This was an incredible read. You put words to some major thoughts I haven’t been able to verbalize. I have to say that I think the internet, which until so recently was mostly an instrument for hate, will save us. there’s a real sense of genuine community and solidarity that wont go away in the face of the unprecedented and growing displays of collective action. The rapidly spreading realization that we’ve been pitted against each other to serve the elite is very real. You can hear it and read it in the cultural convo. Thoughts that used to get you accused of insanity are quickly becoming a legitimate and popular viewpoint. I might be too high to be reliably optimistic and this may all sound neoliberal in the morning to have been this hopeful. I used to be terrified to speak out against the US relationship with Israel despite my being Jewish. But, at least here in NYC, the crowds of Jewish and progressive groups who turned out to tell BiBi to fuck off was truly something I’d never think I’d see. TLDR I think Americans are waking up to the lies we’ve been fed and the resulting anger from all the bullshit is manifesting in a surprisingly positive way.
I see it too and it's encouraging. Networks are forming and interconnecting in opposition to the Plutarchs and Oligarchs who are the CMIC (CongressionalMilitary Industrial Complex) and the Corporate/Government Cabal.
the internet, which until so recently was mostly an instrument for hate, ?
You do understand that the internet is just a tool? Its like saying that hammers are tools of hate because people have used them for hate in the past. The hate doesn't come from the tool it comes from the people using the tool.
But one can observe the actual use of the tool. Also, there is a theory that tools themselves exhibit or convey an ideology, for example, a hammer may make things look like nails. Let us hope the Internet proves more multifarious. It certainly seemed so back in its early days. Study of the particulars of its descent into what we observe today -- gabble, capitalism, propaganda, hucksterism, busywork, surveillance, war -- may be indicated. Someone did it. It did not fall from Mars. Perhaps the malefactors and the misguided might be dissuaded.
I agree someone created the evils we see come across the internet, that seems more attributable to social media than the internet. Its like blaming the highway for driver road rage instead of the driver and the rest of the drivers. My personal choice is to not participate in social media platforms, those platforms seem to encourage bad behavior.
I would say I don't use them very much. Yet here I am.
Curiously, there are engineers who believe that bad behaviors and bad feelings can be increased or diminished by road and infrastructure design. Hence the notion of "traffic calming" presently being experimented with in New York City and other places. The design changes are sometimes seemingly paradoxical, like reducing the number of lanes in a roadway or removing traffic lights. It is also said that the proprietors of social media seek the opposite effect, increased aggression and conflict, in order to "sell eyeballs" (a sort of revolting metaphor, but that's what they actually say.)
I have noticed over the years that Youtube has acted to reduce conflict. At this point they have almost eliminated it. They censor about 45% of replies. Downvotes are hidden. Too upsetting.
Traditional media (magazines, television) though have moving to selling discord. The New York Times was losing money until it moved to the propaganda model (and I stopped reading it). The book "Hate Inc." will give you the inside view.
Together with Caitlin's refreshing optimism of a whole new way of thinking, Stephanie Kass, If what you are saying gathers momentum and come to pass, it will be the saving of life on earth and the earth itself. There has to be an implosion of awareness within America resulting in an inward collapsing of the existing order of things, which in turn will allow the rest of humanity to simply live, even to thrive.
Thinking a lot about this as we, the one's with the entrenched patterning, kick and scream about providing Indigenous People with an albeit emasculated Voice to an imperialist legacy sh*t-show. This came to mind:
Most of us don't realise that imperialism was gamed stealthily to become predatory capitalism, often cloaked in the disguise of ‘economic development.’ This new wave of colonialism (neo-colonialism) has been designed and implemented, not only by oppressive military occupation and tyranny, but by large corporate interests in concert with captive government. The methodology of implementation varies depending on the level of grass-roots resistance. Therefore, it is arguable whether any citizen has a voice if it contradicts the status quo of power and privilege vested in corporate privateering. The default trope of ‘natural’ and 'inevitable' economic development is where racism hides and where it feigns legitimacy. Meanwhile governments pay lip-service to their constituents and actively facilitate the plunder of their own wealth.
Under the global onslaught of this voracious regime, both our natural environment and indigeneity itself are at risk of extinction. Indigeneity is intrinsically an act of resistance, one which might yet save us all.
"predatory capitalism" is nothing but fascism, call it by its proper name. Please stop excusing government as "captured", it excuses the evil crimes of government as something they didn't choose to do. Mega corporations could not exist or rise to their current size without government support and protection. Suggesting that government is innocent in all of this evil and is just being used by industry is bullshit. Capitalism and industry didn't drop nuclear weapons on civilians.
Good points notBob. I think I was implying that government is captive of the ideology of predatory capitalism which you characterise as fascism. It appears that governments of the global north are prone to fascism, certainly in their compulsion to eradicate anything that resembles socialism. The scary thing then is - what does it say about all of us who are in many ways subject to and enabling of government? Maybe I was trying to exculpate myself or distance myself from any responsibility for the actions of my own government, particularly the self-perpetuating nexus you refer to, that of arms manufacture and weapon sales. In Australia we have a dedicated Minister for 'Defence' Industry.
Both the Dutch and British empires were originally private corporations. Their profits were so immense the respective governments horned in and took over.
The Dutch East Indies Company originally got megarich by selling nutmeg as a quack cure for the plague.
Caitlin regularl proves one CAN have a voice, as she does here yet again. These ideas are freely floating about, as I like to think most readers here know. We can also take best available actions, even or especially helping those around us.
The error is in believing that the ruling class are made of the same stuff as us and therefore susceptible to moral critique, when it is far more likely that they, being the stewards of a power relation, have simply trained us to love, and be susceptible to, weapons to which they are impervious.
Yes, those who govern us are not "wired up" the way the rest of us. As the late Gerald Kaufman MP told a pro Palestine audience about Isreali zionnists:"Don't bother looking for their good sides. . They haven't got one."
But they're not "defective" or anything like that; they (and we, to the extent we validate their ethical discourse by participating in it) are simply performing the roles that the perpetuation of class society requires. It is the natural outcome of Neo-Platonic ideology, and its prevailing mythical expression as Christianity, under the historical conditions which it has shaped and been shaped by. Heroes and their myths do not ever emancipate; they only enslave, mislead, and perpetuate lies.
Thanks Daniel, love the idea of raising our voices and acting to help each other. I suppose the idea of having a voice which might directly influence government was my (too limited) focus. Government power over us might eventually become redundant if we are, by our own direction and action, a civil society.
Thanks Jenny, that has certainly been the pattern to date. Maybe sometimes what those people take or feel entitled to acquire at others' expense is a substitute for things which are missing, or an attempt to palliate deep and unrecognised trauma. It might be an expression of unrequited need which has become a limitation to their lives and the lives of those who are drawn into relationship with them. This might even play out at a broader cultural level.
We in North America and Western Europe live in the ghetto of propaganda generated by fascists who want to rule the world. The first thing we have to do is break out of the ghetto and have a world view; not the one generated by those who are willfully destroying our societies for their self-interest.
The new multipolar world is already being formed in Eurasia, and the Pacific. But we in the West are hostage to war mongering idiots and their delusional ambition of ruling the world. Washington is stuck in the last century still dreaming of world empire.
We only represent 12 % of the world's population. Do we really think the other 88% are going to fold up and go back under the tyranny of American foreign policy that has exploited their societies for decades?
The reason we are bombarded with so much propaganda, endless lies and misinformation is the fascists of the West don't want us to know what is happening outside the ghetto. There is a new world order emerging in spite of their criminal efforts to suppress it .
The longer the West wages its wars the more it is marginalized and falls behind the rest of the world. Its time to cut our losses and move into the 21st. century.
Russia and China have spent the last forty years rebuilding their economies and now have the benefits. We in the West have to do the same after exhausting our societies fighting wars for the last half century.
As long as the West is waging war on the world its a race to the bottom--- do we need nuclear war for verification ?
Yes exactly. If only we could be chatting online with everyday people in BRICS and building relationships and friendships with the people who are going to be dominating civilisation instead of endlessly discussing Kennedys, war, excess deaths and conspiracies of Jews.
Absolutely this. Through the internet we have the opportunity to befriend people from all around the world outside of the "ghetto". When we befriend people from other countries, it is harder for the propaganda that tries to divide us to work.
Through love and friendship we can take away the power of the fascists to attempt to control us along with the information we have access to.
People are pretty dumb in my country. I can perceive that by reading remarks to different articles. Both main political parties are corrupt, past fixing. There are some good third party candidates, but it’s all in the PR.
Please be careful with internet dreams... the powers that shouldn't be are actively erasing the human history found there, and are not so subtley providing the "correct" answer to every question. We should be able to use the internet as described, but we cannot:
This is my big caveat to hoping. It was Caitlin herself her first opened my eyes, back in 2016, to just how much emphasis the ruling class places on narrative management as preventing the population from clear thinking is the one thing standing in the way of popular uprising.
And recent years have proved that over and over again. Wrongthink, deplatforming dissenters, Covid-critical memes "kill people", etc
“What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes. First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.”
~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is - infinite”
~ William Blake
The human race (Homo sapiens sapiens, as we like to call ourselves), is possibly the most extreme example of an invasive species the planet has ever experienced. Perhaps 200,000 years ago, an infinitesimal number of us diverged from our parent species (Homo sapiens) and now seven billion of us swarm every landmass on the Earth. The majority of this explosion in population occurred only in the last two centuries; from one billion individuals to seven billion individuals. Five billion people were added in the last hundred years alone. This geometry is a type signature of an invasive species, a species that has occupied an ecological niche in which it has no natural predators or other environmental checks to limit its growth.
That we are no longer subject to any natural predation is self-evident; we have become the apex predator of the entire globe.
How, then, have we evaded all other environmental checks to exponential growth, to the present tune of seven billion and accelerating ever further?
That shift in paradigm, to my way of thinking actually came about a little earlier than two centuries ago, as expressed in the dawn of the Neolithic . . . a time beginning perhaps twelve thousand years ago. The popular view is that mankind settled down from ragged bands of opportunistic scavengers, “hunter-gatherers”, to far superior lives as herdsmen and farmers. We domesticated both plants and animals, mastered metallurgy and subsequently learned the arts of politics, economics, organized religion and warfare to manage the enormous richesse gained from exploiting our environment in these new ways. The first cities were built, and the first proto-nations were formed. Man had discovered the extractive economy, and assumed the power of life and death over all he surveyed. He became civilized.
The hunter-gatherers, those who were left of them, faded into the darkness outside the firelight of civilization. They and their economy, the economy of symbiosis, withdrew into the hinterlands, the wilderness.
Now, the fundament of the extractive economy is that it assumes that the resources from which it profits are limitless and effectively free for the taking. Oil, that geologic distillation of Carboniferous swamps, has no value and no price until we put a price upon it. The act of possession becomes singly material, rather than relational. The concept of abstract wealth as a mensuration of the material life enters here; two primary expressions of early metallurgy were weapons and currency; war and commerce. The very land itself becomes a commodity to be bought and sold, invaded and defended, as also do the people who live upon it.
The economy of symbiosis has no currency. It lacks the initial and subsequent levels of separation in which the relational algorithm is separated into subject and object. Value can neither be accumulated or lost, as it cannot be differentiated from the act of living, which itself is intrinsically a zero-sum process. It is fractal in nature: “As above, so below.”
The difference between these two economies is the result of something I can only identify as a cognitive mutation, a genetic fault line or discontinuity in the neural stratigraphy of the human mind. The new man, this invasive subspecies of Homo, rapidly overwhelmed the old and became the dominant feature in any ecosystem he colonized.
And at the spiritual horizon, the symbiotic Shamanic worldview succumbed to the extractive Neolithic, the hierarchic imposition of Deity, Deified, and Profane. William Blake’s doors of perception were barred and nailed shut; for all practical purposes, forever.
Or so we thought.
Another characteristic of an invasive species is that its population crashes just as dramatically as it expanded when it has consumed the relative overabundance of resources that were available to it in the environments it colonized.
To that species, this is a terminal Black Swan Event; conditions of life as they know it abruptly end, as do the lives of most – if not all – of the population.
The world we are living in today, with its increasingly and violently erratic climate, ever more tenuous energy base and debased and poisoned lands, seas and atmosphere shows all the signs of a niche pushed past its limits of recovery by an invasive species.
Concomitantly, the arts of politics, economics, organized religion and warfare - the flowers of the Neolithic mutation - have proved barren and seedless and are rotting on the stem. As William Yeats forewarned in The Second Coming:
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
The survivors will be the Shamans, those who have retained or re-learned the alphabet of symbiosis, both physical and spiritual. The doors of perception will be opened and cleansed; the wing song of the first, impossible white swans will fill the air.
“What we call here a White Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes. First, it is ex-stasis, as it begins within the realm of regular expectations, because something in the timestream – past, present and future - convincingly points to its possibility. Second, it carries an unconditional holistic resonance; it thrills the soul. Third, in spite of its ecstatic status, human nature makes us aware of its occurrence as a foreshadowing, making it intrinsic and desirable.”
~JSI
“For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”
~ William Blake
William of Ockham is said to have written “Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem”, or, “Plurality must never be posited without necessity”, although the actual phrase has never been discovered in his writings. This has been used as an epigraph by thinkers since as a dictate to use the one to quantify the multitude rather than the multitude affirming the one. It is the basis of all modern scientific thought and, as such, the basis of Western culture.
It is estimated that about one hundred billion neurons of several differing varieties and their accompanying axons, dendrites and synapses coexist in the human brain - an order of magnitude beyond our comprehension – and that each neuron is capable of firing every five milliseconds, also an order of magnitude beyond our comprehension. These numbers beggar any concept of plurality that we think we are capable of, yet . . . . it is indisputable that they are present inside the vaults of our skulls and account, as an example, for the writing of this sentence.
This leads me to deduce that we self-censor or redact very nearly all that we are aware of, or at least it would appear that way, until I think about Aldo Leopold and his critique of flood control with respect to the natural rhythms of any given ecology. He wrote of the insanity (I use this word literally) of the Army Corps of Engineers and their program of straightening the sinuous curves of natural river channels to greatly improve the flow of – in the Corps’ opinion – an unneeded and unwanted abundance of water, then putting dams on those ruler straight channels to “control” the flow they just had created. “Flood Control”, they called it. “Prevents Erosion”, they intoned. That a river should be allowed to “flood” and run outside its banks was a very bad thing; a “good” river flowed exactly where the Corps told it to run, and when, and how. Leopold pointed out the obvious; that the Corps’ efforts did neither, and that they actually damaged the geomorphology and hydrology of the living organism of the land. In short, this infliction disrupted the land, the watershed, and the communities of life that lived there, sometimes terminally.
As above, so below: the vault of our skull contains the watershed of awareness and the cognitive rivers that flow from it. To put it another way, the net of interactions of billions of neurons – if perceived as the billions of molecules of water residing in a geological watershed - becomes the cognitive watershed, and its resultant rivers of awareness, each singular as a sentence. That these rivers will flood and run outside their banks is the condition of ex-stasis, and, as I stated in the definition of a White Swan event, beginning “within the realm of regular expectations”.
The cognitive discontinuity introduced during the Neolithic was the beginning of straightening the channels of our perception and as time went on, placing the dams of hierarchical thought along these new, linear constrictions. The monoliths of politics, economics, organized religion and warfare were imbedded in these straightened channels to control the flow even further. Perceptual stagnation set in – not only unnoticed for what it was, but pursued as a charismatic ideal of perfection – becoming the sine qua non of the human species. I recognize these forms of thought as the type specimens of what I’ll call Homo sapiens sapiens novus. Man had shuttered the doors of perception. Awareness had been civilized; all that remained were the narrowing “chinks of his cavern”. The rivers had been channeled, the flow multiply dammed.
The celebration of pluralities, the seeing of one/ness in all/ness and all/ness in one/ness, and the renewal cycle of ex-stasis intrinsic to the previous two hundred thousand years of human cognition was deemed unnecessary. What was necessary was to straighten ever more cognitive channels, build more cognitive dams. Those populations of humans who persisted in the primal, unregulated cycle of cognition, and the renewal of ex-stasis, were driven out, marginalized or killed.
This is nowhere more evident than in the contrast between the Neolithic extractive economies and the Shamanic symbiotic economies and the history of the Neolithic rise to dominance. Neolithic man, Homo sapiens sapiens novus became the apex predator of the entire planet in a geological nanosecond, the most successful invasive species we know of. What he did with his cognition, so did he to his physical environment. In human time, this did not take overnight but, as I said, over a dozen or so millennia; now, the last remnant fragments of the aboriginal Shamanic populations persist as a curiosity, an exhibit, on reservations set up for them by their keepers. Equally, the last remnant fragments of the uncut, unmined, unbulldozed, undammed, unharvested, unoccupied original landscape are set aside as “wilderness”, whether as a signal reminder – as decapitated heads of the enemy were impaled on pikes and displayed on castle walls – or as a bittersweet nostalgia, I do not know.
And so we come to the forty third Hexagram of the I-Ching, Kuai (break-through or resoluteness), as expressed in the Wilhelm-Baynes translation of the I-Ching:
The Image
The lake has risen up to heaven:
The image of BREAK-THROUGH.
Thus the superior man
Dispenses riches downward
And refrains from resting on his virtue.
Wilhelm and Baynes write, “The hexagram Kuai actually means a break-through as when a river bursts its dams in seasons of flood. The five strong lines are thought of as mounting from below, resolutely forcing the weak upper line out of the hexagram.”
For all the channeling and dam building done to our awareness and cognitive process, it must be realized that the original perceptual landscape is the bedrock of mythos upon which the Neolithic constructed its artifices of logos. An irrevocable result of the straightened channels and dams of rivers subjected to flood control is that the water’s impoundments silt up until the channel is no longer a channel and the dam is no longer a dam. The water then finds its own way again, true to its nature no matter how long previously confined.
This is true . . . . whether we speak of the watersheds and rivers of the planet or the watersheds and rivers within the vault of our skull, the cognitive universe; partly planet and partly person.
In precisely this sense, the White Swan events of our lives herald the bursting of the dams erected to constrain our actual, original cognitive gifts and the recognition of the return of the Shamanic river of perpetual return.
The One is forever the Other: As above, so below.
Or, as William Blake put it: “Energy is eternal delight.”
I love doomers. It takes courage to look at current reality and not flinch. I think it’s the 1st step. But in my reading and experience, what follows doom is always an awakening. It’s slow and it’s painful, and plenty of people could die, but death isn’t the worst thing. Killing and greediness and suffering are all much worse. And that’s what we have now. So I say, doom away. The best is yet to come.
"Competition is the law of the jungle, but cooperation is the law of civilization." ~Peter Kroptkin
And there are plenty of examples, going back to classic antiquity, where cooperation created an enormously powerful culture and civilization - from the Greeks and Romans, all the way up to the cooperation it took for the US to build Hoover Dam, or the Interstate Highway system, or the cooperation it took to defeat the scourge of the Nazis in world war II. Or the cooperation it took to land a man on the moon in the 1960s. Cooperation and collaboration is the centerpiece of any advanced, successful civilization. Without cooperation, there would be no human civilizations.
I once saw a video of two coyotes chasing down a rabbit. It took quite some time. When they finally caught up with him they let him go. "Nice run dude!"
I love how you have expressed the essence of a book I've been working on, or worked on by, for more than ten years! It's such a relief to encounter somebody who gets it, and can be so elegant and forthright. You go!
The only way this future civilization could possibly come into being is if humans are forced into it by necessity, and by this I mean forced by an environmental catastrophe that reduces the human population of the earth by at least half.
Fortunately, or unfortunately (depending on how you look at it), it’s only a matter of time before nature engages in some serious blow-back.
I have a question. If we are to collaborate, does that mean that I have to do what you tell me to, or that you have to do what I tell YOU to do? Just asking how that works.
We used to try to teach “collaboration” to Middle School kids and had a hell of a time. Not because of the kids—the kids were great at it, especially the athletes—it was the teachers who couldn’t collaborate, who had the massive power struggles you are identifying, who couldn’t figure out what real collaboration is. What the kids taught us is, collaboration is basically just shifting leadership, shifting points of power, the ability to let go when needed and to step up when needed. In other words, a wonderful but serious game. That was 20:years ago. Those kids are in their 30’s now. And they seem to be providing answers to our failing empire challenges.
"If there are future generations, they will necessarily be living in a society that functions in a completely different way than our current one does."
Spot on, Caitlin! And therein lies the rub... Too many fear change, even change that will be for our ultimate benefit. They rather dwell in a dysfunctional society than to risk everything for a functional one where all have their needs met and tended to. We have to grow past this irrational fear of becoming truly equals with one another and truly sharing and caring for all human beings, not just for those with large bank accounts. Here's hoping that we'll reach that day sooner rather than later (after the nukes have fallen).
To call it "change" obscures the fact that people have more or less stake in the current state of things, and what that state of things entitles them to in the future. They are possessed by their property (not necessarily tangible), demonstrate it at every turn in proportion to their personal insecurity, and subordinate their every act or utterance to their property values. As Chuck Palahniuk put it, "The things you own end up owning you."
This was an incredible read. You put words to some major thoughts I haven’t been able to verbalize. I have to say that I think the internet, which until so recently was mostly an instrument for hate, will save us. there’s a real sense of genuine community and solidarity that wont go away in the face of the unprecedented and growing displays of collective action. The rapidly spreading realization that we’ve been pitted against each other to serve the elite is very real. You can hear it and read it in the cultural convo. Thoughts that used to get you accused of insanity are quickly becoming a legitimate and popular viewpoint. I might be too high to be reliably optimistic and this may all sound neoliberal in the morning to have been this hopeful. I used to be terrified to speak out against the US relationship with Israel despite my being Jewish. But, at least here in NYC, the crowds of Jewish and progressive groups who turned out to tell BiBi to fuck off was truly something I’d never think I’d see. TLDR I think Americans are waking up to the lies we’ve been fed and the resulting anger from all the bullshit is manifesting in a surprisingly positive way.
I see it too and it's encouraging. Networks are forming and interconnecting in opposition to the Plutarchs and Oligarchs who are the CMIC (CongressionalMilitary Industrial Complex) and the Corporate/Government Cabal.
Well, I really hope that is true. And can I say that it's none too soon for the US public to grow up
the internet, which until so recently was mostly an instrument for hate, ?
You do understand that the internet is just a tool? Its like saying that hammers are tools of hate because people have used them for hate in the past. The hate doesn't come from the tool it comes from the people using the tool.
But one can observe the actual use of the tool. Also, there is a theory that tools themselves exhibit or convey an ideology, for example, a hammer may make things look like nails. Let us hope the Internet proves more multifarious. It certainly seemed so back in its early days. Study of the particulars of its descent into what we observe today -- gabble, capitalism, propaganda, hucksterism, busywork, surveillance, war -- may be indicated. Someone did it. It did not fall from Mars. Perhaps the malefactors and the misguided might be dissuaded.
I agree someone created the evils we see come across the internet, that seems more attributable to social media than the internet. Its like blaming the highway for driver road rage instead of the driver and the rest of the drivers. My personal choice is to not participate in social media platforms, those platforms seem to encourage bad behavior.
I would say I don't use them very much. Yet here I am.
Curiously, there are engineers who believe that bad behaviors and bad feelings can be increased or diminished by road and infrastructure design. Hence the notion of "traffic calming" presently being experimented with in New York City and other places. The design changes are sometimes seemingly paradoxical, like reducing the number of lanes in a roadway or removing traffic lights. It is also said that the proprietors of social media seek the opposite effect, increased aggression and conflict, in order to "sell eyeballs" (a sort of revolting metaphor, but that's what they actually say.)
I have noticed over the years that Youtube has acted to reduce conflict. At this point they have almost eliminated it. They censor about 45% of replies. Downvotes are hidden. Too upsetting.
Traditional media (magazines, television) though have moving to selling discord. The New York Times was losing money until it moved to the propaganda model (and I stopped reading it). The book "Hate Inc." will give you the inside view.
Well, whatever their customers want.
Together with Caitlin's refreshing optimism of a whole new way of thinking, Stephanie Kass, If what you are saying gathers momentum and come to pass, it will be the saving of life on earth and the earth itself. There has to be an implosion of awareness within America resulting in an inward collapsing of the existing order of things, which in turn will allow the rest of humanity to simply live, even to thrive.
Thinking a lot about this as we, the one's with the entrenched patterning, kick and scream about providing Indigenous People with an albeit emasculated Voice to an imperialist legacy sh*t-show. This came to mind:
Most of us don't realise that imperialism was gamed stealthily to become predatory capitalism, often cloaked in the disguise of ‘economic development.’ This new wave of colonialism (neo-colonialism) has been designed and implemented, not only by oppressive military occupation and tyranny, but by large corporate interests in concert with captive government. The methodology of implementation varies depending on the level of grass-roots resistance. Therefore, it is arguable whether any citizen has a voice if it contradicts the status quo of power and privilege vested in corporate privateering. The default trope of ‘natural’ and 'inevitable' economic development is where racism hides and where it feigns legitimacy. Meanwhile governments pay lip-service to their constituents and actively facilitate the plunder of their own wealth.
Under the global onslaught of this voracious regime, both our natural environment and indigeneity itself are at risk of extinction. Indigeneity is intrinsically an act of resistance, one which might yet save us all.
This is a much more coherent way of describing the truths Americans are starting to wake up to than what I attempted above
"predatory capitalism" is nothing but fascism, call it by its proper name. Please stop excusing government as "captured", it excuses the evil crimes of government as something they didn't choose to do. Mega corporations could not exist or rise to their current size without government support and protection. Suggesting that government is innocent in all of this evil and is just being used by industry is bullshit. Capitalism and industry didn't drop nuclear weapons on civilians.
OK, say "bought off" instead of "captured."
Obama has gotten almost a billion dollars in contributions for his library. Payment for services rendered.
Good points notBob. I think I was implying that government is captive of the ideology of predatory capitalism which you characterise as fascism. It appears that governments of the global north are prone to fascism, certainly in their compulsion to eradicate anything that resembles socialism. The scary thing then is - what does it say about all of us who are in many ways subject to and enabling of government? Maybe I was trying to exculpate myself or distance myself from any responsibility for the actions of my own government, particularly the self-perpetuating nexus you refer to, that of arms manufacture and weapon sales. In Australia we have a dedicated Minister for 'Defence' Industry.
Both the Dutch and British empires were originally private corporations. Their profits were so immense the respective governments horned in and took over.
The Dutch East Indies Company originally got megarich by selling nutmeg as a quack cure for the plague.
Caitlin regularl proves one CAN have a voice, as she does here yet again. These ideas are freely floating about, as I like to think most readers here know. We can also take best available actions, even or especially helping those around us.
The error is in believing that the ruling class are made of the same stuff as us and therefore susceptible to moral critique, when it is far more likely that they, being the stewards of a power relation, have simply trained us to love, and be susceptible to, weapons to which they are impervious.
Yes, those who govern us are not "wired up" the way the rest of us. As the late Gerald Kaufman MP told a pro Palestine audience about Isreali zionnists:"Don't bother looking for their good sides. . They haven't got one."
But they're not "defective" or anything like that; they (and we, to the extent we validate their ethical discourse by participating in it) are simply performing the roles that the perpetuation of class society requires. It is the natural outcome of Neo-Platonic ideology, and its prevailing mythical expression as Christianity, under the historical conditions which it has shaped and been shaped by. Heroes and their myths do not ever emancipate; they only enslave, mislead, and perpetuate lies.
Thanks Daniel, love the idea of raising our voices and acting to help each other. I suppose the idea of having a voice which might directly influence government was my (too limited) focus. Government power over us might eventually become redundant if we are, by our own direction and action, a civil society.
There will always be another human who will take what he/she wants.
Thanks Jenny, that has certainly been the pattern to date. Maybe sometimes what those people take or feel entitled to acquire at others' expense is a substitute for things which are missing, or an attempt to palliate deep and unrecognised trauma. It might be an expression of unrequited need which has become a limitation to their lives and the lives of those who are drawn into relationship with them. This might even play out at a broader cultural level.
True change begin inside your consciousness and is not transferrable to other people or institutions.
I reserve and exercise my unalienable rights to
- Critical consciousness
- Compassion
- Coexistence
- Consensus
(Nota bene : organized politics, religion and economics are bereft of these principles and actively oppose the principles.)
We have to break out of the ghetto!
We in North America and Western Europe live in the ghetto of propaganda generated by fascists who want to rule the world. The first thing we have to do is break out of the ghetto and have a world view; not the one generated by those who are willfully destroying our societies for their self-interest.
The new multipolar world is already being formed in Eurasia, and the Pacific. But we in the West are hostage to war mongering idiots and their delusional ambition of ruling the world. Washington is stuck in the last century still dreaming of world empire.
We only represent 12 % of the world's population. Do we really think the other 88% are going to fold up and go back under the tyranny of American foreign policy that has exploited their societies for decades?
The reason we are bombarded with so much propaganda, endless lies and misinformation is the fascists of the West don't want us to know what is happening outside the ghetto. There is a new world order emerging in spite of their criminal efforts to suppress it .
The longer the West wages its wars the more it is marginalized and falls behind the rest of the world. Its time to cut our losses and move into the 21st. century.
Russia and China have spent the last forty years rebuilding their economies and now have the benefits. We in the West have to do the same after exhausting our societies fighting wars for the last half century.
As long as the West is waging war on the world its a race to the bottom--- do we need nuclear war for verification ?
Right now the FU West is playing a losers game.
Yes exactly. If only we could be chatting online with everyday people in BRICS and building relationships and friendships with the people who are going to be dominating civilisation instead of endlessly discussing Kennedys, war, excess deaths and conspiracies of Jews.
Jo
Absolutely this. Through the internet we have the opportunity to befriend people from all around the world outside of the "ghetto". When we befriend people from other countries, it is harder for the propaganda that tries to divide us to work.
Through love and friendship we can take away the power of the fascists to attempt to control us along with the information we have access to.
Yes, everything they teach us is to make us hate the 'other'. There is no other.
I agree with you georgie but we need to remember History everyday. History was yesterday.
People are pretty dumb in my country. I can perceive that by reading remarks to different articles. Both main political parties are corrupt, past fixing. There are some good third party candidates, but it’s all in the PR.
Please be careful with internet dreams... the powers that shouldn't be are actively erasing the human history found there, and are not so subtley providing the "correct" answer to every question. We should be able to use the internet as described, but we cannot:
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/multimedia/robert-walton/47924324
This is my big caveat to hoping. It was Caitlin herself her first opened my eyes, back in 2016, to just how much emphasis the ruling class places on narrative management as preventing the population from clear thinking is the one thing standing in the way of popular uprising.
And recent years have proved that over and over again. Wrongthink, deplatforming dissenters, Covid-critical memes "kill people", etc
Part I -
The White Swan - Beyond Occam’s Razor
I.
“What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes. First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.”
~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is - infinite”
~ William Blake
The human race (Homo sapiens sapiens, as we like to call ourselves), is possibly the most extreme example of an invasive species the planet has ever experienced. Perhaps 200,000 years ago, an infinitesimal number of us diverged from our parent species (Homo sapiens) and now seven billion of us swarm every landmass on the Earth. The majority of this explosion in population occurred only in the last two centuries; from one billion individuals to seven billion individuals. Five billion people were added in the last hundred years alone. This geometry is a type signature of an invasive species, a species that has occupied an ecological niche in which it has no natural predators or other environmental checks to limit its growth.
That we are no longer subject to any natural predation is self-evident; we have become the apex predator of the entire globe.
How, then, have we evaded all other environmental checks to exponential growth, to the present tune of seven billion and accelerating ever further?
That shift in paradigm, to my way of thinking actually came about a little earlier than two centuries ago, as expressed in the dawn of the Neolithic . . . a time beginning perhaps twelve thousand years ago. The popular view is that mankind settled down from ragged bands of opportunistic scavengers, “hunter-gatherers”, to far superior lives as herdsmen and farmers. We domesticated both plants and animals, mastered metallurgy and subsequently learned the arts of politics, economics, organized religion and warfare to manage the enormous richesse gained from exploiting our environment in these new ways. The first cities were built, and the first proto-nations were formed. Man had discovered the extractive economy, and assumed the power of life and death over all he surveyed. He became civilized.
The hunter-gatherers, those who were left of them, faded into the darkness outside the firelight of civilization. They and their economy, the economy of symbiosis, withdrew into the hinterlands, the wilderness.
Now, the fundament of the extractive economy is that it assumes that the resources from which it profits are limitless and effectively free for the taking. Oil, that geologic distillation of Carboniferous swamps, has no value and no price until we put a price upon it. The act of possession becomes singly material, rather than relational. The concept of abstract wealth as a mensuration of the material life enters here; two primary expressions of early metallurgy were weapons and currency; war and commerce. The very land itself becomes a commodity to be bought and sold, invaded and defended, as also do the people who live upon it.
The economy of symbiosis has no currency. It lacks the initial and subsequent levels of separation in which the relational algorithm is separated into subject and object. Value can neither be accumulated or lost, as it cannot be differentiated from the act of living, which itself is intrinsically a zero-sum process. It is fractal in nature: “As above, so below.”
The difference between these two economies is the result of something I can only identify as a cognitive mutation, a genetic fault line or discontinuity in the neural stratigraphy of the human mind. The new man, this invasive subspecies of Homo, rapidly overwhelmed the old and became the dominant feature in any ecosystem he colonized.
And at the spiritual horizon, the symbiotic Shamanic worldview succumbed to the extractive Neolithic, the hierarchic imposition of Deity, Deified, and Profane. William Blake’s doors of perception were barred and nailed shut; for all practical purposes, forever.
Or so we thought.
Another characteristic of an invasive species is that its population crashes just as dramatically as it expanded when it has consumed the relative overabundance of resources that were available to it in the environments it colonized.
To that species, this is a terminal Black Swan Event; conditions of life as they know it abruptly end, as do the lives of most – if not all – of the population.
The world we are living in today, with its increasingly and violently erratic climate, ever more tenuous energy base and debased and poisoned lands, seas and atmosphere shows all the signs of a niche pushed past its limits of recovery by an invasive species.
Concomitantly, the arts of politics, economics, organized religion and warfare - the flowers of the Neolithic mutation - have proved barren and seedless and are rotting on the stem. As William Yeats forewarned in The Second Coming:
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
The survivors will be the Shamans, those who have retained or re-learned the alphabet of symbiosis, both physical and spiritual. The doors of perception will be opened and cleansed; the wing song of the first, impossible white swans will fill the air.
Guess you ain't payin attention, John--it's eight billion now.
. . . note the date of my copyright . . . 3 Dec 2011 . . . I wrote the piece twelve years ago in Dubai.
Part 2 -
II.
“What we call here a White Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes. First, it is ex-stasis, as it begins within the realm of regular expectations, because something in the timestream – past, present and future - convincingly points to its possibility. Second, it carries an unconditional holistic resonance; it thrills the soul. Third, in spite of its ecstatic status, human nature makes us aware of its occurrence as a foreshadowing, making it intrinsic and desirable.”
~JSI
“For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”
~ William Blake
William of Ockham is said to have written “Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem”, or, “Plurality must never be posited without necessity”, although the actual phrase has never been discovered in his writings. This has been used as an epigraph by thinkers since as a dictate to use the one to quantify the multitude rather than the multitude affirming the one. It is the basis of all modern scientific thought and, as such, the basis of Western culture.
It is estimated that about one hundred billion neurons of several differing varieties and their accompanying axons, dendrites and synapses coexist in the human brain - an order of magnitude beyond our comprehension – and that each neuron is capable of firing every five milliseconds, also an order of magnitude beyond our comprehension. These numbers beggar any concept of plurality that we think we are capable of, yet . . . . it is indisputable that they are present inside the vaults of our skulls and account, as an example, for the writing of this sentence.
This leads me to deduce that we self-censor or redact very nearly all that we are aware of, or at least it would appear that way, until I think about Aldo Leopold and his critique of flood control with respect to the natural rhythms of any given ecology. He wrote of the insanity (I use this word literally) of the Army Corps of Engineers and their program of straightening the sinuous curves of natural river channels to greatly improve the flow of – in the Corps’ opinion – an unneeded and unwanted abundance of water, then putting dams on those ruler straight channels to “control” the flow they just had created. “Flood Control”, they called it. “Prevents Erosion”, they intoned. That a river should be allowed to “flood” and run outside its banks was a very bad thing; a “good” river flowed exactly where the Corps told it to run, and when, and how. Leopold pointed out the obvious; that the Corps’ efforts did neither, and that they actually damaged the geomorphology and hydrology of the living organism of the land. In short, this infliction disrupted the land, the watershed, and the communities of life that lived there, sometimes terminally.
As above, so below: the vault of our skull contains the watershed of awareness and the cognitive rivers that flow from it. To put it another way, the net of interactions of billions of neurons – if perceived as the billions of molecules of water residing in a geological watershed - becomes the cognitive watershed, and its resultant rivers of awareness, each singular as a sentence. That these rivers will flood and run outside their banks is the condition of ex-stasis, and, as I stated in the definition of a White Swan event, beginning “within the realm of regular expectations”.
The cognitive discontinuity introduced during the Neolithic was the beginning of straightening the channels of our perception and as time went on, placing the dams of hierarchical thought along these new, linear constrictions. The monoliths of politics, economics, organized religion and warfare were imbedded in these straightened channels to control the flow even further. Perceptual stagnation set in – not only unnoticed for what it was, but pursued as a charismatic ideal of perfection – becoming the sine qua non of the human species. I recognize these forms of thought as the type specimens of what I’ll call Homo sapiens sapiens novus. Man had shuttered the doors of perception. Awareness had been civilized; all that remained were the narrowing “chinks of his cavern”. The rivers had been channeled, the flow multiply dammed.
The celebration of pluralities, the seeing of one/ness in all/ness and all/ness in one/ness, and the renewal cycle of ex-stasis intrinsic to the previous two hundred thousand years of human cognition was deemed unnecessary. What was necessary was to straighten ever more cognitive channels, build more cognitive dams. Those populations of humans who persisted in the primal, unregulated cycle of cognition, and the renewal of ex-stasis, were driven out, marginalized or killed.
This is nowhere more evident than in the contrast between the Neolithic extractive economies and the Shamanic symbiotic economies and the history of the Neolithic rise to dominance. Neolithic man, Homo sapiens sapiens novus became the apex predator of the entire planet in a geological nanosecond, the most successful invasive species we know of. What he did with his cognition, so did he to his physical environment. In human time, this did not take overnight but, as I said, over a dozen or so millennia; now, the last remnant fragments of the aboriginal Shamanic populations persist as a curiosity, an exhibit, on reservations set up for them by their keepers. Equally, the last remnant fragments of the uncut, unmined, unbulldozed, undammed, unharvested, unoccupied original landscape are set aside as “wilderness”, whether as a signal reminder – as decapitated heads of the enemy were impaled on pikes and displayed on castle walls – or as a bittersweet nostalgia, I do not know.
And so we come to the forty third Hexagram of the I-Ching, Kuai (break-through or resoluteness), as expressed in the Wilhelm-Baynes translation of the I-Ching:
The Image
The lake has risen up to heaven:
The image of BREAK-THROUGH.
Thus the superior man
Dispenses riches downward
And refrains from resting on his virtue.
Wilhelm and Baynes write, “The hexagram Kuai actually means a break-through as when a river bursts its dams in seasons of flood. The five strong lines are thought of as mounting from below, resolutely forcing the weak upper line out of the hexagram.”
For all the channeling and dam building done to our awareness and cognitive process, it must be realized that the original perceptual landscape is the bedrock of mythos upon which the Neolithic constructed its artifices of logos. An irrevocable result of the straightened channels and dams of rivers subjected to flood control is that the water’s impoundments silt up until the channel is no longer a channel and the dam is no longer a dam. The water then finds its own way again, true to its nature no matter how long previously confined.
This is true . . . . whether we speak of the watersheds and rivers of the planet or the watersheds and rivers within the vault of our skull, the cognitive universe; partly planet and partly person.
In precisely this sense, the White Swan events of our lives herald the bursting of the dams erected to constrain our actual, original cognitive gifts and the recognition of the return of the Shamanic river of perpetual return.
The One is forever the Other: As above, so below.
Or, as William Blake put it: “Energy is eternal delight.”
© Salskov Iversen
3 December 2011
Sorry. I'm a doomer. We ain't going to make it.
Here, here! Cheers 🍻
I love doomers. It takes courage to look at current reality and not flinch. I think it’s the 1st step. But in my reading and experience, what follows doom is always an awakening. It’s slow and it’s painful, and plenty of people could die, but death isn’t the worst thing. Killing and greediness and suffering are all much worse. And that’s what we have now. So I say, doom away. The best is yet to come.
It's not about us but what it is that we leave behind for the next generations.
"Competition is the law of the jungle, but cooperation is the law of civilization." ~Peter Kroptkin
And there are plenty of examples, going back to classic antiquity, where cooperation created an enormously powerful culture and civilization - from the Greeks and Romans, all the way up to the cooperation it took for the US to build Hoover Dam, or the Interstate Highway system, or the cooperation it took to defeat the scourge of the Nazis in world war II. Or the cooperation it took to land a man on the moon in the 1960s. Cooperation and collaboration is the centerpiece of any advanced, successful civilization. Without cooperation, there would be no human civilizations.
Actually, the first law of the jungle is "Get along."
I once heard a man say, "They say the world is a jungle. I've been in jungle. It's not so bad."
I've also seen wild animals of different species help each other out.
'The tiger only gnaws and tears, that is all it knows. Nothing can be as spectacularly cruel as human beings.'
I once saw a video of two coyotes chasing down a rabbit. It took quite some time. When they finally caught up with him they let him go. "Nice run dude!"
I love how you have expressed the essence of a book I've been working on, or worked on by, for more than ten years! It's such a relief to encounter somebody who gets it, and can be so elegant and forthright. You go!
The only way this future civilization could possibly come into being is if humans are forced into it by necessity, and by this I mean forced by an environmental catastrophe that reduces the human population of the earth by at least half.
Fortunately, or unfortunately (depending on how you look at it), it’s only a matter of time before nature engages in some serious blow-back.
Let's get real...#The3Tacks
https://rumble.com/vwwhod-the-3-tacks.html
I have a question. If we are to collaborate, does that mean that I have to do what you tell me to, or that you have to do what I tell YOU to do? Just asking how that works.
We used to try to teach “collaboration” to Middle School kids and had a hell of a time. Not because of the kids—the kids were great at it, especially the athletes—it was the teachers who couldn’t collaborate, who had the massive power struggles you are identifying, who couldn’t figure out what real collaboration is. What the kids taught us is, collaboration is basically just shifting leadership, shifting points of power, the ability to let go when needed and to step up when needed. In other words, a wonderful but serious game. That was 20:years ago. Those kids are in their 30’s now. And they seem to be providing answers to our failing empire challenges.
Simple: look up the definition of a word you used - ‘collaboration’.
Quoth the prophet Zimmerman:
"Everybody whisperin, nobody listenin."
Well, some may be listening.
¿Verdad, no?
yes ❤️🙏🏼
"If there are future generations, they will necessarily be living in a society that functions in a completely different way than our current one does."
Spot on, Caitlin! And therein lies the rub... Too many fear change, even change that will be for our ultimate benefit. They rather dwell in a dysfunctional society than to risk everything for a functional one where all have their needs met and tended to. We have to grow past this irrational fear of becoming truly equals with one another and truly sharing and caring for all human beings, not just for those with large bank accounts. Here's hoping that we'll reach that day sooner rather than later (after the nukes have fallen).
To call it "change" obscures the fact that people have more or less stake in the current state of things, and what that state of things entitles them to in the future. They are possessed by their property (not necessarily tangible), demonstrate it at every turn in proportion to their personal insecurity, and subordinate their every act or utterance to their property values. As Chuck Palahniuk put it, "The things you own end up owning you."