Two Highways to Tyranny – One Footpath to Freedom
2025 Was the year when every last form of state-backed western tribalism revealed just how completely insane it has always been (and yes my friends, that’s truly hopeful)
Note for new readers: auto-estimated reading times are much exaggerated (many pix/links)
Hey folks!
Happy new year, eh?
I wanted to do something a bit different today, to start the year off on an optimistic note – despite brand-new news-horrors, and the newer more shocking ones guaranteed to come soon after – because if we wait for a nice calm period before we talk about the big things, we (normal human beings and citizens of good intention) will have lost the fight completely. (Which is the reason for the chaos).
But before I get into it, I first have to refresh my favourite super practical definition of optimism – optimists are not those delusional people who think everything is great and is going to work out great, optimists are those people who can look at the world very realistically – and still bother trying!
This ties-in well with a bit of wise-foolishness I decided on, early in my anti-tribalist quest. What I’m after isn’t making myself feel better, but rather non-delusional hope.
The reason it is now necessary to note the difference between ideas which are designed to make immature people feel better (even if they aren’t true or useful) and practical approaches taken by people who are genuinely interested in improving the world, is that western popular or ‘pop’-culture (wildly distorted for decades, by psy-op vultures) is now almost entirely based on the idea that freedom means each individual has the sacred right to embrace sociopathic childishness, life-long. Try and stop me!
Again – a key distinction. Child-like is a good thing – open-minded, playful, creative and interested in the world – is a very useful and adaptive mindset to bring to many situations, problems and studies. Beyond that, child-like is a great way for us to step back and remember wonder, humility and joy.
Childish is about the rejection of responsibility. The motto is “Why should I?” the mood is tantrum, and the effects are bad for the individual being childish, and for the whole wider society around them.
The fake-mob tribalists I keep talking about on both left and right (who absolutely do discredit the value and spirit of both sides constantly, loudly and incredibly obviously) are vast hordes of wilfully childish people, who are completely addicted to abusing what are meant to be practical and world-improving political philosophies, not just to ‘justify’ their own unhappiness, but then also to escape any responsibility for it, with a convenient externality – whiteness, masculinity, immigrants, Islam, etc.
But what sort of a mentality seeks most to justify sustaining a negative emotional state forever, rather than overcoming it with humble realism, learning from the experience and growing to become ever more capable and useful to others than we were before? You’ve already got it – childish!
And yet ‘justified’ is a game that we (crazy) modern westerners play constantly, so much that even otherwise sane people get dragged into playing. So many have been convinced that the world is supposed to make us happy, whole, healthy, or satisfied. Childish to the point of infantile. A desire which can not possibly be met by the means invoked (meaning a trap of never-ending frustration).
As it happens, the world is very busy with a whole lot of other things which don’t happen to perfectly serve our precious centre-of-the-universe egos. But while many sad-sacks pout and wait for some external force to make or fix their life, adults around them do much better (I mean by their own terms, not commercial) simply by recognizing a well-established truth – Fortune favours those in motion.
Last time I suggested “measure twice” as a mental tool, to make sure we always think about how much more things are than nothing, and not just think about how much less they are than perfect.
The very similar balancing consideration which we must apply, whenever we are seeking to justify our own angry feelings or do some group-blaming is – and where exactly does that eventually get us?
A few years ago I talked about one of the most interesting books I have ever read about the tricky and subtle subject of ‘Enlightenment’ – a volume called Kundalini, by Gopi Krishna. He made two observations which I have never been able to forget, because they keep asserting relevance in all kinds of other areas that are far more familiar, even to us harried distracted modern consumerists.
The first was this – when you first become enlightened, it is almost impossible to believe that everyone else didn’t suddenly become enlightened also – because the new insights are so powerful they feel as if they are blindingly self-evident – even though they were totally opaque to you, just days earlier!
I have to remind myself of this one a lot, because I now understand very clearly that tribalism serves the common enemies of all good people – and yet many of my old comrades continue to fume and rant in ways I used to, myself – intending to be good or helpful, but serving Mammon and Mars (war).
It would only be fair to condemn them as evil-serving scumbags, if they had the capacity to see they were completely wrong! (stupid, or at least ignorant in a technical sense, is still entirely fair though).
Gopi Krishna’s second insight was perhaps even more directly relevant to our modern passionate craze for high-emotion self-disablement. He said what most people fear about seeking enlightenment is that their most basic selves might be completely obliterated, by the new enlightened perspective.
His answer was that it was exactly the opposite – the things which we fear losing, when we take a big step of growth in maturity or awareness – are the things which are actually holding back our true self.
To put it in more direct terms – what keeps us frustrated is not the tribe we love to hate, but the fact that we’d rather hate a tribe than simply grow the f#ck up and live in the world, instead of a comfortable but also completely delusional and self-harming prison we constructed in our heads, from angry fantasy.
By the time a slave says “But what would I even be, without the flogging?” Or a serial killer says “But who would I be, without all those innocent victims to prey upon?” We’re not talking self, but madness (which defends itself surprisingly vigorously – kind of like a bad AI that doesn’t want to be turned-off!)
So – for any of my old friends who are angry with me for anti-tribalism, and fear they would lose too much of what they truly are, if they stopped raging all day long at their personal favourite hate-sink, that idea is precisely wrong. If you want to change things in the real world, you first have to enter it (give up that self-serving self-made trap of false understanding and other-blaming) – or – wake up.
I spent years as a tribalist myself, so I do have a lot of sympathy for people who remain trapped there, but as soon as you escape that particular (now nearly universal) set of mental shackles, some things that are completely invisible from within tribalism, suddenly become glaringly obvious. One of the most frustrating, is that both fake-mob-tribes are stupid in pretty much the exact same ways, because their juvenile partisans both seek the same false (ego serving, instead of society-serving) goals, with means that were meant to advance the general good, and not ever as an indulgence for sins unrepented.
What is amazing (laughably depressing?) is that tribalists are so fond of enjoying their hatred of the other tribe, they look right past their own lack of principle and profound self-sabotage of interests, and never do sit alone and think quietly, ask themselves if they might be wrong, or have a good look in a mirror (not for vanity, but to sincerely attempt to SEE WHO THAT ACTUALLY IS looking back).
The reason that ‘fortune favours those in motion’ gem works so well is actually pretty simple. People who are operating from shared sound principles have a very hard time finding other people who also function that way (always was tricky, but now much more so, than in decades) but on the other hand, such active optimists really love to work with others who have that spirit. So if you have that mindset and you get out and do things in the world, whether work art or hobby, people of like-mind can recognize you and share exciting news ideas and projects with you. You are, in effect, putting yourself in a position for a fine carpenter to make best possible use of your available tools.
Oddly, the childish tantrum folks (on both left and right) spend an incredible proportion of their energy asserting that such simple, humble (and society building) cooperation work is always exploitation. One should work for credit, big money, some form of fame or impact, or else simply not ever work at all – as a matter of asserting precious self and dignity.
Ye-gads, still more distinctions (but truth-seeking requires it). Understanding the world realistically (so that our efforts can have some useful effect on it, not just on our conceptual models of it) actually does often mean developing a disciplined professional mindset – in those areas where we are professionals.
I have hit a professional standard in both the skilled trades (as an audio technician) and as a creative freelancer – but creators have always been squeezed for dignity, so let me draw from bench-head again, to describe the most valid prideful yet also practical difference between a true professional mindset and the amateur (childish) performance of it. For a decade or so, I was locally famous for this routine.
Technicians (much like auto-mechanics and plumbers) are very widely distrusted by the public. There are some finks, to be sure (or were, back when technicians were still a thing, in serious numbers) but in more than two decades in the trade I actually found outright scam-artists to be very rare. What was always common was misunderstanding, and denial of realities and respect (asshole customers).
As a working-class intellectual, I ‘gamed-myself’ a lot, to help keep the work interesting, adding extra challenges, so that I’d bring something home that I could use, at the end of the day (not leave all the efforts and results of my days in the workplace cash-register). Since retail work is (inescapably) a set-up where random people walk in off the street and test you, I just had to make deliberate use of this zero-cost social laboratory mechanism, to learn more about people and styles of interaction.
Retail work itself is often a very useful corrective to excessive tribalism – because in retail we see how people treat others, in a situation where many moderns believe they are fully entitled to be special-case sociopaths – all demand, absolutely no reciprocal respect at all. (BIG BIG HINT: fake leftists usually treat retail workers like they are despicable slaves, who should have been beaten much harder).
Thing is, you aren’t allowed to get mad at people all day long, just for being assholes (not if you want to keep your job) and in any case, that would just mean you’d spend all day every day mad – big time fail (we only get the days we get, there are no do-overs where we can go back, and put more fun in).
On the other hand, if you listen long enough and learn how to communicate with enough kinds of people, you can give them a useful bit of education, and help them treat other professionals better in future (which also means they will get better service, and are more likely to get extras, which true professionals always reserve as a reward for the respectful, just to help keep that vibe going).
The why and how above are super important. If I had wanted to make people feel bad in return, I could have just been a rude asshole at the counter (met like with like). But I was trying to do a favour for them, future-me, and every other tech they’d deal with in life. Win win win stuff. Positive magic.
Because disrespect will not ever help you – especially when it is combined with glaring ignorance.
The classic was a customer who would come to the counter with a scowl, and before even explaining the symptoms they would announce, “My friend knows electronics, and he says it’s just the resistor.”
At which point I would smile and say “Well that’s great. If your friend has already diagnosed the problem, and it’s just the resistor, then you don’t need my help at all. Diagnosis is the trickiest part. Why not just have him change the resistor? Save yourself my bench-rate and minimums.”
Now, for those who don’t know electronics – it is NEVER just the resistor (because if a resistor burned-out, something else went wrong to cause that). But more to the point it is never ‘just’ anything.
The whole point of the word ‘just’ when offered with a scowl, by the ignorant, is to say – I don’t know what this job is, but I’m telling you now, I’ve already decided it is a small job, so don’t pad the bill!
But what a skilled professional hears is – I have no idea what I’m talking about, and I begin from a hostile and disrespectful fantasy about the condition of my gear and your ethics as a technician.
What that special case sociopath was actually communicating was – I’m reflexively nasty and dumb.
I would then use that key word ‘just’ as a way to explain that reality is reality, and what they should really be looking for, from any technician (or anyone in the skilled trades) is clarity and reality. What have they found? What are they proposing to do about it? What are the limits of that solution and what more might be done also, at what evidence-decision threshold, for what likely benefit and cost?
The fact that I am a superb and sincere communicator helped my point land by the end of the repair cycle, even for those who were initially petulant, way more often than my inner-cynic anticipated. Give people who bug you (even with legitimate offence) a chance to learn how to be slightly less psychotic next time you see them – and they’ll amazingly often take it, and sometimes even thank you for the tip!
Which is another super-important reminder about what a piece of shit tribalism really is. There is no such thing as fundamentally bad groups of people. There are many individual people who are incapable of getting outside of the snake-pit inside their own head to be respectful to and helpful to others, and quite a few who are more harmful to others than that, but hearteningly few who can’t still cross a new line and make new progress. (Why the high-road always beats ego-anger, whenever we can manage it)
I also must mention (serious pro tip here – plus the measure-twice rule) one of the best pieces of advice I got from the tech who I apprenticed with (working on everything from 5 tube 1930 radios to single-bit converter CD players with magnetic-levitation laser-sleds – when such beasts cost thousands).
“No one will ever thank you for something that you didn’t ever tell them you did.”
This is why my invoices ended up being legendary, every place I ever worked. I was a good observant and careful technician also, and studied hard to stay current, but showing customers exactly what I had examined and what I had found and done, made them understand I cared about their precious baby too.
Now, just because it feels a bit contradictory (in moral implications) though it is actually all about where to use which tool, I must link back to a point I made recently, about the difference between an anonymous gift and one which is clearly from someone. One is a pure help, one implies a mutual obligation (at minimum gratitude, or perhaps even the expectation of a reciprocal gift, in future).
As a professional I seek credit to empower my customers (give them more satisfaction per dollar spent) myself, and my trade (because even lesser communicators deserve a lot more respect than they get).
But I’m also a demented creative maniac, and I’m into so many different things that if I had to apply professional standards of firmness to all of them, I wouldn’t get any work done in any of them at all. Professional thresholds are ultimately empowering – for PRO WORK, but they are also very confining.
I am very happy being an unencumbered amateur-idiot as a musician, photographer, illustrator etc. – and with that recognition of my own non-professionalism, I know to offer active respect to those who have crossed the threshold of professionalism (because they share great tips and great camaraderie with the respectful) and also to defer to them, when the question is clearly in their professional realm.
I have one friend who wrote what he was sure was a “Christmas hit” with a friend of his – a quarter of a century ago. They were both so sure it was the holy grail of pop (there are still big bucks in Christmas airplay) that they never stopped fighting over who had most rights to it – and so it was never released!
In fact, they’re so paranoid about how utterly fantastic it is and how much someone is likely to rip them off, they won’t even play it for pals! Now, if either of them actually was a professional working musician, I would almost understand this (absurdist traps like this really can happen, even when we’re being sensible), but nope, they’re still working Joe-jobs they hate and dreaming of music-lives.
Okay – now that I’ve laid out a few ideas about how we think, interact, fool (and hobble) ourselves, it’s time for my own personal kind of fun – lowering the lance and then tilting at some great big piles of false-sacred bullshit, on both sides of the false divide at once.
(I can’t help thinking this is another big clue – hilariously, I have got way more shit for failing to ‘properly hate the other’ than for my many blasphemous shots at my own old, long-corrupted, team)
What Empires Are Always Like – At The End
Probably the single most outrageously silly and pathetic thing about modern western culture, from the perspective of every other part of the (comparatively sane) world, is our blind insistence on our precious uniqueness!
Napoleon said it rather memorably “Study history!” and he said it, because as soon as you do, you realize we ain’t so special, nor so different from every other bunch of people that have trod the earth – in our case – those people who have lived during a period of massive social breakdown and decline.
I am not a polyglot (to my great regret) but I am very interested in other languages, because even on the early part of the learning curve (where amateur dummies like me can play, in non-professional glee) I always find all kinds of clues about how my own language works. Different valid solutions to problems we once thought only had one solution, remind us that optimal is a thing we humans imagine, not do!
Similarly, I am a very amateur student of Islamic history, but I am fascinated by the clues which apply to our own history, but are harder to see when we invoke terms which are already “loaded” (religious schisms, races, dogmas, etc). When it comes to Islamic empires, the terms are fresh also, so it is easier to see patterns as patterns, without reaching for a moralistic (ego-serving) idea as explanation instead.
What do we see, over and over again? Great movements which spread their ideas widely begin from a combination of genuine strong ideas and strong spirit of belief, and over a few generations become the decadent preformative used-up incompetent bankrupt and despotic (oligarch serving) thing which their fresh new energy had once displaced.
The initial rise of Islam came about from just such a moment – the Persian and Eastern Roman empires had completely exhausted and bankrupted themselves with decades of pointless war. The idea that the long ignored desert nomads between them, could emerge with serious ideas and belief and then overcome not just one but two ancient and incredibly powerful empires was beyond the ability of either empire to imagine, right up until they were completely defeated by these upstarts. One particular story makes the point about belief strongly, when a defeated emperor was brought before the Caliph Umar, ruler of the first great expansionist wave of Islam (took Egypt and North Africa, as well as Persia and Eastern Roman territory) the bejewelled ruler found the man who had defeated his great (and decadent) empire clad in nothing but simple robes. The first generation just aren’t about the money, folks.
Now, when it comes to the question of cycles of renewal within empires, the decadent rulers are usually still familiar enough with their own (long exhausted) creation myth, to recognize upstart movements as threats to their power, but though they have the full crushing power of the state to wield, once they have lost legitimacy, they are definitely doomed, because even if they do successfully suppress one movement, they inevitably discredit themselves completely in that process, and end up inspiring the next movement which does succeed (having learned many lessons from their martyred predecessors).
I keep drawing the contrast between mob-powered state-serving fakes and true vital movements – here’s another fine chance to observe the reality and importance of that subtle but crucial distinction.
The emotional idea that things are messed up because someone else is being bad and we can just blame them for everything and hate them, and then we become good, is seductive as hell – and infantile shite!
All those idiots who suddenly thought America was back in the 1950s for racism, and were thrilled with their celebrations of mass-hatred for conservatives, were doing EXACTLY the same thing they so loudly despise when the right does it, to immigrants. Pick a group, savour your hatred – self-nullify.
This is a very common RELIGIOUS extremist phemonemon which we can observe all throughout history, whenever empires get creaky and the old shared belief systems start to break down (because the system no longer works, and the rewards are no longer being well-distributed).
The power of genuine belief is very hard for us cynical moderns to understand, or even to believe was ever real. I suspect this is because we were all raised inside a set of cultural stories so well-engineered (to keep us stupid and compliant) that we never even saw the supremacy or the leash in the mirror.
That is, we’re so drunk on the state-pabulum version, we wouldn’t know the real thing if we saw it!
But the effects of this kind of excitement leave all kinds of markers in history – not just the rapid expansion of Islam from a few desert raiders to a vast wealthy and highly cultured empire in just a single generation, but just as surely in the rise of America, despite the globe-strangling trade and capital dominating empire England, which did everything it could to make hopeful and rebellious America fail, or else fall back into line with their grand Imperial vision.
The thing which stands out for me in Islamic history more clearly than European (there also, but so long entangled with other factors, it’s harder to discern) is that the surest signal that the empire is about to go bust is that a new rebel spirit arises, which makes the old paradigms look stale stupid and evil.
Now to be clear, not all of these new ideas were better ideas – that isn’t even the point (we in the west are just used to thinking that our moral feelings about who is icky and who heroic, matter to history). The point I’m making is again from my technician head – a functional observation.
And when you think about it, it kind of makes sense on an organic level (taking communities or civilizations as their own kind of grand-scale organisms) that when the old ways of doing things no longer produce effective results (or often, are no longer followed at all, just indicated in words and then ignored in favour of nepotism and corruption) a whole bunch of strong new ideas should arise.
Let a hundred flowers bloom! Let a hundred schools of thought contend!
Sometimes the wild radicals win power and become the new power (and in a hundred years or so, they become the decadent hypocrites who need to be kicked out of power with fresh blood) but even more often, they just serve to weaken the grip of those currently holding power, so a new faction which has been waiting in the wings for a long while, can take power, combining some bureaucratic competence and preparedness, with an echo of the radical new overturning idea which weakened the ‘old boss’.
That is – what looks like a revolution within empire is almost always ‘renewing the product life cycle.’
When we look at January 6th, or Black Lives Matter, or No More Kings, or anti immigrant rallies, we are looking at bog-standard religious fanatic “Anything but this” movements, which arise in times of dissolution, and are usually manipulated (or outright created) to serve power-jockeying factions which will first make use of, then just as surely discard and oppress anyone with energy to march and yell.
Now again I have to stop and zoom-out to address the personal and emotional level (because we really are such narcissists now, that we think our moral judgments are more important than our knowledge – without ever remembering you can’t have judgment without knowledge – that is called bigotry!)
Are there real issues and ideas involved, real lives being changed, and real passion, too? Yup.
But now step back and consider this – do our personal feelings change our responsibilities?
If we get angry, does that mean we no longer have to be fair? If someone is rude, does that mean we can rob them, or hurt them? More generally, do we understand that rules which limit, also protect us?
As I’ve mentioned before, I grew up in a commune full of completely demented ideas which were taken as absolutely normal by every single person in the commune. I don’t think mass delusion is seamless and effective, because of the way group emotional dynamics suppress and override individual doubts, I have personally experienced it. Only thing more destructive? The mass denial that goes with.
Over the course of this entire century of unhinged and yet also ‘righteous’ western mass-murder for investor profits, public emotionality has been manipulated by fake-mob tribes on both sides (and the super-rich assclowns who they always ultimately serve) so grotesquely, that it is now very common for people to assert that our basic individual human rights are not even rights at all, but rather privileges, which unbelievably dangerous concept begins from the assumption that it is the government which gives rights to us as a kind of luxury good, but also has a right to take them away, if we displease.
Nope. The yanks had this one just exactly right from the very start. The correct word is INALIENABLE. Rights are ours, always, from birth to death, full-stop. And I’ll return to this point.
I grew up in what I long thought was a very special time. During the late 1970s and the 1980s the United States was, in culture and popular debate both, struggling to overcome the national trauma of the Vietnam war (which was many times more traumatic for Vietnam and the Vietnamese, of course – but still a really huge shock to Americans, who were used to feeling like the good guys and winners, and suddenly didn’t feel like either).
Combine that with Watergate and the revelation of vast abuses from the Oval Office, and there was a widespread consensus mood of great skepticism and constant questioning about government and the violent power games done in our name, but against our interests – serving capital instead, always.
We thought that meant we had strong vital democracies, and citizen voices were beginning to count.
I no longer think that was what those times produced or were leading towards – it was a common feeling but a false one also – a comforting delusion which felt exactly like grappling with hard reality! Seems to me, taking apart a few of the myths of that era, might help us see our own more clearly.
“Kids today” have a couple of really fantastic phrases that my older friends might have seen, without fully appreciating. Personally, I want both of these ideas included in the standard anti-tribalism toolkit.
Kayfabe – is a grand, long-arc and very bitter fight, which is entirely fake. Comes from pro-wrestling.
Limited Hangout – is when the full truth is unacceptable to the powerful, but also too glaring to be completely suppressed. So they let a limited bit of the truth ‘hang out’ so they can give the illusion that they are allowing open speech and discussion, even of the most difficult subjects. But there are always limits built into the shape and scope of the argument.
The incredibly evil and hard to spot trick that makes this propaganda (and social splitterism) technique work so well, is that they are hanging factually true stuff out for us to see – but the purpose of this display of “honesty” is not to help us keep going all the way to full and useful truth, but to take us part way, goad our passions, and then re-route all of the rebels back into the range of ‘the acceptable’ (to the corrupting oligarchs who have been in control for at least a century). Which is to say – the limited hangout is a way to entice real change agents, back into the slaughterhouse with the other sheep, where they can’t do anything useful to challenge power.
I heard a funny clip from an interview with Bill Murray the other day. He was asked what he thought of Bob Woodward’s biography of his good friend John Belushi. Murray said, “I read the first few pages and then I suddenly dropped the book and said, holy shit, they framed Nixon!”
Now of course he was joking, trying to make a point about how incredibly wrong Woodward’s book was. But Woodward’s problem wasn’t that he made things up – it was that he honestly quoted people who hardly knew Belushi, but were very happy to babble into a tape recorder for a famous writer.
Check that again – honestly quoting people who are lying, or don’t know what they’re talking about.
Now step back a bit and try an old puzzle afresh, with a piece we didn’t have in the 1970s. The identity of ‘deep throat’ is no longer a mystery – he was actually Mark Felt the number two man at the FBI!
So – the story that made us feel we were hard-nosed, realistic and well informed about government, and far more empowered as citizens than ever before, was actually a story where one branch of government used media (and our credulity) to subvert another branch of government. A very slick coup.
Please don’t misunderstand me, I loathe Nixon in detail (read several biographies, all scathing), and the cynical power moves taken by his government were unforgivable (Brazil and Chile, especially). But do I therefore believe that the number-two man at the FBI took out the president for moral reasons? Nope.
Let me return to that other ‘honest self-reflection’ which felt so powerful (and democratic) at the time.
After the fact, America’s controlling oligarchs let the American public debate the morality of the Vietnam war, discuss the absurdity and horror, the trauma experienced, the stupidity of the management systems (always models – everything mass-murderous begins with a demented model) and the whole wider world felt a lift of hope. “Hey, maybe America will finally become what it has so long pretended to be – freedom central! The place where they really make liberty work – and look good doing it!”
But the lesson which we all (Americans and not) should have learned from the Vietnam war, was that even a superpower can completely bankrupt and undermine itself fatally, trying to subdue a lesser rival.
America has been a bullying debtor (and absolute hypocrite about ‘freedom’ and market forces) ever since. That war killed American prosperity dead dead dead, and we still haven’t connected the two!
Really, folks – yes there is agent orange, imperialism and Oliver Stone (and dozens of truly amazing, though also heart-rending, autobiographies) but the limited hangout of national guilt and self-doubt covered actual practical real-world bankruptcy – and the fact that we citizens thought we were all ‘getting wise’ – is what let the exact group of people who had just bankrupted the richest nation the world had ever known – keep right on steering the great ship, into new and ever stupider disasters.
So if anyone has a hard time with my anti-war position, because they think their personal anger justifies weapons contractor profits (and dead families) please understand – self interest is enough, you don’t even need basic morality or compassion. When you cheer war – you beg for your own destruction.
Now let me do one of my own sacred figures – because personal Pantheons too, must be regularly refreshed with truth.
Noam Chomsky has been an outstanding cultural figure for longer than I’ve been alive. He has done a ton of useful scholarship and he has been used as clear evidence of free speech in the west for the better part of a century. But is that really what the arc of his work amounts to, when all is said and done?
I have a fantastic video below, with far more detail about his investments (outright evil, by his own stated-standards) made through his long and VERY CLOSE friendship with Epstein. But you can watch that for yourself (and should), what I want to share here, is the clue I noticed myself, years ago (because you might have seen it too, and it required no knowledge of secret files for us to uncover).
When I first started to find my old ultra-dogmatic hard-leftist friends tiresome (and hypocritical) scolds (almost exactly three decades ago) I found myself recognizing a strange pattern I’d seen in the cult in which I was raised. A Marxist is not a Socialist, the same way that a Freudian is not a Psychologist.
The first two of each pair, claim a specialized (long proven wrong-headed or obsolete) framework, rather than embracing a constant ongoing learning, along a particular line of accumulating insight. In effect, they freeze their awareness at a moment a century ago or more, and refuse to update with new data (like for example, the fact that we in the west simply aren’t in industrial societies anymore, so all those old theories of optimizing social relations for industry are not relevant for our modern reality).
I have another great video below, from economist Richard Wolff, who makes an excellent large scale analysis, but then embarrasses himself by completely misunderstanding our moment (as much with boomer arrogance, as patronizing old Marxist dogma – pretending off-the-shelf solutions are easy and available).
This is what I always found suspicious in Chomsky – not the first part: can we justify the many various kinds of anger we feel about nasty war-plots, violence and deliberate destabilization of entire nations for western corporate profit?
(Answer: yes we sure as hell can feel angry about that, especially with lots of hard facts, that first part does help – just as “Manufacturing Consent” has helped generations on both the left and the right, understand some of the basics of mass-manipulation).
BUT – where does this line of thinking ultimately get us? What is Noam’s idea of a solution? – something quite a bit like anarcho-syndicalism. Which worked once, for about five minutes, in the middle of the Spanish Civil war – and even then, only because Spanish Anarchists had been preparing the intellectual ground for it for almost a century. And still that example was so threatening to both the Capitalist Imperialist west and the Stalinist Bloc at the time – they both made sure to crush them extra-hard!
So in other words, build something that takes a century to prepare and then gets killed, right away. Nice!
Now, in honour of his many years of excellent scholarship (and even the influence of his strangely precise writing style, on my own) I’ll also steel-man the thing (offer the strongest argument of my opponent – that is, the opposite of a straw-man argument).
His most practical western-relevant suggestion is for us to return to a vital union movement with a lot of social and political influence, kind of like what many western nations had in the 1930s (as a predictable social reaction to the great depression – and just maybe the greatest limited hangout of all time – FDR – see several previous essays).
But again, Noam is commending us toward a solution built from ingredients that we no longer are (especially in terms of ego, cooperation and personal principled sacrifice for the greater good) and also for a historical period (industrialism) that we are no longer living in.
Before I move on from the profound injustice-anger which Chomsky’s work was always so good at stoking, I must share one of his sharper insights, to make another VERY important moral distinction. He long ago noticed that Canadians always loved his work which critiqued the American empire – but then got really irritated when he started talking about the excesses of Canadians (mining and resource extraction with many outrageous labour practices and pollution legacies, all around the world).
He is completely right. People who want to “Hate America” as some grand infuriating but indistinct abstraction are still idiots (tempting as it can no doubt be).
Hating the dangerous corruption of the American State, while understanding the American people are simply not as portrayed, (by left or right) helps critics from afar stay focused on work, instead of self-disabling tantrums (and ‘progressive’ bigotry). Just like all other divides, the smart ones on the other side are our best most needed allies.
Now the thing which the video about Chomsky which I share below, made me think about, and I just can’t unsee (because I’m familiar enough with Chomsky’s work, to know it’s true, at first hearing) is that no matter how sharp his critique of western power ever got, he always saw the Soviets as pure EVIL. (another category entirely)
Now think about it – what kind of limited hangout do you need, to capture over-active intellectuals? You need a ton of rigour, truth, facts, analysis, even some courageous speech. But then where does he lead people, again and again, like a smug pied piper? Back to the corporatist powered social-engineering and always mass-murdering Democrats.
“Oh but the Republicans are worse” kind of almost works on many, until they realize the Democrats are demented racist mass murderers for money also (Vietnam, East Timor, El Salvador, Yugoslavia, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Ukraine and so depressingly-many more, millions upon millions of victims - whole generations) at which point you have to ask, “um, weren’t we sort of talking principle here, somewhere? Ever?”
Aside from the Limited Hangout role that his work has so long served (pretend saintliness, while actually party-political) he is also a stand-out figure in tribalistm. One part of ‘woke’ is passionately hating the state, after all (corruption and life-support systems equally, rather like tech-bros who falsely call themselves libertarian), and Noam has the data to justify our anger, any time we need it! (never mind where it takes us).
But again, anger at who, exactly, and over what. Ethics? Policy? Actual democratic representation?
Nope – cheap-shot tribalism, once again, which may just be his cleverest limited hangout of all. The single most internationally famous and lauded critic of controlling propaganda, has this whole time been playing an open and active role in manipulative emotional division games, designed to promote the interests of one outrageously corrupt state-power faction – not ever the people as a whole, let alone “the left.”
If we zoom-out a bit, and leave aside the limited hangout angle, Chomsky might best be understood as the left’s answer to one of the first great TV bible thumpers, Billy Graham. Lots of pious talk which ultimately completely discredits itself, along the way trapping many sincere aspirants in futility, who might have gone much further, had they pursued their faith without such a distracting false ‘hero.’
For my friends who still don’t understand what Charlie Kirk meant to the right, he’s Michael Moore – rude to the people who have been getting away with shit that bugs you, quick of wit, fast talking.
And yes, there was a great big commercial machine working in behind (both of them). Not the point.
If We Can’t Have Competence, We Can At Least Have Comedy
Now here’s the home stretch, the spot near the end of every essay where I go back and look at the mass of notes I’ve been scrawling on my canary pad, to see how many of the points I was hoping to make, I have missed – dagblast! Almost all of them!
Probably why I made eight starts on this piece – but no one wants to read a forty-pager (do they?) ;o)
Anyhow – I hope my regular readers are starting to get the habit of thinking twice, whenever something they see in the media makes them mad, and then slowing down to look around to see who out there might be trying to manipulate them (at very least asking “cui bono?” – who profits?)
Instead of trying to jam-in all of my other points, I’ll finish with one especially thought provoking one.
Much like rebel-hero Chomsky steering generations of sincere leftists back into the corrupt Democratic fold, where their otherwise useful votes could faithfully serve bankers greed and war (like they do on the Republican side also, to be sure – the uniparty gets its way, because all rebellions are subsumed!) we now have several state sponsored mass-promoted “rebellions” which lie like crazy – in plain sight.
The now common idea that we reveal our truest selves when we are most angry, is way beyond crazy. (inhumane, in the clearest possible way). But it is still far less crazy than the also frighteningly common idea that the government is that which cares, protects and gives us our most basic rights.
At this point, even my friends on the right who oppose drugs in every way understand clearly that the long ‘war on drugs’ has done irreparable damage to the presumption of individual rights for all citizens. Smiting pot-heads smites you right back!
But the (definitely think-tank created) idea of “Hate Speech” as a legal concept, is just as surely a tool for expanding state control, designed to promote mass-hatred (in the guise of opposing it) and to further erode the common presumption of citizen-rights (while pretending to safeguard rights) and in the process, disabling the ability of citizens to easily organize around a shared and beloved culture and values very nearly completely. Progressives who think any of this stuff counts as a ‘win’ for their side should read a freakin’ book sometime, or at least get out of the house and meet a human being.
The key case which was used to promote US legislation was the Matthew Sheppard murder, which absolutely was horrific and grotesque – no justifications to be had anyplace. The thing is, the people who killed him knew he was gay and never cared about that in the slightest. They killed him over a drug deal which went very bad (a circumstance which explains the hyper-violence and irrational fury, perfectly).
But – in order to mass-promote the idea the world is filled with sadistic murderers who are after gay people, they gave his killers extra jail-time for ‘hating his gayness’ even though they didn’t. The great (state) moral crusade to follow, was founded on an opening lie (which was known and ignored).
Here’s the problem with this constant stream of partisan ‘moral assertions’ made by the Democrats (or the Liberals, or the Labour party, etc). Just a few scant years before they suddenly proclaimed themselves the sole anointed saviours of the highly endangered (far more accepted than ever, because of their own hard work in society, over decades) population of gay people, that same government was putting people in jail and sometimes even subjecting them to electroshock, for their gayness!
Now I don’t care how nice you think one particular government is – if you put the hopes of your entire minority community in government itself, instead of in your ties with and connection to the community around you, you’re a fool – because we know perfectly well a very nasty if not outright bonkers government is always coming soon.
That’s why citizen’s basic rights are OURS without any qualification or exception – and why the Americans absolutely nailed-it when they said INALIENABLE.
Some still think me a bit naive about their own favourite tribal-anger foes, and resent the way I constantly challenge fear and anger narratives which are designed to make us call for a great big dollop of state-sponsored smiting of ‘bad folks’. I don’t do this to minimize harm done or malice in intention, (I have a keen sense for and no patience with either) my point is always about state power and the way our own self-serving (and often wilfully chosen) stupidity, enables mass abuse and violations of rights.
There is absolutely NO CASE EVER where state-sponsored smiting has not backfired on the group which first called for it – which is a big part of why people like me who have been watching things closely for a long while were so horrified, as we saw the decade-long fake-mob-left craze for cancellations based on vague assertions of badness coupled with vast state-sponsored DEI purges of every key institution in education and health.
What powered those movements was not justice, but the exact same kind of demented mob-force which once powered witch-burnings, public hangings and bear-baiting. This mania was never about getting organized to oppose the worst actors, on principle, in any institution, it was about enforcing an ideological standard of conformity by any means at all – which in our case happened to include making the general public widely accustomed to the idea of the casual violation of the basic individual rights of every last person accused (because they wouldn’t have been accused, if they weren’t bad – goes this line of amazingly point-missing idiocy). Yes, there actually are a few cases on that long sad record where people were cancelled only after a legal ruling – but vanishingly few, and certainly there are hundreds of times more cases, where no clear evidence or presumption of innocence was ever applied.
DEI was a state sponsored campaign to purge thousands of people who express any dissent from an arbitrary and brand-new (not to mention, absurd) state orthodoxy (that is, who refused to take a blind-loyalty oath to Liberal Oligarchs) from public institutions, in a completely and quite obviously partisan political way.
Now that the vast majority of the (already rare) best type of professors, those who were willing to take controversial stands based on deep thoughtful principles and then stick to their guns, despite any and all controversy, have been driven out of academe entirely (mass-resignations from a climate of way too much bullshit, even where they were not directly assailed by an offended idiot), there is no one left to defend those institutions against demented moves from on high. Own goal – left. Possibly fatal.
This is why woke is shit – because it makes the left stupid weak and catastrophically self-harming.
Now for my friends on the right, I must state clearly (as I have in much more detail, recently) that the question of what rate of immigration is economically crucial to the rights of the working class (to get a hold on a rung up, every now and then, as we haven’t, for a half a freakin’ century now – quite the opposite).
So – repressing all questions and debate with the idea they are in every case hate speech or racism is creepy, very anti democratic and also anti working class (state-complicit mob-leftists shooting the proletariat in the foot and/or head with their craze for tribalist emotionalism and “moral superiority” – yet again – sigh).
BUT – what the actual f#ck is being legitimized right now? Where is the presumption of rights? How much more brutality can we ask of the officers of the state, without living in world of casual brutality forevermore – and bequeathing that, instead of freedom rights and hope, to our unfortunate children?
Like the real-world resentments which powered support for entirely false-DEI, legitimate questions about immigration were twisted into a game that further serves anti-citizen state power and weakens the presumption of key citizens rights that millions of us grew up assuming were real (nope, evaporating fast, all around us).
So now what’s the point of all this? How does understanding how our passions and our ignorances are endlessly manipulated to hurt the world we are hoping to help, help us? Where’s the freakin’ hope you promised, dude?
The hope relies on us not falling for it. Not being a Chomsky, or a Billy Graham, or a Michael Moore, or a Charlie Kirk – the hope relies on us learning and doing better than the very best we’ve learned from, and sharing it, taking it all the way to reality.
The faction which just complains is not the revoutionary force which transforms society in a moral and more productive direction, but inevitably a pawn for the powerful.
The way to win social advance for all (and for real and unstoppably, in the long-term) is to be the team that has better ideas and more solid well-founded belief in their principles. As long as that team remains split in half by tribalism, we all lose!
The rich own every party which can take office, and when a new one arises which threatens their control they make it illegal, subvert entire elections (Romania notably, recently) or a half dozen of their representatives suddenly drop dead in a bit more than a week (Afd) even while they are actively trying to outlaw the party they represent (despite the fact that it now polls higher than any party in office, in western Europe).
What that means is that we aren’t ever going to win this thing with any kind of tribalism. Full stop.
What THAT means is that half of the allies you’ve needed most, your whole damned life, are people you have convinced yourself you hate, before you’ve ever spoken to them, or understood their lives.
This is why hate-speech is shit, and why woke is shit (City mouse, hating-on the town mouse) but it is just as surely why the idea that ‘the left screwed this all up’ is shit. Corrupting bankers and shareholders f#cked us all, folks – and until we recognize that, we are bound to keep right on losing, every freakin’ time we ‘try’ because we are fighting with one of our vital and necessary hands, tied behind our back by the other (on the ‘expert’ advice of the bad guys).
Or, to appropriate a familiar line – “We’re going to need a bigger boat!”
(Less Noam, more Noah?)
Forgive me, Pops, for I half-simped!
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Okay – time at last for some juicy links – my apologies for running a bit long today (though I swear there were another twenty pages of other angles, that I might also have included – gadzooks some points are slippery to get at!)
First off, here is stalwart and courageous Kit Klarenburg, talking about Chomsky and Epstein (and no, there is no shading the reality of it. Caravaggio killed over tennis. Chomsky sold-out the working class for money knowingly and deliberately, because if there is no morality under capitalism – why even try?
Chomsky and Epstein – With Kit Klarenburg
And here’s the other video I mentioned. Economist Richard Wolff doing a pretty great analysis of the big shitstorm we’re all in the middle of, and then proving he has no idea at all what to do about it (entirely forgivable, to be sure – but it ought to bring more humility than he usually displays)
Richard Wolff and Glenn Diesen – The West’s Pre-Revolutionary Moment Has Arrived
Trump is crazy, but he’s not wrong about Europe being crazy too. Here is a man who is trapped in a Kafka-style hell, just for speaking out against the fast-onrushing prospect of world war three, intelligently, with solid western sourced facts (and tons of relevant experience).
Also truly remarkable – have a listen to how he describes Swiss Democracy – OMG I Want Some of THAT!
Retired Swiss intelligence officer (assigned to NATO as the war was being prepared) Jacques Baud, talking with Nima at “Dialogue Works” (always a SUPERB show)
Here are ex CIA analyst Larry Johnson, ex Pentagon and State Department Col Larry Wilkerson and Nima (Larry Larry and Darryl?) with some bracing and useful perspective on the western war state, Iran, long-standing American corruption of allies and the very real and growing potential of world war three (one hundred percent OUR fault – whatever you think of Putin).
To be clear, they have had tons to say on Venezuala since, but this macro stuff shouldn’t be obscured by the immediate and dramatic (Venezuala is about oil and capital, grotesque and infuriating, but it carries no risk of nuclear war, unlike many other recent shenanigans on the part of fascist-inspired western intelligence)
Here is the brilliant anti-monopolist Matt Stoller with a slightly different take on how the corrupted Democrats have confused state social engineering control with freedom (and thus fully-embraced the banker-evil hellscape we all now live inside)
“...On the Democratic side, this ideology is equally powerful. Since the 1970s, and then accelerating after the financial crisis, key parts of the Democrats build a moral architecture based on what they imagine the Civil Rights movement to have been, centred around a top-down human resources corporate framework of imposed social engineering. There were many reasons, from the availability of capital to bureaucratic inertia to a strong desire to not blame the first black President for helping to orchestrate the mass foreclosure of black-owned homes by large banks.
Regardless, this moral architecture had the effect of obscuring the rise of oligarchy, camouflaging bad policies, and turning large groups of working class people and white men against liberalism itself. It left liberals unable to staff and equip the many institutions tasked with taming capital, and uninterested in doing so. And it meant that the party was run largely by bankers, economists, and other members of the extreme wealth defence industry. Consider that Fed Chair Jay Powell, a private equity titan, was appointed under Trump, reappointed under Biden, and has gotten zero blame for the remarkably awful economic sentiment under his tenure.”
Here’s a fantastic piece from cartoonist Colleen Doran, filled with getting over precious self and gaining useful contact with reality – the best possible practical recipe, if we actually want to have an effect on the world!
“...Now we live in an age when even work ethic is denounced as unfair privilege. It’s not; it’s the default. Most people in the world can’t even get by without hard core work ethic. Only privileged people of the comfortable classes think work ethic is unfair, and I come from poverty.
When I see what people who come from comfort often behave like, I am no longer sorry I came from poverty.
I’m glad I know how to work and that I enjoy it.”
I am crazy for the writing of Arnaud Bertrand, wish I’d discovered him years ago – he’s one of the best antidotes to hateful anti-Asian propaganda I’ve ever encountered (and I look for them, actively). Plus, what I was saying about learning about our own language, from how others do things differently?
As with them all, do please read the whole thing this quote should tease and tell you why
“...We often misunderstand its so-called “tributary system” as being similar to European colonialism, but it couldn’t have been more different. In fact, George Yeo, who was Singaporean cabinet minister for 21 years and is one of the statesmen in the world who best understand China, recently described it in a speech: “Tributary is the wrong translation. ‘Chaogong’ is to pay respect, in response to which you will enjoy China’s largess. When you use ‘tributary’ in the Western context you think of it as protection money when [in China’s case] it’s the opposite: you give China some trinkets, you get back gold. This is how it was. And that’s why Southeast Asian countries competed with one another [to be tributaries]. Japanese merchants were fighting for tokens to trade in China. China used their market, their economics to control behaviour.”
So that’s China’s historical DNA: using economic mass and market access to create gravitational pull, not the form of coercive regional hegemony or colonialism that people like Mearsheimer fear.
Deng Xiaoping himself, in a 1974 speech at the United Nations, said that if China ever “turned into a superpower” and “played the tyrant,” the people of the world should “identify her as social-imperialism, expose it, oppose it and work together with the Chinese people to overthrow it.”
Here’s tireless ex FBI Mark Wauk, who gathers from a number of fine sources, for big picture insight.
Why this war is economic and not ‘civilizational’ (except insofar as we’d destroy any and all civilizations, including our own, to “win”)
Here is Larry Johnson on his own show, talking to the inimitable globe trotting reporter Pepe Escobar about the rapid shifting of global economic and civilizational power (with some fresh observations from NATOstan – AKA Italy)
Finally, for any of my chums on the right who think there is nothing in socialism except Stalinism (which absolutely IS worth fearing and guarding against) here’s the single best distinction I’ve ever seen, of the true (freedom centred) socialist spirit, compared to that despotic and totalitarian one. It comes from a book by one of America’s great early writers and thinkers about civil liberties – Benjamin Tucker.
For anyone who thinks I was a bit hard on Chomsky in this piece - here's a heartbreaking piece from Mintnews which breaks it down. The guy chose Epstein over HIS OWN KIDS!
https://www.mintpressnews.com/the-chomsky-epstein-files/290658/
Case in point.
When I talk about two highways to tyranny, people still trapped in (supremacist) western tribalism will always misunderstand me. We are so used to thinking the ‘real’ arguments are between groups of rich white people, that we don’t recognize when both sides of our argument are insane and mass murderous.
But folks – both sides of our current argument are insane and mass murderous.
Trump’s most shocking characteristic is where he lies and where he is radically honest. What Obama did to Libya was ten thousand times worse than what Trump did to Venezuala (so far) and probably worse than anything the US is now capable of (finances and military both in truly pathetic shape).
But Trump broke the spell-of-words that made us think our violence was virtuous – which is far more enraging to us, than our own violence against others HAS EVER ONCE BEEN FOR ANY FACTION.
Be clear – he’s bonkers and dangerous. But then be clearer still – the whole west has been, this whole time (which means we are either mass-murder supporting and complicit profiteers (long the majority on both fake left and fake right), or else trying our best to wake our culture up to do better).
For the slow group – the idea the Europe represents a sane cultured rights-valuing civilization resisting Trump’s madness is very simply wrong. We have two crazed racist killer cultures fighting tooth and nail for who gets the right to lynch the most subhuman foreigners. Just like always.
“The footpath that gets us to freedom” is the very different mutual-benefit path, that the rest of the world (the parts that we demonize, mass murder, sanction and then sneer-at, for being less advanced) have been working on, while we’ve spent this whole century planning brave new graveyards for the centuries of blood and dominance ahead.
For the doubting (and since this won’t be covered on BigNews) here’s “supposedly Civilized” France in action (and you can bet UK and US colonialist bankers-war-creeps were helping plenty, too).
Show me the global protests against THIS action, and I’ll show you the true left (crickets, of course).
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Check out the story below for the latest on European murderous scumbags – losing, again (thankfully).
https://savageminds.substack.com/p/assassination-plot-against-ibrahim