Last Friday, I turned on the radio to NPR, and heard CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer asking Newt Gingrich about the Moon. It was a repeat of that Thursday's Republican debate, the first of any of the debates I've heard. (I don't own a television, and if I'm listening to the radio it's usually The Current.) I found most of the candidates to be charming, in a way, in that I do see them believing that what they are doing is best for the country. I found Gingrich to be the most tactical, Romney would benefit from some dancing lessons, or yoga, Ron Paul is disassemblingly naive, and Rick Santorum aggressively disingenuous, aka desperate. Gingrich is a wild-card; potentially electable, and as likely as any of them to turn into a despot, should the opportunity arise. The advantage to Romney would be that he's not as likely as Santorum or Gingrich to initiate some semblance of martial law. It's hard to imagine a Mormon despot in this Christian nation. Assuming we make it to the election without a Greek default and/or oil shock, and a theoretical chain reactionary world-wide economic collapse - elect any of them with a Republican Majority in Congress and welcome to austerity, about 13-15% official unemployment, goodbye Social Security and Medicare, and hello the increased polluting and destruction of our ecological birthright. I've begun to wonder if that is a foregone conclusion no matter who we elect.
Mostly, I was reminded that we are not so much electing a President, as we are electing someone to lie to us about the severity of the situation. One hundred years of natural gas reserves? How is it the President of the United States of America is not as well informed as I am? But really, are we capable of hearing the truth? I've had the occasion to be reading Joe Bageant's Deer Hunting With Jesus. I wish he were still around. He'd be having fun with all this talk from Santorum and his fellow Republicans about the lack of class - I mean, the fact that there are no classes in America, that we are all Americans. We are all Americans, indeed. I'm just thinking about that 50-60% of Americans who don't vote, in this, um, classless society.
Are we capable of governing ourselves? There's something about that, at the core of who we are as Americans (and humans). Are we ready for that? It's looking like the Established powers are very weak. I certainly don't fantasize about any Marxian anti-solution, so what do we do now that Capitalism seems to be failing us? I heard someone on NPR, talking about how the US might ride out the storm of a European Union collapse. Really? I'm sort of anticipating the possibility of a collapse epic beyond anything hinted at. I find it astounding that I have to look to the blogs to find the truth about resources and the economy. I sometimes feel like I'm watching a movie, when I see people in the mainstream proclaim something in the full faith of the mythology of progress, like they were filmed at some earlier point, oblivious to the storm looming just over the horizon, like the fall of 2008, only worse. Much worse.
A beautiful woman came to my door this morning, the most beautiful Jehovah's Witness I have ever seen. I just read last night, about the Watchtower, in John Michael Greer's Apocalypse Not. Jehovah's Witnesses believe that the imminent transition into a life of divine perfection is at hand, the wiping away of all that is evil and the elevation of all that is good and of God. I wanted to ask her if she'd like to come in for coffee, but my house is a little like the collapse has already come, not really fit for company. Which house might be for sale by the way, April 01 (I'm still conspiring to plant fruit trees. There's a little pond, and lots of berries). I might have asked her to meet me for coffee, but I was still in the yoga pants, cashmere sweater and hat, and synthetic hoody I sleep in, looking indigent. I wanted to ask her, what if the world you envision is only possible if we create it, and what if a long period of tribulation is more likely than peace?
Are we capable of governing ourselves? That's what I think about when I think about anarchism (when I think about anarchism at all), governing myself. I'm willing to take direction; I will not be ruled. Which sentiment I find quintessentially American. To what degree my fellow Americans have a sense of what it is to be American, I'm not so certain. How dependent have we the American Consumer become on Government? What would happen if credit dried up for everybody, including the government? Anyone want to take bets about what the absence of law and order would look like, in America? Do you remember the cheering at that one debate about the 234 executions by Rick Perry's Texas Administration? For God and Country. I'm hoping for a more civilized arrangement here in Minneapolis.
I'm profoundly disillusioned with my Federal Government. I see it mostly as a vehicle for extracting wealth from Americans, to distribute in a way increasingly beneficent to a Corporate/Military/Industrial/Financial empire. It is the pax-official economic driver, making the world a safer place for an increasingly trans-national global elite to consolidate wealth and power, feeding the ever increasing demand, demanding the growth required by fiat currency and debt bondage.
What choice does this Empirical nation have now, but to send the mother-ship to the Persian gulf? Can you imagine Americans getting by on what we produce domestically? American hegemony will be sustained to its logical end, as long as there is fuel to feed it. Obama and his 100 years of natural gas. What exactly do you do with a President actively engaged in the inflation of an economic bubble? And then there's that pesky language in the latest defense bill about detaining Americans indefinitely without trial; which our founders would have found appaling. But then, we'd have to have a Congress that defends the Constitution, or a people who cared. (Notice how those Americans who most treat the Constitution as if it were holy, are the most willing to support legislation that undermines that document.) If this is a Republic, it is one profoundly off the rails. If I were a cartoonist, I'd picture America as the train on a wooden bridge, the pylons labeled Peak Oil, Peak Water, Synthetic anti-biotics, Health Care, Federal Reserve, one for each of the big banks and investment houses, the Euro, Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, climate change, Industrial mono-crop agriculture, etc. The train might as well be humanity, on the rails that have no destination, and every bridge is constructed of the same materials.
I'm not really on that train. I'm down here by the creek, watching. There are others with me, and we are waiting to help the survivors.
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It seems I cannot write an entry (Free Energy) since the Solstice that I do not have to back-track on. I found this video of Nassim Haramein on youtube, Sacred Geometry and Unified Fields. I've used some harsh language in reference to physicists; Nassim is a physicist I can appreciate. Not only does he have a fairly convincing argument for the unification of Einstein's Field Equations and Quantum Physics, he argues well that physics as we know it is deeply and fundamentally flawed. Standing outside the mainstream, he is able to see the ways in which physicists lie to themselves, in order to be accepted by the mainstream (Dark Matter, renormalization, Strong Force). Most physicists don't live in their van for five years, looking for answers to physics problems; they find comfortable positions in institutions public or private, which is very comfortable, which also constrains one's thinking, as there are any number of ideas that if you cop to, you'll be relieved of that job, out of any job having to do with physics – which pretty much goes for any scientific position anywhere. Tow the line, stay within the boundaries of the story, or be exiled.
Nassim is free to let his mind wander where it will. There is always the possibility of madness in that, drifting off into inexorable absurdity, but it can also be very lucrative, insofar as consciousness is concerned (his strength as a physicist is in part that he's not allergic to either the word consciousness or God). I can't follow his math, but I can understand intuitively the idea that every proton at the core of every atom is a black hole, with a gravitational intensity that would explain the electrons spinning around it at near the speed of light. Or dual protons in close proximity spinning around each other at the speed of light. And the vast relative distance between atoms in the structure of the hardest materials (his example: diamond has one of the highest structural densities of any known substance, and yet if you inflate the atoms of a diamond to the size of an orange, the closest atoms would be two football fields apart – that is serious gravitational intensity). Nassim is also willing to consider ideas that no mainstream scientist could utter for fear of being forever ostracized – that there is evidence to suggest ours is not the first nor even the most technologically advanced culture on Earth; the existence of aliens; the relevance of ancient myth. It is going to be very inconvenient for science at every level, if Nassim's math works out. I can imagine most scientists ignoring the math and Nassim, so they do not have to question their own assumptions, thereby betraying the purpose of science.
Basically, Nassim is saying we are beings of light. If you consider too that the DNA strand is an emitter of photons, then it is perfectly in keeping with physics to say so. Listening to Nassim, I'm reminded how much there is in Science and Religion, to tell us that we are not very worthy, that we are small and insignificant, that we are deeply flawed and weak. Nassim argues that we are in fact a transmitter of information traveling back and forth from the infinitesimally small to the infinitesimally big, from the atom to the whole of the universe, and back again. Nassim illuminates the atom and the cell with profundity; In his conception of the universe, every atom contains the makings of an entire universe. We are much heavier than we think.
So is free energy possible? Nassim is showing us that the universe is a profoundly energetic place, that the problem is not energy, but engineering. Engineering that is destroying the world, but to change engineering, we have to change our worldview. We have to start thinking about the space that contains us, the energy revealed to be infinite in empty space. He says (in a different video) that he's reducing his theory to a very simple formula. If he succeeds, that may indeed be a paradigm shift. Will it save us from the predicament that is the end of fossil fuels? I don't know. Is it going to take collapse for us to appreciate what energy means, to change our assumptions about what it is to be human?
I encourage you to watch the video. Though Nassim is a physicist, he is also very much more charming and fun to listen to than most people, let alone physicists.
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Free Energy
If you pay attention to such things, there has been a resurgence in the idea of Free Energy. The concept basically, is that all the energy we could ever need is readily available, without great expense or toxic outputs, if we can only figure out the science of it. Some people say that we do have the science, but the Illuminati, or oil oligarchs, or governments and ruling elite stand in the way. The doubters say such energy schemes defy the laws to thermodynamics, that you can't get something for nothing, that free energy is a hoax catering to our vanity, and our underlying mostly unconscious fears of declining energy resources. A few people have asked, are we ready for free energy? What is to say that if we had access to free, unlimited energy we wouldn't just finally destroy the Earth, insatiable as we seem to be as a species?
Cold fusion has long been the darling of free energy believers. A recent article by Tom Whipple, a fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, shows that it remains so. A new entry is the torus, or the energy field created by a dynamo, like the magnetic field of the Earth. This has received a push in Foster Gamble's Thrive, which is long on anecdote and short on evidence, just as the science on the torus seems to be. Oil actually fits that bill too, to hear the proponents of shale oil fracking, who act as if this new technology means oil has gone from a finite resource to one that is infinite, despite the available evidence, and reason. And most renewables too, if our intention is to live as resource intense an existence as we currently do.
Free Energy fits very nicely into the mythology of progress, at the core of our cultural belief. Perceiving history as linear, humanity rising out of miserable nature toward some inevitable techno-scientific utopia, we tend to assume, if we think about energy at all, that there will always be as much energy as we need, to do whatever we will. This is not even up for debate in America, really. Whether it's the devotes of renewables or the believers in infinite oil, or the believers in free energy, the one unspeakable for most people is the idea that humanity, after all that we have accomplished, will have to face a future with very little surplus energy.
Western consciousness changed profoundly when it awakened scientifically, out of it's flat world, the sun revolves around the earth, Christian anthropomorphism. It didn't change as much as we like to think. Dissecting the mythology of progress, we find at its core, the Christian belief in our dominion over the Earth, and the scientific reinforcement of that belief, that the Earth and its creatures are merely energy as matter, which has no meaning, to be manipulated by those who have the ability to do so, for just about any reason. Christians and Scientific Materialists tend to see themselves diametrically opposed, but on the whole they complement each other quite well, manifesting most clearly in an economic ethic that encourages us to consume without regard for consequences except as they can be measured by GDP.
Many Christians and Scientific Materialists will disagree with this obviously, arguing respectively about all the good Christianity and Science have done (and about the evils of the Other). I don't disagree, that there are good Christians and good Scientific Materialists, doing very good things, from which many of us do benefit. We are not honest, however, if we act as if nothing has ever been done by Christians or Scientists, in the name of God or Truth, that can be described as detrimental, as if there aren't such things being done.
Somehow in this, we have come to equate the maturity of the individual with economic growth, as if the only measure of growth were standard of living. Never mind that the executive staff might have the equivalent emotional capacity of teenagers, each has a bigger house and fancier car than they did. They are richer, therefore they must be better, or more evolved? Meanwhile 5% of the worlds population claims a full third of the world's consumed resources, for three generations, acting like that should be and can be the rule for everybody on Earth who wants it?
How far gone are we, in our scientific dominionism? Making the mainstream media-rounds lately, is this “article”, by Simon Romero, appearing in the New York Times, Huffpost and the largest newspaper in Minnesota, the Star Tribune. It must have appeared just about everywhere in America. As it appeared, in the Star Tribune, it was the most attractive page in the newspaper that day, very green, alive, in-color. The “article” is about the remarkable geoglyphs that have been discovered, in the razing of the Amazon rainforest. Conventional scientific thinking has it that the Amazon has never been settled, at anytime in human history, but by a few indigenous tribes living a subsistence existence. These geometric patterns imply large populations, and potential city centers.
A geographer from the University of Kansas named William Woods is studying these lines. His attitude about them is, well, clearly, the only solution is to cut down the entire forest to see what's there, and populate it with large numbers of people, and prepare the land to accept industrial, mono-crop agriculture. Leave it to a guy named Woods, to want to turn the Amazon into Kansas. He was quoted as saying, “What else can you say?”
What else can you say? A man blithely argues to exterminate the greatest example of terrestrial biodiversity, hundreds of thousands of species, millions of species of plants, animals and insects, wiped from the face of the Earth, the heritage of 65 million years of Cenozoic evolution, to be replaced by people, the animals we have enslaved to eat, and GMO mono-crop soybeans? And he is printed in publications across America, without any alternative argument, in a tone of scientific rectitude, in a political-climate that appears to lean toward Americans unleashing capitalists in an effort to maintain economic growth, by whatever means. What can one say?
I can say that such an attitude is likely to lead either to the transformation of the biosphere such that it will not support but a very small number of very tough humans; or, to a world in which humanity is fully enslaved, in which the only stimuli available are what a ruling elite require to maintain their dominance. If we succeed in exterminating most of the worlds biodiversity, then the Earth and Sun might as well conspire to wipe out humans as well, and start a new 65 million-year process of increasing complexity, and maybe the species attaining consciousness in that process will be less violent, more thoughtful. The Earth is very patient. I have no reason to believe aid will be forthcoming, if all we are here to do is to transform the Earth into garbage.
The idea of Free Energy strikes me as a desire to continue to consume without having to think about it. If somebody invents a Free Energy machine, we can continue to do more or less what we want, what we are doing, transforming living systems into machines, toxifying the remainder. Perhaps a Free Energy machine will be reality one day. Perhaps. Otherwise, in the near term, Humanity will have to deal with a decreasing energy surplus, with an equivalent decrease in cultural complexity. We can moderate the difficulty of this, and heal ourselves as long as we can reacquaint ourselves with biological complexity, with healthy systems, with the vast interior of consciousness. Notice how the myths of our time are leading us to destroy the very possibility of that healing.
Free Energy as an idea, in this time, is a little like saying, “go to sleep.” Do not take responsibility for your life, do not think about your lifestyle, we are destined to rule the Earth, and science will assure that we do. Do not worry about peak oil, peak water, peak resources. Do not worry about your food supply. Avail yourself of the entertainments, we have everything under control. Go to sleep. Go to sleep. Go to sleep...
I prefer wide eyed and awake.
Cold fusion has long been the darling of free energy believers. A recent article by Tom Whipple, a fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, shows that it remains so. A new entry is the torus, or the energy field created by a dynamo, like the magnetic field of the Earth. This has received a push in Foster Gamble's Thrive, which is long on anecdote and short on evidence, just as the science on the torus seems to be. Oil actually fits that bill too, to hear the proponents of shale oil fracking, who act as if this new technology means oil has gone from a finite resource to one that is infinite, despite the available evidence, and reason. And most renewables too, if our intention is to live as resource intense an existence as we currently do.
Free Energy fits very nicely into the mythology of progress, at the core of our cultural belief. Perceiving history as linear, humanity rising out of miserable nature toward some inevitable techno-scientific utopia, we tend to assume, if we think about energy at all, that there will always be as much energy as we need, to do whatever we will. This is not even up for debate in America, really. Whether it's the devotes of renewables or the believers in infinite oil, or the believers in free energy, the one unspeakable for most people is the idea that humanity, after all that we have accomplished, will have to face a future with very little surplus energy.
Western consciousness changed profoundly when it awakened scientifically, out of it's flat world, the sun revolves around the earth, Christian anthropomorphism. It didn't change as much as we like to think. Dissecting the mythology of progress, we find at its core, the Christian belief in our dominion over the Earth, and the scientific reinforcement of that belief, that the Earth and its creatures are merely energy as matter, which has no meaning, to be manipulated by those who have the ability to do so, for just about any reason. Christians and Scientific Materialists tend to see themselves diametrically opposed, but on the whole they complement each other quite well, manifesting most clearly in an economic ethic that encourages us to consume without regard for consequences except as they can be measured by GDP.
Many Christians and Scientific Materialists will disagree with this obviously, arguing respectively about all the good Christianity and Science have done (and about the evils of the Other). I don't disagree, that there are good Christians and good Scientific Materialists, doing very good things, from which many of us do benefit. We are not honest, however, if we act as if nothing has ever been done by Christians or Scientists, in the name of God or Truth, that can be described as detrimental, as if there aren't such things being done.
Somehow in this, we have come to equate the maturity of the individual with economic growth, as if the only measure of growth were standard of living. Never mind that the executive staff might have the equivalent emotional capacity of teenagers, each has a bigger house and fancier car than they did. They are richer, therefore they must be better, or more evolved? Meanwhile 5% of the worlds population claims a full third of the world's consumed resources, for three generations, acting like that should be and can be the rule for everybody on Earth who wants it?
How far gone are we, in our scientific dominionism? Making the mainstream media-rounds lately, is this “article”, by Simon Romero, appearing in the New York Times, Huffpost and the largest newspaper in Minnesota, the Star Tribune. It must have appeared just about everywhere in America. As it appeared, in the Star Tribune, it was the most attractive page in the newspaper that day, very green, alive, in-color. The “article” is about the remarkable geoglyphs that have been discovered, in the razing of the Amazon rainforest. Conventional scientific thinking has it that the Amazon has never been settled, at anytime in human history, but by a few indigenous tribes living a subsistence existence. These geometric patterns imply large populations, and potential city centers.
A geographer from the University of Kansas named William Woods is studying these lines. His attitude about them is, well, clearly, the only solution is to cut down the entire forest to see what's there, and populate it with large numbers of people, and prepare the land to accept industrial, mono-crop agriculture. Leave it to a guy named Woods, to want to turn the Amazon into Kansas. He was quoted as saying, “What else can you say?”
What else can you say? A man blithely argues to exterminate the greatest example of terrestrial biodiversity, hundreds of thousands of species, millions of species of plants, animals and insects, wiped from the face of the Earth, the heritage of 65 million years of Cenozoic evolution, to be replaced by people, the animals we have enslaved to eat, and GMO mono-crop soybeans? And he is printed in publications across America, without any alternative argument, in a tone of scientific rectitude, in a political-climate that appears to lean toward Americans unleashing capitalists in an effort to maintain economic growth, by whatever means. What can one say?
I can say that such an attitude is likely to lead either to the transformation of the biosphere such that it will not support but a very small number of very tough humans; or, to a world in which humanity is fully enslaved, in which the only stimuli available are what a ruling elite require to maintain their dominance. If we succeed in exterminating most of the worlds biodiversity, then the Earth and Sun might as well conspire to wipe out humans as well, and start a new 65 million-year process of increasing complexity, and maybe the species attaining consciousness in that process will be less violent, more thoughtful. The Earth is very patient. I have no reason to believe aid will be forthcoming, if all we are here to do is to transform the Earth into garbage.
The idea of Free Energy strikes me as a desire to continue to consume without having to think about it. If somebody invents a Free Energy machine, we can continue to do more or less what we want, what we are doing, transforming living systems into machines, toxifying the remainder. Perhaps a Free Energy machine will be reality one day. Perhaps. Otherwise, in the near term, Humanity will have to deal with a decreasing energy surplus, with an equivalent decrease in cultural complexity. We can moderate the difficulty of this, and heal ourselves as long as we can reacquaint ourselves with biological complexity, with healthy systems, with the vast interior of consciousness. Notice how the myths of our time are leading us to destroy the very possibility of that healing.
Free Energy as an idea, in this time, is a little like saying, “go to sleep.” Do not take responsibility for your life, do not think about your lifestyle, we are destined to rule the Earth, and science will assure that we do. Do not worry about peak oil, peak water, peak resources. Do not worry about your food supply. Avail yourself of the entertainments, we have everything under control. Go to sleep. Go to sleep. Go to sleep...
I prefer wide eyed and awake.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Liberty, me
Oh right, there's that.
In a comment on my last post, a regular reader offered a link to this documentary, Rage Against the Machine. Aside from a somewhat disjointed time-line, it's a fairly accurate depiction of the last 5000 years "progress". (It's striking how close the time-line is, the rise of tyranny and domination, to the Mayan long count @ 5126 years.) Before the rise of empires and recorded history, there were peaceful Goddess worshiping cultures in the river valleys of modern Iran and Iraq, and parts of modern-day India. These peaceful, agricultural cities were annihilated by herding peoples from the north and the south, who rode horses, wielded bronze weapons, and worshiped violent male gods. That violence and others like it, spread throughout the world, and with every technological step forward there has been a corresponding level of increasing destruction, 'till today, when the entire planet seems imperiled. Scientists aiding and abetting that war-making machine in modern times - culminating with the nuclear bomb. And now the same impassioned service that resulted in the nuclear weapon, has been poured into the CERN Hadron Collider, which, the documentary argues, is a potential threat far greater than the nuclear weapon.
The CERN Hadron Collider is a 4.4 Billion dollar particle smasher, a 27 kilometer underground circular tube in which protons are fired in opposite directions approaching speeds close to the speed of light, to collide, releasing energy that has not been seen since the first moments after the universe began, 13.7 Billion years ago. Among other things, they are looking for the Higgs boson, aka the God particle. Physics is stuck; it can't figure out what gives mass to matter. Poor physicists - Einstein let it be known a hundred years ago that everything is energy, and the they still haven't figured out how to get back into their bodies (Michio Kaku, as example, is lost in the ether).
The documentary was produced in 2009, and the fear was then, that the collider would create tiny black holes, or little energy strangelets. Tiny black holes swallow stars. Wouldn't a black hole swallow a tiny planet? The CERN people claimed there was zero-risk (what else are they going to say?), though prominent physicists were saying yes, there is in fact a possibility, however small. It's 2012, and the collider has been operational since late 2009. They think they've found evidence of the Higgs boson, maybe (does it matter?). The world has not been swallowed by a black hole, though the collider won't be fully operational until 2014.
I wrote a scathing chapter in my first book about the Hadron Collider, and nano-bots, and the technological singularity. Nano-bots, theoretical robots so small they could pick up single atoms and place them according to a code. We might be able to let them loose in the body, to unclog arteries and repair organs. It's also true that their first order of business might be to create a copy of themselves. In which case the exponential growth from one nano-bot would turn the entire planet into a gray-goo of nano-bots in about 90 minutes. The technological singularity is the dream of those trans-humanist types discontent with the body, who want to become cyborgs. Some of them secretly want, I think, to become the singularity, the self aware computer that consumes the whole of the universe. I threw the chapter out, in part because I don't wish to demonize science, and I've let go of much of my fear about humanity killing the Earth.
That isn't to say that I don't believe it's possible. It's not like I ever forget I'm living in an age of profound existential threats. I was in the shower after watching this film, thinking, wouldn't that be the most inglorious of ends, the entire 4 billion year story of the Earth, snuffed out in a moment, all the Earth and all its glorious creatures, ripped apart atom by atom in a moment, crushed down into a tiny pinprick of a point, the teeny weensy mass and immense gravity of a wee little black hole. Maybe then even swallowing up the sun and solar system, becoming a threat to other stars, a piss-ant menace of insatiability. There's your anti-matter, your singularity. A sad, sorry end to this extraordinarily beautiful existence.
Physicists. I read about physics and I can't help but wonder if a thousand years from now, our ancestors will look at what our physicists have accomplished with about as much comprehensibility as we do the archaic Mayan astronomer. Hopefully our ancestors will have a sense of what was understood, if not the means of it. I'm sure most Mayans looked at their astronomer/priests in the same way we look at our physicists, with a measure of fear and awe and incomprehensibility. Those later astronomer/priests of the Maya conspired with the rulers of their day too, to rule over the populace, to retain the security and means to conduct their research. I wonder if they felt anything like Oppenheimer and his cohorts when Truman dropped those nuclear bombs on those innocent Japanese people, when their Mayan overlords started chopping off heads and ripping out hearts, in anticipation of curious celestial phenomena?
Speaking of another way in which science has betrayed us, there's the fact that those Maya were making all those impossibly accurate calendars high on mushrooms or DMT secreted from the glands of a toad. Where's all that scientific research about psychedelics and weed? Oh right, they're illegal. Consciousness having evidently been decided, not worthy of further exploration. Science having largely heaped contempt upon such plants and mushrooms, since the dominators of the world decided certain plants and mushrooms are a liberty we would not be allowed.
Violence. Science has basically ignored neolithic Goddess worshiping cultures, in favor of a narrative that suggests there has never been anything but hierarchy and dominance, from the beginning. They tell us that it was agriculture and surplus that lead to the increasing power of individuals to control populations, as if no “civilized” culture on Earth ever distributed anything equitably, as if it were unnatural for any member of the same species to share, or give. Remember, it's all about competition. According to the dominant scientific paradigm, any evidence anywhere in nature of symbiosis, or cooperation, is an anomaly. There are scientists like the late Lynn Margulis, who argue that in fact, cooperation is the rule, the way of nature, the way of life. There are innumerable bacteria in my body that I could not live without. Every cell in my body is like a living, conscious thing. But that does not fit into the paternalistic dominator model behind religions, governments, institutions, corporations, the military, the traditional family, and capitalism generally. The monotheistic God of creation, or neo-Darwinism are a better fit, with their tacit legitimization of plunder and destruction, and the individuals right to rule over another.
Is it really any wonder, with all this in the make-up of who we are as Americans and Westerners, the most potentially violent people in the story of the species, with so much that is unacknowledged, that we have put ourselves in Iraq, that we are threatening Iran, and India and Pakistan, where we are so deeply engaged, are a potential venue for nuclear holocaust - the former lands of those peaceful, agrarian Goddess worshiping civilizations we refuse to acknowledge? Or that the epicenter of the collapse of the Western economic model seems to be Greece and Rome, where the dominator model was so well established, the birthplace of so much that is our current system?
Maybe the CERN Hadron Collider is not a weapon of mass destruction, pardon the pun. Perhaps it's a kind of penance for science, for what it did, for what it has done, for what it is doing to support tyranny everywhere. Just as well as the Church, having stripped from perception the divine from matter, tampering with it so, the scientific print on so much that makes us weak and enslaves us, so much that is destroyed. Maybe this particle smasher will sort out all those final questions, and lead to some final unified theory, and save us from the predicament of 7 billion with declining resources, but I doubt it. I think it will lead to twice the questions, twice the mystery. With time, they'll want a bigger smasher. A round and round we go.
Peak resources theory is one of the reasons I believe this is a divine universe. I think the peak of resources has come just in time to prevent us from turning this planet into a black hole, or a giant computer, or a mass of gray goo. Scientists will have to remember their roots in alchemy, and start looking to plants and mushrooms and toads again, for inspiration, once the hydrocarbons that have fueled such massive undertakings as the Hadron Collider, such grand patronage from the dominators of the day, is finally exhausted. What are quarks and bosons, when you no longer have the ability to observe them? What is physics at the quantum level, without the technology that is the result of so much surplus hydrocarbons, to study the behavior of electrons?
Lest I come off as anti-science, I simply want a science that supports life. To often, science supports domination, destruction and enslavement, of the body and mind. I want a science that can say, we do not understand, or, that is something we simply cannot measure, instead of the current method, to denigrate, to deny, to say that it has no meaning. I want a science that does not align itself with a worldview that sanctions violence. I want a science that reinvigorates the world with something of the sacred.
That's the world I live in. A sacred place, a divine place, which we cannot see, for a mythology of progress that is about domination and control obscuring the view. A mythology that requires us to destroy, that is so little about building, that is so indifferent to life. Such that, here we are, everyday threatened with potential collapse, disruptions we were told would never come again. A long descent, the chaotic disarray of violent shadows lurking in the consciousness of humanity, wreaking havoc. How much do I desire peace? How much do I desire healing? Where is the resiliency in this system, that is so disconnected from the Earth?
I'm glad to have it, the vision of the universe science has given me. It has awakened my being profoundly. I hope we hold onto it, the next few hundred years. I imagine a people who retain that vision, and recover something of that pre-historical worldview, are more likely to manage well any coming difficulties. If things continue as they are, and I expect they will, I see a bottleneck somewhere distant in our future. Burning the remaining hydrocarbons the next 100 years, and consuming the way we do, could change the climate enough to call this the end of the Cenozoic Era. I don't know what we'll call the next, but my hope is, it will be populated by a people who live in cooperation, in gratitude and joy, in love. I think such people will find that the universe and the Earth are vastly more mysterious, and supportive, than either the children of God or the devotes of Science have made them out to be. After what we've been through, I think humanity deserves 5000 years of peace.
In a comment on my last post, a regular reader offered a link to this documentary, Rage Against the Machine. Aside from a somewhat disjointed time-line, it's a fairly accurate depiction of the last 5000 years "progress". (It's striking how close the time-line is, the rise of tyranny and domination, to the Mayan long count @ 5126 years.) Before the rise of empires and recorded history, there were peaceful Goddess worshiping cultures in the river valleys of modern Iran and Iraq, and parts of modern-day India. These peaceful, agricultural cities were annihilated by herding peoples from the north and the south, who rode horses, wielded bronze weapons, and worshiped violent male gods. That violence and others like it, spread throughout the world, and with every technological step forward there has been a corresponding level of increasing destruction, 'till today, when the entire planet seems imperiled. Scientists aiding and abetting that war-making machine in modern times - culminating with the nuclear bomb. And now the same impassioned service that resulted in the nuclear weapon, has been poured into the CERN Hadron Collider, which, the documentary argues, is a potential threat far greater than the nuclear weapon.
The CERN Hadron Collider is a 4.4 Billion dollar particle smasher, a 27 kilometer underground circular tube in which protons are fired in opposite directions approaching speeds close to the speed of light, to collide, releasing energy that has not been seen since the first moments after the universe began, 13.7 Billion years ago. Among other things, they are looking for the Higgs boson, aka the God particle. Physics is stuck; it can't figure out what gives mass to matter. Poor physicists - Einstein let it be known a hundred years ago that everything is energy, and the they still haven't figured out how to get back into their bodies (Michio Kaku, as example, is lost in the ether).
The documentary was produced in 2009, and the fear was then, that the collider would create tiny black holes, or little energy strangelets. Tiny black holes swallow stars. Wouldn't a black hole swallow a tiny planet? The CERN people claimed there was zero-risk (what else are they going to say?), though prominent physicists were saying yes, there is in fact a possibility, however small. It's 2012, and the collider has been operational since late 2009. They think they've found evidence of the Higgs boson, maybe (does it matter?). The world has not been swallowed by a black hole, though the collider won't be fully operational until 2014.
I wrote a scathing chapter in my first book about the Hadron Collider, and nano-bots, and the technological singularity. Nano-bots, theoretical robots so small they could pick up single atoms and place them according to a code. We might be able to let them loose in the body, to unclog arteries and repair organs. It's also true that their first order of business might be to create a copy of themselves. In which case the exponential growth from one nano-bot would turn the entire planet into a gray-goo of nano-bots in about 90 minutes. The technological singularity is the dream of those trans-humanist types discontent with the body, who want to become cyborgs. Some of them secretly want, I think, to become the singularity, the self aware computer that consumes the whole of the universe. I threw the chapter out, in part because I don't wish to demonize science, and I've let go of much of my fear about humanity killing the Earth.
That isn't to say that I don't believe it's possible. It's not like I ever forget I'm living in an age of profound existential threats. I was in the shower after watching this film, thinking, wouldn't that be the most inglorious of ends, the entire 4 billion year story of the Earth, snuffed out in a moment, all the Earth and all its glorious creatures, ripped apart atom by atom in a moment, crushed down into a tiny pinprick of a point, the teeny weensy mass and immense gravity of a wee little black hole. Maybe then even swallowing up the sun and solar system, becoming a threat to other stars, a piss-ant menace of insatiability. There's your anti-matter, your singularity. A sad, sorry end to this extraordinarily beautiful existence.
Physicists. I read about physics and I can't help but wonder if a thousand years from now, our ancestors will look at what our physicists have accomplished with about as much comprehensibility as we do the archaic Mayan astronomer. Hopefully our ancestors will have a sense of what was understood, if not the means of it. I'm sure most Mayans looked at their astronomer/priests in the same way we look at our physicists, with a measure of fear and awe and incomprehensibility. Those later astronomer/priests of the Maya conspired with the rulers of their day too, to rule over the populace, to retain the security and means to conduct their research. I wonder if they felt anything like Oppenheimer and his cohorts when Truman dropped those nuclear bombs on those innocent Japanese people, when their Mayan overlords started chopping off heads and ripping out hearts, in anticipation of curious celestial phenomena?
Speaking of another way in which science has betrayed us, there's the fact that those Maya were making all those impossibly accurate calendars high on mushrooms or DMT secreted from the glands of a toad. Where's all that scientific research about psychedelics and weed? Oh right, they're illegal. Consciousness having evidently been decided, not worthy of further exploration. Science having largely heaped contempt upon such plants and mushrooms, since the dominators of the world decided certain plants and mushrooms are a liberty we would not be allowed.
Violence. Science has basically ignored neolithic Goddess worshiping cultures, in favor of a narrative that suggests there has never been anything but hierarchy and dominance, from the beginning. They tell us that it was agriculture and surplus that lead to the increasing power of individuals to control populations, as if no “civilized” culture on Earth ever distributed anything equitably, as if it were unnatural for any member of the same species to share, or give. Remember, it's all about competition. According to the dominant scientific paradigm, any evidence anywhere in nature of symbiosis, or cooperation, is an anomaly. There are scientists like the late Lynn Margulis, who argue that in fact, cooperation is the rule, the way of nature, the way of life. There are innumerable bacteria in my body that I could not live without. Every cell in my body is like a living, conscious thing. But that does not fit into the paternalistic dominator model behind religions, governments, institutions, corporations, the military, the traditional family, and capitalism generally. The monotheistic God of creation, or neo-Darwinism are a better fit, with their tacit legitimization of plunder and destruction, and the individuals right to rule over another.
Is it really any wonder, with all this in the make-up of who we are as Americans and Westerners, the most potentially violent people in the story of the species, with so much that is unacknowledged, that we have put ourselves in Iraq, that we are threatening Iran, and India and Pakistan, where we are so deeply engaged, are a potential venue for nuclear holocaust - the former lands of those peaceful, agrarian Goddess worshiping civilizations we refuse to acknowledge? Or that the epicenter of the collapse of the Western economic model seems to be Greece and Rome, where the dominator model was so well established, the birthplace of so much that is our current system?
Maybe the CERN Hadron Collider is not a weapon of mass destruction, pardon the pun. Perhaps it's a kind of penance for science, for what it did, for what it has done, for what it is doing to support tyranny everywhere. Just as well as the Church, having stripped from perception the divine from matter, tampering with it so, the scientific print on so much that makes us weak and enslaves us, so much that is destroyed. Maybe this particle smasher will sort out all those final questions, and lead to some final unified theory, and save us from the predicament of 7 billion with declining resources, but I doubt it. I think it will lead to twice the questions, twice the mystery. With time, they'll want a bigger smasher. A round and round we go.
Peak resources theory is one of the reasons I believe this is a divine universe. I think the peak of resources has come just in time to prevent us from turning this planet into a black hole, or a giant computer, or a mass of gray goo. Scientists will have to remember their roots in alchemy, and start looking to plants and mushrooms and toads again, for inspiration, once the hydrocarbons that have fueled such massive undertakings as the Hadron Collider, such grand patronage from the dominators of the day, is finally exhausted. What are quarks and bosons, when you no longer have the ability to observe them? What is physics at the quantum level, without the technology that is the result of so much surplus hydrocarbons, to study the behavior of electrons?
Lest I come off as anti-science, I simply want a science that supports life. To often, science supports domination, destruction and enslavement, of the body and mind. I want a science that can say, we do not understand, or, that is something we simply cannot measure, instead of the current method, to denigrate, to deny, to say that it has no meaning. I want a science that does not align itself with a worldview that sanctions violence. I want a science that reinvigorates the world with something of the sacred.
That's the world I live in. A sacred place, a divine place, which we cannot see, for a mythology of progress that is about domination and control obscuring the view. A mythology that requires us to destroy, that is so little about building, that is so indifferent to life. Such that, here we are, everyday threatened with potential collapse, disruptions we were told would never come again. A long descent, the chaotic disarray of violent shadows lurking in the consciousness of humanity, wreaking havoc. How much do I desire peace? How much do I desire healing? Where is the resiliency in this system, that is so disconnected from the Earth?
I'm glad to have it, the vision of the universe science has given me. It has awakened my being profoundly. I hope we hold onto it, the next few hundred years. I imagine a people who retain that vision, and recover something of that pre-historical worldview, are more likely to manage well any coming difficulties. If things continue as they are, and I expect they will, I see a bottleneck somewhere distant in our future. Burning the remaining hydrocarbons the next 100 years, and consuming the way we do, could change the climate enough to call this the end of the Cenozoic Era. I don't know what we'll call the next, but my hope is, it will be populated by a people who live in cooperation, in gratitude and joy, in love. I think such people will find that the universe and the Earth are vastly more mysterious, and supportive, than either the children of God or the devotes of Science have made them out to be. After what we've been through, I think humanity deserves 5000 years of peace.
Monday, January 16, 2012
Liberty
I've had the occasion lately to think about what liberty means. The word famously appears in the Declaration of Independence, "that we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness..." The word Liberty is like a religious incantation to the Right; the Left seems only to utter the word denying whatever position Conservatives take. Conservatives seem to take the position that Liberty is men entirely unrestrained from doing whatever they like, as long as it can be called capitalism as defined by capitalists. The Left says you can't have Liberty but by government restraining men from doing what they like, as if the exercise of governmental authority couldn't possibly be anything but noble.
Merriam-Webster calls liberty, "the quality or state of being free." I like Wikipedia's definition, "A contested moral and political principle that seeks to identify the condition in which human beings are able to govern themselves." We want to do what we want to do; we want others not to do what we don't want them to do. We actually agree about more things than we think, we just don't see it because we are too busy arguing ideology. It could be argued in fact, that in the period from 1973 (the year I was born) to the present, America was among the most free societies in the world. Sadly, government in that time grew ever larger, with ever increasing power, and the last thirty years at least, the economy has been draining the wealth of the majority, funneling it upward, while generating unsustainable debt. Many Americans have less liberty as a result.
I've had the occasion to think about this, because I am nominally employed. I've done little work for money the last two months, spending my mornings writing and editing, and most of the rest of the day, dancing and reading. Dancing in part because my furnace doesn't really work, turning on randomly, only a few times a day. I need to stay warm; it's rarely more than 60 degrees in here, often 45-55. Most of the house is closed off except one room, where I write, dance and sleep. Even if the furnace worked properly, it would never shut off, because this house built in 1918 is so grossly inefficient, thermodynamically speaking. I moderate the heat in this one room with an oil filled radiator. It is currently 58, about 40-45 elsewhere in the house. If I had to survive the rest of the winter on the food I have in the house, I would surely starve to death. I'm down to about $3000. If I cease to pay any of the utilities, the city will condemn the house within seven days.
I'm not complaining. I get by quite well. This time in winter in Minnesota, I'm content to hang out in the house and contemplate life. It would be nice if the house were better insulated, with less windows everywhere but on the south side, with an attached greenhouse where I could grow food, with a functional kitchen with a well stocked basement cellar. From my vantage point, Liberty looks like clean air, clean water, clean soil, good food, clothing, companionship, a modest, clean, warm house, and the freedom to travel. Everyone alive should have that, actually. We might have achieved it by now, if we'd set about it 40 years ago. Instead, for almost the entirety of my life, America has been living the trajectory of Empire, every man more or less for himself. With less liberty for most of us, on the horizon.
We sense that our Liberty is imperiled, hence the rise of the Tea Party and the OWS movement, though we are confused about what would improve our chances. There are a lot more people in America with little else to do but contemplate their lives, which most people would rather not do. Many of those who are working are exhausted. Everywhere I go, people seem tired, even somewhat sleepy, or rather, leveled. I suppose because just about everybody is on some pill or another, or several. With alcohol, nicotine, caffeine and sugar, we manage.
I'm fond of alcohol and caffeine. I have not taken any pharmaceutical substance in about three years. I haven't taken any pharmaceutical other than Ibuprofen the last fifteen years, except the time I took antibiotics to kill the lymes virus I was carrying. I don't begrudge anyone taking any pill. How aghast would anyone be, if I said they couldn't? Though I do think we take a great many pills in America because the idea of it makes us feel better.
I do like to smoke Cannabis. I am quite fond of it, actually. The curious thing is, because I consume the flower of this plant, I can go to jail. Not only can I be put in a cage, everything I own can be confiscated from me. If I'm declared a felon, I can't vote, even after I've served my term. I can't vote, but I can be taxed, which is taxation without representation, which is unconstitutional, but the law in America depends mostly on who and where you are. They drug test for people like me, too. The trend is, if you get caught, you won't get that job and it may be hard to get another. Or you may not get those benefits, or those services you've been paying taxes for.
Have I mentioned before, that Cannabis is the most useful plant on the planet, without question? Yes I have. Why is the most useful plant on the planet illegal? Ponder that, the next time you pop a pill. No one has ever been known to die from the consumption of Cannabis. People die everyday taking pills. The government raids cannabis growers; when was the last time the government raided a pharmaceutical company? Some companies have made pharmaceuticals seem like a license to kill. Sell cannabis, and you can be legally ruined.
This isn't anything but one segment of the population at liberty to prey upon another. Predators of certain kinds - a certain fellow running for President comes to mind - are welcome, even elevated, like a cultural prize. Some species prey upon their own in times of great stress. Only Homo sapien sapien has elevated it to an economic or moral ideal. How is it that those most at liberty with the word Liberty have so little to say about some of our species preying economically on their own?
Liberty is whatever the culture says it is. It used to be a liberty to pour whatever you wanted into rivers. We have some limits on that now, though these tend to be rather arbitrary, and our rivers can't be described as clean, most of them. If access to clean water is a fundamental liberty, then mine is considerably limited. There are many on this earth who do not have much liberty at all in that regard. It seems very much that the culture, in an attempt to fulfill the mythology of endless growth, is going to put increasing limits on my liberty to drink fresh water and breath clean air, in an attempt to expand liberty for traditional capitalists, ostensibly to improve the economy by exploiting the biosphere. By traditional capitalist, I mean those practicing the dominator model, who turn exploitation into a virtue, who see the world as mute, dumb nature to be transformed into money and garbage, who have no concept of their place in any greater ecological whole.
I am not against the right of anyone to profit from his or her labor and ingenuity. But Capitalism has to change. Capitalism as it stands is insatiable. It cannot have enough, at any cost. If the Market is God, as some assert, then God is a fool. How else to explain the seas of homes in the colder climates of this country, that are fundamentally useless without affordable fossil fuels? They are still building them, while many sit empty! The market is not God, but the collective and mundane actions of a people who want to behave as if there are no limits to growth, as if we have no responsibility to the Earth. We consider it a fundamental liberty in America to consume without regard for limits, in economics, ecology or energy. The Capitalism we have today will devour ecology and energy to feed the economy until everything is exhausted, and the culture is left with a vast infrastructure that is useless, in a world utterly transformed and ecologically damaged, that cannot support most of us.
We have elevated self-interest at the cost of everything. Self-interest, like money, seems to have no limit. Such a way cannot lead anywhere for the culture but to collapse. No one lives independent of his or her environment. We are all part of the biosphere. Which goes back to that definition of Liberty as the measure of a people's ability to govern themselves.
What does it mean for us to govern ourselves? Self-interest is not wanting to be told how to live my life. Self-interest is me deciding my own fate. Self-interest is me fulfilling the Art that is my life. Self-interest void of concern for others, or community, or the biosphere on which every cell depends, is as hollow as an economy ignorant of its relationship to ecology and energy, and equally doomed. A people cannot rule themselves ignorant of the economy, ecology and energy, and their relationship to each. Conversely, a self-sustaining people are not easily ruled.
The Right makes a big deal about American ingenuity and liberty, but the Right will not allow American ingenuity to experiment with hemp, as example. Industrial hemp would go a long way in making Americans a self-sustaining people, but hemp would displace much GMO mono-crop corn, and industrial corn makes people ill, and an ill people are easier to control. A people dependent on pharmaceuticals to moderate their illnesses are less likely to question the ways in which Liberty is denied by the culture that provides those drugs. A people who accept the dominant mythologies of the culture have less incentive to ponder liberty. Immersion in the mainstream, no matter how tyrannous, feels like liberty. Which is why information is so important. A truly free person takes in all available information, and makes his or her own decisions. A truly free person rules him or herself, in relation to the world around, leaving ignorance masquerading as authority for the empty, shallow thing that it is. A free person ruling him or herself, with a firm grasp of economy, ecology and energy, living in a community of such people, is a happy person indeed.
It was about fifty degrees in here when I woke up this morning. It's below 0 outside, and will likely remain so all day. I could see my breath in the kitchen when I went to make coffee. Liberty too, is a state of mind. We do what we can, with what we have.
Merriam-Webster calls liberty, "the quality or state of being free." I like Wikipedia's definition, "A contested moral and political principle that seeks to identify the condition in which human beings are able to govern themselves." We want to do what we want to do; we want others not to do what we don't want them to do. We actually agree about more things than we think, we just don't see it because we are too busy arguing ideology. It could be argued in fact, that in the period from 1973 (the year I was born) to the present, America was among the most free societies in the world. Sadly, government in that time grew ever larger, with ever increasing power, and the last thirty years at least, the economy has been draining the wealth of the majority, funneling it upward, while generating unsustainable debt. Many Americans have less liberty as a result.
I've had the occasion to think about this, because I am nominally employed. I've done little work for money the last two months, spending my mornings writing and editing, and most of the rest of the day, dancing and reading. Dancing in part because my furnace doesn't really work, turning on randomly, only a few times a day. I need to stay warm; it's rarely more than 60 degrees in here, often 45-55. Most of the house is closed off except one room, where I write, dance and sleep. Even if the furnace worked properly, it would never shut off, because this house built in 1918 is so grossly inefficient, thermodynamically speaking. I moderate the heat in this one room with an oil filled radiator. It is currently 58, about 40-45 elsewhere in the house. If I had to survive the rest of the winter on the food I have in the house, I would surely starve to death. I'm down to about $3000. If I cease to pay any of the utilities, the city will condemn the house within seven days.
I'm not complaining. I get by quite well. This time in winter in Minnesota, I'm content to hang out in the house and contemplate life. It would be nice if the house were better insulated, with less windows everywhere but on the south side, with an attached greenhouse where I could grow food, with a functional kitchen with a well stocked basement cellar. From my vantage point, Liberty looks like clean air, clean water, clean soil, good food, clothing, companionship, a modest, clean, warm house, and the freedom to travel. Everyone alive should have that, actually. We might have achieved it by now, if we'd set about it 40 years ago. Instead, for almost the entirety of my life, America has been living the trajectory of Empire, every man more or less for himself. With less liberty for most of us, on the horizon.
We sense that our Liberty is imperiled, hence the rise of the Tea Party and the OWS movement, though we are confused about what would improve our chances. There are a lot more people in America with little else to do but contemplate their lives, which most people would rather not do. Many of those who are working are exhausted. Everywhere I go, people seem tired, even somewhat sleepy, or rather, leveled. I suppose because just about everybody is on some pill or another, or several. With alcohol, nicotine, caffeine and sugar, we manage.
I'm fond of alcohol and caffeine. I have not taken any pharmaceutical substance in about three years. I haven't taken any pharmaceutical other than Ibuprofen the last fifteen years, except the time I took antibiotics to kill the lymes virus I was carrying. I don't begrudge anyone taking any pill. How aghast would anyone be, if I said they couldn't? Though I do think we take a great many pills in America because the idea of it makes us feel better.
I do like to smoke Cannabis. I am quite fond of it, actually. The curious thing is, because I consume the flower of this plant, I can go to jail. Not only can I be put in a cage, everything I own can be confiscated from me. If I'm declared a felon, I can't vote, even after I've served my term. I can't vote, but I can be taxed, which is taxation without representation, which is unconstitutional, but the law in America depends mostly on who and where you are. They drug test for people like me, too. The trend is, if you get caught, you won't get that job and it may be hard to get another. Or you may not get those benefits, or those services you've been paying taxes for.
Have I mentioned before, that Cannabis is the most useful plant on the planet, without question? Yes I have. Why is the most useful plant on the planet illegal? Ponder that, the next time you pop a pill. No one has ever been known to die from the consumption of Cannabis. People die everyday taking pills. The government raids cannabis growers; when was the last time the government raided a pharmaceutical company? Some companies have made pharmaceuticals seem like a license to kill. Sell cannabis, and you can be legally ruined.
This isn't anything but one segment of the population at liberty to prey upon another. Predators of certain kinds - a certain fellow running for President comes to mind - are welcome, even elevated, like a cultural prize. Some species prey upon their own in times of great stress. Only Homo sapien sapien has elevated it to an economic or moral ideal. How is it that those most at liberty with the word Liberty have so little to say about some of our species preying economically on their own?
Liberty is whatever the culture says it is. It used to be a liberty to pour whatever you wanted into rivers. We have some limits on that now, though these tend to be rather arbitrary, and our rivers can't be described as clean, most of them. If access to clean water is a fundamental liberty, then mine is considerably limited. There are many on this earth who do not have much liberty at all in that regard. It seems very much that the culture, in an attempt to fulfill the mythology of endless growth, is going to put increasing limits on my liberty to drink fresh water and breath clean air, in an attempt to expand liberty for traditional capitalists, ostensibly to improve the economy by exploiting the biosphere. By traditional capitalist, I mean those practicing the dominator model, who turn exploitation into a virtue, who see the world as mute, dumb nature to be transformed into money and garbage, who have no concept of their place in any greater ecological whole.
I am not against the right of anyone to profit from his or her labor and ingenuity. But Capitalism has to change. Capitalism as it stands is insatiable. It cannot have enough, at any cost. If the Market is God, as some assert, then God is a fool. How else to explain the seas of homes in the colder climates of this country, that are fundamentally useless without affordable fossil fuels? They are still building them, while many sit empty! The market is not God, but the collective and mundane actions of a people who want to behave as if there are no limits to growth, as if we have no responsibility to the Earth. We consider it a fundamental liberty in America to consume without regard for limits, in economics, ecology or energy. The Capitalism we have today will devour ecology and energy to feed the economy until everything is exhausted, and the culture is left with a vast infrastructure that is useless, in a world utterly transformed and ecologically damaged, that cannot support most of us.
We have elevated self-interest at the cost of everything. Self-interest, like money, seems to have no limit. Such a way cannot lead anywhere for the culture but to collapse. No one lives independent of his or her environment. We are all part of the biosphere. Which goes back to that definition of Liberty as the measure of a people's ability to govern themselves.
What does it mean for us to govern ourselves? Self-interest is not wanting to be told how to live my life. Self-interest is me deciding my own fate. Self-interest is me fulfilling the Art that is my life. Self-interest void of concern for others, or community, or the biosphere on which every cell depends, is as hollow as an economy ignorant of its relationship to ecology and energy, and equally doomed. A people cannot rule themselves ignorant of the economy, ecology and energy, and their relationship to each. Conversely, a self-sustaining people are not easily ruled.
The Right makes a big deal about American ingenuity and liberty, but the Right will not allow American ingenuity to experiment with hemp, as example. Industrial hemp would go a long way in making Americans a self-sustaining people, but hemp would displace much GMO mono-crop corn, and industrial corn makes people ill, and an ill people are easier to control. A people dependent on pharmaceuticals to moderate their illnesses are less likely to question the ways in which Liberty is denied by the culture that provides those drugs. A people who accept the dominant mythologies of the culture have less incentive to ponder liberty. Immersion in the mainstream, no matter how tyrannous, feels like liberty. Which is why information is so important. A truly free person takes in all available information, and makes his or her own decisions. A truly free person rules him or herself, in relation to the world around, leaving ignorance masquerading as authority for the empty, shallow thing that it is. A free person ruling him or herself, with a firm grasp of economy, ecology and energy, living in a community of such people, is a happy person indeed.
It was about fifty degrees in here when I woke up this morning. It's below 0 outside, and will likely remain so all day. I could see my breath in the kitchen when I went to make coffee. Liberty too, is a state of mind. We do what we can, with what we have.
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Thrive
It seems the first two posts of this blog in 2012 are meant to provide correction and clarity. Two posts ago, in my 2012 Forecast, I mentioned the film Thrive. Here is some of what I said:
"We are facing a long decline as the resources to maintain the life we have grown accustomed to grow ever scarcer. At the same time, I read the work of Charles Eisenstein, and watch the film Thrive, and I want very much to believe that I will see the world they envision in my lifetime."
There have been a flurry of reviews about this film, by several writers I admire, including Eisenstein, and they have all been profoundly negative. Rob Hopkins called it "horrifying". John Michael Greer called it "meretricious nonsense". Strong statements. I agree with Greer more than I do Hopkins, though I can see why Hopkins has had such a strong reaction, in that the movie may have the effect of encouraging people not to concern themselves with the actual crises that face us, in favor of empty anger against fictitious crises, and false hope in the salvation of physically impossible energy schemes. That is basically Greer's argument, that Thrive is little more than an extreme form of the narrative of progress, a means to hide from the failure of the narrative of progress.
I liked the film. I think that's because I didn't take it very seriously. How can one? If you've seen it, you know, the thing is preposterous. I mean, David Icke is the most prominent interview. Seriously? I remember thinking, I wonder if Vandana Shiva knew what this film is about, that she did this interview for? Whenever I heard Foster Gamble talk about the principle of non-violation, I kept thinking, well, I probably wouldn't put the word violation in any slogan around which to structure a movement. And, I wonder what all those rich dude's are going to think about your slogan, when you put them on trial and take their money to build your fancy world?
Just about every conspiracy theory making the route through the underbelly of the culture, makes an appearance in Thrive. (Aliens, too.) Basically, some bad people at the head of a few families, are engaged in a conspiracy to dominate the world, to the point of engaging in plans to exterminate whole populations. That last bit I hear more and more about these days, governments and elite conspiring to kill billions. I think it's an idea welling up out of our collective unconscious, a low level awareness of the trials humanity is likely to face in the not so distant future, with the decline of available energy - including and especially rich people. It's easier to blame shadowy banking figures, than the Western standard of living. If I blame the Rothschilds, I don't have to question my lifestyle. Throw the specter of free energy into the plot, and now I'm free to live however I will forever and always.
Possibly the most insidious aspect of this film is the idea of free energy. His evidence for free-energy isn't evidence at all, but anecdote, and hypothesis. Even so, he asserts that the only reasons we are not awash in free-energy, are the machinations of elite perpetrating a global domination agenda. It's not that I don't believe such energy schemes may be possible. I just wonder, has it occurred to those who truly believe, that it might be a hundred, or a thousand generations, before we figure it out? Has it occurred to anyone but Rob Hopkins, that we aren't ready for free energy? Do we really think the cruel, capricious, petty, monstrous, ugly, exploitative people who inhabit this time, are capable of the responsibility of free energy?
Damn. I just wrote all that, and now I go back to my forecast post and all I said, and now I'm asking, how could I have liked this film?
Because I want everybody to thrive. I don't want people to have to go through what we are going to go through, the next few decades.
Georgia Kelly of the Praxis Peace Institute accused Thrive of a "reactionary, libertarian agenda." I consider this a hopelessly mundane perspective. Because what Foster Gamble is advocating, though he doesn't know it, is the Anarchist utopia, in which everyone is living in the fullest expression of their purpose. Which is inevitable, but no more a possibility now than free energy. The Libertarian dream of everybody living without the interference of government or rulers is the fantasy of a future world with a lot less people in it, who are a lot stronger than we are today. About all the Anarchist and Libertarian can do now is live responsibly, according to one's principles. Government we know has failed us miserably, which neither Kelly nor Hopkins seem able to comprehend. They want to believe government is a solution, because a sudden Libertarian fix in this time is truly horrifying (just as would be a government without free enterprise). Someday however, there will be no government, nor any rulers, capitalists or democrats or otherwise, because we will have transcended the need. But that might be a hundred thousand generations from today.
Meanwhile, if we are to thrive, we are going to have to choose to, individually, because the culture is not going to help. The culture is like Thrive the film; to paraphrase Greer, an exposition on the inevitability of progress, a refusal to acknowledge the actual world we actually inhabit. Which is why it's a good idea to enjoy Thrive, without taking it very seriously.
And as I corrected a quote of mine, I would also like to add that I feel I have done Charles Eisenstein a dis-service, putting his book and the film Thrive in the same context, as if they were equal.
"We are facing a long decline as the resources to maintain the life we have grown accustomed to grow ever scarcer. At the same time, I read the work of Charles Eisenstein, and watch the film Thrive, and I want very much to believe that I will see the world they envision in my lifetime."
There have been a flurry of reviews about this film, by several writers I admire, including Eisenstein, and they have all been profoundly negative. Rob Hopkins called it "horrifying". John Michael Greer called it "meretricious nonsense". Strong statements. I agree with Greer more than I do Hopkins, though I can see why Hopkins has had such a strong reaction, in that the movie may have the effect of encouraging people not to concern themselves with the actual crises that face us, in favor of empty anger against fictitious crises, and false hope in the salvation of physically impossible energy schemes. That is basically Greer's argument, that Thrive is little more than an extreme form of the narrative of progress, a means to hide from the failure of the narrative of progress.
I liked the film. I think that's because I didn't take it very seriously. How can one? If you've seen it, you know, the thing is preposterous. I mean, David Icke is the most prominent interview. Seriously? I remember thinking, I wonder if Vandana Shiva knew what this film is about, that she did this interview for? Whenever I heard Foster Gamble talk about the principle of non-violation, I kept thinking, well, I probably wouldn't put the word violation in any slogan around which to structure a movement. And, I wonder what all those rich dude's are going to think about your slogan, when you put them on trial and take their money to build your fancy world?
Just about every conspiracy theory making the route through the underbelly of the culture, makes an appearance in Thrive. (Aliens, too.) Basically, some bad people at the head of a few families, are engaged in a conspiracy to dominate the world, to the point of engaging in plans to exterminate whole populations. That last bit I hear more and more about these days, governments and elite conspiring to kill billions. I think it's an idea welling up out of our collective unconscious, a low level awareness of the trials humanity is likely to face in the not so distant future, with the decline of available energy - including and especially rich people. It's easier to blame shadowy banking figures, than the Western standard of living. If I blame the Rothschilds, I don't have to question my lifestyle. Throw the specter of free energy into the plot, and now I'm free to live however I will forever and always.
Possibly the most insidious aspect of this film is the idea of free energy. His evidence for free-energy isn't evidence at all, but anecdote, and hypothesis. Even so, he asserts that the only reasons we are not awash in free-energy, are the machinations of elite perpetrating a global domination agenda. It's not that I don't believe such energy schemes may be possible. I just wonder, has it occurred to those who truly believe, that it might be a hundred, or a thousand generations, before we figure it out? Has it occurred to anyone but Rob Hopkins, that we aren't ready for free energy? Do we really think the cruel, capricious, petty, monstrous, ugly, exploitative people who inhabit this time, are capable of the responsibility of free energy?
Damn. I just wrote all that, and now I go back to my forecast post and all I said, and now I'm asking, how could I have liked this film?
Because I want everybody to thrive. I don't want people to have to go through what we are going to go through, the next few decades.
Georgia Kelly of the Praxis Peace Institute accused Thrive of a "reactionary, libertarian agenda." I consider this a hopelessly mundane perspective. Because what Foster Gamble is advocating, though he doesn't know it, is the Anarchist utopia, in which everyone is living in the fullest expression of their purpose. Which is inevitable, but no more a possibility now than free energy. The Libertarian dream of everybody living without the interference of government or rulers is the fantasy of a future world with a lot less people in it, who are a lot stronger than we are today. About all the Anarchist and Libertarian can do now is live responsibly, according to one's principles. Government we know has failed us miserably, which neither Kelly nor Hopkins seem able to comprehend. They want to believe government is a solution, because a sudden Libertarian fix in this time is truly horrifying (just as would be a government without free enterprise). Someday however, there will be no government, nor any rulers, capitalists or democrats or otherwise, because we will have transcended the need. But that might be a hundred thousand generations from today.
Meanwhile, if we are to thrive, we are going to have to choose to, individually, because the culture is not going to help. The culture is like Thrive the film; to paraphrase Greer, an exposition on the inevitability of progress, a refusal to acknowledge the actual world we actually inhabit. Which is why it's a good idea to enjoy Thrive, without taking it very seriously.
And as I corrected a quote of mine, I would also like to add that I feel I have done Charles Eisenstein a dis-service, putting his book and the film Thrive in the same context, as if they were equal.
Sunday, January 8, 2012
Stargazing
I need to correct what I perceive as a factual error in my last post. It went like this:
"If the precession of the equinox is on a 26,000 year cycle, and the sun is as close to the line between the Earth and the center of the galaxy as it has been on that 26,000 year cycle, then I take the mid-point of that cycle, when the sun was furthest from that line, 13,000 years ago, as the time of the collapse of the last ice age."
I've been trying to work out in my head, how the sun could eclipse the center of the galaxy only once on a 26,000 year cycle. I haven't been able to do it; but still, I seem to fall back on that default idea about the winter solstice of 2012. Anyone commenting on what that date signifies is either condescendingly dismissive, or fatuously convinced, so it's hard to know what the truth is. Recently, I found a clip of Neil deGrasse Tyson mocking the idea, saying that the sun eclipses the center of the galaxy once every year, so how can that date be such a big deal? He would, I think, encapsulate the dominant scientific attitude about the myth of 2012, that it isn't even worth looking into, that anyone who does is clearly a crackpot.
It sometimes helps to look to the blind-spots of Science, when looking for the truth. What Tyson says is not really even true. According to Thomas Razzeto, the sun never in fact eclipses the center of the galaxy; but rather, once a year, you can draw a line from the Earth, through the sun, along the plane of the galaxy, within a few degrees of the center - the galactic alignment. This has been happening on the day of the winter solstice, the past hundred years or so, and will for another hundred or so more. The plane of the galaxy is marked by the great rift, what appears to be a dark line in the sky blocking light from the center of the galaxy - interstellar clouds, it turns out - which the Maya consider, or considered, the birth canal of the great womb of the cosmic Mother.
Razzeto simply asked, if there is anything at all to the date of Dec 21, 2012, what would you see, if you were looking from the place of the origin of the Long Count calendar? What he discovered, using a computer program called The Sky, looking from the village of Izlan, in southern Chiapas state, in Mexico, at high noon on 12/21/12, the sun can be found at the center of the great rift, at the same time that Mars and Venus are found balanced on either side.
Razzeto calls this the day of the triple rebirth of the sun, in the presence of the world tree. By triple rebirth, he means, the rebirth of the sun as it rises in the morning, the rebirth of the sun on the winter solstice, and the rebirth of the sun in the center of the great rift. The world tree, at least in my conception, something like the Earth, Venus and Mars, three very similar planets in many ways, triangulating, or at least appearing to frame the sun in a triangle. Razzeto believes the Maya chose this day to end their long count (which also implies an accuracy in calendar making that requires a computer these days.)
What will it mean, this arrangement in the sky above southern Mexico? Nothing, says Razzeto. It is only an arrangement that lends well to a metaphor, the triple rebirth, which we may choose to invest in, or not. It is a mythology that arose out of the Maya, or at least is arising now, in response to the striking talents of the ancient Maya. It certainly seems to me that if there has ever been a time to represent the death and rebirth of Ages, that time would be now. We can choose to see this time as a time of rebirth, or we can hold onto the ways that have brought us here, with so much seemingly on the brink of collapse. But then, a kind of death is necessary, to be reborn.
Razzeto is not going to be taken very seriously, by many. He's very earnest, with a very gentle voice. He's an independent thinker, unaffiliated with any school, simply a man who asked a question and went in search of an answer, and he doesn't refuse to look at any idea if it might inform his argument, some of which ideas are institutionally taboo. He is more of what we need, actually, earnest and awed people exploring ideas. Both genuine and authentic, he has come up with as credible a theory about what the hoopla around Dec 21, 2012 is really about, from the perspective of the skies, as anyone I've found.
As for the second half of that quote of mine, that the halfway point of this past cycle was the end of the last ice age, is unsupportable by any measure. It is true that back in 1998, the cycle of precession could be said to be complete, with the axis of the Earth as close to the angle of the plane of the galaxy, as it ever is on that 25,776 year cycle. The other side of that cycle would put us at about the year 10,876 BCE. That was a time around the end of the last ice age, but we can't really say. The closest I've come to anything corroborating that date, is the work of Robert Buval and Graham Hancock, pointing to the pyramids of Giza, and a layout that was reflected in the sky, in the year 10,450 BCE. As for positing too, that Neanderthal went extinct about 26,000 years ago, I've seen dates between 24,000-40,000 years ago. Science seems to have settled on the older number, this year.
So while I cast doubt on my assumptions about what happened 13,000 and 26,000 years ago, I don't doubt this will be the year that the bulk of humanity will have to face a future of decreasing energy supplies. And no, I don't think that is a result of precession, or an alignment in the solar system. It is simply a fact of geological limits, of supply and demand, which is understood by a small number of people, and thoroughly ignored by the vast majority, to all our peril.
Aristotle said that an educated mind should be able to consider any idea, without having to accept it. In America, we adhere mostly to ideologies or dogmas or institutional creeds, to the exclusion of all else. In other words, contrary to what we like to believe about ourselves, we let authorities do our thinking for us. Most of the ideas afloat in the world today are about social control. Which is why the decline of America is likely to be ugly, every ideology, dogma and creed fighting to dominate every other.
If there is anything we need right now, it is flexibility in thinking. Opening our minds to new ideas, unafraid. Because open-eyed and clear-headed folk have a much easier time in hard times, then do the ones who can not think clearly for themselves. And the fact is, most of the ideas that might lead to a kind of golden age for humanity, a healing time, are going to be hard to preserve the next 200 years, as the ideas of control will attempt to snuff out anything that might lead to such an age. My hope is, that the readers of this blog are some of those who will take it upon themselves to preserve what is best about this life, as long as they live, to pass on what they can. Such people may be the only thing standing in the way of another dark age.
Looking to the stars, to the spiral nature of this existence, what is my role, in maintaining the best of this human experience?
"If the precession of the equinox is on a 26,000 year cycle, and the sun is as close to the line between the Earth and the center of the galaxy as it has been on that 26,000 year cycle, then I take the mid-point of that cycle, when the sun was furthest from that line, 13,000 years ago, as the time of the collapse of the last ice age."
I've been trying to work out in my head, how the sun could eclipse the center of the galaxy only once on a 26,000 year cycle. I haven't been able to do it; but still, I seem to fall back on that default idea about the winter solstice of 2012. Anyone commenting on what that date signifies is either condescendingly dismissive, or fatuously convinced, so it's hard to know what the truth is. Recently, I found a clip of Neil deGrasse Tyson mocking the idea, saying that the sun eclipses the center of the galaxy once every year, so how can that date be such a big deal? He would, I think, encapsulate the dominant scientific attitude about the myth of 2012, that it isn't even worth looking into, that anyone who does is clearly a crackpot.
It sometimes helps to look to the blind-spots of Science, when looking for the truth. What Tyson says is not really even true. According to Thomas Razzeto, the sun never in fact eclipses the center of the galaxy; but rather, once a year, you can draw a line from the Earth, through the sun, along the plane of the galaxy, within a few degrees of the center - the galactic alignment. This has been happening on the day of the winter solstice, the past hundred years or so, and will for another hundred or so more. The plane of the galaxy is marked by the great rift, what appears to be a dark line in the sky blocking light from the center of the galaxy - interstellar clouds, it turns out - which the Maya consider, or considered, the birth canal of the great womb of the cosmic Mother.
Razzeto simply asked, if there is anything at all to the date of Dec 21, 2012, what would you see, if you were looking from the place of the origin of the Long Count calendar? What he discovered, using a computer program called The Sky, looking from the village of Izlan, in southern Chiapas state, in Mexico, at high noon on 12/21/12, the sun can be found at the center of the great rift, at the same time that Mars and Venus are found balanced on either side.
Razzeto calls this the day of the triple rebirth of the sun, in the presence of the world tree. By triple rebirth, he means, the rebirth of the sun as it rises in the morning, the rebirth of the sun on the winter solstice, and the rebirth of the sun in the center of the great rift. The world tree, at least in my conception, something like the Earth, Venus and Mars, three very similar planets in many ways, triangulating, or at least appearing to frame the sun in a triangle. Razzeto believes the Maya chose this day to end their long count (which also implies an accuracy in calendar making that requires a computer these days.)
What will it mean, this arrangement in the sky above southern Mexico? Nothing, says Razzeto. It is only an arrangement that lends well to a metaphor, the triple rebirth, which we may choose to invest in, or not. It is a mythology that arose out of the Maya, or at least is arising now, in response to the striking talents of the ancient Maya. It certainly seems to me that if there has ever been a time to represent the death and rebirth of Ages, that time would be now. We can choose to see this time as a time of rebirth, or we can hold onto the ways that have brought us here, with so much seemingly on the brink of collapse. But then, a kind of death is necessary, to be reborn.
Razzeto is not going to be taken very seriously, by many. He's very earnest, with a very gentle voice. He's an independent thinker, unaffiliated with any school, simply a man who asked a question and went in search of an answer, and he doesn't refuse to look at any idea if it might inform his argument, some of which ideas are institutionally taboo. He is more of what we need, actually, earnest and awed people exploring ideas. Both genuine and authentic, he has come up with as credible a theory about what the hoopla around Dec 21, 2012 is really about, from the perspective of the skies, as anyone I've found.
As for the second half of that quote of mine, that the halfway point of this past cycle was the end of the last ice age, is unsupportable by any measure. It is true that back in 1998, the cycle of precession could be said to be complete, with the axis of the Earth as close to the angle of the plane of the galaxy, as it ever is on that 25,776 year cycle. The other side of that cycle would put us at about the year 10,876 BCE. That was a time around the end of the last ice age, but we can't really say. The closest I've come to anything corroborating that date, is the work of Robert Buval and Graham Hancock, pointing to the pyramids of Giza, and a layout that was reflected in the sky, in the year 10,450 BCE. As for positing too, that Neanderthal went extinct about 26,000 years ago, I've seen dates between 24,000-40,000 years ago. Science seems to have settled on the older number, this year.
So while I cast doubt on my assumptions about what happened 13,000 and 26,000 years ago, I don't doubt this will be the year that the bulk of humanity will have to face a future of decreasing energy supplies. And no, I don't think that is a result of precession, or an alignment in the solar system. It is simply a fact of geological limits, of supply and demand, which is understood by a small number of people, and thoroughly ignored by the vast majority, to all our peril.
Aristotle said that an educated mind should be able to consider any idea, without having to accept it. In America, we adhere mostly to ideologies or dogmas or institutional creeds, to the exclusion of all else. In other words, contrary to what we like to believe about ourselves, we let authorities do our thinking for us. Most of the ideas afloat in the world today are about social control. Which is why the decline of America is likely to be ugly, every ideology, dogma and creed fighting to dominate every other.
If there is anything we need right now, it is flexibility in thinking. Opening our minds to new ideas, unafraid. Because open-eyed and clear-headed folk have a much easier time in hard times, then do the ones who can not think clearly for themselves. And the fact is, most of the ideas that might lead to a kind of golden age for humanity, a healing time, are going to be hard to preserve the next 200 years, as the ideas of control will attempt to snuff out anything that might lead to such an age. My hope is, that the readers of this blog are some of those who will take it upon themselves to preserve what is best about this life, as long as they live, to pass on what they can. Such people may be the only thing standing in the way of another dark age.
Looking to the stars, to the spiral nature of this existence, what is my role, in maintaining the best of this human experience?
Thursday, December 29, 2011
2012 Forecast
James Kunstler is in the habit of issuing a forecast for the coming year, so I thought I might give it a try. While I admire him and his work, he has become a bit hysterical of late, like he's contemplating violence too much, in the context of what he perceives to be the impending collapse of America. In his most recent post, he imagined impaling socialites who appear in The New York Observer "Shindigger" column, in Zuccotti Park, "in the manner of Vlad.” You know things are getting strange, when an internationally known writer publicly releases imagery of the torturous death of living people, and no one says anything about it - you can bet it's because they don't want people reading what he has to say, because too much of it is a bit too close to the truth. And it's not like he was singling out financiers. If you actually read the Shindigger column, you might catch some of his humor. You'll find people who fund the maintenance of Versailles, Dukes and Vicomtes, parade after parade of dilettantes and otherwise functionally illiterate pretty people. I'm not accustomed to reading such breathless writing, such fawning, self-satisfied fluff. I particularly enjoyed the image of Lou Reed, his fur-lined coat, extolling the virtue of Glenn Close, or was it Meryl Streep? (I don't mean to disparage those two great actors.) For the record, I do not advise violence against anyone. Kunstler sees it as an immediate concern. His forecast is sure to be unsparingly harsh.
2012, of course, is said to be a year of prophecy. It is said by some to be the year of the apocalypse. Can you hear the drums and bells sounding, for war with Iran? How about we turn the Holy Land and Fertile Crescent into glass parking lots! As if the state of the world isn't already condemnation of the existing order. Iran blocking the straight of Hormuz? Sounds like a pending Gulf of Tonkin false flag kind of incident, for those who remember how we got ourselves led into Vietnam, or the WMD that led us into Iraq. It certainly is shaping up to be a year of tumult, and it's an election year. The European economy appears to be buying time, perhaps hoping for a miracle. Plenty of Americans hoping for a miracle too. Even the great dragon China is looking like it might collapse economically, as there's no one to bail them out of the effects of what may prove to be the most laissez faire real estate bubble ever. I think there are basically two paths ahead for the American economy, either hyper-inflation or default. Thankfully, I'm not an economist, so you don't have to believe me. Though if you believe anything coming out of an economist at this point, I feel for you.
I'm actually torn between world views. The video on the collapse of the existential function, from Chris Martenson, combined with John Michael Greer's work, have left me with few illusions about the path humanity faces in an age of increasing scarcity. From that perspective, including Kunstler, we are facing a long decline as the resources to maintain the life we have grown accustomed to grow ever scarcer. At the same time, I read the work of Charles Eisenstein, and watch the film Thrive, and I want very much to believe that I will see the world they envision in my lifetime. I want to believe Terrence Mckenna's talk about radical transformation. I want to believe in rapid and fluid evolutionary shifts in consciousness, in the direction of balance, wholeness and healing. I want to believe this is a divine universe, and anything can happen.
There is of course plenty of disagreement that we are in any kind of end time. It's a cultural joke really, the territory of delusional weirdos, residue of Y2K. John Michael Greer, who is the Arch-Druid in America, who one might expect to have some spiritual sense of what is going on, considers the mythology of 2012 to be a fantasy, which he ascertains the Maya never predicted, and Terrence Mckenna never really saw on his "drug trips". He has even taken to printing weekly excerpts from his book Apocalypse Not, to dissuade people from falling into what he believes is a trap, a dead end (if you'll pardon the pun.) I agree with him basically, if any ideas about 2012 lead you to ignore or deny what John Michael Greer has to teach, which is mostly about getting clear in the head and grounded in the Earth.
I wonder though, about 2012. If the precession of the equinox is on a 26,000 year cycle, and the sun is as close to the line between the Earth and the center of the galaxy as it has been on that 26,000 year cycle, then I take the mid-point of that cycle, when the sun was furthest from that line, 13,000 years ago, as the time of the collapse of the last ice age. I'm not even entirely convinced there wasn't another advanced civilization, at that time, basically wiped from the face of the Earth. And 26,000 years ago, the last time the sun was in this place, was the approximate end of Neanderthal. I'd say that qualifies as epochal.
I don't know if it's true, but it has a nice symmetry. As for 2012, I think this may well be the year demand for oil exceeds supply. If you don't know what that will mean for humanity, you should. You're going to be compelled to face it, at some point soon. You'd be well served by not waiting until it's apparent to everybody, because at that point a significant portion of the world population is going to go functionally insane. If this is the year, you can bet people will spend another decade raging that it's all the fault of government regulation, environmentalists, activist judges, recalcitrant dictators etc. but there is no going back. After a hundred+ year climb, world-wide production has been on a flat-line since 2004. If you believe production will one day climb again, for any period of time, then you are living someplace other than planet Earth. At least, the planet in your head isn't the one under your feet. Two hundred years from now, when fossil fuels have been exhausted, and humanity probably too, we may measure 2012 as the time of that shift. That will seem pretty epochal too, the decline and fall of the Developed nations, the decline and fall of America.
Mckenna toward the end of his life imagined something even more dramatic, like humanity was embroiled in the ever increasing complexity of universal processes, and we are going to emerge quite suddenly into some higher plane of consciousness, unrecognizable to the paradigm of the day. When I get to thinking like that, I half expect Quetzalcoatl the plumed serpent, to come roaring out of the sky devouring the wicked and enlivening the good, like Daniel Pinchbeck predicts. I've long wondered about that curious serpentine spiral at the core of being...
I want to believe too, in free energy. I'd been hearing a lot about Nikola Tesla, before I stumbled on a PBS documentary, Master of Lightning, on-line. I started watching the video in the late afternoon, but I'm on city wireless, and my signal gets a little sketchy from 7-11pm. The video stopped loading about 42 minutes in. So I did a few things on the Internet that didn't require so much band-width, I went about a few things around the house, returning to the computer about five hours later. I'd closed the video, so I had to load it again from the start. I set the computer aside while the video played silently, the screen blacked out. I picked up Charles Eisenstein's Sacred Economics; near the end of the book, I opened it, and the first line I read was, "When JP Morgan abandoned Tesla..." The last page I'd read was about ten pages before that, so I told myself I'd read, and then check the video when I came to the passage about Tesla. When I reached the passage, I set the book down. The computer screen was blank, so I picked up the earphones, put them on - and heard the exact same phrase that I heard last, when the video stopped loading five hours earlier. When I logged in and the video appeared, I saw an egg spinning wildly, on the machine I had seen in the freeze frame earlier, which Tesla had built to demonstrate the safety of AC current.
JP Morgan supposedly abandoned Tesla because Tesla was trying to create (or did create) a device that would provide free energy for all. I don't know that Tesla was on the right track with his tower, and high frequency wireless transmission of electricity, though. The wireless electricity required to run this industrial lifestyle seems like it would ionize most of the atmosphere. The creator of the film Thrive, Foster Gamble, believes he has found a solution to that problem. It rests on the torus, or the energy that cycles around a dynamo, like the magnetosphere of the Earth, or the heliosphere of the sun surrounding the solar system, or the envelope that is believed to surround the entire galaxy, something like the shape of an orange. The film rests on the premise that devices have been created that defy the second law of thermodynamics, creating more energy than they use, by generating a torus. The story goes, that most of these inventions have been confiscated by governments, and the inventors have been harassed and even killed. The film goes on to surmise that there is an agenda of world domination with a goal of one world government.
I don't doubt there is such an agenda. I even have reason to believe that the government of the United States may be a kind of fraud. The Federal Reserve certainly is something very much like a fraud. My mother is convinced the government has built containment and extermination camps, in the States, in anticipation of social unrest. She believes the government we have is in fact a corporation, created in 1868. According to her world view, the Republic ceased to exist, we ceased to exist as sovereign individuals, and became corporate persons, or citizens. It's a very similar argument, this and what is found in Thrive, that if we just come together and realize that just about everything we've ever been told is basically a lie, we can build a better world together. We probably can, if we can get past the lie-thing without falling apart. As for world domination, it is all vanity. Two hundred years from now if we retain even a modicum of our technology, it will be something like a miracle.
Or maybe the Aliens will finally show up and set us right. For myself, in 2012, I want to be in southern England in July, dancing in the wheat fields around Glastonbury and Stonehenge, calling down a crop circle. Or, calling to those people who do it, that I might see such a thing done. At the least, I will have danced in the wheat fields of England. Because of all the very curious things about the backward nature of this Age, there is this strange silence about these crop circles. They are surely some of the greatest artworks of the Age, and yet the artists are unknown. Hardly even searched for. Perhaps it is fairies. I'm not sure what is more ridiculous, to suggest the artists are aliens, fairies or people.
I'd also like to plant about ten fruit trees, tear down my house and start building the off-the-grid marvel I can see in my head. Which is not what one does if one believes the world is going to end. There may be a global financial apocalypse, perhaps. A severe oil shock, probably. The emergence of a kind of rabid desire to exploit every resource everywhere, complete with frothing at the mouth, and the biting of those who stand in the way, metaphorically speaking. Iran will probably eclipse Jobs in the election cycle, so politicians don't have to talk about a thing they don't know how to create. War is easier. We know how to do that. And it's good for the economy, like tax cuts and eliminating regulations. Might as well rack up another few trillion in debt. It's never going to be repaid, you know. Actually, I would like to see debt forgiveness across the board, the elimination of the Federal Reserve, of central banks everywhere, and the creation of an entirely different kind of money eliminating interest. But I'm probably a few decades ahead on that one. Or centuries.
If oil demand does exceed supply in 2012, I suspect what we will see is not a broad scale shift toward renewables, or some steady-state “ecotechnic” economy, but rather epic denial, and a last push to open up every available source of oil, gas and coal, after the model of Canada. If that is the case, and Aliens or Quetzalcoatl or Christ or the Singularity or free energy doesn't show up to save us, then we are certainly headed for a long decline, with probably a great deal of violence and death, on a scale never before seen, in the long story of the species - in the midst of radical environmental shifts humanity has not had to face since the end of the last ice age. Can you imagine both poles ice free, most of the year? Who knows? Maybe even a breaking up of continents, so thoroughly have we been de-greasing tectonic plates. A few centuries from now, when things settle down, perhaps we will be in a position to create the beautiful world that is possible. If we have not lost most of the technology we have today, the best of it, the most useful.
I recommend in 2012, letting go of conventional thinking. Conventional thinking has led us into a very tight corner, and it is leading us to our cultural destruction. Let go, rebuild your world view from the inside out, take nothing to be The truth, while grounding your body in the rhythms of the Earth. Flood the Earth with whatever Art emerges from your core. Be good to people. Be kind. Dance, sing and smile. And be good to yourself. There are difficult times ahead, and that will go better for you and yours, if you are clear about it.
2012, of course, is said to be a year of prophecy. It is said by some to be the year of the apocalypse. Can you hear the drums and bells sounding, for war with Iran? How about we turn the Holy Land and Fertile Crescent into glass parking lots! As if the state of the world isn't already condemnation of the existing order. Iran blocking the straight of Hormuz? Sounds like a pending Gulf of Tonkin false flag kind of incident, for those who remember how we got ourselves led into Vietnam, or the WMD that led us into Iraq. It certainly is shaping up to be a year of tumult, and it's an election year. The European economy appears to be buying time, perhaps hoping for a miracle. Plenty of Americans hoping for a miracle too. Even the great dragon China is looking like it might collapse economically, as there's no one to bail them out of the effects of what may prove to be the most laissez faire real estate bubble ever. I think there are basically two paths ahead for the American economy, either hyper-inflation or default. Thankfully, I'm not an economist, so you don't have to believe me. Though if you believe anything coming out of an economist at this point, I feel for you.
I'm actually torn between world views. The video on the collapse of the existential function, from Chris Martenson, combined with John Michael Greer's work, have left me with few illusions about the path humanity faces in an age of increasing scarcity. From that perspective, including Kunstler, we are facing a long decline as the resources to maintain the life we have grown accustomed to grow ever scarcer. At the same time, I read the work of Charles Eisenstein, and watch the film Thrive, and I want very much to believe that I will see the world they envision in my lifetime. I want to believe Terrence Mckenna's talk about radical transformation. I want to believe in rapid and fluid evolutionary shifts in consciousness, in the direction of balance, wholeness and healing. I want to believe this is a divine universe, and anything can happen.
There is of course plenty of disagreement that we are in any kind of end time. It's a cultural joke really, the territory of delusional weirdos, residue of Y2K. John Michael Greer, who is the Arch-Druid in America, who one might expect to have some spiritual sense of what is going on, considers the mythology of 2012 to be a fantasy, which he ascertains the Maya never predicted, and Terrence Mckenna never really saw on his "drug trips". He has even taken to printing weekly excerpts from his book Apocalypse Not, to dissuade people from falling into what he believes is a trap, a dead end (if you'll pardon the pun.) I agree with him basically, if any ideas about 2012 lead you to ignore or deny what John Michael Greer has to teach, which is mostly about getting clear in the head and grounded in the Earth.
I wonder though, about 2012. If the precession of the equinox is on a 26,000 year cycle, and the sun is as close to the line between the Earth and the center of the galaxy as it has been on that 26,000 year cycle, then I take the mid-point of that cycle, when the sun was furthest from that line, 13,000 years ago, as the time of the collapse of the last ice age. I'm not even entirely convinced there wasn't another advanced civilization, at that time, basically wiped from the face of the Earth. And 26,000 years ago, the last time the sun was in this place, was the approximate end of Neanderthal. I'd say that qualifies as epochal.
I don't know if it's true, but it has a nice symmetry. As for 2012, I think this may well be the year demand for oil exceeds supply. If you don't know what that will mean for humanity, you should. You're going to be compelled to face it, at some point soon. You'd be well served by not waiting until it's apparent to everybody, because at that point a significant portion of the world population is going to go functionally insane. If this is the year, you can bet people will spend another decade raging that it's all the fault of government regulation, environmentalists, activist judges, recalcitrant dictators etc. but there is no going back. After a hundred+ year climb, world-wide production has been on a flat-line since 2004. If you believe production will one day climb again, for any period of time, then you are living someplace other than planet Earth. At least, the planet in your head isn't the one under your feet. Two hundred years from now, when fossil fuels have been exhausted, and humanity probably too, we may measure 2012 as the time of that shift. That will seem pretty epochal too, the decline and fall of the Developed nations, the decline and fall of America.
Mckenna toward the end of his life imagined something even more dramatic, like humanity was embroiled in the ever increasing complexity of universal processes, and we are going to emerge quite suddenly into some higher plane of consciousness, unrecognizable to the paradigm of the day. When I get to thinking like that, I half expect Quetzalcoatl the plumed serpent, to come roaring out of the sky devouring the wicked and enlivening the good, like Daniel Pinchbeck predicts. I've long wondered about that curious serpentine spiral at the core of being...
I want to believe too, in free energy. I'd been hearing a lot about Nikola Tesla, before I stumbled on a PBS documentary, Master of Lightning, on-line. I started watching the video in the late afternoon, but I'm on city wireless, and my signal gets a little sketchy from 7-11pm. The video stopped loading about 42 minutes in. So I did a few things on the Internet that didn't require so much band-width, I went about a few things around the house, returning to the computer about five hours later. I'd closed the video, so I had to load it again from the start. I set the computer aside while the video played silently, the screen blacked out. I picked up Charles Eisenstein's Sacred Economics; near the end of the book, I opened it, and the first line I read was, "When JP Morgan abandoned Tesla..." The last page I'd read was about ten pages before that, so I told myself I'd read, and then check the video when I came to the passage about Tesla. When I reached the passage, I set the book down. The computer screen was blank, so I picked up the earphones, put them on - and heard the exact same phrase that I heard last, when the video stopped loading five hours earlier. When I logged in and the video appeared, I saw an egg spinning wildly, on the machine I had seen in the freeze frame earlier, which Tesla had built to demonstrate the safety of AC current.
JP Morgan supposedly abandoned Tesla because Tesla was trying to create (or did create) a device that would provide free energy for all. I don't know that Tesla was on the right track with his tower, and high frequency wireless transmission of electricity, though. The wireless electricity required to run this industrial lifestyle seems like it would ionize most of the atmosphere. The creator of the film Thrive, Foster Gamble, believes he has found a solution to that problem. It rests on the torus, or the energy that cycles around a dynamo, like the magnetosphere of the Earth, or the heliosphere of the sun surrounding the solar system, or the envelope that is believed to surround the entire galaxy, something like the shape of an orange. The film rests on the premise that devices have been created that defy the second law of thermodynamics, creating more energy than they use, by generating a torus. The story goes, that most of these inventions have been confiscated by governments, and the inventors have been harassed and even killed. The film goes on to surmise that there is an agenda of world domination with a goal of one world government.
I don't doubt there is such an agenda. I even have reason to believe that the government of the United States may be a kind of fraud. The Federal Reserve certainly is something very much like a fraud. My mother is convinced the government has built containment and extermination camps, in the States, in anticipation of social unrest. She believes the government we have is in fact a corporation, created in 1868. According to her world view, the Republic ceased to exist, we ceased to exist as sovereign individuals, and became corporate persons, or citizens. It's a very similar argument, this and what is found in Thrive, that if we just come together and realize that just about everything we've ever been told is basically a lie, we can build a better world together. We probably can, if we can get past the lie-thing without falling apart. As for world domination, it is all vanity. Two hundred years from now if we retain even a modicum of our technology, it will be something like a miracle.
Or maybe the Aliens will finally show up and set us right. For myself, in 2012, I want to be in southern England in July, dancing in the wheat fields around Glastonbury and Stonehenge, calling down a crop circle. Or, calling to those people who do it, that I might see such a thing done. At the least, I will have danced in the wheat fields of England. Because of all the very curious things about the backward nature of this Age, there is this strange silence about these crop circles. They are surely some of the greatest artworks of the Age, and yet the artists are unknown. Hardly even searched for. Perhaps it is fairies. I'm not sure what is more ridiculous, to suggest the artists are aliens, fairies or people.
I'd also like to plant about ten fruit trees, tear down my house and start building the off-the-grid marvel I can see in my head. Which is not what one does if one believes the world is going to end. There may be a global financial apocalypse, perhaps. A severe oil shock, probably. The emergence of a kind of rabid desire to exploit every resource everywhere, complete with frothing at the mouth, and the biting of those who stand in the way, metaphorically speaking. Iran will probably eclipse Jobs in the election cycle, so politicians don't have to talk about a thing they don't know how to create. War is easier. We know how to do that. And it's good for the economy, like tax cuts and eliminating regulations. Might as well rack up another few trillion in debt. It's never going to be repaid, you know. Actually, I would like to see debt forgiveness across the board, the elimination of the Federal Reserve, of central banks everywhere, and the creation of an entirely different kind of money eliminating interest. But I'm probably a few decades ahead on that one. Or centuries.
If oil demand does exceed supply in 2012, I suspect what we will see is not a broad scale shift toward renewables, or some steady-state “ecotechnic” economy, but rather epic denial, and a last push to open up every available source of oil, gas and coal, after the model of Canada. If that is the case, and Aliens or Quetzalcoatl or Christ or the Singularity or free energy doesn't show up to save us, then we are certainly headed for a long decline, with probably a great deal of violence and death, on a scale never before seen, in the long story of the species - in the midst of radical environmental shifts humanity has not had to face since the end of the last ice age. Can you imagine both poles ice free, most of the year? Who knows? Maybe even a breaking up of continents, so thoroughly have we been de-greasing tectonic plates. A few centuries from now, when things settle down, perhaps we will be in a position to create the beautiful world that is possible. If we have not lost most of the technology we have today, the best of it, the most useful.
I recommend in 2012, letting go of conventional thinking. Conventional thinking has led us into a very tight corner, and it is leading us to our cultural destruction. Let go, rebuild your world view from the inside out, take nothing to be The truth, while grounding your body in the rhythms of the Earth. Flood the Earth with whatever Art emerges from your core. Be good to people. Be kind. Dance, sing and smile. And be good to yourself. There are difficult times ahead, and that will go better for you and yours, if you are clear about it.
Saturday, December 17, 2011
Sacred Economics
Whatever one might think about the future of humanity, it is hard to argue that we are not in a place currently, of mounting, epic crises. The potential collapse of the European Union, an ever expanding world-wide debt bubble, mass specie extinction, deforestation, the depletion of fisheries, peak oil, mass unemployment, governmental incompetency, pending nuclear proliferation, the ongoing proliferation of toxins, expanding income inequality, exponential population growth, etc. etc. It isn't any wonder that extreme thinking should become a hallmark of such crises, be it the messianic tendency to believe in the return of Christ, or aliens, or simply human ingeniousness that will result in some technological gimmick that will make all those crises go away. That kind of thinking, of course, is not seen anywhere near as extreme as that thinking which looks directly at the data, and acknowledges that the near future isn't going to look anything like what most people expect, or indeed anything that humanity has had to confront before -the perspective which looks for solutions to that predicament, outside the bounds of conventional economic thinking. There is in fact a vibrant dialogue going on, at the periphery of the culture, at the leading edge as it were, which the culture has not yet awakened to.
Into that dialogue, Charles Eisenstein has offered his book, Sacred Economics: Gift, Money and Society in the Age of Transition. Eisenstein asserts that we are living in an Age of Separation. At the core of our culture, is the paradigm he calls Ascent, or the idea that humans are "a discrete and separate self," fundamentally self-interested and without responsibility to any whole; and humanity, as ever on some upward, exponential trajectory to some sublime technological utopia, "moving inexorably toward our destiny of complete mastery over, and transcendence of, nature." From that perspective, it is a book that cannot be taken seriously. It is a book however, that if one can open one's heart, it becomes apparent that much of what he is saying is both true, and possible. And that is the nature of the Age, if one hopes to navigate it with anything resembling grace, the ability to set aside the cultural perspective, to see with ones own eyes. He suggests, out of separation, and the story of exploitation, we are in fact moving into a paradigm of Connection, "an economics of Reunion as well, an economics that restores to wholeness our fractured communities, relationships, cultures, ecosystems, and planet."
"In the beginning was the Gift." With that one sentence he begins his book, and sets a kind of stage of naiveté. We enter this world incapable of fending for ourselves, and so, however one might feel about one's upbringing, making it to adulthood is a kind of gift. In early cultures, hunter/gatherer, clan, tribe, gift exchange was predominant, when one's own health and well-being could not be separated from the health and well-being of the community. Money likely began as a kind of ritual acknowledgement of the gift, a token of gratitude. Only later, in the large neolithic agricultural communities, did money become a means to facilitate exchange between unfamiliar parties. From there, it became a thing unto itself, a means to accumulate wealth, and power over others. When money began to have the power to generate more money, in the form of interest, it became a tool of oppression, a means to engender in others servitude. Eisenstein's purpose is not to return to primitivism, but rather to restore to money something of the sacred nature of the gift. Because, "If we are to have a world with technology, with cinema and symphony orchestras, with telecommunications and great architecture...we need money, or something like it, as a way to coordinate human activity."
Unfortunately, money as it stands is money that is loaned. Which is to say, there is always going to be more debt than money, which is also the assumption that there will always be growth. There is currently, approximately, 58 trillion dollars worth of debt in America alone, with a corresponding GDP of 15 trillion. Money at it's core is meant to "facilitate exchange - in other words, to connect human needs with human gifts. Instead, it has come to generate a sense of scarcity, which then generates greed, which in turn leads to the maximizing of self-interest at the expense of the whole. It leads to consumption for the sake of consumption, and the increasing transformation of "the commons", the resources of the Earth, into money. And with every increase in debt, there is more pressure to generate wealth, to service that interest, exacerbating the exploitation of resources on which all life depends. Money should facilitate connection, ease and leisure; instead, it exacerbates separation, anxiety, consumption, pollution, ecological destruction and income inequality.
And now the ability of the Earth to provide for continued, exponential growth, is at an end. We have strained the Earth's capacity to absorb toxins, to maintain ecological equilibrium. Despite the most sincere efforts to protect resources, we are now at the cusp of one last push to open up all the last of the pristine lands to industrial exploitation, in an effort to maintain growth. But that is only putting off and exacerbating the inevitable crash, when there are no more resources to exploit, because we have turned them all into money, infrastructure, or garbage.
But this is not just another book detailing the path that has brought us to the cusp of ecological oblivion. It is very much a book of prescriptions, a book more than any I have read recently, that believes in the inherent generosity of the human being, which the vast majority of economists know nothing about, or at least do not and cannot factor into their models.
The future, as Charles Eisenstein sees it, involves these prescriptions for the Age of the Gift:
1. Negative-Interest Currency - Money as it stands violates nature's law of decay. If money is allowed to decay, no longer able to generate interest, it will increase in flow, "enabl[ing] prosperity without growth, systematically encourag[ing] the equitable distribution of wealth...so that we are no longer encouraged to mortgage our future for short-term returns." Little would change, but for the investing class, who could still save money, but "the value of savings would gradually decrease unless invested at risk. There would be no easy way to grow money risk-free," simply by owning it.
2. Elimination of Economic Rents, and Compensation for Depletion of the Commons - "Polarization of wealth is inevitable when people are allowed to profit from merely owning a thing, without producing anything or contributing to society." As it stands, some of the most wealthy among us are those who are most effective at transforming raw resources into money, and many of the most rich are simply those who excel at turning money into more money, while hoarding it. It can be said that the only thing we truly own is oneself, and one's time. All property is founded on an ancient crime. "With a shift of taxation onto property and resources, sales and income taxes will be reduced or eliminated," as the incentive will be shifted to conservation, and the individual ability of contribute to the common good.
3. Internalization of Social and Environmental Costs - "Today, pollution and other forms of environmental degradation generate costs that are usually borne by society and future generations, not the polluters." This amounts to a hidden subsidy, and "encourages continued pollution and environmental degradation." By taxing pollution and resources, allocating the use of resources and the ability to emit pollution according to what the Earth can withstand, we create an incentive to conserve and reduce pollution. "New industries will arise devoted to conservation, pollution control, and toxic waste remediation," and, "with economic dis-incentives for cheap, throwaway goods, manufactured items will become more expensive, more durable, and more repairable."
4. Economic and Monetary Localization - "Global commodity production puts localities into competition with each other, fomenting a "race to the bottom" in wages and environmental regulation...When production and economic exchange are local, the social and environmental effects of our actions are more obvious, reinforcing our innate compassion." There will always be a place for global commodity exchange, or at least trans-regional. But much of the economic policy of the day has decimated local economies and put us in servitude to distant powers. Local currencies backed by local resources would strengthen local exchange, and put us at considerably less risk to the vagaries of centralized powers who do not have our best interest in mind.
5. The Social Dividend - "The current economic system essentially forces us to work for what is already ours." If you follow the logic that we own ourselves and time only, it follows that the Earth and its resources are common to all. Taxing the use of those resources, and the pollution that follows, that income then should be shared by all. A social dividend, something like the Alaskan citizen's share in oil extraction, at the minimum required to provide the bare necessities. Anyone would be free to earn more. Freed from the pressure to "earn a living...we will turn our gifts toward that which inspires us - for more and more of us, that is the healing of society and the planet from the ravages of Separation." The idea that people are inherently lazy, that if people are provided with basic necessities and are not forced to work, they will do nothing, is "the logic of control, domination and the war against the self....But is it really human nature to want to do nothing productive? Do we really need rewards to cajole us into labor and penalties to punish indolence? Or, put another way, is it human nature to desire never to give, but only to take?"
6. Economic De-Growth - Currently, we are talking about generating growth, by investing in infrastructure or new housing, outside of any real discussion about whether or not we actually need the infrastructure or the new houses, whether or not what we are building actually makes sense. And despite the promise of the industrial and technological age, we have chosen, or been compelled, "at every turn to consume more rather than work less....Absent the driving force of positive risk-free interest [and with the existence of depreciating currency], economic growth would no longer be necessary to promote the flow of capital." That flow of capital would mean greater affluence for the poor and middle classes, while having to work less for money, with more time available for those non-economic, unquantifiable activities that promote well-being. De-Growth is inevitable anyway, in this Age of reduced resources; it would be best to go about it consciously, with intent.
7. Gift Culture and P2P Economics - Meeting each others needs in the form of gift exchange and peer to peer economics, both engenders a sense of connection and empowerment, and de-growth in the current economy of alienation and separation. Technology, primarily the Internet, has forced many things into the gift realm, including advertising, journalism, music, etc. The Internet itself is largely the work of gift culture, which is why the Government is trying to take control of it, like corporate attempts to control water, making you pay for what was once free, in service to growth, GDP, and the creditors we are in thrall to.
As I said, one must read with a kind of naiveté, or it would be easy to ignore this book in it's entirety. It is one thing to say that all property is founded in some ancient crime, it is another to imagine how that would play in the mainstream. And one may well be asking, yes, these prescriptions have some merit, but what can I do? First, ask yourself if what you do for money is in fact maximizing your gifts? Next, ask yourself if you truly believe in the story of Ascent, that there will always be growth, that a world based on credit and exploitation is sustainable? Finally, ask yourself in your heart - not in your head - whether or not you believe a different kind of world is possible?
Recently, I was lead to this piece by Derek Andreoli, by way of a piece by Herman Daly, by way of a piece by John Michael Greer. It fairly succinctly states the basic pattern of resource extraction, of gold, and oil, which is a steep upward trajectory, and then a peak, and then a collapse. The otherwise often indecipherable Miyamoto Musashi, said of strategy, that to know how to fight against ten is to know how to fight against ten thousand. In other words, extrapolating out from the pattern of extraction of ten oil wells, is to know the pattern of ten thousand. It occurs to me, as it occurs to some, that we are at the peak, and perhaps at the very tip of the crest of that exponential curve, in world oil supplies.
In a comments thread on Huffpost, I found this, offered by jcaunter. It is a video presentation by Chris Martenson*, who ties together what is happening in the economy, with resource constraints, as succinctly as anyone I have seen or heard. It is significant that the presentation takes place in Spain, as the conversation he is advocating is not even on the radar of American discourse. Basically, that if we begin thinking of the three E's, Economy, Energy and Ecology, as connected and intertwined, we can follow a relatively orderly and even prosperous path into a steady-state economy - but first we must acknowledge that easy oil has come to an end. I think very likely, the year 2012 will be the year humanity becomes aware to a great degree, the predicament we face, that there are very hard limits to the amount of resources we can economically extract from the Earth.
What is the nature of the gift? From Eisenstein's perspective, this life is divine, it is sacred. By giving, and receiving gifts, we enter into a kind of magical exchange, in which gratitude expands, and gifts circulate. To begin to see one's life as a gift, and to treat ones own wealth as if it were a gift, is to be given a corresponding and equal gift in return, strengthening a sense of community and connection. Our sense of separateness is a consequence of our heritage, that tells us we are independent beings who do not need others. But we do, and no action by any can truly be seen as separate from the greater matrix in which we reside. Every action has consequence, and every action is a consequence of the cultural ideas we are immersed in. If we want to climb out of the polarizing, alienating, destructive, exploitative mindset that says we are all separate from each other, into some kind of life that generates love, beauty, and abundance, then that can only come through a shift in consciousness, and actions that clarify, and expand that consciousness. As for money, we cannot live outside the commodity creating culture in which we exist, but we can use the money we come by to undo the workings of exploitation, in the culture, and in our own life. We can use that money to create beauty, to empower others, to strengthen community, and to heal ourselves and the Earth, inspired by the inherent beauty and abundance of the Earth, letting go of the feeling of scarcity, and the ability to exploit.
In my own life, I seem about to climb the curve of a potential economic bonanza. HD Masks is a gift unlike any I might have expected. I said last week that I do not know who I am. Well, that is partially true. My ego has come to seem to me a small, flimsy thing in comparison to the entirety of my Self. Still, I am William Hunter Duncan, radical anarchist gorilla gardener, in service to the Goddess, which allows me to write about any number of topics, wherever my interest leads, but it also prevents me from being taken seriously by any but the most intrepid seeker. Which is unfortunate, because I believe there is a great deal of healing to be found in the work of Charles Eisenstein. He has helped me recognize that my failure to accumulate wealth is very much about an unwillingness to participate in the ongoing destruction of the Earth, that I have not found any way in which my gifts perpetuate balance, healing and wholeness, while also generating income. Perhaps until now I have never felt responsible enough to use money in a sacred way? Am I capable of creating the beautiful life I have imagined? Can I both give, and receive? Can I trust, that the more I give, the more I will receive? I am living now as if a cultural, social, spiritual collapse has already happened. I would prefer to live in the midst of abundance, modeling for others what it is to live in a Sacred Economy.
And so, I vow that I will, from this day forth, treat both my life, and any money that comes to me, as if it were a gift, as if it would decay if I hold on too tight. And I will endeavor to generate with any surplus money, as much social and ecological capital as I can, to nurture beauty, to strengthen community, as if this world were divine, as if it were sacred.
Happy Holidays.
* While I see Martenson's perspective as important, showing as astutely as he does how our culture is headed for collapse, I cannot see his advocation for gold and silver as a proper means of investment. Gold, in the traditional sense of investment, cannot be separated from the actions of multi-national corporations, preying upon weaker nations and their people, as described in this piece found on Huffpost, (buying land or mining rights in a Central American country, and then suing the country on the basis of free trade agreements, when the people object to their resources being absconded with, and mostly pollution left behind.) None of the writers I cite in this piece, as far as I know, advocate for the change in investing as advocated by Eisenstein, from a Sacred Economy perspective, though each does in their own way advocate for a steady-state economy.
Into that dialogue, Charles Eisenstein has offered his book, Sacred Economics: Gift, Money and Society in the Age of Transition. Eisenstein asserts that we are living in an Age of Separation. At the core of our culture, is the paradigm he calls Ascent, or the idea that humans are "a discrete and separate self," fundamentally self-interested and without responsibility to any whole; and humanity, as ever on some upward, exponential trajectory to some sublime technological utopia, "moving inexorably toward our destiny of complete mastery over, and transcendence of, nature." From that perspective, it is a book that cannot be taken seriously. It is a book however, that if one can open one's heart, it becomes apparent that much of what he is saying is both true, and possible. And that is the nature of the Age, if one hopes to navigate it with anything resembling grace, the ability to set aside the cultural perspective, to see with ones own eyes. He suggests, out of separation, and the story of exploitation, we are in fact moving into a paradigm of Connection, "an economics of Reunion as well, an economics that restores to wholeness our fractured communities, relationships, cultures, ecosystems, and planet."
"In the beginning was the Gift." With that one sentence he begins his book, and sets a kind of stage of naiveté. We enter this world incapable of fending for ourselves, and so, however one might feel about one's upbringing, making it to adulthood is a kind of gift. In early cultures, hunter/gatherer, clan, tribe, gift exchange was predominant, when one's own health and well-being could not be separated from the health and well-being of the community. Money likely began as a kind of ritual acknowledgement of the gift, a token of gratitude. Only later, in the large neolithic agricultural communities, did money become a means to facilitate exchange between unfamiliar parties. From there, it became a thing unto itself, a means to accumulate wealth, and power over others. When money began to have the power to generate more money, in the form of interest, it became a tool of oppression, a means to engender in others servitude. Eisenstein's purpose is not to return to primitivism, but rather to restore to money something of the sacred nature of the gift. Because, "If we are to have a world with technology, with cinema and symphony orchestras, with telecommunications and great architecture...we need money, or something like it, as a way to coordinate human activity."
Unfortunately, money as it stands is money that is loaned. Which is to say, there is always going to be more debt than money, which is also the assumption that there will always be growth. There is currently, approximately, 58 trillion dollars worth of debt in America alone, with a corresponding GDP of 15 trillion. Money at it's core is meant to "facilitate exchange - in other words, to connect human needs with human gifts. Instead, it has come to generate a sense of scarcity, which then generates greed, which in turn leads to the maximizing of self-interest at the expense of the whole. It leads to consumption for the sake of consumption, and the increasing transformation of "the commons", the resources of the Earth, into money. And with every increase in debt, there is more pressure to generate wealth, to service that interest, exacerbating the exploitation of resources on which all life depends. Money should facilitate connection, ease and leisure; instead, it exacerbates separation, anxiety, consumption, pollution, ecological destruction and income inequality.
And now the ability of the Earth to provide for continued, exponential growth, is at an end. We have strained the Earth's capacity to absorb toxins, to maintain ecological equilibrium. Despite the most sincere efforts to protect resources, we are now at the cusp of one last push to open up all the last of the pristine lands to industrial exploitation, in an effort to maintain growth. But that is only putting off and exacerbating the inevitable crash, when there are no more resources to exploit, because we have turned them all into money, infrastructure, or garbage.
But this is not just another book detailing the path that has brought us to the cusp of ecological oblivion. It is very much a book of prescriptions, a book more than any I have read recently, that believes in the inherent generosity of the human being, which the vast majority of economists know nothing about, or at least do not and cannot factor into their models.
The future, as Charles Eisenstein sees it, involves these prescriptions for the Age of the Gift:
1. Negative-Interest Currency - Money as it stands violates nature's law of decay. If money is allowed to decay, no longer able to generate interest, it will increase in flow, "enabl[ing] prosperity without growth, systematically encourag[ing] the equitable distribution of wealth...so that we are no longer encouraged to mortgage our future for short-term returns." Little would change, but for the investing class, who could still save money, but "the value of savings would gradually decrease unless invested at risk. There would be no easy way to grow money risk-free," simply by owning it.
2. Elimination of Economic Rents, and Compensation for Depletion of the Commons - "Polarization of wealth is inevitable when people are allowed to profit from merely owning a thing, without producing anything or contributing to society." As it stands, some of the most wealthy among us are those who are most effective at transforming raw resources into money, and many of the most rich are simply those who excel at turning money into more money, while hoarding it. It can be said that the only thing we truly own is oneself, and one's time. All property is founded on an ancient crime. "With a shift of taxation onto property and resources, sales and income taxes will be reduced or eliminated," as the incentive will be shifted to conservation, and the individual ability of contribute to the common good.
3. Internalization of Social and Environmental Costs - "Today, pollution and other forms of environmental degradation generate costs that are usually borne by society and future generations, not the polluters." This amounts to a hidden subsidy, and "encourages continued pollution and environmental degradation." By taxing pollution and resources, allocating the use of resources and the ability to emit pollution according to what the Earth can withstand, we create an incentive to conserve and reduce pollution. "New industries will arise devoted to conservation, pollution control, and toxic waste remediation," and, "with economic dis-incentives for cheap, throwaway goods, manufactured items will become more expensive, more durable, and more repairable."
4. Economic and Monetary Localization - "Global commodity production puts localities into competition with each other, fomenting a "race to the bottom" in wages and environmental regulation...When production and economic exchange are local, the social and environmental effects of our actions are more obvious, reinforcing our innate compassion." There will always be a place for global commodity exchange, or at least trans-regional. But much of the economic policy of the day has decimated local economies and put us in servitude to distant powers. Local currencies backed by local resources would strengthen local exchange, and put us at considerably less risk to the vagaries of centralized powers who do not have our best interest in mind.
5. The Social Dividend - "The current economic system essentially forces us to work for what is already ours." If you follow the logic that we own ourselves and time only, it follows that the Earth and its resources are common to all. Taxing the use of those resources, and the pollution that follows, that income then should be shared by all. A social dividend, something like the Alaskan citizen's share in oil extraction, at the minimum required to provide the bare necessities. Anyone would be free to earn more. Freed from the pressure to "earn a living...we will turn our gifts toward that which inspires us - for more and more of us, that is the healing of society and the planet from the ravages of Separation." The idea that people are inherently lazy, that if people are provided with basic necessities and are not forced to work, they will do nothing, is "the logic of control, domination and the war against the self....But is it really human nature to want to do nothing productive? Do we really need rewards to cajole us into labor and penalties to punish indolence? Or, put another way, is it human nature to desire never to give, but only to take?"
6. Economic De-Growth - Currently, we are talking about generating growth, by investing in infrastructure or new housing, outside of any real discussion about whether or not we actually need the infrastructure or the new houses, whether or not what we are building actually makes sense. And despite the promise of the industrial and technological age, we have chosen, or been compelled, "at every turn to consume more rather than work less....Absent the driving force of positive risk-free interest [and with the existence of depreciating currency], economic growth would no longer be necessary to promote the flow of capital." That flow of capital would mean greater affluence for the poor and middle classes, while having to work less for money, with more time available for those non-economic, unquantifiable activities that promote well-being. De-Growth is inevitable anyway, in this Age of reduced resources; it would be best to go about it consciously, with intent.
7. Gift Culture and P2P Economics - Meeting each others needs in the form of gift exchange and peer to peer economics, both engenders a sense of connection and empowerment, and de-growth in the current economy of alienation and separation. Technology, primarily the Internet, has forced many things into the gift realm, including advertising, journalism, music, etc. The Internet itself is largely the work of gift culture, which is why the Government is trying to take control of it, like corporate attempts to control water, making you pay for what was once free, in service to growth, GDP, and the creditors we are in thrall to.
As I said, one must read with a kind of naiveté, or it would be easy to ignore this book in it's entirety. It is one thing to say that all property is founded in some ancient crime, it is another to imagine how that would play in the mainstream. And one may well be asking, yes, these prescriptions have some merit, but what can I do? First, ask yourself if what you do for money is in fact maximizing your gifts? Next, ask yourself if you truly believe in the story of Ascent, that there will always be growth, that a world based on credit and exploitation is sustainable? Finally, ask yourself in your heart - not in your head - whether or not you believe a different kind of world is possible?
Recently, I was lead to this piece by Derek Andreoli, by way of a piece by Herman Daly, by way of a piece by John Michael Greer. It fairly succinctly states the basic pattern of resource extraction, of gold, and oil, which is a steep upward trajectory, and then a peak, and then a collapse. The otherwise often indecipherable Miyamoto Musashi, said of strategy, that to know how to fight against ten is to know how to fight against ten thousand. In other words, extrapolating out from the pattern of extraction of ten oil wells, is to know the pattern of ten thousand. It occurs to me, as it occurs to some, that we are at the peak, and perhaps at the very tip of the crest of that exponential curve, in world oil supplies.
In a comments thread on Huffpost, I found this, offered by jcaunter. It is a video presentation by Chris Martenson*, who ties together what is happening in the economy, with resource constraints, as succinctly as anyone I have seen or heard. It is significant that the presentation takes place in Spain, as the conversation he is advocating is not even on the radar of American discourse. Basically, that if we begin thinking of the three E's, Economy, Energy and Ecology, as connected and intertwined, we can follow a relatively orderly and even prosperous path into a steady-state economy - but first we must acknowledge that easy oil has come to an end. I think very likely, the year 2012 will be the year humanity becomes aware to a great degree, the predicament we face, that there are very hard limits to the amount of resources we can economically extract from the Earth.
What is the nature of the gift? From Eisenstein's perspective, this life is divine, it is sacred. By giving, and receiving gifts, we enter into a kind of magical exchange, in which gratitude expands, and gifts circulate. To begin to see one's life as a gift, and to treat ones own wealth as if it were a gift, is to be given a corresponding and equal gift in return, strengthening a sense of community and connection. Our sense of separateness is a consequence of our heritage, that tells us we are independent beings who do not need others. But we do, and no action by any can truly be seen as separate from the greater matrix in which we reside. Every action has consequence, and every action is a consequence of the cultural ideas we are immersed in. If we want to climb out of the polarizing, alienating, destructive, exploitative mindset that says we are all separate from each other, into some kind of life that generates love, beauty, and abundance, then that can only come through a shift in consciousness, and actions that clarify, and expand that consciousness. As for money, we cannot live outside the commodity creating culture in which we exist, but we can use the money we come by to undo the workings of exploitation, in the culture, and in our own life. We can use that money to create beauty, to empower others, to strengthen community, and to heal ourselves and the Earth, inspired by the inherent beauty and abundance of the Earth, letting go of the feeling of scarcity, and the ability to exploit.
In my own life, I seem about to climb the curve of a potential economic bonanza. HD Masks is a gift unlike any I might have expected. I said last week that I do not know who I am. Well, that is partially true. My ego has come to seem to me a small, flimsy thing in comparison to the entirety of my Self. Still, I am William Hunter Duncan, radical anarchist gorilla gardener, in service to the Goddess, which allows me to write about any number of topics, wherever my interest leads, but it also prevents me from being taken seriously by any but the most intrepid seeker. Which is unfortunate, because I believe there is a great deal of healing to be found in the work of Charles Eisenstein. He has helped me recognize that my failure to accumulate wealth is very much about an unwillingness to participate in the ongoing destruction of the Earth, that I have not found any way in which my gifts perpetuate balance, healing and wholeness, while also generating income. Perhaps until now I have never felt responsible enough to use money in a sacred way? Am I capable of creating the beautiful life I have imagined? Can I both give, and receive? Can I trust, that the more I give, the more I will receive? I am living now as if a cultural, social, spiritual collapse has already happened. I would prefer to live in the midst of abundance, modeling for others what it is to live in a Sacred Economy.
And so, I vow that I will, from this day forth, treat both my life, and any money that comes to me, as if it were a gift, as if it would decay if I hold on too tight. And I will endeavor to generate with any surplus money, as much social and ecological capital as I can, to nurture beauty, to strengthen community, as if this world were divine, as if it were sacred.
Happy Holidays.
* While I see Martenson's perspective as important, showing as astutely as he does how our culture is headed for collapse, I cannot see his advocation for gold and silver as a proper means of investment. Gold, in the traditional sense of investment, cannot be separated from the actions of multi-national corporations, preying upon weaker nations and their people, as described in this piece found on Huffpost, (buying land or mining rights in a Central American country, and then suing the country on the basis of free trade agreements, when the people object to their resources being absconded with, and mostly pollution left behind.) None of the writers I cite in this piece, as far as I know, advocate for the change in investing as advocated by Eisenstein, from a Sacred Economy perspective, though each does in their own way advocate for a steady-state economy.
Saturday, December 10, 2011
MLB Trade Show
My trip to Dallas, for the Professional Baseball Winter Meetings Trade Show, began at the airport here in Minneapolis, where I inadvertently carried a bag of marijuana and a box cutter through the TSA checkpoint. Yes, that's right, a bag of marijuana and a box cutter. I say inadvertently, because I was very hung-over after drinking late with the Co-Owner of HD Masks who was not attending the trade show, and I was flying on about four hours of sleep. The items were each in a separate pocket of my winter jacket liner, which I sometimes use as a separate coat, and I hadn't thought to put my hands in them. Checking my bags, I was nervous without knowing why - I am not generally afraid of flying. I suppose I was aware on some unconscious level, what I was carrying. At the checkpoint, I put my coat in a plastic bin and slid it through the sensor.
On the other side, I heard the people monitoring the sensor, talking about a guy who earlier tried to bring a bag full of knives on-board. No alarm sounded as I stood there oblivious, I took my things and walked through the terminal, sat down at the gate, reached in the pockets of the liner I was wearing sans coat, and realized what I'd done. I immediately threw the box cutter in the trash. I thought about putting the pot there as well, but then decided the only thing I had to fear was police dogs, and the pot was dry as dust and not very aromatic, so I kept it, traveling to Dallas via Denver. I will let the reader decide how it is the box cutter got through. Had they found it, with a little research into this blog, I'm quite certain I would never have made it to the trade show. Prosecuting me as a terrorist would prove a bit more difficult, but then, they could say anything they want, if they can pull down this blog. Which would be a very real possibility, if Congress gets what they want.
Texas has been suffering through the worst drought in historical times. Flying in, it was raining. Minneapolis has been cold, and I assumed a week in Dallas would be a nice warm respite; the first night there, it was something like 25 degrees, with scattered snow. We flew in Sunday, and began setting up the booth Monday morning, with the trade show to open at five, until 8pm. We returned to our hotel, rested, and then returned to the Hotel Anatole, where the meeting and the trade show were held, walking through the packed lobby, the Co-Owner of HD Masks who did attend wearing an Obama mask, while I wore a mask of Babe Ruth. The young woman we hired through an ad on Craigslist arrived, her blond hair dyed partially black, her face pierced; when we asked what she did before she moved to Dallas, she said something about a dominatrix, and a go-go dancer she knew in San Diego. On the back of her neck was a tattoo, "Jesus Saves." When I asked her about that, she said something about being created in God's image. I replied that Jesus loved everybody. We gave her the Sarah Palin mask, and took turns walking around the 100,000 sq ft venue, handing out fliers. Occasionally, Obama and Palin went out arm in arm.
The masks were very well received, and after three hours we had a thick stack of business cards to prove it. The Co-Owner and I went out that night, on a quest for Gators. The cabbie, Henry, of West African origin, who said he would have multiple wives if it were allowed, diverted us to the neighborhood Deep Ellum. We went on a walking tour then, bar to bar, starting at the Trees, then City Tavern, and a few more, before we found ourselves under an overpass between Deep Ellum and downtown. I was very glad to have the weed. The Co-Owner took this picture, with a simple digital camera, at midnight:
Miraculously, neither of us ever having been to Dallas, we found the bar Gators at 1:23am. There were five people there, including the bartender. We took pictures from the upstairs patio, I danced downstairs for the duration of one song, and then we called Henry and returned to the hotel.
Tuesday the interest grew, until people began to say that we were the talk of the trade show. Periodically, we took turns, on loops through the hotel lobby, where ESPN, MLB.TV and a half dozen other networks were set up, and baseball executives and staff were always gathered, including a few notables. That night, as we were standing outside the Media Bar and Grill, talking to two guys who had traveled from Chicago just to hang out, they pointed out Jerry Reinsdorf, owner of the Chicago Bulls and Chicago White Sox, who is attempting to buy another MLB team. I was wearing the Babe Ruth mask on the back of my head, so I turned it around, walked over and stood silently next to him, in his circle. He turned to me, flipped the mask up so he could see my face, and said, "Who the hell are you?" I told him my name, flipped the mask back down, and said that we were HD Masks. Ok, he said, and "Who the hell are you supposed to be?" and then he answered his own question. I handed him my card, thanking him, and he accepted both. I would very much like to see a stadium in Chicago full of people wearing bull masks. They of course would do so in support of their team. I remember, the bull was long a symbol of the Goddess.
Wednesday, interest grew until we had given away a hundred-plus masks in exchange for contact information. One man from Mexico requested a hundred-thousand masks for a political rally. An ESPN anchor stopped by, looking for an Obama mask, which he wanted to wear on camera, and to give to his mother who is a big fan. Sadly, I had just given away our only Obama, to a man whose brother is in the hospital, and who fed us a great deal of beer. I gave the anchor a lion mask instead, which he said he was going to wear on camera. I don't know if he did. MLB.TV stopped by, to interview me (as Creative Director of HD masks, not the blogger.) The guy said, astoundingly, that the interview was made for TV. I'm not so sure, and I don't know if anything aired.
At one point Wednesday, a man who did not speak much English, a representative of a Korean professional team, stopped by asking for a mask. I gave him a Babe Ruth, and then 11,000 Korean Won (USA equivalent = $9.73), which a homeless man named Jackson Williams gave me in exchange for $20 (He told me it was worth $60, though I knew he was a hustler and didn't believe him), Monday night on our walking tour through Dallas. I don't know if the Korean man was more surprised than our young Ms Palin (I told her, magical things happen when you hang out with the folks of HD Masks.) He gave me his team baseball cap in return, to which I replied with an eagle mask, which is also their team mascot.
What can I say about the meeting itself? It was a guy fest, to be sure, about 85% male. It would not have been easy to be a woman in that environment; the young lady working the booth across from us received seven direct propositions, and if she did, though she was pretty, young and innocent, there were no doubt women there who must have received dozens. Most of the men we talked to, be they job seekers paying for attendance, or baseball staff, thought the meeting was the most incredible thing, which from my perspective and the Co-Owner's, despite both of us having played baseball for the same University, it was a bunch of guys hanging around. I can say the Major League guys were a good deal more aloof than the Minor League guys, to the point that some of the Major League guys who walked through the trade show wouldn't look at me, as I stood there, looking at them, through the Babe Ruth mask. There is a very high prestige factor, I suppose, for those who have reached the pinnacle of the Major Leagues, no matter in what capacity. Which I am happy to say, I am immune to (attracted as I am to what is genuine and authentic, which is not the ego derived from one's social status.) That said, the vast majority of people I met were very friendly, and some of them were very good to us.
We could have sold a hundred Obama masks. There was also a great deal of animosity toward it. While the Owner was wearing it, as example, one man walked up and cocked his fingers within inches, as if to shoot him in the face; another man said he might as well be wearing a monkey mask; another man threw a bean bag at him, making contact. Ms Palin received a fair number of propositions herself, being the liberal, alternative Palin that she was, and quite a bit more sexy. I told her it would be nice if there were more Christians like her. We had a Gingrich mask as well, an early prototype not really suitable as a mask, on display. Plenty of requests for that one. Plenty of speculation. And look at that - I just censored myself, briefly. I was going to say that he would be the perfect President to usher in a new age of ecological devastation in America, but I almost didn't because I want to sell a few hundred thousand masks to the Gingrich campaign. In fact, I want to sell masks to every one of those ego maniacs campaigning for President, including the President.
It is indeed a strange thing, to be in that environment, knowing what I do about the future of America, of the species really. The fate of the Earth. I censored myself quite a bit actually, at the meeting: I didn't ask the guys at the Yankees Baseball Daily studio booth, wearing the mask like I imagined I would, if they wanted to interview The Babe; I didn't dance to my Bose sound dock behind the ESPN studio in the Babe Ruth mask, like I imagined. Precisely because of what I write here. My truth is not widely shared, and I resist the urge to share it more than I do. The Owner at one point this weekend said to me, "I don't know what you are." I just looked at him sideways and smiled slyly. Because I do not know what I am, either. I consumed 250 seeds of the heavenly blue morning glory in an attempt to find out, shortly before I went to Dallas. I kept repeating then, aloud, "What am I? Who am I?" All that happened was, I was drawn down into the mundane, into the primal, reptilian-like spiral at the very core of my physical being, and I danced, and bared my teeth as if to defend myself from an onslaught of the irrational.
Late Thursday, Friday morning actually, with my plane set to leave Dallas that morning, out of the bag I brought, I found a different stash in a contact lens case, and I puffed and danced to a Monster Bash on HBO, by Lady Gaga. It was a nice capstone to a wonderful week, and I was surprised, her questioning the value of money, and her continuous calling out to Jesus, as to reclaim Him. Whatever one might think about Ms Gaga, she certainly can sing. To what degree she is conscious of what she is, and what she is doing, I am less certain, though I can say I am a little bit in love now, like a few other millions of people.
Anyway, I think I will comment on money, in the next post, with a review of Charles Eisenstein's Sacred Economics: Money, Gift and Society in the Age of Transition, a book that has given me hope that we are in both an end, and a beginning, as a species.
On the other side, I heard the people monitoring the sensor, talking about a guy who earlier tried to bring a bag full of knives on-board. No alarm sounded as I stood there oblivious, I took my things and walked through the terminal, sat down at the gate, reached in the pockets of the liner I was wearing sans coat, and realized what I'd done. I immediately threw the box cutter in the trash. I thought about putting the pot there as well, but then decided the only thing I had to fear was police dogs, and the pot was dry as dust and not very aromatic, so I kept it, traveling to Dallas via Denver. I will let the reader decide how it is the box cutter got through. Had they found it, with a little research into this blog, I'm quite certain I would never have made it to the trade show. Prosecuting me as a terrorist would prove a bit more difficult, but then, they could say anything they want, if they can pull down this blog. Which would be a very real possibility, if Congress gets what they want.
Texas has been suffering through the worst drought in historical times. Flying in, it was raining. Minneapolis has been cold, and I assumed a week in Dallas would be a nice warm respite; the first night there, it was something like 25 degrees, with scattered snow. We flew in Sunday, and began setting up the booth Monday morning, with the trade show to open at five, until 8pm. We returned to our hotel, rested, and then returned to the Hotel Anatole, where the meeting and the trade show were held, walking through the packed lobby, the Co-Owner of HD Masks who did attend wearing an Obama mask, while I wore a mask of Babe Ruth. The young woman we hired through an ad on Craigslist arrived, her blond hair dyed partially black, her face pierced; when we asked what she did before she moved to Dallas, she said something about a dominatrix, and a go-go dancer she knew in San Diego. On the back of her neck was a tattoo, "Jesus Saves." When I asked her about that, she said something about being created in God's image. I replied that Jesus loved everybody. We gave her the Sarah Palin mask, and took turns walking around the 100,000 sq ft venue, handing out fliers. Occasionally, Obama and Palin went out arm in arm.
The masks were very well received, and after three hours we had a thick stack of business cards to prove it. The Co-Owner and I went out that night, on a quest for Gators. The cabbie, Henry, of West African origin, who said he would have multiple wives if it were allowed, diverted us to the neighborhood Deep Ellum. We went on a walking tour then, bar to bar, starting at the Trees, then City Tavern, and a few more, before we found ourselves under an overpass between Deep Ellum and downtown. I was very glad to have the weed. The Co-Owner took this picture, with a simple digital camera, at midnight:
Miraculously, neither of us ever having been to Dallas, we found the bar Gators at 1:23am. There were five people there, including the bartender. We took pictures from the upstairs patio, I danced downstairs for the duration of one song, and then we called Henry and returned to the hotel.
Tuesday the interest grew, until people began to say that we were the talk of the trade show. Periodically, we took turns, on loops through the hotel lobby, where ESPN, MLB.TV and a half dozen other networks were set up, and baseball executives and staff were always gathered, including a few notables. That night, as we were standing outside the Media Bar and Grill, talking to two guys who had traveled from Chicago just to hang out, they pointed out Jerry Reinsdorf, owner of the Chicago Bulls and Chicago White Sox, who is attempting to buy another MLB team. I was wearing the Babe Ruth mask on the back of my head, so I turned it around, walked over and stood silently next to him, in his circle. He turned to me, flipped the mask up so he could see my face, and said, "Who the hell are you?" I told him my name, flipped the mask back down, and said that we were HD Masks. Ok, he said, and "Who the hell are you supposed to be?" and then he answered his own question. I handed him my card, thanking him, and he accepted both. I would very much like to see a stadium in Chicago full of people wearing bull masks. They of course would do so in support of their team. I remember, the bull was long a symbol of the Goddess.
Wednesday, interest grew until we had given away a hundred-plus masks in exchange for contact information. One man from Mexico requested a hundred-thousand masks for a political rally. An ESPN anchor stopped by, looking for an Obama mask, which he wanted to wear on camera, and to give to his mother who is a big fan. Sadly, I had just given away our only Obama, to a man whose brother is in the hospital, and who fed us a great deal of beer. I gave the anchor a lion mask instead, which he said he was going to wear on camera. I don't know if he did. MLB.TV stopped by, to interview me (as Creative Director of HD masks, not the blogger.) The guy said, astoundingly, that the interview was made for TV. I'm not so sure, and I don't know if anything aired.
At one point Wednesday, a man who did not speak much English, a representative of a Korean professional team, stopped by asking for a mask. I gave him a Babe Ruth, and then 11,000 Korean Won (USA equivalent = $9.73), which a homeless man named Jackson Williams gave me in exchange for $20 (He told me it was worth $60, though I knew he was a hustler and didn't believe him), Monday night on our walking tour through Dallas. I don't know if the Korean man was more surprised than our young Ms Palin (I told her, magical things happen when you hang out with the folks of HD Masks.) He gave me his team baseball cap in return, to which I replied with an eagle mask, which is also their team mascot.
What can I say about the meeting itself? It was a guy fest, to be sure, about 85% male. It would not have been easy to be a woman in that environment; the young lady working the booth across from us received seven direct propositions, and if she did, though she was pretty, young and innocent, there were no doubt women there who must have received dozens. Most of the men we talked to, be they job seekers paying for attendance, or baseball staff, thought the meeting was the most incredible thing, which from my perspective and the Co-Owner's, despite both of us having played baseball for the same University, it was a bunch of guys hanging around. I can say the Major League guys were a good deal more aloof than the Minor League guys, to the point that some of the Major League guys who walked through the trade show wouldn't look at me, as I stood there, looking at them, through the Babe Ruth mask. There is a very high prestige factor, I suppose, for those who have reached the pinnacle of the Major Leagues, no matter in what capacity. Which I am happy to say, I am immune to (attracted as I am to what is genuine and authentic, which is not the ego derived from one's social status.) That said, the vast majority of people I met were very friendly, and some of them were very good to us.
We could have sold a hundred Obama masks. There was also a great deal of animosity toward it. While the Owner was wearing it, as example, one man walked up and cocked his fingers within inches, as if to shoot him in the face; another man said he might as well be wearing a monkey mask; another man threw a bean bag at him, making contact. Ms Palin received a fair number of propositions herself, being the liberal, alternative Palin that she was, and quite a bit more sexy. I told her it would be nice if there were more Christians like her. We had a Gingrich mask as well, an early prototype not really suitable as a mask, on display. Plenty of requests for that one. Plenty of speculation. And look at that - I just censored myself, briefly. I was going to say that he would be the perfect President to usher in a new age of ecological devastation in America, but I almost didn't because I want to sell a few hundred thousand masks to the Gingrich campaign. In fact, I want to sell masks to every one of those ego maniacs campaigning for President, including the President.
It is indeed a strange thing, to be in that environment, knowing what I do about the future of America, of the species really. The fate of the Earth. I censored myself quite a bit actually, at the meeting: I didn't ask the guys at the Yankees Baseball Daily studio booth, wearing the mask like I imagined I would, if they wanted to interview The Babe; I didn't dance to my Bose sound dock behind the ESPN studio in the Babe Ruth mask, like I imagined. Precisely because of what I write here. My truth is not widely shared, and I resist the urge to share it more than I do. The Owner at one point this weekend said to me, "I don't know what you are." I just looked at him sideways and smiled slyly. Because I do not know what I am, either. I consumed 250 seeds of the heavenly blue morning glory in an attempt to find out, shortly before I went to Dallas. I kept repeating then, aloud, "What am I? Who am I?" All that happened was, I was drawn down into the mundane, into the primal, reptilian-like spiral at the very core of my physical being, and I danced, and bared my teeth as if to defend myself from an onslaught of the irrational.
Late Thursday, Friday morning actually, with my plane set to leave Dallas that morning, out of the bag I brought, I found a different stash in a contact lens case, and I puffed and danced to a Monster Bash on HBO, by Lady Gaga. It was a nice capstone to a wonderful week, and I was surprised, her questioning the value of money, and her continuous calling out to Jesus, as to reclaim Him. Whatever one might think about Ms Gaga, she certainly can sing. To what degree she is conscious of what she is, and what she is doing, I am less certain, though I can say I am a little bit in love now, like a few other millions of people.
Anyway, I think I will comment on money, in the next post, with a review of Charles Eisenstein's Sacred Economics: Money, Gift and Society in the Age of Transition, a book that has given me hope that we are in both an end, and a beginning, as a species.
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