Simultaneously Evaporating Reciprocal Fantasies (and the insufferable fortunate smug)
America and Europe were not ever what they pretended to be – and are even less the fine humane inspirations they have for so long presented to one another
First off, I have to say hello to my loyal long time readers from my original LargeEssSmallPress site. It got scrambled-up rather badly a couple of months ago, and it took weeks for me to reconstruct my old list of subscribers and get this Substack version fully enriched (better photos than ever, now). Apologies for the delay – welcome back – please do sign-up here (free is fine) so you don’t miss my stuff, even if more social media goes kablooie on us (feels probable, right?) Also have to say thank you to everyone for your keen eyeballs and the thoughtful brains behind them. Finally, I should say thank you to a couple of extremely intelligent essayists, whose work has been extremely inspiring for today’s piece in particular (links below). Don’t always agree (and boy do I hate that I even have to say that, nowadays), but the point is to be principled, listen and learn from each other, even then (perhaps even especially then).
We all know we are living in a badly broken, fractured and dysfunctional society – I say there’s no one here to fix it, but all of us.
People in ‘the west’ are very upset lately. There are a lot of good reasons for us to be upset, too – but despite incredible levels of passion, we are directing almost all of this dissatisfaction energy foolishly, self-harmingly, and most often using it for the purpose of self-justification, instead of self-overcoming (as earlier more stoic generations far more often and more easily did, to the lasting benefit of all).
A whole lot of writers will now tell you we are being lied to – and the honest ones will admit it is even stranger than that, because we are also being lied to with truth, all the time. By which I mean to say smaller things which are true are magnified in importance and attention, in order to deliberately obscure other considerations which would almost certainly bear more fruit for all citizens in common.
I have always read voraciously, and never within safe lines (grew up in the left – but I enjoyed Hayek, and even found his “Road to Serfdom” strong enough to destroy the dogma of a lifelong boomer ‘scientific socialist’ friend). Of course that doesn’t mean I like Hayek’s monetary policy (whole different line of work) but I don’t like every period of Picasso either, my point is that I am open to useful information, and I don’t care where it came from. Malcolm X put it perfectly when he said: “I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it’s for, or who it’s against.”
For the last eight years or so, since I was finally persuaded to shift energy from the time anchored printed page to online writing (join the fray), I have read more widely than ever – and I’m willing to bet that anyone else who comes from deep love of books, but has read deeply and widely online since, shares my gratitude that we got to do so without many gatekeepers. Pray this remains so – that the web itself serves citizens on balance, not crude power politics (or we are all deeply truly f@cked).
My approach to books is simple, but unusual – if I can get one good idea that I never encountered before out of a book – it was a worthwhile read, even if I disagreed with everything else in it. Online, I have spent far more time studying the strength and derivation of contrary arguments than ever before in my life, and I’ve also become far more skeptically curious about why I like those which do appeal.
Which leads me to a two-part idea which has snuck up on me over many years, by multiple impacts of hard to explain and yet very predictable outcomes – both positive and negative.
One big reason that we in the west have such a hard time surfacing above the propaganda that we’re swimming in, isn’t that we are stupid, or even that we’ve lost the capacity to reason, we’ve just stopped caring about the difficult thing that putting wisdom in front of reasoning was always for – duty.
When you are lonely, hopeless, depressed, alienated, bored, underutilized, under-loved and without purpose, whatever resources of cleverness you have, are likely to be employed to defend the one tiny bit of turf (mammalian territorial range) you have left – the precious crap inside your head (and to be clear, the content and quality of that crap, matters not at all). Finding ways to justify ME-ness and accuse all challengers, (who are, far more often than we think, only trying to broaden our view) occupies millions of clever people for their whole intellectual lifetime. How dare you even try to say I’m not complete and perfect, just the way I am?
The idea which goes along with this one, also hides just behind it – and you’ll know what I mean about things we can reliably predict without easily explaining, as soon as I set this one out.
Some of the philosophies of the whole world which are popular are designed for emotionally healthy, self-overcoming, love, integrity and duty centred people. But many of the newer popular big ideas especially, are designed to take a state of mental imbalance (depression, paranoia, narcissism) and, gathering any intellectual referents which might (seem to) strengthen the claim, use them to ‘prove’ their mental illness is both an objective general truth – and also the fault of the whole wide world.
I have to qualify that clearly. Like I say, I come from the left (literally grew up in a cult/commune) and I absolutely did sustain serious lasting emotional damage from that craziness, so I struggle too.
I am heartbroken about the implosion of my own (Canadian) national optimism and hopefulness, the state of the global economy, the lies, influence and obvious madness of super-powerful warmongers – and many other worrisome factors which many of you will share.
BUT – I am depressed or not depending on how I engage with the possibilities of each day (this isn’t victim blaming or false-machismo – just practical reality – we do or do not try to overcome as we go).
I have been obsessed with watching the world (history, before someone else interprets it) for clues, ever since I was a history keener paperboy, actively comparing the stories in the 1970s newspapers I was delivering, to the 1914 newspapers I scanned endlessly on microfilm at the library, as I tried very hard to understand WWI – and all the clues it left, which were later obscured by the mythologized sequel.
So – I take in a ton of upsetting information, and will keep doing that (someone has to keep their eyes open, even if we don’t ever get our hands on the wheel, we can at least yell at the sleeping driver “CLIFF!”)
Taking in so much legitimately depressing stuff every day, is WHY I work to stay clear and purposeful about ideas about the world, and keep them rigorously distinct from ideas about my own emotional state. Were I to seek rationalizations instead, I would go from curious and moderately knowledgeable to fantastically ignorant, instantly. (Wrong box for feeling, wrong purpose for reason).
We all know at least one person who creates obvious traps of disappointment or frustration for themselves every single day, and yet always blames others for the predictable failures they keep asking for. One can even feel a bit jealous of them – they have that rarest thing in the modern world – perfect certainty – they always know what to be angry at! (And prepare fresh experience to ‘prove it’)
But we don’t rely on people like that to help us with important work.
By contrast, when you feel love connection and duty constantly, for a period of many years in a row, you become used to the idea that the purpose of reasoning is for best possible understanding, so that you can be of greatest possible use to the people who you are caring for, and care for you.
Understanding your possibilities, difficulties, risks and responsibilities realistically – all of which are so much more important than our pride in any opinion, as to almost completely obliterate that as a goal.
There are of course, a whole hell of a lot of other ways to go wrong, with reasoning (to be sure!). But I think these are a few basic starting splits we should learn to recognize. Many people now use words which sound like thinking, but function like excuses for their own ongoing petulance and ignorance. They aren’t trying to solve anything about the world at all – only their own ego problems.
I still find it worthwhile to engage with people who are stuck inside constant self-congratulation and justification – even though many do function in the world as bullies, using words I would rather see treated with a great deal more respect (that is, discrediting good ideas, with wrong emotional uses).
BUT – if I want to have a discussion which is actually about the world, instead of tribal psychology, I first look for someone who is trying to deploy reason to challenge themselves, more than others.
Always struck me as step-one functional modesty. Don’t assume you know, watch and learn instead.
And it seems to come reliably to those who have learned to put someone else first (love and duty as action, and not just selfish-steam hot air).
Another great thing that happens, when you learn to recognize this difference in thinking (with or without functional wisdom incorporated) is that when you do find a few people thinking with principle foremost, you have also found people who not only can, but want to work past tribal nonsense.
I don’t mean they stop caring about the places where they differ, I just mean they are capable of recognizing the best arguments of their opponents, instead of being so emotionally lazy they assume the worst motives, just to make themselves feel heroic, for being obstructive tantrum throwing brats!
Mind you, even sorting for principle over ego (that is, talking to emotional adults of any tribe) we still have the problem I opened with. There are so many kinds of truth. Mental models which reveal aspects which feel important, even though they contradict or obscure other arguably valid models.
Ratiocination, people. Being rational is about determining ratios of importance, not blending collections of provocative facts and our own sought-after emotion. (Tragically, fear and sanctimony are both more entertaining now for many millions of us, than even trying for far more risky happiness).
I have discussed the Platonic/Aristotelian split many times, and that’s a really crude divider anyhow. We all know that most people don’t give a shit either way about either of them – just what works, cheapest?
And that’s another useful entry caution we should try to bear in mind. Just as I always try to remember library-head, when I’m writing with a keyboard (instead of my beloved canary pads), we must remember that when we get into grand philosophical discussions on the web, we are still weirdoes talking to weirdoes, every damn time.
I’m not saying the subjects aren’t important (sometimes world changing – definitely culture shaping) I’m just saying lets all remember that we’re a bunch of people with heads filled with words and ideas that don’t bother most other people much at all. We can speak with passion, but must never pretend to represent anything more than one faction of what is always a field composed of nothing but weirdoes.
And no, normal people who don’t obsess about things like nuclear war, famine in the horn of Africa, debt to earnings ratios, currency devaluation and cultural dissolution – aren’t less-than us AT ALL. They are in fact the medium which supports freaks like us. We’re the froth, first to go (farmers last).
So – every wonderfully complex and heartfelt thesis we propose, every dazzling feat of scholarship, deep reference, deep reverence, or high-wire intellection is really bird-song, unless it does real work.
Mind you, because I have been watching politics and the corruption of our once hopeful society with horror and fascination since the late 1970s, I feel nowadays, a bit like that apocryphal investor in 1929 who famously said, “I knew for sure that it was time to get out of the market, when the elevator boy gave me a stock tip.”
EVERYONE has a favourite pet theory now – at least one – and often a whole menagerie of them.
As someone who has been falling in love with theories and then self challenging and tearing them apart for decades now, there is a certain temptation sometimes, to browse along the gallery rows and point out, “this one is strong, beautiful and useful – but this one here is a bad copy of an artist who thoroughly sucked in the first place.”
But no one likes that asshole. In fact, after many years of teaching, sometimes stealthily (I had grade sevens coming to me for contraband college algebra homework, just for the illicit thrill of it) and sometimes openly (standing in front of a class really is harder than people who haven’t done it, think), I have come to the conclusion that there are only a few ways that people really learn things.
- They want to know it, and so actively seek out more and more clues and keep adding and connecting them as they go (why inspiration is the master skill for teachers).
- They are forced to know, or be exposed to it (often through some kind of life upsetting shock).
- They are confronted with their own ideas and language, and shown where they ultimately go wrong.
That is to say, the only way I have found to actually change someone’s mind, when they have an idea which is wrong in fact, or in use, is to enter far enough into their idea, to prove that it leads nowhere.
One could call this an application of Reductio Ad Absurdum (reduce to an absurdity) in Socratic style (empathy for the arguer, even when wrong). But you know it when you see it, named or not.
Just saying someone is wrong, or yelling it, or saying they shouldn’t speak at all, persuades no one.
But that’s still basic level stuff – what really interests me is the way that we have now all got tangled up in a dense thicket of ideas which we are fond of, even though they don’t add up to a useful whole.
Perhaps the most common error is what some would call framing. Using a romantic mindset for a question like climate and pollution is ridiculous. That calls for thermodynamics at an absolute minimum, and people who want to express their deep caring for the subject, should learn some!
People who are enviro-upsettists – honestly don’t care if they cause mass starvation. Not helpful.
Mind you, applying thermodynamics, or far too commonly now, a business school cost-benefit mindset, or an upsettist dogma, to the fostering and health of culture, is no less barbaric and ruinous.
Somehow, we have got into a mode of operating our society in which almost everything is done badly, using a theory which belongs to something else (or in many cases, in a museum of irony).
Small wonder so many come to think cleverness is for self defence – even if the thing they are defending is not really their pride, the way they are trained to think, but in fact their ignorance.
The strange thing I come to here, is a point where some might think I am defending old ideals like quality and hierarchy of accomplishment – but actually I am (by lifelong habit) extremely skeptical about both of those (though in favour, when they serve). What I’m really after is PURPOSE.
Recognizing proven accomplishment and putting genuine competence in charge, (inspired students grown into self-driving enthusiasts) is all downstream of purpose, because once you are engaging in common purpose, respect is naturally generated for those who make outsize contributions to it.
YES – institutions can be very badly corrupted indeed, when other factors intervene (and there are a ton of those, which we can all list easily, forms of money and weird dogma taking most of the top ten spots), but our modern focus on what’s wrong with everything, skips past the question “Why were we doing that?” and ignores the serious problems many of our institutions were created to address.
I am not saying they all serve their purpose anymore, I’m just saying the problems are still there too.
My long time readers will know another split I often make – Eloi and Morlocks – HG Welles’ caricatured care-(and brain)-free elite Eloi, playing happily on the surface of an immaculate world, as worker Morlocks toil in vast caves underground without hope or light, to provide their cheery illusion (and now and then, eat an Eloi).
The funny thing about living dumb and lucky, that is – in a society so decadent that we are no longer even able repair our infrastructure inheritance, let alone leave massively improved infrastructure for others to come, is that we lose track of our respect and reasons, and with that surrender to sloth, narcissism and upsettism, we deny our young those crucial keys to purpose also. Which really means denying them access to hope. (not a notion or a feeling – it comes truly, only in the form of a PLAN!)
So much for how we’re thinking (or pretending to, while generating only noise).
Now I have to admit clearly that I am a bit of an ornery cuss. Not given to bandwagons (and even less, to bullying – regardless of the dogma or cause being invoked and abused, as if it somehow justifies the obvious offence).
I also learned a very hard lesson long ago, about wasting energy taking mere words too seriously, instead of concentrating on the plans and work so many of our words were once meant to indicate.
BUT – there are a lot of popular ideas which are foolish and leading people into unhelpful positions, and yet employ language which is so teasingly close to helpful, it is tricky to separate the serious error from the sympathetic aspiration (almost always in the form of implication – a feeling not a plan).
When people use ideas like supremacy to explain discrepancies in various fields of work, I am always tempted toward the old line “Never explain as malice, that which may be adequately explained by stupidity.” Only in place of stupidity here, one should use individual choices and random life factors.
Not saying there are no racist assholes left, there are, but the idea that the fundamental structure of the world of work in the wealthy west is racism, is just weird. The ideas we most clearly see in action right in front of us are – total Elite domination (“meritocracy” and acceptable-homelessness, taken as a package). A kill or be killed economics with increasing stratification and ever more left-behinds.Balanced against a very strange (expensive yet pathetic) leftist industry of water-treading charity.
A rough (and for the last forty years at least, never once friendly or mutually accepting) balance of forces between unhinged individualist competition and unwholesome institutions of mass surrender – the first skimmed by, and the second entirely administrated (also skimmed) by, the ruling class – investor/manipulators and corporate functionaries or NGO staffer and civil service types, respectively.
Any reader might be forgiven for wondering where my own sympathies lie – and in explaining this honestly I might make my general position clearer for new readers especially. Both – very strongly. And at the same time – neither one – because both pretend to be adequate to all cases, and yet have a long demonstrated record of constant failure. Positions backed by ideals, instead of demonstration.
There are a lot of things westerners don’t like about China (and not all are bullshit stories from our war-promoting media and state intelligence, though far more are, than we think). On the other hand we can say one thing truthfully. In China, capitalism serves society. Here, society serves capitalism.
I know very few here, who wouldn’t insist we still have a better lifestyle deal, but fewer still who could prove that, with anything other than reference to romantic idealism and wildly dishonest propaganda. Obviously it is less painful to be a bully, than a victim of extortion – but neither would be far better still.
When we in the west celebrate our freedom, we must also bear in mind how many people our institutions deny freedom to, so that we can steal from the poor elsewhere, and get our taste of the loot. The fatal flaw and fuel for every doomed empire.
I did have several long duration technician and education gigs I greatly enjoyed, but I’ve spent most of my life as a freelancer or a subcontractor, underpaid and less than reliably employed. Sometimes this means doing the work of a full-timer, but costing the company none of the benefits, and sometimes it means exploiting yourself ten times harder than you’d ever let any boss get away with.
That whole – weakest person in the chain takes all the risk – work hustle is now a very standard mode of work for many (one entirely legitimate reason that kids are so hopeless and depressed) but back in the eighties, when I first started at it, it was new and weird, and most workers still thought everyone else who was working was being treated decently (offered a pension, paid sick days, etc).
By the time awareness of reality and empathy for the put-upon finally sunk-in (boomers retired in droves) that complex of lousy worker-screwing deals had pretty much replaced the premium and respect once commanded by many skilled trades in the working class, and been made standard – which is to say, workers had all been beaten down hard enough, for long enough, to accept it and comply (very sad).
At this point, many don’t even realize it’s not normal or acceptable (neither dignified nor survivable). Often, we end up blaming ourselves as defective individuals, for not being able to figure out how to work a system which is expressly designed not to work for us! (serves us up to company interests on a silver platter, and has not been a fair or hopeful future-building deal for individual middling citizens, for many decades).
I have also had several runs at zero-capital small business, and made some money doing freelance repairs over the years, but found I am way better at doing work than hustling it up. Of course our society does idolize hustle – but we are what we are. Recognizing our nature, can help us appreciate the value good employers do still offer – work with dignified conditions, like respect. (not kidding, that is worth far more in job satisfaction, than any numbers-over-humans manager ever does understand).
How much respect for the individual people in the team, and how much focus on the bottom line, has also shifted steadily downward for this whole period, to the point where young people now cannot even dream of home ownership, because even if they are making mortgage-paying money this month, they know they can’t count on that still being true next year. We have been pushed from being owners citizens and stakeholders of our own towns and cities, back to the state of landless peasants begging favours from the lords, in just a few generations (while crowing to the world about our “cultural achievements” the whole time).
I don’t say any of this to indulge, but just to say yes I have seen it – watched it fall apart in front of me. Much as I enjoy the work of countless economists and social theorists, most reveal in their writings that they don’t really ‘get’ this side of life at all. For them, the frustrating go-nowhere struggle-hustle which breaks the hearts and hopes of entire generations, is strictly theoretical. A data-point, at best. A shift of demand.
Despite many such gulfs in understanding between classes, cliques and generations, it actually is quite obvious to everyone now, young and old, left and right, that our aristocracy is way out of control – but so far we would rather keep slinging mud at our disagreeing neighbour (tradition, after all), than recognize our common opponents, and use the tools still left to ‘citizens’ (those who will drop the cop-out mantle of ‘consumers’ and again embrace a measure of responsibility, regardless of their personal fortune or lack thereof) to at least seriously try to do something about it.
Nothing accidental about that, of course. Just as consumerism itself was designed just after world war two – to be a pacifier for risky passions (and a steady source of profits for our aristocracy), the culture war, whatever legitimate bases it might once have had, has clearly been turned toward evil (and turned on high), this entire century. Paralyzing legions of uncurious citizens with hyped-up false division, so the warmongers and controlling skimmers can split us into weaker smaller groups and wear down remaining resistance with a deluge of fury and social chaos, coupled with unprecedented institutional incompetence and indifference.
When the big story about a pair of devastating hurricanes on ever more insipid corporate news is “Stop hurting the government’s feelings!” you know for sure we took a wrong turn, way way back.
So – why do I find the suddenly popular word “Supremacy” teasing right on the edge of usefulness, even though most of the cases it is used to explain, seem like examples where it is, at best, a minor factor?
Because we in the rich west (the phrase “golden billion” really says it), have been fantasizing for the entire post-war period that we were becoming ever more perfect societies – and Europe and America have each helped to sustain the illusion that the other, contained the last few bits they were missing, to perfect the recipe.
Riffing here (going after a ‘feeling’) but say – blend a French work/life balance, a Mediterranean diet, Scandinavian working conditions and American super-prosperity and you’d have a perfect society! One so fantastic, it might even justify the way we steal from poor countries around the world at the point of a bayonet, to prop the whole mess up, economically. (Not to them, of course, but this IS a supremacist dream, after all – left and right together – as for all our worst collective evils).
In reality, for several decades straight now, our system has been working really well only for a very small percentage of the population – the ever lonelier aristocracy, less well for the fast dwindling middle class – and not at all for the ever growing hordes of permanently dispossessed citizen/peasants.
The wild cognitive dissonance (I want to say shearing force) involved in thinking that we are the moral pinnacle of human civilization, even as we impoverish our own citizens, and continue to exploit every weaker economy around the world, wherever we can use our weight, bayonets or dollars to bribe, persuade and open doors (or level mountains) is dizzying stuff – vertiginous!
But it sure as heck doesn’t inspire any modesty or introspection, let far alone stop us from shaking a fist at everyone else, when they dare to disobey us, does it?
Imran Khan is the most popular politician in recent Pakistani history. Do you know why he is now in jail, instead of in power? Because Biden’s USA considered his foreign policy “Aggressively Neutral” (that’s the actual State Department quote) and planned with his own spy service to remove him from power – the charge against him? (hold on to your Orwells) He looked at the top secret orders to destroy him – and even as Prime Minister – he didn’t have the right security clearance, even to read the commands of the foreign owner-bully-bastards (collective us). Definition of Law-fare, really. Kafka as political strategist. (Demented empire, totally out of control).
In the dictionary, under control freak? That page is a mirror, because it really is incorporated us. Absolutely-not just our corporations, but the jerks we elect, and ways we comply, just as surely. Making us something rather less than the greatest realization of humanity, ever – we can all admit that now, right? (Or at least feel it as a deep foreboding, even if we can’t yet bring ourselves to speak blasphemy out loud)
If that thought still offends you, please consider how many of us are now medicated and self-medicating just to drag themselves through the day, then tell me again how we are creating something of extraordinary value, worth the incredible human cost. (To ourselves spiritually, no less than to poorer others, physically).
In reality, what we really are is incredibly weird (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) compared to every other society on earth. Societies which have proven cultural continuity and adaptive strength for hundreds or even thousands of years, through good times and very very bad.
Every single one of our ideas is unlike theirs. We don’t care about other people, our community, or the future, anything close to the way lasting traditional societies do. We also look at those older cultures with enormous (smugnorant) contempt – even though the current version of our modern western societies have never known anything but good times – except when we forced disaster with our own hubris (over and over again) – and still we can’t cope or sustain, let far alone thrive and grow stronger!
I’ll stop to better qualify that. Even super-rich healthy and happy people have better and worse days. Their very worst day might seem materially fantastic, to someone less fortunate, but it is still bad for them (everyone has their own frame of reference – and we are too childish and stuck inside our own heads now, to allow ourselves to be regularly reminded that our idea of zero, is usually someone else’s six).
I’ll clarify one more degree and point, before moving on. I am not among those who are gifted with faith. But I do not in any way disdain the value of faith, for those who do have it. (Used to, very ashamed of that now). Even on the most cynical or clinical materialist level, one must acknowledge that religion does several things very well. This crucial reminder of humility and fortune is an important one. So is community connection.
I am just silly and ambitious enough that I spent several decades thinking about what a created religion, which offered some of those consolations without requiring faith, might look like (for a novel which I finally saw how to write – but did not, because I felt sure it would be taken exactly wrong).
The point here is that we moderns pretend we have transcended the “Limitations of religion” while in truth we have never stopped being blindly faithful (the obvious false supremacy, I described above) and even proselytizing – like no other social construct in recent human history. The two parts of religion which atheists always say they hate the most – and yet in practise LOVE to embrace themselves, when given any old rusty piece of catharsis-serving dogma! Unbelievers are really all painted as sinners.
My long time readers will know that there are many other layers, underneath our self-congratulatory mythology, which I have been writing about for many years. The evil games played to rob others of rights livelihood and even lives, to enrich our aristocracy, and give us a dilute cut of the loot (almost like royalties for our agreement to consent to the murder, while keeping our eyes firmly locked on the TV instead).
This very deliberately obscured history winds through all kinds of opaque institutions. Chalmers Johnson spent his entire career working in the American foreign service, and later wrote especially well about the strange collusion between US diplomacy, corporate ends and the war state (and finally warned, before his death, that CIA must be abolished, for the USA to have any hope of surviving).
“Nato was created to keep the Germans down, The Americans in, and the Soviets out” might be a typically useful gem from this angle. (Actual quote from a key founding theorist of the cold war).
Adam Curtis’ extraordinary documentary series address some of the cultural sides of our WEIRDness which are, strangely, even harder to characterize (the myths are so fondly held by so many).
The huckster mass-media layer is yet another – actively criticized and debated since the 1960s, without citizens ever really getting on top of the games being played against them (like an arms race between new levels of awareness – and very expensive new strategies for deliberate bafflement).
We can see how hilariously corny the TV tricks were a few generations ago, but still fall for the latest fine-tuned variations of them, reliably.
My younger readers will get a huge laugh out of “The Glass Teat” – a book of Television criticism by the spectacularly cantankerous Harlan Ellison. Some of the manipulations are almost quaint – and yet the main programs remain active, even in the latest social media tug-of-war battles for our minds.
So – when I hear the word supremacy, my immediate hope is that we are waking up and beginning to realize that we have a lot to learn from others – cultures which have managed to survive tough times, again and again, with their cultural spirit and determination tested repeatedly, but emerging (ultimately) intact.
Edward Said famously said Orientalism was created to sustain the illusion that the west was in a natural position of tutelage, toward the societies of west Asia. And this points to what IS for sure supremacy – with fake-left and fake-right working together in lock step. The main point of the whole game is really “WE KNOW BEST” (always with a great big side order of – “...so you’d better do it now, even if we have yet to make it work here, ourselves, or else you won’t like what happens to you, next.”)
Especially gross and stupid when the superior airs and threats come from feeble powers in decline like greatly exaggerated Britain, France, or never-powers like my own Canada. “My big brother will beat you up” is not the position of an honourable adult. Damn though, our puffed-up out of touch aristocrats simply will not break that habit. Selling us out wholesale, of course, but they are no longer able to hide the scam from us effectively – so instead they stoke the fires of division, repeatedly, with state force.
One particularly ridiculous recent example was Rahm Emmanuel (Obama’s former chief of staff), as US ambassador to Japan, pressuring the Japanese to adopt specific legislation aimed at what some Americans think of as sexual freedom. Say what you like about their also imperfect society, the idea that the Japanese need Americans (among the most sexually twisted and unhealthy humans in the entire world) to civilize them on such basic matters is well beyond grotesque. What year is this?
Of course his inappropriate foreign influence campaign, created tons of resistance on principle, which could then be used as evidence of resistance to the American principle – instead of resistance to AMERICAN FORCE which of course it actually was. And if the ultra-restrained Japanese get that mad about these games we keep playing, should we really be surprised that those we treat much worse, are much angrier? What we pretend is well-meaning, helpful and humane, is almost always really a game of control.
There actually are a lot of people around, who do not ever need that explained to them. Some of them are the lucky few here, who are still being nourished with old-fashioned compassion and direct human attention, and so learn connection duty and compassion for others early. Some are folks who found their own nourishment later, with the vital human caring connection needed, to rise above petty upsettism. But many more who see it, are people from other cultures which never did pay much attention to the costumes and the advertising, because in their tradition of deep wisdom, they never forgot that the iron fist underneath, is the part that you really have to watch.
I wrote a note to Simplicius the thinker, a writer whose work I greatly admire, awhile ago, and mentioned that my closest friends were immigrants (growing up in a cult, you forever feel a bit of an outsider, and can relate). I didn’t explain why I found people from elsewhere so profoundly rewarding, but I should have.
The folks I find most engaging, are the ones who come here carrying a part of our old culture, which we’ve lost here, and don’t know where to find anymore (inside our starving hearts, of course – but how do you tax, regulate, or profit from that? And how do we learn to believe in things beyond that, in common, once again?)
Friends more important than stuff. Loyalty and integrity more important than expedience. Shared steady gains over cut-throat screw-you short term advantage.
But before you think I’m going all pollyanna and idealistic about my friends, I should add the opposite side, also, which for many years baffled me. Many folks from cultures with more community centred values, and way less desperate lonely isolation, do incomparably better on the practical side, also.
In a way (and I am sorry, to any insulted by this) what I really want to say is that psychologically, most modern westerners are like permanent emotional teenagers. Insecure as hell and dog-paddling like crazy, to hide that insecurity and deny their basic self. Obsessed with what everyone else thinks, really means, and maybe says behind their back, and OMG how can I even...?
For my friends from elsewhere, the answer to such consuming self-doubts is usually, “Well, you get up and try, and if it doesn’t work, you figure out why and try again.” And no matter what sort of wonderful yarns we might spin in our navel-gazing narcissism and paranoia, just try and see really is a far better way.
Drat – now I am at risk of sounding inane – that point sounds so simple and obvious. But I swear (compassion for the conflicted) the efforts we spend in worrying about each other, instead of actually BEING WITH each other, are wasteful on an epic scale, of every nourishment we suffer for needing.
Our weirdness again – so distinct from every society which has lasted, and (we are convinced) so much superior that we are entitled to take force and kill without limit, and remain “good” even as we do.
I have written in a direct witness way about the unravelling of our institutions – a slow motion fire sale which has been consuming and degrading life in the west for four decades (at least). A hollowing out of principle, care and wisdom. An emptying of beauty, quality and confounding of high purpose.
But again, there are levels and levels. We could tell no less tragic a story about the tool and die trade and highly refined fabrication skills which flourished for generations across the Great Lakes region, north and south of the border, and are now in danger of dying out completely. They need steady work, for that soil to raise a new apprentice crop and pass on the old hard-won mastery – but our economy does not serve our society, remember? (cause we’re FREE) ;o)
This might sound like a romantic digression, but I swear what I’m really after is a meeting place where those who start from principle and thermodynamics (and a few other objective bases for reasoning) can actually talk seriously about what we might try next, which would restore some vital life and hope to our society.
Noticing that skilled trades are being decimated – while art institutions are also steadily dismembered, is important. It is really easy, for some groups especially, to feel as if they are uniquely under siege. Recognizing that gentrification takes most from those who are just barely getting by as it is, but also that the costs to save old buildings in pretty areas can be staggering, and must be met somehow.
Even acknowledging the freaky contradiction of social assistance. Many of us need a boost at some point in our lives. The bottom falls out, a meal on the table is everything (even a box of macaroni). And yet the spiritual effects over time are corrosive and hard to escape. Get stuck down there long enough, and it can feel as if you are looking at the whole rest of the ‘normal world’ from a pit about twenty feet deep – smooth sides, no climbing allowed.
I have met genuinely admirable creators and entrepreneurs who have done extremely well, but even then, how often have I seen them successfully pass-on their spark, to another generation of managers, or even their own offspring? Vanishingly rare.
What we think of as a normal way of living – a never-stopping always-consuming shark of constant change – inevitably ends up consuming almost everything which every enduring culture on earth considers most crucial.
Friends, family, community, spirit, belonging, purpose, meaning.
Sure, we might employ such words for a staff meeting or artists statement. But could we really mean them?
I will grant that it is too much to ask, to say please check the left and rightness at the door as you enter – we all bring plenty of odd freight, and there are always many treasures in there to be found, even if we’ve prepared ourselves in advance, to prefer to be offended and have a dumb fight.
But people – we can’t stay split like this. It isn’t just mental and emotional poison – a shitty way to live and treat others – it is defeat for every single point of key principle the left and right agree on sincerely. And the things the non-aristocrats agree on – left and right – ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS.
I know, I know – blasphemy – how can I possibly say there are a ton of things we all agree on? Because I’m tired of tribal bullshit, and there really are (Matt Stoller’s writing about those working against monopolies, for one example, is fascinating – and reveals a lot about the new forces on both sides, working together on principle, against the most anti-citizen government-twisting corporations).
More simply and more bang-on practical, the aristocracy are few, and they now see us as in the way of their plans and profits. If we want our culture to survive at all, we must share strength and purpose.
Popular freakin’ front (I know, my long time readers were waiting for me to invoke that). Imperfect, of course (and we can go into the challenges in this often-effective approach, more deeply, another time), but we must recognize that again and again in history, people from many different walks of life have come together and stood up against fundamental corruption together – and won change.
I’m personally very fond of the example of “The Upper Canada Rebellion” (1837) in which a small number of rich families had effectively seized control of the regional government (the infamous ‘Family Compact’) and the first mayor of my home town Toronto, Willian Lyon Mackenzie, led farmers with pitchforks and angry workers together, to march against British redcoats of the line (a few blocks north of my place).
Modern cynics might look at history like that and think – they all must have been completely crazy. Or read a bit further, to the part where they were of course defeated (by actual soldiers, so, no surprise) and think, they all must have been stupid. What was the point of even fighting, if you’re obviously gonna lose?
In the event, the point was that the British parliament was so alarmed by the rebellion, that they finally gave effective legislative powers to the colonies themselves, shifting to a symbolic role, instead of maintaining their far distant (and thus far too uninterested) direct control. An independence benefit which reverberated around the empire (just as signal and instructive wins by others, helped us).
Can’t exactly say we won by losing – but we sure wouldn’t have won what we did, without trying (crazy or not).
So if that wasn’t craziness, and it wasn’t stupid, and it wasn’t just incoherent anger, what was it?
Spirit, purpose, care for principle and community – the will to put future ahead of self.
That full flame life force I find so fine vital and vivid in some of my dear friends from elsewhere, who bring us back precious pieces of the qualities we once had and even embodied ourselves.
Not being pollyanna here. Some folks do bring nothing but malice and poison, clarity on that fundamental difference, is absolutely crucial for delicate things to bloom again.
What I am saying is that as sad and hopeless as your corner of reality may look right now, and no matter how many excellent reasons you can assemble to prove futility, there is someone you haven’t yet met, who carries a candle with the flame you need.
It’s up to us to remember how to offer them kindling, take the spark and let our hearth-fires be re-lit.
Always assuming we’d rather sit around a bonfire and laugh again, than keep fighting our neighbours and most natural allies forever – and meanwhile let the fire which has warmed us all so well these many years, gutter and go out for good.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
As you know, one of my lifelong quests is to search for clues to non-delusional hope. Elle Griffin at the Elysian is one of my favourites for this, and she comes at it from many angles. I have to leave you with two today (to make up for the heavier links, which duty demands I also share) ;o)
This piece is about the Mondragon cooperative – a vital, highly profitable and competitive industrial concern – still worker-run, decades later (and established during Franco’s reign in Spain – wow).
And here is a piece about how important a really great piece of writing can be – a bit of inspiration for my fellow struggling scribes (and/or monkeys chained to typewriters) ;o)
Now here’s something sobering and hard nosed – Larry Johnson (ex CIA, super empire-skeptical) talking to Col Lawrence Wilkerson (Colin Powell’s chief of staff) about the way shit really works in Washington. My older friends who remember knowing that and why the Iraq war would be a disaster before it began, will be especially intrigued – but he’s got creepy insights from Gulf War One, too.
And this discussion with Jeffrey Sachs and Mo Gawdat may help some grumpy lefty chums better understand why I am not in any way impressed with Biden, Harris or the Dems as a whole (lies, contempt for rights and mass-murder bug me, can’t see past it).
Finally, this brilliant essay by Ianto Watt – hosted on the “Science Is Not The Answer” substack site, of the also brilliant (and precision-cantankerous) William M Briggs – who treats us to feisty and elegant deployments of mathematics seeking sense, again and again – bravo!
As I said at the start, I differ in places (as I do with many strong smart thinkers), but I always appreciate serious thinking when I see it – and far prefer vital and productive challenge and stimulation, to any form of ignorance reinforcing pride, cheap flattery or soul-numbing conformity. You too, right?
Found the link to your site on a Mattias Desmet article. Love your work! There is a solution. See: mosquitorevolution.net