image from piqsels, CC0

My last article talked about how we’re biologically and culturally conditioned to love the music we love (and perhaps the people we love). This time around I want to explore the shadow side of this — how our biological and cultural conditioning ‘teaches’ us to hate and fear, and how we can be ‘groomed’ to hate and fear even more.

The thesis is basically the same: We have no choice, free will or control over what we think, believe and do. Everything we think, believe and do is a result of our biological and/or cultural conditioning, given the immediate circumstances of the moment.

So, for example, our attraction to potential partners is mostly due to our body’s chemical ‘reading’ of the appropriateness of the other person (appearance, health, fitness, genetic compatibility etc), to produce healthy offspring, and only secondarily to what we have ‘learned’ (ie been culturally conditioned by our own and others’ personal life experiences and learning) to want and not want in a potential partner. It is not a ‘rational’ choice; in fact, it is not a choice at all.

Our political worldview, on the other hand, is mostly culturally rather than biologically conditioned. It is determined primarily by the aggregate views and opinions of the people we have lived, worked with, hung out with, and heard or read in our studies and in ‘the media’.

We would like to believe this worldview is based on facts and hard evidence, but it rarely is. Our brains tend to form conclusions based on first impressions (which tend to be more emotional than logical), and those conclusions tend to harden in the absence of compelling direct personal experiences or arguments to the contrary. In fact, our brains tend to form hypotheses quickly, and to reject evidence that undermines our belief in those hypotheses, so that most of what we think of as our ‘beliefs’ are really just largely unsubstantiated opinions subject to a host of cognitive biases. We are inherently credulous until we form an opinion on something; and then we are resistant to changing that opinion.

There is nothing ‘wrong’ with this irrational brain behaviour. It has evolved in humans because it appears to work better than constantly challenging everything to the point we may become paralyzed by indecision and uncertainty.

Hence our worldview is a massively complex phenomenon — Our personal experiences play a role, we condition each other to align our worldviews, our worldviews become entrenched based on early experiences and learning, and external media are continually influencing, and attempting to influence, these worldviews. And the worldviews implicit in those external media are in turn influenced by the worldviews of the ever-changing decision-makers in those media, which are in turn influenced by people those decision-makers encounter. No one is in control.

There is considerable evidence that our worldviews are influenced much more by those we know and interact with personally, than by the ‘media’, especially in this age of enormous media distrust. ‘My buddy Joe’ has no reason to lie to me, and he never has (I don’t think, except maybe that once). The corporate media, by contrast, have all kinds of reasons to lie to me, and they repeatedly have. A recent study revealed that most fans of Faux News enjoy the simplistic reassurances they get from the network, but don’t actually buy a lot of what its clowns tell them, especially when viewers cannot relate the claims to their direct personal experiences.

And, as I’ve written here perhaps too much, we tend to believe what we want to believe, regardless of whether it’s true or not. We want to believe we can do and become anything we set our minds to, which is essentially preposterous. Why do we believe it then? Because it’s just too depressing to believe otherwise. We don’t want to believe our current civilization is in a state of (human-caused) accelerating collapse that will cause our descendants unimaginable suffering, because accepting that would fill us with feelings of guilt, shame, and hopelessness. Our beliefs, therefore, reflect what we feel (and want to feel, and what we don’t want to feel) far more than they reflect what we think.

The term grooming has recently been repurposed to mean “manipulating someone until they’re isolated, dependent, and more vulnerable to exploitation”. Isolated to make them believe that they can’t talk to others ‘outside’ about their situation (what eg QAnon and other cults do), dependent to make them believe they can’t get away from the situation, and hence vulnerable to more manipulation. It’s a form of psychological imprisonment to instil learned helplessness, in this case helplessness to believe or do anything other than what the groomer wants.

The word grooming was first appropriated, quite powerfully, by foes of spousal abuse to explain the psychopathic processes used by abusers. Since then it’s been used to describe the processes used by child molesters to ‘soften up’ their victims’ resistance to abuse, by right-wing book-burners like Ron DeSantis to malign teachers and parents who want children exposed to new ideas that are contrary to right-wing orthodoxy, and by progressives to disparage right-wingers who want to restrict their children from accessing perspectives other than their own long-held positions.

What it all comes down to is the desire of the groomers (or alleged groomers) to control or influence the conditioning of the ‘groomees’. This desire is what underlies almost all propaganda, censorship, and mis- and disinformation campaigns. It is the core business of marketing, PR, advertising, self-proclaimed ‘influencers’, and ‘reputation management’ organizations. And it is the raison d’être for social media ranking algorithms. If my thesis about conditioning underlying all of our beliefs and behaviours is correct, this is a very important business, enough to warrant the trillions spent on it each year.

The question is: Is it really possible to condition someone to believe or do what they wouldn’t have believed or done anyway? It does seem to be possible when it comes to children, especially if they’re isolated from saner voices. (Makes you think about the whole business of parenting.) And it does seem to be possible in controlled cult environments (both physical ‘compounds’ and virtual ‘echo chambers’). And the relentless campaigns to persuade the public of the veracity of lies about Ukraine, Russia, China, Iran etc show remarkable success, judging by subsequent opinion polls.

So what’s going on here? Are we all so credulous and gullible that our worldviews are up for grabs by the wealthiest, most powerful, and craftiest propagandists and marketers? Can we be conditioned not only to buy shiny, cleverly-marketed, environmentally destructive, unhealthy crap we don’t need, but also to fear and hate certain groups to stoke division, polarization, further oppression, and thirst for violence and war?

The answer to both questions, worryingly, is probably Yes, to a point. The PMC top-caste, a relatively small group, may be hell-bent on war with China, but most people in the US/NATO bloc seem, while persuaded of the Chinese government‘s maleficence, unwilling to lay down their, or their children’s, lives to combat it.

Most, I think, have been persuaded that the Chinese government is ‘evil’, because:

1. This belief doesn’t obviously conflict with their own, limited, direct personal experiences;
2. Their peers haven’t spoken up on the subject one way or the other;
3. The media they read have not offered any conflicting point of view, and have written ad nauseam and in one voice about the ‘plight’ of China’s supposedly oppressed Uyghurs, Tibetans and Hong Kongese.
4. They’ve never lived in or visited China, so they have no idea what life there is like; and
5. They have few or no Chinese friends or acquaintances who’ve said anything about it.

This results in what I would call a ‘soft’ worldview position on the ‘evilness’ of the Chinese government. (It was my own position until a few years ago, when I actively started to learn more about it. I’m definitely not proud of that.)

Such a position (“Their government is seemingly awful, expansionist and probably genocidal, but so are many other governments”) isn’t going to change your vote, or cause you to enlist. But it also isn’t going to get you to protest against a war with China. This position is ‘aligned’ with the groomers’, but it isn’t strongly held.

This, however, is all the groomers really want. They want to pre-emptively block widespread public opposition to their planned war. That’s all they need. It was all they needed in Vietnam (until the very end), and all they needed in, among many other countries, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Cuba, Chile, Venezuela, and now Ukraine.

It doesn’t take a lot to instil fear and hate in a large swath of the population, sufficient to block opposition to a campaign against the targets of the hate-mongers, and to, as Noam Chomsky calls  it, “manufacture consent” for a planned action. You don’t have to manufacture support anymore (now that wars are fought mostly with foreign proxies, private mercenaries, drones, and long-distance missiles). You just need to sow enough fear, hatred and anxiety to undermine, sabotage and silence broad dissent.

A coordinated and incessant wave of lies has been used to instil fear and hate against alleged ‘enemies’ for over 60 years: North Vietnam, Vietnam War protesters, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, the Occupy and BLM protest movements, the ‘red menace’ and ‘yellow menace’, Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, popular socialists all over the world, and dozens more. We are now being groomed to fear and hate the governments (and ‘complicit’ citizens) of Russia, China, and Iran, sufficient to undermine and block opposition to war against them.

Of course, we are also being groomed to hate and fear imagined ‘enemies’ within our countries, leading to what I would describe as a ‘soft’ polarization — not enough to provoke (a lot of) violence, but enough to paralyze any movement towards understanding and working with the internal ‘enemy’.

Contemporary political analyst Aurélien has made the argument that in most parts of the world, “different beliefs exist side-by-side without conflict”. That doesn’t mean they necessarily like each other; they just respect each other’s right to their views as long as they don’t impose them on others. But in the US/NATO bloc, he says, “the dynamic of western culture has [increasingly] been one of a constant tendency towards intolerant, unchallengeable assertions of [absolutist] Truth”. Think of this like a Crusade mentality — any opposing views to Ours must be vanquished by any means necessary.

This absolutism brings with it, he says, a set of rather dangerous beliefs: That war is not so much about territory as it is about the moral and intellectual superiority of certain ideas, and that there is therefore a certain unquestionable inevitability about the eventual global ‘success’ of the underlying ideology. He argues that the PMC embraces this ideology with a religious fervour, but is finding it harder and harder, in the face of its increasingly obvious failings (ever-growing poverty, inequality, violence, polarization, intolerance, collapsing infrastructure, economic fragility, anomie etc in the countries where this ideology is based), to sell even their own citizens on supporting the Crusade to make this ideology a uniform, global one).

Hence, perhaps, the need to manufacture consent by seeding fear and hate to undermine internal dissent against this Grand Cause. They might be thinking: “If we can’t get the unhappy citizens to accept that Our Way (untrammelled capitalistic neoliberalism) is the only right way for the world to live, we can use hate and fear to at least bewilder the opposition to our plans, and, since we now control the global purse-strings, we can pursue the Crusade without popular support, as long as they stay out of our way.”

This ties into my earlier post about our inability to admit failure. As the Crusade continues to stumble, the response of the PMC is to double down, ratchet up the propaganda and censorship, and demonize opponents of the cause as enemies.

I need to stress again that this isn’t an organized campaign. The PMC isn’t a cohesive group. But it is an earnest one. And they genuinely believe that those they have identified as enemies, and their ideas, absolutely must be vanquished. They have conditioned each other very well. And they have power and influence disproportionate to their small numbers.

I was struck by the complete hatchet job the CBC did on Canadian Daniel Dumbrill after he agreed to be interviewed about his views on China, where he lives. The CBC reporter in question is young and inexperienced, but showed no signs of zealotry. It was clearly not hard for him to accept the premise of his assignment — that Daniel was either a propagandist working for the Chinese government, or a hopelessly misinformed Communist idealist.

Of course, Daniel is neither, but the worldview of the reporter was completely unable to fathom that possibility. He could not accept that he’d been conditioned to believe a whole series of complete fictions about China. After all, all his newsroom buddies shared his beliefs. They couldn’t all be wrong, could they?

You can see the same blind conditioning in the recent, utterly unprofessional hatchet job a New Yorker reporter did on John Mearsheimer. What John was saying was so incompatible with what all the New Yorker reporters believed, that obviously it had to be John, not them, who was misinformed — or even malevolent.

This is how cultural conditioning works. Everyone involved can believe they know and are speaking the truth, even as they are perpetrating horrific lies with potentially catastrophic consequences.

And we don’t even learn from our mistakes. The current perpetrators of lies about China and Russia include a whole rogues’ gallery of the same fools who, believing they were telling the truth, led the world into the ghastly wars in Iraq. They’ve never acknowledged their lies. They cannot. They’ve been conditioned too well to change, to even contemplate the possibility that they were wrong, and admit their culpability in the resultant disaster.

What prompts any of us to feel anger and fear, especially when there’s nothing to be fearful or angry about? In other words, what is the mechanism by which we’re so easily conditioned to hate and fear?

I think it plays off a number of very human foibles:

1. We’re afraid of thinking ourselves ignorant (and of being thought of as ignorant), and hence being vulnerable to manipulation or exploitation. So when we’re given a simple (and possibly wrong) answer and reassured that that it’s “all you need to know”, we are all too eager to accept it.
2. Unfamiliarity breeds fear and contempt. In many cases, even if we live in culturally diverse places, we know no one from cultures other than our own, and little or nothing about other cultures. That’s easy to exploit by planting distrust, suspicion, and untruths about the unknown “other”.
3. We kind of enjoy righteous indignation. It makes us feel like we’re on the ‘right side’, that we’re knowledgable, and that our easily-inflamed anger and fear is justified.
4. If we hear something repeated often enough, especially if we’re never exposed to anyone refuting it, we are inclined to believe it must be true.
5. We have an inherent desire to know things. It’s comforting, and often carries with it a certain degree of prestige.
6. We really do loathe complexity. Uncertainty and incomprehensibility displease us. We much prefer simple, unquestionable, black and white “truths”.
7. We are easily frustrated when we perceive a situation is out of control (and out of our control), or when we feel a sense of impotent moral outrage (“it shouldn’t be like this”), or when we feel helpless or powerless. That can quickly manifest itself in anger, in fear, and in hatred — since hatred is often a projection of anger to a class of people, creatures, ideas or things, and more often than not a mask for fear.

These reactions and behaviours are all perfectly understandable, and evolutionarily selected for. But they’re also easy to exploit.

And so, we are played, conditioned, groomed, exploited, and manipulated. Mostly, we do this to each other, mostly unintentionally, infecting each other with hate and fear. Sometimes this is done to us by politicians, by the media, or by PR and other organizations paid to incite it.

And sometimes this will provoke us to actual acts of violence. More often, though, it is enough for the perpetrators (who, remember, almost always really believe the incendiary untruths they are provoking us with) that we be sufficiently knocked off balance that we don’t resist, interfere, object, or dissent, but instead that we suspend judgement and action, and be passive. So that the perpetrators, righteous Crusaders all, can do what they want to do (in ‘everyone’s’ best interest, of course), until it’s too late to stop them.

This is a bit of a follow-up to my post last fall exploring why I love sad songs (and romantic comedies).

still from dance-practice video by Japanese-Korean hip-hop/R&B group XG

Some of my favourite YouTube channels offer analysis of music, for the purpose of understanding what it is about certain music that we so much appreciate, and hopefully to teach us how to compose ‘better’ music.

Recently, after reading through a bunch of my old blog posts, I was lamenting how ignorant and arrogant I was when I started this blog 20 years ago. I marvel at how much my entire worldview and attitude toward life has been transformed over that time period, yet so slowly that I didn’t even notice it. That change is reflected, for example, in my complete indifference, now, to TV, films, and almost all fiction, which once were a very important part of my life. Though my interest in these “popular entertainment” forms has dramatically waned, my interest in “popular music” has, if anything, increased.

So I went back through my 60 year library of favourite music to see if it showed evidence of a similar evolution. It did not. On the contrary, despite the thousands of hours I have spent looking for enjoyable music (I’m pretty particular), I can honestly say that my musical tastes have not really changed one iota.

There is a largely-unchallenged view that our musical tastes are culturally, rather than biologically, conditioned. A careful and open-minded study of music, we are told, will give us an appreciation of music we would previously have been closed to, just as a thorough study of history and culture can substantially alter our perception of current events.

We are told, for example, that indigenous cultures are not nearly so closed to what we consider “dissonant” music as we are, and that may well be true. A current theory is that music works on the brain in a two-stage recognition/reward process. First, our brain’s inherent propensity for pattern-seeking and pattern-remembering comes into play as we listen, and then our brain starts to ‘predict’ what will come next in a song. A correct prediction will yield a burst of dopamine, while an incorrect prediction will not — there’s no reward for an evolutionarily useless wrong guess. And a dramatic tension in the music before the predicted resolution seems to extend, amplify and reinforce the dopamine reward (perhaps in the same way that sexual edging does).

But we also get a dopamine charge when there is an unexpected (but not catastrophic) ‘surprise’ in the progress of the music, such as a sudden key change, or the introduction, for example, of a minor ninth chord just before the resolution to the major. I’d guess this might be how we ‘learn’ new patterns to extend our brain’s predictive capacity. After hearing the minor ninth, we now start to listen for it again later in the song, and take note of whether it repeats or not.

Too much repetition and predictability, on the other hand, and we essentially stop listening, so there is no dopamine rush. Each person’s min/max threshold for repetition, surprise, and novelty is apparently different.

In my earlier article, I described a popular theory that our love of sad songs is about catharsis and/or the safe, vicarious, ‘pleasurable’ experience of emotions that might be too precarious to feel as a result of a direct, personally sad event. Beyond that, I posited that it’s our body that makes decisions on what music we listen to, and reacts accordingly, and that ‘we’ (with our supposedly discerning musical tastes) really have no say in it whatsoever.

That would suggest that our biological conditioning plays just as important a role in our musical tastes as cultural conditioning. And indeed, the people whose musical tastes are closest to mine (measured by the degree to which our personal music ‘libraries’ overlap) do not correlate at all with those whose cultural conditioning most closely resembles mine. Peers I grew up with, while perhaps liking certain music that was popular when we were doing things together, mostly have very different musical preferences from mine. And people with whom I have almost zero cultural connection, but some biological similarities to (eg a predisposition to depression) seem much more likely to share my musical tastes.

What does our body want, then, if it, rather than our cultural influences, is ‘choosing’ our musical tastes for ‘us’?

Perhaps, just as it ‘chooses’ food for us to compensate for its perceived nutritional deficiencies or to feed its chemical addictions, our body might be ‘choosing’ music for us that restores its chemical balance or feeds its chemical addictions (eg too little or too much dopamine).

The emotions that arise in me listening to Adagio for Strings, for example, are a kind of sadness, but they are a joyful, peaceful kind. Maybe it’s my body’s way of saying “You need to feel sadness about the awful state of the world, but you’re afraid to, so here, try this music”. Several people who suffer from depression have told me they love this piece because it makes them cry, and feel better.

And when I listen to (and watch the remarkable choreography of) a song¹ like Left Right, perhaps my body is urging me to listen to it in order to get me to feel, and to appropriately express, a sense of incredible joy and connection with the rest of the world, which is, after all, an astonishingly beautiful place in which we’re all doing our best: “Hey, life is good, get off your ass and enjoy it, laugh, dance, celebrate”. This song, which is only a month old, has already been ‘covered’ by at least 40 dance groups captivated by its infectious vibe and its fun, expressive choreography. Maybe a lot of bodies out there are telling their ‘owners’ to get up, laugh, dance and celebrate.

In my earlier article, I asked:

Does my infatuation with these songs indicate that am I looking to lose myself (lose my self?) in a safe-to-feel world? A world that makes more sense (viscerally, rather than intellectually) and is more emotionally honest and courageous than the one I seem to live in? These songs reach through my fear of feeling and let me feel things I’ve only otherwise ever felt strong enough to feel when I’ve been in love — when the chemicals just overpowered the fear.

So perhaps our taste in music is just one more subtle, ‘unconscious’ way our body does its best to take care of itself (and ‘us’).

A guy who’s written a book about the emotional impact of Adagio analyzed it as follows:

By taking the listener through emotional landscapes of its own creation, on its own terms, at its own speed, music is as close as one can come to actually re-experiencing the process and texture of unfolding emotion. It doesn’t show you a reflected image of the landscape of loss, it takes you through it – a very different notion. And Barber’s Adagio is so moving, so affecting, precisely because as we pass through that territory, we reel with the shock of recognition.

Emotionally, psychologically, we’ve all been here before; we can feel the congruence to our own experiences of grief and desperate hope as it unfolds through time. In a nutshell, it works so very well because he got it so very, very right.

Listen… to the orchestral recording of the Adagio. Hear how we begin in deep mourning and isolation, are lifted into the possibility of redemption by the IV-V in D-flat major, then dropped back into the darkness by iv-V in minor. This is the subtext of the entire piece: a desperate struggle to escape from the reality of grief (B-flat minor) into the consolation of hope (D-flat), only to slide back into an inevitable reality, over and over… [Barber] demonstrated a breathtaking comprehension of both musical and psychological processes, then wrote a piece of music so astonishingly well-matched to the unfolding process of grief that one can hardly help being moved by it.

Well, maybe. Or perhaps Samuel Barber had no choice but to write this piece exactly as it was written, through him and his body, an expression of his own body’s need to reconcile with the possibility of never-ending grief, to adapt to it, to accept it, and to express it, the only way it could.

1. I think there’s a lot more to this ‘pop’ song than meets the eye. XG consists of seven young Japanese women who spent the last five years in an intense program in Korea learning advanced singing, dancing, composition and other skills, and rehearsing endlessly, before their first song was released a few months ago. The music was written specifically for the group by a team of at least 14 composers, some of whom obviously have classical music training; you can spot a whole suite of international genres and influences in the instrumentation, harmonies, rhythms, and musical overlays going on, mostly unobtrusively, in this ‘simple’ happy song. 
2. POSTSCRIPT: I’ve been asked a lot about my opinion on the new AI apps, and my response generally has been that it’s not intelligence at all, and, like video games, will mostly turn out to be an amusing new form of entertainment (and, sigh, a military training tool). But I do believe it will have a major effect on the arts, including music. There is no reason why AI couldn’t, for example, parse my library of favourite music, and produce a (plagiarized, derivative, kind of) work that might well become my favourite song. It is capable of sussing out, and replicating, the ‘ingredients’ inherent and present in art that we love, in novel and potentially exciting ways. It is certainly soon likely to outperform the current music ‘recommendation engines’, whose algorithms are essentially not up to the task.

cartoon by Michael Leunig

Letting go of the idea of free will is both liberating and terrifying. As I watch the world devolve into fascism and nuclear brinksmanship, I long to believe this is just a temporary aberration in human behaviour, though I know it is not.

It’s pretty clear now that the bipartisan American PMC, goaded by the Pentagon and military-industrial complex (the one Eisenhower, the Republican president and war general warned us about), is so ashamed of its 60 years of endless and uninterrupted military and political blunders and failures, that it has doubled down and is now hell-bent on regime change in Russia and China even at the risk of nuclear war.

The parallel propaganda war, unlike its real wars, has been a stunning success: In a total reversal, most people in the US/NATO bloc now falsely believe it was the Americans, not the Russians, who were most responsible for defeating the Nazis in WW2, and now falsely believe that China presents an existential threat to their security. In Australia, for example, both oligopolistic newspaper chains have been running long series of Pentagon-scripted fear-mongering editorials calling for a return to compulsory military service for young Australians and preparations for war with China (its largest trading partner) in 2025. This while the US has secured absolute rights to use American military bases in Australia to assemble its missiles and other war arsenals ready to launch the war.

Sadly, this collective madness is just the result of how we dumb, ignorant, gullible humans have been conditioned all of our lives. It’s the ghastly result of all eight billion of us doing our best. A quote from Julian Jaynes comes to mind:

Animals are evolved; nervous systems and their mechanical reflexes increase in complexity; when some unspecified degree of nervous complexity is reached, consciousness appears, and so begins its futile course as a helpless spectator of cosmic events. What we do is completely controlled by the wiring diagram of the brain and its reflexes to external stimuli. Consciousness is nothing more than the heat given off by the wires, a mere epiphenomenon.

Consciousness can no more modify the working mechanism of the body or its behavior than can the whistle of a train modify its machinery or where it goes. Moan as it will, the tracks have long ago decided where the train will go. Consciousness is the melody that floats from the harp and cannot pluck its strings, the foam struck raging from the river that cannot change its course, the shadow that loyally walks step for step beside the pedestrian, but is quite unable to influence his journey.

The tracks have long ago determined where this train, the human experiment, was going to go, and all we can do is shrug and wish it had been otherwise.

Et in Terra Pax.  Sigh.

COLLAPSE WATCH

cartoon (thanks to Jae Mather for the link) (unable to find this online — neither Google image lens nor a search on the cartoonist’s name turns up anything)

I expect you don’t need to read any more articles about looming economic and ecological collapse. As has been explained here ad nauseam, systems collapse is accelerating, and nothing that anyone is doing is having any significant impact. The brief respite of La Niña has ended, so get ready for faster global warming. Otherwise, not much new to report.

Migrating to a low-tech future: The Honest Sorcerer, B, explores what the next decades will be like for most of us as we shift from an unsustainable economy of profligate waste, to a save-fix-and-scavenge economy.

The perpetual con of nuclear: Albert Bates explains how the old con about nuclear energy is being resurrected to try to sell nuclear fusion as a technotopian solution to energy problems. He also explains the accelerating nightmare of methane release into the atmosphere, partly thanks to fracking and the US bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines.

The vicious cycle of pesticide use: How pesticide use and climate collapse are advancing in lockstep. Thanks to Kavana Tree Bressen for the link.

LIVING BETTER

Calvin and Hobbes cartoon by Bill Watterson, who has a new adult fable book coming out

I have Stewart McDonald’s emails: Craig Murray totally undermines a Scottish MP-con-artist’s attempt to pin his incompetent leaking of his own personal information, on “Russians”.

A well-being economy: Interesting attempt to outline what an economy based on well-being rather than profit and growth, might look like.

The road to drug decriminalization: A long and important review and discussion of the complex challenges of combating toxic street drug poisonings; some of the Vancouver politicians really do get it. By contrast, a report on what Oregon and BC are doing, fails to mention the critical step of creating a safe supply.

The irrepressible Clare Daly: The Irish MEP is serving as a one-woman conscience for the entire European Community. Here she is again talking about EU silence on the US bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines.

Iran and Saudi Arabia reestablish ties: Brokered by China, the end to hostilities between the two leading Arab countries opens possibilities for the ending of their horrific proxy war in Yemen.

The struggles of the “buy-nothing” movement: A long and fascinating account of how the movement was grounded by attempts to wean itself off reliance on Facebook. Thanks to Kavana Tree Bressen for the link.

The need to save ecosystems, not species: Why endangered species designation and legislation misses the mark, using a ‘zoo’ mentality instead of a holistic one.

Bernie Sanders on capitalism: His heart really is in the right place, but he’s being ground up and spat out by the political system he’s trying to work within. Thanks to John Whiting for the link.

Lyz Lenz on the ERA: Lyz rants deliciously about how the US has given women their own ‘month’ (March), instead of equal rights and equal pay.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

Historical US attempts to bring about regime change — Map by HapHaxion , CC BY-SA 4.0, on wikimedia
Legend:    (purple) Organized or gave material/financial support to coup plotters/armed insurgents which failed to overthrow incumbent government   (orange) Organized or gave material/financial support to coup plotters/armed insurgents which overthrew incumbent government   (brown) Invaded/militarily intervened to enforce U.S. interests   (green) Allegedly interfered in elections on behalf of preferred candidate(s) or against non-preferred candidate(s). The map is very incomplete, notably omitting interventions in Venezuela, Yemen, Australia, Pakistan, and Ukraine. Not to mention the embargoes against many other countries. These interventions, which collectively have cost trillions of dollars and millions of lives, can just about all be characterized as military and political failures. (None of the US-installed replacement governments in countries in orange are still in power.)

Corpocracy, Imperialism & Fascism: Short takes (thanks to John Whiting for many of these links):

• Will China dump its codependency on the US and its dollar? The implications for the economy, and peace, would be enormous.
• Biden’s constant calls for nonviolence by protesters while condoning violence by police are asking for the impossible and the ahistorical.
• The US’ recent balloon hysteria just makes it look stupid.
• Zelenskyy admits deliberately sabotaging Minsk peace accord.
• US bombing of Nord Stream pipelines: Ray McGovern, Jeffrey Sachs, Aljazeera, Clare Daly (again), Sy Hersh followup interview, Yves Smith.
• Canada has ‘privatized’ much of its activities to McKinsey consulting.
• The role of Canada and the US in the recent Peru government overthrow.
• The negligence behind the toxic Ohio trail derailment.
• Why the US needs the rest of the world dependent on its dollars.
• Could both progressive and conservative voters both turn on the bipartisan PMC (spoiler: probably not).
• Is the Jan 6 investigation mostly just show-trials of deplorables while the true miscreants walk?
• Leader of now-banned Ukrainian leftist party decries thousands of street renamings and new monuments honouring Ukrainian Nazis.
• Feminists call for firing execrable warmonger Victoria Nuland.
• Kinder Morgan sold its half-built tar sands pipeline to the Government of Canada claiming it would cost in total $12B; the cost now stands at $31B and rising.
• Chomsky calls for peace, not escalation, in Ukraine. So do the Rage Against the War Machine protesters, including Dennis Kucinich. And the UK Stop the War coalition. And Craig Murray.
• Canadian governments lobbied the US for exemption from its anti-deforestation bill.
• Vancouver government cancels commitment to pay its workers a living wage (closed-door meeting of course).
• What average Russians think of the war in Ukraine (thanks to Paul Heft for the link).
• Historian Aurélien explains how US/NATO equipment and training are utterly unsuited to a local close-quarters war.
• The Silicon Valley Bank collapse: Why the bankrupt 16th largest bank in the US didn’t do anything different from what the 15 larger banks have done. Basically they’ve stopped making loans (too ‘risky’), and instead invest most depositors’ money in overpriced stocks and overpriced bonds, and they don’t devalue them on their balance sheet when those investments tank. The bank’s mostly-uninsured ‘clients’ want the government to pay their losses.

Propaganda, Censorship, Misinformation and Disinformation: Short takes:

• The context for the amped-up US anti-China campaign.
• NPR yet again debunks the lab leak theory.
• NPR also (seemingly alone in covering this) debunks the Havana Syndrome conspiracy theory. Now about those balloons…
• China protests its vilification at the hands of the US, with its long history of war crimes, coups, election interference, embargoes, and sanctions. The report was quickly dismissed as propaganda by virtually all western media, which provided no details on the contents of the report. But if you’re not afraid of who might be surveilling you, you can read it here.
• How Cochrane meta-analyses are being misused by anti-mask conspiracy theorists.
• How the media were played by anti-Trump groups in Trump-Russia ‘scandals’.
• You have to be trusted by the people you lie to. Interesting psychological exploration of when and how propaganda works.
• Undercover investigation reveals private Israeli company that has been providing weaponized disinformation technologies enabling its clients to interfere in elections for 20 years.
• John Whiting’s own lament on the demise of the media in the US and UK and beyond, and its impact on democracy; it was written back in 1995, and it rings even more true today.

FUN AND INSPIRATION

from the memebrary — artwork by the contemporary Polish artist Aleksandra Waliszewska

Disquiet: A lovely and challenging essay from Flat Caps about our relationship with nature, and how the ghosts of its loss haunt us.

Capital as cudgel: Rhyd Wildermuth reviews a book by Silvia Federici that suggests that capitalism, far from being a child of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, was actually a counterrevolution “that destroyed the possibilities that had emerged from the anti-feudal struggle — possibilities which, if realized, might have spared us the immense destruction of lives and the natural environment that has marked the advance of capitalist relations worldwide”.

But is it art?: Adam Gopnik explores what AI is good and not-so-good at. It’s hopeless at reasoning by metaphor and drawing on complex history, but it’s surprisingly good at producing works that meet just about all the definitions of good art.

From CoVid-19 to the senses of animals: NPR interviews Ed Yong, who won a Pulitzer for his early work on the pandemic, and has moved to exploring and documenting (in a new book, An Immense World) the astonishing sensory world of non-human animals.

The problem with particle physics: A funny and scathing review by Sabine Hossenfelder of what goes wrong in the sciences when it pays more to invent problems and imagine hypothetical solutions than it does to actually do reality-based work.

Goat yoga: My home town is offering afternoons doing yoga outdoors at a farm, surrounded by baby goats. Bus trip, wine and bowl of curry included. Ummmm!

Art from sea to sky: My artist friend Di is the subject of a new short documentary that follows her creation of a new series of paintings from conception to completion. Great look into the processes by which art gets made.

Most popular song each month since January 1980: You’re going to hate me if you start watching this video. It’s an hour long, with quick excerpts from about 500 chart-topping songs over the past 42 years. It’s hard to stop watching, as you groan through some dreck, and then suddenly “Hey I remember that; it wasn’t half bad.” The complete Spotify playlist is here.

THOUGHTS OF THE MONTH

from the memebrary

From Indrajit Samarajiva, on How we don’t live under capitalism:

When we talk about defeating Capitalism, the fact is that it has already lost. Yes money has the power of death over us, yes the inherent social contract of Capitalism is work or starve, but man does not live by bread alone. Though we may earn our bread by the sweat of our brow, we still share it with children we keep in the shade. We still split what we have with those that have nothing. We still give food (and energy) away joyfully, in ‘transactions’ Capitalism can make no sense of. Like birthday parties. Or weddings. All the ‘irrational’ things that make us more than ‘rational economic actors’. All the things that make us decent human beings.

From Dorianne Laux: Antilamentation:

Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook.
Not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication.
Not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punchline, the door, or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don’t regret those.
Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the living room couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.
You’ve walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs
window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied
of expectation. Relax. Don’t bother remembering
any of it. Let’s stop here, under the lit sign
on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.

Afghan children, from pxhere, CC0

Recently, the rather dim-witted right-wing leader of Canada’s Conservative party, Pierre Poilievre, whose elected representatives have been hobnobbing with the German neo-Fascist AfD party, announced a bid to overturn Canada’s new, tepid, right-to-die law. Sufferers of debilitating, excruciating, lifelong depression, he insisted, have no right to end their own lives. They should have to suffer until and unless they “get better”.

He wants the medical assistance in dying (MAID) law reversed to the extent it goes even one inch beyond patients with immediate, excruciating, advanced, terminal, physical diseases. That means, for example, that patients with early stage dementia cannot pre-authorize doctors to end their lives when their dementia later becomes horrific, because by then they are ‘mentally ill’ and hence ineligible for MAID. “There is always hope for someone to regain their health”, one Conservative senator asserted, calling for the law to be overturned.

I have been trying for 50 years to understand why right-wingers who don’t much like the idea of the government being involved in anything, seem so willing to interfere zealously with citizens’ decisions over their own bodies.

As usual, I start from the assumption that we’re all doing our best and we’ve all been biologically and culturally conditioned to believe and do what we do, rather than that those beliefs and actions are subject to our free will and control. I like to give people the benefit of the doubt.

When I looked at the anti-MAID advocates’ statements, I discovered the advocates mostly seem to fall into two camps: religious people who believe ending one’s life mercifully is against their god(s)’ will and hence immoral and/or evil; and shrinks (and a few other doctors) who believe that those suffering haven’t fully availed themselves of less drastic psychological and medical measures to deal with that suffering.

What’s going on here?, I wondered. And then it hit me: These are the people most likely to feel that MAID represents an admission of failure. The failure of religious fundamentalists to convince most citizens of the validity of their fervent moral beliefs, and the failure of shrinks (and doctors) to actually heal people suffering from chronic and excruciating mental (and physical) illness.

Why are we so afraid, and so unwilling, to admit failure, no matter what the cost to our society and our world? Part of it, I think, is shame. We hate to admit our incompetence, our inability to create a better world for ourselves and future generations. Our helplessness. Our gullibility. Seeing the world we believed in, falling apart, not working as it was supposed to. So of course we look for someone or something to shift the blame for that failure to. A lack of courage or perseverance. Laziness. Incompetence. Corruption. And those old conservative standbys, evil and insanity.

Part of our incapacity to admit failure also, I think, stems from fear — if I admit this was a failure, what else might I have to admit to being a failure? At what point is my worldview so shattered by acknowledging this failure that I am cast adrift, with no anchor to hold on to anymore? If I admit that psychiatry and meditation and 12-step programs won’t usually actually help with my mental illness or addiction, then what? If I admit to the abject failure of the 20-year-long staggeringly expensive US/NATO military adventure in Afghanistan, what might I have to admit about the failure of the west’s entire foreign policy and its judgement and treatment of the rest of the world’s people?

And I think there’s a second type of fear that underlies our incapacity to admit failure — the fear of the consequences of that failure. So, when it comes to MAID, will it lead to people just wanting to die because they’re tired of living, and want to be allowed to end their lives for no other reason? How awful would that be, rubbing our faces in our failure! And if we admit to the abject failure of most of our well-intentioned but astronomically-expensive and dysfunctional health systems to prevent and treat diseases to extend our healthy lives, then what are we going to do as the population ages and needs exponentially more services from them?

The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve realized that much, perhaps most of humans’ hate- and anger-fuelled behaviours and actions represent, at root, a refusal to admit failure.

I would say that the anti-abortion movement, for example, cannot bear to admit to the failure of of our political, social and economic systems to eliminate the enormous, never-ending, pressing need for abortions. And they refuse to admit to their failure to persuade their fellow citizens of the virtue of their absolutist moral views.

Nostalgia-fuelled admonitions to ‘MAGA’, I suggest, reflect a refusal to admit to past failures and a stubborn determination to repeat them. Likewise, the current warmongering of Cold War II zealots on both sides reflect a refusal to admit to the utter failures of both the Soviet bloc and the NATO bloc, neither of which has ever served any useful purpose to its members.

Our fear and loathing of those struggling with addiction, and of the unhoused, and of the staggering number of incarcerated people locked away uselessly for a lifetime, reflect, I believe, a refusal to admit to the complete failure of our programs, processes and systems to properly provide effective and urgently-needed care and treatment to those unable to care for themselves.

The frenzy of the west’s top-caste¹-led fury and disinformation aimed at Russia and China likewise belies, I think, an admission of failure that unipolar global control of the planet and its resources by ‘exceptional’ leaders in the US and its vassal states (in the collective interest of the planet, of course) is neither practicable nor wanted in most of the world, and that seventy years of relentless effort and propaganda to that end have simply not worked.

And they represent an admission of failure that untrammelled capitalism and massive US military/CIA adventurism are not only not the ultimate routes to “freedom and democracy for all”, but rather disastrously-flawed, unworkable and ecologically disastrous experiments that we would best end quickly.

But we have nothing to replace these failures with, and, for most, our livelihoods depend directly on these failed systems’ continuance. Small wonder, then, that the war belligerents, and the market fundamentalists and their adherents are doubling down, unwilling to admit to their failure and are instead encouraging us to stay the course and repeat our mistakes.

Watching the US Democrats cowed into condemning socialism as inherently “authoritarian” and “brutal” was heartbreaking. But like Republicans, they are unwilling to admit to the utter failure of America’s stalwart flirtation with extreme capitalism. Especially not to their bewildered constituents!

Likewise, climate and ecological collapse deniers are unwilling to admit to the catastrophic failure of the much-vaunted systems that have precipitated this collapse (remember “the green revolution”?), or to admit to the failure of magical ‘green’ solutions (like carbon capture) promised by starry-eyed technophile simpletons who understand nothing of the workings of complex systems.

I am always surprised at how much hot air as been expelled over the question of whether our accelerating ecological collapse was or is ‘human-caused’. If our ecological systems are crumbling and presenting us with an existential crisis, who the fuck cares who or what caused it? But now I see — it’s all about the admission of failure. It’s OK if we have to deal with crises, but don’t you dare suggest it was our own fault, a collective human failure. Shame on you!

And so it goes. Rather than admit to our abject failure to prevent tens of millions of deaths from a pandemic that had been predicted for decades and which we had lots of advance notice about, we would prefer to blame it all on government bungling or lab leak conspiracies or, depending on your point of view, on anti-vaxxers and human stupidity in general. Not our fault though! Someone else’s failure!

Take away the blame game, and you take away the shame. It’s no one’s fault, no one is to blame, and there’s nothing for anyone to be ashamed of. We are all doing our best. We are just another struggling species, eight billion mildly deranged monkeys, and certainly not the crown of creation. We can only do what we’ve been biologically and culturally conditioned to do, given the ever-changing circumstances of each moment.

But even if we move past the shame, we may still be incapable of admitting failure, because of fear of what other failures it might cause us to have to admit, or fear of the failure’s consequences. The fear of everything being out of our control (and out of the gods’ control) may be just too much to bear.

When I read about the decision of the Canadian government to freeze and seize the assets of Russian citizens held in Canadian banks at home and abroad, that fear arose for me in spades. I remember as a youth when my mail from ‘hostile’ countries was opened and inspected by the Canadian security authorities (I was an avid shortwave radio listener and got mail from all over the world.) I remember being photographed by a plainclothes RCMP officer in the early 1960s as I was going into the Socialist Book Store on Main Street in Winnipeg. I’ve learned what a hostile government can do to citizens if it fails to function in those citizens’ collective interest. So I wrote, in response to the CBC article on the government seizure (the CBC immediately censored and removed my comment):

We didn’t like the First Nations people so we stole their property. We didn’t like Canadians who came from countries we fought in WW2, so we stole their property and put them in camps. We didn’t like the Taliban so we sat idle as the US stole billions of dollars from Afghan bank accounts, some of it humanitarian aid funds desperately needed by their starving citizens, and gave it out to Americans. Now because we don’t like Russia we’ve legalized the theft of property from Russian citizens. Wonder what will happen if the government decides it doesn’t like us?

As I watch the steady advance of neofascism all over the planet in these troubled times, I am still not quite ready to admit to the failure of democracy, especially in Canada and the angry country to our south. The closer I get to acknowledging that failure, the more fearful I get. It’s not admitting that failure I’m afraid of; it’s the consequences of that failure that terrify me. I know people who have suffered atrocities at the hands of fascists, and whose families have been tortured or ‘disappeared’. You can’t blame anyone for refusing to admit that our political and economic systems are failing so quickly and so completely that we might soon be facing such atrocities ourselves.

I can also imagine myself, ten years from now, about the age my father (and his twin) were when they declined rapidly into an endless nightmare of rage and paranoia as dementia took hold of them. I am already often forgetting things, especially people’s names, and sometimes what I was just doing. I imagine myself, not improbably, headed down the same road he went. I am quite sure that even if the ghastly Conservatives don’t get elected, Canadians in my situation will still have no right to a death with dignity. I imagine I will be shackled to a cot “for my own safety” as the demons possess what is left of my destroyed mind. As I will then be insane, I imagine my “advance directive” for MAID will have no legal force and the doctors will just shrug and say to my family and friends that they’re doing all they can legally do. If I’m lucky, I will retain just enough sanity to refuse food and water. These are the consequences of failure.

Am I ashamed at these looming and continuing failures, ashamed of my own behaviours and those of Canada’s governments? Not a bit. We’re all doing our best, the only thing we can do. I am, of course, more than a little afraid of the suffering that will likely come as a consequence of these failures. And I certainly appreciate how we may all be incapable of admitting to these failures, because the shame and/or fear are just too much to bear.

But it’s interesting to observe just how powerful a role our not-so-simple incapacity to admit failure seems to play in what is unfolding these days.

1. Paul Heft suggested I define the term ‘top caste(s)’, since I use it often, rather than ‘upper class’ or ‘elite’, when describing those who, while not organized or coordinated, disproportionally make and affect political and economic decisions, and hoard most of the world’s wealth at the expense of others. So here’s my stab at a definition (thanks to Paul for several edits):

Caste is hereditary or acquired social rank, as recognized by one’s peers (and often by those of other castes), that brings with it unique, tacitly accepted privileges, status, wealth, recognition, access, respect, authority and opportunities not permitted or accessible by those of lower castes. Factors influencing one’s peer-perceived and peer-recognized caste may include, for example, in addition to one’s parents’ acknowledged caste and pedigree, one’s race and ethnicity, birthplace, workplace and other positions and titles, level and type of education, physical appearance and dress, physical stature and health, emotional health, wealth and income, behaviour and demeanour, choice of spouse, artistic and cultural tastes, memberships, location of seating in public events and public transportation, and the people with whom one associates and the extent of one’s connections to others in that peer caste and higher. Caste is not usually a formal recognition, and different people might perceive you to be a member of different castes, but any one person would likely perceive you to be a member of one particular caste — theirs or another (though in any community or society there may be a lot of castes, some more distinct than others). 

I try not to judge whether the existence of castes is a good or bad thing. All I know is that they exist, and have an enormous impact on our lives. How big is the ‘top caste’? I don’t know — it’s too amorphous and ever-changing a group to even guess. I do know that at one time in my life, for a brief few years, I was acknowledged (and, I confess, a bit flattered) to be part of it. And that I am no longer. 

Chart from Wikipedia by Derek Snider, CC-BY-SA 3.0

There is a lot of controversy about current experiments to decriminalize ‘hard’ drugs. Critics, and long-time supporters of the horrific “war on drugs”, argue that it’s a road to perdition, and that the only answer is to get users into ‘treatment’ (although no effective treatment exists), and incarcerate them as long as they refuse treatment, along with their pushers.

That perspective reflects a catholic view of human nature — we are all sinners who need to be coerced to follow a virtuous path and punished if we refuse to follow it. If we give up the war, they believe, the devil and anarchy will take over the planet. Repent thy sins or face god’s wrath, as exercised by his devout followers. They offer Vancouver’s Downtown East Side as proof of that belief, as a warning.

Their belief, as with most religious dogma, is that every transgression is a slippery slope. Give the sinners this, and next they’ll want that.

So what do users of these substances, and opponents of the endless war on drugs, ultimately want? There is of course no one answer to this, but some want only to be left alone. Others want the government to meet their basic needs, which for them, now, includes an affordable, legal, safe supply of the drugs they’re addicted to.

Those who are addicted to nicotine and alcohol already have this, though the government sees fit to punish those addicted to these substances through massive hidden taxes that often deprive users of the money they need to keep themselves and their families healthy and comfortable. Often the result is broken homes, homelessness, and an increase in crime and illness — a result that likely stems more from financial instability and stress than from behaviours “under the influence”.

It could be argued that we are even more hypocritical in our attitude to those addicted to sugar, salt, and saturated fats, which are packed into products that take up more than half of the space in supermarkets that is not already taken up by alcohol, and which sicken and kill far more people than all other drugs put together. Products catering to these addictions are not only freely available, they are massively subsidized, falsely advertised as nutritious, and openly marketed to children.

Hospitals and homes are filled with people with diabetes, heart diseases, cancers, immune-system disorders and other chronic and wasting diseases, unable to work, live ‘normal’ lives and look after themselves and their families — all because they are addicted to the unhealthy substances in our food supply.

So why the double standard? Perhaps it’s because consumption of these drugs masquerades as socially acceptable behaviour. We all have to eat and drink, right? What’s the harm in getting a little pleasure, a little buzz, from something we have to do anyway? With bars on almost every street-corner, especially in poorer and more oppressed neighbourhoods, alcohol is almost unavoidable.

I’m not cynical enough to believe we tolerate the marketing of unhealthy addictive substances and poisons just because they’re profitable. There has to be a deeper reason than that. I wonder if this is the pressure-release valve that we tacitly recognize our high-stress, crowded, gruelling, unnatural, suffering-filled modern way of life needs to prevent the citizenry blowing up and just refusing to continue supporting our oppressive, unhealthy, and grossly-unequal civilization?

This is a complex phenomenon, and the resulting social behaviours weren’t and aren’t prescribed, directed, caused or controlled by any group in our society. We get hooked on our particular drugs, from caffeine to fentanyl and from TV to video games to porn, because they give us pleasure and promise to give us more if we keep using them. We are mostly not even conscious of this happening. Evolution apparently drives us to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, so we pursue the former and avoid or sedate ourselves against the latter. Addiction is just conditioning with a positive feedback loop.

What offends our puritan culture is not the exercise of our conditioned evolutionary instinct, but exercising it in a way that casts our civilization culture in a bad light. If we’re rich, we can hide our socially unacceptable addictive behaviours behind the closed doors of our homes. But if we’re poor, they get exercised instead in public — in bars and bathrooms, and in the streets and back alleys. We tacitly accept the need to feed our addictions, but we don’t want to explicitly acknowledge or know about them, and don’t want to see them in public. This, of course, is not about addiction, but about shame.

It is also about fear — of the unknown, and of scary, dysfunctional public behaviour. It’s fear, for example, that underlies much of the opposition to legalizing psychotropic drugs. What will this person unpredictably do next, that could harm themselves, or me? That fear is understandable, and applies just as much to dealing with the behaviour of people intoxicated with alcohol. We want users of such substances removed from public spaces in the interest of public safety. While providing affordable, safe street drugs won’t solve that problem, it’s a problem we’re already dealing with with alcohol.

Our shame at seeing fentanyl or methamphetamine users (or, increasingly, those using both opioids and stimulants at once) in the streets, sometimes going through withdrawal, is also understandable. We feel ashamed for them, and for the circumstances that have led to their misery that “shouldn’t ever have to arise” in a healthy society.

A safe, legal, affordable, properly labeled drug supply would certainly help reduce poisonings and the resultant staggering death toll, but it’s questionable whether visible ‘hard’ drug use in public places would change, any more than regulated alcohol sales could have been expected to reduce public drunkenness. And if the picture on the streets is unchanged, the program will inevitably be labelled a failure by critics, with calls for its cancellation and a return to mandatory ‘treatment’ and incarceration.

So while I believe that we should provide a safe, legal, affordable, regulated supply of drugs that people are going to take anyway, just to reduce the carnage of deaths and hospitalizations from poisoned street drugs, I don’t think that’s going to change the public behaviours that induce such shame and fear in the rest of us.

If we addressed the social factors underlying the craving for drugs to escape the pain and misery of many people’s existence — chronic poverty, homelessness, stress, the lack of meaningful work, financial anxiety, and chronic illness just for a start — it would certainly have a dramatic effect. But we might as well wish for the moon and the stars. The existing economic and political systems that have led to these chronic social problems are well-entrenched and digging in their heels while teetering on the edge of collapse. We can’t hope to reform them.

People, especially those facing profound and chronic stress, take opioids and stimulants for the same reasons people use alcohol and nicotine, and for the same reasons we enjoy sugar, salt and saturated fats in our diet — they invoke chemical reactions in our bodies (dopamine etc) that increase our pleasure and sedate and distract from our pain.

This is biologically (and, to a lesser degree, culturally) conditioned behaviour that has evolved over millions of years for our benefit — sugars, salts and fats, for example, are relatively scarce in the natural world, and are essential in small quantities to our health, so it’s no wonder we crave them. It’s sheer hubris to think that we can change our addictions through any ‘treatment’ or ‘reprogramming’ activity, as the utter failure of programs trying to do this, despite mammoth public and private funding, attests. And it’s equally hubristic to think we are going to change the utterly broken systems that have given rise to our now-ubiquitous, unhealthy addictions.

I suspect that one of the reasons conservatives in particular oppose the legalization of ‘hard’ drugs, is their acknowledgement that life in our modern civilized world is really hard and stressful, and so they fear that if these drugs were legalized, ‘everyone’ would be taking them, and our society would fall apart. Well, guess what, folks, it’s already falling apart. Legalizing alcohol didn’t make it fall apart any faster. And a lot of drugs, including heroin and cocaine, used to be legal, and society didn’t fall apart then.

I’m not much interested in trying to change people’s behaviours — it’s pretty clear to me that laws, jails, bribes, pleas, threats, and therapies don’t change our behaviours, at least not for long. Our species, IMO, just isn’t meant to live this way. We live in a global culture that produces so little pleasure and causes so much pain. Can’t blame anyone for wanting a brief and temporary respite from it.

A footnote thought: It’s intriguing that fans of the ‘privatization of everything’ haven’t taken note of what’s happened with the ‘private sector’ controlling the sale of illicit drugs — gangsterism, violence, bribery, extortion, price-fixing and price-gouging, tampering, deceptive marketing, fraud, money-laundering, oligopoly, negligence, and poor quality control. The ‘free market’ at work.

Yes, this is a bit of a rant.

The Underhoused: Tent cities in (upper left) Vancouver BC, (upper right) Portland OR, and (lower right) new tents on a street in Nanaimo BC. The Vancouver site was bulldozed and converted to a playground. A new Portland tent city site has been installed by the local government, to mixed reviews. The original Nanaimo tent city site was bulldozed and replaced with “temporary” housing in construction trailers, and no one is happy. The building lower left is one of 2500 public housing “projects” run by New York’s NYCHA, housing nearly 400,000 people; the authority is near bankruptcy and many of the facilities are plagued with problems rendering them close to uninhabitable. 

The Tyee recently ran an article on the need for Vacancy Controls — the extension of rent controls to houses and apartments that are temporarily vacant. This would prevent renovictions and other forms of price-gouging and abuse by property owners in ridiculously overheated housing markets like Vancouver’s.

A shill for landlords and real estate speculators evidently screamed bloody murder and demanded an ‘equal time’ piece rebutting the proposal, which for some reason they gave him.

It made for discouraging reading. Vacancy Controls were, the opponent said, meddling in the market, depriving property owners of ‘market’ incentives to provide and upgrade rental housing. He wanted welfare instead — government handouts for those extremely impoverished to enable them to pay, in theory, for basic affordable housing. Anything else was meddling with property owners’ rights.

I guess he must be rich and out of touch with middle-class citizens. The median annual family income in Vancouver is $72,000 before taxes (works out to about $25/hr vs minimum wage of about $15/hr); that’s $51,000 after taxes. The median annual rent for a 2-bedroom home in Vancouver is $44,000 plus utilities. Basically less than one in five families working in Vancouver can (according to bank guidelines) afford to rent in Vancouver, and rents outside the city are now only marginally lower. These rents are completely unsustainable, and they’re increasing by 20% per year.

My response was:

When the necessities of life become unaffordable to a large proportion of the population, it is the absolute duty of all levels of government to enact laws to fix the problem. That doesn’t mean tinkering with the market, it means a massive program to construct a million or more quality housing units across Canada, and rent them out at affordable rates, even if that isn’t “profitable”. That’s what governments are for, and other countries have successfully done this. It’s really that simple.

Fifty or sixty years ago, price and rent controls were considered by most Canadians to be a reasonable way to deal with unaffordable housing and price-gouging, and any writer who wanted the ‘market’ to decide what rents should be, untrammelled, would have been loudly booed. But since then, the Overton window of accepted thought has shifted and shrunk, thanks to relentless conservative and right-libertarian propaganda, to the point that rent controls are considered by many if not most to be an unrealistic, discredited, socialist scheme.

I continue to believe, unfashionably now, that ensuring essential goods and services are available and affordable to all citizens is the fundamental purpose of government. Of course that is a socialistic idea. It also works. Raw, unregulated capitalism, which is the system we have now, and which we have been brainwashed to accept as the only system that has ever worked, is, by contrast, completely unworkable, good only for stealing resources and property from poor citizens, foreign countries, and future generations, and redirecting it to the very top caste of the elite of imperial nations — aka the 1% or the PMC.

Yet today, the right has so thoroughly smeared and discredited governments and public agencies and institutions, that even the lion’s share of progressives eschew expecting or requiring governments to do anything for their citizens; they’re increasingly viewed as corrupt, incompetent, obsessed with surveillance of citizens, and either totally unnecessary or a barely necessary evil.

But they’re not. Many studies over the past decades have shown that government and government agencies are, when they are not crippled and sabotaged by politicians, actually more efficient at providing goods and services than private corporations of similar size and scale. (John Ralston Saul’s books make this point eloquently.)

Furthermore, the criticism that governments simply cannot “afford” to ensure citizens have access to affordable essential goods and services is hogwash. The costs of dealing with the consequences of millions of people without secure, livable homes, without nutritious food, without access to essential health care, without a quality education, without reliable public infrastructure, and without adequate energy resources, is many, many times higher than the cost the government would incur to directly ensure these essential goods and services were available to all. And as depression-era programs have shown, when governments really are pressed to provide these goods and services, they suddenly discover they can afford to do so, and cannot afford not to do so.

Of course, this means taxes on the rich to pay for them. That is, taxes on the top caste who now own most governments, thanks to lax regulation, lax enforcement, heinous political funding rules, and corrupt and incompetent judiciaries.

And provision of such services would probably mean that there wouldn’t be money for wars and other forms of foreign military and political interference. What a tragedy, eh?

So I suppose I have to outline what government is for, in kind of theoretical terms, since it is highly unlikely that the top caste will cede its control and influence and allow governments to actually do their job.

I believe the government should authorize and control the construction and maintenance of millions of units of safe, comfortable, ecologically sound housing, and offer them at subsidized prices that enable all citizens to afford decent housing without spending more than 30% of their income on them. That would drive down the prices of units currently being built and rented by private developers. Maximum rental prices based on home size and local costs of living should be instituted to make more units affordable, and homes other than principal residences that are not rented out should be heavily taxed to bring them into the rental market or encourage the owner to sell them.

Food and energy are the two other essentials that should be governed by price caps and, in the case of energy, limited rationing against egregious excess usage. Foods included in national nutritional guidelines should be subsidized so that they are significantly less expensive than junk foods. Food and energy oligopolies should be broken up.

Universal and comprehensive health care and quality education including university should be free for everyone.

Essential public infrastructure — water, sewer, power, public transportation, communication, roads etc — should be maintained everywhere at minimum standards established by engineering and usage reports, with no delays or deferrals permitted.

And there should be a guaranteed annual income for all, based on living costs, and administered through the tax system (as a ‘negative income tax’). No one should have to live with the burden of debts exceeding the value of their assets, and debt jubilees and strict interest rate caps and anti-usury laws need to be reintroduced.

We could, theoretically, do this. Parts of it have been implemented throughout the world, repeatedly and successfully. We can afford it. We can’t afford not to do it. But with our economic, political and, increasingly, our social systems in an ever-growing state of collapse, we won’t do this. Nevertheless, regardless of what conservatives and right-libertarians may tell you, it’s not impossible.

This is, after all, what government is for. To ensure that the essential needs of its citizens are met, full stop. We seem to have forgotten.

Jeremy Corbyn before the smear campaign and purge of leftists from the UK Labour Party; unlike Jeremy, his former party now supports escalation of the Ukraine war: photo by Sophie J Brown, CC-BY-SA 3.0 

Everywhere you look in the Euro-American nations of the world, you can see the left in retreat, in shambles, in disarray, and embroiled in internal conflict:

• In the US, Bernie Sanders and The Squad were forced to take back their call for a negotiated peace in Ukraine, because the warmongers controlling the Democratic Party wouldn’t stand for it.
• Bernie has acknowledged that universal health care, which most Euro-American nations have had for years, is never going to happen there. And for the first time, a majority of Canadians are now willing to accept that privatization of their health care system, and its replacement with a two-tier system, one for the rich and the other for the rest, is inevitable here as well. After all, that’s what “the market” wants!
• Leftists’ energies to use government regulation, laws and taxes to reduce inequality and provide essential social services have been sapped from within and without by ideologically anti-government elements who think everything government does is necessarily evil, suspect and an infringement on “individual rights”.
• The UK Labour party, stripped of all its leftists in the anti-Jeremy Corbyn witch hunt, is now accepting the necessity of privatization of the once-venerable NHS.
• The Scottish National Party has been taken over by a right-wing anti-democratic group that has abandoned its commitment to Scottish independence.
• The environmental movement just about everywhere has lost all its momentum thanks to identity politics. Its recent abandonment of direct action (partly because that apparently discriminates against members not able to participate in such actions) and its subordination of urgent climate action priorities to feel-good issues of “social justice” and “climate reparations” have essentially destroyed the movement.
• The Greens in Germany have abandoned ecological protection and become the unofficial War Party in that country, advocating for expansion of the war in Ukraine.
• The Greens in Canada have imploded when their leader purged all senior members who supported BDS activities and banned those supporting BDS from running for leadership.
• The BC NDP (provincial Labour) party is supporting massive LNG fracking, pipelines and precarious tanker exports, and ecologically disastrous mega-dam projects, and has continued the destruction of the province’s old growth forests. The only candidate who challenged these positions in a recent leadership race was disqualified by the party brass on a technicality.
• Self-styled progressives in the US largely support the continuation of the war in Ukraine, and many also now support nuclear brinksmanship through US/Pentagon/CIA/NATO efforts to bring about regime change in both Russia and China, and also favour stricter immigration laws and penalties.
• Whistle-blowers, who in the Vietnam War era were celebrated as truth-tellers and heroes, are now quickly imprisoned or exiled. Leftists who espouse beliefs unpopular with, or too complex for, the media’s corporate sponsors and ‘average readers’, are now banned from their pages. Fact-free and evidence-free right-wing propaganda has taken their place, so citizens unable to spend an inordinate amount of time delving into alternative media (some of it infiltrated by the same propagandists) simply give up on knowing what is really going on.

Those of us who can remember truly progressive, activist, environmentalist leaders who actually got elected, who received a lot of uncensored media coverage, and who at least tried to fight for action to deal with the polycrisis and the commensurate systems collapses and extinctions we are now facing, have to wonder: What in the world went wrong?

My sense is that the left utterly lost a fiercely-fought PR war for the “hearts and minds” of citizens that began in the mid-1960s and continues today. That happened for three reasons: (1) the population is now far less informed about history, current events and politics than they were in the 1960s, and hence far more vulnerable to groupthink, mis- and dis-information; (2) new technologies and new media have vastly increased the capacity of spinmeisters to shift and alter public opinion; and (3) the right has exploited (1) and (2) to their advantage, while the left assumed that most people would be ‘like them’ and strive to be informed and to uncover the truth no matter what.

We are, after all, emotional creatures more than intellectual ones, and our beliefs represent what we have been conditioned to feel, more than what we have been conditioned to think. More than we’d like to admit, we are motivated by fear, righteous indignation, and primal hatred, anger and resentment, often more than by rational argument.

The Professional-Managerial Caste (PMC) which controlled the centrist parties and centrist (so-called “liberal”) media since the 1960s have now abandoned their progressive principles in a desperate struggle to hold on to power and influence as the right has swept up most of the corporate political donations and hence political control over the rest of the apparatus of state (intelligence, military, police, lobbyists, media, churches, more recently schools, etc).

As a dumbed-down populace abandoned progressive principles that were bedrock in the 1960s, the PMC shifted hard right to try to pander to them, and to the corporate donors on which their wealth and power ultimately depends. In the process, the PMC have now become pro-war, anti-tax, anti-regulation, anti-government advocates substantially indistinguishable from the right-wing parties and media, other than in style and physical appearance, and as a result they have been abandoned by many disgusted progressives who now have to hold their noses to vote for them for fear that even-more right-wing parties will sweep them out of office.

There is no solution for this. It’s far too late to undo sixty years of persistent, clever, but uncoordinated manipulation of citizens who are now too dumb to know they’ve been had, and are continuing to be had every day, now by all the mainstream parties and media voices telling them variations of the same lies (“Russia bad/evil — torture babies; yes of course but China worse/eviler — lab leak, lab leak!*”).

The prognosis is not good — economic and political collapse are now likely to happen sooner than they would have had more reasonable voices prevailed, and social collapse is now more likely to accompany them. If we’re able to avoid nuclear annihilation, by the time ecological collapse weighs in, our civilization will almost surely already be in tatters, and no coordinated response to it will be possible.

If you’re a true progressive — a believer that peace is always the answer and war never is; a believer that a healthy society is free of both billionaires and paupers; a believer that government has an essential role to play in providing essential goods and services to all and curtailing the excesses of corrupting power; and a believer that we’re all trying to do our best, not our worst, for and to each other — then I think you’ll have to content yourself with knowing what was and is best for the human species, rather than influencing how the human experiment on this planet is actually going to play out.

Tragic, though. It was a really good idea. Turned out we weren’t quite able to make it work in practice. But a nice try nevertheless.

* The latest WSJ/DOE crap about the lab leak was perpetrated by Michael Gordon, the very same right-wing zealot who sold the world on the lie that Iraq had WMD, in order to garner support for the atrocity of the Iraq War. I suspect that this new ‘revelation’ is part of the ongoing CIA/Pentagon campaign to whip up racist anti-Chinese fervour to support a war against China in the next year or so. Unlike the Nord Stream revelations, Gordon’s ‘opinion’ piece was immediately picked up by the NYT and hundreds of other faithful scribes of CIA/Pentagon propaganda. Even Edward Snowden got sucked in by it.

This is #14 in a series of month-end reflections on the state of the world, and other things that come to mind, as I walk and hike in my local community.

I am walking toward the city’s small sports stadium, which, except in those rare times when an event is in progress, is open for use by the public, and is a place for practice.

In the elevator, on the way down from my apartment, I meet a woman accompanied by a small, anxious-looking dog wrapped in a winter coat. When I ask the woman about the dog, she looks rather apologetic and says:

“Oh, it’s not my dog, really. Her owner, my friend and neighbour, is now bedridden and not able to take her for walks. It’s the least I can do. Poor dog is 17 years old, and deaf and blind now, but once she’s navigated out the elevator she’s in her element, and she loves to sniff everything outside. When she dies, I don’t know what my friend is going to do. The two of them are inseparable. She has a little ramp to get up onto the bed, and spends almost all her time curled up with her person, sleeping and getting pets. They have a love that I don’t think many people could ever understand.”

She’s tearing up a bit, and so am I. Just another small grace, these walks, these stories, happening all around us that we never learn about. I wave to the dog-walker and head north.

I think about the famous commencement speech by David Foster-Wallace, about how so much depends on how and what we pay attention to. He said:

“Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience… [long, funny, grim story about having to do ghastly, infuriating grocery shopping at the end of a mind-numbing day at work].

“The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it’s not impossible that some of these people in SUV’s have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he’s in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in his way…

“Most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness.

“Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.”

I arrive at the little stadium, having made my way past the many numbered sports fields, mostly occupied now by practicing girls’ teams, since it’s not “prime time” for boys’ practices and games. I maneuver onto the eight-lane track through the runners and walkers, and begin my daily half-hour jog. I smile at the metaphor of all these people, going around and around in circles, getting nowhere. When the weather’s bad, I do my run on the gym’s treadmill instead, where it’s the belt that goes in circles.

There’s a slightly-overweight boy walking mid-way between the lanes marked for running and those marked for walking. As he comes up behind a bevy of chattering girls roughly his age jogging slowly on the outermost of the ‘running’ lanes, he slides over into the innermost lane, puffs himself up, and sprints past them. I laugh. I’ve seen him before, and, as I expected, as soon as he’s around the curve from the girls, he swings back into the walking lanes, gasping.

I think about the crow outside my window who regularly drops a pebble in midair and then dives down to grab it in his beak, only to soar up and repeat the exercise over and over. Showing off to potential mates, or just practicing? Or just doing it for the sheer fun of it? Unlike the gasping boy on the track, the crow need not invent a story of what might be possible if he plays his cards right, and says the right words to the right girl at the right moment.

There is an older couple ambling, hand in hand, along the walking lanes of the track. She keeps shooing him on ahead, saying, in some universal language: “Go on now; you don’t have to wait for me. I am only slowing you down.” But he refuses; of course, she is not slowing him down. They are like two cars on the same train, hitched. Without her, he would quickly go ‘off the rails’. At least that is my story. Does she know this, I wonder? And does he know how to tell her?

Unlike Mr Foster-Wallace, I don’t believe we have any control or choice over what or how we think, or what we notice. Our conditioning determines what we think and notice and do, and whether we are or are not self-aware enough and motivated enough to see or think about things differently. We may be conditioned to see others compassionately, believing that we’re all doing our best, and, as the famous quote in the photo above puts it, exercise the kindness that comes from understanding humans’ endless, tragic and ubiquitous struggles.

Or we may be conditioned to become inured to caring about others, because it’s just too much sadness and sorrow to bear, and because trying to care when we can’t, paralyzes us into despair, callousness and indifference.

Both kinds of conditioning are perfectly understandable. No argument, no intervention, can make someone care when they can’t.

After a year of gentle rehab, I have finally recovered the ability to run, for an extended period, without pain or exhaustion. I don’t know why this is such an important capacity to me, such a core part of my self’s identity, but it is. Perhaps I still believe I am no use to the world broken.

As I run, I watch the practice going on in the field in the centre of the track. It’s a girls’ field lacrosse practice, with a sizeable group of young teens for such a male-dominated sport. Unlike the boys’ game, and like ice hockey, women’s lacrosse is non-contact, and as such it’s a joy to watch — faster, more elegant and more strategic than the body-damaging, penalty-ridden, more discontinuous men’s game.

I am astonished by the intensity of the practice, the concentration and obvious care that goes into their repetition and learning of moves. This is serious play, and a commitment to the kind of rigorous, patient practice that makes so much of a difference in so many fields of human endeavour.

Practice, it seems, is a bit out of fashion these days. In the workplace, it’s now become too expensive (ie too profit-suppressing) to provide time and space to let people learn, and make mistakes, on the job, so we expect their schooling to give workers all the practice they need to be competent, or perhaps extraordinary. But they don’t get it in the educational system either.

For most, I fear, developing competence in human endeavours, from gardening to parenting and from coding to business and political governance, is now a matter of fake-it-’til-you-make-it, and if you fail, well, try the same approach in some other field. Perhaps as a result, there is a huge, and unnecessary, amount of failure, that ultimately costs us more than the investment in practice up-front would cost. But we no longer dare think that far ahead. Why practice when the world is fucked?

We shouldn’t be surprised, then, that in writing, in music, in diplomacy, in the media, and in business “management” we are now surrounded by hacks, dilettantes and incompetents who believe their diploma or their ‘natural gift’ gives them everything they need to be brilliant, without the need for practice.

Practice is, after all, tedious and exhausting. If it’s done badly, it will merely reinforce errors and bad habits. It can be discouraging. But it is essential. The lack of practice in so many aspects of our society shows up in the mediocrity of our art, music and literature, the utter incompetence of most organizational and political ‘leaders’, and the lack of innovation in technology and the sciences.

I shake my head and extract myself from this rant-inside-my-head, and simply admire the intensity and perseverance of the young lacrosse players. They remind me of the skateboarders that I see every place where there is a ramp or a curb or an unimpeded stretch of concrete. They show us that practice is ultimately its own reward, and that sometimes, despite everything, people will be conditioned to be willing to practice, and practice, and practice — until they can do, easily, what they once thought impossible.

I just hope that these young lacrosse players will be spared from the epidemic of abuse, psychopathy, hazing, debilitating injury, and cheating that has ruined most ‘professional’ and many amateur sports and destroyed so many young bodies and young lives.

Walking home, now, beneath the overhead skytrain tracks, I come upon a guy sitting at a concrete table in the midst of the wide walkway. He has his bicycle upside down on the ground beside him, much of it dismantled, and there are dozens of parts organized neatly on the table where he’s working with a cloth and a small toolkit. He is singing, and smiles at me as I pass. I have no doubt that he will soon have reassembled all these mysterious parts into a precisely engineered whole, and will zip by me before I get home.

I think back to last weekend’s Bowen Island Fix-it Fair, where my friend Paola Qualizza and her husband organized a dozen volunteer repairers of electronics, musical instruments, bicycles, clothing and furniture to spend three hours fixing close to a hundred odd items that the islanders brought in. Many of the fixers took home items they didn’t get around to fixing in the allotted time. Several people came in, toolboxes and sewing machines in hand, just to help the fixers, impromptu. Others came in, empty-handed, just to watch and ask questions and learn how to fix things themselves.

We’ve been doing this, twice a year, for nearly a decade, and it keeps growing. I just sat at the entrance, smiling and greeting people as they came in, and marvelling.

Mid-way through the event, a young man carrying a baby in a soft (“SSC”) carrier took the baby into the men’s washroom, drew down the baby change table, and quickly and skilfully changed the baby, chatting away to it the entire time.

A few minutes later, I saw a teenaged boy, with his apparently-repaired skateboard under his arm, stride out of the school gym where the event was held. His black hoodie, in large letters, read: “Be gentle, man!”

It’s a magical event.

So now I’ve made it home. The Amazon delivery guy is struggling at the front door of the apartment building, dragging a full mega-bag of parcels, each to be delivered to the recipient’s door. I hold the door open for him, since his load is too awkward and heavy to haul to the door before the 5-second opening click ends. I thank him for doing his thankless, ghastly job. As I watch him juggle several devices and plan out his delivery, I realize that he, too, is learning to be really good at what he does, through practice. There was no manual that taught him to be so competent.

Beneath the hardened exteriors of so many of the people we meet, there are endless stories of grief, of shame, of sorrow, of fear and anxiety and helpless rage and hopelessness and struggle. Mostly we dare not tell them, or even hear them. We cannot reveal ourselves to be that vulnerable to the rest of us eight billion mildly deranged monkeys, all of us pacing our cages and wondering what the next uncertain day will bring.

Yet the world is full of small graces, when our absurdly busy lives and relentless conditioning let us take the time to notice them.

Back in my apartment, I make a cup of tea, and look out the window in the falling dark. I nod and quietly thank those whose many small actions of kindness and compassion are never noticed, and those whose unrecognized, practiced competence makes our world a slightly better place, and its monkeys a tiny bit less deranged.

(Another post on political theory)

The late David Graeber talks with Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, image from London Real (2015)

The adjective ‘preterite’ (rhymes with the adjective ‘confederate’) is an ancient word referring to ‘that which has been passed over’.

In his recent retrospective review of Thomas Pynchon’s Ulyssean novel Gravity’s Rainbow, writer Aurélien describes how the term is used (extensively) in that book. I’ve been using the term ‘precariat’, referring to people who live their lives in a state of permanent precarity (scarcity, uncertainty, and imminent danger of loss). But Aurélien’s use of the term ‘preterite’, meaning those who have been or are being forgotten, lost, passed over, damned by the gods, seems equally if not more à propos. They (we?) are the losers in an increasingly-desperate rats-in-a-cage game of survival in a time of current or looming collapse and obscene inequality.

Perhaps the precariat is also (to coin a word) the preteriat? Or perhaps the preteriat is a much larger group, encompassing both the precariat and those who don’t yet realize just how vulnerable and helpless they (we?) are as collapse deepens. All those who are being and will be ‘passed over’.

Aurélien describes the preterite as “ordinary people, mostly reasonably good, mostly reasonably honourable, trying to do their best in a world where power lies elsewhere”.

Gravity’s Rainbow uses the term in this sense of “the multitudes who are passed over by God and History”, in apposition to the “elite”, the chosen. Thomas Pynchon also uses the term as a form of wordplay: Gravity’s rainbow of the title, is, after all, a reference to the arc of a missile, an arc that ‘passes over’ those below it.

Regardless of what you make of the novel, the term is an intriguing metaphor and perhaps a useful label for the increasing proportion of the world unlikely to survive our civilization’s collapse. This mass of humanity spans the globe and the political spectrum. It’s a label that many of those who fall under its umbrella would shudder to share with others who fit the definition, for whom they feel no affinity. They (we?) are united only to the extent we are, if we are willing to admit it, the losers in this increasingly cut-throat game of musical chairs. But what better strategy for the elite than to condition the preteriat to loathe each other by focusing on our differences from each other?

It is doubtful that the preteriat could ever unite enough to rally each other and call for an end to our deference and fealty to this small, quiet, disorganized, self-absorbed elite — privileged self-proclaimed ‘leaders’ ultimately preoccupied only with themselves and their self-aggrandizement.

But it’s interesting and amusing to imagine. Picture the rabble of left and right, the woke and the ignorant, the racialized and the racists, the disaffected, idealistic young and the cynical, embittered old, together, shouting, OWS-style…

À bas the elites, the celebrities, the obscenely rich, the do-nothing heirs, the worthless scions, the smug C-suite circle-jerkers, the media barons, the new robber barons, the pompous bone-headed tech billionaires living off corporate and military-industrial welfare, the corrupt psychopaths whizzing through the military/industrial/financial/government suites’ revolving doors extorting taxpayers’ money, paid for through cynical political campaign contributions, and all the rest of the professional-managerial caste (PMC) (and it’s a caste, not a class)! Aux barricades!

On the ramparts of this bizarre coalition of the passed-over, a rebellion would begin — against the babied, coddled, endlessly-subsidized rich whose parents bought and bribed universities to get them prestige university admission, and degrees and jobs they could never have obtained on their own merits, along with the commensurate deferment of military service. Not to mention zero inheritance tax. This is not anti-intellectual rebellion. It is anti-alphas, anti-top-caste fuckery.

You might be a member of the preteriat if:

• You have to do work you hate just to survive
• You would be in deep shit if you got a sudden unexpected bill for $10,000, or if your net worth, excluding the precarious equity in your home, is less than $100,000, or if a stock market crash would wipe out your pension and force you back to work in a society in which you are now too old and weak to be employable
• You are in any of the categories of poor, dumb shits (thanks to our crumbling education systems) that Hilary Clinton would consider “deplorables”
• You haven’t eagerly embraced the US/NATO goal of crushing and bringing about regime change in Russia and China so that its wealth can be stolen and hoarded (and not for you)
• You work for less than $35/hour, or have to work two jobs, or more than 50 hours/week, just to get by
• You have never, and could never, get a job, a promotion, a military deferment, or a special deal on something, simply by pulling strings with your, or your family’s, connections
• You could never afford to fly “business” class
• You don’t own your own home outright
• You have committed the sin of being poor, sick, uneducated, or homeless
• You actually pay taxes, since you don’t qualify for the tax credits reserved for the ultra-rich

If you are, perhaps unknowingly, a member of the preteriat, then beware:

• When economic and/or ecological crises hit, you’ll be abandoned and left to your own devices. The cupboard will have been pre-emptively emptied.
• The PMC/elite are quietly buying up well-secured properties in ‘safe haven’ locations like New Zealand, that you cannot afford and in which you are not welcome except as an obedient labourer.
• The US and its vassal states are working fiercely to become the world’s unipolar nuclear power and effective owner of all the world’s natural resource stocks, and controller of all the world’s information media. Consider why they might be doing that. (Oh, wait, that would be a conspiracy theory — never mind.)
• There are lots of churches ready to tell you you will be rewarded in the afterlife for your sacrifice and obedience in this one. Good luck with that.

We’re all doing our best. The ill-defined and utterly disorganized PMC/elite are scared and bewildered about what’s happening, just like the rest of us. They’re not evil, or any more insane than the rest of us. If we were in their shoes, we’d probably be doing just what they’re doing.

There isn’t going to be a caste war. That isn’t how nature works, and it isn’t how human societies have ever worked.

Ironically, for all their hoarding, the PMC/elite are no more likely to survive this Long Emergency than the preteriat. In the long run (and this will take decades or more to play out) the survivors will be those with strong communities with collective know-how (practical, agricultural, ecological, social, useful-stuff-making and fixing know-how, not military or managerial), not those with wealth, resources and power.

So thanks to Aurélien for the new term, for a huge and growing group that no one wants to be a part of. I think it’s a useful, and needed, addition to the vocabulary of collapse.

image from rawpixel, public domain cc0

This blog just turned 20 years old, celebrated its 3,000th post and surpassed the 10,000 cumulative page mark. Looking back at its evolution, I’m astonished how little I’ve perceived myself changing from year to year when it’s clear I am a completely different person from the guy who started this blog as a work pilot project in Feb 2003.

I don’t believe the same things, or perceive the world, or other humans, the same way. The things I used to want, which I mostly never got, just aren’t important any more. I don’t know why they ever were. And I’ve long since given up the belief that what I do in the world makes any direct and enduring difference. I’m fine with realizing that almost no one really cares, or even notices or understands, what anyone else says and does. How could they? Everyone’s caught up in their own self-preoccupied loop of knowing and struggle and dis-ease.

To the extent I’ve made any difference, it will be in ways far too circuitous and complex for me to ever understand.

My new lists of what I want for myself, and what I want to give the world, are much shorter and less ambitious. In part that’s because I am older and have less time left to accomplish things, but mostly it’s because I’ve learned that we really have no choice in what we believe and do, so a shorter list is just less likely to lead to disappointment.

This is a bit of a theoretical exploration. I had to write it out to make sense for myself of the two complex articles it attempts to summarize, so I thought others interested in the theory of politics and power might find it interesting.

This is how it’s supposed to work. From flickr by Occupy Posters (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Over the past few days, Rhyd Wildermuth has been exploring the subject of political collapse and the history of human governance, drawing in particular on a summation of Carl Schmitt’s political theories by the arch-conservative historian NS Lyons.

This article is an attempt to summarize these two extremely long articles, and figure out what they might mean for our current situation. The basic argument is, I think, as follows:

Throughout the history of civilizations, governance has always been about power — who has it, and when and how it should be used. Civilizations in order to function need an acceptance of a hierarchy, and authorization of those in power, to maintain order. Without it, chaos and anarchy would prevail and these civilizations would inevitably politically collapse.

For most of our civilizations’ history, that power was vested in the gods, and in their chosen representatives — the shamans, the clergy, the emperors, and the royalty. These representatives acted on the will of the gods, with whom they were in direct communication, and hence had the “divine right of kings”.

Most of our civilizations’ wars and crusades were thus ideological, internecine battles between different groups who claimed they were the ones that spoke for the god(s) (singular or plural). These were absolutist battles between ‘good’ friends and ‘evil’ enemies.

Attempts to introduce secular and representative governments were a direct confrontation to this arrangement of power, though they existed side-by-side for much of our more recent history. They are, it is argued, inherently weak, since under them power is supposedly granted from below, by people who never really know with any finality what they want, rather than vested from above, by gods who are omniscient. 

Carl Schmitt (an advisor and supporter of Hitler) claimed that such secular governments can survive only to the extent they retain the power of exceptionalism — to impose executive orders that suspend democracy, by a kind of resurrected ‘divine’ right, as ‘custodial dictators’ when the circumstances require it (a ‘war on terror’, for example). A tacit pact must always therefore exist between the ruling government which provides security for the masses in any large society or state, in return for obedience to those rulers. 

If obedience is not forthcoming, Schmitt argued, anarchy and collapse of the state is threatened, and then the government’s duty is to suppress the disobedience by suspending the laws as needed, decreeing the disobedient to be ‘enemies’ of the state, and destroying them, in the interest of restoring and maintaining order and security. Just as the gods once ‘smote’ enemies directly so that good would triumph over evil.

So, as we have seen in countries where drug lords, criminal gangs, kleptocracies, robber barons, corrupt corpocracies, and religious fanatic groups (Taliban etc) are actually in a better position to provide security to the citizens than the elected government is, the citizens will quickly pay fealty to these unelected powerful groups instead, as long as that makes them feel more secure.

Rhyd argues that what we’re facing now is a situation where governments think they can and must invoke emergency and executive orders to maintain authority and order, while the citizens have come to believe that governments should have no such authority — that all authority must be the will of the people, and that executive orders, like CoVid-19 mandates and undercover wars and decrees on universal ‘rights’, are a violation of that authority. 

The problem is that, while many agree with this, they disagree on what exactly constitutes a violation of government authority. Some see CoVid-19 mandates as essential to the health and safety and hence security of the citizens, while others see them as tyranny. Some would see the ‘secret’ CIA bombing of the Nordstrom pipelines as essential for the eradication of enemies of the US and its vassal states and the maintenance of global order and security, while others see it as a blatant and indefensible war crime.

The question, then, is: How, if at all, can secular governments survive in the absence of any consensus on who the ‘good’ (friends) are and who the ‘evil’ (enemies) are? Especially when modern technology enables propaganda, mis- and dis-information, censorship, surveillance and mass oppression by whoever happens to be in power against whoever happens to not be in power.

Complicating all this, Rhyd argues, is the belief by many religious fundamentalists that the collapse of this unstable, corrupted civilization is actually a good thing, since it will usher in a ‘rapture’ of some kind or other, where the gods will save them (in their current or future lives), smite the ‘bad’ guys and disbelievers, and restore the ‘natural order’ of the gods. All of this generally presupposes humans to be inherently evil, flawed sinners incapable of governing ourselves. 

This is radically opposed to the more recent but some might say equally religious view of an equally large number that we are inherently good, that the ‘natural order’ of things is an unsteady but inevitable ‘progress’, and that technology is speeding us along that trajectory.

_____

My thoughts on all of this:

There is a tendency here for us to see our current situation as rather unique — an unprecedented struggle everywhere in the world for power over the ‘other’ groups that are seen as threatening to destroy everything we believe in.

But I would instead see this as just a change in the geographic playing field of similar struggles that have been with us since the dawn of human civilizations. Whereas at one time crusading armies conquered the enemy by marching on and occupying their territory, and either killing them or ‘converting’ them, today the opposing forces are right in our midst. 

So what is unique, today, I think, is that the planet is now so crowded with humans that instead of homogenous tribes and nations of similar-thinking people warring against each other along their borders, our ‘enemies’ today often live right among us. The ‘winning’ side can no longer just redraw the borders to show how good conquered evil. The red-blue map, for example, is no longer two solid blocks of colour with a Mason-Dixon line between them, with largely-unopposed (at least, unopposed by those enfranchised) governments in power in each area. 

In fact, all over the world we have seen such a fracturing of beliefs in every small geographical area that we can no longer Balkanize our way into separating the combatants. Even a ‘civil war’ is impossible, because the opposing sides, while living in their own psychological and religious worlds, walk the same streets and live in the same communities, largely indistinguishable from each other by their dress, language and practices. Segregation, at every level, almost never works.

We saw in Rwanda where this can lead — during the 1994 genocide, Rwandan Hutus slaughtered nearly a million fellow Rwandans, mostly Tutsis and Hutu ’sympathizers’, and mostly with machetes. These two peoples are virtually indistinguishable in appearance, and share the same languages and religions, and live in the same communities. Some Catholic and Protestant church leaders egged on the Hutu murderers, using their pulpits and broadcast media, falsely portraying the Tutsis as un-Christian ‘foreigners’. Many observers trying to keep the peace were severely traumatized by the sheer ferocity of the slaughter, often neighbour-against-neighbour.

Some would say that humans are just inherently xenophobic (and there are some interesting evolutionary arguments as to why we evolved that way), and that the only answer is homogenous tribal communities with clear geographic territorial boundaries between them, and resigning ourselves to constant skirmishes over those boundaries. Others would blame more recent phenomena like the new media, or new technologies, or overpopulation, or new religions, or ‘evil’ leaders and stupid/complacent followers, for the kinds of ideological polarization that seem poised to erupt into violence almost everywhere.

I have no idea myself. Human civilization has evolved the way it has, and I don’t think it has to be logical. Nor does it have to be inevitably leading in any particular direction. Most changes are cyclical, not linear. “History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes.”

The important thing, to me, is that we simply don’t have any time or energy to waste on ideological and philosophical and religious differences and the resulting wars and violence. Our world is on fire, and the industrial economy that spread the conflagration is poised to collapse.

But it seems likely to me that, since our ideological differences are more visceral, more relatable, and more emotional, to most people, than the heady abstract stuff of climate change and economic fragility, we will continue to pursue our wars, our coups, our bombings, our propaganda, our oppression, and our xenophobic hate, even as everything continues to collapse around us.

Is that just the way we are? Can we really not help killing each other, and in so doing accelerating the damage to our planet and its climate, at the very time collaboration on dealing with our shared crises is so desperately needed? Over any period of time longer than a century or two, are we just incapable of governing ourselves in any kind of democratic way?

These are rhetorical questions. But political theorist Rhyd and historian NS, from opposite sides of the political spectrum, put forward a pretty compelling case that the answer to all of them is ‘yes’.

This is a work of fiction.

image from Pixabay, CC0

Seville came in from lacrosse practice, dropped her stuff in the closet, and plunked down on the sofa opposite where her father was working.

“OK. This makes absolutely no sense, dad.”

“You’re just figuring that out now? I though you were my smart daughter.”

“I’m your only daughter, dad. No, I mean the Nordstrom pipeline bombing. So, your premise in everything is that everything we do is conditioned behaviour, and that we’re all doing our best, right?”

Darien nodded, slowly, pulling his attention away from reading something on his computer.

“So, Sy Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist, who uncovered the My Lai massacre, and did much of the work exposing Watergate and the Abu Ghraib tortures, has published overwhelming evidence that the US Navy and CIA, with the complicity of the government of Norway, and with the advance approval of Biden, blew up the Nordstrom pipelines. That’s an act of war against a major nuclear power, and a war crime under any sane definition. Staggeringly risky act. Huge, long-term consequences. So how on earth was it ever approved?”

“My guess is that they thought they would get away with it. They do this kind of thing all the time in dozens of countries. By the time their biggest atrocities are fully revealed, they’re old news and too late to do anything about, so people just shrug and move on. It’s always worked before.”

“So how exactly were they ‘conditioned’ to commit endless numbers of war crimes and atrocities? And by whom?”

“Fear is a great conditioner. People like Joe Biden and Victoria Nuland have oceans of blood on their hands. But they have both been conditioned all their lives by the people around them to absolutely believe they’re doing the right thing. That if they don’t commit ‘good guy’ atrocities, then ‘the terrorists’, who play by their own rules, win.”

“Jeez, you make it sound like Hollywood war, or a sports movie, where the evil guys cheat and almost win but the good guys triumph in the end. Real life’s not like that.”

Darien shrugged.

Seville continued: “They must know they can’t keep these things secret when there are investigative journalists and whistleblowers committed to exposing them?”

“Last I saw, most real investigative journalists and whistleblowers who dared show the US or its allies in a bad light were either shunned by all the major media, or they’re living in exile, or in prison on trumped-up charges. Or dead. Who’d want to risk their life to expose crimes when the citizens have been conditioned to see those crimes as just business-as-usual?”

“So why are the media colluding with all this? Surely some of them have some moral compass ‘beyond the ends justifies the means’.”

“Maybe because powerful people have conditioned them the same way. They’ve come to believe that they have the power to topple governments, as they did with Tricky Dick. They don’t want to topple Biden by telling the truth about what he did, because if that happened, Trump or DeSantis will win, and Putin and Xi will win. So they refused to print Sy’s story, even the journals he used to work for, for the same reason they now refuse to print anything by Noam Chomsky.”

“But someone is eventually going to publish it, surely?”

“Doesn’t matter. If the main arbiters of important public discourse all refuse to give it any attention, it can be dismissed as blog blatherings and conspiracy theories.”

“So the generals and the defence industry, like the US general who just announced his troops are readying for war with China in 2025, what’s their conditioning?”

“I suppose it’s the same as it’s been for 70 years, still fighting the cold war. They believe religiously that the only safe future is one under unipolar US control. That all foreigners are suspect — especially if they look different from us, or espouse socialist ideas, or question the American dream. The crusade of the US/NATO political-military-industrial complex is for a world free of conflict because it’s free of dissent. A world where everyone believes the same thing. Conditioned fear, conditioned faith.”

“Not to mention a world with big profits for defence contractors.”

“Yep. And my sense is the defence contractors genuinely believe they’re doing the best for their shareholders and their families, and also upholding freedom and democracy.”

“Sheesh… OK, so what about the climate crisis? If Biden really believes we have to keep temperature change below 1.5ºC, how can he justify mongering for wars with Russia and China that will enormously worsen global warming?”

Darien smiled: “That’s a really good question. How would you explain it, giving him the benefit of the doubt that he’s trying to do his best?”

“He’s fooling himself, believing that somehow he can put off dealing with climate but not fighting world wars? Or he believes that he can’t do anything with an antagonistic Congress? Or that if he tries to deal with climate change he’ll be out of office and the alternative going forward will be much worse for the planet?”

“OK, those are reasonable guesses. Let’s take them one at a time. Now this guy has the brightest minds on the planet who know the most about climate change at his disposal. What do you think he believes about the possibility of stopping or mitigating climate collapse?”

“Hmmm, well, since the billionaires are all buying bunkered mansions in New Zealand, because they know collapse is coming soon, Biden probably knows it too. So privately he’s acknowledged that that battle is already lost?”

“I think that’s a reasonable assumption. So if climate collapse is coming soon and can’t be stopped, what’s his duty?”

“Well, the alpha rats start hoarding all the food in times of scarcity. So… his duty is to get everything he can for the Americans as soon as possible… and that means that since Russia and the OPEC countries have so much energy, and China owns and processes all the key metals and dominates global manufacturing, they both have to be defeated and their wealth and processing capacity has to be appropriated for American use.”

“Makes sense to me. Sounds like a conspiracy theory though, doesn’t it?”

“It’s a very depressing idea. So fear is the primary conditioner. But there’s something else going on these days, isn’t there? I know a lot of adults who are living in despair about war and the climate and the general failure of your generation to leave anything for my generation. They are experiencing… what? Guilt, grief, helplessness, hopelessness… shame?”

“Yes. Brilliant. Shame is almost as effective at conditioning us as fear. So what do we do when we feel overwhelming shame?”

“Look for someone else to blame everything on. Or deny it’s happening at all.”

“Exactly. I think there’s a growing sense that we have failed dismally to make the world a safe and healthy place for future generations. So who or what do we blame?”

“Um… ‘systems’ that needs to be reformed. Overpopulation. Immigrants. Russia, China, Iran. Communism and socialism. Corrupt, greedy individuals. Failure to take responsible action… But you say no one is to blame!”

“Yes, but most people will never accept that. They’ve been conditioned that someone or something must be to blame, must be responsible. So if people have been conditioned to feel shame and fear, and to have absolute faith in certain unquestionable truths, it doesn’t surprise me to see them scapegoating others. And in the meantime, if they’re feeling hopeless, they may also be inclined to hoard everything they can for themselves, their families, and their confrères. Hoarding is our biological conditioning in times of scarcity and precarity. Blaming is our cultural conditioning in times of catastrophe and shame.”

“You don’t have a very high opinion of our species, do you?”

“I don’t mean it to be critical. It’s just our conditioning. No one is in control. We’re just eight billion mildly deranged monkeys, all trying to do our best and conditioning each other to continue to do what has got us into this mess, with the best of intentions.”

“Apparently.”

“Apparently.”

“Fuck… That totally sucks… So, if we’re doing our best and our best isn’t good enough, then what?”

“Then we vacate the scene and see if the next group of species, which may or may not include humans, can avoid the mistakes we made when we were, for no apparent reason, put in charge of the lab.”

“If there’s a livable ‘lab’ left.”

“True. But we eight billion at least get to find out how the story ends. The first 100 billion of our species died before they had any idea where we’d be now. That’s something, isn’t it? We all want to know how the story ends, even if it’s not a happy ending.”

“That’s not good enough; we have to do something.”

“Of course we do; that’s our conditioning. That’s all we can do.”

“I hope you’re wrong about us all being conditioned and not having free will.”

“Me too. For your sake. If we’re all just acting out roles in a play, for no reason, for no purpose, with no idea what our next lines are going to be, and all that can be done is to watch, and to wonder, and to give up trying to make sense of it and understand it and just witness the sheer awesomeness of it, that’s fine with me… apparently.”

“If you say ‘apparently’ one more time, I might have to kill you.”

“Oh, but then who would you have to depress you with data and charm you with witty rhetoric and enchant you with impossible, useless ideas about how the world works?”

“I’m sure among those eight billion deranged monkeys there must be a few who could render that invaluable service.”

Pacific Ocean temperature anomaly data from NOAA, based on the INO measurement, one of several used to measure the intensity of El Niño and La Niña cycles; projections are mine, but are consistent with several of the latest climate models

When you live on the west coast of the Americas, you really feel the influence of El Niño (exceptionally warm ocean temperatures in the Pacific) and La Niña (exceptionally cool ocean temperatures in the Pacific). Here in Vancouver, we have just come off three years in a row of (on average) cooler than normal temperatures, as La Niña has held sway. And that’s despite the fact that we’ve broken all time high temperature records in each of the last two summers — at the -1.0º nadir of La Niña. It’s been two years of extremes for the usually-moderate weather of the coast. Last August was the hottest August on record, and last November the coldest November on record.

In our last El Niño cycle, in 2014-16, we broke records here for the hottest one-year moving average temperature. Meteorologists are predicting the next El Niño will start late this year or early next year, and if that’s true, we’ll get our eyes opened about climate collapse pretty quickly. If we hit 43ºC (110ºF) in suburban Vancouver in 2021 when La Niña was at -1.0ºC from normal, what will we be facing when El Niño tops out (as it did in 2015-16) at +2.6ºC from normal?

—— vs: ——

chart from Wikimedia Commons; projections for 2023-24 and Strong-El Niño trendline are my additions

The chart above from Wikimedia shows the inexorable rise of average global surface temperatures to well over 1.0ºC above ‘pre-industrial’ (1850-1900 average) levels. Climate scientists have made it clear that avoidance of climate collapse, and the livability of our planet, depends on keeping these increases to less than 1.5ºC above these levels.

As I’ve been reporting for 20 years now, an increasing number of climate scientists say that keeping increases to that level is practicably impossible. If you draw a trendline through recent El Niño maxima, then if we get another strong El Niño in 2024, as many climate predictors are now forecasting, we could easily shoot past the 1.5ºC ceiling next year. So much for predictions we’d have “until 2030” to achieve this.

Along with other recent revelations about Big Oil suppressing their actual huge emission levels, about alarming rises in methane emissions, about the utter failure of tech solutions like carbon offsets, carbon capture and storage, and transitions to renewables to have any impact whatever on rising emissions, about the staggering ecological cost of endless wars, and of course the failure of doltish, doddering, virtue-signalling politicians everywhere to even begin to act on their absurd promises, climate catastrophe is now inevitable. The only question is how much and what parts of the planet will become unlivable, and how fast.

These data suggest, once again, that this is coming faster than even last year’s gloomiest predictions anticipated.

cartoon by Michael Leunig

Every once in a while I take a quick peek at the publications that I once lauded for their insight, their investigative reporting, and their courage to speak truth to power. Basically I wanted to read their response to award-winning journalist Sy Hersh’s exposé on the Biden-approved US Navy/CIA bombing of Russia’s Nordstrom gas pipelines.

So I glanced at the headlines in the NYT, the latest New Yorker, the Guardian, and Daily Kos, just to get a sampling. Other than one buried verbatim transcription of the White House’s and CIA’s one-sentence “utterly false” dismissal of the revelations, there was nothing. Complete silence. (Billmon has elaborated on Sy’s article, as have Patrick Lawrence and Craig Murray.)

I suppose, like all the other times they have been embarrassed to have been duped and caught in monstrous US military war-crime lies (My Lai and Vietnam, Abu Ghraib, the Hill & Knowlton PR con about Kuwaiti baby incubators being turned off, the “shock and awe” Iraq Wars, the obscene war in Afghanistan, the photo-op Navy Seals’ murder of Bin Laden in a Pakistani prison, and on and on and on), these complicit news media hope that if they say nothing people will forget about their grievous misreporting and move on. Their mastheads should read: We Never Apologize.

These once-important news and analysis sources are now really nauseating to read. Endless, amateurish, shameless, information-free, anti-Russia, anti-China, anti-Iran, war-mongering, fear-mongering screeds, full of hate and fury and misinformation and dutifully transcribed propaganda from the Pentagon and CIA spooks and White House PR offices. Reading even just the staggeringly-biased headlines and the first paragraphs visible above the paywalls now leaves me feeling polluted, disgusted, insulted, and abused.

It’s just scary to think that a lot of people believe these rags are reporting something even vaguely resembling the truth. Having read just a bit of what I’ve been missing since I turned them off, I have to go take a bath and scrub off the dirt.
/rant

COLLAPSE WATCH

you don’t suppose this would have anything to do with Biden’s attempts to foment war with a certain foreign country, do you?

How to give up: Dark Mountain Manifesto co-author Dougald Hine talks about XR’s decision to abandon Direct Action, the inspiration of Oaxaca’s Gustavo Esteva, and what we can do next after we discover we have no choice but to give up and walk away from everything we once believed to be true, including our false sense of control and power and agency and certainty about the future, and words that have lost their meaning. But I’m dismayed he’s looking at the disastrously unsuccessful 12-step ‘surrender to your powerlessness’ program as a model going forward. We’d be better looking to wild creatures for ideas on coping with collapse, rather than new religions. The crows can show us how the light actually gets in.

Bend not break: Nate Hagens has a 5-part series of interviews with Daniel Schmachtenberger on adapting to and coping with collapse and the polycrisis; the 3rd (outline and transcript; video) on the psychology of collapse, and the 5th (outline and transcript; video) on strategies for dealing with it, are IMO the most valuable. Thanks to Paul Heft for the links.

Biding time: Lovely essay from Flat Caps on how our perception of time has evolved and now come unraveled, and how that perception determines our worldview on collapse.

Will political collapse accompany economic & ecological collapse?: Two measures of political collapse are corruption and kleptocracy, and they are on the upswing everywhere.

Why a transition to renewable energy is an impossible dream: Albert Bates employs the chart above to explain some of the reasons, and Richard Heinberg elaborates:

This means that, if society’s overall emissions are to stay within the budget permissible to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees, the rest of society (i.e., sectors other than the energy industry) will have to reduce emissions, perhaps effectively to zero. How this could be accomplished for sectors such as aviation and the steel and cement industries is barely imaginable. Unless we figure out how to reinvent many key industrial processes, they’ll simply have to be significantly downsized.

Hospicing Modernity: Dougald Hine writes about a different way of thinking about our role in times of collapse:

‘In these times, all we can do is be a sign,’ a father tells his daughter in Ben Okri’s novel The Freedom Artist. ‘We have to help to bring about the end of the world.’ We must do this, he goes on, so that a new beginning can come. ‘But first there must be an end.’

First there must be an end – but many kinds of end are possible. My friend Vanessa Machado de Oliveira wrote a book called Hospicing Modernity. The title invites us to a kind of work in which the focus is not on saving modernity, or bringing it down, or rushing to build what comes afterwards, but doing what we can to give it a good ending.

Carbon offsets are a fraud: But then you already knew that. And you already know carbon capture and storage is a fraud too. Thanks to John Whiting for the link, and the one that follows.

Greenland’s already soared past a 1.5ºC rise: Its ice sheet is collapsing at an incredible rate.

LIVING BETTER

cartoon by Will McPhail, from his website

Dying with dignity: This Canadian organization produces courageous, factual, articulate reporting and advocacy for those facing excruciating and humiliating end-of-life agony, who are prohibited from ending their lives peacefully by religious zealots and political opportunists. This is the abortion fight all over again. Gutless waffler Trudeau Jr is, again, fighting on the wrong side of this issue.

Global South shows us how to prepare for pandemics: It’s all about global collaboration, not competition to develop new tech.

Eugene bans natural gas in new homes: A courageous step, especially since they voted for it now, rather than kicking it to a referendum that would end up seeing it defeated by moneyed lobbyists. Thanks to Kavana Tree Bressen for the link.

How not to fight poverty: Lyz Lenz outs right wingers’ contemptuous laws trying to gut social assistance to the poor and compel single mothers to get married.

Vancouver adds mental health nurses to emergency response teams: Still far too many mis- and under-skilled cops on the payroll, but these pairings with mental health nurses have been shown to work better.

A real strategy to deal with the housing crisis: The Vancouver Foundation reiterates the need for massive-scale construction of decent, affordable, publicly-financed and operated housing.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

facebook meme; thanks to Michael Dowd for the link

What’s really going on behind the curtain: Daniel Dumbrill and other actual investigative reporters discuss what’s happening in the US/NATO/Russia war, China warmongering, CoVid-19 capitulation and other subjects. Still some flickerings of truth out there.

Bend or break?: Aurélien provides some historical context to explain why the current political system is teetering on collapse.

Corpocracy, Imperialism & Fascism: Short takes (thanks to John Whiting for many of these links):

• Jeremy Corbyn on Julian Assange, multipolarity, and the need for peace in Ukraine
• Aurélian explains the absurdity of Europe’s “rearmament” and how most of those opining about the advances and withdrawals in the Ukraine war have no idea how wars are actually conducted
• The Chinese weather balloon lunacy and why China didn’t pick up the phone
• Bill Gates celebrates China’s rise — didn’t he get the memo?
• Chris Hedges on imperialism’s cooption of “woke” culture
• Sacrifice workers to fight inflation or no op-eds for you (thanks to Gerry Gras for the link)
• Pentagon urges overt military offensive against Russia
• Self-proclaimed “untethered” US general calls for war on China by 2025
• Pentagon war against Russia, China and Iran has long been in the planning (a warning written back in 2018)
• The demise of Finland’s vaunted education system (due to cuts in health and education spending — what a surprise!)
• 100,000 Israelis march to protest Netanyahu’s corrupt, totalitarian, apartheid regime
• Medea Benjamin outlines how peace in Ukraine is possible. So do Lee Camp and David Swanson. A former Israeli PM says the US blocked his attempt to mediate in the war. And finally there are peace marches, Feb 19 in the US and Feb 25 in the UK.

Propaganda, Censorship, Misinformation and Disinformation: Short takes:

• The imperialist spinmeisters have launched an all-out disinformation attack on Caitlin Johnstone
• Economist JK Galbraith explains why “the debt ceiling” is a myth

CoVid-19 Watch: Short takes:

• Biden’s continued CoVid-19 policy of mass infection without mitigation
• Zeynep Tüfekçi explains the dangers of the current explosion of H5N1 bird flu
• Canada has been lucky so far in 2023 because the bivalent vaccines that most senior Canadians have received seem to work on the XBB.1.5 variant
• China reports that 80% of its population has now been infected, in line with the experience of other countries abandoning protections. But because the new variants are so much less lethal (so far), China’s previous, stringent policies have saved millions of lives.

FUN AND INSPIRATION

six word story — from the memebrary

Barnes & Noble turns it around — by refusing promotional money from dealers, charging a fair price, and making the stores interesting. Thanks to Kavana Tree Bressen for the link.

A piano lesson: How to play Grieg’s beloved Concerto in A minor like a professional. Fascinating.

Scientists find new way to control quantum computers: Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder at her funniest.

Genetic screening is already here: Also from Sabine. How genetic screening is currently used, and how it might be used in the future, for better or worse.

Making eye contact: Liana Finck explains it’s OK if you can’t look the world in the face.

A high-pressure exhibit: Hank Green takes us behind the scenes at the Monterrey Bay aquarium, which shows creatures from the deep sea, kind of in the own environment, a technical tour-de-force.

Is this the future of pop music? In a feat going Milli Vanilli one better, a Korean company has introduced a K-POP group called MAVE: that is made entirely of avatars. No human dancers can match their gymnastic feats, the singers don’t have to be pretty or skinny or coordinated or fit to be part of the group (as long as they can sing). And that way recognition can go to the real stars, the music’s composers and players (not that it will). Look out, David Crosby, they may not be done with you yet! (Oh, and the ‘performers’ even have personal profiles, in case you want to stan them.)

Yuja and Khatia: Yuja Wang and Khatia Buniatishvili are my two current favourite pianists. My sense was always that Yuja was more technically precise and Khatia was more emotional in her playing. But when I listened to them playing the same pieces, I ended up with the opposite impression. And surprisingly (as I’m a romantic) I can’t decide which I like more. Of course, it’s not a duel.

The new rules of etiquette: Some of these rules are very funny and insightful, especially the first two sections on dealing with friends, lovers and strangers. (What is not funny is finding your way around the pay/registration wall to access it.)

THOUGHTS OF THE MONTH

combination of two memes from the memebrary; here’s a third: Egyptian scholars have found records of late-Egyptian archaeological work dating back to 500 BCE, on early-Egyptian relics from 3,000 years earlier; that one single culture lasted so long that it required the expertise of archaeologists from its final centuries to reconstruct the history of its earliest centuries

From Kim Addonizio, in Tell Me

New Year’s Day

The rain this morning falls
on the last of the snow

and will wash it away. I can smell
the grass again, and the torn leaves

being eased down into the mud.
The few loves I’ve been allowed

to keep are still sleeping
on the West Coast. Here in Virginia

I walk across the fields with only
a few young cows for company.

Big-boned and shy,
they are like girls I remember

from junior high, who never
spoke, who kept their heads

lowered and their arms crossed against
their new breasts. Those girls

are nearly forty now. Like me,
they must sometimes stand

at a window late at night, looking out
on a silent backyard, at one

rusting lawn chair and the sheer walls
of other people’s houses.

They must lie down some afternoons
and cry hard for whoever used

to make them happiest,
and wonder how their lives

have carried them
this far without ever once

explaining anything. I don’t know
why I’m walking out here

with my coat darkening
and my boots sinking in, coming up

with a mild sucking sound
I like to hear. I don’t care

where those girls are now.
Whatever they’ve made of it

they can have. Today I want
to resolve nothing.

I only want to walk
a little longer in the cold

blessing of the rain,
and lift my face to it.

Many years ago I had the privilege of going hiking in Wales with Dave Snowden, back when we were both more-or-less inventing the discipline now (and unfortunately) called ‘Knowledge Management’.

Other than the fact we share a Welsh heritage, and we’re both political lefties, we could hardly be more different (“to give up hope is a mortal sin”, he says somewhat mockingly of his conversion to Catholicism), which is one of the reasons I continue to enjoy our occasional correspondence and keep up with his new work. Though I should confess he still loves to debate, while I, the conflict-averse Canadian, abhor it, which sometimes challenges our relationship.

He recently did another long talk at The Stoa, in which he delightfully attacks muddle-headed, arrogant, well-intentioned, self-important idealists and ideologies which fail to understand how change (or anything else) actually happens in the real world. He takes shots at the execrable Jordan Peterson, at Ken Wilber and the Spiral Dynamics crew, at Rebel Wisdom, at logical positivists and post-modernists and meta-modernists and neo-platonists and stoics, at self-proclaimed and anointed gurus of all stripes, and many more. He even criticizes the Game B gang that includes Daniel Schmachtenberger and many of the Stoa regulars.

The real value of this talk, however, as with most of Dave’s work, is appreciating his pragmatic, evolving, challenging take on the world and how it works, and how practically we can nudge it in more positive directions.

His talks are dense, opinionated, sometimes rambling, and full of the jargon of complexity which he’s had to master to deal with the largely-academic world he has to navigate, and to introduce new concepts for which there is no useful English term. There is a glossary however, for those willing to learn the shorthand, and I certainly needed it for this talk. Nevertheless, as a caveat, some will find his talk opaque and annoying.

This post is basically to capture what I learned from this particular talk. I may have some of it wrong, and/or oversimplified, but here are my notes:

1. Focus on understanding the present, rather than inventing an aspirational future: What is the “next right thing” that can be done to move in a positive trajectory? Knowing the current situation is far more useful than picturing an ideal future state, and it keeps you grounded instead of caught up in fanciful ‘design’ activities that may be completely impracticable. We should explore new ways of thinking and being in the world to deal with the realities of the moment, not a new grand narrative for the future of the world that some lotus-eating group of idealists thinks we should all strive for. More present-focused activists, please, and fewer future-focused designers.
2. Evolution, at every scale, is a punctuated, and synthesizing process, rather than a prescribable linear one: We didn’t ‘advance’ from “hunter-gatherer” to “agricultural” to “industrial” cultures. Every change was a blending of the old and new, with the best of each not necessarily selected for. There has never been any simple set of stages of ‘progress forward’ in any complex situation, and stage theories are hopelessly flawed, simplistic ways of trying to solve problems or assess ‘progress’. Likewise, there are no “higher levels of enlightenment” that people can achieve. Terms like “turquoise” measure nothing more than your level of narcissism. Learning and evolution are, instead, complex processes directed towards “messy coherence”.
3. The meta-crisis is actually a poly-crisis: Meta actually means ‘between’ not ‘higher’, and the multiple, complex, interrelated crises we face are not part of some one larger crisis, but rather manifold and diverse.
4. It makes no sense to look at things in isolation from their relationships and their environments:  Narrowing your focus and analyzing something as if it were separate and apart from everything else is simply bad science. As Richard Lewontin has explained, for example, the real cause of most of the diseases we face is not bacteria, viruses and cancers, but rather overwork, malnourishment, and dysfunctional, under-regulated industrial systems.
5. Social atomism is a terrible basis from which to analyze complex problems: Humans evolved to make decisions as collectives, not as individuals. We are defined by our communities and our physical and social environments. We are not isolated individuals whose aggregate choices transform the world; we are part of our collective(s) and our environment. Collectives can do many things that individuals cannot. Our current hyper-individualism does not augur well for our capacity for addressing the poly-crisis.
6. How to nudge a group forward: Three questions to understanding the situation: (1) Who has a voice or power in this situation (“agency”)?; (2) what opportunities and constraints are available to them to exercise that power (“affordances”)?; and (3) what methods and paths can be employed to act on those opportunities and overcome established impediments and deterrents to change (“assemblages”) ie What are the adjacent possibles that can be identified and enacted right now? [This resonates a bit with Daniel Schmachtenberger’s 35 questions.] Dave’s organization helps groups to (i) map where people are now, (ii) give individuals the epistemic sovereignty to define their own position, and (iii) from that, identify sustainable pathways to a different future, in part through asking the above questions.
7. When people have to choose between eating food and heating their home, this is not a “crisis of meaning”: People with their heads so far up in the clouds that they mistake real problems for epistemological ones, need to get a life.
8. Putting people in positions where they have to think differently: There’s a myth that informed dialectics and conversation actually promote change, but it is far more effective to put people in a position where they have no choice but to think differently. Take them to visit a factory farm. Have them accompany a cop and a social worker who’ve been called to deal with a domestic violence incident. Or impose new constraints, such as “you can’t come to the office for the next year because of the pandemic”.
9. Making it easier: Changing the dispositional state: Lowering the ‘energy’ cost of change, or shortening the time needed to change, makes it easier and more likely that change will happen. [I might add that making it more fun can also improve the dispositional state for change.] If you want people to use LED bulbs instead of incandescents, make them cheaper and more accessible. [If you want people to learn some new skill, make a game of it.]
10. The next pandemic is likely to be much worse: It’s likely to be an avian virus or bacterial disease with a much higher fatality rate. Recent hyper-individualistic behaviours and distrust of public health authorities suggest we’re really poorly equipped to handle such a crisis.
11. One unsolvable problem for AI is its incapacity for drawing on historical context and for creating and learning from metaphor: We reason by analogy and communicate and innovate by metaphor, and that capacity draws on a vast, diverse, and culturally-based history of knowledge, ideas and experiences. That is not programmable.
12. There is no such thing as mastery: Learning is a complex, iterative, continuous, non-linear process. Holding oneself out as a ‘master’ of anything is a conceit.

Lots to think about here.

When/if I next get the chance to sit down with Dave, I’d love to explore with him my sense that humans (or at least human brains) loathe complexity, uncertainty, and not knowing, and what we might be able to do to get people to embrace complexity and revel in uncertainty and not knowing instead. Is the answer making it more fun? Chess players seem to enjoy complexity. Murder mystery fans seem to enjoy uncertainty and not knowing, for a while at least. Perhaps the play’s the thing?

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer’s art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.
Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But remind of our, and Adam’s curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.
The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

— TS Eliot, East Coker, the Four Quartets

I‘ve always been a daydreamer, and a bit of a misanthrope. It’s not that I don’t like people. I just find it hard to care about all the things they care about. I look out at the city with astonishment and joy, and I participate in social activities. But I feel like I’m living in a whole-world hospital, full of people with serious physical, emotional and situational illnesses. They’re doing their best, but I’m not inclined to want to spend a lot of time with them, since I can’t do anything for them, and I find their illnesses (as I found my own) exhausting, enervating, and unpleasant.

I imagine, as I look down at the people and cars scurrying around, that we’re eight billion bewildered monkeys, racing around mimicking each other desperately, in the hope that someone knows what they’re doing and how it came to this, and where it’s going. Eight billion monkeys totally conditioned by our biology and culture, doing the only things we can under the circumstances of the moment. All doing our best to cope with the illnesses that afflict and confront us everywhere. We know something is not right, but we’re helpless to understand or address it.

I never quite got with the program. From my earliest school years I just couldn’t relate to what other people said, did, or cared about. It just didn’t make sense. Why were they acting this way? They were like starving rats in a maze, or beaten zoo animals endlessly pacing their cages. They were cruel, angry, anxious, selfish, driven by jealousy, guilt, and shame. They were dreadfully unhealthy, and mostly unhappy.

So I just withdrew into a world of imaginary creatures that acted the way I though everyone should — creatures that cared about what I cared about. I still interacted with other people, and sometimes really enjoyed those interactions, but they were mostly half-hearted and unpleasurable. I played out my own conditioning and then retreated as soon as possible into my own, very different, invented reality, one that made sense to me.

This looks familiar, vaguely familiar
Almost unreal yet it’s too soon to feel yet
Close to my soul and yet so far away
I’m going to go back there someday.
Sunrises, night falls; sometimes the sky calls
Is that a song there and do I belong there?
I’ve never been there but I know the way
I’m going to go back there someday.

Come and go with me; it’s more fun to share
We’ll both be completely at home in midair —
We’re flying not walking on featherless wings
We can hold on to love like invisible strings.

There’s not a word yet for old friends who’ve just met
Part heaven, part space, or have I found my place?
You can just visit, but I plan to stay —
I’m going to go back there someday.

— Paul Williams (for The Muppet Movie), I’m Going to Go Back There Someday

No surprise that, now, much of my time is spent writing fiction, of one kind or another. I can imagine myself, and imagine others (joyful, curious comrades and playmates) with me, on a beach or in a forest or in a totally different world, as vivid as any ‘real’ thing.

As a child, I created a world of fictional characters, imaginary friends, people who were, to me, far more interesting than the ‘real’ people I had to interact with, since my fictional characters were healthy, wild creatures, not the domesticated, reactive, tense, damaged inmates of this global self-made prison we call civilization.

The list of ‘actual’ people I’d like to meet and invite to my ‘ideal dinner party’ has gradually been whittled down to a handful. I’d much rather have dinner with some of the fictional characters I’ve invented over the years — healthy, joyful, curious creatures that would never want to live in the ‘real’ world we have (in more ways than one) constructed.

I find most writers’ fiction to be hopelessly and depressingly unimaginative, wallowing as it does in the milieus and personas of our global hospital-prison. Why would anyone want to read, or watch, depictions of ghastly human struggle and suffering, with their absurd, impossible Hollywood deus ex machina endings? Perhaps they make others feel better and hopeful about their own situation, but they no longer have any appeal to me.

So if I want to spend time with people and animals and in places and times that I find joyful and interesting, I mostly have to make them up.

And I do. I turn the sound off on the screen and make up my own lines for what the characters are saying, which are generally more interesting and more fun than what the hack screenwriters provided. At tea houses and in restaurants I imagine fascinating stories and conversations for the other patrons. I’m rarely interested in knowing who they ‘really’ are or what they’re ‘really’ talking about.

Although I’ll probably never know for sure, my sense is that the 8 billion mutually-conditioned Homo monkeys on the planet, and the 100 billion others who have lived and died creating and struggling in civilization’s hospital-prison, have inherited the terrifying disease whose principal symptom is the chronic illusion of having a self that is somehow separate from everything else, and which then needs to be constantly protected and defended from everything else.

As I’ve written elsewhere (probably too often), I think this is a uniquely human affliction, the result of evolving a brain sophisticated enough to invent complicated models of what is happening in the ‘real’ world, and then, with encouragement from other afflicted humans, mistaking those models for actual reality.

It’s as if humans, as young children, suddenly went to sleep one day in an astonishing, full, already-complete world, and then woke up the next in an ersatz simulacrum of a world, a fake, incomplete model of the world, where nothing worked and nothing made sense. And then had to spend the rest of their lives trying, hopelessly, to make sense of it, when it isn’t even real.

And through this effort, we have created a dreadful, prosthetic, human world, the one I see outside my window, a mad world that has so utterly destroyed its ecosystems that it’s produced the massive and unstoppable extinction of most life on the planet.

So my invention of these other worlds, these alternative fictions of healthy, joyful, loving creatures living together in peace, is not about hope. I have no illusions that there is a path from today’s beautiful, terrible world to the ones I have invented. I am not expecting anything to ‘get better’, to unfold any way other than the only way it can. I will not be disappointed if the human experiment, as seems increasingly likely, ends badly.

If there is consolation in this, other than the fact that, despite the human carnage, this world is still an astonishing, wondrous place, it is that if our selves and the atomized world of their invention are truly just illusions, then it doesn’t matter what we do, or don’t do. It doesn’t matter whether we choose to live in endless struggle in the composite human fiction of the ‘real’ world, or in an alternative fiction that is far more pleasant.

Jeremy Bentham was an early exponent of the idea that we should in all things seek to maximize pleasure and minimize pain for the greatest number (and as he was an animal rights advocate, that ‘number’ was not limited to just humans). My observation has been that this is far more than just a moral code — it essentially describes what evolutionarily underlies the conditioning of all life on the planet. It is Gaia’s modus operandi.

But seen through the veil of the dis-ease of the illusion of self and separation, the calculation of optimal pleasure and minimal pain has changed, for humans, from a holistic assessment (“what is healthiest for the organism that is ‘all-life-on-Earth'”), to one of the adding-up of individuals’ levels of pleasure (“what is optimal for the greatest number of individuals, weighted somehow by their relative importance”). That is an insane calculus.

My conditioning precludes me from being a NTHE‘er, at least not to the point of trying to crash civilization faster than it’s already doing itself.

Instead, my conditioning seems to be leading me to withdraw from the cacophony of that collapse, and instead sustain myself in the alternate fiction of a world that is so well attuned to the rhythms of all life on earth that it need not collapse, one that already maximizes the pleasure and minimizes the pain of all-life-on-Earth.

So I’m checking out of the hospital and the prison, where I was not equipped to be of much service anyway. I’m going back to that undivided, uncivilized, pleasure-filled, vaguely familiar place, with echoes of my earliest childhood where there was nothing that had to be done.

I’ve never been there, but I know the way.

image CC0 from pexels.com

I‘m a member of a discussion group around the book Reinventing Organizations and the concept of Teal. The book, and practice, advocates creating organizations that are self-organized, self-managed, self-correcting, transparent and minimally hierarchical. I’ve written about it before.

The upcoming session of our group challenges us to take Teal personally. How can we exemplify and model the practices and principles of Teal organizations in our everyday lives — in whatever activities (even just conversation) we undertake with family, friends, collaborators, and other ‘community’ members — and not just in the “work world”?

Here are some of my thoughts on the subject — none of them novel, but pulled together in one place:

1. Start by knowing ourselves better — As I described in my collapse readiness reminders poster, this entails knowing what we’re good it, and lousy at, what our blind spots and biases and triggers and tacit assumptions are, and being aware of why we’re reacting, in the moment, the way we are.
2. Growing our capacity to engage others — The art of inviting others to a group or a conversation or an exploration begins with genuine curiosity about what others care about, and entails learning how to ‘craft’ an engaging invitation.
3. Sustaining an atmosphere of trust — The very best theatre ensembles trust each other deeply, and they ‘rehearse’ together to get better, as equals, authentically, transparently, with utter honesty and a focus on each other’s and their ‘customers’ extraordinary experience. Just don’t ask me how they do it!
4. Learning by asking great questions — Asking questions to understand why things are the way they are and how they might be different. Daniel Schmachtenberger’s brilliant list of questions to ‘understand the problem-space’ is great for starters, including challenging our own tacit assumptions.
5. Appreciating what we have in common — Understanding and building on our shared values and beliefs, what we all care about, enjoy doing, and are really good at, and how we uniquely do things and express ourselves. Our whole way of being in the world that we share in common. This is the bedrock of community. Without it, everything is a negotiation.
6. Learning to understand and appreciate opposing perspectives — Kind of the antithesis of #5. This entails deeply exploring and appreciating why people believe things so different from our beliefs. And then trying to synthesize some sensible understanding and viable approaches that are compatible with and encompass both sets of beliefs. Devilishly difficult, but powerful when it works.
7. Staying aware of where we’re going — Because too often we go off on tangents in meetings and conversations, because we forget what our common purpose or objective is. This ‘purpose’ may be a best possible outcome. Or, if things are in flux and we don’t know yet, it might just be the first next step, some tactics aimed along the trajectory we think might be the best one.
8. Learning to recognize and call out power dynamics — Most of us kinda wish we had more power, so we’re quick to use it when we have it. But exploiting power differences almost never produces optimal results, and can lead to resentment, disengagement, learned helplessness, and abuse. Sometimes power abuse is unintentional, or passive-aggressive, or even non-verbal.  It takes constant diligence to keep challenging the use of power, and shifting power to those with less, to restore healthy group dynamics and optimal behaviours.
9. Being willing to delegate to the most competent — That means acknowledging that the person with the matching title or job description or CV isn’t necessarily that person. It means letting go of control. And, always, it means matching authority to responsibility. Too many lousy ‘leaders’ delegate the latter but hold on to the former.
10. Being willing to take courageous, calculated risks — Most of us become more risk-averse as we age and gain authority. That’s partly why real innovation is everywhere in precipitous decline, and why so many corporate oligopolies are dangerously sclerotic. Life is too short to always play it safe. We learn much more from our mistakes than from our successes. And there are ways to make it safer to fail.
11. Learning and practicing collective accountability — This is not the same as ‘responsibility’, which refers to being the one on the hook to take action (and/or flak for failure). It means assessing together the measure of what has happened, and collectively deciding what should be done about it. It removes the ‘blame game’ and the individual burden, especially since in most cases no one person or group of people ’caused’ the outcome anyway.
12. Learning and practicing the Art of Dialogue — This is more, and less, than conversation. It entails a lot of listening and paying attention without analyzing or even really thinking. It requires suspending judgement and postponing questions and objections. Its author David Bohm said true Dialogue requires and enables us to set aside our conditioned thoughts and beliefs and open ourselves to appreciating those of others, and hence developing a collective understanding.
13. Learning how to self-correct (adapt to change) — This is about honing our capacity to continually sense what is happening and respond effectively, much as a living organism does when it detects something wrong. It requires a commitment to accept and exercise collective accountability (see #11 above). It requires a knowledge of what a “healthy state” looks like for the group in question (family, community, organization, or even for an individual) at a time of upset, struggle or turmoil. And it requires awareness of what pathways might be available to shift toward that healthy state.
14. Learning and practicing facilitation, consensus and conflict resolution skills — We can practice these skills in many contexts: eg at the family dinner table, during a political debate, or when someone needs guidance (not advice) to sort out their own thoughts and priorities. Facilitation is a servant/steward role; consensus is not the same as agreement; and conflict resolution is about fairly discharging emotional distress. You don’t learn these essential skills in MBA school.

These are worthwhile objectives, I think, but the real question is: How do we actually get better at these things? What practices can we put into place now to test and track our improvement? How can this list be made useful instead of just interesting?

What is needed are practical methods to obtain and hone these skills. My guess is that one reason so many organizations that try to “get to Teal” fail is because their people just don’t have these skills, and there isn’t an opportunity to develop and practice them.

My sense is that we need a kind of “Teal curriculum” to learn the fundamentals of these important capacities, and to practice them until we’re really good at them. Like an anti-MBA program. Maybe even offer it in high schools.

Fun to think about, anyway.

photo taken last summer out my window — Kulshan (Mt Baker) looms over the Pitt River Bridge and the Port Coquitlam dockyards

She keeps her secrets frozen under glaciers way up north
And people have got lost up there, in the home of the grizzly bear
And you can ask the mountain, but the mountain doesn’t care.
— Antje Duvekot, Long Way

Now, in the dead of winter, The Watcher is totally buried in snow. Kulshan, its First Nations name, is called Mt Baker by the colonists, but in earlier traditions, and to me, it is The Watcher, keeping an eye on what is happening all the way from Victoria and Vancouver to Seattle, from where it can be seen. Even on clear days it is often shrouded in cloud and fog, but when it emerges it is breathtaking.

The Watcher is 90km (58mi) from my window, and two miles (3300m) high, but it dwarfs everything else along the long rugged skyline visible from my panoramic view. It is an active volcano, like its sisters Mt St Helens (Lawetlat’la — “The Smoking Maiden”), Mt Rainier (Tahoma — “The Water Source”), Mt Hood (Wy’east — “Lawetlat’la’s Suitor”), Glacier Peak (Dahkobed — “The Parent”), Lassen Peak (Kohm Yah-mah-nee — “The Snowy One”), and Mt Shasta (Waka-nunee-Tuki-wuki — “Walk around and around, but never on top, because that is only for the gods”).

The Watcher is really a baby as far as volcanoes go. While the area has teemed with volcanic activity for four million years, The Watcher, mostly constructed from the debris of many earlier and now collapsed volcanoes, only emerged as an active volcano 140,000 years ago, and its greatest volcanic activity occurred from 40,000 to 12,000 years ago. A more recent eruption permanently changed the course of the Nooksack River, which once emptied north into the Fraser River and now empties west into Bellingham Bay. There are concerns that, with climate change, constant “atmospheric rivers” might so flood the lowlands north of The Watcher that the Nooksack might once again flow into the Sumas Valley and hence into the Fraser, with catastrophic implications for BC agriculture and the local First Nations peoples.

Small eruptions occurred as recently as 1843 and 1880, and even more recently (notably in 1943) escaping gas and high pressure have caused explosions leading to avalanches and mud flows. No one knows when it will erupt again.

The Watcher has a remarkable 12 glaciers angling down from its peak, covering an area of 50km² (20 square miles). But the glaciers are melting, even though the peaks of The Watcher are the snowiest place on Earth, receiving between 60′ (20m) and 100′ (35m) of new snow each year.

So more extreme weather events are now a double threat to the peoples who live in the shadow of The Watcher — disastrous flooding in the rainy winter, compounded by spring snow melt, and then disastrous drought in the summer, when retreating glaciers mean sharp declines in water supplies downstream.

As the photo above illustrates, even a mountain that receives so much snow can be dry by the following summer.

What will happen when the snows become rains instead as the planet warms? When the water stored up in glaciers in past years instead rushes immediately into the lowlands and hence into the sea, leaving flooding and erosion in the spring, and drought and dried-up rivers in the summer and fall?

The Watcher isn’t telling. It’s been here longer than even the earliest hominids. It’s seen ice ages, when ice covered everything for hundreds of miles around, two miles thick. It’s been here since before the Salish Sea was carved out by the ice’s retreat, when Vancouver Island, Haida Gwaii and all the Gulf Islands were just a part of the mainland. It will be here long after humans cease tinkering with the land and the waters, when nature once again follows its own course.

It’s just marking time, stoically chronicling the rise and fall, the ebb and flow, the changing of seasons and climates. Kind of like I am, I guess, though it does so with much more grace.

It’s not here to watch over us, after all. Just to watch, to see what happens, to witness how the story ends.

This post is about the most recent of the 2-3 hour ‘contemplative wanderings’ that I do near the end of each month.

In the early hours of evening, at this time of year this far north, it’s already been dark for a while. But it’s not raining, or windy, or foggy, so I make my way down the elevator and head outside. Here, in the city, a flashlight isn’t essential, as it was when I lived on Nex̱wlélex̱wm, so I have purposely left it behind.

This is the hour of after-work joggers, some of them sporting headlamps or reflective tape on their clothes. It’s the hour of dog-walkers, and late commuters, and weary night-shift workers. Drawn to the sea, I walk towards the eastern edge of Burrard Inlet (səl̓ilw̓ət — “tsuh-LAYL-wut” in the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ local First Nation language).

After my recent post on our “sense of scents”, I’m hoping to see whether the darkness allows me to exercise my non-visual senses. Will I be able to smell səl̓ilw̓ət’s salt water, and remember it? Will it then strike me, the next time I’m near, differently from the rich green smell of Hoy Creek, which I often visit, and which I’ve just passed? Will I ever be able to map the emotional landscape of these smells? Is there a language of smells, a language that can’t be spoken, a language in which that smell could be related to that feeling, the way a major seventh, or a sus4 chord, relates to that feeling?

I’m walking alongside rows of hedges and riverside trails, but I’m not able to discern much in the way of scents, even when I briefly close my eyes and try to concentrate.

And then a guy walking a beagle passes by going in the other direction, and the dog stops the guy it’s taking for a walk, in order to sniff. I slap myself on the side of the head. Of course! I utter a greeting to the guy, and nod to the dog in thanks for the lesson.

When I stop walking, and focus, and pay attention, I really can smell the differences from plant to plant. But it’s strange and frustrating — I have no language with which to distinguish and remember these scents. Perhaps if I knew what the names of the shrubs and trees were, I could at least ‘tag’ the smells with the names of their bearers, as I can now with cedars and lilacs. But I am totally unpracticed at this — I can no more make sense of these scents than I can make sense of the conversation of the people I passed a few moments ago speaking — what? — Mandarin or Cantonese or Korean? Japanese even? I have no idea.

How is it even possible to ‘remember’ anything if you have no taxonomy, no ontology, no words for it, I wonder? I recall scents from even way back in my childhood, when I’m re-exposed to them. “That smell” means “that precise place” or “that thing that happened” or even “that person”. It all comes rushing back. But we have no words for it — for the Cardiff Bridge Street smell or the listening-to-Gymnopédies-with-Joanne smell. Perhaps there is no need for words for it.

As I continue to walk, I am a bit surprised at the number of people, mostly women, who say words of greeting to me as we pass in the darkness. Since I moved here I’ve not noticed that very much. What’s changed? I am smiling, but that’s not unusual for me, especially when I’m walking. Is it because it’s dark, so it’s a safety acknowledgement, like the gentle ting of bicycles when they are passing you on multi-use paths?

And then I laugh. It’s because I’m not wearing a mask! For the past three years I’ve defaulted to wearing one, even outdoors when I’m in busy places. They were acknowledging my unmasked smile, along with my eye-contact and brief attention to them as our paths crossed. Nothing more meaningful, and nothing less human, than that.

There are, of course, people who don’t meet your gaze, who shrink down and look away and hurry past.

That gets me thinking about what it must be like to live a life of constant precarity, constant unease, constant wariness, or constant struggle. A life in the shattering aftermath of trauma. A life in never-ending fear of the reappearance of an abuser, or another horrific war. A life full of the the shame and dread of not knowing where the next meal for you or your children will come from, or the next fix, or where you’ll sleep tonight, and tomorrow night.

No wild creature, I am convinced, would ever put up with such a life — having known a better life, it would be too far down for them to even contemplate putting up with it. They would skulk away, lie down quietly and gracefully and just let it end.

What is it that drives humans to go on, no matter how ghastly their lives? Is it hope, or is it just the only life they know and the only life they can imagine? Are we all domesticated creatures like Lucky the dog, willing to put up with almost anything once we get used to it?

I sigh. The older I get, the more I realize that I know nothing. I wonder if my walking in the dark is a metaphor for where we are, we humans, now, always, scurrying around in a sea of unknowing. Wild creatures live in a world of wonder, while we, allegedly homo sapiens (twice), live mostly in a world of dissatisfaction, anxiety and bewilderment. Is this what all our ‘knowledge’ brings us?

As I reach the long arm of the ocean, and descend down the steps from the always-noisy road to the sand-and-pebble shore, I discover that last month’s king tide damaged the boardwalk across the edge of the inlet. There’s yellow tape everywhere, so I can’t even get close enough to smell the ocean, or what the ocean becomes in its transition to rivers and lakes. So I sit on the park bench quietly and listen to the ducks. There could be thousands of them out there; it’s too dark to see.

On the way back, I find myself walking behind two little girls with (I suppose) their mothers. The girls are dancing and singing and spinning around holding small flashlights in their hands, illuminating everything around them. “Aha!” says one, “You can’t avoid my gaze.” The other asks whether they can take the riverside path home instead of the “boring” roadside sidewalk. The mother is dubious. “We can show you the way,” the girl replies, in superhero voice. “We can see anything even far away, so we can protect you.” And then, shining the light from below her chin to eerily illuminate her face, she adds: “We have TASERS!” “Whaaaat?” shouts the mother, as I make my way by them.

I’m sort of glad I won’t hear where that conversation is going as I pass out of earshot.

It’s quiet then, for a while. From my treadmill routine, I’ve started to walk fast, about 7 km/h, and now I come up behind another couple, I’m guessing in their late teens, walking in the same direction. They’re speaking in urgent, hushed tones, and the young woman is pressed up against the guy as they walk. I can’t make out what they’re saying until the woman suddenly throws up her hands and says, in a loud, exasperated, grief-filled voice:

“All I want is to be able to curl up with you every night when we go to sleep, and wake up in your arms every morning, and spend all day loving you and being loved by you! Why is that so hard?… Why is everything good in this world impossible?”

I am briefly stunned by this bravura performance, and have to restrain myself from giving her a raised fist salute and shouting “Right on, sister!” Instead, as I pass them, I smile and nod to the woman, and give her a ‘thumbs-up’.

And for the rest of the walk home I am haunted by her questions. Has there ever been a time in human prehistory where that was how we lived, perhaps back in the days when we were pre-bonobos living in the trees? Was life, in those times of abundance and balance, such that we could simply reach out and grab a fig or some other nutritious food, and then sink back into the arms of the one we loved? If that were so — if it’s not just a fantasy of starry-eyed paleontologists and paleoanthropologists — then where did we go wrong, or was our trajectory from there to here just one of tragic but necessary evolutionary adaptation to ecological change?

Instead of going straight home, I head first to the neighbourhood bistro for a matcha latte. The place is jammed, so I grab a seat and eavesdrop for a few minutes. The group at the next table is talking about the crows dive-bombing from the top of their apartment and then soaring back up again. One of them was repeatedly dropping a pebble and then swooping down at incredible speed and grabbing it in its beak, and then repeating the exercise over and over. Having witnessed this often, I smiled.

There are a lot of anthropocentric explanations for why wild creatures play — mostly relating to their use of play as ‘practice’ for serious real-life situations. But biologists who have carefully studied wild creatures insist this is a false myth.

As I wave goodnight to the hardworking, gentle boss of the bistro, I wonder why crows play. I wonder if they do it just for fun. I wonder if they do it because that is just what crows do with their large brains and abundant leisure time. I wonder why they have migrated dramatically to the cities over the past 50 years, to the point more live in cities than in the countryside now — just like us. I wonder why, in each city, they mass each night (except in breeding season) in enormous, crowded, raucous roosts of thousands of birds, and then return miles to their far-flung homes each morning.

I wonder why there has to be a reason for anything, or if there even is a reason for anything — perhaps reasons are just placeholders, inventions of the brain, misleading us into seeing, and sharing, patterns where none really exists.

Perhaps there isn’t even a reason why “everything good in this world is impossible”. I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I’m just standing here in the dark, looking up at the moon, and wondering.

my now-slightly-outdated map of worldviews about collapse; right-click and open in a new tab to see it full-sized

It’s interesting to listen to social philosopher Daniel Schmachtenberger try to reconcile his assessment of the state of the world with his vehement insistence that we have to try as hard we possibly can to avert the ‘metacrisis’ that threatens to bring about the collapse of human civilization and the extinction of most or all life on earth, including humans.

In a recent video, he said:

How can evolutionarily nasty chimpanzees with a high orientation for conflict and irrationality, with nuclear weapons and AI and synthetic biology, with a history of using technology in conflict-oriented and harm-externalizing ways, how can 8 billion of us with exponential tech [increasingly available to all] do a good job of governing that much power? It doesn’t actually look that promising.

Yet he insists that “we cannot know for certain” that we are fucked (or that we are not), so we each have a responsibility to do what we can, working with others, to pull us back from the brink.

His argument reveals a curious quirk about humans and our relationship to complexity, uncertainty, and hope. We seem completely preoccupied with what John Gray calls “the needs of the moment”, and it is clear that this preoccupation has directly produced the metacrisis (a combination of many, unintended, crises and system collapses — economic, ecological, political, social, health, educational, resource, technological, and, for some, spiritual/religious) in which we find ourselves. Yet we continue to cling to hope for our future when all logic says it’s unfounded.

Daniel harks back to when he was 12-15 years old, and first became aware of the monstrous cruelty to animals inherent in factory farming. (This is also how my own political activism started, though I was a bit older.) It seemed an impossibly complex problem to solve. But for Daniel, as long as there was some uncertainty about the outcome, some small possibility of an unknown occurrence (lab-produced animal-less meat?) that could unexpectedly intervene in the system and radically alter its trajectory, he could not allow that it was ever acceptable to give up, to shrug and say “There’s nothing we can do.”

Of course Daniel is enormously biologically, economically and culturally privileged, and it would be easy to say “Daniel, that’s easy for you to say…”. But while he acknowledges his enormous privilege, Daniel insists he is not exceptional or unusual, and that our inherent biophilia, instincts and basic human capacities make it possible, and essential, for everyone to play a role in understanding and working fiercely to resolve the metacrisis in the best way possible.

My philosophy of late has been that we have no free will, and that our beliefs and behaviours are entirely conditioned, such that “we’re all doing our best”. I think Daniel is saying “we can and will and must do better”.

I think he’s wrong about the capacities of the human species, though I do accept that if everyone in the world was as intelligent, as informed, as thoughtful, as open-minded, as engaged, as curious, as connected, as humble, as articulate, and as coherent in their thinking as he is, we really might be able to ‘save the world’ from what we have unintentionally wrought.

Instead, we are where we are. I don’t believe we can blame humans for being preoccupied with “the needs of the moment” and for only being able to do their inadequate-to-the-current-situation best.

Here’s a thought experiment to illustrate why I think this is so:

Suppose you knew, or believed, the following:

1. The probability of a nuclear war this year is about 5%, easing slowly to about 2% in each year from 2026 onwards, should we outlive the Russia/US/NATO/China proxy wars in Ukraine and Taiwan.
2. The probability of the economy collapsing permanently at some point over the next 15 years is 50%, rising to 95% over the following 15 years. [By “collapsing permanently” I mean a situation where the vast majority of the world’s population is hungry, permanently unemployed, and either squatting in place (unable to afford housing) or constantly transient or migrating.]
3. The probability of an ecological catastrophe in your community occurring at some point in the next 15 years is 25%, rising to 95% over the following 15 years. [By “ecological catastrophe” I mean a situation where the vast majority of the community’s population is displaced and must migrate to another part of the world.]

I’m not asking you to accept these numbers as true — obviously we cannot know with any precision what is going to happen and when. But let’s assume you buy these probabilities. Your near-term perspective, now in 2023, of the existential risks you face would then be as illustrated below:

What demands the most of your attention, and perhaps keeps you awake at night, would naturally be the personal needs of the moment, shown in blue. If you have any bandwidth left for existential anxiety and are paying any attention to the doomscroll, your remaining preoccupation would likely be the risk of nuclear war, as its probability has soared over the past year. The horrific, longer-term economic and ecological (and other) crises we face would understandably be pushed to the back of your mind.

There’s nothing wrong-headed or inappropriately selfish about that. We have survived because our conditioning has inclined us to focus on the personal and the short-term.

But what if we extended the chart above over a longer-term risk horizon, and looked at the cumulative risks of these elements of the metacrisis, rather than the annual risks? Of course, the further out we go, the greater the uncertainty and the likelihood of our guess being wrong. But this is what it might look like, using the same hypothetical assumptions above:

“It doesn’t look promising!”

This chart suggests a different focus for how we view and prioritize the crises we are facing. This way of looking at them makes a lot of sense, logically and statistically, but this is not how humans make sense of things. For a start, the longer out we go, the more we are inclined to discount our belief in the likelihood of these crises happening, because of their enormous uncertainty*. Secondly, we know that such predictions are prone to being rendered unreliable and useless by “black swan” events (like pandemics), by novel technologies, and by other unforeseeable developments (like cosmic radiation, asteroids, and solar flares). And third, we don’t think in terms of cumulative risk; like lousy casino players, we only see one roll ahead, and if we dodge a bullet, we think the likelihood of dodging the next one is suddenly much higher.

So if we make it to 2032 (a toss-up), or 2039 (unlikely) with none of these crises having occurred, we are probably going to be unduly optimistic that they won’t happen in the next decade or two either (just as the Davos gnomes were ridiculously optimistic in late 2019 that there would be no pandemic, because there hadn’t been one recently). Same logic for the “big one” destroying Cascadia.

And when/if our systems are still basically functional in the 2030s, it’s likely our focus will still be the short-term challenges we face over the next year or two, which means we will remain preoccupied with our personal needs of the moment, until global economic or local ecological collapse changes everything.

That is one reason we will not address the metacrisis until it is too late. There is another, very human reason, and that is that we can’t, and don’t want to try to, fathom the enormous complexity and interrelatedness of the elements of the metacrisis, each one of which is enormously complex in itself. For most, it’s enough to make our heads explode. We believe it to be impossible to understand and deal with, so it in fact becomes impossible to understand and deal with. This is what “doing our best” means for human animals. And that is not a criticism.

Yet despite this, we hope. As my map of the different types of Salvationists at the top of this post describes, hope comes in lots of flavours: Hope that the gods or aliens will take care of us. Hope that technology and innovation will come to the rescue. Hope that some human elite of leaders, beneficent or hard-nosed, will save us from ourselves. Hope that a massive spontaneous return to self-sufficient community-based living or global uplifting of human consciousness will solve the crisis. Place your bets and spin the wheel.

And then there are deniers who hope and believe that it’s all a hoax. And there are the NTHE Gaia-lovers who hope our awful species will perish quickly so the planet can start to recover from the human experiment sooner rather than later.

What is behind this hope? What is it about our perverse species that uniquely chooses to believe things, and do things, based purely on this thing called hope? Is it some kind of mental illness endemic to humans?

What causes us to elect a president who runs a campaign based solely on hope — twice? What causes abused spouses and children to stay around in the hope the abuser is going to change? What causes people to desperately keep loved-ones on life support, when the prognosis is dismal? Why does Hollywood, playing to the crowd, show success at CPR at a rate ten times higher than its real-life success rate? Why do so many believe that the only alternative to unwarranted hope is crippling despair?

I have said, ad nauseam, that we believe what we want to believe, and the truth be damned. So it must follow that hope is what we want to believe is true, and want to believe will happen, even when we think that belief is fraught with risk. Hope is future-oriented, and there is evidence that we are the only species on the planet that is so oriented. What is underlying that hopeful belief? Is it shame or guilt about what we have done wrong or failed to do successfully (like leave a healthy planet for our children) up ’til now? Is it anger about past ‘wrongs’ we want and hope to see atoned? Is it fear of a future we can’t bear to face, so we mask it with hopefulness?

I have, for now, come to grips with a realization that we seem to have no free will or control over our actions and inactions. When I acknowledged that everything we do is conditioned, I was able to give up hope. We can’t know or control what the future will bring, so what will happen is the only thing that could have happened. If we are hopeful on that basis, we are almost sure to be disappointed. But when we are disappointed, we may just double-down and hope even more fervently that things will be better next time, or next year. We are hope junkies.

Caitlin Johnstone just wrote a very eloquent, lovely. heartfelt essay about hope and wonder. On hope, in remarkably Schmachtenberger-ish language, she writes:

Hopelessness, when it comes to the fate of humanity, is an irrational position. The belief that we’re all inevitably going to destroy ourselves or keep marching into the depths of dystopia to the beat of the propaganda drum assumes a level of knowledge that nobody can possibly have. Nobody could possibly have enough information to draw that conclusion with any degree of confidence, and believing that you have is actually a bit arrogant. You don’t know what the future holds for our species, what unpredictable sociological, technological, environmental or situational surprises lie in wait that could cause a radical deviation from the norm… Hopelessness is the baseless and irrational shrinking of possibilities down to the spectrum of what’s known.

Yes, we cannot know, but lots of research shows that the people who have studied and learned the most about history and human nature and the current state of the world and how it works, are the most pessimistic about the future — the least hopeful. I’ve talked to enough climate scientists to think this is probably true.

And yes, we cannot know enough to be sure of the endgame, or even if there will be one. But, on the balance of probabilities, we can get a pretty strong sense that “it doesn’t look promising”. Why, then, can’t we seem to manage to move beyond hope, and just accept what is, and how fascinating the human experiment has been, despite its discouraging trajectory?

In her essay Caitlin moves on, deliciously, from hope to wonder:

If you really open your eyes, you’ll notice that the world is crackling with so much radiant beauty and wonder that even if we were to lose it all tomorrow, it would have been enough. A lucid perception of reality brings with it an experience of awe, and an on-your-knees gratitude for the fact that there was ever anything at all. From a perspective that isn’t clouded with mental narrative and internal distraction, each moment is too miraculous and too priceless a gift to get hung up on the possibility that it might not last.

Wonder is always accessible, even in the depths of sadness or depression. You might not always be able to find it in the trees or the butterflies, but you can always find it somewhere, often in the sadness itself. Even in the pain and despondency. Even in the car exhaust and the tattered billboards. Even in the background shimmering of existence. It’s always there to be found; you just might have to zoom out or zoom in your camera in order to find your access point to it.

Yes, and yes, there is wonder! The joyful pessimist in me finds it everywhere. The eight billion of us comprise only 7% of the over 100 billion humans who have ever lived on this planet. We are among the blessed 7% who will possibly get to witness the final chapter of the human experiment, who get to know how the story ends! And if it ends badly, well, that’s the only way it could have ended. All civilizations, and all stories, end. We all did our best. Nothing to be sad or ashamed about.

It doesn’t have to have a happy ending to be a wonderful story.

So, on the balance of probabilities, it’s more-or-less hopeless. And that’s fine, because we don’t need to be hopeful. Other creatures have lived for millions or billions of years without the need for hope. They understand this, in a way our species, smart and destructive and reckless and whiny as a young child in a family of patient, wise elders, is still far from learning.

If they have a purpose, it has nothing to do with hope, and everything to do with wonder. We might learn this, if we last long enough.

But I’m not hopeful.

* At the other extreme, there is an emotionally unmoored but very well-financed fringe group, including Elon Musk, who subscribe to a belief called Longtermism, that advocates actions, even if they could entail massive death and suffering of the planet’s current inhabitants, if those actions increased the odds of even more humans being alive in the far distant future. (Uncertainty is not factored in to their ghastly calculus.)