War Hair

‘Get your hair cut!’ Few men have not had that phrase thrown at them at one time or another. Other phrases like ‘long haired layabout’, and the social pressures against men who whose hair is ‘like girls’, have always intrigued me.

When I discovered that the basis of current attitudes to men and their hair is over 2000 years old I was surprised. Not many cultural attitudes endure for that long. The ones that do tend to have some value or they soon fade. It seems that the reason for long hair being favoured is that it has a strong connection to war and power and the related concept of civilisation. The Macedonians and Romans chose short hair initially because their warriors cut their hair so that an enemy could not get a hold of it in battle. Short hair then became associated with war and power so that a mark of a ‘civilised’ society [1] was one in which men have short hair. This also says a lot about the foundations of what we call civilised societies, in which the monopoly over state use of force has now become the routine use of force not for defence and maintaining order but for increasing geopolitical power and control over the supply of resources [2].

The notion that real men have short hair has remained in Western culture to this day. However, if people understood the roles of warfare and the centralised power that are inherent in the current configuration of civilised [3] societies, then many more men would be reluctant to cut their hair short. Short hair and business attire make the statements: I wear the uniform of the industrial-military complex; I am a fighting (competitive) man. I acquiesce to the expedient abuse of capitalism, competition, centralised power, warfare. I acquiesce to the ideologies associated with empire, exploitation, poverty, and the headlong technological and globalised rush to grab what is left of the earth’s resources before the planet’s ability to support six billion people collapses. Short male hair is associated with the future deaths of millions of children. Men: discuss this with your hairdresser/barber. Women: cut your hair short and expect a lot of negative attention for subverting the communication purpose of short hair, for appropriating our symbol of control.

1. I use the term civilised here alongside the term war because one aspect of civilised human society is that it is based on war and the centralisation of power. Those who engage in war are supported by the elites in society (centralised power) and aspects of the warrior mindset tend to be embraced by civil culture – e.g. corrupt business and public practices, competitiveness, might-makes-right, poverty, short hair, etc. The US administration’s Dick Cheney calls it ‘Our way of life’.
2. I use the term control over the supply of resources precisely. This does not mean ownership of resources. Ownership comes through other power differential processes which a state uses to attract the resources to itself, as if by right but usually by might and resulting in some aweful living and working conditions for those in the countries from where the resources are being stripped.
3. Civilised is used here to mean the distinction between the centralised power and political systems required for urbanised peoples and the distributed localised power and culture of pagans (the people of the fields).

Psychological Benefits of Cannabis

Drugs mess-up your head. This message is carried explicitly or implicitly within every warning on illegal drugs. The warnings are very rarely placed alongside a balanced description of their benefits. If this were the case we would see: ‘Sometimes drugs mess-up your head, and sometimes they help solve your mental problems’. However, when have you ever seen that realistic message portrayed by the government or mainstream media?

The reason we are rarely told about the psychological benefits of drugs - apart from the promotion of legal and costly pharmaceuticals – is that governments and medical professionals are finding it very hard to reverse the decades of negative spin that they have applied to the subject. So they continue in the vein: ‘Drugs screw you up’.

In contrast with this dogma, grass-roots drug reform movements have long known that simple dichotomies presented by governments and right-wing campaigners are unhelpful and often seriously wrong. It’s not their fault of course, because governments are by their very nature incapable of thinking in complex ways and presenting complex messages. An issue has to be binary for them because they are dumb and reactionary. As for anti-drugs campaigners I make no comment.

Cannabis appears to be useful in helping to treat chronic pain, multiple sclerosis, gastrointestinal tract disorders and HIV/AIDS. It is also claimed that cannabinoids play a protective role in the brain, slowing the rate of disease. Studies have shown it to slow the growth of three kinds of cancer in mice - lung and breast cancer, and a virus-induced leukemia and in another study THC destroyed incurable brain tumors in rats. Notably a recent epidemiological study found no greater incidence of lung cancer among cannabis smokers than among those who did not smoke cannabis – potentially due to the anti-cancer properties cancelling out the effects of tar or due to its expectorant effect producing mucous which may catch the tar and lift it from the lungs before damage occurs. Most recently, a study has shown it is far more effective than available Alzheimer drugs to halt the disease’s progression. It has also been found to be related to new cell growth deep in the brain’s memory areas. Cannabis appears to be a drug of significant medical utility as well as a drug that some people abuse.

The medical benefits of cannabis may also be psychological. Hallucinogen researcher Charles Grob says that ‘psychedelic drugs have the potential to alter modern medicine’. Charles Grob is editor of “Hallucinogens: A Reader” and recently co-edited, with Roger Walsh, “Higher Wisdom: Eminent Elders Explore the Continuing Impact of Psychedelics.” Cannabis as a hallucinogen has the effect of promoting direct perception alongside relaxation. This potent combination for behavioural change and self-awareness is only one of the ways in which a person can be helped to provide him or herself with psychotherapy.

Endogenously created psychological change and personal growth is ideal because it is controlled by the patient and permits introspective analysis of the person’s problem as well as presenting unique creative solutions for those problems. Quite often mental problems are based on incorrect perceptions of the world (e.g., depression) and can be alleviated by altering the perceptual frame. As cannabis becomes more accepted as a medicine we can expect to see greater use of both its biological and psychological properties.

System Failure: The 20:80 Game

By failure I mean collapse, and by system I mean Western industrialised society for which the future is predicated on technological solutions and capitalism, and which is now on the globalisation warpath. All systems fail eventually. The concept of linear growth towards some future point at which an equilibrium is reached is a fallacy. Systems come and systems go again. As most of us already know but few are prepared to discuss – the beginning of the end is already occurring for the current dominant civilisation. War, famine, and the deaths of billions are on the cards if we do not reduce our addiction to energy and resource consumption. Diamond is only one of many thinkers and writers who are attempting to alert us but they are fully aware that those who have the power to change the course of Western civilisation are ignorant, blind, or plain stupid. That’s civilisations; self-congratulatory concerning the marvels of technology and society and yet they plunge headlong over the cliff anyway.

One potential solution is an abrupt change in the way people in Western society live. Not in five or ten years but this year. This could involve switching every remaining spare resource (from making consumer goods and other unnecessary products and services) to building wave, wind and solar energy systems and making every essential service highly energy efficient. Alongside this a return to labour intensive agricultural systems is also the only option. Show me a politician who has the guts to publicly accept that such a solution is imperative. Funnily enough we have the political will to do this in wartime, but faced with the prospect of the coming horrors it won’t happen despite the potential for world wars on an unprecedented scale. It won’t happen because the powerful believe they will benefit from the social and environmental collapse as well as from the warfare - from which they have historically always come out richer.

When I said that civilisations are stupid I was not referring to those at the helm. They and their masters know only too well what is going to happen. George Bush is intent on pursuing the War on Terror to the point of full information war (claiming explicitly that the US population needs controlling through the media and through the way it uses the internet). This is a clue as to how those in power see the world. Controlling the way the US communicates with itself is the way in which the powerful will profit from the coming upheavals. The US administration has also built 600 new prison camps in order to house around 12 million people. They claim that this is to prepare for an invasion of Mexican migrants but their mere existence is a worrying fact. The camps (usually called concentration camps but termed ‘Civilian Inmate Labour Program’ camps) would also be equally useful for a totalitarian state to control its own population. Something sinister is afoot either way – a Western government is preparing to house 12 million immigrants in forced labour conditions rather than turn them back (the US has a powerful army with which to do so). That the US administration is considering putting anyone in labour camps is worrying, but it is to be expected. The US government has known for a long time that their empire is on the road to collapse and the powerful oligarchy that supports US policies is doing what it can to ensure that they will retain power during and after the turmoil.

I am their enemy, and so are you if you are reading and recognising potential truth in this page and the thousands of others on similar themes. Bin Laden is merely a distraction from the real game – in the information war to come you and I are the real enemy as the US and other governments try to suppress knowledge of environmental and social collapse so that the powerful can retain what they have amassed. The US government has plans to take over the internet in order to control its own people. Messages like this post will ensure that I am on their wanted list, after they have wiped the data away. If you believe that 9/11 was an inside job, then consider the possibility that the continuing propaganda over the threat of terrorism is yet another a gambit aimed at gaining greater control over the US people and its friends around the world. The next terrorist attack (or false flag attack if they need it) will be used to show that total information control is essential in the ‘War on Terr’. The hawks are already preparing the ground for these tactics with their information gathering processes and with explicit demands that the internet be controlled in order to silence ‘those who tell lies against us in the war on terror’. The internet is the great leveller and fount of truth. A forum in which the truth can be found can only be harmful to those who do not want the truth to be known.

Conspiracy theory? Other right-wing governments have done far worse in the 20th century when they had the power to get away with it. Bush calls it the War on Terror, and now the Long War, but it is really to be a complete world war between the 20 percent with the greatest power (80 percent of it) and the 80 percent with the least power (20 percent of it); a race to grab what’s left of the world’s resources for the few at the expense of the majority. That’s what the political right stands for: power and self and if you are weak and die then that’s tough. It is a game to be played out under the cover of social and environmental collapse. But I really do hope I am wrong.