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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.
Needed: A Revolution in Thinking
By CARROLL QUIGLEY Professor of History, Georgetown University, Washington, DC. (Originally published in 1968)
Every event, every human experience, is unique. It occurs at a certain place, at a certain moment, to persons at a specific age and condition and in an arrangement of all these which will never be repeated. Never again will that event happen at that place, at that time, to those people, under those conditions.
People can deal with such unique events by action. The baseball player at the plate faces that unique and never-to-be repeated pitch and by making a never-to-be-repeated swing at it may be able to hit the ball over the fence for a home run. This is an example of how individuals, by action, can deal successfully with the unique events that make up the living experience of humankind.
But people also try to deal with the continuous stream of unique events which make up their lives by other methods besides action. They try to think about them and to communicate with others about them. To do this, they classify unique events into general classes or categories and they attach names or labels to such categories.
This process of classification and labeling ignores the qualities which make events unique and considers only those qualities which events are believed to share or to have in common. In this process, each society (and each person in that society) classifies its experiences and events into categories and then gives labels to these categories and puts a relative value on them -- regarding some of them as good or desirable and others as less good and less desirable.
Each society has such a system of categories and of valuations of categories. This is known as the society's "cognitive system." It is the most important thing we can know about any society and the most difficult to learn. When individuals speak of the "inscrutable Chinese" or the "mysterious East," they are really saying these remote peoples have cognitive systems that are different from theirs and are therefore more or less incomprehensible to them.
Getting to know the cognitive system of any people (or even of other persons in our own society, since no two persons have exactly the same cognitive system) is difficult because it is not easy even to take the first step to recognize that we ourselves have a cognitive system, a distinctive way of looking at the world that is not the way the world actually is but is simply the way our group conventionally looks at our world.
The best way to recognize that one's own group has a distinctive way of looking at things and that our own way is not the way things necessarily are is to deal with groups who have cognitive systems different from ours and who are just as certain that their way of seeing things is the way things actually are.
Such an experience, called "cultural shock," may lead to cognitive sophistication -- the recognition that all cognitive systems are subjective; that each is misleading to those who have it; and that although each enables those who have it to function within their own group, it handicaps them in dealing with persons from other groups. Moreover, even within a single society or group, cognitive sophistication is necessary whenever the experiences of that society are changing so rapidly that the old ways of looking at actuality handicap rather than help in dealing with the society's problems.
When people or groups with different cognitive systems interact, frictions and clashes occur, in many cases, without anyone's being able to see why. This happens even where there may be a maximum of goodwill on both sides. The difficulty occurs because individuals are unaware that they have a cognitive system of their own and, while seeing fully what other people do that irritates them, they cannot see why anything they are doing should irritate anyone else.
Cognitive sophistication makes it possible to know both one's own cognitive system and that of the different group with which one works so that one may be able to translate both talk and actions from one such system into the other, while recognizing the conventional and arbitrary nature of both.
Cognitive sophistication is so rare and so difficult to acquire that interaction across cultural barriers is a frequent cause of conflict. This applies to all relationships across cultural barriers -- not only to those with other nations and major cultures but also to those within a culture, such as relationships between suburbanites and slum dwellers or between races or social classes.
The cause of such cognitive conflicts may arise in large part from the different ways in which peoples look at time. Time is undivided duration, but in order to think or talk about it, each culture must divide it.
Our culture divides time into two parts, the past and the future, which meet at the present moment -- an instant without duration. This is reflected in European languages, which have tenses in the past, present, and future. But some peoples, such as the Bantu of Africa, do not have time classes of this sort in their language or social outlook. Many Bantu tongues divide verbs into those concerned with completed and uncompleted actions. They have no future tense because they categorize the future and the present together into a single form concerned with unfinished actions. (Similarly, in English we sometimes say, "I am going to school tomorrow," using the present tense for a future action.)
In the usual Bantu cognitive system, time is quite different from what it is to middle-class Americans, since it consists of a present of long duration and great importance; a past of less importance and moderate duration, such as can be held in personal memory; and almost no future distinguishable from the present.
Among some of these people, the future is not conceivable beyond the next few days and certainly has no meaning in terms of years. These people live in and value the present with all its problems, pleasures, and human relationships. Such people, even if they are given birth-control devices, are unlikely to use them, simply because they have no training in subjecting present relations to a hypothetical event nine months in the future.
Such cognitive differences are of great significance, especially when value systems are different. The African values the present, whereas many middle-class Americans put all emphasis on the importance of the future and are ready to make almost any sacrifice in the present for the sake of some hypothetical future benefit. In contrast to both, the aristocrat of today, like the ancient Greek, usually puts highest valuation on the past.
In our society, the latter viewpoint is now generally ignored, but the conflict between the "future preference" of the American middle-class suburbanite and the "present preference" of the lower-class slum dweller leads the former to regard the latter as shiftless, irresponsible, and lacking in self-discipline, while slum dwellers may regard the suburbanites' constant present sacrifice for future benefit as making them dehumanized and inhibited. In my opinion, the collapse, over the past two decades, of middle-class efforts to export our "self-enterprise" economic system to "underdeveloped countries" or to abolish ignorance and poverty in our own cities has been caused primarily by the existence of cognitive barriers -- specially the one associated with time.
But there is much more to the problem than this. People can deal with their experiences consciously only if they have a cognitive system. This is why individuals cannot remember the events of the first year or two of their own lives, before they had acquired a cognitive system by learning to talk and rationalize. The events of that period of "infantile amnesia" are incorporated in people's neurological and metabolic systems, as can be shown by getting individuals to relive an early experience under hypnosis, but they cannot consciously recall and verbalize the experience until they have categorized it, something they could not do when it occurred.
The cognitive system of any people is of major importance because it includes all those unconscious classifications, judgments, and values which trigger most of an adult's initial responses to events. Every culture, including our own, has a cognitive system at its very foundation, and this is what really keeps it functioning, because it enables large numbers of people to live in the same society without constant clashes and conflicts. A few examples will serve to show this.
We divide the whole range of colors, as found in the rainbow, into six colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. With our European background, we think a view is beautiful if it consists of alternating horizontal bands of green and blue, as in a landscape consisting of a foreground strip of green shore, a blue lake beyond, a farther shore of green trees and hills, and a blue sky beyond that.
But to a Bantu of dry Africa, such a view is a rather boring panorama of a single color, for many natives of that language group place green and blue in a single category with one name, although they divide the lower red-orange-yellow portion of the spectrum into a larger number of basic colors with different names. That is why what impresses us as a beautiful view of shore, lake, and sky strikes them as a rather monotonous field of one color, whereas, conversely, an African landscape, which to us seems to be a dull expanse of semi-parched soil with dry grasses, may seem to them to be an exciting scene of many different colors.
(As Americans of European background have become familiar with the African-like views of Arizona and New Mexico, many have come to feel that these semi-desert views are preferable to the more "conventional beauties" of New England, Wisconsin, or upper Michigan. And the Navaho or other natives of our Southwest show their preference for the red-orange-yellow portion of the spectrum by their extensive use of these colors and their scanty use of green, blue, or violet in their arts.)
A somewhat similar example exists in respect to distinguishing and naming the various states of H2O. In our culture, we divide that range into no more than five or six categories, such as ice, snow, slush, water, and steam. But some Eskimo groups who are vitally concerned with how a dogsled moves on snow divide snow alone into 50 or more different categories, each with a distinct name. Today, in our own culture, as the sport of skiing grows more popular, we are developing numerous names for snow conditions on ski slopes to describe different skiing conditions.
Another significant example of any culture's cognitive view of experience may be seen in the way it divides the life span, especially the preference it places on these divisions.
Many native societies of Africa, for example, are formally divided into six or seven rigid stages, and the transitions from one to another are marked by formal, often painful, "crisis ceremonies.” Frequently, there is little contact between different age classes. Thus, youths of seven to 11 years may live together in bands with almost no contact with parents, while the age group 18 to 28 may be almost totally devoted to war or hunting and forbidden to marry until they move, as a group, into the next age range, say from 28 to 45.
By contrast, in the medieval period, Christian Europe divided a person's life into only two stages, childhood and adulthood, separated at about age seven by First Communion. There was a slight tendency, arising from the Jewish Bar Mitzvah, to make another division at about age 13, marked by the sacrament of Confirmation, but generally, anyone over seven was spoken to and treated as an adult.
Over the last five centuries or more, however, our Western culture has changed its cognitive view of this matter to become more like the African, until today we have at least six or more age classifications: infants, children, teens or adolescents, the college crowd, the young marrieds, middle-aged people, and retired persons. There is increasing segregation of these -- in education, in living quarters, in reading and entertainment, and in commercial markets (as in a department store).
The generation gap has become a familiar problem, and communication across age-group barriers has become a major issue. Moreover, female preference for the adolescent period has given us hordes of 40-year-old women trying to look like adolescents. The influence of such cognitive changes on all aspects of life is evident.
The power and affluence of Western civilization do not result from our technology, our political structure, or even our economic organization but from our cognitive system, on which they are based. That system began to develop before 500 B.C. with the introduction of the idea, in Palestine and Persia, of one God -- omnipotent, omniscient, and perfect -- and with the growth of two-valued logic in Persia and Greece.
Although our cognitive system has made our civilization the richest and mightiest in the world, its continued use without cognitive sophistication is leading us to disaster. Lynn White, Jr., pointed this out in his article, "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis," in Science for March 10, 1967.
Professor White's thesis is that when the Judeo-Christian faith established the view that there is no spirit in nature other than the human, the world was reduced to a created object to be exploited by humans, and the way was thus opened to the destruction of nature and to the total pollution of the world -- a consequence that may have become inevitable with the rejection, in the latter thirteenth century, of the message of St. Francis to treat all nature as sacred.
The cognitive techniques derived from our underlying outlook have included ( a) using analysis rather than synthesis in seeking answers to problems; (b) isolating problems and studying them in a vacuum instead of using an ecological approach; ( c) using techniques based on quantification rather than on qualification study done in a contextual situation; (d) proceeding on the assumption of single-factor causation rather than pluralistic, ecological causation; and (e) basing decisions and actions on needs of the individual rather than needs of the group.
In our society, if we want to know how something functions, we take it apart, cut it up, isolate it from its context; we analyze its factors and assume that only one is an independent variable. We then quantify the changes this independent variable makes in all the other variables that are assumed to be dependent on it. Then we make the independent variable one link in a chain of such independent variables, each surrounded by its system of dependent variables, the whole forming a chain going back to some original cause in the past or extending forward in a similar chain to some ultimate goal in the future.
From such reasoning, given to us from the Greeks through Aristotle, we got the "final" causes ( or goals) and the "Unmoved Mover" (that which is the first cause of all movement and does not itself move) of Aristotelian metaphysics, and, today, we still use this way of thinking, even though we no longer believe in Aristotle's metaphysics.
The now obsolescent mode of thought and cognition just described might be contrasted with a newer method which is, incidentally, closer to the thinking processes of southern and eastern Asia, which were never much influenced by transcendental Hebrew monotheism or by Greek two-valued logic.
This newer (or older) way of looking at experience tries to find how anything functions by seeing its relationships to a larger system and, ultimately, to the whole cosmos. To do so, it uses an ecological and qualitative approach, seeking to grasp the whole contextual situation of innumerable factors, all of which are changing at once, not only by quantitative changes within a fixed identity (such as Western logic can handle) but with constant shifts of identity and quality.
This more intuitive and less logical point of view is now sweeping the West as is evidenced by the fact that our traditional Western categories and cognitive assumptions were rejected not only by youthful hippies but also by those hardheaded, analytical people on whom the survival of the West depends.
The stumbling block, of course, is that our whole institutional setup is based on the old method of thought. For example, our educational system is based on the methods of categorization, specialization, and quantification, which must be replaced. This old method of thought is seen on the lower levels, where objective tests assume such things as two-valued logic (True, False), the principle of contradiction (Yes, No), and the principle of retained identity, just as, on the highest levels, the great increase in the use of computers assumes the possibility of objective analysis and quantification of life experiences.
It is difficult to reform our old methods of thinking no matter how bankrupt they may be. Standing in the way of change are the pressures exerted by institutionalized establishments, the profits of powerful groups producing equipment based on old ways of thinking, and the need which the large bureaucratized organizations have for persons with narrow technical training in the older cognitive patterns.
On the other hand, if we do not make such reforms, we may well be destroyed by problems that cannot be handled by the established methods of specialization, isolation, and quantification. These problems are already swallowing us up in the crises of environmental destruction, urban blight, social and racial tensions, poor mental health, and international conflicts that threaten to lead to nuclear annihilation.
American Men Take Up Their Vow of Chastity
Men have neglected their responsibilities toward women and the family for too long.
Gentlemen, it's time for you to stand up and let the world know what a good Christian conservative means when he commits to the right to life.
From now on, your behavior must be exemplary. A man's behavior mustn't contribute to unwanted pregnancies.
When men behave responsibly, we can get the government out of making laws regarding reproductive rights and family healthcare. Abortion will be a thing of the past.
It's up to us, good, Christian, Western men.
Conservative Men make this commitment to future mothers and wives.
1. We will not fornicate with women.
2. We will not temp women with our dress, style, or demeanour.
3. We will not have premarital sex.
4. After marriage, we will only have sex for reproductive purposes.
5. Married couples may enjoy intimate play in private.
6. Men will encourage wives, daughters, and female family members and acquaintances to dress modestly.
7. We will ensure, through the law of our holy land, that online dating sites, porn, chat sites, adult entertainment, prostitution, nudie bars, strip clubs, massage centers, and other forms of sexual entertainment are illegal in all jurisdictions of the Realm.
8. We will guard the purity of our female family members and acquaintances.
9. Dating will be a controlled activity until marriage.
10. People will not be allowed to dance provocatively.
11. Music that agitates sexual desire must be outlawed.
12. Movies will no longer have scenes portraying any sexual activity.
13. There will be no more nudity in any content.
14. We will limit our drinking to three drinks on special occasions.
15. Drug use will be punishable by a trip to hell.
More rules of proper male behavior and virtues will be announced as the country reforms itself through the genius of our dear and holy leader. He alone will determine the law and the correct interpretation of the Constitution. His appointed clergy will teach according to his understanding of scripture.
God's will makes every man free to be a good man.
Take up your cross and protect women from our sinful world.
Yours Truly,
Noble Edward Tali Bon
Executive Advisor and Earl of Kansas
IS CAPITALISM SUSTAINABLE?
I implore you to read this book and others like it. We must understand the material basis for economic growth and its limitations. We are at an inflection point where circumstances outside our control dictate how hard we land after almost two hundred years of industrial and technological development made possible by exploiting fossil fuel resources. There is a vast amount of literature across domains of science addressing our need for energy and materials to continue our current economic growth paradigm. We will either understand what these efforts are telling us and work to mitigate the harshest consequences of our actions or blindly crash. The results of inaction will be dire.
The essay below by the author of Sustainable Capitalism is simply common sense. It’s not a sophisticated treatment of modern capitalism and consumer society, nor the science of sustainability, but it captures the spirit of many people’s concerns. I have recommended many books concerning these topics.
The Players of The Great Game will never address the core concerns and science of sustainability unless people make them.
"John Ikerd combines insights from philosophy, psychology, ecology, sociology, and economics to question many of our current free-market assumptions and to make a case for employing common sense to build a more sustainable future for our plant."—Fred Kirschenmann, University of Iowa
"A seminal contribution to the concept of sustainability."—J. Paul Mueller, North Carolina State University
"John Ikerd has shown an uncanny ability to address the questions that need to be answered—now. This is a must-read book for students, teachers, and policymakers who strive for a framework to ensure economic sustainability and intergeneration equity."—E. Ann Clark, University of Guelph
John Ikerd is a professor emeritus of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Missouri, Columbia.
I implore you to read this book. We must understand the material basis for economic growth and its limitations. We are at an inflection point where circumstances dictate how hard we land after almost two hundred years of fossil-fuelled industrial and technological development. There is a vast amount of literature addressing issues of energy and atoms across domains, all pointing to limitations under our current economic growth paradigm. We will either understand these issues and work to mitigate the harshest consequences of our actions or blindly crash. The results of inaction will be dire.
I realize most readers of this magazine are operators of small farms. But, some questions are too important to leave the economists and politicians. If our capitalistic economy is not sustainable, neither are our farms or our society or humanity. Some questions are so important that no one can afford to remain uninformed, uncommitted, and uninvolved.
Is capitalism sustainable? Not the type of capitalism that dominates America and most global economies today. This is not a matter of personal opinion but a direct consequence of the most fundamental laws of science. Sustainability ultimately depends upon energy because anything useful in sustaining life on earth relies on energy. All material things that are of any use to humans, food, clothes, houses, and automobiles, require energy to make and energy to use. All practical human activities, working, and thinking require energy. Physical scientists lump all such functional activities together and call them "work." All work involves energy (definitively.)
Energy is continuously transforming. The natural tendency of energy to change from more concentrated to less concentrated forms gives energy its ability to perform work. All material things, such as food, gasoline, plastic, and steel, are just highly concentrated forms of energy. Matter converts into energy, as in eating food or burning gasoline—the structure of energy changes by using heat to make electricity and electricity to produce light. However, even though work invariably changes matter to energy or changes the form of energy, no energy is lost. This is the first law of thermodynamics, energy conservation law, as in Einstein's famous E=MC2.
At first, it might seem that energy could be recycled and reused forever as if sustainability would be inevitable. However, once energy performs work before, it must be reconcentrated, reorganized, and restored. Unfortunately, it takes energy to reconcentrate, reorganize, and restore energy. And, the energy used to reconcentrate and restore energy is simply no longer available to do anything else. It has lost its usefulness. Entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, is the tendency of all closed systems toward the ultimate degradation of matter and energy, toward inert uniformity, an absence of structure, pattern, organization, or differentiation. The barren surfaces of the Moon or Mars are examples of systems near entropy.
Since the loss of energy to entropy is inevitable, it might seem that sustainability is impossible. Even if waste and pollution could be avoided entirely by using and reusing energy, the tendency toward entropy would continue. Life on earth would not be sustainable without the daily inflow of new solar energy. Sustainability ultimately depends upon using solar energy to offset the unavoidable effects of entropy.
Capitalism is a very efficient energy extraction system, but it provides no incentive to reconcentrate and restore energy to offset entropy. Capitalists have no economic incentive to invest in energy renewal to benefit future generations. Capitalists reduce waste and pollution or reuse resources only when it is profitable to do so. Capitalists have incentives to use renewable energy to support current consumption but not to re-storing energy for future generations. Capitalism inevitably tends toward physical entropy.
The law of entropy applies to social energy as well as physical energy. All forms of human energy labor, management, innovation, and creativity are products of social relationships. Humans cannot be born, reach maturity, and become useful without the help of other people who care about them. People must be educated, trained, civilized, and socialized before becoming productive members of complex societies. All organizations, including business organizations, governments, and economies, depend on the ability of people to work together for a common purpose, which in turn depends upon the sociability and civility of human societies. Human productivity directly results from healthy personal relationships within families, friendships, communities, and cultures.
Capitalism inevitably dissipates, disperses, and disorganizes social energy because it weakens personal relationships. Maximum economic efficiency requires that people relate to each other impartially, which means impersonally. People must compete rather than cooperate if market economies are to function efficiently. When people spend more time and energy working and being economically productive, they have less time and energy to spend on personal relationships within families and communities. When people buy things based solely on price rather than buy from people they know and trust, personal relationships within communities suffer from neglect. Capitalism devalues personal relationships and disconnects people, thus dissipating, dispersing, and disorganizing social energy.
Capitalistic economies use people to do work while doing nothing to restore the social capital needed to sustain positive personal relationships. There is no economic incentive for capitalists to invest in families, communities, or society to benefit future generations. Capitalists build relationships or contribute to social causes only when such contributions contribute to their profits or growth. Capitalists do not waste energy by investing in social capital. Capitalism inevitably tends toward social entropy.
Economies are how people facilitate their relationships with other people and their natural environment in complex societies. Economies transform physical and social energy into raw materials to create products and services for impersonal marketplaces. All economic capital uses natural or social capital. Once all our natural and social capital is exhausted, there will be no need for financial capital. Without capital, an economy loses its ability to produce; it tends toward economic entropy. Today's capitalistic economies quite simply are not sustainable.
A sustainable economy must be based on a fundamentally different paradigm, precisely, on the paradigm of living systems. Living things by nature are self-making, self-renewing, reproductive, and regenerative. Plants have the innate capacity to capture, organize, and store solar energy to support other living organisms and offset the energy lost to entropy. Living things also have a natural propensity to reproduce their species. Humans, for example, devote significant amounts of time and energy to raising families, with an insignificant economic incentive to do so. Individual life is not sustainable because every living thing eventually dies. But, communities and societies of living individuals have the capacity and natural propensity to be productive while devoting a significant part of their life's energy to conceiving and nurturing the next generation.
Relationships within healthy living systems must be mutually beneficial and thus must be selective. All living organisms are made up of cells, and a selective or semi-permeable membrane surrounds each living cell. These semi-permeable boundaries keep some things in and let other things out while keeping some things out and letting other things in. Likewise, living organisms are defined by boundaries, skin, bark, and scales that selectively allow different elements, air, water, food, and waste, to enter and leave the organism's body. If these boundaries were completely permeable or impermeable, reproducing life forms could not exist.
The same principle holds for all living systems: ecosystems, families, communities, economies, and cultures. The relationships among elements of healthy natural ecosystems are, by nature, mutually beneficial. However, relationships among humans and between humans and nature are matters of choice and thus must be consciously and purposefully selective. People must be willing and able to choose to maintain positive relationships with other people and decide to take care of the earth to benefit themselves and benefit future generations.
Capitalism provides no economic incentives to sustain life on earth, but humans have the innate capacity and natural tendency to do so. Throughout human history, people have chosen families, communities, and societies over isolation, even when it was not in their short-run individual self-interests. Many cultures had respected, revered, and cared for the ecosystems they depended on without financial incentives. Modern self-interest is a very new thing. It puts material consumption over everything that makes us human. Not until the last few decades were the social and ethical constraints removed, turning capitalism into an unsustainable system of extraction and exploitation with no consideration for future generations.
To restore sustainability, people must make conscious, purposeful decisions to rely on renewable energy, not just for consumption but also to rebuild stocks of natural capital for the benefit of future generations. To restore sustainability to capitalism, people must make conscious, purposeful choices to rebuild positive, mutually beneficial relationships with other people, not just for economic gains but also to restore depleted stocks of social capital. No economic system approaches the efficiency of capitalism in utilizing natural capital to meet individual material human needs and wants. But, natural and social capital must be continually renewed and replenished to sustain economic prosperity. Our current breed of politicians and economists hasn't the mindset to address sustainability issues in a capitalist frame. They are only concerned with their careers and profits.
Is capitalism sustainable? You don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand energy and entropy. All people have the ability and responsibility to understand the importance of this question, commit, and become involved. If we don't, greed will destroy our species sooner than we think.
Thoughts That Bubbled Up While Listening To PhilosophiCat and Aarvoll
I am new to this line of philosophical inquiry within this ideological context. I am not sure if linking this to the New Right or traditionalism is fair, but I think this is their perspective. Aarvoll is a fascinating scholar I recently discovered. I had not known of PhilosophiCat until I watched this video.
Below are my comments on the video.
This was an excruciatingly exciting conversation. I am always thrilled when I find people having this kind of discourse in this manner.
I don’t feel any of the following is profound. (I am not steeped in the literature, although I have read some of the books.)
Thoughts that popped up while listening.
There are no subsets distinct from the set.
I have a good relationship with my self but am not entirely enamored with my self.
I endeavor to experience truth and behave as truthfully as possible, but I can’t imagine knowing “the truth” about anything esoteric. I feel humans are limited by too many things to have a deep understanding of reality. It is the root of all suffering that complete understanding constantly remains out of reach. “The Truth” is impossible for us to grasp, so we keep experiencing the same cycles in pursuit of it. Modern science with the latest, best of breed, tools brings us a particular type of knowledge (if we are able for it) while we are attracted to the musings of “The Ancients” in a constant desire for more profound meaning. (We are hanging on, grasping at straws.)
After great effort, is “letting go” essential to a life well-lived?
I sense similar relative cycles involving goods, or “The Good.” Any virtue is part and parcel of human experience close to culturally acquired focus.
It is difficult for “The Will” to escape/transcend experiential programming.
I can’t begin to imagine how any human could define God.
When considering “The Infinite,” how deep could our understanding be? Even if we assume that we possess some divine, ineffable qualities due to our ability to reason or something else, that is not something because it is immaterial.
What is Time? How many answers to this question can there be, and within what constraints? Can time dilate so fast that it’s eliminated? Can there be “The Void?” Can there be anything in “The Mouth” of “The Void?”
What is the quality, character, and utility of a city-state where wisdom and truth are prime and core values? From a violent, ignorant ghetto, how does that arise? It seems to get snuffed out again and again, but the need for some individuals is to keep trying to make it happen. Most people can’t focus on metaphysical ideas. Even simple virtues are excruciatingly hard to live by on the ground of sin and desire. What scale of human society can have such a community? Could there be a world with a million distinct enlightened communities?
Why do saints exist at all? Is it as simple as there can be no saints without sinners? God created “man” to have a creator?
For God to experience the greatest good, there must be a modicum of free will and many deleterious avenues to focus one’s attention. God needs hyper-normal stimuli to experience himself? How can this be? How is God a self, a subset of the set?
We know nothing of God; we only dissect and examine our selves (if we have the ability to do this in us for various mysterious reasons).
Most people are parrots, robots, monkeys because, _______________________________. It is some people’s desire to fill in the blank.
As always, why, why, why, and then you die.
It is what it is, was what it was, and shall be what it shall be, by virtue of having been.
Until death, I will imagine that I know what is going on: This is how I live with myself.
You may say he lacks the ability to explain himself, but that’s not so; he lacks the artistic audacity to do so.
Forgive me if I have gotten it all wrong.
Strive To Understand The Whole Picture
When Steven Pinker says, I'm paraphrasing, that all that's required to tackle the worst probable outcomes of climate change is knowledge, I must beg to differ. Complex problems require a lot more than that.
Who would argue that climate science isn't complex and climate, as it relates to functions of civilization, aren't complex? The climate affects every aspect of our lives in many ways. I won't go into systems theory, complexity science, climate science, and how those domains relate to economics, politics, food, ecosystems, etc. You can read up on those things as you wish. I have posted book recommendations and website links on my website at globe hackers.
The main point I am trying to make is that when we point to various areas of progress that we have experienced since, say, 1750, we need to understand it within an ever-changing context.
If we notice that a woman in China might prefer a factory job over working in rice paddies because the money she would earn from the factory will impact her life in more positive ways, we also need to understand the many changes that go along with that, their probable directionalities and cultural impacts; issues of sustainability and so on. They may all be good but will they always be good and relative to what? It is likely that when the woman working at the factory makes enough money, she might want to start a business or be a real estate investor or broker. Who knows, but she will probably move on from the factory if she can and wants to.
Immigrants to Brooklyn in the eighteenth century may have sewn caps in their tiny apartments and worked the docks to earn money to pay for their children's education, a noble thing, by the way. Still, their children will be working within a vastly different context with different desires and needs. Everything we inherit these days is in flux—today, much more so than in the early eighteenth century.
We have taken for granted fossil fuel energy, what Nate Hagens metaphorically refers to as 50 billion "slaves" (because fossil fuel energy allows us to do much more work than a mule fed with oats) for many generations, and it's given us more wealth than anyone in the seventeenth century could have possibly imagined. But things change, and it turns out fossil fuels have some economic externalities and environmental impacts that are not good for the health of ecological systems and public health.
We have known about climate change for decades, and our leaders and people have chosen to ignore the problem and instead carry on as if this particular set of circumstances can last forever without a hitch.
We all hope that free enterprise, science, engineering, and technology will facilitate solutions to our problems and allow us to continue our GDP based economic growth forever so that all people around the world can have air conditioners, white goods, shopping malls, Amazon warehouses, cars, medicine and so on. That is perfectly reasonable. However, it may require that we modify our way of doing things to achieve this constantly evolving state of progress.
We can do so many positive things to ensure a brighter future for most people and maintain a healthy balance in the natural services surrounding us and upon which we depend. Again, I refer you to books and internet resources if you feel you want to educate yourself regarding the various challenges we are facing.
We need to understand the broader and constantly evolving and changing context we are in both on a micro and macro level. We need to ensure that our way of life allows us to maintain good health and a positive mental attitude. We need to strive to understand the multitude of perspectives required to understand something well. Staying in our ideological safe space will not do.
When I say context, I mean across domains of knowledge.
Our culture needs to be conscious of the need to do this, as do all of us as individuals. If we are not aware of what is going on, there is nothing we can do to affect what's going on.
We can't assume that people who benefit significantly from how the system works in this era want to change the system as needed because they are rational. (If they don't, it won't benefit them, so they must.) A profits first mentality is horrendously short term.
We need to consider immediate needs, five-year, ten-year, and 25-year blocks at a minimum, and take action for nature's long-term health and welfare. We are part and parcel of the biological systems from which we evolved. People who can't recognize this need help. They need education.
If war is expensive, destructive, and potentially devastating to life, we need to work to end our need to wage war. This project is not some naive hope; it's imperative in a world where technology drives our ability to be more and more efficient at destroying things. We could create a new game that would allow us to compete without the need to kill. If you can't imagine that possibility, then, in many crucial ways, you are a deficient person.
If we want to look back with pride at how things have progressed twenty or one hundred years from now, we will have to recognize how things must change, and we are the only ones who can do that work.
Some things that are needed:
Consciousness-raising
Knowledge
Structural and systemic change
New concepts of economic growth
Better management of crucial global resources
Better environmental stewardship
A better understanding of negative externalities from business
A science-based approach to regulation, health, and business
The above list is not to say that we haven't made progress in these areas. I want to emphasize that we must continually evaluate the effectiveness of what we are doing in light of new information. (Let's pay attention to the data and the science and act accordingly.)
I'll end the bulleted list there. It is by far too short. Let's add all the positive and still relevant things The Enlightenment has given us. I am not for throwing babies out with the bathwater. We should build upon the institutions and systems that have proven to work and stood the test of time.
We need:
More free speech
More freedom
More free enterprise
More creativity
Better critical thinking and sense-making skills
Ethical business leaders
Leaders who are committed to our welfare and general health
We will not get these things through brutal, short-term, game-theoretic competition. As we always have, we will get there through cooperation, broad knowledge networks, economic activity, cultural exchange, etc.
Those of you who believe this is impossible need help. You need to get to work and educate yourself. You need to realize that you can be an active part of the solution.
We have to fight to stop those who would make this project impossible wherever they are, whatever ideology they subscribe to. We need an open society. Going back to closed societies is untenable in the twenty-first century.
We move on, or we go back. One way or another, our choices and actions will bring about the circumstances that will ultimately dictate the result.
DiEM25 Manifesto
Follow the link and read the DiEM25 Manifesto.
Are you in favor of more or less democracy? Do you feel government represents you? Do you feel your elected officials put people first?
Europe will be democratised, once its oligarchy is overthrown!
A MANIFESTO FOR DEMOCRATISING EUROPE For all their concerns with inflation, migration, populism, climate change, pandemics, security and terrorism, only one prospect truly terrifies the Powers of Europe: Democracy! They speak in democracy’s name but only to deny, exorcise and suppress it in practice. They seek to co-opt, evade, corrupt, mystify, usurp and manipulate democracy in order to break its energy and arrest its possibilities.
For rule by Europe’s peoples, government by the demos, is the shared nightmare of:
Big Tech, Big Pharma, permanently bailed out bankers, fund managers, insurers, the security-military-industrial complex – in short, the resurgent tapestry of cartels perpetually contemptuous of the many and their organised expression
Their army of unelected bureaucrats, ‘technocrats’ and lobbyists pulling the strings of governments in general and of EU institutions in particular
Political parties appealing to liberalism, democracy, freedom, environmentalism, social justice etc., only to betray their most basic principles when in power
Governments whose policy of socialism-for-the-financiers and harsh-austerity-for-everyoneelse fuels nativist populism which these same governments audaciously pretend to rail against
Corporations that use terms like “sustainability” and “net zero” to continue with business-asusual, greenwashing their planetary-scale vandalism Media moguls who have normalised disinformation and weaponised fear-mongering
Our pledge We are inspired by the vision of a non-exploitative Europe that nurtures Reason, Freedom, Tolerance and Imagination made possible by real Solidarity, comprehensive Transparency, and authentic Democracy. We aspire to:
1. A Democratic Europe in which all political authority stems from Europe’s sovereign peoples
2. A Postcapitalist Europe that practises democracy at the workplace and in all aspects of life, not just in electoral politics
3. A Social Europe that cherishes not only freedom from interference but also the basic income, care and goods that render one free from need and exploitation
4. A Sustainable Europe that lives within the planet’s means, minimising its environmental impact through living harmoniously with all living beings, conserving and restoring biodiversity, eliminating pollution, and leaving all fossil fuels deep inside the earth
5. An Ecological Europe that leads a green and just transition world-wide
6. An Internationalist Europe that treats non-Europeans as ends-in-themselves and works in active solidarity with exploited peoples across the world
7. A United Europe whose peoples show as much solidarity across nations as they do within them
8. A Pluralist Europe of regions, ethnicities, nations, languages, philosophies and cultures where one can be, at the same time, European and patriotic
9. A Diverse Europe that celebrates difference and ends every discrimination based on social class, education, gender, skin colour, age, national origin, philosophy, faith, disability or sexual orientation
10. A Decentralised Europe that uses central power to maximise democracy in towns, cities, regions and states
11. A Transnational Europe in which political representation transcends national borders
12. A Transparent Europe where all decision-making takes place under the citizens’ scrutiny
13. A Sovereign Europe that presses its home-grown technologies into the service of solidarity
14. An Honest Europe that seeks a bright future without hiding from its imperialist past
15. A Cultured Europe that harnesses its people’s rich cultural mosaic and promotes not only its invaluable cultural heritage but also the work of Europe’s dissident artists, musicians, writers and poets who contribute to a progressive democracy
16. A Creative & Technologically Sovereign Europe that releases and safeguards the innovative powers of its citizens’ imagination
17. A Peaceful Europe de-escalating tensions in its Eastern, Mediterranean and Aegean regions, ending its colonial projects in the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere as well as acting as a bulwark against the sirens of militarism and expansionism everywhere
18. An Open Europe that is alive and attractive to ideas, people and inspiration from all over the world, recognising fences and borders as signs of weakness thus spreading insecurity in the name of security
19. A Welcoming Europe that recognises that, after centuries during which Europeans colonised or dominated the politics of the rest of the world, it is now necessary to welcome migrants and refugees
20. A Liberated Europe where privilege, prejudice, deprivation and the threat of violence wither, enabling people in Europe and beyond to be born into fewer stereotypical roles, to enjoy even chances to develop their potential, and to be free to choose more of their partners in all aspects of life, work and society
Carpe DiEM25
www.diem25.org
Big, Fast and Shameless Growth
"Everyone holds his future in his own hands, like a sculptor the raw material he will fashion into a figure. But it's the same with that type of artistic activity as with all others: We are merely born with the capability to do it. The skill to mold the material into what we want must be learned and attentively cultivated."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
When I was a kid, we used to see a lot of westerns. I grew up in the States and spent part of each summer in Ireland. My family there ran the village post office and had a salon where aunt Breeda fixed people's hair. We had a small vegetable garden in the back near a wall that separated our garden from the neighbor's and a few fruit trees at the end of the garden where there was another wall with a small river behind it. My cousins would stick two pitchforks in the ground in front of the orchard, and we'd take shots on goal. Across the street was McConnell's Pub, and to the right, down a few doors, there was a movie house. It was small with simple benches in the front for kids and some raked seating in the back. The last few rows had excellent padded seats with arms like you'd find in a bigger movie theatre in Limerick.
Every Thursday night, they had a film. The most popular ones were American. We lads like Westerns. Much as in the States, I'd play Cowboys and Indians with my friends in the village. The ways Westerns often dehumanized native Americans never crossed our minds. There were good and bad guys, which was all you needed for a good story. I guess that's why we also liked gangster films, full of colorful characters. Gangster films are still universally appreciated. We couldn't get enough.
These days I've discovered a new genre that represents our time and American culture like nothing else — The Unicorn film or series. It's my new favorite genre, one that makes me laugh out lough at the outrageousness and ego-bouncing lack of self-awareness of the colorful characters that mark these anti-morality tales.
The messianic cult leader
The coattail riding actual inventor of the goods or services that couldn't sell shit to the sewer
The wisecracking lawyers and consultants who've seen it all before, but not this particular jackass
The woman behind the man
Sexual harassment
A media that can't get enough
Cool-headed investors and bankers
Mentors who just want to see everything work out for the best
and on and on...
Guaranteed belly laughs and downright hysteria if you've actually been around these types.
The story arch is predictable because you followed it in the papers. It's a roller coaster ride with luscious schadenfreude and a climactic crash as the Players move on to the next, next thing.
Anything is possible in a world where everything is a commodity and anyone can become a brand. Hell, with enough money, you can potentially buy trips to Mars and immortality. You can transcend nature.
Welcome back to the real world.
Unicorn is a term used in the venture capital industry to describe a privately held startup company with a value of over $1 billion.
Lately, I've been watching Super Pumped and WeChrashed. Both are stories about hyper-competitive, egomaniacal, narcissistic, sociopathic, and ambitious entrepreneurs trying to get filthy rich by changing the world with their startups. Hubristic: Not for characters like these, the world is progressing fast, can be changed practically overnight, and always for the better.
Anyway, it occurred to me that these films represent the deepest desires of our current culture. Get attention, lead people, inspire people, make as much money as you can doing outrageous things and make sure people know how special you are. We see this with some startup entrepreneurs, and we see this from some of our Tubers and social media influencers. It's all over sports culture and celebrity culture; even our politicians have succumbed.
We think we have to be outrageous, crazy, and reckless to be attractive and successful. Well, these traits have always been American. But one thing struck me. I may be wrong about this, but it seems that the only businesses that matter anymore are businesses that make some asshole obscenely rich no matter how they make their money. They can cheat, lie, and break the law as long as there are potentially billions in the market for their offering. No matter how they make their money, they always get a pass. If you are a Player, you want to become too big to fail and too big to jail. That's the real mark of success, and that's how the big business game is structured.
If you raise money, you are worth money. It's not your money. Your salary is your money, but it's as if the investor's money is your money, and everything depends on the valuation of your company. I'm familiar with this culture, but I won't go into it. This stuff is mundane. What bothers me is that it seems so much like a scam. People make similar bets repeatedly, and win or lose; it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what happens to people or workers. Individuals should be responsible for their choices—only the markets matter.
VCs and investment banks make intelligent bets and huge sums on service fees and markets.
The Game is everything that matters.
There are no limits to how much money one can make.
The Game is exciting for the players and entertaining for spectators.
Most of us are happy to be spectators, and if we have enough money or credit to buy a ticket to the show, we are delighted. If we have a little more cash and credit, we can ape the behavior of the wealthy entrepreneurs, bankers, venture capitalists, hedge fund managers, sports stars, and celebrities we worship. We just want to fit in. We don't even think of the dehumanizing qualities of the Game.
I was also thinking about the hundreds of thousands of businesspeople running businesses for decades, not to get super rich but to get wealthy in an honest way by providing good products and services to their customers and communities. If we put in a little effort, intelligence, compassion, and care, our businesses allow us to live a good life. That's most of us.
But that's boring.
Lead with the noisemakers. Any publicity is good publicity. The founder makes potentially billions by bringing motivation, energy, excitement, ideas, technology, processes, people, etc., to the company they founded.
Grow fast, get big, establish monopoly power, and exit with billions.
I respect the founders of WeWork and UBER. I don't begrudge them for playing the Game hard and exiting with lots of money. I can't even fault them for how they played the Game because it required them to do precisely what they did. Could they have played nicely? Some people can; some people can't. Maybe Tim Cook is a nice guy. I don't know. Maybe Bill Gurley is a gentleman and only trying to help good people create great businesses.
Ordinary people will always pay attention to, marvel at, and wish they were the tough guy, the hero. The fantasy keeps us going in a world where nothing is more meaningful or valuable than money. If you take risks like the big Players, the worst thing that can happen to you is that you fail before getting started. If you are determined, you start again. Neither of these founders stopped creating startups after they were ousted. They made billions and continue to develop businesses—it's what they do. If they are genuinely fortunate, they've learned from their experiences and might do better next time. If they are psychopathic, they will continue using their talents to wreck things.
Whether a Player is a good guy, a bad guy, or a complex guy with fascinating nuances, they know how to use their money to protect themselves within a culture hungry for winners.
The creative destruction thing is at the core of American values.
Gangsters,
cowboys,
soldiers,
guns,
war,
power,
competition,
spectacle,
entertainment,
drugs,
alcohol,
lots and lots of religions,
speed,
tech,
progress,
life-extension,
the singularity,
AI,
Ex Machina,
Sex robots,
Al Capone,
Scarface,
award shows,
American Idol,
sports stadiums,
skyscrapers,
Ballers,
big oil,
big pharma,
union bosses,
876 military bases around the world,
forever wars,
political correctness,
social justice warriors,
the Far Right, the Alt-Left, Far Left, New Right, Leftish,
WOKE,
graffiti,
jazz,
rap,
hip-hop,
etc., etc.
Live Free or Die.
Go big or go home.
There are no limits.
Everyone can be a winner.
This culture is exciting as hell, and it will terminate our species sooner than we think.
Great stuff!
Be Skeptical of the Western Media's Account of the Ukraine War
There are many ways to look at an elephant as long as you never know it’s an elephant.
azov rehabilitated and the arming of civilians approved—behold, the meat grinder
To arrive at the truth, one must have a fine-grained understanding of many perspectives. Unfortunately, lies win the battles of The Great Game.
How many good Emporers and benevolent dictators have there been? The profit motive will always dictate to a faux democracy beholden to corporations.
I feel it’s imperative to augment your understanding of the war in Ukraine with perspectives from European intelligence experts with a broader understanding of the events in question and not entirely obedient to the status quo.
Rather than understanding the realities, complexities, and the fog of war in an unbiased way, we will follow the media narrative and cheer on a bloody war that could be limited or ended if we could understand the motives of the actors and had the power to do something.
Tragically, we will only watch as the players, the only people and entities that stand to benefit from death and destruction, do whatever they want while passing on the cost of the mayhem to us.
As a minority attempts to mitigate the madness and unravel the misinformation, as protests mount, people in Ukraine will be torn apart and killed.
I feel compelled to share this article because those paying attention over the past forty decades will have recognized a horrific and avoidable pattern. We shall have to repeat the lessons this pattern teaches us as many times as is necessary before we learn how to make and maintain peace or until our species is extinct. —SC
“Treat those who are good with goodness, and also treat those who are not good with goodness. Thus goodness is attained. Be honest to those who are honest, and be also honest to those who are not honest. Thus honesty is attained.” — Lao Tzu
Former NATO Military Analyst Blows the Whistle on West’s Ukraine Invasion Narrative
Posted by SHEERPOST in English from:
THE MILITARY SITUATION IN UKRAINE
JACQUES BAUD
Former Colonel of the General Staff, former member of Swiss strategic intelligence, specialist in Eastern European countries.
What's Wrong With Joe Rogan
So what is wrong with Joe Rogan?
If you find Joe's podcast entertaining, nothing. If you want to learn something, read a book or use some of the thousands of excellent online resources to learn about any domain that interests you.
I think most people enjoy doing the work.
Podcasts, videos on tubes, and blogs have introduced me to many things I would not have known of if I didn't have them.
However, we should be careful to stay humble when our knowledge of a subject is shallow.
Always cross-reference extraordinary claims, and don't be afraid of experts. They are not all bad.
Can you recommend a good book you heard about on the Joe Rogan podcast?
Joe Rogan: Just an average Joe?
Looking into Ontological Coaching with Maximilian Hachtmann
ontological coaching is about generating positive changes in a client’s way of being.
Until I met Maximilian, I was not aware of Ontological Coaching. Through our conversations, I realized it could be a valuable transformational process for people who feel stuck. I’m looking forward to learning more by listening to Maximilian’s podcast.
Below are some takeaways from our conversation. I’m only scratching the surface. Contact Maximilian Casper Hachtmann to learn more.
transforming the way we understand and interpret ourselves and those around us
we are critical observers of ourselves and our relationships
we are constantly growing and changing
we can shape change
we can adapt our way of seeing the world
when we actively change, everything changes in subtle or significant ways
developmental integrated dynamics involve our emotions, language, and thoughts
we can better understand our internal narratives and beliefs
the process involves relationships
somatic psycho/physical awareness
Key Questions
“How am I observing this?”
“What is it about my way of being that has me observe this way?”
“What is it about my way of being that needs to shift so that I can observe differently?”
Ontological coaching helps people feel more confident, empowered, and inspired by letting go of beliefs, behaviors, and patterns that no longer serve them and embracing possibility.
We can change our perceptions, emotions, and attitudes and develop effective language and communication.
Manage one’s responses and emotions.
Recognize and understand the fears, triggers, motivators, and stories that keep us stuck.
find clarity about the following
How do I perceive?
How do I respond?
What thoughts keep me sad, paralyzed, and depressed?
Who and how do I forgive?
How am I taking care of myself?
Am I fulfilled?
What is my purpose?
What behaviors do I need to change to be clear, centered, and confident?
Mad Smile
We had so much; we were so well entertained, and laughter came so easily. When I see carefree young people laughing, my stomach tightens, and my heart feels like it's in someone's clenched fist.
We finally know what it means to be a nanosecond from doomsday.
Can we be forgiven? None of us could have prevented this.
The system's logic was intended to be akin to god's will and who can thwart god's will.
Will wealthy players enjoy a fulfilling existence in their bunkers, knowing that they can eat a month longer than the family in the village?
Will they feel wise that they moved out of harm's way in time?
In Beyond Good and Evil, after cautioning the reader that someone who fights monsters risks becoming a monster himself, Nietzsche said, "if you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you?"
Most of our leaders are narcissistic sociopaths. They believe the destruction they cause is creative. Rewards for taking charge are plentiful in this world and even more significant in the next.
Men of action always know what must be done.
The Abyss represents the parts of ourselves that we fear, the aspect of our creative will that is god, or fears god, or hates, or is hated. When the Abyss stares back, it sees the weakness of the conscious ego that thinks it can control the Abyss. When the conscious self stares into the archaic unconscious, it realizes that we are darker and more animal than we like to admit.
Some may feel guilt or shame.
Ordinary folks don't dare to contemplate the Abyss, so it hypnotizes them.
At the end of the world, we are all monsters afraid to confront that truth. We summon the Devil to make the final, fatal blow, releasing us from fear.
When we fail to confront reality, reality swallows us whole like Moby Dick.
Still, we are assuaged. It is the Devil's fault.
And so, those of us who understand what it means to roll the boulder up the hill keep smiling while we stare into the Abyss.
What's Wrong With Yanis Varoufakis
The answer will quickly be apparent.
Yanis Varoufakis is a deep thinker with skin in the game, and he's been busy fighting for what he believes in for a long time.
Yanis Varoufakis
Here is a brief bio from Berliner Festspiele. "Berliner Festspiele stand for a cultural programme where the new becomes visible."
Yanis Varoufakis is an economist and politician who, as Greece's finance minister in 2015, led the struggle against the European Union's and the International Monetary Fund's austerity and bank bailout policies. Since then, he co-founded DiEM25 (the Democracy in Europe Movement) and is the leader of MeRA25, DiEM25's political party in Greece. Before his election to Greece's Parliament, Varoufakis taught economics in universities in Britain, Australia, the United States, and Greece for three decades. He holds a chair in economic theory at the University of Athens and is Honorary Professor of Political Economy at the University of Sydney, Honoris Causa Professor of Law, Economics and Finance at the University of Torino, Visiting Professor of Political Economy at King's College, London, and Doctor of the University Honoris Causa at the University of Sussex. His best-selling books include: "Adults in the Room: My struggle against Europe's and America's Deep Establishment" (London: The Bodley Head); "Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: A brief history of capitalism" (London: The Bodley Head), "And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's crisis and America's economic future" (New York: Nation Books, 2016); and "The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the World Economy" (London: Zed Books, 2011,2015).
As with any public figure in politics, he has his opponents, detractors, and critics. An excellent place to start to understand what people have made of his work, particularly during the Greek debt crisis, start here: A critical review of the critical reviews of the book' Adults in the Room by Yanis Varoufakis.
As Adam Tooze writes in his indispensable overview of the critiques, the debate around Yanis Varoufakis's account relates to Europe's political economy, and in particular to the question of how to break away from the neoliberal policies that have dominated the history of the "Old World" for decades, and what strategy to adopt to do it.
Here is a review of his recent book, which I have read, "Talking to My Daughter About the Economy."
And for a hard look at his book "Adults in the Room," which I have read, I refer you to this article from The New Republic:
"If you are not the sort of person who is already likely to read a 500-page book on the former Greek finance minister's efforts to save his country from the machinations of the International Monetary Fund, then you aren't going to become one because I leave you in suspense. So let me spoil Yanis Varoufakis's Adults in the Room for you now. He failed."
Yanis Varoufakis is currently active in a political movement he helped found, DiEM25.
"DiEM25 is a pan-European movement of democrats, united under the conclusion that the European Union will only survive if it is radically transformed."
I am sure you know where I stand already. Yanis Veoufakis is a flawed but committed campaigner for the progressive transformation of our current institutions. He is a good man trying his best to make a difference without allaying himself with the destructive forces that run our global political, financial, and economic system.
Have a look at this and decide what you think.
Is neutrality Ukraine's best option?
So let me tell you what motivated me to write this brief post. I often encounter trolls (sorry for the disrespect, but that's all you are) who have read something about someone somewhere and instantly decided that they hated someone based on an article or two. This form of narrow-minded and dogmatic judgment most likely arises because something about the critique of the person in question excited a response. The troll thinks, "Yes, this makes sense, so and so is an idiot, all bad, and I see it now. I vehemently concur with the article in the Economist or the New York Times or so-and-so’s blog.”
Generally speaking, most trolls have a shallow understanding of what they criticize. They may not even know much about the domains surrounding the subject, or if they do have some knowledge, it's based on having read a book or an article. People are three-dimensional, to say the least, and politics, economics, big business, and geopolitics are complex subjects.
A troll is comfortable with one sentence or two parroted from their meager sources that are supposed to sound final—a kind of mic drop. They will say things like: "She messed up this or that!" "He is responsible for wrecking everything!" No further comment needed, nothing constructive, no alternatives, not even an honorable mention of who would have done better, what might have been a better outcome, who might have been a better leader, or how things might have been done more effectively. "He's stupid, he's bad, enough said, and if you post anything ever again about this villain, I'll repeat myself until you finally understand how stupid you are to pay attention to this guy." Trust me, I am not immune to this kind of childishness, we are still living in the Trump era whether you believe it or not. (Giggle.)
I'd suggest people withhold their opinions until they have something constructive to say. Go back and study political philosophy, read up on various points of view on events, read primary sources concerning the subject from earnest people who have formed their opinions through hard work.
What have you done lately? Are you a Player?
Regardless of who you dislike or whether this little blog poster agrees with you or not, make an effort to provide good sources and arguments for your beliefs so I can learn something from you.
Maybe we will all be able to imagine our own, Another Now.
What Is Game B?
For over forty years I have thought that our way of doing things as a global civilization has to be redesigned. We need new systems, new institutions, new structures and most importantly new cultures. This is not to say that there are not many components of what we have now that would help constitute these new ways of managing human affairs.
UNDERSTANDING THE BLUE CHURCH—JORDON HALL
A number of folks noted that they were not familiar with the concept of the Blue Church and wondered what was meant by it. The Democratic Party? Liberalism? Progressivism? As I mentioned in SA:2017, I had originally lifted the idea wholesale from that Reddit post with only an intuitive sense that it (and its juxtaposition with a Red Religion) was useful and pointed at something real.
In this essay, I dive into the concept. Below I endeavor to provide an answer that is adequate to Deep Code. I believe that the results are well worth the effort, but this is not a simple journey. Few things of importance these days are. If we want to get to the bottom of the contemporary situation, we are going to have to get comfortable going deep.
The abstract is this: the Blue Church is a kind of narrative / ideology control structure that is a natural result of mass media. It is an evolved (rather than designed) function that has come over the past half-century to be deeply connected with the Democratic political “Establishment” and lightly connected with the “Deep State” to form an effective political and dominant cultural force in the United States.
We can trace its roots at least as far back as the beginning of the 20th Century where it emerged in response to the new capabilities of mass media for social control. By mid-century it began to play an increasingly meaningful role in forming and shaping American culture-producing institutions; became pervasive through the last half of the 20th and seems to have peaked in its influence somewhere in the first decade of the 21st Century.
It is now beginning to unravel.
Welcome to GameB Home
GameB FaceBook Group
The Emancipation Party
My Intellectual Immune System is Weak
I keep getting PMs from friends on Signal who subscribe to grand conspiracy theories regarding our C19 experience. I replied with links to articles from different perspectives that I thought might inform their thinking for a while. I was wrong to believe that they would be interested in any content that didn't support their narrative.
I will refer to “The Narrative” so allow me to first set the stage. I nicked the quote below from Rebel Wisdom’s latest post regarding their new film.
“Lockdowns are not needed, masks do not work, the safety and efficacy of the vaccines are being oversold, vaccine passports will not only fail but further segregate society, and in the near future we can expect Giradian scapegoating of the unvaccinated. In other words, we are positioned on the precipice of a slippery slope that leads towards increasingly draconian biopolitical control measures, the grip of which is unlikely to release even once the pandemic is over.”
Setting the stage:
Next February, the seventeenth, in the year of a particular Lord, two thousand and twenty-three, there will only be 526,403 people alive on this great earth. Finally, the re-wilding of the "commons" and the building of Golf Courses, pleasure palaces, and sports stadiums will begin in earnest, and everyone, everyone I tell you, will have their own customized, shape-shifting sex robot. Homo Sapiens will have been saved from The Great Game by the Players of The Great Game. It's exciting to know that soon the Players will begin this uber endeavor—culminating with the invention of an even better game. In the not too distant future, they can export this new, and supreme culture to inhabitable planets in this particular Universe. Because, don't you know, that in eight thousand years our sun will be a Dyson Sphere and Elon Musk (he will be alive then) will be using the Penrose Process to find said inhabitable planets. (Elon could do it now, by the way, but that would mean that the Plebs would benefit, and they are simply not worthy.)
This was my final message to one of my Signal interlocutors. From now on, when any of my conspiracy-minded warriors on Signal or even WhatsApp share a link to something regarding our wonderous C19 experience, I will send back a photo of gelato.
I wonder if reading the content at this link will make me roll my eyes? I want to click on the link, but then I ponder, why? It's not like I'm in the tribe. My interests are too broad. I've rummaged around in that bubble for a while, and I get it. Enough. Joe Rogan? LOL! I am beginning to think you are not a reader? Sincerely, should we stop sharing anything except photos of gelato? There are facts to be found within the know-it-all narrative, but the narrative itself is shallow. But fuck me, right? I'm stupid and blinkered. I'm a normie. I'm alt-middle or alt-sensible. I took the wrong color pill. I've been infected by the dreaded "@-the-real-propaganda." I don't consume garbage day and night, which has made me weak. My intellectual defenses are not strong enough because my reading habits are too clean, peppered with authors who are experts in their field, and therefore incentivized by billionaires who fund their research. OMG, maybe that's why I don't do my own research. 😂 I won't click on the link you have shared. I already understand the narrative. I'd rather read a good book that I can learn something from. Pass that crap around to the properly woke-woke people—keep driving your knowledge of the grand conspiracy home. You and yours will save the world. Thank you in advance. 🙏🥰
Bon Appétit!
The New Normal Conspiracy
But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain — that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.
— Lysander Spooner
This normie, bog-standard, middle stream, CIA cutout (Cirtifyably Insane Association) scribbler would like to share a piece someone wrote about "The Way Thing Really Are."
"The UK New Normal Dictatorship" UK Column News — Lian Davis
This post title from The UK Column says a lot if you think about it.
Spoiler alert! Everybody's in on it, even the Plebs.
This is a classic and informative piece — it's all there. It parrots every buzzword, pulls every trigger, and has hyperlinks to more of the same. It contains many scary and easily identifiable propositions and big words, some with definitions from mainstream encyclopedias. Peppered with references to ideas and realities that are indeed alarming, it weaves a standard narrative about the powers that be.
And by golly, some of the content contains observations that ring true and may even represent problems worth a mortal struggle. However, I prefer different sources of cultural criticism and polemic to writers who refer to so many worn-out conspiracy theories.
You may feel: #powerless #hopeless #outraged after reading it.
You are not a fan of this genre if you are not entirely familiar with every shocking pseudo revelation.
Would you please tell me what the author's ideological bent is? It has to have a name.
Suppose you are a fan of actually understanding how things work. In that case, you will know we are far from perfect governance systems, whether referring to global corporations, nongovernmental institutions, economic schools, social systems, political systems, etc., in any arena or Nation-State. But you will also know that civilization has always been structured around various messy things, people and institutions.
Systems Theory and Complexity Theory are difficult topics to understand, much less be knowledgeable about to the point where they become valuable tools — so are socioeconomic theories and practices. Let's not mention all the other domains this piece touches upon.
If you genuinely understand how various systems work, you might have some good ideas on how to repair them, reform them, change them, destroy them or even innovate from them.
Do you have to do a lot of reading to achieve that? What kind of reading? You tell me.
These narratives are entertaining but far from empowering, nor do they offer any alternative solutions. The cry is, "Fight back by following “the” narrative!"
One might wonder what a blogger in the early 16th Century might have written about the opaque goings-on in court. Isn't conspiring face-to-face a more satisfying activity? But back then, the powerless people were illiterate, and only the big players played the game. One can imagine conniving goings-on from every class during the Roman Empire.
Perhaps the only times safe from institutions were when there were only bands, tribes, and small nations of indigenous people. You can't conspire very effectively when everyone around the fire is watching. I wonder if large nation-states can ever enjoy perfect governance. I don't think we will ever see a happy-go-lucky world of libertarian tiny states and city-states.
Doggone it, I wish I could be more optimistic. Sometimes a little apathy goes a long way.
But come hither and tell me your ideas, thoughts, and feelings. What should we do about this?
Lian Davis writes for online publications like UKCOLUNM that all have a certain kind of catastrophic color. He seems like a fun man to have a few drinks with; take a look at the rest of the contributors for UKCOLUNM — forget drinks, let's have a party! No pun.
No Jail For The Wicked
I like to read books. I am not sure how much good it’s done me. I wish everyone read more.
Take a look at the bibliography in this short article from Ralph Nader posted at SHEERPOST. Think of the implications of this. Why are normal people so powerless in the face of this kind of corruption and greed? Perhaps, throughout history, the lower classes have always been relatively powerless and lazy.
The “Players” make the rules and have the freedom to break them. There are no crimes they can’t commit with impunity.
We are living in a culture where one only needs money.
Along the same vein, don’t miss this post from Christopher Hedges, American Satyricon.
A licentious, money-drenched, morally bankrupt and intellectually vacuous ruling class, accountable to no one and free to plunder and prey on the weak like human vultures, rise to power in societies in terminal decline. This class of parasites was savagely parodied in the first-century satirical novel “Satyricon” by Gaius Petronius, written during the reign of Nero. Epstein and his cohorts for years engaged in sexual perversions of Petronian proportions, as Miami Herald investigative reporter Julie Brown, whose dogged reporting was largely responsible for reopening the federal investigation in Epstein and Maxwell, documents in her book “Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story.”
Despite many books being published on corporate crooks, there have been no corporate crime law reforms, no additional prosecutions of these CEOs, not even comprehensive congressional or state legislative hearing. What gives?
Corporate Crime and Punishment: The Crisis of Underenforcement by John Coffee
Mass Tort Deals: Backroom Bargaining in Multidistrict Litigation by Elizabeth Burch
Why Not Jail? Industrial Catastrophes, Corporate Malfeasance … by Rena Steinzor
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe
Closing Death’s Door: Legal Innovations to End the Epidemic of Healthcare Harm by Michael J. Saks and Stephan Landsman
Who Poisoned Your Bacon Sandwich?… by Guillaume Coudray
The Monsanto Papers: Deadly Secrets, Corporate Corruption… by Carey Gillam
The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business by David Courtwright
Frankie: How One Woman Prevented a Pharmaceutical Disaster by James Essinger and Sandra Koutzenko
Killer Airbags by Jerry Cox
Making the World Safe for Coke by Susan Greenhalgh
Big Dirty Money by Jennifer Taub
Business and Human Rights by Ellen Hertz
Industrial-Strength Denial by Barbara Freese
Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act by Nicholson Baker
Too Big to Jail: How Prosecutors Compromise with Corporations by Brandon L. Garrett
Capital Offenses: Business Crime and Punishment in America’s Corporate Age by Samuel W. Buell
Profiteering, Corruption and Fraud in U.S. Health Care by John Geyman
Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power by David Dayen
Global Banks on Trial by Pierre-Hugues Verdier
Triumph of Doubt: Dark Money and the Science of Deception by David Michaels
Murder, Inc.: How Unregulated Industry Kills or Injures Thousands of Americans Every Year…And What You Can Do About It by Gerald Goldhaber
Paradise Lost at Sea: Rethinking Cruise Vacations by Ross A. Klein
Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy by Matt Stoller
Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in An Age of Fraud by Tom Mueller
Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom by Katherine Eban
GMOs Decoded: A Skeptic’s View of Genetically Modified Foods by Sheldon Krimsky and Marion Nestle
GM: Paint it Red: Inside General Motors’ Culture of Failure by Nicholas Kachman
The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives by Jesse Eisinger
Watchdog: How Protecting Consumers Can Save Our Families, Our Economy, and Our Democracy by Richard Cordray
First Class: The U.S. Postal Service, Democracy, and the Corporate Threat by Christopher Shaw
Un-American: A Soldier’s Reckoning of Our Longest War by Erik Edstrom
Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War by Samuel Moyn
Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America by Eyal Press
Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? by Alexander Keyssar
Public Citizens by Paul Sabin
The United States of War by David Vine
The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions by Chuck Collins
Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillis
The Case Against George W. Bush by Steven C. Markoff
Tax the Rich: How Lies, Loopholes, and Lobbyists Make the Rich Even Richer by Erica Payne and Morris Pearl
Salt Wars: The Battle Over the Biggest Killer in the American Diet by Dr. Michael Jacobson
Unrig: How to Fix Our Broken Democracy by Daniel G. Newman
Plaintiff in Chief: A Portrait of Donald Trump in 3,500 Lawsuits by James D. Zirin
Stealing Our Democracy by Don Siegelman
Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor by Steven Greenhouse
All the President’s Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator by Monique El-Faizy and Barry Levine
Money, Power, and the People: The American Struggle to Make Banking Democratic by Christopher Shaw
Troubled Water: What’s Wrong with What We Drink by Seth M. Siegel
Disrupt, Discredit, and Divide: How the New FBI Damages Democracy by Mike German
United States of Distraction: Media Manipulation in Post-Truth America… by Mickey Huff and Nolan Higdon
The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age by Tim Wu
The End of Ice by Dahr Jamail
Confessions of a Rogue Nuclear Regulator by Dr. Gregory Jaczko
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff
America, Democracy & You: Where Have All the Citizens Gone? by Ronald R. Fraser
Unsettled (on Purdue Pharma and the Sackler Family) by Ryan Hampton
Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas
China Rx: Exposing the Risks of America’s Dependence on China for Medicine by Rosemary Gibson and Janardan Prasad Singh
Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World by Nomi Prins
Attention All Passengers: The Airlines’ Dangerous Descent and What You Can Do To Reclaim Our Skies by William McGee
Whitewash: The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer, and the Corruption of Science by Carey Gillam
The CEO Pay Machine: How it Trashes America and How to Stop It by Steven Clifford
World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer
The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, …. and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite by Duff McDonald
The Culture Seems To Love Gun Violence—is it at war with itself?
Will I be pilloried for mentioning glaring evidence of cultural differences?
The debate about firearms rages on in the United States while gun ownership skyrockets.
Michigan has approximately the same population as Portugal.
In 2019, there were 742 firearm suicide deaths in Michigan, including 31 children and teens (ages 0–19).
According to the latest WHO data published in 2018, Suicide Deaths in Portugal reached 1,450 or 1.61% of total deaths. The age-adjusted Death Rate is 8.62 per 100,000 population ranks Portugal #97 in the world.
In 2019 there were 1,471 suicides in Michigan. Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in Michigan.
As of Feb. 1, 2018, Michigan had 621,327 active concealed pistol licenses on file — about 8 percent of the state’s adult population.
As of 2021, the number of licensed gun owners in Portugal is reported to be 216,000.
Recent surveys find that about 40% of adult Americans own a gun or live with someone who does. A majority of those gun owners cite protection as their primary reason for owning a gun, and most believe the gun or guns they own make their homes safer. (Why do they need protection?) But research has consistently shown that households with firearms are actually less safe — with markedly higher risks for accidental deaths, suicides, and domestic homicides. AP
I lived in Japan for over 9 years, where the death rate by firearms per 100,000 people is practically nonexistent.
Gun crimes Japan 2011–2020
Published by Statista Research Department, Oct 21, 2021
In 2020, the number of reported cases involving damage caused by the firing of firearms in Japan amounted to 17 cases. This represented an increase compared to the previous year when 13 cases of damage by firearms were reported. The population of Japan was 125.8 million (2020).
Japan’s Homicide by firearm rate was 0.0 (cases per 100,000 population) in 2014.
In 2020, Japan had 4 homicides by firearms. *WORLD DATA ATLAS JAPAN CRIME STATISTICS
I lived in Hong Kong for over 10 years. Between 2003 and 2017, Hong Kong’s homicides by firearm rate remained stable at around 0 cases per 100,000 population.
Hong Kong movies would make you think that there were shootouts every month in Hong Kong. There are shootouts every month in the United States.
In China, the total annual homicides by any means in 2018 amounted to 7,525. The population of China in 2020 was 1.402 billion. (You can find good statistics on worldwide homicide rates from many reputable sources if you want to.)
America seems to think that armed conflicts, no matter how limited, are essential for its security.
THE HUMAN COST OF THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN:
American service members killed in Afghanistan through April: 2,448.
U.S. contractors: 3,846.
Afghan national military and police: 66,000.
Other allied service members, including from other NATO member states 1,144.
Afghan civilians: 47,245.
Taliban and other opposition fighters: 51,191.
Aid workers: 444.
Journalists: 72.
In 2021 so far there have been 39,654 deaths in the USA due to firearms. Let’s imagine that there has been an average of 12,000 gun-related deaths a year in the USA over the last 20 years. During the 20 year duration of the war in Afghanistan, the death toll in the US due to firearms would amount to 240,000. The total number of deaths during the 20-year war in Afghanistan added up from the above numbers was 171,246.
It seems to me that America is at war with itself.
In a highly armed culture where its leaders seem to encourage violent “police actions” worldwide, what will happen in the United States if its institutions are damaged beyond repair?
I hear people in the United States talking about civil war. Now, please, are you fucking kidding me?
Seek And Your Intuition Will Be Stronger
We all think we know what to do until we know what to do.
intuition
noun
— the ability to understand something instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning
— a thing that one knows or considers likely from instinctive feelings rather than conscious reasoning.
I also hear heuristics. I think of neuroscience. I think of agency. I think of connections and connectedness.
I've been thinking about intuition lately. I have thought about intuition for decades, and what I think about it is constantly evolving. The evolution of understanding is the core of intuition.
The more curious one is, the more one explores and experiences, the better one's intuition gets.
Ontology
Epistemology
Empiricism
If you read a lot across many subjects; if you have traveled and worked in several different businesses or industries; if you are deeply curious about the nature of things and how things work; if you are constantly questioning what you know and what other people seem to know; if you are not afraid of reality or truth no matter how uncomfortable it may be; and, most importantly, if you embrace these experiences and attitudes with openness, a bit of joy and excitement — perhaps even love and compassion — your intuitions will be strong and more accurate than average.
Many people are comfortable on a well-worn path. Most people are happy with what they have learned long ago, are at home in their inherited circumstances, and are uncomfortable with unfamiliar things. Perhaps, we could say that they are more traditional.
We are creatures of habit, all animals are, but homo sapiens have the capacity of profound exploration. The need to explore is one of the traits that make our species unique and successful. Throughout our species history, there have been those who would wander off the path and explore unfamiliar things. In doing so, they ignite their imagination and liberate creative impulses that allow them to discover new things, new experiences, new challenges, and new knowledge. With new knowledge, we would create new stories, ideas, processes, tools, and technologies.
I often wonder about the state of people's minds as they evolved towards the phase transition that brought us language. Can you imagine the first humans in one of our ancestral species that, for some reason, started naming things and later, much later, how grammar spontaneously emerged from the use of those symbols?
And the flesh made word a miraculous being.
It didn't happen suddenly, it only emerged gradually and imperceptibly, and then there were generations of creative people experiencing life in entirely new ways. For a long time, for many generations, we could not easily imagine what we might be able to create. Still, some of us ventured out and randomly discovered new possibilities. We learned through our active existence, acquiring knowledge, and experimenting until we deliberately created something.
The trouble with our civilization is that it doesn't value intuition enough, the kind of intuition that comes from adventurousness, imagination, exploration, curiosity, and a deep appreciation of what one encounters. Here I am not talking about the market of such things — not Instagram. I refer to the intense desire to break free.
We are programmed to be timid and fit into our niche, and do our work. We are programmed to be greedy attention seekers. We are, perhaps, a bit too needy of validation.
I was reading about a study of people who claim to talk to God. It turns out that it takes a lot of practice to experience that. One has to pray a lot. To quiet the mind and experience, one's more authentic nature. One might practice meditation, for example, for a very long time before a profound sense of what one truly is, disperses into one's consciousness. We practice sports, music, and dance diligently over time and experience flow states. You know what I mean. Getting good at anything requires commitment and practice: even our moral intuitions, feelings of compassion, empathy, and love. Before becoming loving, one must practice care, consideration, listening, affection.
Context and Preconditions
One can learn how to kill and how to love.
One can kill with reverence to survive.
There is a context for everything. Depending on the conditions we've grown in and our sensibilities, our intuitions will be different. It takes many kinds of people to make our civilization operate as it does.
Intuition is not magic, and yet it's magical.
I was listening to Liv Boeree talking with Alexander Beiner on the Rebel Wisdom channel on YouTube. Ms. Boeree is an impressive woman. When I hear people like her talk about things they know well, I am always impressed by their epistemic humility, their grappling with reality, and their courage in the face of failed experiments. Even if I don't understand some of the things they refer to, I have a strong intuitive sense that what they are communicating makes sense. I trust them and am inspired to consider carefully what they are trying to say.
People I enjoy listening to have encountered some of the same things I have encountered on my journey. Yet, they have unique ways of expressing their experiences and knowledge that engage my imagination.
We have crossed paths; by that, I mean, explored the same things in different ways and at different times in different contexts from different perspectives. We are moving through reality, building on our experiences and what we've learned from others while feeling an intense need to communicate our experiences with those we've encountered. We are peering out at the world on the shoulders of giants, looking for more, knowing we will never know enough or have enough experience to be satisfied. And we are comfortable with that, even excited by the thought of our limitations and constraints.
Highly intuitive people need to share. Intuitive people need to learn from people. If you seek wisdom, knowledge, and novel experiences unleashing your creativity, you build intuitive power.
I looked at the video description of "A Poker Pro Explains Game Theory" and found a link to a Slate Star Codex post from 2014, Meditations on Moloch. I read that post in 2014. When I first read it, it was at once new, exciting, and very familiar. I reread it this morning and experienced the essay in entirely new ways, and it was still utterly familiar to me.
The magical aspect of a good intuition is that our ideas, thoughts, and feelings broaden as we explore strange things, allowing us to feel familiarity regardless of incomplete understanding.
Where one person is confined to the familiar because of fear or narrowness, a more intuitive person embraces the unfamiliar, no matter how scary or challenging. Seeking out the unknown leads to familiarity — and the world becomes more hospitable.
The more familiar one is with various things, the greater one's intuition.
The tricky question is: What preconditions inspire these traits in some people and not so much in others. I recognize that all people are curious, but clearly, some more than others.
Intuition is still mysterious to me, no matter how much I read, explore, meditate or pray, there will still be new intuitive states I can look forward to experiencing.
In 2010 I would talk with people down the pub about Bitcoin and Climate Change, and they would look at me like I was a foolish goofball. Ten years later, they are trading Bitcoin for a bit of fiat buck and having climate change stories hurled at them from every media source twenty-four seven. You will not be very popular if you bring up strange things with people. Too few will engage with the unfamiliar.
Most of us will stay on the well-worn path until circumstances dictate that we find another way.
The problem today is that we need more intuitive people to help navigate a world where our intuitions and explorations have helped us paint ourselves into a corner where existential risks have the potential to put an end to our species.
If you have been paying attention, you feel it.
What, if anything, will we do about it?
When I encounter intuitive people, I'm thrilled to be in such good company. But what I need is to work with people nearby to cultivate values that lead to a wise, intuitive culture that loves and reveres everything about being alive and life on earth. That’s my utopia — simply doing that.
I want to intuit a loving culture emerging.
Redefining Wealth, Prosperity, and Growth
I'm happy to see Ms. Williamson talking with Peter Joseph. I recommend The New Human Rights Movement to people weekly. Work this train of thought in your communities, and let's hope it scales rapidly. Marianne Williamson is an earnest, wise, and compassionate author whose work has inspired many people. She also ran for President of the United States. Arrogant? Presumptuous? She believed she could do some good. It should be a breath of fresh air to have a woman with her disposition in a presidential race. (Yes, I know, she's Oprah Winfrey's spiritual advisor— we can forgive her for that.) Peter's book is a compelling survey of our socio-economic culture that may spark your interest in delving more deeply into how our system works and why it's not sustainable. He does not have all the answers, nor does he pretend to. Engaging with his train of thought will require a good-faith effort to understand concepts that may be uncomfortable for many people to ponder these days. (How can we criticize a system that got us all this cool stuff, and what about Steven Pinker's take on the glories of Western Civilization? Surely it's all good?) He has a structuralist perspective and talks about structural violence and racism, for example. Today, even bringing up racism will trigger many people in the USA who are tired of the subject. Peter is not utopian in his thought. He simply understands the necessity of imaginative, innovative, and structural change if we intend to sustain civilization. Redefining wealth, prosperity, and growth is a great way to start.