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It’s Time To Change The Rhyme
A SAID POEM
for Ronald and Beatrice Gross
"I have seen the future, and it doesn't work," said Robert Fulford.
"If there weren't any Poland, there wouldn't be any Poles," said Alfred Jarry.
"We aren't making the film they contracted for," said Robert Flaherty.
"History never repeats itself, but it rhymes," said Mark Twain.
In 1845 an interesting thematic precursor using the descriptive phrase "mystic rhyme" was printed in the publication "The Christian Remembrancer":
"The vision recurs; the eastern sun has a second rise; history repeats her tale unconsciously, and goes off into a mystic rhyme; ages are prototypes of other ages, and the winding course of time brings us round to the same spot again."
I was going to quiz you, but I decided to get straight to the point. Below are two inaugural speeches; the first from Franklin Delano Roosevelt; the latter from Adolf Hitler. Both of these speeches profoundly inspired their respective constituencies. The rhetoric echoes a dire sense of emergency.
Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes administers the constitutional oath of office to Franklin Delano Roosevelt as it occurred on March 4, 1933. President Roosevelt's inaugural address follows.
President Hoover, Mr. Chief Justice, my friends: This is a day of national consecration, and I am certain that my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the Presidency I will address them with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our nation impels.
This is pre-eminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper.
So first of all let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear. . .is fear itself. . . nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.
In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days. In such a spirit on my part and on yours we face our common difficulties. They concern, thank God, only material things. Values have shrunken to fantastic levels: taxes have risen, our ability to pay has fallen, government of all kinds is faced by serious curtailment of income, the means of exchange are frozen in the currents of trade, the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side, farmers find no markets for their produce, the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone.
More important, a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.
Yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply.
Primarily, this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failures and abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.
True, they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit, they have proposed only the lending of more money.
Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored conditions. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers.
They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.
The money changers have fled their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths.
The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.
Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money, it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.
The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow-men.
Recognition of the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be values only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit, and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing.
Small wonder that confidence languishes, for it thrives only on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, on unselfish performance. Without them it cannot live.
Restoration calls, however, not for changes in ethics alone. This nation asks for action, and action now.
Our greatest primary task is to put people to work. This is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously.
It can be accompanied in part by direct recruiting by the government itself, treating the task as we would treat the emergency of a war, but at the same time, through this employment, accomplishing greatly needed projects to stimulate and reorganize the use of our national resources.
Hand in hand with this, we must frankly recognize the over-balance of population in our industrial centers and, by engaging on a national scale in a redistribution, endeavor to provide a better use of the land for those best fitted for the land.
The task can be helped by definite efforts to raise the values of agricultural products and with this the power to purchase the output of our cities.
It can be helped by preventing realistically the tragedy of the growing loss, through foreclosure, of our small homes and our farms.
It can be helped by insistence that the Federal, State, and local governments act forthwith on the demand that their cost be drastically reduced.
It can be helped by the unifying of relief activities which today are often scattered, uneconomical and unequal. It can be helped by national planning for and supervision of all forms of transportation and of communications and other utilities which have a definitely public character.
There are many ways in which it can be helped, but it can never be helped merely by talking about it. We must act, and act quickly.
Finally, in our progress toward a resumption of work we require two safeguards against a return of the evils of the old order: there must be a strict supervision of all banking and credits and investments; there must be an end to speculation with other people's money, and there must be provision for an adequate but sound currency.
These are the lines of attack. I shall presently urge upon a new Congress in special session detailed measures for their fulfillment, and I shall seek the immediate assistance of the several States.
Through this program of action we address ourselves to putting our own national house in order and making income balance outgo.
Our international trade relations, though vastly important, are, to point in time and necessity, secondary to the establishment of a sound national economy.
I favor as a practical policy the putting of first things first. I shall spare no effort to restore world trade by international economic readjustment, but the emergency at home cannot wait on that accomplishment.
The basic thought that guides these specific means of national recovery is not narrowly nationalistic.
It is the insistence, as a first consideration, upon the interdependence of the various elements in and parts of the United States. . . a recognition of the old and permanently important manifestation of the American spirit of the pioneer.
It is the way to recovery. It is the immediate way. It is the strongest assurance that the recovery will endure.
In the field of world policy I would dedicate this nation to the policy of the good neighbor. . .the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others. . .the neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a world of neighbors.
If I read the temper of our people correctly, we now realize, as we have never realized before, our interdependence on each other: that we cannot merely take, but we must give as well, that if we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective.
We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline because it makes possibly a leadership which aims at a larger good.
This I propose to offer, pledging that the larger purposes will hind upon us all as a sacred obligation with a unity of duty hitherto evoked only in time of armed strife.
With this pledge taken, I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people, dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems.
Action in this image and to this end is feasible under the form of government which we have inherited from our ancestors.
Our Constitution is so simple and practical that it is possible always to meet extraordinary needs by changes in emphasis and arrangement without loss of essential form.
That is why our constitutional system has proved itself the most superbly enduring political mechanism the modern world has produced. It has met every stress of vast expansion of territory, of foreign wars, of bitter internal strife, of world relations.
It is to be hoped that the normal balance of executive and legislative authority may be wholly adequate to meet the unprecedented task before us. But it may be that an unprecedented demand and need for undelayed action may call for temporary departure from that normal balance of public procedure.
I am prepared under my constitutional duty to recommend the measures that a stricken nation in the midst of a stricken world may require.
But in the event that the Congress shall fail to take one of these courses, and in the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me.
I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis. . .broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.
For the trust reposed in me I will return the courage and the devotion that befit the time. I can do no less.
We face the arduous days that lie before us in the warm courage of national unity, with the clear consciousness of seeking old and precious moral values, with the clean satisfaction that comes from the stern performance of duty by old and young alike.
We aim at the assurance of a rounded and permanent national life.
We do not distrust the future of essential democracy. The people of the United States have not failed. In their need they have registered a mandate that they want direct, vigorous action.
They have asked for discipline and direction under leadership. They have made me the present instrument of their wishes. In the spirit of the gift I will take it.
In this dedication of a nation we humbly ask the blessing of God. May He protect each and every one of us! May He guide me in the days to come!
BERLIN, REICHSTAG
SPEECH OF MARCH 23, 1933
IN NOVEMBER, 1918, Marxist organizations seized the executive power by means of a revolution. The monarchs were dethroned, the authorities of the Reich and of the States removed from office, and thereby a breach of the Constitution was committed. The success of the revolution in a material sense protected the guilty parties from the hands of the law. They sought to justify it morally by asserting that Germany or its Government bore the guilt for the outbreak of the War.
This assertion was deliberately and actually untrue. In consequence, however, these untrue accusations in the interest of our former enemies led to the severest oppression of the entire German nation and to the breach of the assurances given to us in Wilson's fourteen points, and so for Germany, that is to say the working classes of the German people, to a time of infinite misfortune....
The splitting up of the nation into groups with irreconcilable views, systematically brought about by the false doctrines of Marxism, means the destruction of the basis of a possible communal life.... It is only the creation of a real national community, rising above the interests and differences of rank and class, that can permanently remove the source of nourishment of these aberrations of the human mind. The establishment of such a solidarity of views in the German body corporate is all the more important, for it is only thereby that the possibility is provided of maintaining friendly relations with foreign Powers without regard to the tendencies or general principles by which they are dominated, for the elimination of communism in Germany is a purely domestic German affair.
Simultaneously with this political purification of our public life, the Government of the Reich will undertake a thorough moral purging of the body corporate of the nation. The entire educational system, the theater, the cinema, literature, the Press, and the wireless - all these will be used as means to this end and valued accordingly. They must all serve for the maintenance of the eternal values present in the essential character of our people. Art will always remain the expression and the reflection of the longings and the realities of an era. The neutral international attitude of aloofness is rapidly disappearing. Heroism is coming forward passionately and will in future shape and lead political destiny. It is the task of art to be the expression of this determining spirit of the age. Blood and race will once more become the source of artistic intuition....
Our legal institutions must serve above all for the maintenance of this national community. The irremovableness of the judges must ensure a sense of responsibility and the exercise of discretion in their judgments in the interests of society. Not the individual but the nation as a whole alone can be the center of legislative solicitude. High treason and treachery to the nation will be ruthlessly eradicated in the future. The foundations of the existence of justice cannot be other than the foundations of the existence of the nation.
The Government, being resolved to undertake the political and moral purification of our public life, is creating and securing the conditions necessary for a really profound revival of religious life.
The advantages of a personal and political nature that might arise from compromising with atheistic organizations would not outweigh the consequences which would become apparent in the destruction of general moral basic values. The national Government regards the two Christian confessions as the weightiest factors for the maintenance of our nationality. It will respect the agreements concluded between it and the federal States. Their rights are not to be infringed. But the Government hopes and expects that the work on the national and moral regeneration of our nation which it has made its task will, on the other hand, be treated with the same respect....
Great are the tasks of the national Government in the sphere of economic life.
Here all action must be governed by one law: the people does not live for business, and business does not exist for capital; but capital serves business, and business serves the people. In principle, the Government will not protect the economic interests of the German people by the circuitous method of an economic bureaucracy to be organized by the State, but by the utmost furtherance of private initiative and by the recognition of the rights of property....
The Government will systematically avoid currency experiments. We are faced above all by two economic tasks of the first magnitude. The salvation of the German farmer must be achieved at all costs....
Furthermore, it is perfectly clear to the national Government that the final removal of the distress both in agricultural business and in that of the towns depends on the absorption of the army of the unemployed in the process of production. This constitutes the second of the great economic tasks. It can only be solved by a general appeasement, in applying sound natural economic principles and all measures necessary, even if, at the time, they cannot reckon with any degree of popularity. The providing of work and the compulsory labor service are, in this connection, only individual measures within the scope of the entire action proposed....
We are aware that the geographic position of Germany, with her lack of raw materials, does not fully permit of economic self-sufficiency for the Reich. It cannot be too often emphasized that nothing is further from the thoughts of the Government of the Reich than hostility to exporting. We are fully aware that we have need of the connection with the outside world, and that the marketing of German commodities in the world provides a livelihood for many millions of our fellow-countrymen.
We also know what are the conditions necessary for a sound exchange of services between the nations of the world. For Germany has been compelled for years to perform services without receiving an equivalent, with the result that the task of maintaining Germany as an active partner in the exchange of commodities is not so much one of commercial as of financial policy. So long as we are not accorded a reasonable settlement of our foreign debts corresponding to our economic capacity, we are unfortunately compelled to maintain our foreign-exchange control. The Government of the Reich is, for that reason, also compelled to maintain the restrictions on the efflux of capital across the frontiers of Germany....
The protection of the frontiers of the Reich and thereby of the lives of our people and the existence of our business is now in the hands of the Reichswehr, which, in accordance with the terms imposed upon us by the Treaty of Versailles, is to be regarded as the only really disarmed army in the world. In spite of its enforced smallness and entirely insufficient armament, the German people may regard their Reichswehr with proud satisfaction. This little instrument of our national self-defence has come into being under the most difficult conditions. The spirit imbuing it is that of our best military traditions. The German nation has thus fulfilled with painful conscientiousness the obligations imposed upon it by the Peace Treaty, indeed, even the replacement of ships for our fleet then sanctioned has, I may perhaps be allowed to say, unfortunately, only been carried out to a small extent.
For years Germany has been waiting in vain for the fulfillment of the promise of disarmament made to her by the others. It is the sincere desire of the national Government to be able to refrain from increasing our army and our weapons, insofar as the rest of the world is now also ready to fulfill its obligations in the matter of radical disarmament. For Germany desires nothing except an equal right to live and equal freedom.
In any case the national Government will educate the German people in this spirit of a desire for freedom. The national honor, the honor of our army and the ideal of freedom must once more become sacred to the German people!
The German nation wishes to live in peace with the rest of the world. But it is for this very reason that the Government of the Reich will employ every means to obtain the final removal of the division of the nations of the world into two categories. The keeping open of this wound leads to distrust on the one side and hatred on the other, and thus to a general feeling of insecurity. The national Government is ready to extend a hand in sincere understanding to every nation that is ready finally to make an end of the tragic past. The international economic distress can only disappear when the basis has been provided by stable political relations and when the nations have regained confidence in each other.
For the overcoming of the economic catastrophe three things are necessary:
Absolutely authoritative leadership in internal affairs, in order to create confidence in the stability of conditions.
The securing of peace by the great nations for a long time to come, with a view to restoring the confidence of the nations in each other.
The final victory of the principles of common sense in the organization and conduct of business, and also a general release from reparations and impossible liabilities for debts and interest.
We are unfortunately faced by the fact that the Geneva Conference, in spite of lengthy negotiations, has so far reached no practical result. The decision regarding the securing of a real measure of disarmament has been constantly delayed by the raising of questions of technical detail and by the introduction of problems that have nothing to do with disarmament. This procedure is useless.
The illegal state of one-sided disarmament and the resulting national insecurity of Germany cannot continue any longer.
We recognize it as a sign of the feeling of responsibility and of the good will of the British Government that they have endeavored, by means of their disarmament proposal, to cause the Conference finally to arrive at speedy decisions. The Government of the Reich will support every endeavor aimed at really carrying out general disarmament and securing the fulfillment of Germany's long-overdue claim for disarmament. For fourteen years we have been disarmed, and for fourteen months we have been waiting for the results of the Disarmament Conference. Even more far-reaching is the plan of the head of the Italian Government, which makes a broad-minded and far-seeing attempt to secure a peaceful and consistent development of the whole of European policy. We attach the greatest weight to this plan, and we are ready to co-operate with absolute sincerity on the basis it provides, in order to unite the four Great Powers, England, France, Italy, and Germany, in friendly co-operation in attacking with courage and determination the problems upon the solution of which the fate of Europe depends.
It is for this reason that we are particularly grateful for the appreciative heartiness with which the national renaissance of Germany has been greeted in Italy....
In the same way, the Government of the Reich, which regards Christianity as the unshakable foundation of the morals and moral code of the nation, attaches the greatest value to friendly relations with the Holy See, and is endeavoring to develop them. We feel sympathy for our brother nation in Austria in its trouble and distress. In all their doings the Government of the Reich is conscious of the connection between the destiny of all German races. Their attitude toward the other foreign Powers may be gathered from what has already been said. But even in cases where our mutual relations are encumbered with difficulties, we shall endeavor to arrive at a settlement. But in any case the basis for an understanding can never be the distinction between victor and vanquished.
We are convinced that such a settlement is possible in our relations with France, if the Governments will attack the problems affecting them on both sides in a really broadminded way. The Government of the Reich is ready to cultivate with the Soviet Union friendly relations profitable to both parties. It is above all the Government of the National Revolution which feels itself in a position to adopt such a positive policy with regard to Soviet Russia. The fight against communism in Germany is our internal affair in which we will never permit interference from outside....
We have particularly at heart the fate of the Germans living beyond the frontiers of Germany who are allied with us in speech, culture, and customs and have to make a hard fight to retain these values. The national Government is resolved to use all the means at its disposal to support the rights internationally guaranteed to the German minorities.
We welcome the plan for a World Economic Conference and approve of its meeting at an early date. The Government of the Reich is ready to take part in this Conference, in order to arrive at positive results at last. . . .
“More than 14 years have passed since that ill-fated day when, blinded by promises at home and abroad, the German volk [people] lost sight of the most valuable assets of our past and of our Reich, its honour and its freedom – and thus lost everything. Since those days of treachery, the Almighty has withheld His blessing from our Volk. Dissension and hatred have made their way into our midst. In the most profound distress, millions of the best German men and women from all walks of life watch as the unity of the nation vanishes and dissolves in a muddle of political and egotistical opinions, economic interests and differences…
HITLER’S FIRST ADDRESS AS CHANCELLOR (1933)
Adolf Hitler made his first address as chancellor in February 1933. In this extract, Hitler condemns the previous government and outlines the focus of his new regime:
The misery of our volk is appalling! The starving millions of unemployed proletarians in industry are being followed by the impoverishment of the entire Mittelstand [middle-class] and artisan professions. When this disintegration ultimately reaches the German peasants, we will be confronted by a catastrophe of unfathomable dimensions. For not only will the Reich disintegrate, but with it a 2000-year-old inheritance, the most valuable assets of human culture and civilisation.
The warning signs of this approaching disintegration are all about us. In a single gigantic offensive of willpower and violence, the communist method of madness is attempting to poison and disrupt the volk, which is shaken and uprooted to its innermost core…
Peasants, workers, and bourgeoisie must all join together to provide the building blocks for the new Reich. The government will therefore regard it as its first and foremost duty to re-establish Volksgemeinschaft – the unity of spirit and will of our volk. It will preserve and defend the foundations upon which the power of our nation rests. It will extend its strong, protecting hand over Christianity as the basis of our entire morality, and the family as the germ cell of the body of our volk and State. It will reawaken in our volk, beyond the borders of rank and class, its sense of national and political unity, and its resultant duties. It will establish reverence for our great past and pride in our old traditions as the basis for the education of our German youth. It will declare a merciless war against spiritual, political and cultural nihilism. Germany must not and will not drown in anarchistic communism…
Resolved and true to our oath, we will — in view of the present Reichstag’s inability to support this work — ask the German volk itself to take on this task we call our own. Reich President von Hindenburg has called upon us and given us the order to use our own unity to restore to the nation the chance for recovery. Thus we now appeal to the German volk to take part in signing this deed of reconciliation.
The government wants to work – and it will work. It was not this government which led the German nation into ruin for 14 years. This government wants to lead the nation to the top once more. It is determined to pay the debt of 14 years in four years. But it cannot make the work of reconstruction dependent upon the approval of those who are to blame for the collapse.
The Marxist parties and their fellow travellers have had 14 years to prove their prowess. The result is a heap of ruins. Now, German volk, give us four years, and then pass judgment upon us!
True to the order of the Field Marshal, we shall begin. May Almighty God look mercifully upon our work, lead our will on the right path, bless our wisdom, and reward us with the confidence of our volk. We are not fighting for ourselves, but for Germany!”
Today, our leaders still echo a sense of defeat, of emergency, but what are our leader's real concerns? That question is so important, and yet we seldom ask it. While our leaders deftly work to inspire fear and mobilize their base, real emergencies face our civilization – crises that most of us have been trained to ignore in favor of our desire to consume.
Although today we have access to more information than ever, we may find it hard to determine the difference between propaganda and information intended to inspire and inform.
Put aside your emotional habits, and think carefully, learn from history, read primary sources, prepare yourself for what's to come. Everything in our world is changing fast, and the remedies of the past will not help us in the twenty-first century.
We are currently facing our species' extinction – this is a fact. It's time to learn why this is so and to demand that everyone take action to prevent our destruction. The global conflagrations of the past two centuries are nothing compared to what is coming. If you are distracted, if you can't focus, if you don't have the strength to educate yourself, if you are not fit, if your mind is not healthy, you will only know horror and panic in the days to come.
I am not a doomsayer, I am a truth-teller, and I blush when I say it because it sounds so arrogant.
When you imagine yourself to be noble and righteous because you are just getting on with it, try to remember that future generations will be the most impacted by how you are getting on with it. If you turn away from reality now, you are not doing younger people any favors by paying rent and tuition. We must all speak truth to power now. Our voices must rise in concert – all of our voices across the world.
We must put aside our differences and come together as a species and determine the right way forward. We don't have a minute to waste. Organize within your community and talk about what we are facing. Don't let yourself be mesmerized by selfish leaders who are only in their position for money, power, and fame.
Do what you can to educate and enlighten those who are less interested in understanding how the world works. The full knowledge of humanity is at your fingertips – learn, discuss, and share.
In many ways, today looks like 1933. We are at a crossroads; only this time, civilization truly is at stake.
Get your inspiration from sincere teachers like Chris Hedges and Peter Josephs.
Train Your Mind | Compassion or Hate – Decide
We highly recommend this article. Our near future will require great strength, intelligence and wisdom. Civilization as we have known it is coming to an end. Business as usual won’t help us. We must learn how to liberate ourselves. Learning from various wisdom traditions can help us cope with what’s to come.
“Buddhism Is What Science Should Be Doing”
Robert Thurman discuss the Buddha’s scientific worldview and argues that it is less dogmatic than modern science.
By Matthew Abrahams with Robert A. F. Thurman
JUN 21, 2019
That involves a couple of presuppositions. One is that mindfulness is Buddhism—or even that meditation is Buddhism—which is highly sold but not the case. The three educations, or trisikkha, is usually translated as trainings. But shiksha is the word used in India’s department of education today. Calling it training allows Western people to avoid the idea that Buddhism has a knowledge that is equal to and/or superior to the knowledge of materialist science.
Saying that mindfulness is all you need to thrive in your corporation or in your household is completely overselling it, and there should be a backlash against it. Also, it’s not all of Buddhism by any means. It’s one branch of eight branches, the seventh part of the eightfold path. And mindfulness by itself is not at all how you get free of suffering. Real mindfulness will actually make you more aware of how much you are suffering and will make you resolve to try to do more about it. But it won’t be by just sitting and being more mindful.
Some people will say, “I’m spiritual, and science has nothing to say about my spirituality. Why would I want my spirituality to be dragged down?” But that ignores the fact that science is the religion of the modern world. The idea that Buddhism can get dragged down falls into the scientific materialistic trap by assuming that our religious beliefs make us feel good but are unrealistic and not scientifically corroborable. And that, again, is conflating Buddhism with blind faith, which it isn’t. Buddha was 100 percent against blind faith. He said if you believe in something that your reason and common sense say couldn’t be true, that belief will cripple you mentally.
No, I’m being a little more aggressive. I’m saying that Buddhism is what science should be doing—Buddha’s wisdom teaching is what scientists should practice. They can do their material science, too, but the modern idea that secular means totally materialistic is a very rare case in history. The Buddha was seeking knowledge of reality, but for him, the mind was part of that secular reality. So by practicing Buddhist science, they would be taking a different kind of responsibility about the quality of their own minds and experience, and they would truly drop the dogma of materialism.
I am insisting that Buddhism be taken seriously as a knowledge system. The arrogance of Western materialist scientists, that they understand the world and know how to fix it, is ridiculous because they are destroying it, not fixing it. They need higher knowledge—not just some faith or god. And the Buddha’s teaching has a way of helping them. Scientists who meet the Dalai Lama often come away saying, “Boy, I had some new insights talking with him. He’s so smart.” But they don’t ask any questions about Buddhist science or what Buddhist knowledge is. They don’t think that he knowssomething, they just think he’s peaceful and nice and that, in his presence, they have great ideas. That is our Western arrogance. It’s really terrible.
When I say that everyone should be a Buddhist scientist, I don’t mean they have to be a Buddhist or change their group affiliation, just that they need to be more enlightened. [His Holiness the 14th] Dalai Lama often says he doesn’t want people leaving their grandmother’s religions because they studied some Buddhism. He wants people to keep granny happy and stay in that religion, and if they learn by meditating, studying, or being more ethical, then they’re elevating their own cultural setting, which is great.
Imagine going to [New York City] Mayor Bill De Blasio and asking for a big building in the park for anybody who wants to shave their head, put on an orange robe, and renounce their name and property to live there, be fed freely, and be respected and asked questions. What would he say?
That is what the Buddha did, and it is revolutionary. He created a non-caste caste in the middle of the rigid Indian system and got the kings and the warriors to cater to it. In my [1998] book Inner Revolution, I argue that it is a total social revolution to say that the individual has a higher destiny than just fitting into their role in society—and the idea that the individual can achieve freedom from suffering and achieve higher awareness of the nature of reality.
Sometimes when I speak to a big audience of four, five hundred people, I will ask, “How many of you think that we will avoid major war, avoid this climate catastrophe that looms over us, and make the radical changes necessary to govern wisely?” Very few people will raise their hands. People are resigned; they are all brainwashed into thinking that they have no power. They think that nobody good will ever come and that all governments are equally bad. People voted for [President Donald] Trump because they hate all of them, and they thought, “Here’s some guy who hates them all too.” Meanwhile, he’s the worst of them.
Compassion in the teeth of that cynicism is radical. But there is a tendency among some Buddhists to act like, you can’t be too compassionate because you’ll get wasted. Well, that’s not the Buddhist attitude. Compassion and nonviolence is a powerful thing, it’s not a weakness. The Harvard sociologist Gene Sharp wrote many books on nonviolence and how, for example, under the Nazis, nonviolent protests saved trainloads of people. Determined nonviolent protests by masses of people are really very effective. Even the worst, nastiest people will not endlessly kill people who are opposing them unarmed. They might kill a few hoping to take it down, but they don’t kill them all.
The Dalai Lama has been fighting back against the genocidal invasion of his country, nonviolently, and seeking dialogue with the government. Many people have said, and they continue to say, “That’s unrealistic, it’ll never work, and it’s a lost cause.” But my question to them is, how is violence doing? How is militarism doing? Has anyone really won anything? Is it ever going to be stable? I don’t think so. So my point is, radical compassion is the one thing that could possibly save the world at this time.
With Focused Attention Comes Love
"For beautiful eyes, look for the good in others; for beautiful lips, speak only words of kindness; and for poise, walk with the knowledge that you are never alone." – Audrey Hepburn
"In order to control myself, I must first accept myself by going with and not against my nature." – Bruce Lee
In 2019, more than any time in human history, one's primary concern must be: What can I do to become wiser, every day? Wisdom discovers the flow of truth from authentic experiences. Wisdom allows one’s experience in the world to come into focus with acceptance, obliterating one's conflict with reality. With understanding, one encounters her emotions with equanimity, and her attitude towards the world becomes more compassionate.
"You must be shapeless, formless, like water. When you pour water in a cup, it becomes the cup. When you pour water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle. When you pour water in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can drip, and it can crash. Become like water my friend." – Bruce Lee
This kind of focus allows one to think clearly, rationally and logically, to slow down and examine one's circumstances more closely with childlike curiosity, flexibility, and resilience.
Clear, precise, and gentle awareness opens the heart and mind to the miracle of conscious existence. From this posture, possibility expands and opportunities to create flows forth. Creativity is an elixir; it's the healthiest stimulus we have.
The system we live in today uses the science of division and contradiction to control us. Our socioeconomic system programs us to think and behave in ways that will support the system. Our education does the same, and as we socialize, we are being programmed to join or form groups that conflict with each other. This conflict also supports the system. So we must learn what this system is, we must become wise to it if we are going to learn what freedom means; if we are going to learn how to improve our society. We must redesign our system of conflict and remake it as a system based on wisdom.
Wise people, are compassionate intellectuals who are always learning and teaching – they are committed to curiosity and to helping others; they are individuals without egoism; they hold their knowledge lightly with a sense of epistemic humility. Wise people also notice where their thoughts, expertise, and emotional reactions originate. For them, the world is symbiotic and interconnected. Community and relationships are integral, valuable, and even potentially dangerous, which is why they focus on health. Healthy societies are peaceful and secure; they minimize conflict with other cultures through positive interactions. Is it time that we transcended war in favor of compassionate, positive relationships designed to improve the health and welfare of life on earth. This must be done no matter how impossible it seems to us today. How else can our children have a prosperous future? Would you give your grandchild a world without elephants, without fresh air, good food and kind people?
To consistently become wiser one must be concerned with physical, emotional, and intellectual health, and practice deliberately and systematically to improve in these areas.
I listened to a podcast recently that made me wonder why I quit meditating twenty years ago. As I thought about it, an epic, personal story began to emerge, one that I hope to share someday.
How the brains of master meditators change
The scientist joins The Ezra Klein Show to discuss what he learned from bringing the Dalai Lama to his lab.
Richie Davidson has spent a lifetime studying meditation. He's studied it as a practitioner, sitting daily, going on retreats, and learning under masters. And he's pioneered the study of it as a scientist, working with the Dalai Lama to bring master meditators into his lab at the University of Wisconsin and quantifying the way thousands of hours of meditation changed their brains.
The word "meditation," Davidson is quick to note, is akin to the word "sports": It describes a huge range of pursuits. And what he's found is that different types of meditation do very different things to your brain, just as different sports trigger different changes in your body.
There are wisdom traditions in every culture across time. Wise people can be straightforward, sophisticated, or conventional.
Sadhguru may look like a textbook, Indian wise man, and regardless of his unique talents, he has worked hard to develop his wisdom. I am always skeptical of people with power, but there are influential, thoughtful people in the world who can be trusted. What do you think of his insights in this video?
Here is another perspective on wisdom.
Morality In The Age Of Artificial Intelligence: Why Do We Need Wisdom To Lead In The Future?
We live in a society that encourages us to think about how to have a great career but leaves us inarticulate about how to cultivate the inner life. The road to success is definitively paved through competition and so fiercely that it becomes all-consuming for many of us. It is commonly accepted today that information is the key source of all being; yet, information alone doesn’t laver one with knowledge as knowledge alone doesn’t lead to righteous action. In the age of artificial information, we need to consider beyond data to drive purposeful progression and authentic illuminations.
We need wisdom and compassion to develop a sustainable and just human civilization. At present, we are still far from achieving such a society. We have made material, scientific and technological progress at a fast rate over the past one hundred and seventy years, however, very few of us understand its cost to public health and the health of vital ecosystems. What's more important is that we are far from understanding how to deploy our scientific and technical knowledge with wisdom and compassion. And this, we must learn.
Let's all chose the path of enlightenment. Allow me to paraphrase a Navaho prayer:
All day long, in wisdom may you walk
With wisdom on your right
And wisdom on your left
Wisdom ahead of you
And wisdom behind you
With many wise friends, teachers, and students
May wisdom sustain and motivate you
And may wisdom be your gift to share
Through your actions in this life
And may your wisdom linger for many generations to come
And, as always, I hope you will read, "The New Human Rights Movement," by Peter Josephs. You will find wisdom there also.
With All The Nonsense Out There, Wouldn't It Be Prudent To Slow Down A Bit?
5G is coming at us fast. The last one hundred and seventy years went by us like a bullet. The level of complexity in human society has skyrocketed. It's hard to keep up with the amount of information coming at us every day, and it's even harder to separate the nonsense from practical and beneficial information. It seems that even the most biased and false narratives always contain a grain of truth, making it even harder to evaluate its value.
What's worse is that communicators from conspiracy theorists to scientists, to government officials and media pundits, are getting extremely good at the art & science of bull shit.
Nonetheless, I'm fascinated by conspiracy cranks. They can be as mesmerizing as an evangelical preacher or a new age profit's garbled and confused musings.
Today I watched another episode of The Corbett Report on YouTube. If you aren't familiar with James Corbett, he's a prolific proponent of alternative narratives and conspiracy theories.
Media Bias|Fact Check summarizes his work this way:
CONSPIRACY-PSEUDOSCIENCE
Sources in the Conspiracy-Pseudoscience category may publish unverifiable information that is not always supported by evidence. These sources may be untrustworthy for credible/verifiable information; therefore, fact-checking and further investigation is recommended on a per article basis when obtaining information from these sources. See all Conspiracy-Pseudoscience sources.
Factual Reporting: LOW
Notes: The Corbett Reports is a right-wing biased conspiracy site. Some featured topics are the New World Order, 9-11 conspiracies and of course false flag operations. There are many more. (D. Van Zandt 2/4/2017)
Never the less, sometimes people like James Corbett publish something that inspires one to do more investigation of a subject, and that's not a bad thing.
Case in point, his rundown of the dangers of 5G networks and the so-called, Internet of Things. Have a look.
Many of his concerns are interesting, while some, like his veering off into his typically biased views on technocratic initiatives and movements may be a bit off the mark. It's not my desire here to breakdown and criticizes his video. I only want to suggest that the unintended consequences of 5G could be daunting and we might want to slow down a bit before connecting everything in the world to a data producing network with their massive databases run by supercomputers that are controlled by organizations|corporations that don’t necessarily have ordinary people's best interests at heart. If we could first solve the socioeconomic structural issues that make our civilization vulnerable to so many existential risks, all of this technocratic stuff would probably be a good thing.
The world is getting more complex, and people can't digest it. The rate of change is fast. It's impossible to keep up. Soon we may find ourselves without any sovereignty or agency what so ever.
I wish we could slow down somehow so ordinary people could take back more control. Democracy is in decline; inequality is exacerbating concerns about freedom and justice; ecosystems are deteriorating; and then there is climate change. Oh, and, how do you think you’d fare if the grid went down and you didn’t have all of your gadgets? Could you last a month?
Where shall we invest our resources? In what ways does The Internet of Things benefit us when our civilization is falling apart?
Falling apart, Steven, now you sound like a conspiracy nut.
Advanced technological civilization developed fast, and it could, even more quickly, deteriorate.
Is The Corbett Report fake news?
Below are some links to, perhaps, some better information about 5G. It's essential to understand it because it's coming fast.
5G Is Coming
The imminent roll-out of 5G technology has again sparked media coverage of the possible risks of EMF exposure, but the scientific consensus remains that the technology is safe.
Steven Novella / May 15, 2019
Are Smart Meters a Health Risk?
Don't worry. There is no plausible health risk from the miniscule EMF from smart meters.
Steven Novella on February 27, 2019
What is 5G?
The definitive guide to next-generation wireless technology
It is a capital improvement project the size of the entire planet, replacing one wireless architecture created this century with another one that aims to lower energy consumption and maintenance costs. It's also a huge gamble on the future of transmission technology, doubling down on consumers' willingness to upgrade.
Scott Fulton III
By Scott Fulton III | February 1, 2019 -- 17:01 GMT (01:01 GMT+08:00) | Topic: How 5G Will Transform Business
What Is 5G?
AT&T, Verizon, and other carriers are starting to launch 5G networks this year. But what exactly is 5G, and how fast is it compared with 4G? Here are the facts we know so far.
By Sascha Segan April 16, 2019 10:23AM EST
Where Each Wireless Carrier Stands in the 5G Race
5G technology could change the world, but carriers have to build networks that support it first.
Adam Levy (TMFnCaffeine) Sep 21, 2018 at 8:18AM
5G Radiation Dangers – 11 Reasons To Be Concerned
Posted by Lloyd Burrell on May 12, 2017
5G Mobile Wireless Technology
The new 5G mobile communications system will enable many new mobile capabilities to be realized - offering high speed, enormous capacity, IoT capability, low latency and much more it provides the bearer for many new applications.
Why Controlling 5G Could Mean Controlling the World
The United States believes that whoever controls fifth-generation cellular networks, known as 5G, will have a global advantage for decades to come. The fear is that China is almost there. NYT Daily Podcast
And last but not least, please read this essay by Chris Hedges. When a few corporations and governments have all of our data, who will watch the watchers?
The Thought Police Are Coming
Chris Hedges Columnist
We have watched over the last decade as freedom of the press and legal protection for those who expose government abuses and lies have been obliterated by wholesale government surveillance and the criminalizing of the leaking and, with Julian’s persecution, publication of these secrets. The press has been largely emasculated in the United States. The repeated use of the Espionage Act, especially under the Obama administration, to charge and sentence whistleblowers has shut down our ability to shine a light into the inner workings of power and empire. Governmental officials with a conscience, knowing all of their communications are monitored, captured and stored by intelligence agencies, are too frightened to reach out to reporters. The last line of defense lies with those with the skills that allow them to burrow into the records of the security and surveillance state and with the courage to make them public, such as Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Jeremy Hammond, now serving a 10-year prison term in the United States for hacking into the Texas-based private security firm Strategic Forecasting Inc., or Stratfor. The price of resistance is high not only for them, but for those such as Julian willing to publish this information. As Sarah Harrison has pointed out: “This is our data, our information, our history. We must fight to own it.”
Our Data Is Precious So Why Are We Squandering It? Privacy, What Privacy?
Please read this article. We need to think about this more than ever. Do you really want a few people and global corporations to own you?
The New Wilderness
We’re at the point where we need a similar shift in perspective in our privacy law. The infrastructure of mass surveillance is too complex, and the tech oligopoly too powerful, to make it meaningful to talk about individual consent. Even experts don’t have a full picture of the surveillance economy, in part because its beneficiaries are so secretive, and in part because the whole system is in flux. Telling people that they own their data, and should decide what to do with it, is just another way of disempowering them.
Our discourse around privacy needs to expand to address foundational questions about the role of automation: To what extent is living in a surveillance-saturated world compatible with pluralism and democracy? What are the consequences of raising a generation of children whose every action feeds into a corporate database? What does it mean to be manipulated from an early age by machine learning algorithms that adaptively learn to shape our behavior?
We Must Manage Global Resources For Life Support And For Quality of Life
Below are three videos I saw recently on YouTube that I'd like to recommend. We must all consider the messages within them. They tell our story and can point us in a better direction. Regardless of what that might be, we can't stay on the path we're on now.
We can't go on with business as usual and continue to survive. Somehow we must find ways to make people understand this. If you want to live a thoughtful, well-examined life and thrive, you must risk losing one community to create a better one.
Many people don't want to think; they are perfectly comfortable with their beliefs. Thoughtless people are followers who need leadership. We must supersede our current guidance and replace it with something completely different.
When I hear experts across multiple domains speak about climate change as an urgent emergency requiring radical action, I think about the TZM framework.
First, please watch Part One of a series produced by Breakthrough Productions in Australia titled, "Home Front." Absorb what these experts, many from Australia's defense and security sector, have to say about climate change.
Whether you know it or not, you are living through the most challenging crisis humanity has ever faced.
Video description:
Part I of HOME FRONT, Facing Australia's Climate Emergency. The film documents the existential threat of climate change from a uniquely Australian economic and national security perspective.
The film is a powerful and eye-opening analysis that presents some of Australia's former security, defense and political leaders who all warn us that climate change is 'a catalyst for conflict' and a 'threat multiplier' as it fuels instability in the world's most vulnerable regions.
Now listen to what Dr. Ira Leifer has to say about our chances of survival in the coming years. Dr. Leifer says there is strong evidence that we are headed for a global average temperature of 4C or higher. Global carbon emissions are rising in a straight line. Our carbon emissions are driving rapid climate change and global warming; the effects of which will last for centuries. Nothing short of a coordinated, global effort can save civilization. We can't do that within our current socioeconomic paradigm. "The data doesn't lie, and there are no excuses in physics." We are talking about a revolution.
Here's a quote from Dr. Leifer in a truthout.org article published last year.
"The jet stream, which controls seasonal storms in the mid-latitudes, is a result of these three cells, and would disappear in a single weather cell planet, dramatically altering rain patterns and almost certainly heralding an ecosystem catastrophe," Leifer explained. "The plants that underlie the food chain would be replaced by others that the local animals (insects to apex predators) could not utilize — in short, an abrupt acceleration of the current Great Anthropocene Extinction event."
Video description:
Stuart Scott engages with Dr. Ira Leifer, atmospheric scientist, and researcher, in this fascinating discussion of the desperate portends of our inability as a society to deal with the knowledge that we have destabilized the climate system. The bad news, according to Dr. Leifer, is that only a few thousand humans may survive at the poles. The 'good news' is that some of life is likely to survive (including cockroaches) since the Earth has proven so resilient over the eons of time since life evolved.
So you see, you are, in fact, either a part of the solution or a walking breathing part of the disaster. There is no middle ground. We don't have time to waste.
Of course, if you think absolutely nothing can be done, then you can join the global hospice movement and focus instead on living life in the moment. For that message let's turn to Guy McPherson. To me, his message is very positive and makes perfect sense. It's even uplifting and inspiring. After all, truth and honesty are refreshing in our current world.
Download:
EXISTENTIAL CLIMATE-RELATED SECURITY RISK
A scenario approach
Understanding climate-driven security risks relies on climate impact projections, but much knowledge produced for policymakers is too conservative. Because the risks are now existential, a new approach to climate and security risk assessment is required using scenario analysis.
We Can't Greenwash Our Way Into A Bright Future
Two articles today say a lot about our current predicament. I know the fence sitters, the deniers, the Ayn Rand cultists, the neoliberal financialization experts, consultants for the uber-wealthy, economic growth cultists, golfers, addicts, Kardashians, office clerks, salarymen and women, executives, salespeople, shopkeepers, and zombie consumers are all doing there best to avoid facing the facts, the truth. Their cognitive dissonance might have to be surgically removed, that's how stubborn they are. I'll say it again; they can't conceive of the forest for the Ikea furniture.
They are happy, happy I say, paying for wars when the global players order a reset; when banks run out of reasons to print money for investment banks to fuel the game. The people might call a war a "reset" if they were more aware of how the world works. Instead, they feel it's peacemaking. Or, that it's necessary to spread freedom, democracy, liberalism, Judeo Christian, or Western values. During and after "the reset," ordinary people sing hymns and patriotic songs while remembering their fallen heroes. Chris Hedges' book title aptly illustrates their catharsis, "War Is The Force That Gives Us Meaning."
They have been adequately brainwashed into believing that their leaders have their best interests at heart and are not merely in it for the money and power. Think, Dick Cheney, even if you think the movie was inaccurate or unfair. The system trains us to compete with each other and fight among ourselves. We are confused and retreat to the comfort of our tribe where we retrench and harden our hearts.
Ordinary people get all fired up when they hear weasel words and terms they don't understand but have been taught to fear. Ordinary people are easy to point and shoot. Tell them socialism is a bad word, and they will use grotesque invective when referring to a socialist. "Those beep, beep, mother beeping, socialists – kill them all!"
It's sad, but we are that easy to manipulate, and we don't even know it. We think we are making this stuff up as we go along. We have the illusion of a creative process when, in reality, we are programmed Zombies going about some other person's business.
I'm writing this in Hong Kong now, where thousands of people are in the streets fighting for their minimal but precious rights. All they want is for their leaders to keep their promises. I am sad to say that they don't stand a chance. If mainland people don't join their struggle, their struggle is lost. Meanwhile, Steve Bannon, that limelight seeking vandal, gives speeches to the players about how America is letting China down and nothing but regime change in Beijing can sort the world out.
Special forces consisting of economic hitmen continue to destroy Venezuela's economy, creating yet another refugee crisis. The player's story is that the blame for Venezuela's woes can be laid squarely at the feet of Maduro, he alone brought it upon the people. Of course, the people had already voted to keep Maduro in a free and fair election, only to have Koch Industries, and their CIA minions, fund an opposition party that has no legs and no legitimacy. And the faithful believe it without question — the millionaires who are paid by billionaires on cable TV spout the propaganda like deep fake puppets.
So what's in the news accept absurd irony and more honest attempts to point decent people in a new direction, a direction that will save their children's lives and give them the better life that they feel is their duty to provide.
First, let's look at an article in that radical rag known as The National Geographic. It sites studies that say that the best way for city dwellers to combat the existential threat of climate change is to consume less. It made me chuckle because people like myself have been saying this for thirty years. Can brainwashed consumer addicts get off that train? Remember what the 46th president of the great United States said was the answer to the last economic crisis; that great fleecing of the people? "Just go shopping." – George W. Bush
Now National Geographic is telling us that the only thing we need to do to come out smelling like a rose garden is to take a green shower by shopping less. I shake my head slowly, staring at the floor, my shoulders slumped before turning on YouTube to find inspiration from Jordon Peterson.
Next, we have some more honest and prescient advice published on Jacobin, titled, "Stop Polluting Our Green New Deal."
In it, they list their "The Ten Pillars of the Green New Deal for Europe."
1. Faced with the emergency of the climate and ecological crises, winning slowly is the same as losing. The Green New Deal, then, must meet the scale of the challenge with sufficient investment in an economic transformation that respects our planetary boundaries, not only decarbonizing our economies but also reversing biodiversity loss.
2. The burden of our transition cannot fall on the shoulders of working families, so the Green New Deal must be grounded in Keynesianism: the money must be raised by public banks issuing green bonds.
3. The green transition cannot be a top-down process. Instead, the Green New Deal must be infused with democracy, empowering citizens and communities to make the decisions that shape their futures.
4. Europe — like the United States — is mired in a mix of unemployment, underemployment, and precarious employment that fails to generate prosperity for working families. The Green New Deal must be a program of job creation, providing a decent job to all those who seek one.
5. But it must also move beyond a job guarantee and raise the standard of living for all. For example, the Green New Deal must construct millions of sustainable homes and smart energy grids, addressing the crises of housing insecurity and fuel poverty.
6. The standard of living generated by the Green New Deal cannot be clawed back by the interests of capital. So the Green New Deal must create structures that entrench equality within and between countries — regardless of race, sexuality, gender, age, or ability — by taking the interests of finance head on and challenging its pursuit of short-term gain for the few over long-term prosperity for the many.
7. The Green New Deal is an opportunity to reimagine our future. It must harness our collective knowledge and invest in technological advancements that will liberate us from labor — not increase shareholder value.
8. Measuring progress through GDP growth is at the root of our crises of inequality and environmental devastation. So the Green New Deal must abandon the dogma of GDP growth and focus on what matters: health, happiness, and the environment.
9. Because we cannot solve the environmental crisis on our own, the Green New Deal must redress the colonial legacy of aggressive pollution and resource extraction across the Global South. It must support others in their green transition and ensure that the supply chains that drive the green transformation are committed to principles of social and environmental justice.
10. Finally, the Green New Deal must graduate our environmental politics from negotiation to action. After nearly thirty years of failed negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Green New Deal is an opportunity for a decisive shift towards credible, specific measures targeted at every area of our societies.
That's all for today except to say, fence sitters, I want you to try to persuade me that The Zeitgeist Movement is not a great way to frame humanities struggle during the first quarter of the 21st Century. Come on, don't be afraid, my team argues to discover, not to injure.
TZM Discovery Train Volume One: Hayek, Infinity, CRISPER, Messy Business and Ideas
We need international agreements in place before precise technological or scientific solutions can be implemented because the changes they introduce can have a profound effect across borders. Today, there is no doubt that we live in a global community of people who have more in common than not. Pollution in China affects the health of people in America. Everything we do influences everything.
Can you imagine if Latvians, for example, couldn't benefit from a given technology because they were just so different from Poles? A Latvian, don't you know, couldn't use a smartphone if her life depended on it. When I was younger and hanging out in Tokyo, Japanese people believed that most, if not all Japanese people were allergic to cheese. When I went to a grocery store in Tokyo at that time, I couldn't find any cheese. I could buy Osembe, Natto, Soy Sauce, lots of Japanese ingredients but not many imported products. If one goes to Tokyo now, one might find an Italian restaurant and a pizza parlor in every neighborhood serving lots of dishes with cheese in it. In the early 1980s, many Japanese people believed they couldn't consume some foreign products because, in every conceivable way, they were inherently different from Westerners. That belief has changed now, and stores in Japan are full of imported consumer goods.
Our beliefs change all the time, just as the stories we tell ourselves are always changing. The fashions of the moment easily sway people's emotions, ideas, thoughts, and opinions.
Have you ever thought of the concept of Infinity? I was listening to a BBC Discovery podcast episode this morning about it. It was fascinating and, as usual, got me thinking. When most of us think carefully about something, we will discover connections between what we are focused on and peripheral ideas that may not seem relevant at the time.
After listening to the episode on Infinity, I listened to another Discovery podcast, “Editing the Genome, Part Two.” I'm sure you've heard about CRISPER. The main takeaway from that episode was that when one edits genes, for whatever useful purpose, one must think of the whole, planetary organism and all of the members of global civilization before one implements it. Genes don't recognize nation states. What one country does to eradicate mosquitos or diseases in pigs will most likely affect all other countries; therefore, international regulations must be in place to protect the web of life and human populations from unintended consequences.
Some scientific endeavors are publicly supported, and benefit the public even if money isn't made on the effort. Wait, is that even possible? Why should one do something if one can't make a profit on it? Let me count the ways. Never mind that the list is too long for this puny essay. The fact is, we could do a lot of things in concert with one another, in a global community that recognized differences and also understood that life on Earth is interdependent and also profoundly affected by human beliefs and actions. Japanese people could still eat miso soup every morning while Americans could have their bacon and eggs. Your identity doesn't disappear just because you recognize that you are part and parcel of something more significant and more complex.
Is the Universe flat or curved towards infinity? Is the Universe we can see only a flash of time, energy, and mass in the Multiverse? What are all the numbers between zero and one? Why does it even matter to ask that question and if you do and have a new theory about those questions, can you be killed for your efforts? What does calculus have to do with Infinity? Listen to the podcast to find out.
Don't take anything for granted, if you don't know about something, find out about it. Even a cursory understanding of a subject will help you a lot in formulating your ideas.
These musings, for some reason, made me think of a conversation I saw between George Will and Charles Lane. They both work for the Washington Post.
Here is a description of the video.
[In a conversation with Post columnist Charles Lane, George F. Will, author of the new book "The Conservative Sensibility," defines the plight of the modern conservative. In a political environment hostile to prudent ideas, Will recommends turning away from rampant progressivism and looking to the wisdom of the Founding Fathers.]
The Founding Fathers – there you have it, those gentlemen, way back when, had all the answers. Never mind that they had never heard of a nuclear bomb and thought that the best labor saving device a man could own was a slave.
George Will is a big fan of Friedrich August Hayek. During the talk, Mr. Will mentions Hayek a lot. He also enjoyed saying that politics and conservatism are messy and that that makes them fun. George seems a bit anti-technocratic, which, in specific contexts, is understandable. Market economies are messy and unpredictable, he says, and the best way to progress is to let the markets do what they do and figure things out as you go along. Information in a market economy is tricky and often opaque; markets are unpredictable, but they always create value over time. It's as if we lived in a world with infinite resources and never-ending opportunities to invent more things to bring to market and consume.
Hayek is certainly the go-to economist for conservatives.
Hayek was interested in how prices influence almost everything; business cycle theory; and he was a prominent defender of Capitalism. He's a significant economist so if you're even remotely interested in the subject you need to be familiar with his work. His intellectual rival in the field was John Maynard Keynes. Understanding the difference between the two economists will take you a long way towards understanding the world in which we live. If you read only one book from these two essential economists, I'd recommend, Hayek's, "The Road to Serfdom," and Keynes', “The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.” These two knew a lot about how money works in society.
So why talk about CRISPER, the concept of Infinity, a conservative like George Will and two economists who did their best work in the 1920s and 1930s? It's because once you understand how all of these things dovetail into a socioeconomic system and are exploited and co-opted by the market system, you can begin to understand how our challenges today are structural. And, you may even become interested in how complex social systems work.
Use your imagination. Why does money have anything to do with how we manage global resources, public health, and the integrity and sustainability of habitats and ecology? Don't you think we can find better ways of creating value and increasing health and well being?
Ideas are just stories. We need better ideas if our civilization is going to have a future. Once you have educated yourself, you will see everything in different ways and be able to imagine different ways of organizing things that are more in line with what we know and understand in 2019.
It's essential to understand how ideologues think and where they got their ideas. When we do, we can begin to be creative and think of even better ways of doing things; founded in scientific rigor and expert understanding of how human designed and engineered complex systems can work for the greater good of life on Earth.
I'll end with a quote Peter Josephs included in an introduction to his book, "The New Human Rights Movement."
"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to, and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong, which will be imposed upon them ." – Frederick Douglass
News From My TZM Filter Bubble Volume One
Every morning I get up before the sun rises and check my news feeds. I have broad interests, but primarily I'm simply a witness, like you are, of a train wreck in slow motion. I can't remember where I heard this, but it's stuck in my head: "Climate Change is a nuclear war in slow motion." Think of the chemical experiment we're running and its potential consequences to our civilization and our ecosystem. We are cleverly, collectively "splitting the atom" in a ballet of death by a thousand micro-cuts. When we turn on the lights, we are all "pushing the button" every single day.
I'm not saying any of us as an individual is to blame, we're not, but we are all sleepwalking into disaster. We also seem to think that it's someone else's job to fix everything that ails us. Think about it, if you get sick you go to a doctor and get a prescription; if the economy or government services aren't to your liking you vote for someone and assume they'll fight for you and solve the problem; oh and, scientists and engineers have the fix. All you need is the right school, a good teacher, a good education, or a good idea, and everything will fall neatly into place.
Well, I'm here to tell you that if you are paying attention, you should know by now that the significant things ailing society are not getting any better. And I know, I repeat myself. One must focus one's attention on details to understand the meaning of the picture.
We can't consume our way into a healthier world. Think about how fasting is suddenly the most significant trend in healthy living. Health experts are now talking about healthspan rather than lifespan as a way of gauging one's quality of life. It would be much better if we focused on the quality and utility of consumer goods rather than the quantity of production and consumption. Blind consumerism is not making our ecosystem more robust; it doesn't make us happier. Selling more, buying more, and making more money doesn't make us better people.
If we continue with our current socioeconomic paradigm, the systems that support our civilization will breakdown. When that occurs, it will happen fast, and there will be hell to pay. We are woefully unprepared.
So what's in the news?
I watched professor Richard Wolff talk about the different kinds of socialism from a historical and contemporary point of view. One might as well educate oneself on the subject; education is rarely fatal. We must go further, of course, more towards a system described by The Zeitgeist Movement. We have to operate spaceship Earth in an efficient way for the benefit of life on Earth. We must employ 21st Century solutions. We have to build the ultimate sharing economy.
FROM, theecologist.org
Billions of pounds of British taxpayers' money is supporting fossil fuel energy schemes around the world, undermining the U.K.'s commitment to tackle climate breakdown, M.P.s said.
U.K. Export Finance (UKEF), which provides loans, insurance, and guarantees for firms operating overseas, gave £2.5 billion to fossil fuel projects between 2013/14 and 2017/18.
The Commons Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) called on the government to end support for new fossil fuel energy projects by 2021.
We have to stop our governments from subsidizing wasteful, and destructive industries. We must determine what is wasteful and harmful through disciplined scientific inquiry and processes, and expert interpretation of data from a holistic perspective.
FROM, blogs.scientificamerican.com
We Need To Get Serious about "Critical Materials"
The U.S. is 100 percent import-reliant on 14 minerals and metals that are essential for defense technologies, consumer goods and clean energy technology, and 50 percent or more reliant for another 30, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. These numbers go beyond the recent headlines on rare earths to illustrate fundamental building blocks of the energy transition: lithium, cobalt, and nickel for batteries, and materials for solar power and wind turbines. In many of these areas, China has become the dominant world player. The issue is not geological resource constraints, but on whether the domestic focus on mining production, processing, and manufacturing should be prioritized.
This article underlines the necessity to produce for good rather than for war or ruthless financial competition. It also makes clear that the price factors arising from our current economic system don't take into account externalities or harmful effects to communities around the world. The U.S. gets its rare earths from China, not because they are rare but because the U.S. doesn't want to pay the actual cost of producing them.
A GREAT QUOTE
"Nothing captures the biological argument better than the famous New Age slogan: 'Happiness begins within.' Money, social status, plastic surgery, beautiful houses, powerful positions – none of these will bring you happiness. Lasting happiness comes only from serotonin, dopamine, and oxytocin." – Yuval Noah Harari
FROM THE BBC
More than 320 million tonnes of plastic was produced globally in 2015, over 40 percent of which was single-use. Recycling helps to tackle the problem, but as Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall and Anita Rani explain in BBC One's War on Plastic, the plastic you put in a recycling bin doesn't always get recycled.
Why do we throw away so much plastic? Why are things designed to fall apart after two years? Why is almost everything we consume destined for a landfill? It's because our current model is based on consumerism and earning profits and not about any other form of utility.
There was a lot in the news today about the opioid crisis. Companies may have to go bankrupt due to court cases, but that won't stop the demand for drugs. Supplies of legal and illegal drugs come from all over the world, and supplies will continue to flow as long as people feel the need to numb themselves with drugs. We need to fight the real causes of drug addictions and create a society that allows people to live fulfilling happy and healthy lives.
Please read “The Zeitgeist Movement Explained” and “The New Human Rights Movement” and let's talk about them. They are not the only books one could learn from that are focused on radical alternatives to the system we have today, but they are an excellent foundation to start with and are well referenced.
What is the difference between rigorous scientific processes and ideology?
"I believe in intuitions and inspirations...I sometimes FEEL that I am right. I do not KNOW that I am."
― Albert Einstein
"The Seven Social Sins are:
Wealth without work.
Pleasure without conscience.
Knowledge without character.
Commerce without morality.
Science without humanity.
Worship without sacrifice.
Politics without principle.
From a sermon given by Frederick Lewis Donaldson in Westminster Abbey, London, on March 20, 1925."
― Frederick Lewis Donaldson
The cycles of modern, global civilization occur over and over again. Nations, cultures, groups, bosses, employees make the same mistakes again and again.
There is a simple reason for this: Science and ideology affect people in fundamentally different ways. The process of doing science and the act of thinking something you want to believe are very different ways of viewing the world.
If one is sincere about one's pursuit of truth and knowledge, it's essential to understand that one can't turn away from severe problems or uncomfortable situations. Cruel circumstances can arise at any time; one often fails and encounters dead ends. Those of us who find it painful to fail will find that they are much more inclined to embrace ideology over experiencing the process of doing science or philosophy.
Let's look at a definition of ideology.
ideology
n. A set of doctrines or beliefs that are shared by the members of a social group or that form the basis of a political, economic, or other system.
n. The science of ideas or of mind; a name applied by the later disciples of the French philosopher Condillac to the history and evolution of human ideas, considered as so many successive forms or modes of certain original or transformed sensations; that system of mental philosophy which derives knowledge exclusively from sensation.
n. The science of ideas.
There is a lot to ponder within that definition. "The science of ideas" sounds good. What's not to like about ideas? Well, perhaps bad ideas are less likable than good ones. A synonym for "sensation" is "feeling." The bedrock of ideology today is more emotional than it used to be and less reliant on facts, data, reason, or science. Money and tribalism motivate people to be true believers rather than critical thinkers.
So how would one know if one were a true believer vs. a rational, scientific, critical thinker? Well, as a first step, let's take a look at the meaning of science.
Here's a definition of science from a dictionary.
science
n. The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena.
n. Such activities restricted to a class of natural phenomena.
That's a simple definition. Let's expand on that a bit.
"The principles and empirical processes of discovery and demonstration considered characteristic of or necessary for scientific investigation, generally involving the observation of phenomena, the formulation of a hypothesis concerning the phenomena, experimentation to demonstrate the truth or falseness of the hypothesis, and a conclusion that validates or modifies the hypothesis."
From: answers.com
"Sciences: Rigorous, systematic approach, designed to eliminate bias and other subjective influences in the search, identification, and measurement or validation of facts and cause-effect relationships, and from which scientific laws may be deduced."
From: businessdictionary.com
I think you can see that science is more rigorous than pure ideological belief.
Let's go a bit further and discuss the scientific method in general. Below is an excellent, brief article on that. Please take a moment and read it unless you already think you understand the subject well.
What Is Science? By Alina Bradford, Live Science Contributor | August 4, 2017
So this is all very basic. You probably knew all of this already. Why did I bring it up? Because these days I am having too many conversations with people who don't want to know about problems in our world and don't want to be part of the solution to those problems. When one turns away from Climate Change, for example, and says that there is nothing they can do about it, they instantly become the problem. Apathy is not the answer.
When one thinks that our current socioeconomic model is the best there is, they instantly become the core of the problem. Our system needs a lot of structural improvement, or we will keep making the same mistakes over and over again. (I'll defend these propositions in posts to come.)
Through science and other means of inquiry, we can identify problems and create solutions to those problems. If you think that doing nothing is permissible, you are wrong.
When a country decides to go to war, people should never blindly follow. Ideologically inspired blind obedience happens again and again throughout history, and most of the time, nothing good comes of war. It would be better if more people worked to understand what was happening in a broader, more in-depth way and fought, instead, to prevent conflict and make peace.
We must learn about nuclear energy, economics, sociology, culture, and other vital subjects in a profound way. Then we can be a part of the solution instead of the core of the problem.
All of this is to say; we must educate ourselves and each other. If someone is too frightened or uncomfortable to face the terrible truth of a situation, we must keep teaching. If some people can't listen, move on to those who can and hope that, eventually, the sheer number of enlightened people will gain sway over the willfully ignorant masses.
And there are those who are utterly unteachable. People like that prefer to imagine themselves in a safe space where no one can challenge their beliefs. Some people, who are full of faith, feel terrorized when their faith is argued with or criticized. They are more helpless than most and are usually more reliant on ideology and groupthink. Their reasoning is motivated mostly by emotions. It's sad to say, but sometimes one has to let those people go and focus on communities more open to reality.
If I have any hope, I hope that you will be optimistic in your ability to learn and to teach. In a scientific, rational, logical, and sincere way, of course. It takes a little courage, and you may never be the most popular person in your village, but I think you will find your efforts well worth your time, energy and yes, even emotion. Rewards will come through the efforts you make and the positive stresses you encounter on your journey, making you stronger, more resilient, and creative.
Science & Technology Alone Won't Save Us From Ourselves
When Homo Sapiens discover something and put it to good use, it changes everything, it molds culture and spurs evolution; it changes landscapes and ecosystems. Six to seven million years ago, our human, apelike ancestors were making and using tools. There is good evidence that one million years ago our human ancestors had domesticated fire. Experts speculate that between one and six million years ago, humans started cooking meat. They learned that fire could be a tool. Their use of fire changed everything. A carpet of tools was discovered in Africa, revealing one million years of tool making by our ancient ancestors. Human ancestors repeatedly invented stone tools.
Competition for resources and population drive human expansion over millions of years. Early Homo Sapiens migrated around the globe to find areas of abundance where they could thrive. Throughout their journey, they made discoveries, and their cultures evolved. Just think of how fast we changed as new tools allowed new cultures to grow and thrive. And remember, Homo Sapiens have only been around for two hundred thousand years or so.
Take a look at this timeline of historic inventions.
5000 BC, we invented the wheel, and it changed everything. 17,000 BC, the ancient Egyptians created various kinds of twisted rope, and that changed everything. Archeologists have found flutes that are 50,000 years old. Can you imagine how music changed everything? Archaeological evidence indicates that humans arrived on New Guinea at least 60,000 years ago, probably by sea from Southeast Asia during an ice age period when the sea was lower and distances between islands shorter. Boats changed everything. Early humans were using paint and creating art four hundred thousand years ago. By 250,000 years ago, wooden spears were made with fire-hardened points. From 280,000 years ago, humans began to make sophisticated stone blades, which were used as spear points. By 50,000 years ago, there was a revolution in human culture, leading to more complex hunting techniques. We could mention clothing, housing, and knives, all of which would have changed everything.
We had people like Isaac Newton come along and change everything. More recently, we could talk about The Age of Reason when we finally broke away from centuries-old dogma, tradition, and religiosity. Immanuel Kant, defined enlightenment this way:
"Enlightenment is the liberation of man from his self-caused state of minority. Minority is the incapacity of using one's understanding without the direction of another. This state of minority is self-caused when its source lies not in a lack of understanding but in a lack of determination to use it without the assistance of another."
Then came the industrial revolution and new inventions: the spinning jenny; the steam engine; the power loom; the cotton gin; the telegraph; the sewing machine; fossil fuels; the steam engine; the locomotive; liquid fossil fuels; the internal combustion engine; the telephone; the phonograph; the airplane.
With these inventions, colonialism and imperialism took off, and a hoard of European migrants spread out across the globe. Economies grew faster and bigger, more businesses and business models where born. New tools of war allowed participants to kill more people, including civilians at a shocking rate, and with horrific outcomes. Since 1901 the world has been at war somewhere on the planet.
Today, the tools we take for granted, the smart-phones in our pockets are a black box to most of us. We don't know how they are made, the principles that underlie them, or how they work. We take it all our conveniences for granted.
Our science, engineering, and technology continue to advance at a rapid pace. No one could argue that we are not making progress in those areas. However, we are not growing any wiser. If you are a student of history and take a close and honest look at the past 200 years, you'll see the patterns. The similarities between 1901 and 2001 are striking. What did we do differently after the 2007 economic crisis? We keep making the same mistakes.
Our problems are structural. Our culture barely shifts. In fits and starts, we continue to make progress only to see our efforts undone again and again. Scarcity haunts our minds; we feel the only way we can get enough is through a brutal competition where one wins while the other loses.
Peter Josephs chose a very apt quote for the front page of his book, The Zeitgeist Movement Explained.
"The tremendous and still accelerating development of science and technology has not been accompanied by an equal development in social, economic, and political patterns...We are now...only beginning to explore the potentialities which it offers for developments in our culture outside technology, particularly in the social, political and economic fields. It is safe to predict that...such social inventions as modern-type Capitalism, Fascism, and Communism will be regarded as primitive experiments directed toward the adjustment of modern society to modern technology." - Dr. Ralph Linton
Even if we produce cold fusion reactors, deploy carbon sequestration technology, find solutions to the aerosol masking effect, restore rain forests – it won't matter what we do, we will still disrupt the carrying capacity of the Earth. Our current global economic system is unsustainable, and we can't count on science to save us. We must first redesign our socioeconomic system and our political system.
All nations need to come together and collaborate in a transparent, open source way. We need truly united nations working together in trust and good faith.
Do you think that will happen? If not, then what's next? Please share your thoughts.
*Imagine if you could time travel, what kind of world would you want to find 300 years from now?
Is time travel possible?
Ever wanted to meet your historical heroes or explore the inventions of the future? We look at what science tells us about the possibility of travelling in time.
Do The Math, We Are Already in World War III
If you can't do the math, find someone who can explain it to you. We all need to understand what's in the article below.
If we don't change course, we will soon find ourselves in a world of pain and suffering. The article below is not akin to yelling fire in a crowded movie theater, it's merely the predicament we find ourselves in at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
As the anniversary of D-day passes this year we find ourselves in a new World War and this time, if we don't all come together and win it, we will all, collectively, as a species, lose it.
What will it mean to lose the war against climate change? We don't know for sure, but we can reckon with a high level of certainty that civilization as we know it will disappear and never return. There are stacks of data that indicate that life on earth is at stake.
If civilization breaks down, how will we secure the nuclear power plants scattered around the world? Try to imagine what the fallout will do to the intricate web of life we have known.
If you can't do the math, learn how to do the math or find someone you trust who can do the math, and have that person explain it to you. Climate change is something you absolutely must understand.
JUNE 5, 2019
Our Globally Warming Civilization
Terraform The Earth And Then We Can Terraform Mars
One could argue that human civilization has done some extreme damage to our environment. Every day we hear about plastics in the oceans, and species of life going extinct because of the impact civilization has on habitat.
Meanwhile, billionaire entrepreneurs and scientists talk about having a multi-planet civilization in the future. Some even say our survival depends on it. But we would first have to thrive here long enough to establish the capacity to create a civilization on another planet. How can we do that when we are destroying the ability for Earth's ecology to support life now? We need a longer-term perspective along with a better understanding of how biological systems work.
It's easy to produce things for the market; however, it might be a lot harder to develop a global socioeconomic system, and the political institutions undergirding and supporting it that would make a sustainable future possible.
We need to determine what's most important to our lives now and what we can do now to guarantee we'll have a healthy society on a healthy planet for a long time to come.
If we wanted to, we could reverse the damage we have caused with our hyper, market-oriented consumer culture and head in a different direction. We could, in short, terraform the Earth and make it an even better habitat for life. It would be a heck of a lot easier to conserve our Planet than to terraform Mars. At any rate, our global civilization would have to survive at least another couple hundred years before we'd have the technology and scientific knowledge to do something like that.
Let’s get our priorities straight, shall we?
You Really Need To Know About Global Dimming And The Aerosol Effect
Don’t you want to know what climate change is, what causes it, and how it will affect human civilization in the coming years? The climate has been more or less ideal for Homo Sapiens civilization efforts for a long time now, over ten thousand years in fact. Our civilization depends on our habitat, and climate has a lot to do with that. If the climate changes too fast, global culture is in big trouble. What will we need to do to maintain our current way of life? Is it even possible to sustain economic growth based on consumerism when the ability to grow grains at scale no longer exists, when water tables are dangerously depleted and when the web of life that supports the food web upon which we depend is devastated? We need to prepare for these changes. It must be a global effort, and it must start now.
Actually, it should have started thirty years ago, but we were distracted. In fact, we are still dangerously distracted. Is that a good thing? Maybe it’s somehow psychologically beneficial to be oblivious to what’s coming. Don’t worry, be happy, right?
Please take a few moments and educate yourself about the aerosol effect and global dimming. If this doesn’t inspire a sense of urgency regarding our efforts to mitigate the impacts of climate change, nothing will. Honestly, this is something you need to know about.
SKEPTICAL SCIENCE IS A GREAT RESOURCE ON THE SUBJECT
Skeptical Science is the best website to monitor the debate with climate science deniers.
Aerosols are atmospheric particles, which have an overall cooling influence on climate by reflecting sunlight back into space. They also have an indirect effect by making clouds brighter; this further increases the reflection of sunlight back into space. Sources of human-generated aerosols include the use of fossil fuels and burning of vegetation.
Although human sources of aerosols are broadly similar to those of carbon dioxide, there is an important difference. (theconversation.com)
Devil’s Bargain: Why Aerosols Pose a Deadly Climate Change Threat
We already have planet-cooling technology – the problem is, it’s killing us – by Eric Holthaus at (rollingstone.com)
Below is some potentially good news about the cooling effect of aerosols.
Finally, life wouldn’t be as entertaining without an alarmist video on the subject.
The climate is an extremely complex system. We live in a sophisticated civilization that has a profound effect on our environment. It doesn't matter where you are from or how you live; everything we do has an impact on the earth's various systems. It's good to think about that sometimes.
Who Is Serving The People? Mueller vs. Barr
I know, most of us are suffering from Russia Gate burnout but this really is a big deal with huge ramifications. It will be years before we have a clear, fine grained view of what actually happened and how it has effected the integrity of the U.S. system of government.
Is Barr the people’s attorney?
Chart: A Side-by-Side Comparison of Barr’s vs. Mueller’s Statements About Special Counsel Report on 2016 Russian Election Interference.
Even though there seems not to have been any collusion or conspiracy between the Trump family or the Trump campaign with “The Russians”; the Russians still muddled things up and the Trump administration and the Republican party don’t seem to care.
This will clarify a lot.
“I am told that [Mueller’s] reaction to that was that it was my prerogative as attorney general to make that decision,” Barr said during his press conference.
Meanwhile, Mueller — as previously stated — made it clear that “the Constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting President of wrongdoing.”
Chart: A Side-by-Side Compa... by on Scribd
As Just Security notes:
Mueller appears to be saying, as one might expect, that the Office of Legal Counsel opinion precludes the Justice Department from deciding whether to indict a sitting president. “It is unconstitutional,” Mueller adds in a curt sentence. He also emphasizes that indicting the president was not an option that his office, as “part of the Department of Justice” could even consider. Presumably that would apply to the Attorney General as well, unless Barr overturns the Office of Legal Counsel opinion.
This is the crux of the situation:
When a subject of an investigation obstructs that investigation or lies to investigators, it strikes at the core of the government’s effort to find the truth and hold wrongdoers accountable.
So who do you think Barr works for?
“[T]here is substantial evidence to show that the President was frustrated and angered by a sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents, and fueled by illegal leaks,” Barr said during his press conference. “… Apart from whether the acts were obstructive, this evidence of non-corrupt motives weighs heavily against any allegation that the President had a corrupt intent to obstruct the investigation.”
Dr. Ralph Linton – An Important Anthropologist
If you haven’t studied Anthropology, you might want to do so. Understanding “human kind” and our various social expressions is needed more today than at any time in history. After all, what will our machines become when most of us have such a narrow view of human culture? KNOW THYSELF
What is Anthropology?
Anthropology is the study of people throughout the world, their evolutionary history, how they behave, adapt to different environments, communicate and socialise with one another. The study of anthropology is concerned both with the biological features that make us human (such as physiology, genetic makeup, nutritional history and evolution) and with social aspects (such as language, culture, politics, family and religion). Whether studying a religious community in London, or human evolutionary fossils in the UAE, anthropologists are concerned with many aspects of people’s lives: the everyday practices as well as the more dramatic rituals, ceremonies and processes which define us as human beings. A few common questions posed by anthropology are: how are societies different and how are they the same? how has evolution shaped how we think? what is culture? are there human universals? By taking the time to study peoples’ lives in detail, anthropologists explore what makes us uniquely human. In doing so, anthropologists aim to increase our understanding of ourselves and of each other.
"The tremendous and still accelerating development of science and technology has not been accompanied by an equal development in social, economic, and political patterns...We are only now...only beginning to explore the potentialities which it offers for developments in our culture outside technology, particularly in the social, political and economic fields. It is safe to predict that...such social inventions as modern-type Capitalism, Fascism, and Communism will be regarded as primitive experiments directed towards the adjustment of modern society to modern technology." – Dr. Ralph Linton
Click on the photo for
a brief biography of Dr. Ralph Linton
The Study Of Man
40 Great Anthropology Books That Anyone Can Appreciate
We highly recommend you read these books. They are indeed, all classics.
Cheers!
There Are Many Reasons To Stick With The Status Quo But We Shouldn't
I don't know about you, but it seems to me that there are many reasons to stick with the status quo, to not rock the boat, to keep your head down and do what you're told to do, what you are trained to do. Also, obviously, it feels good to fit into a community, even if that community doesn't include a lot of "real" friends.
You have responsibilities and to fulfill them, you need money.
Or maybe you don't have money, you can't make much money but you need to grow food and gather water, or you and your family will die.
Perhaps the War Lord or Strong Man in your region demands something of you, and you don't have the power to refuse. Maybe you are an office clerk, an entertainer, a sports star, a model, a rock star, a professional, an investment banker, a laborer with specialized skills and you are making enough money to have everything you need and more.
I could think of many more examples, but at the crux of it is that everything boils down to money and power relationships. You weren't born with GenX values burned into your soul any more than I was born with Baby Boomer values. You randomly pop into the world because your mother and father did some things and you made it past childhood and into adulthood, and now you have a good chance at having a long life. Things are pretty good if you were born into the right circumstances. If not, you have to deal with carrying water, always being at the edge of starvation, being brutally exploited for your labor, paying down your debt, still in fear of War Lords and tough guys who have no compunction about killing people: that's just the luck of the draw.
If you're lucky, you're a healthy, well-balanced person with some excellent friends living a beautiful life. You have all the comforts and conveniences our current world has to offer. You are well entertained, well loved, you have some interesting hobbies and some plans for the future. You are a fortunate person.
Let me say this if you are a fortunate person, you have more in common with an unfortunate person than you think. That's because everything in the Universe and on this planet is interconnected. Without getting into the weeds of causality, systems theory, chaos theory, thermal dynamics, quantum physics and complexity theory; without getting into nature and nurture, psychology, the interwoven big and small things that determine our behavior, epigenetics, concepts of free will, law, sociology and all the rest of it, the fact remains that you could not exist without everything else in existence.
The Tiger needs the forest and the river and the forest and the river need the Tiger.
Understanding this is understanding that the trees are not the most essential part of the forest. Why did I just mention trees and forests? Because it's a good illustration of why we need each other and why many ideologies and world views are so pathological.
Allow me to quote the first two paragraphs of "How a Forest Ecosystem is Defined" by Steve Nix at ThoughtCo.
Forest ecosystems are defined by a "salient" or common set of characteristics that make the forest ecology of a particular area unique. These very complex sets of forest conditions are studied by forest ecologists who try to isolate and classify the common structural patterns that continually reoccur in a particular forest's environment.
The perfect forest ecosystem is where simpler biotic communities live in the same approximate space with increasingly more complex biotic communities to each communities benefit. In other words, it is where many individual biotic communities symbiotically live in "harmony" with other biotic communities in perpetuity for the benefit of all neighboring forest organisms.
If you don't understand homeostasis and the dynamic interplay between the systems in your body and the systems in your environment that keep you healthy and satisfied allowing you to contribute to a socioeconomic system that is highly destructive, you are on the bandwagon heading for a violent dead end.
I know, look around, if you are in a rich country and have an excellent job; if you are a successful entrepreneur or business person who can afford to consume a lot of stuff at a high level, you're probably thinking that things are great the way things are. Sure, you have your complaints, but you're going to go to the game or the concert this weekend, and you're hardly concerned about parsing poverty statistics or keeping track of which animal went extinct last month or which ecosystem around the world is under threat. Climate change is slow moving, right? We don't have to think about it until January, first 2100 and, by then, a bunch of genius entrepreneurs, scientists, engineers, and technologists will have found a commercial solution that is affordable and have fixed everything. By then, we will be extracting the things we need to keep the economy growing from asteroids. Well, we want to hope for the best.
It's good to be optimistic, mainly because many of the fantastic things we currently dream of doing are possible if not probable, but do you know why I'm not that enamored by our current socioeconomic structure? It's because the incentives are all wrong, our understanding of causality is all wrong. We can't see the forest for the trees.
Because we don't pay attention to some fundamental domains of thought like structuralism (there are many kinds of structuralism) and systems theory, we can't comprehend the delicate balance required for a healthy, sustainable society.
Honestly, here I have to say, ignore these ideas at your peril. It's time people everywhere got on a new bandwagon that's going somewhere truly beautiful. It's time we understood what it truly means to be an evolved human on Earth in 2019.
Don't worry, you can still go to the game and the concert. I'm only suggesting that you spend a little time looking into concepts that may seem unfamiliar to you now but that I'm sure you'll understand in no time at all.
Let's learn about a "Natural-Law Resource-Based Economy." Since TZM began in 2008, scholars, scientists, and professionals from all over have been publishing work that, without intending to, supports the framework of ideas inherent in The Zeitgeist Movement's train of thought.
In later posts and videos, I will focus on some of these people, their work, and the public debate that surrounds them. Lest you think I'm spouting the party line and can't think for myself, actually, over the past 35 years, I've known lots of people who've had similar trains of thought, including me, it just happens that this particular organization is unusually acute in its vision. More on that later.
Please take this journey with me, and let me know what you know about developing a sustainable and healthy global culture. We are very much open to new ideas. Do you have solutions to water shortages, or how to maintain biodiversity; do you have answers to inequality, corruption, debt peonage, global trade, energy development, and the like? Please let us know who you are and what you're working on. If there is someone you think we should know about, please tell us. We don't want to give ourselves headaches criticizing the way things are, we want to experience the positive stress of the challenge of making things better for ourselves and future generations. We may yet, crash and burn, but the efforts we make to come together and solve problems will allow us to live a much happier, healthier, and loving life.
Is The Zeitgeist Movement A Cult?
Oh, Come On!
Are we brainwashed? Did Jesus poop? Who won the football game? Can we have a fair wage and also get tips? If you pray to the Buddha, what do you get? How many shares in Microsoft does a given coal miner own? Why do we have to borrow so much money? Will liquid fuels last forever and ever? Are you prepared for a grid down situation? Does it matter if your son feels more comfortable identifying as a girl? If you are Catholic and you marry a Jewish person, will the blood of your children be impure? Does "The Sixth Extinction" matter to a good shopper? If the global average temperature of the Earth increases to 5c above the 18th-century baseline, could we still use airplanes to travel? Should we remove all regulations on fishing? Why do we need the Amazon rain forest? What would happen if most people in rich countries bought a pair of jeans once every three years, instead of buying five pairs a month? When groundwater tables have been depleted, how much will a loaf of bread cost? Again, why do we have to borrow money? Why?
Is The Zeitgeist Movement a cult? Why do I ask? Well, I stumbled on the Wikipedia article on the movement and found it terribly out of date. Someone should update it. The first three references in the article are from The Daily Telegraph, The Journal of Contemporary Religion, an international journal concerned with the discussion and analysis of contemporary aspects of Religion, focusing on significant trends, developments, and processes of the past 20-30 years, and Tablet Magazine, an online publication about Jewish life and culture. Then there is a reference to a New York Times article that's a bit more balanced than the views above.
Peter Josephs on, The Young Turks
There's nothing more to say about the Wikipedia article. It's hopelessly out of date and extremely biased. Peter makes an anti-establishment art film regarding sustainability, and our "cultish" financial system and the movement is characterized as a whacky cult. I am sure that the people who contributed to the Wikipedia article have not done the slightest first-hand reading on the subject.
If you want to know what the movement is about, read The Zeitgeist Movement Explained and The New Human Rights Movement. If you do, you will understand that Peter put a lot of work into those two books. The first one explains the movement in great detail. The second one is even better and describes many ways we could improve the lives of the many without hurting, in the slightest, the lives of the few at the top.
Why are we so unable to imagine a world different from the one we are accustomed to? To find an answer to that question, one would have to read up on anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, medicine, sociology, and many other domains of interest to develop a context for the question. Then one could start to think about it. Massive Online Open Courses from MIT, Harvard, Yale, are readily available, many schools around the world offer massive open online courses, and they are free. We all need to be grounded in many subjects so we can be more creative when thinking about new ideas. To be able to update one's prior understanding of things, one must have previous knowledge of things and be able to think critically about them. We all need a foundation upon which we can build out our understanding of how things work.
Humans are learning machines. Any human denied the opportunity to continually learn and grow is suffering. Any wasted intellectual energy is a tragedy. If all people had access to the resources needed to educate themselves, the challenges facing human civilization would be easily solved.
It would be foolish for me to reinvent wheels here unless I thought I had something new to add so for now, I would like to refer you to two YouTuber channels who have some exciting things to say that might help inform your opinion on the question in the title above.
First, let's find out what a cult is. Here I'd like to refer you to GENETICALLY MODIFIED SKEPTIC on YouTube. He has some great videos on the subject of cults.
Next, I'd like to refer you to ZERO BOOKS and their new series, "We Live In A Society."
You see, context is essential.
Is our current economic system the best of all possible commercial orders? Where's your imagination? We can do better than this and we must.
Note – I'm a fan of Peter's work, and I like the Zeitgeist community. I am not a member of a cult. I'm not a member of any TZM organization or chapter. However, I do feel it's urgent to help educate people on these subjects so we can begin to have a broader conversation on what could be done to meet the challenges of human civilization moving forward. More people need to be talking about these things.
Also, we can talk about Marx, Socialism, Cults, Religion without labeling ourselves. I am fascinated by Religion, and yet, I am not religious. I can read Marx and learn from his social criticism without being a Marxist. I can recognize that I am part of a society without being a socialist. I’m a businessman, and yet, I’m not a “capitalist.” Sticks and stones, right?
Marx was not a Marxist, Jesus (if he existed at all) was surely not a Christian, and Buddha was not a Buddhist. If you want to know what Peter and the people who get his "train of thought" think, talk to them.
I don't speak for TZM, but I know they are trying to discover ways of sustaining human civilization while at the same time improving human health and the health of all ecosystems on Earth. What's wrong with that? It's not scary. It won't hurt you to be curious about unfamiliar ideas. We all need to think about the direction we’re headed. We all share and depend on this one amazing ecosystem.
BULIAMTI’S TAKE
Exercise it, Renew it, or Watch if Fade Away
Some kind and considerate person asked me a tough question on one of my YouTube channels today. “If I were the top dog, what would I do to usher in a “resource-based” economy?” (I’m paraphrasing.) We are talking about ideas that Peter Josephs, the founder of The Zeitgeist Movement espouses in his work. I won’t go into that in this post but you can rest assured that there will be a lot more on that in later posts.
Friends are your best resource.
The question has me thinking and I’ll address the core of it later in another post. I need to think about it a bit more. But the first thing that came to mind is – how would I get “buy in” from 5% of the global population? That’s just to start.
And then, three questions popped into my mind:
What do you want?
Why do you want it?
How are you going to get there?
These are three core questions all of use have to wrestle with. The first one seems easy but how many people do you know who really understand what they really want? Let me ask another question. What motivates you? What motivates your reasoning? Is it a combination of emotional responses and learned behaviors, plus a parroting of certain language and ideas that you picked up somehow subconsciously? I mean, your way of thinking didn’t come from somewhere deep down inside you, did it. And yet, you take it for granted that your thoughts are your own. Why is that? Deep. Oh no, not another tough question.
How do we manufacture consent? How did we get into this set of living arrangements? You’d have to do a lot of reading across domains of interest just to start to understand those two questions. Then, you’d have to train yourself to understand complex systems because this set of living arrangements is highly complex. You’d have to buff up your understanding of some pretty complex theories as well, like, for instance, complexity theory. What? Don’t go there? I hear you. Let’s take a deep breath.
That was good. OK, back to those first three questions.
The first step to understanding the first question is to admit that you don’t know why you want what you want. You want a truck, and you think you know why you want a truck, but you really don’t know why you want a truck. I know, you think I’m nuts. Of course, you know why you want a truck, your truck is your corporate utilitarian vehicle and you need it to survive. Or do you?
You see, one of the problems is that you simply can’t imagine a world in which you don’t need a truck to survive. You don’t need it to signal your manhood to your tribe, you don’t need it to do donuts at a famous intersection in your city, and you don’t need it to get from point “a” to point “b”. You don’t need to borrow money to buy it. You don’t need to buy insurance for it. You don’t need to pay to park the damn thing somewhere. Hell, you don’t need to maintain it or sell it or die in it. There are lots of other ways to get around.
Walking is healthy, riding a bike is healthy, taking public transportation in a community of people that have been brought up to be polite, considerate and helpful is much healthier than listing to a shock jock in a traffic jam. No, not now, I won’t bore you with the studies, the evidence, the science, the physiological and psychological accrued benefits of living as Homo Sapiens lived for tens of thousands of years.
What do I want? Well, I don’t want a lot of baggage weighing me down. I don’t want layers of identity confusing me. I don’t want to feel outrage or to feel oppressed. I don’t want to be stressed out all the time, that’s for sure. I don’t want a lot of truly useless, cheap shit clogging up my life and spilling out of my closets and into landfills. And I don’t want to worry about MONEY all the time.
I want a few inspiring relationships. I want to feel vital and strong. I want the freedom to dream and do what I want. I want a pat on the back and a sincere smile when I do a good job. I want to wake up every morning and go to bed every night feeling like I made a difference while having an overwhelming feeling of loving life. I want to feel that beautiful wave of gratitude wash over me every day.
Why do you want that, Mr? WOW! That’s a much harder question. Again, I’d need to be intellectually curious and willing to do some reading across domains to answer that question. I’d need solid relationships with some mentors. I’d have to figure out how human desires work. Where do desires come from? Did I just wake up in the morning one day with this ingenious realization that I had to start smoking because ________________________. Fill in the blank. Oh, I do remember Winston tastes good like a cigarette should. NO! I need to start vaping, everyone is doing that these days. I just want to FIT IN. I’m not an American psycho, I’m just human.
The first step to answering the why questions is to admit that you really don’t know why. Then you can start doing some mind and soul searching, you can do some research, and then, only then, you might figure it out.
I know, you thought the “How” question was the toughest but it’s not. In a community we have all the tools and expertise at the ready to sort anything out: That’s a plain and simple fact. You are not just an individual, your body, mind, and life are all about community. If you didn’t have a hell of a lot of gut bacteria living inside your intestines you’d be dead in a split second of a heartbeat. If you didn’t live in a community the water would stop flowing and if you didn’t know where to get drinkable water you’d be dead in a few days. Think of all the busy people around you going about their “business” and what it really means to you. Now think of a problem. If you had access to those human resources, to that social capital, to that intellectual capital, to that aggregate of human caloric energy and power, there is nothing you couldn’t accomplish. And I mean “you” as in you all because you are nothing without a community.
We can expand on all of this, of course, but the main point is that if you can’t answer these questions, you can’t even begin to imagine how to start building a resource-based economy. There are material resources having to do with the “carrying capacity of the Earth”, and there are the emergent and just as tangible resources having to do with human spirit, imagination, creativity, motivational power and force of action. If we understand how those things really work, then you can bet that some generation in the future will boldly go where no human has gone before.
Be curious. Study primary sources. What do I mean by that? Read the works of people who have done the work and stay the hell away from pop culture, shock jocks and circus acts that are paid for by you, the taxpayer, the consumer. You need to focus on things that have been well thought through. You have to become addicted to "the work". Go ahead, tomorrow, when you get up, do some breathing exercises and some push-ups and take an hour long walk. Then read a good book for a half hour, take a cold shower, have a cup of coffee, and get busy. Eat your first meal of the day at one o’clock. Make sure you’re eating whole foods, hopefully from a market where you know the vendors personally. Do something like that for a month and tell me how you feel.
This is human life, people. Exercise it and renew it or watch it fade away. You, my friend, are a creator, not just a robotic consumer.
Patrick Lee Miller
Patrick Lee Miller is a thinker to follow. He’s a unique writer and educator with a broad and wise understanding of our current cultural challenges. Have a look at his articles on Quillette.
About this video:
Avatars were embodied appearances of divinities in the ancient narrative of the Bhagavad Gita before they represented embodied players in the cyberspace of massively multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPGs). Beginning with these games, this talk asks why players choose the avatars they do, and why they do with them whatever it is that they do. The answer given is psychoanalytic, arguing that players choose avatars in order to project outward their "inner objects," relics of earlier life, integrating them into their self-image in order to live better. But this is also what we do in our embodied lives, at least according to philosophers as disparate as Nietzsche and Plato. Each taught that the sensible world is a drama of projected personae. Whereas Nietzsche thought these personae were actions of the material body, however, Plato thought this drama needed a director off-stage, an immaterial soul. Plato was right, this talk argues, if we're to make sense of the notion of living a life, rather than being lived by one. Not coincidentally, his notion of living a life presupposed a doctrine of reincarnation akin to that of his predecessors in India. For both, embodied life is virtual; in other words, this "meatspace" we share is but a massively multi-player cosmic role-playing game. Or rather, a cosmic game with only one player—the Self.