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What happens to cognitive diversity when everyone is more WEIRD?

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By Kensy Cooperrider

Source: aeon

For centuries, Inuit hunters navigated the Arctic by consulting wind, snow and sky. Now they use GPS. Speakers of the aboriginal language Gurindji, in northern Australia, used to command 28 variants of each cardinal direction. Children there now use the four basic terms, and they don’t use them very well. In the arid heights of the Andes, the Aymara developed an unusual way of understanding time, imagining the past as in front of them, and the future at their backs. But for the youngest generation of Aymara speakers – increasingly influenced by Spanish – the future lies ahead.

These are not just isolated changes. On all continents, even in the world’s remotest regions, indigenous people are swapping their distinctive ways of parsing the world for Western, globalised ones. As a result, human cognitive diversity is dwindling – and, sadly, those of us who study the mind had only just begun to appreciate it.

In 2010, a paper titled ‘The Weirdest People in the World?’ gave the field of cognitive science a seismic shock. Its authors, led by the psychologist Joe Henrich at the University of British Columbia, made two fundamental points. The first was that researchers in the behavioural sciences had almost exclusively focused on a small sliver of humanity: people from Western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic societies. The second was that this sliver is not representative of the larger whole, but that people in London, Buenos Aires and Seattle were, in an acronym, WEIRD.

But there is a third fundamental point, and it was the psychologist Paul Rozin at the University of Pennsylvania who made it. In his commentary on the 2010 article, Rozin noted that this same WEIRD slice of humanity was ‘a harbinger of the future of the world’. He had seen this trend in his own research. Where he found cross-cultural differences, they were more pronounced in older generations. The world’s young people, in other words, are converging. The signs are unmistakable: the age of global WEIRDing is upon us.

This marks a major change of course for our species. For tens of thousands of years, as we fanned out across the globe, we adapted to radically different niches, and created new types of societies; in the process, we developed new practices, frameworks, technologies and conceptual systems. But then, some time in the past few centuries, we reached an inflection point. A peculiar cognitive toolkit that had been consolidated in the industrialising West began to gain global traction. Other tools were abandoned. Diversity started to ebb.

The WEIRD toolkit comprises our most basic frameworks for understanding the world. It touches on every aspect of experience: how we relate to space and time, to nature, to each other; how we filter our experiences and allocate our attention. Many of these mental frameworks are so ingrained we don’t notice them. They are like the glasses we’ve forgotten we’re wearing.

Consider our obsession with numbers. In global, industrialised cultures we take it for granted that we can – and should – quantify every aspect of experience. We count steps and calories, track interest rates and follower counts. Meanwhile, people in some small-scale societies don’t bother to track how old they are. Some couldn’t because their languages don’t have numbers beyond four or five. But WEIRD quantiphilia is quickly catching on. Hunter-gatherers in the Amazon are now eagerly learning Portuguese number words. In Papua New Guinea, once home to a rich variety of ‘body count’ systems – numbered landmarks on body, usually ranging to about 30 – children are learning English numbers instead.

Another peculiar part of the WEIRD toolkit is our fixation on time. We budget it, struggle to save it, agonise over losing it. We count days, hours and seconds. We are always oriented to exactly where we are on the long arrow of history. In the United States, for example, when doctors screen patients for cognitive impairment, one of the first questions they ask is the year, month and date.

To many in non-Western, non-industrialised groups, this fixation might seem odd. One early 20th-century ethnographer, Alfred Irving Hallowell, observed that the Ojibwe of native North America would be unruffled by not knowing whether it was a Thursday or Saturday. What would distress them, he remarked in 1957, is not knowing whether they were facing south or east. Not so for WEIRD people: our fixation on time appears to be balanced by a breathtaking obliviousness to space. A 2010 study found that Stanford students could not reliably point to North.

Now, such obliviousness to space is going global. Satellite-based navigation systems are displacing traditional techniques worldwide. It’s happening in the Arctic, as we have seen, but also in the Pacific. In Micronesia, seafaring was once accomplished with jawdropping precision by using a conceptual system so different from Western ones that scientists struggled to understand it. Today, this masterwork lives largely in museum exhibits.

Everyday ways of talking about space are undergoing a sea change, too. Very often, people in small-scale communities prefer to describe space using cardinal directions or local landmarks – often slopes, rivers or salient winds. Some of these systems, like the Gurindji compass terms, are highly elaborated. In contrast, WEIRD folks prefer to carve up the world in terms of their own bodily axes – their lefts and rights, fronts and backs. This ego-based frame of reference now appears to be taking hold broadly, spreading along with the influence of global languages such as Spanish.

Humanity is getting more ego-centred in other ways, too. It has long been observed that Western adults – and Americans in particular – privilege the individual over the group. We give our children unique names; we put them in bedrooms of their own; we emphasise their autonomy and needs. People in many other societies, most famously in East Asia, have historically privileged the collective instead. But Western-style individualism is gaining a foothold, even in the East. Japanese people have started giving their children unique names, too. A recent analysis of 78 countries found that, over the past half-century, markers of individualism have increased in the majority of them.

These are just some of the frameworks that are being displaced as global WEIRDing accelerates. Elsewhere, taxonomies, metaphors and mnemonics are evaporating. Many were never really documented in the first place. Researchers still don’t fully understand the conceptual system motivating khipus – the intricate string recording devices once made by the Inkas – but there’s no one left to explain it.

Human cognitive diversity joins a number of other forms of diversity that are disappearing. Diversity of mammals and plants, of languages and cuisines. But the loss of cognitive diversity raises issues all its own. Cognition is invisible and intangible, making it harder to track and harder to record. You can’t pin mindsets to a specimen board, or store them in a seed vault. It’s not easy to pose ways of knowing in a diorama. Thinking leaves footprints, of course – in language, in artifacts, in knotted string – but the act itself is ephemeral.

The loss of cognitive diversity raises an ethical dilemma, too. The forces that are eroding cognitive diversity – the forces of global WEIRDing – are often the same forces that are raising literacy levels worldwide, promoting access to education and opportunity in indigenous communities, and connecting people across the globe. Few would deny that these are positive developments for humanity. So we are left to ask, not only whether we can slow the loss of human cognitive diversity, but also whether we should even try.

Cognitive scientists such as myself are not used to grappling with these kinds of questions. Nor are we used to thinking about big trends in the human journey. But global WEIRDing is a trend we can’t ignore, one with scientific, humanistic and ethical implications. For much of human history, one of our most distinctive traits as a species has been our sheer diversity. But then our course began to change – and it’s time that cognitive scientists joined the conversation about where we’re going.

The 4 Greatest Enemies of the State

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By Gary Z McGee

Source: The Mind Unleashed

“It’s no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” ~Krishnamurti

How do we know that our society is profoundly sick?

  • 1.) Our society pollutes the air it needs to breathe.
  • 2.) Our society pollutes the water it needs to drink.
  • 3.) Our society pollutes the food it needs to eat.
  • 4.) Our society pollutes the minds it needs to evolve with.

Any system that forces its people to breathe polluted air, drink polluted water, eat polluted food and then continue to do all the things that causes that pollution is a profoundly sick society.

It is in this fundamental way that human wellbeing itself has become the enemy of the state. Statism only functions with unhealthy, divided individuals. It cannot continue if people are healthy and connected. In short: statism fails when enough people achieve a sense of wellbeing despite it.

So, if wellbeing is the enemy of the state, then it stands to reason that anyone seeking wellbeing is also an enemy of the state. Just as those seeking health, vitality and freedom do well to be maladjusted to a profoundly sick society, those seeking wellbeing do well to become enemies of the state.

Freedom is the enemy of the state:

“State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies; and this lie slips from its mouth: ‘I, the state, am the people.’” ~Nietzsche

Have no illusions, the curtailment of human freedom is the state’s business. At every turn the Goliath of the state rears its ugly head, checking the free movement of otherwise free individuals. It’s a monstrous Hydra of overreaching power, hellbent on keeping its people controlled, corralled, and contained under the illusion of security and safety, and under the rampant delusion of law and order.

No nation-state on the planet is genuinely free. All are falsely and insincerely “free.” They are only ever “free” inside the unhealthy box of their conditions. Therefore, they are not free. True freedom is allowing the free movement of people and allowing people to govern themselves under the guidance of the golden rule and the nonaggression principle.

So what is a free-range human to do in the face of such a monstrosity? Become David against Goliath. Become Heracles against Hydra. Become a well-armed lamb contesting all votes. Become lionhearted despite all cowards.

But before that, you must check yourself. You must become free. If you are not free, then you cannot be heroic. You must be free in order to gain the type of courage necessary to become. Full stop.

The golden rule is the enemy of the state:

“Live simply so that others may simply live.” ~Gandhi

Statism is the antithesis of the golden rule. Why is this? Because the state demands that you do unto each other as the state demands. This is the opposite of the golden rule.

The state tricks you into believing that the state is the people. But the state is not the people. It’s the illusion of a people. People are made up of individuals. Individuality is predicated upon freedom. Further freedom is predicated upon individuals allowing other individuals to be free. The state doesn’t allow individuals to be free. It only gives individuals “permission” to be free upon certain conditions, which is the illusion of freedom.

If freedom is the foundation of the golden rule, then consent is its backbone. Without consent there is only rape. Lest we allow rape, consent is paramount.

It’s simple: The difference between robbery and a good trade is consent. The difference between murder and assisted death is consent. The difference between rape and a healthy sexual encounter is consent. The difference between oppression and freedom is consent. The difference between coercion and voluntarism is consent. Consent is everything.

If I don’t want to trade my dollar for your twinkie and you steal my dollar anyway, that’s robbery, because I did not consent. If I don’t want to have sex with you but you have sex with me anyway, that’s rape, because I did not consent. If I feel that your arbitrary law is immoral and you force me to follow it anyway, that’s oppression, because I did not consent. If I don’t want to give up my money to your arbitrary tax system but you force me to do so anyway, that’s coercion, because I did not give my consent.

In order to be a healthy, responsible, moral, and just human being, you must allow others to give their consent. Otherwise, you are violating the golden rule.

If your values are based upon violence being the solution to problems, then your values violate the golden rule. If your values are based upon hindering the freedom of others, then your values violate the golden rule. If your values are based upon coercing people to give you money when they haven’t consented, then your values violate the golden rule.

Bottom line: if your values are based upon violating the golden rule, then your values are immoral, unjust and unhealthy.

Nonviolence is the enemy of the state:

“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” But “When there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence.”~Gandhi

The state wants violent citizens so that it can control them. When people are nonviolent and compassionate toward each other the state doesn’t have an excuse to prevent freedom (though it will still make up excuses). When people are violent and intolerant toward each other the state has a reason to prevent freedom.

Nonviolence is the enemy of the state because the state’s solution to all problems is violence. When its citizenry comes up with nonviolent solutions it makes the state obsolete. But the state will always fight to maintain its overreaching power and control. So, in order not to become obsolete, it must maintain its violence.

The only thing that can prevent state violence is the people realizing that the state is not the people, and upon realizing this, choose to be nonviolent despite the violence of the state.

The flip side of this coin, however, is self-defense. The people must also wake up to the fact that they alone must defend themselves against violence. Whether that violence comes from an individual, a group of individuals, or from the state. The only time when violence is morally correct is in self-defense.

This can become a tricky psychological briar patch. But, basically, offensive violence is unhealthy and immoral (tyranny), whereas defensive violence is healthy and moral (justice). As Albert Camus said, “Absolute freedom mocks justice. Absolute justice denies freedom. To be fruitful, the two ideas must find their limits in each other.”

Peace is the enemy of the state:

“Never relinquish your ability to doubt, reflect, and consider other options –your rationality as an individual is your only protection against the madness that can overcome a group.” ~Robert Greene

If wellbeing, health, freedom, the golden rule, and nonviolence are all the enemy of the state, then what does that tell you?

Feel free to lose the wrestling match between your higher reasoning and your cognitive dissonance. I’ll wait here…

The bottom line is this: War is the only way any nation-state maintains itself. And yet love (peace, compassion, freedom, justice) is the only way humans can progressively evolve in a healthy way.

The state is always at war—with itself, with its citizens, with other states. There is no way out of its net of covert violence unless you leave it behind and become a free-range human. In order to be a lover of humanity one must become an enemy of the state.

The realization that in order to be a healthy, moral, and just human one must become an enemy of the state, is a tough pill to swallow. It’s not for the faint of heart. It will take counterintuitive reasoning to fully fathom it. It will require you to think outside of whatever box you’ve been conditioned to think inside of for most of your life. It will force you to unwash the brainwash. It will involve reprogramming your programming. It will demand that you question the profoundly sick society you were born into.

Most of all, it will require audacious courage in the face of comfortable cowardice. But, as Ralph Waldo Emerson wisely stated, “A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition. I ought to go upright and vital and speak the rude truth in all ways. Your goodness must have some edge to it—else it is none.”

The Five Stages of Collapse, 2019 Update

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By Dmitry Orlov

Source: Club Orlov

Collapse, at each stage, is a historical process that takes time to run its course as the system adapts to changing circumstances, compensates for its weaknesses and finds ways to continue functioning at some level. But what changes rather suddenly is faith or, to put it in more businesslike terms, sentiment. A large segment of the population or an entire political class within a country or the entire world can function based on a certain set of assumptions for much longer than the situation warrants but then over a very short period of time switch to a different set of assumptions. All that sustains the status quo beyond that point is institutional inertia. It imposes limits on how fast systems can change without collapsing entirely. Beyond that point, people will tolerate the older practices only until replacements for them can be found.

Stage 1: Financial collapse. Faith in “business as usual” is lost.

Internationally, the major change in sentiment in the world has to do with the role of the US dollar (and, to a lesser extent, the Euro and the Yen—the other two reserve currencies of the three-legged globalist central banker stool). The world is transitioning to the use of local currencies, currency swaps and commodities markets backed by gold. The catalyst for this change of sentiment was provided by the US administration itself which sawed through its own perch by its use of unilateral sanctions. By using its control over dollar-based transactions to block international transactions it doesn’t happen to like it forced other countries to start looking for alternatives. Now a growing list of countries sees throwing off the shackles of the US dollar as a strategic goal. Russia and China use the ruble and the yuan for their expanding trade; Iran sells oil to India for rupees. Saudi Arabia has started to accept the yuan for its oil.

This change has many knock-on effects. If the dollar is no longer needed to conduct international trade, other nations no longer have hold large quantities of it in reserve. Consequently, there is no longer a need to buy up large quantities of US Treasury notes. Therefore, it becomes unnecessary to run large trade surpluses with the US, essentially conducting trade at a loss. Further, the attractiveness of the US as an export market drops and the cost of imports to the US rises, thereby driving up cost inflation. A vicious spiral ensues in which the ability of the US government to borrow internationally to finance the gaping chasm of its various deficits becomes impaired. Sovereign default of the US government and national bankruptcy then follow.

The US may still look mighty, but its dire fiscal predicament coupled with its denial of the inevitability of bankruptcy, makes it into something of a Blanche DuBois from the Tennessee Williams play “A Streetcar Named Desire.” She was “always dependent on the kindness of strangers” but was tragically unable to tell the difference between kindness and desire. In this case, the desire is for national advantage and security, and to minimize risk by getting rid of an unreliable trading partner.

How quickly or slowly this comes to pass is difficult to guess at and impossible to calculate. It is possible to think of the financial system in terms of a physical analogue, with masses of funds traveling at some velocity having a certain inertia (p = mv) and with forces acting on that mass to accelerate it along a different trajectory (F = ma). It is also possible to think of it in terms of hordes of stampeding animals who can change course abruptly when panicked. The recent abrupt moves in the financial markets, where trillions of dollars of notional, purely speculative value have been wiped out within weeks, are more in line with the latter model.

Stage 2: Commercial collapse. Faith that “the market shall provide” is lost.

Within the US there is really no other alternative than the market. There are a few rustic enclaves, mostly religious communities, that can feed themselves, but that’s a rarity. For everyone else there is no choice but to be a consumer. Consumers who are broke are called “bums,” but they are still consumers. To the extent that the US has a culture, it is a commercial culture in which the goodness of a person is based on the goodly sums of money in their possession. Such a culture can die by becoming irrelevant (when everyone is dead broke) but by then most of the carriers of this culture are likely to be dead too. Alternatively, it can be replaced by a more humane culture that isn’t entirely based on the cult of Mammon—perhaps, dare I think, through a return to a pre-Protestant, pre-Catholic Christian ethic that values people’s souls above objects of value?

Stage 3: Political collapse. Faith that “the government will take care of you” is lost.

All is very murky at the moment, but I would venture to guess that most people in the US are too distracted, too stressed and too preoccupied with their own vices and obsessions to pay much attention to the political realm. Of the ones they do pay attention, a fair number of them seem clued in to the fact that the US is not a democracy at all but an elites-only sandbox in which transnational corporate and oligarchic interests build and knock down each others’ sandcastles.

The extreme political polarization, where two virtually identical pro-capitalist, pro-war parties pretend to wage battle by virtue-signaling may be a symptom of the extremely decrepit state of the entire political arrangement: people are made to watch the billowing smoke and to listen to the deafening noise in the hopes that they won’t notice that the wheels are no longer turning.

The fact that what amounts to palace intrigue—the fracas between the White House, the two houses of Congress and a ghoulish grand inquisitor named Mueller—has taken center stage is uncannily reminiscent of various earlier political collapses, such as the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire or of the fall and the consequent beheading of Louis XVI. The fact that Trump, like the Ottoman worthies, stocks his harem with East European women, lends an eerie touch. That said, most people in the US seem blind to the nature of their overlords in a way that the French, with their Gilets Jaunes movement (just as an example) are definitely not.

Stage 4: Social collapse. Faith that “your people will take care of you” is lost.

I have been saying for some years now that within the US social collapse has largely run its course, although whether people actually believe that is an entire matter entirely. Defining “your people” is rather difficult. The symbols are still there—the flag, the Statue of Liberty and a predilection for iced drinks and heaping plates of greasy fried foods—but the melting pot seems to have suffered a meltdown and melted all the way to China. At present half the households within the US speak a language other than English at home, and a fair share of the rest speak dialects of English that are not mutually intelligible with the standard North American English dialect of broadcast television and university lecturers.

Throughout its history as a British colony and as a nation the US has been dominated by the Anglo ethnos. The designation “ethnos” is not an ethnic label. It is not strictly based on genealogy, language, culture, habitat, form of government or any other single factor or group of factors. These may all be important to one extent or another, but the viability of an ethnos is based solely on its cohesion and the mutual inclusivity and common purpose of its members. The Anglo ethnos reached its zenith in the wake of World War II, during which many social groups were intermixed in the military and their more intelligent members were allowed to become educated and to advance socially by the GI Bill.

Fantastic potential was unleashed when privilege—the curse of the Anglo ethnos since its inception—was temporarily replaced with merit and the more talented demobilized men, of whatever extraction, were given a chance at education and social advancement by the GI Bill. Speaking a new sort of American English based on the Ohio dialect as a Lingua Franca, these Yanks—male, racist, sexist and chauvinistic and, at least in their own minds, victorious—were ready to remake the entire world in their own image.

They proceeded to flood the entire world with oil (US oil production was in full flush then) and with machines that burned it. Such passionate acts of ethnogenesis are rare but not unusual: the Romans who conquered the entire Mediterranean basin, the barbarians who then sacked Rome, the Mongols who later conquered most of Eurasia and the Germans who for a very brief moment possessed an outsized Lebensraum are other examples.

And now it is time to ask: what remains of this proud conquering Anglo ethnos today? We hear shrill feminist cries about “toxic masculinity” and minorities of every stripe railing against “whitesplaining” and in response we hear a few whimpers but mostly silence. Those proud, conquering, virile Yanks who met and fraternized with the Red Army at the River Elbe on April 25, 1945—where are they? Haven’t they devolved into a sad little subethnos of effeminate, porn-addicted overgrown boys who shave their pubic hair and need written permission to have sex without fear of being charged with rape?

Will the Anglo ethnos persist as a relict, similar to how the English have managed to hold onto their royals (who are technically no longer even aristocrats since they now practice exogamy with commoners)? Or will it get wiped out in a wave of depression, mental illness and opiate abuse, its glorious history of rapine, plunder and genocide erased and the statues of its war heroes/criminals knocked down? Only time will tell.

Stage 5: Cultural collapse. Faith in “the goodness of humanity” is lost.

The term “culture” means many things to many people, but it is more productive to observe cultures than to argue about them. Cultures are expressed through people’s stereotypical behaviors that are readily observable in public. These are not the negative stereotypes often used to identify and reject outsiders but the positive stereotypes—cultural standards of behavior, really—that serve as requirements for social adequacy and inclusion. We can readily assess the viability of a culture by observing the stereotypical behaviors of its members.

• Do people exist as a single continuous, inclusive sovereign realm or as a set of exclusive, potentially warring enclaves segregated by income, ethnicity, education level, political affiliation and so on? Do you see a lot of walls, gates, checkpoints, security cameras and “no trespassing” signs? Is the law of the land enforced uniformly or are there good neighborhoods, bad neighborhoods and no-go zones where even the police fear to tread?

• Do random people thrown together in public spontaneously enter into conversation with each other and are comfortable with being crowded together, or are they aloof and fearful, and prefer to hide their face in the little glowing rectangle of their smartphone, jealously guarding their personal space and ready to regard any encroachment on it as an assault?

• Do people remain good-natured and tolerant toward each other even when hard-pressed or do they hide behind a façade of tense, superficial politeness and fly into a rage at the slightest provocation? Is conversation soft in tone, gracious and respectful or is it loud, shrill, rude and polluted with foul language? Do people dress well out of respect for each other, or to show off, or are they all just déclassé slobs—even the ones with money?

• Observe how their children behave: are they fearful of strangers and trapped in a tiny world of their own or are they open to the world and ready to treat any stranger as a surrogate brother or sister, aunt or uncle, grandmother or grandfather without requiring any special introduction? Do the adults studiously ignore each others’ children or do they spontaneously act as a single family?

• If there is a wreck on the road, do they spontaneously rush to each others’ rescue and pull people out before the wreck explodes, or do they, in the immortal words of Frank Zappa, “get on the phone and call up some flakes” who “rush on over and wreck it some more”?

• If there is a flood or a fire, do the neighbors take in the people who are rendered homeless, or do they allow them to wait for the authorities to show up and bus them to some makeshift government shelter?

It is possible to quote statistics or to provide anecdotal evidence to assess the state and the viability of a culture, but your own eyes and other senses can provide all the evidence you need to make that determination for yourself and to decide how much faith to put in “the goodness of humanity” that is evident in the people around you.

Jacques Ellul: A Prophet for Our Tech-Saturated Times

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Read his works to understand how we’ve been caught in technology’s nightmarish hold.

By Andrew Nikiforuk

Source: The Tyee

By now you have probably read about the so-called “tech backlash.”

Facebook and other social media have undermined what’s left of the illusion of democracy, while smartphones damage young brains and erode the nature of discourse in the family.

Meanwhile computers and other gadgets have diminished our attention spans along with our ever-failing connection to reality.

The Foundation for Responsible Robotics recently created a small stir by asking if “sexual intimacy with robots could lead to greater social isolation.”

What could possibly go wrong?

The average teenager now works about two hours of every day — for free — providing Facebook and other social media companies with all the data they need to engineer young people’s behaviour for bigger Internet profits.

Without shame, technical wonks now talk of building artificial scientists to resolve climate change, poverty and, yes, even fake news.

The media backlash against Silicon Valley and its peevish moguls, however, typically ends with nothing more radical than an earnest call for regulation or a break-up of Internet monopolies such as Facebook and Google.

The problem, however, is much graver, and it is telling that most of the backlash stories invariably omit any mention of technology’s greatest critic, Jacques Ellul.

The ascent of technology

Ellul, the Karl Marx of the 20th century, predicted the chaotic tyranny many of us now pretend is the good and determined life in technological society.

He wrote of technique, about which he meant more than just technology, machines and digital gadgets but rather “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency” in the economic, social and political affairs of civilization.

For Ellul, technique, an ensemble of machine-based means, included administrative systems, medical tools, propaganda (just another communication technique) and genetic engineering.

The list is endless because technique, or what most of us would just call technology, has become the artificial blood of modern civilization.

“Technique has taken substance,” wrote Ellul, and “it has become a reality in itself. It is no longer merely a means and an intermediary. It is an object in itself, an independent reality with which we must reckon.”

Just as Marx deftly outlined how capitalism threw up new social classes, political institutions and economic powers in the 19th century, Ellul charted the ascent of technology and its impact on politics, society and economics in the 20th.

My copy of Ellul’s The Technological Society has yellowed with age, but it remains one of the most important books I own. Why?

Because it explains the nightmarish hold technology has on every aspect of life, and also remains a guide to the perplexing determinism that technology imposes on life.

Until the 18th century, technical progress occurred slowly and with restraint. But with the Industrial Revolution it morphed into something overwhelming due in part to population, cheap energy sources and capitalism itself.

Since then it has engulfed Western civilization and become the globe’s greatest colonizing force.

“Technique encompasses the totality of present-day society,” wrote Ellul. “Man is caught like a fly in a bottle. His attempts at culture, freedom, and creative endeavour have become mere entries in technique’s filing cabinet.”

Ellul, a brilliant historian, wrote like a physician caught in the middle of a plague or physicist exposed to radioactivity. He parsed the dynamics of technology with a cold lucidity.

Yet you’ve probably never heard of the French legal scholar and sociologist despite all the recent media about the corrosive influence of Silicon Valley.

His relative obscurity has many roots. He didn’t hail from Paris, but rural Bordeaux. He didn’t come from French blue blood; he was a “meteque.”

He didn’t travel much, criticized politics of every stripe and was a radical Christian.

But in 1954, just a year before American scientists started working on artificial intelligence, Ellul wrote his monumental book, The Technological Society.

The dense and discursive work lays out in 500 pages how technique became for civilization what British colonialism was for parts of 19th-century Africa: a force of total domination.

In the book Ellul explains in bold and uncompromising terms how the logic of technological innovation conquered every aspect of human culture.

Ellul didn’t regard technology as inherently evil; he just recognized that it was a self-augmenting force that engineered the world on its terms.

Machines, whether mechanical or digital, aren’t interested in truth, beauty or justice. Their goal is to make the world a more efficient place for more machines.

Their proliferation combined with our growing dependence on their services inevitably led to an erosion of human freedom and unintended consequences in every sphere of life.

Ellul was one of the first to note that you couldn’t distinguish between bad and good effects of technology. There were just effects and all technologies were disruptive.

In other words, it doesn’t matter if a drone is delivering a bomb or book or merely spying on the neighbourhood, because technique operates outside of human morality: “Technique tolerates no judgment from without and accepts no limitations.”

Facebook’s mantra “move fast and break things” epitomizes the technological mindset.

But some former Facebook executives such as Chamath Palihapitiya belatedly realized they have engineered a force beyond their control. (“The short-term dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works,” Palihapitiya has said.)

That, argued Ellul, is what technology does. It disrupts and then disrupts again with unforeseen consequences, requiring more techniques to solve the problems created by latest innovations.

As Ellul noted back in 1954, “History shows that every technical application from its beginnings presents certain unforeseeable secondary effects which are more disastrous than the lack of the technique would have been.”

Ellul also defined the key characteristics of technology.

For starters, the world of technique imposes a rational and mechanical order on all things. It embraces artificiality and seeks to replace all natural systems with engineered ones.

In a technological society a dam performs better than a running river, a car takes the place of the pedestrians — and may even kill them — and a fish farm offers more “efficiencies” than a natural wild salmon migration.

There is more. Technique automatically reduces actions to the “one best way.” Technical progress is also self-augmenting: it is irreversible and builds with a geometric progression.

(Just count the number of gadgets telling you what to do or where to go or even what music to play.)

Technology is indivisible and universal because everywhere it goes it shows the same deterministic face with the same consequences. And it is autonomous.

By autonomous, Ellul meant that technology had become a determining force that “elicits and conditions social, political and economic change.”

The role of propaganda

The French critic was the first to note that technologies build upon each other and therefore centralize power and control.

New techniques for teaching, selling things or organizing political parties also required propaganda.

Here again Ellul saw the future.

He argued that propaganda had to become as natural as breathing air in a technological society, because it was essential that people adapt to the disruptions of a technological society.

“The passions it provokes — which exist in everybody — are amplified. The suppression of the critical faculty — man’s growing incapacity to distinguish truth from falsehood, the individual from the collectivity, action from talk, reality from statistics, and so on — is one of the most evident results of the technical power of propaganda.”

Faking the news may have been a common practice on Soviet radio during Ellul’s day, but it is now a global phenomenon leading us towards what Ellul called “a sham universe.”

We now know that algorithms control every aspect of digital life and have subjected almost aspect of human behaviour to greater control by techniques whether employed by the state or the marketplace.

But in 1954 Ellul saw the beast emerging in infant form.

Technology, he wrote, can’t put up with human values and “must necessarily don mathematical vestments. Everything in human life that does not lend itself to mathematical treatment must be excluded… Who is too blind to not see that a profound mutation is being advocated here.”

He, too, warned about the promise of leisure provided by the mechanization and automatization of work.

“Instead of being a vacuum representing a break with society,” our leisure time will be “literally stuffed with technical mechanisms of compensation and integration.”

Good citizens today now leave their screens at work only to be guided by robots in their cars that tell them the most efficient route to drive home.

At home another battery of screens awaits to deliver entertainments and distractions, including apps that might deliver a pizza to the door.

Stalin and Mao would be impressed — or perhaps disappointed — that so much social control could be exercised with such sophistication and so little bloodletting.

Ellul wasn’t just worried about the impact of a single gadget such as the television or the phone but “the phenomenon of technical convergence.”

He feared the impact of systems or complexes of techniques on human society and warned the result could only be “an operational totalitarianism.”

“Convergence,” he wrote, “is a completely spontaneous phenomenon, representing a normal stage in the evolution of technique.”

Social media, a web of behavioural and psychological systems, is just the latest example of convergence.

Here psychological techniques, surveillance techniques and propaganda have all merged to give the Russians and many other groups a golden opportunity to intervene in the political lives of 126 million North Americans.

Social media has achieved something novel, according to former Facebook engineer Sam Lessin.

For the first time ever a political candidate or party can “effectively talk to each individual voter privately in their own home and tell them exactly what they want to hear… in a way that can’t be tracked or audited.”

In China the authorities have gone one step further. Using the Internet the government can now track the movements of every citizen and rank their political trustworthiness based on their history of purchases and associations. It is, of course, a fantastic “counterterrorism” tool.

The Silicon Valley moguls and the digerati promised something less totalitarian. They swore that social media would help citizens fight bad governments and would connect all of us.

Facebook, vowed the pathologically adolescent Mark Zuckerberg, would help the Internet become “a force for peace in the world.”

But technology obeys its own rules and prefers “the psychology of tyranny.”

The digerati also promised that digital technologies would usher in a new era of decentralization and undo what mechanical technologies have already done: centralize everything into big companies, big boxes and big government.

Technology assuredly fragments human communities, but in the world of technique centralization remains the norm.

“The idea of effecting decentralization while maintaining technical progress is purely utopian,” wrote Ellul.

Towards ‘hypernormalization’

It is worth noting that the word “normal” didn’t come into currency until the 1940s along with technological society.

In many respects global society resembles the Soviet Union just prior to its collapse when “hypernormalization” ruled the day.

A recent documentary defined what hypernormalization did for Russia: it “became a society where everyone knew that what their leaders said was not real, because they could see with their own eyes that the economy was falling apart. But everybody had to play along and pretend that it was real because no one could imagine any alternative.”

In many respects technology has hypernormalized a technological society in which citizens exercise less and less control over their lives every day and can’t imagine anything different.

Throughout his life Ellul maintained that he was “neither by nature, nor doctrinally, a pessimist, nor have I pessimistic prejudices. I am concerned only with knowing whether things are so or not.”

He called a spade a spade, and did not sugarcoat his observations.

If you are growing more anxious about our hypernormalized existence and are wondering why you own a phone that tracks your every movement, then read The Technological Society.

Ellul believed that the first act of freedom a citizen can exercise is to recognize the necessity of understanding technique and its colonizing powers.

Resistance, which is never futile, can only begin by becoming aware and bearing witness to the totalitarian nature of technological society.

Ellul believed that Christians had a special duty to condemn the worship of technology, which has become society’s new religion.

To Ellul, resistance meant teaching people how to be conscious amphibians, with one foot in traditional human societies, and to purposefully choose which technologies to bring into their communities.

Only citizens who remain connected to traditional human societies can see, hear and understand the disquiet of the smartphone blitzkrieg or the Internet circus.

Children raised by screens and vaccinated only by technology will not have the capacity to resist, let alone understand, this world any more than someone born in space could appreciate what it means to walk in a forest.

Ellul warned that if each of us abdicates our human responsibilities and leads a trivial existence in a technological society, then we will betray freedom.

And what is freedom but the ability to overcome and transcend the dictates of necessity?

In 1954, Ellul appealed to all sleepers to awake.

Read him. He remains the most revolutionary, prophetic and dangerous voice of this or any century.

Learning from Gandhi

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By Robert J. Burrowes

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on 2 October 1869: 150 years ago this year.

There will be many tributes to Gandhi published in 2019 so I would like to add one of my own.

This reflects not just my belief that he gave the world inspiration, ideas and powerful strategies for tackling violence in a wide range of contexts but because my own experience in applying his ideas has proven their worth. This included his awareness that led him to declare that ‘If we are to make progress, we must not repeat history but make new history. We must add to the inheritance left by our ancestors.’ and his encouragement to reflect deeply and listen to one’s ‘inner voice’: ‘you should follow your inner voice whatever the consequences’ and ‘even at the risk of being misunderstood’.

In essence, we can productively learn from history but we can build on it too. And, vitally, this includes dealing more effectively with violence.

So how did Gandhi influence me?

Shortly after midnight on 1 July 1942, my Uncle Bob was killed when the USS Sturgeon, a U.S. submarine, fired torpedoes into the Japanese prisoner of war (POW) ship Montevideo Maru. The ship sank immediately and, along with 1,052 other POWs, Bob was killed.

Apart from his older brother, my father’s twin brother was also killed in World War II. In Tom’s case, he was shot down over Rabaul on his first (and final) mission. He was a wireless air gunner on a Beaufort Bomber. See ‘The Last Coastwatcher: My Brothers’.

My childhood is dotted with memories of Bob and Tom. The occasional remembrance service, war medals and the rare story shared by my father.

In 1966, the year I turned 14, I decided to devote my life to finding out why human beings kill each other and to work out how such killing could be ended. The good news about this ‘decision’ is that, at 14, it all felt manageable! But I wasn’t much older before my preliminary investigations proved that even understanding why humans are violent was going to be a profound challenge. And I intuitively understood that I needed this understanding if any strategy to end violence was to be effective.

In any case, as one might expect, my research into violence and strategies for addressing it led me to nonviolence. I came across virtually nothing about nonviolence during my own studies at school and university but was regularly presented with news reports of people participating in activities – such as demonstrations and strikes – that I later learned to label ‘nonviolent action’.

In 1981 I decided to seek out materials on nonviolence and nonviolent action so that I could learn more about it. I had not been reading for long when the routine reference to Mohandas K. (or Mahatma) Gandhi, about whom I had heard a little and knew of his role in leading the Indian independence struggle, forced me to pay more attention to his life and work. So I sought out his writing and started to read some of his published work. An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth was an obvious and early book but there were many others besides. I also read many books about Gandhi, to get a clearer sense of his life as a whole, as reported by his coworkers and contemporaries, as well as documented by scholars since his death. And I spent a great many hours in a library basement poring over The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi.

The thing that struck me immediately about Gandhi was that his own interest in tackling violence had a comprehensive ‘feel’ about it. That is, he was not just interested in the violence that occurs when nations fight wars or one person kills or injures another. He was interested in addressing the violence that occurs when individuals and nations exploit other individuals/nations (such as when British imperialism exploited India and Indians) and the violence that occurs when a structure (such as capitalism or socialism) exploits the individuals within it. In his words: ‘exploitation is the essence of violence’. He was interested in the violence that occurs when members of one social group (say, Hindus) ‘hate’ the members of another social group (such as Muslims). He was interested in the violence that occurs when men oppress women or caste Hindus oppress ‘untouchables’. He was interested in the violence that occurs when humans destroy the environment. And he was interested in the violence that one inflicts on oneself.

This comprehensive interest resonated deeply with me because, apart from war, my own childhood and adolescence had revealed many manifestations of violence ranging from the starvation of people in developing countries to the racism in the United States (highlighted by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during the 1960s) to the destruction of the environment, each of which had gradually but deeply embedded itself in my consciousness. Tackling violence was a far bigger task than the large one I had originally imagined. Violence is everywhere. Most importantly, it seemed to me, there was enormous violence directed against children in the family home but little was spoken or written about this.

So how did Gandhi explain violence and what was his strategy for addressing it?

Gandhi on Conflict and Violence

For Gandhi, conflict was a perennial condition. He also viewed it positively and considered it desirable. For him, it is an important means to greater human unity precisely because their shared conflict could remind antagonists of the deeper, perhaps transcendental, unity of life, which is far more profound than the bond of their social relationship.

He viewed violence differently, however. And, as might be gleaned from the many configurations of violence that concerned him, as noted above, he considered that violence was built into social structures and not into people.

Fundamentally, as Leroy Pelton characterized it, Gandhi understood that the truth cannot be achieved through violence (‘which violates human needs and destroys life’), because violence itself is a form of injustice. In any case, violence cannot resolve conflict because it does not address the issues at stake.

To reiterate then, for Gandhi there was nothing undesirable about conflict. However, Gandhi’s preoccupation was working out how to manage conflict without violence and how to create new social arrangements free of structural violence. The essence, then, of Gandhi’s approach was to identify approaches to conflict that preserved the people while systematically demolishing the evil structure. Nevertheless, he firmly believed that structural purification alone is not enough; self-purification is also essential.

In other words, in Gandhi’s view, resolving the conflict (without violence) is only one aspect of the desired outcome. For Gandhi, success also implies the creation of a superior social structure, higher degrees of fearlessness and self-reliance on the part of both satyagrahis (nonviolent activists) and their opponents, and a greater degree of human unity at the level of social relationships.

Two Key Questions

Despite the enormous influence that Gandhi had in shaping my own conception of conflict and the precise conception of nonviolence that should be used in dealing with it, I nevertheless remained convinced that two questions remained unanswered: What is the psychological origin of the violent behavior of the individual who perpetrates it? And what theory or framework should guide the application of nonviolent action so that campaigns of all kinds are strategically effective?

The first question is important because even if someone is trapped within a social structure (such as the class system) that is violent, the individual must still choose, consciously or unconsciously, to participate (as perpetrator, collaborator or victim) in the violence perpetrated by that structure or one must choose, consciously, to resist it. Why do so many individuals perform one of the first three roles and so few, like Gandhi himself, choose the role of resister?

The second question is important because while Gandhi himself was an astonishingly intuitive strategic thinker (whose 30-year nonviolent strategy liberated India from British occupation), no one before him or since his death has demonstrated anything remotely resembling his capacity in this regard.

Hence, while nonviolence, which is inherently powerful, has chalked up some remarkable successes, vital struggles for peace (and to end war); to halt assaults on Earth’s biosphere; to secure social justice for oppressed and exploited populations; to liberate national groups from dictatorship, occupation or genocidal assault; and struggles in relation to many other just causes limp along devoid of strategy (or use one that is ill-conceived). So badly are we failing, in fact, that humans now teeter on the brink of precipitating our own extinction. See ‘Human Extinction by 2026? A Last Ditch Strategy to Fight for Human Survival’.

Anyway, having studied Gandhi extensively and learned from his strategic approach to nonviolence (elements of which I was progressively including in nonviolent campaigns in which I was involved myself), I resumed my original research to understand the fundamental origin of human violence and also decided to develop a strategic theory and framework for addressing violence in the campaign context so that Gandhi’s strategic thinking could be readily copied by other nonviolent activists.

It turned out that developing this strategic theory and strategy was simpler than the original aim (understanding violence) and I have presented this strategic thinking on two websites: Nonviolent Campaign Strategy and Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy.

Despite my preliminary efforts in the 1990s to encourage fellow activists to use this framework, it soon became clear that only the rarest of activists has the capacity to think strategically about an issue, even when presented with a framework for doing so.

The Origin of Human Violence

Consequently, the vital importance of understanding the origin of human violence was starkly demonstrated to me yet again because I knew it would answer key supplementary questions such as these: Why to do so many people live in denial/delusion utterly incapable of perceiving structural violence or grappling powerfully with (military, social, political, economic and ecological) violence? Why is it that so many people, even activists, are powerless to think strategically? How can activists even believe that success can be achieved, particularly on the major issues of our time (such as the threats of nuclear war, ecological devastation and climate cataclysm), without a focused and comprehensive strategy, particularly given elite resistance to such campaigns? See ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’.

Hence, in an attempt to answer questions such as these, Anita McKone and I went into seclusion in an endeavor to understand how our own minds functioned so that we might better understand the minds of others. I hoped it would take a few months. It took 14 years.

So what is the cause of violence in all contexts and which, depending on its precise configuration in each case, creates perpetrators of violence, people who collaborate with perpetrators of violence, people who are passive victims of violence, people who live in denial/delusion, people who are sexist or racist, and activists who cannot think strategically (among many other adverse outcomes)?

Each of these manifestations of human behaviour is an outcome of the adult war on children. That is, adult violence against children is the fundamental cause of all other violence.

How does this happen? It happens because each child, from birth, is socialized – more accurately, terrorized – so that they fit into their society. That is, each child is subjected to an unrelenting regime of ‘visible’, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence until they offer the obedience that every adult – parent, teacher, religious figure… – demands.

So what constitutes ‘visible’, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence?

‘Visible’ violence includes hitting, screaming at and sexually abusing a child which, sadly enough, is very common.

But the largest component of damage arises from the ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence that we adults unconsciously inflict on children during the ordinary course of the day. Tragically, the bulk of this violence occurs in the family home and at school. For a full explanation, see ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

‘Invisible’ violence is the ‘little things’ we do every day, partly because we are just ‘too busy’. For example, when we do not allow time to listen to, and value, a child’s thoughts and feelings, the child learns to not listen to themSelf thus destroying their internal communication system. When we do not let a child say what they want (or ignore them when they do), the child develops communication and behavioral dysfunctionalities as they keep trying to meet their own needs (which, as a basic survival strategy, they are genetically programmed to do).

When we blame, condemn, insult, mock, embarrass, shame, humiliate, taunt, goad, guilt-trip, deceive, lie to, bribe, blackmail, moralize with and/or judge a child, we both undermine their sense of Self-worth and teach them to blame, condemn, insult, mock, embarrass, shame, humiliate, taunt, goad, guilt-trip, deceive, lie, bribe, blackmail, moralize and/or judge.

The fundamental outcome of being bombarded throughout their childhood by this ‘invisible’ violence is that the child is utterly overwhelmed by feelings of fear, pain, anger and sadness (among many others). However, mothers, fathers, teachers, religious figures and other adults also actively interfere with the expression of these feelings and the behavioral responses that are naturally generated by them and it is this ‘utterly invisible’ violence that explains why the dysfunctional behavioral outcomes actually occur.

For example, by ignoring a child when they express their feelings, by comforting, reassuring or distracting a child when they express their feelings, by laughing at or ridiculing their feelings, by terrorizing a child into not expressing their feelings (for instance, by screaming at them when they cry or get angry), and/or by violently controlling a behavior that is generated by their feelings (for example, by hitting them, restraining them or locking them into a room), the child has no choice but to unconsciously suppress their awareness of these feelings.

However, once a child has been terrorized into suppressing their awareness of their feelings (rather than being allowed to have their feelings and to act on them) the child has also unconsciously suppressed their awareness of the reality that caused these feelings. This has many outcomes that are disastrous for the individual, for society and for the biosphere because the individual will now easily suppress their awareness of the feelings that would tell them how to act most functionally in any given circumstance and they will progressively acquire a phenomenal variety of dysfunctional behaviors, including some that are violent towards themself, others and/or the Earth.

So what do we do?

Well, if you want to make an enormous contribution to our effort to end violence, you can make the commitment outlined in ‘My Promise to Children’. If you need to do some healing of your own to be able to nurture children in this way, then consider the information provided in the article ‘Putting Feelings First’.

If you want to systematically tackle violence against the biosphere, consider (accelerated) participation in the fifteen-year strategy, inspired by Gandhi, outlined in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’. This project outlines a simple plan for people to systematically reduce their consumption, by at least 80%, involving both energy and resources of every kind – water, household energy, transport fuels, metals, meat, paper and plastic – while dramatically expanding their individual and community self-reliance in 16 areas, so that all environmental concerns are effectively addressed. As Gandhi observed 100 years ago: ‘Earth provides enough for every person’s need but not for every person’s greed.’

But, critically important though he believed personal action to be, Gandhi was also an extraordinary political strategist and he knew that we needed to do more than transform our own personal lives. We need to provide opportunities that compel others to consider doing the same.

So if your passion is campaigning for change, consider doing it strategically, as Gandhi did. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy.

And if you want to join the worldwide movement to end all violence against humans and the biosphere, you can do so by signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

Gandhi was assassinated on 30 January 1948. But his legacy lives on. You can learn from it too, if you wish.

 

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

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

Email: flametree@riseup.net

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

What Are We Working For? The Economic System is a Labyrinthine Trap

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Global Research

One also knows from his letters that nothing appeared more sacred to Van Gogh than work.” – John Berger, “Vincent Van Gogh,” Portraits

Ever since I was a young boy, I have wondered why people do the kinds of work they do.  I sensed early on that the economic system was a labyrinthine trap devised to imprison people in work they hated but needed for survival.  It seemed like common sense to a child when you simply looked and listened to the adults around you.  Karl Marx wasn’t necessary for understanding the nature of alienated labor; hearing adults declaim “Thank God It’s Friday” spoke volumes.

In my Bronx working class neighborhood I saw people streaming to the subway in the mornings for their rides “into the city” and their forlorn trundles home in the evenings. It depressed me.  Yet I knew the goal was to “make it” and move away as one moved “up,” something that many did.  I wondered why, when some people had options, they rarely considered the moral nature of the jobs they pursued.  And why did they not also consider the cost in life (time) lost in their occupations?  Were money, status, and security the deciding factors in their choices?  Was living reserved for weekends and vacations?

I gradually realized that some people, by dint of family encouragement and schooling, had opportunities that others never received.  For the unlucky ones, work would remain a life of toil and woe in which the search for meaning in their jobs was often elusive.  Studs Terkel, in the introduction to his wonderful book of interviews, Working: People Talk About What They Do all Day and How They Feel About What They Do, puts it this way:

This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence – to the spirit as well as to the body.  It is about ulcers as well as accidents, about shouting matches as well as fistfights, about nervous breakdowns as well as kicking the dog around.  It is, above all (or beneath all), about daily humiliations. To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us.

Those words were confirmed for me when in the summer between high school and college I got a job through a relative’s auspices as a clerk for General Motors in Manhattan.  I dreaded taking it for the thought of being cooped up for the first time in an office building while a summer of my youth passed me by, but the money was too good to turn down (always the bait), and I wanted to save as much as possible for college spending money.  So I bought a summer suit and joined the long line of trudgers going to and fro, down and up and out of the underground, adjusting our eyes to the darkness and light.

It was a summer from hell. My boredom was so intense it felt like solitary confinement.  How, I kept wondering, can people do this?  Yet for me it was temporary; for the others it was a life sentence.  But if this were life, I thought, it was a living death.  All my co-workers looked forward to the mid-morning coffee wagon and lunch with a desperation so intense it was palpable.  And then, as the minutes ticked away to 5 P.M., the agitated twitching that proceeded the mad rush to the elevators seemed to synchronize with the clock’s movements.  We’re out of here!

On my last day, I was eating my lunch on a park bench in Central Park when a bird shit on my suit jacket.  The stain was apt, for I felt I had spent my days defiling my true self, and so I resolved never to spend another day of my life working in an office building in a suit for a pernicious corporation, a resolution I have kept.

“An angel is not far from someone who is sad,” says Vincent Van Gogh in the new film, At Eternity’s Gate. For some reason, recently hearing these words in the darkened theater where I was almost alone, brought me back to that summer and the sadness that hung around all the people that I worked with.  I hoped Van Gogh was right and an angel visited them from time to time. Most of them had no options.

The painter Julian Schnabel’s moving picture (moving on many levels since the film shakes and moves with its hand-held camera work and draws you into the act of drawing and painting that was Van Gogh’s work) is a meditation on work.  It asks the questions: What is work?  What is work for?  What is life for?  Why paint? What does it mean to live?  Why do you do what you do?  Are you living or are you dead?  What are you seeking through your work?

For Vincent the answer was simple: reality.  But reality is not given to us and is far from simple; we must create it in acts that penetrate the screens of clichés that wall us off from it.  As John Berger writes,

One is taught to oppose the real to the imaginary, as though the first were always at hand and the second, distant, far away.  This opposition is false.  Events are always to hand.  But the coherence of these events – which is what one means by reality – is an imaginative construction.  Reality always lies beyond – and this is as true for materialists as for idealists. For Plato, for Marx.  Reality, however one interprets it, lies beyond a screen of clichés.

These screens serve to protect the interests of the ruling classes, who devise ways to trap regular people from seeing the reality of their condition.  Yet while working can be a trap, it can also be a means of escape. For Vincent working was the way.  For him work was not a noun but a verb. He drew and he painted as he does in this film to “make people feel what it is to feel alive.”  To be alive is to act, to paint, to write.  He tells his friend Gauguin that there’s a reason it’s called the “act of painting, the “stroke of genius.”  For him painting is living and living is painting.

The actual paintings that he made are almost beside the point, as all creative artists know too well. It is the doing wherein living is found. The completed canvas, essay, or book are what is done.  They are nouns, still lifes, just as Van Gogh’s paintings have become commodities in the years since his death, dead things to be bought and sold by the rich in a culture of death where they can be hung in mausoleums isolated from the living. It is appropriate that the film ends with Vincent very still in his coffin as “viewers” pass him by and avidly now desire his paintings that encircle the room that they once rejected. The man has become a has-been and the funeral parlor the museum.

“Without painting I can’t live,” he says earlier.  He didn’t say without his paintings.

“God gave me the gift for painting,” he said.  “It’s the only gift he gave me.  I am a born painter.”  But his gift has begotten gifts that are still-births that do not circulate and live and breathe to encourage people to find work that will not, “by its very nature, [be] about violence,” as Terkel said. His works, like people, have become commodities, brands to be bought and sold in a world where the accumulation of wealth is accomplished by the infliction of pain, suffering, and death on untold numbers of victims, invisible victims that allow the wealthy to maintain their bad-faith innocence. This is often achieved in the veiled shadows of intermediaries such as stock brokers, tax consultants, and financial managers; in the liberal and conservative boardrooms of mega-corporations or law offices; and in the planning sessions of the world’s great museums. Like drone killings that distance the killers from their victims, this wealth accumulation allows the wealthy to pretend they are on the side of the angels.  It’s called success, and everyone is innocent as they sing, “Hi Ho, Hi Ho, it’s off to work we go.”

“It is not enough to tell me you worked hard to get your gold,” said Henry Thoreau, Van Gogh’s soul-mate. “So does the Devil work hard.”

A few years ago there was a major exhibit of Van Gogh’s nature paintings at the Clark Museum in Williamstown, Massachusetts – “Van Gogh and Nature” – that aptly symbolized Van Gogh in his coffin.  The paintings were exhibited encased in ornate gold frames. Van Gogh in gold. Just perfect.  I am reminded of a scene in At Eternity’s Gatewhere Vincent and Gauguin are talking about the need for a creative revolution – what we sure as hell need – and the two friends stand side by side with backs to the camera and piss into the wind.

But pseudo-innocence dies hard.  Not long ago I was sitting in a breakfast room in a bed-and-breakfast in Houston, Texas, sipping coffee and musing myself awake.  Two men came in and the three of us got to talking.  As people like to say, they were nice guys.  Very pleasant and talkative, in Houston on business. Normal Americans.  Stressed.  Both were about fifty years old with wives and children.

One sold drugs for one of the largest pharmaceutical companies that is known for its very popular anti-depressant drug and its aggressive sales pitches.  He travelled a triangular route from Corpus Christi to Austin to Houston and back again, hawking his wares.  He spoke about his work as being very lucrative and posing no ethical dilemmas.  There were so many depressed people in need of his company’s drugs, he said, as if the causes of their depression had nothing to do with inequality and the sorry state of the country as the rich rip off everyone else.  I thought of recommending a book to him – Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime: How big pharma has corrupted health care by Peter Gotzsche – but held my tongue, appreciative as I was of the small but tasteful fare we were being served and not wishing to cause my companions dyspepsia.  This guy seemed to be trying to convince me of the ethical nature of the way he panned gold, while I kept thinking of that quote attributed to Mark Twain: “Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.”

The other guy, originally from a small town in Nebraska and now living in Baton Rouge, was a former medevac helicopter pilot who had served in the 1st Gulf War.  He worked in finance for an equally large oil company.  His attitude was a bit different, and he seemed sheepishly guilty about his work with this company as he told me how shocked he was the first time he saw so many oil, gas, and chemical plants lining the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans and all the oil and chemicals being shipped down the river. So many toxins that reminded him of the toxic black smoke rising from all the bombed oil wells in Iraq.  Something about it all left him uneasy, but he too said he made a very good “living” and that his wife also worked for the oil company back home.

My childish thought recurred: when people have options, why do they not choose ethical work that makes the world more beautiful and just?  Why is money and so-called success always the goal?

Having seen At Eternity’s Gate, I now see what Van Gogh was trying to tell us and Julian Schnabel conveys through this moving picture.  I see why these two perfectly normal guys I was breaking bread with in Houston are unable to penetrate the screen that lies between them and reality.  They have never developed the imaginative tools to go beyond normal modes of perception and conception. Or perhaps they lack the faith to dare, to see the futility and violence in what they are working for and what their companies’ products are doing to the world.  They think of themselves as hard at work, travelling hither and yon, doing their calculations, “making their living,” and collecting their pay.  It’s their work that has a payoff in gold, but it’s not working in the sense that painting was for Vincent, a way beyond the screen.  They are mesmerized by the spectacle, as are so many Americans.  Their jobs are perfectly logical and allow them a feeling of calm and control.

But Vincent, responding to Gauguin, a former stock broker, when he urged him to paint slowly and methodically, said, “I need to be out of control. I don’t want to calm down.”  He knew that to be fully alive was to be vulnerable, to not hold back, to always be slipping away, and to be threatened with annihilation at any moment. When painting, he was intoxicated with a creative joy that belies the popular image of him as always depressed.  “I find joy in sorrow,” he said, echoing in a paradoxical way Albert Camus, who said, “I have always felt that I lived on the high seas, threatened, at the heart of a royal happiness.”   Both rebels, one in paint, the other in words: “I rebel: therefore we exist,” was how Camus put it, expressing the human solidarity that is fundamental to genuine work in our ephemeral world. Both nostalgic in the present for the future, creating freedom through vision and disclosing the way for others.

And although my breakfast companions felt safe in their calmness on this side of the screen, it was an illusion. The only really calm ones are corpses. And perhaps that’s why when you look around, as I did as a child, you see so many of the living dead carrying on as normal.

“I paint to stop thinking and feel I am a part of everything inside and outside me,” says Vincent, a self-described exile and pilgrim.

If we could make working a form of such painting, a path to human solidarity because a mode of rebelling, what a wonderful world it might be.

That, I believe, is what working is for.

Human Beings are Destroying Life on Earth but Deluding Ourselves that We are Not

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By Robert J. Burrowes

It is easy to identify the ongoing and endless violence being inflicted on life on Earth. This ranges from the vast multiplicity of assaults inflicted on our children and the biosphere to the endless wars and other military violence as well as the grotesque exploitation of many peoples living in Africa, Asia and Central/South America. But for a (very incomplete) list of 40 points see ‘Reflections on 2018, Forecasting 2019’.

However, despite the obvious fact that it is human beings who are inflicting all of this violence, it is virtually impossible to get people to pay attention to this simple and incontrovertible fact and to ask why, precisely, are human beings behaving in such violent and destructive ways? And can we effectively address this cause?

Of course, one part of this problem is the existence of many competing ideas about what causes violence. For example, some ideologies attribute the cause to a particular structural manifestation of violence, such as patriarchy (which generates a gendered system of violence and exploitation) or capitalism (which generates a class system of violence and exploitation). However, none of these ideologies explains why humans participate in structures of violence and exploitation in the first place. Surely a person who was not violent and exploitative to begin with would reject such violent and exploitative structures out of hand and work to create nonviolent and egalitarian structures instead.

But most people really just accept the elite-promulgated delusion that humans are innately dysfunctional and violent and this must be contained and controlled by socialization processes, laws, legal systems, police forces and prisons or, in the international arena, by such measures as economic sanctions and military violence. It is a rare individual who perceives the blatant dysfunctionality and violence of socialization, laws, legal systems, police forces, prisons, economic sanctions and military violence, and how these institutions and their violence serve elite interests.

Hence, humans are trapped in a cycle of attempting to address the vast range of manifestations of violent human behaviour – the wars, the climate catastrophe, destruction of the environment, the economic exploitation of vast sectors of the human population (women, indigenous peoples, working peoples…), the military dictatorships and occupations – without knowing what, fundamentally, causes dysfunctional and violent human behaviours and draws many people to participate in (and benefit from) violence in whatever form it takes.

Well I, for one, find it boring to see the same manifestations of violence repeated endlessly because we do not understand or address the fundamental cause (and so even well-meaning efforts to address it in a variety of contexts are doomed to fail). How about you?

Moreover, I find it boring to listen to (or read about) people endlessly deluding themselves about the violence; that is, deluding themselves that it isn’t happening, ‘it was always like that’, ‘it isn’t as bad as it seems’, ‘nothing can be done’, ‘there is another explanation’, that I am ‘doing enough already’, and so on.

To illustrate the above let me write some more frequent examples of people deluding themselves about the cause. You may have heard delusions like these expressed yourself; you may know some of the many others.

  1. ‘The child deserved the punishment.’
  2. ‘She asked for it.’
  3. Violence is innate: it is ‘in our nature’.
  4. ‘War is inevitable.’
  5. The people in Africa/Asia/Central/South America ‘have always been poor’.
  6. ‘The weather hasn’t changed; it was like that when I was a child.’
  7. ‘We can’t control Mother Nature.’
  8. ‘Nature is abundant.’

Of course, the most common delusional state is the one in which most people are trapped: they are just not paying significant attention to critical issues and have no knowledge (and informed opinion) about them but allow themselves to be distracted from reality by the various elite channels used for doing so, such as the corporate media.

So why do most people delude themselves rather than carefully observe reality, seek out and analyze the evidence in relation to it, and then behave appropriately and powerfully in response?

Because they are (unconsciously) terrified.

‘Is that all?’ you might say. ‘Surely the explanation for dysfunctional (and violent) human behaviour is more complex than that! Besides, when people I observe doing the sorts of dysfunctional and violent behaviours you mention above, they don’t look frightened, let alone terrified.’

So let me explain why the explanation above – that most human beings live in delusion, behave dysfunctionally and violently, fail to observe and analyze reality and then behave powerfully in response to it, because they are terrified – is the complete explanation and why people who are utterly terrified don’t ‘look frightened’.

At the moment of birth, the human individual has a genetically-embedded potential to seek out and powerfully pursue their own unique destiny by progressively developing a complex set of capacities to observe and listen, to think and feel, to analyze and evaluate, to plan and strategize, and to behave with awareness and power in response to their own astute insight into reality and the guidance provided by their conscience.

However, rather than nurture this potential so that the child grows up deeply in touch with their conscience, sensing capacities, thoughts, feelings and other faculties necessary to seek out and powerfully travel their own unique path, the significant adults in the child’s life immediately start to ‘socialize’ (that is, terrorize) the child into conforming with culturally and socially-acceptable norms of thought and behaviour on the basis that one human is more-or-less identical with another (give or take some minor variations among races, languages….).

The idea that each human mind might be unique in the way that each body is unique (while conforming to a general pattern in relation to shape, height and other physical characteristics) never even occurs to anyone. The idea that their child could have the potential to be as creative, powerful and unique as Leonardo Da Vinci, Mary Wollstonecraft, Sojourner Truth, Albert Einstein, Mohandas K. Gandhi or Rosalind Franklin never enters the mind of the typical parent.

Instead, we parent and teach children to conform to an endless sequence of beliefs and behavioural norms on the basis that ‘one size fits all’ because we are literally (but unconsciously) terrified that our child might be ‘different’ or, horror of horrors, unique! And we reward most highly those individuals who do conform and can demonstrate their conformity by passing, often literally, the endless series of socially-approved tests, formal and otherwise, that we set. See, for example, ‘Do We Want School or Education?’

The last thing we want is an individual who fearlessly thinks, feels and behaves as they personally decide is best for themself, perhaps even because their conscience dictates. But when they do act out of their own volition, we punish them to ensure that behaviour that is generated by their unique ‘Self’ is, if possible, terrorized out of them.

Of course, there are ‘good reasons’ for doing this. If we want obedient students, soldiers, employees and citizens, it is the perfect formula. Terrorize the child when they are young and obedience to a set of parentally/socially-approved beliefs and behaviours is virtually guaranteed.

Equally importantly, by starting this onslaught against the child from the moment of birth, they will grow up utterly unaware of the fact that they were terrorized out of becoming their ‘True Self’ and seeking their own unique destiny so that they could be the slave of their society, performing some function, menial or even ‘professional’, after they have submitted to sufficient training. The slave who never questions their role is truly a slave. And that is what we want!

Equally importantly, the person who has fearfully surrendered their Self at the alter of physical survival cannot observe or listen to the fear expressed by anyone else, including their own children. So they simply ‘fail to notice’ it.

So what, exactly, do we do so that each human being’s individual Self is crushed and they are rendered too terrified, self-hating and powerless to pursue their own life path, to honestly observe and listen to their own children and to mindfully consider the state of our world and act powerfully in response?

We inflict enormous, ongoing violence on the child, starting immediately after their birth.

‘How?’ you might ask. ‘I don’t scream at or hit my child. And I never punish them.’

Well, if that is true, it is a good start.

But, unfortunately, it is far more complex than these obvious types of violence and, strange though it may seem, it is not just the ‘visible’ violence (such as hitting, screaming at and sexually abusing) that we normally label ‘violence’ that causes the main damage, although this is extremely damaging. The largest component of damage arises from the ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence that we adults unconsciously inflict on children during the ordinary course of the day. Tragically, the bulk of this violence occurs in the family home and at school. See ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

So what is ‘invisible’ violence? It is the ‘little things’ we do every day, partly because we are just ‘too busy’. For example, when we do not allow time to listen to, and value, a child’s thoughts and feelings, the child learns to not listen to themSelf thus destroying their internal communication system. When we do not let a child say what they want (or ignore them when they do), the child develops communication and behavioral dysfunctionalities as they keep trying to meet their own needs (which, as a basic survival strategy, they are genetically programmed to do).

When we blame, condemn, insult, mock, embarrass, shame, humiliate, taunt, goad, guilt-trip, deceive, lie to, bribe, blackmail, moralize with and/or judge a child, we both undermine their sense of Self-worth and teach them to blame, condemn, insult, mock, embarrass, shame, humiliate, taunt, goad, guilt-trip, deceive, lie, bribe, blackmail, moralize and/or judge.

The fundamental outcome of being bombarded throughout their childhood by this ‘invisible’ violence is that the child is utterly overwhelmed by feelings of fear, pain, anger and sadness (among many others). However, mothers, fathers, teachers and other adults also actively interfere with the expression of these feelings and the behavioral responses that are naturally generated by them and it is this ‘utterly invisible’ violence that explains why the dysfunctional behavioral outcomes actually occur.

For example, by ignoring a child when they express their feelings, by comforting, reassuring or distracting a child when they express their feelings, by laughing at or ridiculing their feelings, by terrorizing a child into not expressing their feelings (e.g. by screaming at them when they cry or get angry), and/or by violently controlling a behavior that is generated by their feelings (e.g. by hitting them, restraining them or locking them into a room), the child has no choice but to unconsciously suppress their awareness of these feelings.

However, once a child has been terrorized into suppressing their awareness of their feelings (rather than being allowed to have their feelings and to act on them) the child has also unconsciously suppressed their awareness of the reality that caused these feelings. This has many outcomes that are disastrous for the individual, for society and for nature because the individual will now easily suppress their awareness of the feelings that would tell them how to act most functionally in any given circumstance and they will progressively acquire a phenomenal variety of dysfunctional behaviors, including some that are violent towards themself, others and/or the Earth.

From the above, it should also now be apparent that punishment should never be used. ‘Punishment’, of course, is one of the words we use to obscure our awareness of the fact that we are using violence. Violence, even when we label it ‘punishment’, scares children and adults alike and cannot elicit a functional behavioural response. See ‘Punishment is Violent and Counterproductive’.

If someone behaves dysfunctionally, they need to be listened to, deeply, so that they can start to become consciously aware of the feelings (which will always include fear and, often, terror) that drove the dysfunctional behaviour in the first place. They then need to feel and express these feelings (including any anger) in a safe way. Only then will behavioural change in the direction of functionality be possible. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

‘But these adult behaviors you have described don’t seem that bad. Can the outcome be as disastrous as you claim?’ you might ask. The problem is that there are hundreds of these ‘ordinary’, everyday behaviors that destroy the Selfhood of the child. It is ‘death by a thousand cuts’ and most children simply do not survive as Self-aware individuals. And why do we do this? As noted above, we do it so that each child will fit into our model of ‘the perfect citizen’: that is, obedient and hardworking student, reliable and pliant employee/soldier, and submissive law-abiding citizen.

Moreover, once we destroy the Selfhood of a child, it has many flow-on effects. For example, once you terrorize a child into accepting certain information about themself, other people or the state of the world, the child becomes unconsciously fearful of dealing with new information, especially if this information is contradictory to what they have been terrorized into believing. As a result, the child will unconsciously dismiss new information out of hand.

In short, the child has been terrorized in such a way that they are no longer capable of learning (or their learning capacity is seriously diminished by excluding any information that is not a simple extension of what they already ‘know’).

Fundamentally, the child is now incapable of carefully observing reality, analyzing the evidence in relation to that reality and responding strategically so that conflicts and problems are moved closer to resolution. That is, the child is now unconsciously trapped, believing and behaving precisely within the spectrum of socially-approved beliefs and behaviours that society terrorized them into accepting, no matter how dysfunctional and violent these beliefs and behaviours might be.

In industrialized countries, for example, this will invariably include overconsuming, which is standard (but highly dysfunctional and violent) behaviour, particularly given the current state of the biosphere. See ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’.

 

Responding Powerfully to Reality

So how do we nurture children to become the unique and powerful individual that is their birthright? Someone who is able to clearly identify what they need and what outcomes work for them, and who does not learn to progressively compromise themselves until there is nothing left of their unique identity. Someone, in short, who is so powerless, that they are incapable of considering themself, others and the state of the biosphere. Someone who lives in delusion.

Well, if you want a powerful child, you can read what is required in ‘My Promise to Children’.

If, after reading this ‘Promise’, you feel unable to nurture children properly, you might consider doing the healing necessary so that you can do so. See ‘Putting Feelings First’.

If you already feel free of the delusions that afflict most people and able to respond powerfully to the state of our world, then consider joining those participating in the fifteen-year strategy outlined in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’ and signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

If you are powerful enough to campaign for change against one or more of the ongoing manifestations of violence in the world, consider doing so strategically so that you have maximum impact. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy.

And if none of the options I have offered immediately above appeals, ask yourself if you are serious about helping to end the violence or just deluding yourself like all of those people I described above.

 

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

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

Email: flametree@riseup.net

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

Lobotomized: Secrecy and the “Dis-enlightenment”

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By Gordon Duff

Source: New Eastern Outlook

As we enter 2019, one thing above all others is clear, the mechanisms of human engagement, education, media and information, even what passes for human contact through social media and email, is all subjected to “algorithms,” whatever those are.

It was Snowden that brought it to our attention, from the Guardian back in 2014:

“Increasingly, we are watched not by people but by algorithms. Amazon and Netflix track the books we buy and the movies we stream, and suggest other books and movies based on our habits. Google and Facebook watch what we do and what we say, and show us advertisements based on our behavior. Google even modifies our web search results based on our previous behavior. Smartphone navigation apps watch us as we drive, and update suggested route information based on traffic congestion. And the National Security Agency, of course, monitors our phone calls, emails and locations, then uses that information to try to identify terrorists.”

Documents provided by Edward Snowden and revealed by the Guardian today show that the UK spy agency GHCQ, with help from the NSA, has been collecting millions of webcam images from innocent Yahoo users. And that speaks to a key distinction in the age of algorithmic surveillance: is it really okay for a computer to monitor you online, and for that data collection and analysis only to count as a potential privacy invasion when a person sees it? I say it’s not, and the latest Snowden leaks only make more clear how important this distinction is.”

When we look back on 2014 from where we are today, Edward Snowden’s warnings of an Orwellian nightmare seem innocent. Maybe it was Donald Trump that opened our eyes, if so, whatever contribution history attributes to him, he might well want to hang his hat on this one.

The fake science of intruding into lives in order to recognize and control “influencers” began in the private sector and was “tuned up” for political races, crime and terrorism prevention and more.

By “more,” we mean “dumbing down” the “masses,” as they are called, presenting reality as a consumer product, custom engineered to be believable, to create drama or fear, to raise concerns of imaginary threats, to distract, and, above all, to control.

Social scientists have postulated that humans can actually be programmed to respond to the most basic stimuli, touch, hearing, taste, based on “fake” information, that the human mind can be fooled into filtering out such basic sensory responses as smell.

The basic synaptic connections that tie sensory input to ideas or concepts, let’s look at one glaring example. Try to say the word “Palestinian” without following it with “terrorist.”

Then again, let’s go back one more step and define the difference between an “armed militant” and a “freedom fighter.” Nothing here is new, the rules were laid out a century ago.

Einstein predicted this in his “Autobiographical notes” on epistemology. It was some 50 years ago when Dr. John Ward of Michigan State University pounded this into my head in his Philosophy of Science lectures. “The relationship between sense experiences and concepts is entirely intuitive as are the relationships between all concepts. You see what you see, not because of what you see but because of what you think.”

It was quite one thing when such pursuits were endeavors of science and philosophy at our great universities, but it became something quite different when Wilson Bryan Key, back in 1973, wrote the seminal work, Subliminal Seduction, demonstrating how altered images could reach into the most basic primitive drives, the “reptile brain,” as it were, driving an unknowing viewer to alter both perceptions and reasoning, even toward lowering human survivability.

Key’s imagery, taken from popular magazines, strange figures of death’s heads or nude women, airbrushed into ice cubes, were an opening salvo. If thanatotic drive could sell liquor or cigarettes, how easy might it be to sell a war?

No more films like Sergeant York or Red Dawn needed, or perhaps only as a “supporting actor,” pounding the nail in just a bit more.

Twenty years prior to the publication of Key’s work, the US government began a project known as MK Ultra. Though it officially ended in 1973 after 20 years of poorly documented “research” into every form of psychological manipulation, in truth, MK Ultra and other programs as well, simply “went dark.”

The reason, of course, we are traveling his historical path today is that those programs, after not 50 but 65 years of still classified efforts, after billions of dollars in black funding, programs with no oversite, programs carried out on unsuspecting citizens, sometimes entire cities, sometimes on unwilling victims in “black sites,” are the precursors to the world of Google and Facebook today.

Looking at 2018, there were some obvious “projects,” the White Helmet staged fake gas attacks for sure. This involved Facebook posts, fake videos, but the key is that they were channeled directly to the President of the United States who had been programmed to ignore credible intelligence sources. Thus, Trump ordered an attack on Syria entirely based on a Facebook post.

But there are millions of Facebook posts every day. Why did he get this one? Who put it in front of him? Is Trump surrounded by handlers, traitors?

You see, it is one thing when something is put on the internet, the equivalent of leaving a post-it note in a public restroom on the “wrong side of town.” It is quite something else when the message, a parentless bastard of disinformation, is given to a man who has, according to sources within the White House, openly advocated use of tactical nuclear weapons against Syrian people in retribution for wildly fabricated accusations.

Consider the implications, even if someone, perhaps General Mattis, had taken the nuclear option off the table. Simply put, it lowers the standards of the United States exercising war powers in attacking a sovereign nation to an anonymous social media post.

Again, we ask, it is one thing posting something malicious and dangerous and quite something else when a national leader with access to nuclear weapons is programmed to seek out and act upon same.

Then again, were any other president to order a missile strike based on, well, based on nothing whatsoever, not even a decent lie, one might expect negative repercussions.

Let’s take a second to juxtapose. If a fake public narrative exists, and it is reasonable to postulate that “the public,” such as it is, is more than aware that a “real world” exists in which what is generally known and accepted as true is, in fact, utterly false.

In fact, some of the most popular television series of the past decades have exposed the flummery of generally accepted history. Shows like The Secret History of World War II and many if not endless others, feed a hungry public a continual diet of debunked reality.

What we are left with is this, an ongoing process, a spiral as it were, around and down, around and down, ever faster, ever more hopeless, intrusion into lives, into thoughts, planted feelings, manipulated responses, altered perceptions, until nothing can be trusted, especially not ourselves.

 

Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War that has worked on veterans and POW issues for decades and consulted with governments challenged by security issues. He’s a senior editor and chairman of the board of  Veterans Today, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”
https://journal-neo.org/2019/01/09/lobotomized-secrecy-and-the-dis-enlightenment/