The ‘Global Awakening’?… or “The Great ‘Re-Set’”?
This continues the conversations: Staying Focused on Designing A Future… On Not Getting Divided and “Unpacking Robert Reich’s Baggage”
(See also: Bentham's Strategic Verities and Karl Popper on Authentic Education for Youth… and Miklos Nyiszli Lessons On Class]
You Know How I Know 'Localization'… or 'Democratic Economics'… Is A Con? and Conversation with Joel McIver)
09.25.13:
This page provides a partial transcript, including audio files and some articles discussed, during the September 29, 2013 through October 20, 2013 Waking Up Radio Show.
Excerpts and audio files follow.
For other audio files visit: Waking Up Radio Audio Conversations Page.
Initial Thoughts for the: * September 29, 2013 show.
Initial Thoughts for the: * October 6, 2013 show.
Initial Thoughts for the: * October 13, 2013 show.
Initial Thoughts for the: * October 20, 2013 show.
09.26.13: Also see Initial Thoughts that are coming up for me out of this process: Karl Popper on Authentic Education for Youth… The Global Awakening or The Great Re-Set? (part 2).
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10.21.13: Sisters and brothers… the “Plan B for Business” articles have been moved to a new page (in development) : “Considering The ‘New Development Paradigm’… A.K.A. ‘Plan B For Business’ Articles: Is Capitalism Doomed?”
…and please listen to the following audio-files (from the Archives)…. which were discussed on the September 22, 2013 show: (see: Staying Focused on Designing A Future… On Not Getting Divided… “Initial thoughts for the September 22, 2013”….)
How does turning the world into a heartless jungle promote 'happiness'?…
Transcript of this January 6, 2013 WUR show excerpt:
If ‘economy’ is the ‘global lexicon’… holding all nations… all peoples… to a point… a goal… a purpose… ‘power’ creates a ‘universal jungle’….
But this destroys society, as Karl Polanyi (in The Great Transformation) says… and with it… ‘happiness’… while creating a global ‘consciousness’.
Market ethics are only ‘utilitarian’ (in Bentham’s sense… i.e. that which creates ‘happiness to work’ in ‘the people’…) up to a point. It manufactures scarcity, and so keeps the cattle herded… but it exposes the fundamental violence (coercion) of the system… while creating a global audience of that violence.
How does turning the world into a heartless jungle promote ‘happiness’?… This trick can only be accomplished if our thoughts are made and given us….
Bentham defines ‘happiness’ as ‘happiness to work’… to instill ‘industriousness’ in ‘the people’. This is seen clearly when you put together these two statements of his about the role of government: “to increase ‘want’ in order to make the physical sanction of hunger effective…” and “the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the only proper end of government…”
“A mill to grind rogues honest, and idle men industrious…” Bentham said of his Panopticon… because it destroys our connections with each other and allows the master to keep our attention….
So… how do we turn our heads? How do we break that hold, and see each other again?
The ‘Panopticon’ means total control… total hold… of our thoughts… ensuring that the majority tend to obedience… which requires that ‘the people’ attend to ‘power’s message… we have to be a captive audience… but the new terms require that our subjection be ‘freely’ given…
…it is the tendency… the constant pressure toward ‘obedience’… yet with the least expenditure of energy, Bentham said… that can hold a majority…
“…constant pressure toward obedience…’
…meanwhile… we renounce having any ‘say’ at all about the world we live in… and, as a result… look around… it’s not a pretty sight.
So it’s totally ‘logical’ that ‘power’ wants us to keep our focus narrow… that it trots out people like Richard Wolff to encourage us to keep our frame right on the community we live in… to not care about our brothers and sisters who create the cheap stuff to keep the rest of us in harness…
…and not just in a ‘material’ sense… equally in a ‘heart’ sense… a spiritual sense….
When we don’t care about our brothers and sisters in China, it also means that we don’t care about our brothers and sisters stuck in meaningless tasks right next to us… right in the same communities we live in.
It’s the ‘Panopticon’… keep your eyes focused on ‘economic growth’… ignore what your body says… which is: “I don’t want to do this anymore.”
(“How does turning the world into a heartless jungle promote ‘happiness,’” January 6, 2013, WUR show excerpt)
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* “The September 29, 2013 show”
Growing our authentic thought is ‘wealth’… growing our authentic thought is ‘pursuing happiness’… ‘pursuing happiness’ requires leisure…
–––The one who first brings it on the stage of American politics is a classical scholar, George Mason. Ten years before he did this, he had written describing himself as a man who spent most of his time in retirement and seldom meddled in public affairs; content with the blessings of a private station, he enjoyed a modest but independent income and disregarded the smiles and favors of the great. The Virginia Declaration of Rights is substantially the work of this man. In it the natural rights of men include the enjoyment of life and liberty, as in the Declaration of Independence, and also “the means of acquiring, and preserving, property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” This clause passed unchanged over to the Virginia constitution of 1776. Mason had prepared the statement for the Constitution of the United States too; it was left out through a complex series of circumstances. In one form or another, the clause has been incorporated by two thirds of the state constitutions framed up until this century. Some of them actually go so far as to say in the language of the Declaration of Independence that it is the people’s right to “alter or abolish” a government that fails to secure happiness for the people. (Sebastian de Grazia, Of Time, Work, and Leisure, p. 263,quoted in Unpacking ‘Democracy’, p. 8 – 9)
The theme of today’s show is: “getting our leisure back… because we can’t have ‘happiness’… without it.
Yesterday, I listened to the head of Greenpeace International (being interviewed by Bill Moyers) say that when people ask him “Is it too late to stop climate change?” he replies, “Yes and no. ‘No’ for most of the world, but ‘yes’ for Africa, particularly the poor…” and then he said he knows that even that top CEO of some big oil company cares about their grandchild… and then he and Bill Moyers commiserate on the plight of ‘the poor’. There’s much confusion here… and as he and Bill Moyers were in fundamental agreement… these two pundits can never help us uncover it. We are never… if ‘power’s sway holds… supposed to discuss it.
First of all… if we let our mother-tongue speak… if we can see that the wealth of a human being is a matter of self-possession and the degree of integrity of soul… then ‘the poor’ is “‘power’ and the ‘punditry’” and not folks struggling… with heart and love intact… to bring two ends artificially kept wide meeting eye-to-eye. The way that ‘power’ and the pundits talk about ‘the poor’ hasn’t changed since ‘class’ first created ‘them’.
Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies can help us see ‘power’s motives… and its plans… and how they manifest in us… let's discuss the page of his words I’ve put up…
Secondly… whether or not ‘power’ cares about their grandchildren or not… they believe that their grandchildren are served by ruthlessly disposing of so-called ‘imperfection’ – meaning… us. I’ve put up a page [Karl Popper on Authentic Education for Youth… The Global Awakening or The Great Re-Set? (part 2)] in which we can collectively explore Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, which should be required reading for all who say they believe in ‘democracy.’ I believe he can help us see ‘power’s motives, and where they plan to take us.
Moreover… I think these motives can be seen in us – and all around us.
For instance, yesterday I heard someone say, in opposition to the Affordable Care Act, that he didn’t want to be forced to pay for someone else’s slovenly habits. There is a deep belief in class which we must tout de suite… start discussing… this notion that ‘some are worth more than others.’
Thirdly… I think that the pundit shares in ‘power’s pursuit of ‘perfection’… unconsciously… else he could not calmly say that “it’s too late for Africa…” – that is an outrage.
We in the so-called ‘knowledge-sectors’ of the ‘world economy’ have a responsibility… and we in the U.S. especially… to unseat ‘power’ from its throne… so that true power… true wealth… and ‘heart’ for days – the ‘heart’ of people in Bangladesh and South African and Congo and China… can finally have its say… and stand unfettered in the world.
The U.S has fattened off the world… it’s time for us to give back… it’s time to pursue happiness… it’s our codified right…
One of the ‘New Development Paradigm’ articles that I’ve posted on the page “The Global Awakening or the Great ‘Re-Set’” –“For Richer, For Poorer” – states that of the world’s billionaires, 421 are U.S. citizens, followed by Russia (96), China (95), and India (48)… now that is overwhelming dominance… a dominance that cannot be overcome by the conventions of class that pundits adhere to… it can’t…
[…and every day… everything we do adds to it… adds to their ‘plus’ column… that’s how ‘compound interest’ works… that’s how ‘over-balancing’ works… it draws everything into it… it’s the vortex… the maelstrom… Charybdis (a dangerous whirlpool in a narrow channel of the sea, opposite the cave of the sea monster Scylla…)]
…now that’s just seeing reality. And those are just the numbers of billionaires… if we put those numbers in terms of dollars… perhaps then it would register…. Because those trillions just accumulate… interest… our blood, sweat and tears… continuously get sucked into that, just as John Trudell said… this is a system that consumes energy… we are the source of all wealth… we and the earth… it requires our hands to dig it out of the earth… to poison it… to extract from it…
…it’s going to require our hands… to release that stranglehold that ‘power’ has on it…
And the U.S… us… it’s up to us – I mean, just look at those numbers… sheer dollars and cents shows us… that it has to be us. Egypt can’t do this for us. Heart for days they may have… Bangladeshis… they have heart for days too… our brothers and sisters stuck in that noose called “‘power’s stranglehold on the world” cannot do this….
It’s up to us… because we can….
Simple as that… because we can.
The U.S. has fattened off the world. It’s time for it to give back.
It’s time for us… we in the U.S…. to ‘pursue happiness’.
It is our codified right.
Think about that. That’s a serious advantage. It is our codified right to pursue happiness.
And once we talk about that, we’ll see… as Sebastian de Grazia told us a half century or more ago… that it is only possible… if we possess leisure.
So ‘leisure for all’ is either materially possible… or it isn’t. So why are we not allowed to discuss it?
Ask yourself that question and the answer will come to you.
No one disputes that ‘work’ as we know it now cannot be sustained… even if you want it to be.
Why aren’t we even talking about that? Everybody dances around it… these pundits on the airwaves: “well, you got automation… well, there’s resource-scarcity… and there’s not enough water… there’s not enough fossil fuels because there was such profligacy on the part of these ‘power’-guys… so we’re going to have to just adjust ourselves as always…”
No. No. No. No. No.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
We don’t have to. We have the numbers. We have the means… the technology. We know what their game is now… global supremacy. We can talk to our brothers and sisters globally… they will have our backs because we have theirs…. That’s what it takes. That’s the whole thing… that’s the whole point….
So we know… that ‘work’ as we know it cannot be sustained.
So either we decide to be free… or we accept an even deeper imposition of slavery on the world.
Think about the shift in the electro-magnetic field of the world… when we all… globally… start to want our energy back…
And as ‘sufficiency’ does exist for all of us to have leisure… the only thing that prevents our accomplishing it… is our thoughts….
If you care about the earth… and your brothers and sisters – and these are chains that weigh upon us all… regardless of so-called ‘station’ – it’s time to crack that nut (this question)… and explore its substance…
…and see that what has been our longing since class began… is now a real possibility…
…we live in a time of alchemy…
…we are made of thoughts…
…and authentic thought has been suppressed…
…yet water it but a little…
…and it springs back.
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…there we see the importance of codification… now we must re-seize the initiative on ‘pursuing happiness’… before its possibility is nullified…
In the September 15th show [see: “Unpacking Robert Reich’s Baggage”] we noted that Manfred Max-Neef is one of a group of 60 or so folks planning… what he says is… “a new economic paradigm and… a paradigm for the world.”
The next day I did a little Internet-digging and unearthed a little background:
In April 2012, Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations, urged the Royal Government of Bhutan to take GNH to a new level. He gave the government the task of creating a New Development Paradigm (NDP) that, whether adopted into policy or not, will mark for future generations a point in history when populations across the globe started rethinking the role of government.
Secretary Ban Ki-moon, said there is an urgent need for “a revolution in our thinking” to address the multiple economic, ecological and social crises facing our world. “The old model is broken. We need to create a new one…. In this time of global challenge, even crisis, business as usual will not do…. Clearly we must unite around a shared vision for the future – a vision for equitable human development, a healthy planet, and enduring economic dynamism.”
To that end, prime minister Lyonchchen and the Kingdom of Bhutan hosted this landmark IEWG gathering in the capital Thimphu from January 28 to February 2, 2013. The prime minister’s steering committee assembled an impressive list of participants including scientists, economists, environmentalists, psychologists and other great minds from all continents to collaborate with a select group of their Bhutanese counterparts. Their job was to “articulate the principles, goals, structures and responsibilities of the new paradigm, so that this alternative perspective on development can contribute to the United Nations’ post-2015 development agenda.” The Secretariat stated that “The new development paradigm will focus on balancing thriving natural, human, social, cultural and built assets, and recognising ecological sustainability, fair distribution and the efficient use of resources as key conditions.” The draft report will be presented to the UN in June, 2013, and a final document given by September 2014. (Written by noajones on February 14, 2013. Published in Relationship trouble on Asia, Bhutan, >http://futurechallenges.org/local/a-new-development-paradigm-takes-shape-in-bhutan/<)
Now it seems to me this whole effort rests… on controlling the definitions…
…on re-defining … not just ‘economics’ (which Ban Ki-moon et al. suggest we start calling ‘development’…) but… even more importantly… all the terms that we would want to use… to free ourselves… from ‘power’ – e.g. ‘leisure’… ‘freedom’… ‘progress’… ‘democracy’ – and it’s becoming glaringly clear, that if we-the-people do not interfere… in this plan of ‘power’… to seize the hour… away from our Global Awakening… we will be turned from the future we deserve… and handed with new collars our ‘new’… ‘re-designed’… and re-defined… ‘work’….
For instance… what should we make of this puffy-propaganda-piece on Sir Richard… or should we say ‘the Duke’?… an appropriate name, I think, unlike ‘the Virgin’… for someone so dedicated to trying to dupe:
I like Richard Branson. The billionaire Virgin Airlines guy just looks like he has fun, well just being alive. You just have to admire that. On LinkedIn today, Richard… asked a question that really is more insightful than it seems on the surface:
“How happy are you?”…
Richard highlights an example of a people who really understand happiness: the Bhutanese… Bhutan is hemmed in by China, India and the Himalayas; so fear and trepidation could understandably be their major export (or import). But, Richard says this about the tiny kingdom of Bhutan and the Bhutanese:
[…one wonders what words were excised here… what they revealed that had to be concealed… but the overall thrust is telling enough… “‘money’ means nothing… you’re responsible for your own ‘happiness’…”]
With this in mind, I was delighted to hear the Bhutanese have introduced a Minister for Happiness.
This Himalayan kingdom has a new measurement of national prosperity too – “gross national happiness”. By focussing on people’s well-being rather than economic productivity, there is likely to be a knock-on effect for business too. After all, a happy workforce makes for a more successful and productive team.
The Bhutanese and Richard are absolutely correct, of course. If we can all try to focus less on defining success by how much money you earn or how big your bank account is, we would all have more time to focus on the happier things in our lives.
In fact, Richard says that is the key to success: focus on being happy and happiness will simply surround you. Now maybe that happiness won’t be on a private jet flying over the Himalayas, but it doesn’t really have to be, now does it? (November 15, 2012, hrrumph, “Richard Branson…Bhutanese…and Happiness” – >http://www.hrrumph.com/tag/richard-branson/<)
…time after time the punditry buffs up some words and says… “See… now you’re free…” ‘power’ is trying to re-direct all those youth who care deeply about the planet… before they can take that next necessary, logical, step to seeing that their brothers and sisters are the ‘earth’ that has to get freed before the earth can get free…
Now every aspect of ‘propaganda for the class system’ is packed in that…. Even ‘the economy must be protected at all costs…’ is allowed in clandestinely… as the ultimate legitimization for the ‘necessity’ that states’ show some minimum degree of concern about ‘its’ people… “happy slaves are more productive slaves” no doubt will be one bit of ‘wisdom’ to come out of Bhutan (but without including the coda that if states don’t, we might start thinking… as Platonov pointed out.)
They chose Bhutan, in which the great majority of native Bhutanese have kept their connection to the earth. Wikipedia describes this connection as “subsistence farming and animal husbandry…” describing Bhutan’s ‘economy’ this way:
Rugged mountains dominate the terrain and make the building of roads and other infrastructure difficult and expensive. The economy is closely aligned with India's through strong trade and monetary links and dependence on India's financial assistance. Most production in the industrial sector is of the cottage industry type. Most development projects, such as road construction, rely on Indian migrant labor. Model education, social, and environment programs are underway with support from multilateral development organizations. Each economic program takes into account the government's desire to protect the country's environment and cultural traditions. For example, the government, in its cautious expansion of the tourist sector, encourages visits by upscale, environmentally conscientious tourists. (Wikipedia, 09.16.13 search, on ‘Bhutan’)
Of course Sir Richard et al. decline to mention this earth-connection (and presumably a relative absence of coercion) as a possible reason (if it’s true…) that the Bhutanese are “a people who really understand happiness…”
…a mere oversight… no doubt… of the arm-numbing work (all that heavy silver to hoist… and vino to carry about) of Branson’s pack of experts… a mere slip of the morals in their conscientious search for the source… of this elusive quality ‘happiness’ (under ‘class’)… as they forage among the smashed remains of us and our ‘class’-bludgeoned souls.
So… Bhutan… it seems… has seized its fortunate fate of being less penetrable to ‘power’… and is turning it to account (most likely in order to help it remain so… remain a little oasis in which ‘market-ethics’ has yet to batter it completely senseless.)
And Sir Richard too sees a golden opportunity in Bhutan’s happy accident of geography… and seizes on its earth-connected cultural inheritance… a legacy that elsewhere ‘power’ either devastated or wiped out completely… and tells us that it’s their ‘happy thoughts’ alone that keeps the Bhutanese ‘happy’… and uses his clout no doubt to help make of Bhutan a little oasis for the “upscale, environmentally-conscious…”
And then Team B pretends that a physical… a daily lived and developing… connection with the earth can be destroyed… and replaced with… them!… or rather with the thoughts they produce so ‘scientifically’….
‘Power’ has a ‘scientific’ fix… for even the soul’s theft… we simply have to be taught to train our minds to admit naught… but happy thoughts… and of course to ignore our bodies (which amounts to ignoring truth… which is the point.)
And the more subtle message is (an Internet-era version of the ‘rags-to-riches’ myth…) that it’s all in our heads!… that ‘wealth’ has come to them… the ‘power’-guys… not just because they’re ‘smarter’… but even more because they’re more psychically healthy than we party-pooper-dispossessed. So in this quite bizarre twist… we have the folks responsible for trashing the planet… and devastating our lives… hoping to pose as the spiritually-uplifted… claiming moral superiority… saying that they intend to save us all… of course never bothering to add… from them.
…we are earth… so it will pull our coats…
…when the B-Team say… “No one could foresee the results of our profligacy…” we say… “Pawn your cons some other place… Nikola Tesla pulled your coats a hundred years ago…”
Sir Richard Branson… led a discussion with his Twitter followers. The subject under discussion was: “How can business change the world for the better?”
This… topic has become increasingly central to Brand Branson in the past few years… On October 3rd [and I’m quoting from an Economist column of 2012…] Sir Richard began to roll out a third initiative, which he has christened the B Team… the B… refers both to business and to the need for a “Plan B” for capitalism. The idea is to form a small group of business leaders who will campaign for reforms to make capitalism more oriented to the long term and socially more responsible. Needless to say, they will bear no resemblance to the A-Team, whom fans of 1980s television will recall a bunch of mercenaries who everyone assumed were in it for themselves but in fact wanted to save the world….
[And of course this is precisely how ‘power’ sees itself… misunderstood… beleaguered…. Here they are installing the Republic… (and please visit Karl Popper on Authentic Education for Youth… The Global Awakening or The Great Re-Set? (part 2) where we’ll be exploring ‘power’s motives… their endurance to the present… and how we move beyond them… in the present…) the dream that has tormented big brains like themselves for millennia… “we’re almost there!…” they’re doing it for us… all of it…]
…Other members [besides “Sir Richard and Jochen Zeitz, boss of Puma, a German sporting-goods firm”] are being recruited… before a formal launch early next year. The idea is that each member will champion a particular reform and work with the others to get all the reforms adopted. A consultation exercise is already under way to find which reforms are ripe to be pushed through. Proper accounting for environmental impact, and end to quarterly reporting of results and the phasing-out of fossil-fuel subsidies are likely to be near the top of the list….
[No doubt they plan a long ‘phase’… to allow for full extraction… no matter it be “barbarous and wantonly wasteful”… and work against “the interest of coming generations…”:
“We have at our disposal three main sources of life-sustaining energy – [fossil] fuel, water-power and the heat of the sun’s rays…. The force of wind offers much better chances and is valuable in special instances, but is by far inadequate. Moreover, the tides, waves and winds furnish only periodic and often uncertain power and necessitate the employment of large and expensive storage plants. Of course there are other possibilities, but they are remote, and we must depend on the first of these resources. If we use [fossil] fuel to get our power, we are living on our capital and exhausting it rapidly. This method is barbarous and wantonly wasteful, and will have to be stopped in the interest of coming generations. (Nikola Tesla, “The Power Of The Future,” published in 1915, Collected Writings, Volume 2, p. A-183)]
Now… that is for all the folks who say that “it could not have been foreseen… the results of all our profligacy….” Pawn your cons some other place. Nikola Tesla pulled your coats a hundred years ago. ]
Discussed on the WUR, Sunday, October 6th, 2013 radio show: “Staying Focused On Designing A Future… (Pt. 7): “the hidden tribalisms of ‘power’ (Pt. 6)”… and continuing: “The ‘Global Awakening’?… or “The Great ‘Re-Set’”? ” Draft
“Socrates’ Dilemma”… points to the illegitimacy of ‘rule’…
Today we’re going to continue examining the Sir Richard-and-Ban-and-World-Bank-head-led initiative to sooth our concerns about global ‘inequality’… (which no doubt they will frame as “inequality in education”… )
…in an attempt to re-direct our eyes from our good, rich earth – and the fact that we’ve been… and are being…
(…and a big ‘shout-out and thank you’ to our brothers and sisters globally – from South African to Chile to Bahrain, Greece and China – who are fighting this dispossession… including the dispossession of our bodies…)
– removed from this seat of our health and well-being and happiness… the earth…
…and so we will be asking, with Karl Popper’s help… “leadership to what?” And I’ve posted a short piece on this page called “On Leadership and Self-Organization… On ‘Poor’ and ‘Rich’” which I hope you’ll read. I’m intending it to be a sort of ‘preface’ to our conversation with Karl Popper.
And as I commented in his chapter on ‘The Principle of Leadership’ on the page Karl Popper on Authentic Education for Youth:
…we will be discussing not just Popper’s insights on ‘authentic education’… and the fostering of ‘leadership’… but also whether, or to what degree, these insights bear on the possibilities for ‘authentic governance’… i.e. we will be challenging this seeming sacrosanct notion of ‘rule’…
Now this ties in to ‘Socrates’ Dilemma’:
“Socrates’ Dilemma… points to the illegitimacy of ‘rule’”:
But this moral intellectualism of Socrates is a two-edged sword. It has its equalitarian and democratic aspect, which was later developed by Antithenes. But it has also an aspect which may give rise to strongly anti-democratic tendencies. Its stress upon the need for enlightenment, for education, might easily be misinterpreted as a demand for authoritarianism. This is connected with a question which seems to have puzzled Socrates a great deal: that those who are not sufficiently educated, and thus not wise enough to know their deficiencies, are just those who are in the greatest need of education. Readiness to learn in itself proves the possession of wisdom, in fact all the wisdom claimed by Socrates for himself; for he who is ready to learn knows how little he knows. The uneducated seems thus to be in need of any authority to wake him up, since he cannot be expected to be self-critical…. (from chapter 7, “The Principle of Leadership” of Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies: The Spell of Plato)
[I think the way out of this seeming dilemma of the ‘need – or not – for authority’… is to recognize, and to trust, the authority of the earth… its power to recapture mis-taught souls. The ‘force’ upon our minds of that which feeds us is profound… and authentic judgment rests… on being self-sufficient. – PS.]
…and it beggars belief to pretend to think… that Sir Richard’s and Ban’s and the World Bank chief’s efforts are completely distinct… let’s not waste time investigating… let’s “Learn - By - Play”…
Plato, I believe, knew the answer to this dilemma – that the earth itself is always trying to re-align us with her – else he could not have, with such certainty, stressed the importance of holding our eyes… controlling our minds… our thoughts….
So… as we read on about this latest con… let’s keep in mind… that it is an effort to claim our eyes:
There were too few candidates from the business world of sufficiently unimpeachable character, it seems, and, more positively, some members of the B Team are likely to be relatively young. Instead, the plan is for the B Team to consist of people who have done business in a way that fits the guiding principles, such as Mr. Zeitz, perhaps Ben Cohen (of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream) or Paul Polman, who is trying to double Unilever’s revenues while halving its environmental footprint….
One reason to be optimistic is that many of these reforms have strong support from the generation of leaders now rising to the top of the corporate world, who are often deeply unhappy with the practices and norms bequeathed by their elders – other than Sir Richard, of course. (Schumpeter, “Call in the B Team,” The Economist, October 6th, 2012)
With leadership from progressive business, we should be able to satisfy the material and non-material well-being-needs (though not the created 'wants')… of nine billion people….
[…presumably his ‘need’ equals what ‘science’ tells us we need (‘science’ being a chief means of keeping us asleep… as it implies that ‘others’ must do the thinking… while we must be weak adjuncts of those ‘minds’…) and his ‘want’ equals what our bodies – ‘merely’, i.e. ‘trivially’… as ‘trivial’ as the people who harvest the food we need to exist – tell us we need… ‘Bodies’, we are led to think, ‘perform’ for ‘the system… they don’t speak the earth’s truth.]
But to do so will require business to think very differently about its role and how it operates. That's why at The B-Team, we understand that the sustainable business of the future, the future bottom line, the future of leadership and future incentives will all need to be defined by their ability to ecologically-efficiently satisfy our well-being-needs. (Jules Peck, Founding Partner, Jericho Chambers; Trustee, New Economics Foundation, “Good Business = Well-Being of People and Planet?”: “The B Team,” Huffington Post, September 17, 2013, Posted: 09.16.13, >http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jules-peck/good-business-wellbeing-o_b_3936924.html<)
And while it’s primarily PR (public relations) I think it has a simultaneous (intended) side effect of putting ‘businessmen’ and ‘statesmen’ who profess ‘independence’ on notice: “expect that things will be different. We big boys will amass massive dollars… you little ones ‘get used to disappointment…’ because the cattle are restless… so nothing else now takes precedence… over getting past this global threat – and we intend to lead us all out of it….”
And although the U.N. initiative presents itself as a separate effort… these ‘guys’ (and women too… a few) are a very small tribe… so there’s a lot of cross-over in their planning bodies (‘power’ is ‘power’ is ‘power’… whatever mask it wears…) in efforts of global paradigm redesign… and there’s only one planet to rule (so far… which is but one more reason… to move beyond these small people…)
…but recalling that our focus (no less than ‘power’s on its vision) must be on bringing into being a future based on free human beings (if we want to get it…) I’d advise… to recognize the obvious when we see it… and not waste too much time ‘investigating’ in order to ‘prove’… that they collude… and it beggars belief to pretend to think… that Sir Richard’s and Ban’s and the World Bank chief’s efforts are completely distinct. But here’s a tip of that iceberg for any that need it:
Natural Capitalist Solutions; http://natcapsolutions.org/ealert/June2013/Ealert-June2013.txt
“Transforming the Global Economic Paradigm: An article by Hunter Lovins”
You know well the challenges facing us. From reversing ecological and economic collapses to meeting the development needs of seven billion (and growing) residents of our planet, we've got our work cut out for us.
[You see? ‘Power’ thinks ‘big’… which is why the problems we face are ‘big’… which is why we can only meet the challenge of them by being big ourselves.]
But what can one person-or one organization-do?
A lot. It's why I keep climbing on airplanes, and meeting with CEOs, students, government officials.
And I need your help.
Join me on an adventure to transform the global economic paradigm. I'm part of an International Expert Working Group, convened by the King of Bhutan to set forth the intellectual architecture for this new paradigm, and we created the Alliance for Sustainability and Prosperity, or ASAP for short, to convene the expertise needed to bring genuine prosperity and well-being to everyone on the planet. Check us out at www.asap4all.org.
ASAP seeks your ideas. The world needs help and its leaders are asking for your answers.
Twitter Accolades: Natural Capitalism Solutions (@natcapsolutions) was named one of the top 20 NGO's to follow on twitter by Triple Pundit (@triplepundit), while Hunter (@hlovins) was named by The Guardian (@guardian) as one of the top sustainability women to follow on twitter. If you are on twitter be sure to follow us to see what all the buzz is about, if you aren't already following us.
Corporate Social Responaibility Leader: Hunter Lovins; A number of past and current NCS clients, as well as Hunter, were named as 35 Female CSR leaders you should know of in Triple Pundit.
Wonder Woman: Hunter Lovins; New Hope Media Named Hunter one of 9 Wonder Women of the Natural Industry.
Thought Leader: Hunter Lovins; Trust Across America named Hunter one of the Top 100 thought leaders in trustworthy business behavior for 2013, along with an extraordinary group of leaders.
Advisory Roles: As we go to press, Hunter was asked to become an advisor to Unilever North America, and to Richard Branson's B-Team effort to make business work better. How? By shifting the focus from just financial gains, towards environmental and social gains as well.
Bhutan Working Group Meeting; Birmingham, UK (16-18 August 2013)
As you read above, I'm part of an International Expert Working Group, convened by the King to set forth the intellectual architecture for this new paradigm.
In a sense, this is what we do at Natural Capitalism: create new paradigms, and help companies, communities and countries implement them. It's why I keep climbing on airplanes, and meeting with CEOs, students, government officials. This spring I've been going down the road at an even more manic pace than usual - from setting sail with Unreasonable at Sea (read my last blog, click here) to flying to Bhutan, then down to Costa Rica for the UN's consultation on creating the ext global development goals, to criss-crossing the US and Canada, teaching and keynoting conferences, I've been on the road all but 20 days this year.
Coming home to Colorado is always nourishing, but never more so than in early summer, with horses knee-deep in verdant pastures and nighthawks swooping insects from the warm evening skies. With a few exceptions, I'll be home now until fall. Which is a good thing as the report to the King is due by September, and I'll need time to focus on it.
Warmest regards, Hunter
Natural Capitalism Solutions is a 501(c)3 non-profit
And reading her post brought up an at first unaccountable sadness… her need to trumpet her achievements is so like what I see in those abandoned children of two or three… or thirteen… or thirty-three… whose eyes seek yours and say “Look at me! Look at me!” We are all abandoned children under class’ regime.
(And forgive the seeming excess… but this talk of being abandoned here pitches me into a needed ‘digress’… and this is particularly up for me because my grandchild is being subjected to… what I consider to be a soul-crushing pre-school. When I described its rigidity to another member of the Berkeley Liberation Radio Collective at our last meeting (October 3, 2013), he said: “It sounds like Montessori…” and he got it in ‘one’… it was… or, rather (unfortunately)… is… and he said: “that’s what they’re known for….” He thinks of them as “Keep It In Its Container.” His three-year-old goes to a pre-school that uses the method “Learn-By-Play”… to which I would add that we adults need to learn this… from the toddlers.)
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‘Education’ may replace ‘the economy’ in determining ‘rank’-designation… if we allow the ‘A-Team’ to ‘lead us’ to their ‘new and improved’ class-destination…
The discussion that’s being discreetly ignored in the spate of articles about this supposed ‘re-invention’ of ‘business’ is ‘economics’ itself – and the concept, therefore, at its core: ‘value’ – ‘economics’ being, at base, a ‘value’-assigning mechanism.
But to say this is also to say that ‘economics’ is a ‘rank’-assigning mechanism… and though the main one, not the only one. ‘Education’ is a big one… and will, I believe… should ‘power’s will prevail… swell in importance as it steps up to preserve, if it can, ‘class’… and, then, they hope, supplant it… i.e. that ‘education’ could serve as exclusive means to determine ‘rank’ when ‘wage’ is ‘passé’… and keep us divided… and prevented from uniting.
And no doubt we’ll have to discuss the plans of ‘power’ to (supposedly) rule by ‘merit’… as it may be (for some) counter-intuitive… to challenge it.
We learned from Marilyn Waring that ‘value’ is in the eye of the beholder… and from Bentham that ‘power’ plans to be the single ‘eye’ we see through (by means of his Panopticon….)
‘Power’s dream to keep us asleep…
…to keep us hypnotized…
…is to be…
…for every human being…
…the single dazzling eye…
…that awes us by being…
…or seeming…
…‘all-seeing’…
…the sun to which we rise…
…that calls us to our labors…
…gives us light and the food that feeds us…
…gives us our every thought to think…
…becoming, in short…
…our everything.
Now until very recently this is a description that fit ‘the economy’. But in this ‘wake-up’ moment for ‘the people’… globally… ‘power’ has decided (too late we hope…) in all humility… to toss off that robe… and reveal itself in all its golden wisdom… and ‘all-seeingness’… and benevolence…
(…I mean… they are ‘the A Team’… as The Economist told us… the misunderstood ones… and despite our obliviousness… they must save us… they must step up. There’s a crisis!
And though their motives may be misjudged… and they may be abused by some (the ungrateful ones…)
…as the rest hang back and are helpless…
…only they can do what needs to be done….
There remains, merely… the anointment.
So… purse-bulging…
…he convenes groups of ‘experts’…
…all eager to please that bag…
…and to get written up in the papers…
…as the ones who are saving the planet.
…as ranking can never produce ‘happiness’… the ‘A-Team’ is rushing to define it for us… ‘scientifically’ of course…
So… as ranking can never produce ‘happiness’ (and why are we not talking about that?… we here in the Land of the Codified Right to Pursue Happiness?…) the challenge for ‘power’ is how to seem to retire ‘rank’ while maintaining (or rather even deepening) ‘class’… i.e. their exclusive hold on ‘decision-making’… their ownership and defining of ‘the state’.
It seems to me they will have to fall back on some alleged ‘natural’ distinction between those who are ‘gifted’… and those who are (sadly) ‘not’…
…falling back on some alleged ‘natural’ hierarchical barriers / divisions between us…
…that they must ‘prove’ by means of the ‘education’ system… ‘show’ (because everyone, they will argue, is given the same ‘chance’ (back to that hideous Gates Foundation crap…)
So there are multiple cons (illusions) ‘power’ is floating right now… several ropes it’s playing out with which it hopes to hang us (or just tie us up… depending… on whether and what use it has for us…) in order to achieve certain outcomes.
Cons:
…Refreshing the definitions;
…The ‘natural’ hierarchy… which implies:
…‘Natural’ leadership;
…‘Re-set’ ‘progress’… with the confluence of environmental and economic crises it’s a hard illusion to prop up…;
…Paternalistic guidance and management;
…Waiting for ‘the smart ones’ to ‘find the answers’;
…‘Education’ ‘proving’ the above;
…‘Power’ and ‘the people’ are one… (they have to get our necks back in those collars….)
Outcomes:
…‘Power’ disappears into ‘the people’ (we see this in all their propaganda… it’s not them – oh no – trashing the planet… it’s those pesky pre-historic brains betraying us… or ‘human nature’… or some damn thing…);
…‘Finance’ disappears into states; (now that they’re positioned with a seemingly unassailable advantage);
…Abolition of ‘private property’… (by which they mean our attachment to our common earth… all may be folded into the ready arms of oligarchic governance… perhaps they’ll take a leaf here from the tale of the Chinese elites…);
…Repossession of human energy globally;
…Oligarchic stewardship of the resources of the planet.
Now perhaps your response is similar to that of a young woman I spoke with in my book-hawking days. When I said, “these ten thousand guys or so could be called the Tribe of Plato, because they believe in the rule of the ‘philosopher-king’…” she replied: “well, what’s wrong with that? What should we have? Rule of the stupid?” (We’ll discuss this question of ‘rule’ shortly… but I encourage folks to check out how Popper frames the question… and how he debunked this notion of hers… exposed the fallacy of ‘wise, oligarchic rule’… of ‘authority’ enshrined by ‘the state’… in his chapter, “The Principle of Leadership.”)
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…forget the toy car… let's come together… let our eyes scale the walls of the illusion… and decide what it means… to ‘pursue happiness’…
Last week, we said that the structures of state that grow out of the imperatives of ‘power’ (as reflected in ‘the economy’…) reflect a set of ‘value’-assigning practices and conventions. But I think it’s more accurate to say that ‘the economy’ is a set of ‘value’-assigning devices backed up by the arm of the state… and that it is our energy that moves that arm. And although the frame called ‘class’ provides the overall shape… it’s we that create the seeming complexity… perhaps most particularly the ‘middle ranks’. So there seems to be infinite complexity as the state invents means to keep us within bounds… and as it tinkers with all the devices that arise in response to the multitudinous interests to which we provide lift… in our struggle for resources artificially limited (by the state.)
But if that boulder ‘scarcity’ is never dropped in our calm waters… then the waves of distress dissolve into gentle, overlapping circles of assistance. Just as distress feeds distress… assistance and peace seeds peace.
So the seeming complexity of ‘the economy’ is but the mirror of us… skewed by the limits the state imposes on us…. It mirrors us… but it mirrors us in a box with walls that stop us every time we try to grow bigger. So… rather than study our stuntedness… why not let our eyes scale the walls… and pursue happiness? We simply have to begin discussing, “What does ‘pursue happiness’ mean?”
And while these articles claim that this campaign is to promote “a new set of progressive business values that ‘prioritize people and planet alongside profit’…” (“Plan B for Business”, Eco-Business: Asia Pacific's Sustainable Business Community, >http://www.eco-business.com/news/branson-and-zeitz-launch-plan-b-business/<)…
…until we-the-people have our own agreed-upon definitions – which we religiously re-assert every time we get bombarded by contrary ones – until that day… every media message they promulgate, rest assured, is calculated to re-enslave.
So it’s a fair assumption… in de-coding the above… that when they say they are ‘prioritizing people’… they mean that for them nothing else takes precedence… over re-capturing our wandering attention.
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The battle for our future…
…‘power’ wages behind scenes…
…behind a screen of lies…
…and the class-old-cons that it revises…
…and the lexicon it’s hurriedly re-writing…
…a gift of its pundits’ naiveté gratis …
The signs are everywhere (in the media that it uses to keep us – particularly those among us who might claim the name ‘progressive’– conditioned…) that ‘power’ has mounted its fleetest steed to overtake ‘we-the-people’… in this race – on the part of ‘we’ – to get free…globally… and – on the part of the ‘philosopher-statesmen’ – to ‘re-set’ the class system.
The rapid-fire bombardment of late:
…Jaron Lanier does his small part to try to drive a stake in our building unity across false divisions… with a book the title of which gives the false impression that ‘the future’ might be… to his mind… up to us. But… no… the more he describes it, the more we realize that it does not diverge in the slightest from the standard “reverence for ‘mind’ over ‘hand’”… required in mainstream-published prognostications about ‘the future’…
…Robert Reich and others… (I’m hearing the same message severally…) reminding youth of how much can be done… if you work within ‘the system’… and even by just “calling your Congressmen and women…
…Robert Reich and Amy Goodman and Manfred Max-Neef (naively or no, who knows?… but certainly in concert…) plant the seed that ‘the smart ones’ are planning a new ‘global paradigm’… one “based on well-being and happiness and ecological sustainability and adequate distribution of wealth and intelligent use of natural resources…” (…should we call this the ‘gaudy lipstick con’? as if with a wave of their magic-wand… all the beating-down and pounding-senseless of ‘hand’ labor will [poof!] be gone… or that they will free us with flowery words… or over-awe us with the sheer grand sum of the collective-pundit-years of higher education that ‘power’ has dedicated to this con-job.)
…and then this Friday salvo… is immediately followed… by the Huffington Post bespattering the online world with some mind-numbing pap… from someone named ‘Peck’… whose take on this “new global paradigm” sounds very much like the “old global paradigm”:
At Jericho Chambers, we’ve developed a process called [blah… blah…blah…] which is based on insights from user-centered-design, positive psychology, well-being and welfare economics, theories of human needs, hedonomics and neuroscience. This strategic innovation process helps companies map, measure, manage and maximize the well-being-satisfaction their brands, products and services can provide to customers and society. It's based on unpacking and understanding the real well-being-needs of customers and either mapping current products and services against that landscape of needs, or innovating with new products or services which can satisfy those needs in an ecologically optimal manner.
“Surviving Progress”… classic bait-and-switch… is also classic propaganda in defence of the class system…
…and just today (September 24th, 2013) excerpts are being played from a documentary (“Surviving Progress” by Ronald Wright) that pretends to expose “the notion of ‘civilization’” as covert propaganda… which, in a typically (for ‘power’) Machiavellian fashion, is precisely what it purports to expose.
The film is classic ‘bait-and-switch’. It begins with a decent analysis of the inherent deceptions in ‘economic’ notions… explaining why ‘economy’ is a fiction… and then they hurriedly turn our eyes from the obvious… that there are people who stand behind the deceptions… and rather try to make a case for ‘our’ alleged ‘pre-historic’, and therefore ‘primitive,’ ‘brains.’ This is not just classic ‘bait-and-switch’… this is classic propaganda in defense of the class system.
The excerpts I’ve heard manifest most of the key bits (see: “Unpacking Robert Reich’s Baggage”) that we expect of “propaganda in support of the ‘class’-system.”
•The statist ‘we’ – and this notion of ‘the state’ is inclusive of ‘power’ (in all its guises…) – the corporate ‘we’… talking about ‘the state’ but using the word ‘we’. This was the film’s dominant con, although, given the subject matter, expressing it was also necessarily a legitimization of ‘class’.
Here are some of the ways the cons were expressed:
– “…one challenge we face… we are more and more in a position of behaving like gods… manipulating other species and even ourselves…”;
(…in saying this the con is conveyed that both the authority, and the interests, of we-the-people and of ‘power’ are one…)
– “…it’s imperative that we get more and more people to realize the humanity of other people…”
(…as if ‘we’ [we-the-people] don’t! As if we-the-people are not uniting across false divisions as never before seen under the regime of class…. Narrow particularities are falling before this threat [‘power’s global supremacy project’] despite the appearance of the opposite – magnified as always by the pundits…)
– “…the greater the top – bottom differential, the blinder the elite is. The rich countries have a tremendous amount of wealth compared to the poor countries…”
(…! So we-the-people in the U.S. are made ‘the elite’! while ‘power’ discreetly withdraws from view…)
…several cons essential for ‘power’ are thereby reinforced:
…it ‘invisibles’ the indigenous and other earth-connected folks like Nikola – as we saw from our earlier quote;
…it deflects focus from the ‘elite’…
…it merges our interest with that of the ‘philosopher-kings’…
…it would have us believe that it is our so-called ‘primitive brains’ that are the problem… not concentrated and organized ‘power’.
So as class is a given… all the cons that legitimate it are necessarily present.
• Magical thinking: concentrated ‘power’ as an organized actor is never seriously credited… or sometimes even admitted into the calculation of the so-called ‘solution’ being proposed;
• Coerced work, of course, is never questioned;
• ‘Class’ is assumed as inevitable:
“Ordinary folks losing faith in the social contract is a pattern we see a lot in modern times…”
(Of course ‘the contract’ is accepted as a fait accompli and a given, i.e. “we let you give us our work (subsistence… minimum existence in which we relinquish our gifts…) and we give you our obedience…” (what a deal for ‘power’…) and no pundit ever questions the so-called ‘contract’.)
“Brains have begun to get together around the planet.”
(Relax… the ‘brains’ are on it. But… what about the ‘hearts’? Isn’t it our hearts that have gone missing? What did Emily say? “To fill a Gap… Insert the Thing that caused it… Block it up With Other – and ’twill yawn the more – You cannot solder an Abyss With Air.”)
What we have is a communally-developed-and-egalitarian-species-creativeness stuffed in an ancient, millennia-long class / rank-based ‘elevation of the few’ form of social arrangement… and we are bursting out of the false constraints…
• And that “‘statist ‘we’” leaves much confusion in its wake just because of its lack of clarity: the film presents itself as a critique of ‘civilization’ (undefined)… says that “it’s been around for 5,000 years… that it’s the problem…” but then tells us that the real problem is that “our hunter-and-gatherer hardware… our ‘Paleolithic’-hunter brain… hasn’t caught up with its software [modern technology…];
(…No, we have a ‘communally-developed-and-egalitarian-species-creativeness’ stuffed in an ancient, millennia-long class / rank-based ‘elevation-of-the-few’ form of social arrangement… and we chafe at the artificial restraints… and we are bursting out of them…)
…that “our nature is to make snap-judgments and not to think about the future …”(!?) “…we have these animal minds and the enlightened part may not come naturally to us…” someone says (!?) “Can we transcend that inner animal nature… that Ice Age hunter?” asks another (!?)… “There are five billion people waiting to tap into this bonanza of cars and…” “We have to think about the finite nature of the planet so we can keep it alive. The Ice-Age hunter is still us… those folks who always thought there’d be another herd of woolly mammoths over the next hill.”
(The following is from the dictionary in this computer:
Wooly mammoth: a mammoth that was adapted to the cold periods of the Pleistocene, with a long shaggy coat, small ears, and a thick layer of fat. Individuals are sometimes found frozen in the permafrost of Siberia.
The Pleistocene epoch lasted from 1,640,000 to about 10,000 years ago. It was marked by great fluctuations in temperature that caused the ice ages, with glacial periods followed by warmer interglacial periods. Several extinct forms of human, forerunners of modern humans, appeared during this epoch.
Paleolithic: of, relating to, or denoting the early phase of the Stone Age, lasting about 2.5 million years, when primitive stone implements were used. Also called Old Stone Age. Origin: mid-19th century: from paleo- [of prehistoric times] + Greek lithos ‘stone’ + -ic.
Further:
The Paleolithic period extends from the first appearance of artifacts to the end of the last ice age (about 8,500 years ago). The period has been divided into the Lower Paleolithic, with the earliest forms of humankind and the emergence of hand-ax industries (ending about 120,000 years ago), the Middle Paleolithic, the era of Neanderthal humans (ending about 35,000 years ago), and the Upper Paleolithic, during which only modern Homo sapiens is known to have existed.)
So he is identifying so-called ‘pre-civilization-brains’ as the problem, not really ‘civilization’ itself… which is the opposite message to what he purports it to be.
This seems very much like an orchestrated campaign… presenting the problem as ‘Paleolithic’-brains feeds nicely into Sir Richard’s agenda… a very neat pass of the ball along to his pack of ‘experts’… “the ‘best brains out there’ will fix it all – inequality… oceans dying… all the poisoning and the global warming – all for us…” he assures us…. All we need do is give them our trust… this is called ‘re-setting’ our allegiance… just when we were starting to hear… the earth.
And this orchestration speaks to our need to convene our own discussions… apace… apace… apace… so we can have our ‘say’… and decide what’s best… “The ‘Global Awakening’?… or “The Great ‘Re-Set’”?” When Susuki says (essentially), “we thought we were well on track… on this train called ‘progress’… but we were presumptuous…” his destination… and ours… are not the same.
The ‘re-set’ is about finding a new lens (or prism) for the Panopticon. The point of the Panopticon – though it literally means “all-seeing” – is to hold our eyes…
…so that all are seeing it – this is the ‘energy-efficiency’ bit in ‘power’s design… this is why contrary – to ‘power’s – thoughts are so abhorrent to it… control (patrolling both the cons and us… to assure their fit and our compliance…) becomes expensive when authentic thought proliferates… the costs run high in time and treasure… for realizing Plato’s vision depends on constant forward pressure – momentum… because our (we-the-people’s) thought wants to develop.
And it’s important that we begin to see that this tactic – constant forward pressure – is necessary for we-the-people as well… that it’s the only means of getting free – having a vision of mutual assistance to establish leisure globally… and ensuring that we move towards it… daily. There’s a word for this in martial arts… for meeting and mirroring an opposing force… in order to bring it down… bring down the level of energy… which happens as we help each other… and dispel the illusion of ‘scarcity.’
It’s the youth this propaganda effort is for… “time captured by jobs” is shrinking… the ship called the global economy is sinking… and they have “too much time” for thinking (and this is thinking authentically)…
The Panopticon was Jeremy Bentham’s answer to the question: “how can the few control the many?” Of course there really was no mystery. Plato told ‘power’ long ago that the way to control the herd (us)… was to control what we could think. Until very recently it was ‘jobs’ (‘the economy’ was the lens) that accomplished this… and control of where the money goes (‘credit’) determined what thoughts we could think during the day – both at work and what we were given over the airwaves – i.e. ‘credit’ selected the thoughts for which we could receive pay. And the hidden hammer behind this process is the manufactured-scarcity-squeeze… as we must eat… and land to grow food has been seized by the state or in other ways made private. We are kept working because there is no where else to go (in the ‘class’ system…) and there are no other thoughts to think that would allow us to question this way of things.
But with “time captured by ‘jobs’” shrinking… many more of us devote our time to re-thinking – with our bodies… believing them… believing what our bodies say ‘works’ for us as living things… and this is a vastly different practice than was our former (conditioned) simple regurgitation habit… this is thinking authentically –
…while all around us the signs can be seen… that the ship called ‘the global economy’ is sinking… hence… not just ‘Occupy’… but the excitement at the prospect… of being ‘self-sufficient.’ So ‘power’ began madly pondering… how to reclaim all this energy that’s up-springing… from the global system’s foundering.
It sees our longing to be ‘big’… to continuously grow our gifts… and reckons it must corral it (a tried-and-true tactic ‘power’ has ever successfully used…) but ‘corral’ in such a way… that it reinforces ‘hierarchy’ (‘class’ by another name.)
So as ‘the economy’ can no longer do the trick… ‘education’ or ‘finding the creatives’ will be the ‘new’ (or more grossly inflated…) ‘re-set’…
A report that The Economist did a year ago concluded by saying that ‘power’ must “invest in the young”… which doesn’t sound ominous… until you consider who’s saying it…
…and it – significantly – redefined the problem of ‘inequality’ as ‘inequality in education.’ Now, ‘power’ has always used this tactic… but, in this moment, to fall back on ‘merit rises’… is telling.
This special report will explore how 21st-century capitalism should respond to the present challenge; it will examine the recent history of both inequality and social mobility; and it will offer four contemporary case studies: the United States, emerging Asia, Latin America and Sweden. Based on this evidence it will make three arguments. First, although the modern global economy is leading to wider gaps between the more and the less educated, a big driver of today’s income distributions is government policy. Second, a lot of today’s inequality is inefficient, particularly in the most unequal countries. It reflects market and government failures that also reduce growth.
[Back to Bentham’s admonition that ‘controlling the people’ by ‘instilling discipline’ is ‘energy efficient.’]
And where this is happening, bigger income gaps themselves are likely to reduce both social mobility and future prosperity.
Third, there is a reform agenda to reduce income disparities that makes sense whatever your attitude towards fairness. It is not about higher taxes and more handouts. Both in rich and emerging economies, it is about attacking cronyism…
[…i.e. the appearance of unfairness…]
…and investing in the young. You could call it a “True Progressivism”. (Zanny Minton Beddoes, “For Richer, For Poorer”, The Economist, October 13, 2012), http://www.economist.com/node/21564414)
In a sense, ‘social mobility’ is modern-statistician-talk for ‘keep-the-cattle-herded’… for it’s key to the legitimization of the ideology of ‘hierarchy’…
‘Class’ requires ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’… those who have ‘gifts’ and those ‘ungifted’ … those who are ‘smart’ and those ‘dull-witted’…
…and if ‘money’ cannot ‘prove’ the legitimacy of your ‘rank’… then it must be your ‘level of service’… to the planet. (And the edge in ‘education’… in this unacknowledged competition… is as assuredly given to the sons and daughters of the ‘philosopher-statesmen’ as the edge that their legacy trillions give.)
It’s the youth who are the focus of all these concerted efforts… it is the youth that this massive propaganda campaign is primarily for. Youth will be asked to ‘help the state’ ‘re-set’ ‘progress’ – and… if Sir Richard can ignite his plans more broadly – in all states not laggards to the plate… as they all have an ‘interest’ (‘power’ will remind them…) in controlling their captive populace. And it will be a propaganda most beguiling… and hard to challenge on its face… because it all sounds urgently needed… with the planet in such dire.straits.
And this is why we must see clearly… and not allow ‘re-corralling’ to take place – which is possible even as we see… more and more… each other’s humanity. Because if we have no other thought to think but of the alleged “‘necessity’ of bowing to ‘political realities’”… the resulting cognitive dissonance – as our bodies long for authentic definitions in a social arrangement that’s been re-invented – will be rationalized away.
It would be hard to find a clearer admission… of a totalitarian ambition… and ‘the people’ just want… to be free…
The problem for the earth… and we who are made of it… has been our conditioned habit of turning our backs on each other… this is a millennia-long wound to be healed… for us to grow our gifts individually… and as a global humanity.
So let’s look at our current terms of containment… the plans our ‘rulers’ have to constrain us… the gap between this burdened existence… and what our lives could be as free humans.
Is this ‘growing our gifts’? If you think so, please tell me, how?
This [the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership between Europe and the United States, “creating an economic power with nearly half of the world’s gross domestic product”] is not a declaration of economic war against the East. Rather, it reflects an awareness that China and others need to be brought into the West, bringing two halves of the world together. A greater American and European combination would amass $32 trillion today and much more tomorrow. A balance of power leads to conflict. But an overbalance attracts others to its economic core.
[It would be hard to find a clearer admission… of a totalitarian ambition on the part of ‘power’ – and by the way… Terry Hopkins, I think this answers your question about ‘power’s “theory of the formation of states…” (see the table of contents of Palmers’ Chat: As We Take Our Earth Back for the full Terence Hopkins quote…)
There are] two important [contradictions… in the creation of the ‘modern world system’]… : (1) the growing competition among states (owing to their increasing number and their increasingly competitive policies) to house centers of the production-accumulation network [i.e. to draw ‘capital’ to themselves] versus the strengthening tendency of that network toward centralization of the accumulation process (fewer centers) [the concentration of ‘power’ symbolized by those hidden trillions squirreled away… that we’ve been hearing about (see the James S. Henry 2008 Nation article)] (2) the increasing influence of class-organized politics (resulting from capitalist development) on state-policies versus the increasingly competitive search by larger and larger units of capital for larger and larger pools of low-cost labor…. [i.e. the ‘class struggle’… but conceived more dynamically as a layered and multi-dimensioned thing…]
[The elites of ‘states’ try to enlarge their ‘stake’ by playing the card of ‘sovereignty’… and use ‘the people’ to improve their position… in playing the game of the global competition… and we-the-people are yo.yoed about… jerked by ‘state’ actors absorbed in the Big Game… and pulled by ‘power’ via its hold on the states… caught in the grip ‘power’ has on the purse-strings… the terms ‘power’ sets with its credit… so ‘power’ places the weight… and with sangfroid (…more or less…) waits… for the physics at work to resolve… tightening its squeeze… making more ‘scarcity’… broadening our debt… lengthening its column of ‘credit’ … “an inevitability,” it thinks… that… calumny-heaped… buried-deep… debt-stripped… bill-whipped… sucked dry… ‘the people’ must… one day… be resigned… but ‘the people’ just want to be free… ‘over-seen’… scorn-scathed… privacy-stripped… seared with contempt… universally… we-the-people just want… to be free. Both of these ‘contradictions’… pull on ‘power’s purposes… and its purse… as we still (unaccountably)… want to be free.]
…it’s not the ‘smart ones’ that we need… it’s the global releasing of the people’s energies…
We turn now to conceptions of the formation and transformation of states, viewed from the outset as the sovereignties of the interstate system. There is wide agreement among comparative historians and scholars of civilizations on the historical originality of the European state-system. For example, Walter Dorn (1963) begins a study by noting that the “competitive character of the state system of modern Europe… distinguishes it from the political life of all previous and non-European civilizations of the world.” It is thus especially disconcerting that none of the explicit theories of state-formation (nation-building and the like) takes this apparently unique setting as its point of departure.
[I think he knew… but for some reason wanted others to prove it. If he’d lived longer, perhaps… he would have stopped hanging back. ‘Power’ constructs states with the purpose to corral us… state structures grow out of the imperatives of ‘power’ (as reflected in ‘the economy’… i.e. it’s the mirror to ‘power’s moves…) i.e. there is a missionary ‘mind’… a proselytizing ‘mind’… behind the pundit ‘thought-cover’.]
And China is dependent on that core. Unlike Russia, China must import the majority of its oil, and its use is currently at 9.7 million barrels a day. The money to buy this petroleum and natural gas must come from exports, mainly exports to the West. Here the West maintains a continuous advantage, because China receives only about 50 percent of the “value added” of its exports. The rest is garnered by European and American companies, which provide the research and development, design, marketing and financing for most products exported from China.
[So you see pricing ‘hand’ low… and ‘mind’ high… and then privatizing our Great Communal Mind… over-tips the ‘balance’ to your side.]
For decades to come, China will have to sell in the West to gain money and access to technologies that it doesn’t yet possess. The consolidation of a Euro-American economic unit will require [“…you will be compelled to come in…”] China to join, too, as it becomes a more open, liberal and rule-governed polity….
[…as it accepts the new terms of totalitarian (global) ‘governance’…]
In the end, trade – not war – will attract others to the West’s economic core. (Richard Rosecrance, “Want World Domination? Size Matters,” The New York Times, July 28, 2013)
If you take a moment to let your heart absorb this instead of your head… you might feel the endless hell to which it consigns factory ‘hands’ in China… you might feel the screams of the earth as we rape it… you might feel our lives tossed about on the global game board like poker chips… and most of all you might feel the loss of your own rich gifts… after which… you might cry a little in outrage… and then… begin to insist that we here in the U.S…. demand our right to pursue happiness… which… means growing our gifts as we see fit… and sharing our means – those of us who want to – to do it.
At some point ‘we-the-people’ have to begin seeing… and talking about… the fact that our interests and the interests of those who speak for us… both ‘power’ (the ‘philosopher-statesmen’…) and its pundits are not only not convergent… but opposed. We are the energy on which ‘the system’ runs… and yet we are treated like disposables… like trash… our gifts… ‘the system’ so arranges things to ensure… are never seen. So we paint our graffiti on concrete… or in bits and bytes on the computer screen… we make our marks on our prison walls… we forego our gifts’ full expression for but mean existence… so the Sir Richards and the Kissingers can pretend that they save us… from the destruction they wantonly cause.
It’s not ‘the smart ones’ that we need… it’s the global releasing of the people’s energies… by freeing ourselves of guilt and shame because at last we are all interlinked by this amazing thing… which a hundred years go Nikola could foresee… called simultaneous… global… thinking.
WUR, Sunday, October 13th, 2013 radio show: “Staying Focused On Designing A Future… (Pt. 8): “the hidden tribalisms of ‘power’ (Pt. 7)”… and continuing: “The ‘Global Awakening’?… or “The Great ‘Re-Set’”? ” Draft
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“…salvation from your woes is only possible when you free yourself from the obsolete idea of patriotism and from the obedience to Governments that is based upon it, and when you boldly enter into the region of that higher idea, the brotherly union of the peoples…”
In upcoming shows we will be drawing a lot on Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, both volumes one and two, because I believe he can help us think through the juncture in the human story where we now stand… and develop greater clarity for how to proceed. And although my bringing Popper to the table reflects what I believe to be a need to come to consensus of humankind generally… I also bring him selfishly… as a way to ‘think-through’ certain areas of disagreement. But I’m beginning to suspect that my ‘disagreement’… where it exists… is partly ‘style’… partly ‘focus’… but now in retrospect I think the two are perfectly consonant.
As to ‘style’, at first, I must admit… I thought I gravitated more to Tolstoi… whose need to speak for a living expression… a living existence… of the notion ‘global humanity’… deeply resonates with me. But now in retrospect I think the two are perfectly consonant, though Popper seems slightly more resigned to the state’s existence… saying that we must concentrate on improving the conditions we find in the particular state we were born in… despite his critique of ‘sovereignty’. Although with complete assurance we can attest… both are supreme humanists.
Though Tolstoi may have been so in a broader sense:
Whoever you may be – Frenchman, Russian, Pole, Englishman, Irishman, or bohemian – understand that all your real human interests, whatever they may be – agricultural, industrial, commercial, artistic, or scientific – as well as your pleasures and joys, in no way run counter to the interests of other peoples or States; and that you are united, by mutual co-operation, by interchange of services, by the joy of wide brotherly intercourse, and by the interchange not merely of goods but also of thoughts and feelings, with the folk of other lands.
Understand that the question as to who manages to seize Wei-hai-wei, Port Arthur, or Cuba – your Government or another – does not affect you, or, rather, that every seizure made by your Government injures you, by inevitably bringing in its train all sorts of pressure on you by your government to force you to take part in the robbery and violence by which alone such seizures are made, or can be retained when made. Understand that your life can in no way be bettered by Alsace becoming German or French, and Ireland or Poland being free or enslaved – whoever holds them. You are free to live where you will, if even you be an Alsatian, an Irishman, or a Pole. Understand, too, that by stirring up patriotism you will only make the case worse, for the subjection in which your people are kept has resulted simply from the struggle between patriotisms, and every manifestation of patriotism in one nation provokes a corresponding reaction in another. Understand that salvation from your woes is only possible when you free yourself from the obsolete idea of patriotism and from the obedience to Governments that is based upon it, and when you boldly enter into the region of that higher idea, the brotherly union of the peoples, which has long since come to life, and from all sides is calling you to itself.
If people would but understand that they are not the sons of some fatherland or other, nor of Governments, but are sons of God, and can therefore neither be slaves nor enemies one to another – those insane, unnecessary, worn-out, pernicious organizations called Governments, and all the sufferings, violations, humiliations, and crimes which they occasion, would cease. (Leo Tolstoi, ‘Patriotism and Government,” May 10, 1910)
Now that’s authentic-talk. I would but add that ‘God’ goes by many names and, to my mind, they all mean: ‘the earth.’
Tolstoi shows us why ‘art’, in potential, is such a threat… how… in reaching out to all humanity… it leads us to see that state claims of ownership (of us) are patently illegitimate.
…and I want to see every child get ‘big’… to use their full human gifts…
So… I don’t think that we disagree spiritually, Popper and me, it’s rather that we have our eyes on different prizes… he’s looking at the nation-state narrowly… as a fait accompli… and as a tool (in theory) against ‘tyranny’…
(…Tolstoi, to my mind, sees ‘the human’ more clearly, and in some ways more optimistically… perhaps because he kept better company – seemed to see that ‘the ways of earth’ broadly are still in us inherently…)
…and I’ve got my mind stayed… with Tolstoi… on freedom… the accomplishment of which requires… all of us rolling along on this earth figuring out how to get there… so my eyes are stayed on the world.
This… ‘mind’s-eye-on-different-prizes’… is the source of much disagreement… this ‘looking at different things’… when we’re nominally ‘discussing’.
For example yesterday (10.10.13) I listened to a debate of sorts about ‘parental disciplining of children’ generally (including the use of ‘time-out’…) but particularly on whether parents should hit ‘their’ children…
…and I thought…
“…we’re looking at different things, them and me – different ideas… models… ‘concepts’… of the ‘human being’…. These folks seem to want a child that will ‘fit in’… a child that has learnt ‘obedience’… and I want to see every child get ‘big’… to use their full human gifts – we have different ‘objects’.”
So… as always in matters of movement… in the matter of getting from ‘here’ to ‘there’… the question arises… that can’t be denied… which is: “what is the objective?”… “what is the goal of our activism?” And for most of those voices to which the airwaves give ‘lift’, the answer is generally… unconsciously… simply: “we must preserve the system…”
…which is getting on the ‘Plato-Train’… heading for the destination, “No Change.”
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…if it’s designed not to work… that’s ‘shadow governance’…
Last week – last many weeks… years… – we’ve been saying that the governance structure we’re given to manipulate is pretense… that the little toy.car is being directed by unseen actors… and that those ‘representatives’ turning the wheel don’t alter its movement not one little bit… and even less the determination of ‘power’ to achieve its object… (and let’s not forget that this is an object set by amassed and concentrated ‘power’… so it will not… can never… reflect we-the-peoples’ interests.)
And it’s not a matter of competing interests duking it out in the polity. It’s lunacy to think that we can compete with that ever-increasing mountain of money sitting on top of us… (of course the physics changes when we interlink our energies.)
Now Bernie Sanders may rail all he likes about not letting an oligarchy rule the U.S. – but what about the world, Bernie? Who should we leave that to? Tolstoi? What about this mass of dollars that compounds itself daily… this exponential increase that confounds all containment… as it was designed to… meant to – that’s what it’s for – to defeat us… and fix in place… ‘philosopher-king-global-statesmen’…
…by the grace given by a world economic system set up by them to keep amassing it.
…all the waste of our energy…
UBS opened its first American branch in 1939, and for all we know, has likely been facilitating tax fraud ever since, but the Senate investigation focused only on 2000 to 2007. During this period, even as UBS was sharply expanding its onshore US operations by acquiring Paine Webber, expanding in investment and retail banking, it also mounted a top-secret effort to recruit wealthy Americans, spirit their money to Switzerland and other havens and conceal their assets from the IRS.
…the intoxicating pursuit of ‘the Republic’… requires fat funding…
This program, aimed at people with a net worth of $40 million to $50 million each, was staffed by fifty to eighty senior calling officers and 1,000 client advisors. Based in Zurich, Geneva, and Lugano, each officer made two to ten surreptitious trips per year to the United States, calling on thirty to forty existing clients per visit and trying to recruit new ones by attending HNW (high net worth) watering holes like Miami's Art Basel and the UBS Regatta in Newport. By 2007, this program had garnered 20,000 American clients, with offshore assets at UBS alone worth $20 billion.
To achieve these results, UBS established an elaborate formal training program, which coached bankers on how to avoid surveillance by US customs and law enforcement, falsify visas, encrypt communications, secretly move money in and out of the country and market security products even without broker/dealer licenses….
The most important point is that this entire program would clearly have been impossible without the knowledge and approval of the bank's most senior officials in Switzerland, and probably some senior US executives as well -- although the committee did not press this point….
Third, blacklisting havens focused on the wrong dimension. As Senator Levin's hearing has underscored, the real problem is a global pirate banking industry that cuts across individual havens, and includes many of our largest, most influential commercial and investment banks, hedge funds, law firms and accounting firms. From their standpoint, it doesn't much matter whether a particular haven survives, so long as others turn up to take their place in providing anonymity, security and low-tax returns. Up to now, despite blacklisting, the supply of new tax-haven vehicles has been very elastic.
On the other hand, as the UBS and LGT cases show, the dominant players in global private banking are relatively stable institutions--which makes sense, given their clients' need for stable sanctuaries. This suggests that it makes more sense to focus on regulating institutions than regulating or blacklisting physical places.
Until the UBS case, this seemed to be much more difficult than, say, beating up on some tiny and distant sultry island for shady people. Even now, after the Birkenfeld case supplied the first private banker prosecution, we have yet to see the first criminal prosecution of a top-tier private bank--apart from BCCI in the early 1990s, which had already failed and was hardly top-tier.
This is not because of a shortage of despicable behavior. For example, UBS, like most of its competitors in global private banking, has a long history of engaging in perfidious behavior, apologizing for it and then turning back to the future. This includes UBS's involvement in South Africa's apartheid debt and the accounts scandals of the 1980 involving the Marcos family; Benazir Bhutto, Mobutu Sese Seko, Holocaust victims and Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha of the 1990s; the 2001 Enron bankruptcy and the Menem scandal; the 2003 Parmalat scandal; the 2004-2006 Iran/Cuba/Saddam funds transfers scandal, for which it was fined $100 million by the Federal Reserve; the 2008 Massachusetts securities fraud case; and now the Birkenfeld matter. Furthermore, as the committee report noted, UBS has a history of violating even its own policies. From this angle, unapologetic LGT is at least not hypocritical.
…there are global statesmen with a totalitarian ambition… who move policy coherently because they have a destination… this state of things wasn’t governed into being… and it won’t be governed away…
It is also well to remember that UBS and LGT are hardly the only global private banks involved in recruiting wealthy clients to move money offshore. The committee report indicates a long list of other banks that also provided offshore services to American clients involved in the UBS and LGT cases--including Citibank (Swiss), HSBC, Barclays (Birkenfeld's original employer), Credit Suisse, Lloyds TSB, Standard Chartered, Banque du Gotthard, Centrum, Bank Jacob Safra and Bank of Montreal. In addition, there are dozens of other non-US and US banks that are also active in the offshore US private banking market…. (James S. Henry, “Attack of the Global Pirate Bankers”, August 4, 2008 edition of The Nation)
Henry shows us the amorphousness of ‘power’… the slipperiness it achieves in being global… and therefore state-less.
This ‘system’ wasn’t ‘governed’ into being and it won’t be ‘governed’ away. That’s the hard truth artists… or I should say ‘whole beings’… keep telling us… which it seems (until we have our own means for building the necessary conversations…) only they have the courage to face.
Now some may say that concentrated money means ‘greed’ only… not organized, concerted action – which the above quote refutes by the way.) But fostering greed – and clearly the global banking industry was prodding on a literal feeding frenzy – destroys our ability to be self-sufficient… by privatizing the commons… by stripping bare the resources of the planet and placing them in private hands… by forcing we-the-people to accept the barest minimum… reducing us to literal beggars – and this carnage being the result… choose to believe ‘market forces’ is but blind, full-out marching of mind-less machinery if you want to… but the inter-linkages between their financial and policy planning bodies speaks otherwise.
The critical point here to note… is that our lives are not our own. Our lives are directed by shadowy global players… who are beyond the reach of state agencies – and by this I don’t mean the inter-dependence of national currencies and economies – that declining health, however defined, in one region necessarily affects another. I don’t even mean, in a simple sense, that regional or global financial agencies like the IMP or the World Bank dictate terms to dependent states. I mean that there are global statesmen with a totalitarian ambition… who move policy coherently because they have a destination… these are folks who sit ob global planning bodies for sure… but are distinct from them… folks like Branson and Kissinger who share the goal of creating a global ‘order’ in which ‘the people’ are ‘permanently’ under control.
And they have the freedom of movement of gods… the moment an attempt at regulation extends… they slither away and are gone again. Even in instances where it seems they’re penned… and fines are levied… just as Henry says… the game goes on. And for ‘power’… that’s all that matters… because they’re in it for the long haul – and their policy-voices when candid are clear… they have a goal.
[Let’s never forget the tale Mao told… (An ancient Chinese fable...) that reflects the mindset of ‘power’ across (class) time.]
…we have to begin thinking differently… or the thoughts we’ve been trained in… reconstitute class…
Now what does Henry propose we-the-people do?
The second challenge is to organize a global alliance around this issue. This is more difficult, although steps are already being taken. Global organizations like Tax Justice International, Oxfam GB, Friends of the Earth, Global Witness and Christian Aid are converging on a new global campaign around the issue of havens and offshore tax evasion. They've been enlisting support for this effort from countries like Norway, Chile, Brazil, Spain and France, organizations like the UNDP, the World Bank and even the International Monetary Fund.
…‘power’s tactic when afraid of an action: “…get to the front and lead ’em where you want ’em to go…” and the resources they bring are very seductive… so it’s easy to lie to ourselves about it…
This is very exciting…
[Perhaps he should temper his excitement a bit… because… as we’ve been discussing with issues of re-defining ‘work’ and defining ‘happiness’… when ‘power’ is afraid of something… they ‘leap-frog’ jump to the front of it… and try to direct it…– PS]
This is very exciting, but the organizers face one critical problem--the fact there are serious conflicts of interest among developed and developing countries. The fact is that the United States, the UK and other developed countries not only lose tax revenue to haven banking; they also profit from it, because their own banks are so deeply engaged in it, especially when it involves developing countries.
Back in April 1986, this author broke the story that Citibank was actually taking far more capital out of Latin America and other developing countries than it was lending to them, despite its reputation as the largest Third World lender. Indeed, the business of helping Third World elites decapitalize their own countries had become so large and lucrative that Citi's private banking group was the bank's single most profitable division.
To achieve that feat, Citigroup resorted to skullduggery and the flouting of local laws all over the planet. This included repeatedly sending teams of private bankers undercover to countries like Brazil, Argentina, and Venezuela; helping to set up thousands of shell companies and bank accounts in offshore havens and secretly transferring funds to them; teaching its clients money-laundering tricks like mis-invoicing and back-to-back loans; designing ways to communicate with clients that kept their financial secrets safe; and overall, concealing vast sums of flight capital from Third World tax authorities (and their competitors), while lobbying Congress to insure that any foreign capital that arrived in the United States enjoyed near-zero taxes and near-Swiss secrecy. For a time the resulting tax breaks and lax banking rules that applied to "nonresident aliens" from other countries made the United States, in effect, one of the world's largest tax havens.
In short, from the 1970s to the 1990s, banks like Citigroup, BankAmerica and JP Morgan Chase (and UBS, Credit Suisse, RBS, Paribas and Barclays etc.) were behaving throughout the Third World just as badly as UBS has recently been behaving here. And their very success laid the foundations for the global private-haven banking industry with which the IRS is now struggling.
At the time, it seemed that their behavior was hurtful mainly to the developing world, which wasn't strong enough to hold Senate hearings and put Citibankers in jail. But lately it has become clear that the system has grown large enough to consume its creators.
…stateless trillions held in reserve for…
In the last thirty years, fueled by the globalization of financial services, lousy lending, capital flight and mind-boggling corruption, a relatively small number of major banks, law firms, accounting firms, asset managers, insurance companies and hedge funds have come to launder and conceal at least $10 trillion to $15 trillion of private untaxed anonymous cross-border wealth.
Rich people the world over, including tens of thousands of wealthy Americans, are now free to opt in to this sophisticated, secretive, utterly unprincipled global private banking industry. They can become, in effect, residents of nowhere for tax purposes, citizens of a brave new virtual country, which offers its inhabitants unprecedented freedom from the taxes, regulations and moral restraints that the rest of us take for granted. They wield enormous political influence even without paying taxes, merely by making contributions, threatening to withhold them--or better yet, threatening to abscond with their capital unless certain conditions are met. In a sense, this is the ultimate libertarian pipe dream: representation without taxation. But it is a nightmare for the rest of us, and we must design and organize our way around it. (James S. Henry, “Attack of the Global Pirate Bankers”, August 4, 2008 edition of The Nation)
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…we have to begin discussing how to lead ourselves… as becoming ‘big’ is what brings true happiness… as ‘rule’ forbids the development of this quality inherent in all of us… leadership… ‘rule’ legislates away our happiness…
In “Unpacking Robert Reich’s Baggage” we said that “it’s ‘power’ that keeps ‘the economy’ running by determining where money (which represents stolen earth) goes…” and from whom it’s disproportionately stolen… as Henry points out.
Now this is not how we experience the functioning of ‘the economy’ because our frame… our vision… is artificially foreshortened… by the pundits… who ever keep us looking at – and thinking in terms of – the minutiae of national ‘governance’ structures… the U.S.’s and others.
(And I’m thinking it so I’ll say it: I’m not suggesting that these pundits can do otherwise. It’s been pointed out before that they wouldn’t be there long if they started saying these things. That’s the clamp… the hold… ‘power’ has on the media… via the wage… the coerced-work system… it determines what even a good-hearted person can say over the airwaves.)
Because if we were discussing the reality of this hidden, amorphous, state-less, global governance [perhaps we need to discuss what ‘governance’ consists of… what determines the parameters in which it’s set? …] – we would begin discussing the need for we-the-people creating and claiming an open global self-governance… i.e. that rather than being led to a destination [and here the unfortunate image of cattle being led to slaughter comes to mind…] unchosen by us… we must begin discussing how to lead ourselves… reclaiming our own bodies – which is why we’ll be devoting some time on this question of leadership – and the need for us… all of us… to step up… with a global consciousness.
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So what does it mean for us?… this shadow global governance structure that is effectuated by means of the utilization… the application in the delicate or gross… the surgical or blunt use… of dollars – of amassed means for controlling the ‘political’ scene? And if we recall our definition of ‘politics’ in Waking Up – that it means the art of coercing human energy – we can see that ‘power’s actions-all resolve to this ultimately… to ‘politics’.
And as this informal, clandestine global governance structure exists… what do we propose to do about it? Do we… each one of us… want to develop our own capacities for leadership?… become ‘big’? – which is what brings true happiness.
Global governance implies a ‘clutching at’ leadership… an unwillingness to share it… and as this is a quality inherent in all of us… but the development of which (as a ‘right’ inherent in life itself) ‘rule’ forbids… ‘rule’ artificially and unnaturally limits our growth… it legislates away our happiness.
Because the ‘polity’ they want they are systematically sculpting… using ‘nation-states’ as levers to move ‘the people’… to force us to build the traps that they hang us with… as the builders of Auschwitz were consumed by their work.
There are layers and layers of intervening ‘structures’… and ‘agencies’… and ‘decision-making bodies’… between the effect (look around you for evidence of its hideousness…) and the cause … so it’s understandable that we don’t see it.
What makes the facade particularly difficult to distinguish is that most of its nominal actors of state (the ‘political class’)… the agents… believe the illusion… do their work all unconscious… play their roles without knowing them.
Virginia Woolf’s point that we are ‘creatures of illusion’ cannot be over-stated. We believe what we’re told when we’re young because – like all living things – we are built for honesty.
We are built for honesty, yet we have a system that depends on – is based on – duplicity… dishonesty… lies… depends on forcing us to be what we are not (machine-like…) and on forcing us to accept a system’s pretense of being what it is not – which can never allow us to pursue a path of true happiness… which is living our gifts… self-creation.
Imagine how much more efficient an open governance structure for the world will be! We won’t have to get on planes and have all those face-to-faces…so as to leave no traces… All this hiding / clandestine stuff destroys our humanness.
We have to recognize – start discussing – that global governance exists… we’re not talking about something phenomenal… or something that has to be created… it’s already in place, but it’s clandestine… and kept private… is tightly held in the hands of the few… and therefore monopolized… and we have to ask, “Is that right?”… right for the health and wholeness of all of us… and all life? And once we begin considering the question from all sides… we have to say, “No…” not if health and wholeness and happiness is our goal.
So where is this pack in Bhutan et al. attempting to take us?
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…how to see in the club of the budget… shadow governance…?
We took time with Galbraith because he was studying ‘power’s track… the slime they drag behind them… showing its global nature… and how ‘governance’ is done clandestine… by applying and withdrawing ‘credit’… we see this whenever large sums are exchanged between large banks and states… or large states to smaller…
…or on Galbraith’s and Henry’s scale… by the big global banks setting interest rates… and imposing ‘austerity’ globally…
…and we know that ‘austerity’ means ‘disciplining the people to accept less and less…’
…less and less control over our own lives…
…less and less earth for our personal use…
…the absence of leisure for ourselves and our children…
…the absence of health… less and less safety net…
…and of course less and less food… especially untainted and fresh….
And this is a global imposition of ‘less’… accomplished ‘simply’ by siphoning ‘money’ (a representation of earth…) out of our communities… by ‘power’s henchmen in government… quite nonchalantly… who sadly or blithely (it little matters…) cite their ‘budget authority’… raise it up high and pound it hard on our heads.
The wage work system destroys our empathy…
…the surveillance state destroys our trust…
…each one of us is meant to grow our full gifts…
…division… coercion… and necessity forestalls their development…
…the hiding and pretense warps our humanness…
…and absolutely none of it (not remotely…) brings us happiness.
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Machiavelli said… and ‘power’ obviously knows well… that “all the people ask for is to not be oppressed…” so even in this moment of dire threat (for ‘power’… and long-awaited opportunity for us…) it never occurs to them that they cannot successfully con us again. But for this they have no convincing actors among their own ranks (they don’t have anyone even remotely believable in the role of “advocate of ‘the people’”…) they’ve lost the ability to convincingly speak… even an approximate… “language of ‘the people’”… i.e. the language of ‘heart’… and this is why they need pundits who seem to know… who mouth the approximate phrases… that seem to say, “I care about the people.”
It is the pundit class… in service to its masters… that is making this happen… this propaganda attempt to ‘re-set’ our heads. There’s simply no other way to look at it.
And the thoughts I want to hear… are from the ones who declined to appear… who declined the status-perk of being numbered within such an exclusive group… providing its ‘expert-service’… and in return being treated like emperor-statesmen…
…I want to hear the thoughts of those who refused to be used in Bhutan… and who rather try to be… the ‘heart’ ‘we-the-people’ need to see.
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The evolution of business leadership away from a focus on short-term profits [as there are no ‘short-term’ profits to be had…] is essential for the future generation of leaders,” said Arianna Huffington. […i.e. to con young people…]
“We need a ‘Plan B’ for the way business is managed, starting with leadership more committed to well-being, wisdom and sustainable business success.”…
“The private sector can and must redefine both its responsibilities and its own terms of success; a Plan B for concerted, positive action that will ensure business becomes a driving force for social, environmental and economic benefit,” the group stated, adding that global society now faces severe challenges in terms of resource scarcity and continuing inequality. “While there are myriad reasons we’ve arrived at this juncture, much of the blame rests with the principles and practices of ‘business as usual’….
The declaration added that there was now no alternative but for business leaders to develop a new approach, which it many ways would constitute a new form of capitalism. (“Plan B for Business”, Eco-Business: Asia Pacific's Sustainable Business Community,
>http://www.eco-business.com/news/branson-and-zeitz-launch-plan-b-business/<)
[First we’re told “there is no alternative” to raping us and the planet… now we’re told “there is no alternative… but to appear that… present the image that… we care… that we are trying to staunch the gaping wound we opened… else ‘the people’ will be roused to examine more closely the cost of their lost lives and think… that perhaps they are the true ‘custodians’ of the earth…and our ‘work’ that’s been centuries in the making to install ‘the perfect state’ will dissolve to dust… so it’s imperative that the people not awake….” They want us to continue to believe in ‘the system’… or to at least not actively turn away… and begin discussing an authentic alternative… an alternative that would dissolve their sway over decision-making.]
When the ‘B-for-business pack’ say that what they want out of this process is for ‘capitalism’ to emerge intact… they mean they want to keep ‘the assignment of value by the miniscule few’ – their control over us – intact…
…and they’re saying that, “we wise men finally see that there is ‘value’ (as our privileged status hangs in the balance…) in “‘the people’s believing that we care about their ‘well-being’” and…
“…we can pretend to identify the ‘fundamental elements’ of this quality ‘happiness’… say we will integrate them into ‘business’… and then make you pay extra for it!”
“…that’s what ‘capitalism’ means…. It means socialized costs… our hands in your pockets… transferring wealth up… and privatizing the planet!”
It was a truly new millennial meeting of minds with all the expected agreements and disagreements. How does one structure such a new paradigm? Based on the 9 domains of GNH? Or the UN’s Millennium Development Goals? Discussions were carried out under cloudless skies and in hallowed halls with hand-painted walls. Stories of success and collapse were articulated by this most articulate of groups. Hopes ran high and visionary statements flowed. “We need to remove the idea of private wealth from public decision-making,” said one delegate.
[…now that’s cutting edge…]
“The inseparability of all that space contains is the key to bringing about fundamental change,” said geneticist David Suzuki.
[…in his best con-artist jargon…]
“Don’t get too romantic or ideological about nature,” countered Mark Mancall, “We are the custodians.” Suzuki warned that progress doesn’t always stick. “What we thought were great victories were just skirmishes,” he said. “We didn’t get to the root. We were too concerned with the symptoms and not with the underlying root causes.
[…one shudders to imagine what he considers “the root”…]
The Secretariat group hopes to identify these root causes and provide the best solutions known to mankind today. One root cause or symptom repeatedly discussed was income distribution. It was agreed that equality was more important for happiness than a country’s GDP and relative wealth on the world platform. Studies have shown that inequality is divisive and socially corrosive, and ends up hurting the have’s as well as the have-nots. Francis Moore-Lappe suggested that people either “reclaim or come up with another word for ‘democracy’, another way to come together.” (Written by noajones on February 14, 2013. Published in Relationship trouble on Asia, Bhutan, >http://futurechallenges.org/local/a-new-development-paradigm-takes-shape-in-bhutan/<)
The arrogance of these guys is truly breathtaking. Here we have Francis Moore-Lappe saying to this gathering that they should “reclaim or come up with another word for ‘democracy’, another way to come together…” and this with the example of the Occupy Movement still fresh in our minds.
…figuring out what we need to be ‘happy’ is not difficult… we don't want to be forced to work anymore…
The tone of this would have us believe that ‘inequality’ is a continued mystery… as if Bentham hasn’t been pulling their coat for centuries… and others (like Sir Thomas More, for example) before him… and that we’re all collectively stuck in an early 18th century (or Medieval…) boggle… all asking, “where on earth did all these po’ folks come from?”
Figuring out what we need to be ‘happy’ is not difficult… You don’t need to drop your millions… fly in your experts… host them royally…
…fold your bills back in your pocket… here it is: we don’t want to be forced to work anymore… we want to fully develop our gifts as we see fit… in common with our sisters and brothers…. We don’t want to be divided from each other… we want to fully explore our earth again… with love in hand… and get to know our plant and animal friends… we want to repossess our time… a.k.a. our lives…
There you have your answer. Take it back to your masters… we want our lives back… and you and your masters both… off our backs.
–––
Their ‘New Development Paradigm’ will probably look like this… ‘benevolent’ ‘rule’… rules…
There are several points to keep in mind in our analysis of this promulgation…
…that in it we are seeing both a sense of urgency on the part of ‘power’ to recapture the eyes of youth… and defeat the ‘Global Awakening” (“…the great ‘re-set’…”)
…and I think we can see in it Bentham’s ‘energy-efficiency’ sanction… the underlying imperative driving his injunction to ‘power’ to always… always… control the definitions.
Which is why they’re trying…
…to seize our language of hope…
…use it to ‘re-set’ youth…
…to accept status-quo….
…to steal the language of love…
…lull us back into somnolence…
…accepting their prod into re-formed cages.
But they have no ones who still own their mother-tongue…
…can even attempt to speak it…
…with any degree of fluency… or credibility.
Their ‘new development paradigm’ probably will look like this:
One… their ‘benevolent’ guidance (this goes without saying…);
Two… ‘money’ is a hindrance to clandestine reign…
Three… youth get to ‘choose’ the ‘service’ by which they ‘prove’ their dedication to the ‘planet’ (their ‘worth’….)
‘Power’ will no doubt attempt to use our ‘mother’ (i.e. ‘earth’) tongue… but in their mouths the words will be as dust… for when they say ‘the earth’ what they mean is but themselves… the ‘wise’ and ‘just’ ‘philosopher-statesmen’…
The language of ‘hierarchy’ of course must be massaged… as the youth all want to move beyond it… so they’ll try to develop softer tones… like ‘qualities of service’… or perhaps… more gentle… ‘roles’…
After all, we must move beyond all ‘division’ between us… we all must play our parts to heal the planet… ‘the wise and the just’ will be the mask they choose to con us… to keep us in our boxes… and train us to call them “our gardens…”
–––
WUR, Sunday, October 20th, 2013 radio show: “Staying Focused On Designing A Future… (Pt. 9): “the hidden tribalisms of ‘power’ (Pt. 8)”… and continuing: “The ‘Global Awakening’?… or “The Great ‘Re-Set’”? ” Draft
…there has to be a way for us to go around the weight… of the machines of states (both shadow and official…) and start building mutual aid…
Thank-yous are due… a few… a mere drop in our sea of resistance to earth-eating and trashing all over the globe… thanks are due to you in Buharest, Romania who sent Big Oil packing… and in New Brunswick ‘Idle No More’ is occupying…. Stay strong. And to all our brothers and sisters resisting beat-down status in the fast food industry… and in transportation… folks at Bay Area Rapid Transit… resisting management efforts to force you to be mere automatons: stay strong.
And to our brothers and sisters in Egypt… I can’t help but feel that we in the U.S. have abdicated the responsibility that comes from having more room to maneuver in resistance. There has to be a way for us to go around the weight of the machines of states – shadow and otherwise – and start building means for mutual aid – as human beings to other human beings – we are the same… and we have the same interests… which are not those of states.
–––
…KPFZ-Allen: the videos and mp3s are much needed…
Before we begin I’d like to urge all who can… to urge KPFZ – Lakeport’s GM, Allen Markowski, to get up off those files! – audio and video – as the Nascence website needs some fresh tools! He filmed an hour and a half long conversation I had with their local Timebanks coordinator (Terry, I believe)… as well as the radio conversation itself. So… Allen… if you could at least send me the mp3 of the radio show I can share it on the website… and those two videos… when you can get to it… would be a real gift for the Nascence.
–––
…you are invited to Frank Moore’s, the shaman performance artist, latest dance jam celebration…
And… my clumsy mistake in misreading the announcement of Frank Moore’s, the shaman performance artist, latest dance jam celebration… may have unintentionally tapped into the truth… I didn’t understand when I read the announcement that he recently passed and the party is a tribute to his life. Frank invited D-Way and me to his internet TV-show on July 29th of last year when our radio program was only two months old… and his graciousness in helping us forward these ‘time to end coerced work’ conversations… was a singular one for quite some time. This man full of fun… for whom the word ‘undaunted’ was written… will… trust… undoubtedly be in attendance… so those who can… get your groove on… “bring your passions’… and come… November 2, 2013… 8 PM… Temescal Art Center… 511 – 48th St. (at Telegraph) in Oakland. For more information, call: 510. 526.7858 or email: fmoore@eroplay.com
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…infants are here to show us that we’re born happy… so the fact that its ‘pursuit’ is an issue… exposes the illegitimacy of what states call ‘governance’…
*“The most important Manhattan Projects of the future…”
The most important Manhattan Projects of the future will be vast government-sponsored enquiries into what the politicians and the participating scientists will call ‘the problem of happiness’ – in other words, the problem of making people love their servitude. Without economic security, the love of servitude cannot possibly come into existence…. The love of servitude cannot be established escept as the result of a deep, personal revolution in human minds and bodies…. Today, it seems quite possible that the horror may be upon us within a single century…. [We] have only two alternatives to choose from: either a number of national, militarized totalitarianisms… or else one supra-national totalitarianism… (Aldous Huxley writing in 1952, quoted by Erich Fromm, The Sane Society)
(from Blog 52: “Becoming the Function”)
[“…The love of servitude cannot be established except as the result of a deep, personal revolution in human minds and bodies…” and clearly this has happened… as we’re made for honesty… and the requirement to perform in order to eat… is a crime against authenticity… forcing us to make our peace with duplicity…. But I would argue that this shift… or mutilation… or ‘soul-distortion’… occurred millennia earlier… with the ‘invention’ of slavery… and that “work for ‘subsistence’”… though a hard-fought-for advantage… is functionally but a re-invention.]
When I typed up that blog… watching the malevolent schemes of ‘power’ unfold… to manufacture ever more ‘crises’… and then hearing about the HAARP machine… [see the Leuren Moret article, “The Historical Roots of the New World Order and Its Permanent War Economy”: The Historical Roots of the New World Order and Its Permanent War Economy] …and all the designing of ultra-low-frequency and radio-signal weaponry… it seemed ‘power’ was focusing more on the techno-military than on the psycho-martial fix… and I wrote this:
But… I think they've decided that…
…the “happiness project” may be dispensed with,
…and that they can manage manufactured unhappiness,
…if ‘chaos’ and ‘crises’ pummel our consciousness…
…such that survivors are pounded into ‘passive obedience’…
…with the rest of us deleted from “what exists.”
– So how can we begin to make ourselves rather than cooperating with the plans of others to make us?
(from Blog 52: “Becoming the Function”)
Now it seems… four years since…
…that although ‘power’ in this emergency… for it…
…and this “come on let’s roll!” opportunity for us…
…‘power’ likely deploys all its weaponry…
…is throwing everything in its arsenal and playbook at us…
…still…
…clearly…
…Aldous has a perspicacity extreme…
…the likes of which today…
…is seldom seen…
…thank you Aldous for your heads-up!…
…though to do with it we knew not what…
…’til Nikola’s endowment fully devolved…
…and all of us around the globe…
…are now taking it on.
–––
…so as the conditions of our existence have progressively worsened… decade after decade… ‘governance’ is a fraud… you let our human energy go and we’ll show you it’s not hard to steadily improve our conditions of life… we are rich in gifts… we just want to be able to use them…
**“Dr. Mengele was…
Dr. Mengele was indefatigable in the exercise of his functions. He spent long hours in his laboratories, then hurried to the unloading platform, where the daily arrival of four or five trainloads of Hungarian deportees kept him busy half the day. (Miklos Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account, p. 33)
And are we not all “indefatigable in the exercise of [our] functions”?… ‘functions’ given us by a system that is illegitimate… as it gets in the way of our ‘pursuit of happiness’…
–––
We have been discussing the fact that we are being led… without our consent or consultation… and that to refuse the destination we must develop… each one of us… our leadership capacity.
Last week we noted the profound media silence about the reality of a very shadowy, informal, global governance structure… arguing that were we to begin discussing it, our thought process would, in all likelihood, have been carried into dangerous waters for ‘power’…
…though essential waters for us…
…we would have been carried to see the pressing need for we-the-people to begin creating and claiming not just an open global self-governance… but our own intelligence… our own capacities for leadership (we can’t have one without the other…)
…we would have seen that rather than being led to a destination [and here the unfortunate image of cattle being led to slaughter comes to mind…] unchosen by us… that we must begin discussing how to lead ourselves… how to reclaim our own bodies… which include hearts and minds… undivided.
…the system’s stripping us of our power… is… the stripping us of our happiness…
But in thinking about this further it occurs that perhaps we need to discuss what ‘governance’ consists of… what determines the parameters in which it’s set? So today we’ll talk more about it…
(…we’ll be considering whether it’s helpful to think of ‘governance’ as a game in which we play both ‘defense’ and ‘nascence’… – i.e. that it’s about noticing what’s around us that we want to keep… and simultaneously seeing what needs to be… in order to restore… and secure further… health, wholeness and happiness… – i.e. fully-developing individualities – I think that if we know this as… hold clearly before our eyes as… the goal (fully-developing individualities…) it will guide ‘governance.’ This will come up later as well… when we discuss the point Popper made in chapter 6 (in volume one) called “Totalitarian Justice”… his point that the system of class – though he didn’t put it like that – rests on, and fosters, a ‘collectivist’ rather than an individualistic definition (and existence) of ‘altruism’…. This is a particularly needed discussion for us… not just because this is a key piece for us to see in order to understand how the stripping of we-the-people of the power we were born with was accomplished (the ‘mental control’ or ‘internalized discipline’ Bentham wrote of…) and that to ‘begin again’ to form our ‘more perfect union’ requires fully-functioning humans…
…but also because facing an entrenched ‘power’-system arguably requires ‘altruism’ of the ‘individual’ sort (which ‘power’ suppresses precisely to forestall such challenges to its rule.
And as ‘a future that’s free’ – i.e. one based in whole human beings – requires not just different… but opposite… operating premises… ‘a future that’s free’ must advance an individualistic definition of ‘altruism’ (i.e. we don’t subserve individualities to tribes… whether that tribe is ‘environmentalist’… or ‘anarchist’… as John Trudell pointed out a few weeks back (and… an aside: whoever deleted that John Trudell audio file… please add it back to the mix… we need it.)
And last week we asked… what does it mean for us?… this shadow global governance… and…
…as this informal, clandestine global governance structure exists… what do we propose to do about it?… how do we build mutual aid habits around it?
And we asked… do we… each one of us… want to develop our own capacities for leadership?… become ‘big’? – which (the use and development of our gifts…) in furthering good fellowship… is what brings true happiness.
Global governance by the few, we argued, displays a sad – if unsurprising – unwillingness to share… as leadership is a gift we all wear quite handsomely… when allowed to strut our stuff we joyfully find… our strong wings weren’t left behind… in that dank prison called the forced-work system… but were carefully folded… and tightly kept… for those first few drops of encouragement… so that spirit… refreshed and re-set… may once again pursue happiness.
And we said that as ‘leadership’ is a quality inherent in all of us… a ‘right’, in fact, inherent in life itself… but the development of which ‘rule’ forbids… and is therefore illegitimate… ‘rule’ artificially and unnaturally limits our growth – it legislates away… gets in the way of… our happiness…
And we said that as we are built for honesty, yet forced to accept a system that depends on – is based on – duplicity… dishonesty… lies… a system that depends on forcing us to be what we are not (machine-like…) and on forcing us to accept the pretense of a system as real… it’s claim of being what it patently is not – we are prevented ‘by statute’ from pursuing true happiness… which is living authentically… self-creation.
We said that as we are being mis-led… away from authenticity (truth)… and away from developing our leadership and our gifts… that we have to begin discussing how to lead ourselves… as becoming ‘big’ is what brings true happiness….
And this is the juncture where we now stand.
–––
…if the aim of ‘rule’ (the system) is totalitarian… arguably it is totalitarian… as ‘rule’ has the weight to set that tendency… and the tendency is therefore weighted to produce its intended outcome…
Karl Popper has rightly pointed out that ‘the future’… the form of self-organization we agree to… is up to us… and even with totalitarianism’s ugly head rearing itself around him as he wrote… he still believed in the capacity of the existing institutions to rise to the occasion and wrestle with it…. He wrote (in his chapter, “The Principle of Leadership” in The Open Society and Its Enemies: The Spell of Plato):
Even the most powerful tyrant depends upon his secret police, his henchmen and his hangmen. This dependence means that his power, great as it may be is not unchecked, and that he has to make concessions, playing one group off against another. It means that there are other political forces, other powers besides his own, and that he can exert his rule only by utilizing and pacifying them. This shows that even the extreme cases of sovereignty are never cases of pure sovereignty. (p. 122)
And while I commented on the page, Karl Popper on Authentic Education for Youth…, that it’s only from the perspective of ‘the whole’ that the truth can be known… a point Popper has made himself in another context… ‘the whole’ being a global system that cannot be reined in by individual nation-state actors… this doesn’t on it’s face negate what Popper is saying… it merely broadens its applicability… its effects… to the world scene… recalling Terence Hopkins’ point that ‘sovereignties’ compete on the global stage.
But it does pose, I think, a challenge to Popper’s broad sense of cautious optimism… if not flat-out contradicting it… that is, if we admit the determination implied in ‘power’ becoming global into the conversation – i.e. ‘power’ becoming functionally totalitarian because it is global… because its aim (no matter its impossibility…) the effect of its ‘unfelt imaginations’ to use Shakespeare’s language… of its steady forward thrust… is that it does (at least in tendency… until we mount a challenge…) eliminate all opposition, options or challenges to its rule… i.e. setting the tendency made by its global ambition to wipe out even the thought of any challenge to it has been entirely successful.
And let’s never forget Aldous’ point that between ‘national’ or ‘supra-national’ tyrannies there’s little to choose….
Our only course is to end ‘rule’ …
(…and the quotes around ‘rule’ are to indicate… the degree to which it has been insinuated… incorporated… in us… we class-bound humans…)
…central banks suck our energy (represented by money) out of us… and earth… as we rape it… and recycle it to more raping… and to states who chain us for ‘power’…also: is ‘class’ an advance… or an energy-sink and a blockage?
And although our global resistance is building… (all over the world Grandmother is shaking us awake from our long slumber… because the threat is so great…)
(…because ‘power’ has set a weight – and here perhaps we should consider simply how the ‘central bank’ functions to draw all our energy to one hub and… using its discretion… funnels it out again… in such a way that the world is turned constantly to ‘power’s advantage: the banks via ‘credit’ suck money out of us – we who are the hands that literally rape the planet – and use it to feed the nation-states… who keep us in chains… and then banks also use it to refuel the raping… again and again…
…so it is a weight that increases the advantage of ‘power’ with each turn it makes… with each turn adds to its mass… which then keeps increasing its advantage all over again… continuously… it fattens its finances… according to the terms it established – so we have to see the obvious… that the terms themselves are rigged… and the only way out is ‘distributed generation’…)
…we haven’t yet developed the mechanisms – both ‘defensive’ and ‘nascent’ (and it could be that the mechanisms we develop to resist… are also the mechanisms that we use for self-governance…) – that would allow us to grapple with the global threat… partly because ‘power’ acts in secret… and largely because we are denied the means to talk about it (globally.)
(And ‘defensive’ is that window through which we see the need to hold on to what we’ve created – while inter-linking our efforts with our brothers and sisters globally… i.e. with our eyes on a vision… which we use as our guideposts… for structuring discussions and building a plan…
…and ‘nascent’ is that window through which the future beckons… through which we see the need to build… and feel the urge to ‘found’ – while inter-linking our efforts with our brothers and sisters globally… i.e. with our eyes on a vision… which we use as our guideposts… for structuring discussions and building a plan…
…and both views call up the quality of leadership in every one of us…)
And it seems to me Popper was not being as ruthlessly consistent in his thinking as we need him to be… and if this is so, I think the reason may be laid at the feet of the ‘progress’ mythology. Although his critique of ‘historicism’ discredits the notion of progressively unfolding ‘stages’…
(In Beginning Again I argue that a good short-hand for the ‘historicist myth’ might be ‘story-leading-reality’ – the notion that ‘history’ is unfolding in some predetermined manner… according to some story or other… whether the story is Hegel’s (and ‘power’s) ‘Idea’ [of ‘Perfection’] ‘realizing itself’… or Marx’s and Engel’s ‘development of the productive forces’…)
(…and as an aside… I believe Popper’s concerns about the ‘class’ uses of ‘tribe’ – the base mindset of ‘class’ of the ‘citizen – barbarian’ divide… [I like Virginia Woolf’s language, ‘the two worlds’… described in this 03.24.13 audio-blog called “What defines ‘class’? The mindset of ‘in’ and ‘out’” (Pt. 1)…] about her book Three Guineas]… set him up I suspect to make some unwarranted assumptions about ‘tribe’ in a non-class context… i.e. to harbor erroneous notions about earth-connected peoples.)
So while his ‘historicism’ critique includes a debunking of the ‘stages of history’ bunk, Popper’s humanism (‘humanism’ in the sense of ‘believing in human goodness’ and our capacity to ‘figure things out’ and to solve the problems that confront us…) seems to have led him into an uncritical acceptance of ‘civilization’-mythology… an acceptance that I would consider ‘historicist’… by which I mean that the notion that ‘humans continuously strive to improve their conditions’… or, as I would put it, ‘grow their gifts’… is often used to ‘disappear’ non-class peoples and to uncritically imagine the invention of ‘class’ to be a result of efforts to ‘grow our gifts’ continuously –
(…as opposed to being the result of an elite’s efforts to own, marshal and exploit all the gifts of a global humanity…)
– while I see ‘class’ as an energy-sink and a blockage.
…‘power’ is leading us to but a deepening of ‘class’… to ask how we can begin leading ourselves… we must confront the past…
But whether Popper believed that ‘class’ was an ‘advance’ or not… many of us do… so let’s take a moment to talk about it. It may be that at base this issue is a version of “Socrates’ Dilemma” that Popper pointed us to… and which we mentioned during this show a couple weeks ago…
(This is the key dilemma of ‘class’… for getting out of it…. We the people are land-bound birds… with heavy wings never stretched for flight… trying to overcome… the weight of millennia upon us – but it lifts with but our testing of it… if we but trust it will.)
And Hegel’s notion is also a version of this seeming dilemma… the notion that ruthless ‘Reason’ must shake… out of our alleged lethargy… we earth-connected peoples… shake us awake from our dreary (or child-like – these guys put it variously…) state of “identity with ‘mere’ mature”…
…as is Marx’s and Engel’s notion – which they used Hegel to validate – that the ‘forces of Greed’ played a positive part in history because it shook we sleepy (read: happy) people awake (i.e. ‘helped’ us ‘see’ our worth lay only in our ‘utility’ to ‘power’) –
(…and how dare we, really… how dare we be happy when ‘power’ was mired in its ‘life-and-death-struggle’ to conquer the forces of ‘UnReason’ and realize its dreams of ‘Perfection’ – while we lazy dullards want only to live well and love – how dare we be happy when ‘power’ was “mired in the muck” (read: us)…
[…and here I must interrupt the interruption to encourage all who can to request and read Miklos Nyiszli‘’s Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account from your library… the existence of which is a gift nonpareil… and which gives us – among much much more than just this – a good example of this psychological dynamic:
Dr. Mengele was indefatigable in the exercise of his functions. He spent long hours in his laboratories, then hurried to the unloading platform, where the daily arrival of four or five trainloads of Hungarian deportees kept him busy half the day.
Unceasingly the new convoys marched off in columns of five, flanked by SS guards. I watched one come in and line up. Although my vantage point was at some distance from the tracks and my view obstructed by the maze of barbed wire fences, I could still see that this convoy had been expelled from some fair-sized city: the prisoners' clothes were smartly tailored, many were wearing new poplin raincoats, and the suitcases they carried were of expensive leather. In that city, wherever it was, they had managed to create for themselves a pleasant, cultured way of life. And that was the cardinal sin for which they were now paying so dearly. (p. 33)] [Beginning sometime this December, 2013 we’ll we reading and discussing together some or all of this book… on the page: Miklos Nyiszli Lessons On Class]
…so was ‘power’ mired in the muck of our ‘imperfection’?…
…or mired in reality in the muck of their belief …
…in their own insufficiency…
…betrayed… unconsciously… they must surely have thought…
…by Grandmother… the dark… the unseen… forces of Chaos…
…surely it was she who left them hanging in that tree…
And now we are left…
…with all these descendants…
…of the bitter children of Abandonment…
…determined to ‘prove’…
…so all will see…
…their ‘incontestable’
…‘sufficiency’…
Why does this matter?
It matters because we humans are living in “an age on the verge of change…” and we have some decisions to make about a change in direction… we are asking ourselves how do we create a future based on different premises… as we’re coming to see that the premises themselves must change if we are to achieve a shift to authenticity… and we’re faced with a very entrenched interest called ‘power’ that is erecting apace… the facade of ‘change’… with the goal but to con us with more of the same…
…and we-the-people must decide…
…if we’re tired of just being along for the ride…
…if we’re willing to put false division aside…
…and get on the same page…
…which means the same side…
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10.24.13… Brothers and sisters: With Karl Popper’s help we’ve been attempting to come to grips with the implications (for our ‘selves’… our souls… and necessarily then… for our common humanity…) of giving our allegiance to the state… arguing that doing so has meant (and can only mean) betraying our common humanity and the earth…
…as allegiance to the ‘common wealth’ (the group project of raping the earth so that it may be converted from common treasure to private ownership…) has meant – and will continue to mean while it exists – giving our allegiance to ‘princes’… to ‘statesmen’… to puffs-up-in-love-with-an-illusion…
…and that to establish our world based on (the opposite operating premise inherent in) distributed generation… we have to develop – each one of us… our leadership.
This Sunday, October 27, 2013 we begin that conversation.
At this moment we are globally pondering… globally trying to see… what the qualities of a new world – beyond commodification and rank – would have to be… for us to constitute the opposite of class authentically.
It’s time for us to embark on our common road together… toward “Reclaiming Our Stolen Gifts… Our Leadership… To Establish A Future Based On Distributed Generation.”
We begin by looking at the question of ‘leadership.’
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* “On ‘Leadership’ and ‘Self-Organization’… on ‘Poor’ and ‘Rich’”
[From… Karl Popper on Authentic Education for Youth…: In upcoming WUR shows we will be discussing not just Popper’s insights on ‘authentic education’… and the fostering of ‘leadership’… but also whether, or to what degree, these insights bear on the possibilities for ‘authentic governance’… i.e. we will be challenging this seeming sacrosanct notion of ‘rule’. We have to challenge the notion of ‘rule’ because that’s the only way out… as our global ‘intercourse’ must be effectuated somehow…. We either leave it to those who see us and the earth as means for them to achieve their illusion of supremacy… or we grow up as a global humanity. – PS]
Labor unions are anathema to ‘power’ because in them they see the capacity for ‘self-organization’… or another way of saying (seeing) this… they see in them a capacity for ‘leadership’ – they see a capacity that could potentially step into an assumed ‘vacuum’… a gap in service provision, say… or food distribution….
So let’s talk about this question of ‘self-organization’ in a transitional period.
On a previous show we talked about Petr Kropotkin’s broken heart [watching totalitarianism wither the hopes of those who had welcomed the Russian Revolution…] because he felt that maybe he hadn’t thought through well enough this question of the transitional period and the need for food…. So let’s do that work now. Let’s think that through now.
We-the-people have been conditioned to see ourselves (or others among us) as ‘poor’ (whether in ‘thought’ or in ‘possessions’…) and ‘power’ as ‘rich’ (whether in ‘thought’ or in ‘possessions’…)
(…and Bill McKibben’s speech provides a good illustration of this… when he says, “…the reason corporations should not have the right of free speech is because they’re simple. If you want to build a car efficiently a corporation is a great tool. They are far more capable of executing a plan… it has a single-minded focus on creating wealth… like the Koch Brothers.” (…I heard this excerpt on 10.08.13 on KPFA.) Such language contributes to the mythology of dispassionate ‘machine-like market forces’… as well as the mythology of the ‘innovativeness’… the ‘productive genius’… of concentrated ‘power’ – “it may have no conscience but it sure gets things done.” But ‘it’ is not doing anything… we-the-people are the ones who are getting everything done… and we can either stay in harness and be directed by actual, real, literal sociopaths-in-love-with-an-imagined-paterfamilias (and not metaphors for sociopathy…) or we can begin directing our own energies…)
…and to the degree we feel (fear) this… to that degree we fear opening our hearts to the possibility of freedom… i.e. true freedom… from ‘necessity’… from coercion… and from the fear of necessity and coercion.
But before we begin this discussion I think we should ground ourselves in this: the whole wage-work / coerced work system promotes a callousness towards our brothers and sisters. The grief beneath these words have never been probed: “if you can get the many chasing money…” – we don’t trust ‘power’ but we don’t yet trust each other.
What we don’t see… because ‘power’ has blindered our side-wise glances successfully… is that what we see in ‘power’s ‘wealth’… or ‘capacity’… is but our reflected selves… the extraction of our wealth… our wealth appropriated… our renounced gifts… our earth’s boundless riches… seized… using us as means… to cast our self-knowledge of abundance into shadow (“Keep It In Its Container.” It begins that early.)
But with ‘distributed generation’ we create ‘a new abundance’… in aligning our lives with truth.
(‘Power’ knows this… that we are the source of all abundance… sees that the only way to restore the earth is to feed our energy back into it… just as they finessed the guileless in Detroit to attempt to cleanse vacant lots of contamination. But for ‘power’ the risk of our reconnection to earth is immense… and it knows this too… so it’s determined to get in front – and stay in front – of this (reconnection.)
“What we want” is what we’ve always wanted: to explore our earth without fear… to walk its roads and know that anywhere we stop we’ll find a welcome… because we are… each one… as stars to the other… and with a ready pace we embrace our sisters and brothers. (And in future shows we’ll be talking about the connection between leadership and cross-fertilization… how the confluence of diverse perspectives helps to stimulate leadership….)
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There is an existing governance structure for the world… it is a ‘shadow structure’… i.e. it is ‘informal’ and depends on (embeds itself in) secrecy… but it is this shadowy web… that we must consciously ‘exit’… as we begin weaving an alternative… even as we reclaim its stolen capacity as our own.
We have to devise fluid structures that survive attempts to re-establish ‘rank’… hierarchy.
Until now… we’ve mouthed the thoughts of ‘power’ pretty exclusively… turned our backs pretty sharply on those who dared to let reality creep into their speech…
Until now… we’ve mouthed the thoughts of ‘power’ pretty exclusively… turned our backs pretty sharply on those who dared to let reality creep into their speech…
…but not today….
(…and I have to share this quote from a man who spoke these words two thousand four hundred and sixty years ago… more or less:
The commands of law are artificial, those of nature necessary. The commands of law are the result of agreement, not of growth; the commands of nature are the result of growth, not of agreement. Therefore the transgressor of the law, if he escapes the notice of those who made the agreement, is free of dishonor or punishment, but not if he is seen. But suppose a man goes against possibility and does violence to something that has grown up in nature, if he escapes the notice of all men, the harm is no less; if all see him, the harm is no greater. For the damage is not a matter of opinion but of reality. The point of this inquiry is that the majority of the rights laid down by law are at enmity with nature. (Antiphon writing about 450 B.C.)
This is what I hoped to show in The Talking Tree… that we’re stuck in the same story.)
Today other voices are being raised that counter false division… that refuse to say ‘the poor’ are anything but the shadowy unseen figures that lurk behind the scenes… stroking their weight of gold and watching the globe to anticipate where it must be placed… to lure the unsuspecting and the complicit with its ‘credit’…
(…and today [10.24.13] we were given a really good illustration of this when the City of Fresno demolished yet another encampment… a small, established group of women had built community together… good fellowship… were causing harm to no one… but the City found their living arrangement… by its very existence… posed an intolerable challenge to the logic of ‘the state’ – the ideology… propaganda… that it’s needed to ‘protect us’…. When one of the women who’d lived there for three years was asked, “What will you do now?” she replied, “Let go and let God figure it out.” That is richness. Thank you sister for that gift.)
Globally we are seeing that the presented governance structure is paraded like PR… a charade to entertain and ‘occupy’ ‘the people’… to satisfy with pretense our need to believe in some degree of ‘fairness’ or ‘legitimacy’ in the rationale we’re given to ‘justify’ our lost lives.
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‘Ponzi scheme’ defined: “…a form of fraud in which belief in the success of a nonexistent enterprise [in our case called ‘progress’] is fostered by the payment of quick returns to the first investors from money invested by later investors [our ‘investment’ coerced… extracted with violence]. Named after Charles Ponzi (died 1949), who carried out such a fraud (1919 – 20.)”
So ‘progress’ always was a Ponzi scheme… the former so-called ‘European peasantry’ is paid off with so-called ‘New World’ blood… and on it went… each ‘new discovery’ or ‘new conquest’ in reality new rape and pillage of the earth… grabbed and stuffed into the maw of ‘power’… that eats without cessation and without thanks… its only thought how the expense of each new conquest can be pushed off down the road… its only thought ‘the race’… to be the ‘last man standing’… the one who rules o’er all… amidst the Pyramid’s collapse… the one on whom the crown is planted… ‘controlling interest’ of the world… who calls the tune the earth-entire must dance to… all living-now… all coming… and all thought of what can be.
(It wants to triumph especially over our sense of our own possibilities… we… as from ‘power’s earliest beginnings… being the critical ground to ‘cover’ and to claim.)
A Ponzi scheme which sucked us all into the machinery of ‘power’… as drivers and as fuel (in truth its ‘fuel’ we all were simply…) eyes full of its false promises of payment down the road… a promissory note that never could be paid…
…but that we didn’t know.
And so we let our hearts turn cold and brittle… our faces frozen masks… so we could betray each other… and crisply turn our backs… until we caught our sad reflections in the glass… and, all-unwilling, saw the shadow that looked back.
We class-conflicted humans… with our eyes on ‘power’s purse… for long now we’ve avoided our devastated earth… but now that purse… it shakes out empty… and at last we turn to truth… and our gaze now that we see her… without judgment… she returns.
And now there’s no one left to con… the Pyramid is coming down… and with it banners, walls, illusions… all…
…all fallen back to earth…
…and now…
…we look around.
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In earlier iterations of this apocalyptic confrontation of ‘power’ with ‘the people’ – and a brief pause here to thank the man who recently published a book on the Occupy movement (I believe it had the word ‘apocalypse’ in the title…) for the information that the ancient meaning of the word ‘apocalypse’ was “to uncover” or “to reveal.”
(…and whenever I hear people refer to ‘Ancient Greece’ I think, “thank you, thank you Martin Bernal… who wrote Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Volume 1: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785 – 1985… for the necessary reminder that ‘Ancient Greece’ was an invention – the concept… the lie… the propaganda… ‘Ancient Greece’…. The ‘ancient world’ was ‘the Great Mediterranean Bowl’…. Here’s one example (as well as an example of how we uncover the truth [reality] by following our questions…) I was just reading the “Epistle” to Sir Thomas More’s Utopia… in which the writer tells a story about Diogenes “now, who’s ‘Diogenes’?,” I wondered – who… when he saw his fellow townspeople in urgent preparations for an invasion by Alexander the Great… began rolling his tub up and down a hill. When someone stopped and asked him why he was rolling his tub up and down a hill, he replied, “everyone else is so busy, I thought I should be busy too….” When I went to the footnotes to find out more about this strange tale, I learned it was from ‘Lucian’ – “well, who’s ‘Lucian’?” – and I found out that Lucian was a Syrian… born about 120 A.D…. who went to Athens to learn the ancient Greek language so he could read the works written in it…)
He described it as a moment of enlightenment or revelation… a point of crossing-over from which one can’t cross back… and he said that many members of Occupy had experienced this ‘Thelma and Louise’ moment….
(…and this is another good example of how ‘power’ changes the meanings of words it’s threatened by…)
But to return to this thread of ‘leadership’… in earlier iterations of this apocalyptic clash of ‘power’ with our refusal to go back to our debased status… ‘power’s m.o. (modus operandi…) was to identify the ‘leadership’ and get rid of it….
Of course they still do this… even with ‘Occupy – which professed no leadership – they did this. I remember hearing that ‘certain occupiers’ (who not-coincidently were key to the encampment’s success…) were hit with ‘stay-away’ orders from the courts.
But missing from the discussions of ‘leadership’ – a thread that it’s critical that we-the-people take up – is “where are we going? …” “leadership to what?…”
Because… how… for any group that is activist… can ‘leadership’ of any form exist… if that question hasn’t occurred to it? if the only thing it says is, “Resist! Resist! Resist!”? If that’s the extent of our activism then there truly is no leadership… and ‘leadership’ we need… otherwise our ship is rudderless… and founders in the blast of wind or water ‘power’ brings… as we sit and motionlessly dream…
So rather than ‘no leaders’… it seems a key part of our motto must be “all of us are leaders”… individually… collectively… severally…
…individually… collectively… severally…
…we know where we’re going…
…and our oars find ‘fit’ in the same ship…
…and they pull in stroke together…
…and we find we’re moving forward… finally…
…finally rowing in the same direction…
…and all knowing that when we reach our destination…
…we will look around and notice we can breathe…
…as free beings…
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