Become Aware Of It, Pay Attention To It. Read About It, Learn About It, Write About It, Talk About It. Teach It.
Reflections upon anything under the sun and beyond. It may not be easy to be a Global Citizen, but it's not hard to engage the Globe.
We Can't Greenwash Our Way Into A Bright Future
Two articles today say a lot about our current predicament. I know the fence sitters, the deniers, the Ayn Rand cultists, the neoliberal financialization experts, consultants for the uber-wealthy, economic growth cultists, golfers, addicts, Kardashians, office clerks, salarymen and women, executives, salespeople, shopkeepers, and zombie consumers are all doing there best to avoid facing the facts, the truth. Their cognitive dissonance might have to be surgically removed, that's how stubborn they are. I'll say it again; they can't conceive of the forest for the Ikea furniture.
They are happy, happy I say, paying for wars when the global players order a reset; when banks run out of reasons to print money for investment banks to fuel the game. The people might call a war a "reset" if they were more aware of how the world works. Instead, they feel it's peacemaking. Or, that it's necessary to spread freedom, democracy, liberalism, Judeo Christian, or Western values. During and after "the reset," ordinary people sing hymns and patriotic songs while remembering their fallen heroes. Chris Hedges' book title aptly illustrates their catharsis, "War Is The Force That Gives Us Meaning."
They have been adequately brainwashed into believing that their leaders have their best interests at heart and are not merely in it for the money and power. Think, Dick Cheney, even if you think the movie was inaccurate or unfair. The system trains us to compete with each other and fight among ourselves. We are confused and retreat to the comfort of our tribe where we retrench and harden our hearts.
Ordinary people get all fired up when they hear weasel words and terms they don't understand but have been taught to fear. Ordinary people are easy to point and shoot. Tell them socialism is a bad word, and they will use grotesque invective when referring to a socialist. "Those beep, beep, mother beeping, socialists – kill them all!"
It's sad, but we are that easy to manipulate, and we don't even know it. We think we are making this stuff up as we go along. We have the illusion of a creative process when, in reality, we are programmed Zombies going about some other person's business.
I'm writing this in Hong Kong now, where thousands of people are in the streets fighting for their minimal but precious rights. All they want is for their leaders to keep their promises. I am sad to say that they don't stand a chance. If mainland people don't join their struggle, their struggle is lost. Meanwhile, Steve Bannon, that limelight seeking vandal, gives speeches to the players about how America is letting China down and nothing but regime change in Beijing can sort the world out.
Special forces consisting of economic hitmen continue to destroy Venezuela's economy, creating yet another refugee crisis. The player's story is that the blame for Venezuela's woes can be laid squarely at the feet of Maduro, he alone brought it upon the people. Of course, the people had already voted to keep Maduro in a free and fair election, only to have Koch Industries, and their CIA minions, fund an opposition party that has no legs and no legitimacy. And the faithful believe it without question — the millionaires who are paid by billionaires on cable TV spout the propaganda like deep fake puppets.
So what's in the news accept absurd irony and more honest attempts to point decent people in a new direction, a direction that will save their children's lives and give them the better life that they feel is their duty to provide.
First, let's look at an article in that radical rag known as The National Geographic. It sites studies that say that the best way for city dwellers to combat the existential threat of climate change is to consume less. It made me chuckle because people like myself have been saying this for thirty years. Can brainwashed consumer addicts get off that train? Remember what the 46th president of the great United States said was the answer to the last economic crisis; that great fleecing of the people? "Just go shopping." – George W. Bush
Now National Geographic is telling us that the only thing we need to do to come out smelling like a rose garden is to take a green shower by shopping less. I shake my head slowly, staring at the floor, my shoulders slumped before turning on YouTube to find inspiration from Jordon Peterson.
Next, we have some more honest and prescient advice published on Jacobin, titled, "Stop Polluting Our Green New Deal."
In it, they list their "The Ten Pillars of the Green New Deal for Europe."
1. Faced with the emergency of the climate and ecological crises, winning slowly is the same as losing. The Green New Deal, then, must meet the scale of the challenge with sufficient investment in an economic transformation that respects our planetary boundaries, not only decarbonizing our economies but also reversing biodiversity loss.
2. The burden of our transition cannot fall on the shoulders of working families, so the Green New Deal must be grounded in Keynesianism: the money must be raised by public banks issuing green bonds.
3. The green transition cannot be a top-down process. Instead, the Green New Deal must be infused with democracy, empowering citizens and communities to make the decisions that shape their futures.
4. Europe — like the United States — is mired in a mix of unemployment, underemployment, and precarious employment that fails to generate prosperity for working families. The Green New Deal must be a program of job creation, providing a decent job to all those who seek one.
5. But it must also move beyond a job guarantee and raise the standard of living for all. For example, the Green New Deal must construct millions of sustainable homes and smart energy grids, addressing the crises of housing insecurity and fuel poverty.
6. The standard of living generated by the Green New Deal cannot be clawed back by the interests of capital. So the Green New Deal must create structures that entrench equality within and between countries — regardless of race, sexuality, gender, age, or ability — by taking the interests of finance head on and challenging its pursuit of short-term gain for the few over long-term prosperity for the many.
7. The Green New Deal is an opportunity to reimagine our future. It must harness our collective knowledge and invest in technological advancements that will liberate us from labor — not increase shareholder value.
8. Measuring progress through GDP growth is at the root of our crises of inequality and environmental devastation. So the Green New Deal must abandon the dogma of GDP growth and focus on what matters: health, happiness, and the environment.
9. Because we cannot solve the environmental crisis on our own, the Green New Deal must redress the colonial legacy of aggressive pollution and resource extraction across the Global South. It must support others in their green transition and ensure that the supply chains that drive the green transformation are committed to principles of social and environmental justice.
10. Finally, the Green New Deal must graduate our environmental politics from negotiation to action. After nearly thirty years of failed negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Green New Deal is an opportunity for a decisive shift towards credible, specific measures targeted at every area of our societies.
That's all for today except to say, fence sitters, I want you to try to persuade me that The Zeitgeist Movement is not a great way to frame humanities struggle during the first quarter of the 21st Century. Come on, don't be afraid, my team argues to discover, not to injure.
TZM Discovery Train Volume One: Hayek, Infinity, CRISPER, Messy Business and Ideas
We need international agreements in place before precise technological or scientific solutions can be implemented because the changes they introduce can have a profound effect across borders. Today, there is no doubt that we live in a global community of people who have more in common than not. Pollution in China affects the health of people in America. Everything we do influences everything.
Can you imagine if Latvians, for example, couldn't benefit from a given technology because they were just so different from Poles? A Latvian, don't you know, couldn't use a smartphone if her life depended on it. When I was younger and hanging out in Tokyo, Japanese people believed that most, if not all Japanese people were allergic to cheese. When I went to a grocery store in Tokyo at that time, I couldn't find any cheese. I could buy Osembe, Natto, Soy Sauce, lots of Japanese ingredients but not many imported products. If one goes to Tokyo now, one might find an Italian restaurant and a pizza parlor in every neighborhood serving lots of dishes with cheese in it. In the early 1980s, many Japanese people believed they couldn't consume some foreign products because, in every conceivable way, they were inherently different from Westerners. That belief has changed now, and stores in Japan are full of imported consumer goods.
Our beliefs change all the time, just as the stories we tell ourselves are always changing. The fashions of the moment easily sway people's emotions, ideas, thoughts, and opinions.
Have you ever thought of the concept of Infinity? I was listening to a BBC Discovery podcast episode this morning about it. It was fascinating and, as usual, got me thinking. When most of us think carefully about something, we will discover connections between what we are focused on and peripheral ideas that may not seem relevant at the time.
After listening to the episode on Infinity, I listened to another Discovery podcast, “Editing the Genome, Part Two.” I'm sure you've heard about CRISPER. The main takeaway from that episode was that when one edits genes, for whatever useful purpose, one must think of the whole, planetary organism and all of the members of global civilization before one implements it. Genes don't recognize nation states. What one country does to eradicate mosquitos or diseases in pigs will most likely affect all other countries; therefore, international regulations must be in place to protect the web of life and human populations from unintended consequences.
Some scientific endeavors are publicly supported, and benefit the public even if money isn't made on the effort. Wait, is that even possible? Why should one do something if one can't make a profit on it? Let me count the ways. Never mind that the list is too long for this puny essay. The fact is, we could do a lot of things in concert with one another, in a global community that recognized differences and also understood that life on Earth is interdependent and also profoundly affected by human beliefs and actions. Japanese people could still eat miso soup every morning while Americans could have their bacon and eggs. Your identity doesn't disappear just because you recognize that you are part and parcel of something more significant and more complex.
Is the Universe flat or curved towards infinity? Is the Universe we can see only a flash of time, energy, and mass in the Multiverse? What are all the numbers between zero and one? Why does it even matter to ask that question and if you do and have a new theory about those questions, can you be killed for your efforts? What does calculus have to do with Infinity? Listen to the podcast to find out.
Don't take anything for granted, if you don't know about something, find out about it. Even a cursory understanding of a subject will help you a lot in formulating your ideas.
These musings, for some reason, made me think of a conversation I saw between George Will and Charles Lane. They both work for the Washington Post.
Here is a description of the video.
[In a conversation with Post columnist Charles Lane, George F. Will, author of the new book "The Conservative Sensibility," defines the plight of the modern conservative. In a political environment hostile to prudent ideas, Will recommends turning away from rampant progressivism and looking to the wisdom of the Founding Fathers.]
The Founding Fathers – there you have it, those gentlemen, way back when, had all the answers. Never mind that they had never heard of a nuclear bomb and thought that the best labor saving device a man could own was a slave.
George Will is a big fan of Friedrich August Hayek. During the talk, Mr. Will mentions Hayek a lot. He also enjoyed saying that politics and conservatism are messy and that that makes them fun. George seems a bit anti-technocratic, which, in specific contexts, is understandable. Market economies are messy and unpredictable, he says, and the best way to progress is to let the markets do what they do and figure things out as you go along. Information in a market economy is tricky and often opaque; markets are unpredictable, but they always create value over time. It's as if we lived in a world with infinite resources and never-ending opportunities to invent more things to bring to market and consume.
Hayek is certainly the go-to economist for conservatives.
Hayek was interested in how prices influence almost everything; business cycle theory; and he was a prominent defender of Capitalism. He's a significant economist so if you're even remotely interested in the subject you need to be familiar with his work. His intellectual rival in the field was John Maynard Keynes. Understanding the difference between the two economists will take you a long way towards understanding the world in which we live. If you read only one book from these two essential economists, I'd recommend, Hayek's, "The Road to Serfdom," and Keynes', “The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.” These two knew a lot about how money works in society.
So why talk about CRISPER, the concept of Infinity, a conservative like George Will and two economists who did their best work in the 1920s and 1930s? It's because once you understand how all of these things dovetail into a socioeconomic system and are exploited and co-opted by the market system, you can begin to understand how our challenges today are structural. And, you may even become interested in how complex social systems work.
Use your imagination. Why does money have anything to do with how we manage global resources, public health, and the integrity and sustainability of habitats and ecology? Don't you think we can find better ways of creating value and increasing health and well being?
Ideas are just stories. We need better ideas if our civilization is going to have a future. Once you have educated yourself, you will see everything in different ways and be able to imagine different ways of organizing things that are more in line with what we know and understand in 2019.
It's essential to understand how ideologues think and where they got their ideas. When we do, we can begin to be creative and think of even better ways of doing things; founded in scientific rigor and expert understanding of how human designed and engineered complex systems can work for the greater good of life on Earth.
I'll end with a quote Peter Josephs included in an introduction to his book, "The New Human Rights Movement."
"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to, and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong, which will be imposed upon them ." – Frederick Douglass
News From My TZM Filter Bubble Volume One
Every morning I get up before the sun rises and check my news feeds. I have broad interests, but primarily I'm simply a witness, like you are, of a train wreck in slow motion. I can't remember where I heard this, but it's stuck in my head: "Climate Change is a nuclear war in slow motion." Think of the chemical experiment we're running and its potential consequences to our civilization and our ecosystem. We are cleverly, collectively "splitting the atom" in a ballet of death by a thousand micro-cuts. When we turn on the lights, we are all "pushing the button" every single day.
I'm not saying any of us as an individual is to blame, we're not, but we are all sleepwalking into disaster. We also seem to think that it's someone else's job to fix everything that ails us. Think about it, if you get sick you go to a doctor and get a prescription; if the economy or government services aren't to your liking you vote for someone and assume they'll fight for you and solve the problem; oh and, scientists and engineers have the fix. All you need is the right school, a good teacher, a good education, or a good idea, and everything will fall neatly into place.
Well, I'm here to tell you that if you are paying attention, you should know by now that the significant things ailing society are not getting any better. And I know, I repeat myself. One must focus one's attention on details to understand the meaning of the picture.
We can't consume our way into a healthier world. Think about how fasting is suddenly the most significant trend in healthy living. Health experts are now talking about healthspan rather than lifespan as a way of gauging one's quality of life. It would be much better if we focused on the quality and utility of consumer goods rather than the quantity of production and consumption. Blind consumerism is not making our ecosystem more robust; it doesn't make us happier. Selling more, buying more, and making more money doesn't make us better people.
If we continue with our current socioeconomic paradigm, the systems that support our civilization will breakdown. When that occurs, it will happen fast, and there will be hell to pay. We are woefully unprepared.
So what's in the news?
I watched professor Richard Wolff talk about the different kinds of socialism from a historical and contemporary point of view. One might as well educate oneself on the subject; education is rarely fatal. We must go further, of course, more towards a system described by The Zeitgeist Movement. We have to operate spaceship Earth in an efficient way for the benefit of life on Earth. We must employ 21st Century solutions. We have to build the ultimate sharing economy.
FROM, theecologist.org
Billions of pounds of British taxpayers' money is supporting fossil fuel energy schemes around the world, undermining the U.K.'s commitment to tackle climate breakdown, M.P.s said.
U.K. Export Finance (UKEF), which provides loans, insurance, and guarantees for firms operating overseas, gave £2.5 billion to fossil fuel projects between 2013/14 and 2017/18.
The Commons Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) called on the government to end support for new fossil fuel energy projects by 2021.
We have to stop our governments from subsidizing wasteful, and destructive industries. We must determine what is wasteful and harmful through disciplined scientific inquiry and processes, and expert interpretation of data from a holistic perspective.
FROM, blogs.scientificamerican.com
We Need To Get Serious about "Critical Materials"
The U.S. is 100 percent import-reliant on 14 minerals and metals that are essential for defense technologies, consumer goods and clean energy technology, and 50 percent or more reliant for another 30, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. These numbers go beyond the recent headlines on rare earths to illustrate fundamental building blocks of the energy transition: lithium, cobalt, and nickel for batteries, and materials for solar power and wind turbines. In many of these areas, China has become the dominant world player. The issue is not geological resource constraints, but on whether the domestic focus on mining production, processing, and manufacturing should be prioritized.
This article underlines the necessity to produce for good rather than for war or ruthless financial competition. It also makes clear that the price factors arising from our current economic system don't take into account externalities or harmful effects to communities around the world. The U.S. gets its rare earths from China, not because they are rare but because the U.S. doesn't want to pay the actual cost of producing them.
A GREAT QUOTE
"Nothing captures the biological argument better than the famous New Age slogan: 'Happiness begins within.' Money, social status, plastic surgery, beautiful houses, powerful positions – none of these will bring you happiness. Lasting happiness comes only from serotonin, dopamine, and oxytocin." – Yuval Noah Harari
FROM THE BBC
More than 320 million tonnes of plastic was produced globally in 2015, over 40 percent of which was single-use. Recycling helps to tackle the problem, but as Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall and Anita Rani explain in BBC One's War on Plastic, the plastic you put in a recycling bin doesn't always get recycled.
Why do we throw away so much plastic? Why are things designed to fall apart after two years? Why is almost everything we consume destined for a landfill? It's because our current model is based on consumerism and earning profits and not about any other form of utility.
There was a lot in the news today about the opioid crisis. Companies may have to go bankrupt due to court cases, but that won't stop the demand for drugs. Supplies of legal and illegal drugs come from all over the world, and supplies will continue to flow as long as people feel the need to numb themselves with drugs. We need to fight the real causes of drug addictions and create a society that allows people to live fulfilling happy and healthy lives.
Please read “The Zeitgeist Movement Explained” and “The New Human Rights Movement” and let's talk about them. They are not the only books one could learn from that are focused on radical alternatives to the system we have today, but they are an excellent foundation to start with and are well referenced.
What is the difference between rigorous scientific processes and ideology?
"I believe in intuitions and inspirations...I sometimes FEEL that I am right. I do not KNOW that I am."
― Albert Einstein
"The Seven Social Sins are:
Wealth without work.
Pleasure without conscience.
Knowledge without character.
Commerce without morality.
Science without humanity.
Worship without sacrifice.
Politics without principle.
From a sermon given by Frederick Lewis Donaldson in Westminster Abbey, London, on March 20, 1925."
― Frederick Lewis Donaldson
The cycles of modern, global civilization occur over and over again. Nations, cultures, groups, bosses, employees make the same mistakes again and again.
There is a simple reason for this: Science and ideology affect people in fundamentally different ways. The process of doing science and the act of thinking something you want to believe are very different ways of viewing the world.
If one is sincere about one's pursuit of truth and knowledge, it's essential to understand that one can't turn away from severe problems or uncomfortable situations. Cruel circumstances can arise at any time; one often fails and encounters dead ends. Those of us who find it painful to fail will find that they are much more inclined to embrace ideology over experiencing the process of doing science or philosophy.
Let's look at a definition of ideology.
ideology
n. A set of doctrines or beliefs that are shared by the members of a social group or that form the basis of a political, economic, or other system.
n. The science of ideas or of mind; a name applied by the later disciples of the French philosopher Condillac to the history and evolution of human ideas, considered as so many successive forms or modes of certain original or transformed sensations; that system of mental philosophy which derives knowledge exclusively from sensation.
n. The science of ideas.
There is a lot to ponder within that definition. "The science of ideas" sounds good. What's not to like about ideas? Well, perhaps bad ideas are less likable than good ones. A synonym for "sensation" is "feeling." The bedrock of ideology today is more emotional than it used to be and less reliant on facts, data, reason, or science. Money and tribalism motivate people to be true believers rather than critical thinkers.
So how would one know if one were a true believer vs. a rational, scientific, critical thinker? Well, as a first step, let's take a look at the meaning of science.
Here's a definition of science from a dictionary.
science
n. The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena.
n. Such activities restricted to a class of natural phenomena.
That's a simple definition. Let's expand on that a bit.
"The principles and empirical processes of discovery and demonstration considered characteristic of or necessary for scientific investigation, generally involving the observation of phenomena, the formulation of a hypothesis concerning the phenomena, experimentation to demonstrate the truth or falseness of the hypothesis, and a conclusion that validates or modifies the hypothesis."
From: answers.com
"Sciences: Rigorous, systematic approach, designed to eliminate bias and other subjective influences in the search, identification, and measurement or validation of facts and cause-effect relationships, and from which scientific laws may be deduced."
From: businessdictionary.com
I think you can see that science is more rigorous than pure ideological belief.
Let's go a bit further and discuss the scientific method in general. Below is an excellent, brief article on that. Please take a moment and read it unless you already think you understand the subject well.
What Is Science? By Alina Bradford, Live Science Contributor | August 4, 2017
So this is all very basic. You probably knew all of this already. Why did I bring it up? Because these days I am having too many conversations with people who don't want to know about problems in our world and don't want to be part of the solution to those problems. When one turns away from Climate Change, for example, and says that there is nothing they can do about it, they instantly become the problem. Apathy is not the answer.
When one thinks that our current socioeconomic model is the best there is, they instantly become the core of the problem. Our system needs a lot of structural improvement, or we will keep making the same mistakes over and over again. (I'll defend these propositions in posts to come.)
Through science and other means of inquiry, we can identify problems and create solutions to those problems. If you think that doing nothing is permissible, you are wrong.
When a country decides to go to war, people should never blindly follow. Ideologically inspired blind obedience happens again and again throughout history, and most of the time, nothing good comes of war. It would be better if more people worked to understand what was happening in a broader, more in-depth way and fought, instead, to prevent conflict and make peace.
We must learn about nuclear energy, economics, sociology, culture, and other vital subjects in a profound way. Then we can be a part of the solution instead of the core of the problem.
All of this is to say; we must educate ourselves and each other. If someone is too frightened or uncomfortable to face the terrible truth of a situation, we must keep teaching. If some people can't listen, move on to those who can and hope that, eventually, the sheer number of enlightened people will gain sway over the willfully ignorant masses.
And there are those who are utterly unteachable. People like that prefer to imagine themselves in a safe space where no one can challenge their beliefs. Some people, who are full of faith, feel terrorized when their faith is argued with or criticized. They are more helpless than most and are usually more reliant on ideology and groupthink. Their reasoning is motivated mostly by emotions. It's sad to say, but sometimes one has to let those people go and focus on communities more open to reality.
If I have any hope, I hope that you will be optimistic in your ability to learn and to teach. In a scientific, rational, logical, and sincere way, of course. It takes a little courage, and you may never be the most popular person in your village, but I think you will find your efforts well worth your time, energy and yes, even emotion. Rewards will come through the efforts you make and the positive stresses you encounter on your journey, making you stronger, more resilient, and creative.
Science & Technology Alone Won't Save Us From Ourselves
When Homo Sapiens discover something and put it to good use, it changes everything, it molds culture and spurs evolution; it changes landscapes and ecosystems. Six to seven million years ago, our human, apelike ancestors were making and using tools. There is good evidence that one million years ago our human ancestors had domesticated fire. Experts speculate that between one and six million years ago, humans started cooking meat. They learned that fire could be a tool. Their use of fire changed everything. A carpet of tools was discovered in Africa, revealing one million years of tool making by our ancient ancestors. Human ancestors repeatedly invented stone tools.
Competition for resources and population drive human expansion over millions of years. Early Homo Sapiens migrated around the globe to find areas of abundance where they could thrive. Throughout their journey, they made discoveries, and their cultures evolved. Just think of how fast we changed as new tools allowed new cultures to grow and thrive. And remember, Homo Sapiens have only been around for two hundred thousand years or so.
Take a look at this timeline of historic inventions.
5000 BC, we invented the wheel, and it changed everything. 17,000 BC, the ancient Egyptians created various kinds of twisted rope, and that changed everything. Archeologists have found flutes that are 50,000 years old. Can you imagine how music changed everything? Archaeological evidence indicates that humans arrived on New Guinea at least 60,000 years ago, probably by sea from Southeast Asia during an ice age period when the sea was lower and distances between islands shorter. Boats changed everything. Early humans were using paint and creating art four hundred thousand years ago. By 250,000 years ago, wooden spears were made with fire-hardened points. From 280,000 years ago, humans began to make sophisticated stone blades, which were used as spear points. By 50,000 years ago, there was a revolution in human culture, leading to more complex hunting techniques. We could mention clothing, housing, and knives, all of which would have changed everything.
We had people like Isaac Newton come along and change everything. More recently, we could talk about The Age of Reason when we finally broke away from centuries-old dogma, tradition, and religiosity. Immanuel Kant, defined enlightenment this way:
"Enlightenment is the liberation of man from his self-caused state of minority. Minority is the incapacity of using one's understanding without the direction of another. This state of minority is self-caused when its source lies not in a lack of understanding but in a lack of determination to use it without the assistance of another."
Then came the industrial revolution and new inventions: the spinning jenny; the steam engine; the power loom; the cotton gin; the telegraph; the sewing machine; fossil fuels; the steam engine; the locomotive; liquid fossil fuels; the internal combustion engine; the telephone; the phonograph; the airplane.
With these inventions, colonialism and imperialism took off, and a hoard of European migrants spread out across the globe. Economies grew faster and bigger, more businesses and business models where born. New tools of war allowed participants to kill more people, including civilians at a shocking rate, and with horrific outcomes. Since 1901 the world has been at war somewhere on the planet.
Today, the tools we take for granted, the smart-phones in our pockets are a black box to most of us. We don't know how they are made, the principles that underlie them, or how they work. We take it all our conveniences for granted.
Our science, engineering, and technology continue to advance at a rapid pace. No one could argue that we are not making progress in those areas. However, we are not growing any wiser. If you are a student of history and take a close and honest look at the past 200 years, you'll see the patterns. The similarities between 1901 and 2001 are striking. What did we do differently after the 2007 economic crisis? We keep making the same mistakes.
Our problems are structural. Our culture barely shifts. In fits and starts, we continue to make progress only to see our efforts undone again and again. Scarcity haunts our minds; we feel the only way we can get enough is through a brutal competition where one wins while the other loses.
Peter Josephs chose a very apt quote for the front page of his book, The Zeitgeist Movement Explained.
"The tremendous and still accelerating development of science and technology has not been accompanied by an equal development in social, economic, and political patterns...We are now...only beginning to explore the potentialities which it offers for developments in our culture outside technology, particularly in the social, political and economic fields. It is safe to predict that...such social inventions as modern-type Capitalism, Fascism, and Communism will be regarded as primitive experiments directed toward the adjustment of modern society to modern technology." - Dr. Ralph Linton
Even if we produce cold fusion reactors, deploy carbon sequestration technology, find solutions to the aerosol masking effect, restore rain forests – it won't matter what we do, we will still disrupt the carrying capacity of the Earth. Our current global economic system is unsustainable, and we can't count on science to save us. We must first redesign our socioeconomic system and our political system.
All nations need to come together and collaborate in a transparent, open source way. We need truly united nations working together in trust and good faith.
Do you think that will happen? If not, then what's next? Please share your thoughts.
*Imagine if you could time travel, what kind of world would you want to find 300 years from now?
Is time travel possible?
Ever wanted to meet your historical heroes or explore the inventions of the future? We look at what science tells us about the possibility of travelling in time.
Do The Math, We Are Already in World War III
If you can't do the math, find someone who can explain it to you. We all need to understand what's in the article below.
If we don't change course, we will soon find ourselves in a world of pain and suffering. The article below is not akin to yelling fire in a crowded movie theater, it's merely the predicament we find ourselves in at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
As the anniversary of D-day passes this year we find ourselves in a new World War and this time, if we don't all come together and win it, we will all, collectively, as a species, lose it.
What will it mean to lose the war against climate change? We don't know for sure, but we can reckon with a high level of certainty that civilization as we know it will disappear and never return. There are stacks of data that indicate that life on earth is at stake.
If civilization breaks down, how will we secure the nuclear power plants scattered around the world? Try to imagine what the fallout will do to the intricate web of life we have known.
If you can't do the math, learn how to do the math or find someone you trust who can do the math, and have that person explain it to you. Climate change is something you absolutely must understand.
JUNE 5, 2019
Our Globally Warming Civilization
Terraform The Earth And Then We Can Terraform Mars
One could argue that human civilization has done some extreme damage to our environment. Every day we hear about plastics in the oceans, and species of life going extinct because of the impact civilization has on habitat.
Meanwhile, billionaire entrepreneurs and scientists talk about having a multi-planet civilization in the future. Some even say our survival depends on it. But we would first have to thrive here long enough to establish the capacity to create a civilization on another planet. How can we do that when we are destroying the ability for Earth's ecology to support life now? We need a longer-term perspective along with a better understanding of how biological systems work.
It's easy to produce things for the market; however, it might be a lot harder to develop a global socioeconomic system, and the political institutions undergirding and supporting it that would make a sustainable future possible.
We need to determine what's most important to our lives now and what we can do now to guarantee we'll have a healthy society on a healthy planet for a long time to come.
If we wanted to, we could reverse the damage we have caused with our hyper, market-oriented consumer culture and head in a different direction. We could, in short, terraform the Earth and make it an even better habitat for life. It would be a heck of a lot easier to conserve our Planet than to terraform Mars. At any rate, our global civilization would have to survive at least another couple hundred years before we'd have the technology and scientific knowledge to do something like that.
Let’s get our priorities straight, shall we?
You Really Need To Know About Global Dimming And The Aerosol Effect
Don’t you want to know what climate change is, what causes it, and how it will affect human civilization in the coming years? The climate has been more or less ideal for Homo Sapiens civilization efforts for a long time now, over ten thousand years in fact. Our civilization depends on our habitat, and climate has a lot to do with that. If the climate changes too fast, global culture is in big trouble. What will we need to do to maintain our current way of life? Is it even possible to sustain economic growth based on consumerism when the ability to grow grains at scale no longer exists, when water tables are dangerously depleted and when the web of life that supports the food web upon which we depend is devastated? We need to prepare for these changes. It must be a global effort, and it must start now.
Actually, it should have started thirty years ago, but we were distracted. In fact, we are still dangerously distracted. Is that a good thing? Maybe it’s somehow psychologically beneficial to be oblivious to what’s coming. Don’t worry, be happy, right?
Please take a few moments and educate yourself about the aerosol effect and global dimming. If this doesn’t inspire a sense of urgency regarding our efforts to mitigate the impacts of climate change, nothing will. Honestly, this is something you need to know about.
SKEPTICAL SCIENCE IS A GREAT RESOURCE ON THE SUBJECT
Skeptical Science is the best website to monitor the debate with climate science deniers.
Aerosols are atmospheric particles, which have an overall cooling influence on climate by reflecting sunlight back into space. They also have an indirect effect by making clouds brighter; this further increases the reflection of sunlight back into space. Sources of human-generated aerosols include the use of fossil fuels and burning of vegetation.
Although human sources of aerosols are broadly similar to those of carbon dioxide, there is an important difference. (theconversation.com)
Devil’s Bargain: Why Aerosols Pose a Deadly Climate Change Threat
We already have planet-cooling technology – the problem is, it’s killing us – by Eric Holthaus at (rollingstone.com)
Below is some potentially good news about the cooling effect of aerosols.
Finally, life wouldn’t be as entertaining without an alarmist video on the subject.
The climate is an extremely complex system. We live in a sophisticated civilization that has a profound effect on our environment. It doesn't matter where you are from or how you live; everything we do has an impact on the earth's various systems. It's good to think about that sometimes.
Who Is Serving The People? Mueller vs. Barr
I know, most of us are suffering from Russia Gate burnout but this really is a big deal with huge ramifications. It will be years before we have a clear, fine grained view of what actually happened and how it has effected the integrity of the U.S. system of government.
Is Barr the people’s attorney?
Chart: A Side-by-Side Comparison of Barr’s vs. Mueller’s Statements About Special Counsel Report on 2016 Russian Election Interference.
Even though there seems not to have been any collusion or conspiracy between the Trump family or the Trump campaign with “The Russians”; the Russians still muddled things up and the Trump administration and the Republican party don’t seem to care.
This will clarify a lot.
“I am told that [Mueller’s] reaction to that was that it was my prerogative as attorney general to make that decision,” Barr said during his press conference.
Meanwhile, Mueller — as previously stated — made it clear that “the Constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting President of wrongdoing.”
Chart: A Side-by-Side Compa... by on Scribd
As Just Security notes:
Mueller appears to be saying, as one might expect, that the Office of Legal Counsel opinion precludes the Justice Department from deciding whether to indict a sitting president. “It is unconstitutional,” Mueller adds in a curt sentence. He also emphasizes that indicting the president was not an option that his office, as “part of the Department of Justice” could even consider. Presumably that would apply to the Attorney General as well, unless Barr overturns the Office of Legal Counsel opinion.
This is the crux of the situation:
When a subject of an investigation obstructs that investigation or lies to investigators, it strikes at the core of the government’s effort to find the truth and hold wrongdoers accountable.
So who do you think Barr works for?
“[T]here is substantial evidence to show that the President was frustrated and angered by a sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents, and fueled by illegal leaks,” Barr said during his press conference. “… Apart from whether the acts were obstructive, this evidence of non-corrupt motives weighs heavily against any allegation that the President had a corrupt intent to obstruct the investigation.”
Dr. Ralph Linton – An Important Anthropologist
If you haven’t studied Anthropology, you might want to do so. Understanding “human kind” and our various social expressions is needed more today than at any time in history. After all, what will our machines become when most of us have such a narrow view of human culture? KNOW THYSELF
What is Anthropology?
Anthropology is the study of people throughout the world, their evolutionary history, how they behave, adapt to different environments, communicate and socialise with one another. The study of anthropology is concerned both with the biological features that make us human (such as physiology, genetic makeup, nutritional history and evolution) and with social aspects (such as language, culture, politics, family and religion). Whether studying a religious community in London, or human evolutionary fossils in the UAE, anthropologists are concerned with many aspects of people’s lives: the everyday practices as well as the more dramatic rituals, ceremonies and processes which define us as human beings. A few common questions posed by anthropology are: how are societies different and how are they the same? how has evolution shaped how we think? what is culture? are there human universals? By taking the time to study peoples’ lives in detail, anthropologists explore what makes us uniquely human. In doing so, anthropologists aim to increase our understanding of ourselves and of each other.
"The tremendous and still accelerating development of science and technology has not been accompanied by an equal development in social, economic, and political patterns...We are only now...only beginning to explore the potentialities which it offers for developments in our culture outside technology, particularly in the social, political and economic fields. It is safe to predict that...such social inventions as modern-type Capitalism, Fascism, and Communism will be regarded as primitive experiments directed towards the adjustment of modern society to modern technology." – Dr. Ralph Linton
Click on the photo for
a brief biography of Dr. Ralph Linton
The Study Of Man
40 Great Anthropology Books That Anyone Can Appreciate
We highly recommend you read these books. They are indeed, all classics.
Cheers!
There Are Many Reasons To Stick With The Status Quo But We Shouldn't
I don't know about you, but it seems to me that there are many reasons to stick with the status quo, to not rock the boat, to keep your head down and do what you're told to do, what you are trained to do. Also, obviously, it feels good to fit into a community, even if that community doesn't include a lot of "real" friends.
You have responsibilities and to fulfill them, you need money.
Or maybe you don't have money, you can't make much money but you need to grow food and gather water, or you and your family will die.
Perhaps the War Lord or Strong Man in your region demands something of you, and you don't have the power to refuse. Maybe you are an office clerk, an entertainer, a sports star, a model, a rock star, a professional, an investment banker, a laborer with specialized skills and you are making enough money to have everything you need and more.
I could think of many more examples, but at the crux of it is that everything boils down to money and power relationships. You weren't born with GenX values burned into your soul any more than I was born with Baby Boomer values. You randomly pop into the world because your mother and father did some things and you made it past childhood and into adulthood, and now you have a good chance at having a long life. Things are pretty good if you were born into the right circumstances. If not, you have to deal with carrying water, always being at the edge of starvation, being brutally exploited for your labor, paying down your debt, still in fear of War Lords and tough guys who have no compunction about killing people: that's just the luck of the draw.
If you're lucky, you're a healthy, well-balanced person with some excellent friends living a beautiful life. You have all the comforts and conveniences our current world has to offer. You are well entertained, well loved, you have some interesting hobbies and some plans for the future. You are a fortunate person.
Let me say this if you are a fortunate person, you have more in common with an unfortunate person than you think. That's because everything in the Universe and on this planet is interconnected. Without getting into the weeds of causality, systems theory, chaos theory, thermal dynamics, quantum physics and complexity theory; without getting into nature and nurture, psychology, the interwoven big and small things that determine our behavior, epigenetics, concepts of free will, law, sociology and all the rest of it, the fact remains that you could not exist without everything else in existence.
The Tiger needs the forest and the river and the forest and the river need the Tiger.
Understanding this is understanding that the trees are not the most essential part of the forest. Why did I just mention trees and forests? Because it's a good illustration of why we need each other and why many ideologies and world views are so pathological.
Allow me to quote the first two paragraphs of "How a Forest Ecosystem is Defined" by Steve Nix at ThoughtCo.
Forest ecosystems are defined by a "salient" or common set of characteristics that make the forest ecology of a particular area unique. These very complex sets of forest conditions are studied by forest ecologists who try to isolate and classify the common structural patterns that continually reoccur in a particular forest's environment.
The perfect forest ecosystem is where simpler biotic communities live in the same approximate space with increasingly more complex biotic communities to each communities benefit. In other words, it is where many individual biotic communities symbiotically live in "harmony" with other biotic communities in perpetuity for the benefit of all neighboring forest organisms.
If you don't understand homeostasis and the dynamic interplay between the systems in your body and the systems in your environment that keep you healthy and satisfied allowing you to contribute to a socioeconomic system that is highly destructive, you are on the bandwagon heading for a violent dead end.
I know, look around, if you are in a rich country and have an excellent job; if you are a successful entrepreneur or business person who can afford to consume a lot of stuff at a high level, you're probably thinking that things are great the way things are. Sure, you have your complaints, but you're going to go to the game or the concert this weekend, and you're hardly concerned about parsing poverty statistics or keeping track of which animal went extinct last month or which ecosystem around the world is under threat. Climate change is slow moving, right? We don't have to think about it until January, first 2100 and, by then, a bunch of genius entrepreneurs, scientists, engineers, and technologists will have found a commercial solution that is affordable and have fixed everything. By then, we will be extracting the things we need to keep the economy growing from asteroids. Well, we want to hope for the best.
It's good to be optimistic, mainly because many of the fantastic things we currently dream of doing are possible if not probable, but do you know why I'm not that enamored by our current socioeconomic structure? It's because the incentives are all wrong, our understanding of causality is all wrong. We can't see the forest for the trees.
Because we don't pay attention to some fundamental domains of thought like structuralism (there are many kinds of structuralism) and systems theory, we can't comprehend the delicate balance required for a healthy, sustainable society.
Honestly, here I have to say, ignore these ideas at your peril. It's time people everywhere got on a new bandwagon that's going somewhere truly beautiful. It's time we understood what it truly means to be an evolved human on Earth in 2019.
Don't worry, you can still go to the game and the concert. I'm only suggesting that you spend a little time looking into concepts that may seem unfamiliar to you now but that I'm sure you'll understand in no time at all.
Let's learn about a "Natural-Law Resource-Based Economy." Since TZM began in 2008, scholars, scientists, and professionals from all over have been publishing work that, without intending to, supports the framework of ideas inherent in The Zeitgeist Movement's train of thought.
In later posts and videos, I will focus on some of these people, their work, and the public debate that surrounds them. Lest you think I'm spouting the party line and can't think for myself, actually, over the past 35 years, I've known lots of people who've had similar trains of thought, including me, it just happens that this particular organization is unusually acute in its vision. More on that later.
Please take this journey with me, and let me know what you know about developing a sustainable and healthy global culture. We are very much open to new ideas. Do you have solutions to water shortages, or how to maintain biodiversity; do you have answers to inequality, corruption, debt peonage, global trade, energy development, and the like? Please let us know who you are and what you're working on. If there is someone you think we should know about, please tell us. We don't want to give ourselves headaches criticizing the way things are, we want to experience the positive stress of the challenge of making things better for ourselves and future generations. We may yet, crash and burn, but the efforts we make to come together and solve problems will allow us to live a much happier, healthier, and loving life.
Is The Zeitgeist Movement A Cult?
Oh, Come On!
Are we brainwashed? Did Jesus poop? Who won the football game? Can we have a fair wage and also get tips? If you pray to the Buddha, what do you get? How many shares in Microsoft does a given coal miner own? Why do we have to borrow so much money? Will liquid fuels last forever and ever? Are you prepared for a grid down situation? Does it matter if your son feels more comfortable identifying as a girl? If you are Catholic and you marry a Jewish person, will the blood of your children be impure? Does "The Sixth Extinction" matter to a good shopper? If the global average temperature of the Earth increases to 5c above the 18th-century baseline, could we still use airplanes to travel? Should we remove all regulations on fishing? Why do we need the Amazon rain forest? What would happen if most people in rich countries bought a pair of jeans once every three years, instead of buying five pairs a month? When groundwater tables have been depleted, how much will a loaf of bread cost? Again, why do we have to borrow money? Why?
Is The Zeitgeist Movement a cult? Why do I ask? Well, I stumbled on the Wikipedia article on the movement and found it terribly out of date. Someone should update it. The first three references in the article are from The Daily Telegraph, The Journal of Contemporary Religion, an international journal concerned with the discussion and analysis of contemporary aspects of Religion, focusing on significant trends, developments, and processes of the past 20-30 years, and Tablet Magazine, an online publication about Jewish life and culture. Then there is a reference to a New York Times article that's a bit more balanced than the views above.
Peter Josephs on, The Young Turks
There's nothing more to say about the Wikipedia article. It's hopelessly out of date and extremely biased. Peter makes an anti-establishment art film regarding sustainability, and our "cultish" financial system and the movement is characterized as a whacky cult. I am sure that the people who contributed to the Wikipedia article have not done the slightest first-hand reading on the subject.
If you want to know what the movement is about, read The Zeitgeist Movement Explained and The New Human Rights Movement. If you do, you will understand that Peter put a lot of work into those two books. The first one explains the movement in great detail. The second one is even better and describes many ways we could improve the lives of the many without hurting, in the slightest, the lives of the few at the top.
Why are we so unable to imagine a world different from the one we are accustomed to? To find an answer to that question, one would have to read up on anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, medicine, sociology, and many other domains of interest to develop a context for the question. Then one could start to think about it. Massive Online Open Courses from MIT, Harvard, Yale, are readily available, many schools around the world offer massive open online courses, and they are free. We all need to be grounded in many subjects so we can be more creative when thinking about new ideas. To be able to update one's prior understanding of things, one must have previous knowledge of things and be able to think critically about them. We all need a foundation upon which we can build out our understanding of how things work.
Humans are learning machines. Any human denied the opportunity to continually learn and grow is suffering. Any wasted intellectual energy is a tragedy. If all people had access to the resources needed to educate themselves, the challenges facing human civilization would be easily solved.
It would be foolish for me to reinvent wheels here unless I thought I had something new to add so for now, I would like to refer you to two YouTuber channels who have some exciting things to say that might help inform your opinion on the question in the title above.
First, let's find out what a cult is. Here I'd like to refer you to GENETICALLY MODIFIED SKEPTIC on YouTube. He has some great videos on the subject of cults.
Next, I'd like to refer you to ZERO BOOKS and their new series, "We Live In A Society."
You see, context is essential.
Is our current economic system the best of all possible commercial orders? Where's your imagination? We can do better than this and we must.
Note – I'm a fan of Peter's work, and I like the Zeitgeist community. I am not a member of a cult. I'm not a member of any TZM organization or chapter. However, I do feel it's urgent to help educate people on these subjects so we can begin to have a broader conversation on what could be done to meet the challenges of human civilization moving forward. More people need to be talking about these things.
Also, we can talk about Marx, Socialism, Cults, Religion without labeling ourselves. I am fascinated by Religion, and yet, I am not religious. I can read Marx and learn from his social criticism without being a Marxist. I can recognize that I am part of a society without being a socialist. I’m a businessman, and yet, I’m not a “capitalist.” Sticks and stones, right?
Marx was not a Marxist, Jesus (if he existed at all) was surely not a Christian, and Buddha was not a Buddhist. If you want to know what Peter and the people who get his "train of thought" think, talk to them.
I don't speak for TZM, but I know they are trying to discover ways of sustaining human civilization while at the same time improving human health and the health of all ecosystems on Earth. What's wrong with that? It's not scary. It won't hurt you to be curious about unfamiliar ideas. We all need to think about the direction we’re headed. We all share and depend on this one amazing ecosystem.
BULIAMTI’S TAKE
Exercise it, Renew it, or Watch if Fade Away
Some kind and considerate person asked me a tough question on one of my YouTube channels today. “If I were the top dog, what would I do to usher in a “resource-based” economy?” (I’m paraphrasing.) We are talking about ideas that Peter Josephs, the founder of The Zeitgeist Movement espouses in his work. I won’t go into that in this post but you can rest assured that there will be a lot more on that in later posts.
Friends are your best resource.
The question has me thinking and I’ll address the core of it later in another post. I need to think about it a bit more. But the first thing that came to mind is – how would I get “buy in” from 5% of the global population? That’s just to start.
And then, three questions popped into my mind:
What do you want?
Why do you want it?
How are you going to get there?
These are three core questions all of use have to wrestle with. The first one seems easy but how many people do you know who really understand what they really want? Let me ask another question. What motivates you? What motivates your reasoning? Is it a combination of emotional responses and learned behaviors, plus a parroting of certain language and ideas that you picked up somehow subconsciously? I mean, your way of thinking didn’t come from somewhere deep down inside you, did it. And yet, you take it for granted that your thoughts are your own. Why is that? Deep. Oh no, not another tough question.
How do we manufacture consent? How did we get into this set of living arrangements? You’d have to do a lot of reading across domains of interest just to start to understand those two questions. Then, you’d have to train yourself to understand complex systems because this set of living arrangements is highly complex. You’d have to buff up your understanding of some pretty complex theories as well, like, for instance, complexity theory. What? Don’t go there? I hear you. Let’s take a deep breath.
That was good. OK, back to those first three questions.
The first step to understanding the first question is to admit that you don’t know why you want what you want. You want a truck, and you think you know why you want a truck, but you really don’t know why you want a truck. I know, you think I’m nuts. Of course, you know why you want a truck, your truck is your corporate utilitarian vehicle and you need it to survive. Or do you?
You see, one of the problems is that you simply can’t imagine a world in which you don’t need a truck to survive. You don’t need it to signal your manhood to your tribe, you don’t need it to do donuts at a famous intersection in your city, and you don’t need it to get from point “a” to point “b”. You don’t need to borrow money to buy it. You don’t need to buy insurance for it. You don’t need to pay to park the damn thing somewhere. Hell, you don’t need to maintain it or sell it or die in it. There are lots of other ways to get around.
Walking is healthy, riding a bike is healthy, taking public transportation in a community of people that have been brought up to be polite, considerate and helpful is much healthier than listing to a shock jock in a traffic jam. No, not now, I won’t bore you with the studies, the evidence, the science, the physiological and psychological accrued benefits of living as Homo Sapiens lived for tens of thousands of years.
What do I want? Well, I don’t want a lot of baggage weighing me down. I don’t want layers of identity confusing me. I don’t want to feel outrage or to feel oppressed. I don’t want to be stressed out all the time, that’s for sure. I don’t want a lot of truly useless, cheap shit clogging up my life and spilling out of my closets and into landfills. And I don’t want to worry about MONEY all the time.
I want a few inspiring relationships. I want to feel vital and strong. I want the freedom to dream and do what I want. I want a pat on the back and a sincere smile when I do a good job. I want to wake up every morning and go to bed every night feeling like I made a difference while having an overwhelming feeling of loving life. I want to feel that beautiful wave of gratitude wash over me every day.
Why do you want that, Mr? WOW! That’s a much harder question. Again, I’d need to be intellectually curious and willing to do some reading across domains to answer that question. I’d need solid relationships with some mentors. I’d have to figure out how human desires work. Where do desires come from? Did I just wake up in the morning one day with this ingenious realization that I had to start smoking because ________________________. Fill in the blank. Oh, I do remember Winston tastes good like a cigarette should. NO! I need to start vaping, everyone is doing that these days. I just want to FIT IN. I’m not an American psycho, I’m just human.
The first step to answering the why questions is to admit that you really don’t know why. Then you can start doing some mind and soul searching, you can do some research, and then, only then, you might figure it out.
I know, you thought the “How” question was the toughest but it’s not. In a community we have all the tools and expertise at the ready to sort anything out: That’s a plain and simple fact. You are not just an individual, your body, mind, and life are all about community. If you didn’t have a hell of a lot of gut bacteria living inside your intestines you’d be dead in a split second of a heartbeat. If you didn’t live in a community the water would stop flowing and if you didn’t know where to get drinkable water you’d be dead in a few days. Think of all the busy people around you going about their “business” and what it really means to you. Now think of a problem. If you had access to those human resources, to that social capital, to that intellectual capital, to that aggregate of human caloric energy and power, there is nothing you couldn’t accomplish. And I mean “you” as in you all because you are nothing without a community.
We can expand on all of this, of course, but the main point is that if you can’t answer these questions, you can’t even begin to imagine how to start building a resource-based economy. There are material resources having to do with the “carrying capacity of the Earth”, and there are the emergent and just as tangible resources having to do with human spirit, imagination, creativity, motivational power and force of action. If we understand how those things really work, then you can bet that some generation in the future will boldly go where no human has gone before.
Be curious. Study primary sources. What do I mean by that? Read the works of people who have done the work and stay the hell away from pop culture, shock jocks and circus acts that are paid for by you, the taxpayer, the consumer. You need to focus on things that have been well thought through. You have to become addicted to "the work". Go ahead, tomorrow, when you get up, do some breathing exercises and some push-ups and take an hour long walk. Then read a good book for a half hour, take a cold shower, have a cup of coffee, and get busy. Eat your first meal of the day at one o’clock. Make sure you’re eating whole foods, hopefully from a market where you know the vendors personally. Do something like that for a month and tell me how you feel.
This is human life, people. Exercise it and renew it or watch it fade away. You, my friend, are a creator, not just a robotic consumer.
Patrick Lee Miller
Patrick Lee Miller is a thinker to follow. He’s a unique writer and educator with a broad and wise understanding of our current cultural challenges. Have a look at his articles on Quillette.
About this video:
Avatars were embodied appearances of divinities in the ancient narrative of the Bhagavad Gita before they represented embodied players in the cyberspace of massively multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPGs). Beginning with these games, this talk asks why players choose the avatars they do, and why they do with them whatever it is that they do. The answer given is psychoanalytic, arguing that players choose avatars in order to project outward their "inner objects," relics of earlier life, integrating them into their self-image in order to live better. But this is also what we do in our embodied lives, at least according to philosophers as disparate as Nietzsche and Plato. Each taught that the sensible world is a drama of projected personae. Whereas Nietzsche thought these personae were actions of the material body, however, Plato thought this drama needed a director off-stage, an immaterial soul. Plato was right, this talk argues, if we're to make sense of the notion of living a life, rather than being lived by one. Not coincidentally, his notion of living a life presupposed a doctrine of reincarnation akin to that of his predecessors in India. For both, embodied life is virtual; in other words, this "meatspace" we share is but a massively multi-player cosmic role-playing game. Or rather, a cosmic game with only one player—the Self.
TRIP OF COMPASSION
We highly recommend this film.
Tens of millions of people worldwide suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Millions more have suffered from emotional and physical abuse but never get diagnosed.
“Trip of Compassion” documents one unusual approach to healing trauma that might astonish you, an innovative treatment involving the psychoactive drug MDMA (commonly known as “ecstasy”). As you will see firsthand, if the therapy is well designed, true rebirth and transformation can happen in a matter of weeks and not years.
If you’ve ever felt held back, felt defective in some way, or felt that you’re not living up to your full potential, this film will give you hope. - Tim Ferriss
Some People Are Thinking About How To Do Things Differently
We’d like to share the thoughts and ideas of
Charles Eisenstein.
The true exercise of freedom is one’s ability to imagine a new way of doing things, a way that makes things better.
A Little Heartbreak
By Charles Eisenstein
Wednesday, September 26th, 2018
Can we invent a better myth to live by?
ROLAND BARTHES - "Mythologies"
“I am at the barber’s, and a copy of Paris-Match is offered to me. On the cover, a young black soldier in a French uniform is saluting, with his eyes uplifted, probably fixed on a fold of the tricolour. All this is the meaning of the picture. But whether naively or not, I see very well what it signifies to me: that France is a great Empire, that all her sons, without any colour discrimination, faithfully serve under the flag, and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by this black soldier in serving his so-called oppressors.”
“For the myth-reader [i.e., the believer of myth] the outcome is quite different: everything happens as if the picture naturally conjured up the concept, as if the signifier gave a foundation to the signified: the myth exists from the precise moment when French imperiality achieves the natural state”
“Any semiological system is a system of values; now, the myth-consumer takes the signification for a system of facts: myth is read as a factual system, whereas it is but a semiological system.”
“the mythology of wine can in fact help us to understand the usual ambiguity of our daily life. For it is true that wine is a good and fine substance, but it is no less true that its production is deeply involved in French capitalism, whether it is that of the private distillers or that of the big settlers in Algeria who impose on the Muslims, on the very land of which they have been dispossessed, a crop of which they have no need, while they lack even bread. There are thus very engaging myths which are however not innocent. And the characteristic of our current alienation is precisely that wine cannot be a blissful substance, except if we wrongfully forget that it is also the product of an expropriation.”
We Are Living. We Are Able. This Is Not Doom and Gloom.
Globe Hackers is changing tack, but before we start anew we’d like to share again an article on the dreaded, uncomfortable subject of climate change. Perhaps we’ve been too polemical at times but our focus was never doom and gloom. We have always been too curious to worry too much about how things will end.
What happens after the sunset?
We want to focus on all the wonderful things there are to learn and the fabulous things we wish to create. We want to share amazing experiences that transformed our lives and plan new ones. We believe that finding solutions to challenges is fulfilling, life-affirming and enjoyable. We want to see people focusing on their avocations and vocations within a loving community where their curiosity and sincere quest for understanding and truth is never curtailed.
We understand the need for hope. We also feel that we must face reality with an open mind and heart.
With these things in mind we highly recommend reading the following article carefully. Think about what it's saying even if it relays information that’s hard to hear and even if you don't agree with its prognosis. And please, share it with your friends.
The Uninhabitable Earth
Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak — sooner than you think.
See also:
The Uninhabitable Earth, Annotated Edition
The facts, research, and science behind the climate-change article that explored our planet’s worst-case scenarios.
See also:
We are living in a time of abundance and relative peace. We know we still have a lot to learn. As a whole, we are clever but not wise. We are dependent on all living things and yet we barely notice it. We have agency that we don’t use. We are all, to some degree, responsible for how things are although we rarely acknowledge this without blaming or shaming.
We hope all of us can continue this great adventure knowing there is a lot of work to be done and knowing we can always do better.
Globe Hackers wants to celebrate the greatest period of bread and circus human civilization has ever known. Not only the past two hundred years or so when things really took off but in the present moment where we can hardly fathom what’s next.
If there is something that needs fixing, for Life’s sake, let’s try to fix it. If we fail, at least we had a fantastic time trying to make things better.
For the foreseeable future, Globe Hackers is dedicated to bringing you, “Bread and Circus in the Anthropocene”.
More on that later.
The Brave New World of Political Technologists
If you are British, why did you vote to remain or leave?
Are our choices really our own? To what degree do outside influences and our subconscious determine our choices? How many social media platforms have you joined and shared your data with? Most of us register and opt-in without much of a thought. Powerful organizations use our data every day to influence our decisions.
Have a listen to the following episode from BBC's Analysis Podcast and think twice about how your decisions are made. If you think you are a free agent, you might want to reassess.
British Politics: A Russian View
Analysis
Peter Pomerantsev asks why new techniques in political campaigning have succeeded and what the consequences are for society. He has a different view to most from his past career working inside the TV industryin Moscow.
The future arrived first in Russia. The defeat of communism gave rise to political technologists who flourished in the vacuum left by the Cold War, developing a supple approach to ideology that made them the new masters of politics. Something of this post-ideological spirit is visible in Britain. Centrism no longer seems viable. Globalisation is increasingly resented. Ours is an uncertain political landscape in which commentators and polls habitually fail to predict what is to come. There was a time when if you lived in a certain place, in a certain type of home, then you were likely to vote a certain way. But that is no longer the case. Instead, political strategists imagine you through your data. The campaigns that succeed are the ones that hook in as many groups as possible, using advances in political technology to send different messages to different groups.
Pomerantsev, one of the most compelling voices on modern Russia, is a senior visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and is the author of "Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia".
Do you think society at large is capable of getting out ahead of the curve when it comes to understanding these kinds of issues? Perhaps we have no real choice except to go along for the ride.
We Are Programmed by the Fiercely Competitive.
Click to see the documentary.
It seems to me we have two choices that are achievable to some degree, perhaps we've always only had only two major choices of some kind or another.
We can work hard at being fiercely competitive or we can work hard at making our best attempt at enjoying life with our family and friends.
Sacrificing and struggling for progress (whatever you might mean by that) may only be a vain attempt at developing a human society that humans are not capable of. Fiercely competitive people program society with the algorithms that are designed to benefit the fiercely competitive.
In the immortal words of Tony Montana, "In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, you get the women." The woman bear your children and your children are privileged with money and power and there we have our mean. (As if "the women" have no say in the matter.)
Those of us who refuse to learn from the wisdom of our iconic movies are doomed to make the same movies over and over again. Movies imitate life while life imitates movies and so goes the genius of cultural evolution.
Trump has the money, Trump has the power, Trump has the women - Trump has his base - full Stop!
Are we devolving or progressing? Or, what makes a puppet human?
Are we devolving? Sure, culture is simply doing what it always does. Culture acts upon us and sucks us into its agenda. Culture is a beast that keeps growling at our heals. Culture roars and we are inspired to run up the hill to a better vantage point or escape into a tree, just out of reach, where we can keep our fear to ourselves. Culture barks and society rolls back down to a former position. That's why we need to stay focused and pay attention so we know when we'll need to make an effort to transform culture and push society back up toward the light.
But what about progress? This thing we call progress is generally an illusion. In order to make progress, we'd have to know how things work. Unfortunately, most of us are puppets who have no idea how puppets work. What puppet could understand the mechanisms of mind that made it and make it dance? Only God knows those mysterious things. We learn how something works if we need to know. We are compelled to survive after all. We are special puppets who are a tad bit more evolved because we are a tad bit more conscious. We have this thing called "self" and we are not yet sure whether ants have self-awareness or dogs or cows or chickens or tuna fish or pine trees. Those life forms don't talk like us. They don't seem to have the capacity to lie. They don't make complicated tools that allow them to seemingly have dominion over nature. They are simply part and parcel of a greater whole.
We build rocket ships and MRI machines and yet our moods are influenced by microbes that inhabit our intestines. Why do human bodies host so many microbes and if microbes influence our thoughts and moods, how does that work? What's going on with all these microbes? Some people ask such questions; some people like to think slow; some people are more curious than others; some people like to investigate things.
If we are losing something and therefore devolving, what is it we're losing?
Past ideals are constructs, fantasies. Alexander the Great's soldiers while marching into Persia carried their constructs and fantasies. Did those mental things add weight to their kit?
We are programmed to fit in and behave. If we don't we fit in and can't behave, we find somewhere else where we can fit in and behave. If we can't find our community we become derelict and loveless. A nose ring, a tattoo or a Luis Vuitton bag are just parts of a uniform that will hopefully attract love. Any random sneeze might put a potential nosering wearing hipster on a path to Yale Law School where, eventually, a Luis Vuitton bag would have immense importance. Does one really love the bag or its function as a lure meant to attract love? We are simply signaling in an attempt to get what we think we need when what we actually need are loving relationships.
A butterfly flaps its wings and we dance to whatever music we come to need to dance to. It may actually be that random, and at the same time, that deterministic.
Perhaps we'd be better off thinking about degrees of "agency". To a certain degree, some of us have a tad bit more of it. If you need to ask what, why and how questions, you probably have more agency than most. That is, of course, if you do the work to try to answer those questions.
So what can turn a puppet into a human being? First, fight the lies that make us puppets and if we become truly brave, truthful and unselfish we will be born again as real human beings content with a struggle that leads to something better.
