The Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm, or world view, of atomistic, dualistic, mechanistic reductionism, is a very recent, 400 year old delusion, a recent blink of the eye, and is now crumbling as an ideology, world view or paradigm. It is also by no means “scientific”. The evidence now refutes it. It is detritus, delusion, dogma, now refuted by quantum physics – and therefore, a thoroughly unscientific, lingering, but slowly dying, quasi-religious pseudo-science, clung to by dogmatic secular fundamentalists. Stop calling it scientific.
*
We could say, of course, that the 400 year old paradigm, or way of viewing the world, which is materialist reductionism, did have some degree of validity and usefulness – and that is true, of course. It divided the world, *in our minds*, into myriad, ever smaller pieces, giving rise to an explosion of knowledge about the way natural phenomena arise, change, and pass away. But knowledge is not understanding, much less wisdom. And dividing the world in our minds has ultimately proven disastrous – nay, catastrophic – leading us toward the brink of self-annihilation, while destroying and despoiling life on Earth at ever increasing speeds, and while producing great and increasing conflict, strife, alienation, inner hollowness, a terrible loneliness, sense of meaninglessness, and an insatiable hunger to fill the resulting inner void, leading to endless consumerism, materialism, escapism, addiction, voyeurusm, vicarious living, perpetual restlessness, anxiety, depression, mental illness and compulsive entertainment addiction, thereby accelerating the downward spiral, into further alienation, hollowness, and insanity. Clearly, this must change.
The world view of materialist-reductionism could also be described as a mental map, which all theories, dogmas, paradigms, philosophies and ideologies are. Some are more usrful or more destructive than others. Nazi idrology is incredibly destructive. Materialist reductionism, which is foolishly still referred to as “science”, is only slightly less destructive – and perhaps even more destructive.
Moreover, aside from usefulness versus destructiveness, a mental map, philosophy, paradigm or world view can be assessed based upon its degree of relative accuracy, in its ability to accurately describe the nature of reality. By that measure, as well as being incredibly powerful, in ways that have in some senses been useful and beneficial, and simultaneously, in other ways, being incredibly destructive, the materialist-reductionist paradigm has, of course, some degree of accuracy or validity. We know what molecules and atoms are, how metalurgy works, etc. But its accuracy is severely limited, as a mental construct, lens, map, or way of viewing the world. What we can call this Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm, which is atomistic, mechanistic, dualistic, and materialist-reductionist, is in some measure accurate, useful, and valid. But it also grossly distorts our perception of reality, life, the cosmos, and the nature of being and reality.
Imagine if you wanted to travel the world, and you had to choose between a map made in ancient Greece in 500 BC, and a map made in the 21st century using satellite imagery. Which one would be more accurate and more useful? Clearly the 2,500 year old map had some accuracy, validity and usefulness, but it was extrenely limited, with enormous blind spots, and enormous distortions of the real world. Well, our maps are outdated, once again. And the mental map which is the Newtonian-Cartesian, materialist-reductionist paradigm or world view, is now worse than outdated and obsolete – it must be abandoned, in light of the now mountainous and undeniable evidence, and it must be abandoned now, before our extremely distorted view of the world, destroys us all. Fortunately, this is exactly what is in the process of happening, as we speak.
*
A paradigm shift is underway. And the awakening has begun. Now, perhaps, we can begin to combine knowledge with wisdom, thereby saving ourselves from a self-made hell on Earth, and a self-generated final oblivion.
Reality is non-dual. Being is One. And thou art that.
But don’t take anyone’s word on things. Examine things for yourself. See for yourself.
Question everything. This is the path to enlightenment – and to a new renaissance, and a rebirth of our world.
JTR,
February 3, 2024,
Villa Samadhi,
Uruguay
(See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions; Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces; Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy; Alan Watts, The Book; Joanna Macy, World As Lover, World As Self; and Allan Wallace, Choosing Reality.)
A brief metaphysical musing on the nature of enlightenment, being and reality
There are indeed many paths up the mountain. Sectarianism is juvenile and problematic at best; and dogmatism is confirmed blindness, confirmed delusion.
Being is non-dual, all-pervasive, infinite, stainless, primordially awake; yet, there remain many viable paths to realizing what we already and always, eternally are.
Know thyself. To do that, one must focus – and choose a path up the mountain. There are many paths to the top of the mountain, but surveying the paths from below will not take you to the top.
You can be broad-minded, and study widely, and that is good, but a path must still be chosen. Focus is imperative.
Furthermore, false messiahs, fads, and pop culture celebrity gurus abound. The distractions and dead-ends are limitless. Don’t waste your time. Cut carefully through the noise and the chaff, to find the real treasures.
A video inspired this musing, one I will link below. The gist of what I want to say here is contained in my response or comment on the talk, which I present here.
Blessings and peace to all.
Travel well, my friends.
And enjoy the journey!
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Excellent talk, but there are some errors. One is, a too negative view of spiritual traditions. For example, if you want a sure and swift path to liberation and enlightenment, the profound depth and precision of Nyingma – the ancient school of Tibetan Buddism, founded by Padmasambhava, the second Buddha of our time – in its blending and union of wisdom and method, uniting Mahayana, Vajrayana and atiyoga, is seldom and rarely matched.
There is no “upgrade” needed or required. The nature of being and mind is unchanging, though its manifestations are a dance of continual flux. Wisdom and skillful means, therefore, remain timeless, as well. And improving upon perfection is an impossibility. Separate culture from essence, and the ancient teachings remain as relevant and alive as ever. Old or new has no bearing on truth. Truth is reality, once seen, ever clear. The delusions of modern hubris must die if wisdom is to be born. First empty your cup, if you want it to be filled.
Further, you don’t invite neophytes to invent their own spiritual practices or path. That is a road to madness, destruction, or simply wasting eons of time. When you are fully enlightened, then you can invent practices. Until then, follow the guidance of the enlightened ones.
And no, once again, wisdom is not temporally, culturally or historically conditioned, but is timeless. So too, refined skillful means, bequeathed and taught by enlightened beings, does not ever lose its relevance or need to be “updated”! Such a foolish, ignorant thought. Preschoolers wanting to set the university course curiculum for the professors. Such infantile and egocentric non-sense. Start with humility, or wander aimlessly forever.
Cut out the chaff, plumb the depths, and realize the infinite, which is the heart of all things, here and now, always and forever.
Blake is a good starting point. Read Blake, the mystic poet and key holder, and the doors of perception and wisdom will begin to open.
What is the nature of good and evil, being and reality?
An open letter to two fine gentlemen, on my favourite philosophy podcast: Seekers Of Unity
I must say, with great respect, this is an excellent and extremely rare caliber of discussion, which is extraordinarily helpful to our world at this critical, pivotal time of global crisis; but it is a discussion between two individuals who self-evidently have never tasted, or glimpsed, reality.
I speak, by the way, not from theory, nor speculation, but from direct experience, frankly, because it must be said. The world is in too much peril for mincing of words or excessive delicacy.
Humility or non-humility has no bearing on it, once it is directly realized there truly is no self, and no duality of subject and object, self and other, whatsoever. Moreover, false modesty merely sows confusion, when what we need is clarity, above all. If you know how to walk, you do not say, No, I do not know how to walk. If you have seen, then you have seen. It is simply a matter of straight forward fact.
I do not have time to elaborate here, but as to the four critiques of the perennial wisdom, points 1, 3 and 4 are demonstrably false, and easily refuted. Point two is invalid, being a statement which can stem only from ignorance, from a dweller in the cave of shadows, from one who has never opened his eyes, and has not seen.
The central issue, however, is this: theory will never suffice. You can debate to the end of time, and remain forever in ignorance. The point is to deeply examine things for yourself, via a true radical empiricism, yes, and to actually see.
When the direct experience of the non-dual/interdependent nature of being and reality arises, there are no more questions, and no more theories – you know. Only the subtleties of interpretation and refinement of vision remain to be addressed, if even that. Reality becomes self-evident, and undeniable, for the first time. Until then, debate, discuss, and theorize all you like. But keep a true modesty about it, because you are still blind men in a dark cave.
As to the question of evil: universal, unconditional, subjectless, objectless compassion is the natural state of the awakened mind that directly perceives the non-dual nature of being and reality; moreover, it is compassion which itself opens the gates of wisdom, because it is the primary antidote to the ego-grasping which both stems from and also perpetuates the delusion of duality. That is to say, the door to enlightenment is opened solely through the key that is compassion. Compassion is therefore integral to the path, as well as the result. This is the union of the outer and inner, the exoteric and esoteric, the sutrayana path and the vajrayana path, the causal and result vehicles, in other words, or the relative and the absolute.
Furthermore, compassion is enlightened self-interest and basic intelligence, for all things are interconnected and truly one. Like ripples in a pond, whatever we send out, sooner or later echoes back, reverberates and returns to us. This is the nature of interdependence, which is the manifest dance of the non-dual ground of being itself.
The question of evil is therefore answered best, and answered adequately, solely by the perennial wisdom of the non-dual view, and by no other.
Whence evil? Evil is greed and hate, stemming from the delusion of duality, which Socrates and the ancient Greeks called, somewhat euphemistically, ignorance. Cut the root of ignorance, or more precisely, delusion, and evil ceases to arise. Until then, it is temporary, bandaid solutions only that are possible.
Or if we simply wish for freedom, liberation, happiness or peace, either for ourselves, others, or both, then it is likewise either piecemeal, temporary bandaid measures, or it is enlightenment. You take your pick.
Again: Brilliant, important work you are doing, yes; but be aware that there is indeed more to heaven and earth than is contained in your philosophy.
– With much love, J. Todd Ring,
Villa Samadhi,
Uruguay
November 27, 2023
Here is the original podcast, referred to above – which is, as I say, excellent, though by necessity limited, as was already explained:
OK, gangster punks, rebels and revolutionaries, free spirits and seekers of truth, hear this:
People don’t understand the power of emptiness. With all my heart, I wish they did. And I wish I were more firmly grounded in that awareness. I merely have a knowing, a deeply felt and directly seen knowledge, but not a continuous awareness. Yet, I can honestly say that I have seen directly the non-dual nature of being and reality, and not merely theorized about it, speculated, or read about it in books. It is real. It is the ground of being, the very fabric of reality itself. It is worth thinking about, and exploring. But don’t take anyone’s word on anything. As the Buddha also said, Examine things for yourself. See for yourself.
Emptiness is the greatest power in the world. The greatest power in existence. There is nothing that can remotely compare to it. It is not understood, even intellectually, by more than a few, and fully realized by no more than one in millions, but it is real, and it is the ultimate power. And by emptiness, of course, we must clarify what is meant: it is the non-duality of being, the fundamental unity of being.
(See Allan Wallace, Joanna Mcy, Einstein and Bohm if you want a secular, scientific discussion of non-duality, or Joseph Campbell, Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, Spinoza, Nagarjuna or Meister Eckhart, if you are not afraid of a religious or spiritual approach to the ultimate nature of reality, or if you insist on a theistic discourse on the unnamable ultimate reality.)
Realizing emptiness means realizing that there is no self. That may sound frightening, but it means realizing that you are truly one with the cosmos – and there is nothing to fear, nothing to grasp upon, nothing to hold on to, and nothing to lose or defend. With the realization of emptiness, one viscerally, and not just intellectually, realizes, as Einstein said, that, “The perception of a division between self and other is a kind of optical delusion.”
And with that realization, comes tremendous fear, generally, at first, as all that we had clutched at falls away like dust, like a passing dream upon awakening. But after some time, after aclimatization, or familiarization – which is what meditation is all about – you slowly begin to realize that not only is there nothing to hold on to, but there is no need to hang on.
Thus begins the ultimate freedom – and the ultimate power. It is not the power of the ego and all its confused and deluded grasping, but the power of the universe, or Life, itself. And it is unstoppable, and unvanquishable. This is the death of fear.
As the Zen saying goes, “Men fear that in the abyss they will lose themselves. But it is in the abyss that they will find themselves.”
Have no fear. Plumb your depths. They are the very depths of all life.
It is amazing to hear such a mish-mash from two intelligent and seemingly well-read individuals. I used to like them both, Steven Pinker and Stephen Fry, (video linked below) and I still do – especially Stephen Fry – but the number of giant errors in one talk, presented here as unassailable fact, is really striking, and almost shocking, especially for two people who are prominent public intellectuals. Not that everything Steven Pinker has to say is wrong, but on the contrary, much of it is right – which makes his enormous errors all the more shocking. One pointer, to just one of the several glaring, giant errors, that I will mention only: the Davos Report, from Oxfam. How Steven Pinker can say with a straight face that global inequality is falling, in stark contrast to the actual, staggering figures, which glaringly show the exact opposite being true, is simply appalling. Either he is a very good liar, which I trust he is not, or else he is a very committed ideologue, and he simply lies to himself, and moulds the data to fit the ideology he wants to uphold – which is clearly a defense of neoliberal capitalism as the glorious pinnacle of human history.
This is why I’d rather watch D&D videos or Star Trek, than listen to “intellectuals” on youtube. Read widely and deeply, I would advise; and above all, question everything. Well over 99% of what you read, watch or hear, is pure, unadulterated bullshit, propaganda, or sheer drivel.
Stephen Fry, good sir, question more. This man you are fawning over is not what you believe him to be.
To correct the enormous errors presented by Steven Pinker, who in general, has some valuable things to say, I would urge people to read Joseph Campbell on religion, Allan Wallace on the philosophy of science, and Noam Chomsky and Vandana Shiva on neoliberalism and the current state of the world, along with my own books and essays.
Steven Pinker, though he has much of value to say, has nevertheless become the new Dr. Pangloss. All is rosy and good! Ain’t that just swell!
I think that Steven Pinker is a genuinely good-natured and seemingly honest person, but frankly I haven’t heard such bullshit since Francis Fukayama absurdly pronounced it was the end of history! The Soviet Union had fallen, and the inescapable conclusion, of course, was that neoliberal corporate-ruled pseudo-democracy was the highest possible achievement of humankind, and the end of all human evolution. Now Steven Pinker takes up the torch, to make the grand Panglossian apologetics for the new crypto-fascist corporate oligarchy, and we are all supposed to cheer and applaud, and be duly impressed and all aglow. Ah, shucks.
And there is no problem whatsoever with the mechanistic, materialist, atheist, dualistic world view which rules the modern world, of course – and never you mind that it is destroying the planet we live on, by filling our minds with dangerous delusions, or that it has been overturned by quantum physics, 100 years ago!
As Shakespeare said, “There is more to heaven and earth than is contained in your philosophy” – Dr. Pangloss.
“It’s not hard to do things right; it’s much harder to do things wrong.” – Jane Jacobs
“Years of learning and a plethora of subtle and complicated dogma have arisen on a foundation of nonsense.” – Jane Jacobs
“For a city to thrive, it has to be forever young.” – Jane Jacobs
There is a Chinese curse, which says, “May you be born in interesting times.” It is a curse, because in peaceful times, not much of interest or note is happening. And we are, most certainly, living in interesting times now. As Thomas Paine said, “These are the times that try men’s souls.”
But there is also another Chinese saying, which is also relevant, and good to bear in mind: “A hard rain doesn’t last all day.” Or as George Harrison said, “All things must pass.”
All good things must come to an end – and all bad things too. The current shit storm which the world is now in, and which is heightening in intensity daily, will not last forever. It is good to keep that in mind.
Not that we should be complacent – that is the last thing we need, and one of the most foolish responses to life, particularly in troubled times, that we can possibly make. We must be much more proactive and much more engaged with the society, communities, nations and world we live in, or our future, both individually and collectively, will be decidedly dark.
There are times for yielding, times for waiting to see how things unfold, time to take a long mental vacation from the problems of life, times to be placid and quiescent. These are not such times.
It is always sound advice to keep our eyes and ears open, to be alert, although, yes, with as much inner calm as possible, and to pay attention to what you are doing, and what is going on, both inside yourself and around yourself, in the world at large. In such times as now, the imperative to keep our eyes open could not be greater.
Those who do choose to keep their eyes open, which, sadly, at the moment is a minority of the people, will in general weather the storm better, and moreover, will also be more empowered to help in the great task of our time, which is the rebuilding and healing of our world. Those who choose to continue to live with eyes closed, will not only rob their lives of meaning, depth, richness, satisfaction, fulfilment and joy, but will be in the greatest of danger, as well.
All that being said, consider this.
Imagine a world in the near future where there are millions of thriving communities experiencing a resurgence and a renaissance, along with a few cities that are also thriving and undergoing a rebirth, amidst a sea of rural poverty, and truly dystopian, authoritarian, technocratic, neo-feudal and neo-Dickensian cities, which are the great majority of cities on Earth. That is one probable future that lies ahead. We should be perfectly clear and honest with ourselves, in terms of both the positive trends which are taking place, and growing around the world, and the dark ones. The world is polarizing, and with increasing speed. While a growing minority are bringing forth a healing of themselves, their communities and the world we live in, the dominant trends at the moment are toward a global Orwellian dystopia. We should think clearly, and hard, about where we want to be, over the coming years and decades ahead; and what we want to be a party to, how we want to live, and what we want to create. Some communities will do well. Others, including the great majority of the big cities, are driving hard toward a dark age, as Jane Jacobs and many others have predicted, and they will be, if we don’t change course, truly hell on Earth.
Remember what America’s greatest philosopher, Henry David Thoreau said:
“All good things are wild and free.”
And,
“In wildness is the preservation of the world.”
We have become domesticated animals, and worse, cogs in a great machine. Wildness, therefore, is not only the true source of all innovation, adaptability, resilience and creativity, it is also imperative to both our freedom, and to our survival.
We face three great dangers above all, in the world of the 21st century: the escalating ecological crisis, the even more rapidly escalating war on democracy and freedom, and the risk of nuclear or biochemical warfare. What we need to know and to understand, is that while many factors are involved, all three are rooted in oligarchy, in empire: that is to say, in over-centralization, and in the greatly excessive concentrations of power that we have allowd to arise. Unless we come to understand that, and boldly address that most central and urgent of facts, all our talk, and all our efforts at healing our world and creating positive social change, are idle and futile – or worse, and more commonly, will actually aggravate, compound, and greatly worsen the underlying problem, and with truly gruesome and horrific results.
That is the sociological side which is absolutely imperative for us to now understand, and to face. But there is also the side of geology, ecology, and Earth’s finite life systems, which we must also address and come to terms with.
I should say here, that I studied philosophy, politics and environmental studies at Trent University, in my home country of Canada, three decades ago, and I have devoted over 50,000 hours to research, reading and studies in these and related fields since then. I am not talking off the cuff here. What I am presenting now is the most dense and concise summary possible of decades of research and reflection. I would urge people to consider it with an open mind, and reflect on it deeply, and well. The research and reading behind it is profoundly in-depth, and sweeping in its global and historical scope.
The other side of the equation to be considered here, along with the sociological, is the Earth’s finite life systems: namely, ecology and geology. And there are laws of nature there that cannot be violated, without seriously harming or destroying ourselves – as late industrial, modern civilization (sic) is beginning to realize and to find out.
There is a wonderful, brilliant talk that I heard on Ted Talks, on the best ideas for cities in the 21st century. It presented itself as being the cutting edge. And the presenter was affable and kindly, and the talk was truly brilliant – for 1971. Unfortunately, the talk was given in 2017. That’s how far behind the curve the “leading experts” are, in terms of urban planning and design, or macro-scale political-economic and environmental policy and planning. They are utterly lost. They are literally half a century, or more, behind the curve. And these are our “leading minds”. The big ideas that were presented in the talk are still generally good ones, but most of them were known in 1971 – we just disregarded them for fifty years. And beyond that, the ideas presented were far too timid, tepid and piecemeal for what we needed to do in 1971! By now, they are putting lipstick on the Titanic and calling that a bold and brilliant plan of action. Think again.
(The video is linked below the article you are reading now. I would urge everyone to finish reading the article first, however. Kindergarten will have to wait until after grad school in this case.)
What is not widely known, among other things, is that the planetary ecosystems which we are straining to the breaking point, will not be healed by renewable energy, by technocracy, by elite planning, by break-neck total urbanization, or by “smart grids” and “smart cities”, which together make up the Davos billionaire elites’ plan to save humanity and the Earth. That plan will bring tyranny, fascism, dystopia, and also ecological collapse and global systems failure.
The overwhelmingly greatest power that we have to heal the planet, and thus, the overwhelmingly greatest need, urgency and imperative, is to bring the people and animals back onto the land – contrary to what the scientists, economists, and even the environmentalists had previously believed – in order to heal the soil, which then sequesters and captures carbon in absolutely vast quantities, thereby slowing, then halting, then reversing climate change; and, healing the Earth’s terrestrial ecosystems, and ourselves, and our society and world, in the process. This, in turn, requires intelligent decentralization, revolving around small-scale, diverse, local organic, regenerative agriculture. If we fail to understand that now, the planet will recover on its own, in time, but we humans will be extinct.
We need local regenerative agriculture, combined with a radically re-localized economy, demographics, population distribution, and way of life, in order to: a) sequester carbon like there’s no time to spare, which there isn’t – through regenerative, small-scale local agriculture; and b) radically slash the shipping distances by 90-99%, for 90-99% of all the food, products and material goods that we consume or buy – by re-orienting our lives and economies to revolve around local communities. If we fail at either one, our species is finished.
Know these facts, or forget all hopes for humanity.
Please read on.
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“It’s ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations. What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They’re totalitarian institutions. You take orders from above, and maybe give them to people below you. There’s about as much freedom as under Stalinism.” – Noam Chomsky
“I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them. Unless a justification for them can be given – sometimes they are justified, but usually they are not – then they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled to increase the scope of human freedom.” – Noam Chomsky
In order to understand what is happening in the world today, in this, late-industrial phase of our globalized 21st century society, there are a few key, major patterns which we must understand. One of the biggest and most important, but almost universally overlooked, is this. The global power elite – a small group of fewer than 400 individuals, mainly banking and other corporate elites and their top level technocratic acolytes, defined very clearly and very well by sociologists C. Wright Mills, Peter Phillips and others – are facing a global crisis of legitimacy. They know their power is greater than ever, but more fragile than ever. So, their response is to consolidate power, through what can only be accurately or honestly called fascism – or technocracy, if you prefer that term – before they lose all power altogether. I warned of this for over 30 years. The trends have been clear for decades. Now it is here.
“The general population doesn’t know what’s happening, and it doesn’t even know that it doesn’t know.” – Noam Chomsky
“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” – Benjamin Franklin
“Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!” – Patrick Henry
We have several options in the face of a growing global corporate technocracy, authoritarianism, or fascism, however you want to label it – at least, for those who are courageous enough to face the reality honestly, or at all, while the rest bury their minds and their conscience, their lost integrity and their souls, in the flight from reality that is cell phone culture, “social media”, and habitual, chronic escapism and denial: we can run, hide, submit, fawn and appease and grovel and lick boots, fight a civil war, launch a revolution; or, we can try to create resilient communities that can build a global movement, network, alliance or federation to replace the corporate oligarchy, when it inevitably collapses, as it sooner or later will, and more likely sooner than later, and as a way to build the movement for non-violent democratic revolution, in order to hasten the change and the transition, from ecocidal, genocidal, anti-democratic and tyrannical corporate oligarchy, to truly free and truly green democracies, which is clearly and urgently needed. The latter response, of building community, and building networks of communities, makes the most sense to me, in terms of a) strategies for social change, and in terms of b) helping people in the immediate and near term, through the troubles and the long emergency which is unfolding and in which we now live, and in terms of c) healing the planet we live on. And non-violent revolution, and the building of a network or federation of resilient communities – both of which are arising and gaining speed now; and by those means, working together to create both freedom and healing for our world, also makes sense, not only out of dire urgent need; but also, it makes sense in light of the fact that the power elite are acting in desperate ways, precisely because they are weak, not because they are strong – because they face a deep and growing crisis of legitimacy, which the people should recognize as a tremendous and rare opportunity for potentially decisive and major, truly world-shaping, tectonic scale, positive social change. Seize the day, I say. Seize the moment. The time is absolutely now.
Grow carrots, grow gardens, grow communities, grow in awareness, grow the new renaissance, grow the movement for a free and green society, grow the revolution. Grow it now. And remember, when the time is ripe for change, no force of nature, nor any force of human reactionary responses, can stop the coming change. I believe that time is now. And if I am wrong, then we will die with our boots on, and not die licking boots. If I am wrong, then we will go out by giving our best, and not by hiding like cowards under desks and corporate board room tables, or behind computer screens, isolated and alone, bored and banal, meekly peering out to watch our world slowly burn and collapse; but will have lived, and truly lived, and have given our all. But I do not think I am wrong. Nature has a time for everything. And the time for freedom and the healing of our world, is now.
“We shouldn’t be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas.” – Noam Chomsky
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” – Margaret Mead
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” – Mahatma Gandhi
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At the same time, while we begin to deal with the realities of politics, economics and sociology, and the central issues of distribution of wealth, and far more importantly, the distribution of power – or whether we will live with freedom and democracy, or under oligarchy, technocracy and fascism; we must also be mindful and aware of the realities of ecology and geology on a finite planet, of course, and naturally so.
In the year 1500, Britain had fewer than twenty population centres of 1,000 people or more. Each was a major regional centre for culture and trade at the time. London had just 40,000 people. The population of Britain was not just rural – it was overwhelmingly rural. Life was centred around small villages, typically of 40 to 50 people. Life was centred around small rural villages – and moreover, life revolved around small scale, diverse, local organic agriculture. 80-90% of the people were farmers. Most of the rest were local artisans and trades persons: blacksmiths, weavers, spinners, shoe-makers, tailors, tinkers and tinsmiths, fish vendors, bakers, candlestick makers, potters, glass blowers, cheese makers and brewers, etc. (Corporate HR directors, CEOs and marketing executives might have a hard time finding employment in that scenario.) I am not trying to paint a romantic picture here, and I am not saying we should go back to that scenario – I am simply trying to portray the reality of life for the vast majority of human beings for thousands of years – from 10,000 years ago, until the last flicker of a moment, which we call the modern world. It is a soap bubble, and it is about to burst, whether we like it or not.
In 1640, at the outset of the English Revolution, there were 9,000 local parishes in England. Think of that number. That is the number of villages in just one average-sized (small, that is) country of the world – which is itself less than half the size of most US states. Bear that in mind as a reference point. Travel was possible and was done, but it was not something that most people did, or else they did it only rarely. Most people lived their lives in the shire, in the small village that was the heart of the local parish. Today, we have sprawling megacities that require vast, long supply chains to keep the people fed and warm (to say nothing of keeping them entertained, and to feed the ever-growing torrential rivers of disposable consumer products) – the extremely long supply chains that keep 3.9 billion urban inhabitants from starving to death, or from freezing to death in the winter. Those extremely long global supply chains are unequivocally: a) utterly unsustainable ecologically, due to their utter dependency on vast amounts of diesel fuel for shipping and transportation to keep them going on a daily basis; and b) are increasingly fragile, and are going to fray, and begin to crumble and collapse, due to a combination of soon to soar fuel prices, and escalating environmental disasters, disruptions and chaos. These are the realities we must now face, if we want to deal with reality at all. Decentralization, therefore, is not only necessary as a means to protect and safeguard, strengthen and renew freedom, democracy and human rights, but also for reasons of ecological sustainability, and for reasons of sheer necessity, brought on by both geological and ecological realities. Our experiment in hyper-urbanization is soon to be over – almost certainly in this century, likely within 20-30 years, and quite possibly, very, very soon – no matter whether we view that as a liberation or as a tragedy.
What this mean is , in order to slash the unsustainably long supply chains, which are needed to support vast sprawling metropolitan cities of millions of people each within a globalized economy, we would need, to begin with, a million villages globally, based in highly localized economies, with the majority of primary goods, including food, water and renewable energy, coming from the surrounding region, ideally within 100 miles; and we would have to quickly grow that number to 10 million ecologically sound villages, centred on local, diverse, regenerative, small scale organic farming and horticulture. That would be roughly 10,000 villages for every average-sized country, such as England or France, and 10,000 villages for every state or province of the 10 giant nations like the US, Canada, Brazil, India or Russia.
The Global South, it turns out, will in some ways have great advantages over the more urbanized and industrialized “leading” “developed” nations, because more than half their populations are already rural peasant farmers living in or around small villages; because the peasant cultures have retained the knowledge and skills needed for community self-reliance when the globalized industrial infrastructure, economy and supply chains fray and crack; because fewer people have received the virtual lobotomy and deep alienation from themselves, their common sense, nature and one another that has come from our mass pandemic of digital addiction, escapism, narcissism and consumerism in the more urbanized and “developed” Global North; and because the large indigenous populations in many of the nations retain valuable knowledge and skills for living without the global industrial giant vampire squid and its production and distribution network.
The off-grid movement, the re-ruralization, back to the country, re-localization, permaculture, regenerative and organic agriculture and farming, homesteading, and voluntary simplicity movements, along with the indigenous peoples’ movements, in the Global North and the Global South alike, will be invaluable, and will become leading pioneers and teachers; but it will likely be the Global South that, on the whole, fares better through the coming unavoidable transition back to decentralized, community-based rural life.
Obviously this is a giant undertaking, and cannot be done in a short time, unless catastrophe impels the people to move en mass voluntarily, out of economic necessity, or because the alternatives are simply too grim. But considering billions of people migrated from rural areas to cities over the past few decades, it is entirely possible for the people to reverse that flow over the coming decades. The one difference is, this time there may be more of a sense of urgency, once the emerging patterns grow beyond their inception state. That is to say, when the giant cities become Orwellian police states in themselves – Toronto, New York, Chicago, San Franscisco, LA, Berlin, Paris or London, for example, and we should picture it, because it is coming; and when, in addition, the supply chains supporting the great cities begin to crumble and break down, then, moving to cleaner, greener, quieter, more peaceful, vibrant and free, small ecovillages and communities in the countryside, will seem very attractive to millions of people.
But I can hear the false populists, the faux progressives, and the good-natured but naïve, all thumping tables and podiums with their fists and shouting into cameras and microphones, “We need…..This! And we need….That! And we demand…This! And we demand….That!” Well, good luck with that endeavour, I say. How well has that worked out for the people over the past 50 years? Not at all. Petitioning the government with prayers, requests, or “demands”, has been falling on deaf ears for more than four decades now. The governments of the Western world have been taken over by big business interests. Millions of valiant citizen activists have been waging a rear-guard action, fighting a raging wildfire with garden sprinklers, and running backwards as fast as they can. The politics of appeasement are not working, and even our more bold “progressive” efforts are all rear-guard actions now, and in general are losing ground every year, and virtually every day. I hate to rain on anybody’s parade, but this is the reality, in most nations today. We are rapidly losing ground on all fronts. Expecting help from the government now, borders on insanity.
Local communities, from neighbourhoods, to villages and towns, to cities, have the power to make major positive changes. The higher levels of government are almost universally in the sewer now, having been high-jacked by vested elite interests – that is, they have been taken over by the rats. I am not saying we should forget about state or national politics, but I am urging that, for the near term, some of us may want to re-focus on the local, where there is more power accessible to the people, and the possibilities for real change are greater.
The people have been abandoned by their governments, and worse, sold into bondage by the political elite, to be the serfs, peasants and slaves, of their corporate masters. I do not blame people for continuing to try to wring some small measures of aid or relief for the people from their governments, but I would say this: it would be futile and insane to make that our primary focus, or our primary strategy. That strategy has clearly failed. It is now one of two options that we have left to choose from: revolution, or helping ourselves. And since helping ourselves and one another precedes and prepares the ground for revolution, then we are doubly intelligent for choosing that path. Waiting on the government for help surely cannot be our Plan A… or Plan B, or C, or D.
Plan A must be, We, the people, help ourselves, and help one another. Plan B? See Plan A.
And if, in the process of the people helping themselves and helping one another, we in turn inspire, or more likely, embarrass the governments of the world to also take action, then that will be just swell. But don’t hold your breath. Our governments have betrayed the people. We can expect people’s trials, to try the business and political elite for treason, and for crimes against humanity and the Earth, before we can expect anything substantial or significant in the way of assistance to the people coming from the government, in most nations today. And if assistance does come, watch for the strings that will likely be attached. If you have to sell your freedom, or your basic, innate human rights, in order to receive what they are offering, then you are selling yourself into bondage, and into slavery.
So, we have the outline of a vision, and we have outlined a few of the bigger and more urgent reasons for a global tectonic shift in our society: from over-centralization, and greatly excessive concentrations of power and wealth, to clean, green societies, based in strong local roots, combined with constitutional democracy and freedom. But what about the nuts and bolts? I will be as brief and concise as possible here, because there are already many excellent books covering those subjects, and because I am a philosopher, above all, and I tend to work with the big picture view, not the finer details. But I will offer this.
In terms of small scale community and village modelling, there are literally hundreds of thousands of examples, and hundreds if not thousands of highly innovative models, along with a great many books, journals and documentaries, that we can look to for ideas. But the central thrust is this: truly resilient and Deep Green villages or communities must be diverse, to match our human diversity, and the diversity of climates and ecosystems; they must be human scale, and in fact, are best when very small scale, or tiny in scale; they must have short supply lines, meaning they must have bioregional, localized economies; they must be oriented around regenerative, organic agriculture, and/or permaculture, and diverse, local, small scale farming, gardening and horticulture; they must be highly energy efficient, and must have low ecological footprint, and low or closed-system resource use; they must be highly resilient communities, meaning, among other things, they should be self-reliant in terms of water, food and energy, at least; and there must be, as quickly as possible, millions of them globally.
I would offer this central idea, as well, in terms of resilient green village design. In many areas, and in fact, in most of the inhabited temperate areas on the planet, which is where the majority of the human population live, straw bale/adobe (or, *in areas that are moderate to warm year-round*, alternatively, cob, Earth Bag, sun-dried adobe block, rammed Earth, or low-cost 3-D printed or Earthship homes, depending on tastes, and on the local resources and climate) combined with passive solar, bermed Earth, or Earth Home design (bermed and buried on the East, West and North sides, in the Northern Hemisphere, where the sun is to the south) as the model; and in the form of tiny green townhomes of 200-700 square feet (roughly 20-70 square meters), would meet the needs of most families, with very low cost, very low ecological footprint, very high energy efficiency, low to ultra-low embedded energy, low to negative embedded carbon, excellent and healthy indoor air quality, excellent resistance to storms, pests, floods, fires and earthquakes, and with comfort and great charm, and with a truly Deep Green design for both homes and communities. Ten to twenty tiny green townhomes would make a small ecovillage, surrounded by shared greenspace, ponds, flower and herb and vegetable gardens, pastures, wind turbines, and fruit and nut trees. (Imagine the Shire, from Lord of the Rings – and yes, it can be that charming, as well as comfortable, and wired for the electronics we are addicted to, if we choose.) The image is not only idyllic – it is also a green community design model that can work for millions of people, and beautifully so. Around the tiny green townhomes in the centre of a ten acre village, could be scattered single family green homes, from tiny to moderate size. And the small scale, of 10-50 acres, with 10-30 green homes, and 30-100 people, makes for a potentially very cohesive sense of community, and a vibrant local democracy – and one that is both highly resilient, and actively healing for our families, communities, societies, ecosystems and world. And the speed of building dozens, thousands, and millions of green villages can be exponentially accelerated with the use of rent-to-own cooperative financing. However we do it though, it simply must be done: for environmental reasons; for social justice, affordable housing and humanitarian reasons; for the healing of the Earth, our society, our families and ourselves; for the strengthening and renewal of freedom, human rights and democracy – for reasons of simple, practical necessity.
Millions of people are already making an exodus out of the big cities – and out of the US, Canada and Europe – for reasons of quality of life, lower stress, closer connections to nature and to community, and for powerful economic reasons, as well. That trend is only going to increase exponentially over the coming years and decades ahead.
Among other things, this means that the brain drain, the artistic drain, and the talent drain, from the Global South to the (once) prosperous Global North, and from the rural areas to the big cities, is going to reverse as well. The thinkers, artists and rebels are already fleeing, and moving to better digs, so to speak. That river of migration is only going to swell as the years go by, as the city-scape grows more Orwellian, and more bleak.
Of course, a small minority of cities are forward-looking, and are making rapid progress, not only to become clean and green, but also more humane, democratic and free. But that is not the general trend of the world’s cities. The much bigger trend is toward fascism, instability, and decay.
Naturally, the richest 1% will have their walled enclaves, in this neo-feudal era, just as they did in medieval times, except that now they are much more exclusive and much more insular, and they have their armed private security forces to defend them, and air-lift helicopters at the ready, in case of any crisis or danger. This is already a well-established trend, and that trend is set to further explode. For the vast majority of people living in cities, however, there is no private army or air-lift helicopter waiting in the wings, if and when things go bad – as they almost surely will.
The majority of cities will face rising instability, crumbling infrastructure and supply lines, and a host of dark scenarios, combined with the rising authoritarianism. The countryside is looking better and better all the time, and the contrasts between the cities and the country will only grow more stark with time.
The baby boomers, along with the biggest landowners, who are the big corporations and the millionaires and billionaires of the world, are the new landed aristocracy – with the great majority of baby boomers being small scale land owners, or the lower ranks of the landed gentry, of course. This is another reality we should face, and with honesty and courage and compassion. Neo-feudalism is taking over, and it is radically unstable, as well as radically unethical, inhuman and unjust. Many baby boomers have no land; but many have 20, 50, 100 acres, or more. It would be both humane, ethical, moral and compassionate, as well as healing for the Earth, and far-sighted, prudent and wise, if anyone owning more than 10 acres of land, other than farmers; and all farmers who own 100 acres or more; would share, or lease at low cost, some portion of their land, in order to enable the creation of millions of land trusts, rural housing co-ops, and small scale organic, regenerative farming co-ops and communities. And if the millionaires and billionaires want something virtuous and ethical, and wise, to do with their money, seeding democratic ecovillages and small scale organic farming co-ops, would be an extremely good idea. Frankly, the alternative is pitchforks and torches, as the peasants begin to revolutionize and to rebel. Telling them to eat cake, or bugs, will not be a good idea. And even the private security forces will not be able to hold out and protect you forever, or for long.
Closing your eyes and hoping for the best would be a disastrously foolish strategy, though that is the unconscious strategy of the great majority of the people at present. And hoping or trusting that the government will help you if things get bad, is also dangerously naïve, and foolish in the extreme. The government, in most nations, is more likely to round the people up and incarcerate them in Orwellian prison cities, under the guise of public safety measures, than to actually help the people in a time of need – as they have already proven.
(Tolstoy wrote, “Better lean and free than fat and chained.” And we could extend that now to say, Better lean and free than being fattened in chains.)
Does anybody remember Hurricane Katrina? Imagine several ecological disasters a year on that magnitude or bigger. That is the harvest we have sown, sadly. And authoritarian governments will only make the situation more harsh and more horrible, not less.
I would implore people here: Do not succumb to the mesmerizing power of denial; don’t rely on the government or the media to guide or inform you, or Facebook, YouTube, Instagram or Twitter; and do not conform to the herd, who have no idea what is going on, and are sleep-walking together toward a cliff – cell phones clutched tightly in hand, heads bowed low, as they stare into the little screen, and walk toward the approaching edge.
Again, I have to say: Who predicted the 2008 global economic crisis – which, by the way, we still have not resolved, nor recovered from? I know of only three people who made that prediction. One was Gerald Celente, the world’s leading trend analyst, with a track record of trend forecasting that no one can beat. The second was myself. So, I would recommend that you take what you are reading here, not with a grain of salt, but with a mountain of sober reflection. You have been forewarned.
*
It is important to note that it is a sociological analysis of power structures that is being presented here, and an institutional and class analysis, which is at play here, along with an ecological analysis, and a resource- and systems-analysis; and it cannot be poo-pooed or dismissed as mere “conspiracy theory” – whatever that foolish and meaningless, pejorative and dismissive, anti-intellectual and mind-numbing term may mean; not at least, by anyone who is both serious and reasonably empirical, or well-informed.
Remember that the American Revolution began with 77 men at Valley Forge. If the many are behaving as bewildered lemmings at the moment, with their heads buried firmly in the sand, or somewhere else, even more unfitting, that is fine: we will, as respectfully as possible, and as pointedly as need be, wake them.
Further, it is important to note, that while the global power elite, to use sociological terms, number less than 400 individuals, mainly banking elites and their loyal minions; that same power elite, the global corporate and financial elite, have most clearly and undeniably captured the institutions of state power, to use further terminology of sociological analysis.
How? Why should we believe the view of 80-90% of the people – whose common sense is in that sense at least, intact: that the billionaire corporate elite have effectively taken over the governments of the world? Must we spell it out? Ok, then. For the slow on the uptake, we can draw a picture. How do the billionaire transnational corporate elite dominate and effectively control the governments of the world? Well, first of all, they buy elections. We call it “political campaign contributions” or “political donations”. But as the world’s leading trend analyst, Gerald Celente has said, “Let’s be adults here. They’re called bribes.”
The moneyed aristocracy, as Thomas Jefferson called them, invest in all major parties and all major political candidates, then whoever gets elected, they are expected to return services to their investor/backers. We could call this political prostitution, and we should, but instead we call it, “democracy”.
In reality, in truth, if we were honest, we would call it a plutocracy: the super-rich, the one-tenth of a percent of the population, effectively rule over the rest, and rule both the nations, and by now, the world. It is not complicated, and it is not rocket science. An intelligent seven year old can understand it. Big money translates into big economic power, and also into big cultural power, big social power, and big political power. If we want democracy, if we want human rights, if we want constitutional rule, if we want a green society, a truly sustainable society, a peaceful society, a stable society, or if we want freedom, justice, or responsive or accountable government, if we want any of the above, then we must decentralize economic power, and remove big money, not only from politics, but from its position as the de facto ruler of the world. People will say, Oh, but that’s impossible. But in 1750, and even in 1775, democracy seemed impossible too. Monarchy, aristocracy and feudalism ruled the world, and nobody thought it would ever change, and few even thought that it should. Then the American Revolution happened, and what was considered to be impossible, quickly became a reality. In 1775, nobody wanted a revolution, other than Thomas Paine. Then in 1776, Thomas Paine wrote and published his seminal work, a little book called, Common Sense, and it convinced Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, and George Washington, and a few others, that democracy and revolution were both justified and necessary. In the same year that that one small book was published and released, the Declaration of Independence was drafted and signed, and the American Revolution, and modern democracy and freedom, began. One single year, and one single book, turned the tides of history, and undid 10,000 years of empire and imperial rule. We were not thorough enough, however, not far-sighted or prescient enough, and that is the problem now, and has been the problem ever since; but the change which began in 1776 was tremendous, world-changing, and tectonic, nevertheless. And it is the same now as it was then. When the people are ready, nothing can stop them. The only remaining question is, What are we waiting for? A sign from God? Well consider this it. Get off your knees, and on your feet. And stand.
How do the global corporate elite control governments? Aside from outright bribery, which we euphemistically and evasively, dishonestly call election financing, there is also financial extortion: you hold the governments hostage by controlling their credit flow, their access to capital and loans, and the rates of interest charged on that capital, which can sustain or crush or break the will of any government; or you control their credit ratings, or threaten their credit ratings, which was enough to make the democratically elected government of Canada in 1991 immediately and completely abandon and reverse all its core election promises, for example, forcing them to back off completely from the promise to radically restructure the NAFTA “trade deal” that was destroying the middle class and the nation’s economy, with one single open letter in the Wall Street Journal published by Moody’s investment firm and directed to the government of Canada, threatening to slash Canada’s triple-A credit rating, thus spiking deeply costly interest payments and rates, and which is a simple but powerfully effective financial extortion strategy which works the same in any time and for any government of the world; or you manipulate their currencies, or attack and crash their currencies, as has been done many times, or threaten to devalue or crash their currencies, which is usually sufficient in itself to gain compliance and subservience; or you use the corporate media, which is deeply embedded in the same nexus of global corporate oligarchy, which shares certain obvious, common class interests, to attack and vilify or discredit any government, party or individual who threatens to create an actual outbreak of democracy – and the state media and “public media” are generally compliant and happy to serve the purpose just as well, since they tend to serve the same big business elites as the corporate media serve, as we saw with the recent BBC smear campaign against Jeremy Corbyn, which turned what would have been a landslide victory for the Labour party (and not Tony Blair’s poodle party of elite boot-licking compliance and servitude, but a real labour victory for the 99%) into a win for the right wing Conservative party, in an impressive feat of psychological warfare, fear-mongering, utterly deceitful slurs and attacks, propaganda and social engineering; or you use clauses in “trade agreements”, which are, in reality, corporate rights agreements, and investors’ rights agreements, which give corporations the power to sue governments, and thereby over-ride all of their sovereignty and democratic powers, and eviscerate and nullify them completely.
The mechanisms by which the global power elite, who are the plutocratic big business elite, rule over the nations and control the democratic governments and the world, can and should be studied in depth and detail. But what is most important, again, is that we are able to see the big picture, and be able to see the forest for the trees.
In short, the concentration of wealth and economic power has become so staggeringly great over the past 250 years, and especially over the past 50 years, that big business is now simply more powerful than even the richest of governments – not singly, but when they act together. And business elites may be unscrupulous, but they are not stupid. They realize that they share certain common interests, certain class interests – though they also fight amongst themselves, like a band of cut-throats and thieves, they also know they must have some unity among them in order to individually succeed.
And so, the business elite, and their minions and collaborators among the political elite, academia and the media, form roundtables, and clubs: such as the order of Skull & Bones – the secretive Yale fraternity for rich white New England men that is deeply connected to the CIA and the Wall Street banking elite, which both John Kerry and George Bush Jr. were (and are) members of while they appeared as opponents running against each other in the US presidential election; the Council on Foreign Relations, which likes to portray itself as a scholarly think tank, but which is in reality another rich mens’ club, with a few intellectuals sprinkled in to make it look more legitimate, and less like a kleptocratic club for emperors and wound-be emperors, which it is; the Trilateral Commission, which was formed by David Rockefeller, scion of the most powerful family in the Americas (until the rise of the Silicon Valley new money plutocrats, and maybe afterward as well) and “Zbig” Brzezinski, as he likes to be called, the chief intellectual in residence for the Western elite, who in 1979 hatched and launched the plan to arm, fund and train Islamic militant extremists in Afghanistan, to lure the Soviet Union into a trap of a destabilizing war, “their own Vietnam”, and in the process created the Islamic terrorist network which the US and its vassals – sorry, allies – claims now to be fighting; and the Bilderberg group and the World Economic Forum, among other groups and clubs for the rich and powerful – and they meet to discuss their common interests, of course.
Do the global business elite fight amongst themselves? Certainly. Do they compete with one another? Selectively. Do they share common class interests? Indubitably, clearly and obviously. Do the business elite get together to talk about how to raise minimum wages world-wide, or how to abolish poverty, or how to radically reduce the staggering and exponentially growing inequality globally and within nations, which now threatens the societies of the world with chaos, instability, implosion or civil war? Not unless they are joking. No, they meet to discuss how to increase their wealth and power, and how to manage the nations and people and economies of the world to lessen the risks to them, and to increase their own, already stratospheric, wealth and power. I am sure the power elite, like all emperors and power elites before them, convince themselves that they are the great benefactors of humanity, but their actions show a different story: they seek power and wealth for themselves; and whenever the goals of ever more wealth and ever more power conflict with the goals and values of democracy, freedom, human rights, constitutional rule, environmental protection, human health, justice or peace, well, you can guess which set of goals and values wins out. Actually, we don’t have to guess, because the historical record and the documentary record spell it out clearly. The goals of wealth and power for the ruling class win out, almost invariably, and all else, and everyone else, is expendable. It is no different from Adam Smith’s time, when he wrote, in his major work, The Wealth of Nations, of what he called, “the vile maxim of the masters: all for us, nothing for anyone else”. I have quoted it before and I will quote it again, because it is the crux and core of the matter, which we need to understand most of all, and viscerally understand, as well as intellectually understand.
What has happened, therefore, is that big business has taken over the state; or more precisely said, big business and the state have formed an alliance, in which both parties benefit, but the business elite is the dominant party. China is the mirror opposite of the West. In China, big business and the state have merged, but the political elite are in the driver’s seat. In the West it’s the other way around, but either way, it is a merger.
What has happened is that the powers of big business and the state have merged – and that, again, as I have said before, and it bears repeating, is precisely what Mussolini himself, the inventor of modern fascism, defined as corporatism, which he said is the proper term for fascism.
So yes, it is a state-corporate complex, a global corporate oligarchy, or plutocracy, which is the newest ruling empire of the world. That must be born in mind. This is not some vague abstraction. There are very real and tangible centres, institutions, organizations, networks, alliances and groups, which form the global power elite, and the new global corporate oligarchy – and which form what could be called the Deep State of the world, or the new Global Deep State; though it is hardly hidden, and is now brazenly open to public view, in many, though not all, of its actions and agendas. In general, I use Davos as the short-hand term of reference to designate the global plutocratic oligarchy; since, as the leading business journal in the world, the Financial Times, itself calls Davos, “the de facto world government”, and it is, as the eminent Canadian philosopher and former Governor-General of Canada, John Ralston Saul has said, “The new Palace of Versailles”, and “the new royal court”. But Davos is only one of the centres of power in the new global fascist corporate state, and that should be born in mind.
But that is enough of fine-tuning of definitions and terminology for the moment. We can get lost in the weeds. Detail and depth are important, and precision is important, but again, what we need most is perspective, above all.
What is most important is that we can see the big picture, and that we can see the forest for the trees. And in order to do that, we must also have freedom of thought, and freedom of speech, naturally, or we are, in all likelihood, doomed to the tunnel vision of our narrow preconceptions, social conditioning and indoctrination. It is through discourse, as well as reading, reflection, and experience, that we learn, we see through our temporary illusions, and we become more alive, more aware, and more free.
“With regard to freedom of speech there are basically two positions: you defend it vigorously for views you hate, or you reject it and prefer Stalinist/fascist standards. It is unfortunate that it remains necessary to stress these simple truths.” – Noam Chomsky
“It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.” – Noam Chomsky
I think Chomsky is using the term intellectual in the broad sense: that is, people who choose to have a life of the mind, have a responsibility to seek the truth and to speak the truth. Ideally, that means all of us. But if someone is being paid to do intellectual work, or their vocation or life path is academic, scholarly or intellectual, or they are lawyers, doctors, journalists, writers or film-makers, priests or ministers, artists, actors, producers or directors, or are attending or teaching school, college or university, then I think it is true that they, public intellectuals in the broad sense, have an added responsibility to seek the truth and to speak the truth. I think of Oliver Stone, Joel Bakan, Michael Moore, Rocco Galati, Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn here, and people like Gerald Celente, James Corbett, Michel Chossudovsky, Anthony J. Hall, Paul Craig Roberts, Maude Barlow, David Suzuki, Vandana Shiva, Arundhati Roy, Jeremy Corbyn, Yanis Varoufakis, Russell Brand, Abbey Martin, Aaron Mate, Jimmy Dore and Matt Taibbi, and brave whistle-blowers and publishers like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, as prime examples of honourable, virtuous, truly noble integrity with intelligence and courage, and I tip my hat to them, and to others like them. But I think the important part to realize is that it is a responsibility of everyone in society, and especially in a democratic society, or a society that wants to be free or democratic, for all of the people, or as many of the people as possible, to actively seek the truth, and to speak the truth, to the best of our ability and understanding.
Many people get querulous, fastidious and nitpicking over the most insignificant things, while their eyes glaze over if you try to talk to them about the most important things – or they will pick out the most unimportant, trivial, minor detail when being presented with an important subject, and want to focus entirely on that. I think it’s a habitual, unconscious fear response, of intellectual flight from reality. It is absolutely insane. It’s like you’re asking them, urging them, to get into the lifeboat, because the ship is sinking, and they want to discuss whether they have the straps on correctly, or whether we have the right strapping procedure, or what colour the life vests are. Just get in the fucking boat!
Once you get your ass into the boat, then you can discuss whether we should have purchased a different colour of life preservers, or whether our straps are properly fastened in the correct way, or who gets to sit where, or how many sandwiches do we dole out to each person, or whether the pregnant mothers get an extra sandwich or not. Just get your fucking ass into the fucking boat!
But people will actually quibble about all sorts of irrelevant or trivial, minor things – such as how to define an intellectual. Is that not like asking how to define a cloud, a horse, a tree? You don’t define it, you just know it. Do you like to read, and read for knowledge as well as pleasure? Then you’re an intellectual. Do you like to watch documentaries and learn about the world? Then you’re an intellectual. Do you like to question what you hear or read or see on TV? Then you’re an intellectual. It’s not complicated. Do you like to think, or would you rather avoid it? If you like to think about things, and not just go through life like a robot, a zombie, or a cog in a machine, but actually think and reflect, and maybe once in a while discuss things above and beyond mere trivia, gossip and entertainment, then you’re an intellectual. It can be helpful to define things, but to define persons is complicated, and a bit dangerous. We are not, and never should be, one-dimensional beings. Nor are we static or fixed. Life is change. Our thoughts should change too. Life is for learning, not stagnation, hence life is to be lived, not merely survived, and that means learning and change and experimentation are also an inherent part of life, which means that we are not static and fixed creatures, but are always evolving, always changing, always being born, and always dying to the past. And in all things, our definitions of things can be clarifying, or simply blinding. In fact, the act of defining people, events, phenomena or things, can clarify, illuminate or reveal, or more often, cloud, conceal and occlude – and almost always, our mental labels hide and conceal the truth and the reality far more than they reveal it. It’s like affixing labels to people: Oh, well, he’s a brick-layer – he wouldn’t know anything about that; or, she’s a stock broker, she must know about small business entrepreneurship; or, he waits tables, he must not know anything; or, she’s an anarchist – you can’t trust them… and on and on it goes. How about we just take people, as people – at least first, and foremost, and above all. Then we can get to know them as individuals. And when it comes to ideas, let’s get to know them as individuals as well, and not lump them prematurely into groups of categories and labels, whereby we can sufficiently park our intellect so as to never have to use our intelligence at all. That is what most people do, and it is a prison of the mind.
“In every cry of every man, In every infant’s cry of fear, In every voice, in every ban, The mind-forged manacles I hear.“ – William Blake
“Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.” – Noam Chomsky
“If you are not offending people who ought to be offended, you’re doing something wrong.” – Noam Chomsky
For example:
“The police can go to downtown Harlem and pick up a kid with a joint in the streets. But they can’t go into the elegant apartments and get a stockbroker who’s sniffing cocaine.” – Noam Chomsky
But we’re not supposed to say such things.
Nor do the police go and arrest the real criminals, the greatest criminals, sitting in the board rooms of companies like Goldman Sachs, Pfizer, Exxon-Mobil and Monsanto/Bayer, and who sit around tables in Washington, Ottawa, London, Paris, Brussels, Basel, Davos and Berlin – and the people aren’t supposed to talk about such things either. But we should be talking about the fact that the business elite, who are considered “too big to fail”, are also considered to be too big to jail. Why are they? In the US, Bush and then Obama bailed out the bankers who caused an $8 trillion housing market crash, and committed massive fraud, giving them over $20 trillion as a reward for criminal behaviour. In Iceland, the people put the bankers in jail, and threw out the government that aided and abetted the crooks, and replaced it with a new and more democratic and accountable government. The Nuremberg Trials tried people for war crimes and crimes against humanity. We need such public trials again today – for the new set of criminals in high places among the business and political elite, along with their criminal collaborators in the media. We should be saying these things, talking about these things, and yes, doing these things. We need a people’s court. And we need to start by speaking the uncomfortable truths.
There are teachers of various kinds, and writers of various kinds, journalists, scholars, scientists, lawyers, doctors, engineers, counsellors, psychologists, priests and thinkers and poets, and they and other groups are public intellectuals, whose vocation includes thinking, or the life of the mind. Why we would feel the need to narrowly define this, I don’t know, but I’ve seen strange responses to simple, straight-forward things, many, many times. I would say that an intellectual is simply someone who has a life of the mind. Ideally that would be everyone. But it certainly is a wide swath of people, from all walks of life; and it is not the same as being “educated”, which can mean well-informed, or simply well-indoctrinated. In fact, it is the rare individual who is strong enough in mind and heart and spirit to withstand the trials of higher education and come out with all three intact, and most especially his or her mind, or ability to think. College and university are usually akin to the function of a contraceptive sponge: they soak up the most creative, spirited and intelligent individuals, or as many of them as they can, and neutralize them. Fortunately, they are only somewhere between 60-80% effective, so a lot of minds and hearts and spirits survive the ordeal.
“Education is a system of imposed ignorance.” – Noam Chomsky
The analogy is flawed, since gender does not indicate intelligence, creativity or strength of character, of course, but you get the idea. Actually, I think I am greatly underestimating the school systems, both public and private, and the colleges and universities. I think their effectiveness is probably closer to 85-99%, depending on the subject, the department or the field. It’s pretty hard to screw up math. Geography is hard to mess with, too. Mumbai is where Mumbai is. It is in India, not Nebraska or the South Pacific. It is not up for serious debate. Everything else, outside of math and geography, is deeply questionable and radically in question. In the humanities, the social sciences, and the life sciences, and almost everywhere in the colleges, universities and schools, aside from math, geography and phys-ed, literature, dance, theatre, music and visual arts, it is probably closer to 99.5%. In civics, politics and economics, the success is stupendous. Almost no functioning brain cells, or moral conscience, survives or gets through.
“The indoctrination is so deep that educated people think they’re being objective.” – Noam Chomsky
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We should remember, too, that corporate-driven globalization – which is very different from and diametrically opposed to free and fair trade (the business elite want cartels, monopolies, and a nanny state), and is very different and diametrically opposed to international cooperation and alliances to address and resolve the pressing issues of democracy, freedom, human rights, sovereignty, fair trade, social justice, equitability, sustainability and peace – corporate-driven globalization, which is a very specific form of internationalism, a form specifically crafted by the elite for the benefit of the elite, has been, for its nearly 50 year history, one the one hand a race to the bottom, and on the other, which is merely the other side of the coin, a brutal and escalating class war, as working people, labour markets and communities around the world are pitted against each other, and a race to the bottom in the sense of the accelerating war on democracy, freedom, constitutional rule and human rights, which is the heart of the class war, and the shift from corporate-dominated liberal democracies with a large middle class, to what Chomsky called the Third-Worldization of the wealthiest nations, pushing them into the Third World model which was enforced and imposed by the colonial and neo-colonial powers of Europe, the United States and their satellite vassal states such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand, with the help of the IMF, World Bank, GATT, WTO and other “trade agreements”, in which the 1% effectively own and rule the nations of the world, while a small minority of the population are the more privileged servants of the ruling oligarchs – commonly called the professional class, ironically – and the remaining other, roughly 90% of the population form the permanent underclass, in a system which bears little resemblance to authentic democracy, but which is a business-run oligarchy, with a powerful nanny state to fund and protect it. The US has been in the lead in that race to the bottom, among the richest industrial nations, and shows us the way: toward kleptocracy, fascism, the looting and pillaging of the nation and the people by the business elite, and the very real danger of explosive civil war, revolution, or social, economic and/or ecological collapse. And by now, “We’re all in this together” – though not exactly in the way the propaganda narrative would have us believe.
Yes, we’re all peasants now – though some are clearly far worse off than others. And we’re all facing liquidation – spiritually, politically, psychologically and mentally, economically, ecologically, and quite possibly in more ways as well, considering the brutally ruthless game the corporate elite are now playing, which is simply an intensification of the class war, the war on the 99%, and the war on democracy, humanity and the Earth, which have been building in intensity for more than five decades, since the crisis of legitimacy for the ruling powers broke out in earnest with the popular democratic movements of the 1960s. We stand or fall now. And groveling appeasement will not serve us. Choose well.
We now live in an Orwellian technocracy, ruled by an unscrupulous and unaccountable, unelected, and frankly sociopathic, global business elite. Are we going to lay down and grovel, or lay down and die, or are we going to do something about it? That is the central question. All other social issues, as well as the paramount issues of the ecological crisis, and the survival of freedom and democracy, revolve around this.
But the immediate battle line, the key battle line, is between authoritarianism, and those who prefer and value, and choose, freedom, democracy, human rights and constitutional rule, and are willing to fight for them. That will unite the great majority of the people – both right and left, rich and poor, North and South, black, white, gay, straight, bi and trans, African, Asian, North America, Latin AmericanorEuropean – who do not want to live in a police state. We may have many disagreements, but we can agree on this. And this is our common ground, our common cause, and the basis of our unity – the only basis we need: we choose freedom, as well as compassion and solidarity, and we will be fooled no longer into believing that the one must be sacrificed for the other, because it is a lie.
One flash-point is the astronomical and historically unprecedented, extreme and still growing, vast inequality, both within nations, for example in the United States, Canada and Britain, and also globally and between nations. Here is a typical sound-byte, or sample, and it is righteous, truthful, and legitimate, and resonates deeply with the great majority of the population:
Robert Reich wrote on Twitter today, as I write this essay:
“So let me get this straight: 55 of the most profitable companies in America paid no federal income taxes, but Republicans in Congress still think corporate taxes are too high?” – Apr 4, 2021, via Twitter
The tax on the richest individuals and families in the US went from 94% in 1945, to 39.6% in 2017, according to public records, compiled by the Tax Policy Center of the Brookings Institute. That was before Obama’s tax cuts for the richest few kicked into their highest level, right before he left office, unsurprisingly, and before Trump’s further round of tax cuts, which, while they were presented as helping the middle class and the poor, as usual, went overwhelmingly to the richest 1%. Similar tax cuts for the richest 1% have been handed out by successive boot-licking and literally treasonous governments in Canada, Britain and elsewhere. Corporate tax rates have equally been slashed over the past four decades of globalization and neoliberalism – which means, governments serving the interests of the corporate oligarchy and the super-rich, and aiding their global looting spree and their rape and pillage policies, while systematically gutting the middle class, the poor and the Earth. But even these figures don’t convey the sheer magnitude of the feeding frenzy of the ruling elite upon the other 99.99%, who don’t show up in the census data, because they are such a tiny group in terms of the number of individuals and families who make up that ruling class. The 1% get tax cuts, but the giant corporations and the ruling tenth of a percent – the plutocrats who own and control the giant corporations, the central banks, the global economy, the financial system, the money supply, the six media empires that control 80% of the major media in the world, an increasing number of the scientific journals and much of academia, the major international organizations, the central banks, the EU, and the formerly democratic governments, don’t pay tax. When the loopholes and tax avoidance schemes are factored in, along with the on-going massive corporate subsidies, in this giant, global welfare state for the rich that we now live under, the richest few receive far more from the government, from the public treasuries and the people, than they give back. The people and the planet are being systematically devoured. And as George Bush Jr. said, “Taxes are for little people.” But not everyone is happy about that.
The revolutions of England, in the 17th century, and America and France in the 18th century, had a mix of both causes and results. In the US, the revolution was democratic and republican, with a strong constitutional framework to protect and defend freedom, human rights and democracy. But the American Revolution was led by the wealthy landowners predominantly, and so, only 4% of the people of the new democracy could vote: the landless, the poor, women, blacks and native peoples could not vote and had few or no rights, and little to no voice or power. The rich, white, landowning men had virtually all of the power, or at least the lion’s share of it. In that sense, it was a bourgeois revolution, to a considerable extent, even though it was a radical breakthrough, and a beautiful, liberating new model for the world, compared to what came before, and compared to what was the global norm of the time. In the English and French Revolutions, the spirit of freedom and constitutional democracy, or republican democracy, was certainly present and very, very strong; but again, in both cases, the revolutions were quickly taken over by the wealthy and the landowning elite. That was the weakness of the first round of modern democratic revolutions, which began with the English Revolution and included the American and French Revolutions. It is that oversight that we must address and correct now. We allowed landowning elites and business elites to be exempt from the checks and balances, and limits on concentrations of power, which we rightfully insisted on applying to the political powers and the church. That blind spot has now cost us our freedom, our democracy, our constitutions and our rights, and will cost us much more if we do not quickly and very soon correct it.
The richest 1% now have $32 trillion in private offshore bank accounts, thanks to the accelerating upward transfer of wealth over the past five decades – read, class warfare and economic predation – along with repeated rounds of tax cuts for the wealthiest few and the biggest corporations. Meanwhile, the middle class has been devoured in the richest nations of the world – disemboweled and left dead by the side of the road; a billion people and rising live in extreme poverty; and five billion live in increasingly precarious lives, with the bottom falling out from beneath them. This is a recipe for disaster – for civil unrest, for civil war, for demagoguery and fascism – or alternately, and equally possible, for revolution.
But while poverty and inequality alone could bring down the house of cards which is the new, pseudo-democratic corporate oligarchy, and likely if not certainly will, if other flash-points don’t do the job first; it is not the growing and extreme inequality of wealth which is the greatest or most urgent issue, the central issue, or the issue which is the most volatile – it is the vast and extreme, and ever widening gap, in terms of power. That is the key, that is the crux, and that is also the central flash-point of the coming democratic revolutions. The question is, in essence, and at the very core, whether we will live as free and equal women and men, in a society governed by laws and constitutions, with human rights for all which are both inalienable and innate, and also deeply respected and protected, in actual, authentic, functioning constitutional democracies and republics; or whether we will live under a police state, under the imperial rule of a global corporate oligarchy which is flatly genocidal, ecocidal, and fascist. That is the key issue, the core issue, the central issue, the most pressing and most fundamental issue, which is at the heart and the centre of all other issues that need to be addressed; and that, is how and why the next waveof democratic revolutions will begin, and are beginning now, as we speak.
And as I write this essay, news breaks from England, and I have to interject it here, because it is precisely what I am talking about, and precisely what I am urging: unite the people to resist and to reject authoritarianism, and to restore freedom and constitutional democracy. And that battle has just begun to explode in Britain now.
This is the spark that will light the fuse that will begin the next democratic revolution in Britain: Prime Minster Boris Johnson tries to pass a bill banning protests, in the spring of 2021. Mark this date. The US, Canada, and the rest of the world, will not be far behind, or may even take the lead. Things are about to get exciting.
Jeremy Corbyn wrote:
“We will always defend the right to demonstrate against injustice. Proud to address today’s #KillTheBill demonstration – together we will stop Boris Johnson’s protest ban.” Apr 3, 2021, Twitter
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“If you assume that there is no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, then there is a possibility that you can contribute to making a better world.”– Noam Chomsky
“Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so.” – Noam Chomsky
“You can’t have meaningful political democracy without functioning economic democracy.” – Noam Chomsky
When a society has political democracy, but not economic democracy, and furthermore, has a history of allowing vast concentrations of economic power to arise, and even allows its government or state to support and sponsor the continued upward transfer of wealth and power to an economic elite, which it subsidizes and protects, then you get the inevitable, predictable result: big business eventually takes over the government, and hollows out democracy from the inside, as well as strong-arming and extorting it into submission from without. That is the kind of oligarchic government Chomsky is talking about when he made this other, more chilling remark, which the documentary record and the historical record both support very clearly: “Governments will use whatever technology is available to combat their primary enemy – their own population.”
Two broad visions for society are emerging. One is the vision or agenda being aggressively pushed by the Davos bankers and corporate elite. It is authoritarian, elitist, anti-democratic, dystopian and anti-ecological. The other is based, not in robbing the people of their power, but empowering the people. That is the key battle line now.
The key question, therefore, is whether we want to be pushed further along our current path, which is the hyper-concentration of all wealth and power in the hands of the few, which will spell fascism, and we must be perfectly clear and honest about that, combined with even more excessive centralization and globalization, which not only disempowers, and systematically robs and disenfranchises the great majority, for the increasing power and wealth of the few, and all of this leading to inevitable social and ecological collapse in a barren and toxic dystopian world, marked by barbed wire and walled enclaves of the rich, defended by robot soldiers and private armies, and surrounded by a sea of poverty and desperation; or whether we feel we have tried the experiment in empires long enough, and will choose to dethrone the oligarchs, and empower the people instead.
An important contextualization is critically essential to understand here, for perspective. Currently, modern industrial civilization (sic) is racing toward collapse. We may avoid it, and it would be smart to avert it, to make an enormous understatement, but collapse is certainly our current trajectory. Ironically, the oligarchy is pushing hard for collapse – because they plan to be the ruling god-kings, afterward. This is endgame.
We most definitely and urgently need a Green New Deal, but not the deal that is being aggressively pushed by the Davos set of corporate plutocrats. They want a Global Reset, as they have openly announced, and it is clear that their grand plan for restructuring the world is deeply authoritarian, rabidly ant-democratic, absolutely crushing of freedom, constitutional rule and human rights, and ecologically disastrous and insane, in addition. That is a bad deal. That is a deal with the devil.
We need a Green New Deal that will invest heavily in decentralized, community-based, local economies, high speed electric rail, powered by wind energy (not solar, which has a much bigger environmental footprint than wind, and certainly not fossil fuels or nuclear, which must be phased out immediately), and energy efficient communities that are centred around regenerative organic agriculture, with millions of clusters of small organic farms and small villages and towns, and a revenue neutral plan that is based on taxes on resource extraction, along with serious taxes on financial speculation, great profits and great wealth. And we need a Green New Deal that deeply, and not just in rhetoric, respects and honours and defends human rights, constitutional rule, democracy and freedom – not a faux green deal from Davos that undermines and destroys all of the above.
A universal basic income is another valuable idea, and one that is supported by conservatives such as Milton Friedman and libertarian socialists such as Bertrand Russell. But again, the Great Reset agenda of the super-rich oligarchs is antithetical to what we need. They want universal dependency, so that they have universal wealth and universal power. If you accept their electronic passports and the digital currencies they control, then you can have a hovel and some gruel, but you will have to give up these silly antiquated notions of freedom, mobility, privacy, human rights, constitutions and democracy in order to get them. As Klauss Schwabe, founder of the Davos-based World Economic Forum said, “You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy.” Dr. Evil is saying there, in effect, that all wealth and all power will be in the hands of the new “masters of the universe”, as they like to call themselves. Again, that is a deal with the devil. That is universal human bondage, not justice or humanitarianism. We could greatly benefit from a universal basic income (UBI) that deeply and in practice respects human rights, freedom and constitutional democracy, but not the Davos plan which annihilates all three.
As I argued in my first published book, Enlightened Democracy, there are two extremes to be avoided. They are: dogmatism on the one hand, which is always a kind of fundamentalism, whether it be secular or religious; and nihilism on the other. The power elite are paradoxically both nihilists and fundamentalists. They are nihilists in that they believe in nothing but money, power, and their own grandiose, inflated egos. And they are fundamentalists in the sense that they believe, quite self-servingly, that whatever ideology they happen to think will serve them best in the moment, is the gospel truth, set down in stone, as though Moses himself were delivering it in the hand-writing of God. Their fanatical dogmatism was neoliberalism, from 1970 until roughly 2019, but now that neoliberalism has obviously failed, and is about to fail even more spectacularly than it already has, they have already moved on to their next pet ideology, which is equally set in stone, and believed in as if it were the very word of God. And that is technocracy: the view that a messianic elite – themselves – are going to save the word through a re-packaging of fascism, prettied up with the garb of “inclusivity” and “sustainability”, and wedded to advanced technology. That is a hideous ideology, which any sane man or woman should vehemently and totally reject. But the problem is, most of the people, who are not among the ruling elite, have been so frightened and terrified of dogmatism and fanaticism, after the experiences of World War II, that they don’t really have any beliefs or values at all, and so, have fallen into a vacuous state of drifting, which always plays into the hands of a cynical and manipulative, Machiavellian elite, and they have fallen into nihilism. That, among other things, is exactly what we have to overcome. And so, again in this essay, as in my first two books, I will lay out, and in a bit further detail, some common ground which can unite the people, or at least unite the great majority, in a vision which is neither nihilistic nor fanatical, but which is based in shared cause and common sense, or what can maybe be better described as our innate human intelligence.
I would suggest people watch the films 300 and V for Vendetta again. Those films present a pretty accurate picture, in broad strokes, of what we are up against. This is simply a new form of empire that we are living under, and it is morphing rapidly into a very darkly Orwellian global police state. We have seen these patterns before. But to continue…
The crux: If anthropogenic global warming is real, then we should immediately slash fossil fuel use. If it is not, we should slash fossil fuel use for other major health and environmental reasons. But, it can be done in authoritarian or non-authoritarian ways. Guess which the elite prefer?
The key battle lines globally now are not left versus right, but authoritarianism versus democratic freedom. This is absolutely crucial to understand.
We need to unite the people, and we also need to better understand what is actually going on, and what must be done. When the Soviet Union and the entire Eastern Bloc fell, nobody saw it coming, and it happened virtually overnight. A tipping point came after a long and deepening crisis of legitimacy. Exactly the same pattern is emerging in the West, as the Western corporate oligarchy faces a deep and growing, global crisis of legitimacy. The people must now recognize the opportunity, and seize it. But they must also be clear about what they want instead of authoritarian corporate rule. I would argue for decentralization, and for a plurality of models and approaches. It would be tyranny as well as foolishness if we only have one monolithic world model. But in any case, we do need some basic clarity of vision for the road ahead.
In the Soviet Union, the people became clear in their minds that they were sick of authoritarianism. They rejected it, and it fell like a house of cards. But they were not clear about what they wanted to replace it, seemingly having only vague ideas of democracy and freedom. What resulted was a Wild West period of gangster capitalism, which decimated the country. A little more clarity of forethought might possibly have averted that dark period of the 1990s. And certainly now, across the West and around the world, when we are facing the slow-motion collapse of the Western oligarchy, we need, most critically, three things: to unite the people; to embrace our power and reject the ruling corporate empire of pseudo-democracy; and to have at least a broad outline of what kind of society we want to replace this increasingly fascist corporate oligarchy which is now teetering on collapse.
Democrats and Republicans have equally lost all remaining trace of credibility or legitimacy. Both are wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Wall St., plutocratic elite. And now that independents outnumber both Republicans and Democrats, it is clear the majority know it. Now, what comes next, when, not if, the old order collapses?
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To halt the decline of our civilization and stop our race toward ecological, economic and social collapse, we must sow and create a paradigm shift, a shift in the dominant world view, a shift in consciousness. That requires consciousness raising, media activism, and education. But we also need a fundamental change, not only in consciousness, but in our social systems. The most urgent task is to dethrone the business elite and restore constitutional democracy. But we need major changes to our systems of doing things, as well, clearly and undeniably.
That, in turn, requires decentralization: economic, above all, but also demographic, political, and in terms of media, culture, the arts, science, health care, and education. Corporate globalization has harmed and degraded all of these areas of life, and above all, is destroying the planet, democracy, and freedom, and is degrading or destroying life for the poorest 90% or more of humanity. International cooperation is urgently needed, but that is very different from corporate globalism, which is gathering all power in Davos and Beijing, while undermining humanity and the prospects for life on Earth.
Freedom and democracy are fundamental Enlightenment values that are worth preserving, and worth fighting for. And they need to be more than slogans. They need to be lived, and applied. The reality is, any form of hyper-concentration or excessive centralization of power, whether political or economic, breeds tyranny, and undermines and eventually destroys both freedom and democracy. We have allowed political centralization to become far to great, and economic centralization to become staggering, and simply neo-feudal. This must be reversed, or we are doomed to an Orwellian dark age, followed by collapse.
The central problem of late-industrial capitalist society is, quite simply, that the business elite were allowed to amass exponentially greater and greater wealth and power, over the span of 200 years and more, to the point where they have effectively taken over the national democracies, and by now effectively rule the world. It is the global corporate take-over that is at the heart of the environmental crisis, the crisis of democracy, and virtually every major social crisis, as well. We either remove the billionaire elite from power, or we face a dystopia, and a slow-motion death cycle, until we reach ecological and civilizational collapse. That is, we face a crisis that is rooted in a vast over-centralization of power, in the hands of the global corporate elite. We either correct that error, or we watch our world die slowly, and with increasing speed.
Chomsky was right: despite being a self-proclaimed anarchist and a libertarian socialist, he argued that we need to temporarily strengthen the nation-state, and strengthen national democracies – so that we can wrest power back from the global corporate elite, who have vastly over-stepped their proper bounds, and have turned democracies into oligarchy, and are turning the world into a labour camp.
That means, we need political decentralization in the long term, so as to safeguard and protect liberty and democracy, and to take them to a higher level; but in the short term, and in the immediate present, we need to rescue the nation-state from its institutional capture by big business, and restore the powers of national democracies, to counterbalance the unelected and unaccountable powers of big business and the international corporate elite.
What that means, is that we need long term political decentralization, but with an immediate strengthening of national democracies; combined with what is most urgent and essential, which is an economic decentralization: break up the corporate giants, and put firm checks and and balances, and strict limits, on all great concentrations of wealth and economic power.
Economic decentralization and re-localization are both the means and the ends we must now pursue, with all urgency, if either democracy, human rights, constitutional rule or freedom are to survive, or if we are to build a clean, green, just and peaceful, truly sustainable, or even viable, society for the 21st century.
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In terms of the environmental crisis, it is clear we urgently need economic decentralization. We cannot be shipping consumer goods halfway around the planet, from China to the US, for example, and shipping parts and commodities from all over the world to China to manufacture them. That is a completely unsustainable system. We need to eat local and buy local, and re-orient our economies toward local production and consumption, or else watch our ecosystems collapse, and our economies and societies along with them.
We don’t have to be isolationist, and should not be, but we need to be buying, and producing, 80-90% of what we need or consume from the local bioregion, from within 100 miles, or not much more.
That means we need to re-industrialize across the Western world, but in a decentralized way, oriented around smaller population centres that are much more self-reliant, based in energy efficient, clean, wind powered, small scale manufacturing for the local region, combined with a resurgence of local artisan production.
Economists are of course insane secular fundamentalists, and they and the business and political elite, and the media they control, along with many trained seals from academia, will howl with horror and derision, saying it is impractical, inefficient or impossible. But what is impractical and grossly inefficient is sending parts and commodities from all over the world to China and then sending the manufactured products from China to consumers around the world. Further, that is a system headed for inevitable collapse. It may be challenging to replace this system, but it is impossible to sustain it. It will end whether we like it or not.
Decentralized, small scale local production is vastly more efficient in terms of total energy consumed for production, since parts, commodities and finished products are shipped less than 200 miles, compared to our present norm, which is often 40,000 miles or more. It may generate less profit, but it is an economic system designed not for maximum profit, but for maximum human benefit, within the bounds of respecting the earth, human beings, and freedom.
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As an important side note, which needs to be touched upon briefly, so as to wipe away another mountain of confusion, delusion and corporate PR we must say this: We can forget the idea of driverless cars – they are suitable only for mindless citizens of mindless nations. The last thing we need is to extend the shelf life of a disastrous transportation system, based around the private automobile.
We need to shift to cities and communities that are designed so that work, school, shopping, entertainment, spirituality, greenspace, leisure space, intellectual life and social life, are all accessible within a walking radius of 20 minutes; and to compliment that, add in networks of cycling lanes, and walking and bicycling paths; supported finally by highly efficient, public mass transportation, primarily utilizing buses of various sizes from mini-van size to bi-articulating buses carrying 225 people each.
Private automobiles have no place in an ecological city, village or town, or if they do, they are at the margins, and not the centre of our land use or transportation planning. If we continue to allow them, and we should for a time, maybe a few decades at most, we should tax them heavily with pollution taxes, and on top of it, charge them $50 a day to enter the city at all, as they do in London – after the public transportation systems are built and operating, which we should and must do immediately, and there are no more excuses left.
If we tax pollution, as we should and must, then two things are necessary, if it is to be just, or intelligent, or at all compatible with a free and democratic society: a) pollution taxes should be collected at the local municipal level, in order to further empower local communities and grassroots democracy, and to rescue them from encroaching bankruptcy, and not imposed or collected at the level of the state, province or nation, and absolutely not at the supra-national or global level, which would only result in tyranny and outright fascism – and this is an absolutely critical point that we need to be clear on, and steadfastly insist upon; and secondly, if we are going to tax pollution, as we must, then we must also, and simultaneously, cut taxes for the poor, the middle class, small and medium businesses and farmers, who are already struggling to survive, and are sinking, and being eaten alive, due to class warfare being waged by the corporate elite and the ruling 1%, and also due to excessively a greatly excessive tax burden on these same groups. All of them need their taxes slashed – and I do mean slashed.
Tax all personal income over $1 million per year at 90%; tax all private wealth over $10 million at 90%; tax profitable large corporations at 90% on all profits over $1 billion a year; and tax all financial speculation and financial exchanges at 1% – and as a result of these measures, the treasuries will be full to overflowing, and there will be room for social and environmental programs, as well as great and urgently needed tax cuts for small and medium business, farmers, and the bottom 90% of the population. Pollution taxes, and resource extraction taxes and royalties paid to the people, will simply incentivize the shift to cleaner modes and means, habits and technologies, and will further fund the much needed People’s Green New Deal – which rejects the faux green deal being presented by Davos, which is a deal with the devil.
But even with these measures, automobiles should, ideally, in the longer term, and as soon as possible, be in community car co-ops, not private driveways and private garages. You sign out a Lamborghini, a Porsche, a Cadillac or a Tesla, like you would take out a library book – except at a very high premium price. And you can sign out a mini-van or cargo van, or a truck, a Prius, a Bolt or a Smart Car, for a more modest price. What we most definitely do not need is millions of private automobiles, of any description, being the basis of our transportation. We tried that – it was a catastrophe. Make the roads 70-90% devoted to buses, bicycle lanes and pedestrian streets, open air markets and public greenspaces and gardens. Automobiles of any description, whether electric or fossil fuel burning, driverless or not, have to be squeezed to the margins, and removed from their current status as a primary mode of transportation and mobility, or our civilization is going down the tubes fast. In 1901, driverless electric cars would have been a terribly short-sighted and stupid idea to base a transportation system around, for the reasons described vividly and clearly in this article. To think, in 2021, over a century later, that any form of private automobile use could be the centre-piece of our transportation infrastructure for the future, is absolutely insane.
Even in terms of land use and transportation, which are two separate but closely intertwined issues, the century-old habit of planning cities and communities around a transportation system that is centred on the private automobile, has been a disaster in multiple ways. Firstly, every time a city builds a new highway or widens a highway to increase traffic flow capacity and reduce traffic congestion, more people drive and people drive more often, resulting in more roads and highways being clogged with more cars and more congestion. The model has been a dismal failure for decades, yet we keep doing the same thing and keep repeating the same strategy, expecting different results. As Einstein said, this is the very definition of insanity.
Then there are the mass deaths and injuries from an automobile-centred transportation system. In the US over 40,000 people are killed in automobile accidents, including pedestrians being hit by cars in cities and towns, many of them children. The same number of people, in rough figures, are killed by cars in the US as are killed by opiods. There is a great hew and cry about opioid addiction, and rightfully so, and yet there is a deathly silence about our far more disastrous addiction to private automobiles, because that would be like criticizing the holy sacraments. Worse, it is fashionable and even held to be praiseworthy to criticize the churches, even in the most scathing of ways, but to question the sanctity and centrality of the private automobile as the centre-piece of all urban and transportation planning, invokes screaches and howls akin to the witch burnings of the Inquisition. We must re-think our presumptions, especially those that are most cherished and deeply held.
I am speaking, by the way, as an inveterate car lover. But while I love cars, I do not think it makes any slightest sense to make them the central focus of transportation or urban planning.
Another disastrous effect of that dismal model is of course smog. While the people and governments lost their minds over what is in reality, a new variant of the flu, in 2020 roughly 1.5 million people died globally from Covid, roughly the same number that have died, tragically, every year from the flu for centuries, but in the same year, as every year, though it is climbing exponentially, several million died from air pollution and smog. As I have written about before, our threat assessment capacities are completely shot, and utterly disconnected from reality. (See, Reality Check.)
Further, there is the issue of wasted land. Roughly 70% of Las Angeles is now covered with highways, streets and parking lots. Clearly, the sacred car is more important to us than either human life, or ecology and the rest of nature. If we were serious about public health in the slightest, which we are not, we would rip up half the streets and parking lots and turn them into pedestrian malls, greenspace and community gardens to create food for all and food self-reliance for all cities towns and villages, and turn half of the highway lanes into (wind-powered) electric bus lanes. But we have no slightest concern for human health, or human life or death. Our pretenses are all hollow, and as Thoreau said, “Our sills are all rotted.” Our founding assumptions and dogmas are killing millions of human beings, young and old, every year, and billions of other living creatures, and destroying ecosystems, and pushing us fast toward civilizational collapse and extinction. And yet, we cry loudly and with wringing hands about our deep and abiding, profound humanitarianism, and our commitment towards public health and the ending of needless deaths. The hypocrisy and self-deceit could scarcely be more extreme.
This should also be said, in brief: I warned people since 1991, thirty years ago, that the rising trend was not only ecological disaster, but also, and more chilling, fascism. Now it is here. But what I did not expect was for the great majority to respond to the “new normal” of authoritarianism with a yawn, and with a cheerful obedience and total complacency, as their human rights, constitutions, democracy and freedom are shredded and destroyed. And I certainly did not expect ordinarily sane people to be cheerleading for the new corporate fascist police state. But it is clear, the majority are no longer sane. They are dissociated from reality, which is the most precise definition of insanity that is possible.
Here I must say a word to the politically correct lemmings who feel that censorship and neo-Maoist thought control are legitimate and justified. Taking care with our words and speech, being thoughtful and sensitive and compassionate, and avoiding and transcending bigotry, prejudice, callousness, discrimination and hate, are obviously positive things. But political correctness can turn into a witch hunt, and another form of authoritarianism and collective group-think. That, it has done. While I can and do sympathize with people having mental health issues, especially since I lived with severe anxiety and depression for 17 years, between the ages of 18 and 35, it is nevertheless important that we can speak plainly about reality and the world we live in. When someone, or some policy or habit of our collective, supremely abnormal norm, is not just bad, but far beyond bad, we need stronger terms to convey the gravity of it. Sometimes the word evil is the only appropriate term, such as in regards to the Holocaust, or with regards to the global fascist coup being carried out as we speak. Other times, saying something is “a bad idea”, is simply far too weak and evasive a description. Sometimes we must state the truth plainly, no matter who may be offended: the policy, behaviour, or norm, is not just bad – it is patently insane. Let us not become so enfeebled of mind that we cannot talk openly and plainly about reality and the world we live in, or we will be simply doomed, by way of our own self-imposed virtual lobotomy.
But to continue…
If we were to get serious about stopping toxic pollution and smog, and got serious about ensuring all people have access to healthy food in sufficient quantities, neither of which we are remotely serious about now, then our self-image of being deeply concerned with human health and human life could begin to be taken seriously. As it stands, we ignore the biggest issues of human health and human deaths, while screaming our support for utterly counterproductive authoritarian measures. That is not only morally bankrupt, it is positively insane.
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Among the most urgent and compelling reasons, and areas, for decentralization is in regards to food, agriculture and global warming. The Davos billionaire’s club wants to convince us that they will solve the world’s hunger and environmental crises, both, among other messianic acts. But their plan involves removing the people from the land, and concetrating all control over food and agriculture in the hands of a few hundred globalist corporate elites. If that sounds safe to you, I suggest you think again.
It is the Land Enclosure Acts all over again – the giant land grab in Britain, which took place between 1235 and 1914, and particularly in the 17th and 18th centuries, whereby the landed aristocracy essentially stole the commons, with the aiding and abetting of the equally criminal government, unsurprisingly, especially considering parliament was largely made up of the wealthy land owning elite themselves, who were pushing for ever more land enclosures to increase their already great wealth and power; and which in turn drove the people off the land, because the landed aristocracy could make more money raising cattle, or sheep for valuable wool textiles, and forced the people to choose between dying of starvation, joining the ranks of the desperate urban poor, who filled the new sweat shops of the Industrial Revolution, or getting on a boat, risking all, and sailing to the New World. The trouble is, there is nowhere left to flee the robber barons: this time, the land grab is global, and it aims to be total and complete.
(I can hear the quibbling now from the ever-evasive and slippery Sophists who are the grim majority in the academy, who forever feel compelled to make apologetics and glosses for the crimes of whatever power elite happen to be in power at the time, as most academics throughout history have done – and they are a disgrace for it, and by no way scholarly in such actions. But yes, while the theft of the commons and the usurpation of land happened through various processes, it was by and large theft, and class warfare; and while there have been many drivers of urbanization throughout history, the single greatest driver has been and continues to be the loss of land by the rural peasantry and the poor, through one form or another of usurpation or theft by the rich. The same process is driving the peasants of the Global South into the shanty towns and slums of the cities around the world, and that has been going on for a very long time, though it has exponentially accelerated over the past few decades. When Adam Smith is correct, I would cite him; in instances where Marx is more correct, I would cite Marx. I am not a Marxist, but Marx was by and large correct when he identified the land enclosure movement as an act of theft and class warfare, creating the bulk of the workforce of what became the urban industrial labour pool or proletariat. And no, it is not relevant to cite that agriculture was “rationalized”, since theft remains theft, no matter the justification. “Well, you see, I am stealing your land in order to help you”, isn’t an argument that peasants, small scale farmers or the rural poor felt to be very convincing then, nor do they now, and nor should they. And yes, the land enclosures or theft of the commons was as much about power, or more, than it was about agriculture or food production – far more. Land is the primary source of wealth, and therefore of power, then as now, and always, as Malcolm X realized and clearly stated, as well. Then as now, controlling the land is the primary means of controlling the people. This has nothing to do with romanticizing the past, by the way, and everything to do with whether an aristocratic or business elite should run roughshod over the other 99%. So yes, while there are numerous dynamics in land use and urbanization, one of the biggest is theft of land by the rich, driving the rural poor into desperate actions, including the ugly choice of becoming urban wage slaves, as it was widely viewed to be.)
In fact, it is even worse and more dystopian than that, because the plutocrats want to not only own or control all of the land, but also, all productive assets or means of producing wealth, including the factories, businesses, shipping and transportation, real estate, along with the media, the mass communication system, the global economy and financial system, the private armies (yes, the military industrial complex is being systematically privatized), the new digital currencies, without which none shall buy or sell, and are seeking to enclose, own, patent or otherwise control all of life – seeds, animals, breeding stock, our data and personal records and habits, and effectively, our own bodies and minds, as well. Everything is a commodity to them, and they have modest desires: they simply want it all.
As Adam Smith said, it is, “The vile maxim of the masters: all for us, nothing for anybody else.”
Again, as Klaus Schwabe said, “You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy.”
Furthermore, the plan of the corporate elite is to use petrochemical industrial agriculture as their answer – a model which is now proven to be catastrophic for the environment, for soils and souls, in terms climate change, environmental degradation, soil depletion, food security, and in terms of the human and social costs. If we want to see the collapse of global food production, along with most ecosystems in the world, and the collapse of civilization as a result, as has happened to many civilizations in the past, following the elites’ plan will virtually ensure it.
Technology can be helpful or harmful, but as I concluded in my first year of university in environmental studies and philosophy, and as everything I have read, observed and experienced has confirmed, technology is not what will save us. It is a problem that is two-fold, which plagues us: attitudes or world view, and power structures and systems. If we do not address these two fundamental areas, then all our efforts to resolve the environmental crisis, or any of our myriad, interconnected social crises, will come to nothing, or worse. The ideology of the ruling Davos billionaire elite, is technocracy. That is worse than useless. That is the building of a dystopia. It would be better if the billionaires retired to their private islands, mansions and yachts, and left the world alone. And if they refuse, we may well have to put them under house arrest.
Remember, even if authoritarian measures are justified in an emergency – and I am not saying they are justified now, but even if you believe that they are – those authoritarian measures must be temporary and short-lived. If they are not, then we have been swindled and duped yet again, and instead of crisis management, we are being sold into a permanent state of authoritarianism; which, in more honest times, would be called what it is: fascism. Bear that in mind as the days and months roll by, in this “new normal”, as we have been told a thousand times that it is.
This is not a temporary set of emergency measures. This is endgame. And don’t run off screaming that this is a wild conspiracy theory. It has nothing to do with conspiracy or theory. It is simply class analysis, a sociological analysis, and an institutional analysis. Our social institutions, particularly the democratic nation-state, along with the media, the financial system and the economy, have been captured by powerful individuals and giant corporations. And what they want is what the power hungry and the greedy have always wanted throughout history: more power, and more money. Why is this so hard to fathom? Have the business elite or the state ever exploited a crisis to their advantage? Don’t answer that until you have read, The Shock Doctrine. Of course they have. And they are doing it again.
But don’t worry, Davos’ Eric Schmidt assures us that, “The Davos universe will be fine.” Ah, well that is reassuring. I was worried about the welfare of the super-rich and the excessively powerful. So long as they will be fine, why should we be worried? The billionaire class will be fine, and their loyal ass kissers among the political, media and technocratic elite will be fine (admitting of course that they too are expendable), and who really cares about the plebes? Let them eat cake. No, better, as our good friend and patron, Bill Gates said, “Let them eat bugs.”
But Erich Schmidt goes on to assure us that more “efficient” systems will benefit everyone. This is the standard trickle down theory nonsense, which we have seen is utterly hollow. The super-rich are swallowing up all the wealth on Earth that they can, and poverty and inequality are soaring as a result. So the technocratic utopia he is promising should strike us, properly, as nothing other than snake oil, as well as being a dystopian nightmare.
Of course, as Chomsky has said, every emperor and every dictator throughout history has convinced himself that he is the great benefactor and saviour of humanity. But that doesn’t mean that we should also believe in their delusions.
Remember that all social systems and institutions are human creations. That means, they are not immutable, they are not permanent, and they are not inevitable, and it means that if they do not truly serve human interests broadly, but only serve the interests of the powerful few, they can and should be discarded.
Another important note, which is often conflated, especially by propagandists and elite vested interests, is this. There are two very different sets of meanings to the word elite. In one sense, elite means someone who is particularly gifted or talented in a certain area. There are elite basketball players, elite pianists, elite chefs. Nobody discounts that human talents are diverse. That is not a problem. What is a problem is the other meaning of the term elite. That is the term in reference to a power elite. That means that a small group of people have a tremendous amount of power in society. That kind of elite, a power elite, always spells corruption, and always, in the end, spells tyranny. But the power elite always want to conflate the two meanings, and that is also their delusion. They tell themselves that they are not dominating usurpers of power, or power mongers, but that they are “leaders” or even messianic figures. That is elitism. And when enough people believe in the self-serving delusions of the elite, then you get fascism. And that is precisely what is happening now.
The billionaire elite want to effectively round the people up like cattle and corral them in sprawling, tightly controlled, total surveillance “smart cities”, with stark prospects for freedom or democracy, and lab grown meat as the daily menu. Aside from the horrific crimes against humanity involved in this plan of mass forced relocation, and the final destruction of freedom, human rights, constitutional rule and democracy, the billionaire’s Great Reset agenda, which the founder and president of the Davos World Economic Forum, Klaus Schawbe exlicitly and publicly announced, the plan of the corporate elite will aggravate, not alleviate, the world’s environmental crisis.
What the environmental movement has been slow to understand, but what people like Allan Savory, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Richard Heinberg and Vandana Shiva have proven beyond any doubt, is that small scale, decentralized, organic, regenerative agriculture, is not only the best, safest, least impact, and most secure way to feed humanity, but it is also the single most powerful method or tool we have for healing the planet, and reversing climate change. What that means, is that we have to bring the people back to the land, not drive them off it.
Through regenerative agriculture the soil is healed, and carbon is caputured in the healthy soils and rural landscape, which not only slows climate change, but can quickly reverse it. The business elite’s plan will possibly cut fossil fuel use, which is good, but will further hasten the global death of soils, meaning, the carbon capturing capacity of the Earth’s soils is killed, along with their ability to grow food or support any form of life, resulting in a net worsening of the climate crisis under the billionaire’s plan.
The corporate oligarchs have been investing like there is no tomorrow in the fossil fuel industry, while talking virtuously about the need for carbon reduction and sustainability. All three of the biggest hedge funds on Earth, who manage the money of the super-rich, are heavily invested in all of the top 100 carbon emitting corporations. The Great Reset is a lie. The corporate elite are interested in whatever brings them more money, more wealth, and more power, and humanity and the Earth be damned; along with freedom, human rights and democracy, naturally. That is what their actions prove beyond any doubt.
While Klauss Schawbe and his Davos coterie propound about sustainability, they want to take the existing petrochemical industrial model of agriculture, which is destroying the planet and poisoning our food, air, soil, water and bodies, and which is heavily dependent on fossil fuels, and essentially put it on steroids. There is no remote way any sane person can view that plan as being sustainable or ecologically sound, all human rights and social concerns aside. The Davos-driven Great Reset plan which is being aggressively pushed by the billionaire elite is therefore a recipe for systems failure and ecological catastrophe, mass human rights abuses, and a full-scale war on democracy and freedom, followed quickly by civilizational collapse.
The Davos Great Reset plan of the billionaire oligarchy is also premised on an abundance of cheap energy in the form of diesel fuel. But there too, the indicators are, that the era of cheap oil and diesel fuel is about to end, and end abruptly. World conventional oil production peaked in 2006. The fracking boon was a boondoggle that temporarily glutted the world with a brief extended flash of cheap oil, but fracking is a money losing scheme, made possible only by cheap money, as Max Keiser has repeatedly pointed out, and now the industry is dying as the fracking companies go bankrupt en mass. Total oil production has now also peaked, as of 2018. The return on investment numbers across the fossil fuel industry broadly, further show the case, as to the end of cheap energy, irrefutably. A century ago, it cost a dollar to extract $100 in profit margin of oil. By the 1990s it was $10 profit for the same investment, and falling fast. Every action, machine or system has built in inefficiencies that to some extent are unavoidable. This is the inviolable second law of thermodynamics. With fracking and tar sands, we are down to $3-4 profit per dollar invested, which is not enough to maintain the infrastructure costs to extract, refine and ship it. The energy cliff, therefore, is nearly upon us. The profits versus investment ratio of the biggest oil companies proves the point beyond all debate. The plan among environmentalists was always, primarily, to build a renewable energy infrastructure to replace fossil fuels. But that requires trillions of dollars in investment, and an abundance of cheap energy to build it. We had that chance in the 1970s and ’80s, but we passed it up. Now we will be severely constrained, not by money, but by soon to skyrocket energy costs. It means that ship has, in terms of the big picture, and aside from small local pockets, already sailed. Besides that ugly fact, is this: renewable energy produces electricity, but 80% of our global energy use is not electricity but fossil fuels – and particularly in terms of shipping and transportation, which runs on diesel. Even as late as 2000-2020, we still had abundant cheap energy to build a renewable energy and transportation infrastructure, but that window is rapidly closing now. It is still imperative to get off of fossil fuels swiftly and decisively, and to shift to renewable energy, and especially to build wind-powered, high speed electric light rail, and electric and bi-reticulated bus transportation grids; along with redesigning our communities, centred around pedestrian streets, public green spaces and gardens, public libraries, walking and cycling paths and mass transit. But the landscape is changing fast, and the energy costs are about to soar. The fact is, therefore, that we will experience a severe energy shortage, and a global economy that depends upon long supply chains is inevitably going to break. The only way we can make the transition to renewable energy now, and moreover to simply weather the coming storm, is to shift to decentralized, small-scale, regenerative agriculture-based communities, as well as to greatly reduce our energy consumption – and that means slashing shipping distances, which means decentralizing the economy, particularly food production. But the Davos elite want to push us in the opposite direction. Carbon farming, meaning, local regenerative agriculture, which requires decentralization, combined with major cuts to energy consumption, is now the only viable path to healing our planet. But again, that is 180 degrees opposite to where the Davos elite are driving us. Aside from deep and grave concerns over human rights, freedom and democracy, therefore, the elites’ plan to save the environment, is guaranteed to fail, and fail spectacularly, if we are foolish enough to go along with it, for reasons of both ecological collapse, and energy cost spikes.
But then again, the billionaire class is insulated from the disastrous effects of their actions. They all have expensive, ultra-premium insurance policies, so that if there is a severe storm, hurricane, tornado, food riots, or the county they live in goes up in flames from wildfires burning out of control, they will be air-lifted by private helicopter out of danger, and flown to a five-star resort of their choosing, or to one of their other mansions, country estates, yachts or private islands. This at least partially explains why they can be so giddy and aggressively pushing when it comes to plans and agendas that will dramatically increase their already stratospheric wealth and power, while further destabilizing the planet, and further degrading, poisoning, depleting and razing the natural world that supports us all. This is precisely how and why civilizations collapse: the elite are insulated from the problems, and so, continue to sip champagne on the top decks of the sinking ship, believing their wealth and power will protect them – and who cares about the lesser beings on the lower decks who are already drowning and under water.
What the billionaire elite are doing, therefore, and the evidence is clear from their actions, is gathering all wealth and power that they can – buying up farm land, driving the people off the land, taking the entire S&P private, setting themselves up as the rent collectors for every aspect of life and the real economy, and launching digital currencies that they will control, among other actions – prior to the systems failure that they know full well is coming. When it comes, they want to be left as the ruling landed aristocracy, in a neo-feudal era, where they will effectively live, and rule, as god-kings.
As Michael Moore’s recent film showed, we have been conned in more ways than one. Some of the biggest environmental groups have made a deal with the devil. They have joined forces with the corporate elite, presumably believing they could win benefits for the Earth, but have either been duped, bribed, or otherwise co-opted. Across the US, so-called “clean energy” and “renewable energy” projects have been passed by legislatures, and built. But what was secretly built in most cases was not wind turbines, but biofuel plants. That means any organic life form, living or dead, can be burned to make energy. Presently these biofuel plants are burning live trees and entire forests. That cannot last long. When they have finished burning the forests which are the lungs of the Earth, what will they burn next? Maybe the seven billion superfluous humans. It would not be the first time such things have happened. And prison labour can only utilize so many. Maybe we should think again about the Holocaust. Are we so sure it could not happen again? Maybe we should watch Soylent Green again as well.
The oceans are reaching their limit in terms of their ability to capture carbon, because we have radically altered and undermined their ecology. Now the billionaires want to cut the lungs out of the soil as well. That is not a good plan. That is suicide.
Are they stupid, or are they simply pathological and sociopathic? Probably both. But we can see by their actions that they are definitely pathological and sociopathic. A million dead Iraqis for the sake of oil money is simply a good investment to their minds. And they are invested up to their eyeballs in the very fossil fuel industry they claim we must get away from. “You shall know them by their fruits.” They are sociopathic liars, quite frankly, as we can see by the record of their actions. They make Dick Cheney look like a swell guy.
Mind you, of course, the few hundred billionaire elites who effectively rule the world have armies of technocrats, bureaucrats, spokespersons and other minions, most of whom are so deeply indoctrinated that they sincerely believe what they are doing is good for the people and the planet. But Stalin, Mussolini and Mao had their minions as well, and despite their good intentions, they were, in reality, paving a super-highway to hell on Earth.
The ideology of the global power elite is Machiavellian, neo-Malthusian technocracy, which is simply another way of saying ruthless power lust and genocidal fascism. But they support their goals of gathering all wealth and power into their hands through what used to be called propaganda, but what is maybe more accurately termed psychological warfare or social engineering. And the worldview they promote is both misanthropic and Hobbesian: they are actively indoctrinating people to mistrust themselves and one another, in a classic strategem of divide and conquer, while sowing the completely deceitful, or delusional, notion that the elite are the saviours of humanity and the Earth. Their guiding icons are Spencer, who corrupted Darwinism and created Social Darwinism, Machiavelli, who rationalized any means necessary as justifiable in order to gain, maintain, expand or consolidate power, and Plato and Hobbes, who argued, incoherently, that an elite of philosopher kings or technocrats are essential to human well-being, when in fact, history has abundantly proven, over and over again, that elitism, empire, and any form of authoritarianism, lead not to salvation, but to tyranny, and to great crimes against humanity. This is the web of deceit and delusion that we must cut through, to free ourselves and to heal the world.
The business elite want to urbanize 100% of the world’s population. The misinformed believe this will lessen pressure on the environment. The opposite is true. Urbanization creates vast chains of supply lines which are both increasingly fragile as well as completely unsustainable. Worse yet, it insulates people from the effects of their actions, by separating them from the land and alienating them from nature. It is that very alienation which is at the heart of the environmental crisis. Therefore, total urbanization will, in multiple ways, make the environmental crisis far worse, not better.
Remember that before WWII the vast majority of the world’s population, well over 80%, lived in rural areas. Encouraging people to move out of the big cities, into smaller, more ecologically sound communities, with closer relations and closer ties to the natural world, will be a great transformation, but it is simply reversing our error, created over the past 75 years. It is big, but it is achievable. The alternative is mass urbanization and mass dehumanization, in an Orwellian control grid which is really a kind of techno-fascism, and which is both genocidal and utterly unsustainable.
Again, we are presented with two very starkly opposed alternatives. We can allow all power to be concentrated in the hands of the global corporate elite, including all economic power, effectively all political power, as they over-ride every democratic government, and all power over food production and distribution; or we can decentralize economic power, renew and reaffirm national democracies, and create thriving communities that are actively healing the land and the world we live in. I think our choices are becoming starkly clear.
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Bear in mind that the original democratic theorists never expected or intended for democracy to be practiced on a vast scale, such as the present day US, Canada, Russia, China, India, Australia, Argentina or Brazil, which are geographically vast countries, many times the size of most nations in the world. (It will be surprising if these geographically giant nations can stay internally united, at least with any centralized power centres or centralized governments, although they could much more easily stay united as federations, with much more decentralized powers internally. Historically, no empire has ever lasted, and nations that are on the scale of empires, no matter how they behave or are structured, are unlikely to survive in the long term, unless they consciously decentralize and federate powers internally, as Thomas Jefferson advised and urged, for example). Rousseau himself intended democracy to be practiced on the scale of his home country of tiny Switzerland.
The US itself was originally a union of thirteen colonies, with 3.5 million people. And even that was a federation of semi-autonomous states in a federation of shared powers. Today the US has a landmass roughly five times bigger, and has nearly 100 times the population.
When power is over-centralized, the supposedly democratic governments become so removed and out of reach from the people that democracy withers and dies, and is gradually replaced by oligarchy. That has now occurred. Democracy is dead. Or rather, democracy is on life-support, and dying, and freedom, human rights and constitutional rule, along with it.
Worse yet, we placed checks and balances, and firm limits, on concentrations of political power, but left economic power unchecked. 200 years after the birth of modern democracy, economic power has become so staggeringly concentrated globally, that a new moneyed aristocracy, as Thomas Jefferson called them, have effectively taken over, and are now the de facto rulers of the world.
“I pray we shall crush the moneyed aristocracy in its infancy, for already it bids defiance to our laws and seeks a contest of strength with our democratic government.” – Thomas Jefferson
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I am not anti-business, but I am certainly anti-fascist. And if we are foolish enough to allow extreme concentrations of economic power, then those powers will inevitably come to overshadow, then dominate, and finally to eviscerate both freedom and democracy, and all human rights and constitutional rule along with them. And that, is exactly what we have allowed to happen. First, remove the plutocratic business elite from power. Only then can we have any serious discussion of other social or environmental issues. Until then, we are talking, prattling, hot-air-filled fools, and all talk of social justice or sustainability, freedom, democracy, human rights or peace, or any positive social change, are futile and meaningless.
As to political powers, I am and will be forever more on the side of freedom and constitutional democracy. Churchill was right: Democracy is the worst form of government ever invented, except for all the others. There are only two choices, ultimately, in political philosophy. As Chomsky said, “You’re either a democrat or an aristocrat.” We live in a dream world if we believe it otherwise. Either you believe in government of the people, by the people, for the people, or you believe in some form or other of elite rule, which means oligarchy, and which always spells, in the end, tyranny. So, therefore, you either choose constitutional democracy, or you chose one or another form of servitude, serfdom, or slavery. Can it be made any more clear than that? I hear people arguing for oligarchy, for technocracy, not knowing that is what they are doing. They may as well be forging their own shackles and chains, for that is precisely what they are doing.
As to human rights, they are innate and inalienable. They are not granted by constitutions, or governments, or the state. If the society is intelligent, just, or simply sane, then it will uphold human rights, but it does not grant them: it either honours our human rights which are innate, or it does not. But the rights remain innate, no matter whether the society or the government has the virtue and the good sense to honour them or not. Constitutions are important, and are the foundational and ultimate law of the land. But a culture which respects and honours human rights is more fundamental yet. Without such a culture and such a consciousness, constitutions are mere pieces of paper, to be ignored at whim, whenever it is convenient, profitable, or expedient to do so. That is why Thoreau’s short essay, On Civil Disobedience, is the most important political tract ever written. Unless the people stand up for their rights, even the Magna Carta is meaningless, and simply an inert piece of paper.
As to the powers of government, yes, a democratic government has the right and the obligation to enforce laws protecting the people, and also the land and the ecology of the land. But the fundamental rule of any just society, or any society that wishes to be stable, or sociologically sustainable in the long run, is that individual freedom can only be constrained when an individual is actively harming another individual, or the commons which supports us all.
I watched a biography on Oscar Wilde tonight, and at the end, the thought that dominated my mind was this. What sheer and utter arrogance it is that people feel they can tell other people how they should live! Again, unless someone is harming another person, or is causing ecological harm to the environment which we share, by dumping toxic waste into a river, or clear-cutting a forest, for example, neither the government, the state, nor any group or individual has the right to impose their notions of how someone should live upon another, and nor do they have the slightest right, in any way, to either tell another person how they should live, where they can or cannot go, who they can or cannot love, what clothes they can or cannot wear, what they must wear on their face, what they can say, or do, or not do, or to limit or constrain their freedom in any way. To impose our notions on another person as to how they should, and must, live, is the highest arrogance, and in fact the original sin, of false pride, and sheer hubris. It is tyranny, and it is abhorrent, in all its forms, no matter the justifications which are made.
Compassion, solidarity, or people helping one another, is the basis of a just society, a peaceful society, and a stable and sustainable society; but equally so is freedom. Without freedom being practiced, and honoured in practice, and not just espoused, our society cannot hope to be sustainable, much less just. It will be neither. It will be a boorish dystopian gulag of one sort or another, until it finally collapses and destroys itself. Freedom is fundamental. This, we must remember, and now. And over-centralization, both political and even more so economic, is at the very heart of the problem.
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In the longer term, and as soon as the people are ready for it and have the will, we must democratize the economy. In the immediate realm of urgently needed actions, right now, we must reverse the long term trend of hyper-concentration of wealth and economic power, dethrone the corporate oligarchs, and break up the biggest corporate giants, which have effectively taken over the elected governments of the world. We either face reality bravely and head on, or the new reality of global corporate empire will devour us, and the planet along with us. These are our two choices now.
The following is absolutely critical to understand. The corporate-state oligarchy is now in the midst of a deep and widespread, global crisis of legitimacy – the same phenomenon of crisis of legitimacy which, after decades of gradual loss of public confidence, trust, and patience with the system, led finally to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the entire Eastern Bloc, in just a year and a half, between 1989 and 1991. This is the biggest opportunity for real, positive social change that we will get. It is precisely because the crisis of legitimacy for the ruling powers is so deep, that the business and political elite are resorting to such desperate measures. Their increasingly desperate measures are not a sign of their strength, but of their weakness, and their fear. We must seize the moment, and press now, for real, fundamental, systemic change. The people must reclaim their power, and now.
Remember that the US spends a trillion dollars a year on the military and war, while 90% of its people are reduced to peasants, the infrastructure disintegrates and begins to collapse, and the people are told there is no money for public health care; and meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry is subsidized by $5 trillion a year globally, and the US alone wastes another trillion dollars a year on a private health care system that costs twice as much as the public health care systems of Canada and Europe. There is no shortage of money – the billionaire elite are awash in money. There is now over $30 trillion sitting in the offshore private bank accounts of the super-rich. The billionaire corporate elite keep demanding billions and trillions in bail-outs and “stimulus” money, and they get it. The problem is not lack of money or resources, but the mass systemic theft being carried out daily by the corporate elite, who feed at the bottomless public trough, and are feeding off the real economy, the people and the earth, and draining them all of wealth, and of life. And there are many things we can do about it, big and small. Remember that General Motors, one of the biggest companies in the US, was nationalized. But that is just one option among many. Remember, most importantly, nearly every major positive change in human society in history has come from below, from the people, and not from the government or the ruling elite.
The American and French Revolutions began with one single book, Common Sense, by Thomas Paine. The movement to end slavery began with just a handful of people. Great things almost always have small beginnings. The fact is, We, the people of the Earth, the 99%, have all the power we need, and a good many proven models, to take on the giants, and to win the world back, and to heal our world in the process.
Join a credit union, move your money out of the big banks, use local currencies and Bitcoin, or at least cash instead of credit cards and bank cards, whenever you can, and cut the banking elite out of the picture everywhere you can – stop feeding your slavers; switch to a co-op insurance company; support your local farmers, farmers’ markets and artisans; learn about the anti-trust movement led by Teddy Roosevelt, and also, the very successful experiments in local democratic budget making, land reform and agrarian reform movements, industrial and workplace democracy, Participatory Economics, social ecology, communitarianism, the Spanish Revolution, the Mondragon Co-op, Via Campesina, Transition Towns and the Transition Network, the organic food and agriculture movement, the permaculture and regenerative agriculture movements, the land trust movement, which makes owning land affordable, because the ownership is democratically shared, and the co-op movement of America, which now has 140 million members; join the localization movement (sometimes called the re-localization movement), the bioregional movement, the decentralization movement, the co-op movement, the public bank movement, the buy local, or local procurement movement, or the New Economy movement; start a community garden project, a community food self-reliance project, a community water harvesting, water protection and water self-reliance co-op, a community car co-op, child care co-op, a health care co-op, a community herbal medicine growers co-op, a co-op greenhouse, a co-op laundry, a co-op school, community-run radio, newspapers, magazines, podcasting, web tv or other media, a co-op legal action and lawyers group, or a community renewable energy co-op; switch to or at least embrace and support alternative media and alternative social media; consider an urban or rural housing co-op or a land trust; get involved in the boycott, divestment or shareholder activism movement; join a CSA, plant a garden, invest locally, eat local, buy local, and support local independent business, as an important start. Then, join with others to take the power back in even bigger ways.
As my mother used to say, If you don’t interest yourself in politics, politics will interest itself in you. In the US today, the three richest men, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, control more wealth than the poorest half of Americans. Globally, the eight richest individuals control more wealth than the poorest half of humanity.
We no longer have liberal democracy in the West. We now live under a global corporate oligarchy. We now have neo-feudalism, and it is morphing rapidly into fascism.
We had best deal with reality, or reality will deal with us.
“Historically, the real basis of power has always been wealth, in one form or another.” “Democracy? They control the action. Liberty? The numbers are pretty nasty.” “Either we probe much deeper to the institutional and systemic basis of the old order, or we lose.” “What does the next system look like, as the old order collapses?” – Gar Alperowitz
“Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”, as Lord Acton said. Remember that always. It is the excessive concentration or centralization of power which is the greatest danger. Nothing else comes even close. So long as a few dozen corporate giants, mainly banks, and the billionaires who control them, effectively control the global economy, as a recent Swiss systems analysis confirms, and essentially rule the world, there is zero chance of us resolving either our social crises or the environmental crisis. We need strong anti-trust action to break up the biggest corporate empires, especially in banking, finance and the media, redistribute their assets in the formation of a network of local democratic co-ops, and create legislative and constitutional checks and balances, and firm limits on great concentrations of economic power and wealth; otherwise, if we do not, then democracy, freedom, human rights, constitutional rule, the planet, and the great majority of the people, will continue to have the life sucked out of them, by this same giant vampire squid which is the global corporate empire. This is the stark reality that we must face, and now. You cannot have a strong economy, much less justice or sustainability, nor, most fundamentally, freedom, constitutional rule or functioning democracy, so long as the giant corporate cartels and oligarchs effectively rule the nations and the world. The conservative and libertarian right now understands this better than the left, which is by and large obsessed with getting a few more crumbs from the tables of the rich. The Neville Chamberlains, cowards and Quislings must be forcefully moved aside. The time for bold and decisive action against the rising corporate fascist powers, is now.
Remember, the American Revolution and the birth of modern democracy began with just 77 men at Valley Forge. In fact, it began with one person writing one book: Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. Before that, in the mid 1700s, the idea of democracy seemed radical, extremist, impractical, and impossible. But it happened.
Big changes do happen in history. And almost all of them begin with a handful of people: from the birth of modern democracy and the overthrow of feudalism, to the abolition of slavery, to the universal right to vote, the abolition of child labour, to the labour movement securing decent pay, basic workplace safety, and work weeks shortened from 100 hours, to 80, to 60, to 40, and lowering.
Big changes happen, and another major shift in the world is emerging now. Either it will be led by the corporate oligarchy, in which case it will be an Orwellian neo-feudalism, technocracy and fascism, or it will be led by the people, in which case, the power is in our hands to choose something better. This is the fork in the road. Let us choose wisely.
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Our present system cannot and will not continue, but will inevitably collapse. A decentralized economic system can sow community prosperity and resiliency, while respecting ecology and freedom. The present system is not only destroying the earth’s ecosystems, and the basis of all life, but has also created a global corporate oligarchy, which is destroying freedom and democracy, and creating a growing sea of poverty. We can do better than this broken system, and we must.
As it turns out, democracy, ecology, culture, the arts, economics, health care, science, philosophy, spirituality, education, and virtually every aspect of life, thrives best when we respect and embrace diversity, freedom, curiosity and creativity – and this, in turn, requires decentralization in all of these major areas of life.
The globalized economy, with its long supply chains and its fossil fuel dependency, and the global corporate oligarchy which controls it, is going to collapse. That is a good thing. We should hasten its demise, in every peaceful and non-violent way we can. And we should look to get out of the cities and into more resilient and life-affirming communities, before it comes crashing down around our ears.
We should bear in mind that in physics, mathematics, in science and in life, it is often the simplest solutions which are the best. Think of Enstein’s theory of relativity. Almost nobody can understand it, but it does come down to one simple equation: e=mc(squared). (My apologies that I can’t type that properly on my keyboard, but you get the picture.) Simplicity is not only the highest form of elegance, it is also generally the best solution in terms of freedom, democracy, human rights, quality of life, ecological stewardship and genuine sustainability, and for community and urban design.
Remember Tainter’s analysis of how civilizations collapse: they collapse, in large part, because they become excessively complex – because, while that complexity of systems brings certain advantages, it also exponentially increases the system’s fragility, and hence, the civilization’s fragility, until, in its rigidity, its fragility, and its inability to adapt, it begins to crumble and to collapse. We are experiencing that right now, and globally. We are witnessing the beginning of collapse. We are at the beginning of the end of corporate globalization, and of corporate-run industrial civilization.
It is over-centralization – of demographics and populations, of political powers and government, of media control, mass communications, energy and culture, and especially overcentralization in terms of globalized economics, and at the heart of it, a vastly over-centralization and hyper-concentration of economic power and wealth – that is causing the multiple, inter-connected social, economic, political and ecological crises, and is driving the decline, decay, disintegration and slow-motion collapse of modern industrial societies. But over-centralization is also linked to and gives rise to excessive levels of complexity, and to rising levels of systems fragility, and systems collapse. What we do not want to do, therefore, and must not do, is to respond to these interlocking crises with more of the same thinking, and the same habits and patterns and models, that created the crises in the first place – which is exactly what we are doing now.
“Hmm… Let’s see: Over-centralization, combined with extreme concentrations of power and wealth, has produced instability, fragility, disintegration, chaos and decay…. So…let’s redouble our efforts, and do more of that.” That is the Great Reset agenda in a nutshell. That is the agenda and the mind-set of the elite. And that, is madness.
As Eistein said, you cannot solve a problem with the same thinking that created it. Moreover, as Eistein also said, Repeating the same behaviour and expecting different results is the very definition of insanity.
I think of something my great Swiss aunt used to say often: “Complicated works too.”
But then again, complicated works, only until it doesn’t. And complicated, is a strategy that is rapidly and systemically failing us now.
As Thoreau said, “Simplify, simplify.”
Remember what Aldous Huxley said, in his most important book, which is Brave New World Revisited: the central problem of society is over-organization. A certain level of organization is needed for any society, but when we adopt what Aldous Huxley called over-organization, we get bureaucracy, technocracy, unaccountable governments, and insulated, out of touch, self-serving and self-rationalizing elites, a stifling and claustrophobic, suffocating society, and a gulag society in the end, followed by collapse. The Soviet Union is the perfect textbook example. And the world is now racing to follow that same model, once again, into tyranny, a dark age, dystopia, and finally, collapse. We had best lift our heads and look around, because we are on the wrong track. This track leads to Auschwitz, and to the collapse of our civilization, for those who live long enough to see it.
We don’t need to be romantic primitivists, nor do we need to be anti-technology; but worshipping technology, and an endless line of consumer gadgets, as our salvation, is simply a form of madness. Technology is neutral, other than certain ones which should be banned, such as genetic engineering, industrial agriculture, factory farming, nuclear power and weapons of mass destruction. It depends on how we use technology, whether it improves life, or degrades and destroys it. Both technophilia, or the worship of technology as salvation, and technophobia (though to a far lesser extent) are unreasonable attitudes to take, but the former will almost invariably degrade, if not destroy our lives, our communities, and our world. (And yes, Elon Musk, Klaus Schwabe and Eric Schmidt are insane.)
Technology is neither the problem nor the solution. The problem is over-centralization, excessive concentrations of power and wealth, and the systems, institutions, mindsets, ideologies, policies, habits and norms that are founded upon over-centralization, and are based in extreme inequality of power and wealth. The solutions are in our nature, as David Suzuki wisely says, and the solutions are implicit and clear, once we clearly recognize the nature of the problem.
What is perhaps most urgent and imperative for us to realize, is this. Engineering is a marvellous set of skills and knowledge, but it must be guided and constrained by human values of solidarity, equitability, ecology, peace, democracy, human rights, and freedom. Left to their own devices, and infatuated by their powers and their worship of moulding and controlling all life, engineering becomes ecological destruction and ecological holocaust, and, simultaneously, technocracy and fascism.
That is what you get when you disconnect engineering from the core values of democracy, human rights, freedom and ecology. You get tyranny and you get destruction, masquerading as human progress and human liberation. You get an Orwellian dark age, followed by collapse.
If we are sane, we will firmly and passionately reject technocracy, which is a cult of social engineering, and root both engineering and government, and above all, the economy, in democracy, human rights and freedom, as well as ecology: and that requires and demands a fundamental rejection of over-centralization, a rejection of all excessive concentrations of power, whether political, cultural or economic, and a firm and unwaivering, categorical rejection of all forms of authoritarian rule, in favour of constitutional democracy, diversity and freedom, rooted in ecological awareness.
“Two roads diverged in the woods,
and I took the one less travelled by.
And that has made all the difference.”
The fork in the road is here. Nature will correct us in the end, if we are too stupid to correct ourselves. But over-centralization will end in either case, and soon.
We need to analize the problems, yes – as we have done here. But we also need to open our eyes and our minds to opportunities and potentials – as we have also done here. We need vision, not just analysis. Further: We must cease to forever be patching holes in the Titanic with ever more duct tape, bubblegum and bailing twine. We must begin to think big – and we often do that best by first thinking small, with a big mind view of unlimited possibilities.
We must now reject all theories, attitudes, philosophies, policies, parties, platforms, agendas and ideologies that are based in elitism, hubris, a command and control fetish, demagoguery, false messiahs, authoritarianism, and their inevitable concommitants of over-centralization, bureaucratization, technocracy, standardization, homogenization, uniformity and obedience. We must therefore reject figures such as Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Hegel, Spencer and Marx. Above all, we must refuse, at once, to be serfs or slaves, or to have our boot on anyone’s neck – and we must reject all dogmatism and monocultures of the mind.
We can and should have values, views, philosophies, preferences and opinions, but we must now hold them with a less feverish and desperate, clutching grip, and open our minds and our eyes, as well as our hearts and our ears. Diversity, creativity, imagination, experimentation, solidarity and freedom are not threats to be overcome, but values to ge embraced – and what’s more, they are our greatest of powers, and our greatest strengths.
Vision is good. Adaptability is better. But why settle for one, when we can just as easily embrace both?
We must now overcome, and firmly reject and jettison, our 2,000 year old + idolatry of ideology: our obession with our symbols, our pet theories and our cherished, preconceived notions, and presumptions about the way things must be. We must begin to deal more directly with reality. That will require a rejection of dogmatism, and a rejection of conformity, servility, submissiveness and submission, unthinking obedience to authority, a command and control fetish and mentality, the entire passive-aggressive split, the social model based on domination and submission, conquest and empire, along with all fixed and rigid habits of legalism, authoritarianism, and group-think; and a willingness to question and reflect, a willingness to try out new ideas, to freely discuss and debate, and to experiment. It will require, in short, and as a necessity, creativity and imagination, as well as adaptability and resilience. That, in turn, requires diversity, openess, and freedom. And that, requires decentralization, the rejection and overturning of excessive concentrations of power, and a reaffirmation of freedom, democracy, diversity, and the local. We now begin to understand these key dynamics, or we are doomed to a dark age ahead.
All the greatest thinkers, from Lao Tzu to Emerson, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Thoreau, Chomsky and Popper, Bookchin, Kropotkin, Vandana Shiva and Helena Norberg-Hodge, and many, many more, have realized these central truisms of life. Over-centralization, the excessive use of force, in any manner, great inequality and excessive concentrations of wealth and power, breed tyranny, decay, fragility, instability, rigidity, blindness, myopia, decline, and finally, collapse. It is now no longer a luxury to be so lucid, prescient and well-informed. It is now a necessity for survival.
Think networks, think federations, think alliances of mutual responsibility and mutual aid, think holistically, think in systems, think organically, think both micro and macro, long term and short; and think of a global network of communities, cities, villages and towns, and maybe a few sensible nations and states along with them, that leads the world to a renewal of democracy, freedom, the Earth, and Life. That is within our power to achieve. And we can and must build it now.
Build the alliance for a global renaissance, based in local communities, ecological sanity, diversity, democracy, freedom and peace. That is what the world needs now – not an Orwellian dystopia of global technocracy, ruled an egomaniacal and messianic elite, drunk with power.
What is going on in 2020/2021? The world has developed a pandemic case of Stockholm Syndrome. The Davos elite have decided it’s time to go totalitarian, and the political class are aiding and abetting the criminal global fascist coup. The majority of people remain stupified and petrified and virtually lobotomized by daily, continuous, all pervasive fear-monger, indoctrination, psychological warfare and propaganda, while a rapidly growing minority realize this is endgame: that we either stand up now, or become slaves forever.
Beware the military industrial complex, as Eisenhower so presciently, soberly, and ominously warned us, 60 years ago, and beware the now global Deep State which it controls. And know that it has now morphed into a global military industrial technotronic “Big Data” and financial complex. Beware above all, of the Big Tech, Pharma and banking elites, and their agenda – including Google, Amazon, Netflix, Uber, Facebook, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft and Apple: they are now aggressively pushing and implementing a global technocracy, and they are quite literally crypto-fascists. Boycott and divest from them all, and reject their Orwellian vision – decisively, unflinchingly, and now.
Remember this always: While the dangers are stark, and very real, the global awakening of humanity, and the emerging resistance and renaissance, are also real, and are ultimately far more powerful than any system, empire, oligarchy, or elite powers, agendas and plans. Know what side you are on. And stand up for your rights, and those of others, as we join together, in unity amidst our great and wondrous, and essential diversity, to heal our world, our communities, and ourselves, and to liberate humanity and the Earth from the dying system of plutocracy, oligarchy and greed.
The question will be asked, however, who in their right mind would support such a vision and plan of action as I have outlined here? Well, let’s see. The libertarians, anarchists, libertarian socialists, communitarians and greens, if they have any sense, should emphatically and passionately support it – and they collectively make up at least 30% of the population, if not a good deal more. Sensible conservatives will support it, because it strengthens constitutional rights and freedoms, dislodges and dethrones the oligarchy, and rebuilds strong and free, prosperous local communities. Sensible liberals should support it, if there are any such creatures left, and I know that there are more than a few. Adding the liberals and conservatives we have at least another 30% of the population. And democratic socialists should support it, as well. That means, together, at least 60% of the people, and possibly as many as 80%, should support such a plan, and ardently. That leaves only the fascists, the authoritarians of various stripes, the fans of technocracy, and the people who have made a career or an ideology out of licking their boots, along with the die-hard ideologues. Together, that sordid lot make up no more than 40% of the populace, would be a reasonable estimate, or less. So yes, the question is not whether the people would support it, but whether the people simply have the nerve to make the kinds of changes and take the kinds of action which are clearly and urgently needed. They most certainly will at some point in the near future, if not immediately. The changes that are taking place now and rapidly gaining speed, will drive them to the conclusion that all else is sheer madness, or slavery, or both.
Tainter was at least in part right, and in our case, his warning is most definitely relevant. We have created such excessive complexity for ourselves, that it has resulted in a fragility in our systems and our entire society – worse, it has resulted in fetters, chains, blindness and tyranny. As Thoreau said, “Simplify, simplify.” But that is not where the elite are driving us. They are driving us in precisely the opposite, and wrong, direction.
I have thought, we should seek to keep our lives, and the places we live, clean, green, simple and harmonious. And that applies also to our communities. And to those four guiding principles or guiding values I would add three more, which apply to both our communities and our society in general: that is, we should strive to make them vital, resilient, and just. And in turn, these three also apply to our lives and our homes, our schools, and places of work or leisure. With these seven guiding principles, our communities can thrive, and our lives and our society can thrive. If, on top of this firm foundation, we add some well-chosen and thoughtful layers of complexity, that is fine; but we should make sure, as Thoreau also warned, that our “improvements”, our clever innovations, or our safety and security measures, do not become a burden and a bondage, instead of a blessing and a liberation.
As always, life is change, and the future is in our hands. That is what is perhaps most critical for us to realize, and to know – especially now.
Get ready for a more community-centred world. It is needed, and urgently so; and it is now inevitable, and also a sheer necessity, as well as a boon, and a rebirth. Nature will force us to make that change and others, if we don’t make them voluntarily. We would be smart to make them voluntarily, and now.
J. Todd Ring,
March 30, 2021
Post-Script:
Who are some of the guiding lights in terms of what must be done? I would suggest Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, Thoreau, Chomsky, Vandana Shiva, Murray Bookchin, EF Schumacher, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, Erich Fromm, Anthony J. Hall, David Suzuki, Ronald Wright, Richard Heinberg, Gar Alperowitz, David C. Korten, Joanna Macy, Elinor Ostrom, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Gerald Celente, Max Keiser, Paul Craig Roberts, Michel Chossudovsky, Whitney Webb, Gary Null, Sayer Ji, Rocco Galati, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine are among them. And I would also humbly offer my own essays and books, as a summary and a synthesis of the best.
We have confused wisdom with power, and quality of life with quantity of money and material goods. Until we correct that deep confusion, modern industrial society will be, and will remain, doomed to destroy itself. Cutting through illusion, therefore, is not a luxury for philosophers, scientists, monks and mystics alone. It is an urgent necessity for us all.
As Plato said, everyone has opinions, but few have knowledge. It is important that we keep that in the back of our minds, if not the fore.
Two levels, there are, in everything: there is the question of how to live, and how to construct a society that is just, good, or intelligent, which is the worldly aspect, pertaining to moral, social and political philosophy; then there is the ultimate question of the true nature of being and reality. Extremely few people do a good job in addressing either one, only a handful have done a good job in addressing both. This is an important thing to realize and to bear in mind.
In terms of moral, social and political philosophy:
No man is an island, as Martin Luther King Jr. said. That means, we are all interconnected and interdependent. That means that kindness, compassion and mutual aid are not only virtuous, but also a matter of basic intelligence, or enlightened self-interest.
From that flows an ethos of compassion, community, solidarity, cooperation or mutual aid. And from that flows an ethos, a value of, and a profound respect for, liberty or freedom, since it is certainly experienced to be a violence, an act of aggression, and a cruelty and great suffering to be made someone else’s slave, or to have our freedom unduly constrained, and to be dominated by any man, woman, or system.
Taking compassion and freedom as our core founding values, or community and freedom, or liberty, equality, solidarity, the founding values of the Enlightenment, however you may prefer to say it, will produce a just, equitable, and eminently sane society, and in the relative sense of the term, an enlightened democracy. That is all we need to know and to remember in order to build a better world, and to resolve the great social, economic, political and environmental crises which we face now. But we will have to be bold about it, and swift. Remember that Jesus did not drive the money changers from the temple with a limp piece of leaf lettuce, but with a whip. Remove the money changers from power. Only then can we seriously begin to address the urgent problems confronting us.
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As to enlightenment, in the absolute or ultimate sense, or the nature of knowledge vs opinion, and the true nature of being and reality, we can say this.
In short, and to put the matter as succinctly as possible, we are born, as Kant rightly said, with innate frameworks of thought, an innate latticework or architecture of inborn thought constructs, through which we view and experience the world. As Descartes and Locke rightly said, we know that we are thinking, and we believe we are accurately percieving things as they truly are, but the accuracy of our perceptions is radically in question.
Thought relates to thought, and while we believe we are directly relating to things in the world, when we examine our minds closely, we see that we are relating directly, only to our own ideas about things, and not directly to phenomena or things themselves. That is, everything we percieve, think or experience, is filtered through an unconscious and habitual set of mental constructs, a set of filters and lenses, as well as social conditioning and indoctrination. We do not, therefore, relate to anything directly, but only to our own unconscious mental architecture of preconceived thought constructs, lenses and filters.
To put it in Buddhist terms, all phenomena (beings, things and events) are viewed by our minds with an unrecognized mental imputation. We think we see separate, concrete, divided beings and things; but while being exists, and Descartes was right on that, the “I” is imputed, and has no valid basis in reality. We impute or project a separation, permanence and division to phenomena, beings and things, where none exists in reality. As Einstein said, “The field is everything.”
Remember what Alan Watts said. “Most metaphysics are unconscious metaphysics. And unconscious metaphysics are bad metaphysics.” Question everything.
Descartes famously began modern philosophy, 400 years ago, by trying to go back to first principles, trying to make zero assumptions or unsupported premises (philosophy and science both are riddled with unconscious and unsupported assumptions) to see what we can know for certain, and then to build a coherent philosophy on that firm ground or foundation. He did not assume that any given authority is 100% certain in its reliability, nor was he willing to assume that any idea, theory, philosophy, ideology or theology is necessarily 100% reliable. That left only radical empiricism (and let us not fetishize an obsession with numbers and measurement, solely, any longer). In short, we must examine things for ourselves: that is, as the Buddha also urged, to not resort to simply taking someone’s word on things, as being the infallible truth.
Descartes said, What if I am dreaming? When I dream, things in the dream seem real, but when I awake, I realize I was only dreaming. How do I know I am not dreaming now? How do I know my perceptions of reality are accurate? Maybe they are 100% accurate, or 90%, or 1%, or completely illusory and delusional? How do I verify what is actially real or true?
Without seriously addressing this question of perception vs reality, and the problem of imputing realities to reality – as Hume asked, in his landmark work which radically transformed the entire landscape of Western philosophy, in 1776, and which no one yet has satisfactorily answered, in the West at least – there can be no sound foundation for either science or philosophy, and we will be wildly speculating, and completely unscientific and anti-empirical, without even knowing it.
And we are!
(Most scientists have never seriously addressed Hume, or this question, the problem of inference or imputation, which is foundational to any true, genuine, or valid empiricism, or any truly scientific or philosophical approach; and hence, do not really merit being called scientists. The same goes for great majority of philosophers, religious leaders, politicians, pundits, scholars, and social or political commentators: their words and views rest on thin air. They have all the reliability of quacking ducks, and so, their statements should be taken with a train load of salt.)
Descartes then realized, I am thinking, therefore I know, at least, that I exist. Cogito ergo sum. But he was mistaken, and radically so. And to my knowledge, no one has yet realized or pointed out his error – until now.
If there is thinking, and we do directly experience thinking, so we can confirm that much, then there must be consciousness, and existence or being, of some kind. The “I” in Descartes’ famous, “I think therefore I am”, however, is simply a habitual, unexamined, and utterly unsupported assumption – an unconscious mental imputation or projection, with no valid basis in reality, and no sound evidence to support it.
We then have:
A. Thinking is present
B. Therefore:
i, consciousness of some kind is present;
and
ii, being or existence of some kind is present.
We know therefore that there exists consciousness and its contents, being or existence of some kind, and space. There is no basis for presuming or imputing duality, permanence or division of any kind, however. And we should remember, distinction is not the same as division. The crests and troughs of waves on the ocean are distinct, but there is no real division between crest and trough, or between waves. The waves are a formation or movement of the ocean, but the ocean while ever changing, remains essentially unchanged, and one. Reflect deeply on this, and the nature of all phenomena will become clear.
The assumption or imputation of a separate self, an “I”, a self that is a separate island in a vast cosmos, is wholly unsupported, and pure, anti-empirical and unscientific conjecture, speculation, or mere superstition – no matter how firmly or habitually we may believe it, and no matter how many others may believe it. The imputation or assumption of a duality between self and other, or any kind of duality of being, is similarly unsubstantiated mental flotsam, without any sound basis or empirical support whatsoever. The burden of proof rests on those who assert a positive claim of some entity, attribute or thing, by the way, and not on those who deny it, for lack of evidence. (See Bertrand Russell’s teapot analogy.)
Remember, it was only yesterday, in the long view of human history, that everyone “knew”, and was absolutely certain, that the Earth was the centre of the universe. It just so happened that everyone was wrong.
Not long ago, slavery was thought to be natural, normal, ethical, and just. Virtually everyone, from Aristotle and emperors, to popes, priests, “learned men”, scholars, scientists and the common people, knew that slavery was natural, normal and just. But everyone was wrong.
In both cases, what was assumed by everyone to be unquestionably true, turned out to be flatly and completely mistaken and wrong. It is the same with the nearly universal belief in duality. We are, as Plato said, dwellers in a cave of shadows. But enlightenment, or waking up to reality, is entirely within our reach.
Enlightenment, it should be added, does not mean floating off into space, on some mystical cloud. It means, quite simply, waking up. It means seeing reality clearly, for the first time, and abiding in that awareness of the non-dual nature of emptiness and form, being and reality, with universal compassion, indestructible peace, and natural, spontaneous, intelligent responsiveness, as the naturally arising result, of simply being fully and truly awake.
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Does this mean nothing exists? No, that is nihilism, and it is a delusion, as the Buddhists have also made clear – and a dangerous delusion. Does that mean everything exists in the mind, and that only the mind exists? No, that is philosophical idealism, or in Buddhist terminology, the Mind Only school; and that, while closer to the truth than nihilism, is also a misperception with regards to the true nature of reality.
Does that mean that the dualism of Descartes, and his materialist bias, along with Newton’s mechanistic view of the universe, should be rejected? Yes.
Newtonian mechanics still work, as crude approximations which have their uses in technology, for example, but the non-dualist view of Spinoza turns out to be far more accurate as a theory, paradigm or world view, and will lead us to better experiments, new discoveries, and most importantly, better judgement and better actions and policies, leading to a better society, and a better world.
Does it then mean we should adopt an interactionist view of mind and body, consciousness and matter? No. That would be vastly superior to the dualistic, mechanistic, materialist-reductionist world view which we now accept as “knowledge”, as “scientific”, “empirical”, as “educated” opinion, or as common sense. But that would be an ecological view, a holistic or organic view, which is vastly superior, more accurate and more sane, but still subtly imprecise.
No, it means that a non-dualistic view is the only view supported by either a radical empiricism, a thorough-going empiricism, a genuine empiricism, an authentically scientific approach; or by the philosophers and sages who wrote, spoke and elaborated the view of non-duality, in what has been called the Perennial Philosophy.
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Note that quantum physics – if we are not unscientific about it, and anti-intellectual, or irrationally averse to drawning conclusions, based on clear and unequivocal evidence (a few “scientists” fit that description, and a very few “philosophers”) – demonstrated over a century ago, that the atomistic, mechanistic, dualistic, materialist-reductionism which we fell into, as in a bog, along with Netwon and Descartes, a mere four centuries ago, is a radically mistaken paradigm, theory, ideology, philosophy, or view of reality. What modern physics shows us, is not that elaborate conjectures of multiple universes or dimensions (all speculative conjecture) are necessarily the reality, but more pointedly, and of profoundly more importance, that the imagined duality, separation or division between subject and object, self and other, mind and body, and consciousness and “matter”, is entirely fictional, and does not exist.
As Enstein said, “The perception of a division between self and other is a kind of optical delusion.” “We must stop talking about the particle and field. The field is everything.”
Or as Schrodinger, the godfather of quantum mathematics, said, perhaps even more strikingly, “The number of minds in the universe is one.”
Note that Einstein said he believed in Spinoza’s view of God. That is, there is only one substance in existence, and you can call it God, or you call it nature, but it is One.
As the last of the ancient philosophers, Plotinus said: the many are One; the One manifests as many.
Or as the Tao Te Ching says, “Naming is the mother of the ten thousand things.”
Or as the Heart Sutra, the Heart of the Sutra of the Perfection of Wisdom, says:
“Form is emptiness; emptiness is form.
Form is not other than emptiness; emptiness is not other than form.”
This is explicitly stated to be a refutation and a denial of both nihilism and eternalism. The true nature of reality lies in the middle way between those two extremes, both of which are delusional.
How do we come, to first conceptually, and then experientially, and deeply, understand and then directly see and realize the non-duality of being and reality? Begin with reflecting deeply and often on the interdependence of all beings, things and phenomena. That will lead to higher awareness, liberation and enlightenment, and will avoid the terrible rotting bog, which is the mental prison, of nihilism.
Then examine the labelling process of the mind. That will finish the job of removing all remaining traces of doubt and dualistic delusion.
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Spinoza and Plotinus, in the West, along with Meister Eckhart, Thomas Merton, Mathew Fox, Ken Wilber, Joseph Campbell, Joanna Macy, Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, Allan Wallace, Einstein, Shrodinger, Wheeler, Bohm, and myself; and Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Shankara and the Buddha in the East, to make a very incomplete list, have all expressed the perennial philosophy of non-duality. We would be wise to at least look into it, and to keep an open mind.
But above all, think for yourself. Question everything. And as the Buddha said, examine things for yourself, see for yourself.
As Shakespeare said, “There is more to heaven and earth than is contained in your philosophy.” “Life is rounded by a little sleep.”
And as Thoreau said,
“There is more day yet to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.”
We are not smaller or lesser than we had imagined, but infinitely more. Being and reality is basically good. The world is in a dark and terrible state because it is ruled by illusions. Illusion is the root of our problems. Uproot that, and we can live in peace, and in lives, and a world, more beautiful than we dare to imagine.
Compassion, and the unceasing search for truth: these are our best guides, and our sole concerns, if we are aware enough to live in ways that are truly sensible and intelligent. With compassion and the pursuit of truth (not the dogmatic presumption of truth) as our beacons, the future is brighter than our dreams. Without them, we are lost.
The choice, as always, is ours to make.
J. Todd Ring,
March 28, 2021
Post-Script:
It has become the fashionable norm in Western philosophy, in the past few centuries, for philosophers to write great tomes of books, often hundreds of pages long, and in the most arcane and obscure language possible. There is a good reason for this. It is to hide the fact that most philosophers have little or nothing to say. (The fetish is also for maximum footnotes, since ideas are not judged on their own merits, as all good science or philosophy does, but are judged by how well they can be entangled upon the architecture of presumed authority. We are thoroughly scholastic as a result, pre-Enlightenment, and more medieval than the medievalists.) In fact, aside from Socrates, Spinoza, Plotinus and Hume, and a handful of others, most of Western philosophy is the finger-painting of preschoolers. It is not worth the paper it is written on. That certainly includes all of post-modernism, which has virtually lobotomized intellectuals for the past fifty years. (Replace all the post-modernists, existentialists and phenomenologists with a study of Emerson, Blake and Thoreau, and we would be getting somewhere – beyond our present state, which is parked in a cul de sac.) In a few short words, we have said here what thousands of books on philosophy and politics have not, and could not, because they lacked the clarity, and the depth, to be able to do so. The importance of a work is not measured by its volume of words. The Declaration of Independence, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, the UN Charter of Human Rights, the Magna Carta, and Henry David Thoreau’s On Civil Disobedience, are short, pithy works, of unsurpassed importance. Thoreau’s essay On Civil Disobedience is just fifteen pages, and the Heart Sutra is just two pages; but they are the most important political and philosophical tracts, respectively, ever written. Do not be fooled by wordiness and verbosity, or by esoteric and arcane language. Most of it is nothing but hot air – a tale full of sound and fury, told by an idiot, signifying nothing.
See also:
The Hero With A Thousand Faces – Joseph Campbell
World As Lover, World As Self – Joanna Macy
Choosing Reality – Allan Wallace
The Holographic Universe – Michael Talbot
Mysticism and The New Physics – Michael Talbot
Dialogues With Scientists and Sages – Rene Weber
Dreamtime and Inner Space – Holgar Kalweit
The Way of Zen – Alan Watts
Tao: The Watercourse Way – Alan Watts
The Mother Of The Buddhas – Lex Hixon
The Perennial Philosophy – Aldous Huxley
No Boundary – Ken Wilber
Stolen Continents – Ronald Wright
A Short History of Progress – Ronald Wright
Year 501: The Conquest Continues – Noam Chomsky
Necessary Illusions: Thought Control In Democratic Societies – Noam Chomsky
The Shock Doctrine – Naomi Klein
A Game As Old As Empire – John Perkins
Class Warfare – Noam Chomsky
The Power Elite – C. Wright Mills
Giants: The Global Power Elite – Peter Phillips
The New Rulers Of The World – John Pilger
Ancient Futures – Helena Norberg-Hodge
From The Ground Up – Helena Norberg-Hodge
The Chalice and The Blade – Rianne Eisler
The Ecology of Freedom – Murray Bookchin
Mutual Aid – Peter Kropotkin
The Empathic Civilization – Jeremy Rifkin
Elders’ Wisdom – David Suzuki
The Wayfinders – Wade Davis
The Great Turning – David C. Korten
Oneness vs The 1% – Vandana Shiva
Enlightened Democracy – J. Todd Ring
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Here is a good introduction to epistemology, ontology and metaphysics, or the question of what is the true nature of appearances versus reality, in the short video below. It is only an introduction, however. Russell does not answer the question here, but merely sets the stage for the investigation, which is itself important, though incomplete. See Plato’s Parable of the Cave, Descartes, Spinoza, and finally, the Buddha and Nagarjuna.
Note that BR is among the best in terms of political philosophy, and among the worst for metaphysics. But he at least introduces the question of perception vs reality well.
Or start with my book, Enlightened Democracy, which synthesizes the best of East and West, North and South, ancient and modern, science and spirituality, the philosophical and the political, long term vision and immediate action. Then read Joseph Campbell, Alan Watts, Allan Wallace, Joanna Macy, Ken Wilber, Murray Bookchin, and the other major figures listed above.
It is in emptying ourself of ourself that we find ourself, and are renewed.
Ideology is neither salvation nor liberation.
As important as a paradigm shift, a shift in world view, or a shift in consciousness and perspective, clearly is, we must understand this. It is not ideas or ideology that will save us.
Belief never saved anyone. Faith is trust, or you could say confidence. Belief is dogma. Faith and dogma are not only different, they are opposite poles. They can combine, but they are definite opposite polarities. Some degree of trust, faith, or confidence is needed, or at least greatly helpful. But even these terms mislead people. What is needed is openness. If your belief, faith, ideology or dogma closes you – which is usually what they do – then you are going backwards, or are at least remaining stagnant. What we need is not a new ideology, theology or religion, but simply a fresh perspective. We need to open our eyes, and take a fresh look at things, as they are, and not through the filters and lens or our ideologies, fervently held beliefs, and cherished assumptions.
This is the challenge. And there are proven methodologies or practices which can help us do that – which can open us up to life, the world, nature, and our deeper selves, which means opening to the sacred in the process.
There is prayer – and especially prayer that is an opening into stillness and receptivity, rather than making requests, which are fine, but insufficient, as spiritual practice. There are numerous practices for contemplation. There is meditation, which is powerful far beyond most people’s wildest imagination, though it generally works slowly, and is not something akin to a microwave pizza, that’s done in two minutes.
There is yoga, t’ai chi, chi gong, sweat lodges and saunas. There is pilgrimage. There is the simple but powerful, and sometimes very challenging path, of what in the East is called karma yoga, or in the West is called service to others, where you open your heart and give of yourself for others’ benefit.
And there are many ways, from simple to elaborate, for opening yourself up, simply and in solitude, to nature, so that the sacred presence which is omnipresent, fills, and awakens that radically fresh perspective, arising out of simple, naked openess, which brings ecstasis: the ability to see things freshly and as they more truly are; which is both refreshing and healing, and at once liberating and revelatory, enlightening.
The point here is that we must learn to unlearn: we must strip away preconceptions and ideologies, or at least set them aside for periods of silence and inner stillness, where our chattering minds filled with presumed “knowledge” can become quiet enough that we can truly know, by truly seeing for the first time.
Ideas, concepts, theories, ideologies, words and beliefs can be helpful. But if we cannot at least set them aside for periods of inner stillness, devoid of conceptual frameworks of preconceived beliefs, then we will see nothing, and know nothing, and we will live in darkness forever, forever to be the dwellers of Plato’s cave of shadows, filled with self-righteous and self-presuppossing dogmas and beliefs, while the Earth and our society burn.
Seeing is what we need, not ideology. Do not go to the extreme of trying to banish ideology, philosophy, theory or belief: that will only make you nihilistic, and more deeply lost. But take your cherished beliefs with a little more lightness, and do not cling to them like they are salvation. They are not. A little humility and openess, combined with dignity and confidence, will open the door to the heart, and free the mind from its shackles, its prison, and its chains – the ones we so often presume we are free from.
Remember what Augustine said: “The final obstacle to God is our ideas about God.” Meditate and reflect on that deeply. And know that it applies to enlightenment, liberation, reality and truth, no matter what your world view may be. The map is not the terrain. The signpost is not the destination.
(See Gregory Bateson, Alan Watts, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Shakara, The Cloud of Unknowing, Vine Deloria, Thomas Merton, Meister Eckhart, Mathew Fox, the Gospel of Thomas, Joseph Campbell, Chogyam Trungpa or Zen, among many other sources, for further elaboration on stillness and seeing vs ideology and belief.)
Seeing is enlightenment, not theory, ideology or belief. And remember that we do not need everyone to become enlightened right away. What we need is a loosening of the rigidities of mind, so that a sufficient freshness of perspective can arise that we can begin dealing with reality. Then three things will happen. We will become refreshed, re-energized, inwardly enriched and empowered. We will be on our way to enlightenment, because we have made some inner space for it. And we will be able to deal with reality, so that we can heal ourselves, our communities, and our world. And that is no small thing. That is achievable, and neccessary – right now. There is no time for delay. Pause for stillness, focus and clarity, then, let us together heal our troubled world. And in healing our world, we will find own our healing and liberation in the process.
(This ought to raise the hackles of the fundamentalists – both secular and religious. But I don’t write for the narrow of mind anyway, so I am not concerned about that.)
Now here is someone who knows what he is talking about: Rabbi David C. Cooper explains what non-dualism is, from the perspective of Kabbalah, which is the Jewish mystical tradition.
(Radio recording of talk is linked below.)
“The idea that we have of God as some being, as some thing, in essence, as a noun that we relate to – it’s me and God, or the creation and the creator – is really not the way mystical Kabbalah looks at the divine. It relates to God in what they term Ein Sof, which can be translated as boundlessness, which has no characteristic and no description, and is constantly present everywhere at all times, and is not some *thing*. So, the closest that we can come to, is describing it as a process, and this is the reason for the idea of God as a verb.”
(Note the similarity and congruence with Whitehead’s concept of the cosmos and all that is within it, and reality itself, as being a *process*, and not an assortment of things. We should look again at Whitehead, and Einstein, and Schrödinger, and Wheeler, and Bohm, because they are each saying something very similar to what the mystics have said for millennia – and are still saying, if any have ears to hear!)
“In the end, the East and West come together in the deepest meditative practices” – Rabbi David Cooper
And what Rabbi David Cooper says, is perfectly in accord with what Meister Eckhart said – and Meister Eckhart is the archetypal Christian mystic:
“There is nothing that I can point to that is not God. God is within me, and God is all around me.” – Meister Eckhart, 13th century Christian Dominican theologian, philosopher, and Germany’s greatest mystic (along with Hildegard of Bingen, who in turn, inspired St. Francis, and Da Vinci, and the Renaissance).
The New Testament Bible also sheds light on the subject, when the story is told of the disciples asking Jesus when the kingdom of heaven would come. (Everyone was expecting it any day.) And Jesus answered:
“It will not come by waiting for it.”
(There is a shocker that should make people stop and think.)
And Jesus continued:
“If the kingdom of heaven was above you the birds would have preceded you. If the kingdom of heaven was beneath you the fish would have preceded you. Rather, the kingdom of heaven is within you.”
Remember, we are created in the image of God. And moreover, how can all-pervasive mean anything other than all-pervasive? All-pervasive means, unless we are deeply neurotic or deeply indoctrinated into mumbo-jumbo double-think, quite simply, non-duality. All-pervasive is all-pervasive. That means there is nothing that is outside of God. God is the very fabric of reality, as the Jewish mystics have said: “God is the only reality.” And that is not a philosophical idealism which is being presented, but a non-dualist view.
How do evil and suffering arise? Evil arises from dualistic illusion – namely, the clinging to the illusion of a separate self, or ego, and all the greed, conflict, anger, lust, possessiveness, hubris and hate that arise out of self-cherishing and egocentricity. Suffering likewise arises out of not knowing who we are or even what is real. Suffering arises from the illusion of duality, the illusion of separateness and lack. This is precisely why the ancient Greeks held the highest maxim to be “Know thyself”, and why the founder of Western philosophy, Socrates, had that maxim written on his tombstone. Know thyself. Become awake. Seek enlightenment. They are saying the same thing. Wake up! Seek and ye shall find. “Let those who have eyes see.”
And in the Old Testament, God spoke, saying, “I AM that I am.” The clear indication was and is that God is beyond all names and forms, and all of our ideas or concepts, utterly transcendent – and the mystics, and Jesus, both avowed, imminent as well as transcendent. And when the sacred is both imminent and transcendent, and is not limited by any specific form, that is non-dualism, by definition.
Which is why Meister Eckhart could describe God as “the ground of being”. This is based in Biblical teachings, as well as his own direct experience as a mystic. Again, the maxim of Socrates and the ancient Greeks now makes perfect sense: know thyself, and all shall be revealed – because the true nature of your own being, is the true nature of Being itself, the Being of beings, as Heidegger tried to get at. Or as Bob Marley said, “Open your eyes, and look within.”
And that non-dualistic view echoes all the great sages, as I have said. In the Upanishads, the sacred texts of India, it is said, echoing Jesus, when it is said in the Bible, “The kingdom of heaven is within you”, and echoing the Old Testament passage, where God says, “I AM”, the Upanishads puts it directly: I am that I am – “And thou art that.”
The central teaching of the yogis is, Tat Tvam Asi, which translates as, Thou art that. Meaning, there is no duality between God and the cosmos, or between you and God.
The dualistic illusion is represented mythologically and allegorically, in the PARABLE, not to be taken literally, of the exile from Eden. We exiled ourselves, by falling into the (false) “knowledge” of duality. We fell into dualistic illusion, and hence, suffer for our illusions, and because of our illusions. We have lost our sense of home, and of paradise, because we have become blind, by way of falling into the spell of illusion – the illusion of duality. But the Book of Genesis has been taken far too literally for 3,000 years – and that is precisely why we are lost.
The Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist and Taoist mystics all have understood this. It is high time we did too.
(See: Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces; Allan Wallace, Choosing Reality; Joanna Macy, World As Lover, World As Self; Karen Armstrong, A History of God; Rabbit David Cooper, God Is A Verb; and Mathew Fox, Original Blessing, for important, further reading.)
We can be free, and awake, if we choose it. Grace is present. And duality, is an illusion.
As the Dalai Lama said, the universal religion is love. So on the outer level, the level of social and ethical teachings, there is a basic accord between the major religions: love thy neighbour. And when you get to the spiritual depths, to the mystic heart essence of the major religions, there too, you find accord: being and phenomena, reality and the cosmos, are non-dual.
Only the blind quarrel over what stands before them. One blind man says it is like a rope – feeling the elephant’s trunk. One says, no, it is like a pillar, feeling the leg. One says, no, it is like a broom, feeling the tail. One says, no, it is wrinkly – like a crumpled rug! And so they argue, and argue, and argue, and argue…..
As the Quran also says, everywhere you look is the face of Allah. Again, non-dualism is at the heart of the spiritual traditions of the world, as all the greatest religious scholars, such as Joseph Campbell, have also realized. And again, only the novices quibble.
(Meanwhile, the atheist materialists miss the banquet altogether, and stuff themselves on their own hollow dogmas, which never truly satisfy – which is why they tend to be so thorny and full of venom!)
The majority have a pre-school version of religion, and that is perfectly fine, but that is not all there is to spirituality – it goes much deeper than that.
Faith is not belief. There is a critical thing to understand. Faith, if it is sensible, is confident trust. When you put your food in the refrigerator, you have faith it won’t rot. You have confident belief, or confident trust. That is reasonable, sensible faith. Faith is not dogmatism, however. That is idiot faith. That is egotism, false pride, hubris, arrogance, narrowness, parochialism, prejudice, presumption, or smallness of mind.
Faith is confident trust, or confident belief. But when you SEE, you no longer need to rely on mere belief. Belief is the crutch of the blind – use it only until you learn how to see for yourself, and regain your lost sight. Then, belief becomes teaching – not a crutch, but a gift, freely given, to those who still remain sightless and blind, so they too can find their way. But “one who has seen”, does not cling to belief as though belief is salvation. No, belief does not save. Faith saves, and faith is not belief.
Realize who you are, and you will see. Then belief no longer enters into it. Belief is a raft. When you get to the other shore, you don’t carry the raft on your back. You put it down, and leave it for the next person to cross to the other shore.
The Renaissance caught a glimpse of our true nature, which is a spark of the divine – and it was that glimpse that brought Europe out of the Dark Ages. And that glimpse, and the resulting Renaissance, is exactly what we need again today.
“We are stardust, we are golden,We are caught in a devil’s bargain,And we’ve got to get ourselvesBack to the garden.” – Joni Mitchell, Woodstock
Alan Watts – who was an Anglican priest, but then decided it was too narrow of a space for him to be in, and who did his Masters of Divinity, and studied extensively and in great depth the philosophies and spiritual approaches of both East and West, and is probably the single greatest interpreter of Eastern philosophy for the Western world, and of Western religious philosophy for the Western world, which generally understands its own traditions and their richness not in the slightest – has many brilliant writings and many brilliant witticisms to convey. (He gets a bit gooey at the end, and resorts to what seems to me to be a much too laissez-faire approach, which for most people, simply induces torpor, sloth, self-indulgence, and a dreamy perpetual distraction – and a perpetual waste of time and of life, as a result. But his books which I have referenced here are extremely good, and extremely worthwhile to read. Only a rare few can match them.) In any case, he once said that there are “prickles and goos”. The prickles like to be very precise, or at least like to think of themselves as being very precise. They imagine they are being very scholarly and very scientific, but really, they are in general completely unable to see the forest for the trees. They never get beyond the mere surface of things. This, they bombastically pronounce to be “knowledge” – usually with a capital K. And wisdom, they believe, doesn’t exist. They are pretentious, blind fools, and Jesus and the Buddha would tell them the same.
The goos, on the other hand, like to reduce everything to a rosy vagueness – think, New Age pop psychology – and by doing so, they really do very little other than hang out, trying to look cool.
Precision is needed, in sum, but open-mindedness is needed too. Book learning is useful, but inadequate in itself. Experience trumps theory. Remember that.
Only novices squabble over doctrine. The mystics may engage in debate, may clarify important points, but they don’t attach such a great importance to words and belief, to doctrine and dogma and the written word, as has impaled the Western mind since the Book of Genesis.
We suffer from an idolatry of ideology in the West, and have for three millennia. (I am borrowing that phrase, from my favourite poet-musician, because it fits.) Our neurosis in the West is to think that our pet theories, dogmas and ideologies are THE truth. We are lost, precisely because we cling so tightly to our ideas.
Remember what Thomas Aquinas said after finishing the dictation of his Summa Theologica, his master work, which became the guiding text, along with the Bible (and unfortunately, along with the heresy of Augustine’s dark and jaundiced world-view, which came to overshadow the words and teachings of Christ, tragically). When he was finished, he put his head in his hands and wept, and said, “All that I have written is chaff compared to what I have seen.”
Remember what the very first line of the Tao Te Ching says:
“The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao.”
Words and ideas and texts are very useful, but they can never contain the full, complete or ultimate truth. Language and concepts simply fail to capture, much less convey, that which is without bounds.
Shankara, the mystic and philosopher of Advaita Vedanta, from the yogic tradition of India, spelled this out quite clearly, when he says that language and human thought are dualistic by nature: they compare this to that – and inherently dualistic language and thought, therefore, cannot possibly ever capture or convey that which by nature is non-dualistic.
Plato’s Seventh Letter echoes the same essential point: language, concepts and words can never capture or convey the ultimate truth. The same message is related in the Lankavatara Sutra, from the Buddhist teachings, and it is again echoed in the Taoist teachings, which say:
“When the rabbits are caught, the snares are forgotten.When the fish are caught, the nets are forgotten. When the truth is caught, the ideas are forgotten.”
The Tao Te Ching gets straight to heart of things, with one crucial line:
“Naming is the mother of the ten thousand things.”
Peel away the names, the labels, which our mind projects onto reality, imagining or imputing a division which does not exist, and in that open space of perceiving or seeing without dualistic thought projections, the unified field of being becomes self-evident. That realization of the non-dual, inseparable nature of being and reality, is what is called enlightenment. But no theory can deliver it. You must see for yourself. Words cannot convey it, nor can concepts, theory or ideas capture it.
As the Lankavatara Sutra says:
“All of the scriptures are like a finger pointing at the moon. If you mistake the finger for the moon, you will understand nothing.”
This is the problem with fundamentalism. Not only are fundamentalists forever fighting with one another, quarrelling, bickering, engaging in hubris and false pride perennially ad nauseum, sowing war and division and strife. There are deeper problems even than that. Fundamentalists are like people trying to climb a ladder, but they are so in love with the ladder, that they cling to the rungs, and are frozen – not realizing they are not rising at all, but are simply stuck to the ladder, like imbeciles.
The ladder is a tool, a part of the journey – it is not the destination. As Alan Watts said, if you want to go to Paris, you don’t climb the sign post that says, “Paris”. Or as he also put it, in his humourous sort of way, rascally Zen master as he was: “Intellectuals commonly make the mistake of eating the menu instead of the meal.”
Don’t be anti-intellectual. That is not helpful. That is foolish. But don’t fool yourself into thinking that theory is the same thing as experience. And it is experience that matters above all.
A scholar is not necessarily a sage, and usually is not. A pandit is not the same as a rishi, in Indian terms. One has knowledge; one has wisdom – and the two are categorically different.
Second hand information is only useful up to a certain degree. You have to walk the path for yourself. Only you can walk through the door – no one can walk through it for you. Grace is real. Help is available. But you still have to undertake the journey for yourself. No one can walk it for you. You put one foot in front of the other, and you start, naturally, where you are, wherever you happen to be.
“Knock, and the door shall be opened.” But you have to choose to walk through the door once it is opened! Having a fervent belief, or “faith” as it is erroneously called, that this door is a very good door, and maybe the only door, is not enough. No matter how fervently you believe, believing in the holiness of the door is not the same thing as walking through the door!
Study, reflect, actively seek out wisdom teachings, meditate and pray, and discuss (humbly! and with an open mind) – but remember, that which you seek cannot be contained within any limited, finite space – whether that be concepts and ideas, philosophical doctrines, theories, dogmas, ideologies or words. Truth is far bigger than that.
Empty your cup, so that it can be filled. Empty yourself of your self, so that you can be filled. Compassion empties you – and there is the secret. Empty yourself by giving, and by compassion, and the imaginary separate “self” the ego, dissolves into the space of pure Being, whereby, you become naturally filled, without even seeking anything. Compassionate action matters, but it is the emptying process that comes with true compassion which is most liberating. By that emptying of the self of the self, grace enters.
“He who saves himself will lose himself. He who loses himself will find himself.”
Confidence and dignity are virtues, and are useful, even necessary, but so too, is humility, and an open mind and open heart. Meditate on the true nature of being and phenomena, which are impermanent, and meditate on death – not to be morbid, but to really realize that all things are fleeting, and so, become truly open to life. These two meditations, combined with universal compassion, will open the door to the heart, and to wisdom.
Remember that all phenomena are impermanent, and fleeting – and this life is fleeting. Death is a certainty, and the hour of death is totally uncertain. Therefore, there is not a second to waste. This life IS a precious opportunity – to discover the sacred, here and now, in this life, in the midst of the world, or apart from it, for a time, in the heart of your own being.
Do not sprint to win the race, as the Tibetans say, and, “Don’t be sporadic.” Be patient, be persevering, but seek the truth with energy and vigour!
Remember what the Upanishads advise – and urge: “You should seek the truth like a man whose hair is on fire jumps into a lake.”
Enjoy the journey, and try not to be side-tracked or too distracted. Solomon was right: everything in this world is fleeting; therefore, chasing after things of this world is like chasing the wind. Do not do that. That is foolish, and a waste of your precious time. As Solomon advised, love God, and live a simple life. But do seek the truth, and seek it with a passion!
Again, it must be re-affirmed, and it can’t be emphasized enough:
Practice compassion, live with compassion to every extent of your power, and:
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.
Writings of J. Todd Ring 
Decentralization & Re-localization, Or Collapse
Posted in Uncategorized with tags 1%, analysis, anarchism, authoritarianism, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bioregionalism, boycott Big Tech, Chomsky, climate, climate change, climate emergency, collapse, communitarianism, community, crypto-fascist, Davos, decentralization, driverless cars, ecology, economics, economy, electric car, elite, emissions, enlightened democracy, enlightenment, environment, environmental economics, environmental footprint, environmental philosophy, environmental policy, environmental theory, EV, fascism, global analysis, Global Footprint, global issues, global warming, globalism, globalization, Great Reset, greatest danger, green, infrastructure, libertarian, libertarian socialism, libertarianism, liberty, localization, New Economy, Parecon, Participatory Economics, police state, policy, political economy, political philosophy, political science, political theory, politics, pollution, relocalization, social analysis, social commentary, social ecology, social philosophy, social psychology, social theory, sociology, systems collapse, systems theory, tesla, Tesla delusions, The Enlightenment, Thoreau, threat assessment, Transition Network, Transition Town, transportation, urban design, urban planning, urbanization, values, vision on March 30, 2021 by jtoddring“It’s not hard to do things right; it’s much harder to do things wrong.”
– Jane Jacobs
“Years of learning and a plethora of subtle and complicated dogma have arisen on a foundation of nonsense.” – Jane Jacobs
“For a city to thrive, it has to be forever young.” – Jane Jacobs
There is a Chinese curse, which says, “May you be born in interesting times.” It is a curse, because in peaceful times, not much of interest or note is happening. And we are, most certainly, living in interesting times now. As Thomas Paine said, “These are the times that try men’s souls.”
But there is also another Chinese saying, which is also relevant, and good to bear in mind: “A hard rain doesn’t last all day.” Or as George Harrison said, “All things must pass.”
All good things must come to an end – and all bad things too. The current shit storm which the world is now in, and which is heightening in intensity daily, will not last forever. It is good to keep that in mind.
Not that we should be complacent – that is the last thing we need, and one of the most foolish responses to life, particularly in troubled times, that we can possibly make. We must be much more proactive and much more engaged with the society, communities, nations and world we live in, or our future, both individually and collectively, will be decidedly dark.
There are times for yielding, times for waiting to see how things unfold, time to take a long mental vacation from the problems of life, times to be placid and quiescent. These are not such times.
It is always sound advice to keep our eyes and ears open, to be alert, although, yes, with as much inner calm as possible, and to pay attention to what you are doing, and what is going on, both inside yourself and around yourself, in the world at large. In such times as now, the imperative to keep our eyes open could not be greater.
Those who do choose to keep their eyes open, which, sadly, at the moment is a minority of the people, will in general weather the storm better, and moreover, will also be more empowered to help in the great task of our time, which is the rebuilding and healing of our world. Those who choose to continue to live with eyes closed, will not only rob their lives of meaning, depth, richness, satisfaction, fulfilment and joy, but will be in the greatest of danger, as well.
All that being said, consider this.
Imagine a world in the near future where there are millions of thriving communities experiencing a resurgence and a renaissance, along with a few cities that are also thriving and undergoing a rebirth, amidst a sea of rural poverty, and truly dystopian, authoritarian, technocratic, neo-feudal and neo-Dickensian cities, which are the great majority of cities on Earth. That is one probable future that lies ahead. We should be perfectly clear and honest with ourselves, in terms of both the positive trends which are taking place, and growing around the world, and the dark ones. The world is polarizing, and with increasing speed. While a growing minority are bringing forth a healing of themselves, their communities and the world we live in, the dominant trends at the moment are toward a global Orwellian dystopia. We should think clearly, and hard, about where we want to be, over the coming years and decades ahead; and what we want to be a party to, how we want to live, and what we want to create. Some communities will do well. Others, including the great majority of the big cities, are driving hard toward a dark age, as Jane Jacobs and many others have predicted, and they will be, if we don’t change course, truly hell on Earth.
Remember what America’s greatest philosopher, Henry David Thoreau said:
“All good things are wild and free.”
And,
“In wildness is the preservation of the world.”
We have become domesticated animals, and worse, cogs in a great machine. Wildness, therefore, is not only the true source of all innovation, adaptability, resilience and creativity, it is also imperative to both our freedom, and to our survival.
We face three great dangers above all, in the world of the 21st century: the escalating ecological crisis, the even more rapidly escalating war on democracy and freedom, and the risk of nuclear or biochemical warfare. What we need to know and to understand, is that while many factors are involved, all three are rooted in oligarchy, in empire: that is to say, in over-centralization, and in the greatly excessive concentrations of power that we have allowd to arise. Unless we come to understand that, and boldly address that most central and urgent of facts, all our talk, and all our efforts at healing our world and creating positive social change, are idle and futile – or worse, and more commonly, will actually aggravate, compound, and greatly worsen the underlying problem, and with truly gruesome and horrific results.
That is the sociological side which is absolutely imperative for us to now understand, and to face. But there is also the side of geology, ecology, and Earth’s finite life systems, which we must also address and come to terms with.
I should say here, that I studied philosophy, politics and environmental studies at Trent University, in my home country of Canada, three decades ago, and I have devoted over 50,000 hours to research, reading and studies in these and related fields since then. I am not talking off the cuff here. What I am presenting now is the most dense and concise summary possible of decades of research and reflection. I would urge people to consider it with an open mind, and reflect on it deeply, and well. The research and reading behind it is profoundly in-depth, and sweeping in its global and historical scope.
The other side of the equation to be considered here, along with the sociological, is the Earth’s finite life systems: namely, ecology and geology. And there are laws of nature there that cannot be violated, without seriously harming or destroying ourselves – as late industrial, modern civilization (sic) is beginning to realize and to find out.
There is a wonderful, brilliant talk that I heard on Ted Talks, on the best ideas for cities in the 21st century. It presented itself as being the cutting edge. And the presenter was affable and kindly, and the talk was truly brilliant – for 1971. Unfortunately, the talk was given in 2017. That’s how far behind the curve the “leading experts” are, in terms of urban planning and design, or macro-scale political-economic and environmental policy and planning. They are utterly lost. They are literally half a century, or more, behind the curve. And these are our “leading minds”. The big ideas that were presented in the talk are still generally good ones, but most of them were known in 1971 – we just disregarded them for fifty years. And beyond that, the ideas presented were far too timid, tepid and piecemeal for what we needed to do in 1971! By now, they are putting lipstick on the Titanic and calling that a bold and brilliant plan of action. Think again.
(The video is linked below the article you are reading now. I would urge everyone to finish reading the article first, however. Kindergarten will have to wait until after grad school in this case.)
What is not widely known, among other things, is that the planetary ecosystems which we are straining to the breaking point, will not be healed by renewable energy, by technocracy, by elite planning, by break-neck total urbanization, or by “smart grids” and “smart cities”, which together make up the Davos billionaire elites’ plan to save humanity and the Earth. That plan will bring tyranny, fascism, dystopia, and also ecological collapse and global systems failure.
The overwhelmingly greatest power that we have to heal the planet, and thus, the overwhelmingly greatest need, urgency and imperative, is to bring the people and animals back onto the land – contrary to what the scientists, economists, and even the environmentalists had previously believed – in order to heal the soil, which then sequesters and captures carbon in absolutely vast quantities, thereby slowing, then halting, then reversing climate change; and, healing the Earth’s terrestrial ecosystems, and ourselves, and our society and world, in the process. This, in turn, requires intelligent decentralization, revolving around small-scale, diverse, local organic, regenerative agriculture. If we fail to understand that now, the planet will recover on its own, in time, but we humans will be extinct.
We need local regenerative agriculture, combined with a radically re-localized economy, demographics, population distribution, and way of life, in order to: a) sequester carbon like there’s no time to spare, which there isn’t – through regenerative, small-scale local agriculture; and b) radically slash the shipping distances by 90-99%, for 90-99% of all the food, products and material goods that we consume or buy – by re-orienting our lives and economies to revolve around local communities. If we fail at either one, our species is finished.
Know these facts, or forget all hopes for humanity.
Please read on.
*
“It’s ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations. What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They’re totalitarian institutions. You take orders from above, and maybe give them to people below you. There’s about as much freedom as under Stalinism.” – Noam Chomsky
“I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them. Unless a justification for them can be given – sometimes they are justified, but usually they are not – then they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled to increase the scope of human freedom.”
– Noam Chomsky
In order to understand what is happening in the world today, in this, late-industrial phase of our globalized 21st century society, there are a few key, major patterns which we must understand. One of the biggest and most important, but almost universally overlooked, is this. The global power elite – a small group of fewer than 400 individuals, mainly banking and other corporate elites and their top level technocratic acolytes, defined very clearly and very well by sociologists C. Wright Mills, Peter Phillips and others – are facing a global crisis of legitimacy. They know their power is greater than ever, but more fragile than ever. So, their response is to consolidate power, through what can only be accurately or honestly called fascism – or technocracy, if you prefer that term – before they lose all power altogether. I warned of this for over 30 years. The trends have been clear for decades. Now it is here.
“The general population doesn’t know what’s happening, and it doesn’t even know that it doesn’t know.”
– Noam Chomsky
“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
– Benjamin Franklin
“Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!” – Patrick Henry
We have several options in the face of a growing global corporate technocracy, authoritarianism, or fascism, however you want to label it – at least, for those who are courageous enough to face the reality honestly, or at all, while the rest bury their minds and their conscience, their lost integrity and their souls, in the flight from reality that is cell phone culture, “social media”, and habitual, chronic escapism and denial: we can run, hide, submit, fawn and appease and grovel and lick boots, fight a civil war, launch a revolution; or, we can try to create resilient communities that can build a global movement, network, alliance or federation to replace the corporate oligarchy, when it inevitably collapses, as it sooner or later will, and more likely sooner than later, and as a way to build the movement for non-violent democratic revolution, in order to hasten the change and the transition, from ecocidal, genocidal, anti-democratic and tyrannical corporate oligarchy, to truly free and truly green democracies, which is clearly and urgently needed. The latter response, of building community, and building networks of communities, makes the most sense to me, in terms of a) strategies for social change, and in terms of b) helping people in the immediate and near term, through the troubles and the long emergency which is unfolding and in which we now live, and in terms of c) healing the planet we live on. And non-violent revolution, and the building of a network or federation of resilient communities – both of which are arising and gaining speed now; and by those means, working together to create both freedom and healing for our world, also makes sense, not only out of dire urgent need; but also, it makes sense in light of the fact that the power elite are acting in desperate ways, precisely because they are weak, not because they are strong – because they face a deep and growing crisis of legitimacy, which the people should recognize as a tremendous and rare opportunity for potentially decisive and major, truly world-shaping, tectonic scale, positive social change. Seize the day, I say. Seize the moment. The time is absolutely now.
Grow carrots, grow gardens, grow communities, grow in awareness, grow the new renaissance, grow the movement for a free and green society, grow the revolution. Grow it now. And remember, when the time is ripe for change, no force of nature, nor any force of human reactionary responses, can stop the coming change. I believe that time is now. And if I am wrong, then we will die with our boots on, and not die licking boots. If I am wrong, then we will go out by giving our best, and not by hiding like cowards under desks and corporate board room tables, or behind computer screens, isolated and alone, bored and banal, meekly peering out to watch our world slowly burn and collapse; but will have lived, and truly lived, and have given our all. But I do not think I am wrong. Nature has a time for everything. And the time for freedom and the healing of our world, is now.
“We shouldn’t be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas.” – Noam Chomsky
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” – Margaret Mead
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
– Mahatma Gandhi
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At the same time, while we begin to deal with the realities of politics, economics and sociology, and the central issues of distribution of wealth, and far more importantly, the distribution of power – or whether we will live with freedom and democracy, or under oligarchy, technocracy and fascism; we must also be mindful and aware of the realities of ecology and geology on a finite planet, of course, and naturally so.
In the year 1500, Britain had fewer than twenty population centres of 1,000 people or more. Each was a major regional centre for culture and trade at the time. London had just 40,000 people. The population of Britain was not just rural – it was overwhelmingly rural. Life was centred around small villages, typically of 40 to 50 people. Life was centred around small rural villages – and moreover, life revolved around small scale, diverse, local organic agriculture. 80-90% of the people were farmers. Most of the rest were local artisans and trades persons: blacksmiths, weavers, spinners, shoe-makers, tailors, tinkers and tinsmiths, fish vendors, bakers, candlestick makers, potters, glass blowers, cheese makers and brewers, etc. (Corporate HR directors, CEOs and marketing executives might have a hard time finding employment in that scenario.) I am not trying to paint a romantic picture here, and I am not saying we should go back to that scenario – I am simply trying to portray the reality of life for the vast majority of human beings for thousands of years – from 10,000 years ago, until the last flicker of a moment, which we call the modern world. It is a soap bubble, and it is about to burst, whether we like it or not.
In 1640, at the outset of the English Revolution, there were 9,000 local parishes in England. Think of that number. That is the number of villages in just one average-sized (small, that is) country of the world – which is itself less than half the size of most US states. Bear that in mind as a reference point. Travel was possible and was done, but it was not something that most people did, or else they did it only rarely. Most people lived their lives in the shire, in the small village that was the heart of the local parish. Today, we have sprawling megacities that require vast, long supply chains to keep the people fed and warm (to say nothing of keeping them entertained, and to feed the ever-growing torrential rivers of disposable consumer products) – the extremely long supply chains that keep 3.9 billion urban inhabitants from starving to death, or from freezing to death in the winter. Those extremely long global supply chains are unequivocally: a) utterly unsustainable ecologically, due to their utter dependency on vast amounts of diesel fuel for shipping and transportation to keep them going on a daily basis; and b) are increasingly fragile, and are going to fray, and begin to crumble and collapse, due to a combination of soon to soar fuel prices, and escalating environmental disasters, disruptions and chaos. These are the realities we must now face, if we want to deal with reality at all. Decentralization, therefore, is not only necessary as a means to protect and safeguard, strengthen and renew freedom, democracy and human rights, but also for reasons of ecological sustainability, and for reasons of sheer necessity, brought on by both geological and ecological realities. Our experiment in hyper-urbanization is soon to be over – almost certainly in this century, likely within 20-30 years, and quite possibly, very, very soon – no matter whether we view that as a liberation or as a tragedy.
What this mean is , in order to slash the unsustainably long supply chains, which are needed to support vast sprawling metropolitan cities of millions of people each within a globalized economy, we would need, to begin with, a million villages globally, based in highly localized economies, with the majority of primary goods, including food, water and renewable energy, coming from the surrounding region, ideally within 100 miles; and we would have to quickly grow that number to 10 million ecologically sound villages, centred on local, diverse, regenerative, small scale organic farming and horticulture. That would be roughly 10,000 villages for every average-sized country, such as England or France, and 10,000 villages for every state or province of the 10 giant nations like the US, Canada, Brazil, India or Russia.
The Global South, it turns out, will in some ways have great advantages over the more urbanized and industrialized “leading” “developed” nations, because more than half their populations are already rural peasant farmers living in or around small villages; because the peasant cultures have retained the knowledge and skills needed for community self-reliance when the globalized industrial infrastructure, economy and supply chains fray and crack; because fewer people have received the virtual lobotomy and deep alienation from themselves, their common sense, nature and one another that has come from our mass pandemic of digital addiction, escapism, narcissism and consumerism in the more urbanized and “developed” Global North; and because the large indigenous populations in many of the nations retain valuable knowledge and skills for living without the global industrial giant vampire squid and its production and distribution network.
The off-grid movement, the re-ruralization, back to the country, re-localization, permaculture, regenerative and organic agriculture and farming, homesteading, and voluntary simplicity movements, along with the indigenous peoples’ movements, in the Global North and the Global South alike, will be invaluable, and will become leading pioneers and teachers; but it will likely be the Global South that, on the whole, fares better through the coming unavoidable transition back to decentralized, community-based rural life.
Obviously this is a giant undertaking, and cannot be done in a short time, unless catastrophe impels the people to move en mass voluntarily, out of economic necessity, or because the alternatives are simply too grim. But considering billions of people migrated from rural areas to cities over the past few decades, it is entirely possible for the people to reverse that flow over the coming decades. The one difference is, this time there may be more of a sense of urgency, once the emerging patterns grow beyond their inception state. That is to say, when the giant cities become Orwellian police states in themselves – Toronto, New York, Chicago, San Franscisco, LA, Berlin, Paris or London, for example, and we should picture it, because it is coming; and when, in addition, the supply chains supporting the great cities begin to crumble and break down, then, moving to cleaner, greener, quieter, more peaceful, vibrant and free, small ecovillages and communities in the countryside, will seem very attractive to millions of people.
But I can hear the false populists, the faux progressives, and the good-natured but naïve, all thumping tables and podiums with their fists and shouting into cameras and microphones, “We need…..This! And we need….That! And we demand…This! And we demand….That!” Well, good luck with that endeavour, I say. How well has that worked out for the people over the past 50 years? Not at all. Petitioning the government with prayers, requests, or “demands”, has been falling on deaf ears for more than four decades now. The governments of the Western world have been taken over by big business interests. Millions of valiant citizen activists have been waging a rear-guard action, fighting a raging wildfire with garden sprinklers, and running backwards as fast as they can. The politics of appeasement are not working, and even our more bold “progressive” efforts are all rear-guard actions now, and in general are losing ground every year, and virtually every day. I hate to rain on anybody’s parade, but this is the reality, in most nations today. We are rapidly losing ground on all fronts. Expecting help from the government now, borders on insanity.
Local communities, from neighbourhoods, to villages and towns, to cities, have the power to make major positive changes. The higher levels of government are almost universally in the sewer now, having been high-jacked by vested elite interests – that is, they have been taken over by the rats. I am not saying we should forget about state or national politics, but I am urging that, for the near term, some of us may want to re-focus on the local, where there is more power accessible to the people, and the possibilities for real change are greater.
The people have been abandoned by their governments, and worse, sold into bondage by the political elite, to be the serfs, peasants and slaves, of their corporate masters. I do not blame people for continuing to try to wring some small measures of aid or relief for the people from their governments, but I would say this: it would be futile and insane to make that our primary focus, or our primary strategy. That strategy has clearly failed. It is now one of two options that we have left to choose from: revolution, or helping ourselves. And since helping ourselves and one another precedes and prepares the ground for revolution, then we are doubly intelligent for choosing that path. Waiting on the government for help surely cannot be our Plan A… or Plan B, or C, or D.
Plan A must be, We, the people, help ourselves, and help one another. Plan B? See Plan A.
And if, in the process of the people helping themselves and helping one another, we in turn inspire, or more likely, embarrass the governments of the world to also take action, then that will be just swell. But don’t hold your breath. Our governments have betrayed the people. We can expect people’s trials, to try the business and political elite for treason, and for crimes against humanity and the Earth, before we can expect anything substantial or significant in the way of assistance to the people coming from the government, in most nations today. And if assistance does come, watch for the strings that will likely be attached. If you have to sell your freedom, or your basic, innate human rights, in order to receive what they are offering, then you are selling yourself into bondage, and into slavery.
So, we have the outline of a vision, and we have outlined a few of the bigger and more urgent reasons for a global tectonic shift in our society: from over-centralization, and greatly excessive concentrations of power and wealth, to clean, green societies, based in strong local roots, combined with constitutional democracy and freedom. But what about the nuts and bolts? I will be as brief and concise as possible here, because there are already many excellent books covering those subjects, and because I am a philosopher, above all, and I tend to work with the big picture view, not the finer details. But I will offer this.
In terms of small scale community and village modelling, there are literally hundreds of thousands of examples, and hundreds if not thousands of highly innovative models, along with a great many books, journals and documentaries, that we can look to for ideas. But the central thrust is this: truly resilient and Deep Green villages or communities must be diverse, to match our human diversity, and the diversity of climates and ecosystems; they must be human scale, and in fact, are best when very small scale, or tiny in scale; they must have short supply lines, meaning they must have bioregional, localized economies; they must be oriented around regenerative, organic agriculture, and/or permaculture, and diverse, local, small scale farming, gardening and horticulture; they must be highly energy efficient, and must have low ecological footprint, and low or closed-system resource use; they must be highly resilient communities, meaning, among other things, they should be self-reliant in terms of water, food and energy, at least; and there must be, as quickly as possible, millions of them globally.
I would offer this central idea, as well, in terms of resilient green village design. In many areas, and in fact, in most of the inhabited temperate areas on the planet, which is where the majority of the human population live, straw bale/adobe (or, *in areas that are moderate to warm year-round*, alternatively, cob, Earth Bag, sun-dried adobe block, rammed Earth, or low-cost 3-D printed or Earthship homes, depending on tastes, and on the local resources and climate) combined with passive solar, bermed Earth, or Earth Home design (bermed and buried on the East, West and North sides, in the Northern Hemisphere, where the sun is to the south) as the model; and in the form of tiny green townhomes of 200-700 square feet (roughly 20-70 square meters), would meet the needs of most families, with very low cost, very low ecological footprint, very high energy efficiency, low to ultra-low embedded energy, low to negative embedded carbon, excellent and healthy indoor air quality, excellent resistance to storms, pests, floods, fires and earthquakes, and with comfort and great charm, and with a truly Deep Green design for both homes and communities. Ten to twenty tiny green townhomes would make a small ecovillage, surrounded by shared greenspace, ponds, flower and herb and vegetable gardens, pastures, wind turbines, and fruit and nut trees. (Imagine the Shire, from Lord of the Rings – and yes, it can be that charming, as well as comfortable, and wired for the electronics we are addicted to, if we choose.) The image is not only idyllic – it is also a green community design model that can work for millions of people, and beautifully so. Around the tiny green townhomes in the centre of a ten acre village, could be scattered single family green homes, from tiny to moderate size. And the small scale, of 10-50 acres, with 10-30 green homes, and 30-100 people, makes for a potentially very cohesive sense of community, and a vibrant local democracy – and one that is both highly resilient, and actively healing for our families, communities, societies, ecosystems and world. And the speed of building dozens, thousands, and millions of green villages can be exponentially accelerated with the use of rent-to-own cooperative financing. However we do it though, it simply must be done: for environmental reasons; for social justice, affordable housing and humanitarian reasons; for the healing of the Earth, our society, our families and ourselves; for the strengthening and renewal of freedom, human rights and democracy – for reasons of simple, practical necessity.
Millions of people are already making an exodus out of the big cities – and out of the US, Canada and Europe – for reasons of quality of life, lower stress, closer connections to nature and to community, and for powerful economic reasons, as well. That trend is only going to increase exponentially over the coming years and decades ahead.
Among other things, this means that the brain drain, the artistic drain, and the talent drain, from the Global South to the (once) prosperous Global North, and from the rural areas to the big cities, is going to reverse as well. The thinkers, artists and rebels are already fleeing, and moving to better digs, so to speak. That river of migration is only going to swell as the years go by, as the city-scape grows more Orwellian, and more bleak.
Of course, a small minority of cities are forward-looking, and are making rapid progress, not only to become clean and green, but also more humane, democratic and free. But that is not the general trend of the world’s cities. The much bigger trend is toward fascism, instability, and decay.
Naturally, the richest 1% will have their walled enclaves, in this neo-feudal era, just as they did in medieval times, except that now they are much more exclusive and much more insular, and they have their armed private security forces to defend them, and air-lift helicopters at the ready, in case of any crisis or danger. This is already a well-established trend, and that trend is set to further explode. For the vast majority of people living in cities, however, there is no private army or air-lift helicopter waiting in the wings, if and when things go bad – as they almost surely will.
The majority of cities will face rising instability, crumbling infrastructure and supply lines, and a host of dark scenarios, combined with the rising authoritarianism. The countryside is looking better and better all the time, and the contrasts between the cities and the country will only grow more stark with time.
The baby boomers, along with the biggest landowners, who are the big corporations and the millionaires and billionaires of the world, are the new landed aristocracy – with the great majority of baby boomers being small scale land owners, or the lower ranks of the landed gentry, of course. This is another reality we should face, and with honesty and courage and compassion. Neo-feudalism is taking over, and it is radically unstable, as well as radically unethical, inhuman and unjust. Many baby boomers have no land; but many have 20, 50, 100 acres, or more. It would be both humane, ethical, moral and compassionate, as well as healing for the Earth, and far-sighted, prudent and wise, if anyone owning more than 10 acres of land, other than farmers; and all farmers who own 100 acres or more; would share, or lease at low cost, some portion of their land, in order to enable the creation of millions of land trusts, rural housing co-ops, and small scale organic, regenerative farming co-ops and communities. And if the millionaires and billionaires want something virtuous and ethical, and wise, to do with their money, seeding democratic ecovillages and small scale organic farming co-ops, would be an extremely good idea. Frankly, the alternative is pitchforks and torches, as the peasants begin to revolutionize and to rebel. Telling them to eat cake, or bugs, will not be a good idea. And even the private security forces will not be able to hold out and protect you forever, or for long.
Closing your eyes and hoping for the best would be a disastrously foolish strategy, though that is the unconscious strategy of the great majority of the people at present. And hoping or trusting that the government will help you if things get bad, is also dangerously naïve, and foolish in the extreme. The government, in most nations, is more likely to round the people up and incarcerate them in Orwellian prison cities, under the guise of public safety measures, than to actually help the people in a time of need – as they have already proven.
(Tolstoy wrote, “Better lean and free than fat and chained.” And we could extend that now to say, Better lean and free than being fattened in chains.)
Does anybody remember Hurricane Katrina? Imagine several ecological disasters a year on that magnitude or bigger. That is the harvest we have sown, sadly. And authoritarian governments will only make the situation more harsh and more horrible, not less.
I would implore people here: Do not succumb to the mesmerizing power of denial; don’t rely on the government or the media to guide or inform you, or Facebook, YouTube, Instagram or Twitter; and do not conform to the herd, who have no idea what is going on, and are sleep-walking together toward a cliff – cell phones clutched tightly in hand, heads bowed low, as they stare into the little screen, and walk toward the approaching edge.
Again, I have to say: Who predicted the 2008 global economic crisis – which, by the way, we still have not resolved, nor recovered from? I know of only three people who made that prediction. One was Gerald Celente, the world’s leading trend analyst, with a track record of trend forecasting that no one can beat. The second was myself. So, I would recommend that you take what you are reading here, not with a grain of salt, but with a mountain of sober reflection. You have been forewarned.
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It is important to note that it is a sociological analysis of power structures that is being presented here, and an institutional and class analysis, which is at play here, along with an ecological analysis, and a resource- and systems-analysis; and it cannot be poo-pooed or dismissed as mere “conspiracy theory” – whatever that foolish and meaningless, pejorative and dismissive, anti-intellectual and mind-numbing term may mean; not at least, by anyone who is both serious and reasonably empirical, or well-informed.
Remember that the American Revolution began with 77 men at Valley Forge. If the many are behaving as bewildered lemmings at the moment, with their heads buried firmly in the sand, or somewhere else, even more unfitting, that is fine: we will, as respectfully as possible, and as pointedly as need be, wake them.
Further, it is important to note, that while the global power elite, to use sociological terms, number less than 400 individuals, mainly banking elites and their loyal minions; that same power elite, the global corporate and financial elite, have most clearly and undeniably captured the institutions of state power, to use further terminology of sociological analysis.
How? Why should we believe the view of 80-90% of the people – whose common sense is in that sense at least, intact: that the billionaire corporate elite have effectively taken over the governments of the world? Must we spell it out? Ok, then. For the slow on the uptake, we can draw a picture. How do the billionaire transnational corporate elite dominate and effectively control the governments of the world? Well, first of all, they buy elections. We call it “political campaign contributions” or “political donations”. But as the world’s leading trend analyst, Gerald Celente has said, “Let’s be adults here. They’re called bribes.”
The moneyed aristocracy, as Thomas Jefferson called them, invest in all major parties and all major political candidates, then whoever gets elected, they are expected to return services to their investor/backers. We could call this political prostitution, and we should, but instead we call it, “democracy”.
In reality, in truth, if we were honest, we would call it a plutocracy: the super-rich, the one-tenth of a percent of the population, effectively rule over the rest, and rule both the nations, and by now, the world. It is not complicated, and it is not rocket science. An intelligent seven year old can understand it. Big money translates into big economic power, and also into big cultural power, big social power, and big political power. If we want democracy, if we want human rights, if we want constitutional rule, if we want a green society, a truly sustainable society, a peaceful society, a stable society, or if we want freedom, justice, or responsive or accountable government, if we want any of the above, then we must decentralize economic power, and remove big money, not only from politics, but from its position as the de facto ruler of the world. People will say, Oh, but that’s impossible. But in 1750, and even in 1775, democracy seemed impossible too. Monarchy, aristocracy and feudalism ruled the world, and nobody thought it would ever change, and few even thought that it should. Then the American Revolution happened, and what was considered to be impossible, quickly became a reality. In 1775, nobody wanted a revolution, other than Thomas Paine. Then in 1776, Thomas Paine wrote and published his seminal work, a little book called, Common Sense, and it convinced Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, and George Washington, and a few others, that democracy and revolution were both justified and necessary. In the same year that that one small book was published and released, the Declaration of Independence was drafted and signed, and the American Revolution, and modern democracy and freedom, began. One single year, and one single book, turned the tides of history, and undid 10,000 years of empire and imperial rule. We were not thorough enough, however, not far-sighted or prescient enough, and that is the problem now, and has been the problem ever since; but the change which began in 1776 was tremendous, world-changing, and tectonic, nevertheless. And it is the same now as it was then. When the people are ready, nothing can stop them. The only remaining question is, What are we waiting for? A sign from God? Well consider this it. Get off your knees, and on your feet. And stand.
How do the global corporate elite control governments? Aside from outright bribery, which we euphemistically and evasively, dishonestly call election financing, there is also financial extortion: you hold the governments hostage by controlling their credit flow, their access to capital and loans, and the rates of interest charged on that capital, which can sustain or crush or break the will of any government; or you control their credit ratings, or threaten their credit ratings, which was enough to make the democratically elected government of Canada in 1991 immediately and completely abandon and reverse all its core election promises, for example, forcing them to back off completely from the promise to radically restructure the NAFTA “trade deal” that was destroying the middle class and the nation’s economy, with one single open letter in the Wall Street Journal published by Moody’s investment firm and directed to the government of Canada, threatening to slash Canada’s triple-A credit rating, thus spiking deeply costly interest payments and rates, and which is a simple but powerfully effective financial extortion strategy which works the same in any time and for any government of the world; or you manipulate their currencies, or attack and crash their currencies, as has been done many times, or threaten to devalue or crash their currencies, which is usually sufficient in itself to gain compliance and subservience; or you use the corporate media, which is deeply embedded in the same nexus of global corporate oligarchy, which shares certain obvious, common class interests, to attack and vilify or discredit any government, party or individual who threatens to create an actual outbreak of democracy – and the state media and “public media” are generally compliant and happy to serve the purpose just as well, since they tend to serve the same big business elites as the corporate media serve, as we saw with the recent BBC smear campaign against Jeremy Corbyn, which turned what would have been a landslide victory for the Labour party (and not Tony Blair’s poodle party of elite boot-licking compliance and servitude, but a real labour victory for the 99%) into a win for the right wing Conservative party, in an impressive feat of psychological warfare, fear-mongering, utterly deceitful slurs and attacks, propaganda and social engineering; or you use clauses in “trade agreements”, which are, in reality, corporate rights agreements, and investors’ rights agreements, which give corporations the power to sue governments, and thereby over-ride all of their sovereignty and democratic powers, and eviscerate and nullify them completely.
The mechanisms by which the global power elite, who are the plutocratic big business elite, rule over the nations and control the democratic governments and the world, can and should be studied in depth and detail. But what is most important, again, is that we are able to see the big picture, and be able to see the forest for the trees.
In short, the concentration of wealth and economic power has become so staggeringly great over the past 250 years, and especially over the past 50 years, that big business is now simply more powerful than even the richest of governments – not singly, but when they act together. And business elites may be unscrupulous, but they are not stupid. They realize that they share certain common interests, certain class interests – though they also fight amongst themselves, like a band of cut-throats and thieves, they also know they must have some unity among them in order to individually succeed.
And so, the business elite, and their minions and collaborators among the political elite, academia and the media, form roundtables, and clubs: such as the order of Skull & Bones – the secretive Yale fraternity for rich white New England men that is deeply connected to the CIA and the Wall Street banking elite, which both John Kerry and George Bush Jr. were (and are) members of while they appeared as opponents running against each other in the US presidential election; the Council on Foreign Relations, which likes to portray itself as a scholarly think tank, but which is in reality another rich mens’ club, with a few intellectuals sprinkled in to make it look more legitimate, and less like a kleptocratic club for emperors and wound-be emperors, which it is; the Trilateral Commission, which was formed by David Rockefeller, scion of the most powerful family in the Americas (until the rise of the Silicon Valley new money plutocrats, and maybe afterward as well) and “Zbig” Brzezinski, as he likes to be called, the chief intellectual in residence for the Western elite, who in 1979 hatched and launched the plan to arm, fund and train Islamic militant extremists in Afghanistan, to lure the Soviet Union into a trap of a destabilizing war, “their own Vietnam”, and in the process created the Islamic terrorist network which the US and its vassals – sorry, allies – claims now to be fighting; and the Bilderberg group and the World Economic Forum, among other groups and clubs for the rich and powerful – and they meet to discuss their common interests, of course.
Do the global business elite fight amongst themselves? Certainly. Do they compete with one another? Selectively. Do they share common class interests? Indubitably, clearly and obviously. Do the business elite get together to talk about how to raise minimum wages world-wide, or how to abolish poverty, or how to radically reduce the staggering and exponentially growing inequality globally and within nations, which now threatens the societies of the world with chaos, instability, implosion or civil war? Not unless they are joking. No, they meet to discuss how to increase their wealth and power, and how to manage the nations and people and economies of the world to lessen the risks to them, and to increase their own, already stratospheric, wealth and power. I am sure the power elite, like all emperors and power elites before them, convince themselves that they are the great benefactors of humanity, but their actions show a different story: they seek power and wealth for themselves; and whenever the goals of ever more wealth and ever more power conflict with the goals and values of democracy, freedom, human rights, constitutional rule, environmental protection, human health, justice or peace, well, you can guess which set of goals and values wins out. Actually, we don’t have to guess, because the historical record and the documentary record spell it out clearly. The goals of wealth and power for the ruling class win out, almost invariably, and all else, and everyone else, is expendable. It is no different from Adam Smith’s time, when he wrote, in his major work, The Wealth of Nations, of what he called, “the vile maxim of the masters: all for us, nothing for anyone else”. I have quoted it before and I will quote it again, because it is the crux and core of the matter, which we need to understand most of all, and viscerally understand, as well as intellectually understand.
What has happened, therefore, is that big business has taken over the state; or more precisely said, big business and the state have formed an alliance, in which both parties benefit, but the business elite is the dominant party. China is the mirror opposite of the West. In China, big business and the state have merged, but the political elite are in the driver’s seat. In the West it’s the other way around, but either way, it is a merger.
What has happened is that the powers of big business and the state have merged – and that, again, as I have said before, and it bears repeating, is precisely what Mussolini himself, the inventor of modern fascism, defined as corporatism, which he said is the proper term for fascism.
So yes, it is a state-corporate complex, a global corporate oligarchy, or plutocracy, which is the newest ruling empire of the world. That must be born in mind. This is not some vague abstraction. There are very real and tangible centres, institutions, organizations, networks, alliances and groups, which form the global power elite, and the new global corporate oligarchy – and which form what could be called the Deep State of the world, or the new Global Deep State; though it is hardly hidden, and is now brazenly open to public view, in many, though not all, of its actions and agendas. In general, I use Davos as the short-hand term of reference to designate the global plutocratic oligarchy; since, as the leading business journal in the world, the Financial Times, itself calls Davos, “the de facto world government”, and it is, as the eminent Canadian philosopher and former Governor-General of Canada, John Ralston Saul has said, “The new Palace of Versailles”, and “the new royal court”. But Davos is only one of the centres of power in the new global fascist corporate state, and that should be born in mind.
But that is enough of fine-tuning of definitions and terminology for the moment. We can get lost in the weeds. Detail and depth are important, and precision is important, but again, what we need most is perspective, above all.
What is most important is that we can see the big picture, and that we can see the forest for the trees. And in order to do that, we must also have freedom of thought, and freedom of speech, naturally, or we are, in all likelihood, doomed to the tunnel vision of our narrow preconceptions, social conditioning and indoctrination. It is through discourse, as well as reading, reflection, and experience, that we learn, we see through our temporary illusions, and we become more alive, more aware, and more free.
“With regard to freedom of speech there are basically two positions: you defend it vigorously for views you hate, or you reject it and prefer Stalinist/fascist standards. It is unfortunate that it remains necessary to stress these simple truths.” – Noam Chomsky
“It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.” – Noam Chomsky
I think Chomsky is using the term intellectual in the broad sense: that is, people who choose to have a life of the mind, have a responsibility to seek the truth and to speak the truth. Ideally, that means all of us. But if someone is being paid to do intellectual work, or their vocation or life path is academic, scholarly or intellectual, or they are lawyers, doctors, journalists, writers or film-makers, priests or ministers, artists, actors, producers or directors, or are attending or teaching school, college or university, then I think it is true that they, public intellectuals in the broad sense, have an added responsibility to seek the truth and to speak the truth. I think of Oliver Stone, Joel Bakan, Michael Moore, Rocco Galati, Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn here, and people like Gerald Celente, James Corbett, Michel Chossudovsky, Anthony J. Hall, Paul Craig Roberts, Maude Barlow, David Suzuki, Vandana Shiva, Arundhati Roy, Jeremy Corbyn, Yanis Varoufakis, Russell Brand, Abbey Martin, Aaron Mate, Jimmy Dore and Matt Taibbi, and brave whistle-blowers and publishers like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, as prime examples of honourable, virtuous, truly noble integrity with intelligence and courage, and I tip my hat to them, and to others like them. But I think the important part to realize is that it is a responsibility of everyone in society, and especially in a democratic society, or a society that wants to be free or democratic, for all of the people, or as many of the people as possible, to actively seek the truth, and to speak the truth, to the best of our ability and understanding.
Many people get querulous, fastidious and nitpicking over the most insignificant things, while their eyes glaze over if you try to talk to them about the most important things – or they will pick out the most unimportant, trivial, minor detail when being presented with an important subject, and want to focus entirely on that. I think it’s a habitual, unconscious fear response, of intellectual flight from reality. It is absolutely insane. It’s like you’re asking them, urging them, to get into the lifeboat, because the ship is sinking, and they want to discuss whether they have the straps on correctly, or whether we have the right strapping procedure, or what colour the life vests are. Just get in the fucking boat!
Once you get your ass into the boat, then you can discuss whether we should have purchased a different colour of life preservers, or whether our straps are properly fastened in the correct way, or who gets to sit where, or how many sandwiches do we dole out to each person, or whether the pregnant mothers get an extra sandwich or not. Just get your fucking ass into the fucking boat!
But people will actually quibble about all sorts of irrelevant or trivial, minor things – such as how to define an intellectual. Is that not like asking how to define a cloud, a horse, a tree? You don’t define it, you just know it. Do you like to read, and read for knowledge as well as pleasure? Then you’re an intellectual. Do you like to watch documentaries and learn about the world? Then you’re an intellectual. Do you like to question what you hear or read or see on TV? Then you’re an intellectual. It’s not complicated. Do you like to think, or would you rather avoid it? If you like to think about things, and not just go through life like a robot, a zombie, or a cog in a machine, but actually think and reflect, and maybe once in a while discuss things above and beyond mere trivia, gossip and entertainment, then you’re an intellectual. It can be helpful to define things, but to define persons is complicated, and a bit dangerous. We are not, and never should be, one-dimensional beings. Nor are we static or fixed. Life is change. Our thoughts should change too. Life is for learning, not stagnation, hence life is to be lived, not merely survived, and that means learning and change and experimentation are also an inherent part of life, which means that we are not static and fixed creatures, but are always evolving, always changing, always being born, and always dying to the past. And in all things, our definitions of things can be clarifying, or simply blinding. In fact, the act of defining people, events, phenomena or things, can clarify, illuminate or reveal, or more often, cloud, conceal and occlude – and almost always, our mental labels hide and conceal the truth and the reality far more than they reveal it. It’s like affixing labels to people: Oh, well, he’s a brick-layer – he wouldn’t know anything about that; or, she’s a stock broker, she must know about small business entrepreneurship; or, he waits tables, he must not know anything; or, she’s an anarchist – you can’t trust them… and on and on it goes. How about we just take people, as people – at least first, and foremost, and above all. Then we can get to know them as individuals. And when it comes to ideas, let’s get to know them as individuals as well, and not lump them prematurely into groups of categories and labels, whereby we can sufficiently park our intellect so as to never have to use our intelligence at all. That is what most people do, and it is a prison of the mind.
“In every cry of every man,
In every infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear.“
– William Blake
“Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.” – Noam Chomsky
“If you are not offending people who ought to be offended, you’re doing something wrong.” – Noam Chomsky
For example:
“The police can go to downtown Harlem and pick up a kid with a joint in the streets. But they can’t go into the elegant apartments and get a stockbroker who’s sniffing cocaine.” – Noam Chomsky
But we’re not supposed to say such things.
Nor do the police go and arrest the real criminals, the greatest criminals, sitting in the board rooms of companies like Goldman Sachs, Pfizer, Exxon-Mobil and Monsanto/Bayer, and who sit around tables in Washington, Ottawa, London, Paris, Brussels, Basel, Davos and Berlin – and the people aren’t supposed to talk about such things either. But we should be talking about the fact that the business elite, who are considered “too big to fail”, are also considered to be too big to jail. Why are they? In the US, Bush and then Obama bailed out the bankers who caused an $8 trillion housing market crash, and committed massive fraud, giving them over $20 trillion as a reward for criminal behaviour. In Iceland, the people put the bankers in jail, and threw out the government that aided and abetted the crooks, and replaced it with a new and more democratic and accountable government. The Nuremberg Trials tried people for war crimes and crimes against humanity. We need such public trials again today – for the new set of criminals in high places among the business and political elite, along with their criminal collaborators in the media. We should be saying these things, talking about these things, and yes, doing these things. We need a people’s court. And we need to start by speaking the uncomfortable truths.
There are teachers of various kinds, and writers of various kinds, journalists, scholars, scientists, lawyers, doctors, engineers, counsellors, psychologists, priests and thinkers and poets, and they and other groups are public intellectuals, whose vocation includes thinking, or the life of the mind. Why we would feel the need to narrowly define this, I don’t know, but I’ve seen strange responses to simple, straight-forward things, many, many times. I would say that an intellectual is simply someone who has a life of the mind. Ideally that would be everyone. But it certainly is a wide swath of people, from all walks of life; and it is not the same as being “educated”, which can mean well-informed, or simply well-indoctrinated. In fact, it is the rare individual who is strong enough in mind and heart and spirit to withstand the trials of higher education and come out with all three intact, and most especially his or her mind, or ability to think. College and university are usually akin to the function of a contraceptive sponge: they soak up the most creative, spirited and intelligent individuals, or as many of them as they can, and neutralize them. Fortunately, they are only somewhere between 60-80% effective, so a lot of minds and hearts and spirits survive the ordeal.
“Education is a system of imposed ignorance.” – Noam Chomsky
The analogy is flawed, since gender does not indicate intelligence, creativity or strength of character, of course, but you get the idea. Actually, I think I am greatly underestimating the school systems, both public and private, and the colleges and universities. I think their effectiveness is probably closer to 85-99%, depending on the subject, the department or the field. It’s pretty hard to screw up math. Geography is hard to mess with, too. Mumbai is where Mumbai is. It is in India, not Nebraska or the South Pacific. It is not up for serious debate. Everything else, outside of math and geography, is deeply questionable and radically in question. In the humanities, the social sciences, and the life sciences, and almost everywhere in the colleges, universities and schools, aside from math, geography and phys-ed, literature, dance, theatre, music and visual arts, it is probably closer to 99.5%. In civics, politics and economics, the success is stupendous. Almost no functioning brain cells, or moral conscience, survives or gets through.
“The indoctrination is so deep that educated people think they’re being objective.”
– Noam Chomsky
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We should remember, too, that corporate-driven globalization – which is very different from and diametrically opposed to free and fair trade (the business elite want cartels, monopolies, and a nanny state), and is very different and diametrically opposed to international cooperation and alliances to address and resolve the pressing issues of democracy, freedom, human rights, sovereignty, fair trade, social justice, equitability, sustainability and peace – corporate-driven globalization, which is a very specific form of internationalism, a form specifically crafted by the elite for the benefit of the elite, has been, for its nearly 50 year history, one the one hand a race to the bottom, and on the other, which is merely the other side of the coin, a brutal and escalating class war, as working people, labour markets and communities around the world are pitted against each other, and a race to the bottom in the sense of the accelerating war on democracy, freedom, constitutional rule and human rights, which is the heart of the class war, and the shift from corporate-dominated liberal democracies with a large middle class, to what Chomsky called the Third-Worldization of the wealthiest nations, pushing them into the Third World model which was enforced and imposed by the colonial and neo-colonial powers of Europe, the United States and their satellite vassal states such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand, with the help of the IMF, World Bank, GATT, WTO and other “trade agreements”, in which the 1% effectively own and rule the nations of the world, while a small minority of the population are the more privileged servants of the ruling oligarchs – commonly called the professional class, ironically – and the remaining other, roughly 90% of the population form the permanent underclass, in a system which bears little resemblance to authentic democracy, but which is a business-run oligarchy, with a powerful nanny state to fund and protect it. The US has been in the lead in that race to the bottom, among the richest industrial nations, and shows us the way: toward kleptocracy, fascism, the looting and pillaging of the nation and the people by the business elite, and the very real danger of explosive civil war, revolution, or social, economic and/or ecological collapse. And by now, “We’re all in this together” – though not exactly in the way the propaganda narrative would have us believe.
Yes, we’re all peasants now – though some are clearly far worse off than others. And we’re all facing liquidation – spiritually, politically, psychologically and mentally, economically, ecologically, and quite possibly in more ways as well, considering the brutally ruthless game the corporate elite are now playing, which is simply an intensification of the class war, the war on the 99%, and the war on democracy, humanity and the Earth, which have been building in intensity for more than five decades, since the crisis of legitimacy for the ruling powers broke out in earnest with the popular democratic movements of the 1960s. We stand or fall now. And groveling appeasement will not serve us. Choose well.
We now live in an Orwellian technocracy, ruled by an unscrupulous and unaccountable, unelected, and frankly sociopathic, global business elite. Are we going to lay down and grovel, or lay down and die, or are we going to do something about it? That is the central question. All other social issues, as well as the paramount issues of the ecological crisis, and the survival of freedom and democracy, revolve around this.
But the immediate battle line, the key battle line, is between authoritarianism, and those who prefer and value, and choose, freedom, democracy, human rights and constitutional rule, and are willing to fight for them. That will unite the great majority of the people – both right and left, rich and poor, North and South, black, white, gay, straight, bi and trans, African, Asian, North America, Latin American or European – who do not want to live in a police state. We may have many disagreements, but we can agree on this. And this is our common ground, our common cause, and the basis of our unity – the only basis we need: we choose freedom, as well as compassion and solidarity, and we will be fooled no longer into believing that the one must be sacrificed for the other, because it is a lie.
One flash-point is the astronomical and historically unprecedented, extreme and still growing, vast inequality, both within nations, for example in the United States, Canada and Britain, and also globally and between nations. Here is a typical sound-byte, or sample, and it is righteous, truthful, and legitimate, and resonates deeply with the great majority of the population:
Robert Reich wrote on Twitter today, as I write this essay:
“So let me get this straight: 55 of the most profitable companies in America paid no federal income taxes, but Republicans in Congress still think corporate taxes are too high?” – Apr 4, 2021, via Twitter
The tax on the richest individuals and families in the US went from 94% in 1945, to 39.6% in 2017, according to public records, compiled by the Tax Policy Center of the Brookings Institute. That was before Obama’s tax cuts for the richest few kicked into their highest level, right before he left office, unsurprisingly, and before Trump’s further round of tax cuts, which, while they were presented as helping the middle class and the poor, as usual, went overwhelmingly to the richest 1%. Similar tax cuts for the richest 1% have been handed out by successive boot-licking and literally treasonous governments in Canada, Britain and elsewhere. Corporate tax rates have equally been slashed over the past four decades of globalization and neoliberalism – which means, governments serving the interests of the corporate oligarchy and the super-rich, and aiding their global looting spree and their rape and pillage policies, while systematically gutting the middle class, the poor and the Earth. But even these figures don’t convey the sheer magnitude of the feeding frenzy of the ruling elite upon the other 99.99%, who don’t show up in the census data, because they are such a tiny group in terms of the number of individuals and families who make up that ruling class. The 1% get tax cuts, but the giant corporations and the ruling tenth of a percent – the plutocrats who own and control the giant corporations, the central banks, the global economy, the financial system, the money supply, the six media empires that control 80% of the major media in the world, an increasing number of the scientific journals and much of academia, the major international organizations, the central banks, the EU, and the formerly democratic governments, don’t pay tax. When the loopholes and tax avoidance schemes are factored in, along with the on-going massive corporate subsidies, in this giant, global welfare state for the rich that we now live under, the richest few receive far more from the government, from the public treasuries and the people, than they give back. The people and the planet are being systematically devoured. And as George Bush Jr. said, “Taxes are for little people.” But not everyone is happy about that.
The revolutions of England, in the 17th century, and America and France in the 18th century, had a mix of both causes and results. In the US, the revolution was democratic and republican, with a strong constitutional framework to protect and defend freedom, human rights and democracy. But the American Revolution was led by the wealthy landowners predominantly, and so, only 4% of the people of the new democracy could vote: the landless, the poor, women, blacks and native peoples could not vote and had few or no rights, and little to no voice or power. The rich, white, landowning men had virtually all of the power, or at least the lion’s share of it. In that sense, it was a bourgeois revolution, to a considerable extent, even though it was a radical breakthrough, and a beautiful, liberating new model for the world, compared to what came before, and compared to what was the global norm of the time. In the English and French Revolutions, the spirit of freedom and constitutional democracy, or republican democracy, was certainly present and very, very strong; but again, in both cases, the revolutions were quickly taken over by the wealthy and the landowning elite. That was the weakness of the first round of modern democratic revolutions, which began with the English Revolution and included the American and French Revolutions. It is that oversight that we must address and correct now. We allowed landowning elites and business elites to be exempt from the checks and balances, and limits on concentrations of power, which we rightfully insisted on applying to the political powers and the church. That blind spot has now cost us our freedom, our democracy, our constitutions and our rights, and will cost us much more if we do not quickly and very soon correct it.
The richest 1% now have $32 trillion in private offshore bank accounts, thanks to the accelerating upward transfer of wealth over the past five decades – read, class warfare and economic predation – along with repeated rounds of tax cuts for the wealthiest few and the biggest corporations. Meanwhile, the middle class has been devoured in the richest nations of the world – disemboweled and left dead by the side of the road; a billion people and rising live in extreme poverty; and five billion live in increasingly precarious lives, with the bottom falling out from beneath them. This is a recipe for disaster – for civil unrest, for civil war, for demagoguery and fascism – or alternately, and equally possible, for revolution.
But while poverty and inequality alone could bring down the house of cards which is the new, pseudo-democratic corporate oligarchy, and likely if not certainly will, if other flash-points don’t do the job first; it is not the growing and extreme inequality of wealth which is the greatest or most urgent issue, the central issue, or the issue which is the most volatile – it is the vast and extreme, and ever widening gap, in terms of power. That is the key, that is the crux, and that is also the central flash-point of the coming democratic revolutions. The question is, in essence, and at the very core, whether we will live as free and equal women and men, in a society governed by laws and constitutions, with human rights for all which are both inalienable and innate, and also deeply respected and protected, in actual, authentic, functioning constitutional democracies and republics; or whether we will live under a police state, under the imperial rule of a global corporate oligarchy which is flatly genocidal, ecocidal, and fascist. That is the key issue, the core issue, the central issue, the most pressing and most fundamental issue, which is at the heart and the centre of all other issues that need to be addressed; and that, is how and why the next wave of democratic revolutions will begin, and are beginning now, as we speak.
And as I write this essay, news breaks from England, and I have to interject it here, because it is precisely what I am talking about, and precisely what I am urging: unite the people to resist and to reject authoritarianism, and to restore freedom and constitutional democracy. And that battle has just begun to explode in Britain now.
This is the spark that will light the fuse that will begin the next democratic revolution in Britain: Prime Minster Boris Johnson tries to pass a bill banning protests, in the spring of 2021. Mark this date. The US, Canada, and the rest of the world, will not be far behind, or may even take the lead. Things are about to get exciting.
Jeremy Corbyn wrote:
“We will always defend the right to demonstrate against injustice. Proud to address today’s #KillTheBill demonstration – together we will stop Boris Johnson’s protest ban.” Apr 3, 2021, Twitter
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“If you assume that there is no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, then there is a possibility that you can contribute to making a better world.” – Noam Chomsky
“Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so.” – Noam Chomsky
“You can’t have meaningful political democracy without functioning economic democracy.” – Noam Chomsky
When a society has political democracy, but not economic democracy, and furthermore, has a history of allowing vast concentrations of economic power to arise, and even allows its government or state to support and sponsor the continued upward transfer of wealth and power to an economic elite, which it subsidizes and protects, then you get the inevitable, predictable result: big business eventually takes over the government, and hollows out democracy from the inside, as well as strong-arming and extorting it into submission from without. That is the kind of oligarchic government Chomsky is talking about when he made this other, more chilling remark, which the documentary record and the historical record both support very clearly: “Governments will use whatever technology is available to combat their primary enemy – their own population.”
Two broad visions for society are emerging. One is the vision or agenda being aggressively pushed by the Davos bankers and corporate elite. It is authoritarian, elitist, anti-democratic, dystopian and anti-ecological. The other is based, not in robbing the people of their power, but empowering the people. That is the key battle line now.
The key question, therefore, is whether we want to be pushed further along our current path, which is the hyper-concentration of all wealth and power in the hands of the few, which will spell fascism, and we must be perfectly clear and honest about that, combined with even more excessive centralization and globalization, which not only disempowers, and systematically robs and disenfranchises the great majority, for the increasing power and wealth of the few, and all of this leading to inevitable social and ecological collapse in a barren and toxic dystopian world, marked by barbed wire and walled enclaves of the rich, defended by robot soldiers and private armies, and surrounded by a sea of poverty and desperation; or whether we feel we have tried the experiment in empires long enough, and will choose to dethrone the oligarchs, and empower the people instead.
An important contextualization is critically essential to understand here, for perspective. Currently, modern industrial civilization (sic) is racing toward collapse. We may avoid it, and it would be smart to avert it, to make an enormous understatement, but collapse is certainly our current trajectory. Ironically, the oligarchy is pushing hard for collapse – because they plan to be the ruling god-kings, afterward. This is endgame.
We most definitely and urgently need a Green New Deal, but not the deal that is being aggressively pushed by the Davos set of corporate plutocrats. They want a Global Reset, as they have openly announced, and it is clear that their grand plan for restructuring the world is deeply authoritarian, rabidly ant-democratic, absolutely crushing of freedom, constitutional rule and human rights, and ecologically disastrous and insane, in addition. That is a bad deal. That is a deal with the devil.
We need a Green New Deal that will invest heavily in decentralized, community-based, local economies, high speed electric rail, powered by wind energy (not solar, which has a much bigger environmental footprint than wind, and certainly not fossil fuels or nuclear, which must be phased out immediately), and energy efficient communities that are centred around regenerative organic agriculture, with millions of clusters of small organic farms and small villages and towns, and a revenue neutral plan that is based on taxes on resource extraction, along with serious taxes on financial speculation, great profits and great wealth. And we need a Green New Deal that deeply, and not just in rhetoric, respects and honours and defends human rights, constitutional rule, democracy and freedom – not a faux green deal from Davos that undermines and destroys all of the above.
A universal basic income is another valuable idea, and one that is supported by conservatives such as Milton Friedman and libertarian socialists such as Bertrand Russell. But again, the Great Reset agenda of the super-rich oligarchs is antithetical to what we need. They want universal dependency, so that they have universal wealth and universal power. If you accept their electronic passports and the digital currencies they control, then you can have a hovel and some gruel, but you will have to give up these silly antiquated notions of freedom, mobility, privacy, human rights, constitutions and democracy in order to get them. As Klauss Schwabe, founder of the Davos-based World Economic Forum said, “You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy.” Dr. Evil is saying there, in effect, that all wealth and all power will be in the hands of the new “masters of the universe”, as they like to call themselves. Again, that is a deal with the devil. That is universal human bondage, not justice or humanitarianism. We could greatly benefit from a universal basic income (UBI) that deeply and in practice respects human rights, freedom and constitutional democracy, but not the Davos plan which annihilates all three.
As I argued in my first published book, Enlightened Democracy, there are two extremes to be avoided. They are: dogmatism on the one hand, which is always a kind of fundamentalism, whether it be secular or religious; and nihilism on the other. The power elite are paradoxically both nihilists and fundamentalists. They are nihilists in that they believe in nothing but money, power, and their own grandiose, inflated egos. And they are fundamentalists in the sense that they believe, quite self-servingly, that whatever ideology they happen to think will serve them best in the moment, is the gospel truth, set down in stone, as though Moses himself were delivering it in the hand-writing of God. Their fanatical dogmatism was neoliberalism, from 1970 until roughly 2019, but now that neoliberalism has obviously failed, and is about to fail even more spectacularly than it already has, they have already moved on to their next pet ideology, which is equally set in stone, and believed in as if it were the very word of God. And that is technocracy: the view that a messianic elite – themselves – are going to save the word through a re-packaging of fascism, prettied up with the garb of “inclusivity” and “sustainability”, and wedded to advanced technology. That is a hideous ideology, which any sane man or woman should vehemently and totally reject. But the problem is, most of the people, who are not among the ruling elite, have been so frightened and terrified of dogmatism and fanaticism, after the experiences of World War II, that they don’t really have any beliefs or values at all, and so, have fallen into a vacuous state of drifting, which always plays into the hands of a cynical and manipulative, Machiavellian elite, and they have fallen into nihilism. That, among other things, is exactly what we have to overcome. And so, again in this essay, as in my first two books, I will lay out, and in a bit further detail, some common ground which can unite the people, or at least unite the great majority, in a vision which is neither nihilistic nor fanatical, but which is based in shared cause and common sense, or what can maybe be better described as our innate human intelligence.
I would suggest people watch the films 300 and V for Vendetta again. Those films present a pretty accurate picture, in broad strokes, of what we are up against. This is simply a new form of empire that we are living under, and it is morphing rapidly into a very darkly Orwellian global police state. We have seen these patterns before. But to continue…
The crux: If anthropogenic global warming is real, then we should immediately slash fossil fuel use. If it is not, we should slash fossil fuel use for other major health and environmental reasons. But, it can be done in authoritarian or non-authoritarian ways. Guess which the elite prefer?
The key battle lines globally now are not left versus right, but authoritarianism versus democratic freedom. This is absolutely crucial to understand.
We need to unite the people, and we also need to better understand what is actually going on, and what must be done. When the Soviet Union and the entire Eastern Bloc fell, nobody saw it coming, and it happened virtually overnight. A tipping point came after a long and deepening crisis of legitimacy. Exactly the same pattern is emerging in the West, as the Western corporate oligarchy faces a deep and growing, global crisis of legitimacy. The people must now recognize the opportunity, and seize it. But they must also be clear about what they want instead of authoritarian corporate rule. I would argue for decentralization, and for a plurality of models and approaches. It would be tyranny as well as foolishness if we only have one monolithic world model. But in any case, we do need some basic clarity of vision for the road ahead.
In the Soviet Union, the people became clear in their minds that they were sick of authoritarianism. They rejected it, and it fell like a house of cards. But they were not clear about what they wanted to replace it, seemingly having only vague ideas of democracy and freedom. What resulted was a Wild West period of gangster capitalism, which decimated the country. A little more clarity of forethought might possibly have averted that dark period of the 1990s. And certainly now, across the West and around the world, when we are facing the slow-motion collapse of the Western oligarchy, we need, most critically, three things: to unite the people; to embrace our power and reject the ruling corporate empire of pseudo-democracy; and to have at least a broad outline of what kind of society we want to replace this increasingly fascist corporate oligarchy which is now teetering on collapse.
Democrats and Republicans have equally lost all remaining trace of credibility or legitimacy. Both are wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Wall St., plutocratic elite. And now that independents outnumber both Republicans and Democrats, it is clear the majority know it. Now, what comes next, when, not if, the old order collapses?
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To halt the decline of our civilization and stop our race toward ecological, economic and social collapse, we must sow and create a paradigm shift, a shift in the dominant world view, a shift in consciousness. That requires consciousness raising, media activism, and education. But we also need a fundamental change, not only in consciousness, but in our social systems. The most urgent task is to dethrone the business elite and restore constitutional democracy. But we need major changes to our systems of doing things, as well, clearly and undeniably.
That, in turn, requires decentralization: economic, above all, but also demographic, political, and in terms of media, culture, the arts, science, health care, and education. Corporate globalization has harmed and degraded all of these areas of life, and above all, is destroying the planet, democracy, and freedom, and is degrading or destroying life for the poorest 90% or more of humanity. International cooperation is urgently needed, but that is very different from corporate globalism, which is gathering all power in Davos and Beijing, while undermining humanity and the prospects for life on Earth.
Freedom and democracy are fundamental Enlightenment values that are worth preserving, and worth fighting for. And they need to be more than slogans. They need to be lived, and applied. The reality is, any form of hyper-concentration or excessive centralization of power, whether political or economic, breeds tyranny, and undermines and eventually destroys both freedom and democracy. We have allowed political centralization to become far to great, and economic centralization to become staggering, and simply neo-feudal. This must be reversed, or we are doomed to an Orwellian dark age, followed by collapse.
The central problem of late-industrial capitalist society is, quite simply, that the business elite were allowed to amass exponentially greater and greater wealth and power, over the span of 200 years and more, to the point where they have effectively taken over the national democracies, and by now effectively rule the world. It is the global corporate take-over that is at the heart of the environmental crisis, the crisis of democracy, and virtually every major social crisis, as well. We either remove the billionaire elite from power, or we face a dystopia, and a slow-motion death cycle, until we reach ecological and civilizational collapse. That is, we face a crisis that is rooted in a vast over-centralization of power, in the hands of the global corporate elite. We either correct that error, or we watch our world die slowly, and with increasing speed.
Chomsky was right: despite being a self-proclaimed anarchist and a libertarian socialist, he argued that we need to temporarily strengthen the nation-state, and strengthen national democracies – so that we can wrest power back from the global corporate elite, who have vastly over-stepped their proper bounds, and have turned democracies into oligarchy, and are turning the world into a labour camp.
That means, we need political decentralization in the long term, so as to safeguard and protect liberty and democracy, and to take them to a higher level; but in the short term, and in the immediate present, we need to rescue the nation-state from its institutional capture by big business, and restore the powers of national democracies, to counterbalance the unelected and unaccountable powers of big business and the international corporate elite.
What that means, is that we need long term political decentralization, but with an immediate strengthening of national democracies; combined with what is most urgent and essential, which is an economic decentralization: break up the corporate giants, and put firm checks and and balances, and strict limits, on all great concentrations of wealth and economic power.
Economic decentralization and re-localization are both the means and the ends we must now pursue, with all urgency, if either democracy, human rights, constitutional rule or freedom are to survive, or if we are to build a clean, green, just and peaceful, truly sustainable, or even viable, society for the 21st century.
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In terms of the environmental crisis, it is clear we urgently need economic decentralization. We cannot be shipping consumer goods halfway around the planet, from China to the US, for example, and shipping parts and commodities from all over the world to China to manufacture them. That is a completely unsustainable system. We need to eat local and buy local, and re-orient our economies toward local production and consumption, or else watch our ecosystems collapse, and our economies and societies along with them.
We don’t have to be isolationist, and should not be, but we need to be buying, and producing, 80-90% of what we need or consume from the local bioregion, from within 100 miles, or not much more.
That means we need to re-industrialize across the Western world, but in a decentralized way, oriented around smaller population centres that are much more self-reliant, based in energy efficient, clean, wind powered, small scale manufacturing for the local region, combined with a resurgence of local artisan production.
Economists are of course insane secular fundamentalists, and they and the business and political elite, and the media they control, along with many trained seals from academia, will howl with horror and derision, saying it is impractical, inefficient or impossible. But what is impractical and grossly inefficient is sending parts and commodities from all over the world to China and then sending the manufactured products from China to consumers around the world. Further, that is a system headed for inevitable collapse. It may be challenging to replace this system, but it is impossible to sustain it. It will end whether we like it or not.
Decentralized, small scale local production is vastly more efficient in terms of total energy consumed for production, since parts, commodities and finished products are shipped less than 200 miles, compared to our present norm, which is often 40,000 miles or more. It may generate less profit, but it is an economic system designed not for maximum profit, but for maximum human benefit, within the bounds of respecting the earth, human beings, and freedom.
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As an important side note, which needs to be touched upon briefly, so as to wipe away another mountain of confusion, delusion and corporate PR we must say this: We can forget the idea of driverless cars – they are suitable only for mindless citizens of mindless nations. The last thing we need is to extend the shelf life of a disastrous transportation system, based around the private automobile.
We need to shift to cities and communities that are designed so that work, school, shopping, entertainment, spirituality, greenspace, leisure space, intellectual life and social life, are all accessible within a walking radius of 20 minutes; and to compliment that, add in networks of cycling lanes, and walking and bicycling paths; supported finally by highly efficient, public mass transportation, primarily utilizing buses of various sizes from mini-van size to bi-articulating buses carrying 225 people each.
Private automobiles have no place in an ecological city, village or town, or if they do, they are at the margins, and not the centre of our land use or transportation planning. If we continue to allow them, and we should for a time, maybe a few decades at most, we should tax them heavily with pollution taxes, and on top of it, charge them $50 a day to enter the city at all, as they do in London – after the public transportation systems are built and operating, which we should and must do immediately, and there are no more excuses left.
If we tax pollution, as we should and must, then two things are necessary, if it is to be just, or intelligent, or at all compatible with a free and democratic society: a) pollution taxes should be collected at the local municipal level, in order to further empower local communities and grassroots democracy, and to rescue them from encroaching bankruptcy, and not imposed or collected at the level of the state, province or nation, and absolutely not at the supra-national or global level, which would only result in tyranny and outright fascism – and this is an absolutely critical point that we need to be clear on, and steadfastly insist upon; and secondly, if we are going to tax pollution, as we must, then we must also, and simultaneously, cut taxes for the poor, the middle class, small and medium businesses and farmers, who are already struggling to survive, and are sinking, and being eaten alive, due to class warfare being waged by the corporate elite and the ruling 1%, and also due to excessively a greatly excessive tax burden on these same groups. All of them need their taxes slashed – and I do mean slashed.
Tax all personal income over $1 million per year at 90%; tax all private wealth over $10 million at 90%; tax profitable large corporations at 90% on all profits over $1 billion a year; and tax all financial speculation and financial exchanges at 1% – and as a result of these measures, the treasuries will be full to overflowing, and there will be room for social and environmental programs, as well as great and urgently needed tax cuts for small and medium business, farmers, and the bottom 90% of the population. Pollution taxes, and resource extraction taxes and royalties paid to the people, will simply incentivize the shift to cleaner modes and means, habits and technologies, and will further fund the much needed People’s Green New Deal – which rejects the faux green deal being presented by Davos, which is a deal with the devil.
But even with these measures, automobiles should, ideally, in the longer term, and as soon as possible, be in community car co-ops, not private driveways and private garages. You sign out a Lamborghini, a Porsche, a Cadillac or a Tesla, like you would take out a library book – except at a very high premium price. And you can sign out a mini-van or cargo van, or a truck, a Prius, a Bolt or a Smart Car, for a more modest price. What we most definitely do not need is millions of private automobiles, of any description, being the basis of our transportation. We tried that – it was a catastrophe. Make the roads 70-90% devoted to buses, bicycle lanes and pedestrian streets, open air markets and public greenspaces and gardens. Automobiles of any description, whether electric or fossil fuel burning, driverless or not, have to be squeezed to the margins, and removed from their current status as a primary mode of transportation and mobility, or our civilization is going down the tubes fast. In 1901, driverless electric cars would have been a terribly short-sighted and stupid idea to base a transportation system around, for the reasons described vividly and clearly in this article. To think, in 2021, over a century later, that any form of private automobile use could be the centre-piece of our transportation infrastructure for the future, is absolutely insane.
Even in terms of land use and transportation, which are two separate but closely intertwined issues, the century-old habit of planning cities and communities around a transportation system that is centred on the private automobile, has been a disaster in multiple ways. Firstly, every time a city builds a new highway or widens a highway to increase traffic flow capacity and reduce traffic congestion, more people drive and people drive more often, resulting in more roads and highways being clogged with more cars and more congestion. The model has been a dismal failure for decades, yet we keep doing the same thing and keep repeating the same strategy, expecting different results. As Einstein said, this is the very definition of insanity.
Then there are the mass deaths and injuries from an automobile-centred transportation system. In the US over 40,000 people are killed in automobile accidents, including pedestrians being hit by cars in cities and towns, many of them children. The same number of people, in rough figures, are killed by cars in the US as are killed by opiods. There is a great hew and cry about opioid addiction, and rightfully so, and yet there is a deathly silence about our far more disastrous addiction to private automobiles, because that would be like criticizing the holy sacraments. Worse, it is fashionable and even held to be praiseworthy to criticize the churches, even in the most scathing of ways, but to question the sanctity and centrality of the private automobile as the centre-piece of all urban and transportation planning, invokes screaches and howls akin to the witch burnings of the Inquisition. We must re-think our presumptions, especially those that are most cherished and deeply held.
I am speaking, by the way, as an inveterate car lover. But while I love cars, I do not think it makes any slightest sense to make them the central focus of transportation or urban planning.
Another disastrous effect of that dismal model is of course smog. While the people and governments lost their minds over what is in reality, a new variant of the flu, in 2020 roughly 1.5 million people died globally from Covid, roughly the same number that have died, tragically, every year from the flu for centuries, but in the same year, as every year, though it is climbing exponentially, several million died from air pollution and smog. As I have written about before, our threat assessment capacities are completely shot, and utterly disconnected from reality. (See, Reality Check.)
Further, there is the issue of wasted land. Roughly 70% of Las Angeles is now covered with highways, streets and parking lots. Clearly, the sacred car is more important to us than either human life, or ecology and the rest of nature. If we were serious about public health in the slightest, which we are not, we would rip up half the streets and parking lots and turn them into pedestrian malls, greenspace and community gardens to create food for all and food self-reliance for all cities towns and villages, and turn half of the highway lanes into (wind-powered) electric bus lanes. But we have no slightest concern for human health, or human life or death. Our pretenses are all hollow, and as Thoreau said, “Our sills are all rotted.” Our founding assumptions and dogmas are killing millions of human beings, young and old, every year, and billions of other living creatures, and destroying ecosystems, and pushing us fast toward civilizational collapse and extinction. And yet, we cry loudly and with wringing hands about our deep and abiding, profound humanitarianism, and our commitment towards public health and the ending of needless deaths. The hypocrisy and self-deceit could scarcely be more extreme.
This should also be said, in brief: I warned people since 1991, thirty years ago, that the rising trend was not only ecological disaster, but also, and more chilling, fascism. Now it is here. But what I did not expect was for the great majority to respond to the “new normal” of authoritarianism with a yawn, and with a cheerful obedience and total complacency, as their human rights, constitutions, democracy and freedom are shredded and destroyed. And I certainly did not expect ordinarily sane people to be cheerleading for the new corporate fascist police state. But it is clear, the majority are no longer sane. They are dissociated from reality, which is the most precise definition of insanity that is possible.
Here I must say a word to the politically correct lemmings who feel that censorship and neo-Maoist thought control are legitimate and justified. Taking care with our words and speech, being thoughtful and sensitive and compassionate, and avoiding and transcending bigotry, prejudice, callousness, discrimination and hate, are obviously positive things. But political correctness can turn into a witch hunt, and another form of authoritarianism and collective group-think. That, it has done. While I can and do sympathize with people having mental health issues, especially since I lived with severe anxiety and depression for 17 years, between the ages of 18 and 35, it is nevertheless important that we can speak plainly about reality and the world we live in. When someone, or some policy or habit of our collective, supremely abnormal norm, is not just bad, but far beyond bad, we need stronger terms to convey the gravity of it. Sometimes the word evil is the only appropriate term, such as in regards to the Holocaust, or with regards to the global fascist coup being carried out as we speak. Other times, saying something is “a bad idea”, is simply far too weak and evasive a description. Sometimes we must state the truth plainly, no matter who may be offended: the policy, behaviour, or norm, is not just bad – it is patently insane. Let us not become so enfeebled of mind that we cannot talk openly and plainly about reality and the world we live in, or we will be simply doomed, by way of our own self-imposed virtual lobotomy.
But to continue…
If we were to get serious about stopping toxic pollution and smog, and got serious about ensuring all people have access to healthy food in sufficient quantities, neither of which we are remotely serious about now, then our self-image of being deeply concerned with human health and human life could begin to be taken seriously. As it stands, we ignore the biggest issues of human health and human deaths, while screaming our support for utterly counterproductive authoritarian measures. That is not only morally bankrupt, it is positively insane.
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Among the most urgent and compelling reasons, and areas, for decentralization is in regards to food, agriculture and global warming. The Davos billionaire’s club wants to convince us that they will solve the world’s hunger and environmental crises, both, among other messianic acts. But their plan involves removing the people from the land, and concetrating all control over food and agriculture in the hands of a few hundred globalist corporate elites. If that sounds safe to you, I suggest you think again.
It is the Land Enclosure Acts all over again – the giant land grab in Britain, which took place between 1235 and 1914, and particularly in the 17th and 18th centuries, whereby the landed aristocracy essentially stole the commons, with the aiding and abetting of the equally criminal government, unsurprisingly, especially considering parliament was largely made up of the wealthy land owning elite themselves, who were pushing for ever more land enclosures to increase their already great wealth and power; and which in turn drove the people off the land, because the landed aristocracy could make more money raising cattle, or sheep for valuable wool textiles, and forced the people to choose between dying of starvation, joining the ranks of the desperate urban poor, who filled the new sweat shops of the Industrial Revolution, or getting on a boat, risking all, and sailing to the New World. The trouble is, there is nowhere left to flee the robber barons: this time, the land grab is global, and it aims to be total and complete.
(I can hear the quibbling now from the ever-evasive and slippery Sophists who are the grim majority in the academy, who forever feel compelled to make apologetics and glosses for the crimes of whatever power elite happen to be in power at the time, as most academics throughout history have done – and they are a disgrace for it, and by no way scholarly in such actions. But yes, while the theft of the commons and the usurpation of land happened through various processes, it was by and large theft, and class warfare; and while there have been many drivers of urbanization throughout history, the single greatest driver has been and continues to be the loss of land by the rural peasantry and the poor, through one form or another of usurpation or theft by the rich. The same process is driving the peasants of the Global South into the shanty towns and slums of the cities around the world, and that has been going on for a very long time, though it has exponentially accelerated over the past few decades. When Adam Smith is correct, I would cite him; in instances where Marx is more correct, I would cite Marx. I am not a Marxist, but Marx was by and large correct when he identified the land enclosure movement as an act of theft and class warfare, creating the bulk of the workforce of what became the urban industrial labour pool or proletariat. And no, it is not relevant to cite that agriculture was “rationalized”, since theft remains theft, no matter the justification. “Well, you see, I am stealing your land in order to help you”, isn’t an argument that peasants, small scale farmers or the rural poor felt to be very convincing then, nor do they now, and nor should they. And yes, the land enclosures or theft of the commons was as much about power, or more, than it was about agriculture or food production – far more. Land is the primary source of wealth, and therefore of power, then as now, and always, as Malcolm X realized and clearly stated, as well. Then as now, controlling the land is the primary means of controlling the people. This has nothing to do with romanticizing the past, by the way, and everything to do with whether an aristocratic or business elite should run roughshod over the other 99%. So yes, while there are numerous dynamics in land use and urbanization, one of the biggest is theft of land by the rich, driving the rural poor into desperate actions, including the ugly choice of becoming urban wage slaves, as it was widely viewed to be.)
In fact, it is even worse and more dystopian than that, because the plutocrats want to not only own or control all of the land, but also, all productive assets or means of producing wealth, including the factories, businesses, shipping and transportation, real estate, along with the media, the mass communication system, the global economy and financial system, the private armies (yes, the military industrial complex is being systematically privatized), the new digital currencies, without which none shall buy or sell, and are seeking to enclose, own, patent or otherwise control all of life – seeds, animals, breeding stock, our data and personal records and habits, and effectively, our own bodies and minds, as well. Everything is a commodity to them, and they have modest desires: they simply want it all.
As Adam Smith said, it is, “The vile maxim of the masters: all for us, nothing for anybody else.”
Again, as Klaus Schwabe said, “You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy.”
Furthermore, the plan of the corporate elite is to use petrochemical industrial agriculture as their answer – a model which is now proven to be catastrophic for the environment, for soils and souls, in terms climate change, environmental degradation, soil depletion, food security, and in terms of the human and social costs. If we want to see the collapse of global food production, along with most ecosystems in the world, and the collapse of civilization as a result, as has happened to many civilizations in the past, following the elites’ plan will virtually ensure it.
Technology can be helpful or harmful, but as I concluded in my first year of university in environmental studies and philosophy, and as everything I have read, observed and experienced has confirmed, technology is not what will save us. It is a problem that is two-fold, which plagues us: attitudes or world view, and power structures and systems. If we do not address these two fundamental areas, then all our efforts to resolve the environmental crisis, or any of our myriad, interconnected social crises, will come to nothing, or worse. The ideology of the ruling Davos billionaire elite, is technocracy. That is worse than useless. That is the building of a dystopia. It would be better if the billionaires retired to their private islands, mansions and yachts, and left the world alone. And if they refuse, we may well have to put them under house arrest.
Remember, even if authoritarian measures are justified in an emergency – and I am not saying they are justified now, but even if you believe that they are – those authoritarian measures must be temporary and short-lived. If they are not, then we have been swindled and duped yet again, and instead of crisis management, we are being sold into a permanent state of authoritarianism; which, in more honest times, would be called what it is: fascism. Bear that in mind as the days and months roll by, in this “new normal”, as we have been told a thousand times that it is.
This is not a temporary set of emergency measures. This is endgame. And don’t run off screaming that this is a wild conspiracy theory. It has nothing to do with conspiracy or theory. It is simply class analysis, a sociological analysis, and an institutional analysis. Our social institutions, particularly the democratic nation-state, along with the media, the financial system and the economy, have been captured by powerful individuals and giant corporations. And what they want is what the power hungry and the greedy have always wanted throughout history: more power, and more money. Why is this so hard to fathom? Have the business elite or the state ever exploited a crisis to their advantage? Don’t answer that until you have read, The Shock Doctrine. Of course they have. And they are doing it again.
But don’t worry, Davos’ Eric Schmidt assures us that, “The Davos universe will be fine.” Ah, well that is reassuring. I was worried about the welfare of the super-rich and the excessively powerful. So long as they will be fine, why should we be worried? The billionaire class will be fine, and their loyal ass kissers among the political, media and technocratic elite will be fine (admitting of course that they too are expendable), and who really cares about the plebes? Let them eat cake. No, better, as our good friend and patron, Bill Gates said, “Let them eat bugs.”
But Erich Schmidt goes on to assure us that more “efficient” systems will benefit everyone. This is the standard trickle down theory nonsense, which we have seen is utterly hollow. The super-rich are swallowing up all the wealth on Earth that they can, and poverty and inequality are soaring as a result. So the technocratic utopia he is promising should strike us, properly, as nothing other than snake oil, as well as being a dystopian nightmare.
Of course, as Chomsky has said, every emperor and every dictator throughout history has convinced himself that he is the great benefactor and saviour of humanity. But that doesn’t mean that we should also believe in their delusions.
Remember that all social systems and institutions are human creations. That means, they are not immutable, they are not permanent, and they are not inevitable, and it means that if they do not truly serve human interests broadly, but only serve the interests of the powerful few, they can and should be discarded.
Another important note, which is often conflated, especially by propagandists and elite vested interests, is this. There are two very different sets of meanings to the word elite. In one sense, elite means someone who is particularly gifted or talented in a certain area. There are elite basketball players, elite pianists, elite chefs. Nobody discounts that human talents are diverse. That is not a problem. What is a problem is the other meaning of the term elite. That is the term in reference to a power elite. That means that a small group of people have a tremendous amount of power in society. That kind of elite, a power elite, always spells corruption, and always, in the end, spells tyranny. But the power elite always want to conflate the two meanings, and that is also their delusion. They tell themselves that they are not dominating usurpers of power, or power mongers, but that they are “leaders” or even messianic figures. That is elitism. And when enough people believe in the self-serving delusions of the elite, then you get fascism. And that is precisely what is happening now.
The billionaire elite want to effectively round the people up like cattle and corral them in sprawling, tightly controlled, total surveillance “smart cities”, with stark prospects for freedom or democracy, and lab grown meat as the daily menu. Aside from the horrific crimes against humanity involved in this plan of mass forced relocation, and the final destruction of freedom, human rights, constitutional rule and democracy, the billionaire’s Great Reset agenda, which the founder and president of the Davos World Economic Forum, Klaus Schawbe exlicitly and publicly announced, the plan of the corporate elite will aggravate, not alleviate, the world’s environmental crisis.
What the environmental movement has been slow to understand, but what people like Allan Savory, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Richard Heinberg and Vandana Shiva have proven beyond any doubt, is that small scale, decentralized, organic, regenerative agriculture, is not only the best, safest, least impact, and most secure way to feed humanity, but it is also the single most powerful method or tool we have for healing the planet, and reversing climate change. What that means, is that we have to bring the people back to the land, not drive them off it.
Through regenerative agriculture the soil is healed, and carbon is caputured in the healthy soils and rural landscape, which not only slows climate change, but can quickly reverse it. The business elite’s plan will possibly cut fossil fuel use, which is good, but will further hasten the global death of soils, meaning, the carbon capturing capacity of the Earth’s soils is killed, along with their ability to grow food or support any form of life, resulting in a net worsening of the climate crisis under the billionaire’s plan.
The corporate oligarchs have been investing like there is no tomorrow in the fossil fuel industry, while talking virtuously about the need for carbon reduction and sustainability. All three of the biggest hedge funds on Earth, who manage the money of the super-rich, are heavily invested in all of the top 100 carbon emitting corporations. The Great Reset is a lie. The corporate elite are interested in whatever brings them more money, more wealth, and more power, and humanity and the Earth be damned; along with freedom, human rights and democracy, naturally. That is what their actions prove beyond any doubt.
While Klauss Schawbe and his Davos coterie propound about sustainability, they want to take the existing petrochemical industrial model of agriculture, which is destroying the planet and poisoning our food, air, soil, water and bodies, and which is heavily dependent on fossil fuels, and essentially put it on steroids. There is no remote way any sane person can view that plan as being sustainable or ecologically sound, all human rights and social concerns aside. The Davos-driven Great Reset plan which is being aggressively pushed by the billionaire elite is therefore a recipe for systems failure and ecological catastrophe, mass human rights abuses, and a full-scale war on democracy and freedom, followed quickly by civilizational collapse.
The Davos Great Reset plan of the billionaire oligarchy is also premised on an abundance of cheap energy in the form of diesel fuel. But there too, the indicators are, that the era of cheap oil and diesel fuel is about to end, and end abruptly. World conventional oil production peaked in 2006. The fracking boon was a boondoggle that temporarily glutted the world with a brief extended flash of cheap oil, but fracking is a money losing scheme, made possible only by cheap money, as Max Keiser has repeatedly pointed out, and now the industry is dying as the fracking companies go bankrupt en mass. Total oil production has now also peaked, as of 2018. The return on investment numbers across the fossil fuel industry broadly, further show the case, as to the end of cheap energy, irrefutably. A century ago, it cost a dollar to extract $100 in profit margin of oil. By the 1990s it was $10 profit for the same investment, and falling fast. Every action, machine or system has built in inefficiencies that to some extent are unavoidable. This is the inviolable second law of thermodynamics. With fracking and tar sands, we are down to $3-4 profit per dollar invested, which is not enough to maintain the infrastructure costs to extract, refine and ship it. The energy cliff, therefore, is nearly upon us. The profits versus investment ratio of the biggest oil companies proves the point beyond all debate. The plan among environmentalists was always, primarily, to build a renewable energy infrastructure to replace fossil fuels. But that requires trillions of dollars in investment, and an abundance of cheap energy to build it. We had that chance in the 1970s and ’80s, but we passed it up. Now we will be severely constrained, not by money, but by soon to skyrocket energy costs. It means that ship has, in terms of the big picture, and aside from small local pockets, already sailed. Besides that ugly fact, is this: renewable energy produces electricity, but 80% of our global energy use is not electricity but fossil fuels – and particularly in terms of shipping and transportation, which runs on diesel. Even as late as 2000-2020, we still had abundant cheap energy to build a renewable energy and transportation infrastructure, but that window is rapidly closing now. It is still imperative to get off of fossil fuels swiftly and decisively, and to shift to renewable energy, and especially to build wind-powered, high speed electric light rail, and electric and bi-reticulated bus transportation grids; along with redesigning our communities, centred around pedestrian streets, public green spaces and gardens, public libraries, walking and cycling paths and mass transit. But the landscape is changing fast, and the energy costs are about to soar. The fact is, therefore, that we will experience a severe energy shortage, and a global economy that depends upon long supply chains is inevitably going to break. The only way we can make the transition to renewable energy now, and moreover to simply weather the coming storm, is to shift to decentralized, small-scale, regenerative agriculture-based communities, as well as to greatly reduce our energy consumption – and that means slashing shipping distances, which means decentralizing the economy, particularly food production. But the Davos elite want to push us in the opposite direction. Carbon farming, meaning, local regenerative agriculture, which requires decentralization, combined with major cuts to energy consumption, is now the only viable path to healing our planet. But again, that is 180 degrees opposite to where the Davos elite are driving us. Aside from deep and grave concerns over human rights, freedom and democracy, therefore, the elites’ plan to save the environment, is guaranteed to fail, and fail spectacularly, if we are foolish enough to go along with it, for reasons of both ecological collapse, and energy cost spikes.
But then again, the billionaire class is insulated from the disastrous effects of their actions. They all have expensive, ultra-premium insurance policies, so that if there is a severe storm, hurricane, tornado, food riots, or the county they live in goes up in flames from wildfires burning out of control, they will be air-lifted by private helicopter out of danger, and flown to a five-star resort of their choosing, or to one of their other mansions, country estates, yachts or private islands. This at least partially explains why they can be so giddy and aggressively pushing when it comes to plans and agendas that will dramatically increase their already stratospheric wealth and power, while further destabilizing the planet, and further degrading, poisoning, depleting and razing the natural world that supports us all. This is precisely how and why civilizations collapse: the elite are insulated from the problems, and so, continue to sip champagne on the top decks of the sinking ship, believing their wealth and power will protect them – and who cares about the lesser beings on the lower decks who are already drowning and under water.
What the billionaire elite are doing, therefore, and the evidence is clear from their actions, is gathering all wealth and power that they can – buying up farm land, driving the people off the land, taking the entire S&P private, setting themselves up as the rent collectors for every aspect of life and the real economy, and launching digital currencies that they will control, among other actions – prior to the systems failure that they know full well is coming. When it comes, they want to be left as the ruling landed aristocracy, in a neo-feudal era, where they will effectively live, and rule, as god-kings.
As Michael Moore’s recent film showed, we have been conned in more ways than one. Some of the biggest environmental groups have made a deal with the devil. They have joined forces with the corporate elite, presumably believing they could win benefits for the Earth, but have either been duped, bribed, or otherwise co-opted. Across the US, so-called “clean energy” and “renewable energy” projects have been passed by legislatures, and built. But what was secretly built in most cases was not wind turbines, but biofuel plants. That means any organic life form, living or dead, can be burned to make energy. Presently these biofuel plants are burning live trees and entire forests. That cannot last long. When they have finished burning the forests which are the lungs of the Earth, what will they burn next? Maybe the seven billion superfluous humans. It would not be the first time such things have happened. And prison labour can only utilize so many. Maybe we should think again about the Holocaust. Are we so sure it could not happen again? Maybe we should watch Soylent Green again as well.
The oceans are reaching their limit in terms of their ability to capture carbon, because we have radically altered and undermined their ecology. Now the billionaires want to cut the lungs out of the soil as well. That is not a good plan. That is suicide.
Are they stupid, or are they simply pathological and sociopathic? Probably both. But we can see by their actions that they are definitely pathological and sociopathic. A million dead Iraqis for the sake of oil money is simply a good investment to their minds. And they are invested up to their eyeballs in the very fossil fuel industry they claim we must get away from. “You shall know them by their fruits.” They are sociopathic liars, quite frankly, as we can see by the record of their actions. They make Dick Cheney look like a swell guy.
Mind you, of course, the few hundred billionaire elites who effectively rule the world have armies of technocrats, bureaucrats, spokespersons and other minions, most of whom are so deeply indoctrinated that they sincerely believe what they are doing is good for the people and the planet. But Stalin, Mussolini and Mao had their minions as well, and despite their good intentions, they were, in reality, paving a super-highway to hell on Earth.
The ideology of the global power elite is Machiavellian, neo-Malthusian technocracy, which is simply another way of saying ruthless power lust and genocidal fascism. But they support their goals of gathering all wealth and power into their hands through what used to be called propaganda, but what is maybe more accurately termed psychological warfare or social engineering. And the worldview they promote is both misanthropic and Hobbesian: they are actively indoctrinating people to mistrust themselves and one another, in a classic strategem of divide and conquer, while sowing the completely deceitful, or delusional, notion that the elite are the saviours of humanity and the Earth. Their guiding icons are Spencer, who corrupted Darwinism and created Social Darwinism, Machiavelli, who rationalized any means necessary as justifiable in order to gain, maintain, expand or consolidate power, and Plato and Hobbes, who argued, incoherently, that an elite of philosopher kings or technocrats are essential to human well-being, when in fact, history has abundantly proven, over and over again, that elitism, empire, and any form of authoritarianism, lead not to salvation, but to tyranny, and to great crimes against humanity. This is the web of deceit and delusion that we must cut through, to free ourselves and to heal the world.
The business elite want to urbanize 100% of the world’s population. The misinformed believe this will lessen pressure on the environment. The opposite is true. Urbanization creates vast chains of supply lines which are both increasingly fragile as well as completely unsustainable. Worse yet, it insulates people from the effects of their actions, by separating them from the land and alienating them from nature. It is that very alienation which is at the heart of the environmental crisis. Therefore, total urbanization will, in multiple ways, make the environmental crisis far worse, not better.
Remember that before WWII the vast majority of the world’s population, well over 80%, lived in rural areas. Encouraging people to move out of the big cities, into smaller, more ecologically sound communities, with closer relations and closer ties to the natural world, will be a great transformation, but it is simply reversing our error, created over the past 75 years. It is big, but it is achievable. The alternative is mass urbanization and mass dehumanization, in an Orwellian control grid which is really a kind of techno-fascism, and which is both genocidal and utterly unsustainable.
Again, we are presented with two very starkly opposed alternatives. We can allow all power to be concentrated in the hands of the global corporate elite, including all economic power, effectively all political power, as they over-ride every democratic government, and all power over food production and distribution; or we can decentralize economic power, renew and reaffirm national democracies, and create thriving communities that are actively healing the land and the world we live in. I think our choices are becoming starkly clear.
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Bear in mind that the original democratic theorists never expected or intended for democracy to be practiced on a vast scale, such as the present day US, Canada, Russia, China, India, Australia, Argentina or Brazil, which are geographically vast countries, many times the size of most nations in the world. (It will be surprising if these geographically giant nations can stay internally united, at least with any centralized power centres or centralized governments, although they could much more easily stay united as federations, with much more decentralized powers internally. Historically, no empire has ever lasted, and nations that are on the scale of empires, no matter how they behave or are structured, are unlikely to survive in the long term, unless they consciously decentralize and federate powers internally, as Thomas Jefferson advised and urged, for example). Rousseau himself intended democracy to be practiced on the scale of his home country of tiny Switzerland.
The US itself was originally a union of thirteen colonies, with 3.5 million people. And even that was a federation of semi-autonomous states in a federation of shared powers. Today the US has a landmass roughly five times bigger, and has nearly 100 times the population.
When power is over-centralized, the supposedly democratic governments become so removed and out of reach from the people that democracy withers and dies, and is gradually replaced by oligarchy. That has now occurred. Democracy is dead. Or rather, democracy is on life-support, and dying, and freedom, human rights and constitutional rule, along with it.
Worse yet, we placed checks and balances, and firm limits, on concentrations of political power, but left economic power unchecked. 200 years after the birth of modern democracy, economic power has become so staggeringly concentrated globally, that a new moneyed aristocracy, as Thomas Jefferson called them, have effectively taken over, and are now the de facto rulers of the world.
“I pray we shall crush the moneyed aristocracy in its infancy, for already it bids defiance to our laws and seeks a contest of strength with our democratic government.” – Thomas Jefferson
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I am not anti-business, but I am certainly anti-fascist. And if we are foolish enough to allow extreme concentrations of economic power, then those powers will inevitably come to overshadow, then dominate, and finally to eviscerate both freedom and democracy, and all human rights and constitutional rule along with them. And that, is exactly what we have allowed to happen. First, remove the plutocratic business elite from power. Only then can we have any serious discussion of other social or environmental issues. Until then, we are talking, prattling, hot-air-filled fools, and all talk of social justice or sustainability, freedom, democracy, human rights or peace, or any positive social change, are futile and meaningless.
As to political powers, I am and will be forever more on the side of freedom and constitutional democracy. Churchill was right: Democracy is the worst form of government ever invented, except for all the others. There are only two choices, ultimately, in political philosophy. As Chomsky said, “You’re either a democrat or an aristocrat.” We live in a dream world if we believe it otherwise. Either you believe in government of the people, by the people, for the people, or you believe in some form or other of elite rule, which means oligarchy, and which always spells, in the end, tyranny. So, therefore, you either choose constitutional democracy, or you chose one or another form of servitude, serfdom, or slavery. Can it be made any more clear than that? I hear people arguing for oligarchy, for technocracy, not knowing that is what they are doing. They may as well be forging their own shackles and chains, for that is precisely what they are doing.
As to human rights, they are innate and inalienable. They are not granted by constitutions, or governments, or the state. If the society is intelligent, just, or simply sane, then it will uphold human rights, but it does not grant them: it either honours our human rights which are innate, or it does not. But the rights remain innate, no matter whether the society or the government has the virtue and the good sense to honour them or not. Constitutions are important, and are the foundational and ultimate law of the land. But a culture which respects and honours human rights is more fundamental yet. Without such a culture and such a consciousness, constitutions are mere pieces of paper, to be ignored at whim, whenever it is convenient, profitable, or expedient to do so. That is why Thoreau’s short essay, On Civil Disobedience, is the most important political tract ever written. Unless the people stand up for their rights, even the Magna Carta is meaningless, and simply an inert piece of paper.
As to the powers of government, yes, a democratic government has the right and the obligation to enforce laws protecting the people, and also the land and the ecology of the land. But the fundamental rule of any just society, or any society that wishes to be stable, or sociologically sustainable in the long run, is that individual freedom can only be constrained when an individual is actively harming another individual, or the commons which supports us all.
I watched a biography on Oscar Wilde tonight, and at the end, the thought that dominated my mind was this. What sheer and utter arrogance it is that people feel they can tell other people how they should live! Again, unless someone is harming another person, or is causing ecological harm to the environment which we share, by dumping toxic waste into a river, or clear-cutting a forest, for example, neither the government, the state, nor any group or individual has the right to impose their notions of how someone should live upon another, and nor do they have the slightest right, in any way, to either tell another person how they should live, where they can or cannot go, who they can or cannot love, what clothes they can or cannot wear, what they must wear on their face, what they can say, or do, or not do, or to limit or constrain their freedom in any way. To impose our notions on another person as to how they should, and must, live, is the highest arrogance, and in fact the original sin, of false pride, and sheer hubris. It is tyranny, and it is abhorrent, in all its forms, no matter the justifications which are made.
Compassion, solidarity, or people helping one another, is the basis of a just society, a peaceful society, and a stable and sustainable society; but equally so is freedom. Without freedom being practiced, and honoured in practice, and not just espoused, our society cannot hope to be sustainable, much less just. It will be neither. It will be a boorish dystopian gulag of one sort or another, until it finally collapses and destroys itself. Freedom is fundamental. This, we must remember, and now. And over-centralization, both political and even more so economic, is at the very heart of the problem.
*
In the longer term, and as soon as the people are ready for it and have the will, we must democratize the economy. In the immediate realm of urgently needed actions, right now, we must reverse the long term trend of hyper-concentration of wealth and economic power, dethrone the corporate oligarchs, and break up the biggest corporate giants, which have effectively taken over the elected governments of the world. We either face reality bravely and head on, or the new reality of global corporate empire will devour us, and the planet along with us. These are our two choices now.
The following is absolutely critical to understand. The corporate-state oligarchy is now in the midst of a deep and widespread, global crisis of legitimacy – the same phenomenon of crisis of legitimacy which, after decades of gradual loss of public confidence, trust, and patience with the system, led finally to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the entire Eastern Bloc, in just a year and a half, between 1989 and 1991. This is the biggest opportunity for real, positive social change that we will get. It is precisely because the crisis of legitimacy for the ruling powers is so deep, that the business and political elite are resorting to such desperate measures. Their increasingly desperate measures are not a sign of their strength, but of their weakness, and their fear. We must seize the moment, and press now, for real, fundamental, systemic change. The people must reclaim their power, and now.
Remember that the US spends a trillion dollars a year on the military and war, while 90% of its people are reduced to peasants, the infrastructure disintegrates and begins to collapse, and the people are told there is no money for public health care; and meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry is subsidized by $5 trillion a year globally, and the US alone wastes another trillion dollars a year on a private health care system that costs twice as much as the public health care systems of Canada and Europe. There is no shortage of money – the billionaire elite are awash in money. There is now over $30 trillion sitting in the offshore private bank accounts of the super-rich. The billionaire corporate elite keep demanding billions and trillions in bail-outs and “stimulus” money, and they get it. The problem is not lack of money or resources, but the mass systemic theft being carried out daily by the corporate elite, who feed at the bottomless public trough, and are feeding off the real economy, the people and the earth, and draining them all of wealth, and of life. And there are many things we can do about it, big and small. Remember that General Motors, one of the biggest companies in the US, was nationalized. But that is just one option among many. Remember, most importantly, nearly every major positive change in human society in history has come from below, from the people, and not from the government or the ruling elite.
The American and French Revolutions began with one single book, Common Sense, by Thomas Paine. The movement to end slavery began with just a handful of people. Great things almost always have small beginnings. The fact is, We, the people of the Earth, the 99%, have all the power we need, and a good many proven models, to take on the giants, and to win the world back, and to heal our world in the process.
Join a credit union, move your money out of the big banks, use local currencies and Bitcoin, or at least cash instead of credit cards and bank cards, whenever you can, and cut the banking elite out of the picture everywhere you can – stop feeding your slavers; switch to a co-op insurance company; support your local farmers, farmers’ markets and artisans; learn about the anti-trust movement led by Teddy Roosevelt, and also, the very successful experiments in local democratic budget making, land reform and agrarian reform movements, industrial and workplace democracy, Participatory Economics, social ecology, communitarianism, the Spanish Revolution, the Mondragon Co-op, Via Campesina, Transition Towns and the Transition Network, the organic food and agriculture movement, the permaculture and regenerative agriculture movements, the land trust movement, which makes owning land affordable, because the ownership is democratically shared, and the co-op movement of America, which now has 140 million members; join the localization movement (sometimes called the re-localization movement), the bioregional movement, the decentralization movement, the co-op movement, the public bank movement, the buy local, or local procurement movement, or the New Economy movement; start a community garden project, a community food self-reliance project, a community water harvesting, water protection and water self-reliance co-op, a community car co-op, child care co-op, a health care co-op, a community herbal medicine growers co-op, a co-op greenhouse, a co-op laundry, a co-op school, community-run radio, newspapers, magazines, podcasting, web tv or other media, a co-op legal action and lawyers group, or a community renewable energy co-op; switch to or at least embrace and support alternative media and alternative social media; consider an urban or rural housing co-op or a land trust; get involved in the boycott, divestment or shareholder activism movement; join a CSA, plant a garden, invest locally, eat local, buy local, and support local independent business, as an important start. Then, join with others to take the power back in even bigger ways.
As my mother used to say, If you don’t interest yourself in politics, politics will interest itself in you. In the US today, the three richest men, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, control more wealth than the poorest half of Americans. Globally, the eight richest individuals control more wealth than the poorest half of humanity.
We no longer have liberal democracy in the West. We now live under a global corporate oligarchy. We now have neo-feudalism, and it is morphing rapidly into fascism.
We had best deal with reality, or reality will deal with us.
“Historically, the real basis of power has always been wealth, in one form or another.” “Democracy? They control the action. Liberty? The numbers are pretty nasty.” “Either we probe much deeper to the institutional and systemic basis of the old order, or we lose.” “What does the next system look like, as the old order collapses?” – Gar Alperowitz
“Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”, as Lord Acton said. Remember that always. It is the excessive concentration or centralization of power which is the greatest danger. Nothing else comes even close. So long as a few dozen corporate giants, mainly banks, and the billionaires who control them, effectively control the global economy, as a recent Swiss systems analysis confirms, and essentially rule the world, there is zero chance of us resolving either our social crises or the environmental crisis. We need strong anti-trust action to break up the biggest corporate empires, especially in banking, finance and the media, redistribute their assets in the formation of a network of local democratic co-ops, and create legislative and constitutional checks and balances, and firm limits on great concentrations of economic power and wealth; otherwise, if we do not, then democracy, freedom, human rights, constitutional rule, the planet, and the great majority of the people, will continue to have the life sucked out of them, by this same giant vampire squid which is the global corporate empire. This is the stark reality that we must face, and now. You cannot have a strong economy, much less justice or sustainability, nor, most fundamentally, freedom, constitutional rule or functioning democracy, so long as the giant corporate cartels and oligarchs effectively rule the nations and the world. The conservative and libertarian right now understands this better than the left, which is by and large obsessed with getting a few more crumbs from the tables of the rich. The Neville Chamberlains, cowards and Quislings must be forcefully moved aside. The time for bold and decisive action against the rising corporate fascist powers, is now.
Remember, the American Revolution and the birth of modern democracy began with just 77 men at Valley Forge. In fact, it began with one person writing one book: Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. Before that, in the mid 1700s, the idea of democracy seemed radical, extremist, impractical, and impossible. But it happened.
Big changes do happen in history. And almost all of them begin with a handful of people: from the birth of modern democracy and the overthrow of feudalism, to the abolition of slavery, to the universal right to vote, the abolition of child labour, to the labour movement securing decent pay, basic workplace safety, and work weeks shortened from 100 hours, to 80, to 60, to 40, and lowering.
Big changes happen, and another major shift in the world is emerging now. Either it will be led by the corporate oligarchy, in which case it will be an Orwellian neo-feudalism, technocracy and fascism, or it will be led by the people, in which case, the power is in our hands to choose something better. This is the fork in the road. Let us choose wisely.
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Our present system cannot and will not continue, but will inevitably collapse. A decentralized economic system can sow community prosperity and resiliency, while respecting ecology and freedom. The present system is not only destroying the earth’s ecosystems, and the basis of all life, but has also created a global corporate oligarchy, which is destroying freedom and democracy, and creating a growing sea of poverty. We can do better than this broken system, and we must.
As it turns out, democracy, ecology, culture, the arts, economics, health care, science, philosophy, spirituality, education, and virtually every aspect of life, thrives best when we respect and embrace diversity, freedom, curiosity and creativity – and this, in turn, requires decentralization in all of these major areas of life.
The globalized economy, with its long supply chains and its fossil fuel dependency, and the global corporate oligarchy which controls it, is going to collapse. That is a good thing. We should hasten its demise, in every peaceful and non-violent way we can. And we should look to get out of the cities and into more resilient and life-affirming communities, before it comes crashing down around our ears.
We should bear in mind that in physics, mathematics, in science and in life, it is often the simplest solutions which are the best. Think of Enstein’s theory of relativity. Almost nobody can understand it, but it does come down to one simple equation: e=mc(squared). (My apologies that I can’t type that properly on my keyboard, but you get the picture.) Simplicity is not only the highest form of elegance, it is also generally the best solution in terms of freedom, democracy, human rights, quality of life, ecological stewardship and genuine sustainability, and for community and urban design.
Remember Tainter’s analysis of how civilizations collapse: they collapse, in large part, because they become excessively complex – because, while that complexity of systems brings certain advantages, it also exponentially increases the system’s fragility, and hence, the civilization’s fragility, until, in its rigidity, its fragility, and its inability to adapt, it begins to crumble and to collapse. We are experiencing that right now, and globally. We are witnessing the beginning of collapse. We are at the beginning of the end of corporate globalization, and of corporate-run industrial civilization.
It is over-centralization – of demographics and populations, of political powers and government, of media control, mass communications, energy and culture, and especially overcentralization in terms of globalized economics, and at the heart of it, a vastly over-centralization and hyper-concentration of economic power and wealth – that is causing the multiple, inter-connected social, economic, political and ecological crises, and is driving the decline, decay, disintegration and slow-motion collapse of modern industrial societies. But over-centralization is also linked to and gives rise to excessive levels of complexity, and to rising levels of systems fragility, and systems collapse. What we do not want to do, therefore, and must not do, is to respond to these interlocking crises with more of the same thinking, and the same habits and patterns and models, that created the crises in the first place – which is exactly what we are doing now.
“Hmm… Let’s see: Over-centralization, combined with extreme concentrations of power and wealth, has produced instability, fragility, disintegration, chaos and decay…. So…let’s redouble our efforts, and do more of that.” That is the Great Reset agenda in a nutshell. That is the agenda and the mind-set of the elite. And that, is madness.
As Eistein said, you cannot solve a problem with the same thinking that created it. Moreover, as Eistein also said, Repeating the same behaviour and expecting different results is the very definition of insanity.
I think of something my great Swiss aunt used to say often: “Complicated works too.”
But then again, complicated works, only until it doesn’t. And complicated, is a strategy that is rapidly and systemically failing us now.
As Thoreau said, “Simplify, simplify.”
Remember what Aldous Huxley said, in his most important book, which is Brave New World Revisited: the central problem of society is over-organization. A certain level of organization is needed for any society, but when we adopt what Aldous Huxley called over-organization, we get bureaucracy, technocracy, unaccountable governments, and insulated, out of touch, self-serving and self-rationalizing elites, a stifling and claustrophobic, suffocating society, and a gulag society in the end, followed by collapse. The Soviet Union is the perfect textbook example. And the world is now racing to follow that same model, once again, into tyranny, a dark age, dystopia, and finally, collapse. We had best lift our heads and look around, because we are on the wrong track. This track leads to Auschwitz, and to the collapse of our civilization, for those who live long enough to see it.
We don’t need to be romantic primitivists, nor do we need to be anti-technology; but worshipping technology, and an endless line of consumer gadgets, as our salvation, is simply a form of madness. Technology is neutral, other than certain ones which should be banned, such as genetic engineering, industrial agriculture, factory farming, nuclear power and weapons of mass destruction. It depends on how we use technology, whether it improves life, or degrades and destroys it. Both technophilia, or the worship of technology as salvation, and technophobia (though to a far lesser extent) are unreasonable attitudes to take, but the former will almost invariably degrade, if not destroy our lives, our communities, and our world. (And yes, Elon Musk, Klaus Schwabe and Eric Schmidt are insane.)
Technology is neither the problem nor the solution. The problem is over-centralization, excessive concentrations of power and wealth, and the systems, institutions, mindsets, ideologies, policies, habits and norms that are founded upon over-centralization, and are based in extreme inequality of power and wealth. The solutions are in our nature, as David Suzuki wisely says, and the solutions are implicit and clear, once we clearly recognize the nature of the problem.
What is perhaps most urgent and imperative for us to realize, is this. Engineering is a marvellous set of skills and knowledge, but it must be guided and constrained by human values of solidarity, equitability, ecology, peace, democracy, human rights, and freedom. Left to their own devices, and infatuated by their powers and their worship of moulding and controlling all life, engineering becomes ecological destruction and ecological holocaust, and, simultaneously, technocracy and fascism.
That is what you get when you disconnect engineering from the core values of democracy, human rights, freedom and ecology. You get tyranny and you get destruction, masquerading as human progress and human liberation. You get an Orwellian dark age, followed by collapse.
If we are sane, we will firmly and passionately reject technocracy, which is a cult of social engineering, and root both engineering and government, and above all, the economy, in democracy, human rights and freedom, as well as ecology: and that requires and demands a fundamental rejection of over-centralization, a rejection of all excessive concentrations of power, whether political, cultural or economic, and a firm and unwaivering, categorical rejection of all forms of authoritarian rule, in favour of constitutional democracy, diversity and freedom, rooted in ecological awareness.
“Two roads diverged in the woods,
and I took the one less travelled by.
And that has made all the difference.”
The fork in the road is here. Nature will correct us in the end, if we are too stupid to correct ourselves. But over-centralization will end in either case, and soon.
We need to analize the problems, yes – as we have done here. But we also need to open our eyes and our minds to opportunities and potentials – as we have also done here. We need vision, not just analysis. Further: We must cease to forever be patching holes in the Titanic with ever more duct tape, bubblegum and bailing twine. We must begin to think big – and we often do that best by first thinking small, with a big mind view of unlimited possibilities.
We must now reject all theories, attitudes, philosophies, policies, parties, platforms, agendas and ideologies that are based in elitism, hubris, a command and control fetish, demagoguery, false messiahs, authoritarianism, and their inevitable concommitants of over-centralization, bureaucratization, technocracy, standardization, homogenization, uniformity and obedience. We must therefore reject figures such as Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Hegel, Spencer and Marx. Above all, we must refuse, at once, to be serfs or slaves, or to have our boot on anyone’s neck – and we must reject all dogmatism and monocultures of the mind.
We can and should have values, views, philosophies, preferences and opinions, but we must now hold them with a less feverish and desperate, clutching grip, and open our minds and our eyes, as well as our hearts and our ears. Diversity, creativity, imagination, experimentation, solidarity and freedom are not threats to be overcome, but values to ge embraced – and what’s more, they are our greatest of powers, and our greatest strengths.
Vision is good. Adaptability is better. But why settle for one, when we can just as easily embrace both?
We must now overcome, and firmly reject and jettison, our 2,000 year old + idolatry of ideology: our obession with our symbols, our pet theories and our cherished, preconceived notions, and presumptions about the way things must be. We must begin to deal more directly with reality. That will require a rejection of dogmatism, and a rejection of conformity, servility, submissiveness and submission, unthinking obedience to authority, a command and control fetish and mentality, the entire passive-aggressive split, the social model based on domination and submission, conquest and empire, along with all fixed and rigid habits of legalism, authoritarianism, and group-think; and a willingness to question and reflect, a willingness to try out new ideas, to freely discuss and debate, and to experiment. It will require, in short, and as a necessity, creativity and imagination, as well as adaptability and resilience. That, in turn, requires diversity, openess, and freedom. And that, requires decentralization, the rejection and overturning of excessive concentrations of power, and a reaffirmation of freedom, democracy, diversity, and the local. We now begin to understand these key dynamics, or we are doomed to a dark age ahead.
All the greatest thinkers, from Lao Tzu to Emerson, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Thoreau, Chomsky and Popper, Bookchin, Kropotkin, Vandana Shiva and Helena Norberg-Hodge, and many, many more, have realized these central truisms of life. Over-centralization, the excessive use of force, in any manner, great inequality and excessive concentrations of wealth and power, breed tyranny, decay, fragility, instability, rigidity, blindness, myopia, decline, and finally, collapse. It is now no longer a luxury to be so lucid, prescient and well-informed. It is now a necessity for survival.
Think networks, think federations, think alliances of mutual responsibility and mutual aid, think holistically, think in systems, think organically, think both micro and macro, long term and short; and think of a global network of communities, cities, villages and towns, and maybe a few sensible nations and states along with them, that leads the world to a renewal of democracy, freedom, the Earth, and Life. That is within our power to achieve. And we can and must build it now.
Build the alliance for a global renaissance, based in local communities, ecological sanity, diversity, democracy, freedom and peace. That is what the world needs now – not an Orwellian dystopia of global technocracy, ruled an egomaniacal and messianic elite, drunk with power.
What is going on in 2020/2021? The world has developed a pandemic case of Stockholm Syndrome. The Davos elite have decided it’s time to go totalitarian, and the political class are aiding and abetting the criminal global fascist coup. The majority of people remain stupified and petrified and virtually lobotomized by daily, continuous, all pervasive fear-monger, indoctrination, psychological warfare and propaganda, while a rapidly growing minority realize this is endgame: that we either stand up now, or become slaves forever.
Beware the military industrial complex, as Eisenhower so presciently, soberly, and ominously warned us, 60 years ago, and beware the now global Deep State which it controls. And know that it has now morphed into a global military industrial technotronic “Big Data” and financial complex. Beware above all, of the Big Tech, Pharma and banking elites, and their agenda – including Google, Amazon, Netflix, Uber, Facebook, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft and Apple: they are now aggressively pushing and implementing a global technocracy, and they are quite literally crypto-fascists. Boycott and divest from them all, and reject their Orwellian vision – decisively, unflinchingly, and now.
Remember this always: While the dangers are stark, and very real, the global awakening of humanity, and the emerging resistance and renaissance, are also real, and are ultimately far more powerful than any system, empire, oligarchy, or elite powers, agendas and plans. Know what side you are on. And stand up for your rights, and those of others, as we join together, in unity amidst our great and wondrous, and essential diversity, to heal our world, our communities, and ourselves, and to liberate humanity and the Earth from the dying system of plutocracy, oligarchy and greed.
The question will be asked, however, who in their right mind would support such a vision and plan of action as I have outlined here? Well, let’s see. The libertarians, anarchists, libertarian socialists, communitarians and greens, if they have any sense, should emphatically and passionately support it – and they collectively make up at least 30% of the population, if not a good deal more. Sensible conservatives will support it, because it strengthens constitutional rights and freedoms, dislodges and dethrones the oligarchy, and rebuilds strong and free, prosperous local communities. Sensible liberals should support it, if there are any such creatures left, and I know that there are more than a few. Adding the liberals and conservatives we have at least another 30% of the population. And democratic socialists should support it, as well. That means, together, at least 60% of the people, and possibly as many as 80%, should support such a plan, and ardently. That leaves only the fascists, the authoritarians of various stripes, the fans of technocracy, and the people who have made a career or an ideology out of licking their boots, along with the die-hard ideologues. Together, that sordid lot make up no more than 40% of the populace, would be a reasonable estimate, or less. So yes, the question is not whether the people would support it, but whether the people simply have the nerve to make the kinds of changes and take the kinds of action which are clearly and urgently needed. They most certainly will at some point in the near future, if not immediately. The changes that are taking place now and rapidly gaining speed, will drive them to the conclusion that all else is sheer madness, or slavery, or both.
Tainter was at least in part right, and in our case, his warning is most definitely relevant. We have created such excessive complexity for ourselves, that it has resulted in a fragility in our systems and our entire society – worse, it has resulted in fetters, chains, blindness and tyranny. As Thoreau said, “Simplify, simplify.” But that is not where the elite are driving us. They are driving us in precisely the opposite, and wrong, direction.
I have thought, we should seek to keep our lives, and the places we live, clean, green, simple and harmonious. And that applies also to our communities. And to those four guiding principles or guiding values I would add three more, which apply to both our communities and our society in general: that is, we should strive to make them vital, resilient, and just. And in turn, these three also apply to our lives and our homes, our schools, and places of work or leisure. With these seven guiding principles, our communities can thrive, and our lives and our society can thrive. If, on top of this firm foundation, we add some well-chosen and thoughtful layers of complexity, that is fine; but we should make sure, as Thoreau also warned, that our “improvements”, our clever innovations, or our safety and security measures, do not become a burden and a bondage, instead of a blessing and a liberation.
As always, life is change, and the future is in our hands. That is what is perhaps most critical for us to realize, and to know – especially now.
Get ready for a more community-centred world. It is needed, and urgently so; and it is now inevitable, and also a sheer necessity, as well as a boon, and a rebirth. Nature will force us to make that change and others, if we don’t make them voluntarily. We would be smart to make them voluntarily, and now.
J. Todd Ring,
March 30, 2021
Post-Script:
Who are some of the guiding lights in terms of what must be done? I would suggest Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, Thoreau, Chomsky, Vandana Shiva, Murray Bookchin, EF Schumacher, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, Erich Fromm, Anthony J. Hall, David Suzuki, Ronald Wright, Richard Heinberg, Gar Alperowitz, David C. Korten, Joanna Macy, Elinor Ostrom, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Gerald Celente, Max Keiser, Paul Craig Roberts, Michel Chossudovsky, Whitney Webb, Gary Null, Sayer Ji, Rocco Galati, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine are among them. And I would also humbly offer my own essays and books, as a summary and a synthesis of the best.
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