Staying Focused on Designing A Future…
On Not Getting Divided
This continues the conversations: Beginning To Rebuild Our Freedom and To Rebuild Our Freedom and Classifying Will Not Bring ‘Class’ To A Close: The Case For Not Labeling Our Future Freedom
(See also: “Occupying Our Commons”
“Getting To Our Future Freedom” and Conversation with Joel McIver)
08.19.13:
This page presents partial transcripts of our discussions on the Waking Up Radio Show beginning with the August 25, 2013 show.
The following two audio-file-excerpts from our June 3, 2012 show will be discussed on the August 25, 2013 show: **“Staying Focused on Designing A Future”** and **“…we can call that ‘love’… or we can call that ‘being human beings’… focusing on what works for us automatically leads away from this system… coercion runs through every aspect of this system…”**
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Excerpts and audio files follow.
For other audio files visit: Waking Up Radio Audio Conversations Page.
Initial thoughts for the * August 25, 2013 show.
Initial thoughts for the * September 1, 2013.
Initial thoughts for the * September 8, 2013.
Initial thoughts for the * September 15, 2013 .
Initial thoughts for the * September 22, 2013 .
Initial thoughts for the * .
Initial thoughts for the * .
WUR, Sunday, August 25th, 2013: “Staying Focused On Designing A Future… On Not Getting Divided… (Pt. 1): “what do we covet? (Pt. 3)” Draft
(The following two audio-file-excerpts from our June 3, 2012 show will be discussed on the August 25, 2013 show:
*“Staying Focused on Designing A Future”* and…
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Why is it that “those whose hearts are most capable of embracing the world and of loving it” are the “most free”?
There continues to be confusion and disagreement about the nature and the purpose of ‘the state’ (now that’s an obvious conversation to have… if there really was such a thing as open discussion in this country…) which is why I heard a pundit reply in the negative when asked whether the August 14th massacres by the Egyptian state could have been predicted.
So… let’s ask ourselves… what is the purpose of ‘the state’?
Last week we said that ‘the state’ and ‘the wage work system’ are two ways of saying the same thing. A cursory look at the question tells us that ‘power’ doesn’t want us to think of our core societal role as anything more than ‘worker’ (and by ‘core societal role’ I mean how we feed ourselves.) Now, most of us seem to believe (although in the absence of on-going… direct discussions in our communities, this is difficult to gauge…) because we’re taught to think this… that it has to be this way – that we must be stripped of our gifts… (and they doubt whether any exist…) and compelled to work in order for ‘society’ to function ‘efficiently’…. No one wants to do the ‘drudgery’… so… some ‘must’ be ‘trained’ to do it… and egoism being what it is (as Plato schooled ‘power’ to see…) the majority we need to end ‘rule’ is easily confused into thinking that “the drudgery-work is not for me, but you…” and, “my gifts are such they place me above the vast majority…” and we then work hard our whole life long to ‘prove’ it… and ‘power’ is left alone… to rule us.
So… seeing that equivalency – regardless of its imagined legitimacy… or not – seeing that ‘the state’ constructs us such that we relinquish our authentic power… and get to work… thereby helping to reproduce the set of terms by which ‘power’ is aggregated in ‘the state’… that the point of the coerced renunciation of our power – our unique earth-gifts – is to make us easier to control – easier to manipulate on those strings (or treadmill…)… make us ‘processed’ versus ‘crude’ fuel to light ‘the theatre’… the stage on which the few can play-pretend at being philosopher-king-statesmen….
…means that (as Plato put it…) ‘the state’ exists to “keep the cattle herded”… and not “to help ‘its’ people develop their earth-given gifts and cultivate within themselves… ‘the infinite’” (as the ancestors who wanted each one of us to be as ‘big’ as possible – and who I believe we should emulate… told us.) Recall Maxim Gorky’s words: “I know the time will come when people will wonder at their own beauty, when each will be like a star to all the others… and the best people will be accounted those whose hearts are most capable of embracing the world and of loving it, those who are most free, for in them lies the greatest beauty.”
…the tactic of paying folks either without means or without heart to pretend to be what they aren't in order to influence public opinion…
(And while we’re on this subject… to our street-musician brothers and sisters in Madrid… I hope you will give a big fat finger to your ‘state’… telling you that your gifts are not sufficient to subject our ears to them… excuse me, this is how we grow them… this is how we claim them… and the ranking that ‘the state’ takes as its prerogative… is its big fat finger to us… which sometimes bends in a crook… to woo us in… to wither our spirit either from without or within… encouraging us to sneer at each other – a familiar, even familial, pattern… I would say.
[And no doubt… our but pointing out this tactic will inspire the agents of ‘power’ to pay folks without either heart or means… to pretend to be what they aren’t. I suspected such doings when my local community here in Berkeley was being asked to vote on a ‘sit-lie ordinance’… which criminalized occupying the public sidewalks (so ‘frightened’ of each other we must be, it would have us believe, as to need ‘the state’s protection from folks’ taking for themselves such a modest degree of independence from convention…) and as the vote was being pondered… the local Telegraph drag down by the university held an exceptionally disruptive quotient of street-youth… the authenticity of many of whom I doubted. This tactic of paying folks to influence public opinion was also used recently in Richmond, California… where folks suspect that it was Chevron behind the non-profit that paid low-income folks to flood a City Council meeting and pretend to be homophobic… and… best believe… my brothers and sisters occupying our main post office here in Berkeley… some inauthentic folk will try to make your lives a misery… and try to wear you down to make you leave… and selfishly I say… please stay.]
… and just now… I’ll say it while I’m thinkin’ it… I heard this: “…human beings in general aren’t good at ‘prevention’… they’re good at responding to things…” (…these are the words of a pundit I heard on 08.23.13 on a ‘progressive’ radio station…) to which I say, “use ‘I’ statements, dude, please.” The First Folks here… and earth-connected folks ‘in general’ are… mos def… able to think about what future is wanted… and in this same segment both the host and guest made ‘the brain’ the ‘actor-determiner’ of behavior apart from the whole-of-us … a pet-peeve of mind… … this is deep propaganda that is reinforced across the political spectrum….)
…it must be we in the ‘mind-work’ zones to take the lead… and say “we need a Global General Strike…”
While we will hear ad infinitum that our priority should be to ‘develop the economy’, we will not hear discussed how ‘the economy’ is the structural framework for ensuring that we never develop our voices… our unique gifts.
If we see all this as we see the trashing and consuming of the earth… it’s easier to see why it’s but continuing our enslavement with re-forged chains… re-polished locks… to limit our vision of the future to ‘fixing the state’… i.e. to ‘improving’ incrementally the conditions of our lives, or trying to ‘lessen’ ‘power’s grip on the planet… while leaving the structure… the class system… the wage work system… intact.
And if we see this, we also see the power of owning the lexicon – consider the effect of simply defining ‘the state’ as “aggregated ‘power’”… “what?… we should even more effectively renounce our power… vest even more of it in the institutions that keep us on ‘lock-down’?” – and how authentic definitions lead us deeper into ‘truth’… and why, then, we need ‘the lexicon for a free people’ (an earth-based language in which we describe what we want…) as opposed to using those float-away or drift-words… e.g. ‘democracy’… or at the very least we see the need to make our own meanings of terms now seized and filled by ‘power.’
I believe that to begin living authentic lives we have to begin having authentic conversations with each other about the reality of our lives… and entertain the possibility that we have been misled… and systematically placed upon a treadmill that we were trained not to see…
…but that… now that we do see it… it is possible to step off of it.
There are two images to keep before our eyes… ‘what we want’… and ‘what we don’t want’… and the threat of that ‘don’t want’ is the spur at our backs… and the prize of that ‘do’ is the sparkling ‘ahead-of-us’ that we don’t want to lose.
So let’s begin with the threat… with ‘what we don’t want’: we don’t want to lose all empathy for our brothers and sisters… which we are at risk of having happen to us…
…when those who have access to ears and eyes in many countries around the world refuse to say:
“…we need a mass movement to end wage work… and we must begin now… take that first step… that leads to the next… that leads to the next… by withholding our labor all around the world on a single day which we take for ourselves… a one-day Global General Strike to sit and discuss with each other what the future we want would look like… and perhaps its reach is such that it doesn’t even register as a blip in overall global human-energy-extraction… but in a month or so… we do it again… and again… and again… each time discussing… each time putting more flesh on our vision… such that a picture begins to form before more and more eyes – and then… we have a means… of responding… to the massacres… to the callousness… to the wholesale contempt and abusiveness… of ‘states’…”
The end-point is inevitable… because earth (earth in us) backs it… if we would but start.
And we shouldn’t under-estimate the value to our souls… of finally addressing that “wrong that comes up to face us everywhere…” The ‘Occupy’ movement is again illustrative… it felt good to be able to folks struggling on the streets, “have you been down to the ‘Occupy’ encampment?”… and to know that good fellowship (at least at first… before ‘power’ started catching up…) and a chance to use their gifts awaited them.
And it seems it must be we… in the “global ‘mind-work’ zones”… primarily… to take the lead… before we too are looking down the barrel of Autocracy… or Oligarchy… before we too find that the ‘global shadow-state’ has checked all moves.
…without a global response we become less human… and the Sophists ‘power’ was so afraid of they had to redefine ‘sophism’…
The need for urgency is there for all to see. ‘Power’ is moving… apace… apace… apace… to separate our lives… our ‘fates’… to divide us globally… by the very fact that they can unleash atrocities… for all to see… and send the implicit message, “you are helpless to intervene… you can do nothing…” and by sending that message and we receiving… and with that receipt confirming its imagined truth… they incrementally but systematically (as it builds daily) blunt our outrage… dull our appetite for empathy….
When we don’t build a global response, we are not just made helpless… we are forwarding a process by which we become less and less human.
And though it’s only now… with the Internet… that we’re beginning to challenge the fallacy of ‘the fait accompli of the state’ (globally… and the force of this fallacy is such that it hobbled even great hearts like Malcolm X… until he went to Mecca… fast upon which, ‘power’ murdered him) – as the Internet allows our thought as a species to advance exponentially… within a single generation… although there have always been ancestors who saw through it… “we shall be of one blood all nations’’ is a knowledge spoken by Nikola Tesla, Gorky, Tolstoi… the anti-slavery activists of Plato’s day…
(…I mean, think about it… Plato, who did everything he could to defeat the anti-slavery movement, we know… but about those who worked to end slavery we know next to nothing… that speaks to the existence of a very organized ‘power’… and the Sophists ‘power’ was so afraid of, they had to re-define ‘sophism’ to mean “making a phony argument…” to suppress the truth, that it means “believing in the fundamental equality of all humans…)
…and so many others pushed away from us… to ensure we would have no access to them.
So when I say we must join hands with Congo… with Egypt… with Syria… Bangladesh… and China… with Bedouins robbed of their ancestral lands… with all those who have no homes… I don’t mean “send money”… I mean “let’s form a plan to end ‘power’ globally…” and systematically work toward realizing it… by embracing with our actions… not just those targeted to receive ‘power’s worst beatings… but ourselves.
As we discuss the nature of ‘the state’ and weigh these two competing theories – ‘the state’ serves the people versus ‘the state’ herds the people – consider that all the evidence of our bodies (…as to our minds… I’ve been arguing that the very structure of ‘class’ is designed to prevent authentic thought… as our thoughts have been captured and guided from birth…) lies with the theory that ‘the state’ exists to control and manage ‘the people’…
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What is ‘the state’? …in what sense do we represent for ‘the state’?
But… as we always want to work towards achieving greater clarity with the terms we use… I propose a few questions… that I hope will help us to all get on the same page… by sharpening our picture of “what is ‘the state’?”:
Do we-the-people as individuals manifest… or represent for… ‘the state’? In what sense beyond ‘we behave as we’re trained’? Is there a sense in which we represent beyond the fact that it shapes us via its various institutions (family… wage-work… political and ‘cultural’)?
(…i.e., yes, we are conditioned to be control-freaks and competitive… dispassionate and even cut-throat… to harden our hearts to suffering… and yes, we agree with ranking… with the veneration of ‘Mind’ and the devaluation of ‘Hand’… and yes, we energetically focus on our ‘functions’… on ‘working hard’ and ‘being productive’… and confuse the value ‘power’ assigns us with our true value… i.e. we see ourselves as ‘power’ sees us… yes, yes, yes… all yes… but beyond that?)
If the function of ‘the state’ is “to keep the cattle herded…” the key form our representation for it (of it) takes is by performing the work of ‘management’ – most importantly of our children… and of ourselves – we do not trust each other… we do not trust the earth… we do not trust what the earth instructs… instead, we trust ‘the state’ to guide us… and, most poignantly and critically for ‘power’s reign, our children – and it shapes us to suit its purposes. So is it possible to trust the earth instead? And what would that mean?
If we assume a certain equivalency between ‘the state’ and ‘the wage work system’… where do ‘particularities’ (raising particular allegiances as identities) fit in the reproduction of the ‘class system’?
Does ‘no particularities’ mean that we don’t want ‘the state’ in us?
But aren’t some identities oppositional to ‘power’?… to ‘the state’?
Don’t we challenge our disempowerment by ‘reclaiming our authentic voices’…
By claiming oppositional identities aren’t we ‘reclaiming our authentic voices’?… and isn’t cultivating an allegiance with a tribe as opposed to ‘the state’ reducing the power of ‘the state’?
How are particular identities coherent with ‘the majesty of the state’? Do they act like ‘mini-states’?… as ‘state sovereignties’ on a micro scale… ‘nations’ that do not fundamentally challenge ‘power’ but rather try to finesse, position, or maneuver for themselves a larger share of the earth’s resources… a somewhat better bit of flotsam on which to perch… while lording over the treaders and downtrodden… or the floating-lost who no one gives a hand to?
Is not love the greatest threat to ‘power’?
Was Maxim Gorky right, when he said that those who are capable of embracing the world… and of loving it… are the most free?
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So… let’s challenge this hour conventional notions… is it true that we have to accept the fait accompli of ‘the state’? And if not… how would we self-organize ourselves differently?
Is it true that cultural identities that accept the fait accompli of ‘the state’ are in any way a threat to ‘power’?
And we have to test this notion – deeply reinforced and conditioned in us by ‘power’ – that not everyone can be ‘big’… can grow their gifts… can begin to encompass ‘the infinite’…
…or… that even if this is a theoretical biological inheritance (…though even this they deny…) the practical limits of available resources will not allow it… not allow everyone the freedom from necessity… the leisure… to realize that possibility inherent in our nature as living things.
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We’ve been considering ‘what we don’t want’… we don’t want to lose all empathy for our brothers and sisters (globally)… we don’t want to lose our humanity… our ability to grow as a species… and we don’t want to lose that prize of generalized human freedom.
Now let’s consider just for a moment what we do want… and how to determine what that is… and how to come to consensus about what that is. Because it seems to me that if we’re going to have a conversation about the future… that there are two main options for we-the-people to contemplate: either we see ourselves as – depending on how you look at it – either… huddling or cozying in… or militantly or courageously occupying… our tribes (whether you call those tribes ‘collectives’ or ‘low-income lesbians’ or ‘ex-pat Pakistanis,’ or ‘theoretical physicists’…) – or we take responsibility for the species and decide to stand with and represent for all of our brothers and sisters.
Some might argue that it weakens ‘power’ if they live separate lives… with their tribes… that ‘power’ is not going to determine them… occupy their time… that their time will go to growing big souls… regardless of bully-‘power’s attempts to control…. But if ‘the state’ tips everything into its maw by controlling all social institutions – through the schools they got your child… through the wage-work system they got you – is it really possible to ‘separate’? And what about those floating-lost?… those ones pushed-under?… those pounded by the big boot?
When ‘power’… that deeply entrenched, consolidated and accumulated Imbalance (which is simultaneously emboldened by our seeming… our implicit… ‘helplessness’…) has not been dissolved… but is rather allowed to continue biasing the world in its direction… i.e. toward ever-greater Imbalance… all ‘particularities’ become advocacies for a larger share of that biasing mass… and will inevitably be consumed by it – as the biasing of Titanic, once done, could not be undone… and took everything on board with it… as the sinking ship in the film Jaws… slid everything on the deck into the waiting jaws of the Great White… so will all those ‘psychological-mini-states’ that cultural advocacies resolve into… under ‘class’… when ‘particularity’ attempts to erect a protective defense in the face of gross Imbalance… likewise be subsumed… and rendered moot.
So it’s only by confronting the global state in the world – as opposed to just in our minds – that we can confront the global state in us… because it’s not just that the global state tips everything into its maw… it also worms its way into every apple… every heart… every tribe… so long as it exists… i.e. it’s not just that ‘power’ won’t leave your tribe alone in an active sense… will actively intervene to destroy earth-connected tribes like the Uygers… or the Ama-zon indigenous… or the Bedouins that Israel is (as we speak) trying to eradicate – but that it will force its way into our spirits simply because it exists… if we don’t face… take that “longest stride of soul men ever took… affairs are now soul size.”
It may be that the kind of tribe defined by wholeness-for-all as a generalized human capacity will have to be invented… as we expand the space that our individual power takes… and the space taken now by aggregated ‘power’… shrinks… exponentially….
Whatever you’re looking at… whatever you’re giving your attention to… your job… your tribe… your gifts… pause for a moment and look at this: look at the problem… the problem is global ‘power’… what can stop it?… only our… we-the-people’s… global power… can stop it. If that is true it will continue to be the hard truth our children face unless we choose to free them of that burden… by ending ‘power’ ourselves.
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…apocalyptic propaganda notwithstanding… good fellowship will prevail… once abundance is the premise of our lives… once we start organizing those global strikes…
“…the estate [state] is green and yet ungoverned;
Where every horse bears his commanding rein,
And may direct his course as please himself…
(Richard III, II, iii)
What does it mean for a people to be ‘ungovernable?’ Does it truly mean chaos? – a message we are being blasted with from all sides of late… film… novels… apocalyptic commentaries about increasing strife… or its effects… dominating our lives – but I believe all such messages are propaganda posing as prognostications… hoping to foster division and reinforce the competitive mindset of ‘class’… in which ‘necessity’ pits us against each other… a ‘class’ which depends on created scarcity to exist – ‘power’s grand scheme to keep us divided. But under the terms we create for our lives, I think we’ll find that abundance butters our paths and that we slide to each other (as our nature is communal…) and that… we actually like each other.
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The David Price article: “A Social History of Wiretaps”, serves to remind us of the consistency and the consistent forward thrust of ‘power’s vision… they never let up for an instant (…and in that respect alone we would do well to emulate them… but in their narrow self-interest and duplicitousness… we will be as far from them as infinite distance will allow.)
Quotes from (and my comments on the quotes from the article…
…from“A Social History of Wiretaps”:
The years following Hoover’s 1972 death brought successive scandalous revelations about the FBI and CIA’s illegal intrusions into Americans’ private lives. The Church and Pike Committee investigations revealed extensive surveillance campaigns directed at Americans engaging in lawful political activities. The American public was outraged at the extent of the CIA and FBI’s illegal activities, but an initial wave of shock gave way to complacency, and congress abandoned meaningful oversight of domestic and foreign intelligence agencies. With time, many Americans learned to forget these documented instances of CIA and FBI prurient surveillance, harassment, assassination and defamation programs—by 2001, few American’s recalled the FBI and CIA’s abuses that led to the restrictions on domestic intelligence activities that were removed by the Patriot Act. (…from“A Social History of Wiretaps”)
Our children see that we accept what does not make us very nice people… i.e. that we accept what makes us unhappy… see that we huddle in ‘what-is’ and lose our dreams of ‘what-we-want’… and our children can come to no other conclusion than that there must be a very good reason for what we do… and for what we tell them with our bodies… with our ‘complacency’… with our fierce loyalty to ‘what-is’… and so they follow us… trustingly… into the chasm.
Because children are born big… and start out asking at age two… “if something is wrong…” because our unhappiness is obvious… “if something is wrong, why don’t they fix it?” Children never shirk from asking the obvious questions… until the punishment for so doing tips the balance away from honoring earth.
…Many Americans opposed the 1994 Digital Telephony Act, which required all fiber-optic based switches be equipped to facilitate court approved wiretaps. The ACLU and Electronic Privacy Information Center organized widespread opposition to the bill, and across the country letters to editors and editorials criticized the bill’s obtrusive features….
With little public notice the Reagan, Bush and Clinton administrations each increased the use of federal wiretaps, and the conservative federal judiciary appointed during the 1980s brought little judicial opposition to wiretaps. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s there was a steady increase in wiretaps undertaken by federal authorities, but given the secrecy surrounding FISA approved wiretaps, these numbers only tell a small part of the story. According to investigative journalist and longtime NSA chronicler, James Bamford, offshore surveillance networks such as ECHELON skirted pre-Patriot Act limitations on domestic surveillance by using third-party countries to monitor US citizens’ phones and email….
As cultural beings we are all susceptible to the numbing and routinizing impacts of recurrent events. Time normalizes what were once obvious atrocities. Sustaining shock is always difficult, outrage’s half-life is short and the toll of cognitive dissonance weighs heavy. With time the outrageous and offensive can be seen as the “unfortunately necessary,” the potency of shock is short-lived as once current events become historicized. (…from“A Social History of Wiretaps”)
But I think we need to go deeper than merely re-stating George Eliot and put what he’s observing in the frame of the fait accompli of ‘the state’… which sets the terms for our lives. (Because we are kept… artificially kept… in survival mode… and even if you’re a so-called professional person… bringing home pay in the hundreds of thousands… you are in ‘survival mode’…)
…if George Eliot told us this… told us that “our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds… [that] there is a terrible coercion in our deeds…” which conditions us to see with “the lens of apologetic ingenuity” as opposed to “the healthy eye of the soul…” that, “Europe adjusts itself to a fait accompli, and so does an individual character – until the placid adjustment is disturbed by a convulsive retribution…” (and, by the way, this could be called ‘pragmatism’ – ‘seeking “the good” – but always within the scope of ‘the possible’ – by Plato… or Machiavelli… or Kissinger… i.e. by the ‘philosopher-statesmen’…) …if George Eliot told us this… and here we have David Price telling us all over again… we are not growing up as human beings.We’re here to synthesize and advance the earth-gifts our ancestors give.
One of his final points in the article addresses our progressive loss of power attendant upon our being called ‘citizens’… that we cede greater and greater authority to ‘the state’… and that as it becomes stronger… we necessarily become weaker. We betray our essential gifts.
…it's so easy to be free… because the earth is abundant and shares her knowledge… so ‘freedom from necessity’ for us… to ‘power’… is anathema…
• And lastly that morning, I listened to several interviews conducted by the host of the Morning Mix, who brought on several guests who brought good information to the airwaves… but whose conduct of the interviews raised some con-alerts that can serve us as illustrations. The more powerful the guest, the more she talked on top of him… and often her questions – whether with intent or not, who knows? – seemed worded to plant doubt in the minds of the listeners – either about the intellectual credibility of the guest… or about… and this is a key propaganda-insertion-point for ‘power’… of what ‘wealth’ is.
She asked the guest, “…so why are big corporations interested in El Salvador… I know there’s cheap labor and everything,” she hurriedly added, “but I mean beyond that…. What does El Salvador have that they want?” and she continued her emphasis overlong… and her tone implied that what she was digging for was… the ‘real wealth’… what ‘real wealth’ are the corporations after? she seemed to be asking. And in this way the seed is planted that a market in humans is not the point…
…when in actuality, the earth they can rape for free… it’s we who are the troublesome ‘resources’…
(…and ‘we’ means ‘we’ who make the machinery… dig the coal… construct the pipelines… drive the trucks… you see my point…)
…we who are always wanting more to life than slavery… always fighting our ‘fate’… refusing our place… always wanting more… and must, therefore, be continuously re-boxed… (it was quite annoying, really…) in scarcity.
…the practice of child abandonment is not just socially-sanctioned… but socially-mandated…
But it was her final interview that was most troubling. The guest directed a non-profit called Coach and Court, the purpose of which is to “provide a skilled [volunteer] workforce to after-school programs with shrinking budgets… and which are therefore cutting staff… in order to address the crisis of child neglect in low-income communities.
The host asked the guest: “how do you know 3:00 – 10:00 PM is when children in low-income communities are most likely to get in trouble?” And the guest replied, “because parents are working multiple jobs and can’t be there for their children.”
She wants to teach youth “a love of ‘showing up’”… a.k.a. “good work habits”…and then she stated a truism of class… that the children ‘feel abandoned’… because of course they are.
She told a story you’ll hear often in the world of children’s services provision, about a child asking one of the coaches, “Coach, will you be back tomorrow?” “Of course, why do you ask?” “Because no one ever comes back.”
Now, this is true… all children… one way or another… are abandoned in a class system… but the particular form in low-income communities can be particularly blatant. Because it’s reinforced across society… no ideology that justifies ‘the state’ can encompass the fact of it… as we’re seeing through the con ‘individual dysfunction’…. It’s become patently clear to all that we have no control over this mess… called ‘manufactured scarcity’… so the only conclusion is the correct one: “the state doesn’t exist for us… that is to say, to serve our interests.”
Although these observations may seem small… as they reflect the pattern in micro… if we can see it small… we can see it all. And… I believe we have to pay closer attention to what seems minor… that it’s in subtlety that propaganda works most insidiously… and therefore effectively.
This interview was disturbing to me on so many levels it’s hard to unpack. Perhaps the center of my concern is that the obvious questions… as always… are not asked… (we see this repeatedly in propaganda-plants…) leaving in its wake a vague sense of dissatisfaction at the lack of completion of the logic presented… the other shoe never drops…
(…e.g. if the problem is that parents are not allowed to be with their own children… shouldn’t we be talking about that?… asking why the practice of child-abandonment is so widely accepted?… not just socially-sanctioned but socially-mandated… asking why parents are kept struggling in scarcity-mode… acknowledging that children pay the biggest price to maintain the practice of coerced work?… why aren’t we talking about that?…)
…and when the most obvious questions are not asked (Con-Alert!)… it means either the interviewer is swimming shallow with intent or unconscious… either way… we need the opposite: deep analysis. Rather, the convoluted non-logic is presented: “since parents are kept from being with their own children by the wage-work system… let’s give this coerced-work system a helping hand by training people to work for nothing!”… and we’re left with our unanswered questions.
Another example I heard just yesterday (08.17.13)… a former IMF economist was asked if Greece and Spain can pull themselves out of their economic malaise… and he replied: “if they can start to grow their economies, they can grow themselves out of this crisis….” To which the obvious… but unasked and unaddressed… question was… ‘how?’
* " The September 1, 2013 show"
WUR, Sunday, September 1st, 2013: “Staying Focused On Designing A Future… On Not Getting Divided… (Pt. 2): “the hidden tribalism of ‘power’ (Pt. 1)” Draft
P.S.: My son and I are recording children’s songs designed to confirm and encourage children’s love for themselves… if anyone among those listening in would like to help us get them out into the world… your help would be most welcome.
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…still processing Lakeport…
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The bigger the goal, the bigger our impact…
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What the prison authorities of California are engaged in is flat-out murder… to define ‘protest of the torture of the SHU – for a population under their complete control – such that to engage in it is to risk their very lives… to not allow them nutritious fluids at the risk of being excluded from the number of courageous folk putting their lives on the line… is murder. The courage of these men elevates them so far above the brutes who claim to rule them is as sun to deepest pit of soullessness.
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And Egypt: ‘power’ has used… continues to use… disagreement over the motives of a former president as the wedge to divide… this tactic is not just as old as ‘power’… but defines it. ‘Power’s existence is premised on finding levers to control us… and wedges to thwart our resistance… our raison d’etre, therefore, must be… in a word… unity… unity… unity….
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We are living in times in which we-the-people are challenging… globally… ‘the fait accompli of the state’… asking… must ‘the human’ mean ‘the state’?… should it not be all of us that determine it?… determine what ‘the human’ is?… and not the narrow ‘few’… forcing us to be conditioned… by its mechanisms of ‘state’… to fit its slender contours… our soul its image make?
–––
We’ve said that a world market is fundamentally… as we are everything… a market in us… and that we are the fuel on which the system runs… and that ‘power’ likes to think of itself as pursuing ‘Knowledge-Infinite’… by throwing our lives in the trash-bin… and picking and choosing through the mess… and out of this craft of chaos… they tell themselves rise ‘the best’… (but this is not pursuing ‘knowledge’… this is the few pursuing an aerated image of themselves… and always at our expense….)
But what is evident is that the academics and the self-averred intellectuals join with ‘power’ in that self-delusion…
…and have conned us for centuries into thinking that it might be so… “maybe what they do does matter more than I do,” we are encouraged to think… particularly if you occupy despised or discount boxes… or languish in categories that are never seen.
And so we kiss-off our true gifts… especially as survival is kept dubious… and we can’t therefore even begin to imagine being the ones who make the decisions for the world…
…which must be… for us to achieve… a future in which we can grow as a species.
Because – as we’ve been discussing [“On the practice of ‘democracy’”…] – in the presence of scarcity we can’t engage in ‘decision-making for our global society’… and in the absence of our making the decisions… the world we are given to live in… is necessarily the realization of a totalitarian… and oligarchic… vision.
[The punditry has yet to face reality (and of course some consciously practice deceit…) and so we-the-people never get to hear authentic speech… or even basic logic, at the least… so that we could more quickly develop our thinking.
But it’s not, I don’t think, controversial, so say that ‘power’ practices deceit… hides behind a bland face… has deep plans to entrench ‘class’… in innumerable places and ways… globally; such that… as it works on multiple hidden fronts and layers… it’s impossible to stop their vision… via the incremental means that the official Left punditry is ‘comfortable’ using (and by ‘comfortable’ I mean ‘earns a nice living doing’… nestled in the Duke of Gloucester’s purse.]
Using Plato's playbook ‘power’ invades places with powerful people to flip the culture… if they can… and so: Heads Up! Kris Worthington… come on!…
A local free weekly paper provides some evidence for us – one example is local, the other local and global – of how decision-making, on every level, becomes oligarchic under conditions of manufactured scarcity…
Last week we talked about ‘vision creep’… the straight-ahead… never-stopping-for-an-instant… determined efforts to realize a vision… (along with their conjoined efforts to keep them hidden.) So ‘power’ will never tell you up front the deep motives in its seemingly innocent… seemingly small policy steps. When the Library Commission wanted to level our branch libraries… (I suspect to make them more ‘surveillance-friendly’… ‘power’s very concerned about what books we read…) they didn’t say this… they asked for (and received) permission to make ‘improvements’ (part of a plan to ‘tidy up’ cities… ‘transform’ them into places of privilege… and then bus us in from the fringes… to do the ‘dirty work’…) and when the ‘powers-that-be’ behind Oakland, California’s makers of policy wanted to swing wide city doors to surveillance hard-core… they didn’t say this… they asked for (and received) permission to choose a surveillance contractor with / for the Port of Oakland… and before you know it… the entire City’s in bed with SAID [Science Applications International Corporation] (“Oakland’s Surveillance Contractor Has a History of Fraud,” East Bay Express, August 28 – September 3, 2013)… and when ‘power’ decides it’s time to nullify… the wild card of radical youth at a favored alma mater (and rid themselves of the sole progressive City Council member in one fell swoop…) they didn’t say this… they asked for (and received) permission to give students their own city council district (“Berkeley Moves Forward With UC Student District,” East Bay Express, August 21 – August 27, 2013).
And come on, Kris Worthington (the City Councilmember mentioned above…) you’re not going to let yourself get duped by these guys… you’re not going to pull an ‘Al Gore’ on us are you? You’re gonna fight tooth and nail, right?… to keep your seat? Because it’s not about you… but rather keeping some little bit of progressivism alive in Berkeley….
(There is a plan… well in motion… to make the Bay Area, what once was a bastion of ‘progressivism’, much more ‘conservative’… much more quiescent… much more subdued… and definitely more heartless… no more home to resistance, but, rather, home to ‘small-self’ self-interest, privilege-seeking, and ‘power’-worship. [They like to be high above us… looking down…)
And Machiavelli schooled them long ago… “it’s critical that your motives seem pure… your face benignant… seeming trustworthy” and… we could add… to never neglect to ensure… that ‘the people’s noses are kept close to ‘their work’… by keeping their future unsure.
–––
It's up to us to decide that we humans will grow beyond being ‘the state’ and ‘the tribe’…
Because the solution to ending ‘power’s reign is so obvious… and would be so easy if we got the necessary conversations going… in order to achieve the necessary solidarity… it’s worth while taking some time to think through why ‘the obvious’ ‘power’ is ever able to make certain will elude us…
Today’s show considers the hidden tribalism of ‘power’… and its connection to oligarchic decision-making posing as ‘democracy’ – elites are primed for ‘rule of the people’… and ‘the people’ are primed for work.
And today’s show will ask “what is a human being?” “Who gets to decide?” “Is the ‘human being’ ‘the state’?” “Is the ‘human being’ ‘the tribe’?”
…or is ‘the human being’ ‘the ocean’… the pulsing earth… the sky? Are we all that ever lived and died?… that loved and laughed and cried? What is a human being? And who gets to decide?
–––
We are at that juncture where answers to big questions are being asked of us… of all of us globally:
Who gets to decide what is a ‘human being’?
Who gets to decide in what direction goes… and grows… the species?
The pattern set by ‘power’ makes clear its answer to these questions.
They choose themselves… dressed up as ‘philosopher-statesmen…’ that shadowy specter that Plato gave them… that hovers over us… watches what we do…monitors our moves.
They have spoken loud and clear in centuries drenched in blood… but we have yet to speak… we, who harbor in our lives the ‘heart’ that sees and sets a different future… a new unfolding of centuries that sparkle in a sun-drenched beauty… in which we are simply allowed to be… just be… and live our days in that harmony made of rich diversity… harmony is not made of single notes… many-to-the-infinite voices sing… to make our future fit for human beings.
“Seldom comes the better, except we make it so…”
Just now (08.26.13) I heard a man say that the preponderance of archaeological evidence shows that prior to ‘class’ there was no tribal fighting… that ‘war’ was an invention… like ‘art’… and therefore that the terms our lives achieve can be our conscious choice… as, he says, Margaret Mead once noted before him.
And I thought… “the archaeological evidence proves”?… what about our hearts?… was there ever stronger evidence that ‘war’ is not our nature…? they tell with strongest voice … once the pressure of performance and the lie that ‘scarcity exists’ is removed… and each new child… before pounded by the instruments of ‘class’ and manufactured scarcity… tells us too.
The academic-pundits always say… referring to those times when humans didn’t ‘war’ with each other… they say: “before ‘civilization’”… they never say the truth… that ‘without war’ means: “before ‘class’”… before the worm coercion entered hearts… and turned them to betrayal… of their fellow beings.
What is a ‘human being’?… will we really continue to allow those damaged souls who sit atop us to be the ones who tell us what a human being is?… the limits of what’s allowed for our common humanity? Surely not… surely all our ancestors of heart did not labor so for us that now… when Tesla’s dream’s upon us… and we could awake and make it real… surely not… brothers and sisters… in these times to serve but self-betrayal to ourselves?… when we could retake our world?….
We’ve done it ‘power’s way for many millennia… we’ve walked that road… know every nook and cranny of that road… and… if we’re honest with ourselves… we know its destination….
“Seldom comes the better…”
…they said in Shakespeare’s day……but our remade world is waiting…
…so our remade phrase must say…
“Seldom comes the better…
…except we make it so…”
…that needed ‘we’ we have now…
…that before we didn’t know…
…and all of the religions…
…are premised on that ‘then’…
…a ‘then’, that’s true…
…millennia long…
…ten thousand years and more…
…but ‘then’ is done…
…and ‘now’ is come…
…when humanity as a global ‘one’….
…together will make ‘the better’…
…and leave the ‘then’ to be…
…a dimming thought…
…a shudder-sense…
…from a fearsome-felt…
…and daily-fading…
…dream.
We have to act globally to be free locally…
Their way is to care about naught but ‘self’ and one’s own tribe… and they’ve ensured their tribe has in its hands the globe-entire… its resources, and especially our lives… they’ve set the terms… they’ve placed the weight that makes them always win… and we’ve lived by their rules… their given limits to us… despite our knowing… that they test false… over and over again…
…and still we live by them….
It’s cowardice alone… or rather fear… that keeps us silent… fear, and separation from each other… which it’s time now… for us to end.
The faux-maxim they put on bumpers…
…to keep us lulled to sleep…
…has it exactly backwards…
…as its very locally we must think…
…with these local minds and bodies…
…our hands… our eyes… our speech…
…and the trees that bloom just for us…
…through the earth beneath our feet…
…answer “here” to “what will we covet?”…
…in this inter-linked-vision we see…
…and will… very soon…
…with our sisters and brothers…
….act globally…
…to make it be.
“That global ‘we’ we have now” – so we can act globally to be free locally.
And on this matter of being a global actor… ‘power’s example is telling. It means set-backs are absorbed philosophically… as it’s the ‘overall’… the tend… toward which we continuously bend… that matters. It’s the realization… and the acting-on that realization… that we are a global humanity that allows us to get beyond particular grievances (and to use the word ‘grievance’ is not to diminish or to be dismissive of the significance of them.)
–––
* " The September 8, 2013 show"
WUR, Sunday, September 8th, 2013: “Staying Focused On Designing A Future… On Not Getting Divided… (Pt. 3): “the hidden tribalism of ‘power’ (Pt. 2)” Draft
…“Know Your Enemy”…
Today we’re going to continue thinking about what it means to: “stay focused on designing a future… and argue that “staying focused” also means “clearing away the diversions…” and that “the hidden tribalisms of ‘power’ and ‘punditry’” – and “the machinations of states” that unite them – are the major ones.
So what is this ‘prize’ that is our future?… we’ll be asking. And on this question I hope you’ll read the text of a Conversation with Joel McIver… that I just put up… that I had with the British writer on rock music, as part of his research for the biography he’s writing of the band Rage.Against.The.Machine. (Working title: Know-Your-Enemy) I hope you’ll read it because I think it’s a pretty good short explanation of how it is that ‘power’… over the generations… has been successful in keeping us from achieving our well-deserved prize of generalized human leisure.
–––
…a spectrum of ‘heart’…
I hear… the mayor shed big crocodile tears… about the imminent loss of our main Berkeley post office… the man who wrote the book on disingenuousness pretends to care… that’s priceless… or perhaps… purse-full… and of course purpose-full.
But from this poverty of ‘heart’ let’s waste no time in turning… to ‘heart’ in abundance… hearts beating strong with backs unbent… and courage long for days… of our brothers who were on hunger strike…at Pelican Bay… protesting legalized torture… particularly the normalized SHU-horror… your model of heart places you with the incomparable Victor Jara. Thank you. Words don’t exist to express our debt to you. And thank you most of all for preserving your lives, so that you may continue to model ‘heart’ for your brothers and sisters. We need you.
–––
…if your analysis has got you to the ‘power’-guys… if you’ve gotten to that point… why stop?
09.04.13: Brothers and sisters… 80,000 South African miners… 10,000 Mexican teachers… thousands more on their feet in the U.S…. serving food made fast and cheap… or being picked at in Wal-Mart’s teeth… as it fattens on your shrinking standard of living… on your low wage subsidies…
…it’s time to think and plan more strategically…
…and combine our strikes globally…
…and ask all folks of heart to show solidarity…
–––
‘Power’… by means of global geo-political planning bodies… acknowledged and covert… is determined to ‘organize’ the world for us… impose a structure on the world that realizes a vision over two thousand years old… the very age itself of it they believe makes it legitimate… and no sacrifice… of the earth or our bodies… is to great for us to make… if it will allow Papa-Plato to rest at last…
So the Tribe of Plato presides over greater and greater…
(…seemingly impartial as the rules themselves empty our shrinking stores into their coffers…)
…consolidation of the resources (wealth) of the planet… even as we are pushed into smaller and smaller units to prevent our coming together… and are prodded, as we squirm in our small buckets… to lash out at each other.
So this is ‘the state’ our pundits are wedded to… and desperately trying to convince us… as their ‘worth’ (to ‘power’) depends on it… to be wedded to as well (…but there were in the not-too-distant past significant exceptions… significantly all dead… or mostly… but one thing is for sure… they are no longer speaking.)
The wage work system does not allow us to develop our gifts… why does no one in academia talk about this?… and what to do about it?
“The sky is being poisoned with nuclear fallout. The world’s ozone layer is diminishing, and the seas are polluted. No economic model provides the means for understanding how both economic growth and ecological sustainability might be possible.” (Marilyn Waring, writing in 1986)
…this is the state of affairs the punditry seems set on preserving… and now we’re facing imminent ocean death (see “You Know How I Know 'Localization' or 'Democratic Economics' Is A Con?”).
When will we accept that the global inter-state system… and the world market…are actually not set up to improve our conditions of life… but actually to worsen them? That this worsening is what is happening is indisputable… the only question is intent. And I put to you… that question is irrelevant…
…whether with intent or no… it’s time for both of these structures to go… and for we-the-people to assume our much deserved… and much too-long delayed place… as stewards of our own lives… and the earth.
–––
…it’s as if the U.S. state is a daddy left pundits castigate…
I’ve been trying to find the words to describe the lunacy of… the sense of unreality with which I hear… the complete illogic of… the discourse from Left pundits on the issue of U.S. intervention in the proprietary gassing of a head-of-state of ‘his’ ‘citizens’. Here we have a U.S. state that closely monitors ‘its’ ‘citizens’ for signs of independent thinking… China likewise… Russia ditto… on down the line (maybe you know one that doesn’t… if so, fine… but the trend is clear, I think we can agree on that….) The weight is all on the side of global ‘power’ to ultimately decide the fate of the planet’s inhabitants… given time and our quiescence they will do it… those trillions make it so… those trillions buy a lot of ‘political-and-pundit-class’ quiescence. But it can’t buy us… ‘the people’… especially if those privileged-intermediaries decide to stand with us… across the false divisions.
So the question of whether and what and why and can we find the blood-stained hand that did the deed… as it was paid to… is avidly discussed… the finger wags to say that there must not be interference in the sovereignty of ‘states’… oh really?… so we are but possessions in pundit-speech… and they hope we rate ourselves as low as this as well (a bonus awaits, perhaps.)
The reasoning is all quite convoluted… here we have a U.S. state so determined to thwart the efforts of ‘its’ people to stretch their gifts even just a little bit… so determined to keep us small that it monitors us all… and a Syrian state so afraid of ‘its’ people that it gasses them to send a message – no one disputes the man is a tyrant – yet the official Left cares so much about preserving the sanctity of sovereignty… the right of this tyrant to slaughter and terrorize ‘his’ people… that hundreds are moved to take to the streets to protest the effort of this U.S. state to not be accused later of doing nothing in the face of genocide.
So in this situation some quotient of the Left is roused… but the obvious conclusion that “‘states’ don’t care about us…” and that we must look beyond them and link hands to grow the future we deserve… they… the punditry… flee from as from the breath of death upon them.
On the machinations of ‘states’… including Syria and the U.S.:
It’s quite surreal to me –
…as someone hoping to see…
…the emergence of ‘we’ as a global humanity…
(…to replace that statist ‘we’) –
…to hear the professional Left…
…going along with ‘power’s agenda so unquestioningly…
…debating the ‘yes’s and ‘no’s…
…the ‘to’s and ‘fro’s…
…of opaque state machinations.
When will we reclaim…
…and focus…
…all of that furious thinking…
…we lay at ‘power’s feet…
…like an obeisance…
…and devote it rather…
…to making ourselves global actors…
…ourselves the check…
…the sun rising at last…
…dissolving global vampires.
It’s as if the U.S. state is a daddy left pundits castigate…
…but they’re living in his home…
…and so… ambivalent…
…and rationalize that they’re trying…
…to minimize the effects that…
…daddy’s misanthropic mischief has on strangers…
…and they either don’t see…
…or else don’t take seriously…
…that they’ve come to be he…
…in not disassociating…
…and are themselves participating…
…in perpetuating…
…the insanity.
–––
States lie to ‘their’ people… parents lie to ‘their’ children… it’s all quite incestuous. The Bedouins have lived their good life… and it was… their self-created good life – not Denmark’s (there must be no coercion in our future – each one of us must be free to choose…) – for generations. But the state of Israel tells ‘its’ people that the Bedouins are invaders… and then, or so the media says, Israelis then believe it… and repeat it… then teach their children to believe it… and in this way ‘the state’ bloats gaseous and ‘the people’ – bones-jut-shrunk – become shadows… of ‘philosopher-statesmen.’
–––
…confusion about ‘economy’ abounds… without the ‘people’s lexicon’…
“What is the goal?” repeatedly we’ve asked… “will what you’re doing ‘end ‘power’… and in a single generation? Or will it ameliorate harsh conditions?” Because it is only the former that is good enough in the face of the massive privatization of the planet’s resources… ever-expanding ‘power’s purse… a big ‘nada’ weighting ours… with ocean death looming upon us… and the total suppression of our humanness.
So what should we be doing?
Here’s a letter from someone who, like me, wants… or says he does… to get to the heart of the problem:
The strategies to “end corporate rule” presented in the Spring [2012] issue of YES! [Magazine] can, like welfare programs, ameliorate some of the unjust systemic consequences of capitalism, but they cannot possibly produce an economy of equal liberty and justice for everyone.
We will not end corporate rule until the power to expand the money supply…
[…now let’s pause here for a moment… because I believe he’s already veered off-course…. In my recent Conversation with Joel McIver, he asked, “are corporations the root of the problem?”… and today we’ll also be asking, “does this word ‘economy’ have any meaning for a future premised on generalized human leisure?”…]
…of the society is taken away from private banks and given, instead, to a collectively controlled capital access process – one that, by law, expands the money supply to ensure every person access to the capital necessary to develop a successful share of the economy.
We cannot attain a truly free society by patching a system that is designed not to attain the free society.
(J.D. Prudhomme, Lake Charles, La., letter in the Summer, 2012, YES!)
So the confusion here is truly dismaying… and speaks again to the importance of creating, using and disseminating a “people’s lexicon.” Look at the terms he’s using without defining… leaving them dangling, or rather free-floating for ‘power’ to snap up at its leisure: ‘economy’… ‘liberty’… ‘justice’… ‘free’… all of which he then associates in our minds with this phrase he spouts uncritically… whether intentionally or no, nonetheless planting ‘power’s key ideology… that “capital is necessary to develop… the economy….”
But we don’t have ‘the people’s lexicon’… in play over the airwaves anywhere… such that it’s currency could be exchanged among us… and we could watch true power… true wealth… sprout in its tracks.
Today we’re asking again, “what is ‘wealth’ and where does it come from?” Because only when we’re unclear on where ‘wealth’ comes from can we imagine that beginning to tax financial transactions… or attempting to limit ‘profits’ –
…even if it could be accomplished on a large enough scale to register as a blip (globally)… and slightly improve the conditions under which we-the-people live (all of which is doubtful… given ‘power’s hold on the levers of ‘state’)
– could mean that ‘wealth’ is returned to us.
…an ever-decreasing fragment of our energy is devoted to the wage-work system… while our major energy has to be working toward the prize of a future of generalized leisure…
Wall St. is a big casino… and the bets are against the earth… all run for the destruction of the planet… and it’s time to ask, “who do you serve?”
(…yes, even the ones who claim ‘socially-responsiveness’… reinforce the key myths… and retard true ‘progress’….)
John, in Lake County, who is running for a City Council seat, is struggling with the question of how to appropriately allocate energy to electoral politics… my question to him: “What is your long-term goal, and how does everything you do tie into it?
And this question applies overall to our participation in the wage work system… of which electoral politics is a subset.
Generalized human leisure means we define ourselves… instead of continuing to waste our days in endless recognition-seeking… of the system…
It seems to me our picture of what ‘the economy’ is and what ‘the state’ is (recurring themes of this show…) is still fuzzy… and will have to become much sharper before… or as… a sufficient number of ‘we-the-people’ becoming that critical mass… get clear on what ‘the wage work system’ is.
When I wrote Waking Up, I tended to stress more the ethical and spiritual question of what it means to sell our human energy… arguing that if we reconnected with our sources of power (true power) we would begin to see ourselves in a true light…
(…because we are here to grow our gifts (the ability to do which defines true ‘happiness’… and for some that’s a way in to this issue (ending coerced work) – but many believe that they are claiming them… by working through the conventional, the rewarded, means… ‘the state’… ‘the market’… and the university (‘power’s three horns… on which they hope to impale us…) – and they are too busy using the ideologies of ‘class’ – the ‘mental-manual divide,’ ‘progress,’ ‘the economy,’ and ‘merit-rises’ being the chiefest – as the means to achieve a sense of purpose… to begin to see their earth-given gifts as the priority… not as ‘tools’. And I’m not sure on this… can you intellectually decide that a wage-work system is wrong?)
So in Waking Up I argued that we must reunite with our sources of power in order to see our true value… and not look at ourselves as ‘power’ does… as ‘resources’… as ‘tools’… as ‘capital’… as energy to fuel a ‘system’… as instruments for serving ‘the market’ and ‘the state’…
…and while I think this is so… we are effectively thwarted at the first step of developing the motivation to want to grow our gifts independent of the hoops ‘power’ tells us to jump through… independent of the so-called ‘legitimate’ means for ‘proving’ – ‘achieving’ confirmation of – our ‘worth’… independent of the given means of recognition-seeking…
(…because we all need reassurance of ‘worth’… as this is denied us from birth… due to the ‘wage-work system’…)
…and we turn to the ‘official sources’ for confirmation of our power because no others are presented… the issue as a whole is never discussed in the media… i.e. those perspectives premised on the need to end ‘power’ are never discussed… as, until now, the fait accompli of ‘the state’ was never questioned…
(…‘power’ shuts out other options… by controlling the discourse… the thoughts we hear… and because we are structurally made needy… denied access to love and security as children, due to the wage work system….)
‘Power’s influence over our minds holds sway… until we are able… to the satisfaction of our powers of analysis… expose ‘power’s fundamental aims….
Only then it seems are we open to alternative ways of seeing… as opposed to seeking strokes of appreciation.
So let’s approach again this question of ‘the economy’… and ask whether it’s a word that has meaning in any future premised on freedom from necessity… generalized human leisure… and as we do try to establish… by taking a step back to this question of generalized human leisure… whether it can exist or no… and what… in any objective sense (as opposed to our deep conditioning…) could possibly prevent it – i.e. by seeing ‘power’ we see that it is only ‘power’ that prevents it…
…and asking also – what would ‘careful stewardship of the earth’s resources’ – something we’re told is what ‘economy’ means – require?
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So… it is only to preserve the privatizing means of ‘power’… and essentially their egos… that we accept the degradation of human beings.
It is only by trashing the earth that ‘the economy’ generates ‘worth’…
…it is only by sitting on ‘its’ people’s gifts that ‘the state’ accrues ‘power’ to itself.
Take this passage for instance: “…a local biotech firm that manufactures flow cytometers – machines that test blood and sundry other fluids. Menlo is developing the software that organizes and analyzes data collected by the device.” (Matthew Shaer, “The Boss Stops Here,” New York, June 24 – July 1, 2013, p. 34)
Let’s assume for the purposes of our example that these programmers ‘make’ ten times what the people who feed them ‘earn’… take home twice the ‘pay’ of the folks who dig the coal out of the mine that lights their warm, sun-washed, pleasant abodes… and the machines the software will be running… these are the physical manifestations of numerous materials ripped out of the earth and converted into objects that will linger above-ground for some time before they are returned… (and though far better… for the sake of her health… for them to remain in those factories for all the good they do buried in our grandmother (earth).
Now we will be told that these ‘jobs’ are ‘growing the economy’… that ‘wealth’ is being created. But clearly this is not the case. Our brothers and sisters who pick the food… and work the mines… their lives are being wasted… and of course the earth proper is being exhausted and trashed at the same time. So what is really happening behind the nice screen of the word-cover is expropriation, privatization and destruction. Because clearly there is food in abundance… enough to feed us all… every day… the chains could be thrown away. It is only to preserve the privatizing means (‘the market’)… (to keep us from knowing that ‘power’ is not needed…)
(…and this is what’s key to ‘power’s psychology… this insistence of the philosopher-statesmen that they not just be needed… but worshipped…)
…that we accept the degradation of human beings.
We've been recycling the same thoughts… stopping short of a critique to end ‘power’… generation after generation…
So the terms we are given… to try to make sense of the world we live in… are not just false… but flipped… completely upside-down.
And the propagandistic nature of the phrase ‘economic growth’ (a point made by Marilyn Waring two decades ago… in If Women Counted…) the fact that the measures we are told to use… of ‘growth’… of ‘progress’… measure in truth but progress towards death for the planet… is seeping into our general consciousness.
* " The September 15, 2013 show"
WUR, Sunday, September 15th, 2013: “Staying Focused On Designing A Future… On Not Getting Divided… (Pt. 4): “the hidden tribalisms of ‘power’ (Pt. 3)” Draft
…and when I say “all the earth is eaten” you know that I mean that the control of it is secured… and how is it secured?… it's secured by states… that’s key…
Recently, my son and I were talking about ‘money.’ He’s been hearing the argument a lot lately that it’s the root of all of our problems of injustice in our human relations, and therefore that the abolition of the monetary system would be a big step forward… towards our future freedom. I heard this argument in Lakeport when I was there as well. But I believe that the focus on money is a diversion… that money is but a stand-in… a symbol… a nexus… for something else… and that it’s this ‘something else’ – the earth – that requires our notice and our repossession.
Money is but tool…
…a means to measure…
…a ruler…
…to show how much of earth into your coffers goes…
– in ‘power’s way…
…unnoticed and unthanked.
And though converted into death…
…to silence…
…into inert objects…
…minus eyes or tongue…
…it still…
…as air that seeps up from the pit of hell…
…will mutely speak…
…the loss of all soul’s guidance.
So now that all the earth is eaten, nicely packaged, poisoned, pocked, and made damaged…
(…and when I say that “all the earth is eaten” you know that I mean that the control of it is secured. And how is it secured? It’s secured by states – that’s key…)
…now… when the lion’s share of means to feed ourselves is put in private hands… and we-the-people also packaged in our narrow box called ‘worker’… now… with manufactured scarcity in hand… ‘power’ is ready… to dispense our dangling signs that read: “will work for food.”
Now that so many of us are being tossed out of the jobs-nexus… let's use that time… our lives… to think through what this system is based on… and how to move beyond it…
So… “who needs money?” ‘power’ says… “the work of setting place and privatizing means is done… money’s but an inconvenience to us now… it screens transactions of ‘the people’… and we insist on seeing them… all….”
I said in the Conversation with Joel McIver that if our efforts to end ‘power’ coalesced behind the banner “a mass movement to end wage work” that it would be very difficult for ‘power’ to undermine it. But it strikes me that – unless we talk about it and so are not caught unaware – that this diversionary tactic… this red herring… ‘money’… could be a way for ‘power’ to do precisely that… for the ‘power-‘guys (and their emissaries) to say they too are all about ending ‘the wage’… and that this movement therefore must instead be framed as “a movement to end coerced work… to end the sway of ‘necessity’ in our lives… and to usher in… a world of generalized human leisure.
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The other key dynamic leading to a terminal confrontation with ‘power’ is that we want more than this… privatizing obsession of ‘philosopher-statesmen’… animated by the simple means of a market in our lives…
Also in the “Conversation with Joel McIver” he asked, “major change is at hand, then?”… and I replied that it feels like ‘end-game-time’… and I mentioned the necessary convergence of environmental and economic crises, and the fact that the Internet has changed the game in our favor (despite our political strategizing not having caught up with these changed conditions.) But there’s another key dynamic – implied in the Immanuel Wallerstein quote I cited in Waking Up, as well as in the interview… that “‘capitalism’ is doomed” because the ‘accumulation process’ inevitably grinds to a halt with the exhaustion of the resources of the planet – and this other key dynamic… that’s leading to a terminal confrontation with ‘power’… is our exhaustion… our refusal… our resistance.
I realized after re-reading this ‘end-game’ bit of the interview that it would have strengthened the argument if we had taken time to unpack these words of Wallerstein: “If thirty percent of Indians or the Chinese are middle class…a lot more money has to go into their hands. So the world level of profits declines with the growth of the middle class globally. And they consume an enormous amount of goods – food and energy – so you see prices go way up because there are more people who can afford to buy those products.” The reason more of the earth has to go into Indian and Chinese hands is because we-the-people ever fight our down-pushed state… ever want more for our children than we accepted for our lives as ‘fate’…
…us not wanting to be slaves… plus ‘accumulation’… equals… ‘end-game’…
…and under ‘class’ this is an on-going process…
…as is ‘accumulation’ itself…
…which intermingling reinforce and multiply each other…
…and accelerate the coming of their common ‘end’…
…the scraping dry the plate of planetary resources…
…and as that ‘end’ has come…
…‘power’ sees no other course…
…but to at once condition us to accept…
…both less and less of less…
…and less and less of us…
…i.e. to reduce our numbers…
…particularly those of us who insist on being ‘troublesome’…
– i.e. that from the view of ‘statesmen’ we are not needed…
…particularly as they can no longer feed us…
(…read: “they cannot ‘give us’ ‘jobs’”…)
…and especially cannot feed the need we have to improve our children’s lives and lots….
Thor's hammer…
So when we hear that the Syrian state cannot feed ‘its’ people…
…and Egypt likewise… and China… on down the line…
…and hear of numbers dying in the tens and hundreds of thousands…
…erased from ‘power’s ‘debit-side’…
…and hear of high-tech toys of death that ‘weaponize the energy of the planet…”
…and know how dearly that the ‘big boys’ love their high-tech toys…
…wielding them as Thor might fling his hammer…
– we’ve seen Assad’s answer to the pressure of ‘his’ people for whom ‘he’ cannot provide ‘jobs’…
…we’ve seen the heavy hand of obvious tyrants…
…but global ‘power’ moves more slick than this…
…and ever strokes its fetish of the ‘technological fix’…
…ever plucks its HAARP to wreak havoc…
…then has its pundits – open and covert…
– plant the seeds that say once again it’s we who are the problem…
…‘we-the-people’ nibble away like gross rabbits at the earth’s resources…
…and having over-stayed our welcome…
…are ‘over-populating the planet’….
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…we are creatures of ‘power’s illusions…
And what stands in stark contrast to ‘power’s ever-forward-thrustingness toward its vision… is our recycling of the same sad thoughts that pretend to counter it… this vision… generation after generation… while always stopping short of the only thing that can… the dissolution of ‘power’ itself: the end of its exclusive hold on the planet… the end of its hold on us… and the end of its hold on governance.
So we see that the pundits of today stop short exactly where twenty years ago Marilyn Waring also checked the horse of her analysis (while congratulating themselves on their ‘hard work for the people’…) when it faced the unslacking utter-fierce formation of concentrated and organized ‘power’ – and by their own words we know they weren’t altogether stopped by their confusion.
The truth of our lives under ‘class’ is straightforward and simple: we are dependent and our bodies don’t like it.
So the only question – that one that ‘power’ so constructs the built-up world around us to discourage, if not stop altogether, from arising – is whether our dependence is derived from a necessary sequence of conditions… or whether it’s contrived.
Virginia Woolf aptly – if ‘class’ is a given – aptly said that we are “creatures of illusion”. But it’s more true to say that we are “creatures of ‘power’s creation”… as they have created the illusions: the illusions of ‘power’… the illusions of ‘wealth’… the illusions of ‘value’… the illusions of ‘market’….
Marilyn Waring said, quoting Joan Robinson: that “value is… most certainly in the eye of the beholder…” – but what she neglected to add… or didn’t fully see… is that we’ve allowed ‘power’ to substitute its eye (its definitions that construct an illusory ‘reality’) for our own “healthy eye of the soul,” as George Eliot put it. And in the illusion ‘the market’ (read: ‘the slave market’… because what is subject to aught but earth is slave…) we find the chief illusion… and when once the master’s eye is gone we’ll see… it is a construction of the sheerest lunacy.
Bad is the world; and all will come to naught,
When such ill dealing must be seen in thought [‘observed but not referred to’].
(William Shakespeare, Richard the Third, III, vi)
I am but voicing what we all know…
…so the illusion has been seen through….
When the magician’s trick has dissolved to truth…
…we will not long continue in our fetters…
…as the key to the mystery of our bound hands –
– commodification of our common treasure…
…taking from us… and earth… and listing it for ‘the market’ –
– removed the bindings…
…first from our minds…
…after which the rest–
– our wholeness…
…will follow.
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So by the simple device of a ladder… some above us… some below…
…and by the simple device of ranking ‘mind-work’ highest…
…to solemnify our doubt of our born-gifts…
…and by the simple device of fencing off our suppers…
…and by the simple device of ensuring we have leaders…
…and are looking to our ‘betters’ to provide…
…our minds’ garnish…
…and so by the simple device of keeping us dependent…
…on pundits for our thoughts…
…on ‘power’ for our food…
…we are made…
…creatures of ‘power’s illusions…
…and believe we sacrifice our gifts…
…in the service of ‘the good’.
By all of these devices ‘power’ leads us…
…into its own state of ever-seekingness…
…and never-soul-seeingness…
…caught soul-stuck in its own mindset…
…from which no exits are on offer…
…sealed up in ‘power’s tomb.
So we look to the pundits… and credit their guidance… and let their voices stand for the silence… the loss of our bodies true voice. And to serve as illustration let’s examine… the layers of misdirection… in the words of Robert Reich. [The transcription of, and audio files for, the second half of the show are found at: “Unpacking Robert Reich’s Baggage”]
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* " The September 22, 2013 show"
WUR, Sunday, September 22nd, 2013: “Staying Focused On Designing A Future… On Not Getting Divided… (Pt. 5): “the hidden tribalisms of ‘power’ (Pt. 4)” Draft
09.18.13: Sisters and brothers… Please read the “Plan B for Business” article excerpts that I've posted at “The ‘Global Awakening’?… or “The Great ‘Re-Set’”?”
…and please listen to the following audio-files (from the Archives):
How does turning the world into a heartless jungle promote 'happiness'?…
It is our right to abolish a government that does not allow us to pursue happiness… the pursuit of which 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)
09.22.13 explanation of this January 6, 2013 WUR show excerpt:
…it’s as if Sir Richard has jumped on Bentham as being useful for ‘power’ today … for reframing ‘the role of government’…
If ‘economy’ is the ‘global lexicon’… (and the Panopticon… because it claims our eyes…) holding all nations… all peoples… to a point… a goal… a purpose… ‘power’ (in forcing us to redirect our allegiance away from the earth, the ancestors, and each other…) 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 (coercion).
(And this is the place in our human story where we stand now.)
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’…
(…and so Sir Richard Branson latches upon Bhutan and thrusts it before our eyes and says, “See!… here we have a people who work happily… and look at me! I work happily! We are the same! Why? Because of happy thinking! That’s the key…” says he… Sir Richard… Duke of Cons…)
…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…”
(…and by the way, Branson latching upon ‘happiness’ is quite bizarre…. It’s as if someone finally told him about Bentham, and he realized that Bentham really had something there… about the role 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 economy’ can’t provide ‘the good life’… so ‘power’ is busy redefining it… but the ‘value’ of commodification itself… of marketing our gifts (the key source of our unhappiness…) ‘power’ will not revisit… ‘the economy’ is a fiction that we treat as real…
The way they conned us was… the particular form the Panopticon took… was by means of the global market and our joining with our masters in their global ‘competition’…
…so by the simple means of a ladder… and by making resources scarce… ‘power’ kept our eyes narrowly focused… on the con ‘economic growth’… our personal stats and ‘the nation’s… both….
But ‘the economy’ cannot provide it any longer… this ‘economic’ defining of ‘the good life’… and in particular cannot fulfill our expectation that we will set up for our children better times… than we accepted for ourselves.
“So ‘the good life’ must be re-visited,” says ‘power’, “revisited and revised… such that ‘the people’ can be reminded… that ‘the good life’ is all in their minds… ‘money can’t buy happiness’ we will tell them… after which we can advise: ‘set aside all fruitless complaining… and make… out of thin thought… something ‘happy’… and construct… for yourselves… your individual selves… better lives….”
The discussion that’s being discreetly ignored in the spate of articles about this supposed ‘re-invention’ of ‘business’ is ‘economics’ itself – ‘economics’ being, at base (under ‘class’), “the defining and assigning of ‘value’…” – and what’s particularly being ignored is the concept at its core: ‘value’… or rather the mechanisms at work behind its assignment – i.e. who gets to assign it – and most particularly, the ‘value’ of commodification itself… of marketing our gifts… as the source of our unhappiness.
‘The economy’ (under ‘class’) is essentially a ‘value’-assigning set of practices… conventions… made concrete by embedding them in our social relations… out of which grow the structures of state that ‘ensure’ (until we stop believing in them… i.e. stop thinking the thoughts we are given…) their continuance.
Marilyn Waring and Joan Robinson put their fingers on the key issue… “what has value? And who defines it?”
If the whole edifice ‘economy’ is erected on this base… is a rationalization for the assignment of a ‘power’-determined need for particular ‘value’ assignments… a need to determine who gets paid what. And if that determination is not arbitrary… but is also not based on anything intrinsic to what is being priced… but is rather determined by ‘political’ factors (ultimately)… then ‘the economy’ is a fiction that we treat as real. So, for example, when a letter-writer in a local paper says that the government should “put people to work” because it would “stimulate the economy…” he lends credence to the notion that there actually is some rational mechanism called ‘the market’ that operates according to certain objective ‘laws’… takes necessary, provided – provided by who?… and under what conditions of coercion? – inputs… and grinds them into products the value of which is intrinsically-related to the ‘rationally-determined value’ of the inputs…
…i.e. plug in resource materials… …add human energy… …out come products sold at the value determined by the… blah… blah… blah…
When I hear folks talk about ‘the economy’ like this, the unfortunate image that comes to my mind is that rape trial in which the defense attorney argued there was consent because the victim didn’t keep her legs shut… and illustrates with a dummy… after which the prosecutor picks up a bat… and pounds the doll to dust and asks… “where flies ‘agreement’ now?”
‘The pundit class’ is the physical manifestation of that necessary barrier between ‘the rulers’ and ‘the ruled’ that Popper wrote about… its creation assured by ‘power’s exclusive control… of the assignation of ‘value’…
And we have to recognize the role of the pundits in this. When Popper wrote:
For a full justification of the demand that the philosophers should rule, we must therefore proceed to analyse the tasks connected with the city’s preservation.
We know from Plato’s sociological theories that the state, once established, will continue to be stable as long as there is no split in the unity of the master class. The bringing up of that class is, therefore, the great preserving function of the sovereign, and a function which must continue as long as the state exists. How far does it justify the demand that a philosopher must rule?… The great importance which Plato attaches to a philosophical education of the rulers must be explained by… reasons…purely political.
The main reason I can see is the need for increasing to the utmost the authority of the rulers….
Thus Plato’s philosophical education has a definite political function. It puts a mark on the rulers, and it establishes a barrier between the rulers and the ruled.
[So there’s no mystery that almost all of us under ‘class’ feel that we’re ‘not smart enough’… that’s by design… that’s intended.]
It puts a mark on the rulers, and it establishes a barrier between the rulers and the ruled. (This has remained a major function of ‘higher’ education down to our own time.) Platonic wisdom is acquired largely for the sake of establishing a permanent class rule. It can be described as political ‘medicine’, giving mystic powers to its possessors, the medicine-men. (Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies: The Spell of Plato, p. 147 – 8, quoted in Revealing Division, p. 10)
…it is the pundit class that is the physical manifestation of that barrier. The pundit class creates the ‘complexity’… the endless (linear) iterations of ‘rational’ or ‘philosophic’ ‘logic’.
And this seemingly ‘complex’ work of ‘power’s hired guns, the pundits, serves as shield – or ‘thought-cover’ – for the ruling elite. It is their ‘work’ that holds our eyes… our attention (for ‘power’, though perhaps without intent…) keeps us closely following the twisted dealings… of ‘the monied interests… and ‘the state’… and leaves us ever with confusion… doubting our gifts… and ever convinced… that our powers of analysis… are inadequate.
This of course has a very salutary effect on pundit-egos (which explains why “they aren’t bothered”… by the squashed state of ours.) The pundits feel very powerful because they’re using… not their full gifts but what they’re told are their full gifts… because linear thought, memorization and regurgitation of provided facts, and devotion to thinking the thoughts we are fed from birth – is ‘valued’ by ‘power’ above all else. So… ‘the economy’, in being a ‘value’-assigning mechanism… is simultaneously a ranking mechanism… a mechanism for erecting that necessary barrier called ‘the pundit class’ –
…add to this almost total control of the airwaves – the thoughts we get… literally… in our ears – and you have we-the-people pretty much herded.
Another device… tangled weave… spun from the Panopticon… via the pundits… to keep our focus narrow and forestall the development of our thought process… keep from our minds those authentic thoughts from ‘earth’ (our bodies… what we see and feel…) that reveal the truth of our lives… is ‘measurement’… or ‘data-collection’…. The focus on minute details is a way to claim our eyes… our attention… because it requires a lot of focus to untangle a web of lies… or a web of financial transactions…or to grasp the (infinitely-expandable complexity… because it’s spun out linearly…) invented factors of, therefore, phony formulae.
It’s an entirely false exercise that ‘power’ ensures will deliver a big load of false reward to its practitioners. And like a carrot before a horse we chase it… chase false ‘value’… because we lost our hold on true value long ago… back at age two… to please our mothers.
The ‘market mechanism’ assigns values to us… this can never produce ‘happiness’… we have the right and the responsibility as life… to start fresh…
We said last week that what’s called ‘the U.S. economy’ is in actuality the compact manifestation of a substantial portion of the resources of the globe… wealth stolen from the earth-entire… and if that’s so… it escaped even the sham process of ‘accounting’… was never ‘valued’ at the point of theft…
…and the ‘extra-market’… or ‘extra-economic’ factor called ‘the state’ that pounds ‘hand-work’ low… ensured that that was so…
…which means that what’s presented to us as ‘accurate accounting’ is a fiction… a way for bullies to say… “here’s a rationale you can give them… if they insist on having one.”
In all of the propagandistic articles about some alleged “business re-set”, ‘class’ is assumed… and our ‘agreement’ with it… our ‘consent’… we’re told… exists simply because we’re born into it… into ‘class’…
…and the pundits never give us hope that it can be questioned…
…the ‘value’ of being free is never admitted into the discussion.
‘The economy’ is how they held our eyes… pointed us toward realizing ‘power’s goal… serving its vision…. But this vision cannot be openly stated… and they substitute in the thoughts they give us ‘the good life’… but our bodies know better… we know the lives we live are not self-determined… the only true definition of ‘happiness’… but we endure it and hope for the best… or ‘the better’… for our children… we endure for our children… and to ensure that their lives can be… determined by them exclusively (or so we innocently dream…) by being free from necessity…
…but with ‘the economy’ no longer able to deliver this hope… the ‘powers-that-be’ are now trying to ‘re-set’ ‘economy’.
What they’re not acknowledging is that it is commodification itself that has destroyed ‘society’ – that ‘good life’ we once created for ourselves – as Polanyi warned would happen… and ‘society’ cannot be reconstituted by ‘power’s fiat.
The ‘market mechanism’ (thoughts) assign values to us… this can never produce ‘happiness’… the ‘great re-set’ simply means… “how do we re-claim their attention?”
Bentham too wanted to analyze and even quantify ‘well-being’… break it down to its so-called component parts and remake it into a thing that does ‘work’… for ‘power’… and so rendering us… ‘predictable’….
We are the ‘factor’ ‘accumulation’… on multiple levels…
…we do the work of appropriation (read: ‘rape’…) of the earth… the results of which ‘power’ stuffs in its pockets…
…we do the work of invention… that speeds this process…
…and we demand ever more for our children… which speeds it still further….
The idea of possessing the earth-entire is arguably totalitarian…. Polanyi argued that until the driven attempt to establish a so-called ‘self-regulating’ global market, markets were never more than “accessories to economic life…” (p. 68) (obviously defining what is ‘economic’ as the art of feeding, clothing, and sheltering ourselves…)
(And by the way… ‘division of labor’… it is not the issue… the issue is force… coercion in our lives… the orchestrated imposition of conditions of scarcity (‘manufactured scarcity’), in order to compel us to work… so that an infinitesimal few can realize their fantasies… at the cost of everyone else never seeing their full gifts… and at the overall cost of a fully-realized humanity.)
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“‘Measurement’ to guide us… toward what?” is for all of us to think through… because in a future premised on generalized leisure… there is no ‘economy’…
Our journey to a discussion of Marilyn Waring and, with her help, to a deeper understanding of what is meant by ‘the economy’… was interrupted… and in that interruption came a prime example… of precisely what Marilyn Waring is saying in If Women Counted – that ‘value’ is a manipulated notion.
Marilyn Waring concluded her book, If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics, by putting forward an alternative model for measuring ‘the wealth of nations’ developed around 1980 by Hilkka Pietila, a ‘Finnish feminist activist’. It’s represented by three concentric circles: A. is the inmost circle, and moving outwards, we find B. and C.: “A. the free economy; B. the protected sector; and C. the fettered economy…”
…arguing… essentially… and in these new-old modern terms that Branson is promoting… that is it the ‘free economy’ that generates ‘happiness’… and the ‘fettered economy’ that makes us unhappy (and Branson, thereby, unintentionally reveals that… illustrates that… by choosing Bhutan…)
Pietila’s diagram describes the non-monetary part of the economy as the free economy, since it consists of the work and production that people do voluntarily for the well-being of their families and for pleasure without requesting or receiving pay. The protected sector consists of production and work for the home market as well as public services (such as food production, construction of houses and infrastructure, administration, schools, health, transport, and communication). This sector is, in most countries, protected and guided by legislation and official means, and thus the prices and other terms can be determined independently without too much pressure from the world economy. Large scale production for export is usually called the open economy. Pietila calls it the fettered economy, since this is fettered to the world market. The terms of this sector, the prices, competitiveness, demand, and so on are determined by the international market . Pietila writes that, in terms of the UNSNA [United Nations System of National Accounts], the whole life of a society is geared to support this sector, while it accounts for a quite modest proportion of the total production in any one nation and in the world….
Political and economic policies flow from the narrow agendas of political elites, and their decisions on the data they choose to collect are utterly inadequate. And while we can collect more data, goals and priorities should flow, not from assemblages of statistics, but from values….
We will still need data for guidance… [but]what matters in terms of measurement are the qualitative indicators and our interaction with them…. [For example] diet, as opposed to household income, may well be a far better indicator of the “well-being” of the community. (Marilyn Waring, If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics, 1988, p. 300, 302, 54)
…and then she argues… using the language of ‘class’… that ‘data’ – the quantification and measurement of the earth’s stores – will still be needed to guide us… but ‘guide us’ toward… what? That is the question that must be thought through… that we must stop at once to consider…
…because…
…if the earth is not our candy store… but our grandmother to whom we return even more than she rewards… if the point of our society is leisure and rest… and not exhaustion… and waiting for death (of the earth… of ourselves…)
…if every human is self-sufficient… has learned what Hesiod also did… the ways of Demeter… such that the labor of a single day provides sufficiency for a year…
…add to this the boon of creative communal energy…
…add to this the boon of instantaneous communication with out brothers and sisters globally…
…add to this the boon of all our energies reclaimed for our own use…
…which means for the earth a return to health and wholeness…
…as we-all-of-us are free to contribute to planning in advance for crises…
…and our energies are devoted to life…
…instead of the narrow aggrandizement of the few…
…then…
…why on earth do we need ‘measurement’ of her goods?…
…which she willingly shares…
…and we willingly return?
…measurement of her health, perhaps… but of her goods?… when ‘measurement’ itself we’ve seen brings the opposite of ‘good’ upon us… brings acquisitiveness and greed… at least this is what we’ve seen under conditions of manufactured scarcity… it’s difficult to imagine a need for quantifying earth-riches when abundance is our daily inheritance.
If living well is the point of life… and coercion is no more… then certainly we will not entertain… not even for a moment… that which eats our harmony… our ability to live well.
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If ‘economy’ is ‘free’ is it still ‘economy’? – and recall that ‘economy’ (according to the ideology…) means the quantification and measurement of planetary resources in order to ‘rationally’ manage them… which in practice means their transfer into private hands… and away from ‘the people’… which means that implied is the notion – reinforced in the propaganda – that private ownership equals ‘careful stewardship’….
But their conversion into quantities erodes and erases all interest in them as qualities… as we see with the privatization of post office properties… because of the race to accumulate.
So we see that ‘economy’ is ideology designed to conceal the true objective: the competitive game of ‘global supremacy’…
So… as… in a future premised on generalized human leisure there is no competitive rush to convert the earth into quantities so that it can be accumulated in one’s ‘plus’ column… in a future premised on generalized human leisure… there is no ‘economy.’
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The con “You’re not smart enough” can’t work anymore… authentic thoughts are flying across the globe simultaneously… this is a unique moment…
What she’s essentially describing is what today is called the ‘local movement’… and ‘power’ has embraced it because it has no choice… and ‘power’s embrace is the vampire’s kiss… so we must do (way) better than this… for freedom to be our future.
Waring was one of many progressive economists of that time who saw that a tiny few had set the weight… (moved by their values, by the way…) that skewed the world toward ever-increasing dependency for everyone but them… and who, not just sounded the alarm but devoted much sweat and love to try to influence policy decisions in a progressive direction… to interrupt the pattern clearly in place. But they didn’t credit the weight… they didn’t acknowledge that there were, in fact, ‘values’ driving the privatization process… that there were ‘values’ being expressed in the pattern that was set… or that the game ‘economics’ has been rigged for millennia… and that the only way out… is for us to stop playing. As this was ‘unthinkable’… as ‘the fait accompli of the state’ was deeply embedded in their thinking… assumptions… analysis and conclusions… they could do nothing to help us unseat… the weight. The proof of this is in the constant repetition… the continuous recycling… of the so-called ‘solutions’…
…and the proof is in the incontestable worsening of our lives… our health… and the health of the planet.
The discipline of ‘economics’ churns the available ‘solutions’…
…which are limited… because they can never release us from captivity, that would end ‘power’… so, since that’s off the table… the ‘solutions’ available that maintain class in place are limited (and in essence haven’t changed since Plato’s day…
And they churn out these limited, available ‘solutions’… crank them out as ‘fresh’ for each new generation to hopefully (from ‘power’s perspective) be conned by – none of which challenge the game itself (it goes without saying) – while simultaneously inventing ever-more-convoluting financial instruments and dealings… adding layers and layers of ‘con’… while we-the-people are told all we can do is to try to ‘hold on’ because we’re not smart enough to do anything else.
It’s a con that has worked up to now because we could not develop our thought… I say this a lot, but I see it before my eyes, I see that this is happening… I know I’m not the only one who has figured this scam out over the centuries… or right now… and it is because in this ‘right now’ our thoughts are flying across the globe instantaneously… we’re sharing them with each other… there is no way they can keep these thoughts suppressed anymore… despite their paid hired guns, the pundits…
…this is a unique moment… so we have to trust… trust what we’re seeing before our eyes…
…because we’re not going to hear it over the airwaves…
…trust what we see in our own hearts…
…that we don’t need to be forced to share our gifts…
…we know this….
So the force… the coercion… is for what? It’s for a tiny few to be on top. It’s for the most ignoble reason possible.
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Joan Robinson has written:
To learn from the economists regarded as scientists, it is necessary to separate what is valid in their description of the system from the propaganda that they make, overtly or unconsciously, each for his own ideology. The best way to separate out scientific ideas from ideology is to stand the ideology on its head and see how the ideas look the other way up. If they disintegrate with the ideology, they have no validity of their own. If they still make sense as a description of reality, then there is something to be learned from them, whether we like the ideology or not.
[So ‘power’ tells us that the measurement and privatization of all economic activity allows for the most efficient stewardship of these resources… which would mean therefore that it minimizes waste… but this is hardly the case… as ‘the economy’ is premised on and creates waste… so if a system creates waste, it cannot be ‘efficient’… and if we are the key resource on which the system runs… which clearly we are… and our health, each generation, worsens… clearly there is no ‘careful stewardship’.
So there is ‘value’ that is excluded from the measurement… which… as Marilyn Waring points out (below)… if it were included in the calculation, the ideology could not hold.
Our bodies know what has value… clean lungs have value… joyful children have value… moving freely on the earth unwatched and unencumbered by those who mean you ill has value… – include these key resources in our calculation and the theory of careful stewardship… which in any case never stood up for a second… collapses.]
The UNSNA [United Nations System of National Accounts] and its rules and regulations govern the measurement of national income in all countries. It is my confirmed belief that this system acts to sustain, in the ideology of patriarchy, the universal enslavement of women and Mother Earth in their productive and reproductive activities.
If I am wrong, then the system, when turned on its head to include recognition of all economic activity, will be operative. If it is not possible for the UNSNA to function by way of such inclusion, then the role of propaganda in the system will be clear. For example, if women’s work cannot be successfully incorporated in a system which purports to measure all economic activity, if the system at that point disintegrates, then it is invalid. The sole function of the system is to legitimize the propaganda.
“This strong word ‘value’ has been taken from us…” by… who are these guys?
Whose propaganda would we be examining?
Harvard biology professor Ruth Hubbard, in commenting on the medical profession, said, “The system… by which I mean both the structure and content of the scientific and technical professions, has been constructed by one particular, limited social group, composed of the economically privileged, university-educated, white men, and it serves their need more than ours.” The economic system has been constructed in exactly the same way. The profession of economics is that of a limited social group – economically privileged, university-educated, white men. It serves neither the majority of humankind nor our fragile planet. Its structure and content have a design and a beguiling propaganda. (Marilyn Waring, If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics, 1988, p. 18 – 24, 31 – 32, 43 – 45)
“Who are these guys?” It’s as if we-the-people… chased and beleaguered by unseen but concentrated and organized ‘power’… we who simply want to live and love and honor the ancestors well… must continuously stop and turn and stare behind us… century after century… stuck in one long Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid chase scene… and ask ourselves… “what kind of people are these?… so longing for what they have not… that they would destroy all joy… all health… all hope… all life… and the earth itself… to get it.”
And it seems the pundits of good heart who point to them… the ‘power’-guys… and for the record note that this state of things they make is wrong… believe that there responsibility ends… like De.Niro making The.Good.Shepherd… or the Wachowski brothers The.Matrix… but is that true?
If this system is premised on waste… what keeps us from our leisure is not insufficiency…
…‘plenty’ of ‘plenty’ is not just made by this system…
…but even more ‘plenty’ of ‘plenty’ is simply thrown away…
…and that ‘plenty’ of ‘plenty’ could nurture us all… and the earth as a whole… if we were set free…
…to make ‘plenty’ of ‘plenty’ of joy… and peace… and ease…
…because ‘plenty’ of ‘plenty’ is what we are inherently…
…it is our nature… which…
…once we’re free we’ll see…
…very concretely.
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Plato argued that for ‘rule’ to exist there had to be an ‘intermediary class’…
(…and as regards the function of that critical intermediary class that Plato told ‘power’ it needed to have to keep the cattle herded… we can now see clearly that this includes: “to keep the cattle divided… and confused….”)
… an ‘intermediary class’ that functions as a tribe every bit as much as Plato’s Tribe itself… which very much wants us all to think tribally as… that way… their ‘top-dog’ status is simply a matter of those ‘legacy trillions’… and millennia-long habits.
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“Why won’t they say it?” I’ve thought a lot about this question… “Why won’t they say it?” as they have time to ponder while the slavery of the rest of us is such we barely have time to briefly rest before we rise and back to work again… is that the answer?… everyone else must slave away… yet they have time to think…. “They’re not bothered. Ah yes. That’s it.” (“Oh be disturbed, madam, be disturbed to the extent of a tut and I’ll thank God for civilization.”)
…quite a perk… as Platonov showed us… quite a perk… it must be quite a perk to reap such a harvest… command such a price…
…but that hardly seems sufficient reason for the burying of heart… when it seems so blazonly and blazingly clear that it’s wrong to make a market in our humanity… wrong to make a market in our lives… why won’t they say it?… when its’ worse than wrong, it’s refuse from a steaming pit of hell… leave aside the marketing of life overall… we’ll make that moot as we flood the walls… once those potent words are spoke… we’ll flood the walls and re-fertilize the world with basic common sense… i.e. the truth.
This tribe – this pundit tribe – seems to unify across false divisions… (something I generally advocate for…) and maybe even real ones… despite their bombast and their nationalist rhetoric… acting as a form of nationalist-orates… that congregate at conferences and commiserate together… on the dullness of ‘the masses’ they’ve committed themselves to ‘protecting’…
…a tribe with the function of furthering ‘exclusivity’ as a key political principle for divvying us up into small little mini-states for ‘power’… all for the ‘greater-good’ of keeping us herded… neatly packaged and powdered fresh for the eating… and definitely well-conned and kept perennially perplexed…
…I digress…
…why do they hoard their manufactured certainty? Their unity in either contempt or paternalistic concern for us surpasses any differences in the specificities of their exclusivities… what they claim as their exclusive advocacies…
…why?… if not because those eyes upon them are so intoxicating?
‘Power’ knows how strong the pull of our full gifts… how piercingly they scream to be reclaimed… that which is inherent in us… but structurally disclaimed…
So we stand in line to join the tribe of ‘Mind’… the tribe of ‘smart ones’… the tribe of those who ‘manage’ the ‘child-like proles’… the Tribe of Plato… because the human ability to see from high above the low-ground-level of things…
…is so intoxicating.
(So… it’s likely not… on the Left… conscious betrayal… but, as George Eliot pointed out… there is an inventiveness of ‘mind’ that takes ‘what is’… as fait accompli… and ‘adjusts’ to it… tells itself it has no choice… invents reasons why it’s ‘legitimate’… to not demand for others… the perks it has claimed for itself.)
A few weeks back, a progressive radio host, Davey D., played a speech by a former political prisoner who spoke as a black nationalist, and he used the phrase ‘the punditry class’… saying that, “the problem is ‘the rise of a punditry class’ that is not pushing forward the conversations that we need to have…” (07.30.13).
Now that is very like something I would say… if not my exact words… and to hear these words… used for such a purpose… what I would consider furthering division…
(…putting forward the notion of the self-privileging of ‘white-folks’ as the problem… and not full-fledged, straight-on ‘power’… in maximum-wing-extension… a focus on which would ask: “has not the worm of ‘power’… the worm of ‘contempt’… the worm of ‘management’… found its way into my heart, too?… which unchecked rots it out?” I think we have to ask ourselves… is our goal to ‘manage’ others?… to get them to do our bidding? – that’s the worm of ‘power’ in us… for instance. I’ve made up these little children’s songs because I think they’re needed […these are very rough… but I’d like to share them… and hope you’ll factor in the slapdash terms of their emergence…. I look at them as gifts from Nanji.]:
(Nanji:
At two he was his mother’s…
…at three he came to me…
…at five there were no others…
…to ‘govern’ him but he…
…and Oh that ‘he’ it held the earth…
…and all the ancestors of steady berth…
…fast-held docked in lovingness…
…for all the world…
…for all the world…
…is he.)
“Listen to the MUSTN’TS, child,
Listen to the DON’TS,
Listen to the SHOULDN’TS,
The IMPOSSIBLES, the WON’TS,
Listen to the NEVER HAVES,
Then listen close to me –
Anything can happen, child,
If you want it to be.”
(Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends, 1974)
[“Nashville is hard on the living… but it sure does well by the dead.”]
“If you need help… take this feather from my body…
…shake it three times…
…shake it three times…
…shake it three times…
…and I will come and help you…”
(Mei Ying, Kindhearted Xiawudong, 1984)
[“A carp, a mother vulture, and a mother fox and her cubs, help a Uygur boy outwit a wicked princess who has a magic mirror and likes killing young men.”]
“When I put on my Superman-cape…
…and I go and look and see… I know…
…if I take a good look… and get up close…
…ain’t nothin’ botherin’ me… Oh no…
…ain’t nothin’ botherin’ me.”
…and I asked my son to help me… too many times… hoping to harness his energies… now that’s the worm of ‘power’… an insidious thing… this ‘asking’… under conditions of manufactured scarcity.
(I’ve argued that we should substitute ‘coercion’ for ‘violence’ in our thinking… in our defining of the problem… if our goal is to end ‘power’ and to avoid shifting the onus to ourselves… quite unjustly. Because ‘coercion’ points squarely at ‘power’… while ‘violence’ (‘power’ has ensured) points to us….
But I’ve also put forward that the basic operating premises of those of us who want to establish a very different world… a future that’s free… must be: “no division… no violence… no leaders…” – but our ultimate goal for the species to grow… is for that “no violence” to be “no coercion.”)
…and in such a venue… designed to reach a progressive audience… is quite disheartening… and could provoke our curiosity… as it seems to be the same tactic (discussed here) used by David Brooks… but we won’t indulge it… ***
…beyond restating the conclusion of that audio-blog: he who controls the lexicon (and in this case ‘confuses it’…) i.e. our thoughts… rules the world.
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It is apparently a very dangerous thing to read the words of ancestors who long for our freedom… a very dangerous thing to love the earth… a very dangerous thing to love your brothers and sisters – for these offenses against ‘the state’… against ‘power’… you will be watched… and attempts will be made to unsettle you….
But a cursory look behind the screen of ‘power’s official screed and we see in their determination to keep college beyond the means of everyone but those who boast a long family history of folks who take readily to the leash (or to the crown, that goes without saying…) and to the carrot of recognition… and who eagerly seize the challenge of leaping blithely through whatever hoops are given to achieve it…
…a fear…
…because those still-earth-connected… and so not-easily-led to lose their souls for poisoned carrots…
(…when healthy ones the earth will give if you but sit with her and learn her lessons – what a no-brainer that is… if your connection to her still exists…)
…pose ‘problems’….
There is a plain… straight-up power that comes from earth… that comes from being earth-taught… that comes to bloom completely unconnected to any conscious certainty…. Yet certainty is its effect.
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Does getting to that discussion of the world… the future… we want… presume a power we don’t yet have?
That tripartite disconnection we’ve discussed bears repetition here… in losing earth we’ve lost our power and our voice… in losing the ancestors, we’ve lost the means to develop our thought, and so our certainty… in losing access to each other, our communal form, we’ve lost empathy, heart and spirit…
…so… looked at this way might lead us to say… the way to regain our lost wholeness is to reunite heart, voice, and root… we must sink our roots in healthy thoughts… and healthy earth… in communion with each other.
So the goal seems to be to drop particularity… drop particular allegiances… and embrace a global humanity… not as a thought but as a practical reality… i.e. as a process of consciously constructing our world.
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We said if we could see the pattern… then we could intervene… but intervene how? where? and with what tools and tactics and strategies?… and we’ve been considering the effect of ‘the Greek Chorus’…
(…and by the way… meetings can be a form of ‘Greek Chorus’… if we don’t provide ourselves with quiet time to reflect apart from the thoughts made conventional by their preponderance in our lives – a quiet space to reflect – so we can listen to our bodies… and grow our gifts…. This is a key piece… both ends and means in one… of our future freedom…)
… how the ‘Greek Chorus’ called the ‘pundit tribe’ is both cause and effect of our continued disempowerment… and, that ‘disempowerment’ means ‘lack of certainty’… the absence of belief that we deserve to be free… and lack of clarity about what it means to be free…
…and the critical need… therefore… to break free… of those voices… and to develop our own.
(And we’ll return to this point in a future show… particularly as we’re constantly told that some hang back… and some are bold… i.e. that there is ‘natural leadership’… a notion supportable only if you freeze in time a moment… and trot it out later as truth… when our truth as life is motion… our gifts must be constantly and consciously grown…
…which is why I say that ‘happiness’ is self-creation… because if you continuously thwart the efforts of a living thing to live its biological inheritance… it will be unhappy…
…that’s simply the way of it… of life.)
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The gap between our hanging back…
…and deciding to act…
…cannot be filled but…
…by our restored power…
…and our love.
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David Brooks… and controlling the lexicon… (Pt. 3)