LILA RAJIVA: The Mind-Body Politic
Individuals Not Ideologies
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Archive of "Art and Ideas" Category
Kurt Tucholsky On Love Of Country
“We have just written “no” on 225 pages, “no” out of sympathy and “no” out of love, “no” out of hate and “no” out of passion - and now we would like to say “yes” for once. “Yes” - to the countryside and the country of Germany America. The country where we were born and whose language we speak. (…)
And now I would like to tell you something: it is not true that all those who call themselves ‘national’ and who are nothing but gentrified militants have taken out a lease on this country and its language just for them. Germany America is not just a government representative in his tailcoat, nor is it a headmaster, nor is it the ladies and gentlemen of the steel helmets. We are here too. (…)
Germany America is a divided country. We are one part of it. And whatever the situation, we quietly love our country - unshakably, without a flag, or a street organ, no sentimentality and no drawn sword.”
(Kurt Tucholsky, Heimat, in Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, Berlin 1929, p. 226)
Vandana Shiva on Nishkama Karma
Physicist and environmental activist Vandana Shiva on the practice of Right Attitude, or in Hindu terms, devotion to work without attachment to reward (nishkama karma):
“If you do anything with a narrow mindset, it makes you think according to a calculus of success and failure. Obviously when you are up against powerful interests, there are greater chances of failure than success. But when your work is inspired by a way of life and thinking, that process becomes a reward unto itself. That’s also what the Gita says, that you don’t count the results, you do the right thing according to your context. A spiritual outlook helps you see what the right thing in your context is. What matters is fulfillment, and that cannot be measured by the yardstick of society and its view of you, but by how your soul feels. Then the awards don’t matter, the brickbats don’t matter, the lousy rumors don’t matter. Nothing affects you.”
Mercedes Sosa Sings Solo Le Pido A Dios
Argentine singer Haydee Mercedes Sosa (July 9, 1935 – October 4, 2009) was dubbed “the voice of the voiceless ones” for her socially conscious music. She became popular through out Latin America as a leading exponent of nueva cancion , a type of song that combined Latin American folk music, rock rhythms, and highly politicized lyrics, and was often associated with left-wing politics. Many nuevo cancion artists went into exile in the 1970s and 1980s, when right wing military dictatorships came to power in their countries. Sosa herself went into exile in Spain.
Solo le pido a Dios
Solo le pido a Dios
I only beg God
Que el dolor no me sea indiferente
To let me not be indifferent to pain
Que la reseca muerte no me encuentre
May death never find me indifferent
Vacio y solo sin haber echo lo suficiente
Empty and alone without having done enough
Solo le pido a Dios
I only beg God
Que lo injusto no me sea indiferente
To let me not be indifferent to injustice
Que no me abofeteen la otra mejia
So I don’t turn the other cheek
Despues que una garra me arane esta frente
When a claw has already scratched my face
Chorus:
Solo le pido a Dios
I only beg God
Que la guerra no me sea indiferente
To let me not be indifferent to war
Es un monstro grande y pisa fuerte
It is the great monster that tramples
Toda la pobre inocencia de la gente
The poor innocence of the people
Es un monstro grande y pisa fuerte
Toda la pobre inocencia de la genteSolo le pido a Dios
I only beg God
Que el engano no me sea indiferente
To let me not be indifferent to deceit
Si un traidor puede mas que unos quantos
If one traitor is stronger than the rest of us
Que esos quantos no lo olviden facilmente
May the rest of us not forget too easily
Solo le pido a Dios
I only beg God
Que el futuro no me sea indiferente
To let me not be indifferent to the future
Deshauciado esta el que tiene que marchar
Helpless are those who are forced to leave
A vivir una cultura diferente
And live in a foreign land..Robert Byrd On The Abuses of Majorities
“Minorities have an illustrious past, full of suffering, torture, smear, and even death. Jesus Christ was killed by a majority.”
– Senator William Ezra Jenner of Indiana speaking in opposition to invoking cloture by majority vote on January 4, 1957, cited by Senator Robert Byrd, Senate speech on March 1, 2005, warning against a procedural effort being considered by some senators to shut down minority voices in senate debates.
Random Thoughts On My Return
My thoughts on the last leg of my schlepp back to the US were mixed….how did my 4 month jaunt get stretched to double the length, for starters..
And why does a continent as rich in natural resources as South America have poverty of any kind….and why is customer service such a difficult concept for some cultures….
But let me rewind a bit.
I left you in Salta, where I spent a two days recovering from a 33 hour bus trip from Montevideo sans any food.
That wasn’t provoked by an attack of asceticism. When I got to Buenos Aires, I had no Argentine pesos on me, the banks were closed, the ATM wouldn’t take my card for some reason, and it was pouring too heavily for me to venture out into the city. The restaurants at the station wouldn’t accept Uruguayan pesos or a card. So, between Friday morning in Uruguay and late Monday in Salta I literally ate nothing, except for a soggy white bread sandwich with watery cheese and ham. I didn’t really feel hungry, though, until I got off at Salta….
But more on all that in another post, when I’ll give you my impressions of my trip back..
Today, I’m still catching up and will just leave you with a few random thoughts….
1. The infrastructure and organization of the United States is still unparalleled and impressive in every way, in spite of deterioration and neglect…
2. Americans should get over their love affair with politics. They’re bad at it, it doesn’t suit their style, and it annoys everyone else. America is at her best making things happen. The business of America really is business.
3. I love the English language. With a smattering of Asian and European languages for comparison, I still find everything I want in English.
4. You can lead a rich, well informed, and not uncomfortable life without a car or a bicycle, without air conditioning, a fan, internet, a phone, an I-Pod, a blackberry, wireless, a TV, or even a radio.
5. If you’re willing to drink tap water and eat stall food, you can eat every meal out on 2 dollars a day in Peru, and have meat/fish at least once a day. If you cooked at home, you could eat well for under 15 dollars a month.
6. America has been a unique experiment in history, made possible because several favorable elements lined up in one spot on the globe. One of those elements - in fact, one of the cardinal ones - was the puritan work ethic. What it does it say that our intelligentsia, by and large, despises it.
7. A man can be free with just economic freedom. Even if he cannot act politically, or speak his thoughts, he can think them. If he can think his own thoughts, he is still his own man. But a man without economic freedom can think only his master’s thoughts….and his master will be the state.
8. It isn’t the politicians we need to worry about. They have to stand election. It isn’t even the financiers. They have to reckon with bankruptcy.
But the media faces neither elections nor a balance-sheet. There you have the tyrant.
Bernard Stiegler On Justice And Shame
French philosopher Bernard Stiegler writes about the need to have an ideal that informs the competition of the market place. This ideal would prevent competition and efficiency from degenerating into what he calls shamelessness, a state he associates both with globalization and with the suppression of individuation in modern societies:
“Imitation cannot be the first or unique principle of a new political and economic community. It is precisely to the degree that relations between countries allied in the same political community are not reduced to economic exchanges and competition, but instead presuppose a common interest above particular interests, that one can distinguish between a political union and a simple league of economic interests like the Hanseatic League or the Alena today, as well as countless other zones of special economic exchanges.
Maya Angelou On What People Remember
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
— Marketing saw, quoted by Maya Angelou
My Comment:
This quote led me to think of the way in which political debates these days have become entirely devoid of emotional intelligence. I’m convinced that the way we debate things is at least as important as what we debate. Maybe even more important.
There’s something fundamentally wrong with the media when it humiliates public figures, either directly and anonymously on the internet, or indirectly though misrepresentation and innuendo in print. There’s nothing funny, liberated, or “free speech” about any of it. It’s an abuse of speech… a form of violence.
Now if you cuss out someone who’s provoking and attacking you directly, that’s one thing. Turn about is fair play.
But using sexual humiliation as a tool to demonize political candidates (Sarah Palin) or feeding public voyeurism about prominent figures with no political relevance (David Letterman, John Edwards, Tiger Woods) is morally wrong and socially dangerous. It feeds a constant cycle of partisan retaliation that drives everyone but the most insanely ambitious out of politics.
Then, of course, the media turns around and complains without irony about how insanely ambitious politicians are.
Reporters are professionals. They have standards to adhere to. It’s not their job to simply supply a demand. It’s one thing to follow stories that interest people (within certain boundaries of what’s relevant to public discourse). That’s fair enough. But reporters can’t just cave into whatever it is they think people want to talk about.
You could, after all, argue that people also like watching snuff movies. Does that mean the media feeds that appetite too?
Demand doesn’t just come into being. It’s also created. And that’s not a one-way thing. There’s a feedback loop. Demand feeds supply, which feeds demand….. There’s an addictive element to the whole thing.
Which means writers can’t just give up their own moral freedom to feed a demand for immoral things. They have to make a conscious choice to go against what’s in their (or their publisher’s) economic interest and, instead, do what’s right. Admittedly, it’s hard.
As for the so-called hypocrisy of politicians, politicians and entertainers aren’t meant to be moral exemplars, so the question really shouldn’t arise at all.
Since the public expects a certain image, politicians have to conform if they want to get elected. Wanting that image to reflect reality strikes me as an example of the foolishness of the public, not of the hypocrisy of politicians.
Public figures are more and more simply the victims of mob mentality. From that perspective, John Edwards did quite right to deny the scandal until the end. It’s no business of the mob’s to know everything about a politician’s marriage and demand a standard from him that the vast majority of people don’t hold to.
Now, Edward’s team members are a different issue. They sacrificed money and time and they might naturally feel betrayed. That’s a different matter. Perhaps they should have researched him a bit more before latching onto him. That they didn’t suggests they have a problem - mindless hero worship.
People can have extraordinary talents but it doesn’t follow they’re perfect human beings, and there’s something deeply troubling about the urge to demand perfection from mere human beings…. and then attack them when they can’t supply it.
If I were Edwards, I would have banged the door on reporters who hounded me, a long time back. I would have turned the tables and started asking them a few questions about their private lives.
I suppose that’s why I have a degree of sympathy for people who’ve played the game back at reporters, like CEO Mark Cuban..and lately, Patrick Byrne.
Cuban has used Web 2.0 to his advantage against regulators as well.
A New York Times article in 2007 described how John Mack Mackey of Whole Foods and even disgraced and convicted financier Conrad Black of Hollinger International posted anonymously on message boards to counter negative posts about their companies. The articles noted that they ran the risk of violating securities laws, especially if they disclosed company business in their posts.
Perhaps that’s where the problem lies. We have laws to stop CEO’s of companies from defending themselves against attacks, but none for the people who do the attacking, even if they have a financial motive for it and even if their attacks are founded on semi-truths and lies indistinguishable by casual or lay readers.
Mack Mackey used the handle rahodeb, an acronym of Deborah, his wife’s name, and he even commented on how cute he looked with a new hair-cut. Byrne, on the other hand, has used a pseudonym Hannibal (the ruler of Carthage, not the star of “Silence of the Lambs”), but always signs his name underneath. Both took up the pen to counter attacks on their companies by anonymous internet posters.
It seems to have become a real problem.
In 2008 Apple CEO Steve Jobs finally had enough of the rumor mongering about his health and called Joe Nocera of the New York Times a juicy epithet I will chastely refrain from repeating.
[Since I've begun contributing to Deep Capture and enjoy a degree of bloggeraderie with them, I'm refraining from commenting directly on Byrne's running battle with the media, about which I've written before. I will just admit to being on their side versus Goldman and the short-raiders. I think they tell it like it is. But any obscene rants at reporters' expense don't earn brownie points with me. And I maintain a neutral rating on Overstock, since I just don't know enough about that end of things].
Either journalists act like a responsible press, or they are paparazzi, in which case they should expect to be hounded and harassed in turn. If reporters want access to the highest levels of business and government, if they want to report on subjects that are socially and politically important, then they should show some respect for their jobs, qualify themselves, adhere to professional standards of behavior, and avoid tormenting other human beings just to make their names.
Remember these are the same reporters who failed to report accurately or in time on one of the biggest stories in a hundred years, and why was that? Because (with honorable exceptions) they were either too comfortable with Wall Street, too lazy to do the research, too ignorant to know where to look, too provincial to read the people who could tell them, and too venal to go against their interests…. or all of the above..
This kind of public exposure we subject people to is not a one-time business. There is a record of the Edwards saga for ever on the net, visible to the whole globe….every little painful detail. What kind of sensitivity to a sick woman does that show, just to take one angle. Or consider their children..
Isn’t it a kind of torture?
And doesn’t it make us, as it makes any kind of torturer, bestial?
Meanwhile, the victims never forget…Games of Knowledge, Games of Power
“The academic game is the game of knowledge (and ignorance) which is inextricably, if not always intentionally, also a game of power. The only way to put an end to this game (…under conditions of domination…) is to play it better than the players themselves. The only way to undermine the power of Western definitions of the world that burden the rest of the world is to beat the powers at their own game….play enough or as much as necessary to expose it for what it really is — only a game — a game not because it is innocuous but because it is arbitrary and cannot be grounded anywhere.”
– Vassos Argyrou, “Anthropology and the Will to Meaning”, cited at Zeroanthropology
(My only caveat with this is to suggest it needs the word imperial added before the word West. It is the fundamentally imperial (state-centric) nature of the organization of knowledge - the privileging of elite schools, of certain forms of learning, of certain evidence of expertise - that is the problem. It is Western in so far as the west is the predominant carrier and transmitter of the virus. But the state everywhere is infectious….)
Elis Regina Sings Uma Casa No Campo
Brazil’s beloved Elis Regina sings Eu Quero Uma Casa No Campo. (more…)
The Machinery of Habit
A piece I wrote four years ago, The Burgh: Downsizing,” examines the nature of change and habit in relation to urban economies transformed by globalization and war.
“The boys come in and the beer flows. Ricardo tells us about training. Four-mile runs, 200 push-ups every morning, wall-climbing. “They break you, man,” he shakes his head. “They make you tough.
“I said I hoped so, considering where he was going. But Melanie, who studies the theology of the medieval anchoress Juliana of Norwich and sells papers on a corner in Oakland for the Socialist Worker, is more worried about his getting into what she calls killing mode. I ask her if a mode is the same as a habit. It takes time after all to form a habit. A mode on the other hand sounds like a gearshift on an Audi. And if you can shift into a gear, you can shift out. Maybe it’s really a question of what sort of habits. Learning, retraining, moving need effort. They don’t come easily. But war is a machinery that moves on its own and blood-lust, like a winter flu, might be easy to pick up and impossible to get rid of.
War and demolition come too easily to human nature. And take away too much. Anything worth pursuing, on the other hand, needs to be stalked through the years with the patience and vigilance of a hunter, cultivated through seasons of scarcity and remembered in times of forgetting. In our sophistication we laugh at those who buy dear and hold dearer. Who stay when they should have left. Bag holders. Fools. Who step into the river and expect the waters to stay the same. The immobilized in our mobile society. What is the value of an abandoned church, an obsolete mill, an aging worker? Flux, we shrug, is the only certainty. Change is the first law of nature.
“People talk about joining but they don’t,” says Ricardo, “I’m the only one who did.” He sounds proud.
“I ask him if he thinks good health insurance and tuition money are worth risking his life for. He laughs.
“Look — I ain’t gonna die. Most of the guys who teach me, they’ve been there. They got through. More chances I’d get shot in a ghetto. So some guy’s lost an arm…or a leg. So what? All this new technology now, reconstruction…they can make you another leg; it’s really no big deal.”At 26, you can think of that as a good trade. An amputation of the body or the mind is all it takes to keep up with change. Like those translucent lizards which shed their tails seasonally as they wait immobile and vigilant for flies on dusty window sills, we might grow new limbs just as good. New memories to replace old ones. Here in the hills, at the confluence of three rivers, we have learned not to resist the laws of nature.
“But perhaps we don’t live by nature alone. Perhaps, as Juliana of Norwich said, we also need mercy and grace.”
“The need to change and the machinery of habit that makes it difficult - a theme I find myself returning to , over and over, especially when I’m confronted with the depressing spectacle of people going back to the same propaganda, the same bogus assertions that caused this global catastrophe in the first place.
Going back, like dogs to vomit.
I’m sorry if that sounds ugly, but what’s happening now in DC is ugly….and very very dangerous.
Anarchism In the Kibbutz Movement
Haaretz on a study of anarchism in the Kibbutz movement:
“If there is a vision of Israel that can avoid the polarization and mythmaking of much Diaspora and Israeli discourse, it requires an appreciation of the complexities of Israeli society. James Horrox’s “A Living Revolution: Anarchism in the Kibbutz Movement” provides a welcome reminder that Israel wasn’t always seen by radicals as an outpost of Western imperialism. Horrox unearths the utopian, anarchist influences behind the growth of the kibbutz movement in pre-state Israel. Anarchism may be a highly flawed ideology, but at the very least it offered a vision of Zionism that, in not aiming to build a Jewish state, held out the possibility of a land in which Jews and Muslims could coexist peacefully. This was never likely to happen, of course, but at the very least it’s important to remember that Israel didn’t have to be the place that its contemporary detractors and defenders imagine it to be - and it doesn’t have to be that place now.”
My Comment:
Notice the reflexive genuflection to the state. Why is anarchism that promises coexistence a flawed ideology? Isn´t “flawed” a much truer description of the statist ideology rooted in race and faith (Zionism) that guarantees displacement of one people by the other?
Oscar Wilde On Incarnation
Oscar Wilde in De Profundis
“Who never ate his bread in sorrow, Who never spent the midnight hours Weeping and waiting for the morrow, - He knows you not, ye heavenly powers.’
They were the lines which that noble Queen of Prussia, whom Napoleon treated with such coarse brutality, used to quote in her humiliation and exile….
Clergymen and people who use phrases without wisdom sometimes talk of suffering as a mystery. It is really a revelation. One discerns things one never discerned before. One approaches the whole of history from a different standpoint. What one had felt dimly, through instinct, about art, is intellectually and emotionally realised with perfect clearness of vision and absolute intensity of apprehension.
P. J. O’Rourke On Santa And God
P. J. O’Rourke via Samizdata:
“I have only one firm belief about the American political system, and that is this: God is a Republican and Santa Claus is a Democrat. God is an elderly or, at any rate, middle-aged male, a stern fellow, patriarchal rather than paternal and a great believer in rules and regulations. He holds men strictly accountable for their actions. He has little apparent concern for the material well-being of the disadvantaged. He is politically connected, socially powerful and holds the mortgage on virtually everything in the world. God is difficult. God is unsentimental. It is very hard to get into God’s heavenly country club. Santa Claus is another matter. He’s cute. His nonthreatening. He’s always cheerful. And he loves animals. He may know who’s been naughty and who’s been nice, but he never does anything about it. He gives everyone everything they want without thought of a quid pro quo. He works hard for charities, and he’s famously generous to the poor. Santa Claus is preferable to God in every way but one: There is no such thing as Santa Claus.”
Peter Boettke On Paul Samuelson
Peter Boettke writes a sobering obituary for Paul Samuelson:
“John Hicks once wrote that the story of economics in the 1930s was the battle between Hayek and Keynes. I think Hicks is right, and that this battle continues to this day as witnessed in our current policy debates. But I think there is a deeper debate that goes at the very project of economics as a scientific discipline. And that battle is the one between Samuelson and Mises, and the fateful choice was the late 1940s. Rather than following Mises’s Human Action, the economics profession went the path of Samuelson’s Foundations. Formalism was interepreted as synonymous with logical rigor, and in the subsequent decade positivistic testing was interpreting as synonymous with empirical analysis. By the 1960s, formalism and positivism transformed the science of economics so that the Misesian understanding of “theory” and “history” was actually completely dismissed as a relic of a pre-scientific age.
Since then a large part of the great efforts by economists have been directed at recapturing insights that Mises-Hayek possessed already by mid-century — whether we are talking about cognitive limits of man, the role of property rights (and legal and political institutions in general and behavior related to them), and the microfoundations of all macroeconomic phenomena. New institutional Economics, New Classical Economics, New Economic History, Experimental and Behavioral Economics, etc. all deviate in significant ways from the scientific and policy project that Samuelson initiated in the late 1940s and which dominated economic thinking from that time until the 1980s. The Samuelsonian project had to be pecked away at for progress in economic understanding to take place. Yet the ’scientific’ allure of the project still remains — unfortunately even among many of those who pecked away at the Samuelsonian project. The pretense of knowledge (see Hayek’s Nobel) and the claim to the mantle of science (see Rothbard’s paper of that title) have a much stronger grip on the minds of economists and intellectuals than what might be reasonably expected in the wake of repeated failures.
Samuelson argued that like all great scientists he was only concerned with the applause of his peers. And he received great praise in his lifetime and will be celebrated in the short-run in his death. But I have stated on more than one occasion that I believe Samuelson will be remembered in the same way as Sir William Petty is remembered, not as Adam Smith is remembered. His substantive contributions (as oppopsed to the form in which he stated arguments) are not immediately obvious to pinpoint. We must always remember that Samuelson was the great anti-Misesian of 20th century economics, and in my book that translates into a force for anti-economics despite all the scientific accolades, awards, honorary degrees, and reverence by his peers he was granted in his lifetime.”
Medicine And Disease
“But what does it mean when we’re in a world that’s on fire? What kind of perfection is this? It’s the perfection of medicine and disease subduing each other, where completeness and brokenness are not in conflict.”
– “The Whole Earth Is Medicine,” Zen Mountain Monastery
Libertarian Living: Expat Belonging
My first year as an expat. Come New Year and I will have done the necessary time outside the country.
I must say it´s a relief. At the best of times I never quite fit into America, although I think I fit in better there than I would ever have fit into India…but I´ll never know, since I left India as a student.
Honestly, I think I wouldn´t really fit into any country, except as an observer of sorts. A kind of partial citizen. That´s me. I spend a lot of my time alone, because people tire me out. Yet I like them around me anonymously…. preferably talking a language I don´t understand.
Loren Eisely, the anthropologist, once wrote somewhere in some essay of his that he liked spending time by himself in dark theaters (or was it bars?). I´m like that.
I like a seat in the corner of a crowded restaurant or lobby where I can watch people. The current of voices, as long as it doesn´t impinge too much on my thoughts, soothes me. A dark hum of water whirring around me. A kind of return to the womb.
Airport lounges…small coffee shops, one-star hotels with wooden cupboards that tilt precariously when you open them late at night…unfamiliar streets that open up suddenly as you turn a corner ..a grey sea… I feel at home around them. Anonymity seems to make my own self clearer to me. In a group of friends, on the other hand, I lose a sense of who I am.
People yearn to belong somewhere. I spend my time elaborating ways of not belonging. And when I begin to feel at home, it´s always a warning sign that soon, very soon, I will want to leave.
Coincidence In Nabokov´s “Lolita”
Anthony Uhlman on Vladimir Nabokov
“Brian Boyd, in his magnificent biography, shows how Nabokov developed an aesthetic method which at once focuses meticulously on unrepeatable particulars, and stresses the importance of pattern. Coincidences, apparently meaningless details, when examined, are shown to be linked by gossamer threads to something other, some still more complex pattern. Clearly, Nabokov could not have known, when he published Lolita, that a then three year old boy called Brian Boyd would grow to become Dr Boyd, author of numerous works on Nabokov, including the definitive biography. Yet, when Humbert first takes Lolita to a hotel after her mother has died and she is at last at his mercy, he meets a conference attendee in the Men’s Room who ‘inquired of me how I had liked Dr. Boyd’s talk, and looked puzzled when I (King Sigmund the Second) said Boyd was quite a boy’ (125).
What can we can say about a pure coincidence like this, one which shows little respect for chronological or logical plausibility? At present, through science, philosophy, sociology, and religion, we are able to say very little: only artists, like Nabokov, somehow help us to consider this, offering a shudder of recognition, allowing us to apprehend how apparently finite lives might achieve an intuition of the infinite.“
My Comment
Coincidences have fascinated me since childhood..probably because I always seem to walk into them..
I seem to evoke synchronicity quite mysteriously. So much so that it turned into an intellectual interest that led me to study Jung´s writing for a number of years and then many forms of symbolic language, mythology and analysis.
Psychic Income Versus Real Income (Updated)
John Mauldin in Frontline Thoughts on one off balance sheet vehicle that might get us out of this crisis faster than we think: psychic income, our dreams for our future…
“Every night we go to sleep on our psychic income, and every day we get up and try to figure out how to turn it into real income……The future is never easy for all but a few of us, at least not for long. But we figure it out. And that is why in 20 years we will be better off than we are today. Each of us, all over the world, by working out our own visions of psychic income, will make the real world a better place.”
My Comment:
In response to RobertinDC, my loyal reader, who politely calls this a “crock,” I should add the context of Mauldin´s note, which is technological change.
Mauldin argues that even if the market stays flat or depressed in real terms, even if unemployment increases and the standard of living falls, none of us can know for sure what the future holds. In ten years time, the world may very well be a better place.. in terms of possibilities… than it is today because of technological innovation.
Is this implausibly “feel good” stuff?
Well, yes.
Of course.
It takes no great courage or imagination to imagine plausible scenarios.
Imagination is the ability…the very creative and fundamentally life-giving ability..to imagine implausible..even unbelievable scenarios and then make them not only plausible but inevitable.
And, again in a fundamental sense, that is how creativity in all fields works. Focusing solely on the negative is itself a form of delusion.
I don´t mean by this that you can wish yourself into any outcome you want. There are also physical laws at work that you have to accept. You cannot wish away a contraction of the economy because of overspending, for instance. The economy has to correct.
But the effects of the contraction, the extent, and its resolution can in fact be ameliorated by a change in attitude.
And by staying alert to every possibilty, we can also sense when deterministic interpretations - such as, “this is the way capitalism is“ — are being used to cover up what is in truth a very manipulated reality.
In that case, what we should focus on is an imagined ideal, the way capitalism should be, which may be implausible or even a crock, in some views, but is our only true guide to a way out of this debacle.
This is why I wrote, in 2007, that the economy didn´t have to crash. It was in a PR piece for the book.This wasn´t because I lacked a healthy sense of reality. But reality in the sense that physicists understand it is a very different thing from the “common sense” understanding of reality. The physicists´view is actually closer to what might be called implausible or even unbelievable. But it´s none theless true. The same divergence between common sense perception and underying reality exists in the economy. Cynicism is often right. But not always. Pessimism is often warranted. But not always.
There were fundamental problems in the economy in 2006-2007, but the way the crash occured struck me then as very strange.
I suspected at the time that some of the indices were manipulated…and now the deepcapture team (and others like Pam Martens) have shown how they could have been (see prior posts).
In time, you are going to find that this is true of many of the indicators we use to read the mood of the investing public. Markets are driven by emotions. And smart crooks with the ability to manipulate that emotion can make big money from the manipulation….
And if they can, it stands to reason they will.
What is surprising is only why it took so long for supposedly tough minded financial reporters to figure that out.
In any case, whether manipulation is proved or not, what ordinary people can do is to take for their model the good trader. Good traders are people who can “keep their heads when all around you are losing theirs and blaming it on you”..as Kipling said.
The hall mark of expert trading is to control the emotions and rein them in from succumbing to mass moods. What does that mean in practical terms?
It means when everyone is panicking, look for silver linings, and when everyone is complacent, learn to worry…
Ramana Maharshi On Wearing Shoes
“Wanting to reform the world without discovering your true self is like trying to cover the whole world with leather to avoid the pain of walking on stones and thorns. It is simpler to wear shoes.”
– Ramana MaharshiHexagram 12: P’i - Stand still, Stagnation
12 - Hexagram Twelve: P’i
StagnationHeaven and Earth move away from each other.
In the ensuing void, the small invade where the great have departed.
There is no common meeting ground, so the Superior Person must fall back on his inner worth and decline the rewards offered by the inferior invaders.
Difficult trials as you hold to your course.
ANALYSIS
It is natural to assume that, if Earth above Heaven forms the hexagram for Peace and Paradise, then the opposite configuration, with Heaven over Earth would represent the antithesis of Paradise, Hell.
Not so.This hexagram is actually the Dark side of Peace, its unsavory byproduct, Stagnation.
In a time when most of our wants are provided, there is little need for the heroes, the artists, the great thinkers and innovators.As they recede into the shadows, Idleness, Apathy, and Lassitude come to the forefront.
Peace has become boring, bland, unchallenging — Stagnant.
Now our attention turns to the quick fix, the instant celebrity, the fad, the one-nighter, the current buzz.There is no room for depth.
If you are a passionate soul, you must wait for a better time to find kindred spirits. In these times, they are only curious legends, bas-relief, dead poets.
Totalitarianism: The Total Domination of Man
From “Evil: The Crime Against Humanity,” by Jerome Kohn
The “total domination of man” was radically evil, in Arendt’s eyes, not only because it was unprecedented but because it did not make sense. She asked: Why should lust for power, which from the beginning of recorded history has been considered the political and social sin par excellence, suddenly transcend all previously known limitations of self-interest and utility and attempt not simply to dominate men as they are but to change their very nature; not only to kill whoever is in the way of further power accumulation but also innocent and harmless bystanders, and this even when such murder is an obstacle, rather than an advantage, for the accumulation of power?
(see “Ideology and Propaganda”)There is no ready answer to that question. In Hitler’s case it is well known that his unrelenting dehumanization and destruction of those who presented no threat to him hindered his ability to fight effectively against his real enemies at the end of World War II. What is the point of dominating men at any cost, not as they are but in order “to change their very nature”? If it is for the sake of “the consistency of a lying world order,” as she went on to suggest, what is the point of a system that even if it succeeded in destroying the human world would not end in the creation of a “thousand-year Reich” or “Messianic Age” but only in self-destruction? Arendt, to be sure, never thought the suicidal “victory” of totalitarianism likely. That would first require global rule by one totalitarian power, and in that regard she believed that Hitler’s invasion of Russia in 1941 was symbolically significant in spite of his pact with Stalin two years earlier and in spite of the two leaders’ mutual admiration which she emphasized. Moreover, she saw that “no system has ever been less capable [than totalitarianism] of gradually expanding its sphere of influence and holding on to its conquests.” Most important of all, because plurality is the inescapable condition of human existence–”not Man but men inhabit this planet”–Arendt increasingly came to consider farfetched the notion that a single totalitarian regime could ever destroy the entire world.”
Forgiveness Without Repentance Is Un-Christian
Several readers had questioned my rejection of the common understanding of forgiveness as it appears in Christian theology. In response to that, I’m posting what I consider a proper interpretation of forgiveness:
“A very dramatic example of confronting the offenders is seen in the life of John the Baptist, Matt. 3:7-10. Some of those who came to be baptized were clearly suspect and John sent them away unbaptized telling them to get a track record of repentance, then consider baptism. It was not just some words of repentance that John demanded before accepting them, he wanted some action commensurate with the confession to back it up.
In our day and age, we are so shallow in these things, we simply get some quick nod of the head about repentance and baptize them immediately. We would never do what John did, and I venture to say that many Christians are extremely uncomfortable with the fact such action on John’s part is even included in Scripture. It is an embarrassment to many fine Christian people that John did such a thing, and they secretly wish that it had not been recorded.
God expects us to take the right course of action even though it is difficult.”
That’s from the ministry of Gordon Rumford.
I’m quite sure that my philosophical and religious notions are a world apart from Pastor Rumford’s, but on the moral correctness of his position I’m in no doubt. I’ve verified that not just from argument and reasoning, or from the study of comparative religious ethics, or from my own personal experience, but also from lifelong observation of actions and consequences.
These are the real reasons why people think forgiveness can be granted when there’s been no acknowledgement of wrong-doing, no repentance and no restitution:
1. They’re not reading the New Testament in proper context, but taking passages selectively as they wish. They need to examine the whole texture of the Bible (that is, the Torah) teaching, on which Jesus’ teaching was based.
(Update: I am adding a link here to the doctrine of Teshuva or repentance, expounded by Rabbi David R. Blumenthal, Professor of Judaic Studies, Emory University, as evidence.
Quote:
In rabbinic thought, only the offending party can set the wrong aright and only the offended party can forgo the debt of the sin. ……Teshuva is part of the structure of God’s creation; hence, the sinner is obligated to do teshuva and the offended person is obligated to permit teshuva by the offender.
The most basic kind of forgiveness is “forgoing the other’s indebtedness” (mechil). If the offender has done teshuva, and is sincere in his or her repentance, the offended person should offer mechila; that is, the offended person should forgo the debt of the offender, relinquish his or her claim against the offender. This is not a reconciliation of heart or an embracing of the offender; it is simply reaching the conclusion that the offender no longer owes me anything for whatever it was that he or she did. Mechila is like a pardon granted to a criminal by the modern state. The crime remains; only the debt is forgiven.
The tradition, however, is quite clear that the offended person is not obliged to offer mechila if the offender is not sincere in his or her repentance and has not taken concrete steps to correct the wrong done. Maimonides is decisive on this subject: “The offended person is prohibited from being cruel in not offering mechila, for this is not the way of the seed of Israel. Rather, if the offender has [resolved all material claims and has] asked and begged for forgiveness once, even twice, and if the offended person knows that the other has done repentance for sin and feels remorse for what was done, the offended person should offer the sinner mechila” (Mishne Torah, “Hilchot Chovel u-Mazzik,” 5:10). Mechila is, thus, an expectation of the offended person but only if the sinner is actually repentant. ….
…The principle that mechila ought to be granted only if deserved is the great Jewish “No” to easy forgiveness. It is core to the Jewish view of forgiveness, just as desisting from sin is core to the Jewish view of repentance. Without good grounds, the offended person should not forgo the indebtedness of the sinner; otherwise, the sinner may never truly repent and evil will be perpetuated. And, conversely, if there are good grounds to waive the debt or relinquish the claim, the offended person is morally bound to do so. This is the great Jewish “Yes” to the possibility of repentance for every sinner. “
Lila: Note that this is only one of three levels of forgiveness and it’s the only one that is obligatory, if the conditions are met. The other two levels, selich (approaching the offender with mercy and empathy) and kappar (purification or wiping out of sin, which can only be done by God) are not. Indeed, kappar is impossible for human beings.
2. They’re not placing the Gospel statements about forgiveness in the context of the sound teachings of other religions and of non-religious ethics, with which true religion should not be in severe conflict.
Thus Islam:
“The Arabic word used for self rapprochement is An-Nafs Al-Lawamah which refers to blame oneself and to feel sorry for ones sins. So this is recommended and good in the sight of Allaah and necessary to have the sin forgiven by Allaah.
Ceasing to commit the sin immediately. If the sin was against Allaah, then he should (1) stop doing it if it was an unlawful act, or (2) hasten to do it if it was an obligation that he abandoned doing. And if the sin was against a created being (such as humans), then he should hasten to free himself from it, whether by returning it back to him or seeking his forgiveness and pardon.”
3. They’re not taking into account prudence, reason, courage, and other moral virtues as being as necessary as kindness to moral development.
4. They’re not considering the duality of mercy–judgment, which is a cornerstone of Old Testament teaching (which itself is the foundation of Jesus’ ethic). Mercy without judgment is not only not correct, it is an impossibility. This is confirmed from the imagery and symbolism in the practice of magic in the western esoteric tradition, where the masculine form is invoked in contemplating mercy, so that the image of mercy/compassion doesn’t devolve into mere sentimentality. (More on that in another post, as it is a complex topic).
5. They’re disguising their cowardice and their fear of the repercussions of being outspoken, especially toward those more powerful.
6. They’re psychologically incapable of standing up for themselves and in need of therapy to become more assertive.
7. They have an excessive and immoral regard for “keeping peace” at all counts.
8. They’ve been abused or have low self-regard or do not consider injustice to themselves as injustice but part of religiously ordained suffering or “submission,” under authoritarian understandings of the Bible.
9. They have a streak of masochism that derives some psycho-sexual gratification or pseudo-religious exaltation from being injured.
10. They’re using public forgiveness as a technique of persuasion, as in 4th generation warfare (Gandhi was a master of the practice).
11. Their spiritual vanity is so great that they think they can out-Christ Christ, who certainly required his followers to confess their sins and repent.
12. They don’t like the notion of “judgment” and consider it unhealthy.
13. They’re confusing Christianity with some schools (and not the deepest, I should add) of modern psychology.
14. They’re emotionally and psychologically shallow.
15. They’re confusing Christianity with cultural Marxism, in which the notion of guilt and individual responsibility for wrong has been shucked off entirely to structural and societal causes.
Solzhenitsyn: Walk Away From the Gangrene
Live Not By Lies
Monday, February 18, 1974
Following is the full text of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s essay ``Live Not By Lies.” It is perhaps the last thing he wrote on his native soil [before the collapse of the Soviet Union] and circulated among Moscow’s intellectuals [at that time]. The essay is dated Feb. 12, the day that secret police broke into his apartment and arrested him. The next day he was exiled to West Germany.
“At one time we dared not even to whisper. Now we write and read samizdat, and sometimes when we gather in the smoking room at the Science Institute we complain frankly to one another: What kind of tricks are they playing on us, and where are they dragging us? gratuitous boasting of cosmic achievements while there is poverty and destruction at home. Propping up remote, uncivilized regimes. Fanning up civil war. And we recklessly fostered Mao Tse-tung at our expense– and it will be we who are sent to war against him, and will have to go. Is there any way out? And they put on trial anybody they want and they put sane people in asylums–always they, and we are powerless.
Things have almost reached rock bottom. …..We fear only to lag behind the herd and to take a step alone-and suddenly find ourselves without white bread, without heating gas and without a Moscow registration……
When violence intrudes into peaceful life, its face glows with self-confidence, as if it were carrying a banner and shouting: “I am violence. Run away, make way for me–I will crush you.” But violence quickly grows old. And it has lost confidence in itself, and in order to maintain a respectable face it summons falsehood as its ally–since violence lays its ponderous paw not every day and not on every shoulder. It demands from us only obedience to lies and daily participation in lies–all loyalty lies in that.
And the simplest and most accessible key to our self-neglected liberation lies right here: Personal non-participation in lies. Though lies conceal everything, though lies embrace everything, but not with any help from me.
This opens a breach in the imaginary encirclement caused by our inaction. It is the easiest thing to do for us, but the most devastating for the lies. Because when people renounce lies it simply cuts short their existence. Like an infection, they can exist only in a living organism.
We do not exhort ourselves. We have not sufficiently matured to march into the squares and shout the truth our loud or to express aloud what we think. It’s not necessary. It’s dangerous. But let us refuse to say that which we do not think…..
Our path is to walk away from the gangrenous boundary. If we did not paste together the dead bones and scales of ideology, if we did not sew together the rotting rags, we would be astonished how quickly the lies would be rendered helpless and subside. That which should be naked would then really appear naked before the whole world.
.. Either truth or falsehood: Toward spiritual independence or toward spiritual servitude….
And he who is not sufficiently courageous even to defend his soul- don’t let him be proud of his`progressive” views, and don’t let him boast that he is an academician or a people’s artist, a merited figure, or a general–let him say to himself: I am in the herd, and a coward. It’s all the same to me as long as I’m fed and warm.
Even this path, which is the most modest of all paths of resistance, will not be easy for us. But it is much easier than self-immolation or a hunger strike: The flames will not envelope your body, your eyeballs, will not burst from the heat, and brown bread and clean water will always be available to your family…….
It will not be an easy choice for a body, but it is only one for a soul. Not, it is not an easy path. But there are already people, even dozens of them, who over the years have maintained all these points and live by the truth.
So you will not be the first to take this path, but will join those who have already taken it. This path will be easier and shorter for all of us if we take it by mutual efforts and in close rank. If there are thousands of us, they will not be able to do anything with us. If there are tens of thousands of us, then we would not even recognize our country…..
And if we get cold feet, even taking this step, then we are worthless and hopeless, and the scorn of Pushkin should be directed to us:“Why should cattle have the gifts of freedom? Their heritage from generation to generation is the belled yoke and the lash.”
Mencken On Fighting a Woman
“Any man who is so unfortunate as to have a serious controversy with a woman, say in the departments of finance, theology or amour, must inevitably carry away from it a sense of having passed through a dangerous and almost gruesome experience.”
- H. L . Mencken (hat-tip to Lew Rockwell)
Thoreau On the Dangers of Comfort
“We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven. We have adopted Christianity merely as an improved method of agriculture.
We have built for this world a family mansion, and for the next a family tomb. The best works of art are the expression of man’s struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that the higher state be forgotten.
There is actually no place in this village for a work of fine art, if any had come down to us, to stand for our lives, our houses and streets, furnish no proper pedestal for it. There is not a nail to hang a picture on, nor a shelf to receive the bust of a hero or a saint.”
—- Henry David Thoreau, “On Practicing Economy in Life”
The Spectacle of General Secrecy
Political theorist Guy de Bord on the spectacle of public life:
“The concentrated spectacle
The spectacle associated with concentrated bureaucracy. Debord associated this spectacular form mostly with the Eastern Bloc and Fascism, although today mixed backward economies import it, and even advanced capitalist countries in times of crisis. Every aspect of life, like property, music, and communication is concentrated and is identified with the bureaucratic class. The concentrated spectacle generally identifies itself with a powerful political leader. The concentrated spectacle is made effective through a state of permanent violence and police terror.[edit]
The diffuse spectacle
The spectacle associated with advanced capitalism and commodity abundance. In the diffuse spectacle, different commodities conflict with each other, preventing the consumer from consuming the whole. Each commodity claims itself as the only existent one, and tries to impose itself over the other commodities:
Irreconcilable claims jockey for position on the stage of the affluent economy’s unified spectacle, and different star commodities simultaneously promote conflicting social policies. The automobile spectacle, for example, strives for a perfect traffic flow entailing the destruction of old urban districts, while the city spectacle needs to preserve those districts as tourist attractions.
The diffuse spectacle is more effective than the concentrated spectacle. The diffuse spectacle operates mostly through seduction, while the concentrated spectacle operates mostly through violence. Because of this, Debord argues that the diffuse spectacle is more effective at suppressing non-spectacular opinions than the concentrated spectacle.
The integrated spectacle
The spectacle associated with modern capitalist countries. The integrated spectacle borrows traits from the diffuse and concentrated spectacle to form a new synthesis. Debord argues that this is a very recent form of spectacular manifestation, and that it was pioneered in France and Italy.
According to Debord, the integrated spectacle goes by the label of liberal democracy. This spectacle introduces a state of permanent general secrecy, where experts and specialists dictate the morality, statistics, and opinions of the spectacle. Terrorism is the invented enemy of the spectacle, which specialists compare with their “liberal democracy”, pointing out the superiority of the latter one. Debord argues that without terrorism, the integrated spectacle wouldn’t survive, for it needs to be compared to something in order to show its “obvious” perfection and superiority.”
My Comment:
Thanks to reader J. T. Gordon for reminding me of this. I’ve posted before on de Bord and the notion of the spectacle of society. Like so much powerful analysis, this one too has roots in the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the most productive thinkers of the last 150 years.
What should be noted here is that in the spectacle of secrecy, the greatest emphasis is placed on openness. Thus, “freedom of speech” occupies a central position in the culture. By this means, all barriers to privacy are brought down, all psychological barriers between the individual and the crowd. Yet, this openness at one level (in public culture) operates side-by-side with secrecy at the highest level (governments and corporate leaders).
(More later)
Back…
Reading through this again, I feel I need to question De Bord’s division, which corresponds to communist, capitalist and liberal democratic. It’s too neat. In fact, things are much more muddy
Genesis On the Resource Wars…
From the Parsha of Toldot (Genesis 25: 19 -28:9)
“Isaac has now moved into the valley of Gerar (meaning: Lodging Place) and settled his family. Here alone I believe we can stop and look at what he has gone through. Surely we can say this was a man of faith. He had to believe that the L-rd truly intended to bless him as He had his father Abraham. Isaac demonstrated patience by never giving up on G-d, for the birth of his heirs. He trusted in the midst of a famine that the land he was led to would be blessed. He even had to trust, that now, as he was being “forced” from the land where he became so wealthy, that G-d still was faithful to keep His promises. We know that Abraham was a man of faith but likewise so was Isaac. Yet, it’s still not here where our lesson stems. It is in the land where Isaac has now settled, in the valley.
Isaac is in this valley, the very same place his father had been years before Isaac’s birth. Isaac now decides to re-dig the wells his father had once dug. He even intended to give each the same name his father had given to each. These wells had to be restored, because after the death of Abraham, the Philistines had sealed off all of the wells that Abraham had dug. As the servants of Isaac dug and discovered water, the herdsmen of the valley began to quarrel with Isaac’s men. These men demanded that the water of this new well belonged to them. This quarrel led Isaac to name the well Esek, which means “contention”. However, instead of stewing over or forcing his way into ownership of this well he moves on to dig another. Again, there is another argument of this the second well. Once more the long-suffering character of Isaac, which was formed through his twenty years of waiting on the L-rd for children, through his stay with the Philistines and here in the “lodging place”, becomes evident. Instead of arguing over this second well he leaves it as well and calls it Sitnah which means “enmity”. Many of us may be tempted to quit at this point and submit ourselves to the task of just trying to make as little stir as possible and not run the risk of having our work stolen from us again. Not Isaac.
Just when it seems as though every well Isaac seeks to dig will be stolen by the people of the valley, his servants dig another well. Isaac doesn’t stop and think what if I dig this well and they come and take it from me again. Instead, he decides he will dig once more. If the L-rd has blessed him then no man can stop that blessing. Isaac’s faith further deepened his resolve to go out and dig one more time. It is this well where, finally, no conflict arises……”
My Comment
And likewise with inventing or writing or starting a business….
The libertarian way is to move on, realizing that the answer to a fight over resources or markets (or attribution), is to move to a new place. It’s also the thesis of a popular business book, The Blue Ocean Strategy
Unlike Malthusians or Marxists, the true free marketer (unlike the opportunistic free marketer) recognizes that neither resources nor markets nor credit are really limited (they might sometimes seem to be) and that only the uncreative needs to poach.
Joseph Glanvill on the Infinite and the Eternal
” The most congruous apprehension that we can entertain of the Infinite and eternal Deity,
is to conceive him as an immense and all glorious Sun, that is continually communicating
and sending abroad its beams and brightnesse.”– Joseph Glanvill (Christian bishop, apologist for psychic phenomena, and philosophical skeptic)
Tagore on Freedom
“Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by
narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms toward perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the
dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever-widening
thought and action;
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country
awake!”RABINDRANATH TAGORE
Johns Lanchester on Neo-Feudal Bad Times to Come
John Lanchester in The London Review of Books cited by Chris Hedges at Truthdig:
“The cost of daily living, from buying food to getting medical care, will become difficult for all but a few as the dollar plunges. States and cities will see their pension funds drained and finally shut down. The government will be forced to sell off infrastructure, including roads and transport, to private corporations. We will be increasingly charged by privatized utilities—think Enron—for what was once regulated and subsidized. Commercial and private real estate will be worth less than half its current value. The negative equity that already plagues 25 percent of American homes will expand to include nearly all property owners. It will be difficult to borrow and impossible to sell real estate unless we accept massive losses. There will be block after block of empty stores and boarded-up houses. Foreclosures will be epidemic. There will be long lines at soup kitchens and many, many homeless. Our corporate-controlled media, already banal and trivial, will work overtime to anesthetize us with useless gossip, spectacles, sex, gratuitous violence, fear and tawdry junk politics. America will be composed of a large dispossessed underclass and a tiny empowered oligarchy that will run a ruthless and brutal system of neo-feudalism from secure compounds. Those who resist will be silenced, many by force. We will pay a terrible price, and we will pay this price soon, for the gross malfeasance of our power elite.”
Friedrich Hayek on the Pretence of Knowledge
Friedrich Hayek on “the pretence of knowledge:”
“Unlike the position that exists in the physical sciences, in economics and other disciplines that deal with essentially complex phenomena, the aspects of the events to be accounted for about which we can get quantitative data are necessarily limited and may not include the important ones. While in the physical sciences it is generally assumed, probably with good reason, that any important factor which determines the observed events will itself be directly observable and measurable, in the study of such complex phenomena as the market, which depend on the actions of many individuals, all the circumstances which will determine the outcome of a process… will hardly ever be fully known or measurable.”
Thanks to Kevin Duffy.
Mandukya Upanishad on the Ego and Dream States
The Upanishads are Sanskrit texts of commentary on the four primary Vedic religious classics of Hinduism (the Rig, Sama, Yajur, Atharva).
This passage is a commentary on dream analysis contained in one of them:
“Dreams, therefore, are due to repressed desires. This is one of the causes behind dreams. This is the only factor that the psychoanalysts of the West emphasise. But Indian psychologists and psychoanalysts, like the Raja Yogins and the philosophers of the Vedanta, have touched another aspect of dream. The dreams may be, to some extent, of course, the results of complexes created by frustrated desires. But, this is not wholly true. Dreams may be due to other reasons also; one such reason being the working of past Karma. The effects of past Karmas, meritorious or unmeritorious, may project themselves into dream when chances are not given to them for expression in waking life. Also, a thought of some other person may affect you. A friend of yours may be deeply thinking of you; and you may have a dream of him, or you may have a dream with experiences corresponding to his thoughts. Your mother may be far away, crying for you, and her thought can affect you; you may have a dream. All this is equal to saying that a telepathic effect can produce dreams. In the case of spiritual seekers, Guru’s grace can cause a dream; and catastrophic experiences that one may have to pass through in the waking world may pass lightly as a dream experience by his grace. Due to the power of the Guru, one may have a dream suffering, instead of a waking one…….. The reason is that you oppose their function in waking life, due to the assertions of the ego. You counteract Isvara’s working and Guru’s blessing by the action of your own egoism. But, in dreaming, the ego subsides, to some extent. You become more normal, one may say, and you approximate yourself more to reality, rather than to artificiality, in dream. Thus, it is easier for these powers to operate in dream than in waking. .”
— The Mandukya Upanishad on dreams, elucidated by Swami Krishnananda
Solzhenitsyn On Why We Don’t See the Truth
“It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes… we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially selfish ones.”
-Solzhenitsyn
(Thanks to reader, Sean)
Samuel Johnson on Hypocrisy
Samuel Johnson writing about the misuse of the charge of “hypocrisy”:
“Nothing is more unjust, however common, than to charge with hypocrisy him that expresses zeal for those virtues which he neglects to practice; since he may be sincerely convinced of the advantages of conquering his passions, without having yet obtained the victory, as a man may be confident of the advantages of a voyage, or a journey, without having courage or industry to undertake it, and may honestly recommend to others, those attempts which he neglects himself.”
Libertarian Living: A Country Boy Can Survive
A Country Boy Can Survive
- Hank Williams Jr.The preacher man says it’s the end of time
And the Mississippi River she’s a goin’ dry
The interest is up and the Stock Market’s down
And you only get mugged
If you go down townI live back in the woods, you see
A woman and the kids, and the dogs and me
I got a shotgun rifle and a 4-wheel drive
And a country boy can survive
Country folks can surviveI can plow a field all day long
I can catch catfish from dusk till dawn
We make our own whiskey and our own smoke too
Ain’t too many things these ole boys can’t do
We grow good ole tomatoes and homemade wineAnd a country boy can survive
Country girl know how to fry..etc.
War Pigs
War Pigs - Nothing’s Changed
Hat-tip to Brad SpanglerIt’s still the bankers making money from debt and war…
While the sheeple swing their woolly heads back and forth, hypnotized -
left-right
black-white
public-private
socialist-capitalist
gay-straight, feminist-patriarchal, Muslim-Christian, East-West, poor-rich, working-class-middle-class, urban-rural, blue-state-red-state…
back-forth…democrat-republican…
Theodore Roethke On Learning Where to Go
One of my favorite poems, and certainly my favorite American poet.
The Waking
- Theodore RoethkeI wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go….etc.
Independence Day: Alfredo Zitarossa Sings Adagio en Mi Pais
Adagio en Mi Pais (Adagio in My Country), written and sung by Alfredo Zitarossa.
Zitarossa was a beloved and important Uruguayan composer, poet, singer, and journalist, who was ostracized for his involvement with the Frente Amplio of the left, during the 1970s, at the time when the military junta (with its torturous secret police) came to power in Uruguay. Zitarossa’s songs were banned in the Southern Cone countries and he himself was forced to live in exile in Argentina, Spain, and Mexico. He died young in 1989 at the age of 52. The most characteristic voice of resistance in Uruguay’s second “independence,” he makes a good subject for a post on Independence Day (Dia de la Independencia) , which happens to be today.Behind every door
my people are alert,
and no one can silence their song,
and tomorrow they will sing again.
In my country we are tough,
the future will show that.[Here is a complete translation by Yoshi Furuhashi, Monthly Review Press]
A bit of history: Uruguay won its independence from a triangular war between Spain, Argentina, and Brazil between 1825 and 1828. As the second smallest country in South America (after Surinam) it’s still somewhat overshadowed by its giant neighbors, Argentina and Brazil, with whom it shares it western and northern borders respectively.
Uruguay has many things to recommend it to a libertarian temperament. It’s a small country. The culture is unpretentious and laid back. It’s the home of the gaucho, the ferociously independent vagabond cowboy of South America. And the national motto, Libertad o Muerte (Liberty or Death) echoes Patrick Henry’s famous words (”Give me liberty or give me death”) before the Virginia Convention in 1775.
It’s traditional to go out on the night before Dia de la Independencia and I made it to a neighbor’s asado (barbecue). According to the Uruguayans, the asado, mate (the ubiquitous herbal tea that is sipped through a straw), and tango all come from Uruguay, not Argentina. Of course, in Argentina, you hear another story.
The asador did a fine job with the wood fire that cooks the meat. I took a shot at it too. The idea is to spread out the embers as they fall through the grate of the parrilla (grill)* from the log fire. Too many in one place and the meat gets burned. Too few and it doesn’t cook. Most of our guests wanted their meat - the world-famous Uruguayan organic beef - well done, so the asador and I were quite busy. The beef cut is called tira de asado (a cut from the ribs) and is mixed with other kinds of meat, like chorizo (sausage). We served the asado with chimichurri - a relish from oil, oregano, garlic, and chopped belly peppers - and with baguettes and clerico (made by mixing fruit drinks and wine).
*The term parrilla is also used, by analogy, to refer to torture and to the torture-rack, which were wide-spread in the 1970s and 1980s in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Brazil…..
For the role of the US in fostering the routine use of torture in Uruguay, read this piece by Bill Blum.
A Plague of Locusts: A True Tale from Argentina…..
Reading the history of these regions, I came across this early example of the futility of trying to fend off nature…
No other part of the world has in recent years suffered from such a
plague of locusts as the agricultural districts of Argentina. They come from the north in clouds that sometimes darken the sun. Some of the swarms have been estimated to be sixty miles long and from twelve to fifteen miles wide. Fields which in the morning stand high with
waving corn, are by evening only comparable to ploughed or burnt lands. Even the roots are eaten up.In 1907 the Argentine Government organized a bureau for the destruction of locusts, and in 1908 $4,500,000 was placed by Congress at the disposal of this commission. An organized service, embracing thousands of men, is in readiness at any moment to send a force to
any place where danger is reported. Railway trains have been repeatedly stopped, and literally many tons of them have had to be taken off the track. A fine of $100 is imposed upon any settler
failing to report the presence of locust swarms or hopper eggs on his land. Various means are adopted by the land-owner to save what he can from the voracious insects. Men, women and children mount their horses and drive flocks of sheep to and fro over the ground to kill them. A squatter with whom I stayed got his laborers to gallop a troop of mares furiously around his garden to keep them from settling there. All, however, seemed useless. About midsummer the locust lays its eggs under an inch or two of soil. Each female will drop from thirty to fifty eggs, all at the same time, in a mass resembling a head of wheat. As many as 50,000 eggs have been counted in a space
less than three and a half feet square.During my sojourn in Entre Rios, the province where this insect seems to come in greatest numbers, a law was passed that every man over the age of fourteen years, whether native or foreigner, rich or poor, was compelled to dig out and carry to Government depots, four pounds
weight of locusts’ eggs. It was supposed that this energetic measure would lessen their numbers. Many tons were collected and burnt, but, I assure the reader, no appreciable difference whatever was made in their legions. The young jumpers came, eating all before them, and
their numbers seemed infinite. Men dug trenches, kindled fires, and burned millions of them. Ditches two yards wide and deep and two hundred feet long were completely filled up by these living waves.
But all efforts were unavailing–the earth remained covered.— “Through Five Republics on Horse-back: Being an Account of Many Wanderings in South America,” G. Whitfield Ray, 1915
My Comment
An apt metaphor for most government intervention..
Efforts to tackle our own plague of locusts are just as futile..Sometimes nature must take its course…and right now, nature demands that a season of fat be followed by a season of lean..
Robespierre Contra Danton: Power Versus the People
This is an insightful segment from the powerful French film Danton (1983), by Polish director, Andrzej Wajda
The film is based on the short story, Danton’s Tod by the Romantic German playwright, Georg Buchner, and contrasts two of the leading figures of the French Revolution - Georges Danton and Maximilien Robespierre. The two revolutionaries fall out when Danton, the man of the people, dissents from Robespierre’s post-revolutionary Reign of Terror.
Wajda made the film in France but used Polish actors for Robespierre and his flunkies to convey his contempt for the Communist government in Poland, which was at the time trying to break the popular movement, Solidarity, by imposing martial law on the land. The French actor, Georges Depardieu, is tremendous, especially in the scene before the Revolutionary tribunal that condemns him to die. But this scene too is powerful, if a little black and white, in its contrast of the sickly theorist and vain “idealist,” Robespierre, who claims to speak for “the people,” and the vital, if corrupt, man who is actually one of them.
The scene makes a fitting commentary on a certain malignant strand of liberalism in America today.
The Federal Reserve Game
Play the Federal Reserve Game. [Thanks to Eddy Elfenbein’s Crossing Wall Street blog).
Elis Regina Sings “O Bebado e a Equilibrista”
Brazilian pop singer Elis Regina (1945 - 1982) is one of my new finds. One half of an album Elis and Tom (with Antonio Carlos Jobim) that’s considered one of the best in bossa nova, Regina was a passionate, supremely gifted, and original performer. Not as overtly political as other singers, her own unconventional life and stage presence lent weight to her political engagement. She was once vilified for a public performance in support of Brazil’s military junta (1964-1985) that later turned out to have been coerced. After that, the cartoonist Helfil, one of her detractors, became her friend, and she joined him to support a popular movement demanding the amnesty of political prisoners and exiled artists and intellectuals.
This was the subject of her classic 1979 performance of “O Bêbado e a Equilibrista” (Blanc/Bosco), which refers to “the return of Henfil’s brother.” This was the cartoonist’s older brother, Betinho, a leading sociologist, who had been exiled. Regina’s campaign was an important contribution to some 5000 Brazilian political prisoners returning from exile.
O Bebado e a Equilibrista
The Drunk and the Tightrope Walker (1979)Lyrics: Carla Cristina
Music: Aldir Blanc/João Bosco
Translation: Steven EnglerEvening fell like a bridge
A drunk in a funeral suit reminded me of Chaplin’s tramp
The moon, like some brothel madam
Begged a rented shine from each cold star
And clouds, up there in the blotting paper sky
Sucked at tortured stains
What insane pressure
The drunk with the bowler hat made a thousand bows
For Brazil, my Brazil’s night
Is dreaming of the return of Henfil’s brother
Of so many people who left, in a dangerous situation
Our country is crying, gentle mother
Marias and Clarices are crying on Brazilian soil
But I know that pain this sharp can’t be pointless
Hope dances on the tightrope with an umbrella
With each step on that rope you can hurt yourself
Bad luck, the balancing hope
Knows that each artist’s show must go onMencken on Fake Do-Gooders
“In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.”
– H.L. MenckenRenouncing America in India (Comment added)
Jeff Knaebel tore up his US passport out of hatred for the state and became a stateless person wandering through the villages in India. In case you’re thinking he must be some kind of hippy, Knaebel is a former CEO of a company and an engineer trained at Cornell University.
“The one actual, real and direct action that I could take was to break the paper chains that were holding me as a slave to the Empire. I tore up my U.S. passport at the Gandhi Samadhi, Rajghat, New Delhi. Rather than arrest me, the Indian police told me that I was free to roam anywhere in India, and to call them for help if I ran into any trouble.
The great Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote, “Man is moral choice.” This is what I have been calling the Law of Moral Causation. By unilateral renunciation of my citizenship, I chose to assert my responsibility by denying that the U.S. government could act in my name and on my behalf.
Here is the quotation of a freedom fighter in Mexico which seems equally relevant to the India of today:
“Why is it necessary to kill and to die so that you should listen to Ramona, seated here beside me, tell you that Indian women want to live, want to study, want hospitals, want medicines, want schools, want food, want respect, want justice, want dignity? ~ Insurgente Marcos to President of Mexico Salinas after the cease fire in Chiapas, San Cristobal de las Casas, February 1994 (Our Word Is Our Weapon, Seven Stories Press).
I plan to continue to present to the State and to humanity the question of whether we are ready to permit a peace-loving man to exist and to move about freely, without tracking tags and permission-to-exist documents. Or have we been so thoroughly conditioned that everyone except third world villagers and tribal people is destined to live in the big surveillance sheep pens constructed by states all over the world.
Hat-tip to Lew Rockwell for running the article on his site.
My Comment
Bravo for the gesture. But as an Indian by birth I must say I wouldn’t advise any expat Indian to try this. The Indian police will treat you very differently from a vellakara (this is Tamil for ‘white man’ ). A friend of mine, a graduate of one of the Indian Institutes of Technology, spent the year after his graduation roaming India, minus “English language privilege” - i.e. he pretended he didn’t speak it. He said he saw a side of India he hadn’t experienced until then.
Besides, the cynic in me wants to know - did Knaebel dispose of his assets before this gesture….or after? And if so, how? I’m sorry if my questions seem derisive. They’re meant respectfully.
I feel the same way about some…some... elements in the “patriot” movement.
Did civil liberties and the police state work them up so much when George Bush was in power? Is it civil liberties or the thought of an African-American president that incenses some people?
I’d say in a few cases it’s the latter….
Leonard Cohen On How Light Gets In
“There is a crack, a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in.”
– Canadian poet and song-writer, Leonard Cohen (via Truth to Power blog)
Adriana Varela Sings Mario Benedetti’s “No Te Salves”
Uruguayan writer, Mario Benedetti, was the poet of the urban guerrilla movement of the 1960s-1980s called the Tupamaros. He died on May 17, 2009 at the age of 88. Here, the distinctive Argentine tango singer, Adriana Varela, sings a poem of his, “No Te Salves”:
No Te Salves/Don’t Save Yourself
by Mario Benedetti
No te quedes inmóvil Don’t stay motionless
al borde del camino by the way side,
no congeles el júbilo don’t freeze your joyno quieras con desgana or love half-heartedly.
no te salves ahora Don’t save yourself now
ni nunca or ever.
no te salves Don’t save yourself,
no te llenes de calma don’t be so calm,
no reserves del mundo and in this world don’t keep
sólo un rincón tranquilo a tranquil corner,
no dejes caer los párpados or let your eyelids
pesados como juicios drop heavy with judgments.
no te quedes sin labios Don’t be left without lips,
no te duermas sin sueño don’t sleep without dreams,
no te pienses sin sangre or imagine yourself bloodless,
no te juzgues sin tiempo or judge yourself with haste.pero si But if,
pese a todo after all,
no puedes evitarlo you can’t help it,
y congelas el júbilo and you freeze your joy,
y quieres con desgana and you love half-heartedly,y te salvas ahora and you save yourself now;
y te llenas de calma if you stay serene,y reservas del mundo and in the world keep
sólo un rincón tranquilo only a tranquil corner,
y dejas caer los párpados let your eyelids
pesados como juicios drop heavy as judgments,
y te secas sin labios remain without lips,
y te duermes sin sueño and sleep without dreams;
y te piensas sin sangre if you imagine yourself bloodless,
y te juzgas sin tiempo judge yourself in haste,
y te quedas inmóvil and stay motionless
al borde del camino on the side of the road,
y te salvas - and you save yourself -
entonces Then -
no te quedes conmigo. don’t stay with me.(Mario Benedetti)
[I've made minor changes to the translation to make it easier to understand the sense...I apologize if that detracts from the poem for those who know it in its original form].
Individuals and Institutions
“Nothing can be achieved without individuals, nothing can last without institutions”
– Robert Schuman (1886-1963)
Libertarian Living: Mirambika - Schooling with Emotional Development
“Fantasy and imagination should be allowed to flower in the child. Talk that may seem without logic may not necessarily be irrational- it could be suprarational,” informs [sic] Dr Ramesh. He further mentions that one of the serious flaws with today’s educational system is that, “emotions are most often ignored in our rigidly regulated and tightly controlled system. But it is essential to transform them to retain the best of the emotions- vitality, love and enthusiasm. This manifestation of our divine essence cannot be nurtured through rote learning. We have to create such situations where this part is also brought forward. Thus, training of the psychic voice is an important task of the teacher”. However, mainstream education completely overlooks this aspect and hence, manufactures emotionally underdeveloped children, who are made to fit into the industrialized society. These children do not question authority, they only follow suit. The result is masses of people who do not think for themselves but blindly obey. It was in reaction to this mass-production approach that the alternative education movement began.
This movement gave an impetus to those people who believed that the child had to be driven by his/her own need to learn and know. “We believe that nothing can be taught. Education is inherent in the child, we only help in stimulating it to bring out the best in him/her”, asserts Sulochana Di, one of the teachers who have spent more than 20 years at Mirambika.”
Chesterton on the Supernatural and the Unnatural
“Take away the supernatural and what you are left with is the unnatural.”
- G. K. Chesterton
Atlas Flubbed
Just to rile up market fundamentalists, here’s a sharp jab from a lefty blog at “going Galt” - the fantasy nurtured by some naive libertarians that were capitalists (theorized as financiers) to take a day off, society would collapse.
(The reference to Galt is a reference to Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” a book about which I have mixed feelings. Rand is a far more complex and interesting figure than either her defenders or her critics seem to realize..)
The quote below confuses genuine capitalists and the predator financiers currently in power, but it packs some punch:
“Have you heard of the documentary, “A Day Without A Mexican?” You know why it’s not called Atlas Shrugged? Because the people who made it aren’t utterly detached from reality. Because doing actual work gives one perspective. Because spending the day going from rooftop to rooftop in a helicopter to chew the fat with other geniuses could lead you to believe you’re the glue that holds the entire planet together. People who don’t have private islands have a more realistic idea of what they do to contribute to society.
You know why the uber-wealthy don’t go on strike? Because they know there are millions of smart, hardworking people ready to take their places…..”
My Comment
What I’d like to know is why more people don’t vote with their pocket books against this predator class. For instance, I try to avoid using Microsoft Word because of my antipathy to Gates’ monopolistic practices.The issue is not capitalism, ultimately. It’s monopoly and the absence of competition. In other words, it’s the absence of real free markets that’s the reason why “capitalism” is now synonymous with predation — and why rants like this are increasingly persuasive.
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