Strategy and Conscience: Subverting Elite Power So We End Human Violence

Posted on July 31, 2018 by Reid Mukai

Fragment of “Butcher to the World” by Sue Coe.

By Robert J. Burrowes

Given the overwhelming evidence that activist efforts are failing to halt the accelerating rush to extinction precipitated and maintained by dysfunctional human behavior, it is worth reflecting on why this is happening.

Of course, you might say that the rush to extinction is being slowed. But is it? Even according to BP’s chief economist: ‘despite the extraordinary growth in renewables in recent years, and the huge policy efforts to encourage a shift away from coal into cleaner, lower carbon fuels, there has been almost no improvement in the power sector fuel mix over the past 20 years. The share of coal in the power sector in 1998 was 38% – exactly the same as in 2017…. this is one area where at the global level we haven’t even taken one step forward, we have stood still: perfectly still for the past 20 years.’ See ‘Analysis – Spencer Dale, group chief economist ’.

And, to choose another measure that highlights our lack of ‘progress’: species extinctions proceed at a rate of 200 each day, which is vastly greater than the long-term background rate, with another 26,000 species already identified as ‘under threat’. See ‘Red list research finds 26,000 global species under extinction threat ’.

But it wouldn’t matter what measure you analyzed – efforts to prevent cataclysmic nuclear war, to halt the many ongoing wars, to contain and reverse the prevalent and grotesque economic exploitation, to end slavery or the sex trafficking of women and children, to halt or even slow the rampant destruction of the biosphere, including the rainforests and oceans – we are rapidly losing ground (and often despite some apparent gains such as adoption of the ‘Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons’ by many non-nuclear states on 7 July 2017).

Not only are we destroying the rainforests – currently at the rate of 80,000 acres each day: see ‘Measuring the Daily Destruction of the World’s Rainforests’ – and oceans – see ‘The state of our oceans in 2018 (It’s not looking good!)’ – as a fellow long-standing nonviolent activist, Kelvin Davies, recently observed to me: the oceans and remaining rainforests are ‘being emptied of life’ as impoverished people, forced to the economic margin, hunt remaining wildlife, including tropical fish, for food and/or trafficking.

Before we blame impoverished people for their destruction however, it is the consumption by those of us in industrialized countries that is generating the adverse circumstances in which they are forced to survive. For one simple example of this, related to our diet alone, see ‘Emissions impossible: How big meat and dairy are heating up the planet’.

Of course, you might object that it is not activist efforts that are responsible for the failure to halt elite violence and our complicity in it. It is the failure of corporatized society to seriously consider and respond intelligently to the scientific and other evidence in relation to all of the violence in its many manifestations. However, any explanation of this nature fails to understand and appreciate why progressive change has always occurred in the past.

Social progress is the result of people of conscience strategically challenging elite power in such a way that new norms become so widely accepted that elites are compelled to work within them. This has always been essential for the simple reason that elites are insane and have never acted sensibly, whatever the issue. Elites have only ever orchestrated events to maximize their own power, profit and privilege whatever the cost to the rest of us and the Earth itself. Hence, violence, war, grotesque economic exploitation and ecological destruction are rampant across the planet; that is the way elites want it; that is what maximizes elite power, profit and privilege. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’.

As an aside: if you aren’t convinced that the global elite is insane, then perhaps you might ponder the possible implications of the recent call by US President Donald Trump, for the creation of a new Space Force as a sixth branch of the U.S. military – ‘We must have American dominance in space’ – in violation of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. See ‘Trump Orders Establishment of Space Force as Sixth Military Branch’.

While this enterprise, if it gets Congressional approval, would be staggeringly profitable to the global elite while further gutting social and environmental programs to pay for it, the proposal also raises the possibility, as Professor Karl Grossman graphically expressed it (given that there is no way to have the envisaged weapons in space without nuclear power) that ‘the heavens are going to be littered with radioactive debris’ for millennia (but in substantially greater amounts than is already there). See ‘Trump’s Space Force: Military Profiteering’s Final Frontier’ and ‘Star Wars Redux: Trump’s Space Force’.

Of course, if you want even more evidence of elite insanity, then look no further than the current hysteria generated by Donald Trump’s supposed ‘treason’ for having a meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin in Helsinki with the intention of improving mutual understanding and the prospects of peace between the two countries. For a sample of the literature that discusses this summit intelligently, which you won’t find in the corporate media, see ‘US Media is Losing Its Mind Over Trump-Putin Press Conference ’, ‘Is President Trump A Traitor Because He Wants Peace With Russia?’, ‘Helsinki Talks – How Trump Tries To Rebalance The Global Triangle’ and ‘Trump, The Manchurian Candidate: “Conspiracy” to Destabilize the Trump Presidency ’.

Some informed and thoughtful analysts believe this could lead to an elite coup to remove Trump from the US presidency. See ‘Coming Coup Against Trump ’ and ‘The Coming Coup to Overthrow President Trump: Sedition at the Highest Levels ’.

So, to consolidate the information presented above, let me encapsulate the nature of geopolitics in one paragraph:

The military forces of the United States are not intended to defend the United States against military attack. The military forces of the countries in NATO are not intended to defend the respective member countries against military attack. The military forces of the United States and NATO are controlled by the global elite and used by the global elite to aggressively attack, in violation of all relevant national and international laws, any country that seeks independent control and development of its resources, particularly fossil fuels, strategic minerals and water. The global elite, which is in total control of the global economy and world affairs generally, does this in order to expand its own power, profit and privilege. It does this no matter what the cost to any individual (outside the elite), people, country and the biosphere. Why does the global elite do all of this? The global elite does this because it is completely insane.

Hence, to return to my point about the driver of social progress historically: Did the trans-Atlantic slave trade end because elites decided to halt the practice? Did gains for some women during the 21^st century occur because elites committed themselves to ending patriarchal privilege? Did the British walk out of their colony in India because the British elite suddenly perceived the injustice of their violence and exploitation?

Despite the successes of activists of earlier generations, however, those of us who identify as activists of this generation are failing, quite comprehensively, to respond intelligently, powerfully and strategically to the vast challenges posed by an elite that has expanded its capacity to intimidate, outflank and overwhelm us (which is why, incidentally, slavery is now far more widespread than during any earlier period in human history, violence against women still manifests in a grotesque variety of forms all over the planet and even India has strayed monstrously from Gandhi’s vision).

In essence, strategic lessons learned by earlier generations of activists are forgotten or ignored as we stumble powerlessly to the extinction that is shortly to claim us all.

While I could write at some length about our shortcomings as activists in the era of perpetual violence and war, grotesque economic exploitation and pervasive climate and environmental destruction, I would like to focus on what I regard as the two key issues: strategy and conscience.

The global elite is deeply entrenched and manages world affairs, particularly through its capitalist economy. The global elite has developed over hundreds of years during which time it has fully and deeply penetrated all of the major power structures in world society, most of which it created (or moulded during their creation), so that the primary levers of power in the modern world – key financial institutions such as central banks, the major asset management corporations and the giant corporations in key industries (such as, but not limited to, the banking and weapons industries) – as well as the instruments through which its policies are implemented – including governments, military forces (both national and as ‘military contractors’ or mercenaries), key ‘intelligence’ agencies, legal systems and police forces, key nongovernment organizations such as the Vatican, and the academic, educational, media, medical, psychiatric and pharmaceutical industries – are all fully responsive to elite control.

More precisely than this, as explained in his forthcoming book ‘Giants: The Global Power Elite’, Professor Peter Phillips identifies the world’s top seventeen asset management firms, each with more than one trillion dollars of investment capital under management, as the giants of world capitalism. The total capital under management on behalf of all seventeen corporations is in excess of $US41.1 trillion; it represents the wealth invested for profit by thousands of millionaires, billionaires and corporations. These seventeen giants operate in nearly every country in the world and are ‘the central institutions of the financial capital that powers the global economic system’. They invest in anything considered profitable, ranging from ‘agricultural lands on which indigenous farmers are replaced by power elite investors’ to public assets to war.

Phillips goes on to note that the global elite develops and coordinates its policies through a variety of private planning fora such as the Group of Thirty, the Trilateral Commission and the Atlantic Council which determine the policies and issue the instructions for their implementation by transnational governmental institutions like the G7, G20, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization and the World Bank. Elite policies are also implemented following instruction of the relevant agent, including governments, in the context. These agents then do as they are instructed.

Or, if they do not, they are overthrown. Just ask any independently-minded government over the past century. For a list of governments overthrown by the global elite using its military and ‘intelligence’ agencies since World War II, see William Blum’s book ‘Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II’ or, for just the list, see ‘Overthrowing other people’s governments: The Master List’.

As a result of coordination through the above elite fora, for example, gigantic media, public relations and entertainment corporations are used to reinforce elite dogma promulgated through national educational institutions so that most western humans become powerless consumers of elite product, informational and material, as the elite pursues ever-increasing profit, power and privilege. Oblivious to the way in which they are caught up in the elite drive to make us consume, even most western activists are major consumers, failing to limit their consumption in line with some appreciation of the per capita ecological carrying capacity of the Earth.

Hence, as should be obvious by now, with a deeply entrenched global elite in total control of major economic/financial, political, military, legal and social (including educational and media) power structures, only a comprehensive and sophisticated strategy has any prospect of succeeding, whatever the issue, and certainly the fundamental one: elite power.

In other words, if we want to end war (or even just one war), halt exacerbation of the climate catastrophe (in a region, country or the world), end environmental destruction on a vast range of fronts, terminate economic exploitation including (modern) slavery, end the sex trafficking of women and children, end the military occupation of Palestine, Tibet, West Papua… then we are going to have to think, plan and act strategically, which includes engaging and mobilizing, in a focused way, a significant proportion of the human population. Simply ‘campaigning’ on the basis of a few ideas and tactics that we think worked in the past, is not enough. Campaigning without strategy – and all that strategic thinking, including a penetrating analysis of the very nature of society and its power structure, entails – is a waste of time.

This is why most work of virtually all ‘activist’ NGOs is useless. They work within the elite-designed and managed global power structure, fearfully self-limiting their actions in accordance with elite-approved processes, such as those ‘within the law’ and lobbying elite-controlled governments and institutions, as well as international organizations such as the UN. By participating in elite-controlled processes, our dissent is absorbed and dissipated, as the elite intend.

This is the great achievement, from an elite perspective, of ‘democracy’: to the extent that people can be persuaded to participate in the delusion that democracy exists (anywhere on Earth) and that voting and lobbying changes anything important, they are unwitting victims of elite-manipulated processes and propaganda.

This also explains why virtually all NGOs invariably end up promoting elite-sponsored delusions such as, for example, those in relation to the climate catastrophe which talk of an ‘end of century’ timeframe (about 70 years more than we actually have), staying within 2 (or 3 or 1.5) degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level (rather than the .5 degrees that is actually necessary) and, the most fundamental delusion of all, that we must substitute renewable energy for fossil fuels (which is certainly necessary), rather than (in addition) profoundly reduce – by at least 80% – consumption generally, involving both energy and resources of every kind – water, household energy, transport fuels, metals, meat, paper and plastic – while dramatically expanding our individual and community self-reliance if all environmental concerns are to be effectively addressed.

But elite-sponsored delusions are widely promulgated by its corporate media on a vast range of issues with only the rarest ‘activist’ NGO, concerned to focus on what it defines as its primary mission, taking a stand on these apparently ‘separate’ issues. So, for example, elite-sponsored delusions that are widely promulgated by its corporate media convince huge numbers of people that US-NATO wars against impoverished and militarily-primitive countries are in ‘self defense’ and that terrorists are a genuine threat to ‘national security’. At a more mundane level, elite-sponsored delusions propagated through its corporate media promote everything from genetically-mutilated, poisoned and junk food to psychiatric drugs. See ‘Defeating the Violence of Psychiatry’. These products are also highly profitable but because their insanity includes lacking any sense of morality, elites are unconcerned about the damage they inflict on us in these regards just as in all others.

Some grassroots activist groups are more politically savvy than NGOs but usually still lack comprehensive and sophisticated strategies. On rare occasions, it should be noted, one of these campaigns or national liberation struggles succeeds, because of such factors as the raw power of nonviolent action (even without strategy) or because they could rely on the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) effect to facilitate mobilization of significant numbers of people in a local area.

However, the global elite is unconcerned about the occasional local ‘setback’ which does not adversely impact its global agenda and where minor gains by grassroots activists can, if necessary, be subsequently reversed (including by simply violating the law, as the elite routinely does with impunity). Consider again, the above example of Trump’s call to violate the 1967 Outer Space Treaty or routine violation of legally-declared (and sometimes World Heritage-listed) national parks in Africa, Asia and Central/South America as major corporations seek to exploit oil and mineral wealth. The law is designed to intimidate and impede us; it is rarely used in an attempt to hold elites accountable and has little, if any, impact when it does: a corporation may, occasionally, be fined (an expense against generating monstrous profit). Fundamentally, elites are above the law: they draft it to defend their interests against the rest of us.

But to reiterate the main point: given the sheer number of (sometimes even large-scale) mobilizations on one issue after another around the world that achieve nothing of substance in relation to the issue itself (consider the demonstrations against the imminent war on Iraq, held in over 600 cities around the world and involving as many as 30 million people, on 15 February 2003), it is painfully clear that most grassroots activists have no conception of strategy either, including the appropriate strategic focus for their tactics.

And this applies equally to those national liberation activists in occupied countries such as Palestine, Tibet and West Papua, as well as those activists living in the many countries, such as Cambodia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, run by dictatorships or where the elected government, such as that of Brazil, has been removed in a coup.

As touched on above, however, lack of sound strategy (including the structural analysis on which it must be based) is not the only shortcoming in our efforts to halt elite (or even our own) violence.

In the past, a primary motivator of activists, and particularly the great ones such as Mohandas K. Gandhi, was their conscience: The ‘inner voice’ that called them to action on both the personal and political levels.

But there is more to conscience than being called to action. So what is so important about conscience? Conscience is the mind function that asks the deeper questions such as ‘What is the right way to go about this?’, ‘How must I behave if I am to model what I ask of others?’ and ‘How will we design this campaign so that its conduct helps to create the world we envision?’ (rather than the simpler question ‘How will we win this campaign?’).

Moreover, living by one’s conscience requires courage: This includes making strategic choices to take significant or, occasionally, even great risks when elite violence threatens to intimidate a struggle into submission and silence.

It was his unyielding conscience, deeply guiding his personal and political behaviour (including his commitment to nonviolence and his extraordinarily austere lifestyle), and his superlative understanding of strategy that made Gandhi the great activist that he was. Why?

Because Gandhi’s nonviolence was based on certain premises derived from his conscience – including the importance of the truth, the sanctity and unity of all life, and the unity of means and end – his strategy was always conducted within the framework of his desired political, social, economic and ecological vision for society as a whole and not limited to the purpose of any immediate campaign.

It is for this reason that Gandhi’s approach to strategy is so important. He is always taking into account the ultimate end of all nonviolent struggle – a just, peaceful and ecologically sustainable society of self-realized human beings – not just the outcome of this campaign. He wants each campaign to contribute to the ultimate aim, not undermine vital elements of the long-term and overarching struggle to create a world without violence.

So what do we do?

If you would like to better understand why so many human beings, including those within the elite, are devoid of anything resembling a conscience, you can do so by reading what happened to them as a child in ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice ’.

If you are interested in acting in ways that maximize the chance that elite opponents and their agents will reflect, deeply, on what they are doing, while fundamentally changing the power relationship between you and your opponents, then you are welcome to consider acting strategically in the way that Gandhi did. Whether you are engaged in a peace, climate, environment or social justice campaign or a national liberation struggle, the 12-point strategic framework and principles are the same. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy and Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy.

The strategic aims and a core list of strategic goals to end war and to end the climate catastrophe, for example, are identified in ‘Campaign Strategic Aims’ and the strategic aims and a core list of strategic goals to defeat a political or military coup, remove a military occupation, remove a dictatorship or defeat a genocidal assault are identified here: ‘Liberation Strategic Aims’.

If you would like a straightforward explanation of ‘Nonviolent Action: Why and How it Works’ and an introduction to what it means to think strategically, try reading about the difference between ‘The Political Objective and Strategic Goal of Nonviolent Actions’.

If you anticipate violent repression by a ruthless opponent, make sure that you plan and implement any nonviolent action as history has taught us: ‘Nonviolent Action: Minimizing the Risk of Violent Repression’.

If you are interested in nurturing children to live by their conscience and to gain the courage necessary to resist elite violence fearlessly, while living sustainably despite the entreaties of capitalism to over-consume, then you are welcome to make ‘My Promise to Children’. After all, capitalism and other dysfunctional political, economic and social structures only thrive because of our dysfunctional parenting which robs children of their conscience and courage, among many other qualities, while actively teaching them to over-consume as compensation for having vital emotional needs denied. See ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’.

Why this emphasis on children you might ask? For good reason. It is dysfunctional human behavior that got us into this civilizational mess and allowed the emergence of exploitative social, political and economic structures. So if we do not emphasize the importance of profoundly changing the way in which we nurture children so that they behave functionally in context, everything else we do to preserve humanity and the biosphere must ultimately fail. The onslaught of our dysfunctional species will simply overwhelm the biosphere, sooner or later, whether it is this generation or the next.

But we don’t have to settle for improving our parenting. We can improve our own functionality and access our conscience and courage too. How? See ‘Putting Feelings First’.

If you are already guided by your conscience to act powerfully in response to elite violence, you might also consider joining those participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth ’, which outlines a simple plan for people to systematically reduce their consumption while progressively increasing their self-reliance, and consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

You may believe that you can halt elite violence without engaging your conscience (and the deep internal search that this requires) and without using Gandhian nonviolent strategy. Even if you are right, the key question is then this: Is the world you will get any better than this one?

And don’t forget the timeframe. Major historical struggles, including those noted above, took decades (whatever the merits and shortcomings of their strategies) or, as in most cases, are ongoing. How long do you want to wait before you invest time in learning how to think, plan and act strategically when the future of humanity and the biosphere is now at stake?

So, to conclude: The global elite controls all significant human affairs and even exercises almost total control over the individual lives of human beings. Because the global elite is insane and its psychological (and hence behavioral) dysfunctionality is of a particular kind, it cannot pull back from its existing regime of violence and exploitation, even in response to imperatives from the biosphere.

In this circumstance our choice is simple: near-term human extinction based on our unwitting complicity in elite violence or a conscientious, courageous and strategic response that fundamentally undermines elite power.

This will require a significant number of interrelated nonviolent strategies that each tackle elite violence in one context or another.

You are welcome to consider the options presented just above for your own involvement.

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

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

Email: flametree@riseup.net

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

The Search for Meaning in Modern Life

Posted on January 28, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Kingsley L. Dennis

Source: Waking Times

Every good story about a search begins with a tale. So, here’s one; it’s a tale about a magician who gave a dinner for his neighbours.

There was once a Magician who built a house near a large and prosperous village. One day he invited all the people of the village to dinner. ‘Before we eat,’ he said, ‘we have some entertainments.’

Everyone was pleased, and the Magician provided a first-class conjuring show, with rabbits coming out of hats, flags appearing from nowhere, and one thing turning into another. The people were delighted. Then the Magician asked: ‘Would you like dinner now, or more entertainments?’

Everyone called for entertainments, for they had never seen anything like it before; at home there was food, but never such excitement as this. So, the Magician changed himself into a pigeon, then into a hawk, and finally into a dragon. The people went wild with excitement.

He asked them again, and they wanted more. And they got it. Then he asked them if they wanted to eat, and they said that they did. So the Magician made them feel that they were eating, diverting their attention with a number of tricks, through his magical powers.

The imaginary eating and entertainments went on all night. When it was dawn, some of the people said, ‘We must go to work.’ So the Magician made those people imagine that they went home, got ready for work, and actually did a day’s work

In short, whenever anyone said that he had to do something, the Magician made him think first that he was going to do it, then, that he had done it and finally that he had come back to the Magician’s house.

Finally, the Magician had woven such spells over the people of the village that they worked only for him while they thought that they were carrying on with their ordinary lives. Whenever they felt a little restless he made them think that they were back at dinner at his house, and this gave them pleasure and made them forget.

And what happened to the Magician and the people, in the end? Do you know, I cannot tell you, because he is still busily doing it, and the people are still largely under his spell.

Modern life is much like this tale – we live under a magician’s spell – and the magician is called Modernity. Modernity, especially as it emerged in western, industrialized cultures, created a system that put a spell on us. And this spell is principally promoted through our mainstream medias. Whether rationally, instinctively, or deep in our hearts, most of us know that something is not right about how human societies are managed. Human life is not yet in balance. And too many people still live in fear.

We are manipulated by our mainstream medias at unprecedented levels, and constantly fed with a controlled flow of information. This process is the old mind of humanity, still operating through control, censorship, and consumerism. In this way our contemporary societies are increasingly centered around emotion to a degree that allows people to be entertained as well as manipulated like never before. What we may be less aware of is that the human being is driven by an evolutionary energy that manifests through mental, emotional, and physical/sexual processes. This energy can be used to develop and drive us forward, or it can be hampered, blocked, and manipulated into slowing down our development. Mental, emotional, and physical/sexual energies are all necessary components of the social human being. If we take just a casual look at our mainstream media, entertainment, and social attractions/distractions we will readily see that these are the very areas which are targeted by the ‘culture of spectacle’ that is modern society.

Ancient religious-spiritual traditions have long talked about such ‘energy predators’ that are said to feed off from unstable human mental and emotional states. The early gnostic Christians referred to some of these as the Archons; various North American Indian tribes refer to Wetiko/Wendigo; Don Juan in the Carlos Castenada books refers to the Predators; and South American shamans have long talked of spirits that feed off from and fragment the vulnerable human inner state/soul.

We must wonder why it is that our modern cultures promote entertainments that manipulate and play upon excessively distorted images of mental and emotional anguish as well as exaggerated portrayals of sexuality. Furthermore, we are bombarded daily with images of death. In fact, a recent study into western media announced that the most repeated word in media is ‘death.’ Further, it revealed that in the first twelve years of a child’s life they would have been subjected to around 20,000 murders through television news and programs, films, online content, and video games. These forms of stimulation directly target a person’s mental, emotional, and physical states, which in turn hampers the operation of harmonious, developmental energies.

Modern life is increasingly a life addicted to high stimulation. Yet by its very nature it also creates anxiety. Many people are forced, or seduced, into lives that are continually stressful and busy. There is no room for the spaces, the intervals, of internal reflection. Yet similar to how music is not music without the intervals, so is life not a life without those internal spaces.

We spend our days trying to grasp at life, trying to understand it, often with ways that are not adequate. It is like trying to capture the ocean with a bucket. The ocean stands magnificently before us, and yet so many of us in modern societies are running around anxiously with empty buckets in our hands. We’ve been told that only full buckets are of any use – full buckets represent usefulness and progress.

Here is another story:

A man had two large pots, each hung on an end of a pole which he carried across his neck. One of the pots had a crack in it, and while the other pot was perfect and always delivered a full portion of water at the end of the long walk from the stream to his house, the cracked pot arrived only half full.

For a full two years this went on daily, with the man delivering only one and a half pots full of water to his house. Of course, the perfect pot was proud of its accomplishments, feeling accepted and appreciated. But the poor cracked pot was ashamed of its own imperfection, and miserable that it was able to accomplish only half of what it had been made to do. After two years of what it perceived to be a bitter failure, it spoke to the man one day by the stream.

“I am ashamed of myself, and I want to apologize to you.”

“Why?” asked the man. “What are you ashamed of?”

“I have been able, for these past two years, to deliver only half my load because this crack in my side causes water to leak out all the way back to your house. Because of my flaws, you have to do all of this work, and you don’t get full value from your efforts.” the pot said.

The man felt sorry for the old cracked pot, and in his compassion, he said, “As we return to my house, I want you to look at the beautiful flowers along the path. It will make you feel better.”

Indeed, as they went up the hill, the old cracked pot took notice of the sun warming the beautiful wild flowers on the side of the path, and this made it feel a little happier. But at the end of the path, it still felt bad because it had leaked out half its load, and so again the Pot apologized to the man for its failure.

The man said to the pot, “Did you notice that there were flowers only on your side of your path, but not on the other pot’s side? That’s because I have always known about your flaw, and I took advantage of it. I planted flower seeds on your side of the path, and every day while we walk back from the stream, you’ve been watering them. For two years I have been able to pick these beautiful flowers to take home to my wife. With you being just the way you are, you have given beauty and meaning to me every day.”

The way we are can give us beauty and meaning every day, and yet it seems we are living in a world of decreasing meaning. Our modern systems strive for perfection – for progress and efficiency – yet there is less and less happiness.

And the situation is worse in modern western cultures where so many people are seemingly dissatisfied even when they have acquired most things to keep them happy. Perhaps a society that provides superficial comfort produces conditions that do not develop people or cause them to turn an inward gaze or to question notions of their meaning and existence. It is important that other cultures do not follow this western model of superficial consumerism.

It is unfortunate that the meaning of life is often a meaningless question to so many people. Seeking the ‘unnamable’ might sound like madness to many people, and certainly there is little place for it in modern societies that prize themselves on progress. And yet a life that seeks meaning is its own adventure. The ‘unnamable’ does not need to be named – only recognized internally. The external world is not the only reality that exists for us.

The attitude of the modern-day person to the ‘world outside’ has largely been one of hostility – we have been conquering the external world for the most part of human history, instead of mastering our own inner nature. This hostile attitude ignores the reality that all life is interdependent and that our lives are a projection of our inner realities – that is, our fears, anxieties, and insecurities become projected into the world the same as our hopes, visions, and dreams. Whatever we project externally eventually becomes our sense of reality.

We all share a collective reality, despite our cultural differences. Although it alters depending upon where we were born and in which cultures we live, the methods each modern system uses are basically the same – we are provided with beliefs, cultural references, and norms and attitudes. The writer Doris Lessing referred to this as ‘The prisons we choose to live inside.’ And within these psychological prisons many people, as well as the institutions of the modern world, have rejected the wisdom of sages, mystics, philosophers, and even the voices of creative artists. They prefer instead the superficial trappings, entertainments, and technological distractions of the consumerist marketplace. Now, I wish to be clear here – I am not anti-technology. In fact, I am a great supporter of it; but not at the expense of the human vision. Despite the technological progress of the external world, there must always be a developed interior world to observe, reflect, and to question it. Without this, the exterior life is unleashed without values. Without an interior life to seek for significance, what gives meaning to our lives?

So, what is the ‘interior life’? There are no instruction sets for how to live a human life – and we live in a world where more and more people are at a loss to know either why they live or why they die. In life we must strive to examine the human condition.

Modernity has attempted to reinterpret the human condition – to see it as an external drive for progress – and this has resulted in a separation from our need to seek an essential inner self. This modern project has sought to divorce the human being from their imperative to find meaning in existence. The human project, if we wish to call it that, can never be ‘completed’ – it is an eternal quest to always be becoming. Here is a quote I would like to share:

‘When you have found yourself you can have knowledge. Until then you can only have opinions. Opinions are based on habit and what you conceive to be convenient to you. The study of the Interior Life requires self-encounter along the way. You have not met yourself yet. The only advantage of meeting others in the meantime is that one of them may present you to yourself. Before you do that, you will possibly imagine that you have met yourself many times. But the truth is that when you do meet yourself, you come into a permanent endowment and bequest of knowledge that is like no other experience on earth.’ ~TARIQAVI

What we are truly seeking for – and what the interior life can show us – is power over ourselves: not for power over others.

The world is in need of soulful healing, not power-seeking through corruption and manipulation. The world requires healed, integrated, and balanced people; for that which we lack in ourselves we shall always find lacking in the world outside. Also, there are many external forces in the world that are trying to make us live not according to our own sense but according to dominant social narratives. We are told that we must live according to certain social narratives that generally benefit those systems that have no interest in the human soul. And when we deny ourselves such essential nutrients we find that we have a discomfort within us. People are taking increasing amounts of antidepressants, or stimulants; as well as relaxants – we take drugs to bring us up and other drugs to take us down. We are open and vulnerable to the energies of discouragement. Here is a tale about the price of discouragement:

Once the word spread that the devil was pulling out of his business and was arranging to sell-off all his tools of the trade to the highest bidder. The night of the sale all the tools were arranged for the bidders to view. What a motley crew it was! There were sinister tools of hatred, jealousy, envy, malice, treachery, plus all the other elements of evil. Yet besides these there also was an instrument that seemed harmless, a wedge-shaped instrument that appeared worn out, shabby, and yet was priced so much higher than all others. Someone asked the devil what was the name of such a poor-looking instrument.

‘Discouragement,’ answered the Devil.

‘And why is the price so high for such a non-malicious sounding instrument? asked the bidder.

‘Because,’ spoke the Devil, ‘this instrument is more useful to me than any other. I can enter the consciousness of a human being when all other ways fail me and once inside through the discouragement of that person I can do whatever I please. The instrument is worn out because I use it almost everywhere and as very few people know about this I can continue to successfully achieve my goals.’

And as the price of discouragement was so very, very high even today it remains a tool in the property of the Devil.

The price of discouragement is a price too many people are paying – and it is a high price (as the devil knows!)

It is a common situation that we tell people at work we are happy when for much of the time we are not. We buy more and more items to feel happiness within ourselves or to buy happiness in others. People in modern cultures continue to accumulate goods and possessions whilst feeling empty within. Such consumerism empties our pockets and fails to fill our souls. And not only our physical lives become crowded with belongings but our psychological spaces too. We are crowded with those belongings that have accumulated as psychological attachments: the beliefs, ideologies, nationalisms, opinions, likes, dislikes, and all the rest. We are often cluttered in our minds by belonging to this and that and all the other things that we cling to or that cling to us. And this is where some of the disruptions are, and will continue to come from, because our belongings are now breaking apart. As our social, cultural, economic, and work lives go through change and transformation – as they are currently doing – then the clinging to old ‘belongings’ will only serve to cause greater confusion and disorientation. Already it seems as if we are living in a world that is displaying increasing outward signs of craziness and psychopathic tendencies. We must ensure that the world never has more critics than visionaries, or more complainers than positive doers. We must ensure that we do not lose sight of our frameworks for meaning.

Pre-modern societies, for example, lived within their own frameworks of meaning. Not all questions had their answers, yet mysteries and the mysterious at least had a home in which they could exist. We often live today within an atmosphere of meaningless questions and contradictory answers. The pursuit of meaning is being replaced by the pursuit of progress. Progress may alleviate some of our suffering and pains, yet it shall never compensate for the lack of fulfillment we feel inside, for this requires metaphysical or transcendental nourishment. Any notion of the spiritual, or the metaphysical, is often considered not essential to our daily life, and we are taught to dismiss it. Modernity’s task was thus seen as freeing us from the illusions of transcendence. And yet the desire, or the need, for some Absolute remains deep within us and can never be totally eradicated. Perhaps it is this contradiction that lies at the heart of our contemporary distress.

Modern life also tries to eradicate, or at least hide, all sense of enigma. Yet it is precisely these enigmas that make our lives rich in wonder and awe. To attempt to abolish them is an act of great ignorance and hubris. Unanswerable questions must be embraced and not rejected. Mystery and the mysterious must be allowed a space to thrive and enthrall us. It is this sense of mystery that keeps us curious, and curiosity is one of our driving, motivating forces.

Modern societies may well praise their sophisticated intellectual culture, yet it comes at the cost of having a deteriorated spiritual culture. That which belongs to the experience of the human soul is considered not only incommunicable, but rather dangerous to communicate. In the end, life’s mysteries are kept out of sight because they cannot be fully known and thus controlled. There is a spell upon us, and we are being distracted from the essential. Here is another tale:

A lion was captured and imprisoned in a reserve where, to his surprise, he found other lions that had been there for many years, some even their whole life having been born in captivity. The newcomer soon became familiar with the activities of the other lions, and observed how they were arranged in different groups.

One group was dedicated to socializing, another to show business, whilst yet another group was focused on preserving the customs, culture and history from the time the lions were free. There were church groups and others that had attracted the literary or artistic talent. There were also revolutionaries who devoted themselves to plot against their captors and against other revolutionary groups. Occasionally, a riot broke out and one group was removed or killed all the camp guards and so that they had to be replaced by another set of guards. However, the newcomer also noticed the presence of a lion that always seemed to be asleep. He did not belong to any group and was oblivious to them all. This lion appeared to arouse both admiration and hostility from the others. One day the newcomer approached this solitary lion and asked him which group he belonged to.

‘Do not join any group,’ said the lion. ‘Those poor ones deal with everything but the essential.’

‘And what is essential?’ asked the newcomer.

‘It is essential to study the nature of the fence’

A whole society can be distracted. There is a pertinent analogy here to how, in 256AD, the Persian army took Antioch from the Roman Empire. Many of the inhabitants were attending the roman theatre and were oblivious to the enemy archers who had climbed up behind them into the stands. The actors down below had seen the enemy archers and were desperately trying to warn them with hand signals…but the audience did not understand, thinking it part of the entertainment – until it was too late. They were amused up to the point of death. Perhaps we too, in the words of social critic Neil Postman, are ‘Amusing ourselves to Death.’

Understanding Our Place In The World

The only genuine freedom is to be found by turning within ourselves. The human being is naturally an imaginative and creative creature. Reality may be harsh and painful, yet it is also the realm of so much wonder and awe. We may live our lives playing in the mud, yet our minds can reach the stars. Our science can reach into the molecule as well as penetrate into the formation of the universe. Our mystics and sages can reach into the pulsating heart of the cosmos. The human being has an inner dimension that needs to be investigated and which, in turn, is timeless.

It is my view that the role of imagination – the interpenetration of the interior world – is crucial. It is what fuses together that which is above to that which is below. It is also a channel for intuition; and it is through intuition that we get closer to the essential. The inward gaze forever attempts to reveal the role of the human being, and what makes us human. It is about trying to understand our place in the world and our shifting views of the world. And right now, we find ourselves at a crucial point in human history.

Life on this planet is undergoing a great change. There is a revolution coming as people, especially the young people, develop their ways of communication, collaboration, and a new consciousness. We are seeing examples of empathy and compassion from young people around the world, as well as innovation, creativity, and inspired motivation. I have stated before that we are shifting into an epoch where new value sets will emerge as the dominant traits.

[1] And some of these values are already being expressed within our younger generations. I refer to these as the ‘C’ values of Connection – Communication – Collaboration – Consciousness – Compassion. Such changes will come into our lives, yet not overnight. It is not like flicking on a light switch. I expect it will be a process where much soul-searching and the questioning of our meanings and values will have to occur beforehand. However, it is not all about violence and thuggery, despite what our mainstream news may be showing us. There is a change emerging across the planet, and this change shall arise from within, through a new understanding of the human spirit, and of our place not only in our local cultures but also within a shared, planetary home. These are critical times of transition – and of momentous importance to us.It is important to recognize that we are undergoing a shift from localized cultures into a period of becoming planetary citizens. Nationalisms will need to become secondary, or put aside altogether, as we come closer together as a global species. And this significant transition is dissolving our securities, our belief systems, and our models of reality. Everything around us is beginning to shake – and so is the earth, literally. We can no longer remain within the old narratives. We are in need of new worldviews, both as individuals as well as within our communities and societies. What we now need is genuine and sincere far-reaching vision. And in our mainstream cultures we are also lacking hope and trust, especially in our socio-political systems. What is now essential is hope and trust in humanity, and in the richness and resilience of the human spirit. We are on the cusp of a different world coming into being, and at its centre shall be the human heart and soul. There can be no genuine, lasting future if it is based solely on the exterior life – it must be driven by the values that come from the interior of the human being.

To be prepared for the future world that is now emerging before us we must adapt our thinking and our consciousness to all possibilities. What we first need is a genuine change of mind:

God decided to come down to Earth for a quick look at how creation was coming along.

God approached Earth and happened to look at a big tree full of howling monkeys. As God looked down, one of the monkeys happened to look up and saw God.

The monkey became excited and started to shout: ‘I see God…..I see God!’

None of the other monkeys paid any attention. Some thought the monkey was crazy or perhaps just a religious fanatic. They went on about their daily lives of collecting food, taking care of their young, fighting with each other, etc., etc. Not getting any attention, our monkey decided to try to get attention from God, and said:

‘God, Almighty, You are the Beneficent, the Merciful, please help me!’

In an instant, the monkey was transformed into a man living in his own human community. Everything changed, except for one thing: the monkey’s mind. The monkey immediately realized that could be a problem.

‘Well, thank you God, but what about my mind?’

‘That,’ said God, ‘you will have to change yourself.’

As in this story, we have the human form. The next step is for us to assume the responsibility for the correct level of consciousness. It is as simple and as difficult as that.

We have to accept the responsibility for our own choices and actions; and also, how we choose to respond to events. Everything begins and ends with ourselves, and anything other than this is an excuse, no matter how plausible it may seem to us. As creative, imaginative beings we invent and innovate. At the same time, we are masters at inventing our own false stories and imaginings that self-deceive. In this regard we must choose carefully where we wish to put our attention, time, and efforts. After all, when we visit a beautiful garden do we choose to sit by the roses and savour their sweet smell, or to sit amidst the weeds that prick us? It is important to gift ourselves moments of joy, for joy is an infectious energy – and it shares easily too.

It is up to us to choose those moments, events, and circumstances to engrave upon our memories and heart. It is also about choosing what things to forget. Most of the things we encounter or accumulate we would be best to give up, or give away. We should only keep the few, thus ensuring the quality and integrity of those things we keep close to us. Here is another tale:

An Arabian legend tells of two friends who were travelling through the desert and at one point they fell into disagreement about the trip whereby one of the friends slaps the other across the face.

The friend who had been slapped said nothing, only wrote in the sand: ‘Today my best friend slapped me in the face.’

Both friends continued on their journey and eventually arrived at an oasis where there were baths to refresh themselves. The friend who had been slapped jumped into the large baths yet soon found himself starting to drown. The other friend immediately jumped in after him and saved him. After recovering the first man took a pen and wrote on a stone: ‘Today my best friend saved my life.’

Intrigued, the friend asked: ‘Why is it that after I hurt you, you wrote in the sand and now after saving you, you write on a stone?

Smiling, the other friend replied: ‘When a good friend offends us, we write in the sand where the wind of forgetfulness and forgiveness will be responsible for clearing it off; on the other hand, when something great happens to us, we burn it into stone in memory of the heart where no wind in the world can erase it.’

We build up and develop our own interior world by all the small things and moments we choose to engrave upon our heart, spirit, and soul. We can choose those things we wish to line our forward path with.

Choosing Our Path

We should not be afraid to talk about things of the spirit – to be present with spirit and to live with it in our everyday moments. As Bob Dylan says, those who are not busy being born are busy dying. We are representatives of the spirit, and so should seek to be present to this, without the urge for external showing-off. There is no need for acting weird or strange; to wear odd clothes or follow customs antagonistic to the culture in which we are living. We may think and feel differently, and have experiences that are beyond the accepted, normal ken. Yet to revert to odd external behavior only shows that we are unable to internalize and stabilize these experiences and energies. To all purposes, there is nothing wrong in appearing normal to the outside world. To engage with the spirit, we may have to first learn how to be still, without being bored. There are already enough active distractions in the world as it is – why add more?

It is a normal request to ask for ‘practical things.’ People want to find activities, acts, exercises, and rituals to help them along their own path of development. And the world offers many of these things, in varying degrees of genuineness, sincerity, and effectiveness. Yet sometimes being given an action to attend to belittles the process of the initial search. For me personally, I am unable to give specific remedies for the search for meaning, other than to say that a person must first experience what this longing, this need, feels like. We are catalysts for our own search for meaning, and each path is walked differently. To begin with, we must learn how to articulate this need. This will then begin the course of one’s life that will forever alter what comes after. We are compelled to trust our instincts, our intuition, and to take the appropriate response. We are not here in this life to live like ghosts amongst the phantasms of the world. We always have an internal choice, and this should not force us to surrender into the abyss of mass insanity. As the story goes,

There was once a wise and powerful king who ruled in a remote city of a far kingdom. And the king was feared for both his might and his love of wisdom. At the heart of the city was a well whose water was cool and crystalline, and all the inhabitants drank from this well, even the king and his courtiers, because there was no other well in the city. One night, while everyone was asleep, a witch entered the city and poured seven drops of a strange liquid into the well, and said:

‘From now on, anyone who drinks this water will go crazy.’

The next morning all the inhabitants drank the water from the well, except the king and his lord chamberlain, and very soon everyone went mad, as the witch had foretold. During that day, all people went through the narrow streets and public places whispering to each other:
‘The king is mad. Our king and his lord chamberlain have lost their reason. Naturally, we cannot be ruled by a mad king. We must dethrone him!’

That night, the king ordered a golden cup of water from the well to be brought to him. And when they brought the cup the king and his lord chamberlain drank heavily from it. Soon after that there was great rejoicing in that distant city of a far kingdom because the king and his lord chamberlain had regained their reason.

We must be fearless in committing to the inner path we have chosen, so long as we harm no other. The genuine inner path is a subtle one. At times it can seem as if nothing is happening – as if we are going nowhere. Perhaps the path itself is a search for no-place and no-where. And yet we can rest assured that the inner path is active in each moment, in all times. And the search for this can bring meaning to us as we engage with the modern world. Amidst the distractions and entertainments on offer it is possible to remain focused with our own internal meaningful enjoyment. And this inner joy brings with it its own sacred moments.

It will do us good to remember that life lies beyond reason, and is a sacred thing. And we should allow this sacred presence into our lives, with joy, respect, and even a little humour. After all, just a little bit of joy, respect, and humour can go a long, long way – and we have far to travel.

References:

[1] See The Phoenix Generation: A New Era of Connection, Compassion & Consciousness

James C. Scott’s Against the Grain

Posted on January 4, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By chilke

Source: The HipCrime Vocab

During my long discursion on the history of money, the academic James C. Scott published an important book called Against the Grain: A Deep History of the First States.

Regular readers will know that this has been a longstanding area of research (or obsession) of mine. I’ve referred to Scott’s work before, particularly Seeing Like A State, which I think is indispensable in understanding many of the political divisions of today (and why left/right is no longer a useful distinction). We’re in an era where much of the “left” is supporting geoengineering and rockets to Mars, and the “right” (at least the alt-right) is criticizing housing projects and suburban sprawl.

It’s unfortunate that Scott’s title is the same as another one of my favorite books on that topic by journalist Richard Manning: Against the Grain: How Agriculture Hijacked Civilization, another book I’ve referred to often. Manning’s book is not only a historical account about how the rise of grain agriculture led to war, hierarchy, slavery and sickness, but a no-hold-barred exploration of today’s grain-centric agribusiness model, where wheat, corn, soy and sugar are grown in mechanized monocultures and processed by the food industry into highly-addictive junk food implicated in everything from type two diabetes, to depression to Alzheimer’s disease (via inflammation):

Dealing with surplus is a difficult task. The problem begins with the fact that, just like the sex drive, the food drive got ramped up in evolution. If you have a deep, yearning need for food, you’re going to get along better than your neighbor, and over the years that gene is going to be passed on. So you get this creature that got fine-tuned to really need food, especially carbohydrates. Which brings us to the more fundamental question: can we ever deal with sugar? By making more concentrated forms of carbohydrates, we’re playing into something that’s quite addictive and powerful. It’s why we’re so blasted obese. We have access to all this sugar, and we simply cannot control our need for it—that’s genetic.

Now, can we gain the ability to overcome that? I’m not sure. You have to add to this the fact that there’s a lot of money to be made by people who know how to concentrate sugar. They have a real interest in seeing that we don’t overcome these kinds of addictions. In fact, that’s how you control societies—you exploit that basic drive for food. That’s how we train dogs—if you want to make a dog behave properly, you deprive him or give him food. Humans aren’t that much different. We just like to think we are. So as an element of political control, food and food imagery are enormously important.

The Scourge of Agriculture (The Atlantic)

Cancers linked to excess weight make up 40% of all US diagnoses, study finds (The Guardian)

Child and teen obesity spreading across the globe (BBC)

In that interview, Manning also makes this point which got so much attention in Yuval Noah Harari’s blockbuster, Sapiens (which came out years later):

…it’s not just human genes at work here. It’s wheat genes and corn genes—and how they have an influence on us. They took advantage of our ability to travel, our inventiveness, our ability to use tools, to live in a broad number of environments, and our huge need for carbohydrates. Because of our brains’ ability, we were able to spread not only our genes, but wheat’s genes as well. That’s why I make the argument that you have to look at this in terms of wheat domesticating us, too. That co-evolutionary process between humans and our primary food crops is what created the agriculture we see today.

As for the title, I guess Against the Grain is just too clever a title to pass up 🙂

I’m still waiting on the book from the library, but I have seen so many reviews by now that I’m not sure I’ll be able to add too much. What’s interesting to me is the degree to which the idea that civilization was a great leap backward from what we had before is starting to go mainstream.

The old, standard “Whig version” of universal progress is still pretty strong, though. Here’s one reviewer describing how it was articulated in the turn-of-the-century Encyclopedia Britannica:

The Encyclopaedia took its readers through a panorama of universal history, from “the lower status of savagery,” when hunter-gatherers first mastered fire; to the “middle status of barbarism,” when hunters learned to domesticate animals and became herders; to the invention of writing, when humanity “graduated out of barbarism” and entered history. Along the way, humans learned to cultivate grains, such as wheat and rice, which showed them “the value of a fixed abode,” since farmers had to stay near their crops to tend and harvest them. Once people settled down, “a natural consequence was the elaboration of political systems,” property, and a sense of national identity. From there it was a short hop—at least in Edwardian hindsight—to the industrial revolution and free trade.

Some unfortunate peoples, even entire continents such as aboriginal North America and Australia, might fall off the Progress train and have to be picked up by kindly colonists; but the train ran along only one track, and no one would willingly decline to board it…

What made prehistoric hunter-gatherers give up freedom for civilization? (The New Republic)

But, it turns out that the reality was quite different. In fact, hunter-gatherers resisted agriculture. Even where farmers and H-G’s lived side-by-side, the H-G’s (and herders) avoided farming as long as they could. When Europeans equipped “primitive” societies with seeds and hoes and taught them to farm, the natives threw away the implements and ran off into the woods. The dirt farmers of colonial America often ran away to go and live with the nomadic Indians, to the extent that strict laws had to be passed to prevent this (as documented in Sebastian Junger’s new book Tribe).

The shift to agriculture was in some respects…harmful. Osteological research suggests that domiciled Homo sapiens who depended on grains were smaller, less well-nourished and, in the case of women, more likely to be anaemic, than hunter-gatherers. They also found themselves vulnerable to disease and able to maintain their population only through unprecedentedly high birthrates. Scott also suggests that the move from hunting and foraging to agriculture resulted in ‘deskilling’, analogous to the move in the industrial revolution from the master tradesman’s workshop to the textile mill. State taxation compounded the drudgery of raising crops and livestock. Finally, the reliance on only a few crops and livestock made early states vulnerable to collapse, with the reversion to the ‘dark ages’ possibly resulting in an increase in human welfare.

Book Review: Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott (London School of Economics)

So why did they do it? That is a question that nobody know the answer to, but it appears they stumbled into not because it was a better way of life, but due to some sort of pressures beyond their control. As Colin Tudge put it, “People did not invent agriculture and shout for joy; they drifted or were forced into it, protesting all the way.”Rather than taking up agriculture because it presented a better, more secure way of life as the Victorians thought (due to chauvinism and ignorance), it was actually much more unpleasant and much more work. Here’s a bit from Richard Manning’s book (pp. 23-24):

Why agriculture? In retrospect, it seems odd that it has taken archaeologists and paleontologists so long to begin answering this essential question of human history. What we are today–civilized city-bound, overpopulated, literate, organized, wealthy, poor, diseased, conquered, and conquerors–is all rooted in the domestication of plants and animals. The advent of farming re-formed humanity. In fact, the question “Why agriculture?” is so vital, lies so close to the core of our being that it probably cannot be asked or answered with complete honesty. Better to settle for calming explanation of the sort Stephen Jay Gould calls “just-so stories.”

In this case, the core of such stories is the assumption that agriculture was better for us. Its surplus of food allowed the leisure and specialization that made civilization. It’s bounty settled, refined, and educated us, freed us from the nasty, mean, brutish, and short existence that was the state of nature, freed us from hunting and gathering. Yet when we think about agriculture, and some people have thought intently about it, the pat story glosses over a fundamental point. This just-so story had to have sprung from the imagination of someone who never hoed a row of corn or rose with the sun for a lifetime of milking cows. Gamboling about plain and forest, hunting and living off the land is fun. Farming is not. That’s all one needs to know to begin a rethinking of the issue. The fundamental question was properly phrased by Colin Tudge of the London School of Economics: “The real problem, then, is not to explain why some people were slow to adopt agriculture but why anybody took it up at all when it is so obvioulsy beastly.” Research has supported Tudge’s skepticism.

Circumstances beyond their control must have played a role. Climate change is most commonly implicated. Overpopulation must have played a role, but this raises a chicken-and-egg problem: overpopulation is a problem created by agrarianism, so how could it have caused it?

One novel idea I explored earlier this year was Brian Hayden’s idea that the production of ever-increasing surpluses was part of a strategy by aggrandizing individuals in order to gain political power.

Periodic feasting events were ways to increase social cohesion and deal with uneven production in various climatic biomes–it was a survival strategy for peoples spread-out among a wide geographical area (mountains, plains, wetlands, riparian, etc.). If food was scarce in one area, resources could be pooled. Such feasting/resource pooling regimes were probably the earliest true “civilizations” (albeit before cities). It was also the major way to organize mass labor, and this lasted well into the historical period (both Egyptian and Mesopotamian texts testify to celebratory work feasts).

At these events, certain individuals would loan out surplus food and other prestige items in order to get people in debt to them. Cultural expectations meant that the debts would have to repaid and then some (i.e. with interest). These people would get their families and allies to work their fingers to the bone in order to produce big surpluses in societies where this was possible, such as horticultural and affluent forager societies. They would then become “Big Men”–tribal leaders without “official” status.

Would-be Big-Men would then try and outdo one another by throwing bigger feasts than their rivals. Competitive feasting provided an opportunity for aggrandizers to try and outdo one another in a series of power games and status jockeying. But the net effect such power games had across the society was to ramp up food production to unsustainable levels. This, in turn, led to intensification.

At these feasts, highly “prized” foodstuffs would be used by aggrandizers to lure people into debt and other lopsided obligations, as well as get people to work for them. Manning notes above how food has been traditionally used to control people. And, Hayden speculates, the foods used were probably ones with pleasurable or mind-altering effects. One common one was almost certainly alcohol.

He speculates that grains were initially grown not for flavor or for carbohydrates, but for fermentation. It’s fairly certain that alcohol consumption played a major role in feasting events, and it’s notable that the earliest civilizations were all big beer drinkers (Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, Mesoamerica). Most agricultural village societies around the world have some sort of beer drinking/fermentation ritual, as Patrick E. McGovern has documented. The first “recipe” ever written down was for beer brewing. Hayden speculates that early monoliths like Gobeckli Tepe and Stonehenge were built as places for such feasting events to take place, wedded to certain religious ideologies (all of them have astronomical orientations), and archaeology tends to confirm this. It’s notable that the earliest sites of domestication/agrarianism we know of are typically in the vicinity of these monoliths.

In other words, the root of this overproduction was human social instincts, and not just purely environmental or climatic factors. Is there some connection between plant/animal domestication and religious ideology? Is it any wonder that religious concepts in these societies transform to become very different from the animist/shamanic ones of hunter-gatherers? Flannery and Marcus point out that the establishment of a hereditary priesthood that constructs temples (replacing the shaman) is always a marker of the transition from an egalitarian society to a hierarchical one with hereditary leadership. Even in the Bible, king and temple arise more or less simultaneously (e.g. Saul/David/Solomon).

Scott’s book emphasizes the key role that cereal agriculture played in the rise of the early states.

It was the ability to tax and to extract a surplus from the produce of agriculture that, in Scott’s account, led to the birth of the state, and also to the creation of complex societies with hierarchies, division of labor, specialist jobs (soldier, priest, servant, administrator), and an élite presiding over them. Because the new states required huge amounts of manual work to irrigate the cereal crops, they also required forms of forced labor, including slavery; because the easiest way to find slaves was to capture them, the states had a new propensity for waging war. Some of the earliest images in human history, from the first Mesopotamian states, are of slaves being marched along in neck shackles. Add this to the frequent epidemics and the general ill health of early settled communities and it is not hard to see why the latest consensus is that the Neolithic Revolution was a disaster for most of the people who lived through it.

It’s worth noting that it wasn’t simply agriculture, but cereal production that relied on artificial irrigation that saw the rise of the first states. The need to coordinate all that labor, partition permanent plots of land, and resolve settlement disputes, must have led to the rise of an elite managerial class, as Ian Welsh points out:

Agriculture didn’t lead immediately to inequality, the original agricultural societies appear to have been quite equal, probably even more so than the late hunter-gatherer societies that preceded them. But increasing surpluses and the need for coordination which arose, especially in hydraulic civilizations (civilizations based around irrigation which is labor intensive and require specialists) led to the rise of inequality. The pharoahs created great monuments, but their subjects did not live nearly as well as hunter-gatherers.

The Right Stuff: What Prosperity Is and Isn’t (Ian Welsh)

And sedentism, as I’ve noted, is not so much a product of agriculture as a cause. Sedentary societies coexisted with high mobility for some time. Likely sedentary societies needed to be around for some time in order to build up the kind of surpluses aggrandizing elites needed to gain power. These probably started as “redistributor chiefs” who justified their role through a combination of martial leadership and religious ideology:

Sedentism does not have its origins in plant and animal domestication. The first stratified states in the Tigris and Euphrates Valley appeared ‘only around 3,100 BCE, more than four millennia after the first crop domestications and sedentism’. Sedentism has its roots in ecologically rich, preagricultural settings, especially wetlands. Agriculture co-existed with mobile lifestyles in which people gathered to harvest crops. Domestication itself is part of a 400,000 year process beginning with the use of fire. Moreover, it is not a process (or simply a process) of humans gaining increasing control over the natural world. People find themselves caring for dogs, creating an ecological niche for mice, ticks, bedbugs and other uninvited guests, and spending their lives ‘strapped to the round of ploughing, planting, weeding, reaping, threshing, grinding, all on behalf of their favorite grains and tending to the daily needs of their livestock’.

This was also noted in the Richard Manning interview, above:

…we always think that agriculture allowed sedentism, which gave people time to create civilization and art. But the evidence that’s emerging from the archeological record suggests that sedentism came first, and then agriculture. This occurred near river mouths, where people depended on seafood, especially salmon. These were probably enormously abundant cultures that had an enormous amount of leisure time—they just had to wait for the salmon runs to occur. There are some good records of those communities, and from the skeleton remains we can see that they got up to 95 percent of their nutrients from salmon and ocean-derived sources. Along the way, they developed highly refined art—something we always associate with agriculture.

Of course, agrarian societies using irrigation and plow-based agricuture in set plots are very different from horicultural societies practicing shifting cultivation. This is likley why early agricutural societies were rougly about as egalitarian as their predecessors, as Ian Welsh pointed out above. By the time the trap snapped shut, however, it was too late.

How agriculture grew on us (Leaving Babylon)

I’ve often wondered if, when certain humans learned how to domesticate, they used it as much on their fellow man as they did their animals. In this Aeon article, this passage really struck me:

When humans start treating animals as subordinates, it becomes easier to do the same thing to one another. The first city-states in Mesopotamia were built on this principle of transferring methods of control from creatures to human beings, according to the archaeologist Guillermo Algaze at the University of California in San Diego. Scribes used the same categories to describe captives and temple workers as they used for state-owned cattle.

How domestication changes species including the human (Aeon)

Indeed, the idea that humans domesticated themselves is another key concept in Harari’s Sapiens. Perhaps that domestication was much more “literal” than we have been led to believe. Perhaps human sacrifice was a way for early religious leaders to “cull” individuals who had undesirable traits from their standpoint: independence, aggression, a questioning attitude, etc. Indeed, hunter-gatherers do not like obeying orders from a boss. I wonder to what extent this process is still going on, especially in modern-day America with its schools, prisons, corporate cubicles, police, military, etc.:

Anthropologists and historians have put forward the ‘social control hypothesis’ of human sacrifice. According to this theory, sacrificial rites served as a function for social elites. Human sacrifice is proposed to have been used by social elites to display their divinely sanctioned power, justify their status, and terrorise underclasses into obedience and subordination. Ultimately, human sacrifice could be used as a tool to help build and maintain systems of social inequality.

How human sacrifice helped to enforce social inequality (Aeon)

And this is very relevent to our recent discussion of money: writing and mathematics were first used as methods of social control. As Janet Gleeson-White points out in this essay, accounting was our first writing technology. Money–and taxes–were an outgrowth of this new communications technology:

War, slavery, rule by élites—all were made easier by another new technology of control: writing. “It is virtually impossible to conceive of even the earliest states without a systematic technology of numerical record keeping,” Scott maintains. All the good things we associate with writing—its use for culture and entertainment and communication and collective memory—were some distance in the future. For half a thousand years after its invention, in Mesopotamia, writing was used exclusively for bookkeeping: “the massive effort through a system of notation to make a society, its manpower, and its production legible to its rulers and temple officials, and to extract grain and labor from it.”

Early tablets consist of “lists, lists and lists,” Scott says, and the subjects of that record-keeping are, in order of frequency, “barley (as rations and taxes), war captives, male and female slaves.” Walter Benjamin, the great German Jewish cultural critic, who committed suicide while trying to escape Nazi-controlled Europe, said that “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” He meant that every complicated and beautiful thing humanity ever made has, if you look at it long enough, a shadow, a history of oppression.

The Case Against Civilization (The New Yorker)

And the connection between writing and domestication/subjugation is powerfully made by this article from the BBC documenting the world’s oldest writing:

In terms of written history, this is the very remote past. But there is also something very direct and almost intimate about it too. You can see fingernail marks in the clay. These neat little symbols and drawings are clearly the work of an intelligent mind.

These were among the first attempts by our human ancestors to try to make a permanent record of their surroundings. What we’re doing now – my writing and your reading – is a direct continuation. But there are glimpses of their lives to suggest that these were tough times. It wasn’t so much a land of milk and honey, but porridge and weak beer.

Even without knowing all the symbols, Dr Dahl says it’s possible to work out the context of many of the messages on these tablets. The numbering system is also understood, making it possible to see that much of this information is about accounts of the ownership and yields from land and people. They are about property and status, not poetry.

This was a simple agricultural society, with a ruling household. Below them was a tier of powerful middle-ranking figures and further below were the majority of workers, who were treated like “cattle with names”. Their rulers have titles or names which reflect this status – the equivalent of being called “Mr One Hundred”, he says – to show the number of people below him.

It’s possible to work out the rations given to these farm labourers. Dr Dahl says they had a diet of barley, which might have been crushed into a form of porridge, and they drank weak beer. The amount of food received by these farm workers hovered barely above the starvation level. However the higher status people might have enjoyed yoghurt, cheese and honey. They also kept goats, sheep and cattle.

For the “upper echelons, life expectancy for some might have been as long as now”, he says. For the poor, he says it might have been as low as in today’s poorest countries.

Breakthrough in world’s oldest undeciphered writing (BBC)

So the earliest writing tends to confirm Scott’s account. And not just Scott’s account, but that of anthropologist James Suzman, who has simultaneously come out with a book about the disappearing way of life of the the !Kung San Bushmen of the Kalahari. This is also reviewed in the New Yorker article, above. These hunter-gatherers are going through today exactly what those people in the Near East experienced roughly 6-8000 years ago, giving us a window into history:

The encounter with modernity has been disastrous for the Bushmen: Suzman’s portrait of the dispossessed, alienated, suffering Ju/’hoansi in their miserable resettlement camps makes that clear. The two books even confirm each other’s account of that sinister new technology called writing. Suzman’s Bushman mentor, !A/ae, “noted that whenever he started work at any new farm, his name would be entered into an employment ledger, documents that over the decades had assumed great mystical power among Ju/’hoansi on the farms. The secrets held by these ledgers evidently had the power to give or withhold pay, issue rations, and determine an individual’s right to stay on any particular farm.”

Writing turned the majority of people into serfs and enabled a sociopathic elite to live well and raise themselves and their offspring above everyone else.

And here we are at the cusp of a brand new “information revolution” where literally our every thought and move can be monitored and tracked by a tiny centralized elite and permanently stored. And yet we’re convinced that this will make all our lives infinitely better! Go back and reread the above. I’m not so sure. I already feel like “cattle with a name” in our brave new nudged, credit-scored, Neoliberal world.

We’re also experiencing another period of rapid climate change and resource depletion, just like that experienced at the outset of the original coming of the state. We’re now doing exactly what they did: intensification, and once again it’s empowering a small sociopathic elite at the cost of the rest of us. And yet Panglossians confidently tell us we’re headed for a peaceful techno-utopia where all new discoveries will be shared with all of us instead of hoarded, and we’ll all live like gods instead of being exterminated like rats because we’re no longer necessary to the powers that be. Doubtless the same con (“We’ll all be better off!!!”) was played on the inhabitants of early states, too. Given the human social instincts noted above, let’s just say I’m not optimistic. Please pass the protein blocks.

Scott points out that the state is a very novel development, despite what we read in history books. We read about the history of states because states left written history, and we are their descendants. But that doesn’t mean most people lived under them. By Scott’s account, most humans lived outside of nation-states well into the 1500’s. A review of Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday by Scott published a few years back in The London Review of Books was a foreshadowing of his current book (and may have even inspired it). In that review, he stated:

…Homo sapiens has been around for roughly 200,000 years and left Africa not much earlier than 50,000 years ago. The first fragmentary evidence for domesticated crops occurs roughly 11,000 years ago and the first grain statelets around 5000 years ago, though they were initially insignificant in a global population of perhaps eight million.

More than 97 per cent of human experience, in other words, lies outside the grain-based nation-states in which virtually all of us now live. ‘Until yesterday’, our diet had not been narrowed to the three major grains that today constitute 50 to 60 per cent of the world’s caloric intake: rice, wheat and maize. The circumstances we take for granted are, in fact, of even more recent vintage …Before, say, 1500, most populations had a sporting chance of remaining out of the clutches of states and empires, which were still relatively weak and, given low rates of urbanisation and forest clearance, still had access to foraged foods. On this account, our world of grains and states is a mere blink of the eye (0.25 per cent), in the historical adventure of our species.

Crops, Towns, Government (London Review of Books)

Why a leading political theorist thinks civilization is overrated (VOX)

Wither Collpase?

One of the more provocative ideas from Scott’s book is to question whether the withering away of state capacity–that is, a collapse–is really a bad thing at all!

We need to rethink, accordingly, what we mean when we talk about ancient “dark ages.” Scott’s question is trenchant: “ ‘dark’ for whom and in what respects”? The historical record shows that early cities and states were prone to sudden implosion.

“Over the roughly five millennia of sporadic sedentism before states (seven millennia if we include preagriculture sedentism in Japan and the Ukraine),” he writes, “archaeologists have recorded hundreds of locations that were settled, then abandoned, perhaps resettled, and then again abandoned.” These events are usually spoken of as “collapses,” but Scott invites us to scrutinize that term, too.

When states collapse, fancy buildings stop being built, the élites no longer run things, written records stop being kept, and the mass of the population goes to live somewhere else. Is that a collapse, in terms of living standards, for most people? Human beings mainly lived outside the purview of states until—by Scott’s reckoning—about the year 1600 A.D. Until that date, marking the last two-tenths of one per cent of humanity’s political life, “much of the world’s population might never have met that hallmark of the state: a tax collector.”

Book Review: Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott (LSE)

Is the Collapse of Civilizations A Good Thing? (Big Think)

Indeed, is collapse even a relevant concept? What, really is collapsing?

We also need to think about what we apply the term ‘collapse’ to – what exactly was it that collapsed? Very often, it’s suggested that civilisations collapse, but this isn’t quite right. It is more accurate to say that states collapse. States are tangible, identifiable ‘units’ whereas civilisation is a more slippery term referring broadly to sets of traditions. Many historians, including Arnold Toynbee, author of the 12-volume A Study of History (1934-61), have defined and tried to identify ‘civilisations’, but they often come up with different ideas and different numbers. But we have seen that while Mycenaean states collapsed, several strands of Mycenaean material and non-material culture survived – so it would seem wrong to say that their ‘civilisation’ collapsed. Likewise, if we think of Egyptian or Greek or Roman ‘civilisation’, none of these collapsed – they transformed as circumstances and values changed. We might think of each civilisation in a particular way, defined by a particular type of architecture or art or literature – pyramids, temples, amphitheatres, for example – but this reflects our own values and interests.

[…]

States collapsed, civilisations or cultures transformed; people lived through these times and employed their coping strategies – they selectively preserved aspects of their culture and rejected others. Archaeologists, historians and others have a duty to tell the stories of these people, even though the media might find them less satisfactory. And writers who appropriate history for moral purposes need to think carefully about what they are doing and what they are saying – they need to make an effort to get the history as right as possible, rather than dumbing it down to silver-bullet theories.

What the idea of civilisational collapse says about history (Aeon)

Scott’s book gives us hope that the collapse of states, rather than being a bad thing, might lead to a flourishing of human freedom. In that, there is some hope. I’ll end with this thought from Scott’s review of Diamond:

Anthropology can show us radically different and satisfying forms of human affiliation and co-operation that do not depend on the nuclear family or inherited wealth. History can show that the social and political arrangements we take for granted are the contingent result of a unique historical conjuncture.

A Skeleton Key to the Alt Left

Posted on August 7, 2017 by Reid Mukai

Source: the HipCrime Vocab

Last time we looked at the differences between the “Left” as manifested in the mainstream political discourse and those of a number of authors, blogger and thinkers that I’ve (somewhat arbitrarily) lumped under the umbrella of the Alt-Left. We listed a lot of their views, but what lies at the heart of the Alt-Left’s critique?

I think an answer to that question might be illuminated by this article: Kanth: A 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding (Institute for New Economic Thinking)

The article describes the ideas of a thinker named Rajani Kanth. Like some on the Alt-Right, Kanth is highly critical of many of the ideas which came out of the European Enlightenment. Kanth’s critique, thought, centers around what he calls Eurocentric Modernism, which he feels had come to define the current world order, pushing out any alternatives:

We’re taught to think of the Enlightenment as the blessed end to the Dark Ages, a splendid blossoming of human reason. But what if instead of bringing us to a better world, some of this period’s key ideas ended up producing something even darker?

In [author Rajani Kanth’s] view, what’s throwing most of us off kilter…was…a set of assumptions, a particular way of looking at the world that pushed out previous modes of existence, many quite ancient and time-tested, and eventually rose to dominate the world in its Anglo-American form…Kanth argues that this framework, which he calls Eurocentric modernism, is collapsing….

Many of the authors previously mentioned are critical of Eurocentric Modernism, even if they are not familiar with that concept. What is Eurocentric Modernism?

The Eurocentric modernist program, according to Kanth, has four planks: a blind faith in science; a self-serving belief in progress; rampant materialism; and a penchant for using state violence to achieve its ends. In a nutshell, it’s a habit of placing individual self-interest above the welfare of community and society.

Eurocentric Modernism is also intrinsically tied up with the concept of the One Big Global Market put into place by European economic liberals using strong centralized states and top-down state violence. The Market itself is the greatest “social engineering” project ever conceived, and is currently showing signs of fraying around the edges (or even collapsing outright):

Eurocentric modernism…delivered a society which is essentially asocial — one in which everybody sees everybody else as a means to their own private ends…[and] consigned us to an endless and exhausting Hobbesian competition. For every expansion of the market, we found our social space shrunk and our natural environment spoiled. For every benefit we received, there came a new way to pit us against each other…[P]eople are not at all like Adam Smith’s homo economicus, a narrowly self-interested agent trucking and bartering through life. Smith…turned the human race — a species capable of wondrous caring, creativity, and conviviality — into a nasty horde of instinctive materialists: a society of hustlers.

In fact, economics has been called the “crown jewel” of the Eurocentric Modernist project. Rather than any sort of actual “science,” it is a code of ethics and philosophical justification for the world as it is under Eurocentric Modernism. It prevents any challenge to it, depicting the current order as “scientific,” “natural” and “inevitable.” (i.e. “There is no alternative”). According to its adherents, any criticism of it is contrary to “human nature.” Every day, millions of people in every corner of the globe are indoctrinated in its tenets, like a modern-day religion. You can’t understand the political regime of Eurocentric Modernism without its philosophical handmaiden—Economics.

Modern orthodox economists frequently theorize and propose their models wrapped in algebraic expressions and econometrics symbols that make their theories incomprehensible to anyone without a significant training in mathematics. These complicated mathematical models rely on sets of assumptions about human behavior, institutional frameworks, and the way society works as whole; i.e. theoretical underpinnings developed through history. Yet, more frequently than not, their assumptions go to such great lengths that the models turn out utterly detached from reality.

This approach was promoted during the 1870s, in an effort to emulate the success of the natural sciences in explaining the world around us, and so transform Political Economy into the “exact” science of Economics. The new discipline, born with a scientific aura, would provide a legitimate doctrine to rationalize the existing system and state of affairs as universal, natural, and harmonious.

It is understandable that economists wanted their field to be more like the natural sciences. At the time, great advances in physics, biology, chemistry, and astronomy had unraveled many mysteries of the universe. Those discoveries had yielded rapid development around the world. The Second Industrial Revolution was well underway, causing a transition from rudimentary techniques of production to the extensive uses of machines. Physics and mathematics were validated to a great extent with the construction of large bridges, transcontinental railroads, and the telephone. There exists extensive evidence to establish that this success of the natural sciences and the scientific method had a big influence on the mathematization of what had been the field of Political Economy. Early neoclassical theorists misappropriated the mathematical formalism of physics, boldly copied their models, and mostly admitted so. Particularly guilty of this method were W.S. Jevons and Léon Walras; credited with having arrived at the principle of marginal utility independently…

The Borrowed Science of Neoclassical Economics (The Minskys)

Not only did it borrow the language of science, at around the same time it eliminated all class/institutional power relations from consideration, instead depicting us all as “equals” making mutually beneficial voluntary exchanges.

…Power was originally recognised as important by the Classical economists like Adam Smith. However this changed with the rise of socialism. Wealthy industrialists and rulers feared this threat and sought to find an economic theory that would debunk socialism and protect themselves. It was for this reason that economics began to downplay issues like inequality and poverty. It also de-emphasised production and therefore any resulting questions about social relations. Instead economics switched to discussing marginal utility of hypothetical individuals where none had power over the other. There was no boss or servant, but rather groups of individuals voluntarily interacting in mutually beneficial arrangements.

Crucially, economics became depersonalised and it was no longer possible to make value judgements. A dollar spent by a rich person on a loaf of bread was the same as a dollar spent by a poor person on the same loaf. It was no longer argued that one person may need the dollar more or that the starving may need the loaf more than the fat. Economics abandoned the idea that people have needs and assumed we only have desires. This change in focus did not happen by chance or due to superior argument but due to the politics of the time…

Economists and the Powerful (Whistling in the Wind)

Rather than the pseudoscience of Economics, Kanth suggests we take our social inspiration from a different source—human anthropology:

Utopian dreamers have often longed for a more hospitable way of living. But Kanth believes that when they look to politics, economics or philosophy for answers, they are missing the best inspiration: human anthropology…without which our forays into economics, psychology, sociology, and pretty much everything are hopelessly skewed…the Eurocentric modernist tradition, influenced by the Judeo-Christian idea that we are distinct from the world of nature, seeks to separate us from the animal world. We are supposed to be above it, immortal, transcending our bodies and the Earth…

As Kanth sees it, most of our utopian visions carry on the errors and limitations born of a misguided view of human nature. That’s why communism, as it was practiced in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, projected a materialist perspective on progress while ignoring the natural human instinct for autonomy— the ability to decide for ourselves where to go and what to say and create. On flip side, capitalism runs against our instinct to trust and take care of each other.

[D]idn’t Eurocentric modernism…give us our great democratic ideals of equality and liberty to elevate and protect us?…Kanth…notes that when we replace the vital ties of kinship and community with abstract contractual relations, or when we find that the only sanctioned paths in life are that of consumer or producer, we become alienated and depressed in spirit. Abstract rights like liberty and equality turn out to be rather cold comfort. These ideas, however lofty, may not get at the most basic human wants and needs.

The key is not to project ourselves into the future, but to learn from the practical, beneficial ways humans have lived in the past and still do, in some cases, in the present…

Now let’s introduce a related concept here called High Modernism. This concept was developed by James Scott in his book Seeing Like A State. It has some similarities and overlaps with Eurocentric Modernism, but is distinct from it.

Seeing Like a State (The Easiest Person to Fool)

Book Review: Seeing Like A State (Slate Star Codex)

High Modernism is associated with the project of state-building. To this end, it is intrinsically tied up with many elements of the mainstream Left/Right view–democracy, meritocracy, top-down technocratic management, rationalism, materialism, educational attainment, laissez-faire capitalist markets, centralized power, standardization, multiculturalism and globalism.

High Modernism is the attempt to standardize and regularize the world so as to make it legible for rational management and top-down planning by centralized bureaucracies. It places a premium on maximizing “efficiency.” The ultimate purpose is taxation–the funneling of resources from a periphery to a core. In Scott’s view, this process defines the creation of what we normally term “the State.” However, this process often has unforeseen consequences.

[James] Scott defines [High Modernism] as[:]

“A strong, one might even say muscle-bound, version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), and above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws.”

…which is just a bit academic-ese for me. An extensional definition might work better: standardization, Henry Ford, the factory as metaphor for the best way to run everything, conquest of nature, New Soviet Man, people with college degrees knowing better than you, wiping away the foolish irrational traditions of the past, Brave New World, everyone living in dormitories and eating exactly 2000 calories of Standardized Food Product (TM) per day, anything that is For Your Own Good, gleaming modernist skyscrapers, The X Of The Future, complaints that the unenlightened masses are resisting The X Of The Future, demands that if the unenlightened masses reject The X Of The Future they must be re-educated For Their Own Good, and (of course) evenly-spaced rectangular grids (maybe the best definition would be “everything G. K. Chesterton didn’t like.”).

Clearly both the Mainstream Left and Right are adherents of High Modernism. But more importantly, even the major so-called “Leftist” or “collectivist” movements of the Twentieth Century, such as Soviet Communism, were just as wedded to ideas of “progress” and High Modernism as was Western “libertarian” capitalism. The distinction between Left and Right breaks down here.

Many adherents of Communism were moved by Marx’s descriptions of Capitalism’s flaws and shortcomings, but they attempted to construct a “new and improved” top-down hierarchical system in its place which was just as much based on a flawed conception of human nature (the Soviet “new man;” a “classless society”). To keep this utopian project going also required state violence and oppression. Yet we forget that our Capitalist Systems rely just as much on state violence and social control. Note that the “free” societies of the West have now become just as much carceral/surveillance states as the fallen regimes of Eastern Europe, if not more so. As John Gray commented, “The Cold War was a family quarrel among Western ideologies. “

Both ostensibly “Left” and “Right” movements were obsessed with an idea of “progress” that left millions of dead bodies in its wake. As I’ve written before, we are taught to believe that One Big Capitalist Market came about organically through the “scaling up” of primordial farmer’s markets due to our “natural” instincts to “truck barter and exchange.” Yet this is horribly wrong. It’s another part of economics indoctrination.

As Karl Polanyi demonstrated, the One Big Global Market was an artificially constructed by aggressive top-down state violence. The Enclosure Movement, the Highland Clearances, the Poor Laws, Speenhamland, Work Houses, Debtor’s Prisons, the Luddite Revolts, the Corn Laws, Game Laws, Colonialism, the Gold Standard, state-granted corporate charters (e.g. the East India Companies), national banks (the Bank of England), and many other historical changes brought it about.

Millions of people perished in the construction of the Market, from Native Americans, to English peasants, to Irish subsistence farmers, to Indian and African villagers (to the unemployed coal miners overdosing in rural Appalachia today). Many institutions we take for granted in the modern world are band-aids put into place as a result of popular demands for some sort of protection from the destructiveness of this project (e.g. popular democracy, the Welfare State, unemployment insurance, child labor laws, environmental protections, etc.). These people were victims of Modernism just as much as the victims of the Holdomor, yet they have been erased from history. The top-down creation of the Market by central governments is what allowed Capitalism to form in Northern Europe and to project itself around the world.

It may be hard to believe given how much we’ve become inured to it, but the social dysfunction we take for granted today, with its rampant homelessness, mental illness, unemployment, abused children and elderly, beggars on the street, and so forth, would have been unthinkable to traditional societies. What was once shocking has become normal.

Scott describes in detail the processes by which local knowledge is supplanted by regularized systems. Some examples he gives are: the replacement of small-plot peasant agriculture with large-scale, “efficient” mechanized farms of monocrops, assigning people permanent last names (and later ID numbers), bulldozing neighborhoods of crooked streets and replacing them with planned, rectangular grids of wide-open streets, replacing vernacular architecture with cookie-cutter high-rise housing projects, the supplanting of regional dialects with a single “national” language, universal childhood education, and the standardization of money, weights and measures. For example:

…Enlightenment rationalists noticed that peasants [in 18th century Prussia] were just cutting down whatever trees happened to grow in the forests, like a chump. They came up with a better idea: clear all the forests and replace them by planting identical copies of Norway spruce (the highest-lumber-yield-per-unit-time tree) in an evenly-spaced rectangular grid. Then you could just walk in with an axe one day and chop down like a zillion trees an hour and have more timber than you could possibly ever want.

This went poorly. The impoverished ecosystem couldn’t support the game animals and medicinal herbs that sustained the surrounding peasant villages, and they suffered an economic collapse. The endless rows of identical trees were a perfect breeding ground for plant diseases and forest fires. And the complex ecological processes that sustained the soil stopped working, so after a generation the Norway spruces grew stunted and malnourished. Yet for some reason, everyone involved got promoted, and “scientific forestry” spread across Europe and the world.

And this pattern repeats with suspicious regularity across history, not just in biological systems but also in social ones…

With the advent of globalism, the High Modernist concept now has the entire world in its grip, and is driving us off a cliff. From the countless environmental catastrophes, to the breakdown of entire nations like Syria and Afghanistan, to the ultimate High Modernist project of China, it seems like this project has run its course and is leaving us with a destabilized climate and social situation.

Unemployment, violent crime, war, violence, depression, obesity, environmental catastrophe, social chaos, extreme inequality, mass incarceration–all are getting worse, and our leaders have no answers besides enriching themselves! No wonder we’re desperately searching for alternatives.

I see a lot of the criticism of the Alt-left stemming from a critical view of both Eurocentric modernism and High Modernism. The similarities between them are that both are fundamentally a Procrustean bed for humans, as opposed to the anthropology-centered approach advocated by Kanth.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues that we, the human beings inhabiting this planet, try to solve problems of great significance and complexity with the…Procrustean method. Instead of making the bed fit the travelers, we stretch and cut off limbs to do the inverse.

One example Taleb points out are schoolchildren who we pump full of medication so that they adapt to the unbelievably flawed education system, instead of altering the curriculum to suit the children. It couldn’t be that the 10-year-old boy is not meant to sit in the same chair inside the dull classroom for hours on end every day, and when he starts to fidget he’s diagnosed with ADHD, considered hyperactive and has a learning disability, which of course needs to be corrected by tinkering with his brain chemistry.

Situations like this are everywhere around us and they often bear grave consequences…[The Bed of Procrustes] represents Taleb’s view of modern civilization’s hubristic side effects:

Modifying humans to satisfy technology

Blaming reality for not fitting economic models

Inventing diseases to sell drugs

Defining intelligence as what can be tested in a classroom

Convincing people that employment is not slavery

Philosopher John Gray writes in Straw Dogs:

The chief effect of the Industrial Revolution was to engender the working class. It did this not so much by forcing a shift from the country to towns as by enabling a massive growth in population. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, a new phase of the Industrial Revolution is under way that promises to make much of that population superfluous.

Today the Industrial Revolution that began in the towns of northern England has become worldwide. The result is the global expansion in population we are presently witnessing. At the same time, new technologies are steadily stripping away the functions of the labour force that the Industrial Revolution has created.

An economy whose core tasks are done by machines will value human labour only in so far as it cannot be replaced. [Hans] Moravec writes: ‘Many trends in industrialized societies lead to a future where humans are supported by machines, as our ancestors were by wildlife.’ That, according to Jeremy Rifkin, does not mean mass unemployment. Rather, we are approaching a time when, in Moravec’s words, ‘almost all humans work to amuse other humans’.

In rich countries, that time has already arrived. The old industries have been exported to the developing world. At home, new occupations have evolved, replacing those of the industrial era. Many of them satisfy needs that in the past were repressed or disguised. A thriving economy of psychotherapists, designer religions and spiritual boutiques has sprung up. Beyond that, there is an enormous grey economy of illegal industries supplying drugs and sex. The function of this new economy, legal and illegal, is to entertain and distract a population which – though it is busier than ever before secretly suspects that it is useless.

Industrialisation created the working class. Now it has made the working class obsolete. Unless it is cut short by ecological collapse, it will eventually do the same to nearly everyone. ..Bourgeois life was based on the institution of the career – a lifelong pathway through working life. Today professions and occupations are disappearing. Soon they will be as remote and archaic as the ranks and estates of medieval times.

Our only real religion is a shallow faith in the future; and yet we have no idea what the future will bring. None but the incorrigibly feckless any longer believe in taking the long view. Saving is gambling, careers and pensions are high-level punts. The few who are seriously rich hedge their bets. The proles – the rest of us – live from day to day.

In Europe and Japan, bourgeois life lingers on. In Britain and America it has become the stuff of theme parks. The middle class is a luxury capitalism can no longer afford.

What is Kanth’s alternative?

Kanth thinks what we’d much prefer is to live in what he calls a “social economy of affections,” or, put more simply, a moral economy. He points out that the simple societies Europeans were so moved by when they first began to study them, conjuring images of the “noble savage,” tended toward cooperation, not competition. They emphasized feeling and mutual affection. Karl Marx got his idea of communism from looking at the early anthropological studies of simple societies, where he was inspired by the way humans tended to relate to each other.

“Today we are taught to believe that society doesn’t owe us a living,” says Kanth. “Well, in simple societies they felt the exact opposite. Everybody owed everybody else. There were mutual ties. People didn’t rely on a social contract that you can break. Instead, they had a social compact. You can’t break it. You’re born with it, and you’re delighted to be part of it because it nurtures you. That’s very different from a Hobbesian notion that we’re all out to zap each other.”

Note that this is very different from the Alt-Right, who celebrate capitalist Markets as Social Darwinist winnowing mechanisms eliminating the “weak” and “unfit” and argue that one’s intrinsic value as human being is solely a function of one’s Intelligence Quotient (IQ) and money-earning power. They celebrate a society of constant, unremitting conflict, where all one is entitled to is what he or she can claw free from the impersonal market, nothing more and nothing less.

The Alt-Right is, as one commenter observed, obsessed with the idea of inequality–between people, nations, and various “races.” They believe that the strong are entitled to rule, and that the weak must yield. They believe in a society where the “best” climb to the top, and anything that retards this, like “democracy” or “collectivism” is bad and leads to dysgenics or some sort of ill-defined cultural rot. The Alt-Right wants an “every man for himself” predatory world of relentless individualism, where society owes you nothing and you owe nothing to society, and the strong are free to prey upon the weak at every turn (“There is no such thing as society…there are individuals, and there are families…”).

In my view, one of the major mistakes of the Alt-Right is their refusal to accept that modern globalized libertarian capitalism is a project of the High Modernism of the Enlightenment, rather than a permanent feature of the human condition stemming from our “natural instincts” to “exchange value.” Note that “exchanging value” is not the same thing as maximizing profits. Most ancient thinkers saw profiting at the expense of others as unnatural, since by definition it implies an unequal exchange of value (which it must be). Furthermore, they made no distinction between “the economy” and the rest of society. This was a creation of economic liberals of eighteenth century Britain.

While there’s always been an elite with a lust for power, the desire to hoard and accumulate possessions was not a major factor until fairly recently. Neither was acquiring large amounts of money. The Alt-Right accepts the economics creed as gospel—that markets are “natural”, that we are instinctively inclined to maximize our own self-interest, and that anything that restricts this behavior is an affront to “freedom.” However, most societies before the present day recognized that runaway greed and self-interest would tear society apart and lead to collapse, not to “higher” states of civilization. They put certain limits on self-seeking behavior. It was the centuries-long process of breaking down communitarian values and privatizing the commons that led to market-based capitalism (along with mechanization). Capitalism is simply impossible without strong centralized states (meaning that “anarcho-capitalism” is an oxymoron).

The Alt-Right looks to the Victorian Era (and perhaps the Roman Empire) as their ideal society. Men rule, and women’s sexual behavior is extremely regulated. Constraints on social behavior are strictly enforced by restrictive social norms. Political control is restricted to the “best” people (the wealthy and property-holders) rather than the “rabble.” Monarchy is still a valid system of government, and power is often hereditary. The gap between rich and poor is extreme, and there is no “welfare state” to support the useless eaters. In this Dickensian economy, people are forced to struggle just to survive, and this breeds “achievement culture.” The winners (usually white males) are rewarded with higher reproductive success, driving Darwinian evolution to “superior” lifeforms. Without being able to satisfy their carnal urges, people instead channel their efforts into work and duty to empire. Europe is not on its back foot, but ruling over much of the globe (including Africans and Muslims) with no apologies, as it should be. The Market dominates the globe without all the pesky rules and regulations imposed by nanny states to protect the weak and unfit. Large-scale heroic engineering projects are launched on a weekly basis, from bridges to canals to railroads. Anything that departs from this ideal society is “decline”–an obsession with the alt-right.

Personally, I don’t think that most people want to live this way.

We may be able to perform dazzling technical feats, like putting a colony on Mars, but we will pay for it by working even harder and longer hours so that a few may get the benefit. A whole lot of lost time and suffering, and for what? Kanth points out that the Bushmen do not have a Mars rocket, but they do have a two-and-a-half-day workweek — something that most modern humans can only dream of. What’s more significant to the lives of most of us?

“We have become unhinged from our own human nature as heat-seeking mammals,” says Kanth. “What we really crave is warmth, security, and care — the kinds of things we get at home and in close social units.” Our greatest human need, he says, is something far more humble than launching rockets: we want to huddle.

The Alt-Left, from what I can tell, is much more focused on creating a well-functioning society where the rapacity of the elites is held in check. They believe in communitarian values–things like common ownership and worker self-determination. To this end, they oppose authoritarianism, institutionalized hierarchy, slavery, gender inequality, racism, bigotry, and conflict. They advocate that the needs of business and the market be subordinated to the needs of a healthy society, rather than society arranging itself according to the requirements of the global marketplace. They advocate environmental stewardship and living in harmony with the natural world (e.g. Permaculture in place of the industrial food system).

If there’s once commonality I see in many of the Alt-Left’s arguments, it is the replacement of large-scale, depersonalized, centralized, high-tech, authoritarian systems with communal, locally-based, more informal ones based in face-to-face relationships and intrinsic social ties such as family, friendship and community. This does not advocate isolationism; only that one’s local community is intact and more important than abstract notions of globalism. It is a vision of a convivial society. There is often more than a hint of nostalgia in their writings.

Thus, for example, James Howard Kunstler argues that we need to downsize and downscale, abandon suburban sprawl, move back to small and medium-sized towns, grow our own food in local farms and gardens, get the old train system up and running again (NOT build new high-speed rail) and reactivate downtown main streets in place of Wal mart. He sees much ill in the alienating suburban infrastructure America has built around automobiles (“Happy Motoring”) and big-box consumerism.

His fictional World Made by Hand series of books depicts a future America where we live essentially like modern-day Amish–with pre-Civil war technology in small towns connected by horses, canals and railroads, growing food locally and living in line with the seasons. Computer scientists, business executives and telemarketers have been replaced by dirt farmers, carpenters and blacksmiths. But the key is, he depicts this way of life, harsh as it is–as far more meaningful and emotionally satisfying than life in modern-day America, which is increasingly resembling the hellish dystopias envisioned by cyberpunk authors in the 1980’s.

When I go around the country, there’s a great clamor for ‘solutions.’ Whenever I hear that world solutions, it’s always invariably in connection with the wish to keep all our stuff running. The amount of delusional thinking that’s being generated by this set of very vexing problems is staggering. There’s understandably a wish to keep all the stuff running that we’ve got up running. That’s the psychology of previous investment. The only conversation they want to have at the Aspen Environmental Institute is all the nifty new ways we’re going to run our cars.

The most impressive part of the situation at the moment is our failure to construct a coherent consensus about what’s happening to us, and what we’re going to do about it…I think the young people especially are going to have to discover that hope is not something that is given to them by a politician or a corporation or by anybody else. Hope is something that you generate inside yourself by demonstrating to yourself that you’re competent–that you understand the signals that are coming to you from the universe…Life is tragic, and history doesn’t care if we pound our civilization down a rathole…

John Michael Greer advises us to “collapse now and avoid the rush.” He argues that we will increasingly be unable to sustain our extravagant ways of life due to decreasing net energy available to industrial civilization. This means that more and more people will inevitably be thrown into what is considered poverty by modern American standards, and we had best learn to live with it. He looks to the past to find inspiration about different and less resource-intense ways to live. He is highly skeptical of new technology, seeing them as “solutions in search of problems.”

His recent fiction work imagines a world where modern cutting-edge high technology has been replaced with older, simpler, more resilient technologies (Retropia). The imaginary country has “fallen back” to earlier levels of development, but these are far more stable and politically functional that the world depicted “outside” where the status-quo is failing and a slavish devotion to technology and “innovation” is increasingly becoming a burden for most people rather than a blessing.

First, industrial society was only possible because our species briefly had access to an immense supply of cheap, highly concentrated fuel with a very high net energy—that is, the amount of energy needed to extract the fuel was only a very small fraction of the energy the fuel itself provided…Second, while it’s easy to suggest that we can simply replace fossil fuels with some other energy source and keep industrial civilization running along its present course, putting that comfortable notion into practice has turned out to be effectively impossible. No other energy source available to our species combines the high net energy, high concentration, and great abundance that a replacement for fossil fuel would need…Third, these problems leave only one viable alternative, which is to decrease our energy use, per capita and absolutely, to get our energy needs down to levels that could be maintained over the long term on renewable sources. The first steps in this process were begun in the 1970s, with good results, and might have made it possible to descend from the extravagant heights of industrialism in a gradual way, keeping a great many of the benefits of the industrial age intact as a gift for the future. Politics closed off that option in the decade that followed, however, and the world’s industrial nations went hurtling down a different path, burning through the earth’s remaining fossil fuel reserves at an accelerating pace and trusting that economic abstractions such as the free market would suspend the laws of physics and geology for their benefit…

Fourth, while it’s fashionable these days to imagine that this process will take the form of a sudden cataclysm that will obliterate today’s world overnight, all the testimony of history and a great many lines of evidence from other sources suggests that this is the least likely outcome of our predicament. Across a wide range of geographical scales and technological levels, civilizations take an average of one to three centuries to complete the process of decline and fall, and there is no valid reason to assume that ours will be any exception…Fifth, individuals, families, and communities faced with this predicament still have choices left. The most important of those choices parallels the one faced, or more precisely not faced, at the end of the 1970s: to make the descent in a controlled way, beginning now, or to cling to their current lifestyles until the system that currently supports those lifestyles falls away from beneath their feet…

Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush (Archdruid Report)

Dmitry Orlov advises us to disengage from the money economy and formal work arrangements, and instead develop informal, face-to-face relationships based on shared commonalities. He advises “investing” in practical skills and land rather than opaque financial instruments. He himself lives a peripatetic life based on sailing.

His book “Communities that Abide” looks at what are considered minority “out-group” cultures that nonetheless have managed to sustain themselves even as big, top-down hierarchical political systems have collapsed around them (like the Soviet Union, the original focus of his writings). These groups all have durable, time-tested ways of living that have largely resisted Scott’s “High Modernism” and retained earlier lifeways, for example, the Roma (Gypsies), The Old Order Mennonites (Amish), the Pashtun tribes of Afghanistan, and others. His latest book, “Shrinking the Technosphere” describes how our dependence on centralized high technology is increasingly antagonistic to genuine freedom and autonomy, and describes ways to minimize dependence on such technologies in our daily lives.

He cynically believes that large-scale institutions, including state, national, and local governments, are irreformable, and that any attempts to “fix” them are doomed to fail. Politics is nothing more than show business. Instead, he argues, we should actively disengage from them to the greatest extent possible, refuse to participate, and tend to our own business by forming ways to attend to our daily needs which do not rely on the existence of any large-scale institutions, whether public or private.

I would argue that all of the above authors are all “Small-C” conservatives, in the true sense of the word. They are highly suspicious of anarchic capitalist markets and banks and skeptical of all the new technology being foisted upon us. They see “innovation” as more often than not a dirty word. They all advocate less dependence on top-down hierarchical systems, an emphasis on local community, self-reliance for one’s daily needs, and a slower/simpler way of living.

According to Ran Prieur:

If I defined an alt-left, it would explicitly take no position on race, or on racially charged subjects like immigration. The core of my alt-left definition would be economics. Libertarians want a “level playing field” but I want a playing field slanted so hard that trying to turn a lot of money into more money would be like climbing a mountain, and being content with just enough money for basic dignity and comfort would be like coasting downhill on a bicycle.

http://ranprieur.com/archives/053.html

Rather than the Victorian Era, the Alt-Left looks back much farther—to the hunter-gatherer past—in search of answers. It was a world of equality, sexual openness, freedom, spontaneity, abundance, and leisure. They are likely to see our decline as starting with the transition to sedentary agriculture where elites gained control of the political system, women’s reproductive behavior began to be strictly regulated, war became endemic, slavery was established, yawning gaps between rich and poor emerged, we destroyed our natural habitats, population exploded, people got sicker had to work far longer and harder to support the ruling class.

Or, perhaps they might look for inspiration to the European High Middle Ages, with the dissolution of the centralized Roman State and the re-emphasis on small-scale local economies. While the mainstream Left sees this as a time of backwardness caused by adherence to religion, the Alt-Left sees much to admire in societies not based on acquisition and overproduction, but instead focused on humanism and spiritual values (even if the behavior of the Catholic Church was less then admirable):

The Alt-Left has many antecedents, what Morris Berman calls the “alternative tradition.” This ranges from the old-school communist/anarchist thinkers such as Marx, Proudhon, Kropotkin, Owen, and others, to the American Transcendentalists like Thoreau, Whitman and Emerson, to voices from the 1960’s–Lewis Mumford, E.F. Schumacher, Richard Theobald, Kenneth Boulding, Jane Jacobs, Barry Commoner, and others. These views have always been suppressed by the dominant culture, which is dedicated to the religion of progress.

However, the religion of progress seems to be breaking down. It’s telling that many of the above writers are put in the “collapse” camp. Perhaps when Eurocentric Modernism has run its course and consigned to the dustbin of history, we can rebuild something more healthy and durable. Assuming there are any of us left, that is.

Kanth…senses that a global financial crisis, or some other equivalent catastrophe, like war or natural disaster, may soon produce painful and seismic economic and political disruptions. Perhaps only then will human nature reassert itself as we come to rediscover the crucial nexus of reciprocities that is our real heritage. That’s what will enable us to survive.

Hopefully it won’t come to that, but right now, we can learn to “step out and breathe again,” says Kanth. We can “reclaim our natural social heritage, which is our instincts for care, consideration, and conviviality.” Even in large cities, he observes, we naturally tend to function within small groups of reference even though we are forced into larger entities in the workplace and other arenas. There, we can build and enrich our social ties, and seek to act according to our moral instincts. We can also resist and defy the institutions that deny our real humanity. Rather than violence or revolution, we can engage in “evasion and disobedience and exile.”

We had better get to it, he warns. To put it bluntly, Eurocentric modernism is not compatible with human civilization. One of them has got to go.

Three Paths

Posted on July 19, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Erik Lindberg

Source: Resilience

To have lost the godlike conceit that we may do what we will, and not to have acquired a homely zest for doing what we can, shows a grandeur of temper which cannot be objected to in the abstract, for it denotes a mind that, though disappointed, foreswears compromise. But, if congenial to philosophy, it is apt to be dangerous to the commonwealth. –Thomas Hardy

We have the choice of three paths into the future. But choice is probably not the right word, for historical change is, at its most orderly, the result of action and reaction and reaction to that. The word paths may in the same way be too tidy, for we are more likely to go crashing into the thickets than to follow the marked and warn paths that inhabit our imagination.

But here, in this brief exercise, I’m thinking about moral and cognitive maps and the way we might direct our ideals. Perhaps, then, I may be forgiven these simplifications. I am not making predictions about how the future might actually unfold; rather, I’m imagining the directions towards which we might cast our highest aspirations.

1) The Arc of History Bends towards Progress

Path 1 might be called the Liberal[i] Choice. It follows the idea that a just and secure global order requires basic equality among all humans and all nations. But equality is only a half of it: as important as the ideal of equality to the Liberal vision is the way equality might be achieved—namely by way of economic growth and increased overall wealth, which (the Liberal half-assumes and half-hopes) will be spread more equitably in the coming decades, allowing the impoverished to increase their standard of living faster than the already-prosperous will. The Liberal vision imagines that Western and industrialized standards of living might be spread across the globe so that all people might enjoy electricity, paved roads, internet connection, urban anonymity, and (almost as human right) relief from the most difficult aspects of manual labor or subsistence farming, with the opportunity to become educated and free from the limiting prejudices of traditional societies. It sees mobility, individualism, and choice as the hallmarks of this just and equitable society[ii], and imagines humanity becoming more cosmopolitan, tolerant, and secular, while earning its daily bread through endeavors deemed creative according to middle class values.[iii]

Liberals sometimes appreciate the link between economic growth or growing overall prosperity, on the one hand, and a tolerant and cosmopolitan global order, on the other. This link is more implied than discussed (though it is also sometimes difficult to find policy makers discussing anything but economic growth). But Liberals are mistaken to assume, as they often do, that education, mobility, and secular tolerance (along with the embrace of “free markets” and the cultivation of an entrepreneurial spirit) have themselves created economic growth and growing prosperity, and are wrong to imagine (as they do in a vague and image-filled sort of way) that Africa, Asia, and South America might join the Euro-American prosperous middle class once they free themselves from the train of ancient and venerable prejudices[iv] that stunt their progress. Western prosperity, after all, is not a pretty thing if you look into it too much.

Liberals are likewise mistaken to believe that tolerance or peacefulness is a simple state of mind, or that they might be projected effectively with bumper-stickers, protest signs, and earth-tone sweaters, or that a Clinton regime would have somehow been less bloody than a Trump one, or, cum Sanders, that our unparalleled levels of consumption (i.e. prosperity) does not in fact require a menacing global military presence in addition to the manipulations of a multi-billion dollar marketing industry. Peace does not come from virtuous mental states; it is instead the product of a delicate sociological balance that is absent in many parts of the world and that is disappearing in traditionally Liberal nations—and often for reasons that Liberals are hard-pressed to explain except by declaring that we need more Liberalism and its states of mind, backed by vague and increasingly incoherent policy objectives. The tepid enthusiasm for the center left (in the U.S. last autumn or in France today[v]) may be a symptom of its incoherent and increasingly implausible vision.

2. Power Realism[vi]

As I write these words, geo-political analysts are envisioning Russia and the United States on the verge of a new cold war. Perhaps. Regardless of how heated it becomes, the nature of this new East-West opposition, especially when compared to the previous one, is well worth noting. Not only has the past ideological divide mainly disappeared, we might instead be struck by the way these global rivals are coming to resemble each other. Never mind the possible scandals and whatever is at their root, the arrival of Trump represents what might hyperbolically be called Russianization of the U.S. Like Putin, after all, Trump does not operate according to a myth of emancipation, but only according to the pursuit of national power. Trump may not share Putin’s understanding that the source of power lies in resources (but perhaps he does), but his actions and his economic assumptions seem to concur with this view, as does the operating outlook that statecraft should work to corner as many remaining resources as possible.[vii]

Meanwhile, the rise of Trump and Trumpism in the U.S., as well as similar movements and sentiments in Western Europe, should in fact be attributed to the failure of the Liberal path and the decline of global economic growth—the end of one version of the “delicate sociological balance,” and the only version most of us can imagine (that gap in imagination is why I write). Long term stagnation and the end of expansive bourgeois hope have worked to weaponize the “me first” attitude: under a neo-Liberal world order, self-interest was supposed to lead to a rising tide, but Power Realists have little need for any such benevolent apologia. Now harnessed by belligerent nationalists, this attitude of economic competition is more and more likely to accept wide-scale inequality and is instead concerned to be on the winning side of a winner-take-all competition over the world’s remaining resources and comparative advantages.[viii]

To put this last point in another way, relatively few people have, at least until very recently, been willing to openly and consciously embrace the me-first belief-system of Power Realism, absent any accompanying narrative of emancipation. But most of the West’s middle-class has long wanted, expected, and demanded in a way that effectively “chooses” a path of Power Realism and the international bullying it requires–far sooner, at least, than it would veer towards a lowering of any such demand and expectations.

Dead Ends

Liberals and Power Realists equally see the dead-end that the opposing path leads to. But both are equally blind to, or at least resignedly sanguine about, the dead-end that their own path leads to. Liberals correctly understand that the widespread global inequality that Power Realists appear ready to tolerate will lead to permanent war and conflict and perpetual assaults on national security by those left behind.

Meanwhile, Power Realists seem to understand[ix] or sense (though they don’t openly articulate it in public) that the Liberal vision of 3% economic growth into perpetuity is a farce and a fantasy, and that the whole world will never live like we in Europe or America do.[x] Our way of life may in fact depend, in the end, on the walls and borders that Liberals decry on “moral” grounds. Insularity and defensiveness may be the required dispensation, as we choose our way of life over global equality. Power Realists also intuit that most Liberals can be turned into Power Realists under increasingly common economic conditions. The mere loss of expansive prospects is enough to turn many an Obama supporter into a Trump supporter. Minor economic decline, even the absence of economic expansion, was all that it took. Except for those prepared to blaze a new trail into uninhabited ideological wilds, Path 1 usually leads to Path 2 with the onset of only moderate duress. Liberals mistakenly believe that hate is a prime driver[xi] of inequality or discrimination, and that it might be purged from the heart with an enlightened dose of Liberal hope. This may occasionally be true, but hate is more the symptom and might inflict itself on anyone who has suffered repeated humiliations or degradation—or even the mere loss of unquestioned privilege.

Our current political conflicts, both domestic and international, can therefore be largely attributed to our adherence to these two merging paths—especially if we take into account our destabilized climate and resulting droughts in places like Syria and Somalia, in addition to all the other ways nations and peoples jostle for power and advantage. Climate chaos and the resulting political chaos will be the most notable legacy of Liberal growth and the Power Realism that has begun to cruelly manage it.[xii]

Political conflicts are almost always presented as a battle of ideals (as with the American choice of freedom over tyranny during WWII[xiii]) with the implied presumption that we might choose peace and equality as discrete policies or national values, unconnected from our economic and consumptive being- in-the-world. According to this battle of ideals, then, one side sees the world divided between a coalition of enlightenment, empathy, tolerance, and inclusion, opposed to uninformed bigotry and short-sighted selfishness. As a bumper sticker I saw the other day smugly put it, “I think, therefore I’m Liberal.” The other side sees a line dividing steadfast, uncompromising faithfulness and resolve from naïve and undiscerning acceptance and compromise, a line between strength and weakness, between realism and soft-headed idealism.

But our current global change and conflicts are better understood with concepts drawn from sociology or anthropology than from self-reassuring talking-points. A stable social order requires what we might refer to as consent or “buy in,” perhaps a lessening of the inevitable tension between civilization and its discontents into a stable détente. During the short Pax Americana, this consent has been purchased with the promise of expanding prospects for all, fueled by an economy that devoured its own resource base in a way that renders its continuation impossible. The Liberal order replaced social bonds with growing possibility,[xiv] and required for its maintenance the fulfilled promise that every year would provide more and that every generation could expect distinct material improvements. [xv] This order had no plan for material contraction or the onset of limits, other than to declare in the face of reality that there are no limits to growth.

This lack of a plan for stasis, let alone degrowth, might explain the demise of what so many Liberals believed to be the arc of history. We maintain our acquisitive and competitive values and the primacy of individual liberty. But in the absence of the growth and opportunity that purchased consent, trust horizons shrink and we see a turn towards group identity (as an alternative to participation in some imaginary global civilization) and begin an openly hostile scramble for remaining pockets of wealth and privilege (in the absence of the promise that everyone might have more forever). Globalist buy-in has no dependable currency.

Picture global conflict not as the fight between liberals and conservatives, between the enlightened and the ignorant, between moderates and fundamentalists. Picture, instead, penniless children with their noses pressed against the candy store window, while entitled brats stuff their pockets full of unearned loot.[xvi] Forget ideals and instead imagine repeated humiliation, envy, and frustration, broken promises and abortive ideals. It is not some obscure “ideology of hate” or an unexplained failure of moderate pro-Western policies according to which the explosive vest is strapped on. Nor can we explain as simple sexism the way Donald Trump’s gropings (and so much else) were so widely forgiven. Far stronger than we tend to accept is the desire for purpose and belonging, and the desperate (and sometimes violent) search for renewed social bonds when the limitless world of boundless and bondless expansion flounders on the shoals of a finite planet. We once lived in a world when there was little disbelief in face of the comforting contradiction that we might all somehow “get ahead.” Now it is clear that only a few can actually do so. It is this realization that creates nationalism, Brexit, right wing populism, hatred of immigrants, or “America First.”

3. A Third Way

The Liberal Dream is dying because the planet was never infinite and our potential never limitless–not because some bad-guy ignoramuses somehow got the upper hand. A social order could never be maintained for long by the promise of more every year, while the tide can only rise so high before it washes all good fortune away. The most direct and facile, yet brutal and likely, antithesis of Liberal Growthism is personified by Trump, Putin, or Le Pen today, Hitler, Mussolini and Franco in years past,[xvii] and can only lead to war and repression.[xviii] Such rulers are what arise at the onset of Liberalism’s decline. But they offer no real solution, only a quick reordering of hope and expectation into anger and hate—an ordering nonetheless. Intoxicated by the thrill of an arms race, Power Realists ignore the fact that the oppression and forceful repression of at least half the world’s population is unsustainable, and that the immiseration it spreads will eventually inflict us all. Liberals know this and are aghast at the rise of these values. But they, in turn, are all too ready to ignore the fact that Liberal hope requires unsustainable growth and insulate themselves from the realization that our global climate crisis was not caused by nationalism or the greed of someone else. It was caused by this same growth, which continues to demand levels of goods and services that are bringing our ecological systems to the point of collapse.

There is of course a third choice—one that is simple yet mainly unthinkable. It sees with heart stopping clarity the dead-end towards which the other two paths lead and has math, science, and even hard-headed economic analysis[xix] on its side, not to mention a pretty solid interpretation of most of the world’s major religions. But it is a choice that few appear prepared to adopt, even entertain. It accepts the view that a secure and stable global order must be a relatively egalitarian one—that, according to one idiom, all God’s children deserve a fair share of the Earth’s bounty. It understands that the 5% of the global population that the United States accounts for cannot continue to use a quarter or a fifth of the world’s energy and natural resources while emitting a similar proportion of carbon dioxide.

And here is where this path parts ways from any of the views normally deemed fit for polite company: for it does not believe that the rest of the world should be brought to our level; that would be ecological suicide. For if the whole world were to live like Americans we would need an additional four to six Earth’s to supply the required energy and natural resources, and to absorb our terrible waste. A transition to wind and solar power does not substantially change this equation, nor do all the most far-flung efficiencies that anyone might realistically imagine.

The path according upon which humanity has a chance to find a just and sustainable world requires what is unthinkable yet mathematically impeachable and morally imperative: that we in America and Europe live more like African villagers, Indian subsistence farmers, and South American peasants.[xx] They must become our models for the triumph of human dignity and justice, not to mention sustainability. We, who have the appearance, at least, of a choice, must choose this sort of radical simplicity, embrace the hard work and the community interdependence, and abandon dreams that we might live without limits and be or do anything we can imagine (that godlike conceit was forged under the illusion that we have an infinite universe at our disposal[xxi]).

This will never happen you say. It is unrealistic. People will never give up privilege unless they have to.[xxii] Congratulations: you have just chosen Path 2. But true enough, I can’t disagree, this skepticism is probably warranted, especially if the limits of human aspiration are to be pragmatic and strategic, if you can’t hope beyond the current political parties and already established life-paths for middle class people. For there is no clear path from where we are to a world of radically simple sustainability, except the one paved with cataclysmic violence and bloodshed, in which we will eventually be forcefully taken to our knees.[xxiii]

But we might still stand up and declare, “this is the right path, this is what I support, this is where I will throw my energy.” There is no reason why we must continue to choose Path 1 or Path 2, or accept it–no reason why we must continue to pretend that our way of life or our side of the ideological divide (give or take a few ideological tweaks) is just and sustainable. There is no reason why we should continue to give our consent to the maintenance of either growth or inequality. Let us openly and loudly declare our commitment to our own eventual material poverty, and in this declaration find moral and spiritual wealth. Let us begin to proclaim the unthinkable and think it every day.

[i] By Liberals I mean philosophical Liberals, which has generally included many who are considered political conservatives. Ronald Reagan was as much a Liberal as Bernie Sanders. Donald Trump, however, may not be a Liberal.

[ii] To borrow Chris Smaje’s term, Liberals are “solutionist” when it comes to freedom and choice, unable to see that there are in it advantages and disadvantages, payoffs and collateral damage.

[iii] Where apps are “creative” but managing erosion on a hardscrabble farm is not.

[iv] And accept that loan from the IMF along with the accompanying “restructuring” and “reforms.

[v] Does anyone really embrace the vision of a Clinton or a Macron? Or is it just a safe alternative to the alternative?

[vi] I am not suggesting that “Power Realists” are across the board more “realistic.”

[vii]http://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-01-24/donald-trump-and-economic-growth-a-brief-interregnum-on-growthism/

[viii] http://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-01-24/donald-trump-and-economic-growth-a-brief-interregnum-on-growthism/

[ix] I’m completely not sure about this. Power Realists may be as Growthist as neo-liberals and certainly trumpet the ideals of economic growth. But their rise, I would assert without much qualification, has been made possible by the ending of growth and their policies are suited to the end of a Growthist order.

[x] It is with some weariness that I feel compelled to provide evidence for this conclusion. Either the idea that the Earth can provide enough resources for the rest of the world to live like us, or the idea that exponential growth remains a viable plan for the future, on their own, belie any mathematical conclusions. But the Liberal vision requires both. A true Liberal paradise would require that we maintain 3% or so economic growth in the industrialized world, while the “developing” world grows even faster to catch up. The main reason that this can’t work is, simply, that growth is tantamount to mass genocide followed by mass suicide. For despite ballyhooed efficiencies and alleged “decoupling” no one has figured out to create more stuff for more people without using more natural resources. There is no way to lift a 400 ton passenger airplane off the ground with a small ecological footprint or provide everyone with one-hundred horsepower personal transportation without making the planet unlivable. If everyone were to live like Americans, we would require about 6 times the current amount of things like rubber, oil, timber, concrete, and iron ore. Meanwhile 3% economic growth—the amount most Liberal economists believe is necessary to maintain our delicate sociological balance—means that the size of the economy (and the amount of natural resources it requires) will double every 23 years. That means in 56 years, the natural resource requirements would be quadruple the current level. This is not a viable path into the future. These resources simply don’t exist, and attempting to squeeze them out of our planet would make it unlivable. Past and current attempts may already have. No wonder so many pro-growth technophiles look to outer space as the solution to humanity’s alleged need for growth—which begs the very basic existential question of why so many humans see this as a better plan than the unthinkable one I suggest below. I review some of the fundamental problems of economic growth in http://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-02-22/economic-growth-a-primer/

[xi] What Jacques Derrida would have referred to as a “transcendental signifier,” a thing-in-itself, something that just is, which, like “evil,” not only needs no further explanation, but in fact shuns it.

[xii] As Michael Klare has recently noted more people are on the brink of starvation now than at any time since WWII. http://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-04-21/climate-change-genocide/

[xiii] This “choice” is far better described with that word, and with the notion of “ideals,” than anything we encounter today. However, the clean narrative of good vs evil has nevertheless been simplified, with the relation of national interests to resources and empire being erased from the picture, or perhaps overshadowed by the atrocities.

[xiv] http://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-01-17/the-growthist-self-growthism-part-3/

[xv] http://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-01-11/a-geo-physis-of-freedom/

[xvi] And then picture these same entitled brats with their noses pressed up against another window on some other day.

[xvii] As the US Joint Forces Command concluded in 2010, “A severe energy crunch is inevitable without a massive expansion of production and refining capacity. While it is difficult to predict precisely what economic, political, and strategic effects such a shortfall might produce, it surely would reduce the prospects for growth in both the developing and developed worlds. Such an economic slowdown would exacerbate other unresolved tensions, push fragile and failing states further down the path toward collapse, and perhaps have serious economic impact on both China and India. At best, it would lead to periods of harsh economic adjustment. To what extent conservation measures, investments in alternative energy production, and efforts to expand petroleum production from tar sands and shale would mitigate such a period of adjustment is difficult to predict. One should not forget that the Great Depression spawned a number of totalitarian regimes that sought economic prosperity for their nations by ruthless conquest.” https://fas.org/man/eprint/joe2010.pdf, p.22 (emphasis added).

[xviii] Someone like Reagan is of great historical interest, what with his attempt to create a synthesis of the two, reflected in his soaring rhetoric, but paid for with massive debt and the strategic use of populist hate.

[xix] I am not, of course, referring to most mainstream economic analysis. Economics as a discipline has been charged mainly with the task of figuring out how to grow the economy regardless of the consequences or the possibility. By “hard-headed” I am thinking of the few economists who have escaped this Growthist ideology and follow what Charles Hall and Kent Klitgaard refer to as “biophysical economics.”

[xx] This point has been made most poignantly by Chris Smaje. If you haven’t been reading his work, start now. It’s among the most interesting in the “deep sustainability” world. I need to further note that this current essay was motivated by Chris’s “Article 51” where he writes: “I’ve been accused before of irresponsibly wishing to lower the standard of living in the wealthier countries to the level of common misery experienced by humankind in general in relation to my remarks on immigration. On reflection, I’m happy to embrace that accusation, if I’m allowed a few extra lines of defence. I embrace it because, well, what’s the alternative? Historically, capitalist ideology has justified itself with aqueous metaphors of downward trickling and upwardly rising tides that benefit all. It’s become clear that these are mirages. So the argument against a fair global spread of economic resources then boils down essentially to the devil take the hindmost. I can’t justify that to myself ethically, and in any case I think that road leads to a still deeper mire of global misery.” http://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-03-28/article-51/

Smaje consistently condenses complicated issues into digestible form without sacrificing the complexity. I’m trying to recondense some of his thoughts—or my take on them—into my own idiom and may be justly accused of adding little to what he has already said.

[xxi] It’s a nice sentiment, and it’s everywhere. The prevailing “moral” of 90% of the movies currently made for 5 year olds is that they can be who or whatever they want, if they only follow their dreams and “be themselves.” I get where this is coming from, and can glimpse the cost of abandoning this fiction. But we need to start considering the fact that it just isn’t true, and certainly can’t be, at least as currently understood, for 6 or 7 or 8 billion people. It might be possible, for a while, for half a billion or so. And then they are likely to kick and scream and pout when the promise turns out to have been false.

[xxii] And the ecological limits of the world will never appear to us as a “have to,” even though they most certainly are.

[xxiii] There are of course brave pioneers who have beaten a track in this direction—ones like Jim Merkel. But the problem of a whole-society or whole-system transition has yet to be solved.

I think therefore I am capital

Posted on March 12, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Jamie Goldrick

Source: Adbusters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abandoning the Ship of Fools: Postmodernist and Wildist Responses to Civilization

Posted on March 7, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Jeriah Bowser

Source: The Hampton Institute

Once upon a time there was a people who lived with the Sea; living in connection, intimacy, and harmony with their aquatic environment for a very long time. Then one day a dangerous and powerful man had a bold idea. He thought that if he could build a Ship to sail over the Sea, he might find a better world to live in, a Paradise. He had a hard time convincing others that this Paradise was something to pursue, however, so in order to accomplish this he had to enslave lots of other sea-people to make the voyage possible. The sea-people, under threat of violence and death, built a large ship out of dead plant and animal people, stocked the ship with supplies, and took their place at the oars of the slave-galley. This great Ship then sailed away from the sea-people’s ancestral homeland and headed into the great unknown. After a long time at sea, the slaves forgot they were slaves. As they adapted to their new life of labor and hardship aboard the Ship, they forgot what life was like as sea-people and began identifying with the Ship and its mission. As they forgot how to live on their own away from the Ship, their survival and happiness became inextricably bound up with the Ship and the Captain, until they no longer saw themselves as slaves at all, but as willing participants onboard this fantastic adventure. Their language, culture, rituals, and mythology transformed to reflect their new way of life. They now worshipped the Captain and Paradise Gods as they saw themselves fundamentally separated from the Sea and its ways. The Captain created laws and morals with which to guide correct behavior aboard the Ship. They created rituals for themselves which gave them context for their roles on the Ship and gave meaning to their lives of labor and struggle. They lost all contact with their former ways of being and understanding the world. They were truly unanchored in the world; the Ship being their only reference point for Truth and Deception, Meaning and Nihilism, Beauty and Ugliness, Community and Individuality, Pleasure and Suffering, Sacredness and Profanity.

After a while, some of the slaves felt uncomfortable with what they perceived as unjust treatment aboard the Ship. They were tired of being beaten and starved and worked to death and wanted a better life. But instead of abandoning the Ship, they simply asked for more participation. The slaves had forgotten what life was like before the voyage, they couldn’t imagine living without the Ship and the Captain. They had begun identifying with the Ship and its mission so much that they wanted an equal role in participating.They were tired of just rowing and thought that the Navigator’s job might be fun, along with some of the other jobs on board the Ship that were usually reserved for the Captain’s friends. When this discontent reached a certain point, there would be mutinies where the slaves would demand equal access to the Ship, they demanded equal rights. The Captain, being a shrewd man, would listen to their requests and grant them greater access to the Ship. He even let some of the slaves take the wheel for a few minutes on special occasions; it was always a great spectacle when a slave would be called up from the galleys to the captain’s chair for a few minutes, turning the wheel this way and that, grinning idiotically as a rush of power, purpose, and meaning rushed through the slave until their turn was up and they were sent back down to the galleys. The hope of getting a turn at the wheel inspired much enthusiasm and loyalty to the project. Of course, no-one, not even the Captain perhaps, knew that the wheel had been broken for a long time now – it was merely a symbol. Even if the wheel did work, the Ocean current the Ship was now in was much too strong to break out of with a mere wheel turn. The Ship was now caught in a force much larger than itself, it had started on a voyage which it now had no control over.

One day, a few of the more clever slaves got together and started whispering to each other about some things that seemed strange about the whole affair. They couldn’t really put their finger on exactly what was wrong, they just felt that… something was wrong, so they began poking around and investigating. Some of these clever slaves had access to navigation equipment and, after much calculation, discovered that not only was the wheel broken, but the Ship was caught in a huge ocean current that was going in a giant circle and heading nowhere which meant that… there was no Paradise. This was very troubling news. Another member shared that he had discovered a mask with the Captain’s face on it – it seemed that the all-powerful Captain was a mere puppet. Was he in hiding? Was he still alive? Who had killed him? Was he ever real? These were even more troubling discoveries. A few others gained access to the forbidden areas of the Ship: the secret rooms and cellars where the Ships records were stored. As they began exploring the dark and musty belly of the Ship, they discovered that the Ship itself was starting to sink – water was slowly leaking in through the rotting hull and pulling the Great Ship down. Terrified and angry at having been lied to, they decided to try and jettison from the Ship as quickly as possible. They tore apart a section of a storeroom and, using the lumber and tools from the Ship, made a small dinghy together. They launched their dinghy one dark and stormy night, and spent a long time celebrating and high-fiving each other, full of self-congratulatory exhilaration at having escaped the fate of the other slaves. What they didn’t yet realize, however, was that they were caught in the same current as the Mother-Ship. They were headed for the same fate, they had no bearings in the great Sea, no ability to change their course even if they did know where they were, and their dinghy (having been made of the same tools and materials as the Mother-Ship) was already starting to rot and leak.
*****************
The mythology of the Ship of Fools is very old, it is first attributed to Plato, a 4th century BCE Greek philosopher. He used the Ship as an analogy for the fragility and irrationality of a democratic society, as only a strong Captain (a rigidly Rational and authoritarian political system) could maintain order and keep the Ship on course. Some have translated Plato’s metaphor (as well as the remainder of the Republic) as a work of psychology a well, as we mustn’t allow the chaos of our irrational desires and whims (the passengers) distract us or drown out the one voice of Reason (the Captain) in our heads. ^{^[1]} Various philosophers and writers have since used this metaphor as a literary device and point of philosophical inquiry. Michel Foucault, a 20th century French postmodernist, used the story as a reference point in his book, “Madness and Civilization,” where he explored the history of the social construction of mental illness. In Foucault’s book, he talks about the mythological and historical legacy of the legend and discovered that there were indeed floating insane asylums – the “Narrenschiffs” – which carried those deemed insane from port to port in Europe, particularly in Germany, in the early 15th century. These floating asylums were eventually retired in favor of prison-like insane asylums, which eventually became our mental hospitals.^{^[2]} Sebastian Brant, a late-fifteenth century German theologian, used the mythology of the Ship of Fools as a satirical device as he mocked politicians, academics, and various prophets of Modernism during his time.^{^[3]} Ted Kaczynski used the Ship of Fools as a metaphor for industrial capitalism in order to critique the role that leftism/reformism plays in distracting and co-opting dissent, and his essay on the topic is considered to be Ted’s most coherent and accessible work.^{^[4]} In Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno’s landmark 1947 book, “Dialectic of Enlightenment,” they explore this myth by working from Homer’s epic poem, “The Odyssey.” Horkheimer and Adorno portray the epic story of Odysseus as a metaphor for humanity’s journey away from wildness and into civilization. ^{^[5]}

Since my first introduction to this myth, I felt that it was heavy with archetypal symbolism which begged to be explored. I searched for an explanation which would satisfy my curiosity, but found none that sufficed. It looks like this task has fallen to me.

The Ocean is steeped in archetypal symbolism, most of it revolving around the theme of wildness, as it is the largest and most inaccessible wilderness on our planet. Jung described the Ocean as the very embodiment of the unconscious, with our consciousness a tiny island in the midst of it. ^{^[6]} While every corner of land on our planet has been thoroughly mapped, every animal or plant we come across has been catalogued and placed on an evolutionary tree, and every “resource” depleted for human consumption, the Ocean still remains vast, mysterious, and elusive from the greedy hands of Science and Progress. The Sea still holds its own against those who would colonize it, although it is slowly being killed despite its resistance. As such, the Ocean holds great symbolism as our unconscious shadow side, our repressed hidden instincts and urges, the dark and dangerous animal that lies in us all.

In my retelling of the Ship of Fools, the Ocean also represents our ancestral homeland, as (according to evolutionary biologists) mammals came from the Ocean and I believe a part of us still recognizes that. I feel it when I stand on a beach and find myself staring out into the vast wild ancestral homeland of my species. I also made the Ocean our home because having a land-destination brings up to possibility of a destination and a potential rescue, it dangles the carrot of Paradise out in front of the Ship. No, there is no land, no destination, no possibility of a safe landing, there will be no survivors washing ashore. There is just more Ocean everywhere you look, more wildness, there is no escaping it. This also brings up the point that there never was a destination in the first place, just an inevitable return and release to wildness.

The Ship is an excellent metaphor for Civilization, as it is the great technological project that carries us to Paradise. Although I found scant mentions of ships in Jungian symbolism (not that I am an authority on Jung), the few mentions of it I did find present the Ship as the Animus (male quality) to the Anima (feminine quality) of the Sea. Therefore, ships refer to the Ego-consciousness and masculine energy, as these man-made floating islands rise above and ride on top of the vast feminine unconscious that is the Sea.^{^[7]} Trying my hand at depth psychology, I find that it also represents Technology, as a Ship is a piece of advanced technology which requires division of labor, slavery, private property, objectification, and anthropocentrism to exist. The presence of a slave-galley requires all of those ideas to become systemic and normalized, as well as the ever-present but invisible social violence of civilization which keeps the slaves rowing. A ship is made of dead trees, tar, rope, metal hardware, cloth sails, etc. It is a floating human container made of tree corpses, a vessel built out of and predicated on death. This technological vessel of death allows us to float a few feet above the reality of wildness, allowing us to act like the Ocean isn’t there while we go about our business aboard the floating Machine. It is literally a manufactured barrier between us and the cold, dark, mysterious reality of the Ocean. But no Ship is infinite. No matter what materials they are made out of, they will eventually succumb to the law of return: wood will eventually rot, metal will eventually rust, and fiberglass will eventually break down. The thin barrier between us and wildness will eventually erode; our model of infinite growth on a finite planet will have to face reality sooner or later.

The cultural transition of the slaves into willing participants represents the process of domestication. This is also known as trauma-bonding, colonization, or the Stockholm syndrome. When an animal becomes totally dependent on their domesticators for survival, approval, meaning, and validation, we begin to identify with our oppressors, releasing our hatred/resistance towards them and accepting their needs, beliefs, and desires as our own. ^{^[8]} This takes place on many levels, and when a culture has become domesticated enough we will begin adapting our language, symbols, mythology, and rituals to correspond to our new reality. The old ways of understanding the world no longer make sense in a new world of separation, trauma, and domination. Mythology is a means of situating oneself within a community, a way of deriving meaning from a seemingly chaotic and uncontrollable reality. Ritual is a way of initiating one into and reaffirming cultural mythology. In the civilized world, our rituals reflect our mythology perfectly: we participate in self-destructive, dangerous, and meaningless rites of passage such as gang initiations, getting drunk, graduating high school, getting our driver’s license, or having sex, and our initiation societies are those which inculcate us further into Empire: academia, military, business, and street gangs invite us in, given us our identities, give us a role within a community, and use us until they are done with us and they find another young person desperate for meaning and purpose in their life. Aboard the Ship, we completely lose our bearings to reality as we are swept away into the future. All of our symbols reflect those of the Ship: we understand ourselves and the world around us only through the medium of Ship language and culture. We forget that another way of being in the world ever existed or even could exist.

The Captain represents God, Morality, Modernism, Science, and Objective Truth. The Captain is whatever or whomever currently holds Truth and Power. Of course, there actually is no Captain, nor was there ever, but that doesn’t stop everyone onboard from emphatically believing in his existence and striving to live their lives in ways that are acceptable to the Great Captain. His presence in this story is important for two reasons. One, it is important to realize that domestication is never a voluntary activity. That is, it is always done through oppression, violence, and Trauma. The slaves did not join this Ship voluntarily, they were forced into it – civilization is predicated on violent domination and slavery. Two, the Captain represents the ever-present specter of Morality/Truth/Power within civilized cultures. The Captain may have never existed, or he may have died a long time ago. It makes no difference to domesticated people, for once he has colonized us we reserve a special place for Him in our heads: He is always watching, and any infraction of His rules brings swift judgment from above in the form of conscience/guilt.

The slave revolts that take place aboard the Ship are the central focus of Kaczynski’s version of the story, as he was focused on exposing leftism/reformism as ultimately futile within the larger context of the Ship’s course. Conversations on “rights” or “equality” always take place within the larger context of civilization. “Granting Rights” is a legal term, it uses the language of Power, it means granting a person or a living thing a privileged position within the hierarchical structure of Power; it does not mean destroying the power structure. The critics of Wildism will point out that this itself is a privileged position: we must not care about the injustices of oppressed groups of people in order to take such a dismissive stand. This entirely misses the point. Do I want cops to be able to kill black people whenever they want? Do I want men to able to assault women whenever they want? Of course not. Leftism acts as a co-opting tool, it obfuscates power by playing with symbols. Police brutality in the US did not end with “racial equality,” because equality in this context means giving people with darker skin equal access to systems of oppressive power. I don’t want white cops killing anybody and I don’t want black cops killing anybody. I don’t want men assaulting anybody and I don’t want women assaulting anybody. I don’t want Latino lawyers or women presidents, I don’t think giving historically oppressed people an opportunity to share in oppression is progress at all… but of course it is Progress. Leftism serves as a safety-valve for cultural resistance. When the pressure gets a bit high, oppressed cultures can let off steam by participating in symbolic protests or fighting for equality, so long as they don’t actually challenge the dominant narrative, as long as they never question or challenge Civilization or Progress. Now, that doesn’t mean that resistance is always leftist/reformist, it just means that resistance to domination/oppression/domestication often gets subverted into some bullshit political agenda that challenges nothing and changes nothing.

The instances of slaves taking the wheel is of course a metaphor for the political system in general, as the entire puppet show is a complete distraction and has no bearing on the course of the Ship. The wheel has been broken for a long time, and even if a group of people genuinely tried to fix the wheel and steer the Ship somewhere else, they would find themselves trapped in the Ocean current. We are caught up in forces way beyond our comprehension or control. Civilization is experiencing massive overshoot, and the planet simply cannot continue supporting this way of being. But the wheel still sits there, tempting us to try and do something, fix something, if we can just be creative and committed enough… but even this great symbol of Hope and Progress will go down with the Ship.

The clever slaves represent the postmodernists – those who, having investigated the Ship and its Captain, have figured out that we have been duped, and are therefore trying to escape by jettisoning from the Mother-Ship. A noble effort, for sure, but ultimately doomed because they never looked past the Ship itself to see what lies beneath. Their survival craft is built with the same materials as the Mother-Ship, the postmodernists have not let go of any of the pillars of civilization but have instead tried to re-imagine them through language games and attempts at subjective Truth. Except for a thoroughly consistent rejection of Power and Objective Truth, the rest of the pillars of civilization remain present throughout much postmodern work: Anthropocentrism, Androcentrism, Progress, Atomization, Dualism, Hierarchy… the gang’s all here, sometimes questioned but never examined to their origins and then rejected. The postmodernists went all the way to the cellar of the Ship, but they stopped at the hull. They never tried to look past the thin barrier of death that lay between them and wildness, they never questioned what was on the other side, they simply took the Ship as an unfortunate but necessary reality and tried to rebuild a new Ship from some spare materials. Those clever slaves found themselves again stranded in the middle of nowhere in a rotting and leaking dinghy, this time without even the reassuring lies of Objective Truth to comfort them. They are truly a sorry lot. With no cultural mythology, context, or ritual to guide them, without connection, they are aimlessly and meaninglessly floating next to the Mother-Ship, caught in a current of impending destruction, in an Ocean of terrifying wildness.

Postmodernism has failed to provide meaning or connection primarily because it begins its search for meaning within the confines of civilization. Any course or book on Western philosophy begins with the Ancient Greeks: the Pre-Socratics. They call this period of time “Premodernism” and proceed from there, accepting the words and thoughts of these thoroughly domesticated humans as somehow representing our origins as humans. Postmodernism accepts radical disconnection/domestication/Trauma as a given, fast-forwards 8000 years, and then wonders why we are so disconnected/domesticated/Traumatized today.

Postmodernists ask a lot of really good questions; they relentlessly critique and question Power and Objective Truth, and they understand that Modernism has failed us miserably. However, they offer nothing better! In fact, one could make the argument that telling a thoroughly domesticated/traumatized person that Truth is subjective is almost a cruel joke; without context for understanding subjective experience, without connection, subjective Truth is terrifying and overwhelming. It is no favor to tell a civilized person that their entire framework for understanding reality is false, you leave them stranded on a leaky dinghy in the Ocean, with no context for how to find meaning in the universe, no guidance for situating themselves within their human and biotic communities, no advice for restoring connection and returning to wildness.

To return to the Ship metaphor, what other option is there? What are the anti-modernists, the anarcho-primitivists, the rewilders, and Wildists doing? Well, we are either actively sabotaging the Ship by attempting to burn it down and drilling holes in the hull, or we are literally jumping Ship – actively seeking a return to wildness and embracing the dark icy chill of the unknown. We know that the wheel of political change is a joke, there is no Paradise, the Captain is a lying sadistic tyrant (who doesn’t actually exist), the postmodernist dinghy is doomed to failure, and to stay aboard the Ship is to go down with it… so we are done with the whole thing. This does not mean that we will escape any of the consequences of civilization or that we will somehow survive the impending collapse of the Ship and the rise of Wildness, it simply means that we are done rowing and believing in the Ship, in Paradise, in the Captain, or in any false hope of rescue. Like the postmodernists, we emphatically reject any notion of Objective Truth, but our rejection is grounded in the context of relationship and connection. Our growing connection to the wildness both inside and outside of us orients us as we abandon Ship, as we allow the great terrifying, wild mystery of the Ocean consume us, destroy us, heal us, and take us home.

Notes

^{^[1]} “Republic: Book Six” – Plato

^{^[2]} “Madness and Civilization” – Michel Foucault (1964)

^{^[3]} “Ship of Fools” – Sebastian Brant (1494)

^{^[4]} http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ted-kaczynski-ship-of-fools

^{^[5]} “Dialectic of Enlightenment” – Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno (1944)

^{^[6]} “The Portable Jung” – C.G. Jung, edited by Joseph Campbell (1976)

^{^[7]} “The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious” – C.G. Jung (1981)

^{^[8]} Frantz Fanon has explored this phenomenon of trauma-bonding, or colonization, exhaustively.I cannot more highly recommend his works for those interested in exploring the impacts of domestication on humans.

Numbered Man – An Analysis of The Prisoner (1967)

Posted on July 6, 2015 by Reid Mukai

An excellent analysis from Jay Dyer of one of the best television series created so far, imho.

	Reid Mukai on Saturday Matinee: Wizards
	Lara/Trace on Saturday Matinee: Wizards
	Lara/Trace on Saturday Matinee: From He…
	lobotero on Saturday Matinee: From He…
	Lara/Trace on Saturday Matinee: The Wicker…

After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

Tag Archives: Progress