Tag Archives: Philosophy

Jesus Was Born in a Police State

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By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Jesus is too much for us. The church’s later treatment of the gospels is one long effort to rescue Jesus from ‘extremism.’”—author Gary Wills, What Jesus Meant

The Christmas narrative of a baby born in a manger is a familiar one.

The Roman Empire, a police state in its own right, had ordered that a census be conducted. Joseph and his pregnant wife Mary traveled to the little town of Bethlehem so that they could be counted. There being no room for the couple at any of the inns, they stayed in a stable, where Mary gave birth to a baby boy, Jesus.

Unfortunately, Jesus was born into a police state not unlike the growing menace of the American police state. When he grew up, he had powerful, profound things to say—things that would change how we view people, alter government policies and change the world. “Blessed are the merciful,” “Blessed are the peacemakers,” and “Love your enemies” are just a few examples of his most profound and revolutionary teachings.

When confronted by those in authority, Jesus did not shy away from speaking truth to power. Indeed, his teachings undermined the political and religious establishment of his day. It cost him his life. He was eventually crucified as a warning to others not to challenge the powers-that-be.

Yet what if Jesus, the revered preacher, teacher, radical and prophet, had been born 2,000 years later? What if, instead of being born into the Roman police state, he had been born and raised in the American police state?

Consider the following if you will.

Had Jesus been born in the era of the America police state, rather than traveling to Bethlehem for a census, Jesus’ parents would have been mailed a 28-page American Community Survey, a mandatory government questionnaire documenting their habits, household inhabitants, work schedule, how many toilets were in their home, etc. The penalty for not responding to this invasive survey can go as high as $5,000.

Instead of being born in a manger, Jesus might have been born at home. Rather than wise men and shepherds bringing gifts, however, the baby’s parents might have been forced to ward off visits from state social workers intent on prosecuting them for the home birth. One couple in Washington had all three of their children removed after social services objected to the two youngest being birthed in an unassisted home delivery.

Had Jesus been born in a hospital, his blood and DNA would have been taken without his parents’ knowledge or consent and entered into a government biobank. While most states require newborn screening, a growing number are holding onto that genetic material long-term for research, analysis and purposes yet to be disclosed.

Then again, had Jesus’ parents been undocumented immigrants, they and the newborn baby might have been shuffled to a profit-driven, private prison for illegals where they would have been turned into cheap, forced laborers for corporations such as Starbucks, Microsoft, Walmart, and Victoria’s Secret. There’s quite a lot of money to be made from imprisoning immigrants, especially when taxpayers are footing the bill.

From the time he was old enough to attend school, Jesus would have been drilled in lessons of compliance and obedience to government authorities, while learning little about his own rights. Had he been daring enough to speak out against injustice while still in school, he might have found himself tasered or beaten by a school resource officer, or at the very least suspended under a school zero tolerance policy that punishes minor infractions as harshly as more serious offenses.

Had Jesus disappeared for a few hours let alone days as a 12-year-old, his parents would have been handcuffed, arrested and jailed for parental negligence. Parents across the country have been arrested for far less “offenses” such as allowing their children to walk to the park unaccompanied and play in their front yard alone.

Rather than disappearing from the history books from his early teenaged years to adulthood, Jesus’ movements and personal data—including his biometrics—would have been documented, tracked, monitored and filed by governmental agencies and corporations such as Google and Microsoft. Incredibly, 95 percent of school districts share their student records with outside companies that are contracted to manage data, which they then use to market products to us.

From the moment Jesus made contact with an “extremist” such as John the Baptist, he would have been flagged for surveillance because of his association with a prominent activist, peaceful or otherwise. Since 9/11, the FBI has actively carried out surveillance and intelligence-gathering operations on a broad range of activist groups, from animal rights groups to poverty relief, anti-war groups and other such “extremist” organizations.

Jesus’ anti-government views would certainly have resulted in him being labeled a domestic extremist. Law enforcement agencies are being trained to recognize signs of anti-government extremism during interactions with potential extremists who share a “belief in the approaching collapse of government and the economy.”

While traveling from community to community, Jesus might have been reported to government officials as “suspicious” under the Department of Homeland Security’s “See Something, Say Something” programs. Many states, including New York, are providing individuals with phone apps that allow them to take photos of suspicious activity and report them to their state Intelligence Center, where they are reviewed and forwarded to law-enforcement agencies.

Rather than being permitted to live as an itinerant preacher, Jesus might have found himself threatened with arrest for daring to live off the grid or sleeping outside. In fact, the number of cities that have resorted to criminalizing homelessness by enacting bans on camping, sleeping in vehicles, loitering and begging in public has doubled.

Viewed by the government as a dissident and a potential threat to its power, Jesus might have had government spies planted among his followers to monitor his activities, report on his movements, and entrap him into breaking the law. Such Judases today—called informants—often receive hefty paychecks from the government for their treachery.

Had Jesus used the internet to spread his radical message of peace and love, he might have found his blog posts infiltrated by government spies attempting to undermine his integrity, discredit him or plant incriminating information online about him. At the very least, he would have had his website hacked and his email monitored.

Had Jesus attempted to feed large crowds of people, he would have been threatened with arrest for violating various ordinances prohibiting the distribution of food without a permit. Florida officials arrested a 90-year-old man for feeding the homeless on a public beach.

Had Jesus spoken publicly about his 40 days in the desert and his conversations with the devil, he might have been labeled mentally ill and detained in a psych ward against his will for a mandatory involuntary psychiatric hold with no access to family or friends. One Virginia man was arrested, strip searched, handcuffed to a table, diagnosed as having “mental health issues,” and locked up for five days in a mental health facility against his will apparently because of his slurred speech and unsteady gait.

Without a doubt, had Jesus attempted to overturn tables in a Jewish temple and rage against the materialism of religious institutions, he would have been charged with a hate crime. Currently, 45 states and the federal government have hate crime laws on the books.

Had anyone reported Jesus to the police as being potentially dangerous, he might have found himself confronted—and killed—by police officers for whom any perceived act of non-compliance (a twitch, a question, a frown) can result in them shooting first and asking questions later. Daniel Shaver, 26 years old, was crawling on the floor, sobbing and begging for his life, and had just reached down to pull up his shorts when a police officer opened fire on him with an AR-15 rifle. “If you move, we’re going to consider that a threat and we are going to deal with it and you may not survive it,” the cop shouted at Shaver before his partner started shooting.

Rather than having armed guards capture Jesus in a public place, government officials would have ordered that a SWAT team carry out a raid on Jesus and his followers, complete with flash-bang grenades and military equipment. There are upwards of 80,000 such SWAT team raids carried out every year, many on unsuspecting Americans who have no defense against such government invaders, even when such raids are done in error.

Instead of being detained by Roman guards, Jesus might have been made to “disappear” into a secret government detention center where he would have been interrogated, tortured and subjected to all manner of abuses. Chicago police “disappeared” more than 7,000 people into a secret, off-the-books interrogation warehouse at Homan Square.

Charged with treason and labeled a domestic terrorist, Jesus might have been sentenced to a life-term in a private prison where he would have been forced to provide slave labor for corporations or put to death by way of the electric chair or a lethal mixture of drugs.

Either way, whether Jesus had been born in our modern age or his own, he still would have died at the hands of a police state.

Indeed, as I show in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, what Jesus and other activists suffered in their day is happening to those who choose to speak truth to power today.

For those who celebrate Christmas as a season of miracles, it is indeed a time for joy and thanksgiving. Yet it should also be a time of reckoning, re-awakening and re-commitment to making this world a better place for all humanity.

Remember, what happened on that starry night in Bethlehem is only part of the story. That baby in the manger grew up to be a man who did not turn away from evil but instead spoke out against it, and we must do no less.

Thus, we are faced with a choice: remain silent in the face of evil or speak out against it. As Nobel Prize-winning author Albert Camus proclaimed:

What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak out, loud and clear, and that they should voice their condemnation in such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt, could rise in the heart of the simplest man. That they should get away from abstraction and confront the blood-stained face history has taken on today. The grouping we need is a grouping of men resolved to speak out clearly and to pay up personally.

Seeking Happiness Beyond Neo-Liberal Consumerism

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(Photo by Chris Hondros/Getty Images)

By Graham Peebles

Source: Dissident Voice

Irrespective of nationality, religion, race, or gender; whether stinking rich, desperately poor, or somewhere in between, happiness is the one thing everyone is seeking – consciously or not.

The architects of the socio-economic system in which we live have devised a system that promises to satisfy this yearning. But instead of building a society at ease with itself, full of peaceful, happy people, collective discontent is fed, resulting in a range of mental health issues, and in some cases, suicide.

Happiness, according to the duplicitous devotees of Neo-Liberalism, is to be found in the homogenous shopping centers of the world, the sterile holiday resorts and brash casinos. In things, in products and services that stimulate and excite: Happiness in this perverse paradigm has been replaced by pleasure, love exchanged for desire, choice substituted for freedom.

Echoes of happiness

Happiness that lasts is what we yearn for, not a transient state in which one feels the tingle of happiness for a moment or so, only to see it evaporate as the source of our happiness loses its appeal, or is exhausted — the holiday comes to an end, a relationship breaks up, the gamble doesn’t pay off, a new I-Phone or handbag hits the high street making the old one redundant etc., etc. We sense that a state of lasting happiness is possible but know not where it is or how to find it. The mistake commonly made, and one we are constantly encouraged to make, is to search for happiness within the sensory world where all experiences, pleasant or unpleasant, are facile and transient. The inevitable consequence of such shallow encounters with happiness is discontent and frustration.

Despite being repeatedly confronted with disappointment, instead of refraining from this never-ending quest, the searcher becomes increasingly desperate; a new relationship may be sought, a change of job or new home, more shopping outings, dinners planned, alcohol and drugs taken and so on into the darker reaches of sensory satisfaction and hedonistic indulgence.

Of course, it is important to enjoy life, and, yes, something resembling happiness is experienced on these excursions, but it is a happiness dependent on something, other people, and on certain elements being in place: take these away and the “happiness” very quickly evaporates. Such happiness is a mere echo of ‘True Happiness’, and one that carries with it conflict, fear and anxiety; this taste of happiness, functioning via the desire principle and the medium of the senses is relentlessly stoked by the exponents of neo-liberal idealism.

The success of their divisive project; i.e., profitability, growth, development, progress, call it what you will, is totally contingent on consumerism and the act of consuming relies on, and is the result of, perpetual desire. To their utter shame, despite having a responsibility to create the conditions in which ‘True Happiness’, can be experienced, most, if not all governments collude with corporate man/woman to promote the unhealthy, materialistic values that are the source of unhappiness.

Desire is constantly agitated through advertising, television, film and print media; fantastical, sentimental, idealized images, of not just where happiness lies, but what love looks like, are pumped around the world every minute of every day. The aim of this extravagant pantomime is to manipulate people into believing they need the stuff that the corporate-state is selling in order to be happy. But happiness cannot be found within the world of sensations, pleasure yes, but not happiness, and pleasure will never fill the internal void that exists and is perpetuated through this movement into materiality. Pleasure is not happiness, nor does it bring lasting happiness, at best it creates a false sense of relief from unhappiness and inner conflict, a momentary escape before dissatisfaction and desire bubble up again.

Cycles of discontent

Nothing but discontent is to be found within this endless cycle of desire, temporary satisfaction, and continued longing. It is an insatiable, inherently painful pattern that moves the ‘Seeker of Happiness’ further and further away from the treasure he or she is searching for, creating disharmony and conflict, for the individual and society. Add to this polluted landscape competition and inequality and a cocktail of division and chaos emerges: Competition between individuals and nations separates and divides, working against humanity’s natural inclination towards cooperation, sharing and tolerance; qualities that were crucial in the survival of early man.

Competition fosters ideas of superiority and inferiority, and together with conformity, an image of ‘success’ and ‘failure’, of beauty, and what it means to be a man or a woman, particularly a young man or young, is projected and thrust into the minds of everyone from birth. One of the effects of this is the tendency towards comparison, leading to personal dissatisfaction (with myriad symptoms from self-harming to addiction and depression), and the desire, or pressure, to conform to the presented ideal.

At the root of these interconnected patterns of discontent and misery, lies desire. Desire not just for pleasure, but desire for things to be other than they are; it is this constant movement of desire that creates unhappiness and deep dissatisfaction. If desire is the obstacle to happiness, then all desire needs to be negated, including the desire for happiness. Perhaps the question to be addressed then is not what will bring lasting happiness, but how to be free of unhappiness and discontent.

In ancient Greece, where life was hard and happiness was widely believed to be reserved for those rare individuals whom the Gods favoured, Socrates (470 BC – 399 BC) proposed that happiness could be attained by everyone by controlling their hedonistic desires, turning their attention towards the soul and by living a moral life. His view finds its root in the teachings of the Buddha, who, almost 100 years earlier had made clear in the Second Noble Truth, that far from bringing happiness, desire is, in fact, the cause of all suffering, and further, that freedom from suffering and unhappiness is brought about when desire is overcome.

True Happiness is an aspect of our natural self. It will not be found within the world of pleasure and material satisfaction, comfort and indulgence. It is an inherent part of who and what we are, and in principle at least, the possibility of unshakable happiness exists for everyone, everywhere, irrespective of circumstances.

Human Anxiety in Late-Stage Capitalism

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By Phil Rockstroh

Source: Consortium News

A number of recent press articles, including an over 8,000-word feature piece in The New York Times have asked, to quote the Times’ headline, “Why Are More American Teenagers Than Ever Suffering From Severe Anxiety?”

Although the question was proffered, the reporters and editors responsible for the articles remain resolutely obtuse to the obvious: The bughouse crazy environment of late-stage capitalist culture evokes classic fight-or-flight responses attendant to episodes of severe anxiety and panic attacks.

The word panic has its derivation in reference to Pan, the Greek god of wilderness and wildness, of the animal body encoded within human beings and its attendant animalistic imperatives. To wit, deracinate an animal from its natural habitat and it will evince, on an instinctual basis, a fight-or-flight response.

If caged, the unfortunate creature will pace the confines of its imprisonment, chew and tear at its fur and flesh, become irritable, enervated, languish and even die from the deprivation of the environment it was born to inhabit. A caged animal, even if the unfortunate creature endures captivity, is not the entity nature conceived; the living being has been reduced to A Thing That Waits For Lunch.

Human beings, animals that we are, respond in a similar fashion. Experiencing anxiety is among the ways our innate animal spirits react to the capitalist cage. Inundate a teenager with the soul-defying criteria of the corporate/consumer state, with its overbearing, pre-careerist pressures, its paucity of communal eros, its demands, overt and implicit, to conform to a shallow, manic, nebulously defined yet oppressive societal order, and insist that those who cannot adapt, much less excel, are “losers” who are fated to become “basement dwellers” in their parents’ homes or, for those who lack the privilege, be cast into homelessness, then the minds of the young or old alike are apt to be inundated with feelings of angst and dread.

Worse, if teenagers are culturally conditioned to believe said feelings and responses are exclusively experienced by weaklings, parasites, and losers then their suffering might fester to the point of emotional paralysis and suicidal inclinations.

No Real Remedies

What does the capitalist state offer as remedy? Obscenely profitable, corporately manufactured and widely prescribed psychoactive medications. Treatment, which, at best, merely masks symptoms and bestows the illusion of recovery.

As R. D. Laing observed: “What we call ‘normal’ is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience. It is radically estranged from the structure of being.”

In short, it is insanity to be expected to adapt to socially acceptable insanity. Yet we are pressured to adapt to, thus internalize odious, groupthink concepts and tenets. To cite one such groupthink example: homelessness is natural to the human condition and is a communally acceptable situation.

Closer to fact: The problem of homelessness is the result of a societal-wide perception problem — the phenomenon is the very emblem of the scrambling, twisting, dissociating, and displacing of perception that capitalist propagandists specialize in. Homelessness would be considered a relic of a barbaric past if this very simple principle was applied: Having access to permanent shelter is a human right and not a privilege.

What kind of a vile, vicious people would deny that simple proposition? Those conditioned by a lingering Puritan/Calvinist mindset to believe: Punishment for resisting the usurpation of the fleeting hours of one’s finite life must be severe. If the over-class can no longer get away with, as was once common practice in the Puritan/Calvinist tradition, public floggings to whip the labor force into line, then those who will not or cannot comply will be cast onto the cold, unforgiving concrete of a soulless cityscape.

It comes down to this, societies that are ridden with vast wealth inequity, due to the machinations of a rapacious over-class, create the obscenity known as homelessness. Moreover, the situation is only one of the numerous obscenities inherent to state capitalism. Obscenities that include, events that are dominating the present news cycle, e.g., the predations of a lecherous movie mogul, to the sub-cretinous doings and pronouncements of a Chief of State who is a bloated, bloviating, two-legged toxic waste dump.

Trump, No Aberration 

How is it then, liberals fail to grasp the fact that the Trump presidency is not an aberration; rather, his ascension to power should be regarded as being among the high probability variables of late-stage capitalism and empire building? The psychopathic, tangerine-tinged clown Trump is the embodiment of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, a development that is concomitant to over-expanded empires. Thus he will continue to flounce deeper into the quagmire of crash-engendering, economic legerdemain and perpetual war.

Empires are death cults, and death cults, on a subliminal basis, long for their own demise. Paradoxically, the collective mindset of imperium, even as it thrusts across the expanse of the world, renders itself insular, cut off from culturally enhancing novelty, as all the while, the homeland descends into a psychical swamp of churning madness.

A draining of the swamp of the collective mind cannot come to pass, for the swamp and citizenry are one. Withal, the likes of leaders such as Trump rise from and are made manifest by the morass of the culture itself. In a swamp, the gospel of rebirth and redemption is heard in the song of humus. New life rises from its compost.

In the presence of Trump’s debased mind and tombified carcass, one is privy to arias of rot. While Hillary Clinton’s monotonous tempo was the dirge of a taxidermist — cold, desiccated of heart, and devoid of life’s numinous spark — Trump’s voice carries the depraved cacophony of a Célinean fool’s parade … its trajectory trudging towards the end of empire.

As liberals new BFFL (Best Friend for Life) George W. Bush might ask, “Is our liberals learning.”

In a word, no. For example, the collective psyche of U.S. culture as been enflamed by the revelations that actresses were coerced into sexual encounters with a movie mogul whose power in the industry was only matched, even enhanced, by his sadistic nature. The staff of his company assisted, was complicit in, or remained silent about his lechery, as did the whole of the movie industry and the entertainment press. All as NFL athletes are being threatened with expulsion from the League if they kneel during the national anthem.

The Great Unspoken 

Yet the great unspoken remains: The enabling of and submission to the degradation, exploitation and tyranny, and the lack of resistance thereof share a common and singular factor: The careerism of all concerned. The cultural milieu concomitant to capitalism is at the rotten root and noxious blossoming of the situation.

Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 cinematic barnburner “Two or Three Things I Know About Her” should be required viewing for those unaware or in denial of the acuity of the film’s theme i.e., becoming enmeshed within the psychical landscape of dominance, degradation, and submission inherent to and inseparable from capitalist/consumer culture will cause one to become party to societal sanctioned prostitution. When life is negotiated within a collective value system that devalues and deadens the individual’s inner life thus warps every human transaction, anomie descends, the worst among a people ascend to positions of power.

“Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.” — William S. Burroughs, from Ghost of Chance

When friends visited me in New York, where I lived for decades, I would take them on walking tours through the city. We would cross the Westside Highway and stroll the pedestrian walk along the Hudson River, or cross the East River by walking across the Brooklyn Bridge.

The effect of these excursions on people was often profound … the combined elements of the elemental beauty of the rivers and vastness of the city’s architecture and scope, clamor, and the dense interweaving of traditional ethnic customs and ad hoc social codes of New Yorkers often would heighten the visitors’ senses and open them to larger, more intricate awareness of themselves and extant reality … the freeways of the contemporary mind (conditioned to be constantly engaged in manic motion, with one’s mind either frenzied by an obsession with performing (ultimately futile) maneuvers directed to saving time — or stalled at a frustration inducing standstill) were replaced by the exigencies of life at street level, i.e., novel situations that had to be apprehended and negotiated.

The possibilities of life seemed greater. The crimped eros of insular suburban thought became loosened before the city’s intricacies and expansiveness. Although: Not all, or even a scant few, New Yorkers can maintain the state of being. Few of us can live by Rilke’s resolve to “make every moment holy.” Life, in the city, becomes grotesquely distorted … High rents, inflicted by hyper-gentrification, in combination with the deification of success and its cult of careerism overwhelm one’s psyche … There is so far to fall.

Angst (the word originally can be traced to the ancient Greek deity Ananke, the immovable by prayer and offering bitch Goddess of Necessity and the root word of anxiety) clamps down one’s sense of awareness. Ananke dominates the lives of the non-privileged citizenry while Narcissus, Trump’s, the Clintons’, et.al. and their financial and cultural elitists’ patron God rules the day. The pantheon of possibility has been decimated, a cultural cleansing has been perpetrated, by the egoist caprice of the beneficiaries of the late capitalist dictatorship of money.

Hence, we arrive at the primal wisdom tacitly conveyed by anxiety-borne states of fight or flight. Due to the reality that capitalism, on both an individual and collective basis, drives individuals into madness, all as the system destroys forest and field, ocean and sea and the soul-scape of all who live under its rapacious dominion, our plight comes down to this: We either struggle and strive, by and any and all means, to end the system — or it will end us.

A New Concept of Consciousness

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By Ervin Laszlo

Source: Reality Sandwich

The following is excerpted from The Intelligence of the Cosmos by Ervin Laszlo, published by Inner Traditions.

What about mind? If the world is vibration, is also mind and consciousness a form of vibration? Or on the contrary, are all vibrations, the observed world, a manifestation of mind?

Although it is true that when all is said and done all we know is our consciousness, it is also true that we do not know our own consciousness, not to mention the consciousness of anyone else. We do not know what consciousness really is or how it is related to the brain. Since our consciousness is the basis of our identity, we do not know who we really are. Are we a body that generates the stream of sensations we call consciousness, or are we a consciousness associated with a body that displays it? Do we have consciousness, or are we consciousness? Consciousness could be a kind of illusion, a set of sensations produced by the workings of our brain. But it could also be that our body is a vehicle, a transmitter of a consciousness that is the basic reality of the world. The world could be material, and mind could be an illusion. Or the world could be consciousness, and the materiality of the world could be the illusion.

Both of these possibilities have been explored in the history of philosophy, and today we are a step closer than before to understanding which of them is true. There are important insights emerging at the expanding frontiers where physical science joins consciousness research.

On the basis of a growing series of observations and experiments, a new consensus is emerging. It is that “my” consciousness is not just my consciousness, meaning the consciousness produced by my brain, any more than a program transmitted over the air would be a program produced by my TV set. Just like a program broadcast over the air continues to exist when my TV set is turned off, my consciousness continues to exist when my brain is turned off.

Consciousness is a real element in the real world. The brain and body do not produce it; they display it. And it does not cease when life in the body does. Consciousness is a reflection, a projection, a manifestation of the intelligence that “in-forms” the world.

Mystics and shamans have known that this is true for millennia, and artists and spiritual people know it to this day. Its rediscovery at the leading edge of science augurs a profound shift in our view of the world. It overcomes the answer the now outdated materialist science gives to the question regarding the nature of mind: the answer according to which consciousness is an epiphenomenon, a product or by-product of the workings of the brain. In that case, the brain would be like an electricity-generating turbine. The turbine is material, while the current it generates is not (or not strictly) material. In the same way, the brain could be material, even if the consciousness it generates proves to be something that is not quite material.

On first sight, this makes good sense. On a second look, however, the materialist concept encounters major problems. First, a conceptual problem. How could a material brain give rise to a truly immaterial stream of sensations? How could anything that is material produce anything immaterial? In modern consciousness research this is known as the “hard problem.” It has no reasonable answer. As researchers point out, we do not have the slightest idea how “matter” could produce “mind.” One is a measurable entity with properties such as hardness, extension, force, and the like, and the other is an ineffable series of sensations with no definite location in space and an ephemeral presence in time.

Fortunately, the hard problem does not need to be solved: it is not a real problem. There is another possibility: mind is a real element in the real world and is not produced by the brain; it is manifested and displayed by the brain.

 

Mind beyond Brain: Evidence for a New Concept of Consciousness

If mind is a real element in the real world only manifested rather than produced by the brain, it can also exist without the brain. There is evidence that mind does exist on occasion beyond the brain: surprisingly, conscious experience seems possible in the absence of a functioning brain. There are cases—the near-death experience (NDE) is the paradigm case—where consciousness persists when brain function is impaired, or even halted.

Thousands of observations and experiments show that people whose brain stopped working but then regained normal functioning can experience consciousness during the time they are without a functioning brain. This cannot be accounted for on the premises of the production theory: if there is no working brain, there cannot be consciousness. Yet there are cases of consciousness appearing beyond the living and working brain, and some of these cases are not easy to dismiss as mere imagination.

A striking NDE was recounted by a young woman named Pamela. Hers has been just one among scores of NDEs;* it is cited here to illustrate that such experiences exist, and can be documented.

*For a more extensive sampling see Ervin Laszlo with Anthony Peake from The ­Immortal Mind (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2014).

Pamela died on May 29, 2010, at the age of fifty-three. But for hours she was effectively dead on the operating table nineteen years earlier. Her near-demise was induced by a surgical team attempting to remove an aneurism in her brain stem.

After the operation, when her brain and body returned to normal functioning, Pamela described in detail what had taken place in the operating theater. She recalled among other things the music that was playing (“Hotel California” by the Eagles). She described a whole series of conversations among the medical team. She reported having watched the opening of her skull by the surgeon from a position above him and described in detail the “Midas Rex” ­bone-cutting device and the distinct sound it made.

About ninety minutes into the operation, she saw her body from the outside and felt herself being pulled out of it and into a tunnel of light. And she heard the bone saw activate, even though there were specially designed speakers in each of her ears that shut out all external sounds. The speakers themselves were broadcasting audible clicks in order to confirm that there was no activity in her brain stem. Moreover, she had been given a general anesthetic that should have assured that she was fully unconscious. Pamela should not have been able either to see or to hear anything.

It appears that consciousness is not, or not entirely, tied to the living brain. In addition to NDEs, there are cases in which consciousness is detached from the brain in regard to its location. In these cases consciousness originates above the eyes and the head, or near the ceiling, or above the roof. These are the out-of-body experiences: OBEs.

There are OBEs where congenitally blind people have visual awareness. They describe their surroundings in considerable detail and with remarkable accuracy. What the blind experience is not restored eyesight, because they are aware of things that are shielded from their eyes or are beyond the range of normal eyesight. Consciousness researcher Kenneth Ring called these experiences “transcendental awareness.”

Visual awareness in the blind joins a growing repertory of experiences collected and researched by Stanislav Grof: “transcendental ­experiences.” As Grof found, these beyond-the-brain and ­beyond-here-and-now experiences are widespread—more widespread than anyone would have suspected even a few years ago.

There are also reports of ADEs, after-death experiences. Thousands of psychic mediums claim to have channeled the conscious experience of deceased people, and some of these reports are not easy to dismiss as mere imagination. One of the most robust of these reports has come from Bertrand Russell, the renowned English philosopher. Lord Russell was a skeptic, an outspoken debunker of esoteric phenomena, including the survival of the mind or soul beyond the body. He once wrote, “I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive.” Yet after he died he conveyed the following message to the medium Rosemary Brown.

You may not believe that it is I, Bertrand Arthur William Russell, who am saying these things, and perhaps there is no conclusive proof that I can offer through this somewhat restrictive medium. Those with an ear to hear may catch the echo of my voice in my phrases, the tenor of my tongue in my tautology; those who do not wish to hear will no doubt conjure up a whole table of tricks to disprove my retrospective rhetoric.

. . . After breathing my last breath in my mortal body, I found myself in some sort of extension of existence that held no parallel as far as I could estimate, in the material dimension I had recently experienced. I observed that I was occupying a body predominantly bearing similarities to the physical one I had vacated forever; but this new body in which I now resided seemed virtually weightless and very volatile, and able to move in any direction with the minimum of effort. I began to think I was dreaming and would awaken all too soon in that old world, of which I had become somewhat weary to find myself imprisoned once more in that ageing form which encased a brain that had waxed weary also and did not always want to think when I wanted to think. . . .

Several times in my life [Lord Russell continued] I had thought I was about to die; several times I had resigned myself with the best will that I could muster to ceasing to be. The idea of B.R. no longer inhabiting the world did not trouble me unduly. Befitting, I thought, to give the chap (myself) a decent burial and let him be. Now here I was, still the same I, with the capacities to think and observe sharpened to an incredible degree. I felt earth-life suddenly seemed very unreal almost as it had never happened. It took me quite a long while to understand that feeling until I realized at last that matter is certainly illusory although it does exist in actuality; the material world seemed now nothing more than a seething, changing, restless sea of indeterminable density and volume.

This report “from beyond” appears hardly credible, were it not that it is supported by other ADEs. One of the most striking and difficult to dismiss of these ADEs is the case of a deceased chess grand master who played a game with a living grand master.*

*For details see Laszlo with Peake, The Immortal Mind.

Wolfgang Eisenbeiss, an amateur chess player, engaged the medium Robert Rollans to transmit the moves of a game to be played with Viktor Korchnoi, the world’s third-ranking grand master. His ­opponent was to be a player whom Rollans was to find in his trance state. Eisenbeiss gave Rollans a list of deceased grand masters and asked him to contact them and ask who would be willing to play. Rollans entered his state of trance and did so. On June 15, 1985, the former grand master Geza Maroczy responded and said that he was available. Maroczy was the third-ranking grand master in the year 1900. He was born in 1870 and died in 1951 at the age of eighty-one. Rollans reported that Maroczy responded to his invitation as follows.

I will be at your disposal in this peculiar game of chess for two reasons. First, because I also want to do something to aid mankind ­living on Earth to become convinced that death does not end everything, but instead the mind is separated from the physical body and comes up to us in a new world, where individual life continues to manifest itself in a new unknown dimension. Second, being a Hungarian patriot, I want to guide the eyes of the world into the direction of my beloved Hungary.

Korchnoi and Maroczy began a game that was frequently interrupted due to Korchnoi’s poor health and numerous travels. It lasted seven years and eight months. Speaking through Robert Rollans, Maroczy gave his moves in the standard form: for example, “5. A3 – Bxc3+”; Korchnoi gave his own moves to Rollans in the same form, but by ordinary communication. Every move was analyzed and recorded. It turned out that the game was played at the grand-master level and that it exhibited the style for which Maroczy was famous. It ended on February 11, 1993, when at move forty-eight Maroczy resigned. Subsequent analysis showed that it was a wise decision: five moves later Korchnoi would have achieved checkmate.

In this case the medium Rollans channeled information he did not possess in his ordinary state of consciousness. And this information was so expert and precise that it is extremely unlikely that any person Rollans could have contacted would have possessed it.

There are also firsthand testimonies of consciousness without a functioning brain. The well-known Harvard neurosurgeon Eben Alexander, who was just as insistently skeptical about consciousness beyond the brain as Lord Russell had been, gave a detailed account of his conscious experience during the seven days he spent in deep coma. In the condition in which he found himself, conscious experience, he previously said, is completely excluded. Yet his experience—which he described in detail in several articles and three bestselling books—was so clear and convincing that it has changed his mind. Consciousness, he is now claiming, can exist beyond the brain.

The above-cited cases illustrate that there is remarkable, and on occasion remarkably robust, evidence that consciousness is not confined to the living brain. Although this evidence is widespread, it is not widely known. There are still people, including scientists, who refuse to take cognizance of it. This is not surprising, given that the evidence is anomalous for the dominant world concept. Those who strongly disbelieve that such phenomena exist, not only refuse to consider evidence to the contrary, they often fail to perceive evidence to the contrary.

Nonetheless, the view that consciousness is a fundamental element in the world is gaining recognition. The Manifesto of the Summit on Post-Materialist Science, Spirituality and Society (Tucson, Arizona, 2015) declared: “Mind represents an aspect of reality as primordial as the physical world. Mind is fundamental in the universe, i.e., it cannot be derived from matter and reduced to anything more
basic.”

Live Free or Die: The Psychology of Rebellion & Dissent

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By Gary ‘Z’ McGee

Source: Waking Times

“I rebel—therefore we exist.” ~Albert Camus, The Rebel

Dissent is a tricky subject. The need to rebel against atrocity is deeply ingrained in the human condition. Even if most of us don’t act on it, the impulse is still there, churning our guts with disgust, getting our hearts pumping, moving us to spit curse words in lathered fury and shout in angry defiance. The problem is that most of us don’t know what to do with this powerful and sometimes overwhelming energy.

Most of us were raised in violent societies that use violence to keep the culture churning in a diabolical conquer-control-consume-repeat cycle. So, most of us tend to use violence to channel our deep and powerful need for dissent, thus perpetuating more violence. When the culture is jamming violence down our throat as a solution to its problems, are we really that surprised when our acts of rebellion turn out to be violent? Something’s got to give if we want to break this cycle of violence deeply imbedded in our culture.

In his book, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, Albert Camus wrote about the “true rebel.”The true rebel is in revolt against oppression, violence, slavery and tyranny for the sake of others through constructive and life-affirming action. The true rebel protests out of love, so that others may be free. Intent is everything. True rebellion, Camus argues, is an act motivated but concerned with the common good rather than by self-interest. The rebel in revolt out of selfishness, greed, or need for power, eventually becomes a tyrant. The rebel in revolt for the sake of others, becomes a hero.

Whether you are alt-right or alt-left, republican’t or democan’t, voluntarist or anarchist, if you are seeking power over others for your own selfish and greedy ends, your revolution means fuck-all. You’re just another would-be-tyrant getting churned out of the meat-mill of violence begetting violence. It doesn’t matter how noble or important you think your cause is; if you need to use violence to persuade others to follow it, your cause is fundamentally flawed and immoral. Acting violently in a violent culture only perpetuates violence. Similarly, acting immorally in an immoral society just perpetuates immorality. Unhealthy acts beget unhealthy acts. Like Gandhi said, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”

Lest we all go blind, we must rebel so that others may freely exist. This requires our dissent to be based in freedom for everyone, even those we don’t agree with. A kind of metamorality arises from this kind of thinking, like Joshua Greene writes about in his book, Moral Tribes. But, and here’s the rub, any freedom which seeks to violate the nonaggression principle must not be tolerated. Violence is where the line must be drawn. As someone once said, “Your freedom to swing your fist ends an inch from my nose” (unknown). In such cases, self-defense is paramount. As Gandhi also advised, “When there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence.”

A true rebel doesn’t seek out rebellion for the sake of rebellion, or just as an excuse to act out violently. No. A true rebel passionately seeks a healthy environment (physically, culturally, and psychologically) and they rebel against anything that stands in the way of that healthy environment. As Camus said, “Rebellion, though apparently negative, since it creates nothing, is profoundly positive in that it reveals the part of man which must always be defended.” And that’s what it comes down to: self-defense, self-preservation, and survival. Not just personal survival, but the survival of the species.

That’s where life-affirming action comes in. When our rebellion is life-affirming, freedom-affirming, and based on nonviolence, it is healthy (heroic). When our rebellion is life-denying, freedom-denying, and based on violence, it is unhealthy (tyrannical). The hero is free, and uses that freedom with the soul intent to free others. The tyrant (or would be tyrant) is also free, but uses that freedom with the soul intent to rule others. We escape tyranny when we seek to free others through our own freedom. Liberty coincides with heroism when we’re able to go from asking, ‘free from what?’ to asking, ‘free for what?’

At the end of the day, the history of our culture of violence is only fruitful through a vigilant rebellion against it. This means a vigilant rebellion against oppression, hate, violence, and slavery of all kinds. Those who dedicate themselves to this culture of violence dedicate themselves to nothing and, in turn, are nothing. But those who dedicate themselves to life, freedom, and health, despite the culture of violence, dedicate themselves to survival and reap from it the harvest that sows its seed in the progressive evolution of our species.

A species hellbent on violence against itself is unhealthy and eventually destroys itself. A species determined to be healthy only ever uses violence as a last resort in self-defense and for the preservation of the species itself. From the former, the defiant tyrant juts his ugly head, declaring himself free at the expense of the freedom of others. From the latter, the defiant hero rises up, denying the tyrant’s violent oppression, and affirming freedom through the freedom of us all. That’s what Camus meant when he wrote: “I rebel –therefore we exist.”

What Science Isn’t

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The Cult of Lay-Positivism

By Equanimous Rex

Source: Modern Mythology

Science. Does the word bring images of space ships and high-tech equipment doing miraculous things? Wonder drugs and new solutions to old problems? Good, because this article isn’t a declaration that science is evil, or dead. Keep that shining gaze on the things that amaze you, and buckle up.

Never before has it been so easy as in the modern era to find something to fill a person’s God-Hole with. What’s a God-Hole, you ask? Well, put simply its a metaphor for the part of our psyche where religious surety and faithful fanaticism would have been reserved for Yahweh and his earthly cohorts, as was the case with generations and generations of many of our ancestors. These days you can’t walk three steps without crushing some cult or dealing with apologists for yet another embryonic subculture, and one of the most wide-spread and pervasive modern cults is that of the materialist–positivists.

You might not be familiar with the names but you’re definitely familiar with the faces, the words, the general attitudes of the MP’s. They tend to identify themselves by their atheism though their atheism is the least descriptive part of their belief system. Erroneously, MP’s have been in the spotlight for so long that nowadays people assume that if you are an atheist, you must fall in line and along trends of attitudes of this group, despite the fact that an atheist could be a Buddhist, LaVeyan Satanist, religious naturalist, believe in the supernatural, ghosts, psychic powers, or what have you, (since none of these things are theoi, or gods). MP’s on the other hand are intrinsically opposed to the study of or contemplation of seemingly paranormal or preternatural phenomena.

Likewise they have taken hold of the term “skeptic” and have become its face in mainstream discourse. These days all you have to do to be thought of as a skeptic is to, firstly, tell everyone quite loudly that you are one, and secondly, start engaging in specified, surgical doubt of only the belief systems and ideologies you are already antagonistic towards, while neglecting to perform the same upon anything you tacitly presume to be true. Engage in rampant polemics against your opponents and frequently craft apologetics for your own beliefs, use your inquisitiveness and doubt like a blade with which to carve out the proverbial flesh of those whom you despise ideologically. This is far from philosophical skepticism as it was originally intended, but as long as you tell people often enough you are a skeptic, you must be one.

The combination of a certain brand of materialism (philosophical monism, in which they deem all things that exist are material) and positivism (belief that everything that exists can be verified scientifically and anything that can’t be verified scientifically doesn’t exist) forms a unique cocktail, an anti-belief based upon a sense of superiority against all other beliefs. “You have beliefs. We have facts.” It is a potentially useful worldview, which many people use as a metric with which to quantify worthiness, but use is only the same as truth to the strictest of pragmatists.

Most proponents of MP eschew philosophy as navel-gazing aphorisms and platitudes, seeing the field as the decrepit grandfather of science. Given that they are mostly unaware of philosophy — due to their aversion — they don’t usually know that their beliefs fall squarely under philosophy, and they don’t usually seem to know that there are still to this day debates about the validity of their philosophical presuppositions.

Again, being critical of the philosophies of positivism and materialism is not being anti-science, though such a claim is inevitable should you question the sacrosanct nature of anything tangentially related to science or adjacent to science. Karl Popper — the guy who came up with the concept of falsifiability  — was a major opponent to positivism, for example. They’d probably say he was anti-science as well, though that is entirely inaccurate.

This isn’t a condemnation of (most) scientists. I’ve had the pleasure to meet a few over the years and I’ve always found them quite humble in terms of facing the mysterious of the universe. They were the least likely to make outrageous claims or swerve outside of their proverbial lanes. The problem lies mostly with what I’ve come to think of as “positivist laity”.

The “lay-person” is a concept found generally from religion, and refers to someone who is not a part of the clergy, who are not ordained or educated on the ‘inner mysteries’ of the religious order. They are deferential to the priests and clerics and put great faith in them but do not themselves have the same information, education or knowledge.

The materialist-positivist laity seems to consist of people who have no formal or informal education dealing with the scientific method(s) or in the fields of science. They often come from a Post-Christian background (at least in the United States) and are angry that they believed the literalism their parents or geographical region shoved down their throats. They end up seeing a few debunking videos, or those in which someone who is self-identified with atheism points out the inconsistencies of the Christian cosmological mythos. They start to notice that the explanations and descriptions of the world that scientists and science educators give are more functional, and are trusted to be provable, even though the concept of ‘proof’ is mathematical, not scientific.

Either way, for whatever reason, they come to replace Yahweh and his priests for their conception of Science and it’s own educated, inner-circle experts. Once again, not a critique of science nor atheism. Not even really a critique of materialist-positivism. We must focus on the issue at hand. Large swathes of lay-positivists are turning the concept of science into a cargo-cult religion, using it to fill in their empty God-Hole and clutching to their conception of a cohesive and explanatory world-story.

It was the jobs of priests for thousands upon thousands of years to give the simple folk a world-story, without such as story anxieties rise and existential doubt creeps in. The crafting and dissemination of a world-story has since been split up from between priests to spread into other areas and specialists such as philosophers, academics and of course, scientists.

Science isn’t a religion. Science isn’t a good many things. For example, science isn’t technology, which would probably shock quite a few lay-positivists. Humanity used and invented technology since as far back as we can find evidence for humans at all. We created aqueducts, agricultural technology, wartime technology, shipbuilding and navigational technology, calendars and time keeping technology, architectural technology, psychological techniques and so on and so forth, well before science was a twinkle in the eye of natural philosophy. People with no education on science or without any formal training to this day still invent new technology. So, next time someone points to a piece of technology and tries to conflate it with science, keep this in mind. One cannot simply anachronistically and retroactively claim for ‘science’ everything which works or is useful, though this does not prevent some from attempting such a thing.

Science is also not ethics. Nor can science tell you what to do with the information you glean from the universe via science. I’m sure people will disagree, but I’m also sure most of them are not scientists and/or do not have a clear understanding of the scientific method(s). Not every moment of clear-thinking and rationality is science, not every free-thought is evidence of science in the works. By trying to make it appear as though everything which makes sense and works is science, lay-positivists have before-the-fact designated everything that is not science as nonsensical and nonexistent.

Intuition and introspection are cast aside by positivism because they are not scientific, and I agree wholeheartedly that intuition can be flawed, rife with bias and misconceptions. But it’s a ‘don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater’ scenario. Don’t forget that most of us get up every day and manage to navigate this world without using the slightest bit of the scientific method. For instance, we’ve got inductive, deductive and abductive reasoning, none of which are isolated to scientific methods. You’ve got examples of people thought to be great scientists in bygone eras who never used an ounce of empiricism to figure out their great contributions. (Galileo, for example, used rational but non-empirical means to infer a heliocentric model).

Science isn’t a cult, a religion, or anything of the sort. But lay-positivism stands to become just that. People seeking to fill a God-Hole, to give their life a sense of meaning and to provide a cohesive world-story so that they do not feel they exist in a state of uncertainty and chaos. Nietzsche, Freud, Feuerbach, and many others have recognized this fact: the need for Gods is not so easily replaced as the Gods themselves are. If scientific findings are used with an ideological agenda to offer fragile humanity a security blanket against the cold, unpredictable unknown, misrepresented and misunderstood by those who have never even bothered to Google “scientific method” who are merely disenfranchised with their old Church, it very well stands that the word “science” will be appropriated akin to the terms “skepticism” and “atheism” to refer to specified, pigeon-holed belief systems, made sacred and subject to no criticism.

“Meet the old laity, same as the new laity.”

Blade Runner And The Synthetic Panopticon

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Truth Is Always An Open Question

By James Curcio

Source: Modern Mythology

This Is Only A Model

We are living in alternate realities. In one reality people see Trump’s incessant lying, and no one in power seeming to doing anything to stop it. Others see him as battling the deep state. Some see Brexit as a blind idiot kamikaze mission, while others see it as fighting back the evils of globalism. These are not equivalent claims, but they are both claims, narratives that claim to represent the way things are, and that’s what I’d like to examine here.

“All things are subject to interpretation, whichever interpretation prevails is a function of power and not truth.” — Nietzsche

Note that this aphorism doesn’t say “there is no truth,” nor does it question whether we all ultimately inhabit a single reality, only that whichever interpretation of the truth prevails is a function of power. Truth relies on an accurate or corresponding representation of reality. In this sense, we can talk of them singularly. But we only have our narratives and experiences with which to evaluate what that is.

And what is power? That demands at least an article in itself, but a popular 1984 quote lays the heart of what it’s purpose is: more of itself.

We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

This interpretation of social dynamics doesn’t contest the legitimacy of the scientific method, iteratively approaching closer approximations of truth (a model) distilled from reality, through experimentation. In fact, this premise was presented by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow in their 2010 book, The Grand Design.

Model-dependent realism is a view of scientific inquiry that focuses on the role of scientific models of phenomena. It claims reality should be interpreted based upon these models, and where several models overlap in describing a particular subject, multiple, equally valid, realities exist. It claims that it is meaningless to talk about the “true reality” of a model as we can never be absolutely certain of anything. The only meaningful thing is the usefulness of the model.

However, social dynamics aren’t exactly like physics, either. Not being able to recognize the difference between the ideal (an appeal for rationality, consistent methodology, and balance), vs. how people actually engage with interpreting it is a serious problem. And got to catch up. Fast.

In other words, the appeal for truth — whether CNN’s recent “this is an apple” advertisement, or Fox New’s old “fair and balanced” — itself enters into the marketplace of ideas. Or perhaps a more apt metaphor is a battlefield, especially when we consider the amount of capital, technology and labor that states, corporations, and billionaires can throw at furthering their personal agendas.

Cognitive biases, innate responses like tribalism, the myopia of fear, etc. are all being leveraged via media, all around us, all the time. This includes all forms of media, since it’s all digital narrative building of a collective sort. Myth making, even. That’s the real point, and it seems to be drowned out across the spectrum. We’re all too familiar now with the ideas of dis/information wars, but all of them are fundamentally a contest over who gets to define the narrative. If we recognize that this is fundamentally about power, do we also recognize that it operates on dynamics that have absolutely nothing to do with our dearly held moral values?

An assumption some may draw from this is that vested interests have distorted reality; therefore there is no reality. However, that obviously isn’t quite right, either. What obscures clear thinking on this is that reality essentially has two meanings: the “state of things as they are”, which makes no assurances of what that state is, and the question of if things exist at all. The first poses an epistemological framework, the latter, an ontological one.

The former we might consider the social-linguistic definition. That shouldn’t be conflated with the absolute existence of a thing. No, it can only speak to the identity and meaning that we apply to what we’re given.

The Hierarchy of Reality

This may seem like a tangent, but consider the Turing test:

The Turing test, developed by Alan Turing in 1950, is a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. Turing proposed that a human evaluator would judge natural language conversations between a human and a machine designed to generate human-like responses. … If the evaluator cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test.

In other words, the appearance of sentience is all we ever get. An AI that behaves as if conscious is, from the outside, precisely the same as a conscious agent. If we appear to be having a conversation, then so we are. But does that prove we’re real in some definitive sense? No. Again, we are being presented with the social-linguistic layer of reality, that speaks to perceptions.

The relevance here to society is to be found within Blade Runner, which of course takes a great deal of inspiration in its core mythos from the problems posed by the Turing test. The world presented there is a hierarchy of power based on perceived degree of reality.

There is, within this, the implications of Benthamite Utilitarianism, and Foucault’s later elaboration on those ideas: that we may consider the world based on externalities that are socially determined rather than based on our internal experience. This seems in some sense precisely the opposite of “lived experience,” which seeks to situate our internal experience as the center of our concerns.

This directly enters into Blade Runner 2049, for instance, Joi, who seems the lowest on the hierarchy of reality, is seen as a pure surface, and all but K seem to question whether she has any lived experience at all. Mariette observes to K, “Oh I see, you don’t like real girls,” and later to Joi, “I‘ve been inside you. Not so much there as you think.”

Of course, this question is always open, one must always be judged “sufficiently real.”

Another example of this dilemma can be found in a current medical crisis. As many Americans know, we have something of an opiate epidemic in the United States. Although there is no end of debate over why this is the case, for doctors concerned about liability and patients concerned about being in pain for the rest of their lives, much of the politics boils away.

The problem comes down to the nature of pain itself. We may exhibit external signs of pain, but some patients will present with those more or less, for various cultural, personal, and even biological reasons. So the appearance of pain or lack of it is little use, when trying to determine whether a patient is “drug seeking.” Even if we test the biological response of different patients who are experiencing pain, we find that it is very difficult to tell. This is especially true with those who experience chronic pain. For instance, blood pressure often rises when you’re in pain, but higher blood pressure isn’t proof, and one must also ask what the baseline is. All of this calls to mind the lie-detector style tests used in the first Blade Runner movie to assess the reality of the subject, from the outside in.

Patient reporting was seen as the golden standard for pain level diagnosis during the years that doctors were ostensibly over-prescribing. But this too is no better than asking a Replicant whether they’re “real” or not. What we’re left with is a dependence on trust of people’s own stories about their lived experience, but of course, people can also lie. It comes down to a matter of faith and trust, and those are commonly in short supply.

This outside-in valuation is also the basis for what has recently come to be called — with some contention — neoliberal capitalism.

… it [Utilitarianism] presupposes a very concrete theory of nature as well as human nature: an understanding of human beings not as unique, irreplaceable beings — as neighbors, friends, or members of a community oriented toward justice and fairness — but rather as nameless, faceless, calculating, hedonistic, atomistic units. Alongside of this it understands nature and the natural world of plants, animals, trees, oceans and mountains not as intrinsic goods in themselves, but merely as ‘things’ that have only human use-value.

This gives us a clue to understanding why utilitarianism is so attractive to a modern bureaucratized, consumerist culture that is prepared to uphold profit maximization over human health, environmental safety, clean water and nutritious food. In other words, utilitarianism is widely embraced precisely because it replaces the living, breathing, emotional and experiencing human being with the human as pleasure or profit maximizing machine; it prizes the quick technical fix over the difficult task of understanding the human condition; it valorizes thoughtless calculation over thoughtful ethical discernment and practical wisdom. — CounterPunch

So Blade Runner presents an acceleration of the myths many of us already apply to the world around us, one which is deeply suspicious of our ability to find singular truth, or maybe more aptly, to avoid inflicting our power fantasies, needs and fears upon one another, forever.

The Authority of Authorship

When we engage with narratives online, in the press, in the media, we need to remain constantly aware that it is presenting a view of the world, and it is a view which in many ways is likely to be self-serving. There is, at the same time, an invisible architecture at work underneath the ways the world is re-presented to us, and this composes one of the fundamental anxieties that Baudrillard presented in Simulacra and Simulation. We cannot always discern even our own motives, or the reasons why we feel that one thing is more true than another when truly sufficient evidence has not been provided. Because interpretations of truth are malleable. And there has never been a mass-surveillance, mass-behavioral and linguistic analysis machine like the Internet.

It is easy for us to apply this sort of cynicism towards our presumptive ideological enemies, but will always remain more difficult to apply that same consideration to narratives that immediately go, “ah, this seems true!” Again, truth is always a claim, which must be proven — and never finally.

All authority that seeks to stop this process and say “put no others before me” are plays at power. Even within our own minds and hearts this is true.

We mustn’t forget that.

Revolutionary Terror: Mark Steven’s ‘Splatter Capital’

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By Michael Grasso

Source: We Are the Mutants

Splatter Capital: The Political Economy of Gore Films
By Mark Steven
Repeater Books, 2017

“Splatter confirms and redoubles our very worst fears. It reminds us of what capital is doing to all of us, all of the time—of how predators are consuming our life-substances; of how we are gravely vulnerable against the machinery of production and the matrices of exchange; and of how, as participants of an internecine conflict, our lives are always already precarious.”

—from the Introduction to Splatter Capital

Political readings or interpretations of horror films are nothing new. But in Mark Steven’s 2017 study, Splatter Capital, an explicit connection is made between the bloody gore of what Steven terms “splatter” horror films and the dehumanizing, mutilative forces of global capitalism. Moreover, Steven posits the artistic motivation behind splatter horror as an explicit repudiation of this system: “It is politically committed and its commitment tends toward the anti-capitalist left.” In splatter films, Steven tells us, the images of gory dismemberment do double duty. They both offer a clear metaphor for capitalism’s cruelty, and act as a cathartic revenge in which the bloody legacy of capitalist exploitation is often visited upon its perpetrators and profiteers among the bourgeoisie.

Some definitions are in order here, given that Steven’s schema of genres—“splatter,” “slasher,” “extreme horror”—draws distinctions that might not be apparent even to horror fans. Splatter horror, according to Steven, is all about the violence that can be visited upon the human body and all the abjection that follows. It is machinery tearing apart flesh, blood, and guts: the moment a human body becomes meat. It differs from the personalized and often sexualized “hunt” of the slasher flick. The protagonist in a slasher movie is an individual (often female) resisting violent death at the hands of another individual (often male). In victory against Jason, Freddy, or Michael Myers, this protagonist, in Steven’s words, “restores a social order, which is all too regularly white, middle-class, and suburban.” Splatter horror not only expands the horizons of mutilation and violence allowable in a horror film but systematizes it. The splatter enemy is an implacable, impersonal force, full of shock and awe; its grudge is not personal, but instead overwhelming, inescapable, and, most importantly, class-based.

The language of violence and horror has been with Marxist thought from the beginning. Steven gives us a good précis of Marx’s use of explicitly Gothic (along with bloody and cannibalistic) imagery throughout his works, as well as a splatter-tastic explanation of the exploitation behind surplus value, using an imaginary case study in the manufacturing of chainsaws and knives. The October Revolution in Russia is viewed as a reaction to the inhuman mechanized slaughter of the first World War; Eisenstein’s early filmic paeans to the necessity of revolution such as Strike (1925) demonstrate, thanks to Eisenstein’s pioneering use of montage, capitalism’s role as butcher. Steven also discusses avowed leftist filmmakers from outside the Soviet Union such as Godard, Makavejev, and Pasolini—specifically their use of gore to embody the cruelty of the ruling classes.

As we enter the world of Hollywood film in Chapter Three, Steven examines splatter film as a specifically American reaction to the constant churning crisis of capitalism. Specifically, Steven looks at the two peaks of gore-flecked horror—the mid ’60s through the early ’80s, and the post-Cold War “torture porn” trend of the early ’00s—as expressions of two very important economic and political shifts. The first splatter peak in the ’70s is seen as a clear reaction to the slow, inexorable widening of neoliberal and globalist postindustrial economics and its impact on the American industrial worker. (The aftermath of this trend continues into the 1980s with the evaporation of industry and the establishment of a new information-and-finance-based economy.) The splatter/torture porn trend of the ’00s and beyond is a reaction to the crises of capitalism under a new world order of neocolonialist conflict: the War on Terror, the final disestablishment of the Western industrial base in favor of cheap labor in the developing world, and the new interconnected, networked world’s rulership by speculative capital in the form of the finance sector.

Steven cites too many splatter movies to cover in this review, but central to his thesis is the seminal 1974 Tobe Hooper film, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The death of local industry leads Leatherface and family to keep their slaughterhouse traditions alive by carving up and eating young people. These young people, Steven is quick to point out, are only here at all because they were unable to get gas for their car (thanks to the first of two 1970s oil crises). American decline is everywhere; betrayal by global economic forces are central to the trap that’s being laid by the cannibals. (Of course, the carnage of the Vietnam War can’t be overlooked here either, given the visual language of ambush, capture, and torture; Hooper himself has cited this in subsequent interviews.) Steven notes that the victims in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre are representative of a bourgeoisie who don’t know how the sausage is made. It’s important and vital, Steven says, that the cannibalistic side of splatter involves the bourgeoisie being forced to eat members of their own class. It’s Burroughs’s famous “naked lunch“: “the frozen moment when everyone sees what is at the end of every fork.”

As the neoliberal takeover of the world economy begins in earnest in the 1980s, as complex and largely ephemeral systems of mass media and finance take the place of the visceral, grinding monomania of industrial capitalism, splatter horror follows suit. Steven’s analysis of David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) is especially sharp, examining the links between the body horror of the film and the Deleuzian body without organs. Max Renn’s body becomes an endlessly modular media node, able to accommodate video cassettes, to generate and fuse with phallic weapons (used to assassinate and destroy the media forces who’ve made him this way), to mesh and mold and mix with the hard plastic edges of media technology. By the end of the film, Renn is a weapon reprogrammed and re-trained on the very media-industrial complex that made him. More body horror: the cult classic Society (1989) and its shocking conclusion posits the ruling class as a cancerous monster, an amorphous leviathan straight out of a Gilded Age political cartoon, eating and fucking and vomiting, red in tooth and claw and pseudopod. Barriers between bodies break down; the system begins swallowing up all alternate possibilities.

By the time the Cold War is finished, the era of post-9/11 eternal war, of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, led to the popular new splatter sub-genre of “torture porn.” Steven identifies the genre’s distinguishing aesthetic feature: the indisputable, systematic, and worldwide victory of capitalism and the hypnotic Spectacle that accompanies it. In this era, there are no longer any alternatives. Everyone, rich and poor, is trapped in the system, and the system reintegrates torture into a worldwide video spectacle. This is embodied in both the global conspiracies of the wealthy in Roth’s Hostel series and in the Jigsaw Killer’s industrially-themed Rube Goldberg devices in the Saw franchise—devices of dismemberment explicitly linked to moral quandaries reminiscent of capitalism’s impossible everyday Hobson’s choices for the working class. The system will go on consuming you, whether you’re unlucky enough to be a splatter film’s victim, or “lucky” enough to wield the power to splatter (for example, Hostel: Part II‘s reversal of fate on the ultra-wealthy hunters, or the Jigsaw Killer’s death from cancer in Saw III—ultimately due to… a lack of health insurance).

Possibly the most intriguing aspect of this already very good book is Steven’s interspersing of personal anecdotes on when and where he discovered some of his favorite horror and genre films. By placing his personal and psychological experience of splatter films front and center, and linking it to his personal growth and increasing political maturity, he demonstrates the personal impact of the political, and the necessity of personal epiphany, mediated by culture, to achieve political awareness. Splatter Capital ultimately is not a book for the already-convinced and committed leftist, the Marxian thinker already well-versed in theory. (Another of Splatter Capital‘s very strong points is how Steven largely eschews jargon and obscurantism for an approachable tone and topic that laypeople can dive into easily.) It is for the fans of these films who’ve always wondered about the ineluctable appeal of visceral, shocking violence on screen, and perhaps why it all feels so strangely familiar.