The United States of Work

Posted on May 1, 2017 by Reid Mukai

Employers exercise vast control over our lives, even when we’re not on the job. How did our bosses gain power that the government itself doesn’t hold?

By Miya Tokumitsu

Work no longer works. “You need to acquire more skills,” we tell young job seekers whose résumés at 22 are already longer than their parents’ were at 32. “Work will give you meaning,” we encourage people to tell themselves, so that they put in 60 hours or more per week on the job, removing them from other sources of meaning, such as daydreaming or social life. “Work will give you satisfaction,” we insist, even though it requires abiding by employers’ rules, and the unwritten rules of the market, for most of our waking hours. At the very least, work is supposed to be a means to earning an income. But if it’s possible to work full time and still live in poverty, what’s the point?

Even before the global financial crisis of 2008, it had become clear that if waged work is supposed to provide a measure of well-being and social structure, it has failed on its own terms. Real household wages in the United States have remained stagnant since the 1970s, even as the costs of university degrees and other credentials rise. Young people find an employment landscape defined by unpaid internships, temporary work, and low pay. The glut of degree-holding young workers has pushed many of them into the semi- or unskilled labor force, making prospects even narrower for non–degree holders. Entry-level wages for high school graduates have in fact fallen. According to a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, these lost earnings will depress this generation’s wages for their entire working lives. Meanwhile, those at the very top—many of whom derive their wealth not from work, but from returns on capital—vacuum up an ever-greater share of prosperity.

Against this bleak landscape, a growing body of scholarship aims to overturn our culture’s deepest assumptions about how work confers wealth, meaning, and care throughout society. In Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk About It), Elizabeth Anderson, a professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan, explores how the discipline of work has itself become a form of tyranny, documenting the expansive power that firms now wield over their employees in everything from how they dress to what they tweet. James Livingston, a historian at Rutgers, goes one step further in No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea. Instead of insisting on jobs for all or proposing that we hold employers to higher standards, Livingston argues, we should just scrap work altogether.

Livingston’s vision is the more radical of the two; his book is a wide-ranging polemic that frequently delivers the refrain “Fuck work.” But in original ways, both books make a powerful claim: that our lives today are ruled, above all, by work. We can try to convince ourselves that we are free, but as long as we must submit to the increasing authority of our employers and the labor market, we are not. We therefore fancy that we want to work, that work grounds our character, that markets encompass the possible. We are unable to imagine what a full life could be, much less to live one. Even more radically, both books highlight the dramatic and alarming changes that work has undergone over the past century—insisting that, in often unseen ways, the changing nature of work threatens the fundamental ideals of democracy: equality and freedom.

Anderson’s most provocative argument is that large companies, the institutions that employ most workers, amount to a de facto form of government, exerting massive and intrusive power in our daily lives. Unlike the state, these private governments are able to wield power with little oversight, because the executives and boards of directors that rule them are accountable to no one but themselves. Although they exercise their power to varying degrees and through both direct and “soft” means, employers can dictate how we dress and style our hair, when we eat, when (and if) we may use the toilet, with whom we may partner and under what arrangements. Employers may subject our bodies to drug tests; monitor our speech both on and off the job; require us to answer questionnaires about our exercise habits, off-hours alcohol consumption, and childbearing intentions; and rifle through our belongings. If the state held such sweeping powers, Anderson argues, we would probably not consider ourselves free men and women.

Employees, meanwhile, have few ways to fight back. Yes, they may leave the company, but doing so usually necessitates being unemployed or migrating to another company and working under similar rules. Workers may organize, but unions have been so decimated in recent years that their clout is greatly diminished. What’s more, employers are swift to fire anyone they suspect of speaking to their colleagues about organizing, and most workers lack the time and resources to mount a legal challenge to wrongful termination.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. As corporations have worked methodically to amass sweeping powers over their employees, they have held aloft the beguiling principle of individual freedom, claiming that only unregulated markets can guarantee personal liberty. Instead, operating under relatively few regulations themselves, these companies have succeeded at imposing all manner of regulation on their employees. That is to say, they use the language of individual liberty to claim that corporations require freedom to treat workers as they like.

Anderson sets out to discredit such arguments by tracing them back to their historical origins. The notion that personal freedom is rooted in free markets, for instance, originated with the Levellers in seventeenth-century England, when working conditions differed substantially from today’s. The Levellers believed that a market society was essential to liberate individuals from the remnants of feudal hierarchies; their vision of utopia was a world in which men could meet and interact on terms of equality and dignity. Their ideas echoed through the writing and politics of later figures like John Locke, Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, and Abraham Lincoln, all of whom believed that open markets could provide the essential infrastructure for individuals to shape their own destiny.

An anti-statist streak runs through several of these thinkers, particularly the Levellers and Paine, who viewed markets as the bulwark against state oppression. Paine and Smith, however, would hardly qualify as hard-line contemporary libertarians. Smith believed that public education was essential to a fair market society, and Paine proposed a system of social insurance that included old-age pensions as well as survivor and disability benefits. Their hope was not for a world of win-or-die competition, but one in which open markets would allow individuals to make the fullest use of their talents, free from state monopolies and meddlesome bosses.

For Anderson, the latter point is essential; the notion of lifelong employment under a boss was anathema to these earlier visions of personal freedom. Writing in the 1770s, Smith assumes that independent actors in his market society will be self-employed, and uses butchers and bakers as his exemplars; his “pin factory,” meant to illustrate division of labor, employs only ten people. These thinkers could not envision a world in which most workers spend most of their lives performing wage labor under a single employer. In an address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society in 1859, Lincoln stated, “The prudent, penniless beginner in the world labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself, then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him.” In other words, even well into the nineteenth century, defenders of an unregulated market society viewed wage labor as a temporary stage on the way to becoming a proprietor.

Lincoln’s scenario does not reflect the way most people work today. Yet the “small business owner” endures as an American stock character, conjured by politicians to push through deregulatory measures that benefit large corporations. In reality, thanks to a lack of guaranteed, nationalized health care and threadbare welfare benefits, setting up a small business is simply too risky a venture for many Americans, who must rely on their employers for health insurance and income. These conditions render long-term employment more palatable than a precarious existence of freelance gigs, which further gives companies license to oppress their employees.

The modern relationship between employer and employee began with the rise of large-scale companies in the nineteenth century. Although employment contracts date back to the Middle Ages, preindustrial arrangements bore little resemblance to the documents we know today. Like modern employees, journeymen and apprentices often served their employers for years, but masters performed the same or similar work in proximity to their subordinates. As a result, Anderson points out, working conditions—the speed required of workers and the hazards to which they might be exposed—were kept in check by what the masters were willing to tolerate for themselves.

The Industrial Revolution brought radical changes, as companies grew ever larger and management structures more complex. “Employers no longer did the same kind of work as employees, if they worked at all,” Anderson observes. “Mental labor was separated from manual labor, which was radically deskilled.” Companies multiplied rapidly in size. Labor contracts now bonded workers to massive organizations in which discipline, briefs, and decrees flowed downward, but whose leaders were unreachable by ordinary workers. Today, fast food workers or bank tellers would be hard-pressed to petition their CEOs at McDonald’s or Wells Fargo in person.

Despite this, we often speak of employment contracts as agreements between equals, as if we are living in Adam Smith’s eighteenth-century dream world. In a still-influential paper from 1937 titled “The Nature of the Firm,” the economist and Nobel laureate Ronald Coase established himself as an early observer and theorist of corporate concerns. He described the employment contract not as a document that handed the employer unaccountable powers, but as one that circumscribed those powers. In signing a contract, the employee “agrees to obey the directions of an entrepreneur within certain limits,” he emphasized. But such characterizations, as Anderson notes, do not reflect reality; most workers agree to employment without any negotiation or even communication about their employer’s power or its limits. The exceptions to this rule are few and notable: top professional athletes, celebrity entertainers, superstar academics, and the (increasingly small) groups of workers who are able to bargain collectively.

Yet because employment contracts create the illusion that workers and companies have arrived at a mutually satisfying agreement, the increasingly onerous restrictions placed on modern employees are often presented as “best practices” and “industry standards,” framing all sorts of behaviors and outcomes as things that ought to be intrinsically desired by workers themselves. Who, after all, would not want to work on something in the “best” way? Beyond employment contracts, companies also rely on social pressure to foster obedience: If everyone in the office regularly stays until seven o’clock every night, who would risk departing at five, even if it’s technically allowed? Such social prods exist alongside more rigid behavioral codes that dictate everything from how visible an employee’s tattoo can be to when and how long workers can break for lunch.

Many workers, in fact, have little sense of the legal scope of their employer’s power. Most would be shocked to discover that they could be fired for being too attractive, declining to attend a political rally favored by their employer, or finding out that their daughter was raped by a friend of the boss—all real-life examples cited by Anderson. Indeed, it is only after dismissal for such reasons that many workers learn of the sweeping breadth of at-will employment, the contractual norm that allows American employers to fire workers without warning and without cause, except for reasons explicitly deemed illegal.

In reality, the employment landscape is even more dire than Anderson outlines. The rise of staffing or “temp” agencies, for example, undercuts the very idea of a direct relationship between worker and employer. In The Temp Economy: From Kelly Girls to Permatemps in Postwar America, sociologist Erin Hatton notes that millions of workers now labor under subcontracting arrangements, which give employers even greater latitude to abuse employees. For years, Walmart—America’s largest retailer—used a subcontracting firm to hire hundreds of cleaners, many from Eastern Europe, who worked for months on end without overtime pay or a single day off. After federal agents raided dozens of Walmarts and arrested the cleaners as illegal immigrants, company executives used the subcontracting agreement to shirk responsibility for their exploitation of the cleaners, claiming they had no knowledge of their immigration status or conditions.

By any reasonable standard, much “temp” work is not even temporary. Employees sometimes work for years in a single workplace, even through promotions, without ever being granted official status as an employee. Similarly, “gig economy” platforms like Uber designate their workers as contractors rather than employees, a distinction that exempts the company from paying them minimum wage and overtime. Many “permatemps” and contractors perform the same work as employees, yet lack even the paltry protections and benefits awarded to full-time workers.

A weak job market, paired with the increasing precarity of work, means that more and more workers are forced to make their living by stringing together freelance assignments or winning fixed-term contracts, subjecting those workers to even more rules and restrictions. On top of their actual jobs, contractors and temp workers must do the additional work of appearing affable and employable not just on the job, but during their ongoing efforts to secure their next gig. Constantly pitching, writing up applications, and personal branding on social media requires a level of self-censorship, lest a controversial tweet or compromising Facebook photo sink their job prospects. Forced to anticipate the wishes not of a specific employer, but of all potential future employers, many opt out of participating in social media or practicing politics in any visible capacity. Their public personas are shaped not by their own beliefs and desires, but by the demands of the labor market.

For Livingston, it’s not just employers but work itself that is the problem. We toil because we must, but also because our culture has trained us to see work as the greatest enactment of our dignity and personal character. Livingston challenges us to turn away from such outmoded ideas, rooted in Protestant ideals. Like Anderson, he sweeps through centuries of labor theory with impressive efficiency, from Marx and Hegel to Freud and Lincoln, whose 1859 speech he also quotes. Livingston centers on these thinkers because they all found the connection between work and virtue troubling. Hegel believed that work causes individuals to defer their desires, nurturing a “slave morality.” Marx proposed that “real freedom came after work.” And Freud understood the Protestant work ethic as “the symptom of repression, perhaps even regression.”

Nor is it practical, Livingston argues, to exalt work: There are simply not enough jobs to keep most adults employed at a living wage, given the rise of automation and increases in productivity. Besides, the relation between income and work is arbitrary. Cooking dinner for your family is unpaid work, while cooking dinner for strangers usually comes with a paycheck. There’s nothing inherently different in the labor involved—only in the compensation. Anderson argues that work impedes individual freedom; Livingston points out that it rarely pays enough. As technological advances continue to weaken the demand for human labor, wages will inevitably be driven down even further. Instead of idealizing work and making it the linchpin of social organization, Livingston suggests, why not just get rid of it?

Livingston belongs to a cadre of thinkers, including Kathi Weeks, Nick Srnicek, and Alex Williams, who believe that we should strive for a “postwork” society in one form or another. Strands of this idea go back at least as far as Keynes’s 1930 essay on “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.” Not only would work be eliminated or vastly reduced by technology, Keynes predicted, but we would also be unburdened spiritually. Devotion to work was, he deemed, one of many “pseudo-moral principles” that “exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues.”

Since people in this new world would no longer have to earn a salary, they would, Livingston envisions, receive some kind of universal basic income. UBI is a slippery concept, adaptable to both the socialist left and libertarian right, but it essentially entails distributing a living wage to every member of society. In most conceptualizations, the income is indeed basic—no cases of Dom Pérignon—and would cover the essentials like rent and groceries. Individuals would then be free to choose whether and how much they want to work to supplement the UBI. Leftist proponents tend to advocate pairing UBI with a strong welfare state to provide nationalized health care, tuition-free education, and other services. Some libertarians view UBI as a way to pare down the welfare state, arguing that it’s better simply to give people money to buy food and health care directly, rather than forcing them to engage with food stamp and Medicaid bureaucracies.

According to Livingston, we are finally on the verge of this postwork society because of automation. Robots are now advanced enough to take over complex jobs in areas like agriculture and mining, eliminating the need for humans to perform dangerous or tedious tasks. In practice, however, automation is a double-edged sword, with the capacity to oppress as well as unburden. Machines often accelerate the rate at which humans can work, taxing rather than liberating them. Conveyor belts eliminated the need for workers to pass unfinished products along to their colleagues—but as Charlie Chaplin and Lucille Ball so hilariously demonstrated, the belts also increased the pace at which those same workers needed to turn wrenches and wrap chocolates. In retail and customer service, a main function of automation has been not to eliminate work, but to eliminate waged work, transferring much of the labor onto consumers, who must now weigh and code their own vegetables at the supermarket, check out their own library books, and tag their own luggage at the airport.

At the same time, it may be harder to automate some jobs that require a human touch, such as floristry or hairstyling. The same goes for the delicate work of caring for the young, sick, elderly, or otherwise vulnerable. In today’s economy, the demand for such labor is rising rapidly: “Nine of the twelve fastest-growing fields,” The New York Times reported earlier this year, “are different ways of saying ‘nurse.’” These jobs also happen to be low-paying, emotionally and physically grueling, dirty, hazardous, and shouldered largely by women and immigrants. Regardless of whether employment is virtuous or not, our immediate goal should perhaps be to distribute the burdens of caregiving, since such work is essential to the functioning of society and benefits us all.

A truly work-free world is one that would entail a revolution from our present social organizations. We could no longer conceive of welfare as a last resort—as the “safety net” metaphor implies—but would be forced to treat it as an unremarkable and universal fact of life. This alone would require us to support a massive redistribution of wealth, and to reclaim our political institutions from the big-money interests that are allergic to such changes. Tall orders indeed—but as Srnicek and Williams remind us in their book, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work, neoliberals pulled off just such a revolution in the postwar years. Thanks to their efforts, free-market liberalism replaced Keynesianism as the political and economic common sense all around the world.

Another possible solution to the current miseries of unemployment and worker exploitation is the one Livingston rejects in his title: full employment. For anti-work partisans, full employment takes us in the wrong direction, and UBI corrects the course. But the two are not mutually exclusive. In fact, rather than creating new jobs, full employment could require us to reduce our work hours drastically and spread them throughout the workforce—a scheme that could radically de-center waged work in our lives. A dual strategy of pursuing full employment while also demanding universal benefits—including health care, childcare, and affordable housing—would maximize workers’ bargaining power to ensure that they, and not just owners of capital, actually get to enjoy the bounty of labor-saving technology.

Nevertheless, Livingston’s critiques of full employment are worth heeding. As with automation, it can all go wrong if we use the banner of full employment to create pointless roles—what David Graeber has termed “bullshit jobs,” in which workers sit in some soul-sucking basement office for eight hours a day—or harmful jobs, like building nuclear weapons. If we do not have a deliberate politics rooted in universal social justice, then full employment, a basic income, and automation will not liberate us from the degradations of work.

Both Livingston and Anderson reveal how much of our own power we’ve already ceded in making waged work the conduit for our ideals of liberty and morality. The scale and coordination of the institutions we’re up against in the fight for our emancipation is, as Anderson demonstrates, staggering. Employers hold the means to our well-being, and they have the law on their side. Individual efforts to achieve a better “work-life balance” for ourselves and our families miss the wider issue we face as waged employees. Livingston demonstrates the scale at which we should be thinking: Our demands should be revolutionary, our imaginations wide. Standing amid the wreckage of last year’s presidential election, what other choice do we have?

Miya Tokumitsu is a lecturer of art history at the University of Melbourne and a contributing editor at Jacobin. She is the author of Do What You Love. And Other Lies about Success and Happiness.

Are We Humans Terminally Insane or Just Waking Up?

Posted on April 23, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Paul Levy

Source: Reality Sandwich

The following article was originally published on Awaken in the Dream.

“The world today hangs by a thin thread, and that thread is the psyche of man.”
– C. G. Jung

How does anyone possibly express in words the state of collective madness that humanity has fallen into at this time in our history? As if in a hypnotic trance, our species is enacting a mass ritual suicide on a global scale, rushing as fast as we can towards our own self-destruction. We are destroying the biospheric life-support systems of the planet in so many different ways that it is as if we are determined to make this suicide attempt work—using a variety of methods as a perverse insurance policy, in case a couple of them don’t do the job. What modern-day humanity is confronted with, to quote the author and Trappist monk Thomas Merton, is “a crisis of sanity first of all.”

In trying to find a way to write about this state of affairs, I find myself going “off-planet,” imagining what it would look like if some enlightened aliens, in their travels throughout the universe, came upon our planet. Observing from a distance, they would naturally see all the various living beings who call planet earth home as related members of one larger organism—a single eco-system—who literally depend upon each other for survival. From this vantage point, I imagine, they would be utterly baffled at why human beings—the seemingly most intelligent species ever to appear on planet earth—are acting out their destructive impulses practically without restraint in every corner of the globe. Contemplating the state of humanity, I imagine these awakened beings wondering, “What in the world has gotten into them?”

I imagine these illumined aliens, in agreement with Merton, would quickly conclude that human beings had become afflicted with some sort of psychological illness, a disease of the mind and soul that has caused us to turn on ourselves in self-and-other destruction. Apparently in a “fallen state,” we have lost our way, become disoriented, and, in our confusion, become quite deranged. It is as if our collective madness is so overwhelming—and by now so familiar and so normalized—that most of us, its sufferers, have no idea how to even think about it, let alone how to deal with it. Not knowing what to do, many of us inwardly dissociate—which only exacerbates the collective madness—and in our fragmented and disempowered state go about our lives in a numbed-out, zombie-like trance, making the best of what seems to be a bad situation.

The question naturally arises: how would these enlightened beings conspire with us to help wake us up? We can only imagine. For our part, it seems essential that we ask questions such as: what is the nature of this madness, and how can it be consciously engaged so that humanity can get back on the right track?

Seen as an organism, there is a systemic psycho-spiritual disease that has infected the whole body politic of humanity. At present we are having an acute—and potentially deadly—inflammation of this illness. As with any disease, in order to cure the pathology that ails us we must come up with the right diagnosis. Under the present circumstances, it is a healthy response for us to have an appropriate level of alarm. If we aren’t “alarmed” at what is happening in our world, we are still sleeping.

Economy

It’s difficult to appreciate how our behavior might appear strange—let alone completely insane—to an impartial observer. But engaging in a “benign onlooker” thought experiment—in this case, through the imagined insights of enlightened aliens—affords us some much-needed perspective. Even from this vantage point, though, the collective madness that humanity is acting out is hard to fathom. It is truly as if the inmates are running the asylum.

The first thing these aliens might perceive is a single living organism in crisis. What makes life itself possible is that every cell and organ of a living organism plays a uniquely vital role to the life and health of the greater organism; each part works together as part of an integrated and interdependent whole system. Our planet and its biosphere is a seamlessly interconnected whole system that operates as a macro-organism, and yet its supposedly most intelligent species has set up a global system for managing its rich diversity of natural resources that would kill a living organism in no time if such a system were implemented within the individual bodies of any of its members. If the human body was organ-ized and operated in a similar way to the global economy—where certain parts of the system demand disproportionate and ever-increasing shares of the existing resources—the body would die in no time.

At the heart of this reality is the fact that the way the global economic system has been crafted primarily serves the interests of the very few. Machine-like, “the system” relentlessly, and increasingly, sucks, drains and redistributes wealth from the majority of the populace—who more and more become impoverished and practically enslaved—into the hands of the already unthinkably wealthy. The powers-that-be then use coercive power to not only deny people the means to make even a subsistence living, but even denies them the basic human right to life on massive scales. This system doesn’t just passively allow people to fall below the poverty line, it actively pushes them under, as if poor people are being intentionally “left behind.” The most powerful and successful financial institutions have taken on the form of parasitic enterprises that have attached themselves to governments and people around the world, upon which they shamelessly and ravenously engorge themselves. These illumined aliens, with their clairvoyant vision, would surely find it revealing that the ones who own the wealth are—like vampires—energetically “feeding” off of the ones who barely have enough to eat.

The evidence is overwhelming. The current global economic system has brought us to a point where an incredibly small minority of human beings own a grossly disproportionate percentage of the planet’s resources. According to recent figures, the 62 richest people on the planet have more wealth than the poorest half of the global population combined, and over time this imbalance is increasingly getting worse. This is globalization at work. Much of this rising inequality is a direct result of the fact that globalization is the process by which multinational corporations are taking over sovereign governments—of the 100 largest economies in the world, over half are corporations.

These challenging economic times we live in are simultaneously the times of the greatest profits in all of history for certain select corporate conglomerates. Those at the top of the economic pyramid then use this ever-increasing gap between the rich and the poor to further game the system—itself riddled with corruption—so as to protect their advantage even more. The United States government in particular, instead of being a “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” has instead become a plutocracy—a government “of the rich, by the rich, for the rich.” It should get our attention that such economic stratification into the have and have-nots historically plays a crucial role in the collapse of civilizations.

These aliens would recognize that earth’s current way of “doing business” is unsustainable. Instead of creating value and wealth for the good of all, the way business is done on planet earth is actually destroying the genuine wealth and health of the whole system, with people, communities and the environment considered to be nothing more than collateral damage—all for the benefit of a small minority. If humanity is viewed as a family, there is abuse of power being perpetrated within the family system for the simple reason that those in the positions of power can act with total impunity and, in a case of “moral insanity,” can—and do—literally get away with murder.

These benign aliens would find it revealing that such a large percentage of earth’s resources—including humanity’s intrinsic ingenuity—instead of being used to care for each other and enrich life, are being used to create more potent and deadly weapons of mass destruction. In other words, humanity’s divinely inspired genius is being channeled into ever-more efficient ways of murdering each other! We have become conditioned to accept this astonishing cruelty and destruction as normal. We spend trillions of dollars to sustain a state of endless war against God knows who, while at the same time innumerable of our fellow brothers and sisters are impoverished and dying of starvation every day. These spiritually awake beings would realize that the destruction that humanity is playing out in the world is an unmediated reflection of an imbalance deep within the collective human psyche.

From the meta-perspective of the enlightened aliens, the behind-the-scene financiers who on the surface are benefitting the most from this diabolical set-up are themselves merely puppets in the hands of some darker forces that are informing the whole enterprise. To use writer Matt Taibi’s infamous phrase, a “vampire squid” is running rampant and feasting on the living body of humanity. To quote eminent theologian David Ray Griffin, “It does seem that we are possessed by some demonic power that is leading us, trancelike, into self-destruction.” Similarly, the Bible points out that our fight is not against “flesh and blood” (i.e., human forces), bot rather, against “powers and principalities” (spiritual forces). These forces are not only acting themselves out in our world, but are simultaneously interfacing with and covertly operating through our own minds.

It is as if we have become possessed by a self-created Frankenstein monster that is running amok, wreaking untold havoc all over the planet. This Frankenstein monster has seemingly gained a quasi-life and autonomous will of its own, independent of its creator—us—who it holds in its thrall, as we are unable to escape from the out-of-control hell of our own making. In any case, it certainly seems as if there is a force that is hell-bent on stopping us—both individually and collectively as a species—from reaching our full creative potential.

We are at a severe “crisis” point in our world, which, medically speaking, always tells us that our sickness has reached a dangerous climax. Our species is suffering from what the great doctor of the soul C. G. Jung calls a “sickness of dissociation,” which is a state of fragmentation deep within the collective unconscious that has seemingly spilled outside of our skulls and is playing itself out en masse on the world stage. This primordial rupture, which is a form of trauma on a cosmic scale, has become the in-forming force behind human history itself, conditioning the experience of each individual, as well as our species as a whole. Seen as a whole person, it is as if the undivided wholeness of the universe has split into cosmic multiple sub-personalities who are dissociated from and seemingly separate from each other, desperately in need of recognizing their connection so as to come together and reintegrate. Our sickness of dissociation and the world crisis we are facing as a result can be seen, as Jung points out, as the labor pains of a new birth.

Wetiko

Author and environmental activist Derrick Jensen writes in his foreword to the classic book Columbus and Other Cannibals by Native American scholar Jack Forbes, that it is “the most important book ever written on one of the most important topics ever faced by human beings: why is the dominant culture so excruciatingly, relentlessly, insanely, genocidally, ecocidally, suicidally destructive?” Oftentimes, the most important point in finding a solution to a problem is asking the right question; Jensen’s question feels like the right question, a question literally demanding to be answered.

Forbes’ book beautifully elucidates the Native American idea of “wetiko psychosis,” which can be likened to a mind virus that has infected the human psyche.[1] Jung never tired of pointing out that the greatest danger which threatens humanity comes from the psyche. We are living with the very real possibility that millions—maybe even billions—of us can fall into our unconscious together, reinforcing each others’ madness in such a way that we become unwittingly complicit in our own self-destruction. An inner disease of the soul, wetiko flavors our perceptions by stealth and subterfuge so as to act itself out through us while simultaneously hiding itself from being seen. Being an illness that afflicts the psyche itself, wetiko—a term connoting the spirit of evil—is a psycho-spiritual disease of the soul, a disorder of consciousness existing deep within the collective unconscious of humanity that is playing out writ large on the world stage. Like a cannibal, those taken over by wetiko—also called “cannibal sickness”—consume the life force of others, both human and nonhuman, for private purpose or profit, and do so without giving back anything of real value from their own lives.

The idea of wetiko can be enormously helpful in creating a wider context that can assist us in getting a handle on the mass insanity that is playing out in our world today. Though using individuals as its instruments, wetiko—a “collective psychosis”—can’t replicate itself; it needs the unconscious masses for its genesis and proliferation on the world stage. Wetiko psychosis is highly contagious, spreading through the channel of our shared unconsciousness, rendering us oblivious to our own madness. This fluidly moving, nomadically wandering bug reciprocally reinforces and feeds off and into each of our unconscious blind spots, which is how it nonlocally propagates itself throughout the field. A psychic epidemic, wetiko is at the bottom, at the very root of the seemingly never-ending destruction we are wreaking upon ourselves, each other and the very biosphere we depend upon for our survival as a species.

Every wisdom tradition throughout history has been pointing at wetiko in its own unique way. The Gnostics (“the ones who know”), for example, were pointing at wetiko when they spoke of the “Archons,” who they thought of as “mind parasites” which had infiltrated the human mind. The Nag Hammadi text called The Apocryphon of John II describes these Archons, “They sought to overpower humanity in its psychological and perceptual functions…their triumph is in deception.” Wetiko/the Archons occlude us in such a way that our occlusion becomes self-perpetuating, the result being that we can’t even tell we are occluded. Wetiko bedazzles, bewitches, and bedevils consciousness so that we become blind to the underlying, assumed viewpoint through which we perceive, conjure up and give meaning to our experience of both the world and ourselves. An intrinsic challenge to our investigation of the wetiko virus, therefore, is that it is incarnating in and through the very psyche which itself is the means of our inquiry. In our encounter with wetiko, we find ourselves in a situation where we are confronted—practically face-to-face—with the unconscious.

As Jung has pointed out, when it is a question of mass psychosis, nothing but “new symbolic ideas,” i.e., novel, creative, redemptive, archetypal conceptions, brought up from the depths—which embrace, express and help to re-contextualize the emerging chaos and disorder—can save us from the impending catastrophe. This is to say that in light of our current world crisis, a new creative achievement has become a necessity. The concept of wetiko and all that it stands for is precisely such a “new symbolic idea.” What Plato calls “the eyes of the soul,” ideas have real power, as they are the means by which we see the world and creatively envision and give meaning to our lives.

Being a disease of the soul, we all potentially have wetiko, as it pervades and in-forms the underlying field of consciousness. Any one of us at any moment can fall into our unconscious and unwittingly become an instrument for the evil of wetiko to act itself out through us and incarnate in our world, which is a realization that cultivates humility while simultaneously serving as an inoculation against wetiko’s pernicious effects. If we see someone who seems to be taken over by wetiko and we think that they have the disease and we don’t, we have then fallen under the spell of the virus, as wetiko feeds on the inner, psychological process of shadow projection which underlies and informs our experience of separation, polarization and the paranoid fear—and terror—of “the other.”

Wetiko can be conceived of as a cancer of the psyche that slowly metastasizes, gradually subsuming all of the healthy parts of the psyche into itself to serve its sinister agenda. The personality then becomes one-sided, self-organizing an outer display of coherence around this pathogenic core, which masks the inner dysfunction, making it hard to recognize. In a psychic coup d’état, the wetiko bug can usurp and displace a person, who becomes its puppet and marionette. Like a parasite, the wetiko virus can take over and subvert the will of an animal more evolved than itself, enlisting that creature into serving its nefarious agenda. The psychological fact of being taken over by something “other” than ourselves finds expression in the belief in demons and their ability to possess humans, a belief found among all peoples from time immemorial.

Once the wetiko virus becomes sufficiently entrenched within the psyche, the prime directive coordinating a person’s behavior comes from the disease, as it is now the one in the driver’s seat. As it commandeers and colonizes the psyche—centralizing power and control in the process—wetiko eventually incorporates a seemingly autonomous regime within the greater body politic of the psyche. Once it gains a sufficient sovereignty, wetiko forms something like a totalitarian “shadow government” within the psyche which dictates to the ego. Being an archetypal, transpersonal and daemonic energy, wetiko can not only take over an individual, but also a group of people, a nation or even—potentially—an entire species.

Wetiko is especially unique, in that, though an inner disease of the soul, it is able to inform, give shape to and configure events in the outer world so as to synchronistically express—and reveal—itself. For example, as if the boundary has dissolved between the inner and the outer, the internal landscape of the wetikoized psyche is mirrored in the external world through the totalitarian-like “shadow government”—with its ever-increasing centralization of power and control—that has taken over our seeming democracy. Both within our psyche and in our alleged “democracy,” we are allowed our seeming freedom, but only so long as it doesn’t threaten the sovereignty and dominance of the “ruling” power (interestingly, the word “Archon,” a synonym for wetiko, means “ruler”).

Wetiko covertly works through the projective tendencies of the mind to distract us, keeping our attention directed outside of ourselves, thereby obstructing us from finding and utilizing the immense light of intrinsic awareness within, which would “kill” wetiko, rendering it impotent. The “Buddha” (which means one who has woken up to the dreamlike nature of reality) realized in his enlightenment that the solution to the human predicament could never be found externally, but had to be discovered within the very nature of one’s own mind. If we don’t realize that our current world crisis has its roots within, and is an expression of, the human psyche, we are doomed to unconsciously repeat it, continually re-creating endless destruction in more and more amplified form—as if we are having a recurring dream. Our nightmare will then be fated to continue with ever-alarming intensity until we receive its message.

Wetiko can easily trick and deceive us by materializing itself in, as, and through the medium of the outside world, which we then assume—as if entranced—is distinct from our psyche. Once the ever-increasing sociopolitical insanity plays itself out on the world stage, we have all the proof we need that the conflict is outside of ourselves. It then becomes nearly impossible to convince anyone that the source of the conflict is to be found within the psyche of every individual. The psyche has then become exteriorized, as an internal psychic conflict takes place by way of projection in the outside world in living (and dying) flesh and blood. The sponsor of the whole project(ion), the wetiko bug remains behind-the-scenes, invisible and unnoticed.

Wetiko subversively turns our “genius” for reality-creation against us in such a way that we literally become entranced by our God-given power to create our experience of both our world and ourselves so that it boomerangs against us, undermining our potential for individual and collective evolution. Strangely enough, people under the enchantment of wetiko become compulsively, even fanatically, attached to supporting a social or political agenda that oftentimes is diametrically opposed to serving their own best interests. This self-sabotaging behavior is an outer reflection of the inner state of being under the sway of —and unwittingly serving—the self-destructive wetiko parasite.

An aberration of the psyche, wetiko cannot be ultimately healed by merely bringing about external reforms (although such reforms are welcome and needed); it must be dealt with where it originates—within the human psyche of each individual. Wetiko can’t be “legislated” out of existence via political or social means, but can only be transformed within the individual, who, as Jung reminds us, is the real carrier of life.

To the extent we are unconsciously possessed by the spirit of wetiko, it is as if a psychic tapeworm or parasite has taken over our brain and tricked us, its host, into thinking we are feeding and empowering ourselves while we are actually nourishing the parasite. Wetiko is a virulent, psychic pathogen that insinuates thought-forms and beliefs into our mind which, when unconsciously enacted, feed it, and ultimately, like a fatal addiction, kill its host—us. Beyond informing our addictions, wetiko psychosis is itself the addictive process taking living form so as to take life.

Savaged by the ferocity of their unending hunger, people who are sufficiently infected by the wetiko virus, like the hungry ghosts of Buddhist cosmology, have become possessed by an insatiable craving that can never be filled. Not in possession of their true selves, they try to possess something outside of themselves to both escape from and fill the void within—the result is a futile and never-ending grasping. Attempting to secure a self that by its very nature is illusory and thus can never be secured, their appetites can never be quenched, just as an illusion can never be satisfied.

At the collective level, this perverse inner process is mirrored in the outer world by the consumer society in which we live, a culture that continually fans the flames of never-ending and mostly unnecessary desires, conditioning us to always want more. As if starving, we are in an endless feeding frenzy, trying to fill a bottomless spiritual void. In this regard, wetiko can be likened to a psychic eating disorder.

If the planet were seen as a single organism, and people seen as cells in the greater organism of the planet, it would be as if these cells had become cancerous or parasitic, and had turned on themselves, destroying the very organism of which they are a part. Wetiko can be compared to an autoimmune disease of the psyche that is getting collectively acted out, writ large on the world stage. In autoimmune deficiency syndrome, the immune system of the organism, in its attempt to protect itself against perceived attacks, attacks projected aspects of itself that falsely appear to be “other,” leading, ultimately, to its own self-destruction. Bewitched by its own projections—as if hypnotizing itself—the autoimmune system of the wetikoized psyche has fallen under its own self-created illusion and in its state of confusion and trauma, is tricked into creating the very problem it is trying to resolve. One glaring example of how this internal process is getting acted out in the external world: the way our nation is fighting terrorism is creating ever-more terrorists, as if in fighting a fire we are pouring fuel on it.

Once the wetiko virus takes root in our minds and incorporates itself in the world, it “manages our perception” by framing the terms of our inner and outer dialogue through determining the metaphors which dominate the accepted historical narrative, thus controlling the parameters of our conversation and debate. The consensually agreed-upon thought-forms and beliefs act as an intrinsic, built-in control system, defining the limits of what we imagine our possibilities are, as individuals, nations and a species. If we don’t consciously tap into and use the power of our creative imagination, others, particularly “the state,” will be more than happy to do so in our stead.

Just like vampires, full-blown wetikos have a thirst for the very thing they lack—the mystical essence of life—that is, the “blood” of our soul. Wetiko is a deceptive spirit that apes, mimes and imitates the real thing—called the Antimimon pneuma(literally, “counterfeiting spirit”) in the Apocryphon of John (Apoc. John III, 36:17). Impersonating us, if we identify with wetiko’s false version of ourselves, we have then identified with who we are not while simultaneously disconnecting from—and giving away—who we actually are. We then become a duplicate, a copy of ourselves, losing touch with the original.

Wetiko is an expert at imitation, but it has no creativity on its own. Once it “puts us on,” i.e., fooling us into buying into its version of who we are, it can then piggyback onto and plug into our intrinsic creativity, co-opting our creative imagination to serve its malevolent agenda. When we fall under wetiko’s spell, our life-force and God-given creativity become vampirically drained, as we are bled dry of what really counts.

This situation is a reflection of what happens when wetiko infects an organism (be it a person or species)—certain aspects within its bio-system become starved. In essence, when we are under the thrall of wetiko, the creative spirit within us, the very function which connects us to something beyond ourselves, becomes malnourished and impoverished. We then can’t even imagine things being any other way, let alone being able to actively imagine a way out of our dilemma. This points to the profound importance for each of us to intimately connect with the creative spirit living within us as a way of abolishing wetiko’s death sentence.

Many of the institutions in our world are embodiments of the formless wetiko virus taking on corporeal—and incorporated—form. The counterfeiting spirit of wetiko, a true imposter, imitates something but—in a process known as countermimicry—with the intention of making the copy, the fake version, serve a purpose counter to that of the original thing or idea. For example, the entity of the global economic system itself is a living symbol of wetiko disease “in business.” A “real” economy has to do with the production and distribution of goods and services—generating wealth in the process—while the virtual “bubble economy” that we living in is mainly an exercise in profiting from the manipulation of money—draining real wealth in the process. It is as if wetiko has managed to create a simulation of the real economy, replacing the real thing with a copycat version (what I call the “wetikonomy”) that has inverted its original purpose. This is a reflection in the outer world of the covert operations of wetiko within our minds.

Finding the Name

Our collective psychosis is invisible to us, manifesting itself both in the way we are looking at the world as well as the unspoken ways we have been conditioned—i.e., programmed—to not perceive. Wetiko has the power to induce—both individually and en masse—what writer Philip K. Dick calls a “negative hallucination,” i.e., instead of seeing what is not there, we cannot see what isthere. When we are afflicted with wetiko, we literally are unable to see what is right in front of our face. Wetiko is a form of psychic blindness that not only believes itself to be sighted, but believes it is more sighted than those who are actually clear-sighted. This looking away, this “conspiracy of denial” that is endemic to our culture is simultaneously both the cause and effect of wetiko.

Because wetiko is a psychic blindness, the cure for wetiko starts with seeing it—both seeing how it operates in the world and also tracking how it covertly operates within our own minds. In the medical model we describe the various pathogens that make us sick as cancers, bacilli, parasites, plagues, viruses, etc.. Due to the materialistic culture we live in, we are attached to the idea that for something to have “reality” it must be made of a material substance. The implication of this perspective is that if something is not physical it is not real, which disables our capacity to see wetiko. Though “immaterial,” wetiko is as real as we are.

We have to name something, however, before it can be seen, formally “discovered,” and brought into our shared collective cartography. To quote Jung, “For mankind it was always like a deliverance from a nightmare when the new name was found.” Mythologies and fairy tales the world over have been expressing this from time immemorial—finding the name of the offending demon takes away its power over us. This is why it is important to introduce the word “wetiko”—and the idea it represents—into our planetary dialogue.

Once we become more acquainted with the idea of wetiko and all that it entails, we can “spread the word”—creating a new meme in the process—thus conjuring up a living antigen to the heretofore unrecognized mind virus of wetiko. For nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come—wetiko is just such an idea, pregnant with new possibilities. Similar to how a vampire hates the light of day, however, the wetiko virus can’t stand to be illumined, for in seeing how wetiko covertly operates through our own consciousness or lack thereof, we not only take away its seeming autonomy and power over us, we empower ourselves.

Seeing the correlation between the inner and the outer—which is to say, seeing the dreamlike nature of reality—is the doorway through which we develop the requisite vision to see wetiko. In a dream, the inner psyche of the dreamer is expressed through, and is therefore not separate from, the outer forms of the dream. Similar to a dream at night, in the waking dream called life, events in the outer world symbolically—and synchronistically—express the inner psychological situation of the dreamer, which is all of us. We don’t have to try to create or fabricate this correlation between the inner and the outer; rather, we simply have to recognize it, for it is always already the case. Once we realize the dreamlike nature of our situation, we have started to develop the eyes to see wetiko, and hence, dispel its malevolent effects. We have then broken the seeming curse we have fallen under (please see my book Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil).

A Catalyst for Human Evolution

People taken over by wetiko—a word Jung never used, but in his writings he referred to the same idea by the phrase “totalitarian psychosis”—are often attracted to positions of power, where, as if compelled by forces beyond themselves, they can’t help but to create scorched earths as outer correlates to the inner ravaged landscape of their souls. Insanely enough, many of the people who are most taken over by wetiko are not in asylums, but are freely running around (and running) the world, oftentimes established in positions of great power to influence world events.

Fueled by the myopic vision that prioritizes the bottom line of corporate-driven profits above anything else, people motivated by the greed of the wetiko virus have little meta-awareness of the long-term and whole-system implications of their rapacious actions. All that the wetiko bug craves is to satisfy its narcissistic desires, experience orgasmic release, and glory in the seeming victory of short-term profits. Hiding behind the deceptive banner of “progress,” the Frankenstein monster of ever-enlarging empire, with its incessant, greed-driven need for endless growth, is like a runaway locomotive gaining speed, approaching the catastrophic event horizon of its inevitable crash. Meanwhile, this “progress” destroys people, families, communities and threatens our entire species, as we potentially trigger a “sixth mass-extinction event.”

At the heart of wetiko is our identification with and subsequent grasping onto an illusory “me,” a seemingly separate, independent self which doesn’t actually exist in the way we think it does. Clinging onto this false sense of self—a “lethal mirage” that becomes a self-perpetuating addictive process with a life of its own—our life-force then gets continually invested into protecting, defending and maintaining an illusion. Identifying with a self-constructed illusion whose originating conditions remain obscure is the stuff of which madness is made.

Reciprocally co-arising with the subjectively convincing and self-validating feeling of a separate “I” is the feeling of “mine,” the sense that this “I” can possess and own things. Modern humanity is, in Walt Whitman’s phrase, “demented with the mania of owning things.” We insanely devote so much of our time and energy—our precious human life—in trying to obtain material goods that we really don’t need and that bring no real benefit to us. Speaking of the white man, Chief Seattle said, “His appetite will devour the earth and leave behind only a desert.” Along similar lines, Sitting Bull said, “the love of possession is a disease with them.” This love of possessing things to fill a void that can never be filled is wetiko disease in a nutshell.

Wetiko is a collectively “dreamed up” phenomena in which we are all ultimately implicated. This means that—at least in theory if not in practice—we have the capacity to dream it differently. In other words, because we’ve created wetiko, we can “un-create” it. We don’t yet know how to do this, however, or we wouldn’t be continuing to create it in a way that is destroying us. Our unconscious process of dreaming up wetiko in all its full-blown destructiveness is the way we are teaching ourselves how to not destroy ourselves, which we evidently haven’t yet learned or we wouldn’t be destroying ourselves. The fact that we wouldn’t have realized how to not destroy ourselves without wetiko’s arrival on the scene is to say that the seeming curse of wetiko actually has a hidden blessing secretly encoded within it.

Wetiko is a quantum phenomenon, in that it contains superposed within it both the deepest darkest evil imaginable, while hidden within it is its own medicine. Encoded within wetiko’s pathology is not only its own cure but a precious gift, as it can—in true quantum style, “potentially”—introduce us to our own agency in calling forth our experience of both the world and ourselves. In other words, the wetiko epidemic is revealing to us our nature as empowered co-dreamers/creators of a universe that is more malleable, plastic and dreamlike than we have previously imagined.

Similar to how the unconscious compensates a one-sidedness in the psyche through the dreams it sends our way, the totalitarian psychosis/wetiko running rampant throughout the world today is the psyche’s way of revealing to us that we are forgetting the crucial role it plays in creating our experience. Marginalizing our own authorship and authority, we then dream up totalitarian forces to limit our freedom and create our experience for us. The “totalitarian psychosis” known as wetiko is, in Jung’s words, “forcing us to pay attention to the psyche and our abysmal unconsciousness of it. Never before has mankind as a whole experienced the numen of the psychological factor on so vast a scale.” Literally demanding that we pay attention to our own psyche, wetiko is thus the greatest catalyst for human evolution that our species has ever encountered.

Wetiko can literally destroy our species through wrenching poverty, endless war and catastrophic environmental destruction. Or, if confronted, named and understood, it can introduce us to the dreamlike nature of reality, which changes everything. Wetiko is a living revelation that only reveals its gifts to us, however, if we recognize what it is a reflection of within ourselves. How it manifests depends upon how we dream it. The choice is truly ours.

It is as if through the instrument of wetiko, a higher intelligence is revealing to us the wholeness of our totality through our darker side. This darkness is revealing light by contrast to itself. As we recognize that the evil we see playing out in the world is a reflection of our own darkness, we notice that, paradoxically, with our increase in consciousness the good and positive features within us come more to light too. As we more and more recognize the correlation between the outer world with what is going on deep within our soul, the enlightened aliens, who have been signaling to us the dreamlike nature of our situation by synchronistically arranging events in the world to reflect back what’s going on deep within us, hide behind the scenes, laughing.

Isms, Schisms and Post-Political Correctness

Posted on April 9, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By rahkyt

Source: MAR

I grew up in the 70s and came of age in the 80s. Pre-political correctness. Which means I’ve never been interested in glossing over what people really think with some false veneer of civility that obscures more than it reveals.

In my experience, that is dangerous.

I’ve experienced extreme forms of racism in my life. Have been called nigger countless times. Have been in physical fights in neighborhoods and on playgrounds. Heckled racially by entire classrooms in Oklahoma and Illinois in the 70s. Was on a diverse basketball team coming from a diverse, military school district and among the first live black people entire towns had ever seen in Washington State in HS. In the 80s.

I’ve been the first black American in university departments of Geography; subjected to drive-by racism, debates and arguments in the 90s during the fabled Flame Wars. As a result of these experiences, I’ve had to fight ignorance on the streets, in the classroom, boardroom and the academy, and I ain’t trying to pretend this world ain’t what it is in no way, shape or form.

I’d much rather someone hate to my face. Honestly.
Glaring at me through machines while working at an automobile factory, shooting at me with their index finger while racing me on a highway through Houston, giving me and my sometimes white girlfriends the evil eye in different cities and states in this beautiful, dangerous country of ours.

Don’t get me wrong.

All these folks were and are not just conservatives. There are liberal racists too, who prefer the “color-blindness” of white privilege and who couch their distaste in socioeconomic and cultural terms. Who hate rap and certain kinds of dances and call them degradations of culture and music, who hold stereotypes about and bemoan the situation of the inner-cities while proselytizing the prison-industrial complex and the welfare-state because “blacks and browns and reds can’t take care of themselves” and need a paternal, Eurocentric social system to take care of them.

There are many other examples of how ideological liberalism and conservatism are two sides of the same supremacy coin. The difference between them is in the intention. The intention to exclude or include.

Political correctness as an exercise in potentiality was high-minded in intention, low-brow in execution, demanding compliance and cooptation of individual experience and knowledge. While it’s aspirations toward a higher and more inclusive society during the era of the culture wars were laudable, the resentment and ignorance its cultural deployment bred are well in evidence now. It further exacerbated the divide between moderate whites, which has affected blacks and browns and reds in predictable ways.

Big “T” Truth always trumps little “t” truth.

Societal truths are subordinate to universal Truths. One such relevant comparison is the reality of the human race versus the perception of multiple races. Words are power. Rhetoric has created the reality we live in right now, where people believe in a black race, a white race, a yellow race. Where people generalize and stigmatize groups in order to maintain their political and economic supremacy.

This is a human problem, one of segregation rather than holism. A problem that cannot be “fixed” at the level of rhetoric. A problem that can be alleviated only through experiential learning. When dealing with the subconscious structures of societal and cultural indoctrination, surface attempts at changing the way that people act, talk and think can only be successful if people are open to learning in the first place. Religious and social stigmas based upon the inherent polarity of black versus white, good versus evil, affect too many at a level they are not aware of, which bounds thought, words and actions, constricting potentiality only to the limited known universe of responses.

So political correctness as a “soft” public policy was doomed from the start. Because people keep it real even when they don’t. Tone and silence speak as loudly as words. Body language, expressions and eyes reveal deeper communications.

We should rejoice in this new, collective choice to say what we mean and mean what we say. It makes things clearer and simpler. People no longer have to attempt to decode key words and dog whistle phrases. And ignorance can be confronted directly at its illogical roots.

Cognitive dissonance is an effective force for change and seeding the consciousness fields of our virtual and immediate physical environments should be the goal of our communication strategies. Telling and showing the truth, sharing it wIth those on the cusp of knowing, who will share it with their networks, remains a valid modality for effective engagement.

The Truth holds power.

It overcomes lies by virtual of its resonant and cohesive essence and compliance with logic and nature law. Resting in the Truth makes political correctness unnecessary. We should not bemoan the end of a false narrative that hid more than it revealed.

Claiming Truth is claiming the power of your convictions and this power is what Is rising now within multitudes intent upon continuing this Great Experiment and perfecting this union no matter what it takes.

Each word you write, each article and video you share is another volley in service of a diverse and inclusive America and world. Don’t back down, don’t give up and continue to shift hearts and minds. Every, single soul counts. Your loved ones, your family and friends are your responsibility.

We are indeed our sisters’ and brothers’ keepers. Because, in the end, we are all One. And what we think, say and do affects others far beyond our most fantastic speculations.

Seeing Wetiko: On Capitalism, Mind Viruses, and Antidotes for a World in Transition

Posted on April 2, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Alnoor Ladha and Martin Kirk

Source: Reality Sandwich

It’s delicate confronting these priests of the golden bull
They preach from the pulpit of the bottom line
Their minds rustle with million dollar bills
You say Silver burns a hole in your pocket
And Gold burns a hole in your soul
Well, uranium burns a hole in forever
It just gets out of control.
– Buffy Sainte-Marie, “The Priests of the Golden Bull”1

What if we told you that humanity is being driven to the brink of extinction by an illness? That all the poverty, the climate devastation, the perpetual war, and consumption fetishism we see all around us have roots in a mass psychological infection? What if we went on to say that this infection is not just highly communicable but also self-replicating, according to the laws of cultural evolution, and that it remains so clandestine in our psyches that most hosts will, as a condition of their infected state, vehemently deny that they are infected? What if we then told you that this ‘mind virus’ can be described as a form of cannibalism. Yes, cannibalism. Not necessarily in the literal flesh-eating sense but rather the idea of consuming others—human and non-human—as a means of securing personal wealth and supremacy.

You may dismiss this line of thinking as New Age woo-woo or, worse, a lefty conspiracy theory. But this approach of viewing the transmission of ideas as a key determinant of the emergent reality is increasingly validated by various branches of science, including evolutionary theory, quantum physics, cognitive linguistics, and epigenetics.

The history of this infection is long, strange, and dark. But it leads to hope.

Viruses of the Mind

The New World fell not to a sword but to a meme.
~ Daniel Quinn²

One of the most well-accepted scientific theories that helps explain the power of idea-spreading is memetics.

Memes are to culture what genes are to biology: the base unit of evolution. The term was originally coined by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. Dawkins writes, “I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged . . . It is still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate which leaves the old gene panting far behind.” He goes on, “Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain, via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.”³

One of the high priests of rationalism, the scientific method, and atheism, is also the father of the meme of ‘memes.’ However, like all memes or ideas, there can be no ownership in a traditional sense, only the entanglement that quantum physics reminds us characterizes our intra-actions.⁴

Of course, similar notions of how ideas move between us have been around in Western traditions for centuries. Plato was the first to fully articulate this through his Theory of Forms, which argues that non-physical forms—i.e., Ideas—represent the perfect reality from which material reality is derived.

Modern articulations of the Theory of Forms can be seen in Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s idea of the Noosphere (the sphere of human thought) and Carl Jung’s Collective Unconscious, where structures of the unconscious are shared among beings of the same species. For Jung, the idea of the marauding cannibal would first be an archetype that manifests in the material world through the actions of those who channel or embody it.

For those who prefer their science more empirical, the growing field of epigenetics provides some intellectual concrete. Epigenetics studies changes in organisms caused by modification of gene expression rather than any physical alteration of the gene itself. In other words, how traits vary from generation to generation is not solely a question of material biology but is partly determined by environmental and contextual factors that affected our ancestors.⁵

The Wetiko Virus

We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, and the winding streams with tangled growth as “wild.” Only to the White man was nature a “wilderness” and only to him was the land infested by “wild” animals and “savage” people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery. Not until the hairy man from the east came and with brutal frenzy heaped injustices upon us and the families we loved was it “wild” for us.
~ Luther Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle⁶

Many spiritual traditions, including Buddhism, Sufism (the mystical branch of Islam), Taoism, Gnosticism, as well as many Indigenous cultures, have long understood the mind-based nature of creation. These worldviews have at their core a recognition of the power of thought-forms to determine the course of physical events.

Various First Nations traditions of North America have specific and long established lore relating to cannibalism and a term for the thought-form that causes it: wetiko. We believe understanding this offers a powerful way of understanding the deepest roots of our current global polycrisis.

Wetiko is an Algonquin word for a cannibalistic spirit that is driven by greed, excess, and selfish consumption (in Ojibwa it is windigo, wintiko in Powhatan). It deludes its host into believing that cannibalizing the life-force of others (others in the broad sense, including animals and other forms of Gaian life) is a logical and morally upright way to live.

Wetiko short-circuits the individual’s ability to see itself as an enmeshed and interdependent part of a balanced environment and raises the self-serving ego to supremacy. It is this false separation of self from nature that makes this cannibalism, rather than simple murder. It allows—indeed commands—the infected entity to consume far more than it needs in a blind, murderous daze of self-aggrandizement. Author Paul Levy, in an attempt to find language accessible for Western audiences, describes it as ‘malignant egophrenia’—the ego unchained from reason and limits, acting with the malevolent logic of the cancer cell. We will use the term wetiko as it is the original, and reminds us of the wisdom to be found in Indigenous cultures, for those who have the ears to hear.

Wetiko can describe both the infection and the body infected; a person can be infected by wetiko or, in cases where the infection is very advanced, can personify the disease: ‘a wetiko.’ This holds true for cultures and systems; all can be described as being wetiko if they routinely manifest these traits.

In his now classic book Columbus and Other Cannibals, Native American historian Jack D. Forbes describes how there was a commonly-held belief among many Indigenous communities that the European colonialists were so chronically and uniformly infected with wetiko that it must be a defining characteristic of the culture from which they came. Examining the history of these cultures, Forbes laments, “Tragically, the history of the world for the past 2,000 years is, in great part, the story of the epidemiology of the wetiko disease.”⁷

We would presumably all agree that behavior of the European colonialists in North America can be described as cannibalistic. Their drive for conquest and material accumulation was a violent act of consumption. The engine of the invading culture suckedin lives and resources of millions of others and turned them into wealth and power for themselves. The figures are still disputed, but it is safe to place the numbers killed in the tens of millions, certainly one of the most brutal genocides in history. And the impact on non-human life was equally vast. Moreover, it was all done with a moral certainty that all destruction was justified in the name of ‘progress’ and ‘civilization.’

This framing belies the extent of the wetiko infection in the invader culture. So blinded were they by self-referential ambition that they could not see other life as being as important as their own. They could not see past ideological blinders to the intrinsic value of life or the interdependent nature of all things, despite this being the dominant perspective of the Indigenous populations they encountered. Their ability to see and know in ways different from their own was, it seems, amputated.

This is not an anti-European rant. This is the description of a disease whose vector was determined by deep patterns of history, including those that empowered Europeans to drive ‘global exploration’ as certain technologies emerged.

The wetiko meme has almost certainly existed in individuals since the dawn of humanity. It is, after all, a sickness that lives through and is born from the human psyche. But the origin of wetiko cultures is more identifiable.

Memes can spread at the speed of thought but they usually require generations to change the core characteristics of cultures. What we can say is that the fingerprints of wetiko-like beliefs can be traced at least as far back as the Neolithic revolution, when humans in the Fertile Crescent first learned to dominate their environment by what author Daniel Quinn calls ‘totalitarian agriculture’ — i.e., settled agricultural practices that produce more food than is strictly needed for the population, and that see the destruction of any living entity that gets in the way of that (over-)production—be it other humans, ‘pests’ or landscaping—as not only legitimate but moral.

This early form of wetiko-logic received an amplifying power of indescribable magnitude with the arrival of Christianity. “Let us make mankind . . . rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground,” said an authority no less than God in Genesis 1:26. After 8,000 years of totalitarian agriculture spreading slowly across the region, it is perhaps not surprising that the logic finds voice in the holy texts that emerged there. Regardless, it was driven across Europe at the point of Roman swords in the two hundred years after Christ’s death. It is no coincidence that, in order for Christianity to become dominant, the existing pagan belief-system, with its understanding of humanity’s place within rather than above nature, had to be all but annihilated.⁸

The point is that the epidemiology of wetiko has left clear indicators of its lineage. And although it cannot be pathologized along geographic or racial lines, the cultural strain we know today certainly has many of its deepest roots in Europe. It was, after all, European projects—from the Enlightenment to the Industrial Revolution, to colonialism, imperialism, and slavery—that developed the technology that opened up the channels that facilitated the spread of wetiko culture all around the world. In this way, we are all heirs and inheritors of wetiko colonialism.

We are all host carriers of wetiko now.

Wetiko Capitalism: Removing the Veils of Context

I don’t know who discovered water, but I can tell you it wasn’t a fish.
~ Attributed to Marshall McLuhan

When Western anthropologists first started to study wetiko, they believed it to be only a disease of the individual and a literal form of flesh-eating cannibalism.⁹ On both counts, as discussed, their understanding was, if not wrong, certainly limited. They did, however, accurately isolate two traits that are relevant for thinking about cultures: (1) the initial act, even when driven by necessity, creates a residual, unnatural desire for more; and (2) the host carrier, which they called the ‘victim,’ ended up with an ‘icy heart’— i.e., their ability for empathy and compassion was amputated.

The reader can probably already sense from the two traits mentioned above the wetiko nature of modern capitalism. Its insatiable hunger for finite resources; its disregard for the pain of groups and cultures it consumes; its belief in consumption as savior; its overriding obsession with its own material growth; and its viral spread across the surface of the planet. It is wholly accurate to describe neoliberal capitalism as cannibalizing life on this planet. It is not the only truth—capitalism has also facilitated an explosion of human life and ingenuity—but when taken as a whole, capitalism is certainly eating through the life-force of this planet in service of its own growth.

Of course, capitalism is a human conception and so we can also say that we are phenomenal hosts of the wetiko mind virus. To understand what makes us such, it is useful to consider a couple of the traits that guide the evolution of human cultures.

We have decades of evidence from social science describing just what highly contextual beings we are. Almost all aspects of our behavior, including our moral judgments and limits, are significantly shaped in response to the cultural signifiers that surround us. The Good Samaritan studies, for example, show that even when people are primed with the idea of altruism, they will walk by others in need when they are in a rush or some other contextual variable changes.¹⁰ And the infamous Stanley Milgram experiments show how a large majority of people are capable of shocking another human to a point they know can cause death simply because an authority figure in a white lab coat insists they do so.¹¹

We really are products of our environment, and so it should be taken as inevitable that those who live in a wetiko culture will manifest, to one degree or other, wetiko beliefs and behaviors.

Looking through the broader contextual lens, we must also account for the self-perpetuating nature of complex systems. Any living network that becomes sufficiently complex will become self-organizing, and from that point on will demonstrate an instinct to survive. In practical terms, this means that it will distribute its resources to support behavior that best mimics its own logic and ensures its survival.¹²

In other words, any system that is sufficiently infected by wetiko logic will reward cannibalistic behavior. Or, in Jack Forbes’ evocative language, “Those who squirm upwards [in a wetiko system] are, or become, wetiko, and they only perpetuate the system of corruption or oppression. Thus the communist leaders in the Soviet Union under Stalin were at least as vicious, deceitful and exploitative as their czarist predecessors. They obtained ‘power’ without changing their wetiko culture.”¹³

This ensures that the essential logic of cultures spreads down through generations as well as across them. And it explains why they self-organize resources to maintain a high degree of continuity in distributions of power, when those distributions efficiently serve their survival and growth. When this continuity is interrupted or broken, revolutions occur and the system is put under threat.

However, as the above quote suggests, the disruption must happen at the right level. Merely trading one wetiko for another at the top of an otherwise unchanged wetiko infrastructure (as in the case of Stalin replacing the czars or, more contemporarily, Obama replacing Bush) is largely pointless. At best, it might result in the softening of the cruelest edges of a wetiko machine. At worse, it does nothing except distract us from seeing the true infection.

The question, then, for anyone interested in excising the wetiko infection from a culture is, where is it? In one respect, because it is a psychic phenomenon that lives in potential in all of us, it is non-local. But this, though ultimately important to understand, is not the whole truth. It is also true that there is a conceptual place where the most powerful wetiko logic is held, and that, at least in theory, makes it vulnerable.

In the same way that a colony of bees will instinctively house its queen in the deepest chambers of the hive, so a complex adaptive system buries its most important operating logic furthest from the forces that can challenge them. This means two things: first, it means siting the logic in the deep rules that govern the whole. Not just this national economy or that, this government or that, but the mother system—the global operating system. And second, it means making these rules feel as intractable and inevitable as possible.

So what is this deep logic of the global operating system?

It comes in two parts. First, there is the ultimate purpose, which we might call the Prime Directive, which is to increase capital.

We often dress this up in a narrative that says capital generation is not the end but the means, the engine of progress. This makes the idea of dethroning it feel dangerous and even contrary to common sense. But the truth is, we have created a system that artificially treats money as sacred. At this point in capitalism’s history, life is controlled by, more than it controls, the forces of capital. The clue is really in the name. But if you need further proof, look no further than how we define and measure progress: GDP. More on that below.

Then, there is the logic for how we, the living components of this system, should behave, which we would summarize with the following epithet:

Selfishness is rational and rationality is everything; therefore selfishness is everything.¹⁴

This dictates that if we all prioritize ourselves and maximize our own material wealth, an invisible hand (ah, what a seductive meme!) will create an equilibrium state and life everywhere will be made better. We are pitted against each other in a form of distributed fascism where we cocoon ourselves in the immediate problems of our own circumstances and consume what we can. We then couch this behavior in the benign language of family matters, national interests, job creation, GDP growth, and other upstanding endeavors.

Put these two parts of the puzzle together and it’s easy to see why the banker who generates excess capital receives vast rewards and is labelled ‘productive’ and ‘successful,’ almost regardless of the damage s/he causes. Those who are less ‘successful’ at producing excess capital, meanwhile, are rewarded far less, regardless of the life-affirming good they may be doing. Nurses, mothers, teachers, journalists, activists, scientists—all receive far less reward because they are less efficient at obeying the Prime Directive and may even be countermanding the ‘self-interest’ operating principle. And as for those who are actually poor—well, they are effortlessly labelled not just as practical but also moral failures.

This infection is so far advanced that the system now requires exponential capital growth. The World Bank tells us that we have to grow the global economy by at least 3 percent per year to avoid recession.¹⁵ Let’s think about what this means. Global GDP in 2014 (the last full year of data) was roughly USD $78 trillion.¹⁶ We grew that pie by 2.4% in 2015, which resulted in the commodification and subsequent consumption of roughly another $2 trillion in human labor and natural resources. That’s roughly the size of the entire global economy in 1970. It took us from the dawn of civilization to 1970 to reach $2 trillion in global GDP, and now we need that just in the differential so the entire house of cards doesn’t crumble. In order to achieve this rate of growth year-on-year, we are destroying our planet, ensuring mass species extinction, and displacing millions of our brothers and sisters (who we commonly refer to as ‘poor people’) from around the world.

So when people tell us that the market knows best, or technology will save us, or philanthrocapitalism will redistribute opportunities (pace Bill Gates), we have to understand that all of these seemingly common sense truisms are embedded in a broader operating system, a wetikonomy, with all that that means. And the more they are presented as ‘unchangeable,’ the more often we’re told, ‘there is no alternative,’ the more we should question. There is actually a beautiful irony in the fact that, when we know what we’re up against, such statements are our signposts for where to look.

It is not that we are against markets, technology, or philanthropy — they can all be wonderful, in the right context—but we are against how they are being used as alibis to excuse the insanity of the wetiko paradigm that they are inseparable from. We are reminded of Jack Forbes’ heavy words; “It is not logical to allow the wetikos to carry out their evil acts and then to accept their assessment of the nature of human life. For after all, the wetiko possess a bias created by their own evil lives, by their own amoral or immoral behavior. And too, if I am correct, they were, and are, also insane.”¹⁷

Information Tribalism, starring Terence McKenna, Marshall McLuhan and Alan Watts.

Seeing Wetiko: Antidote Logic

Launch your meme boldly and see if it will replicate—just like genes replicate, and infect, and move into the organism of society. And, believing as I do, that society operates on a kind of biological economy, then I believe these memes are the key to societal evolution. But unless the memes are released to play the game, there is no progress.
~ Terence McKenna, Memes, Drugs and Community¹⁸

You might just be a black Bill Gates in the making.
~ Beyoncé, Formation¹⁹

A key lesson of meme theory is that when we are conscious of the memetic viruses we are less likely to adhere to them blindly. Conscious awareness is like sunlight through the cracks of a window.

Thus, one of the starting points for healing is the simple act of ‘seeing wetiko’ in ourselves, in others, and in our cultural infrastructure. And once we see, we can name, which is critical because words and language are a central battleground. To quote McKenna again:

The world is not made of quarks, electromagnetic wave packets, or the thoughts of God. The world is made of language.. Earth is a place where language has literally become alive. Language has invested matter; it is replicating and defining and building itself. And it is in us.²⁰

His last line is critical for exploring our own agency in the replication of wetiko. We are all entangled in the unfolding of reality that is happening both to and through us. In place of traditional certainties and linear cause-and-effect logic, we can recast ourselves “as spontaneously responsive, moving, embodied living beings—within a reality of continuously intermingling, flowing lines or strands of unfolding, agential activity, in which nothing (no thing) exists in separation from anything else, a reality within which we are immersed both as participant agencies and to which we also owe significant aspects of our own natures.”²¹

If wetiko exists, it is because it exists within us. It is also entangled with the broader superstructure, relationships, and choice architecture that we are confronted with within a neoliberal system on the brink of collapse.

Forbes reminds us that we cannot ‘fight’ wetiko in any traditional sense: “One of the tragic characteristics of the wetiko psychosis is that it spreads partly by resistance to it. That is, those who try to fight wetiko sometimes, in order to survive, adopt wetiko values.

Thus, when they ‘win,’ they lose.”²² A lot of reform-based initiatives, from the sharing economy to micro-lending have succumbed to the co-optation and retaliation of wetiko capitalism.

However, once we are in the mode of seeing wetiko, we can hack the cultural systems that perpetuate its logic. It is not difficult to figure out where to start. Following the money usually leads us to the core pillars of wetiko machinery. Those of us that are within these structures, from the corporate media to philanthropy to banking to the UN, have access to the heart of the wetiko monster.

For those of us on the outside, we can organize our lives in radically new ways to undermine wetiko structures. The simple act of gifting undermines the neoliberal logic of commodification and extraction. Using alternative currencies undermines the debt–based money system. De-schooling and alternative education models can help decolonize and de-wetikoize the mind. Helping to create alternative communities outside the capitalist system supports the infrastructure for transition. And direct activism such as debt resistance can weaken the wetiko virus, if done with the right intention and state of consciousness.

By contracting new relationships with others, with Nature, and with ourselves, we can build a new complex of entanglements and thought-forms that are fused with post-wetiko, post-capitalist values.

We have to simultaneously go within ourselves and the deep recesses of our own psyches while changing the structure of the system around us. Holding a structural perspective and an unapologetic critique of modern capitalism—i.e., holding a constellational worldview that sees all oppression as connected—serves our ability to see the alternatives, and indeed, all of us, as intricately connected.

Plato believed that ideas are the ‘eyes of the soul.’ Now that the veils obscuring wetiko are starting to be lifted, let us give birth to, and become, living antigens, embracing the polyculture of ideas that are challenging the monoculture of wetiko capitalism. Let us be pollinators of new memetic hives built on altruism, empathy, inter-connectedness, reverence, communality, and solidarity, defying the subject-object dualities of Cartesian/Newtonian/Enlightenment logic. Let us reclaim our birth right as sovereign entities, free of deluded beliefs in market systems, invisible hands, righteous greed, chosen ones, branded paraphernalia, techno utopianism and even the self-salvation of the New Age. Let us dance with thought-forms through a deeper understanding of ethics, knowing, and being,²³ and the intimate awareness that our individual minds and bodies are a part of the collective battleground for the soul of humanity, and indeed, life on this planet. And let us re-embrace the ancient futures of our Indigenous ancestors that represent the only continuous line of living in symbiosis with Mother Nature. The dissolution of wetiko will be as much about remembering as it will be about creation.

Endnotes

1 These are lyrics from a song entitled “The Priests of the Golden Bull” by the Na-
tive Canadian singer/songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie from her 1992 album entitled Coincidence and Likely Stories. The authors believe this was their first encounter
with the memetic mind virus of wendigo (a version of wetiko). This will all make sense at the end of this article.
2 Quinn, D. Beyond civilization: Humanity’s next great adventure. Broadway Books (2008), p. 50.
3 Dawkins, R. The selfish gene. Oxford University Press (1990).
4 ‘Intra-action’ is a neologism created by Karan Barad and described in her book, Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007). Barad writes about intra-action, rather than interaction, to illustrate how entanglement precedes thingness. In other words, there are no things as such, just relationships—and these ongoing relational dynamics are co-responsible for how things emerge.
5 Recent research, for example, has shown how the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors have different stress hormone profiles than those from otherwise very similar circumstances but whose grandparents did not suffer through the Holocaust. Rodriguez, T. “Descendants of Holocaust survivors have altered stress hormones,” Scientific American (March 2015), accessed at: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/descendants-of-holocaust-survivors-have-altered-stress-hormones/
6 Luther Standing Bear. Land of the spotted eagle. Bison Books (2006).
7 Forbes, Jack D. Columbus and other cannibals: The wetiko disease of exploitation, imperialism and terrorism. Seven Stories Press (2008), p.46.
8 See Not in His Image (2006) by John Lamb Lash for a comprehensive account of the systematic annihilation of paganism by the new Christian religion.
9 Cooper, J.M. “The Cree Witiko Psychosis” in Primitive Man, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Jan., 1933), pp. 20-24: The George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research.
10 Darley, J. M., and Batson, C.D. “From Jerusalem to Jericho: A study of situational and dispositional variables in Helping Behavior.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1973), Vol. 27, Number 1, pp. 100-108.
11 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment.
12 Capra F, Luisi P, A systems view of life: A unifying vision. Cambridge (2014), Chapter 8.
13 Forbes, Jack D. Columbus and other cannibals: The wetiko disease of exploitation, imperialism and terrorism. Seven Stories Press (2008), p.46.
14 A version of this argument was originally published on Occupy.com by the authors in a two-part essay entitled “Capitalism is Just a Story and Other Dangerous Thoughts.” See more at: http://www.occupy.com/article/capitalism-just-story-and-other-dangerous-thoughts-part-i#sthash.INKCFdNs.dpuf.
15 For example, see this forecast report by the World Bank: http://www.worldbank.org/content/dam/Worldbank/GEP/GEP2016a/Global-Economic-Prospects-January-2016-Global-Outlook.pdf
16 See http://databank.worldbank.org/data/download/GDP.pdf
17 Forbes, Jack D. Columbus and other cannibals: The wetiko disease of exploitation, imperialism and terrorism. Seven Stories Press (2008), p.37.
18 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NO6-1sqQme0
19 These lyrics are from Beyoncé’s song “Formation,” which was originally debuted at the 2015 Super Bowl. For a critical analysis, see Dianca London’s article entitled Beyoncé’s capitalism, masquerading as radical change.
20 McKenna, T. The archaic revival: Speculations on psychedelic mushrooms, the Amazon, virtual reality, UFOs, evolution, shamanism, the rebirth of the goddess, and the end of history. Harper Collins (1992).
21 John Shotter, “Agential realism, social constructionism, and our living relations to our surroundings: Sensing similarities rather than seeing patterns’’ Theory and Psychology, 2014.
22 Forbes, Jack D. Columbus and other cannibals: The wetiko disease of exploitation, imperialism and terrorism. Seven Stories Press (2008), p.61.
23 Karan Barad talks about the confluence of ethics, knowing, and being as an ‘onto-ethico-politico-epistemology.’ Ontology refers to what is in the world. Epistemology is about how we know what is in the world. And ethics is how we should engage in the world. These are not separate, but emerge materially in an ongoing dynamic. The nature of reality and the nature of knowledge are entangled—not fixed or final or determinate— and thus cannot be divorced from power and what we find valuable or just.

Bureaucratic Insanity is Yours to Enjoy

Posted on March 24, 2017 by Reid Mukai

Reposted below is Dmitry Orlov’s review of the new publication from Club Orlov Press: “Bureaucratic Insanity: The American Bureaucrat’s Descent into Madness” by Sean J. Kerrigan.

By Dmitry Orlov

Source: ClubOrlov

In contemporary United States a child can be charged with battery for throwing a piece of candy at a schoolfriend. Students can be placed in solitary confinement for cutting class. Adults aren’t much better off: in 2011 the Supreme Court decided in 2011 that anyone the police arrest, even for an offense as minor as an unpaid traffic ticket, can be strip-searched. These acts of official violence are just the tip of the iceberg in our society.

The number of rules and laws to which Americans, mostly unbeknownst to them, are subject, is hilariously excessive. But what makes this comedy unbearable is that these rules and laws are often enforced with an overabundance of self-righteous venom. Increasingly, contemporary American bureaucrats—be they police, teachers or government officials—are obsessed with following strict rules and mercilessly punishing all those who fail to comply (unless they are very rich or politically connected).

In so doing, these bureaucrats have become so liberated from the constraints of common sense that the situation has gone far beyond parody and is now a full-blown farce. Consider this recent news story involving a Virginia sixth-grader, the son of two schoolteachers and a member of the school’s program for gifted students. The boy was targeted by school officials after they found a leaf, probably a maple leaf, in his backpack. Someone suspected it to be marijuana. The leaf in question was not marijuana (as confirmed by repeated lab tests). End of story, wouldn’t you think?

Not at all! The 11-year-old was expelled and charged with marijuana possession in juvenile court. These charges were eventually dropped. He was then forced to enroll in an alternative school away from his friends, where he is subjected to twice-daily searches for drugs and periodic evaluation for substance abuse problems—all of this for possession of a maple leaf.

“It doesn’t matter if your son or daughter brings a real pot leaf to school, or if he brings something that looks like a pot leaf—okra, tomato, maple, buckeye, etc. If your kid calls it marijuana as a joke, or if another kid thinks it might be marijuana, that’s grounds for expulsion,” the Washington Post cheerfully reassures us.

A reasonable school official would recognize the difference between a technical violation caused by an oversight and a conscious attempt to smuggle drugs into the school. But school officials were intent on ignoring their own better sense, instead favoring harsh punishments.

In his new book, Bureaucratic Insanity: The American Bureaucrat’s Descent into Madness, Sean Kerrigan documents dozens of eyebrow-raising examples in which America’s rule-enforcers perversely revel in handing out absurd and unfair punishments for minor infractions. They demand total and complete submission, driven by a perverse compulsion to “put us in our place” and to “teach us a lesson.” They mercilessly punish even the most inconsequential transgressions in order to maximize our terror and humiliation.

When Sean first began following this story several years ago, he became mesmerized by this bizarre carnival of unreason. “Where is all this pent-up rage coming from?” he wondered, “and why is it being directed toward the weakest and most vulnerable members of society?” And then news stories like those mentioned above grew more and more common. Eventually, he started compiling a list of the most egregious abuses, trying to detect patterns, searching for some explanation for why your average garden-variety bureaucrat has morphed into a monster and has started to take sadistic pleasure in the suffering of innocent people.

Some people might argue that this kind of behavior is the result of political correctness gone amok. Others point to the irrational fear of terrorism and mass shootings. Yet others might think that it has to do with the bureaucrats’ fear of losing their jobs—merely for failing to comply with the exact letter of some rule. While there may be some truth to each of these explanations, they are far from adequate. Many of these bureaucratic abuses have nothing to do with political constraints on free speech, or with guns or terrorism, and in most cases the bureaucrats have the power to minimize harm, but instead they choose to maximize it.

In looking closer at each individual instance, it became clear that most of the offending bureaucrats weren’t even attempting to use their judgment but were mindlessly following written rules. Even in the most nurturing and humanistic professions—teachers and physicians—their practitioners have been robotized to such an extent that they now perform a very narrow range of actions. Thanks to all the progress in IT, their work is now quite detached from physical reality. Much of their work now consists of monotonously, mindlessly pounding at the computer keyboard. Consequently, a large portion of their waking lives has taken on an ethereal, pointless quality. Even teachers, who once had a relatively free reign in forming the minds of the next generation, are now forced to behave like machines, teaching to standardized tests and working a grueling average of 53 hours a week.

The psychological effects of this pressure have been profound. Minus the opportunities to make their own decisions and to see those positive effects of their efforts, their work has become personally meaningless, alienating, depersonalizing and psychologically damaging. As a result of this damage, American bureaucrats, although they may look like mild-mannered professionals, have become prone to sudden bouts of aggressive, sadistic behavior. They are unable to act out their repressed rage in any socially acceptable way other than by doling out punishments, fines, rejections, expulsions and other forms of objective, systemic violence.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and rest assured that this is all being done for our own good. The purpose of all of these rules and laws, from the perspective of the American system of governance, is to maximize control over everything that can be controlled and to micromanage every possible detail of our lives—in order to make them better! From student testing all the way to global trade, those in leadership positions are trying to centralize as much authority as possible in order to maximize efficiency, profit, American power… while minimizing our dignity, well-being and happiness. Oops!

In his book Bureaucratic Insanity, Sean traces the development of this trend from the early years of the industrial revolution to the modern day, from its initial appearance in factory life and in the military, to it later metastasizing to the office, and now taking over America’s schools. He argues persuasively, based on a careful and thorough review of literature in history, philosophy, psychology, anthropology and social criticism, that the average American bureaucrat is literally, clinically insane. The average American bureaucrat has a warped perception of reality and an intense, repressed self-hatred. Their only way to vent their rage is by punishing others using bureaucratic methods. They demand absolute conformity because it is their only way to give their meaningless lives some semblance of meaning. They suppress all thoughts that might lead them to discover the true nature of their condition, because that would cause them to spiral down into outright schizophrenia.

The book concludes with an assessment of what we can do to insulate ourselves from this seemingly unstoppable trend, and of how we can reinvigorate our lives by giving it real meaning.

‘Conspiracy Theories’ and Clandestine Politics

Posted on March 14, 2017 by Reid Mukai

MarkLombardi

By Jeffrey M. Bale

Source: Lobster Magazine

Very few notions generate as much intellectual resistance, hostility, and derision within academic circles as a belief in the historical importance or efficacy of political conspiracies. Even when this belief is expressed in a very cautious manner, limited to specific and restricted contexts, supported by reliable evidence, and hedged about with all sort of qualifications, it still manages to transcend the boundaries of acceptable discourse and violate unspoken academic taboos. The idea that particular groups of people meet together secretly or in private to plan various courses of action, and that some of these plans actually exert a significant influence on particular historical developments, is typically rejected out of hand and assumed to be the figment of a paranoid imagination. The mere mention of the word ‘conspiracy’ seems to set off an internal alarm bell which causes scholars to close their minds in order to avoid cognitive dissonance and possible unpleasantness, since the popular image of conspiracy both fundamentally challenges the conception most educated, sophisticated people have about how the world operates and reminds them of the horrible persecutions that absurd and unfounded conspiracy theories have precipitated or sustained in the past. So strong is this prejudice among academics that even when clear evidence of a plot is inadvertently discovered in the course of their own research, they frequently feel compelled, either out of a sense of embarrassment or a desire to defuse anticipated criticism, to preface their account of it by ostentatiously disclaiming a belief in conspiracies. (1)

They then often attempt to downplay the significance of the plotting they have uncovered. To do otherwise, that is, to make a serious effort to incorporate the documented activities of conspiratorial groups into their general political or historical analyses, would force them to stretch their mental horizons beyond customary bounds and, not infrequently, delve even further into certain sordid and politically sensitive topics. Most academic researchers clearly prefer to ignore the implications of conspiratorial politics altogether rather than deal directly with such controversial matters.

A number of complex cultural and historical factors contribute to this reflexive and unwarranted reaction, but it is perhaps most often the direct result of a simple failure to distinguish between ‘conspiracy theories’ in the strict sense of the term, which are essentially elaborate fables even though they may well be based upon a kernel of truth, and the activities of actual clandestine and covert political groups, which are a common feature of modern politics. For this and other reasons, serious research into genuine conspiratorial networks has at worst been suppressed, as a rule been discouraged, and at best been looked upon with condescension by the academic community. (2) An entire dimension of political history and contemporary politics has thus been consistently neglected. (3)

For decades scholars interested in politics have directed their attention toward explicating and evaluating the merits of various political theories, or toward analyzing the more conventional, formal, and overt aspects of practical politics. Even a cursory examination of standard social science bibliographies reveals that tens of thousands of books and articles have been written about staple subjects such as the structure and functioning of government bureaucracies, voting patterns and electoral results, parliamentary procedures and activities, party organizations and factions, the impact of constitutional provisions or laws, and the like. In marked contrast, only a handful of scholarly publications have been devoted to the general theme of political conspiracies–as opposed to popular anti-conspiracy treatises, which are very numerous, and specific case studies of events in which conspiratorial groups have played some role — and virtually all of these concern themselves with the deleterious social impact of the ‘paranoid style’ of thought manifested in classic conspiracy theories rather than the characteristic features of real conspiratorial politics. (4)

Only the academic literature dealing with specialized topics like espionage, covert action, political corruption, terrorism, and revolutionary warfare touches upon clandestine and covert political activities on a more or less regular basis, probably because such activities cannot be avoided when dealing with these topics. But the analyses and information contained therein are rarely incorporated into standard works of history and social science, and much of that specialized literature is itself unsatisfactory. Hence there is an obvious need to place the study of conspiratorial politics on a sound theoretical, methodological, and empirical footing, since ignoring the influence of such politics can lead to severe errors of historical interpretation.

This situation can only be remedied when a clear-cut analytical distinction has been made between classic conspiracy theories and the more limited conspiratorial activities that are a regular feature of politics. ‘Conspiracy theories’ share a number of distinguishing characteristics, but in all of them the essential element is a belief in the existence of a ‘vast, insidious, preternaturally effective international conspiratorial network designed to perpetrate acts of the most fiendish character’, acts which aim to ‘undermine and destroy a way of life.’ (5)

Although this apocalyptic conception is generally regarded nowadays as the fantastic product of a paranoid mindset, in the past it was often accepted as an accurate description of reality by large numbers of people from all social strata, including intellectuals and heads of state. (6) The fact that a belief in sinister, all-powerful conspiratorial forces has not been restricted to small groups of clinical paranoids and mental defectives suggests that it fulfills certain important social functions and psychological needs.(7)

First of all, like many other intellectual constructs, conspiracy theories help to make complex patterns of cause-and-effect in human affairs more comprehensible by means of reductionism and oversimplification. Secondly, they purport to identify the underlying source of misery and injustice in the world, thereby accounting for current crises and upheavals and explaining why bad things are happening to good people or vice versa. Thirdly, by personifying that source they paradoxically help people to reaffirm their own potential ability to control the course of future historical developments. After all, if evil conspirators are consciously causing undesirable changes, the implication is that others, perhaps through the adoption of similar techniques, may also consciously intervene to protect a threatened way of life or otherwise alter the historical process. In short, a belief in conspiracy theories helps people to make sense out of a confusing, inhospitable reality, rationalize their present difficulties, and partially assuage their feelings of powerlessness. In this sense, it is no different than any number of religious, social, or political beliefs, and is deserving of the same serious study.

The image of conspiracies promoted by conspiracy theorists needs to be further illuminated before it can be contrasted with genuine conspiratorial politics. In the first place, conspiracy theorists consider the alleged conspirators to be Evil incarnate. They are not simply people with differing values or run-of-the-mill political opponents, but inhuman, superhuman, and/or anti-human beings who regularly commit abominable acts and are implacably attempting to subvert and destroy everything that is decent and worth preserving in the existing world. Thus, according to John Robison, the Bavarian Illuminati were formed ‘for the express purpose of ROOTING OUT ALL THE RELIGIOUS ESTABLISHMENTS, AND OVERTURNING ALL THE EXISTING GOVERNMENTS IN EUROPE.’ (8)

This grandiose claim is fairly representative, in the sense that most conspiracy theorists view the world in similarly Manichean and apocalyptic terms.

Secondly, conspiracy theorists perceive the conspiratorial group as both monolithic and unerring in the pursuit of its goals. This group is directed from a single conspiratorial centre, acting as a sort of general staff, which plans and coordinates all of its activities down to the last detail. Note, for example, Prince Clemens von Metternich’s claim that a ‘directing committee’ of the radicals from all over Europe had been established in Paris to pursue their insidious plotting against established governments. (9)

Given that presumption, it is no accident that many conspiracy theorists refer to ‘the Conspiracy’ rather than (lower case)conspiracies or conspiratorial factions, since they perceive no internal divisions among the conspirators. Rather, as a group the conspirators are believed to possess an extraordinary degree of internal solidarity, which produces a corresponding degree of counter solidarity vis-a-vis society at large, and indeed it is this very cohesion and singleness of purpose which enables them to effectively execute their plans to destroy existing institutions, seize power, and eliminate all opposition.

Thirdly, conspiracy theorists believe that the conspiratorial group is omnipresent, at least within its own sphere of operations. While some conspiracy theories postulate a relatively localized group of conspirators, most depict this group as both international in its spatial dimensions and continuous in its temporal dimensions. ‘[T]he conspirators planned and carried out evil in the past, they are successfully active in the present, and they will triumph in the future if they are not disturbed in their plans by those with information about their sinister designs.’(10)

The conspiratorial group is therefore capable of operating virtually everywhere. As a consequence of this ubiquitousness, anything that occurs which has a broadly negative impact or seems in anyway related to the purported aims of the conspirators can thus be plausibly attributed to them.

Fourthly, the conspiratorial group is viewed by conspiracy theorists as virtually omnipotent. In the past this group has successfully overthrown empires and nations, corrupted whole societies, and destroyed entire civilizations and cultures, and it is said to be in the process of accomplishing the same thing at this very moment. Its members are secretly working in every nook and cranny of society, and are making use of every subversive technique known to mankind to achieve their nefarious purposes. Nothing appears to be able to stand in their way–unless the warnings of the conspiracy theorists are heeded and acted upon at once. Even then there is no guarantee of ultimate victory against such powerful forces, but a failure to recognize the danger and take immediate countervailing action assures the success of those forces in the near future.

Finally, for conspiracy theorists conspiracies are not simply a regular feature of politics whose importance varies in different historical contexts, but rather the motive force of all historical change and development. The conspiratorial group can and does continually alter the course of history, invariably in negative and destructive ways, through conscious planning and direct intervention. Its members are not buffeted about by structural forces beyond their control and understanding, like everyone else, but are themselves capable of controlling events more or less at will. This supposed ability is usually attributed to some combination of demonic influence or sponsorship, the possession of arcane knowledge, the mastery of devilish techniques, and/or the creation of a preternaturally effective clandestine organization. As a result, unpleasant occurrences which are perceived by others to be the products of coincidence or chance are viewed by conspiracy theorists as further evidence of the secret workings of the conspiratorial group. For them, nothing that happens occurs by accident. Everything is the result of secret plotting in accordance with some sinister design.

This central characteristic of conspiracy theories has been aptly summed up by Donna Kossy in a popular book on fringe ideas:

Conspiracy theories are like black holes–they suck in everything that comes their way, regardless of content or origin…Everything you’ve ever known or experienced, no matter how ‘meaningless’, once it contacts the conspiratorial universe, is enveloped by and cloaked in sinister significance. Once inside, the vortex gains in size and strength, sucking in everything you touch. (11)

As an example of this sort of mechanism, one has only to mention the so-called ‘umbrella man’, a man who opened up an umbrella on a sunny day in Dealey Plaza just as President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade was passing. A number of ‘conspiracy theorists’ have assumed that this man was signalling to the assassins, thus tying a seemingly trivial and inconsequential act into the alleged plot to kill Kennedy. It is precisely this totalistic, all-encompassing quality that distinguishes ‘conspiracy theories’ from the secret but often mundane political planning that is carried out on a daily basis by all sorts of groups, both within and outside of government. It should, however, be pointed out that even if the ‘umbrella man’ was wholly innocent of any involvement in a plot, as he almost certainly was, this does not mean that the Warren Commission’s reconstruction of the assassination is accurate.

However that may be, real covert politics, although by definition hidden or disguised and often deleterious in their impact, simply do not correspond to the bleak, simplistic image propounded by conspiracy theorists. Far from embodying metaphysical evil, they are perfectly and recognizably human, with all the positive and negative characteristics and potentialities which that implies. At the most basic level, all the efforts of individuals to privately plan and secretly initiate actions for their own perceived mutual benefit –insofar as these are intentionally withheld from outsiders and require the maintenance of secrecy for their success–are conspiracies. Moreover, in contrast to the claims of conspiracy theorists, covert politics are anything but monolithic. At any given point in time, there are dozens if not thousands of competitive political and economic groups engaging in secret planning and activities, and most are doing so in an effort to gain some advantage over their rivals among the others. Such behind-the-scene operations are present on every level, from the mundane efforts of small-scale retailers to gain competitive advantage by being the first to develop new product lines to the crucially important attempts by rival secret services to penetrate and manipulate each other. Sometimes the patterns of these covert rivalries and struggles are relatively stable over time, whereas at other times they appear fluid and kaleidoscopic, as different groups secretly shift alliances and change tactics in accordance with their perceived interests. Even internally, within particular groups operating clandestinely, there are typically bitter disagreements between various factions over the specific courses of action to be adopted. Unanimity of opinioon historical judgements. There is probably no way to prevent this sort of unconscious reaction in the current intellectual climate, but the least that can be expected of serious scholars is that they carefully examine the available evidence before dismissing these matters out of hand.

Footnotes

1. Compare Robin Ramsay, ‘Conspiracy, Conspiracy Theories and Conspiracy Research’, Lobster 19 (1990), p. 25: ‘In intellectually respectable company it is necessary to preface any reference to actual political, economic, military or paramilitary conspiracies with the disclaimer that the speaker “doesn’t believe in the conspiracy theory of history (or politics)”.’This type of disclaimer quite clearly reveals the speaker’s inability to distinguish between bona fide conspiracy theories and actual conspiratorial politics.

2. The word ‘suppress’ is not too strong here. I personally know of at least one case in which a very bright graduate student at a prestigious East Coast university was unceremoniously told by his advisor that if he wanted to write a Ph.D. thesis on an interesting historical example of conspiratorial politics he would have to go elsewhere to do so. He ended up leaving academia altogether and became a professional journalist, in which capacity he has produced a number of interesting books and articles.

3. Complaints about this general academic neglect have often been made by those few scholars who have done research on key aspects of covert and clandestine politics which are directly relevant to this study. See, for example, Gary Marx, ‘Thoughts on a Neglected Category of Social Movement Participant: The Agent Provocateur and the Informant’, American Journal of Sociology 80:2 (September 1974), especially pp. 402-3. One of the few dissertations dealing directly with this topic, though not in a particularly skilful fashion, is Frederick A. Hoffman, ‘Secret Roles and Provocation: Covert Operations in Movements for social Change’ (Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation: UCLA Sociology Department, 1979). There are, of course, some excellent academic studies which have given due weight to these matters–for example, Nurit Schleifman, Undercover Agents in the Russian Revolutionary Movement: The SR Party, 1902-1914 (Basingstoke: Macmillan/ St. Anthony’s College, 1988); and Jean-Paul Brunet, La police de l’ombre: Indicateurs et provocateurs dans la France contemporaine (Paris: Seuil, 1990)–but such studies areunfortunately few and far between.

4. The standard academic treatments of conspiracy theories are Richard Hofstadter, ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’, in Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1966), pp. 3-40; Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Chico, CA: Scholars, 1981 [1969]); J. M. Roberts, The Mythology of the Secret Societies (London: Secker & Warburg, 1972); Johannes Rogallavon Bieberstein, Die These von der Verschwrung, 1776-1945: Philosophen, Freimaurer, Juden, Liberale und Sozialisten als Verschwrergegen die Sozialordnung (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1976); and Carl F. Graumann and Serge Moscovici, eds., Changing Conceptions of Conspiracy (New York: Springer, 1987). See also the journalistic studies by George Johnson, Architects of Fear: Conspiracy Theories and paranoia in American Politics (Los Angeles: Tarcher, 1983); and Jonathan Vankin, Conspiracies, Cover-Ups, and Crimes: Political Manipulation and Mind Control in America (New York: Paragon House, 1992).

5. See Hofstadter, ‘Paranoid Style’, pp. 14, 29.

6. Although conspiracy theories have been widely accepted in the most disparate eras and parts of the world, and thus probably have a certain universality as explanatory models, at certain points in time they have taken on an added salience due to particular historical circumstances. Their development and diffusion seems to be broadly correlated with the level of social, economic, and political upheaval or change, though indigenous cultural values and intellectual traditions determine their specific form and condition their level of popularity.

7. As many scholars have pointed out, if such ideas were restricted to clinical paranoids, they would have little or no historical importance. What makes the conspiratorial or paranoid style of thought interesting and historically significant is that it frequently tempts more or less normal people and has often been diffused among broad sections of the population in certain periods. Conspiracy theories are important as collective delusions, delusions which nevertheless reflect real fears and real social problems, rather than as evidence of individual pathologies. See, for example, Hofstadter,’Paranoid Style’, pp. 3-4.

8. See his Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried on in the Secret Meetings of free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies, Collected from Good Authorities (New York: G. Forman, 1798), p. 14. This exhibits yet another characteristic of ‘conspiracy theorists’–the tendency to over-dramatize everything by using capital letters with reckless abandon.

9. See his ‘Geheime Denkschrift nber die Grundung eines Central-Comites der nordischen Machte in Wien’, in Aus Metternichs nachgelassenen Papieren, ed. by Richard Metternich-Winneburg (Vienna: 1881),vol. 1, p. 595, cited in Rogalla von Bieberstein, These von der Verschwrung, pp. 139-40.

10. Dieter Groh, ‘Temptation of Conspiracy Theory, Part I’, in Changing Conceptions of Conspiracy, p. 3. A classic example of conspiratorial works that view modern revolutionary movements as little more than the latest manifestations of subversive forces with a very long historical pedigree is the influential book by Nesta H. Webster, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements (London: Boswell, 1924). For more on Webster’s background, see the biographical study by Richard M. Gilman, Behind World Revolution: The Strange Career of Nesta H. Webster (Ann Arbor: Insight, 1982), of which only one volume has so far appeared.

11. Kooks: A Guide to the Outer Limits of Human Belief (Portland: Feral House, 1994), p. 191.

12. For more on P2, see above all the materials published by the Italian parliamentary commission investigating the organization, which are divided into the majority (Anselmi) report, five dissenting minority reports, and over one hundred thick volumes of attached documents and verbatim testimony before the commission. Compare also Martin Berger, Historia de la loggia masonica P2 (Buenos Aires: El Cid, 1983); Andrea Barbieri et al, L’Italia della P2 (Milan: Mondadori, 1981); Alberto Cecchi, Storia della P2 (Rome: Riuniti, 1985); Roberto Fabiani, I massoni in Italia (Milan: L’Espresso, 1978); Gianfranco Piazzesi, Gelli: La carriere di un eroe di questa Italia (Milan: Garzanti, 1983); Marco Ramat et al, La resistabile ascesa della P2: Poteri occulti e stato democratico (Bari: De Donato, 1983); Renato Risaliti, Licio Gelli, a carte scoperte (Florence: Fernando Brancato, 1991); and Gianni Rossi and Franceso Lombrassa, In nome della ‘loggia’: Le prove di come lamassoneria segreta ha tentato di impadronarsi dello stato italiano. Iretroscena della P2 (Rome: Napoleone, 1981). Pro P2 works include those of Gelli supporter Pier Carpi, Il caso Gelli: La verita sulla loggia P2 (Bologna: INEI, 1982); and the truly Orwellian work by Gelli himself, La verita (Lugano: Demetra, 1989), which in spite of its title bears little resemblance to the truth.

13. For the AB, see Ivor Wilkins and Hans Strydom, The Super-Afrikaners: Inside the Afrikaner Broederbond (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 1978); and J.H.P.Serfontein, Brotherhood of Power: An Expose of the Secret Afrikaner Broederbond (Bloomington and London: Indiana University, 1978).Compare also B. M. Schoeman, Die Broederbond in die Afrikaner-politiek (Pretoria: Aktuele, 1982); and Adrien Pelzer, Die Afrikaner-Broederbond: Eerste 50 jaar (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 1979).

14. See his Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), pp. 74-8.

I think therefore I am capital

Posted on March 12, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Jamie Goldrick

Source: Adbusters

In the worldview of the Cree, life is lived along a trail of experiences. Sharing experience with others is a result of the crossing of two life trails. Life is experienced as a tangled pattern of all beings. In this way, beings do not occupy one world, as in the Western sense: they inhabit their own relational field.

To the Cree, even the wind is alive. It interacts and has agency, and it has the capacity to come into contact with other beings and be affective. In this respect the wind too has the capacity to be alive as it can give shape to the world. For the Yukaghir in Siberia, Elk have the capacity to enter into personhood depending upon which relational field they enter.

In animist cosmology, objects can be ascribed personhood simply by the fact that they have potential to enter into relations with the environment and other living beings. According to Anthropologist Tim Ingold, “different creatures have different points of view of the world, because of different capabilities and perception they attend to the world in different ways”. Thus to the animist, life is lived through the relational field that objects enter into with each other. Regarding all beings and objects, we exist, therefore we are.

Edward Tylor coined the term animism in 1871. He used it to describe the idea that inanimate beings and objects were attributed with spirits. To Tylor, an evolutionist, this was just an aberration on the part of the animists, a “magical philosophy grounded in error” and nothing more than the simple mistake of a basic society on the path to modernity.

Steeped in the western philosophical tradition, Tylor naturally found focus in rational inquiry and scientific progress. He is a product of the Enlightenment, espousing such values as the natural rights of humans to life, liberty and property. Roy Porter, describing Immanuel Kant, observes:

For Kant enlightenment was man’s final coming of age, the emancipation of human consciousness from an immature state of ignorance and error. He believed that this process of mental liberation was actively at work in his own lifetime. The advancement of knowledge – understanding of nature, but human self-knowledge no less -would propel this giant leap forward.

Yet even to this day Enlightenment values have yet to break free from the shackles of Christianity, perhaps even the Classical Period that came before it as well. There are blind spots and limitations to rational inquiry and scientific progress. Our thinking is infected by it.

One such blind spot presumes a nature-culture divide, the notion that we are different than other sentient beings. In this worldview, animals exist as mere automata. They are machines without consciousness, all body and no mind, or to use Descartes’ famous cogito ergo sum, the definitive difference between us and all other beings on this planet is consciousness: I think, therefore I am.

Thus the environment, the humans who had yet to achieve enlightenment and the animals alike who inhabited it were objects to be manipulated and used by us, the subjects. This is the ontological basis that the West is built upon. It is the foundation that provides the philosophical conditions for capitalism to flourish. The gulf between what is theorized in the minds of men and what is a lived environmental reality was alluded to by one of the foundational thinkers of the Enlightenment, Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations:

The same division that caused the social organism to grow also causes the individual worker to become impoverished …the man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.

The Wealth of Nations relied upon the bodily suffering of the disempowered to function at the expense of an abstract social body and to those in possession of the means of production. Written in 1776, things have somewhat changed in the past 240 years.

Briefly, it has been a long, arduous, and somewhat brutal journey for capital to the present day. Capital, in its search for surplus value, has penetrated through domestic markets, foreign markets, future markets, even now to our very sociality via the technological advances that have allowed for online social networking to occur. The collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement, which eliminated the gold standard, allowed the dollar to become symbolic and abstract, facilitating a new definition of economic worth, as evinced by the liberalization of capital markets, the emergence of futures markets, and the notorious derivatives. Economic value has become anthropocentric, a closed human based value system, abstracted from the material environment.

Take for example Google’s $66 billion turnover in 2014, Facebook’s 1.3 billion users, or Twitter’s initial stock market flotation of 23 billion. This value is located in the climate cooled data centers of financial institutions, abstracted from reality. This descent into the digital ether compounds as these abstract value systems begin to play a greater and more influential role in our lives. At a time when our relationship to nature urgently needs to be re-examined, the gulf between nature and culture grows exponentially. Nature – earth’s ‘free gifts’ – becomes further objectified, commodified and excluded from our sense of being-in-the-world.

Maurizio Lazzarato notes that Neoliberalism relies on the individuality of its users, which has a profound effect upon our understanding of the new digital labor. To Lazzarato, digital labor functions by uniting and bringing together extreme individualization and dividuation (the collection of individuals’ idiosyncrasies into data banks) of individuals. The appendages of digital labor feed off our subjectivity and thus enslave us. As Marx argued, machinery enslaves and is manifested as a form of fixed capital. Today these machinic processes have invaded the daily. Lazzarato observes that we are currently enslaved by the mega-machine. Once our individual identity is stripped, a process called machinic enslavement, the individual is rendered as “a gear, a cog, a component part of business and financial assemblages”.

Today the circulation of capital is now the principal means of generating profit. Capital is reliant on human activity to function and flow. Immaterial capital flows are reliant on dividuals to •connect the circuits• between entities. This modern machinic enslavement does not subscribe to traditional categories of subject/object or human/machine binaries. The dividual does not stand by an external machine, for as Lazzarato notes “together they constitute a human machine apparatus in which humans are but recurrent and interchangeable parts of production and consumption. The individual is part of the machine: part-mineral, part-mind and integral to the functioning of modern day capitalism. By habitually updating a status, Googling a mundane thought, or checking into any given establishment, the bodily language of non-engagement now screams: I think, therefore I am capital.

Technology, paced by notions of progress and modernity, has always had an ambivalent place in Western discourse. The obsession with progress obfuscates the objective effects of technology. Technology once demarcated the distinction between work time and leisure time. According to E.P. Thompson: “Before the industrial revolution, time was task based, with the introduction of the machine to the factory floor, this brought the time-keeper, the informer and the fines.” Capital intensive machines had to be attended to round the clock to function. With the advent of the steam engine, the shift from organic to carbon power, a new proletariat was born. Today technology is once again blurring the boundaries by creating a social factory from out of our leisure and private time. History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. Innovation within the dominant paradigm of capitalism serves to innovate existing forms of domination. In this case, those who control the visions of the future control the present.

The predominant discourse of think therefore I am, and our obsession with progress blinds us to the realities of the day. We are within its apparatus when we work, or when we play, when reaching out to others, or solitarily in our own homes. What if we could see the true effects of this mega-machine? Strip away Cartesian subjectivity and take on the oft forgotten worldview of the animist. Proclaim “what manner are these things, part mineral, part mind that serve the few and enslave the many, while fouling the land, the water and the air! “We can no longer see objects as they truly exist in the world. To use Descartes’ term, now we are the automata, cogs and gears, the circuitry of the mega machine, assembled on the false logic of a nature/culture divide.

Set to the backdrop of species collapse, the disappearance of the rainforests, the acidification of the oceans, the mega-machine operates faster than ever before. The creatures outside look in, from person to machine, and then from human to person, and from person to machine again; but already it is impossible to say which is which….

-Jamie Goldrick is a filmmaker and contributing editor to Rabble magazine in Ireland.

A New Map

Posted on March 5, 2017 by Reid Mukai

Collective-Consciousness-1

By Kingsley L. Dennis

Source: Waking Times

‘It is the tragedy of our time that the average individual learns too late that the materialistic concept of life has failed utterly in every department of living.’ ~Manly P. Hall

We have entered times of incredible change, readjustment, and upheaval. There are many contrary forces pushing through our diverse societies and straining to breaking point the incumbent structures and institutions that, in many cases, are no longer functional for progress. Politics – politikos, ‘of, for, or relating to citizens’ – is in a sense the science of community. It is also an expression of the science of the soul; it reflects the state of human consciousness, and the political sphere provides a vessel for the growth and transformation of the human being. Our social communities are the incubators for the enhancement and expansion of human consciousness.

Political and social theories and practices do not exist in a philosophical and psychological vacuum. Importantly, they are related to two important factors: i) the human being’s worldview, and view of the universe, and ii) the human being’s view of himself or herself. A concept of society, government and justice always rests on the conceptions we have of the cosmos and our place in it.

The orderly medieval worldview was held together by a largely coherent religious cosmological system. This was then replaced by a scientific paradigm held together by a Cartesian-Newtonian cosmological doctrine. And yet in our modern age of scientific-psychological exploration we are witnessing the demise of this once-dominant consensus. To put it plainly, as a species we are lacking any coherent cosmological view to provide us with meaning and significance. Human consciousness is lacking a coherent and shared vision, which in turn affects how we project ourselves onto society and within socio-political discourse. C.G. Jung said that ‘Every advance in culture is psychologically an extension of consciousness.’ Likewise, an extension of human consciousness lacking coherence and meaning projects dissonance into our societies. This is why it is imperative we adopt a new map of reality that can provide us with a new cosmology and worldview that has meaning for our times. Especially as we are on the cusp of transitioning into a diverse yet hopefully unified planetary civilization.

Modern western society places little or no value upon the inner experience, thus placing no value or attention upon the need for conscious evolution, preferring to dwell within a largely economic rationalization of the world. In this worldview the human ego exalts the individual personality at the expense of compassionate relations, empathy, and connectedness. It is the ego which propels a minority of voices on the world stage to declare separatism, division, and national self interests over and above the need for international cooperation, collaboration, compassion, and understanding. It is this rhetoric which gives the opportunity for a hitherto neglected section of society to come forward through the expression of repressed anger and the unleashing of chaotic, disruptive energy. It also allows for the mindset that economic and political changes and upheavals are able to solve all problems because the source of such ills is in the objective environment rather than in the consciousness of the human being. And yet whilst the projection of peoples’ anger and negativity onto others creates the illusion of improvement, it is actually an unhealthy mechanism that fails to address the real concern. The projection of repressed anger attaches itself to external socio-political movements and charges them with great power – this has long been the bane of human history!

That is why today we are desperately in need of a new understanding – a new map of reality – that allows us to recognize the greater truth. A truth that shows how our material reality is interconnected at the most fundamental level. It is a truth which shows how all living beings are inherently immersed within a collective field of consciousness that resonates between us. We are not separate individuals – isolated islands – but individualized expressions of a unified consciousness that embraces us all at the very core of our being. The new map of the cosmos tells us that the evolutionary trend is toward ever-greater coherence and cohesion, and not it’s opposite. It is these aspects which are conducive to a thriving, sustainable future – not the elements of division, conflict, competition, or fear.

If we are to transition into an integrative, coherent phase of human civilization we need to adopt as soon as possible the new paradigm – the new map – that comes at a time when it is most needed. Each person determines his or her conduct within the larger context of the nature of the world and the meaning of human life. We find this context through our ideas – our maps of reality. We need to share the new cosmological understanding through our institutions, our educational systems, and most importantly of all – in our human relations with one another. We are a human family, diverse and yet unified; each an expression of a cosmic oneness that seeks expression within a material reality. We are now called upon to reflect that unity, and to represent the true legacy that is the human race. Our time is now.

About the Author

Kingsley L. Dennis is the author of The Phoenix Generation: A New Era of Connection, Compassion, and Consciousness. Visit him on the web at http://www.kingsleydennis.com/.

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