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To Rebuild Our Freedom (Pt. 2):

This is Part 2. For Part 1 please visit: Beginning To Rebuild Our Freedom (Pt. 1)

and for Part 3 please visit:

Classifying Will Not Bring ‘Class’ To A Close: The Case For Not Labeling Our Future Freedom

 

(See also: “Occupying Our Commons”

 

"Getting To Our Future Freedom")

07.06.13:

This page presents partial transcripts of our discussions on the Waking Up Radio Show from July 7th – July 21, 2013 show.

 

To read partial transcripts of our May 26 – June 30, 2013 shows, please visit: Beginning To Rebuild Our Freedom (Pt. 1)

…and for our shows beginning with the July 28, 2013 show, please visit: Classifying Will Not Bring ‘Class’ To A Close: The Case For Not Labeling Our Future Freedom …and beginning with the August 25, 2013 show at:

Staying Focused on Designing A Future… On Not Getting Divided

 

Excerpts and audio files follow.

 

For other audio files visit: Waking Up Radio Audio Conversations Page.

 

Initial thoughts for the * " July 07, 2013 show".

 

Initial thoughts for the * " July 14, 2013 show".

 

Initial thoughts for the * " July 21, 2013 show".

 

Initial thoughts for the * " July 28, 2013 show".

 

 

* " The July 07, 2013 show"

 

Egypt: a de-centralized civic structure… requires transforming 'work'…

 

WUR, Sunday, July 7th, 2013: Work is the key focus that unifies us… that will allow us to build our global freedom… Draft

 

July 5, 2013: To our brothers and sisters in Egypt… we are in awe of you… thank you for showing us what heart and determination can do.  And let me say from the start… ‘power’ is so afraid of you… a lot of resources are being deployed behind scenes to sink your solidarity (and twenty million people in the streets is pretty solid…) I am very afraid of the horrors ‘power’ might unleash on you… now that it knows what you can do… and particularly if you use your powers of organization to shut down the Suez Canal and attempt to reclaim your country’s resources to fuel a de-centralized civic structure. I just want to say, “I feel you…” and if the professional Left stands for anything of worth, it needs right now to begin organizing global support… which means planning a global General Strike. Egypt cannot be left to face this threat alone. The question they are calling… the freedom they are advancing… is for us all.

 

The primary thrust of recent discussions has been: how can we better support each other? What are the mechanisms that will allow us to have each others’ backs… globally… so that we can align our actions with the actions of those who are withdrawing their ‘labor’… challenging ‘coercion?’ And how do we begin developing these mechanisms? Or… is the problem that we don't have a clear enough goal that unites our thoughts and acts?

 

I believe that a focus on ‘work’ provides this unity… because it is what unifies us… all over the world we are the subjects of those who harness our energy… and harvest our energy… for ends ‘the people’ never determine. But the problem has advanced well beyond the ability of the ideology ‘democracy’ to present itself credibly as the solution… well beyond the illusion that we are confronted by a problem of simple ‘injustice’… i.e. a matter of ‘exclusion’ of  ‘outsider’ groups… to be ‘solved’ by including them… the problem, on the contrary, has advanced to the degree that we can recognize that we are, in fact, facing a global totalitarian threat. This threat is not what makes this moment singular…  ‘power’ has known at least since the insights of Jeremy Bentham… that the installation of a class system had to be global – total – to be successful. The spread of fascism across Europe in the 1930s and forties was not an isolated attempt… not an aberration… far from it. ‘Power’ would not be ‘power’ if it was not steadily moving toward this goal –  its every action and thought is informed by it. This steady movement toward a clear vision – clear, despite its manifesting itself in different versions – has effectively put a global population on lock-down… has almost achieved the freezing in place of ‘class.’

 

In today’s show, we’ll continue challenging the official Left to consider the destructiveness of their class-based assumptions – their reluctance to put forward a demand for the global-end to the global wage-work system… and through a discussion of “Why ‘rationalism’ is a con…” we’ll hope to set this issue into clearer relief… and we’ll be drawing on Getting To Our Future Freedom to examine why language is at the heart of this matter of our transformation.

 

–––

Egypt calls the question of 'the state'...

 

In recent shows and on the website (particularly in light of recent events in Egypt)… we have been asking, “how can we better support each other?” But it’s important to acknowledge… and doing so may be sufficient to show how bankrupt is the professional Left… that we haven’t yet even started the conversation (over the airwaves) about the fact that this global society called ‘class’  is specifically structured to dissuade us from… and prevent the possibility of… mutual assistance… which is our nature as human beings. So… we have, until very recently, been effectively checked… atomized and kept divided… except… the cell-doors are opening… the ice floes are melting… and we’re beginning to see… what ‘power’ is doing.

 

–––

What gets numbers is big vision, big hope... we want big change... we want the future... "affairs are now soul size"...

 

(And forgive this aside… but this mention of floes reminds me to acknowledge another ancestor who sooths the soul, Christopher Fry, who wrote This Lady’s Not For Burning, a play I laboriously audio-taped from the television many moons ago and listened to repeatedly as a sort-of ‘bedtime-story.’ Fry shows the power of words… i.e. of thought… which is essentially the focus of today’s show… the notion that reclaiming ‘thought’ is our hand-hold out of the pit ‘power’ continuously tries to shove us back into. This poem is from his play A Sleep of Prisoners:

The Longest Stride of Soul

 

(“Dark and cold we may be, but this is no winter now…” now that’s a great opening line… we may be dark and cold… but that doesn’t mean it’s winter… no… things are not what they seem… there’s a fire down below…)

 

Dark and cold we may be, but this

Is no winter now. The frozen misery

Of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move,

The thunder is the thunder of the floes,

The thaw, the flood, the upstart Spring.

Thank God our time is now when wrong

Comes up to face us everywhere,

Never to leave us till we take

The longest stride of soul men ever took.

Affairs are now soul size.

 

(Christopher Fry, A Sleep of Prisoners)

To reclaim the earth in reality we must simultaneously reclaim it in language.

(from Nascence website page called: "Getting To Our Future Freedom"

And though it may not seem so initially… focusing on ‘work’ is the key to the floes melting, the doors opening… the language coming… the words and thoughts that are the hand-holds out of the pit.

 

I’m very grateful for these radio conversations (despite their, as a rule, never going out over the airwaves)… as they’ve shed some light, I think, on this question of how to rebuild our freedom….

 

 

All of our un-asked-for energy we let go... that's wrong... there are critical ancestors who preserve the thoughts (the certainty) we need to see through 'power's cons...

 

Meeting this challenge can perhaps best be grasped by returning to our analysis in Waking Up… which argued that ‘power’ has been wildly successful in maintaining steady momentum toward its vision of ‘universal rule’ (as Kissinger put it *** ) by disconnecting us from our three sources of power: the ancestors (mind… they hold the thoughts we need)… the earth (body)… and each other (spirit). Using that tripartite lens allows us to see more clearly… and fully… exactly what happened to us… and what we need to do.

 

 

Seeing in 'the infinite' the key to bridging rifts between all religions (and it's only 'scarcity' that leads to all the false divisions being contentious issues between us)...

 

At its most basic, what we need to do is to begin honoring our bodies’ truth… which means respecting our longing for reconnection… and that doing so opens up the path to recovering lost freedom… and those three areas of focus emerge… one leads to the other leads to the other. We have to…

•         See reality  [(which we need the ancestors for… those suppressed thoughts they preserve for us… (mind… the ancestors…)]

…recognize the cons (‘progress’ or ‘civilization’ or ‘rationalism’ [and we’ll be discussing why these three notions are various ways of expressing the same underlying reality]… and ‘economy’) as cons…;

…recognize the global threats of totalitarianism and ocean death (as a short-hand for destruction of our health); and so, therefore…

…recognize the urgency of our finally righting this upside-down social world…

…recognizing that we have to do this before we can do anything else… before we can heal the planet, and before we can heal our relations with each other…

 

•         Feel confident about how we will get our food (body… earth…) We have to trust the earth will feed us.

 

•        Overcome false divisions [systematically sown by ‘power’ (spirit… each other…)]: particularly the false divide between so-called ‘hand’ and so-called ‘mind’; as well as to see in ‘the infinite’ the unity of all authentic religion… and as the root of our fundamental unity…. To attempt to encompass in oneself… to attain… to become an adept in… ‘the infinite’… is Hugo’s practice of religion… and Tesla’s practice of the art of ‘science’… and so ultimately we see Nikola helps us to bridge this rift… between religion and science… this ‘distance’ as well…. (And… it is only ‘scarcity’ – which is a manufactured scarcity and not actual – that leads to religion… and all the other false divisions… being contentious issues between us….)

To examine ‘work’ with unskewed vision… without the lens of the sight-warping con ‘civilization’… and with a heart intact… means to see its otherwise hidden bias… that leans it towards the key dilemma of ‘class’… abusive authority… totalitarianism… not as a problem of any particular nation… but as a problem for global humanity.

 

 

So what would the martial arts training for ending 'class' look like?... But we have to want to be free to start working on it...

 

Moreover, we cannot know ourselves while we stand in a net of coercion… a web of obligation… in a tangle of lies… and a trap of fear…. And to remain lost to ourselves… and this for millennia as well… is abominable. (But the Egyptian people have shown us our true cooperative selves… very humbling, it has been, to see… [and ‘power’ will never rest till it has destroyed our belief that such solidarity ever was… unless we stand with her… and prove it….])

 

And ‘the job’ manifests this problem in microcosm… with its demand to suppress authentic thought and elevate ‘rationalism’ (excised feeling)… and… we’re beginning to see that excised feeling means… ‘performance’… on the job… and under orders.

 

And if we choose to listen to the ancestors who call attention to the hidden actors… that set the weight…

…the shadow state of ‘power’…

…the ancestors who explained what moves these actors…

…and the visible effects that prove these motives….

 

The truth they point to emerges around us clearly.

 

It takes no perspicacity to see that ‘power’s never paused for an instant… in its forward-thrusting towards its aims… its goal of total privatization… and total control… its intent is evident all around us… and so… all that remains for us to know… is how to take that first step… to a global resistance? –  global… to meet their ambition-total. (…And Egypt opens the door… invites us to start doing it…. How much more must Egypt do? They need some help… and that’s not helping them, that’s helping global humanity move to its long deserved… and long deferred… future freedom.)

 

To rebuild our freedom we have to re-knit our solidarity… which… Petr Kropotkin reminds us is the first condition for courage… mutual confidence – which is why ‘power’s use of agent provocateurs… paying people to act clandestinely… is such an effective tactic… and why we have to diligently pursue allegiance to our values and our vision and the earth….  And that’s hard to do in the flood of emotion… so we have to start talking about this. Remember that ‘kenpo stance’ I talked about in Waking Up? Well, we have to be able to re-ground in flux – that’s the point of martial arts training, so that you aren’t caught off-guard when you’re thrust into the situation that Egypt is now in. So what would the mar.tial arts training for ending ‘class’ look like? It’s time to start practicing it right now… events are moving pretty quick.

 

But the necessary companion piece to our freedom’s achievement… as a species… is wanting freedom as individualities. “Individual power is the only effective check to ‘power’…” is what we’ve been arguing… and to suppress this need ‘power’ invented the ‘civilization’… or ‘progress’… story… and since controlling the stories that occupy our minds is critical for ‘power’… we have to systematically replace the stories ‘power’ tells us… with ones of our own creation. Instead of, “We must work…” pundits could be helping us learn: “We are all artists… We all have the capacity for heroism…” and: “The critical heroic task of the moment which we must all help with is ‘society-redesign’ in order to replace the Hierarchy Myth… which is based, of course, on the myth of scarcity….”

 

 

We have to change the physical infrastructure of society... and that means de-centralizing 'power' globally...

 

We all know by now how ‘power’ thinks… we can see it’s sinking us… we don’t want that… so we can now start developing… our own thought.

 

It’s time now to turn away from ‘power’… from  ‘class’… and the damage it’s done to us… and start the discussions of what we want… leisure… our time… our lives… it’s time to let that goal guide us… begin to describe the transformations of the physical world we seek to effect… and let the earth blow away the false fog… and clear our sight to the true path… so we can keep our eyes on the prize.

 

‘Time to let the goal guide us’ means getting behind (driving) a new train on a new track… this time with the earth on our side… the one we’re on is being driven by an historicist-myth… or rather by us as its manifestation … suppressing our own vitalness… the energy of suppression encounters enormous resistance (unconsciously)… requires enormous costs and loss of life-energy… and now, when we’ve entered a time which calls for huge energy inputs to correct the evil effects of so much suppression… over the thousands of generations… still… ‘power’ wants to extract that toll by force… to use the same means that led to so much misery… and it will not let go their dream of so-called ‘mastery’… of so-called ‘perfection’… in which the various functions never drift from their designated places… so that ‘power’ can pretend it bends us all to ‘Knowledge-Infinite’.

 

But their ‘knowledge’ is not our knowledge… their ‘reason’ not ours… but we can only become certain of this… certain we have reclaimed the definitions… if we consciously develop them… all of us… not some self-important few.

 

Today we’re going to examine some of the key notions to be reclaimed… and discuss why it’s critical that we do.

 

 

Controlling us has three aspects... comprehended by 'the Panopticon'... globally...

 

Before we begin let’s take a moment to recall a key piece of ground covered in these conversations, that serves as foundation for the present discussion.

 

Thanks to Karl Popper, in his book The Open Society and Its Enemies: The Spell of Plato, we learned that Plato identified the problem of ‘imperialism’ as the key problem to be solved in order to install a structure of rigid, fixed class… and thereby create the ‘perfect state’…

(…and we can see ‘power’s push to install a system of rigid, fixed ‘class’ in its relentless propaganda that ‘science’ will bring us ‘our future’… “Relax…” is what they tell us… “we’ll keep our eyes on the future… while you keep your eyes on the ground…”)

…and we learned from Popper that this became an on-going project… the key ‘historicist myth’… the longing to finally realize Plato’s totalitarian vision. (He wrote during the rise and march of fascism across Europe in the 1930s and forties.) And Martin Bernal, in Black Athena: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785 - 1985, explained how this class-conscious mission of ‘power’ was inculcated in its middle and higher ranks by installing a ruling mythology… called ‘the classical heritage’ in its ‘institutions of higher learning.’

 

This problem of ‘imperialism’ was defined by Plato as ‘outsiders’ coming in and infecting the (hitherto) mentally-captive classes by bringing in new notions that disrupted the carefully-crafted mind-set of class.

 

‘Power’s solution to this problem identified by Plato at base folded along a tripartite conceptualization of the aspects of totalitarianism… leading to ‘total control’… of us: of mind… body… and spirit… i.e. it focused on the psychological-physical-spiritual aspects of how to control us… in order to define how we see the world.  Previous shows focused on the mind-body… or psychological-physical-aspects of this social world of class… i.e. ‘power’s solution for controlling these dimensions. Today we’re going to consider ‘rationalism’ as the solution to addressing the spiritual dimension of this conceptualization… arguing that it literally dis-spirits us…

 

We’ve argued in these shows that Jeremy Bentham essentially restated and updated this problem Plato identified… and then devoted his days to solving it… on behalf of ‘perfect state’-lovers everywhere. (We also argued that, ultimately, in ‘solving’ this problem of how to achieve the ‘perfect state’… ‘power’ necessarily ‘outs’… or exposes… itself.)

 

Bentham’s solution was to exhaustively explain to ‘power’ the need for careful assessment, planning and design… of us… and then how to accomplish it. He called this body of work that he created ‘the logic of the will’… and created as its physical expression, the Panopticon – a structure designed to maximize effective control… of us. Viewed as the key structural design ‘power’ uses for managing us…  and as a short-hand for his entire body of ‘knowledge’, the ‘knowledge’ of control… it’s fair to say Bentham’s Panopticon was enthusiastically embraced and successfully  installed by ‘power’ globally.

(And, by the by, with so many folks staying plugged in 24 – 7…

…what the new technology does… in ‘power’s hands, not ours… if not leave the brain exposed… it at least leaves it vulnerable… and as ‘power’ has been trying to figure out for centuries how to control our thoughts… by giving them to us… this is concerning…

 

…they want us to be soulless beings… completely designed by ‘power’.)

–––

A single world market compels everyone, all the people of the world, to, eventually, ‘come in’… making ‘the economy’ thereby a ‘universal lexicon’…

 

Bentham’s primary gift to ‘power’ was to provide the psychological solution… and to remind them of the need for a ‘total’-solution… to the problem of installing… rigid, fixed, class. And he also contributed to solving the ‘total’ dilemma by focusing on the physical-side of the problem of control by reminding ‘power’ of the need to always maintain conditions of generalized ‘scarcity’ and suggesting it could be accomplished globally… even drawing on Confucius… as Kissinger did.

 

Karl Polanyi wrote that Bentham explained to those who hope to rule us… (which he, along with Plato, hoped would one day be ‘philosopher-statesmen’…) that the role of government is to increase want in order to make the physical sanction of hunger effective. He abhored crude violence and recommended that ‘power’ focus on the physical design of the world… to focus on ‘prevention’ and ‘environmental interventions’ (as the public health bureaucrats of today might put it)… rather than ‘punishment’ after the fact. It was a matter of simple ‘economics’, he said… of ‘efficient use of resources.’

 

However, the broader material dimension of control, we learned from Albert O. Hirschman in The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph… was addressed first by the creation of the bill of exchange… which made transactions liquid across regions… and then, most importantly, we learned from Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation… was the creation of a single global market… by means of the installation of the 19th century gold standard… and a single world market compels everyone, all the people of the world, to, eventually … ‘come in’… making ‘the economy’ thereby a ‘universal lexicon’… all state priorities came to be convertible to this currency.

 

So… ‘power’s goal is to control what we think… (internal control)… control what we see… the physical world… (what’s called ‘reality’… [external control])… and control our longing… that which flies between the two and tries to change things… our energy… our will to affect our environments. ‘Power’ tries to ensure that the ‘will to transform’ and apply our skills in the physical world is confined within the strict lines given… by them… by ‘rationalism’….

 

The sense in which all these paths meet in ‘rationalism’ is what we’ll now be discussing.

 

 

* " The July 14, 2013 show"

 

WUR, Sunday, July 14th, 2013: “Why Rationalism Is A Con” (Part 2)… Draft

 

July 7, 2013: Brothers and sisters: When ‘power’ brings out its pundits to tell us in the U.S.: “How sad Egyptian men don't know self-control and so are raping their sisters…” please remember the January 25 revolution… when young women in Tahir Square said that for the first time in their lives they felt safe with their brothers…. Well, that's because ‘power’ was caught off-guard and hadn't time to prepare… of course now they have.

 

We can see ‘power’s push to install a global system of rigid, fixed ‘class’ in its relentless propaganda that ‘science’ will bring us our future…. So what is ‘the future’ we want?… and how do we get there given ‘power’s effective use of agent provocateurs? We first considered this question in the blog “Occupying Our Commons”, under the title “Agent Provocateurs”… in which we raised the question of “what is effective political education?” I hope you’ll get a chance to check it out. We’ll be discussing this matter of ‘the future’… this Sunday, July 14, 2013 on Waking Up Radio.

 

The 'imperialism of rationalism' erects interior structures in us all...

 

Today we’re going to be talking about ‘Egypt’… about “why ‘rationalism’ is a con”… about “how do we hang onto a movement when it’s being intentionally undermined by paid agents?”… about “in what sense did we mean last week that, ‘Egypt is calling the question of the state?’”… and that different angles on the truth – these different angles on the same reality – once translated into each other’s terms, or rectified… reveal more of the truth.

 

(And this last question is moving toward a juxtaposition of “revealing ‘truth’” with the project of ‘journalism’… which, I think we’ll see, resides in a sub-division of ‘rationalism’…. And in the next show we’ll looking at the question of ‘rationalism’ as the third dimension of ‘power’s totalitarian control.)

 

The June 30 2013 Egyptian Revolution has brought to mind those words of Victor Hugo:

The counterfeits of the past take assumed names, and are fond of calling themselves the future. That spectre, the past, not infrequently falsifies its passport. Let us be ready for the snare. Let us beware. (Victor Hugo, Les Miserables, Book VI – XI)

So long as ‘class’ exists, ‘power’ will never… can never… retire this magician’s trick… this attempt to pass repackaged relationships of class… off on us as some bright and shiny… more ‘just’… ‘future’… a sleight-of-hand which is, just as Hugo said… palming the past in a false show of ‘open-hand’… that it will, down the road, unceremoniously, shove down our throats.

 

So… it’s time to look around us and say, “is this what we want?”… as… ‘the future’ ‘power’ plans for us is but a harsher version of what we have now. “Let us be ready for the snare. Let us beware.”

 

But how?

 

This is essentially the same question we asked last week, when we said: “What would the [physical] training for ‘ending class’ look like?”… particularly when the deepest pockets that ever were is funding multiple layers of hidden opposition… in order to reverse this global awakening led by the Egyptian people…. 

 

So… let us not underestimate the threat, as, apparently, from birth onward states know… ‘statesmen’ stay on top only if we stay at each other’s throats… which means that ‘practical political education’ must prepare us for the snare of ‘division’… and… for the (hired) ‘hands’ that set it on our paths to trip us up. ‘Division’ is ‘lesson number one’ in ‘power’s plan for controlling us. And its preferred status as a tactic seems deserved… certainly the moments when it’s failed them are moments we generally never hear of…. But around us today exceptions are taking root in our minds…. In Pelican Bay Prison… where, in an earlier day, the most severely punished might have turned their pain on each other… are working together in good fellowship, bridging false divisions.

(And… by the way… bridging false divisions is different from healing them – though it’s certainly the first step to healing them. ‘Power’ knows divisions can’t be fully healed so long as it [‘power’] controls the design of the infrastructure of society, so you’ll find it pretending to encourage the attempt as a practice of mental discipline… i.e. individualism… which is not a threat to our continued atomization)

Bridging false divisions is what we see when twenty-four million people are in the streets… or when Occupy settlements grow. We become like a crew at a job site… (I wrote in Waking Up)… where we find ourselves all together at the same place and the same time… and we get the job done because we share the same goal. So the only thing we have to do… to get the job done… is to share the same goal. But I’m arguing that it has to be a big goal… or we get “same-ol’-same-ol’” And Egypt is proving that point for us in real time… (no matter the extreme measures to divide we’re seeing in the media…) Egypt is moving us all… as a common humanity… forward at a speed heretofore unknown in history… we can see the truth of it… in a single generation…

…we just have to drive it home… to freedom.

And even though so many ancestors saw through the cons… and left their precious help… not a one could overcome the structure of class itself….

We have to change the infrastructure…

…and… never doubt…

…we all want this…

…good fellowship…

…heart…

…which…

…if we develop the stances and the practices we need…

…trumps heartless ‘division’…

…brings…

…the upstart Spring.

And therein lies the key to a successful strategy when we find false minds are crawling through our movement.

 

I believe that allegiance to our values can inoculate us from the poisonous bite of agent provocateurs… but we also added last week that, “we have to want to be free to start working on our kenpo stance… and they have stolen our certainty… as Andrey Platonov pointed out almost ninety years ago – “It’s as if someone, or some few, had drawn the feeling of certainty out of us and taken it for themselves…” he said… and Shakespeare concurred with his energizing words, spoken some four hundred years ago…   that “our doubts are traitors…” and, we must always add, that these traitors are created… systematically invented… and over time inserted in our lives.

 

Last week we said that the structures of class are designed to keep us contained… and that inserting good people in them cannot change them… but there is a second part to that question… which is that the real action of ‘statesmen’ happens behind scenes… and that the forefront is theater… and a third part… which is that the ‘imperialism of rationalism’ erects interior structures in us all.

 

Because ‘rationalism’ is a con set at a very oblique angle… and opaque as well… we will have to come at it from many directions to reveal it. So let’s review what we’ve been discussing of these issues in recent shows.

–––

 

When will the Left pundits call the question of what we want?

 

Last week we said this to the Egyptian people, that: “a de-centralized civic structure requires transforming ‘work.’” And not long ago we noted that Immanuel Wallerstein told folks at the 2013 Left Forum that even these ‘power’-guys are no longer trying to prop up the illusion of ‘capitalism’… that even they have concluded it is doomed.

 

This is confirmed in articles we’ve discussed on this show from the Yale Globalization Center. One of their articles was the subject of the January 13, 2013 audio-blog, The Panopticon Illustrated... (Pt. 2), in which we contrasted the relentless ‘ever-forward-thrustingness’ of ‘power’ – as represented in multiple of these reprinted articles […and Epoch Times, why aren’t you reprinting them anymore? I miss them…] – and the reluctance of Left pundits to drift from mere megaphoning of what it thinks ‘power’ is doing…

(…and this on the most superficial level… on the level of ‘proof’… i.e. what can be seen using the skewed lens of ‘class society’…  by which I mean… that the logic of ‘class’ itself is never challenged… that we are taught not to trust what is obvious from ‘the pattern’ itself… the pattern of only a miniscule few ever being able to use a part of their earth-given gifts…. Instead we are taught, in the absence of ‘concrete proof’ otherwise… that the few ‘facts’ that [are allowed to] surface… must reflect what’s ‘true’… that ‘the best’ are picked by means of ‘the system’… and the rest ‘merit’ their subordinate status… this obvious lie passes by the eyes of those who supposedly ‘speak’ for us… the official voices… of our ‘spokespeople’… the press and the elected representatives.)

 

Egypt has given us so many gifts... they are showing us that the global economy exposes the con 'nationalism'...

 

In the Yale Globalization article the author was saying what I’ve also heard Immanuel Wallerstein say, that: “empires fall… hegemonic states are self-liquidating…”

(…and this was discussed on the December 2, 2012 blog, “'Power' exposed... the 'philosopher-king' has no clothes...”, in which we said that the global economy exposes the con ‘nationalism’ as it exposes that ‘rulers’ / elites have but one allegiance… and that is to ‘power’. We also said that ‘global scarcity’ [austerity] eliminates the need for economic ideology as ‘scarcity’ is self-justifying… and asked: “so what ideology replaces it?” Remember Victor Hugo’s words, “…no vacuum in the human heart…”? … ‘power’ seems to have recognized that need of ours… to have some meaning to our lives.)

 

We have to stop focusing on the name they give to 'the system'... it's only the fact there is a class system that is relevant...

 

So the professional Left… hand-in-hand with the policy-think-tanks of ‘power’… (at least as represented by the Yale Globalization Center…) is now speaking in one voice that the ideology known as ‘capitalism’ can no longer credibly contain the rhetoric of ‘progress’… (the most critical con ‘power’ has going for it at this point… the ‘barbarian hoards’ having failed miserably…) – ‘capitalism’ as ideology can no longer fit with the ‘progress-myth’… and something new must be invented…

 

…and all the pundits… left, right and center… I’m sure are busy on it….

First they tried to rehabilitate ‘capitalism’…

…by distinguishing it from its ‘crony’ bad side…

Then they went straight to…

…‘free-market’… tried and true…

…now they’re taking ‘democratic economics’ out for a ride…

…just to see if we’ll buy… but…

…it’s a flawed con if all nations want it….

So I suspect what they’ll float next…

…is just to say…

“…who needs ‘nation-states’ anyway?…

“…aren’t we all ‘one’?…”

“…let’s all share in common…”

“…since the earth is in trouble…

…and the oceans may die soon…

…let’s call the resources of the planet ‘communal’!”

And they’ll laugh into the lexicon kept private…

…along with the ledgers in which entries are shifted…

…carefully from one line to another…

…and in that kept-private lexicon…

…they’ll quietly switch…

…to ‘stewards of the communal…’

…from ‘philosopher-statesmen’….

–––

 

‘Capitalism’… you will recall… according to the ideology… was ‘necessary’ to ‘develop the productive forces’… so that we could all have better lives…

 

…that this ‘better life’ quality tended to drift upwards… and exponentially so over time… can now no longer be denied…

 

…nor that the alleged superiority of ‘mind’… or the supposed ‘scientific rationality’ of it all… is a lie… as we watch the oceans die… and the lakes and rivers cough up death… and the poisoned soils cause cancer and make frogs lose their gender… and all the toxic-contaminating is killing the bees. And as we have trouble breathing… and all the electromagnetic and chemical hormone-mimicking is destroying any illusion of ‘health’ as a possibility… and the survival-stress wears us down to a bleak acquiescence…

 

…the pundits can no longer say (at least with a straight face…) how ‘improved’ are our lives… thanks to the supreme rationality… of the objectified ‘Mind’… mind with heart excised….

 

 

The exploding, eroding notion of 'work'...

 

Along with the dissolution of the ‘capitalism’ myth, the other concept that will be absorbing the pundits is the exploding-eroding notion of ‘work’…

 

So… “Egypt requires a transformed practice of ‘work’…” is also saying: “we better get on top of this concept quick… and define it ourselves… or we’ll find ourselves with a fresh and shiny hell served up… that ‘power’ will call ‘our service’… while telling us we must support their ‘service’… for us (we’ll be told)… so they can ‘save the planet’… and deliver to us their latest version of… the ‘good life’.

 

The ‘privatization-mechanisms’ of ‘power’ – also known as ‘capitalism’ – cannot sustain the illusion that ‘the economy’ provides livelihoods… (let alone ‘the good life’… defined as: ‘comfortable levels of consumption…’) for more and more and more of us…

So… if in fact ‘capitalism’ was just a rationalization for the privatization mechanisms of ‘power’… which cannot stop as long as there is ‘power’… if that has been the truth all along… it will continue rolling along… undisturbed by an ideology’s purge…

 

So… we can see now stark and clear… the truth that the processes at work lo! these many years… is not ‘capitalism’ at all… but a progressive tightening of the noose… of the ‘total-control’… of humans.

 

 

For thirty years at least we should have been talking about this contradiction Terence Hopkins pointed out...

 

In the audio-blog, “Egypt calls the question of ‘the state’…,” we said: “…if folks in individual nations cannot do anything to advance their freedom because the structure of the state is designed to prevent that… and it’s backed up by global ‘power’…

 

…then ‘power’ stands bare and naked. It’s now clear for all to see that ‘the state’ is a husk filled up by the ‘world economy’…

 

This is that point we said we’d return to when we reviewed ‘key ground covered’ last week… i.e. that ‘power’ gets exposed in this process… this privatization process… this process of creating a single world market… and that state sovereignty… or the inability of ‘power’ to totally control the definition of it… is the fatal flaw in their practice of establishing ‘total control’… of us….

 

This is what we are being shown by Egypt. It’s an ‘in-real-time’ lesson in the hollowness of ‘the state’ as an ideology (and as an actual vehicle) through which we can achieve ‘freedom’.

But… it’s double-edged for ‘power’… this ideology.

 

So this contradiction between our need to realize ourselves… our power… by utilizing state structures (trying to make them work for us…)

 

…the contradiction between our use of the state for our purpose and the use of the state for ‘power’s purposes – that contradiction was pointed out by Terence Hopkins in the book he edited with Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: Theory and Methodology, in 1982…

 

…and so at least for the last thirty years we could have been working on this question. And perhaps in academia they are… but they didn’t get all of us working on it. We are one mind now… we always were but the internet has allowed us to actually make that a practical reality. There are honorable people in academia – and Terence Hopkins is one, for sure – so these critical questions that affect us all cannot be the exclusive province of a few designated ‘thinkers’… have to be translated out of academic jargon and turned over to all of us… through the airwaves… because our eye has to stay on freedom… always… I don’t care what role you play in the Matrix… in the world-system… in this artificial construction of ‘power’… you have to have your eye on freedom for the species… that’s what we’re here for.

 

So… this inherent contradiction… if this had been a discussion… over the airwaves… would we still… thirty years later… would these left pundits have the nerve to stand up there and talk about ‘perfecting the state’? if we had been discussing the fact that the state cannot deliver freedom… that only we can. So, instead of spinning our wheels over and over and over to get that Constitutional Amendment through, or whatever, we need to be talking to each other… we need to be advancing each other’s thought… just as we’re seeing in Egypt… apace… apace… apace….

 

And I am so concerned about the difficulty they face doing that as these paid folks are trying to wear us down. At this point it’s an endurance test – I mean it always is….

 

So we have to hold close to our hearts… the vision… the future we want… of generalized, human freedom… and it has to be a global vision… or else they’ll just isolate those who are recalcitrant… and systematically chip away at them… push them into that ‘loser’ box… and try to get everybody else to turn our backs on them. That’s been their winning strategy from Day One, and the exact opposite needs to happen… we need to be having each other’s backs so tough, so tight… and we have the mechanisms… the technology… to do it. No excuses today.

 

None.

 

–––

 

 

Terence Hopkins and Karl Popper: different angles on the truth that together reveal more of it... the key for rectifying them – called 'the earth' – will have to be developed quickly... in real time...

 

 

So…this ‘contradiction’ – between our use of the state for our purpose and the use of the state for ‘power’s purposes – was pointed out by Terence Hopkins.

 

The quotes that follow – first from Terence Hopkins and then from Karl Popper – hopefully will help us see… how different angles on the truth… together reveal more of the reality.  They’re looking at the same reality but from very different angles and from different distances from that reality… but it’s the same reality… and… just as when I juxtaposed Alice Miller and Herbert Marcuse in Waking Up… they both tell the truth, but from different angles on it… and I’m going to be arguing that… that which is true can be described variously, but these different angles on the truth – these different angles on the same reality – once translated into each other’s terms, or rectified… reveal more of the truth. They’re saying the same thing, but there’s a key for rectifying them called the earth… which we’re going to have to develop quickly… in real time… so that we can keep our eyes on the prize.

 

So this is Terence Hopkins… presenting in a very, very condensed form… the overall picture… looking from the vantage of the whole:

If, now, one were to try to give the main ideas informing the construct of “the modern world-system” in a highly abbreviated form, they might run as follows. First, there is the “structure” of this social system, consisting of: (a) one expanding economy; (b) expanding multiple states; and (c) the capital – labor relation. Second, there is this social system’s “development”….

 

…This one world-scale economy… has a single or axial division and integration of labor processes (“division of labor”) [effectuated by the nineteenth century gold standard], which is both organized and paralleled by a single set of accumulation-processes…

[…viewed differently, ‘accumulation-processes’ means a process of creating ‘winners’ and ‘losers’… and this is a process we always resist… because of its basic unfairness… life wants balance… that’s in our constitution as life… that’s the only constitution we need, to get our freedom…]

 

The 'accumulation process' is the 'privatization process'...

 

…between its always more advanced, historically enlarging, and geographically shifting core and its always less advanced, disproportionately enlarging, and geographically shifting periphery. (p. 11)

[…so try to picture this… because this is condensed… but it’s not jargon… he speaks plainly, but it’s dense… you know, like Shakespeare… you gotta unpack it, you gotta let it… bloom in your mind… the fullness of what he’s saying… because he’s trying to capture life in words… improvisation… jazz… whatever… so you have to see that there’s this pressure… and it’s essentially us… we-the-people… that are pressuring the ‘winner’-box to enlarge… more and more people want to claim more and more of their wholeness…. At the same time, what’s working against that, is this accumulation process, whereby the earth is exponentially made private… and so there’s this constant pressure to push people out… this is called ‘increasing disparities’…. So that’s what he means when he says that there’s this “historically enlarging, and geographically shifting core…” and by ‘geographically shifting’ you’re picturing China wants ‘in’… ‘Russia’ wants ‘in’… ‘Japan’ wanted in… (got in…) and then that means… ‘who’s gonna be “out”?’ you gotta keep enlarging that number of people ‘out’… and this is the contradiction that he’s describing here… because nobody wants to be ‘out’…. This whole thing he’s describing then is the process, as he says, of “modern social change”…]

–––

The inherent contradiction between the development of the “one economy” and the development of the “multiple states” continually paces, and shows itself in specific forms in the course of, the social system’s long-term development (which equals modern social change)…. It is the articulation of the processes of the world-scale division and integration of labor and the processes of state-formation and deformation… that constitute the system’s formation and provide an account, at the most general level, for the patterns and features of its development (hence, of the patterns and features of modern social change). The articulation of the two sets of processes necessarily results, in the theory, in the network of relations among political formations… being patterned like the network of relations among production-accumulation zones (core-periphery), and vice versa…. [so… the ‘political power’ of states matches their ‘economic power’…]

 

[There are] two important [contradictions]…: (1) the growing competition among states (owing to their increasing number and their increasingly competitive policies) to house centers of the production-accumulation network versus the strengthening tendency of that network toward centralization of the accumulation process (fewer centers); […you feel that tension that he’s trying to capture in words…] (2) the increasing influence of class-organized politics (resulting from capitalist development) on state-policies versus the increasingly competitive search by larger and larger units of capital for larger and larger pools of low-cost labor. (Terence K. Hopkins, “The Study of the Capitalist World-Economy: Some Introductory Considerations,” in Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein (eds.), World-Systems Analysis: Theory and Methodology, p. 12 – 13, quoted in Palmers’ Chat, As We Take Our Earth Back…)

 

What he’s calling ‘capital,’ I don’t call ‘capital’, I call ‘power’… because I believe that the ‘accumulation process’ for ‘power’ is essentially a privatization process with an underlying ‘political’ motive – i.e. that what we’re seeing with this deepening ‘institutionalization’ of class is the accumulation of means (which includes the control of us… we-the-people…) to shape the future. And this missing ‘power’ piece is one of the many reasons why Karl Popper is so important to add to the mix. He studied ‘power’ and believed that Marxist theorists underestimated it… and that’s because he looked real long… could read ancient Greek… (and wrote as fascism marched across Europe…) and he knew that lust for ‘power’ is nothing new. He studied ‘power’ just as Shakespeare did… and those who studied explicitly ‘power’ we need… they are not ancient history, by any means… until ‘class’ is settled – because ‘class’ is just the way they sculpt the world they want – until we reclaim our lives as a global humanity… we’re going to be struggling with this problem called ‘power.’

That’s one of the many reasons I love that poem we read last week:

Thank God our time is now when wrong

Comes up to face us everywhere,

Never to leave us till we take

The longest stride of soul men ever took.

Affairs are now soul size.

Christopher Fry knew the truth of it… when he says, “when wrong comes up to face us everywhere,” ‘wrong’ is just another word for ‘power’… ‘power’ is everywhere… that’s just another way of saying, ‘we have a single, world system…’

 

So this is what I mean by saying that there is one reality… it can be described in many ways… but if it is accurately describing that reality… it is the truth… and you can use different words… you can use the language of Alice Miller… you can use the language of Shakespeare and Christopher Fry… you can use the language of Terence Hopkins, or any of his tribesmen like Erich Fromm or Herbert Marcuse…

 

…they’re describing accurately the same underlying reality – honestly… not trying to con… that’s the key difference… they want generalized human freedom. And they may have been misled about what the possibilities are… how we get there… or what it looks like… but they want it… they have a hunger for it….

 

–––

 

Is it really possible for we-the-people to claim the mechanisms of 'the state'?

 

Karl Popper, in The Open Society and Its Enemies (Pt. 2), I’m arguing, is looking at this same reality from a different angle – and closer in. Terence Hopkins was stepping back and looking from the vantage of the whole. But Karl Popper, in The Open Society and Its Enemies (Pt. 2), also revealed this same tension… implicitly… this contest…

 

…and Polanyi talked about this too… this tension over ‘who claims the state’…

 

…and this underscores why it’s so frustrating that even though they’ve given us all we need to have these conversations for thirty… forty… fifty years… and yet we still haven’t had these conversations about: “is that a realistic strategy to engage in a contest for the mechanisms of ‘the state’?… can the people claim the mechanisms of ‘the state’?”… (conversations which would have been so helpful to the people of Egypt….)

 

Terence Hopkins offered insights that… if Karl Popper had thought about… he may have changed his mind… this is the conversation… we have to start having real conversations instead of always breathlessly waiting for the next scandal for ‘power’ to present to us to occupy our so-called ‘reasoning process’… which it isn’t, it’s just scandal-mongering… it’s voyeurism… we have to start realizing… of course there’s a surveillance state… of course they lie to us… duh…  come on…. And we-the-people know this. We have to somehow get better representation over the airwaves… to not just push our thought forward… but push our hope forward… to know that there’s some life out there in the universe that is on our side….

 

So… Karl Popper, from his different angle was also looking at this tension… by looking at this word ‘nationalism’… because, as I said, ‘power’ continually tries to dupe us by changing the meaning of words. And he describes, in this second volume of The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 2: The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath, a really interesting episode in which [the late eighteen / early nineteenth century ‘philosopher’] Hegel was brought in by the Prussian Emperor in order to quell a ‘nationalist’ uprising (and this word is used to describe it now, but Popper reminds us that the ‘nation-state’ concept is extremely new, and was not one used then) – but I do want to re-emphasize the point that we have to be helping Egypt right now… which means helping ourselves…. If we can help Egypt forward this discussion of “how do we achieve our freedom when ‘the state’ has been captured by the ‘global economy’?”… which is just another word for ‘power’…. We have to be talking about this all over the globe… because otherwise we’re going to be duped by these pundits who tell us to ‘fix the state’… and that that’s the way… “let’s just working on the Constitution…” come on….

 

And so Egypt is accelerating our thought process on this… because… whoa… I mean it’s breathtaking… two revolutions in the space of a couple years…. So… it’s like: “ok… here’s our revolution… we got rid of the dictator… alright, now let’s have this democracy… ok, no… didn’t work… perhaps ‘democracy’ is a con… hmm….” And so then they went ahead and called the question, right? “We don’t want repackaged tyranny… we want democracy…” and so now… they got nothing else left to give the Egyptian people but… ‘divide-and-conquer’: “Oh well, see, ‘tribalism’ is rearing its ugly head… that’s because, well,  we turn against each other because of… blah, blah, blah…. Or… because the world economy is in such a dilapidated state… there’s scarce resources, so we gotta fight each other… blah, blah, blah…”

 

So… this is not Egypt’s problem, this is the problem for global humanity… to see through this con ‘nation-state’… or… what I’m arguing is… because they’ve claimed the lexicon, we’ve got to start developing earth-terms… that cannot be co-opted… and undermined that way… that we cannot let them tell us that ‘leisure’ is ‘having free time’… we cannot let them tell us that ‘freedom’ is anything but ‘freedom from scarcity’… having the possession of our own bodies… being able to do what we want when we wake up in the morning… every single one of us….

 

We have the means. The earth is extremely generous.

 

–––

 

But Karl Popper, in The Open Society and Its Enemies (Pt. 2), also revealed it… implicitly… when he pointed out that ‘nationalism’ can either be a branch from the tree of freedom: “we shall be of one blood all nations…” or from the tree of fascism.

 

"This world is not conclusion... the world in which each one of us gets to be 'big'... stands beyond...

 

I now proceed to a very brief sketch of a rather strange story – the story of the rise of German nationalism…. Nationalism appeals to our tribal instincts, to passion and to prejudice, and to our nostalgic desire to be relieved from the strain of individual responsibility which it attempts to replace by a collective or group responsibility.

[And I have to interject here… because I don’t altogether agree with that… but I don’t altogether disagree either….

 

As with most analysts based in… trained by… ‘class’ – what most people call ‘the West’… trained in a class-based set of assumptions (‘civilization’… the assumption of that… what Terence Hopkins might call ‘the division of labor’)… the possibility that Petr Kropotkin saw – because he knew earth-based people… and understood our reverence for the earth – the possibility that Kropotkin saw of individuality thriving in the security of the tribe eluded Karl Popper… i.e., that my power does not only not negate your power… but grows stronger in it: “the more I give to thee, the more I have….”

 

We all want to be big… and we often latch onto ‘state sovereignty’ as a means to be ‘big’… but states have been roped into the world economy… tied into that web of obligation…. So the overall (global) structure Terence Hopkins describes cannot survive the expansion of our individualities beyond it.

 

We want to be big… to encompass in ourselves more and more of the infinite… (this is what unifies all the different religions… we are trying to encompass the ‘infinite’…) while these structures we’re trying to adapt for our use were designed to subject us to the world market… i.e. to ‘power’….

 

But Popper accurately descried what he saw… which was a class-based reality… but s Emily Dickinson told us, “This world is not conclusion. A species stands beyond – invisible as music – but positive as sound –” …this world is not conclusion… a reality called ‘generalized human freedom’… called ‘we all deserve to own our own selves…” stands beyond… and… our wholeness stands beyond…. And we’re looking at it… towards it… in our mind’s eye… in our heart, when we don’t even know we are… that’s the world we want… and we have to start talking about it.]

It is in keeping with these tendencies that we find that the oldest works on political theory, even that of the Old Oligarch, but more markedly those of Plato and of Aristotle, express decidedly nationalist views; for these works were written in an attempt to combat the open society and the new ideas of imperialism, cosmopolitanism, and equalitarianism. But this early development of a nationalist political theory stops short with Aristotle….

 

–––

 

 

* " The July 21, 2013 show"

 

WUR, Sunday, July 21st, 2013: “‘Rationalism’ as a dimension of totalitarian control (Pt. 3)” Draft

 

July 16, 2013: Brothers and sisters: Somehow we have to get beyond personalizing the injuries of ‘class’ – which our hurt at racial injustice fundamentally is – in order to get beyond ‘reaction’… and move toward actively shaping the future… the world… we want.

 

But how do we do that when the only ‘spokespeople’ (pundits) allowed over the airwaves are those who will (for the most part) stoke division?

 

If we were discussing how ‘power’ sculpts the world it wants… shapes the future… it would quickly become apparent both the function (across multiple dimensions)… for ‘power’… of targeting by ‘race’…

 

and… if we want a world without ‘rank’ (by whatever criteria… and I do)… then it would also become apparent what the effective strategies for achieving that world would have to look like….

 

This is essentially the argument of The Violence of 'Class', which addressed the issue of sexual violence. It’s is a pretty straight-forward… even obvious… argument to make… yet we never hear it discussed over the airwaves. This fact alone speaks to the existence of an extremely organized resistance… called ‘power’.

 

We aren’t encouraged to think about the ‘hidden assumptions of class-based thought’… or the advocacies implied when ‘the state’ is petitioned for redress… essentially the argument of the pundits. (And even a slight delving into those “advocacies implied” uncovers ‘validating the state’… ‘the unconscious assertion that we want to remain slaves… and that we still need ‘daddy’’.)

 

So… if the infrastructure of class society itself reproduces ‘winners’ and ‘losers’… and if race and gender are convenient tools (for ‘power’) to use to do that… what infrastructure would support the absence of ‘rank’?…

…how would the infrastructure of society have to change to support a world that works for us?

…and shouldn’t we be talking about it?

 

–––

 

A big shout-out and thank you to the youth not letting 'power' play you...

 

Brothers and sisters: to those of us full of grief and fury at the execution of Trayvon Martin… along with all the other like executions of youth by… what I believe… are folks paid to be heartless… please understand… we are at a turning point… and you’re looking at a plan. Recall that these ‘stand-your-ground’ laws have been passed in thirty states. That’s not by accident. It grants to those ‘paid-to-be-heartless’ folks… paid to potentially cause havoc and certainly dismay… a possible escape….

 

But to pundits who claim to be outraged… I have this to say: what if you’re being played? I want to pose a hypothetical to you. Given that to the vast, vast majority of people in this country the thought would simply not occur… to track and stalk a child… to make a murder and so a martyr… or to then work under-cover to convince others – ‘less certain others’ (and recall what we’ve been discussing about the power of ‘certainty’)… to get that person off… because ‘the law’, as one juror said, required her to… – and… “what is official is incontestable” (that’s a line from The Lady’s not for Burning by Christopher Fry)… i.e. is part of the structure of control – so… again…

 

…what if it’s orchestrated?

 

…because a tiny few… folks utterly without soul… but with a lotta lotta money… want to orchestrate… if not race war… then certainly an intensified race-divide. (And a shout-out and thank you to the youth… and older folks like you… who refuse to be played that way… and are standing together across race.)

 

But… returning to the official Left spokespersons… if you were among this miniscule few… who never got that love which is true wealth… and who cling, therefore, to their illusions of ‘specialness’… might you not, when the world is wising up to all your cons to keep us asleep… do such things as we’re seeing around the country… along with the militarization and infiltration of the police… if it means being able to keep your exclusive illusions?

 

I pose this hypothetical to say… if you knew you were being played and diverted… and so the question then was… “diverted from what?”… and if that ‘what’ is such a threat to require such orchestration… should not that threat – our unity – be the goal-entire we seek…?

 

…and shouldn’t we set aside outrage – as… for those who do the ‘tightening of the screw’ your indignation is a pleasure and a joy – and shouldn’t our every thought, then, rather be… “by what means do we achieve it – our unity?”

 

–––

 

If there are people paid not to care... the problem is the wage-work system...

 

OK, let’s back away from the hypothetical for a second…. Do you… speaking to our left-pundit brothers and sisters… think our unity as commoners is the greatest threat to ‘power’? based on your analysis?… or on your simply being alive and breathing under class? If so, should that be what we need to be bending our minds around?… how to achieve that unity?… if we want to end ‘power’? Do you want to end ‘power’? Aren’t these the questions we should ask?… the discussions we should have?… instead of, “why can’t they recognize our common humanity?” First of all, because most people do, so that’s not our problem… our problem is organized ‘power’ (I mean, come on, ‘stand-your-ground’ laws popping up all at once in thirty states? What more evidence of organization and orchestration do you need?)… and to ‘organized ‘power’’ your outrage is a joy-supreme… amusing, if not downright thrilling….

 

And second… if there are people paid not to care… the problem… in addition to organized ‘power’… is the wage-work system.

 

The wage-work system is designed to structurally prevent our knowing… and so caring for… each other… to prevent our having empathy for each other…

 

…this outcome is structurally ordained…

…and your outrage only deepens the success of it… as a tactic…

 

Only a new structure is capable of preventing any of us from being dependent on… and so vulnerable to… the machinations of ‘power’….

(And on this tip…

…please don’t let us ever forget…

(till we’re free… and there’s no need… to not forget…)

…the virulent effect…

…of paid…

…provocative…

…agents.

If you were a small group of high-flyin’ statesmen…

…sitting on mountains of money…

…and the world was awakening…

…and you knew clandestine agents were a way…

…on the cheap…

…and moreover effective means…

…of unseating it…

…and of preserving therefore your extreme privilege…

…in which you get to make the decisions…

…for the world!

(…now that’s high-flyin’ vision…)

…what would you do?

 

[If you haven’t already considered the essay “Agent Provocateurs” in the blog “Occupying Our Commons”… I hope you will.)

–––

 

Let's focus on the underlying (hierarchical) structure... recognize that it is inimical to life... and then start 'future-defining'... instead of focusing on the antics of the state...

 

Today we’ll be asking, “what design of infrastructure supports ‘freedom’?”…  as well as, ‘in what way is ‘rationalism’ a dimension of totalitarian control?”

 

And how are these two things related? –  the structural reproduction of our atomization and lack of empathy for each other… called ‘the wage-work system’… and… ‘rationality’ as a piece of the picture of ‘power’s ‘total control’… of us…?

 

I believe they’re related because ‘rationality’ is a key piece of how the control of we-the-people is structurally reproduced… key to that reproduction-process.

 

I’ve been… in deference to Bentham… using the word ‘Panopticon’ to mean ‘the hierarchical structure of control (and this in macro and micro) by which we-the-people are directed into ‘classes’… and, therefore, into our various functions…

 

…the mechanism for issuing orders and ensuring they are implemented (…the Panopticon is the design of a prison that allowed maximum control of the many by the few… and prevented our interaction with each other… that produced thereby… atomization…)

 

…the physical manifestation of the structure of dominance and control which we mean when we say, ‘hierarchy’….

 

As we learned from Terence Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein, the international system assigns a hierarchical place to nations… and as we learned from Jeremy Bentham and Alice Miller… this same structure manifests… in the ‘family system’ as well. But it is an organization-type inimical to life.

 

No world can exist for life and still be this.

 

I believe we have to start seeing this – the underlying structure of ‘class’… in all its manifestations… in order to resist it… and that we have to start giving our attention to this… and not the theatre… the antics of the state is mere diversion… diversion of our energy and time (and generally designed to divide…) divert us from what really does deserve our focus… the future-defining that must be the underlying content of our every thought and act….

 

–––

 

So the difficulty in chief... is overcoming the belief... that nothing is certain...

 

How does focusing on the illegal actions and misdeeds of governments (‘states’… shadow or otherwise) help the Egyptian people now when they need it? Do the sacrifices they make affect their freedom only?

 

So a structure that not only forestalls our unity… but even our ability to think authentically…

…and we have to consider seriously the degree to which the exclusive focus on scandal-mongering of the punditry forestalls our thinking… it draws us into horror and despair… and cannot release the critical energy of founding (discussed in Beginning Again….) It prevents us from doing the thinking we need to shake off ‘power’… the thinking that develops certainty…

 

…cannot be the structure we need for generalized human freedom…

…and “a tangled web of willing witnesses”…

…of ancestors who want freedom for us…

…have assured us that ‘freedom’ means…

…‘freedom from necessity’…

…and if it does…

…then the resources of the planet…

…which allow for ‘life-exuberant’…

…cannot be made private…

…must be shared with all of us…

…equally…

including the resource called ‘decision-making’…

…and ‘developing our thinking’…

…the resource called…

‘…using our intelligence to shape the world that works for all of us…”

These are capacities that must be shared equally… and…

…moreover… if we recall that to do significant harm… to the earth we are the stewards of… requires the dull compliance of masses among us… then we can readily see… not only that we haven’t the means as individualities to make much mischief… but that we need… each one of us… to become big enough to see the earth-entire… if we are to protect our freedom and the health of our earth (two ways of saying the same thing exactly…) and if we move to such a world… in which each one of us develops his or her earth-gifts, then we have moved to a world made exponentially more healthy… just by taking us ‘off-leash’… and granting to us all equal responsibility for running things… as we all want to eat well, sleep well and grow to our full heights… these tasks necessarily receive our first attention.

 

The Egyptian people have shown us our cooperative spirit… it has shown us ourselves off-leash. So this matter of infrastructure-design is all about what works for humans….

 

The earth is abundant – and we must help each other to trust that… to trust both the earth and our cooperative spirit… so that we can move on… beyond the narrow boxes of ‘class.’

 

So the issue is… what design of infrastructure allows the unfolding of our full human possibilities…

that should be our sole consideration in thinking through this question.

 

–––

 

So the difficulty in chief… is overcoming what we’ve been taught to believe… which is… beause of structurally-reinforced and enforced scarcity… that “nothing is certain….”

 

It’s just as Platonov said… a tiny few have hoarded all the certainty, and to the rest of us is left an endless quest… to find it… and as we’re kept ever-doubting what our children tell us… what the earth tells us… what our bodies tell us… while we follow orders from above… to pound recalcitrant life into tight boxes… told if we do we’ll one day find it… discover why we sacrificed our lives… while a tiny few already know… that it’s for them our lives were lost… for them… they are the point-entire of all our stolen lives and accumulated misery… for them… to play-pretend at being gods.

 

–––

 

It's easy to see what we need for a healthy life... and the resources exist for it... that instead life is made a feat of endurance... should clue us in... there's a plan...

 

And ‘rationalism’ is the dance they make us do on our leashes… “round and round and round we go… but not merrily.”

 

In recent shows we have been exploring the relationship between hierarchy (as structured by the global market)… discipline (…and its internalization… Bentham’s ‘logic of the will’… the implementation of which is achieved by means of imposed scarcity…) … and rationalism (hijacked longing… excised feeling… dismissing the voice of the body… while subjecting the constructed ‘facts’ given (by ‘power’) to the ‘creative intelligence’ for dissection…)

 

…pondering these elements of control we see… that hierarchy requires us to be ever-striving… discipline, likewise… rationalism… ditto… and…

 

…as dissection is without end… our lives pass by unexamined.

Ever-strivingness implies a goal… who determines it? We certainly are not asked…

So who benefits… by all this ever-strivingness… as the earth is abundant… and if the globe… macro and micro… was not tied up… in a web of obligation…

 

…we’d just grow our own food then… why can’t we just do that now?

 

It’s easy to see what we need for a healthy life… and the resources exist for us all to have it… the fact that, on the contrary, life is made a feat of endurance should clue us in… to conscious plan.

 

–––

 

 

The point of 'class'... as Plato named it... is to prevent thought (in us) from happening... and looking behind we see... a structure that precludes the possibility of empathy...

 

So… who has assumed responsibility for this task… of tying us up in a web of obligation? who engineered it into the physical structures of our common world?

 

Moreover… an ever-strivingness (of the ‘lower-orders’) does not allow time to think…

…and so… for ‘power’…

…the risk…

…that we will develop ‘thought’, then…

…is successfully averted….

So here we have yet another…

…of the innumerable ways that ‘class’…

…upends ‘thinking’…

…is upside-down-making…

…such that ‘rationalism’…

…practically speaking…

…means: thought‘s absence….

The point of ‘class’ – as Plato named it – is to prevent thought…

 (…in ‘the people’…)

…from happening…

…and as…

…to ‘life’ thought is so intrinsic…

…only when we are kept striving…

…stressed…

…‘survival’-focused…

…can we be kept thought-less.

Only if a constant state of scarcity is maintained…

…can we be kept striving…

…with ‘discipline’ replacing…

…‘thought’.

 

(‘Productivity’ is the name we’re encouraged to give to ‘internalized discipline.’)

–––

In observing the quality of thinking in alienated man, it is striking to see how his intelligence has developed and how his reason has deteriorated. He takes his reality for granted; he wants to eat it, consume it, touch it, manipulate it. He does not even ask what is behind it, why things are as they are, and where they are going. You cannot eat the meaning, you cannot consume the sense, and as far as the future is concerned – apres nous le deluge! (Erich Fromm, The Sane Society, p. 171 – 2)

…which essentially means, “who cares?” And of course we see… and manifest in ourselves… this sentiment all the time….

 

I remember a conversation I had with an insect exterminator when I tried to advocate for the earth a bit… that was his response… “who cares?”

 

He did not love the earth.

 

And Erich Fromm was describing this gap… this disconnection… in essence… when he said… in The Art of Loving… that “everyone wants to be loved, but no one wants to be loving…”

 

…as if ‘to be loving’ is an act of will… or an important conclusion to be reached by ‘Reason’…. This is why I wrote in Unpacking ‘Democracy’ that Sebastian De Grazia… in contrast with Fromm’s emphasis on ‘alienation’… an abstract that stands for ‘the structure of work’ (and whenever we have a perfectly good earth-term in hand – let’s use that… over the abstract)… that De Grazia nailed it when he identified work as the true problem… which is identifying the structure of society itself… as the true problem… …a truth Fromm is also calling our attention to when he tells us to look behind things(behind the outrage… the scandal… the facade… so…)

 

So… looking behind we see… a structure that precludes the possibility of empathy…

 

…we cannot love each other or the earth… because… no one loves us… and our bodies know this, no matter what stories they give our conscious minds to chew on… that they attempt to con us with… we know the truth of it… we are but fuel to run the system with… we are being-made-use-of… we are not valued…

 

…which is why to say that basic fairness should be the basis of all our inter-relations… and to then express outrage when there’s injustice… may be using your intelligence… but not your reason.

 

And Erich Fromm is calling us to look at this structure of the world as well, implicitly, by telling us to look behind things… reminding us that we cannot accept the social world of class as it presents itself at face value… and of course Bentham explained why… he explained that what we see is crafted carefully… and with his help the crafting stands in clear relief… we see it’s done by designing the ‘components’ of society in the image they want for the whole – the ‘total’ society… which means ‘power’ ensures that all component structures are premised on scarcity (and nothing more so than ‘time-off-leash’… off-duty… time when we don’t have to be preoccupied with psychic and physical survival…) and struggle for the resulting ‘made-scarce’ resources is made the defining quality of our lives… which become, then, about hoarding rather than helping… and about competition instead of good fellowship.

 

 

…helping each other… our natural tendency to come together… is the true force… that 'power' must continuously attempt to crush by creating conditions of scarcity…

 

What we see is the appearance of people behaving ‘freely’ (no obvious overseers standing with whip in hand)… coercion remains hidden in the circumstances crafted by simple means of making the resources of the earth private… i.e. in the structure of ‘society’ itself… made subservient to ‘the market’ (which, Polanyi told us, destroys ‘society’)… and ‘the market’ exists to make the resources of the planet… private…

 

…a structure that continuously reproduces conditions of scarcity… and clearly this is what is done by ‘the market’… abundance is hoarded (…and… perhaps most devastatingly… the abundance of love and attention we have to give to each other)… and parceled out to those who work… and work… and work…

…for if you don’t… you must stand… mouth watering… hat in hand… looking at that abundance and feeling excluded from love itself… because for some reason never explained… you do not deserve it.

 

So this is structural reinforcement.

 

We cannot live the lives we long to live… deserve to live… which is our biological inheritance… with this structure called ‘the global market’… which at base (as we are everything) is a market in us… constructed not by ‘greed-for-money’ fundamentally… but ‘greed-for-‘power’’… for exclusive possession of the keys… to leisure… leisure kept artificially scarce… by the market… (that’s why it exists…) while the vast majority are kept working… so this infinitesimal few can pretend they think for the rest of us.

 

This is not just wrong… it’s monumentally wrong…

 

…and we must change it.

 

We cannot love the earth if we do not first love ourselves… and that means loving our brothers and sisters… and that means creating the conditions of abundance that allow us to love… that allow good fellowship.

 

It means changing the structure.

 

‘Reason’ leads us to this conclusion… but only when… it walks hand-in-hand… with heart.

‘Reason’ is not ‘reason’…

…if ‘heart’ be not there…

…for truth is closed off to it…

…when ‘reason’ cannot care.

 

(– cannot care…. The structure of society does not allow it. This is why all the indignation is not just useless… it hurts us… makes us feel we are to blame… instead of being the ones set up… in ‘power’s game.)

So… the ‘imperialism of rationalism’ means we are unseated from within… by an invasion… of heartlessness…

 

…the consequences of which are then presented to us to use as the ‘objective’ facts of our lives.

 

So the struggle for existence is presented as a fact of nature… when, rather, as Kropotkin showed us… helping each other… our natural tendency to come together… is the true force… that ‘power’ must continuously attempt to crush… to overcome… by creating conditions of scarcity.

 

So it is heartlessness disguised as ‘reason’ that we’re seeing when we’re told that “China is leveraging it’s cheap manual labor to develop its intellectual capital…” or that “the  manufacturing process in China adds very little to the value of the final product…” or that “the level of advancement of a society is determined by the degree of development of the productive forces…” – all of which statements have appeared in the mouths of progressive pundits over the years… we are hearing ‘craft’ posing as ‘fact’…  heartlessness posing as ‘common sense’… ‘the only way’…

 

…and in this way are we pulled in…

…by progressive pundits…

…into lack of empathy and a lethal lethargy…

…for it kills the soul.

 

–––

 

We don't talk about what we've lost is losing the earth… this is another one of those conversations about ‘the future’ we need to have…

 

When we can’t open our doors wide and let our children roam the earth freely… and explore it as they’re meant to… these are crafted facts posed as ‘advanced civilization’… we are conditioned to accept less and less in terms of the quality of life and the use of our faculties… while those who still have both are disparaged as ‘primitive’… (e.g. the mom I met from Yemen… who had such an effervescent energy… a vividness and vitality… it was jaw-dropping.)

 

We have to reunite with our sources of power – wholism – because our authentic connections have been replaced with fraudulent ones….

 

When we said last week that our ancestors who wrote for us… had a hunger to see generalized human freedom… the hunger was in the ‘all’ of them… their bodies… their minds… no difference. It was they themselves that hungered. This… ‘freedom’… our bodies remember… no matter how forcefully and relentlessly ‘power’ tries to pound out the memory. It’s not an abstract concept… it is our physical existence as whole beings… bodies… souls… no difference….

 

And this brings us back to ‘work’ – wage work – … ‘work’… whatever ‘idea’ you think it serves… it does not serve our wholeness – and it’s time now for our wholeness… to lead… to say… to call the shots….

 

And it doesn’t matter what that ‘work’ is that they give you… or how much you may enjoy it. All the pundits, I’m sure, would say they love their job… would say it meets their passion… because it allows them to use their intelligence…

 

…but ‘one’s intelligence’ cannot get you to the underlying structure. On the contrary… it gets you… all unbeknownst to your conscious mind… to reproduce it.

 

…and, as we’ve said, they’ve made the ability to use (a fraction of) our gifts a scarce commodity… as with everything we need for a human existence…

 

…but Fromm reminds us… that ‘using one’s intelligence’ is not wholeness… just the opposite… it leads you into narrow ruts from which you cannot grow… let alone fulfill our goal… of freeing the species.

 

–––

 

The official Left has forfeited the ground of ‘freedom’… self-creation…

 

‘The future’… how do we make it our priority when most of us are too immersed, as Stanley Tookie Williams said, in our personal dramas called ‘survival’ to devote much time to thinking about it to any degree beyond what touches these personal dramas… and of course we never hear validated in the media… ‘progressive’ or otherwise… the idea that we should be taking responsibility for the species itself… ‘the earth’… perhaps… but this notion of ‘the earth’… (in the media…) which we are permitted to think and care about… is a concept exclusive of us… Is there any clearer evidence that we are the property of ‘nation-states’… with no legitimacy… within that frame… apart from them?

 

The entire mind-set of ‘power’… the only one we hear in the official voices (the media)… is, from the standpoint of standing with life… diseased and debased… the ground of freedom (defined as ‘freedom from necessity’) is surrendered without the slightest murmur of complaint.  Today I heard an official ‘thinker’ on the Left allow that ‘wage-work’ is an outmoded notion… he said (I paraphrase), “it’s clear that we should divorce ‘income’ from ‘work’…” (or was it the other way around?…) by which he meant… I think… that ‘the economy’ in its current depleted state cannot support a system of ‘work-for-wage’… and… given that we-the-people are ‘no longer needed’… and he… (charitably…) would prefer to see our existence prolonged…

(Is this what the distinction between ‘left’ and ‘right’ has come to?… that the ‘radical’ voices proclaim our right to exist? This is our defense?… from those who would pose the false opposition between our lives and the planet’s existence?… those who claim that we are illegitimate?… that we take without giving. Is there any sharper lens with which to see the crying need for all of us to reclaim responsibility for securing the ‘freedom from necessity’ we need?)

…he would courageously request of ‘power’ that it consider the possibility that charity begins at home… This ‘bold’ assertion brings us back to the very same one from Jeremy Rifkin lo! these twenty years ago (…and in Waking Up I critiqued this notion that ‘power’… utilizing its individual ‘nation-state’-levers… should benevolently dole out a bit of ‘its’ largesse to us… as we still seem to be on the planet… still breathing.)

 

And wasn’t this the same ‘solution’… (from a different pundit and stood up in slightly different clothing…) that I also heard today (07.10.13)… telling us that the ‘U.S. economy’ can be ‘fixed’ if a movement would only begin… to have the ‘New Deal’ all over again?  “This is realistic,” he assured us, “it’s not utopian. It happened [once… i.e. it can happen again…]”

 

Can it?

 

A March 24, 2013 audio blog, Why do we have pundits?… noting popular confusion about the sources of ‘poverty’… addressed progressive economists directly:

“If you have not educated us about what ‘economy’ truly means and why there is ‘poverty’… in this day and age… then you need to go back to square one and start these conversations… since ‘society-re-design’ does not seem to be on your front burner at the moment… an authentic discussion of what ‘the economy’ is… that it is a major con for keeping us under control… that we don’t need a ‘market’ to help each other… we need ‘power’ off our backs.”

So these progressive pundits unbeknownst to themselves are serving us a healthy portion of ‘left-rationalism’ – i.e. their speech is divorced from their bodies… and what their bodies say is dismissed… they have relinquished all longing…

“The economy grows if people work. If the private sector won’t put people to work, then government should put people to work. Roosevelt put people to work so we need to put pressure on Barack to put people to work…” (…or at least put some money in our hands so we can eat – I presume is an equally acceptable version of this prime example of Left logical-thinking – that we deserve to be free is never granted legitimacy.)

‘Rationalism’ means reducing life to ‘factors’ (generously provided by ‘power’) that can be manipulated… (which by definition excludes the possibility of self-creation… excludes the possibility of freedom.)

 

But ‘manipulated’ by whom? …well by ‘the thinkers’ of course… who are… necessarily then… the ‘managers’… of us…. And ‘power’ is disappeared into the mathematical process of cranking out satiety-units to keep the superfluous ‘hands’… un-rebellious… (until some more permanent solution can be found.)

 

But ‘power’ has not gone away… whether pundits choose to acknowledge it or not… and if ‘jobs’ as a concept can… on some level… be reduced to ‘the capacity to buy food and shelter’… as life ‘must’… (for the pundits who use the master’s tongue…) be commodified… (for some reason never discussed…) then… even if governments get busy printing money… at some point the buck butts up against actual earth… as there is an earth that is the ultimate provider… and sometimes that earth takes the shape of so-called ‘immigrant labor’… whose hands are priced artificially low… (so that ‘government’ [or read: ‘power’]) can do all this other stuff it finds fascinating….)

 

But this should not be… right?… this artificially-low pricing?…

 

So will our imaginary governments… free from the influence of ‘power’… subsidize a healthy increase in these salaries as well? At whose behest?

 

And, by the way, are the oceans still dying… while whoever it is… is deciding?

 

How far down this fantasy-road do we have to go before the existence of ‘power’ is admitted into the calculation?…

At which point ‘rationalism’ is thrown out the window.

 

–––

 

‘Power’s hollow concepts tumble in when examined… and… once this is the work of enough of us… crash ‘the system’…

 

In the Waking Up Radio discussions beginning on May 26th, 2013 to this one, the key idea we began with was… if we can see the pattern… then we can intervene and stop it… but intervene how? and where?

 

And so our thoughts inevitably were led to the global arena.

 

We need (global) society-wide conversations, we concluded… the issue is: how to start them?

 

How do we see ourselves as global beings? How do we take responsibility for the species… when we can’t hear our thought developing over the airwaves?

 

And this is how we arrive at the importance of certainty… that Andrey Platonov called our attention to… because only with certainty can we pressure those available airwaves to advance the conversations we need to throw off the hold of ‘power’ on our minds… because that’s what’s keeping us held back right now… we have the technology (thanks to Nikola…)

 

…only with certainty, is courage steeled for facing the inevitable resistance of ‘power’… and doing the things we have to do… knowing we have to do them. Without certainty we bend to the force ‘power’ exerts… without certainty, we have no counter-force of our own.

 

What ‘power’ does is provide an entire, internally-consistent universe… but as its hollow constructs are necessarily inter-laced… such that no way out could ever become apparent to us… they necessarily had to build it that way to keep our thought from finding a way out… and because they had to design it in that inter-locked way… once you pull at one thread… the whole thing tumbles in….

 

With authentic thought it is the opposite… pull at one thread and thought deepens… grows stronger… it can’t be pulled apart because earth itself backs it… i.e. it is true… it aligns with the uncoerced energy of life.

I’ve been trying to help further this process of developing our authentic thought… to further a means of describing the world of class using authentic terms… by developing a set of concepts and definitions and language of what has been happening to us… such that our understanding of what is true deepens.

 

And, again, because truth has the opposite effect when you pull at it… of strengthening the weave by drawing us to pull more… and more… and yet again more… until eventually we ourselves are pulled in too… as… we are authentically a part… and the weave has the strength of being infinitely interwoven into… everything… authentically… not as artificial constructs of the objectified ‘Mind’… personified by ‘philosopher-statesmen’… set on realizing a very personal goal.

 

–––

 

The power of 'certainty'...

 

‘Power’ knows that the power of our collective thought is awesome… and so it has successfully harnessed and harvested it to serve its purpose – what it tells itself… and us… is – ‘the pursuit of “Knowledge-Infinite”’… by constructing a massive ‘psychological experiment’… that spanned generations… and forced the globe-entire ‘to come in’ – and constructed a ‘reality’ such that we would adopt that false ‘pursuit’ as our purpose too…. (Because of course it’s not really ‘Knowledge’-Supreme for which they lust, but ‘Power’-Supreme… over us.)

 

It has hijacked our lives for millennia, while telling themselves it was the ‘greater good’ that they served… the best goal imaginable… ‘Perfect Reason’… and buffed up its philosophical pundits to provide ‘philosophical’ cover for the carnage that resulted… from their breakneck destruction of the planet… in their rush to own it… all of it… so they could control us…

 

So ‘mind’ was elevated over ‘hand’ …via the market… and all of us conned to see it as legitimate… via its educational system… for a few confused folks… to play ‘god’.

 

And within that story we see… writ large as society itself… the power of certainty.

 

–––

 

Technological domination... 'power's muscle... can be met by the organized resistance of scientists... or... if we just... stop...

 

If the Panopticon is the optimal infrastructure design for ‘power’s purpose… a design which places command in the hands of the tiny, tiny few… and we must upend this plan with one that has the opposite effect… of putting command in everyone’s hands… would not the effect… as well as the means… be that every one of us has to see the world… not just the few… be able to encompass it in our being… our daily lives… and make it be the basis of our thought and decision-making?… beyond even Stevie Wonder’s ‘higher ground’… to the ‘highest ground’ imaginable?

 

We cannot allow ourselves to get mired (stuck) in ‘the particular’… in ‘what-is’…

…rather we try to express ‘the infinite’ in ourselves… on its model… and apply that insight to shape ‘the particular’….

 

We cannot shape the future by allowing ‘what-is’ to own or ‘occupy’ us… to ‘be’ us… we have to be the future… (which takes as its shape ‘the infinite’…) if we want to escape ‘class’… a world of being trapped in boxes… ‘the particular’ in micro….

 

–––

 

‘Rationalism’ is the third dimension of their control… and arguably their back-up… their muscle… their fall-back and stop-gap… their last defense if we wake up… if the other mechanisms of control fail.

 

So we find ourselves back to that Marcuse quote about “the organized resistance of the scientists”… the responsibility of the ‘mind-workers’… the ones who give to ‘power’ its technological domination… that strong arm against us… but…

…even more than this… ‘power’ is defeated… if we… just… stop.

 

That simple.

 

Because of the power of certainty.

 

–––

 

In the July 7th show we argued that ‘power’s solution to its dilemma of how to establish totalitarian control of us fell across three dimensions:

• Mind… the internalization of discipline, or psychological control;

• Body… ensuring that (external) societal conditions reflected the imperative (for ‘power’) of generalized ‘scarcity’… by creating… and extending globally… mechanisms for transferring the resources of the planet into its (‘power’s) hands, or structural control;

• Spirit… limiting our will to change things to the limits defined by ‘rationalism’… or by the requirement that ‘mind’ be objectified and divorced from ‘body’… that we relinquish control of our bodies… and all longing to be free – these latter thoughts then become ‘unthinkable’; this might be called the control of our effective energy… our vitality.

Today we’ve been discussing how this third dimension of ‘power’s solution to establishing totalitarian control of us: the spiritual dimension… recalling Hugo’s point that there must be “no vacuum in the human heart… that our lives must have meaning… we’ve been discussing how it effects… effectuates… solidifies or concretizes… the structure of class.

 

Most of us want to believe that we’re part of some grand project – which explains the appeal of ‘nationalism’ – but this is only because our lives lack intrinsic meaning.

 

And most of us absolutely need our existence confirmed – recognition… and as we discussed in Revealing Division… when attention is made a scare commodity… recognition itself becomes a type of currency. And ‘power’ owning exclusive rights to this dispensation (along with every other necessary resource for human existence)… the possession of ‘recognition-distribution rights’ ensures an effective on-going check on ‘heart’.

 

So what would release it? How do we ‘reoccupy’ our bodies? And how do we get the discussions going that will lead to conviction… certainty… and therefore ‘back-up’… the support of other people with conviction?

 

If we can agree that a good working definition of ‘rationalism’… one that reveals its practical effects… is that “‘body’ is divorced from the thought-process”… how does ‘rationalism’ direct us to ‘power’s self-averred goal of ‘Knowledge-Infinite’? or assign this goal? It prioritizes ‘mind’… it directs society to only reward with recognition the ‘work’ of cognition… of ‘thought-for-thought’s sake’… of ‘Mind’-objectified.

 

–––

 

(Part 3 of this discussion (…which begins with the July 28, 2013 The Waking Up Radio Radio Show) is at: Classifying Will Not Bring 'Class' To A Close

 

…continue on to part 3…

 

* …return to top…

 

 

 

*** “Almost all empires were created by force, but none can be sustained by it. Universal rule, to last, needs to translate force into obligation. Otherwise, the energies of the rulers will be exhausted in maintaining their dominance at the expense of their ability to shape the future, which is the ultimate task of statesmanship. Empires persist if repression gives way to consensus.” (Henry Kissinger, On China, p. 13)

 

 

 

 

 

The Future: What do we call it? Who cares?… So long as it means… generalized leisure for all…

* quotes from Chairman Mao

So what is this thing called ‘the rational mind’… that doesn’t feel but only calculates… that sets to work on clearly observable ‘factors’… clutching in fist one’s given orders. And the orders are dressed in various ideologies… but the essence (and our bodies know this)… is the same. Here’s a Chinese Community Party version:

Within the ranks of the people, democracy is correlative with centralism and freedom with discipline…. We must affirm anew the discipline of the Party, namely:

(1) The individual is subordinate to the organization;

(2) The minority is subordinate to the majority;

(3) The lower level is subordinate to the higher level; and

(4) The entire membership is subordinate to the Central Committee.

Whoever violates these articles of discipline disrupts Party unity. (Quotations From Chairman Mao, p. 254 – 5)

 

No one in a leading position is competent to give general guidance to all the units unless he derives concrete experience from particular individuals and events in particular subordinate units. This method must be promoted everywhere so that leading cadres at all levels learn to apply it. (Quotations From Chairman Mao, p. 227)

 

It is part of the art of leadership to take the whole situation into account and plan accordingly in the light of the historical conditions and existing circumstances of each locality, decide correctly on the centre of gravity and the sequence of the work for each period, steadfastly carry through decision, and make sure that definite results are achieved. (p. 228)

Whose results? Obviously these are given by means of ‘the hierarchy’… unless one is listening to a ‘higher authority’…. And it’s precisely this listening to our ‘earth-truth’ that ‘power’ seeks to confuse and hijack into ‘rationalism.’

 

 

The Future: What do we call it? Who cares?… So long as it means… generalized leisure for all…

* quotes from Nikola Tesla

Whose results? Obviously these are given by means of ‘the hierarchy’… unless one is listening to a ‘higher authority’…. And it’s precisely this listening to our ‘earth-truth’ that ‘power’ seeks to confuse and hijack into ‘rationalism.’

 

In my boyhood I suffered from a peculiar affliction due to the appearance of images, often accompanied by strong flashes of light, which marred the sight of real objects and interfered with my thoughts and action. They were pictures of things and scenes which I had really seen, never of those imagined. When a word was spoken to me the image of the object it designated would present itself vividly to my vision and sometimes I was quite unable to distinguish whether what I saw was tangible or not…I soon discovered that my best comfort was attained if I simply went on in my vision further and further, getting new impressions all the time, and so I began to travel; when alone, I would start on my journeys – see new places, cities and countries; live there, meet people and make friendships and acquaintances and, however unbelievable, it is a fact that they were just as dear to me as those in actual life, and not a bit less intense in their manifestations. This I did constantly until I was about seventeen, when my thoughts turned seriously to invention. Then I observed to my delight that I could visualize with the greatest facility. I needed no models, drawings or experiments. I could picture them all as real in my mind. Thus I have been led unconsciously to evolve what I consider a new method of materializing inventive concepts and ideas, which is radially opposite to the purely experimental and is in my opinion ever so much more expeditious and efficient. (Autobiography, p. 12-13, quoted in Waking Up, p. 56 – 57)

The ability to see with our hearts… with your wholeness… (as opposed to through the function… as opposed to the orders that come from above… the hierarchy in whatever form it is manifested…) we cannot allow… (if we want it to live broadly in the world… to be a general quality of humanity… cultivated to thrive globally…) we cannot allow to be the outcome of luck merely – which means we must design the structures that allow it to be… in all of us… globally.

 

If we are defined by the structures we’re born into… and our souls tend to bigness… what framework for our lives would allow for this?

 

Tesla envisioned a single brain… and that image suggests an organic whole… but not one imposed by force… but rather a furthered existence… a web of assistance. How can we best further each other? we will be asking this in our global fellowship. Just as life blood flows to where it’s needed… so we serve the whole as individuals… but this does not mean diminishment of individual power… just the opposite… individual exhuberance and verve blossoms within the attendance upon each other’s needs… on the nurturance of global fellowship… (as Kropotkin showed us….)

But Tesla’s daydreams were not about “the coming power of men.” He dreamed about the coming unity of men:

 

…The earth was found to be, literally, alive with electrical vibrations…this planet despite its vast extent, behaved like a conductor of limited dimensions… The results attained by me have made my scheme of intelligence transmission, for which the name of “World Telegraphy” has been suggested, easily realizable. It constitutes…a radical and fruitful departure from what have been done heretofore…it will add materially to general safety, comfort and convenience, and maintenance of peaceful relations. It involves the employment of a number of plants, all of which are capable of transmitting individualized signals to the uttermost confines of the earth. Each of them will be preferably located near some important center of civilization and the news it receives through any channel will be flashed to all points of the globe. A cheap and simple device, which might be carried in ones pocket, may then be set up somewhere on sea or land, and it will record the world’s news or such special messages as may be intended for it. Thus the entire earth will be converted into a huge brain, as it were, capable of response in every one of its parts. Since a single plant of but one hundred horsepower can operate hundreds of millions of instruments, the system will have a virtually infinite working capacity, and it must needs immensely facilitate and cheapen the transmission of intelligence. (Nikola Tesla, Collected Papers, Vol. 2, p. A-153 – A-158)

 

Tesla had devised a means for the wireless transmission of power, not to enrich a few, but to bring the world together.

 

With its full development and a perfect system of wireless transmission of the energy to any distance man will be able to solve all the problems of material existence. Distance, which is the chief impediment to human progress, will be completely annihilated in thought, word and action. Humanity will be united, wars will be made impossible and peace will reign supreme. (Nikola Tesla, Collected Papers, Vol. 2, A-184, quoted in Waking Up, p. 59 – 60)

All those spokespersons who did not throw themselves away… wrestle from their various angles with this question: how to help us want what they have… i.e. ourselves… our souls… so we will fight to save them.

 

Just as… if ‘power’ gives us our thoughts it can control what we think… so it is that if it gives us the physical structures we’re born into… and must live in, while they tell us ‘thought’ itself equates with excised feeling… such that we have no ‘facts’ from which to form an analysis… but the ones shaped by… and so premised on… relations of class.

 

The so-called ‘rational mind’ has nothing to work on save the facts and sights ‘power’ gives it.

So… they give us the thoughts to think and the ‘facts’… the ‘material reality’… with which to form an analysis…

 

So when Mao cites the ‘material reality’ as the starting point of thought, it’s important never to forget that these are manufactured conditions… often ones given by him… that ‘the people’ are forced to live with… and treat as if legitimate… as if carrying a certain inevitability.

What this means is that ‘materialism’… (as a philosophical notion…) itself gets called into question.

 

 

 

 

 

The Future: What do we call it? Who cares?… So long as it means… generalized leisure for all…

* quotes from Andrey Platonov's The Foundation Pit

The following quotes are from the opening pages of The Foundation Pit by Andrey Platonov (1899 – 1951), written in the late 1920s and early 1930s:

On the day when he reached the thirtieth year of his personal life Voshchev was discharged from the small machine factory where he had earned the means of his existence. The dismissal notice stated that he was being separated from his job because of his increasing loss of powers and tendency to stop and think amidst the general flow of work. (p. 3)

 

“The government gave you an extra hour for your thinking, Voshchev. You used to work eight hours, and now it’s only seven. You should have lived and kept quiet! If everybody starts thinking all at once, who’ll do the acting?”

“Without thought, there won’t be any sense in the action,” Voshchev said reflectively. (p. 6)

[i.e. we would be like the rocks… and the dried-up leaves…]

 

Everything surrendered itself to meek, unquestioning existence, Voshchev alone was apart and silent. A dead, fallen leaf lay near his head… Voshchev picked up the dry leaf and hid it in a secret compartment of his sack, where he collected all sorts of lost, unfortunate objects. You did not know the meaning of your life, Voshchev thought with careful sympathy. Lie here; I’ll find out why you lived and died. Since nobody needs you and you are lying uselessly in the middle of things, I will keep and remember you.

 “Everything lives and suffers in the world, without understanding or knowledge,” said Voshchev, and got up from the roadside to go on, surrounded by general patient existence. “It’s as if someone, or some few, had drawn the feeling of certainty out of us and taken it for themselves.” (p. 7 – 8)

 

It was only now that he saw the center of town and the building going on there…. Set apart from nature, in the bright electric place, people worked with a will, raising brick walls, carrying loads within the wooden delirium of scaffolding. Voshchev watched for a long time the erection of a tower he knew nothing about; he saw that the workmen moved smoothly, without sharp force, but something was visibly being added toward the completion of the structure.

“Don’t people decrease in their sense of life when buildings increase?” Voshchev hesitated to believe. “Man will make a building and unmake himself. Who will live in it then?” Voshchev wondered as he walked away. (p. 11 – 12)

 

All sorts of dreams come to a laboring man at night: some express his hope fulfilled, others bring premonitions of his own coffin in a clay grave. But daytime is lived in the same stooped manner by everyone – in the patience of the body digging the earth so that the everlasting, stony root of the indestructible edifice could be set into the fresh deep pit. (p. 48 – 9)

 

 

“The proletariat lives for the enthusiasm of work, Comrade Voshchev! It’s time you got this tendency. Every union member’s body should be aflame from this slogan!”

Chiklin was away. He was walking in the neighborhood around the tile factory. Everything looked the same as before, but now it had the shabbiness of a dying world. The trees in the street were dried out with age and had long stood lifeless, but there were still some people who existed, hiding behind the double windows of the tiny houses, living more durably than the trees. In Chiklin’s younger days there was the smell of a baker here, coal-deliverers rode through the street, and loud propaganda of milk was heard from village carts. (p. 51 – 2)

 

Early in the fall Voshchev began to feel the duration of time and sat indoors, surrounded by the darkness of the weary evenings.

The other men, too, either sat or lay there. The common lamp lit their faces, and no one spoke. Comrade Pashkin had providently installed a radio loudspeaker in the diggers’ barrack, so that during the hours of rest each man might learn the meaning of class life.

“Comrades, we must mobilize nettles on the Socialist construction front! Nettles are an object of necessity abroad….”

“Comrades, we must clip our horses’ tails and manes!” the loudspeaker demanded again. It demanded something every other minute. “Each eighty thousand horses will provide us with thirty tractors!”

 

Safronov listened with a sense of triumph, regretting only that he could not talk back into the speaker, to make known his readiness for all activity, for clipping horses, and his general happiness. But Zhachev, and Voshchev, too, began to feel unreasonably ashamed as they heard the long speeches over the radio. They had nothing against the speakers and admonishers, but they felt more and more acutely their personal disgrace. Sometimes Zhachev could no longer endure the oppressive despair of his soul, and he shouted amid the noise of social consciousness pouring from the loudspeaker:

 

“Stop that sound! Let me answer it!…”

Safronov would immediately step forward with his graceful walk:

“I should think, Comrade Zhachev, it’s about time to give up your expressions and submit wholeheartedly to the production of the leadership.”

 

“Leave the man alone, Safronov,” Voshchev would say. “Our life is sad enough.”

 

But the socialist Safronov was afraid of forgetting the duty of joy, and always answered everybody with finality, in the supreme voice of power:

“Whoever carries a party card in his pants pocket must be constantly concerned about keeping the enthusiasm of labor in his body. I challenge you, Comrade Voshchev, to socialist competition in the highest happiness of mood!”

 

The radio loudspeaker worked unceasingly, like a snowstorm, and then it proclaimed once more that every workingman must aid the accumulation of snow in the collective fields. At this, the radio fell silent; the power of science, which until then had indifferently sped across all nature the words that were so necessary to mankind, must have blown out. (p. 55 – 6)

 

Not long ago, walking up a main drag of Berkeley, I’d been thinking thoughts very similar to Chiklin’s… how lifeless were the trees… how I missed the wonderful used-toy store… the popular video store… sad that none of the scattered pedestrians acknowledged each other, but moved like robots attuned only to their customized loudspeakers or the echoes of allowable thought patterned across our brains.… There’s not much left of the Berkeley I knew… except the voracity of ‘power’… its voracious university… and banks… who need only to open wide their jaws for the political handmaidens to rush to them and shove in whatever is required.

 

Now by the lights of Mr. Batty, Berkeley grows ever-richer by the second… but my mind lights upon this question: “What is ‘objective truth’ to those for whom the health of earth no longer matters? as they’ve been designed… to ignore it?” The ever-growing concentration of the resources of the planet into private hands… leaves to the most of us lifeless decrepitude… a dull sameness of want… of longing for lost life.

 

So this cannot be the structure we need for generalized human freedom… if ‘freedom’ means ‘freedom from necessity’… and “a tangled web of willing witnesses”… of ancestors who tell us never to forget our right to it (freedom)… assure us that it does… then the resources of the planet… which allow for ‘life-exuberant’… must be shared with all of us… equally… including the resource called ‘decision-making’… the resource called ‘using our intelligence to shape the world that works for all of us…”

 

If we recall that to do significant harm… to the earth we are the stewards of… requires the dull compliance of masses among us… then we can readily see… not only that we haven’t the means as individualities to make much mischief… but that we need each one of us to become big enough to see the earth-entire… if we are to protect our freedom and the health of our earth… two ways of saying the same thing exactly… and if we move to such a world… in which each one of us develops his or her earth-gifts, then we have moved to a world made exponentially more healthy… just by taking us ‘off-leash’… and granting to us all equal responsibility for running things… as we all want to eat well, sleep well and grow to our full heights… these tasks necessarily receive our first attention.

 

The Egyptian people have shown us our cooperative spirit… it has shown us ourselves off-leash. So this matter of infrastructure-design is all about what works for humans… the earth is abundant – once we help each other to trust that – to trust both the earth and our cooperative spirit.

So the issue is what design of infrastructure allows the unfolding of our full human possibilities… that should be our sole consideration in thinking through this question.

 

The depersonalized, bureaucratic language of rationalism… is the language of ‘power’… the master’s tongue… it is the same in its essentials whereever class exists… as class depends… on robbing us of feeling… on numbing sensibility and reducing u to quantities… destroying our empathy… with all life… including and especially ourselves…

…in the bureaucratic imperative… there’s always something more important than us…

…which means we must flip it… if we… as full human beings… are to live.

 

So what is this thing called ‘the rational mind’… that doesn’t feel but only calculates… that sets to work on clearly observable ‘factors’… clutching in fist one’s given orders. And the orders are dressed in various ideologies… but the essence (and our bodies know this)… is the same.

 

…Nothing is certain… it’s just as Platonov said… a tiny few have hoarded all the certainty, and to the rest of us is left an endless quest… to find it… and as we are kept ever-doubting what our children tell us… what the earth tells us… what our bodies tell us… while we follow the orders from above… to keep pounding recalcitrant life into tight boxes… what if we do we’ll one day find it… discover why we sacrificed our lieves… while a tiny few already know… for them… our lives were lost… for them… they are the point-entire of all our stolen lives and accumulated misery… for them… to play-pretend at being gods.

 

 

 

 

The Future: What do we call it? Who cares?… So long as it means… generalized leisure for all…

* What is meant by 'the economy' 'growing'?

 

It might be helpful to look at an example of what is actually happening… (and translate to authentic terms…) when pundits talk about ‘the economy growing…’

 

The so-called ‘Chinese Industrial Revolution’… one – we’re told – that was compressed within a mere three decades… shows us in a very ‘sped-up’ form… the disaster called ‘ripping-from-our-hands… the land’… in the name of ‘rationalism’… development of the productive forces’… ‘the most efficient use of planetary resources’… the evolution of the human mind’… take your pick of bedtime stories as a palliative for losing your soul… lost… in losing that which makes us… feeds us… and welcomes us back in time… the earth.

 

Robert Schaeffer:

After taking power in 1978, Deng worked to free China from the low-level equilibrium trap [“…economist Richard Nelson… argued that if poor countries successfully used investment to promote economic growth, their efforts to raise per capita incomes would fail if the population continued to grow…” p. 29.] Because he lacked a “viable blueprint for systematic institutional reform,” Deng was forced to adopt a series of ad hoc policy initiatives and so was compelled to “cross the river by groping for stones.” In practice, this meant that the regime took policies from the 1950s and adopted them for use in the 1980s. In many ways, the reforms Deng introduced represented a “return,” not just an “advance.” Scholars have described the policies the regime adopted as “reforms,” which suggest that they involved a “substantial relaxation (fangsong) and increased permissiveness.” However, to think of the reform policies as introducing greater “freedom” because some of the reforms were accompanied by a reassertion of “control” would be a mistake. As one scholar observed, “For Deng, a new authoritarianism was a prerequisite for rapid economic advance.” The regime’s draconian, coercive population-control policies, which were a centerpiece of the “reforms,” were one expression of this “new authoritarianism.” In fact, the regime said that the goal of reform was to create what it called a “birdcage” economy: “The concept… likened the planned economy to a cage in which the market adjustment mechanism, like a bird, could fly freely… this concept was commonly called the ‘birdcage economy,’ in which ‘freedom’ was contained by ‘control.’

 

To pry open the jaws of the low-level equilibrium trap, the regime had to find solutions to four problems associated with agriculture, investment, labor and population. The first and most important problem for the regime was how to increase food production.

 

The regime decided to transfer collective land to individual rural households and give them incentives to increase food production. But although this solution increased food production, it also reduced the surplus available to the regime, a surplus that it had long used to finance industrialization. This created a second problem: how to finance industrialization.

 

The regime decided to take advantage of the economic aid provided and invite foreign capital to “return” to China. The regime used access to foreign loans along with direct investment from the overseas Chinese community and from the United States and Japan to finance industrialization and promote the expansion of export commodity production, which was based in the special export processing zones in the southeast, an area that became known as the Gold Coast. However, this solution immediately created a third problem: how to create a cheap labor force for industries in cities along the coast without triggering a massive migration into China’s cities.

 

The regime decided to allow rural workers to migrate to the cities but also treat them as illegal migrants so that they could be returned, if need be, to rural areas, thereby restricting the migration of workers into the cities. This enabled the regime both to regulate the size of the industrial labor force and keep the wages of illegal migrants and legal urban workers relatively low. (Robert K. Schaeffer, Red Inc.: Dictatorship and the Development of Capitalism in China, 1949 to the Present, 2012, p. 71 – 3; the “birdcage economy” quote is from Sasumu Yabuki, China’s New Political Economy: The Giant Awakes, 1995, p. 41 – 3)

‘Power’ can only ‘break us’ by means of atomization – which keeps our eyes locked on those above us (waiting for directives…) and not seeing our sisters and brothers… and this globally – and atomization is deepened by our internalization of discipline… and then by the unity of the master class… expressed in the creation of the world market.

 

Red Inc. provides a good illustration… as it shows what we all go through in being disciplined by the world market…. China could not escape the ‘low-level equilibrium trap’, …and ‘equilibrium’ is just another way of saying ‘self-sufficiency…’ (so… ‘low-level self-sufficiency’ means that the earth is not being eaten exponentially…) because it was, in effect, hemmed in by the world market. Karl Polanyi explained over a half-century ago that the world market was specifically created to force economic-interdependency between nations… to force everyone ‘to come in’… in order to transfer the resources of the entire planet into private hands…. It is critical for ‘power’ that we-the-people have nowhere to go… either physically or mentally.

(This relates to our comment last week about the meaning of the word ‘imperialism.’ ‘Power’ is much more concerned about the possibility of alternative ideas ‘infecting’ the populace than organized use of force against them… they almost welcome the latter by comparison because it reinforces ‘division’ (their sine qua non of controlling us…) i.e. it reinforces the mindset of ‘power’.

 

In On China, Henry Kissinger quotes Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, speaking in January, 1950 to the National Press Club about the decision of the Truman administration to not deploy military force to help the Chinese nationalists, led by Chiang Kai-shek, hang onto “Formosa” (Taiwan). He said:

 

This communistic concept and techniques have armed Russian imperialism with a new and most insidious weapon of penetration. Armed with these new powers, what is happening in China is that the Soviet Union is detaching the Northern provinces [areas] of China from China, and is attaching them to the Soviet Union… anyone who violates the integrity of China is the enemy of China and is acting contrary to our own interest…. Today is a day in which the old relationships between east and west are gone… the relationship of east and west must now be in the Far East one of mutual respect and helpfulness. (Dean Acheson quoted in Kissinger’s On China, p. 120)

 

Kissinger comments on this: “Acheson was laying out a prospect for a new Sino-American relationship based on national interest, not ideology.”

 

‘National interest’ defined as what, then?

He then notes that two decades would elapse before Nixon, probably nudged by Kissinger, picked up this thread spun by Acheson.)

…and so… now that we are all ‘in’… should it not at least be from this global reality that pundits explain how the ball of economic possibilities bounces?

 

The ‘rulers’ of the Chinese people understood the rules of ‘the supremacy game’… and were determined to emerge triumphant… that ‘their own people’ had to be sacrificed… was of little consequence…

 

‘Rationalism’ is not just a stilted way of describing the world… beyond being – because of ‘power’s exclusive possession of the lexicon – a logical trap designed to distract… it’s an energy-sink that draws us into endless dissection-projects… and as a trap that saps, it’s first and foremost a control tactic… it de-energizes us, quite literally dis-spirits us… because it means a break with solidarity….

 

To illustrate, we’ll look at a recent Epoch Times article (of June 27 – July 3, 2013) called “In Search of a Formula With Which to Build Better Cities.” The writer, Michael Batty, Professor of Planning at University College London, opens with the sentence, “When the great economist Alfred Marshall proposed the idea that as places get bigger they generate economies of scale, this idea was found to be consistent with the way population and traffic movements might be modeled.” ‘Economies of scale’ is given this definition in the dictionary: “a proportionate saving in costs gained by an increased level of production…”, ‘gain’ is defined as “to increase the amount or rate of something…”, ‘production’ is defined as “the action of making or manufacturing from components or raw materials…”; and… while we’ve got the dictionary open, we can add that: ‘rationalism’ is described as “the belief or theory that opinions and actions should be based on reason and knowledge rather than on religious belief or emotional response…” and ‘knowledge’ is defined as “what is known in a particular field or in total; facts and information…” – all of these are notions we’ve been trained (by ‘power’) to accept as obvious… “no thought required…” we’re implicitly told… and of course we’re never allowed to question or discuss… the goal.

 

We’re told that ‘rationalism’ means to base your thinking on objective facts… rather than subjective feeling… but if those facts are themselves creations deliberately crafted… then your ‘objective analysis’ is anything but…

 

‘Economies of scale’ is a craft hewn from the material ‘power’ provides… is a view solely from the perspective of ‘power’. It means we are ‘cheaper’… that’s the ‘economy’ they mean… that we are ‘managed’ easier… that the product ‘labor’ is rendered predictable… the package ‘human’ more readily accessible… more ‘willing’… because we’re (artificially rendered) dependent… more ‘willing’ to accept cheap food… cheap homes… cheapened lives….

 

Moreover, ‘economies of scale’ on closer scrutiny… if we bring to the inspection a critical eye… carries this baggage (as with all of ‘power’s favorite notions): that the notion of ‘scarcity’ is implied… and that it assumes ‘class’ and unequal ‘power’-relations. It’s premised on the notion that the goal of ‘resource-stewardship’ (if we can reconceive, for the purposes of this conversation, ‘economics’ as that)… is to ‘eat the earth’ as fast as possible.

 

But, if that’s not the goal… and if we view from the vantage of the whole… from which it’s clear no true ‘economy’ exists in resource-exhaustion… just costs pushed off down the road.

 

When the great economist Alfred Marshall proposed the idea that as places get bigger they generate economies of scale, this idea was found to be consistent with the way population and traffic movements might be modeled.

 

While there have long been efforts to establish a “science of cities,” progress was only made after the development of complexity theory – the study of complex systems and the interaction of their parts. Today it underpins our understanding of cities and influences the interventions we make through urban planning.

 

For the ensuing 100 years, we had a love-hate relationship with cities; but today, the general consensus on cities has shifted. Once the view was that cities were evil places and that planning should attempt to dissipate this evil with a return to the countryside. This, in turn, fostered urban sprawl.

 

In an almost total about-face, cities, especially big cities, have now become the flavor of the month. Behind this urban favoritism is the notion that the bigger the city, the greater the diversity and the greater the number of opportunities – and the greater the potential rewards.

 

This relies on the premise that as cities get bigger, the number of potential interactions or contacts increased proportionally (at the rate of the square of the population)….

One of the clearest indications that big cities generate more opportunities is that incomes tend to grow more than proportionately with city size – bigger cities are richer cities.

The downside of city growth is that congestion also increased…

 

Writing in Science last week, Luis Bettencourt unpacks these rather simple relationships between the levels of innovation, income, congestion, and many other factors compared against city size. His elegant and plausible thesis is that as cities grow, their average incomes grow, as do their abilities to innovate. The infrastructure that services them increases at a less than proportionate rate, and thus forces further efficiencies. While he demonstrates that the mixing of populations as cities grow leads to increased costs, he argures these costs are outweighed by the benefits of increased income and innovation-generating interactions…. (Michael Batty, “In Search of a Formula With Which to Build Better Cities,” The Epoch Times, June 27 – July 3, 2013)

 

 

 

 

The Future: What do we call it? Who cares?… So long as it means… generalized leisure for all…

The problem is...primarily...sharing work, sharing experience...

 

 

 

 

The Future: What do we call it? Who cares?… So long as it means… generalized leisure for all…

The problem is...primarily...sharing work, sharing experience...