Saturday Matinee: Rollerball (1975)

Posted on June 24, 2017 by Reid Mukai

The Science Fiction of Rollerball Is Nothing Compared to the Facts of Real Life Control

By Rich Monetti

Source: Omni

If you’ve never seen Rollerball, stop what you’re doing and dial up the DVD for this 1975 Science Fiction Movie classic. Set in the year 2024, this dystopia puts Bread and Circuses on a violent whirlwind that’s engineered to keep the world’s corporate overlords out of the crosshairs. As such, revolving door heroes are amply provided and give the population cause to question the saccharin surroundings they live in. That is until each warrior meets their predetermined end and complacency has no other choice but to comply. Great Science Fiction but real control is so much easier.

Nonetheless, the backdrop of this dark world takes place after the “Corporate Wars” have bankrupted the world’s nations. In the void left behind, the corporations employ and govern. This leaves the public free of concerning themselves with important decisions, which are better left to “the few” in this standout among dystopian movies.

The Privileged Few

They also enjoy the privilege – even at the expense of Jonathan E. (James Caan). In the hero class of distraction, E. lost his wife to an executive who wanted her for himself. Paid off to leave him, the accompanying villa in Rome was no match for the rugged, introspect of the world renowned figure.

In this, we are given the vehicle to dig into underbelly as we digest the glory of the game and all its bloodletting. Obviously discontented, Jonathan questions the tradeoff between the material preeminence his position affords and freedom. One of his hanger’s on who serves among the privilege Jonathan reaps doesn’t have such depth and toes the line the system forges like the mindless drone she is. “But comfort is freedom,” reasons Ella.

Enough of the citizenry bought off with nice things, the oversight does not even consider those who may reap much less, because this set up is sure to have losers on a far greater scale. This all sends E. off to determine how people have been so effectively siphoned off as sheep.

Information is Power

Expectedly, the information is scarce – or better yet – properly edited. Summaries of important works are readily available, and in case 24-7 of the game on telescreen gives way to inquiry, the overlords will reset any doubt in the comfort of your own easy chair. “What do you want books for?,” Jonathan’s teammate, Moon Pie asks “Look Johnny, if you wanna learn somethin’, just get a Corporate Teacher to come and teach it to ya’.

Jonathan defers and goes to Geneva to visit a computerized archive. The prospects are quickly eradicated as the librarian is little help, and the system even less. Leaving E at a loss, the willing agent reveals that “the whole of the 13th Century is gone.”

All still escapes Ella with Jonathan coming to a crossroad. “Why don’t you do what the executives want – especially since you’ll be paid handsomely,” she doesn’t get it.

Specifically, they want him to retire. His survival defies the preset odds and disturbs the complacency. Or in chilling John Houseman-speak, the game was created to demonstrate “the futility of individuality.”

Real Control is much Easier

Your mind is officially blown. But a simple look at voter turnout or the tune out that hundreds of TV stations afford us and control takes on the form of despondency. Most significantly, a two party system in which the same elites support both sides, and the important decisions gives the many the illusion of choice.

Even so with the two party gaming clearly at our disposal, we are still sold on the stark differences, and coalesce into our corners over less substantial issues. So while we all don’t like American jobs shipped overseas of elite born trade policy, hate money in politics, the never ending improprieties of the big banks and inefficient delivery of healthcare, we are unable to find crossover or a leader able to unite across party lines.

Instead, our only common place involves a shared sense that the other side is mired in stupidity. This even as we see enough smarts among them that they are also able to navigate survival against such a stacked deck. Blinded by the many fictional divides, who really needs to pick up spilled guts or dislodged eyeballs when the powerlessness our elites have created is so much easier to clean up.

All the News That’s Fit to Print

Of course, the chance to narrow the divides can be a function of the availability of information. In the Science Fiction of Rollerball, this is diminished by keeping information controlled by offering tidbits or official accounts. But secrets only give rise to the desire to seek out what you’re not supposed to know.

It’s far more efficient to let people think they have a free press, and now with the internet and cable news, sources that rise to the top are the ones providing fictitious entertainment in place of facts.

In addition, the unseen hand of Google elevating disinformation now rivals the wall between advertising and content, which doesn’t really exist, and has always acted as editors to protect the elite.

Of course, we do have our distractions, and the cult-like mass following of the NFL can’t help but be seen as a parallel to Rollerball. The circus though is subtle and smarter than 2024.

Whoever has the most Toys

Putting aside violence on the decline, a no one left standing approach has been replaced with parity where everyone has a chance to win. Far more effective for viewership, and the Sunday, Monday, Thursday cascade plays right into the American consumerism that one ups Rollerball’s ability to feign comfort for the masses. Or why give people stuff to keep them complacent when you can make them ever in pursuit of the next gadget that is sure to bring unending happiness.

As Brad Pitt says in Fight Club, “the things you own, they ending up owning you.” For example, when Apple outsources production to a Chinese factory where nets keep workers from jumping out the windows, stock options go a long way to allaying the guilt and getting you that Lexus you can’t do without.

But who knows, Rollerball might have emerged because people figured out how to beat the system, and the powerful went back to the basics that the Romans perfected. Maybe, we should be content, and let the elites have their ball so they go don’t go home and take it with them. You know, before they return with something worse, and we’re left rolling over dead instead of despondent.

Watch the full film here.

(To switch off subtitles, click the “cc” button on the bottom left corner of the video window.)

America’s Retarded Awareness

Posted on June 20, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Denis Conroy

(RINF)

Alternative ideas don’t come easily to Americans. It seems that Americans imported colonial hierarchal practices from Europe to cultivate them to their own advantage. Over millennia, Europeans had come to accept the authority of Church, Monarchy or State Principalities to be the places where the ‘rightful-centres’ existed. The ‘rightful-centre’ was always beyond the reach of the masses. Pontiffs and warlords alike had built their power base upon the belief that the common people should accept the fact that the centre of power was somewhere above their heads and that it was the lot of underlings to live the life of fellow travellers.

The Confucian idea, that the centre was everywhere, had failed to penetrate the European pantheon. In Asia, actions and their consequences were measured in language that was neither hierarchical nor internalised within rhetorical borders, but connected to truths that had their origin in humanity-oriented-grass-root realism…ethics. Europe, for its part, went the way of evangelical Christianity by legitimizing religion as the celebrity voice par excellence. Operating in space above the heads of the common folk, Emperors and Popes engaged in the practice of issuing edicts that instructed the commoners on how they should think and respond to the celebrity classes doing their thinking for them.

Branding religion was the event that opened the door to the branding of everything. Patriarchal authority, the central tenet of the Old Testament, reappeared again in the guise of male-dominated New Testament culture when it was integrated into the Roman state. Rebranding regulations to secure the authority of the power-base required a narrative that sought to recluse authority from popular critique. The Founding Fathers in Rome or Washington, became very astute in crafting directives and devices that enabled them to toss their bountiful wisdom to an amorphous flock that would forever defer to their ‘wisdom’. The creation of an inscrutable Machiavellian dimension…secrecy…put in place to coddle the aspirations of the commoners, had the desired effect of separating them from the business of government.

By these means, the State as a force-unto-itself came into being, with lawmakers, merchants and agents of the evangelical stripe committing rank, energy and capital to fulfilling a dream of progress that would see them on a path to seeking mastery over all things…nature included…per subjugation of all things. This was the philosophy that the colonial mind found prepossessing…business-as-usual as a staple operation that would take devotees of their exceptional ilk anywhere they chose to go to, expropriate whatever resources were available to them, while defiling the health of the planet in the process…and think about what we Westerners became and what we did and to whom in the process?

When the genie was released from Europe’s empirical arse-crack, was it because the grass looked greener across the vast expanses of America’s prairies which appeared to be there for the taking? Was the Australian bush an all too alluring opportunity to rebrand someone else’s homeland? Europeans, living midway between science and barbarism went across the world to smote the idyllic ‘innocents’ living midway between paradise and paralysis, believing them to be inferior. With a pugnacious conviction born of arrogance, they swarmed through the greener-grasses with scant regard for life or limb.

So, moving on to present day America…which sees itself as the leader of the free world… who or what can explain the introverted perspectives that draw the national psyche into an ever-expanding empirical loop. There is much evidence available to show that a covert passion for Great-Game memes continues to haunt the power-elites in Washington. It now seems that American presidents may come and go but Henry Kissinger is here to stay. Henry…who served first as Nixon’s national security adviser and then as his secretary of state 1969 until 1974… and nowadays frequently seen slumped in a chair in the Oval Office, looking like a grim medieval gargoyle, whose drooping flesh and demeanour convey an image of intransigence…worthy of Machiavelli’s attention… hovering there to counsel the many presidents who pass through the White House, in the art of genuflecting before Zion. Henry, the Zionist Pope, keen to examine the credentials of all those aspiring to occupy this high office, conjures up the inevitable question; at what point in time did this secondary space and highest office in the land become a Zionist habitat?

Strangest of all, the recent election happened and hardly anybody gave a fig about the destructive consequences of America’s wars abroad. It was like permanent war was o.k. so long as it happens in somebody else’s country…or benefited Israel. The public, before-during-and-after the election, expressed zilch concern for the millions of people their government had destroyed. After all, the American corporate juggernaut was unstoppably hooked on exploiting the globe…leave no paddock unexploited…and the electorate, the fellow travellers… who accepted the propagandized narrative coming per media…from above their heads…would always accept corporate branded salve.

What helped them to ignore the consequences of permanent war was an inhouse injunction…the American narrative had become a religion that represented all that was good for business as gospel…and that was that! Confirming the only ‘reality’ they knew, the fellow travellers passively accepted a piece of the action. America’s brutality in the world at large would continue, signalling that ‘butcher shop’ carte blanche would go on, regardless of who was elected.

The election focused on brand and who would control the narrative. The winner was ‘more-of-the-same’…and that was good for business. The election was merely about people choosing their favourite celebrity, but the one who succeeded failed to fulfil the expectations of the liberal-elite and that meant a ‘wigs-on-the-green’ melee was in the offing. An awareness-deficient electorate left the rest of the world wondering if there was much difference between educated and uneducated Americans.

Where were the voices that might have stormed the barricades with rhetoric that condemned the American practice of sending its apprentices…butcher-boys all…abroad to kill! Kill! Kill! Awareness was absent because the electorate was too comfortable with the hierarchical world above their heads…Wall Street, the Pentagon and the accompanying galaxy of job opportunities available to the educated and uneducated alike. After all, inclusion in the system was all that mattered come payday… and after all, cash cows R us!

“According to U.S. Census 2013 data, 1.68 percent of Americans over the age of 25 have a PhD. This equates to approximately 2.5 million people. People with professional degrees such as MD or DDS make up 1.8 percent of the U.S. population making the total percent of Americans referred to as doctors equal to 3.16 percent.

The vast majority of adults in the U.S., over 88 percent, have a high school diploma or additional education. Around 31 percent of the population has a bachelor’s degree or higher, and almost 12 percent have a master’s degree or higher”…which begs the question; how can so many people live with so much carnage? Can it be that the American dream of freedom and independence, for so long the playbook of the straight white man expressing racial bravado in his quest for dominance, is now beginning to show evidence of him falling…in slow motion…upon his own petard?

As America grew bigger and bolder and wealthier, the echelons attached to the running of the state multiplied too. In subtle ways, the business of the people operating in the zone above the level of the common people became ever more numerous and secretive…after 9/11, the main perpetrators of secrecy became the CIA and the FBI, regulating the level of fear to kept the public focused on fabricated threats designed to promulgate the ‘war-on terror’ mantra. In the process, the temporal beast grew an extra dimension of the mystical kind to extend its purview beyond its own borders so that the people could believe that greatness was now a context in which America and Americans could shine and shove it to the world. What was happening abroad was bound to enrich them…and to hell with the consequences.

Americans, surfing the contours of their very own exceptional imperial arse-crack, in quest of ever easier access to mother nature’s assets, deluded themselves into believing that the assets allocated to sand-bunnies and other assorted detritus were mistakes that needed correcting. Deriving emotional security from the possession of their vast stock of ballistic missiles, the American imperial persona descended into a state of amnesia as a convenient way of ignoring the increasing problem of the body-count forever multiplying in the countries they were rendering dysfunctional. American boots on the ground had come to spell venality abroad and valour at home.

What was happening abroad was inconsequential…reportage at home became more heated, but it had little impact on a critique-resistant ‘exceptional’ entity like astigmatic America. Retarded awareness was turning the ‘great’ society into an intellectual cadaver…critique had caught some fatal disease that caused ‘John Brown’s Body’ to mournfully turn in its grave.

As Uncle Sam, in horizontal locomotion style, cast his war-ware across the Muslim world, people came to recognized the familiar appearance of the grim reaper, hidden in the folds of the stars and stripes, as their great airpower transported democracy eastwards. They were aware that death and destruction in their country had long ceased to receive much attention in Western media. America was too busy navel-gazing.

To be too preoccupied with one’s own anatomy or infrastructure is likely to cause serious problems for people who live in glasshouses. America’s post traumatic rage over the result of the 2016 presidential election might have gained something if people had stopped a moment to reflect on proverbial insightfulness for a moment, “people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones”.

Ad hominem warfare in America is spreading like wildfire. The population is determined to leave no stone unturned. A veritable ‘kristallnacht’ of sorts, affecting the secondary classes…celebrity classes…more than the ‘deplorable-class’ suggests that the America dream and its affiliations with politic heft and hove is up shit-creek. The current brand of stone thrower lives in that space above the common people’s heads and personifies the American dream from a specific perspective; status, power, money, independence et al… and nothing gels!

But on second thought, perhaps proverbial wisdom needs revision; for example; insular people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw tantrums or missiles.

And there’s more; Wall Street, AIPAC, The Pentagon, The FBI, The CIA, The State Department, T.V. Talk Hosts, Established Media, Hollywood, Silicon Valley and countless other membranous boundaries that represent the hydra-headed social order are all insular to a man (or woman). Insularity however, inevitably means more trouble for the uninitiated masses excluded from the banquet… secrecy being the better part of valour…but?

So, we don’t ever really know what goes on behind closed doors. Nobody ever comes through the door to explain why evangelical America threatens 150 million Russian Christians with nuclear annihilation. Nobody comes through the door to explain why American bombing throughout the Middle East is Guernica writ large in perpetuity…as was the case with Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, etc. etc., Nobody knows who decides which democratically elected government abroad is next in line for regime change. Nobody, on the other hand, is ever allowed to enter the closed doors that conceal the little men who ruminate over charts, statistics, numbers, surveillance data and funding dossiers that help insular careerists to navigate a path ever deeper into Doctor Strangelove’s hoary entrails where drone strikes and Armageddon is contemplated.

The American Constitution, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Washington all have their place in history as instructors…and instructors are there to advise one on how to move forward. The great achievement of the new great country which embarked on so many projects to develop infrastructure, failed to acknowledge that developing at so great a tempo left no time to reflect on the consequences of its actions. As it rushed headlong into the future, it lost sight of where it was coming from.

On becoming a country without a past, its memory span disappeared more and more as the locomotion of its enterprise took America ever deeper into an illusion that the country had to keep its foot on the accelerator 24/7 to achieve greatness for all. In the absence of grass-root ethics that might have revealed the connection between object and subject, respecting and being respected, ‘greatness’ became a synonym of pedigree and power… ‘us-and-them’ a code for superior and inferior, exceptional and unexceptional. The America of superman fame adopted the eagle as super-bird, not as a Phoenix rising in a new world, but as a symbol of a bird of prey with a mission to destroy…the corporeal devouring the spiritual! …History does repeat itself!

“By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest”…………..Confucius, 551—479 BC……..

Former World Bank Staffer Explains How Neoliberalism Is Destroying The World

Posted on March 28, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Dylan Charles

Source: Waking Times

More destructive than bombs, money has become the weapon of choice for the global elite, for the hidden hand of finance can plunder and conquer entire nations, assimilate whole cultures, exploit resources and rape the earth while forcing billions into poverty, all with the surprising stealth of pen-strokes and business contracts.

Neoliberalism is the economic and political philosophic driving force in the world today. It suggests that human progress is the result of competition, best expressed by an extremist version of unfettered capitalism, where privatization of profits and socialization of losses are acceptable ethics, regardless of human and environmental costs incurred along the way.

Neoliberalism is the killer plague of the 21st century. Neoliberalism is economic fascism. It is a criminal doctrine. Globalized neoliberalism privatizes public goods for private profit. Neoliberalism led by Washington with the shameful complicity of Europe has in the last fifteen years killed between 12 and 15 million people by wars, famine, deprived health services… forced refugees. Today a small world elite of corporate and Wall Street CEOs and selected politicians call the shots. ~Peter Koenig

First defined in 1938, its global implementation today is the product of the Washington Consensus of 1989 which describes a set of economic prescriptions for developing and crisis-wracked nations created by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the U.S. Treasury Department. It is a policy which relies on the creation of social and financial crises to distract and soften target nations and peoples, creating problems while providing the ‘solutions.’

At present, Mexico is on the brink of revolution, a direct result of the fallout of three decades of neoliberal policy.

It [Neoliberalism] finds that representative democracy has been perverted through fear, putting central political decisions in the hands of power groups with special interests.The social impact of this process has been devastating, with a polarized income distribution, falling wages, increased precarious jobs, rising inequality, and extreme violence. Health conditions have also deteriorated and disorders associated with violence, chronic stress, and a changing nutritional culture have become dominating. [Source]

Journalist George Monbiot describes neoliberalism as follows:

Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.

Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve. ~[Source]

Economic hitman turned whistleblower, John Perkins, wrote in detail of his ‘boots-on-the-ground’ experiences in conquering third-world nations through economic aid and infrastructure financing in his seminal classic, Confessions of an Economic Hitman. He’s since been on a world crusade to expose the madness of neoliberalism, seeking redemption by connecting with many of the indigenous cultures he previously had worked to enslave and oppress.

In recent years, Greece has become a more visible victim of this policy as the IMF and the European Union have forced the people of this ancient culture into austerity and starvation as part of a plan of economic restructuring to force repayment of illegitimate debts to international bankers.

Speaking at The Delphi Initiative in 2015, economist, geopolitical analyst, and former World Bank staffer, Peter Koenig, explained the scourge of this political and economic philosophy and how it is destroying our world today.

What we are confronted with today is the globalization, and the globalization basically that we are living is like a fetish of the neoliberals. The neoliberals who want to reduce the world to one culture, to one set of values, all based on greed consumption and maximizing profits. ~Peter Koenig

Koenig also speaks of neoliberalism as the root of the type of endless global conflict we see today, including wars of occupation and their resulting terrorism, noting that the U.S. economy is now so dependent on military spending that if peace were to break out, our economy would collapse.

Although from 2015, Koenig’s message is critically important today as the world continues to wake up to the reality that our lives are in the hands of a small exploitative group of inhumane corporations and governments who will stop at nothing to control the resources which make life possible, including water, destroying any civilization that stands in its way.

The Mainstream Has Failed

Posted on January 5, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

The good news is there is a way to avoid failure and stagnation: avoid the mainstream like the plague.

The mainstream became mainstream because it worked: the mainstream advice to “go to college and you’ll get a good job” worked, the mainstream financial plan of buying a house to build equity to pass on to your children worked, the mainstream of government regulation worked to the public’s advantage at modest cost to taxpayers and the mainstream media, despite being cozy with government agencies such as the C.I.A. and operating as a profit machine for the families that owned the newspapers, radio stations, etc., functioned as a basically honest broker of information and reporting.

Now, the mainstream has failed. Mainstream career advice now leads to crushing debts and career stagnation, mainstream financial planning generates high risks, mainstream government regulations are costly and burdensome, and the mainstream media is little more than a corporate-owned mouthpiece of propaganda and distributor of infotainment that is sold as “news.”

Does anyone actually believe the mainstream political process isn’t broken? Those who claim it isn’t broken are either well-paid shills just doing their job or they’re delusional.

The mainstream American diet now leads to chronic disease and early death.Supersized portions, large amounts of sugar and/or salt in virtually every packaged food item, heavy doses of low-quality fats in almost all mainstream fast foods–these have become mainstream at a very high cost in diminished health and reduced years of life free of chronic disease and pain.

The mainstream level of fitness contributes to chronic disease and early death.The mainstream lifestyle is one in which people passively watch a few daredevils pursue extreme sports on a variety of digital screens, passively “consume” music rather than learning to play music themselves, passively consume “news” rather than being engaged in community activities that make news, and so on.

The mainstream healthcare system is structured so it is incapable of promoting health. As my longtime friend GFB recently asked, “Who is happy with the current healthcare system?” Certainly not the doctors and nurses or the patients. Perhaps Big Pharma is happy as a result of their enormous profits (more of which is spent on marketing the latest marginally useful and often dangerous drug than on R&D), but even Big Pharma has legitimate complaints about the cost and time required to get a potentially life-changing drug (such as immunotherapy drugs) through the pipeline.

But the real problem is the soaring costs of the system will eventually collapse the entire economy. The same can be said of the soaring costs of increasingly marginal higher education, the soaring costs of increasingly marginal weapons systems, and so on.

The mainstream healthcare system is incapable of promoting health or restraining costs:

The other problem with the mainstream is that any attempt to structurally reform these broken systems will trigger collapse. The mainstream systems are now so fragile that any significant change will cause them to implode. I explain why in my book Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform.

The good news is there is a way to avoid failure and stagnation: avoid the mainstream like the plague. Stop eating packaged and fast foods, eat restaurant meals only occasionally, prepare 90% of your meals at home with real ingredients, including lots of fresh vegetables. Walk at least one mile/2 kilometers a day, start bicycling instead of driving (where possible), start doing yoga, tai chi, etc. every day, turn any 6-foot square floor area into your home gym–get lean.

Stop watching sports and start doing sports (appropriate to your age and climate, of course).

As for fashioning a sustainable career–don’t count on a college degree to work some sort of magic. I describe a more proactive approach to forging a sustainable career in my book Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy.

Don’t accept “standards of care” that include addictive pain-killers and powerful meds that require another six meds with their own side-effects to counter the side-effects of the first med. Do you own research, get a second opinion. Discover what you can do to help heal yourself first.

Stop “consuming” mainstream media except in small, limited portions and consume even these portions with a skeptical eye and ear for propaganda and rigged numbers that supports failed mainstream narratives.

We are what we do every day. Step out of the mainstream and stay out of the mainstream and opportunities that are unavailable to those who passively accept the mainstream as “all there is” will emerge.

As Douglas MacArthur observed, “There is no security on this earth; there is only opportunity.”

If you’re interested in avoiding the mainstream of failure and stagnation, please consider these quotes drawn from my extensive list of Aphorisms:

“We are what we repeatedly do.” (Aristotle)

“Do the thing and you shall have the power.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.” (E.F. Schumacher)

“He who will not risk cannot win.” (John Paul Jones)

Life on Earth is Dying

Posted on December 14, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Robert J. Burrowes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Why is this?’ you might ask.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Extinction beckons. What will you do?

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

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

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

Depicting Perpetual Crimes committed by Corporate Culture and its Mainstream Media

Posted on November 23, 2016 by Reid Mukai

Russian Novels Combating Global Capitalist Nightmare

By Andre Vltchek

Source: Dissident Voice

Imagine Moscow being taken over by some international corporate cartel. By a monster which has its own factories and office buildings, security services, private prisons, re-education (‘training’) centers, and its obedient mass media outlets. Imagine that it also has detailed databases on almost everyone who really matters in the capital.

Imagine that human lives suddenly don’t matter. People are only expected to produce and consume; they become fully disposable.

Imagine that the once greatly educated Russia with its legendary artists and philosophers is gradually getting reduced to an unimaginably primitive level. Suddenly, there is US pop trash flying about everywhere, and the greatest entertainment for the masses comes from watching countless television ‘reality shows’, including those that graphically depict, candidly, how both men and women are shitting and pissing in the capital’s public toilets.

That’s what you get when reading a witty, provocative and thoroughly outrageous novel by Sergei Minaev, called R.A.B.; 521 pages of it!

In all his novels, including Soulless, The Telki, Media Sapiens and R.A.B., Minaev masterfully depicts the perpetual crimes committed by corporate culture and its mainstream media. Brutally and candidly he describes an apocalyptic society constructed on the soulless, merciless and murderous principles of the modern Western-style capitalist system.

In such a world, nothing is sacred anymore. The ‘elites’ are having great fun hunting on the outskirts of the city, not for some animals, but for homeless people living in abandoned pipelines (R.A.B.). A US mainstream television news channel, together with its local counterpart, manage to trigger a military conflict between Georgia and Russia, after hiring several combat helicopters and retired soldiers, killing real people, just in order to increase their ratings. And several terrorist attacks in Moscow are being paid for and staged by other big media conglomerates (Media Sapiens).

Minaev is not crying; he is definitely far from being a ‘bleeding heart’. He is tough and cynical. His characters are mostly ruthless super-yuppies from Moscow, go-getters, living a fast life, taking drugs, partying in luxury clubs, having sex literally with everything that moves (Soulless).

But they get burned, destroyed, brought to near suicide.

They have no ideology, no political views. They laugh at, they insult everything and everybody, but deep inside they are actually suffering from a horrible void, from emptiness. In those rare moments of honesty, they admit to each other and to themselves, that they are actually still longing for at least ‘something pure and decent’, uncorrupted by the global market-fundamentalist regime and its ‘values’ and ‘culture’.

*****

In R.A.B. Minaev goes much further. His yuppies (paradoxically, the mid and upper-level managers) start a rebellion against the system. They go on strike, march through the streets, and build barricades. They begin demanding social justice. They burn down their own offices.

They do it after their Russian toy-producing company (and other companies all over the city) gets swallowed by a US-based multi-national corporation, which immediately begins dismantling all social benefits, while injecting uncertainty and fear into the workplace. A multi-national also opens a horrid toy factory on the outskirts of Moscow, which then employs desperate immigrants from the Central Asian republics.

The privately-owned mass media outlets first confront the protesters, and then follow up with pro-corporate propaganda and in the end the corporate security services and the army. Many people disappear. Others are locked up in the offices and secret prisons of the corporations, and tortured. Those who survive become ‘unemployable’, their names permanently on the blacklist.

But what does Minaev really call for? Is it a true revolution?

Yes and no. He does not believe that in the countries that have been conquered by market fundamentalism and by unbridled consumerism, a ‘real revolution’ is possible. He does not think that the people there have any ideals or any zeal left. At the same time, at least some of his characters are clearly unwilling to surrender.

It is chilling to read R.A.B. while at the same time those ‘rebellions’ in Greece, France, Spain and the U.K. are taking place.

One of the main characters of R.A.B. confronts the demonstrators: It is not a revolution! You are all parts of the system. You just want a better deal for yourself. Through this rebellion, you are actually negotiating with the cartel of the corporations. If you get what you are asking for, you’ll happily remain where you are and carry on as if nothing happened.

*****

Then Minaev does exactly what no Western writer would dare to do. He begins to argue that to destroy the system, there has to be an armed struggle. Otherwise no real change could ever be achieved.

The suppressed rebellion of the yuppies eventually triggers much a wider movement, and soon there are real battles raging in several provincial capitals.

The end of the novel is open. The main character of R.A.B. is destroyed. He loses the love of his life (in desperation she commits suicide); he has no job, no money and no place to go. But he is still alive. Russia is still alive. It is obvious that no matter what, it will never accept this monstrous system that was forced on it by the West.

*****

It all may sound like an insane fantasy, but. in fact, what Minaev writes about is not too far from the nightmares that Russia was descending into right after Gorbachev allowed the country (USSR) to fall apart, and then Yeltsin introduced unbridled privatization and gave unprecedented concessions to foreign corporations. During that period, Russia went through something that could be easily described as a social genocide. Life expectancy dropped to the levels of war-torn countries in Africa. Lawlessness ruled. All ideals were ridiculed and spat at. A big number of Russian intellectuals were bought and organized by the West into countless NGO’s. The lowest grade of Western pop and entertainment torpedoed Russian culture. During those dark days, the West finally succeeded in bringing Russia to its knees.

Not even two decades later, a new Russia is once again proud, strong and confident.

It rose to its feet, it began successfully producing again, and it underwent a tremendous and positive social transformation.

Just one week ago I returned from the Russian Far East, from the cities of Vladivostok, Khabarovsk and Petropavlovsk Kamchatski. Wherever I went, I witnessed new and impressive infrastructure. I encountered a confident, hard working nation, which was working hard to restore at least some of the socialist structures and benefits that it used to enjoy in the past.

The new, present-day Russia is much closer to China; much more impressed by the Chinese system, than by what it was forced to adopt in the past; during the “pro-Western era” which is now generally considered to be synonymous to a national disaster.

Russian writers played an important role in describing the horrors of the Gorbachev/Yeltsin years, and of the brutal global economic, political and ‘cultural’ regime injected by the West to all the corners of the Planet. From an outrageous Eduard Limonov’s novel It’s Me, Eddie to Minaev’s R.A.B., Russian literature has been daring, insulting, direct and brutally honest.

While Limonov and Minaev sell millions of copies of their books at home, their work is virtually unknown in the West. I found no English translations when searching on Amazon.com, and elsewhere.

In his New York-based Eddie, Limonov is calling openly for terrorist acts against the Western regime, while some of Minaev’s characters also believe in an armed struggle, although of a more conventional type.

Nothing is spared. When the US toy-producing corporation demands a special tax from its employees in Russia, for “helping out those poor children in the Third World”, the main character of R.A.B. thinks: “well, they can now use that money to buy coffins for children they employ and kill in Indonesia or Thailand”. When the tax goes slightly up, he comments: “now they will have enough funds to dig at least a few mass graves”.

All this is simply too outrageous for Western readers. Or more precisely, the ‘book business’ most likely ‘thinks’ that it is.

The fact remains that despite what is constantly repeated by Western propaganda, those who read Russian can clearly see and appreciate that Russian literature is actually much more free, daring and rebellious than its counterpart in the West.

When several Russian bestselling novelists are calling openly for combat against the global regime (the same regime which is, until now, at least partially, controlling the economy of their country), one has no choice but to be impressed by the level of freedom in the country which allows such work to be published and then promoted.

But in the West, you would never know all this, unless you spoke Russian. It is because in the West (and in its ‘client’ states and colonies) you are being extremely well ‘protected’ from such uncomfortable (and the regime would even say ‘dangerous’) thoughts!

André Vltchek is a novelist, filmmaker, and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. His latest book is Exposing Lies of the Empire.

Punishment is Violent and Counterproductive

Posted on November 14, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Robert J. Burrowes

Punishment is a popular pastime for humans. Parents punish children. Teachers punish students. Employers punish workers. Courts punish lawbreakers. People punish each other. Governments punish ‘enemies’. And, according to some, God punishes evildoers.

What is ‘punishment’? Punishment is the infliction of violence as revenge on a person who is judged to have behaved inappropriately. It is a key word we use when we want to obscure from ourselves that we are being violent.

The violence inflicted as punishment can take many forms, depending on the context. It might involve inflicting physical injury and/or pain, withdrawal of approval or love, confinement/imprisonment, a financial penalty, dismissal, withdrawal of rights/privileges, denial of promised rewards, an order to perform a service, banishment, torture or death, among others.

Given the human preoccupation with punishment, it is perhaps surprising that this behaviour is not subjected to more widespread scrutiny. Mind you, I can think of many human behaviours that get less scrutiny than would be useful.

Anyway, because I am committed to facilitating functional human behaviour, I want to explain why using violence to ‘punish’ people is highly dysfunctional and virtually guarantees an outcome opposite to that intended.

Punishment is usually inflicted by someone who makes a judgment that another person has behaved ‘badly’ or ‘wrongly’. At its most basic, disobedience (that is, failure to comply with elite imposed norms) is often judged in this way, whether by parents, teachers, religious figures, lawmakers or national governments.

But is obedience functional or even appropriate?

Consider this. In order to behave optimally, the human organism requires that all mental functions – feelings, thoughts, memory, conscience, sensory perception (sight, sound, touch, smell, taste), truth register, intuition… – must be developed and readily involved, without interference, in our life. If this happens, then all of these individual functions will play an integrated role in determining our behaviour in any given circumstance. This is a very sophisticated mental apparatus that has evolved over billions of years and if it was allowed to function without interference in each individual, human beings would indeed be highly functional.

So where does obedience fit into all of this? It doesn’t. A child is genetically programmed to seek to meet their own needs, not obey the will of another. And they will behave functionally in endeavouring to meet these needs unless terrorized out of doing so. Moreover, they will learn to meet their own needs, by acting individually in some circumstances and by cooperating with others when appropriate, if their social environment models this.

However, if a child is terrorized into being obedient – including by being punished when they are not – then the child will have no choice but to suppress their awareness of the innate mental capacities that evolved over billions of years to guide their behaviour until they have ‘learned’ what they must do to avoid being punished. For a fuller explanation of this, see ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and
Practice’.

Unfortunately, as you can probably readily perceive, this process of terrorizing a child into suppressing their awareness of what they want to do so that they do what someone else directs is highly problematical. And it leads to a virtually infinite variety of dysfunctional
behaviours, even for those who appear to have been successfully ‘socialized’ into performing effectively in their society. This is readily illustrated.

Perhaps the central problem of terrorizing individuals into obedience of conventions, commands, rules and the law is that once the individual has been so terrorized, it is virtually impossible for them to change their behaviour because they are now terrified of doing so. If the obedient behaviours were functional in the circumstances then, apart from the obviously enormous damage suffered by the individual, there would be no other adverse social or environmental consequences.

Unfortunately, when all humans have been terrorized into behaving dysfunctionally on a routine basis (in the Western context, for example, by engaging in over-consumption) then changing their behaviour, even in the direction of functionality, is now unconsciously associated with the fear of violence (in the form of punishment) and so desirable behavioural change (in the direction of reduced consumption, for example) is much more difficult. It is not just that many Western humans are reluctant to reduce their consumption in line with environmental (including climatic) imperatives, they are unconsciously terrified of
doing so.

By now you might be able to see the wider ramifications of using violence and threats of violence to force children into being obedient. Apart from terrorizing each child into suppressing their awareness of their innate mental capacities, we create individuals whose entire (unconscious) ‘understanding’ of human existence is limited to the notion that violence, mislabeled ‘punishment’, drives socialization and society.

As just one result, for example, most people consider punishment to be appropriate in the context of the legal system: they expect courts to inflict legally-sanctioned violence on those ‘guilty’ of disobeying the law. As in the case of the punishment of children, how many people ask ‘Does violence restore functional behaviour? Or does it simply inflict violence as revenge? What do we really want to achieve? And how will we achieve that?’

Fundamentally, the flaw with violence as punishment is that violence terrifies people. And you cannot terrorize someone into behaving functionally. At very best, you can terrorize someone into changing their behaviour in an extremely limited context and/or for an extremely limited period of time. But if you want functional and lasting change in an individual’s behaviour, then considerable emotional healing will be necessary. This will allow the suppressed fear, anger, sadness and other feelings resulting from childhood terrorization to safely resurface and be expressed so that the individual can perceive their own needs and identify ways of fulfilling them (which does not mean that they will be obedient). For an explanation of what is required, see ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’ which is referenced in ‘My Promise to Children‘.

So next time you hear a political leader or corporate executive advocating or using violence (such as war, the curtailment of civil liberties, an economically exploitative and/or ecologically destructive initiative), remember that you are observing a highly dysfunctionalized individual. Moreover, this dysfunctional individual is a logical product of our society’s unrelenting use of violence, much of it in the form of what is euphemistically called ‘punishment’, against our children in the delusional belief that it will give us obedience and hence social control.

Or next time you hear a public official, judge, terrorist or police officer promising ‘justice’ (that is, retribution), remember that you are listening to an emotionally damaged individual who suffered enormous violence as a child and internalized the delusional message that ‘punishment works’.

You might also ponder how bad it could be if we didn’t require obedience and use punishment to get it, but loved and nurtured children, by listening to them deeply, to become the unique, enormously loving and powerful individuals for which evolution genetically programmed them.

I am well aware that what I am suggesting will take an enormous amount of societal rethinking and a profound reallocation of resources away from violent and highly profitable police, legal, prison and military systems. But, as I wrote above, I am committed to facilitating functional human behaviour. I can also think of some useful ways that we could allocate the resources if we didn’t waste them on violence.

If you share this commitment and working towards this world appeals to you too, then you are welcome to consider participating in the fifteen-year strategy outlined in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth‘ and to consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World‘.

Punishment can sometimes appear to get you the outcome you want in the short term. The cost is that it always moves you further away from any desirable outcome in the long run.

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

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

Thinking Dangerously in the Age of Normalized Ignorance

Posted on October 6, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Henry Giroux

Source: CounterPunch

What happens to a society when thinking is eviscerated and is disdained in favor of raw emotion? [1] What happens when political discourse functions as a bunker rather than a bridge? What happens when the spheres of morality and spirituality give way to the naked instrumentalism of a savage market rationality? What happens when time becomes a burden for most people and surviving becomes more crucial than trying to lead a life with dignity? What happens when domestic terrorism, disposability, and social death become the new signposts and defining features of a society? What happens to a social order ruled by an “economics of contempt” that blames the poor for their condition and wallows in a culture of shaming?[2] What happens when loneliness and isolation become the preferred modes of sociality? What happens to a polity when it retreats into private silos and is no longer able to connect personal suffering with larger social issues? What happens to thinking when a society is addicted to speed and over-stimulation? What happens to a country when the presiding principles of a society are violence and ignorance? What happens is that democracy withers not just as an ideal but also as a reality, and individual and social agency become weaponized as part of the larger spectacle and matrix of violence?[3]

The forces normalizing and contributing to such violence are too expansive to cite, but surely they would include: the absurdity of celebrity culture; the blight of rampant consumerism; state-legitimated pedagogies of repression that kill the imagination of students; a culture of immediacy in which accelerated time leaves no room for reflection; the reduction of education to training; the transformation of mainstream media into a mix of advertisements, propaganda, and entertainment; the emergence of an economic system which argues that only the market can provide remedies for the endless problems it produces, extending from massive poverty and unemployment to decaying schools and a war on poor minority youth; the expanding use of state secrecy and the fear-producing surveillance state; and a Hollywood fluff machine that rarely relies on anything but an endless spectacle of mind-numbing violence. Historical memory has been reduced to the likes of a Disney theme park and a culture of instant gratification has a lock on producing new levels of social amnesia.

As we learned in the recent debate between Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton (a billionaire and millionaire), ignorance is the DNA of authoritarianism, serving to subvert the truth and obscure the workings of power. Willful ignorance has become a normalized political tool and form of public pedagogy that both provides the foundation for what Noam Chomsky labels as the rise of the “stupid party” and which works incessantly to create a “stupid nation.”[4]Trump, of course, proves that stupidity is in fashion and deeply entrenched within the larger culture while Hilary capitalizes on her penchant for disingenuousness by claiming support for policies she really disdains, i.e., stating she will raise taxes on her buddies from Goldman Sachs and other members of the financial elite. Hardly believable from a woman who “has earned millions of dollars from speeches to Wall Street banks and investment firms (and) was paid $675,000 for a series of speeches to Goldman Sachs.”[5] No hints of the radical imagination here, or the truth for that matter. Only the politics of stupidity and evasion and a media spectacle supporting the celebration of corrupted and limited and pathologized political horizons.

Manufactured ignorance also makes invisible the corruption of the financial elite, allowing them to plunder resources and define the accumulation of capital as a divine blessing. It gets worse. Manufactured ignorance aided by the voracious seductions of commodified corporate-driven disimagination machine that promotes a culture of empty pleasures through and endless regime of consuming and discarding. American society is now dominated by a pervasive commodified landscape of disimagination machines that extends from Hollywood movies and video games to mainstream television, magazines, news, and the social media. These mind-numbing desiring machines which thrive on speed and sensation function mostly as workstations of ignorance to create a fog of distractions that promote forms of social amnesia that erase from memory and public discourse the structural, systemic and social forces that reinforce what can be called organized powerlessness and massive human suffering. This is the stuff of a politics of disappearance that erases the presence of the poor, unemployed, the “approximately 11 million Americans cycle[d] through jails and prisons each year,” black youth, immigrants, ecological disasters, class warfare, acts of state sponsored terrorism, the rise of the police state, and the rise of the warfare state.[6] As the machinery of social death accelerates, America’s most precious investment, youth, also disappear. As neoliberal disimagination machines such as Fox News make clear youth as a social investment no longer count in a society that disdains long term investments and their messy calls for being included in the script of democracy. As such, the current war on youth is about erasing the future, at least any alternative future and any notion of imagination that might summon one into view.

When coupled with an age of precarity and endless uncertainty in which young people have few decent jobs, are strangulated by debt, face a future of career-less jobs, and isolation, young people have little room for politics because they are more concerned with trying to survive rather than engaging in political struggles, or imagining a different future. At the same time, armies of the unemployed or underemployed are caught in a spiral of receding wages, diminished social provisions, and increasingly find themselves paralyzed by anxiety and free-floating anger. In such situations, thinking and informed action become more difficult while a politics wedded to economic and social justice is eviscerated. Moreover, politics becomes toxic when dominated by unapologetic discourses of racism and hatred and is on full display in the Trump campaign. Tapping into such anger and redirecting away from the real problems that produce it has become the central script in the rise of the new authoritarians. This poisonous discourse gains momentum and accelerates as it moves between white supremacist incantations of Trump and his zealots and the deceptive vocabulary of Hillary Clinton and her financial elite backers who embrace a savage neoliberalism with its false claims to freedom, choice, and the virtues of militarization. Civic death is on full display as the ideals of democracy disappear in an election in which authoritarianism in its various forms rules without apology. As thinking dangerously and acting with civic courage wanes, state violence, disposability and voicelessness become the dominant registers of an authoritarian politics that has intensified in American life producing neo-fascist movements in American society that have moved from the fringes to the center of political life.

Tragedy looms large in American society as the forces that promote powerlessness and voicelessness intensify among those elements of the population struggling just to survive the symbolic violence of a culture of cruelty and the material violence of a punishing state. The issue of losing one’s voice either to the forces of imposed silencing or state repression weaken dissent and open the door to the seductions of a dogmatism that speaks in the language of decline, making America great again, while touting the coded vocabulary of white nationalism and racial purity. How else to explain Trump’s call for imposing racial profiling as a way to boost the notion of law and order.

Thinking undangerously is the first step in the triumph of formalism over substance, theater over politics, and the transformation of politics into a form of celebrity culture. The refusal to think works in the service of a form of voicelessness, which is another marker of what it means to be powerless. Within this moral and political vacuum, the codes, rhetoric, and language of white supremacy is on the rise wrapped in the spectacle of fear-mongering and implied threats of state repression. In this instance, emotion become more important than reason, ideas lose their grip on reality, and fashion becomes a rationale for discarding historical memory, informed arguments, and critical thought. Reflection no longer challenges the demands of commonsense. In the mainstream media, the endless and unapologetic proliferation of lies become fodder for higher ratings, informed by suffocating pastiche of talking heads, all of whom surrender to “the incontestable demands of quiet acceptance.”[7]Within such an environment, the truth of an event is not open to public discussion or informed judgment at least in the official media apparatuses producing, distributing and circulating ideas that parade as commonsense. As a result, all that remains is the fog of ignorance and the haze of political and moral indifference.

Americans occupy a historical moment in which it is crucial to think dangerously, particularly since such thinking has the power to shift the questions, provide the tools for offering historical and relational contexts, and “push at the frontiers…of the human imagination.”[8]Stuart Hall is right in insisting that thinking dangerously is crucial “to change the scale of magnification. … to break into the confusing fabric that ‘the real’ apparently presents, and find another way in. So it’s like a microscope and until you look at the evidence through the microscope, you can’t see the hidden relations.”[9] In this instance, the critical capacity for thinking becomes dangerous when it can intervene in the “continuity of commonsense, unsettle strategies of domination,” and work to promote strategies of transformation.[10]

As Adorno observes, such thinking “speaks for what is not narrow-minded—and commonsense most certainly is.”[11] As such, dangerous thinking is not only analytical in its search for understanding and truth, it is also critical and subversive, always employing modes of self and social critique necessary to examine its own grounds and those poisonous fundamentalisms in the larger society haunting the body politic. As Michael Payne observes, thinking dangerously (or critical theory in this instance) should be cast in the language of hints, dialogue, and an openness to other positions, rather than be “cast in the language of orders.”[12] Of course, this is not to suggest that thinking dangerously guarantees action, but at the same time, any action that distances itself from such thinking is bound to fail.

In an age when shouting, rage, and unchecked emotions shape public discourse, self-reflection becomes a liability and suppresses the axiom that critical thought should function to “lift…human beings above the evidence of our senses and sets appearances apart from the truth.”[13] Salmon Rushdie is right in viewing thinking dangerously as a type of political necessity whose purpose is to “push boundaries and take risks and so, at times, to change the way we see the world.”[14] As Hannah Arendt noted, thoughtfulness, the ability to think reflectively and critically is fundamental to radical change and a necessity in a functioning democracy. Put differently, formative cultures that make such thinking possible along with the spaces in which dialogue, debate, and dissent can flourish are essential to producing critically literate and actively engaged citizens.

Unfortunately, thinking undangerously cuts across ideological and political divides. For instance, there is a new kind of historical and social amnesia overtaking some elements of resistance in the United States. Many progressives have forgotten the lessons of earlier movements for real change extending from the anti-Vietnam War and Black Freedom movements to the radical feminist and gay rights movements of the sixties. History as a repository of learning with vast resources to enable people to build on historical legacies, develop mass movements, and take seriously the pedagogical task of consciousness raising, is in decline. Too much of contemporary politics has become more personal, often reducing agency to the discourses and highly charged emotions of trauma. These historical legacies of resistance did not limit their politics to a call recognition and security within the confines of isolated political issues. Instead, they called for a radical transformation of capitalist and other authoritarian societies. Moroever, they understood that the truth of domination lie in understanding the totality of a society and how various issues were connected to each other. George Monbiot exemplifies this issue in arguing against responding to the varied crisis associated with neoliberalism as if they emerged in isolation—a response that contributes to neoliberalism’s anonymity. He writes:

Its anonymity is both a symptom and cause of its power. It has played a major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the financial meltdown of 2007?8, the offshoring of wealth and power, of which the Panama Papers offer us merely a glimpse, the slow collapse of public health and education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness, the collapse of ecosystems, the rise of Donald Trump. But we respond to these crises as if they emerge in isolation, apparently unaware that they have all been either catalyzed or exacerbated by the same coherent philosophy; a philosophy that has – or had – a name. What greater power can there be than to operate namelessly?[15]

This politics of the disconnect is exacerbated by the fact that mass social movements run the risk of undermining by a politics that has collapsed into the personal. For example, for too many progressives personal pain represents a retreat into an interiority that focuses on trauma. Robin Kelley provides a caveat here in pointing out that all too often “managing trauma does not require dismantling structural racism” and the larger issues of “oppression, repression, and subjugation” get replaced with “words such as PTSD, micro-aggressions, and triggers.” [16] Kelley is not suggesting that the pain of personal suffering be ignored. Instead, he warns “against … the consequences of framing all grievances in the ‘language of personaltrauma.’”[17]

Personal trauma in this case can begin with legitimate calls for spaces free of racism, sexual harassment, and various other forms of hidden but morally and politically unacceptable assaults. And at its best, such a politics functions as an entry into political activism; but when it becomes less a justifiable starting point than an endpoint it begins to sabotage any viable notion of radical politics. Kelley is right in insisting that “trauma can easily slip into thinking of ourselves as victims and objects rather than agents.”[18] Moreover, the language of safe spaces, personal trauma, and triggers can easily become a topsy-turvy discursive universe of trick mirrors and trapdoors that end up reproducing a politics of intimidation and conformity, while forgetting that pedagogical practices and a corresponding politics in the service of dramatic transformation are always unsettling and discomforting.

Progressives must avoid at all cost is the rebirth of a politics in which how we think and act is guaranteed by the discourses of origins, personal experience, and biology. When individuals become trapped within their own experiences, the political imagination weakens, and a politics emerges that runs the risk of inhabiting a culture of exclusion and hardness that shuts down dialogue, undermines compassion, kills empathy, makes it more difficult to listen to and learn from others. A politics that puts an emphasis on personal pain can become blind to its own limitations and can offer falsely a guaranteed access to the truth and a comforting embrace of a discourse of political certainty.

In such cases, the walls go up again as the discourses of biology and exclusion merge to guard the frontiers of moral righteousness and political absolutism. Put differently, the registers of militarization are on full display in such alleged sites of resistance such as higher education where a growing culture of political purity marks out a space in which the personal becomes the only politics there is housed within a discourse of “weaponized sensitivity” and “armed ignorance.”[19] The first causality of armed ignorance is a kind of thoughtfulness that embraces empathy for the other, a willingness to enter into public discussion, and dialogue with those who exist outside of the bunkers of imagined communities of exclusion. Leon Wieseltier is right in arguing that “grievance is sometimes the author of blindness, or worse.”[20]

Under such conditions, empathy wanes and only extends as far as recognizing those who mirror the self, one that endlessly narrates itself on the high ground of an unassailable moralism and stultifying orbits of self-interests. In addition, politics collapses into the privatized orbits of a crude essentialism that disdains forms of public discourse in which boundaries break down and the exercise of public deliberation is viewed as fundamental to a substantive democracy. Of course, there is more at work here than what might be called the atrophy of critical thought, self-reflection, and theory, there is also the degeneration of agency itself.

What does thinking look like when it is transformed into a pedagogical parasite on the body of democracy? At one level, it becomes toxic, blinding the ideological warriors to their own militant ignorance and anti-democratic rhetoric. At the same time, it shuts down any attempt to develop public spheres that connect rather than separate advocates of a politics walled in by suffocating notions of essentialism dressed up in the appeal to orthodoxy parading as revolutionary zeal. What must be remembered is that thinking undangerously mimics a pedagogy of repression that falsely assumes a revolutionary stance when in fact everything about it is counter-revolutionary. In the end this suggests a kind of theoretical helplessness, a replacing of the courage to think dangerously with the discourse of denunciation and a language overflowing with the comforting binary of good and evil.

There is more at risk here than legitimating the worse forms of thoughtlessness, there is also the intolerable potential for both the moral collapse of politics and the undermining of any vestige of democracy. Thinking dangerously as a critical enterprise is about both a search for the truth and a commitment to the recognition that no society is ever just enough and hence is fundamental to the always unfinished struggle, making the impossible all the more possible. Not one or the other but both. Such thinking should be used to both understand and engage the major upheavals people face and to connect such problems to larger political, structural, and economic issues.

Thinking dangerously can make the pedagogical more political by mapping the full range of how power is used and how it can be made accountable in all of its uses. Thinking dangerously is about more than doing a critical reading of screen culture and other texts, it is also about how knowledge, desire, and values become invaluable tools in the service of economic and political justice, how language provides the framework for dealing with power and what it means to develop a sense of compassion for others and the planet. Dangerous thinking is more than a mode of resistance, it is the basis for a formative and pedagogical culture of questioning and politics that takes seriously how the imagination can become central to the practice of freedom, justice, and democratic change.

Notes.

[1] This essay draws upon a number of ideas in Henry A. Giroux,Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism (New York: Routledge, 2015).

[2] I have borrowed this term from Jeffrey St. Clair, “The Economics of Contempt,” Counterpunch (May 23, 2014).

[3] Brad Evans and I have taken up the issue of violence in its various valences in Brad Evans and Henry A. Giroux, Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of the Spectacle (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2015). Also, see Henry A. Giroux, America’s Addiction to Terrorism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016).

[4] Noam Chomsky, “Corporations and the Richest Americans Viscerally Oppose the Common good,” Alternet (Sep9tember 29, 2014). Online: http://www.alternet.org/visions/chomsky-corporations-and-richest-americans-viscerally-oppose-common-good

[5] Chris Cillizza , “The New York Times just perfectly explained Hillary Clinton’s Goldman Sachs speech problem,” The WashingtonPost (February 26, 2016). Online:https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/02/26/the-new-york-times-just-perfectly-explained-why-hillary-clintons-answers-on-her-paid-speeches-dont-work/

[6] Rebecca Gordon, “There Oughta Be a Law…Should Prison Really Be the American Way?,” TomDispatch.com (September 25, 2016). Online: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176190/tomgram%3A_rebecca_gordon%2C_arresting_our_way_to_%22justice%22/

[7] Brad Evans and Julien Reid, “The Promise of Violence in the Age of Catastrophe,” Truthout (January 5, 2014. Online: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/20977-the-promise-of-violence-in-the-age-of-catastrophe

[8] Arundhati Roy, Power Politics (Cambridge, Ma: South End Press, 2001), P. 1

[9] Stuart Hall and Les Back, “In Conversation: At Home and Not at Home”, Cultural Studies, Vol. 23, No. 4, (July 2009), pp. 664-665.

[10] I have taken this phrases from an interview with Homi Bhaba in Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham, “Staging the Politics of Difference: Homi Bhabha’s Critical Literacy JAC ((1999), p. 9.

[11] Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Life (London: Polity Press, 2005), p.139.

[12] Michael Payne, “What Difference Has Theory Mad? From Freud to Adam Phillips,” College Literature 32:2 (Spring 2005), p. 7.

[13] Ibid., Bauman, Liquid Life, 151.

[14] Salman Rushdie, “Whither Moral Courage?” The New York Times, (April 28, 2013)

[15] George Monbiot, “Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems,” The Guardian, (April 15, 2016) Online: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot

[16] Robin D.G. Kelley, “Black Study, Black Struggle – final response,”Boston Review, (March 7, 2016). Online: http://bostonreview.net/forum/black-study-black-struggle/robin-d-g-kelley-robin-d-g-kelleys-final-response

[17] Ibid., Robin D.G. Kelley, “Black Study, Black Struggle – final response.” Boston Review.,

[18] Robin D.G. Kelley, “Black Study, Black Struggle,” Boston Review,(March 7, 2016) Online: https://bostonreview.net/forum/robin-d-g-kelley-black-study-black-struggle

[19] The notion of weaponized sensitivity is from Lionel Shriver, “Will the Left Survive the Millennials?” New York Times (September 23, 2016). Online. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/23/opinion/will-the-left-survive-the-millennials.html. Armed ignorance was coined by my colleague Brad Evans in a personal correspondence.

[20] Leon Wieseltier, “How voters’ personal suffering overtook reason – and brought us Donald Trump,” Washington Post, (June 22, 2016). Online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/06/22/how-voters-personal-suffering-overtook-reason-and-brought-us-donald-trump/

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Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University. His most recent books are America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth (Monthly Review Press, 2013) and Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (Haymarket Press, 2014). His web site is www.henryagiroux.com.

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