I used to wonder why music no longer reflects the sentiment of the 60s and 70s. Knowing that the FBI had a folder on The Monkeys tells me all I need to know. The. MONKEES. For God's sake. The one's who sang "Daydream Believer."
Actually, if you read about Mickey Dolenz' lawsuit against the FBI, the FBI began these files because their stage show during the song "The Last Train to Clarksville" showed anti-war images.
If I never read anything else, this essay would sustain my spirit for the rest of my time on this planet. Because it testifies to the one fact you can hold onto: all the lies, the deception and hypocrisy, the evil manipulation, point to one thing: it could not exist and be so carefully cultured and nurtured, like an evil, unnatural plant grown out of control that hides the sun and moon and sky, and tries to convince us that's all there is - so live with it - if there were not something wonderful it was desperately attempting to hide, disguise, kill. We were not born evil, we are not naturally ugly, and the universe does not seek to annihilate us. Our planet is wonderful, has it all: isn't that a clue to the truth? Even animals are totally wonderful to consider and behold in their power, grace, courage and good humour.
The ugly was invented by the ugly few who took control, and even their enforcing god is ugly and vengeful. But it is all built on a crumbling foundation that can't stand up to reason, love and fairness.
Reminds me of a quote attributed to Werner Heisenberg ... ''The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.''
The literal minded will see only what they are capable of seeing in that quote, but with an approach closer to Joseph Campbell's (The Power of Myth),that 'god' is the god of Spinoza, Emerson, and Einstein ... a metaphor for nature in its entirety. Your essay manages to say the same thing to me, but without the now irrevocably shattered and divisive words of 'god' or 'spiritual'.
A thread of thought I am seeing in comments to your other posts, more so than in the original posts, is that some sort of collective moral progress is possible ... either through an alternative ideology (-ism), or through mind-expanding drugs. Although JMHO, I don't think we social primates are neurologically wired to collectively mature as a species. We all begin life, not as little angels, but close to a fractal mirror of dark-triad (B-cluster) personality types — little narcissistic, opportunistic, psychopaths which have to be nurtured and educated, individually, to become mature, morally autonomous members of a community ... or not.
Various ''- isms'' may provisionally solve some problems but at the cost of creating others. Capitalism, for example, does not do a very good job of constraining the small but persistent percentage of dark-triad personality types in any population, and neither does it deal with some of the competing instincts in the more neuro-typical majority ... the tendency to depend on tribalism for identity, deference to authority, or a preference for loss-aversion behavior — even when that is not the best choice of strategy to solve a problem. Frans de Waal termed us 'the bi-polar ape'. I liked how you showed the dark side of 'the force' first, and the potential for the good in human nature as a counterpoint.
Cheers Cailin. Looking forward to see what directions your writing will lead.
I like the example in Star Wars (the Force Awakens?) where the human stormtroopers are trained to kill from a very young age and some choose probable death instead.
Actually, we do not know whether babies would be angels or demons or are a blank page waiting to be written upon. It sounds like you are making the Christian argument that humans are born in sin.
What if this immense range of behavior on the continuum of barbarism to altruism, this possibility of choice and the potential of change are stimuli of awakening?
But I also grew up on a farm where it is easy to see the total dependence that new born mammals have on their mother, and the energy expended by the mother or members of the social group, to insure enough maturity in the young to become biologically autonomous — find their own food, do their own mating, and raise their own brood until their time for that dust-to-dust thingy. Humans, in the best of circumstances, are not so different ... though a lot of nepotism, cronyism, tribalism ... and yes, too literal-minded an approach to language, both on the writer's part and the reader's part.
I like the ideas of nurturing, educational communities, but have found this 'modern era( has left more to rule-driven institutions than to empathy-driven communities ... and to the detriment of education as fostering the full potential of positive human autonomy. I find it in the small print of college contracts .... the purposeful conflation of 'touchy-feely' educational communities with non-disclosure agreements to silence would-be whistle blowers of institutional corruption.
It takes two to dance, and I am ready for another number.
I prefer jazz Carol.
Do you speak Jazz?
Here is a piece I was playing for background music while Japanese Jr. High kids were doing group work about the provisional nature and potential problems (such as the explosion of the 1999 Mars Climate Orbiter mission — it's on wiki) of quantification (that necessary filtering of raw information referred to earlier) when those cultures 'speaking' the metric system run up against those who have stubbornly stayed with the 'imperial system' ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ODR70Xg08Y ... I made the montage myself.
As an interesting contrast, that music was from the 1970's ... antiquated by 'pop' standards. Compare that with something making the rounds from the last couple of years ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRg_8NNPTD8. I actually like Heilung, and their back-story of healing through 'amplified history' performances is a wonderful idea. But to compare the complexity and sophistication of the music on merits of music alone, I can't help but to question the very idea of 'progress' regardless of domain.
As with religion or questions of 'god' in Japan, none of the students bothered to ask if the music's melody was 'true' or 'false'. By culture, they knew such a question would make no sense. Yet that does not let Japan Inc. off the hook.
As in the states, none of the higher-echelon 'dark-triads' which make up Japan's LDP ruling political party, nor any of 'manager-priests' in the former Unification Church who are caught up in dirty 'dark-triad' concentrations of power leading to former Prime Minister Abe's assassination are among my friends. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2022/09/03/national/politics-diplomacy/unification-church-ties-ldp/
To get a better handle on those would-be mover-and-shakers who are dark-triads, I found Dr. Ramani's YouTube Masterclass with MedCircle for the difference between sociopaths and psychopaths to shed more light on the subject — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpjYtAB9i2w&t=48s .
And in a recent substack by Mathew Crawford, was introduced to two new words ... 'ponerology' (the study of evil ... and a great book that I think is better than Mathias Desmet's current take on Mass Formation Psychosis ... Andrzej Łobaczewski's work ... ''Political Ponerology: The Science of Evil, Psychopathy, and the Origins of Totalitarianism''. The short wiki read on ponerology is quite revealing about the corporate nation-state's preference of tactics to try and herd us ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_ponerology
Although I haven't searched, I would not be surprised if the Inuit did not have a term for 'angel'.
Just now finishing this edit before I am shuttled into a classroom of Jr. High kids and trotted out as a nature speaker model for 'proper' American pronunciation. A far cry from years spent as a college biology lab director, or decades spent teaching Comparative Culture or communication skills in Japanese colleges. Still ... gotta pay the rent, and pensions in Japan are becoming about as worthless as the fiat currency they are printed on.
Thanks again for the clarification Carol. I do hope we can find the time and opportunity to chat beyond the limitations of technology.
Oh wow! I just edited this, and for the first time, got a short message, in red, just below the comment box reading .... 'Please type a shorter comment'. I thought only YouTube and Facebook put a cap on comment length.
Will post this edited comment as 'Part 1' and 'Part 2', beginning with the first half ...
Part 1
Hi Carol,
Thanks for the later clarification. Yeah, maybe babies are born with the predisposition to 'sin' by virtue of being the rationalizing beast. Get a hundred Christians (or Capitalists) together in one room, and sooner or later, you'll have a hundred different definitions of each ... that narcissism of small differences thingy. And ironically, the more self aware we are, the less likely we are united in how we express ourselves (except against a common existential threat). Herding poets is like herding cats. These social dynamics continues to play out time and again since before the beginning of history.
Yes I agree you are 'right', depending on how you define 'sin', or 'who', specifically, is awakening. Triangulating between a career in applied linguistics, an undergrad in biology in particular agreement with a lot of the implications of primatologists Frans de Waal and Jane Goodall, and a passing acquaintance with other intersections between the 'hard' and 'soft' sciences.
My basic assumption is that language, logic, and its cutting-edge extensions such as algorithms were originally proxies for the empathy which bound our evolutionary progenitors (along with some other species). This allowed us to extend a small community or family of hunter-gatherers into towns, cities, or empires which would aspire to a thousand years .... and fail, because there is no such thing as a free lunch. The abstraction of language itself, from empathy, and sometimes its re-synthesis pointing back to empathy (as Caitlin has done with her post) has its trade-offs. Depending on one's sensibility, one may call language the 'original blessing, and sin'.
And I agree with your assumption about the immense range along a moral continuum ... the good, the bad, and the ugly ... the possibility of choice, potential for change, and stimuli for awakening.
Where I am on more shaky ground is our biological wiring to do so 'collectively'. I see salient temperamental differences in a litter of kittens. How much more that range of moral diversity, and the speed and timing of change, if at all, can be different between different individuals even within the same nuclear family, much less a community, and much-much less a universal evolution.
I like reading Caitlin, not so much for her critique of Capitalism, as for her critique of the dark side of human nature as expressed by some current definitions of Capitalism. If 'the same' Caitlin had been born in another time and era, I suspect she would be nailing her equivalence of Martin Luther's theses to the Catholic Church's corrupt door, or writing a first draft of The Magna Carta. But then, she would not be 'the same Caitlin'. Or would she? Don't want to go down that rabbit hole of the fundamental attribution 'fallacy' for now, but would like to think there is something uniquely individual about her, aside from the circumstance we are all in.
At the most literal, conversational level, I agree with you ... neither original sin nor literal angels or demons have anything to do with it. I live in Japan, a secular land of a thousand gods. This is a culture where 'do you believe in god' is a conversational non-starter ... and any metaphysical exploration or discussion takes a back seat to the social-psychological dynamics that come with navigating in-groups and out-groups ... a mind-set that has advantages and problems of its own, but is not the topic of discussion here. The petty politics of 'small village mentality' within rule-driven institutions can be infuriatingly frustrating here.
I expect Caitlin's readers are beyond the traditional Western fundamentalists' idea of 'god' as a separate big-daddy in the sky along with all of the psychological contortions that usually come with that package. However, I count a few Christians, Muslims, Jews, and atheists among my friends, but for more personal, individual reasons not connected with any tribal identity regarding their mythos, narrative, schemata, or what whatever you want to call the cultural scaffolding that keeps them ticking.
Similar to the reason I follow Caitlin, they are friends because of their personal integrity and temperament. Though there are genetic and epigenetic components to that temperament, I know they did not have that level of integrity at birth. How they dealt with the loves and losses of experience must have a lot to do with it ... and that is something more fundamental and universal to human nature than any particular language or narrative under which they matured.
As I mentioned, I do not take language or logic itself, literarily. The best we can do with mathematical models or literary metaphors is to describe and only provisionally 'invent' our realities. I think it was the physicist Max Born who said something along the lines of 'we can never 'know' reality, only observe our descriptions of it'. As I think we can intuit things that we can not express in symbols, I don't entirely agree with him. But I like how he hints at how those models and metaphors come along with their own psychological trade-offs for for the intuitions, traditions, and provisional practicalities w've gained from them ... or for the idealist's continual fall down the rabbit hole in quest of 'unfiltered empirical information' — an oxymoron in itself for those who have have kicked Wittgenstein's Ladder behind them, smiled at the more general implications of Gödel's Theorem, or just remember the smell of bong-water wafting up from a dorm room's shag carpet .
Cheers back at you! I do index finger writing on my phone .. why my comments are short! I like the practice of simple and concise expression.
I used the Christian reference as an example not to imply anything about you.
Rather than attempt to respond to so many idea you expressed I postulate another possibility. What if this is like the Matrix except that rather than reality being an apocalyptic aftermath the reality is a world most cannot see that is all around us of Consciousness full of love and light?
So, we have the potential to awaken to Consciousness and perhaps create a different and more equal and compassionate society. Maybe we are having this experience of Maya to learn and create because it is one thing to read about a thing or be taught about a thing and quite another to directly experience a thing.
Cheers back atcha Carol ... and sorry for going full bore essay in a mere sub-comment. We appear to be on the same side, (as with Caitlin). Will go back and edit with the new info in mind. 'Simple and concise' .... a great aim. In the right hands, it would reduce us to the pregnant silence of zen. In the wrong hands, a handful of Zuckerberg's emoticons. (I'm still banned from Facebook for breaking community standards with my concise verbosity 🤣.
And yes, although I tend to follow Occam's Razor in metaphysics, it is my twist on Hanlon's Razor I have come to apply to these periodic expansions and contractions of concentrations of social hierarchies ... 'Never attribute incompetence to that which can adequately be explained by corruption.' — Martin's Razor.
I hold Russel Brand or Vandana Shiva as more optimistic role models, but by circumstance, temperament, or age, I can't quite follow in their footsteps.
I agree with you about the possibility of that Matrix-like world of illusion. I remember a phrase coined by Schopenhauer a couple of hundred years ago that he had borrowed from the Vedic scriptures ... 'The Veil of Maya' as a metaphor to distinguish superficial epiphenomenon from fundamental reality. But the first time I saw 'The Matrix' ... I immediately thought, 'Oh, a re-make of Plato's Allegory of the Cave! Used it a couple of times for group discussions in those Japanese college Comparative Culture classes. The kids seemed to get it.
And that last sentiment you expressed about love and light, yes. Those Japanese who think about it might refer to it as 'ki' ... roughly translated as the same 'energy' in Einstein's famous equation. It's interesting to watch the back and forth between the structural reductionists and process-oriented in the sciences.
I found T.S. Kuhn's 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' as an easily digestible read using the history of the concept of the atom as a metaphor for paradigm shifts. The current paradigm seems to suggest we've 'progressed' to the planck unit as a theoretical limit to the infinity of the small. No doubt that if we survive long enough as a species, some day, that unit will be as blunt and quaint a concept as Democritus's original idea of the atom. Ironically, Bertrand Russell did not realize how apt the expression of 'Turtles, all the way down' was when he tried to dismiss the metaphysical intuition found in religious faith.
At school, now, and no classes for a bit, so will go back and edit my original sub-comment, and think about making an independent essay or story out of it. In another life, I would have tried to say the same 'thing' in a piano improvisation.
Cheers again Carol, and thanks for the clarification. 🥰
Now, this is rich, for who to choose to represent the so-called free world.
Canadian Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland is one of the likely candidates set to replace NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who is leaving his post next year, according to an article by CBC published on Wednesday.
The selection of Freeland, grandaughter of the Ukrainian World War Two Nazi collaborator Michael Chomiak would raise eyebrows, not least in Russia. The politician has paid tribute to Chomiak’s legacy, despite knowing that he “was the chief editor of a Nazi newspaper in occupied Poland that vilified Jews during the Second World War,” according to the Globe and Mail newspaper.
She reportedly speaks Ukrainian at home and is a former Moscow bureau chief of the Financial Times. Freeland has been banned from Russia for a number of a years, apparently due to her strong support for the post-Maidan regime in Kiev.
Excellent writing! You've really captured the essence of what life is like for so many of us dealing with the constant propaganda/bullsh*t of the 21st century. I only wish I had half your optimism that eventually we'll all free ourselves from these mental cages and realize the truth of our existence on this planet. Time will tell.
Death awaits, no passport need. Those who love Absurdistan believe they can use capitalism to beat death to death, if only the can accumulate enough of it.
That's a pretty good question because most of us are deeply addicted to civilization. We don't know how to live without it. Indeed, without industrial methods of production, a dominant feature of civilization, most of us -- 99.9% I would guess -- could not eat or clothe and house ourselves, or defend ourselves from diseases and large predators. Looks like we're stuck with it.
This is fantastic Caitlin. Pretty much, from the first word to the last, describes how I feel every day.
Welcome my son
Welcome to the machine
Where have you been?
It's alright we know where you've been
(Pink Floyd)
I used to wonder why music no longer reflects the sentiment of the 60s and 70s. Knowing that the FBI had a folder on The Monkeys tells me all I need to know. The. MONKEES. For God's sake. The one's who sang "Daydream Believer."
The Monkeys were the American version of The Beatles. Maybe that had something to do with it!
Actually, if you read about Mickey Dolenz' lawsuit against the FBI, the FBI began these files because their stage show during the song "The Last Train to Clarksville" showed anti-war images.
I think the national mood has shifted, and the public schools have had more opportunity to alienate students and stifle inquisitiveness.
Thank you, Caitlin, for putting it all together so beautifully. I absolutely agree with you.
Wow! I needed to hear this prospective.
Thank you!
If it were merely fake and stupid I might just ignore it, but
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/09/07/john-pilger-silencing-the-lambs-how-propaganda-works/
JOHN PILGER: Silencing the Lambs — How Propaganda Works
September 7, 2022
Leni Riefenstahl said her epic films glorifying the Nazis depended on a “submissive void” in the German public. This is how propaganda is done.
That is a great article by JP. Thanks for linking that.
TITLE SAYS IT ALL.
If I never read anything else, this essay would sustain my spirit for the rest of my time on this planet. Because it testifies to the one fact you can hold onto: all the lies, the deception and hypocrisy, the evil manipulation, point to one thing: it could not exist and be so carefully cultured and nurtured, like an evil, unnatural plant grown out of control that hides the sun and moon and sky, and tries to convince us that's all there is - so live with it - if there were not something wonderful it was desperately attempting to hide, disguise, kill. We were not born evil, we are not naturally ugly, and the universe does not seek to annihilate us. Our planet is wonderful, has it all: isn't that a clue to the truth? Even animals are totally wonderful to consider and behold in their power, grace, courage and good humour.
The ugly was invented by the ugly few who took control, and even their enforcing god is ugly and vengeful. But it is all built on a crumbling foundation that can't stand up to reason, love and fairness.
I don't know how to express that what you have written here is so incredibly true. Thank you
The perfect articulation of just what I needed. I can now get through another day.
Thanks Caitlin! - this article really speaks to me more than usual - I needed the reminder that I am not alone - much appreciated.
I like this one Caitln.
Reminds me of a quote attributed to Werner Heisenberg ... ''The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.''
The literal minded will see only what they are capable of seeing in that quote, but with an approach closer to Joseph Campbell's (The Power of Myth),that 'god' is the god of Spinoza, Emerson, and Einstein ... a metaphor for nature in its entirety. Your essay manages to say the same thing to me, but without the now irrevocably shattered and divisive words of 'god' or 'spiritual'.
A thread of thought I am seeing in comments to your other posts, more so than in the original posts, is that some sort of collective moral progress is possible ... either through an alternative ideology (-ism), or through mind-expanding drugs. Although JMHO, I don't think we social primates are neurologically wired to collectively mature as a species. We all begin life, not as little angels, but close to a fractal mirror of dark-triad (B-cluster) personality types — little narcissistic, opportunistic, psychopaths which have to be nurtured and educated, individually, to become mature, morally autonomous members of a community ... or not.
Various ''- isms'' may provisionally solve some problems but at the cost of creating others. Capitalism, for example, does not do a very good job of constraining the small but persistent percentage of dark-triad personality types in any population, and neither does it deal with some of the competing instincts in the more neuro-typical majority ... the tendency to depend on tribalism for identity, deference to authority, or a preference for loss-aversion behavior — even when that is not the best choice of strategy to solve a problem. Frans de Waal termed us 'the bi-polar ape'. I liked how you showed the dark side of 'the force' first, and the potential for the good in human nature as a counterpoint.
Cheers Cailin. Looking forward to see what directions your writing will lead.
— steve
I like the example in Star Wars (the Force Awakens?) where the human stormtroopers are trained to kill from a very young age and some choose probable death instead.
Actually, we do not know whether babies would be angels or demons or are a blank page waiting to be written upon. It sounds like you are making the Christian argument that humans are born in sin.
What if this immense range of behavior on the continuum of barbarism to altruism, this possibility of choice and the potential of change are stimuli of awakening?
Part 2
But I also grew up on a farm where it is easy to see the total dependence that new born mammals have on their mother, and the energy expended by the mother or members of the social group, to insure enough maturity in the young to become biologically autonomous — find their own food, do their own mating, and raise their own brood until their time for that dust-to-dust thingy. Humans, in the best of circumstances, are not so different ... though a lot of nepotism, cronyism, tribalism ... and yes, too literal-minded an approach to language, both on the writer's part and the reader's part.
I like the ideas of nurturing, educational communities, but have found this 'modern era( has left more to rule-driven institutions than to empathy-driven communities ... and to the detriment of education as fostering the full potential of positive human autonomy. I find it in the small print of college contracts .... the purposeful conflation of 'touchy-feely' educational communities with non-disclosure agreements to silence would-be whistle blowers of institutional corruption.
It takes two to dance, and I am ready for another number.
I prefer jazz Carol.
Do you speak Jazz?
Here is a piece I was playing for background music while Japanese Jr. High kids were doing group work about the provisional nature and potential problems (such as the explosion of the 1999 Mars Climate Orbiter mission — it's on wiki) of quantification (that necessary filtering of raw information referred to earlier) when those cultures 'speaking' the metric system run up against those who have stubbornly stayed with the 'imperial system' ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ODR70Xg08Y ... I made the montage myself.
As an interesting contrast, that music was from the 1970's ... antiquated by 'pop' standards. Compare that with something making the rounds from the last couple of years ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRg_8NNPTD8. I actually like Heilung, and their back-story of healing through 'amplified history' performances is a wonderful idea. But to compare the complexity and sophistication of the music on merits of music alone, I can't help but to question the very idea of 'progress' regardless of domain.
As with religion or questions of 'god' in Japan, none of the students bothered to ask if the music's melody was 'true' or 'false'. By culture, they knew such a question would make no sense. Yet that does not let Japan Inc. off the hook.
As in the states, none of the higher-echelon 'dark-triads' which make up Japan's LDP ruling political party, nor any of 'manager-priests' in the former Unification Church who are caught up in dirty 'dark-triad' concentrations of power leading to former Prime Minister Abe's assassination are among my friends. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2022/09/03/national/politics-diplomacy/unification-church-ties-ldp/
To get a better handle on those would-be mover-and-shakers who are dark-triads, I found Dr. Ramani's YouTube Masterclass with MedCircle for the difference between sociopaths and psychopaths to shed more light on the subject — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpjYtAB9i2w&t=48s .
And in a recent substack by Mathew Crawford, was introduced to two new words ... 'ponerology' (the study of evil ... and a great book that I think is better than Mathias Desmet's current take on Mass Formation Psychosis ... Andrzej Łobaczewski's work ... ''Political Ponerology: The Science of Evil, Psychopathy, and the Origins of Totalitarianism''. The short wiki read on ponerology is quite revealing about the corporate nation-state's preference of tactics to try and herd us ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_ponerology
Another surprising word for me is the Inuit word r'Kungaleta' .... roughly translated as 'psychopath'. https://kar.kent.ac.uk/66548/1/167COMPLETE%20FILE%20FINAL%2010-01-14%20PDF.pdf
Although I haven't searched, I would not be surprised if the Inuit did not have a term for 'angel'.
Just now finishing this edit before I am shuttled into a classroom of Jr. High kids and trotted out as a nature speaker model for 'proper' American pronunciation. A far cry from years spent as a college biology lab director, or decades spent teaching Comparative Culture or communication skills in Japanese colleges. Still ... gotta pay the rent, and pensions in Japan are becoming about as worthless as the fiat currency they are printed on.
Thanks again for the clarification Carol. I do hope we can find the time and opportunity to chat beyond the limitations of technology.
Cheers!
— steve
Oh wow! I just edited this, and for the first time, got a short message, in red, just below the comment box reading .... 'Please type a shorter comment'. I thought only YouTube and Facebook put a cap on comment length.
Will post this edited comment as 'Part 1' and 'Part 2', beginning with the first half ...
Part 1
Hi Carol,
Thanks for the later clarification. Yeah, maybe babies are born with the predisposition to 'sin' by virtue of being the rationalizing beast. Get a hundred Christians (or Capitalists) together in one room, and sooner or later, you'll have a hundred different definitions of each ... that narcissism of small differences thingy. And ironically, the more self aware we are, the less likely we are united in how we express ourselves (except against a common existential threat). Herding poets is like herding cats. These social dynamics continues to play out time and again since before the beginning of history.
Yes I agree you are 'right', depending on how you define 'sin', or 'who', specifically, is awakening. Triangulating between a career in applied linguistics, an undergrad in biology in particular agreement with a lot of the implications of primatologists Frans de Waal and Jane Goodall, and a passing acquaintance with other intersections between the 'hard' and 'soft' sciences.
My basic assumption is that language, logic, and its cutting-edge extensions such as algorithms were originally proxies for the empathy which bound our evolutionary progenitors (along with some other species). This allowed us to extend a small community or family of hunter-gatherers into towns, cities, or empires which would aspire to a thousand years .... and fail, because there is no such thing as a free lunch. The abstraction of language itself, from empathy, and sometimes its re-synthesis pointing back to empathy (as Caitlin has done with her post) has its trade-offs. Depending on one's sensibility, one may call language the 'original blessing, and sin'.
And I agree with your assumption about the immense range along a moral continuum ... the good, the bad, and the ugly ... the possibility of choice, potential for change, and stimuli for awakening.
Where I am on more shaky ground is our biological wiring to do so 'collectively'. I see salient temperamental differences in a litter of kittens. How much more that range of moral diversity, and the speed and timing of change, if at all, can be different between different individuals even within the same nuclear family, much less a community, and much-much less a universal evolution.
I like reading Caitlin, not so much for her critique of Capitalism, as for her critique of the dark side of human nature as expressed by some current definitions of Capitalism. If 'the same' Caitlin had been born in another time and era, I suspect she would be nailing her equivalence of Martin Luther's theses to the Catholic Church's corrupt door, or writing a first draft of The Magna Carta. But then, she would not be 'the same Caitlin'. Or would she? Don't want to go down that rabbit hole of the fundamental attribution 'fallacy' for now, but would like to think there is something uniquely individual about her, aside from the circumstance we are all in.
At the most literal, conversational level, I agree with you ... neither original sin nor literal angels or demons have anything to do with it. I live in Japan, a secular land of a thousand gods. This is a culture where 'do you believe in god' is a conversational non-starter ... and any metaphysical exploration or discussion takes a back seat to the social-psychological dynamics that come with navigating in-groups and out-groups ... a mind-set that has advantages and problems of its own, but is not the topic of discussion here. The petty politics of 'small village mentality' within rule-driven institutions can be infuriatingly frustrating here.
I expect Caitlin's readers are beyond the traditional Western fundamentalists' idea of 'god' as a separate big-daddy in the sky along with all of the psychological contortions that usually come with that package. However, I count a few Christians, Muslims, Jews, and atheists among my friends, but for more personal, individual reasons not connected with any tribal identity regarding their mythos, narrative, schemata, or what whatever you want to call the cultural scaffolding that keeps them ticking.
Similar to the reason I follow Caitlin, they are friends because of their personal integrity and temperament. Though there are genetic and epigenetic components to that temperament, I know they did not have that level of integrity at birth. How they dealt with the loves and losses of experience must have a lot to do with it ... and that is something more fundamental and universal to human nature than any particular language or narrative under which they matured.
As I mentioned, I do not take language or logic itself, literarily. The best we can do with mathematical models or literary metaphors is to describe and only provisionally 'invent' our realities. I think it was the physicist Max Born who said something along the lines of 'we can never 'know' reality, only observe our descriptions of it'. As I think we can intuit things that we can not express in symbols, I don't entirely agree with him. But I like how he hints at how those models and metaphors come along with their own psychological trade-offs for for the intuitions, traditions, and provisional practicalities w've gained from them ... or for the idealist's continual fall down the rabbit hole in quest of 'unfiltered empirical information' — an oxymoron in itself for those who have have kicked Wittgenstein's Ladder behind them, smiled at the more general implications of Gödel's Theorem, or just remember the smell of bong-water wafting up from a dorm room's shag carpet .
Cheers back at you! I do index finger writing on my phone .. why my comments are short! I like the practice of simple and concise expression.
I used the Christian reference as an example not to imply anything about you.
Rather than attempt to respond to so many idea you expressed I postulate another possibility. What if this is like the Matrix except that rather than reality being an apocalyptic aftermath the reality is a world most cannot see that is all around us of Consciousness full of love and light?
So, we have the potential to awaken to Consciousness and perhaps create a different and more equal and compassionate society. Maybe we are having this experience of Maya to learn and create because it is one thing to read about a thing or be taught about a thing and quite another to directly experience a thing.
Cheers back atcha Carol ... and sorry for going full bore essay in a mere sub-comment. We appear to be on the same side, (as with Caitlin). Will go back and edit with the new info in mind. 'Simple and concise' .... a great aim. In the right hands, it would reduce us to the pregnant silence of zen. In the wrong hands, a handful of Zuckerberg's emoticons. (I'm still banned from Facebook for breaking community standards with my concise verbosity 🤣.
And yes, although I tend to follow Occam's Razor in metaphysics, it is my twist on Hanlon's Razor I have come to apply to these periodic expansions and contractions of concentrations of social hierarchies ... 'Never attribute incompetence to that which can adequately be explained by corruption.' — Martin's Razor.
I hold Russel Brand or Vandana Shiva as more optimistic role models, but by circumstance, temperament, or age, I can't quite follow in their footsteps.
I agree with you about the possibility of that Matrix-like world of illusion. I remember a phrase coined by Schopenhauer a couple of hundred years ago that he had borrowed from the Vedic scriptures ... 'The Veil of Maya' as a metaphor to distinguish superficial epiphenomenon from fundamental reality. But the first time I saw 'The Matrix' ... I immediately thought, 'Oh, a re-make of Plato's Allegory of the Cave! Used it a couple of times for group discussions in those Japanese college Comparative Culture classes. The kids seemed to get it.
And that last sentiment you expressed about love and light, yes. Those Japanese who think about it might refer to it as 'ki' ... roughly translated as the same 'energy' in Einstein's famous equation. It's interesting to watch the back and forth between the structural reductionists and process-oriented in the sciences.
I found T.S. Kuhn's 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' as an easily digestible read using the history of the concept of the atom as a metaphor for paradigm shifts. The current paradigm seems to suggest we've 'progressed' to the planck unit as a theoretical limit to the infinity of the small. No doubt that if we survive long enough as a species, some day, that unit will be as blunt and quaint a concept as Democritus's original idea of the atom. Ironically, Bertrand Russell did not realize how apt the expression of 'Turtles, all the way down' was when he tried to dismiss the metaphysical intuition found in religious faith.
At school, now, and no classes for a bit, so will go back and edit my original sub-comment, and think about making an independent essay or story out of it. In another life, I would have tried to say the same 'thing' in a piano improvisation.
Cheers again Carol, and thanks for the clarification. 🥰
— steve
I'm so with you Caitlin.
Now, this is rich, for who to choose to represent the so-called free world.
Canadian Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland is one of the likely candidates set to replace NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who is leaving his post next year, according to an article by CBC published on Wednesday.
The selection of Freeland, grandaughter of the Ukrainian World War Two Nazi collaborator Michael Chomiak would raise eyebrows, not least in Russia. The politician has paid tribute to Chomiak’s legacy, despite knowing that he “was the chief editor of a Nazi newspaper in occupied Poland that vilified Jews during the Second World War,” according to the Globe and Mail newspaper.
She reportedly speaks Ukrainian at home and is a former Moscow bureau chief of the Financial Times. Freeland has been banned from Russia for a number of a years, apparently due to her strong support for the post-Maidan regime in Kiev.
Excellent writing! You've really captured the essence of what life is like for so many of us dealing with the constant propaganda/bullsh*t of the 21st century. I only wish I had half your optimism that eventually we'll all free ourselves from these mental cages and realize the truth of our existence on this planet. Time will tell.
The Simpsons advertising for Ukraine proxy war is almost too much to bare. OMFG
The Simpsons have been zombies for 20-odd years but you're right, it still stings
Do we need a passport to get out of Absurdistan? Where can we go for asylum?
Death awaits, no passport need. Those who love Absurdistan believe they can use capitalism to beat death to death, if only the can accumulate enough of it.
That's a pretty good question because most of us are deeply addicted to civilization. We don't know how to live without it. Indeed, without industrial methods of production, a dominant feature of civilization, most of us -- 99.9% I would guess -- could not eat or clothe and house ourselves, or defend ourselves from diseases and large predators. Looks like we're stuck with it.
This is not civilization. This is plutocracy and slavery and the reign of brutality
Thank you!