BLOWBACK – And Collapse

JFK, MLK, The CIA – And The Collapse Of The West

Yes, the evidence is clear: the CIA killed JFK, RFK, MLK, and Malcolm X. They are the goons of the corporate-state oligarchy. What did you think they do? Defend freedom and democracy? Were you born yesterday? (Read, Killing Hope, Class Warfare, Necessary Illusions, Year 501, The Shock Doctrine, and The CIA’s Greatest Hits.) Of course they’re a goon squad.

Read Blowback: America’s Secret Recruitment of Nazis. The SS, the Gestapo, the CIA… same shit, different pile. They’re hired thugs. That’s all they are.

Rare exceptions, are people like Ray McGovern – an intell agent with actual intelligence, a brain, a heart, a spine, and integrity. For the rest, the more fitting name would be something like, the Central Ineptitude Agency – or the BTI… Brainless Thugs Incorporated.

JTR,
November 3, 2023

P.S.:

Watch the video introduction to my newest book, on Rumble:

The Collapse Of The West:

Exodus

&

The Global Tectonic Shift

A Video Excerpt From My New, Multi-Media Book, By Way Of Introduction

By J. Todd Ring,
Author of Enlightened Democracy,
The Failure Of Propaganda, and The People vs The Elite
October 2023,
Villa Samadhi,
Uruguay

Note also:

Did the CIA foresee the collapse of the Soviet Union? Nope. Central Ineptitude Agency. Did the major media, academics, talking head pundits, politicians, business “elite”, or pop culture gurus foresee the collapse of the Soviet Union? Nope. Only one person is on record as having predicted the collapse of the Soviet Empire. But it happened anyway.

Now, I am telling you, the Davos/WEF-based, Western corporate-state empire is collapsing, and it is taking down what has been called Western civilization, along with it.

Given that only five people predicted the global economic crisis of 2008 – and I was one of the five – you might want to take heed, when I say that something extremely big is fast approaching.

Or not. Your call. Be bug splatter if you choose to be.

Your choice. You have been warned.

The Collapse Of The West: Chapter One: The Global Tectonic Shift

By J. Todd Ring

Preface:

I wrote this essay in January of 2020, then the covid crisis hit, and it was shelved for over a year. The macro-scale patterns have not changed fundamentally since then, although the slow-motion collapse of the US, and the West more broadly, has accelerated. I would offer the following as a synopsis and overview of what I see coming. I do not have a crystal ball, but the major patterns and trends are all deeply established and already set in motion; therefore, what I am predicting here, has a high probability of being generally accurate.

The US is headed for collapse, which will likely occur within this decade, and possibly very soon. Canada, Europe, Britain, Australia and New Zealand have all tied themselves to the sinking ship of the dying US empire, and so will suffer greatly for that deeply unwise move. Or rather, they tied themselves to the US after WWII, and were not perceptive enough to decouple from the US, when its decline became clear in the 1970s and ’80s, and undeniable by 2008. Russia and many other countries have largely decoupled from the US. Those who have not done so, will sink with the US, when it implodes and goes down.

China, Russia, India, Mexico and Brazil, will be the new economic super-powers, in a newly multi-polar world. Assuming we can avoid WWIII during the global tectonic shift, which is certainly not guaranteed, the world has the potential, at least, of becoming more equitable and more stable, as the global hegemony of the US and its satellites in NATO sink into secondary status, if not post-collapse chaos, and the Global South, or Third World, along with the East, find some long sought-after breathing space.

A multi-polar world will arrive, and with it, prospects for greater equality, freedom and peace – so long as we don’t blow ourselves up in the transition. The billionaire oligarchs who effectively rule the West, along with most of the world, however, want to maintain both their global hegemony, and their internal power: and the plutocrats are increasingly desperate, and are therefore taking increasingly desperate actions. That creates great danger for the world, including, most especially, for the people of the West, particularly in North America, Britain and Europe. But we should remember that desperate actions taken by desperate men show their weakness, not their power.

Meanwhile, Russia and China are now in an economic alliance, and each wants to preserve its own independence, above all, while they decouple from the collapsing US, but make short-term agreements with the Davos oligarchs, out of expedience.

It is an uncertain and dangerous time globally, to say the least. That is leaving aside the equally pressing issues of the environmental crisis, and fascism, which of course, also demand urgent attention and urgent action. But remember this. History is full of surprises. Nobody expected the American Revolution to succeed, but it did. Nobody expected WWI, but it happened. Nobody expected the collapse of the Soviet Union, but it happened nevertheless. Permanence is an illusion. Radical change happens unexpectedly. Only in hindsight, do the great majority come to see the precursors to radical change, after it happens, which the prescient few, saw in advance. It has always been so.

History is always unfolding, and full of uncertainty. That being said, we can see clear patterns unfolding. We can see the direction we are headed; and if we don’t change course, we will end up precisely where we were going, naturally. 

Freedom, democracy, equality, ecology and peace are the core issues, I would say; and the core obstacles to all of these, are empire, authoritarianism and artificial scarcity. That is, or should be, our big picture orientation.

The five maxims of empire are to divide, demoralize, disempower, indoctrinate and control. We must, therefore, do precisely the opposite: unite, inspire, empower, inform and liberate. 

As always, the future is in our hands. It just so happens, however, that this is, quite possibly, the most pivotal time in human history, and almost certainly so. 

The world needs us now, more than ever. And we need each other. Unite the people, and fight for freedom, democracy, justice and peace, and a clean and healthy, better world for all.

JTR,

June 18, 2021

***

The original essay,

Written, January 2020:

Global Tectonic Shift

“They have plundered the world, stripping naked the land in their hunger… they are driven by greed, if their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor… They ravage, they slaughter, they seize by false pretenses, and all of this they hail as the construction of empire. And when in their wake nothing remains but a desert, they call that peace.” ~ Tacitus

“In 1492 Columbus discovered America. He too had been seeking the East, and America, unluckily for its inhabitants, happened to lie in his way round the world. Here there were no guns to face, not even weapons of metal; the coasts lay open, and the two organized empires, Aztec and Inca, were both new and oppressive; the invaders could go much further than occupying odd harbours, which in any case would have been useless. Mexico was taken from the Aztecs, with the help of their neighbours, before 1520, and Peru from the Incas in the 1530s. Neither Spain nor Europe ever lost the intoxicating memory of these two great realms overthrown in the twinkling of an eye by a handful of white men; it cancelled the triumphs of the Turks, and gave the West a perpetual confidence in its power and its future.”

• An excerpt from a very interesting and thoughtful book on the history of Europe and the world: The Oldest Europe And Its Neighbours, by Victor Kiernan, Zed Books

Context is everything. History matters.

“England’s East India Company had been founded in 1600. These two rivals represented a new imperialism, not in need of any crusading motives to nerve it for enterprises in continents now relatively familiar, or of any ideology beyond that of the counting-house. The Turkish threat to Europe was receding; besides, to Dutchmen and Englishmen, Spain and the Inquisition, not Turkey and the Koran, were the menace. They had no notion of spreading Christianity in Asia; these Protestants kept religion, business and politics in separate compartments. As the natives were going to be roughly handled in either case, it may have been better for Christianity not to be compromised, as it was in America, by getting mixed up in the matter. Anglo-Dutch power in the East Indies, until well on in the nineteenth century, marked the most sordid but least hypocritical phase of European expansion.”

But we went back to ideological rationalizations, sometimes religious, sometimes secular: as now, the systemic and brutal imperial violence, which is not only military, but more often paramilitary, and above all, economic, is carried out in the name of spreading democracy and freedom, or intervening out of humanitarianism. And Orwell still rolls in his grave at the obvious and extreme deceit, and self-deceit.

Kiernan himself, quoted above, stumbles back into such comfortable self-delusions as are the norm. The ethnocentrism, and sheer cultural arrogance and presumption, are staggering:

“Today when Europe is no longer in the lead it is tempted to think, or to agree with others, that the civilization it was incubating was no unique property of its own but a stage of progress that other regions were moving towards. India on this view would have had cotton-mills, Japan would have come by submarines, whether Europe had brought them or not. This is of course possible, but may be regarded as exceedingly unlikely on any time-scale of centuries rather than millennia. An intricate set of interacting factors is required to bring about any significant historical transition, and there is small sign anywhere else (most perhaps in Japan) of anything like the complex of material and psychological forces then at work in north-west Europe. No other part of Europe itself could have made an Industrial Revolution. It is even doubtful whether any Asian country would have modernized itself by imitation of the West, if not forced by the West to do so as India, Japan, China all in different ways were.”

It bears repeating:

Comfortable self-delusions are the norm. The ethnocentrism, and sheer cultural arrogance and presumption, are staggering. Alas, the white man’s burden is a heavy one…

Kiernan and a great many others have begun to realize the dangers of such cultural arrogance, and such recognition is well-put here:

“Yet Europe’s conviction of being the only really civilized region was becoming so strong that even its offscourings, these Ishmaels of the seven seas, carried it with them, and were fortified by it in their lawlessness. Whatever a white man did must in some grotesque fashion be ‘civilized’.”

However, in the same essay Kiernan argues in defence and apologetics of European colonialism, neocolonialism and empire, as we have seen. And such stark self-contradiction, and self-deceit, is also the norm in the North-West.

And back again to rationalizations we return again and again: conquest is always for the benefit of the conquered, the subjugated, and the plundered, don’t you know…

“Westerners impregnated with their new ethos of change, progress, energy, invested Commerce with the same divine right that monarchy formerly claimed, and were irresistibly tempted to resort to force. They could feel that by doing so they were doing right, as the French Revolutionary armies marching over Europe and carrying liberty on their bayonets had felt. To knock down decrepit régimes was to liberate peoples from the crushing burden of their past. In the first stage of European expansion Spain and Portugal thought of making a return to benighted regions for what they took from them, by giving them Christianity. Now there was again a feeling that expansion ought to have some ideal purpose, a goal beyond sordid greed, which came to be expressed in the phrase ‘civilizing mission’. Backward lands would be given civilization, in return for the products wanted by Europe; Christianity might be part of it, though a subsidiary one. The idea of Europe’s ‘mission’ dawned early, but was taken up seriously in the nineteenth century. Turkey, China, and the rest would some day be prosperous, wrote Winwood Reade, one of the most sympathetic Westerners. ‘But those people will never begin to advance … until they enjoy the rights of man; and these they will never obtain except by means of European conquest.’” – ibid

“The civilizing mission was now all the rage, whereas in earlier years it had often been rejected as too expensive. It was easiest of all to believe that what was good for Europe must be even better for the ‘natives’. By now the white man had worked himself into a high state of self-conceit; but all through the century his reaction to any natives who tried to reject the blessings of civilized rule was that of Dr Johnson to the rebel Americans: ‘They are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for any thing we allow them short of hanging.’” – ibid

We have told ourselves we are bringing freedom, democracy, and civilization to the world. But we have brought guns and bombs, economic predation, subjugation, exploitation, colonialism, neocolonialism, and stark imperialism, no matter how it is rationalized, justified, or camouflaged. This is bringing aid and help to our neighbours? I am sure our neighbours would all agree, that kind of help, they can do without.

As my great literary hero, Thoreau said, “If I knew someone was coming to do me some good, I should like to get as far away as possible.”

And moreover, “The better part of what my neighbours believe to be good, I believe in my heart to be bad. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well.”

I agree with TS Eliot: We are the hollow men. The leaders of the free world? We are neither leaders nor free. We are cleverly driving ourselves in a frantic race toward our own extinction – with tyranny and fascism, neofeudalism and war, a toxic landscape and a toxic culture, as landmarks along the way. And through our benevolent leadership we have convinced or coerced the rest of the world to join us in our madness, and our race to oblivion. Some leadership.

I agree with Gandhi. When he was asked what he thought of Western civilization he replied, “I think it would be a good idea.”

To the presumed superiority of (North-)Western civilization, I say, we are neither superior, nor civilized.

We are but one corner of the globe, for a time dominant, but in no way superior to other societies. Each society has its glories and its shames, its triumphs and its failings. We are no different, and no better.

Was Nazi Germany twisted, diabolical, demented, deluded and depraved? Unquestionably. Cultural relativism, nihilism and post-modernism are a wasteland of the mind, leading to madness. There are faults, and there are great failings, and we should not pretend that war is peace, or slavery is freedom, lest we simply lose our minds in the act of self-delusion.

And I agree with Thoreau. Is modern society, or modern Western society, either one, however you care to look at it, in any real way superior to older, earlier societies, or to native societies, for example? His response was a definitive, No. And I agree. As America’s greatest philosopher, Henry David Thoreau said, We have improved the houses men live in (perhaps), but not the character of the men who live in them.

Here, here.

We have gained much, but lost more. We have toys and trinkets and gadgets galore, but our souls are hollow, our minds and spirits debased, our communities and communion eroded and degraded and largely gone, our morals and ethics deeply in question, and generally serving power and expedience, over all calls of conscience or compassion. And we are less happy and less free.

We are fatter, weaker, less healthy, less vigourous, less strong in both body and mind, and in spirit; and every psychological, sociological and anthropological study shows us to be less happy, more lost and adrift, and more lonely and alienated than “primitive” societies of 10,000 years ago. Clearly we need to rethink our notions of “progress”, “development”, “civilization”, “freedom”, and “the good life”.

Medieval, ancient, “primitive”, and indigenous societies can teach us much. As can the global South, and the East. We do not need to become primitivists, or orientalists, but we do need to dispense with our ill-conceived and disastrous, misguided and frankly delusional sense of cultural superiority. If we do not, chances are that none of us, anywhere on Earth, will survive.

It will be a post-imperial world ahead, or it will be a post-human world. And to get to that post-imperial world, which is the heart of the transition we must make now, we will need guidance, as well as courage, compassion, and common sense.

Some of that good guidance will come from the West, some from the East, some from the North, and much from the South.

And we will be wise to seek counsel from traditional indigenous peoples, who still remember how to be stewards and protectors of the land and the waters, and not despoilers, looters and pillagers only.

“First Nation’s Peoples — and the decision of Canadians to stand alongside them — will determine the fate of the planet.”

—Guardian, UK

And we must note, and remember, how that spirit of common cause, unity, solidarity, shared purpose, and peace, is starkly at odds with the history of colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, and empire. The contrast between what must be left behind, and what must come next, if we are to survive at all, could scarcely be more stark.

*

The Doctrine of Discovery

“…to invade, search out, capture, vanquish and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ, wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all moveable and immoveable goods whatsoever, held and possessed by them, and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to apply and appropriate to himself and to his successors the kingdoms, dukedoms, counties, principalities, dominions, possessions and goods, and to convert them to his and their use and profit.”

– Pope Nicholas V (Papal Bull 1452)

Infantile grandiosity? Imperial hubris? Extreme cultural arrogance? Sheer racist lunacy? Demonic possession? Whatever it was, such mutually destructive madness must end now.

The following battle lines will only heat up, mark my words; and to state the obvious, until the age of empires, and the war on nature, are brought to an end:

Solidarity, stewardship, and peace – not fossil fuels, pipelines, Big Oil, planetary destruction and imperial hubris: this is what we need, and now. Support native rights and environmental protection, with human rights, equality and freedom for all – not planetary pillage by a rampaging, Caligula-like, utterly delusional and power-drunk plutocracy, infused with suicidal corporate greed.

US professor of law and indigenous studies, Robert A. Williams Jr., author of Savage Anxieties, put it simply and directly, in an interview with the venerable Bill Moyers: “The Western world has been at war with the tribal world for 3,000 years.” This, along with the class war, the gender war, the wars of race and colonialism, and the war on nature, is the root of imperialism and empire, and the 5,000 year old social model based on hierarchies of power, conquest and domination. That war must end now, that social model must end now, the age of empires, along with its inseparably intertwined war on nature, must end now, or the human species will simply end, itself – or at least, anything resembling civilization, or the possibility for a decent human life, will soon come to an end.

*

We should remember that Europe was a cultural backwater, for nearly a thousand years after the fall of the inglorious Roman Empire. The conquest of the Americas, with its incomprehensible wealth, looted and pillaged by way of genocidal mass slaughter, propelled Europe into a position of global dominance. This mass theft, and mass slaughter, not an innate moral, cultural or intellectual superiority, is what gave rise to five centuries of global domination by Europe and its most favoured colonies. Let us now be unabashedly honest about it – for a change.

That inconceivably vast loot, stolen from two continents in the Americas; combined with cheap, abundant, destitute, near-slave labour, after the mass dislocation caused by the grand theft of the land and the commons, which was the land-enclosure acts; combined with a third staggeringly vast pool of resources, which was England’s discovery of coal reserves, equal to Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth at its peak, just under their feet; and combined with the unspeakable institution of slavery; together brought about the Industrial Revolution – and not just European cleverness and industriousness, as it has been assumed.

Remember also, that at the time of the industrial revolution, India had a higher quantity and also a higher quality of steel output than England. Active de-industrialization was part of colonization and empire building. It still is.

In any case, the global dominance of the European and Euro-American North-West lasted roughly 500 years, and is ending now. It is becoming a multi-polar world; and I think that bodes well for the world – including for that North-West corner of the world, which has become known as, “The West”.

History is never over, as some have foolishly posited. History is still unfolding – is ever unfolding. And we are either making it, shaping it together; or watching it unfold, pathetically and passively. But unfold it will, in either case.

And major changes lay in store. What shape they take, is largely up to us. What I do hope, is that the age of empires, after 5,000 years, can be put behind us, as foolishness from our youth.

Let there be freedom. And let there be peace.

*

We should remember also, that Europeans didn’t invent empire. There were the Persians, the Egyptians, the Babylonians, and many others before.

And we would do well to read the Book of Daniel. The succession of empires will end. There will be peace. How soon, depends upon what we do, or fail to do, right now. Extinction or rebirth? That is our choice, at this critical juncture, of our shared human history on Earth.

Europe didn’t invent slavery, conquest, domination, usurpation, annexation, or empire. Nor did they invent the heirarchical power structures, inequality and elite rule, which give rise to tyranny and predations, both at home and abroad, and which are the seedbed and germination of empire itself.

But the decline and fall of the European and Euro-descendent American empire, slow or sudden as it may come, and inexorable as it is, may well mark the growing of a global awakening across the world’s great human family, and the beginning of the end, of the age of empires itself. Let us hope that it is. Let us pray we are so wise; or simply, so sane. The alternatives are nothing short of grim, at best.

In fact, the likelihood is this: what we are facing now, in the early part of the 21st century, is either the dying of the age of empires, or the dying of humanity, and the human species on Earth. Let us hope we are sensible enough, despite the all-pervasive fog of delusion, and the stupor of imagined powerlessness, and denial, to choose the former, and not simply drift aimlessly into the latter, with a moan, and a collective whimper, or a yawn.

Stand, I say.

*

As Bob Marley sang:

“400 years

(500+ now)

Of the same philosophy…”

(Imperialism *is* neofeudalism)

“Babylon system is a vampire

Suckin’ the blood of the sufferers

Tell the children the truth

Tell the children the truth

That we’ve been grinded on the wine press

Much too long

Rebel

Rebel….”

And this means the people of the North and the West, as well as the South and the East:

Rebel, rebel.

Imperialism and neofeudalism, elitism and tyranny, always go together. We can have empire; or we can have freedom, democracy, justice, equality, and peace. But we cannot have empire, and also have the latter, infinitely superior things.

*

“Hardly any European countries had significant connections, other than imperial, with any continent except America. Towards the end of the century, the ‘age of imperialism’ proper, a craze for annexations seized on everyone who had any chance, and Italy, Germany, Belgium all got shares, with the USA joining in. Individual businessmen were obviously doing well out of colonies; nations were easily tutored into believing (nearly always mistakenly) that they could do equally well, especially when they saw that all their neighbours believed it.”

– ibid

Again, imperialism abroad, breeds tyranny at home; and in the end, either fascism or neofeudalism, as we are being driven into, like cattle, right now.

Orwell understood. Gandhi understood, as did Thoreau. Mark Twain understood. Martin Luther King Jr. understood. Do we?

Rebel, rebel.

It is time for justice. It is time for freedom. And it is time for peace. And we will not have peace, until we also have justice and freedom.

Rebel.

(Que the John Lennon.)

Power to the people.

*

Europe and Euro-America didn’t give the world Shakespeare, Einstein, Socrates, Botticelli, democracy and the Magna Carta *because* we set out to conquer the world, because of empire, but despite it. Empire, at its heart, is always brutal, is always the enemy of freedom, democracy, justice, compassion, peace, and civilization itself, at least in any meaningful or positive definition of the word.

It is time now for Europe and America to relinquish the empire-lust of their youth, and the infantile grandiosity which always accompanies it, and with maturity and grace, accept their position as great powers in a multi-polar world, where war and conquest, empire and power struggles, are not only barbaric and uncivilized as ever, but are now positively suicidal. It is time to become great civilizations. And that is only possible if we now together declare that the age of empires is dead.

Let there be peace. There is much to be shared, and much work to be done. We have a world to be saved from our own ecological neglect. Infighting and imperial power games will only distract and divide us, at a time when we need unity amidst diversity, as well as democracy and freedom, in order to save ourselves from ourselves, and from our own tyrannizing, world-devouring elites.

Remember liberty, equality, solidarity and mutual aid, on the road ahead – they are essential, and they are under attack.

Let there be peace now. Let the age of empires be over. It is entirely in our power to choose it, and make it so. There is much work, great work, to be done. Let us begin. Together, and in peace.

JTR,

February 20, 2020

What Is Buddhism, and What Is Non-Dualism?

And What Are They Not?

Open letter to Russell Brand, regarding a video (linked below) titled,

Dualism vs Monism EXPLAINED!

Russell, who the hell are you interviewing?! The guy is clearly talking out of his ass. (Sorry for my directness and occasional bluntness. I was heavily influenced by Chomsky, Trungpa and Thoreau, and can’t seem to help it.) He says, “I’m a firm dualist….That’s a very Buddhist view.” No, sorry, flatly 180 degrees wrong.

In Buddhist philosophy or spirituality, the aspect of our own true nature, which is also the true nature of being, which is Wisdom Mind, or Universal Mind, or infinite wisdom, is depicted in visual form as Manjushri. Manjushri is shown seated on a lotus flower, holding a flaming sword in his right hand – which never harms any living being, but is used only to cut through illusions – and holds in his left hand a sacred text. That text is the Prajnaparamita Sutra, also known as the Sutra of the Perfection of Wisdom. That tells us everything we need to know about the heart of Buddhist teachings. And the teaching is expressly, non-dualist.

Buddhism is expressly and explicitly non-dualist, as is expressed in the Prajnaparamita Sutra, the Sutra of the Perfection of Wisdom, and as is expressed in the Hriydaya Sutra, the Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom Sutra, commonly known as the Heart Sutra – which is recited daily in Zen monasteries across the world – which states, “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form; form is not other than emptiness, emptiness is not other than form.”

Then, after radically misrepresenting Buddhist philosophy, your guest goes on to misrepresent Plato as a dualist as well. Plotinus certainly understood Plato better than most modern commentators, because he was the last of the ancient philosophers (leaving out Augustine, since he was not a serious philosopher); and because he was a student of Plato’s philosophy, who said that he had nothing to add to Plato, but was simply clarifying Plato’s message – the core of which is: the many are One; the One manifests as the many. Again, your guest is flatly and radically wrong, and is misrepresenting yet another philosophical school of thought.

Then he completely contradicts himself. First he said that Buddhism is a dualistic philosophy. Then he says, “The Eastern religions, they go one step further by arguing that there is no matter at all, that mind is the only thing that exists.” Wrong again. First he says Buddhism is dualistic, then he says it is monist. Do you realize that these two philosophical views are utter opposites of each other?

So, which is it, buddy? Is Buddhism a dualistic philosophy, as you say first, or is it a monist philosophy, as you say later? Clearly he doesn’t have any idea what he is talking about. A first year philosophy professor would have to give him a D-, at best, for both grossly misunderstanding two major schools of philosophy, and worse, for flatly contradicting himself. (YouTube sets extraordinarily low standards.)

Then he goes on to enlighten us on the philosophy of science, with similar results. He says, again with the certitude of Moses coming down from the mountain, with the word of God written on stone, “You can go with science, which is materialistic, which says that everything is physical.” And again, he is 100% wrong. There was this recent event in science, dude, maybe you heard about it, a new discovery, a radically new approach and understanding of science, called, “quantum physics”. It’s a brand new scientific paradigm, just discovered about a century past, which radically undermined and in fact shattered the old paradigm (see Thomas Kuhn’s, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) of Newtonian-Cartesian mechanistic, atomistic, materialist-reductionism. But then again, you can’t be expected to keep up with everything. After all, quantum physics only arrived on the scene 100-some years ago.

Then he goes back to misinterpreting and misrepresenting Buddhism – which he says, states that, “everything is mind. There’s no such thing as a physical reality.” Wrong again. Again, he is contradicting himself: first saying Buddhism is dualist, then saying it is monist. And secondly, he is flatly wrong in saying Buddhism is a mind-only (idealist) philosophy (eg: Berkeley). In actual fact, the Buddhist teachings explicitly say that the Mind-Only School is a close approximation to the truth, but is subtly mistaken. The Dalai Lama, or any other qualified Lama or Zen master, can correct him on that. Nagarjuna, the preeminent philosopher of Buddhist philosophy, makes it explicitly clear that dualistic views are mistaken, and so too are nihilistic and philosophical idealist views also mistaken – the true nature of being and reality being non-duality. If he wants to argue with the Dalai Lama or Nagarjuna, I say, good luck. He is clearly out of his depth, and is in way over his head.

As the Mahayana texts state clearly, “Nirvana and samsara are one.” How much more explicitly non-dualist can it be? Buddhism therefore, is not about exiting, leaving, or escaping the world – it is about waking up, and being fully aware of the true and profoundly rich nature of being.

The way the guest here presents dualism, as interactionism or interdependence between mind and body, or consciousness and matter, is actually one of the few accurate things he has to say. Interactionism is a more intelligent view than materialist monism, or materialist reductionism, as it is more commonly called, but it is still not the Perennial Philosophy of non-dualism, which has been expressed by all the great mystics, East and West, throughout the ages, nor is it the view of Eastern philosophy, and nor is it, to be specific, the view of Buddhism, Taoism, or the Advaita Vedanta teachings of the yogis. Again, other than accurately depicting what interactionism is, he is pretty much 100% wrong on everything he has talked about here.

Ken Wilber – someone who is an actual scholar, and who does not talk out of his ass, put it well, when he said that Western philosophy for 5,000 years has been a battle between what he called “the ascenders and the descenders”. (Ken Wilber is out of his depth and deeply mistaken in terms of political philosophy, but otherwise is a simply stellar polymath and truly brilliant philosopher and scholar – one of the dozen or so greatest scholars of the past 100 years, along with Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Alan Watts, Joseph Campbell, Joanna Macy, Rianne Eisler, Murry Bookchin, Erich Fromm, Mathew Fox, Thomas Merton, Einstein and Noam Chomsky.)

The ascenders view the world, nature, the body, and life on Earth, as unreal, illusory, or less real and less important, than the transcendent realm of pure spirit of consciousness. (The Earth is a waiting room, and everything in this world is inferior and also depraved at its core, and heaven is what we are waiting for., while we suffer through this dismal, sordid, pathetic material plane. World-hating dualists, is what they are.) They are dualists, in essence, who devalue, or occasionally deny the existence, of one pole: devaluing the imminent, the Earthly and the material, while valuing the spiritual and the transcendent. The descenders are the materialists, who want to devalue, or more commonly deny, the existence of the spiritual, the transcendent, or of consciousness or spirit. (They are materialist-reductionists, and epiphenomenalists, clinging to a worldview that is a century out of date, and thus are anti-empirical and unscientific, at least since the discovery of quantum physics.)

The real truth, the true nature of phenomena, being and reality, as Ken Wilber rightly points out, is what the great mystics have all said, and which quantum physics is now corroborating: which is non-duality. But this guest of Russell’s is no scholar – either of religion, of philosophy, or of science.

I mean, he seems an intelligent lad, but he is a novice, clearly, speaking as if he has the pontificate, and is delivering the Sermon on the Mount, the Answer of all answers, when he says definitively and with an air of utter authority, what Buddhism, Plato, Eastern religions, and science are all about. And he got it wrong on all four counts.

Russell Brand, by contrast, your approach is refreshingly humble, yet filled with a very legitimate and indeed important spirit of dignity and confidence – and with humility and confidence in balance, as they should be, and need to be, if we have any good sense, as you clearly do. Your guest, by contrast, is filled with presumption, and what the ancient Greeks would call, hubris. Or flatulence and hot air, to be more direct.

People should bear in mind that it was only recently, in the long view of history, that we humans knew, with full and absolute, unquestionable certainty, that the world is flat, and the Earth is the centre of the universe. Everyone knew these things to be true, and unquestionably true. And everyone was wrong. In fact, when people dared to question the holy dogma of the Earth being the centre of the universe, they were met with the Inquisition, and the serious threat of being burned at the stake for heresy.

How similar to the world we live in today.

Another thing to bear in mind is that, in truth, you are more likely to be struck by lightning seven times in a single life, than to find truly reliable information on youtube, the internet in general, or the media, or for that matter, from academia – to say nothing of pop culture icons, such as your very presumptuous guest.

In fact, unless what you are hearing, reading or watching comes directly – and I mean directly – from a Buddhist, Taoist or yogic master, the odds are that the information being presented is partially or wholly mistaken; and more than likely, not a little mistaken, but more commonly, radically mistaken, if not flatly either propaganda or delusion. People need to learn to have far more discernment, and to separate the wheat from the chaff – and the drivel, pap, dross and dung, from the gems.

I listen to what Russell Brand has to say, quite often, because he is generally very lucid, as well as good-hearted and highly intelligent, and highly articulate, not to mention often witty, and always has something interesting to say. His guests, however, are very hit and miss, at best; and sometimes, I’m sorry to say, simply full of shit.

Russell, when you said, “I feel that we are experiencing the limitations of our current models”, you were bang on. Yes, we have been in the midst of a scientific revolution, a shift in paradigms, or world-view, which began over a century ago. (These things take time – and a century, in human history, is but a blink.) Moreover, we have been in the midst of a cultural awakening of humanity since the late 1950s (the Beat poets, for example, along with the Civil Rights movement), which blossomed in the 1960s, and which did not die out, but has quietly grown and accelerated over the past 50-60 years, and continues to accelerate and to grow world-wide.

I would offer what Leibniz called The Perennial Philosophy – which Aldous Huxley wrote about very well – as a major clue as to where we should look for a better understanding of what reality really actually is. And the Perennial Philosophy echoes the recent findings in quantum physics, which show that the supposed material building blocks of all matter, do not exist – at least, not in the way we had imagined. (“Where is the matter? No matter. Where is the mind? Nevermind.”)

Quantum physics shows us that subatomic particles are not particles – which was a misnomer we put on them, a label we put on them, while we were still steeped in the deluded world-view of Newtonian-Cartesian mechanistic materialist-reductionism. Nor are they local. And non-local means non-dual. Subatomic particles are condensations or areas of concentration within energy fields – and as Einstein said, “We should stop talking about particles and fields. The field is everything.” Or as Einstein also said, getting right to the heart of the matter: “The perception of a division between subject and object is a kind of optical delusion.” Or as Shrodinger put it – and he was of course the god-father of quantum mathematics: “The number of minds in the universe is one.” (See Einstein’s star pupil and protégé, David Bohm, for further elaboration.)

Again, non-dualism is the heart of the perennial philosophy, the heart of the mystics’ teachings, East and West (see Meister Eckhart, for example), the heart of Buddhist, Taoist and yogic teachings, and the heart of what quantum physics and modern science is now confirming.

“Science” – and it must be placed in quotation marks, since there are few who are truly empirical, and hence, few who are truly scientific – is the slow man in the race; but is beginning to catch up, despite the foot-dragging of the pseudo-empirical, quasi-scientific majority of “scientists”, who, like Dark Age priests, cling to the old Newtonian-Cartesian materialist paradigm like it was the Holy Grail itself.

Western philosophy, as is widely acknowledged, is at an impasse. I would say a cul de sac is a better description. Academic Western philosophy, and most of what passes for “intellectual culture” alternates between the nihilist morass of polysyllabic post-modernist psychobabble, and the equally nihilistic myopia of stridently dogmatic materialist flatlander anti-science. We need to go back to fundamentals, retrace our steps, and re-think and re-examine our first principles and basic assumptions. We got off on the wrong track with Descartes’ dualism, 400 years ago, and with Newton’s mechanistic materialism, and with a largely unconscious assumption of certitude, which Stephen Toulmin unearths in his important work, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, and which, to a frightening and very real, and very large degree, threw us back into the dogmatic quasi-religious, pseudo-science of the Dark Ages. Uncover and examine these three grossly delusional assumptions which underpin the modern world, and we will be getting somewhere. Then only, will the fog begin to clear.

Until then, we have three main options in the West: post-modernist nihilism; materialist nihilism; and pop culture pap – all of which have the merit and the intellectual rigour of a dung ball. It is time to think more critically, and to take a fresh look at things. Then we will experience a new Renaissance – which is, by the way, emerging now, despite and maybe because of the darkness of the times – and not before.

Overcoming the absurd and grotesque hubris and supreme arrogance of the modern Western world, and rediscovering a little true humility and open-mindedness, would do wonders as well, and is absolutely imperative and essential. As Bertrand Russell said, we will have to allow the East into our thoughts, and on an equal footing. And we must allow the global South, as well, into our thoughts, and also on an equal footing. And further, we must overcome this grandiose smugness, which silently or sometimes aloud proclaims, foolishly, that we have nothing to learn from the ancients, from the “primitive” indigenous peoples of the world, from the medieval world, or from the first Renaissance. What assumptions we make – and what darkness we live in, as a result. When we broaden and deepen our perspective in these ways, then sparks will fly, and the new Renaissance will be secure, and will truly and rapidly blossom, to the great and profound benefit of all.

J. Todd Ring,
March 13, 2021

For a scholarly perspective on Buddhism and non-dualism, Eastern philosophy, and the philosophy of science – and not a gross misrepresentation of them, as was presented here – see:

Choosing Reality – Allan Wallace

World As Lover, World As Self – Joanna Macy

The Hero With A Thousand Faces – Joseph Campbell

The Perennial Philosophy – Aldous Huxley

The Way of Zen – Alan Watts

Tao: The Watercourse Way – Alan Watts

Psychotherapy East and West – Alan Watts

The Holographic Universe – Michael Talbot

Mysticism and The New Physics – Michael Talbot

Dreamtime and Inner Space – Holgar Kalweit

The Tao Te Ching – Jane English translation only

The Gospel of Thomas – Marvin Meyers translation only

The Heart Sutra – with commentary by Thich Nat Hahn

The Prajnaparamita Sutra – see Lex Hixon’s, The Mother of the Buddhas

The Diamond Sutra and the Sutra of Hui-neng – Shambhala Classics edition

The Uttaratantra – see Buddha Nature: The Mahayana Uttaratantra Shastra

And anything and everything by the Dalai Lama, Chogyam Trungpa,

or my own teachers, Lama Zopa, Lama Tharchin and Kirti Tsenchab Rinpoche

And to this short list of seminal, core texts, I would humbly, and frankly, offer my own work, as an overview of philosophy, within a broad historical and global perspective, and within the context of sociology, political-economy, culture and ecology, and as a vision for the way ahead: Enlightened Democracy, and, The People vs The Elite. Both are available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble now.

My sincere apologies to your guest, Russell, but a person cannot grossly misrepresent Buddhism and Eastern philosophy without being called and corrected on it. He needs to study far more before speaking with such an air of authority. It is inappropriate, grossly misleading, and frankly juvenile.

No Question: We Have Returned To The Dark Ages

 

Witch burning, anyone?

Suspicion equals proof.

Indefinite detention on suspicion alone.

Maybe we should break out the rack, the Inquisition, and a little Hieronymus Bosch, and really get this party going.

Or maybe we’d prefer a little sanity….

Listen to the world’s most reliable trend analyst:

“Media Fear Machine in High Gear

As reported in detail in the Trends Journal, data from around the world confirms the vast majority of those who have died from COVID-19 had serious pre-existing illnesses such as high blood pressure, diabetes, chronic heart conditions, and lung diseases (99 percent in Italy, over 86 percent in New York City).

In Italy, the Italian Health Institute reported the average age of those dying was about 80 years old.

According to the CDC, in the U.S. “a mortality rate of 10% to 27% for those ages 85 and over, 3% to 11% for those ages 65 to 84, 1% to 3% for those ages 55 to 64, and less than 1% for those ages 20 to 54.”

Also underreported is the significant amount of those dying from COVID-19 being smokers. This virus attacks the lungs, and a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine found Chinese coronavirus patients who smoked to be twice as vulnerable to serious infection and death from COVID-19 than those who didn’t smoke.

Yet the mainstream media, ignoring these hard facts, continues to pump out their tabloid headlines. For example, despite the fact stated above by the CDC that less than one percent of those between 20-54 years of age are dying from COVID-19, we get this 9 April headline from the Washington Post: “Hundreds of young Americans have now been killed by the coronavirus, data shows.””

The article states, “At least 759 people under age 50 across the United States who have perished amid the deepening pandemic, according to a Washington Post analysis of state data. These deaths underscore the tragic fact that while the novel coronavirus might be most threatening to the old and compromised, no one is immune.”

What’s left out of this junk journalism, which hyper-inflates the “deepening pandemic,” is that in the U.S. there are over 200 million people under the age of 50. Therefore, the 759 “under age 50” who have “perished” from the coronavirus represent around 0.0000038 percent.

Included in the Pandemonium Panic Awards for “Most Fear-Mongering Headline” was this one from Newsweek on 9 April: “CORONAVIRUS BECOMES NUMBER ONE CAUSE OF DEATH PER DAY IN U.S., SURPASSING HEART DISEASE AND CANCER.”

This headline was picked up by media across the nation… despite the fact that it’s “dead” wrong.

[Actually, it’s a bald-faced lie – something the media is very good at. Remember Saddam’s WMDs?]

Even if the current highest estimate of 60,000 U.S. deaths from coronavirus were reached, it pales in comparison with the number of deaths each year from heart disease (over 650,000, according to the CDC) and cancer (over 600,000, according to the American Cancer Society).

Also left out, as we’ve been making the case in the Trends Journal, is that the numbers of COVID-19 deaths in America can’t even begin to compare with the number of U.S. deaths each year from other health issues, such as obesity and smoking.

According to the National Institute of Health, it is estimated that obesity causes the premature death of around 300,000 Americans every year.

And, according to the CDC, in the U.S., there are 480,000 deaths annually from smoking… yet smoking has not been banned.”

– The Numbers Don’t Add Up, COVID-19 Special Trend Report, Trends Journal, April 14, 2020

Deaths from the common annual flu are still higher than deaths from coronavirus. Are we going to put the world under fascist lockdown and mass house arrest for six months every year from now on? How did we avoid that for the past 300,000 years? Reason, anyone?

Deaths from junk food and obesity are higher than deaths by coronavirus, by a factor more than ten-fold. Yet MacDonald’s and other junk food restaurants are not banned.

That would be a strong reaction, a heavy-handed reaction, but at least a rational one – and fundamental civil rights would not be suspended. Mortality rates would plummet. I’m not suggesting we do that, but at least it would be sane – and it would not be a fascist response, but merely a heavy handed one.

Spending trillions of dollars to create a real jobs program, a green jobs program, would slash poverty and stress, and thus slash mortality rates. But the concern here, among ruling elites, is not health. It is power.

Has anyone noticed that the US elite always scream there is no money for universal public health care, while a trillion dollars a year is spent on war, the military industrial complex and the new global surveillance and police state?

Yet the people blindly believe that now the business and political elite suddenly have a deep concern for public health?

Yes, that’s why they are engaged in economic warfare against the 99% – which is one of the real reasons for the lockdown – and which will kill far more than the virus. The elite are deeply concerned with your health.

Concern for public health also explains why the Wall Street elite are giving themselves trillions of dollars in relief, while the 99% get crumbs.

Yes, it is a deep concern for public health that clearly motivates the Western and Eastern oligarchic elite – or so it seems if you are delusional, or otherwise insane.

Mass house arrest of billions of healthy people is a socio-economic and public health disaster, incomparably worse than the virus itself, utterly unjustifed by science or common sense, and the preamble to fascism. Do you get it now?

The people had better snap out of their stupor of group-think and blind obedience soon. They are in grave danger, and it has nothing to do with a virus.

JTR,

April 19, 2020

Thomas Jefferson, Ursula Le Guin, and Collective Rebirth

 

Reading a novel by Ursula Le Guin, I think, not only is she a joy to read, in so many ways, but she refused to give in to a culture and a society that is, frankly, deeply lost. 

I think of something Thomas Jefferson said, “In matters of fashion, swim with the current. In matters of principle, stand like a rock.” Ursula Le Guin would understand that. 

(And yes, the morally bankrupt, or simply spineless and snivelling, will point fingers at Jefferson; but Jefferson, despite his faults, was a true leader, who helped to catapult us above and beyond our limits of the time, to a higher, though still far from perfect plane. And for that, he stands in general, many leagues above his rather petty and small-minded critics. I’m sure something similar can be said, and will one day be written, of Ursula K. le Guin, as well.)

The ancient Greeks, like the ancient people of India and China, recognized a pattern that was sometimes called The Four Ages of Man, and saw that 2,500 years ago we were already in a dark age, and have remained there, despite the boasting and the juvenile fanfare, though we are free to awaken from it at any time. I am sure Ursula Le Guin understood this quite well, too. Our culture and society are to be guided and corrected, not blindly followed or naively cheered.

She refused to become a typical post-modernist dogmatic nihilist, as has been the norm among “intellectuals” for over forty years; and she refused to embrace a staunch and unwavering moral relativism. 

She stood with timeless principles; and when conformity to the crowd or obedience to authority dictated that the bleating herd once again abandon all conscience to embrace the latest madness and depravity, in the unspoken and devoutly religious service to power, greed, vanity and egomania, she quietly left the crowd to their unthinking obedience and conformity, to fall in a ditch, unfortunately, as it is said, and rejected the self-serving demands of the elite to once again abandon all principles. 

She held to, upheld, and aspired to principles of devotion to family, community, service, sacrifice, spirituality, reflection, home and hearth, honesty, loyalty, kinship and alliances of neighbours and friends, patriotism in the thinking person’s sense (which of course forever questions everything, as it must, if it is not to be tragic, blind, or insane); and she upheld values of freedom, equality, compassion, balance, and both confidence and humility, which must always be balanced, along with open-mindedness, adaptability, courage, resilience, perseverance, patience, boldness, silence, duty, justice, forethought, ecology, and peace, and truth, among other high ideals, which we would be most wise to hold fast to, and to further pursue, and most foolish to abandon.

Unlike our present culture and society, she held higher values than narcissism, or collective narcissistic regression to an infantile and boisterously ever-demanding egocentric state, which is the current course and trajectory of both the self-deluded elite, and what seems to be the great majority – who are approaching staggering levels of self-delusion of their own, though they are modest compared to those of their masters. 

There are many who still do hold to higher values. And that is refreshing. And amidst a global awakening, which is occurring now, their number are growing. 

Margaret Atwood, Noam Chomsky, David Suzuki, Maude Barlow, Michael Hudson, Gerald Celente, Peter Dale Scott, Naomi Klein, Vandana Shiva, Arundhati Roy, and millions of others, hold to higher values than the current fashion of narcisistic hedonism and escapism, relativism, conformity, status-seeking, celebrity worship, and obedience to power – to name a few bright lights in the darkness.

She, and they – and we, any of us who seek to keep our hearts and minds alive, in a truly insane society that seeks to drown them both – are cause for celebration: and for confidence in the future; and for hope.

JTR,

February 19, 2020

Bernie Madoff, Robin Hood and the present dark age

Why is Bernie Madoff the only Wall St. criminal to face jail time? Because he robbed the 1%, and not the 99%.

Rob the rich, and you are attacked, reviled, vilified and quite possibly imprisoned as well, if not burned at the stake or publicly beheaded, drawn and quartered – and whether you are Bernie Madoff or Robin Hood makes no difference. But if you rob the poor and the middle class, rape the earth, despoil the commons and devastate the hopes of all future generations, in this late-stage capitalist-corporatist culture, you are lauded, and garlands are thrown ’round your neck. This is surely the dark age, and it is rapidly devouring itself. Stay tuned. This is not the end of the story.

JTR,
February 18, 2014