How things got so effed up...

We are living in a time of unprecedented, extraordinary change. Have been for a couple hundred years, in fact. Only it keeps accelerating. No serious student of history, regardless of their political, religious, or other beliefs, can seriously dispute that much. But people on the whole do not handle extremely rapid change well. Extreme change breaks things, destroys arrangements to which people have become adjusted, and routinely threatens our actual survival. And yet, we are living within an entire civilization predicated on rapid change. Paradox a bit?

It's not a paradox at all, if you are a political radical, though, and have arrived at various subversive conclusions about civilization, conclusions that are hardly a big stretch given these basic facts I have outlined. Conclusions like: maybe our civilization is not really designed to benefit the majority? That kind of seems to be true on its face, being the only hypothesis that resolves the supposedly uncanny "paradox". And from there, it seems almost an inevitable conclusion that, if there are those who are benefiting, then they have quite a vested interest in such a design, even though it's very harmful to the majority.

However, the majority of people are sensible creatures, and under normal circumstances do whatever they can to muddle along, to adjust to the "slings and arrows" as they come, and find a way to survive. That's almost axiomatic. Because when that axiom ceases to hold, then circumstances are no longer "normal", and that is when a revolution happens. When an absolute majority (or even a large enough plurality) no longer find any way to adjust themselves to the dominant social order, that social order probably cannot continue much longer without a major transformation, it should go without saying.

All of which makes radicals a very lonely bunch. A radical is always "jumping the gun", and wants to hasten revolutionary social transformations (that he or she reckons are probably inevitable anyways, but can turn out a lot better or worse, depending on how they go and who influences them the most effectively). A radical always wants to shout, "Hello, people, this is NOT really working!" And at some level, all the sensible, "normal" folks already know that anyways, the radical is not revealing any great insights at all. Tell me something I do not already know! But, more importantly, tell me something that is actually useful in the here-and-now.

But unfortunately, the radical does not have anything much that is immediately actionable. He or she can talk til they're blue in the face about direct democracy, proportional representation, or even something as modest as public campaign financing. However, the ordinary mortal can hardly act on such noble ideas in any substantial way from inside their cubicles at work. A normal person wants to get by, and wants something to do that's readily actionable and has some tangible returns on their investment of time and trouble, a perfectly sensible expectation for ordinary mortals to have. But a radical has no such practical options to offer them. So the ordinary mortal mostly rolls their eyes at the radical's antics. "There goes Mr. Marxist again, railing about the ruling class!" the sensible person thinks, and then mostly tunes out anything the radical still has to say about the matter.

(I do not want to muddy the waters at the moment by addressing the fact that those sensible creatures who constitute the majority of humanity have a multitude of coping mechanisms, including all manner of "glass-half-full" mental tricks, with which to discount the bad and emphasize the good in any situation, even to the extreme of engaging in denial and fantasy by doing so. Yes, that is also part of the picture, how could it not be? But it's just a tangent to the points I am trying to make at the moment. Besides, there are already plenty of people brighter than myself who focus on that particular problem anyways.)

Consequently, most radicals discover pretty quickly that focusing on issues that affect people's immediate self-interests and survival are a lot more productive than focusing on more abstract concerns. This often poses a challenge, though, when we are facing problems like environmental threats that do not threaten to immediately leave dead bodies in the streets. No wonder all efforts to forestall catastrophic global warming have so far mostly come to naught. Also, effective organizing always means focusing on those most directly affected by a problem. But also, unfortunately, that usually means organizing people who are the most disadvantaged and have the fewest resources at their disposal. But an effective organizer usually does not sink their efforts too much into the majority of "comfortably well off" or even "fair to middling" folks, but in those minorities (whether socioeconomic, ethnic, or otherwise) who are most oppressed, and consequently have the most to gain, and the least to lose, from fighting for social change.

So far, I am only talking about leftist radicals, though. If you are a rightwing radical, you may get more traction, thanks to some inherent advantages you enjoy. To begin with, you are not challenging a system of social and political relationships. More likely, you are a practical political entrepreneur, whose "market demographic" resides in the majority, not a distinct minority, and you are only asking your audience to focus their attention on some relatively powerless minority, lower on the social ladder, who are getting an even worse break from "the system" than those in your audience -- your audience being the same majority who mostly, so far, are managing to muddle through, although maybe their "muddling" is getting increasingly precarious. But by focusing their wrath on the "welfare cheats", or affirmative action, or some such thing, you can get them riled up about a bogieman/scapegoat who is not "one of them", is in fact "beneath them", and yet, is supposedly drawing away resources that they could be getting.

Again, since "sensible" people always just want to muddle through, are naturally afraid of radical change, and want quick results, it makes all the sense in the world that "punching down" will hold a lot more attraction for them than joining an uncertain movement to challenge the basic structure of social relationships that dominate our society (and, especially, those who sit at the apex of those relationships, those much richer and more powerful than themselves).

The recent article in Jacobin, "The Minsky Millennium" (issue no. 31, Nov 2018), alluded to this problem, when it pointed out that radicals are always awaiting the "moment of truth" when society's internal contradictions become exposed in a way that even the (possibly wobbly but comfortable) majority can no longer pretend to ignore. The trouble is, the article points out, when such moments finally arrive, there is no reason to expect that a radical social transformation in favor of the majority will necessarily ensue, because the quickest and surest solution to the crisis will probably entail attempting to shore up the same original system of social relations in the first place, that keeps the majority on a leash to a tiny but powerful minority. Unless those radicals have already prepared the ground for an alternative model that the majority now believe has some hope of "working" (ie, restoring some tolerable form of stability), they are highly unlikely to embrace it, especially since the proposals that radicals advance usually are among the least likely to "restore business confidence" and any resumption of the (wobbly but possibly tolerable) status quo ante.

Given all this, it's a wonder we are not already living under a much worse sort of fascism than we've reached so far. We should be thankful that, despite it all, the better disposed among us remain a majority, and the audience for the most vicious political entrepreneurs remains relatively small and marginalized.

I don't have any "solutions" to offer to these conundrums at this time, except to suggest, maybe leftists should be a little less angry and little more compassionate -- and grateful -- that despite having our work cut out for ourselves, and the deck heavily stacked against us by the basic dynamics of things, people are nonetheless a lot more kindly disposed towards our way of thinking than we ever had any right to expect! And surely it's not primarily thanks to any merits on our part, brilliant dialectics, or great people skills we can boast of...

Liberalism as mental disorder

I am only partly kidding with my cruel title. And yet, it is astonishing how true the aphorism rings that I just read moments ago, plastered on a lamppost around the corner from here:

In a political economy of ruthless competition, the rightwing destroy the world, while leftists destroy each other.
-RiotCop

For example, otherwise comfortable, middleclass people can be simultaneously terrified of the consequences of pollution and environmental destruction, for themselves, their children, and their elders, and moderately responsive to leftwing analyses of the problem, but simultaneously even more afraid of the dangers of losing some measure of bourgeois "respectability" by appearing to get too exorcised over the matter, or heaven forbid speaking hastily and getting anything factually wrong in their passion about it.

In reality, though, it has always been precisely when people got sufficiently pissed off and "unreasonable" as to make life a little bit unpleasant for the power brokers, that concrete concessions have been won. Appearing "reasonable", "moderate", and modest in their demands has never accomplished much of anything, other than getting steamrolled.

What is it about the people in the socioeconomic "middle" that always seems to make them the scaredest pussycats around?

Folks at the bottom rarely raise their voices on anything, being too busy mostly with just surviving to have the time. When they do, its usually in the news, think riots in LA or Milwaukee, scaring the bejesus out of the comfortable everywhere. Folks at the top feel free to pursue the most extremist antisocial agenda in favor of their personal self-interest with hardly an eyebrow raised and few consequences. But folks in the middle? You are exceedingly lucky if you can get them to sign a petition between breaks sipping their latté.

Grace and Gratitude (on reading Wall-Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass)

Lately, I have been reading a book by Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass. Robin speaks of having her feet in two worlds: she is a professor of botany who leads academic research in her field, but she is also an indigenous woman with strong Native American (Potowatomi) roots. Her book is about not only the traditional craft of braiding sweetgrass (Hierochloe odorata, or "wiingaashk" in Potowatomi), but also the braiding of cultural outlooks on the world.

The author appreciates the scientific method as a way of getting at certain parts of the truth, but she equally esteems the insights of her own culture and other cultures indigenous to the continent, whose outlook is informed above all by what she calls "The Honorable Harvest".

The principles of the Honorable Harvest are hinted at well by the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois confederation) custom of reciting a lengthy "Pledge of Gratitude" at the beginning of all important councils and public events. This recitation consists of enumerating in great detail a seemingly endless list of things which "all present should be able to agree deserve our collective gratitude". These include forces like the sun, the rains, trees, other animals, indeed everything essential to our own continued survival. She attributes a not insignificant role to this ceremony in the famed prowess of the Haudenosaunee at negotiations and in unifying their peoples.

This Haudenosaunee ceremony illustrates one form which the Honorable Harvest takes, a set of principles nowhere spelled out in an official law book, but which she ventures to enumerate as follows:

• Take only what is given
• Never take more than half
• Acknowledge and honor the gift
• Learn to reciprocate the gift

As radically different as such an outlook on the world seems from the perspective of contemporary, mainstream Western culture, the overarching principle here is certainly not altogether foreign to wisdom traditions common to Western civilization. It comes closest, perhaps, to the Christian principle of "grace" (χάρις), a gift of God freely given but one which it is quite impossible to "earn", only to appreciate. The Greek word is obviously related to the English word, "charity" which, while utterly distinct in meaning, preserves an element of its origins, in that, by definition, no one would ever suppose charity to be obligatory or inevitable. It is rather, above all, a gift freely given. Of course the word "gratitude" itself shares the same roots. "Gratitude" may be defined precisely as the correct attitude to be adopted by the recipient of grace.

What, we may ask, does the world look like to those for whom all of its wonders, indeed practically everything in it not made directly by our own two hands, are gifts of grace (and, of course, even every single product of our labor originates with raw materials, which are in turn gifts)?

To such a community, the Honorable Harvest becomes axiomatic.

This is not to say that people never run afoul of these principles and learn hard lessons, to the contrary. Indigenous storytelling is replete with cautionary tales of what happens to those who violate these precepts. People have always learned through bitter experience.

The author's book is certainly a sorrowful lamentation at the state of our world, and the threats to all life forms we are presently witnessing, threats she attributes clearly to our overwhelming ignorance of the Honorable Harvest. At the same time, her outlook is informed by a sweeping ecological perspective that wisely does not dwell on blame. Instead, she includes numerous vignettes of people from different walks of life, both indigenous and Euro-American, seeking to restore and rehabilitate the world around them. She compares the cultures that came to these shores after 1492 CE to the "hardy pioneer" species familiar to ecologists, and ever present in disturbed places, like clearcuts and waste spaces of modern cities and towns. They spread haphazardly without a thought of the future, so long as resources are abundant. But they cannot sustain the furious pace of their early development, and must eventually be succeeded by plant communities knit together by more stable strategies for survival.

Trump is no Hitler

Mr. Trump is no Hitler, for many reasons. But there's one uncanny parallel I can see in the two men: they were/are both ciphers. Neither were/are known to ever have had "friends" in the normal sense of the word. Far more than being personalities with their own peculiarities, both were/are more like vessels for pouring in certain essential qualities of their respective countries/times. For Hitler, those qualities were ultranationalism, militarism, racism, anti-Semitism, anti-Communism, etc. For Trump, while some of those qualities are apparent in him, too, the far more essential quality that is really characteristic of Trump is infantility.

The "Trump baby blimp" that activists plan to fly in London alludes to this. But to pretend that this is some kind of coincidence not revealing of the country he presides over is grotesque. The infantilism of USA culture has been increasingly apparent, since well before Marshall McCluhan's observations about the early days of television. The problem is really not even a question of a "left/right" divide (that there exists today no electoral political left in the USA, properly so-called, is a whole other can of worms, that I don't want to get into now).

Any even cursory inspection of some of the criticisms against Trump -- for, say, meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un -- reveals a kind of "bipartisan" cranky infantility. Never mind that by doing so, he was helping to defuse a dangerous confrontation of his own creation. No, the danger that he might get any credit for stepping back from the brink of a nuclear war was too much for his staunchest Democratic critics. "Trump hobnobs with a murderous dictator!" screamed Democrats! Senator Tammy Duckworth (D, IL) even introduced a proposed law banning the Pentagon from withdrawing forces from Korea!

The entire "Russia conspiracy" fairy tale, and the credulity with which zealous anti-Trump members of the public have swallowed it, point to the same infantilism. I mean, ok, I can well believe that intelligence agencies engage all the time in numerous efforts at influencing the media. But the idea that any foreign intelligence agencies might be capable of becoming a crucial determinant of the results of elections in a country with such a balkanized, baroque voting system as the one prevailing in the USA is preposterous. (And not only preposterous, but truly dangerous, to the extent that it distracts from the very real, methodical and insidious GOP projects at intimidating and suppressing voters in dozens of states, which we know have had crucial effects.)

The ultimate infantilization of USA political and public life becomes most apparent in the very 24/7 reality-TV show now embodied by Trump. The Presidency as a political institution was already an absurd monstrosity all by itself, effectively hardly more than a quadrennial monarchy. To have it occupied now by a man of Trump's ilk, though, guarantees the ultimate degeneracy of the "mainstream" mass media -- even while they profit lavishly from the mesmerizing quality of it all. These qualities of Trump's surely made it no accident that he was chosen by author Bret Easton Ellis, all the way back in 1991, as his protagonist's personal hero in that author's controversial novel, "American Psycho." Trump already embodied a certain kind of Lord-of-the-Flies mixture of amoral hyperindividualism, vanity, cruelty, and decadent neoliberal opulence that spoke to something deep in the heart of the culture Ellis observed.

Befitting the "bipartisanship" in evidence here, the main character of that novel even leads a kind of double-life: by day, he criticizes his colleagues in his Manhattan highrise offices for making racist and sexist jokes. But by night, he plays a serial killer, who viciously stabs a black, homeless man to death, shouting as he does so, "do you even realize how pathetic you are?!" It hardly takes much imagination to read a prophetic fable/metaphor for our times now, currently manifesting itself via a daily reality TV show, into Ellis's novel.

Trump also reminds one of a figure from another, much earlier, quintessential "great American novel," Fitzgerald's "Great Gatsby," of course. The uppercrust society playboy Tom's racist eugenicist rants come to mind, and of course the unforgettable epitaph summing up his character:

"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."

As such, Trump is really more like a kind of archetypal caricature of childish sefishness of a very vicious, schoolyard bully sort, one devoid of the normal sorts of adult qualities, even of allegiances or a sense of responsibility to institutions or other people that he tries so often to claim that others owe him. He is almost closer to an unalloyed Platonic ideal of the "Ugly American" than a real human being.

I am reminded of the interviewer who challenged him over whether his rhetoric against Moslems wasn't stoking more anger and violence in the world. His response was, "what difference can it make, the world is already an angry, angry place!" It was as if a cop had caught a polluter red-handed pouring poison into a lake, and the culprit pointed to the dead fish on the shore and said, "So what?! They're already all dead anyways!"

I hesitate even to talk about the elephant in the room, for that very reason, since talk about Trump is hardly in short supply, and can only confer on him more importance and legitimacy than he really has. And yet, Trump does indeed offer other bullies and culprits more license to pour out their poisons and then point at the dead fish on the shore. But in the end, reveling in hating Trump probably does no more than pour more poison into that lake. So something else is called for.

Storytelling

Hercules and the Hydra, and the story of the Biblical Jubilee, are two very different semi-mythological stories that play foundational roles in the larger story of Western civilization itself. What can we learn from them?

Storytelling is a quintessential human activity. When people ask me my reading preferences, I must confess that they tend towards nonfiction. Yet storytelling is everywhere, and is inherent in all we do, including reading and writing nonfiction. Including even the "scientific method" itself. For what is an hypothesis we pronounce and then aim to prove, but a story of a certain kind?

Lately, we hear a lot about "fake news". The notion of "fake news" is itself authoritarian, even if we believe that objective truth is available for us to know. Because "fake news" presupposes that there is an obvious, objective truth, which we can arrive at by snapping our fingers or, more usually, listening to some authority figures, usually on the TV or in the "official" press, snapping theirs, usually accompanied by "experts" they chose. No wonder people are sceptical about it, when they discover there are many "stories" to choose from, and they can just as well choose the one that pleases their own personal fancy, as any other. That much, for good or ill, has been a gift of the Internet age.

We are constantly telling stories, and that can be a very salutary thing. To pretend that there is some kind of impenetrable firewall between stories and truth is a basic misunderstanding of the scientific method. Scientific truths are no more handed down by God from on high than any particular story, fictional or otherwise, necessarily is. And yet, any story automatically has a kernel of truth in it by the very nature of its effects on our thinking and our lives.

Stories always form the horizons and limits of our understanding of the world and its possibilities. In the book, "Many Headed Hydra", historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Reddiker refer repeatedly to semi-mythological stories, like that of Hercules and the Hydra from Greek mythology, and the Jubilee from the Bible, that in times past were foundational to many of our ancestors' ways of thinking about the world.

The stories of Hercules and the Hydra, contrasted with those of the Biblical Jubilee, represent almost opposite poles in the mythological underpinnings of the modern world. Hercules represented the metahistorical "Great Man", whose mighty individual strength puts down and defeats the disorderly and rebellious masses of commonfolk, represented by the Hydra. The commoners are embodied by the monstrous Hydra, an inhuman and ominous threat to all of civilization, which must be tamed, if not outright exterminated, to save the latter. The Great Man, Hercules, is the hero whose efforts attain this feat.

By contrast, the story of the Bibilical Jubilee, when all prisoners were set free, all debts forgiven, and the property of the great and powerful redistributed to the commoners, represented a great hope for moral and physical redemption, right here in this world and this life, for the downtrodden and struggling masses.

Whether a Jubilee ever actually occurred exactly as people understood it from reading the Bible was hardly crucial to the inspiration they drew from it. Likewise, whether a superman like Hercules ever really lived was hardly important to the social elites who drew inspiration from his myth.

Likewise, in our own times, the ignorance of stories like those of the Jubilee (or, for that matter, the origins and significance of the Herculean myth) represent a profound handicap for the moral imaginations of ordinary people. The particular facts of history are far less relevant than the impact they have (or the limitations they place) on the imaginations of those who do (or do not) learn them.

The Honorable Harvest

Extreme individualism harms the human individual.

The doctrine and philosophy of extreme individualism is, like an excess of a nutrient like vitamin A, harmful and potentially lethal to actual human individuals, both those who espouse it, and those who must live around and with them.

The ideological structure of the USA, its politics and society, privileges individualism above all else. The watchwords of the American revoltuion were “life, liberty, and property” (modified, in the Declaration of Independence, to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, which must have sounded less crass). Still, these are attributes pertaining to individuals only. It’s a striking fact, especially since the society of that time was far less obsessive in its individualism then, by economic necessity, in an historical epoch when most people were farmers and rural folk who depended on their neighbors for a multitude of forms of assistance, like barnraisings, than it is today, in a mostly urban population largely estranged from the activities of real production and subsistence. Being “lonely amidst a crowd” in the city is a commonplace observation.

When the individual comes to really believe that he or she is alone in the world, and reliant solely on his or her own efforts, the possibility or even the thought of any collective activity towards the common good becomes remote. The very notion of a “democracy” depends on some thought towards such a common good and working towards it, and it likewise becomes remote and unattainable.

No doubt such thoughts influenced the philosopher Victor Frankl, when he urgently proposed that postwar America seriously consider building a “Statue of Responsibility,” to offer some counterbalance to its existing Statue of Liberty. For what can “responsibility” possibly mean, if not responsibility to others?

The false opposition between the individual and the common good can be considered the cornerstone of the “American ideology” (aka “American Dream”), par excellence. Instead of comparing it to Socialism, or Communism, or other ideologies, we can most readily contrast it with another, much older ideal for the goals of human existence that was clearly already native to these shores, once called “Turtle Island” by some of its original inhabitants, and which predated what is now known as the “American Dream”. The botanist and Native American (Potawatomi) writer, Robin Wall Kimmerer, beautifully evokes this other worldview in her 2013 book, “Braiding Sweetgrass”

In “Braiding Sweetgrass”, the author relates the relationship and worldview of native peoples of the Americas, one which survives to this day for some, in which the Earth and its other creatures are co-equals in meaning and significance to human beings, and to which the latter owe a debt of gratitude and reciprocity. Indeed, the principles of gratitude and reciprocity form the cornerstone of their relations to both the world and each other. The author describes a guiding and overarching code of conduct that she says forms the most fundamental of moral teachings for native peoples, at the heart of which is what she calls “the Honorable Harvest”. The Honorable Harvest is entirely incompatible with individualism as an ideology privileging the individual for its own sake. In the indigenous understanding of the world, the individual is entirely dependent on a web of relationships for his or her own survival. An imbalance in these relationships can quickly lead to disaster. Our own actions, whether through greed, or laziness, or inattention, can always threaten such a disaster. Responsibility to the whole becomes paramount.

There are four precepts required for observing the Honorable Harvest:

• Take only what is given;
• Use it well;
• Be grateful for the gift;
• Reciprocate the gift.

For the native peoples of this land, it was evident that all of life abounded with gifts that they could not possibly have produced by themselves alone. Gratitude came easily and naturally under such circumstances. But for the mostly European settlers who supplanted them, the good things in life were literally “goods”, often commodities to be bought and sold, but only after being wrested by force from the Earth.

It is easy to see how the doctrine of individualism as a paramount end unto itself arises naturally from the latter worldview. The growth of consumer capitalism carries it to its apogee.

Recently, I read that the rate of suicide is reaching epidemic proportions. In some places and age groups, it is now the leading cause of death, rivaling or surpassing car crashes. The Brave New World of the “rugged individual” appears not so rosy anymore.

Can the Honorable Harvest Kimmerer describes become an antidote to modern anomie and despair? Can we recover a different outlook on life, and intentionally cultivate the kind of gratitude that once came naturally to many people?

Bosses Against Meditation

“Hey, boss, you don’t want your workers meditating”, screams a provocative New York Times headline.

The article purports to relate the results of research which is supposed to be controversial and attention-grabbing. Surprise: meditation makes workers less motivated to make more money for their employers (and themselves), not more!

Of course, anybody familiar with meditation and other mindfulness practices would not be surprised by this conclusion.

The article is thought provoking, though, but not for the reasons the author thinks.

The article takes it as a given that the sole measure of the legitimacy of any worker’s activities is whether it contributes to an employer’s “bottom line”.

Now, anyone can easily think of rebuttals to such an argument. Doesn’t an employer care about whether that worker can get along with others in a harmonious way? Can’t a person who enjoys greater serenity and confidence around others contribute to an employer’s bottom line in other ways, not as easily quantified, but still real and valuable?

However, such arguments are hardly rebuttals to the basic assumptions of the author. Because the author takes for granted, for example, that the wellbeing of the employer, by whatever measure chosen by him or her, is the problem of paramount concern, and that the worker – or at least that portion of the substance of the worker’s life, his or her time spent in his employment by his boss – is the only valid measure of any activity by the worker. The worker, in short, is truly a “wage slave”, and except for whatever laws and regulations by which the government has deemed fit to limit him, an employer may do with his worker as he sees fit. Whereas, for the worker, it is “not his to reason why, his but to do or die.”

Lest we accept such an ideology at face value as the natural order of things, it is worth pointing out that, had the original US labor movement, born after the American Civil War, succeeded in its complete program and objectives, the rights of workers would have been founded on the basis of the 13th amendment of the US Constitution, that which prohibits slavery, and therefore would have been taken to be inalienable human rights. As it turned out Instead, however, the judicial branch did uphold the power of government to regulate the conditions and wages of workers against challenges by employers made under the doctrine of the supposed sanctity of “freedom of contract”, but those judges, of both past and present, based their decisions on the Commerce Clause and the power of the federal government to regulate all interstate commerce. Therefore, labor became an article of “commerce”, akin to a box of wigs or a bushel of wheat, as opposed to the substance of the life of a free man or woman.

These are the assumptions and this is the jumping off point for an article such as the one that lately appeared in the New York Times. This is what the radical Italian philosopher and revolutionary Antonio Gramsci meant by “hegemony”: the power to dictate ideological discourse so forcefully that it becomes axiomatic, so that one can write an article such as this based on assumptions – such as the greed of an employer and his absolute right to use his employees to serve that greed as he sees fit – with scarcely a thought that the public might bat an eyelash at them. More likely still, such a thought did not even occur to the author himself.

Delusions are endless

What are delusions? In Buddhism, a delusion is a form of misunderstanding that is not necessarily strictly voluntary nor involuntary. Certainly it is true that delusions can be willfully indulged. Sometimes the expression "wishful thinking" approximates this kind of delusion. Other times, the misunderstanind might be inadvertent. Seen another way, though, we can never be certain, because we can arrive at a misunderstanding in so many ways. For example, laziness, haste, failure to take the time to carefully observe, or other mistakes can cause us to shortcircuit the process of discernment that could have resulted in a better understanding of a situation. Other times, we may willfully indulge in averting our gaze from unpleasant truths, and become so practiced at that bad habit that we forget we are even doing it, and start to believe sincerely in the wishful thinking we are actively cultivating.

Such an outcome should not come as a surprise. Habits eventually harden into character, ie, a set of traits that we cannot simply will away, even when we start to actively regret them, in other words, they are not completely voluntary anymore.

I have a close relative who often expresses puzzlement or annoyance at my deliberate avoidance of any packaged and processed foods. I have a lot of reasons for this avoidance. I know that any food that is packaged has to produce a profit for multiple middlemen. That leaves a strong incentive for those intermediate parties between me and the original harvester, farmer, or other producer to cut corners in the quality of the ingredients used, the care taken with them in the packaging and production, and so on, to ensure an adequate profit after all their expenses are taken into account.

The more middlemen, the more acute the problem. I have often shared with this relative snippets from the endless barrage of articles that come out every day about contamination of industrial food products, everything from melamine in dog and baby food, to willful use of moldy ingredients in canned tomatoes, to heavy metal contamination of corn syrup and illicit importation of Chinese products like "counterfeit" honey (honey that has been dilluted illegally with cheaper adulterants like contaminated corn syrup, and ultrafiltrated to remove any traces of pollen, preventing palynologists from tracing its sources -- products cannot be legally labelled as honey in the first place if all pollen has been removed from it, because any real honey always contains pollen, but pollen also allows forensic investigators to trace its source to within a few miles, since pollen from every locality has very distinct characteristics, so organized crime interests who know this will cover their tracks, even though the ultrafiltration raises the production cost of the illicit product).

The industrial economy presents us with an apparent cornucopia of products, most of which are useless if not actively harmful to our long term personal and planetary health. We cannot kick the habit though, because among other things, an entire "better-living-through-chemistry" generation has grown up accepting these things as givens, without question, and no amount of factual information will "stick" with most of them that there is a deadly urgent problem afoot. Staring these truths in the face would put them too far outside of their comfort zone. The delusion here is definitely neither strictly voluntary nor involuntary.

When I retell my relative the same information six months or a year or two years later, they sincerely express astonishment and swear it is the first they ever heard all this. And it's not on account of age-associated memory loss, because they don't exhibit any other kind of forgetfulness.

Delusion is the foundation of the entire industrial economy. It is evident to even a child who hears any tv news segment today that our civilization is careening towards oblivion. Only a rigorous habit of distraction and obliviousness can obscure that truth. Alas, precisely such a habit is omnipresent and at work every day to keep us on track for the approaching apocalypse.

Buddhist Economics

Long before I had any more than the foggiest idea what Buddhism was about, I remember the deep impression EF Schumacher's chapter entitled "Buddhist Economics" from his book, "Small is Beautiful," made on me. Schumacher's major thesis in that part of the book was the basic confusion between means and ends prevalent in conventional (Western) economics, in comparison to the clarity and simplicity of those teachings of Buddhism that principally touch upon themes which today we refer to as "economics". The biggest insight, one which is really the heart of Buddhism itself, is that the multiplication of wants is a really, really bad idea, and no sound economic system, much less society, can ever rely on such a perverse basis. This is simply a translation of the second of the Four Noble Truths (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Noble_Truths) into economic terms, that suffering arises from "grasping and aversion".

Unfortunately for us, the determined -- I dare say maniacal -- multiplication of desires is the very foundation of capitalism as we know it. Also, research psychologists have only just managed to rediscover another truth that a certain prince in northern India noted two thousand years ago: it is far more emotionally painful to be forced to part with something once you have it than to have a desire for something new never be met. "Psychological addiction" is just a fancy way of describing the same truth.

So there it is: a double whammy. As if it weren't bad enough to desire something and suffer the pangs of feeling unfulfilled lest we get it, it is literally true that the even worse outcome for us, to quote the waggish joke, is to have our wishes fulfilled! For in the end, Buddhism informs us (and our own lived experiences easily confirm it) that nothing is permanent. So once we get something, our loss of it is already predetermined, it is only a question of when.

Yet here we are in a system that one may say has been scientifically determined to cause the "cancer" of suffering, and generally the worst kind of suffering, and that we have on the authority of not only modern psychological research, but also one of the world's great wisdom traditions. "What is to be done?"

The Buddha was a radical after a manner of speaking, there is no doubt, although he was probably not a Leninist. He did recognize that some kind of internal revolution was called for, though, and that is what he preached to his disciples.

I don't know if I necessarily have any more clarity on the answers to that question than the next poor slob on the street, although I do feel confident that a decent first step is to at least start asking such questions in the first place. An echo of a similar insight is heard in Socrates, father of Western philosophy: "the unexamined life is not worth living." The contemplative traditions have for many generations been elaborating detailed methods for asking these questions. They involve things like meditation, metta practice, giving and taking of precepts, etc.

At some point, though, merely asking questions is likely insufficient. One has to live and make actual decisions, however flawed they turn out to be. Hopefully, therefore, at the end of the process of self-examination, another process of discernment informed by the previous one offers up some more or less sound conclusions for our further consideration moving forward.

If it is really true that the multiplication of wants is profoundly antithetical to happiness, and even actively causes unhappiness, surely that has profound practical implications for every aspect of our lives. What can it mean for someone who watches television programming, for example, where they are being passively marinated in the production of such desires for hours? Or, for those of us who, mercifully, manage to escape such "programming", what can it mean to be surrounded by others who have been shaped in this way? Are we really immune to such forces when all or most of those in our immediate vicinity have been thoroughly shaped by them?

Now there are new media of communications, supposedly "multidirectional", "social" media, but they are overlayed on top of a society already thoroughly saturated in the older media, the ones about which Marshall McLuhan warned us. Now we have new and only very slight variations on the old themes. We hear about "FOMO", "fear of missing out", which is supposedly the biggest hazard of reading or watching videos of our friends hanging out with the cool kids, keeping up with the Jones, or just generally enjoying life with, Goddess forbid, possibly greater intensity or enjoyment than us. Oh no!

How very different such a "fear" is than the virtues extolled by the Brahmaviharas ("Divine Abodes"), one of which, we are informed, is "mudita", or "sympathetic joy", meaning that enjoyment which flows from the successes and enjoyment of others. (Yiddish and Hebrew have a word for a similar emotion: "nakhes".)

Can we imagine an economy in which our enjoyment flows from the pleasures and successes of others, at least as much as from our own?

John Ruskin, the 19th century philosopher, devout Christian (and, to hear Mahatma Gandhi tell it, the principal inspiration for the latter's social movement in India), in his book, "Unto This Last", noted that one could know a truly prosperous business, society, or country, by the status of the least of those living under it. If those at the bottom are doing well, that should surely impress us. Afterall, what does it prove if only a few at the top wallow in wealth, while vast numbers below them wallow in squalor? Surely that is no distinction at all. One can easily find countless examples throughout history of miserable places where a handful are obscenely rich.

The Buddha said that "good companions are the whole of the way". Likewise, Aesop said, "a man is known by the company he keeps." What, then, when an entire world system has been constructed, which it is hardly possible to completely escape, which is rather violently antithetical to our aspirations? People on the political left have wrestled with their own translation of the same kind of question: "Can one have socialism in one country?"

One of the Sixeen Bodhisattva Precepts perhaps offers a clue. "Not contriving reality for the self is called the precept of not indulging anger." Yet we know things around us are dissatisfactory in many ways, even downright perverse. Surely that is something about which anger is warranted.

Maybe anger is warranted. But the precept about anger does not simply say "anger", it refers to "indulging anger". "Indulging anger" means making a deliberate habit of it, fiercely holding onto it. I definitely get how that can be corrosive, to oneself and others. Who hasn't observed the harmfulness of anger as a habit?

Again, this points to habits of introspection as being necessary. One does not just generally decide to do something which one knows is harmful to oneself and others out of some sudden perverse impulse. Rather, one gets caught up in it, like a wave that builds over time, almost inexorably and often without consciously noticing it.

Then, if these habits of introspection are combined with actively building communities that engage collectively in such habits, one arrives at spiritual communities, "congregations", "sanghas".

The inevitable question presents itself, though: can a spiritual path translate into a political and social movement that brings about a positive collective change, transcending any narrow creed or religious tradition?

The Three Poisons

We are living today in a world economy which depends for its continued functioning on the digging up and burning, “cracking”, “fracking”, fissioning, or other processing of prodigious amounts of various noxious poisons out of the bowels of the Earth. Simpleminded people of all previous human societies surely would have concluded such a thing to be demonic. But any well educated member of the modern, smarter, “better living through chemistry” generation could easily disabuse them of such quaint superstitions. Fast forward fifty years to today, however, and most scientists are soberly but urgently trying to get through to us that, actually, the simpletons of yesteryear largely had it right, and that our continued survival on the planet now depends on taking a rather sharp u-turn. How did we arrive at such a strange impasse?

In Buddhism, it is taught that there are “three poisons” with which the human condition is inevitably beset: greed, hate, and delusion. To be sure, they are internal conditions, but they manifest in outward forms. To successfully wrestle with them, it is crucial that we attain clarity around our own intentions. Probably the greater part of what Buddhism calls “practice” involves seeking this clarity, as well as techniques for cultivating good intentions. The intersection between the inner and outer worlds is precisely where the most vital work happens.

In light of such a truth, I can hardly imagine a more pernicious doctrine than one which deliberately attempts to confuse matters, by taking the skull-and-crossbones off a bottle containing a poisonous substance and deliberately mislabeling it with, say, a smiling face. And yet, such doctrines are routine things in our world.

Take the old chestnut, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” Ok, let us assume good intent about the original thought here: Perhaps it is not a deliberately vicious effort to sow confusion. It does point to the fact that the world can be complex, and that unintended consequences can arise from actions that come from a benign motivation. But the same thing can be said, equally if not far more likely, of actions motivated by bad intentions. So why not simply say, “the road to hell is paved with unforeseen or unintended consequences”? That is a pretty reasonable truism that is not ideological, but strictly practical.

Ideology exists, however, as surely as the sun, the moon, and the stars. Another word for it, the Buddhist one, is “delusion” (one of those poisons again!) Ideology is the particular form that delusion takes when it attempts to articulate justifications for things that are contrary on their face to the expectations that people of good will generally have about the world. So although some may quote the saying I have cited about “the road to hell” with benign if confused innocence, others have a very calculated ideological intention.

I am looking at various problems here through a Buddhist lens simply because it is the one with which I am most familiar. But one could equally well use a Christian or other lens from any of the world’s other “wisdom traditions”. Some essential qualities of wisdom are: deeply looking into the truth of things, beyond mere transitory “facts”, which may require constant revision from one moment to the next, as well as rigorously examining and clarifying distinctions between means and ends, and candidly noting and acknowledging anywhere that the two come into clear conflict.

There are real world consequences to unresolved internal contradictions in ourselves. In fact, life under capitalism derives its most stressful qualities from the lack of clarity around intentions, and conflicts between means and ends, conflicts arising both within ourselves and between ourselves and others. The excessive valuation and promotion of competition as an end in itself already flirts dangerously with the “three poisons” of Buddhism. In a world where the all-consuming “pursuit of happiness” for oneself, devil-take-the-hindmost, is the highest purpose of our economic lives, we find that, all of a sudden, we cannot trust either our own intentions or those of the people around us. I can hardly imagine a more senselessly stressful condition in which to place ourselves.

The aspiration towards “utopia” can be compared with the aspiration in Buddhism for a perfect alignment between means and ends, intentions and actions. Both of them depend crucially on the same purification of those intentions. A key insight of Buddhism is that the purification of intentions requires ongoing work, and is not compatible with laziness or lax morals. Instead, a rigorous personal examination of one’s own actions and mental states is called for. (In years past, left-leaning people have called for developing the habit of "self-criticism". Sounds familiar!) And the fact that an ideal is never perfectly attained is not an acceptable excuse for failing to try, just the opposite!

Here again, we can see one of those ideological blinders with which our civilization routinely seeks to cloud our thinking. “Oh, that can never work! Get with the real world!” is the kind of refrain anybody hears as soon as they promote an idealistic goal in any practical undertaking, especially business or economics. And yet, the world has now arrived at such an impasse that, ironically, only so-called “impractical idealism” can now save us. “Soyez réaliste. Demandez l’impossible,” exhorted the situationists in 1968. Today, these are practical and sober instructions frankly required for our basic physical survival.

Fear

Hitler was afraid.

There are many passages in Hitler's speeches and writings where he stokes fear in others, and betrays his own fears. Over and over again, he paints the specter of an apocalypse that will come about if the Communists or the Jews get their way. The world will descend back into utter primordial darkness. All the legacies of human civilization will vanish from the earth. Etc. In the end, of course, he did more than most to realize and bring down upon his own country a desolation and destruction somewhat resembling the very thing he feared.

Likewise, America and Americans are in fear. Zionists live in perpetual fear. White supremacists in general live in fear. There are endless enemies, "savages", "terrorists", always threatening the descent of the world back into primordial darkness. And, like Hitler, like the Nazis, like all the other empires of the past that eventually decayed and collapsed, we are doing more than most to precipitate the very descent of the planet into the hellish dissolution that we most fear. The Pentagon is the biggest consumer of fossil fuels on the planet. The very quest to protect "our way of life" now threatens all humanity and much of the rest of life on Earth with annihilation.

None of this is to say that all fears are exactly alike, or all equally irrational. Arguably, the fears of the Zionists bear some foundation in reality more than did, say, Hitler's. Osama Bin Laden did bear malice and kill innocent people. Even if the Cold War really was largely a fairy tale told expressly to enrich and empower the USA military industrial complex, still and all, Stalin was not-such-a-nice guy. Maybe in some ways the Dulles boys did have a good bogeyman straight out of central casting. But was it really necessary to use that as a pretext to subvert and overthrow an endless list of supposed "dominos", from Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala (God forbid United Fruit should be forced to start paying taxes on its banana plantations! Better fight the Red Menace over there before they come over here!) to Mossadegh in Iran, and a thousand places in between. Was (or rather, IS) it really necessary to bomb and blockade Gaza to the point of starvation for almost a decade? Is there not a disproportion in all of this imperial rage, blindness, and mayhem not dissimilar to the worst excesses of the worst dictators in history?

So what's the alternative?

How about face our fears? And I mean our worst fears. What would happen if we just gave it all back?

Give the Palestinians back their country. Give the Native peoples everywhere back their countries.

The horror of it all!

Except, could it really be worse than the place we are headed now? Climate science is telling us we are headed to a very dark place indeed. The future of human survival may very well be at stake, and possibly within a few short years, not even decades.

So imagine we took a supreme leap "backwards", and opted to give it all up. What would that look like?

People are simpleminded creatures, for the most part. That's part of why they are so easily frightened. So I should hasten to point out that literally "giving it all back" is not even really possible, because ... to exactly whom do you give what back? The original Native peoples of the Americas, for example, had no use for oil refineries, or speedboats, or tv sets...

So what I really mean by "give it all back" cannot be taken in the Biblical literalist, "God-created-heaven-and-Earth-in-seven-days" sense. But it can mean this: begrudging no one anything, and giving up the notion that we are in any way superior or more deserving of a decent and fulfilling life than any other being on this Earth. Putting down our defenses of "our way of life", and instead living and walking in humility and a sense of gratitude and service to others.

As silly and simpleminded as most people are, I actually think that's a point in such a creed's favor. Because what humanity needs right now is in fact a whole lot less cleverness and calculation. Our cleverness and calculation is in fact what has probably been most conspiring towards our own demise. We are half again too clever for own good.

The simple fact of the matter is that our collective survival depends more on the humble and simpleminded people getting the upperhand than our maniacal "betters" getting theirs, they who are not perpetually scheming for grandiosity and personal advantage, they who most easily and readily take heed of Christ's admonition, "Consider the lilies of the field: they neither pique nor pine, yet even King Solomon himself had not such a raiment as these".