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“My father rode a camel. I drive a car. My son flies a jet-plane. His son will ride a camel.”
They have heard it a million times over the past decade. I’ve gone hoarse trying to get my elected representatives to listen (see some of my rants on Western Fragility and the Rhizome Alternative).
Globalisation is a moronic enterprise. It is ecologically insane to reduce redundancy and diversity. It’s called ‘putting your eggs in one basket’. The financial crisis is simply the first of many major events that will very likely lead to a global economic and societal collapse – the end of civ. We learned nothing from the Romans and every other civilisation except how to repeat their mistake (See Jared Diamond or Derrick Jensen on this monumental elephant in the room).
Our British Prime Minister, supposedly hot on economics, seems to know very little about the complex processes that underlie his neat classical thinking. He is no ecologist, and clearly never took acid. No doubt the fundamental complexities of our universe probably scare politicians and business leaders ridged. They like it simple and neat so they can control it – anything else and they plunge into denial.
I’ve just read Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan and he puts the same thing in different words. Yet, I doubt if any politician will read his book. They just don’t want to admit that the whole political class has got it wrong and that the Emperor is Stark Bollock Naked:
Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while reducing volatility and giving the appearance of stability. In other words it creates devastating Black Swans. We have never lived before under the threat of a global collapse. Financial Institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks – when one fails, they all fall. The increased concentration among banks seems to have the effect of making financial crises less likely, but when they happen they are more global in scale and hit us very hard. We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur ….I shiver at the thought. (Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. April 2007)See more from Taleb here
The solution is not more technology. The solution is not more centralised control. The solution is to simplify, build diversity and redundancy into our socio-economic system, and to embrace the rhizome, embrace anarcho-syndicalism, embrace the ecovillage and localism. Embrace a scale-free human-scale social attractor.
Governments are simply not going to do this. They do not have the culture, language or attitude for it. But you can. And you should, if you value your own well-being and that of future generations.
We are in the midst of a historic revolution, a time of great change. Bob Dylan identified it in 1964:
…admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’
Little did he know then of global warming. His point was a social one. But he was nevertheless right on both counts: in order to stop the waters rising we have to start swimming for our own lives socially. We need to connect with others and head in the right direction, not the direction that culture has mapped out for us. We need to turn 180 degrees from consumption, 180 degrees from selfishness born of powerlessness.
Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin’.
That old road is the social order of the past, the hierarchical order in which everyone ‘knew their place’. The hierarchy was thought to be the only way in which the diversity of human states of being could be managed: Only a few could be entrusted with controlling our societies, only a few could be entrusted with the self-actualisation that is the objective of education, only a few should be entrusted with the empowerment that this brings. We now live in a new order of self-actualisation and empowerment for all, brought about by our human right of freedom.
The internet, specifically the accelerating evolution of mass peer-to-peer communication, is enabling this new order to blossom. It began with the freedom for all to engage in telecommunication in the twentieth century, and the transition will not stop.
As hierarchy melts away rhizome is taking its place. Knowledge dispersal across the internet offers the potential of self-empowerment for all, for the benefit of all. The human network that we are creating for ourselves is breaking down the barriers of control, power, and illegitimate authority. Inner authority is on the ascendant, the revolution that is the Ascent of Man is now exploding into colour. Embrace it and network, network, network the new rhizome together:
Decide to Network
Decide to network
Use every letter you write
Every conversation you have
Every meeting you attend
To express your fundamental beliefs and dreams
Affirm to others the vision of the world you want
Network through thought
Network through action
Network through love
Network through spirit
You are the center of a network
You are the center of the world
You are a free, immensely powerful source of life and goodness
Affirm it
Spread it
Radiate it
Think day and night about it
And you will see a miracle happen the greatness of your own life.
In a world of big powers, media and monopolies
But of [six] and a half billion individuals
Networking is the new freedom the new democracy
A new form of happiness
(Muller, M., Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations.)
Be aware of the Network. We live by a network of connections and links. Your connection to yourself, to your intimates, to your place, to the collective, to the planet, to the Infinite. (Each is a distinct connection.) Equally powerful are the collective’s connections to you (not at all the same as yours to it), to groups of intimates, to itself, to the planet, to the Infinite. Finally, the connections of groups of intimates to one another, to the collective, to the planet, to the Infinite. All these levels and connections interweave. All are equally important.
All the links or connective points of this network (call them the acupuncture points of our universe) both take and generate energy. Any link out of sync weakens the others. (The West, for instance, has concentrated too much on the individual; the East, too much on the collective; both approaches have been catastrophic on every level of the network.) This network, from you all the way to the Infinite, is a living while, ceaselessly changing. Some of these changes take millions of years. Some happen instantaneously.
May the links of the network shine.
(Ventura, M., 1993. Solutions to Everything.)
Why does horticultural therapy, care farming, ecotherapy, work?
Nature is the most basic form of reality; our evolutionary home is nature. Furthermore, direct physical and perceptual contact is at the core of our connection with this reality. Direct perception works best when the person is in their innate environment – the mapping is direct. Who we truly are can then come flooding back to us; we are nature.
Human perceptual processes work at the bodily, subconscious, implicit level, while much of the modern world we live in requires processing at a cognitive, mental, associative, consciously explicit level. This latter environment leads to a profound disconnection from reality. We can end up living in conceptual worlds in our heads, and feeding on little more than received ideas. Ideas and words are not real.
When a person is subjected to sensory deprivation a severe disconnection is forced. Disconnected from any environment a person will be significantly challenged in staying sane. Psychotic states can then emerge rather quickly.
When a person is disconnected from their evolutionary biological environment a more subtle but equally pervasive form of sensory deprivation occurs. We need stimuli from this normal environment – and we need to be able to act upon that environment automatically, intuitively. It requires no effort to do so. If we can neither perceive the kinds of information that we are born to expect or make the kinds of effects that we are born to project onto the world, then a disconnection from our true selves begins to take hold.
Going back to the sensory deprivation example, a less severe form of this is imprisonment. People and non-humans who have been caged begin to exhibit various forms of abnormal behaviour. One of these forms of behaviour is known as learned helplessness (Seligman). Learned helplessness is associated with depression and anxiety.
More extreme forms of abnormal state include repetitive and anxiety related behaviours – caged animals, particularly those in solitary quarters, develop patterns of activity that have no real purpose other than perhaps to mimic the positive feedback of having at least some impact on their environment. Furthermore, depression and anxiety are ‘comorbid’ with schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is the most sever form of disconnection from reality – people with schizophrenia live in worlds of their own mind’s making. Another example is autism. Autism is a social disconnection but there is still plenty of scope for people with this disability to reconnect with their natural ecology.
It is not hard to see how disconnection from reality, disconnection from sensory input from reality, can be a precursor to mental illness. In urban and other non-natural environments, in solitary living arrangements, people can become mental ill for no other reason than they have no connection with a supportive loving society or a real natural environment. Mental illness in turn can predispose a person to physical illness.
One way in which modern society appears to have ameliorated our disconnection from reality is through work – certain kinds of work. Working with physical material and working with people at least give us some pleasure in the sense of having an effect on the world. Craft as a self-development process has ancient roots.
Another form of therapy is meditation, a process through which we learn to master our attentional processes. These attentional processes work as a filter between conscious mental life and subconscious perceptual life. When we are forced into cognitive modes of being our attentional processes become mechanistic and disconnected from the flow of reality. Suppressing irrelevant information becomes a chore and eventually an illness.
Learning to use our attentional-perceptive filters most effectively (e.g. through meditation practices of various kinds) so that we process real information and act according to that real information can help to counter forms of mental illness that are precipitated by modern industrialised urbanised and intellectualised culture. However, in persistent artificial environments (e.g. urban living) this only goes so far.
Connection with our real evolutionary environment takes the cure much further. This is the realm of ecotherapy.
If you are an activist against government policy then you are the enemy. Internment is a favoured option for ‘combating subversion’ (what you and I call political activism), and would almost certainly be employed after the next real or hoax terrorist attack.
If you are a real ‘terrorist’ or ‘freedom fighter’ then please think twice. If you take such actions you will get all of us locked up and you will have lost your cause, neither will there be any effective political route that any of us can take against the regimes that are screwing up all our lives.
Control the mythological ‘economic system’ which most people are subservient to and you control the people from the bottom up.
Inverted Totalitarianism, as argued by Sheldon S. Wolin (Emeritus Professor of Politics, Princeton University) in his recent book Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, is where there is an apparent democracy but those who do the voting (or refrain from voting) are being manipulated by the political and corporate elite in their choices.
Hence there is no open choice but what Noam Chomsky characterises as a choice between Pepsi and Coke. You can have you porridge with sugar or salt but there is no dialogue as to whether you should get porridge or something else. In our current configuration of democracy there is no option to reopen the ballot by abstention from voting – no option to choose ‘none of the above’ and demand extra options. Hence we get what the elites want us to have.
See this article reviewing Wolin’s book
See this article which pinpoints the contribution of inverted totalitarianism in terms of monetary policy during the ‘WarOnTerrer’.
The suspected truth emerges. Liquid explosives were not a viable threat to an aircraft. So what was all that fuss about? How did those conspiracy convictions occur if intent could not have been turned into reality?
According to security sources, the terror suspects were planning to board up to ten civilian airliners and detonate highly volatile liquid explosives on the planes in a spectacular terrorist operation.
