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.
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.
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
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.)
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.
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.
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.