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Eternity, nature, society and the absurd fantasies of the rich

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Fragment of “Butcher to the World” by Sue Coe.

By Kurt Cobb

Source: Resilience

Professor and author Douglas Rushkoff recently wrote about a group of wealthy individuals who paid him to answer questions about how to manage their lives after what they believe will be the collapse of society. He only knew at the time he was engaged that the group wanted to talk about the future of technology.

Rushkoff afterwards explained that the group assumed they would need armed guards after this collapse to defend themselves. But they rightly wondered in a collapsed society how they could even control such guards. What would they pay those guards with when the normal forms of payment ceased to mean anything? Would the guards organize against them?

Rushkoff provides a compelling analysis of a group of frightened wealthy men trying to escape the troubles of this world while alive and wishing to leave a decaying body behind when the time comes and transfer their consciousness digitally into a computer. (I’ve written about consciousness and computers previously.)

Here I want to focus on what I see as the failure of these people to understand the single most salient fact about their situations: Their wealth and their identities are social constructs that depend on thousands if not millions of people who are employees; customers; employees of vendors; government workers who maintain and run the law courts, the police force, the public physical infrastructure, legislative bodies, the administrative agencies and the educational institutions—and who thereby maintain public order, public health and public support for our current systems.

Those wealthy men aren’t taking all this with them when they die. And, while they are alive, their identities will shift radically if the intellectual, social, economic and governmental infrastructure degrades to the point where their safety is no longer guaranteed by at least minimal well-being among others in society. If the hunt for diminishing food and other resources comes to their doors, no army of guards will ultimately protect them against the masses who want to survive just as badly but lack the means.

One would think that pondering this, the rich who are capable of pondering it would have an epiphany: Since their security and well-being ultimately hinges on the security and well-being of all, they ought to get started helping to create a society that provides that in the face of the immense challenges we face such as climate change, resource depletion, possible epidemics, growing inequality and other devils waiting in the wings of the modern world. (In fairness, some do understand this.)

At least one reason for the failure of this epiphany to occur is described by author and student of risk Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Taleb describes how the lives the rich become increasingly detached from the rest of society as arbiters of taste for the wealthy convince them that this detachment is the reward of wealth. The rich visit restaurants that include only people like themselves. They purchase larger and larger homes with fewer and fewer people in them until they can spend whole days without seeing another person. For the wealthiest, neighbors are a nuisance. Better to surround oneself with a depopulated forest than people next door.

The rich are convinced by this experience that they are lone heroes and at the same time lone victims, pilloried by the media as out of touch and heartless. These self-proclaimed victims may give to the Cato Institute to reinforce the idea that the individual can go it alone and should. They themselves have done it (or at least think they have). Why can’t everyone else?

The wealthier they are, the more their fear and paranoia mounts that others not so wealthy will try to take their wealth; or that impersonal forces in the marketplace will destroy it or at least diminish it significantly; or that government will be taken over by the mob and expropriate their wealth through high taxes or outright seizure. And, of course, there are the natural disasters of uncontrolled climate change and plague, just to name two.

It’s no wonder some of the super rich are buying luxury bunkers to ride out the apocalypse. These bunkers come with an array of amenities  that include a cinema, indoor pool and spa, medical first aid center, bar, rock climbing wall, gym, and library. High-speed internet is included though one wonders how it will work after the apocalypse.

But strangely, even in these luxury bunkers built in former missile silos, dependence on and trust in others cannot be avoided. The units are actually condominiums. And while they contain supplies and ammunition said to be enough for five years, it will be incumbent on the owners, whether they like it not, to become intimately acquainted with their neighbors in order to coordinate a defense of the compound should that need arise.

The irony, of course, is that this is precisely the kind of communal entanglement which their wealth is supposed to allow them to avoid. Society, it seems, is everywhere you go. You cannot avoid it even when eternity is advancing on your door. And, you cannot escape with your consciousness into a computer (assuming that will one day be possible) if there’s no stable technical society to tend to computer maintenance and no power to keep the computer on.

It turns out that we are here for a limited time and that trusting and reciprocal relationships with others are ultimately the most important possessions we have—unless we are too rich or too frightened to realize it.

Why We’re Underestimating American Collapse

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The Strange New Pathologies of the World’s First Rich Failed State

By Umair Haque

Source: Information Clearing House

You might say, having read some of my recent essays, “Umair! Don’t worry! Everything will be fine! It’s not that bad!” I would look at you politely, and then say gently, “To tell you the truth, I don’t think we’re taking collapse nearly seriously enough.”

Why? When we take a hard look at US collapse, we see a number of social pathologies on the rise. Not just any kind. Not even troubling, worrying, and dangerous ones. But strange and bizarre ones. Unique ones. Singular and gruesomely weird ones I’ve never really seen before, and outside of a dystopia written by Dickens and Orwell, nor have you, and neither has history. They suggest that whatever “numbers” we use to represent decline — shrinking real incomes, inequality, and so on —we are in fact grossly underestimating what pundits call the “human toll”, but which sensible human beings like you and I should simply think of as the overwhelming despair, rage, and anxiety of living in a collapsing society.

Let me give you just five examples of what I’ll call the social pathologies of collapse — strange, weird, and gruesome new diseases, not just ones we don’t usually see in healthy societies, but ones that we have never really seen before in any modern society.

America has had 11 school shootings in the last 23 days. That’s one every other day, more or less. That statistic is alarming enough — but it is just a number. Perspective asks us for comparison. So let me put that another way. America has had 11 school shootings in the last 23 days, which is more than anywhere else in the world, even Afghanistan or Iraq. In fact, the phenomenon of regular school shootings appears to be a unique feature of American collapse — it just doesn’t happen in any other country — and that is what I mean by “social pathologies of collapse”: a new, bizarre, terrible disease striking society.

Why are American kids killing each other? Why doesn’t their society care enough to intervene? Well, probably because those kids have given up on life — and their elders have given up on them. Or maybe you’re right — and it’s not that simple. Still, what do the kids who aren’t killing each other do? Well, a lot of them are busy killing themselves.

So there is of course also an “opioid epidemic”. We use that phrase too casually, but it much more troubling than it appears on first glance. Here is what is really curious about it. In many countries in the world — most of Asia and Africa — one can buy all the opioids one wants from any local pharmacy, without a prescription. You might suppose then that opioid abuse as a mass epidemic would be a global phenomenon. Yet we don’t see opioid epidemics anywhere but America — especially not ones so vicious and widespread they shrink life expectancy. So the “opioid epidemic” — mass self-medication with the hardest of hard drugs — is again a social pathology of collapse: unique to American life. It is not quite captured in the numbers, but only through comparison — and when we see it in global perspective, we get a sense of just how singularly troubled American life really is.

Why would people abuse opioids en masse unlike anywhere else in the world? They must be living genuinely traumatic and desperate lives, in which there is little healthcare, so they have to self-medicate the terror away. But what is so desperate about them? Well, consider another example: the “nomadic retirees”. They live in their cars. They go from place to place, season after season, chasing whatever low-wage work they can find — spring, an Amazon warehouse, Christmas, Walmart.

Now, you might say — “well, poor people have always chased seasonal work!” But that is not really the point: absolute powerlessness and complete indignity is. In no other country I can see do retirees who should have been able to save up enough to live on now living in their cars in order to find work just to go on eating before they die — not even in desperately poor ones, where at least families live together, share resources, and care for one another. This is another pathology of collapse that is unique to America — utter powerlessness to live with dignity. Numbers don’t capture it — but comparisons paint a bleak picture.

How did America’s elderly end up cheated of dignity? After all, even desperately poor countries have “informal social support systems” — otherwise known as families and communities. But in America, there is the catastrophic collapse of social bonds. Extreme capitalism has blown apart American society so totally that people cannot even care for one another as much as they do in places like Pakistan and Nigeria. Social bonds, relationships themselves, have become unaffordable luxuries, more so than even in poor countries: this is yet another social pathology unique to American collapse.

Yet those once poor countries are making great strides. Costa Ricans now have higher life expectancy than Americans — because they have public healthcare. American life expectancy is falling, unlike nearly anywhere else in the world, save the UK — because it doesn’t.

And that is my last pathology: it is one of the soul, not one of the limbs, like the others above. Americans appear to be quite happy simply watching one another die, in all the ways above. They just don’t appear to be too disturbed, moved, or even affected by the four pathologies above: their kids killing each other, their social bonds collapsing, being powerless to live with dignity,or having to numb the pain of it all away.

If these pathologies happened in any other rich country — even in most poor ones — people would be aghast, shocked, and stunned, and certainly moved to make them not happen. But in America, they are, well, not even resigned. They are indifferent, mostly.

So my last pathology is a predatory society. A predatory society doesn’t just mean oligarchs ripping people off financially. In a truer way, it means people nodding and smiling and going about their everyday business as their neighbours, friends, and colleagues die early deaths in shallow graves. The predator in American society isn’t just its super-rich — but an invisible and insatiable force: the normalization of what in the rest of the world would be seen as shameful, historic, generational moral failures, if not crimes, becoming mere mundane everyday affairs not to be too worried by or troubled about.

Perhaps that sounds strong to you. Is it?

Now that I’ve given you a few examples — there are many more — of the social pathologies of collapse, let me share with you the three points that they raise for me.

These social pathologies are something like strange and gruesome new strains of disease infecting the body social. America has always been a pioneer — only today, it is host not just to problems not just rarely seen in healthy societies — it is pioneering novel social pathologies have never been seen in the modern world outside present-day America, period. What does that tell us?

American collapse is much more severe than we suppose it is. We are underestimating its magnitude, not overestimating it. American intellectuals, media, and thought doesn’t put any of its problems in global or historical perspective — but when they are seen that way, America’s problems are revealed to be not just the everyday nuisances of a declining nation, but something more like a body suddenly attacked by unimagined diseases.

Seen accurately. American collapse is a catastrophe of human possibility without modern parallel . And because the mess that America has made of itself, then, is so especially unique, so singular, so perversely special — the treatment will have to be novel, too. The uniqueness of these social pathologies tell us that American collapse is not like a reversion to any mean, or the downswing of a trend. It is something outside the norm. Something beyond the data. Past the statistics. It is like the meteor that hit the dinosaurs: an outlier beyond outliers, an event at the extreme of the extremes. That is why our narratives, frames, and theories cannot really capture it — much less explain it. We need a whole new language — and a new way of seeing — to even begin to make sense of it.

But that is America’s task, not the world’s. The world’s task is this. Should the world follow the American model — extreme capitalism, no public investment, cruelty as a way of life, the perversion of everyday virtue — then these new social pathologies will follow, too. They are new diseases of the body social that have emerged from the diet of junk food — junk media, junk science, junk culture, junk punditry, junk economics, people treating one another and their society like junk — that America has fed upon for too long.

The Age of Ego

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By Dan Corjescu

Source: CounterPunch

Hegel’s conception of history taught us that the meaning of history was the liberation of the individual through his or her recognition as a fully autonomous rational person.

Indeed, since the French Revolution, the Age of the Individual has expanded apace even if not always in a straight line.

Today, more than ever, our politics, economics, culture, and society are all, at least nominally, directed at the well being and full recognition of each and everyone of us.

If this is so, then why are so many people still frustrated and unhappy in their daily life?

In part, this state of affairs might be due to our neglecting of the second part of the Hegelian equation: the individual’s place and relationship to others mediated by the State.

The State, according to Hegel, is the representation of universal rationality. Put in another way, the state is the structure which allows individuals to be recognized as full individuals through their participation in it. Each and every individual has a role to play within the state. The fulfillment of that role satisfies our need for recognizing one another and the constant realization that we are not and cannot be just for ourselves but for each other.

A culture, such as ours, which celebrates the socially untethered individual is propagating a fundamental lie. Individuals cannot be fully realized without the cooperation of all other individuals; an essential activity which, in the modern world, is mediated by the state.

Yet, what is the state in the modern world? What has it become? Is it a universalist, rationalist tool for the realization of the greater good?

Certainly not.

Today, the modern state is a tool of elites to ensure their total domination and power over all other classes and groups. It does not matter if the state calls itself “democratic” or a “one party state”. In effect, all states today are “one party” states controlled by their respective elites who are often tied to one another transnationally. We are, all of us, under the thumb of a new global elite who dictates the nature of our social being. “Global Empire” is not an all too fanciful term for the present situation.

And like the Roman Empire before it, it is not a coincidence that many people are turning spiritually inward toward personalistic philosophies of self-help and care. Ironically, even the philosophy of ancient Stoicism is making somewhat of a comeback.

None of this is surprising.

The individual cannot be truly satisfied if he or she is not a participating and consequent member of a polity; of a state. The elites of this world have carefully and calculatedly castrated our social and economic potentialities to do so.

The root of our gnawing unhappiness in our brave new world is simply this: consequential inter-personal participation in the sphere of the political has been vanishing for decades. The ability to effect collective change from below has been diminishing. True collectivity has been consistently denied.

The disassociation of the individual from the polity; in effect the non-existence anywhere of true democracy has led to a hollowing out of the human personality. It is only in concrete social action that we materialize fully as human beings. It is as members of a community who are able to truly guide that community that we find a deep human purpose.

Once again, recalling Hegel and the Greeks before him, it is not enough to exist as economic man symbolically feigning electoral freedom every two or four years ; one must directly participate in the polis.

Radicle and Rhizomati: Notes from a Folk Herbalist

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By Lisa Fazio

Source: Resilience

Hierarchy

Power structures establish various systems to ensure the organisation of interrelationships and the distribution of resources throughout a group, community, or ecosystem. In human terms, these systems become our tribes, societies, and civilisations. The dominant power structure in the Western world at this time is capitalist, colonial, and hierarchical, with resources being distributed (or, more accurately, hoarded) from the top down.

Before capitalism, many of us who have descended from the nations of Europe have a cultural history of feudalism or some other social-ranking hierarchy. Feudal society is the rootstock of capitalism. One of the primary differences subsumed from this medieval power structure by early capitalism was the waged exchange of labour. The feudal peasants were non-waged, that is, not paid in monetary currency for their labour. Instead, they were paid by an exchange of resources such as land, shelter, and farming rights. Both capitalist and feudal hierarchies were architected to direct and control the circulation of currency from those at the top, who are the elite and few, down to those at the bottom, who are the poor and many.

Capitalism depends on unrestrained growth and production, the manufacturing of material goods, and the extraction of resources to meet these ends. Colonisation, the imperious expansion of geographic, cultural, and political boundaries becomes requisite — with all its cruelty and overconsumption — as a result of this excessive and continuous reach to sustain the unsustainable.

When contemplating the quagmire of obstacles and institutions within our capitalist society that interfere with the equitable and just interchange of currency and access to resources, I find myself motivated to explore less oppressive economic, social, and political human relationships.

In doing so, I have become aligned with that ever-gallant and hopeful group of folks dismissed as unrealistic dreamers. We ‘dreamers’ always hold fast to the truth that the wilful designation of creation and power can be delineated into a network of horizontal or lateral functions that make greed, conquest, and competition unnecessary and invalid, except in extreme conditions.

In the words of Larry Wall, creator of Perl, the open-sourced computer programming language: ‘There is more than one way to do it.’ Perl, and Wall’s band of merry hackers, revolutionised the internet with a coding script that encourages other programmers to interject or hack, as they say in the business, their own design style and innovations that contribute to improvements and success for everyone using the network.¹ These internet wizards built the bridge between those of us who simply want to use the internet and those who actually understand it.

I personally am not remotely skilled in the exotic language of programming or the strange tongue of capitalist economics. As one called to the path along the hedges, in the woods, the fields, the gardens, and all the green, untamed and untrailed places, I have found another way to do things in learning the ways of the world beneath the dark shadows of treetops and in the soils with the rooted ones.

As a folk herbalist practising in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains of New York State, I live remotely, keeping a distant participation to some degree (perhaps never enough?), in the mainstream rush and panic of daily life in the ‘real’ world of productivity, competition and corporate time sheets. My work with others, however, brings me into direct contact with the consequent ills, both physical and emotional, of life within the overworked, overstimulated and ‘red in tooth and claw’ system. My long hours and days gathering and growing the herbs to share with my clients, family, neighbours and friends feels like a different world or alternate reality in contrast to the interface I must make with the civilised world of offices, fluorescent lights and concrete. While I truly love all parts of my work, this polar interchange always clearly elucidates for me the distinct difference between the world of unruly winds and wild waters, and the tame and burning filaments of electricity enslaved within the lightbulb.

Much of my herbal work is spent with a shovel, basket and clippers as I dig and gather roots, leaves, flowers, bark and berries that are prepared into teas and other herbal formulations. I make every practical effort to harvest from local sources. This requires me to be tuned into to the seasonal cycles and growing patterns of wild plants. I also grow a variety of herbs in my own garden, and have become acutely tuned into conservation and ethical harvesting techniques that ensure the long-term survival and proliferation of our wild medicine plants.

This art and practice of traditional herbalism has deep roots into the history of every culture on earth. These roots have twisted, turned and intertwined throughout thousands of years of human civilisation, often being lost and forgotten as the quality of our communal engagements and our narrative with the world has placed humans on top of a hierarchy that centralises power into an above-ground, rootless, disembodied, hegemony.

That said, I think it’s important here to acknowledge that hierarchies occur naturally in wild communities, especially in herd animals, and that hierarchy is not always played out as an oppressive power structure. It can be an excellent tool for ensuring survival, protection and the health of a herd or community when based on consensus, synergy and cooperative principles.

Becoming radicle

Radicle: a rootlike subdivision, the portion of the embryo that gives rise to the root system of the plant
— biology-online.org 

Radicle describes the first part of the seed to emerge after germination that subsequently becomes the primary root. Radicles and the roots they become are a most powerful natural force that, as every city sidewalk knows, will crack and divide concrete. The soil depends upon these mighty revolutionaries to deeply move, turn and aerate the surface of the planet so that life can ascend from it. Plants ‘know’ that in order for productive growth to be sustained, they must first set their roots and begin to make contact with the vast and nutritious field of minerals and essential microbes within the substratum.

Plant roots have many different and effective growing styles, but my favourite are those that are rhizomatic. A rhizome is actually an underground stem that is rootlike; it spreads horizontally, sending out shoots and creating a lateral chain of connection where new sprouts can emerge.

Rhizomes are non-hierarchical and extremely resilient because even if you dig up one part, the other sections will continue to grow and proliferate. Rhizomes have no top or bottom, any point can be connected to any other. They can be broken off at any point and will always be able to start up again. Their network can be entered at any point; there is no central origin. And because there is no central regulatory force, rhizomes function as open systems where connections can emerge regardless of similarities or differences. Freedom of expression exists within a rhizome.

Rhizomes, therefore, are heterogeneous and can create multiplicities, or many different roots, that are sovereign but still in contact and communication with all other parts of the system. This is in contrast to, for instance, a tree, which has a central origin or trunk from which all of its roots and branches emerge. Disconnected from that source, they are no longer in direct contact with their growing system.

As author and storyteller Martin Shaw writes about ‘the rhizomatic universe’ in his book A Branch From the Lightening Tree:

The rhizome is a plant root system that grows by accretion rather than by separate or oppositional means. There is no defined center to its structure, and it doesn’t relate to any generative model. Each part remains in contact with the other by way of roots that become shoots and underground stems. We see that the rhizome is de-territorial, that it stands apart from the tree structure that fixes an order, based on radiancy and binary opposition.

Learning methods and cultural philosophies have been inspired and developed from the patterns observed within rhizomatic root systems. One such concept was introduced by philosopher Guilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Felix Guattari. From their book on the subject, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia:

As a model for culture, the rhizome resists the organizational structure of the root-tree system, which charts causality along chronological lines and looks for the original source of ‘things’ and looks towards the pinnacle or conclusion of those ‘things.’ A rhizome, on the other hand, is characterized by ‘ceaselessly established connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles.’ Rather than narrativize history and culture, the rhizome presents history and culture as a map or wide array of attractions and influences with no specific origin or genesis, for a ‘rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.’ The planar movement of the rhizome resists chronology and organization, instead favoring a nomadic system of growth and propagation.

In this model, culture spreads like the surface of a body of water, spreading towards available spaces or trickling downwards towards new spaces through fissures and gaps, eroding what is in its way. The surface can be interrupted and moved, but these disturbances leave no trace, as the water is charged with pressure and potential to always seek its equilibrium, and thereby establish smooth space.

Examples of rhizomatic patterns exist throughout the living world and include plants such as ginger, crabgrass, violets and, my favourite, wild sarsaparilla (Aralia nudicalis). In human terms we can see many examples of rhizomatic systems, such as we discussed above about Larry Wall and the internet, even amid the context of complex societal hierarchy. New economic and environmental models of power such as permaculture, bioregionalism, and re-localisation are designed to work as horizontal, cooperative, synergistic, and non-competitive systems.

The Rhizomati

Rhizome: A continuously growing horizontal underground stem that puts out lateral shoots and adventitious roots at intervals.
— Oxford English Dictionary online

Herbal medicines are, and always have been, a rhizomatic source of the equitable and lateral distribution of basic needs that seeks not to hoard, commercialise, and capitalise on healthcare or to dole it out only to those with access to the necessary currency. Herbs themselves have not escaped the thralls of patriarchal conquest. All of our modern medicine was founded on the insight gained from the common people and their unwritten relationship with the medicine of the plants. Many of the early European physicians gathered their knowledge from village herbalists, often women who could not read or write (as the patriarchy forbade them). These women are rarely even mentioned in the published literature of medical history. An example can be found in the book written by Dr William Withering (1774-1799), the man who is said to have ‘discovered’ the medicinal use of foxglove. The very first page of his book makes a short mention of a village wise woman who used it in a formula for dropsy: ‘I was told that it had been a long-kept secret by an old woman in Shropshire, who had sometimes made cures after the more regular practitioners had failed.’

The village healers were not elite or favoured by the ruling classes, and in fact were historically perceived as a threat. Their healing work was focused on the direct and intimate needs of their local community, which they frequently sought to empower and support. Traditional herbal medicine was not motivated by profit nor was it sanctioned by the overculture.

In our current times, herbal medicine and plant-based culture has re-emerged in many forms and I perceive it is in a major cycle of transformation. Many call it the ‘herbal renaissance’ and it’s not clear yet what the trajectory will be, as the world seemingly changes at the speed of light. However, the core values remain inextricably connected to the interdependent place-based character of the village healer and his or her reciprocal conversation with the wild and green world.

Our ancestors in healing, the long-ago plant people, were in service to their human community as well as the medicine allies they harvested from the hedges. These plant people often lived on the edge of town and worked as not only healers of physical sickness, but also practitioners of spirit, shamans of the village soul, and knowers of, or in old English ‘cunners’ of, the ‘wort’, or herb. Some were called wortcunners. Some were called magicians. Some were called witches. There are many different types of herbalists now and in the past. In ancient times — interestingly! — they were called the rhizomati, or by some sources, rhizotomoki, meaning ‘root gatherers’ or ‘root cutters’.

The rhizomati were rhizomatic practitioners of underground and lateral energy patternsas found in the plant kingdom. According to Christian Rätsch, ‘the rhizotomoki still spoke with the plant spirits…’ He adds: ‘These root-gatherers observed the gods sacred to the respective plant. They made use of the moon’s energy and knew the particular oath formulas for each plant. Witchcraft medicine belongs to the spiritual and cultural legacy of the rhizotomoki.’

Rätsch asserts, therefore, that ‘witchcraft medicine is wild medicine. It is uncontrollable, it surpasses the ruling order, it is anarchy. It belongs to the wilderness.’² Anarchy and wildness, in this sense, are not instances of chaos, mayhem, or lack of a system; rather, it is a system that is self-organised, organic, self-regulated, and impervious to oppressive external control mechanisms.

The rhizomati were carriers of traditional healing knowledge and have emerged at various points in time. In fact, as would a rhizome — going underground for a time andsprouting their legacy up to the surface in another place or time. Renowned modern-day herbalist David Hoffman has compared herbalists of our time to the Greek ‘rhizotomoi’ who held a very special place in the hierarchy of health-care practitioners during ancient times. He asserts that, now as then, herbal healers ‘breach so many realms.’

It is important to understand that the rhizotomoi were not merely the garden labourers that grew the plants, nor did they have the status of academic physicians who dispensed already prepared pills and formulas. Hoffman says: ‘They were people who knew the plants, knew where they grew, knew how to cultivate them, knew how to collect them appropriately, knew how to make the medicine, but then also knew how to use the medicine in the context of the people’s needs… they were herbalists.’

The legacy of these herbalists has carried their medicine bags into the vernacular, or kitchen, gardens of the past few hundred years in Europe and North America. Such gardens belonged to people of any class, and provided subsistence food and medicine to individuals and families. These communal plots were stewarded by the rhizomati and provided a local source of plants and seeds, were designed to meet the natural rhythms of the seasons, and were small enough to adapt to changing local conditions. They were places ‘in which “herb women” and rhizomati, root gatherers, are a key source of plant materials and seeds, and garden innovations are shared among peers—family, neighbors, friends—rather than distributed by a central authority.’³

Today’s root cutters, root gatherers, folk herbalists, plant charmers, and the like, face unknown challenges as the trail leads into the future of a global, capitalist economy. Herbal medicine has become increasingly mainstream and, will no doubt, continue to be commodified and profiteered at some level.

The overculture has made many recent bids to commercialise, exploit and restrict the use of plants by the people. There have been recent regulations enacted that limit the ability of herbalists to maintain home-based businesses, thereby restricting access to local products and serving the burgeoning corporate herbal industry.4

That is not to say that there is not a place in our health-care system for phyto-physicians that work with herbs allopathically. Plant-based preparations have already found a place in mainstream bio-medicine as a complementary modality, a method of prevention, and as a tool of synergy to potentise pharmaceutical protocols. However, this does not concede the necessity of the decentralised, community focused, and client-centred practice of folk herbalists. The modern rhizomati are a source of resilience and empowerment for our society and world, thanks to their interface with plants and people. This resilience will come not only at our resistance to capitalist exploits, but in our ability to establish rhizomatic, horizontal and local systems of vital sustenance, imagination, and community.

Change and dissent are enacted on even the simplest, most humane level when we just become aware of equitable alternatives to our dominant power structure. This I believe to be true well beyond the realms of herbal medicine practice. It has implications for our homes, businesses, communities local and beyond, schools, food production, the arts, and developing technologies. The key to the door of social justice and change is the knowledge that there are other ways to do it — as well as in the courage and innovation of those that are willing to imagine more than one possibility.

May the rhizomati live again and may we all rise rooted!

—

Footnotes
1. Silberman, Steve, Neurotribes, New York: Avery, 2015
2. Müller-Ebeling, Claudia, Christian Rätsch, and Wolf-Dieter Storl, Witchcraft Medicine: Healing Arts, Shamanic Practices, and Forbidden Plants, Rochester, Vermont Inner Traditions, 2003
3. ‘Vernacular Gardens’, Wyrtig.com, For gardeners with a sense of history, 2015. Accessed February 18, 2017
4. For more on these regulations or the cGMP laws: A Radicle blogspot. FDA cGMP compliance open source project. aradicle.blogspot.com, 2015. Accessed February 18, 2017

10 Life Lessons I Learned as a Psychiatric Nurse – and Patient

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By Cortland Pfeffer

Source: Wake Up World

Over the past 25 years, I have been immersed in the mental health and addiction system as a patient, later as staff, as a Registered Nurse (RN), and eventually as a supervisor. My time in the mental health system officially began at age 17 when I was first hospitalized in a psychiatric unit. This preceded further hospitalizations, a number of treatment episodes for alcoholism/addiction, along with multiple stints of incarceration in jails. Eventually, through this experience, I was able to embrace recovery and ultimately gain employment at some of these same facilities in which I was treated.

Often I am asked about how I went from being a psychiatric patient and homeless drug addict to being a registered nurse and a supervisor at some of these facilities. While there is no magical answer to that question, there certainly have been some valuable life lessons learned along the way. These are 10 of the life lessons I have learned over time, which allowed me to continue on this journey.

1. If you are naturally different than the majority, you will be labeled.

It is our nature to want to try to fit in with the tribe. It can be lonely when you feel like you are different from other people. When you are not like the majority, others will notice this and try to get you to fit in to this box of normality. But defining “normal” is an impossible task. It is defined as conforming to a standard. However, this standard changes with different cultures and time periods. What was once normal, is now insane. Today we clearly live in an insane society – one in which we favor materialism over that of our fellow man; one in which there is more public uproar over a sporting event than the humanitarian crisis in Aleppo. To be “normal” in this type of society would actually make one insane. Yet, when you don’t follow the mold of a brainwashed culture you get labeled as different.

This can be quite destructive as Erich Fromm points out in his 1941 book “Escape from Freedom” as he highlights how people are drawn to authority as it is safer to go along with the pack than to think independently.

We go along with the societal norms for harmony, acceptance, and belonging – which are also innate human desires. Each human has a desire to feel a sense of community and purpose. However, when we go along with the group – even when it is violates our personal beliefs just for acceptance – it causes us to believe that something is wrong with us for thinking differently.

Solomon Asch tested human’s conformity in an experiment in 1951. Over the 12 critical trials approximately 75% of participants conformed at least once; and 25% of participants never conformed. In the control condition, the participants were asked to write down the correct match between the lines without sharing their answers with the group. The results showed that the participants were very accurate, giving the correct answers 98-percent of the time. This is one of many studies that show most people will go along with a crowd, even if it is not what they believe. So what happens if the tribe has decided that there is something “wrong” with you? Science will show that most of us will go along with that.

However this is a mistake. Take a look at the bell curve, which is used to show “normality distribution.” The bell curve is used in many areas of life and can be used here. In many bell curves, you see that 95-percent are within two deviations from the mean, or average. On the very end you will always see 5-percent of people. They are at the extreme end and do not fall inside the box of “normal.” It doesn’t make you bad to be outside the norm, and it also doesn’t make you crazy or sick. In fact, I would argue that those on the extreme ends are the ones that have changed the world.

For example, Mahatma Gandhi did not fit inside that box. The “norm” of his time was to accept the British imperialism in his home country of India. He saw the injustices and spent his life trying to free his people from oppression. He was imprisoned and survived many assassination attempts (although one finally killed him). Likewise, Martin Luther King Jr. also saw the injustices of African-Americans were facing in the United States and stood up to the oppression. They both went against the norms, were labeled, judged, and eventually lost their lives for speaking against the status quo. They both ended up dead, but years later we realized they were speaking the truth against an insane society.

Other people’s labels of you are just that — other people’s labels. It is out of fear and ignorance. Do not adapt to other people’s expectations. The world needs people of all sorts. We need diversity.

If you closely take a look at the criteria for someone who is gifted versus someone who has ADHD, Bipolar, Aspergers, and many other mental health diagnosis you will see that they are almost identical. So whether you are called bipolar or gifted doesn’t depend on you, but rather on the so-called expert assessing your life. It is all about perception and none of it matters. All that matters is that you are your most authentic and true version of yourself.

2. We as a society create mental health and addiction.

There have been numerous studies that have exposed the fact that trauma as a child leads to neural chemistry changes in your brain. Childhood trauma has been called the smoking of mental health. The same way smoking can cause or invoke many physical diseases, childhood trauma and maltreatment does the equivalent for mental health and addiction.

There are higher relapse rates for hypertension and heart disease than there are for addiction and mental health. However, we often treat the addict like they are a bad person or making bad choices. So we are taking someone who has been traumatized and often did not receive treatment for their trauma and we punish them by locking them up. This creates more shame, exasperating the trauma and causing the cycle to repeat itself. Additionally, the patient is not going to be readily willing to seek help in the first place due to the aforementioned shame.

What if we had a cancer drug that works 10-percent of the time and made people sicker? We would throw the drug away! However if a treatment center has a 10-percent success rate for addiction or mental health they’re considered successful. What other business could be 10-percent successful and would continue to exist?

The addiction and mental health industry continue to grow, despite this complete lack of success. There are extremely high rates of recidivism in these fields. Speaking from personal experience, more often than not the patients get sicker while in treatment.

The staff then blames this lack of success on the patient. They point fingers and say that the patient “was not ready” or that they have “poor insight.” The site that failed to provide adequate treatment blames the victim and takes no responsibility for their failure.

This system only continues because too many people are making too much money off keeping people sick. The staff tends to be undertrained, under-qualified, and lack any meaningful or diverse life experience. They are trained to believe that their patients are bad people that are making bad choices instead of a sick person who has been traumatized. This obviously results in receiving much different treatment.

Now there are some absolutely wonderful people in this field. That is a fact. However, in general there is an overall lack of humanity and compassion in the way this population has been treated. We are the most incarcerating society in the history of mankind and most of these prisoners are there for harmless drug offenses.  Due to this influx of incarcerations, we have created for-profit prisons which rely on mass incarcerations for profit. They set up contracts with governments to guarantee high occupancy rates and spend millions of dollars lobbying to congress to make tougher prison laws to ensure they stay profitable. In turn, members of congress then hold stock in these private prisons – meaning that the people that make the laws are making money off the laws they sign into action.

We are locking up people who have a disease to profit the rich. Punishment does not work for this disease – it never has and it never will. If it did work, we would not have a this astronomical recidivism rate in jails for drug offenses.

3. Be true to who you are.

We run from who we truly are because we are told to by our environment. We are told that it is not okay to be our true self from the time we are young and we begin to believe it to be true. We spend our whole lives living for other people and living based on other people’s expectations. We eventually lose ourselves and create a false persona (or false self) – This is what I refer to as “The Mask”.

The longer we wear the mask, the more we forget who we are underneath. We start to think that we are our masks – the character that we present to the world for acceptance. As this continues, we grow to dislike our mask because it is not our true self. This leads to depression, self-hate, or even suicidal ideation. We think we hate ourselves, but in reality we hate this false self that we have created. When we go against our own nature, it will always create depression.

If you have forgotten who you are, it’s easy to remember. You know the truth by how you feel. If you want to remember what that feeling is like, simply go do something that is pure, genuine, and has good intentions and see how that feels. If you can do something for somebody that can never repay you, you will remember this feeling – that is the feeling you are seeking.

Some of us may not even know who we really are because we’ve been wearing this mask for so long. In that case you get to explore and try new things. You get to discover who you truly are and what makes your soul feel alive. This can be viewed as an obstacle or an opportunity. You can now try everything – writing, dancing, singing, etc. – try anything you desire and you will find your true self in the process.

You will find out who you were, before the world told you who you were supposed to be.

This concept can be frightening, especially if we have become too accustomed to the mask. Some will do anything and everything to put the mask back on for safety, security, and possibly they are benefiting from pretending to be their false self. Although, in the long run it will create more inner dissent.

The world needs you to be you. Your true self fits into the world exactly how it should. When we go against this, we are robbing humanity of the gifts our true selves possess. Albert Einstein said, “great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”

It can be scary to finally be yourself. You will likely start feeling rejected and you will lose some people. But those are the people that you want to lose. You will also gain people in your lives – the ones that love the true you and not the false you.

This is a change that is painful and it causes most people to go back into their false self (ore put their mask back on). However, this is an essential struggle that you will encounter on your way. It will turn your world upside down and your relationships will change.  But as the old saying goes, “it is better to be hated for who you are than to be loved for who you are not.”

You are only doing a smidgen of what you are capable of doing by being your true self. You have no idea what you’re capable of until you embrace who you are and you will be blown away by the results.

4. Fear destroys us; and makes others money.

When we are not ourselves, then our lives are being lived and based on fear. When we are always afraid, it is from remembering pain or trauma. Just like any animal, when we are afraid we will hide. We live in a society in which many people benefit of us being afraid.

We are evolutionarily programmed to remember the negative experiences at a much higher rate, more clearly and more intensely, than positive experiences.

Many businesses profit off of our fear. The news gets higher ratings when they show fights, violence, and all the things that are wrong with the world. So that is what they show and that is what we see. They are not showing a true representation of the world, but a sample size that spreads fear and increases ratings. This is paid for by commercial advertisements that spend millions of dollars by spreading fear into your mind in an effort to buy their product. They will tell you might get bitten by a snake, so you need to buy a fence to keep the snakes out. They tell you to buy material items to fit into society or you will be left out and not included. When the fear does not go away, we continue to consume more. And it never goes away until we realize that we are being played.

“If tomorrow, women woke up and decided they really liked their bodies, just think how many industries would go out of business?” – Dr. Gail Dines

Our insane society has created these masks and then they profit off these masks they created. Then you are labeled as insane if you don’t want to wear your mask anymore. Because when we take off our masks, they lose business.

What goes into your brain will affect your subconscious mind. If you feed it with fear, it will seek fear. If you feed it with love, it will find love. The opposite of living in fear is living with love. Love is the antidote to fear.

When you live with love, you will be faced resistance from those still guided by fear. But remember, in the end, throughout history, every single time love always wins. There may be a time it seems this is not true. But it becomes a crucial point in your recovery when you decide to choose love over fear if you are going to succeed. Every person going through a true recovery will come to this stage and it is scary, it is lonely, and it is supposed to be. It takes immense strength to love when everything inside of you tells you to run away. Once you make it through this stage, you have reached a turning point and the mask begins to crumble.

5. Love, acceptance, and truly listening is far more powerful than any advice you can ever give someone.

We have all seen someone struggling and we want to fix it. Usually we want to fix it the way we would fix it for ourselves if we were in the same struggle. We tend to go in and tell people how to change. Although well-intentioned, when we do this, we begin to lose them. Everyone is different, and every recovery is different. Every mask is unique, and therefore every mask removal must be unique.

Relationships are the single most important thing to someone going through a recovery. You can have the cure for them, but if they do not trust you, they will not hear it. They do not care how much you know, until they know how much you care.

Accepting people for who they are and where they are at in their life will go further than any piece of advice you can ever give them. Giving someone love and a hug when everybody else is kicking them is what I call “psychological life support.”

I had two people that did this for me and they saved my life. Not those who criticized me and tried to force me into treatment. It was those who offered unconditional love and acceptance who kept me alive. Unconditional, meaning without conditions/judgments, but just loving them and accepting them in their entirety with no desire to change or point out their flaws. When I was ready to change, I went to the same people because I had gained their trust.

Relationships come first. If you cannot build a relationship, a trusting relationship, then you will only do damage. I believe many staff in this field are well-intentioned, however they make these problems much worse and the patients get much sicker simply because there is a lack of acceptance, love, and an overabundance of advice giving and fixing.

Trust me, if there was an easy-fix, the person would have already done so. In rushing to fix a person, you are sending the message that they are incompetent and could not think of this on their own. A broken person doesn’t need to be fixed, they need to be loved, then they are able to heal themselves.

When I say listening, I mean being present completely with that person. This means not checking your phone, not looking at the clock, and not even thinking about anything else. This is referred to as active listening. The ten people I think are the best in this field all do this. They make the person they are with feel like they are the most important person on earth in that moment. When the person can feel heard, the magic begins.

6. Embrace your struggles, they are gifts.

When I see a patient walking around a treatment center saying “everything is fine,” “everything is ok,” or “I’m doing great,” this becomes a giant red flag. You should be struggling. Muscles do not grow without struggle and the same goes for our soul.

Since we were young, we were trained to believe that admitting to a struggle is a sign of weakness, but in fact it is a great strength. We are all going through a struggle. We should be working on the thing that is the most difficult for us for optimum growth. The thing that you are most scared to do is probably the thing that is most essential to your recovery.

If you are in pain, if you are crying, if you are scared, then you are growing. If you are questioning why you are there, or why you are going through this, or questioning your own sanity, then you are growing. If you are angry, if you are tense, if you are isolating, then you are growing.

If there is no struggle, there is no growth. If there is no growth, there is no recovery.

Everything in my life in which I thought would be my demise, ended up being the very best things in the long run. We see a small portion of the big picture and act like that’s the reality, when it’s not. We must trust the process and trust in the bigger picture. Without the illusion, there would be no enlightenment.

There will come a time that you will think this is not worth it and feel like giving up. This means you are getting close to breaking through. We usually give up right before the miracle happens.

There is not one magical moment where you reach some mountaintop. It usually takes two steps forward, followed by one step back. It is a continuous, non-linear process. It is like a newborn baby deer trying to learn to walk. Their feet are wobbly and they fall down often. Falling down is not the issue, it is the learning process that makes you stronger and not having shame about the fall. It is about being around people that do not judge the fall.

The only way through the pain you have is to deal with it. There are many things we have hidden inside ourselves through the years because of fear and using the mask. Sometimes it may be for years, or decades, but all things eventually rise to the surface and all your pain is revealed. But that is the only way that it can be healed is for it to come to the surface. It cannot be healed when it is buried.

Let the storm come. After the storm comes the rainbow.

“Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass; it’s learning to dance in the rain.” – Vivian Greene

7. Our subconscious is what drives us.

We have two parts of our mind – the conscious and the subconscious. The conscious is all of which we are aware. The subconscious is the part that we are not aware, but all the millions of things we process daily and store away.

Our brain cannot tell if what is in our subconscious is true or not. It takes everything in as fact. It is like a hard drive that receives commands and stores everything as fact. It is built by other people and society – parents, siblings, teachers, television, pop culture, advertisements, etc. If we grow up being told that we are “bad,” our subconscious processes it to be true.

Everything is a perception and not reality. However, as different things start to play out in our conscious mind, then the subconscious files come to the surface to back it up as “evidence.” This creates stronger files in our subconscious mind. These files in our subconscious mind are what drives us; not what we are consciously aware.

As young children and even as adolescents, our brains are flooded with gray matter. This is the part of our brain that can be molded and create the person we are to become. This is what shapes the subconscious mind which will determine what drives us for a lifetime. If someone is told they are bad, lazy, incompetent, then they will be driven by this. If someone deals with pain, torture, trauma, and abandonment, they will be drive by this as well.

The good news is we can change the subconscious mind by implanting new messages. It is flexible, but it takes time, practice and patience.

Additionally, some of us will be more affected than others by these messages. Some people are naturally more sensitive, more prone to trauma,  and more prone to take things too personally.

We are all born with an innate temperament that lasts our entire lives. That would be like if a couple people were eating a pizza. One person takes a bite and it tastes lukewarm to them; but the other person burns their mouth and complains as to how hot it is. The others would not believe it to be true.  However when it comes to emotions, we can’t see anything, the scars or burns are invisible. So we are told that it is not real and our emotions are crazy, in which we believe to be true. This only further pushes our true selves down and creates more negative self-talk which creates files in the subconscious.

This leads to the most sensitive, warm, kind people in our society being invalidated and told they are “babies” for feeling and caring more than most. We tell them that they are not right when inside they are going through a trauma.

But if a young boy acts out in anger instead of crying, that is more acceptable in our society. That is one form of a mask that is created and is prevalent among young men. Then with this mask, and all masks, comes depression from not being your true self from going against nature.

That’s the inner voice, it is the subconscious.  It is strong but it may not even be true. The only way to combat this is to start telling yourself positive things (affirmations), surround yourself with positivity, changing your perceptions of the world (cognitive behavioral therapy), focus on the positive things in life (gratitude). This starts to build more positive files in your subconscious which drives you out of despair and into a positive direction.

We all are born pure, and with nothing but love in our hearts. This is often taken from some of us by a combination of temperament, environment, society, and trauma. We eventually believe that we are not good at our core. But we are. We can change our subconscious by what goes into our brain daily. This takes persistence and daily practice, and it is hard when we are used to thinking negatively about ourselves. However, this out of everything is probably the key to sustained long-term recovery- dealing with that inner voice and changing our thoughts.  It will seem foreign at first to say “I’m a good person.” If you are going to make it, you have to start doing on a daily basis. You can replace those files just like your body replaces every cell in the body every seven years. Soon those old files will be gone and the new positive files will be your subconscious.

8. Who you surround yourself with is one of the most important decisions you will make.

I have heard many wise people say that we are the average of the five people we spend the most time with. As I said above, that directly affects our subconscious and what we think of ourselves.

I remember years ago my oldest daughter enrolled in a private school. Everyone in the school was Catholic and she came home and believed in her inner core that the entire world was Catholic. She cried about it at night that she was different because she did not go up to get the fake bread at their ceremonies. Similarly, if you are around five people that smoke pot and you do not smoke pot, then you are the weirdo for not smoking pot. However, if you are with five people that do not smoke pot and you do, then you are considered strange for smoking pot.

At the end of the day, if you are around negativity — eg. those who consider you strange or different — it will eventually influence you.

Now some negativity can be good if you’re an overly positive person and turn a blind eye to all negativity because that is also unrealistic and can actually benefit the person. Also, being angry can help mobilize and motivate you to change. People who are totally happy and content at all times are never the ones that change the world – see Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi. It is those that are healthy discontents that create change.

On the flip side, if you only are surrounded by negativity it will suck the life out of you. Likewise if you are around a bunch of people who believe that you are a bad person, be that your family, friends, or relatives, then that’s going to creep right back into your subconscious and you creep right back into old patterns. Soon you believe that pattern as real.

You cannot do this alone. It took many others to help us put the mask on, and it will take others to help remove the mask as well. I came across five amazing people that helped change my life and save it.

Part of recovering is making the effort to be true to yourself. Once you can do this, you will find yourself in others. You start to see that all of life is a synchronicity. You will suddenly be around people who can help you and you have to be willing to accept help and make yourself vulnerable. If you cannot expose yourself and be vulnerable to these good people, then you will fall.

Vulnerability allows others to lift the mask.

You have to start all over sometimes; that may even mean leaving your family and lifelong friends. It is terrifying, but you will find new people that embrace your true self, whereas your friends and family have only got to know your mask and are not ready for your true self. You’ll find that people who you thought were close friends really were not; and people who you thought were not your friends actually were. You find out everybody’s true character when you go through this. It’s a gift in that way as well. Someone you may not have associated with five years ago, you’ll love them when you are your true self. This just means that the transformation is happening.

9. You must learn to truly love yourself or you will not make it.

I wrote earlier about being your true self and that is completely different from loving your true self. There is a reason we wear these masks and have these false selves. It is because we think that at our core, we are not OK. Then we start to be ourselves, but also seek to make changes. We have to 100-percent, truly, genuinely love our true self and embrace it or we will eventually slip back on our masks.

This is the often overlooked Steps Six and Seven of the 12-Steps. We are removing the parts of ourselves that are not true and keeping those that are. However, we get confused at this point because we feel that part of ourselves is flawed.

But, that is impossible! Every single person is perfect at their core. You do not have any flaws. That is a lie created by society. Every person is perfect and once you find your true self you will see this to be true.

Which is why, when you are finally being yourself you are likely going to be mocked, ridiculed, and teased. It begins to seem much easier to revert back to old ways (the mask). It is hard when you have run your whole life and been afraid. Then you start to be yourself and people start teasing you or pushing you away. You must realize that this has nothing to do with you and has everything to do with them. If somebody loves you that usually has more to do with them than you; and if somebody hates you that has more to do with them than you.

I remember when I had to have a psychological test done, I had to have my four closest people fill out a form and I figured it would all be the same answers that they gave. I got four completely different forms with four completely different sets of answers. Others love us based on their perception of us or they hate us based on their perception of us, none of this is reality – but it is reality to them.

What matters is what we think of ourselves. If we love ourselves, we will glow and other people will be drawn to us and some will be drawn away from us.

“The ego says, ‘Once everything falls into place, I’ll find peace.’ The spirit says, ‘Find your peace, and then everything will fall into place.’” – Marianne Williamson

10. Whatever you do, if you do it with love in your heart as your intention, you cannot go wrong.

The world is full of opinions. Everyone has the answers. You can’t do this, or you shouldn’t do that. People can show you evidence about why they are right and why you are wrong. Everyone will tell you how to handle your recovery and how to handle every situation in life. When we are listening to other people instead of our true selves, we are going against our own truth and against our own nature.

There is no right and wrong. We used to think smoking was okay for you and doctors advertised it. We used to think the world was flat. We used to think Columbus discovered America. There is no truth, there is only perception. You must do what your true inner self believes. Your mask is unique so your mask’s removal is going to be unique. The one thing that is common for all mask removals is connection and love. Science and studies have found out that we are breathing the same air that people breathed in and breathed out thousands of years ago. The air we breathe is composed of mainly nitrogen, gas, and oxygen gas. Very little is lost in space, and only occasionally is there a new source of carbon or oxygen introduced into this planet. So every breath you take has atoms that have been here for billions of years.

There was a computer program set up in various spots around the world. It would shoot off random numbers, there was no pattern ever seen for years. This is called a Random Number Generator. However when the September 11th attacks happened, or other moments that human consciousness became coherent, things changed. For instance, in the case of a severe tragedy in which all humans are thinking about similar things and having similar emotions, all the numbers become structured and organized. They show an unpredictable sequence of ones and zeroes. The odds of this happening by chance is one in a trillion. How is this possible?

Every single thing you can see around you — the rocks, the birds, and the trees — all are comprised of the same atoms. They are just expressed differently — yet intricately interconnected. Whatever you do and whatever decisions you make, if you do it with love as your motive and if your intentions are pure with love you cannot be wrong. So know your intentions and know your truth and embrace it. You were born with a light that others have tried to dim with a mask, let your light shine again and take your mask off. Humanity needs the gift that your true self possess.

Taking the Mask Off: Destroying the Stigmatic Barriers of Mental Health and Addiction Using a Spiritual Solution

“Taking the Mask Off” is the new book by Cortland Pfeffer and Irwin Ozborne. Cortland Pfeffer spent years as a patient in psychiatric hospitals, treatment centers, and jails before becoming a registered nurse and working in the same facilities. Based on his experience, this story is told from both sides of the desk. It offers a unique and valuable perspective into mental health and addiction, revealing the problems with the psychiatric industry while also providing the solution – one that brings together science, spirituality, philosophy, and personal experience.

“Taking the Mask Off: Destroying the Stigmatic Barriers of Mental Health and Addiction Using a Spiritual Solution” is available on Amazon, and Balboa Press.

Positively Thriving Through the Collapse of Civilisation

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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)

The Mechanics Of A Free Society

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By Colin Turner

Source: Freeworlder

Most people who have given any consideration to a moneyless, ‘free world’ society are already aware that we have the technology today to create a world of abundance without the constraints and inequality of the traditional market system, owing to how much human labour can now be efficiently automated.

Without scarcity, and a massive reduction in the need for labour, money effectively becomes obsolete. That’s the theory. But it’s not the full story, nor does it convince everybody who comes into contact with the theory. In fact, it convinces surprisingly few indeed.

In my opinion, this kind of super-advanced “Star Trek” moneyless society is still quite a distance away – not because we lack the technology – but because we humans lack the openness and understanding required to make it work.

A truly free society should be just that – unlimited, self-determining and self-organising for the optimum benefit of all. Today it appears that, left to our own devices, humanity just can’t wait to blow itself to pieces. How can you de-regulate society and hope to achieve equilibrium against that backdrop?

Let us remind ourselves that today we share our world with people separated by walls to stop them killing each other, giant corporate agencies detached from the social and ecological effects of their business, people who kill animals for pleasure, and, worst of all, a population that has somehow programmed itself to consume recklessly to compensate for its own imagined insecurity.

To my mind, celebrity/brand worship, religious fervour, and xenophobic flag-waving are all here to remind us that – irrespective of our technological advances – we still have a long way to go before humanity can unite in the common purpose of sharing our world and its bounty equitably and sustainably for all.

As someone who has considered these ideas perhaps more than most, I have had plenty of time to critique and refine my own philosophy along the way. As a result of these self-inquiries, I have come up with a number of ideas that I believe can help us paint a fuller picture of what to expect in a free society, and some ways that we can enact it today.

Social Gravity

This is the glue that keeps society together. We are a social species. By and large, we prefer to do things together. We naturally gravitate into groups, teams, villages and cities.

This all stems from one basic human need –  the urge of individuals to belong to something greater. Everything from our cities, our cultures, our religions, even our great unwritten social contract of be-good-to-others – stems from this need.

Social Gravity is the force that naturally binds us – even keeping our unfair, outdated system together, with all its flaws. This is because most people prefer to accept the broader consensus rather than apply radical new thinking. The fact that it keeps our system together, in plain view of its injustices and suffering, tells you just how powerful a force Social Gravity is.

Now imagine how much more powerful this force could be in a society that positively promotes life, health, diversity and happiness for all. Social Gravity is the primary force that will bond a free society and make it work.

Currently, most free world advocates are fighting against Social Gravity as they meet peoples’ resistance to radically new ideas and change. But we know this is changing ever more by the day as these people are beginning to question the logic and injustice of the prevailing system themselves.

As more change their viewpoint, the more they ‘normalise’ the environment for others to do so too. This is why it’s important to let people know how you are thinking. Even if they disagree now, you will probably become a point of reference for them later as they too begin to change.

This natural social pressure is what will maintain order, balance and efficiency in a free society. The more people benefit from it, the stronger that force becomes.

Self-Determination

Most people do not understand the true meaning of anarchy – to the point that I’ve almost given up using the term. Over the years, the media and prevailing thought have suffused its meaning with disorder, chaos and violence. But this is not anarchy – this is usually just the collapse of oppression.

Our screens are often filled with views of young people rioting, throwing missiles or looting shops, with the strong suggestion that they have become ‘lawless’, or that ‘law and order’ need to be restored – but this is a deep and dangerous misunderstanding.

Scenes like this are, in fact, the backlash of oppression. Whatever happened before is what creates those scenes. This is anger, not anarchy.

The best way to describe anarchy is to look to the animal kingdom. By and large, animals are peaceful creatures and will happily co-exist with each other in a steady-state* environment. The only time an animal is ever violent is when it must kill to eat, or when threatened, and – crucially – no animal ever kills more than it needs.

This is self-determination – the default behaviour of all beings. When survival is not threatened, peaceful coexistence is the default state of all animals, including humans. It’s simply easier than violence.

History books and media are full of references to aggressive culture, heinous acts of violence and torture – man pitted against fellow man. This gives an abiding impression of a bloodthirsty homo sapiens, indiscriminately bludgeoning all in his path to get what he wants. But this is a false impression, and yet another dangerous misunderstanding of the world and of ourselves.

The reason for this is simple. Wars, conflict and aggression make for more interesting stories so are always reported on and read about in our history books and media. Whereas, peace and non-conflict is essentially boring and does not get written about – yet it probably accounts for 99.999% of all human behaviour.

For every lunatic who takes up a gun and starts killing people, there are millions and millions of other people who don’t, but we never hear about them. The reality is, our human experience, from a statistical point of view, is almost entirely peaceful.

A self-determining society doesn’t use or require laws. Laws were invented primarily to protect private interests and enforce the payment of taxes. In a world of abundance, open access and greater understanding of ourselves, these laws would become redundant.

Nor do we need laws to protect ourselves from each other, as that basic morality is already hard-wired into us. We are a social species. We want to get along. We all experience this spirit of humanity every day in the help we get from our work or student colleagues, our friends and families, and from strangers – even in times of crisis. When financial stress is gone, people are good to each other.

The ideological boundaries between us – culture, religion, nationality, etc – are purely superficial, and friction between differing views – much of which is inequality-based – can only diminish as the common ideals and benefits of a free society become apparent.

As long as we each have our survival needs met by society, there is nothing to compete for – at least nothing that is worth killing or dying for.

Of course, we cannot expect self-determination to automatically rule out all acts of senseless violence or anti-social behaviour, but once scarcity is not an object to peoples’ existence, we can certainly expect to reduce such incidences to a minimum.† (See Anti-Aggression Strategies)

* A steady state environment is an environment where scarcity and territories are not an issue. Technically, we humans have long since solved the problem of scarcity through the application of technology. We just have to work on our own ‘software’ to create a fair distribution system for it. Also, by doing so, we will regain sufficient trust between each other to render our territorial and cultural boundaries as meaningless as county lines.

† It’s worth pointing out that senseless violence and anti-social behaviour are already common daily occurences under our current law system – most of which can be related directly to scarcity and inequality. It seems wholly unreasonable to assume such behaviour would increase in a self-determining, abundant society.

Life Education Program

To give a free society any chance of succeeding or surviving, a radical overhaul of our current education system is essential. By and large, our current system prioritises reading, writing and arithmetic as core learning, but, in my opinion, these are far from the most important skills we need to acquire.

Children from the earliest age (even from 0) must have access to the most important information that can help them live a rich and fulfilling life, with all the skills for building great self, inter-personal and community relationships. This information can easily be compiled for children of all levels of cognisance.

Here are some examples of topic headings (though I’m sure many more could be extrapolated here):

  • Nature
    Introduction to our planet, our ecosystem, death and the cycle of life, appreciation of all life.
  • Environment
    Ecology, the food chain, water, weather, city and bio-systems, energy, sustainability, regeneration.
  • Community
    The mechanics of community, the purpose and benefits of sharing, respect, trust, empathy, being responsible, leadership, team-work, resolving disputes,  appreciating unfamiliar races and cultures.
  • Self
    Anatomy of self, basic hygiene, health, nutrition, hydration, oxygenation, meditation, massage, self-awareness, self-acceptance, self-respect.
  • Life Skills
    Interpersonal relationships, effective communication, empathy, understanding and coping with negative emotions, problem solving, critical thinking, creative expression, food growing and preparation, sex, parenting and family.

Of course, traditional learning still has enormous value and will continue to be taught in a free society, but relevant and practical lessons on life and life skills must have precedence in order to create better, happier communities.

By building Life Education as a modular program, we could even start introducing this vital new education in stages today.

Community Service

While many necessary jobs in the community will naturally be filled by those passionate and motivated enough to devote their time unconditionally to it, there will invariably be a shortfall in volunteers to participate in some of the less glamorous functions of modern society – like sweeping the roads, etc.

Community service is a concept that most of us are already familiar with – though we usually associate it with punishment for petty criminals. But the fact is, organised community service is undoubtedly the most efficient way to deliver essential services equitably within a large population.

In the enactment of a free society, every member of the community should be encouraged to contribute a reasonable minimum number of hours community service a month. Remember, for a society without conventional employment, this would be a trivial commitment for most people.

A monthly schedule of required services and tasks in the community could be published, where members would opt to participate in whichever tasks best suited their skills and availability at the time.

The number of recommended hours per month would obviously depend on local factors, ie. what needed to be done, population number, availability of skills, complexity of tasks, etc, but the idea is to keep peoples’ commitment to a minimum by spreading the community workload as widely as possible.

Children should also be actively encouraged to engage in their community’s projects from as young as possible – and in as many diverse tasks as possible. This would help them discover their own aptitude, engage with the community, and gain valuable life experience in the process.

Each service task would have a strong social aspect, where people are encouraged to work in teams, during the same hours, and towards common goals. There’s no reason why community work in a free world should ever be onerous, or could not even be carried out in entertaining ways.

For example, with a little imagination, some tasks could even be turned into sports events where teams compete to fulfil tasks, or see who can come up with the most innovative solutions. The overriding goal is that community service, while providing essential services, would be entirely opt-in, and a fulfilling and engaging experience that people would enjoy.

The Project Pledge Scheme

In any community, large projects always need to be undertaken – like building a new bridge, road, school or hospital. The current market system works quite well in this regard, as it monetarily ‘locks in’ the required personnel to complete large scale tasks uninterrupted for many months or years at a time.

In a moneyless world, rotating volunteer personnel from within local communities to help with long, complex projects may prove inefficient, or, in some cases unworkable.

A solution might be to create a Project Pledge scheme, where willing workers publicly pledge to see the project through until completion. It’s reasonable to assume that any large scale community project would find it easy to enlist local volunteers who would benefit directly from the project.

A project launch ceremony could be held where they each undertake their pledges. What’s important is that the project managers would seek the full commitment and pledge from participants at the outset, while the volunteers themselves become personally invested in the project’s success too.

As with all community service, large projects would also have a strong emphasis on creating an enjoyable social experience for the participants.

As technology gets better and more widely available, large intensive projects would obviously require fewer and fewer personnel, but a Project Pledge Scheme could be a viable interim solution.

Central Resources & Skills Database

A free society needs an effective information network to maintain its efficiency.  We can have a central information database relating to resource location and inventory, and a comprehensive directory of people and skills. Such a database would be maintained and moderated by users.

The resources section would be a map-based inventory and requisition facility for users to list, find and request the resources they require. By resources, I mean anything from raw iron ore to a wooden dining table. Whatever physical resources people have available for sharing, they can list it on the database.

Anyone looking for those resources would simply run a search on the database, find the nearest match, and place a requisition order. If necessary, resource requisitions could be weighted according to urgency and depth of benefit to the community. For example, a community urgently requiring concrete for re-construction of a well would have greater priority than an individual requiring concrete to build a garage.

Like the inventory, the requisition system would be entirely transparent, and a user making the request would be able to see where his request was positioned in the queue and read the other requests. A fully transparent system is the only way to avoid needless misunderstandings and conflicts.

Items that need to be delivered from one area to another could then come under the Community Service system in the despatching area to source a driver and truck to carry the requested goods – if possible on an already existing despatch route.

The skills section would be a map-based directory of people who wish to offer their labour or specialist skills to others. Users looking for those skills would be able to make contact with them directly.

It would seem logical for a company like Google who already have the established infrastructure and reputation to incorporate such a facility into their current portfolio, but of course, it could be any provider.

The HonorPay System

Obviously the notion of giving for reward is firmly embedded in our culture. It’s not entirely clear to me if we can ever fully transcend this essentially ego-based reward paradigm – or even if transcending this would be a good idea.

Many supporters of a free society believe we can surpass ego. I’m not so sure, since at its most base level, ego is part of our survival mechanism, and, in its highest form, embodies our individuality. Certainly in the interim period, moving from a market-based system to a free society, I believe it will be useful to maintain a symbolic reward or Honor system.

The HonorPay system, or something like it, may offer just such a symbolic payment system. It’s a free web utility that provides a means to award limited ‘Honors’ to any person you wish, aggregating their public reputation score.

The Honor awards have no useable value, and are simply tokens of appreciation. In a world powered purely by volunteerism, appreciation will be a valuable incentive.

The HonorPay system is already live (honorpay.org), and something that can be used today, providing people with a means of incentive and reward beyond physical or monetary tokens.

Open Proposals Platform

In matters relating to large numbers of people, it would make sense to have a an open platform where each person can vote on decisions that affect everybody, voice their own opinions, and propose motions of their own.

Relatively simple to implement, such a platform would seem to be a basic requisite for an open society. Though surprisingly, it may end up seeing little use, since a more conscious, abundant and creative society will likely have moved beyond reducing everything to binary choices and leaving an endless trail of disgruntled minorities! However, while still useful, there may be a far more interesting and potentially beneficial purpose for building such a system.

Today, even in supposedly democratic countries, most important decisions relating to things like budgets, laws, jobs or foreign conflict are never put to a public referendum. Most referenda are nothing more than democratic window-dressing that only address political ‘hot potatoes’ or moral hazards that politicians would rather avoid, and which usually have almost no relevance to how the country is actually run.

Implementing a public polling platform today would give people the opportunity to ‘vote’ on every issue that affects their lives. Even though their vote would not officially count, it would still give them a means for their collective voice to be heard. For example, it would be much more difficult for a country’s government to follow through on its own internal policy when the open polling platform is clearly showing a large majority of the population that don’t agree with it.

Such a platform could play a very important role in bringing about change, while also bringing the required technology for post-change society.

Organic Leadership

Just because a self-determining society doesn’t use governance doesn’t mean that we don’t need leaders and role models. Leaders are people who see further, who can envision greater possibilities, who can solve problems, or who have the courage and enthusiasm to inspire people during uncertain times.

In a free society, people will still seek leaders to inspire and help them. However this does not mean that we need rulers. Rulers do not necessarily help, they merely rule – and usually only when there is something to protect.

A truly free society does not require protection, as it is based on the understanding of nature and community first, not on private property. However, some kind of leadership structure is undoubtedly an efficient way of accomplishing complex tasks. (Think film director, for instance)

In Organic Leadership, leaders are nominated for specific tasks based on their ability through the common wishes of the group. Selection can happen in any way, but should be an organic process where the natural choice of the group is obvious.

A leader’s true role is merely to administrate the desires of others, or to adjudicate on which suggested course of action is the best one. Leadership in this form will only exist as and for when it is necessary, and based on the common understanding that, once chosen, the leader has final say on matters for which they are appointed.

Creative Arbitration

No matter how well we design and create the kind of world we want to see, there will always be disputes among people, whether over relationships, personal beliefs, or claims on land or property. That is just part of the deal with being human. We aren’t perfect – so it’s best to begin by accepting that fact!

By far the most crucial instrument in resolving disputes is speed. Unresolved problems create stress, animosity and compound fear. These are the explosive ingredients of aggression and war, so the sooner a solution is found, the better.

Where people are unable to find solutions themselves, it would seem reasonable for both parties to nominate an independent arbitrator whom they both trust to help them reach a solution. (The arbitrator can be anyone from the community who is willing to help)

But let’s define what we mean by ‘solution’. In today’s world, resolutions are usually reached using the law or courts to decide. It almost always come down to a binary choice where one side wins and the other loses. There’s nothing wrong with this in theory, but to create a lasting, stable society, no-one should ever need to be the loser.

For example, if two parties A and B are arguing over property rights, and an arbitrator – acting in the interest of the community – decides that A is the more deserving claimant, it may please A and the community, but still leaves B the loser. Even though B may accept that resolution, they are left with a sense of personal injustice and/or embarrassment that can ferment into one of the previously mentioned ingredients of aggression. This is unnecessary.

In a free society, we should never settle for a resolution that leaves even one person marginalised. This is a limited view. There is always a creative solution that brings an optimal – and preferably superior – outcome for everyone, and nothing should be considered solved until such a solution is found.

Once the limits of traditional society are lifted, much more solutions become available. For example, why would someone want to claim your house if they could readily organise an even better one for themselves elsewhere?

Creative Arbitration is about finding an amazing solution that makes all parties happier than before. We shouldn’t settle for less. The best persons to be elected to assist in dispute resolution ought not necessarily to be those most wise, but those most flexible and creative in problem-solving.

Anti-Aggression Strategies

Implementing a free and abundant society is undoubtedly the best way to reduce incidences and reasons-to-exist of socially aberrant behaviour, but, of course, we are not perfect and some incidences of violence and anti-social behaiour will still arise – albeit many times less than before.

Having a system of prescribed laws and measures to tackle ‘crime’ will not be possible nor desirable in a self-determining society, so what is the solution? How do we stop people perpetrating violence on others? How do we stop people who take unfair advantage? How do we punish people? Should we punish people at all?

The answer is simple: common sense.

Every situation is unique and should be handled using local information, with respect to the people involved, and the application of common sense. Creative Arbitration can be applied to resolve disputes and find an optimal outcome, but if it’s not possible and someone is continually making life miserable for others or being violent, then they need to be restrained. It’s that simple.

Common sense dictates that you don’t allow a gunman to continue his killing spree uninterrupted. He will obviously be restrained. How and in what measure would be determined by the situation. Drastic force may be required.

In the event that anyone does need to be restrained to prevent harming others, then every effort should be made to rehabilitate that person during that time, and to integrate them back to the community as early as possible.

In today’s world, a prison is merely a place to lock people up out of harm’s way, but it should be viewed more as a ‘timeout’ opportunity for someone with social or emotional problems to get the intensive help they need.

There are plenty of effective rehabilitation strategies and techniques available today that can be employed, but which are usually too expensive and labour intensive to be successfully implemented. A free society would have no such restrictions, and plenty of good councillers passionate enough about their work to put in the time.

Community Lighthouse

In order to prevent social decay, or regression back to our former imperial ways, a free society requires an early warning protection system. This could perhaps be incorporated into the Open Proposals platform and act like an immune system for the community at large.

If there are problems in some areas with resources or people where quality of life is becoming less than optimal, then members of that community should be able to raise alerts – anonymously if desired – to warn the greater community of the problem.

As previously stated, speed is the key to finding effective solutions, and applying a creative problem-solving approach. For example, say a remote village is being denied some vital resource due to the actions of a local farmer. A problem like this, if ignored, could end in some violent confrontation, which in turn could lead to repercussions, which in turn could become a larger tribal or familial conflict, etc.

A Community Lighthouse system could alert a neighbouring community who may be able to intervene quickly, impartially, and creatively arbitrate a solution, or, failing that, find an alternative means of providing that resource to the community.  It may even just suffice for the farmer himself to be alerted to how unpopular he is becoming.

All major problems spring from unresolved small problems. By resolving small problems early, we can avoid the larger ones. A Community Lighthouse system would be crucial to the ongoing stability and security of a free society.

Breaking the chains: precarity in the Age of Anxiety

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breaking-the-chainsBy Joseph Todd

Source: RoarMag.org

In our Age of Anxiety, society assaults us from every possible angle with an avalanche of uncertainty. How do we fight back under conditions of precarity?

­An Age of Anxiety is upon us, one where society assaults us from every possible angle with an avalanche of uncertainty, fear and alienation. We live with neither liberty nor security but instead precariousness. Our housing, our income and our play are temporary and contingent, forever at the whim of the landlord, policeman, bureaucrat or market. The only constant is that of insecurity itself. We are gifted the guarantee of perpetual flux, the knowledge that we will forever be flailing from one abyss to another, that true relaxation is a bourgeois luxury beyond our means.

Our very beings come to absorb this anxiety. We internalize society’s cruelty and contradiction and transform them into a problem of brain chemistry, one that is diagnosed and medicated away instead of being obliterated at root. All hope is blotted out. Authentic experience, unmediated conversation, distraction-free affection and truly relaxed association feel like relics of a bygone era, a sepia dream that perhaps never existed.

Instead we have the frenetic social arenas of late capitalism: the commodified hedonism of clubs and festivals, express lunches, binge culture and the escapist, dislocating experience of online video games, all underlined by either our desperate need to numb our anxieties or to create effective, time-efficient units of fun so we are available for work and worry.

This is assuming we have work, of course. Many of us are unemployed, or are instead held in constant precarity. Stuck on zero-hour contracts or wading through as jobbing freelancers in industries that used to employ but don’t anymore, we are unable to plan our lives any further than next week’s rota, unable to ever switch off as the search for work is sprawling and continuous.

And if we do have traditional employment, what then? We are imprisoned and surveilled in the office, coffee shop or back room, subject to constant assessment, re-assessment and self-assessment, tracked, monitored and looped in a perpetual performance review, one which even our managers think is worthless, but has to be done anyway because, hey, company policy.

Continuous is the effective probationary period and we are forever teetering on the edge of unemployment. We internalize the implications of our constant assessment, the knowledge that we’re always potentially being surveilled. We censor ourselves. We second-guess ourselves. We quash ourselves.

And thanks to the effective abolition of the traditional working day, work becomes unbearable and endless. The security of having delineated time — at work and then at play — has been eradicated. Often this is because individuals have to supplement their atrocious wages with work on the side. But it is also because traditional 9-to-5 jobs have suffered a continuous extension of working hours into out-of-office time, enabled and mediated by our laptops and smartphones. These gadgets demand immediacy and, when coupled with the knowledge that you are always reachable and thus available, they instill in us a frantic need to forever reply in the now.

And with this expectation comes obligation. Hyper-networked technologies gift our bosses the ability to demand action from us at any moment. Things that had to wait before become doable — and thus are done — in the now. If you are unwilling, then someone is ready to take your place. You must always be at their beck and call. From this, our only refuge is sleep, perhaps the last bastion of delineated time against frenetic capitalism, and one that is being gradually eroded and replaced.

For those that are out of work the situation is no better. They face the cruel bureaucracy of the Job Centre or the Atos assessment, institutions that have no interest in linking up job seekers with fulfilling employment but instead attempt only to lower the benefits bill through punitive, arbitrary sanctions and forcing the sick back to work. Insider accounts of these programs betray the mix of anxiety inducing micro-assessment and surveillance they employ.

Disabled claimants — always claimants, never patients, insists Atos — are assessed from the moment they enter the waiting room, noted as to whether they arrive alone, whether they can stand unassisted and whether they can hear their name when called. Compounding this is the hegemonic demonization of those that society has failed: if you are out of work, you are a scrounger, a benefit cheat and a liar. Utterly guilty of your failure, a situation individualized in its totality and attributable to no system, institution or individual but yourself.

We are surveilled, monitored and assessed from cradle to grave, fashioned by the demand that we must be empirical, computable and trackable, our souls transformed into a series of ones and zeros. This happens in the workplace, on the street and in various government institutions. But its ideological groundwork is laid in the nursery and the school.

These institutions bracket our imaginations while still in formation, normalizing a regime of continuous surveillance and assessment that is to last for the rest of our lives. Staff are increasingly taken away from educating and nurturing and instead are made to roam nurseries taking pictures and recording quotes, all to be computed and amalgamated so authorities can track, assess and predict a child’s trajectory.

It is true that this does not trouble the child in the same way traditional high intensity rote examination does. But what it instead achieves is the internalization of the surveillance/assessment nexus in our minds; laying the groundwork for an acquiescence to panoptical monitoring, a resignation to a private-less life and a buckling to regimes of continuous assessment.

Britain is particularly bad in this respect. Not only does our government have a fetish for closed-circuit television like no other, but also, GCHQ was at the heart of the Snowden revelations. Revelation, however, is slightly misleading — as what was most telling about the leaks wasn’t the brazen overstep by government institutions, but that few people were surprised. Although we didn’t know the details, we suspected such activity was going on. We acted as if we were being watched, tracked and monitored anyhow.

In this we see the paranoid fugitive of countless films, books and television dramas extrapolated to society writ large. We are all, to some extent, that person. Our growing distrust of governments, the knowledge that our technologically-integrated lives leave a heavy trace and the collection of “big” data for both commercial and authoritarian purposes contributes to our destabilized, anxious existence. An existence that impels us towards self-policing and control. One where we do the authority’s job for them.

Many individuals offer the amount of choice we have, or the amount of knowledge we can access at the click of a button, as the glorious consequences of late capitalist society. But our rampant choice society, one where we have to make an overwhelming number of choices — about the cereal we eat, the beer we drink, or the clothes we wear — is entirely one sided. While we have an incredible amount of choice over issues of little importance, we are utterly excluded from any choice about the things that matter; what we do with the majority of our time, how we relate to others or how society functions as a whole. Nearly always these choices are constricted by the market, the necessity of work, cultures of overwork and neoliberal ideology.

Again we find this ideology laid down in primary education. Over the years more and more “continuous” learning has been introduced whereby children, over a two week period or so, have to complete a set of tasks for which they can choose the order. This is an almost perfect example of how choice functions in our society, ubiquitous when insignificant but absent when important. The children can choose when they do an activity, which matters little as they will have to do it at some point anyway, but cannot choose not to do it, or to substitute one kind of activity with another.

Why does this matter? Because meaningful choices about our lives give us a sense of certainty and control. Avalanches of bullshit choices that still have to be made, as study after study has shown, make us incredibly anxious. Each of them takes mental effort. Each contains, implicitly, the multitude of choices that we didn’t make; all those denied experiences for every actual experience. This is fine if there are only one or two. But if there are hundreds, every act is riddled with disappointment, every decision shot with anxiety.

Compounding this orgy of choice, and in itself another root cause of anxiety, is the staggering amount of information that assaults us every day. Social media, 24-hour news, the encroachment of advertising into every crack — both spatially and temporally — and our cultures of efficiency that advocate consuming or working at every possible moment all combine to cause intense sensory overload. This world, for many, is just too much.

Although we’ve talked mostly about work, surveillance, assessment and choice, there are a multitude of factors one could add. The desolation of community due to the geographical dislocation of work, the increased transiency of populations and the growing privatization of previously public acts — drinking, eating and consuming entertainment are increasingly consigned to the home — shrinks our world to just our immediate families.

Camaraderie, extended community and solidarity are eroded in favor of mistrust, suspicion and competition. Outside of work our lives become little more than a series of privatized moments, tending to our property and ourselves rather than each other, flitting between the television shows, video games, home DIY and an incredible fetish for gardening with no hint towards the thought that perhaps these experiences would be better if they were held in common, if they appealed to the social and looked outward rather than in.

In the same way we could mention the ubiquity of debt — be it the mortgage, the credit card or the student loans — and the implicit moral judgment suffered by the debtor coupled with the anxiety-inducing knowledge that they could lose everything at any moment. Or we could consider the near-existential crises humanity faces, be it climate change, ISIS or the death throes of capitalism; all too abstract and total to comprehend, all contributing to a sense that there is no future, only a grainy, distant image of lawless brutality, flickering resolutely in our heads.

But the crux, and the reason anxiety could become a revolutionary battleground, is that neoliberal ideology has individualized our suffering, attributing it to imbalances in our brain chemistry, constructing it as a problem of the self, rather than an understandable human reaction to a myriad of cruel systemic causes. Instead of changing society the problem is medicalized and we change ourselves, popping pills to mold our subjectivities to late-capitalist structures, accepting the primacy of capitalism over humanity.

This is why “We Are All Very Anxious”, a pamphlet released by the Institute of Precarious Consciousness, is so explosively brilliant. Not only does it narrate the systemic causes of anxiety, but it situates the struggle within a revolutionary strategy, constructing a theory that is at once broad and personal, incorporating one’s own subjective experience into an explanatory framework, positing anxiety as a novel, contemporary revolutionary battleground, ripe for occupation.

It is, they claim, one of three eras spanning the last two-hundred years where we have progressed between different dominant societal affects. Until the postwar settlement we suffered from misery. The dominant narrative was that capitalism benefited everybody; while at the same time overcrowding, malnourishment and slum dwelling were rife. In response to this appropriate tactics such as strikes, mutual aid, cooperatives and formal political organization were adopted.

After the postwar settlement, until around the 1980s, a period of Fordist boredom ensued. Compared to the last era, most people had stable jobs, guaranteed welfare and access to mass consumerism and culture. But much of the work was boring, simple and repetitive. Life in the suburbs was beige and predictable. Capitalism, as they put it, “gave everything needed for survival, but no opportunities for life.” Again movements arose in opposition, positioned specifically against the boredom of the age. The Situationists and radical feminism can be mentioned, but also the counter-culture surrounding the anti-war movement in America and the flourishing DIY punk scene in the UK.

This period is now finished. Capitalism has co-opted the demand for excitement and stimulation both by appropriating formerly subversive avenues of entertainment — the festival, club and rave — while dramatically increasing both the amount and intensity of distractions and amusements.

In one sense we live in an age of sprawling consumerism that avoids superficial conformity by allowing you to ornament and construct your identity via hyper-customized, but still mass-produced products. But technological development also mean that entertainment is now more total, immersive and interactive; be it the video game or the full-color film watched on a widescreen, high-definition television.

Key to this linear conception is the idea of the public secret, the notion that anxiety, misery or boredom in these periods are ubiquitous but also hidden, excluded from public discourse, individualized and transformed into something unmentionable, a condition believed to be isolated and few because nobody really talked about it. Thus to even broach the subject in a public, systematic manner becomes not just an individual revelation but also a collective revolutionary act.

I’ve seen this first-hand when running workshops on the topic. Sessions, which were often argumentative and confrontational, became, when the subject was capitalism and anxiety, genuinely inquisitive and exploratory. Groups endeavored to broaden their knowledge of the subject, make theoretical links and root out its kernel rather than manning their usual academic ramparts and launching argument after rebuttal back and forth across the battlefield.

But more than this, there was a distinct edge of excitement, the feeling that we were onto something, a theory ripe with explosive newness, one that managed to combine our subjective experiences and situate them in a coherent theoretical framework.

However, we must be critical. To posit anxiety as a specifically modern affect, unique to our age, is contentious. What about the 1950s housewife, someone mentioned in one of the sessions, with her subjectivity rigidly dictated by the misogyny and overbearing cultural norms of the time? Didn’t this make her feel anxious?

Well, perhaps. But if we take anxiety to mean a general feeling of nervousness or unease about an uncertain outcome — with chronic anxiety being an actively debilitating form — then we can draw distinct differences. Although the housewife was oppressed, her oppression was codified and linear, her life depressingly mapped out with little room for choice or maneuver. Similarly with the slave — surely the universal symbol of oppression — hierarchies aren’t nebulous but explicit, domination is ensured by the whip and the gun, the master individualized and present.

This is in stark contrast to the current moment. While it is obvious that oppressions are distinct and incomparable, we can nevertheless see that the fug of the 21st century youth is of a different nature. Our only certainty is that of uncertainty. Our oppressor is not an individual but a diffuse and multiplicitous network of bureaucrats, institutions and global capital, hidden in its omnipotence and impossible to grasp.

We aren’t depressed by the inevitability of our oppression, but instead are baffled by its apparent (but unreal) absence, forever teetering on the brink, not knowing why, nor knowing who we should blame.

Similarly it is bold to claim that anxiety is the dominant affect of Western capitalism, tantamount to pitching it as the revolutionary issue of our age. Yet if we analyze the popular struggles of our time — housing, wages, work/life balance and welfare — they are often geared, in one way or another, towards promoting security over anxiety.

Housing for many is not about having a roof over their heads, but about security of tenure, be it via longer fixed-term tenancies or the guarantee that they won’t be priced out by rent rises that their precarious employment can’t possibly cover. In the same way struggles over welfare are often about material conditions, but what particularly strikes a chord is the cruel insecurity of a life on benefits, forever at the whim of sanction-wielding bureaucrats who are mandated to use any possible excuse to remove your only means of support.

Anxiety is also a struggle that unites diverse social strata, emanating from institutions such as the job center, loan shark, university, job market, landlord and mortgage lender, affecting the unemployed, precariously employed, office worker, indebted student and even the comparatively well-off. Again we find this unification in the near-universal adoption of the smartphone and other hyper-networked technologies. All of us, and especially our children, are beholden to a myriad of glowing screens, flitting between one identity and another, alienated and disconnected from our surroundings and each other.

This is not to say a movement against anxiety itself will ever arise. Such a rallying cry would be too abstract and fail to inspire. Instead, anxiety must be conceptualized both as an affect which underlies various different struggles, and a schema within which they can be assembled into a revolutionary strategy.

So, what is our tangible aim here? In part it must be to reduce the level of general anxiety so as to increase quality of life. Yet if we are to take a revolutionary rather than a mere humanitarian approach, this drop in anxiety must in some way translate into a rise in revolutionary disposition. In certain ways it obviously will. If there is a public realization that large swathes of the mentally ill are not as such because of their unfortunate brain chemistry but instead because of a misconfiguration of society, people are already thinking on an inherently challenging, systemic level.

Similarly, conflict with the state or capital — be it on the street, in the workplace or inside one’s own head — tends to be high-impact and anxiety-inducing. A drop in general anxiety will make it more likely that individuals will engage in such moments of conflict and, crucially, experience the intense radicalization and realization of hegemonic power that can only be achieved through such visceral moments. But a second part to this, hinted at already and integral to giving the struggle a revolutionary edge, is to emphasize that there is a public secret to be aired. As well as combating the sources of anxiety, we must say we are doing so; we must situate these struggles within larger frameworks and provide education on its systemic nature.

Thus, any strategy would need to be both abstract and practical. On one hand we must explode the public secret by raising consciousness. This would require a general onslaught of education, including, but not limited to, consciousness-raising sessions, participatory workshops, articles, books, pamphlets, leaflets, posters, YouTube videos and “subvertised” adverts. The emphasis would be to educate but also to listen, to intermingle theoretical understanding with subjective experience.

The second part would be to strategically support campaigns and make demands of politicians that specifically combat anxiety in its various different guises. When it comes to work, the abolition of zero-hour contracts, the raising of the minimum wage in line with the actual cost of living, and the tightening of laws on overwork as part of a broader campaign to assert the primacy of life over work, of love over pay, would be a good start.

For those out of work, underpaid or precarious, the introduction of a basic citizen’s income would represent a revolutionizing of the job market. In one move it would alleviate the cultural and practical anxieties of worklessness — ending the bureaucratic cruelty of the job center while removing the anxiety-inducing stigma associated with claiming benefits — while simultaneously allowing individuals to pursue culturally important and revolutionary activities such as art, music, writing or (dare I say it?) activism, without the crushing impossibility of trying to make them pay. When we look to housing obvious solutions include mandatory, secured five-year tenancies, capped rent increases and a guarantee of stable, suitable social housing for those who need it.

There are many more reforms I could list. You will notice, however, that these are indeed reforms; bread and butter social democracy. Does that mean such a program is counter-revolutionary? A mere placatory settlement between capital and the working class? No, it does not. Revolution does not emerge from the systematic subjection of individuals to increased misery, anxiety and hardship as accelerationist logic demands. Instead it flourishes when populations become aware of their chains, are given radical visions for the future and the means to achieve them. It is when leftists critique but also offer hope. It is when the population writ large are included in and are masters of their own liberation; not when they are viewed as a lumpen, otherly mass, of only instrumental importance in achieving the glorious revolution.

Look at the practicalities and this becomes obvious. How can we expect individuals to launch themselves into high-tension anxiety-inducing conflicts if the mere thought of such a situation causes them to have a panic attack? How can individuals, in the face of near panoptical surveillance and monitoring, combat the overwhelming desire to conform if they aren’t awarded some freedom from the practical anxieties of life? How are we to think and act in a revolutionary, and often abstract, manner if the very real and immediate anxieties of work, home and play fog our minds so totally?

This is not to say freedom will be given to us. It must always be taken, and we must not rely on electoral politics to hand us the revolution down from above. Nor will true struggle ever be an anxiety-free leisure pursuit. Genuine conflict with the state and capital will always entail danger, stress and the possibility of intensified precariousness.

Nevertheless, the dismissal of electoral politics in its totality represents abysmal revolutionary theory. The pursuit of reforms by progressive governments being bitten at the heels by sharp, vibrant social movements can produce real, tangible change.

It was what should have happened with Syriza, and it is what will hopefully happen with the new Labour leadership in the UK. And if, as individuals and communities, we are to puncture the distress, precariousness and general sense of cruel unknowing so particular to the moment in which we live, if we are to overcome the avalanche of bullshit and reclaim our confidence, if we to construct and disseminate a distinctly communal, hopeful revolutionary fervor, such changes are imminently needed.

 

Joseph Todd is a writer and an activist. Find more of his writings here or follow him on twitter.