Aug 22, 2022·edited Aug 22, 2022Liked by Tereza Coraggio
Interesting. It supports the ideas I put into two mini-courses I put together 20 years ago after being appalled and shocked at how wrong university, hence world, economic practices are. Economics has become our biggest religion because more people on the planet will be allowed to die or be killed for its 'truth'. It is total bullshit. I wrote and taught "Economics Debunked" and "Banks Skanks". Graeber's book fit into my understanding perfectly, and filled in many gaps. Wonderful read.
Thank you for sharing your ideas. And I will get 'muskrat love' to read. We have entered a time when a rebirth of imagination and curiosity is required. We are living the Bhagavad Gita and I am so happy to be fighting with Arjuna. Amazing times we are in.
Your mini-courses sound fascinating, Guy, I'm so glad that Alan linked to your Substack. I'll definitely be checking it out with great interest!
One of the intro quotes in my book is from Johan Galtung, who writes: "I have one advantage in life: I'm not trained as an economist. So it is so much easier to see reality. When you have to see through the kind of crazy training these guys get, it becomes very difficult. I admire any economist who nevertheless could talk sense--there's not many of them, but it happens."
Aug 22, 2022·edited Sep 13, 2023Liked by Tereza Coraggio
Hello, Tereza. That is a fantastic and astute quotation. I'll keep that handy.
While taking one of the high level economic courses I questioned the TA on the validity of GDP as a measure of economic wealth when a huge part of that 'wealth' comes from societal destruction and decay. For example, the 9/11 destruction of the Trade Centres was very bad for the society, and wonderful for the economy. So too natural disasters and war. He answered "Yes. I used to think that too. Now I use GDP and that is it." Later, after the professor had left after explaining that mathematics in Economics is of minimal value if doesn't make sense in the 'real' world, the TA dismissed what his professor said and directed us to learn 'the intermediate value theorem.' I wondered if the professor even knew that he had been so casually dismissed. It was a fascinating lesson in the formation of religious zealotry disguised within the garb of economic truth.
Something else I have thought about is how the devolution of humanity came with the development of agriculture. Once we 'needed' to store our food, we created a deserving and undeserving class: those who got to store the food had the power to disseminate it. Who would get it? Those who belonged to the 'right' group, and the militia who defended that food against those undeserving of it.
And so we created what I prefer to call the 'deserving' and the 'undeserving' classes. All that we are seeing now is the evolution of that: the deserving and the undeserving. Once an undeserving is created it is about a two step rationalisation to let them die, as we do the homeless and the poor because our religious faith in economic truth. From that it is a simple leap to killing them, as vigilantes have done. They simple put into action our base belief in our class values rationalised in our economic practices. In our current experience, it is Schwab, Gates, Harari and their ilk asserting that there is no value of the unnecessary eaters. Such interesting times. A true turning point in human and human societal evolution.
And I've removed from my language and thinking saying that I or someone else deserves this or that. That use provides an energy that supports the deserving/underserving split in our unconscious. If I 'deserve' then, by default, someone someone else doesn't deserve. And it makes no sense to say we all deserve a break, because then the word 'deserve' makes no sense. And I watch how 'deserve' is used: it is an unconscious compensatory expression of the trauma of being an undeserving.
Glad you liked that, Guy. On the GDP, Robert F Kennedy (Sr) agrees with you. I have a long quote from him in my book where he lists the destructive things included in the GNP (as it was then called). He concludes it "does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile."
I follow it with a quote from Wendell Berry: "We have a system of national accounting that bears no resemblance to the national economy whatsoever, for it is not the record of our life at home but the fever chart of our consumption."
If you do read The Dawn of Everything, you'll see they challenge that agriculture ruined everything. They talk about people "play farming" where it didn't become a dependency. What seems to have consistently ruined things is slave labor, getting other people to do your work, which made people fat and lazy. My book talks about money as trading in pieces of slave, renting slave labor by the hour instead of the life. In the indigenous communities, women 'owned' the land they planted and were in charge of distribution.
I'll think about that. I would need to do more research on it to state more firmly my understanding that slave labour became viable after farming was developed. Before that they had little or any value. I've marked your book, and Graeber's 2nd, on my to be read list before I die. You may find the book Stone-age Economics by Marshall Sahlins an interesting read. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28254.Stone_Age_Economics
I'm honored to be on your read list, and I wish you a good, long life to get to all of them!
That's an interesting question, whether slavery would have any value without agriculture. And the Daves have an answer! The Northwest Coast Kwakiutl, who relied on fishing, were "societies dominated by warrior aristocracies engaged in frequent inter-group raiding and in which traditionally, a significant portion of the population had consisted of chattel slaves." A quarter of the population were slaves who hewed wood, drew water and processed fish. The children of slaves were also slaves.
Archeologists estimate that slavery started here in 1850 BCE based on burials where some people are sacrificed, mutilated, 'harvested' or otherwise worthless. They distinguish AmerIndian slavery as different than Greek or Roman household slaves or plantation slavery. Mines are certainly another place slaves are useful or in the galley of ships. And along with household slaves, the line gets very fine in whether women in general or women of a certain class would qualify. Jus' saying, there's a lot of work to get done besides farming, if you're making other people do the work.
Northern California Yurok, who subsisted mostly on acorn foraging, didn't keep slaves at all. They were compared to Puritans in their work ethic and modest living. The point the Daves make is these were self-aware choices--they knew their neighbor's way of living and went the other way. Thanks for the book recommendation!
Thanks Tereza, lovely words and everything, and yes also https://gduperreault.substack.com/ - I extend your comment about imagination and curiosity rebirth: that I sense/believe/witness that this has been happening for a while (perhaps always, given the uncertainties and likely many falsehoods of time/space/light/energies, etc) and Tereza/you/we are (all actually) evidence of this magical flow and transcendence.
What a beautiful reply, Alan. I will definitely be reading Guy's Substack, as I said to him. I feel that you're right about the rebirth and love your use of the me/you/we/all ;-) I don't know if you've seen/read/listened to any of my videos on spirituality and A Course in Miracles. It seems you might like them and lead to even more tantalizing conversations! Thank you for reading this.
Yes, Alan. This is a time of a 'great' awakening. The trappings of power are openly showing their malevolence and have given us a chance to see the truth. I've recently begun to re-explore Buddhism and way up there is 'Right Seeing' before change can be created. The yogic tradition, as articulated so beautifully by Patanjali, has right seeing as critical before change can occur.
This is truly a deeply spiritual time. And, coincidentally(?), is coming at the transition from the Piscean to Aquarian ages. And each time there has been an astrological transition, there has been similar social cataclysms. So fascinating.
Thank you Tereza, I feel blessed by your work so offer the following.
I'm involved in working & living with 1st Nation's & worldwide 'indigenous' (Latin 'self-generating') peoples on projects & in communities, now for over 60 of my 70 years of age. Like about 70% of Turtle-Islanders (N. America), I have First Nation blood, but outside of my own family's recall, which I found recently in the past decade upon graveyard research. I'm inspired particularly by many 100s of elders & friends across Turtle-Island & by chance with indigenous elders who've come here from worldwide. My basic stance is that Indigenous Knowledge of all our ancestors, although quite erased from mainstream memory, has the keys to re-establishing abundant living aligned with the Biosphere for all of us on earth today.
My own background in Mathematics, Accounting, Economics, Governance, Group-dynamics focuses on particular indigenous accounting, record-keeping, organization, mapping & communication practices, which are applicable to our time.
One can understand organizational Culture as a set of Bottom-up 'Fractals' ('Fraction, Multiplier, Building-block, where-the-part-contains-the-whole'), which apply to the individual, family, extended-family, ~100 person Multihome, Village, City, regions, Nation, Confederacies, Continental & Hemispheric Councils. Turtle-Island for example had ~110 nations organized into 23 Confederacies of 5-7 nations. The city of Tenochtitlan aka Mexico-city today is estimated to have had 350,000 people living on an artificial island in Lake Texcoco. The organization of Tenochtitlan is 'fractal' in its architecture & ~100 person Multihome economic units as building-blocks of economy & society. Cortez writes in astonishment, because in traversing the bridges of Tenochtitlan & touching the water, it is pure & clean, unheard of in European cities, which were much smaller. The Aztec & other nations were bio-digesting (bacterial & plant treatment) the fecal & urine into healthy fertilizer production of food stuffs for a mostly self-sufficient city. Tenochtitlan was entirely canoe & foot transport with benefit & no harm to ecology & human. Remember that most indigenous peoples worldwide were practically vegetarian. These practices also applied to cities across Turtle Island such as my own Tsi-'Tiohtiake' (Mohawk 'Place where the nations & their rivers, unite & divide'), Montreal island city, which once had 50 villages along with the larger 'Hochelaga' (Mohawk 'At-the-beaver-dam') city, now quite polluted in air, water, soil etc. https://sites.google.com/site/indigenecommunity/b-ecological-design/2-responsible-compassionate-health
I've read & encountered many of the same authors you mention including Kandiaronk, definitely inspirational for understanding who we are today. My 1st Nation Mohawk (Kanien'kehaka) & Mi'kmaq friends refer to Cahokia as part of the system of Mound-Cities of the Mississippi Missouri & Ohio river watersheds. Charles C. Mann in his book '1491' recounts some of the elder lore (Ethnohistory) on the Mound-cities. My sources describe the move from the Mound-Cities to the more distributed, decentralized Longhouse villages as deliberate. However they precaution the timing with the violent arrival of the Spanish conquistadors & massive fleeing of millions of 1st Nation peoples as refugees in whole populations, north, west & into less-rich Turtle-Island hinterlands to escape colonial Christian violence & oppression.
Jared Diamond is reliance on Malthusian 'Overpopulation' theories & supposedly unavoidable Epidemics as reasons we can wash our hands of historical injustice. Diamond doesn't understand humans as essential productive parts of the biosphere, which contribute in any population number.
I am spokesperson in the following set of Bio-digestion films made with Radio-Canada about 20 years ago on Fecal transformation into Methane fuel & fertilizer. This one factor along with many other indigenous approaches to energy & material supply completely changes the unfortunate Climate & environment perpetual tragedy mindsets of Environmentalists & their NeoLib & Con $$ masters who are acting to control the world. &https://sites.google.com/site/indigenecommunity/b-ecological-design/5-bio-digestion-toilets
My sources point to this massive uprooting from millennial old ~100 (50-150) person Multihome city networks in well established 100s of years old Polyculture Orchards, spanning the Americas. One can not understand indigenous life without understanding the massive productivity of Polyculture at some ~100 times (10,000%) more productive of food, materials, energy & water-cycle than 2-D 'agriculture' (Latin 'ager' = 'field'). Basically the 92-98% Photosynthesis of solar-energy in tree-centered Polyculture versus 2-8% photosynthesis of monocrop fields & Polyculture Tree roots many 10s of metres deep pumping water, mining minerals & developing extensive sub-terranean nutrient colonies versus 'agriculture' roots only centimetres (<1/2 inch) deep. Add the food, materials, energy & water-cycle productive contributions of soil bacteria & all forms of 'Wild' (Old English 'Having-will' or 'Willed') Life. Read Henry F. Dobyns in 'Their Number Become Thinned' as another careful Ethno-historian of Elder-lore, whose work on Polyculture-Orchard food productivity in Permanent community food systems changes the whole sustainable 'Population' equation. Ethnohistory, practically (in practical analysis) exposes the pervasive pecuniary $$ induced lies of mainstream Colonial Anthropologists & Anthropologists, who take too much of their narrative, from Colonial 'hired' historians who are still pushing the colonizing agenda, captured by their institutions & funding right to this day. The lie of 'agriculture' aka 'farming' (French 'ferme' = 'Contract' of servitude binding the Serf in produce taxes to supply & submit to the Aristocrat. This fake contract is what empowers land-speculators like Bill-Gates, Monsanto (originally a Jewish Dutch Slave-owning family in the Caribbean), Cargill & others here & worldwide in extraction & exploitation of people & biosphere. https://sites.google.com/site/indigenecommunity/b-ecological-design/1-indigenous-welcome-orchard-food-production-efficiencies
I'm also feeling blessed that you are in my path, Douglas. I read both comments slowly and carefully, as they deserved. What a tremendous amount of worthwhile work you've done, and in so many areas of overlap with mine! With your permission, I'd like to do an episode on you and these links so I can go into depth. The one I'm working on now is about Pedo-Sadist Cults, so we'll all be ready for some wholesome solutions after that, me most of all!
I've thought of each size community as interlocking, like a honeycomb, with the six surrounding entities--so that each configuration is different with the host central, so that no one is on the border of their economic unit. Your terminology of fractals for this is brilliant! It captures exactly how I was picturing it.
I agree completely on Jared Diamond and did a radio show saying that a decade ago.
I love your fondness for etymology, another passion of mine. Now that regenerative is being co-opted by Monsanto and the WEF, self-generating might be more descriptive. VERY interesting about Monsanto being Jewish-Dutch slaveowners. My pedo-sadist episode is on Anneke Lucas, whose horrific experience was in Belgium, where I've written about King Leopold and the Congo. What goes around comes around, it seems.
I'm very interested in your maps project. On one of my sites, retrometro.com, I worked with someone to map out like-sized neighborhoods: http://retrometro.com/maps/. Although the google map it was drawn onto hasn't survived, each of the neighborhoods then scaled both down and up into groupings. I think it's the Mutsun people who are indigenous to Santa Cruz?
Fascinating with the 1700 money system. Mathew Crawford recently mentioned that 70% of people were independently employed in the 18th century, I think it was. And my monetary system is based on Benjamin Franklin's scrip, which may have borrowed extensively from the wampum model, since I know much of his principles of governance were taken from the Six Nations, I think it was?
So many exciting topics, Douglas. I don't know if you know Gavin Mounsey's stack? I think you'd have much common ground, and I think you're in a common ground literally, if I'm remembering his location correctly. If I found a way to slip some of his photos in with an episode on you, it would do much to restore all of our spirits ;-) https://gavinmounsey.substack.com/p/joyous-july. Thanks again!
Tereza, I wanted to send you our Indigene Community 'DO-WE-KNOW-WHO-WE-ARE-?' Community Economy web-software program. This sofware is designed to give people particularly the 70% of people today in Multihomes to Catalogue, Map, Account & Communicate their talents, goods, services, resources & dreams as core economies for local livelihood CIRCULAR-ECONOMY. It doesn't go through on your substack. Can I send you this by email?
Many good anthropologists remark on the urban Mohawk Placename Geographic Information System (GIS = 'multilayered' themes) Mapping, which I helped coordinate & report in www.IndigeneCommunity.info While coordinating a previous Eco-Montreal Tiohtiake Green GIS Map at McGill Urban Planning, I inquired to Kahnawake Elders if we could use our resources in any way on their issues. It took a couple of years but my friends came back with the request from Kahnawake & Kanehsatake Onkwawen:na Language centre to help 36 elders with GIS placename mapping which we engaged with 40 post-Doc, PhD, Masters, BSc, BA students & profs from McGill Geography Department as well as one Master's Engineering student from Universite du Provence in Marseilles, France.
My Anthropology & Archaeology professor friends describe the Urban Placename mapping as something which would be a career ender for themselves at Universities & other schools which only get government, institutional & corporate funding for keeping the glorious Colonial Settler myth alive as supposedly 'Brave' pioneers. The reality is that settlers were insecure Refugees from Oligarch mismanagement in Europe fleeing war, failed economy & destroyed ecologies. Polyculture as described above keeps many 1000s of productive animal & plant species thriving in the vertical 'city' of trees, maintaining underground water flow, holding quadrillion tonnes of water in complex living substrates & percolating this water in Steady-state flow. Tsi-Tiohtiake aka Montreal island for example had one billion productive food trees, bushes etc. before colonization, which maintained 3000 feeder creeks, 45 canoe-passable rivers & 10 lakes, most of which disappeared with Settlers having to 'clear' the land in order to gain title & pay back their Atlantic ship voyage debt to the same failing Oligarchs who similarly mismanaged & destroyed European Polyculture abundance.
Most of our settler (some of my own since 1650) ancestors were very submissive to colonial authority & colluded in, to help impose this same destructive system of top-down violent & coercive hierarchy here on Turtle Island as cowards. The Half Bloods, Metis, Mestizos represent those settlers who fled from the colonial madness to join 1st Nation communities. By about 1700 over 85% of colonial trade & economy is being accounted for on the time-based, equivalency-accounting of the String-shell Value system aka Wampum, Esnoguay, Seewan, Kayoni & other names across Turtle-Island to the same Economic System. With European empire false 'Moneys' (Greek 'mnemosis' = 'memory') sitting idle, unused in 1700, there was a massive violent aggressive coordinated destruction, imposed by some 100,000 European soldiers sent across the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English, French America's Colonies to destroy the Wampum of Turtle Island & the Quipu of S. America.
Jared Diamond in his & now mainstream 'Disease Epidemic' theories adopted by institutional History departments is unaware that 1st Nations & indigenous peoples worldwide having profound Holistic Medical & Plant-based Nutritional Science. 1st Nation sachem or medical people healed the 1st wave of colonial incursions such as the whole of Jacques Cartier's ships suffering & dying from Scurvy. Sachems diagnosed the Vitamin C deficiency & prescribed White Cedar, which healed & cured the whole crew, who would have died. In return Cartier kidnaps (unknown to families & communities) 3 1st Nation children as trophies to bring back to Europe. Two children die on the voyage back. https://sites.google.com/site/indigenecommunity/d-participatory-structure/6-holistic-science
1st Nations & indigenous peoples easily adapted to the 1st waves of European (based in Animal enslavement & transmission) diseases. The epidemics only took hold upon 1st Nations when they were forced to flee as refugees to northern & western hinterlands from their Polyculture Orchards & vast Pharmacopeia of healing Plants & much more. The duress of the Christian based settler & state (army & police) murder & 'genocide' (UN definition = 'removing people from or destroying the means of livelihood') with 1st Nation refugees moving in fearful haste without food, shelter, clothing, warmth & particularly the medical knowledge of elders, did induce quick death-rates. This move from fertile river valley & sea side cities to mountainous hills induced starvation & susceptibility to the European diseases. Colonial FALSE SCIENCE persists to this day with the recent COVID-19 & false mRNA killer shots. Indigenous people worldwide were very careful about maintaining historical memory. Alex Haley the author of the book 'Roots' describes the indigenous Griots of West Africa as having many 1000s of years of historical (epidemiological) memory of people, names & historical health & livelihood events. https://sites.google.com/site/indigenecommunity/a-home/9-undoing-false-science
Tereza, From your videos & writings, I don't believe this Indigenous Knowledge will overwhelm you as it does some. Over 40,000 different readers from 184 nations, reading 60,000 web-page-sections have found their way to the www.indigenecommunity.info over the past 12 years. I enjoy your information & do hope we can continue to communicate. douglasjack@indigenecommunity.info
Very interesting essay. I am put off by Hedges and Diamond. Not that they don't have valuable things to share. Just so sanctimonious.
You write:
The lesson reached by Hedges is that “The more insurmountable the crisis becomes, the more we, like our prehistoric ancestors, will retreat into self-defeating responses, violence, magical thinking and denial.”
I believe we should be extremely careful about characterizing our "prehistoric ancestors."
I enjoyed the essay, thanks for writing it! It's funny, this is the second time in a few months I have heard about muskrat man, and I am pretty sure it wasn't both from you. (Alas... only pretty sure.) I had two points to bring up:
1: I am not sure Rousseau really advocated for small groups. Largely that is because I am not sure one can argue that he made enough coherent points to advocate for anything. I am perpetually amazed how much people like his writing considering it is a rambling self contradictory mess. It is like an audio recording of my kids dropping their toy instruments down a few flights of stairs becoming the top musical hit of the decade.
2: I think we ought to be a little careful blaming money for the fall of man, or whatever other evils in the world. Money as we know it goes pretty far back, and medium of exchange trade in little pretty decorative things goes a whole lot farther back than that; periodically they find worked shell beads 10s of thousands of miles from the shore, etc. So how much money is the culprit as opposed to, say, any long term store of wealth is questionable at least.
Further, many societies' ruling class collected taxes in non-monetary ways up until fairly recently. Tax paying in food (whether processed and storable like cheese or fresh like a brace of rabbits) was pretty common. The expropriating classes don't let a silly thing like a barter economy keep them from stealing your proverbial lunch money. More's the pity.
(Of course money does make the modern income tax model vastly easier to implement, and the income tax was one of the really, really bad ideas to come out of the first few decades of the 20th century.)
Thank you for subscribing, Dr Hammer, it's good to have a friend on Guttermouth, where I'm always watching my back for a smart Viking swarm. Way too many clever people over there! And well-read ones--how many Substacks are you up to?
Good observation on money. My book goes back to Graeber's hefty volume, Debt: the First 5000 Years. He does talk about non-monetary debt, like the Pharaoh's graneries or feudalism or slavery. But his point is that fiat coinage made militarism and conquest into a self-perpetuating well-oiled machine. It certainly happened before, but not with the efficiency of getting everyone to literally 'buy in' to it. I talk about it in The Story of Money but didn't put that one on Substack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0Zh8p4zw8c.
I think you'd like The Dawn of Everything, they talk exactly about those shell beads far, far from shore and the ways they may have gotten there. Graeber makes no objection to money as a unit of trade but shows that wasn't its purpose from the get-go.
And in my solution I use a digital local currency backed by mortgages--and free of those pesky income taxes when spent for local goods and services! So I don't see money as evil, I see it as the primary tool of gov't to get things done. And it's working really well for those bankers who stole the power to issue it in those first few decades of the 20th century.
You are welcome! Thanks for writing something worth subscribing to :)
I have lost track of how many now, more than I can count on my fingers, so maybe 40? Fortunately for my backlog as some go paid only I start getting fewer and fewer essays to read, but I rather miss some of those. Still, I have yet to have to look for something good to read :)
I will have to check out the video on the history. (I am a lot slower on videos, and without a commute anymore I hardly listen to podcasts.) I think you are quite correct that governmental control of the money supply definitely leads to blowing through that money for the purpose of war, regardless of the initial intent.
I will have to see if the library has The Dawn of Everything. That's an interesting argument, but I struggle a little bit to see how it lines up with the fact that mints and the standardization of money (of whatever type) was often done by non-state actors and then taken over by the rulers. I have always seen it as a progression where people make something handy to cut down on transaction costs, and then the rulers peek over saying "Hmmm now there's a thing..."
I also have to read up on your digital currency idea. I am leery of digital systems since they seem to necessitate a third party to every transaction, but I honestly don't have a good answer other than "cash worked well... credit cards are passable?" Figuring out how to keep the issuance, governance and just control of money from devolving into a tool for oppression and control by the ruling classes is definitely a worthy goal.
As I remember from clicking on your name, you're over 50 stacks. Stacks just fly when you're having fun!
I also need a stack of dishes to listen to a video or podcast, so there are a lot that I pass up that I'd like to hear. I need more monotonous manual labor in my life.
Graeber's going back 3500 years to the invention of coinage as a way for local rulers to hire the mercenary soldiers that Greece was pumping out. They took the treasure and stamped it with a higher value, used it to pay the soldiers, and then taxed the people in that coin. They had to supply the military with food, shelter, armor, sex, whatever, to get the coins so they didn't fall into slavery. They came back to the ruler so he could use them again. The coinage-military-slavery complex, Graeber calls it.
But Ron Paul makes your same point in End the Fed about how WWI and WWII were funded with new money creation and they could never have gotten taxes to pay for them. However, it's not the gov't creating it, it's a cartel of bankers.
What I say in my book is that money is a means of organizing labor in the interests of whoever issues it. My system is based on Ben Franklin's colonial scrip that enabled Pennsylvania to put everyone to work who wanted a job. I talk about it some in https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/the-constitutional-convention-coup.
Aye, there is something terribly useful about work or activities that keep your hands and body busy but let the brain process. Driving and painting used to serve that role for me, but I don't do as much now, and working on the forge tends to be less than conducive :) Periods of listening punctuated by periods of loud banging make podcasts hard to follow.
Yea, that combination of government and bankers seems to be the recipe for problems. The bankers love the government keeping out competitors and providing backing, and the government loves having bankers to lend money ad infinitum. Creating the national banks (Bank of England, Federal Reserve, etc.) only adds to the issue. Larry White wrote a good history of the Scottish free banking system, wherein each bank issued its own notes (paper money) and how that worked; short version: a lot better than the state controlled central banks.
I think we have to be a little careful to not throw out the exchange of goods and services baby with the fiat currency bathwater. The trick is to allow for wide ranging exchange (for which some form of money, whether shells, coins or paper is all but necessary) without creating a system where some people can produce nothing, or indeed negative value, via their control of either force or the medium of exchange. The current common system is to give the same group of people both a monopoly on violence and a monopoly on the production of the medium of exchange which... well is probably the worst way to do things :)
I need to read more before I make any more comments, though. I am probably not telling you anything new.
Oh dear, my computer glitched and lost my half-baked comment. I'll make sure and hit post on this one even if it's still gooey in the middle ;-)
That's a REALLY interesting observation that the same group has a monopoly on violence and a monopoly on producing the medium of exchange. Although I'd say it's two hands of the same body, gov't and bankers.
And I don't at all throw out the exchange baby. There's that phrase about not dismantling the master's house with his tools, which I think is really stupid. What else are you gonna use? My book has a chapter called "What If Money Was No Object" that uses system change to reimagine money based on what we want it to do.
The Scottish system sounds fascinating. Money is a powerful tool, it's the 'how' to the 'what' that people want to do as a community.
Okay, better hit send before I have a brain glitch ...
Oi, yea, I've been there. I have gotten to the point that after a few paragraphs I get nervous and turn the comment into a post and just link it, for fear of getting distracted and losing it.
Ahh, see I need to spend more time reading your work. From your introduction I was taking away that you seemed worried about exchange outside the immediate family or perhaps community level. I must have been reading too much into the distrust for money as a distrust of impersonal exchange over all. Been a really busy week at work and home (hooray, ALL the kids are sick) so I am running a little under capacity :)
One of the really cool things about the Scottish system that you might appreciate is that since every bank issued its own notes (money) they were free to inflate, but at the same time that was shooting themselves in the foot as people started to suspect and start making claims on bullion. So unlike the centralized currencies you could have a variety of strategies (super conservative banks to maybe a little too fast and loose with the notes banks) and thus customers could pick what they felt comfortable with while banks explored what worked, and perhaps more importantly no bank could get nuts and break the system itself, or behave badly and get the physical force side of the house to make people accept its notes anyway.
As you say, making banks and rules two hands of the same body was a really, really bad move. Church and state mixed doesn't go very well, but bank and state might be worse.
Aug 23, 2022·edited Aug 23, 2022Liked by Tereza Coraggio
Ah yes, the Coast Kwakiutl. Glad you mentioned them. I won't be able to source the following. When I was doing my research on economics one writer considered the Coast Kwakiutl to be the equivalent of farmers because they didn't forage or go out to hunt in any significant way. They 'farmed' salmon, primarily.
They make an interesting argument both for and against farming being a significant requirement for slavery.
Mining only has real value when a tribe is settled and doesn't need to keep moving to find food, as hunter gathers do. So I'm not convinced that that is a great argument against slavery existing independently of farming. My thought is that mining came at best concurrently with farming or slightly after. I am open to being shown in error with that thinking as I'm not in a position to research that at this time.
In a fantastic book, The Case Against Sugar, Gary Taub observes that the Moslems adopted slavery practices after they discovered processed sugar and refused to do the brutally hard work of harvesting and processing the sugar cane. Processed sugar is likely the biggest reason for slavery in the 'western' world, and created amongst the wealthiest of all drug lords on the planet. The history of the sugar industry buying false dietary recommendations from Harvard and buying off. the FDA is interesting. It is very unlikely that processed sugar would be considered officially generally safe without monetary interference with the FDA. Also a great read.
You and I have been on parallel lifetracks or at least mindtracks, Guy. One of my book's headings is Seduced by Sugar and I talk about the way that, by 1900, it supplied one-fifth of the calories of an English diet, sweet milky beverages replacing hot midday meals so they could work nonstop at factories and colonizing the third world. My research is from Stanley Mintz, Sweetness and Power.
I also talk about sugar later compared to fossil fuels (although my view on the latter keeps getting more complex): "Fossil fuels, a form of currency backed by the dinosaurs and underwritten by future generations, have become the sugar of the post-industrial world. Like sugar, they give the body politic a burst of fast, cheap energy. Like sugar, they sabotage the body's process of deriving energy from slower sources. Like sugar, they release a slow poison while creating a visceral dependence. And also like sugar, fossil fuels have enslaved entire continents."
Aug 23, 2022·edited Aug 23, 2022Liked by Tereza Coraggio
Exactly. Yes.
My thinking about fossil fuels has taken twists and turns too as my thinking and understanding, and perhaps knowledge, has broadened.
And it is an interesting twist that Rockefeller's wealth has been the most potent force in undermining trust in natural health with the financial support and promulgation of the so-called science-based fossil fuel pharmaceutical industry. Was it his plan, aligned with Carnegie the philanthropist, to ensure a good supply of slave labour by keeping people basically unhealthy in body and mind?
If one were conspiratorial, one might think that the plan of the economic elite has been to create diet, medicine and thinking/belief practices and ideology to ensure a continuous supply of 'slave' labour.
One of the telling structural beliefs within economics is the so-called 'natural rate of unemployment.' I puzzled over that for a while. Chomsky helped clarify that in my mind and I understood that the 'natural rate of unemployment' is the elites manipulating the economy to keep the workers just hungry enough to accept, even begrudgingly, unsavoury circumstances and wages because the ability to move to new work is restricted. Interesting that the restriction of movement is high on the current reset agenda. Except that it isn't new, of course.
I imagine you have seen reference to the now removed article on the WHO webpage extolling the virtue of keeping the world population hungry, if not actually starving, to ensure a good supply of willing labourers. Yes, exactly.
The WHO and the elites haven't hidden anything. Which, in an odd synchronicity, reminds me now of yogic joke I recently read: Q: where would you hide the most valuable thing in your possession? A: In the present moment, because no one is willing to look there.
Very funny joke, and oh so true. Oh and I went to goodreads for the book you recommended and it was on two lists at the bottom--one for heterogenous economics, where David Graeber's Debt was the first book, and one on future primativism, which had two of my favorite fiction writer on it--Ursula K LeGuin. So it must be up my alley!
Aug 23, 2022·edited Aug 23, 2022Liked by Tereza Coraggio
I think you mean Stone-Age Economics. It isn't 'popular' because, amongst other things, it counters the narrative that we are lucky in our time to have access to work and schools and health that because in the bad old days people starved or died of diseases. Stone age societies worked at most 2-3 hours per day on average for food. And they didn't normally work hard. More often they died of old age, not from medications. Death by medication is, I seem to remember reading, the most common cause of death, despite the narratives about heart disease and cancer, etc.
And I think it was Chomsky, I don't remember for sure, that commented that in the so-called 'Dark Ages' there were about 130 religious days per year in which no one worked. Everyone worked very hard during harvest and sowing times, and the rest of the time, not very hard. We have been living an industrialist manufactured work lie for a few centuries.
And it is important to remember that the current educational model was built and then fully established by the elite to serve their purposes. There are two purposes, although Kenneth Robinson talks about only the first one in his great TED talk about how the school system kills creativity. And I would add that school kills curiosity and imagination. The longer we are in school, the more that perhaps three of the most human characteristics have been removed: creativity, curiosity and imagination. The second purpose is linked to the first, which is to create the enforcers of the elites' power structure. The leaders who unthinkingly enforce the structures of power as if it is the only way and has always been this way.
Evidence of that is in the successful dissemination of things like the covid narrative: the most educated are often the most asleep, in my experience and the enforcers.
As I've written elsewhere, most of the people fleeing the burning New York city in the time of Orson Welles' 1930s War of the World broadcast (narrative) were the educated. They had gone to school, assiduously listened to 'news' radio and read the 'important' papers. They didn't trust their eyes enough to see that the city wasn't in flames as they were jammed in traffic to escape the destruction.
That is how blind people are when stuck in a narrative of fear: they cannot even see what is real. The agency of blindness begins in k-12 schooling. Our covid narrative is a bit more difficult for some to see because the educated who are pushing the agenda and the destruction are more easily hidden by being behind the closed doors of the government and their agencies and hospital. Often I see educated people rationalising the blindness away as fear of losing their job. Yes, there is some of that. I think that most of it is simply blindness: they do not see the fires that are destroying lives and society.
Chomsky was asked once why the editors and writers in the journals of news and education do not even see that they are disseminating lies and propaganda. His answer is an interesting one: because people do not live comfortably with being a liar. And to live comfortably with themselves simply stop seeing the truth.
Dawn of Everything agrees with everything you and Stone Age Economics are saying. It's a little more nuanced in that they add this element of 'play-farming,' where it didn't take up much time and wasn't the bulk of their diet. Where do you see that leading in terms of solutions to our current dilemma?
I've bookmarked the Kenneth Robinson talk for later viewing, especially since Reinventing Education is one of the draft episodes I'm working on. It's always been a big topic to me, and I'm in agreement with you fully. On my 12-yrs ago radio show at http://thirdparadigm.org/themes.php, I have 5 episodes on education that you might agree with, just from looking at the titles.
Chomsky, like fossil fuels, has taken some recent turns in my thinking. I don't know if you've looked at my Substack page but I have a recent episode on https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/noam-chomsky-is-the-problem. What I've come to feel is that he, like Chris Hedges, substitutes a hierarchy of moral superiority for the hierarchy of power.
My only dogma is that I'm no better than anyone else: an essential belief for anarchy, which is the opposite of hierarchy. So while Chomsky has been absolutely, beautifully essential for clarifying my thinking and giving me insights like the ones you quote, I feel his thinking has hardened into a more simplistic "why isn't everyone as good as I am?" And fallen into another trap, which I talk about in a YT on Manufacturing Contempt: https://youtu.be/Z7SJoMQVIVE.
Hmmm. At the time I read this I had an odd feeling-reaction to your self-proclamation of being dogmatic about being no-better or worse than anyone else. For some reason this fine dogma you cited created a kind of echo in me that took some time to figure out.
It came to me this morning that I am in the practice, right now and hopefully not dogmatically, of being free of using self-referential (and often limiting) labels. My yogic-spiritual practice is asking me to remove labels and stories from Self and others. For example, I have been practicing the removal of 'deserve/undeserved' and 'deserving/undeserving' from my vocabulary and thought. We rarely actively use 'undeserving' because we clearly have the overt ideal, perhaps ideology, of no one being undeserving of life, beyond, perhaps, a few sociopathic genocidal maniacs. And yet we frequently use 'deserve' as a reward for hard work or effort. Or within the class of the elites, their narcissistic belief in their superior deservedness. And yet every time any of us use 'deserve' we have put energy into the creation of the undeserving. We do not have one without the other.
Once an undeserving class is created, we are then free to do with them as will, such as has been done throughout agricultural history. The uninjected are just the latest who have been put into the undeserving class, and hence being prepared for future disposal. (For example: did you read that Trudeau has contracted for the building of 'voluntary' internment camps for the uninjected? Voluntary? Really? The uninjected refused to be injected, so are they going to go voluntarily into a 'camp'? With the support of the injected the uninjected will be 'asked' to go with 'gentle' persuasion into them at some point, for the good of the 'deserving'.)
And there is for me also a small synchronicity with the ideas being expressed about schools of martial arts by the Japanese Buddhist Takuan and his contemporary Miyamoto Musashi. Attaching oneself to a 'school of thought' is a limiting belief that removes freedom of movement in mind and action.
That is a bit subtle, and I have no obvious conscious idea why that has come to mind a couple of days after reading this. Maybe it will have some meaning to you. More likely it resonated with some part of me that has dogmatically stuck to a limiting idea I have about myself. And so this is an opportunity of self-reflection as I look outward into your expression.
Aug 24, 2022·edited Aug 24, 2022Liked by Tereza Coraggio
I have a revision of Chomsky too, of late. I watched him advocate internment camps for the uninjected. His argument was weak, and he made some poorly made arguments that are antithetical to what he has said earlier. And showed to me that his quality of thought has declined.
So, his opus is a great contribution to thought, and helped confirm the observations I made about the media before I discovered him. And it seems he has fallen back from advocating anarchy to central government for climate change and pandemics. :-) I'm not sure if he has fallen back, perhaps, or if his shadow was hierarchical and is coming to the front. Or is he an example of how the highly educated, even one who has excoriated the press for being government and corporate mouthpieces and flunkies, has allowed himself to be deluded by the press. Maybe his shadow has come out, triggered by fear. Fascinating.
Thank you for the links. I'll look. OMG, so much to read and write.
And I've got more for you to read, too. On education, this time.
I took a few semesters of Education at university. I took them for the credits and because they were distant education since I was going to school while working full time. The one course had me angry for 13 weeks because of its unconscious advocacy and inculcation of hypocrisy and childish inanity. The course was 'Conflict Resolution in the Classroom'. The most glaring example of how the department of education is teaching people to be hypocrites was with an example they gave about a well respected, highly educated teacher who always had trouble from her students. She agreed to be videotaped. Somewhere in her training she had been taught the importance of touching the students to encourage them. So she would gently touch them on their shoulders or backs. What they didn't teach her is that washing her hands, in the sink at the back of the classroom, after touching the black children was going to create problems. Amazing.
So, my bias is to show that there is a different way, to awaken imagination and possibility. This gives people tangible evidence that there is a choice about how we proceed with creating a society rooted in Nature. It aligns with the Regeneration Farming practices promoted by Dr. Mercola. Following the podcast I linked, what we can do tangibly and physically is to begin to create regenerative farming practices within an urban centre? When we show that growing food well is less work than 8-12 hr 5-7 day a week work habit, it may become inspiring to others looking to stop being slaves to their possessions and perceptions of work. A slow process of one person at a time. And does not require centralised government. I finished reading Getting Free by James Herod. It is Herod's vision of how to create an anarchic social structure. It was interesting.
This is a tiny thought, because it doesn't address the issue of how integrated into our current structure is money. I've thought about this quite a lot in the past. I had some ideas before the government displayed just how corrupt it is. So, I will rethink that idea, which was originally inspired by my Economics Debunked course. The basic idea involves removing money as fiat trust and going back to unmitigated trust. Hmmm. Things to think about.
That is a quick reply, not too much thought and food for me to rethink.
Don't forget the ARTS and Critical Thinking skills that were once benchmarks of an education. Civic engagement, what happened to that?
Chomsky, NPR, Amy Goodman.......................................time to move on. They've been bought and captured in my opinion. Covid was the perfect example.
it could be that the arts and critical thinking have been held up idealistically as the mark of a 'good' education more so than in reality. when i was horrified at the dreck i read by one of the british 18th century canon writers, john dryden, i came to a couple of biographies of what his 'proper' classical education was comprised of. and it was brutal, brutalising, and very likely schismogenetic in effect. so... is that even true in experience rather than our dreams?
i talk about chomsky in an essay when i was looking at authority structures. it turns out that he in his long ago past affirmed his belief in authority structures in the case of emergencies. in it i develop the idea of the chomsky paradox and the chomsky effect. see the film 'manufacturing consent: noam chomsky and the media'. (it is not a documentary about his and herman's book.)
i concluded the following:
1) 'The Chomsky Effect'. It follows my discovery of our being blind to Chomsky' covert hypocrisy and then our anger at having misattributed to him an hypocrisy for which he is not guilty of but which we were also blind to. A kind of two-faced double blindness, in a way.
2) With that I have also defined 'The Chomsky Paradox': the overt disbelief in the validity of power structures and the concomitant covert or unconscious belief in a similar power structure to temper the invalid power structure.
in a short exchange with mark crispin miller, miller shared with me his puzzlement at chomsky's unwillingness to even consider things like jfk or 9/11. so... bought? or is his compromise simply one of a lack of courage to consider that the government structure that he criticised for its world hegemonous brutality is equally willing to brutalise its citizenry? hmmmmm. that wilful blindness may be at its core his belief in authority-based political structures being the best ones. and so that the American one, the best one in history even if horrific, isn't to be examined for its domestic abuses. pure speculation, of course.
and it is funny you put chomsky in line with npr because, of course, chomsky was a huge critic of the public media systems as corporate mouthpieces even worse than 'open' media. lol! omg, the world has a wicked sense of humour.
i was never a fan of goodman. i tried a few times 20(?) years ago and she simply didn't catch my attention for some reason.
I'll reply here so it goes to you both. Guy, I love your definition of The Chomsky Effect and The Chomsky Paradox. It confirms my suspicion that cognitive dissonance is the second most powerful tool they're using against us. The first is, I think, our love for each other. That's why, imo, 'don't kill granny' has been more effective than fears for our own health. If the latter, we would see people as brave rather than selfish, which was the topic of this one that played off of Chomsky:
I watched DN religiously for a decade and I'm not sorry I did. It was an important stepping stone for me. And I know you've seen my episode on Chomsky, but Greg likely hasn't. But still keep suggesting topics for me, Greg, it gives me a chance to show off my backlog! :-)
Investors thought Gilead was crazy and their stock plummeted.
Not only had Gilead purchased a "cure" but the cure saved others from becoming victims of transmission. The market was outraged.
Luckily, Gilead managed to land on their feet due to, ultimately, the taxpayer (like always) bailed out everyone as the product went from $16 per dose to over $1,000.
Even more egregious, the VA Doc was an EMPLOYEE OF THE GOVERNMENT. Why wasn't the government the natural recipient of the discovery?
As a "kind gesture", the VA Hospitals receive a 50% discount (off of the $1,000 per dose price) which of course the taxpayer pays anyway?
And I'm still reading your latest, Guy. Everytime I dig in, a new butterfly comment flits past my inbox and I go chasing. I think that gives me the attention span of a Chihuahua.
that was a rather funny and highly inappropriate image, tereza. with such an attention span it could take a few weeks to finish what i think is my longest pile of words yet! very funny. as i was writing it, and synchronicity came in, i would turn to my body and ask it 'this too?' yes. 'it is getting very long' i would observe. 'yes, that's fine' my body responded. so... likely only a few people will read it. so far two likes and no comments. hmmmm. lol! and that goes to one of the key points of the essay, of course: hold the words at the point of highest tension and then see where they fall, like snow from a leaf, or ripe fruit from the tree.
i listened to Jasun's podcast from last year. you may find it interesting as he and his guest go way way over the jq line. if interested, here is the link:
Hi Tereza. Just got back from a road trip in Western Japan, and read this before finishing my YouTube comment. I'm glad I did read this for a few reasons ...
1 — There are a few fuzzy areas where our fundamental definitions and assumptions don't perfectly align ... but then I recall that old logical positivist thingy... 'the clarification of a proposition is its verification', so I'm guessing 'close enough' alignment will mean a continual dialogue. Thinking about my observations of Japan as a permanent outsider, maybe the biggest tussle will be disambiguating the 'should' from the 'is' of human nature. But then again, you can also see the world from a perspective I never will be able to fully grasp ... never having married, much less raising my own kids.
2 — I was happy to see we share a lot of the same background information, and share some of the same critiques of those thinkers. I liked Steven Pinker when I first started reading him, but gradually came to think of him as a 'best of all possible worlds' Professor Pangloss, too insulated from the real world by his Ivory Tower. I would love to see his reaction to a movie such as ''Nomadland'' ''https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9770150/''. Your characterization of Chris Hedges gave me a wicked snicker — ''the Eeyore of sanctimonious political analysis'' ... LOL. Yeah, I generally like Chris's values and 'walking the walk', and respect his eloquence as wordsmith. But a little of him goes a long way ... dark and depressing, and a bit too much self-promotion, as if he were still wrestling with his fall from grace with the powers that be. Maybe a bit too close for comfort with my own relationship with Japan Inc. And although I read and vaguely remember liking Sapiens ... now seeing how Harari has become a spokesman for Schwab and the Davos crowd, I am going to have to go back and read that book again, this time more critically.
3 — There has been too much time between some books you mentioned in your references, and I've yet to read the two Davids or you. I looked for your book on Amazon Japan, but only found hard copy available from the U.S. Have you published a digital copy? Regarding the two Davids ... I am on a Kindle plan that allows me to download a summary of the book. Will give that one a look first because I have such a backlog of other books.
Maybe a good preliminary question about the Davids' book and yours (as well as one of my critiques of Diamond), is how much salience do you give to 'dark-triad' personality types ... that small, but persistent percentage of pathological narcissists, machiavellian opportunists, and morphologically defined psychopaths among us? I get the uncomfortable feeling that we might be underestimating the influence of those personality types on the ebb and flow of concentrations of power at any scale of human relationships — from pair-bonding to historic empires to the modern corporate nation state.
I still don't know how to deal with that part of human nature ... and suspect that this, rather than being foreign, is most responsible for my marginalization in Japan. I don't know if anything can be done at any scale other other than maintaining a never ending vigilance and resistance. For example, even though I have my very small group of friends I can depend on here in Japan (I can count them on one hand), decades of good will, communication skills, and work have not expanded my community here to a financially sustainable and independent level. I've got to start thinking about digital communities and how to keep the power mongers out.
Thanks for the inspiration, Tereza. Lots to read and think about ... and even then, I might have to resign myself to something more mundane, just to keep the wolf from my door.
Welcome back, Steve! So many juicy things to respond to!
1. I hadn't heard of the 'logical positivist thingy' ;-) but I like the idea. A friend was asking if I ever read WaPo, which is her go-to, and I said that I respond primarily to people, in my videos, with whom I'm in 90% agreement because that 10% is the exciting growing tip. I would like to know more about where our assumptions don't align because I think it's important to get disagreement down to its lowest common denominator--figure out where the branches diverge from the root or if we're on the same branch but different twigs. For definitions, what I suggest is that you substitute a different word for the concept I'm capturing, so we're discussing ideas rather than words. So, if anarchy for instance, doesn't mean the same to you, substitute community self-governance or whatever expresses the same in your vocabulary.
2. Wicked snicker! Such a great phrase. Glad you appreciated my little indulgence in snark. Of course, Chris is someone I'm in 90% agreement with. Just wish he'd tone down the preaching. Perceptive of you that it may be related to his fall from grace, iow prestige, and very self-reflective to see that from a related perspective. I've wondered how much of my overcompensation is part of being uncredentialed, unemployed, and unpublished.
3. My advice, always, is that you forget about reading anyone else (including me) and devote yourself night and day to catching up on my YTs! Much shorter wait-time for responses. But since I have your email, I'll happily send you the pdf of my book, as I did for Maria in Australia and Colin in NZ, who also can't get it. Share it freely!
Thanks for defining the dark triad, with which I wasn't familiar. This might get to the 'root' of our difference. My only dogma is that I'm no better than anyone else, from which it follows that people are inherently good and, when they behave badly, systems are to blame. I've certainly seen a lot of bad behavior, in kids for instance. But I've never met one that was 'born bad.' When I've known their context, I can always see a reward system gone awry, mostly because we're "living in the country of money" and trying to live at the bottom of a lake, as Kandiaronk says. Money makes us dependent on invisible slaves, so it's like trying to raise moral kids on a plantation without seeing or ever mentioning what surrounds and sustains you.
Good luck keeping that wolf from your door, Steve, and thanks for taking the time from the wolf-watch to respond! Here are two episodes you make me think of (to add to your to-do pile):
after attending a 10 day on-line summit exploring narcissism from all angles, likely your thought it is much more prevalent than we 'imagine' is correct. one of the presenters, a lawyer and a counselor cites an official estimate of 25% of the population suffers from it. her personal thought is that it is much higher.
as to inherent or made. i have come to align with tereza's observation (hope?) that it is 100% made and not an inherent characteristic. it is a bit like the chicken and egg problem: once we have both it is hard to imagine how it got started. (cliff high blames it on the elohim, blood thirsty aliens to whom the original judains(?) did their best to appease and so we are living under a kind of protracted elohim blood sacrifice stockholm syndrome which continues to traumatise as the 'best' way going forward now that it is the well established way. i'm not sure about cliff's take, although at this point it isn't easily dismissed. or their is the presence of the ickian aliens moving amongst us in good disguise. hmmmm. entities anyone, to further muddy the waters! lol! endless endless endless.
i'm sorry that your presence in japan has been one of the outsider.
great to have you back steve! all the best with what is.
Good to chat with you again, though I am not entirely back. Gotta pay the rent and I am having health issues.
I hear you about the high estimates of narcissism and have likewise seen higher estimates than I had first imagined. I think Dr. Ramamani recently put out a podcast citing 1/6 of the general population, and I have seen studies of a minimum of ⅓ of American CEOs being high in those traits.
That being said, I have some hedges. At the risk of falling into the fundamental attribution fallacy, I tend to think of a range of narcissistic behavior rather than labeling people. For example, we all exhibit narcissistic behavior when prepping for a first date. It is sustained sociopathic levels that I think are genetically influenced ... the kind of 'charismatic' bad-apple behavior that can be found in many a family closet, small community, or classroom of kids.
Another problem is that I think it is difficult to tease out that behavior from overlapping opportunism (both of which can be heavily influenced by the culture (or bad nurturing) such as 'profits as the standard of behavior', and morphologically defined psychopathy ... those who are neurologically incapable of experiencing empathy as most of us know it. Except for those rare instances of trauma (Phineas Gage comes to mind, or late-stage syphilis such as Al Capone) is genetically determined ... and fundamental attribution may correctly be applied) . It is widely distributed enough in world populations so that as Mathew Crawford pointed out, even the Inuit have a word for them ... kulangeta.
I can't really say anything about "Elohim", "Archons", or "Ickian Aliens" because I have not pursued any reading in those areas. I suspect I am like most people from the Far East or India who have little knowledge of either the mainstream Judeo-Christian heritage or its more controversial precursors / implications.
Thanks for the appreciating what it is like to be the permanent outsider. But to be fair, that may be restricted to the petty politics of work place, but also to character. Even if I had remained back in the U.S., I suspect I would have aged like a stranger in a strange land.
i wish you well into full recovery and that the bills are easily paid!
i agree with your range of narcissistic behaviours, in the sense that within narcissism there is a range from horrifically murderously sociopathic to soul destroying. once the lower end is passed, then to me that goes into the varying ranges of selfish or vanity behaviours, which are really narcissistic as psychopathy. so i would narrow the meaning of narcissism to that of a person using their behaviour to get emotional and psychological nourishment from controlling the life — physical, emotional, mental, psychological — of another person: basically a vampire. the less deadly keep their victims physically alive while doing their best to diminish them to nothing.
i don't have too much to say about the 'alt-roots' of the abrahamic 'stuff' either as i haven't pursued it beyond what has come across my path through my substack subscriptions. so, for now, interesting ideas. i have a friend who has pursued the alien reptile stuff and is absolutely sure that that explains most ever. clif's research is strong... so... lol. who knows. maybe everything is all true at the same time?!
and it is likely you would have been a stranger in a strange land — and that i know all to well, because that has been my existence, and that of yoshiko too. (did you know that the phrase 'stranger in a strange land' comes from the baynes/wilhelm translation of the i ching?)
well, time for my bed after a busy and interesting day, that included today's version of rain ceremony that is likely thousands of years old. the mexicans have very ancient civilisations, and some of that survived the spanish invasion. amazing stuff.
Feeling a bit apologetic after dashing off my recent reply. Lately, I am a lot less certain of anything I write or believe. Yeah, your demarcation of what veers into sociopathic behavior is pretty close to my own.
One problem with the democritization of the web is that I'm seeing all kinds of implied definitions for cluster B's, dark triads, and sociopathy. But something that didn't hit me until we started chatting is my intuition that Maggie Thatcher (despite my revulsion for her politics) was right when she said there is no such thing as society — though I disagree with her proxies of individuals and families. As social primates, maybe families and small communities (under Dunbar's number) might be closer to the mark, and it is that level of social organization totalitarians seem to target for elimination. They see the individual as still useful but disposable cogs in their Moloch-machine.
I didn't know that about "Stranger in a strange land".
Good find! And one I will not soon forget.
I took it from the Robert Heinlein title.
Mexico sounds fascinating. The closest I've come to first-hand experience of "the culture" is a night at a bodega in the little border town of Agua Prieta and a bull-fight-for-the-tourists in Nogales. 😂 My literary excursions are not much better ... some of the pop-stuff by Carlos Castaneda and "Aztec", a somewhat bloody piece of fiction.
That's a really interesting point, Steve. As individuals, we're powerless. As societies, we're meaningless. There's only the inbetween of family and small community that makes sense. Glad you're in mine.
Just heading to bed, trying to shake off something that feels like a cross between a chest cold and hay fever ... but who knows? Top headlines in Japan today are of the recall of supplements because of some yet as to be determined toxic effect on the kidneys. A total of 1 has died, and that was enough for the Ministry of Health to strike a brave public pose ... yet as early as two years ago, there had been at least 1300 deaths reportedly associated with the clot shot, and the govt. is still pushing that stuff.
Yeah ... as societies, we are meaningless, or pushed and pulled into a zero-sum game of promoting one provisional narrative over another. Recently been happy just to see some patterns in the which, when, and how of birds visiting my veranda for vittles.
My mini-narrative of Japan Inc.'s domestic situation at the moment ...
The bean-counters for the ruling class are trying to zero in on 'optimizing' three big variables (and lots of smaller ones) ...
1 — how much in taxes they can keep for themselves by killing off the elderly and those with comorbidities
2 — how many tax cows they need to keep at minimum wage until ...
3 — how quickly those workers can be replaced with A.I. and robotics
Just watched Part 2 of Dune last night. A pretty good metaphor for these current games of thrones.
about 'stranger' i suspect that, heinlein 'borrowed' it from the i ching without accreditation. that book was one of my very first early disappointments. i read it when i was around 12, i suspect. the ending was/is one of the most flaccid stupid ones ever written. (later i would see that that was a common characteristic of pretty much all of his books - except maybe 'the moon is a harsh mistress.')
my father was a huge fan of castenada and at the same time lived an emasculated and disempowered life. for some reason i have not ever felt his books call to me, despite a few other 'respected' people bringing them to my attention. i tried, once i think, and fell asleep instantly and didn't read much beyond half a chapter, i think. my father died of a heart attack at the age of 55 or so, obese, diabetic with gangrene, and an alcoholic. so... whatever spirituality castenada offers to the world didn't help him to find his own personal integrity into full personal responsibility. imo.
the image of the 'moloch-machine' took me back to my sociology studies where i was introduced to emile durkheim, (1858-1917) who is likely the father of 'true' ie modern, sociology — although perhaps co-father is max weber, also interesting especially for his book *the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism*. durkheim (maybe weber, memory weak here) describes the need for the moloch-machine as *the* management tool of large organisations. lol! of course he didn't call it that: his name for that form of 'management-requirement' was 'bureaucracy'. he may have been the one who coined the phrase, although my memory on that isn't 100% sure.
and the 'natural' state of small organisations as a kind of family unit goes back to the hunter/gatherer groupings, of course. pre-agriculture. (i met an actual descendent from a modern nomadic group out of the russian steppes on sunday. we had a great conversation.) and as was interestingly argued by daniel quinn in his 'novel' *ishmael*, it is likely that the actual curse of man was when we gave up nomadic hunter-gathering for agriculture and with that the creation of the 'haves' and 'the have-nots', deservedness and undeservedness and armies to keep them separate and, of course, big groups. (i write about that in my substack series that looks at obedience to authority.)
i will modify your 'powerless' point. i agree and disagree. we are powerless to *enforce change outside of ourselves.* and we have (nearly) infinite power, the power of the universe, to change ourselves. and that, to me, points to the great immaturity and the great fear — to take full responsibility for the true powerfulness of our selves; and for our full powerlessness over the other. the success of the bully culture is absolutely predicated on creating the feeling of our own powerlessness over others and over life. i've argued elsewhere that fear of death is false flag, a red herring, a spiritual by-pass to keep us from feeling our fear of our own power to be responsible. and the current tyranny is a great example of that, imo: the powerless feeling of the grand poopahs as the root of them looking for ultimate control over life and death.
some thoughts on a warm rain-free night. good night.
hello Crow told me about you... please get in touch with me, I would love to start a podcast with guest speakers who understand that our current system cannot be fixed. I also penned a blog citing Kandiaronk and David Graeber.
Link to your post please!!! I confess to having a massive crush on Kandiaronk. Do they still make men like that? Or do we need to undo the system so men like that can re-emerge?
Crow and Owl (Tobin) have been showing up lately in my peripheral vision ;-) I have a draft on the town of Chiron, which Crow also wrote about. I was in Patzcuaro and became friends with a French woman who photographed them. I have a large portrait of a young man with an owl tattoo on his chest with his grandmother, who stood up to the cartels and paramilitaries.
I would LOVE to have a conversation about why our current system can't be fixed. The first four sections of my book should have a banner that says, "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here." It shows why anything less than system change can't possibly work, so when I explain the system changes that will, they seem easy by comparison: https://www.amazon.com/How-Dismantle-Empire-2020-Vision/dp/1733347607.
Aug 28, 2022·edited Aug 28, 2022Liked by Tereza Coraggio
Without a crystal ball and a handful of magic mushrooms, it is not possible to say whether Chris Hedges is right or wrong.
Three generations ago, acid-fueled hippies believed we were about to enter the Age of Aquarius. Since then, we've seen Charlie Manson, Larry Nassar, Hunter Biden, and Fauci.
Where will it end? How will it end? Some suggest that the USA is the linchpin of Western society and others (like myself) believe Amerika is spearheading the 4th Reich and the New World Order.
It is not a subject most dare consider, but there are racial and societal differences that determine the direction that governments and their subjects gravitate towards.
Switzerland famously has mandatory military service for its young men and it is common for military rifles to be in homes. Yet, Switzerland hasn't the American curse of mass murders, self-loathing, and insanity that has taken over the USA.
There is no doubt that the world is about to experience a Great Turning, but no one knows what direction it will take.
Maybe Russia will prove to be the savior of Christianity. Maybe China will lead the world into mindless compliance. America will either see a revival of its traditional values or it will self-destruct.
Charles! Thanks for checking my episode out. I agree that the future is unknown but I'm happy to know that the past isn't nearly as dismal as it's been presented. You're certainly right, imo, that we're at a Great Turning that's impacting the entire world at the same time. Your phrase, the 4th Reich--more efficient than ever--seems apt. But Amerika seems too broad of a word to describe a group of people--a few dozen? a few hundred? a handful? And I doubt they're all residing in the US. Israel seems likely, the UK most probably, France, Germany. With all the secret bank accounts in Switzerland holding all of the stolen loot, I can't imagine its government's hand are clean.
I believe Einstein stated once: "I'm not certain what firepower will be utilized to fight WW III, but I'm pretty certain WW IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
You're welcome, Teresa. Your essays are always intriguing and informative. As a proud descendant of Swiss Menonites, I find it difficult to criticize Switzerland (despite all the evidence).
My use of the term "Amerika", while ripped off from the radicals of the sixties, describes not only the oligarchs and puppets they've placed in Washington, DC. It describes the docile and brainwashed masses of Americans who still believe the third Obama administration has another goal besides replacing our style of government
Interesting. It supports the ideas I put into two mini-courses I put together 20 years ago after being appalled and shocked at how wrong university, hence world, economic practices are. Economics has become our biggest religion because more people on the planet will be allowed to die or be killed for its 'truth'. It is total bullshit. I wrote and taught "Economics Debunked" and "Banks Skanks". Graeber's book fit into my understanding perfectly, and filled in many gaps. Wonderful read.
Thank you for sharing your ideas. And I will get 'muskrat love' to read. We have entered a time when a rebirth of imagination and curiosity is required. We are living the Bhagavad Gita and I am so happy to be fighting with Arjuna. Amazing times we are in.
Your mini-courses sound fascinating, Guy, I'm so glad that Alan linked to your Substack. I'll definitely be checking it out with great interest!
One of the intro quotes in my book is from Johan Galtung, who writes: "I have one advantage in life: I'm not trained as an economist. So it is so much easier to see reality. When you have to see through the kind of crazy training these guys get, it becomes very difficult. I admire any economist who nevertheless could talk sense--there's not many of them, but it happens."
Lovely phrase on the Bhagavad Gita!
Hello, Tereza. That is a fantastic and astute quotation. I'll keep that handy.
While taking one of the high level economic courses I questioned the TA on the validity of GDP as a measure of economic wealth when a huge part of that 'wealth' comes from societal destruction and decay. For example, the 9/11 destruction of the Trade Centres was very bad for the society, and wonderful for the economy. So too natural disasters and war. He answered "Yes. I used to think that too. Now I use GDP and that is it." Later, after the professor had left after explaining that mathematics in Economics is of minimal value if doesn't make sense in the 'real' world, the TA dismissed what his professor said and directed us to learn 'the intermediate value theorem.' I wondered if the professor even knew that he had been so casually dismissed. It was a fascinating lesson in the formation of religious zealotry disguised within the garb of economic truth.
Something else I have thought about is how the devolution of humanity came with the development of agriculture. Once we 'needed' to store our food, we created a deserving and undeserving class: those who got to store the food had the power to disseminate it. Who would get it? Those who belonged to the 'right' group, and the militia who defended that food against those undeserving of it.
And so we created what I prefer to call the 'deserving' and the 'undeserving' classes. All that we are seeing now is the evolution of that: the deserving and the undeserving. Once an undeserving is created it is about a two step rationalisation to let them die, as we do the homeless and the poor because our religious faith in economic truth. From that it is a simple leap to killing them, as vigilantes have done. They simple put into action our base belief in our class values rationalised in our economic practices. In our current experience, it is Schwab, Gates, Harari and their ilk asserting that there is no value of the unnecessary eaters. Such interesting times. A true turning point in human and human societal evolution.
And I've removed from my language and thinking saying that I or someone else deserves this or that. That use provides an energy that supports the deserving/underserving split in our unconscious. If I 'deserve' then, by default, someone someone else doesn't deserve. And it makes no sense to say we all deserve a break, because then the word 'deserve' makes no sense. And I watch how 'deserve' is used: it is an unconscious compensatory expression of the trauma of being an undeserving.
Glad you liked that, Guy. On the GDP, Robert F Kennedy (Sr) agrees with you. I have a long quote from him in my book where he lists the destructive things included in the GNP (as it was then called). He concludes it "does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile."
I follow it with a quote from Wendell Berry: "We have a system of national accounting that bears no resemblance to the national economy whatsoever, for it is not the record of our life at home but the fever chart of our consumption."
If you do read The Dawn of Everything, you'll see they challenge that agriculture ruined everything. They talk about people "play farming" where it didn't become a dependency. What seems to have consistently ruined things is slave labor, getting other people to do your work, which made people fat and lazy. My book talks about money as trading in pieces of slave, renting slave labor by the hour instead of the life. In the indigenous communities, women 'owned' the land they planted and were in charge of distribution.
And if you go to my YT channel, I have a playlist on the Great Reset, some of which are on Substack like this one: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/yuval-harari-and-the-metawealth-miniverse. Thanks again!
I'll think about that. I would need to do more research on it to state more firmly my understanding that slave labour became viable after farming was developed. Before that they had little or any value. I've marked your book, and Graeber's 2nd, on my to be read list before I die. You may find the book Stone-age Economics by Marshall Sahlins an interesting read. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28254.Stone_Age_Economics
I'm honored to be on your read list, and I wish you a good, long life to get to all of them!
That's an interesting question, whether slavery would have any value without agriculture. And the Daves have an answer! The Northwest Coast Kwakiutl, who relied on fishing, were "societies dominated by warrior aristocracies engaged in frequent inter-group raiding and in which traditionally, a significant portion of the population had consisted of chattel slaves." A quarter of the population were slaves who hewed wood, drew water and processed fish. The children of slaves were also slaves.
Archeologists estimate that slavery started here in 1850 BCE based on burials where some people are sacrificed, mutilated, 'harvested' or otherwise worthless. They distinguish AmerIndian slavery as different than Greek or Roman household slaves or plantation slavery. Mines are certainly another place slaves are useful or in the galley of ships. And along with household slaves, the line gets very fine in whether women in general or women of a certain class would qualify. Jus' saying, there's a lot of work to get done besides farming, if you're making other people do the work.
Northern California Yurok, who subsisted mostly on acorn foraging, didn't keep slaves at all. They were compared to Puritans in their work ethic and modest living. The point the Daves make is these were self-aware choices--they knew their neighbor's way of living and went the other way. Thanks for the book recommendation!
Thanks Tereza, lovely words and everything, and yes also https://gduperreault.substack.com/ - I extend your comment about imagination and curiosity rebirth: that I sense/believe/witness that this has been happening for a while (perhaps always, given the uncertainties and likely many falsehoods of time/space/light/energies, etc) and Tereza/you/we are (all actually) evidence of this magical flow and transcendence.
What a beautiful reply, Alan. I will definitely be reading Guy's Substack, as I said to him. I feel that you're right about the rebirth and love your use of the me/you/we/all ;-) I don't know if you've seen/read/listened to any of my videos on spirituality and A Course in Miracles. It seems you might like them and lead to even more tantalizing conversations! Thank you for reading this.
Yes, Alan. This is a time of a 'great' awakening. The trappings of power are openly showing their malevolence and have given us a chance to see the truth. I've recently begun to re-explore Buddhism and way up there is 'Right Seeing' before change can be created. The yogic tradition, as articulated so beautifully by Patanjali, has right seeing as critical before change can occur.
This is truly a deeply spiritual time. And, coincidentally(?), is coming at the transition from the Piscean to Aquarian ages. And each time there has been an astrological transition, there has been similar social cataclysms. So fascinating.
"Rebirth". Yes, a great point. I chant in my Kundalini yoga 'Sa Ta Na Ma' often. Ma refers to rebirth after Na, death or transformation. Thank you.
Thank you Tereza, I feel blessed by your work so offer the following.
I'm involved in working & living with 1st Nation's & worldwide 'indigenous' (Latin 'self-generating') peoples on projects & in communities, now for over 60 of my 70 years of age. Like about 70% of Turtle-Islanders (N. America), I have First Nation blood, but outside of my own family's recall, which I found recently in the past decade upon graveyard research. I'm inspired particularly by many 100s of elders & friends across Turtle-Island & by chance with indigenous elders who've come here from worldwide. My basic stance is that Indigenous Knowledge of all our ancestors, although quite erased from mainstream memory, has the keys to re-establishing abundant living aligned with the Biosphere for all of us on earth today.
My own background in Mathematics, Accounting, Economics, Governance, Group-dynamics focuses on particular indigenous accounting, record-keeping, organization, mapping & communication practices, which are applicable to our time.
One can understand organizational Culture as a set of Bottom-up 'Fractals' ('Fraction, Multiplier, Building-block, where-the-part-contains-the-whole'), which apply to the individual, family, extended-family, ~100 person Multihome, Village, City, regions, Nation, Confederacies, Continental & Hemispheric Councils. Turtle-Island for example had ~110 nations organized into 23 Confederacies of 5-7 nations. The city of Tenochtitlan aka Mexico-city today is estimated to have had 350,000 people living on an artificial island in Lake Texcoco. The organization of Tenochtitlan is 'fractal' in its architecture & ~100 person Multihome economic units as building-blocks of economy & society. Cortez writes in astonishment, because in traversing the bridges of Tenochtitlan & touching the water, it is pure & clean, unheard of in European cities, which were much smaller. The Aztec & other nations were bio-digesting (bacterial & plant treatment) the fecal & urine into healthy fertilizer production of food stuffs for a mostly self-sufficient city. Tenochtitlan was entirely canoe & foot transport with benefit & no harm to ecology & human. Remember that most indigenous peoples worldwide were practically vegetarian. These practices also applied to cities across Turtle Island such as my own Tsi-'Tiohtiake' (Mohawk 'Place where the nations & their rivers, unite & divide'), Montreal island city, which once had 50 villages along with the larger 'Hochelaga' (Mohawk 'At-the-beaver-dam') city, now quite polluted in air, water, soil etc. https://sites.google.com/site/indigenecommunity/b-ecological-design/2-responsible-compassionate-health
I've read & encountered many of the same authors you mention including Kandiaronk, definitely inspirational for understanding who we are today. My 1st Nation Mohawk (Kanien'kehaka) & Mi'kmaq friends refer to Cahokia as part of the system of Mound-Cities of the Mississippi Missouri & Ohio river watersheds. Charles C. Mann in his book '1491' recounts some of the elder lore (Ethnohistory) on the Mound-cities. My sources describe the move from the Mound-Cities to the more distributed, decentralized Longhouse villages as deliberate. However they precaution the timing with the violent arrival of the Spanish conquistadors & massive fleeing of millions of 1st Nation peoples as refugees in whole populations, north, west & into less-rich Turtle-Island hinterlands to escape colonial Christian violence & oppression.
Jared Diamond is reliance on Malthusian 'Overpopulation' theories & supposedly unavoidable Epidemics as reasons we can wash our hands of historical injustice. Diamond doesn't understand humans as essential productive parts of the biosphere, which contribute in any population number.
I am spokesperson in the following set of Bio-digestion films made with Radio-Canada about 20 years ago on Fecal transformation into Methane fuel & fertilizer. This one factor along with many other indigenous approaches to energy & material supply completely changes the unfortunate Climate & environment perpetual tragedy mindsets of Environmentalists & their NeoLib & Con $$ masters who are acting to control the world. &https://sites.google.com/site/indigenecommunity/b-ecological-design/5-bio-digestion-toilets
Complementary-Energy presently damaging our cities can easily supply 200% of our present energy usage. https://sites.google.com/site/indigenecommunity/b-ecological-design/9-complementary-energy
My sources point to this massive uprooting from millennial old ~100 (50-150) person Multihome city networks in well established 100s of years old Polyculture Orchards, spanning the Americas. One can not understand indigenous life without understanding the massive productivity of Polyculture at some ~100 times (10,000%) more productive of food, materials, energy & water-cycle than 2-D 'agriculture' (Latin 'ager' = 'field'). Basically the 92-98% Photosynthesis of solar-energy in tree-centered Polyculture versus 2-8% photosynthesis of monocrop fields & Polyculture Tree roots many 10s of metres deep pumping water, mining minerals & developing extensive sub-terranean nutrient colonies versus 'agriculture' roots only centimetres (<1/2 inch) deep. Add the food, materials, energy & water-cycle productive contributions of soil bacteria & all forms of 'Wild' (Old English 'Having-will' or 'Willed') Life. Read Henry F. Dobyns in 'Their Number Become Thinned' as another careful Ethno-historian of Elder-lore, whose work on Polyculture-Orchard food productivity in Permanent community food systems changes the whole sustainable 'Population' equation. Ethnohistory, practically (in practical analysis) exposes the pervasive pecuniary $$ induced lies of mainstream Colonial Anthropologists & Anthropologists, who take too much of their narrative, from Colonial 'hired' historians who are still pushing the colonizing agenda, captured by their institutions & funding right to this day. The lie of 'agriculture' aka 'farming' (French 'ferme' = 'Contract' of servitude binding the Serf in produce taxes to supply & submit to the Aristocrat. This fake contract is what empowers land-speculators like Bill-Gates, Monsanto (originally a Jewish Dutch Slave-owning family in the Caribbean), Cargill & others here & worldwide in extraction & exploitation of people & biosphere. https://sites.google.com/site/indigenecommunity/b-ecological-design/1-indigenous-welcome-orchard-food-production-efficiencies
I'm also feeling blessed that you are in my path, Douglas. I read both comments slowly and carefully, as they deserved. What a tremendous amount of worthwhile work you've done, and in so many areas of overlap with mine! With your permission, I'd like to do an episode on you and these links so I can go into depth. The one I'm working on now is about Pedo-Sadist Cults, so we'll all be ready for some wholesome solutions after that, me most of all!
So I'll only mention a few of the synchronicities here. Your background covers all the essential areas for building societies. I've thought about the right size of community for different functions and my book goes from neighborhood blocks around 120 people (I think in multiples of twelve) to hamlets of 1400 and villages of 17K to commonwealths of 200K to EcoStates of 2.5M to federations of 30M. I played with this more in this video (not text): https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/what-do-i-want-from-a-president? and in this: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/how-to-be-czar-of-your-fiefdom, but this one does a different take that might interest you as an economist: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/five-feminine-economies.
I've thought of each size community as interlocking, like a honeycomb, with the six surrounding entities--so that each configuration is different with the host central, so that no one is on the border of their economic unit. Your terminology of fractals for this is brilliant! It captures exactly how I was picturing it.
I agree completely on Jared Diamond and did a radio show saying that a decade ago.
I love your fondness for etymology, another passion of mine. Now that regenerative is being co-opted by Monsanto and the WEF, self-generating might be more descriptive. VERY interesting about Monsanto being Jewish-Dutch slaveowners. My pedo-sadist episode is on Anneke Lucas, whose horrific experience was in Belgium, where I've written about King Leopold and the Congo. What goes around comes around, it seems.
I'm very interested in your maps project. On one of my sites, retrometro.com, I worked with someone to map out like-sized neighborhoods: http://retrometro.com/maps/. Although the google map it was drawn onto hasn't survived, each of the neighborhoods then scaled both down and up into groupings. I think it's the Mutsun people who are indigenous to Santa Cruz?
Fascinating with the 1700 money system. Mathew Crawford recently mentioned that 70% of people were independently employed in the 18th century, I think it was. And my monetary system is based on Benjamin Franklin's scrip, which may have borrowed extensively from the wampum model, since I know much of his principles of governance were taken from the Six Nations, I think it was?
So many exciting topics, Douglas. I don't know if you know Gavin Mounsey's stack? I think you'd have much common ground, and I think you're in a common ground literally, if I'm remembering his location correctly. If I found a way to slip some of his photos in with an episode on you, it would do much to restore all of our spirits ;-) https://gavinmounsey.substack.com/p/joyous-july. Thanks again!
Tereza, I wanted to send you our Indigene Community 'DO-WE-KNOW-WHO-WE-ARE-?' Community Economy web-software program. This sofware is designed to give people particularly the 70% of people today in Multihomes to Catalogue, Map, Account & Communicate their talents, goods, services, resources & dreams as core economies for local livelihood CIRCULAR-ECONOMY. It doesn't go through on your substack. Can I send you this by email?
douglasjack@indigenecommunity.info 514-365-9594
2nd Half
Many good anthropologists remark on the urban Mohawk Placename Geographic Information System (GIS = 'multilayered' themes) Mapping, which I helped coordinate & report in www.IndigeneCommunity.info While coordinating a previous Eco-Montreal Tiohtiake Green GIS Map at McGill Urban Planning, I inquired to Kahnawake Elders if we could use our resources in any way on their issues. It took a couple of years but my friends came back with the request from Kahnawake & Kanehsatake Onkwawen:na Language centre to help 36 elders with GIS placename mapping which we engaged with 40 post-Doc, PhD, Masters, BSc, BA students & profs from McGill Geography Department as well as one Master's Engineering student from Universite du Provence in Marseilles, France.
https://sites.google.com/site/indigenecommunity/a-home/5-tiohtiake-mohawk-placenames
https://sites.google.com/site/indigenecommunity/a-home/5-mapping-ecological-indigenous-heritage
My Anthropology & Archaeology professor friends describe the Urban Placename mapping as something which would be a career ender for themselves at Universities & other schools which only get government, institutional & corporate funding for keeping the glorious Colonial Settler myth alive as supposedly 'Brave' pioneers. The reality is that settlers were insecure Refugees from Oligarch mismanagement in Europe fleeing war, failed economy & destroyed ecologies. Polyculture as described above keeps many 1000s of productive animal & plant species thriving in the vertical 'city' of trees, maintaining underground water flow, holding quadrillion tonnes of water in complex living substrates & percolating this water in Steady-state flow. Tsi-Tiohtiake aka Montreal island for example had one billion productive food trees, bushes etc. before colonization, which maintained 3000 feeder creeks, 45 canoe-passable rivers & 10 lakes, most of which disappeared with Settlers having to 'clear' the land in order to gain title & pay back their Atlantic ship voyage debt to the same failing Oligarchs who similarly mismanaged & destroyed European Polyculture abundance.
Most of our settler (some of my own since 1650) ancestors were very submissive to colonial authority & colluded in, to help impose this same destructive system of top-down violent & coercive hierarchy here on Turtle Island as cowards. The Half Bloods, Metis, Mestizos represent those settlers who fled from the colonial madness to join 1st Nation communities. By about 1700 over 85% of colonial trade & economy is being accounted for on the time-based, equivalency-accounting of the String-shell Value system aka Wampum, Esnoguay, Seewan, Kayoni & other names across Turtle-Island to the same Economic System. With European empire false 'Moneys' (Greek 'mnemosis' = 'memory') sitting idle, unused in 1700, there was a massive violent aggressive coordinated destruction, imposed by some 100,000 European soldiers sent across the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English, French America's Colonies to destroy the Wampum of Turtle Island & the Quipu of S. America.
Jared Diamond in his & now mainstream 'Disease Epidemic' theories adopted by institutional History departments is unaware that 1st Nations & indigenous peoples worldwide having profound Holistic Medical & Plant-based Nutritional Science. 1st Nation sachem or medical people healed the 1st wave of colonial incursions such as the whole of Jacques Cartier's ships suffering & dying from Scurvy. Sachems diagnosed the Vitamin C deficiency & prescribed White Cedar, which healed & cured the whole crew, who would have died. In return Cartier kidnaps (unknown to families & communities) 3 1st Nation children as trophies to bring back to Europe. Two children die on the voyage back. https://sites.google.com/site/indigenecommunity/d-participatory-structure/6-holistic-science
1st Nations & indigenous peoples easily adapted to the 1st waves of European (based in Animal enslavement & transmission) diseases. The epidemics only took hold upon 1st Nations when they were forced to flee as refugees to northern & western hinterlands from their Polyculture Orchards & vast Pharmacopeia of healing Plants & much more. The duress of the Christian based settler & state (army & police) murder & 'genocide' (UN definition = 'removing people from or destroying the means of livelihood') with 1st Nation refugees moving in fearful haste without food, shelter, clothing, warmth & particularly the medical knowledge of elders, did induce quick death-rates. This move from fertile river valley & sea side cities to mountainous hills induced starvation & susceptibility to the European diseases. Colonial FALSE SCIENCE persists to this day with the recent COVID-19 & false mRNA killer shots. Indigenous people worldwide were very careful about maintaining historical memory. Alex Haley the author of the book 'Roots' describes the indigenous Griots of West Africa as having many 1000s of years of historical (epidemiological) memory of people, names & historical health & livelihood events. https://sites.google.com/site/indigenecommunity/a-home/9-undoing-false-science
Tereza, From your videos & writings, I don't believe this Indigenous Knowledge will overwhelm you as it does some. Over 40,000 different readers from 184 nations, reading 60,000 web-page-sections have found their way to the www.indigenecommunity.info over the past 12 years. I enjoy your information & do hope we can continue to communicate. douglasjack@indigenecommunity.info
Very interesting essay. I am put off by Hedges and Diamond. Not that they don't have valuable things to share. Just so sanctimonious.
You write:
The lesson reached by Hedges is that “The more insurmountable the crisis becomes, the more we, like our prehistoric ancestors, will retreat into self-defeating responses, violence, magical thinking and denial.”
I believe we should be extremely careful about characterizing our "prehistoric ancestors."
Agreed on both points ;-) I think sanctimonious might be the exact term I use for Hedges in the video, a born and bred preacher.
Yes. Nothin' at all wrong with preachers but sanctimonious ones??? Kind of distorts what they are selling, lol.
I enjoyed the essay, thanks for writing it! It's funny, this is the second time in a few months I have heard about muskrat man, and I am pretty sure it wasn't both from you. (Alas... only pretty sure.) I had two points to bring up:
1: I am not sure Rousseau really advocated for small groups. Largely that is because I am not sure one can argue that he made enough coherent points to advocate for anything. I am perpetually amazed how much people like his writing considering it is a rambling self contradictory mess. It is like an audio recording of my kids dropping their toy instruments down a few flights of stairs becoming the top musical hit of the decade.
2: I think we ought to be a little careful blaming money for the fall of man, or whatever other evils in the world. Money as we know it goes pretty far back, and medium of exchange trade in little pretty decorative things goes a whole lot farther back than that; periodically they find worked shell beads 10s of thousands of miles from the shore, etc. So how much money is the culprit as opposed to, say, any long term store of wealth is questionable at least.
Further, many societies' ruling class collected taxes in non-monetary ways up until fairly recently. Tax paying in food (whether processed and storable like cheese or fresh like a brace of rabbits) was pretty common. The expropriating classes don't let a silly thing like a barter economy keep them from stealing your proverbial lunch money. More's the pity.
(Of course money does make the modern income tax model vastly easier to implement, and the income tax was one of the really, really bad ideas to come out of the first few decades of the 20th century.)
Thank you for subscribing, Dr Hammer, it's good to have a friend on Guttermouth, where I'm always watching my back for a smart Viking swarm. Way too many clever people over there! And well-read ones--how many Substacks are you up to?
Good observation on money. My book goes back to Graeber's hefty volume, Debt: the First 5000 Years. He does talk about non-monetary debt, like the Pharaoh's graneries or feudalism or slavery. But his point is that fiat coinage made militarism and conquest into a self-perpetuating well-oiled machine. It certainly happened before, but not with the efficiency of getting everyone to literally 'buy in' to it. I talk about it in The Story of Money but didn't put that one on Substack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0Zh8p4zw8c.
I think you'd like The Dawn of Everything, they talk exactly about those shell beads far, far from shore and the ways they may have gotten there. Graeber makes no objection to money as a unit of trade but shows that wasn't its purpose from the get-go.
And in my solution I use a digital local currency backed by mortgages--and free of those pesky income taxes when spent for local goods and services! So I don't see money as evil, I see it as the primary tool of gov't to get things done. And it's working really well for those bankers who stole the power to issue it in those first few decades of the 20th century.
You are welcome! Thanks for writing something worth subscribing to :)
I have lost track of how many now, more than I can count on my fingers, so maybe 40? Fortunately for my backlog as some go paid only I start getting fewer and fewer essays to read, but I rather miss some of those. Still, I have yet to have to look for something good to read :)
I will have to check out the video on the history. (I am a lot slower on videos, and without a commute anymore I hardly listen to podcasts.) I think you are quite correct that governmental control of the money supply definitely leads to blowing through that money for the purpose of war, regardless of the initial intent.
I will have to see if the library has The Dawn of Everything. That's an interesting argument, but I struggle a little bit to see how it lines up with the fact that mints and the standardization of money (of whatever type) was often done by non-state actors and then taken over by the rulers. I have always seen it as a progression where people make something handy to cut down on transaction costs, and then the rulers peek over saying "Hmmm now there's a thing..."
I also have to read up on your digital currency idea. I am leery of digital systems since they seem to necessitate a third party to every transaction, but I honestly don't have a good answer other than "cash worked well... credit cards are passable?" Figuring out how to keep the issuance, governance and just control of money from devolving into a tool for oppression and control by the ruling classes is definitely a worthy goal.
As I remember from clicking on your name, you're over 50 stacks. Stacks just fly when you're having fun!
I also need a stack of dishes to listen to a video or podcast, so there are a lot that I pass up that I'd like to hear. I need more monotonous manual labor in my life.
Graeber's going back 3500 years to the invention of coinage as a way for local rulers to hire the mercenary soldiers that Greece was pumping out. They took the treasure and stamped it with a higher value, used it to pay the soldiers, and then taxed the people in that coin. They had to supply the military with food, shelter, armor, sex, whatever, to get the coins so they didn't fall into slavery. They came back to the ruler so he could use them again. The coinage-military-slavery complex, Graeber calls it.
But Ron Paul makes your same point in End the Fed about how WWI and WWII were funded with new money creation and they could never have gotten taxes to pay for them. However, it's not the gov't creating it, it's a cartel of bankers.
What I say in my book is that money is a means of organizing labor in the interests of whoever issues it. My system is based on Ben Franklin's colonial scrip that enabled Pennsylvania to put everyone to work who wanted a job. I talk about it some in https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/the-constitutional-convention-coup.
But the one you might like, as a reader, that doesn't have a video is https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/in-the-beginning-was-the-purpose. It's the intro to my book and gives the philosophical framework to it. Thanks for reading!
Aye, there is something terribly useful about work or activities that keep your hands and body busy but let the brain process. Driving and painting used to serve that role for me, but I don't do as much now, and working on the forge tends to be less than conducive :) Periods of listening punctuated by periods of loud banging make podcasts hard to follow.
Yea, that combination of government and bankers seems to be the recipe for problems. The bankers love the government keeping out competitors and providing backing, and the government loves having bankers to lend money ad infinitum. Creating the national banks (Bank of England, Federal Reserve, etc.) only adds to the issue. Larry White wrote a good history of the Scottish free banking system, wherein each bank issued its own notes (paper money) and how that worked; short version: a lot better than the state controlled central banks.
I think we have to be a little careful to not throw out the exchange of goods and services baby with the fiat currency bathwater. The trick is to allow for wide ranging exchange (for which some form of money, whether shells, coins or paper is all but necessary) without creating a system where some people can produce nothing, or indeed negative value, via their control of either force or the medium of exchange. The current common system is to give the same group of people both a monopoly on violence and a monopoly on the production of the medium of exchange which... well is probably the worst way to do things :)
I need to read more before I make any more comments, though. I am probably not telling you anything new.
Oh dear, my computer glitched and lost my half-baked comment. I'll make sure and hit post on this one even if it's still gooey in the middle ;-)
That's a REALLY interesting observation that the same group has a monopoly on violence and a monopoly on producing the medium of exchange. Although I'd say it's two hands of the same body, gov't and bankers.
And I don't at all throw out the exchange baby. There's that phrase about not dismantling the master's house with his tools, which I think is really stupid. What else are you gonna use? My book has a chapter called "What If Money Was No Object" that uses system change to reimagine money based on what we want it to do.
The Scottish system sounds fascinating. Money is a powerful tool, it's the 'how' to the 'what' that people want to do as a community.
Okay, better hit send before I have a brain glitch ...
Oi, yea, I've been there. I have gotten to the point that after a few paragraphs I get nervous and turn the comment into a post and just link it, for fear of getting distracted and losing it.
Ahh, see I need to spend more time reading your work. From your introduction I was taking away that you seemed worried about exchange outside the immediate family or perhaps community level. I must have been reading too much into the distrust for money as a distrust of impersonal exchange over all. Been a really busy week at work and home (hooray, ALL the kids are sick) so I am running a little under capacity :)
One of the really cool things about the Scottish system that you might appreciate is that since every bank issued its own notes (money) they were free to inflate, but at the same time that was shooting themselves in the foot as people started to suspect and start making claims on bullion. So unlike the centralized currencies you could have a variety of strategies (super conservative banks to maybe a little too fast and loose with the notes banks) and thus customers could pick what they felt comfortable with while banks explored what worked, and perhaps more importantly no bank could get nuts and break the system itself, or behave badly and get the physical force side of the house to make people accept its notes anyway.
As you say, making banks and rules two hands of the same body was a really, really bad move. Church and state mixed doesn't go very well, but bank and state might be worse.
Ah yes, the Coast Kwakiutl. Glad you mentioned them. I won't be able to source the following. When I was doing my research on economics one writer considered the Coast Kwakiutl to be the equivalent of farmers because they didn't forage or go out to hunt in any significant way. They 'farmed' salmon, primarily.
They make an interesting argument both for and against farming being a significant requirement for slavery.
Mining only has real value when a tribe is settled and doesn't need to keep moving to find food, as hunter gathers do. So I'm not convinced that that is a great argument against slavery existing independently of farming. My thought is that mining came at best concurrently with farming or slightly after. I am open to being shown in error with that thinking as I'm not in a position to research that at this time.
In a fantastic book, The Case Against Sugar, Gary Taub observes that the Moslems adopted slavery practices after they discovered processed sugar and refused to do the brutally hard work of harvesting and processing the sugar cane. Processed sugar is likely the biggest reason for slavery in the 'western' world, and created amongst the wealthiest of all drug lords on the planet. The history of the sugar industry buying false dietary recommendations from Harvard and buying off. the FDA is interesting. It is very unlikely that processed sugar would be considered officially generally safe without monetary interference with the FDA. Also a great read.
You and I have been on parallel lifetracks or at least mindtracks, Guy. One of my book's headings is Seduced by Sugar and I talk about the way that, by 1900, it supplied one-fifth of the calories of an English diet, sweet milky beverages replacing hot midday meals so they could work nonstop at factories and colonizing the third world. My research is from Stanley Mintz, Sweetness and Power.
I also talk about sugar later compared to fossil fuels (although my view on the latter keeps getting more complex): "Fossil fuels, a form of currency backed by the dinosaurs and underwritten by future generations, have become the sugar of the post-industrial world. Like sugar, they give the body politic a burst of fast, cheap energy. Like sugar, they sabotage the body's process of deriving energy from slower sources. Like sugar, they release a slow poison while creating a visceral dependence. And also like sugar, fossil fuels have enslaved entire continents."
Two forms of "crack cocaine" of our modern world. Progress..........................or maybe not.
Exactly. Yes.
My thinking about fossil fuels has taken twists and turns too as my thinking and understanding, and perhaps knowledge, has broadened.
And it is an interesting twist that Rockefeller's wealth has been the most potent force in undermining trust in natural health with the financial support and promulgation of the so-called science-based fossil fuel pharmaceutical industry. Was it his plan, aligned with Carnegie the philanthropist, to ensure a good supply of slave labour by keeping people basically unhealthy in body and mind?
If one were conspiratorial, one might think that the plan of the economic elite has been to create diet, medicine and thinking/belief practices and ideology to ensure a continuous supply of 'slave' labour.
One of the telling structural beliefs within economics is the so-called 'natural rate of unemployment.' I puzzled over that for a while. Chomsky helped clarify that in my mind and I understood that the 'natural rate of unemployment' is the elites manipulating the economy to keep the workers just hungry enough to accept, even begrudgingly, unsavoury circumstances and wages because the ability to move to new work is restricted. Interesting that the restriction of movement is high on the current reset agenda. Except that it isn't new, of course.
I imagine you have seen reference to the now removed article on the WHO webpage extolling the virtue of keeping the world population hungry, if not actually starving, to ensure a good supply of willing labourers. Yes, exactly.
The WHO and the elites haven't hidden anything. Which, in an odd synchronicity, reminds me now of yogic joke I recently read: Q: where would you hide the most valuable thing in your possession? A: In the present moment, because no one is willing to look there.
Very funny joke, and oh so true. Oh and I went to goodreads for the book you recommended and it was on two lists at the bottom--one for heterogenous economics, where David Graeber's Debt was the first book, and one on future primativism, which had two of my favorite fiction writer on it--Ursula K LeGuin. So it must be up my alley!
I think you mean Stone-Age Economics. It isn't 'popular' because, amongst other things, it counters the narrative that we are lucky in our time to have access to work and schools and health that because in the bad old days people starved or died of diseases. Stone age societies worked at most 2-3 hours per day on average for food. And they didn't normally work hard. More often they died of old age, not from medications. Death by medication is, I seem to remember reading, the most common cause of death, despite the narratives about heart disease and cancer, etc.
And I think it was Chomsky, I don't remember for sure, that commented that in the so-called 'Dark Ages' there were about 130 religious days per year in which no one worked. Everyone worked very hard during harvest and sowing times, and the rest of the time, not very hard. We have been living an industrialist manufactured work lie for a few centuries.
And it is important to remember that the current educational model was built and then fully established by the elite to serve their purposes. There are two purposes, although Kenneth Robinson talks about only the first one in his great TED talk about how the school system kills creativity. And I would add that school kills curiosity and imagination. The longer we are in school, the more that perhaps three of the most human characteristics have been removed: creativity, curiosity and imagination. The second purpose is linked to the first, which is to create the enforcers of the elites' power structure. The leaders who unthinkingly enforce the structures of power as if it is the only way and has always been this way.
Evidence of that is in the successful dissemination of things like the covid narrative: the most educated are often the most asleep, in my experience and the enforcers.
As I've written elsewhere, most of the people fleeing the burning New York city in the time of Orson Welles' 1930s War of the World broadcast (narrative) were the educated. They had gone to school, assiduously listened to 'news' radio and read the 'important' papers. They didn't trust their eyes enough to see that the city wasn't in flames as they were jammed in traffic to escape the destruction.
That is how blind people are when stuck in a narrative of fear: they cannot even see what is real. The agency of blindness begins in k-12 schooling. Our covid narrative is a bit more difficult for some to see because the educated who are pushing the agenda and the destruction are more easily hidden by being behind the closed doors of the government and their agencies and hospital. Often I see educated people rationalising the blindness away as fear of losing their job. Yes, there is some of that. I think that most of it is simply blindness: they do not see the fires that are destroying lives and society.
Chomsky was asked once why the editors and writers in the journals of news and education do not even see that they are disseminating lies and propaganda. His answer is an interesting one: because people do not live comfortably with being a liar. And to live comfortably with themselves simply stop seeing the truth.
Dawn of Everything agrees with everything you and Stone Age Economics are saying. It's a little more nuanced in that they add this element of 'play-farming,' where it didn't take up much time and wasn't the bulk of their diet. Where do you see that leading in terms of solutions to our current dilemma?
I've bookmarked the Kenneth Robinson talk for later viewing, especially since Reinventing Education is one of the draft episodes I'm working on. It's always been a big topic to me, and I'm in agreement with you fully. On my 12-yrs ago radio show at http://thirdparadigm.org/themes.php, I have 5 episodes on education that you might agree with, just from looking at the titles.
Chomsky, like fossil fuels, has taken some recent turns in my thinking. I don't know if you've looked at my Substack page but I have a recent episode on https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/noam-chomsky-is-the-problem. What I've come to feel is that he, like Chris Hedges, substitutes a hierarchy of moral superiority for the hierarchy of power.
My only dogma is that I'm no better than anyone else: an essential belief for anarchy, which is the opposite of hierarchy. So while Chomsky has been absolutely, beautifully essential for clarifying my thinking and giving me insights like the ones you quote, I feel his thinking has hardened into a more simplistic "why isn't everyone as good as I am?" And fallen into another trap, which I talk about in a YT on Manufacturing Contempt: https://youtu.be/Z7SJoMQVIVE.
Hmmm. At the time I read this I had an odd feeling-reaction to your self-proclamation of being dogmatic about being no-better or worse than anyone else. For some reason this fine dogma you cited created a kind of echo in me that took some time to figure out.
It came to me this morning that I am in the practice, right now and hopefully not dogmatically, of being free of using self-referential (and often limiting) labels. My yogic-spiritual practice is asking me to remove labels and stories from Self and others. For example, I have been practicing the removal of 'deserve/undeserved' and 'deserving/undeserving' from my vocabulary and thought. We rarely actively use 'undeserving' because we clearly have the overt ideal, perhaps ideology, of no one being undeserving of life, beyond, perhaps, a few sociopathic genocidal maniacs. And yet we frequently use 'deserve' as a reward for hard work or effort. Or within the class of the elites, their narcissistic belief in their superior deservedness. And yet every time any of us use 'deserve' we have put energy into the creation of the undeserving. We do not have one without the other.
Once an undeserving class is created, we are then free to do with them as will, such as has been done throughout agricultural history. The uninjected are just the latest who have been put into the undeserving class, and hence being prepared for future disposal. (For example: did you read that Trudeau has contracted for the building of 'voluntary' internment camps for the uninjected? Voluntary? Really? The uninjected refused to be injected, so are they going to go voluntarily into a 'camp'? With the support of the injected the uninjected will be 'asked' to go with 'gentle' persuasion into them at some point, for the good of the 'deserving'.)
And there is for me also a small synchronicity with the ideas being expressed about schools of martial arts by the Japanese Buddhist Takuan and his contemporary Miyamoto Musashi. Attaching oneself to a 'school of thought' is a limiting belief that removes freedom of movement in mind and action.
That is a bit subtle, and I have no obvious conscious idea why that has come to mind a couple of days after reading this. Maybe it will have some meaning to you. More likely it resonated with some part of me that has dogmatically stuck to a limiting idea I have about myself. And so this is an opportunity of self-reflection as I look outward into your expression.
Thank you for your help.
I have a revision of Chomsky too, of late. I watched him advocate internment camps for the uninjected. His argument was weak, and he made some poorly made arguments that are antithetical to what he has said earlier. And showed to me that his quality of thought has declined.
So, his opus is a great contribution to thought, and helped confirm the observations I made about the media before I discovered him. And it seems he has fallen back from advocating anarchy to central government for climate change and pandemics. :-) I'm not sure if he has fallen back, perhaps, or if his shadow was hierarchical and is coming to the front. Or is he an example of how the highly educated, even one who has excoriated the press for being government and corporate mouthpieces and flunkies, has allowed himself to be deluded by the press. Maybe his shadow has come out, triggered by fear. Fascinating.
Thank you for the links. I'll look. OMG, so much to read and write.
And I've got more for you to read, too. On education, this time.
I took a few semesters of Education at university. I took them for the credits and because they were distant education since I was going to school while working full time. The one course had me angry for 13 weeks because of its unconscious advocacy and inculcation of hypocrisy and childish inanity. The course was 'Conflict Resolution in the Classroom'. The most glaring example of how the department of education is teaching people to be hypocrites was with an example they gave about a well respected, highly educated teacher who always had trouble from her students. She agreed to be videotaped. Somewhere in her training she had been taught the importance of touching the students to encourage them. So she would gently touch them on their shoulders or backs. What they didn't teach her is that washing her hands, in the sink at the back of the classroom, after touching the black children was going to create problems. Amazing.
I was very surprised by one course, though. I think the title was 'The Philosophy of Education'. It turned out to be very thoughtful and thought provoking. We had two small readers which I'll recommend to you. The Philosophy of Schooling https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9301144-the-philosophy-of-schooling and Understanding Skills: Thinking, Feeling and Caring https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9301132-understanding-skills
both by Robin Barrow.
Also, if you haven't stumbled across it in your reading, look for Walter Ong's excellent book, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/164515.Orality_and_Literacy
"Where do you see that leading in terms of solutions to our current dilemma?"
Wow, that is a great question. And an odd, perhaps even amazing synchronicity with a Buddhist discussion I listened to by Michael Stone today. "What Can You Do About the World?" https://podcasts.apple.com/mx/podcast/awake-in-the-world-podcast/id923427517?i=1000566135300
So, my bias is to show that there is a different way, to awaken imagination and possibility. This gives people tangible evidence that there is a choice about how we proceed with creating a society rooted in Nature. It aligns with the Regeneration Farming practices promoted by Dr. Mercola. Following the podcast I linked, what we can do tangibly and physically is to begin to create regenerative farming practices within an urban centre? When we show that growing food well is less work than 8-12 hr 5-7 day a week work habit, it may become inspiring to others looking to stop being slaves to their possessions and perceptions of work. A slow process of one person at a time. And does not require centralised government. I finished reading Getting Free by James Herod. It is Herod's vision of how to create an anarchic social structure. It was interesting.
This is a tiny thought, because it doesn't address the issue of how integrated into our current structure is money. I've thought about this quite a lot in the past. I had some ideas before the government displayed just how corrupt it is. So, I will rethink that idea, which was originally inspired by my Economics Debunked course. The basic idea involves removing money as fiat trust and going back to unmitigated trust. Hmmm. Things to think about.
That is a quick reply, not too much thought and food for me to rethink.
Don't forget the ARTS and Critical Thinking skills that were once benchmarks of an education. Civic engagement, what happened to that?
Chomsky, NPR, Amy Goodman.......................................time to move on. They've been bought and captured in my opinion. Covid was the perfect example.
it could be that the arts and critical thinking have been held up idealistically as the mark of a 'good' education more so than in reality. when i was horrified at the dreck i read by one of the british 18th century canon writers, john dryden, i came to a couple of biographies of what his 'proper' classical education was comprised of. and it was brutal, brutalising, and very likely schismogenetic in effect. so... is that even true in experience rather than our dreams?
i talk about chomsky in an essay when i was looking at authority structures. it turns out that he in his long ago past affirmed his belief in authority structures in the case of emergencies. in it i develop the idea of the chomsky paradox and the chomsky effect. see the film 'manufacturing consent: noam chomsky and the media'. (it is not a documentary about his and herman's book.)
i concluded the following:
1) 'The Chomsky Effect'. It follows my discovery of our being blind to Chomsky' covert hypocrisy and then our anger at having misattributed to him an hypocrisy for which he is not guilty of but which we were also blind to. A kind of two-faced double blindness, in a way.
2) With that I have also defined 'The Chomsky Paradox': the overt disbelief in the validity of power structures and the concomitant covert or unconscious belief in a similar power structure to temper the invalid power structure.
In substack
See https://gduperreault.substack.com/p/just-this-is-it-what-is-this-pt-2
in a short exchange with mark crispin miller, miller shared with me his puzzlement at chomsky's unwillingness to even consider things like jfk or 9/11. so... bought? or is his compromise simply one of a lack of courage to consider that the government structure that he criticised for its world hegemonous brutality is equally willing to brutalise its citizenry? hmmmmm. that wilful blindness may be at its core his belief in authority-based political structures being the best ones. and so that the American one, the best one in history even if horrific, isn't to be examined for its domestic abuses. pure speculation, of course.
and it is funny you put chomsky in line with npr because, of course, chomsky was a huge critic of the public media systems as corporate mouthpieces even worse than 'open' media. lol! omg, the world has a wicked sense of humour.
i was never a fan of goodman. i tried a few times 20(?) years ago and she simply didn't catch my attention for some reason.
thank you for the great comment. night.
I'll reply here so it goes to you both. Guy, I love your definition of The Chomsky Effect and The Chomsky Paradox. It confirms my suspicion that cognitive dissonance is the second most powerful tool they're using against us. The first is, I think, our love for each other. That's why, imo, 'don't kill granny' has been more effective than fears for our own health. If the latter, we would see people as brave rather than selfish, which was the topic of this one that played off of Chomsky:
https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/manufacturing-contempt.
I watched DN religiously for a decade and I'm not sorry I did. It was an important stepping stone for me. And I know you've seen my episode on Chomsky, but Greg likely hasn't. But still keep suggesting topics for me, Greg, it gives me a chance to show off my backlog! :-)
https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/noam-chomsky-is-the-problem.
No "medical". business ever earned a decent profit making people healthy.
A VA Doc named Dr. Raymond Schinazi invented a cure for the once devastating Hepatitis C.
https://www.disabledveterans.org/va-doctor-invented-hepatitis-c-cure-sold-it-for-400-million-profit/
Gilead bought the discovery for $11.4B.
Investors thought Gilead was crazy and their stock plummeted.
Not only had Gilead purchased a "cure" but the cure saved others from becoming victims of transmission. The market was outraged.
Luckily, Gilead managed to land on their feet due to, ultimately, the taxpayer (like always) bailed out everyone as the product went from $16 per dose to over $1,000.
Even more egregious, the VA Doc was an EMPLOYEE OF THE GOVERNMENT. Why wasn't the government the natural recipient of the discovery?
As a "kind gesture", the VA Hospitals receive a 50% discount (off of the $1,000 per dose price) which of course the taxpayer pays anyway?
Got to love Capitalism/Crimainalism/Cronyism.
hola, wtd.
thank you for this bit of interesting medical history. i've added it to my research pile.
gracias.
And I'm still reading your latest, Guy. Everytime I dig in, a new butterfly comment flits past my inbox and I go chasing. I think that gives me the attention span of a Chihuahua.
lol!
that was a rather funny and highly inappropriate image, tereza. with such an attention span it could take a few weeks to finish what i think is my longest pile of words yet! very funny. as i was writing it, and synchronicity came in, i would turn to my body and ask it 'this too?' yes. 'it is getting very long' i would observe. 'yes, that's fine' my body responded. so... likely only a few people will read it. so far two likes and no comments. hmmmm. lol! and that goes to one of the key points of the essay, of course: hold the words at the point of highest tension and then see where they fall, like snow from a leaf, or ripe fruit from the tree.
i listened to Jasun's podcast from last year. you may find it interesting as he and his guest go way way over the jq line. if interested, here is the link:
https://childrenofjob.substack.com/p/jobcast-20-sympathy-for-the-scapegoat
goodnight!
Hi Tereza. Just got back from a road trip in Western Japan, and read this before finishing my YouTube comment. I'm glad I did read this for a few reasons ...
1 — There are a few fuzzy areas where our fundamental definitions and assumptions don't perfectly align ... but then I recall that old logical positivist thingy... 'the clarification of a proposition is its verification', so I'm guessing 'close enough' alignment will mean a continual dialogue. Thinking about my observations of Japan as a permanent outsider, maybe the biggest tussle will be disambiguating the 'should' from the 'is' of human nature. But then again, you can also see the world from a perspective I never will be able to fully grasp ... never having married, much less raising my own kids.
2 — I was happy to see we share a lot of the same background information, and share some of the same critiques of those thinkers. I liked Steven Pinker when I first started reading him, but gradually came to think of him as a 'best of all possible worlds' Professor Pangloss, too insulated from the real world by his Ivory Tower. I would love to see his reaction to a movie such as ''Nomadland'' ''https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9770150/''. Your characterization of Chris Hedges gave me a wicked snicker — ''the Eeyore of sanctimonious political analysis'' ... LOL. Yeah, I generally like Chris's values and 'walking the walk', and respect his eloquence as wordsmith. But a little of him goes a long way ... dark and depressing, and a bit too much self-promotion, as if he were still wrestling with his fall from grace with the powers that be. Maybe a bit too close for comfort with my own relationship with Japan Inc. And although I read and vaguely remember liking Sapiens ... now seeing how Harari has become a spokesman for Schwab and the Davos crowd, I am going to have to go back and read that book again, this time more critically.
3 — There has been too much time between some books you mentioned in your references, and I've yet to read the two Davids or you. I looked for your book on Amazon Japan, but only found hard copy available from the U.S. Have you published a digital copy? Regarding the two Davids ... I am on a Kindle plan that allows me to download a summary of the book. Will give that one a look first because I have such a backlog of other books.
Maybe a good preliminary question about the Davids' book and yours (as well as one of my critiques of Diamond), is how much salience do you give to 'dark-triad' personality types ... that small, but persistent percentage of pathological narcissists, machiavellian opportunists, and morphologically defined psychopaths among us? I get the uncomfortable feeling that we might be underestimating the influence of those personality types on the ebb and flow of concentrations of power at any scale of human relationships — from pair-bonding to historic empires to the modern corporate nation state.
I still don't know how to deal with that part of human nature ... and suspect that this, rather than being foreign, is most responsible for my marginalization in Japan. I don't know if anything can be done at any scale other other than maintaining a never ending vigilance and resistance. For example, even though I have my very small group of friends I can depend on here in Japan (I can count them on one hand), decades of good will, communication skills, and work have not expanded my community here to a financially sustainable and independent level. I've got to start thinking about digital communities and how to keep the power mongers out.
Thanks for the inspiration, Tereza. Lots to read and think about ... and even then, I might have to resign myself to something more mundane, just to keep the wolf from my door.
Welcome back, Steve! So many juicy things to respond to!
1. I hadn't heard of the 'logical positivist thingy' ;-) but I like the idea. A friend was asking if I ever read WaPo, which is her go-to, and I said that I respond primarily to people, in my videos, with whom I'm in 90% agreement because that 10% is the exciting growing tip. I would like to know more about where our assumptions don't align because I think it's important to get disagreement down to its lowest common denominator--figure out where the branches diverge from the root or if we're on the same branch but different twigs. For definitions, what I suggest is that you substitute a different word for the concept I'm capturing, so we're discussing ideas rather than words. So, if anarchy for instance, doesn't mean the same to you, substitute community self-governance or whatever expresses the same in your vocabulary.
2. Wicked snicker! Such a great phrase. Glad you appreciated my little indulgence in snark. Of course, Chris is someone I'm in 90% agreement with. Just wish he'd tone down the preaching. Perceptive of you that it may be related to his fall from grace, iow prestige, and very self-reflective to see that from a related perspective. I've wondered how much of my overcompensation is part of being uncredentialed, unemployed, and unpublished.
3. My advice, always, is that you forget about reading anyone else (including me) and devote yourself night and day to catching up on my YTs! Much shorter wait-time for responses. But since I have your email, I'll happily send you the pdf of my book, as I did for Maria in Australia and Colin in NZ, who also can't get it. Share it freely!
Thanks for defining the dark triad, with which I wasn't familiar. This might get to the 'root' of our difference. My only dogma is that I'm no better than anyone else, from which it follows that people are inherently good and, when they behave badly, systems are to blame. I've certainly seen a lot of bad behavior, in kids for instance. But I've never met one that was 'born bad.' When I've known their context, I can always see a reward system gone awry, mostly because we're "living in the country of money" and trying to live at the bottom of a lake, as Kandiaronk says. Money makes us dependent on invisible slaves, so it's like trying to raise moral kids on a plantation without seeing or ever mentioning what surrounds and sustains you.
Good luck keeping that wolf from your door, Steve, and thanks for taking the time from the wolf-watch to respond! Here are two episodes you make me think of (to add to your to-do pile):
https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/we-need-to-agree-to-agree
https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/in-the-beginning-was-the-purpose This is the intro to my book, I forget if I already sent you there.
welcome back steve. great comment.
after attending a 10 day on-line summit exploring narcissism from all angles, likely your thought it is much more prevalent than we 'imagine' is correct. one of the presenters, a lawyer and a counselor cites an official estimate of 25% of the population suffers from it. her personal thought is that it is much higher.
as to inherent or made. i have come to align with tereza's observation (hope?) that it is 100% made and not an inherent characteristic. it is a bit like the chicken and egg problem: once we have both it is hard to imagine how it got started. (cliff high blames it on the elohim, blood thirsty aliens to whom the original judains(?) did their best to appease and so we are living under a kind of protracted elohim blood sacrifice stockholm syndrome which continues to traumatise as the 'best' way going forward now that it is the well established way. i'm not sure about cliff's take, although at this point it isn't easily dismissed. or their is the presence of the ickian aliens moving amongst us in good disguise. hmmmm. entities anyone, to further muddy the waters! lol! endless endless endless.
i'm sorry that your presence in japan has been one of the outsider.
great to have you back steve! all the best with what is.
I have a draft of an episode called Elohim & Archons & Aliens, Oh My! <insert wicked grin>
Hi Guy.
Good to chat with you again, though I am not entirely back. Gotta pay the rent and I am having health issues.
I hear you about the high estimates of narcissism and have likewise seen higher estimates than I had first imagined. I think Dr. Ramamani recently put out a podcast citing 1/6 of the general population, and I have seen studies of a minimum of ⅓ of American CEOs being high in those traits.
That being said, I have some hedges. At the risk of falling into the fundamental attribution fallacy, I tend to think of a range of narcissistic behavior rather than labeling people. For example, we all exhibit narcissistic behavior when prepping for a first date. It is sustained sociopathic levels that I think are genetically influenced ... the kind of 'charismatic' bad-apple behavior that can be found in many a family closet, small community, or classroom of kids.
Another problem is that I think it is difficult to tease out that behavior from overlapping opportunism (both of which can be heavily influenced by the culture (or bad nurturing) such as 'profits as the standard of behavior', and morphologically defined psychopathy ... those who are neurologically incapable of experiencing empathy as most of us know it. Except for those rare instances of trauma (Phineas Gage comes to mind, or late-stage syphilis such as Al Capone) is genetically determined ... and fundamental attribution may correctly be applied) . It is widely distributed enough in world populations so that as Mathew Crawford pointed out, even the Inuit have a word for them ... kulangeta.
I can't really say anything about "Elohim", "Archons", or "Ickian Aliens" because I have not pursued any reading in those areas. I suspect I am like most people from the Far East or India who have little knowledge of either the mainstream Judeo-Christian heritage or its more controversial precursors / implications.
Thanks for the appreciating what it is like to be the permanent outsider. But to be fair, that may be restricted to the petty politics of work place, but also to character. Even if I had remained back in the U.S., I suspect I would have aged like a stranger in a strange land.
Cheers Guy!
hola, steve.
i wish you well into full recovery and that the bills are easily paid!
i agree with your range of narcissistic behaviours, in the sense that within narcissism there is a range from horrifically murderously sociopathic to soul destroying. once the lower end is passed, then to me that goes into the varying ranges of selfish or vanity behaviours, which are really narcissistic as psychopathy. so i would narrow the meaning of narcissism to that of a person using their behaviour to get emotional and psychological nourishment from controlling the life — physical, emotional, mental, psychological — of another person: basically a vampire. the less deadly keep their victims physically alive while doing their best to diminish them to nothing.
i don't have too much to say about the 'alt-roots' of the abrahamic 'stuff' either as i haven't pursued it beyond what has come across my path through my substack subscriptions. so, for now, interesting ideas. i have a friend who has pursued the alien reptile stuff and is absolutely sure that that explains most ever. clif's research is strong... so... lol. who knows. maybe everything is all true at the same time?!
and it is likely you would have been a stranger in a strange land — and that i know all to well, because that has been my existence, and that of yoshiko too. (did you know that the phrase 'stranger in a strange land' comes from the baynes/wilhelm translation of the i ching?)
well, time for my bed after a busy and interesting day, that included today's version of rain ceremony that is likely thousands of years old. the mexicans have very ancient civilisations, and some of that survived the spanish invasion. amazing stuff.
good night. all the best with what is.
Hi Guy,
Feeling a bit apologetic after dashing off my recent reply. Lately, I am a lot less certain of anything I write or believe. Yeah, your demarcation of what veers into sociopathic behavior is pretty close to my own.
One problem with the democritization of the web is that I'm seeing all kinds of implied definitions for cluster B's, dark triads, and sociopathy. But something that didn't hit me until we started chatting is my intuition that Maggie Thatcher (despite my revulsion for her politics) was right when she said there is no such thing as society — though I disagree with her proxies of individuals and families. As social primates, maybe families and small communities (under Dunbar's number) might be closer to the mark, and it is that level of social organization totalitarians seem to target for elimination. They see the individual as still useful but disposable cogs in their Moloch-machine.
I didn't know that about "Stranger in a strange land".
Good find! And one I will not soon forget.
I took it from the Robert Heinlein title.
Mexico sounds fascinating. The closest I've come to first-hand experience of "the culture" is a night at a bodega in the little border town of Agua Prieta and a bull-fight-for-the-tourists in Nogales. 😂 My literary excursions are not much better ... some of the pop-stuff by Carlos Castaneda and "Aztec", a somewhat bloody piece of fiction.
Happy rainy season Guy.
That's a really interesting point, Steve. As individuals, we're powerless. As societies, we're meaningless. There's only the inbetween of family and small community that makes sense. Glad you're in mine.
A murder of crows be we!
Hi Tereza!
Just heading to bed, trying to shake off something that feels like a cross between a chest cold and hay fever ... but who knows? Top headlines in Japan today are of the recall of supplements because of some yet as to be determined toxic effect on the kidneys. A total of 1 has died, and that was enough for the Ministry of Health to strike a brave public pose ... yet as early as two years ago, there had been at least 1300 deaths reportedly associated with the clot shot, and the govt. is still pushing that stuff.
Yeah ... as societies, we are meaningless, or pushed and pulled into a zero-sum game of promoting one provisional narrative over another. Recently been happy just to see some patterns in the which, when, and how of birds visiting my veranda for vittles.
My mini-narrative of Japan Inc.'s domestic situation at the moment ...
The bean-counters for the ruling class are trying to zero in on 'optimizing' three big variables (and lots of smaller ones) ...
1 — how much in taxes they can keep for themselves by killing off the elderly and those with comorbidities
2 — how many tax cows they need to keep at minimum wage until ...
3 — how quickly those workers can be replaced with A.I. and robotics
Just watched Part 2 of Dune last night. A pretty good metaphor for these current games of thrones.
On that, will try to catch a few winks.
Good night Tereza.
hola, steve:
about 'stranger' i suspect that, heinlein 'borrowed' it from the i ching without accreditation. that book was one of my very first early disappointments. i read it when i was around 12, i suspect. the ending was/is one of the most flaccid stupid ones ever written. (later i would see that that was a common characteristic of pretty much all of his books - except maybe 'the moon is a harsh mistress.')
my father was a huge fan of castenada and at the same time lived an emasculated and disempowered life. for some reason i have not ever felt his books call to me, despite a few other 'respected' people bringing them to my attention. i tried, once i think, and fell asleep instantly and didn't read much beyond half a chapter, i think. my father died of a heart attack at the age of 55 or so, obese, diabetic with gangrene, and an alcoholic. so... whatever spirituality castenada offers to the world didn't help him to find his own personal integrity into full personal responsibility. imo.
the image of the 'moloch-machine' took me back to my sociology studies where i was introduced to emile durkheim, (1858-1917) who is likely the father of 'true' ie modern, sociology — although perhaps co-father is max weber, also interesting especially for his book *the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism*. durkheim (maybe weber, memory weak here) describes the need for the moloch-machine as *the* management tool of large organisations. lol! of course he didn't call it that: his name for that form of 'management-requirement' was 'bureaucracy'. he may have been the one who coined the phrase, although my memory on that isn't 100% sure.
and the 'natural' state of small organisations as a kind of family unit goes back to the hunter/gatherer groupings, of course. pre-agriculture. (i met an actual descendent from a modern nomadic group out of the russian steppes on sunday. we had a great conversation.) and as was interestingly argued by daniel quinn in his 'novel' *ishmael*, it is likely that the actual curse of man was when we gave up nomadic hunter-gathering for agriculture and with that the creation of the 'haves' and 'the have-nots', deservedness and undeservedness and armies to keep them separate and, of course, big groups. (i write about that in my substack series that looks at obedience to authority.)
i will modify your 'powerless' point. i agree and disagree. we are powerless to *enforce change outside of ourselves.* and we have (nearly) infinite power, the power of the universe, to change ourselves. and that, to me, points to the great immaturity and the great fear — to take full responsibility for the true powerfulness of our selves; and for our full powerlessness over the other. the success of the bully culture is absolutely predicated on creating the feeling of our own powerlessness over others and over life. i've argued elsewhere that fear of death is false flag, a red herring, a spiritual by-pass to keep us from feeling our fear of our own power to be responsible. and the current tyranny is a great example of that, imo: the powerless feeling of the grand poopahs as the root of them looking for ultimate control over life and death.
some thoughts on a warm rain-free night. good night.
I vaguely remember 'stranger in a strange land' also being biblical, so we can mark that down to another thing they stole.
hello Crow told me about you... please get in touch with me, I would love to start a podcast with guest speakers who understand that our current system cannot be fixed. I also penned a blog citing Kandiaronk and David Graeber.
Link to your post please!!! I confess to having a massive crush on Kandiaronk. Do they still make men like that? Or do we need to undo the system so men like that can re-emerge?
Crow and Owl (Tobin) have been showing up lately in my peripheral vision ;-) I have a draft on the town of Chiron, which Crow also wrote about. I was in Patzcuaro and became friends with a French woman who photographed them. I have a large portrait of a young man with an owl tattoo on his chest with his grandmother, who stood up to the cartels and paramilitaries.
I would LOVE to have a conversation about why our current system can't be fixed. The first four sections of my book should have a banner that says, "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here." It shows why anything less than system change can't possibly work, so when I explain the system changes that will, they seem easy by comparison: https://www.amazon.com/How-Dismantle-Empire-2020-Vision/dp/1733347607.
Thank you for getting in touch!
Without a crystal ball and a handful of magic mushrooms, it is not possible to say whether Chris Hedges is right or wrong.
Three generations ago, acid-fueled hippies believed we were about to enter the Age of Aquarius. Since then, we've seen Charlie Manson, Larry Nassar, Hunter Biden, and Fauci.
Where will it end? How will it end? Some suggest that the USA is the linchpin of Western society and others (like myself) believe Amerika is spearheading the 4th Reich and the New World Order.
It is not a subject most dare consider, but there are racial and societal differences that determine the direction that governments and their subjects gravitate towards.
Switzerland famously has mandatory military service for its young men and it is common for military rifles to be in homes. Yet, Switzerland hasn't the American curse of mass murders, self-loathing, and insanity that has taken over the USA.
There is no doubt that the world is about to experience a Great Turning, but no one knows what direction it will take.
Maybe Russia will prove to be the savior of Christianity. Maybe China will lead the world into mindless compliance. America will either see a revival of its traditional values or it will self-destruct.
Charles! Thanks for checking my episode out. I agree that the future is unknown but I'm happy to know that the past isn't nearly as dismal as it's been presented. You're certainly right, imo, that we're at a Great Turning that's impacting the entire world at the same time. Your phrase, the 4th Reich--more efficient than ever--seems apt. But Amerika seems too broad of a word to describe a group of people--a few dozen? a few hundred? a handful? And I doubt they're all residing in the US. Israel seems likely, the UK most probably, France, Germany. With all the secret bank accounts in Switzerland holding all of the stolen loot, I can't imagine its government's hand are clean.
I believe Einstein stated once: "I'm not certain what firepower will be utilized to fight WW III, but I'm pretty certain WW IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
Haha! Great quote!
You're welcome, Teresa. Your essays are always intriguing and informative. As a proud descendant of Swiss Menonites, I find it difficult to criticize Switzerland (despite all the evidence).
My use of the term "Amerika", while ripped off from the radicals of the sixties, describes not only the oligarchs and puppets they've placed in Washington, DC. It describes the docile and brainwashed masses of Americans who still believe the third Obama administration has another goal besides replacing our style of government