Try to google the word Happiness, the first (sponsored) result of your search will be shophappiness.com. Happiness can be bought. This is a plus point for the British animator and artist Steve Cutts, director of the short film Happiness.
Cutts imagines humanity as a horde of rats, adored by the marketing god, bewitched by Black Friday or Cyber Monday. Loose cannon looking for the last offer. Happiness is the penny that is always missing at the prices of super discount products. Happiness is a commodity exchange of the new capitalism.
Happiness, by definition, is the moment in which all one’s desires are satisfied, but humanity always wants more. Like so many rats, we are looking for compulsive crumbs of happiness. Producers sow these crumbs on online and offline advertisements.
There are products that answer any type of question, even for the inability to endure frustration of being constantly dissatisfied.
This limitless race is rendered in an excellent way by the images of Happiness, full of details and oversized information. Chaos. Steve Cutts describes the irrepressible frenzy of modern society, the compulsive and often illogical search to possess new objects, and lastly, the money, motor that moves the world.
Happiness is a short economic textbook and an explicit critique of contemporary society. The final question does not spare anyone – are we trapped?
“He who controls the past, controls the future; and he who controls the present, controls the past.”–George Orwell
“The mistake of judging the men of other periods by the morality of our own day has its parallel in the mistake of supposing that every wheel and bolt in the modern social machine had its counterpart in more rudimentary societies…”–H.S. Maine
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” –L.P. Hartley
I’ve often referred to the “Flintstonization of history”—a concept I borrowed from the book Sex at Dawn. It’s the tendency to project our present-day circumstances onto the past, assuming that people basically thought and acted much as we do. But when we do that, we bring our “modern” sensibilities and worldview along with us. And those have been decisively shaped by the time and culture in which we live.
Today I’d like to introduce a related concept–the retconning of history.
Looking back, that’s been the theme of a lot of my writing over the past year. I’ve looked at a lot of history which challenges and overturns the conventional narrative that our present-day circumstances and social organization are basically the same as past societies, except with better technology and a few more creature comforts (i.e. the past, but with cell phones). Or that they are the way things have always been, and that there are no alternatives.
Now, most of you probably know what retconning is. It is short for the phrase “retroactive continuity”. In order to make a narrative coherent, the authors “rewrite” (or simply ignore) what has occurred in previous episodes or iterations of a long-running franchise in order to maintain continuity with the ongoing “new” narrative arc and characters. The phrase originated with comic books, and is typically used in reference to films, television shows, books, video games, etc.
From there, the word has passed into common parlance. Normally, retcon is still used in the context of a work of fiction. However, I’ve seen the word spread beyond just talking about movies and TV shows to the world in general. When people say retcon now, they are usually referring to an attempt to “rewrite” past events by deliberately distorting them or altering the record after the fact. That is, “[people] tell themselves a different story about what happened in prior events in order to maintain consistency with their current circumstances.” That story may include a blatant distortion of facts and a general disregard for reality. Much of this is derived from our current political situation. A politician may suddenly reverse their position, and then declare that what came before didn’t happen (“fake news”), or simply ignore it altogether if it doesn’t fit with the narrative “spin” of the political parties.
At it’s heart, it is an attempt to “erase” or “rewrite” the past for the sake of present circumstances. As one of it’s earliest descriptions had it, “retroactive continuity ultimately means that history flows fundamentally from the future into the past.”
What’s any of this got to do with history? It strikes me that much of what we learn about history are attempts to “retcon” the past.
What do I mean by this? It seems that history often adopts a “modern” point of view to explain past events. In this narrative, we were always heading to exactly where we are: globalized free-market corporate monopoly capitalism.This is done to depict our present circumstances not as deliberately engineered, or contingent on any historical circumstances, or political choices, but rather as something “natural” and just an expression of unchanging human nature. With this retconning, we are unable to think of different ways of organizing things, because those ways—even in the very recent past—have been retconned out of history. Even things in recent living memory—such as not going into debt for an education, or being able to afford a single family house on 25 percent of your income—are retconned to make it so that they never happened.
Here are just a few of the major retcons I have discovered over the past year or so:
1. Economists tend to depict all of human history as heading towards “free and open” markets, if only government would only just “get out of the way” and drop all restrictions and regulations on merchant princes and wealthy oligarchs. That is, globalized corporate free trade is “natural” (as is currency), and collective governance is “artificial” and unnecessary. Our “natural instinct” is to “truck, barter and exchange” declared Adam Smith. John Locke argued that the reason governments came to exist was to protect and secure private property, and that they should do little else besides this.
Of course, all of this is false. For example, an attempt at retconning history was engaged in by economists Santhi Hejeebu and Deirdre McCloskey (of ‘bourgois virtues’fame) attempting to refute some of Karl Polanyi’s book The Great Transformation. As political economist Mark Blyth countered, citing the works of Polanyi and Albert Hirschmann:
“While gain-seeking has indeed existed throughout history…the historical oddity was that gain-seeking became equated with market transactions only relatively recently. This was a qualitative and not a quantitative change; otherwise Incas, Mayans, Romans, and contemporary Britons were/are all living in societies that were more or less similar in their economic structure, despite the differences in, for example, the presence of slaves.”
“Painting the history of all hitherto existing societies as the history of capitalism in vitro probably obscures more economic history than it illuminates…capitalism did not simply evolve, it was argued for. It was propagandized by Scottish enlightenment intellectuals, English liberals, and French physiocrats long “before its triumph”. And it was as much a project of governance; limiting the state; constructing the commodified individual; building a singular notion of economically based self-interest, as much as it was one of creating wealth…”
“Capitalism was created, it did not just ‘happen’, and labeling all hitherto existing societies as ‘almost capitalism’ hardly erases the distinctions between historical periods and economic systems. The fact the ‘we’ today accept Smith far more readily than ‘we’ accept Polanyi speaks directly to the power of ideas rather than the discovery of facts…”
As Polanyi himself summed it up: “Laissez-faire was planned, planning was not”. From The Great Transformation:
Indeed, on the evidence available it would be rash to assert that local markets ever developed from individual acts of barter.
Obscure as the beginnings of local markets are, this much can be asserted: that from the start this institution was surrounded by a number of safeguards designed to protect the prevailing economic organization of society from interference on the part of market practices. The peace of the market was secured at the price of rituals and ceremonies which restricted its scope while ensuring its ability to function within the given narrow limits. The most significant result of markets—the birth of towns and urban civilization—was, in effect, the outcome of a paradoxical development. Towns, insofar as they sprang from markets, were not only the protectors of those markets, but also the means of preventing them from expanding into the countryside and thus encroaching on the prevailing economic organization of society…
Such a permanent severance of local trade and long-distance trade within the organization of the town must come as another shock to the evolutionist, with whom things always seem so easily to grow into one another. And yet this peculiar fact forms the key to the social history of urban life in Western Europe…Internal trade in Western Europe was actually created by the intervention of the state.
Right up to the time of the Commercial Revolution what may appear to us as national trade was not national, but municipal…The trade map of Europe in this period should rightly show only towns, and leave blank the countryside—it might as well have not existed as far as organized trade was concerned. So-called nations were merely political units, and very loose ones at that, consisting economically of innumerable smaller and bigger self sufficing households and insignificant local markets in the villages. Trade was limited to organized townships which carried it on either locally, as neighborhood trade, or as long-distance trade—the two were strictly separated, and neither was allowed to infiltrate into the countryside indiscriminately…neither long-distance trade nor local trade was the parent of the internal trade of modern times—thus apparently leaving no alternative but to turn for an explanation to the deus ex machina of state intervention…
This retconning has been particularly egregious by the debunked “Austrian economic school” which was expressly created to overturn history and rewrite it for the benefit of capitalists and the wealthy. Michael Hudson, an economist who probably knows more about ancient economic organization than anyone since Polanyi, writes:
…Karl Polanyi[‘s] doctrine was designed to rescue economics from [the Austrian] school, which makes up a fake history of how economics and civilization originated.
One of the first Austrian’s [sic] was Carl Menger in the 1870s. His “individualistic” theory about the origins of money – without any role played by temples, palaces or other public institutions – still governs Austrian economics. Just as Margaret Thatcher said, “There’s no such thing as society,” the Austrians developed a picture of the economy without any positive role for government. It was as if money were created by producers and merchants bartering their output. This is a travesty of history.
All ancient money was issued by temples or public mints so as to guarantee standards of purity and weight. You can read Biblical and Babylonian denunciation of merchants using false weights and measures so see why money had to be public. The major trading areas were agora spaces in front of temples, which kept the official weights and measures. And much exchange was between the community’s families and the public institutions.
Most important, money was brought into being not for trade (which was conducted mainly on credit), but for paying debts. And most debts were owed to the temples and palaces for pubic services or tribute. But to the Austrians, the idea was that anything the government does to protect labor, consumers and society from rentiers and grabbers is deadweight overhead.
Above all, they opposed governments creating their own money, e.g. as the United States did with its greenbacks in the Civil War. They wanted to privatize money creation in the hands of commercial banks, so that they could receive interest on their privilege of credit creation and also to determine the allocation of resources.
So we see that in this case that there is a very specific political agenda behind the retconning of history. It’s pressed in economic textbooks and expressly designed to promote a libertarian point of view. Much of retconning history does serve a political agenda that benefits a select group of people.
Trying to analyze all premodern economies as though they were just proto-capitalists lead to all sorts of errors, as Branko Milanovich points out in a recent post:
“The equilibrium (normal) price in a feudal economy, or in a guild system where capital is not allowed to move between the branches will be different from equilibrium prices in a capitalist economy with the free movement of capital. To many economists this is still not obvious. They use today’s capitalist categories for the Roman Empire where wage labor was (to quote Moses Finley) ‘spasmodic, casual and marginal’.”
2. The individual has always been the basic unit of social organization. People have always thought of themselves primarily as citizens of territorial nation-states (British, German, French, Canadian, etc.) with well-defined borders. The neolocal monogamous nuclear family is the only natural and logical form of human social organization.
None of these statements are true, of course. Such arrangements are very contingent upon time and place and culture, and often very recent. For most of human history, the nation-state did not exist. There is nothing “natural” about it–it was created from above by oligarchic elites, just like the One Big Market. They are artificial creations.
And while families are, indeed, “natural,” the form they take varies widely. Most families were extended, and consisted of many generations living either on the same land or under the same roof, together with agnatic relations. Who was or was not considered a part of the family had to do with kinship structures, typically encoded into the language and culture.
Extended kinship networks were the primordial form of human social organization (as Lewis Henry Moran discovered). Religion, too, played a significant role, especially ancestor worship, collective rituals, and food-sharing meals and feasts (even bonobos do it).
This was the conclusion made by Henry Sumner Maine by studying ancient legal structures and comparing to them to surviving village communities in India, Java, North America, and elsewhere. He writes, “We have the strongest reason for thinking that property once belonged not to individuals nor even to isolated families, but to larger societies composed on the patriarchal model.” Concerning private property, he concludes,
“…[P]rivate property, in the shape in which we know it, was chiefly formed by the gradual disentanglement of the separate rights of individuals from the blended rights of a community. Our studies…seemed to show us the Family expanding into the Agnatic group of kinsmen, then the Agnatic group dissolving into separate households; lastly the household supplanted by the individual; and it is now suggested that each step in the change corresponds to an analogous alteration in the nature of Ownership.”
“…if it be true that far the most important passage in the history of Private Property is its gradual elimination from the co-ownership of kinsmen, then the great point of inquiry…what were the motives which originally prompted men to hold together in the family union? To such a question, Jurisprudence, unassisted by other sciences, is not competent to give a reply. The fact can only be noted.” (p. 159)
This is why Marxists argued that “primitive communism” was the original form of property ownership, i.e. socialism. Historically, this is correct. The problem was that this was predicated upon extended kinship networks and not large, industrial, nation states, composed of strangers. That is, primitive communism does not scale, which is why market economies came to supplant them over time.
Regarding the “lone individual” posited by Classical Liberals as the primordial atomic unit of society, this, too, is ahistorical. Like the primitive barter economy, anthropology has failed to turn it up anywhere it has looked for it:
It is here that archaic law renders us one of the greatest of its services, and fills up a gap which otherwise could have only been bridged by conjecture. It is full, in all its provinces, of the clearest indications that society in primitive times was not what it is assumed to be at present, a collection of *individuals*. In fact, and in the view of the men who composed it, it was an *aggregation of families*. The contrast may be most forcibly expressed by saying that the *unit* of an ancient society was the Family, or a modern society the individual. We must be prepared to find in ancient law all the consequences of this difference.
[Archaic Law] is so framed as to be adjusted to a system of small independent corporations. It is therefore scanty, because it is supplemented by the despotic commands of the heads of households. It is ceremonious, because the transactions to which it pays regard resemble international concerns much more than the quick play of intercourse between individuals.
Above all…it takes a view of *life* wholly unlike any which appears in developed jurisprudence. Corporations never die, and accordingly primitive law considers the entities with which it deals, i.e. the patriarchal or family groups, as perpetual and inditinguishable…
Ancient Law pp. 134-135
Surveying continental Europe and much of the colonial world, French scholar Emile de Lavaleye came to the same conclusion:
Originally the clan, or village, is the collective body owning the soil ; later on, it is the family, which has all the characteristics of a perpetual corporation. The father of the family is merely the administrator of the patrimony: when he dies, he is replaced by another administrator. There is no place for the testament, nor even for individual succession…Such was also the law everywhere where these communities have existed; and, probably, every nation has passed through the system.
The point of all this, of course, is not to advocate a rewind to the past. Rather, it is to show us that social forms change over time; and what may adaptive in one context (say, Fordism), will not work in another (say, an information economy). Lavaleye points this out himself:
“…the object of this book is not to advocate a return to the primitive agrarian community; but to establish historically the natural right of property as proclaimed by philosophers, as well as to show that ownership has assumed very various forms, and is consequently susceptible of progressive reform.”
3. Everyone before the Industrial Revolution was miserable, sick, and hungry all the time, irrespective of time and place. Life was, as Hobbes argued, “nasty, brutish and short” throughout prehistory before the last hundred years or so. We’ve doubled the human lifespan—a thirty year-old man was considered “old” just a few generations ago.
I’ve written so much disproving this idea that it’s not worth reiterating here. But here is yet another item that shows us that life in the past was not as horrible as it is commonly depicted by the evangelists of the Progress Gospel:
According to my history professor at Dalhousie University, Cynthia Neville (one of the top scholars in early medieval Scottish history), the Scots in medieval times had an incredibly healthy diet compared to many other parts of Europe at the time.
Wheat doesn’t grow well so far north, but hardier grains like oats and barley do quite well, and provide much better staple foodstock, along with many native vegetable varieties. Also, because cows weren’t as viable (except for the wealthiest lowland nobles), they lived on sheep’s milk and goat milk, which are much easier on the human digestive system. Much of their proteins came from seafood, which, as we know today, are loaded with omega fatty acids and essential vitamins.
There was a bit more to it, but that’s about all I can recall off the top of my head from her classes. This is one of the reasons why the Scots had a reputation for being taller and stronger, because their diets and hardy lifestyles kept them fit and healthy.
And:
When the Romans invaded Gaul, they noticed the Gauls were more than a foot taller, on average, than the Romans. This was due to better nutrition. Many prehistoric people’s had great nutrition. They were defeated by “civilized” people’s who had the advantages of greater numbers and organization. The same was true of the Indians of Massachusetts, when the Pilgrims arrived.
Not all prehistoric people had good nutrition, and not so people’s proliferate societies had bad nutrition. The Norse (Vikings) were dairy farmers and fishermen, and had excellent nutrition, like the Scotch, in medieval times.
4. People need “jobs” in order to feel valuable, or else they will go crazy. That is, we need to find a willing buyer for our labor, or we will feel like a useless burden on society. Furthermore, working forty hours a week is something we’ve just always done since forever. We would all be bored otherwise.
Of course, “jobs” are very recent invention. Most people in the past did not have formalized “jobs”—wage-labor was actually seen as a kind of slavery for much of ancient history. Yet today we’re told that jobs are an absolute necessity to feel “meaningful” and to have any kind of social outlet in today’s society.
Moreover, even when wages were paid, it was for a specific task and a specific duration (say, bringing in the harvest), not selling precisely 40 hours a week of your time to the highest bidder. Modern jobs are more of a babysitting operation than anything else. Of course people in earlier times had occupations and professions—farmers, craftsmen, warriors, artisans, clerks, priests, and so on. One of the biggest challenges capitalism faced was overcoming the previous work/leisure patterns and “disciplining” workers. Ryan Cooper sums up the very novelty of these ‘eternal’ notions:
The idea that work is a bedrock of society, that absolutely everyone who is not too old, too young, or disabled must have a job, was not handed down on tablets from Mount Sinai. It is the result of a historical development, one which may not continue forever. On the contrary, based on current trends, it is already breaking down.
The history of nearly universal labor participation is only about a century and a half old. Back in the early days of capitalism, demand for labor was so strong that all the ancient arrangements of society and family were shredded to accommodate it. Marx’s Capital famously described how women and very young children were press-ganged into the textile mills and coal mines, how the nighttime was colonized for additional shifts, and how capitalists fought to extend the working day to the very limits of human endurance (and often beyond).
The resulting misery, abuse, and wretchedness were so staggering, and the resulting class conflicts so intense, that various hard-won reforms were instituted: the eight-hour day, the weekend, the abolition of child labor, and so forth.
But this process of drawing more people into the labor force peaked in the late 1990s, when women finally finished joining the labor force (after having been forced out to make room for returning veterans after World War II). The valorization of work as the source of all that is good in life is to a great degree the result of the need to legitimate capital’s voracious demand for labor.
And here’s investigative journalist Yasha Levine recounting part of capitalism that have been retconned out of existence, citing the underappreciated work of economist Michael Perelman:
One thing that the historical record makes obviously clear is that Adam Smith and his laissez-faire buddies were a bunch of closet-case statists, who needed brutal government policies to whip the English peasantry into a good capitalistic workforce willing to accept wage slavery.
Francis Hutcheson, from whom Adam Smith learned all about the virtue of natural liberty, wrote: ”it is the one great design of civil laws to strengthen by political sanctions the several laws of nature. … The populace needs to be taught, and engaged by laws, into the best methods of managing their own affairs and exercising mechanic art.”
Yep, despite what you might have learned, the transition to a capitalistic society did not happen naturally or smoothly. See, English peasants didn’t want to give up their rural communal lifestyle, leave their land and go work for below-subsistence wages in shitty, dangerous factories being set up by a new, rich class of landowning capitalists. And for good reason, too. Using Adam Smith’s own estimates of factory wages being paid at the time in Scotland, a factory-peasant would have to toil for more than three days to buy a pair of commercially produced shoes. Or they could make their own traditional brogues using their own leather in a matter of hours, and spend the rest of the time getting wasted on ale. It’s really not much of a choice, is it?
But in order for capitalism to work, capitalists needed a pool of cheap, surplus labor. So what to do? Call in the National Guard!
Faced with a peasantry that didn’t feel like playing the role of slave, philosophers, economists, politicians, moralists and leading business figures began advocating for government action. Over time, they enacted a series of laws and measures designed to push peasants out of the old and into the new by destroying their traditional means of self-support.
“The brutal acts associated with the process of stripping the majority of the people of the means of producing for themselves might seem far removed from the laissez-faire reputation of classical political economy,” writes Perelman. “In reality, the dispossession of the majority of small-scale producers and the construction of laissez-faire are closely connected, so much so that Marx, or at least his translators, labeled this expropriation of the masses as “primitive accumulation.”
Indeed, average non-agricultural workers had much more autonomy and leisure time in the past, according to Perelman:
A medieval peasant had plenty of things to worry about, but the year-round control of daily life was not one of them. Perelman points out that in pre-capitalist societies, people toiled relatively few hours over the course of a year compared to what Americans work now. They labored like dogs during the harvest, but there was ample free time during the off-seasons. Holidays were abundant – as many as 200 per year. It was Karl Marx, in his Theory of Alienation, who saw that modern industrial production under capitalist conditions would rob workers of control of their lives as they lost control of their work. Unlike the blacksmith or the shoemaker who owned his shop, decided on his own working conditions, shaped his product, and had a say in how his goods were bartered or sold, the modern worker would have little autonomy. His relationships with the people at work would become impersonal and hollow.
Clearly, the technological wonders of our capitalist system have not released human beings from the burden of work. They have brought us more work. They have not brought most of us more freedom, but less.
Yet now we’re told that we need “jobs” to have any sort of meaning? Really?? WTF??? The vast majority of human existence has occurred outside of formalized wage work, as anthropologist James Suzman points out. Yet society will fall apart if we don’t submit ourselves to worker ‘discipline’ and scientific management? I don’t buy it. Whom does this narrative benefit, anyway?
In addition, laborers who recalled the previous autonomous lifeways–as late as the eighteenth century–were much more resistant to the constraints and insults of corporate capitalism. Now that the past has been retconned, we no longer even remember those past ways of being. Why is there no longer any resistance to the crushing or workers? Why do we not resist, even celebrate, the fortunes of today’s robber barons, unlike our forefathers? American resistance to our ruling elites has vanished. A lot of it has to do with the retconning of history, as this review of the Steve Fraser’s excellent book The Age of Acquiescence makes clear:
The fight against slavery had loosened the tongues of capitalism’s critics, forging a radical critique of the market’s capacity for barbarism. With bonded labor now illegal, the target pivoted to factory “wage slavery.” This comparison sounds strange to contemporary ears, but as Fraser reminds us, for European peasants and artisans, as well as American homesteaders, the idea of selling one’s labor for money was profoundly alien.
This is key to Fraser’s thesis. What fueled the resistance to the first Gilded Age, he argues, was the fact that many Americans had a recent memory of a different kind of economic system, whether in America or back in Europe. Many at the forefront of the resistance were actively fighting to protect a way of life, whether it was the family farm that was being lost to predatory creditors or small-scale artisanal businesses being wiped out by industrial capitalism. Having known something different from their grim present, they were capable of imagining — and fighting for — a radically better future.
It is this imaginative capacity that is missing from our second Gilded Age, a theme to which Fraser returns again and again in the latter half of the book. The latest inequality chasm has opened up at a time when there is no popular memory — in the United States, at least — of another kind of economic system. Whereas the activists and agitators of the first Gilded Age straddled two worlds, we find ourselves fully within capitalism’s matrix. So while we can demand slight improvements to our current conditions, we have a great deal of trouble believing in something else entirely.
A similar point is made in this review of the book in the London Review of Books:
Resistance to capitalism, it appeared, could look back as well as forwards; it was rooted not only in utopian visions of the future but also in concrete experience of the present and past, in older ways of being in the world, depending on family, craft, community, faith – all of which were threatened with dissolution (as Marx and Engels said) in ‘the icy waters of egotistical calculation’. Radical critiques of capitalism might well arise from conservative commitment to pre-capitalist ways of life, or memories of that life.
This wasn’t only an American pattern. E.P. Thompson, in The Making of the English Working Class (1963), rescued the Luddites and other artisans from ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’ by showing that their apparently reactionary attachments to custom and tradition created the leading edge of working-class consciousness. Soon American historians were making similar discoveries.
The Thompsonian history of the working class revealed a common pattern on both sides of the Atlantic: as workers became less grounded in traditional ways, their critique of capitalism tended to soften.
5. New technology and innovation increases leisure time.The Industrial Revolution was accomplished purely by technological advances with no dislocation or bloodshed, and it made everyone better off with no government intervention whatsoever.
If there’s one consistent trend in technology, it’s this – new technology increases the amount of work! Greater leisure has only and ever been delivered due to worker insurrection and deliberate organization, and not by the “invisible hand” of the Market. Furthermore, entire generations were sacrificed and written out of the historical narrative to make the Industrial Revolution seem like a harmless win-win. As this commenter to Slashdot writes:
“Luddites weren’t just angry conservatives (literal, not political) trying to maintain some mythical “way of life”, it was a movement stated due to massive unemployment brought on by innovation in the textile industry. It became a generic insult because we’re so far removed from their (very real) suffering.”
“There was [sic] close to 80 years of unemployment following the industrial revolution that is seldom talked about (if you took history in high school or college you got maybe a paragraph at best). This is because text book historians like to keep an upbeat tone and because school boards are often staffed by economically conservative (political now) who don’t want anyone speaking ill of capitalism. Go find a book called “A People’s History of the United States” if you want a sense for how screwed up American history actually is.”
5. Ancient people were uniformly ruled over by evil despots (i.e. ‘Oriental Despotism’). The “West” was all about freedom, justice, and democracy compared to the yoke of despotism the rest of the world lived under in primitive places such as Asia, Africa and the Americas.
As we’ve seen, Classical civilization–from the ancient Greeks to the Romans–was the most slave-driven economy in history to that point (only to be surpassed in the ‘Western’ colonial Americas). While that slavery decayed due to the dissolution of the Roman Empire, subsequent serfdom could hardly be considered freedom. By contrast, not all “primitive” societies were anywhere near as despotic as Western Europe and Imperial China were. That was a retconning of history to depict Western European civilization as “enlightened” in opposition to the ignorant “heathens.” For example, here is an excerpt from the book The Story of Manual Labor:
At no time in the history of ancient Mexico do we find that heartless oppression of the poor by the rich, that lack of humanity toward the wage-worker, that blackens the annals of so many European peoples. Luxury existed in the court of the Montezumas, it is true, but to support that luxury the poorer classes were not plunged into poverty and degradation. They were a simple people, and their needs were small and easily satisfied. Living in a tropical climate, upon a soil that repaid a thousandfold the slightest effort of the farmer; surrounded by forests full of game and rivers teeming with edible fish, the Mexican lived a life of comfort that to the Saxon churl or French bourgeoise of the same day would have seemed idyllic.
There are countless other examples, from long car commutes, to 20+ years of formalized schooling and expensive post-graduate degrees required for a job (or any formalized education at all), but I think you get the point.
As Chris Hedges poignantly writes in his latest book, America: the Farewell Tour:
If we do not know our history and our culture, if we accept the history and culture manufactured for us by the elites, we will never free ourselves from the forces of oppression. The recovery of memory and culture in the 1960s by radical movements terrified the elites. It gave people an understanding of their own power and agency. It articulated and celebrated the struggles of working men and women and the oppressed rather than the mythical beneficence of the powerful. It exposed the exploitation and mendacity of the ruling class. And that is why corporatists spent billions to crush and marginalize these movements and their histories in schools, culture, the press, and in our systems of entertainment.
Not only does the people have no precise consciousness of its own historical identity,” Gramsci lamented under fascism, “it is not even conscious of the historical identity or the exact limits of its adversary.
If we do not know our history we have no point of comparison. We cannot name the forces that control us or see the long continuity of capitalist oppression and resistance… p. 17
Anyway, here’s to a happy (or at least, tolerable) 2019, and I hope you all stick around and continue reading and commenting. Thanks!
If you feel like you are unsure of what is real and what is unreal then you are not alone. Our materialistic mode of life is accelerating and expanding so rapidly that it is saturating our modern cultures to the point of abstraction. Life in materially-privileged societies is increasingly shifting into a world of image and show. Many people today are living within their bubbles that are customized by all the digital conveniences tailored to individual needs. By being surrounded by conveniences that satisfy all our needs we are deliberately excluding so much else, including all of life’s serendipities.
Reality – whatever that is or was – has retreated behind a spectacle of make-believe that is playing at being the new, shimmering façade for the 21st century. One result of this is that things which once stood in opposition to one another are losing their meaning and becoming indistinguishable. That is, fixed identities that used to make life easy for us – us/them, friend/enemy, good/bad, and the rest – are now more like false realities. Life has shifted, or has been pushed, into a realm of invention that is being exploited ever more overtly by politicians, mainstream media, and their propaganda machinery. Out of this, a different sense of reality has emerged that succeeds in absorbing differences and contradictions and making them seem smooth rather than jagged. And the result is what I refer to as hyperreality.
The Hyperreality Pill
It is no longer the jagged pill we are forced to swallow, but the smooth pill we are willing to pop. And this smoothness is presented as succulent and easy to swallow. Our modern cultures want us to think that they are simple, smooth, and therefore require our willing obedience. As a consequence, many of us no longer know, or care in knowing, where the resistance is. And if we do feel the need to express resistance, we find ourselves at a loss of where it should be placed. The ‘smooth ideal’ is that society is managed so there can be no efficient resistance against it. This is what Herbert Marcuse once referred to as a ‘comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom.’ The hyperreal evades any real contact. It is like being at the end of a phone call when waiting for the automated voice service. This evasive strategy of the hyperreal has succeeded in obscuring any site of resistance. It’s all so ‘real,’ and yet of course it is not.
The original notion of hyperreality (a term borrowed from semiotics and postmodern theory) is an inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality, especially in technologically advanced societies. We are no longer faced with the threat of struggling with our shadows – we are now faced with the threat of our clones. This may be the radical illusion we are slipping into.
Yet the radical illusion of the world has been faced by all cultures. It has been described by mystics, symbolized by art, and struggled over by philosophers. The notion of illusion is not the main issue – rather, it is the medium through which it is conveyed. Or, more importantly, whether it is deliberately exaggerated and amplified. And how, by who – and why? Illusion is now perhaps our greatest industry, especially in western societies. Illusion is the consensus story we are told when growing up and which we all believe in. It’s the story that’s always been told because ‘that’s the way it’s always been.’ No wonder there is so much confusion, which is then fed by another great western industry – therapy.
Hyperreality plays a somewhat different game, with new rules and a different deck of cards. The paradox today is that those of us caught up in the game have no idea what the gameplay is. This is similar to a Jorge Luis Borges short story ‘The Lottery in Babylon’ where all activities in life are governed by the lottery; that is, by chance. And the lottery is run by ‘The Company,’ the rules of which not only are the rules of the game but become the rules of life. If that’s not confusing enough, then we need another hyperreality pill.
Please Sir, Can I Have Some More Hyperreality?
Hyperreality – the inability to distinguish the real from simulation – has become our new reality structure (perception set) and is constructed so that everyone believes in it and goes along with it. There is an underlying feeling that something is not quite right, yet our sense of reality often appears so extreme that it becomes ‘extra-plausible.’ It appears that strange walls of falsehood are being erected between the individual and what is real. The result is a distortion of how we see things. In other words, a perception distortion. To put it simply, hyperreality can be described as the normalization of delusion. When mass society adheres to a collective delusion we call it normal, or ‘reality,’ and if one person strays too far from this consensus thinking then we often label them as delusional, or unstable. It is as if we have been struck by on-coming car headlights and we are like dazed rabbits in the middle of the road. Better not sit around too long wagging our fluffy tails!
The hyperreal smoothes and soothes all contradictions. When once we thought we had ‘left’ politics and ‘right’ politics, these distinctions are now nullified. There is no more any ‘left’ or ‘right,’ only agendas that use varying means to acquire the same power. Any basis of truth has slipped into the sleek substitution – the simulation. Let me ask a question: Do we really think that the face of politics, for example, represents any vestige of truth? There is no more truth in politics than there is in someone wearing a laboratory coat in a television commercial trying to persuade us to buy a particular brand of detergent. There is persuasion and falsity that parades as an element of truth, yet it is a pure simulation. We have slipped into an age where the new ‘reality principle’ tells us that nothing is out of reach and that almost everything can be bought for a price. That is, the real is solid and exists as the flow of goods, services, desires, wants, pleasures, and an almost instant availability.
The question now is how far can the world go before yielding to a permanent state of hyperreality? Perhaps we are already in this state right now; after all, the hyperreal is contagious, like a chain reaction. In the hyperreal world the space of communications is condensed into the simultaneous now; marginal spaces on the periphery are now the hidden spaces where secrecy flows in offshore networks. Our networks of mobility and movement are fragmented into those that privilege some and exclude the many. Even the space above our heads is colonized by the satellites that spy on us. We have street views being watched and analyzed by Google. Our movement, speech, and text being spied on, processed, and interpreted by intelligent algorithms. We have injected a ‘smart-virus’ into the Earth in order to monitor all activity.
Our smooth digital flows allow – with precision and efficiency – for many aspects of our national and private economies to be shifted to the periphery where the secret networks operate. Only the hyperreal economies remain in the spotlight. There is now a global offshore world that moves in exclusive, mostly secretive networks. The phenomenon of offshoring has transformed peripheral and marginal places into central nodes. Offshored economies had mostly operated in the unseen shadows until the scandal of the Panama Papers in 2015. This massive leaking of documents led to political and celebrity scandals across the world, forcing many politicians to resign from their coveted positions. Presidents are now further pressed to release their tax returns to prove their legitimacy. Yet with the farce within the hyperreal, such players as US President Donald Trump can evade these processes with blatant deceptions. Offshored secrecy and surveillance are central to the functioning of contemporary societies.
Hyperreality is also about disappearance.
Please Sir, Can You Tell Me Where I Can Find Some Hyperreality?
Hyperreality is not only about speed and velocity; it is also about size – things are condensing into ever smaller spaces before disappearing altogether. Our urban habitats, information flows, financial transactions, have all shown increased density at the same time as velocity. Financial crashes today are more explosive because they affect so many more systems on a global level. They are dense in their complexity.
At the core of the condensed form what we once knew as the real begins to disappear. At the extremity of economics, the value of money disappears. At the extremity of warfare there is no real humanity, only insanity and immense sorrow, loss, and pain. At the extremity of sexuality there is no warmth only the pornography of lust and the commodity of desire. At the extremity of goodness there is the greed to do good. And even at the extremity of love there is no real love, but obsession and possession. Within these extremities we lose touch with anything that once came close to the real. We are in the slipstream of the hyperreal where the substitute replaces its former host. And the substitute is ‘always-on’ 24/7.
An ‘always-on’ hyperreal world also creates the illusion of mobility. Precisely because we can be connected throughout the world by the technologies in our pocket we are no longer required to move. We can be in the office while speaking with colleagues across the globe; or chatting with friends on another continent whilst remaining seated on our sofas. The contradiction here is that hypermobility creates its own sedentary life. This was explored in the sci-fi film Surrogates (2009) where people purchase remote-controlled humanoid robots to conduct their social life and affairs whilst the real person remains at home wired to their chair. Of course, everyone chooses a pretty or handsome humanoid to represent them (just like avatars in the online world) whilst their real bodies lie fat and underused in the unmoving chair.
We have yet little cultural experience to protect us from the invasion of simulation, artificiality, and the hyperreal. It has all happened too quickly for us and our senses have not fully adjusted. Some of us are struggling with aching bodies, restless sleep cycles, and tired eyes from all the screens in our lives. It is not motion sickness we are suffering from more and more but monitor sickness. One of the features of hyperreality is that communication occurs extremely rapidly, and we are bombarded with information almost constantly.
The hyperreal brings to the fore a convincing collection of disastrous non-events. Everything that is happening somehow gets reported, transmitted, and commented upon, creating an explosive babble of micro-impacts that dominate our superficial conversations. Then the next day they have disappeared into a black hole of amnesia and replaced by another twenty-four-hour dose of attention-topics. This hyperreal lifestyle creates a background noise; a seemingly endless low static buzz that infests our everyday spaces. It’s like the static we experience when changing radio channels, or when a digital television channel isn’t yet synchronized.
Many of us are living in a high-velocity, always-connected, post-historic world. For those people who are not yet attuned to this it is highly unpleasant. Things seemingly take place, but we are not quite sure. This is the dilemma. The hyperreal takes the wounded soul and Photoshops it into a caricature of its former self. It becomes glorified and falsely beautified into the less real, but with hyper-appeal. Events and issues are glossed over, making truths little more than quick sound-bites that flash before our eyes. Despite these absurdities we are still living in a world that is physically very real.
The Hyperreal in Overreaction and Overload
We ultra-react because we are continually under bombardment by a stream of information that keeps us in overload. We wish to know as much as possible about what is going on in our environment because this used to be an evolutionary survival strategy for our ancestors. Yet our distant ancestors didn’t have the Internet, smartphones, and a whole array of connected gadgets – they had clubs and hatchets. We’ve changed our rhythms, or rather our new technologically-pervasive environment has altered our rhythms, and we’ve not had sufficient time biologically, as well as psychologically, to adjust. We are waking up to a world in a new rhythm, with a new, faster speed and an altered resonance; and frankly for most of us it makes us feel as if we’re partially inebriated. The world is making our children respond to its hyperreal energy, and then subsequently we go about tranquilizing them. The rise of young schoolchildren in the modern world taking medications for ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) is phenomenal. In such a world it becomes much harder to practice and maintain certain types of attention, such as contemplative, reflective, and introspective thought. We are accessing information, yet less so are we translating this information into rich, interior states or memories.
It is as if we are afraid to be bored. We may feel that being bored – or being boring – is a failure; that we have failed to make use of all the information and opportunities at our fingertips. Yet the brain is continually working hard to process all information and external impacts, and so we need to take time off to relax, recharge, and replenish. We need to retain our attentiveness instead of giving in to the lazy approach of digitally-offloading our attention. We cannot navigate our own path through life by GPS. At the same time, retaining attention should not require artificial, chemical inducers. Nor should it require copious amounts of fantasy masquerading as the real. Many highly developed cultures are already basking in the ‘Disneyfication’ effect where western commercial pursuits, practices, and values are promoted around the world as a panacea for all. Disneyfication gives us bigger, faster, and better entertainment that’s the same the world over – US mass culture values on the global stage. Disneyfication hides the ‘real’ places, yet paradoxically many people seem to prefer being in the imaginary. Perhaps its real function is to make us believe that the rest of society is imaginary and only that which resides within the walls of Disney is real. In the hyperreal the spectacle becomes the lived space of our social lives. Disney is colonizing our lives and that colonization becomes the new world map.
The Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges famously wrote of a great Empire that created a map that was so detailed it was as large as the Empire itself. The actual map grew and decayed as the Empire itself conquered or lost territory. When the Empire finally crumbled, all that remained was the map. This ‘imaginary map’ finally became the only remaining reality of the great Empire: a simulation of the once physical reality that has now been colonized by its own spectacle. This is where the Real loses its center and becomes origin-less.
The hyperreal too evades a sense of origin, which accounts for the rise in nostalgia, retro-revival, and people dressing up as superheroes. Star trek conventions, speaking Klingon, and entering a whole new universe meshes with the online worlds and their avatars. In the realm of the hyperreal the origin is origin-less, and real place is place-less. We are given new maps of celebration and celebrity that hide a commodity fetishism – yet where is the meaning? We crave for meaning.
The hyperreal incorporates everything within itself. There is no outer or inner within its realm. The only escape is a form of transcendence – a process or act of gnosis – that can see through the superficiality of the spectacle. This is the current dilemma – our systems are extending but not transcending themselves. Many of us are in this situation: we go for more of the same, only a little bit different. The answer lies in becoming beyond difference. Life has always been a sequence of events that we ascribe meaning too. When we experience this sequence in a reasonable enough form then we create our meanings. It is when this sequence of events and signs becomes asymmetrical, non-linear, or accelerated beyond our limits of standardized perception that we begin to lose our ability to ascribe significance to it. Hyperreality is the zone where this slippage occurs and meaning loses its anchorage. The result is that we feel we are being carried away from ourselves. We are being pulled into the flux and flow of this hyperreality and we lose sight of the ground. Not only the grounded-ness of place, but also our inner ground – that part of us which makes us feel human. It is the soulful part of us that we are losing.
In these hyperreal times we need to find a new balance and arrangement between things. Our old arrangements are shifting, and those things once in perceived stability and order are losing their moorings. We should remember that the ‘Real’ exists somewhere inside of us and keep this in mind as the world outside continues its head-long rush into a frenetic, whirlwind of chaotic events. In the end, we can only truly rely on our own good sense and intuition. As Václev Havel stated in one of his addresses, ‘Transcendence is the only real alternative to extinction.’
We must try to remain stable and as sane as possible as life accelerates into its own hyperreality. Otherwise we may not find our own center within the global maelstrom. The ride has only just begun.
The fact that lies and cover stories are now the official norm only makes us love our servitude with greater devotion.
We can summarize the current era in one sentence: truth is what we hide, self-serving cover stories are what we sell. Jean-Claude Juncker’s famous quote captures the essence of the era: “When it becomes serious, you have to lie.”
And when does it become serious? When the hidden facts of the matter might be revealed to the general public. Given the regularity of vast troves of well-hidden data being made public by whistleblowers and white-hat hackers, it’s basically serious all the time now, and hence the official default everywhere is:truth is what we hide, self-serving cover stories are what we sell.
The self-serving cover stories always tout the nobility of the elite issuing the PR: we in the Federal Reserve saved civilization by saving the Too Big To Fail Banks (barf); we in the corporate media do investigative reporting without bias (barf); we in central government only lie to protect you from unpleasant realities–it’s for your own good (barf); we in the NSA, CIA and FBI only lie because it’s our job to lie, and so on.
Three recent essays speak to the degradation of data and factual records in favor of self-serving cover stories and corrosive political correctness.
“It’s not just that isolated individuals are unmasked as corrupt or self-interested (something that is as old as politics), but that the establishment itself starts to appear deceitful and dubious. The distinctive scandals of the 21st century are a combination of some very basic and timeless moral failings (greed and dishonesty) with technologies of exposure that expose malpractice on an unprecedented scale, and with far more dramatic results.
Perhaps the most important feature of all these revelations was that they were definitely scandals, and not merely failures: they involved deliberate efforts to defraud or mislead. Several involved sustained cover-ups, delaying the moment of truth for as long as possible.
(The selective coverage) “generated a sense of a media class who were adept at exposing others, but equally expert at concealing the truth of their own behaviours.
Several of the defining scandals of the past decade have been on a scale so vast that they exceed any individual’s responsibility. The Edward Snowden revelations of 2013, the Panama Papers leak of 2015 and the HSBC files (revealing organised tax evasion) all involved the release of tens of thousands or even millions of documents. Paper-based bureaucracies never faced threats to their legitimacy on this scale.”
When I was a young reporter, I was taught that there were almost always two sides to a story and often more. I was expected to seek out those alternative views, not dismiss them or pretend they didn’t exist. I also realized that finding the truth often required digging beneath the surface and not just picking up the convenient explanation sitting out in the open.
But the major Western news outlets began to see journalism differently. It became their strange duty to shut down questioning of the Official Story, even when the Official Story had major holes and made little sense, even when the evidence went in a different direction and serious analysts were disputing the groupthink.
Looking back over the past two decades, I wish I could say that the media trend that we detected in the mid-1990s had been reversed. But, if anything, it’s grown worse. The major Western news outlets now conflate the discrete difficulties from made-up “fake news” and baseless “conspiracy theories” with responsible dissenting analyses. All get thrown into the same pot and subjected to disdain and ridicule.
In truth, facts today are deemed controversial if they deviate from accepted narratives, and professors must self-censor out of fear of being condemned and losing their jobs.
Based on conversations I’ve had with colleagues still working in academia and from what I can tell about recent cases of censorship, the antagonism is primarily from left-leaning colleagues attacking other liberals.
These instances are indicative of a larger, worrisome trend – instead of debating contentious ideas, those in opposition to them throw words ending in “-phobic” around, shutting the conversation down and pretending they don’t exist.
For those who say ideas that denigrate members of society shouldn’t be entertained, silencing the debate doesn’t make hateful beliefs go away. In many cases, it isn’t controversial findings that pose a threat; the threat comes from the possibility that others will use these facts to justify discrimination. But it’s important that we distinguish between an idea and the researcher putting forth that idea, and the potential for bad behaviour.
With academics avoiding entire areas of research as a result, knowledge currently being produced is constrained, replaced by beliefs that are pleasant-sounding but biased, or downright nonsensical. The recent “grievance studies” investigation, led by academics Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose, laid bare how bad the problem has become. The trio managed to get seven fake papers (but oh-so politically correct and hence “good to go”–CHS) accepted in high-ranking humanities journals.
In a consumerist-based culture accustomed to 24/7 selling of one self-serving story or another, the fact that lies and cover stories are now the official norm only makes us love our servitude with greater devotion. I’ve noticed a new twist on self-serving propaganda: an alternative opinion isn’t debated, it’s debunked, as if questioning the official narrative is by definition a “conspiracy theory” that can be “debunked” by repeating the official self-serving cover story enough times.
A White House report recently proclaimed that the “War on Poverty is largely over and a success.” United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley said it was “ridiculous for the United Nations to examine poverty in America.”
Well-positioned Americans must talk like this, of course, because admitting the debilitating state of poverty in America might provoke feelings of guilt for 35 years of oppressive economic policies. Wealthier people need to take an honest look at the facts. They need to face reality as it sadly exists in America today.
1 in 7 Americans is Part of the World’s Poorest 10%
According to the Credit Suisse 2018 Global Wealth Databook, 34 million American adults are among the world’s poorest 10%. How is that possible? In a word, debt. In more excruciating words: stifling, misery-inducing, deadly amounts of debt for the poorest Americans. And it goes beyond dollars to the “deaths of despair” caused by the stresses of inferior health care coverage, stagnating incomes, and out-of-control inequality.
Numerous sources report on the rising debt for the poor half of America, especially for the lowest income group, and largely because of health care and education costs. Since 2008 consumer debt has risen almost 50 percent. The percentage of families with more debt than savings is higher now than at any time since 1962.
It could be argued that Scandinavian countries face the same degrees of debt as Americans. But far less of the debt is for health and education costs. And the Scandinavian safety net is renowned for its generous provisions for all citizens.
Half of us Are in or Near Poverty
$1 in expenses twenty years ago is now $1.25. $1 in earnings twenty years ago is now still $1.
More and more Americans are facing financial difficulty. Estimates of adults living from paycheck to paycheck range from half to 60 percent to 78 percent. Any sign of a recession would be devastating for most of us.
It’s estimated that a typical U.S. household needs about $60,000 annually to meet all expenses. That’s only manageable if two adults are working full-time for $15 per hour. Beyond that, little cushion exists. No American adult in the bottom 40% has more than $31,124 in total wealth, including house and car and savings (Table 3-4).
Booming Economy, Low Unemployment, and Other Deceptions
While 1 in 7 Americans is part of the world’s poorest 10%, nearly 3 in 7 Americans are part of the world’s richest 10%. The economy is booming for THEM. Yet the Wall Street Journal has the arrogance to claim that “Americans traditionally left behind…are reaping the benefits..”
How about the “jobs for everyone” fantasy? The official unemployment rate, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) itself, is based on employees “who did any work for pay or profit during the survey reference week.” The BLS workforce includes contingent and alternative employment arrangements that make up about 10% of the workforce. It includes part-time workers (even one hour a week!), who make up about 16% of the workforce. And, inexplicably, it fails to count as unemployed those who have given up looking for work – 4% more Americans than in the year 2000.
Many of today’s ‘gig’ jobs don’t pay a living wage, and most have no retirement or health benefits, no job security, no government regulations backing them, and usually a longer work day, with many people putting in 10- to 12-hour days for $13 per hour or less. According to a New York Times report, “41.7 million laborers – nearly a third of the American work force – earn less than $12 an hour, and almost none of their employers offer health insurance.”
Safety Net Failures
While it’s true that the U.S. spends a greater percentage of its GDP on social safety net programs than developing countries, Americans generally have to face much higher costs for housing, heating, transportation, child care, and other basic expenses.
Beyond this, there are significant shortcomings in American social protections, as pointed out by the UN. These include the “shockingly high number of children living in poverty” and the “reliance on criminalization to conceal the underlying poverty problem.” Furthermore, with the call for work requirements comes the realization that the job market for the poorest Americans is “extraordinarily limited.”
Poverty: Not Just a Number
Poverty is living without health care, and choosing the life-threatening alternative of opioid painkillers. Poverty is the stress of overwhelming debt; the steady decline of jobs that pay enough to support a family; the inability to afford a move to a desired neighborhood; the deadening impact of inequality on physical and mental well-being.
The United Nations describes America as a nation near the bottom of the developed world in safety net support and economic mobility, with its citizens living “shorter and sicker lives compared to those living in all other rich democracies,” with the highest infant mortality rate in the developed world, the world’s highest incarceration rate, and the highest obesity levels.
Low-income Americans are often surrounded by food deserts, with insufficient access to clean water and sanitation, and with the pollution levels of third-world countries. The poorest among us are even susceptible – unbelievably – to rare tropical diseases and once-eradicated scourges like hookworm.
The extreme levels of American poverty and inequality are ripping apart once-interdependent communities with mental health and homelessness problems, and with a surge in drug and alcohol and suicide“deaths of despair.”
Part of the definition of poverty is “the state of being inferior in quality.” As one of the most unequal nations in the entire world, America is also, in many ways, one of the most poverty-stricken.
While it is now very late in the life cycle of homo sapiens, with extinction now due to consign us to Earth’s fossil record – see ‘Will humans be extinct by 2026?’ – I would like to make a belated pitch for the importance of the human individual and why nurturing each individual’s uniqueness is so important even if it is now probably too late.
‘Why are you writing about this?’ you might ask, adding that many people accept that each one of us is unique, important and deserves the opportunities and support necessary to live a fulfilling life according to our own culture and choices. It is just the sexists, racists, bigots (religious and otherwise), upper class, governments, corporations, members of the global elite, and some other categories of people, as well as many organizations, particularly those that are violent, that do not.
Well, I wish that this was true. But I am troubled by the overwhelming evidence that suggests it is not. In fact, from my own observations and investigations, I see virtually no evidence that anyone really works to actively nurture the uniqueness of individual human beings. The whole purpose of socialization is to terrorize the child into surrendering their unique individuality so that they become like everyone else.
Of course, you might counter my claim by noting that socialization is necessary to make the child fit into their society but once they have done so, they can make certain choices of their own. This particularly applies once the individual is an adolescent or an adult when, for example, they can choose their own school subjects (from the range offered), their work (from the employment options available), decide for whom they will vote to govern them (from a narrow selection of individuals and political parties) if they live in a ‘democracy’ and, if they work hard enough at socially-approved employment and thereby accumulate enough wealth while living in a relatively wealthy industrial society, they can also choose the foods, clothing, housing, entertainment and travel options they will consume.
Needless to say, to children we do not even offer this parody of ‘freedom’ whether they live in an impoverished country where many of these opportunities are not available or even if they live in a wealthy industrialized one. Under the unending threat of violence (usually labeled ‘punishment’ to obscure from ourselves that we are using violence) by parents, teachers, religious figures and adults generally, children are coerced into doing what we believe is in their ‘best interests’ as we define them. We do not listen to children so that they can tell us what they need in order to travel their own unique life journey.
You might argue that children do not have this capacity to tell us what they need. But this is not my experience and I wonder if it is really yours. Most parents are ready to complain about the enormous effort (that is, violence) it takes ‘to train a child to do as they are told’; that is, to obey the orders of all adults in all contexts.
But because each adult, when they were a child, was terrorized into unconsciously accepting the importance of obedience, only the rarest individual ever reaches a point in life where they are able to consciously reflect on their own childhood and ask fundamental questions about it. Questions such as these: ‘Why do I believe that obedience is so important? And is it?’, ‘Is terrorizing a child into obedience really the best way to raise a child?’ and ‘What would happen if I listened to a child and let them guide me on the support they need to become their own unique Self?’
Tragically, it is that most hallowed of institutions – school – which I call ‘prison for children’ where much of the damage is done. Designed to terrorize children into obedience and conformity on the basis that ‘one size fits all’, school destroys the physical, sensory, intellectual and emotional capacities of children churning out individuals with near-zero capacity to feel anything profound, think creatively and behave powerfully with integrity.
That is, we take the uniquely gifted baby at the moment of birth and turn them into an individual who has multiple lifetime disabilities, physically, sensorily, intellectually and emotionally. For further information and a fuller explanation with links to background documentation, see ‘Do We Want School or Education?’
Of course, this suits governments and those corporations who want vast quantities of cheap labor to work as soldiers, in a factory or at one of the other dangerous and/or meaningless jobs that qualify as ‘employment’ in the modern economy. But before you conclude that it is only working class employment that is in this category, only the rarest of professionals, in any industry, has the capacity to feel deeply, think genuinely creatively (as distinct from within the narrow parameters of their profession) and to act powerfully with integrity. In short, those who work 8-5, five days (or more) a week, doing what others trained them to do at University or elsewhere, are simply being better rewarded for surrendering their soul as a child.
But, unfortunately, it is not school that does the most damage. All children within the childhood home experience extensive ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence, and many experience ‘visible’ violence as well. These are comprehensively explained in ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.
The inevitable outcome of this violence is that the child suppresses their awareness of the feelings that would have guided them to behave most functionally in each and every circumstance of their life (including about whether or not to attend school). Moreover, a consequence of suppressing their awareness of these feelings is that the child is left with an (unconscious) legacy of fear, self hatred and powerlessness, precisely because they have been terrorized into suppressing their own Self-will and obeying the will of another.
So by the time the child is forced to attend school – no free choices about this, you may have noted, with homeschooling (to an externally-imposed syllabus) only marginally less violent – they have already been terrorized into submission, doing what they have learned is least terrifying and, hopefully, also gains them approval by adults.
Thus, virtually all children are utterly powerless to perceive the world clearly, analyze it, make intelligent and moral choices about how to respond, and to then behave powerfully in doing so. And a decade, more or less, of school makes sure that only the rarest of individuals survives to achieve some version of their evolutionary potential, which required a nurturing, not terrifying, social environment.
In short, this person is not an individual with an unshakable sense of their own self-worth who, as a result, inherently values the worth of all others. They are simply a person who has been terrorized into conformity with a set of localized norms by the significant adults in their life.
At its worst, the outcome is an adult who is so devoid of a Self that they identify with other similarly and equally damaged individuals and then violently attack people in ‘legitimized victim groups’. See, for example, ‘What is Generation Identity?’ This individual might be a prominent political leader who wages war against other national groups that are ‘different’, it might be a corporate executive who exploits people in other parts of the world who are ‘different’ or it might be an ‘ordinary’ person who hurls abuse at someone in their neighborhood who is ‘different’.
But the most common outcome is those who are simply too scared and powerless to respond meaningfully to the violence in our world and particularly the extinction-threatening assault on Earth’s biosphere.
And so, at this point in human history, it is extraordinarily difficult to get the typical human being to focus their attention on reality (including military, economic and ecological reality), astutely observe the phenomena presented, analyze the evidence in relation to it, devise (or seek out) a thoughtful strategy to resolve any problem or conflict that has arisen without resorting to violence, and to then behave appropriately, powerfully and with integrity in response.
Hence, instead of nurturing emotionally and intellectually resourceful and resilient individuals who are engaged with the world and capable of identifying and grappling powerfully with problems and conflicts early so that they do not spiral out of control, we are now faced with a last-ditch fight to avert our own extinction with most people still living in the delusion that we have an ‘end of century’ timeframe. See ‘Human Extinction by 2026? A Last Ditch Strategy to Fight for Human Survival’. How intelligent is that?
So can we get out of this mess?
I don’t know and, frankly, I doubt it. But if you want to be part of the effort to try, consider making ‘My Promise to Children’, which particularly requires the capacity to listen deeply to children – see ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’ – so that we start to nurture each child to become the extraordinarily powerful individual that is built into their genetic potential.
And we don’t have to settle for just improving how we relate to children. We can improve our own functionality and access our conscience and courage too. How? See ‘Putting Feelings First’.
If you are following the evidence in relation to the imminent extinction of human beings – see articles above – rather than the garbage published in the corporate media, and want to respond powerfully, consider joining those participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’.
So how important is the human individual? In the context of life on Earth at the current time, I simply respond with ‘What is more important?’
We can do nothing about our fate if we do not value, above all else, the human individual and their potential. Including our own. This potential is difficult to nurture; it is easily destroyed.
But, as Mohandas K. Gandhi once observed in one of his many memorable lines: ‘The individual is the one supreme consideration.’
And remember, if the challenge to honour the human individual and to act powerfully yourself (as vital parts of our strategy to avert human extinction) sounds daunting, Gandhi also noted that ‘Whatever you do may seem insignificant to you, but it is most important that you do it.’
In essence, the foundation of any strategy for human survival must be the powerful individual. It is this individual who will mobilize some of those around them simply by making their own life-enhancing behavioural choices consciously and courageously.
Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here. http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com
Robert J. Burrowes
P.O. Box 68
Daylesford, Victoria 3460
Australia
“I must create a system or be enslaved by another Man’s.” ~William Blake
Becoming free is creating your own virtuous system despite being outflanked by unvirtuous systems controlled by unvirtuous men. It is cultivating a healthy way of living despite the unhealthy ways of unhealthy men. It’s becoming so “absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion” (Albert Camus). Then it’s building “a new model that makes the existing model obsolete” (Buckminster Fuller).
But first, we must ask ourselves what we are freeing ourselves for before asking ourselves what we are freeing ourselves from. The answer to that question, what are we freeing ourselves for, will be the foundation of our freedom, the cornerstone of our virtue, the building blocks of a healthier way of being human in the world.
Understand: we must be critical and highly skeptical of any “answer” that should arise from asking this most vital of questions. For if our “answer” is deemed invalid/unhealthy by the dictates of universal law (what’s healthy and what’s not), then it should be discarded as invalid/unhealthy for any humans who are attempting to be virtuous and healthy. Also, every “answer” should remain flexible and adaptable lest it become stagnant, rigid, dogmatic, tyrannical, or stuck in its ways.
A virtuous system follows the Golden Rule and the Nonaggression Principle:
“Beware of the good and the just! They like to crucify those who invent their own virtue for themselves.” ~Nietzsche
As human beings there is no way around the fact that we are social creatures. We need each other to survive in a hostile (entropic) universe. Therefore, the golden rule is paramount.
It is imperative that whatever we are freeing ourselves for does not overreach or impede the health and welfare of others. A truly virtuous system never forces its virtue onto others. The moment a so-called virtuous system forces its virtue or values onto others, it ceases to be virtuous. There’s no way around this absolute fact. Any attempt to “get around it” is a violation of the golden rule and therefore unvirtuous.
Likewise, it is vital that whatever we are freeing ourselves for does not violate the nonaggression principle (See caveat). A truly virtuous system is never directly violent. It is only ever violent in self-defense. The moment a so-called virtuous system becomes directly violent it ceases to be virtuous. The only moral exception to this fact is when violence is necessary to defend against direct violence –and, even then, only as a last resort. Any attempt to use violence to force others into compliance is a violation of the nonaggression principle and therefore unvirtuous.
Caveat: Being social animals in an environment with finite resources is highly complicated. To the extent that our virtuous system indirectly pollutes the environment it gets a pass for somewhat violating the nonaggression principle. The tragedy of the commons is a very real and sometimes unavoidable paradox. But, and here’s the rub, to the extent that our virtuous system directly pollutes the environment it is in direct violation of the nonaggression principle and therefore can no longer be considered virtuous.
A healthy system is sustainable, moral, and eco-conscious:
“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” ~ Aldo Leopold
How do we know the current system (society) is unsustainable, immoral and even ecocidal, and thus unfit for healthy and virtuous people? It’s self-evident…
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 creates unhealthy individuals it needs to evolve with.
Any system that forces its people to breathe polluted air, drink polluted water, eat polluted food and then continues to do all the things that causes that pollution is a profoundly sick society. Krishnamurti’s quote is a powerful reminder of this vital fact: “It’s no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
The solution is to create a system that is sustainable, moral, and eco-conscious; to create a healthy system that makes the unhealthy system obsolete.
The problem is that the unhealthy system overreaches. It overreaches with its pollution and it overreaches with its power. So almost any attempt at creating a healthier system will have to be covert and strategically defensive. Both in its attempt to create a healthy system and in its attempt to thwart the encroaching unhealthy system. It will have to be clandestine and stealthy on the one hand, and creative and daring on the other hand.
This will probably result in pockets of horizontal democracy on the group level: sustainable communes, ecovillages, and various types of anarchist groups. While on the individual level it will probably result in plenty of free-range humans, ninjaneers, eco-warriors, and various types of sustainable hermits.
The bottom line: Discovering a healthy and virtuous answer to the question ‘what are we freeing ourselves for?’ is no easy feat. It’s not for the faint of heart. It will take counterintuitive reasoning. 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. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said:
“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.”
But, in the end, it will have been worth it. For you will have discovered moral virtue. You will have discovered provident health. You will have discovered authentic freedom. And your conscience will have finally been cleared.
Hallucination (huh-loo-suh–ney-shuh n) : a sensory experience of something that does not exist outside the mind, caused by various physical and mental disorders, or by reaction to certain toxic substances, and usually manifested as visual or auditory images.
Psychiatry has built an entire infrastructure around the definition of normal.
In my training, I learned clinical, diagnostic terms like “magical thinking” to pedantically dismiss any flourishes of wonderment, “delusions of reference” to coldly malign any experience of meaning or synchronicity, and even “grandiosity” if you might deign to think too much of yourself.
When human behavior is medicalized, the foundation of a shared belief system is set up. Some behaviors are unacceptable, some are not. And conforming to these expectations – even through force and involuntary submission, retention, and medication – is essential to reinforcing what is considered normal. Those who are not performing their expected part in the machinery of this system are deemed less or non-functional (the quantification of which, psychiatry assigns a numerical value based on the Global Assessment of Functioning metric scale). But what if it is, as Krishnamurti warned, “no measure of health to be well-adapted to a profoundly sick society”? What if being “functional” requires buying into an entire matrix of illusions, many of which require a total divorce from one’s own soul?
Mental Illness as an indicator of sensitivity
It’s my belief that those who are mentally ill are the canaries in this coal mine. Whose bodies, minds, and spirits are exquisitely sensitive to all that is off, amiss, misaligned, and divergent from truth. What if these illnesses are a special invitation to wake up, to embody, and to move through a dark night, a tight passage, shedding one more artificial skin, revealing a layer closer to an unfettered experience of being, of freedom, and of joy. A sometimes loud reminder to stop eating chemical food, stop participating in the poisoning of this planet, stop working just to work, and start making room for whatever it takes to awaken.
In this case, those hallucinating are those who still believe, despite all of the evidence to the contrary, that we are, as my favorite philosopher, Alan Watts says, flesh robots on a dead rock, spinning out in the middle of nowhere. That the natural world is an indifferent backdrop subject to random forces that we must shield ourselves from. Those who still believe, despite the grossly exposed limitations of the model, that Newtonian physics – linear cause and effect, what you get out is what you put in, push-pull hydraulics – reigns over subtler, nonlinear quantum processes. Quantum physics introduces all manner of uncomfortable concepts to those firmly fixated on the delusional belief that there is an objective, quantifiable, measurable reality of known variables that predictably govern a non-sentient universe.
What if this is a collectively held delusion? Those who have had mystical experiences know that it is but an illusion that our selfness is between our ears and behind our eyes, and that the natural world needs to be managed and controlled. We know that we emerge from the complexity of beingness on this planet and that there is no objective good and bad, and perhaps no objective anything at all.
Alan Watts, puts it this way:
I wonder what you mean when you use the word I.
I’ve been very interested in this problem for a long, long time. And I’ve come to the conclusion that what most civilized people mean by that word is a hallucination—that is to say a false sense of personal identity that is at complete variance with the facts of nature.
And as a result of having a false sense of identity, we act in a way that is inappropriate to our natural environment. And when that inappropriate way of action is magnified by a very powerful technology, we swiftly begin to see the results of a profound discord between man and nature.
As is well known, we are now in the process of destroying our environment as a result of an attempt to conquer it and master it. And we have not realized therefore that our environment is not something other than ourselves.
In assuming that it is, we have made a great mistake and are now paying the price for it.
Resolving the hallucinations of the dominant narrative
The thing is, that a hallucination that becomes aware of itself, dissolves, if it is, indeed a hallucination. In the case of the dominant belief system – the most collectively shared hallucination – this is called awakening and it has everything to do with generating an awareness of the story that we have been telling ourselves.
We have been telling ourselves that we control our lives – or we wouldn’t experience anxiety.
We have been telling ourselves that we are supposed to simply feel ok with what is happening on this planet – or we wouldn’t feel depressed.
We have been telling ourselves that the world is unsafe – or we wouldn’t feel paranoid.
We have been telling ourselves to stay in line, punch the clock, and behave – or we wouldn’t get manic.
So what if we simply turn the light on and wake up to the story and recognize it as such.
Here’s how to wake up and dissolve the illusion:
1. Feel better
Information, in and of itself, changes nothing. We have to experience the truth, viscerally, for our bodies, minds, and spirits to shift and open. In order to generate the conditions of a reunion with the natural world, and a felt sense of having emerged from it, it becomes critical to experience the environment as an inextricable part of oneself. This means that nature is rendered sacred again. The human organism is seen as a miracle before which your consciousness bows. In this light, the only proper comportment is to strip away chemicals and the participation in a chemical free lifestyle, eat whole organic food, and begin the process of healing from many years of desecration. It is my belief that these simple behaviors – being in nature, cleaning up your consumerism, your eating, and beginning to detox – not only result in feeling better but in feeling apart, feeling held, and feeling a deep sense of ok-ness that stands in sharp contrast to the feeling of discord generated by the modern lifestyle.
2. Know better
Once you feel better, you are ready to learn about why. This is a good time to explore the wisdom of our forefathers and mothers, of indigenous cultures, and of modern visionaries. If you’re attracted to science as a means of narrating our shared perceptions, then begin to enjoy a growing body of science that tells a totally different story about the natural world, healing, and the wonder of this planet. Continue to look at the places where you may still be asleep, delusional, or hallucinating!
Part of this process is claiming radical responsibility for your journey, your decisions, and your experience. If you can reclaim all of the energy you are putting towards blaming, resenting, hating, and otherwise feeling victimized, you will be amazed at the experience of empowerment that results. Deeper change, reflexive self-examination, and compassion towards others comes from this shift in perspective.
3. Do better
Once you feel better and you know better, then you are ready to live differently – to do better. But here’s the surprising news. There’s no pilgrimage required, no major planning or strategy, no big decisions. Doing better, in an awakened state, involves simply caring for yourself – kneeling at the altar of your body and getting clear enough to see the programs of fear and control when they creep back into your consciousness. Getting clear involves pausing, every day.
This is how you keep the “I” illusion at bay. You resist the temptation to do, fix, better yourself and your life circumstances endlessly. You let it be. You say yes, I accept. And you work with the flow. You give to others even when you feel most in need. In short, you burn your stories and you have faith. Watts says,
“To have faith is like when you trust yourself to the water. You don’t grab hold of the water when you swim, because if you do you will become stiff and tight in the water, and sink. You have to relax, and the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging, and holding on. In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe becomes a person who has no faith at all. Instead they are holding tight. But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.”
Call it living in the Matrix, call it hallucinating, call it Biopolitic, or Maya, if you live life according to what mainstream media, government, and appointed authorities say is, there will come a time when you crack. Freak out. Or choose to opt out. Or when you simply leave the premises. You’ll be labeled with ADHD, Generalized Anxiety, Major Depression, Schizophrenia, or Bipolar Disorder. You will be told you are the sick one, that something is wrong with your inbuilt hardware. The figurative bone will be pointed at you and the collective will support your containment, restraint, and oppression to keep the infrastructure of the illusion intact.
But the mortar is cracking. Too many of us who have felt the truth that is spirituality. To be infused with spirit. To feel your own soul. To stop and inspire, breathe, and understand that without the entire ecosystem of beingness on this planet, you yourself are nothing. And once you have felt the fearlessness of this faith, you can never be controlled again, and you are finally free.
Transcript:
I wonder what you mean when you use the word I.
I’ve been very interested in this problem for a long, long time. And I’ve come to the conclusion that what most civilized people mean by that word is a hallucination—that is to say a false sense of personal identity that is at complete variance with the facts of nature.
And as a result of having a false sense of identity, we act in a way that is inappropriate to our natural environment. And when that inappropriate way of action is magnified by a very powerful technology, we swiftly begin to see the results of a profound discord between man and nature.
As is well known, we are now in the process of destroying our environment as a result of an attempt to conquer it and master it. And we have not realized therefore that our environment is not something other than ourselves.
In assuming that it is, we have made a great mistake and are now paying the price for it.
But most people would agree with the lines of the poet who said “I, a stranger and afraid. In a world I never made” because we have the strong sensation that our own being inside our skin is extremely different from the world outside our skin, that while there may be intelligence inside human skins, and while there may be values and loving feelings, outside the skin is a world of mechanical process which does not give a damn about any individual and which is basically unintelligent, being gyrations of blind force, and so far as the merely biological world is concerned, gyrations of libido, which is Freud’s word for “blind lust.”
It should be obvious that the human being goes with the rest of the universe even though we say in popular speech “I came into this world.”
Now, it is not true that you came into this world. You came out of it in the same way as a flower comes out of a plant or a fruit comes out of a tree. And as an apple tree apples, the solar system in which we live, and therefore the galaxy in which we live, and therefore the system of galaxies in which we live, that system peoples. And therefore, people are an expression of its energy and of its nature.
If people are intelligent—and I suppose we have to grant that if—then the energy which people express must also be intelligent because one does not gather figs from thistles and grapes from thorns. But it does not occur, you see, to the ordinary civilized person to regard himself or herself as an expression of the whole universe. It should be obvious that we cannot exist except in an environment of earth, air, water, and solar temperature, that all these things go with us and are as important to us, albeit outside our skins, as our internal organs, heart, stomach, brain, and so forth.
Now, if then we cannot describe the behavior of organisms without at the same time describing the behavior of their environments, we should realize that we have a new entity of description—not the individual organism alone, but what would now be called a field of behavior, which we must call rather clumsily the “organism environment.” You go with your environment in the same way as your head goes with the rest of your body. You do not find in nature faces arriving in the world sui generis; they go with a body.
But also, bodies do not arrive in a world which would be, for example, a plane, ball of scrubbed rock floating without an atmosphere far away from a star. That will not grow bodies. There is no soil for bodies. There is no complexity of environment which is body-producing.
So, bodies go with a very complicated natural environment. And if the head goes with the body, and the body goes with the environment, the body is as much an integral part of the environment as the head is part of the body.
It is deceptive of course because the human being is not rooted to the ground like a tree. A human being moves about and therefore can shift from one environment to another. But these shifts are superficial. The basic environment of the planet remains a constant. And if the human being leaves the planet, he has to take with him a canned version of the planetary environment.
Now, we are not really aware of this. Upon taking thought and due consideration, it does occur to us, yes, indeed, we do need that environment. But in the ordinary way, we don’t feel it, that is to say we don’t have a vivid sensation of belonging to our environment in the same way that we have a vivid sensation of being an ego inside a bag of skin located mostly in the skull about halfway between the ears and a little way behind the eyes. And it issues in these disastrous results of the ego which, according to 19th century common sense, feels that it is a fluke in nature, and that if it does not fight nature, it will not be able to maintain its status as intelligent fluke.
So, the geneticists are now saying, and many others are now saying, that man must take the course of his evolution into his own hands. He can no longer trust the wiggly, random, and unintelligible processes of nature to develop him any further, but he must interfere with his own intelligence, and through genetic alterations, breed the kind of people who will be viable for human society and that sort of thing.
Now, this I submit is a ghastly error because human intelligence has a very serious limitation. That limitation is that it is a scanning system of conscious attention which is linear—that is to say it examines the world in lines rather as he would pass the beam of a flashlight across a room (or a spotlight).
That’s why our education takes so long. It takes so long because we have to scan miles of lines of print. And we regard that, you see, as basic information.
Now, the universe does not come at us in lines. It comes at us in a multi-dimensional continuum in which everything is happening all together everywhere at once. And it comes at us much too quickly to be translated into lines of print or of other information however fast they may be scanned. And that is our limitation so far as the intellectual life and the scientific life is concerned.
The computer will greatly speed up linear scanning, but it’s still linear scanning. And so long as we are stuck with that form of wisdom, we cannot deal with more than a few variables at once.
Now, what do I mean by that? What is a variable? A variable is any one linear process. Let’s take music. When you play a Bach fugue, and there are four parts to it, you have four variables. You have four moving lines, and you can take care of that with two hands. An organist using two feet can put in two more variables and have six going. And you may realize, if you’ve ever tried to play the organ, that it’s quite difficult to make six independent motions go at once. The average person cannot do that without training. The average person cannot deal with more than three variables at once without using a pencil.
Now, when we study physics, we are dealing with processes in which there are millions of variables. This, however, we handle by statistics in the same way as insurance companies use actuarial tables to predict when most people will die. If the average age of death is 65, however, this prediction does not apply to any given individual. Any given individual will live through plus or minus 65 years. And the range of difference may be very wide indeed of course. But this is alright. The 65 guess is alright when you’re doing large-scale gambling. And that’s the way the physicists works in predicting the behavior of nuclear wavicles.
But the practical problems of human life deal with variables in the hundreds of thousands. Here, statistical methods are very poor. And thinking it out by linear consideration is impossible.
With that equipment then we are proposing to interfere with our genes. And with that equipment also, be it said, we are trying to solve our political, economic, and social problems. And naturally, everybody has the sense of total frustration. And the individual fears “Well, what on earth can I do?”
We do not seem to know a way of calling upon our brains because our brains can handle an enormous number of variables that are not accessible to the process of conscious attention. Your brain is now handling your total nervous system, to be more accurate, your blood chemistry, the secretions from your glands, the behavior of millions of cells. It is doing all that without thinking about it—that is to say without translating the processes it is handling into consciously reviewed words, symbols, or numbers.
Now, when I use the word “thinking,” I mean precisely that process, translating what is going on in nature into words, symbols or numbers—of course, both words and numbers are kinds of symbols.
Symbols bear the same relation to the real world that money bears to wealth. You cannot quench anybody’s thirst with the word “water,” just as you cannot eat a dollar bill and derive nutrition from it.
But using symbols and using conscious intelligence—scanning—has proved very useful to us. It has given us such technology as we have.
But at the same time, it has proved too much of a good thing. At the same time, we’ve become so fascinated with it that we confuse the world as it is with the world as it is thought about, talked about, and figured about—that is to say with the world as it is described. And the difference between these two is vast.
And when we are not aware of ourselves except in a symbolic way, we are not related to ourselves at all. We are like people eating menus instead of dinners. And that’s why we all feel psychologically frustrated.
So then we get back to the question of what do we mean by I?
Well, first of all, obviously, we mean our symbol of ourselves. Now, our ourselves in this case is the whole psychophysical organism, conscious and unconscious, plus its environment. That’s your real self.
Your real self, in other words, is the universe as centered on your organism. That’s you.
Let me just clarify that a little for one reason. What you do is also a doing of your environment. Your behavior is its behavior as much as its behavior is your behavior; it’s mutual. We could say it is transactional. You are not a puppet which your environment pushes around, nor is the environment a puppet which you push around. They go together, they act together.
In the same way, for example, if I have a wheel, one side of it going down is the same as the other side of it going up. When you handle the steering wheel of a car, are you pulling it or are you pushing it? No, you’re doing both, aren’t you? When you pull it down this side, you are pushing it up that side. It’s all one.
So, there’s a push-pull between organism and environment. We are only rarely aware of this as when in curious alterations of consciousness, which we call “mystical experience,” “cosmic consciousness,” an individual gets the feeling that everything that is happening is his own doing, or the opposite of that feeling that he isn’t doing anything, but that all his doings, his decisions, and so forth, are happenings of nature.
You can feel it either way. You can describe it in these two completely opposite ways, but you’re talking about the same experience. You’re talking about experiencing your own activity and the activity of nature as one single process. And you can describe it as if you were omnipotent like God or as if it were completely deterministic and you hardly existed at all.
But remember, both points of view are right. And we’ll see where that gets us.
But we don’t feel that, do we, ordinarily? What we feel instead is an identification of ourselves with our idea of ourselves, or I would rather say, with our “image” of ourselves. And that’s the person or the ego.
You play a role, you identify with that role. I play a role. It’s called Alan Watts. And I know very well that that’s a big act. I can play some other roles besides Alan Watts if necessary. But I find this one is better for making a living.
But I assure you, it’s a mask, and I don’t take it seriously. The idea of my being a kind of messiah or guru or savior of the world just breaks me up because I know me. It’s very difficult to be holy in the ordinary sense.
So, I know I’m not that. But most of us are taught to think that we are whom we are called. And when you’re a little child, and you begin to learn a role, and your parents and your peers approve of your being that, they know who you are. You’re predictable, so you can be controlled.
But when you act out of role, and you imitate some other child’s behavior, everybody points the finger and says, “You’re not being true to yourself.” “Johnny, that’s not you. That’s Peter.” And so you learn to stay Peter or to stay Johnny.
But of course, you’re not either… because this is just the image of you. It’s as much of you as you can get into your conscious attention which is precious little.
Your image of yourself contains no information about how you structure your nervous system. It contains no information about your blood chemistry. It contains almost no information about the subtle influences of society upon your behavior. It does not include the basic assumptions of your culture, which are all taken for granted and unconscious. You can’t find them out unless you study other cultures to see how their basic assumptions differ.
It includes all kinds of illusions that you’re completely unaware of as, for example, that time is real and that there is such a thing as a past which is pure hokum. But nevertheless, all these things are unconscious in us and they are not included in our image of ourselves, nor of course included in our image of ourselves. Is there any information about our inseparable relationships with the whole natural universe?
So, this is a very impoverished image. When you ask a person, “What did you do yesterday?” they’ll give you a historical account of a certain number of events in which they participated and a certain number of things which they saw, used, or were clobbered by. But realize at once that this history leaves out most of what happened.
I, in trying to describe what happens to me this evening, will never be able to describe it because there are so many people here that if I were to talk about everyone whom I’ve seen, what they were wearing, what color their hair was, what sort of expressions they had on their faces, I would have to talk through doomsday.
So, instead of this rich physical experience—which is very rich indeed—I have to attenuate it in memory in description to saying, “Oh, I met a lot of people in Philadelphia. There were men, and there were women. Lots of them were young, and some of them were old.” It’s a most utterly impoverished account of what went on.
So, therefore, in thinking of ourselves in this way, what I did yesterday, what I did the day before, in terms of this stringy, mangy account, all I have is a caricature of myself. And you know the caricaturist doesn’t draw you all in; he just put certain salient features whereby people will recognize you. It’s all a skeleton.
So, we are, as it were, conceiving ourselves as a bunch of skeletons. And they’ve got no flesh on them, just a bunch of bones. And no wonder we all feel inadequate!
We’re all looking for something—to the future to bring us the goodie that we know we ought to have. There’s a golden goodie at the end of the line somewhere. There’s a good time coming be it ever so far away, that one far-off divine event which all creation moves… we hope.
And therefore, we say of something that’s no good, it has no future. I would say it has no present, but everybody says it has no future.
Now, here we are, as it were, psychically starved and always therefore looking—seeking, seeking, seeking. And this confused seeking is going on everywhere. We don’t know what we want. Nobody knows what they want. We say, yes, we think of what we want in vague terms—pleasure, money, wealth, love, fulfillment, personal development. But we don’t know what we mean by all that.
If a person really sits down to figure out, write a long essay, 20 pages, on your idea of heaven, it’ll be a sorry production.
You could see it already in medieval art whether it be depictions of heaven and hell. Hell is always much better than heaven—although it’s uncomfortable. It’s a sadomasochistic orgy. Wowie! Hell is really rip-roaring. Whereas all the saints in heaven are sitting very, very smug and demure like they were in church.
And you’ll see also the multitudes of the saved. Instead of this writhing wormy thing, you can see all their heads which the artist has drawn to abbreviate them, just the tops of their heads in masses. They look like cobblestone street flattened out.
So, what has happened then is this, that our eye is an illusion. It’s an image. And it is no more our self than an idol is the godhead.
But we say, “It can’t be so because I feel I really exist. It isn’t just an idea in my head. It’s a feeling. I feel me!” Well, what is it that you feel when you feel I?
Well, what is it that you feel when you feel I, I’ll tell you.
What do you do when somebody says, “Pay attention”? What is the difference between looking at something and taking a hard look at it, or between hearing something and listening intently? What’s the difference? What’s the difference between waiting while something goes on and enduring it?
Why, the difference is this.
When you pay attention instead of just looking, you screw up your face. You frown and stare. That is a muscular activity around here. When you will, you grit your teeth or clench your fists. When you endure or control yourself, you pull yourself together physically, and therefore, you get uptight. You hold your breath. You do all kinds of muscular things to control the functioning of your nervous system. And none of them have the slightest effect on the proper operation of the nervous system.
If you stare at things, you will rather fuzz the image than see them clearly. If you listen intently by concentrating on muscles around the ears, you will be so much attending to muscles here that you won’t hear things properly. And you may get singing in the ears. If you tighten up with your body to pull yourself together, all you do is constrict yourself.
I remember in school, I sat next to a boy who had great difficulty in learning to read. And what they always say to children is, “Try! If you can’t do something, you must try!” So the boy tries. And what has he done? When he’s trying to get out words, he grunts and groans as if he were lifting weights. And the teacher is impressed. The boy is really trying and gives him a B for effort.
It has nothing to do with it.
Now, we all make this muscular straining with the thought that it’s achieving psychological results, the sort of psychological results it’s intended to achieve. Now all this amounts to is this. You’re taking off in a jet plane, you’re a mile down the runway. The thing isn’t up in the air yet, you get nervous, so you start pulling at your seatbelt. That’s what it is now.
Now, that is a chronic feeling. We have it in us all the time. And it corresponds to the word I. That’s what you feel when you say I. You feel that chronic tension. When an organ is working properly, you don’t feel it.
If you see your eye, you’ve got cataract. If you hear your ears, you’ve got singing in your ears. You’re getting in the way of hearing. When you are fully functioning, you are unaware of the organ.
When you’re thinking clearly, your brain isn’t getting in your way. Actually, of course, you are seeing your eyes in the sense that everything you see out in front of you is a condition in the optic nerves at the back of the skull. That’s where you’re aware of all this. But you’re not aware of the eye as the eye. I’m talking about the optical eye.
So, when we are aware of the ego I, we are aware of this chronic tension inside ourselves. And that’s not us. It’s a futile tension. So when we get the illusion, the image of ourselves, married to a futile tension, you’ve got an illusion married to a futility. And then, you wonder “why I can’t do anything, why I feel, in the face of all the problems of the world, impotent, and why I somehow cannot manage to transform I.”
Now, here we get to the real problem. We’re always telling each other that we should be different. I’m not going to tell you that tonight. Why not? Because I know you can’t be. I’m not going to. That may sound depressing, but I’ll show you it isn’t. It’s very heartening.
Everybody you see who is at all sensitive and awake to their own problems and human problems is trying to change themselves. We know we can’t change the world unless we change ourselves. If we’re all individually selfish, we’re going to be collectively selfish. If we don’t really love people, and only pretend to, somehow we’ve got to find a way to love. After all, it’s said in the Bible, “Thou shalt love the Lord, thy God, and your neighbor as yourself.” You must love. Yeah, we all agree. Sure! But we don’t.
In fact, one psychologist very smartly asked a patient, “With whom are you in love against?” And this particularly becomes appalling when we enter into the realm of higher things, by which I mean spiritual development.
Everybody these days is interested in spiritual development—and wisely because we want to change our consciousness. Many people are well aware that this egocentric consciousness is a hallucination. And that they presume it’s the function of religion to change it because that’s what the Zen Buddhists and yogis and all these people in the Orient are doing, they are changing their state of consciousness to get something called satori or mystical experience or nirvana or moksha or what-have-you.
And everybody around here is really enthused about that because you don’t get that in church. I mean, there has been Christian mystics, but the church has been very quiet about them.
In the average church, all you get is talk. There’s no meditation, no spiritual discipline. They tell God what to do interminably as if He didn’t know. And then, they tell the people what to do as if they could or even wanted to. And then, they sing religious nursery rhymes.
And then, to cap it all, the Roman Catholic Church, which did at least have an unintelligible service, which was real mysterious and suggested vast magic going on, they wouldn’t put the thing into bad English. They took away incense, and they took away… they became a bunch of Protestants. The thing was just terrible!
So now, all these Catholics are at loose ends. As Claire Boothe Luce put it—not to be a pun, but she said, “It’s no longer possible to practice contemplative prayer at mass” because you’re being advised, exhorted, edified all the time. That becomes a bore. Think of God listening to all those prayers. I mean, talking about grieving the Holy Spirit. It’s just awful! People have no consideration for God at all.
But in pursuing these spiritual disciplines—yoga and Zen and so forth, and also psychotherapy—there comes up a big difficulty. And the big difficulty is this: I want to find a method whereby I can change my consciousness, therefore to improve myself. But the self that needs to be improved is the one that is doing the improving. And so I’m rather stuck.
I find out the reason that I think I believe say in God is that I sure hope that, somehow, God will rescue me. In other words, I want to hang on to my own existence. I feel rather shaky about doing that for myself, but I just hope there’s a god who’ll take care of it. Or if I could be loving, I would have a better opinion of myself. I’d feel better about it. “I could face myself,” as people say, “if I were more loving.”
So, the unloving me, somehow, by some gimmickry, has to turn itself into a loving me. And this is just like trying to lift yourself off the ground with your own bootstraps. It can’t be done!
And that’s why religion, in practice, mainly produces hypocrisy and guilt because of the constant failure of these enterprises.
People go and study Zen. They come back and say, “Wow! Getting rid of your ego is a superhuman task.” I assure you, it’s going to be very, very difficult to get rid of your ego. You’re going to have to sit for a long time and you’re going to get the sorest legs. It’s hard work! All you wretched kids who think you’re getting rid of your ego or something or another, easy yoga, you don’t know what you’re in for.
When it really comes down to the nitty-gritty, you know, the biggest ego trip going is getting rid of your ego.
And the joke of it all is our ego doesn’t exist! There’s nothing to get rid of. It’s an illusion as I tried to explain. But you still want to ask how to stop the illusion. Well, who’s asking?
In the ordinary sense in which you use the word I, how can I stop identifying myself with the wrong me? But the answer is simply you can’t.
Now, the Christians put this in their way when they say that mystical experience is a gift of divine grace. Man, as such, cannot achieve this experience. It is a gift of God. And if God doesn’t give it to you, there’s no way of getting it. Now, that is solidly true. You can’t do anything about it because you don’t exist.
Well, you say, “That’s pretty depressing news.” But the whole point is it isn’t depressing news. It is the joyous news. There’s a Zen poem which puts it like this. Talking about it, it means the mystical experience, Satori, the realization that you are the eternal energy of the universe like Jesus did. It like this:
“You cannot catch hold of it, nor can you get rid of it. In not being able to get it, you get it! When you speak, it’s silent. When you’re silent, it speaks.”
Now, in not being able to get it, you get it, because this whole feeling, what Krishnamurti is trying to explain to people, for example, when he says, “Why do you ask for a method? There is no method. All methods are simply gimmicks for strengthening your ego.”
So, how do we not do that? He says, “You’re still asking for a method.” There is no method. If you really understand what your I is, you will see there is no method.
Is it just so sad? But it’s not. This is the gospel, the good news, because if you cannot achieve it, if you cannot transform yourself, that means that the main obstacle to mystical vision has collapsed. That was you.
What happens? You can’t do anything about it. You’re at your wit’s end. What would you do? Commit suicide. But supposing you just put that off for a little while, wait and see what happens.
You can’t control your thoughts, you can’t control your feelings because there is no controller. You are your thoughts and your feelings. They’re running along, running along, running along. Just sit and watch them. There they go!
You’re still breathing, aren’t you? Still growing your hair? Still seeing and hearing? Are you doing that? I mean is breathing something that you do? Do you see, I mean do you organize the operations of your eyes? You know exactly how to work those rods and cones in the retina? Do you do that? It’s a happening. It happens.
So, you couldn’t feel all this happening. Your breathing is happening. Your thinking is happening. Your feeling is happening—your hearing, your seeing. The clouds are happening across the sky. The sky is happening blue. The Sun is happening shining.
There it is, all that’s happening. And may I introduce to you… this is yourself.
This begins to be a vision of who you really are. And that’s the way you function. You function by happening, that is to say, by spontaneous occurrence.
And this is not a state of affairs that you should realize. I cannot possibly preach it to you because the minute you start thinking, “I should understand that,” this is the stupid notion again of “I should bring it about” when there is no you to bring it about. So that’s why I’m not preaching. You can only preach to egos. All I can do is to talk about what is. It amuses me to talk about what is because it’s wonderful. I love it. And therefore, I like to talk. If I get paid for it, then I make my living. And sensible people get paid for doing what they enjoy doing.
So, you see, the whole approach here is not to convert you, not to improve you, but for you to discover that if you really knew the way you are, things would be sane. But you see, you can’t do that. You can’t make that discovery because you’re in your own way, so long as you think “I’m I,” so long as that hallucination blocks it.
And the hallucination disappears only in the realization of its own futility, when at last you see you can’t do it. You cannot make yourself over. You cannot really control your own mind.
See, when we try to control the mind, a lot of yoga teachers try to get you to control your own mind mainly to prove to you that you can’t do it. There’s nothing, you know, a fool who persists in his folly will become wise. So what they do is they speed up the folly.
And so, you get concentrating. And you can have a certain amount of superficial and initial success by a process commonly called self-hypnosis. You can think you’re making progress, and a good teacher will let you go along that way for a while until he really throws you with one. Why are you concentrating?
See, Buddhism works this way. The Buddha said, “If you suffer, you suffer because you desire, and your desires are either unattainable. You’re always being disappointed or something. So cut out desire.” So, those disciples went away, and they stamped on desire, jumped on desire, cut the throat of desire, and threw out desire. But then they came back and Buddha said, “But you are still desiring not to desire.” Now they want to know how to get rid of that.
So when you see that that’s nonsense, there naturally comes over you a quietness. And seeing that you cannot control your mind, you realize there is no controller. What you took to be the thinker of thoughts is just one of the thoughts. What you took to be the feeler of the feelings, which was that chronic muscular strain, was just one of the feelings. What you took to be the experience of experience is just by the experience.
So, there isn’t any thinker of thoughts, feeler of feelings. We get into that bind because we have a grammatical rule that verbs have to have subjects. And the funny thing about that is that verbs are processes and subjects are nouns which is supposed to be things. How does a noun start a verb? How does a thing put a process into action? Obviously, it can’t.
But we always insist that there is this subject called the “knower.” And without a knower, there can’t be knowing. Well, that’s just a grammatical rule. It isn’t a rule of nature. In nature, there’s just knowing like you’re feeling it.
I have to say you are feeling it as if you were somehow different from the feeling. When I say, “I am feeling,” what I mean is there is feeling here. When I say you are feeling, I mean there is feeling there. I have to say even “there is feeling.” What a cumbersome language we have. Chinese is easier. You don’t have to put all that in. And you say things twice as fast in Chinese as you can in any other language.
Well, anyway, when you come to see that you can do nothing, that the play of thought, of feeling, et cetera, just goes on by itself as a happening, then you are in a state which we will call meditation. And slowly, without being pushed, your thoughts will come to silence—that is to say all the verbal symbolic chatter going on in the skull.
Don’t try and get rid of it because that will again produce the illusion that there’s a controller. It goes on, it goes on, it goes on. Finally, it gets tired of itself and bored and stops. And so then there’s a silence. And this is a deeper level of meditation.
And in that silence, you suddenly begin to see the world as it is. You don’t see any past. You don’t see any future. You don’t see any difference between yourself and the rest of it. That’s just an idea. You can’t put your hand on the difference between myself and you. You can’t blow it. You can’t bounce it. You can’t pull it. It’s just an idea. You can’t find any material body because material body is an idea; so is spiritual body. This is somebody’s philosophical notions.
So, reality isn’t material. That’s an idea. Reality isn’t spiritual. That’s an idea. Reality is {claps}.
So, we find, if I’ve got to put it back into words, that we live in an eternal now. You’ve got all the time in the world because you’ve got all the time there is which is now.
And you are this universe. You feel the strange feeling when—ideas don’t define the differences. You feel that other people’s doings are your doings. And that makes it very difficult to blame other people. If you’re not sophisticated theologically, you may of course run screaming in the streets and say that you’re God.
In a way, that’s what happened to Jesus because he wasn’t sophisticated theologically. He only had Old Testament biblical theology behind him. If he’d had Hindu theology, he could have put it more subtly. But it was only that rather primitive theology of the Old Testament. And that was a conception of God as a monarchical boss. And you can’t go around and say, “I’m the boss’ son.” If you’re going to say, “I’m God,” you must allow it for everyone else too.
But this was a heretical idea from the point of view of Hebrew theology. So what they did with Jesus was they pedestalized him. That means “kicked him upstairs,” so that he wouldn’t be able to influence anyone else. And only you may be God. That stopped the gospel cold right at the beginning. It couldn’t spread.
Well, anyway, this is therefore to say that the transformation of human consciousness through meditation is frustrated. So long as we think of it in terms of something that I, myself, can bring about by some kind of wangle, by some sort of gimmick.
Because you see, that leads to endless games of spiritual one-upmanship and of guru competitions. “My guru is more effective than your guru. My yoga is faster than your yoga. I’m more aware of myself than you are. I’m humbler than you are. I’m sorrier for my sins than you are. I love you more than you love me.” There is interminable goings-on about which people fight and wonder whether they are a little bit more evolved than somebody else and so on. All that can just fall away.
And then, we get this strange feeling that we have never had in our lives except occasionally by accident. Some people get a glimpse that we are no longer this poor little stranger and afraid in the world it never made, but that you are this universe and you are creating it at every month.
Because, you see, it starts now. It didn’t begin in the past. There was no past. So if the universe began in the past, when that happened, it was now, see? But it’s still now.
And the universe is still beginning now and it’s trailing off like the wake of a ship from now. When the wake of the ship fades out, so does the past. You can look back there to explain things, but the explanation disappears. You’ll never find it there. Things are not explained by the past. They’re explained by what happens now that creates the past. It begins here.
That’s the birth of responsibility because, otherwise, you can always look over your shoulder and say, “Well, I’m the way I am because my mother dropped me. And she dropped me because she was neurotic because her mother dropped her” and away we go back to Adam and Eve or to a disappearing monkey or something. We’ll never get at it.
But in this way, you’re faced with… you’re doing all this. And that’s an extraordinary thought.
So, cheer up! You can’t blame anyone else for the kind of world you’re in. And if you know, you’ll see that I, in the sense of the person, the front, the ego, it really doesn’t exist, then it won’t go to your head too badly if you wake up and discover that you’re God.
After the Crash 