you can see through the veil, there’s nowhere to begin. So my first suggestion – assuming you feel any resonance with me – is to work to see past the veil into what is surely now taking place: collapse of the civilisation we currently depend upon.

When this lands for you, you’ll realise like the Hopi Elders, that the only way to prosper through this collapse, is by spiritual means. This will be a ‘war’ of the spiritual through the material. Not fighting. Rather breaking through the sense of physical disempowerment into the liberation of the spirit. The expression of the boundless, unlimited you, and watching this miraculous nature shine out into the world. Trusting that your every step will be supported. Not in the way your ego might want. It won’t deliver the physical outcome you desire. It’ll deliver much more than that: as the old skin peels off, a metamorphosis into an interconnected, interdimensional way of being – The rise of the Divine Human.

But yes, at this time we are physical beings too. And we’ll need a platform from which to unveil our divine being at the heart of every man, woman and child. Just as the dragonfly stands on the leaf, peels off the old skin and unfolds its wings in the sunlight before taking flight, so we’ll need a stable background to help people learn to fly.

What does that mean exactly?

It means we have to bring as swift an end to the system as possible. It’s gobbling up precious resources and energy, ridiculously wasting them on idle rubbish, mindless entertainment and hopeless addiction. We have to ween ourselves off this crutch through non-compliance with the corporations that would try to bolster it – those that would like to keep mankind dwelling in the murky depths of the pond, rather than flying liberated above it.

Discovering how less is more

We have to spend our time and money wisely now: to invest in ourselves and our future (especially since paper money will lose its value); to gather together the resources and communities that can help one another out as society steadily pulls itself apart. Even if you continue to work in the matrix, you can still prepare. And don’t worry, you have time, if you begin now. Society will not collapse in one fell swoop. It will be a steady degradation. It’s happening now. It’s just that most haven’t clicked yet as to what’s going on. So you’ve got time to gather together, share ideas, support and suggestions about what might work best. You can start growing your own food and collect a reserve of essentials to tide you through difficult times.

That’s the inspirational idea behind Transition Towns, which have been springing up and thriving all around the world for several years now. It’s about supporting local skills, already developing the web of a local support and resource mechanism. Even if it’s just a micro community of a few neighbours and friends, it will make all the difference as the globalised structure fractures.

In the film below, Michael shares a poignant and prophetic example of the fate of two countries – North Korea and Cuba – that both suffered through the collapse of the iron curtain: affected because they were both dependent on Soviet oil, just as the civilised world is right now.

The North Korean approach was to centralise resource, for government to control everything, like the collectivised food supply and nationalised energy. Communism? It sounds suspiciously like the leading western ‘democracies’ to me. And what was the result? Starvation on a massive scale. Cuba on the other hand encouraged people to come together in local communities, to grow their own food in their own back gardens, thus consuming a fraction of the energy. They no longer have the paraphernalia of modern society – a blessing – and the people positively thrived by needing less, discovering that less is more.

Some will say we can use unlimited supplies of ‘free energy’. Whilst we may benefit from new technologies that could come through, what we have to realise is how hopelessly dependent the current system is on oil. How will all those fossil fuel engines be replaced? Where will the resources come from to build the new machines, gadgets and widgets? Whatever technology we discover to tide us through, it is my strong assertion that we need to get used to consuming less, using wisely the resources we currently have…

Even if you new the world was to end tomorrow, would you plant that apple tree today? Would you live wisely, with compassion and a soft footprint on the earth? It is these souls that will ascend through the collapse of the old world. This is the new consciousness which will thrive as the old is peeled away.

Pinch yourself awake

The universe is a flowing ocean of energy. Humanity – spurred by an Interdimensional Intervention – has built a dam and tried to contain it in some eddy current. And we’ve turned a blind eye as the realigning energy of higher dimensional forces and devic consciousness now comes in to break apart the false reality fabric over time.

This shift and cleansing process that is beginning will be unlike any other to have taken place on earth. Why? Because Gaia has released her karma. She needed the control mechanism too, in order to experience being fully accepting and forgiving of those that would disrespect her. But she’s processed that constriction now and needs it no longer. Thus the ‘matrix’ no longer has a foundation. It will be peeled off over time. There will be no place for the old human consciousness, which will be shed with the skin too. Instead, will incarnate the new human consciousness – Divinicus Cometh – to thrive through this cleansing process which has now begun.

The renewed human spirit is meant to ride this realigning wave, rather than try to manipulate it. Because anything that tries to control something else, ultimately ends up controlling only itself. So we need to learn to ride the wave of the soul once more. To listen to it and above all, feel it coursing through our veins, respond to its direction. We need to master the inner alchemy of change. There’s two streams of consciousness within you. Which do you identify with: the sense of separation, the fear and contraction? or do you penetrate that, soften through it and flow with your eternal spirit?Right now too many are still caught ‘rabbit like’ in the car headlamps as the slow motion tsunami approaches them. Hoping, pretending, that they’re just in a dream and when they wake up, all will be okay, the car won’t really be careering towards them. But by then, it’s too late.

I urge you then to watch the film, pinch yourself awake, but then let the soul inspire you to make new choices in this new multidimensional landscape. And if you can’t yet clearly hear the soul and follow its guidance through every choice, then I would suggest that’s the best place to begin. Here’s the documentary and afterwards, if you’d like help with the soul guidance part, feel free to get in touch.

from my heart to yours

Open
(on behalf of Openhand)

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After the Crash

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

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