Tag Archives: Philosophy

Starving and Bombed Children of Yemen Seek Entrapment in Flooded Thai Cave

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By Robert J. Burrowes

While the world watched and waited with bated breath for the outcome of the substantial global effort – involving over 100 cave divers from various countries, 1,000 members of the Thai Army and 10,000 others in various roles – to rescue a team of 12 young football players and their coach, who were trapped inside a flooded cave in Thailand for 17 days, 850,000 children were killed by human adults in other parts of the world, many of them simply starved to death in Yemen or other parts of Africa, Asia and Central/South America.

But other children were killed in ritual sacrifice, many children were killed after being sexually trafficked, raped and tortured, many were killed in wars (including in Yemen), many were killed while living under military occupation, many died as child soldiers or while working as slave laborers, and vast numbers of other children suffered violence in a myriad other forms ranging from violence (including sexual violation) inflicted in the family home to lives of poverty, homelessness and misery in wealthy industrialized countries or as refugees fleeing conflict zones. See ‘Humanity’s “Dirty Little Secret”: Starving, Enslaving, Raping, Torturing and Killing our Children’.

Why did the world’s corporate media highlight the flooded Thai cave story so graphically and why do so many ordinary people respond with such interest – meaning genuine emotional engagement – in this story? But not the others just mentioned?

And what does this tell us about human psychology and geopolitics?

Needless to say, a great deal.

During the Thai cave drama, major corporate media outlets, such as the Washington Post and the BBC, were routinely releasing ‘breaking news’ updates on the status of the rescue effort. At high points in the drama, reports on this issue were overshadowing major political and other stories of the day. At the same time, there were no ‘breaking news’ stories on any of the many myriad forms of violence against children, which were (and are still) killing 50,000 children each day.

So why the corporate media interest in this essentially local (Thai) story about a group of 12 children trapped in a cave? And why did it attract so much support, including foreign cave divers, engineers and medics as well as technology billionaire Elon Musk, who flew in to investigate rescue options and assist with the rescue effort. They and their equivalents are certainly not flying in to rescue children in a vast number of other contexts, including where the provision of simple, nourishing meals and clean water would do wonders.

Well, in essence, the story was a great one for the corporate media, simply because it reported on something of little consequence to those not immediately impacted and enabled the media to garner attention for itself and other (western) ‘heroes’ drawn into the story while engaging in its usual practice of distracting us from what really matters. And it was an easy story to sell simply because the media could use a wide range of safe emotional triggers to draw people into the dramatized story without simultaneously raising difficult questions about the (appalling) state of the world and responsibility for it.

In simple language: like sports events and other forms of entertainment, the cave rescue provided a safely contained time and space for people to feel emotionally engaged in (this case) a real-life drama (with feelings like fear and relief allowed an outlet) while carefully reinforcing their unconscious feeling of powerlessness to do anything about it and their acceptance of this. This is why it was so important that expert rescue efforts were highlighted: the key media message was that ‘there is nothing you can do’.

Of course, in this context, this was largely true. The problem is that the corporate media coverage wasn’t aimed at this context. It was aimed at all those other contexts which it wasn’t even discussing, let alone highlighting: the vast range of issues – including the many ongoing wars and endless military violence, the threat of nuclear war, the climate catastrophe and innumerable threats to our biosphere posed by such activities as rainforest destruction, the refugee crisis, military occupations, as well as the ongoing violence against children in so many contexts as touched on above – that need a great deal of our attention but for which the elite uses its corporate media to distract us and reinforce our sense of powerlessness.

Another aspect of the story was the way in which it highlighted the ‘accidental’ nature of the incident: no one was really responsible, even the hapless coach who was just trying to give his young players an interesting excursion and whom, according to reports, none of the parents blamed.

By focusing on the logistical details of the story (the distance into the cave, the narrowness of certain passages, rescue possibilities, equipment, the threat of monsoon rains…), without attributing blame, the media could reinforce its endless message that ‘no-one’ is responsible for the state of the world. Hence, no individual and no organization is responsible for doing anything either. Again, this message is designed to deepen a sense of powerlessness and to make people disinclined to act: to make them powerless observers rather than active participants in their own fate.

As an aside, of course, it should be noted that in those contexts where it serves elite interests to attribute blame, it certainly does so. Hence, elites might contrive to blame Muslims, Russians, Palestinians or the other latest target (depending on the context) for some problem. However, in these contexts, the story of ‘blame’ is framed to ensure that elites have maximum opportunity to act as they wish (often militarily) while (again) engendering a sense of powerlessness among the rest of us.

The tragedy of the Thai cave incident is that one man died and many boys spent 17 days in a situation in which they were no doubt terrified and suffering genuine physical privation. But elite media cynically used the event to distract us from vitally important issues, including ongoing grotesque violence against children in a large number of contexts, and to reinforce ‘The Delusion “I Am Not Responsible”’.

In short, while the 12 boys and their coach were rescued after 17 days trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand which required a sophisticated and expensive international effort, during the same period around the world, 850,000 children were killed by human adults. Even in Thailand during this 17-day period, apart from those children violated and killed as a result of sex trafficking and other violence, 119 children drowned (at the rate of seven each day). See ‘Swim Safe: Preventing Child Drowning’. Obviously, these children were ignored because there was no profit in reporting their plight and helping to mobilize an international effort to save them.

So what can we do?

Well, for a start, we can boycott the corporate media and certainly not spend any money on it. What little truth it contains is usually of even less value (and probably gets barely beyond a good sports report). Instead, invest any money you previously spent on the corporate media by supporting progressive news outlets. They might not have reported events in relation to the Thai cave rescue but they do report on the ongoing violence inflicted on children in more grotesque circumstances such as the war in Yemen. They will also report and analyze important global events from a truthful and life-enhancing perspective and will often offer strategies for your engaged involvement.

If you want to understand why most people are suckered by the corporate media, whose primary function is to distract and disempower us, you will get a clear sense from reading how adults distract and disempower children in the name of ‘socialization’. See ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

If you want to nurture children to be powerful agents of change who will have no trouble resisting attempts (whether by the corporate media or any other elite agent) to distract and disempower them, you are welcome to consider making ‘My Promise to Children’.

If you are easily conned yourself, you will vastly enhance your capacity to discriminate and focus on what matters by ‘Putting Feelings First’ which will, among other things, restore your conscience, intuition and ‘truth register’, vital mental functions suppressed in most people.

You are also welcome to consider participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’ which maps out a fifteen-year strategy for creating a peaceful, just and sustainable world community so that all children (and everyone else) has an ecologically viable planet on which to live.

And for the vast range of other manifestations of violence against children touched on above, you might consider using Gandhian nonviolent strategy in any context of particular concern to you. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy or Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy.

You might also consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’ which explicitly identifies the role of the corporate media, among many other elite agencies, in promoting violence.

Am I pleased that the 12 children and their coach in Thailand were rescued? Of course I am. I just wish that an equivalent effort was being made to rescue each of the 50,000 children we will kill today, tomorrow, the next day and the day after that….

 

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

Robert J. Burrowes
P.O. Box 68
Daylesford, Victoria 3460
Australia

Email: flametree@riseup.net

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

Slow suicide and the abandonment of the world

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Intrepid Report

“The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years. Our behavior is a function of our experience. We act the way we see things. If our experience is destroyed, our behavior will be destructive. If our experience is destroyed, we have lost our own selves.”—R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience, 1967

“The artist is the man who refuses initiation through education into the existing order, remains faithful to his own childhood being, and thus becomes ‘a human being in the spirit of all times, an artist.’”—Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death

Most suicides die of natural causes, slowly and in silence.

But we hear a lot about the small number of suicides, by comparison, who kill themselves quickly by their own hands. Of course their sudden deaths elicit shock and sadness since their deaths, usually so unexpected even when not a surprise, allow for no return. Such sudden once-and-for-all endings are even more jarring in a high-tech world where people are subconsciously habituated to thinking that everything can be played back, repeated, and rewound, even lives.

If the suicides are celebrities, the mass media can obsess over why they did it. How shocking! Wasn’t she at the peak of her career? Didn’t he finally seem happy? And then the speculative stories will appear about the reasons for the rise or fall of suicide rates, only to disappear as quickly as the celebrities are dropped by the media and forgotten by the public.

The suicides of ordinary people will be mourned privately by their loved ones in their individual ways and in the silent recesses of their hearts. A hush will fall over their departures that will often be viewed as accidental.

And the world will roll on as the earth absorbs the bodies and the blood. “Where’s it all going all this spilled blood,” writes the poet Jacques Prévert. “Murder’s blood . . . war’s blood . . . blood of suicides . . . the earth that turns and turns with its great streams of blood.”

Of such suicides Albert Camus said, “Dying voluntarily implies you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit [of living], the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering.” He called this feeling the absurd, and said it was widespread and involved the feeling of being an alien or stranger in a world that couldn’t be explained and didn’t make sense. Assuming this experience of the absurd, Camus wished to explore whether suicide was a solution to it. He concluded that it wasn’t.

Like Camus, I am interested in asking what is the meaning of life. “How to answer it?” he asked in The Myth of Sisyphus. He added that “the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions.” But I don’t want to explore his line of reasoning to his conclusions, whether to agree or disagree. I wish, rather, to explore the reasons why so many people choose to commit slow suicide by immersing themselves in the herd mentality and following a way of life that leads to inauthenticity and despair; why so many people so easily and early give up their dreams of a life of freedom for a proverbial mess of pottage, which these days can be translated to mean a consumer’s life, one focused on staying safe by embracing conventional bromides and making sure to never openly question a system based on systemic violence in all its forms; why, despite all evidence to the contrary, so many people embrace getting and spending and the accumulation of wealth in the pursuit of a chimerical “happiness” that leaves them depressed and conscience dead. Why so many people do not rebel but wish to take their places on this ship of fools.

So what can we say about the vast numbers of people who commit slow suicide by a series of acts and inactions that last a long lifetime and render them the living dead, those whom Thoreau so famously said were the mass of people who “lead lives of quiet desperation”? Is the meaning of life for them simply the habit of living they fell into at the start of life before they thought or wondered what’s it all about? Or is it the habit they embraced after shrinking back in fear from the disturbing revelations thinking once brought them? Or did they ever seriously question their place in the lethal fraud that is organized society, what Tolstoy called the Social Lie? Why do so many people kill their authentic selves and their consciences that could awaken them to break through the social habits of thought, speech, and action that lead them to live “jiffy lube” lives, periodically oiled and greased to smoothly roll down the conventional highway of getting and spending and refusing to resist the murderous actions of their government?

An unconscious despair rumbles beneath the frenetic surface of American society today. An unspoken nothingness. I think the Italian writer Robert Calasso says it well: “The new society is an agnostic theocracy based on nihilism.” It’s as though we are floating on nothing, sustained by nothing, in love with nothing—all the while embracing any thing that a materialistic, capitalist consumer culture can throw at us. We are living in an empire of illusions, propagandized and self-deluded. Most people will tell you they are stressed and depressed, but will often add—“who wouldn’t be with the state of the world”—ignoring their complicity through the way they have chosen compromised, conventional lives devoid of the spirit of rebellion.

I keep meeting people who, when I ask them how they are, will respond by saying, “I’m hanging in there.”

Don’t common sayings intimate unconscious truths? Hang—among its possible derivatives is the word “habit” and the meaning of “coming to a standstill.” Stuck in one’s habits, dangling over nothing, up in the air, going nowhere, hanging by a string. Slow suicides. The Beatles’ sang it melodically: “He’s a real nowhere man/Sitting in his nowhere land/Making all his nowhere plans for nobody/Doesn’t have a point of view/Knows not where he’s going to/Isn’t he a bit like you and me.” It’s a far cry from having “the world on a string,” as Harold Arlen wrote many years before.

Maybe if we listen to how people talk or what popular culture throws up, we will learn more through creative associations than through all the theories the experts have to offer.

There have been many learned tomes over the years trying to explain the act of suicide, an early and very famous one being Emile Durkheim’s groundbreaking sociological analysis Suicide (1897). In thousands of books and articles other thinkers have approached the subject from various perspectives—psychological, philosophical, biological, etc. They contain much truth and a vast amount of data that appeal to the rational mind seeking general explanations. But in the end, general explanations are exactly that—general—while a mystery usually haunts the living whose loved ones have killed themselves.

But what about the slow suicides, those D. H. Lawrence called the living dead (don’t let “the living dead eat you up”), those who have departed the real world for a conscienceless complacency from which they can cast aspersions on those whose rebellious spirits give them little rest. Where are the expert disquisitions about them?

We’ve had more than a century of pseudo-scientific studies of suicide and the world has gotten much worse. More than a century of psychotherapy and people have grown progressively more depressed. Large and increasing numbers are drugged to the teeth with pharmaceutical drugs and television and the Internet and cell phones and shopping and endless talk about food and diets and sports and nothing. Talk to talk, surface to surface. Pundits pontificate daily in streams of endless bullshit for which they are paid enormous sums as they smile with their fake whiter-than-white teeth flashing from their makeup masks. People actually listen to these fools to “inform” themselves. They even watch television news and think they know what is happening in the world. We are drowning in a “universe of disembodied data,” as playwright John Steppling has so aptly phrased it. People obsessively hover over their cell phones, searching for the key that will unlock the cells they have locked themselves in. Postliteracy, mediated reality, and digital dementia have become the norm. Minds are packaged and commodified. Perhaps you think I exaggerate, but I feel that madness is much more the norm today than when Laing penned his epigraphic comment.

Not stark raving screaming madness, just a slow, whimpering acceptance of an insane society whose very fabric is toxic and which continues its God-ordained mission of spreading death and destruction around the world in the name of freedom and democracy, while so many of its walking dead citizens measure out their lives with coffee spoons. A nice madness, you could say, a pleasant, depressed and repressed madness. A madness in which people might say with T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock (if they still read or could remember): “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons . . . And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, / and snicker, / And in short, I was afraid.”

But why are so many so afraid? Everyone has fears, but so many normal people seem extremely fearful, so fearful they choose to blend into the social woodwork so they don’t stand out as dissenters or oddballs. They kill their authentic selves; become conscience-less. And they do this in a society where their leaders are hell-bent on destroying the world and who justify their nuclear madness at every turn. I think Laing was right that this goes back to our experience. When genuine experience is denied or mystified (it’s now disappeared into digital reality), real people disappear. Laing wrote:

In order to rationalize our industrial-military complex, we have to destroy our capacity to see clearly any more what is in front of, and to imagine what is beyond, our noses. Long before a thermonuclear war can come about, we have had to lay waste our sanity. We begin with the children. It is imperative to catch them in time. Without the most thorough and rapid brainwashing their dirty minds would see through our dirty tricks. Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I. Q.s if possible. From the moment of birth, when these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father, as their parents and their parents before them, have been. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of it potentialities, and on the whole this enterprise is successful. By the time the new human is fifteen or so, we are left with a being like ourselves, a half-crazed creature more or less adjusted to a mad world. This is normality in our present age. Love and violence, properly speaking, are polar opposites. Love lets the other be, but with affection and concern. Violence attempts to constrain the other’s freedom, to force him to act in the way we desire, but with ultimate lack of concern, with indifference to the other’s own existence or destiny. We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love . . . We live equally out of our bodies and out of our minds.

So yes, I do think most people are victims. No one chooses their parents, or to be born into poverty, or to be discriminated against for one’s race, etc. No one chooses to have their genuine experience poisoned from childhood. No one chooses to be born into a mad society. This is all true. Some are luckier than others. Suicides, fast and slow, are victims. But not just victims. This is not about blame, but understanding. For those who commit to lives of slow suicide, to the squelching of their true selves and their consciences in the face of a rapacious and murderous society, there is always the chance they can break with the norm and go sane. Redemption is always possible. But it primarily involves overcoming the fear of death, a fear that manifests itself in the extreme need to preserve one’s life, so-called social identity, and sense of self by embracing social conventions, no matter how insane they may be or whether or not they bring satisfaction or fulfillment. Whether or not they give life a meaning that goes deep.

But for those who have taken their lives and are no longer among us, hope is gone. But we can learn from their tragedies if we are truthful. For them the fear of life was primary, and death seemed like an escape from that fear. Life was too much for them. Why? We must ask. So they chose a life-in-death approach through fast suicide. Everyone is joined to them in that fear, just as everyone is joined by the fear of death. It is a question of which dominates, and when, and how much courage we can muster to live daringly. The fear of death leads one to constrict one’s life in the safe surround of conventional society in the illusion that such false security will save one in the end. Death is too much for them. So they accept a death-in-life approach that I call slow suicide.

But in the end as in the beginning and throughout our lives, there is really no escape. The more alive we are, the closer death feels because really living involves risks and living outside the cocoon of the social lie. Mr. Pumpkin Head might seize you, whether he is conceived as your boss, an accident, disease, social ostracism, or some government assassin. But the deader we feel, the further away death seems because we feel safe. Pick your poison.

But better yet, perhaps there is no need to choose if we can regain our genuine experience that parents and society, for different reasons, conspire to deny us. Could the meaning of our lives be found, not in statements or beliefs, but in true experience? Most people think of experience as inner or outer. This is not true. It is a form of conventional brainwashing that makes us schizoid. It is the essence of the neuro-biological materialism that reduces humans to unfree automatons. Proffered as the wisdom of the super intelligent, it is sheer stupidity.

All experience is in-between, not the most eloquent of phrasing, I admit, but accurate. Laing, a psychiatrist, puts it in the same way as do the mystics and those who embrace the Tao. He says, “The relation of my experience to behavior is not that of inner to outer. My experience is not inside my head. My experience of this room is outside in this room. To say that my experience is intrapsychic is to presuppose that there is a psyche that my experience is in. My psyche is my experience, my experience is my psyche.” Reverie, imagination, prayer, dream, etc., are as much outer as inner, they are modalities of experience that exist in-between. We live in-between, and if we could experience that, we would realize the meaning of life and our connection to all living beings, including those our government massacres daily, and we would awaken our consciences to our complicity in the killing. We would realize that the victims of the American killing machine are human beings like us; are us, and we, them. We would rebel.

Thoreau said a life without principle was not worth living. Yet for so many of the slow suicides the only principals they ever had were those they had in high school. Such word confusion is understandable when illiteracy is the order of the day and spelling passé. Has anyone when in high school ever had Thoreau’s admonition drummed into his head: “The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse.” Of course not, since getting a “good” living is never thought to involve living in an honest, inviting, and honorable way. It is considered a means to an end, the end being a consumer’s paradise. “As for the means of living,” Thoreau added, “it is wonderful how indifferent men of all classes are about it, even reformers, so called—whether they inherit, or earn, or steal it.” Is it any wonder so many people end up committing slow suicide? “Is it that men are too much disgusted with their own experience to speak of it?”

What the hell–TGIH!

I believe the story has it that when he was in jail for refusing the poll tax that supported slavery and the Mexican-American war, Thoreau was visited by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, who asked him, “Henry, what are you doing in there?” To which Thoreau responded, “Ralph, what are you doing out there?” Today, however, most folks don’t realize that being outside their cells is being in them, and such imprisonment is far from principled. That’s not a text message they’re likely to receive.

I recently met a woman, where or when I can’t recall. It might have been when walking on the open road or falling in a dreaming hole. She told me “if you look through a window, you can see the world outside. If you look in a mirror, you can see yourself outside. If you look into the outside world, you can see everyone inside out. When the inside is seen outside and the outside is seen inside, you will know what you face. Everything becomes simple then,” as she looked straight through me and my face fell off.

Invisible Architecture III: The Psychogeography of Hyperspace

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By Rococo Modem Basilisk

Source: Modern Mythology

Ordinarily, when we discuss psychogeography, we operate at the scale of a city: we discuss how people are drawn through a walkable space, at a speed in which they can be affected by each piece of passing scenery and make a detour to examine it. But, at the same time the Lettrists were wandering Paris and laying the groundwork for Disneyland in the micro-scale, at the macro-scale holes were being punched through the fabric of the United States in the form of highways.

Habitual migration patterns break the close association between culture and geography. There’s a psychogeographic wormhole between Fairfield County, CT and south Florida, and used to be one between there and upstate NY. If you live in Fairfield County (or certain parts of NYC) you’re liable to be culturally closer to some parts of south Florida than to many points in-between, not because of natural rock formations or bodies of water, but because highways have made it possible to pass through the middle without interacting with it.

Areas of transience — the hyperspace of psychogeography — are not ‘non-places’ with ‘non-culture’. They have a uniquely warped kind of culture, in the same way tourist-dependent places do. Some people spend large amounts of their lives there: long-haul truckers, jet-setting businessmen, touring bands or comedians or authors. The attempt at producing a consistent experience across geography produces an experience that can only exist in hyperspace.

Our own psychogeographic hyperspace is not as psychedelic as the one in Cordwainer Smith’s A Game of Rat and Dragon, but it is stranger, in a Ligottian way.

Why do they have ice machines? Why do they have pools? Why are airplanes and airports trapped in a perpetual 1963 idea of what luxury looks like? Path dependence has made the culture of our hyperspace deeply strange: there are low upper limits on quality of manufacture and high lower limits on quality of service, and the assumed transitory state of most inhabitants means bonds cannot be formed.

When new ideas are integrated here at all, they slot into existing structures — structures that don’t exist outside, in the world that is normal for most of us. Wifi passwords come with the keycard; a robot kiosk in front of the check-in desk prints tickets, as the clerk who formerly printed tickets watches.

These liminal spaces are only forgettable for people who have destinations. They’re also populated by residents, or commuters from geographically — nearby places, who fill the service jobs. What’s it like to have a diner with no regulars? This situation is capitalism-optimized. If you are a resident of psychogeographic hyperspace — nomadic or not — you are dog-fooding the experience that Rand thought was natural to man: separation of orbits, mediated by impersonal monetary transactions. It looks like endless beige hotels with broken ice machines.

What are the attributes of this Randian New Man who lives as hyperspace nomad? Sleep deprivation, boredom, and a dependence on stimulants. Gas stations in hyperspace cater to truckers, abnormally large DVD and pornography selections and every variety of pick-me-up not yet banned. Airports, whose nomads are of a higher caste and have less private space or scheduling freedom, focus more on overpriced convenience food, mediocre reading material, and headphones, and pillows. A Cinnabon could not survive outside of hyperspace, even if it grew up in the shallows of the shopping mall, but in this ecosystem, sheltered from competitors and provided with a steady stream of easy prey, it thrives.

The culture of hyperspace is not a psychogeography, except in a fairly minor sense: everywhere is the same, or tries to be. The few deviations, like Denver International Airport, are notable because deviation is so rare. There is an international internet radio station specifically for airports, and I have heard it play the same playlist in three states. (It never played Brian Eno.) However, like the hyperspace of fiction, it is a strange world that fills the gaps as we jump from one point to another without travelling in-between.

Transit systems are not the only holes in psychogeography. Communications systems also create them. Just as the prevalence of snowbirds and Adirondack cottages make it possible for small segments of northern New York and southern Florida to influence Manhattan finance and vice versa, arbitrary decisions or early-mover advantages gave Los Angeles cultural power over film, Cleveland cultural power over radio, and Atlanta cultural power over podcasting.

Communications technologies have their own hyperspace-cultures, although the geographic centralization of the big players has a larger impact on how they manifest than in the case of hotels. Twitter is the internet equivalent of a trucker-optimized gas station, and caters to journalists — the long-haul truckers of the information landscape. Facebook is the internet equivalent of a Holiday Inn: a premium-mediocre imitation of homeyness that is endearing in its complete failure to be convincing but ultimately irritating if you try to stay too long. (Facebook’s ice machine is always broken, and always loud.) The film industry is a bit like any airport: perpetually stuck in a cheap imitation of an imagined luxurious past, adapting poorly to the cosmopolitanism produced by globalization while profiting through its monopoly on the means of that globalization.

The culture of any hyperspace, because the means of association are limited to the Randian, will be corporate in its manifestation: customer service, marketing, selection, returns, free coupons as a means of apology. It differs from non-hyperspace because these are the only forms of communication truly available. This diner has no regulars with whom the waitress can be frank, only strangers perpetually passing through. It can get away with being shallow and having nothing under its surface, because only very rarely will someone stay long enough to peel it back.

Monuments to the Ego

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By David Mattson

Source: CounterPunch

Some rich bourgeoisie newcomers have perpetrated yet the latest in a series of atrocities upon the small valley where we live, entailing an assault on the sensibilities of virtually everyone and everything living there. Adding insult to injury, this has all been done with apparent utter disregard for us, our neighbors, our dirt road, the wildlife, the native vegetation, and everything sacred and beautiful.

The newcomers scalped the hillside they’ve occupied, smoothed out the offending topographic wrinkles, tore up all the untidy native shrubs, hacked a bench in the slope, erected a large garish pole barn, chiseled out an impractically steep access road, covered every flat or otherwise traversed surface with thick coats of coarse and fine gravel, revegetated the raw soil with non-native plants, propagated massive amounts of weeds, and displaced the deer and elk…meanwhile afflicting all of the neighbors below their lofty perch with the endless noise of heavy equipment suited for construction of interstate highways and a ceaseless caravan of over-sized dump trucks kicking up billowing clouds of dust while assaulting us with their jake brakes. And, no doubt, these naïve newcomers will panic when they realize that mountain lions and bears prowl the ridge where they live, with resulting fatal consequences for any large carnivore ranging nearby.

Perhaps not surprisingly, one of the favorite pastimes among us and other long-term residents is grousing about the rich newcomers, especially the ugly monstrosities they’ve built in highly-visible places. Our nearest neighbor, a salt-of-the earth kind of guy, has a talent for naming the $1 million-plus edifices, including The Ugly House, The Chicken Coop, The Atrocity, and, most recently, The Abortion Clinic.  But the most compelling comment was delivered by yet another long-time neighbor, who billed all of these overbuilt ugly piles with-a-view as simply “monuments to the ego.”

Ego and Egotism…

Ego is an interesting concept upon which to hang the rapine pillaging in our little valley…as well as throughout the human-occupied world. Freud and Buddha would have us believe that all humans have an ‘ego’ (Anatta to the Buddhists), whether as a literal reality or simply as a useful partitioning of the psyche. By these conceptions, ego entails a way of orienting to the world that engenders survival and practical action by the ‘self’.

But, importantly, Freud allows for a curbing effect of the super-ego that embodies ethical concerns and cultural constraints, usually in service of some greater collective good. Likewise, Buddhists distinguish between the Small Self, entailing ego-based motivations, and the Greater Self that, like the super-ego, embodies evolution towards a maturity manifesting compassion and cognizance of connection with other beings. In both instances, ego unchecked by the super-ego or by evolution towards a Greater Self manifests as greed, selfishness, arrogance, fear, and hedonism, with resulting indifference, dishonesty, ruthlessness, and even cruelty exhibited towards others—especially others who are alien or otherwise different.

And Our Moral Universe

Another way of framing all of this is through the lens of moral universes. A person driven wholly by crass motivations originating in the brainstem and ego has a moral universe collapsed into the cesspit of Small Self. This is to say, essentially no moral universe. Expanding outward from this problematic condition are those who deploy notions of fairness, obligation, concern, and benevolence only to family members—as in the Mafia. Next beyond are those with a moral orientation that additionally encompasses those who are of identical or similar identity—national, tribal, ethnic, racial, gender, or the like. And, at the doorstep of enlightenment and transcendence, are those who extend moral concerns and deportment towards all humans—even towards non-human sentient beings.

Scholars such as Peter Singer and Shalom Schwartz have expounded on the importance of an every-expanding moral universe to the welfare and dignity of all humans, even of non-humans with varying degrees of manifest sentience. A world comprised solely of ego-driven humans operating with little restraint or related regard for the effects of their actions on others would be a truly horrific, eventually uninhabitable, place. As Steven Pinker has argued, our small Earth has become a more hospitable and charitable place largely because ever more people are regarding ever more beings of ever greater difference with ever more benevolence, despite what one might think reading vitriolic trash published in outlets such as Breitbart.

The Larger Psycho-Sociological Context

In the end, though, unchecked egotism and all the ills that flow from it flourishes only to the extent that such a condition is sanctioned, even encouraged, by culture, society, and institutions. People obviously shape all of these derivations of basic human behaviors, but human behaviors are in turn powerfully shaped by the higher-order social-psychological phenomena within which they are embedded, creating the potential for powerfully wicked—or powerfully benevolent—synergies.

Of relevance here, culture, society, and institutions ineluctably invoke the nature of our somewhat benighted nation and the more overtly benighted nature of the individualistic capitalist enterprise we have so enthusiastically embraced and codified.

Contradictions of Capitalism

Neoconservatives and their lapdog economists would have us believe that unchecked unfettered capitalism under-girds the best of all possible worlds. Moreover, freely but selectively quoting the likes of John Locke and Adam Smith, they would further have us believe that unbridled greed and unqualified self-interest, channeled by the invisible hand of free markets, is the surest means of furthering the well-being of all humans. Indeed, the Princes of Capitalism who run amuck on Wall Street proudly and unabashedly profess their greed and fundamental disregard for others, assuming that we who hear such professions somehow know it ends well for the rest of us due to the transformative magic of markets.

Never mind peoples’ unequal access to markets. Never mind inequalities in power and privilege. Never mind unequal access to information. Never mind the fundamentally irrational behavior of humans. Never mind the distorting effects of artificial demand created by manipulative advertising. Never mind the chronic gross distortion of markets by hidden (or not so hidden) subsidies created by power elites beholden to wealth elites. Never mind…ad nauseam. We have no free markets.

Despotism…

In the end, people who are wealthy or powerful become ever more wealthy and powerful at the expense of everyone else. Despotism reigns in the sense that an ever smaller minority of people amass an ever greater portion of values, while everyone else becomes comparatively more impoverished. It is no coincidence that we have seen a trend, not only in the United States, but in most developed or developing countries, towards the amassing of more and more wealth in the hands of a mere 1%—even 0.1%—of the populace.

As the radical thinker and economist Charles Eisenstein pithily observed, the modern business enterprise operates on the basis of shifting costs onto others as a normal part of making profits; in other words, by privatizing profits while socializing costs. Put another way, profits—the fundamental underpinning of the capitalist enterprise—are axiomatically created by passing as many costs as possible onto the affected human community, the natural environment, and future generations, often in ways that are fundamentally destructive. The French economist Thomas Piketty offered a complementary argument in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, holding that ‘trickle down’ from wealth elites to the comparatively impoverished masses is, in reality, inconsequential and little more than cover for this despotic capitalist enterprise.

And the Problem of Externalities

But concern about the imperfections and problematics of capitalism are not limited to radical or revisionary economists. Indeed, the likes of John Locke and Adam Smith were acutely aware that, despite the hidden hand of markets, the monetary capitalist systems they championed would generate social costs and income inequalities that required rectification by governments.

Some of these social costs have been termed ‘externalities’ by succeeding generations of economists—an externality being a cost or benefit generated by a private economic transaction or activity, but incurred by those who did not chose to partake of the outcome. Classic examples of such externalities include air and water pollution, spillover effects of development on surrounding property values, and the loss of finite biota caused by profit-making enterprises.

Our society has, reasonably enough, responded to these sorts of externalities with laws that zone development, control pollution, and protect endangered species. Whether overtly or tacitly, most people realize that we do, in fact, live in community where considerations of the commonwealth occasionally weigh heavily in the scale of considerations. Indeed, every credible economic or political philosopher or theorist since Locke and Smith and afterwards, Marx, has viewed capitalism and property, not as ends in themselves, but rather as candidate means (dubious means, in the case of Marx) of uplifting humanity and enhancing the well-being and dignity of all—of promoting a flourishing commonwealth; something that many contemporary politicians, economists, and bourgeois capitalists seem to miss.

As it is, the pervasive systemic problem of privatized profits and socialized costs remains, especially in a society such as ours that is wedded to the justifying myth of capitalism and, in the minds of some, the virtues of unchecked greed and individualism—and where those who profit so much from displacing the costs of their activities onto society hold such sway over politicians. This insidious system continues to spawn the sorts of people who show up in our little valley with ill-gotten (by definition) wealth to manifest their ego in various physical obscenities.

Property…

The notion of ‘property’ is yet another pillar of Smith’s capitalism that factors into on-going devastation of the natural world by societies that have succumbed to the capitalist premise. More to the point, private property rights plays a central role in not only the unfolding ecological holocaust, but also in simultaneously catalyzing and justifying damage to human communities.

On the face of it, ‘property’ seems a benign or even beneficial concept. The term is generally understood in reference to anything owned or possessed by someone. Adam Smith even advanced the notion that one’s own labor and physical body are property held, by right of ‘natural law’, exclusively by the salient embodied person. Yet the notion of property has, in fact, been extended to possession of one human by another, most egregiously in the form of overt slavery, but historically (and, in places, still) even in application to dependent children and adult women.

And Its Problems

These latter extensions to other humans highlight an intrinsic, even potentially fatal, problem with the notion of ‘property’. Relegation of anything to the category of property constitutes the ultimate instrumentalization and related erasure of intrinsic worth. Through this, property has no rights, no prerogatives, and no claim to considerations of well-being and health.

Relegation of inanimate physical objects to the category of property is perhaps not problematic, but any application to another life form, especially one with plausible sentience immediately raises moral questions. Does a dog deserve consideration of its health and well-being, despite being property? Some people would say ‘no’, but our society has answered a resounding ‘yes’ through the passage, for example, of animal welfare laws and even serious consideration of whether chimpanzees deserve rights. But, then, do elk and bears and lions deserve consideration of their welfare? Do ecosystems have ‘health’ and, if so, do even these abstract entities warrant moral concern, especially when it comes to fostering and preserving ‘health’?

I hold that the manner in which a person orients to such issues offers a profound commentary on their ego maturity and moral universe—Small versus Greater. And, in fact, orientations towards living property end up being entangled with precepts of capitalism and consideration of ‘the other’ in choices people make regarding their use of property, specifically whether they care at all about the negative impacts their choices may have on others, whether human, animal, vegetal, or even spiritual. People with small souls and a small moral universe will probably not give a damn, and even actively resist any societal requirements that they be held accountable for the harm they cause, often by deploying the justifying rhetoric of libertarianism and the primacy of individual freedom.

Inanities of Property Rights

All of this comes to a head in considerations of private property rights, although it is worth first noting that property can be held privately, publicly, or communally, and also simply by societal consent without rising to the level of a ‘right’. But there are some ideologues and yahoos (not mutually exclusive) who hold that the only credible sort of property is private, and that all private property is axiomatically held by the owner as a ‘right’.

Such simple-minded constructions hardly pass the laugh test. On the face of it, public property has more intrinsic merit than private property simply because it is held in trust to explicitly serve the greater good of society. The same could be said for communal property, but with ‘the greater good’ reckoned at the scale of a given community.

Insofar as being a ‘right’ is concerned, Debbie Becher cogently observed in a 2015 article that “…social theorists have long understood that property is not the ownership of a thing or a set of individual rights, but a set of social agreements about what ownership entails…Property rules involve government intimately not only in creating value but also in determining who deserves which valuable resources.”

Notice ‘social agreements’, the role of ‘government’, and the invocation of ‘deserve’. None of this bespeaks a ‘right’ in the conventional sense that we think of such things, especially in application to human health and happiness (see my article on Human Dignity and Micheline Ishay’s book The History of Human Rights), although our society paradoxically—even perversely—holds that rights attach to our property but not to our health. In fact, property is held solely by the consent of society and ultimately (whether acknowledged or not) in service of promoting the commonwealth of human well-being and dignity.

Rich and Not-So-Rich Yahoos

Yet our country is filled with people who think that they not only have an absolute right to their property, but that this supposed ‘right’ gives them the prerogative to mete out use, abuse, destruction, and harm without restraint or consideration of impacts on other humans—much less impacts on other sentient beings, and certainly not impacts on the health and wholeness of the ecosystems they exploit.

Such seems to be the case with our new neighbors wreaking havoc upstream in yet the latest exhibition of stunted moral development by newly-arrived rich folk. Although these people are by no means the only ones.

Metamorphosis?

We all suffer sooner or later living in a world of unchecked greed, selfishness, and self-centeredness—understood by some to be the equivalent of ‘individualism’. This is especially true in a country such as ours where simple-minded conceptions of capitalism and private property encourage, if not sanctify, abusive relations with the land, other people, and other life forms. Under such auspices, people are prone to the fallacy of conflating ‘freedom’ with possession, which can never lead to contentment.

No doubt, most of us want the greatest scope of free choice possible, as well as assurance that the physical goods we depend upon and hold dear will be secure from depredation. Yet, more assuredly, I would hold that most of us—albeit inchoately—want to be part of a commonwealth of human dignity. Inescapably, such a commonwealth requires that we curb our actions out of respect for others and with due consideration of harm we may cause. Sadly, our society seems to be exhibiting less rather than more of such dignified self-restraint.

There are perhaps only a few ways that the current death spiral of our living Earth can be checked. The spiritually dead look to technological fixes. A highly virulent and contagious disease specific to humans might save the rest of life on this planet, but only through erasure of our species. More hopefully, we humans might evolve towards greater benevolence, generosity, and concern, not only for other humans, but for all of life.

But such evolution depends on the rapid expansion of our collective moral universe beyond the frontiers of humankind. To do so, though, requires that we transcend our delusional fixation with patently destructive ideologies, of which capitalism and private property rights are currently one of the most potent. Closer to home for me, I hope to live long enough to see the end of people scraping, gouging, chiseling, hacking, tearing, and uprooting the naked living Earth simply to build yet another monument to their ego.

Crisis in Consciousness: Change and the Individual

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By Graham Peebles

Source: Dissident Voice

Our society is besieged by a series of interconnected crises. Millions of people around the world know this and are crying out for change, for a different way of living, for justice, peace and freedom.

Political leaders, Prime Ministers, Presidents and the like, are apparently incapable of responding to these demands; they do not understand the depth of the anguish or the complex interconnected nature of the problems. Instead of presenting new possibilities and working for peace and social harmony, they do all they can to maintain the divisive status quo and act in accordance with the past. But life is not static, it cannot be contained within any ideology – religious, political/economic or social – all must change to accommodate the new. And ‘the new’ is now flooding our world, stimulating change, demanding response and accommodation.

The world and the individual are one; for substantive change to occur this basic fact must be acknowledged; responsibility for the world rests firmly with each and every one of us. If we are to heal the planet and create harmony in the world change is imperative, but it must first of all take place within the individual. Over the last 40 years or so a gentle, yet profound shift in attitudes has indeed been taking place within large numbers of people; the increased level of social-political participation and in many nations revolt against historical injustice and suppression testify to this development. Whilst this is extremely positive, urgent and fundamental change is required if the many issues facing humanity are to be overcome and a new way of living set in motion.

What are the crises facing humanity: The environmental catastrophe and war – conventional and nuclear – global poverty, inequality, terrorism, the displacement of people, and, festering beneath all of these, the socio-economic systems under which we all live. These issues, and they are but the most pressing, are the effects of certain ideals and conditioned ways of thinking; they are the results of the underlying crisis, what we might term the Crisis in Consciousness, or the Crisis of Love. Not sentimental, emotional love, but love as a unifying force for liberation and change. Love as the Sword of Cleavage, as the exposer of all that is false, unjust and corrupt in our world.

‘Society’, large or small, is a reflection of the consciousness of those who constitute that society; it is formed by the values, relationships and behaviour consistently and predominantly expressed by the people within it. Such expressions are to a large degree the result of socio-psychological conditioning, poured into the minds of everyone from birth by parents and peers, friends and educators, the media and political propaganda. This conditioning pollutes the mind, distorts behaviour and creates a false sense of self. It colours every relationship and forms the corrupt foundations upon which our lives are set. From this polluted centre, filled as it is with selfishness, competition, nationalism and religious ideologies, action proceeds and the divisive pollution of the mind is externalized. Where there is division conflict follows, violent conflict or psychological conflict, community antagonism or regional disputes.

For lasting change to take place, for peace and justice to flower, we must do all we can to break free of this inhibiting conditioning and in so doing cease to add to the collective pollution. The instrument of release in this battle is awareness: Observation and awareness are synonymous. In choiceless observation there is awareness – awareness of the values, motives and ideals conditioning behaviour. In the light of such awareness, unconscious patterns are revealed, and through a process of non-engagement can, over time, be negated and allowed to fall away.

Realizing unity

Through competition, fear and ‘ism’s of all kinds we have divided life up; separated ourselves from the natural environment and from one another. The prevailing economic system encourages such divisions; individuals are forced to compete with one another, as are cities, regions and nations. Competition feeds notions of separation and nationalism, ‘America First’ and Brexit being two loud examples of countries, or certain factions within these countries, following a policy which they mistakenly believe to be in their nation’s interest, meaning their economic interest. Such divisions work against the natural order of things by strengthening the illusion of separation.

The natural environment is an integrated whole, humanity is One and an essential part of that whole; the realization of unity in human affairs, however, is dependent upon social justice, and this is impossible within the constraints of the current economic model, which is inherently unjust. Neo-Liberalism is a major source of the psychological and sociological conditioning which is polluting the mind and society; creative alternatives that challenge the orthodoxy, which proclaims ‘there is no alternative’, must be cultivated and explored.

New criteria need to be established for any alternative economic model; the acknowledgment that human need is universal and should be universally met, and that nobody ‘deserves’ to live a life of suffering and hardship simply because of their place and family of birth. Sharing is a key principle of the time; it must be placed at the heart of our lives and of any new socio-economic structures. Not just sharing of the natural ‘God-given’ resources of the world, but of space, ideas, knowledge and skills, all should be distributed based on need, not bought and sold based on wealth and power. The recognition that humanity is one is crucial in bringing about the needed transformation in consciousness; sharing flows quite naturally from the acknowledgment of this fact and by its expression encourages a shift in attitudes away from the individual towards the group, thus strengthening social cohesion and unity.

Sharing, justice and freedom are vibrant expressions of Love and the Crisis in Consciousness is itself the consequence of a Lack of Love. Like virtually every aspect of life, love has been perverted, distorted and trivialized. Love is not desire, it is not dependent on anything or anyone for its being: Love is the nature of life itself. Remove the psychological clutter and Love will shine forth, bringing clarity and lasting change, within the individual and by extension society.

Anomie and Postmodernism

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By Richard Sahn

Source: Bracing Views

These are not exactly happy times. Americans have fewer safeguards for their jobs, financial well-being, and, ultimately, their very lives. Uncertainty and insecurity have become more prevalent than ever I can remember. As a consequence, insomnia, depression, angst seem to be characteristic of an increasing number of people across the country, almost as American as apple pie. Just as being a divorcee in California is nothing to write home about—you’re even considered odd if you have never been divorced—so is the sense that something “bad” can happen at any time, without warning. Sociologists—I am a sociologist–call this condition “anomie,” a concept formulated by one of the founders of sociology, Emile Durkheim. The Trump presidency, it may be argued, exacerbates anomie since we seem to be moving closer to economic nightmares and possibly nuclear holocaust than in recent decades.

What exactly is anomie? Anomie literally means without norms. It’s a psychological condition, according to Durkheim, in which an individual member of a society, group, community, tribe, fails to see any purpose or meaning to his/her own life or reality in general. Anomie is the psychological equivalent to nihilism. Such a state of mind is often characteristic of adults who are unemployed, unaffiliated with any social organization, unmarried, lack family ties and for whom group and societal norms, values, and beliefs have no stabilizing effect.

The last situation can readily be the outcome of exposure to sociology courses in college, providing the student does not regularly fall asleep in class.  I’ve always tried to caution my own students that sociology could be, ironically, dangerous to their mental health because of the emphasis on critical thinking regarding social systems and structures. Overcoming socialization or becoming de-socialized from one’s culture—when one begins to question the value of patriotism, for instance—can be conducive to doubt and cynicism which may give rise to anomie.  Of course, I also emphasize the benefits of the sociological enterprise to the student and to society in general. For example, a sociology major is perhaps less likely to participate voluntarily in wars that only favor special interests and which unnecessarily kill civilians.

Clinical depression is virtually an epidemic in the U.S. these days. Undoubtedly, anomie is a major factor, especially in a culture where meaningful jobs or careers are difficult to obtain.  To a great extent social status constitutes one’s definition of self. In Western societies the answer to the perennial philosophical question, “Who are you?” is one’s name and then job or role in the social structure.  Both motherhood and secure jobs or careers are usually antidotes against anomie. Childless women and unemployed or under-employed males are most susceptible to anomie.

What does postmodernism offer to combat the anomie of modern society and now the Trump era itself? An over-simplification of post-modernism or the postmodern perspective is that there is no fixed or certain reality external to the individual. All paradigms and scientific explanations are social constructs, one model being no more valid than the other. A good example of the application of the postmodern perspective is the popular lecture circuit guru, Byron Katie. Ms. Katie has attracted thousands of followers by proclaiming that our problems in life stem from our thoughts alone. The clutter of consciousness, thoughts, feelings, can simply be recognized as such during meditation and then dismissed as not really being real. Problems gone.

An analogy here is Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic worker movement, proclaiming in the 1960s that “our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.” Postmodernists would claim that our problems stem from our acceptance of the Enlightenment paradigm of reality—the materialist world-view, rationality itself.  Reality, postmodernists claim, is simply what we think it is. There is no “IS” there. Postmodern philosophers claim that all experiences of a so-called outside world are only a matter of individual consciousness.  Nothing is certain except one’s own immediate experience. The German existential philosopher, Martin Heidegger, contributed significantly to the postmodern perspective with his concept, “dasein,” or “there-being.” Dasein bypasses physiology and anatomy by implying that neurological processes are not involved in any act of perception, that what we call “scientific knowledge” is a form of propaganda, that is, what we are culturally conditioned to accept as real. There is no universal right or wrong, good or bad.

The great advantage of adopting the postmodern perspective as a way of overcoming anomie is the legitimacy or validation it gives to non-ordinary experiences. If the brain and nervous system are social constructs then so-called altered states of consciousness such as near death experience (NDE), out-of-body experience, reincarnation, time-travel, spirits, miraculous healing become plausible. Enlightenment science and rationality are only social constructs, byproducts of manufactured world-views. The “new age” idea that we create our own reality rather than being immersed in it has therapeutic value to those suffering from anomie.

Sociologist Peter Berger employs the concept of “plausibility structures” to legitimize (make respectable) views of the “real world” which conflict with the presuppositions of Enlightenment science. Science then becomes “science” or social constructs which may or may not have validity even though they are widely accepted as such.  A good example is the postmodern practice of deconstructing or calling into question empirical science and rational thought itself, disregarding the brain as source of all perceptions, feelings, desires, and ideas. Postmodernists maintain that only individual consciousness is real; the brain is a social construct which doesn’t hold water—no pun intended—as the source of what it means to be human.

CAVEAT

The postmodern perspective may work for a while in suppressing anomie and dealing with the horrors of a hostile or toxic social and political environment. Sooner or later, however, existential reality intervenes. The question is, can postmodernism alleviate physical pain, the death of a loved one, personal injury and illness, the loss of one’s home and livelihood? At this point in the evolution of my philosophical reflections I would argue that postmodernism can reduce or eliminate the depression that inevitably comes from too much anomie–but only temporarily.   The postmodern perspective is not up to the task of assuaging the truly catastrophic events in one’s life. As much as I would like not to believe this, I’m afraid only political and social action can help us out when the going really gets rough, although I don’t recommend sacrificing the teaching of critical thinking, a possible cause of anomie, in regard to society’s values and institutions.

 

Richard Sahn, a professor of sociology in Pennsylvania, is a free-thinker.

SHAME: How To Beat The Two-System Blame Game That Takes Us Down & Keeps Us Stuck

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By Jack Adam Weber

Source: Collective Evolution

Shame is different from guilt, because guilt is to feel badly about something we have done; shame is to feel badly about who we are. We might develop shame because we have been shamed at some point in our life. Shame can be a kind of anger and violence directed at ourselves or others.

Shame can get us into a vicious cycle of sabotaging ourselves, as if to prove to ourselves, to validate and enforce the belief of how worthless we perceive ourselves to be. This can be a form of self-abuse used to violently express our anger, often unconsciously. Self-shame also helps us remain in a victim role, as we victimize ourselves with self-administered punishment and negative reinforcement.

When shamed, we develop an internal persona that feels badly about who we are as a person. As a result, we might condemn ourselves, feel less-than, and perceive the world negatively. Shame is also often concomitant with some degree of depression, when we feel worthless. Yet, this feeling of worthlessness might be more a symptom of depression than bona fide shame. On the other hand, depression can also arise from being shamed by others and by ourselves.

Surprisingly, it can be scary to leave the insular world of shame. To maintain this suffocation and prevent against realizing that we have been living a small life and that we can change our reality by working through our shame, we seem to find every justification to stay in our little box of mediocrity.

To this end, we sabotage ourselves, turn away goodness (also because we don’t yet know how to let it in,) engage in negative perspectives and consider these negative beliefs we have learned and to which we have grown accustomed to be facts about who we are. Of course, this is not the case, as we can change our beliefs and perspectives, even if we have harboured shame for a long time.

One-Two Punch

Shame is a one-two punch in that it both creates a negative and impoverished sense of self and it perpetuates that poverty.

Shame’s first punch is a negative self-image dealt to us by impoverished and condemning others. To heal the punitive false beliefs about our core sense of self we need to contact and reprogram this narrative. To recover through shame we also need to address the emotions caused by the violence done to us, emotions that often remain repressed until we confront and begin to work with our shame.

We can uproot, unearth, and replace the negative operating system of false beliefs about ourselves. Releasing any pent-up rage, fear, and sadness from being unloved and shamed instead is also key because these emotions keep us stuck, especially by preventing us from receiving goodness. This way we can disarm shame’s first, original blow.

Shame’s second punch is a fear of feeling shame again, of admitting and seeing shame’s first punch. If we were to see shame’s architecture inside us, we might shame ourselves for being this way, which is to shame ourselves more and build more shame on top of shame’s first punch. In other words, shame scares us into believing that we would shame ourselves for admitting and embodying our original shame.

So, not only do we have the first punch of a negative shame operating in us, but to recognize and reveal that programming can trigger more shame: self-shaming ourselves on top of that shame that’s already there. This is why shame is particularly insidious: it prevents us from pursuing our healing because we shut down our recognition of it for fear of activating our self-criticism, the critical shame that hurt us in the first place.

Shame’s second punch might trigger this kind of self-talk: “Oh God, I’m so awful for having these feelings, for failing, and for being such a loser for so long.” Of course, if we are afraid of this voice, we might knee-jerk into shutting down awareness of our shame altogether so we don’t have to feel worse for self-judging ourselves over our shame. This of course only keeps our shame hidden and lethal.

Shame, self-condemnation and judgment can also develop through unhealthy envy. It’s one thing to feel envy — to covet what someone else has — but it’s another to spin a story about our unworthiness or being a complete failure because of it. Competitiveness can spark us to excel and even be fun, but when it’s used as a weapon against us, it becomes toxic and leads to shame that gets in the way of our thriving.

When we can recognize when shame’s second punch is being delivered, we can cut through its lies to get to our core shame. Remembering that shame’s first punch is not our fault and something we learned from someone else, often as vulnerable children, we can similarly work with shame’ second punch the same way. We can treat  shaming ourselves over our shame the same way we do our original shame: deconstruct, reprogram, and release any toxic emotions in our shame. Expressing and acting with self-compassion is crucial at this point as we allow the stuck feelings to emerge and learn to treat ourselves kindly and to tolerate relationships that also treat us well.

Sadly, we often learn shame’s second punch from those who dealt us the first. We might even hear in our own self-shame the haunting echo of a parent, sibling, or teacher. We break through shame’s double-whammy by recognizing the dynamics of all this. If we’re not able to notice and admit it, we don’t stand a good chance to heal shame that keeps us down. After all, we all have wounds, and to be a grown-up means to take responsibility for our own healing and not remain in old beliefs that perpetuate our mediocrity. In fact, healing our emotional wounds is a key initiation into adulthood, as we learn to free up the vitality, creativity, and aliveness that got squelched in us once ago.

Comfortably Numb

Part of the cage of negativity shame builds for us seeks to keep us in that cage. We humans like to stick with what we know. Believe it or not, it’s easier to remain stuck (and remain bitter) than to break free and learn a new way of being. To break out of the shame-game requires courage, humility, and an ability to tolerate the fear of scary emotions and to live outside our comfort zone.

If we have not recognized and decoded shame’s dynamic in us, we keep our world small by shooting down solutions, thwarting goodness and dismissing promising opportunities—because we don’t believe we deserve them. And, a less obvious reason why we do this is that growing into accepting goodness and abundance would rattle our comfortable, familiar cage and put us in touch our sense of unworthiness. It’s much easier to stay small and bitter rather than confront our fears and shadow by acting differently.

If we don’t mount the fight to overcome shame, it will cleverly and often covertly (beneath our awareness) sabotages goodness, as if to say, “See, it’s true, life is unfair and I’m right about how useless and worthless I am.” Mounting this “fight” against shame, mind you, includes lots of self-acceptance and self-compassion, because part of healing shame is to recognize the survival dynamics of why we developed shame: because once ago when we were unawares and powerless at the behest of adults, we took on shame for a fear of offending or upsetting our elders for fear that we would be abandoned by them—physically and/or emotionally.

Of course, these fears may not be true and to a child they are as real and terrifying as anything. As adults, these shameful beliefs we harbor aren’t factual unless we make them so. It’s the lie we tell to further sabotage ourselves. It’s what we secretly do to fend off the scariness of change and the realizations that come with it, which often includes some remorse for not doing the healing work sooner. But, hey, better late than never, and we can grieve and shake off the lost months and years so that we at least rescue the remainder of our life from the shackles of shame’s iron fist.

So, if we don’t recognize our shame, we never get to move beyond our illusory limitations. We never get to experience, hang onto, and build upon abundance because we don’t believe we are worth it. This goodness is so incongruous with our perceived self-image and inner dialogue that we just aren’t able to accept it, hold onto it and build upon it . . . until we break through. Having the cognitive understanding of shame’s first and second punches helps us navigate and cope ahead as we travel healing shame’s unsettling and unsettled waters.

Becoming Conscious

We will do almost anything to keep ourselves down, just the way we are, so we don’t have to confront our shame and all the dreadful emotions and regrets that come with it. Often, we do this unconsciously. But if we can see the territory before entering into it, then we have a better chance to move beyond the apparent roadblocks that prevent us from healing the toxic mess shame makes of our lives.

Shame operates unconsciously until we become conscious of it. Some of these unconscious mechanisms include gambling away our savings, talking ourselves out of or compulsively rejecting an attractive and worthwhile partner and coming up with many reasons not to accept better opportunities. These include a) focusing on and emphasizing the negative or risky aspects of anything new b) attacking others’ suggestions for how to move into a different and better life and to make different, often uncomfortable, changes c) treating ourselves poorly by not exercising or eating poorly, and c) repeatedly recreating stressful, impoverished, abusive scenarios.

Shaming, especially what we receive from an early age, is pernicious. While we might feel that the people who shamed us or otherwise instilled worthlessness in us might be evil and deserving of the cruelest punishment, at some point we have to be willing to move beyond blame. Paradoxically, at first this might look like unleashing our hatred towards them in a safe, therapeutic context in which we let out our venom for being abused. We don’t have to express ourselves directly to the person who shamed and hurt us. Working with a psychotherapist can help determine appropriate action and how to vent and purge without causing more damage and burning bridges in the process. As this toxicity is purged, we naturally move through and eventually beyond blame . . . and shame.

By releasing the hatred in our toxic shame instead of directing it towards ourselves or others, we also diffuse the backlog of anguish we have used to punish and keep ourselves down (as well as our loved ones). Simultaneously, we learn to talk and treat ourselves more kindly. As we take responsibility, learn to receive goodness from everyone and everything, we might find we stop blaming the world for our misfortune . . . which we realize was just a way for us to defend against healing and moving through the gauntlet of shame.

So yes, we have obstacles, yes we have suffered, yes we have some tough healing to do. Yes we are angry and full of rage, yes we didn’t deserve it and yes we have every good reason to be exactly as pissed off and resentful as we are. At the same time, we have every reason to take responsibility for and transform our current state and reclaim our lives. We overcome shame by noticing and admitting our dynamics, processing hurt feelings, thinking differently to gain positive new perspectives, and acting in ways that build resources to improve our lives. All these obstacles require that we endure the uncomfortable lies and mediocre ways of being we have learned and are now unlearning. This way we learn to tolerate goodness until it becomes a new normal.

In Sum

Tolerating newfound goodness from the graveyard of shame can be difficult because it pushes our buttons; it flies in the face of who we have believed and witnessed ourselves to be. This is part of why we sabotage and try to keep our world small: so we don’t have to deal with the distress of cognitive dissonance, of moving beyond our self-image, which only keeps our world small and suffering large.

Another reason we might not want to confront goodness and abundance is that we might have to stop complaining and condemning as much. Yet another reason is because we might wake up to the fact that we have been sabotaging ourselves for a long time, maybe years or decades. And this sad realization can sink us into grief or even depression. So, coming out of shame is no small task and if the going gets too rough or we can’t seem to break through, it’s probably best to seek the support of a therapist.

Once we see the dynamics of shame’s one-two punch—how it diminishes our lives and then perpetuates that poverty—we can set out with courage and confidence and appropriate humility to purge the toxic emotional backlog, rewrite the narrative for our self-care and care of others, and inhabit a new life of prosperity. Heck, one day we might even help others heal from their own toxic shame. If you or someone you love suffers from shame, I hope this writing has helped you.

 

Neoliberal Defenestration and the Overton Window

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By Stephen Martin

Source: CounterPunch

‘It is difficult to get Artificial Intelligence to understand something, when the Research and Development funding it depends upon its not understanding it’–

Paraphrase of Upton Sinclair.

defenestration  (diːˌfɛnɪˈstreɪʃən)

n

the act of throwing a person or thing  out of a window

[C17: from New Latin dēfenestrātiō, from Latin de- + fenestra window

The freedictionary.com

‘If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists of treating another human being as a thing‘

John Brunner ‘The Shockwave Rider‘

This small article a polemic against neoliberal hegemony; in particular the emerging issue of ‘surplus population’ as related to technological displacement in context of a free market, an issue purposive to such hegemony which as an ‘elephant growing in the panopticon’  i.e. not to be mentioned?

The central premise is that Artificial Intelligence (AI) + Robotics  comprise a nefarious as formulaic temptation to the elite of the ‘Technetronic era’ as Zbigniew Brzezinski put it: this consistent with a determinism as stems ontologically from ‘Empiricism’  form of a  ‘One Dimensionality’ as Marcuse phrased it over five Decades ago; and which thru being but mere simulacra, AI and Robotics represent an ontological imperative  potentially expropriated under pathology to denial of Kant’s concept of ‘categorical imperative’?  (That Kant did not subscribe to determinism is acknowledged). The neoliberal concepts of ‘Corporatism’ and ‘free market’ are powerful examples of this ‘one dimensionality’ which is clearly pathological, a topic notably explored by Joel Bakan concerning the pursuit of profit within a Corporatist framework.

– ‘One dimensionality in, one dimensionality out’– so it goes ontologically as to some  paraphrase of GIGO as trending alas way of ‘technological determinism’ towards an ‘Epitaph for Biodiversity’  as would be – way of ‘Garbage’ or ‘Junk’ un apperceived as much as ‘retrospection’ non occurrent indeed -and where ‘Farewell to the Working Class’ as André Gorz conceived to assume an entirely new meaning: -this to some denouement of  ‘Dystopian Nightmare’ as opposed to  ‘Utopian Dream’, alas; such the ‘Age of Leisure’  as ‘beckoning’ to be not for the majority or ‘Demos’,but rather  for the ‘technetronic elite’ and  their ‘AI’ and Robotics – such ‘leisure’ being as to a ‘freedom’ pathological and facilitated  by the absence of conscience as much as morality; such the ‘farewell’; such the defenestration of ‘surplus’ , such the ‘Age’ we ‘live’ within as to ‘expropriation’ and ‘arrogation’  to amount to  ‘Death by Panopticon’ such the ‘apotheosis’?

It is being so cheerful which keeps these small quarters going.

But digression.

–  It is a relatively small step from ‘the death of thought’ to ‘the death of Life’under Neoliberal Orthodoxy as proving to be the most toxic ideology ever known– such the hegemony as a deliberative, shift of the ‘ Overton Window’ currently occurring as to trend deterministic; such the mere necrotrophy as a ‘defenestration’ – and the ‘one percent’ but a deadly collective of parasitic orifice? For what is ‘Empiricism’ when implemented thru  AI and Robotic Technology in a Corporatist economy as but a ‘selective investment’  as to Research and Development by elite ‘private interests’,  which to a determinism so evidently entailing a whole raft of ‘consequence’ ; such the means, such the production, such the ‘phenomenology’ as ‘owned’ indeed? Under pathology, selectivity is impaired to point of ‘militarization’?

But foremost amongst said ‘raft’ of consequence – the concept of ‘classification’ as incorporates methodological reduction of the particular to a composite of generalities so typical of ‘Science’ as expropriated; the fruition thereof replicated not least thru ‘Consumerism’ – and ‘Lifestyle’ – as much as ‘Life’ reduced as much as abrogated to but correlation way  of ‘possession’ of ‘things’: this  as said replication expressed as much ‘thru’ Linnaeus as Marx  concerning ‘class’- and as results in concepts’ Incorporated’ such as the ‘Overton Window’ – as will be explored by way of ‘extrapolation’ below? The debasing of identity as a correlate of possessions as a necessary ‘abrogation’ by way of engineered ‘bio hack’ is only furthered, such the loss of dimensionality as a potential, by such as social media? An excellent multimedia illustration of such loss is found here.

It’s to be noted that for Empiricism the concept of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ entails an extra dimensionality  as ‘metaphysical’ – and that ‘Politics’ so deconstructed despite abuse under orthodoxy as to ‘mitigation’ remains as  ‘Moral Economics’ – this despite the  mitigative contention of neoliberal orthodoxy that there no morality in the ‘synonymy’; to a pragmatic as ‘Utilitarian’ point of a ‘Killing the Host’ prevailing at paradigmatic as much as Geopolitical level as but explicative of a ‘necrotrophy’; as much as the ‘defenestration’ as euphemism herein proposed this small article  would explicate?

Kudos to Michael Hudson for exposing, and continuing to expose, the ‘death of thought’ which Neoliberalism as an orthodoxy as but a mere ‘racket’ of ‘transfer of resources’ represents.

– Are we ‘on a roll’ here as much as ‘off the leash’ – such the rebellion ‘psycho political’; such the ‘CounterPunch’ by way of digital pamphleteering as ‘restricted code’ rejected evidenced by way of ‘alternative’?

‘Politics’ should mean a diversity biological as much as phenomenological; it should mean more than Empirical ‘utility’, by way of the extra dimensionality which Metaphysics represents; this, as much as ‘Democracy’ demands diversity; ‘thought permitted’ as evidencing same as much as questions allowed to be asked; while Corporatism as antithesis demands ‘line’, a homogeneity, a uniformity, an abrogation as to a contingency?

Whether ‘Empiricism’ as to Philosophy is ‘Essentialist’ or ‘Instrumentalist’ is as of much political relevance as the Medieval question ‘how many angels can dance upon the head of a needle?‘ – the tragic fact remaining in ‘Oceania’  become to Corporatism  is that the economic impact of (AI + Robotics) constitutes a ‘technological displacement’ which under a ‘one dimensionality’ as ‘Orthodox’  is as a ‘political impact’ at a quintessential or axiomatic level, such the ‘formulae’ as (=Ecocide) ‘completes’ under a determinism of hegemony as demands ‘whoredom’? AI and Robotics destroy the symbiotic relationship between production and consumption thru reducing the requirement for human labor as waged in the productive process; AI and Robotics thereby impact upon the distribution of resources as wage based. The fairy tale of compensatory employment opportunities is at best wishful thinking, at worst it is a purposively contrived propaganda?

‘Biodiversity’, alas, becoming more limited to a ‘Thanatos‘ of ‘Military Industrial Corporatist Complex’  as explicates the ‘Age of the Anthropocene’as of the ‘1%’ as funders of ‘hegemony’ such the transfer of resources?

‘As ‘we’ view the world so it becomes’, indeed – this as much as how ‘Others’, through hegemony as ‘Utilitarian’, would have it viewed – and that such a large part of ‘Currency’ as ‘it’  to the permit of ‘Hegemony’ which would control and issue views – such the window as ‘Overtonian’ as can be shifted?

How long before the ‘collateral damage’ concerning premature fatality and reduced life expectancy as evidenced in homelessness, withdrawal of social welfare, militarization of policing, drug abuse, including prescription of synthetic opioids, incarceration all as obscenities explicating the ‘cheapening of life’  becomes ‘formalised’ under neoliberal orthodoxy as euthanasia? To such an Overton Window would it at first be ‘voluntary’?

It was ‘Utilitarianism’ as gave the World the concept of ‘Panopticon’ back in the Eighteenth Century.

Apropos to such ‘Thanatos‘ identified:

Wherefore art thou ‘Eros’: as represented by checkout operator, bank teller, driver, warehouseman, barista, cook, secretary, journalist, lawyer, receptionist, ‘ human voice at the end of the line’ – such the insidious inroads being made consequent the advance of Empirical based Technology?

The ‘Litany’ of such ‘displacement/defenestration’ could go on, as it undoubtedly shall under prevailing Hegemony ‘Western’ as ‘Oceanic’ as much orthodox as ‘deadly’, such the invasive penetration of ‘one dimensionality’ as ‘technological displacement’ evidenced under neoliberal orthodoxy as entailing a transfer of resources to mere ‘Stateless Bastards’, such the point of a determinism as would prevail woeful?

Ponerological questions such as would not be asked commensurate:

‘Is the ultimate ‘stateless bastard’ satan?

Can ‘synonymy seen’ be’ revolutionary’?

‘Technological displacement’ under an ontology of ‘One Dimensionality’ aka‘Corporatism’ but a euphemism for ‘surplus population’; this as much as ‘Corporatism’ promotes the illusion of ‘Democracy’ by way of ‘mental cheating’; such the synonymy as ‘simulacra’ an ‘illusion’ denied – but ‘real’ under ‘doublethink’?

‘Trickle down economics’ is as real as much as ‘technological displacement’ to be compensated for in the ‘opening up of a whole new vista of opportunity’, such the death of thought as neoliberal orthodoxy represents some parallel of tales told by such as Horatio Alger to point of ‘illusion’ encouraged?

These small quarters would ‘rip a new one’ in Neoliberal Orthodoxy by way of polemic.

It remains a ‘big’ question under contemplation of the genius of Orwell and the highly perspicacious ratio of ‘1/15/84’ (hence the ‘one percent’) as to why, within an undoubtedly comprehensive as prescient Dystopian vision where ‘oligarchic collective’ a synonym of ‘technetronic elite’, he ‘permitted the currency’ of the ‘Prole’ as ‘84%’ to prevail as a presence rather than but a memory disappeared by way of ‘memory hole’?

Under neoliberal orthodoxy the political utility of the ‘Proles’ and in particular the ‘Lumpenproletariat’, alas, is as to but fear as a ‘stick’; a basis of control and manipulation same sense as Upton Sinclair explicated ‘carrot’ contingent by way of synonym seen: to wit;  accept control and manipulation as ‘rewarded’ or be ‘expelled’; be but as a ‘Prole’ subsisting and awaiting death, such the economic incarceration as ‘CAFO’ epitomises the cheapening of life under a hegemony as has corollary of alienation, marginalization and impoverishment wielded under Dystopian imperative; this to a ‘transfer of resources’ from ‘Eros‘ to ‘Thanatos‘ reinforced thru contingency of profit such the ‘ponerology’ of ‘Biodiversity’ reduced by way of paradigm Geopolitical?

To love Life is to loathe the deadly; such the philanthropy as would only be evidenced, such the irony, by the ‘ragged trousered’ as so reduced, such the divide et imperaevidenced?

-And so to ‘defenestration’ as ongoing 21stC. by way of ‘surplus population’ generated deterministically as to be dealt with ‘Utilitarian’ as much as the elimination of ‘Biodiversity’ such the ‘technetronic era’ as much as of Dystopia for Humanity as opposed to a Utopia for (AI + Robotics)?

In the annals of International Finance, in which ‘usury’ figures large as polymorphous(?), the power of (AI + Robotics) ‘growing’ as ‘metastasising’ –  as evidenced by the concept of ‘Dark Pools’, and in political manipulation to point of control and issue of currency  by algorithms, such as  infamously deployed by the now defunct Cambridge Analytica using data ‘supplied’ by Facebook are on the rise – such the ‘technetronic era’ furthered?

When neoliberal orthodoxy states ‘Say hello to my little friend!‘ way of the militarization of ‘AI +Robotics” then a ‘defenestration’ form of ‘take all to hell’ will occur, such the shift of the ‘Overton Window’ in progress?

As to the ‘Overton Window’ as in title this small article; a fellow ‘CounterPuncher ‘sees thru it’ most apposite:

Overton described the evolution to broad public acceptance as a process that develops by degrees: “Unthinkable; Radical; Acceptable; Sensible; Popular; Policy.” The right used this model and stuck with it for 30 years to achieve its current dominance. Ideas like slashing unemployment insurance and welfare, privatizing crown corporations, gutting taxes on the wealthy, making huge cuts to social programs and signing “trade” deals that give corporations more power, were all “unthinkable” or “radical” in the beginning. But after 30 years of relentless promotion and the courting of politicians, all of these ideas are now public policy.

Murray Dobbin

– You see it is really quite ‘simple’ when boiled down, such the reductioad absurdumas ‘one dimensionality’ the result of Empiricism embraced to an exclusion of alternative, as ‘Evolution’ circumscribes as much as theoretically delineates?

‘The Talking Heads’ got it right regarding the consequences of neoliberal orthodoxy as concerns the masses and the ‘death of thought’ whereby a ‘Road to Nowhere’  becoming more ‘incorporative’?

Thru Empiricism as an ‘Ontology’, Man in process of nurturing a necrotrophy, such the orifice as existing to be stuffed to a ‘friction of the finitude’. Each ‘Billionaire’ as become so Empirically quantifiable as under such ‘neoliberal jungle’ such the paradigm of abrogation is as to to an obscene ‘transfer of resources’ whereby egocentricity a ‘Thanatos‘ as opposed to ‘Eros‘, and whereby in such land of the blind as a ‘Kingdom’, the ‘one eyed’ as ‘one dimensional’ as much as Empiricism lack any sense of empathy let alone mercy, and which AI and Robotics to epitomise?

Under such ‘paradigm’ of necrotrophy as debasement as much as abrogation it is as blessed to be a Prole? As Martin Luther so humorously said:

‘So our Lord God commonly gives riches to those gross asses to whom He vouchsafes nothing else’

The rationale for composing this small article is not to be pessimistic, rather such the pretension it is as to be a ‘gadfly’ against the manifestly ongoing cheapening of life thru which such a small minority profit from, and which yet remains mutable, as future submissions shall propose.