LILA RAJIVA: The Mind-Body Politic
Individuals Not Ideologies
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Archive of "Cognition" Category
Which “Bastards”? More Discrepancies In Wikileaks “Revelations”
Maximilien Forte at Zero Anthropology:
“Which Bastards?
When asked by Larry King on Monday, 26 July, who he meant to call “bastards” when he told Der Spiegel “I enjoy crushing bastards,” Assange specified he meant U.S. forces. Assange must also believe that those studying these documents will not focus as much on the atrocities committed by the Taleban, such as the devastating carnage caused by their IEDs and suicide bombers, and their apparent disregard for the scores of civilians that are killed as a result of going after one target with a massive bomb–The Guardian, with what is arguably the best coverage of the three newspapers to have obtained the documents a month in advance of their public release, has already covered this aspect quite quickly. In these same reports, the Taleban appear to be using hammers to kill mosquitoes. Left at that level of discussion, we have data, but not much understanding–for example, of why the Taleban have nonetheless gained strength and support, or why we may view their deadly attacks as something for which the U.S. and NATO share partial responsibility, for having overthrown and persecuted the Taleban after invading and occupying their country, thereby provoking a hostile and asymmetric reaction. It would be a silly or wicked person who would argue that Afghans have no right to fight back.
While I generally agree with Assange’s sentiments, to the extent that they are knowable, I do not share his optimism about the impact of these documents. Information is not power, and it is not meaning. To make sense of these documents requires interpretation and argumentation that goes beyond and outside the limits of what are, after all, reports reflective of an American optic, produced by combatants. Source criticism and cross checking will be paramount, and to the extent that is not done, Wikileaks may witness members of the public using the same documents to not only bolster the arguments to support continuation of this war, but even an escalation to direct hostilities with Iran (see The Guardian, and see the justified alarm expressed by Marc Lynch at Foreign Policy). There is also debate between The Guardian and The New York Times over the extent to which the reports can be trusted when it comes to Pakistan’s supposed role in aiding the Taleban and conducting covert operations against the government of Afghanistan and western forces–that dispute happened within the first day of reporting on the documents, and disagreement over their credibility did not stop the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan from verbally thrashing each other in public, again within 24 hours of the documents’ release. These reports overall contain enough to hurt those who are critics of U.S. foreign policy, as much as they will hurt those who support it. They contain as much potential for escalating and expanding conflict, as they contain for mobilizing popular support to stop it. I also understand that my commentary here may well be premature, but then so are all the current commentaries.
What Should Matter to Social Scientists?To bring this discussion closer to the concerns of anthropologists and social scientists generally, there are a few points that I feel need to be made. One concerns the extent to which these records are only a partial selection of all records produced by the U.S. military. That is a significant problem, because we cannot know if the items excluded would in some way modify any conclusions we reach about the records we have. Wikileaks received a total of about 110,000 records, and released about 92,000. It is hard to believe that a period covering six years of war could have produced only this amount. To my knowledge, Julian Assange has not been asked any questions about this issue. We therefore also do not know why these records were included and others excluded. This issue will come up again when I speak about what the records reveal about the workings of the Human Terrain System.
A second problem, and it is a major one, concerns Assange’s assertions that the items were redacted to minimize the risk of harm to the sources indicated in the records. From what we have seen already, just with reference to Human Terrain Teams alone and their sources, that is completely untrue. There is no evidence whatsoever of any kind of redaction. Moreover, when one deletes information for a record, one is supposed to mark the text in some way to say either “name deleted” or “sentence deleted,” etc., and I see no evidence of that. In addition, who comprises Wikileaks’ team of redactors, and on the basis of what knowledge and expertise, as either war fighters, or people with experience and knowledge of Afghanistan, could they make calls about what was “harmless” versus “harmful” information? Which specialists did they consult, and for how long did they have the records to study? Not a word about this, merely bland and general assurances.
Indeed, Assange’s statements about Wikileaks’ “harm minimization process” seem to only focus on the safety of his “bastards,” noting that the documents “do not generally cover top-secret operations” and that they “delayed the release of some 15,000 reports” as “demanded by our source” (source). This is an exchange Assange had with Der Spiegel on this issue:
SPIEGEL: The material contains military secrets and names of sources. By publishing it, aren’t you endangering the lives of international troops and their informants in Afghanistan?
Assange: The Kabul files contain no information related to current troop movements. The source went through their own harm-minimization process and instructed us to conduct our usual review to make sure there was not a significant chance of innocents being negatively affected. We understand the importance of protecting confidential sources, and we understand why it is important to protect certain US and ISAF sources [emphasis added].
SPIEGEL: So what, specifically, did you do to minimize any possible harm?
Assange: We identified cases where there may be a reasonable chance of harm occurring to the innocent. Those records were identified and edited accordingly.
A third problem has to do with source criticism, source confirmation, and Assange’s call for crowdsourcing. Anthropologists should relate to this issue personally. Imagine that someone gets hold of your fieldnotes, and releases a part of them. No analysis, no contextualization, no doubts about the veracity of what an informant told you is in those notes. They are released, and then members of a broad public take hold of their interpretation, and take what is reported as the truth of a situation. Wouldn’t this make you freak out? Are any of our books and journal articles a mere transcription of our fieldnotes? So who is this “crowd” that will make solid arguments from these notes? How will they check their veracity? Do they know who wrote these reports, under what conditions, under what limitations, and with what motivations? Will they travel to Afghanistan and cover the ground covered by these military units? What other documents will they use to confirm these reports, or will they trust them blindly? These are already some of the issues being raised about the alleged Iran-Al Qaeda connection, and Pakistan’s role in supporting the Taleban.”
Ramana Maharshi
“Wanting to reform the world without discovering one’s true self is like trying to cover the world with leather to avoid the pain of walking on stones and thorns. It is much simpler to wear shoes.”
— Ramana Maharshi
Arch Crawford on The Mars-Uranus Cycle
Veteran star-gazer and market timer, Arch Crawford, on the Mars-Uranus cycle and its indications for the period August 1. 2010 to March 2011.
UK Mind-Reading Surveillance System Monitors Anti-Social Behavior
Along the lines of Google Suggest, which replaces your own thoughts with intrusive suggestions, the cheery little police state in Britain is exploring some anticipatory thought control of its own:
“The technology, called Sigard, monitors movements and speech to detect signs of threatening behaviour.
Its designers claim the system can anticipate anti-social behaviour and violence by analysing the information picked up its sensors.
It’s The Media, Stupid..
Lloyd Marcus at Renew America, June 28, 2010:
“Again, I say charges that the movement is racist are absurd. Here are a few of my personal tea party experiences. Keep in mind, I have performed at well over two hundred tea parties across America.
Echelon: The Global Spy System
An article by Nicky Hager at Cryptome.org from Covert Action Quarterly (1998) about Echelon. Hager’s book on the subject, “Secret Power: New Zealand’s Role In the International Spy Network,” is dated 1996, so I’m a little confused by the dating of the article. Echelon is/was a global espionage and interception system coordinated by the US/UK with the aid of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. In NZ, writes Hager, it was implemented without the assent of the public and most public officials.
Here’s a timeline for the development of the system. Per Cryptome, the earliest public report on Echelon is in 1972.
The first reporter to write on it is British intelligence reporter, Duncan Campbell: “They’ve Got It Taped,” New Statesman, August 12, 1988 (republished at Cryptome.org). Campbell testified before Congress on the subject in 1999 and prepared a report for the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) that was refused by EPIC’s director Marc Rotenberg, on the grounds that much of the information hadn’t been substantiated (see this correspondence between Rotenberg and Young). After that, there was debate between Campbell and Bamford over what the main focus of the espionage was. I will expand on that and link it later…
“IN THE LATE 1980′S, IN A DECISION IT PROBABLY REGRETS, THE U.S. PROMPTED NEW ZEALAND TO JOIN A NEW AND HIGHLY SECRET GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE SYSTEM. HAGER’S INVESTIGATION INTO IT AND HIS DISCOVERY OF THE ECHELON DICTIONARY HAS REVEALED ONE OF THE WORLD’S BIGGEST, MOST CLOSELY HELD INTELLIGENCE PROJECTS. THE SYSTEM ALLOWS SPY AGENCIES TO MONITOR MOST OF THE WORLD’S TELEPHONE, E-MAIL, AND TELEX COMMUNICATIONS.
Anatoliy Golitsyn: The Communist Strategy Of Deception And Disinformation
Anatoliy Golitsyn - New Lies for Old: The Communist Strategy of Deception and Disinformation
Google: The CIA’s Spy-Buddy
From Eric Sommer at Pravda.ru via Market Oracle, January 14, 2010:
“The western media is currently full of articles on Google’s ‘threat to quit China’ over internet censorship issues, and the company’s ’suspicion’ that the Chinese government was behind attempts to ‘break-in’ to several Google email accounts used by ‘Chinese dissidents’.
However, the media has almost completely failed to report that Google’s surface concern over ‘human rights’ in China is belied by its their deep involvement with some of the worst human rights abuses on the planet:
Is Google Trying To Think For You?
In the upcoming edition of The Atlantic Nicholas Carr suggests that even Google’s biggest fans are finding the far too solicitous company’s latest technology, Google Suggest, more creepy than cuddly: (more…)
Doug Casey Flips Bird At Revelations, Mayan Calendar, Nostradamus…
“I hate to make such a gloomy forecast, if only because people that draw wacky conclusions from sources like Nostradamus, the Bible, and the Mayan calendar are so prone to do so, ” says Doug Casey in a recent interview at The Daily Bell.
Caveat one. It’s not the sources that are the problem. It’s the people reading the sources.
Rational and sophisticated thinkers will draw rational and sophisticated conclusions from even the most speculative or imaginative texts. Idiots will only draw idiotic conclusions. But then idiots would draw idiotic conclusions even from Euclid’s Geometry….
Caveat two. One man’s ‘whacky’ is another man’s ‘wise’…….
Francis Bacon On Errors In Reasoning
“The human understanding is no dry light, but receives an infusion from the will and affections; whence proceed sciences which may be called “sciences as one would’. For what a man had rather were true he more readily believes. Therefore he rejects difficult things for impatience of research; sober things, because they narrow hope; the deeper things of nature from superstition; the light of experience from arrogance and pride, lest his mind should seem occupied with things mean and transitory; things not commonly believed, out of deference to the opinions of the vulgar. Numberless, in short, are the ways, and sometime imperceptible, in which the affections color and infect the understanding.”
Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, in Works, ed. J. Spedding et al. (London, 1857-61), iv. 57, cited in “Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth Century Philosophy,” Susan James, Clarendon, 1997, p. 162.
Rudolf Steiner On Why Plutocrats Love Democracy
“It is interesting that the excellent statement was made in 1910 [by Francis Delaisi, La Démocratie et les Financiers, 1910]: ‘… that big capital has succeeded in creating out of democracy the most wonderful, the most effective, the most flexible instrument for the exploitation of the population as a whole.
Earth To Government: No More False Flags
“Those who have studied history know that nothing invigorates and empowers an authoritarian regime more than a spectacular act of violence, some sudden and senseless loss of life that allows the autocrat to stand on the smoking rubble and identify himself as the hero. It is at moments like this that the public—still in shock from the horror of the tragedy that has just unfolded before them—can be led into the most ruthless despotism: despotism that now bears the mantle of “security.”
Alexander Solzhenitsyn: The Line Between Good And Evil
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Russian dissident writer, in Part II of The Gulag Archipelago:
“It has granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of my youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first strivings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and then all human hearts… And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains… an unuprooted small corner of evil.”
Tomas Schuman: Love Letter To America
Note:
Please note. Bezmenov was talking about Soviet society and propaganda in the 1960s and 1970s. That means his analysis of the general dynamics of propaganda has to be cautiously reconfigured, when it comes to specifics. The US and USSR he described then (prior to the 1980s) had clearly differentiated economic/political systems. In the 30 years that have passed since, the ideological convergence he mentions elsewhere, has in many ways occurred, or is in the process of occurring. [I describe this in much greater depth in "The Language of Empire."]
The USA hasn’t been free-market capitalist in any real way for some 20-30 years, at the very least. Instead, we’ve had ever-accelerating state intervention and crony capitalism that has turned into the final danse macabre of casino capitalism and pure plunder.
Thus the terms that Bezmenov uses in discussing the totalitarian communism of the Soviet system now actually apply to the US, albeit incompletely.
Bezmenov didn’t know, or perhaps chose not to express, since this was the country he defected to, that US propaganda and psyops were far more subtle, and thus in the long run more effective, than Soviet propaganda.
He also doesn’t acknowledge that at many levels “capitalist” and “communist” leaderships were/are symbiotic and that they have ultimately led to the globalized kleptocracy, in which the two ideological forms, while retaining different emphases, copulate and spawn the “third way” of corporatized politically-correct social democracy, which is the benign face of the corrupt neo-liberalism that has always been the power behind the throne of the multilateral institutions, such as the World Bank, IMF, EU, UN, and others…
There is no longer a west versus east polarity. The division is really between centralizers (neoliberal globalizers, central bankers) and decentralizers, in which, however, some of the decentralization is orchestrated to promote the globalizers’ agenda. One has to know the specifics of every situation. They can’t be understood ideologically.
Tomas Schuman Yuri Bezmenov-Love Letter to America
Ex-KGB Describes Psyops In The US
Update:
Bezmenov divides the stages of ideological subversion into four:
1. Demoralization (15 -20 yrs) 2. Destabilization 3. Crisis 4. Normalization
My speculation:
1. The 1960s - 1980s is the period of demoralization
2. 1990s - 2001 The fall of the Berlin Wall marks the acceleration of this into active destabilization of the US’s economy and foreign policy (the neo-conservative paper, “A Clean Break,” as well as proposals for “full-spectrum” dominance; Yugoslav and Iraq wars; the total financialization and electronification of the US capital markets, leading to the stock market bubble). This period is initiated by the fall of the Berlin Wall, on November 9, 1989 (11-9-1989) and George Bush’s statement about a “new world order” on September 11, 9-11-1990.
3. 2001 - 2008 Period that entails vast changes in the political and economic systems, following two crises - one, political, on 9-11 and another exactly 7 years later, economic, around 9-11 too.
We are now still in the period of crisis, which, in my opinion, will throw up further catalyzing “events’ of all kinds, whether occurring spontaneously in the realm of politics/economics/nature, or whether manufactured.
Note:
Bezmenov was talking about Soviet society and propaganda in the 1960s and 1970s. That means his analysis of the general dynamics of propaganda has to be cautiously reconfigured, when it comes to specifics. The US and USSR he was describing (prior to the 1980s) had clearly differentiated economic/political systems. In the 30 years that have passed since then, the ideological convergence he mentions elsewhere, has in many ways occurred or is in the process of occurring. [I describe this in much greater depth in "The Language of Empire."]
The USA hasn’t been free-market capitalist in any real way for some 20-30 years certainly, even longer. Instead, its experienced ever-accelerating state intervention/mercantilism and crony capitalism. Now that has turned into the final danse macabre of casino capitalism and pure plunder.
Thus the Bezmenovian analyis might plausibly be applied both to the actual situation in the US, as well as to the propaganda the US directs toward its enemies.
Bezmenov didn’t know, or perhaps chose not to voice (since this was the country he defected to), the fact that US propaganda and psyops have been subtler, and thus in the long run much more effective, than Soviet propaganda.
He also doesn’t acknowledge that at many levels “capitalist” and “communist” leaderships have become symbiotic and created a globalized kleptocracy in which the two ideological forms, while retaining different emphases, copulate and spawn a “third way.” This is the corporatized politically correct social democracy that increasingly seems to be the benign face of corrupt neo-liberalism, which is the power behind the throne of the multilateral institutions - the World Bank, IMF, EU, UN, and others.
ORIGINAL POST
March 07, 2009 — Yuri Bezmenov 1983 Soviet subversion of Western Society
Yuri Bezmenov, a.k.a. Tomas Schuman, soviet KGB defector, explains in detail his scheme for the KGB process of subversion and takeover of target societies at a lecture in Los Angeles, 1983.
Yuri Alexandrovitch Bezmenov is a former KGB propagandist who was assigned to New Dehli, India, defected to the West in 1970, and was interviewed by Edward Griffin in 1985. Bezmenov explains his background, some of his training, and exactly how Soviet propaganda is spread in other countries in order to subvert their teachers, politicians, and other policy makers to a mindset receptive to the Soviet ideology.He also explains in detail the goal of Soviet propaganda as total subversion of another country and the 4 step formula for achieving this goal. He recalls the details of how he escaped India, defected to the West, and settled in Montreal as an announcer for the CBC.
Note: As I said before about the wikileaks video, the notion that you need to ferret out secret documents, hack computers, or conduct spy v spy ops to understand what’s going on is simply romantic myth. 85% of KGB intelligence ops in the US, according to Schuman, is about ideological subversion or aggressive propaganda, which is intended to demoralize the population so that even when presented with all possible information it’s unable to draw common sense conclusions, protect its own self-interest, or act rationally. Even when confronted with evidence of war atrocities, such as those on the video, people will simply reframe the facts to fit their ideological predisposition.
Murray Rothbard On The Cult Of St. Ayn
Rothbard’s penetrating analysis of the cult of St. Ayn:
“The adoption of the central axiom of Rand’s greatness was made possible by Rand’s undoubted personal charisma, a charisma buttressed by her air of unshakeable arrogance and self-assurance. It was a charisma and an arrogance that was partially emulated by her leading disciples. Since the rank-and-file disciple knew in his heart that he was not all-wise or totally self-assured, it became all too easy to subordinate his own will and intellect to that of Rand. Rand became the living embodiment of Reason and Reality and by some quality of personality Rand was able to bring about the mind-set in her disciples that their highest value was to earn her approval while the gravest sin was to incur her displeasure. The ardent belief in Rand’s supreme originality was of course reinforced by the disciples’ not having read (or been able to read) anyone whom they might have discovered had said the same things long before.
Ejection From Paradise
The Rand cult grew and flourished until the irrevocable split between the Greatest and the Second Greatest, until Satan was ejected from Paradise in the fall of 1968. The Rand-Branden split destroyed NBI, and with it the organized Randian movement. Rand has not displayed the ability or the desire to pick up the pieces and reconstitute an equivalent organization. The Objectivist fell back to The Ayn Rand Letter, and now that too has gone.
With the death of NBI, the Randian cultists were cast adrift, for the first time in a decade, to think for themselves. Generally, their personalities rebounded to their non-robotic, pre-Randian selves. But there were some unfortunate legacies of the cult. In the first place, there is the problem of what the Thomists call invincible ignorance. For many ex-cultists remain imbued with the Randian belief that every individual is armed with the means of spinning out all truths a priori from his own head – hence there is felt to be no need to learn the concrete facts about the real world, either about contemporary history or the laws of the social sciences. Armed with axiomatic first principles, many ex-Randians see no need of learning very much else. Furthermore, lingering Randian hubris imbues many ex-members with the idea that each one is able and qualified to spin out an entire philosophy of life and of the world a priori. Such aberrations as the “Students of Objectivism for Rational Bestiality” are not far from the bizarreries of many neo-Randian philosophies, preaching to a handful of zealous partisans. On the other hand, there is another understandable but unfortunate reaction. After many years of subjection to Randian dictates in the name of “reason,” there is a tendency among some ex-cultists to bend the stick the other way, to reject reason or thinking altogether in the name of hedonistic sensation and caprice.
We conclude our analysis of the Rand cult with the observation that here was an extreme example of contradiction between the exoteric and the esoteric creed. That in the name of individuality, reason, and liberty, the Rand cult in effect preached something totally different. The Rand cult was concerned not with every man’s individuality, but only with Rand’s individuality, not with everyone’s right reason but only with Rand’s reason. The only individuality that flowered to the extent of blotting out all others, was Ayn Rand’s herself; everyone else was to become a cipher subject to Rand’s mind and will.
Nikolai Bukharin’s famous denunciation of the Stalin cult, masked during the Russia of the 1930’s as a critique of the Jesuit order, does not seem very overdrawn as a portrayal of the Randian reality:
It has been correctly said that there isn’t a meanness in the world which would not find for itself and ideological justification. The king of the Jesuits, Loyola, developed a theory of subordination, of “cadaver discipline,” every member of the order was supposed to obey his superior “like a corpse which could be turned in all directions, like a stick which follows every movement, like a ball of wax which could be changed and extended in all directions”… This corpse is characterized by three degrees of perfection: subordination by action, subordination of the will, subordination of the intellect. When the last degree is reached, when the man substitutes naked subordination for intellect, renouncing all his convictions, then you have a hundred percent Jesuit.3
It has been remarked that a curious contradiction existed with the strategic perspective of the Randian movement. For, on the one hand, disciples were not allowed to read or talk to other persons who might be quite close to them as libertarians or Objectivists. Within the broad rationalist or libertarian movement, the Randians took a 100% pure, ultra-sectarian stance. And yet, in the larger political world, the Randian strategy shifted drastically, and Rand and her disciples were willing to endorse and work with politicians who might only be one millimeter more conservative than their opponents. In the larger world, concern with purity or principles seemed to be totally abandoned. Hence, Rand’s whole-hearted endorsement of Goldwater, Nixon, and Ford, and even of Senators Henry Jackson and Daniel P. Moynihan.
Neither Liberty Nor Reason
There seems to be only one way to resolve the contradiction in the Randian strategic outlook of extreme sectarianism within the libertarian movement, coupled with extreme opportunism, and willingness to coalesce with slightly more conservative heads of State, in the outside world. That resolution, confirmed by the remainder of our analysis of the cult, holds that the guiding spirit of the Randian movement was not individual liberty – as it seemed to many young members – but rather personal power for Ayn Rand and her leading disciples. For power within the movement could be secured by totalitarian isolation and control of the minds and lives of every member; but such tactics could scarcely work outside the movement, where power could only hopefully be achieved by cozying up the President and his inner circles of dominion.
Thus, power not liberty or reason, was the central thrust of the Randian movement. despite explicit devotion to reason and individuality, are not exempt from the mystical and totalitarian cultism that pervades other ideological as well as religious movements. Hopefully, libertarians, once bitten by the virus, may now prove immune.” The major lesson of the history of the movement to libertarians is that It Can Happen Here, that libertarians,
Of the several works on Randianism, only one has concentrated on the cult itself: Leslie Hanscom, “Born Eccentric,” Newsweek (March 27, 1961), pp. 104–05. Hanscom brilliantly and wittily captured the spirit of the Rand cult from attending and reporting on one of the Branden lectures. Thus, Hanscom wrote: After three hours of heroically rapt attention to Branden’s droning delivery, the fans were rewarded by the personal apparition of Miss Rand herself – a lady with drilling black eyes and Russian accent who often wears a brooch in the shape of a dollar sign as her private icon….
“Her books,” said one member of the congregation, “are so good that most people should not be allowed to read them. I used to want to lock up nine-tenths of the world in a cage, and after reading her books, I want to lock them all up.” Later on, this same chap – a self-employed “investment counselor” of 22 – got a lash of his idol’s logic full in the face. Submitting a question from the floor – a privilege open to paying students only – the budding Baruch revealed himself as a mere visitor. Miss Rand – a lady whose glare would wilt a cactus – bawled him out from the platform as a “cheap fraud.” Other seekers of wisdom came off better. One worried disciple was told that it was permissible to celebrate Christmas and Easter so long as one rejected the religious significance (the topic of the night’s lecture was the folly of faith). A housewife was assured that she needn’t feel guilty about being a housewife so long as she chose the job for non-emotionalAlthough mysticism is one of the nastiest words in her political arsenal, there hasn’t been a she-messiah since Aimee McPherson who can so hypnotize a live audience.”
At least as revelatory as Hanscom’s article were the predictable howls of overkill outrage by the cult members. Thus, two weeks later, under the caption “Thugs and Hoodlums?”, Newsweek printed excerpts from Randian letters sent in reaction to the article. One letter stated: “Your vicious, vile, and obscene tirade against Ayn Rand is a new low, even for you. To have sanctioned such a stream of abusive invective…is an act of unprecedented moral depravity. A magazine staffed with irresponsible hoodlums has no place in my home.” Another man wrote that “one who has read the works of Miss Rand and proceeds to write an article of this caliber can only be motivated by villainy. It is the work of a literary thug.” Another warned, “Since you propose to behave like cockroaches, be prepared to be treated as such.” And finally, one Bonnie Benov revealed the inner axiom: “Ayn Rand is…the greatest individual that has ever lived.” Having fun with the cult, Newsweek printed a particularly unprepossessing picture of Rand underneath the Benov letter, and captioned it: “Greatest Ever?”5
My Comment:
I was repelled when I first read “The Fountainhead” when I was about twenty. To tell the truth, I didn’t really read it. I read about 20 pages and then got someone else to tell me about it.
That was natural, I think. I was reading a lot of Catholic philosophy and was surrounded by socialists. In India, that book and the kind of people who read it were people who lived in a different world from mine.
My friends and I tended to laugh at them, as well as at the crowd we called “JNU Marxists” (upper class and upper middle-class Indian students who affected Marxism and usually attended the Marxist dominated university, Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi). These Randian contemporaries of mine, like the JNU Marxists, were usually affluent and enamored of the West, which they saw through the eyes of Western counter-culture.
It was only 15 years later, when I reread Ayn Rand, that I came to appreciate what had first seemed repellent to me.
I thought about this when I was reading Shikha Dalmia’s recent commentary about Rand at Forbes. She writes that a love of Rand is a sign of adolescence and is something you leave behind when you become an adult with adult responsibilities. Dalmia’s criticism is a common one, but for me it’s unconvincing, because in my case, I came to admire Ayn Rand relatively late in life.
As for Rothbard, as always, he presents many useful insights, but he was perhaps temperamentally unsuited to understand a woman of Rand’s nature. There’s a whiff of male chauvinism here. Despite all her pretentiousness (and the pretentiousness of her acolytes), despite the flaws in her thinking and in her character, to reduce her to a power-hungry, narcissistic “wicked witch of Capitalism” is just mistaken.
Whatever warping of her personality took place, we have to remember when and where she grew up. She had to struggle mightily simply to maintain her vision of individualism intact, floating in a sea of collectivism and political ideology in the middle of the twentieth century. That, more than pathology, probably accounts for those ideological and personal alignments she made that seem opportunistic to us today….
“I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”
Call this what you will but it’s not narcissism…and it is very very far from selfishness.
As for what is is that sends people screaming to the exits when they hear her name:
“The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see.”
Jesus, The Trend Follower
King James Bible, Chapter 12, Verse 54
“And he said also to the people, When ye see a cloud rise out of the west, straightway ye say, There cometh a shower; and so it is. And when ye see the south wind blow, ye say, There will be heat; and it cometh to pass. Ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky and of the earth; but how is it that ye do not discern this time?”
My Comment
The notion that you could look at nature and “read” it is part of the so-called “hermetic” tradition of the West and very much a part of eastern religion (Buddhism, Hinduism) as well, from where they might have been derived partially. In the hermetic tradition, the world was conceived of as a complex fractal system in which each part reflected the whole in a succession of patterns that extended from the stars in the sky down to star fish in the ocean. This way of looking at nature holistically in symbolic terms is not necessarily diametrically opposed to the scientific method, a truth that is evident from the fact that leading scientists from the Renaissance to the twentieth century have managed to pursue impeccably empirical research, while holding beliefs that the intellectual class today would call obscurantist.
Frank Lloyd Wright: Education Today Provides Conditioning…
This is a brief excerpt from a live interview with legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright (June 18, 1957), when he was ninety. The audio isn’t very clear, so I’ve provided a transcript. The words are pungent and speak succinctly to the task of weaning people from dependence on the state:
“Education has been unrealistic.
Education has not seen the nature of the thing we needed as a people.
Education has not provided enlightenment. It’s provided conditioning
By way of books, by way of what has been, by way of the past,
By the habituation of the human species to date.
And it hasn’t taken the views of the men who are capable of looking beyond
and seeing what the nature of the thing was.
What is the nature of this thing we’re in.
Now that’s the grace(?) of seeing in, not seeing at.
And all education today is a seeing at.”John Gatto On State-Controlled Consciousness
Toward the end of this video, John Taylor Gatto, the iconoclastic critic of compulsory education and state schools and ardent advocate of “unschooling,” has an especially memorable passage.
He points out that while the state can violently coerce a few people at a time (through arrest and shooting), there’s no way (outside war or genocide, I presume) to coerce large masses of people over time, except through controlling their minds.Or more accurately, through creating the habits and attitudes that make them obedient to puppet strings in their own minds.
Compulsory schooling by the state, he argues, is a way to colonize the minds of children to make them their own police-force, eager to report other deviants.
[Preparing them to become tax snitches, as I blogged earlier, or political informants, or supporters of biometric ID legislation].
In “Dumbing Us Down”, Gatto argues that state schooling causes the following in a child’s mind:
1) Confusion, with its jumbled ensemble of tests, memorized and then forgotten
2) Dependence on class position
3) Indifference/apathy
4) Emotional dependency
5) Intellectual dependency
6) Provisional self-esteem that needs the assurance of experts to maintain
7) Habituation to constant surveillance and the denial of privacy
Bastiat On The Virtues Of Misers
In my view, the moral problem at the root of socialism is actually not envy, as many libertarians contend. I grew up among socialists, and they were, by far, motivated by honorable concerns: a sense of injustice, grief for the poor, compassion.
(I’m not talking here about political activists, some of whom do, in fact, have much baser motives).
The principal flaw in the socialist world view, as I see it, is a too great concern with appearances and an inability to see cause and effect in any complex way. It’s not the ‘materialism’ of dialectical materialism I object to. It’s the lack of ‘mind’ in the materialism. The reasoning is limited, superficial, and inaccurate. It lacks sufficient particularity, as Michael Oakeshott argued in “Rationalism in Politics” (1962).
And as Oakeshott argued there, that can be a problem in Hayek, as well.
Libertarian theorist, Frederic Bastiat, makes much the same point in his acute analysis of the superiority of the miser over the spendthrift, an analysis that would be iconoclastic from the point of view of traditional religious morality, where the miser’s avarice would usually be condemned and the spendthrift’s generosity praised:
Israel-Palestine Problem Exhibits Wound Of PTSD
At Forward, Leonard Fine puts his finger on the emotional trauma underlying the intellectual and political impasse in the Middle East:
“From time to time in this space, I’ve made passing reference to the post-traumatic stress disorder that afflicts Israelis (and the Palestinians, too). It may be a bit of a stretch, but there is a growing literature that suggests that not only individuals, but social institutions, can suffer from PTSD. Thus, for example, Loren and Barbara Cobb, in an article entitled “The Persistence of War,” argue that “specific symptoms of untreated PTSD are particularly troublesome for the social institutions of a society suffering from epidemic levels of these disorders. These symptoms are: hypervigilance, emotional numbing, denial and avoidance, seeing the world in black and white, magical thinking, and apocalyptic thinking.”
They go on to quote Dr. Jonathan Shay, widely regarded as among the giants in the study of PTSD: “Democratic process entails debate, persuasion, and compromise. These presuppose the trustworthiness of words. The moral dimension of severe trauma, the betrayal of ‘what’s right,’ obliterates the capacity for trust. The customary meanings of words are exchanged for new ones; fair offers from opponents are scrutinized for traps; every smile conceals a dagger.”
In the American military experience, PTSD most often arises when a soldier has witnessed the deaths or terrible wounds of his or her comrades. That happens in Israel, too, of course.
But in Israel, whole societies are the witnesses, and the word “post” is, alas, premature. The traumas are very much ongoing, and we do not yet have the clinical vocabulary to comprehend them.
For Jews, the great trauma is, of course, the Holocaust itself, the systematic and ultimately incomprehensible slaughter of one-third of world Jewry. That left a wound that will never quite heal, but that might by now have formed a bearable scab.
But mini-traumas ever since have picked at that scab, rendered the wound ever-raw. The excruciatingly painful list of suicide attacks, the hateful rhetoric, Sderot and the entire aftermath of the withdrawal from Gaza, and now, around the corner, Iran.
And then there have been and are the politicians who whether out of conviction or for purposes of dreadful exploitation pick at the scab and refresh the trauma. For Menachem Begin, Beirut was Berlin and Yasser Arafat was Adolf Hitler; for Benjamin Netanyahu, this is 1938, Tehran is Berlin, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is Hitler. It was ever thus, it will ever be thus, hence it is here, now: They hate us. “Never again” may be our common oath, but “always, everywhere” is our common belief. The wound will not heal.
And the Palestinians? Betrayed by the corruption of their own leadership, theirs is not only the Nakba of defeat and displacement in 1948 and again in 1967; it is daily humiliation both thoughtless and intended, new bypass highways for the Jewish settlers in their midst, still more than 500 checkpoints and barriers to clog or block their own roads and travel, a security fence that slices and snakes through their fields and their farms and their villages and their cities, reminding, reminding, insulting.
Over Gaza, a sky from which at any moment death may be launched; in the streets of the West Bank, raids and roundups. Ongoing trauma, ongoing disorder. The wounds will not heal.
The Palestinians say: Without justice, there will be no peace. The Israelis say: Without peace, there will be no justice. Both sides are stuck with their wounds and their traumas; they need not only diplomacy, they need therapy. Their empathic capacity has been battered. They cannot place themselves in the shoes of the other, nor can they see themselves as the other sees them.”
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.”
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 in to whatever it is they think people want to talk about.
You could, after all, argue that people like watching snuff movies. Does that mean the media feeds that appetite too?
Demand doesn’t just come into being. It’s 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.
That 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 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 too - 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 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 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…..The Mental Gulag Is Here (Update)
Mind-reading passengers for terrorist potential - (note, potential) i.e. “thought crimes” - is here, folks, and seriously being batted about by Homeland Security:
“The aim of one company that blends high technology and behavioral psychology is hinted at in its name, WeCU — as in “We See You.”
The system that Israeli-based WeCU Technologies has devised and is testing in Israel projects images onto airport screens, such as symbols associated with a certain terrorist group or some other image only a would-be terrorist would recognize, said company CEO Ehud Givon.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.
MindBody: Reading Between The Tea-Leaves
When I was young - around 11 or 12 - I recall having very strong hunches about things that would pan out. Nothing weird, simply day-to-day things. I’d lose my stamp album and then I’d go to sleep and in my dreams I’d see it was in the bottom drawer of a cupboard. And when I woke up and went to the drawer, I’d find it. I would have very strong feelings I’d pick up from other people’s emotions. When someone said something, I’d feel the emotion from which they spoke. I’d hear anger, and overlaid on that, jealousy or envy. I’d often have a sense of what someone was going to say before they said it.
None of this was overtly alarming. It blended very easily into what I considered normal and never made me feel different. I didn’t talk about it to anyone, except my mother, who dismissed it as “just imagination.” But I always knew it wasn’t either “just” or “imagination.” (more…)
Why We Believe Propaganda
From a piece I wrote in 2005, “America´s Downing Syndrome,” about why the airwar in Iraq was never represented in media coverage:
“And how does the public conscience square with all this? Simple. The civilians who are fair game are not American civilians. The skies that are threatened are not American skies. It may take a village to raise a child, but given enough air power, we now know also that it only takes a child to raze a village. Our children, their villages. And in return for our invulnerability, we make cultural icons out of bomber pilots, turning a blind eye to their ravages abroad. While the grunt that kills and is killed on the scorched ground bears the burden of public backlash against any horrors of war making that might elude censorship, his mates in the clouds are untouchable. Atrocities are always only committed on earth. So a Lieutenant Calley is court-martialed over My Lai and a Charles Graner is imprisoned for Abu Ghraib, but the bombers who wreak havoc on a magnitude far grander not only walk free, but are feted by a society in which for many reasons the air force is substantially white and the officer corps even whiter.
But there’s more. Strategic bombing directed broadly against a country´s will or morale rather than military targets has nearly always been associated with civilian not military control. Pen-pushers in think tanks and journals, couch-crusaders on Wall Street and Main Street are the most hysterical groupies for total war from the skies. (9) Remote from actual bloodletting, they’re still the quickest to tote up grand calculations of its necessity in bringing about their favorite utopia. It was Lyndon Johnson, not the generals, who first ratcheted up the air war against North Vietnam to genocidal proportions.
And because the civilian leadership unlike the military is always indebted to public opinion for its existence, it´s ultimately public approval rather than military need that drives air war against civilians, which is why the corporate media obligingly does its bit to keep that approval going.
Media and government duplicity, widespread intoxication with technological wizardry, a deadly sense of impunity combined with a deadlier sense of omnipotence, cultural myth making, and socio-economic class are the causes of America’s fundamentally diseased relationship with air power and thus with the raw foundation of imperial might. It is the cognitive disease which periodically manifests itself in redundant “smoking-guns” and “exposes” about memos whose sole purpose apparently is to maintain our illusion of ourselves as eternal naifs duped by an endless procession of charlatans in government.
Clearly, it’s not merely war propaganda so much as the public´s receptivity to war propaganda that’s the problem. The addiction to war-as-Grand Theft Auto reveals an insatiable craving in the bowels of the military-industrial leviathan for physical violence. Air war feeds that craving while disarming us with its technical virtuosity and its remote-controlled, surreal impersonality.
Air war works because it displays naked aggression masked as defense, hard core furtively masquerading as family viewing in the American living room. It’s the secret fix that lets us look like good guys but act like bad guys; it’s the other face of the double-eagle, the predator behind the mask of the protector.
Air war is the white noise of a consumer society so narcotized that only violence makes us feel alive. If we no longer see it, hear it, or talk about it in the heart of empire, it’s ultimately only because for more than fifty years now, we’ve never really done without it.”
Edward Bernays On Why Conspiracies Work
“In almost every act of our lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons [...] who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.”
– Edward Bernays
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.”
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…
Bank Chief Admits He Didn’t Know…
John Thain now admits no one at Merrill had any idea what their CDOs (collateralized debt obligations) were worth. They created them on computer programs. Not only was the global economy rear-ended by a bunch of greedy corporate hacks, it turns out they were too dumb to know what they were doing and too reckless and arrogant to ask. It’s bad enough being scammed by psychopaths. It really hurts to be scammed by morons.
“We think it’s good news that Thain is now emphasizing the knowledge problem when it came to banking–highly paid, well-educated people at the top of their field just didn’t understand the credit derivative products they were buying and selling. This is important as much of our financial reform seems to ignore this problem, focusing instead on fixing incentives in compensation.
It also undermines the idea that the Fed–or any other regulator–will be able to properly assess the risk of these kinds of derivatives.”
My Comment:
I’ve always suspected this, because in graduate school one of my close friends was working on a PhD in finance (where he’d ended up after starting out in mathematics). He was very smart and believed that you could quantify decision- making at all levels. He wanted to turn the social sciences into the hard sciences. We had passionate arguments about this, since I thought the hard sciences were a very faulty (if useful) model for the arts and humanities. I was flabbergasted to find out one day that he didn’t understand what a mortgage was - he lived in such a rarefied world of theory and had been a student for so long. It wasn’t that he lacked empathy or emotions. He didn’t. What he lacked was any experience of the practical world. [He ended up becoming a trader for JP Morgan and had an office at the World Trade Center. Fortunately he wasn't in on 9-11].
Libertarian Living: Neuroeconomics and Cooperation
“The Science and Ethics of Cooperation,” by Michael Townsey, Prout Institute:
“The cooperative system is fundamental to the organization and structure of a Prout (the Progressive Utilization Theory) economy. It is an expression of economic democracy in action - cooperative enterprises give workers the right of capital ownership, collective management and all the associated benefits, such as profit sharing.[i] Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar, the propounder of Prout, goes further and argues that an egalitarian society is actually not possible without a commitment to the cooperative system.[ii] The commitment is not just to an economic order but also to a cooperative ethic and culture. This essay explores some of the scientific evidence that humans have a predisposition to cooperation and in particular to economic cooperation. The evidence comes from a new and exciting field of research known as neuro-economics. We then turn to those insights provided by sociological studies.
Neuro-economics
Neuro-economics is the study of the neuro-physiological underpinnings of economic decision making. The field is new and providing unexpected insights into human economic behavior. Classical economic theory requires individuals to make complex calculations to maximize their personal advantage or utility. Utility, however, is a strangely ambiguous concept. On the one hand it is given a numerical value which implies the counting of something but on the other it is entirely abstract and not anchored to anything in the real world that can be counted. The advent of neurophysiology led to the idea that utility was really a surrogate for some chemical currency inside the brain, with most interest focused on serotonin molecules because these are known to be responsible for the experience of pleasure.
It turns out that a wide range of molecules of emotion[iii] impinge on the mental cost-benefit calculations that are supposed to take place inside the brain and they have unexpected effects. For example, in a ’sharing experiment’, person A was asked to share a sum of money with person B. These experiments demonstrated behavior inconsistent with neoclassical theory. People appear to put a high value on fairness. In a follow up experiment, persons A and B were placed in the same experimental scenario as before, but they were (unknowingly) given an intranasal administration of oxytocin. Oxytocin is a neuropeptide that plays a key role in social attachment and affiliation in animals and causes a substantial increase in trust in humans. In these experiments the effect of oxytocin was to increase the amount of money that A gives B. The experimenters concluded that “oxytocin may be part of the human physiology that motivates cooperation.”[iv] It is worth adding that such hormone-mediated interactions are not confined to human relationships but are also likely to be involved in human-animal relationships.[v]
Oxytocin is not the only neuro-chemical to promote cooperation. Recent observations of bonobo monkeys in the jungles of the Congo reveal fascinating contrasts with chimpanzees.[vi] Bonobos are matriarchal and show little aggression compared to the patriarchal chimps. Chimps respond to strangers with aggression, while bonobos demonstrate curiosity. When under stress, chimp tribes degenerate into fighting while bonobos respond to stress by engaging in collective sexual activity. Scientists have concluded that bonobos demonstrate higher levels of trust both with each other and with strangers. Of most interest, however, from a neuro-economics point of view, is the ability of the monkeys to perform a simple task requiring cooperation in retrieving some bananas that are out of reach. Although both species are intelligent enough to work out a solution (for example, by one climbing on the shoulders of the other or by one holding a ladder for the other), the chimps fail because they cannot trust one another. On the other hand, bonobos have no trouble cooperating to retrieve the bananas.[vii]“
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
Prechter - Debt Is the Problem, Not Paper Printing
Goldseek radio has an interview with Robert Prechter here.
Prechter’s 2002 book, “Conquer the Crash,” predicted the current economic collapse and this is an interesting and wide-ranging interview. Prechter is a renowned Elliot Wave theorist and a long-time prophet of depression.
Summing up his most important points:
*We have been in a developing deflation since 2002
*Debt is the problem, not paper-printing.
*Gold will hold value and do well, but it won’t go to the moon
*Cash is a good place to be
*The market will go down for a replay of 2008, in spades
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)
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.
Thought Control and the Sex Police
The media these days has an unhealthy and strange preoccupation with the sex lives of politicians and “public figures”… especially when they’re adulterous.
All this, despite journalists’ protests that they’re interested in “privacy”…
The issue becomes doubly important because of the role sexual blackmail…or worse yet, sexual libel.… plays and has played in controlling political mavericks, reformers, or even whistle-blowers, whether in government or elsewhere.
I call it strange, because modernity is supposed to have removed itself so far from oppressive mores and bourgeois conventions….and yet in most commentary on the subject, one finds nothing more than the same hideous cliches - about guilt, predation, sex-pots, cheating, and high drama….
In point of fact, most spouses wander (or more accurately, cultivate fantasies of wandering) because of lack of emotional connection in their marriage.That’s clear from Mark Sanford’s tepid (yawn) revelations..
Now, as a good Tory-Bohemian, I find myself often on both sides of this issue.
On the one hand, the nostalgic popular imagery of It’s a Wonderful Life, and Father Knows Best…..
And, as a Christian - even an unorthodox one, the fact that one is supposed to admire the impossible standard set in the Sermon On the Mount…
A standard that no normal human could follow to the letter..
A standard that perhaps no normal human should follow to the letter.
[I wonder if that was the point Jesus was trying to make?]Yet, while no one casts stones at anyone for not giving away all his belongings, or for failing to keep the sabbath, or for slandering or lying, or for fraudulent business practices, strange that even the most benign friendship should bring out the sex police.
(As an example, think of McCain’s supposed affair with a lobbyist - an affair both of them denied and for which no proof existed beyond the media’s fervent desire for a little dirt…and mind you, if one were to be precise, it was McCain’s marriage itself that was grounded in adultery…Cindy being a former ‘other woman’).
Stranger yet, the sex police these days are usually so-called leftists and liberals.
Their modus operandi would have made the gestapo proud…If there’s anything calculated to keep women out of public life, it’s this intensely misogynistic and pornographic scrutiny. If you don’t think that’s what all this is, why haven’t we been treated to sexualized nudes of, say, George Bush, as we have of Hillary?
Why wasn’t Ralph Nader lynched by the media mob in the same way as Cindy Sheehan?
So my sympathies are with scarlet women (and men), then and now, paraded up and down while the public stones them symbolically. Even Eliot Spitzer has my sympathy. The man after all did try to cordon off his extramarital life from his wife and children. He had that much concern for them. It was the guardians of public morality who had none.
I admit it. When there’s a stoning, I’ll take the side of Hester Prynne and Anna K.
I prefer Tolstoi’s intelligent, ambitious, restless, sexual, and deeply moral adulteress, to either her vain, shallow lover or her wooden, hypocritical husband….or even to her brother’s long-suffering wife, the plaintive, babied-out Dolly - so aptly named.
Tolstoi, being a man, could give Anna no credit for anything except beauty or sexuality, but the fact is, you read the novel for her. ..and not for Dolly, or for Levin, or for Karenin, or for Vronsky. She’s worth them all.
The other woman…..
Who’s to say how much this unspeakable she profited countless miserable marriages, neutered husbands, and pathetic, damaged children…by taking up the slack (physical or emotional) of the immoral “business arrangement,” by which I loan you my body to make babies and play with, and in return you fork over 50% or more of everything you make, or will ever make, while we endlessly bait, hurt, rob, insult, control, extort, blackmail, bore, manipulate, wound, sue, demean, abuse, and torture each other verbally, emotionally, and physically….all in the name of holy matrimony.
What a fraud….
And that’s how many children are raised today. Any wonder they became traumatized adults, easily manipulated by propaganda?
Where would respectable Victorian marriage have been without the brothel, asked Shaw..
And where would the nuclear family be without countless other women, whether they were only friends, sisters, neighbors, and “office wives,” or whether they crossed the boundary into a physical relationship?
Thank God for other women….and for other men.
It takes a village to raise a married couple…..
We all have an image of the other woman in our heads: the calculating predator who moves in on happily coupled men. The cloistered, diamond-draped mistress. The office sexpot who’s always just a little too close to your guy at his holiday party. She’s a staple of novels, movies, tabloids, even history books - from the restless Emma in Madame Bovary to Fatal Attraction’s bunny boiler to, most recently, Eliot Spitzer’s hotel call girl. And if you’ve never seen it, go YouTube the legendary clip of Marilyn Monroe purring “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” to her rumored lover, J.F.K. That’s the other woman as we usually imagine her.
More at Glamour, via Truth to Power blog.
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)
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
Codex Alimantarius Disinformation?
A few months ago I blogged a youtube video by one Rima Laibow on globalist control of food.
But recently I came across this article by Robert Singer at Dissident Voice, which argues persuasively that Laibow is part of a disinformation campaign aimed at discrediting food security advocates by peddling exaggerated accusations against Monsanto, the main agri-culprit of the New World Order.
Here’s the money part from the Singer piece:
“The Natural Solutions Foundation (NSF) originated the Linn Cole articles.
The Organic Consumers Association and other legitimate heath advocates have been questioning the NSF for several years, and the criticism is universally the same: Why does the NSF keep turning out factually inaccurate, hysterically grim articles such as Linn Cole’s?The answers start with the NSF founders, husband-wife team Albert Stubblebine and Rima Laibow. Now, when I accuse these people of being disinformation professionals, let me explain. I’m not saying they’re doing sloppy research, and I’m not saying they’re being overzealous. What I am saying is that they are working, for pay, to spread false information and to make their organization look like a legitimate activist group.
My conclusion is Stubblebine and Laibow are using the Natural Solutions Foundation—and Linn Cole—to undermine the health freedom community by spreading disinformation about HR 875.
Stubblebine is a retired U.S. Army major general who designed AEGIS, “a major Homeland Security private initiative.” Given this background and his ties to the U.S. intelligence community, eyebrows were raised in the health freedom community in early 2005 when, along with Laibow, Stubblebine launched the NSF website and began to promote his wife as an expert on Codex Alimentarius, the commission working to adopt strict new guidelines for vitamin and mineral supplements.
Dr. Rath, founder of the 4.dr-rath-foundation, a legitimate health advocacy group, and the author of A Modern Major General Exposed? writes: “It quickly became apparent to experienced health freedom observers that Stubblebine either hadn’t done his homework properly, or that he and Laibow were intentionally spreading inaccurate and misleading material about Codex and other related dietary supplement issues via their website and press releases.
Moreover, despite repeated concerns being expressed by more experienced health freedom observers, Stubblebine and Laibow continued to disseminate this material, and pointedly ignored requests to remove it from their website.”
In my “Scared to CodeX Death” article, I refer to Dr. Rima Laibow when I write: “And although the effects of Codex are devastating and will result in humans dying from starvation and preventable diseases from under-nutrition, any claims that WHO or FAO have released epidemiological projections are untrue.”
Dr. Rima Laibow, to the consternation of those fighting Codex, is the source of the untrue claims about the “epidemiological projections” in her YouTube video “Codex Alimentarious & Nutricide.”
The NSF pair want to discredit HR 875, because when the cleverly worded HR 875 finally goes to committee, Monsanto will unleash a massive PR campaign aimed at, guess who? Linn Cohen-Cole and the other lefties who, according to Monsanto, are spreading false and misleading information about an innocent food safety bill.Later, the headlines such as “HR 875 doesn’t criminalize small agriculture” will warn the population about health freedom activists who, by spreading misinformation, are threatening our food safety and free speech. Then, HR 875 and the real threat, HR 859, are passed without fanfare.
….My Comment:
I know Stubblebine from my research into the CIA and mind control. He’s a leading figure in Jon Ronson’s “The Men Who Stare at Goats” - a book I cited in The Language of Empire. Unfortunately, I came across the book rather late in writing LOE, and was able to use it only tangentially. It’s written in an apolitical narrative style - which both gives it its power and also defuses its political content. (It’s no surprise to me that Ronson ended up with a gig in entertainment TV in Britain. The powers that be would no doubt prefer that any one who connects those sorts of dots ends up talking about aliens and shape-shifting lizards).
And why do CIA men stare at goats? Because yogic texts tell us that if enough psychic energy is brought to bear on a living creature, it can be killed. And the CIA apparently thought goats were the place to start practicing so useful a skill.
All this is not bizarre to anyone who has a long standing interest in parapsychology, as I do. In my teens, I spent a lot of time experimenting with lucid dreaming, color-sensing, psychokinesis, and all sorts of other “mind-control” phenomena. At one point, I taught extension classes in what is sometimes called transpersonal psychology. Some of my best reading was drawn from books about the CIA’s research in that area. And the CIA was itself playing catch up with the KGB in that area.
The Neurolinguistic Programming of Reality
“An excellent example of globalist
redefinition of a common term
is the use of the word “state” in place of “country”
. When the media and leaders
refer to a country like Iran as a “state”
this has the same or similar effect as the
British globalists referring to the United States
as “the colonies”, which is off-handed at best.
This type of redefinition of terms is
designed to belittle the conception of a
supposed and/or perceived enemy by making
them appear less important and smaller in perspective
to the aggressors. Most soldiers would be
more willing to attack a “rogue state” than an “enemy
country”. The actual usage of this type of
terminology actually creates a mass perception
that the said country has already been assimilated
into the globalist empire and is simply acting out of
turn and is deserving of punitive damage whether
compensatory or offensive or both.
However, the true modus operandi
of the globalists is essentially Hegelian
in nature. Time and time again as a
species we can observe the workings of “thesis,
antitheses and synthesis”.An excellent example would be the attacks on
the World Trade Center of 2001.
Thesis: “terrorists are a continual threat
to our liberty”. Antitheses: the
attack on the World Trade Center. Synthesis:
the Patriot Acts and Office of Homeland
Security, also known as: the loss of liberty
in the name of security…….There are many conclusions to be drawn when
looking at the cycle of empires, but one
stands clearly: ruling is a science, and it
involves coercion whether via induced
suffering, psychological
torture and/or destabilization….”— Max Mitchell, “Foundations of War:
Terminology of the New World.”Reiki Therapy at Maryland Trauma Center
Alternative medicine gets some recognition at the University of Maryland:
“At one of the nation’s top trauma hospitals, a nurse circles a patient’s bed, humming and waving her arms as if shooing evil spirits. Another woman rubs a quartz bowl with a wand, making tunes that mix with the beeping monitors and hissing respirator keeping the man alive.
They are doing Reiki therapy, which claims to heal through invisible energy fields. The anesthesia chief, Dr. Richard Dutton, calls it “mystical mumbo jumbo.” Still, he’s a fan.
“It’s self-hypnosis” that can help patients relax, he said. “If you tell yourself you have less pain, you actually do have less pain.”
More in this AP report.
Jill Bolte Taylor on Rebuilding Your Own Mind
Jill Bolte Taylor on rebuilding your own mind (thanks to NonE from Sunni Maravillosa’s blog):
My Comment
Ignore the canned laughter. How amazingly similar this is to the religious experiences of neti-neti (not this, not this) and samadhi... (back with more later)
Do Wise Latina Women Judge Differently from White Males?
There’s a lot of discussion in the blogosphere about likely Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s remarks in 2001 when she was an appeals court judge.
““I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,” said Judge Sotomayor.”
(Published by the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal)
At The Volokh Conspiracy, Jonathan Adler finds the implication of her remarks troubling. He suggests that they go beyond simply stating that each individual’s perspective matters to negating the existence of an objective stance altogether.
Ho hum. This is such a tired battle. No one ever seems to say anything new or insightful. It all seems to boil down to a power struggle. Those upholding objective standards claim they do so because indeed standards are “out there” - i.e. objective.
Those arguing for identity as the trump card claim that the objective standard merely disguises power relations and the (white, male) identity of the powerful.
Can I say anything new? I don’t know, but it’s worth a try if only to spare myself future boredom reading the reasoning on both sides of these kinds of debate.
Back later with more.
******
OK. Here’s how I see it.
Experience always alters perception, so, to that extent, Sotomayor is not saying anything inaccurate.I think the part that bothered Adler is this one (and I can see why): He says she “quotes approvingly” law professors who have said that “to judge is an exercise of power.”
Again, note the problem with reasoning in the social sciences here. There is an elision, a gap, in which changes in meaning are lost.To say something is an act of power is not the same thing as saying it’s only an act of power. Moreover, power has a connotation in today’s political lingo that’s inherently negative.
Supposing then you were to substitute the word “will,” for the word “power,” what then?
Sotomayor would then be saying that people’s experiences influence the way they think, which informs their judgment. Their judgment is as much an act of will as it’s the logical conclusion of reasoning independent of the actor who performs it.Instead of discussing power relations (politics), we’d end up in a much more fruitful arena, exploring the relationship between our will and our perceptions and reasoning. We’d be in the territory of cognitive science and philosophy. And we’d be much more likely to come up with something useful.
And all from looking at our language a bit more critically.
Of course, I have no idea whether that’s what Sotomayor meant. I’m just saying that a nuanced reading of words might be a place where both sides of the debate could start.
Instead, the debate ends locked in what I think I’ll label a Catholic (God is all-knowing*) versus Protestant (God is all-powerful) polarity, with judge substituting for God.
* I originally wrote all-rational, which seems to have led to a misunderstanding. I meant “reason” (as in ‘right reason’ rather than Reason, as in Enlightenment rationality)
C. S. Lewis on Habit and Will
“No amount of piety in his imagination and affections will harm us if we can keep it out of his will. As one of the humans has said, active habits are strengthened by repetition but passive ones are weakened. The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and in the long run, the less he will be able to feel.”
C. S. Lewis, “The Screwtape Letters,” p. 71.
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