Technology and a Tyranny Worse than Prison

Posted on April 13, 2023 by Reid Mukai

By Bert Olivier

In an outstanding piece of political-theoretical writing, titled ‘The Threat of Big Other’ (with its play on George Orwell’s ‘Big Brother’) Shoshana Zuboff, succinctly addresses the main issues of her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism – The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, Hachette, 2019), explicitly linking it to Orwell’s 1984.

Significantly, at the time she reminded readers that Orwell’s goal with 1984 was to alert British and American societies that democracy is not immune to totalitarianism, and that “Totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere” (Orwell, quoted by Zuboff, p. 16). In other words, people are utterly wrong in their belief that totalitarian control of their actions through mass surveillance (as depicted in 1984, captured in the slogan, “Big Brother is watching you”) could only issue from the state, and she does not hesitate to name the source of this threat today (p. 16):

For 19 years, private companies practicing an unprecedented economic logic that I call surveillance capitalism have hijacked the Internet and its digital technologies. Invented at Google in 2000, this new economics covertly claims private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data. Some data are used to improve services, but the rest are turned into computational products that predict your behaviour. These predictions are traded in a new futures market, where surveillance capitalists sell certainty to businesses determined to know what we will do next.

By now we know that such mass surveillance does not merely have the purpose – if it ever did – of tracking and predicting consumer behaviour with the aim of maximising profits; far from it. It is generally known among those who prefer to remain informed about global developments, and who do not only rely on the legacy media for this, that in China such mass surveillance has reached the point where citizens are tracked through a myriad of cameras in public places, as well as through smartphones, to the point where their behaviour is virtually completely monitored and controlled.

Small wonder that Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum (WEF) does not let an opportunity pass to praise China as the model to be emulated by other countries in this respect. It should therefore come as no surprise that investigative reporter, Whitney Webb, also alluding to Orwell’s prescience, draws attention to the striking similarities between mass surveillance that was developed in the United States (US) in 2020 and Orwell’s depiction of a dystopian society in 1984, first published in 1949.

In an article titled “Techno-tyranny: How the US national security state is using coronavirus to fulfil an Orwellian vision,” she wrote:

Last year, a government commission called for the US to adopt an AI-driven mass surveillance system far beyond that used in any other country in order to ensure American hegemony in artificial intelligence. Now, many of the ‘obstacles’ they had cited as preventing its implementation are rapidly being removed under the guise of combating the coronavirus crisis.

Webb proceeds to discuss an American government body that focused on researching ways in which artificial intelligence (AI) could promote national security and defence needs, and which provided details concerning the “structural changes” which American society and economy would have to undertake to be able to maintain a technological advantage in relation to China. According to Webb the relevant governmental body recommended that the US follow China’s example in order to surpass the latter, specifically regarding some aspects of AI-driven technology as it pertains to mass surveillance.

As she also points out, this stance on the desired development of surveillance technology conflicts with (incongruous) public statements by prominent American politicians and government officials, that Chinese AI-technological surveillance systems instantiate a significant threat for Americans’ way of life), which did not, however, prevent the implementation of several stages of such a surveillance operation in the US in 2020. As one knows in retrospect, such implementation was undertaken and justified as part of the American response to Covid-19.

None of this is new, of course – by now it is well-known that Covid was the excuse to establish and implement Draconian measures of control, and that AI has been an integral part of it. The point I want to make, however, is that one should not be fooled into thinking that strategies of control will end there, nor that the Covid pseudo-vaccines were the last, or worst, of what the would-be rulers of the world can inflict upon us to exercise the total control they wish to achieve – a level of control that would be the envy of the fictional Big Brother society of Orwell’s 1984.

For example, several critically thinking people have alerted one to the alarming fact that the widely touted Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) are Trojan horses, with which the neo-fascists driving the current attempt at a ‘great reset’ of society and the world economy aim to gain complete control over people’s lives.

At first blush the proposed switch from a fractional reserve monetary system to a digital currency system may seem reasonable, particularly in so far as it promises the (dehumanising) ‘convenience’ of a cashless society. As Naomi Wolf has pointed out, however, far more than this is at stake. In the course of a discussion of the threat of ‘vaccine passports’ to democracy, she writes (The Bodies of Others, All Seasons Press, 2022, p. 194):

There is now also a global push toward government-managed digital currencies. With a digital currency, if you’re not a ‘good citizen,’ if you pay to see a movie you shouldn’t see, if you go to a play you shouldn’t go to, which the vaccine passport will know because you have to scan it everywhere you go, then your revenue stream can be shut off or your taxes can be boosted or your bank account won’t function. There is no coming back from this.

I was asked by a reporter, ‘What if Americans don’t adopt this?’

And I said, ‘You’re already talking from a world that’s gone if this succeeds in being rolled out.’ Because if we don’t reject the vaccine passports, there won’t be any choice. There will be no such thing as refusing to adopt it. There won’t be capitalism. There won’t be free assembly. There won’t be privacy. There won’t be choice in anything that you want to do in your life.

And there will be no escape.

In short, this was something from which there was no returning. If indeed there was a ‘hill to die on,’ this was it.

This kind of digital currency is already in use in China, and it is being rapidly developed in countries like Britain and Australia, to mention only some.

Wolf is not the only one to warn against the decisive implications that accepting digital currencies would have for democracy.

Financial gurus such as Catherine Austin Fitts and Melissa Cuimmei have both signalled that it is imperative not to yield to the lies, exhortations, threats and whatever other rhetorical strategies the neo-fascists might employ to force one into this digital financial prison. In an interview where she deftly summarises the current situation of being “at war” with the globalists, Cuimmei has warned that the drive towards digital passports explains the attempt to get young children ‘vaccinated’ en masse: unless they can do so on a large scale, they could not draw children into the digital control system, and the latter would therefore not work. She has also stressed that the refusal to comply is the only way to stop this digital prison from becoming a reality. We have to learn to say “No!”

Why a digital prison, and one far more effective that Orwell’s dystopian society of Oceania? The excerpt from Wolf’s book, above, already indicates that the digital ‘currencies’ that would be shown in your Central World Bank account, would not be money, which you could spend as you saw fit; in effect, they would have the status of programmable vouchers that would dictate what you can and cannot do with them.

They constitute a prison worse than debt, paralysing as the latter may be; if you don’t play the game of spending them on what is permissible, you could literally be forced to live without food or shelter, that is, eventually to die. Simultaneously, the digital passports of which these currencies would be a part, represent a surveillance system that would record everything you do and wherever you go. Which means that a social credit system of the kind that functions in China, and has been explored in the dystopian television series, Black Mirror, would be built into it, which could make or break you.

In her The Solari Report, Austin Fitts, for her part, elaborates on what one can do to “stop CBDCs,” which includes the use of cash, as far as possible, limiting one’s dependence on digital transaction options in favour of analog, and using good local banks instead of the banking behemoths, in the process decentralising financial power, which is further strengthened by supporting small local businesses instead of large corporations.

One should be under no illusion that this will prove to be easy, however. As history has taught us, when dictatorial powers attempt to gain power over people’s lives, resistance on the part of the latter is usually met with force, or ways of neutralising resistance.

As Lena Petrova reports, this was recently demonstrated in Nigeria, which was one of the first countries in the world (Ukraine being another), to introduce CBDCs, and where there was initially a very tepid response from the population, where most people prefer using cash (partly because many cannot afford smartphones).

Not to be outdone, the Nigerian government resorted to dubious shenanigans, such as printing less money and asking people to hand in their ‘old’ banknotes for ‘new’ ones, which have not materialised. The result? People are starving because they lack cash to buy food, and they do not have, or do not want, CBDCs, partly because they lack smartphones and partly because they resist these digital currencies.

It is difficult to tell whether Nigerians’ doubts about CBDCs is rooted in their awareness that, once embraced, the digital passport of which these currencies will comprise a part, would allow the government complete surveillance and control of the populace. Time will tell whether Nigerians will accept this Orwellian nightmare lying down.

Which brings me to the significant philosophical point underpinning any argument about resisting the drive for dictatorial power through mass surveillance. As every enlightened person should know, there are different kinds of power. One such variety of power is encapsulated in Immanuel Kant’s famous motto for enlightenment, formulated in his famous 18^th-century essay, “What is Enlightenment?” The motto reads: “Sapere aude!” and translates as “Have the courage to think for yourself,” or “Dare to think!”

This motto may be said to correspond with what contributors to the activities of Brownstone Institute engage in. Hence, the emphasis on critical intellectual engagement is indispensable. But is it sufficient? I would argue that, while speech act theory has demonstrated, accurately – emphasising the pragmatic aspect of language – that speaking (and one could add writing) is already ‘doing something,’ there is another sense of ‘doing.’

This is its meaning of acting in the sense one encounters in discourse theory – which demonstrates the interwovenness of speaking (or writing) and acting through the imbrication of language with power relations. What this implies is that language use is intertwined with actions that find their correlate(s) in speaking and writing. This is compatible with Hannah Arendt’s conviction, that of labour, work and action (the components of the vita activa), action – the verbal engagement with others, broadly for political purposes, is the highest embodiment of human activity.

Philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have shed important light on the question of the connection between Kant’s “Sapere aude!” and action. In the third volume of their magisterial trilogy, Commonwealth (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2009; the other two volumes being Empire and Multitude), they argue that although Kant’s “major voice” shows that he was indeed an Enlightenment philosopher of the transcendental method, who uncovered the conditions of possibility of certain knowledge of the law-governed phenomenal world, but by implication also of a practical life of dutiful social and political responsibility, there is also a seldom-noticed “minor voice” in Kant’s work.

This points, according to them, towards an alternative to the modern power complex that Kant’s “major voice” affirms, and it is encountered precisely in his motto, articulated in the short essay on enlightenment referred to above. They claim further that the German thinker developed his motto in an ambiguous manner – on the one hand “Dare to think” does not undermine his encouragement, that citizens carry out their various tasks obediently and pay their taxes to the sovereign. Needless to stress, such an approach amounts to the strengthening of the social and political status quo. But on the other hand, they argue that Kant himself creates the aperture for reading this enlightenment exhortation (p. 17):

[…] against the grain: ‘dare to know’ really means at the same time also ‘know how to dare’. This simple inversion indicates the audacity and courage required, along with the risks involved, in thinking, speaking, and acting autonomously. This is the minor Kant, the bold, daring Kant, which is often hidden, subterranean, buried in his texts, but from time to time breaks out with a ferocious, volcanic, disruptive power. Here reason is no longer the foundation of duty that supports established social authority but rather a disobedient, rebellious force that breaks through the fixity of the present and discovers the new. Why, after all, should we dare to think and speak for ourselves if these capacities are only to be silenced immediately by a muzzle of obedience?

One cannot fault Hardt and Negri here; notice, above, that they include ‘acting’ among those things for which one requires the courage to ‘dare.’ As I have previously pointed out in a discussion of critical theory and their interpretation of Kant on the issue of acting, towards the conclusion of his essay, Kant uncovers the radical implications of his argument: if the ruler does not submit himself (or herself) to the very same rational rules that govern the citizens’ actions, there is no obligation on the part of the latter to obey such a monarch any longer.

In other words, rebellion is justified when authorities themselves do not act reasonably (which includes the tenets of ethical rationality), but, by implication, unjustifiably, if not aggressively, towards citizens.

There is a lesson in this as far as the ineluctable need for action is concerned when rational argument with would-be oppressors gets one nowhere. This is especially the case when it becomes obvious that these oppressors are not remotely interested in a reasonable exchange of ideas, but summarily resort to the current unreasonable incarnation of technical rationality, namely AI-controlled mass surveillance, with the purpose of subjugating entire populations.

Such action might take the form of refusing ‘vaccinations’ and rejecting CBDCs, but it is becoming increasingly apparent that one will have to combine critical thinking with action in the face of merciless strategies of subjugation on the part of the unscrupulous globalists.

Reality Tunnels: How to Control & Re-Program Your Mind

Posted on April 9, 2023 by Reid Mukai

By Jack Fox-Williams

Source: Waking Times

When I was in secondary school, a teacher showed me an animated optical illusion in which a dancer appears to be spinning in one direction. I was adamant that the dancer was spinning clockwise, while my teacher insisted it was spinning counterclockwise. She then told me that you could change the direction of the dancer by focusing on the feet. I gazed with meditative fixation, and suddenly, to my amazement, the dancer started spinning counterclockwise! My teacher explained that since there are no visual cues for three-dimensional depth, your mind can determine what direction the dancer spins.

At that moment, I realised that reality is a construct of the mind, and we all potentially see the same world differently. I may have put it in less eloquent terms than that (considering I was only a teenager), but there was a fundamental shift in my understanding. The illusion made me realise that the notion of ‘objective truth’ was essentially arbitrary since our subjective beliefs mediate sensory experience.

My teacher and I could have argued for hours, days or weeks as to which direction the dancer was spinning; science couldn’t have proven either of us correct since it was a matter of perception rather than ‘truth’. In ‘reality’, the dancer was spinning in both directions, but since the brain has a natural tendency to classify, categorise and catalogue information in binary terms (up/down, left/right, black/white, clockwise/counterclockwise), the animated optical illusion appears monodirectional.

There are numerous examples of this in our day-to-day lives, like when we fail to appreciate other people’s viewpoints because we perceive the world differently. We believe we are right despite the multiple (if not infinite) interpretations about the nature of reality.

What are Reality Tunnels?

The countercultural guru Timothy Leary coined the term ‘reality-tunnel’ to describe our filtered perceptions of the world. Robert Anton Wilson later developed the concept to describe “pre-composed patterns of thinking which limit and distort the perception of reality by reducing complexity and options.”¹ According to Wilson, reality-tunnels shape our phenomenological sense of self, editing out experiences that do not support our beliefs while focusing on those which do.²

An advocate for capitalism, for example, will gather facts to support the view that capitalism is the most effective socioeconomic model, discarding any information that runs contrary to this viewpoint. Similarly, a Marxist will construct arguments based on select information to support the view that communism is the best system, often neglecting evidence that contradicts their position.

As the psychedelic scholar Ido Hartogsohn states, “all of us harbour established ideas about minorities, religions, nationalities, the sexes, the right ways to think, act, feel govern, eat, drink, and what not. Reality tunnels act to help us fortify these ideas against challenging information.”³ In this sense, there is a crossover between the concept of reality-tunnels and confirmation bias, the latter described as the “human tendency to notice and assign significance to observations that confirm existing beliefs while filtering out or rationalising away observations that do not fit with prior beliefs and expectations.”⁴ The phenomenon of confirmation bias helps explain why people who ascribe to a reality-tunnel are oblivious. Most people believe their worldview corresponds to the “one true objective reality,” however, Wilson emphasises that many reality tunnels are artistic creations, a culmination of biological, cultural and environmental inputs.⁵

The notion that reality is shaped by the conditions of the human mind is not new. The 18^th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant proposed in his Critique of Pure Reason that experience is based “on the perception of external objects and a priori knowledge.”⁶ We receive information about the external world through our five senses, which is then processed by the brain, allowing us to conceptualise its contents. When I look at an object, such as a chair or a table, I have no understanding of its external nature. The qualities that enable me to denote the meaning of the object, such as shape, colour, size etc., have no objective existence; they are merely by-products of the brain.

The French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Jacques Lacan proposed his theory distinguishing between ‘The Real’ and the ‘Symbolic’. Lacan argued that ‘The Real’ is the “imminent unified reality which is mediated through symbols that allow it to be parsed into intelligible and differentiated segments.”⁷ However, the ‘Symbolic’, which is primarily subconscious, is “further abstracted into the imaginary (our actual beliefs and understandings of reality). These two orders ultimately shape how we come to understand reality.”⁸

The Harvard sociologist, Talcott Parsons, uses the word gloss to describe how our minds come to perceive reality. According to Parsons, we are taught how to “put the world” together by others who subscribe to a consensus reality based on shared beliefs, norms and associations.⁹ A gloss constitutes a total system of language and/or perception. For example, the word ‘house’ is a gloss since we lump together a series of isolated phenomena – floor, ceiling, window, lights, rugs, etc. – and turn it into a totality of meaning.

The author and anthropologist Carlos Castaneda commented on this notion, stating, “we have to be taught to put the world together in this way. A child reconnoitres the world with few preconceptions until he is taught to see things in a way that corresponds to the descriptions everybody agrees on. The world is an agreement. The system of glossing seems to be somewhat like walking… we learn we are subject to the syntax of language and the mode of perception it contains.”¹⁰

The French philosopher Jacques Derrida stated that our understanding of objects (and the words which denote them) are only understood in relation to how they are contextually related to other objects (and denotive words).¹¹

We can break free from prescribed reality-tunnels by using objects and language in unusual or disjointed ways, thereby creating new discursive meanings, associations and connotations. This was the aim and outcome of certain art movements such as Dadaism and Surrealism, as well as Brion Gysin and William Burroughs’ cut-up method.¹²

The famous ethnobotanist and psychonaut, Terence McKenna, argued that ideology and culture are tools “which give other people control over one’s experience and identity since they lead individuals to shape their identity according to pre-conceived forms. If a person identifies with commercial brands or with popular ideas of what is beautiful, true or important, they give away their power to other people.”¹³ McKenna once said that you should not see “culture and ideology as your friends,” implying that you should understand reality on your own terms rather than buying into “pre-packaged ideological and cultural ideals” such as communism, capitalism, democracy or some form of totalitarianism.¹⁴ Belief in itself, argued McKenna, was “limiting to the individual, because every time you believe in something you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite. By believing something, you are virtually shutting yourself from all contradictory information, thus once again performing the sin of imposing a rigid simplified structure upon an infinitely complex reality.”¹⁵

Much like McKenna, Wilson recommends that a “fully functioning human ought to be aware of their reality tunnel and be able to keep it flexible enough to accommodate and, to some degree, empathise with different ‘game rules’, different cultures.”¹⁶ According to Wilson, constructivist thinking, which considers how social and cultural processes determine our perception of the world, constitutes an exercise in metacognition, enabling us to become aware of how reality tunnels are never truly objective, thereby decreasing the “chance that we will confuse our map of the world with the actual world.”¹⁷

How Your Reality Tunnel Is Formed

The constraints of human biology partially limit our models of reality. As Wilson states, our DNA “evolved from standard primate DNA and still has a 98% similarity to chimpanzee (and 85% similarity to the DNA of the South American Spider Monkey). We have the same gross anatomy as other primates, the same nervous system and the same sense organs. While our highly developed pre-frontal cortex enables us to perform ‘higher’, more complex mental tasks than other primates, our perceptions remain largely within the primate norm.”¹⁸

The neural apparatus produced by our genetic coding helps create what ethologists call the umwelt, or “world-field.” Birds, reptiles and insects occupy a separate umwelt or reality-tunnel to primates (ourselves, included). For example, bees are able to perceive floral patterns in ultraviolet light, which we cannot (unless certain technologies are utilised). Canine, feline and primate reality-tunnels remain similar enough that friendship and communication can occur between these different species, however, a snake (for example) occupies such a different reality tunnel that their behaviour appears entirely alien.

As Wilson argues, the belief that human umwelt reveals “reality” or “deep-reality” is as “naïve as the notion that a yardstick shows more reality than a voltmeter or that ‘my religion is better than your religion’. Neurogenetic chauvinism has no more scientific justification than national or sexual chauvinisms.”¹⁹ He goes so far as to suggest that “no animal, including the domesticated primate, can smugly assume the world created by its senses and brain equal in all respects the ‘real world’ or the ‘only real world’.”²⁰

Reality-tunnels are also influenced by “imprint vulnerability,” periods in our lives when early childhood/adolescent experiences “bond neurons into reflex networks which remain for life.”²¹ The psychological researchers, Lorenz and Tinbergen, won a Nobel Prize in 1973 for their research into imprinting, which demonstrated that “the statistically normal snow-goose imprints its mother, as distinct from any other goose, shortly after birth. This imprint creates a ‘bond’ and the gosling attaches itself to the mother in every possible way.”²² These imprints can be imposed onto literally anything. Lorenz observed a case in which a gosling, in the absence of its mother, imprinted a ping-pong ball. It followed the ping-pong ball around and, on reaching adulthood, “attempted to mount the ball sexually.”²³

Wilson estimates that the age at which we are imprinted with language determines lifelong programs of “cleverness” (verbal intelligence) and “dumbness” (verbal unintelligence), since linguistic models enable us to articulate mental processing, evaluate complex ideas and communicate with those around us.²⁴ Furthermore, how and when our first sexual experiences are imprinted can “determine lifelong programs of heterosexuality, brash promiscuity or monogamy etc.”²⁵ In more obscure imprints, such as celibacy, foot-fetishism and sadomasochism, the “bounded brain circuitry seems quite as mechanical as the imprint which bounded the gosling to the ping-pong ball.”²⁶

These examples suggest that experiences during childhood, when the brain exhibits optimal ‘neuroplasticity’ (a term used to refer to malleability of neural networks in the brain), can shape our reality tunnels far into adulthood. As Sigmund Freud proposed, many “rational” thoughts and behaviours are typically the result of “repressed” memories, impulses and desires, which dwell in the murky depths of the unconscious mind.²⁷

Furthermore, reality-tunnels are shaped by social conditioning, the “sociological process of training in a society to respond in a manner generally approved by the society in general and peer groups within society.”²⁸ Manifestations of social conditioning are multifarious but include nationalism, education, employment, entertainment, popular culture, spirituality and family life. Unlike imprinting, which usually requires only one powerful experience to set permanently into the neural networks of the brain, conditioning requires “many repetitions of the same experience and does not set permanently.”²⁹

The processes of social conditioning vary greatly, depending on the cultural environment to which one is exposed. For example, an individual born in a Muslim country (such as Saudi Arabia) will likely believe in the teachings of the Quran and adhere to certain religious norms, customs and traditions. However, individuals born in a Western capitalist/consumerist country, or an Eastern country with Hindu or Buddhist traditions, will adhere to different cultural and behavioural codes.

Reality-tunnels are also formed through the process of learning. Much like conditioning, learning requires repetition, but it also requires motivation. Therefore, it plays “less of a role in human perception and belief than genetics and imprinting and even less than conditioning does.”³⁰ Learning marks a major difference between how mammals, reptiles, insects and birds perceive the world. For example, snakes share the same reality tunnel since they merely act on biologically determined reflexes, with only minor imprinted differences. Mammals show “more conditioned and learned differences in their reality tunnels.”³¹

Humans demonstrate a higher aptitude for learning due to our highly developed cortex and frontal lobes as well as our prolonged infancy. This variability functions as “the greatest evolutionary strength of the human race” since it enables us to pass down knowledge from one generation to the next. But it also means that we can become brainwashed and label other people who do not share our beliefs as “mad,” “anti-social,” or “blasphemous.” In fact, it could be said that the majority of all wars are the result of two (or more) opposing reality tunnels fighting for supremacy. This is particularly evident in the case of religious conflict, where people kill each other in the name of “God.”

Tunnel Vision: The Politicisation of Reality

The rise of “identity politics” in the 21^st century perfectly demonstrates how reality-tunnels prevent us from considering alternative perspectives and viewpoints. During the last decade, the political domain has become increasingly polarised as the left and right engage in a battle for cultural supremacy. Such polarisation was apparent in the Brexit referendum of 2016, in which 51.9% of the British public voted to leave the European Union while 48.1% voted to remain.³² The marginal success of the ‘leave’ campaign highlighted the strong division between both sides of the political spectrum. The former stressed the importance of the Union in promoting social and economic stability, while the latter emphasised the importance of national identity, sovereignty and independence.

The rhetoric employed by both the ‘leave’ and ‘remain’ campaign was so binary in its articulation that neither side engaged in meaningful dialogue; instead, the referendum became a series of baseless slogans, mottos and catchphrases – an advertising campaign designed to appeal to target demographics. The referendum was more about two separate reality-tunnels competing for ideological supremacy than a balanced analysis of benefits and risks.

The US presidential election of 2016 was a similar drama of competing reality-tunnels, shaped by masterful spin doctors and hidden persuaders who exploited modern advertising techniques to capture specific demographics based on class, age, sex, religion, geographical location and other criteria.

Donald Trump was well-known for his campaign slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ and other catchphrases that employed a lexicon of patriotism, populism and protectionism to appeal to those on the right. On the other hand, Hillary Clinton used the slogan ‘Stronger Together’ to evoke feelings of unity, compassion, and solidarity. The election became a battle between two contrasting reality-tunnels, grounded in meaningless rhetoric and hyperbole.

Another example of politicisation is the Covid-19 crisis, with the public divided into two camps – those who supported measures such as lockdowns versus the other side that rejected many of these same measures. Political polarisation demolished a sane balanced approach to the crisis, exacerbated and intensified by the ongoing political divide across the media landscape.

‘Echo Chambers’ & Identity Politics

Social media has fuelled identity politics by enabling groups and movements to generate an online presence and have real-world impacts. According to independent scholar and author Ilaria Bifarini, this results in the emergence of ‘echo chambers’ in which internet users “find information that validates their pre-existing opinions and activates confirmation bias.”³³ This mechanism, says Bifarini, “strengthens one’s beliefs and radicalises them, without adding anything to information and knowledge. The result is the ideological extremism that we are observing today and in which we are taking part, where political debates have been replaced by supporters and verbal violence.”³⁴

Another way this happens, for example, is how Google’s online video sharing and social media platform YouTube utilises algorithmic data to show users similar content to their prior engagements – content they are likely to engage with in the future, thus creating a feedback loop in which they are exposed to media reinforcing their political preferences.³⁵ As media scholars Brooke E. Auxier and Jessica Vitak state, “many social media platforms structure their content-feeds based on what an algorithm determines to be the ‘top’ or most ‘relevant’ stories. While these tools may help users control their information and news environments – making consumption more manageable and mitigating information overload – it is possible that these tailoring tools will expose users to redundant information and singular viewpoints.”³⁶

Both sides of the political spectrum fail to engage in meaningful discussion when they are entrapped in a single reality-tunnel, the stability of which is threatened by competing narratives. Instead, political dialogue becomes characterised by inflammatory insults, name-calling and defamation.

Loaded language – such as ‘virtue signallers’, ‘snowflakes’, ‘racist’, ‘transphobic’, ‘Islamophobic’, ‘hetero-normative’, ‘privileged’ – enables identity groups to protect the integrity of their reality-tunnel by excluding those who hold a different opinion. In the same way that religious cult leaders isolate their members from the outside world, so too do identity groups orientate themselves around a closed belief system, which is immune to criticism, contention or challenge.

In order to facilitate a more meaningful discussion, it is important that both sides learn to break free from the constraints of their reality-tunnel.

Rising Above the Fray

In his book Prometheus Rising, Robert Anton Wilson provides various techniques for challenging dominant reality tunnels. Writing in the early 1980s, Wilson suggested that “if you are a liberal, subscribe to the [conservative magazine] National Review… Each month try to enter their reality-tunnel for a few hours while reading their articles. If you are a conservative, subscribe to New York Review of Books for a year and try to get into their headspace for a few hours a month. If you are a rationalist, subscribe to Fate Magazine for a year. If you are an occultist, join the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal and read their journal, The Sceptical Inquirer, for a year.”³⁷

To put a modern ‘spin’ on this exercise, if you follow conservative thinkers online such as Jordan Peterson or Ben Shapiro, expose yourself to leftist thinkers such as Slavoj Zizek or Noam Chomsky, and do the opposite if you are on the left. Subscribe to internet channels that do not align with your reality-tunnel. By performing this exercise, you will find that you can think about political issues in a more balanced, neutral and multidimensional way, free from the constraints of ideological dogma.

You can use the same technique with religion. In one exercise, Wilson says, “become a pious Roman Catholic. Explain in three pages why the Church is still infallible and holy despite Popes like Alexander VI (the Borgia Pope), Pious XII (ally of Hitler), etc.”³⁸ Then explain why the Church is an immoral and outdated institution; also write three pages detailing why you believe this to be the case. If you have the time, you can perform the same exercise with other religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and even Satanism. Explain why these religions hold the key to the ‘true’ nature of ‘reality’ and then refute yourself by providing a counterargument.

You can use the same technique to become more conspiratorial in your thinking. In one exercise, Wilson says, “start collecting evidence that your phone is bugged. Everyone gets a letter occasionally that is slightly damaged. Assume that somebody is opening your mail and clumsily revealing it. Look around for evidence that your co-workers or neighbours think you’re a bit queer and are planning to have you committed to a mental hospital.”³⁹ Observe how these assumptions influence your perception of other people and their behaviour – it won’t be long before you find evidence to support your paranoid thinking!

Once you have sufficiently experimented with this reality-tunnel, “try living a whole week with the program, ‘Everybody likes me and tries to help me achieve all of my goals’.”⁴⁰ Then try living a whole month with the program, “I have chosen to be aware of this particular reality.”⁴¹ Then try living a day with the program, “I am God playing at being a human being. I created every reality I notice.”⁴² Then try living forever with the metaprogram, “Everything works out more perfectly than I plan it.”⁴³ By adopting these different reality-tunnels, you will notice how malleable your perceptual faculties really are – the world can become a place of conspiracy and collusion or a place of benevolence and positivity, depending on how you view it.

Wilson provides another interesting exercise to expand the boundaries of consciousness, in which you “list at least 15 similarities between New York (or any large city) and an insect colony, such as a bee-hive or termite hill. Contemplate the information in the DNA loop, which created both of these enclaves of high coherence and organisation, in primate and insect societies.”⁴⁴ Then, “Read the Upanishads and every time you see the word ‘Atman’ or ‘World Soul’, translate it as DNA blueprint. See if it makes sense to you that way.”⁴⁵ According to Wilson, “Contemplating these issues usually triggers Jungian synchronicities. See how long after reading this chapter you encounter an amazing coincidence – e.g., seeing DNA on a license plate, having a copy of the Upanishads given to you unexpectedly…”⁴⁶

Experimenting with different reality tunnels is a necessary practice if one wishes to challenge dominant narratives, perspectives and viewpoints and expand the boundaries of human consciousness. As we find ourselves in a post-modern ‘information age’, where an increasing number of political factions compete for informational authority, we are exposed to the hidden forces of propaganda more than ever before.

Every time we log into Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, we allow ourselves to be manipulated by a complex system of algorithms that generates content based on our likes, dislikes, and even our differences. In order to escape the trappings of ideological dogma, we must become conscious of our biological, social and environmental conditioning and adopt a more multidimensional way of thinking.

Understanding about ‘reality-tunnels’ becomes instrumental in achieving true inner liberation since it enables us to think about the mind as a form of technological software that can be continually updated and reorganised. We achieve a state of metacognition, an awareness of one’s thought processes and an understanding of the patterns behind them. It is what the pioneering mind explorer John Lilly called our capacity for “metaprogramming,” the creation, revision, and reorganisation of mental programs.⁴⁷

Although we are constrained by the limitations of biological programming (to a certain extent), the creativity of human consciousness is infinite, a maze of endless possibilities and potentialities waiting to be explored. As the Buddha said, “All that we are is the result of all that we have thought. It is founded on thought. It is based on thought.”⁴⁸

Footnotes

1. Hartogsohn, I. (2015). The Psychedelic Society Revisited: On Reducing Valves, Reality Tunnels and the Question of Psychedelic Culture, Psychedelic Press, 3

2. ultrafeel.tv/reality-tunnel-how-beliefs-and-expectations-create-what-you-experience-in-life

3. Op cit., Hartogsohn, I. (2015), 4

4. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias 

5. Anton Wilson, R. (1983). Prometheus Rising, Tempe, Arizona: New Falcon

6. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Kant

7. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_tunnel

8. Ibid

9. Parsons, T. (1951). The Social System, Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1951

10. Sam Keen, Castaneda interview, Psychology Today, December 1972

11. Derrida, J. (1978). ‘Genesis’ and ‘Structure’ and Phenomenology, in Writing and Difference, Routledge.

12. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dada

13. Op cit., Hartogsohn, I. (2015), 1

14. Ibid, 2

15. Anton Wilson, R. (1990). Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You & Your World, New Falcon Publications

16. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_tunnel 

17. Quantum Psychology, 74

18. Ibid, 74

19. Ibid, 75

20-24. Ibid, 76

25-26. Ibid, 76-77

27. Wollheim, R. (1971). Freud, Fontana Press

28. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_conditioning 

29. Quantum Psychology, 77

30. Ibid

32. Ibid

33. Bifarini, I. Cognitive bias and echo chambers: The social media trap, www.academia.edu/40650380/Cognitive_bias_and_echo_chambers_The_social_media_trap

34. Ibid

35. Nguyen, C. Echo Chamber and Epistemic Bubbles, www.academia.edu/36634677/Echo_Chambers_and_Epistemic_Bubbles

36. Auxier, B. and Vitak (2019). Factors Motivating Customization and Echo Chamber Creation Within Digital News Environments. Social Media and Society, April-June 2019

37. Prometheus Rising, 83

38. Ibid, 159

39. Ibid, 241

40-43. Ibid, 242

44-46. Ibid, 190

47. Lilly, John C. Programming & Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer, New York: The Julian Press, Inc., 1967

48. The Dhammapada

Arguments Against Despair

Posted on April 2, 2023 by Reid Mukai

By David Edwards

Source: Media Lens

Eliot Jacobson is a retired professor of mathematics and computer science who regularly appears on our Twitter feed discussing the climate crisis. He sends tweets under the grim title, ‘Your “moment of doom” for the day’. These channel the latest news on rapidly rising carbon emissions and temperatures, catastrophic examples of extreme weather, and so on. It’s depressing fare, and Jacobson is candid about the level of anguish he feels:

‘I woke up feeling angry at about 2:30 AM this morning.

‘It’s easy to find something wrong with just about anything I look at. It’s all projection. I’ve been writing and deleting Tweets, but I still feel angry.

‘I’m angry that there’s very little I can do and there’s no way out.’

In a blog post, he wrote:

‘This sadness is so overwhelming, so all-consuming, that it takes my breath away. The things I do to cope with the weight of it all are mere distractions from this sadness. Volunteer for a few hours, then sadness. Go for a walk, then sadness. Listen to music, read, visit websites, then sadness. Visit with friends or family, then sadness. Sadness returns every time I have a moment to reflect on the predicament of the present moment.’

I’m no stranger to this emotional roller-coaster. 1988 was the big year for me, when NASA scientist James Hansen told the world we were heading for disaster. I had no difficulty believing him.

It seemed inconceivable to me that the profit motive driving global industry could be restrained, let alone reversed, in time. I was then working as a marketing manager for British Telecom in the West End of London where I set up a Green Initiatives Group. Small changes were made, but they were just window dressing – deeper changes impacting profit were completely unthinkable. It seemed obvious to me that this fundamentalist corporate resistance must, sooner or later, lead to disaster.

I first protested for action on climate change with Friends of the Earth on the streets of central London in October 1989. I was 27 when I started campaigning; I’m now 61. I’ve thought a lot, worried a lot, talked a lot, read a lot, and written a lot about these issues for three and a half decades, more than half my life.

It seems absolutely incredible to me – by which I mean it seems something that I honestly would not have believed was possible – that what seemed like an urgent crisis to me in the late 1980s can still seem like ‘hype’, a ‘liberal tax scam’, an ‘oligarch plot’ and ‘bourgeois hysteria’ to large numbers of people in 2023. In the 1980s, we said things would change when there were ‘bodies in the streets’ – but the bodies are all around us now, and there is still no sign of meaningful change.

I say all this to make clear that I am in no way complacent about, or indifferent to, the looming climate catastrophe (it seems absurd to even describe it as ‘looming’). My comments below are not intended to detract from the vital need to take immediate action; they are addressed to the despair that I know many people, like Jacobson, are feeling.

You, Me And The Mysterium Tremendum

After everything I have myself suffered, it seems to me that we have two main tasks at the present time: first, to do everything in our power to avert the terrifying crisis threatening us with extinction. Second, to do everything we can to transform the fear and suffering of our predicament into love and bliss.

The first of these is new. The second may sound preposterous, even annoying, but it has actually always been the great human task.

Many activists devoted to action, to change, despise the very idea that our own happiness should be any kind of concern. The suggestion is dismissed as self-indulgent ‘navel gazing’. We have to dispense with all such ‘sentimentality’ and focus on ‘hard politics’. We have to plunge into the darkness of realpolitik and fight for our lives. It’s going to be bruising, to hurt – forget all kitten-cuddling ideas about ‘love’ and feeling good. And how on earth can you feel ‘bliss’ when the world is falling apart? Such nonsense!

As so often, the anger is rooted in fear – the fear that such concerns will divert energy and attention away from what really matters. The counter-argument is that not giving a damn about personal feelings, about our needs as human beings in this short life, is actually one of the key factors that got us into this fine mess in the first place. (See my Cogitation: ‘Our Indifference To Ourselves’ – Beyond The ‘Virtue’ Of Self-Sacrifice – Parts 1 and 2)

Just as I can’t understand how so many people can fail to see the truth of the existential crisis we’re facing, I can’t understand how people can feel so absolutely certain about the significance, the meaning, of this crisis that they fall into absolute despair.

First of all, we need to remember that despair is a function of mind; it is not something mandated by Existence. As Thoreau noted, we have a choice:

‘However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names.’ (Thoreau, ‘Walden’, Oxford University Press, 1997, p.292)

This has been as true for everyone in human history facing death from illness, starvation, genocide, as it is for all of us now, facing extinction.

I find the universe so mysterious, so fundamentally Unknown, and even Unknowable, that I cannot establish a solid base of existential certainty that allows me to be confidently desperate about even this situation.

Of course, climate collapse is terrible for us – I don’t want to die, you don’t want to die; we don’t want so-called human ‘civilisation’ to disappear. But we all do have to die and the deeper significance of even a disaster on this scale is fundamentally unknown.

We are a miniscule part of billions of years of existence involving 200 billion galaxies each containing 200 billion stars, and who knows how many planets, swirling over distances that completely defy imagination – all of it emerging out of the mysterium tremendum, the how and why of Existence (we can’t say Creation; we don’t even know if it has a beginning or an end).

This immensity of space and time has led to this moment that stands before us. Here we are! Everything in this cosmos has led us here. We can’t just blame politicians, corporate executives and their journalistic enablers – the universe made them as they are and this is what the universe has given us to deal with.

Who are we to break down in despair as if we were certain about the final meaning of what is happening? What do we really know about anything? Do we really know enough to find a solid position from which we can cast judgement even on the extinction of human life, or even of all life, on this planet?

In November, spiritual writer Steve Taylor posted a poem, ‘Being Watched by The Moon’, on Facebook. Taylor wrote of our cosmic near neighbour:

‘Then I noticed a look of concern on her face.

There was a glint of disapproval, a hint of dismay

in her gaze, as it followed me home

as if she was witnessing an accident, or a crime.

Had I done something wrong? I wondered.

Had I injured or offended someone?

Had I gone astray, and lost the meaning of my life?

But then I looked closer, and realised:

she wasn’t just watching me.

She was watching the whole world.’

A glint of ‘concern’, ‘disapproval’ and ‘dismay’, as if ‘witnessing an accident, or a crime’? Is this really the most likely reaction of the Moon? After all, she has seen a lot – she’s around 4.5 billion years old, about the same age as the Earth. Human beings have been around for just 2.8 million years, and in our problematic modern form for just 200,000 years. The Sun formed about 4.6 billion years ago from an enormous molecular cloud that gave birth to numerous other stars. Our star has about 5 billion years of life left; she’s in her prime. The universe itself is about 13.8 billion years old – at least in this cycle, if it is a cycle. We don’t know where all this comes from, what it means, what lies at the base of it all.

Worst case scenarios suggest that human-induced climate change might devastate most animal and plant species to such an extent that it could take five million years for life to recover. But 5 million years is a blink of the cosmic eye to old-timers like the Moon, Earth and Sun whose memories stretch back, not millions, but billions of years. And if things don’t work out here post-climate collapse, maybe they’ll go better among the billions and billions of stars out there – that’s a lot of stars, a lot of possibility. From this perspective, one might surmise that human despair at the prospect of human extinction is one more manifestation of an egotism that causes us to vastly overestimate our own importance.

Might it alter our despairing perspective to consider that the enlightened mystics might be right in declaring that, not just plants and animals, but the entire universe is alive? We think life arises miraculously, ‘accidentally’ (what on earth does that mean?), Lazarus-like, from dead matter. But atoms are pretty lively phenomena; they are whizzing flea circuses of jumping sub-atomic particles, quantum waves and other forms of energy. Might we one day conclude that what we call life arises from these subtler forms of life? Is energy in some sense life?

And might our despair be leavened by the possibility, as mystics also insist, that, not just human beings, but the entire cosmos is conscious? What would it mean, if it turns out that even rocks are consciousness in a kind of coma; that evolution is ultimately a process of consciousness awakening from the slumber (not the death) of matter?

If everything is alive and everything is conscious, then even human beings are unable to inflict any real damage – a manifestation of eternal life rises and falls, comes and goes, but the ocean of living consciousness continues completely unharmed.

The universe seems to consist of objects, of material ‘things’. But that is not all: these rocks, animals, planets and stars appear in the something that is no-thing that we call space. Likewise, our awareness also provides an internal space in which sense perceptions, thoughts and emotions can appear and be known. We assume the universe is material and yet awareness seems non-material, seems entirely other than that which is material. Is it possible that external space and the internal space of awareness are related? Could they actually be the same phenomenon? We tend to see our internal space as an epiphenomenon of the brain, but is external space an epiphenomenon of matter?

Could the mystics even be right when they insist that awareness evolves in the universe by moving from ageing bodies to new ones? Westerners find this a childishly obvious example of wishful thinking. But does that make it untrue? Do we imagine that Buddha, Bodhidharma, Nagarjuna, Lao tse and all other enlightened humans were inventing when they made this claim over and over again? Could they even be right in arguing that consciousness moves from old, exhausted planets to fresh, new planets better suited to the continued evolution of consciousness?

If that sounds ludicrous, is it any crazier than the idea that the universe suddenly emerged from nothingness – nothing, nothing, nothing, then, Bang! – or that it has somehow always existed? These appear to be the only two possibilities, and yet both seem totally nonsensical to us. If the only logical possibilities seem impossible, how can we so confidently root our despair in our clearly inadequate human capacity for logic?

‘Satchitananda‘

I controversially suggested our task was to find bliss in the face of looming extinction. Is that possible? Is it moral even to try in the face of so much suffering?

Seasoned meditators tell us that the mysterious awareness perceiving these words is inherently blissful. Not just pleasurable, mind you – ecstatic. We are told the bliss is already there, is always there; that it is the very nature of awareness. The idea is captured in the Sanskrit epithet ‘satchitananda’, or ‘reality, consciousness, bliss’ – existence is aware and awareness is blissful.

This sounds counter-intuitive standing at a bus stop on a rainy Monday morning commute to work. We are here, we are aware, thank you very much, and we are emphatically not beaming with delight.

There are two possible explanations for this contradiction: either all the enlightened mystics were talking nonsense, or we are not in fact here, not in fact aware, and are therefore not able to experience the bliss that is here.

But if we’re not here, where on earth are we?

We are physically here, of course, but our minds are not in the present; they are in the past and in the future. Because the past and future do not exist, because they are mere ideas in the mind, when we are thinking we are absent; we are not truly here.

There are times when I sit in meditation for an hour when thoughts finally drop away; thoughts by which I am otherwise unceasingly plagued by day and night (dreams are thinking in pictures). When thoughts drop away, even for a moment, something very subtle, but very powerful slips through. In my experience, it emerges like a wispy strand of pink candy floss spinning out from some completely unknown depth and melting into my heart (my ‘dantian’ and ‘lower dantian’, in the terminology of Qigong). The melting is experienced as a sweetness, a delight, that glows with unconditional love for everyone and everything.

It is clear, sitting alone in a room, that this loving bliss is uncaused. I may have been as miserable as sin about the state of the world before slumping down to watch my thoughts and feelings – nothing in my world has objectively changed in that hour. In fact, as all the mystics insist, this loving delight has not been caused; it has simply been unveiled, revealed.

Thought is the veil. This is why we can’t feel the bliss of existence: it is hidden from us by layer upon layer of thought, rather like the multiple layers of cloud that typically greet solemn holidaymakers returning to Britain.

Human beings are the only animal that can become lost in the unreal world of mentation. All the virtuous, politically correct and well-intentioned thought by which we have always hoped to make the world a better place – the whole, misguided 17th and 18th century dream of the European ‘Enlightenment’ – has combined with all other thoughts to form an almost impenetrable barrier between us and the real source of civilisation, of personal and global salvation, within us.

The truth is that we have destroyed our planet and become almost completely estranged from the inherent bliss of being because we have sought civilisation and happiness in our heads. In reality, true civilisation – not the ability to build machines to pyrrhically ‘conquer’ nature, other animals and humans – is found when we transcend thought and connect deeply and often with our hearts.

‘The Best People In The World’ – Actual Human Civilisation

The very idea of technological ‘progress’ implies some kind of ‘Manifest Destiny’. It is our ‘destiny’ – the natural path of any ‘advanced’ civilisation on any planet – to develop ever more powerful technology, that we might one day voyage across the cosmic ocean just as we once voyaged across the water and air of our home planet.

But this may be wrong. It may be that the right option is to journey inwards in an exploration of being, of consciousness, to an unimagined brave new world of love and bliss.

Perhaps we don’t hear anything from highly technological ‘civilisations’ out there in the cosmos because the whole effort is a suicidal wrong turn that leads to near-instant decline and extinction. The cosmos may nevertheless be teeming with genuinely civilised beings who have gone in a very different direction.

After all, even on our planet, there have been examples of authentically civilised humans – people who live in their hearts rather than in their heads, who are free of our obsessive thinking. They appear to have rooted their daily lives in the kind of love and bliss that we in the West can only find in meditation.

In his book, ‘The Conquest of Paradise’, writer and ecologist Kirkpatrick Sale described the low-tech, Taino society encountered by the Spanish conquistadors in 1492:

‘So little a part did violence play in their system that they seem, remarkably, to have been a society without war (at least we know of no war music or signals or artifacts, and no evidence of intertribal combats) and even without overt conflict (Las Casas reports that no Spaniard ever saw two Tainos fighting).’ (Kirkpatrick Sale, ‘The Conquest of Paradise’, Papermac, 1992, p.99)

But the lack of violence was only one aspect of the Tainos’ towering civilisation:

‘And here we come to what was obviously the Tainos’ outstanding cultural achievement, a proficiency in the social arts that led those who first met them to comment unfailingly on their friendliness, their warmth, their openness, and above all – so striking to those of an acquisitive culture – their generosity.’ (p.99)

Even Admiral Cristobal Colon (‘Christopher Columbus’ in old money), the man who brought death and disaster to the lives of the Taino, recorded in his journal:

‘They are the best people in the world and above all the gentlest. They became so much our friends that it was a marvel… They traded and gave everything they had, with good will.’ (pp.99-100)

He continued:

‘I sent the ship’s boat ashore for water, and they very willingly showed my people where the water was, and they themselves carried the full barrels to the boat, and took great delight in pleasing us. They are very gentle and without knowledge of what is evil; nor do they murder or steal.’

Colon added:

‘They love their neighbours as themselves, and they have the sweetest talk in the world, and are gentle and always laughing.’ (p.100)

Sale wrote poignantly:

‘It is to be regretted that the Admiral, unable to see past their nakedness, as it were, knew not the real virtues of the people he confronted. For the Tainos’ lives were in many ways as idyllic as their surroundings, into which they fit with such skill and comfort. They were well fed and well housed, without poverty or serious disease. They enjoyed considerable leisure, given over to dancing, singing, ballgames, and sex, and expressed themselves artistically in basketry, woodworking, pottery, and jewellery. They lived in general harmony and peace, without greed or covetousness or theft.’ (pp.100-101)

American geographical scholar Carl Sauer concluded:

‘…the tropical idyll of the accounts of Columbus… was largely true’. (p.101)

The Tainos were human beings who lived in their hearts, not in their heads. They had no august universities packed with thinkers, philosophers and other half-crazed intellectuals; no 24/7 outpourings of media pollution – they lived in the bliss of awareness unclouded by obsessive thought.

As for us! By painful contrast, in his book, ‘Impact of Western Man’, historian William Woodruff commented on the society from which Colon had sailed:

‘No civilization prior to the European had occasion to believe in the systematic material progress of the whole human race; no civilization placed such stress upon the quantity rather than the quality of life; no civilization drove itself so relentlessly to an ever-receding goal; no civilization was so passion-charged to replace what is with what could be; no civilization had striven as the West has done to direct the world according to its will; no civilization has known so few moments of peace and tranquillity.’ (Sale, ibid, p.91, my emphasis)

To live in the head, to sacrifice the moment for the future, to prioritise the ‘serious’, ‘important’ work of the greedy, plotting mind over the bliss of the heart is to build a self-destructive, doomed version of fake ‘civilisation’.

Or consider the experience of the Mexican anthropologist Miguel Covarrubias on visiting the island of Bali in 1938. Covarrubias wrote:

‘No other race gives the impression of living in such close touch with nature, creates such a complete feeling of harmony between the people and the surroundings… The Balinese belong in their environment in the same way that a humming-bird or an orchid belongs in a Central American jungle.’ (Miguel Covarrubias, ‘Island of Bali’, KPI, 1986, p.11)

Covarrubias added:

‘A man is assisted by his neighbours in every task he cannot perform alone; they help him willingly and as a matter of duty, not expecting any reward other than the knowledge that, were they in his case, he would help in the same manner’. (p.14)

The result, Covarrubias wrote, was a village system which operated as ‘a closely unified organism in which the communal policy is harmony and cooperation – a system that works to everybody’s advantage’. (p.15)

In the late 1990s, I worked with the Swedish ecologist and activist Helena Norberg-Hodge who lived for many years among the people of Ladakh on the Tibetan plateau of Northern India. In her book ‘Ancient Futures’, Norberg-Hodge wrote of how she was bewildered by the strange fact that the Ladakhis were always smiling:

‘At first I couldn’t believe that the Ladakhis could be as happy as they appeared. It took me a long time to accept that the smiles I saw were real. Then, in my second year there, while at a wedding, I sat back and observed the guests enjoying themselves. Suddenly I heard myself saying, “Aha, they really are that happy”. Only then did I recognize that I had been walking around with cultural blinders on, convinced that the Ladakhis could not be as happy as they seemed. Hidden behind the jokes and laughter had to be the same frustration, jealousy, and inadequacy as in my own society. In fact, without knowing it, I had been assuming that there were no significant cultural differences in the human potential for happiness. It was a surprise for me to realize that I had been making such unconscious assumptions, and as a result I think I became more open to experiencing what was really there.’ (Helena Norberg-Hodge, ‘Ancient Futures – Learning From Ladakh,’ Sierra, 1992, p.84)

As amongst the Tainos, fighting in traditional Ladakhi society was unknown, disputes were settled quickly and peaceably, and when one person had a problem the entire community did its best to help:

‘In traditional Ladakh, aggression of any sort is exceptionally rare: rare enough to say that it is virtually non-existent… Even arguments are rare. I have hardly ever seen anything more than mild disagreement in the traditional villages—certainly nothing compared with what you find in the West.’ (p.46)

Norberg-Hodge concluded:

‘I have never met people who seem so healthy emotionally, so secure, as the Ladakhis.’ (p.85)

These societies that seem so ‘primitive’ and ‘uncivilised’ to goal-oriented, power-obsessed, head-trapped Europeans, were actually exemplars of authentic human civilisation.

I am not suggesting that we can become like the Tainos, Balinese and Ladakhis. If we are too high-tech primitive to save ourselves from climate disaster, we can obviously not hope to create that kind of paradise on earth.

What I am suggesting, though, is that the existence of these societies powerfully supports the contention of the mystics: that awareness unclouded by obsessive thinking is indeed in the nature of bliss and love. I am suggesting that such low-tech civilisations may exist in abundance, undetected, on other planets that will of course continue to thrive no matter what happens on our planet. I am also suggesting that you and I can create a little patch of this paradise in our own hearts.

Perhaps in our world as it is, genuinely civilised, loving societies are doomed to be destroyed by brutal, head-trapped, Western-style societies. But you and I still have the freedom, even in the face of this wider brutality, even in the face of environmental catastrophe, to live a life overflowing with love and bliss. Maybe that is all that is possible for us, and maybe that is enough.

Rage Against The War Machine: What Rage? ‘When Will They Ever Learn?’

Posted on March 27, 2023 by Reid Mukai

By Robert J. Burrowes

In his iconic 1950s anti-war hit song ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?’, Pete Seeger posed the eternal question about war: ‘when will they ever learn?’ Of course, Seeger’s question was primarily directed at those individuals who choose to participate in the fighting. But it might equally have been directed at those in the ‘anti-war’ movement.

A few years later in 1963, Native Canadian Buffy Sainte-Marie penned the equally iconic ‘Universal Soldier’ to draw attention to ‘individual responsibility’ for war.

The question ‘Why war?’ has troubled human beings for millennia and individuals of conscience have long resisted it, sometimes paying a heavy price for doing so. And back in 1932, two of humanity’s giants – Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud – grappled with the question, exchanging letters on the subject.

See ‘Why War?’

Beyond war, a great deal of effort has gone into understanding conflict and violence, including their structural and cultural components, and I have noted some of these efforts, including my own, in a wide range of documents such as these:

‘Why Violence?’,

‘Comforting a Baby is Violent’,

‘The War to End War 100 Years On: An Evaluation and Reorientation of our Resistance to War’ and

‘Einstein and Freud’s ‘Why War?’

Revisited: Why Anti-War Efforts Go Nowhere’.

Four things fundamentally missing from all previous efforts to halt a particular war or to end war generally, however, are these:

a serious effort to understand the dysfunctional psychology, and what causes it, that drives human violence generally,
a serious effort to analyse war as a system of power: Who is causing it, why and how? (This is important because understanding how power works in the world system as well as who, precisely, is driving what is happening, why, and how they are doing it are crucial prerequisites for developing an effective strategy to resist, or end, war.)
a sophisticated nonviolent strategy based on this understanding and analysis that is thoughtfully designed to address each of the foundational components of war, and
sufficient courageous people committed to implementing this strategy by participating in it themselves and mobilizing others to do so too.

Consequently, to say that anti-war efforts lack sophistication is to put it mildly in the extreme. As the very long history of ‘anti-war’ struggle clearly demonstrates.

And so it was listening to the anti-war speeches delivered in Washington DC at the Rage Against the War Machine rally on 19 February 2023. You can watch whole or abridged versions of these speeches here: Rage Against the War Machine.

Rage might give a person power in some contexts but, in itself, rage has zero strategic value. And are these people really feeling ‘rage’ about the ongoing war all over the planet or even the war in Ukraine? And acting on it? Of course not. Even if they were, as mentioned ‘rage’ is no substitute for acting powerfully (that is, strategically) to end war.

Moreover, there is a simple reason for this. Most anti-war activists do not feel rage against the war machine for the simple reason that they are terrified of it.

And this fear incapacitates them, leaving most anti-war activists too scared to seriously commit themselves to doing what is necessary to end war. Again, as the record demonstrates.

Hence, they complain powerlessly, rather than analysing, devising strategy and then acting powerfully knowing that their actions will contribute to the long-term struggle to end war once and for all.

So let me go back a step and analyze why the anti-war movement is so frightened and powerless and why it cannot learn from its own history of failure.

Why do most people complain?

In essence, this happens because when they were children, their parents interfered with their emotional expression which, in turn, stifled those innate behaviors bestowed by evolution to ensure that the baby, and later the child and then adult, acted to have their needs met. Usually by a young age, the child will learn to complain powerlessly when they do not get what they want. But complaining, rather than acting, does not meet their needs.

Thus, just as the child, endlessly thwarted by a parent who ignores the child’s genuine needs and then ignores their pleas to have these addressed, is trapped in the mode of complaining, most activists never learn that the role of politicians is to ignore them too. Of course, the value in this for those who genuinely wield power in society and whose aim is to facilitate perpetual war to achieve a variety of Elite ends (notably including the ongoing consolidation of Elite power and the maximization of corporate profits by financing both sides in any war) is that efforts of this nature, such as public protests against ‘government policies’ absorb and dissipate dissent, as intended.

And so it was on 19 February 2023 when a list of anti-war speakers echoed the eternal cries of powerlessness at one of the latest manifestations of an anti-war street protest:

‘Enough is enough! We demand change! Do the right thing! Implement ceasefire in Ukraine!’ See ‘Twenty Years after the Start of the War in Iraq, People Around the World are still Raging Against the War Machine’.

Einstein and Freud’s ‘Why War?’ Revisited: Why Anti-War Efforts Go Nowhere

Really?

As even former US Secretary of State Alexander Haig once noted about a massive anti-war demonstration: ‘Let them march all they want, as long as they continue to pay their taxes.’ See Alexander Haig. As a four-star general, Haig, not regarded as the most intelligent Secretary of State in US history, certainly understood that tactical choice is a question of strategy. Most activists have no idea.

So What Must We Do to End War?

Earlier in this article I identified four elements missing from the anti-war movement’s efforts. Let me restate them and offer my own learning in relation to these points.

a serious effort to understand the dysfunctional psychology, and what causes it, that drives human violence generally.

As the final stage of more than four decades investigating the cause of violence, I spent 14 years living in seclusion with Anita McKone. You can read what I learned in the document ‘Why Violence?’, in which I explain the destructive impact of the ‘visible’, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence that adults relentlessly inflict on children – resulting in the bulk of the adult human population being unconsciously terrified, self-hating and powerless, with Anita’s description of our process in:

‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

If you like, you can also read other articles I have written such as

‘The Psychology of Projection in Conflict’ and

‘Challenges for Resolving Complex Conflicts’.

a serious effort to analyse war as a system of power: Who is causing it, why and how? This is important because understanding how power works in the world system as well as who, precisely, is driving what is happening, why, and how they are doing it are crucial prerequisites for developing an effective strategy to resist, or end, war.

I made considerable effort to explain this as part of a wider study identifying the Global Elite and how its power is exercised in the world system. This included explaining why the Elite has a vested interest in ensuring that war continues. For more than 200 years, members of this Elite have carefully facilitated the precipitation of war and then profited immensely from financing both sides in any war of significance as well as the rebuilding of infrastructure and the care of injured soldiers in its aftermath. Hence, preparations for war, the conduct of war and the rebuilding/healing necessary post-war is the most profitable economic venture, by far, conducted on Planet Earth and it greatly enriches Elite families, such as the Rothschilds and Rockefellers, as well as their agents.

See Historical Analysis of the Global Elite: Ransacking the World Economy Until ‘You’ll Own Nothing.’

a nonviolent strategy based on this understanding and analysis that is thoughtfully designed to address each of the foundational components of war.

First, this requires a completely different approach to parenting if we want to raise powerfully nonviolent children.

See ‘My Promise to Children’ and

‘Do We Want School or Education?’

And given that strategy has long been a passion of mine and nonviolent strategy particularly, I investigated this thoroughly when I wrote The Strategy of Nonviolent Defense: A Gandhian Approach.

But for the simplest explanation of nonviolent strategy to end war, you can read it on this website starting with the list of ‘Strategic Goals for Ending War’.

sufficient courageous people committed to implementing this strategy by participating in it themselves and mobilizing others to do so too. This is important because nonviolent activism to end war has a price, measured in jail terms, adverse psychological assessments from people intent on stopping you, and a myriad other penalties depending on the legal jurisdiction in which the activist operates.

But if the antiwar activist is not willing to pay the price of their nonviolent activism, then the victims of wars in other places will pay the price of war with their lives.

Clearly, identifying sufficient courageous people is a primary challenge and the obvious shortage of courageous and tenacious people committed to strategically resisting war is just another outcome of our violently dysfunctional parenting of children mentioned in the first point above.

So if we are going to mobilize sufficient people willing to act powerfully over an extended period to resist all of those foundational elements that make war possible, we must profoundly alter our parenting model to produce powerful children and offer adults a chance to heal from the violence they suffered as children as well.

See ‘Putting Feelings First’ and ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

Otherwise we are condemned to watch people speak against war and march up and down in ‘anti-war’ rallies (or employ other tactics devoid of strategic impact) until the world is blown up.

An Obvious Criticism

An obvious criticism of the approach I have outlined above is that it is ‘too slow’. It offers no quick solution to deal with the immediacy of the threat we face at the current moment with the proxy war being fought by the US and NATO through Ukraine against Russia which includes the risk of the war ‘going nuclear’.

See ‘The Dire Significance of Putin’s Feb 21 Speech’.

And I am well aware of the many calls for negotiations on the one hand – see, for example, ‘The Ukraine War: Think Deeper Or We Shall All Lose’ – and long-standing US war-fighting policy on the other as routinely explained in a plethora of US Government ‘defense strategy’ documents.

See, for example, ‘2022 National Defense Strategy of The United States of America’ and a thoughtful discussion of US nuclear strategy by Professor Michel Chossudovsky in

‘“Preemptive Nuclear War”: The Historic Battle for Peace and Democracy. A Third World War Threatens the Future of Humanity’.

I am also aware of calls, such as that by Scott Ritter, for US anti-war activists to focus on nuclear arms control as the highest priority for now.

See ‘Scott Ritter on the War Machine and the Future of the Antiwar Movement’.

And other perspectives and proposals besides.

But the obvious response to the ‘too slow’ criticism of my longer-term proposals above is simple: The result of the current crisis is so far beyond the existing anti-war movement to realistically influence, it is laughable. And so, in my view – which is consistent with my research into, and analysis of, what has transpired historically:

see Historical Analysis of the Global Elite: Ransacking the World Economy Until ‘You’ll Own Nothing.’ – the war will most probably end when Russia has defeated the Ukrainian state but only after the war has been dragged on for as long as it can be conducted profitably, from an Elite perspective.

And while there is undoubtedly considerable risk of the war ‘going nuclear’ through policy or strategic miscalculation – see ‘Stanislav Petrov, “The Man Who Saved The World,” Dies At 77’ – accident – see Command and Control – or rogue local ‘initiative’, the Elite will ‘gamble’ against these possibilities while (presumably) constraining it at policy level, as has most likely occurred throughout the nuclear age.

Insane? Of course, it is insane. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’. It’s just that, in my view, there is nothing new to observe here: Just repetition of what we have seen before, which includes being taken to the brink of nuclear war and relying on ‘unknown factors’ – including, but not exclusively, background control by the Elite – to avoid it.

Conclusion

War is brutal. The Elite perpetuates war endlessly to capture control of people and resources to maintain the existing system of world power and make monumental profits. It will not be stopped because we make fine speeches, chant anti-war slogans at rallies or call for negotiations.

The human world is a system of power. And we need to understand how that system of power works to understand, and change, the world. This applies particularly when dealing with systems, structures and processes at the heart of Elite power, such as economics and war.

But underlying even this we need to understand the psychology of human violence because this also enables us to understand why the Elite controls world affairs to precipitate war (among a vast range of other violent and exploitative outcomes) as well as why ‘ordinary’ people fight in wars and the vast bulk of people who identify as ‘anti-war’ are so powerless.

In essence, war will be ended by analysing and understanding what makes it all happen and taking action intelligently, courageously and tenaciously to change what makes it possible; that is, by resisting in strategically appropriate ways the foundational components on which the entire system of war is built.

And given the ultimate foundation of the war system is our violent parenting model that renders virtually all humans into a state of fearful submission to violence, we haven’t even started the long journey to end war yet.

Nevertheless, while my own lifetime of effort has failed to remedy anything significant about the war system, out of love for my uncles, great uncles and humanity generally – see ‘Who Am I?’ – I continue to focus my own attention on undermining its foundations as documented above. It is slow, ‘unrewarding’ work in the short term.

But my hope is that some future generations of humans, assuming we effectively resist a myriad of current and future threats notably including the vast range of threats we all face at the hands of the Elite now – see ‘We Are Being Smashed Politically, Economically, Medically and Technologically by the Elite’s “Great Reset”: Why? How Do We Fight Back Effectively?’ – will live in a world without violence and war.

Obviously, given the precarious state of the world in many respects, a tremendous amount of intelligent, strategically-oriented action will be needed for this hope to be realized.

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?’ http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here. http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com

The World Wants to Be Deceived

Posted on March 12, 2023 by Reid Mukai

By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

My title comes from a 19^th century author whose name does not matter nor would it mean much if I mentioned him. It’s an old truth that has not changed a bit over the centuries. I think, however, it would be more linguistically accurate to say that most people want to be deceived, for the world, the earth doesn’t give a damn, as the French poet Jacques Prévert reminds us in “Song in the Blood”:

There are great puddles of blood on the world
where’s it all going all this spilled blood
is it the earth that drinks it and gets drunk
funny kind of drunkography then
so wise . . . so monotonous . . .
No the earth doesn’t get drunk
the earth doesn’t turn askew
it pushes its little car regularly its four seasons
rain . . . snow
hail . . . fair weather
never is it drunk
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
It doesn’t give a damn
The earth

But people, the thinking reeds as Pascal called us, we, who through the support of wars and violence of all sorts, care just enough to want to be deceived as to what we are doing by making so much blood that is inside people get to the outside for the earth to drink.

I could, of course, quote liberally from truth tellers down through history who have said the same thing about self-deception with all its shades and nuances. Those quotations are endless. Why bother? At some very deep level in the recesses of their hearts, people know it’s true. I could make a pretty essay here, be erudite and eloquent, and weave a web of wisdom from all those the world says were the great thinkers because they are now dead and can no longer detect hypocrisy.

For the desire to be deceived and hypocrisy (Greek hypokrites, stage actor, a pretender) are kissing cousins. I write this to try to say something of value about the mass idiocy of the media’s daily barrage of lies and stupidities that pass for news on the front pages and newscasts of the corporate media. And the people who believe them.

It is not easy. No matter how obviously absurd the claims about Chinese “spy” balloons, the shooting down of unidentified flying objects, reports of how Russia is losing the war in Ukraine, all the support for presidents and prime ministers who shill for the war industries, etc. – a list that could be extended indefinitely on a daily basis – these media are relentless in presenting government propaganda juxtaposed with trivia.

When you think they must realize they have gone too far since even a moron could see through their fabrications, they double down. And I am referring only to what they do report, not what they omit – e.g. how the U.S. has restricted aid to the earthquake victims in Syria or Seymour Hersh’s report on the U.S. blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines, two examples of terror by a terrorist state that must be protected at all costs. This is the protection racket by omission and commission.

Maybe an anecdote would help. A week ago, I ran into an old friend at a coffee shop. Hersh’s article, aspects of which I question, had just come out and I asked him if he had seen it. He said he hadn’t but didn’t know anything about such pipelines being blown up. I was stunned. A devout consumer of mainstream media, yet he somehow missed this major September 2022 event in the U.S. war against Russia that was reported widely by the media he relies upon. Those media went on to suggest that Russia blew up its own pipelines, a claim beyond ridicule but one that was part of its war propaganda narrative. My friend is a guy who has strong opinions about everything and finds NPR, The Guardian, The New York Times, CNN, etc. to be credible news sources. How could he have missed one of the major stories of 2022, one that The New York Times, etc. was reporting on into December, still suggesting that Russia did the deed? How could he have missed the pipeline story whose reverberations spread through all aspects of the U.S. war against Russia via Ukraine when it was referenced in so many reports of gas and oil prices, a cold winter for Europe, and so many other issues? Its ramifications are manifold and have been reported as such, but he had never heard of it. I was stunned.

I wanted to quote him Dylan’s facetious words from “The Ballad of the Thin Man”: “’Cause something is happening/And you don’t know what it is/Do you, Mister Jones?” But I did not.

I have spent a week wondering how it is possible that he didn’t know anything about the pipeline explosions. I am sure he wasn’t lying to me. So how explain it?

In the interim, as I have been trying to comprehend these matters, the Super Bowl with its mesmeric half-time spectacle replete with crotch grabbing has come and gone, and I have read an interesting article by Ethan Strauss, a sports journalist, “Why America Needs Football. Even its Brutality” that raises important questions.

Much has been written about football’s violence and the injuries it causes, the most recent example being the near fatal injury to Damar Hamlin of the NFL’s Buffalo Bills that garnered headlines for weeks (even though why he suffered cardiac arrest has been left unanswered since that would raise the COVID vaccine problem, which is also taboo). Strauss notes the many arguments calling for the banning of football – the war game – because of its violence. He notes that it is very true that football is very violent but that this is part of its great appeal. He writes:

And the NFL gives Americans that war, as spectacle, week after week.

Today, at 6:30 p.m., eastern time, begins the biggest spectacle of them all: the Super Bowl, where we channel those ancient animal spirits into a highly commercialized event that ends with fireworks and a shiny trophy.

We should celebrate that.

He doesn’t argue for the celebration of war, which he opposes, but for the war-like game of football. To Malcolm Gladwell’s statement in support of the banning of football as “a moral abomination” – “This is a sport that is living in the past that has no connection to the realities to the game right now and no connection to American society.” – he responds quite rightly that Gladwell is wrong:

In 2022, 82 of the top 100 TV shows in America were NFL games, and the top 50 most viewed sporting events were football games or events that immediately followed football games. By contrast, in 2016, only 33 of the top 50 were football-related. The country has lost interest in so much else, but football remains a huge draw and, in fact, is gaining relative market share.

Americans love violence, not just the military propaganda that precedes the Super Bowl game, but the smashing hits that players make and take in the games. It is hard to deny. Strauss goes on to show how over ninety percent of former NFL players who suffer from daily lifelong pain say they would do it again. The violence is intoxicating and Americans get drunk on it. It is the American Way.

I don’t agree with all of Strauss’s points or assumptions, especially his imperative that “we have war within us, whether or not there’s one to wage,” but he clearly is right that despite all the rhetoric about how terrible violence is, there is something about it that Americans love. D. H. Lawrence’s point a century ago still applies: “The essential America soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”

But this killer soul must be hidden behind a wall of deceptions as the U.S. warfare state ceaselessly wages wars all around the world. It must be hidden behind feel good news stories about how Americans really care about others, but only others that they are officially allowed to care about. Not Syrians, Yemenis, Russian speakers of the Donbass, Palestinians, et al. The terrorist nature of decades upon decades of U.S. savagery and the indifference of so many Americans go hand-in-hand but escape notice in the corporate media. The major theme of these media is that the United States government is the great defender of freedom, peace, and democracy. Every once in a while, a scapegoat, one rotten apple in the barrel, is offered up to show that all is not perfect in paradise. But essentially it is one massive deception.

There’s a make-believe quality to this vast spectacle of violent power and false innocence that baffles the mind. To see and hear the corporate masked media magicians’ daily reports is to enter a world of pure illusion that deserves only sardonic laughter but sadly captivates so many adult children desperate to believe. This is so even as the propagandists’ trial balloons are popped in the society of the comedic spectacle.

But back to my friend I mentioned earlier. He hates violence in all its forms, is strongly opposed to war, and has a most compassionate heart, yet he remains devoted to the media that have lied us – and continue to do so – into war after war, a media that clearly fronts for the warfare state. I still can’t explain how he knew nothing about the pipeline explosions. Nor can I explain his allegiance to the media that lie to him daily.

Even as his government, led by that very media, leads the world toward nuclear annihilation, he remains true to his media informants.

I am stunned.

In the Blood

Born in a normal time,
The periodic slaughter of millions
By the civilized nations of the earth
I grew to adulthood half-crazed
With fear and numbed wonder.

I always wished to believe otherwise,
That people were good at heart,
Wanted to live in mutual peace
And tend the green earth as if
It were a garden
As if pity vivified all living things.

Somehow the blood that was in me
Said otherwise,
Spoke truth to the power
Of my wish,
While everywhere around me lay the lie.

But my blood, this blood that became me
While millions were being butchered
And Bing Crosby crooned I’m dreaming
Of a white Christmas,
This red blood said otherwise.

Do not accept the way they say
“Good Morning”
And the way they nod as they pass,
As though they didn’t want to kill
Each other.

Do not believe their eyes
And the way they pray to the skies
To save them.
Do not believe their beliefs,
All lies woven to deceive.
For at heart they truly hate
The green earth.

Do not believe the way they say
“Good Evening”
For they wish the darkest night
To descend upon us,
The nothingness of their knowledge
To swallow all.

That is what will release them,
That is all.

Thus my blood spoke to me,
A child of a sanguine century,
Born in a normal time,
The periodic slaughter of millions
By the civilized nations of the earth.

And despite all appearances,
I have never believed them.
Never. Not at all.

HOW TO DISCOVER YOURSELF THROUGH YOUR OWN PHILOSOPHY

Posted on March 5, 2023 by Reid Mukai

By Mickey Z.

Source: Waking Times

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” ~Oscar Wilde

There are now over eight billion people on the planet. We each have a different psychophysiological reaction to any given stimuli, no matter how minute the difference. From forks to forklifts, spoons to spoonerisms, folklore to philosophy. Every single one of us perceives everything differently.

The way I perceive the concept of something as simple as a tree is fundamentally different than the way every single other person perceives the “same” concept. This is due to our historically unique experiences with “trees.”

The memories we form influence our experience of perceiving trees. I may have fallen out of a tree and broken my arm. You may be blind and can only touch or smell a tree. I may have chopped down twenty trees to build a house. You may have crashed into a tree and totaled your car. The point is, every single historical interaction with a tree has formed a unique interpretation of “tree” in our psychophysiology.

The same thing applies to abstract concepts such as love, God, and philosophy. We each have historically unique experiences regarding these abstract concepts as well.

Which brings me to the point of this article: we should own up to the fact that we each have a devastatingly unique perception of all things, including philosophy. And rather than merely piggyback, kowtow, or place all our eggs into a single historical philosophy forsaking our individuality, we should make our individuality foremost and create our own philosophy out of the mulch, fodder, and compost of past philosophies.

We should double down on our uniqueness and fatten our individuality on the food of philosophies past.

Most people settle upon one established philosophy (religion, ideology, worldview), unaware that they have a unique perception of what that philosophy is. It is already the case that we perceive the concept of philosophy in a fundamentally different way than others do even within the same philosophy. Developing our own unique philosophy is simply becoming aware and honoring our unique perception.

It’s a matter of awareness and honor. Becoming aware of our unique perception of all things puts us into an existential pickle: We either admit it and honor it, or we deny it and dishonor it. If you choose the former, read on. If you choose the latter, not even the one-dimensional philosophy you lean on like a cripple can save you from yourself.

Here are five ways to discover yourself through your own philosophy…

1.) Practice self-inflicted philosophy:

“To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s.” ~Dostoevsky

What does it mean to inflict yourself with philosophy? It means being ruthless with your perception of reality. No excuses. No mercy. No self-pity. It means forcing your head over the edge of the abyss. No rose-colored glasses. No pie-in-the-sky delusions. No safety nets. Just you and the eternal darkness. Just you and the rawness of nihilism. Just you and the existential angst.

You’re faced with the bleeding-meat realness of reality, a snarling darkness puking up all things. It forces you into a vital confrontation, demanding you think rather than believe. Full-frontal, no punches pulled, it grabs you by the throat and asks you, point blank, “Are you ready to accept that everything you believed was a lie?”

Self-inflicted philosophy forces you to perceive reality with a clean slate. It gets down to brass tacks. It’s philosophy in action. It digs down to the roots of the human condition. It cuts deep into the pulsing blister of the mortal wound. It reveals the lodestone. It’s your ticket to staying ahead of the curve because it exposes how everything is on the curve. No exceptions.

As Marcus Aurelius said, “All that exists is the seed of what will emerge from it. You think the only seeds are the ones that make plants or children? Go deeper.”

2.) See the world from the shoulders of multiple giants:

“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” ~Isaac Newton

Don’t be afraid of becoming an autodidact. Read a lot. Connect the dots. Stay curious. Seek the shoulders of giants. Seek help, expertise, guidance, and wisdom from others. Become a sponge for higher knowledge. Soak it up. Ring it out. Repeat. Learn; unlearn; relearn.

Don’t cling. Never settle. Putting down roots on a giant’s shoulder is a death knell for your uniqueness. Jump! Take a leap of courage out of faith. Stay loose. Stay flexible. Create a scaffolding between giants. Keep your curiosity ahead of your certainty.

Don’t get caught up in the hype. Don’t allow their destiny to prevent your own. Rather, use their destiny to invigorate your own hero’s journey.

What does this mean? It means staying out of your own way. It means allowing for guideposts, other points of view, and a healthy sense of detachment. It means sojourning, not standing, on the shoulders of multiple giants to see further than they did. It means employing self-interrogation strategies as pivot points in order to better navigate the labyrinth of life.

When you sojourn on the shoulders of giants, you are effectively building a bridge to the Overman. You rise above the outdated past to embrace the updated future.

3.) Interrogate the knowledge:

“As anywhere else in the world, the unwritten law defeated the written one.” ~Herman Hesse

The flipside of sojourning on the shoulders of giants is the ability to be circumspect with the knowledge gained. To truly be original one must be able to “entertain a thought without accepting it (Plato).” This means you must take the knowledge gained and interrogate your perception of it lest you become stuck in a belief.

Human ingenuity, like human evolution, is a flowing process of change and mutation. The key to maintaining the process is to allow reimagination despite past imaginings.

The stale and outdated past must give way to a fresh and updated future. Otherwise, there is only stagnation, devaluation, and de-evolution. Therefore, you must have the wherewithal to question everything you’ve learned to the nth degree.

The best way to do this is to honor what validates Universal Law and discard what doesn’t. A deep enough interrogation of the knowledge you gained from sojourning on the shoulders of giants should reveal its validity in relation to the benchmark of health.

When you use health as a benchmark, you realize that health is not a matter of opinion. Rather, it is dictated by an indifferent universe with universal laws that apply to everyone, despite our interests, biases, opinions, or beliefs. And this applies to everyone not only physically, but mentally and spiritually as well.

But health will only get you so far. It can teach you moderation and temperance. But it won’t get you outside the box, the comfort zone, the domesticated bliss, the indoctrination, the cultural conditioning, or the dogmatic mental paradigm. Only audacity and courage can do that.

It doesn’t take courage to blindly follow the dictates of the giants who came before you (manmade laws), but it does take courage to question them (using universal laws). Be audacious. Be courageous. Interrogate your knowledge.

4.) Blend it all together with your unique soul-signature imagination:

“Your time is limited, don’t waste it living someone else’s life.” ~Steve Jobs

If given a choice between the path most travelled and the path least travelled, choose neither. Choose your own path instead.

Don’t fall into the trap of following someone else’s plan. Deconstruct, analyze, and scrutinize their plan, then improvise it. Infuse it with your own essence. Take the knowledge gained from standing on the shoulders of giants and run it through the sieve of your imagination. Customize your life to your own fitting.

Take this piece from this ideology and that piece from that ideology, but then connect it all to your own unique perspective. Be creative. Think outside the box. Push your culturally prescribed comfort zone as far as it will go. It’s all yours for the making.

You are a pivot with a point of view. You are a wave crashing onto the shores of eternity. You are a unique emergence from the universal interdependent spirit molecule. You are the cosmos becoming aware of itself. And you are vital for the progressive evolution of the interconnectedness of all things, whether you realize it or not.

Don’t let anything else lay your uniqueness low, whether spiritually or psychologically. This is your life. This is your story to tell. As Nietzsche said, “The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”

Indeed. No price is too high to pay for the privilege of discovering yourself through your own philosophy. No price is too high to pay for the privilege of self-mastery.

5.) Recycle the mastery:

“To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day.” ~Lao Tzu

When it’s all said and done, mastery is just as illusory is it is useful. Don’t allow it to kill your quest for truth. Let the life-death-rebirth process come alive inside you. Resurrect Beginner’s Mind. Keep the flow state flowing. Keep the fountainhead resonating. Keep the Truth Quest always ahead of the “truth.”

As Scott Adams said, “Awareness is about unlearning. It is the recognition that you don’t know as much as you thought you knew.”

For a true seeker there is no settled state, there is no final stage. There is always something more to learn. There is always an answer to question. Mastery is always recyclable. The journey is always the thing, or it is nothing. The sword is always sharpened dullness. The diamond is always pressurized coal. As James Hillman said, “the pearl is also always grit, an irritation as well as a luster.”

Mastery must be discarded on the funeral pyre of muscle memory lest it become the dogma that kills your journey. Feel the mastery, love it, relish being in awe and overwhelmed with gratitude for it. Then let it go. Surrender “mastery” to Cosmos. Practice detachment. When you’re attached to nothing, you’re connected to everything.

Signs of Early Onset Activist Syndrome

Posted on February 26, 2023 by Reid Mukai

By Mickey Z.

Source: Dissident Voice

In my very young days, I lived in a fourth-floor apartment in a five-story, pre-war, walk-up building. On the second floor, you’d find an older Italian couple: Mr. and Mrs. Larucci. (I say “older” because that’s how they appeared to me at the time. I’m probably older now than they were then.)

Anyway, the two Laruccis were the first cat people I had ever encountered. They religiously fed the local strays — rain or shine, in sickness and in health — in an alcove behind the building. Their diligence, effectiveness, and focus clearly inspired my mother and sister to become cat ladies/animal lovers for life. To a slightly lesser degree, both me and my Dad were influenced by witnessing all this animal-based altruism.

It was while dwelling in that building that I first showed signs of Early Onset Activist Syndrome. To follow are but two of many symptoms.

Even as a very young child, I understood:

1. The war in Vietnam was becoming increasingly unpopular

2. Being on TV is a really big deal to most people

So, it was while hanging out on the stoop with my grade school friends — not far from the 59th Street Bridge, connecting Queens to the east side of Manhattan — that I hatched a cynical scheme to allegedly capitalize on the above two facts.

About six of us staged our very own anti-war protest amidst the high volume of motor vehicles streaming down Crescent Street on their way to the city (Queens may be one of New York’s five boroughs but for us, only Manhattan is and will ever be “the city”).

Mimicking the images we saw nightly on our black-and-white TV sets, we made rudimentary signs and posters. One of my fellow subversives wasn’t a regular on the block. He was a little older than me, perhaps a classmate of my big sister. I can’t remember his full name but I do recall that his last name was Castro and that he later became notorious for ending up in the hospital after attempting to ride a motorized mini-bike down a flight of concrete steps.

By the time I was in my teens, I heard a rumor that Castro had died during the commission of a crime. Considering how many of my childhood friends ended up in jail or dying young, this was a rumor to be taken at face value.

Anyway, I can still see Castro’s chastened expression when I scolded him for a misspelling on his sign: “SPOT THE WAR!” it read. I insisted that he correct it.

With or without proofreading, we enthusiastically held up our protest posters to passing cars and trucks and yelled “stop the war” until our pre-pubescent voices grew hoarse. “Someone will call the news,” I promised, “and we’ll all be on TV tonight.”

Our children’s crusade lasted maybe 20 minutes. When it neither ended the war nor landed us on TV, we got bored. One by one, we heard our mothers’ voices calling us to dinner from different windows of the tenement buildings looming above us. Hunger trumped revolution, and the experiment was over. I don’t believe any of us ever mentioned it again.

Today, that same anti-war demo or rally or protest or march or whatever would’ve had its own social media event page. It would’ve been live-streamed. And it would’ve been deemed a “success” if it garnered even just one of us a kick-ass Facebook profile pic for which we could use the caption: #warrior.

Speaking of “anti-war,” a few years after I organized that futile demonstration, I first saw Duck Soup on TV. Instantly, I was hooked on the Marx Brothers… but I had a problem. You see, this was long before YouTube and free streaming services. It was also before VHS players and video stores.

To see more of the Marx Brothers, I had to hope that one of the local NYC channels (5, 9, 11) would randomly show one of their 13 films (12 actually, because Animal Crackers was in the midst of a legal battle at that time).

After catching a couple more of the Marxster’s movies, I grew tired of waiting for the rest so I hatched a plan. With help from my Mom, I found the names and addresses of the directors of programming of the local channels (easier said than done in the pre-Google days of yore).

I hand-wrote three passionate petitions — requesting/demanding more Marx Brothers movies be shown on their stations — and brought the documents to my Catholic grammar school.

I was popular enough and cool enough to convince, cajole, or coerce all my classmates to sign. Feeling mighty proud of myself, I mailed off all three petitions and sat back to wait for a steady supply of Harpo, Chico, Zeppo, and Groucho.

The weeks and months passed with a) no change in local programming and b) no reply from any of the stations. All the necessary lessons about “activism” were right there in front of me, but I wasn’t yet ready to learn. Not even close.

Nope, that part would only happen after decades had passed, and — through personal experience — I could finally recognize activism for what it is. And what it could potentially be.

This brings me back to Mr. and Mrs. Larucci. While I was trying to “spot” the war and spread “Marxism” on TV, my cat-loving neighbors just kept feeding and caring for the local strays. Regardless of weather or personal issues, they fulfilled their chosen mission.

Cat ladies get results.

A cat lady understands urgency when she encounters it. She also accepts her limitations and works around them. From there, she basically behaves like a triage nurse. As a result, she gets results. Day after day, felines within her reach are fed and have safe havens in which to hide. If they fall ill or are injured, they will be promptly cared for with dignity.

When others in the general area see a hungry, sick, injured, or threatened cat, they know who to contact: the local cat lady. No delusions of grandeur about shifting global conditions or ‘changing the conversation.’ No social media fame. Just results.

Finally, lessons learned.

So, to all the #woke activists still out there virtue signaling their way onto my news feed, I have this message from a song by Groucho:

“I don’t know what you have to say.

It makes no difference anyway.

Whatever it is, I’m against it!”

Inside the Iron Cage

Posted on February 19, 2023 by Reid Mukai

By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

“No one knows who will live in this [iron] cage in the future….”
– Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

I would prefer not to relay the following very strange story given to me by a fellow sociologist, but he had done me a number of favors, and since he asked me to do him a favor in return, I feel obligated. I don’t know what to make of the whole thing. Following this brief introduction, you will find the manuscript he handed me. I realize you are getting this third hand, but there’s nothing I can do about that. I don’t know his friend. When he asked me to print it for him, I told him I would prefer not to, but then guilt got the best of me, so here it is.

This is one of those stories hard to believe. When I first heard it, I thought it was a joke, some sort of parable, and my friend who was telling it to me had had too much to drink or was just pulling my leg. I’m not sure. Like so much in today’s world, the difference between fiction and fact has become very blurry.

Let me call him Sean, since these days holding a strong dissenting opinion can cost you your job. He is a professor who, like the character David in John Fowles’ story, “The Ebony Tower,” teaches art history. And like Fowles’ character he is a very frustrated academic. In Sean’s case, he has had to contend with the transformation of his college from a place of learning to a place where “Woke” ideology stifles dissent. Perhaps more importantly, he has suffered from extreme writer’s block. He had just been telling me how, after years of writing copiously in his private journals, he had grown nauseated by it because it seemed so self-involved, concerning self and family stuff he was sick of. He wanted to write articles and books, yet when he tried, he couldn’t. All his energy had been going into his futile daily journals, where he felt trapped by family matters. Until one recent day at the bar where we regularly meet, he heard this strange story. It jolted him.

Here is what he told me over beer at the tavern. I am paraphrasing, but because his tale was so startling, I know I have the essentials right. He said:

“It was late in the afternoon last Wednesday when I came in here for a beer. I was feeling very tired that day, though depressed would be more accurate. The teaching routine seemed absurd to me. I wasn’t writing. I felt at a dead end. I guess I was. Anyway, you know that guy Tom whom we’ve talked to here before? Well, he was here and we got talking. The place was empty. It turns out his last name is Finn – Tom Finn. His father was Russell Finn, the famous painter, you know, the one the mainstream media gush over. A realistic sentimentalist is the way I’ve heard him described, although I would say he was a sick fabulist trying to repaint history for Hallmark Cards. Anyway, so this Tom Finn had had a few beers, and as he got talking, the both of us had a few more. It became obvious that he was obsessed with his father. He didn’t say that exactly, but I could guess it from the snide remarks about him he’d laugh out of the side of his mouth. I asked him about a big traveling exhibit of his father’s paintings which I had recently read about in the newspapers; had he seen it? ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t go to that kind of crap. That’s his bag of marbles.’ Things like that.

“It turns out the son is also a painter, but he said nothing about his own work, just that he painted. He talked all about his father’s work, how his father stole ideas, wasn’t very good, etc. I told him I agreed that his father’s work was overhyped and mediocre, but that my experience studying art taught me that was true for every era. I was trying to be nice, something I tend to overdo. I got the impression he turned to painting by default, it being some kind of knee-jerk reaction to his father, some kind of Oedipal contest.

“It turns out his real obsession is toys, no shit, and he got very animated as he talked about them. He wanted me to come over to his house to see his vast toy collection. The invitation was so weird, and with the beer’s effects, I couldn’t refuse. It was nearly dinner time, so I called Sara and told her I’d be late. I was actually interested in what made him tick. I mean, why would a grown man – I’d say he is in his mid-forties – collect fucking toys? And weirder still, he said his specialty was tiny plastic figures of all sorts. Of these he had more than 25,000 – for some reason he emphasized that number – that he’d periodically put on display at local libraries.

“So I followed him over to his house which is on that street adjoining the university where a number of art history professors live. Oak Terrace, I think it is. I couldn’t help laughing when I saw all those abstract sculptures decorating their lawns. It was getting dark and they were spotlighted. What a juxtaposition – so perfect – so-called realism and cerebral abstraction side-by-side. And both utter bullshit. I was reminded of a description of Russell Finn’s paintings that I once read: Cute wallpaper for readers of Reader’s Digest.

“Actually, Finn’s house is quite cute itself. When we were going in, I had to restrain myself from saying to him, ‘Life’s cute, isn’t it?’ I don’t think he would have appreciated that, although it’s very possible that he wouldn’t have known what the hell I was getting at. He’s a toy collector after all and what’s cuter than that.

“I’ll tell you this. I wasn’t prepared for what he showed me. He took me down to his finished basement, which he called ‘the laboratory.’ When he switched on the lights the room was empty except for the walls. They were covered with shelves about six inches apart that ran from wall to wall and ceiling to floor. It gave the large room this incredibly bizarre look as though it were a prison cell. There were even spotlights that illuminated the shelves, upon which, right along the outer edges looking out, he had lined up his collection of little figures. As we stood in the middle of the room, it was as though thousands of little people were staring at us, the giants. I felt as though I was hallucinating. Finn just chuckled when I said, ‘Pretty fucking amazing!” Then he said, ‘I like the perspective, don’t you?’ I knew he didn’t expect an answer and I could only chuckle in response, even as I felt a chill on the back of my neck. It was so eerie that I had to contain a shudder. For a brief moment I had the feeling that the door we had entered was going to shut and be bolted and that something terrifying was about to unfold.

“But at that moment he gestured to me to follow him to another door, over which a sign read, ‘The Family Fun Room.’ ‘This is my favorite,’ he said with a smile.

“In the middle of this pink painted room there was a cage that extended from floor to ceiling, and in the cage, sitting on stools, were two life-sized and very realistic figures of a man and a woman. They were both dressed in those black and white stripped prison uniforms you’ve seen in old movies. The woman was facing away from the man. I couldn’t tell who the woman was, but I immediately recognized the man. It was Finn’s father, down to the most realistic detail. He was holding a small toy figurine and was looking into its face. The door to the cell was padlocked shut. ‘That’s to make sure they can’t escape,’ Finn said with a straight face. ‘Now that I got them where I want them, I can’t take any chances. They’re dangerous and can cause me a lot of grief.’

“He then closed the door and we went upstairs. Neither of us said a word. He offered me a beer, but I declined. I felt spooked, some dreadful feeling in my gut. I told him I had to be leaving, which I did. On the way out I noticed a framed photograph in the foyer. It was a picture of Finn at about the age of nine or ten with his parents and sister. They are sitting together on a couch, the two kids caught between the parents. No one is smiling. Behind them on the wall is the father’s famous painting of a family of four sitting on a couch. In that one, everyone is smiling and the father in the painting is Finn’s father. As you probably know, that was one of his father’s favorite techniques – to put himself in his paintings. Such a cute double-message: I did it, of course, but how could I have done it when I’m in it. You’re left wondering: who really did it? Who executed the painting of these happy people. But since it’s all supposed to be so amusing, you’re left to chuckle, to think, how cute, how tricky. You’re supposed to smile. But no one was smiling in the picture on the wall. It seemed like a house of smoke and mirrors and I was damn glad to leave.

“As I drove home, I sure as hell wasn’t smiling. There was something terribly disturbing about it all. I felt nauseated, disgusted, really disturbed. Maybe it seems obvious, but I felt there was a connection between this weird experience and myself. A double connection, actually. I won’t go into all the details now, and you know about my writer’s block, but this bizarre experience has left me with a new sense of freedom, some kind of opening to a new way to write that at the time I couldn’t put my finger on. I’ve come to think of it as writing beyond a cage of categories.

“I thought about all the stuff we talk about, the political propaganda about everything, the loss of a sense of reality, the illusions and delusions with the digital technology, the warmongering by the U.S against Russian, the covid bullshit, all of it, all the stuff we share over beers. Especially the disconnect between the private and the public and the two-faced nature of a way of living that is so fucking phony. I realized why I had been hiding in my notebooks, how they had become my cage.

“To top it all off, when I got home and told Sara about my experiences with Tom Finn, the cage and all, she didn’t believe me. She accused me of having drunk too much, which I had to admit I did. She said I was scaring her with such a ridiculous tale and that I was sounding like a deluded conspiracy nut.

“Anyway, I’ve told no one else about Finn. I’m afraid they wouldn’t believe me either. You’re a sociologist and know all about Max Weber’s prediction of a coming disenchanted world with its iron cage. Shit, I feel like I had a small glimpse of it. Do you think anyone would believe me if I told this story?

“Do you?”

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After the Crash